by Tom Kratman
She found strong hands replaced by strong arms wrapped around her, while Richard whispered in her ear, “Thank all the gods that ever were or might have been that you’re safe.”
“It was close a couple of times, Richard,” she answered, without elaborating.
He nodded, though what he was agreeing to wasn’t clear. Maybe that I’ll give him a fuller explanation later. That’s probably it.
“The blood isn’t mine, Richard,” she informed him.
“Thank them for that, too.”
Letting her go, Richard pulled himself back to his command chair. “Can’t we do something about that damned message?” he asked.
“If we still had communications we could, sir, but it’s either abandoned or in mutineers’ hands. We’re stuck with it.”
“Shit. Guns, have we got the antimeteorite cannon on-line yet?”
“Online, yes, Captain, but we don’t have one that can bear on the shuttle yet.”
“How long?”
“A little over a minute.”
Oh, hell, thought Esma, now or never. Unseen, behind Richard’s command chair, she opened her tunic, pushed herself back against the hatch she’d just come through, and pulled her pistol out.
“Get away from the controls, Guns! Everyone, get your hands up.”
At the tone of her voice, full of desperate purpose and infinite menace, with just a hint of hysteria for ambience, all eyes on the bridge except for the captain’s turned to her. For Richard, earl of Care’s part, he swung his chair one hundred and eighty degrees around before asking, “What are you doing, Esma?”
“Just keep your seat, Richard,” she ordered. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
He smiled slightly, certain that his lover couldn’t hurt him. He began to stand.
“Stop, Richard. Just stop.”
He ignored her, continuing to rise and then to push himself forward.
With an inarticulate scream, half of anger and half of despair, Esma pointed the Helva at him and pulled the trigger, once, twice, a third time. Each shot pushed her back against the hatch while driving her hands and arms upward. There was a slight delay between shots as she recovered and took aim anew.
The frangible ammunition Bertholdo had procured for her was somewhat irregular and unpredictable. The first bullet entered his abdomen, fragmenting into hundreds of smaller bits and dumping all its energy into collanderizing his lower intestine. This begat the beginning of a scream from sheer agony. The second hit him over his right lung, but did not disintegrate before passing through. This one broke up on the inner bulkhead above the main screen. The third shot took Richard in the right shoulder, breaking up on the shoulder cup and doing incalculable damage to muscle, tendon, and bone.
Each shot pushed him back toward his command chair. The last one pushed him into it. He sat there a few moments, uncomprehending. He looked down and saw blood pouring from his body. Where did that come from? Is Esma all right? I cannot see her. I cannot look up to see anything.
Slowly, so slowly, he raised his left arm. For some reason, he couldn’t move the right. As he raised his arm he forced his head up again. Ah, there she is . . . safe. So beautiful. Such a wonder. When we are married and settle down here . . .
Slowly, with the image of the girl he loved engraved on his eyes, Richard, earl of Care and one of the few decent Class Ones to be found anywhere, let his lids relax and sleep take him.
Esma, watching her lover die, screamed his name once. But she could not go to him, not yet. Gulping, taking her nonfiring hand off the Helva to wipe her eyes, she ordered, “Now pump out the hangar deck and open the doors.”
Ex-Admiral’s Barge, astern of the Spirit of Peace
“ Tribune, the hangar doors on the target . . . sir, they’re opening them up.”
Aguilar cocked his head inside the helmet, staring at the screen with a cynicism born of many years with the legions. I wouldn’t trust that if they baited it with a piece of cheese. “Ignore it, Lopez. We proceed as per the plan.”
While the hangar bay was stationary relative to the shuttle, the exterior of the Spirit of Peace chosen for touch down spun at about ninety-two feet per second. Long, many long, hours had been spent aboard the shuttle by Lopez and his copilot, just learning with the simulator program to match velocity while maneuvering inward to touch the hull.
But, thought Lopez, simulators never quite give you all the answers. On the other hand, we didn’t train to enter the hangar at all, so . . . hmmm . . . on the other hand, the prisoner.
“Sir, we could have the high admiral pilot us into the bay.”
“No, Lopez. It could be a trap. It’s too convenient not to assume it’s a trap. So we go in as we planned, the hard fucking way.”
“Yes, sir.”
Lopez applied retros to slow down, stop, spin the shuttle on its axis, and then begin to match the rate of spin of the ship. This was complex and difficult, because the shuttle insisted on continuing in a straight line, while the pertinent par of the hull kept turning away. Finally, he admitted defeat: “Tribune, there’s no way I am going to be able to touch down where we planned. The simulator just didn’t prepare us for this; it’s a lot harder than it looked.”
“High Admiral?” asked Aguilar. “Your recommendations?”
“My first one was to take the hangar bay but you’re right; it’s too convenient while Wallenstein is nothing if not sneaky and treacherous. You have a way to affix the shuttle to the hull?”
“ Yes, we’ve got adhesive stanchions. Peel ’em; slap ’em to the hull; wait nine seconds, and they stick. Then we could lash the shuttle to them. And we know they work because we have six of them stuck to the hull of the shuttle and they wouldn’t budge a bit when we tried.”
“How much cord do you have?” Robinson asked.
“Shitloads, why?”
“Send the strikers down to affix the stanchions and tie themselves down, then we can match speed and haul the shuttle in.”
“Lemme think . . . Sergeant Ruiz?”
“Yes, Tribune?”
“Can your team tie the shuttle down, then move forward of it to blow the hull?”
“Maybe better to move forward and counterspin-wise, Tribune, to keep from having the piece we take out smash the shuttle.”
“Okay, fine; the key question is can you do it?”
“Probably.”
“Fucking ‘probably’? What the fuck is ‘probably’?”
“Life’s a gamble, Tribune. We can probably do it. But sure as shit we can’t stay out here indefinitely.”
God save us from philosophical sergeants, thought Aguilar. “Yeah, yeah; all right. Are you ready?”
“As much as we’re going to be.”
“Lopez?”
“Yes, Tribune?”
“Take your orders from Ruiz.”
“We need a short period of no spin relative to the ship, Lopez, while we’re over our breach point. Can you do that?”
“Give me . . . twenty seconds.”
“Roger.”
“Okay . . .” said the pilot. “Get ready . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . go!”
Ruiz was first out of the cargo hatch, as was only appropriate. He trailed a thin cord behind him as he progressed, the cord running back to the shuttle. Using his right hand to manipulate the little joystick that sat on an arm jutting forward from his maneuver pack, he directed himself to the ship, thin and faintly visible streams of fire coming from the back and sides of the pack. In his left hand he held a stanchion that was already peeled and tied off, with an elastic cord running to a D-ring on his suit. His feet hit the hull a glancing blow, which twisted him to where he was facing away from it off into outer space.
“Shit!” For a brief moment, facing infinity and having temporarily lost his bearings, Ruiz almost panicked. The key word there, though, was “almost.”
Forcing himself to calm, with a little more manipulation of the joystick he
managed to turn himself around to where he was facing the hull again. A bit more and he began to move in closer . . . closer . . . closer.
“Got it!” Ruiz exulted, as his left hand smashed the stanchion’s adhesive side against the hull, breaking the thin plastic film and letting the adhesive reach the hull to stick. With a well-practiced set of motions, he untied the cord he’d trailed from his own suit and then reattached it to the stanchion.
“Come on down,” he ordered his team who, one by one, appeared in the cargo hatch, attached themselves to the cord, then moved themselves down to the hull. There, at the hull, five more stanchions were stuck on.
While that had been going on, two more men crawled out onto the exterior of the shuttle. Working from rear to front, each tied off three color-coded cords to three stanchions that were attached to each side of the shuttle. As soon as they saw that the six stanchions had been affixed to the ship’s hull, they tossed down the free ends of the cords.
Total gaggle fuck, thought Ruiz, watching his men try to scramble for the cords. That was bad enough, but still they got them. It was when they tried to tie off the shuttle so they could haul it down that the real problem arose. Neither the men nor the adhesive nor the stanchions were strong enough for the task.
“Goddammit, grab Velez,” Ruiz shouted, seeing one of his men torn off the hull and heading into space.
“It’s not going to work, Tribune,” Ruiz said, “Got a better idea?”
There was a long pause before Aguilar answered, “Yeah . . . maybe. Can you tie off some cords to the five remaining—”
“Four remaining,” Ruiz corrected.
“What the fuck ever; four remaining stanchions. Can you get some cord on them and run the free ends to the cargo hatch?”
“Think so.”
“Good, because we’re going to burn our boats and just let the shuttle go.”
“Guts move, Tribune.”
“That what I get the big drachmae for.”
Crewmen Steven Smith and Gaige Mosher, having seen the chaos into which the ship had descended, had decided they wanted no part of it. Rather than be caught up in the mayhem, they’d decided to find a nice safe spot, only diverting long enough to hit the crew’s bar and grab a couple of glasses, a bucket of ice, and a bottle of, it must be admitted, not very good scotch on the way.
With glasses and booze and ice in hand, they’d gone as far from the sound of anything resembling excitement as they could, finally finding themselves in a large storage compartment just off the ship’s full gravity gym. There, having piled some boxes into makeshift chairs, and dogged the hatch from the inside, they’d proceeded to crack the bottle, add some ice to the glasses, and wait things out in a degree of style.
They were on their third round when Gaige asked, looking down, which is to say, outward, “Steve, did you just hear something?”
Exterior hull, UEPF Spirit of Peace
From Ruiz’s point of view, the slowly receding outline of the shuttle disappeared behind the spinning hull. It would come back into view in about two hundred seconds, though it would be farther away and even less likely to be recovered. The shuttle kept the same orientation to the ship as it floated away.
I hope to hell Carrera’s got a sense of humor about that shuttle, thought Aguilar.
Meanwhile, through a combination of maneuver packs and belay lines, the rest of the force—one commander, Aguilar, one assistant, Centurion Martin, two pilots, one former and future high admiral, and nineteen strikers—assembled on the hull, securing themselves either to the previously anchored stanchions or adding new ones.
“Breach it, Ruiz,” ordered Aguilar, while Martin made sure everyone else got as close and low to the hull as humanly possible.
“C’mon, First Squad; let’s make us some hole.”
Following Ruiz the other five and he formed a loose circle. Each man had taken out and carried in one hand a folded and curved section of something that looked rather like door weather stripping on steroids. Each also had an adhesive stanchion attached to a bungee cord, itself attached to their suits.
Ruiz was the first down. He gave the joystick for his maneuver pack a little extra oomph, then released it and took the stanchion in that hand. A bit more experienced now, he waited until the hull was less than an arm’s length away and . . .
“Got it.” Calling for “Number Two,” he unfolded his section of presumed weather stripping, held it onto the hull, and hit the top of one end hard with his right fist.
Yeah, fucking yeah, he cursed as the blow drove him away from the hull until the bungee cord caught him short and pulled him back. Every action has a reaction, equal to . . . and fuck it. It’s just going to take more time.
He struck the strip again, a little bit away from his first blow. The same thing happened but, since he was more ready for it, the third blow came quicker still. By that time, number two was nearly beside him, unfolding his own section after slapping his stanchion down.
Number three followed . . .
“Are you people done yet?” Martin asked, possibly only to break the monotony of the group being nagged and cajoled by Aguilar.
“Few minutes, Top. Almost there.”
A few minutes passed with both Aguilar and Martin ready to apply a little more verbal encouragement when Ruiz and his five came floating back on maneuver pack power. Hands reached up and pulled them down, close to the hull.
Ruiz started to turn the detonator over to Aguilar. “You want the honors, sir?”
“Nah; your crew did the work; you can have the honors.”
“Yes, sir. Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole!”
“What, you think some space monster’s beating on the hull to get in?” Smith ridiculed.
“I don’t know what it was, Steve, but something was beating on the hull.”
“Drink more,” Smith suggested, proffering the bottle. “At least then we’ll have an excuse for . . .”
Suddenly flames jutted into the compartment, a circular wall of them, rising about six feet high, surrounding Mosher. The instant overpressure burst both sets of eardrums. The flames then disappeared, as did Mosher and a circular section of the hull. As that section went, so went Smith, initially because he lunged to grab Gaige but then unwillingly following Mosher as he was pulled out of the compartment with the escaping air. His hands’ attempt to gain purchase on the rim of the newly made hole proved sadly futile.
Both men had screamed, soundlessly, in stark terror. This had its upsides and its down. In the first place, screaming emptied their lungs, which saved them from rupturing. But in the second place—the down side—it roughly doubled from fifteen to thirty seconds the amount of time it would take them to lose consciousness before dying. And those seconds were going to be long seconds, indeed.
Three effects hit both Smith and Mosher close enough to simultaneously that they couldn’t have told the difference even if they hadn’t been in utter mindless agony. First was the sun which, without an atmosphere, was intense, causing extremely serious sunburn on all exposed skin as that skin rotated with the bodies. Second, the moisture in their eyeballs and nasal passages evaporated, causing freezing of both. If that wasn’t quite shitty enough, each got an instant and agonizing case of the bends.
Ah, but there was more. In the hard vacuum, the moisture on the tongues began to boil, even as the pressure differential between inside the skin and outside caused the skin to puff up, especially the extremities. Mosher’s hands, for example, just before he went blind, looked to him to have grown to four or five times their normal size. It is possible that this effect was exaggerated in his mind; we’ll never know for sure.
Finally, mercifully, after those long, long seconds, both Smith and Mosher lost consciousness. They were unaware of it, then, when paralysis and convulsions took turns sending them into something remarkably reminiscent of an Old Earth entertainer’s dance routine or, rather, several of them.
“Holy shit,
” said Ruiz. He wasn’t the only man to make the sign of the cross over his suit and helmet as the two twisting, writhing bodies sailed off into space behind a circular section of the hull.
“First squad, in,” ordered Aguilar.
“Follow me,” said Ruiz, flailing doomed bodies forgotten. He carried with him one of the cords—a white one—that he would tie off inside.
“Second squad, follow me,” Aguilar continued, as the last of Ruiz’s squad disappeared into the hull.
“Third squad,” said Centurion Martin, with the high admiral and the pilots in tow, “in you go, after the tribune. The rest of you, follow me. Just haul yourselves along the white cord.”
Nobody lost their grip as they moved along the exterior of the hull and into the compartment, though Centurion Martin was poised and ready to retrieve anyone who did. When Martin reached the hole, he looked up to see that half of the force had already dumped their maneuver packs and the rest, less third squad, were being helped to do so.
Aguilar looked down at the gaping hole and ordered, “Third Squad, seal it.”
The assistant squad leader unrolled a six foot in diameter sheet, woven carbon fiber backed up by an aramid fiber, sandwiching a thick layer of mylar between them. The six members of the squad each took a portion and stretched it over the hole the shaped charge had cut, rhythmically punching the edges to release the adhesive and then running palms over those to create a seal.
“Looks good, sir,” third squad leader, Sergeant Padilla, announced.
“You have the spare if this doesn’t work, right, Padilla?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay, everyone find something to grab . . . and . . . pressurize.”
Every member of third squad pulled out a red metal bottle topped by a valve. All together they turned the valves, releasing enough air to form a normal atmosphere. The bottles soon misted as their temperature dropped well past icy. While Martin kept an extremely close eye on the seal, Padilla and Aguilar, both, watched their pressure gauges until, “We’re at one atmosphere. First squad to the left, second to the right, take your posts by the hatch.”
