Graeme blushed.
“We launched a probe an hour ago,” Spetzna continued. “It exited the cluster ten minutes ago and transmitted as detailed a chart of the interior as it could.” A circle appeared around a small, dark section near the far edge. “This is the Forager. We can ascertain only as much as Captain Horne was able to convey through his communication—that the ship is disabled and deteriorating rapidly. Scanners were not able to gather more information on the ship’s functioning systems. We should assume that life support is nearing complete malfunction.”
“Then we should presume to move our asses,” Delphyne said. Horus’s smile felt like slime running down her body.
“You’ve gone and found some sass,” he said. “I dig it.” He swung his legs to the side, launching himself to his feet. “Spetzna, set a course for the far side of the cluster. We’ll enter from the closest point to the Forager’s location. Alert all aboard that radiation suits are mandatory from this point on.” He turned to Delphyne. “Get to medical. We’ve got extra rad-suits there. We’ll be crossing over into the most radiation-saturated environment you’ve ever seen in about an hour.”
Croft and Byron paced the corridor outside the shuttlebay. They thrummed with anticipation. Waiting was a chore for them, as it was for most operatives. They were made for the kind of work that dropped them in the middle of the action. They were not built for pacing.
Oliver Graeme was not built for high anxiety situations.
Delphyne was seriously questioning Mao’s personnel decisions.
“Would you two mind not doing that?” Graeme wiggled his index and middle finger, making his hand appear like it was walking up and down the hall. He stared at the floor as he did. “It’s disconcerting.”
“You know what’s disconcerting?” Croft said. “Standing around while fellow soldiers are cooking alive in a radiation swamp. We should be doing something.”
“You want to go for a swim through that swamp?” Delphyne said, stepping between Graeme and Croft. The operative stepped back from her, his hands up like he meant no offense. The jarhead hadn’t even realized that he stepped to Graeme, that the comms officer may have felt threatened. “Because that’s about all you could do right now. We need to sit tight until we’re in position.”
Croft didn’t calm. He only took to muttering to himself. Byron twirled his knife in his hand as he walked. He noticed how Roker watched it, unsettled, but he didn’t seem to care.
Spetzna appeared as if from nowhere, stepping in Croft’s way. The operative let out a stifled yelp of surprise.
“We have arrived,” the ghostly Spetzna said. “Follow me.” He entered the bay. Horus joined them a minute later. The captain clapped his hands together, reminding Delphyne of a sumo wrestler participating in the ceremony before a match.
“Well,” Horus said, eyeing each of them. “Let’s get this thing done. Here she is.” He pointed to a shuttle. “A right damn beauty, if I do say so.”
Delphyne choked back the sudden dread that surged in her throat. “No, it isn’t. No, we are not sailing in that thing.” The shuttle looked like the smaller and more disheveled cousin of the Bucket. The shielding, though impressive, was welded onto the hull in a haphazard, patchwork manner. The portions of the hull that were visible looked like one solid punch away from a breach. The whole mess looked like it was dragged out of a junkyard that morning.
Horus scoffed. “Don’t be rude now. You are a guest on my ship. A little respect couldn’t hurt.”
“But getting in that thing will. Does it even fly?”
Horus’s scoff ballooned into a full guffaw of disgust. “Does it fly? Of course, it damn well flies. I’ve personally flown Petunia into the debris fields left after some of the war’s most brutal battles. That mess near the Strait of Pontoors? That was me and little Petunia who fished the drive engines out of the three Byers juggernauts and sold them for a disgusting fortune on the black market.” His voice caught in his throat. His mouth broke into a smile. “Allegedly. Point is, that ship can handle this cluster. She’s proven herself.”
Delphyne felt the eyes of her crew on her. She felt Graeme and Roker’s apprehension. She felt Croft and Byron’s exhilaration. “Fine,” she relented.
“Seriously?” Roker looked like she wanted to stuff the words back in her mouth as soon as she said them. “Ma’am. Even with just a visual inspection, I can identify at least three code violations.”
“Navy code doesn’t carry much weight in my world,” Horus said.
“A man I once trusted implicitly trusted this man,” Delphyne said, pointing to Horus. “That will need to be good enough.”
The sentiment didn’t ease Roker’s worries. She knew Bayne’s reputation, for both good and ill.
Horus shrugged. “Trust is strong word, but whatever gets this moving along. Load up.”
Delphyne, Roker, Graeme, Croft and Byron boarded the shuttle, followed by the shuttle pilot, a heavy-set woman named Delilah, and Horus. Delphyne shot Horus a look of surprise.
“I like to personally guard my investment,” he said. “You all die, and Mao will be wanting his money back.” He didn’t smile as he pushed past them, barely squeezing by in the tight confines of the shuttle. “The Bucket is yours, Spetzna. Ready a tether and keep it locked on our position. We may need a lifeline.”
“Aye, sir. Safe travels.”
The Petunia elicited no more confidence once the engines fired up. They sputtered a moment too long before humming and falling into a rhythm. It rattled like a can full of pennies as it rolled forward and exited the Bucket.
“Clear,” Delilah said. The shuttle fell into tense silence as they neared the edge of the cluster. Only once they had did Delilah break it. “Approaching the cluster. Activating radiation shielding.” With the flick of a switch, the air filled with energy, like they were dropped inside a battery.
Each section of shielding welded to the hull was wired to each other. Once powered up, they formed an energy net that filtered radiation. The best shielding on the open market filtered at a seventy-five percent rate. This shielding, stolen Byers proprietary tech, filtered at closer to eighty-five. But the radiation from the cluster was powerful enough that individual rad-suits were still needed, and, even then, all the protection offered by both would only keep the crew alive for about two hours.
“Shields up,” Delilah said. “Crossing into the radiation zone.” The temperature inside the shuttle began to rise steadily over the next several minutes. The rad-suits had individual climate controls, so the heat was tolerable for the moment. “Coming up on the Forager.”
The words had yet to register in Delphyne’s ears when the ship came into view. The sight locked Delphyne’s chest in chains and squeezed until she couldn’t breathe. The ship was cut in half. The bow section was maybe a third of the ship. The stern portion was the remaining two-thirds, though pieces of that were drifting away as shreds of debris. The scene was so startling that Delphyne couldn’t interpret what she was seeing beyond the carnage. She could decipher the bits of information coming, but she couldn’t analyze it to truly understand the tragedy.
In all her emotional detachment, Roker had no such impediment. “Rear section of the ship has lost all power. As evidenced by the lack of visible emergency lightning and…” Her voice broke off. Maybe she wasn’t as emotionally detached as she seemed. “And the clear absence of internal atmosphere.”
“The bodies,” Horus said. “You mean them bodies floating out there in the Black.” The rear of the Forager was adrift in a sea of human bodies. When the ship split, energetic webbing would have sealed the hull breaches, securing the remaining atmosphere and allowing for life support. Unless there was catastrophic damage and the power died completely. Then there would have been no webbing, no atmosphere, no air to breathe, and the crew would have been sucked out into the void.
Delphyne’s first reaction was to admonish Horus for his callousness, but she understood that wasn’t his intention. L
ike Bayne, Horus not only disliked sugarcoating situations, he found it to be dangerous. “What else?” She looked to Roker.
The engineer cleared her throat and narrowed her eyes. “Signs of emergency lighting are visible on the front section of the ship. That section still has power. The radius of space around it seems relatively free of…debris, compared to the stern. That suggests that energy webbing deployed successfully and still holds.”
Delphyne allowed a slight intake of relief. “Any clues as to what may have caused this?”
Roker scanned silently. “The area of separation is too far toward the bow to have been an explosion in the engine room or malfunction with the drive engines. It seems to have clustered more around the ship’s weapon systems.”
“Suggesting an attack,” Delphyne said.
Roker shook her head. “On the surface, yes. But the details don’t add up. The small details.” She pointed toward the large aft section. “This portion is without power, but that is where the ship’s main power supply is. At the moment of impact, assuming energy webbing deployed successfully on both sections, the power on the bow would have run out first. And I can’t see a situation where power in the rear would have been cut but power in the front would have remained.”
“So what does that mean?” Horus asked.
“Something more deliberate than a blunt force attack. I think the power in the rear of the ship was disabled locally, allowing power to remain in the rest of the ship.”
“You think the ship was being shut down?” Delphyne asked. “The only reason to do that would be to board it.”
Roker nodded.
Delphyne stared out at the scene, growing larger as they approached, with a new lens. “So they were being boarded. And then…what? Why blow the ship to hell if you’re trying to get on?”
“Maybe they did get on,” Graeme said. “Maybe they got what they wanted and blew the ship as they escaped.”
“Horne didn’t say anything about that.” Delphyne spoke into her hand, muffling her voice.
“He said the attack came out of nowhere,” Graeme said. “Maybe it came from inside the ship.”
Delphyne considered it, all while watching the desecrated ship grow larger. “Try to make contact with Horne. Tell him we’re about to dock.” She turned to Croft and Byron, the anticipation already shining in their eyes. “We may encounter hostiles.”
They squeezed their pulse rifles proudly. “We’re ready,” they said in unison.
The shuttle swung around the bow of the Forager, its lights illuminating the dying ship more than the emergency lighting. They spied someone moving through the Forager’s viewport, shielding his eyes with his arm. He waved the shuttle on with his other.
“I can’t raise Horne on comms,” Graeme said.
“I think we see him,” Delphyne said.
Delilah was surprisingly graceful as she maneuvered Petunia into position. Docking with a disabled ship was no easy task. They needed to secure an airlock where no airlock was meant to be. She cut the thrust and let the shuttle drift into place, aligning perfectly parallel to the Forager. A tube just big enough for someone Horus’s size to crawl through extended from the shuttle and secured magnetically to the Forager.
A hatch slid open. Horus’s upper body disappeared as he climbed in and banged on the hull of the ship with a torch. A moment later, a banging sounded from the other side. Horus lit the torch and began cutting. When Horus reemerged, his beard smoked from the sparks. He swatted them out and gestured for Delphyne to enter.
“I thought you wanted to protect your investment,” she said.
“I am a shrewd businessman, but also a gentleman. Ladies first.”
Delphyne waved Croft and Byron ahead. “You guys are up.”
“About time,” Byron grunted. With a running start, he dove into the tunnel headfirst, rifle at the ready. Croft followed. A moment later, they issued the all-clear.
The rest of the team crawled through and emerged on the bridge of the Forager. Horne sat on his captain’s chair like the zombie king of a dead nation, the only man left to lord over a cemetery. “Welcome,” he said, his breathing shallow, “to the finest Deep Black ship in the United Navy.”
“I might have to disagree with you there, Jacob.” Delphyne squatted in front of Horne and grabbed the sides of his helmet. She studied his face through his dingy faceplate.
“Well, you’re welcome to make yourself look the fool if you want. I won’t stop you.”
Delphyne laughed in the uncomfortable way people often do at funerals. Horne’s face had a bluish tint. He must have been running low on oxygen. She checked the levels on his suit, but they appeared sufficient.
She waved Croft and Byron ahead. They secured the bridge, finding no hostiles and no signs of a fight. Graeme and Roker set about salvaging what information they could from the computer systems.
“What happened here, Jacob?” Delphyne asked Horne. “Were you boarded?”
“Don’t think so. Something tore through us before we even noticed we were under attack. No time to scan. No time to suss out the enemy. Don’t even know if there was an enemy. Could’ve been a damn meteor for all I know. Or a gravity fluctuation.”
“No, you were definitely attacked.” The crew looked to each other, waiting for someone to expound on the theory, but they quickly realized it was none of them who spoke. “And you were definitely boarded.” The voice came from the far side of the bridge, the area closest to what would have been the rest of the ship. It was a lone figure, masked, the same kind of holo-projection Delphyne had seen before—a red and white design, like a kabuki mask. His voice, though filtered through the mask and tinged with a robotic hum, was that of a man. He had a sheathed sword strapped to his back, a pistol on one hip and a dagger on the other. “Now,” the man said, drawing his sword. “I think we have some things to sort out.”
8
Cramps seized the muscles in Ayala’s legs. She’d taken to counting through them, like some women did with childbirth. Down from ten. The pain came in waves and never fully subsided. She pushed the soles of her feet into the floor of her cell, which was bigger than a locker, just tall enough that she couldn’t quite stand fully upright, narrow enough that she couldn’t sit down, hoping that the tension would resolve some of the cramping. It didn’t.
She’d been confined to her new quarters for at least two full days. She had lost track of time. She’d received no meals since being moved, and the water was infrequent. She expected to die soon, although she suspected her captors were cruel enough that they wouldn’t allow it. They didn’t want her dead. They wanted her punished. What other reason could they have for keeping her alive? She told them everything she knew about the Void, which was next to nothing aside from the name, and that was no information at all as it wasn’t self-applied. It was the codename decided upon by the select among Naval Command who knew of the Void’s existence.
She had nothing left to give. She swung between hoping they would shoot her in the head next time they opened her door and wanting to fabricate intelligence, trick them into thinking she had value so she could eke out a few more days.
Some days, like this one, she strongly considered bashing her head against the metal wall of her tiny cell until her brains turned to mush.
The door opened violently. Light shot in and set her eyes on fire. The shock made her head swim, and she almost passed out. She would have, had the guard not grabbed her by the arm and pulled her out.
Ayala had forgotten where she was. Two days or so in that box without any way to look out and she thought she could have been anywhere. She hallucinated for a while that she was in the middle of the desert, a lone cactus left to cook in the sun. Now free of the box, her senses came rushing back at once. She was suddenly aware of every pain her body and mind had dulled. She vomited on the guard’s uniform.
The guard, a slight man with an angry face, raised his hand to strike her.
“Stand down,” Tirseer said. A
yala hadn’t noticed her sitting in the folding chair in the far corner. “The admiral looks a bit peckish. What say we bring her some supper?”
“Is it dinnertime already?” Ayala’s voice was a rat clawing out of her throat, diseased and ravenous.
The guard set her down in a chair opposite Tirseer then left the two alone. The colonel watched Ayala with her icy eyes. She gave nothing away, no clue as to what predicated her visit. Ayala had nothing left to keep her up, nothing to fortify her. All pretense was splattered across the front of the guard. “What do you want, Maria? Why bother keeping me alive? Did I do something so grievous to you that you’d take joy in watching me suffer like this?” Tirseer’s expression was unchanging. “Just end it.”
Colonel Tirseer folded her hands across her lap and sat forward slightly. “If I wanted you dead, Shay, I wouldn’t bother with all this. I would put my sidearm to your temple, pull the trigger, and move on with my day. You know me to be a ruthlessly efficient person. This, for the sake of watching you suffer, would be an unforgivable waste of time and resources. No, I want something from you.”
“I told you everything I know about the Void.”
“Which has amounted to nothing.”
“Because that’s all I know about it. That’s all anyone knows about it. Reports were never substantiated. No significant investigations were ever conducted. Everything Naval Intelligence gathered was rumor and hearsay.”
Tirseer leaned forward again, a micro-movement, barely perceptible. “You were the head of Naval Intelligence before it was absorbed by Centel. I know the bureaucratic nightmare that is merging two offices. Files disappeared. Information was shuffled away during the transition.”
Ayala slumped in her chair as she laughed. “You’re paranoid. What reason would I have for burying this? Some obscure mission from a decade ago that never amounted to anything?” She froze. One would think she’d finally succumbed to the torture and died, her body now hardening. She sat upright. Her mind frenzied. She could not decipher between delusion and rational thought, the congealing of a theory and the madness of hunger and sleep deprivation. She had no ability to hide the process as he played across her face. No way to play her cards close to the vest. She was an open book, a book ripped apart and stapled back together. “Something has changed.”
The Deep Black Space Opera Boxed Set Page 42
