But their luck—and, perhaps more importantly, their supply of drones—was nearing its end.
The Mode shook again, twice in rapid succession, but the Sundered youth opted not to launch their last remaining drone just yet. “Cargo bay is breached,” she reported tightly. “No vital systems hit.”
Lu Bu gritted her teeth as the engagement clock passed two minutes. Beside it was the hyper drive's void jump countdown timer, which sluggishly wound down past T-minus-fourteen-minutes mark. She had accepted their deaths about one minute and fifty seconds earlier; now all that was left to them was to make the Imps earn their scalps.
“I have a plan,” she heard Yide growl. “It might work—”
“Do it!” Lu Bu and Yide's sister blurted simultaneously, apparently having heard more than enough to offer their unconditional support.
Yide's fingers flew over the console, and after a few seconds' effort his sister—apparently understanding what her brother intended—drew a sharp intake of air. “We have not tested—“
“This is the test,” he snapped as he manipulated the controls—specifically the hyper drive controls. “Release last decoy on my mark: three...two...one...mark!”
“Decoy releas—” his sister reported before the world exploded in a violent schism of light, sound, and nausea-inducing vertigo.
For what seemed like an eternity, Lu Bu's mind felt detached from her body. It was not like an out-of-body experience precisely; it was more akin to the opposite of déjà vu. Her conscious mind felt like it lagged several seconds behind her senses, which was somehow far more disorienting than déjà vu.
Slowly, over what felt like an eternity but which could have only been five or six seconds, Lu Bu's consciousness and senses realigned and she heard Yide growl, “It actually worked!”
“Stealth systems operating—barely,” his sister cut in, wiping what looked like trace amounts of vomit from her arm and console. “Distance from old position...twelve light seconds...primary engine is offline. I think...I think it might be gone?” she said in muted horror.
“How did you do that?” Lu Bu asked in astonishment. She felt numb all over; she had known they were going to die just a few seconds earlier.
“It was not my idea,” Yide said tightly as he appeared to run some sort of diagnostic on his unresponsive engines. “I read about Admiral Montagne doing something like it; they call it a 'Montagne Maneuver'.”
“The Maneuver will not work with our ship,” his sister chided. “Too little inertia to make strange particles...how do you say...'collide'?”
“I modified it,” Yide retorted, turning to Lu Bu, “but the Imps will find us soon if we do not get distance. The hyper drive looks like it can make another jump—two at the most—before it will be drained of trillium. I need you to inspect the engines from the hull.”
Lu Bu unstrapped herself from her chair and made for the door, “Lancers: we will space-walk to inspect the engines.”
“No pressure on the other side of door,” Yide's sister warned as she put a head bag on, with her brother following her lead and doing likewise.
After the Sundered youths' head bags were affixed, Lu Bu and the other armored Lancers—whose combined bulks barely squeezed into the cramped cockpit—manually opened the door leading to the companionway. When it finally slid open, she saw just how extensively the ship's interior had been damaged by the brief, but frantic flight from the Imperials' guns—a flight which Lu Bu was acutely aware had yet to end.
“Move out,” she grunted, engaging her mag-boots and walking past a slagged power relay junction which had completely melted the thin metal forming the port side of the companionway bulkhead. They moved further toward the ship's stern, and before reaching the halfway mark to the stern cargo bay she could see just how severe that lone weapon strike had been.
The ceiling of the cargo bay was largely gone, revealing a twinkling star-scape above. She actually spotted a pair of artificial light sources in the black of the void, which were clearly engine exhaust from the warships which had nearly destroyed them. She could see from across the compartment that only half of the airlock remained; the powerful weapon strike had torn into the inner airlock door from an downward angle. It was as though a giant plasma torch had sheared through the ship's hull above their heads and had finished in the airlock. Or, more ludicrously, she imagined some giant can-opener had been stopped just short of completing its work of removing the Mode's upper hull, leaving half of the airlock's inner door to mark where that effort had been abandoned.
Moving to the airlock, she found just enough room to move through the hole and exit to the stern of the ship—and when she got there, she breathed a sigh of relief.
“Lu to Yide,” she reported as she surveyed the damage, “we have moderate structural damage to the engines, but it looks like exhausts two through eight are intact. Exhaust one,” she clambered over to get a better look, “is ruined.”
“I see your suit's video feed,” he concurred, “I will test-fire number one when you are ready.”
“Ready,” she acknowledged immediately, and a blue-white burst of fire spat from the exhaust one. That burst spluttered before resuming, this time throwing an odd shade of green into the mix, before he shut it down entirely.
“I will need your help shutting off exhaust one before we can maneuver,” he said, and her HUD was populated by technical schematics and points of interest on the exhaust. She took a few seconds to study the first step and moved toward the damaged piece of equipment after she was confident she knew what to do. “Assist,” she commanded, and her three Lancers obliged.
Wending her way to the damaged structure took half a minute, during which time she kept her head down and focused on the task at hand. The looming Imperial warships' presence was nearly enough to steal her attentions, but she managed to initiate the lock-down procedure before losing her nerve.
A minute later, with the work done, she said, “How does that look?”
“Workable,” Yide replied a few seconds later. A scant puff of liquid spurted from a nearby cracked pipe, but before she could mention it the Sundered said, “I saw it. It is not bad enough to stop us; return to the cargo bay. Their sensors are sweeping the area—we have to get moving.”
Returning to the cargo bay with her team took just over a minute, and when they were back inside Yide gunned the ship's engines—causing Lu Bu to nearly lose her footing as the Mode slid forward, pivoting this way and that to keep its engine exhaust as oblique to the Imperial ships as possible.
Robust as the Mode's stealth capabilities were, it was impossible for them to evade direct sensor sweeps if their engines were driving them in a course within ten degrees of perpendicular to the Imperials' sensors. Some of the older warships in the Spine could have been fooled, but not these higher-end Imperials.
Somewhat surprisingly—but much to her relief and appreciation at the Sundered siblings' impressive work—they managed to increase the distance between themselves and the Imperial warships before the Mode's jump engine finally cycled and enabled them to point transfer to safety.
“Can we make the rendezvous?” Lu Bu demanded irritably. “It is a simple question.”
“With no simple answer,” Yide insisted. “To make the rendezvous point with the Rainbow will take three more point transfers; the ship's trillium storage system is intact but the transfer system is offline, and will take several days to repair so that new trillium can be pumped into the system. With what is left inside the hyper drive's reaction chamber, we can make two jumps only.”
“We cannot manually transfer the trillium?” asked Pentos, one of the young Tracto-ans assigned to the Lancer team.
“We could,” Yide reiterated in exasperation, “but if we do, we run the risk of destroying the entire ship—in the state it is stored aboard this ship, it is far too unstable. If even the slightest interruption is made to its thermokinetic condition, it will explode.”
“Can we remove the storage system
from the ship,” Lu pressed, running a hand through her hair after removing the stifling helmet of the battle suit, “and extract the fuel from a safe remove by space-walk?”
“It doesn't matter,” Yide shook his head. “If the trillium stores go, everyone aboard this ship is dead anyway; we only have sixteen hours of life support left, now that the environmental systems were destroyed along with the cargo bay. There are enough spare parts aboard to make a temporary system that could buy us a few weeks, but it would take too long at our current rate of consumption to complete before we all asphyxiate.”
“Then we start the transfer,” Lu Bu said firmly. “We are certainly dead if we do nothing, but only maybe dead if we do something—is this the best plan we have now?”
Yide and his sister shared a look and nodded together, “It is. But with life support offline throughout the ship, and our head bags only providing an hour of breathable air—”
“You need someone in armor to do the repairs,” Lu concluded, replacing her helmet and locking it into place. “Tell me what to do.”
Three hours later, she had finally gotten to the operative part of the process: the one-time transfer of a small quantity of trillium from the containment system to the hyper drive core.
“Interlocks disengaged,” she reported, more to steady her nerves than anything else. Her body was sweaty after three hours of continuous effort, but her mind and reflexes were as sharp as ever as she deftly removed the containment system's inner casing. “Inner shielding removed.”
“There are three interconnected pipes with micro-valves situated in series,” Yide explained, and she quickly saw what he meant. “The middle pipe is the pressure regulator; manually close the second valve from the junction on that pipe.”
She took out a small multi-tool and did as instructed, turning the valve a quarter turn to the left where it clicked into a locked position. “It locked closed.”
“Good,” Yide's sister cut in, “open both proximal outer pipe valves simultaneously one half turn to right. This should cause failure of middle valves on both pipes; they will hiss and click.”
She took out another multi-tool and did as instructed, eliciting the predicted hiss-and-click from both pipes. “Done.”
“Now,” Yide said steadily, “the bottom pipe and the middle pipe must be opened in tandem, half of a full turn to the right. You have already disabled the safety shut-offs, so you must manually open the top pipe between 0.6 and 0.8 seconds after you open the others. This will shoot enough trillium into the core for us to jump and, if you open the top pipe in time, re-establish equilibrium. But if you wait too long the containment system will fail; too fast and we will not have enough trillium to make the jump. Since we broke those valves, we only get one try.”
“Understood,” she nodded, drawing a single steadying breath before, less than three seconds after receiving her instructions, turning the bottom and middle pipes' valves open in tandem before moving the multi-tool in her left hand to the top pipe. Somehow, her metal-gauntleted fingers dropped the tool from their grip and it clattered to the deck—but her supreme reflexes enabled her to deftly slide the tool in her right hand into place, where she quickly re-opened the top valve.
She felt herself holding her breath for much longer than she had realized before exhaling and checking her HUD's built-in countdown timer—which recorded that she had closed the top pipe's valve in 0.81 seconds.
“Good work,” Yide congratulated with evident relief in his voice. “We've got enough for five jumps; replace the inner shielding and re-engage the safety interlocks. When you finish, we can spin up the hyper drive and make our rendezvous.”
“Copy that,” Lu Bu said, realizing her hands had begun to shake from an uncharacteristic amount of anxiety which now flooded her system with the various chemicals and hormones which, she had come to learn, could paralyze most people in similar situations.
Thankfully, she was not most people.
“You saved our lives, Fengxian,” Yide's sister said into the silence as Lu Bu finished replacing the safety interlocks. “Thank you—“
“We are family,” she interrupted, surprised at hearing herself utter those words. Feeling herself blush from the collar up, she added, “You saved our lives earlier; there is no need—“
“Yes there is,” the female Sundered insisted. “Thank you, Fengxian.”
“She is right,” Yide agreed, “thank you.”
“If I get one more 'thank you' from the banana barrel...” Lu Bu trailed off in a half-sincere warning. Thankfully, her shipmates—including the Tracto-ans—began to laugh, and twenty minutes later the Mode made the first point transfer en route to its rendezvous with the Rainbow.
Chapter XXXVIII: Recollections
“The Mode is safely stowed, Captain,” Yide's voice came over McKnight's com-link just under an hour after the Cutter had slipped into its customary position in the main hangar. “The droids,” he said with a hint of disdain, “say the repairs will take two weeks.”
“They told me it would be more like three weeks,” she cocked her head dubiously.
“That estimate included further 'upgrades',” Yide growled, “which will not be necessary.”
McKnight quirked a grin, “Understood. Good to have the Mode back aboard with all hands, Yide.”
“Thank you, Captain,” Yide acknowledged before cutting the line.
She swiveled her chair to face Lu Bu, who had arrived on the bridge just a few minutes earlier and had begun to debrief her on the post-jump events which had nearly seen the Mode destroyed. “I'm convinced they were waiting for us—but that they didn't know quite what to expect.”
“Agreed,” Lu Bu nodded. “We would not have survived if not for Yide's recent upgrades to the Mode. The Rainbow's reinforced shields also helped.”
“So the Imps waiting for us were working on old intel on the ships,” Spalding mused, “but fresh intel on where we'd be—and when we'd be there.”
“Bellucci betrayed us,” Lu Bu said flatly, but McKnight shook her head.
“It's possible,” she allowed, “but unlikely. From what little I know of the way the woman operates, if she had wanted us dead she would have attacked us from both within and without. The perfectly-attenuated opening salvo—which would have easily overcome the Rainbow's old shield grid—coupled with the tempting target of an isolate Imperial courier ship...this was a trap laid by someone who lacked the opportunity to launch a simultaneous attack from within,” she said, pointedly holding her XO's gaze before flicking a look in Penelope Winters' direction, “which opportunity Bellucci did not lack.”
Spalding stiffened at her intimation, but relaxed after a few seconds and nodded his understanding. “She did not,” he agreed.
“Cornwallis?” Lu Bu asked with a cocked head.
“Probably,” McKnight agreed, “although there are a dozen possibilities I can conceive of right now, including several of our former associates.”
Brows lowered thunderously around the bridge at her suggestion that Tremblay—or Bethany—had been involved in the attack.
“The truth is that it's irrelevant,” she shook her head firmly. “We survived the ambush and are capable of plotting a course that will keep us from anything resembling a space lane out here. They took their shot,” she said with conviction as her lip curled in a smirk, “now it's our turn. Engineering,” she turned to Winters' console as she squirted over the first few legs of their itinerary, “prime the star drive with the following coordinates.”
“Yes, ma'am,” Winters acknowledged, and from the crimson tinge to her ears McKnight presumed that the ship's Chief Engineer had overheard—and understood—her previous remark regarding Bellucci potentially using her as a mole or saboteur.
“This ship's crew is whole again,” McKnight said, turning slowly and raising her voice as she made eye contact with the majority of her bridge crew, “now it's time to find our friends.”
“Star drive ready, Captain,” Winters re
ported with conviction.
“Engage,” McKnight commanded, and the Rainbow's powerful star drive transported them yet another step closer to the trinary star system where Traian had predicted they would find Captain Middleton.
“He still hasn't woken up?” McKnight asked after receiving Helena's report on Traian's condition.
“No, Captain,” the large Tracto-an woman shook her head. “The scans suggest his mind is indeed active, but engaged in activity which we cannot interpret even using the most advanced brain-scanning equipment available to us. One interesting thing, however,” she pulled up a series of brain scan images, magnifying one of the thicker bundles of nanomachinery embedded in his cerebrum, “is that in the last few days the growth of this tissue appears to have ceased almost completely.” She pulled up a second and third set of images, which at first glance looked identical to McKnight's untrained eye, but the three images were soon transposed in such a way that made clear the first set—taken two months earlier—contained less total nanomachinery than the second, and the second only fractionally more than the third, most recent set.
“So if this stuff isn't actively growing into his brain then he won't be awake?” McKnight asked.
“Possibly,” Helena said before sighing. “I am sorry, Captain, but I do not possess the expertise to confidently comment on his condition.”
“Your best guess?”
“My best guess,” Helena cocked her head dubiously, “and it is only that: a guess...is that this nanomachinery has consumed whatever raw materials are required for its continued growth, and that this coma-like state is an unrelated symptom.”
“So you think he might just snap out of it?” McKnight pressed hopefully.
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