Empty, aside from a desk with acceleration couch and a console. The holo stage was empty. There was a nameplate attached to the desk, and he walked forward to examine it. The bright golden letters were etched against black anodized aluminum, waiting for twenty years for Nate to find it.
CMDR. A. FERGELIC.
He sucked in a breath, stumbling back. Kohl’s voice came to him over the comm. “You okay, Cap?” The big man clanked up to the doorway, bright lights from his armor lighting the small space.
“No,” said Nate. “I don’t think so.”
Kohl looked around. “Nothing here.”
“But there is,” said Nate. “Or, there was. She was here.” He tapped the metal plate.
“Who?”
“My sister, I guess she was. Annemarie Fergelic. The Ark Royal was her ship. Makes sense she’d be out here in the hard black at the head of her Navy.” He sucked in another breath, then another. “Kohl? I didn’t even know she was my sister. Not until today.”
“Kinda sucks,” said Kohl. “Finding out you’ve got a family, and they’re all dead. On the same day. You’ve known they were dead for a while. But, uh.They were family all along.”
“Kinda sucks,” agreed Nate. “It’s complicated.”
“You going to be okay?” said Kohl. “I don’t mean that in a mushy way. I mean, are you going to hold it together? There’s still bugs that need killing.”
Nate pushed himself to his feet. “Yeah. I think I’ll be just fine for killing bugs.” Kohl backed out of the doorway, letting Nate through. “Let’s see what else we can find.”
“Sure, Cap.” Kohl clanked off towards the remaining door, open into the dark beyond. “Well, hey. Escape pods.”
Nate hurried to join him. Sure enough, the door led to the emergency evacuation area for the bridge crew. There were three pod bays available. One was sealed tight, and Nate figured beyond that doorway was the hard black of space. The people in that pod were … gone, drifting forever out in space, or had been picked up as bug food.
There were two remaining pods. Their doors were open, waiting. Inviting. The closest one was a standard four-seater pod, fitted with acceleration couches for the extreme G of explosive launch. There was an Ezeroc drone inside, one of its stabbing claws piercing the mummified remains of a bridge officer. The officer still held a sidearm, and the side of the Ezeroc’s skull was holed by rounds from the weapon. This one had gone down fighting. Alone, with the red emergency lights around them. Just one more human the bugs would pay for.
The last escape pod was a single-occupant design. Reserved for the commander of the Ark Royal. Nate slowed as he approached, not sure what he would find. Truth: he wasn’t sure what he wanted to find. He played his suit lights around the interior, biting on his lower lip as he took it in.
An Ezeroc, mandibles around the arm of the … captain. Don’t say her name. Don’t say it. Her sidearm still clutched in a mummified hand. She’d shot the Ezeroc like the other bridge officer. But she hadn’t stopped there. The top of her head was gone, a spray pattern of dried blood on the bulkhead behind her.
Annemarie Fergelic, sister of the Emperor Dominic Fergelic, had died here on the edge of space. She had died alone, a suicide.
“Step away, Cap,” said Kohl. “There’s no good that’ll come of looking in there.”
Nate didn’t move. Annemarie was the smart one. The brave one. “She killed herself, Kohl.”
“Figures,” he said.
Nate rounded on Kohl. “How, Kohl? Tell me how this makes sense.”
The big man didn’t react. “Well, you haven’t had one of those things in your head. I have. If you had … I guess, all the secrets of the Empire, what would you do?”
Kohl was right. Nate turned back to Annemarie’s remains. She had probably realized even if she made it off the ship, she knew too much. There were too many Ezeroc around the Ark Royal. An entire planet of them below, waiting for survivor pods to land. If she’d gone, she’d have still died, but … badly. It would have been terrible.
He reached into the pod, grabbing the Ezeroc’s carapace, and pulling it free. He set it adrift behind him, then looked at Annemarie one more time. That’s your sister, Nate. You figured her for a friend, and she was, but it’s worse. They killed your family. Either directly, or indirectly. How does that make you feel?
“I figure we need to kill some fucking bugs,” he said. He clicked on his comm. “Captain to the Tyche. You there, El?”
“We’re here.”
“Get Hope on over here. Everything that happened, happened a long time ago. We need that reactor online. And we need to pick facts out of the brain of this ship.”
“You got it.” The comm clicked off.
“Coming, Cap?” said Kohl.
“You go,” said Nate. “Meet up with Hope. Watch her, Kohl. Watch her like your life depends on it.” He gritted his teeth. “None of us dies alone.”
“I hear you,” said Kohl. “What are you going to do?”
“I need a minute,” said Nate. “Go. I’ll be along.”
Kohl said nothing, the clank of his armor coming through the decking as he walked away. His lights left with him, leaving Nate to stare at all that remained of Annemarie Fergelic. Just the two of them, a single suit’s light between them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
WHEN SHE AWOKE, it was in darkness, cool and comfortable. The comforting legs of her brethren stepped down her face, down the side of her suit, to walk off. One drone came to free her arms from the resin holding her in place.
She reached a hand up to the top of her head, feeling the seam where they’d had to … work on this body. It hadn’t been. What it was meant to be. Before. But now it was. The song of her people soared around her, soothing her. She knew she differed from them; they were many made into one, and she was one made into many.
It was complicated. It was beautiful.
The body she walked in — how weak and soft it was — was a necessity. She felt the comforting presence of one of her brethren inside her skull, its thin body nestled against her brain. She didn’t need to feel it with her fingers. She knew it was there, guiding her. Helping her. Keeping the pieces of her that didn’t want this perfection silent, quiescent. It felt comfortable. It made her feel complete.
A man stood before her. My daughter, what have they done to you?
She knew, through examining his face, he was what humans would call horrified. She smiled at him, her breath frosting in the air. I have become. What I was meant to be. She thought for a moment. You should be happy. This is what you always wanted.
His expression closed, eyes angry. Not like this. Never like this.
Where are you? she asked. We will come find you. And make you. What you were meant to be.
No, he said. There is still … one more chance.
For what?
He didn’t answer, fading from view. She knew him to be one of the genetic donors to this body, a maker of her genes, and that was of tremendous interest to her people. They had … altered her, cutting what needed to be cut, and growing what needed to be grown. But with this man? They might make more, faster, easier.
It was an exhilarating thought.
Her Queen touched her mind, the vast and ancient intelligence welcome. You will find him.
I will find him, she agreed. He will make more.
You will need the other genetic donor, said her Queen.
Of course, she said.
There was a part of her that wanted to scream never never you can’t have her but the comforting presence in her head pushed it down, made it quiet. It wouldn’t have to do that too many more times before it killed off that tiny piece of uniqueness. She was one made into many, but all she wanted was to not have the one left. It was a mar against the perfection of the collective.
She picked up her sword, because this body was too weak to kill with its tiny claws. Her hands knew the sword, and knew what to do with it.
Perhaps, as she
journeyed, she would find the one who had thought to be together with her. She had all the togetherness she needed. While he was still out there, the small part of her that still screamed inside had hope. So, she would find him first, and kill him, and then there would be no more of this internal conflict.
CHAPTER THIRTY
THE SHIP WAS old, that’s for sure. Hope hadn’t seen a design like this in forever. She felt like it had been minted back when she was in swaddling, or maybe even earlier. Before she’d had dreams of building things. Before she’d taken apart her family’s cleaning bot to see how it worked. Before, even, her parents had dreams of a little Hope.
Old was good. Old wasn’t just rustic. Old was reliable, familiar.
Old was hackable. The tech on this thing would be a piece of cake to bust open.
She and Kohl were in the Ark Royal’s Engineering section, the remains of Ezeroc littered everywhere. The bugs had come in here, hard and fast, and crippled the ship by force. Hope didn’t know why they hadn’t used magic mind wizard powers on the Engineers. She wanted to think it was because an Engineer’s mind was complicated, but the available data didn’t support that worldview: Hope herself had been bundled up and stuck to a wall with goop by a human-piloted Ezeroc back on Absalom Delta.
It was more likely they had a cap on the number of people they could control at once. They might be powerful, but they weren’t gods. If Hope could control minds, she would have started with the Engineers rather than the spacers piloting ships out in the hard black, but there was no accounting for taste. Especially alien taste.
“Fucken bugs,” said Kohl, surveying the room. All the lights were out, the reactors — all six of them — cold. Hope knew he wasn’t referring to the reactors, but what the Ezeroc had done to the people who used to work here.
There was just one left, a woman staked to the side of some secure shelving by a severed Ezeroc claw. Hope knew it was a her despite her mummification in the hard black by the size of her frame and the way her hair flowed out from her head in the vacuum. Small, but she’d died fierce, a plasma cutter in one hand. The Ezeroc claw was charred at the stump; the Engineer had severed it from her attacker before bleeding out.
Hope looked around the Engineering bay, taking in the size of it. There would be at least ten Engineers on shift here, so the mummified Engineer hadn’t died alone. She’d still died though. Hope rubbed at her suit where her bracelet lay, and prayed that she’d got the tech right.
She hated relying on someone else’s code. When she had time, and a little more sleep, she would get to the bottom of the tech. Once she’d unpicked the code, she could … make it better. She was sure they’d make it out alive, that wasn’t in any doubt; the cap had a plan, and his plans were good.
Usually.
Okay, so there was a little doubt. “We’ll start with that one there,” she said, pointing at the closest reactor. “Once it’s online, we can fire the others up.”
“Why that one?” said Kohl.
“It’s closer,” said Hope. “Do you want to pick another one?”
“Does it matter?”
“No. They’re just reactors.”
“Closer is good,” said Kohl. “Let me know if you need anything.”
“Actually,” said Hope, “could you close up Engineering? Seal the doors.”
“Sure,” said Kohl, clanking away in his power armor.
Hope didn’t need Engineering sealed, but it was a convenient excuse to get Kohl out from underfoot. It was nice of the captain to make sure she had an escort, because going anywhere alone on a dead ship was a sure-fire way to get killed. If this was a horror holo script, that’d be how Hope would kill the clever young Engineer. Talented, clever, and young, but killed before her time as she tried — valiantly — to start up a dead reactor on a deader ship, as the alien menace approached. All that aside, she didn’t like being watched while she worked.
Also, if she got this setup working, she wanted to try pressurizing the ship, and Engineering was as good a place to start as any. The Ark Royal might have gone out like a blown candle because she took a lot of damage, but she could also have gone adrift because all the people who brought light into darkness were dead.
The reactor was — again — an old design. She’d studied models like this before. It was a standard Internal Confinement Fusion style of reactor. The ICF was standard everywhere; the Tyche had one, the Torrington had one too. Nice, clean fusion. She checked the reactor over, using her rig to scan it. Lasers reached out to map the exterior of the reactor. No holes. Good start.
Why wasn’t it working?
Probably because it was out of fuel. The other option was that someone had initiated safe shutdown, but Hope didn’t figure that for likely. She looked back at the mummified Engineer. Not likely at all. People had gone down screaming and in terror in here; it’d be tripping the light fantastic to think some Engineer had the presence of mind, while their friends were being turned into shish kebobs by the bugs, to put all six reactors into safe shutdown.
So, fuel. She checked the feeding hopper, and found it well stocked. There was a connector port on the side of the reactor for emergency power to jumpstart ignition, but before she used that: safety first.
The Engineering bay was, like most ship designs, at the rear of the Ark Royal. This meant if you needed to eject a reactor that had gone critical, you would fire it in the ship’s wake. The Tyche was the same, Engineering — Hope’s sanctum sanctorum — at the rear and top of the ship. The Ark had this bay rear and bottom. She wanted to be sure that if the reactor went to a bad place, they could eject it.
She examined the escape ports. They seemed fine, but it was hard to be sure without doing an external inspection.
“Hey,” said Kohl over the comm, almost startling Hope out of her rig.
“Jesus, Kohl,” she said. “Don’t sneak up on people. Especially on a death ship full of alien corpses.”
“It’d be worse if they weren’t corpses,” said Kohl.
“Fair point.”
“Anyway, I’m about done with these doors.” Hope looked across at him, surveying the door he’d just closed on one of the last entryways to Engineering. “What’s the holdup?”
“I’m trying to see if we can eject the reactor if it goes critical.”
“Why?”
“So we don’t die,” she said, letting sarcasm into her voice. Seriously. It’s not like Kohl understood this stuff anyway.
“Okay, but if we eject it,” said Kohl, “where does it go?”
“Outside,” said Hope.
“How far?” said Kohl.
Hope thought about that. “Not very far,” she admitted.
“Far enough that we won’t die?”
“No, probably not,” said Hope.
“Then maybe skip that step,” said Kohl. “Only, Gracie’s out there somewhere and we’re burning air.”
She gritted her teeth. Not that she’d been wasting time on a mistaken premise. It was more that Kohl had been right, and that kind of thing shouldn’t happen too often. Hope pulled power leads out from the base of her rig, connecting them to the reactor’s jumpstart ports. She told the rig to give up a few joules, just enough to engage the feed pipe and start the reactor’s laser.
There was a clank, a hum, and then lights bloomed over the outside of the reactor. The rig’s connection reported that the reactor had started a clean burn against a new fuel pellet, the fusion reaction nice and clean. She disconnected the power leads, moving towards a nearby console. She pressed the power button, but nothing happened.
“Hell,” she said.
“What is it?” said Kohl, clanking closer.
“Console’s busted,” she said. “Must have taken damage in the battle, I guess.”
Kohl looked at her, then at the console, then gave it a good, hard hit with his glove. The whole console shook with it, then lights blinked on, its holo stage coming to life. She stared at him. “You … could have broken it! It …
might never have worked!”
“You’re welcome,” he said, clanking off.
• • •
The bridge wasn’t a happy place, but it was where she had to be.
Engineering was fine for stoking up the reactors, making sure the drives were alive, that kind of thing. And she had; near as could be told from the back of the Ark, things were shipshape.
Up here was where the commands were given. Where the data was kept. There wasn’t a convenient method for people in Engineering taking control of the ship, because multiple points of control were a bad idea on a warship. So here she was in the open space of the bridge, holo stage alight, with one console working. The rest kinda-sorta worked. The Ark had been through it the hard way, her crew with her, no mistake about that. But Hope figured on breathing a little life back into her.
The good news, if there was good news, was that the bridge was sealed, had atmosphere, and was bringing the temperature up from the seventh-circle-of-hell cold to moderately-unpleasant cold. About thirty percent of the lights worked, which was more than she expected. It gave the bridge a you’re-not-welcome-here-but-what-can-I-do-about-it feel, like an aunt’s house who hated her clever, young Engineer niece. Kohl leaned against a busted acceleration couch, his helmet down, sucking in twenty-year-old canned air. “This place smells like shit,” he said.
“It’s not great,” agreed Hope. The air was beyond stale, but the air cyclers should fix that given enough time. If enough of them were working. The ship net said most everything was broken, corrupted systems and things that just weren’t there anymore spotting her display with a heavy wash of red. There was less yellow, and even less green on the board. She could fix it, if she had the time, but most of those things weren’t necessary. They had power, they had air, and they even had grav.
What they didn’t have? Well, Grace, for one, but on the road to getting her back, they didn’t have control over the battle net. The ship net was fine, it was just this one ship, and all Hope had needed to do was ask. The battle net was something else.
It’s lucky she’d brought her tools.
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