In one ear, Adda whispered, Iri, are you all right? Iri!
“Yeah, m’good.” The padding held her head and neck still. Her suit reported 100 percent integrity on the helmet visor’s blue heads-up display. A low whirring came from the platform overhead. Beneath it was a repetitive rasping noise, and the shriek of escaping atmo.
A flat hand tool, most likely for scraping or filing down printed products, was wedged between her calves and the printer base. She unlocked her boot and let the tool fall to the broken former wall currently serving as deck several meters below. The Coin’s speed, and now theirs, was generating less than a g. Iridian fervently hoped that they wouldn’t be hanging from mobile tie-down kits for very long.
The hand tool joined the rest of the room’s clutter, already collecting around the two large tears in the bulkhead where the atmo had vented into the cold and the black. Her helmet HUD gave her an hour on her suit’s O2. That seemed like long enough to get out of the escort ships’ range, unless the escort ships followed the Coin. And logically, Adda was right about the lab being a secondary target. The escort was tasked with protecting the Sabina, and the vast majority of the ship was still in one piece behind the Coin.
Iridian’s inability to turn her head in her helmet combined with the atmo draining away to feel deeply claustrophobic. “Everybody still here?”
“Somehow,” said Chi.
“I am.” When Danail spoke, the repetitive rasping sound stopped. He was hyperventilating loudly enough for his helmet mic to pick it up.
Iridian said, “Lieutenant?”
Something scuffled to her left. Chi grunted. “He just kicked my foot. I think his mic broke. Sir, is your helmet seal compromised? Once for yes, twice for no.” After a beat, she said, “That’s a no.” She sounded as relieved as Iridian felt.
“Lieutenant Tritheist, this is Gladius. Did you do something to draw the escort? Because they are targeting . . .” Two breaths of radio silence made Iridian grin. “Lieutenant,” said the comms officer on Gladius, “are you in . . . Is that . . . ?”
“Protect the Charon’s Coin and its charge.” Captain Sloane sounded convincingly stern. If Iridian hadn’t heard the captain use that tone before, she’d never have known that Sloane was holding in laughter. “Scimitar, report on when we might expect the ITA.”
There’d be a delay while that request was transmitted all the way to wherever Scimitar had engaged the ITA, and Scimitar’s response came back over the op channel. The atmo in the printer lab was gone, leaving Sloane’s crew on the Sabina with only the sound of their own breath in their ears and whatever else the mics in their helmets picked up.
“They’re not shooting at us.” Danail’s voice shook a little, but he was thinking, not panicking. No babysitting required for now. “Can we get down from this thing? My leg’s asleep and I want to see how much filament this job was scheduled to use.”
The lab around them shuddered and grav shifted in a sickening, inexorable twist that left Iridian clutching the mobile tie-down halter. “Now seems like a bad time.”
A long tangle of filament slid down the bulkhead on Tritheist’s side of the module, slithering toward the Coin below them. The bulkhead shuddered beneath Iridian’s boots. “Ah, fuck, pick up your . . . No, too late,” said Chi. “We’re getting caught in this stuff over here.”
“Danail, isn’t that spool mounted on a winch assembly that’ll wind it back up?” Iridian asked.
“It can’t do that without power!”
She winced at the panic rising in his voice. “All right, it’s falling toward one of the holes in the bulkhead. As long as we get it wound up manually before—”
“What holes?”
This was likely the first time he’d ever been in a hab with a punctured hull, so far as the flying lab module could be called a hab. “We lost atmo, so keep your helmet sealed,” she told him. “You’re on canned O2.”
“What?”
Iridian sighed. “We’re okay. This is why we wore the damned suits. We’ll detach from the printer here, and then you’ll climb up and wind the spool in while I get Chi and the LT untangled.”
“How am I supposed to do that when I can’t see anything not exactly in front of me?” Danail demanded.
“I’ll get it, hang on,” said Chi.
After a minute, something jabbed at the base of Iridian’s neck. The impact padding wheezed as it deflated, giving Iridian full range of motion in her neck again. Chi swung under Iridian with one arm through her own mobile tie-down kit, and Iridian’s breath hitched as the solidly built spacefarer crouched with both boots locked to the printer base on either side of Iridian’s chest. Chi caught the edge of the printer beside Iridian’s head to stabilize herself, counting on strong abs and firm thighs to keep her at the angle she wanted in opposition to the grav the Coin was generating.
Even secured for action, her breasts looked great at that angle. Iridian would be all kinds of lucky if she looked that good and moved that well in twenty years. Nice, she thought. And then, Sorry, babe.
No harm in looking. Adda must have gotten into the Sabina’s security cam feed, which’d show this room’s vid until the lab got out of the longhauler’s network range. There had to be about a metric ton of batteries in this lab to power all the cams. That, or Iridian had said more over their comms than she’d meant to, again. Her face heated up.
Over Adda’s reassurance, Chi said, “How’s the head? Your suit thinks you’re fine, but it’ll wait till you’re half dead to tell me about it.”
“Neck aches.” Iridian rotated her head inside the suit to test that, which turned her face and headlamp toward Tritheist.
It looked like half a klick of metal composite cable had piled against the lab’s formerly exterior bulkhead, and it was still sliding past and around them on its way to the new “down.” A coil of filament had looped around Tritheist’s legs and several more were caught against his shoulder. The tie-down kit attached to the printer base was the only thing keeping him from joining the rest of the crap sliding toward the Coin.
The kit was not rated for an armored human plus a hundred kilos of metal cable. “That won’t last,” she said. “Chi, I’ll look for a real strap-down station around here while you help Danail get that filament under control. Assuming we don’t fall to our deaths, we want to make Captain Sloane’s homecoming op look easy, yeah?” Chi grinned and used Iridian’s shoulder for leverage while she climbed across the printer to the ladder on its side to help Danail.
“Scimitar to Captain Sloane, ITA cruiser is one hour and fifty minutes from you,” drawled Scimitar’s comms operator over the op channel in response to Captain Sloane’s earlier request for an update. “Trajectory says the cruiser diverted off the Mars-Ceres reliable route. We are engaged and they’re real interested, Captain.”
“Understood,” said Captain Sloane. “My thanks.”
Sloane’s ships, including the AI-controlled ones that prickled the hairs on the back of Iridian’s neck just thinking about them, were almost in range of an ITA cruiser’s longest range armaments. You’re scrambling the Sabina’s comms, yeah? she asked Adda.
Of course, Adda whispered. As long as she kept transmissions from the Sabina and the escorts from reaching the ITA cruiser intact, it’d be hard for the ITA to create a firing solution.
Iridian had her own problems to solve. The Coin had refrained from killing them with grav so far, but the printer filament still had to be secured with something solid between it and her. Sudden acceleration could break the mobile tie-down kits and drop everybody ten meters onto the torn deck, where the filament would slam into them at several times its current weight. A sudden stop would throw all the junk rolling around the lab at the humans’ faces while they got crushed against the printer. Either way they’d have no grav at all once the Coin stopped accelerating.
A message in dark red text appeared in the upper center of her helmet display. Tritheist: Get this thing the fuck off me and then lock yourself
down going to lose grav.
He’d come to the same conclusion. “Got it,” said Iridian in syncopation to Chi’s “Yes, sir” and Danail’s “Ah, shit. Okay. Shit.”
“At this point, I’d prefer less grav,” Iridian said, and then added, “Not immediately! Later’s fine,” for whatever AI might be listening. She toed her boot locks off and eased herself out of the tie-down kit until she hung from the pieces that had held her shoulders against the printer base.
Directly above her loomed the printer itself. Although cooling molten metal covered large sections of the case’s interior, about half of whatever it’d been making stuck to its printing platform, through some mechanism out of sight from her current angle. The rest of it sloped toward the side of the platform. The crew’s headlamps cast its slime monster shadows on the bulkhead. The whole mess was still now, at least.
“How’s the head?” Chi asked Danail over the local channel.
“My neck hurts,” Danail groaned.
Chi grinned. “Damn, Sloane really does go for the best gear. I can’t believe we’ve got four solid skulls in here.”
Iridian swung herself from her tie-down kit to Chi’s, on her way over to Tritheist. Tritheist’s lips moved behind the helmet faceplate, but his leaf-shaped beard made lip-reading impossible. When she reached him, new red text appeared on her helmet display. Tritheist: Strap down stations by interior door.
“Damn.” The interior bulkheads were the weakest. The one holding the printer was staying so still that she wanted to check the map after all of this was over to see if that was an exterior bulkhead after all. The door they’d come in through was behind her, at least three meters from the printer. It’d be an awkward, swinging leap to reach the stations, and if they missed they’d have a nasty fall onto workbenches and cabinets below them, or onto the Coin’s hullhook. Even if they did catch hold of the straps, it’d be hard as hell to put them on.
A length of filament fell between Iridian and Tritheist. She shoved it over him and away. “If the Coin puts much more pressure on that bulkhead, we might lose the whole thing,” she said over the local channel.
Tritheist: Agreed.
The next coil she pushed off him freed his other arm, which he used to grip the top edge of the printer’s base to keep from following the coils of filament down the slanting bulkhead. She double-checked his tie-down kit before unwrapping the rest of the filaments. He unlocked his boots from the bulkhead to help.
The filament she’d just pushed off him jerked upward. They both startled away from it. “Sorry, heads up,” Chi said. “Danail found a manual winch. The filament’s spooling up now.”
“Turn it off!” Iridian kicked a coil of filament off her leg. The winch pulled it back over her. “We’re tangled in—”
The whole lab jolted up and, for a fraction of a second, the printer dragged Iridian and Tritheist up with it. The straps across Tritheist’s shoulders and chest snapped, followed by the ones across his hips and thighs. The halter strap Iridian had been hanging from slid out of her grip. Tools, clutter, and the unspooled filament plummeted toward the cracked deck, and Iridian and Tritheist fell with them.
Danail yelped over the local channel, and then Iridian, Tritheist, and about a quarter klick of unspooled metal filament hit the deck. Her armor soaked the impact except for her knees, which hit hard and lit warning lights on her HUD as a thick coil of filament fell across her shoulders and knocked her face first against the deck. On the side where the Coin’s hullhook broke through, the deck silently tore all the way from the corner to the cracks in its center. Cabinets, filament, Iridian, and Tritheist spilled into the cold and the black, surrounded by hand tools and metal scrap.
The filament cable Iridian had almost freed herself from moments before became her lifeline, and she grabbed it with both hands. Pain flared in her shoulder joints when they stopped her fall. Gasping, she craned her aching neck to find Tritheist. He’d caught the filament too, several meters farther along than Iridian.
Something from the lab bounced off her shoulder blade. Her armor communicated the light impact through a pulse of tactile feedback while the object tumbled into the cold and the black. The knee joints were leaking atmo, but according to her HUD, it was a slow leak.
“What are you doing?” Chi shouted over the local channel, presumably at Danail. “Don’t stop it now!”
“My arm—the suit’s fraying,” said Danail. “It was against the cable.”
Tritheist: Both here pull us in flashed in red text on Iridian’s faceplate. It was on the local channel, so Danail and Chi would’ve received it too.
As Iridian’s eyes caught up to her brain, she breathed in through clenched teeth. The cable she clung to drifted away from the lab, straightening out from the bounce when it’d stopped Iridian’s and Tritheist’s fall. Beside them, the bulbous Charon’s Coin flew past, scarred and monstrous and unlit among larger ships’ running lights. The Coin’s extended hullhooks clamped over the lab’s exterior bulkhead and dug deep into the one that used to connect the lab to the Sabina. A cloud of small metal and plastic debris flickered along its flank, reflecting her headlamp’s light.
Beyond and around the Coin flew more ships than she’d ever seen in one place outside stationspace, eerie and isolated this deep in the cold and the black. After the war, not even the Near Earth Union could afford to fly convoys this big. One of the escort ships was missing, but she accounted for the other three and at least six Oxia fighters less than twenty klicks from her. Oxia’s ships had come in close to use the Sabina as a shield, she gathered. Since the escort had been optimized to deal with much more distant threats, that seemed to be working out for them.
They arched slowly around each other at such different angles and relative positions that she had to concentrate to maintain her current sense of direction. It was helpful to imagine the Coin pulling her up, because if she let go of the filament she’d fall into the cold and the black. She blinked to activate ship labels. Her HUD identified a ship occluding starlight in the distance as the missing escort ship. The Oxia fleet must’ve been talking on a fleet channel, because the op channel was silent.
Adda whispered in her ear, An escort ship shot at the Coin. It had to speed up to get out of the way. Are you okay?
Whatever hit the Coin was still out there. If the enemy was successful once, they’d take another shot. Worse, one side of her suit was heating up fast. The Coin’s engines were way too fucking close and getting closer as the filament slowly reeled her and Tritheist back into the lab. She’d seen a man die by standing too near this tug’s engine outflow.
“Babe, can you get the Coin to turn off its engines?” Iridian asked over the command channel. “They’re a lot more likely to kill us than the escort ships right now.”
I’ll try, but it really wants to leave that area, Adda whispered. I’d say it’s afraid, but . . .
“But bots don’t get scared and this is an oversized bot, damn it,” Iridian muttered. Ships and bots and drones were all basically AI with different hulls. They followed orders given by somebody millions of klicks away who never had a clear idea of the situation in which those orders would be carried out. Stuff of nightmares, even when they weren’t aware enough to countermand orders with unintelligible AI logic.
“You keep that thing reeling in,” Chi told Danail on the local channel. “I’ll fix your suit.”
“Yeah, okay,” said Danail. Iridian swore and gripped as tight as her gloves would ratchet down on it.
Something hit her boot. Tritheist had pulled himself to within a meter of her feet and was glaring impatiently. She lip-read the word before Tritheist: Move appeared on her helmet display. She hooked a leg around the cable—better to dislocate it than lose her grip and end up drifting through all that ship traffic—and started pulling the filament toward her.
Her suit slowly cooled and heat warnings from the arm and leg nearest to the Coin deactivated. AI really listened to Adda.
Danail said, �
�Hey, is grav falling?” over the local channel.
“Yeah,” Iridian said.
“Keep pulling them in!” Chi added to Danail.
The ship might’ve been slowing, but the filament they clung to hadn’t pulled taut yet. They were still drifting away from the lab almost as fast as they’d fallen out of it. When the line went taut, that’d change. “Lieutenant, hang on, the loose filament’s almost spooled in.” She wrapped a length of it around her arm.
The yank when the cable went taut came with a grinding, tearing pain in her already strained shoulder. A medical alert lit in her faceplate beside the reading on her dwindling O2 supply. A small, new ache in her upper arm meant that the suit had injected her with something. The pain faded before she even had time to get her mind around it, and that scared the shit out of her, but at least the lab was approaching at a steady pace. “Chi, I thought you said you took the gods-damned drugs out of this suit!”
“Be advised, Copper is charging antipersonnel,” someone on the op channel said in one breath, like mentioning that to the targeted personnel was a very late afterthought. “Rapier moving to intercept. Shifting channel encryption in five seconds . . . Mark.” An Oxia ship oriented itself in Iridian’s general direction.
Tritheist: Acknowledged appeared on her HUD, at the same time as Chi snapped, “I said I didn’t take the painkiller out of your gods-damned combat armor, you masochistic meathead!” over the local channel.
The drug made Iridian’s thoughts slow and slippery. The effect wasn’t overwhelming, but it was enough to matter. “The Oxia ships know where we are, yeah?” she asked Adda. This was why she’d wanted the gods-damned narcotics out of her gods-damned auto-injecting suit. If she made it back to HQ, she’d take the cartridge out herself.
Half a meter of filament between her and Tritheist glowed red, then white, and oozed apart from the rest of the cable, soundlessly severed by an invisible and incredibly hot beam weapon. Tritheist’s eyes went wide and the moment froze before Iridian’s eyes, the severed cable still gripped in both of his armored fists. Her long, gasping breath felt and sounded like her last.
Mutiny at Vesta Page 10
