by L S Roebuck
“An innocent bystander,” Dek said. “He was visiting me when the first Hawk, Alan, sacrificed himself. Then Capt. Eaton over there stupidly summoned me to the bridge so I could tell her all the Hawk’s Chasm plans – so they made Ramos come along, too. He is a neutral player and will stay out of our way.”
Marcher the assassin spoke up, also aiming his assault rifle at Ramos. “I don’t trust him.”
“Quite frankly, Marcher, it doesn’t matter if you trust him or not,” Dek said. “I am in command here, and I have decided to let Ramos meet oblivion the same time the rest of us do, not before.”
“God will decide who dies and when,” Ramos said, somewhat defiantly, with his arms crossed.
“Let’s not delay destiny any longer,” Dek said. “Grace here,” Dek pointed at the stunned engineer on the floor, “thought she could slow us down by putting a little unlock puzzle on the control panels.”
As the Chasm agents took their place in front of each terminal, the magnetic reconnect screens came to life with two sets of numeric keypads, spaced on the far side of each screen.
“Okay, this is important,” Dek said slowly. “I am going to give you the code, four pairs of numbers. Each pair has to be entered on each screen – one number for each number pad – within 1 second, or we have to start over.”
“What happens if we get it wrong?” Marcher asked, as he set down his assault rifle in front of the console and hovered each hand in front of a keypad.
“I’m not sure, but my guess is that too many wrong tries will lock the system down,” Dek replied, eyeing Marcher’s rifle. “Okay, is everyone ready? On my mark, enter the first pair of numbers: two-seven. Counting down, five ... four ... three ...”
The Chasm conspirators, facing away from the center command chair, needing both hands to enter the codes, all begun to set down their rifles.
“...two... one.”
The group all frantically punched in the numbers, and at the same time, Dek raised his stun gun and shot Mirandi. She cursed as she hit the floor hard.
Several Chasm agents started to flip around to see what happened, and Dek quickly put two more of them into a shocking sleep.
“What the heck!” Marcher flicked his assault rifle up with his leg, caught it and started to take aim at Dek’s back. But before he could pull the trigger, he also sank to the floor, caught in a stun beam.
Two of the agents looked over at Ramos, who held a small stun gun forward. Ramos clearly had never used a stun gun before was shocked as he saw Marcher writhing on the floor. Both the Chasm rebels simultaneously started reaching for the rifles they had been tricked into setting down. Before they could reach them, they fell unconscious as well. This pair had been taken out by stun bolts from Caddo. At the same time, Snodgrass has also pulled out his hidden stun gun and put three other Chasm operatives into a deep sleep.
Dek flipped around and stunned two more, and soon, there were 11 Chasm operatives with slight convulsions, sleeping un-peacefully on the floor with Grace.
“Did you have to stun Grace?” Caddo asked, with an annoying amount of whine in his voice.
“I had to sell it,” Dek said.
“Let’s airlock the chasm traitors before they wake up,” one of the Marines demanded, as he looked over at the dead captain. “They surely deserve it.”
“No,” Dek said, a natural authority resonating in his voice. “No more death today. Zip bind them and lock them up.”
“We don’t take orders from you,” the other Marine growled.
“Now you do,” Snodgrass said. “As XO, I am placing you under Dek’s command. If we are going to survive this, Dek is the guy to lead us. He’s got the stuff.”
“Are you serious?” the first Marine asked. “He is a Chasm traitor.”
“No,” Snodgrass said slowly. “Actually, he betrayed Chasm... twice. He’s in command, at least until Chief Grace comes around. I mean Captain Grace.”
Dek felt sick to his stomach. The inertia dampeners always made him ill, and they had been on for five Arara 28-hour days as the American Spirit slowed to a full stop. He sat in the command chair that had been piled up with decoy weapons just a week earlier. Dek watched as some of the maintenance crew worked to repair the damage caused by the Chasm Hawk bomb. He was amazed at how quickly the scars and char from that blast had been erased, almost as if the horrible, desperate Chasm gambit had never happened.
“Grace to Tigona,” the comm unit crackled to life.
“Dek here, go ahead Captain,” Dek replied. As the new XO of American Spirit, Dek had come to be trusted by Captain Grace. The captain respected the roguish turncoat as being both resourceful and cooperative. With the Chasm sabotage thinning the command ranks, Grace knew she needed to take advantage of natural leaders if they were going to survive. Now doing double-duty as chief engineer and captain, Himari found herself needed off-bridge, instead leaving Dek in the command chair while she oversaw the efforts to shore up the batteries and backup generators. They were going to need every watt of power to have any hopes of getting in range of a Magellan rescue team before the batteries drained and life support failed – and they all froze or suffocated in the nothingness of deep space.
Dek beamed. He didn’t know if Ramos’ prayers had inspired divine intervention or everything that had transpired was the product of infinite chance, but he was now heading in the direction he wanted – toward Amberly. The odds were that his life was going to be much shorter than if the Chasm sabotage hadn’t stopped them on the decades long trip to Earth. But while his chance of survival was worse than a coin-toss, his chances of ever seeing Amberly again had improved astronomically. Dek would have risked even more, betrayed deeper, sacrificed all, he knew. For the love of a woman, Dek thought. No, for the love of one very special woman.
“Okay, XO,” Himari said through her comms. “Confirming spacewalk to begin the manual conduit bypass from cell bank C to cell bank D. This should buy us at least another month of life support – if we can tap into the D bank.”
“It’s too dangerous, Grace,” Caddo said loudly over Dek’s shoulder. Caddo was acting Security Chief now, though promotion was not his ambition when he killed the previous chief.
“It’s no problem,” Grace said. “Believe me, in six months, you are going to be glad we did this. I got this.” Her words and steady voice did not betray her anxiety.
“Spacewalks make me nervous in the best-case scenario,” Caddo said. “One snag on your suit… or exposure to antimatter residue… or...”
Because of damage from the first Chasm bomb, Grace knew her space walk through jagged and twisted steel fragments and shards was risky. The sabotage assured there was no internal access to many of the batteries — the only way to get there was by going out a nearby airlock into space and maneuvering over and through the gaping hole in the side of the American Spirit.
“Are you sure there isn’t another engineer who could install the conduit,” Dek asked, “you know, someone more expendable?”
“Leadership 101, Dek,” Grace said. “Don’t ask someone to do something for you that you would not be willing to do yourself. That’s what April taught me.”
“Yeah, I read her book, too,” Dek sighed.
“I’m a-go,” Grace said to Dek. She then spoke to the American Spirit VI. “Jefferson, please begin visual scans and loop the XO into your report. Open the airlock.”
Caddo nervously looked over at Dek. “Maybe we should have asked Ramos to pray?”
Captain Himari Grace. As she rolled the phrase in her mind, she chuckled audible. Who would have thought? For a woman who had little ambition, the fact she was now master of the American Spirit seemed absurd. Her breathing echoed in her helmet.
As the airlock slid closed behind her, she reached out and attached a carabiner to a handle on the exterior door. She let herself float for a second, free of the artificial gravity created by the American Spirit.
“Whoa,” Grace said aloud.
“Is
everything alright, Captain?” Dek’s voice projected from the speaker in Himari’s helmet.
“Fine, fine,” she replied, “Just getting used to the weightlessness. I suppose we’ll have to shut the artificial gravity off soon to save power, so soon you’ll be ‘whoa-ing’ too.”
Pulling herself arm-over-arm she ascended the dorsal fin midway, to the open wound inflicted on American Spirit by the first Chasm bomb.
Suddenly, she felt her suit get snagged hard by a jagged piece of ripped hull obscured by shadow. Grace stilled herself as her heart rate jumped. The sharp metal would have torn through most materials, but Grace’s suit was made of advanced flexible polymers, capable of withstanding significant puncture pressure. She freed herself from the snag, pushed her self slightly away from the ship, and examined the damage close up.
“I’m so sorry baby,” the engineer spoke softly to her ship. She peered into the dark hole. “Activate headlamp.” Grace calmly asked Jefferson. The light flicked on and she gasped.
“Captain? Everything OK?”
“I’m fine. Things are not OK. Both cell banks C and D are leaking. Rapidly.” Grace reached for her supply pack to find some space-worthy adhesives. She didn’t expect to have to do a patch job.
Jefferson offered some unsolicited perspective. “Captain, it appears the inertia dampeners in this area of the ship have been damaged, producing extra tension during deceleration on these batteries, creating ruptures. We are fortunate you are out here to catch this problem now.”
“Jefferson, analyze the leakage and calculate the impact on the return to Magellan.” The engineer moved to pack D, and very carefully worked to avoid the highly acidic fluids erupting from the power cells.
Jefferson answered her question in his calm, nearly monotone artificial voice. “Captain, at the current rate of loss, each minute reduces the viability of the American Spirit in maximum conservation mode by roughly two days.”
“I’m patching D now,” Grace said. She expertly applied emergency adhesive to the poly-patch, careful not to accidentally stick it to her suit. If she did that, she’d never get it off.
“Please use caution captain,” the Jefferson said. “The battery fluid is highly corrosive.”
She pressed the patch down quickly and it sealed, but not before a spirt of acid shot in her direction. She threw herself out of the way into space, and for a second wondered if she had attached her safety cord.
The sharp jerk of the cord when it had no more slack to give comforted her, and she pulled herself back to the ship on the two meters of cable that had extended. The force of the pull seemed to have agitated the leak in the C bank, and now it was gushing acid.
“I’m moving to patch C,” Grace said dryly.
“Please be careful,” Dek said.
“No time, no time,” Grace said. She didn’t have to ask Jefferson to know they were losing weeks of power.
Reaching back into her pack, she produced another patch, and applied the adhesive.
“Patching C now,” she reported.
She pushed down on the leak, and managed to seal three sides of the square patch, but fluid continued to escape from under on corner of the patch in a misty spray. She frantically punched down on the corner and the leak sealed.
“Now I just have to connect the conduit,” Grace talked through her next task. The misty acid had formed a crystalline cloud in space. Grace eyed it nervously, and pulled out the conduit. The cloud was drifting toward her.
“Come on, come on,” Grace grumbled as she stretched the power cable between the two battery banks. “C connected.”
Jefferson triggered an alert inside Grace’s helmet. The acidic cloud was dispersing, becoming wider, but less caustic.
“D connected.”
Grace could hear the cheers from the bridge.
“Great job, captain,” Dek said. “Come on home.”
“Wilco,” the captain said. “Dek, I may have a problem.”
The menacing acid cloud was less than a meter from Himari now.
She jumped to avoid the hazard, pushing off the hull with her legs – but didn’t clear as much distance as Grace hoped. Her safety chord was tangled in twisted metal. The acid crystals hit her suit, and heat escaping from the suit immediately melted the crystals. Quickly a thousand micro holes were burned through the polymers. Grace knew she had seconds.
“Dek, I’m out,” Grace said. “I’m sorry.”
“Grace, what is going on?” Before Dek had finished his question, half of Grace’s suit had dissolved. She tried to respond again, but didn’t have enough air left to speak.
Jefferson spoke through the bridge comms. “Himari Grace’s suit has been compromised.”
“No!” Dek said. “No, no, no.”
Everyone on the bridge looked to Dek Tigona, the new captain of the American Spirit.
CHAPTER NINE
Waypoint Magellan, December 13, 2603, Earth date, 14 months after the Battle of Magellan.
To Amberly, Dek Tigona looked as if invisible weights were crushing his beautiful soul. His brown hair was gloriously messy; his lovely grey-blue eyes seemed dim. Her heart ached for him, and she wished she could reach through the vid and hold her mysterious one-time suitor in her soft arms. His arms looked hard, and his pinched face made her think he had lost a few kilos since she last saw him on the eve of his exile. She had only known him for a few weeks before his exile, but the intensity of their relationship during those weeks seared her heart.
The recorded visage spoke with a positive energy that seemed anachronistic with the desperate situation Dek and the American Spirit were in. “This is Dek Tigona, Captain of the American Spirit. This will be our last tight-beam transmission, as we hope to conserve power to keep life support alive long enough that any rescue effort launched by Waypoint Magellan will find people to save, and not just equipment. Jefferson has finally finished the navigation calculations. Our path will take advantage of gravitational impacts and keep us at a velocity that could be matched by rescue vehicles. All the data is in the attached nav chart. You know where we will be and when we will be there.”
Amberly did some quick math in her head. This transmission was sent, traveling at light speed, more than three months ago and if the American Spirit was traveling at top speed, roughly four-tenths the speed of light, it wouldn’t have even covered half the distance to Magellan. And the American Spirit wasn’t traveling at top speed. How long would the reserve power last? She tried to calculate how much time they had to rescue Dek and the survivors on American Spirit before life support gave out. She didn’t have the right data to do the math, but she knew once she saw Jefferson’s navigation chart, she’d know the odds of success.
Dek’s recording continued, “We’ll try to keep everyone alive until a rescue team – should you decide to send them – brings us what we need to repair the antimatter generator. We’ve taken all non-essential systems off line, including artificial gravity. We’ve deployed our stellar radiation panels, but there isn’t much sun in this nowhere patch of space. Our lives are in your hands now, and we have faith that Magellan will live up to its purpose.”
Amberly looked around at the assembled Magellan leadership in the Command Center. The Waypoints were built to serve the deep space-farer traveling the light years between Earth and Arara – and provide hope that help wasn’t too far away if things became critical. Everyone in room had been taught that this was the fundamental reason of existence of every waypoint. They had said oaths to that effect as early as grade school.
Moreno had seen Dek’s last transmission already, so her focus was on how others would react. Gov. Thor Rillio, whose own family had died when an antimatter accident put their ship out of reach decades ago, was struggling to hold back tears. Lt. Boro, a veteran who had seen some of the most intense combat during the battle of Magellan and who was briefly aligned with Chasm before betraying them to Magellan authorities, was less moved. Dek cannot be trusted, he thought. Although he had be
en fully pardoned, his own guilt consumed him. No one who sided with Chasm should be.
Officer Trot Wilder had a stone face, masking the mix of excitement, stoic duty and fear that turned in his thoughts. He was tapped by Thor to lead the rescue flotilla of three Valkyrie-class runabouts to save American Spirit. If Jefferson’s calculations were correct, the flotilla would intercept the American Spirit in about a fourth of an Earth year. There was no margin for error. Without accurate data on the deep space ship’s supply levels, number of survivors, and power drain, it was hard to know if the flotilla could reach the American Spirit in time. If they were able to make repairs, and get the American Spirit up and running to full power, they would load the flotilla on the massive cruiser and be back in Magellan’s safe harbors in six to nine months.
Because of the deadly risk, Trot had wanted to leave his beloved Kora and baby Alroy, but Kora insisted that they come. Trot remembered her argument. “I’ve lost so much family letting them go without me,” Kora had said, tears streaming down her face. “And now Amberly is leaving for Sonnet. I will never leave your side. Alroy and I will follow you wherever you go. Your duty is our duty, and we will face it together as family, do you understand?”
Moreno examined the features of Councilman Skylar Trigs. He had recently cut his golden locks to sport a more practical, aggressive short haircut. He’d also grown a beard. Trigs was going with Amberly to Sonnet, and he was sweet on Amberly, Moreno knew. She worried that if Trigs and Amberly became romantically involved, and such an involvement did not hold fast, that the fallout could jeopardize the whole Spencer Belt operation. Sonnet had an unhappy history for love lost. Still, she was glad to have that overly ambitious, charismatic glorified radio operator off her waypoint for a while.
As the video of Dek continued, Amberly thought about how she had lied to Dek, just over a year ago, when he was in a Magellan cell waiting for exile on the American Spirit. She told him she loved him – because she didn’t have the strength for the truth. She had taken advantage of his love for her to save Magellan. She used Dek, just like her evil mother used people, manipulating them through deceit. Only, her ends justified the means, she thought. She thought about her beautiful sister with her flowing black hair holding baby Alroy. New life. We endure. Even here in the middle of deep space.
