| |
AMA WALKED AROUND THE room , her gaze taking it all in. “This is not what I expected from a mechanical room,” she said. The walls were the same pseudo-leather, but several pipes ran from the floor to the ceiling, and humped control desks dominated the center of the room . And of course, off to the right was the alcove where Acosta and his buddies had tried to use Tyce for spare parts.
The Command engineer, Baker, stood near the center control panel. Even though the man had gray hair and wrinkles, Tyce wanted to punch him in the nose. This was the moron who had sent Acosta after Tyce. Left to his own devices, Acosta probably still would have hatched a murder plot, but he wouldn’t have shoved Tyce head first into the ship if this engineer hadn’t told him it was necessary.
John shoulder-bumped Tyce and spoke softly. “Stop glaring at my engineer.”
“You mean the one who tried to kill me when I was tied up?” Tyce asked. “And of course I was only tied up because I traded myself for two children who your guys wanted to experiment on.” Tyce spoke loud enough that everyone could hear. Some of the Command soldiers appeared angry; others, shocked. Most seemed tired as they leaned against various surfaces. Ama watched silently.
“We need to table this discussion until the Imshee are gone.” John said firmly.
“You can’t kill me,” Baker said in a high voice before he retreated behind a console. Then he realized that put him close to Ama, and he inched back. “I’m the only engineer.”
“We have many engineers,” Ama said. “They’ve tapped into water and protein lines and set up life support. We could live comfortably on this ship for many years, based on the work of our engineers.” She smiled.
Baker lost most of the color out of his face. A sadistic thrill ran through Tyce. The asshole deserved all the shit Ama could dish out.
“Enough,” John said. “Baker, have you found any defensive controls?”
For a second, he froze like a prey animal, then spluttered back to life. “I can’t! Everything routes through the broken circuits. Everything!”
Tyce didn’t know what Baker meant until he gestured at the alcove. Up to this point, Yoss had leaned against the wall with his weapon resting against his shoulder, muzzle toward the ceiling. But now he brought it down, slapping the barrel into his left hand so fast that the sound startled people. “You try it and I’ll shoot you,” he warned.
A dozen Command weapons came up as soldiers targeted Yoss.
“Enough!” John yelled. He stepped right in front of Yoss. “Baker, find a tactical system or keep your head under those consoles.”
“You can’t replace me.” His voice had an edge of desperation to it. Tyce wondered why he hadn’t taken off when Acosta had staged his coup.
John moved closer to him. “Even if I asked the Dragon crew to send engineering help, I wouldn’t replace you,” he said more gently. “You and Chief Wu were our only engineers, but a ship this size would have dozens of them. Investigating a ship of this size would take hundreds of them.” He patted Baker’s arm. “Find any tactical system you can cobble together.”
“Chief Wu?” Ama asked.
“The other schmuck who landed in the alcove.” Tyce jerked his head toward the alcove. “He didn’t survive.”
“Ah.” Ama resumed her tour of the crowded room. Her proximity was making quite a few Command soldiers nervous, but she pretended not to notice.
“Commander?” the doctor kept his voice low, and his gaze kept darting back to the corner where the injured lay on foil blankets on the floor.
“Doctor Elkson?”
The doctor moved closer. “We need supplies for the wounded. We’re out of plasma and blood replacement.” He looked at Tyce. “If the Ribelians can help...”
Earth liked everything sanitized—synthetic blood products, sterilized gauze, disposable needles. Tyce had grown used to the rougher supplies on Ribelian ships, but he remembered his early horror. “We don’t have the sort of supplies you would prefer. We use person-to-person blood transfusions and fabric bandages,” Tyce warned.
The doctor winced, but he nodded at the same time. He must’ve been desperate to make that sort of compromise.
“Ama?” Tyce asked. She glanced at Yoss and jerked her head toward the door. His expression turned thunderous; however, after a staring contest that lasted a good minute, he huffed and strode out of the room.
“Nice discipline,” Plat muttered.
Ama walked over to him and patted him on the shoulder. Plat looked horrified. No doubt he was unsure about how to handle a slight, grandmotherly woman taking liberties. Ama had a face that made a person feel guilty about even considering punching her, even if her words were fucking weapons of mass destruction. “Families are different than armies,” Ama said. “No doubt your mother spent many hours repeating directions.”
That implied Ama was Yoss’s mother, which she wasn’t, but it also reinforced the idea that the Dragon was a family ship, so Tyce fully endorsed the lie.
Out of nowhere, a flare of anger and fear rippled through Tyce with such power that he grabbed the edge of a console. He had an overwhelming urge to kill, to slaughter, to fucking rip the enemy apart. Ama hurried toward him. Tyce tried to tell her to stay back, that he couldn’t control his emotions, but then the deck lurched.
The floor bucked up so hard that everyone was thrown a foot or two into the air before they landed. Tyce thanked God that the floor was padded because he landed hard enough to give his knees a jolt. One Command soldier fired his weapon, and the whine of the discharge had all the soldiers raising their weapons.
Then the floor tilted so they scrambled to secure weapons as they slid across the floor. Tyce skidded into the concave curve of the nearest console and grabbed a young soldier who was about to slide past. The kid went wide-eyed at being so close to Tyce, but she didn’t say anything.
John clung to the side of another console. “Report!” The ship shivered and gravity lurched to one side so Tyce was nearly thrown clear of the console, but he grabbed the edge as the soldier crashed into him. “Sorry,” she said as she clawed her way back to the far side of the console.
Baker said from some place behind and under Tyce’s console, “I don’t know!” Now he sounded panicked as well as petulant.
“Anyone?” John asked calmly.
“It felt like a hull breach,” Ama said.
Tyce kept his grip on the console and carefully stood . The gravity was skewed so he half laid on the side of the console as he searched the room for her. She was in a corner with three Command soldiers, all of them jammed together, but thankfully the curve of the room meant that most of the crew seemed relatively unharmed.
John was staring at the corner. “Doctor?” he called. The worry in his voice reminded Tyce that John had men badly injured. The doctor didn’t answer, but an assistant in medical white said, “If the Ribelian ship can send supplies, we need them now.”
The gravity shifted back toward normal, and Tyce scooted toward the floor a half second before down became down again. A few soldiers who had not adjusted fast enough grunted, and one cursed as he landed on the floor with an ominous thud. “We’ll do our best,” Tyce said. Breaking protocol for a scatter alert, Tyce touched his radio. “Yoss?”
There was no answer. Either he was dead or he was better at obeying protocol than Tyce. Tyce looked toward Ama since Yoss was more likely to listen to her. She touched her own radio and used the newly aligned gravity to join Tyce in the curve of the console. “Yoss, are you still breathing?”
A double click answered. He was fine, but he wasn’t going to broadcast his location to anyone listening. Tyce closed his eyes and sent the universe a prayer of gratitude. While Yoss was a pain in the ass, there wasn’t anyone on the ship that Tyce spent more time with. They loved each other as much as they hated each other.
Ama said, “People are hurting. Hurry if you can.” This time no clicks answered, but Tyce wouldn’t expect Yoss to risk a second signal. Ama pressed her fingertips together and spoke softly. “May all suffering quickly cease, and all joy be fulfilled.” The situation was well and truly fucked if Amali resorted to prayer instead of a weapon.
“Sir, we should send out patrols,” Plat said. “That may have been a new boarding party.”
“That was no boarding,” Ama said firmly. “When a ship boards, you get more of a shiver, but that...” She winced as though a memory hurt her. “Thirty or so years ago, a ship I served on had a hull breach. The sudden loss of atmosphere throws the ship off its axis, but there is no explosive tremor through the ship’s infrastructure.”
“Bone may not carry the vibration the same as metal infrastructure,” Baker said. That might be logical, but Ama had lived in space her whole life and knew more about spaceships—and aging spaceships—than twenty Command engineers. Tyce trusted her judgment.
Tyce asked, “How do we find the breach, and are we at risk?” A low-grade panic rose at the idea of the Dragon crew, isolated, spread out around the ship, at risk. Those were his people in a way no one else ever had been. He refused to lose any of them. And that feeling was ridiculous because he had already lost more than one in this damned war. And given the plan he had helped the rebel council design included the world’s slowest suicide plan, he would lose many more. He felt impossibly old and tired.
“That would depend on what caused the breach,” Ama said. “I don’t see a surveillance set up like in the other room.”
John had been talking to the injured. He knelt next to one, his fingers resting on the woman’s shoulder in a comforting gesture, but now he turned. “Surveillance? You found a surveillance system?”
“Behind a sphincter door,” Ama confirmed.
John frowned, but it was Sergeant Plat who asked, “Behind what?”
Tyce explained. “It’s a retractable door with the mechanism hidden in the designs on the walls. That’s how I got out of the room where you put me. There was a door on the back wall that led to a stair.”
John covered his face with his hand, and several other soldiers muttered. A woman who had been forced into the corner with Ama slapped the wall and let out a creative string of curses. She was the most vocal, but several soldiers appeared angry. Hidden doors were a tactical annoyance, but not the ground-shaking shift in reality these soldiers treated it as. “What?”
Plat answered. “The soldiers who took off with Acosta said that Commander Burden had freed you. They said he was a sympathizer and they refused to listen to him anymore.”
“Oh.” Tyce wasn’t sure what to say. He refused to feel guilty about escaping, but a little part of him whispered that he should. His actions had undermined John’s authority. Tyce looked at John, but he shrugged as if he was dismissing it as unimportant.
Specialist Wiles said, “Commander, I apologize. I searched that room top to bottom. I can’t believe I didn’t find a door.” He appeared horrified at having let John down. Maybe Acosta and his crew hadn’t trusted John, but the disrespect was not universal.
“The door is designed to blend into the wall decorations,” Tyce said, even though he would have ripped a member of the Dragon crew if they’d made the same mistake. He changed the topic rather than examine his own feelings. “How are your injured people?”
“Not good,” John said softly. “We need supplies, and we need to get eyes on the enemy. If a monster gets in here...”
Tyce could follow that logic easily enough, but tactically he didn’t have a solution. If the aliens wanted this room, logic dictated that they had to hold this room. This was the ground worth fighting over. However, the wounded needed a more secure position. But if they split their forces, they wouldn’t have the firepower to protect either—not with Command personnel. The obvious solution was to call in Dragon crew, but that would leave the Dragon’s vulnerable population isolated and stuck in shuttles that couldn’t detach. This felt like one of the ridiculously difficult tactical simulations from the academy.
He looked at Ama. “We could call up Bravo.” They were the standard boarding party, so there was a chance Command would have intelligence on them or even photographs, but they had the most experience fighting through enemy territory. And Joahan had been a merchanteer before joining the rebels, so he would understand Command mindset better than the Ribelian members of the crew.
She slowly nodded . “I agree. We will survive or die together. I would rather we survive. Captain Robinson, give the order,” she said before she inclined her head toward him, giving him the leadership position back again. Tyce gritted his teeth. He didn’t want to give the orders that would send people to their deaths, but he couldn’t deny that he had more tactical experience. She touched her radio. “Elephant with Garuda.” With that simple command, the weight of the mission was, once again, on Tyce shoulders.
“Bravo to Elephant Seven,” Tyce ordered.
Bravo team would move steadily toward Ama, using her radio as a beacon. She turned her beacon on. The Command soldiers shifted nervously, reacting to the Ribelian codes on a visceral level, even if they knew the Imshee was a bigger threat.
“I called Bravo team in to help defend our position. Yoss will get the supplies here as quickly as possible, but none of my people will rush into an area. It will take time for any of them to get here.”
Dr. Elkson spoke up. “If they take too much, some of these people may not survive. That gravity shift tore open wounds.”
The guilt and pain of that tore at Tyce, but he couldn’t change reality or order his people to rush into danger. “We’re all doing our best, Doctor.”
“Yes,” John said. “We are. The only ones to blame for this situation are the Imshee. If they’ve breached the hull, they may be trying to destroy the ship instead of taking her. We need to find the enemy, and to do that, we need that surveillance room.” He stood a little straighter and looked at his people. Command soldiers stood straighter as his gaze passed over them. “These Imshee think we’re easy prey. They may be able to beat the Rownt with their big-ass ships, but those turtles are slow and cautious. Everyone in this room survived because we took risks no Rownt would have.” John turned to Tyce. “We need to get to that surveillance room and get eyes on the Imshee and on any hull breach.”
Tyce nodded. “Agreed. But we can’t fight our way through an Imshee.”
“What do you suggest?” John sounded curious—optimistic even.
Tyce smiled. “Those creatures don’t have good traction. They slip and slide, and the curves and stairs around this place favor us. I think two or three of us should run for the surveillance room.”
“That’s insane,” someone blurted.
“And crazy enough to work,” John said.
“I’m going,” Tyce said before Ama could volunteer. He was younger and faster, and hopefully he would get another gut reaction if something was coming at them. He might not like putting his faith in a feeling he couldn’t identify, but so far the ship had steered him right every time. Ama pressed her lips together in a thin line, but she didn’t protest. Maybe she was starting to put some faith in the ship, too.
“Sir,” Plat said loudly as John opened his mouth. “I volunteer to go with him. I have top scores on obstacle running.”
Until Plat made his offer, Tyce hadn’t realized that he had been hoping that John would come. It had been a ridiculous hope. Of course the Command crew wouldn’t let the only officer go wandering around with a fugitive Ribelian. John nodded, and Tyce’s small hope that he could talk to his friend man-to-man died. This was a mission to get intelligence and nothing else.
“Come on, rebel-rat,” Plat said in a teasing tone as he headed for the door. Tyce desperately wished he had Yoss or John at his back, but he followed Plat.