24

And the Horse You Rode In On

I turn off the display. In the last twelve hours, nothing substantial has changed.

A whole train of ships strung out behind us for light-minutes, all ticking over at a single gravity of acceleration, just switching positions occasionally as someone finds a little fresh vigor and spurts ahead, forcing us to match, for a time. It's ridiculous, compared with how fast we were running earlier, but we're all that beaten down.

I'm reminded of an old Terran joke about a day so hot, that a rancher saw a coyote chasing a rabbit, and they were both walking.

At least wherever that warship is, it hasn't fired any more missiles, EMP or otherwise. I don't know which of the drive signatures chasing us is them, but I'm guessing they're far enough back to be beyond the range of a missile's fuel store. Or their captain's saving them, waiting for a better opportunity. No way to tell.

Apart from the occasional railgun flare, there's nothing to see.

My thoughts are interrupted by a warning chime, steadily increasing in volume over the White Cat's intercom system. Drive cutout alert. Brace for zero gravity.

“Again? Why?”

Miranda's voice over my neural lace is emphatic, exasperated, but hard to make out all the same. There's something in the background. Water?

“Because people are shooting at us. Duuuuuhhhhh,” Leela snaps at her creator. They're talking more now, but if Miranda expected her resentments to just blow over, I suspect she's in for disappointment.

“Yes, I know, but course changes every five minutes?”

“Random intervals, actually. And random angles. If they predict our moves, they'll fill that piece of sky with SPAM fragments. I presume you want to stick to the same number of holes in your meat carcass that you have now?”

That's when the drive, and the gravity, cut out, and Miranda's answer is nothing but choking and sputtering sounds.

You don't wanna lose gravity in the shower.

Have fun, Princess. I'm gonna stay right here in this acceleration chair. Three… two… The Cat shudders as it spins on four axes at once, accompanied by a fresh round of splashing and gurgling.

I shouldn't be laughing at her, I suppose, but prolonged tension hasn't brought out the best in either of us. It's hard to relax, hard to not think about all those tiny shards of tungsten carbide, silently tearing through the void, too fast to dodge, too small to see…

Death without warning. At any moment. Lightning from a clear sky.

The sputtering dies away as gravity cuts in again.

“Water sticks to things in zero gravity,” Miranda complains.

I can't help but chuckle. “Yes. Yes it does. You're supposed to turn it off and wait when you hear the zero grav warning.”

“Oh, now he tells me. Pffah. I think I swallowed some soap.”

“Heh. Sorry. I had no idea you were in the shower. Soap's probably an improvement on your cooking anyway. “

“Hush, you. I'm a damn good cook when I have something to work with, instead of the processed crap you keep aboard this thing. Don't you know how bad that stuff is for you? They had a worldwide obesity epidemic in the early twenty-first century because of processed food, you know.”

“Okay, Doctor Fussbudget, I'll just nip out to the local farmer's market and—”

Thunder. Thunder and the scream of tortured metal. The hull rings, the lights flicker, and something slaps the White Cat, hard, jolting us.

Then gravity is gone again. Over the neural link, I can hear Miranda trying not to drown, with some moderate success, but that noise takes a back seat to the distant and familiar howl.

Of escaping air.

“Marcus, what the hell? You didn't even give me a warning this time! And what's that nois—”

”Alert. Magnetic containment breach. Subcritical thermal event. Fusion reaction core ejected.”

“Alert. Pressure alarm in MAIN REACTOR SERVICE. Possible breach detected.”

“Oh,” Miranda breathes.

I scroll through virtual displays, check pressure readings, and I do not like what I see.

“Looks like we just lost thrust. Leela, did anyone have a chance to scope us? No, never mind, assume they did. We need to change course now. Give us max chemical thrust on a new vector, thirty seconds burn with the attitude thrusters. And fire the railgun a few times to boost us along. It's not much, but let's try not to let them put more rounds in us.”

“Aye, Captain. But we're getting short on railgun ammunition.”

“Marcus, should I be suiting up?” asks Miranda.

“Nah, it's a breech, not a blowout. I can patch it. Just get dried off. I'll get down there and see what the damage is.”

The cargo hold howls.

A typical Orbital might never hear that sound, or only once or twice in his life if he does, even if he's a Belter. But we all know it.

We've all seen the recordings from Vesta Station when United Nations warships sprayed the central hab cylinders with railgun fire—heavy slug rounds.

We know the sound. We remember.

Vacuum breach.

Oh, there's no immediate hard vacuum on the cargo side of the access airlock, when I get through. Only a Flatlander who's seen too many movies would expect that. There's no gale-force winds ripping through the hold, no vast sucking monster waiting to hurl me into the void. With only one atmosphere of pressure difference, between us and the void, that ain't gonna happen except in movies. The gust of air around me is gentle until it hits hull punctures, and squeezes through them, howling and whistling.

It's not gonna kill anyone. That's not how these things work.

At least not right away.

That's why one hundred and seventy-four thousand Vestans had plenty of time to gasp as the air grew thin and frigid, to choke on vacuum, spewing blood into the void as their lung tissue tore, as the surface of their eyeballs boiled and froze at once.

Old people. Women. Little kids.

While those UN warships stood by at anchor, listening to the screams on the radio, picking off the escaping ships and lifeboats with rail fire and point defense cannons.

And they call themselves “Peacekeepers.” Fuck them. They deserved exactly what Erik Nyberg gave them. Them and their whole stinking planet.

There's no “Peacekeeper” ships hovering outside the White Cat, of course, but what's inside is bad news enough for anyone. Above me, the drive spindle is motionless, dark, and surrounded by… is that water?

Yes, water.

A spiral column of tiny round droplets is pouring from the spindle, churning in the zero gravity and turbulent air, swirling up towards… there. Near the cargo bay doors, a waterfall in reverse, mist sucked upwards in a howl of escaping atmosphere. I fly between cargo racks, hand-over-hand, damp spray lashing me, soaking my shirt and sweatpants.

I see it now.

A handful of thumb-sized holes where a cluster of tungsten grit tore through the hull near the cargo bay doors, shredding the rim of the crane track. Must have been a ricochet that hit the drive. I'm not seeing or hearing any sort of exit hole on the other side, although I'm not sure I could tell if there were. This close, it's loud as the end of the worlds. No point in cutting in the radio; Miranda could never hear me over the rush of air and water.

I'm worried about that drive spindle, but the puncture takes first priority—the hold is losing atmosphere, the drive cooling system is losing water, those jets of escaping air are starting to spin the Cat, and a glittering reflective plume of frozen air and water won't do any favors for our ability to hide from enemy telescopes.

Hopefully, the drive shielding isn't breached, and I'm not soaking up a lethal dose of radiation right now. If I am, I'm already dead and just don't know it yet. Nothing to be done but hope.

Clinging to the shredded crane tracks, I slap on single-direction flex laminate patch plates, spray three-second breach foam. I'm soaked now, and the damp seems to be inhibiting the foam seal, but, gradually, the column of water stops streaming toward me and begins to scatter as I cut off the leaks, and the noise fades from a scream to a whisper. There's a ragged hole through the massive cargo bay door hinge that's too complex, too twisted and stretched, for patches. I spray as much foam as I can, exhaust the canister, but it's not neat… we're still leaking a trickle of air.

Good enough for now. If we live through this, I'm going to have to shut the airlock, evacuate the hold, weld permanent patches, maybe replace that hinge if I have time, but I've got other concerns at the moment.

“Miranda? Where are you?”

“Up on the bridge with Leela. How bad is it?”

“I've got us mostly sealed up, but something that came through must've hit the reactor coolant lines; it's totally shut down, and I'm up to my eyeballs in floating water droplets here. I don't know if anything else on the drive was hit, but at least the main containment field emitters held up okay.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I'm not a cloud of ten-thousand-degree plasma spread across several cubic kilometers of space. How about you? Do you need a moment to check?”

“Oh. Okay, I get your point. Can it be fixed?”

“Dunno, haven't gotten in there yet. Maybe, unless something's hit the actual Starlight unit. No tech manuals for those. Rumor has it Starlight rigs them to blow if they're tampered with.”

“Really?”

“No idea. Not a long line of people eager to find out. Leela, what's the swarm doing?”

Leela appears in front of me, circling droplets spinning right through her image. She doesn't seem to notice… I don't think the hold has good camera coverage, so she may be somewhat blind here.

“No one's made any sharp course adjustments yet,” she says. “But they're coming at us pretty quick now that we've stopped accelerating. The closest ones could do a flyby in a few hours, although it'll take them a lot longer if they want to slow down and match velocities. Whatever you're going to do, do it fast.”

“Already on my way,” I say, caroming off racks towards the dark and silent spindle, “but I'm not gonna make any promises. Even if it's just coolant lines, that's an eight-hour fix at least, maybe longer—oh shit.”

“What?”

“It's not the lines.”

“What? What is it? I can't see anything up there!”

Railgun shards are just broken bits of metallic tungsten, without any sort of explosive payload, but even the tiniest piece of dense metal moving at a thousand kilometers per second doesn't need one. This one tore through the vacuum-foam alloy of the hull far too fast to dump much energy, but after that, when it slammed into the primary coolant manifold and hit the dense, incompressible liquid water within—

The five centimeter thick aluminum is shredded outwards, opened like the petals of a rose, must have been a massive explosion of superheated steam. What the explosion didn't do, the rapid cooling from the escaping water finished. Cracked and broken chunks of aluminum drift around the spindle.

“Marcus, what is it?” Miranda asks.

“Coolant manifold. I think it took a direct hit. Looks like the heat deep-fried some of the nearby wiring harness, but that's the least of our problems compared to that manifold being junked.”

“Can you fix it?”

“Can I fix it? Pixie, it's fucking shredded. I'd have to fabricate something to replace it. And before you ask, that's not a quick fix, if I can do it at all. Which I don't guarantee.”

“Oh,” she says, her voice suddenly small. “So what do we do now?”

And that's when it occurs to me that I haven't the faintest idea.