Chapter 21

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Chapter 21: Castles in air, climbing the stair

Planning ahead? Not always one of my strong suits. I knew Jeremiah wouldn't last very long out there, exposed to vacuum. I'd already lost a good fifteen seconds just getting my bearings and jumping out there with him. Already unconscious, he had maybe a minute to be repressurized, or death--irreversible death--would be the conclusion.

Immediately, I began transmitting a distress message, hoping to get the attention of the others aboard Absolution. My vision started to get blurry, but I saw the ship turn around as I caught Jeremiah in my arms. There was really no way for us to stop unless we found some debris to hang on to, and I didn't see any nearby that would do us any good.

To get an extra boost forward, Absolution jettisoned her rear section. They would've needed to do that anyway, thanks to the decimation of the mine launch bay. The opposing force gave them a nudge forward, and the ship quickly turned to port, facing an airlock door toward us. I did my best to ignore the tingling of my skin, the additional soft tissue damage. My cybernetics kept me conscious, kept my blood pressurized and temperature-controlled. Sometimes, being a little more (less?) than human had its advantages. This was not something I wanted to do again anytime soon. Twice in less than a week was plenty.

I positioned myself in front of Jeremiah, so I'd be the one to take the impact when we hit the inside of the airlock. Lana knew better than to try to slow the ship--every second counted. Some bruises on my account were a small price to pay for Jeremiah's life. I looked behind us, the doorway coming up fast, and closed my eyes.

The interior wall absorbed my impact--some of it. I absorbed Jeremiah's. I'd have grunted had there been any wind to knock out of me. The airlock door quickly slid shut. I felt air pressure returning in my ears, and started to breathe again. Some red lights went off in my cybernetic eye, warnings about system damage, low oxygen reserves, blah blah blah. All things I could deal with later.

I laid Jeremiah out on his back and tried to rouse him. "Wake up, kid! You're safe. Come on." I smacked his cheeks. "Come on, wake up." His skin was blue and cool--not freezing cold, he hadn't been out long enough.

Suddenly, he gasped. His eyes opened. And then, he screamed. "I can't see!" He started clawing at his eyes, flailing around, panicked.

I grabbed his arms. "Calm down! The blindness is temporary. You'll be fine. Just relax."

The interior door opened and both his parents rushed in, kneeling next to him. He must have felt his mothers arms go around him, because he practically collapsed into her. She patted his back, helped him to his feet. He wobbled a lot, his body trembling. Arc took Jeremiah's other arm and slung it around his shoulder to keep the body steady.

Lana looked at me. Her eyes thanked me, though the words didn't come out of her mouth. Instead, it was: "Theo is on the bridge running the ship by himself. Please, go help him. I need to tend to my son."

I understood. We parted ways and I made for the bridge. Theo was taking potshots at the engines of the troop ships, and not really getting anywhere with that strategy.

"How's that fleet coming?" I asked.

He pointed down at the tactical display to his left. About a hundred small ships emerged from the planet's atmosphere. I saw several larger ships, too.

I coordinated piloting with Theo, who found a couple troop ships to lob our remaining nukes at. One ship got its front end blown off. The other ripped right in half from the force of the impact. Unfortunately, mines were now out of the question, the nukes were gone, and I assumed some other weapons were lost when the rear module was ditched. I quickly inventoried the ship's remaining weapons using the terminal in front of me, as I held onto a grip protruding from the ceiling. All we had were some light (as in, not heavy) laser cannons and a few gatling guns. Might as well have been left with pea shooters. Aside from the nukes and mines, which they clearly tried to use as rarely as possible, Absolution was strictly a skirmisher, not built for protracted firefights against superior foes.

"Theo, we may need to bug out of here," I warned. "We're effectively defenseless. Did Arcturus get a chance to communicate evacuation orders to the population?"

He nodded, then pointed out another display--this one, of Absolution's internal systems. Notably, the main engines and FV drives were offline. Well, not so much "offline" as "jettisoned with the rest of the ass-end of the ship." So, escape wasn't quite an option here.

"Fuck it, dock with one of your cap ships. Take us to a space station or a moon base. Just get us out of here!"

I realized just how much they sacrificed when they dropped the rear module as Theo aimed us for one of the Darrex capital ships. The secondary engines packed a lot less punch.

I watched the battle unfold up ahead, as Theo prepared to thread the ship through the chaos. The little Darrex fighters made only insignificant pockmarks in the hulls of the troop ships. They just weren't up to enemies of that size. I got the impression their little fleet was designed more to hold off raiders and opportunists, not organized invasion fleets.

The capital ships fared a bit better, slicing through the hulls of their enemies, but their size and strength was also their undoing: they were sitting ducks for the Koraxian crystal ships. After seeing one of the destroyers brutally impaled by a massive shard, I started inputting some data into my terminal about the hull disruptor system, instructions on how to detect the right resonance frequency for a Koraxian crystal ship, and anything else I could think of. "Theo, I've got some data written up here. Send it to all the Darrex ships. I don't know if it will do them any good, but it's worth a try."

He did, and I watched as the fighters grew more desperate. The troop ships began to hit atmosphere now, and time was running out. The fighters arranged in single file lines, three to seven in a row, and then slammed themselves into the engines of the troop ships. Even if it wasn't enough to totally disable the engines, their sacrifices were enough to get the ships captured by Darrex's gravity, and pull them down to the surface. I only hoped any people who still hadn't taken shelter managed to stay out of the way as a rain of out-of-control troop ships plummeted to the surface.

The captains of the destroyers must have understood my data packet, because they turned to the Koraxian escorts and began lobbing projectiles. I wasn't quite certain what they were doing, until a few of the missiles exploded into some kind of brown dust. I swore I saw glowing spheres left at the epicenters of the bursts, and I turned out to be right: secondary explosions ensued, no doubt vibrating the dust clouds against the crystalline spires. While not as devastating as the hull disruptors, some of the shards visibly cracked and broke away. I pulled up a rough analysis of the debris, wondering exactly what the destroyers did. I smirked when I saw they'd essentially packed some warheads full of foodstuffs, then included two warheads. One of them blasted the food into a fine dust, and the other was smaller, meant to produce a shockwave. It certainly did the trick.

The escorts started moving away from the destroyers, and I saw the last group of troop ships get rammed into oblivion by squadrons of Darrex fighters. The battle would be very costly, in the end. There was no way the Darrex could withstand another assault of this magnitude. Theo probably knew this, judging by the grim look on his face. We'd won, but it had cost nearly the whole Darrex fleet. And I knew the Koraxians had more--plenty more. Unless they'd overcommitted to taking on Terran and Oolian forces, they'd be back in a day or two, in force.

I called down to sickbay over the intercom. "Anyone down there?"

I waited a couple minutes, and finally got a response. Arcturus: "What's your status up there?"

"The troop ships have been taken down. The escorts are retreating. But the Darrex basically have no fighters left, and lost a couple destroyers, too."

"Damn," he mumbled. "I assume you've figured out by now we have no 'vector drive."

"Yeah, I saw that. I hope you guys have a spare ship docked here or something."

"I'm sure the Darrex will lend us one. Really, we'll need to pick up the rear section and drag it to a repair facility. It's too costly to replace."

"How's Jeremiah doing?"

Lana chimed in. "I think he'll be fine. Thank God he paid attention to all those explosive decompression lectures I gave him. He didn't try to hold his breath. He's on oxygen, breathing on his own. It might take him a few days to fully recover. But he'll live."

"Glad to hear it."

Arcturus came back on. "Could you tell us what, exactly, happened down there?"

"Totally my fault," I lied. "He was having me disable one of the mines and I blew it. Don't have a lot of experience with that sort of thing, after all. Sorry for all the trouble it ended up causing."

He sighed. "I wouldn't worry about it. The Darrex won't charge us for repairs. We'll get the ship in tip-top shape again. But I wanted to thank you for saving Jeremiah."

"No problem." Leverage. Granted, it's probably not the noblest thing for me to do--thinking about how I could get them to pay me back. Then again, they'd saved my life, too. A life for a life. Were we even?

I could only be sure of one thing. At least for the time being, my fate was bound up in the lives of these people. For good or ill, we were stuck together.

Robert Maxwell, notorious pirate. Yeah, that whole concept would have to grow on me. I wasn't digging it right then.