In her earbug, she heard Lee describing—breathlessly—the chaos on the ship. “We’ve got her safe in the captain’s cabin, you saw that, and it’s secure, but Quincy’s done something—”
“Never mind about that.” Osman’s voice sounded impatient. “We’ll send a team over to take care of it, whatever it is. But you’re sure the captain’s secure?”
“You can see that,” Lee said, sounding grumpy. “I just don’t want Quincy to disable the ship and have us stranded out here—that old woman’s crazy enough…”
Via the implant, Ky could tell that the other ship was broadside-on to its course, as were they: the safest close-maneuver configuration, since neither could fry the other with insystem drives if someone turned them on. This also meant that rotation about the long axis could impart angular momentum to objects shed from a hatch, right back down the course. She had a use for that, if she survived the next few minutes.
“Send someone down to open up,” Osman ordered Lee. “Or I’ll blow the hatch.”
“I am, I am,” Lee said hastily. “Jim, go unlock the door.”
“Why is it always me?” Jim said in a sulky tone for the camera, but in moments he jogged down the central corridor, winking at Ky as he came past her, pulling up the hood of his pressure suit.
“Right side,” Ky reminded him. He said nothing, but nodded. As he undogged the inner hatch, Lee spoke up suddenly. “Jim—look out—Quincy and that idiot Beeah are out of the cargo bay—”
“I’m on it,” Jim grunted. “Don’t worry—” He was now in the emergency air lock, working on the outer hatch. “Damn, this thing is stiff—” Ky assumed that Osman would have an optical link set to observe through the tiny safety window as well as monitoring transmissions.
“It’s always been a problem,” Lee said. “I told you—we had trouble with it at Sabine—but hurry up!”
“Send me some help,” Jim said, making a dramatic lunge at the hatch’s controls.
“Can’t—have to hold the bridge—can’t let them get to the—” Realistic sounds of gunfire cut him off.
“Damn it!” Jim snarled and lunged again as if frantic. This time he hit the controls, and the hatch opened halfway. He shoved, then flattened against the right side of the air lock as Ky cut the restraining line and the EMP mine, powered by every elastic lashdown cord on the ship, shot past his knees, through the twenty meters of transfer tube, and crashed into someone in a pressure suit, knocking him back into Osman’s air lock. The man had been holding a fat disk that Ky recognized—in that instant’s glimpse—as a limpet mine.
“Get that hatch closed!” she said to Jim, and raced to help him, mentally counting seconds. Damn, damn, damn, damn… outer hatch dogged… inner…
Whoomp. Ky opened her mouth to comment. WHOOMP! Lights flickered, an alert signal buzzed. She peeked through the small emergency viewport in time to see a cloud of debris in her own ship’s exterior lights, and the abrupt disintegration of the transfer tube. Grapple lines flailed. Something rattled against the viewport; she ducked, then looked again. Pieces of space armor… trailing clouds that glowed red in the spotlights. Her gorge rose; she swallowed against it. A second and third burst of debris from Fair Kaleen’s air lock, then a steady stream… and the intership distance increased; the other ship began a slow rotation about her longitudinal axis. Ky realized with horror that the ship’s air was bleeding out, the automatic systems disabled by the dual explosion of two mines, not one—and one of them a hullbuster. If the air lock hadn’t already been open, Fair Kaleen would have had a hull breach.
She imagined the howling gale of decompression, terrifying in the darkness when their lights failed. Some compartments would be spared… those in pressure suits might survive for hours, even days… but depending on the damage done by the pair of mines, the ship might be helpless.
That wasn’t what she’d meant to do. In her mind, a tiny voice explained to a nonexistent parent that it wasn’t supposed to happen that way. It was just supposed to mess up the command systems… she closed the inner hatch of the air lock and shook her head at Jim’s questions. She had to figure out what to do now. How long would Fair Kaleen’s systems be down before the automatic reset tried to restore functions? Would the loss of pressurization change that? How much damage had Osman’s own mine done? How many of his crew were dead, and how much resistance would she face if she tried to board? And was he himself dead—had he been in the air lock—or was he still aboard, fighting to regain control of his ship and come after her?
“What was that?” she heard someone yell.
“Them,” she said. Her implant displayed data on the debris still impacting their shields, a flowing mass of numbers—dimensions and presumed mass of particles, their velocities and vectors, hundreds, thousands of tiny impacts. She shut off that analysis as too confusing, checked on her own ship’s integrity and systems function, relieved to find that no serious damage had resulted. On her way to the bridge, she stopped by her cabin to let Stella know they had won the first round.
“Get this thing off my head,” Stella said; Ky helped her get out of the pillowcase, the bindings. She followed Ky to the bridge, where Lee had the controls.
“Can you snug us in against his ship?” Ky asked Lee. Stella, released from her role as a bound captive, leaned on the bulkhead.
“It’s rotating,” Lee said. “It’ll be a tricky maneuver. What’s the purpose?”
“For one thing, he’ll be blind to where we are, even if he gets his main scans back online—we’ll be too close. For another, even if he figures out where we are, attacking us will destroy his own ship. In the time it takes him to figure it out—if he does—we have the chance to get in and convert the ship’s systems. Or we can just keep clobbering them with successive EMP attacks. And his allies, those two warships, will certainly attack us if we’re separated from him, but possibly not if we’re attached.”
“You’re assuming Osman’s still alive and in control,” Stella said.
“I hope not, but for now—yes. It’s safer that way. At least we’re not still attached, and everyone in that transfer tube or air lock should be dead. Controls in all powered suits should be gone, too.”
“Unless he has mechanical overrides,” Martin said, arriving at that moment. “But you’re probably right. And I imagine anyone aboard is too busy trying to survive to try to get to us.” He grinned at Ky. “That was a brilliant idea after all, Captain. But how did you know they’d have a mine with them?”
“I didn’t,” Ky said. “I knew they’d try some trick to disable the crew here; I was actually thinking some kind of chemical weapon. Knock you all down alive, take all the implants—”
Stella shuddered. “That would have been horrible.”
“I can match us to his ship,” Lee said, “but it’ll take a while. I have to get his current vectors, and then match rotation.”
“Do we have enough power to stop the rotation if we’re attached?”
“I don’t know. We can slow it, probably. Why—oh. So we can hide from the other bad guys?”
“Yeah. If they shoot, I want that buffer between us.”
“Right. We leave our defensive suite up, though?”
“Absolutely,” Ky said. “Even if it’s not working perfectly, it’s all we have.”
She called Quincy to ask about progress in the repair. “Toby did it,” Quincy reported. “Better for him to be busy. Oh, and that dratted pup came up with the part he carried off before. Toby says it was defective to start with—it’s mislabeled. It would’ve failed when we turned the system on.”
“Toby is quite the little genius,” Ky said.
“He’s a good kid,” Quincy said defensively. Ky felt her own eyebrows go up.
“I never said he wasn’t—I think we’re lucky to have him—” And not her own sulky teenaged self, though maybe she wouldn’t have been as bad on another ship.