Hellfire (THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY) (30 page)

It wasn’t until they were almost to the bridge that Helstead frowned and turned to her. “Wait, you said I might be able to contribute. All I did was sit there, listen, and crack up at the end.”

“You did help, at the end. You helped me get my point across about the Salik,” Ia said. “The net result won’t have an impact for a few more years, but it’ll be a valuable one in the end.”

“Oh, mucking hell—you mean that stupid song about the butterfly wings causing a hurricane halfway around the world,” Helstead groaned. She drew in a breath to speak, but Sergeant Maxwell’s voice interrupted whatever the lieutenant meant to ask, echoing down the hall, and from her bracer.

“All hands, duty changeup in five minutes. I repeat, duty changeup in five minutes.”

Sighing, Helstead gestured at the door to the side corridor. “I’d better go hit the head. It’s been looking at me funny. Not quite like your first officer, though.”

“He can look at me all he likes. He knows better than to touch,” Ia said.

Helstead lifted her brows. “Have you told him that?”

Ia shook her head, but not in negation. “He did, once, and ended up getting sucked into a precognitive attack.”

“What, like that Fire Girl vision thing?” Helstead asked her. She shuddered. “That was nasty. I didn’t like it when it happened to me, and I don’t like that I keep seeing it in the back of my brain whenever I get close to that restricted cargo of yours. That’s just creepy.”

“What Harper went through was a thousand times worse,” Ia muttered as a crew member came up the hall, heading for
the operations post to relieve his partner. “That’s why he threw my boot at me, and why I left it there for him to throw at me, so he wouldn’t risk suffering again.”

“Duly noted, sir,” Helstead agreed. She lifted one brow. “Just combat boots? Or will, say, a tennis shoe do?”

“Anything but a spiked heel, Delia,” Ia joked dryly. “You throw too hard.”

FEBRUARY 7, 2496 T.S.

INTERSTITIAL SPACE

“Captain, this salvage is going a little harder than anticipated. We have extensive debris blocking the corridor,”
Corporal Puan stated over the comm link.
“Requesting a reroute of some sort.
”

The view from his helmet showed the debris in question, a
tangled mating between a crumpled bulkhead and two support struts. The spaces left would have been difficult for someone in a pressure-suit to navigate, never mind the bulk of a ceristeel-plated mechsuit. Nodding to herself, Ia replied,
“Understood, Corporal. Stand by while I check for alternate routes.”

Closing her eyes, Ia dipped into the timestreams. Specifically, into her own. From there, she could see the branching paths of her own observation point, cycling through the choices ahead of Puan’s salvage team. Some of them were a little foggy, but they could…

Fog?
Ia thought, for one puzzled moment.
Why would my vision be fogging ov—oh
shakk. Surging back into full consciousness, she slapped the comm relays for both ship and boarding party.
“All hands, we have incoming! I repeat, we have incoming, with anti-psi machines!”

“Captain?”
Puan queried.
“What’s going on?”

Anti-psi machines were the only things she could think of that could obscure a previously clear moment in time. As the fog rolled closer, Ia sorted out one of the more blunt approaches.
“Corporal, use a claymore, angle it into the right-hand wall from your position. Smash in and grab the whole cluster; don’t bother to halve it. I want you back on the ship in five minutes.”

“Shakk
—that doesn’t give us—go go
go!
Togama, Tormez, one of you get me a claymore, triple-time it!”

Ia dialed down the volume on his channel, letting it chatter in the background. “Yeoman Sangwan, move us right up against that section of the station; I want us covering that boarding shuttle and that airlock with our own hull. Private Sung, seal up all pods and surfaces on our five o’clock, in case we have to scrape our way to a dust-off. Launch three scanner probes in the triangle and push ’em to the zone edge. Private Ng, start running spatial analyses as soon as Sung’s probes are away. I want to know where the ships are coming from, and I want to know it before they know our position.

“Yeoman Nabouleh, prepare to disengage the moment your team is back on board,”
she ordered over the comm. “All eyes to the boards, all thoughts on your tasks.”

The view from Puan’s helmet pickups rocked a bit from the explosion. A yellow telltale popped onto Ia’s top row of tertiary screens; Private Tormez hadn’t hung back far enough, and had
taken a little bit of damage to the knee-joint of her armor. Toggling the view from her teammate’s camera, Ia watched her flex her leg joint a bit, then move back a little.

From her slight limp, the joint wasn’t responding perfectly, but it was able to move. Togama slapped her on the pauldron and moved forward with Puan and his teammate, Franke. Satisfied the private was still mobile, Ia turned her attention to her main and secondary screens. Nothing happened for the first minute; nothing in the star-studded black changed, if one dismissed the vector-tumbled debris from their initial attack.

One minute turned into two minutes…three…

“…Sir?” Private Ng asked, glancing over her shoulder. “Is something supposed to be happening?”

“Eyes to the boards,” Ia ordered, repeating the Space Force Navy’s mantra. “Thoughts on your tasks.”

Just as Ng turned her head back, the navicomp beeped. “Sir! Incoming—173 by 147. Probe just picked it up, sir; we have partial cover from the station. ETA to our midpoint…five minutes.”

That was a lucky break.

“Sir! We have movement on the station hull,” Private Rammstein warned Ia from his post at the operations station.

“Good catch, Private,” Ia praised. Ng blushed and returned her attention to her screens. Ia shook her head. “Keep an eye on the outer danger, Ng. Rammstein, what’s on the hull?”

“It…ah, looks like a drone, sir,” he said, tapping his controls. Normally, he was supposed to be monitoring the ship’s systems, but two of his tertiary and his right secondary screens had been trained on the battered communications hub. “I can’t get a good angle for a reading, but, it’s headed straight for the shuttle.”

“It’s probably an automated hull mine,” Sung said, eyes and hands working to try and get a gunnery pod’s view of the scuttling automaton.

“Can a gunner pick it off?” Ia asked him. The fog was now thickening in her mind and starting to hurt.

“I think—”

“
Shakk!
Captain, revision, ETA
seven
minutes. Bogey’s as big as a Battle Platform, sir,” Ng corrected tersely. “Just got the stereoscopic off the third probe. It’s farther out, but big as hell and headed our way.”

“Helm to my control in twenty, Sangwan,” Ia ordered, refitting her left hand into the control glove.

“Helm to yours in eighteen, Captain,” Sangwan confirmed.

“Aquinar, fire!”
Sung snapped into his headset. Seconds later, something
boomed
against the hull, rattling it. A dozen telltales streamed up Ia’s left secondary screen, most amber, but a couple red. “Uh, sorry, sir!”

“Holy fractured—! Charlie Papa, Charlie Papa! We’re not all on board, yet!”
Puan hollered across the comm channels, using his phonetic call sign to get their attention.
“Franke almost had her arm ripped off! Her suit seals are red!”

“Sorry, sir,” Sung apologized. “I thought it was a clear shot.”

“That’ll come out of your pay,” Ia quipped. The throbbing in her head was getting harder to focus through, but she knew the databanks were still safe. She could
see
them in the distance downstream and that they would extract the information needed. It was the local moment she couldn’t foresee. Switching channels, she addressed Puan. “
Get on board, meioas. We’ve a whale-sized bogey ETA in six.
Sangwan, I have the helm.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Captain.” The call came from the comm tech, Private Mysuri. “Infirmary is getting reports from all over the ship of headaches. Psis only.”

“Tell the doc it’s a side effect of the anti-psi machines. Have her prepare to receive injured after maneuvers.” She started to say more but was interrupted.

“Nabouleh to
Hellfire,
all parties are boarded, sealing and sailing. You’ll need to move the ship if I’m to dock.”

“Moving now,”
Ia told the shuttle pilot. She couldn’t use the insystem thrusters without risking damage to the shuttle, but she could pulse the FTL panels.
“All hands, brace for maneuvers, ten seconds.”

She spent those ten seconds calculating the angle and the distance, programming the options into her console. Ships could be piloted manually, or they could be programmed. At the end of them, she activated the panels along one side of the ship. Everything slammed to the opposite side as the ship squirted away from the crippled station. Squirted, and scraped, sending new yellow telltales scrolling up her tertiary screens.

For a moment, the interior safety fields kicked on, pressing
in on all sides and pinning everyone in place. Then all the panels flared; greasy on all sides, the ship’s momentum stopped. Her programmed path had kept the bulk of the damaged comm hub between them and the incoming ship, while leaving plenty of room for the shuttle to maneuver. This time, with the field fully enveloping the ship, there was no jolt.

There was also no headache for that brief moment. Just as Ia widened her eyes in realization, the fields cut off—and the headache stabbed back into her brain. She panted for a moment, mastering the ache, then grinned slowly. Ferally. “Well.
That’s
good to know. Sung, tell all the gunners to make sure they’ve synched their weaponsfire to the FTL field…and yes, those new scrapes are coming out of
my
pay.
Nabouleh, dock as soon as possible.
”

“Cargo’s on the shuttle, sir,”
the yeoman stated.
“We have injured on board. ETA one minute.”

“We’re going to have some odd maneuvers in a few moments,”
Ia warned her. Not just her, but the rest of the ship, opening the channel to a shipwide broadcast.
“All hands, stay locked and webbed. I repeat, stay locked and webbed. The headaches are part of the anti-psi machine’s side effects.”

“Captain, incoming is slipping its position,” Private Ng warned Ia. “I think they’re trying to get a clear shot.”

“Thank you, Ng.” Gaze going back and forth between the enemy ship and their own shuttle, Ia waited tensely. Finally, a distant
clunk
echoed down the length of the
Hellfire
.

“We’re in, sir,”
Yeoman Nabouleh informed her.
“Docking clamps have engaged.”

The telltales for the bow shuttle bay lit green on Ia’s upper leftmost monitor, confirming her words. Ia tapped the controls and slipped her left hand sideways and down. The FTL panels greased them that way with another abrupt jolt from momentum, and another hard squeeze from the black bubbles dotted around the cube-shaped room. Another flex of the full field cut out the anti-psi headache for a moment.

Taking advantage of their second dead stop, Ia gently shifted the ship, turning its long axis to follow the flight path of the incoming enemy vessel. Once it was positioned, she reapplied the unidirectional field, cutting off the headache. A touch of the controls configured the field to respond on the microscale for the smallest movements possible.

Once again, the headache went away. The release of mental pressure threatened to make her giddy. Focusing, Ia flipped halfway into the timestreams, and discovered she could now see everything
but
the Salik ship. A quick survey showed three possible escape routes. Ia checked them against the needs of the future.

“Uh, Captain?” Sangwan asked, his voice rising a little. The worry in his tone snagged her attention. “You
do
know we’re sitting ducks if we’re not moving, right?”

“Shhh.” Dipping fully into the waters, Ia double-checked her findings. She had the time for it; things moved faster on the timeplains than they did in reality when she fully submersed her mind.

Using the hyperspace engines, either to escape or rift the ship, was one possibility. Using the main cannon was another. Using either of those, however, would leave the Salik more prepared for their next attack. That meant using slip-and-run tactics.

Opening her eyes, Ia heard Ng announce, “Three minutes to midpoint, twenty seconds to a clear shot, Captain.”

“All hands, brace for acceleration.”
That was their only warning. Shoving her hands forward, one in the glove, the other on the controls with a sliding tap to remove the microscale restrictions, she pulsed the field forward. The cushioning in her seat saved her, as did the interior safety fields. Even with the field greasing the laws of physics around the ship, those fields had to pulse to move them forward, alternating with the insystem thrusters, and that meant some of the inertia did get through to the crew.

Ia was used to the drag of extra gravity on her body; it was part and parcel of growing up on Sanctuary. But even for her, the effects of their acceleration could be felt. Not only was it hard to draw breath, but the colors started to fade around the bridge. Greyness crept into the edges of her vision, warning her of blood loss to her brain. Ia cut the ship’s acceleration for a second, then slipped them up, the only safe direction at that speed.