There was a half-hearted cheer.
I caught Halle’s eye. She grinned at me. She pointed at the Captain, closed her fist and made a pumping movement. I admired her sentiment but she wasn’t being too accurate, anatomically speaking, so I raised my middle finger and jiggled it back and forth.
It took a slap on the back of the head from Jeru, the Commissary, to put a stop to that. ‘Little morons,’ she growled.
‘Sorry, sir—’
I got another slap for the apology. Jeru was a tall, stocky woman, dressed in the bland monastic robes said to date from the time of the founding of the Commission for Historical Truth a thousand years ago. But rumour was she’d seen plenty of combat action of her own before joining the Commission, and such was her physical strength and speed of reflex I could well believe it.
As we neared the cordon the Academician, Pael, started a gloomy countdown. The slow geometry of Ghost cruiser and tinsel-wrapped fortress star swivelled across the crowded sky. Everybody went quiet.
The darkest time is always just before the action starts. Even if you can see and hear what is going on, all you do is think. What was going to happen to us when we crossed that intangible border? Would a fleet of Ghost ships materialise all around us? Would some mysterious weapon simply blast us out of the sky?
I caught the eye of First Officer Till. He was a veteran of twenty years; his scalp had been burned away in some ancient close-run combat, long before I was born, and he wore a crown of scar tissue with pride. ‘Let’s do it, tar,’ he growled.
All the fear went away. I was overwhelmed by a feeling of togetherness, of us all being in this crap together. I had no thought of dying. Just: let’s get through this. ‘Yes, sir!’
Pael finished his countdown.
All the lights went out. Detonating stars wheeled.
And the ship exploded.
I was thrown into darkness. Air howled. Emergency bulkheads scythed past me, and I could hear people scream.
I slammed into the curving hull, nose pressed against the stars.
I bounced off and drifted. The inertial suspension was out, then. I thought I could smell blood - probably my own.
I could see the Ghost ship, a tangle of rope and silver baubles, glinting with highlights from the fortress star. We were still closing. We were going to collide in minutes, no more.
But I could also see shards of shattered lifedome, a sputtering drive unit. The shards were bits of the Brightly. It had gone, all gone, in a fraction of a second.
‘Let’s do it,’ I murmured.
Maybe I was out of it for a while.
Somebody grabbed my ankle and tugged me down. There was a competent slap on my cheek, enough to make me focus.
‘Case. Can you hear me?’
It was First Officer Till. Even in the swimming starlight that burned-off scalp was unmistakable.
I glanced around. There were four of us here: Till, Commissary Jeru, Academician Pael, me. We were huddled up against what looked like the stump of the First Officer’s console. I realised that the gale of venting air had stopped. I was back inside a hull with integrity, then—
‘Case!’
‘I—yes, sir.’
‘Report.’
I touched my lip; my hand came away bloody. At a time like that it’s your duty to report your injuries, honestly and fully. Nobody needs a hero who turns out not to be able to function. ‘I think I’m all right. I may have concussion.’
‘Good enough. Strap down.’ Till handed me a length of rope.
I saw that the others had tied themselves to struts. I did the same.
Till, with practised ease, swam away into the air, I guessed looking for other survivors.
Academician Pael was trying to curl into a ball. He couldn’t even speak. The tears just rolled out of his eyes. I stared at the way big globules welled up and drifted away into the air, glimmering. The action had been over in seconds. That was war in space for you, journeys that can last years, combat that’s over in heartbeats, and your story is done. All a bit sudden for an earthworm, I guess.
Nearby, I saw, trapped under one of the emergency bulkheads, there was a pair of legs - just that. The rest of the body must have been chopped away, gone drifting off with the rest of the debris from Brightly. But I recognised those legs, from a garish pink stripe on the sole of the right boot. That had been Halle. She was the only girl I had ever screwed - and more than likely, given the situation, the only girl I ever would get to screw. I couldn’t figure out how I felt about that.
Jeru was watching Pael, and me. ‘Tar - do you think we should all be frightened for ourselves, like the Academician?’ Her accent was strong, unidentifiable.
‘No, sir.’
‘No.’ Jeru studied Pael with contempt. ‘We are in an escape yacht, Academician. A bit of the lifedome, carved out by the emergency bulkheads when the Brightly was attacked.’ She sniffed. ‘We have air, and it isn’t foul yet. But we’re still closing on that Ghost cruiser.’
I’d managed to forget where we were going, and how little time we had. Fear pricked.
Jeru winked at me. ‘Maybe we can do a little damage to the Ghosts before we die, tar. What do you think?’
I grinned. ‘Yes, sir.’
Pael lifted his head and stared at me with salt water eyes. ‘Lethe. You people are monsters.’ His accent was gentle, a lilt. ‘Even a child such as this. You embrace death—’
Jeru grabbed Pael’s jaw in a massive hand, and pinched the joints until he squealed. ‘Captain Teid grabbed you, Academician; she threw you here, to safety, before the bulkhead came down. I saw it. If she hadn’t taken the time to do that, she would have made it herself. Was she a monster? Did she embrace death?’ And she pushed Pael’s face away.
For some reason I hadn’t thought about the rest of the crew until that moment. I guess I have a limited imagination. Now, I felt adrift. The Captain - dead? I said, ‘Excuse me, Commissary. How many other yachts got out?’
‘None,’ she said steadily, making sure I had no illusions. ‘Just this one. They died doing their duty, tar. Like the Captain.’
Of course she was right, and I felt a little better. Whatever his character, Pael was too valuable not to save. As for me, I had survived through sheer blind chance, through being in the right place when the walls came down: if the Captain had been close, her duty would have been to pull me out of the way and take my place. It isn’t a question of human values but of economics: a lot more is invested in the training and experience of a Captain Teid - or a Pael - than in me.
First Officer Till came bustling back with a heap of equipment. ‘Put these on.’ He handed out pressure suits. They were what we called slime suits in training: lightweight skinsuits, running off a backpack of gen-enged algae. ‘Move it,’ said Till. ‘Impact with the Ghost cruiser in four minutes. We don’t have any power; there’s nothing we can do but ride it out.’
I crammed my legs into my suit.
Jeru complied, stripping off her robe to reveal a hard, scarred body. But she was frowning. ‘Why not heavier armour?’
For answer, Till picked out a gravity-wave handgun from the gear he had retrieved. Without pausing he held it to Pael’s head and pushed the fire button.
Pael twitched.
Till said, ‘See? Nothing is working. Nothing but bio systems, it seems. They have been spared, presumably deliberately - that is a characteristic Ghost tactic. They disable your weapons but leave you alive.’ He threw the gun aside.
Pael closed his eyes, breathing hard.
Till said to me, ‘Test your comms.’
I closed up my hood and faceplate and began intoning, ‘One, two, three …’ I could hear nothing.
Till began tapping at our backpacks, resetting the systems. His hood started to glow with transient, pale blue symbols. And then, scratchily, his voice started to come through. ‘… Five, six, seven - can you hear me, tar?’
‘Yes, sir.’
The symbols were bioluminescent. There were receptors on all our suits - photoreceptors, simple eyes - which could ‘read’ the messages scrawled on our companions’ suits. It was a backup system meant for use in Ghost-ridden environments where anything higher-tech would be a liability. But obviously it would only work as long as we were in line of sight.
‘That will make life harder,’ Jeru said. Oddly, mediated by software, she was easier to understand.
Till shrugged. ‘You take it as it comes.’ Briskly, he began to hand out more gear. ‘These are basic field kits. There’s some medical stuff: a suture kit, scalpel blades, blood-giving sets. You wear these syrettes around your neck, Academician. They contain painkillers, various gen-enged med-viruses … No, you wear it outside your suit, Pael, so you can reach it. You’ll find valve inlets here, on your sleeve, and here, on the leg.’ Now came weapons. ‘We should carry handguns, just in case they start working, but be ready with these. ‘ He handed out combat knives.
Pael shrank back.
‘Take the knife, Academician. You can shave off that ugly beard, if nothing else.’
I laughed out loud, and was rewarded with a wink from Till.
I took a knife. It was a heavy chunk of steel, solid and reassuring. I tucked it in my belt. I was starting to feel a whole lot better.
‘Two minutes to impact,’ Jeru said. I didn’t have a working chronometer; she must have been counting the seconds.
‘Seal up.’ Till began to check the integrity of Pael’s suit; Jeru and I helped each other. Face seal, glove seal, boot seal, pressure check. Water check, oh-two flow, cee-oh-two scrub …
When we were sealed I risked poking my head above Till’s chair.
The Ghost ship filled space, occluding the stars and the warring fleets. The craft was kilometres across, big enough to have dwarfed the poor, doomed Brief Life Burns Brightly. It was a tangle of silvery rope studded with bulky equipment pods. And Silver Ghosts were everywhere. I could see how the yacht’s emergency lights were returning crimson highlights from the featureless hides of Ghosts, so they looked like blood droplets sprayed across that shining perfection.
The four of us huddled together. We had been granted a little bit of peace while the yacht drifted across space, an interval between the destruction of the Brightly and this inevitable collision with the Ghost cruiser. Now the interval was over.
‘Ten seconds,’ Till called. ‘Brace.’
Suddenly silver ropes thick as tree trunks were all around us, looming out of the sky, and we were thrown into chaos again.
I heard a grind of twisted metal, a scream of air. The hull popped open like an eggshell. The last of our air fled in a gush of ice crystals, and the only sound I could hear was my own breathing.
The crumpling hull soaked up some of our momentum. But then the base of the yacht hit, and it hit hard. The chair was wrenched out of my grasp, and I was hurled upwards. There was a sudden pain in my left arm. I couldn’t help but cry out.
I reached the limit of my tether and rebounded. The jolt sent further waves of pain through my arm. From up there, I could see the others were clustered around the base of the First Officer’s chair, which had collapsed.
The grinding, the shuddering stopped. The impact was over.
We had stuck like a dart in the outer layers of the Ghost ship. Shining threads arced all around us, as if a huge net had scooped us up.
Jeru grabbed me and pulled me down. She jarred my bad arm, and I winced. But she ignored me, and went back to working on Till. He was under the fallen chair.
Pael started to take a syrette of dope from the sachet around his neck.
Jeru knocked his hand away. ‘You always use the casualty’s,’ she hissed. ‘Never your own.’
Pael looked hurt, rebuffed. ‘Why?’
I could answer that. ‘Because the chances are you’ll need your own in a minute.’
Jeru stabbed a syrette into Till’s arm.
Pael was staring at me through his faceplate with wide, frightened eyes. ‘You’ve broken your arm.’
Looking closely at the arm for the first time, I saw that it was bent back at an impossible angle. I couldn’t believe it, even through the pain. I’d never bust so much as a finger, all the way through training.
Now Till jerked, a kind of miniature convulsion, and a big bubble of spit and blood blew out of his lips. Then the bubble popped, and his limbs went loose.
Jeru sat back, breathing hard. She said, ‘OK. OK. How did he put it? - You take it as it comes.’ She looked around, at me, Pael. I could see she was trembling, which scared me.
I said, ‘The First Officer—’
Jeru looked at me, and for a second her expression softened. ‘Is dead.’
Pael just stared, eyes empty.
I asked, ‘Sir - how?’
‘A broken neck. Till broke his neck, tar.’
Another death, just like that: for a heartbeat that was too much for me.