The Killing of Worlds (13 page)

The executive officer blinked, suppressed emotions rising in her briefly. She forced them down.

“So, you were one of them, Anst. I always suspected.”

“I know you did, Katherie,” the woman said. “I felt you waiting for me to give myself away. But I’ve been waiting for you, too.”

As the woman spoke, Hobbes felt a familiar complaint from her inner ear. The ship was turning, shifting slowly around its y-axis. Here amidships, the maneuver was subtle enough that the grinning woman before her probably hadn’t noticed it.

“You played it well, Verity. But you’re dead now,” Hobbes said. She glanced sidelong at the chronometer, starting a countdown from twenty. “We won’t be in darkmode forever.”

“We’ll see about that.” With her free hand, Anst yanked open the hatch on the hullside wall: an escape pod. The executive officer swallowed.

“I’ve got a few minutes with you,” Anst said in a whisper. “You, me, and this knife. And then off you go with a load of HE. Zai won’t find enough of you to genoprint. I’ve planned this well.”

Fine, Hobbes thought. Anst wanted to brag. Let her.

Katherie Hobbes willed her body to relax, counting down the few remaining seconds before the coming jolt.

Metal screamed all around the First Engineer.

“Get to the far wall!” he shouted to his team.

Damn that idiot Zai! He was turning the
Lynx
too fast, Frick thought. But then the engineer saw the error he’d made, the realization coming even as he leapt from the shifting mass of armor plates. He had given Zai an absolute limit on acceleration: one-twentieth of a gee, or half a meter per second squared. But that assumed forward or backward thrust, which had an even effect throughout the frigate. Thrusting the ship into a turn, however, worked like a centrifugal gravity simulator: The force was far greater at the ship’s bow and stern than it was at the center.

Frick was like a man at the end of a whip, one that Zai had casually snapped.

Rating Metasmith had returned from the compoint with a warning about the maneuver, but she hadn’t been told why the captain was turning the ship. It didn’t make sense. The plan had been to stay oriented to the Rix. As always, someone was improvising. Frick cursed himself as a fool not to have specifically warned against this.

The plates explosively popped their strongline tethers and began to pile toward the starboard side of the cargo bay. They weren’t moving fast enough to punch through the hullalloy exterior wall, but they were plenty massive enough to crush a crewman.

As one, the engineering team pulled their magnets and jumped toward the sternward wall. The sliding plates rubbed against each other, screeching like a heavy maglev engaging friction brakes.

But his team was clear.

“Well, the captain hasn’t killed us yet!” he said as they landed around him.

A few of his team laughed, but Rating Metasmith raised her fist for their attention. “They said only one-twentieth for the first accel. But much higher for the second. Whatever they can muster.”

“Splendid,” Frick muttered, then cried, “Get your hoods on and tether with hard lines. We’re going into vacuum!”

Ten seconds later, the promised second jolt struck.

It was far worse than Frick expected.

Hobbes’s feet shot out as her count hit twenty, catching Verity Anst in the center of her chest. Her timing was perfect. The woman cried out in surprise as the ship bucked around them, the shock as violent as a collision. The force of Hobbes’s kick was trebled by the sudden acceleration. She was flung from Anst’s grip toward the bow, and rolled into a tumbling ball, bouncing down the corridor like a stone tossed down a well.

But Hobbes felt pain at her throat. Anst had managed to cut her as she’d pushed away. Hobbes felt the wound as she tumbled in freefall; her fingers came away slick, but there was no spurting gout of blood.

She came to a hard stop against a closed hatchway, cracking one shoulder, hand still at her throat. The integrity of her suit was broken, but the thick neck-seal had saved her life by millimeters.

Hobbes glanced down the corridor. Anst was twenty meters behind, kicking her way toward Hobbes with knife leveled.

A huge roar came from behind the executive officer. A shriek of metal and a howling wind from the bow. Damn, Hobbes thought. In the burst of acceleration sternward, the armor plates must have punched through the bow of the ship. The
Lynx
was depressurizing.

Hobbes wasn’t far from the bow cargo bay. She glanced at the pressure meter on the hatchway door. It was dropping into the red.

She spun the hatch’s manual seal, and its safeties complained. Hobbes pressed her hand to the ID plate, and the hatch relented to her command rank.

Gunner Anst was flying toward her, the outstretched knife a few meters away. Hobbes barely had time to beltclip herself to the wall before the hatch blew open.

A great, sudden wind yanked her hard against the clip, bending Hobbes at the waist like a jackknife. Verity Anst sailed past helplessly, screaming bloody murder, and was sucked through the hatch like a doll into a tornado.

Hobbes felt a stinging along one arm: Anst had managed to cut her again.

“Damn you!” she cried.

In a few seconds, the wind began to die down. Somewhere further toward the bow, sprayfoam must be sealing the breaches. Hobbes pulled her pressure suit’s face mask on and extended strongline from her belt clip. She kicked out over the hatchway—with the wind, the hatch led effectively down—and dropped after Anst and toward Frick and his team.

A moment later, Hobbes found the mutineer, knocked unconscious against an ugly set of waste baffles. The pressure was still dropping, and the woman’s flimsy emergency suit was hopelessly rent. Her eyes were starting to bug, forcing the closed eyelids open a hair. Anst wouldn’t last long without help, but there wasn’t anything Hobbes had time to do for her.

The blood from the cut on Hobbes’s arm spurted in time with her racing heart. The globules floated against Gunner Anst’s prone form, dotting her uniform.

“You’ve got my blood. Happy now?” Hobbes asked, spraying repair sealant onto her own wounds.

Another jolt rocked the ship. Not acceleration; something cracking. The structure of the
Lynx
was beginning to fail. Anst’s breathing started to kick up; she was dying.

“May the Emperor save you from death,” Hobbes said to Anst with the cold cadence of tradition. It was all she could do.

She paused to make sure the rent at her own throat was sealed, then pushed on, wondering if Frick and his team were still alive.

Decompression was not the word for it.

When the reverse thrust struck, the plates surged toward the bow, thirty tons of hullalloy doing at least twenty mps. The shock wave from the collision—loose armor plates smashing against the bow hull wall—hammered Frick’s ears even through his pressure hood. He was tossed forward, then pulled up short on his tether with a gut-wrenching snap, finding himself spinning at the end of three meters of strongline. His ribs screamed in fresh agony.

Then came the truncated howl of flash decompression, total and instantaneous.

The entire forewall of the bow was knocked out. In the seconds before he pulled up his face mask to complete the pressure seal around his head, Frick saw the void before him with naked eyes. His ears and eyeballs felt as if they would burst, both sight and hearing ruptured, then the smart plastics of the suit found their grip, and the pounding in his head was replaced with the polymer smell of recycled air.

He blinked until vision returned, looked out at the huge hole torn out by the plates. Had the
Lynx
accelerated forward instead of in reverse, they would have all been crushed. Not just the engineering team—although they would have been flattened most spectacularly—but the entire vessel would have been pummeled by the careening armor.

Against the mean light of the stars, Watson Frick saw the glitter of a drone sailing away from the ship.

Good god, they must have used the deadman rail, launching the drone to push the
Lynx
backward.

What was the captain thinking! Even with easy gravity to compensate, the frigate was designed to accelerate smoothly, not with massive jolts.

Frick scanned his team. They all seemed conscious, although Metasmith was helping Ensign Baxton with his face mask seal. Something about the team looked wrong, however. It wasn’t merely the sudden darkness, the hard shadows of orange gas giants and Legis’s distant sun. It was that the team didn’t seem to be …

He did a quick count.

There were fourteen suited figures. Fourteen.

Someone was gone.

That was impossible. Everyone had been clipped: hypercarbon strongline attached to hullalloy rings on a bulkhead wall. The utility belt on a Navy engineer’s pressure suit was made of diamond-tensile monofilament. You could hang a pair of thrashing African elephants from these rigs with a ten-thousand-year safety margin.

Rating Inders was waving her arms wildly, trying to get Frick’s attention. He looked over at her, disbelief pounding in his head. She pointed at a short crack in the cargo bay bulkhead. The crack ran straight through the line of clip rings.

Then he saw it: One of the hullalloy rings had been ripped out.

The tether rigs were sound, but the bulkhead was cracking.

Frick climbed his strongline up and touched his suit’s audio probe to the bulkhead. He heard the familiar hum of the
Lynx
‘s air nanos, and the moan of decompression through what must have been another hull breach on the other side. And something else—the high-pitched tremolo of tiny pits propagating in hullalloy. The forward bulkhead—the last hullalloy barrier between the
Lynx
and massive decompression—was cavitating. Frick swallowed at the menacing sound. One of the flockers must have released a metal-eating virus; nothing else would cause the material to disintegrate this way.

In minutes, or perhaps seconds, the engineering team would all be pitching through the void.

Frick brought his hand up in a fist, thumb and little finger extended. The vacuum hand sign for lethal emergency. When he had every eye on him, the engineer brought the hand down to point at the hatchway. They had to get it open.

Even through pressure masks, he recognized surprise in a few faces. The other side of the bulkhead was still pressurized. Opening the hatchway now would piss away still more of the
Lynx
‘s oxygen, and test the structural integrity of the walls between here and the next bulkhead, all the way back at the forward gunnery station.

But with the bulkhead cracking, the oxygen was gone anyway. And it would go far less explosively if they let it flow through the hatchway than if the whole bulkhead blew. At this moment, the hullalloy had hard vacuum on one side and almost a full atmosphere on the other. They had to equalize the pressure. The
Lynx
‘s designers would have assumed that the cargo area would lose pressure gradually, at least twenty seconds to empty the huge space of air. No one would foresee the entire front of the ship being sheared away at once. And of course the metal virus added to the stresses on the metal.

Metasmith was the first to react. She swung on her tether like an acrobat, planting her magnet next to the hatchway and bracing her feet to either side. She gave the manual wheel a twist. It seemed to protest for a moment, then started to turn. A few more hands reached the wheel in time to speed her efforts.

When the hatch blew, the outrush of air knocked Metasmith back at a dangerous velocity. But the woman swung in a leisurely arc, letting her strongline run out to its full length. She executed a perfect landing on the far side of the cargo bay bulkhead, as pretty as zero-gee ballet.

Frick pressed his audio probe back against the bulkhead. It shrieked with the familiar wail of decompression, but the engineer’s sharp ears still detected the soprano ringing of a travelling hullalloy fissure.

The
Lynx
was still breaking.

He shut his eyes and listened carefully, praying. Then it came—the sound was changing. The ringing seemed to gradually recede, lessening as the stresses of unequal pressure drained away through the open hatchway.

Frick opened his eyes, sighing with relief.

Now he could actually see the damage in front of him. The crack traveled past him, missing his own tether ring by a few centimeters. He stuck his suited finger into the fissure. It was less than four centimeters deep. And there was no notable vibration trembling within it.

The ship’s hullalloy had an immune system, nanomachines that should fight off the Rix virus, but it might take a while for the infection to be completely eliminated. What the ship needed was a respite from the stresses of high gee and sudden jolts, but for the moment, the
Lynx
had stabilized.

At least until the captain decided to break her again.

Engineer-Rating Telmore Bigz blinked his eyes again, hoping sight would return.

Bigz knew he was lucky to be alive at all. By rights, his head should be smeared across the Legis system by now. Pure chance had saved him. As he’d been torn from the bulkhead wall, his face mask must have been whipped around so that it had sealed itself. Either that, or Bigz had done so with some autonomic part of his brain whose actions were not recorded in memory.

But in the seconds of hard vacuum, his eyes must have bugged bad. He could see a sort of blurry streak before him, and that was all.

From the screaming in his head, Bigz figured that his eardrums had blown too. But that didn’t bother him much. Out here in the airless void, sound was not a native species. And with communications forbidden, he wouldn’t be talking to anyone on his suit radio.

But Bigz wished that he could see.

At least then he could figure out why he’d been plucked from the bulkhead. Bigz was positive that he’d been clipped right. Any shock strong enough to break his monofilament line should have snapped him in two like a breadstick.