"No, open a window and throw empty beer pouches at them. Yes, with the cutting tool! It's a just a bennie with delusions of grandeur." *Roger, Gunny.*
"All right, people, you know what you're supposed to do. Get your thumbs out of your asses and do it!" *Meet you outside, Gunny.*
Torin lost the ping of the implants going off-line in her labored breathing. Civilian life had left her appallingly out of shape, but she managed to sound almost normal when she said, "Looks like we're on our own."
"About time," Craig snorted as they limped to a stop at the lockers. "Cramps my style when the kids listen in."
"You have a style?" Torin reached past him for the latch, but he stopped her, fingers closing around her jaw.
"Your head's still bleeding."
"It's a head wound. They do that."
"We need to…"
"Rip a piece off my sleeve."
"What?"
"We just need to stop it from dripping in my eye. Running out of time," she added when Craig opened his mouth to protest.
"Later," he muttered, grabbing the edge of damaged sleeve and tearing a strip free.
At this point, Torin figured later referred to enough that there was no time to expand on it. When Craig raised the fabric tentatively toward her face, she took it from him and pressed it down over the cut, the blood on the surrounding skin tacky enough to hold it in place.
He rolled his eyes and yanked the locker open. "This one was Nadayki's. This one… Doc's." His tone said he thought she'd have trouble wearing the latter suit.
She felt closer to Doc than she had to anyone since Craig had been taken.
"You're too tall for Doc's." Torin yanked the suit out of the fill niche and let it pool to the deck, the torso held more or less upright by the tanks. "Fuk. My boots…" Bending was pretty much out of the question.
Craig dropped to one knee and unfastened them. Torin resisted the urge to run her fingers through his hair.
She had hold of the locker, mostly to help her stay standing, when the gravity cut out. Anchored, she folded her legs up and shoved them into the rising suit. Teeth clenched, she started to twist, but Craig's hand crossed in front of hers, reached into the collar, and magged her boots to the deck. After that, it was as simple as getting into an HE suit with a cracked rib and four useless fingers.
At least no one was shooting at her, which made suiting up significantly more fun than on three previous attempts.
Just before she slid her good hand down the sleeve, she reached into the locker and touched the gray plastic suit mount. Her fingers brushed against Craig's as he did the exact same thing.
It felt like the first time she'd smiled in… several lifetimes.
Given the smile, their teeth cracked when Craig leaned forward and kissed her.
Emergency klaxons didn't so much shatter the silence as bludgeon it flat.
"Because I'm just that good," Craig murmured as he pulled away.
Torin bit her lip. Laughing now would shatter the tenuous grip she had on the gunnery sergeant, and her work wasn't done.
The crack of seals breaking, of atmosphere beginning to vent, caused a hindbrain response, but training kicked in before panic, and Torin had her helmet flipped up and sealed before the currents started pulling. Craig may have been born dirtside but he was station raised and had lived his life in space-odds were high he'd sealed his helmet even faster.
The inside of Doc's suit smelled like hartwood, a popular scent for men's toiletries back home on Paradise. At one time or another, both Torin's brothers had used it. She hadn't smelled it on Doc when she'd killed him.
The rush of escaping air had already begun to pull on the outside of the suit when Torin released one boot, twisted, bent her knee, and remagged it to the wall. It was a fight against the equalizing pressure to get the second up, but she managed. Body parallel to the deck, helmet pointed toward the opening doors, she turned her head to see Craig had assumed the same emergency position.
The boots were designed to hold even against an atmospheric pressure of 1.06 kilograms per square centimeter suddenly leaving the station.
Leg bones were not.
The decompression doors were about five centimeters apart, and there was still enough atmosphere in the ore docks that the slam of the wrench across the break rang out loud enough to be heard in spite of the rush of air and helmets. Eight centimeters apart when the first of the Grr brothers hit, nine for the second, ten by the time enough bones had broken to fit them both through the space. When Doc hit a moment later, there was almost no delay-Human bones being so much easier to break than Krai.
Torin felt the bulkhead shake as the armory slammed against the inside of the storage pod. Given that it was nearly as tall as the pod and taller than the door, it was, unfortunately, going nowhere without help.
"Should we be worried about that?"
It seemed Doc had been a little hard of hearing. Torin lowered the volume on his suit comm. "The ship it was on blew up around it. It should be able to survive this."
"Should?"
The doors were at the two-meter mark, and most of the atmosphere had vented. Torin released her boots, used her hands to push off gently, folded her feet under her as she came up on the vertical, and used her legs to shoot toward the ceiling and the cargo runners.
Craig was no more than a second behind her.
Unable to get to them from within, Big Bill would send ships. That was a given. He wouldn't let the armory go without a fight. What was also a given was that venting the volume of atmosphere in the ore dock was enough to force the station computers to make orbital corrections. While that was happening, the docking computer would lock down the clamps to minimize the variables. They didn't have much time; hopefully, they had enough.
Reaching the cluster of cables, Torin grabbed one and turned so her boots hit the ceiling. "Where the hell are the controls?"
"Here." Craig flipped the ten-centimeter disk on the end of a cable so Torin could see the controls on its top. "There's a manual fail-safe on each cable in case something takes out the central controls."
There was-had been-a war going on. Stations were prime targets.
"Flick the release," he continued, adding action to words, "Then push off toward the pod. The cable will scroll out with you."
"What happens if Big Bill cuts the power?" Torin asked as she followed him down.
"We're screwed, so let's hope he doesn't think of it." "Captain!" Huirre had both hands and a foot working his board. "The docking clamps won't release!"
"The docking computer is in lockdown, Captain. We can't access it."
We, Cho growled silently. Spreading the blame. He wanted to scream at Dysun to keep her fukking hair still.
"There's no way to get free of the station," she added.
"There fukking well is!" Cho slapped his palm down on his board. "Krisk! How much explosives do we have?"
"Why?"
"Why? So I can stuff them up your ass and detonate! Do we have enough to unlock the docking clamps?"
"We do." The engineer sounded bored. When they got out of this, Cho'd give him bored! "You could always use the emergency blow."
When Cho looked up, Huirre shrugged. "Use the what?" he demanded.
"It's a last resort in case the station gets attacked and is-oh, I don't know-falling out of orbit. It blows the ship away. Of course, it blows a fukking hole in the station and the atmosphere plus anything lying around loose vents right at the ship, so, like I said, last resort."
"Doors are almost all the way open, Captain." He could see from where he was sitting that Dysun had called up a new screen. So she wasn't completely useless. "The dock has lost atmosphere."
"Well, fuk it, if that's the case, use the blow. I'll send the command to your board. Hang on… Should be showing now."