God help us all.
“Sirs, I have a transponder signal. It’s standard encoding, and identifies the ship as the Eclipse, owned by the Mosasa Salvage Corporation, registered on Bakunin.”
“Bakunin?” Hussein repeated along with Captain Rasheed.
“Yes, sir.”
The crippled vessel was over ninety light-years away from anywhere it had a right to be. Everything had suddenly become a lot more complicated.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Seraphim
Sometimes your allies are chosen for you.
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
Survive first, all else comes after.
—MARBURY SHANE (2044-*2074)
Date: 2526.6.3 (Standard) 750,000 km from Salmagundi-HD 101534
A little over thirty minutes after Kugara taped Nickolai to the wall, Wahid’s voice came over the PA system. “We made it! We fucking made it!”
I guess that means the colony, not to mention the star, is still here. She allowed herself a small measure of relief and looked across at her prisoner.
She hadn’t wanted to be the one to guard Nickolai, but her years as an enforcer for the DPS had given her the training to handle someone like him. She was probably the only one in seventy light-years who could. Mosasa was certainly aware of that.
Mosasa’s voice followed Wahid. “We are currently approaching a planetary orbit, and we will commence landing procedures as soon as our drives are cold. That will be approximately twelve hours.”
Twelve hours? The engines must have suffered a bigger hit than I thought.
“As a precaution,” he continued, “anyone who is not bridge crew, please remain in your cabins unless absolutely necessary.”
She was stuck here for twelve hours?
Kugara shook her head. She stood in the corner of the room opposite the wall where she had secured Nickolai. If their situation hadn’t been so dire, it might have been comical. Kugara’s restraints on Nickolai looked almost like a DPS academy hazing.
But not really.
Nickolai hadn’t been beaten, dragged through the slush, or taped to a freezing metal pole. She briefly remembered participating, dousing vodka on the skin of shivering plebes and igniting it, watching the blue flames ripple across naked skin before burning themselves out. The alcohol content was never quite enough to do permanent physical damage, but the poor bastards training to be part of the DPS didn’t know that, and with their heads taped to the pole, they couldn’t see the vodka burning, allowing them to imagine the worst.
Kugara remembered laughing at the screams when the victims lost the ability to tell cold from heat, and felt the sting of ice on their arms as if it was a branding iron.
She stared at Nickolai and thought, And you called me an Angel?
Kugara didn’t like the universe’s sense of humor.
The room was silent for a long time before Nickolai finally spoke. “Why haven’t you asked me?”
Why didn’t I gag you? “Ask you what?”
“Why?”
Kugara shook her head. “I don’t care. I’m a hired gun, and I’m not paid to care about your motives. Not unless Mosasa orders me to do an interrogation. I don’t think you want that.”
There was another long silence, and then Nickolai said, “I apologize for what happened on the observation deck.”
“What?” For a moment Kugara was confused. Things had happened too quickly for her to fit Nickolai’s confession—the little Mosasa had passed along—into her memory of events on the Eclipse.
It struck her much harder than it should have when she realized what his apology meant. “That’s when you rigged the tach-comm!”
It was all crap, from their first meeting onward, a way to distract the one member of the crew that had any training to deal with him. He probably knew enough about her history with the DPS to know exactly how she was going to react when he brought up his damn furry theology.
“I—” Nickolai started to say.
“Shut up. Don’t say another word, or I ignore the fact Mosasa wants you in shape for questioning.” She could easily picture herself slowly tearing bits of flesh away from him, not even for the sake of gaining information, just to teach the tiger a lesson. She was no stranger to that kind of procedure; she had broken people with little more than a pocketknife.
And she hated him for making her remember that.
Over the next couple of hours, the PA broadcast updates; no communication from the planet; drive continuing to cool down; other ship’s systems nominal. About three hours into the silent ordeal, Tsoravitch, who’d taken over the role of bridge communications officer, announced, “We have a transmission from the planet. They’re giving us communications and landing protocols.”
“About time,” Kugara whispered. “We’ve been calling them for three hours.”
“Maybe they don’t want us here.” Nickolai said.
“What?”
“They came out here for a reason. Maybe they don’t welcome visitors from their past.”
Kugara opened her mouth to say something, but she stopped herself. It was a possibility that should have been patently obvious to any native of the Fifteen Worlds. Dakota certainly wouldn’t welcome an unannounced visitor from anywhere, Grimalkin wasn’t much better.
We may be lucky no one is shooting at us.
Twenty minutes later the whole cabin shook.
“What the hell?” Kugara said, trying to keep her feet as the ship violently vibrated. Emergency klaxons sounded, and the cabin lights began flashing red. That’s the signal for a hull breach!
Parvi’s voice came over the PA, “Everyone to the nearest lifeboat/cabin now! We’ve had a critical overlo—”
Her voice was cut short by the sound of a massive explosion that threw Kugara toward the ceiling. As she fell back down, she could feel the weight of her body sucking away, telling her that the gravity manifolds were failing. When she hit the floor again, she bounced lightly off.
The lights in the cabin died, plunging both of them into complete darkness. The PA no longer spoke, and for a few moments the only sound in the cabin came from the two of them breathing.
“Were we attacked?” Nickolai whispered.
“I don’t know,” Kugara answered. She fumbled for a handhold in the dark and found one next to the door. She pulled herself against the wall. Through the wall she could feel vibrations that made her stomach churn. Something overloaded the power plant, she thought. Emergency power should be returning shortly . . .
As if in response to her thought, a dull red light came on above the doorway. Then it began flashing rhythmically.
“Oh, shit,” she whispered through clenched teeth. She opened the console next to the door and confirmed her fears.
“What is it?” Nickolai asked.
“Shut up!” she yelled at him, as if there was anything she could have done at this point. The emergency systems had fully taken over. The cabin was sealed. She tried to get the comm to the rest of the Eclipse responsive, but the cabin’s connection to the rest of the ship was dead.
The display, unresponsive to her touches as it was, helpfully showed a schematic of the cabin’s systems. Power and life support were now on a fully closed loop, helpfully illustrated by two animated arrows pointing at themselves. Six colored blocks connected the square cabin schematic to the rest of the schematic of Eclipse.