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.
Jeru said briskly, ‘Now we move. We have to find an LUP. A lying-up point, Academician. A place to hole up. Do your duty, tar. Help the worm.’
I snapped back. ‘Yes, sir.’ I grabbed Pael’s unresisting arm.