He tried speaking. ‘Executive override. Reboot.’
Nothing happened. Voice recognition might be one of the lost faculties. Either that or the ship was as alive as she was ever going to be.
He tried again, just to be on the safe side. ‘Executive override. Reboot.’
But still nothing happened. Close down that line of enquiry, he thought.
He moved again, shifting an arm until his hand came into contact with one of the tactile control clusters. There was discomfort as he moved, but it was mostly the diffuse pain of heavy bruising rather than the sharpness of broken or dislocated limbs. He could even shift his legs without too much unpleasantness. A screaming jag of pain in his chest didn’t bode well for his ribs, however, but his breathing seemed normal enough and there were no odd sensations anywhere else in his chest or abdomen. If a few cracked ribs and a detached retina were all he had suffered, he had done rather well.
‘You always were a jammy sod,’ he said to himself as his fingers groped around the many stubs and stalks of the tactile control cluster. Every voice command had a manual equivalent; it was just a question of remembering the right combinations of movements.
He had it. Finger there, thumb there. Squeeze. Squeeze again.
The ship coughed. Red script flickered momentarily into view where there had been nothing a moment before.
Getting somewhere. There was still juice in the old girl. He tried again. The ship coughed and hummed, trying to reboot herself. Flicker of red, then nothing.
‘Come on,’ Quaiche said through gritted teeth.
He tried again. Third time lucky? The ship spluttered, seemed to shiver. The red script appeared again, faded, then came back. Other parts of the display changed: the ship explored her own functionality as she came out of the coma.
‘Nice one,’ Quaiche said as the ship squirmed, reshaping her hull — probably not intentional, just some reflex adjustment back to the default profile. Rubble sputtered against the armour, dislodged in the process. The ship pitched several degrees, Quaiche’s view shifting.
‘Careful…’ he said.
It was too late. The Scavenger’s Daughter had begun to roll, keeling off the ledge where it had come to temporary rest. Quaiche had a glimpse of the floor, still a good hundred metres below, and then it was coming up to meet him, fast.
Subjective time stretched the fall to an eternity.
Then he hit the deck; although he didn’t black out, the tumbling series of impacts felt as if something had him in its jaws and was whacking him against the ground until he either snapped or died.
He groaned. This time it seemed unlikely that he was going to get away so lightly. There was heavy pressure on his chest, as if someone had placed an anvil there. The cracked ribs had given in, most likely. That was going to hurt when he had to move. He was still alive, though. And this time the Daughter had landed right-way-up. He could see the bridge again, framed like a scene in a tourist brochure. It was as if Fate were rubbing it in, reminding him of just what it was that had got him into this mess in the first place.
Most of the red parts on the console had gone out again. He could see the reflection of his own stunned-looking face hovering behind the fragmented Latinate script, deep shadows cutting into his cheeks and eye sockets. He had seen a similar image, once: the face of some religious figure burned into the fabric of an embalming shroud. Just a sketch of a face, like something done in thick strokes of charcoal.
The indoctrinal virus grumbled in his blood.
‘Reboot,’ he said, spitting crunched tooth.
There was no response. Quaiche groped for the tactile input cluster, found the same sequence of commands, applied them. Nothing happened. He tried again, knowing that this was his only option. There was no other way to awaken the ship without a full diagnostic harness.
The console flickered. Something was still alive; there was still a chance. As he kept on applying the wake-up command, a few more systems returned from sleep each time, until, after eight or nine tries, there was no further improvement. He didn’t want to continue for fear of draining the remaining avionics power reserves, or stressing the systems that were already alive. He would just have to make do with what he had.
Closing his left eye, he scanned the red messages: a cursory glance told him that the Scavenger’s Daughter was going nowhere in a hurry. Critical flight systems had been destroyed in the attack, secondaries smashed during the collision with the wall and the long tumble to the ground. His beautiful, precious gem of a private spacecraft was ruined. Even the self-repair mechanisms would have a hard time fixing her now, even if he had months to wait while they worked. But he supposed he should be grateful that the Daughter had kept him alive. In that sense she had not failed him.
He examined the read-outs again. The Daughter’s automated distress beacon was working. Its range would be restricted by the walls of ice on either side, but there was nothing to obstruct the signal from reaching upwards — except, of course, the gas giant he had positioned between himself and Morwenna. How long was it until she would emerge from the sunlit side of Haldora?
He checked the ship’s one working chronometer. Four hours until the Dominatrix would emerge from behind Haldora.
Four hours. That was all right. He could last that long. The Dominatrix would pick up the distress signal as soon as she came out from behind Haldora, and would then need an hour or so to get down to him. Ordinarily he would never have risked bringing the other ship so close to a potentially dangerous site, but he had no choice. Besides, he doubted that the booby-trap sentries were anything to worry about now: he had destroyed two of three and the third looked to have run out of power; it would surely have taken another pot shot at him by now if it had the means.
Four hours, plus another one to reach him: five in total. That was all it would take until he was safe and sound. He would sooner have been out of the mess right now, this instant, but he could hardly complain, especially not after telling Morwenna that she had to endure six hours away from him. And that business about not sewing the relay satellites? He had to admit to himself now that he had been thinking less about Morwenna’s safety and more about not wanting to waste any time. Well, he was getting a dose of his own medicine now, wasn’t he? Better take it like a man.
Five hours. Nothing. Piece of piss.
Then he noticed one of the other read-outs. He blinked, opened both eyes, hoping that it was some fault of his vision. But there was no mistake.
The hull was breached. The flaw must be tiny: a hairline crack. Ordinarily, it would have been sealed without him knowing about it, but with so much damage to the ship, the normal repair systems were inoperable. Slowly — slowly enough that he had yet to feel it — he was losing air pressure. The Daughter was doing her best to top up the supply with the pressurised reserves, but it could not continue this indefinitely.
Quaiche did the sums. Time to exhaustion: two hours.
He wasn’t going to make it.
Did it make any difference whether or not he panicked? He mulled this over, feeling that it was important to know. It was not simply the case that he was stuck in a sealed room with a finite amount of oxygen slowly being replaced by the carbon dioxide of his exhalations. The air was whistling out through a crack in the hull, and the leak was going to continue no matter how quickly he used up the oxygen by breathing. Even if he only drew one breath in the next two hours, there would still be no air left when he came to take the next. It wasn’t depleting oxygen that was his problem, it was escaping atmosphere. In two hours he would be sucking on good hard vacuum, the kind some people paid money for. They said it hurt, for the first few seconds. But for him the transition to airlessness would be gradual. He would be unconscious — more than likely dead — long before then. Perhaps within the next ninety minutes.