COMBAT SALVAGE 2165 (14 page)

From the four places on her torso where the artificial, machine limbs would have attached had they been represented, what looked like endless colored veins extended out from the neural interface ports, representing the connections between the breaching ship’s systems and the neural processors set in Chief Horcheese’s torso.

Parker’s face twinged as if something inside her had curdled.

"
Everyone off the bridge!" Chief Horcheese practically bellowed it. "Not you, Meester. You stay right there." Horcheese had arrived. He slammed his palm down hard on the console to kill the projection and did it too hard...so hard that he pushed himself up and out of the chair. Parker made for the hatch like the bridge was on fire.
 

The way Horcheese came at him made him imagine she was going to rip his face off like he’d watched her do to that Squidy out in the debris field. After being beaten by Wambach and manhandled by Burn in the last three hours, Tig couldn’t help it. Part of his brain really thought she was there to kill him. He flinched before Chief Horcheese caught hold of the console and hovered over him at 45 degrees like some vengeful spirit.

"
I may not believe all the bullshit you sling like Burn does," she said. "But don’t you dare question my commitment to this mission - this war."
 

He hadn’t expected that. "What the hell are you talking about? I never…."

"You went
over my fucking head
, Cherry. You went to Burn with your plan instead of me. And you did it because you didn’t think
I’d
greenlight it. You didn’t think
I’d
be willing to give what it takes to make your stupid plan work."
 

"
That’s not…"
 

"If Burn orders me to, I will surrender my body for you to mod like some Staten Island City hotrod, but before I let you cut me up and splice me into this fucking ship, I want you to know
exactly
what’s going to happen if you fuck this up. I know. Raleigh knows.
Wambach
knows." He winced. "Yeah. Posjic’s dead now," she said. "Maybe you really are working with some next-level skills and we humble redsuits don’t always understand what the hell you’re on about, Tig Meester, but every salty red that does the job knows that when
we
fuck up, it won’t just kill
us
. It’ll probably kill a whole bunch of other people that were counting on us doing our jobs right."
 

"I can
do
this." He could. He knew he could.
 

"Are you sure? I mean are you really sure? You said that last time. And we ended up inside the debris field where you said we’d never have to go. When it comes to what we’re doing out here, ‘sort of’ isn’t good enough. You fuck with uncertainty and it will fuck us all back and we will all get reamed. When things don’t work out like you thought this time, it won’t just be Posjic that pays the price. It’ll be all of us. And Parker. You think about that real hard before you say you’re
sure
this will work."
 

Horcheese bored into him with that heavy stare and behind her head, through the dome, the dirty, swirling yellow fog waved like a rippled sheet. "The hell?" A patch of space so huge it made a halo around Horcheese’s head twisted and shifted behind her just like the stars had twisted and shifted behind UNS
Duer
before she’d been silhouetted by the detonation of an alien warhead. Tig blurted out, "Squidy!"
 

The alien emerged from its cloak like a body he once saw surface in an algae pond. Its hull was covered in what looked to be patches of the yellow clouds behind it. They seemed to break apart like an oil slick and migrate down the sides of the hull as it showed itself. It curved like a 120-meter tusk, all swelled out on one side with a set of small bays for its warheads. A pair of tower-mounted small-bore guns towers jutted out port and starboard.

It fired a two-second burst aimed at the breaching ship’s reactors at almost the same moment Horcheese fired the thrusters. She spun the ship, attempting evasive maneuvers it was never designed for. The aliens’ rapier streams missed by scant meters and left glowing swaths of ionized atmo behind them.

Audacity
and
Greenstone's
cannon shells sparkled over the rough alien hull for almost a second before it vanished.

13

Burn said, "Arrange for your pilots to come inside
Audacity
for three-hour breaks."

Jordo nodded. "They’ll like that." The junk’s crew chief handed him a plate of burger-filled buns just like back on the carrier. They let him use their head, too. That alone was worth the trouble it took to park his Bitzer alongside the junk down in that yellow soup and egress the cockpit, but he had other reasons to get out of his fighter and board
Audacity
. He’d learned there were some things you just don’t talk about over comms no matter how much encryption you have.

"
That’s twice now," he said. "Twice, that Squidy slipped by me and made me look like an ass."
 

"
Hey, I’m the one in command," Burn reminded him. "I'm the one Staas Company will ream. Ultimately it’s my responsibility, so I’m the only one that gets to bitch about looking like an ass."
 

"
I bet you’ll take credit when we get him, too."
 

"
You’re mud-fucking right I will. That’s why I’m a Commander now." It was a joke, but she half meant it.
 

"Are you
really
that confident?" Chief Horcheese wasn’t, judging by the way she’d asked.
 

Jordo said, "I went and spent a few minutes going over the specs of the NS191s with one of your cherries…. AMTS Meester...Tig. Take a look at this mod he came up with." He set the buns aside for a moment, withdrew a matchbox computer from his suit, and punched up the projections so they hovered over it after he set it on the console. "
This
is the degree of control he said you’d have over those emitters." The tension was immediately apparent the second Jordo mentioned the Chief's impending and highly experimental integration with
Tipperary
, but he couldn’t very well dance around it. By the way she held her body away from the display, he thought it was obvious she didn’t want to even look at it. "Those are actually Lt. Timms’ numbers," he pointed out. "He's the one that did the math."
 

"
Those numbers could ruin a Squidy’s day," said Burn.
 

"
They fucking better," Horcheese said.
 

*****

Tig checked his version of the integrated capacitor discharge control system one more time. The simulator said it was problem-free. When he finally decided he couldn’t do any more at this stage from the bridge, he went to finalize the connections on the other end, outside.

The airlock door opened onto the inside of
Tipperary’s
ring. The struts leading from the main hull to the edge faded away into the thick, yellow atmo. It turned a brief shade of green after the little micro-discharges in the clouds. Or maybe it was just the impression the lights left on his retinas.
 

"Nice of you to show up, Tig." His helmet pointed Parker out for him. She stood far off in the fog, a ghostly silhouette on the ring. "Aim with your eyes and push with your legs," she said. "Jump."

Forget that. He jetted out to her with a slim-jim belt. Right now they were in a nice, comfy zero-gee field along with the ship, but one wrong move, and that would end fast. If his bad aim made him overshoot the ring and he left that nice bubble of artificial grav, then he’d fall a long way and nobody would be able to stop him. It was a long way to the molten surface below.

Flying out to her slowly, he saw most of the redsuits they’d brought out working the ring. All the control system connections to the capacitors and the actual particle emitters themselves had to be set and checked by hand. He noticed Horcheese departing the salvage junk’s locks, high up on his two o’clock and watched her for too long. He almost flubbed the landing on the ring and overshot.

The yellow condensate that clung in thin droplets on the hull made for a slippery landing. When he finally did get control, he hugged the hull. Parker had a right to laugh. "All your improvised CDCS conduits check out here. This section’s done. I’m moving on."

"
Hey, wait," he said, but when the shadow skated across the curved hull of the ring section in front of him like a predator was swooping in from above, he knew why Parker had been keen to get the hell out of there. Chief Horcheese landed hard in a three-point stance and he swore she dented the hull.
 

"
Give me a status report on the control systems," she said.
 

"
If they're all going as fast as Parker, then they should be almost done," he said. The redsuits were visible every thirty or forty yards or so, clinging to the ring. A cluster of three gathered around one of the new emitters. "We got lu-"
 

"
Don’t say we got lucky. And you better be good for more than luck because so fa-" She inhaled the last syllable of her word in shock and surprise. The light flashed across her face with a flattening white light so bright her face was nothing but whites and pupils.
 

Tig turned to see the misty atmo around the far section of the ring lit up with flashes and crackling with charge. It danced and arced over the ring on the far side like all the capacitors it held had shifted into discharge somehow. The energy frolicked up and down the ring and the spokes like a set of Jacob’s ladders and as the red suits working that side jumped for it and jetted out of there and made for the central axle section, the crackling tendrils of zap threatened to lash across their backs like bullwhips.

He never saw the bolt that got Raleigh, but the man's limp and tumbling suit impacted the axle section only a few meters below the bottom lip of the bridge’s dome.

Seconds later, the discharge was over. The atmo sparked all around them as Horcheese called out for the redsuits to sound off. They called in one by one as she jetted the gap to get Raleigh. She wasn’t closest, but she was the fastest. She landed not far from where Raleigh drifted limp.

She was almost to the airlock with him by the time Tig and the others got there. Through his helmet Raleigh’s face looked charred. "The capacitors must have picked up charge from the atmo. When he tapped in to rig the new control conduit, he got zapped," Wambach said.

Horcheese’s eyes shifted to Tig just long enough for him to feel the accusation in them. "It’s not my fault," he heard himself say before he even knew it was out. His voice had been so weak when he said it that he'd been the only one to hear.

She carried Raleigh inside over her shoulder. His limbs floated and splayed like a ragdoll. "You think you know what the hell you’re doing, Tig Meester. And by the time you figure out you don’t, it’s already too late."

The external airlock doors closed in his face. She couldn't possibly,
rationally
blame this on him, he thought, but she was. He looked around at the handful of redsuits still out there on the ledge with him in the piss yellow, sulfurous haze. He wanted just one of them to tell him she was wrong, that this
wasn’t
his fault. But Hongston and Ellis and Rampone and the rest of them had nothing to say.

14

His projection of the Chief’s torso now floated above the Ops console. It didn’t seem to bother Timms much to see the image of the Chief like that, with bundles of control cables thick as her thighs and arms coming out of her pelvis and her shoulders. But he wasn’t worried about Lt. Timms seeing it.

The rest of them were outside, finishing up with the capacitors, the emitters, and the control leads. They could see him through the dome over the bridge if they wanted to. So could Horcheese.

He’d ripped open the control consoles on the port and starboard side used for firing the emitters and rigged cables and control conduits from all of them leading to the command chair at the center of the bridge. It looked like the empty center of a spider’s web, waiting to be filled. That’s where the Chief would go, of course. They'd plug her in like an organically-based control concatenator.

The straps… He’d forgotten to rig them to hold her limbless torso. As he picked his way through the web, gently pulling himself along in the null-gees, his helmet highlighted the figures of his fellow reds outside, out on the ring. Rampone jetted across with Wambach on his shoulders. They headed for one of the new emitter towers where Komora waited.

The swirling atmo behind him went pale and then bright and whited out. Tig’s vision flashed like a bomb went off behind his eyelids for what felt like seconds. Then, when he blinked and he could see again, what he saw was Komora and the knuckledragger blown apart into pieces by another freak capacitor discharge. Tig squeezed his eyes shut tight until he saw stars and when he opened them again, Komora was where he’d been before, jetting across the gap from one part of the ring to the other. He was fine.