Ships of Valor 1: Persona Non Grata (10 page)

I was no longer in my chair and everything was green. Those were the first two thoughts in my head when I regained consciousness. I’d like to believe these were rational thoughts. Unfortunately, I can’t swim. It was never something I needed to learn how to do. The water where I’m from is too cold to swim in, and it’s not like I ever needed to do it in space. That said, blind fear hit me as soon I realized I was submerged in water.

I’d always been told humans are natural swimmers and in response I’d called anyone who told me that a damn liar, usually with several expletives and a couple of hurt feelings. It’s not that I was scared of the water. I’m was scared to death of drowning, making it really hard to learn how to swim.

As I struggled, I heard
Heart's
muffled voice through my damaged dampers. “Ari, calm down. I will have you out in a moment. Just relax. It was the only way.” At that point, I noticed I was flailing trying to get out, and he was slowly bumping up the grav to force me to stop banging on the cage. I gave a quick double blink of compliance and tried to hold still. The pain made me register my right shoulder was probably dislocated, giving me enough focus to notice I had a rebreather on, probably a good thing because I was hanging in some sort of liquid. A gel really. I didn't realize it but my left arm had been banging on whatever the enclosure was and there was a latticework of cracks emanating from wherever I had hit it. Multiple times. With the little added sanity, I felt the gravity rushing towards my head, which didn't make any damn sense.

Heart
slowly switched gravity from whatever level he had it on to Terra-normal, then to nothing. Followed by a quick vacuum sound as the gel was pulled out of the coffin he had me in. “Ari. Stay still, you have a broken collarbone, we need to get you to the medical bay to set it. I've got a drone and a stretcher coming to you.” In not so kind words, I told him what to do with both of those, and to open the halls for me. I would make my way down.

I then quickly apologized. I knew
Heart
was trying to help and he was right but the pain was making me loopy and I was stubborn. I asked him what happened. “We are going to patch you up first.” He told me in no uncertain terms and refused to answer any other questions. Red emergency lights provided a dim glow to everything, but he flashed blue terminals leading me to the medical bay closest to the bridge. I doubt it was more than thirty meters but even in null grav, it felt like I had run a marathon in double grav. I was sweating hard and swearing just to keep going.

As soon as I entered the bay, I realized
Heart
made sure it was fully operational. No emergency lighting and running at full power.
Heart
was not messing around leading me to believe he wasn't only worried about my collar-bone. The second I was on the table one of his drones stabbed me in the thigh with what I assumed was a syringe half-full of nanites, a heavy dose of adrenaline, and the rest painkillers. I almost blacked out again and only managed to hold onto consciousness when the diagnostic machine screamed for half a second.

Through gritted teeth and a dozen swears, I reiterated my demand to know what happened and got a long pause followed by “I ejected our number four lifeboat, and set its emergency
h
space drive to implode.” This time, I think I did pass out, or redlined enough for all the machines started beeping. I know I said some not very nice things for about ten seconds before he cut me off. “The only way I could be sure was to create a large enough ripple in real-space to hide our dive into the ocean.” Using an
h
space drive inside a gravity well was a bad deal, running the risk of grabbing whatever matter was nearby and pulling it with it. Doing so over water probably wasn’t as dangerous as on solid ground, but not something that should be done anywhere near a planet under normal circumstances. At least with fluids, the natural vacuum effect prevented a chain reaction from sucking in the entire planet.

“It should give the impression we crashed, and there will be enough wreckage to imply our destruction.” I uttered some very choice things, but he was right. Whoever was after us when we made planet-fall had known we were coming, and wanted us gone.
Heart
had made the correct call, grabbing the conn, and doing what he felt was necessary. I apologized and let him know.

I did ask where in the hell we were. “We're currently very deep in the Kermadec Trench. I can't give an exact reading as I have almost all my systems in standby mode. We should be relatively undetectable.” Slick move. Although designed for space travel,
Heart
could go underwater in a pinch. I’m not sure how deep he could go and wasn’t anxious to find out, but even though the types of pressures were different, he could hold his position underwater until we ran out of food. Using our hydronic farm and fully packed freezers that could be a very long time. I’d probably die of boredom eating the same meals before the ocean itself got to us.

The drone finished up on my collar, and a display showed me a full X-ray. Lots of minor cracks but the collar appeared to be the only major break. I was right about the drone’s first injection. Loaded full of nanites, all going to town trying to fix things. I looked at my arms and saw I was bruised into a great yellowish purple haze. I asked
Heart
how long was I out. “It has been a little over fifty-one hours since the incident.” I started swearing again and asked why he didn’t wake me up. Machines started trilling again, but he cut them off almost instantly.

“You were severely injured in the collision. I immediately put you in sustainment fluid and set to work repairing your internal injuries. I was actually hoping to keep you unconscious for another few days and move you to medical for surgery when you were stable. You really should not be up, or even awake at this point.” He paused for several seconds. “I would still like to put you in a medpod for additional recuperation.” I shut that option down fast. I was not going back into one of those boxes if I had a choice.

We had spent a long time focused on me. I decided to shift gears and asked
Heart
how bad off he was. “Excluding the lost lifeboat, my damage is minor. Repairs are nearly complete.” I told him to show me. If he was willing to bend the truth about my health, he was sure as hell willing to do the same about his own. The display lit up after a few seconds. I wasn’t sure if he was changing the data or debating changing the data, but the pause was telling. “The majority of the damage was to the starboard side. Rear starboard sublight is functional, but at sixty percent. We lost two directional propulsors near the fore, but, I can fabricate those. The installation will require your assistance since my drones are not capable of aquatic operations.
Damage to clamping dock number four is beyond my ability to repair. We will require a facility; however, the remaining boats and the Captain’s yacht are still functional.” That stopped me, as I didn’t know we he had a yacht on board, let alone a Captain’s yacht, forcing me to ask about it purely from curiosity.

“Indeed. We have several vehicles aboard. I believe you will need one to use one for your reconnaissance since I will need to conduct repairs, and whoever attempted to destroy us was aware of arrival.” The fog of pain had made me temporarily forget why we were there. That made me angry. If someone wanted us dead, I was going to make it personal.

My refusal to stay in medical any longer than absolutely necessary annoyed
Heart
to no end. I instead spent the next several days in my stateroom after
Heart
adjusted his artificial gravity so we weren’t upside-down, and so I could get a little sleep. He snapped at me a few times when I was being completely unreasonable. Not until I agreed to slap a medpack on and let one of his idiot drones follow me around did he relaxed a little. I don’t think he was trying to mother hen me, but like the captain on the bridge thing, some programming was embedded so deep he couldn’t shake it. Deep down he was a hospital boat, and while I was injured, I was his patient.

I was going stir crazy. It’s one thing being in space and not being able to do something. It’s completely different being told I wasn’t allowed. I did a hell of a lot better than I thought I would. I made it almost three whole days before I was in one of the fabrication bays begging
Heart
to let me do anything to help fix him up. I know what he gave me was busy work, but the tasks kept my mind off the dull throb of healing up.

Once the general fog started to lift and he was able to dial the painkillers down, we started talking about what went wrong. Not that we hadn’t since I woke up, but I kept getting caught in the same circular logic chain. The drugs he had me on made me useless mentally, and it was only the low-g making me moderately useful physically, as though he needed me to begin with. I would have skipped them entirely if he didn’t have the drones following me ready to stab me with a syringe.

Our longest running conversation was why? Followed by whom? “I do not know Ari. For an attack of that nature, our opposition would need to know our arrival window. All data leads to an inside leak of information. However, very few people knew of my involvement.”
Heart
displayed the people who had direct knowledge on the master screens, as well as a smaller subset of their trusted relations. “We can have a fairly high confidence Miss Kellinger and General Campbell were not the direct leak but that does not exclude others within their inner circles.”

That led to how we were supposed to proceed. There was a very long pause from
Heart
after that. To the point where I thought I hadn’t said it out loud. “I do not believe we can trust anyone. We must operate under the assumption all communications are compromised.” A rather chilling thought. If all comms were fried, then my forged idents were probably toast as well. “Concur. However, I believe I can rectify that. We have a few larger concerns.”

“First, we must determine a way to get you ashore. The lifeboats and the Captain’s yachts are suboptimal, but would work. Neither the runabout nor the hopper located in the starboard secondary hold are viable due of our current location, leaving the sloop in fabrication bay three. It is incomplete but functional. Its communications package should be sufficient to act as a relay to me if we are cautious.”
Heart
replaced a
portion of the screen with diagrams of each of the vehicles he mentioned in turn. The final one appeared showing an angrav sloop.

He had glossed over it by calling it a sloop, but an angrav sloop is like a hopper and a runabout had a kid, modified to the point of being space-ready. Essentially a two-seat vehicle a little over five meters long, but rather than having wheels like a runabout, it had angrav pads and a series of directional propulsors like a hopper. What made sloops different was the two sublight engines on the back. Hoppers used propulsors all the way around and topped out around the speed of sound. Angrav sloops topped out by crashing into things.

They were originally conceived by the entertainment industry and people used to do cross-continent and cross world racing with them. Sloops were not only dangerous as hell but also amazing. When I was a kid I would watch the races any chance I could. As soon as I saw the sloop on the screen, I yelled for
Heart
to stop. Probably more forcefully than I intended, but I wanted to know why he had one in one of his bays, and why in the hell I was only finding out about it then.

“I did not know you were interested in them or I would have shown you, but like the ships back on Luna, this has been a pet project of mine for the last several years. The physics behind them are interesting, and a few years back there was a resurgence on Luna for the sport. I have been trying to build a vintage variant since then. Unfortunately, original parts are difficult to find on the secondary market.” He had an original. I was out the bridge door trying to remember where bay three was. He was already lighting the way for me. Over the preceding few days, we had swapped out of emergency power mode, and he had gradually been adjusting gravity back to normal. My blood was pumping when I got there, but oh was it was worth it.

The diagram didn’t do the sloop justice and
Heart
hadn’t done himself justice. Whatever work he had been doing on her was beyond compare. She was gorgeous. I wasn’t sure what he meant by incomplete but from outward appearances, she looked like she was minutes off the assembly line. The only visible thing lacking was paint, having a steel gray exterior at the time. I was spewing compliments as fast as I could, circling her, and running my hands over every centimeter. “I was actually experimenting with a non-stock option for coloring. I know it is not strictly traditional, but I did not think anyone would mind this allowance.”

The exterior of the car changed to a deep scarlet matching my old jacket. “I used a high-density polymer compound that allows me to modify the color scheme to some extent. I believe the Legion uses the same technology on some of their battle armor.” He was right, we did for our scouts. I explained the paint was energy intensive and tended to drain power, so we didn’t use it for everyone. “Yes, that makes sense, however, the engines cannot possibly use the full output of the reactors, so my inclusion was of minimal impact.”

I was truly excited about the prospect of flying this beauty, but I did want to know what he meant by incomplete, especially as I have a healthy respect concerning my own abilities as a pilot. I knew
Heart’s
abilities and not my own saved us. “Most are minor cosmetic issues, however, there are a few other items we can likely replace with aftermarket parts. I will check my databases and see if we can fabricate them. Much of the work has been slow because I have had to manufacture the tools to work on the sloop, even when parts are readily available. I encountered this previously when conducting repairs on myself. Although I have the knowledge, I lack the capability due to things like access, or simply a stripped screw.”

That had to be frustrating. Not being able to fix something because of an inability to reach it.
Heart
had all these little drones running around  he could control, but he still needed help from an outsider. I understood what he was saying in some ways. Like trying to stitch up a wound on my own back, almost impossible. Just no reach. I would need to get help. It reinforced why we were a good team. There were things I wasn’t capable of. Had I been flying any other ship, I would’ve been dead. Without a crew,
Heart
couldn’t make repairs. Or at least, the fixes would take him a much longer time.

I pulled myself away from staring at the sloop, and we started to prioritize a repair plan. Not only for the sloop but also for
Heart
himself. If things went south again, we wanted to be able to hightail it.