Skirmishes (12 page)

Everything was supposition at this point.

Everything.

Including their odds for survival.

FIFTEEN

THE CREW WAS USED to working in zero-g, but they were used to working in zero-g while lights were on. They hadn’t had drills for working in near-darkness since she had been on board, and maybe some of them never had.

One of Elissa’s officer training instructors had run the class through darkness drills. Elissa had found them disconcerting. Several talented officer recruits actually washed out because of those drills. Those recruits had hated working in those conditions, and one of them even demanded that the instructor guarantee they would never encounter such a thing.

He had laughed.
Clearly,
he said,
you’ve never been in battle.

Elissa had been in battle many times, and she’d even commanded disabled ships, but nothing like this.

She had to squint to locate what she believed to be the ship’s consoles. The light coming through the windows was fading, and soon they would only have starlight to work from, and not much of that.

She had learned a zero-g trick as a child. She closed her eyes and mentally erased any effect of gravity. That wiped out the so-called rule that the console had to be on the floor, the windows on the wall, and nothing on the ceiling.

She got rid of concepts like floor and ceiling altogether.

Her ability to mentally erase gravity had made her stand out when the officer training had moved from zero-g with a ship whose attitude controls were working to a ship whose attitude controls had malfunctioned.

She used those skills now, while the rest of her crew probably struggled with attempting to mentally map the actual layout of the slowly rotating ship.

She let go of the jutting thing and floated toward what she believed were the consoles. She grabbed a rounded edge and pulled herself in. Yep, these were the consoles. They had always had a slight vibration as power thrummed through them.

They had no vibration now.

She used one hand to hold herself above the consoles, and then she counted the edges from her spot.

The console wasn’t one big piece of equipment, but several pieces, and if she knew where she was among those pieces, then she knew what faced her on those dark boards.

Lieutenant Nisha Lee joined her. Elissa knew it was Lee, not because of her small size—several of the bridge crew were small—but because of the faint jasmine perfume she always wore. The scent was mixed with sweat now, and probably a hint of anxiety, but Lee said nothing.

She was using both arms, so that dislocated shoulder truly had gone back into its socket.

Two other crew members floated down from various positions and found a place beside Elissa. She cared less about who they were than what they could do.

She was in front of navigation.

“Lieutenant,” she said to Lee, “I believe you have the environmental systems.”

“I know, ma’am.” Lee held her position with one hand and moved the other on the console. She sounded distracted, but Elissa wasn’t sure if that was because she was ignoring the radiating pain in her shoulder or because she had other problems.

Elissa could orient the ship with this part of the console. She moved her fingers up, searching for the raised controls. They should have popped up the moment the lights went out.

But they hadn’t. The console felt flat and useless under her hands.

“Commander,” said Trombino. He was the person who ended up beside her on the left. “Nothing raised up here. This console is still on standard control.”

“This one too,” Lee said.

“And this one,” said Gatson. She was one console over from Trombino. “I’m already under—if that’s the word—trying to manually activate. Nothing wants to work, ma’am.”

Nothing wants to work
. Of course not. They weren’t going to catch a break.

“Do what you can,” Elissa said. “The same with the rest of you. I’ll move to the door controls.”

A small backup control unit was built into the wall beside the door. To the untrained observer, the backup control didn’t do much. But everyone on the bridge knew that the cover plate could be removed, and with a passcode typed into a keypad, an override system could be activated. The keypad was manual, meaning that it operated on a spring rather than a computer.

Only ten members of the crew had that passcode. Two of those people had to be on the bridge at all times. It was an order that most ship commanders ignored, and indeed, had the explosion happened while Elissa was coming back from the Room, only Calthorpe would have had that code.

Elissa moved to the door. Beyond it, she heard more groaning from the ship herself. She didn’t like it. Nothing on the other side of that door should’ve been subjected to the kind of stress that caused that noise.

She made herself focus. Her fingers found the ridge in the wall beside the door. She dug her nails under the edge, then pulled. The control panel opened easily.

Just for the heck of it, she tried to turn on the lights from here. She pressed the familiar depression on the panel, and—nothing happened. She let out a small sigh, as silently as she could. She wasn’t frustrated, not really, but she was growing worried.

She removed the panel, holding it in one hand as she typed on the keypad with the other. The controls eased out of their holder, and her shaky heart sped up. She recognized the feeling for what it was: a surge of adrenaline mixed with hope.

Her fingers slid along the raised control panel. The pattern was familiar. Every commander had been taught to do this one blind. Someone figured that a commander might have to do this behind her back or sideways or upside down, often without seeing what she was doing.

Sometimes the in-the-field experience
did
make it to training.

She activated the panel, worried slightly that the internal lights on the panel itself didn’t come on, then decided to ignore that. She didn’t care as long as she managed to get the systems working inside the bridge again.

She hit the switches, then looked over her shoulder.

The twilight seemed dimmer—she had been right; that flare was fading—but she could see her crew, staring at her.

“Well?” she asked, and her voice had bit more edge than she wanted it to.

She saw Lee swivel slightly, focus on the console in front of her, and move her arms just a little.

“The controls didn’t raise,” she said.

That would have been a first step. So would the lights coming back on.

Neither happened.

No response meant that this panel, too, was damaged.

Someone sighed on the other side of the bridge. The sound echoed in the silence.

Elissa couldn’t think of anything to say. She didn’t know how to reassure her crew.

“How do you think they’re doing in the rear of the ship?” Trombino asked. He sounded desperate.

Or maybe she just heard desperation. She understood it. She was trying to fend it off herself.

“I think whatever happened hit all of us,” she said. “Even if there were power elsewhere in the ship, we’d have to wait until they restore it here before we dare venture out of the bridge.”

She didn’t tell them about the groaning, but she suspected they’d all heard it. And if they thought about it, they knew what it meant.

“Can we open up a console and see if we can repair it inside?” Binek asked.

“It won’t matter,” she said. “Something disabled all of our systems.”

“How can you know that?” Binek asked, and she wasn’t guessing here. He
did
sound desperate.

Elissa lowered her head, then realized she had a piece of information none of the rest of them did.

“The gravity in my boots doesn’t work,” she said. “I would wager if I put on the helmet for the environmental suit that the oxygen isn’t working. I’m convinced all systems are down.”

“How is that possible?” Trombino asked.

“Did those strangers have some kind of weird weapon?” Ryder asked.

Apparently, she had one other piece of information that her crew didn’t have.

“The weapons’ fire from the strange transport ship didn’t hit us,” Elissa said. “It hit the device that Vilhauser wanted off the Room.”

“You’re kidding me,” Binek said. “That thing he was so excited about? It killed him?”

“Yeah,” Elissa said softly. And there was a good possibility that it would kill all of the rest of them too.

SIXTEEN

NO MATTER WHAT they did, they couldn’t access the proper controls on the console. The bridge remained in darkness. At one point, Ryder managed to grab Calthorpe and strap him into a chair. Ryder said Calthorpe was unconscious, but something in Ryder’s tone made Elissa think that maybe Ryder wasn’t telling the crew everything.

She decided not to ask. She couldn’t do anything about Calthorpe, even if he were badly hurt, so it was better to try to get the ship back under control.

If
she could get the ship under control.

The flare had faded to nothing, but her eyes had adjusted to the dimness. She still couldn’t see clearly, but she could make out shapes. And some of those shapes were the crew, doing their very best.

They had two major problems: the ships that were closest to them, the fighters and the transports, hadn’t arrived. Which meant that they were probably disabled as well, although, she had to hope, not as disabled as her ship was.

That meant rescue might take a while. The commanders in her squadron would have to make the right decisions: how to protect the area, maintain the information shield, rescue the crew members in the fighters, and come get the
Discovery
. Theoretically, the
Discovery
should have been their first priority, but the commanders served with the officers on the transports and fighters. Sometimes personal loyalty trumped orders.

The second problem her crew had was more immediate: it was getting colder. The air might last hours, but if the temperature dropped significantly, the crew wouldn’t last hours.

Elissa had managed to snag her environmental suit helmet, and as she suspected, nothing about it worked. It just provided an extra layer of clothing. A super-strong layer, but a layer nonetheless.

Still, she had one and her crew didn’t.

They were her priority.

“Okay,” she said. “We’re going to do two things. Binek, I want you to check the nearest life pod. See if its systems got fried. If the systems are fine, we will finally have a solution.”

She doubted that the systems were fine, but she didn’t say anything. Stranger things had happened.

“Secondly,” she said, “we need to open the equipment locker and remove the environmental suits.”

The equipment locker was part of the bridge. She wouldn’t have to manually open that door to the corridor. And the word “locker” was a misnomer; it was actually a small room off the bridge. The locker had a door with a manual override. The door opened with a simple pull if the power to the ship went down.

Someone had been thinking on that design, at least.

“You think some of the suits will work?” Trombino asked. Again, he sounded a bit too eager, as if he were clutching onto anything.

“I am not in the guessing business, Officer,” she said, her tone flat. A man prone to great highs would also fall to a great low if things did not turn out as he expected. She didn’t want to raise his hopes. “We’re taking this one step at a time.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. She could see his form, outlined against the portal, moving to the far side of the bridge. Apparently, he would be the first to the equipment locker. That was fine.

She followed.

Someone else—she couldn’t tell who—pulled the door open. It groaned, much like the sounds she had heard from outside the bridge.

The interior of the locker was dark, the kind of blackness that hid your hand half an inch from your face.

“Ma’am.” Binek spoke from behind her. “I checked the pod closest to me. None of its systems work. I didn’t go in all the way, because it’s even colder than in here. But I’ll go deeper if you want me to.”

“No need, Binek, thank you.” She wished they could catch a break. She had never been afraid of dying in space, but now that she was faced with that reality, she vaguely wondered why she hadn’t been afraid of it. It was a bad way to die.

“I’m just going to pull the suits out so that we can see sizes,” Trombino said. “That work, Commander?”

“Yes,” she said.

He extended a hand holding a suit, and someone smaller—Gatson?—grabbed it. He continued to take and extend suits until no one picked up the final one.

“Should we put Calthorpe into his suit, Ma’am?” Trombino asked, his tone carefully neutral.

Ryder answered before Elissa could even gather a thought.

“No,” Ryder said.

With that one flat word, they all knew: Calthorpe was dead.

The bridge was silent for a long moment, until a groan echoed in the compartment. The groan came from outside, probably from the way the ship was twisting.

“You have a suit, right, Commander?” Trombino asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“You know,” he said, “this locker’s big. We could get in it before the cold really sets in. Our combined body warmth—”

“Might get us an extra ten minutes,” Gatson said. “I’m not sure I want to be in that kind of darkness for an extra ten minutes.”

“An extra ten minutes is the difference between living and dying sometimes,” Elissa said. “If we need it, we’ll go in there.”

“No one’ll find us in time,” Lee said. “No one would think to look.”

“Unless we marked it somehow,” Binek said.

“There are the reflectors on the last suit,” Trombino said. “I’ll pull them off, see what I can create.”

Elissa didn’t argue. They needed to keep moving, needed to keep busy. Despite what she had said to Gatson, Elissa agreed with her: An extra ten minutes probably wouldn’t make much of a difference.