The Battle of the Void (The Ember War Saga Book 6) (17 page)

Captain Valdar pressed against the bulkhead as Chief MacDougall made his way pass. Valdar’s breath fogged the inside of his visor. He tapped a control on the side of his helmet, chiding himself for not setting the humidity controls correctly. He was a veteran void sailor, he needed to act like it in front of his crew.

The chief wore an augment suit, a bulky exo-skeleton with pincers mounted on the end of the arms. The suit barely fit through the passageway, the roll cage over MacDougall’s head bumped against the ceiling with each step. Lights on the suit flooded the passageway. Bits of broken metal and dust floated in airless, gravity-less, passageway.

The chief stopped in front of a reinforced door marked
BATTERY BAY C.
Amber warning lights mounted on the door frame blinked erratically.

“Sure the rooms dead?” MacDougall asked. “Hate to open the door and get fried like I’m at a chippy.”

“It’s grounded,” chief engineer Levin said. He backed away from MacDougall and bumped up against the team of medics and damage control sailors that filled the passageway.

“Don’t seem too sure, if you ask me,” MacDougall bumped the tips of his pinchers against the door, hard enough the Valdar felt vibrations through his boots. MacDougall waited thirty seconds, then bumped the door again. “Well, no one answering the door. Here we go.”

MacDougall opened the pincers and pressed them against the door frame. His suit shook as the hydraulics drove the tips into the metal. The pinchers penetrated through the door, cutting lasers activated along the metal wedges and sliced through the hinges bolted to the frame. Specks of red hot metal jumped away from the melted sections and pinged off the bulkhead. MacDougall withdrew the pincers, and repeated the operation on the lower hinges.

The chief pressed exo-skeleton’s shoulder against the doorway.

“Lord, preserve me,” MacDougall rocked back and hit the door. It floated back, flipping over slowly.

“Damage control party Bravo, go,” Levin said.

Sailors squeezed around MacDougall, each carrying piston driven multi-tools or welders. Valdar followed them in to the battery room.

The outer hull was ruptured, raw electricity had scorched the jagged edges black. Distant stars of the open void greeted the captain as he stopped on a cat walk. Battery stacks the size of cars floated through the bay, ripped loose by the strike that gouged out a hunk of the
Breitenfeld’s
hull.

“This isn’t good,” Levin said from behind Valdar. “You see the dark energy banks below and against the primary induction lines?” He pointed to squat silver blocks linked together by pencil thin cables. The silver cases were warped, dotted with blotches of burned metal.

“I do,” Valdar said. He knew what he was looking at, the implication, but he needed to hear the words from the Levin.

“I can tell from here, they dumped their charge. Lines are dead between the units. They must have overloaded the buffers, causing the explosion that took out this room. Damn crazy alien tech. Rest of the batteries held up,” Levin said.

“So us getting home?” Valdar asked.

“Dark energy stacks in bay A are slagged, B is at half capacity…which doesn’t do us any good,” Levin crossed his arms over his chest. “We don’t have the charge to get us back to Earth…we’re in the middle of goddamn nowhere. Doubt we can even jump more than a light year with what we’ve got.”

“We’re stuck?” Valdar asked.

“Might as well be. I don’t have the technical knowhow, or the equipment to fix the batteries if I
did
know what I was doing. Lafayette picked a hell of a time to skip a mission,” Levin said.

“I don’t accept that we’re—”

“Medic! We need a medic down here!” came from the lower deck.

Valdar grabbed the catwalk’s rail and swung over. He landed next to two sailors crowding around a mangled battery stack.

“What happened?” Valdar asked.

“Survivor, sir,” one of the sailors said. She stepped aside, revealing a suited crewman pinned between a battery knocked loose from its moorings and crushed against its neighbor.

“His suit’s offline, but still has atmo,” she said.

The trapped sailor, a young man with a blue tint to his skin and wide eyes saw Valdar and opened his mouth to speak. His right arm and leg were jammed between the battery stacks, Valdar heard nothing through the void. Sparks sprang from cracks in the collapsed stack.

Valdar pressed his visor to the sailor’s and spoke, “What’s your name?”

“Kartchner…crewman…sir,” his words came between quick breaths.

“Your air’s going,” Valdar unsnapped his emergency air canister from his belt and plugged it in to the side of Kartchner’s helmet. The sailor took deep gulps of air. Kartchner’s lips moved, but Valdar didn’t hear anything until he pressed their visor’s together again.

“—fried my suit. Would be Dutchman if this stack hadn’t kept me right here. Small favors, right sir?” Kartchner said.

Valdar felt a tap on his shoulder. He pulled away and turned around saw Levin and a pair of medics.

“Captain,” Levin stared Valdar in the eye, “that stack still has residual charge in it. We try and monkey around and it’ll electrocute everyone in the room.”

A corpsman, blood stains smeared across the front of her vac suit, stepped forward.

“We can still get him out,” she nodded to the other corpsman, who had one hand behind his back. He brought his hand around and flashed a laser cutter the size of a hacksaw. “We have amputation kits.”

Valdar swallowed hard. He understood the concept of what the corpsman proposed: the laser would slice right through a void armored suit and cauterize the severed limb. A cap over the stump would restore suit integrity to the patient. He knew the concept, but he’d never seen it in practice.

The trapped sailor was on borrowed time. If the stack discharged, or his suit failed any further, the crewman was done for.

“Do it,” Valdar said.

He turned back to Kartchner and grabbed his hand. Valdar touched his visor to his.

“We’re going to get you out of here. Right now, son. I don’t have any other way to do it,” Valdar said.

“Wait…wait wait,” Kartchner’s eyes darted from Valdar to the corpsmen crowding around them. “Maybe we could—”

“They’re going to cut you free and get you to medical,” Valdar gripped Kartchner’s hand right and wrapped his arm around the crewman’s head, turning it away from his trapped limbs. The corpsman without the laser cutter braced himself against Kartchner.

“No! Sir, don’t do this! Can we—”

Valdar broke the visor-to-visor contact. Kartchner squirmed as the laser snapped to life, casting red light through the room.

Valdar felt Kartchner screaming through his hold as the corpsman went to work on the trapped leg.

****

Bailey sat across from Torni, watching as she buckled herself into the Mule’s seats with the same practiced ease she remembered. The way she moved was the same—she even crossed herself when the straps tightened around chest and hips, just like always. Torni and Malal took up one side of the Mule; the rest of the Marines and Stacey sat across from them.

“I’ve got Orozco in the atmo chamber,” Yarrow said into the ship’s IR.

“No idea how many drones are still out there,” Hale said. “We’re going zero atmo once we’re free of the vault.”

Torni sat up as if startled, then pawed at her thigh where an auxiliary helmet should have been. The pouch was on her shell, but it wasn’t real. Torni touched her face, and then looked at Bailey with panic in her eyes.

“Torni,” Bailey said. “Do you even…breathe?”

“She is beyond the limits of biology,” Malal said.

“I feel like
me
,” Torni said. “Not a lump of metal.”

Bailey reached into a pouch and pulled out a length of blue cloth with the sapphire jewels sewn into it.

“Look at this,” she said. “I wonder if that egghead Sheila—what’s her name, Lowenn? I bet she could tell us what this is. Found it right after Standish, Egan and I went for a tumble.”

The Mule’s engines whined to life and the craft wobbled as it came off the deck.

“Cap’Yir holy vestments,” Malal said. “They were the last experimental batch before I perfected the harvester. They believed they should meet the divine with their souls and bodies bare to judgment. The Cap’Yir threw their clothing off the bridge before entering the annihilation chambers. It was most amusing to watch.”

Bailey looked down at the cloth, her face going slack as Malal’s words sank in.

Malal laughed, a low, evil sound that filled the Mule as it entered the void and the air bled out.

****

Hale shifted in the co-pilot’s seat, his hands floating over the controls.

“Got the ship’s beacon,” Egan said. “Five minutes out. Can’t get them on comms, though…whoa.”

Hale looked up. The wrecked Crucible listed in the void, tilting slowly against its central axis. Loose hunks of the once interconnected thorns spun through space. The Mule slowed down.

“What’s going on?” Hale asked.

“The
Breit
must have turned her main guns on that Crucible. I bet there will be debris all over local space and I’d rather not run into any of it while I’ve got the thrusters burning,” Egan said.

“Right. Got it…should I…”

“With all due respect, sir, don’t touch anything unless I tell you,” Egan said.

“You sound like Durand.”

Hale passed on the warning to the turret gunners.

Several minutes passed before Hale could pick out the
Breitenfeld
against the deep void.

“I never met Torni,” Egan said. “Didn’t ask about her. Thought it better to wait until someone else brought her up to learn more. That’s the way it is with casualties. Right?”

“She died on Takeni, gave up a spot so that a few more Dotok would live. I missed her eulogy because I was laid up in sick bay,” Hale said.

“You think that’s really her? Not some Xaros trick?”

“I hope it’s the former. We will act like it’s the latter until we’re sure otherwise.” Hale zoomed in on the ship. “Flight bay doors are open…looks like they’re on auxiliary power.”

“Mule Zero-Three, this is Gall,”
came over the IR.
“I sure hope you’re coming back with some good news. We’ve had a hell of a time out here.”

“Roger, Gall. We need a master-at-arms contingent to greet us. We have a prisoner.”

“A…prisoner?”

“You heard me.”

“
Ouais, pour quois pas
?
I’ll see if the damage control teams can spare anyone.” Durand cut the transmission.

A pair of Eagles settled on the Mule’s flanks.

“I sound like that?” Egan asked.

“Just get us back to the ship. Somehow I doubt our day’s about to get any better.”

****

Captain Valdar waited for Hale at the bottom of the Mule’s ramp, a team of master-at-arms with gauss carbines behind him. Hale motioned for Torni to stand and follow him.

Valdar and his sailors backed up when they saw Torni’s dancing skin. Hale raised a hand as one of the men-at-arms raised his weapon.

“Lieutenant,” Valdar said, “I’ve had some damn strange things on my ship since this war started. Is that what I think it is?”

“She claims to be Sergeant Torni,” Hale said. “Everything she’s said confirms that.”

“Other than the pictures of her dead body and the fact that she looks like a Xaros drone in human form?” Valdar asked. He motioned to Torni and an MA approached her with a set of shackles. She held her arms out and let the sailor bind her without protest.

“Load a quadrium round, high-power gauss shots if she tries anything,” the petty officer in charge of the arms men said. Torni looked over her shoulder at Hale as the sailors led her away.

“
Gott mit uns
,” she said.

Hale gave her a quick nod.

“Believe it or not, a Xaros drone on my ship isn’t the worst of my problems,” Valdar said. “What about your mission in the vault? Did you find what Malal promised?”

Stacey and Malal sat next to each other in the Mule, watching as a team of corpsmen took Orozco and Cortaro away.

Hale called them over. Stacey bounded down the ramp. Malal stayed seated.

“Captain, great success!” Stacey said, a smile on her face. She tapped the pouch on her belt with the data recorder. “We have everything we need to complete the Crucible and access the Xaros network.”

“Some good news, at least,” Valdar said. His face darkened as he continued. “The jump engine took serious damage when the Xaros came out of that Crucible. The dark-energy batteries dumped their charge. We’re not leaving this place anytime soon…unless you and that ‘technical advisor’ of yours can do something for us.”