The Unincorporated War (15 page)

Fawa’s face now lit up with a beaming smile. “Little dove, every speck of sand, every olive pit, every milliliter of hydrogen does Allah know, and I think he knows you too. But you don’t need to believe it. For now I will believe it for the both of us.” Fawa then took J.D.’s hands into hers and looked directly into her eyes. “I pray that you will accept the offer to serve and that my boy,
inshallah,
will be safe.”

J.D. knew her answer before Fawa had finished the request. “Of course I’ll go, Auntie.”
It’s the least I can do.

There was no way that either of the women could have known that one’s initial act of kindness and the other’s desire to honor it were to have reverberations felt for centuries to come.

J.D. shook her head to clear the memories and spoke to her charge. “Tawfik, how are the new regulators holding up?”

A young man with dark curly hair, a slightly hooked nose, a full, thick beard, and a smile that radiated life brightened at the question. “J.D., they are amazing. They allow us far greater control and we can finally use the new side vents to turn this crate without risking a blowout. The techs at Gedretar know what they’re doing. It’s a good thing you got us to go in.”

“Tawfik,” chastised J.D., “that was the captain’s decision.”

“Of course it was,” he answered with just the barest hint of sarcasm. “I don’t know how I could have been so mistaken.”

J.D. was about to launch into a speech about “proper attitude” when the alarm suddenly went off. Moments later the entire ship began to shake violently. J.D. had never felt anything quite like it before and knew that in space what you don’t know can kill you. She realized from its specific shrill that one of the alarms was for acceleration prep and so screamed for her crew to strap into their couches. They may not have understood, given the cacophony, but they got the idea when they saw what she was doing. The second she’d locked into her couch the ship bolted jarringly into reverse. Even in the couch J.D. almost passed out from the suddenness and extent of the g-force.
Lord,
she prayed, unaware of the fact that for the first time in her life she’d called upon a deity she wasn’t even sure she believed in,
please let everyone have gotten safely into their couches.

“Bridge!” she screamed. “This is Engineering. We can only maintain this level of thrust for a few minutes before the mass of the thruster plates pancakes the rest of the ship!” She waited for a reply but got nothing. She called up her input controls to the couch and began routing a visual feed. After thirty seconds she got one that chilled her to the bone. The bridge was half-gone. It had, from the look of things, been obliterated by a rapid series of small-impact hits. It was open to space and it was also immediately apparent that all her friends, including the captain and first officer, were dead. Struggling against the tremendous g-force, J.D. managed to toggle all bridge information and remaining control functions to her engineering pad. Once that had been accomplished she called out to the rest of the ship.

“Third Officer, report! Third Officer, report!”

“J.D.!” came the distressed response. “J.D., saints alive, what happened?”

“Jackie,” she answered, choosing to ignore his question, “do you know where Yigal is? He’s in command.”

“He can’t be,” said the voice over the intership. “He was in the gravity ring, sleeping. And that’s been sheared off. He’s gone for sure. Who’s in charge?”

I am,
thought J.D. in panic.

“I am,” said J.D in a voice of total calm. She immediately switched the intership to open channel. “Attention, this is the acting captain speaking. Until further notice, all command functions are now being run out of Engineering. I don’t have time to explain, except to say that we just landed in a shit storm and we don’t have an umbrella. But
I am
going to get us out of this. You just have to do what I say
when I say it
. Stations report in.”

She listened to the various reports, interrupting only for clarification while at the same time scanning all the sensor information coming in. It took only seconds to grasp what had happened.

Fuck me.

Floating menacingly in front of the AWS
Doxy
were twenty corporate core
fleet ships blowing the hell out of what was left of her vessel. Luckily not all of them were firing.
Not even a fully trained fleet mercenary officer would know what to do here,
she thought. So with no experience to fall back on, she decided to go with instinct.

“Tawfik,” she said evenly, “cut rear acceleration and let us coast. Power down systems we don’t absolutely need, including your damned popcorn maker.” It was a weak joke, but it got her crew chuckling. She was out of her couch barking an order seconds after deceleration. “Tawfik, I need two mining nukes at the junction between C and D sections. Right now. Move!” Tawfik sprang from his seat and headed aft taking one crewman with him.

“David,” said J.D. “I know you’re only a grease monkey, but you’ve just been promoted to comm. Open a channel with the enemy ship, but make sure it’s unintelligible. Can you do that?”

“Yes, I suppose,” answered the mechanic.

“It has to sound like we’re attempting to make contact but can’t. Hopefully it’ll buy us some time.”

The new communication officer nodded and went to work.

“Also …”

David looked up.

“Send out a masked all-call out on the intership sub net that all survivors make their way back to E Section and that when they do they should strap in tight.”

J.D. then headed out of the engine room toward C Section to see for herself what was left of her ship.

Chunks of the
Doxy
were either missing altogether or so badly mangled as to force the new captain into more creative routes toward her destination. What she saw along the way horrified her. There were freshly nanopatched holes, marked by their distinctive pale color. The nanites had been designed to seal any and all breaches but nothing else. Anyone happening upon a recently repaired breach might visit a scene of massive death and destruction with no apparent directional source. Only the telltale clues of nanopatching would let the experienced eye realize what had recently occurred. Which in this case was that an entire section of the ship had been suddenly and violently exposed to the icy breath of space and, more likely than not, taken a few poor souls with it. Those left inside hadn’t fared much better, as the ship’s massively accelerated retreat hadn’t allowed them to strap into their couches. J.D. bore witness to bodies smashed, crushed, and, where the missiles from the corporate fleet had gotten through, dismembered.

It had been a necessary function of the space-faring human body that upon death, whether permanent or not, the internal nanogrids would shut down.
With the grid down, the body no longer acted as a magnet, as there was no longer a need for its stilted but effective navigation through non–centrifugally spun environments. Plus, it made it easier for the crew to move a weightless body around a tight hold. The problem now was that almost everyone was dead. The remains of her friends were floating in clouds of blood globules staining almost everything they came in contact with, including her.

J.D. continued to check her DijAssist as she moved around and through the floating bodies. Occasionally, she would push a corpse aside, only to be greeted by a few stragglers making their way to the back of the ship. Her readout indicated that the enemy fleet had stopped firing on the
Doxy,
just as she’d hoped when she’d had the ship power down.
They want us alive, good. Let ’em think we’ll cooperate.
She especially wanted to avoid capture knowing that, given her history, she’d have a lot to answer for. But more than that gnawing fear was the cold rage welling up inside. She liked this crew, liked them far more than almost anyone she’d known on Earth. And so the core’s attack would not go unanswered. They wanted her ship and crew alive now that the
Doxy
was crippled, and that would be to her advantage.

Because D Section had taken a tremendous amount of punishment it was barely holding atmosphere and was still frigid from its recent exposure to space. Still, J.D. had managed to make it across and over to the blast doors of C Section. She then said a prayer, tried the pre-command sequence, and nearly roared in triumph as the panel lit up green. Tawfik and another crewman named Pytor arrived with the backpack nukes on their shoulders just as the huge doors slid open. J.D. could see that Pytor too was covered in blood, but Tawfik, who’d been wearing a jumpsuit made of liquid-repellent material, had ruby red globules stuck to and running the length of his entire body. Their bloodstained faces were sullen, but their eyes revealed a fierce determination. Under J.D.’s terse direction the men set the bombs to detonate by remote and then carefully placed them in the newly opened section. They then made their way back to the engineering room as quickly as their legs could carry them with J.D. barking orders for the stragglers they passed to strap in or die.

J.D., bloodstained and hair matted, burst through the door shouting for her crew to prepare for combat maneuvers, then threw herself into her acceleration couch.

“Tawfik,” she commanded, “on my mark broadcast a distress beacon and tell the core ships we’re suffering massive systems and structural failure.” Tawfik sat at the ready.

She then turned to David.

“Com, can you make the rear thrusters produce a wall of force by slightly directing the upper and lower units in toward each other?”

“I think so,” David replied, “but that will limit our escape speed. Why do we—”

“Allah be praised!” interrupted Tawfik, suddenly realizing what the nukes were for. “Mother was right. David, stop answering a question with a question; can you do it?”

“Why not?” he answered with a sly grin.

“Good,” said J.D., exhaling deeply, then tapping the last of her orders into a data pad. “Now follow the commands on your stations, in three … two … one … mark!”

Per her orders, J.D. heard the faux distress signal go out and then waited exactly ten seconds. She then gave the command that broke the C Section from the rest of the ship. Then the B Section broke from C, and finally what was left of the A Section—the bridge—broke apart from B. The new captain prayed that it would appear for all intents and purposes like their ship was beginning to experience catastrophic structural failure.

“No need to shoot at us,” J.D. said softly to no one in particular. “See, we’re already breaking apart.” Tawfik gave her a quizzical look and she nodded back. The
Doxy’
s lateral thrusters started firing, causing the main body of what was left of the ship to swing on its axis. Although it looked awkward with the thrusters firing intermittently, the ship was slowly, imperceptibly, beginning to turn around, putting the three recently disengaged sections between herself and the enemy fleet.

“See,” said J.D., continuing to speak softly, “we can’t even control our own ship; what stupid, useless Belters you’ve ensnared. You must think us pathetic. Just keep thinking it.” As the ship slowly turned around, her heavy and undamaged back thrusters managed to line up with the three recently abandoned sections.

J.D. toggled the shipwide speaker button. “This is your captain speaking. We’re about to boost and in doing so will leave the bodies of our captain and bridge crew behind to be incinerated. I wish we could take them back to our homes to be made a part of our soil. But their last act will be our freedom. May God take them into his keeping.”

As one, the engineering crew responded with an, “Amen.”

“David,” commanded J.D., “on my mark fire main thrusters.”

David’s eyes locked onto his captain as beads of sweat poured down his face.

J.D.’s eyes fixed hard on her data pad. “Fire.”

She felt the enormous power welling all around her and then saw the sensors warning her that the Terran fleet was readying their weapons for more death. They were too late. J.D. then activated the nukes.

The sudden and vast amount of energy produced an enormous impulse
compression that quickly covered the space between the
Doxy
and the enemy fleet, simultaneously rocking both. Only the wall created by the
Doxy
’s inward-firing thrusters stood between the ship and full impact. The compression wave slammed into the wounded ship, bouncing her forward, causing even more alarms to go off. J.D. was afraid that the
Doxy
might buckle from all the force and sudden acceleration that, even locked into her acceleration couch, made her feel like her ribs were trying to exit her back and her eyes escape through her ears. But after what seemed like ages she was able to ascertain that her ship or at least what was left of her had reached a velocity that the Terran fleet could only match if they broke formation. Something she’d determined they wouldn’t do and, to her great relief, hadn’t. When she was sure they were no longer being followed J.D. ordered the ship’s thrust reduced to an acceptable enough level to begin necessary repairs.

David looked around dazed. “I … I … don’t believe it. We made it. We survived an ambush of twenty fleet ships and lived.” The communication officer’s brief outburst was followed by a sustained round of clapping and cheering. J.D. allowed herself to momentarily bask in the adulation. That is, until she saw the reverence with which Tawfik and the rest of the crew were looking at her. It was a look that J. D. Black would see more and more of.