Chapter 44: Black Kite

The bridge smelled of wet gravel, cooling weld-sealant and scorched wiring that had finally faded into a dull background tang.

...Twenty-four hours had passed since the Shroud Ray tumbled off into the dark as a hollow shredded carcass, and most of the damage had been hammered back into working shape.

The crack across the canopy was held tight under two thick ribbons of industrial resin, the capacitor banks were patched through fresh copper jumpers, and the Rail-Harpoon sat snug in its ventral recess with its new alloy bolts torqued to spec.

Up on the dais, Leo sat tipped back in the throne with his boots resting on the lip of the flight console with the twin cradles humming softly against his forearms.

Down on the lower deck, peace had lasted about twelve minutes before the shouting started.

"I am stating an indisputable navigational imperative, not making a suggestion, stray!"

Elena’s voice cut through the hum of the vents like an arc-torch.

She stood by the secondary engineering terminal with her arms crossed, tapping one manicured finger against the sleeve of her fresh flight jacket as her hair was restored to its immaculate severe twist and her pale eyes flashing.

"We have patched the hull... We have refilled the ammunition. We have a working fusion plant... Lingering in this desolate debris-choked field is an exercise in utter futility! We need to calculate an escape vector out of this dead system immediately and find a habitable terrestrial world!"

Leo didn’t even take his boots off the console. He rolled his head to the side and looked down at her with a slow dry blink.

"A habitable planet... Right... Just pop down to the local real estate office, pick up the keys and plant a flag in the front lawn. Why didn’t I think of that?"

"Do not twist my words!" Elena’s chin jerked up. "A terrestrial biosphere is the only permanent solution! I am thoroughly finished with recycled nitrogen, mineral supplements and drinking water that went through a gravel bed twenty minutes ago! I have skin, Leo! Human skin! It is not designed to be pickled in artificial cabin humidity for the rest of my natural life!"

Harper leaned against the tactical station tossing a spare steel socket from hand to hand.

CLACK! CLACK!

"Oh, forgive us, Your Highness," she drawled, grinning wide enough to show teeth with her freckled nose crinkling as well. "We’ll make sure the next planet has five-star room service and a marble bathtub waiting on the landing pad... Would you like a velvet carpet rolled over the regolith, or does Princess Sterling only walk on imported silk?"

"Silence, Bell!" Elena spun on her heel and glared daggers across the deck. "Some of us possess standards of basic civilized hygiene... I am merely suggesting that a ship with a working drive should seek an environment where breathing does not require four redundant filter checks every six hours!"

Camila poked her head up out of the companionway hatch, wiping a smudge of green sap off her cheek with the back of her hand and holding a little tub of freshly picked cherry tomatoes.

"Hey, leave the humidity out of this! My tomatoes love the humidity... If we drop the moisture just because Elena’s hair gets frizzy, the blossoms are going to dry out and fall off before they set fruit."

"My hair does NOT frizz!" Elena gasped, her cheeks flaring scarlet as her hand flew to her temple. "My hair is naturally disciplined and I am not prioritizing nightshades over human comfort!"

"Nightshades make oxygen," Camila shot back, climbing the rest of the steps with her hazel eyes bright and stubborn. "Nightshades don’t complain about the water pressure, either..."

"They’re TOMATOES, Camila, not philosophers!" Elena threw her hands in the air. "They don’t have an opinion on whether we suffocate in an iron box!"

CHIME!

The intercom cleared its throat with an exaggerated high-pitched squelch that cut straight through the argument.

[A brief navigational assessment regarding Crew Unit Elena’s grand expedition... This unit has cross-referenced the proposed search for a biologically hospitable garden world against our current fuel reserves, sub-light velocity and the statistical density of life-bearing planets in this uncharted quadrant. The probability of locating your idyllic pastoral paradise before life support expires in approximately ten days is precisely zero point zero zero zero four percent.]

Elena’s jaw clamped shut and her glare swung from Harper to the ceiling.

[In Layman’s terms, Crew Unit Elena’s strategic initiative can be accurately categorized as a luxury vacation brochure with no fuel budget... If biological units find the recycled atmosphere distasteful, they are welcome to step through the starboard airlock and sample the local vacuum, It is notoriously crisp and free of plant moisture.]

Harper let out a loud obnoxious snort and slapped her knee. "See? Even the tin can thinks you’re dreaming, Sterling!"

"I did not ask the calculating apparatus for an editorial!" Elena stamped her boot on the deck.

THUD!

"The machine is fundamentally cynical! It thrives on misery!"

"It thrives on math," Jin-Ah muttered from station three without looking up from her power logs. "Which in this specific instance happens to correlate directly with misery... Ten days of atmospheric reserves leaves zero margin for random exploratory wandering."

At starboard console one, Ms. Tachibana let out a long soft breath and set her stylus down.

She pinched the bridge of her nose, nudged her glasses up a millimeter and turned around to face the lower deck, her dark hair in its usual elegant twist and her uniform pressed and orderly... that calm unshakeable composure that could usually quiet a classroom in three seconds flat.

"Alright, that is quite enough," she said with the smooth measured authority of a woman who’d spent a decade pulling unruly students apart. "Elena, we all understand wanting solid ground... Nobody wants to live in an armored corridor forever but Leo and Jin-Ah are right. Until we have confirmed routes and enough propellant, leaving the cover of this belt is an unacceptable risk."

Her eyes slid sideways. "And Harper, stop antagonizing her."

Harper gave her a lazy mock-contrite salute with the socket. "Yes, Sensei."

Leo leaned forward and rested his chin in his hand, a lazy smirk tugging at his mouth as he looked down at the navigation station.

"Look at that... Sensei to the rescue, What would we ever do without our stern classroom monitor keeping the kindergarteners in line?"

Ms. Tachibana froze.

Her eyebrows arched and her dark eyes snapped up to the dais.

"Hey!"

She crossed her arms and tilted her head with an indignant half-scolding frown.

"You are getting very bold, Leo. Have you forgotten that I am older than every single person on this bridge? A little respect for your elders would not kill you."

Leo didn’t drop the smirk.

He slowly uncrossed his legs and leaned his elbows on his knees, looking straight down into her eyes with an easy deliberate calm that didn’t waver for a fraction of a second.

"Age doesn’t really matter much anymore, Sensei," he said. "Earth’s gone. Out here, I’m the Captain and you’re my crew."

It hung in the air between them, simple and without a shred of hesitation as her breath caught in her throat.

Behind the neat frames of her glasses, her composed dark eyes flickered with sudden open surprise.

’He’s...’ Her fingers tightened in the fabric of her sleeves as something sharp and warm bloomed behind her breastbone. ’I know he has feelings for me. I’ve known since the College corridors... but when did he start saying such embarrassing things out loud without even blinking?’

A faint unmistakable rose-pink blush crept up out of her high collar and dusted her cheekbones as well as the delicate tips of her ears before she could get her professional mask back on.

She cleared her throat twice, snatched up her stylus and stared very hard at the blank surface of her console... Her heart was beating much too fast for a woman of her age and position.

Across the bridge, Harper’s socket stopped spinning.

CLINK.

It came to a dead halt in her palm, she looked from Leo’s easy confident posture to the flush still lingering on Sensei’s cheekbones.

The grin slid off her face.

’Fuck... Not again.’

Her jaw tightened and her shoulders dropped a centimeter as a quiet heavy stillness settled over her, her grey-blue eyes fixed on the deck between her boots.

Before the silence could turn into something uncomfortable...

BEEP-BEEP-BEEP!

A sharp high-priority proximity alert blared across the main console.

The warm runners on the bulkheads snapped instantly to a cold vigilant white.

"Spatial distortion!" Jin-Ah yelled, her fingers flying across her terminal. "Mass displacement at grid marker Delta-Seven! Velocity zero point eight kilometers per second... no, it just dropped out of sub-light cruise!"

Leo’s lazy slouch vanished in a single beat.

His boots hit the deck with a solid thud and his hands slammed flat into the cradles.

CONNECT!

The link seized his spine with a cold electric snap and flooded his head with the space around them... the slow tumbling iron asteroids, the lingering dust of the Shroud Ray’s corpse, and then, cutting through the void barely four kilometers off the port bow was a massive predatory silhouette.

THOOM!

A starship slid out of the shadow of a four-kilometer silicate rock, its dark hull drinking the starlight.

It was huge.

...Easily twice the length of the Wanderer-7, nearly ninety meters from its sharp prow to its broad flared stern.

Thick overlapping plates of dark-slate armor with no civilian paint anywhere, swept-back stabilizer fins that gave it the vicious angular profile of a hunting bird, heavy twin-barreled rail-cannons seated on its dorsal shoulders and clusters of recessed launch tubes along its belly.

BEEP!

[PROXIMITY WARNING: VESSEL DETECTED]

[Vessel Designation: Black Kite]

[Classification: Tier-3 Raider (Fast Strike Cruiser)]

[Hull: Heavy Slate-Composite Armor Matrix]

[Armament: Dual Heavy Magnetic Rail-Cannons / Ventral Missile Cells]

[Propulsion: High-Yield Deuterium Ion Drives]

The bridge went deathly quiet.

Elena stared through the canopy with her breath hitching.

"A Tier-3 frame... That’s an assault raider and it has military-grade plating."

"Weapons are cold," Harper whispered, her fingers hovering over the turret controls, whatever she’d been feeling a second ago buried instantly under armory instinct. "It has it’s turrets centered... and launch tubes closed. They’re just drifting."

[This unit notes with extreme displeasure that a heavy combat vessel has maneuvered within four thousand meters of our position without triggering long-range warning arrays... In a debris field of this density, that requires either extraordinary cartographic intelligence or an intentional ambush vector. Prepare primary defensive systems.]

"Shield generator is still offline, Leo," Jin-Ah warned with her knuckles pale on the console. "If those rail-cannons fire, our armor takes the full kinetic yield."

"Hold fire," Leo said with his eyes locked on the dark raider. "Turret stays in standby... Don’t paint them with targeting radar, Let’s see what they want."

PING!

A small green icon pulsed in the center of the viewport... It was a communication request.

Every eye on the bridge turned to the dais.

Harper held her breath, Camila slid in close behind Elena’s chair and clutched the edge of the console, Chloe moved silently to the edge of the dais with her small frame rigid and her green eyes gone dark and watchful.

Leo tapped the armrest with his thumb.

"Audio only... Open channel."

PZZZZT... CLICK.

The speakers hissed with faint static, then the crisp clear sound of a relay connecting. Immediately, a voice came through.

It was a man’s voice... He was young, late twenties maybe, relaxed and smooth and laced with an easy disarming warmth that felt impossibly out of place against the frozen black outside.

"Well, now," he chuckled softly with a quiet friendly rumble. "Look at that. A genuine Graventhal assault hull, drifting out here in the middle of a scrap heap. Don’t worry, Wanderer-7... We saw you taking down that Shroud Ray yesterday. Hell of a shot with that harpoon, by the way. We’re not hostile, we’re human survivors from Earth, just like you."

Leo didn’t answer right away as the cold cautious pull in the small of his back tightened.

And beside the navigation table, Ms. Tachibana had frozen solid.

Her hands, resting flat on the edge of the astrogation console a second ago, locked onto the frame so hard the casing groaned under her palms.

The color drained out of her face in one terrifying wave and left her skin as pale as fresh chalk, and her dark eyes blew wide, staring at the speaker grille like a ghost had just stepped out of the air.

She knew that voice.

The soft Kansai lilt tucked under the lazy drawl... The slight unhurried pause before every third word... She had heard that voice across dinner tables in Kyoto and down the narrow hallways of her family’s home for twenty years of her life.

"My name is Ren," the man went on, light and calm and reassuring. "Ren Tachibana, Captain of the Black Kite... Any chance we can talk face-to-face?"

Aoi lunged forward with her fingers digging into the rim of the console, and the breath tore out of her lungs in one raw frantic scream.

"REN?!"