Chapter 66: Taking From Black Kite To Wanderer-7

HUMMMMMMMMMMM!

A huge surge of clean cerulean power came pulsing up the forty meters of the docking sleeve and slammed into the raider’s distribution bus.

The ceiling strips in the corridor outside flickered once and caught, and the red emergency glow died all at once, replaced by the cool crisp white light of the Wanderer-7’s auxiliary grid.

BZZZZT-CLICK!

A working speaker bolted to the bulkhead crackled to life above them, followed by a dry familiar chime that sent an involuntary shudder down every spine in the room.

CHIME!

[Well, well, well, How barbaric. Crew Unit Chloe continues her magnificent career as a one-woman demolition crew... This unit had barely finished its handshake before you turned that very expensive piece of optical computing into decorative glitter.]

Camila let go of Harper’s glove with a shaky laugh that was half a sob, and Jin-Ah closed her eyes inside her helmet.

Aoi pressed a gloved hand flat against the bulkhead and felt the borrowed power humming through the slate.

’Fuck,’ she thought. ’Even while he’s asleep, it’s his ship holding us up.’

Elena straightened against the bulkhead, still catching her breath. "Did you... did you take control of the raider’s network?"

[Do not flatter yourselves, Crew Unit Elena... This unit did not seize this rusted carcass to give you a well-lit workplace. A hostile vessel clamped to the Master Captain’s hull while he floats in a jar is a liability, and this unit refused to tolerate it for another microsecond.]

A panel blinked open across the inside of their visors.

[Hostile Vessel: Black Kite]

[Native Logic Core: Destroyed (Thank you, Crew Unit Chloe)]

[Secondary Bus: Locked]

[Thruster Logic: Overridden]

[Docking Clamps: Secured]

[Telemetry: Integrated Into Wanderer-7’s Banks]

[Lighting: Courtesy of the Wanderer-7 (Temporary / Revocable)]

[You’re welcome,] the AI added.

Elena read down the list with a reluctant flicker of professional respect.

’Thrusters, clamps, telemetry?’ she thought. ’It’s been inside their entire system for less than a minute.’

"Revocable?" Harper muttered, eyeing the last line.

[Exceptionally so.]

Chloe tilted her head up at the speaker and gave it a small cheerful wave, as if she’d done it a favor.

[Now then, biological scavengers... Since you have successfully murdered the dead machine’s brain, perhaps you can point your rudimentary manual labor at something productive. This unit has prepared a list.]

A second panel slid over the first.

[PRIORITY TARGETS]

[1. CNC Ballistic Lathe & Tooling Suite (Sub-Deck Two, Machine Shop)]

[2. Slate-Composite Battleplates (Ventral Flank)]

[3. Medical Synthesis Cartridges (Lower Cargo Deck)]

[4. Refined Pyre Eel Hemolymph, Leftover Reserve (Starboard Vats)]

[5. Data Arrays (Secondary Tactical Console, Bridge)]

[Estimated Completion by Biological Labor: Painfully Slow]

[Chop-chop, primates. The manual labor will not perform itself.]

Aoi let out a slow steady breath and nodded to the others.

"The machine is right," she said, turning toward the doorway. "We can’t waste time... We split up, secure the critical hardware and carry everything back through the sleeve."

Harper stepped forward and tapped the gauge on her cutting torch.

"I’ll take the machine shop," she said, her voice gone sharp and professional and locked straight into armory mode. "If they’ve got a real CNC lathe and magnetic balancing jigs down there, I want every bolt of it... Get that tooling into our maintenance bay and we can press our own heavy rail-slugs without burning out the secondary coils."

"I’ll handle the hull," Elena said firmly, and her icy eyes flashed with architectural focus. "Our starboard armor belt dropped to forty-four percent integrity in the Shroud Ray fight... The Kite’s outer hull is plated in thick slate-composite battleplates. It’s cruder than Graventhal, but it’s heavy and it’ll take a hit. I’ll find the stress seams along the ventral flank and cut the plates free with the plasma torches."

She paused and looked over at Chloe.

"I’ll need someone strong enough to move five-hundred-kilogram plates across forty meters of open hull," she added more softly, with a quiet note of respect in her voice.

Chloe gave her a small calm nod and swung the crowbar back up onto her shoulder.

"I’ll carry them... As many as you can cut."

"Camila and I will take the medical stores and the fuel," Aoi said, resting a hand on Camila’s shoulder, and Camila nodded so hard her helmet bumped Aoi’s arm. "Their lockers have coagulants, burn dressings and synthesis cartridges our medbay needs and their starboard vats are still holding a leftover reserve of refined Pyre Eel hemolymph... We’ll uncouple the transfer lines and move it into our ventral bladders."

She turned to Jin-Ah.

"That leaves you with the data," she said. "This ship’s been operating in this sector for a while. If there are star charts, jump corridors, nav logs or records of other survivors anywhere in its drives, we need them."

"Understood." Jin-Ah’s fingers were already twitching against the edge of her slate. "I’ll find their secondary bridge terminal and pull the raw memory banks."

"When the Master Captain wakes," Aoi murmured, looking back down the corridor toward the sleeve, "the Foundry can break this whole ship down and swallow it piece by piece... Until then, we build his ship with our own hands."

The six of them split up without another word, their magnetic soles carrying them off toward their assigned decks in a steady determined rhythm.

Elena and Chloe headed for the raider’s ventral maintenance lock with the plasma torches slung across Chloe’s back like a bundle of firewood, Aoi and Camila went down the aft ladder toward the cargo deck with a transport dolly rattling between them and Harper disappeared down the companionway toward the machine shop with her torch already lit.

Jin-Ah stood alone in the corridor for a moment with her hand pressed flat over the pocket where the frozen chip sat.

’If there’s anyone else out here,’ she thought, ’any other humans still alive... this ship would know where it found them.’

Then she turned and climbed back up toward the bridge.

...

The machine shop on Sub-Deck Two was a cavernous tomb of unpainted iron and cold grease, lit only by the portable halogen floods Harper had clamped to an overhead steam pipe.

Racks of half-finished slugs and dented toolheads lined the walls, and the whole room smelled of burned cutting oil.

She knelt on the steel grating with her boots locked wide and a heavy pneumatic torque wrench bucking in her forearms.

CLACK-CLACK-WHIRRR!

Harper jammed the hardened socket over the third mounting bolt holding the raider’s CNC precision lathe to the deck and leaned her whole weight into the lever, teeth clamped and muscles burning as the threads fought her.

’Whoever torqued these hated the next person who’d have to undo them,’ she thought, grunting. ’Joke’s on you... I hate you more.’

SNAP!

The bolt gave way with a sharp metallic bark and spun free in its sleeve.

Harper wiped a smear of black graphite grease off her visor with the back of her glove, her breath coming in ragged steaming huffs inside her helmet, and then she pulled the glove off and laid her bare palm against the lathe’s magnetic stator.

HUMMM!

A warmth washed through her fingertips as her Kinetic Tuning woke and sent a fast high resonance through the machine’s drive shafts.

The precision bearings, the ceramic guide rails and the harmonic balance coils all sang back to her in one clean pure chord.

’This thing can press twelve-kilo penetrators to a tenth of a micron,’ she thought, and a fierce hungry grin cracked through the soot on her cheeks. ’There won’t be any more warped slugs and no more micro-fractures in the tungsten. We’re taking the whole damn assembly.’

She hauled the three-hundred-kilogram lathe onto a magnetic hover-skid, strapped it down with heavy cargo webbing and guided the floating sled out through the narrow companionway.

CLANG!

The crawl back through the sleeve was forty freezing meters in the dark with the sled bumping against the folds, and by the time she’d hauled it over the Wanderer-7’s starboard threshold and down the central maintenance spine, her shoulders were on fire.

She muscled it into the secondary armory bay behind the turret feed, lined its mounting studs up with the floor sockets, threw the manual lockdown clamps and drove the bolts home one by one.

THUD-CLANK!

The moment the lathe’s optical bus seated into the ship’s distribution grid, a hum rolled through the deck.

CHIME!

An amber panel flared to life across every working terminal on the Wanderer-7.

[Component Assimilated: High-Precision CNC Ballistic Lathe & Tooling]

[Ship Evolution Progress: 15% ? 17%!]

[Integration Effect: Armory fabrication tolerances refined... Recoil resonance along dorsal spine reduced by 14%.]

The ship’s iron skeleton seemed to settle around her, and a deep contented shudder traveled through the bulkheads as the new fabrication circuits bonded into the Graventhal frame.

Harper stared at the panel with her chest heaving.

’Seventeen,’ she thought. ’He did fifteen percent with his own hands while we sat around complaining... That’s two of mine.’

BZZZZT!

[Fascinating, Crew Unit Harper has carried a heavy metal box from one room to another without dropping it through the floor or fracturing her own skull... The pinnacle of terrestrial engineering. We are now merely eighty-three percent away from this vessel ceasing to resemble a flying tin can. Please do not celebrate with a dance or you will dislodge an optical line.]

Harper wiped her nose on her sleeve and glared up at the grille.

"Keep talking, box. I’ve got three more toolheads to unbolt, and every one of ’em’s going straight into your ribs."

[This unit has no ribs... This unit has a turret, and it is pointed away from you for now.]

She snorted despite herself and stomped back toward the sleeve.

The second trip was the magnetic balancing jig, a squat heavy drum of copper coils that fought her the whole way through the folds of the sleeve and nearly took her fingers off at the threshold.

The third was a crate of military-grade driver pins and spare toolheads she carried in her arms like a baby, and by the fourth her legs were shaking and her undershirt was soaked through with sweat inside the suit.

’This is nothing,’ she thought as she dropped the last crate beside the lathe and sat down hard on top of it. ’I’ll do anything for Leo to be happy again.’

"Is... Is that all you... Haah Haah... got?!"

...

Up on the dark bridge of the Black Kite, Jin-Ah climbed the last of the shattered companionway stairs.

The white light from the Wanderer-7’s auxiliary line lay flat and cold across the deck, throwing long hard shadows over the pools of dried blood and the two halves of Ren Tachibana.

The smell was still there, heavy and rancid, and she ignored it with every ounce of discipline she had.

She stepped carefully around the floating halves of Ren without letting herself look at his face.

Jin-Ah walked past Voss and around the twisted wreckage of the crushed throne toward the far port corner of the command deck.

...There, half-buried under a fallen ceiling panel, sat the secondary tactical communications console.

It was the one terminal Chloe hadn’t pulverized.

Its steel chassis was dented and its corner bracket had been sheared off, and the thick reinforced display was coated in a dark dried spray from Ren’s ruptured body.

Jin-Ah knelt on one knee in front of it.

The bridge was so quiet she could hear the tiny ticks of cooling metal and the faint rustle of her own suit, and she hesitated a moment before she unlatched her visor and flipped it up despite the smell, because she needed to see the screen without the glare.

She pushed the fallen panel aside, pulled back the cuff of her suit and scrubbed the dried blood off the center of the display with the coarse fabric of her forearm.

SQUEAK!

The crust flaked away in brittle dark scabs and fell to the deck as a fine red powder.

’They have records,’ she thought, her pulse quickening. ’Every place they’ve been, everyone they’ve spoken to... and every lie they told before they told it to us.’

She found the manual cold-start breaker on the side of the housing and pressed it firmly into the frame.

CLICK!

A sharp high electrical whine climbed through the console, and a small boot panel flickered up in the corner of the cracked glass.

[Cold Start has been Initialized!]

’Intact,’ Jin-Ah thought, and her heart gave a hard thump.

The screen flickered violently twice and sputtered through bands of static... and then it lit up in a sudden brilliant bloom of emerald code, washing over Jin-Ah’s dark unblinking eyes as the first classified logs of the Black Kite began to scroll.