Chapter 67: Taking From Black Kite To Wanderer-7 [II]

Outside the hulls, the silence of the void was absolute and cold and endless.

The Wanderer-7 hung forty meters off the raider’s flank with the docking sleeve stretched between them like an umbilical cord, and below them both the asteroid belt turned slowly in the starlight.

Sixty meters above the drifting rocks, clinging to the ventral flank of the Black Kite by the magnetic clamps in her boots, Elena Sterling held the heavy industrial plasma torch in both hands.

HZZZZZZZT!

A blinding lance of blue-white fire boiled out of the nozzle and screamed against the raider’s outer hull.

She leaned into it with her eyes narrowed behind her gold-tinted blast visor, watching the thick slate battleplate turn molten orange along the cut line.

Her Mechanical Attunement hummed up through the soles of her boots, mapping every stress line running through the raider’s skin, and she guided the torch along the tiny fault seams where the bond between plate and rib was weakest.

POP-SPARK!

Showers of white-hot slag sprayed off into the vacuum in glittering weightless arcs and cooled into dark jagged beads as they tumbled away toward the rocks.

’Steady,’ she told herself, sweat stinging her eyes inside the helmet. ’Father’s welders took three days to cut a plate like this in drydock... but you have a torch, a talent and a girl with a crowbar so steady.’

"The cut’s clear!" she called over the comm-link, her breath catching as the four-centimeter plate came away from its ribbing with a dull shudder she felt through her feet. "Chloe, anchor the plate...!"

CLANK!

Chloe moved with effortless frightening precision, her black suit nearly vanishing against the stars and her green eyes bright behind her visor.

She leaned over the glowing seam without a winch or a tether, buried her gloved fingers straight into the cooling edge of the five-hundred-kilogram plate and pulled.

SCREEECH!

The retaining brackets sheared like dry plastic.

She lifted the huge slate plate clean off the raider’s ribs and settled it across her shoulders with the casual posture of a dockworker carrying a sack of grain.

’Mmm,’ Chloe thought, her boots locking rhythmically against the hull as she bounded across the gap toward the Wanderer-7’s scarred starboard flank. ’I’ll wrap his ship in iron so thick nothing will ever touch him again...’

Elena followed on her thrust-pack, guiding the edge of the plate as Chloe slammed it flat against the Wanderer-7’s chewed-up armor belt.

THUD!

The heavy slate covered the ragged trenches the Shroud Ray’s hooked teeth had gouged into the hull, and Elena fired up her high-frequency arc welder and traced the perimeter in one continuous blinding seam, fusing the raider’s slate-composite straight into the corvette’s Graventhal base metal.

SHCK-FUSE!

A ring of brilliant cerulean light rippled out across the outer hull from the seam and sank deep into the metal.

CHIME!

[Component Assimilated: Tier-3 Slate-Composite Battleplates (Starboard Flank)]

[Ship Evolution Progress: 17% ? 20%!]

[Integration Effect: Starboard structural integrity 44% ? 52%]

[Kinetic dispersion threshold increased by 22%.]

The Wanderer-7’s plating visibly shifted under their feet.

The jagged old field welds smoothed out as a wave of dark lustrous slate spread outward from the seam and blended into the Graventhal, and the starboard flank came out of it looking broader, meaner and far more dangerous than before.

Elena stared at it with her lips parted.

’It took the plate and made it its own,’ she thought, stunned.

[Well, look at that, Crew Unit Elena has patched a hole without once weeping for her family’s stock portfolio... The starboard belt no longer looks like it was chewed by an anemic space goat. However, Crew Unit Chloe’s habit of carrying half-ton armor plates like beach balls remains computationally terrifying... Please refrain from throwing one through the bridge canopy. We only have so much resin.]

Chloe looked across the gap at the bridge canopy with a thoughtful tilt of her head, and Elena grabbed her arm, just in case.

Elena lowered her welding wand, catching her breath in the tight confines of her suit.

She looked at the clean flawless seam she’d just forged and then over at Chloe, who gave her a small cheerful thumbs-up through her visor.

A small genuine smile softened the corners of Elena’s mouth.

"Good work, Chloe," she murmured into the comm-link, with quiet respect in her voice. "Let’s cut the next one..."

They cut six more.

Elena found the seams and Chloe tore the plates loose, and one after another the dark slabs crossed the gap on Chloe’s shoulders and slammed into place along the starboard belt, until Elena’s arms were trembling from the torch and her suit’s cooling loop was whining in protest.

By the last plate she had stopped calling out the cuts, because Chloe was already waiting at every seam before the glow had faded.

’I need to work harder...’

She cut the fifth plate cleaner than any of the others.

When the seventh plate fused into the belt, a final panel bloomed across both their visors.

[Plates Fused: 7 / 7]

[Starboard Structural Integrity: 94%]

[Welder: Crew Unit Elena (Adequate)]

[Courier: Crew Unit Chloe (Alarming)]

Elena read the word adequate twice, and to her own surprise she laughed out loud inside her helmet instead of feeling insulted.

Chloe floated beside her, looking down along the long dark row of new plates gleaming against the hull, and she patted the nearest one gently with her glove the way someone might pat a horse.

’There,’ she thought. ’Now nothing gets in.’

...

Down in the belly of the Black Kite’s lower cargo deck, the air was bitterly cold and thick with the sulfurous reek of pressurized bio-plasma.

Camila stood beside the raider’s secondary environmental bay, carefully uncoupling the quick-release valves on a heavy titanium medical locker.

PSSH-CLICK!

The seal let go on a plume of cold nitrogen.

Camila reached inside and lifted out tray after tray of vacuum-sealed surgical stabilizers, synthetic tissue coagulants and dense ampoules of neural nutrient fluid, and her small hands shook a little as she read the labels.

’Coagulant, tissue scaffold, neural nutrient,’ she read silently, her lips moving. ’All of it for people like us... they were keeping it for whoever they caught, so the merchandise wouldn’t spoil.’

She swallowed hard and kept stacking.

"Sensei, look," she called, her hazel eyes wide with relief as she stacked the cases onto the transport dolly. "There are three full synthesis cartridges here... These are the exact compounds the medbay needs to keep Leo’s bath topped up."

Aoi knelt five meters away under the amber diagnostic lanterns on the bulkhead.

Her good eye was fixed on the cryogenic transfer lines running from the raider’s starboard vats to its main manifold, and her hands were steady on the heavy bypass wrench as she worked it with slow deliberate care.

CREAAAK!

The valve turned, sealing off the flow.

"The lines are isolated," Aoi said, blinking a bead of sweat out of her eye inside her helmet. "Two thousand liters of refined Pyre Eel hemolymph left in the reserve... That’s enough to keep the Wanderer-7’s sub-light drives burning for three weeks."

Camila came over and knelt beside her, pressing a gloved hand over Aoi’s on the wrench for a moment without saying anything.

Together they hauled the heavy medical cases and the pressurized fuel cylinders through the flexible tube in four exhausting trips, Camila pushing the dolly and Aoi dragging the cylinders behind her on a tether, both of them stopping halfway every time to lean against the freezing folds and catch their breath.

Down in the Wanderer-7’s lower engineering hold, they linked the raider’s high-pressure lines straight into the corvette’s ventral bladders.

CLIK-HISS!

The couplings locked into place with a sharp snap.

GURGLE-PUMP!

Thick glowing orange hemolymph began flowing into the Wanderer-7’s fuel cells, and right behind it the synthesis lines started feeding the new medical fluid down the length of the ship toward the stasis chamber.

CHIME!

[Component Assimilated: Refined Bio-Propellant Reserve & Advanced Medical Synthesis Fluid]

[Ship Evolution Progress: 20% ? 22%!]

[Integration Effect: Reserve propellant increased by 2,000 L... Medbay stasis efficiency increased by 18%.]

The steady purr of the Micro-Fusion Core dropped half an octave deeper and richer, and warmth seemed to spread through the corridors with it.

Aoi closed her eye and listened to the core change pitch, the way she might listen to a sick friend’s breathing finally ease.

[Ah, the domestic division has finished its chores, The Master Captain’s probability of dissolving into an unsightly puddle of organic sludge has been downgraded to negligible... Twenty-two percent. This unit is practically weeping with unearned pride. Kindly make sure the valves do not leak and suffocate us all in our sleep.]

Camila let out a wet breathless laugh and leaned her forehead against the cool composite of the fuel tank, while Aoi gave the metal a quiet lingering pat.

"Eighteen percent faster," Camila whispered. "Sensei, that means he’ll wake up sooner, right...?"

Aoi squeezed her shoulder and didn’t answer, because she didn’t know, and she was done telling these girls things she didn’t know.

’I hope so at least.’

...

Up on the dark bridge of the Black Kite, Jin-Ah Park sat alone in the shadows.

The air was dead and tasted of copper and burned circuitry through her open visor, but she rested her chin on her fist and kept her eyes on the flickering screen.

Every so often an amber log had blinked up in the corner of the display as the others finished their work, seventeen percent, then twenty, then twenty-two, and every one of them had made her type a little faster.

The console was humming smoothly now, linked to the Wanderer-7’s processing bus through the hardwired line in the sleeve.

CLICK-TAP-TAP!

Her fingers flew across the cracked glass keys in a fast precise rhythm, slipping around the raider’s corrupted local firewalls and starting a massive uncompressed data dump straight into the corvette’s memory banks.

A directory tree unfolded across the screen.

[BLACK KITE MEMORY ARCHIVE]

[/NAV: Star Charts & Jump Corridors (3 Systems)]

[/COMMS: Encrypted Packets (1,412)]

[/LOGS: Operational Log (Tachibana, R.)]

[/FIN: Commercial Ledger]

[/ACQ: Asset Acquisition]

[RESTRICTED]

[/CONTRACTS]

[RESTRICTED]

’Restricted,’ Jin-Ah thought, narrowing her eyes. ’For a ship crewed by three men and a stolen core... Who were they hiding it from?’

She started with /NAV, and files cascaded down the display in long ribbons of green code, star charts and jump corridor coordinates and telemetry profiles pouring through the line one after another.

PING!

[Component Assimilated: Navigational Sector Database & Star-Cartography Files]

[Ship Evolution Progress: 22% ? 24%!]

[Integration Effect: Astrogation sensor range expanded by 35%... Jump-corridor accuracy calibrated to 99.4%.]

Jin-Ah watched the bar settle at twenty-four percent, and a rare glimmer of satisfaction touched her lips.

With these charts and these jump routes mapped across three neighboring systems, Elena’s stubborn dream of finding a real planet, a world with solid dirt and air you could breathe, had stopped being a child’s fantasy and turned into a coordinate.

’He’d want to see this,’ she thought, scrolling slowly through the glittering web of routes. ’He’d sit in that throne with his coffee going cold and trace every corridor with his finger, and he’d ask me which one was safest, and for once I should have the answer ready.’

In the corner of the screen, the packet count beside /COMMS ticked over from 1,412 to 1,413, and Jin-Ah was too busy reading to see it.

[Adequate, This unit will now pretend it could not have done that in four seconds.]

Jin-Ah ignored it.

Her fingers had already slid down the list to the first locked directory, and her slate’s decryption routine went to work on the Kite’s degraded encryption.

[DECRYPTION: /ACQ]

[Cipher Integrity: 31% (Degraded by Core Destruction)]

[Estimated Time: 00:00:11]

She counted every one of the eleven seconds with her heart thudding in her ears.

Somewhere below her, Harper’s torque wrench barked twice and went quiet, and across the bridge one of Ren’s limp hands turned slowly in the dead air.

/ACQ opened.

Jin-Ah read the header at the top of the first file, and the blood drained out of her face.

[Syndicate Asset Files: Live Cargo / Seeded Sector Intake]