Ashfall Prophecy, page 8
“The beam loses effectiveness at 215 meters.” It was Zara who answered. When everyone looked at her, she ruffled her shelf of fur. “What? It’s the only weapon the Denzans have ever built. You think I wouldn’t study it?”
I spun up some rough calculations in my head. The laser had a range of more than two football fields, which seemed like a lot, but in the empty space of the Vastness and at the speeds we and the missile were traveling . . . “We’re going to have to let them get close.”
“A six-minute window,” Melian said, apparently having done the math herself. “Between when the missile enters the Battle-Anchor’s range and impact with the Eastwood.”
Tycius was more focused on Hiram than on the Battle-Anchor. My uncle put a hand on the taller human’s shoulder. “Have you had any training?”
Hiram hesitated. “Technically, that would be a no,” he said, and Zara groaned in response. “But Reno let me take it out a few times. You know, for fun? I can shoot the laser. The suit does most of the work anyway.”
“We’ll have to open the cargo doors and drop you out of the ship,” Tycius continued. “You’ll be in zero gravity.”
“I can handle it,” Hiram said, adding, “Captain.”
“Assuming Hiram can hit his target, that still leaves Reno’s ship,” Zara said. “She’ll be close enough to ram us shortly after we take out the missile. Smart thing would be to carve her up with that laser until she stops chasing . . .”
Hiram shook his head. “I won’t do that. Not with Darcy on board.”
“Then we kick on the jets as soon as the missile is taken out,” I said. “And hope we can outrun her.”
While the rest of us were talking, Batzian had gone up on his tiptoes to inspect the Battle-Anchor’s laser array. I’d been watching him out of the corner of my eye as he hurriedly punched information into his tablet, then returned to studying the laser.
“Actually,” Batzian finally said, “I might have an idea. How do you humans say it? To hurt one bird with two stones?”
“Kill,” I said. “And it’s . . . never mind. What have you got, Batz?”
I used the shortened name that Batzian hated on purpose. Because he was the one who’d opened the comms, which meant he was the one who’d brought Reno down on us. He was so eager to explain his plan that he didn’t even correct me. It was his fault we were in this jam, and now he was trying extra hard to get us out of it. The question of why he’d opened the comms—and who he’d contacted—gnawed at the back of my mind. Everything was happening so fast, and we all needed to work together, so I kept that to myself.
Batzian’s idea was solid. The best we had.
I just hoped we could trust him.
10
In my space suit, I felt like a burrito about to be microwaved. The air inside my helmet felt damp from my heavy breathing, and the internal defoggers kept kicking on to make sure my vision stayed clear. With my gloved hands, I gave the metal cable attached to the Battle-Anchor one last tug to make sure it was hooked securely to the back of the mech-suit, then double-checked that there was enough slack leading back to the crank.
I’d be responsible for activating the pulley system that reeled Hiram back onto the Eastwood. I hadn’t trained much for zero gravity, but my enhanced strength meant I was the best person to stay down here in case anything went wrong.
It was just Hiram and me in the cargo bay now. Most of the crew had spent the last few hours making sure everything in the hold was secured—our excess provisions, fuel cells, medical supplies—we didn’t want anything flying off the ship when we opened the cargo doors. Meanwhile, Batzian and Melian worked on their part of the plan, while Captain Tycius made subtle alterations to the Eastwood’s course so that, when the bay doors popped open, Hiram would have a direct line of fire on the missile.
Aela’s tinny voice came over the shared comms channel. “We’re nearing the window. Are you ready?”
I double-checked the cable for probably the tenth time. “I’m good,” I said. “What about Batzian?”
“The code has been uploaded to Hiram’s laser,” Batzian said. “Remember, you need to maintain a steady connection to the missile for three seconds.”
“Three seconds,” I repeated. “Got that, Hiram?”
He didn’t respond. I couldn’t see Hiram’s face from my position, but I could see how the massive pincer hands of the Battle-Anchor clenched and unclenched, doing their best to replicate the motions of the suit’s pilot.
“Two minutes to the window,” Aela said.
I jogged around the Battle-Anchor to see where Hiram was sealed in the cockpit. Only his face and shoulders were visible behind the glass—it wasn’t glass, exactly, but a clear substance of infinitely greater durability that was laced with a webwork of ultonate veins—his skin aglow with the reflection of readouts from his HUD. I hopped up on the knee joint of the exo-suit so we could be face-to-face, but Hiram’s eyes were faraway, as if he could see the Vastness beyond the cargo bay doors.
I slapped the glass. “Hiram! Are you with us?”
Hiram flinched and finally focused on me. “I hear you.”
I took a closer look at Hiram. Only a few hours had gone by since I’d caught him in the airlock, maybe thinking about hurting himself. I switched over to a private comms channel so only Hiram could hear me.
“This isn’t going to be some blaze-of-glory shit, is it?” I asked.
“No,” Hiram said firmly, meeting my eyes. “I’m good, Syd. I’m good.”
“Thirty seconds,” Aela announced.
“Remember,” I said to Hiram. “You’ve got to hold the laser on the missile for a three count for the download to take.”
“I know,” Hiram replied.
“Three seconds,” I repeated. “You can count that high, right?”
Hiram grinned. “I’m going to beat your ass, Syd.”
I put my fist against the glass. “Shoot straight,” I said.
“Always do,” Hiram replied, and tapped his own fist against the other side of the cockpit.
I hopped down and scrambled back to my position at the crank. The apparatus was meant for loading heavy cargo onto the Eastwood. It was all mechanized. All I had to do was throw the switch to reel Hiram back in and supervise.
“Window opening in ten . . . ,” Aela said, and continued the countdown.
Almost as an afterthought, I remembered to check the cable on my own space suit that secured me to the back wall of the cargo hold. Didn’t want to go flying out into the Vastness after Hiram. Everything was where it should be.
“Five . . .”
Behind us, the airlock to the cargo bay slammed shut. Hiram raised the arm of the Battle-Anchor, aiming where he assumed the missile would be, ready to fire as soon as the doors opened.
“Entering distance window,” Aela announced. “Opening cargo doors—”
I lost the rest of Aela’s transmission as the cargo hatch sprang open and all the oxygen rushed into the vacuum. For a moment, it was incredibly loud, like a windstorm at my back. The heavy-duty crates we’d secured to the floor creaked and held where we’d lashed them. The corrugated metal floor made a high-pitched ringing as the temperature dropped.
And then everything was eerily silent. All I could hear was my own breathing in my ears. And Hiram’s over the comm channel.
There was the missile and the Vulpin mercenary ship behind it. It was like staring down a giant bullet as it inched toward you in slow motion. At least, it felt slow. We were actually traveling incredibly fast. I felt the clip on the back of my space suit strain to hold me in place against the tug of the Vastness.
The cable at my feet whipped through the pulley mechanism. Hiram let himself go, floating clear of the cargo bay.
Watching everything unfold through the rectangular opening of the cargo bay, in the oppressive silence of the Vastness, it all appeared sort of fake. Hiram’s Battle-Anchor looked like a toy against the silky black backdrop of space. The missile and Reno’s intimidatingly pointy Vulpin ship right behind it—they looked like cutouts floating in a bad diorama. For a moment, my breath caught from the unreality of it all.
Hiram didn’t have that same moment of awe. He immediately aimed the laser, fixing it on the missile within a heartbeat. If we hadn’t made some adjustments to the Battle-Anchor’s calibrations, he probably would’ve burned a hole straight through the explosive. But we had bigger ideas than that. All he had to do now was hold steady for three seconds so that the code Batzian and Zara had whipped up could download and—
I glanced down at the pulley rig. There was still a lot of slack in Hiram’s line, the weight of his Battle-Anchor carrying him farther and farther from the Eastwood. He was making his pass with the laser too soon.
“Hiram!” I yelled over the comm. “Wait to stabilize!”
The line snapped taut. As it did, the Battle-Anchor jolted and Hiram lost his target. The mechanized suit begin to spin head over heels.
“Shit!” Hiram yelled.
“Upload unsuccessful,” Aela reported.
“Get yourself lined up,” I said, trying to keep Hiram calm and focused. I kept a wary eye on Reno’s ship. Surely, she’d seen that we were trying to mess with her missile. I wondered if there would be a response.
The Battle-Anchor had thrusters in its heels. Hiram activated them, bursts of compressed air firing from his feet, narrowly preventing him from going into a complete spin and becoming tangled with the cable. A more skilled pilot—one with actual training—would’ve brought the Battle-Anchor around smoothly, but Hiram was wobbly, improvising. He tried to make another swipe with the laser, but this one was completely wild as he’d overcorrected with the thrusters. Hiram grunted with annoyance over the comm as he tried to level himself off.
Meanwhile, the missile and Reno’s ship were getting closer.
“Two minutes until impact,” Aela said.
Jesus. We’d already gone through a third of our window.
“Plenty of time,” I said with a calmness I didn’t actually feel. “Get stable and take another shot, Hiram.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he grunted.
Just as Hiram finally got pointed in the right direction, a white flash erupted from one of the fang-like appendages on Reno’s ship. I squinted, seeing little specks of red in my vision.
Zara came on the mic. “She’s shooting at you.”
“Shooting at us?” I replied. “With what?”
“Bullets, dummy,” Zara replied. “Much faster than the missile. You better get to cover.”
Those weren’t flash-induced floaters I was seeing. They were the red-hot tips of a swarm of projectiles, like buckshot from a shotgun blast, except this ammunition was roughly the size of my forearm. Zara wasn’t kidding. The cloud of chaff had already passed by the missile and was streaking right for the Eastwood.
I stared out at the Battle-Anchor. “Hiram doesn’t have any cover.”
“I’m good,” he said. “The suit can handle it.”
As he said this, Hiram got the laser pointed at the missile again. He kept steady, even with a volley of projectiles hurtling his way.
I did the count-off in my head as I pushed off from my position at the crank, diving for a stack of containers that I hoped could absorb ship-to-ship artillery.
One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand . . .
That should be it. We should have it.
“Hold it there,” Batzian came on. “Upload is slower than anticipated.”
“How much—?” I started to say.
“Can’t—!” Hiram yelled over me. He was interrupted by a sharp impact as one of the bullets smashed directly into his cockpit glass.
Reno’s blast peppered the side of the Eastwood. Fist-size pimples popped up in the walls where the bullets struck the outside of the ship. The Eastwood might have been a floating schoolhouse, but it was still built to withstand the rigors of space. The outer armor held.
The interior of the ship wasn’t so lucky. Sections of the floor and ceiling were sheared away as the bullets ripped through the hold. Crates broke apart, including the one I’d been hiding behind. I was knocked to the other side of the cargo bay, surrounded by hundreds of dried mushrooms that were rapidly icing over from the exposure. I hit the wall hard and bounced back, narrowly avoiding an explosion of a fuel canister, glob of shapeless flame briefly floating through the air before being snuffed out by the lack of oxygen.
I came through intact. I mean, all my limbs were still attached, I could breathe, and I didn’t feel any frostbite spreading from a tear in my suit. There wasn’t time to do a more thorough inventory than that. I activated the thrusters in my own suit and swam back toward the pulley rig.
“Hiram!” I yelled. “You good?”
The Battle-Anchor had definitely absorbed some direct hits. One of its arms—luckily not the one with the laser array—was bent backward like the hinge had busted. A shower of sparks floated ceaselessly from one of the suit’s thrusters, indicating that something was wrong internally.
I just hoped all that damage hadn’t knocked out Hiram. Or worse. He was slow to answer.
“Don’t shout, my head’s already ringing,” he said finally, his comm crackling more than before. “Took one to the dome over here. I got all kinds of warning lights going off. Don’t know what they mean . . .”
I half expected another volley to fire from Reno’s ship. Strangely, there was no follow-up to her first attack. Maybe the mercenary vessel was short on bullets, or maybe the old captain had a change of heart.
“Ninety seconds,” Aela announced.
“Yeah,” Hiram replied. “No shit.”
The missile was much closer now. In another minute, it’d be close enough for Hiram to reach out and touch. Flashes of exhaust puffed from the missile’s tail as its internal guidance system adjusted its course toward the Eastwood’s core.
“Now or never,” I told Hiram.
“Even he can’t miss at this range,” Zara observed over the comm.
Hiram raised the Battle-Anchor’s arm, the motion looking a bit janky from the damage the suit had sustained. He fixed the laser on the tip of the missile, but then his aim swung suddenly wide.
“Damn it,” he snapped. “What the hell was that, Syd? Why am I moving?”
I glanced down. “Oh, shit—”
Hiram was moving because Reno’s bullets had torn away a section of the floor right where the pulley system was attached. The steel plating was slowly peeling away, the cable that anchored Hiram to the Eastwood going with it.
And, as soon as I noticed it, the entire mechanism came loose.
I dove forward and grabbed the cable. An alarm blared in my ear as jagged metal from the ruined floor tore through the thigh of my suit. Luckily, the Denzans had built in an auto-patching system, but I would still be leaking oxygen.
The more important thing was Hiram. At the speed we were going, if I lost my grip on the cable, he’d got flying into the Vastness. We’d be hundreds of miles away from him in a few seconds. He’d be alone and afloat in a very empty galaxy, and our engines would be blown, with no way to search for him.
The cable dug into my palms through the space suit. I managed to swing my legs up and brace them against the freshly torn rend in the cargo bay floor and then leaned back, straining against the weight of the Battle-Anchor. The thing weighed half a ton and was straining against a vacuum. I’d never tested my human strength quite like this before. Searing pain lanced through my forearms, my shoulders, my chest. My muscles felt like shredded meat.
“Syd? What’s wrong?” His voice sounded a little shaky, worried, probably because I was spitting and grunting into my comm.
I couldn’t respond. My teeth were gritted so hard that I pictured them shattering in my mouth.
“The line broke and he’s holding you,” Tycius said. My uncle’s voice was calm and cool, no doubt in his mind we were going to survive this. “You better make that shot, Cadet, then reverse your thrusters back on board.”
The laser steadied. The upload began. Reno’s ship edged closer, but no further artillery exploded forth.
Four seconds. Batzian had been off on his calculations by an entire second—I guess that’s what happens when you rush through the math in a couple hours. Four seconds seem like an eternity when your joints are popping and your muscles are screaming bloody death as you drag a mech-suit behind a spaceship flying at hyperspeed.
But also? Not going to lie. My life was cool, and I did cool shit.
The upload completed. It was a pretty simple trick, really. With Zara’s knowledge of Vulpin technology, Batzian had been able to recalibrate the laser in Hiram’s Battle-Anchor to match the communications system on Reno’s vessel.
We hacked her kneecapper. And we sent it back where it came from.
As soon as the missile spun around, Hiram kicked on his thrusters. The cable went slack and the weight eased off me and I threw up in my helmet from the exertion and collapsed.
I didn’t see Reno’s engines get magnetized and her ship lurch to a stop in our wake, but I’m told it was pretty satisfying.
11
You tasted blood leaking from the loose tooth in the back of your mouth, the one you couldn’t stop wiggling with your tongue. A cloud of your own stale breath filled your helmet. That wasn’t the worst part of living inside this space suit—a suit that was made for Vulpin and thus a little too small for you, so that you felt constantly hunched over. The worst part was your own filth. Letting go of your piss and shit and sitting in it, basically. The suit had a waste tank, a filtration unit, but you could still feel it down there.
Disgusting.
At least, since you hadn’t had anything real to eat for days, the urge to go to the bathroom had died down. A small comfort in this misery.
Was it days? Weeks? You couldn’t be sure anymore. Stranded in the perpetual night, there was no way for you to really keep track of time.
