Witten shook his head, still trying to clear it, then hit the controls before croaking out, “Drive activated, Captain. One g acceleration.”
“One minute till field intercept with the second ramship,” Gianeto told her. “The first Shipbuster is thirty seconds out from the disabled enemy vessel. She is not attempting to evade at this time… I think she’s out of it.” He cocked an eyebrow, looking at the display analytically. “They’re pretty small for Eysselink drive ships. They probably don’t have much in the way of personnel or hardware redundancy.”
“Oh, I think they’ve proven devilishly clever,” Minishimi responded sourly. “They’ve certainly made the most of what they have, and I didn’t think they had
“Positive detonation on the first Shipbuster,” Gianeto said, nodding with satisfaction as he saw the white globe of the fusion blast appear on his display. “She’s toast, ma’am.” His eyes flickered to the other readout in front of him. “Twenty-five seconds to impact with the other ramship.”
“Anyone who’s into praying,” Higgs murmured, barely audible, “say one for me.”
“Got you covered, Maggie,” Witten said, shooting her a grin.
“Engineering is ready for impact, Captain,” Mehta, the engineering bridge officer, reported. “Commander Prieta says that the emergency interlocks are in place on the antimatter storage pods. He…” Mehta hesitated, stumbling over the words. “He, uh, says that he has perhaps 25 percent confidence they will hold.”
Gianeto’s face twisted into a grimace as he watched his display. “Oh, damn,” he said, mildly. “Captain, we…”
He didn’t finish. Minishimi thought she would be better prepared for the second field collision, but she was discovering that it wasn’t actually possible to prepare for it. If anything, it was worse than the first time, as if the effects were cumulative somehow. And it felt
Her vision was blurred and her head spinning, but the first thing she could sense was the acrid scent of the smoke from an electrical fire; and then, vaguely, a crackling of exposed power relays in counterpoint to low, antiphonal moans from others on the bridge.
She tried to shake her head to clear her vision, but couldn’t summon the energy for it… instead, her head lolled and she could feel spittle drifting from her slack mouth and floating away. She concentrated feverishly and finally she was able to blink her eyes clear… and almost immediately wished she hadn’t.
The bridge was a haze of slowly-drifting smoke, punctuated by the wild sparking of overloaded relays, blown out when the energy surge from the successive field intersects had finally jumped the dampers. Worse, the smoke wasn’t being automatically sucked out by the bridge fans, which meant that even the batty backups were offline. Her ‘link’s ear bud was silent and the displays were dark; the only light was the ghostly glow from the chemical light strips that lined the bridge. And worst of all, Francis Witten was floating slack in his harness, a trickle of blood from his nose drifting away in loose globules that hung over him absurdly, unmoved by absent breath.
“Francis!” Larry Gianeto yelled, yanking loose his restraints and lunging across the bridge to the Helm officer. A detached, incredibly calm portion of Minishimi’s shock-numbed brain wondered how the Tactical officer could recover so much more quickly than everyone else from the effects of the collision.
Gianeto grabbed the back of Witten’s acceleration couch, halting his momentum and feeling for the man’s pulse. Under normal circumstances, he could have checked the man’s vital signs via remote access to the sensors in his uniform, but that was down along with everything else on the ship.
“Oh, Jesus, he’s not breathing…” Gianeto moaned helplessly. “He doesn’t have a pulse!”
“Larry,” Minishimi rasped, getting up the strength to pull off her harness. She was remembering something, something even more important than Witten’s condition.
“What the hell happened to him?” Gianeto demanded of no one in particular, hands clenching and unclenching helplessly, head turning back and forth as if he were trying to find someone to help him.
“Larry!” Minishimi said more forcefully and his eyes snapped onto her, finally focusing. “We’ll get him to the medical bay,” she promised. “But before the collision… what were you saying?”
“Oh,” he seemed to come back to reality. “Ma’am,” he said, his voice grim, “I caught a reading of two more ramships coming through the wormhole. They’re headed this way.”
Minishimi closed her eyes, taking in a deep breath, then letting it out. A preternatural calm had descended on her, as her options were stripped away until only one was left. She opened her eyes and fixed Gianeto with a fond gaze.
“Larry,” she said gently, “get the bridge crew to the life pods. The intercoms are down; everything is down, we have to abandon ship.”
She heard a gasp from Maggie Higgs as the woman came to her senses and saw Witten’s body. “Oh my God!” the woman cried. “What happened to him?”
“Probably a cerebral hemorrhage,” Minishimi told her quietly. “Leave him here, Larry. We can’t help him now.”
“There’s nothing we can do, Captain?” Gianeto asked her, agony in his eyes as he clung to Witten’s acceleration couch desperately.
“I’m going to head to engineering and see what the situation is,” she said, shaking her head, “but with enemy ships inbound and no power, we have to get the crew to the pods. I’ll call out to the decks I pass, and you do the same.” She put a hand on his shoulder, squeezing it. “Get moving, Commander.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. He gave Witten once last glance, then looked to the others on the bridge. “Higgs, Mehta, we’re abandoning ship. The comms are down, so Higgs, I want you to take B deck and get the word there; Mehta, take C deck. The Captain is headed for Engineering and I’m going to the hangar bay. Got it?”
“Aye, sir,” they responded, unstrapping from their seats and following him to the bridge hatch.
Gianeto pulled open a panel beside the hatch and worked a hand crank, sliding the normally automatic door open at an agonizingly slow rate. Minishimi felt a desperate urgency start to take hold of her, sure that a ramship was bearing down on them at this very moment, ready to rend them into atoms. But she also knew that the life pods weren’t necessarily salvation from that fate… which was why she had to get to Engineering.
She pushed her way to the front of the crowd and slipped through the portal as soon as Gianeto had it open far enough to fit, then headed for the access tubes.
“Ma’am!” Gianeto’s voice stopped her and she turned back. His face looked pale and drawn in the chemical ghostlight, and his eyes were clouded with fear. “You’ll be taking one of the lifepods from Engineering?”
“Yes, Commander,” she assured him, smiling at his concern. “I’ll meet you on the other side.”
Then she shoved off into the access tube and left the others behind her.
The tubes were eerily silent, without the usual hum and shudder of the ship’s systems, and the silence beat in her ears like a pulse as she sailed through the near-darkness. Joyce Minishimi’s whole body was a mass of aches, her healing chest wound was flaring with fresh pain and her head felt as if it would explode, but she flew through the narrow tube with reckless abandon, knowing that time was running out and feeling as if the passage would never end.
She almost missed the exit for engineering, but managed to brake herself at the last moment, catching a handhold at the expense of a painful wrench to her shoulder and a sharp, stabbing jolt of agony in her chest. She gasped, cradling her arm against her chest, but kept moving, kicking out into the corridor. The hatch to Engineering was closed, and she could see nothing through its viewport, but she didn’t hesitate, moving to the panel beside it and accessing the manual controls. Inside the panel was a hand crank and she worked it with her good arm as quickly as she could, pain shooting through her chest with each turn.
As the hatch to Engineering slowly rolled open, a haze of black smoke dotted with bits of particulate metal drifted out of the chamber. With it, she saw as a sense of horror crept through her, drifted a pair of charred and bloodied bodies. She coughed fitfully as the smoke reached her, and she knew that to last in there, she was going to need a respirator. She went to a rack just outside the hatchway and pulled an emergency breather from it, settling the mask over her face and pulling the elastic strap over her head, adjusting it automatically as it tried to yank at her hair.
Fresh air filled her lungs and she felt relief for the first time in long minutes. Thinking quickly, she grabbed a spare respirator and a flashlight from the cabinet and pushed off into the smoke-filled chamber. Shining the powerful light around the Engine Room, she could see, despite the smoke, exactly what had happened: the main trunklines had exploded with incredible force from the feedback of the second field collision, probably weakened
