“Well?” He asked, his voice overpowering the steady chirps that indicated fresh hits form the enemy vessel.
“ Limited sensors, Sir,” Kira said.
Tarn let out a whoop. “I got the bastards!”
The ongoing alerts continued. “Why are we still being fired upon?”
“ Didn’t say I killed ‘em,” Tarn snapped. He went back to his display and began hammering in fresh commands. He snarled as two more plasma shots went out, both missing.
“ Sir, less than two minutes until they’re on us!”
“ Roll us twenty degrees so I can bring both plasma guns on line!”
“ Do it!” Sharp snapped.
Kira rolled the ship, firing the thrusters manually to save time. She arrested the roll too late, but Tarn had already triggered his attack. The star field display went blank. One of the frames on the main display stopped scrolling updated data.
“ What happened?”
“ Something else hit us,” Kira stammered. She was desperately trying to make sense of the data, inputting fresh queries to the system. “An energy weapon I think, looks like they found our primary sensor modules.”
“So we’re blind?”
Kira fought with her system several seconds before she slumped in her chair. “Looks like it…Sir.”
“ Shut those damn alarms off, internal sensors will still tell us if there’s a problem.”
Kira silenced the alarms and stood by, expecting to have to cancel a new one in a few seconds. She realized she’d have to do it constantly and wondered if there was a way to issue a command so that only a different type of alarm would sound.
“ Did you cancel everything?” Sharp asked her as the seconds ticked past silently.
“ No Sir,” she said. “Trying to figure out how to differentiate between the existing attacks and more serious ones.”
“ You may not need to. They’ve stopped shooting at us.” Sharp stared at the unmoving displays then turned to the ex-Marine. “Tarn, did your last shots hit?”
“ Of course! Both barrels down the throat!”
“ Your sensors show the damage before we lost them?”
Tarn grunted as he tapped clumsily away at the display. “Feedback from the sensor loss must have wiped out the logging.”
“ So you don’t know for sure.”
“ That range there ain’t no way I could miss!”
Kira glanced up and saw the stare down between the Captain and the security officer. She looked away, hoping she could ignore the growing tension in the room. “All right no, I got no way of knowing what shape they’re in now.”
Sharp stabbed the intercom button. “Everyone suit up now! Our attackers have destroyed our sensors but we believe they’ve also been damaged. If they board us they won’t give us the time to arrange a welcoming party — they’ll just blow the hull. Suit up and stand ready to repel boarders.”
“ Sir, should I-“
“ Go get your suit, I’ll mind your station until you get back.”
“ Yes Sir,” Kira hopped up and hurried to the air lock. She met Eric on the way and they grabbed each other’s hands briefly, then let go and hurried on when Tarn came huffing along behind them. The suits were unisex and universally uncomfortable. Kira grabbed the tallest one and turned to glace at Tarn. Eric looked up, catching her gaze, then slipped between them while the ex-Marine busied himself with displaying a very hairy back and butt so he could slip into the suit.
With him distracted, Kira shucked her robe and jumped into her suit, zipping it up quickly before fixing the helmet on. The onboard system powered up and did a system check. With a few adjustments it read off a list of green statuses. Kira turned to see Eric helping Tarn into a different suit, then waited patiently for the porcine man to be ready.
“ Get back to the bridge,” Eric told her. “I’ll help Tarn finish up, you’re needed up there.”
“ Be careful!” She whispered.
“ Careful’s my middle name, Legs!” Kira squeezed her eyes shut and clenched her fist at Tarn’s voice over the suit-to-suit radio. He chuckled even as she turned and stormed off.
Her station at the bridge was far from comfortable in a bulky space suit. They had evolved and improved over the years but still weighed twenty five pounds and remained bulky enough to make even a runway model feel like they were wearing a fat suit. She settled in as best she could and then had to break the seal on her suit so she could route the suit’s internal data cable to her palm. After she resealed it, and noticed the Captain trying to look everywhere but at her, she applied the external cable to her station to allow her direct input to the system.
“ Sorry, Sir,” she said, somewhat out of breath. “I’m ready now.”
“ Kira, the bridge is yours. Do what you think is best should the situation require it.” Sharp gave her tap on the shoulder that she barely felt through the suit then he turned and left the bridge.
She stared after him for a long moment, then turned back to look at the partially functioning screens. She swallowed loudly, aware that the only thing she could hear was inside her own helmet. “Okay, let’s see what we’ve got left,” she muttered, feeding fresh commands into the computer as quickly as she could think them up.
Chapter 4
A week passed without further incident. They were blind on the inside, but they remained alive. Of the pirate that attacked them they heard nothing further. Hour by hour they struggled to come up with alternative plans to restore functionality to the ship. Aside from cutting power to the engines, nothing was viable.
Eric had done a couple of walks on the hull of the Rented Mule to assess damage better. The ballistic projectile the pirates had used had cracked, bent, and done damage to numerous portions of the ship. Three thruster ports were damaged or destroyed, the main airlock was inoperable for the foreseeable future, and even one of the pushers had been damaged and knocked slightly out of alignment. The primary sensor array had been fused into a mass of metallic junk. Shielding that protected it from asteroids and incidental physical contact had done little to spare it from the high power energy weapon that had fused it into a single piece of metal.
As frustrating as it was receiving no positive news or answers, Kira found the best way to get through the sickness of being dumped out of cold sleep was to stay focused on her job. Between that, running, and spending a lot of time sweating in the engine room with Eric, she managed to escape the majority of her sorrows and remain hopeful.
The working theory was that an object in motion stays in motion. They should reach their destination on time. The computer would continue to track their progress, using simulated movement versus actual, and notify them when the time was up. It was ugly but with hand scanners and radio links inside the space suits they could still dock with the mining facility to offload their gear, taken on the new payload, and conduct repairs while they were there.
Until then they still had almost two months of travel.
“ So what’s your story?” Kira asked her lover as the sweat cooled on their bodies. “You told me you hadn’t expected to end up here either, or something like that.”
Eric smiled up at her. Kira felt her stomach flutter a little and she knew it must have translated into a muscular movement based upon the way his eyebrows raised. She was sitting on top of him while he reclined against a metal paneled wall. “Nothing too complicated, I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Kira could appreciate that, but it wasn’t an answer. “Isn’t everybody?”
“ I don’t know, I can’t think of a place I’d rather be right now,” He flexed his abs and prominent other muscles that caused Kira to blush at the tickle inside of her.
“ Good point,” she said with a wink. “And yes, it is a very good point.”
“ I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours,” Eric said after laughing with her.
Kira bit her lip. It was why she could never play cards, serious thought required serious introspection. “This is
