Aden smiled, not sure whether to take it as a joke or as a legitimate fact.
“So Palladian food is a ten on the spicy scale, and everyone else is a two or a three except for Acheron,” he recalled, and Tristan nodded.
“Where does their alcohol rank?” Aden asked.
“What’s your number two or three on that scale?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a Rhodian malt. Or a seaweed infusion from Adrasteia. The midgrade stuff, not the garbage that comes in a plastic bladder.”
“In that case, the shit up here is a fifteen,” Tristan said. “And you’re buying the first round, by the way.”
“Why, because I’m the new crew member?”
Tristan laughed, pleased to be able to deliver the punch line.
“No, because you may not be conscious enough after the first round to buy another.”
CHAPTER 6
DUNSTAN
RNS Danae was a light cruiser of the D class. At her commissioning, only seven years ago, she had been 150 meters long from the tip of her bow array to the end of her drive cone, and she had weighed over five thousand tons in standard gravity. The torn and mangled hull remnant that was drifting in space in front of Minotaur was barely bigger than a patrol corvette. Minotaur’s AIC was dead silent as they circled Danae’s wreckage at a safe distance, letting the AI map out every square millimeter of what was left of the other ship.
“That’s the bow section,” Mayler finally said. He brought up a schematic of a D-class cruiser and superimposed it on the visual feed. “Maneuvering deck, AIC, airlock, and pod deck. Everything below the pod deck is gone.”
“That was no gun cruiser,” Dunstan said.
“I don’t think so, sir. There aren’t any impact holes in what’s left of the hull. Whatever hit them, it wasn’t a rail-gun salvo.”
“Like something grabbed the ship in the middle and just ripped it apart.” Bosworth zoomed in on the visual to take a closer look at the twisted and ragged edges of the shattered hull plating.
“More like it blew up from the inside,” Dunstan said. “Look how that armor plating is bowed out, and how the hull has buckled—here and here.” He indicated the spots on the screen.
“Maybe it wasn’t an attack after all. Maybe they had a technical malfunction. Hypervelocity debris going through their missile magazine, something like that.”
“We’re still looking at a hundred dead crew. I doubt they’d appreciate the distinction,” Dunstan replied. “Anything at all on the emergency channel?”
“No, sir. We’ve been sounding off on all frequencies since we came out of the burn and flipped. The only thing broadcasting is the crash buoy. No life pods, no suit transmitters, nothing.”
“The front section is still more or less in one piece. They should have gotten at least a few pods off, even if all the power circuits went dead at the same time. What in Hades happened here?”
Nobody in the AIC ventured a guess at an answer.
“Helm, get us behind what’s left of their command section and match the rotation of the wreckage,” Dunstan ordered. “Keep your distance. Make it five hundred meters.”
“Aye, sir,” Midshipman Boyer replied. “Coming about and matching rotation.”
Boyer used the maneuvering thrusters of the ship to line up Minotaur with the remains of Danae, then initiated a longitudinal spin that matched the movement of the cruiser’s mangled bow section exactly. Dunstan noted with satisfaction that she accomplished the feat manually, without letting the ship’s AI take over the final adjustments.
“Rotation is in sync, sir. We are holding station five hundred meters astern and turning at one point three meters per second.”
“Very well, Boyer.”
Looking up into the violated hull of Danae felt like staring into the open chest cavity of a corpse. Severed fiber links and supply lines snaked out of dented and cracked bulkheads. Minotaur only had one central ladderway along the ship’s spine, but the D-class cruisers like Danae were large enough to have two. They went from the maneuvering deck at the top of the ship all the way to the reactor room at the bottom, and seeing both of them open to space made it look to Dunstan like the trachea and esophagus visible in the neck of a severed head.
“XO, tell the marines to get a boarding party suited up. I want them to go over there and see if they can make it up the open ladderways to the command deck. But no risky business. Anything they can’t open manually or with the plasma cutters, leave it for the recovery team once they get here. If the data core is still intact, the fleet techs will figure it out. Right now, we are looking for survivors. Understood?”
“Aye, sir,” Bosworth replied and punched up the comms link on his console. “Marine country, this is the XO. Sergeant Bosca, you are going for a little stroll. Get your team geared up for EVA and meet me on the airlock deck in fifteen minutes.”
The AIC crew watched as the boarding team from Minotaur’s marine detachment launched from the airlock a short while later. The marines fired short bursts from the thrusters of their EVA suits and coasted over to the remains of RNS Danae in irregular intervals, spaced apart widely so that one explosion or rail-gun salvo couldn’t blot the entire team out of space at once. The armor suits for boarding actions were coated in a layer of flat black carbon composite that made their wearers very tiny sensor targets, and even to the optics from Minotaur’s sensors, the marines were almost invisible against the nothingness of deep space as they covered the distance to the wreck in radio silence. When they were almost at what was now the stern of the wreck, each marine turned and fired thrusters toward their target to slow down again. Dunstan had some experience with EVA suits, and trying to stop at a particular point in space was a hard thing to accomplish, but these marines trained for boarding actions constantly, and he watched
