The Fight for 221 KD
Part 1
The holed Fantomo-3 poured on the hydrogen. Its timbers groaned and thrummed from weapons-bay to fusion deck. The bridge crew was pressure-suited, the running lights on only at half-light. Frozen vapor from a broken waterline covered half the left-side viewports. They were pushed back in their seats and silent at two gs. One of them was dead and had been for the better part of a day; a meter of pine board, blown from the decking by a transiting railgun slug, ran through his crotch and out his chest.
Commandant Neri glared at the monitors. Encased in his armored pressure suit, he felt the acceleration force lying on him irresistibly. He was exhausted after nearly three hours solid of it and twenty hours of quick high-g maneuvers.
“Helm,” he said thickly, “when’s turnaround?”
“Six minutes thirty-five, sir.”
“Comms, hail 221 KD.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Helm, when do we cut?”
“Two minutes, sir.”
“All right. You dirty buggers all right, eh? Sound off!”
“Helm, aye!”
“Comms, aye!”
“Exec, aye!”
“Nav, aye!”
“Gunner, aye!”
“ … And that’s Rossi just sitting there dead. Well, six out of seven ain’t bad.”
“I’ve got 221 KD, sir. The time lag is four seconds.”
“Put him on. … Oi! Control, Fantomo-3 here. How’s it going down there?”
“Fine, sir. I wasn’t expecting any business today. Or this year … You’re coming in awful bright, sir.” The voice sounded concerned.
“We’ll slow if we feel like it. Don’t hurry me, son. We’re about to turn. Expect us to be radio bright for an hour and a half until we cut our fire. You got me, rock-biter?”
“Loud and clear, sir.”
“We’re full of holes. How soon can they patch us up?”
“ … ‘They’? There’s not much of a they here, sir. No ‘they’ at all. Gepardo passed through after the fight around Athena and took the repair staff with them.”
“Matteis!” the commandant snarled. “That plodge! I’ll break his face and feed him his oak leaves when I see him at the Station again. What can you do?”
“Well, I can’t promise until I see you, sir. I’m signals and I guess loading now, too, sir—not a machinist.”
“Bugger all,” the commandant swore. “Up to us, I see.”
The drive cut off, and they were suddenly, startlingly light. The faint blue glow out the bridge ports was gone, and the steady field of stars was brighter and beginning to move relative to their orientation. The ship shivered under the pulse of the attitude jets. “Turning, sir!” said Helm.
“We’re turning, 221 KD. Gonna start decel soon. I expect a cake when we get there and fast work.”
“Aye that, sir.”
“Fantomo-3 out.—Stars and farts, what a little tinkler. Not much of a they! It’s a war, better hump it,” he said. “Suff it all!”
***
221 KD was a world (if the term could be stretched so) not quite two hundred kilometers across, with a trivial escape velocity, a trailing Trojan of the golden gas giant Apollo. It was not a nexus of trade, prospecting, or military activity, and the lonely repair station was its sole claim to fame. The station existed only because some Provisional bean counter said, “By god, we need a repair bay there in case we get pushed that far!” When the Caballardists pushed them that far and took it, they took it without blowing it to hell.
The repair station had saved a few ships that had struggled there, including the maintenance crew-thieving Gepardo, and refueled and resupplied over a dozen more. With the war winding down and the Provisional fleet broken, Specialist Ghuidicello had anticipated being either retrieved by the Caballardist militia or, if bureaucratic indifference won out, being stranded for years until mining returned to the outer system.
Years he could last, considering that a crew of seventeen had been reduced to a crew of one, not even counting the resupply depot, whose contents were kept at a mind-numbingly cold 130° Kelvin by the thrifty virtue of their distance from the sun.
“A nice surprise,” he said to himself. “I wonder if Fantomo will take me with them?
“No,” he answered himself. “No chance. He sounded a bit of an arse. Impatient sod.”
Punching the squawk box off-button, he looked at his improvised bunk, where he’d been lying with his tablet when the klaxon went off. Crew quarters were desolate and lonely since Gepardo visited the planetoid he’d called home for three civil years. He liked walls close around him now, not the spooky, open barracks, and he’d set up in the officers’ staffroom with a good view of the stars. They rolled past his window as the habitat ring rotated around the dock, the neglected repair station rising a bit like a sideways pinwheel from the deep gray surface of 221 KD and the fuel tank farm. He could, and had, watched them for hours at a time, the only human, as far as he knew, for an AU or two in any direction.
The disadvantage of his transplantation was now made manifest. It was moving day, with about two hours to clean up.
“Suff, suff, suff,” he said, stripping down the comfortable couch and running his bedding out. “Hell, hell, hell,” he added, popping his personals into a cardboard box.
“Company’s coming,” he sang the old music hall standard, “and what d’ye do? Send the girl out for a fish and a chicken or two.” He ferried bedding and effects out again into half-lit, echoing hallways.
He was used to expeditious transfers of quarters. He grew up in the refugee-packed slums of Clytemnestra, where the vagaries of landlords, the failure of his mother’s employment, or, once, the inaccuracy of a Provisional airstrike made one flat or another inadvisable, unaffordable, or uninhabitable—that last time moving day had been a quarter of an hour window before the fire brigade forced everyone out of the nine-story housing block.
He stowed everything in the back of a mess-kitchen cabinet and took a seat in Control, rocking back and forth with an innocent whistle as he cranked the telescopes this way and that before finding—
“There we are!”
The fusion drive looked good anyway. Whatever slugs the Provs were putting Fantomo’s way hadn’t clipped anything there. Everything was so bright from the glare of the engine, it was hard to say …
“Bit of a hole there, maybe?” He rubbed his chin (“Damn! Should shave—”), took a screen capture, pulled out a rule, and laid it on the terminal face with a click. It was a narrow cut, like an ink-stylus marked black line, but it might have been … two meters? Three meters long? And there, a secondary instrument pod was missing, shot clean off. He probably had one of those and could figure out the reconnect, but the hull damage would be an issue. “What a mess. I can’t fix this. I wonder what happened inside. I wonder what the other ship looks like.” He paused, concern tickling. The last few years hadn’t featured many Caballardo ships on a red run out of danger. Not, in fact, since before the fall of Aulis and the destruction of the Libereco. “Yah, I do … ” He turned the telescope out again, tracing Fantomo’s path back …
He saw no enemy drive pulsing, but it didn’t make him feel better.
Part 7
Terrific stuff. I think I'm hooked.