ΔV Pt. 16

Lucas slowly opened his eyes -- his body throbbing with fatigue -- and the first thing he saw was the headless corpse, drifting slowly by. The blood that still globbed from the severed neckstump was floating in a glittering trail of wobbling, spherical stars. They were a medtech, and they were otherwise unharmed. It was almost cartoonish -- save for the hideous stink of it. Lucas wriggled in the life support webbing he was caught in and started to hear the other sounds: The alert bleets, the...the siren...the klaxon. The unmistakable klaxon of an breach.

He looked around the room and saw that he was in the medical bay. Several beds had people strapped in, people with far worse injuries than him. Their life support webbing flared orange and green, with some sliding towards red as their indicators flatlined. They were the lucky ones. Three beds had been turned into a fine spray of scrap metal by a single railgun slug that had gone through one wall and out the other. That had been what had taken off the head of the meditech and...if he didn't miss his guess, had aresolized the other.

These thoughts, these rational and semi-coherent thoughts, did not come to him at first.

They came later, after he pieced together the hacking, sobbing, coughing, vomiting mess he became as he wriggled out of the life support webbing and swam through the air, fumbling and grasping for the brightly lit emergency patch kits on the walls. The lights around them strobed green in the dimness of the room, and his long training -- even on the moon, in his comfortable apartments, he had been trained hard on decompression drills -- guided him to the kits. Then the kits to the two holes. The Enterprise was, at the end of the day, a warship. The skin had been penetrated, but the backup webbing had deployed, and the air that escaped was only a slow hiss, not the furious roar that the full railgun shot would have left behind on a civilian ship.

Lucas slapped the patch down after a few moments of desperate fumbling, fumbling accomplished as he slowly rotoated on three axii. Once the patch was down, he looked up -- across -- the room to the other hole. It meant he'd have to get close to the slowly expanding cloud that had been the other medtech. Lucas, who had already vomited, clenched his jaw and kicked off hard on the wall. His nose flared as he breathed in short, shallow pants. He didn't want to. But he had to.

When the second patch slapped down, the klaxon ceased and Lucas could think of something other than his drill. Unfortuantely, that something was the fact that his face was now smeared with blood, and a tiny chip of bone had caught in his short, kinky hair. His clothing was soaked with his own vomit and he had snorted up something that left his nostrils stinging. He coughed and scrambled along the wall until he was in a part of the room that was near the emergency vents. One of the canned air tanks blew fresh oxygen into his face and he started to think halfway clearly.

They had gotten through the battle. But the Enterprise had taken hits.

"Okay," he whispered. "Okay, okay, okay, uh...check the wounded."

He carefully finger walked along the wall until he came to the main console in the room. Punching in the activation key, he was able to bring up a simple daignostic system, and saw that the two people who were redlining had been hit by the flucuation in pressure -- they were already sliding back from the red to the orange. Everyone else seemed stable, save for those unlucky bastards who had gotten mashed by the railgun slug. But as he started hunting around for some kind of a communication system, a small text box popped up in the center of the screen.

BRIDGE: Medbay, come in.

Lucas breathed out a sigh he hadn't realized he had been holding. There had been a part -- a tiny part -- of his brain that had been idly wondering if he was the last person in the last room of the ship. There were more than a few nightmare inducing horror survival movies about a striken starship and the only passengers being left in a single pressurized room, surrounded by the vacuum tomb of their ship. Hell, he didn't even need to look to films for that. The good Glorious Prince of Heaven or whatever the fuck he was called these days had been stuck in that exact situation when the Chinese ship had blown halfway to Arcadia.

Lucas shook himself and typed back a response.

MEDOPS 1: This is Lucas Sibusiso, Logistics Officer. Both medtechs are dead, we have a patch, but it's fixed. Three other KIA, the rest of the wounded are stable. What's the situation in the rest of the ship?

He punched down the enter key.

BRIDGE: This is Captain DuBois, Lucas. Sorry to break it to you, but we're in a bad way and we need your help.

Lucas clenched his hands. Great. Just great. He typed back.

MEDOPS 1: What's the sitch, DuBois?

Hey, he thought. We've been through so much shit, if he can call me Lucas, I can leave off the captain. Right? Right? He stated to get nervous as no response came -- whatever hacked together communication system they were using didn't have any 'person is typing indicator.' Lucas was still trying to kick himself for feeling awkward in a ship that was riddled with railgun impacts when the wall of text arrived.

BRIDGE: We took fifty eight railgun shots, most of them through the habitation sections and the fore. Our lasers are down, most of the tubes are smashed, the reactor has a breach, our remass tanks are holed, two of our three radiators are so much paste, and the only thing that's keeping the ship together is her supersturcture. We're currently following Ceres out of the SOL system and unless we get a rescue boat in the next few days, the surviving crew is fucked. But none of that matters because the enemy has a laser frigate in orbit around Stark -- and they're firing on our ground forces every other hour. Our forward telescope is still working and we got a shot of them -- they're angling towards the ground and getting remass from the other ships in the enemy fleet. My astrogator and I agree: They're preparing for a ship drop. If that ship drops onto Europe, it'll add another fifty million people to the casualties and that's not going to happen on my watch. We have one missile tube left, but the firing control from the bridge to it is down. With our marines on Stark, we're down to whatever we can scrounge: You are within two corridors of an emergency vac suit. From there, you can reach the secondary firing control systems, program in the launch trajectory, and blow that frigate out of orbit before it kills half of Germany and wipes our invasion off the planet. No presure :)

Lucas read all of that with mounting horror. A laser frigate was between ten to twenty thousand tons. If it hit an arcology even a galancing blow, especially if accelerated to max speed...then he realized that it was far worse than it normally would have been. The laser frigate wasn't just a ship. It was an undead ship, raised by magic. It could only be destroyed by holy or purified weapons -- meaning that the heat friction that would have turned a laser frigate into a tumbling mass of wreckage shortly after hitting the atmosphere would pass through it harmlessly.

It would have a full extra half hour to accelerate -- less, as it would be accelerating the whole time. Each minute spent burning at two gravities, emptying its remass tanks, increasing its velocity, going faster and faster, then getting faster at going faster...

Lucas shook himself, then typed back.

MEDOPS 1: Got it.

He started by rummaging around through the medical bay, finding one of their face masks. He tested it, then slipped it on over his head, breathing through it quickly. He found a dosimeter watch -- they were designed to both act as a personal radiation checker and as a way to check around a corner to see if rads were being pumped out of a breech. But the problem was that checking a corner would take unspooling the sampling cable and thrusting it out past the bend. That was fine, if you had the hours that were normally expected during normal damage control procedures. Due to the glacial speed of space travel and space engagements, any repairs requiring less than a few seconds were all assumed to take hours.

He didn't have hours.

But Lucas had watched a truly preposterous amount of garbage spec-fic with Helen -- Helen, who was down there on the planet, fighting her way through the legions of the undead. And in several episodes, he had seen people jerry rig more complicated stuff than a fucking pole. And when he started thinking like that, Lucas found it remarkably easy to break the arm off one of the articulated aid stations, strap the dosimeter watch to it by the wrist band, then hold it infront of him as he came to the door. He paused only to do what he could, binding his arms with gauze, sticking his hands into surgical gloves, then taping those shut. He wrapped his ears with more gauze after plugging them with cotton wadding, then turned back to the rest of the room.

The paitents were all still out cold -- sedated by their life support units.

"Sorry, everyone," he called through the mask. "It'll just be a second!"

The door refused to open, at first. He had to punch in the secure code that the captain had sent via the text message, then override the safty systems. Then the door whisked open and wind roared past him, pushing him through and into the vacuum of the corridor. The door slammed shut after him and he knew that the interior of the room would be refilling. For his sake, he was glad that he was inside -- even if he was in a vacuum now. Vacuum was a remarkable insulator, and while his skin began to prickle and bruise as capillaries burst, he could ignore the pain of it as he breathed through the mask.

He hoped that the gauze was at least doing something to protect him from the lack of pressure.

Lucas started to push himself down the corridor, forcing himself to ignore the floating bits of scrap in the air, the corpses that had been bisected by said fragments, and the eerie, pounding silence that filled his ears. It was hard to not rush as fast as he could, hard to stop himself at the corner and stick the watch out, angling the pole so he could see the rad count -- not dangerous. He rounded the bend and saw the emergency vaclocker.

It had been hit, directly, by a railgun.

The hole beyond opened into a vast, starry sky, shockingly cold and distnat.

Lucas punched the wall and closed his eyes. His skin was prickling beneath the gauze -- he felt the aches and the pains growing more and more intense as the liquid in his body began to try and escape through his pores. The gauze was definitely not enough. Lucas forced himself to begin pushing forward. The path to the firing control room was past this point -- he could make it. He'd have to make it. He stuck his watch around the corner again -- and again, no deadly radiation flares. Lucas dragged himself around the corner...

And saw Isabella, the elf.

She stood in the corridor, as if the whole ship was still spinning, her hands on her hips. For just a moment, Lucas felt a frisson of horror burn through him. He didn't want to see the fiesty water wizard get reduced to...to...he blinked as he saw that Isabella was perfectly fine. She was, in fact, surrounded by a shimmering cloud that roiled and rippled, as if constantly blowing away from her, then being refreshed. Isabella had her back to him. Lucas reached out with his hand, tentatively, and stuck half his arm into the cloud -- and felt the cool brush of air against his skin. He pushed himself forward without a pause, and his body screamed in relief almost as loudly as it had in pain. He stood right behind Isabella, dragging his mask as she turned and smacked him in the face with an open palm, her eyes wide.

"Isabella!" Lucas squaked, his hand going to his cheek. "What the fuck?"

"I thought you were a monster!" Isabella said, her voice shocked. "Lucas? What in the name of the gods are you wearing?"

"The world's shittiest vac suit," Lucas said, wincing as he started to flex his fingers, the joints aching. "Fuck."

"Hurm," Isabella said. "You have magical talents, Lucas. Do you not remember even the basic water cantrips I showed you?"

"No," Lucas said, honestly. His head was beginning to pound. "Isabella, we need to get to that door there..." He noticed that while she was standing casually, he remained floating and had to keep jerking his arms to keep them inside of the sphere of magically generated air that she had wreathed herself in.

"Why?" Isabella asked. "I've been trying to find anyone else since the battle, but...well..." She shrugged one shoulder. "Most of you are dead. Is this really what wars on Stark are like? It seems terribly wasteful -- even the worst battlefields in the Sur, most of us survived to fight again." She shook her head. "Though, I will say, at least it is quick."

Lucas shook his head, then grabbed onto her shoulders, curling his legs up under him. Isabella made a little snorting sound, as if she was offended by being used in such a fashion. But she didn't shake him off and she did begin walking down the corridor, coming to the emergency ladder shaft. Once the door opened and they both looked down it, Lucas frowned as he took stock. The ladder would lead to the core of the ship. Once there, they just had to crawl along it to come to the nose, where the tube firing controls were located. Easy. But the ladderway had been struck several times, leaving jagged rents in the ladder and the wall alike. Lucas looked at Isabella. "Can you adjust the bubble?"

"Yes," she said, casually. "Do you want me to fill in the ladder?"

He nodded.

"It shall be only a minor expenditure of mana for a hydrosphost of my skills," she said, then began to incant. Her fingers moved and the bubble of air expanded past Lucas and into the pipe. A shimmering cloud marked each hole -- the place where air was sublimating out into space. Lucas tried to not think about the matter being added to the universe. How much had to be added before the future of space time was utterly twisted. Current astrophysics said that the universe was set to continue to expand outwards, losing energy over time until space-time ripped apart. But if you had elven wizards running around, dumping mass into the universe by summing it from nowhere, how long before that gravitaional destiny got flipped around and the universe instead headed for a big crunch?

Lucas realized he was stalling.

Every time he had passed a corner, he had needed to steel himself for the red light on the watch going off. Now, he had to do it six times in rapid succession. Great. Great, really great.

He stuck the watch out. It flickered, but did not flare. He was able to slip past one hole -- gaping into a wild profusion of cables that had been left to flip and twist in the microgravity, some still sparking silently in the vacuum of space. Then he saw the watch flaring bright red as he came to the next hole. "Fuck fuck fuck!" He hissed. "Double fuck, can this magical air get irradiated?"

"What's irradiated?" Isabella asked.

Lucas looekd up at her. "Can elven magic cure cancer?"

"Cancer?" Isabella asked.

"A lump that grows. Makes you vomit and kills you really fast?" Lucas asked. "Uh, sometimes it appears on breasts or testacles or- "

"Easily!" Isabella said, sounding offended.

"Fine!" Lucas chucked the dosimeter out through one of the holes that opened into space. The watch tumbled away, flashing intermittently red -- black -- red -- black as the face tumbled away from him. It was being bathed in cosmic rays, and was receiving information that, a century before, would have been of vital, groundbreaking scientific purposes. Now, it was merely beaming the information to a vast, disinterested universe due to a fit of pique. Lucas took every worry he had about bleeding out of his anus and coughing up his own teeth and jammed it into the back of his brain. Instead, he started to drag himself forward.

And yet, when he most wanted to think of the miraclous powers of medical technology as shown on Star Trek, his brain instead decided to dredge up one of the few spec-fic shows from the vast catalog that had gotten something even halfway right about the future of space travel. No matter how many times Lucas thought to himself how incredibly un-useful it was for his brain to fill his thoughts with mental images of James Holden slowly liquifying from radiation exposure, the images from The Expanse did not fail to leave him, all the way to the firing control computer.

Once there, Lucas half expected to find the computer gutted by a railgun shot, just like his last few hopes. Instead, the computer was waiting inside of the cramped, single person room. The shot had, instead, gone through the body of whoever had been staioned here to operate the system in case the bridge was hit. The gore that caked the walls had dried to a fine, gritty powder in the hard vacuum and the stringy bits of uniform that hadn't been sucked out with the upper half of the torso spread across the dooorway like a spiderweb.

Lucas, by now, had managed to get used to seeing what high energy weapons did to human beings who chanced to be between them and the barrel.

He still didn't sit in the chair. Instead, he leaned in, wincing as his elbow brushed against some bleached white bone, jutting into the air. His fingers shook as he punched in the numbers that Captain DuBois had sent him -- and then whispered, softly. "Bombs away."

He thumbed down the launch button.

The ship around him juddered slightly.

Outside, the missile left the tube, flipped around with a spray of cold gas from its RCS, then triggered its engine. It streaked off at an ungodly speed, whipping through space towards the laser frigate. The warhead had been blessed by an elf, an elf that was likely dead now, an elf that may have been lasered to death by the very frigate it flew towards. The missile was too stupid to appreciate the thought. But Lucas did.

It reached ten kilometers of the laser frigate, which was angled towards Europe and preparing its engines, before the frigate even seemed to notice its approach. Maybe the undead crew, driven by the orders of their master, could not spare the mental energy to check for incoming missiles. Maybe their undead telescopes had been damaged during the fast pass. Or maybe they had yerned for some excuse to avoid mass slaughter -- even at the cost of their own unlives. The missile exploded and filled the space ahead of it with a shotgun blast of kinetic projectiles, which spread in a narrow cone. They turned the laser frigate, in the space of a few seconds, into a rapidly expanding loud of debris.

And somewhere between the surface and low orbit, a very tiny dragon remained hovering in the air, panting softly.

"Well, dang!" Hua squeaked to no one -- his voice thin and attunated in the near vacuum he flew through. "They stole my kill!"

***

The Berlin Arcology rose in the distance -- a monument to the splendor and artistry of an entire planet. It was burning. Smoke rose from the sleek, almost organic sides of the structure, and the scrambled airforce of several nations and several epochs dueled in the sky. Across Europe, the European Union's defense forces had scrambled to try and resist the undead conquest of their small patch of the world. While many had been hacked from the sky or shot where they stood, others had managed to pull the same trick that the Americans had of falling back to the wilderness. In earlier eras, this would have been hard to pull off, with the density of Europe's population. But with the great concentration of humanity into the arcologies, green had returned to Europe's shores, and in that green, attack planes, helicopters, tanks, had managed to squirrel themselves away and wait for the signal.