Dry, No Lube Ch. 03: Disrupted

Pixy nodded, thinking about Amisuul's last report, considering. "You're thinking what I'm thinking," she guessed.

Captain Reye just blinked at her. "I haven't known you terribly long," he admitted, "but between you and me, I know you well enough to suspect that the answer is no. I'm not. What are you thinking?"

Pixy wasn't sure herself; it just seemed to make sense. "These things move in a cloud. Thousands of little ships? And they're faster than we are. They should be shooting at us. The fact that they're not?" She shrugged. "I'm guessing that if we ever get a look at one of these, close up, we'll find they're all engine and no weapons."

"No weapons."

"Or small ones. Defensive. The Combat Bulletin didn't say whether they had offensive capabilities at all, because Fleet doesn't know shit. But now they will." She could smell her own breath in the little space between them; he'd know she was high as a kite. Even now, the Drag was making her feel that fake sense of buoyancy, which some users' brains perceived as fatalism. Or maybe that was just her brain; she was still convinced they'd die. "I'm thinking they're designed to do what they almost did to us: find a target, then run it into a star or a pulsar or something before it even knows." She waited, staring at Reye, until the captain nodded slowly.

"USS Jeremiad." He sighed. "The most powerful ship ever built."

"No wreckage." Pixy was sure now, the connections all coming together. "There never will be, either."

"This," Captain Reye decided, nodding, "is a big problem for the Fleet."

"Fucking massive."

"They can virtually control our vessels and fry them at will." Reye considered. "So. How does that help us now?"

Pixy leaned back against the auxiliary mid-beam console, feeling the knobs and switches dig into her shoulderblades. She felt tired suddenly, the drug receding already. Two fucking ounces weren't what they used to be. "I doubt there's anything they can do to us, unless we go superlight."

He nodded shrewdly. "How convinced are you?"

Pixy considered. "Very. It's the only explanation that makes sense to me."

Reye shrugged. "Not that we've got another choice, I don't think. So. We can confirm your hypothesis by going back into lightspace again and observing them, then dropping back out before they run us into something solid."

"Which I won't do." Pixy was shaking her head vigorously. "Sir, I know this XO shit is a made-up position with no real significance. But no. As the second ranking officer aboard?" She thrust her head out a few millimeters, preparing for an argument. "I won't do it. You can let me off in the shuttle before you go to lightspace. Sir."

Reye gave a dry laugh. "Calm down, Ms Pfeiffer. You don't need to have one of your big courageous moments here. I'm not going to strand you in the shuttle. The longer we stay sublight, the more likely they'll figure out that we know what they can do. They won't wait so long next time. So rest your little head, XO. We'll stay at conventional power until we figure out how to defeat them ourselves, or we'll lead them back to a friendly vessel." He smiled without warmth. "Slowly."

Pixy was nodding. "What we should do," she mused, "is image one of the little fuckers. High-res."

"Mouth, Ms Pfeiffer," but it was a quiet admonishment; he could tell her mind was working again. "How?"

* * *

"Say again, sir?" Falgada, wedged at his station beside Julius, the helmsman, actually turned around in his seat and frowned at his captain. "We're decreasing thrust?"

"Ah." Reye nodded, his face tightly neutral. "Good. Your hearing is excellent, Mr Falgada." The first officer blinked, looked at the carefully sheeplike Julius, and then got to work.

"Asteroids," Amisuul called from his station, a few seconds before the prox alarm shrieked briefly. "Portside. Closure factor four." He spent a few more seconds staring into his globe before he leaned back to stretch his neck. "No intercept course though, sir. Nothing to worry about."

"Thank you." Reye sounded relieved, and Pixy could only agree. Under ordinary circumstances, GP service ships could shrug off asteroid hits the way defenders shook off fly tacklers during the Naadam tournaments. But the armor had taken a lot of punishment as they'd struggled to escape the gravity of the star, now rapidly receding through the stern port, and the pelding hadn't been in super shape to begin with. "Maintain course and keep scrubbing speed."

Pixy, standing near Amisuul, was still trying to think about how they could get a decent-resolution image of one of the Hive things. Their scopes couldn't really reach out that far, as Reye had predicted they wouldn't. He'd agreed to reduce speed to see if they'd get any closer, but both he and Pixy had known that wouldn't work well enough. "Who knows, though?" he'd shrugged. "If we slow down enough, maybe they'll just fly away."

"Huh." Pixy had been busy typing out an updated bulletin for the Core, supplementing and updating her first, wild broadcast. "Maybe." They had Chief della Sera on the forward sighting bubble, taking octant sights every ten minutes while the star plotter was agreeing with him dumbly, so the antenna wouldn't be a problem this time. "Goddamn," she'd sighed. "I need about forty uninterrupted minutes in the latrine." Drag always made her gassy.

Reye, working on the manual ETA, had paused. "Yeah. Lunch wasn't the greatest."

"It wasn't lunch, sir," she'd confessed, sighing, and he'd sent a shrewd glance her way.

"Put Mr Donskoi fully in charge of the drugs, Ms Pfeiffer," he'd ordered mildly. "Starting as soon as we get out of this. You're leaving the ship, anyway."

"Aye aye, sir."

"They're keeping their same distance and relative bearing, captain," Amisuul called out ruefully. "We're at our sharpest resolution already."

"Which isn't enough," Pixy muttered. They'd discussed a Plan B, hastily, in the charthouse, but he'd been very unenthusiastic. "The computer can't even get an accurate count, just an extrapolation."

"I can read the plot board, Lieutenant Pfeiffer," Reye had snapped, and Pixy had shut her mouth with a nearly audible sound; it was never good when a superior addressed you by your rank, especially in public. She was getting antsy, her guts roiling again, the ship caught in a weird limbo where everyone was expecting something horrible but yet everything seemed so... well, calm. Here they were, just another starship, moseying through space at sublight, using the same physics Laika had used when she'd led the way off Sol III. The legends said Laika had been a dog, but Pixy had never believed that; there was no way a dog could have worked an abacus, for one thing. Not without gravity, and they probably hadn't had that on spacecraft back then.

Anyway.

Pixy bit her tongue; you had to let Captain Reye come to his own conclusions at times like this. His judgement was sound, but it took him awhile to decide. It was probably why he'd gone Service. But she could feel his eyes on her back from across the bridge, knew he'd be able to see the way she was clamping her hands tightly behind her back, and she silently counted the seconds while he made up his mind, the options stark: keep on sweeping majestically through space at sublight, spending endless drab days with the annoying haze of Cathos Vremein disruptors trawling behind, or go to Plan B and do something really, really useful for the Fleet.

She knew he'd made his mind up when he sighed.

"XO!" he called. "Head on down to the wardroom and figure out a way to get a closer look at those things."

"Aye aye, sir." It was all for show, of course; the plan had been obvious in the charthouse, just a few words between them, for it was really the only way to go. She stopped by Donskoi's station on her way to the hatch. "Call McChang to the wardroom." She glanced across at Amisuul. "Oh, and Mr Amisuul? I'll need to borrow one of your techs, too. Just temporarily."

He looked back, golden eyes glinting. "Why?"

"Because I said so." The reply was immediate, lashing brutally out at him, and she turned her back and strode from the bridge with her usual confidence; she was, once more, the baddest motherfucker in the room, and she knew it.

* * *

"You want what?" Amisuul had sent Herriott, who cringed openly whenever he saw Pixy. In fairness, though, he'd always been like that. "How'm I going to secure the extra torpedoes? And how would you reload them?" From the little officers' galley nearby came the clang of van Angus' pans; she'd mobilized him to prepare ten days' rations for two people, the fresher the better. The soft huff of his blast-freezer punctuated the conversation.

"I want four extra torpedoes in the shuttle crew bay, in addition to the ones in the tubes. All of them need to be variable fuses; I'm thinking lots of small, disparate targets." Pixy felt like events were about to spiral far, far out of control, like she was the only thing keeping everything from going apeshit. So she forced herself to her usual merciless calm. "It's your business how you want to secure them. And it's my business how I want to reload them." She tossed her head at McChang, standing nearby with his hands stiff behind his back. "McChang will handle the paperwork and break the torpedoes out of Supply for you, but this has to happen fast. You both comprehend?"

They each nodded, McChang with the briskness of the newly-drugged, Herriott with the brokenness of withdrawal. "Good. Then go execute." They scuttled off, leaving Pixy to lean back in her chair at the coding table with the repeater shimmering above her head, blinking out ranges, bearings, all the usual trivia of spacecraft rendezvous. She let her mind wander, thinking about just how stupid this was, about the high probability not that she'd be shot at, but that she'd just drift along through space, unable to catch back up with the Pulver, until her shuttle ran out of fuel and left her floating along in a wide-line orbit of the star that had come so close to roasting her that morning.

She'd done the math, just roughly; a stranded shuttle at max fuel range, with her desiccated corpse aboard, would orbit that motherfucker for over 300,000 years before the star sucked it in.

She shuddered. Pixy was deeply afraid of dying in any number of ways; it made her wonder why she kept putting herself in situations where she could. And why she put others there, too, which was the reason she was sighing now. For she needed a fucking copilot, and it had to be someone she wouldn't mind being stranded with in space for all eternity.

Which ruled out a huge number of people.

Few enlisted sailors knew the first thing about operating shuttles, so it pretty much had to be an officer, obviously, and not a critically important one: Reye would not let her take anyone whose absence could endanger the ship, nor would she want to. Van Kleck and Falgada were both out, then, which was good. She'd brought Amisuul on her last suicide mission, and he'd done okay, but he was gaining responsibility and experience and, in the end, she didn't really like him very much.

Which left only her two other officers. And both were Pixy's bedwarmers, the old one who'd ditched her and the new one who... well, the new one.

She brooded a few seconds, but there was no point waiting on a decision. In all brutal honesty, where the safety of the Pulver was concerned, one of them was a fully-qualified deck officer with prior service, the other a miscast engineer with a lackadaisical attitude toward her bridge qualifications. Plus, she was currently racked out after a strenuous watch; with luck, the captain wouldn't realize she was gone until it was far too late. Pixy swept to her feet and headed for the hatch that led to the stinking hole the junior officers slept in.

Klonmyre's quarters were locked, but it was a cheap coded hatch and Pixy had memorized all the quarters codes years ago, on the theory that it was better to be able to snoop on one's shipmates than not to be able to. She kicked the hatch open, ignoring the stench from the communal latrine, and made sure it snicked closed behind her.

For a second she just stood there with her back to the hatch, looking at the bunk. How many times had she stood just like this, though in her own (far, far less stinky) quarters, watching a sleeping Janelle Klonmyre? Looking forward to sliding into the rack behind her and holding her close? To waking her up, perhaps, in the middle of the night to devour her tangy little vagina while the stars swirled outside?

She'd been an outstanding bedwarmer. Probably the best Pixy had ever had.

But that was the past. She crossed the tiny cabin in two chopping strides, bent over the sleeping woman, and took a deep breath. "On your fucking feet, Sublieutenant Klonmyre!" she called with parade-ground resonance, straightening so that they wouldn't butt heads as the younger woman sat bolt upright in bed; Pixy had seen her wake up many times. She wondered whether she'd need to poke her; Klonmyre had gone down less than an hour ago, after over nine stressful hours on the bridge.

Nope. No need for poking.

The dim light showed a blinking, fearful woman with touseled hair and a generally poor view of the world. "What?" she demanded, her face twisting into a dry-mouthed moue of disgust as she caught sight of the chrono by the bunk. "Already?"

"Let's go." Pixy had learned, when trying to bully subordinates into doing dangerous things, that it was best not to give them an option. "Grab a few extra uniforms. Nothing fancy. And your hygiene shit, maybe a couple books. Put it all in a sack. Carry the sack to the shuttle bay, where you'll find McChang and Warrant Officer Herriott loading some torpedoes. Go inside, head up to the flight deck, lock the hatch, and go to sleep on the crew bunk up there. I'll be there shortly."

And then she was gone, turning on her heel, headed back out into the real world. Her body was tingling, live-wired with the usual excitement she got whenever she was making decisions and getting things done. Van Angus was still working up portable meals as Pixy strode back through the wardroom, headed into the other hatch, and stalked into her own quarters. She had packing to do.

Plus, she was determined to have at least one more decent shit before she left. There was no telling how long she'd be on the shuttle, and the onboard latrine was not the best.

* * *

"Why me?" The Pulver was receding in the aft port, spinning slightly in that eccentric way that preceded pulse-acceleration from the shuttle.

"Well, frankly? At this moment in time, you and I are the two officers Pulver can most easily do without." She paused while this sank in, but it couldn't have been a shocker; Klonmyre knew she wasn't a very good deck officer, had known it even before she'd been shunted from the engine room. Which was probably a part of why she wasn't so good.

"Wow." The little redhead scowled. "Don't, like, sugarcoat it or anything."

"Shut the fuck up," Pixy replied absently, totally absorbed in gazing back at the ship. Pulver's fight against the star's gravity had done terrible things to the stern, and Pixy was determined to send Captain Reye a full damage report, with footage. She panned her vidcam slowly across the port, taking in the bubbled armor, the discolored metal, the electrocoat wiped clean off as if sandblasted. "I'm busy."

Klonmyre's replying sigh was heavy, exaggerated, and not at all attractive. "I'm going to go down into the crew bay and sulk," she announced bitterly. "If you need me up here, ma'am, just send for me." The hatch back there grated open. "But I won't come, frankly."

"Fine by me." Pixy was nodding, the vidcam confirming her notion that the Pulver would need another long trip to a repair basin after this. There was no way the crew could repair all that underway. Her mind, the keenly critical one of a once and future First Officer, thought about the maintenance work involved and shuddered. "I'll need to crash eventually, though."

"What?" Klonmyre was startled, still half-awake. "Into what?"

"Jesus, you little fool," Pixy tutted. "I meant I'll need to get some rack time." She flicked her head around, then, a fast tight grin over her shoulder. "I love you, Janelle, but you can be a fucking idiot a lot of the time."

Klonmyre cocked her head, considering, then nodded. "Fair enough. Well, maybe I will come then." She hesitated. "If you ask nicely. Ma'am."

Pixy was back at the vidcam, shrugging. "Suit yourself, Ms Klonmyre, but we're stuck together for quite awhile here. So start out nice."

The chuckle in reply was dry, but at least it was a chuckle. "I'm not the one who led with a 'shut the fuck up,' Ms Pfeiffer." The tone was saucy, but not resentful, and not for the first time Pixy wondered just why she'd driven the little ginger out of her bed so soon. She'd been mindful of Janelle, of her need to gain a good position with the new First; Fleet's bedwarming system had its rules, and Pixy had been looking out for the engineer.

But she missed her.

The hatch to the crew compartment fluttered shut, and Pixy spoke into the vidcam with the flat, neutral monotone they expected in a Fleet report. "So, the damage is obvious and extensive. 97-100% thermal scoring along the entire aft third of the ship, plus further third- and fourth-order layering damage to the binary insulation and the ablatives. A good deal of pelding loss, though it's difficult to determine against preexisting damage." She paused, considered, nodded; she'd been to the survey officers' course, so she felt fit to offer an assessment. "Qualified evaluation of four months' yard time, at a cost of between eighteen and nineteen million shekels. Likely on the higher side."

Sighing, she shut off the cam and got the report ready to send.

Pulver was just a twinkle in the mid-distance by the time she got the shuttle ready to thrust; it never failed to surprise Pixy just how quickly you could be alone in space. She glanced absently out the front port, wondering how long it would take before she could pick up the pursuing Hive with the naked eye. Hours, probably. She sat back and yawned, her feet planted firmly in the worn spot above the instrument panel where every shuttle pilot in the Fleet rested their feet.

Fuck. What was she doing?

Sighing, she ran her mind quickly through what she knew about the resolution on the onboard imagers; she scowled, realizing she should have brought a proper scanner. The imagers needed to be within 6,500 meters to do their best work, she recalled; just over one poronkusema in linear distance. She rechecked the math in her head, thought about feeding the thrusters more power, but there was little point; the Hive was moving toward them already, and she'd need all the fuel she could get to catch the Pulver afterward. She yawned, then wondered why she was still awake. For no Fleet officer ever misses a chance to sleep; you never knew when the chance would come again.

So Pixy set the proximity alarm to max volume, tweaked the autopilot for a simple drift course, and followed Klonmyre down to the crew compartment. After all, when one had a bedwarmer handy, might as well use it.

* * *

Pixy, feeling the fatigue in her bones, stirred with cotton in her mouth. The alarm was wailing throughout the shuttle, and she was grateful she'd thought to set it loud. She blinked as she remembered where she was and why Klonmyre was in her arms, then smacked the younger officer on the ass. "Get up, Janelle."

"Fuck off." The voice from the mass of red curls sounded pissed. "Ma'am."

"No, seriously." A glance at the chrono showed they'd gotten a solid three hours of rack time; shit. Had the Hive things sped up? Or had she missed the gravity factor for the star behind them, dragging the shuttle faster than planned? "I'm not being a bitch. We need to get ready, and you've got my arm pinned."