Chapter 45: Cowardly Captain...

Static hissed through the bridge speakers like dry sand poured over glass.

Then came a breath... a sharp ragged hitch of air, and a laugh that was filled with so much relief that the speaker cone hummed with it.

"Nee-san?"

Ren’s voice cracked right down the middle, the smooth Kansai cadence shattering into raw boyish disbelief.

"Aoi? Is that... is that really you? You’re alive? You’re actually ALIVE?!"

THUD!

Aoi’s knees hit the base of the astrogation console.

She didn’t catch herself.

Her fingers clawed into the leather trim of the display well with her knuckles white and her whole body shaking from the crown of her head to the soles of her boots.

Her glasses slid down her nose and she didn’t push them up as hot blinding tears flooded her eyes and spilled over in unbroken tracks that dripped off her jaw onto the glass.

"Ren..." she choked, in a shredded sobbing gasp that sounded nothing like the composed instructor who’d mapped the stars with steady hands. "Ren, it’s... it’s me. I’m here. We’re here."

’He survived.’

The thought screamed through her head and drowned out the core, the alarms, every calculation she’d ever memorized.

’My little brother. He didn’t burn. He didn’t turn to ash in Kyoto. He’s right there... He’s right outside the glass.’

"God, Nee-san..." Ren laughed again, wet and choked with what sounded like tears. "We’ve been sweeping this sector for three days. When the system took Earth, I thought... I thought I was the only one left but I found people... Good people... I’m running with a salvage contingent from Sterling Orbital. Mechanics, pilots, logistics officers... actual survivors."

Down on the lower mezzanine, Elena’s head snapped up so fast the pins in her hair creaked.

Her pale eyes went as wide as saucers and her hands locked onto the edge of the weapons desk.

’Sterling Orbital...?’ Her heart slammed against her ribs like an artillery shell. ’My family’s division with the orbital engineers. The high-altitude shuttles... If they made it off-world, if they had the evacuation prototypes... Mother might have reached the station. Father might have mobilized the fleet...’

"We saw you take down that Ray," Ren went on, easing back into a calm steady warmth that felt like a thick wool blanket thrown over the freezing dark. "Hell of an effort, but your starboard plates look chewed to pieces and your heat dissipation is bleeding into the void... We’re fellow humans out here, guys... Earth is gone. We’re all each other has left so let us dock... We’ve got spare composite alloys, medical supplies, real ration packs. We just want to help."

Leo sat motionless in the throne.

His eyes weren’t on the glowing audio waveform... They were on the Black Kite, through the cracked resin-patched canopy.

Ninety meters of dark-slate armor scarred by old battles.

Twin heavy rail-cannons, both of them conveniently pointed nowhere in particular.

Deuterium plumes idling at a combat-ready sixty percent, holding position with the effortless precision of a wolf circling an injured fawn.

The pull in the small of his back was screaming at him... feeling very icy all of a sudden.

’A military-grade raider... Showing up a day after the Novice Buffer dies. Carrying my instructor’s brother and wearing the crest of my engineer’s family.’

It was too neat and too clean... It felt like an open steel trap coated in honey so he didn’t ask for a vote from the crew.

His thumb slammed down on the master comms cutoff.

CLICK!

Ren’s warm laughing voice was cut off mid-breath and replaced by the dead sterile hum of the vents.

"AI." Leo’s voice was flat. "Sever the relay... Block every incoming handshake from that vessel as well."

[Acoustic channel terminated... Incoming handshake protocols from the Black Kite have been rejected and blacklisted. Vessel remains on combat perimeter.]

His palms drove down into the cradles.

THOOM!

The twin drives flared turquoise and the corvette surged forward along Beta-9 at five kilometers per second, carving a desperate evasive arc through the outer drift to put stone and distance between their battered hull and the black raider.

For two seconds the bridge sat frozen in shock then the whole bridge exploded at once.

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!"

Aoi’s scream didn’t sound human at all, it was a raw tearing shriek of hysterical agony.

She threw herself against the edge of the command dais and clawed at the metal riser under Leo’s boots with her face twisted and unrecognizable, her teeth bared and her dark hair tumbling wild over her shoulders as fresh tears smeared her glasses.

"Leo! What did you DO?! Turn it back on! OPEN THE CHANNEL!"

"Are you INSANE, stray?!" Elena shrieked from the lower deck, her face flushing scarlet as she jabbed a shaking finger at his chest. "Did your primitive brain suffer a total vascular collapse?! That is Sterling Orbital! My family’s company! They have plates! They have supplies! They could have news of my parents, and you just CUT THEM OFF?!"

"Leo, wait!" Camila stumbled forward from the companionway with the tomato basket clutched to her chest, her hazel eyes wide with frantic confusion. "Why did you run?! He said he’s her brother! He said he wants to help us...!"

"Captain, explain the tactical rationale!" Jin-Ah demanded, her voice jumping a full tone as she stabbed at her dead sensor logs. "That ship outmasses us three to one! Fleeing without acknowledging their transmission will be read as a hostile maneuver... It makes no logistical sense!"

"QUIET!" Leo barked, without taking his eyes off the drift.

He tucked the corvette’s nose behind a three-hundred-meter silicate boulder, working the thrusters in tight defensive pulses with his eyes flicking between the rock and the rear sensors.

PFFT! PFFT!

"All of you, shut up and listen to me! We’ve known that ship for five minutes! FIVE minutes! Do you have any idea what kind of hardware that thing is packing?! That’s a Tier-3 fast raider! It has twin heavy rail-cannons that could punch straight through our armor in two salvos!"

"It is my BROTHER!" Aoi screamed, slamming both palms against the step of the dais hard enough to bruise. "It is Ren! I know his voice! I raised him after our father died! Do you think I don’t know my own brother’s voice, Leo?! Do you think I’m an IDIOT?!"

"I’m not saying it isn’t him, Sensei!" Leo shot back, a muscle twitching violently in his jaw. "I’m saying we don’t know what he’s doing out here! We don’t know who he’s working with! Out here the rules are gone! Earth is gone! Anyone could be anything now, and rolling over to let an armed warship dock with our broken hull the second they say something nice is suicide..."

"He is not ANYONE!" Her voice broke into a ragged desperate sob. "He is my family! He is the only thing I have left in this whole godforsaken universe! How dare you?! How DARE you sit in that chair and treat him like a monster?!"

"Because out here everyone’s a potential monster until proven otherwise!" Leo’s dark eyes flashed with fierce protective fury. "We barely survived that Ray! Our starboard plates are at forty-four percent! There’s a crack down the middle of the canopy! If they dock and decide they want our core, or our food, or this SHIP, we have zero leverage to stop them... We have to be careful!"

"You’re not being careful, you’re being a COWARD!"

Elena stepped up to the foot of the dais, her icy eyes blazing with venomous contempt and her hands trembling with rage.

"You’re terrified, Leo! You sit up there on your little throne pretending to be some great naval commander, but the moment real survivors show up, real professionals with real resources from my family’s fleet, you run like a frightened child! You’re just jealous! You can’t stand the thought that someone else might be able to take care of us better than you!"

"Elena, back off."

Harper’s voice cut in low and warning. She stepped off the vanguard station with her grey-blue eyes gone hard.

"Leo’s keeping us alive... Don’t talk to him like that."

"Keeping us ALIVE?!" Elena laughed, sharp and bitter and hysterical, grating off the bulkheads. "He’s trapping us in an iron coffin! He wants us dependent on his scraps! His little garden, his fried dough and his lucky turret! Sterling Orbital built half the high-altitude defense grids in the solar system! If my family’s engineers are on that ship, they have medical bays! Comms relays... They might have evacuation manifests!"

She took another step up the dais and leaned toward him, her face pale with desperate hope that had curdled into pure cruelty.

"At least there’s a chance MY parents aren’t dead!" she snarled, the words tearing out of her like jagged shrapnel. "Unlike yours and your commoner little sister!"

The bridge died as the air seemed to freeze solid and drop twenty degrees in one heartbeat.

THUD!

Leo’s hands came out of the cradles.

He killed the main drives and fired the forward thrusters in one concussive reverse burst, and the Wanderer-7 jerked to a dead absolute halt in the shadow of the rock.

The engines went silent as only the low hollow purr of the vents was left.

Slowly, Leo turned his head and looked down at Elena and his face... was terrifyingly still.

His dark eyes, usually so warm and grounded and full of that stubborn protective fire that had carried all of them through the dark, were hollow like two black holes carved into stone.

Truly they were dead and empty of light.

Elena’s breath caught in her throat like she’d been slapped.

The self-righteous fury that had fueled every word drained out of her in an instant, and her stomach dropped sickeningly.

’No...’ Her mind froze as cold horror crawled over her skin. ’What did I just say...? Why did I say that...?’

She looked at the ragged tired lines around his eyes.

...At the faint smear of dried blood still lingering by his nostril from the feedback of firing the turret to save her harpoon.

She remembered him in the galley with flour on his hands, cooking bread for them while they cried in the dark.

She remembered the faded grey hoodie he’d mentioned once, quietly, in the small hours.

The words she’d spat felt like poison on her tongue.

Her throat closed up.

Her lips parted and her chest hitched as she tried to force it out... I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it, I was angry, please... but the pride and the shock and the suffocating terror locked her jaw shut like rusted iron.

The apology died behind her teeth as she stood there trembling under the weight of his unblinking stare.

HUMMMMM.

Past the cracked canopy, the shadows shifted.

The Black Kite hadn’t lost them.

With its Tier-3 propulsion and sensor suite, the raider slid around the edge of the boulder with effortless grace and eased its burn until it matched their vector, coming to a dead halt barely two hundred meters off the starboard bow.

Its ninety-meter frame threw a massive suffocating shadow across the bridge.

Leo broke his gaze away from Elena and looked out at it with no expression at all.

He took one slow deep breath through his nose.

When he spoke, his voice was quiet and stripped of every ounce of warmth.

"We shouldn’t trust anyone we just met... Not when we’re broken and they have heavy guns, not out in space at all."

Nobody answered.

Harper stood with her eyes glued to the floor and her knuckles white around her wrench, torn clean in half between her loyalty to Leo and the undeniable human ache of what that ship out there represented.

Camila was crying silently with her forehead pressed to the rim of the basket, overwhelmed by the ugly venom that had poisoned the room.

Jin-Ah sat frozen behind her terminal with her eyes darting between the readings and the floor, running the problem over and over and unable to find a single answer that didn’t tear them apart.

Aoi pulled herself slowly up by the edge of the dais.

She stood in front of him with her hair tangled and her glasses smeared with tears.

The hysteria was gone, and what replaced it was a deep pleading agonizing desperation that cut deeper than anything Elena could have thrown.

"Leo..." she whispered, her voice shaking so hard it barely crossed the meter between them.

She looked up at him... at the student she’d mentored... at the boy whose quiet feelings she’d carried so carefully and at the captain she’d trusted with her life in the dark.

"Leo... please." Her hands clasped tight against her chest. "He’s my brother. My little brother. If you turn him away... if you fly away and leave him out there in the black..."

Her voice broke.

"I don’t want to hate you... Please don’t make me hate you."