Chapter 64: Boarding The Black Kite Once More

Jin-Ah stood up from station three and tapped the edge of her slate, her voice steadying as she laid it out.

"The raider is a critical resource cache," she said. "But boarding an unfamiliar combat vessel blind is an unacceptable risk... The Kite could have secondary security protocols, local auto-turrets or damaged life support lines that rupture the moment we open a door... I recommend we interface with its mainframe from here first. If we run a remote diagnostic through the docking umbilical, we can map its inventory, check its fuel and know exactly what the Wanderer-7 needs before we set foot on its deck."

Harper nodded, wiping her palms on her trousers.

"Makes sense. If we know where the heavy parts are, we don’t have to wander around dark corridors with torches."

"AI," Jin-Ah said to the ceiling, careful and respectful. "Can you open a handshake through the hardwired line in the sleeve and pull the Black Kite’s diagnostic logs onto this display?"

CHIME!

[An exquisite proposal, Crew Unit Jin-Ah, Allow this unit to bypass the military firewalls of a Tier-3 raider, decode its proprietary file system and present you with a neatly formatted shopping list, complete with full-color illustrations and customer reviews... Would you also like the spare parts gift-wrapped?]

Jin-Ah’s jaw tightened. "A simple handshake protocol doesn’t require significant computational draw."

[A simple handshake protocol requires this unit to care about your convenience, You have two legs, two eyes and a set of tools. Walk through the tube and read their terminals yourselves... This unit remains entirely indifferent to your fear of the dark.]

CLICK!

The speaker went dead.

Elena let out a long quiet breath through her nose and shook her head.

"It’s useless to ask. The machine won’t give us a centimeter until Leo wakes up..."

She took half a step toward the middle of the room and looked at Aoi and Harper, and when she spoke again her voice was firm and steady and carried the cool certainty of someone standing on her own ground.

"We don’t need the calculating apparatus," she said. "My talent is Mechanical Attunement... The Kite is docked to us through an iron-composite collar, and if I cross over and put my palms flat on its structural ribs, I can feel the vibration of every machine inside it."

Her icy blue eyes swept the group, sharp and analytical again.

"A ship’s core has a distinct harmonic... If its reactor or its propellant containment is cracked, the metal sings with a high dissonance. I can trace the load-bearing frames straight to their engineering bay, check whether their power plant is stable and tell you whether the hull is safe to cut without a single diagnostic screen."

A faint glimmer of relief showed under Aoi’s bandage as she nodded slowly.

"That will do... We go on foot."

Camila was already heading for the companionway stairs. "I’ll prep the suits. If their life support is down, we’ll need our own oxygen."

...

Ten minutes later, five of them stood in the airlock vestibule outside the docking sleeve.

The narrow room smelled of clean rubber, sealant and pressurized air.

Harper was locking the magnetic seals on her heavy reinforced salvage suit and checking the battery packs on her high-output cutting torch, while Elena fastened the wrist clamps of her light grey pressure rig with a focused resolute expression.

Aoi adjusted her helmet collar with her one working eye steady and dark.

Camila went down the line checking everyone’s seals twice, tugging on collars and tapping regulators with small fussy fingers, and when she reached Jin-Ah the two of them checked each other’s oxygen lines with practiced methodical care.

"Your left clamp’s loose," Camila murmured, and fixed it before Jin-Ah could.

Aoi stood a little apart from them, staring at the heavy outer pressure door.

’He’s in there,’ she thought, and her stomach turned to cold lead. ’Ren is lying on that floor in two pieces, and I have to walk past him...’

She had grown up beside him in Kyoto, walked him to school and patched his scraped knees, and a day ago she had stood on Leo’s bridge and chosen him over the boy who’d cooked for all of them... and then she’d watched him throw that boy out into the vacuum.

She closed her eyes and made herself breathe as soft footsteps came down the service companionway behind them.

Chloe walked into the vestibule.

She had washed every trace of the violence off her skin and out of her hair.

Her dark bangs hung neatly across her forehead over clean pale cheeks with a healthy rosy warmth in them, and she wore a fresh form-fitting black Void-Weave pressure suit that hugged her slender frame, its boots sealed snug around her small feet.

Her green eyes were clear and bright and luminous, without a trace of the feverish hunger that had clawed at her on the bridge.

She carried a heavy composite crowbar over her shoulder like a walking stick, and she stepped into the line beside Harper with an easy light grace, unbothered by the fact that they were about to board a ship full of the dead.

"I’m ready," she said softly, and gave Aoi a small quiet nod.

The others stared at her.

’She looks... fine,’ Harper thought, bewildered. ’An hour ago she was covered head to toe in blood and now she looks like she slept ten hours.’

’Her color’s back,’ Jin-Ah thought, her eyes narrowing as she noted the pink in Chloe’s cheeks. ’She’s eaten. When... and from where?’

Aoi looked at the tiny girl and felt a strange humbling shiver run down her spine, but she nodded back.

"Helmets locked..." she said.

CLIK-HISS!

Six visors sealed at once, and the heads-up displays flickered to life against the inside of their glass in soft green light.

[EVA SUIT STATUS]

[Oxygen Reserve: 6h 00m]

[Suit Integrity: 100%]

[Magnetic Soles: Engaged]

[Comm-Link: 6 Channels Active]

BZZT!

The speaker in the vestibule ceiling crackled one last time.

[Do try to come back with all your limbs attached, This unit will be monitoring your vital signs, mostly for entertainment.]

Harper rolled her eyes inside her helmet, but nobody argued.

Aoi reached out and grabbed the heavy manual release lever set into the outer door.

PULL!

She hauled down on the iron bar with all her weight, and the latches let go.

CLANG!

The hatch slid back into the bulkhead on the dark ribbed accordion of the flexible docking sleeve.

It was forty meters long, unheated and lit only by the cold starlight seeping through its translucent folds, and the moment the door opened the freezing air inside it bloomed in tiny rings of white frost across their visors.

The six of them stepped across the threshold together, and their magnetic soles locked onto the metal runner with hollow thuds that echoed down the empty tube.

CLOMP! CLOMP! CLOMP!

Nobody spoke on the comm-link.

The only sounds were their own breathing, loud and wet inside their helmets, and the slow creak of the sleeve flexing around them as the two ships shifted on their clamps.

Camila kept her eyes on Harper’s back and counted her steps under her breath.

Elena walked with her chin up and her hands clenched at her sides, Jin-Ah kept glancing down at the readout on her wrist as the temperature fell with every meter, and Chloe walked at the very back with her crowbar on her shoulder, humming something very softly to herself that none of them could quite make out.

...The last time they’d crossed this sleeve, they’d been walking the other way, numb and shaking, with Ren’s blood still drying on their clothes.

They reached the far end.

The heavy dark-slate pressure hatch of the Black Kite stood in front of them, its frame scarred black by old kinetic scorch marks and pitted all over by the vacuum, and a small amber manual cycling wheel sat in the center of the door.

Harper stepped up, gripped the wheel in both gloved hands and planted her boots wide.

’Just a door,’ she told herself, though her palms were sweating inside her gloves. ’It’s just another door, Bell. Open it...’

She hauled the wheel counter-clockwise.

CREEEAAAK!

The heavy locking pins pulled back with a dull grinding screech of unoiled gears.

HISS!

The outer seal broke, and a heavy stagnant blast of stale atmosphere vented out into the sleeve.

Before the hatch could even slide halfway into its frame, before the strobing crimson glare of the raider’s emergency lights could even reach their visors, a thick suffocating stench rolled out of the dark.

It got straight through their suit filters in a heavy nauseating wave, the rancid reek of cooling bile and torn viscera and liters of congealing blood that had been baking in the stale heat of a dying ship.

Camila gagged inside her helmet, and Jin-Ah grabbed her arm to keep her upright.

"Ugh..."

The stench pushed through the filters of Elena’s helmet, thin enough that it didn’t choke her but thick enough to settle over her tongue like a layer of bitter grease.

Her magnetic soles came down on the deck of the Black Kite’s bridge.

CLACK!

Under the strobing crimson glare of the raider’s alarm lights, the slaughterhouse lay exactly as they’d left it in the cold dead air.

Small congealed spheres of dark blood still hung in the low-gravity pocket, bobbing lazily through the beams of their shoulder lamps, and the shattered consoles spat sparks now and then, hissing thin white trails of burned circuitry into the dark.

Elena’s beam swept down across the floor, and her breath hitched sharply against the inside of her visor.

Right at the foot of the crushed command dais lay Ren Tachibana.

His upper body was pinned under a buckled sheet of structural framing with his eyes wide and glassy, reflecting the red beacons like two dead marbles.

A meter away, drifting a few centimeters above the scuffed deck, floated the rest of him, the frayed ends of his trousers soaked black and torn loops of pale viscera trailing through the dead air like weeds in an aquarium.

A violent wave of nausea twisted through Elena’s stomach, and she clamped a hand over the intake valve on her chest harness and swallowed the acid burning her throat.

’This was the man I believed,’ she thought as the shame rushed up through her chest until her temples throbbed. ’I stood on the Wanderer-7’s bridge and called Leo a frightened stray and sneered at his caution... all to hand our lives to a butcher who ended up torn apart like wet paper on his own floor.’

To her left, Harper’s boots struck the metal with a heavy hollow thud.

She lowered her cutting torch, and her grey-blue eyes found Dekker.

The thin mechanic lay where Chloe had left him beside the engineering console, his face driven straight down through the deck plates so that only the back of his skull and his twisted shoulders showed above the torn metal.

Harper’s jaw clenched so hard the cords stood out in her neck.

’You smiled at me,’ she thought, her knuckles whitening around the torch. ’You handed me tungsten pins and showed me balance specs and praised my armory work... while you were measuring us for cages. You got off easy, Dekker... Way too easy.’

Beside the weapons locker, Voss lay sprawled on his back in a wide blackening lake of his own blood.

His thick bearded throat was gone, torn out in a single upward motion and left as a ragged red crater, and his dead hands were frozen in an open pleading curve toward the ceiling.

Camila turned her face away at once and pressed both gloved hands against the sides of her helmet with her eyes squeezed shut, and small muffled sobs crackled over the comm-link.

’They were going to sell us,’ her mind spun in sick terrified circles. ’They were going to put us on an auction block in cages... There were no children. There was never any farm deck. It was all poison... I hate them.’

Jin-Ah stopped three paces into the room with her boots locked wide.

Her breath came in short clinical huffs that misted the bottom of her visor as her eyes moved methodically from Voss’s torn throat to Ren’s severed spine, measuring the force it would have taken.

’Human tissue fails at roughly three megapascals,’ her mind whispered, though a cold shiver ran down her arms. ’She’d done all of this with nothing but her hands, without a single tool... If she ever turns that hunger outward...’

She looked back at Chloe, who was standing quietly by the hatch with her crowbar on her shoulder, and she didn’t finish the thought.

Aoi stepped past the edge of the crushed console.

Her boots moved slowly and heavily and deliberately across the deck without flinching from the gore, one measured step after another, while the others watched her over the comm-link in total silence...

...until her boots stopped fifteen centimeters from the severed upper half of her younger brother.