Hobbes shook her head in confusion. What was Frick babbling about?
"Did you ever ride the whip?" he asked.
Hobbes frowned. She remembered the game, a risky zero-gee maneuver reinvented by each successive class at the academy. A long line of recruits holding hands, getting up spin in the big zero-gym on the academy orbital. In the middle, you were hardly moving, but you could feel the line's mass pulling harder and harder in both directions. And at either end, cadets were flying at unbelievable speed. When the line disintegrated, they'd hit the wall as if shot out of a cannon. The game eventually ended with a few cracked collarbones or a fractured skull, and would be strictly forbidden until the next year rediscovered its pleasures.
The executive officer stared wide-eyed at the cracked hullalloy.
"What's going to happen, Frick?"
The first engineer stared at the cracks, then closed his eyes, his lips moving as if talking himself through some complex equation. He pushed out from the bulkhead to look over its entirety.
Hobbes checked Captain Zai's chronometer. Only twenty-eight seconds before the third acceleration was scheduled. Surely Zai knew that the cargo bay had ruptured. The ejected metal and oxygen traveling away from the ship would have been picked up even by passive sensors.
But he wouldn't know that the structural damage extended to another layer of bulkhead. With the Lynx in darkmode, the distributed internal sensors were offline. The bridge crew was blind to the fissures. And who knew how far the virus extended? It was possible that all the frigate's bulkheads were infected.
Would Zai stick to the schedule they had agreed upon?
Twenty seconds.
She pushed herself after Frick, reattached her audio contact to his.
"First Engineer, report!" The man opened his eyes.
"A yaw at that strength will tear the bow off the Lynx," he said flatly.
"We'll lose it all, back as far as the forward gunnery station at least. Maybe farther."
"Maybe the rest of the way?" Hobbes asked.
He nodded.
Hobbes didn't hesitate. There wasn't time to think. She had to contravene the foremost rule of this engagement. This was why Zai had sent her up here: She was the only officer who would break the captain's orders if necessary.
And it was absolutely necessary.
ExO Hobbes pulled the handheld communicator from her belt and activated it. If the Rix spotted the faint signal, so be it.
To hell with them. The Lynx was less than two minutes from safety.
"Priority, priority," she said. "Do not coldjet. We'll break up. Do not accelerate at all. Hobbes out."
Then she flicked the device off.
The first engineer looked at her. She ignored his appalled expression.
"We're stabilized out here. Put your team in damage control positions."
For a moment, he didn't move. He couldn't believe she'd broken the captain's orders.
"I'll spell it out for you, Frick: Move yourself and your people inside."
She yanked her tether, pulling them both toward the hatch.
"We may come under fire soon," she added. Indeed, they almost certainly would.
Katherie Hobbes had made sure of that.
Engineer-Rating The closer he approached the object, the less likely it seemed that Telmore Bigz had found the Lynx.
His vision continued to recover. Bigz could see now that the object wasn't entirely coherent. It seemed to be an agglomeration of large pieces, a few of which pulsed with their own rotation as the whole assemblage swung around itself. It couldn't be the frigate, unless tremendous damage had been done to her.
If Bigz were really going home, home had been blown to pieces.
He blinked again, trying to will his eyes back to clarity. He scanned the void, looking hopefully for a sign of the frigate nearby.
There was nothing.
Of course, even if he spotted the Lynx, there wasn't much he could do about it. Bigz's reaction canister was two-thirds empty--not enough juice in the can to jet off in a new direction.
He was committed to this wreckage.
A little closer, Bigz realized what the objects were.
He could see a ragged metal disk at the center of the assemblage, and a few large pieces of hullalloy around it. The whole thing was surrounded by a faint haze of frozen nitrox.
The largest object was the front of the Lynx, the cargo bay section that had blown out along with the loose armor plates and a certain engineer-rating.
Bigz whistled. The catastrophe that had hurtled him from the ship had been much bigger than he'd thought. He'd suspected a ten-meter wide hole--at most--causing decompression strong enough to suck him through it. But this was major damage. He wondered if any other giant chunks of the Lynx were floating free.
If the whole ship were in pieces, rescue wouldn't be coming anytime soon.
As he approached, Bigz's hurting eyes scanned the debris for a beacon pulse. Perhaps there were other survivors here. Full emergency transmissions weren't allowed--they would draw Rix fire--but someone might have activated their blinker without the radio transmitter. He swept his wrist light through the haze, probing the dark metal. Nothing. Even with the stimulant still pushing happiness through his veins, his heart sank. He was alone.
There were no corpses, at least. Bigz used up a bit more reaction mass to slow himself. He landed with a thunk on one of the pieces of shielding that the team had cut from the singularity generator. His suit magnets held, and the collision didn't set the massive shield spinning too violently.
He stared at the chunk of bow bulkhead a dozen meters away, trying to imagine what the cargo bay would look like now. Fortunately, the engineering team had been tethered to the floor side. If they'd been attached to the plates, they'd all be out here. As it was most of them would still be with the Lynx--it was a fluke that Bigz's ring had popped. Unless, of course, the cargo floor bulkhead had given away too.
No, that didn't make sense. If that had happened, the frigate would be all over the place, and Telmore Bigz would have been flying along with a lot of debris, nitrox, and other crewmen. Apparently, only he had been tossed from the ship.
He was alone, master of this tiny domain.
Suddenly, Bigz heard a message, a transmission pumped past his ruined ears into second hearing.
"Priority, priority" came a clear voice.
Shit! he thought. Who the hell was broadcasting? The Rix would localize the transmission in no time.
"Do not coldjet. We'll break up. Do not accelerate at all. Hobbes out."