Frick was like a man at the end of a whip, one that Zai had casually snapped.
Rating Metasmith had returned from the compoint with a warning about the maneuver, but she hadn't been told why the captain was turning the ship. It didn't make sense. The plan had been to stay oriented to the Rix. As always, someone was improvising. Frick cursed himself as a fool not to have specifically warned against this.
The plates explosively popped their strongline tethers and began to pile toward the starboard side of the cargo bay. They weren't moving fast enough to punch through the hullalloy exterior wall, but they were plenty massive enough to crush a crewman.
As one, the engineering team pulled their magnets and jumped toward the sternward wall. The sliding plates rubbed against each other, screeching like a heavy maglev engaging friction brakes.
But his team was clear.
"Well, the captain hasn't killed us yet!" he said as they landed around him.
A few of his team laughed, but Rating Metasmith raised her fist for their attention. "They said only one-twentieth for the first accel. But much higher for the second. Whatever they can muster."
"Splendid," Frick muttered, then cried, "Get your hoods on and tether with hard lines. We're going into vacuum!"
Ten seconds later, the promised second jolt struck.
It was far worse than Frick expected.
Executive Officer Hobbes's feet shot out as her count hit twenty, catching Verity Anst in the center of her chest. Her timing was perfect. The woman cried out in surprise as the ship bucked around them, the shock as violent as a collision. The force of Hobbes's kick was trebled by the sudden acceleration. She was flung from Anst's grip toward the bow, and rolled into a tumbling ball, bouncing down the corridor like a stone tossed down a well.
But Hobbes felt pain at her throat. Anst had managed to cut her as she'd pushed away. Hobbes felt the wound as she tumbled in freefall; her fingers came away slick, but there was no spurting gout of blood.
She came to a hard stop against a closed hatchway, cracking one shoulder, hand still at her throat. The integrity of her suit was broken, but the thick neck-seal had saved her life by millimeters.
Hobbes glanced down the corridor. Anst was twenty meters behind, kicking her way toward Hobbes with knife leveled.
A huge roar came from behind the executive officer. A shriek of metal and a howling wind from the bow. Damn, Hobbes thought. In the burst of acceleration sternward, the armor plates must have punched through the bow of the ship. The Lynx was depressurizing.
Hobbes wasn't far from the bow cargo bay. She glanced at the pressure meter on the hatchway door. It was dropping into the red.
She spun the hatch's manual seal, and its safeties complained. Hobbes pressed her hand to the ID plate, and the hatch relented to her command rank.
Gunner Anst was flying toward her, the outstretched knife a few meters away. Hobbes barely had time to beltclip herself to the wall before the hatch blew open.
A great, sudden wind yanked her hard against the clip, bending Hobbes at the waist like a jackknife. Verity Anst sailed past helplessly, screaming bloody murder, and was sucked through the hatch like a doll into a tornado.
Hobbes felt a stinging along one arm: Anst had managed to cut her again.
"Damn you!" she cried.
In a few seconds, the wind began to die down. Somewhere further toward the bow, sprayfoam must be sealing the breaches. Hobbes pulled her pressure suit's face mask on and extended strongline from her belt clip. She kicked out over the hatchway--with the wind, the hatch led effectively down--and dropped after Anst and toward Frick and his team.
A moment later, Hobbes found the mutineer, knocked unconscious against an ugly set of waste baffles. The pressure was still dropping, and the woman's flimsy emergency suit was hopelessly rent. Her eyes were starting to bug, forcing the closed eyelids open a hair. Anst wouldn't last long without help, but there wasn't anything Hobbes had time to do for her.
The blood from the cut on Hobbes's arm spurted in time with her racing heart. The globules floated against Gunner Anst's prone form, dotting her uniform.
"You've got my blood. Happy now?" Hobbes asked, spraying repair sealant onto her own wounds.
Another jolt rocked the ship. Not acceleration; something cracking. The structure of the Lynx was beginning to fail. Anst's breathing started to kick up; she was dying.
"May the Emperor save you from death," Hobbes said to Anst with the cold cadence of tradition. It was all she could do.
She paused to make sure the rent at her own throat was sealed, then pushed on, wondering if Frick and his team were still alive.
First Engineer
Decompression was not the word for it.
When the reverse thrust struck, the plates surged toward the bow, thirty tons of hullalloy doing at least twenty mps. The shock wave from the collision--loose armor plates smashing against the bow hull wall--hammered Frick's ears even through his pressure hood. He was tossed forward, then pulled up short on his tether with a gut-wrenching snap, finding himself spinning at the end of three meters of strongline. His ribs screamed in fresh agony.
Then came the truncated howl of flash decompression, total and instantaneous.
The entire forewall of the bow was knocked out. In the seconds before he pulled up his face mask to complete the pressure seal around his head, Frick saw the void before him with naked eyes. His ears and eyeballs felt as if they would burst, both sight and hearing ruptured, then the smart plastics of the suit found their grip, and the pounding in his head was replaced with the polymer smell of recycled air.
He blinked until vision returned, looked out at the huge hole torn out by the plates. Had the Lynx accelerated forward instead of in reverse, they would have all been crushed. Not just the engineering team--although they would have been flattened most spectacularly--but the entire vessel would have been pummeled by the careening armor.
Against the mean light of the stars, Watson Frick saw the glitter of a drone sailing away from the ship.
Good god, they must have used the deadman rail, launching the drone to push the Lynx backward.
What was the captain thinking! Even with easy gravity to compensate, the frigate was designed to accelerate smoothly, not with massive jolts.
Frick scanned his team. They all seemed conscious, although Metasmith was helping Ensign Baxton with his face mask seal. Something about the team looked wrong, however. It wasn't merely the sudden darkness, the hard shadows of orange gas giants and Legis's distant sun. It was that the team didn't seem to be ...