The dirty, yellow atmo pulsed with micro-discharges. It was like sinking into a flashing mist. Burn lowered Audacity down slowly on her own gravity while beads of acrid looking liquid condensed on the porthole. "What is that stuff?"
Nobody answered Tig. None of the red suits on Audacity much felt like talking. Not even Parker.
Wrigley finally said, "Carbon dioxide. Nitrogen. Argon. Sulfur. Chlorine… And.. some organic crap. Atmospheric pressure and temperature not too bad, right here, low wind speed… At about 60Ks over this lava-ball’s surface, you could actually hold your breath and survive without an exosuit for like a minute."
At first, she was only a ring-shaped shadow in the mists, but then, Tipperary seemed to congeal out of the fog. The breaching ship floated bow ‘up’ with the axle shaped part of her hull and the engines pointing down at the surface. Burn parked the junk less than a kilometer off Tipperary’s port side, running parallel to her straight, axle-shaped main hull and perpendicular to her ‘wheel’.
Fifteen minutes later, Tig, Parker, Wambach and Raleigh entered the functional topside airlocks on the breaching ship. Since they’d been gone, Komora, Hongston, and Ellis had got plenty of systems up. They even cranked up the ship's pinch to produce extra negative gees, not only keeping the ship at its station high above the surface, but also producing a zero-gee environment immediately around the breaching ship to make the work easier and provide a workaround for the broken lifts in the ship’s main tube.
Tipperary even had a pressurized atmo now and it was good to get his helmet off once they got out of the locks, but everything smelled burnt. Wambach said what they smelled was the crew. "Anything’s better than the smell of this suit," Parker said before she took her helmet off.
Wambach was the first through the bridge hatch and he went straight to the Ops console to get the readings Burn wanted her to monitor from there. Since putting Posjic in a bag, she hadn’t said much.
Raleigh went up first. "Merry Christmas, Lt. Timms. We got you three NS191 emitters." Tig followed him with Parker close behind. "There they are." Raleigh pointed up through the bridge’s dome where Rampone and Komora in the two knuckledraggers were visible running the salvaged cargo containers to the ring section where they’d unpack them. "Three NS191s," Raleigh said. "As ordered."
"Three." Timms said it without looking up. With his helmet off and his head all bandaged up, the way he gestured over his console as he worked out the math made him look like some old-time parody of a mental patient. "We usually have five NS191 emitters. Three is two less than five."
Wambach growled it from the console without turning around. "Three is what we got."
"Three is two less than five."
Wambach’s nostrils flared as he shook his head. "And…" Parker said, pretending to casually wander between him and Timms, "That means exactly what, Lt. Timms?"
"We need to use a new protocol to push the preexisting hypermass distortions over their mass/energy thresholds to achieve a unified anomaly structure and open a viable faster-than-light passage."
"Spell it out for us," said Parker. "Assume we’re not PhDs in Noondie hypermass mathematics."
"It means were going to have to collide the particle streams we fire at a more direct angle. To do that, we’ll have to hold station closer to the transit point and collide the beams more directly to achieve the same result using less energy."
Tig understood what he meant. "What’s the problem with that?" he said, "We can do that. How much closer does the ship have to be to the Transit when we discharge?"
"Under two Ks from the spatial breach..."
"You mean under two Ks from a super massive fireball of energy and radiation," Raleigh said. "If the breaching ship is going to get cooked, then we'll run Tipperary remotely. I can handle that." He actually grinned for a second until Timms opened his mouth again.
"Without a CDCS, without a control system for the discharge, we can’t fire properly."
"You saying we’ve got to do all this manually?"
"Tipperary’s fully automated control systems are gone and no control system you strip from your junks or your fighters will be capable of handling it. If this ship can discharge and breach space, we’ll need at least ten people on board to coordinate it. And we'll need practice."
For a moment Tig pictured all of them dying at these consoles and the junks flying on to warn Hardway. Something like that might have sounded heroic once, but not now. "No. No," he said.
"No, what?" Raleigh said. "You got a better idea?"
"We don’t all have to be on this ship to make it breach space." Tig hesitated before saying it. Maybe because he saw on some subconscious level he was already aware of how close Wambach was to losing it. But he said it. "There’s one control system we have that we could use that’s actually got what it takes to handle that kind of complex input/output and do it fast enough to fire the NS191 emitters in sync a million times a second. Chief Horcheese’s neural processors can do the job," he said. For some reason he ignored the blanching expression of their faces and the mouths now beginning to gape open. He should have stopped talking when he saw that. "We have to strip off the Chief’s artificial limbs, access her neural interface processors and splice her into Tipperary so she can act as the CDCS to control the discharge."
He’d been numb to her expression while he was talking, but now, he saw the change on Parker’s face in the instant before Wambach lept. Tig never saw him launch himself off the console, but while the pink lights flashed from the impacts to his skull, an oddly dissociative part of his mind calmly deduced that’s what must have happened. He tried to cover his face and he didn’t understand why Wambach was hitting him until his screaming cut through the ringing in his ears and the bloody pink flashes. "Posjic ain’t enough?!"
Tig didn't want to hit him back. Between hamfist blows, he saw Parker try to knock Wambach off while Raleigh just stood by and watched. Then, he saw Burn’s face. She hadn’t been there before, but she was there now, over Wambach’s shoulder with her forearm across his throat. Wambach raised up that fat fist and tried to bring it down on Tig’s face one more time before his eyes rolled back in his head and every muscle in his body went limp.
Burn released him, made sure he was breathing, and pushed his bulk off across the bridge. Then, she turned to Tig, still bent backwards over the NAV console, leaking his mud into the air in purple-red globs. He opened his mouth to speak and inhaled a glob and choked on it.
Burn said, "The fuck was he beating you for?"
"Nothing," Tig said, wiping the blood away with his forearm. Tig Meester was no snitch.
Burn didn’t see it that way. "Wambach is getting locked in a hold. You’re going to tell me what happened or you’re going to tell Chief Horcheese what happened." Burn said, "Choose."
Tig shook his head 2 degrees in either direction. It was barely even enough to be called a refusal, but she grabbed him by his exosuit’s front panel, swing him in an arc over her head, and threw him down through the open bridge hatch. He bounced off the deck below and the rail and fell into the charred, emptiness of the main tube. By the time he’d fallen 50 meters and almost righted himself, Burn was on him. She slammed into him hard and rode him into the bulkhead and pinned him against a ladder. Suddenly the burnt smell of the ship’s atmo burrowed up his nose and stung him behind his face.
"The Chief doesn’t need to find out about Wambach," Tig said "I don’t want to report him."
Burn nodded. "That’s your business. So why did he go ape?"
As Tig told her about Chief Horcheese’s neural interface and how it could control Tipperary’s systems when they breached space, he heard the words coming out of his mouth the way Wambach must have heard them. The way he was describing parts of the Chief and how they could be used, it sounded like he was talking about some intercontinental hopper he planned to rip and strip for parts. It was hard to look Burn in the face as he told her the whole plan. Even he didn’t like it. He desperately wanted to make his mark, but not like this. If there was any other way… Part of him hoped Burn would pick up where Wambach left off and beat the idea out of his skull.
Burn didn’t do that, of course. And he knew she wouldn’t. She asked him, "Are you sure?" and when he said he was, she squinted at him for a half-second trying to see if he really believed that himself. Maybe after he failed to take into account the way the radiation from the debris field would screw with the transmissions from the cargo containers, she wasn’t so eager to believe him.
However much or how little confidence she had in him after that omission and however she felt about using the Chief like that, Burn did the only thing she could do. She ordered him to lay out his plan in detail.
*****
Three hours later, through the bridge’s dome, Tig could see Wambach and the others out on the ring section floating, half disappeared in the yellow fog. They looked like ghosts as they set the NS191 replacement emitters in their mounts. Horcheese had been out there with them the last time he looked up from the console. At that very moment, he’d been mapping out how to use her as the ship’s primary control system. She must have heard of the plan by now. When he looked up later and didn’t see her out there anymore, it worried him.
The projection of Tipperary floated almost a meter long over the console. The structure of the conduits for the new control system that would interface with Chief Horcheese had been color-coded and now covered the ghostly, holographic ship like nerves coming together in a nexus at the center of the breaching ship’s bridge.
"That’s where Chief Horcheese sits, right?"
He didn’t hear Parker coming and his surprise jolted him out of his seat. "The hell you come from?"
"You should let me help you with the interface systems," Parker said, "I’m your ESys specialist. I’m supposed to be your partner."
"I don’t need any help," he said keeping his face in the console. It was a lie. He didn’t want to show her the part he was working on now. He’d actually been putting on his helmet so that he could project that model in his visor to make sure nobody else saw it while he was working. Even he was unsettled by it.
"For fuck’s sake, Tig." From where she hovered over his shoulder, she stabbed at the console with her extended finger. He tried to bat her hand away, but he wasn’t fast enough. Frickin' Parker. Later, she'd probably say some crap about how he was slow on purpose because he wanted her to see it.
When her finger hit the console, the life-size schematic of limbless Master Chief Evelyn Horcheese was projected upwards to float perfectly vertical in the air over the console next to the meter-long model of Tipperary. The Chief’s milky eyes looked strangely alive, but her face was so devoid of expression it looked like a death mask.
From the four places on her torso where the artificial, machine limbs would have attached had they been represented, what looked like endless colored veins extended out from the neural interface ports, representing the connections between the breaching ship’s systems and the neural processors set in Chief Horcheese’s torso.
Parker’s face twinged as if something inside her had curdled.
"Everyone off the bridge!" Chief Horcheese practically bellowed it. "Not you, Meester. You stay right there." Horcheese had arrived. He slammed his palm down hard on the console to kill the projection and did it too hard...so hard that he pushed himself up and out of the chair. Parker made for the hatch like the bridge was on fire.
The way Horcheese came at him made him imagine she was going to rip his face off like he’d watched her do to that Squidy out in the debris field. After being beaten by Wambach and manhandled by Burn in the last three hours, Tig couldn’t help it. Part of his brain really thought she was there to kill him. He flinched before Chief Horcheese caught hold of the console and hovered over him at 45 degrees like some vengeful spirit.
"I may not believe all the bullshit you sling like Burn does," she said. "But don’t you dare question my commitment to this mission - this war."
He hadn’t expected that. "What the hell are you talking about? I never…."
"You went over my fucking head, Cherry. You went to Burn with your plan instead of me. And you did it because you didn’t think I’d greenlight it. You didn’t think I’d be willing to give what it takes to make your stupid plan work."
"That’s not…"
"If Burn orders me to, I will surrender my body for you to mod like some Staten Island City hotrod, but before I let you cut me up and splice me into this fucking ship, I want you to know exactly what’s going to happen if you fuck this up. I know. Raleigh knows. Wambach knows." He winced. "Yeah. Posjic’s dead now," she said. "Maybe you really are working with some next-level skills and we humble redsuits don’t always understand what the hell you’re on about, Tig Meester, but every salty red that does the job knows that when we fuck up, it won’t just kill us. It’ll probably kill a whole bunch of other people that were counting on us doing our jobs right."
"I can do this." He could. He knew he could.
"Are you sure? I mean are you really sure? You said that last time. And we ended up inside the debris field where you said we’d never have to go. When it comes to what we’re doing out here, ‘sort of’ isn’t good enough. You fuck with uncertainty and it will fuck us all back and we will all get reamed. When things don’t work out like you thought this time, it won’t just be Posjic that pays the price. It’ll be all of us. And Parker. You think about that real hard before you say you’re sure this will work."
Horcheese bored into him with that heavy stare and behind her head, through the dome, the dirty, swirling yellow fog waved like a rippled sheet. "The hell?" A patch of space so huge it made a halo around Horcheese’s head twisted and shifted behind her just like the stars had twisted and shifted behind UNS Duer before she’d been silhouetted by the detonation of an alien warhead. Tig blurted out, "Squidy!"
The alien emerged from its cloak like a body he once saw surface in an algae pond. Its hull was covered in what looked to be patches of the yellow clouds behind it. They seemed to break apart like an oil slick and migrate down the sides of the hull as it showed itself. It curved like a 120-meter tusk, all swelled out on one side with a set of small bays for its warheads. A pair of tower-mounted small-bore guns towers jutted out port and starboard.
It fired a two-second burst aimed at the breaching ship’s reactors at almost the same moment Horcheese fired the thrusters. She spun the ship, attempting evasive maneuvers it was never designed for. The aliens’ rapier streams missed by scant meters and left glowing swaths of ionized atmo behind them.
Audacity and Greenstone's cannon shells sparkled over the rough alien hull for almost a second before it vanished.