reikah
in
inmyvortex
Fic: Not Quite Paradise [11/?]
Title: Not Quite Paradise [11/?; ongoing]
Fandom: Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle
Pairing: Fai/Kurogane/Yuui
Author: Co-write between mikkeneko & reikah
Rating: R
Word count: 7,828 this chapter (78,332 total)
Notes: "In a future where science and psionics rule the skies, and both are controlled by the iron fist of the Earth government, two young men make a desperate leap into the unknown in order to evade capture and slavery. AU, Kurogane/Yuui/Fai."
Part One - Earth: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]
Part Two - Mars: [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]
← back to chapter ten
Part two: Mars
hunted by the evil ones
Kurogane remained tense all the way back to the ship, and Yuui couldn't help but mull over what he'd implied. He'd never seen his... companion in a rage like that, and the genuine terror he'd beaten into the Kajitori would soon make way for bluster and then revenge, no matter what; it was the coward's way. Would that mean an attack on the Mokona? Was she even armed? None of her crew had said anything about munitions...
Privately he decided that as soon as they were out of Martian airspace, Kurogane was going to get an earful. He had no right to risk the ship and its occupants because of his temper tantrums, whatever the Kajitori had done to him. Black Dragon of Suwa or not, whatever that meant; the kids might know more. Not for the first time he privately cursed his own patchy and insufficient education; the military school had tried its best to even out his knowledge but the problem with history was that there was a lot of it, and more by the hour. He'd picked the advanced coding elective in the academy anyway, because Fai loved programming and said it would be a much more useful course.
The ship's comlink crackled, and Syaoran's earnest voice came through. "Captain, I see you on Mokona's sensors - did the meeting go okay? Do you need me to bring a grav dolly down to the shuttle bay?"
Kurogane leaned forward and hit a button, his jaw set and his face mulish. "Yeah, we got cargo. But we're gonna need to scramble, so stay the hell where you are." He hit another link and the line closed, and Yuui narrowed his eyes at the man; Kurogane caught it in his peripherals, naturally. "Don't look at me like that," he growled.
"Do you really think they'll come after us?" Yuui asked quietly.
"Dunno," said Kurogane. "We'll have to cross the Kajitori trading lines on our way to the Jovian moons. Could go either way." The Mokona loomed up before them, her shuttle bay doors already open; Kurogane tapped a few keys on the console and the autopilot took them in far smoother than any human ever could have.
Yuui hunched in his seat and folded his arms over his chest, and Kurogane glanced over at him and growled. "Listen," he said, as the doors began closing; the light over the airlock leading further into the ship was still red - it wasn't safe to leave the shuttle yet. "We'll get through this. Ship's got enough firepower to see us out."
Yuui thinned his mouth. "Why did you have to attack them in the first place?" he said. "What could they possibly have done that pissed you off so much, Captain Anger Management Issues? I've told you my secrets, the least you could tell me is why."
Kurogane stiffened, and then glared at him. "It's not a fucking swap meet," he snapped. "You're not fucking entitled to know everything about me, spoonbender."
The mild slur on telekinetics made Yuui fall back, mouth snapping shut as he glared. The light flashed green as Mokona judged the pressure and air sufficient for human habitation, and with a low growl Kurogane pushed his way out of the pilot seat and shoved open the shuttle door. Yuui scrambled after him, but didn't say anything, still stinging with the rebuke. Outside the shuttle bay Kurogane rapped on the glass communications unit with his knuckles until Mokona's rabbit-like avatar appeared there, her ears tilted curiously. He ordered her to find Sakura and send her to the cockpit, and Yuui trailed him as he made his way there himself, his strides long and purposeful. Sakura beat them to it; she was idly swinging in the copilot's chair in her work coveralls when they entered. Syaoran was fiddling with something electric on top of the pilot console; he had a row of screwdrivers laid out before him. They both glanced up and smiled when Kurogane strode in.
"There might be shooting," said Kurogane bluntly, and their smiles vanished. Syaoran grabbed his screwdrivers and began bundling them into a toolbox; Sakura jumped to her feet and zipped her coveralls all the way up to her throat. "The engine good to go?"
"Yes," she said bravely. "It ought to give you six hours' hard burn in a fight, but it'll need to run on half power for a few days after if we're going to get to Jupiter on the same amount of fuel."
Syaoran shoved the toolbox under his desk; he always wore his EVA suit when he was working but he grabbed the helmet and pushed it on. Kurogane nodded at him. "Software is up to date, but the left three canons need looking at," he said through the open window. He pulled up a map on the big screen, and Kurogane folded his arms over his chest and squinted at it before grunting and nodding.
"I'll get those," he said. "We need to get gone, kid. I'll be back here before we cross Kajitori lines. They're the ones who might be taking a potshot at us." He turned on his heel and left while Syaoran's mouth began shaping a question, and both the kids glanced at Yuui uncertainly before Syaoran turned back to the pilot's console and began directing them out.
"What happened, Yuui-san?" Sakura asked quietly. Her face was pale. "You went to see the triads, how could you made the Kajitori so mad?"
"There were some Kajitori in the bar there," Yuui said, slowly. "As soon as Kurogane saw them he just - he just went into a kind of rage, and attacked them. "
Sakura gasped and covered her face in her hands, her eyes wide. "Oh, no," she whispered.
"I can't believe the captain would do that," Syaoran said in a shocked voice. "I always knew that he hated the Kajitori, but I never dreamed that he would…" He trailed off and shook his head.
"Did he kill any of them?" Sakura asked urgently.
"Princess," said Syaoran quietly, his dark eyes on her.
"If he did they'll have a blood feud with him," she said. "It's how the old zaibatsu work, everyone knows that. They're clannish like you wouldn't believe. The Mino don't mind so much as long as you pay restitution, but the Kajitori hunt you down to save face. The Captain told us that."
"No, nobody died. Just a lot of bruises and some nasty cuts," Yuui reassured her, and she breathed a sigh of relief. Slowly, recalling details of the fight, he said, "The Kajitori seemed to know who he was. He called himself the 'Black Dragon of Suwa' and they were... spooked. Does that mean anything to you?"
"Suwa?" said both kids sharply, and he blinked at them in surprise and nodded confirmation. They exchanged a look.
"I've never heard of a black dragon," Sakura said. "But Suwa, well, all the spacers know about Suwa. It was…"
"Assume I'm not a spacer," Yuui said dryly. "Who or what was Suwa?"
"There used to be a third space station company," said Syaoran slowly. "Besides the Kajitori and the Mino. Miss Yeng told us about it at school just before Earth tried to... well. Suwa, she said it was called."
"Yes," Sakura agreed, nodding. "I remember. They were the second full space habitation to be finished, not counting the test station. They handled most of the traffic between Earth and Luna, and it made them hugely rich, until..."
"Until what?" Yuui asked.
"There was an accident," said Syaoran. "The space station - the core overheated and exploded. The plating managed to contain the explosion, but there was a design flaw in the hull and the explosion caused a breach into space. Which would have been okay still, the space stations even then were designed to partition in the event of a leak, but -"
"The bulkhead program was corrupted," Sakura finished. "The partitions didn't come down like they should have. It was awful, just terrible. There was no time to evacuate - everyone living on the space station died in the first five minutes. I remember my dad talking about it."
"There were three separate inquiries just by the Martian government since then - the last one was just before, well, we had to leave school," Syaoran supplied the rest of the tale. "It made a huge sensation about safety regulations in space travel and habitation. Ichihara industries made a killing just by programming partition control into their AIs as an extra layer of safety after that."
"I can imagine," Yuui said. He'd met Chairman Ichihara's daughter - Ichihara Yuuko - several times at the psionic academy. She had been a personal friend of the professor's before she'd left the family business to go into politics; a shrewd, sharp woman. "But - fifty years ago? That must have been before the Captain was even born. Were there any survivors? Relatives on other colonies or something?"
The kids looked at each other again, and Sakura shrugged. "I don't know," she said. "I don't remember. It was all before my time, we only learned so much about it because our school used it as a safety training example. Exposure to the deep vacuum is - oh, no, I almost forgot, the Captain will have my head -"
"What?" Yuui said, mystified, but she waved at him quickly and sprinted out the door, choosing to bypass the rails and jump directly to the hallway beyond with a light thump.
"She's gone to get her EVA suit," said Syaoran. "You should do the same. We're coming up to Kajitori lanes now."
"Get my what?" Yuui repeated. His mind was still trying to wrap itself around the news of the Suwa disaster, and trying to connect it with their mysterious captain. He resolved to look up the Suwa disaster in the archives as soon as he had the time, and see if he could find anything about this 'Black Dragon,' too -
"Your vacuum suit," Syaoran said, looking at him solemnly. "It might be dangerous. If there's fighting, there's a possibility we might lose atmosphere. Just in case, everyone needs to be suited up."
"I don't have a suit," Yuui said in puzzlement. "Why would I? I didn't have anything when I came on the ship except the clothes on my back."
Syaoran was staring at him increasingly alarm, as though Yuui had just told him he didn't have a head. "Oh, the Captain's not going to like this," he fretted.
Speak of the devil, the door slid open and Kurogane ducked to fit inside. He was suited up, in a black suit lined with red, but he carried his helmet loosely in one massive hand. His cool eyes swept briefly over Yuui before he turned to Syaoran, blatantly ignoring the blond man. "Get to your post, kid," he said. "We've got some major ass to haul."
Kurogane settled himself in the captain's chair. Despite the tension singing in his head and neck, he couldn't help but relax a tiny bit at finally being back in his ship, back in control of the universe or at least the most immediate part of it. "Mokona, show us a 3d model of local space on the co-pilot's stand."
Immediately the projection lights lit up, studied at various angles around the table, and a tiny representation of the ship appeared along with a small model of the planet they had just left. Kurogane folded his arms. "Highlight Kajitori-claimed space lanes."
A yellow cylinder appeared, dwarfing the Mokona and disappearing into the distance on either end. His ship was a couple hundred kilometers from the nearest marker; a handful of other vehicles were scattered between them, small numbers floating in the air around them. Cruising Speed, read one attached to the model of the Mokona by a thin red thread.
"We will enter Kajitori space in twenty two minutes and thirty-one seconds," the Mokona said.
"Tch," said Kurogane. "Do a sweep, label all nearby ships in a ten thousand kilometer radius. Kajitori ships in red, any MPS or Earth security ships in green."
Small dots appeared; a cluster of red ones along the edges of the space lane. No green ones, but two blue ones. Kurogane grunted and raised his hand, tapping at those unaffiliated markers with a gloved finger. "Who are these guys?"
"Private yachts registered to Yakusagawa Technologies, Luna LTD. Registered as the Primela and the Shogo," Mokona said, and Kurogane snorted dismissively. Small fry, probably some rich kid's private joyride. "The ships registered to the Kajitori Corporation are located on a habitation platform. Our route will take us less than a hundred kilometers from it. Are you sure you wish to continue?"
Kurogane paused, frowning, but Syaoran was the one to pipe up. "Recommend another route to Europa, showcasing fuel expenditure," he said.
The model scrolled out to show the hulking goliath of Jupiter and the small moons orbiting it. Europa's orbit of its gas giant was marked with a ring of white; Mokona traced several routes in pink and said, "Next efficient alternative route adds three months travel time and seven point three two repeating kilograms of fuel."
Kurogane considered it, weighing the risks versus the cost. Then he shook his head; a mercenary captain couldn't afford to bleed profit by jumping at shadows. "That's almost a quarter million yebs. No. We'll stick with our course and hope the Kajitori are too busy yelling at those idiots from Mars to get organized."
"Aye, sir." Syaoran looked dubious, but he punched in the sequence to break the Mokona from its parking orbit and head for the Kajitori lanes.
There was no change inside the ship itself, no change in acceleration or feeling of pressure - nor would they be unless something went very wrong. The hum of the computer and the engines of the ship were the same as always, the routine comm chatter as Syaoran spoke with the Mino and Kajitori traffic controllers to announce their change in position were all completely routine.
Still, Kurogane felt the tension on the bridge ratchet upwards as they approached the limits of Kajitori-controlled space. Damn, this whole Mars trip had turned out to be a disaster. Ruefully he remembered Sakura's "bad feeling" about staying in Mars orbit too long, and regretted - for the first time - his own lack of impulse control. Even if they got out of this one without trouble, this was going to cause serious problems for them the next time they tried to go to Mars or Earth.
He saw from the corner of his eye as Yuui approached and slipped into the unoccupied copilot's chair, but he reminded himself he was ignoring the nosy bastard and focused intently on the display ahead of him.
"So this ship does have guns, after all?" Yuui said in a casual voice, and Kurogane's shoulders twitched. "How very pirate-like of you after all, I was beginning to wonder if you were 'The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything.' "
"We're not pirates, we're smugglers," Syaoran corrected him from the pilot's chair. "We don't rob other people."
"We have guns," Kurogane said, ignoring the last jab. "Port and bow side, radial array, 50cm ballistic cannon ports. Seeker ammunition, we have flash jammers on the hull in case anyone tries to shoot back at us. We're not going to be staging any raids on fortified space stations any time soon, but it's enough to defend ourselves."
"And you're the gunner as well as the captain?" Yuui said, propping his chin on his fist as he leaned on the arm of the chair. "Hyuu, Captain Samurai is just full of useful talents!"
Kurogane tried to ignore that, although it was hard, since his neck kept threatening to blush. Syaoran looked up from his own console. "It's a little more complicated than that," he replied. "In an actual fight, the computer does the shooting. Everything happens so fast that a human being would never be able to keep up with it in real-time. But someone has to tell the computer what programs to run, what targets to look for and when to start and stop, and that's the gunner. Captain Kurogane is one of the best there is."
"And you're supposed to be a hotshot pilot, so why don't you look at your map instead of playing Combat Programming 101 with our passenger," Kurogane said sharply. Syaoran looked sheepish and returned dutifully to his console, but the truth was there wasn't much for him to do right now. They had entered the Kajitori space lanes, and that meant that there was only one pre-programmed allowable course that they could let their ship run. Syaoran wouldn't take over manual piloting until they reached the Junction and exited the space lane again.
In some ways the job of the gunner and the job of the pilot were similar; both were ship's functions ultimately handled by computers. When a split-second's hesitation could cause your ship to collide with an unforeseen obstacle - or be shot out of the sky by an enemy - then only computers could react quickly enough and with the necessary precision to move the ship to safety. That went double for the gunner's job, because if you were facing an enemy ship then you could be sure their guns were being manned by computers, too.
But although computers excelled at doing tasks very fast and very precisely, they were terrible at deciding which tasks should be done. Even the AIs were limited in that respect. Computers were the ultimate in good at tactics but bad at strategy; in the end, there had to be a trained, competent human mind behind the keyboard to tell the computer what to prioritize, what evasion course to run, what targeting pattern to fire, when to break off and when to seize the advantage of surprise.
There was another part to it, too; someone had to write those flight plans and targeting patterns in the first place. Kurogane had been trained in programming language, of course; pretty much everyone was nowadays, since being able to talk to a computer in the languages it understood was as an essential a skill as being able to read and write. But he would never be more than a passable programmer; his real talent lay in devising tactical patterns, as Syaoran's was in creating flight map vectors. The computer would be the one to actually fire the guns, but he had written the programs it was using, and he would be the one to tell it when to fire.
All in all, though, he really hoped he wouldn't have to fire his weapons on this trip at all. There were too damn many ships around; witnesses as well as potential casualties in an open firefight. But if it came down to that or surrendering his ship - and his passengers - to the Kajitori, Kurogane knew that was exactly what he would do.
He snapped out of his musing as Mokona sounded a discordant tone. "Warning, proximity alert," Mokona's flat voice told them. "Kajitori security vessels on a zero-sixty intercept heading."
"Have they hailed us?" Kurogane snapped, his attention zeroing in on the blood-red icons of the Kajitori ships on his plot.
"No, Captain! I would have alerted you immediately," Syaoran said with just a touch of reproach. "They're moving pretty slowly, and they haven't altered course towards us. It's possible that they're just a routine patrol."
"Anything's possible," Kurogane said, watching the enemy ships intently. "But not likely. Mokona, bring up an outside visual and zoom in on these guys."
The overhead screens obediently blinked into LED display mode, and the vision of the planet below them and the black sky around it flowed past the screen as it zoomed in on the Kajitori ships. There were three of them, and it was clear from their sleek designs that they were security ships, not cargo or passenger. They were moving at a leisurely diagonal across the spacelane, slipping between the other traffic without actually crossing their flight paths. The black and orange logo of the snarling tiger was clearly visible on the ships' hulls.
"Orders, captain?" Syaoran was watching him anxiously.
Kurogane felt a sudden spasm of hatred, and wrestled it down with difficulty. This was not the place to start a fight, not in the middle of a densely populated transit area; even a tiny piece of space wreckage could cause a holocaust if it struck another vehicle at high speeds, as Kurogane had reason to know. He couldn't fire the first shot, but if they did - if he let them get in the first shot… In a dogfight like this, the one that struck the first blow had a huge advantage, and at three-to-one odds, he didn't need any more disadvantages stacked against him.
He felt Yuui watching him intently, and he was reminded of their conversation a week ago, when Yuui had come to his chambers in the middle of the night. He'd berated Yuui for using violence when he didn't need to, for killing people just because he couldn't think of any other option. Just because it would be easier. If he meant to remain a man in Yuui's eyes, to say nothing of the kids, he couldn't forget that now.
"Maintain heading and speed," he ordered, his voice somehow managing to come out calm. "Lay low. Play nice. We're just harmless merchant shipping, nothing else. But if they make a move towards us, break for the least-time heading that will get us clear of the lane and out of the way of the other ships."
"Aye, captain," Syaoran said in relief, and turned back to his board.
The tension pounded in his head along with his heartbeat, as the Kajitori ships glided closer to their position. They moved like sharks through the water, arrogant and secure in their superiority over space, and Kurogane tensed with a vicious need to strike them out of the sky even as he battled with his own awareness about how vulnerable his ship was. If pitched firefights with Kajitori security was what he'd wanted, then he shouldn't have bought a merchant ship and filled it with people he cared about…
The Kajitori's heading slid over theirs; at this magnification, the bellies of their ships seemed almost close enough to touch as they passed over the Mokona's roof. Kurogane could count every gunport in the ship's hull, but the ships neither slowed nor twitched from their heading, and Kurogane exhaled a very slow, silent breath. So, he'd been in time after all; no company-wide memo had gone out flagging their ship. Maybe by the time he came back this way, he could change the shape of his hull, get new transponder numbers, repaint to some other color; maybe he would even have a new ship, and they would never be able to track him down.
As the last vision of the Kajitori's thrusters disappeared behind them, the bridge seemed to breathe again. "All right, we're in the clear," he said aloud. "But keep an eye out. We've still got to make it to the Junction before they catch on. Mokona, send up a shipwide alert if any Kajitori vessels even look at us sideways, all right?"
"Acknowledged," the computer said.
Syaoran took a deep breath. "Looks like we're not getting in a shooting war with the Kajitori today after all," he said, bravely forcing humor into his voice.
"Disappointed?" Yuui needled Kurogane, and the taller man scowled at him.
Footsteps came from the hatchway, and Sakura popped up breathlessly. "I made sure everything is secure in the engine room," she reported. She was in her own vacuum suit, except for the helmet which she had hooked onto the straps on her chest. Like most personally owned vacuum suits, which had to be custom-tailored to fit their owners in the first place, Sakura had customized hers; the material of the suit was a pale pink and the latches and decals were in the shape of flower petals. Syaoran was the only spacer Kurogane knew who hadn't bothered to customize his, sticking to the standard tan color with the bulky factory-issued goggle plates. "How are things going up here? I didn't hear any alarms."
"We're clear, Princess," Syaoran told her with a reassuring smile. "The Kajitori didn't even ping us."
"Oh." Rather than cheering up, this news seemed to make Sakura even more uneasy. She frowned, hesitating. "Are you sure?"
All eyes on the bridge turned to Sakura, who flushed unhappily under the scrutiny. "Why do you ask?" Kurogane said quietly.
"Because - well - it's my 'bad feeling,' " she blurted out. She sounded embarrassed to say it, but Kurogane had constantly reassured her that he'd rather chase something that turned out to be a red herring than to not get a real warning when they needed one. "The one I told you about the other day, Captain… it hasn't gone away. If anything it's worse now."
"The Kajitori?" Syaoran asked tensely.
She shook her head helplessly. "I don't know. I don't know. I don't think so. Just - ships, and - "
Kurogane turned back towards the 3d display, frowning intensely as he raked over the scattered field of space and ships. They were nearing the Junction now, the place where they could break out of the tightly regulated Kajitori control and set a course for the outer solar system. Traffic was thinning out now, most people having business with the planet below and not the chilly, distant outposts of the system's gas giants.
The crimson icons of the Kajitori were cruising steadily away from them, and no others were within sensor range. The green icons of the MPS patrol had vanished from the plot entirely. The blue -
Kurogane's frown deepend as he leaned forward. The pair of blue icons that Mokona had ID'd as private yachts were still with them; they'd maintained their course behind the Mokona's for the last half-hour. What business could a pair of light pleasure ships have with the Jovian junction? They were hardly rated for deep space travel at all. It might make sense if they were heading for the pleasure resorts of the asteroid belt, but at this time of year those were clear in the other direction.
An uneasy feeling began to creep up his spine. "Mokona, I want you to scan those ships again," he said, tapping his finger in the box of light indicating the two vessels. "Not just their transponder IDs, their history and schematics if you can get them. I want to get a better look at who these guys are."
A full minute passed, as Mokona bounced a signal back to the Mars planetary network to check their files. They crossed over the Junction border back into open space, out of the Kajitori territory, but no one blinked; it was, after all, only a line in space.
"Identities confirmed," Mokona's voice came back, and with a blip the ships' information began to scrawl up on the display. "The Primela and the Shogo are two privately owned vessels. Original manufacturer: Neil Armstrong Construction Industries, Inc. Outfitting and private sale: Yasukagawa Industries, Luna, LTD. Purchased by brothers Mark and Elijah Hamilton of Milan Territory, Italy, Eurasia on June 4th, two thousand -"
"Captain," Syaoran interrupted Mokona's biography, and the strain in his voice caused Kurogane to look over at him. His face was pale. "I know that ship."
"What, you know these guys?" Kurogane asked.
Syaoran shook his head. "No, not the owners," he said. "I know the ship. I know her stats, and I know that's not her real name. When Sakura and I came on this ship I downloaded a file of all the mechanical footprints of the small craft that the EFSS had in its fleet. That ship over there is one of them, and it's not a yacht at all; it's just meant to look like one from the outside."
He met Kurogane's eyes squarely. "It's a fed ship in disguise, Captain," he said quietly. "And it's hunting us."
Right. Kurogane inhaled deeply. "That changes things," he said brusquely. "If they're stalking us out into the hinterlands here, it means they don't want to confront us when there's a lot of witnesses around," he said. "That's fine by me. If they're going to try to ambush us, they're going to get a surprise of their own."
"Mokona, battle stations, but don't flash any of the external alarms!" he snapped, turning back to his plot, and the lights in the cockpit turned red as Mokona began to switch over to combat mode. In battle mode all of the nonessential ship's functions would be shut down; even life support and gravity would be turned to a minimum as all power shunted over to the propulsion and munitions systems.
Kurogane yanked his helmet on and snapped the seals into place, glancing quickly around to confirm that the kids were doing the same. Sakura's suit always privately struck him as ridiculous, with pink glitter on the helmet and a tinted visor, but it would protect her from vacuum and that was what mattered.
He turned towards Yuui, intending to reassure his passenger that he had no intention of giving either him or his brother up to the feds. Then stopped when his mind registered what exactly was so out of place about Yuui on the bridge; he wasn't wearing a suit.
He wasn't wearing a goddamned vacuum suit.
"You idiot!" he bellowed, his voice muffled by the faceplate; he snapped it up in order to better convey his glare. "Where the hell is your suit? I told you and Sakura both to get suited up over an hour ago!"
"I," Yuui stuttered, as Syaoran's voice came over their internal suits' radio; "He doesn't have one, captain."
"What the hell d'you mean, he doesn't have one?" Kurogane snarled, his mind reeling with the unbelievable absurdity of the statement. "What kind of brain-dead flipper-fingered idiot goes on any kind of long-term space-travel without a vacuum suit in tow?"
"I never had one!" Yuui shouted back at him. "Why would I? I never even planned to go into space! I was lucky to get myself and my brother out, let alone stop and buy a vacuum suit on the route!"
It was just absurd. It would have been funny if it weren't so horrifyingly dangerous. No space traveller - especially not one raised in a space habitat - would go anywhere without their custom-fitted vacuum suit somewhere close by, and they always maintained a constant awareness of where the suit was and how fast they could get into it. Every stationer had one, children grew through them and passed them down like clothes when they got too big; it was a moment of pride when you got old enough to have one specially issued for you. Syaoran wore his on board out of habit, even when there was no danger; even dome-raised Sakura understood the importance of keeping a breath-support system available. Only an Earthie - only a stupid, unprepared, witless infant of an Earthie - would not even consider the danger.
Just the thought of what could happen if they took a direct hit to their ship made the hair stand up on the back of Kurogane's neck in horror. He whirled around and grabbed Sakura by the shoulder.
"Take him to the ship's lockers," he ordered her tensely. "Get him fitted in our spare suit - it should be big enough for him. Then both of you get into the engine room and stay there!" The engine room had the heaviest shielding in the ship; it had to, if it had any hope of containing the blast in case of engine failure. The same superdense plating that encased the engine room and provided gravity for the rest of the ship would laugh at any ship-mounted missile; once in there, they'd be safe.
"Aye, captain!" Sakura said - he only heard her over the radio, since she had intelligently kept her helmet closed. He would have skinned her if she had opened it now. She saluted and turned back to the hatch, feeling her way down the ladder carefully in the bulky suit.
He turned to Yuui - so skinny, so frail, so unprotected - and fury burned through him with all the force of his fear. "Follow her," he snarled. "Get the suit and get to safety. We don't have time to stop and coddle a stupid dirtboy in the middle of a firefight!"
Yuui looked at him, mouth hanging open as he tried to shape words; then he whirled away and followed Sakura down the hatch.
Kurogane tried to put them both out of his mind as he seated himself at the captain's chair and called up the tactical plot with steady hands. The two icons - now switched over to a flaming red in the display - were closing up on them. The further they got away from civilization, the more obvious it would be to the Mokona that the 'space yachts' were not what they seemed. Sooner or later Syaoran's evasive course would tip the hunters off that their prey was on to them, and then they would have no reason to hold back.
Mokona had a greater acceleration than these ships, and was equipped for deep-space travel where these ships were not. But with the range so close, there was no time to run; they'd have to either destroy both ships outright or knock out the propulsion systems. He'd back Syaoran's evasive piloting against anyone in the solar system, but it was critical they stay out of the crossfire and not let the enemy get a hit in on their own thrusters. If they -
Then the first missile fired, screaming soundlessly across space towards them, and he didn't have time to think of anything else.
Yuui and Sakura pounded down the curving interior that led to Mokona's inner storage lockers, and wondered when the hundred meters of gently curving hallway had gotten so long. The corridor lights had gone red, an ear-shattering siren played over Mokona's speakers, and the gravity was much lower than usual - it should have made this run easier, but instead it just seemed to stretch out into eternity.
There was a stomach-twisting wrench - the ship making a sharp course change that not even the artificial gravity could compensate for. Both of them were thrown off their feet; Yuui managed to right himself with his telekinesis, but Sakura was jolted off course and had to stagger to the nearest corridor wall to stop her momentum.
"What's happening to the gravity?" Yuui demanded, but Sakura just shook her head. She pointed at her helmet and mouthed something at him through the faceplate; No radio, Yuui was just able to make out through the thick red light. With her footing stable once more, Sakura beckoned to him as she launched off down the corridor. Yuui followed, his pulse pounding thickly in his ears. In the weeks he'd spent on board, he'd gradually gotten over his terror of the vacuum of space outside, yet now it was back, no longer an irrational phobia but a very real and all too likely danger.
Why had no one told him of this oh-so-important need for a vacuum suit? All right, maybe he should have thought of it himself; but he'd never travelled in space before and it just didn't occur to him to ask about such things. He still had a fair amount of money left, he could have bought one in the days they'd been stuck in Mars orbit; now it was too late.
Too late for a lot of things. He followed Sakura down the Mokona's corridor which had never seemed so long, and didn't know what to think except for a numb, constantly repeating hope that the seals on Fai's triage chamber really were airtight.
The next moment the universe convulsed around them, as something hit the side of the Mokona's hull like a sledgehammer. The walls themselves - six meters thick of ceramic shielding and titanium-alloy bulkhead - heaved and buckled like an earthquake, and the shockwave rippled out through the air an instant later and threw both of them against the hallway floor.
Yuui's limbs were numb and his ears were ringing; he saw one of the padded handgrips inches from his nose and grabbed onto it with a clumsy hand that felt like it was wrapped in mittens. As the first deafness began to clear, he heard a high-pitched screaming noise and looked frantically around. Sakura's suit-gloves had failed to find a purchase, and she was sliding backwards across the corridor with her hands grabbing frantically for a hold.
"Sakura!" Yuui shouted hoarsely, and reached out and yanked her back towards him with his telekinesis. He grabbed her in his free arm and turned them both back to the wall, both of them grabbing for a better handhold as the force of the blastwave continued to rocket past them.
No -
He could see into Sakura's faceplate now, and although her eyes were wide in terror her mouth was closed. But the screaming noise continued, rising in force and pitch to an unearthly shriek, and so did the terrible wind that threatened to peel them from their perch.
Yuui twisted his head around, dreading what he knew he would find, and the place where the corridor ceiling should have been was a twisted wreckage. The solid metal had peeled apart like someone punching a nail through a sheet of tinfoil, and in the gap between the distended metal edges was the vicious deep blackness of space.
The air roared past them with the force of a hurricane wind; the half-gravity of the ship's core was doing nothing at all to hold them in place against that deadly vortex. Yuui saw now the wisdom of placing the padded handholds on seemingly ridiculous places inside the ship's surface. Between that anchor, and his own powerful kinetic ability, they wouldn't be sucked out.
They wouldn't, but what about the air? Yuui couldn't think above the howling wind, couldn't stop to do the calculations about how much volume of air the Mokona contained and how fast it was whistling out the gap in a spray of frozen water vapor. The force would lessen as the air pressure dropped, but what good would that do them? They would freeze, but first they would suffocate, and when they passed out for lack of oxygen they would be pulled through the gap all the same.
Sakura's gloved fist was pounding on Yuui's chest, trying to get his attention. She pointed upwards towards the deadly hole in the sky, and her lips were moving behind her faceplate; her shoulders were shaking as she tried to shout her message to him. But even if the noise of the wind hadn't deafened him, her suit was sealed; no noise escaped.
Yuui shook his head, and Sakura's face screwed up in an agony of indecision. Suddenly she moved within the circle of her arms, and he had to grab her and slam her back against the wall as she reached up with both hands and twisted her helmet, breaking the airtight seals. A cry formed on Yuui's lips to stop her, force the helmet back onto her head, but her ginger hair was whipping around her face in a frenzy as she pulled the helmet free.
"The ship, Yuui-san!" Sakura shouted at the top of her lungs, the words barely more than a whisper against the shrieking gale. She pointed at the hull breach again. "The ship can heal itself! It can seal the holes! But not like this!"
"What?" he shouted back, hardly even able to hear his own words.
She leaned up to put her mouth close to his ear, and he could feel the violent trembling of her limbs as she clung to her perch and her helmet at the same time. "The ship's hull is made of self-healing materials!" she shouted. "And Mokona can apply a seal over a small breach so it can work, but not with a hole that big! The edges are too far apart. They have to be forced back together so Mokona can seal them!"
Her words stuck Yuui, flashed through his head and grounded like a lightning bolt. He stared at Sakura in incomprehension, his chest working furiously as he heaved for breath in the increasingly thin air. No. She couldn't mean -
But she did, and they had no time, and Yuui knew what he had to do.
He turned to face the breach in the hull, the twisting edges of the gap that framed a darkness deeper than any night he'd ever seen on Earth.
He let go of his hold on the wall, and let the wind take him.
Sakura stared upwards, mouth parted in dismay, as Yuui-san slid off his feet and began to floated towards the breach in the hull. He had to be using his telekinesis to brake himself, or else he would have been sucked much faster and more violently towards the breach. As it was, he drifted in fits and starts, skidding a few inches upwards before braking his momentum with a visible effort.
It was getting hard to breathe - the wind was lessening slightly as the atmospheric pressure dropped, but they had to get that breach closed soon if Mokona was going to be able to restore enough air to breathe. "Warning: Atmospheric integrity in the inner ring has been compromised," Mokona's automated alarm was playing over and over the ship's comm, but Sakura couldn't spare the time to turn her off. "Breach diameter exceeds selfheal capacities. Immediately evacuate to another portion of the ship and initiate EVA repairs."
Sakura struggled awkwardly with her helmet, trying to fix it back on one-handed while her other hang was jammed nervelessly into the anchor by the wall. It wasn't easy to maneuver the big, clumsy helmet one-handed and against the wind, but she had just managed to get it over the head - although the seals weren't yet in place - when suddenly the ship heaved yet again.
It wasn't another missile hit - it was another sharp course correction as Syaoran rolled the ship in a desperate evasion course to keep them clear of enemy fire. But the gravity fluxed and ebbed as the thrusters sucked greedily on the engine output, and Sakura screamed helplessly as the floor suddenly became the ceiling, and she was hanging one-handed above a fall that went on forever.
She had no attention to spare for Yuui, no attention for anything but clinging desperately for dear life; gradually the ship's grav systems, responding sluggishly on their throttled system priority, adjusted to the new heading and the floor was the floor again. Sakura gulped a sob as her feet touched solid ground; the roaring vortex no longer threatened to pluck her from her perch.
The winds had lessened because the air was almost all gone, Sakura realized with a stab of terror, and she looked around wildly - the stupid helmet restricted her vision - for Yuui-san. He hadn't been holding onto anything, and he didn't have a space suit - if he'd been sucked out, what was Sakura to do -
Yuui-san was braced spread-eagled against the hull beside and partially covering the gap, and Sakura cried out in gladness as she saw him moving. As Sakura fumbled to finish sealing her helmet she looked desperately for some way to help him - there was almost no air left, and he couldn't hold his breath forever. "Warning: Atmospheric integrity in the inner ring has been breached," Mokona said completely redundantly in her ear. "Immediately evacuate and initiate EVA repairs."
Slowly and painfully, Yuui-san shifted himself until he was positioned almost directly in front of the hull breach, hands resting on the two biggest fragments of the shattered hull. His body tensed and strained, hands twisting on the jagged metal as though he could force the pieces back into place by sheer muscle strength alone.
It was impossible. Sakura knew it was. Human strength wasn't even in the range of magnitude necessary to shift the monstrous bulk of a spaceship hull; it took heavy-duty industrial equipment to bend the cast duralloy into place. But slowly, centimeter by centimeter, the pieces of the hull were bending back to cover the gap.
Not far enough - air still whistled through a gap half a meter wide, and Mokona could only seal breaches of a decimeter or less. But then Yuui-san brought his legs up to brace himself against the hull, and Sakura clearly saw a shower of bright ice particles stream from his lips as he let out the last of his breath.
The last of the metal shards seemed to flow into place, as though the half-meter-thick metal were hot wax to be molded. At last the broken edges melded meekly into place, the freezing wind tearing fitfully through a spiderweb of cracks only a few centimeters wide. The deadly suction ebbed away at last.
And Yuui-san fell. If not for the half gravity, he would have hurt himself quite badly, or Sakura when she scrambled with her arms held out underneath him. As soon as he was clear of the breach Sakura keyed up her internal ship's mike. "Mokona!" she cried. "Seal the breach in outer hub corridor section jay-seven-delta!"
A thin hiss sounded through the corridor walls, and a pale green substance jetted out from the walls and floor of the corridor towards the deadly spiderweb. It was smartheal plastic, filled with nanobots programmed to ooze into the tiniest cracks and then expand and solidify to form an impermeable seal. It would make the corridor airtight and safe again until someone could get to the outside of the hull and weld replacement armor over the breach; for now, they were safe.
"Atmospheric integrity is compromised in the inner hallway," Mokona said in her ear over the ship's mike, sweetly calm against the horrors of the last few minutes. "Inner seals are holding. Shifting life-support functions to compensate."
Air began to hiss back into the hallway from Mokona's lifesupport vents - something the ship's protocols would have been forbidden to do while the section was still open to space. It was more sluggish than it would have been if Mokona's processing power was still not diverted to munitions and piloting, but Sakura didn't care; she ripped her gloves off and reached to Yuui-san's throat to feel for a pulse.
She found one, faint but steady, and Sakura couldn't help a joyful squeal that echoed inside her helmet. But the tall man wasn't moving, his skin was icy to touch, and his lips and fingernails were blue. Sakura was Martian; she knew the symptoms of anoxia and hypothermia all too well, as any spacer did.
Fortunately, she also knew what she needed to do. She scrambled to her feet and stooped carefully, pulling Yuui-san's limp body across her chest and shoulder. In full gravity she could never have done it; as it was she puffed and wheezed inside her poorly sealed suit as she gained her feet.
"Mokona, unlock the infirmary and prep a lifesupport bed," she cried as she staggered down the endless hallway. There was no more thought of retreating to the shielded interior of the engine room to wait until they were safely out of combat. The next five minutes could mean life - or death.
Onto chapter twelve →
-tbc
Fandom: Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle
Pairing: Fai/Kurogane/Yuui
Author: Co-write between mikkeneko & reikah
Rating: R
Word count: 7,828 this chapter (78,332 total)
Notes: "In a future where science and psionics rule the skies, and both are controlled by the iron fist of the Earth government, two young men make a desperate leap into the unknown in order to evade capture and slavery. AU, Kurogane/Yuui/Fai."
Part One - Earth: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]
Part Two - Mars: [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]
← back to chapter ten
Part two: Mars
hunted by the evil ones
Kurogane remained tense all the way back to the ship, and Yuui couldn't help but mull over what he'd implied. He'd never seen his... companion in a rage like that, and the genuine terror he'd beaten into the Kajitori would soon make way for bluster and then revenge, no matter what; it was the coward's way. Would that mean an attack on the Mokona? Was she even armed? None of her crew had said anything about munitions...
Privately he decided that as soon as they were out of Martian airspace, Kurogane was going to get an earful. He had no right to risk the ship and its occupants because of his temper tantrums, whatever the Kajitori had done to him. Black Dragon of Suwa or not, whatever that meant; the kids might know more. Not for the first time he privately cursed his own patchy and insufficient education; the military school had tried its best to even out his knowledge but the problem with history was that there was a lot of it, and more by the hour. He'd picked the advanced coding elective in the academy anyway, because Fai loved programming and said it would be a much more useful course.
The ship's comlink crackled, and Syaoran's earnest voice came through. "Captain, I see you on Mokona's sensors - did the meeting go okay? Do you need me to bring a grav dolly down to the shuttle bay?"
Kurogane leaned forward and hit a button, his jaw set and his face mulish. "Yeah, we got cargo. But we're gonna need to scramble, so stay the hell where you are." He hit another link and the line closed, and Yuui narrowed his eyes at the man; Kurogane caught it in his peripherals, naturally. "Don't look at me like that," he growled.
"Do you really think they'll come after us?" Yuui asked quietly.
"Dunno," said Kurogane. "We'll have to cross the Kajitori trading lines on our way to the Jovian moons. Could go either way." The Mokona loomed up before them, her shuttle bay doors already open; Kurogane tapped a few keys on the console and the autopilot took them in far smoother than any human ever could have.
Yuui hunched in his seat and folded his arms over his chest, and Kurogane glanced over at him and growled. "Listen," he said, as the doors began closing; the light over the airlock leading further into the ship was still red - it wasn't safe to leave the shuttle yet. "We'll get through this. Ship's got enough firepower to see us out."
Yuui thinned his mouth. "Why did you have to attack them in the first place?" he said. "What could they possibly have done that pissed you off so much, Captain Anger Management Issues? I've told you my secrets, the least you could tell me is why."
Kurogane stiffened, and then glared at him. "It's not a fucking swap meet," he snapped. "You're not fucking entitled to know everything about me, spoonbender."
The mild slur on telekinetics made Yuui fall back, mouth snapping shut as he glared. The light flashed green as Mokona judged the pressure and air sufficient for human habitation, and with a low growl Kurogane pushed his way out of the pilot seat and shoved open the shuttle door. Yuui scrambled after him, but didn't say anything, still stinging with the rebuke. Outside the shuttle bay Kurogane rapped on the glass communications unit with his knuckles until Mokona's rabbit-like avatar appeared there, her ears tilted curiously. He ordered her to find Sakura and send her to the cockpit, and Yuui trailed him as he made his way there himself, his strides long and purposeful. Sakura beat them to it; she was idly swinging in the copilot's chair in her work coveralls when they entered. Syaoran was fiddling with something electric on top of the pilot console; he had a row of screwdrivers laid out before him. They both glanced up and smiled when Kurogane strode in.
"There might be shooting," said Kurogane bluntly, and their smiles vanished. Syaoran grabbed his screwdrivers and began bundling them into a toolbox; Sakura jumped to her feet and zipped her coveralls all the way up to her throat. "The engine good to go?"
"Yes," she said bravely. "It ought to give you six hours' hard burn in a fight, but it'll need to run on half power for a few days after if we're going to get to Jupiter on the same amount of fuel."
Syaoran shoved the toolbox under his desk; he always wore his EVA suit when he was working but he grabbed the helmet and pushed it on. Kurogane nodded at him. "Software is up to date, but the left three canons need looking at," he said through the open window. He pulled up a map on the big screen, and Kurogane folded his arms over his chest and squinted at it before grunting and nodding.
"I'll get those," he said. "We need to get gone, kid. I'll be back here before we cross Kajitori lines. They're the ones who might be taking a potshot at us." He turned on his heel and left while Syaoran's mouth began shaping a question, and both the kids glanced at Yuui uncertainly before Syaoran turned back to the pilot's console and began directing them out.
"What happened, Yuui-san?" Sakura asked quietly. Her face was pale. "You went to see the triads, how could you made the Kajitori so mad?"
"There were some Kajitori in the bar there," Yuui said, slowly. "As soon as Kurogane saw them he just - he just went into a kind of rage, and attacked them. "
Sakura gasped and covered her face in her hands, her eyes wide. "Oh, no," she whispered.
"I can't believe the captain would do that," Syaoran said in a shocked voice. "I always knew that he hated the Kajitori, but I never dreamed that he would…" He trailed off and shook his head.
"Did he kill any of them?" Sakura asked urgently.
"Princess," said Syaoran quietly, his dark eyes on her.
"If he did they'll have a blood feud with him," she said. "It's how the old zaibatsu work, everyone knows that. They're clannish like you wouldn't believe. The Mino don't mind so much as long as you pay restitution, but the Kajitori hunt you down to save face. The Captain told us that."
"No, nobody died. Just a lot of bruises and some nasty cuts," Yuui reassured her, and she breathed a sigh of relief. Slowly, recalling details of the fight, he said, "The Kajitori seemed to know who he was. He called himself the 'Black Dragon of Suwa' and they were... spooked. Does that mean anything to you?"
"Suwa?" said both kids sharply, and he blinked at them in surprise and nodded confirmation. They exchanged a look.
"I've never heard of a black dragon," Sakura said. "But Suwa, well, all the spacers know about Suwa. It was…"
"Assume I'm not a spacer," Yuui said dryly. "Who or what was Suwa?"
"There used to be a third space station company," said Syaoran slowly. "Besides the Kajitori and the Mino. Miss Yeng told us about it at school just before Earth tried to... well. Suwa, she said it was called."
"Yes," Sakura agreed, nodding. "I remember. They were the second full space habitation to be finished, not counting the test station. They handled most of the traffic between Earth and Luna, and it made them hugely rich, until..."
"Until what?" Yuui asked.
"There was an accident," said Syaoran. "The space station - the core overheated and exploded. The plating managed to contain the explosion, but there was a design flaw in the hull and the explosion caused a breach into space. Which would have been okay still, the space stations even then were designed to partition in the event of a leak, but -"
"The bulkhead program was corrupted," Sakura finished. "The partitions didn't come down like they should have. It was awful, just terrible. There was no time to evacuate - everyone living on the space station died in the first five minutes. I remember my dad talking about it."
"There were three separate inquiries just by the Martian government since then - the last one was just before, well, we had to leave school," Syaoran supplied the rest of the tale. "It made a huge sensation about safety regulations in space travel and habitation. Ichihara industries made a killing just by programming partition control into their AIs as an extra layer of safety after that."
"I can imagine," Yuui said. He'd met Chairman Ichihara's daughter - Ichihara Yuuko - several times at the psionic academy. She had been a personal friend of the professor's before she'd left the family business to go into politics; a shrewd, sharp woman. "But - fifty years ago? That must have been before the Captain was even born. Were there any survivors? Relatives on other colonies or something?"
The kids looked at each other again, and Sakura shrugged. "I don't know," she said. "I don't remember. It was all before my time, we only learned so much about it because our school used it as a safety training example. Exposure to the deep vacuum is - oh, no, I almost forgot, the Captain will have my head -"
"What?" Yuui said, mystified, but she waved at him quickly and sprinted out the door, choosing to bypass the rails and jump directly to the hallway beyond with a light thump.
"She's gone to get her EVA suit," said Syaoran. "You should do the same. We're coming up to Kajitori lanes now."
"Get my what?" Yuui repeated. His mind was still trying to wrap itself around the news of the Suwa disaster, and trying to connect it with their mysterious captain. He resolved to look up the Suwa disaster in the archives as soon as he had the time, and see if he could find anything about this 'Black Dragon,' too -
"Your vacuum suit," Syaoran said, looking at him solemnly. "It might be dangerous. If there's fighting, there's a possibility we might lose atmosphere. Just in case, everyone needs to be suited up."
"I don't have a suit," Yuui said in puzzlement. "Why would I? I didn't have anything when I came on the ship except the clothes on my back."
Syaoran was staring at him increasingly alarm, as though Yuui had just told him he didn't have a head. "Oh, the Captain's not going to like this," he fretted.
Speak of the devil, the door slid open and Kurogane ducked to fit inside. He was suited up, in a black suit lined with red, but he carried his helmet loosely in one massive hand. His cool eyes swept briefly over Yuui before he turned to Syaoran, blatantly ignoring the blond man. "Get to your post, kid," he said. "We've got some major ass to haul."
Kurogane settled himself in the captain's chair. Despite the tension singing in his head and neck, he couldn't help but relax a tiny bit at finally being back in his ship, back in control of the universe or at least the most immediate part of it. "Mokona, show us a 3d model of local space on the co-pilot's stand."
Immediately the projection lights lit up, studied at various angles around the table, and a tiny representation of the ship appeared along with a small model of the planet they had just left. Kurogane folded his arms. "Highlight Kajitori-claimed space lanes."
A yellow cylinder appeared, dwarfing the Mokona and disappearing into the distance on either end. His ship was a couple hundred kilometers from the nearest marker; a handful of other vehicles were scattered between them, small numbers floating in the air around them. Cruising Speed, read one attached to the model of the Mokona by a thin red thread.
"We will enter Kajitori space in twenty two minutes and thirty-one seconds," the Mokona said.
"Tch," said Kurogane. "Do a sweep, label all nearby ships in a ten thousand kilometer radius. Kajitori ships in red, any MPS or Earth security ships in green."
Small dots appeared; a cluster of red ones along the edges of the space lane. No green ones, but two blue ones. Kurogane grunted and raised his hand, tapping at those unaffiliated markers with a gloved finger. "Who are these guys?"
"Private yachts registered to Yakusagawa Technologies, Luna LTD. Registered as the Primela and the Shogo," Mokona said, and Kurogane snorted dismissively. Small fry, probably some rich kid's private joyride. "The ships registered to the Kajitori Corporation are located on a habitation platform. Our route will take us less than a hundred kilometers from it. Are you sure you wish to continue?"
Kurogane paused, frowning, but Syaoran was the one to pipe up. "Recommend another route to Europa, showcasing fuel expenditure," he said.
The model scrolled out to show the hulking goliath of Jupiter and the small moons orbiting it. Europa's orbit of its gas giant was marked with a ring of white; Mokona traced several routes in pink and said, "Next efficient alternative route adds three months travel time and seven point three two repeating kilograms of fuel."
Kurogane considered it, weighing the risks versus the cost. Then he shook his head; a mercenary captain couldn't afford to bleed profit by jumping at shadows. "That's almost a quarter million yebs. No. We'll stick with our course and hope the Kajitori are too busy yelling at those idiots from Mars to get organized."
"Aye, sir." Syaoran looked dubious, but he punched in the sequence to break the Mokona from its parking orbit and head for the Kajitori lanes.
There was no change inside the ship itself, no change in acceleration or feeling of pressure - nor would they be unless something went very wrong. The hum of the computer and the engines of the ship were the same as always, the routine comm chatter as Syaoran spoke with the Mino and Kajitori traffic controllers to announce their change in position were all completely routine.
Still, Kurogane felt the tension on the bridge ratchet upwards as they approached the limits of Kajitori-controlled space. Damn, this whole Mars trip had turned out to be a disaster. Ruefully he remembered Sakura's "bad feeling" about staying in Mars orbit too long, and regretted - for the first time - his own lack of impulse control. Even if they got out of this one without trouble, this was going to cause serious problems for them the next time they tried to go to Mars or Earth.
He saw from the corner of his eye as Yuui approached and slipped into the unoccupied copilot's chair, but he reminded himself he was ignoring the nosy bastard and focused intently on the display ahead of him.
"So this ship does have guns, after all?" Yuui said in a casual voice, and Kurogane's shoulders twitched. "How very pirate-like of you after all, I was beginning to wonder if you were 'The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything.' "
"We're not pirates, we're smugglers," Syaoran corrected him from the pilot's chair. "We don't rob other people."
"We have guns," Kurogane said, ignoring the last jab. "Port and bow side, radial array, 50cm ballistic cannon ports. Seeker ammunition, we have flash jammers on the hull in case anyone tries to shoot back at us. We're not going to be staging any raids on fortified space stations any time soon, but it's enough to defend ourselves."
"And you're the gunner as well as the captain?" Yuui said, propping his chin on his fist as he leaned on the arm of the chair. "Hyuu, Captain Samurai is just full of useful talents!"
Kurogane tried to ignore that, although it was hard, since his neck kept threatening to blush. Syaoran looked up from his own console. "It's a little more complicated than that," he replied. "In an actual fight, the computer does the shooting. Everything happens so fast that a human being would never be able to keep up with it in real-time. But someone has to tell the computer what programs to run, what targets to look for and when to start and stop, and that's the gunner. Captain Kurogane is one of the best there is."
"And you're supposed to be a hotshot pilot, so why don't you look at your map instead of playing Combat Programming 101 with our passenger," Kurogane said sharply. Syaoran looked sheepish and returned dutifully to his console, but the truth was there wasn't much for him to do right now. They had entered the Kajitori space lanes, and that meant that there was only one pre-programmed allowable course that they could let their ship run. Syaoran wouldn't take over manual piloting until they reached the Junction and exited the space lane again.
In some ways the job of the gunner and the job of the pilot were similar; both were ship's functions ultimately handled by computers. When a split-second's hesitation could cause your ship to collide with an unforeseen obstacle - or be shot out of the sky by an enemy - then only computers could react quickly enough and with the necessary precision to move the ship to safety. That went double for the gunner's job, because if you were facing an enemy ship then you could be sure their guns were being manned by computers, too.
But although computers excelled at doing tasks very fast and very precisely, they were terrible at deciding which tasks should be done. Even the AIs were limited in that respect. Computers were the ultimate in good at tactics but bad at strategy; in the end, there had to be a trained, competent human mind behind the keyboard to tell the computer what to prioritize, what evasion course to run, what targeting pattern to fire, when to break off and when to seize the advantage of surprise.
There was another part to it, too; someone had to write those flight plans and targeting patterns in the first place. Kurogane had been trained in programming language, of course; pretty much everyone was nowadays, since being able to talk to a computer in the languages it understood was as an essential a skill as being able to read and write. But he would never be more than a passable programmer; his real talent lay in devising tactical patterns, as Syaoran's was in creating flight map vectors. The computer would be the one to actually fire the guns, but he had written the programs it was using, and he would be the one to tell it when to fire.
All in all, though, he really hoped he wouldn't have to fire his weapons on this trip at all. There were too damn many ships around; witnesses as well as potential casualties in an open firefight. But if it came down to that or surrendering his ship - and his passengers - to the Kajitori, Kurogane knew that was exactly what he would do.
He snapped out of his musing as Mokona sounded a discordant tone. "Warning, proximity alert," Mokona's flat voice told them. "Kajitori security vessels on a zero-sixty intercept heading."
"Have they hailed us?" Kurogane snapped, his attention zeroing in on the blood-red icons of the Kajitori ships on his plot.
"No, Captain! I would have alerted you immediately," Syaoran said with just a touch of reproach. "They're moving pretty slowly, and they haven't altered course towards us. It's possible that they're just a routine patrol."
"Anything's possible," Kurogane said, watching the enemy ships intently. "But not likely. Mokona, bring up an outside visual and zoom in on these guys."
The overhead screens obediently blinked into LED display mode, and the vision of the planet below them and the black sky around it flowed past the screen as it zoomed in on the Kajitori ships. There were three of them, and it was clear from their sleek designs that they were security ships, not cargo or passenger. They were moving at a leisurely diagonal across the spacelane, slipping between the other traffic without actually crossing their flight paths. The black and orange logo of the snarling tiger was clearly visible on the ships' hulls.
"Orders, captain?" Syaoran was watching him anxiously.
Kurogane felt a sudden spasm of hatred, and wrestled it down with difficulty. This was not the place to start a fight, not in the middle of a densely populated transit area; even a tiny piece of space wreckage could cause a holocaust if it struck another vehicle at high speeds, as Kurogane had reason to know. He couldn't fire the first shot, but if they did - if he let them get in the first shot… In a dogfight like this, the one that struck the first blow had a huge advantage, and at three-to-one odds, he didn't need any more disadvantages stacked against him.
He felt Yuui watching him intently, and he was reminded of their conversation a week ago, when Yuui had come to his chambers in the middle of the night. He'd berated Yuui for using violence when he didn't need to, for killing people just because he couldn't think of any other option. Just because it would be easier. If he meant to remain a man in Yuui's eyes, to say nothing of the kids, he couldn't forget that now.
"Maintain heading and speed," he ordered, his voice somehow managing to come out calm. "Lay low. Play nice. We're just harmless merchant shipping, nothing else. But if they make a move towards us, break for the least-time heading that will get us clear of the lane and out of the way of the other ships."
"Aye, captain," Syaoran said in relief, and turned back to his board.
The tension pounded in his head along with his heartbeat, as the Kajitori ships glided closer to their position. They moved like sharks through the water, arrogant and secure in their superiority over space, and Kurogane tensed with a vicious need to strike them out of the sky even as he battled with his own awareness about how vulnerable his ship was. If pitched firefights with Kajitori security was what he'd wanted, then he shouldn't have bought a merchant ship and filled it with people he cared about…
The Kajitori's heading slid over theirs; at this magnification, the bellies of their ships seemed almost close enough to touch as they passed over the Mokona's roof. Kurogane could count every gunport in the ship's hull, but the ships neither slowed nor twitched from their heading, and Kurogane exhaled a very slow, silent breath. So, he'd been in time after all; no company-wide memo had gone out flagging their ship. Maybe by the time he came back this way, he could change the shape of his hull, get new transponder numbers, repaint to some other color; maybe he would even have a new ship, and they would never be able to track him down.
As the last vision of the Kajitori's thrusters disappeared behind them, the bridge seemed to breathe again. "All right, we're in the clear," he said aloud. "But keep an eye out. We've still got to make it to the Junction before they catch on. Mokona, send up a shipwide alert if any Kajitori vessels even look at us sideways, all right?"
"Acknowledged," the computer said.
Syaoran took a deep breath. "Looks like we're not getting in a shooting war with the Kajitori today after all," he said, bravely forcing humor into his voice.
"Disappointed?" Yuui needled Kurogane, and the taller man scowled at him.
Footsteps came from the hatchway, and Sakura popped up breathlessly. "I made sure everything is secure in the engine room," she reported. She was in her own vacuum suit, except for the helmet which she had hooked onto the straps on her chest. Like most personally owned vacuum suits, which had to be custom-tailored to fit their owners in the first place, Sakura had customized hers; the material of the suit was a pale pink and the latches and decals were in the shape of flower petals. Syaoran was the only spacer Kurogane knew who hadn't bothered to customize his, sticking to the standard tan color with the bulky factory-issued goggle plates. "How are things going up here? I didn't hear any alarms."
"We're clear, Princess," Syaoran told her with a reassuring smile. "The Kajitori didn't even ping us."
"Oh." Rather than cheering up, this news seemed to make Sakura even more uneasy. She frowned, hesitating. "Are you sure?"
All eyes on the bridge turned to Sakura, who flushed unhappily under the scrutiny. "Why do you ask?" Kurogane said quietly.
"Because - well - it's my 'bad feeling,' " she blurted out. She sounded embarrassed to say it, but Kurogane had constantly reassured her that he'd rather chase something that turned out to be a red herring than to not get a real warning when they needed one. "The one I told you about the other day, Captain… it hasn't gone away. If anything it's worse now."
"The Kajitori?" Syaoran asked tensely.
She shook her head helplessly. "I don't know. I don't know. I don't think so. Just - ships, and - "
Kurogane turned back towards the 3d display, frowning intensely as he raked over the scattered field of space and ships. They were nearing the Junction now, the place where they could break out of the tightly regulated Kajitori control and set a course for the outer solar system. Traffic was thinning out now, most people having business with the planet below and not the chilly, distant outposts of the system's gas giants.
The crimson icons of the Kajitori were cruising steadily away from them, and no others were within sensor range. The green icons of the MPS patrol had vanished from the plot entirely. The blue -
Kurogane's frown deepend as he leaned forward. The pair of blue icons that Mokona had ID'd as private yachts were still with them; they'd maintained their course behind the Mokona's for the last half-hour. What business could a pair of light pleasure ships have with the Jovian junction? They were hardly rated for deep space travel at all. It might make sense if they were heading for the pleasure resorts of the asteroid belt, but at this time of year those were clear in the other direction.
An uneasy feeling began to creep up his spine. "Mokona, I want you to scan those ships again," he said, tapping his finger in the box of light indicating the two vessels. "Not just their transponder IDs, their history and schematics if you can get them. I want to get a better look at who these guys are."
A full minute passed, as Mokona bounced a signal back to the Mars planetary network to check their files. They crossed over the Junction border back into open space, out of the Kajitori territory, but no one blinked; it was, after all, only a line in space.
"Identities confirmed," Mokona's voice came back, and with a blip the ships' information began to scrawl up on the display. "The Primela and the Shogo are two privately owned vessels. Original manufacturer: Neil Armstrong Construction Industries, Inc. Outfitting and private sale: Yasukagawa Industries, Luna, LTD. Purchased by brothers Mark and Elijah Hamilton of Milan Territory, Italy, Eurasia on June 4th, two thousand -"
"Captain," Syaoran interrupted Mokona's biography, and the strain in his voice caused Kurogane to look over at him. His face was pale. "I know that ship."
"What, you know these guys?" Kurogane asked.
Syaoran shook his head. "No, not the owners," he said. "I know the ship. I know her stats, and I know that's not her real name. When Sakura and I came on this ship I downloaded a file of all the mechanical footprints of the small craft that the EFSS had in its fleet. That ship over there is one of them, and it's not a yacht at all; it's just meant to look like one from the outside."
He met Kurogane's eyes squarely. "It's a fed ship in disguise, Captain," he said quietly. "And it's hunting us."
Right. Kurogane inhaled deeply. "That changes things," he said brusquely. "If they're stalking us out into the hinterlands here, it means they don't want to confront us when there's a lot of witnesses around," he said. "That's fine by me. If they're going to try to ambush us, they're going to get a surprise of their own."
"Mokona, battle stations, but don't flash any of the external alarms!" he snapped, turning back to his plot, and the lights in the cockpit turned red as Mokona began to switch over to combat mode. In battle mode all of the nonessential ship's functions would be shut down; even life support and gravity would be turned to a minimum as all power shunted over to the propulsion and munitions systems.
Kurogane yanked his helmet on and snapped the seals into place, glancing quickly around to confirm that the kids were doing the same. Sakura's suit always privately struck him as ridiculous, with pink glitter on the helmet and a tinted visor, but it would protect her from vacuum and that was what mattered.
He turned towards Yuui, intending to reassure his passenger that he had no intention of giving either him or his brother up to the feds. Then stopped when his mind registered what exactly was so out of place about Yuui on the bridge; he wasn't wearing a suit.
He wasn't wearing a goddamned vacuum suit.
"You idiot!" he bellowed, his voice muffled by the faceplate; he snapped it up in order to better convey his glare. "Where the hell is your suit? I told you and Sakura both to get suited up over an hour ago!"
"I," Yuui stuttered, as Syaoran's voice came over their internal suits' radio; "He doesn't have one, captain."
"What the hell d'you mean, he doesn't have one?" Kurogane snarled, his mind reeling with the unbelievable absurdity of the statement. "What kind of brain-dead flipper-fingered idiot goes on any kind of long-term space-travel without a vacuum suit in tow?"
"I never had one!" Yuui shouted back at him. "Why would I? I never even planned to go into space! I was lucky to get myself and my brother out, let alone stop and buy a vacuum suit on the route!"
It was just absurd. It would have been funny if it weren't so horrifyingly dangerous. No space traveller - especially not one raised in a space habitat - would go anywhere without their custom-fitted vacuum suit somewhere close by, and they always maintained a constant awareness of where the suit was and how fast they could get into it. Every stationer had one, children grew through them and passed them down like clothes when they got too big; it was a moment of pride when you got old enough to have one specially issued for you. Syaoran wore his on board out of habit, even when there was no danger; even dome-raised Sakura understood the importance of keeping a breath-support system available. Only an Earthie - only a stupid, unprepared, witless infant of an Earthie - would not even consider the danger.
Just the thought of what could happen if they took a direct hit to their ship made the hair stand up on the back of Kurogane's neck in horror. He whirled around and grabbed Sakura by the shoulder.
"Take him to the ship's lockers," he ordered her tensely. "Get him fitted in our spare suit - it should be big enough for him. Then both of you get into the engine room and stay there!" The engine room had the heaviest shielding in the ship; it had to, if it had any hope of containing the blast in case of engine failure. The same superdense plating that encased the engine room and provided gravity for the rest of the ship would laugh at any ship-mounted missile; once in there, they'd be safe.
"Aye, captain!" Sakura said - he only heard her over the radio, since she had intelligently kept her helmet closed. He would have skinned her if she had opened it now. She saluted and turned back to the hatch, feeling her way down the ladder carefully in the bulky suit.
He turned to Yuui - so skinny, so frail, so unprotected - and fury burned through him with all the force of his fear. "Follow her," he snarled. "Get the suit and get to safety. We don't have time to stop and coddle a stupid dirtboy in the middle of a firefight!"
Yuui looked at him, mouth hanging open as he tried to shape words; then he whirled away and followed Sakura down the hatch.
Kurogane tried to put them both out of his mind as he seated himself at the captain's chair and called up the tactical plot with steady hands. The two icons - now switched over to a flaming red in the display - were closing up on them. The further they got away from civilization, the more obvious it would be to the Mokona that the 'space yachts' were not what they seemed. Sooner or later Syaoran's evasive course would tip the hunters off that their prey was on to them, and then they would have no reason to hold back.
Mokona had a greater acceleration than these ships, and was equipped for deep-space travel where these ships were not. But with the range so close, there was no time to run; they'd have to either destroy both ships outright or knock out the propulsion systems. He'd back Syaoran's evasive piloting against anyone in the solar system, but it was critical they stay out of the crossfire and not let the enemy get a hit in on their own thrusters. If they -
Then the first missile fired, screaming soundlessly across space towards them, and he didn't have time to think of anything else.
Yuui and Sakura pounded down the curving interior that led to Mokona's inner storage lockers, and wondered when the hundred meters of gently curving hallway had gotten so long. The corridor lights had gone red, an ear-shattering siren played over Mokona's speakers, and the gravity was much lower than usual - it should have made this run easier, but instead it just seemed to stretch out into eternity.
There was a stomach-twisting wrench - the ship making a sharp course change that not even the artificial gravity could compensate for. Both of them were thrown off their feet; Yuui managed to right himself with his telekinesis, but Sakura was jolted off course and had to stagger to the nearest corridor wall to stop her momentum.
"What's happening to the gravity?" Yuui demanded, but Sakura just shook her head. She pointed at her helmet and mouthed something at him through the faceplate; No radio, Yuui was just able to make out through the thick red light. With her footing stable once more, Sakura beckoned to him as she launched off down the corridor. Yuui followed, his pulse pounding thickly in his ears. In the weeks he'd spent on board, he'd gradually gotten over his terror of the vacuum of space outside, yet now it was back, no longer an irrational phobia but a very real and all too likely danger.
Why had no one told him of this oh-so-important need for a vacuum suit? All right, maybe he should have thought of it himself; but he'd never travelled in space before and it just didn't occur to him to ask about such things. He still had a fair amount of money left, he could have bought one in the days they'd been stuck in Mars orbit; now it was too late.
Too late for a lot of things. He followed Sakura down the Mokona's corridor which had never seemed so long, and didn't know what to think except for a numb, constantly repeating hope that the seals on Fai's triage chamber really were airtight.
The next moment the universe convulsed around them, as something hit the side of the Mokona's hull like a sledgehammer. The walls themselves - six meters thick of ceramic shielding and titanium-alloy bulkhead - heaved and buckled like an earthquake, and the shockwave rippled out through the air an instant later and threw both of them against the hallway floor.
Yuui's limbs were numb and his ears were ringing; he saw one of the padded handgrips inches from his nose and grabbed onto it with a clumsy hand that felt like it was wrapped in mittens. As the first deafness began to clear, he heard a high-pitched screaming noise and looked frantically around. Sakura's suit-gloves had failed to find a purchase, and she was sliding backwards across the corridor with her hands grabbing frantically for a hold.
"Sakura!" Yuui shouted hoarsely, and reached out and yanked her back towards him with his telekinesis. He grabbed her in his free arm and turned them both back to the wall, both of them grabbing for a better handhold as the force of the blastwave continued to rocket past them.
No -
He could see into Sakura's faceplate now, and although her eyes were wide in terror her mouth was closed. But the screaming noise continued, rising in force and pitch to an unearthly shriek, and so did the terrible wind that threatened to peel them from their perch.
Yuui twisted his head around, dreading what he knew he would find, and the place where the corridor ceiling should have been was a twisted wreckage. The solid metal had peeled apart like someone punching a nail through a sheet of tinfoil, and in the gap between the distended metal edges was the vicious deep blackness of space.
The air roared past them with the force of a hurricane wind; the half-gravity of the ship's core was doing nothing at all to hold them in place against that deadly vortex. Yuui saw now the wisdom of placing the padded handholds on seemingly ridiculous places inside the ship's surface. Between that anchor, and his own powerful kinetic ability, they wouldn't be sucked out.
They wouldn't, but what about the air? Yuui couldn't think above the howling wind, couldn't stop to do the calculations about how much volume of air the Mokona contained and how fast it was whistling out the gap in a spray of frozen water vapor. The force would lessen as the air pressure dropped, but what good would that do them? They would freeze, but first they would suffocate, and when they passed out for lack of oxygen they would be pulled through the gap all the same.
Sakura's gloved fist was pounding on Yuui's chest, trying to get his attention. She pointed upwards towards the deadly hole in the sky, and her lips were moving behind her faceplate; her shoulders were shaking as she tried to shout her message to him. But even if the noise of the wind hadn't deafened him, her suit was sealed; no noise escaped.
Yuui shook his head, and Sakura's face screwed up in an agony of indecision. Suddenly she moved within the circle of her arms, and he had to grab her and slam her back against the wall as she reached up with both hands and twisted her helmet, breaking the airtight seals. A cry formed on Yuui's lips to stop her, force the helmet back onto her head, but her ginger hair was whipping around her face in a frenzy as she pulled the helmet free.
"The ship, Yuui-san!" Sakura shouted at the top of her lungs, the words barely more than a whisper against the shrieking gale. She pointed at the hull breach again. "The ship can heal itself! It can seal the holes! But not like this!"
"What?" he shouted back, hardly even able to hear his own words.
She leaned up to put her mouth close to his ear, and he could feel the violent trembling of her limbs as she clung to her perch and her helmet at the same time. "The ship's hull is made of self-healing materials!" she shouted. "And Mokona can apply a seal over a small breach so it can work, but not with a hole that big! The edges are too far apart. They have to be forced back together so Mokona can seal them!"
Her words stuck Yuui, flashed through his head and grounded like a lightning bolt. He stared at Sakura in incomprehension, his chest working furiously as he heaved for breath in the increasingly thin air. No. She couldn't mean -
But she did, and they had no time, and Yuui knew what he had to do.
He turned to face the breach in the hull, the twisting edges of the gap that framed a darkness deeper than any night he'd ever seen on Earth.
He let go of his hold on the wall, and let the wind take him.
Sakura stared upwards, mouth parted in dismay, as Yuui-san slid off his feet and began to floated towards the breach in the hull. He had to be using his telekinesis to brake himself, or else he would have been sucked much faster and more violently towards the breach. As it was, he drifted in fits and starts, skidding a few inches upwards before braking his momentum with a visible effort.
It was getting hard to breathe - the wind was lessening slightly as the atmospheric pressure dropped, but they had to get that breach closed soon if Mokona was going to be able to restore enough air to breathe. "Warning: Atmospheric integrity in the inner ring has been compromised," Mokona's automated alarm was playing over and over the ship's comm, but Sakura couldn't spare the time to turn her off. "Breach diameter exceeds selfheal capacities. Immediately evacuate to another portion of the ship and initiate EVA repairs."
Sakura struggled awkwardly with her helmet, trying to fix it back on one-handed while her other hang was jammed nervelessly into the anchor by the wall. It wasn't easy to maneuver the big, clumsy helmet one-handed and against the wind, but she had just managed to get it over the head - although the seals weren't yet in place - when suddenly the ship heaved yet again.
It wasn't another missile hit - it was another sharp course correction as Syaoran rolled the ship in a desperate evasion course to keep them clear of enemy fire. But the gravity fluxed and ebbed as the thrusters sucked greedily on the engine output, and Sakura screamed helplessly as the floor suddenly became the ceiling, and she was hanging one-handed above a fall that went on forever.
She had no attention to spare for Yuui, no attention for anything but clinging desperately for dear life; gradually the ship's grav systems, responding sluggishly on their throttled system priority, adjusted to the new heading and the floor was the floor again. Sakura gulped a sob as her feet touched solid ground; the roaring vortex no longer threatened to pluck her from her perch.
The winds had lessened because the air was almost all gone, Sakura realized with a stab of terror, and she looked around wildly - the stupid helmet restricted her vision - for Yuui-san. He hadn't been holding onto anything, and he didn't have a space suit - if he'd been sucked out, what was Sakura to do -
Yuui-san was braced spread-eagled against the hull beside and partially covering the gap, and Sakura cried out in gladness as she saw him moving. As Sakura fumbled to finish sealing her helmet she looked desperately for some way to help him - there was almost no air left, and he couldn't hold his breath forever. "Warning: Atmospheric integrity in the inner ring has been breached," Mokona said completely redundantly in her ear. "Immediately evacuate and initiate EVA repairs."
Slowly and painfully, Yuui-san shifted himself until he was positioned almost directly in front of the hull breach, hands resting on the two biggest fragments of the shattered hull. His body tensed and strained, hands twisting on the jagged metal as though he could force the pieces back into place by sheer muscle strength alone.
It was impossible. Sakura knew it was. Human strength wasn't even in the range of magnitude necessary to shift the monstrous bulk of a spaceship hull; it took heavy-duty industrial equipment to bend the cast duralloy into place. But slowly, centimeter by centimeter, the pieces of the hull were bending back to cover the gap.
Not far enough - air still whistled through a gap half a meter wide, and Mokona could only seal breaches of a decimeter or less. But then Yuui-san brought his legs up to brace himself against the hull, and Sakura clearly saw a shower of bright ice particles stream from his lips as he let out the last of his breath.
The last of the metal shards seemed to flow into place, as though the half-meter-thick metal were hot wax to be molded. At last the broken edges melded meekly into place, the freezing wind tearing fitfully through a spiderweb of cracks only a few centimeters wide. The deadly suction ebbed away at last.
And Yuui-san fell. If not for the half gravity, he would have hurt himself quite badly, or Sakura when she scrambled with her arms held out underneath him. As soon as he was clear of the breach Sakura keyed up her internal ship's mike. "Mokona!" she cried. "Seal the breach in outer hub corridor section jay-seven-delta!"
A thin hiss sounded through the corridor walls, and a pale green substance jetted out from the walls and floor of the corridor towards the deadly spiderweb. It was smartheal plastic, filled with nanobots programmed to ooze into the tiniest cracks and then expand and solidify to form an impermeable seal. It would make the corridor airtight and safe again until someone could get to the outside of the hull and weld replacement armor over the breach; for now, they were safe.
"Atmospheric integrity is compromised in the inner hallway," Mokona said in her ear over the ship's mike, sweetly calm against the horrors of the last few minutes. "Inner seals are holding. Shifting life-support functions to compensate."
Air began to hiss back into the hallway from Mokona's lifesupport vents - something the ship's protocols would have been forbidden to do while the section was still open to space. It was more sluggish than it would have been if Mokona's processing power was still not diverted to munitions and piloting, but Sakura didn't care; she ripped her gloves off and reached to Yuui-san's throat to feel for a pulse.
She found one, faint but steady, and Sakura couldn't help a joyful squeal that echoed inside her helmet. But the tall man wasn't moving, his skin was icy to touch, and his lips and fingernails were blue. Sakura was Martian; she knew the symptoms of anoxia and hypothermia all too well, as any spacer did.
Fortunately, she also knew what she needed to do. She scrambled to her feet and stooped carefully, pulling Yuui-san's limp body across her chest and shoulder. In full gravity she could never have done it; as it was she puffed and wheezed inside her poorly sealed suit as she gained her feet.
"Mokona, unlock the infirmary and prep a lifesupport bed," she cried as she staggered down the endless hallway. There was no more thought of retreating to the shielded interior of the engine room to wait until they were safely out of combat. The next five minutes could mean life - or death.
Onto chapter twelve →
-tbc