CHAPTER
TWENTY
The last moments before the curtain goes up . . . the last moments before the music starts . . . Ky looked at the stage she’d designed, the music she would start, as Fair Kaleen’s grapples reached them, as they were drawn closer to the other ship, as the transfer tube bulged out and adhered to the hull around their emergency exit hatch. All the arguments over: Martin still thought he should be where she was, but she had final responsibility. It was her job.
Her stomach knotted, then unknotted. She and her father’s implant were mostly in accord now, with no more balance problems, no sensory problems that she recognized. She hadn’t had time to familiarize herself with all the faculties, the way he had chosen to organize the proprietary information, but the ship command functions all worked. She shouldn’t, she hoped, need more than that. Foremost, already set up, were her links to her own ship’s functions, and those of Fair Kaleen. Osman would have made some changes, in the years he’d commanded the old ship, but buried deep in its command layers, in kernels hardened from the attack she planned, should be responses to her Vatta command dataset that he could not anticipate and counteract. If she could get there.
In her earbug, she heard Lee describing—breathlessly—the chaos on the ship. “We’ve got her safe in the captain’s cabin, you saw that, and it’s secure, but Quincy’s done something—”
“Never mind about that.” Osman’s voice sounded impatient. “We’ll send a team over to take care of it, whatever it is. But you’re sure the captain’s secure?”
“You can see that,” Lee said, sounding grumpy. “I just don’t want Quincy to disable the ship and have us stranded out here—that old woman’s crazy enough . . .”
Via the implant, Ky could tell that the other ship was broadside-on to its course, as were they: the safest close-maneuver configuration, since neither could fry the other with insystem drives if someone turned them on. This also meant that rotation about the long axis could impart angular momentum to objects shed from a hatch, right back down the course. She had a use for that, if she survived the next few minutes.
“Send someone down to open up,” Osman ordered Lee. “Or I’ll blow the hatch.”
“I am, I am,” Lee said hastily. “Jim, go unlock the door.”
“Why is it always me?” Jim said in a sulky tone for the camera, but in moments he jogged down the central corridor, winking at Ky as he came past her, pulling up the hood of his pressure suit.
“Right side,” Ky reminded him. He said nothing, but nodded. As he undogged the inner hatch, Lee spoke up suddenly. “Jim—look out—Quincy and that idiot Beeah are out of the cargo bay—”
“I’m on it,” Jim grunted. “Don’t worry—” He was now in the emergency air lock, working on the outer hatch. “Damn, this thing is stiff—” Ky assumed that Osman would have an optical link set to observe through the tiny safety window as well as monitoring transmissions.
“It’s always been a problem,” Lee said. “I told you—we had trouble with it at Sabine—but hurry up!”
“Send me some help,” Jim said, making a dramatic lunge at the hatch’s controls.
“Can’t—have to hold the bridge—can’t let them get to the—” Realistic sounds of gunfire cut him off.
“Damn it!” Jim snarled and lunged again as if frantic. This time he hit the controls, and the hatch opened halfway. He shoved, then flattened against the right side of the air lock as Ky cut the restraining line and the EMP mine, powered by every elastic lashdown cord on the ship, shot past his knees, through the twenty meters of transfer tube, and crashed into someone in a pressure suit, knocking him back into Osman’s air lock. The man had been holding a fat disk that Ky recognized—in that instant’s glimpse—as a limpet mine.
“Get that hatch closed!” she said to Jim, and raced to help him, mentally counting seconds. Damn, damn, damn, damn . . . outer hatch dogged . . . inner . . .
Whoomp. Ky opened her mouth to comment. WHOOMP! Lights flickered, an alert signal buzzed. She peeked through the small emergency viewport in time to see a cloud of debris in her own ship’s exterior lights, and the abrupt disintegration of the transfer tube. Grapple lines flailed. Something rattled against the viewport; she ducked, then looked again. Pieces of space armor . . . trailing clouds that glowed red in the spotlights. Her gorge rose; she swallowed against it. A second and third burst of debris from Fair Kaleen’s air lock, then a steady stream . . . and the intership distance increased; the other ship began a slow rotation about her longitudinal axis. Ky realized with horror that the ship’s air was bleeding out, the automatic systems disabled by the dual explosion of two mines, not one—and one of them a hullbuster. If the air lock hadn’t already been open, Fair Kaleen would have had a hull breach.
She imagined the howling gale of decompression, terrifying in the darkness when their lights failed. Some compartments would be spared . . . those in pressure suits might survive for hours, even days . . . but depending on the damage done by the pair of mines, the ship might be helpless.
That wasn’t what she’d meant to do. In her mind, a tiny voice explained to a nonexistent parent that it wasn’t supposed to happen that way. It was just supposed to mess up the command systems . . . she closed the inner hatch of the air lock and shook her head at Jim’s questions. She had to figure out what to do now. How long would Fair Kaleen’s systems be down before the automatic reset tried to restore functions? Would the loss of pressurization change that? How much damage had Osman’s own mine done? How many of his crew were dead, and how much resistance would she face if she tried to board? And was he himself dead—had he been in the air lock—or was he still aboard, fighting to regain control of his ship and come after her?
“What was that?” she heard someone yell.
“Them,” she said. Her implant displayed data on the debris still impacting their shields, a flowing mass of numbers—dimensions and presumed mass of particles, their velocities and vectors, hundreds, thousands of tiny impacts. She shut off that analysis as too confusing, checked on her own ship’s integrity and systems function, relieved to find that no serious damage had resulted. On her way to the bridge, she stopped by her cabin to let Stella know they had won the first round.
“Get this thing off my head,” Stella said; Ky helped her get out of the pillowcase, the bindings. She followed Ky to the bridge, where Lee had the controls.
“Can you snug us in against his ship?” Ky asked Lee. Stella, released from her role as a bound captive, leaned on the bulkhead.
“It’s rotating,” Lee said. “It’ll be a tricky maneuver. What’s the purpose?”
“For one thing, he’ll be blind to where we are, even if he gets his main scans back online—we’ll be too close. For another, even if he figures out where we are, attacking us will destroy his own ship. In the time it takes him to figure it out—if he does—we have the chance to get in and convert the ship’s systems. Or we can just keep clobbering them with successive EMP attacks. And his allies, those two warships, will certainly attack us if we’re separated from him, but possibly not if we’re attached.”
“You’re assuming Osman’s still alive and in control,” Stella said.
“I hope not, but for now—yes. It’s safer that way. At least we’re not still attached, and everyone in that transfer tube or air lock should be dead. Controls in all powered suits should be gone, too.”
“Unless he has mechanical overrides,” Martin said, arriving at that moment. “But you’re probably right. And I imagine anyone aboard is too busy trying to survive to try to get to us.” He grinned at Ky. “That was a brilliant idea after all, Captain. But how did you know they’d have a mine with them?”
“I didn’t,” Ky said. “I knew they’d try some trick to disable the crew here; I was actually thinking some kind of chemical weapon. Knock you all down alive, take all the implants—”
Stella shuddered. “That would have been horrible.”
“I can match us to his ship,” Lee said, “but it’ll take a while. I have to get his current vectors, and then match rotation.”
“Do we have enough power to stop the rotation if we’re attached?”
“I don’t know. We can slow it, probably. Why—oh. So we can hide from the other bad guys?”
“Yeah. If they shoot, I want that buffer between us.”
“Right. We leave our defensive suite up, though?”
“Absolutely,” Ky said. “Even if it’s not working perfectly, it’s all we have.”
She called Quincy to ask about progress in the repair. “Toby did it,” Quincy reported. “Better for him to be busy. Oh, and that dratted pup came up with the part he carried off before. Toby says it was defective to start with—it’s mislabeled. It would’ve failed when we turned the system on.”
“Toby is quite the little genius,” Ky said.
“He’s a good kid,” Quincy said defensively. Ky felt her own eyebrows go up.
“I never said he wasn’t—I think we’re lucky to have him—” And not her own sulky teenaged self, though maybe she wouldn’t have been as bad on another ship.
“Well . . . fine.” Quincy cleared her throat. “Are we . . . still expecting boarders?”
“No. Let me put this on all-ship—” Ky switched channels. “Status report, everyone. Osman tried to double-cross us, have someone carry a limpet mine aboard. We won the toss. Our mine detonated his, both of them in his air lock. His ship’s disabled, losing air out the open air lock, and some of his crew are . . . gone. We’re in pursuit now, trying to match courses and rotation; we still have his allies to worry about, but we have a couple of hours’ grace. Stay in your pressure suits, but you can open up and have something to eat.”
A moment’s silence, then a cheer from somewhere back down the passage. “Does this mean I don’t get to shoot anyone?” Rafe asked.
“Not at the moment.”
“Too bad. What are your next plans, Captain?”
“I’m working on them,” Ky said. “I didn’t expect what did happen.”
“Don’t admit that,” Rafe said. “I was admiring your prescience. I expected treachery, but not that he’d mine our ship before he got you and the implant.”
“He wanted the mine in place,” Ky said. “That was easy to figure. He could have set it off later. But I failed to consider that both mines might detonate together in his ship . . . and I should have.”
“Ma’am, with your permission I’ll go remove the booby traps I set up before someone bumps them.”
“Of course, Martin,” Ky said.
“I’d have thought the EMP from one would’ve turned off his,” Stella said. “Don’t all mines have electronic controls?”
“Yes,” Ky said. “But the limpets like his are also pressure-sensitive—it’s what keeps you from prying them off your ship if you find them before they go off. I got just a glimpse, but it looked like ours hit the limpet square on, with enough force to knock the man carrying it back into the air lock . . . and then it was just the usual few seconds’ delay.”
“Well, food sounds good to me,” Stella said. “I’ll be in the galley if you need me.”
“We have a problem,” Lee said. “Their ship’s moving more irregularly . . . I can still match it, but until something smooths out their motion, our artificial gravity’s going to be hard put to cope with the irregularities.”
“Try it,” Ky said. “I’ll let everyone know to expect some problems.”
Minutes crawled by. Ejecta from the other ship’s air lock flashed against their defensive screen, but nothing penetrated. The scans showed the other ship’s complex motion. The air lock was forward of the ship’s center of mass, so its effect as a maneuvering reaction engine had created an erratic rotation rather than a smooth roll about the center axis. Lee edged Gary Tobai in slowly, using the nav computer to model and then match that eccentricity.
“If we aren’t matched exactly, their greater mass could give us a fatal whap,” he said. “The least relative motion’s close to their center of mass . . . that’s where we should grapple. Nearscan’s accurate enough, but there’s too much data with all that junk she’s spewing.”
“You think it’s too dangerous?” Ky asked.
“Dangerous, yes. Too dangerous . . . compared to what, I’d have to say.”
“I don’t want to lose that ship,” Ky said. “If it keeps losing atmosphere and tumbling, it could be ruined . . . or Osman might find a way to get it back in operation.” If only she’d had a trained boarding team . . . the military could do it; if she’d had a squad of Slotter Key marines . . . but nobody on her ship—except her, and she could not leave the ship—could go out there, board a tumbling ship, and deal with whatever was inside. If the sturdy traditional Vatta systems reset themselves—and they might—Osman could regain control, and then . . . then things would be far worse.
And time was ticking away. The enemy warships would be in range in a few minutes.
She had the other mine. She had the skills herself . . . or she had had them, what was now a year and a half ago, standard. Her scores on EVA maneuvers had always been clears, no faults.
On maneuvers she had practiced repeatedly, in the zero-g gyms. Standard maneuvers, in standardized conditions. This was . . . this was nonstandard.
A dull clank reverberated up the main passage. From the hull? Something had made it through the screens?
“Helmets!” Ky said, before analysis had begun to catch up with instinct. She’d forgotten, she’d turned the exterior analysis module off. “The hatch—” She was moving now, down the passage, boosting the implant feeds, grabbing for pickups as she went.
Air lock in use, the implant told her. Outer hatch open, inner hatch shut . . . “Shut outer hatch,” she said, to the implant.
UNABLE TO COMPLY. PHYSICAL BLOCK OF OUTER HATCH, came up on her display.
Jim had closed it. She knew she had secured both hatches. But emergency hatches could be opened from either side—
A blinding flash of insight: not all those hurtling bodies out of Osman’s air lock had been casualties. His crew was trained in boarding techniques, and she had not sent anyone outside to be sure their hull was clean . . . idiot that she was, with that misplaced sympathy for the crew she’d assumed was dead or dying. After a moment, her heart steadied again, and she felt an icy calm.
“Enemy aboard,” she said. “Everyone get your suits sealed; section seals coming down.” Her implant showed who was where . . . scattered, since she’d given them permission to relax from the first alert. Two in the head, one in the galley, some at duty stations, some in their bunks. The icons moved now, but not quickly enough . . . the section seals came down, securing them wherever they were, with whatever weapons they had in hand at the moment.
“Expect decompression,” she said. It was the simplest way for the enemy to disable them; they were probably rigging a way to shut the ship up again quickly. She herself was now cut off from the bridge, from her cabin, from the other mines in cargo 3; the elegant little handgun she’d bought at Lastway, loaded now with frangibles, was the only weapon she had. Other than the one between her ears.
That one stopped her before she entered the last stretch of the passage to the air lock, still out of sight of the enemy. Her implant’s display gave her a visual of the air lock . . . two figures in pressure suits. What blocked the outer hatch was a suit of space armor, apparently immobile. Through the implant controls, she zoomed the image. Inside the faceplate of the armor, a ghastly image—a face blue-gray, mouth open, eyes wide with horror, dulled with death. She changed the focus of the pickup, and saw that the two pressure-suited figures were indeed working on the inner hatch, attaching the ends of a hydraulic cylinder . . . they did not appear to be safety-lined in yet, though she saw coils of line around the shoulders of one of them. She didn’t recognize the weapons they were carrying, but the tool set they were using on the hatch would certainly open any other hatch in the ship, in time.
If there was enough pressure—and she opened the inner hatch—then they could be blown out themselves . . . if that armor wasn’t stuck too tightly. It probably was; they wouldn’t have left themselves in that vulnerable position. The implant gave her a quick calculation of the amount of force needed to dislodge the armor . . . no, they’d wedged it in well. It would take another fifty kilograms of mass, and she didn’t have that handy, not with the mines now sequestered behind a compartment lockdown, where they could do no good. She could manually open and shut each one, but she knew that would take too long.
Well . . . she did have fifty kilos of mass, but if she let go the safety grabons and used her own body to blow them out the lock, then she’d be out there, accelerating away from her own ship. Not where she wanted to be . . . not a good tactical choice.
She found another vid pickup just inboard of the air lock and aimed it up-passage. The packing cords that had launched her mine lay in a tangle. She could tie onto them as safety anchors; they’d pull her back. It wouldn’t work. It couldn’t work. But neither would letting Osman and his crew aboard. How many of them were there outside? She didn’t have enough external pickups; the implant couldn’t give her that information.
“There are two of them in the air lock,” she said to her own ship intercom. “They have some space armor wedged in the outer hatch. Decompression alone won’t blow them back out . . . it’ll take more mass.”
“How much?” Quincy asked, ever the engineer.
“Oh . . . fifty kilos would do it. Unfortunately, I don’t have a spare fifty kilos.” Quincy would have a fit if she knew what Ky was contemplating. Ky didn’t like it much herself.
“Reopen the seals to the rec room and grab something?” Rafe asked. “I’m there; I could toss you a chair.”
“Are you suited?” Ky asked.
“Yes. Upshift hatch is sealed; the galley hatch should hold for a brief decompression, and that would add additional volume—these chairs aren’t that heavy, but they might be enough with the additional volume.”
It was an idea, but she knew it wasn’t going to work. The implant confirmed that when she queried it.
“Captain—” That was Martin. “Give me the codes for manual opening and closing—let me come help—”
“Where are you?” Ky asked.
“I’m right beside that carton of EMP mines.”
“I’m closer,” Rafe said. “Only one seal away.”
“I have the skills,” Martin said. “Hand-to-hand in vacuum and zero G—”
Just what she needed, two men squabbling over who was better equipped to help her. She would like to have had them both with her, but they weren’t. “You’ll both stay where you are,” she said.
She rifled quickly through the emergency tool locker in the passage. Fire ax, zero-pressure sealant canister, long utility knife, prybar, boards, first-aid kit . . . she couldn’t take it all, but the fire ax and knife went on her belt.
The implant noted that while she was 92 percent likely to break the space armor loose from the outer hatch, she was 83 percent likely to break bones in the process, and 24.3 percent likely to suffer fatal injuries. But the alternative chances were worse: if Osman caught her, she’d be 100 percent dead after suffering she didn’t want to contemplate. No choice, really . . .
Her suit—customized, top of the line from Deere Ltd.—was supposed to have superlative impact resistance, a combination of reinforced panels and impact-inflated cushions. She fed the suit data into her implant, and the probability of fatal injury dropped to 6.2 percent, broken bones to 21 percent . . . that was more like it, though a bone was either broken or not . . .
She moved on down the passage. The boarders could see—if they chose to look—through the window in the interior hatch. But if she was quick enough, all they’d see was a blur. The tangled cords lay in front of her now; she hooked them with the end of the fire ax and pulled them slowly to her.
Best not depend on the strength of her grip; she detached one of the packing cords—purple, breaking load twelve hundred kilograms—and looped it through the reinforced loop on her pressure suit designed for tethers, then around the other cords, and secured it. The implant display showed that the intruders were still intent on their work—no, one of them was looking up and around now.
No more time. Ky backed into the loop of the packing cords, pulling them as taut as she could, then told Lee, “I’m opening the inner hatch.”
“But you’re—”
Her implant took over. She had time to think This was a really stupid idea—and then the combination of elastic cords and escaping air flung her down the passage. She had thought she could hold herself rigid, like a spear, until the moment of impact, but the vortex of escaping air twisted her, threatened to slam her flailing body against the hatch opening. She pulled herself into a tight ball, fists locked on the cords, and struck the boarders with her right side, slamming them into the space-armored figure wedged in the hatch. With a shriek she could feel as much as hear, the space armor broke loose in that instant, and she and the others flew out the open hatch. She could see, in the external lights, someone else splayed flat against the hull. One of the boarders was loose, floating away; the other grabbed the tether, hands alongside hers, as it reached its full extension and began to retract.
Simultaneously Ky and the boarder each took a hand off the line and tried to shove the other off. The enemy managed to grab her wrist; his grip, possibly augmented by his suit, tightened painfully. She didn’t need to hear what he was saying; she could imagine it. They rotated, struggling in the combination of forces, the lack of gravity, the pull of the retracting tether.
Ky let go the tether with her left hand, flipped it around her leg, and grabbed the clearing knife from her tool belt. Her enemy never saw it before she had slit his suit up under the right arm. Air puffed from his suit, pushing her away, yanking her arm. The suit’s repair functions oozed foam, confining the loss to that limb, but immobilizing his arm. She stabbed again, this time ripping the left arm; his hand spasmed, releasing her; they rotated away from each other.
“Five seconds to impact,” her implant warned her. Ky struggled, trying to see, to curl away from hitting the ship head-on. There—but something grabbed her leg, and pulled . . . she could feel the elastic cords stretching . . . she twisted. A hand clamped around her ankle; the suited figure trailed a thin stream that glittered in her headlamp. Powered suit. He had a powered suit—of course he did, that’s how they crossed the interval in the first place—her mind gibbered wildly. The implant threw up a screen of information about powered suits, most of which Ky had no interest in. She was trying to curl up, avoid whatever that was streaming from the other’s suit in case it was corrosive, and get that hand off her ankle. Her contortions made the other figure writhe, and their vector shifted irregularly, but he didn’t let go.
She had been told zero-g fights were chaotic, impossible to predict even inside closed spaces. Outside a ship . . . Just don’t get yourself in that situation, her instructors had said. Fine, but no help now. The suit resisted her attempts to bend over, get her hand and knife near the person clutching her; it had been possible in ship atmosphere, but not here. She tried another tactic, using alternating arm movements to impart a longitudinal spin . . . and that finally brought her arm close to the other. He had something that looked like a wrecker bar with a pointed tip in his hand, but she was inside his guard and almost behind him. She clutched him firmly to her with her right arm, and ran the knife blade up . . . in under the suit . . . up again.
The knife parted his suit from hip to shoulder; a mist clouded her faceplate briefly . . . he let go, and Ky managed to orient herself, finding her ship by its brilliant outside lights—its lights visibly nearing—as the elastic cords accelerated her back toward the open air lock.
If she stayed connected, she would smash into her own ship. If she didn’t, she was hanging out here with no power, no way to get back . . . except she was already moving back. Was it fast enough? Ky cut the tether to the cords and watched them move away from her, writhing like the tentacles of the sea creatures she had watched on the reef at Corleigh. She queried her implant . . . she would hit the ship, but not hard enough to damage the ship—or herself.
She looked around as best she could. That dark moving blot across the starfield was Osman’s ship, tumbling. The line of brilliant lights was her own, with its externals on, with its air lock still open, a larger area of light on the aft hull.
She cut her suit com back on. “Captain to bridge—”
“Where are you? What did you do?”
“I’m closing on the ship now,” she said.
“On Kaleen?” Bewilderment and near panic were clear in Lee’s tone.
“No. On us. I went out the hatch with the bad guys—two of them anyway.” She bounced up the zoom on her helmet scan, looking for the one who had been starfished to the hull beside the hatch. He wasn’t there. Where was he? “What’s your internal scan say . . .”
“Somebody’s inside, in the emergency passage. They won’t answer; we thought it might be you with damage, maybe . . . we were just thinking of shutting the external hatch and airing up so we could open the compartments.”
If she hadn’t been in a suit, in free fall, she’d have pounded her head with her hand. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Captains should never leave the ship in dangerous situations. She’d had that pounded into her time and again at the Academy. Never. Whatever the temptation, the captain stays aboard to deal with the peril . . . and she had flung herself out the hatch, grandstanding, as MacRobert would have said. Correctly. And one of the scumsucking bastards had made it aboard her ship.
“Lock the hatch open, Lee,” she said, even as she wondered why the boarder hadn’t closed it already to keep her out if she escaped his allies. “Don’t break compartmentalization. Scan for other powered suits between us and the Kaleen.”
Abruptly, startlingly, Fair Kaleen’s running lights came on, the beacons defining bow and stern blinking and the others holding steady patterns that outlined her shape. Either the automatic reset had worked, or someone aboard was able to get the systems up. Reset wasn’t a problem, but the other possibility . . .
Now that it was too late, she could think of other things that might have worked better . . .
“We lost vidscan in the emergency passage,” Lee said. “We’re still compartmented—”
“Good,” Ky said.
“But we don’t know where whoever that is has gone or what he or she is up to.”
She knew. She knew with the absolute certainty that had not yet failed her. He was going to blow up the ship, and her family with it, and all he needed was the time he already had. The time she had given him. A flicker of despair, the first touch of a black wave . . . but she had no time for that. “Patch me to Martin.”
“Right.” A pause, then Martin’s voice.
“Ky—Captain—what’s happening?”
“Martin, you’re in the same compartment with the mines, right?”
“Yes, but—”
“Take one with green markings, like the one I used before. Open the side—you saw me do it; you know where. There’s a manual control, a dial. Turn it to the left, all the way. Point the forward end so it will intersect the emergency passage. Set it to a five-second delay and get as far away from it as possible.” An EMP pulse could be focused to some degree. Her implant threw up a schematic showing what ship systems would be in the way of that destructive beam. Too bad . . . better that than complete destruction.
“But that will—”
“Do it now!” Then she tongued shipwide, and never mind if her enemy heard it. “Disaster stations! All hands, disaster stations and hold position.”
A second passed. Another. Another. Another.
As suddenly as Fair Kaleen’s lights had come on, Gary Tobai’s vanished. Her ship—her responsibility—now lay blind, all systems knocked out by a pulse of magnetics strong enough to injure the crew in some cases.
The hypercritical part of her mind screamed at her, Really smart, Ky—now you’ve disabled your ship and you’re barreling toward it and can’t even see when to brace for impact, and that’s if Osman doesn’t blow it anyway—Then she hit, hard, the suit’s protective mechanisms cushioning the blow—but the jar was still enough to take her breath for an instant. Her gloved hands scrabbled for something to hold on to, as rebound took her away, tumbling, and the loop of elastic in her hand caught a protruding stud . . . one of the eighty-two external mounts for the new defensive suite.
There was a control, if she could just get a boot onto the hull . . . and the rotation from that one tenuous handhold brought her left heel down long enough to trigger it. She lost the handhold, but her foot was attached now, thanks to the emergency gripper attachment built into the boots. Now to get her other boot down . . . there. So fine, the nasty mental voice went on. Now you’re stuck to the side of your ship like an old-fashioned bowsprit ornament, and what good does that do? Ignoring the voice, Ky leaned over slowly and gripped the nearest external mount. The faintly adhesive pads on the glove fingers gave her a good grip. The far more adhesive pads on her boot soles grritched loose, one at a time, as she lifted one foot carefully, obtained a second handhold, put that foot back down, and then lifted the other.
The whole trick in moving on a hull without safety lines, the instructor had said, is not to do it in the first place. But just in case you’re blown out of your ship and onto an enemy ship, here’s what you can try. Move slowly. Always have three points of contact. Be aware of gravity fluctuations.
That at least she didn’t have to worry about, with her ship’s systems down. Artificial gravity bleed-through faults in the external containment were the least of her problems. Finding the air lock, for instance, was likely to be a harder task. Figuring out what to do when she found it . . . could wait until she found it.