make any attempt to enter this room,” I say. “I will blow the core.”
40
Krakon
They argue for over an hour. Arguing is a lot better than shooting me down, but they’re still wasting time.
To my surprise, it’s Gethros Mi Kiorus who eventually wins them over.
“He’s a piece of shit,” Gethros says. “But he does love that woman, and he’ll do everything in her power to get her safely off that ship. Let him do it.”
“But the lasers,” someone says.
“If that woman blows the core,” someone says, “we lose thousands of humans. Let the pirate try! She won’t detonate the core just from seeing him! If he fails, we still have the lasers.”
I laugh to myself. Well, last time we saw each other, she hated my guts. Maybe seeing me will push her over the edge. I didn’t tell the aristocrats that the last I heard, Cat hated my guts.
“I can do this,” I say into the mic.
Gethros was going to be one of the inspectors, that’s why he is out here and not back on Summer’s Breeze. Lucky for me, I guess.
I suited up into the breach suit while everyone argued about whether I should go in or not. If they decided not to give me the thumbs up, I figured they’d probably shoot my ship down. I was going to just launch over to the colony ship anyway, and hope they didn’t spot my breach suit.
Now that they’ve agreed to let me go, they’re going to cover my traversal. That basically means that if the colony ship sees me and tries to shoot me down, they will attempt to protect me.
I have to launch from outside my ship. I exit through the cargo bay and into vacuum. I attach the disposable engine to my breach suit, and my ship sends the burn calculations to the engine. I hit the button, and over ten G’s of weight hit me like a house.
I nearly black out, and when the engine detaches itself from my breach suit, the sudden weightless feeling is almost enough to vomit.
It’s gotta’ be like that. A slow, sustained engine burn is easier to spot. The vomit rocket, on the other hand, is done in just a few seconds.
Over the next twenty minutes, the tiny little blue star--the engine exhaust from the colony ship--starts getting really big, until I can actually see the hull of the ship in front of it.
I had to get in front of the ship for this, and I only have one chance to make contact. If I miss, the big anti-matter engines will put the ship way past me, and the engine exhaust will probably burn me to vapor. So let’s not miss.
I use a small amount of built-in thrusters on the suit to kill some of my speed as I approach the ship. I don’t go too hard on those, though, because I don’t want to fuck up my course. This breach suit is thicker than the one I wore before. With everyone awake, I need the extra armor, the extra thrusters, and the extra ammo.
I activate the magnets at the last possible moment. They rip me toward the hull of the ship. The thrusters killed some of my speed, but not enough. It feels like I braked by ramming into a brick wall. The air shoots out of my lungs as I slam against the metal, and I’m pretty sure I feel a rib crack. The breach suit injects a shitload of medicine into me straight away, mostly just drugs to keep me amped and to numb the pain of my new injuries.
The magnets hold. I don’t slide off and into the engine exhaust.
“Contact,” I say into my mic.
One condition of letting me do this is that the Cygnians have to keep a comms link with me. They trust me to talk Catherine down, but they don’t trust me in general. Not after they heard what I did to Gethros.
I apply the termite bots. They eat through the hull. Déjà vu.
The Cygnians gave me an assessment of the humans’ technology on the ship. They don’t think they have anything like the termite bots, and they’ll likely have to use some kind of hot cutting device to eat through the hull. Catherine will be able to see them coming no matter how they try to cut into the anti-matter core, and she’ll have time to detonate. The termite bots work fast enough that she might not have time to react and detonate before