Poor Man's Fight (46 page)

Tanner waited for Heifer to get out of his way, then put down the bundle of tools and kits filling his arms. His helmet tumbled from its spot slung over his shoulder as he tried to set everything down. “I’d have an opinion,” he huffed, “if I knew what the hell was going on.”

“Doesn’t fuckin’ matter,”
Stumpy shook his head. “Should still be someone helping us carry all this shit. Would’ve been Leone if he wasn’t dead.”

“Yeah, he used to get it worse than you before you got here,” Heifer agreed.

Tanner had almost tuned them out. “Wait, what?”

Stumpy and Heifer glanced at one another uncomfortably, but then Heifer just shrugged. “Just sayin’, he was the one who caug
ht all the shit before you did. I mean, it was all just pranks and teasing. You know. Harmless stuff.”

“Harmless stuff,” Tanner repeated.

“Yeah, what about it?” Stumpy asked. “New guy always gets shit on. It’s not like he ever said anything about it.”

“He never said…?” Tanner didn’t move. Ugly things roiled around in his stomach; he couldn’t be sure if they were of anger, or guilt, or both.
Oh god
, he thought.
I never talked to Leone, either. He was so quiet.

“Leone wasn’t the newest on the ship before I got here,” Tanner said quietly, staring at them both. “Wells was the newest. I know. I’ve looked. The newest guy was your drinking buddy, Wells.”

“Yeah, but… Wells is cool,” shrugged Stumpy.

Tanner’s face set in a grimace. He felt a faint burning sensation across his shoulders, trailing down to his ha
nds, which clenched into fists.

Bad enough that they treated him this way. Bad enough that Tanner had to live with it. But Leone died with it, and Tanner never even realized
that someone else on the ship might suffer from the petty bullying and harassment.

The sound of footsteps cut off the conversation. Morales and Freeman appeared through the hatch. “Okay, so here’s the deal,” Freeman began. “We’re responding to a garbled mayday. Captain thinks it’s a ship having an internal emergency, which is why you’re loading all this gear in here. We may have to send over damage co
ntrol parties to help that ship.”

“It’s gonna be
Stumpy, Heifer and me outside if we do a link-up,” Morales added, “because we don’t have time for fucking around or puking or whatever.”

Something inside Tanner snapped. “
Well, thank God there’s always time for you to be a
dick
.”

***

“
ANS St. Jude
, we read you. This is
CDCS Osprey
. We are on scene and linked with
NSS Pride of Polaris
. She has suffered damage in an attempted pirate attack. We responded and the attackers fled.
Pride
’s comms are down. We are providing assistance. Over.”

Jerry snorted as soon as
Lauren’s hand came off the mic. “You really think they’re gonna buy that?”

“For sixty seconds? Why not?” asked
Lauren. “We’ve got transponders and markings. We’ve even got the right paint job.”

“Lotta fun that was to put on,” muttered a crewman.

“Worth the work if it saves your ass here,” she countered. “Now shut the fuck up. Twenty ways this could go wrong. Jerry, how’re they coming?”

“Turned and closing.”

“Watch ‘em as they get in weapons range.”

“
Osprey
, this is
St. Jude
,” came the response. “Acknowledge your status report. Request you open visual communication, over.”

***

“CDC? They’re supposed to be gone,” Gagne noted after he unkeyed the mic.

“Supposed to be cleared out weeks ago,” muttered Reed. “Could be they were transiting through on another job?”

“Sure looks like the liner took a pounding,” observed Harper. He stood at the helm, watching the video screens intently as they closed in. “There’s a debris field, too. Can’t tell if the destroyer’s been hit much.”

“
St. Jude, Osprey
,” said the woman’s voice over the speakers. “Those bastards had deployed an ECM drone net to cut off transmissions. Still a few of ‘em out here. Not all the static has cleared out of our systems yet.”

Skeptical glances and frowns
appeared across
St. Jude
’s bridge. Stevens didn’t notice. He watched the range decrease. “Helm, stand by to cut speed,” he ordered. “XO, tell ‘em we’ll link up to aid in recovery ops.”

***

Heifer and Stumpy both looked on with mouths agape. Freeman was speechless.

“What did you just say, boot?” Morales
growled quietly. He stepped forward.

“
You’ve been a dick to me since I came aboard for no discernible fucking reason,” Tanner fumed. “I do my job. I’d do it better if you people would
teach
me, but instead I have to learn it practically all by myself. I do the best I can every fucking day, and all you do is scapegoat and bitch.”

Heifer nudged
Stumpy. “The fuck does ‘discernible’ mean?” he asked. His shipmate just shrugged.

***

Casey watched the direct feed to his holocom with growing tension. “That thing could fuck us up if she goes hot,” he warned. “She’ll be tricky to hit and she can punch back pretty hard for her size.”

“I hear you, boss,”
Lauren said. “Stand by.”

There was nothing else he could do. The pirate captain put his faith in his crew and watched in silence.

***

“
We acknowledge your intentions,
St. Jude
,” Lauren replied calmly over the comm. “Glad to have the help.”

Her eyes stayed glued to the tactical screens. “We only get one real shot with this, Jerry,” she warned. “Steady aim. Steady. You ready?”

“Soon as you take your hand off my shoulder, hon,” Jerry replied coolly.

Lauren
blinked. She pulled her hand away.

***

“Cap’n, it looks like their weapons are still hot,” warned Reed.

“They said they’re trying to bring down the remaining drones,” Stevens shrugged.

“With the main cannon?”

Stevens blinked. He looked up from his screens through the canopy, where the liner and destroyer
floated tens of thousands of kilometers away.

For a brief instant, the entire world around Stevens went red. Then it was gone.

***

“Tanner!” Freeman barked. “This is not the time for bullshit!”

“Tell that to him,” Tanner snapped back. His eyes stayed on Morales. “What the fuck is your problem with me, anyway? What did I ever do to you?”

“I think those medals really did go to your head,” Morales sneered. He stepped closer, providing a wordless reminder of just how much bigger and stronger he was than the young crewman. “You’ve got two seconds to apologize.”

Tanner had no idea where he was going to go with this. There was nothing for it but to keep swinging. It was what he’d been taught. “I’m just sorry I can’t think of anything worse to call you right now...
dick
.”

The bigger man’s eyes flared. Morales tensed at the shoulders, like a man who was about to either shout or throw a punch.

Bright red light flashed through the compartment immediately behind Morales, so intense that Tanner couldn’t see a thing through it. The light stretched from the deck to the overhead, blotting out everything behind Morales, including Stumpy and Heifer behind him and Freeman off to the big man’s right. It lasted less than a second. In that time Tanner heard a terrible crackle, and then nothing.

In the blink of an eye, everything behind Morales became endless night.

Tanner watched in shock as Morales fell slowly away into the void.

Thirteen: Oscar’s In the Water

Cheers erupted across the bridge on
Vengeance
. Casey heard them perfectly over his holocom. The scene on the bridge of the
Pride of Polaris
was somewhat less unified. Pirates hooted and hollered with bloodthirsty joy. Some of their prisoners wailed; others bowed their heads and wept.

“
Jesus fucking Christ,” Lauren laughed. “We wiped more than half that thing right out of space.”

“We see it,
Lauren,” replied Casey. He watched the wreckage on his video screen. Everything from the starboard wing to most of the corvette’s center had all but disintegrated. The port wing and a portion of its fuselage rapidly drifted closer under the ship’s original momentum, tumbling through space without anything left to control it. Casey thought he could even make out a body floating off on its own.

“Out-fucking-standing, all of you,”
Casey told her. “Damn good job. Alright. Someone’s gonna miss them on their communications net soon. Let’s get our act together and get out of here before any other trouble shows up.”

***

There was no air out here. There was no heat, no gravity. Nothing protected him from the void. Not even coherent thought.

Freezing terror gave way to training and instinct for ten crucial seconds. He dove left for his helmet, which he found floating off the deck right where he’d laid it. Tanner slammed it down on his head and activated the seals as he had a thousand times in basic training. His eyes flicked left, then right, then around, trying to orient himself to what was left of
St. Jude
’s cargo bay.

The tiny remaining patch of ship
filled him with horror. Emergency track lights provided just enough illumination to guide him to the oxygen capsule panel at one remaining bulkhead. Tanner scrambled for it, flailing about in zero gravity as if he’d never experienced it before. He reached for anything he could push off of to propel himself along. He floated with agonizing slowness to the panel, tore it open with trembling fingers and somehow managed to shove a fresh oxygen canister into the back of his helmet.

He tried to paint himself to the deck and bulkhead, sitting down against a corner with his legs pushing him back and his shaking hands searching for something to hold.
He feared floating away and then realized he’d activated the magnetic strips in his vac suit without even thinking about it. Stars watched him without emotion or mercy. Morales floated further away in the void.

Imminent death
dominated his thoughts. The nausea that usually accompanied sudden shifts in gravity didn’t even register. The fact that he survived at all seemed like some unimaginably cruel twist. Everyone else died instantly. Tanner was left to stare eternity in the face until his air ran out.

That thought led him to another, and though it did little to relieve his panic or give him hope, he followed it. Tanner activated his personal holocom and called up the comms net for his shipmates. If anyone had survived at all, even if their bodies floated out in space, the holocoms would register within fifty kilometers.

Morales. Morales was the only one left on the net. He was half a klick away already, without a helmet and well past the maximum thirty seconds a human could possibly survive unprotected in space. Tanner’s eyes shut tightly. The last face he would see was that of Morales. That was last person he’d ever speak to before he died out here, so very far from home.

He didn’t even have a home, he realized. Not really. He had a barracks room on Augustine with a boorish, unfriendly roommate—now dead—and a bunk on this ship that was now just so much dismembered metal floating in space. His family lived in another star system. His friends from school
chased their futures at universities, his shipmates from basic scattered to other billets, all unaware of where he was or what happened to him. Many would probably never know. Even Allison might not know about this for weeks or even months.

He was shy of twenty years old. No university. No career. No girlfriend. Nothing.
Exactly like he’d told the chaplain.

I don’t want to die out here.

Something inside him demanded, in a familiar voice he could practically hear,
Quit sandbagging, recruit.

Tanner blinked away his panicked tears.

No. I don’t want to die.

He slowly, gingerly unglued himself from the bulkhead, crawling across the deck out to the edge again to assess his situation.

It was exactly as he’d feared. The laser blast had gone straight from the bow on through the aft, wiping away everything it touched.
St. Jude
had done nothing to blunt or mitigate the damage. No electrostatic reinforcement of the hull, no evasive maneuver.