Chapter 46
Death Knell
“Davik…!”
It came out as a whisper, but Fia wanted to scream. She wanted to pull him against her. But the medic had warned her that he was injured, and she didn’t want to touch anything on him that looked like it might be hurt.
Almost all of him looked as if it hurt.
But he was alive, and he was here, and she could breathe at least for a moment now that he was aboard. They were not out of the fire yet, but he was here.
The medic on the breach team warned that he would be incoherent for at least a few more minutes. They had dosed him with some potent sedatives to keep him wrangled for transport. But they had tagged him as stable. Which meant: not the priority of the currently overtaxed medics.
Fia felt a flare of anger that they were not doing more to help him. But the team had other patients in far worse states to tend to. Davik wasn’t the only one who needed aid, and she would just have to bite her tongue and be grateful.
And grateful she was. That wasn’t anywhere near a potent enough word to describe what she felt.
But that was an urge she needed to tame.
She was yet again crossing a boundary. She wanted to touch him, to kiss him, to tell him everything she had failed to say.
But he was barely here to even hear her.
There was a very large and entirely reasonable chance that he would want nothing to do with her when he was back in his right frame of mind.
That would be fair. She could live with that. She was Sentu, one who dives into the deep waters to keep the distant dangers at bay. One bred to spy the deadly trails of their predators in the depths, to neutralize them before they encroach on the vulnerable shallows.
Protecting from a distance was in her blood. Though a Sentu always returned to that which they protected. Returned home, their hunt in tow, to be greeted by their family.
That was the way of the old world, though. Perhaps this was her role in the modern age. To watch the datastreams, to keep a distant vigil, to remain a guard on the fringes, stoic and distant.
Warmth bloomed along her arm, and she looked down to see a bandaged hand groping for purchase.
“Fia … you’re here?” he asked, his eyes a glossy and his voice raspy.
“I am. Everything will—” She paused, unable to lie and claim that everything would be fine. “You will be safe, I promise.”
He nodded, and his eyes closed slowly with a flutter. But his hand remained. She didn’t want to move it. Even though she knew they were far from done. She was still soaking wet from the tank, and she would need to return soon.
This was a stolen moment, but not one she could drag on for much longer.
“Sentu, they are reporting telemetry locks with missiles, we need—”
She nodded as she rose from the side of Davik’s cot.
“Tell the pilot to swing us out wide from the Karnel,” she uttered, stealing one more glance at Davik before she returned to her duty.
Back into the tank. Back into the fray.
Nine of the twenty-four Heliovor ships were still reporting as active in her datastreams. Five had been confirmed destroyed. Eight had retreated from the combat zone safely. Two were unknown, twin corvettes that had disappeared entirely with no sign of life or loss.
The Federation had scrambled several small, agile, aggressive gunner ships that were hammering the remaining Heliovor vessels without relent.
Shields were holding, but they could not maintain for much longer.
They could not outrun the Sol gunners, and their strikes were landing on the F.V. Karnel with middling success.
The rescue of the prisoners had been almost perfect, with minimal casualties.
But their primary goal was not rescue. Their primary goal was destruction.
They came here to cause a ripple in the fabric of this system that would send a chill through all of Tau Ceti.
They needed to force the demons to retreat.
True to their banner of Heliovor, they would devour the Federation whole. Bones, blood, bile, and all.
The technician monitoring her tank had pulled the limiters off the dosage drip. Her blood was sluicing through her body, thick with enough adrenaline and stimulants to delve into the deepest, most formidable depths.
She was built for this moment. Her ilsuir’a was safe and aboard the ship.
She was ready.
Her focus melted into the frenzy of wild signals around her, her teeth bared in a savage grin to nobody but her own dim reflection in the tank. She keyed up her comms link to her pilot with a flick of the claw.
“Jess, your nav screens will be disrupted. Rely on raw visuals. Relay to the others.”
“Copy, fuck ‘em up, buttercup!” Jess retorted with an excited whoop.
Despite the chaos, Fia couldn’t help but smile at the infectious energy of her pilot.
That purple-haired woman has earned a bottle of something strong and celebratory. We just need to survive this night to share it.
Fia rolled her neck and shook her tendrils free, reaching out into that wild net of signal beyond. She found the Federation scanners, saw the ships of Heliovor through the eyes of the enemy. Hiding them was a futile measure, but she could muddy the waters.
She knitted together the streams into a replicated signal that was doubled, tripled, and quadrupled across all scanners. It grew in complexity until the visual noise of criss-crossing lines made it impossible to discern the real from the mirage.
The mess tangled in the sensor arrays of all the ships in the conflict. Both friend and foe.
“I do not know what a buttercup is. Do things look up-fucked, Jess?”
“Hooo boy, been a while since I rode bareback like this. Definitely fucked, but the Feddie’s suck at going raw. Hold this as long as y’ can, doll.”
Five minutes melted by while she maintained the fray. After ten had passed, she could barely register the searing pain within her tendrils from the overload. Constantly reshuffling the signal data to shove into the arrays was not a simple task, and the Feds were adapting.
Her certainty that they would reduce the Karnel to nothing but a pile of slag was fading. Evasion wasn’t a long-term solution. They needed to force a submission soon, somehow. There was no fleeing this.
All those people who joined this fight would blink out of existence.
All because she was an out-of-practice weapon.
The Federation had new ships, new encryptions, new algorithms, and new protections.
They had advanced considerably while she slept, and obfuscation was all she could do to fight them now.
And she wouldn’t even be able to do that for much longer.
“Fading, Jess. Give me good news.”
“Ain’t got none, jellybean. We’re alive, by the skin of our fuckin’ teeth. That’s as good as good’s gonna get right now!”
Fia let out a grunt of pain. “Then tell the commander we are out of time.”
There was another agonizing pause, and then the comms line keyed up again.
“Fi … you alright?”
Davik’s voice shot a bolt of heat and pain through her chest. She had wanted to hear him again, but not like this. Not while she was eroding at the edges and about to watch them all die in vivid detail.
“Davik…!” She couldn’t keep the excitement and fear from rushing into her Chorus and cutting into her voice. “Y-you should be resting!”
“Don’t steal my line, Fi. That’s what I’m supposed to say to you after all of this.”
She was still holding on by a thread. She could see the Federation’s adaptation wearing through her attempts to scramble the signals. It was like trying to hold sand in your fingers. It just kept slipping, no matter how tightly she clung to it.
Jess cut in before Fia could even attempt to form the words she needed to say to him.
“Bossman says we’re on full autonomous now. We pick fight or flee depending on our own souls, goals, and how many holes we’ve already got. Our boat is blessedly hole-less. What’s the call, mamas?”
They couldn’t run. They could try, and that might spread the Federation forces thin chasing them all, but none of them had engines up to outrunning them forever.
“Fleeing is—” her entire body coiled in pain as she tried to form the words. She was losing the fight to stay conscious. “Fleeing is slow death. Fighting is sure death.”
Davik’s voice crackled over the line. “Heard someone say all the friendlies out, why not pull a Hail Mary? Fuck these bastards. We’re beyond worrying about war crimes. Kick open their airlocks, vent ‘em wide.”
“N-no access, airgapped.”
Davik hummed over the comms. “Hm … The whole rig like that? All systems? Like entrails and all? Can you get me a schematic at this terminal? I’m sitting pretty in the cockpit.”
Fia couldn’t spare a thought to process his logic at the moment, so she shunted a datastream of the accessible ship controls on the F.V. Karnel to the cockpit displays. Access terminals, maintenance data, security controls. Anything that could be tapped, she sent to his screen.
“That is-is all, all I can see. All I can get you.”
The pain of splitting her focus was immense, falling back to that familiar and terrible sensation of clinging to molten metal.
“Oh, fuck, Fi, remember when you got a face full of dust bunnies helping me fix the coolant system on The Argent?”
They were all about to die, and he wanted to talk about their first days together. She couldn’t help but smile. It was so innocuous, and it made her feel as if she were back there. With him working, whistling, chattering about whatever.
Her chest ached with longing for a return to those easier days. Of a life she could have had — would have had — if she had just broken her oath, given up on all of this to just be with him.
“Y-yes? I remember.”
“Well, these idiots have their coolant systems intertwined with their climate control. Like, their reactor coolant feeds into— Okay, I don’t need to get into the nitty-gritty. Can you get me … these controls?”
She flitted her focus to the terminal in the cockpit and noted the points Davik was queuing up.
“Affirmative. Hold.”
She followed the trace of where his fingers touched the screen, feeling an agonizing pang that this might be the last touch they would share. A digital caress, on opposite ends of a warship.
With gritted teeth, she forced her attention to grip what he had requested and re-routed the controls towards the ship’s cockpit. Whatever it was, it was unsecured, something that the Karnel didn’t think was worth worrying about.
“Okay, okay, okay…” he mumbled along the open comms line. It was so good to hear him again. She cherished every syllable, every little murmur. “Okay, this is probably gonna set off some enviro warnings. Any chance you can lock down maint corridor 84-2 and keep any alarms hush-hush?”
“I. Not while masking us. Too many, too much— I cannot.”
Jess chimed in, her voice still sing-songy but strained as she careened them around the battlefield. “Fuck subtlety, I’ll let the other birds know they’re about to be flying naked. Give ‘em a ten count. C’mon, diva, let’s boil ‘em!”
She was still alone in the tank, but she nodded reflexively. She counted down from ten, closing her fingers in time as the seconds passed. Then, like letting go of a held breath, she unfurled the tangled mess of interference.
The surge of pain from wildly overworked neurons that suddenly had nothing to interpret ached in a surreal way. The distant comms chatter of the other ships still echoed in the trail of focus she had, confusion overlaid with barked orders and panic.
“All clear. Run fast and true, Davik.”
“Alright, watch for enviro alerts and lock out that corridor. If anyone gets in there, this all goes out the window. God, I fucking missed you.”
Her heart raced. Maybe it was the borderline lethal amount of drugs she was on, the adrenaline, or the impending threat of annihilation, but she hoped he meant that in the same way she felt it.
Not just that she missed having her whip-smart engineer.
No, the way she missed him was deeper than that. She missed him.
She could already see the barrage of alerts beginning to flood in. Temperature regulation warnings, excessive pressure alarms, and many, many flashing, blaring, insistent internal systems screaming for attention. Every single one fizzled into nothing with her touch.
All the focus of the crew aboard the Karnel was outward. Nobody stopped to realize the threat brewing on their lower decks. The growing swell of certain death underfoot. A fission reactor, rapidly losing its ability to self-regulate.
Then, one pulse of an alert flared. A hard-wired alarm triggered by the rising heat. Analog, physical. Outside of her control.
“Davik, they have failsafe alerts that I cannot silence. Advise?”
This time Jess chimed in, her voice hoarse and full of terrified laughter. “Damn woman, all business!”
It took a beat for her to realize that her internal monologue of longing for him hadn’t materialized into an actual reply.
“I … I missed you too, Davik. So much.”
“Just focus, Fi. We’ll catch up. After. Just hold on,” he said with a weary creak in his voice. “If you can’t quiet it, then flood them with nonsense reads. They’ll think everything’s going haywire, they won’t know where to look. You can do this.”
She could do that.
Much like the muddied signal-fray to hide the fleet, she echoed and warped warnings and alarms all across the Karnel. Every bell, screen, klaxon, and speaker she could access screamed out a garbled mess of incoherent alerts.
Reports were coming in from all over the ship of power failures, smoke, heat, depressurization, and hull breaches. There was no way those aboard could tell what was real, fabricated, or misinterpreted.
But she could see the true alarms. And amidst the chaos, she saw the penultimate alert begin to wail. The one they had been waiting for.
REACTOR MELTDOWN IMMINENT.
They were ten kilometers out from the Karnel. That might be enough. That might just barely be enough.
“D-Davik, internal alerts showing critical, brace!”
Every signal fizzled into nothingness. The camera feeds fed one last frame of blinding white light before ceasing.
It didn’t make a sound. It seemed almost demeaning that such destruction would be nothing but a bright flash of light in the vacuum of space. Bright light, and then a wave of energy. A death knell.
The electromagnetic burst that followed careened into her raw, open senses and quieted the world in an instant.