House of Reeds

The Cornuelle A Decaying Orbit Over Continent Four

Clinging to the aft boat bay access door, Hadeishi coughed violently. The cutting tool in his hand flew loose, but was almost immediately stopped by a lanyard cinched to his equipment belt. The Chu-sa tried to breathe normally, felt the cool tickling of more coagulants and stabilizers flooding his body and opened his eyes. Reddish spots confused his vision for a moment, until he realized they were on the inside of the face-plate.

Not a good sign, he thought ghoulishly, keenly aware of a crystalline layer of pain suppression narcotics insulating fragile consciousness from the pain wracking his body. I must be getting tubercular.

He forced his hand to grasp the cutting tool, oriented the microscopic plasma beam emitter towards the emergency access plate cover and thumbed the control. A blue-white flare answered the motion and the beam resumed cutting away the damaged plate. The access door itself was undamaged, but the layer of shipskin covering the mechanism had been mortally wounded, stiffening into a hard, steel-like consistency. The flood of heat from the x-ray laser had distorted the fabric of the shipskin as well, occluding parts of the door and the access port.

Hadeishi completed the cut and the fold of shipskin came loose. Reaching in, he found the recessing bolt, drew it back and the entire cover came loose. Hadeishi felt a surge of relief. Something had gone his way at last, if only finding the green 'ready' light gleaming inside the cover. He punched an override code into the panel and let the Fleet transponder in his suit discuss security matters with the door.

Idle, his stunned mind fixed on the explosion which had obliterated the launch. A point-defense railgun must have targeted us. Ship's ident processor has been damaged.

An unusually long period of time passed as the two systems chattered to one another. Hadeishi managed to keep both hands flat on the door, letting the suit grippers hold him to the hull. He tried sucking some water from a tube in the neck ring of his suit, but his whole chest throbbed painfully and he abandoned the effort. He was very thirsty.

At length, the access door shivered, the bolts retracted and a darkened airlock opened before him. Wary – the emergency lights should be on – Hadeishi drifted inside and spun the locking wheel to rotate the outer door closed. As he did so, a single emergency illumination panel woke to life, strobed intermittently for a few moments and went out.

Hadeishi punched his access code into the inner lock door. Nothing happened, though the ready light was shining green on the panel. Feeling a cough coming on, the Chu-sa braced himself against the wall, let his broken chest heave for a moment and the salt and iron taste of blood fill his mouth. Then he checked his z-suit's environmental readouts. Pressure stood at zero in the airlock, though closing the outer door should have caused the chamber to flood with air.

Inner lock won't open to zero-pressure, he realized. Air circulation pumps must be dead.

Licking his lips, Hadeishi eyeballed his z-suit air reserve, trying to remember what minimum air pressure was to reset the safety sensor on the inner door. Three-quarters of a tank. Let's try half that.

Numb fingers unscrewed a valve on his shoulder pack, allowing a cross-connect hose to emerge from the environmental package on the suit. Hadeishi bounced gently from side to side in the lock, searching for the pressure sensors. After a moment, he gave up. Again, he braced himself against the wall next to the access panel and opened the valve.

A faint hissing sound grew louder, second by second. Hadeishi watched his air gauge fixedly, feeling fainter moment by moment as the capacity marker shrank. At one-half, he closed the valve, feeling dizzy and nauseous.

The environmental readout showed non-zero pressure.

The Chu-sa forced his hand – fingers trembling – to punch in the access code. There was another pause. The green indicator flashed to amber, then red. A message appeared on the tiny display. Hadeishi leaned in, having trouble focusing.

Ship's atmosphere compromised, the message read, rebreather support is required.

Hadeishi mashed his thumb against the override button. There was a trembling vibration in the wall under his shoulder. The inner lock door opened, grayish smoke rushing in. The Chu-sa stumbled through into the boat bay and weakly pushed the airlock door closed behind him.

Everything was very dark, save in the direct beam of his suit lamps, which pierced a smoky, turgid gloom. Hadeishi clutched for a guiderail, found the slim tubing along the wall, and began to pull himself forward, squinting into the haze.

At the first bulkhead outside of the boat bay proper, the Chu-sa kicked slowly down a transverse corridor, trying to reach one of the four lengthwise access ways which led from the stern forward. The smoke fouling the aft hangar section thinned but he was becoming seriously concerned. He had yet to see a single crewman, the lights were out, his comm failed to find a single relay node and the air was still unbreathable. Charred debris floated everywhere, making movement in the dark difficult.

Coasting to a halt at the end of the corridor, Hadeishi found the sectional door closed. Hefting the cutting tool, he checked the access panel. This time there was a 'locked' indicator, but the pressure and environment indicators for the far side were glowing green and amber.

Ah, he thought, the boat bay crews abandoned this section because of toxic air. One of the shuttle propellant tanks must have lost integrity and caused a fire. They've starved the fire out, but not bothered to restore atmosphere.

Trying to remember the fire control override codes for the internal doors, he poked experimentally at the access panel. After several tries the door glared red at him and locked out the panel. Hadeishi wanted desperately to scratch his beard, which was itchy with dried blood and bits of vomit, but a Fleet z-suit lacked that amenity.

He pushed up and peered through the glassite port into the access way. There too the main lights were out, but he caught a gleam of the emergency lights burning and a sense of motion. Encouraged, he flashed his suit lamps through the window, hoping to draw someone's attention. Then he waited.

A faceplate swam into view – a crewman with Engineering tabs on his shoulders and a spool of commwire on his shoulder – and an ensign started with surprise to see the haggard face of his captain. Hadeishi pointed at the access plate and made a circling motion. The Sho-i ko-hosei nodded violently and disappeared from view. The Chu-sa pressed himself against the bottom of the door. He felt vibration in the decking through his hands and the door levered up.

Hadeishi squirmed through, heard his comm wake to life with the chatter of crewmen working furiously at damage control and dragged himself up the wall to punch the close-code on the door. Smoke had spilled through with him, but not too much, he hoped. The Chu-sa turned to the boy, the corners of his eyes wrinkled in a smile.

"Ship's status? How fast can you get me to Engineering?"

Twenty minutes later, Hadeishi swung along a guiderail into the main Engineering deck and stared around in tight-lipped concern at the wan faces of his crew and the rows of darkened comp displays. Only the stations devoted to the main drive coil and fusion reactors were showing the glow of active displays.

"What happened?" The Chu-sa kicked to the half-circle of panels associated with main comp.

Isoroku looked up, bald head gleaming in the light of Hadeishi's suit lamps. "The backbone network is infested with six or seven thousand kinds of attack viruses. We've got comm up in most of the ship via suit-to-suit relays and the hardline you followed up here. But everything else is still useless."

"Can you bring the main drives back on-line? We need to adjust orbit immediately."

The engineer nodded. "We can, but you won't have any navigational control from either the bridge or secondary command." A thick gloved finger stabbed at the single comp display still alive in the array. An endlessly mutating face was shining in the display, alternately leering, giggling and showing a sad expression. A dizzying array of ears, hats, tongues and noses changed with bewildering speed. "See this? This is what happens when you bring up a display."

"Main comp is infected?" Hadeishi tried to swallow, but his throat was dust dry. "That's impossible."

The bulky engineer grunted in agreement. "Main comp is fine, the computational cores are fine, archive and ready memory is all fine. But…" He tapped the panel accusingly, voice grating harshly. "The display pane interfaces, the comm nodes and the transmission linkages between the millions of subsystems on this barge are all wrecked by this kind of baka infiltrator. We're isolating systems, reflashing them and stitching them back into the network, but it's going to take a long time."

"Hours? Days?" Hadeishi stared around the Engineering deck with a cold gaze. His eyes lingered on three z-suited corpses tied down to the deck behind one of the work panels. "How bad have casualties been?"

Isoroku glanced over, then shook his head. "Damage control teams are still sorting through the wreckage – somehow we lost the entire area around your suite, the officer's mess and the forward galley – Yoyontzin reports everything up there is just twisted metal. All the hallways are clogged with wreckage."

"Again?" Hadeishi stared at the engineer in confusion. He was starting to feel numb. "From the laser impacts? Did we lose hull integrity forward of bulkhead nine?"

"No," Isoroku said, shrugging. "Some kind of secondary explosion. Nearly severed the data mains to the front quarter of the ship, but the conduit armor held – which does us no good, since every comp panel on the ship is useless." He made a spitting motion towards the evil face.

"Do we have replacement interface panels in stores?"

Isoroku bit the inside of his lip, thinking. "If they're not trashed by battle damage…"

"Isolate the sublight drive system, and rig a control panel just for the engines. Don't connect it to anything else. Will that let us regain maneuvering control?"

The engineer nodded. "We've been trying to clear the primary combat control backbone, but -"

"One little problem at a time," Hadeishi coughed, starting to drift away. Blood was leaking out of his mouth and making tiny crimson bubbles inside his face-plate. "How long until we have pervasive comm in the ship?"

Isoroku stared at the Chu-sa in horror. He seized the nearest crewman. "The captain needs medical attention right now. Get a work cart, get him on it and get him to medical! Someone, what's the status of the medical bay? Do they have air pressure?"

Crewmen scattered in all directions, including one who began chattering into the hardwired comm. Another brought Hadeishi back to the ring of comp panels. The Chu-sa batted feebly at the helping hands. "I'm fine, just have some splinters loose in my rib-cage. Someone has to relay telemetry from the outside to whoever is driving with this panel, so…" He paused, trying to clear his throat. "Are any of the bridge crew alive? Anyone with a pilot's cert?"

"I don't know." Isoroku felt panic start to churn in his stomach. "How bad is the orbit?"

"Not good," Hadeishi wheezed, clenching his teeth together. His medband was shrilling alarms inside his suit. He clenched his arms across his chest protectively. "Ah…! I seem to have exceeded some kind ofthreshold. You must stabilize our orbit quickly. Then you'll have time to fix everything else.

"Find a clean comp and panel, load fresh soft and get them into the hands of someone who knows how to steer. They'll need Navplot, which means guidance sensors have to be working." He smiled, face obscured by the drift of crimson. "Only tiny problems, Thai-i, taken one at a time. Small movements, my friend, small deliberate movements."

Hadeishi's medband tripped the last of its alert levels and flushed his system with knockmeout and a cellular stabilizer. The Chu-sa's eyes rolled up and his head fell loosely forward against the faceplate of his suit.

Isoroku cursed silently, then the work-cart was being wrangled into the work station and he and two of the Engineering deck crew were strapping the captain onto the cart, trying to be as gentle and as quick as possible.