Old Habits Die Hard Pt. 5
05 Dec 2016Desert Fox CXVII
The dogfight had taken a lot out of my old girl, and the re-entry had just made everything worse. After I broke atmo, my port fuel line burst and I started spraying H-fuel all over the jungle canopy. After shutting off fuel supply to my port engine, I fought the controls all the way down to the surface. Somehow I managed to land her without carving out (another) crater on this rock.Even so, she was in no position to fly anywhere, so I was grounded until I could fix her. Or, at least, patch any leaks with spot welds and duct tape. I’m a mercenary, not a mechanic. I only know enough about ship internals to not break down in deep space. So sue me.
So after taking a couple hours to stop hyperventilating and get my prosthetic to stop twitching, I get to work. It was slow going, since I had to crawl through kilometers of ductworks and access hatches just to find the problems.
The punctured fuel like was the easiest to find; the acrid stink of H-fuel hit me like a meteor the moment I popped the cover on the aft-port duct system. Gagging and coughing on the fumes, I slam cover down and stumble away, gasping for breath, From the sheer magnitude of the stench, I could tell this was a heavy leak. I stagger down the hallway towards my equipment locker, my head still swimming from the fumes.
Half an hour and a lot of swearing later, I’ve got one of my musty old hazmat suits on. It’s more like a gas mask and a rubber suit, but it’s all I’ve got. Hopefully it would screen out enough of the radiation so that I don’t develope rapid onset face cancer. I might get, like, huge aggressive belly button cancer in a month or something, but that’s what progenitor cells are for, right?
Anyway, I squelch and squeak back to the access hatch and haul myself into the duct. The mask’s filters screen out the smell of the fuel, so I have to use the geiger counter in my arm to guide me towards the leak. It starts off slow; maybe one or two ticks every ten seconds, but the further in I go the faster it chirps, until an almost solid tone trills from my wrist.
The line is as bit around as my leg, made of treated rubber and woven titanium mesh. It looks like a cannon shell had gone off in here; the line and the electrics around it are pockmarked with shrapnel impacts. Thankfully, it seems the heavy duty insulation had stopped the worst of it; a couple non-essential connections had been cut, but nothing I’d have to worry about. At least not yet.
The fuel line, on the other hand, is shredded. The titanium mesh had deflected most of the shards, but a big piece must have made it through, and the internal pressure of the line dude the rest. A chunk twice the size of my fist is missing from the line, its edges ragged and bowed outwards. A small dribble of neon blue fuel trickles from the puncture, tapping out a steady rhythm onto the deck. I’ll have to replace this section. Patching it up would be useless with a breach of this size; the pressure would just rupture the patch.
Damn
It’s slow work; I can’t use a torch to cut the damaged line. At least, not if I don’t want to light the air on fire and roast myself alive in this fucking duct. I’d like to avoid that, thank you very much.
So I have to do it the old fashioned way, with a saw. I can’t even use the power saw, since I might throw up sparks. See above about being roasted alive. If I was smart, I could just remove the whole line and replace it. But I’m not smart; I only carry the minimum amount of parts to cut down on extra weight, so I only have a small section of spare fuel line.
It takes me hours to saw through, by which point my suit has filled up to my waist in sweat and my real arm is about to fall off. Somehow I manage to finagle the damaged section out of the way and the replacement into position, despite my bulky suit, restricted field of view and the utterly claustrophobic environment. After that, it was just a matter of guiding the temporary seals into place and hitting their internal heatless welders. Then I have to drag myself and my swimming pool of a suit out of the duct, seal up the most contaminated areas, vent their atmospheres to prevent fires, and avoid the aft-port area of the ship like the plague. Easy.
The rest of the repairs are much easier; mostly just rewiring some shorted electricals, spot welding a few hull breaches and shoring up my reactor containment. I did have to reroute the primary fuel pump to my maneuvering thrusters through the starboard line and alter the energy flow to my frame shift drive so I don’t open a dimensional rift and trap myself in limbo for all eternity.
Or, you know, it could just explode, but that’s nowhere near as exciting, is it?
All in all, my redneck rigging took 3 days galactic standard, but only about a day and a half local time. The day/night cycle is really long down here, and it’s fucking with my sleep schedule.
Now that the tide is more or less space worthy, I can get the hell off this mud ball and hightail it for the nearest civilized system for some real repairs. As long as the Federation hadn’t put an APB out on me already.
Anna, this is why you choose contracts with your brain, not your pussy. What were you thinking? Kidnapping a Fed spook? There is no lay good enough to justify this. And now you have to ditch him here. Way to go.
I’m already in orbit before my conscience catches up with me. Who knew the human conscience could reach super-luminal velocities.
Every one of my hard earned instincts are screaming at me to scamper away and save my own skin. To leave all this Imperial business behind and take my advance payment with me.
On the other hand, all of my morals, shriveled and atrophied as they might be, are telling me to find Cass first. Plus, that freak Gideon didn’t seem like the kind of guy to take failure or theft in stride, and I’m not in the mood to be on the run from the Inquisition for the rest of my life. I saw how that turned out before; it didn’t take very long.
Groaning in defeat, I turn the ship around and head back for the surface. This is entirely about self preservation and money. It has nothing to do with Cass or his abs. Nothing at all.
If you ever suggest otherwise, I’ll stab you in the fucking throat.
So I figured the easiest way to find Cass would be to find the crash site. He’s probably using it as a landmark to navigate by, and I wouldn’t put it past him to have some sort of survival gear stashed somewhere on his ship. Either way, credits to croissants he’s at the wreckage or heading towards the wreckage.
Once I’m back in atmo, I point my nose towards the darker of the two smoke columns and hit the throttle. The corvette is a standard military vessel, and as such has a cleaner, more efficient reactor. Cass’ ship, on the other hand, is a custom job, so his heavily modified reactor puts out more power per cubic meter than the ‘vette’s, and his aftermarket drives produce more thrust per square meter. The downside of that is the increased heat and radiation they put out and the greater fuel consumption, combined with a core that goes into meltdown more easily and that super toxic coolant he uses. As a result, the fire raging in the wreckage is hot enough to burn things that wouldn’t even singe on the corvette. That shit he insists on having on board probably isn’t helping either. All of those put together makes a recipe for some seriously noxious smoke.
And that’s where I’m heading. At least I won’t be getting shot at, right?
The air is thick with a haze of smoke, cutting my visibility down to a couple hundred meters at best. I keep low over the treeline as an easy form of navigation, my engines scorching the tops of the foliage as I swoop by. Over the horizon of uprooted trees, the sickly green light of the ship fire illuminates the smoke cloud with an otherworldly glow.
Eventually, she comes into view, a hazy white lump with a blinding green spot at her center. Slowly, she becomes clearer, until I enter the crater and I can see her in full detail; she is twisted, crumpled and smashed, her pristine white paintjob marred by the crash and heat of re-entry. She’s been cracked open like an egg at midships, the terrible glow emanating from the gaping tear in her hull. I can only describe it as hell contained; the fire is bright enough that I need to squint, even through my cockpit’s glass and hot enough to melt the armor plates at the edges of the breach and superstructure beneath. Rivers of burning fuel flow from the reactor, melting deep trenches through the rock and dirt. Radioactive dust and pulverized heavy metals drift down from the cloud of toxic smoke and coat everything that isn’t on fire yet.
Suppressing a shiver at the sheer amount of concentrated death spewing from what was once a beautiful ship, I roll to port and start a wide orbit of the crater, scanning the surface for anything that could be Cass. If he’s not here, I’d widen my search radius and-
There!
8 clicks off is a blurry white and black dot moving slowly out of the treeline towards the nuclear inferno at the center of the crater. In the time it takes me to level out and angle towards the figure, its gait falters and it collapses.
Shit, he’s injured. I hit the boost and punch a hole through the sound barrier. Once I’m within a kilometer, I pull a dicey turn to arrest my momentum and bring down within a few dozen meters of Cass. My vertical thrusters kick up a cloud of dust and ash as my landing gear makes contact with a jolt.
After going through my post-flight checklist with more haste than is generally safe, I rush through the ship and down the gangplank with almost total disregard for the clouds of fallout drifting down around me. I could worry about that later; after all, I’m already planning on buying a half a ton of progenitor cells for personal use, so whats a few hundred extra kilo in the grand scheme of things?
When I reach Cass, he’s barely moving and bleeding from over a dozen ragged and dirty wounds. The worst is on his normie arm, where it looks like he stuck it into an industrial meat grinder set on “lacerate.” His back is a close second, with long strips of pale flesh hanging like streamers from shredded muscle and chipped ribs. If I don’t get him some basic medical attention soon, he wouldn’t survive long enough to make it off world.
Luckily, he’d managed to get his field tourniquet out and mostly attached. With a few deft movements, I tighten it down on his upper arm, clamping down on the artery and cutting off the slow pulse of escaping blood. Now all I have to do is get him back to the Tide and get some antibiotics and artie blood in him.
Grunting with effort, I fling him over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry and begin the slow and laboured march back to my ship. Blood slowly coats my back and shoulders as it leaks from his many wounds. It’s not enough to kill him outright, but enough to make me worried.
About halfway back to the ship, I feel him stir. It’s weak at first, but grows more urgent with each step I take. I try to ignore it, he he just gets more unruly the further we go. Eventually I relent.
“Cass, it’s me!” Immediately his struggles cease as he responds to the sound of my voice. “I’m taking you to my ship. I’m taking you home.”
His struggles start just as abruptly as they stopped. “No.”
“What do you mean, ‘no’?” I hiss at him.
“... mission,” he mumbles, “Gotta… finish.”
“Are you out of your goddamn mind? You’re in no shape to feed yourself, let alone kidnap a Federal spymaster!”
“Pay you… double.”
I stop in my tracks, Cass’s limbs thumping against my torso. Self preservation and greed are having a knock down, drag out brawl in the back of my mind. Ultimately, greed prevails, albeit reluctantly.
Grinding my teeth, I resume my march back to the Tide.
“Fine,” I growl, “But you’re not going anywhere.”
You should have just left him, Anna. What have you gotten yourself into?