He couldn’t look at the lists of the dead until this was over.
“Best-case scenario?” he asked.
“Twenty minutes and I’ll have one bird,” she snapped. “If it works, we’ll have the rest ten minutes after that. At that point, ser, I’ll be looking for pilots.”
“We’ll see what we can buy, CAG, but you might only have ten minutes,” he warned her.
“It’s supposed to be a two-hour process in one gravity,” O’Flannagain replied. “Cross your fingers, ser.”
Henry’s attention turned back to tactical. The starfighters were now heading his way and he didn’t even have shields.
“Ihejirika,” he said calmly. “I read our missile launchers are online?”
“Yes, ser,” the tactical officer confirmed. “We’ve also got about sixty percent of our antimissile lasers.”
“Best news I’ve had all day,” Henry admitted grimly. “Those starfighters don’t have magazine capacity. We do. Open fire as you can range on them.”
“Yes, ser.”
He turned to Henriksson.
“Lieutenant?”
“Yes, ser?” the engineering officer replied, her voice strained.
“Tell me I have a gravity shield.”
“We rebuilt with all of those new breakers,” she said quietly. “If we flip them all and power back up, there’s a sixty percent chance we have the shield back. We have drones inspecting them all as we speak.”
“I’m guessing I wouldn’t like the other forty percent in those odds?” Henry asked.
“Song says…twenty percent chance we pop a couple more breakers and nothing happens. Twenty percent chance one or more of the breakers is melted through and we permanently burn out the gravity generators.”
Henry exhaled and nodded against the viscous gel surrounding him.
“And how long until we’ve checked all those breakers?” he asked softly.
“Fifteen minutes, ser.”
He looked at the pursuing starfighters.
“You have five.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Sylvia woke up to darkness. It took her a solid several seconds to realize that there was a damp cloth wrapped around her head and reach up to touch it.
“How badly is she injured?” she heard Oran Aval ask in Kem.
“She will live,” Alex Thompson replied. “And if she does not, you will not.”
She had no idea what was going on, but it didn’t sound good.
“I’m fine, Commander,” she managed to get out, trying to sit up. She could understand Kem, but speaking it felt beyond her.
“You are no such thing,” Thompson replied sharply. “You hit your head, Ambassador. You have a minor concussion and you were bleeding pretty badly.”
“What happened? How long was I out?” Sylvia demanded. She reached up to try and remove the cloth, but a firm hand intercepted her.
“Leave it for now, Em Todorovich,” the GroundDiv officer told her. “You’re still bleeding. As for what happened…” He sighed. “The Kozun opened fire. Carpenter was destroyed; we don’t know what happened to the rest of the task group.”
Her head felt fuzzy but something in that didn’t sound quite right.
“We’re aboard Carpenter,” she finally noted.
“We were,” Thompson agreed. “Now we’re in some kind of heavily armored safety capsule in the wreckage of a ship that had three hundred people aboard. People the Kozun killed.”
“Right.” Sylvia had to recalibrate her brain for Kem and fast. “I need to see, Commander. Can you move the bandage that much?”
“Give me a moment. Roi!”
Another set of hands touched her head a moment later, delicately adjusting the cloth so that it eventually lifted above her eyebrows. She still couldn’t see and she could feel the crust of dried blood now.
“Close your eyes,” the French noncom helping Thompson told her. “We need to clean them.”
Sylvia obeyed and a new warm wet cloth passed over her face, clearing away the dried blood.
“Bien,” Chief Bilal Roi said, stepping back to survey their handiwork. “It’s not perfect,” they warned her. “The wound has mostly stopped bleeding, but your internal network is working overtime to keep the concussion under control. The more you can rest, the better.”
“You’re a GroundDiv field medic, Chief,” Sylvia pointed out with what she knew was a wan smile. “When was the last time your patients actually rested?”
Roi snorted and stepped back, allowing Sylvia to look over the rest of the room. Everyone who’d been in the room when she’d blacked out was still there, but the Kozun group was now pressed back against a wall, under the guns of her third GroundDiv trooper and the La-Tar bodyguards.
“Felix?” Sylvia said quietly.
“I’m here, Ambassador,” her chief of staff replied, stepping into her field of view.
“Thanks. Turning my head hurts,” she admitted. “Where are we at?”
“Voice Aval ordered her people to lay down their weapons as soon as we realized what had happened,” Felix Leitz told her. “They’ve been under guard since; you were only out for twenty minutes. Long enough to scare us.”
“The security pod contains the conference room and not much more,” Thompson explained. “If anyone other than the diplomatic contingents survived, we don’t know. We have life support and heat control for a little while, but I don’t know how long.”
The big GroundDiv officer shook his head.
“I don’t know fucking anything, ser,” he admitted. “We have Carpenter’s sensor data up to the last moment, but there wasn’t enough warning for anything. The Kozun opened fire and Carpenter was closest.
“If it wasn’t for this armored safety pod, we’d all be dead with the ship.”
“And everyone else probably thinks we are,” Sylvia murmured. “All right. I need to talk to Rising Principle.”
“Are you up to that?” Leitz asked.
“No choice,” she told him. She leaned on Roi to get up to her feet, nodding to the noncom before carefully crossing the conference room to where the Enteni was standing.
They still had artificial gravity. Of all the things they could be wasting power on, that seemed ridiculous to her—but very few people in the concealed escape pod had zero-gee experience.
“Ambassador Rising Principle,” she greeted them in careful Kem. She was certain she was speaking noticeably slower, but she didn’t have much of a choice.
“Ambassador Todorovich. I am-was grateful you survived,” the Enteni told her. She couldn’t read them well, but she had a sudden overwhelming sense of youth from the La-Tar diplomat. Rising Principle was young for their job, and this was outside their experience.
“The Voice?”
“Is-was detained after her people attacked,” Rising Principle said. “She surrendered. If you had-was died, she would-should have-were joined you.”
That wasn’t diplomatic at all, though Sylvia could understand it.
“This module,” she said. “How much power and life support do we have?”