Vakar paused, but when he replied, his voice was hard. “With respect and deep affection, Eva, you are no longer my superior officer.”
“Vakar, don’t—” Before Eva could finish, Min cut in over the speakers.
“Cap, I think you’ll want to hear this,” Min said. “I pulled it out of station comms.”
Another voice replaced Min’s: Mari, her tone professional but strained, the sound of ship alarms and notifications in the background.
“—attacks appear to be from both automated defenses and enemy combatants,” Mari was saying. “Our sensors are not detecting any known markers for sentient life, but the entire planet appears to be Proarkhe in origin. There are at least seven energy signatures that match the escaped artifact and the two counterparts we recovered from—” A sickening whoosh interrupted her, loud enough to make Eva cover her ears. She knew that sound, and if her heart weren’t mechanical, it would have stopped.
“I’ve lost engines,” Mari said quietly. “I’ll continue transmitting data for as long as my instruments are functional. Any hope that we could make contact peacefully seems to be lost. We must prepare for our worst fears to be realized.” If she said anything else, Eva didn’t hear it, because someone cut the connection.
Pink was grabbing her arm before Eva knew what was happening. Her mouth was set in a firm line, her eye seeing everything in Eva’s head as if it were being broadcast on a commwall.
“No,” Pink said.
“I have to,” Eva said.
Pink’s grip on Eva’s arm tightened. “She knew the risks. She knew what might happen. You have to let her go.”
Pink was right. What was Eva going to do, fly through a huge space battle to rescue her sister from a mystery enemy on the other side of a Gate that would be closing any moment? There was hard, and then there was impossible. There was brave, and there was suicidal.
She wasn’t leaving her sister to die, she was honoring her sister’s sacrifice by choosing to live, for herself and her crew. And with any luck, someone from The Forge would be heroic and save Mari for her.
Yeah, none of that shit sounded great to her, either. She closed her eyes and prayed to the Virgin, for Mari and everyone else caught up in this mess.
“You’re sure it’s The Fridge attacking us?” Eva asked Min, opening her eyes again.
“Oh yeah, totally,” Min said. “Station security is super mad about it. What should I do?”
Eva and Pink shared a look, and Pink exhaled loudly, a half-smile baring some of her teeth.
“Merciful heavens,” Pink said. “And here I was, ready to make a run for it quietly.”
“We can make a run for it loudly instead,” Eva said. “We just have to be quick and careful.”
Pink shook her head. “Two cycles to the nearest Gate, remember? Nothing quick about that.”
Except that wasn’t true anymore, was it? “There’s a new Gate right in front of us, and it seems to work fine,” Eva told her. “We can get to that and get through in no time.”
Pink’s smile spread and her eyes twinkled with mischief. “You know, you’re not wrong. Probably safer to do that than to risk being followed, anyway.”
Eva nodded and stepped back onto the bridge. “You get all that, Min?” she asked.
“Sure thing, Cap,” Min replied. “Where should I Gate to?”
We were supposed to pick a vacation spot, Eva thought. Can’t sit around scrolling through options while we wait to get blown up. Think, think . . .
“How about Brodevis?” Sue asked, popping her head through the doorway.
“Where they record Crash Sisters?” Eva asked. She’d heard the memvids from that place were altered to make the beaches seem comfortable instead of freezing, but that could have been a rumor. It was a beautiful place, at least, or it pretended to be.
“Yes!” Min yelled. “Maybe Leroy can get us tickets to a Grand Melee!”
Pink rolled her eye but said nothing, which Eva took for consent.
“Brodevis it is,” Eva said. “Bueno, salpica. Sue, get down to engineering in case something catches fire.”
Sue frowned. “I already repaired all the—”
“Joking, Sue, but get down there anyway, in case new problems need fixing in a hurry.”
“Right, yes, got it!” Sue hesitated, then rushed in to grab Min’s hand and squeeze it before running off toward the cargo bay, trailing a trio of little yellow bots.
Eva held out her own hand to Pink, ignoring the parts of her that were still screaming about rescuing Mari. “You ready?” she asked.
“Baby, I was born ready,” Pink replied, taking the hand she was offered.
“Then let’s make like a flea and jump.” Eva grinned. “And bite.”
While the station had been towing the Gate along before, it had untethered the massive ring and moved a few light-seconds away before conducting the transit experiment, so it was no longer as nearby as it had been. The distance would have been nothing to La Sirena Negra at any other time, except now the space between was filled with people trying to kill each other.
The fighters zipped around taking shots at anything moving within range of their smaller weapons, while the destroyers and frigates lurked at the edges of the fray like bouncers doing crowd control. The larger cruisers and battlecruisers hung back even farther and used their enormous cannons to fire at the station itself. The Forge fired back in turn, laser and plasma and even kinetic weapons continuously repelled by the shields on both sides that were still active—for now. Debris was scattered throughout from the ships that had already been damaged or destroyed, inertia carrying the pieces away from the area in a slow but still dangerous ripple effect of whatever explosion or collision had done the deed.
As with any space battle, Sir Isaac Newton was the deadliest son of a bizcocho in space, and Eva was eager to avoid the long arm of his law.
“Min, get us through,” Eva said, sitting in the captain’s chair on the bridge.
“You bet, Cap,” Min replied, guiding them out into the black and immediately taking a dive down along the length of the station.
The ship’s proximity alarm became a continuous background noise once they were clear, so Eva adjusted the sensitivity until it was only the occasional blip. She pulled up the weapons systems to calibrate the auto-turret, grabbing the appropriate friend-or-foe codes from Min’s logs so they wouldn’t hit any Forge ships, then setting the size and velocity parameters to avoid wasting shots on debris. Pink was already logged into the laser cannon, so Eva took over what they called their bag of tricks—homing mines, electromagnetic decoys, and so on—then opened the tactical display and started plotting where they might best be deployed.
That shit wasn’t cheap, and even though they’d just been paid, it would be nice not to waste their profits on murder supplies.
Time dilated, as it was wont to do when Eva was focused on not dying. Min carefully guided La Sirena Negra across the combat zone, avoiding the pockets of dogfighting and drones and enemy mines that were gradually increasing in density—relatively speaking, given how big space was. The larger ships remained at the periphery, and while the Forge station was still moving thanks to inertia, its engines had apparently been shut down to redirect power to shields that were likely to start overheating any moment. Assuming Fridge hackers hadn’t managed to get past their firewalls to pull some other comemierdería with their systems.