CHAPTER ELEVEN

For a heartbeat Richard just froze, his mind stopped, his mind broken, shocked by the terrible scope of the disaster. Horror bloomed in him like a dark flower. As a warrior he had seen monstrous destruction, indeed, he had been its author, but never had he seen anything like this. An entire Cluster had been obliterated.

And it meant nothing.

Great Father!

He tore his eyes away from the mountain of stone tumbling through star-flecked space and wrenched his attention back to the ’Mech Bay.

Darkness ruled the cavernous space, but it was not unbroken black. There were a few feeble sources of illumination: the Den’s deck lights painted faraway circles of white light on the WarShip’s hull, high overhead; the glow of emergency symbols marked on bulkheads in green phosphorescent paint.

And there was the cold and distant light of the stars.

It might almost have been better if there had been no light at all. The gloom revealed terrible things. The space’s thick steel bulkheads had been torn and shredded, as if some great carnivore had ripped a hunk out of the DropShip’s flesh. Structural beams were bent into fanciful shapes, looped into crooked circles or twisted into strange helical forms. A fallen gantry, broken and bent, its spidery corpse painting unwholesome shadows on what had once been the space’s deck.

It was bitterly cold in the ’Mech Bay, the kind of cold that cut through flesh like a blade. And it was still. Empty of movement. Empty of even the smallest scrap of sound.

There was nothing here but loss. Nothing could have lived through this. Not this. No one would blame Richard if he turned and fled from this horrible, sideways hell. It was the logical thing to do.

And Clan warriors were bred to be coldly logical.

He had every reason to leave.

Instead, he moved further into the space.

Richard clambered over the smashed gantry, gripping steel so cold it stung his hands right through his gloves, twice falling in the darkness, once smashing his face against a hard pole.

He struggled to his knees and gasped.

An icy sliver of pain stabbed into his left leg. For an instant, he thought the limb was broken. And then he realized the pain was cold. He glanced down. A twisted scrap of steel had slashed his suit from knee to ankle. A tightness in the knee told him that a bladder in the suit had inflated, sealing the rest of him off from the breach.

But his leg was out in the cold.

He had a patch kit, but the kit’s gel was only suitable for plugging small punctures—not mending a tear a quarter-meter long.

Grimly, Richard managed to push himself to his feet—and go on.

Ahead, in the tangle of shadows, he saw a dark shape that could only be a fallen BattleMech. He could not identify the machine, but he could see that it was big, an assault ’Mech—or at least a heavy.

It was unnerving to see a ’Mech ripped free from its clamps and tossed casually to the deck. The BattleMech was a fearsome beast. At ten meters, it towered over the 31st century battlefield, a heavily armored monster bristling with weapons, a fusion reactor its beating heart.

Almost nothing threatened a BattleMech—except another BattleMech.

Yet this one had been crushed like it were a child’s discarded plaything.

Richard worked his way down the mountain of twisted steel and snapped on his flashlight, playing the beam across the fallen machine. It was a Mad Dog, a design the Spheroids called Vulture. The ’Mech’s torso was a narrow triangular wedge that looked a little like a beak, set between two massive shoulders topped with missile launchers.

The sixty-ton machine had fallen face-down, the nose buckling under the brutal impact. The fall had also snapped off the twin barrels of the pulse lasers that made up the end of the machine’s right arm, and it had half-rolled onto its side.

The Mad Dog’s cockpit normally sat high atop the torso, but the angle of the machine’s fall had brought it within reach of the deck. Richard hurried down the gantry and sprinted for the cockpit, breathing hard.

The ferroglass canopy was frosted with pale ice and he felt a jet of freezing-cold gas that told him the canopy was cracked and losing atmosphere. Most of the ice was on the inside—but not all of it. With the back of his hand he wiped away the ice that had frozen on the outside of the canopy.

There was a warrior inside.

A woman’s body was pressed against the ferroglass canopy. She must have been sitting in her cockpit when the impact’s terrible force wrenched her machine free of its huge mechanical restraints, but she had not been belted in. The fall might very well have killed her.

Richard rapped on the canopy.

Inside her glass chrysalis, the warrior stirred.

Richard pounded his fist on the canopy, trying to get her attention.

He saw the shadow of her body draw itself up. She leaned forward and wiped the thin film of ice from the canopy and looked down at him, clearly dazed.

The dim half-light washed out all color, but Richard still recognized the woman’s coal-dark skin, the short curls of ebony hair shadowing her skull, the wide, black eyes that should have been a clear hazel.

Star Captain Malika Hall.

Richard held up both hands, begging her to stay with him. He knelt down, pulled a white board and marker from the body bag, and wrote, “P-SUIT.”

Slowly she nodded.

She rummaged through a small locker and came away with an emergency pressure suit. But Richard worried about her slow, clumsy motion. Just how disoriented was she? Emergency suits were designed for ease of use. But if she failed to seal it properly…

He watched her struggle with the suit.

Maybe there was another way. He could use the gel in his patch kit to slow the canopy leak, wait for help to come. Except there was no telling how badly hurt Malika was. He looked up at the huge hole.

And there was no guarantee that help was coming any time soon.

No, he had to do something now.

He wiped his board clean and wrote another message: “CHECK SUIT SEAL.”

She peered at it for a moment, and then nodded.

When she was done, he checked the ’Mech’s warped hatch.

Jammed shut.

He pulled the slug thrower from his waistband and held it up, then waved Hall back.

Her eyes grew large when she saw the weapon.

Again, Richard gestured at her to get back.

At last she understood. Stumbling over her own feet, Hall staggered to the back of the cockpit and crouched down, facing away from him.

Richard ran his hand along the canopy, looking for the leak. Ferroglass was a strong material and ordinarily it would easily stand up to a slug thrower. But the hold was brutally cold and the Mad Dog’s canopy had been subjected to a massive shock. He had cold and a flaw. All he needed to get brittle fracture was a stress.

If he could just find the leak—

There. Right there. Bitter cold stung his hand as a jet of frigid gas played over his fingers. He positioned the weapon a couple centimeters from the crack, angled away from the woman. He drew a deep breath.

And pulled the trigger.

The weapon bucked in his hand, and then the ferroglass exploded. Shards of glass rained down, ricocheted off his faceplate.

During all of this there was no sound, absolutely no sound, not when he pulled the trigger, not even when the canopy exploded into a million pieces.

He savagely punched through the broken ferroglass, opening a hole big enough for a person to crawl through. He was through the jagged ring of broken glass in a heartbeat, checking her suit, making sure it was properly sealed.

She watched him with wide, terrified eyes.

Once he saw the suit was fine, he dug through the first aid kit for a syringe. He was worried about giving Hall a stimulant, but he needed her to be alert. In the end, he decided to give her a third of the syringe, hoping it would be enough. Hoping it would not be too much.

He punched the needle through the tough fabric of the suit, then pulled it back out, sealing the puncture with gel from the patch kid.

The drug seemed to do its job. She closed her eyes for a moment, but when she opened them again, her gaze met his and he thought he saw understanding there.

He pointed behind him, at the hole.

Hall nodded.

Richard swung his body out of the hole, landing on the deck in a crouch. He turned and caught the woman in his arms.

And then he sprinted for the nearest bulkhead.

Spaces as big as the ’Mech Bay possessed closet-sized vacuum shelters, small spaces that a trapped crewman could access in the event of a decompression accident. There. A square hatch marked, Hg 0 SHELTER 6-88-3-B, in glowing green phosphorescent letters.

He reached the hatch and punched an emergency access plate embedded in the bulkhead. The hatch popped open. Richard carried Hall through and closed the hatch behind him, feeling it latch as it shut. There was another access plate on the inside. Richard saw its faint green glow and pushed it.

Nothing happened.

For a moment Richard felt the first stirrings of blind panic rising within him. The vacuum shelters were supposed to have dedicated power supplies, but he remembered crawling through pitch-black corridors. If there was no power, there was no air.

And then he felt a jet of warm air play across his back, heard the subtle hiss of returning atmosphere.

Thank the Great Father!

After a minute, a second hatch popped open and he stepped into a space that was little bigger than two meters by three. He closed the second hatch behind him and gently set Hall on the deck. She was shivering, and Bekker suddenly realized he was, too.

There was light in the little space, a dim yellow glow, and bless all that was holy, there was heat. It was actually warm in the closet-sized space, a toasty thirty degrees Centigrade. It felt wonderful. It took all of Richard’s self-control not to sit down next to the woman, close his eyes, and go to sleep.

She looked up at him. Malika Hall was pretty, though not as pretty as Corinne. “Whas going on?” her voice came out slurred and muffled by the mask.

“Asteroid,” said Richard, not believing the word even as he spoke it. Not believing it even though he had seen it. “The ship was hit by an asteroid.”

“An asteroid,” she whispered and there was horror in her voice, a haunted look in her big, expressive eyes.

Richard understood exactly how she felt. He remembered his own horror when he learned of the manner of Aaron Hall’s sudden death, but this was a thousand times worse, a million times worse. The warriors who had died here had been wasted, all their skill and courage and honor thrown away as if they did not even matter. They had not been felled defending Clan Ghost Bear or the Great Father’s vision.

No, they had been killed in a monstrous accident.

It was hard to see how such a thing could even be possible.

He stripped out of his damaged suit, going to a locker and pulling out a fresh one. His leg throbbed with terrible pain. He searched through the first aid kit until he found the part-empty syringe he had given Hall. He gave himself the balance and immediately felt better.

She tilted her head, looking at him again. “I owe you my life, Richard Bekker.”

He waved her words away. “It was nothing, Star Captain.” He was not being modest, only honest. It was nothing. It was less than nothing. Clan warriors were reared to believe in bravery and honor, but how could those ideas mean anything in the face of something like this.

She frowned. “Well, it means something to me,” she said.

Richard opened his mouth and then closed it again, choosing not to argue the point. “Is there anything I can do for you before I go?”

Hall’s face crumpled into a puzzled scowl. “Go? Where would you go?”

“There are sure to be others out there, Star Captain, trapped in the darkness as you were.”

Hall shook her head. “Richard Bekker, you are clearly hurt. If you venture back out into the vacuum, it will cost you your life, and you will save no one else.”

Richard nodded. “That is what I was told before I came to rescue you.” He leaned forward and touched her shoulder. “Do not worry, Star Captain. When help comes, the vacuum shelters will be the first place they will check for survivors.” He flashed her a lopsided grin as he punched the inner access plate and the door slid open. “And I will do my best to find you some company as soon as I can.”

But he could not help one last, longing glance back into the little bubble of warmth and hope before stepping back out into the desperate cold.