Xeros by Zak Zyz

Author:Zak Zyz [Zyz, Zak]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-06-01T18:00:00+00:00

15

FÜR LYDIA

After a few nights of debauch, Pirate came to my bunk instead of Murderess’s. As I followed him to the latrine, I could see her eyes glinting in the dark, serpentine with resentment.

“Will she snitch?” I asked as I shut the door.

“I’ll deal with her after this,” Pirate shrugged. “Unless you want a go?”

In the crimson light, he couldn’t see me turning bright red. Small blessings. I shook my head, and he shrugged.

“A wiser man than I,” Pirate joked. “Woman’s got a hole in her nothing could ever fill.”

“Do you think the blackout was an attack?” I asked, eager to change the topic.

“Not from the Clabs. We’d all be dead. Likewise, we can infer the reactor wasn’t the problem since we’re still here. It might have been sabotage. But more likely, a meteoroid punched through the hull and hit a distribution node.”

“That would mean mag-deflect is down,” I groaned. It was a horrifying thought. If the shield was down, it was only a matter of time until we were hit again. “We were stuck here for hours. Why didn’t they switch to secondary power?”

“Probably no one left who knows how. We very nearly froze to death,” Pirate agreed. “And they’re still having issues.”

I felt the chill of the void. All those faces I’d seen howling in the airlock came back to me. At every execution, I’d told myself it couldn’t happen to me because I was squared away. Now, I might taste space through sheer incompetence.

Life support is quadruple-redundant. I boggled at the sheer number of stupid decisions that must have happened to get us to this point. Had the drills executed every competent engineer on the station?

“We could…” Pirate began to suggest something, but our eyes met, and the words died in his mouth. I knew what he wanted to say, and why he didn’t say it. The two of us could probably fix the damaged node, or at the very least reroute it. But there was one thing we both knew for certain, no matter how bad things got.

Never volunteer.

“It was like this on Ganglion,” Pirate recalled. “There were forty-eight fabricators, but only ten were online, running at half-capacity. Command still expected us to produce at full output. I hated the fabricator repair crew. Those apes couldn’t fix breakfast. On top of that, OpSec kept pushing out these security patches that broke half of the functions.”

“You never told me how you managed to steal a ship,” I reminded Pirate, nudging him toward thoughts of escape.

“Ha! Stole? Impossible. The Hezo isn’t that stupid. OpSec keys the ship templates so mechanics can’t fly them. There would be nothing but empty repair bays if they didn’t. I couldn’t possibly steal one.”

“Then how’d you get out?”

“I really did build one myself,” Pirate smiled. “Piece by piece. OpSec never laid a hand on my ship because they didn’t know it existed.”

It was an extraordinary claim, and anyone else would have scoffed. But I had seen a side of Pirate the others hadn’t, a little blue masterpiece hidden away in the latrine vent.

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