Torpedo Run Chapter 14
#14 of Torpedo Run
Chapter 14
Private First Class Daryl 'Derry' Blake rushed through the doorway, head down to avoid the storm of bullets and energy pulses that flew only inches above. The sole of his combat boot whipped out by instinct, and plowed upwards into the chin of one fur hidden behind the bulkhead, snapping his head back with a crunch of teeth and vertebrae and sending him crashing to the deck.
The wolf barely slowed for the kick, spinning right to clear a corner and by dint of training alone squeezing off four shots into the rhino that charged at him from that direction. It pitched to the deck at full speed, poleaxed, and skidded almost to his feet before he was off again, covered by other Marines streaming through the door.
"Blake, do you have the bridge? Over."
"Negative, Staff Sar'nt! Under heavy fire! Over!"
From behind him, a nimble shape danced through his Marines, then rushed past him, bent low. Cursing, he followed her, rifle up and breathing hard, covering the crazy fox-ape girl as she sprinted straight down a corridor full of enemies. One of her paws flew forward, and something landed with a hard thunk a dozen yards ahead. She never lost momentum, darting into a side corridor in their tunnel of pipes and tubes.
Up ahead, the explosive detonated with a 'THUMP!' of impact, blasting warm air and pressure back into the Marines with enough force to push him back a step. Then the hall was clear.
Ahead of them, a sealed bulkhead read "Bridge - Authorized Staff Only".
"Staff Sar'nt," he grunted into the communicator, scowling at the fox-ape girl as she emerged from the cubby hole with a grinning shrug, "we've reached the bridge. Please don't send me insane civilians with grenades next time I ask for reinforcements. Over."
The lion's gruff voice, framed by rifle fire in his background, responded with similar wan sardonic tone.
"She's not a civilian, Blake. I'll tell you later. Take the bridge so we can get this damn bay open. Over."
Derry blinked and quirked a brow, as other Marines moved up to take positions by the door. Storming the bridge was a stack-and-assault kind of job, after all.
"Not a civilian? Staff Sar, who the hell is she? Over?"
"You don't want to know. Take the bridge and get the cargo doors open. The transports Kerr stole for us are bound to be followed, might be under fire, and have 90 percent of the ship's crew on board. Get it done, Marine. Out."
Derry scowled, but nodded, glaring at the door as if it were a personal affront. 'Get it done,' Herrin had said. Get It Done was what he planned to do. This time, without Nivea to back him up with her supportive and half-sarcastic commentary, or Clicks with her fearlessness and crazed banter.
His gut wrenched thinking about it, and he had to pause a second to shove his nerve back into place. Every street-kid instinct in him was yelling to go hide somewhere. Without a pack to watch his back, he felt somehow defenseless, an overwhelming sense that someone was about to put a knife between his ribs.
Then he realized something. Twelve Marines were looking at him, and he knew each of their names. They'd only met recently, never shared drinks or stories really, yet here they were waiting on him as if his word were gospel. The feeling of nakedness faded, though he still missed his best friends. These Marines had his back, and he had theirs - And even though he was just a Private, like they were, they'd accepted him as being in charge.
The words came out, though they felt slightly as if someone bigger, stronger, less the frightened child and more the grizzled old lion he had idolized for years, was speaking them.
"Bates, set up the breaching charge. Everyone else, you know the drill. Watch your corners and exercise rifle discipline. We can't afford to mess up the ship's control systems, got it?"
"Yes, lead!" they yelled back.
He nodded once, swallowing down another fluttering butterfly at how responsible he felt for these people. Any that got killed would be his fault, just like the three back at that damn communications tower.
Derry took his spot anyway, at the front of one stack, and gave the thumbs-up to Bates. The fuzzy, tall, skinny bat had a radar-dish of an ear pressed to the bulkhead as he finished applying foamy goo to the bulkhead door's seams.
"Three at least. Armed. Probably more on the catwalk." The bat chattered in short, sharp syllables. Derry nodded, then gave a chopping hand-sign.
The bat ducked back and pressed a button. The explosives lit off with a cacophonous whump. The bulkhead flew away into the bridge.
Derry's rush took him straight over a blast-stunned wolf, fallen prone by the door with his rifle dropped to the side. By the time he'd leveled his weapon on the next target, a coughing, kneeling hare was throwing her pistol aside and putting her paws up in surrender, eyes streaming tears from demolitions smoke. Both stacks rushed the command center, rifles pointing every which way to clear the 'corners' of a round steel-walled chamber.
The third fur Bates had mentioned was an older male, who sat on the captain's chair holding his chest, gone pale and gasping, with his pistol lying on the console. Still panting from the battle nerves and running fight in the halls, Derry checked above, to find the only person in the catwalks was a terrified-looking tech, huddled and sobbing.
Three security furs, one too old and obese to be a real armed guard, he noted. They must have run through the real guards in that hall - These were rent-a-cops.
"Secure the prisoners. Corpsman, see to him, wouldya?" He gestured with a tip of his chin, as the fur in the command chair slumped out of it. Corpsman Daniels, the armadillo, bustled past him, as Marines zip-tied the two prisoners to hand rails along the walls as others began securing.
"Staff Sar'nt, we've secured the command center undamaged. Over. Uh..."
It wasn't as huge as he'd feared, but it was by no means small. A dozen stations, each one miles beyond his paltry technical knowledge, glimmered with dozens of inexplicable lights and details. A hurricane of information, he realized. A sudden feeling of gratitude that this wasn't his job flashed through, as his cybernetic tail flicked its tip.
"Rawlins, get the cargo bay doors open, okay?"
"Yeah, lead!"
The bridge of the Starlit Maiden had become a chaos of action so quickly, Derry felt like he ought to be taking cover and shouting orders. Instead, he was standing in front of a communications station, staring at blue and white lights and a dizzying array of comm. line monitors. Sixteen different frequencies were open and active, as members of the Maiden's crew tried to hash out how to operate the heavy strategic cruiser without their officers to call shots.
A shudder rolled through the ship, as if she were as filled with trepidation as he was.
"We've blasted the gantries off," reported a skinny little horse in an orange jumpsuit, from the gunnery station.
Standing next to the empty captain's chair, SSgt Herrin nodded and pointed towards the view screen. Derry turned his head to look, and saw in front of them the vast void of space, dotted with dozens of civilian ships that were hurriedly trying to get out of the Maiden's flight path.
"Helmsman, until such time as someone decides on a damn ship commander, I'm in charge. Get us away from this station before the orbital guns clear their programming."
Derry swallowed and looked towards one of the ominous things. The space dock was a huge multi-layered geometry of gantries, pressurized and enclosed walkways, free-floating mobile platforms swarming with workers and parts, and all of it surrounded by a constellation of defensive satellites.
They looked like little more than large satellites, but he knew better. Instead of the transmission systems most communications satellites possessed, these were armed with ship-carving energy weapons and launch bays full of electronically-controlled unmanned fighters. If Candace's virus got swept out of the system before they got free of their range, the Maiden would never make it out of the docks in one piece.
Luckily for them, the crewmen that had been rescued were seasoned, skilled squids - The ship started to move, with the strange sense of vertigo that came along with seeing acceleration through the view screen but not feeling it thanks to the lack of external gravity.
Six more comm. lines lit up, and Derry chewed his lip, trying to figure out whether they were something he had to deal with. He had no training for comm. station duty, but the seamen who's job that was had been killed during their fight through the orbital elevator's ground facility.
Finally, he punched a bit of the touch-screen that read 'Incoming Transmission: Ground Control.' He immediately wished he hadn't, as a furious voice roared at him.
"Starlit Maiden, this is Ground Control! You are NOT cleared for launch! Get back to your gantry or we'll open fire on you!"
Derry snorted, and pushed the 'transceive' button.
"Go right ahead."
He clicked the red tab next to Ground Control's frequency, and watched with smirking satisfaction as the indignant response was cut short. A few quick glances told him that Ground Control was sending a large data packet to the guns. He nearly yelled out a warning when he saw the weapons platforms beginning to move, then started laughing when they spun on their axes and began bombarding the planet's surface near the Elevator's base.
"Staff Sar'nt, pretty sure they just opened fire on themselves."
Herrin grunted. No smile from him, just a grunt and a nod of satisfaction. To his left, the fox-ape looked smug, arms crossed over her chest, still wearing her dirty hoody, ripped jeans, and boots.
"Told you it'd work."
Derry was too pumped to feel suspicious. For a single woman to so fortuitously hand them victory like she had just felt off somehow. There was more to this than he knew, and he desperately wanted to understand why he'd gotten three good Marines killed for her plan. Right now, though, all that mattered to the adrenaline-fueled wolf was that her virus had worked, the defense cannons weren't nuking them out of the stars, and they were now moving past the station.
"Helmsman," gruffed the Staff Sergeant, "how good are you, son?"
The fresh-faced helmsman's mate was professional enough not to look over his shoulder. Instead, he kept eyes on the screen and paws on the controls.
"Good enough for whatever you need, si...Uh, Staff Sergeant."
"Good." He strode from his spot next to the command chair, and handed a scrap of paper over to the kangaroo. Derry watched, curious that the command wasn't spoken verbally, and saw the 'roo stiffen up.
"S-sir?" A slip, but the Staff Sergeant didn't correct him. Calling an NCO 'sir' would have gotten Derry and the other Marines bawled out back in Boot.
"Can you do it, son?"
"W...Y...It's...I m-mean...Maybe?"
"There are no Maybes on this ship. Yes or no."
The roo stared for a second longer, then began tapping quickly at his duty station's computer. Calculating a jump, Derry suspected, though most jumps could be easily calculated automatically using a ship's navigation computer.
As jumps went, the only sort an automatic navigation system couldn't really plot were in-system jumps, since those jumps always bore a serious risk when performed by a larger vessel. While a small cargo ship's Torpedo Run couldn't do much more than destroy another ship of its same class, a capital ship's generated singularity could be exponentially more powerful and unpredictable in size. Such ships had to jump from and to specific spots in systems, where calculations showed the singularity wouldn't hit anything when it was released.
The singularity uncertainty effect, he remembered reading in some Navy tactical doctrine documents, was one of the primary reasons modern fleets still used sub-capital ships as escort vessels. They could be utilized in battle as physical relays between ships, as damage control for the big capital vessels, and in a pinch to hop in and out of a fight to bring lethally effective singularity torpedoes into play. In practice, it wasn't done often, due to the risk of accidentally hitting one's own ships, or dragging an errant fighter craft into the gravity well generated by the miniature black hole.
In fact, the idea of making 'short hop' jumps was so proscribed that most military helmsmen wouldn't even think of the tactic. It was something of a taboo, thanks to the whole series of incidents surrounding first contact with the Ix'kat.
At least, Derry figured, there won't be terminus shock again.
A shudder ran down his spine like cold water droplets on bare skin, and the wolf felt his fur fluff up at the thought of seeing that horrible nightmare-world of hallucination again. As much as he wanted to get out of the damnable Atria system, he wasn't looking forward to the experience of going through that again.
The kangaroo looked up from his console, face gone pale under his fur, but his eyes were certain. Derry knew, before the roo nodded to Herrin, that they were a go. The wolf felt his stomach clench, and hoped what they found on the other side of the jump would be something other than certain doom. Tension in the command center was nearly touchable, like a twanging wire.
SSgt Herrin walked back to the command chair, and puffed up his chest before addressing the crew.
"We are about to short hop into an active battle. Based on the information from our intelligence analyst," he nodded to Candace, who gave a pretty grin and slight nod back, "our flagship has maneuvered to the target area intending to lay ambush for the enemy fleet and transmit a request for reinforcement.
"No reinforcements are expected. We are the only relief available within a hundred light years. There is every possibility that she is outmatched and in desperate need of reinforcement. I don't have the authority to force anyone to come along, as I'm not part of your chain of command. If you want to sit this one out, get to the escape pods and we'll pick you up if we survive."
Nobody moved for a few seconds. Then one of the older crewmen snorted and turned back to his station. Like a breaking dam, the other water followed. Herrin just nodded, and spoke to the helmsman.
"Get us there. How long until we're ready to jump?"
The roo didn't look up again, busy punching in some manner of arcane information or another. Derry didn't pretend to understand what he was doing.
"Thirty seconds."
Derry punched the 'general intercom' button, and spoke in an authoritative, hard voice that somehow pushed past the liquidy sense of terror in his gut at the prospect of a jump.
"All crew, this is the bridge. Prepare to jump. We are jumping in approximately twenty seconds."
With that, he hit the button a second time to close the intercom program, and sat down at his station. As an afterthought, he snapped himself into the harness-style restraint system, and turned his head to look back towards SSgt Herrin.
The jump happened a few seconds early, by his inner count. In front of them, visible through the frontal view screen, a blackness so dark he swore it looked back at him bubbled into existence. For a second, they sat still, as the generated singularity pulsed and then stabilized, a perfect marble of crushing nothingness that warped light around it in a warbling miasma.
Then the stars lurched towards them in a rush, and Derry felt as if someone had kicked him in the gut. Raising his eyes, he stared into the black orb as a shot of pain stabbed out from behind his eyes. It was an eye, staring back at him, pitch black and evil, and he could feel it laughing.
Abruptly, the black eye was gone, and they were surrounded with soundless explosions, hurtling missiles, diving, evading fighters fluttering like birds in a tornado.
The black orb shot away, tearing free of its constraints as the jump ended, and crashing straight through the center of an unknown vessel Derry's mind managed to identify as 'Savoy-Class Destroyer'. The grey-silver warship was hit amid-ships, and suddenly warped into the shape of a boomerang, then a crescent moon, then burst apart like a sausage in a car crusher, only to be sucked in.
Then the singularity reached its critical mass and exploded, causing surprised bridge crew to yell out and instinctively cover their faces as the nearly zero-range explosion washed over them in a harmless dazzle of exploding energy and warped bits of the former vessel.
Herrin recovered first, and roared out a command as the computers began outlining enemy vessels.
"We're in the middle of their formation! Gunnery, hit them with everything we've got!"
"Understood!"
In the distance, as Derry looked up, he saw the Fist of the Nascent Dawn, silvery and magnificent in her wrath, pouring torpedoes from all bays and streams of rail gun fire into a pitched brawl with dozens of enemy ships, surrounded in enormous swirling screens of blasted ship debris and whirling fighters.
She was belching atmosphere and plasma from rents in the hull, blackened and cratered in dozens of places, surrounded by the metal corpses of her foes, and continuing to maneuver and fight as a heavy torpedo slammed straight into her nose.
Commander Galen Forza wasn't a small wolf. At well over six feet and built of solid muscle, the big dark lupine carried himself with a dignity that projected stability and confidence to everyone around him. That very poise was what had helped him get his first foot up in rising the ranks.
None of that helped when the Fist took another direct hit. The sudden roiling of the ship's decks bounced him off a wall and to the deck just as he'd stepped through the bulkhead onto the Fist's bridge. Smoky air smelling of burnt circuitry rushed over his face as the wolf dug his fingertips into the floor's steel grate and pulled himself upright, wincing as his half-healed ribs yelled out in annoyance at him.
"Damage report!"
Captain Leith had a goose-egged bruise on her forehead and had strapped herself into the command seat. Her hair, sandy-blonde, had flown free of her tight pony tail and was partly bloodied and sticking together with sweat. Her hovering tactical displays were all over the chamber, having lost power and flown during a power surge from one of the hits. All around her, bridge staff were hard at their tasks, as the computers flickered and sparked from power surges and impact damage.
"Direct hit, frontal armor is severely compromised! Hull breaches in six sections and engine four is on fire!"
One of the ship's medics was dutifully trying to check her eyes with a flashlight, and as Galen approached, she grabbed the light from the medic and tossed it across the bridge.
"Treat me later!"
Galen put a paw to the rabbit's shoulder, and gave him a gentle nod while pushing him away. Captain Leith was a reasonable woman, but battle got her blood up, something he'd learned all too well in their time serving together.
"Commander Forza, reporting for duty, Captain."
She looked up, returned his salute without standing - He doubted she could, with a bruise like that - and gave her order, just as Torvals fired the main guns again. An enemy heavy frigate took both shots along its spine, and broke in half messily, like a bundle of celery under a woodsman's axe.
"Mr. Forza, take a seat and help me come up with a miracle."
He grinned and made a graceful spin to sit at her side, strapping himself in by pure habit as his eyes flicked quickly over each of the room's six main screens. At the moment, they were surrounded by a sea of stars and battle, explosions scudding through the eternal night of space all around them. The enemy had pushed through their traps and blasted aside sections of the asteroid field to create an encirclement of teeth around them.
Fighters swirled in scudding nebulaic clouds, blasting one another to pieces in a chaotic fracas of bravery and skill, as the enemy's modified cargo ships struggled to stay alive amidst the whirlwind of slaughter. Maneuvering to keep up with the Fist's dramatic, sweeping shifts of direction and thrust, six frigates and that damned heavy cruiser were keeping pace, hurling fire into the Fist of the Nascent Dawn in a calculated frenzy.
Most of the enemy's ships were damaged, and many had been reduced to slowly whirling masses of distorted detritus. The double-chevron that had swarmed them with hundreds of rail cannon, particle accelerator, and torpedo attacks had lost nearly half of its number to the savage power of the Fist's main armament, and the armored civilian ships used as the main enemy force were scattered and embattled.
Nonetheless, the Fist couldn't escape through them - The enemy ships were disordered but covering all escape routes with fields of fire. Not to mention the unseen enemy carrier was still belching out more fighters, and those six remaining frigates were keeping up a pounding barrage of attacks that forced the Fist to stay on the defensive. If she tried to make a Hail-Mary run attempting to turn the battle into a chase, she would be a sitting duck for enemy targeting computers. At least at this close range, her superior maneuverability allowed for the sudden shifts in course that would throw off targeting solutions.
Lt. Adeling's long lizard tail flicked hard to the side, and he yelled out.
"Another vessel incoming! Big one, by the distortions!"
Commander and Captain both leaned forward in their chairs, one glaring, the other rubbing his chin in a habitual motion of deep thought.
The six military ships were pulling back into their double chevron formation, likely intending to make another full frontal bombardment together in hopes of scoring a killing blow. Then, a ship flashed into existence right in the center of their formation.
Startled, Galen's head popped up straight, as one of the frigates was sucked in on itself, imploding spectacularly before detonating outwards in all directions, a pulsating wash of jump core plasma and exploding singularity forcing her component atoms apart. A second later, as the bridge crew watched in momentary shock, the graceful heavy strategic cruiser dumped fifteen torpedoes into space.
With no time to analyze the threat and too little space to dodge, torpedoes began smashing into the enemy's ships as if they were sitting still and unaware. In that moment of total surprise, the strategic heavy cruiser, Starlit Maiden, thundered onto the battlefield like an enraged demigod, dealing death and detonation to her enemies.
The Fist of the Nascent Dawn was a pocket battleship, designed to give and take heavy hits and bring Naval power to bear on any foe of the United Systems Federation. She was a command center, a troop carrier, a ship of the line, adaptable, flexible, and well-suited to whatever duty she was given. She was a finely-tuned and razor-sharp tactical and surgical instrument.
Starlit Maiden was only one thing - A strategic cruiser, the unsubtle blunt-trauma weapon of last resort in Naval policy. She had little maneuverability in the sense of the Fist's skill at dodging attacks. Her armoring was heavy, but basically unshielded with her standard single gravity ring. What she did have was a blistering array of heavy torpedoes, designed for annihilating dangerous comets, harpooning disabled battleships, blasting holes in moons, and destroying star bases wholesale.
Their enemy's medium and light frigates didn't stand a chance. Two were annihilated before they could even try to fire engines to evade, thrown to pieces by multiple mid-ships strikes from 60-megaton fusion torpedoes. One fired its retro rockets, pushing it backwards and managing to dodge two torpedoes. The third hit it right in the engines, knocking out all three in a brilliant flash of silent thunder and destruction.
The other three tried to fire point defenses, swatting down one or two torpedoes apiece before being obliterated by those that got through.
Starlit Maiden didn't have fighters, built as she was to operate in convoy with at least two other vessels. She did have point defenses, though, which went to immediate and accurate work wreaking the Navy's favorite form of revenge on mutineers. Galen watched with a grin that quickly shifted into chuckling as enemy fighters began to panic and disengage, flying futilely for their lives as the heavy cruiser's point defense screen suddenly overlapped with the Fist's as the two vessels began drifting together.
"Aye, Captain, miracles it is." He swept a paw forward in what would have been a grand and theatrically humorous bow if he hadn't been strapped to a chair. His big lupine tail was wagging so hard he whapped her in the side with it.
Captain Adriana Leith burst out laughing, the tension bubbling over as she grabbed his furry tail flag and tugged it hard but playfully.
"I could kiss you, Mr. Forza, but it wouldn't be proper. Helmsman, bring us into escort position, flank speed! Starlit Maiden has no fighters, so we need to protect her."
"Aye, Captain!"
Lt. Adeling called out again, pointing to the screen comprising the roof as red-outlined ships began clustering together and pulling back.
"They're regrouping, Captain!"
"Comms, give a call over to Starlit Maiden. We're going to cut off the head together!"
The naval battle had raged on for twelve hours, Adriana later realized as she flopped, exhausted, into her bunk. The red holographic clock next to her blinked the time, as one minute shifted to the next in the endless night of space. Too tired to flick it off, roll over, or even pull her rumpled uniform off, she just stared at the clock.
The overall butcher's bill was immense, and it rolled through her mind, jangling about in her exhaustion-muddled brain. After the enemy heavy cruiser had finally jumped away, torn and venting atmosphere, the remaining enemy vessels had finally begun to surrender in knowledge that they couldn't possibly escape the two larger, faster-jumping ships. Nonetheless, they had fought hard, and both sides had lost many good people.
Of the Fist's 13,000 person complement, just over 10,000 still lived. Many of the dead were aviators and damage control crewmen, killed directly by enemy naval weaponry or by the fires that still smoldered on some of her ship. Others had been killed on that first day before battle was joined, by the cowardly bomb that had torn up her engine room, or the artillery strike that had nearly wiped out her brave Marines planet-side.
That those 80-some Marines were able to not only survive, but then fight back, destroying several times their number of enemy troops before disrupting the enemy commanders, then steal back the Starlit Maiden along with her crew was flatly amazing. In a word, their efforts were heroic, and had saved the entire operation.
As she thought those exhausted thoughts, Adriana let her eyes slide shut, feeling as if they were swollen to the size of chicken eggs. The bruise on her forehead, from where one of her floating panels had smashed her in the face, had gone numb with her fatigue and pain pills Galen had gotten for her.
Thinking of the big wolf made her chest warm, and she grinned sleepily at his bright smile and thoughtful manner. In the hours after he'd finally reappeared on bridge, he had deftly taken over from her, without her initially even noticing. She made a mental note to ask him whether he was colluding with the medics to make her get the head wound checked out.
He must have, considering he was now sitting in her room keeping an eye out in case she had seizures in her sleep. The big wolf had occupied her desk chair, and was quietly leafing through paperwork she'd left unattended during the last few days, and she could distantly hear the scribbling of a pen as he signed off on things that needed doing but had been far less critical than the possibility of being blasted out of the stars.
"Hey, no sleeping until the medics call us back about your head scan, okay?" His words were gentle but insistent, and with a muffled groan she slowly sat up. The numbness in her forehead abated, to her chagrin, and despite the pain pills she felt a pulse of dizzying dull hurt slither down her swollen face.
"Okay, okay, I get it...No sleep for the wicked."
"No coma for my captain, actually." He said it with a rumbling chuckle, and she couldn't help but give him a grudging snort and smile, scrunching her button nose while leaning against the wall for support. It was a struggle to keep her eyes open, and that fact made her realize the medics were probably right - Sleep wasn't something she could do just yet.
"So what do you think comes next, Galen?"
The wolf looked more like a shadow than a person, sitting as far away in such dim light as he did. His lupine eyes, genetic modifications from many generations ago when his line had been created, were well-made for seeing in such poor lighting conditions. By their gleaming golden reflection, she knew he was looking right at her, and something in her instinctive hindbrain made the fine hairs on her neck go up.
"Well, I imagine Senator Bull is going to reconstitute his government. He'll need our help, since we know he can't trust local civilian law. I won't be surprised if we have to blast a few military bases off the map from space in a few days."
Adriana gave a slow, very careful nod, not wanting to jangle her brain any more than it already was. Having the big wolf there to help her was going to be a huge relief. Of all the officers on board that she trusted, Galen was at the top of that list. They'd served together before, after all, and the wolf had not a selfish or corruptible bone in his big dashing body.
Galen continued, matter-of-factly, as he leafed through and read over manifests.
"While we do that, we wait and watch. Admiral Kerrick will have other jobs for us to do, if this civil war is as large as reports seem to indicate. The bigger problem, right now, is that communication blackout. I think we should just be honest with our crew, as soon as Bull's got his government in the works. I somehow doubt we'll have much in the way of desertion."
Adriana wasn't so sure, but she shrugged a shoulder in consent.
"The personal mail blackout continues until we've got Bull in charge of the system. Until then, it's our sole duty to protect him and the civilians. You're right, Galen. We can't worry about the Galaxy at large just yet. It's over our heads, and we don't have enough information."
"You have that right, Captain."
A short pause went on, as they ran out of words for the moment. Then her brain kicked over, slowly becoming more awake.
"You aren't worried about what this civil war means?"
Galen looked up again, and shook his head with a soft, sad laugh.
"Of course I am. Things are going to get a lot worse before they get any better, and a lot of good people are going to die. But we have a good crew and a good ship, and you and I both know we can trust Kerrick even though he's a stuff-shirted ass sometimes. All we can do is our best."
Adriana shook her head slowly, gingerly, feeling chilly stiffness in her neck and shoulders. The battle had jangled her delicate frame around quite a bit, and she was feeling the slings and arrows. Despite looking like a twenty-something thanks to advanced medicine and exercise, she was in her forties, and at the moment she felt it.