Judas Unchained

“No!” Giselle shrieked.

An instant of disconnection—

—and Mellanie found herself spinning violently. She didn’t know why. Her body had gone numb, apart from the single sensation of cold sweat pricking her forehead. She thought it was the prequel to vomiting, but she couldn’t even feel her stomach. Then she smacked into the docking bay wall and rebounded. Her limbs didn’t seem to be working either. It was strange she didn’t feel any pain; that had been a nasty impact. Red dots drifted across her vision, which appeared to be dimming. Sensation came rushing back in on her consciousness in a terrifying wave of pain. She tried to wail, but liquid was blocking her throat. She couldn’t breathe. Her body was alive with agony, at its worst down her left side. She coughed, trying to clear her lungs. Streamers of blood poured out of her mouth, then wobbled crazily in front of her. Her hands scrabbled at the main source of the pain, finding only warm wet jelly. Thick webs of oscillating blood were spinning around her. On the other side of them a giant black shape slid past. Turbulence from its wake swatted the blood, splatting it against her. Her need to breathe was excruciating. She coughed again, and more blood bubbled out of her throat forming sticky ribbons in front of her. Her whole body juddered. The pain was now submerging itself below an intense cold.

A face appeared above her. Nigel. Mellanie tried to smile. He looked very angry.

“Get a fucking medical kit here. Now!”

She tried to tell him it’d be fine, she was okay, really. That just allowed more blood to escape. It was very red. Her vision was closing in.

“Mellanie!” Nigel’s voice, a long way off.

There was so much she wanted to say. She wondered if Orion had woken up yet. But now the blackness conquered everything.

Ozzie had been inside an Apollo command module once. The Smithsonian staff had removed the perspex cover from the hatchway and stood by with nervous smiles as he squirmed around the historic antique interior. He couldn’t remember how long ago that was now, at least two centuries, but he did recall marveling at how three people had survived in such a small space for the ten days it took to travel to the moon and back.

As he followed Mark through the Charybdis airlock and into the cabin he began to feel a twinge of envy for those old astronauts and the abundant room they had back then. The frigate’s cabin was small; three couches fixed to the rear bulkhead (the reason he suddenly remembered the Apollo) with a one-and-a-half-meter gap between them and the forward bulkhead that was a solid wall of arrays and portals.

“Is this it?” he asked in amazement.

“Sure is.” Mark had levered himself into the left-hand couch, and smiled knowingly at him. “You claustrophobic?”

“We’re about to find out.” Ozzie slid into the central couch. The arrays in front of his nose were covered in symbols he didn’t recognize, but they were powered up. He found an i-spot and pressed his hand against it. “Can you interface?” he asked the SIsubroutine.

“Yes.”

“Do it fast.”

“Working.”

“Hey,” he asked Mark. “Is the nova bomb on board?”

Mark seemed a little easier that Ozzie knew about such things. “Yeah. We’re still waiting for the Scylla’s bomb to be delivered. They promised it in another three hours. Not sure we’ll have the systems integration sorted by then, but we should be able to launch tomorrow.”

“So how many quantumbusters have we got?” Ozzie made it sound like a schoolkid asking questions; next it’d be how fast does it go, mister?

“All ten loaded,” Mark said.

“Man, that is a shitload of firepower.” Ozzie felt indecently happy; the Great Frigate Heist was on-line and powering up smoothly. He could probably let rumors about this one slip out into the unisphere.

“You’re telling me.” Mark peered at one of the portal displays. “Uh—” He glanced over at Ozzie’s hand on the i-spot.

“I have command of all primary functions,” the SIsubroutine said.

A plethora of frigate command icons rose up into Ozzie’s virtual vision. Compressed instruction text orbited each one like a gas-giant ring. Just reading all the introductions would have taken a couple of hours. He assumed he’d be able to do most of the piloting himself. After all, how difficult could it be? It looked like he was going to be more dependent on the SIsubroutine than he liked; despite everything that’d happened he still wasn’t sure he trusted it.

“Hey, what are you loading in?” Mark asked in growing alarm.

“Ozzie!” Giselle called. “We’ve got—ohshit.”