Past the Redline

Throttle Sixty-One

Diana pressed her foot against a metal plate and watched as a ring around the edge of the bulkhead sizzled. It wasn’t actually melting. The entire ship was made of nanobots, she was basically just asking a ring of them to break apart the bonds holding them in place. That was trickier to do than it looked, but if she wanted to surprise people, then that was the best option.

The edges of the plate all popped within the same hundredth of a second and Diana shoved her foot down, sending the chunk of armoured steel flying forwards.

It rammed against a metallic pillar with a heavy clang, then bounced around, lost in the innards of the ship.

ChaOS had secured a rough map of the interior of the Federation Cruiser. It was just what he was able to grab in the very short time between the Hercules barging through the hangar doors and it taking enough damage to render most of the ship’s sensors inoperable.

Diana poked her head through the hole and looked around quickly. She half expected there to be a squad or two of angry Federation soldiers waiting for her. She didn’t know if they had the equivalent of marines or not, but she imagined that there were some armed personnel onboard the ship.

Once she confirmed that she was in the clear, she swung herself out of the Hercules and over to the support pillar her chunk of metal had bumped against.

Outside of the artificial gravity field in the hangar, the cruiser had no gravity, and it tried to use that fact in its construction. The ship’s interior was laid out like a hexagon, with the exterior walls always acting as ‘floors.’ It meant that ‘up’ was technically always towards the central shaft running through the ship.

“So, where’s the nearest port?” Diana asked.

“We are just past the hangar. It’s likely that there is some sort of control system nearby, if only to facilitate maintenance,” ChaOS said.

Diana nodded. “Got it. I’ll figure it out, no worries.” She looked around as she decided where to go. The Hercules was wedged into and through multiple layers of armoured bulwarks. Pipes had burst and cables were ripped apart. Still, the entry wound was sealed by multiple layers of expanding foam. The ship wasn’t venting atmosphere, not that there seemed to be much to vent.

The Federation seemed to keep their warships only somewhat pressurised, enough that it wasn’t a vacuum and that a broken suit wouldn’t lead to any more than popped ears and some mild discomfort, at least for a human.

It wasn’t a comfortable choice, but in a warship where comfort was probably a distant concern over efficiency, it made perfect sense.

She noticed a doorway ‘below’ her and spun around to kick off the beam and towards the exit. A slight spurt of compressed air from her suit to adjust her trajectory, and she came to a gentle stop before the door.

There was a button right in the centre of it, which was a little strange. A human vehicle would have that kind of control button next to the door, not on it. She shrugged and tapped it while bringing her handgun up in a ready stance.

The door whisked open, revealing a corridor with a crumpled floor leading deeper into the cruiser. Another door in the corridor opened onto a shaft that led towards the outer edge of the ship.

The Hercules had pierced through the cruiser and lodged itself somewhere past the middle of the ship. They’d probably ripped through dozens of delicate and likely important systems on the way through, but she doubted the damage was enough to take out a warship. Yes, spacecraft were delicate, but if a warship could be taken out by one little act of ramming, then its builders seriously needed to reconsider their priorities.

There weren’t any signs of the crew that she could see. Or at least, no direct signs. There was wear on some handrails along the walls and a smidgen of grime next to the doorway where countless boots had pressed as they jumped ahead.

With her handgun hovering ahead of her, Diana pushed into the room and floated across the corridor. The door slid shut behind her with a pneumatic hiss, and the pressure in the room changed nearly imperceptibly.

She could hear the ship. Diana was pretty keen when it came to vehicles, but she wasn’t one of those magical mechanics who could diagnose a ship’s state just from the subtle sounds it made. Still, it didn’t take a miracle-worker to understand that the vessel wasn’t in the greatest of states.

There was a groaning as warped metal eased into new positions. The cruiser wasn’t quite listing, but she had the impression they were fighting to keep its flight straight. Had they damaged some of the manoeuvring thrusters when they hit?

It was possible. The lines they’d cut through had to be important. Hydraulics, or more likely fuel lines from the ship’s tanks to its forward set of thrusters. Even if there were redundancies in the design, losing a few would still put some strain on the system.

Diana imagined that the point-blank EMP hit hadn’t helped. Even if the shields had taken the vast majority of the impact, at the distance the bomb had detonated and with its power, there was no way that it hadn’t fried a few components. The way the shield was flickering before they’d hit hinted at wide-spread power issues.

She came to the shaft leading towards the outer sections of the hull and grabbed onto its ladder to slow herself down. Then, with a foot on the surprisingly close-spaced rungs, she pushed herself up.

Diana wasn’t expecting to have someone lean down the shaft and look down at her.

She stared at an unfamiliar alien face, partially hidden by a reflective visor.

The alien stared back.

Then they both raced to grab weapons. The Federation crewmember had a weapon strapped to their lower back which they reached for in a hurry.

Diana had her gun in hand already. Really, it wasn’t much of a race. She fired twice, then watched as the Federation grunt was tossed back and out of sight.

Turning around, Diana pushed herself up so that she floated towards the hole the grunt had looked through while facing it properly. It was another passageway like the one she’d been in, but this one had four more Federation soldiers in it.

No, she realised after a quick scan. Not soldiers. The one she’d laid out was a soldier of one sort or another, a polerin like Abatrath in a tight suit that had armoured inserts across the chest and upper arms.

The other four included another polerin, two ktacha, and a four-limbed fungal-like borel whose suit was wrapped around its bulbous body but not its long limbs.

“Alright,” Diana said. “You folk don’t look like soldiers, so maybe you’d like to consider surrendering?” They had tools with them, she noted. Some in pockets on their suits, more in boxes hovering next to them equipped with micro-thrusters so that they didn’t need to be man-handled around the zero-gravity environment.

“Intruder!” the second, still-living polerin shouted. They dove for the dead marine-equivalent and tried to grab their gun.

Diana flicked the setting on her handgun from lethal to less-lethal then fired a trio of shots that sent out bullets which unfolded to minimise impact strength while dispersing the area of impact. Then, once the round rammed into the spacer and sent them tumbling back, it discharged an amount of electricity that would fry the average man into complacency.

She wasn’t sure how that would work out against a polerin, but it seemed to knock the alien out if the way they flopped around then bounced off the far wall was any indication. Diana didn’t waste any time, and with a quick press forwards, she grabbed the marine’s gun and held it off to the side. “I’m not going to ask a third time,” she warned.

The two ktacha and the borel exchanged looks. The fox-like ktacha had wide eyes, which she’d come to understand meant they were either shocked or about to start ranting. They made a gesture, crossing their arms over each other near centre mass. Since that wasn’t close to any weapons or tools, she took it to mean they were surrendering.

The borel was harder to read. It didn’t exactly have a face, and its biology had more in common with fungi than mammals. “We surrender,” he intoned in a deep, solemn voice. “But do you know the consequences?”

“You mean of taking prisoners, or of boarding a Federation ship in the middle of a Federation fleet in the middle of a battle?”

“I think, both?” the smaller of the ktacha said.

Diana nodded. “Yeah, okay. In that case, no, I genuinely don’t. Kind of making things up as I go here. So, is there a procedure for all of this? Because I don’t exactly plan on staying aboard this ship for all that long.”