“Screw the pods.” Tessa grabbed her jacket the instant the call to abandon ship went out, slung the satchel full of data, research and gear over her shoulder, glanced at Ben. “I’m not leaving my rig. Not this close to the end.”
“Then we fly.” Ben said solidly. “Together.”
“Together.” She caught his hand, nodded back. “Until I jump, then you get the hell out of here.” Her eyes locked with his, wouldn’t move, wouldn’t break the stare. “I want you to stay safe, Ben. I want you to live.”
“We all have to die someday.” He said stoically, squeezed her hand. Tessa shook her head.
“Don’t talk that way. Not now.”
Ben smiled softly, looked away, and in the pause, their hands parted, became separate.
“We need to move. We don’t have much time.”
Hallways went fast, disappeared as they shot through abandoned corridors and rooms where fire had burnt across the furnishings and left long black stains in the floor, the ceiling, the wall. Between the labyrinthine passages of the residential deck and the high-ceilinged expanse of the hangar bay, there was no one, nothing but scattered piles of upended furniture, boxes, silicon displays. The doors to the hangar bay passed as they ran, and then the final lock ground open, hesitated as both pilots stopped suddenly, stared on in shock, broken-faced awe.
All around them, the bay opened to space, ragged and burnt edges scattered with crumpled fragments of rigs, the ruins of two squadrons of fighters and the entire technical infrastructure required to maintain them. Air pressure was thin but holding, a fragile envelope kept reined inside the bay by a flickering Mitarashi field that stretched from one end of the gaping wound to the other, bent outward only at the center where an independent generator that someone had lugged out to the shattered end of the vector strip sat maglocked into place.
And next to it, tied to the deck with cables taut in the nearly zero G, Tessa’s Stormfury sat open, primed, online, the only rig intact. The only rig ready to fly.
“Just in time.” The admiral stepped up behind them, smiled as Tessa turned to meet her eyes. A hand reached out, pushed something against the younger woman’s chest, a package of hardware and silicon data storage that felt heavy in her hands. “Here.” Blavatsky’s voice was firm, iron. “You’re going to need this. The amplifier is unsteady, but it’s designed to interface with both your Kvasir and Horus lacings.” Tessa hesitated, opened her mouth, but the admiral cut her off. “What does it do? When the time comes, you’ll use this to focus your thoughts on the drives of the Coralate warships and use your connection to their technology to make them do whatever you want.” She flashed the edge of a smile.
“Coralate. . .” Tessa hesitated, fought the edge of a stammer. How could she know? She swallowed, and in the pause, her answer came back strong, undeniable.
She’s a visionary precog. How could she not know exactly what I was planning. And then the realization– the point in history she was bound for was nine years ago, a position in Earth orbit that would put her dozens of lightyears away from any Coralate attack that might put warships in her path. . .
“I know.” The admiral said suddenly, almost dismissively. “Listen. There isn’t much time, and I can’t tell you what’s going to happen without risking damage to the timeline as I have seen it unfold. I just need you to go. Go and don’t ask questions. This is the way it must be.”
Hesitating, Tessa turned away, turned toward her rig and the empty gulf of stars that yawned beyond, then glanced back, met the admiral’s eyes carefully, uncertainly.
“You’ve been playing me from the beginning, haven’t you?”
The admiral grinned. “Not from the beginning, but close.”
Turning back to Ben, Tessa sniffed, gestured toward her fighter.
“I wish my rig had room for two.” She said, reached out and caught his hand.
“Don’t think about it.” He smiled softly, reached out, wiped a tear from her eye. “This is your flight. Yours and Nemea’s.” Hesitating, she looked down. Part of her wanted to say more, to say something, anything, but the instant she looked up and opened her mouth to speak, Ben pressed a finger against her lips, pulled her into one last, tight hug.
“Shhh.” He breathed. “I’ll be fine. There are escape pods in the corridor above this deck.” He hugged her tighter, kissed her forehead. “There isn’t much time.” Breaking the hug, he pulled back, met her eyes evenly. “Go. Do it. Do what you need to do to save Earth.”
“I love you, Ben.” She managed, blinking against a warm tide of new tears. “Take care of yourself.” Pulling in a deep breath, she tried a smile. “Stay alive.” One hand went to his chest, flattened, caressed. “Stay alive for me, for Nemea.”
“You too.” Ben’s response came broken at the edges, ragged with his own tears. “I’ll never forget you, Tessa.”
Reaching up, she met his lips with one last kiss, then, glancing across at the admiral, she turned away and sprinted for her waiting rig, satchel and package in hand. She found the bridge almost immediately, keyed it to activation, then strapped on her flight helmet. Already running and ready to fly, the Stormfury yielded itself to her, guided her mind through an abbreviated form of a pre-flight checklist. As she moved within the system, it reacted fluidly, almost seemed to anticipate each action and kept her on track even as her mind tried to wander back to Ben, back to all they had, to the fears and uncertainties that ate at her concentration. Thirty seconds later, she punched the throttle, glanced back across her sleek, metallic body to take one last look at the two figures standing on the edge of the hangar bay, winced a little knowing that one of them was the admiral, that the other was Ben.
As her rig tore free of the deck and punched through the stuttering light of the Mitarashi field into the black of space, Dimitrov turned to the admiral, gave her a soft smile.
“We’re not going to make it out of this one, are we Admiral?”
“No.” She said softly, her eyes never leaving the engine burn of Tessa’s rig. “But she will, and that’s all that matters now.”
In the next instant, the generators powering the field sputtered, died, and as the field fell, hard vacuum rushed in, swallowed the bay and everything in it.
