The Honour of the Knights, Stephen J. Sweeney [reading women .txt] 📗

small trail leading from a storage cabinet, to the cockpit chair.

Deep asleep, those last three weeks had passed unnoticed to her. No longer had she to endure the frustration and depression she had suffered during the first seven days alone in the pod. She had wept several times during that period, almost uncontrollably the whole way through jump space. Exhausted, she had settled down and slept in the cockpit seat and had, upon awakening, been greeted by the inky-blackness of space and her exit from the jump.

Hope and relief had washed over her as she looked out of the pod, expecting to see familiar sights of the Independent star system she had entered. Far below her she sighted a planet, though not one she recognised. That didn't matter; she was home. A quick glance out the rear viewport revealed the jumpgate she had exited, the structure not too far behind her.

The navigation systems of the escape pod synchronized themselves with her new location's navigation buoys and soon revealed her location: Iliad, an Independent frontier star system; the planet below her, Diso. According to the navigation computer, Iliad was sparsely populated, but populated nonetheless. At that moment, Natalia had exhaled a breath she seemed to have been holding in for months.

She had activated the pod's SOS broadcast and then explored the cramped pod. From a storage cabinet, she had removed a small bottle of water and a handful of biscuits, before settling back in the cockpit's seat to await rescue. And there she had waited. And waited. And waited. But the minutes had turned to hours, and the hours to days, and in all that time she saw no signs of rescue. In fact, she saw no signs of anything. Not a single glimpse of another vessel, nor any sort of activity within the system.

She had turned to the radar system, in an attempt to discover whether there was anything else around her: perhaps a research station or a ship that may have failed to spot her, her arrival in Iliad having somehow gone unnoticed.

She would have expected to have seen a number of coloured shapes, indicating the presence of other vessels or entities in the area. But except for a solitary yellow marker resting at the bottom of the display, that she had already identified as being the jumpgate, it was empty. With the aid of a flight manual she had discovered, she began tweaking settings and display options, searching for something, anything, that might help rid her of the feeling that she was alone. There was nothing.

After the second day had passed, the relief she had felt upon entering the star system had all but abandoned her, to be replaced by a feeling of dread. Her escape pod continued to drift, moving away from Diso and leaving the jumpgate far behind. She knew what had happened: the system had been abandoned. She had done her best to hold back the anger and frustration she had then felt, but it had forced itself out, and she had hurled the flight manual across the tiny pod's interior, before cursing out loud and slamming her fists onto the console. Soon after that, she had begun to weep again.

Natalia was unable to shake the feeling that all her suffering and loss had been for nothing. Her fate seemed sealed: she would die trapped in this cramped steel coffin, drifting through space.

But no, she had come too far and been through too much to give up hope now. She had looked behind her to the open stasis capsule that she had used it as a bed. She deliberated use of the capsule for a while, before turning back to gaze out at the empty space ahead of her, nibbling on a biscuit and thinking back over the events of the past months.

* * *

Her primary mission had been a complete success. Along with several other operatives, she had completed a series of hit-and-run operations against essential Enemy targets in a number of Imperial systems. The team had gone in hard and fast, there being no sense in attempting to be strategic about it. The Enemy were far better equipped, far more knowledgeable and much more combat efficient than they could ever hope to be. Her unit had suffered losses along the way, but they all knew that many of them would not be coming back.

Another fundamental part of the operation had been to collect as much information about the Enemy and their recent activities as possible. This they had also achieved, though not without the expense of many lives. The data cards holding the various reports now resided safe and secure in her jacket, zipped into an inside pocket.

With their objectives met and their mission accomplished, they had begun the journey home. It was as they approached a jumpgate to cross the Imperial-Independent border that they had been hit hardest. Natalia had been stood on the small bridge of her vessel when a jump point had formed behind the convoy. From it had issued an Imperial frigate and a host of Imperial starfighters, of all variety. They had attacked the instant they were clear of the point, with ferocious speed and efficiency.

One of the convoy had been destroyed within seconds and several others had been crippled moments thereafter. Her own ship had been struck by a volley of rocket fire, sections of the vessel starting to come apart. Fires and explosions had ripped through the interior, resulting in a great deal of damage and casualties. The ship had started to tumble, barely a few kilometres from the gate.

As the Enemy left the vessel, to concentrate on the others who were returning fire and attempting to clear their paths to reach the jumpgate, Natalia had pulled the burnt and injured navigator from his chair...

* * *

She had survived, though for how much longer she did not know. After seven days alone in the Iliad system, the pod's on-board computer had started to jingle. It had warned her that she was running low on oxygen and recommended that she place herself within stasis for the remainder of her journey. Natalia had looked to the screen and then around to the capsules. It seemed she had little choice about using them. The SOS continued to broadcast from the escape pod as it had done for the past seven days, but there was no-one to hear it.

She stood beside the capsule, staring down into the soft beige padding, which would become her resting place until she was rescued. A perfectly normal, healthy human being could survive for months in a capsule such as this, their metabolism slowed to the point where neither food nor water was needed to sustain them. Death would eventually claim them, though. Maybe not for six months, maybe not for twelve, but they would not live forever. And that was the part about it that had scared Natalia the most because she didn't know how long her pod might drift for.

As she'd stripped, Natalia had wondered if the inside of the escape pod would be the last thing she ever saw. Would she close her eyes, never to awake? She paused before relenting to the capsule's control, returning to the cockpit, powering down all the lights and switching the SOS broadcast to a low range.

She was in two minds about advertising her presence. On the one hand, it could aid in her rescue should anyone detect her ship adrift. On the other, the Enemy could be drawn to it. They would without doubt see the craft on their radars and come to investigate, but whether they wasted any more time with it was another matter. She had discovered that the Enemy had begun to aggressively salvage almost everything they could find in recent months, gearing up for their next big push. In combat, they now preferred to cripple their adversaries, so that the vessels could be assimilated into their ranks; only destroying those that were either of a measurable threat or completely unusable. This, she knew, was the only reason she had survived the attack on her convoy: her vessel meeting their requirements only briefly before it had started to come apart.

Through the near-darkness, she made her way back to the capsule and settled down inside, having checked once again that her reports were still secure in her jacket. With that little peace of mind, she activated the controls that would close her in and induce the stasis.

It was Natalia's belief that switching off most of the power would give the Enemy the impression that the escape pod had been drifting for years, the power and vital system components having broken down a long time ago, the occupants almost certainly dead. She hoped that the pod would prove too small to be of any use to them, and that they would waste no further time with it and move on.

Or perhaps they would destroy it anyway, just to make sure.

XI

— Another Rude Awakening —

“Dodds! Hey! Wake up! Wake up!” Dodds blinked awake and became aware of three things: the first was that Estelle was standing next to his bunk, shaking him vigorously; the second, that there was an alarm wailing; and the third, that he had a splitting headache, a result of the previous night's drinking session having caught up with him. He wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep and wake up much later on, when everything had calmed down, and when it no longer felt as though someone was tightening a vice around his head.

He struggled to pull himself into an upright position, wincing at the pain in his head. He saw that all around the quarters other people were hastily pulling on boots, trousers and jackets and running out the door.

“What's happening?” he asked, feeling as though his head was going to explode at any minute.

“Enrique, do not go back to sleep! Don't you dare go back to sleep!” Estelle shouted at the man in the bunk below him.

Dodds leaned over, taking care not to tip himself off the side of the bed.

“Hey, come on!” Estelle called again.

“All right, don't shout, I heard you first time,” Enrique complained. He hauled himself back up, where he sat hunched over, head in his hands. “Aw, man. I feel like I'm going to puke.”

Dodds pulled out a watch that he kept under his pillow and tried to focus on the little blue figures on the face. It was just after four in the morning; he hadn't managed more than three hours' sleep since settling down. He felt a momentary sense of déjà vu.

“What's going on?” Dodds asked again. His eyes followed the figures running out of the room and then saw the answer to his question come striding in through the quarters' doorway, flanked by two other staff.

Commodore Hawke surveyed the scene in front of him with a look of disgust. “Come on! Come one! Get moving!” he barked, clapping his hands together. “You hear that alarm? That's the call to general quarters! That means now! What are you standing around for? Move! Now!”

Estelle turned back to Dodds and mouthed for him to get up now! Dodds looked to Hawke and saw his attention shift to the bunk he and Enrique occupied.

Hawke's eyes narrowed as they fell upon Estelle. “What the hell are you doing? Did I not just make myself clear? Have you gone deaf?” Hawke asked of her.

Even in his current state, Dodds knew that Estelle was in the one place she would rather not be at this point in time: stood next to two members of her flight group, who did not seem capable of mustering the strength to pull themselves out from under the covers.

“Sir, I was...” Estelle began.

“Do these little boys need their mummy to dress them?” Hawke growled. He then looked straight at Dodds and the pilot felt his heart jump the moment the flicker of recognition crossed Hawke's face. “Dodds! I should have known! How could it possibly have been anyone else? Didn't feel like getting out of bed this morning? Decided you were going to call in sick?”

Estelle gave Dodds a pleading look not to answer back.

“No, sir. I just had difficulties sleeping last night, sir,” Dodds said, forcing himself to answer in as much as a normal tone as he could muster.

“Well then, we'll see if we can get you a cot and a teddy bear for tonight then, shall we? Now get your arse out of bed!” Hawke shot back with contempt. With one last look around the dormitory, he turned on his heel and started back down the corridor. But not before issuing an ultimatum: “Main briefing room, Dodds!” he said, pointing a stiff finger. “Three minutes!”

As he stormed out