I stopped the button as soon as she told me, and we drifted into the swarm of spinning metal, plastic, and other trash that came from the massive space battle.
“Zea, curl up into more of a cannonball shape,” Kasta instructed.
“Like this?” Zea gasped, and I caught her move out of the corner of my eye.
“Perfect,” Kasta said, and then I saw a spear-like shard of metal pass right behind me.
“Adam, press lightly on your vertical thrust,” Kasta instructed.
“Like this?” I asked as I pressed it.
“Bit more. That’s it.”
“Shit, shit, shit,” Zea chanted as we passed next to what looked like a missile that hadn’t actually exploded yet.
“It’s going to be okay,” I whispered, but then my words caught in my throat when I saw a spinning blender of fragments tumbling through the space between us and our destination.
“Adam, turn to your left. Good. Now thrust a small amount.”
“Like this?” I asked as I pressed the button once more. The inside of my suit felt like I was in a pool of water, and I saw two ships smash into each other some four hundred meters above us.
“Yep,” Kasta said. “Should be smooth sailing from here. Just no one move, hit your thrusters or do anything.”
“I’m not doing shit,” Zea hissed, and I heard her whisper something under her breath that sounded a lot like ‘what the fuck is wrong with me? Why would I jump out of a perfectly good spaceship?’
None of us spoke as we floated the rest of the way through the tumbling wreckage from the previous battle. Every few seconds, it looked like a piece of metal, rock, or destroyed drone might collide with us, but Kasta’s calculations were perfect, and I was soon reaching for one of the exterior handles of the Jotnar cruiser.
“Got it!” I said as my fingers wrapped around the grip.
“It’s not over yet,” Juliette sighed in our transponders. “Adam, attach that hook, everyone else, you need to get inside quickly. It looks like the hull is still getting battered, and you don’t want to be outside if something hits it.”
My three wives let go of my rope and moved across the hand grips toward the hole in the side of the cruiser, I found one of the anchor tow hitches near the back of the ship, but it took me about five minutes to climb there and attach the rope.
“Get inside, Adam,” Juliette pleaded as soon as I had attached the tow line.
“You don’t have to tell me twice,” I chuckled as I walked hand over hand toward the hole in the hull. As I moved, a few sharp spikes of metal smacked into the metal around me. I didn’t get hit, but each of the sharpened metal points left small divots in the side of the metal, and I guessed they would have torn through me like a needle through a thin piece of cotton.
Zea and Paula carefully pulled me inside of the hole, and then the four of us took a step away from the opening just as a long metal bar bounced off the rim of it like a flipping spear. The gap was about two meters in diameter, and I saw that the interior wall of the ship some five meters away was melted. A corpse of a uniformed Jotnar warrior floated by, and Kasta grabbed him by his belt so that she could pull him to the ground.
“What are you doing?” Zea asked as she glanced around the dark interior of the hallway where we stood.
“Seeing if he has any sort of security keycard, Ms. Hacker.”
“Oh,” Zea laughed. “Yeah, but you see its Queen Hacker now, Sweetie Pie.”
The three of them laughed, and then Kasta pulled what looked like a leather satchel off his corpse.
“Huh. Nothing but what they use for money, and a few print pictures. They might not have any security clearance stuff here, but I’m still taking his pistol.” Kasta untied the dead man’s gun belt and then wrapped it around her space suit.
“How are you going to patch up this hole?” I asked.
“We’ll go to the hold and see what they have for repair equipment,” Paula explained. “Worse case, we’ll cut pieces off the floor and weld it on the inside. It will be super messy.”
“Before that, we should make sure the systems work on this,” Zea said as she gestured to the dark hallway. “The emergency lights aren’t even on. If we can’t get the power to boot, then it isn’t worth patching anything up.”
“And before you do that, I need Kasta to take a look outside real quick, do her math, and let me know the best time to start towing,” Juliette said. “Even if this thing is a piece of junk, you won’t want to swim through the debris again.”
“I’m on it,” Kasta said as she leaned out of the hole.
“Zea and I will move to the bridge and see if we can get the power started,” I said.
“Alright,” Paula said as she gave a nervous glance around the dark hallways. “We’ll move to the hold. Be careful.”
“You too,” I said, and then Zea and I turned and started walking toward the front of the Jotnar ship.
Both of us had our rifles out, but we didn’t expect anything to be alive. It was obvious that the ship was powered off, and most engines had virtually unlimited juice that they recharged from radiation. So this girl was both broken and not pushing out life support, or she had sensed that everyone on board was dead and had turned herself off.
I was hoping it was the second one.
“Did you hear something?” Zea whispered to me after we had walked for a few minutes in the darkness toward where I thought there must have been an elevator.
“No,” I said, “I have good hearing, but sound doesn’t travel through space. Your suit might be picking up vibrations from when I touch the elevator wall.”
“You both are freaking me out,” Paula whispered.
“Me too,” Juliette whispered, “and I’m not even there. I just see your suit’s camera feed.”
“You do?” Zea asked.
“Yeah, Blondie,” Juliette laughed. “We are all eating popcorn and pretending this is a horror movie.”
“I doubt that,” Zea scoffed.
“Juliette was just saying how concerned she was for your safety,” I heard Eve say in the background.
“Maybe,” Juliette laughed again, and I head Aasne and Elana chuckle.
“Let’s keep it quiet,” I said. “Or I won’t be able to hear something if there is something actually here.”
My words shut everyone up, and Zea and I continued moving down the dark hallways.
We only saw a few more bodies, but they looked like rowers. They wore uniforms, but were unarmed. After making a few turns, I almost thought I might have missed the elevator, but then I saw the double doors and gestured for Zea to follow me to them.
“We are at the elevator,” I growled as I forced my hand into the crack opening and began to pry the doors apart.
“We just reached the hold,” Paula said. “They’ve got a bunch of drones here, and a supply of repair parts for the hull. Looks like they need to be repaired from the outside though. They have all the equipment, Sis and I just need the power on so we can start.”
“Working on it,” I gasped as the elevator doors opened.
I leaned my head into the shaft, looked up, and saw the car above us. There was a panel at the bottom that I guessed could be pried open to get inside, and I gestured for Zea to follow me up the chute.
“Jussssssst so you know, this was not how I wanted to spend my honeymoon,” Zea laughed.
“I’m sure Adam will make it up to us,” Paula said.
“Yeah,” I said as I moved my fingers over the elevator unit emergency door. I couldn’t see a latch anywhere, and it wasn’t opening with my pushes. “We’ll do a spa or something.”
“Spa?” Juliette said.
“Yes,” Eve answered. “On Adam’s battle fortress, he has several rooms filled with hot springs and trees. There are many beautiful Nordar women on the ship that offer wonderful massages.”
“Dammmmnnn,” Juliette sighed. “Hey Eve, you can read minds, right?”
“Yes…” I heard Eve reply.
“So when you read Adam’s mind, does he think I’m good wife material, or does he kind of consider me more of a mistress?”
“I am not sure that he has thought much about--”
“Does he like butt stuff?” Juliette interrupted Eve, “cause I’m totally down if it means I get a crown and daily massages.”
“You know we can hear you talking?” Zea sighed.