“Oh, shit,” Juliette laughed, and then I heard her voice cut off.
“I’m going to break this open,” I said as I pointed to the stubborn door with one hand and pulled my rifle off my shoulder with the other.
“Uhh, careful,” the hacker said as I pulled the weapon back over my head.
I slammed the butt of the rifle into the center of the door, and a boom of thunder filled the elevator shaft. The panel dented a bit, but it was bent inward significantly after I took my fourth hit. The fifth broke it open and then we both peered inside.
“Paula and Kasta, you guys hear that banging?” I asked as Zea and I swam through the zero gravity and into the elevator.
They didn’t answer me.
“Paula, Kasta?” I asked again as I tried to keep the panic out of my voice.
“Shit,” Zea hissed. “You made a lot of noise with that. If there is anyone in the cruiser still alive, they must have heard it. Where are they?”
“Juliette?” I asked, but there was no answer from the redhead.
“Fuck,” I growled as I looked for another door up and out of the elevator car. There was a second hatch, and this one popped open with just a flip of my fingers. Then I motioned for Zea to follow me, and we sprang up and out of the car.
“--ange--hear--there?” I heard Juliette say into our transponders, and I sighed with some relief.
“I think our signal is getting blocked,” I told Zea.
“If we can get the power on, I can push our transponder through the ship,” the hacker replied. “That is, if the Jotnar systems are somewhat similar to Persephone or the Nordar ones.”
“We’ll find out soon,” I said as I gestured to the top door on the elevator shaft. “This has to be the entrance to the bridge.”
Then I paused when I saw a flash of light flash out of the seam of the door that we were about to open.
“Uhhh, Adam,” she whispered.
“I saw it,” I whispered back.
“Is there someone alive in the bridge?”
“I doubt it,” I whispered as I swung my body around so that I could try to get a better look at the seam of the elevator shaft door.
“Then what was making the light?” Zea hissed.
“Maybe something on the bridge is powered,” I said with a shrug. “Can you put your back up against the opposite wall?”
“Yeah,” Zea said, and then she kicked off the side wall, flipped through the air, and then grabbed onto an I-beam in the shaft so she could press her back against the far wall.
“Get your rifle out and point it at the door,” I ordered as I pushed my fingers into the small crack on the seam.
“If you don’t think anyone is in there, why am I pointing my gun over there?” she whispered urgently.
“Just in case,” I grunted softly as I began to pull the doors apart. They were a bit stubborn, and I wondered for a few moments if I should shift, but then they came apart a bit, and I dodged to the side as soon as I saw the flash of light inside again.
Zea fired her rifle as soon as I was clear, and then I saw her fling herself to the side as a burst of blue pulse bullets went through the doorway and slammed into the wall beneath where she had been shooting.
I grabbed my own rifle, twisted it around my right shoulder, and then blind fired into the room in the direction that I kind of thought the Jotnar were shooting us from. I heard a single cry, and then I yanked my gun away from the door. No one was returning fire, so I gestured for Zea to take a position on the opposite side of the open crack from me so that we could both lean in and get shots off. She followed my orders, and then I raised three fingers to signal the countdown for her. As soon as I made a fist, we both spun around the crack in the doors I had pulled apart and aimed into the bridge. There was movement off to my right, and both Zea and I fired bursts of rifle bullets into the dark area.
There was a scream, and then the light stayed fixed pointing at the ceiling.
We both held our positions for a few moments, and then I indicated to her that she was going to cover me while I squeezed through the crack and moved forward into the room. A few moments later I was taking cover behind the nearest blocky terminal station while I swung my rifle over the dark room.
I didn’t see any more movement, and the single point of light stayed in its spot across the dark room. I finally gestured back for Zea to come in, and we both carefully covered each other as we moved across the room toward the light source.
The corpse belonged to a Jotnar warrior. The man was wearing a form fitting space suit with a slightly egg shaped helmet. One of Zea’s or my shots had punched through the glass and taken him in the throat, and another shot had put a hole in his chest. His face was frozen with shock, but his eyes were closed, and I wondered if he’d been thankful to depart this world finally.
“Looks like he might have been the only survivor,” I said as I searched him for the weapon he used against us. It was a small pocket-sized pulse pistol, and I checked the safety before putting it in the front pocket of my suit’s chest piece. “This probably isn’t good for us, since he would have gotten the ship back working if he could have.”
“Or he’s a dumbass,” Zea said as she floated over to the pilot’s terminal. “Let me see what I can do.”
I moved myself toward her so that the light coming from my helmet could light the input keyboard for her terminal, and I watched her hammer away at the buttons for a few moments. Nothing happened on the dark screen, and I could see her frown through her helmet.
“Fuck,” I grunted.
“Yeah,” Zea sighed and then pointed at the lower part of the terminal. “Can you yank the bottom panel out? I want to look at the wiring.”
“Sure,” I said, and then I hooked my fingers along the seam, grunted, and peeled the metal outward like a tough sardine can.
Zea pushed her face into the nest of wires until I couldn’t see the inside past her narrow shoulders. She kicked her feet a few times like she was swimming, and then I heard her laugh through the transponder.
“Okay, I think I see something that might work. This terminal has a battery backup, but it looks like that battery was either never wired to the main power, or it was disconnected somewhere in the guts of the ship. It would kind of explain why the power is out everywhere; none of the backup systems could turn on.”
“How do we fix it?” I asked.
“Well, the most obvious solution is to get Paula and Kasta to fix it.” Zea chuckled again, and she kicked her feet a few times as she started to float backward. “But I think I can do it. I just need something to use as a battery for a few minutes, then I can access the systems and see if this is a hardware or software failure. If it’s a software failure, then I can probably fix that. If it’s hardware, the chances of me fixing it without Paula and Kasta are slim, but I might be able to figure something out, or at least I can get the transponder relays working so we can talk to each other again.”
“Can you use the pistol as a power supply?” I asked as I pulled the weapon from my pocket.
“Great idea,” she said as she reached back without looking to take it from my hand. “It might be a little too much juice, but I just need a few minutes of power so that I can get everything working again.”
I waited in silence as the hacker fiddled around in the back of the terminal for a few minutes, then she let out an annoyed grunt and pushed herself out.
“I need your Kitty-boy strength,” she panted. “I can’t get the connector terminals to fit around the power relays for the pistol’s magazines. Can you bend them with your fingers?”
“I’ll try,” I said as I ducked my head into the wire mesh.
“It’s a thick green cord. You’ll see it at the back by what looks like a black painted box about the size of a head.”