Some of the troopers are calling for help on the comms now, but everyone’s cross-talking, yelling and shouting in shock and fear. The cargo bay has two rows of seats, one on each side, and I’m near the front of the starboard side. The entire rear half of the starboard-side seat row has been torn out of the ship, with nothing but mangled metal and shredded hull lining remaining where the Lanky projectile plowed through the Wasp. Half the port-side seats are gone as well, everything from the wing roots in the middle of the ship all the way to the cockpit bulkhead. Sheer luck of the draw has placed me in one of the spots that didn’t get pulverized by millions of foot-pounds of kinetic energy. In the long run, it won’t matter—the ship is destroyed, and we’re in a very high orbit over Sirius Ad. All our fleet units are either engaged in battle, destroyed, or running away from the Lankies, and there’s nobody out there to stop and pluck me out of the wreckage.
Against my better knowledge, I toggle into the pilots’ intercom channel.
“Banshee Two-Five, you copy?”
There’s no answer, of course. I strain forward in my seat straps, unwilling to release the harness lock and risk getting flung out of the back of the ship, and peer around the corner of the doorway in the cockpit bulkhead. The armory nook is still there, and the right side of the cockpit looks relatively undamaged, but the left side has been hammered into a pulp. The left seat is missing altogether, and the right seat is occupied by a pilot who is slumped over sideways in his seat. His head is gone, along with most of his neck, and little frozen blood bubbles are drifting out of the smashed cockpit and into space like a cloud of tiny pink balloons.
“Headcount,” one of the squad leaders says on the platoon channel. “Sound off if you’re still alive.”
I check my tactical screen for suit telemetrics and find that I’m one of four people still alive in the cargo hold. There are two more still strapped into their seats, but their vitals are flat—a suit that didn’t seal in time, a piece of high-velocity shrapnel through the helmet. Half a dozen live troopers are floating in space outside the hull, getting left behind like dumped cap-ship garbage as the Wasp’s inertia carries it further out of orbit.
“Grayson here,” I reply. “Check your oxygen levels and hang on to something solid. I’ll try to get Fleet on emergency comms.”
“For what it’s worth,” the squad sergeant sends back. “Hope they hear you. I got two hours of air in my suit.”
I check my own oxygen supply, and it’s not much better. Three hours and thirteen minutes at present rate of consumption, the suit’s computer informs me in unnecessarily precise fashion. The tanks in our suits are low-capacity reserves designed for emergencies in hard vacuum, like a drop-ship hull breach on descent, but the designers assumed that rescue units would be close by. Battle armor makes lousy extra-vehicular activity gear—the joint seals aren’t the sturdiest, and a nick from an enemy fléchette means that your three-hour supply of air becomes a five-minute supply. The bug suits have much bigger oxygen systems because they’re designed for fighting on high-CO2 Lanky worlds, but my own bug suit is in a locker in my berth on the Manitoba, which is now almost half a million kilometers away.
I fire up my comms suite again, turn the transmitter to full power, and start broadcasting the news of our impending death.
“All fleet units, all fleet units. This is Tailpipe Five on Banshee Two-Five, type Wasp. We have suffered a catastrophic hull breach and are coasting ballistic. Both pilots are casualties. We have four survivors in the hull, and six more outside. Declaring an emergency.”
I listen for a reply, but all I hear is the hiss of an unused carrier wave. I repeat the broadcast three more times, but nobody out there is willing or able to respond.
“Well,” the squad sergeant says. “That’s that, then.”
“Anyone have any weapons left?” one of the other survivors asks.
“Yeah, Goodwin. I got my rifle,” the sergeant replies. “Why, what are you going to do with that fucking pellet gun out here?”
“I got two and a half hours of air left,” Goodwin says. “Two hours and twenty-nine minutes comes around, I’m gonna borrow your rifle for a second if you don’t mind, Sarge.”
“I’ll be dead by then, girl. You’re welcome to it at that point.”
“’Preciate it, Sarge,” Goodwin says with lighthearted politeness, as if the sergeant had just agreed to trade z-ration desserts with her.
“What a fucked-up day,” the sergeant says, echoing the words of the platoon sergeant who was sitting across the aisle from me, and who probably died in a millisecond when the Lanky penetrator rod tore through the ship.
We drift in the darkness in silence, reflecting on that epitaph. I conclude that as far as last words go, the platoon sergeant did pretty well.