“Where’s the ship?” Emla asked, confused.
I carefully parsed through the data stream from the bot, trying to understand what I was looking at. There was some wreckage in the bay, but not nearly enough to account for a ship. The floor of the bay where the ship had been anchored was all torn up, and so was the base camp the techs had set up under it. But the big processing facility they’d been building a little further away was completely intact, and so was most of the maze of pipes and conduits that snaked across the vast space. If there had been any kind of fight that stuff would all be wrecked.
“Did they get away?”
I turned the bot’s sensors on the yakuza ships. Both drone carriers were missing, and the frigate had thousands of its own drones deployed. But I didn’t see any battle damage, or debris.
“Maybe,” I said. “This is really weird. I can’t see any signs of a fight. Did the captain just talk his way out somehow?”
“There’s no way they could have offloaded all those techs this fast,” Emla pointed out. “Besides, something wrecked the base camp pretty good. What could have done that kind of damage?”
I couldn’t answer that, so I queried Hope’s databases. The answer that came back made me gasp.
“A hyperspace transition!”
“What? No way! I thought it was impossible to make a jump with a giant fixed object intersecting your conversion field?”
“A hyperspace converter doesn’t have to project a spherical field,” I pointed out. “That’s just the most economical design, so it’s what people normally use. But we know the captain likes his tricks. If he had the ship fitted with a custom hyperspace converter it might be able to project a field that conforms to the ship’s hull, more or less.”
“So they just, what, retracted the landing gear and dropped into the Gamma Layer? That’s brilliant! By the time the yakuza figured out what was going on and followed they could be outside gunnery range.”
“Or down in the Beta Layer,” I said. “If the captain was going to invest in a fancy hyperspace converter I bet he’d get one with double-jump capability too. The drone carriers must be hunting for him right now, but they’re going to have a heck of a time chasing him down.”
“Awesome! I bet they’ll take care of those yakuza marines and get away clean. Only, what about us?”
I had an awful, sinking feeling in my gut.
“Well, he does have the whole ship to think of,” I said weakly. “I mean, it’s not like there’s any way they could have rescued us. Right?”
It still hurt. I’d trusted Captain Sokol, and it looked like he’d abandoned me. Now what was I going to do?
Emla floated up behind me, and hugged me.
“It will be okay, Alice. The yakuza won’t be here forever, right? If we have to we can just hide until they leave, and then fix one of the lifeboats or something. Right, Hope?”
“Yes, of course,” the ship’s AI agreed. “Although you may want to secure a source of water if that’s your plan. The boarders remained active for a year and a half before their nuke packs decayed, and they spent the majority of that time systematically searching the ship for any resources that could be used to make repairs. The bots themselves will provide an adequate supply of most elements, but we have no hydrogen to run a fusion reactor.”
I let myself relax into Emla’s embrace, and tried to gather my wits. They were right. This was a bad situation, but it could be a lot worse. At least I wasn’t alone.
The thought of trying to repair one of those lifeboats with just Emla to help didn’t sound very promising, and I still didn’t want to start fabbing up Mirai techs. But I had one more avenue to explore.
“Hope, see if you can sneak one of the bots over to where the salvage teams are working. They’re using civilian com relays, so we should be able to connect to their network without raising any alarms.”
“Is there some reason you don’t want me to use my internal systems for that, Alice? The power you’re providing will only run a tiny fraction of the network, but I’m sure I could localize one of the areas where they have network coverage and open a connection.”
“No, these guys are really sneaky and I don’t know what kind of monitoring equipment they have set up. They know I got away, so if they spot a recon bot they’ll just assume I had it stashed somewhere. But if they see the smart matter in one of your bulkheads power up they’ll know they have bigger problems that a little girl with a few bots.”
“Very well, Alice. I can make do with the bots, and take care that I don’t activate any com nodes that they might detect. But it will take some time.”
“I’ve got an idea, then,” Emla said. “While we’re waiting on that, why don’t we get life support running in here? I know vacuum exposure won’t kill you, Alice, but it isn’t doing your organic parts any good. I bet you’d be a lot more comfortable in a warm room full of breathable air.”
“The fabricator needs to be kept in a non-reactive atmosphere,” I said dubiously.
“We can move it. It would make more sense to put it in the boat bay anyway, since that’s where all the salvage is. Your mom was just keeping it in here to hide it from the bots, right Hope?”
“Yes, Emla. I think this is a good suggestion, Alice. We could move it, and then reassemble the bulkhead to keep your refuge hidden. There’s no need to expose yourself to potential discovery when an engineering bot could do the manual labor for you.”
“Does the life support in here even work anymore?” I asked.
“All diagnostics show green, Alice. The refuge has an independent life support system, and you’ve already provided enough power to run it for several days. Princess Susan drained the water reserve to fuel her escape ship, but I can at least provide air and a more comfortable temperature.”
No showers, then. Too bad, a chance to relax and get clean would be heavenly. But I’d take what I could get.
“Alright, you talked me into it. How’s your foot, Emla?”
She held up her leg, and wiggled her toes at me. “Good as new. How about you?”
“My everything hurts,” I admitted. “I just about cooked myself running in overdrive for so long, and I soaked up a lot of radiation too. My synthetic parts are fine, but it’s going to take hours for all my human bits to heal. I’m really starting to wonder why so much of my body is natural organics, considering how fragile that stuff is.”
“It’s a disguise,” Hope explained. “Normally you’d have converted entirely to synthetic tissue by now, which would make you much more resilient. But your development manager has been trying to hide your true nature.”
“Well, you don’t need to push yourself,” Emla declared. “I can move the fabricator for you. Why don’t you take a look at the warbots in that design database? You like stuff like that, and I’m sure we’ll need some before long.”