Seven Minutes

I had seven minutes to live.

In seven minutes one of two things would happen:  The Trader Satriane would exit her sling-shot maneuver from behind a gas giant and catch our attacker off guard with a short range blast from our secondary weapons.  That attacker would be disabled worse than us and we could escape into the outer system where we would repair our primary drive and weapons.  Or, the Trader Satriane would surprise no one and my First Officer or one of my other junior officers would kill me for incompetence, claiming the ship and my commanding shares in her,  and try something else before their seven minutes ran out.

Telling myself that the Trader Satriane should have never been put in that position in the first place was pointless, and yet it was the very thing I found myself doing as I watched time tick away on the mother-of-pearl dials of the main control board.

Only I had allowed the ship bearing the Aetheriat’s identifcation codes and markings to match orbit with us  for docking.  Only I had been surprised when two mechs dropped out of her load bay and sprayed our primary power arrays with EMP nets.  Only I was responsible for the Trader Satriane succumbing to paralysis about us.

If I had not realized these things myself, then surely the eyes of my FO would have told me so.  His gaze burned me now not in anger, but in disappointment. I had failed the ship and him.  The Old Man had failed.

As he stood there at his post, one hand rested on the polished teak railing, while the other rested upon the hilt of the dagger which in the Aetheriat was far more than ceremonial.  Tall.  Sinewy.  Hungry.  A reflection of myself twenty years ago.  He would kill me without hesitation for jeopardizing the ship, just as I had my predecessor.  We were bound to such extreme ways.  He would not, however, be able to claim my wife as spoil, as I had claimed my Merchant-Captain’s woman.  A common death had already taken my Tila.  A power-weaver, she had been claimed by tumors common to engineers which work the arrays.

Tila.

My right hand spasmed.

Yes, the emotional pain was not enough, but my body had to remind me of my physical weakness.

I looked at my FO.  Had he seen the tremble?

To hell with him if he had.  I might tremble a moment, but I was also still the man who might save us.  I was the man who had sent the Trader Satriane plunging into the sling-shot orbit.  I was the man who ordered one of our mechs dropped from our load bay with a 5-megaton mining charge.  It’s explosion just might suggest that we had blown up as we slipped around the backside of the gas giant.  Aetheriat Merchant-Captains with Aetheriat ships under primary power, lazy in their omnipotence to natural law, rarely considered simple orbital mechanics as tactical maneuvers.  They also rarely strayed toward the expanding debris field of an exploded trader.  So many bits and pieces of irradiated hullcrete traveling at ungodly velocities could trouble the best shields and leave them just as they thought they had left us.

Yes, wait there where we left you, fool.  Wait for us to whip around the gas giant and let fly simple ballistics from gilt-inlaid magnetic barrels trained upon your heart by our telekins.

My FO watched me carefully.

The Old Man has not fully failed you yet, boy.  That gleam is hope, not the madness of fear. Oh, I know this last year has showed you that Fear and Doubt sit at my table.  But they take only what they can niggle from me.  Not whole bites. I have been hurt, not beaten. Three more minutes of faith, boy.  Three more minutes and then I’ll step from this chair so as not to stain its silk cushions with my blood.

I requested an update on our trajectory.  The bald psycomp at the control board sung calculations to herself, adjusted sliders and dials ever so slightly on the clock-work control board, and nodded at me.  On course.

I requested an update on our weapons.  The telekin nodded from his cybernetic sling in the weapons niche.  His mind reached out to locate our attacker.  At ready.

The Trader Satriane swung out round the gas giant.  There!  There was our attacker.  The little ship had strayed only a few thousand kilometers from where we left it a hyperbola ago.

The telekin gasped.  His fingers worked in the gloves of the cybernetic sling.

Outside the Trader Satriane, twin magnetic barrels spun on their gymbals in total silence.  Diamond-laced chunks of composite sped from the barrels at velocities exceeding two thousand meters per second.  Destruction painted its way across our attacker’s hull a moment later.  Breathing gases and water erupted from the ship in frozen plumes.  Power arrays shredded like flowpaper.  Lights flickered and went out.  Bodies tumbled from the broken hull, grasping bits of wood and silk.  It was done in seconds.

Our sling-shot manuever whipped us toward the outer system.  I would not waste the momentum to return and obliterate them.  Not on secondary.  When the mains were restored, yes.  But not on secondary.  No, let us continue to limp away carefully and bind our wounds.

I could ill afford a sigh of relief, however, as my FO continued to watch me and my junior officers continued to watch him.  Mere survival is often not enough in our world.  Winning is what counts.

I sprang from the command seat and backhanded my FO with the ruby-studded glove which hid the scars on my right hand.  The young man dropped to one knee under the blow, a line of blood trickling from his lip.  But he looked up at me with what almost seemed relief.  His eyes then deferred to my boots.  I eyed the junior officers.  They moved quickly to oversee the repairs.

I settled into the command chair.  I looked at the mother-of pearl dials on the main control board.

Now to hold things for the next seven minutes.