It wasn’t nearly enough though. Even if I had more than twenty minutes of air, at full burn it would take me more than two hours to get toWrath, so only my corpse would make it.
I watched as the Hivemind ejected a tiny beacon the size of a grain of sand, then used the Grasp Drive to send it out toward Eriok.
Whatever the Hivemind injected me with made my jaw tight. I couldn’t open it, so I asked through my mind how long we were going to wait.
18 minutes.
I double-checked my HUD, which said I had 18 minutes of air. In normal circumstances, I could go without air for several minutes. These were not normal circumstances, as the extreme thrust and g-forces, and now the extreme cold, were pushing my physical form to its limit. I’d be lucky if I could go a minute or two without oxygen.
This was your decision, scion. The Hivemind helpfully reminded me.
I told it to do whatever it could to get me to Airlock with a reasonable hope of survival. I was willing to endure any amount of pain and suffering to get to her, but I hadn’t reckoned with the idea that I might just be sitting in a fucking tin suit for twenty minutes, waiting for Eriok to catch a beacon. I realized it was very possible that I could simply die waiting in this deathtrap without having done a fucking thing to help Airlock. That risk was unacceptable.
But it was a risk I’d taken. We’d always read about the heroes who made it. The ones who took on huge risks to do something great, but we only ever heard about the ones that the risks paid off for. Was I going to turn into one of the unlucky fuckers who took the big risk, then died to a roll of the dice? Maybe the Hivemind had a bad estimate on where Eriok’s ship was? Maybe Eriok had changed course when Tschenkar’s betrayal became evident? Or maybe one of a few other hundred possible things would go wrong, and I’d never even get a chance to try to save her.
But then, with twelve minutes remaining, the Hivemind spoke in my mind.
A response beacon from Eriok has been received. He is in agreement with the plan. Prepare yourself, scion. This will be unpleasant.
Fuck. It wason. I was going to actually do this. “It won’t be as unplesant as suffocating uselessly in this steel tomb.”
Firing engines.
The Hivemind hadn’t explained it to me, but I’d used the last three minutes checking through the details of the plan. The engines—once fired—could not shut down. The beacon had given Eriok the full telemetry though, and after allowing me three minutes of balls-out acceleration, Eriok would fire his Grasp Drive right at me, pulling me right toward him—but not all the way.
He’d let the Drive collapse space back to normal right as I was in range ofWrath. Space would collapse with my drives firing at full speed right towardWrath, I’d—
The engines fired. The cold ice in my veins steeled me, but I’d never felt as close to dying as I did now. Even just sitting there, unable to move even if I wanted to because of the confining tightness of the metal suit entombing me, I had to focusfully—every second—on not dying. As the thrust increased, it felt like I weighed well over 1,000 kilograms. Each breath I drew was a struggle. Only by thinking of Airlock Eve could I force myself to endure the pain of inhaling and exhaling under these conditions. Sometimes I had to stop midway through inhaling just to regain my strenghth, only then did I suck in the rest of the air to fill my lungs.
I couldn’t see a thing. I worried that my eyeballs had misshapen themselves so much from the g-forces that I wouldn’t be able to see when the engines finally cut off.
At one point I bit my tongue—just the left side of it, and only a few centimeters in—but my teeth cut right through like a hydraulic press, and I spit out blood and a chunk of my tongue. I barely got it out, and if I had spit with just a little less force, the chunk of tongue would probably have choked me.
When Eriok’s Grasp Drive pulled me toward my packship, I only noticed it vaguely through an indicator on my HUD. I was too focused on not having my own body kill me under these g-forces to feel any real relief at this part of the plan working.
The HUD updated quickly, and I sawWrathmarked as a little blue dot against the black of space.
Ejecting engines in twelve seconds.
I focused fully on not dying. My tongue was bleeding bad, and blood was being pulled down my throat by the insane g-forces. I had to consciously swallow it bit by bit so that I didn’t choke or drown on my own blood. It was a constant metallic taste dripping across my throat and down my tongue. Once the fucking engines were gone,thenI would figure out how the hell I was going to rescue her.
There was a big jolt, and then the most beautiful fucking weightlessness.
The engines were still firing—nothing could stop them until they consumed all their mass—but the engines were no longer attached to me. I was a weightless hunk of metal hurtling through space, but I was hurtling right towardWrath.
“How long until we’re docked?” I asked.
Six minutes scion, we will deploy grappling tethers and—
“And what? What?”
The Hivemind wasthinking. Normally that happened so fast I took for granted that it actually had to think. The shard of Hivemind within my little suit had so little processing power to work with that it was slower at thinking than even a human.
If I could have moved my hand, I’d have slammed my fist at wherever I thought the largest concentration of processing power was. “What?”
A red dot appeared nearWrath.“I’ve calculated a high likelihood that this shuttle is Tschenkar.”
“Is it or isn’t it?”