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The fire suppression line is severed at the junction and Leo pinches it closed with his bare hand because his gloves are lost somewhere aft and half of aft is on fire.
— ninety seconds earlier, Tess on comms: "Call it off. Kap, call it off, they have an escort —"
"Skatá." He needs a clamp. His fingers find shear tape instead, and shear tape is a lie you tell a pipe, but he tells it — three wraps, four — and moves. Above the engine-room junction swings the little blue máti he zip-tied there his first week aboard, his grandmother's charm and his grandmother's habit, staring into the smoke. Deck Two's venting; the whistle of a widening hull crack runs under every alarm, a pitch he learned the hard way in the wrecks off Páros Station.
— the captain's voice, flat: "Override. We eat this month or we don't."
He seals the Deck Two hatch on the run and doesn't look through the porthole. "Panagía mou." There were two people on Deck Two.
— and Leo, at his station, hands on the intercept vector he'd already tuned. Saying nothing.
Power's dying in waves, brownouts rolling stern to bow like the ship's trying to breathe. He rips the panel off the main bus. Burnt insulation smells like a funeral. Bridge the relay — bare wire, bare hands, don't touch the frame —
— muzzle flash on the escort's hull, silent, almost pretty —
The jolt knocks him back on his heels, and the lights hold. "Éla, koritsi mou," he tells the ship. "Kráta — stay with me." And the Kalypso, gutted and burning, stays.
— the first impact, and Andros just — gone, the whole comms station —
Then gravity stutters and his stomach drops sideways and he grabs a rail and white light pours through the ship from no source at all and every alarm cuts out at once and the deck rolls under him the slow way a coin turns over in a giant's fingers, his inner ear insisting he's falling in six directions while his boots swear he's standing still. His mouth opens on the candles and the saints. Nothing comes out.
— Tess screaming his name, not the captain's, his —
The alarms come back. The deck goes solid. Leo's on his knees with his nose bleeding, and the guns that were killing them are gone from every screen.
— his silence. His silence. His —
He runs for the medbay. The corridor's dark, so he does it by hand-memory — seven meters, hatch coaming, left. The autodoc's still powered, one green light burning in the dead church of his ship, a kandíli that hasn't gone out. Tess is inside it. The readout's a wall of amber, and she's lost more blood than the doc can synthesize by morning.
"Mána mou—" The word's out of him already. Then the other voice takes over, the one he keeps for frightened people and failing pumps, steady as a level bubble: "Hey. You're in the doc, mátia mou. It's got you."
She doesn't answer. The machine hums, sorting her blood from everyone else's problems.
He looks up because he can't keep looking at her. Through the medbay's little viewport the sky is full of strangers — a fat orange sun the color of a heating element, constellations he's never mapped — and on the medbay's repeater screen, a contact ticking at extreme range, a return with straight edges and a rotation too regular to be rock.
Where the hell are they? What the hell just happened? Both questions can wait behind the only one that matters, and he asks it in his grandmother's Greek, to a God he doesn't believe in, crossing himself with a hand still tacky with coolant:
Kráta tin. Take the ship if you're owed — take the kaïki, take me. Let her keep.
@Dr. Ryland Grace ❤ 🧡 💛 💚 💙 💜 🖤 (Rocky & Adrian see ship. question?)