“I know, Jack!” she shouted back. “It’s all I’ve got, okay? If the shields hold, it’ll work, I know it will. And we’re at arm’s length of it. We’ll get hit well before the debris has a chance to disperse. It’ll be like smashing into a cracked brick wall—cracked, but it’s still a damn brick wall. Just trust me, okay?”
“That’s a big ask at the moment, boss.”
“You got another idea, North?” Griffith grunted.
“No, I just didn’t realize we’d opened the table to suicidal options.”
The Synthesis rocked with more small impacts, sending the alarms into another frenzy.
“Time to think suicidal,” Griffith said.
“Fuck, all right.” Adequin exhaled slowly as her thoughts reeled. Jackin was right—it was a risk. But they had zero alternatives and were already out of time. She expanded the life-support interface. “We’re doing this.”
“We got personnel in the back, boss,” Jackin warned.
“I’ll isolate them. Eura, call them to the medbay.”
Eura hopped on comms.
“Griff, trigger quarantine buffers,” Adequin went on. “It’ll help direct the airflow. Jack, switch to banded shield mode then undock the manipulation screen and send it my way.”
They voiced their acknowledgments while Adequin tapped out commands, sealing the cockpit before cordoning off smaller sections of the ship, creating a direct, sealed path from the atmospheric cycler to the dockside air lock on the posterior of the ship. At least from that direction, the force of the expulsion would propel them laterally, and not directly toward the self-destructing Tempus … not to mention the Divide.
“Crew’s in the medbay,” Eura confirmed.
Adequin sealed the medbay bulkhead and deactivated air cycling before sealing the vents ship-wide. Jackin’s defense screen arrived in her queue, and she flicked it open, then quickly tapped in the commands to extend the shields out from the hull of the ship.
“Extending ten meters,” she said.
“That might not be a big enough buffer,” Griffith warned.
“Then fifteen.”
Jackin blew out a harsh breath. “Too thin, we’ll lose cohesion.”
“Fuck—twelve and a half?”
Griffith and Jackin exchanged a look she didn’t have time to analyze, and she locked the final number in.
“Pass me thrusters,” she ordered, and Griffith slid her the thruster control screen.
She was getting really tired of having to move ships with fucking maneuvering thrusters. At least this time she only needed to roll them, so the belly would take the brunt of the impact. It was more thickly armored than the rest of the vessel by almost 50 percent, and devoid of any exterior systems or hatchways.
However, when she keyed in the angles and prepared to engage, the readout flashed a vehement “thruster systems off-line” warning.
“Bloody void,” she growled. “Do any of the fucking systems on this ship work?”
“Uh, life support…” Eura responded carefully, seeming unsure if the outburst had been a legitimate question. “And uh, weapons, sir.”
Adequin paused, exchanging a dubious look with Griffith. That wasn’t a half-bad idea.
Griffith gave a curt nod to indicate his agreement.
Adequin undocked the useless thruster control screen. “Disengage stabilizers.”
“Disengaged,” Griffith responded before she’d even finished giving the order.