Starship Castaways

You deserve mercy given by one honorable crew to another, and I'm ashamed-bitterly ashamed-that a Cranston clan ship is abandoning that duty.

Damn you, Alike! Cousin or no cousin, you're still what happens when a raider captain's chosen according to pedigree instead of by combat record!

"Chandler!" Alike's voice penetrated his thoughts (and probably the Baikal's bulkheads, too, Chandler thought sourly as he responded with lifted head and expectantly directed eyes). "There's no rush now. Don't send the boarding party across until every compartment of that ship's been flooded and then cleared. D' you understand me?"

"Aye, Alike. I do." Chandler inclined his head toward his superior with respect in his manner, and utter disgust in his eyes.

* * *

"Captain, I've got nothing left to give you except thrusters. I'm sorry, but that's it!" Marilla Lansing surveyed the wreckage that used to be the Archangel's engine room, and she shook her graying head in utter frustration. The tears that stung her dark eyes were partly from the wisps of acrid smoke that automatic scrubbers and fire extinguishers (still operating somehow) couldn't remove from the compartment's atmosphere quite fast enough to keep ahead of the situation, and partly from angry despair. Never in all her forty-plus years of living had Rilla felt quite this helpless.

"Damn," came the mutter of Captain Irina Pappaniku's voice over commlink from the bridge. She sounded ridiculously calm. "Well. That takes care of coming about and making a stand against the clan ship, now, doesn't it?"

She probably wasn't expecting an answer, but Lansing gave her one anyway because the engineer could see several pairs of eyes turned expectantly in her direction. She knew without having to guess, because these were her people, which ones were feeling relieved that for them this battle was over now-and which were mortified at learning they couldn't possibly go back and continue doing the job they'd signed on to do.

She said, "You could bring her about, Captain. And there we'd be, dead in space."

A sitting duck, useful to the ship they were supposed to be protecting only if the enemy captain allowed the old cruiser's continued (and probably unexpected) activity to pull the clan ship's attention away from its true quarry. That could only be temporary even if it did happen, because the Archangel and the freighter Keltic were all alone out here. Help wasn't on the way, and slowing the clan ship's boarding of the freighter and slaughter of its crew wouldn't make one bit of difference in this incident's outcome.

An "incident" was just how this day's carnage would be written up by InfoServ, of course, if it made the public broadcasts at all. Incidents in Clan territory got press attention only when they featured particularly lurid details or when prominent Commonwealth citizens died or disappeared. There wasn' t anything newsworthy about a freighter that vanished while attempting an illegal (technically, anyway) passage from Commonwealth to Empire, since InfoServ wouldn't know it had taken this first ever "hired gun" escort ship along with it into oblivion.

How had she, Commander Marilla Lansing of the Commonwealth Defense Service, wound up spending her life's last hour here? Retired Commander Lansing, formerly of the Commonwealth Defense Service, that was...why hadn't she been content to stay on Claris 5 with Abraham and their son, instead of following her old friend and long-time commanding officer Irina Pappaniku into the no man' s land of Clan space?

It was far too late to be wondering about that now, though. Pappaniku's familiar voice was saying evenly over the commlink, "I won't throw our people's lives away making a gesture, Rilla. We've got life support. Unless we fire those thrusters and counter it, we've got forward motion.