Into the Void

Chapter 11

The gunship drifted silently through space. It had been nearly twenty-four hours since they had received the rendezvous coordinates from the Dauntless and it would likely take another full day to reach the debris field. Izzy pulled herself up from the floor hatch and floated into her seat. Her hair was pulled back into a loose bun and her exo-suit was mottled with black stains and smears of grease.

"Remind me to never push the engines that hard again, that was a hell of a mess to fix." she said.

Nate cocked an eyebrow. "We didn't melt the heat sinks did we?" he asked.

"Not quite, rerouting the waste heat into the gun's sinks helped but we burned out a few of the subsystems, electron barrier fields and water recycling were nearly trashed but they're patched up now. How have things been up here?"

"We haven't had to outrun any more supernovas so that's been nice. Honestly, I just woke up, Rowan has been doing most of the flying. Not needing to take a break to sleep or eat is a big help when you need to fly forty-eight hours straight without autopilot."

Rowan shook his head with a small smile. "The ship might as well be on autopilot. We just need to fly straight until we hit the RV point."

"Did the sensors return anything useful about the field?" asked Izzy.

"Maybe," said Rowan. "The pieces are too close together to be a natural asteroid field, the bits on the edge of the cloud are mostly ice then there's rock and metals towards the center. The weird thing is how it's sitting, it looks like there's some kind of mass or gravitational field at the center of the debris. It's keeping it all on a loose spherical pattern like all the chunks are orbiting something. We'll know more when we get closer. I can keep things handled up here if you two need a break."

Izzy blew out a short sigh. "A break sounds nice," she said. "You sure you can handle things up here?"

"Yeah, I'll be fine. I'll shout if anything goes wrong."

Izzy drifted out of her seat and placed a hand on Rowan's shoulder. "Thanks, I really appreciate it" she said with a warm smile.

Izzy and Nate floated through the door at the rear of the cockpit and into the crew compartment. Vance, Damon and the two technicians sat in a loose circle, struggling to play a game of cards. Cards were notoriously hard to deal and set down without gravity. They almost always drifted away from the table and got lost. Onyx stood in the far corner locked to the deck on magnetic pads that folded out from his heels. His massive frame and blank features were deeply unnerving, intimidating even, it made the hairs on the back of Nate's neck stand on end.

Izzy peeled off her exo-suit and nudged it towards the back of the crew compartment. "I think we have some tools in the cargo bay, can you give me a hand patching up our rigs?"

Nate shook his head. "God damn Izzy, don't you ever relax?"

"All the exo-suits got torched by an electromagnetic pulse. We need them running, and compared to working on the ship rewiring suits is relaxing for me." she waved the other two technicians over. They set their cards down with a grumble and floated over to Izzy. They were both unusually tall and thin, they looked almost sickly to Nate. The older of the two techs was a man named Reginald with thick glasses and thinning brown hair. His counterpart was a striking young woman named Olivia, with dark skin and hair as black as the void outside the ship. Nate didn't know too much about the technicians other than their names. Most of the technical crew were from worlds in Second Wave Space and he kept his distance from them, preferring to spend his time with the bridge crew who were mostly ex Void Corps officers from the Alliance.

Izzy paused on her way out of the crew compartment, turning to speak to the warmachine in the corner. "Hey Onyx, you didn't get hurt by the EMP did you? I can help if you need any work done."