Jessica solar's Arc

Chapter 13 of 15

Michael was still coughing soot when Jessica pulled him upright. The boots above them were three decks away. She could hear the wolves too, claws scraping the outer hull where the breaches gaped. Two holes in the port side. One in the belly. Every one of them a door. "I can't weld while they're climbing in," Jessica said. "I need the hull sealed to finish the engine work. I can't seal the hull while they're coming through it." Michael wiped his glasses on his shirt. "So you kill what comes through first." "I kill what comes through first." She dragged the parts crate open and started sorting. Two servo frames from the gutted hauler drones. A rail cannon barrel she had pulled from a Verak component months ago. Tracking coils. Power cells. Enough scrap to build something ugly and enough time to build it only if she moved now. She worked on the deck plate with Michael handing her tools. Two hours. She bolted the servo frames upright and gave each one a Verak targeting eye and a bolt gun off a mining rig. Rough. Bandy-legged. They looked like children's toys welded from junkyard bones. She keyed them to hunt anything moving toward the breaches from inside. The turret took longer. She mounted it on a swivel plate at the corridor junction where all three breach lines converged, fed it the rail barrel, and wired it to the same friend-or-foe loop. "Names?" Michael asked. His pencil was already out. "No names. Just draw them working." She walked the two robots to their posts and left the turret humming. Then she climbed back to the observation port and watched. The crimson boarders came through the belly breach first, six of them, rifles up. They did not see the wolves coming through the port hole behind them. The glass wolves hit the boarders from the rear, red light burning inside their bodies. The corridor turned into a slaughter. The wolves tore through crimson coats. The crimson coats emptied their rifles into glass ribs. Both sides went down in pieces. Whatever crawled out the far end, wolf or man, walked into the robots. The bolt guns cracked. Two wolves fell. Three boarders fell. One wolf reached the junction and the turret cut it in half at the shoulders. The rail barrel kept turning, kept firing, until nothing moved in the corridor. Jessica waited a full ten minutes. Nothing else came. She climbed down and walked the corridor with her welder over her shoulder. The robots tracked her and stood down. The turret clicked to standby. She reached the belly breach and looked out. The drydock floor was empty. The gantry was empty. Whoever was left had pulled back. "I can weld now," she said. Michael was already sketching the turret from behind her. "Draw fast," she said. "I want the hull closed by morning."