Sword of Minerva (The Guild Wars Book 10) by Mark Wandrey (good books to read for teens txt) 📗

before he felt a searing sensation at the base of his neck, and he lost all control of his body. The Wrogul was using its flesh-penetrating tentacles to enter his body.

<Self terminate!> The contingency was in his Mesh, and he wasn’t even aware it had been there. Sato responded to the training and initiated his own death before he even realized what he was doing. As the Mesh began to cook his brains, he heard a voice.

“You were once a good being. This is not the way.” The blackness embraced him.

* * * * *

Chapter Ten

Being blown from the bridge by explosive decompression gave Rick 11 meters-per-second velocity all by itself. Firing the jets in the rapidly venting atmosphere doubled it. He was 70 meters away from the ship when its powerplant exploded, taking the vessel with it.

He curled into a ball as the shockwave slammed into him and imparted even more velocity. The impact stunned him momentarily. He read some rads and was glad the exploding ship’s hull was between himself and the powerplant. He raced away from the asteroid at 77 meters per second. Nice kick, he thought. He was busily running the numbers of his velocity, vector, and destination when the asteroid disappeared in nuclear fire.

Rick had zero clue what had just happened. Fusion plants didn’t explode in a nuclear blast. They could produce a pretty big boom, but not a full-blown nuclear detonation like he now saw. He could also see that the blast seemed to originate from the asteroid, and it was in the multi-megaton range.

Luckily this second, much larger blast was also much cleaner. All he could think of was a demolition or self-destruct charge. He was even more glad he’d gotten the fuck out when he had. He was 2.5 kilometers away from the ship when the asteroid exploded. Had it occurred in a planet’s atmosphere, he would have been vaporized. In space, he was outside most of the blast’s effects. He added some more rads to his growing total.

“Okay,” he said to the void. “No going back to the asteroid, and nobody behind me.” He reoriented himself with puffs from his suit’s cold gas thrusters. They gave him minimal movement in space to work around a ship. Out in the full black, he couldn’t manage more than a few meters per second.

Rick returned to analyzing his flightpath. He had the memorized data on their location from the bridge of Vestoon, as well as the locations of the now defunct asteroid, and the likely fake battleship salvage. He used his pinplants to run calculations, inputting the best estimate of his own location, direction of travel, and velocity.

His escape from the ship had been a spur of the moment decision to avoid being blown up when the reactor went. He’d been afraid the results of that departure had put him on an irreconcilable trajectory. “Not as bad as I thought,” he said as he finished his calculations. Not only was he going in the right direction, but he was also on a rough intercept course. The hulk of the battleship was approaching its closest point to the former asteroid, cutting down the distance he needed to travel.

“This is going to be tricky,” he said, shaking his head as he thought about how easily he’d fallen into talking to himself. There were a few factors he needed to deal with. The first, and most urgent, was the course. Right behind it was breathing.

His new merger with the suit had made it difficult to distinguish between his biological lungs and the suit’s atmospheric processors. They both served a similar purpose, allowing him to breathe. The processors stored the basic elements his cells needed to work. His lungs didn’t store them, they merely extracted them. He’d been holding his breath for 10 minutes and had another 10 left. It was going to be tight, especially if he couldn’t find some air.

Rick secured the two laser rifles he’d borrowed from the opSha, magnetically locking them to his back while keeping them clear of his jets. They’d be needed if he was to have any chance of success.

His sensors were woefully inadequate for use in space. The destination was too far to see as more than a dot two pixels across. His velocity relative to the now-destroyed asteroid base was 101 meters per second. His best estimate put the battleship at 52 kilometers. His remaining oxygen, factored with current velocity, gave him a range of 60 kilometers.

“Math works,” he mumbled. “Now I just need to get there, slow enough to survive impact, and find air in the remaining 90 seconds I’ll have.”

First things first. He removed one of the two rescue bulbs he’d grabbed. Quickly taking it apart, he harvested the air tank. It held enough oxygen under pressure to allow someone to survive 24 hours. Using precious air in his thrusters to turn around, back toward the distant battleship, he ran the calculations again. “I need 29 meters per second to get on course.” At least, that was what his pinplants said. “Damn, I really wish I’d paid more attention to astrogation with Jim in school,” he said as he detached the tank from the bubble.

The longer he waited, the more the numbers could be off. He sighed, fine-tuned his position, put the pressure vessel against his solar plexus, and turned the valve. The results weren’t as he’d hoped. The air exited in an anemic spray almost invisible to his sensors. He cranked the valve all the way open, without change.

Rick lifted it closer to his suit’s main sensors, where his eyes would be if the helmet was open. The tank had a miniature regulator, probably to keep the user from inadvertently doing exactly what he was trying to do. “Dammit!” He tried to figure out how to remove the regulator, but quickly gave up. The