Kales stared at the controls governing the radiation filters around the engine compartments.

As the ship’s physician, he had memorized the progression of injuries caused by exposure to unfiltered engine emissions. The knowledge was intended to help him assess casualties and adjust treatment according to the severity of exposure, though in practice there was little treatment to adjust. There were only degrees of damage.

At the first level, exposure was limited. A patient might suffer burns, scarring, and localized tissue damage, but recovery remained possible. At the second, the burns penetrated deeper, damaging organs, nerves, and bone. Survival was still conceivable, but the victim would almost certainly carry permanent injuries. At the third level and beyond, the patient was merely waiting to die.

Medication could blunt the pain. Sedation could conceal some of the fear. Nothing could reverse the damage once the radiation had passed deeply enough into the body. The victim would deteriorate over hours or days as organs failed and damaged tissue began poisoning everything around it.

It was a slow and terrible death. Kales had no desire to experience it.

Then he thought of Nirenda Station and the relative ease with which everyone aboard it must have died. An antimatter detonation would have produced a flash of energy so intense that most of them would have been vaporized before their minds could register pain. There would have been no wounded for doctors to treat and almost nothing left for families to recover.

The weapons had been designed according to lofty principles.

Maximum destruction. Minimum contamination. Obliterate cleanly.

Now Kales had to weigh the threat posed by five remaining warheads against his own chance of survival—a chance that depended upon trusting the instincts of a strange man who had been found inside a drifting capsule and awakened after God knew how many years. Kales had never imagined dying such an anonymous death. He had expected accomplishment, recognition, and decades of work still ahead of him. He had imagined colleagues quoting his research and advances in medicine carrying him well into another century.

Instead, he stood alone in an access shaft, preparing to let the engines burn him apart from the inside.

He could not risk doing what Phillip had asked. He would not.

Even the possibility that the warheads might be used against another station or a populated world was too great. Kales was a doctor, but he was also a naval officer. Whatever G’Dahn’s true motives might be, the warheads had to be destroyed. If the Serpis’s plan offered the best chance of ensuring that, Kales had a duty to follow it. Still, if he was going to die, he could at least choose how.

The emergency blowout system offered another option. It was designed for situations in which pressure or heat threatened to destroy the engines. Activating it would rupture selected containment panels and vent portions of the engineering section directly into space.

The access shaft in which Kales stood was one of the areas that would open.

The radiation exposure G’Dahn wanted would never occur. Instead, the sudden decompression and blast through Engineering would incapacitate or kill everyone nearby.

Including Kales.

It would be fast.

He reached toward the console with trembling fingers and entered the initial authorization sequence.

The system accepted his medical override without hesitation.

A warning filled the display.

EMERGENCY ENGINE BLOWOUT ARMED

All he had to do was confirm it at the proper moment.

G’Dahn’s plan depended upon Phillip destroying the bridge as their signal to act, but Kales doubted that explosion would ever come. Phillip did not seem to understand the threat posed by the warheads. He believed he could recover the ship, defeat the pirates, and somehow outmaneuver the Serpis as well.

Kales decided he would use the ship’s return to normal space as his signal instead. The moment he felt the transition wave, he would trigger the blowout. G’Dahn would recognize the attack on Engineering and begin the engine implosion.

The warheads would be destroyed.

Kales closed his eyes and rested one hand against the console. Phillip’s voice returned to him.

Then don’t open the filters.

The words had not been pleading or desperate. Phillip had spoken as though survival were another problem to be solved, not a hope to be abandoned.

He knew almost nothing about the pirates, the ship, or the century in which he had awakened. Yet when he spoke of G’Dahn, he sounded certain.

There were stories about the Serpis. Rumors. Fragments repeated across entertainment feeds and fringe discussion networks—the sort of nonsense Kales sometimes watched when he wanted distraction rather than information. Claims that the Serpis concealed their true capabilities. Claims that they had manipulated younger species long before revealing themselves. Claims that they regarded humans as tools rather than allies.

Kales had dismissed those stories as paranoia. Were they still absurd now? Was believing Phillip any more irrational than blowing himself into space?

His finger hovered over the final control.

He thought of an engineer he had once treated after a containment accident. The man had suffered severe burns, though not enough to kill him. During recovery, he had admitted that he had bypassed several safeguards in an attempt to operate two linked systems simultaneously. The shortcut had nearly destroyed both the engine and the engineer.

Nearly.

The safeguards had not failed completely. They had fought one another, limiting the damage even as the engineer tried to override them.

Kales withdrew his hand from the blowout control. He canceled the sequence.

EMERGENCY ENGINE BLOWOUT DISARMED

For several seconds, he stared at the ordinary filter controls. Phillip had told him not to expose himself. G’Dahn expected him to disable the filters entirely. Perhaps he did not need to do either.

Kales began moving quickly through the engineering menus, searching for the interlocks and secondary controls the injured engineer had once described. If he remembered correctly, it might be possible to open the radiation filters only partially while forcing the emergency ventilation system to compensate. The two systems would work against one another, creating enough disruption to make it appear that he had followed G’Dahn’s instructions without producing a lethal exposure throughout the access shaft.

It was an engineer’s solution—dangerous, inelegant, and dependent upon several systems behaving in ways they had never been intended to behave. Kales began entering the revised sequence.

“This,” he muttered, “is why I chose medicine.”

Next Chapter: XVII