He looked up into the pale morning sky and let the thin warmth touch his face, because he suspected there wouldn't be many more mornings like it. Time had already run out, in truth, even if nobody wanted to say so out loud. Things among the crew had turned tribal fast, faster than he liked to admit he'd expected.
He crept back toward the ravine and found himself strangely moved at the sight of his ship wedged between the two rock faces, like prey caught fast in a predator's jaws. Most captains looked at their ships the way they looked at a rapier or a blaster: tools, nothing more. Corvin had never been able to manage that particular detachment.
He loved the Lady Luck the way a man loves something he's poured years of himself into, which wasn't the Thornkin way at all, and was perhaps the human trait that made his bloodline so useful to them as administrators and builders in the first place.
Flying her again wasn't on the table. But her transmitter, if it still worked, could reach the hyperspace beacon, and that beacon would tell the Confederacy where to find him. He might die for failing this mission regardless, but Corvin had never learned how to stop caring about finishing what he started.
He climbed down carefully through a section of hull torn open by the earlier explosion and picked his way through the wreckage toward the cockpit.
He found half a dozen empty vials scattered across the floor, and a seventh clutched in Hugo's trembling hand. Corvin had read the reports on Hugo's history with illegal narcotics, the same habit that had quietly capped his career below where his ambition wanted it. The more immediate problem was that Hugo had beaten him here, against direct orders, and now sat slumped in the captain's own chair, staring at nothing.
"Glad to see the cockpit held together," Corvin said.
Hugo, who clearly hadn't realized he had company, nearly came out of his own skin.
"I came to check the transmitter array.
Looked structurally sound from here," Hugo said, his voice pitched too high.
"From the outside, maybe," Corvin said, climbing over a collapsed section of hull toward a ladder leading up into the crawl space above the cockpit ceiling, where the ship kept its most sensitive electronics.
He forced the access panel open and found melted circuitry waiting for him. The story repeated itself down every corridor he checked: nothing lit, nothing hummed, nothing so much as flickered when he tried to coax it back to life. Only silence.
The Lady Luck was dead.
"Maybe we salvage what's left and cobble together something crude," Corvin said, more hope in it than conviction.
"Unlikely.
The torpedo blast took most of what we'd need," Hugo said.
"The hangar bay, then.
The fighters were still parked outside when we made our way in, there might be something usable there."
"Forget it.
Everything below, including engineering, got crushed in the fall," Hugo said, defeated.
"Then we cut the ship apart, deck by deck, until we've salvaged enough to build what we need by hand," Corvin said.
"With what, our teeth?"
Hugo rose unsteadily, bracing himself against a fallen support beam.
"We're finished, Corvin.
We're here now. Far from everything.
Far from the war."
Corvin ignored him and moved into the corridor, rifling through storage lockers for anything remotely useful, though the fleet's usual supply shortages meant there had never been much to find in the first place.
"We should plan to stay here," Hugo said behind him, his shadow stretching long down the corridor.
"Commander Taj al-Din will assume we vanished with the Corvite.
That we defected."
Corvin let the locker handle go and turned to face his first officer, reading the set of his jaw, the pulse visible at his throat, the way his weight shifted from foot to foot.
"My last first officer was reassigned right after your private conversation with Commander Taj," Corvin said, level.
"What exactly did the two of you discuss?"
"Mission details.
Nothing more," Hugo said, and for one unguarded instant his eyes lost their focus, flicking left, then right, pupils narrowing.
A lie, plain as daylight.
"You discussed having me removed from command, and putting yourself in my chair," Corvin said.
"And when the Commander refused you that, you settled for asking to be my second."
Hugo froze, then panicked, and his hand slapped his shield belt to life.
Corvin's own shield hummed on a half second later, an electromagnetic cocoon settling over him from crown to boot, his rapier already clearing its sheath. The shield would turn aside fast strikes and thrown debris alike. The only way out of this that didn't end in blood was Hugo finally telling him the whole truth, and Corvin had run out of patience for waiting on that.
"No more games.
I want it all, now."
He closed the distance in two strides, pressing the attack. Hugo gave ground, parrying, their shields hissing and sparking where the fields brushed against each other. After a fast exchange, Hugo broke off and ran for the cockpit.
Corvin followed without hesitation, unwilling to let the advantage slip.
That was his mistake.
He walked straight into something closer to a hurricane than a man. Hugo stood at the center of the cockpit, wreckage and shattered viewport debris orbiting him in slow, deliberate circles, like an angry god preparing to smite the disobedient. Corvin's shield turned aside most of it, but not all, and a few jagged fragments punched clean through his uniform.
He'd heard old fireside stories about Thornkin so deeply attuned to the current of life that they could lift stone and steel with nothing but will. He hadn't expected to find himself standing inside one of those stories, facing down a man burning through a drug he didn't fully understand.
A beam of twisted debris slammed into the cockpit wall hard enough to make the dead Lady Luck groan. A second strike tipped the whole wreck onto its side, knocking both men flat. Disoriented, Corvin got to his feet to find Hugo already gone, and followed him out through the ruined viewport, landing badly on the far side and wrenching his ankle for the trouble.