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  RUNNING BLACK

  THE BLACK CHRONICLES BOOK THREE

  J. M. ANJEWIERDEN

  ©2021 Jared Michael Anjewierden

  All Rights Reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Published by CJMA Press, Salt Lake City, UT.

  Cover art by Alison Christensen

  Editing by Stephanie Osborn

  First Edition

  FOR BRIAN

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 01

  Chapter 02

  Chapter 03

  Chapter 04

  Chapter 05

  Chapter 06

  Chapter 07

  Chapter 08

  Chapter 09

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  The End

  Chapter 01

  If you examine just about any type of machine, you will notice that the early models tend to be more durable than the later ones. While in some cases this is because the manufacturers wish you to keep buying new ones and don’t make them to last, mostly it comes down to two things. First, newer models tend to be more complex and therefore have more things that can break, and of course more moving parts means more wear and tear. The second is that it takes time to figure out what is necessary, and what is not, so the first attempts are invariably over-engineered, literally made tougher than strictly necessary.

  - Chief Engineer Kessler, HMS Dauntless, Albion Navy.

  THE OBSERVATION deck that ran along the inner diameter of Takiyama Station was nearly empty, as it had been almost every time Morgan had visited. She still didn’t understand why this would be; gazing out at the ships of the House in all their majestic, rugged, and powerful glory never failed to evoke a powerful reaction in her.

  It’s good to be home.

  This time it almost brought her to tears, though that probably had more to do with the fact that a few short months earlier she had been deathly afraid she’d never see it again, or anything she cared about, than the view on its own.

  Morgan stood there, just looking out at the ships in their docks, some being worked on, and took a moment for herself.

  She was at peace.

  It was a fragile peace, after everything she’d been through. Pirates, assassins, gangs, her entire awful homeworld; it seemed Morgan never had good luck without the bad to go along with it.

  Is it worth it? Nightmares, grief, danger, pain, tremendous injuries, and nearly dying on the regular, are they worth bearing to have the chance to see the stars, to do more with my life than raise a family that would just get fed to the insatiable mines of Hillman? Not to mention never seeing my parents again, and always wondering what happened to them because they helped me escape.

  It was not a question Morgan would have had the ability to define, much less the desire to ponder, as recently as three months earlier, by the Zion calendar. She wasn’t going to admit it, least of all to her therapist, but the months of rest and recovery sequestered at Lady Emily’s estate had not only healed her, they’d changed her.

  She just wasn’t sure how much had changed, or healed for that matter. Some days were fine, others she felt like curling up in a ball on her bed and hiding from everything.

  Nor did she have an answer to the question of worth, not completely.

  It also wasn’t a question she would be able to think on just then, as the bad and good luck she’d been lamenting chose that moment to show up, yet again.

  The good was that Morgan was looking at just the right time to see it happen, a microsecond flash as something discharged on the exterior of one of the nearby freighters, followed by a distressingly small figure hurtling away from the ship.

  Morgan’s feet were in motion before she’d even fully processed what she was seeing, the bag with her things already falling from her shoulder as she shrugged off the strap.

  “Suit helmet deploy,” she said firmly and clearly, the command telling her skinsuit, quite naturally, to get her helmet up, the action also automatically tying her suit and its attached wrist uplink computer into the stations’ network.

  It’s a good thing I was wearing the suit, she thought. Regulations, everyone had to, if they had one, when going through a gate, and she just had gotten back to Takiyama Station from the nearby planet of Albion.

  As the helmet deployed from its housing in her suit’s collar, the segmented clear faceplate sliding into place, she locked the small tracking device in her uplink on the suit of the poor soul out there.

  Tapping into the emergency Damage Control Central line, she confirmed what she was already afraid of; the line was completely clear of traffic; no one knew anything was happening.

  “Dutchman, Dutchman, Dutchman,” she said as calmly as she could, the beyond ancient message that meant someone had gone overboard.

  That would be enough to get whoever was at the damage control stations on the station and the docked freighters to pay attention, but she needed to get them more information.

  Again, the good news was mixed with the bad. Whoever it was, they were headed away from the nearby walls and freighters, so there was no immediate risk of hitting anything. That also meant they were heading out into the cavernous void of the station’s hollow center, which was so massive something as small as a single suited human could easily be lost, especially if they weren’t able to communicate with anyone.

  The ship the person had come from had the distinctive mushroom end of a deep space freighter. Most ships stayed within planetary orbits, and needed neither the armor nor the endurance of such a ship, and Takiyama only had a few of them – her own STEVE among them. This ship was of the more common double mushroom head design, however, and that made it the Herald of Spring, since the Cedars of Nilmar wasn’t due back for at least a month and STEVE’s back end had the stupendous engines that revealed its origin as a military vessel, not civilian.

  Her analysis of the ship had taken barely a moment, and there had not yet been a reply when she added this new information.

  “Crewmember came off the Herald of Spring, headed roughly toward Station center.”

  She’d reached the airlocks next to the Herald, the crewman at the desk controlling entry already starting to stand up as Morgan ran toward him.

  This just meant they both were flung from their feet as the ship’s side ruptured in a massive explosion, strong enough that the station itself, or at least this small part of it, was rocked by it.

  Around them, the breach alarms started sounding, intentionally designed to be so loud and grating that nothing alive could ignore them.

  The DCC channel had similarly devolved into a cacophony of voices, so loud and overlapping that Morgan couldn’t make any sense of it.

  The dockmaster swore as he tried to stand up, both of them staring out the window at the tangled mess that had once been the side of the freighter.

  I don’t think I’ve ever been so glad that something was reinforced in my life, Morg
an thought as a few pieces bounced off the ‘glass’ between her and the hold, glass that was nothing of the sort. Transparent aluminum to the rescue.

  Once that immediate thought was out of the way, Morgan struggled to her feet and pulled up the tracking on the crewmember on her uplink’s holo-display.

  It was still showing up on her screen, though the interference from everything else was making it difficult to pinpoint.

  At least they should have been clear of the blast.

  The dockmaster managed to tear his eyes away from the wreckage long enough to look at the hologram.

  “There is someone out there in that?” he said, swearing again. He must have glanced at the stenciling on her suit, as he added a hasty, “sir.”

  “Yes,” Morgan said, activating the external speaker on her suit so he could hear her. She then gestured toward the small airlock to the side of the main one that linked out to the Herald. “Where’s the emergency thruster pack?”

  “You want to go out there?” was his immediate, incredulous reply.

  “Everyone’s going to be busy with that,” Morgan said, pointing to the hole in the ship. “I’m here, and I have a decent track on the Dutchman. It will take time for anyone else to get down here, even the ready shuttle.”

  Shaking his head, the dockmaster seemed to be lost in thought.

  “Uh, opposite side of the corridor, the upper storage bay.”

  He still seemed shaken, but was clearly starting to come out of it. He sat down at the desk, his fingers a blur of motion. “Damage control teams are responding within, and station teams are on their way. You don’t have to do this.”

  Morgan didn’t reply, instead moving over to the recessed cabinet and pulling out the equipment. It wasn’t terribly bulky, designed to snap on to a skinsuit and work off the existing supply of oxygen to use as thruster fuel.

  Really, beside the framework, most of the pack was taken up by the steering joysticks; the thruster nozzles themselves were quite small.

  “Do you have my suit’s beacon on your screen?” she asked him as she stepped over to the airlock. The beacon wasn’t normally on while inside the station, but connecting the thruster pack should have automatically turned it on.

  “No, wait one,” he said after a moment, one hand held to his ear where an earpiece was clearly visible. “Got it,” he said, then speaking to whoever was listening added, “We have a Lieutenant… Black heading out for rescue efforts. Sending her suit transponder to DCC and the ready shuttle now.”

  Nodding, Morgan opened the inner door of the small airlock next to the primary one that led into the ship, stepping inside the cramped space. Turning to face the interior of the station, she hesitated for a moment before closing the door behind her.

  That’s a lot of debris, most of which is going to have either very sharp or very hot edges.

  Taking a deep breath, she cycled the door, her suit’s external pickups relaying the hiss of the air being evacuated to her, then silence as it equalized with the vacuum outside.

  While the airlock finished that job, she tied her uplink’s tracker to her helmet’s heads-up display, painting an icon representing the person’s suit beacon in her field of view, a small number next to it representing distance in meters.

  The number was growing distressingly rapidly.

  Morgan activated the magnetized boot soles of her suit. They weren’t nearly as powerful as the boots normally added when working outside the ship, but they were better than nothing.

  She let the only nearby – large – piece finish bouncing off the outer door and get a few dozen meters away before opening it.

  A chime sounded in her helmet, an urgent communication request that her suit automatically answered for her.

  “Lieutenant Black, this is Lieutenant West in main DCC. I’ll be monitoring your position from here, and trying to warn you of any big pieces headed your way.”

  “Glad to hear it, sir,” she answered, and that was undoubtedly one of the biggest understatements of her life. She’d worried that, with the much larger problem having literally blown up in everyone’s face, she’d basically be on her own for this single problem, a rather terrifying thought given all the things that could go wrong during a normal trip outside the pressurized parts of the station.

  “It looks like you’re clear for the moment. Given how fast the other crewman is going, I want you to aim for grabbing him and then keep heading for the other side of the station, rather than coming back to where you are now. This will be safer and use up less of your air on maneuvering.”

  “Got it. I’m exiting the airlock… now,” Morgan said, stepping out and using the curved area of hull around the airlock’s frame to get herself onto the side of the observation deck, so that the damaged freighter was now above her to the side, and the imperiled crewmember directly above her.

  “If you walk down fifty meters you should be able to bypass most of the debris,” West said, which matched what Morgan could see as she looked up.

  The magnetized boots made the trip a long one, despite her hurry and the numbers next to the icon on her display still steadily climbing.

  “That should be good,” West said at last.

  “I agree,” Morgan said. She took another deep breath to steady herself, which West must have heard.

  “You’ve got this. Your training covered everything you need to know, and as bad as it looks, almost everything between you and him is empty space.”

  “Right,” Morgan said, idly filing away that the Dutchman was a man – she’d assumed, the majority of the employees were – but it was good to know as she thought about how much mass she was going to be dealing with. Of course, even most of the female employees the company had were bigger than she was too.

  Then another thing occurred to her. Her suit and beacon identified her as a Lieutenant, one of the company’s officers. It was why the dockmaster had done what she’d instructed, almost certainly, and why the Lieutenant in DCC assumed she was trained for this.

  What would they think if they knew that Morgan hadn’t actually had any of that training yet, that she’d only been an officer for a bit more than three months, and none of it was on-the clock time?

  What a great time to think about that, you big idiot, Morgan thought. Aloud all she said was, “I’m releasing my magnetized boots now.”

  “Copy that,” West said over her comm. “The computer is recommending a ten second burst at full intensity to start with.”

  “Got it.”

  She set her own suit to time her, and then nudged herself a bit to be on a better trajectory towards the guiding beacon.

  “Starting in three. Two. One. Mark!”

  Even at full blast, the thrusters weren’t terribly powerful. They couldn’t be, both because of the practical limitations of using her own suit’s air supply for fuel and the fact that a suit wouldn’t have any form of inertial dampening that actual ships could provide with their gravity plating. She had to be able to fine-tune her trajectory as she went, and going fast enough to push her back against the pack would make that difficult at best.

  Still, even a gradual acceleration could get anything moving quite fast if given enough time – that was the whole principle behind most ships relying on the EM drives that required no fuel and (relatively) little power, but with correspondingly little power behind them.

  Morgan watched as the numbers indicating the man’s distance started to slow their gains, gradually at first, finally stop for a moment, and then start to decrease.

  In fact, after the terror of watching the debris field spreading out and imagining what it could do to her suit, armored or not, her flight outward was turning out to be quite uneventful. She was already past the debris, moving faster than the large pieces and slower than the small pieces, which meant the area around her was quite clear.

  West didn’t come on her comm again until she was getting closer to the Dutchman.

  “Okay, you’ll want to slow down now, you need
to get the velocity differential down for when you catch up to him.”

  Morgan swore mentally. She’d been too focused on everything else and had completely forgotten about that.

  If West hadn’t reminded me, she thought, forcing the recrimination away with, but he did, so stop worrying about it and get this right.

  West didn’t tell her how long to burn her thrusters in reverse, however, and Morgan had to try and quickly do the calculations herself. She could feel a bead of sweat trickle down her forehead. She was good at fixing things. Dealing with stressful or dangerous situations, she was learning she was mostly good at that too. Math? Math was hard.

  It was especially harder when she was having trouble remembering what was considered a safe differential for speed. Too fast and she risked injury. Too slow and it would take too long to catch up, and she risked using too much oxygen to fuel it.

  Inaction will kill you just as dead, girl. Decide!

  She settled for cutting half the difference between her current speed and his, and that kind of calculation the suit could help her with.

  Grunting a bit as she brought the thrusters online again, she let the suit handle the timing for that while she made sure she was going to intercept him at the right point.

  No sense in getting the speed right if I miss him by a hundred meters, or even ten.

  She was using too much air making adjustments, she knew, but there wasn’t any other option. She simply didn’t have the experience with the thrusters to do any better, and using too much now was better than having to try and swing around and try again if she missed. If she didn’t have a good margin of safety to get them directly to one of the airlocks on the other side, it would be a simple matter to just get to some part of the other side and walk to the nearest airlock. She was inside a hollow sphere after all; she couldn’t help but reach some part of the inner wall.

  “Ease up a bit,” West said as she got close, close enough that she could see her target clearly. His suit looked intact, but the man wasn’t moving that she could see. “You’re on target just fine. Speed is okay. Just coast now.”