Bone deep weariness suffused Vidya, from her toes to her bones. She had never felt quite so exhausted before in her life -- even at the worst crunch during her training to join with the space survey. That had been several weeks of training on the Indian lunar colony. She had trained in both hard vac-suits and in mechanical counterpressure suits, and gone through every single drill of spacecraft maintenance and operation that she might have needed to follow through while being in detached service. Being a civilian science officer in the astronavy had meant she hadn't needed most of the skills...
Until now.
She was currently clamped to the side of Ceres -- the dwarf planet's native gravity being so minute that she would have launched herself into escape velocity by jumping hard enough -- and was following the hastily scrawled instructions handed to her by a harried Chinese engineer to inflate one of the many jerry rigged constructions that had been hastily packed into the Fleet. Officially called the United Nations Expeditionary Forces, the Fleet was all that was left of free humanity. With the fleets from Arcadia, it came out to only slightly less than the hundred or so ships that the Dark Lord had under his sway.
With the help of Arcadian mages, the Fleet had been able to convert a massive amount of their reaction mass tanks into storage units, containing fabric, connectors, and other raw materials. Most space based construction was modular, hammered out over the century and change of the second space race: Each colony, at the end of the day, was made of the same basic components, like massive, oversized Lego sets. Since the Ganymede colony had been midway through its construction when the Americans had captured it, it had the materials the Chinese had shipped there, and the materials the Americans had shipped when they had decided to make it even larger and more impressive. All those materials were now being put together on Ceres' surface.
Connection struts.
Harnesses.
Sockets, sized up to fit everything from a laser-frigate to one of the bulkier drone carriers. The difficulty was in distributing the contact points: A single strut, normally used to tether a ship to an asteroid, would have been disastrous. Vidya didn't
need
to be a spaceship engineer to see the problem with that, considering the purposes that the fleet was going to put their hundreds of thrusters to. A single contact point would act like a knife, plunging through the whipple shields and aluminum hulls and straight into the habitat sections of the ships. And so, each ship required a truss that would spread the kinetic force of their thrust throughout the entire spaceframe.
This was a construction effort that dwarfed anything accomplished in space since the first, halcyon days of the United Nations efforts to construct the solar mirrors that had bought the human race time to prepare for their climate disasters. And while the mirrors were larger, they had also had the support of the entire technological civilization beneath them. The Fleet had the crews of ninty seven ships, and the civilian population of Ganymede, Ceres, and Mars that could be brought over. Everyone who could fit into a vac-suit and connect struts, screw in components, and follow orders was tethered to the rock.
Which included her.
For the past three days, she had been working on the struts that would support the American frigate, the
Constitution.
She was one of their laser frigates, and working underneath the focusing lenses of several hundred megawatt X-ray lasers had gone from being intimidating to boring to tedious. The work she had been set to had been the low skill stuff, mostly screwing in struts and placing materials. Nothing that required using the WALDO or the exosuits. It had still meant hour on crushing hour in a vac-suit that had been rated for short term EVA, made safe only by the simple fact that they were operating with half the sky concealed by the bulk of Ceres.
And even when she got a break, Vidya had spent her time in sullen silence, eating mechanically, catching snatches of sleep. No conversation. Hell, no familiar faces: She was in with the rest of the menials, who were mostly the lower ranks of the Chinese crews.
And when she dreamed, it was of the horrible ritual the wizards of Arcadia had put her under -- the dissonance between working with struts and screwdrivers by day and reliving black magic and ritual chanting by night felt like it was driving her crazy. But she couldn't shake the memory, the feeling of the spells reaching into her, finding the connection between her and Sukhdeep and...twisting it. Tugging on it. Then, when it was confirmed...pushing through it.
A tapping on the back of her helmet made Vidya shake herself. She turned and saw one of the Chinese technicians waving to make sure he had gotten her attention, then pointing at the next marked out space. Above them, the
Constitution
loomed, like a sword of Damocles. Every instinct in Vidya's head told her that the spaceship was about to come tumbling down on her head -- slewing off the quarter of the struts they had finished to smash her into a pancake. She ignored those, and instead started to move along the edge of Ceres with the hideously slow clamp, unclamp, shuffle movement that was required to keep herself from herring off beyond the reach of rescue.
She came to the marked spot and saw one of the other menials coming forward, a massive load of light weight struts lashed together in a microgravity rigging, connected to their back by a tether. They moved even more cautiously than her -- tugging the net forward, then pushing against it to stop it, braced against Ceres to provide the necessary counterpressure. Even with that caution, the net was not packed as tightly as it might have been and the components within were moving in a wild chaos, rebounding off one another and the net -- and in eerie silence, Vidya saw one of the struts strike a weakened part of the net with enough force to tear it. The fabric spread open and one of the struts came out, given a spin by catching on the edge of the net. It was moving with glacial slowness -- and it was light enough that she knew it'd cause almost no damage if it did strike anything -- but it was still a loose piece of debris in an active construction zone containing the second largest fleet in human history and nearly a thousand vac-techs and menials.
"Debris!" Vidya tapped into the general com. "Debris in section 98-A!"
"Rodger," a clipped, heavily accented voice -- Russian, she thought -- said.
In the illusory stateliness of microgravity, the strut continued to tumble. Tumbled...towards her.
Vidya took a step backwards, instinctively, and felt the tether keeping her attached to Ceres grow taut. She guesstimated the speed, the kinetic energy, of the tumbling spar and decided to risk trying to dodge just by weaving and bobbing. If it hit her, she wanted to be securely attached. She just needed to make sure it didn't-
The strut smashed into her faceplate. The twisting motion, the stark difference between light and shadow, her own fatigue, all of it made the movement hard to predict -- and she had placed herself in exactly the wrong position, at the wrong time. Though lightweight and moving relatively slowly, the strut still had all the kinetic energy it had stored -- and it transmitted all of it to the corner that struck her faceplate. Her head snapped backwards and the suit's alarms blared as the tether turned into a pivot -- drawing taught and smashing her, back first, against the rock of Ceres. Something fragile crunched and she heard more alerts -- diagnostics tried to crawl across the cracked faceplate and she heard a low whistling.
Cracks spider webbed around the impact and blood wobbled in the air between her nose and the face plate. The vents sucked it away with a slurping noise, but more blood emerged from either her nose or her lip to join it.
"Vac-Tech 9081, stay calm," a tired sounding American voice spoke in her ear.
"Uh..." Vidya groaned. Her head pounded.
The cracks spread further.
She fumbled, desperately, for the sealing package. But her fingers bumped only against rock, blindly groping around. She knew that she had been trained, repeatedly, to reach for it. Even blindfolded. But her head couldn't quite call the memory into her thoughts.
The whole face-plate seemed to strain -- and with an explosive, ear popping
sigh
, the weakened surface gave way under an atmosphere of pressure and exploded away from her face. Vidya blew out her own lungs, her eyes blurring. But then, as a roaring filled her ears -- a sudden flash of light filled her eyes...and she found herself looking at a sight so bizarre that it took her muddled head a good five seconds to fully piece it together. In an instant, the star-field had been replaced with an expanse of black, scaled leather. Tiny claws at the edge of the leather hooked onto the metal frame of her helmet, while the center of the rectangle of leather had a small neck, with a small draconic head mounted at the end of it.
Said draconic head said: "Hi!"
Vidya blinked a few more times.
"I saved your life!" the dragon said.
"Hua, right?" Vidya mumbled. "Celestial...something or something?"
