“Fine,” she said, leaning back in the chair and
propping her feet up on her desk. If Up wasn’t coming, then
she could do with a distraction. “I never lose.”
Engineering was a mess.
The lieutenant who had called up to the bridge met Taz
as she arrived, four Rangers on her heels. “I couldn’t save
him,” he said, his head moving rapidly from side to side. “I
couldn’t-”
There was a human arm and a few more unidentifiable
organs lying haphazardly on the deck beside the warp core.
Behind her, she heard Pedro gag.
“Get out of the way,” she said to the lieutenant. “No one
can save him now.”
Taz gave the order to evacuate, and approached the
pulsing engine, a crystal humming at the centre of it. The
heart of the ship. Sickly green liquid, thick and metallic,
pooled beneath it. She wasn’t an engineer, but it didn’t look
good.
“Pedro,” she said. “Our chief engineer is dead. His
second-in-command is useless. You worked in engineering
before you moved up to the bridge, sí?”
Pedro came up beside her, his dark eyes shining green in
the light of the core as he pressed his fingers against the
cracked glass containing it. “The leak is too big. It’s only a
matter of time.”
“That’s not what I wanted to hear, hombre,” Taz said.
Not the Cazadora, not Up’s ship. Dead goddamn Space-
Claw and his estúpido final stand.
“Just look at it, Taz,” Pedro said. “It’s dead already, and
that warp core material is unstable. With the right
equipment, we could contain it for a short time, but we’ve
got to separate the ship before all of engineering blows to
hell.”