The Star Pirate's Folly

Chapter 37: Fragments

For the first week of travel the crew kept to their usual routines. Bee and Truly stuck to the basics of moving around in the nullroom. Truly put a lot of emphasis on daily improvement, constantly pushing her to beat her lap times during drills. She even grazed his heel once in a game of tag. All those hours were starting to pay off.

In the time she had off from the nullroom Bee shadowed Ferro on the bridge to learn about the ship's controls and how pilots navigated the space between planets. She also got the most face time with Captain Anson there. They hadn't spoken at all about what Bee learned from Myra-he never mentioned it and Bee couldn't summon the courage to bring it up.

Even Silver was getting more comfortable with her. He took her on a full tour of Wanderlust and explained how the ship was built, answering any questions she had along the way. The stocky Quartermaster actually seemed to enjoy her curiosity. He took particular pleasure in showing her the ship's mass-driving gravity cannons, their most effective offensive measure-and the most spectacular by far.

"The standard no-nonsense shells are wrapped with nullsteel except for the nose," Silver had said as Myra projected him a model of the slug to illustrate his point. "The gravity cannons need something to pull on to launch them so they're not covered completely. The wrapping reduces the weight of the payload upon firing, requires less energy. But when it hits it's all there."

Bee had begged him to demonstrate, but out in the belt Wanderlust had nothing to target. They were still thousands of miles from anything.

A few days later, though, Myra woke Bee in the middle of the night and told her to meet Silver on the bridge. When Bee showed up Ferro was there too, looking cranky.

"I can't believe we're taking a detour for this," Ferro snapped at Silver. "Costing us time out here."

"It would be nice to know we're fully operational," he said. "I'd hate to find out we've got equipment troubles when we suddenly find the need to defend ourselves. Besides, it's barely out of our way and it's always best to fire on a live target."

"Whole damn trip's out of my way," she grumbled, but relented with her complaints when Bee entered. "You're just in time to see the show."

"What show?" Bee asked.

"There," Silver said, pointing to two display windows above the holographic map of Styx. Wanderlust was on one-the feed came from a recon drone alongside the ship. The other window displayed an oblong soot-gray asteroid. "You see that rock? It's a meteoroid about thirty feet across. We were going to pass within a couple hundred miles of it on the way to our first stop. I asked the Captain to nudge our course a bit, get us into firing range. To test our targeting systems," he quickly explained.

Bee hid her smile from the Quartermaster. "Very responsible of you."

"Myra, you got a bead on it?" Silver asked.

"Oh, I've got it. Permission to fire."

"Fire when ready." Quartermaster Silver gave the order with a growl, grinning and clenching his metal hand into a fist.