Work Text:
Two hours. One hundred and twenty minutes. Seven thousand and two hundred seconds. And counting.
Since the other ship had emerged from the nebula.
Since...
ART, I think I have it patched. I say over the feed, setting aside the welder and pressing experimentally at the bulkhead. It holds.
ART takes three seconds to respond. When it does speak it sounds sluggish, like a tired human. Yes.
Then it goes quiet again. I’m sweating under the heavy gear I had to put on before I came in here. I glance back at the shattered plasteel behind me. I can’t fix that, but I can at least do this much. Beyond the not-glass Iris and Martyn are frantically putting up huge sheets of antistatic something or other. It looks almost like rubber. The cold from inside the glass cage ART’s brain lives in is bleeding out of it, misting on the floor, hence the protective gear it made us all put on before we tried to help it.
It hadn’t detected the other ship until it was on us.
It hadn’t had a chance to even hail it or take much evasive action, and ART is fast. I’ve seen it react to surprises.
It rolled hard, the gravity field increasing to hold everyone to the deck, and the first shot carved a charred scar down ART’s belly but didn’t breach the hull. By the time it deployed its railguns and got a single shot off a second shot to the rear engines sent us into a tailspin. Something exploded and ART’s feed presence became muffled. It limped us away to the nebula, concealing itself in the spacedust until we found a shattered moon to hide in.
ART had lost its starboard engines and the overload had cooked something in its processing suite.
I don’t know if it was dying, but it felt like it.
It was a sun a sun, ART says, blearily, crackling with static and with an echo in its feed voice. I was look-looking at a sun. A white-white dwarf.
Do you want to watch Worldhoppers? I don’t like the way it sounds, it sounds like its babbling, like a concussed human.
No, you don’t understan-stand, ART continues. It bleeds into the public channel. It was-was a sun. The ship was a sun-sun. A star.
It pauses for another twenty agonising seconds. Iris shouts something, muffled by the not-rubber sheets. Martyn exits the glass cage and wheels a tank labeled ‘Nitrogen’ inside. There’s a bunch of hissing and Iris makes a soft noise. I can’t tell if its a noise that means she’s relieved or a noise that means she’s going to cry.
I was-was fucking shot by a fuck-fucking sun, ART hisses through the feed. Apparently it feels well enough to be pissed about it.
Iris chokes out a very wet sounding laugh. “Perihelion.”
ART sits there for another fifteen seconds, then it laughs. Perihelion.