Battles And Heat In Space

The dock’s outer hatch opened three seconds before Veyra’s rotation brought the maintenance ring into shadow.

Mara Kestrel slipped through as the last strip of sunlight knifed across the deck, turning the floating dust to sparks. Behind her, the hatch slammed shut. Magnetic clamps caught with a brutal clang, sealing her inside the heat-locked maintenance dock.

Her suit registered the temperature at once. Forty-eight degrees and climbing.

“Dock Nine,” she whispered. “I’m in.”

Juno Halvar’s voice crackled through the private channel, low and close despite the static. “You have six minutes until the next pressure cycle. After that, the inner doors weld shut.”

“I only need four.”

“You said that before you crossed the hull.”

Mara moved along the wall, boots gripping the grated deck. “I lied.”

A burst of interference swallowed his reply. The dock groaned around her. Veyra was an old military station, built to service warships faster than crews could die. Every surface had been scorched, patched, and scorched again. Heat barriers divided the maintenance bay into narrow corridors, glowing orange behind armored glass. Beyond them, repair gantries hung over the planet-facing void, their arms frozen in the positions of dead machines.

The stolen access key was inside the dock’s command locker, three sections ahead.

It was no larger than her palm, according to the fragmentary intelligence Juno had pulled from a captured fleet courier. Black ceramic. Encrypted military architecture. Taken from a Dominion courier and hidden aboard Veyra before the station changed hands. If Mara recovered it, the resistance could open the fleet routes surrounding the Sable Reach.

If she failed, three rebel squadrons would enter the same kill zone blind.

She reached the first barrier and pressed her gloved hand against the control plate. The metal burned through the suit’s insulation.

“Come on.”

The plate stayed dark.

A warning tone sounded somewhere beyond the bulkhead.

Juno’s breathing sharpened in her ear. “Mara, I’m seeing a power draw on your side.”

“Security?”

“Not yet. The dock is waking up.”

“That’s reassuring.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

She drew a slim bypass spike from her belt and drove it beneath the plate. The tool vibrated against the lock. Heat shimmered in the corridor, bending the red emergency lights into wavering ribbons. Sweat gathered beneath her collar despite the suit’s cooling system.

The plate flashed amber.

Mara twisted the spike. The barrier shutters began to rise, but only halfway. A wall of furnace air struck her faceplate. Her visor dimmed automatically, filtering the glare. On the other side, a maintenance crawler rolled across the passage, its six articulated legs clicking against the deck.

“Patrol route,” Juno said. “Two drones, maybe three.”

“I see one.”

“Then the others see you.”

Mara dropped flat as the crawler’s sensor mast swept toward her. The machine paused behind the half-raised barrier. Its lens irised open, reflecting her shape in miniature.

She held her breath, though the suit had no need of it.

The crawler turned away.

Mara slid beneath the barrier. The armor scraped across her pack. Heat punched through her knees. She cleared the threshold just as the shutters slammed down behind her, trapping the crawler on the other side.

“First barrier crossed,” she said.

“You sound pleased.”

“I’m saving the pleasure for when I’m not being cooked.”

At the end of the corridor, the command locker waited beneath a painted stencil: AUTHORIZED CREW ONLY. The letters had blistered from the wall. A red line pulsed along the deck, marking the edge of another heat field.

Mara advanced as the line brightened.

The field snapped on.

Fire without flame swept across the corridor. Her suit screamed warnings. Temperature surged past sixty degrees. She staggered back, one hand striking the bulkhead. The barrier ahead had not opened. The path to the locker was sealed by invisible heat dense enough to buckle the air.

“Juno.”

“I know.”

“Tell me something useful.”

“The dock has switched to emergency sterilization.”

“Why?”

A pause. “It detected an unauthorized biological signature.”

Mara stared at her own reflection in the black curve of her visor. “I’m wearing a sealed suit.”

“Veyra’s security doesn’t care.”

The alarm began as a distant pulse. Then another answered it. Red lights strobed across the corridor.

Mara looked back. The crawler on the far side of the shutter had stopped moving. Its sensor mast pointed directly at her through the narrow gap between the barrier and ceiling.

“Security has woken up,” Juno said.

“I noticed.”

The crawler fired.

Mara threw herself sideways. A cutting beam struck the deck where her chest had been, liquefying the grate. Molten metal spattered her sleeve. She rolled behind a conduit housing as a second beam carved through the wall.

Her suit sealed the damaged insulation, but the temperature warning turned solid red.

“Three minutes,” Juno said....