Breaching the Crimson Berths

How many seconds remained before Lodewijk van Haelen’s recovery teams flooded Berth Primus depended on the thickness of the blast doors behind them. Daane Vroomen hurried along the suspended catwalk of Level 70, holding the stolen gold keycard between two gloved fingers while keeping a sharp eye on the soot venting from the pneumatic flue. He intended to claim the prototype cruiser The Scharlaken Vos and ignite its untamed living helm before Synod sentries could ruin his crimson velvet coat or seal the atmospheric slipway for good.

Lysbet trotted half a pace behind him, her boots ringing against the iron grating. She adjusted the shoulder strap of her brass vector-slate. "The secondary seal connects directly to the Castellan's command suite," she said, her breathing ragged from the sprint. "If that card fails the cryptographic handshake, the emergency vents will drop liquid nitrogen through the entire bay."

"Then let us trust Lodewijk possessed the courtesy to keep his security clearances tidy," Daane replied without slowing. He paused before the brass-embossed security portal of Mooring Slip Primus. A stylized iron falcon, the heraldic crest of the Iron Synod, glared down from the archway above an amber terminal aperture. "A warlord who spends two hours selecting gilded shoulder plates rarely neglects his private garage."

Daane slid the gold-inlaid card into the reader.

A clean tone hummed through the deck plates. The amber phosphor shifted to a brilliant emerald. Heavy hydraulic pistons exhaled a cloud of superheated vapor, and the inner security seal rolled apart with a deep mechanical groan.

Berth Primus opened before them.

Suspended within concentric magnetic cradle-rings hung The Scharlaken Vos. The prototype hyper-cruiser was an elongated blade of polished carmine composite and dark brass, its needle bow slanting sixty meters toward the outer vacuum gate. Unlike the blunt, slab-sided gunboats favored by the Synod, its hull curved like a folded wing, rimmed with sensor vanes that resembled ceremonial feathers.

"Magnificent," Daane said, running his eye along the sleek contour. "The color alone forgives half of van Haelen's architectural sins."

"Mind the soot from the venting pipes," Lysbet snapped, tugging his elbow. "You're admiring paint while automated sentries wake up."

"I am observing proper artistic etiquette, Surveyor," Daane said, brushing an errant flake of black carbon from his sleeve. "Soot, however, is a capital offense against Flemish weave."

A crimson tracking strobe swept the gantry. Twin ceiling-mounted sentry turrets dropped from overhead recesses, their dual barrels spinning up with a piercing electrical whine.

"Tungsten coilguns," Lysbet said, checking the flickering green readouts on her slate. "Ten thousand rounds a minute. They're wired directly to the cradle locks."

The sentries opened fire.

Supersonic slugs ripped through the gantry air, chewing iron grating and showering the walkway in blinding sparks.

Daane drew his monofilament rapier. The conductive mesh running through the blade caught the emergency lighting, gleaming like a thread of quicksilver. In his vision, the incoming fire resolved into bright kinetic vectors: ribbons of accelerating mass tearing across the chamber.

He advanced into the storm.

Daane did not duck. He kept his spine straight, letting the velvet coat flare behind his boots as he flicked the foil into the path of the first volley. The tip of the monofilament blade met the leading projectile. Psychokinetic polarity flared along the wire. He refused the kinetic force its forward path, twisting its momentum ninety degrees with a sharp turn of his wrist.

The deflected tungsten slug slammed into the hydraulic pivot of the left turret with a deafening crack. The mounting sheared away, spilling hydraulic fluid over the walkway. Daane pivoted on his right heel, parrying twice more in rapid succession. Two supersonic rounds snapped back along inverted trajectories, plunging directly into the ammunition feed of the second gun.

The turret ruptured in a burst of white flame and shredded casing.

A stray burst whistled toward his chest. With a clean diagonal lunge, Daane gathered the incoming momentum across the blade's conductive flat and whipped the collected mass outward. The kinetic shockwave drove straight into the heavy magnetic latch securing the boarding gangway.

The latch shattered. The steel bridge dropped with a ringing crash against the cruiser's main hatchway.

Daane lowered the foil and flicked a speck of burnt powder from his cuff. "A passable percussion section," he said. "Though lacking in rhythmic subtlety."

Lysbet stared past his shoulder at the smoking wreckage, then down at his unblemished coat. "You picked a magnetic deadbolt with supersonic defense rounds."

"One must work with the tools provided, Surveyor." Daane gave a light bow toward the gangway. "Shall we inspect the parlor?"

They crossed the bridge and entered the cruiser. The airlock hissed shut, cutting off the shriek of the drydock alarms.

The interior of The Scharlaken Vos bore none of the utilitarian gray bulkheads common to Synod warships. The main corridor was framed by calcified organic ribs, a biotuned coral lattice that pulsed with a faint, rhythmic violet luminescence. Cool, pressurized air smelled of sea salt and ozone.

Lysbet led the way through the curving corridor to the central bridge. In the middle of the spherical control deck stood no helm console, steering yoke, or standard flight levers. Instead, a pedestaled sphere of bioluminescent neural coral floated above a magnetic well, suspended in a translucent bath of inertial fluid. Deep within the coral, crystalline nodes flickered with jagged, nervous pulses.

Above them, the ship's automated defensive network detected unfamiliar heartbeats. Emergency dampeners began to whine through the deck. A synthetic voice chimed from the overhead grilles, announcing an atmospheric purge in thirty seconds.

Lysbet tapped furiously at her brass slate. "The docking clamps won't respond to remote commands! The core is in diagnostic lockout. It reads zero kinetic input, and it's beginning to vent the fuel cells into the slipway!"

The hull shuddered. Through the forward viewport, Daane saw the massive outer hangar blast doors. Two-meter-thick titanium pressure bars held them sealed against the vacuum outside.

"It will kill anyone who touches it without neural attunement," Lysbet warned, her fingers tightening around her brass instrument. "The feedback will fry your optic nerves."

Daane stepped onto the raised dais.

Behind his theatrical composure, a cold prickle moved along his neck. If the living coral rejected his touch, his career as an aesthetic saboteur ended here in a puddle of boiled blood and ruined velvet.

He pulled off his right dueling glove and tossed it aside onto the command console.

Daane pressed his bare palm against the pulsating surface of the Zuiderzee Core.

A jolt of raw psychokinetic feedback tore through his arm. The coral flared a fierce crimson, burning hot against his skin. It rejected static commands; it fought against balance, demanding momentum, velocity, and danger.

Daane did not resist the rush. He opened his psychokinetic pathways completely, pouring his dueling instinct directly into the living lattice: every waltz step beneath artillery fire, every impossible vector reversal, every brush with vacuum death.

The coral blazed with blinding carmine radiance. The bio-psychic feedback surged through his veins, turning the air around his fingers into crackling static, but Daane laughed aloud and tightened his grip on the living cortex.

The ship answered.

The sub-light drives ignited with a roar that rattled the deck plates. Violet energy surged through the calcified ribs of the hull, illuminating the bridge in vibrant light.

"She's singing!" Daane called out above the thunder of the turbines.

"The blast doors are still barred!" Lysbet shouted, bracing herself against a stanchion as artificial gravity surged beneath her boots. "And the external mooring clamp has the dorsal spine pinned!"

Daane looked through the forward viewport. Outside, a ten-ton steel mooring clamp gripped the ship's upper hull, anchoring them to the drydock frame.

Daane drew upon the erupting thrust of the cruiser's engines through the neural link. Reaching outward with his focused vision, he seized the conductive mass of the mooring clamp and inverted its inertia.

The ten-ton clamp ripped free from the ceiling cradle with an ear-splitting shriek of tearing metal. Daane accelerated the dislodged mass forward, hurling it straight at the reinforced hangar barrier.

The flying clamp struck the blast doors at hypersonic speed.

The titanium barrier buckled, tore, and blew outward into open space. An explosive decompression blasted clouds of shattered metal, frozen vapor, and burning scaffolding into the void.

The Scharlaken Vos surged through the ruined portal, rocketing into the star-strewn dark.

Behind them, the tactical display flared emergency crimson.

Lysbet looked up from the sensor console, her voice hardening. "Look aft."

Clearing the military drydock slip three kilometers behind them, Commander Lodewijk van Haelen’s heavy dreadnought, The IJzeren Klauw, emerged from the shadow of the spire. Its railgun batteries traversed smoothly, locking long-range targeting radar directly onto their wake.