The SAR team does not need instruments to know the ship is broken.

 

The frigate’s entrails arc across the void in sweeping rings. If Leyva squints hard enough against the glare, she can make out bodies amongst the torn metal and leaking hydrazine vapour. Sunlight, cold and distant, glints off the scattered particles.

 

Leyva is also broken. A different sort of broken, but the fractures are there if you squint hard enough.

 

* * *

 

Electronic screaming, digitised klaxons. No time for words; this is the language of barely constrained terror, wrapped in duty and discipline.

 

The SAR team swing out of their bunks and into the zero-gee corridors, pulling themselves through the rarified air like swimmers, grabbing at vac-suits, utility belts, oxygen canisters, polarised goggles. It’s a dance, choreographed in the simulators and played out on the ready-room floor.

 

“Check your seals!” The readiness checks flicker in on Leyva’s HUD. McKay, Orenzes, Samson all shine green.

 

The burn is hard. An end-on-end flip, RCS thrusters engaging in rapid succession, and then the low rumble as the main drive cone kicks into gear.

 

SAR's directive is simple: identify the danger, repair the damage, save some lives.

 

And the unspoken maxim: Make tough choices.

 

* * *

 

Each rescue was a life reclaimed from the great tally of war. Aleksandr jotted them down in a notebook using an old ballpoint pen, much to Leyva’s amusement.

 

“Keeps me sane, no matter what I see out here,” he had said. “We’re doing good work.”

 

She'd nodded so he’d put the notebook down and come back to bed.

 

* * *

 

Nightingale’s SAR team spreads out through the twisted hulk, moving through steel and severed limbs and coolant fluid.

 

“Over here!”

 

Leyva’s suit amplifies the cries of the man pinned below a collapsed deck plate. He’s wheezing, but her bio-scanner shows no organ damage, and he had the prescience to don an emergency oxygen mask during the strike. He’ll live.

 

She grabs the deck plate and tries pulling it, but the rapid heating has fused some of the metal to the wall. She takes out her laser cutter. “Hold still,” she says through the external suit speaker, “I’m going to cut you out of here.”

 

Then, on broadcast: “TACCOM, Angel Three: found survivor, commencing retrieval.”

 

* * *

 

Maybe that’s what Aleksandr was. A place Leyva did not have to think about fissure sealants and radiation flashes.

 

He’s gone now, though. Flicker-bomb strike saw to that.

 

Broke her wide open, too, not that she’d admit it. The psychs ticked the box and she was back on duty two hours later with a fresh laser cutter and emergency rations.

 

* * *

 

The laser cuts slowly. Leyva knows the first cut into a new material is the easiest. She takes deliberate strokes to weaken the metal.

 

“Are you from First Fleet?” the trapped man asks.

 

“Second.”

 

“Long way from home.”

 

Leyva says nothing.

 

“You… been in SAR long?”

 

In any other circumstance, Leyva would not abide small talk. But the man is panicking and his air is running out, so she humours him.

 

“Two years. Since the war started. How long have you been a…” she looks around for a clue, “…technician?”

 

“Weapons tech — three years.”

 

“It’s been a long war.”

 

“You get me out of here and it’ll be over soon, I promise you that.”

 

Leyva laughs despite herself. “You’re going to save the Colonies single-handedly?”

 

There is silence for a moment, long enough for Leyva to stop cutting and look up at the officer. Through the fog of his mask, she sees winter-still eyes. “I have something that will end the war in a matter of hours.”

 

* * *

 

Near the start of the war, Aleksandr’s alabaster skin shines even in the low light of their bunk room. Zero-gee sex leaves a chlorine stink in the air that the carbon scrubbers can’t seem to fix, but Leyva doesn’t mind. She retreats into his arms and he holds her, floating weightlessly in the dark.

 

Later, when he dies, drowning in his own blood as the neutron cascade burns his lungs and boils his guts, Leyva can’t even hold him. He begs her to stay, to save him instead of the civilian transports, and she does not. She listens to his gurgling whimpers through the com-net as the Nightingale throttles away from the carnage.

 

Make tough choices.

 

* * *

 

“Go on.”

 

The man grunts as the metal shifts. “Keep cutting and I’ll tell you.”

 

Leyva continues.

 

“You know the flicker-bombs can’t enter atmosphere, right? Well, we’ve found a way to carry them to low orbit, just under the defence grids.” He sounds excited, and Leyva realises with a gut-sick horror that he’s proud of himself.

 

“To what end?”

 

“Fastest way to end a war is to nullify population centres, right? Couple of missiles in Tharsis City and the Alliance will capitulate.”

 

Leyva hears the words, but they’re distant. She sees Aleksandr, hears his wet hacking coughs as his lungs fall out through his mouth. She remembers the diamond-bright radiation signature of the flicker-bomb, contact, a second sun in the dark. And then the screaming.

 

She turns off the laser cutter, stands up, and walks away. She ignores the man screaming behind her.

 

* * *

 

Alone in her bunk, Leyva perches the laser cutter on her knee, finding the balance point, and locks it open. The short, brilliant jet of white-hot sunlight is so focused that it looks almost solid in the dull blue strobe. It’s a stupid idea, she knows. One wrong move, a miscalculation, a sudden change in shipboard gravity, and the tiny star on her knee becomes a lethal weapon.

 

Aleksandr would have hated it.

 

* * *

 

In the red emergency lighting, Leyva stands wreathed in crimson — an avatar of judgement.

 

Her bio-scanner keeps beeping insistently — survivor nearby.

 

Make tough choices.

 

Leyva sighs, turns back around, and turns on the laser cutter.

 

“TACCOM, Angel Three — retrieval unsuccessful.”

 

The first cut is the easiest.