Cool air rushed in to fill Sabatine’s hard suit as she wrenched her helmet off. The airlock hadn’t yet come to full pressure and the partial vaucumn plucked at her sinuses. The sweat that slicked her body immediately chilled and became clammy, but it was a blessed relief compared to the heat she had generated in nearly two full watches on the hull. The rest of the crew were doing the same, faces red and flushed from hours of heavy labor in zero-g.  Cockburn, a landsman groaned and cradled his arm where a parting line had stuck it. It was probably broken, but he was lucky enough not to have lost it when the woven beryllium monocyrstal was suddenly pulled beyond its tensile strength. A few hours in the autodoc would see him healed enough for light duty.
 
Kaiden’s plan called for the K-21 to be re-rigged and several of her masts stepped to new rings beside. It was a huge undertaking without a dock yard, and only possible at all because they had stripped every spare sail and cable from the Whitehall. That hadn’t pleased Rachet, but he had grudgingly complied. It had pleased the sallow faced lieutenant even less when Kaiden had taken nearly two thirds of his crew, a third to help Sabatine with the repairs to K-21 and the other third to reinforce the Vickie for the next phase of the operation. Even if everything went completely according to plan, all three ships were going to be running with near skeleton crews if and when they got into action with the Alliance. To Sabatine’s personal annoyance, Kadien had left her with a grand total of two petty officers, Klave the Bosun’s mate, and Creavy the Whitehall’s chief engineer. The rest of her crew consisted of six riggers and a score of landsmen who didn’t know a cable splice from their assholes. All the experience spacers were doing yeoman’s work to stop the clumsy landsmen from killing themselves, or worse.
 
“You should get some sleep ma’am,” Klave suggested as they sucked in lungfuls of reprocessed air.
 
“I can sleep when I’m dead,” Sabatine responded, her mind running through the next hour and the myriad tasks she needed to accomplish.
 
“Begging your pardon ma’am, but we might be all be dead if the Alliance jumps in here and you are too exhausted to function. You are the only astrogater we have on board. Sabatine rubbed her eyes with her balled fist. The shortage of astrogaters was a real problem. Kaiden had taken Lieutenant Rachet with him for the next stage of the plan but she wasn’t all together sure that had been the right decision.
 
“Right,” Sabtine responded noncommittally, “good thought.” The airlock came to pressure and one of the landsmen, Gautso?, spun the dogs and opened the door. Sabatine made a gesture to the man helping half carrying Cockburn to enter first, and he lugged his moaning mate out of the lock. Sabatine followed along till they reached the autodock. The destroyer had a larger unit than the Vickie did, with four independent pods. Sabatine helped Cockburn into the first pod and closed it with a hiss, then finished stripping off her suit and climbed into another. It sealed around her with a crackle and she felt the spray of antistetic preparatory to the placement of IV access. Twenty minutes later she awoke as the pod opened, feeling much better now that the machine had purged her blood stream of metabolites and toxins built up from too much work and not enough sleep. It was an old academy trick, the kind that would get you running laps with a hundred kilo pack if the instructors ever caught you. She stopped by  her cabin for a change of clothes and a restorative tot of brandy before heading down to the power room to see how Creavy was getting on with the ships internal systems. After that, if all went well, she could squeeze in two hours sleep before she needed to be back out on the hull.