The Plasma Master

by Brian Rushton

  Chapter 21

  In a station as large as Sigma Omicron it was fairly easy to find a place where others would not intrude. Having infiltrated this particular station several times before, Mirana found one especially quickly. Once again she disabled the room’s security systems and gathered her group for one last briefing, just to make sure they all knew their tasks.

  She brought up a map of the station on a computer console. “According to this, Nemesis is docked here.” She pointed to one of the connecting rings. “Its official crew is not yet aboard, but it’s scheduled to be launched this evening. We’ve got plenty of time, so play it safe.

  “All right. There are ten of us, so we’ll split up into three groups of four. Geld, you lead group one, Randar leads two, I take three. Group one will take position here, in the tertiary reactor room.” She indicated the power generator at the junction between the connecting tube and the sphere. “I have valid security clearance right here. Once this generator goes down the power will be cut off to this entire docking tube, including the station’s shields. Auxiliary power will come back on, but automatic security systems will be severely compromised. As soon as the power goes down I’ll upload a virus that will make sure they’re all out.

  “Group two will take position on the outer ring and will provide cover for me as I work my way along the tube from just ringward of the sphere. We’ll try to get as far down the tube as possible before we’re stopped, but security will tighten up as we near Nemesis. If we get too close to the docking port before the power goes down our cover will be blown and we won’t stand a chance. Randar, anything you can do to block off reinforcements from the ring section and the other docking ports will be appreciated, but don’t get yourself killed; it will take me nearly twenty minutes to reach Nemesis, and I can’t have my cover fire go dying on me early.

  “When the power goes down, group three storms the launch tube until we reach Nemesis. Randar, you’d better meet me there if you don’t want to get left behind. We’ll most likely be under heavy fire by the time we get to where Nemesis is docked. We board the ship as quickly as possible, arm it, and get out of here as fast as we can.

  “The first thing they’ll do when they realize what we’re doing is try to get the shields back up. If they succeed, we’ll be trapped. Group one, there’s absolutely no way you’re going to have time to catch up with the rest of us. If we succeed, you can try to make it back to the freighter, or I’ve got another set of IDs that will get you passage out on another outgoing freighter. The fewer the people that see you, the better your chances.

  “We can contact each other through our private com links, but don’t until our cover’s blown, and then only if you have to; they’ll probably be able to trace the signal. Any questions? Good. Don’t let my confidence here comfort you; I don’t think anyone has done what we’re about to do and survived. One mistake and we all die. Let’s go.”

  A few Anacronian officers saluted Geld, Tren, Norkrin, and Jalin as they made their way from their meeting place upward to the power reactor Mirana had indicated. They reached the reactor’s engineering room, presented their identification, and were admitted. They immediately went to work monitoring the station’s power output and doing various other tasks, waiting until enough time had passed for the other groups to get into position.

  Randar joked heartily with his men as he strolled down docking tube four, he and his group performing a very convincing rendition of four civilians walking home from a long day’s work at one of the station’s restaurants. A few eyes turned in their direction to stare, but that was good; there were hundreds of people just like Randar on the station, and he fit right in. They would not have, though, if anyone had checked inside the bags they were carrying and seen the arsenal of laser weapons and explosives.

  Mirana had far less distance to travel than the other groups did, so she and her trio of escorts traveled slowly. They stopped for lunch at one of the few civilian eating establishments located in the sphere section, then stopped again at a couple of shops in order to purchase various household goods. At last they entered the docking tube, entered a lift pod, and began their journey outward toward the docking port where Nemesis was awaiting launch.

  When the time was up, Geld found a solitary workstation and began dicarbulating the netroprocessing links. Norkrin closed down the backup field coils and scheduled them for emergency maintenance. Jalin intentionally made a large error in computation and distracted the room’s commanding officer by asking him about it. Tren continued the work he had been assigned by the Anacronian officer, watching the others and making sure they were not detected.

  Geld completed his task, glanced around the room to make sure the others were ready, and cut out the room’s automatic security systems. There was not nearly enough time to hide what he had done, so an alarm sounded and the room’s lights went red. At the same instant Tren pulled out a laser carbine and shot the armed guards closest to him, then two more across the room. Laser fire from the remaining armed officers in the room turned to him, but now Geld and Norkrin had joined the fight. The Anacronians were taken completely off guard.

  Only Jalin remained at a work station. After knocking the commanding officer senseless, he turned to initiate the core overload. He then pulled an energen disruptor from his pocket and placed it on his console. Half the work consoles in the room exploded. Jalin grabbed a blaster.

  “It’s set! Let’s get out of here!”

  As far as bringing down the docking tube’s power grid went, their work was done. It was now an added bonus if they could find a way to escape without being captured and shot or caught in the power core’s explosion. They had shut down all communications into and out of the engineering room prior to initiating the core overload, so no one would know their identities yet. Geld led his men to one of the doors leading out of the room, hoping to catch a lift car that would take them clear of the blast.

  Norkrin glanced at one of the intact computer stations. “Wait! They’ve broken through my encryption faster than I thought. They’re trying to cut power to this core!” Without sufficient power, the overload would not occur and the Imperials would be able to reroute power to the docking tube from other generators. “I’ve got to stop them!”

  “Go!” Geld shouted. “Head to the rendezvous point when you’re finished. We’ll see you then.” He led Jalin and Tren out of the room and toward a lift pod. The instant the doors opened, laser fire poured into the room and Geld went down.

  “Up!” Jalin shouted, moving back into the engineering room. The power core was situated several levels below them, so there was a chance that they might get high enough above it that the explosion would not reach them. Tren sealed the doors, and both men climbed ladders that lead to the room’s upper workstations. Once there, they opened a ceiling panel and crawled into the access passages above. “We’ve got to find a vertical shaft or we’ll never make it in time. How long do we have?”

  “Three minutes!” Tren shouted back at him. It took them a minute to find a vertical shaft and crawl into it. Using a nearby access panel, Jalin inverted the shaft’s gravity, and an instant later both men were falling upward, away from the explosion. A deep rumbling sounded from below them. “We’re not going fast enough. The explosion’s going to catch us.”

  Back in the engineering room, Norkrin was inclined to agree. He had blocked out whoever was trying to cut the core’s power supply, but after a glance at his watch he knew there was no time to escape. He had expected as much. The entire place was probably swarming with Imperial troops anyway. The sound of explosions just outside the sealed entrances told Norkrin that they were about to break into the engineering room. He thought for a moment about what he could do that would mean anything, then began working frantically again, his eyes riveted to his monitor.

  Imperial citizens looking out their windows from the inner side of the ring watched in terror as a large chunk of the station, just above where docking tube four connected with t
he central sphere, melted away in a violently expanding cloud of green.

  Sigma Omicron’s inertial dampers almost blocked away the trembling the explosion caused.

  “Admiral! We’re too late! It’s gone!”

  Admiral Sradix slammed his fist down on the table. “What is going on here?”

  “Main power down on docking ring four. All automatic security systems there just went off line as well. Multiple explosions along ringside of the docking tube.”

  “Nemesis. They’re after Nemesis. Send all available troops onto docking tube four. Bring all available starships there, too, in case they try to get at Nemesis from the outside.” He would have preferred to launch the ship immediately, but even he did not have the necessary command codes; only the special crew coming in from Venom could launch Nemesis, and they had not arrived yet. “We can’t let them have that ship.”

  After detonating several explosions along the docking tube, effectively blocking passage from the ring, Randar began the long trip to Nemesis’s docking port. If he did not get there in time he would be left behind. The lift tubes had been deactivated when the main power had gone down, forcing him to make the journey on foot. There were people running everywhere in the launch tube, trying to escape from whatever was happening. Randar and his companions played along with them, screaming and adding to the confusion as well as they could. All the while they moved toward Nemesis’s docking port. There was no pursuit from behind yet, but Randar wondered how Mirana was doing.

  When the power had gone out, hundreds of people had come thundering along the main corridors of the docking tube, away from the explosions on the ring side of the tube. Rather than move against them and risk being run down or detected because of the direction she was traveling in, Mirana chose to use the maintenance corridors within the floor, between decks. Anyone who saw her there would immediately realize what she was trying to do, but she was quick with a laser gun and no one she met had time to report anything. As of yet these corridors were mostly empty, but Mirana knew that pursuit would not be far behind.

  Luck ran out when Mirana came near the docking port. In order to reach it she knew she would be forced to leave the maintenance shaft she had been using, and there were sure to be troops outside. She hesitated for just an instant, and in that instant the passageway behind her erupted with laser fire. Two of her companions were hit and fell to the floor, but Mirana and the other in her group, a man named Ornid, jumped into an intersecting passage. Mirana’s pursuers were coming up fast, and time was running out. “I’m sure they’ve got the outer corridor watched too,” she told Ornid. “They were waiting for us to get here so they’d have us trapped. Come on.”

  She ran down along the maze of maintenance passageways, working her way toward the outer hull of the docking tube. Along the way she stopped briefly to open a supply locker and pulled out two pressure suits. She pulled one on and handed the other to Ornid. His face was tense; he trusted Mirana, but she knew he had to be wondering what she was up to. At last the corridor ended in a small room. Mirana closed the door behind her to seal off the passageway, but the sound of footsteps was growing louder behind them, and Ornid thought Mirana had made her last mistake.

  Mirana worked for nearly a minute at a computer console there. Most such minor access panels had been rendered inoperative by the virus Mirana had uploaded earlier, but she managed to bring this one on line so that she could use it. When she finished she contacted Randar.

  “Imperial troops have sealed off the docking bay,” he informed her. “I can’t get in.”

  “Fine. Make your way down maintenance shaft 421-D. Wait at the end. Got it?”

  “I think so. This had better work.”

  Mirana tapped a control panel on the wall opposite the door through which they had entered, and the entire wall exploded outward into space. Mirana and Ornid were blown out along with it. Sigma Omicron looked absolutely huge from this vantage; it was just barely possible to detect the curvature of the sphere. But it was not the station that impressed Mirana. It was the starship that was docked not sixty yards away.

  When the power core had exploded, Jalin and Tren fully expected to be taken along with it. Falling upward along the access tube, they had no way of increasing their acceleration and getting clear of the blast. They certainly had no way of stopping. At last the countdown finished, and a green fireball engulfed a huge portion of the station. Green fire shot up the access tube, sucking away the air. The wind flowing back to fill the resulting vacuum slowed Jalin and Tren’s fall, and they managed to grab onto some instruments protruding from the walls to stop themselves. The fire continued to approach, and just when the heat began to sear their skin, a silvery flash of energy lit the corridor between them and the explosion. It lasted as long as the explosion did, then died down. Jalin caught his breath, wondering what had happened, and suddenly he knew. “Norkrin! He set up a force field to block the explosion!” His excitement instantly turned to sorrow as he realized that his friend had perished in the blast.

  Tren looked up and down the shaft. “Come on. Let’s find some pressure suits and get out of here.” Tren was thinking along the same lines as Mirana. Travel within the station was suicide, but people in pressure suits floating around in space just might be ignored. Tren found the suits and worked his way to where the power core’s explosion had ripped a hole in the central sphere’s hull, but he was not anxious to spend a great deal of time floating in space. “We’ll just sit here until Nemesis starts to move, and then we’ll jump out and try to get her attention.”

  “And hope it’s Mirana piloting the ship,” Jalin added.

  Nemesis was a magnificent sight. Its main hull was basically a flattened cylinder with a rounded front, and huge thrusters formed winglike projections on the sides. The aft end bulged upward and to the sides where the powerful warp engines sat. The ship was not much bigger than Green Scorpion, not nearly as big as Devastator. From her research Mirana knew that Nemesis, like Devastator, was nearly all weapons and shield generators, but the shield generators on Nemesis had been built using a newly-developed technology that allowed the ship to deflect an unprecedented level of energy. The weapons, too, were new. Dark Viper had been hard at work making improvements on the weapons used on Devastator, and he had finally created one that satisfied him. The annihilator cannon, as Viper called it, was strong enough to breach the shields of just about any starship in just a few seconds. Nemesis had two.

  And then there was the addition the Shadow Master had mentioned.

  While she had been working on the computer console in the maintenance airlock, Mirana had managed to open a similar airlock on Nemesis. Motioning for Ornid to follow her, she turned on her suit’s propulsion jet and made her way along the docking tube’s hull toward the ship. The other starships in the area were expecting her to try to steal a shuttle and fly to the ship, but no one was looking for two people with nothing but space suits for transportation. Eventually they were spotted and some of the ships opened fire, but by then it was too late. Mirana reached the hatch and pulled herself inside, and Ornid followed her.

  “Come on, Ornid. It’s time for a crew change.”

  Mirana had long since memorized the layout of Nemesis. There was not much of one, at least not if one ignored the maintenance tunnels. There were only quarters for six crewmembers, and that was probably more than it needed; another advantage of Nemesis was that it could be run by just one person, if necessary. What that meant at the moment was that there were only two security guards on board, and they were facing out, not in. Once they were gone, Mirana and Ornid headed for the pricom.

  “Admiral Sradix! Nemesis is powering shields and engines!”

  “That’s impossible! The crew hasn’t arrived yet!”

  “It’s ripped free from its docking clamps, sir. We’ve lost it.”

  “Order all ships to open fire. The rebels must not escape with that ship. Destroy it!”

  As soon as Mirana entered the pirated
command codes and brought Nemesis on line, every available weapon on Sigma Omicron and the surrounding ships opened fire. Mirana Kelar’s eyes narrowed as she sat in the command chair, glancing at the various readouts and camera views in front of her. She quickly brought the ship about and pumped the nearest ships full of torpedo fire. Their shields buckled and went down, and the ships broke apart in seconds.

  Then Mirana activated the engines. Faster than any ship docked at the station, Nemesis swerved in and out of the attacking starcraft, leaving a wake of destruction wherever it went. Mirana targeted several of the station’s weapon systems as well and blew them apart. When the torrent of enemy fire had died down a bit, Mirana headed back toward docking tube four. She locked her lasers onto locations on the wall surrounding the end of maintenance shaft 421-D and fired. A small chunk of the station flew outward, and three men in pressure suits jumped clear of it. Dropping shields for just a moment, Mirana opened Nemesis’s shuttle bay, locked onto Randar and his two surviving companions with a tractor beam, and pulled them aboard.

  “Mirana! This is Randar. I was contacted just a moment ago by Tren. They’re waiting in the hole the power core blew in the station.”

  “I see them. Hold on.”

  Mirana picked up the remaining two members of her team in similar fashion and prepared to leave. The damage she had suffered while her shields were down was practically nothing, thanks to the specialized material of her new ship’s hull.

  “Mirana, they’ve got auxiliary power to the hole we made in the shields. Not full strength, but we can’t fly through.”

  “Are the annihilator cannons charged yet?” Mirana asked Ornid.

  “Fourteen seconds. I have warp drive on line.”

  Mirana continued to hammer away at Sigma Omicron’s defenses as the annihilator cannons charged, but she was anxious to go. Most of the ships at the station had already left the battle, but the station’s weapons seemed unlimited.

  “Charged!”

  Mirana aimed her newly-acquired starship away from the station and fired. Twin beams of sparkling green energy lanced out from Nemesis’s twin wingtip cannons and struck the station’s shields where they were only partially charged. After ten seconds of this attack the station’s shields went down again, and Nemesis flashed into a higher warp speed than any starship in the area could dream of matching.