Indra Station

by Joseph R. Lallo

  Lex turned and hurried for the steps.

  “Lex!” Patel called after him.

  Lex turned.

  “If you pull this off, the Patel family will have you to thank a second time for assistance in delicate matters.”

  “Keep that in mind the next time I screw up. Come on, Squee.” He popped the stick of gum in his mouth. “We’re on the clock.”

  #

  Ramses Hatch propped one foot against the far wall of a corridor and his back against the other. From the state of the sheet metal around him, he’d been taking out a tremendous amount of frustration. A radio that had taken a solid thrashing from his wrath was clutched in his left hand, while the brass knuckles clinked against the panel beside him.

  Crick, now waist deep in the unearthed innards of the station’s deeper control hardware, was still hard at work.

  “I don’t know how you idiots can be on an isolated space station with two hostages and end up losing both of them,” Hatch growled.

  “I don’t think we can fairly say Modane was ever a hostage. And now she’s a corpse,” said Crick.

  “Did I ask you for your opinion? This would all be a nonissue if you’d just gotten the station’s control stuff under our control. The surface crew beat you to it, and they were supposed to be the B squad. Now the cover is blown, and we’ve got to trust that the surface facility can hold off an assault until you finish up or we get Preethy to talk.”

  “I’m close, okay?”

  “How close?”

  “I’ve got the exciter subsystem and the pressure subsystem responding to commands. All that’s left is the inhibitor.”

  “Say that in English.”

  “We can make a storm stronger and guide its motion, we just can’t stop one.”

  Hatch grinned. “Why didn’t you say so? Have we got the surface viewers in our control too?”

  “Yeah. Those were one of the easier things to get through.”

  “Good. Get a storm started.”

  “I just said we won’t be able to stop it.”

  “And I just said get one started! They’re onto us. The only way we’re ever going to get any compliance out of anyone is if we use the weapon we’ve been trying to steal. The array isn’t fully focused on us, but we’ve got enough power to get a storm started and building, right?”

  “Yeah. Depending on how small we start, we could get it going pretty strong, and pretty quickly.”

  “Then get one started right around Patel’s little villa.” He raised the radio. “Which one of you idiots has got Preethy?”

  “She’s in a service conduit, but it’s a tight one. We’re having a hard time getting someone in there to ferret her out, so we’ve got men on all the exits.”

  “Fine. Just keep her there and keep quiet.” He turned to the tech. “Can you patch me in to the ship’s PA?”

  “Of course.”

  #

  Preethy huddled in the conduit. One hand clutched the stunner she’d been given. The other was wrapped tightly around a dislodged valve handle. On more than one occasion, she’d been served well by the offensive potential of a good sturdy shoe, so she was confident putting the handle to use would be nearly as effective. It wasn’t often she missed the stilettos she’d worn in her college years, but now would be a fine time to have one. Those heels could really do a number on a would-be assailant.

  “Preethy Misra,” bellowed Hatch over every available speaker. “I’ve got to say, I thought you’d be a pushover. You hear about Patel and his crew trying to get out of the family business, and you imagine they’ve all gone soft, but I’ll be damned if you all didn’t prove me wrong. But, unfortunately for you, there comes a time when being tough is just no match for being smart and well prepared. I’ve made it clear, I want that station code…”

  “And you aren’t going to get it,” she muttered to herself.

  “But from this point forward, I think it’s fairer to say that you want me to have that station code. Listen close, Misra. You hear that hum? The whole station sounds like it’s alive, doesn’t it? That’s the sound of a storm brewing. And for once, that’s not metaphor. We’re in deep enough that we can spin up one hell of a dust storm and put it right where we want it.

  “Now, I know this station is your uncle’s baby. I bet he’s been dying for it to have its first test. Far be it for me to get between a man and his ambition. As we speak, Operlo’s very first synthetic dust storm is settling in on that nice house he’s got. You’d better hope he spent as much money on the storm shelter as he did on the tile roof, though. Because once that storm is raging, our hands are tied. I need that code to stop it.”

  Preethy stayed still. It was possible he was bluffing. But the temperature in the corridor was rising. The entire station was humming. Something was definitely happening.

  “Oh, you’ve got a winner on your hands with this station,” Hatch said. “Even if you don’t care about stopping the storm, you should get out here to see how quickly it’s coming up. A real sight to behold.”

  She shut her eyes. It was pointless to even consider revealing herself. He would do as he pleased with the code or without. And once he had it, he wouldn’t need her at all. It burned at her, but all she could do was lie low, stay sharp, and wait until someone gave her the chance to actually do something useful.

  “Well, well. I don’t know what sort of men your uncle employs, but it looks like someone’s got one hell of a vehicle. It must be moving at quite a clip to come up on the sensors.” His confidence wavered. “And it’s headed straight for the array.”

  Preethy allowed herself a whisper of a grin. If someone was driving at dangerous speeds, throwing themselves headlong into danger, she had an idea of who it was.

  “Can you target that? Target it. Make that the center of the storm.”

  Her grin vanished. Lex was good, but Preethy had seen the sort of intensity Operlo’s storms could reach. This could be catastrophic.

  #

  “You’d think Karter would have put more armor on this if it was for Lex. Everyone is always shooting at him,” Coal opined, still working her way through assorted diagnostics and calibrations.

  “One of these buttons has got to do something,” Michella growled, currently at the mercy of Ma’s absent-minded alter ego.

  “Final test, external sensors. Processing… Oh, these are badly damaged. You have been taking bad care of this hardware platform, Michella Modane. I believe that concludes my briefing. Reactivating internal sensors.”

  “Lives are at stake, Ma!”

  “Coal.”

  “Whatever! We can’t afford to waste any more time.”

  “The briefing file indicates I should be delivering you to the surface and fetching aid to infiltrate and neutralize the people who have overrun the station.”

  The ship pivoted and started to accelerate.

  “No, no! The microwaves!”

  The SOB darted out from behind the station. The moment it was subjected to the transmission, the very same warnings and malfunctions that had plagued the ship last time began again.

  “External temperature rising. I am detecting rapidly accelerating damage. In the circumstances, ‘ouch’ would appear to be an appropriate exclamation.”

  “Turn around!” Michella urged, swiping at the controls that were still held out of her reach.

  “Ouch, ouch, ouch. Hot, hot, hot,” Coal repeated.

  She swung a wide turn and zipped back into the shadow of the station. “I don’t think I’ll be able to get you to the surface, Ms. Modane.”

  “Then listen to me when I tell you that if we want this all to end, we’ve got to do something about the people in that station.”

  “I believe I understand,” Coal said. “If I am going to help, I need to define the success parameters. The briefing indicated keeping you safe is required. This is fortunate, as it qualifies this enterprise as ‘fun.’ Is the complete destruction
of the station an acceptable outcome?”

  “What? No! We’re trying to save lives!”

  “Is partial destruction of the station acceptable?”

  “… Maybe.”

  “Excellent. Once we define a percentage, I believe we can begin.”

  Chapter 12

  Lex blazed across the ground. The navigation system for Operlo had been as spotty as its data network over the last day or two, but now it was entirely absent. Fortunately, the bizarre lights and wavy shimmer of the array were highly effective as a beacon to lead him in the proper direction. At first it had been his plan to ease the sled gradually up to its top speed. It soon became clear that Karter’s penchant for performance had once again overshadowed his reluctant allowances for safety. At anything over seventy-five percent of its thrust, the whole sled felt like it would tear itself to pieces if he did anything as foolish and drastic as making a slight turn.

  Soon a new problem presented itself. The wind was picking up. Hoversleds, as the name suggested, weren’t known for their tight connection to the ground. Getting something resembling traction was one of the technical challenges of the craft’s design, and even the best of manufacturers had limited success. If traction was too good, the sled lost the benefit of hovering in the first place. If it was too poor, it was really only capable of straight lines and wide, sliding turns. The art of racing often came down to manipulating the traction to suit the situation.

  A gust of wind shoved Lex’s hoversled aside, nearly smashing him into a rocky outcropping.

  “I really wish we had a better way to strap you in, Squee,” he said, wrenching the controls aside.

  Lex’s bad influence on the creature was evident in the manic, excited expression on her face. Any sane creature would have been cowering in fear. Squee was fighting against her restraints to get a better view.

  He countered another gust, spinning the sled nearly sideways to keep in a relatively straight trajectory.

  “I think we’re going to have to slow ourselves down if we want to make it to the array in one piece.” He glanced in the reverse camera. “Or maybe not…”

  In the darkness of night, a dust storm really shouldn’t have been visible. But a dust storm also wasn’t supposed to well up in a matter of moments, and it certainly shouldn’t have done so at the urging of an orbital device. Some interplay of the energy being pumped into the storm and the static generated by thousands of little particles clashing and clattering together had produced an eerie fireworks display within the heart of the storm. Sparks and arcs danced through the air and traced spidery lines across the ground. As bad as the storm was around him, it was orders of magnitude worse behind him. In the glow of the sparks, fist-sized gravel was hurdling through the air and man-sized boulders were skittering across the ground.

  “Okay, new plan. We’re outrunning this thing,” Lex said.

  He pushed the sled hard. Its own backwash kicked up more dust and stone, adding to the swirling mass. Powdery, dry soil swept into the air. Visibility started to drop. His sleds lights bounced back at him from the cloud of dust. Jagged stone spires emerged from the dense cloud of debris with barely enough time for him to swerve.

  “Tell me you put good secondary viewers on this thing, Karter. Tell me that was one of the things you splurged on.”

  He risked taking a hand from the steering to flick through the visual overlays. Three or four useless augmentations flicked on and off on the integrated display in his cockpit. The relative times of nonexistent racers popped up with errors. Something evidently intended to display watch-counts and other entertainment ratings came and went. Then a view mode labeled Radar Assisted Trajectory Prediction activated. A high-contrast wireframe traced out along the irregular ground. It only reached out about twice as far as his visibility, but that meant twice the time for his reflexes to avoid a crash. Red markers and dotted lines illustrated likely collisions, and when one such marker intersected his windshield—followed by a stone clashing against his shields—Lex learned that the warnings were not to be taken lightly.

  Minutes rolled by. He was pushing his luck to its breaking point. The storm seemed to have a personal vendetta. Gusts shoved him toward sheer stone walls. Brick-sized hunks of the landscape kicked up and sparked against his shields. And if anything, it was getting worse.

  “How is this possible? I’m moving hundreds of kilometers per hour!” Lex said.

  He hit a mound of earth hard and lofted. The wind nearly flipped him over. He compensated just in time to come back into range of the ground. Any later and he would have been sliding upside down.

  “There’s no way this storm is moving that fast.”

  A static discharge, like a mini bolt of lightning, flashed across the chassis, and for a moment he lost both his steering overlay and his headlights. They flickered back on just in time to reveal he was barreling toward a cliff.

  There wasn’t time to turn. Lex boosted the repulsors, juiced the throttle, and sailed over the edge. For a fraction of a second that felt like a lifetime, the hoversled arced its way into a void almost completely hidden in the wind-whipped dust. His overlay traced out a solid wall of stone approaching from ahead. He heaved the controls and presented the belly of the sled to the approaching surface.

  The landing was forceful enough to bottom out the hoversled, gouging a bite out of the cliff wall. He clamped the traction as tight as he could and poured on the speed. At the moment, it wasn’t entirely clear to Lex which way he was heading. He could be racing along the floor of a gulley. He could be hurdling down a steep slope. As it turned out, the answer to just which way he was headed was revealed when the surface beneath him once again dropped away and Lex happened to notice that one of the numbers ticking upward on his crowded display was his altitude. He’d been racing up a wall, and now had launched himself skyward.

  Vaulting into the stratosphere was problematic. The kind of things that a less specialized hover vehicle might use to control itself effectively without the ground nearby were entirely absent on a hoversled. Lex may as well have been controlling his trajectory through sheer force of will, for all the good the steering was doing him.

  The involuntary flight did, however, answer one burning question. For a brief moment, his jump took him high enough to escape the swirling clouds of dust the storm had kicked up. That treated him first to a view of how much distance remained between him and the edge of the array complex. He was nearly halfway there. It also gave him a view of the bizarre sight behind him.

  Every storm he’d ever seen from above—and he’d seen his fair share—was a blobby, vaguely roundish shape drifting slowly across the landscape. What lay below him looked more like the wake kicked up by a speedboat. It couldn’t be more than a few hundred meters wide where he was. It widened the farther away it got until, back at what must have been Patel’s compound it looked more like the kind of storm nature intended.

  “It’s not following me. It’s forming around me. They’re targeting me. This isn’t about outrunning, it’s about outmaneuvering.” He smiled. “I’ll play that game.”

  A new and very urgent alarm joined the droning alerts. This one was a temperature warning. It was climbing quickly. Far faster than air resistance or getting sandblasted by the storm would explain. His overlay was also flickering and distorting. They were getting up into the very transmission that had made this a mission for ground vehicles in the first place.

  He used his limited controls to angle the sled’s nose downward and redlined the thrust. Squee nearly hit the roof as their jump turned into a dive. He rushed down into the stirring dust cloud. He was able to ease off the dive before he hit the ground, reducing the impact from spine-shattering to merely tooth-rattling. He took a hard turn and, sure enough, found the storm thinning around him. He could almost feel the storm’s path start to shift to follow him, but every swishing swerve cost it some of its intensity. He was getting ahead of it.

  “Who’d’ve th
unk it, Squee? It turns out dust storms are great on the straightaways, but lousy on the corners.”

  #

  “There, zoom in on that,” Michella said.

  She’d come to something approaching an understanding with Coal, and the pair was now technically collaborating on a way to get Michella back onto the station. A section of the view screen was digitally enhanced, revealing what looked to be a crew hatch.

  “Can I get in there somehow?” Michella said.

  “Yes, provided you are able to maintain fine motor control for approximately seventy seconds while in the absence of atmosphere. It will take you that long to operate the latch and activate the internal air lock.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “I didn’t think so. As I recall, the human body is extremely fragile. I recommend you use this as your point of entry.” Coal highlighted a section of the station.

  “That’s just a solid wall, Coal.”

  “I am confident that, with the proper impact velocity, I can upgrade it to a door.”

  “What if Preethy is in that section?”

  “The station is very large. The possibility of her being in any specific place is less than seven percent.”

  “That’s not good enough. What would we do when we got there?”

  “Unknown. That had not been included in my simulations.”

  “Is there any way we can dock?”

  “Processing scans from prior to my installation in this platform… The primary docking bay would appear to have been rendered useless due to your escape method. Other docking possibilities are exposed in whole or in part to the microwaves due to the unfocused nature of the transmission. Calculating.”

  “What are you calculating?”

  “Based upon prior exposure, I can withstand a total of two minutes and sixteen seconds of microwave exposure before system failure. It should take one minute and fifty-seven seconds to dock with the planet-facing crew hatch, defeat security measures, and permit you entry.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I have run the simulation sixty-four times. There will be some minor cosmetic damage to the interior.”