The Clockwork Chimera Series Books 1-3 Box Set

by Scott Baron

  “Looks like I’m just going to have to be black and blue for a while,” she muttered, crawling farther along in the cramped Narrows. “Probably a few shades of purple and green in there too.”

  A half hour of discomfort later, she finally arrived at the closest communications nexus. It wasn’t the main uplink, and it would require a bit of creative wiring, but seeing as how she designed the repaired comms array currently perched atop the ship, Daisy felt confident of her odds of success.

  Of course, patching in would have been much more of a breeze if she weren’t forced to do it with minimal equipment, lying on her belly, and with jury-rigged gear accessing things from the wrong side of the console. Nevertheless, once she got started, the path to success seemed clearer and clearer.

  Daisy knew she could make it work. How long it would take, well, that was another question.

  Nearly an hour later her task finally neared completion. Beyond merely accessing the system from the inside, she had found it necessary to connect several other terminals to create a hard-wired misdirect to prevent Mal from tracking her access point. That meant a lot of crawling, and a lot of rewiring. It helped that Daisy knew which wires she could safely disconnect to use in the endeavor, but even so, the level of safeguards against unauthorized transmission she encountered were quite astounding.

  What were you up to with all that extra security? she wondered.

  “Daisy?”

  Vince’s voice quietly reached out to her through her comms.

  Bastard’s on the override frequency.

  “Daisy, I need you to listen to me.”

  Fat chance.

  “I understand why you did what you did to me, and I want you to know that I don’t hold it against you. I just wish I could have told you sooner. Maybe this all could have been avoided. Won’t you please talk to me?”

  Daisy silently continued her work.

  “Okay, if you won’t talk, then at least listen. The thing is, well, I know I haven’t been exactly forthcoming with you. None of us have, really, and there’s something you need to know—”

  The microphone blared feedback in her ear as he was pushed aside.

  “Daisy, this is Captain Harkaway. You have no idea what you are doing. This is a far more complicated situation than you are aware of, and you are jeopardizing everything. I want you to stop whatever it is you are doing and turn yourself over to us immediately. You’ll be safe and treated well. We mean you no harm. You have my word on that. You just need to talk to us.”

  Silence.

  “Are you sure this thing is transmitting?”

  “Well, she’s the comms expert, but yeah, it should be.” It was Reggie she heard in the background.

  So, that’s it, then. Every single one of them is in on it.

  She was nearly done re-routing the array. Her best bet would be to first attempt to send a message to Dark Side. If that didn’t work, she’d try reaching out to Earth. But listening to the crew’s voices gave her an idea. The uplink could wait a few minutes longer. There was one more thing she wanted to try.

  She pulled one of the comms connectors and clipped its fiber optic data cluster to a neighboring one. The loop was physical, not a coded one, and ideally, it should create a two-tiered result. One, while useful in delaying her adversaries from coordinating their search, was really just a diversion. The second, however, would provide some much-needed intel as she crawled blind in the Narrows.

  Daisy double-checked her connections, then keyed in a quick command sequence to her portable terminal.

  The comms throughout the entire ship spat out a burst of shrill static, then they all went silent. All except the one in Daisy’s ear. Though no one could tell, all other comms were locked open to transmit.

  “What the hell did she just do?” Harkaway barked.

  “I don’t know, Captain. It looks like she just shorted out ship-wide comms. I can’t see a coding solution just yet. Whatever she did, it was certainly creative,” Gus replied.

  “Wonderful. We should have known all that crap in her head would come back and bite us on the ass. Mal, are you able to locate the problem? Mal?”

  “Hang on, Captain,” Gustavo said. “I need to locally re-route her outbound comms to this terminal. Mal can hear us, but she can’t answer just yet.”

  “This is ridiculous. We’ve got to get this under control. We’re only forty-one hours from the moon. If we don’t find her before we reach Dark Side, things could get ugly. Reggie, I want you to hand out the other stun rifles, then I want you to spread out and work in teams. Stay within voice range at all times. Don’t lose contact with one another. I want the smaller of each pair to crawl into the conduit system, while the other paces them in the pod network below.”

  “But, Captain, we’re all kind of big to fit in the Narrows,” Reggie said.

  “I don’t care about your claustrophobia, dammit. The crawlspaces were designed for humans to fit in them. Just because it’s easier for her doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t go there too. We don’t know if she’s in the pods, the passageways, or in the Narrows, but Barry found no trace of her on the exterior of the ship. Yes, I know this is doing it the hard way, but we have no choice. Cut her off. Flush her out. Shit just got real, people. Stop her at all costs.”

  Daisy felt a chill run up her spine. At all costs?

  The captain hefted a stun rifle and held it out to the cyborg.

  “Barry, I want you to take this and cover the shuttle airlock,” the captain continued.

  “Sir, I am much stronger than her. I will not need a stun—”

  “Just take it, Barry. That’s an order. We can’t risk her trying to physically reach the Earth’s surface.”

  Seriously? They really must be worried if they think I’d resort to spending two days floating in space in that old thing. But why Earth?

  “I don’t know, Daze. What if Dark Side is already compromised?” Sarah said.

  “I hope to hell that’s not the case,” Daisy silently replied to the dead woman in her head.

  The magnitude of the implication shook her. If they have agents on the moon working with them. The possibilities spread out like a choose-your-own adventure book, only all of the options were shit.

  “Very well, Captain, I will prevent her accessing the shuttle, should she be foolish enough to attempt it,” she heard Barry say through the hot-miked comms.

  “The rest of you, get moving.”

  Daisy turned and crawled back to the communication nexus she’d so diligently rewired. If they were going to start searching the Narrows, there really wasn’t much time. If she was going to get a message out, it was now or never.

  With the final connections hastily made, she powered on her makeshift jumper box and tapped in to the transmitter to send. For a few moments at least, it would appear to Mal that the transmission was being sent from an entirely different part of the ship.

  “Mayday, mayday, does anyone copy?”

  Nothing but a silent, static hiss.

  “Mayday, mayday, this is Daisy Swarthmore of the Váli, can you read me? Dark Side base, do you copy? Does anyone—”

  “Daisy, you really mustn’t do that,” Mal scolded over the open comms. “I know you can hear me, and I also assume you’ve rerouted your signal to alter your transmission location to a different section of the Váli. Very clever. You really have far exceeded my wildest expectations. Your skills are blossoming in ways far outside the mission forecasts. I’m proud of you, Daisy, but I need you to stop what you’re doing.”

  “Mayday, mayday, this is the Váli calling any—”

  “You might want to save your breath. I anticipated you would attempt to access the transmission relays from inside the ship and have already sequestered the entire external array. Additionally, Barry physically severed the hardwire line directly from the exterior and rerouted it straight to my neural array in Command. You cannot override it. Please, Daisy, it must be awfully cramped in there, and the others are
so worried about you. Won’t you come out and talk with the captain? He has much to tell you.”

  Daisy checked the signal feed, setting it to receive the outgoing message. The answer she feared stared her back in the face. Mal was telling the truth. Nothing she transmitted was even reaching the communications array.

  “Please, Daisy, we can make this all right. I know Vincent is eager to see you as well. You hurt him, Daisy. Quite badly. But you don’t need to worry, I fixed him up, good as new. Well, almost, anyway. I know he loves you, and if you—”

  She yanked the comm from her ear. Sure, it was useful to track the others’ movements as they combed the ship for her, but a headache was brewing behind her eyes, and she just couldn’t take Mal’s stupid mind games. Not right now, anyway.

  So external comms are blocked. Clever, Mal, I have to hand it to you. She rolled the thought around in her mind, letting her options present themselves. Transmission is out. Takeover is out. Hiding… even if I managed to avoid them if they somehow squeeze into the Narrows, they could simply put off landing and just keep us in a low orbit until I run out of water packs and have to come out. Her options were indeed slim.

  Well, then, she thought with morbid realization sinking in. Thanks for the idea, Captain. It looks like the last resort is here.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  It was an uncomfortable way to move through the ship, that was certain, but Daisy felt strangely at ease in her unease. It was, she posited, much as Houdini likely felt, wrapped in familiar shackles and chains that would make any other man blanch.

  She had logged a lot of hours in the Narrows and knew the majority of their twists and turns. At least the main passages, anyway. It was the crawling that was the real problem. Without the option of negating the artificial gravity to take some of the pressure off her body’s contact points, Daisy’s hips, knees, and elbows were aching something fierce.

  Oh yeah, I’m going to be a lovely shade of purple when this is over, she thought as her bruised hips slid across yet another pressure seal between Narrows compartments. She further banged herself up wiggling around to access the panel controlling the airlock, carefully sealing it behind her while executing a minor sensor tweak to ensure its operation would not show on Mal’s readouts.

  Reluctantly, Daisy turned the comms system back on. While Mal and the captain’s attempts to sway her were annoying, if they hadn’t found her workaround that hot-miked the entire crew’s comms, she might still be able to listen in and glean some useful information from their idle chatter.

  “…I agree, Mal, but it’s too much of a risk that way,” Captain Harkaway’s voice crackled through her earpiece.

  Still works, I see, she mused with a grin.

  “Captain, it is indeed a risk, but so is Daisy’s continuing evasion of our crew. Her attempts to send external communications are demonstrable proof that she is a threat to the entire mission. If we do not apprehend her and put a stop to this, years of planning and decades of resources expended will be for naught.”

  “Decades? How far does this rabbit hole go, Daze?” Sarah wondered in her head.

  Hell if I know, but if they’re talking tens of years, they could have compromised countless systems, waiting for the moment to—well, to whatever it is they’re up to.

  The captain’s voice interrupted her musings.

  “I agree, Mal, but we can’t risk it. While depressurizing the Narrows would knock her out, it could also lead to her panicking when she realizes what we’re doing. If she senses the air is being sucked out, well, you know as well as I do just how much she’s capable of. If even a fraction of that potential has been unlocked, dear Lord, just imagine what mayhem she could cause from the Narrows. She has access to damn near everything from in there.”

  “A valid concern, Captain,” Mal replied. “It is most unfortunate that this eventuality, however unlikely, was not foreseen and prepared for.”

  “Sir, can I suggest something?”

  It was Gustavo’s voice joining the conversation.

  Ah, so they’re discussing this in Command. Good. That means less of them out helping with the search.

  “Yes? What are your thoughts, Gus?”

  “You have a valid point that pulling the air out of the Narrows would make her panic. Hell, I know I would. But what if we could oxygen-starve her brain without her knowing it? Knock her out in a way that would prevent her from having the time to damage the ship?”

  “I’m sorry, Gustavo, but we do not carry any manner of aerosolized anesthetics or sleeping agents on board,” Mal replied. “I could likely reconfigure the biological fabricators to process some, but adjusting them for such an out-of-parameters task would take some time.”

  “No, nothing like that,” he said, “but rather, using what we already have at hand.”

  Not liking the sound of that, Daisy thought as she began crawling faster, ignoring the ache in her hips and knees. Not liking the sound of that at all.

  “We can’t risk damaging the ship, and we want Daisy back intact. A lot of effort went into her. We can’t risk permanent damage.”

  Oh, but temporary damage is okay, then? Thanks a lot, Captain.

  “If I’m right, and Mal, please double-check my calculations here,” Gus said. “If I’m right, we could utilize the ship’s air filtration system to back-feed pure nitrogen into the Narrows. If we seal them off from the rest of the ship, it shouldn’t take long at all to raise levels to a high enough percentage to knock her out.”

  “Mal, is this possible?” the captain asked.

  “It is, Captain. While the air filtration system was not designed for such a purpose, it should be relatively easy to re-route the nitrogen bleed-off back into the feed system. It would require a manual adjustment, but we should be able to systematically flood sections of the crawlspaces with nitrogen.”

  “And this won’t cause any permanent harm, correct?”

  “It should not, Captain,” Mal said.

  “Yeah, that was my thinking, Captain. It’s the basics of confined-space rescue protocols, but used to our advantage. Unlike creating a vacuum, which makes you feel like you’re suffocating, because, well, you are, nitrogen and helium both react in the human body like breathing air. The thing is, they aren’t air, so you become oxygen-starved without even feeling it. No panic, no rash acts. Just suddenly passing out.”

  “So she wouldn’t know what was happening? No chance of her causing catastrophic damage to the ship before she loses consciousness?”

  “Not a chance, sir. With nitrogen, that is. Helium, well, if we used that and she happened to be talking to herself in the Narrows, she’d hear the change in her voice. With nitrogen, it’s totally undetectable until it’s too late.”

  Fuck.

  Daisy picked up her pace.

  “Captain,” Mal chimed in, “I believe Gustavo’s plan is a sound one. I can closely monitor the time each section is flooded with the gas to ensure Daisy is not without oxygen long enough to cause permanent damage.”

  “What if she wakes up before we find her? We’ll have to send teams into each section as we go,” Captain Harkaway said, hesitant.

  “We can simply time the process, push out the nitrogen to allow a short window of fresh air, then flood each area again,” Mal replied. “We then repeat the whole thing until we have been able to search each of the sections. It will be time-consuming, but it should work. Further, with each subsequent exposure to the nitrogen, Daisy should be more quick to succumb, as her body will be exhausted and somewhat oxygen-starved. This will result in the requirement of far less gas than prior sessions.”

  “But she’ll notice if we start locking down random sections of crawlspace from here, and we know she has the skills to pretty easily override that from inside the Narrows,” Gustavo pointed out.

  “A valid concern, but if we were to not try to pinpoint her exact location, instead locking down multiple connected sections at a time and hoping she is somewhere in the middle, the odds
of her noticing would be greatly reduced.”

  Captain Harkaway scratched his stubbly chin as he mulled over the option.

  “I don’t like it, but I really don’t see a better option on the table. Mal, what do you need done?”

  “There are manual valve overrides in the atmospherics that will need to be cycled in order for me to affect this plan.”

  “I’ll do it, Captain. I have a basic idea what needs to be done already.”

  “No, Gus, I need you in Command monitoring navs and comms. Daisy’s loose in the guts of this ship, and if she gets any wild ideas, I’ll need you here to help with damage control. Mal, can you send the instructions to Reggie’s tablet remotely?”

  “I’m sorry, Captain, but I am still trying to work around Daisy’s rerouting of our internal wireless communications system.”

  “Well, shit on a shingle. With those comms still out, I’ll have to go track down Reggie on foot. Fine, we’ll do it the old hardwired way. Upload the instructions onto this,” he said, plugging a tablet into an open port. “I’ll get it down to him and have him get to work on it. Do you know what Reggie’s last location was?”

  “I believe he was attempting to access the upper level Starboard crawlspaces near Pod Two, Captain.”

  “Sir, why don’t we just send Barry? We know where he’s at, and it would save a lot of time.”

  “We need to protect the shuttle, Gus, and Barry’s the best qualified of all of us to do it. Mal, once I track down Reggie, how long before we can start the process?”

  “It should take less than twenty minutes to implement. I also wish to inform you that I believe comms should be functional by the time you return.”

  “Great, stand ready. As soon as I get back, we start immediately.”

  That’s my cue, Daisy thought as she paused her crawling to pull components from nearby control panels. I just hope this works.