Several of the troops helped Gānē into the room and stripped off her breather. There was plenty of CO2 in the room from the airlock, but the oxygen levels were high enough to breathe easily.
After he was sure everyone was accounted for, Ty ordered the breaching soldiers to replace the door and insta-weld it in place. The combat airlock should hold, but it was too fragile to trust long-term. Only after the weld was solidifying and the air handler indicators were showing green did Ty remove his own breather. “Breathers off.”
“What’s the op, top?” Ricker asked.
Ty looked at the group. They were all staring at him expectantly. “Ricker, take one troop. Find the station map and figure out if there’s a way to get down from inside here.” He looked around. “Bach, Odebe, search for breather cartridges and scrubbers. Keter and Jul, try to find some water and maybe some rations.” He was just going around the circle of those close enough to read their name tags. Maybe not the best way to pick people for jobs, but it seemed to work. As they all peeled off to their task, he picked the next troop whose name tag he could read. “McGinn, get on the radio and raise fleet. I don’t care if you have to place a commercial call. Just get hold of fleet command.”
He turned last to Gānē. “Are you okay, sir?” He paused. “Uh, sorry for just taking over there, but you looked like you were…”
“I’m fine, Ty, thanks. And no need to apologize. It’s exactly what I would expect of a platoon sergeant, or company sergeant.” She coughed a shallow, dry cough a few times. “Once the scrubbers can’t do anything and your tank is dry, that air out there is nasty as hell.” She looked like she was going to say something more, but stopped.
“What is it, Pas?” Ty asked.
“Nothing. At least, not here or now.” She seemed to gather herself. “Do you think they might have the equipment you need here to read those command modules?”
Ty looked around. “If Ricker has the map, we should be able to find what we need in the armory, if there is one in here.” He called to the room, “Mac, join me over here. Ricker, if you have the map swing by my location for a minute.”
Gānē nodded. “I’ll let you get to your work while I try to come up with something to keep the rest of us busy.” A small smile raised the corner of her mouth. “I chose well.”
Ricker showed Ty the map. There was an armory behind a sealed, heavy door. The map also showed a passage to sub two, direct to the fire station with a complete airlock. “Look, see if Odebe and…” he found he had lost the name.
Ricker prompted him “Bach, sarge.”
“Thanks, if Odebe and Bach have found some breathers, I want you and one other person to refresh your breathers and go through that airlock. Just check out the air on the other side and come right back up. I don’t want you wandering around in what could be a trap.” He looked up from the map. “And be careful, right?”
“Right, sarge.”
“It’s Corp…” Ty stopped himself. “Junior Sergeant, I guess.”
Ricker smirked. “If you say so, sarge.”
Ty turned to Mac. “Armory’s behind that blast door. How are you holding up?”
“Not too bad. I’d rather be scrubbing pistols, but hey, we don’t get to pick.” He handed a water bottle to Ty. “Couple ‘o troops handin’ out water. Take one.” Mac leaned in. “Now that you’re the head shit, are you gonna forget about me?”
“Not likely. Won’t be permanent.” Ty was exhausted, as if he had just run his physical fitness test thirty times in a row without rest. “When we get back to fleet… if we get back to fleet… I’ll be back to scrubbing pistols with you.”
“Like it or not, you’re a sergeant now, for good.” Mac nudged him. “I don’t understand something about that armory though. That door’s not big enough for the autocannons, so where did those come from?”
“No idea. We’ll figure it out after we get in there.” Ty walked over to Gānē. “Sir, if you can spare a couple troops for breach, we have a blast door over here that needs opening,” he pointed at the armory door, “so we can get into the armory and figure out what the hell happened.”
Gānē nodded once. “Good man. Take those three over there.” She pointed out three troops who had been watching. They all rose at her gesture. Ty stepped to the door. “Breach. Watch for traps. Try to bring that door out. Kocking it in might damage equipment we need.”
“Yes, sarge.” “Aye, top.” “Yes, sergeant.” Their replies came on top of the other.
Gānē placed a hand on Ty’s shoulder. “It looks like you’re cut out for this leadership thing, Ty. It fits you well.”
“You’re not doing so bad at it yourself, sir,” Ty replied. Any discomfort he had previously felt in her presence, either due to her agelessness or just her rank in general, was gone. Her presence was more like the company of a lifelong friend. “Pas, I have a question.”
“Ask away.”
“You say you’re thirty-seven, but you’re a sub-captain. Do you feel like you’ve been held back because you’re umale?” Ty regretted the question the moment it was asked, but it was too late to take it back.
Gānē laughed. “Hell, no. I didn’t start out an officer. I was a firefighter in my mandatory service and did it for another couple years before I decided to join combat FDF. And then add officer school, training, and a long, boring deployment in the Bul system, and you get…” she pointed at her collar.
Ty was about to say how that made sense when she pointed at his collar. “Your rank badge is completely covered in grease. Probably from taking the AC apart.” He started to raise his hand to wipe it off and Gānē grabbed his wrist. “Don’t. Leave it. Right now, everyone from Fox thinks you’re a sergeant. Let them go on thinking that.”
The slam of the door coming down caught their attention. One of the breach team called out “Door’s down, sarge. No traps.”
Ty refrained from teasing the troop about being obvious. Instead, he turned to Mac. “Let’s see what we can find out from these command modules.” Turning back to Gānē, he said, “I’ve got Ricker checking the down airlock to the fire station below, and hopefully we’ll have fleet comms soon.” He pulled the command module in its wrapping of anti-static paper out of his cargo pocket. “C’mon, Mac, time to do our job.”
Inside the armory, Ty and Mac were right at home. It was a standard FDF armory, except for the freight elevator door for the cannons, set into the outer wall. They found the maintenance terminal and connected the command modules. They saw the override shutdown command, with the channel and transmitter ID displayed before it. Then came the last set of commands sent to the cannons.
Ty’s face grew pale. “Mac.” He turned.
“Yeah, I see it.” Mac pulled a data gem out of his pocket. “I’m gonna make copies of all this now.”
“I think I’m gonna be sick.” Ty steadied himself with a hand on the bench and took a few deep breaths. “We gotta get this to Gānē ASAP.” He keyed his mic. “Sub-captain Gānē, Carel, you need to see this. Over.”
Her voice sounded strained on the radio. “Carel, Gānē. Can you bring it to my location? I have something you should probably see as well. Over.”
“Roger. Bringing the data to you. Out.” Ty looked at Mac. “Let’s hope it’s comms so we can get out of this hellhole.”
Ty wrapped the command modules back up in anti-static wrap and took the data gem from Mac. “See if there’s anything in here we can use, then get everyone who’s not doing anything to help search for breather cartridges and filters. And find out what’s taking so long with the door to the fire station.”
“Sure thing.” Mac slapped him on the shoulder. “I’ll catch up later.”
Ty entered the comms room at a run and pulled up short when saw the rows of holo-screens on the far wall. They showed the dome, two for each level, and four around the immediate area outside. If one walked around the projections, the entirety of the public areas of the dome could be seen. Gānē was standing on a ch
air to one side of the screens and seemed to be looking along the surfaces of them. By moving next to her position, he could see the floors almost perfectly lined up, the zeroth floor mostly obscuring the ones below.
Gānē stepped down. “Step up there and take a look. Could the cannons have done that?”
Ty stepped up on the chair. He wasn’t as tall as Gānē, but by standing on his tiptoes, he could see what she had been looking at. The hole in the ground floor was lined up with another in the next. Beyond that, it appeared that every floor, or nearly every floor, had been similarly breached. “Can we project a trajectory from that to outside?” he asked.
“Yeah, we already did. It points through the damaged dome directly at cannon two.” Gānē shivered. “It doesn’t match the damage on the dome structure supports though.”
“And it wouldn’t. Those were hit after the dome was breached and the floors were blown out.” Ty stepped down and handed the data gem to Gānē. “You might want to look at this. It’s all the commands sent to the cannons.”
“Does it help you explain how they were hacked?” she asked.
“It explains, but it’s not what we thought.” Ty took a deep breath. “They weren’t hacked. All the commands were sent over the command channel from a comms unit with enough power to contact both at the same time.” He looked at the young Junior troop sitting at the comms console. “McGinn, what’s the ID of that comms terminal?”
McGinn typed on the console keyboard. “Uh, Whiskey Lima Seven Seven Alpha Two Three One.” He looked up. “Uh, sergeant.”
“Sir, that’s the comms that sent the signals to the cannons. And whoever did it was able to see when we landed, there.” He pointed to a screen on the bottom row. “So, who was the operator?” And why are there no dead troops in here? he wondered.
McGinn typed some more. “User logs show Lieutenant Colonel Matt Harp at 14:30 to 14:47, then from 14:52 to 17:19 it just says ‘restricted, authorized user.’” McGinn looked up. “After that, it’s just me on at 18:09.”
Gānē stepped over to the console. “Let me give it a try, Troop. Maybe I have enough clearance to see.” She waited for the console to read her ident chip, log her onto the system, and then opened the user logs. It showed the same thing. Just that someone with a very high clearance used the console. No logs of receivers or message bodies or anything else was available. “No luck. If I read this here, is it going to cause any problems?” She was holding up the data gem and looking at Ty.
“No, sir. It’s in a read-only, no-execute, archive state. It’s a write-once gem we use when there might be evidence to capture.” Ty muttered, “And this is definitely evidence.”
The gem slid into the slot on the console desk and a menu appeared. As she selected through the menu, one of the holo-screen images was replaced with a flat image of text. A list of timecodes and commands.
Ty stepped to the screen and started explaining the commands. “This first command shuts out the manual override. And then the pre-programmed commands were cleared from the buffer, along with friendly recognition.” Bile rose in his throat and he swallowed it back hard. “And then they were set to autonomous anti-personnel. Cannon One finished up in forty-nine seconds, Cannon Two in fifty-six. Then the cannons reported no movement. Then Cannon Two was turned on the dome. The entire artillery payload was released at the same track. That’s seventy-two rounds, in seventy-four seconds. Then it’s set to sentry mode, facing outward, and Cannon One fires four rounds at the dome supports. I don’t know if they thought it would bring the whole thing down, or if they thought it would make it harder to figure out what happened.” Ty looked at the commands remaining on the screen. “These are just positioning commands. They were trying to walk Cannon Two further out from the dome, but the police troops had already locked it to the ground.” He looked at Gānē. “Scroll to the next page?”
The text on the screen scrolled up and was replaced with a new set of commands. “You see this here? The last command to try to move Cannon Two and the next command? Two hours and fifteen minutes. They sat right here over two hours waiting for us. From the moment we touched down, the cannons were set to auto-defend, shield-aware.”
Her face flushed and tears pooling in her eyes, Gānē pulled the data gem out and stuck it in an inside pocket. “We can’t reach fleet yet. The datalink is locked out. Now we know why.” She jumped to her feet. “Foutre! I want comms, I want breathers, and I want someone to open the foutu door to the fire station!”
Ty approached her, and in a low voice said “Sir, we’ll make it happen.”
Gānē nodded. “McGinn, Carel, I apologize for my outburst. It was completely unprofessional and uncalled for.” She turned her back to them and wiped her eyes.
“Sir, if I may?” Ty asked. “It is my opinion that it was completely and totally called for.” Ty keyed his mic. “Mac, any luck?”
“No, nothing yet. We found one breather cartridge, but it’s busted. It’s like they took ‘em all when they went out to train.” There was static on the comms then he continued. “We nearly lost Ricker when he opened the fire station airlock. It’s open to the dome in there and full of bodies. Mostly fire troops.”
“Mac, we’re locked out of datalink. Got any ideas?” Ty knew he was being desperate, but anything was better than sitting still waiting for the air to run out.
“I’ll see what I can find.” Mac sounded less than hopeful, but Ty knew that if anyone could come up with a hack, he was the guy.
There was a long silence, during which Ty’s eyes kept picking out the shapes of bodies on the screens. At last, Mac’s voice came over the radio. “Found someone who can help. She’s coming your way with a crazy idea.”
Ty was about to respond when a young troop barreled into the comms room and snapped to attention. “Sir! Troop Sil Montrose reporting” she snapped out with a salute.
Gānē returned the salute. “At ease, Sil. I hear you have a crazy idea?”
“Yes, sir. Although, not all that crazy.” Sil was tall, stick-thin with stringy blonde hair and a pale pink complexion. Her features were sharp, and she moved and spoke like a rodent on stimulants. “We haven’t heard anything from Bravo, Golf, or Hotel company. Probably because of the way the dust messes up comms. But the Becky Simms is about four klicks out. If we can boost a distress frequency blast enough to be picked up there, the ship’s comms are strong enough to cut through the interference.”
Ty tilted his head. “Okay, with you so far. How do we boost the signal? Our comms are maxed already, and we’re locked out of datalink.”
“That’s the crazy part.” She was past energetic and into excited territory now. “We’re not completely locked out; we’re just locked out from this comms terminal.”
Ty grimaced. “Are you suggesting we try to go back outside the airlock and find another terminal?”
“Not…exactly.” Sil shuffled her feet. “Not a terminal, just the datalink hardline. I already looked at the schematics and there’s a maintenance access just outside the fire station on sub two. If I can get to it, I can connect one of our headset comms to the datalink hardline. It’ll plug us right into the datalink transmitter.”
“Well, shit.” Gānē whipped around. “In that case, couldn’t we just do that and call fleet directly?”
Sil answered, “I wish.” She continued on at breakneck pace. “Our comms don’t have the right encodings for direct fleet communication, except with our own ship. It’s likely that the Simms is sitting out there waiting on an extraction. We just need to let them know where we are, and they can relay to the other companies to bring us breather tanks so we can get back there for extraction.”
“That’s the problem though.” Ty looked at her, trying to figure out if she was brilliant or crazy. “We’d need breather tanks and filters in order to go down to the maintenance access.”
She nodded. “Yes! We have one unused filter. That’s good for about five minutes as an emergency re-breather on its own. We have
twelve tanks with anywhere from one to four minutes of air left. Mine is still at five-nineteen.” She barely paused for a breath. “I load in the fresh filter, carry all the tanks in a sling and change them out as I need. If I’m careful, I should have more than twenty minutes to get to the access, open it, connect, and start transmitting.”
Ty considered. “It’s awfully risky. Is it something you could show me how to do? I don’t like the idea of sending a troop out there solo, so if someone’s gotta go…”
Sil shrugged. “I don’t know if I could teach you. Have you ever worked on electrical-light signal interfaces? I’m a comms engineer, sergeant. I can do it.”
He looked at Gānē. Her face was grim, the lines along her forehead shadowed in sharp relief. She nodded once, and Ty turned back to Sil.
“Okay, you’re doing this, but I want you to bring an extra comm. I expect you to check in every couple of minutes. I want to know what tank you’re on and how much air is left. Nothing more; don’t waste your breath unless it’s an emergency.”
She snapped to attention. “Yes, sergeant! When I get it connected, I’ll head straight back.” She started to turn to go, and Ty put a hand on her shoulder.
“Montrose, if you get below four minutes total reserve, I’m pulling you out.” Before she could say anything else, Ty continued. “You will not argue this, you will comply. We’ve lost too many today already. I’ll not lose another to stupidity. Be careful.”
The intensity in his eyes caught her off-guard. “Ye…yes, sergeant.” She didn’t tell him that she wasn’t coming back until they had comms. As her squad leader used to say, “Better to ask forgiveness than permission.”
“Now, let’s get you geared up. Whatever tools you need to get into the panel and all the non-empty tanks.” Ty turned towards Gānē. “I’ll be standing by at the airlock.” She nodded and Ty and Sil headed into the main room. She grabbed a small laser cutter, an assortment of wire, optical cable, and some parts she quickly gutted out of the maintenance terminal in the armory. Loaded down and with a sling of breather tanks over her shoulder, she headed to the airlock to sub two.
Space Bound: A Dragon Soul Press Anthology Page 28