by David Weber
"Yes, Sir," the ensign replied, unaware of the thoughts running through his seniors mind.
"All right, then," McKeon said, and pulled out a hand com. Half an hour ago, it had belonged to Citizen Sergeant Innis, and using it constituted a risk, though not an enormous one. All personal communications aboard Tepes were recorded as yet one more of StateSecs precautionary measures, and it was remotely possible one of the recording techs would actually be listening in and overhear what McKeon was about to say. But that was a chance they had to take, and he punched in the combination of the com which had once belonged to Citizen Corporal Porter.
"Yes?" Andreas Venizelos answered almost instantly, and McKeon glanced at Harkness and Clinkscales.
"The present is here," he told Venizelos. "Is your part of the party ready?"
"We need another ten minutes," Venizelos replied, and McKeon frowned. It would be better to wait until the chief of staff's group was actually in position, but every passing minute added to the chance that McKeon’s own group would be discovered... or that someone would discover one of the bodies Harkness had left in his wake. And even if he moved right this instant, it would probably take close to ten minutes to put his own part of the operation into action. The problem, of course, was that as soon as either group moved, the fact that escaped prisoners were running around the ship would become quickly evident to Tepes' crew.
He thought for ten silent seconds, then sighed. There wasn't really much choice.
"We'll make delivery on schedule, then," he said.
"Understood," Venizelos responded, and McKeon killed the circuit and nodded to Harkness, who handed Clinkscales the minicomp. The senior chief hated the very thought of letting it out of his hands, but he had no choice. Even if every single member of their party had been armed, the odds against successfully storming a single boat bay, even with total surprise, would have been astronomical, and they needed control of all of Tepes' bays for this to work. And, unfortunately, there was only one way to pull that off.
"Now look here, Mr. Clinkscales," he said in exactly the same calm voice he'd used to generations of junior officers. "All you've got to do is walk into the bay, slide the 'puter into the slot, and hit this function key here. That'll transmit Johnson's access code, log you onto the system, and then execute the programs, got it?"
"Got it, Senior Chief," Clinkscales replied, and Harkness blinked at the sober steadiness of the response. This kid sounded like he meant business, and that was good.
"Then go get 'em, Sir!" he said, and thumped the youngster on the shoulder.
Carson Clinkscales gathered himself and bent to step through the service hatch Senior Chief Harkness and Captain McKeon had opened for him. It was more of a fast, awkward crawl than a "step," really, something that had to be done quickly, lest someone happening along the passage see him and wonder what he thought he was doing, and he stumbled on the hatch coaming. He flung out an arm to catch his balance, half-hopping and half-falling across the narrow passage, and for one dreadful instant the memory of every awkward, humiliating disaster of his adolescence seemed like a garrote about his throat. In that instant, he knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that he was going to screw this one up, as well, and when he did, all the people counting on him would die.
But then his outstretched hand smacked into the bulkhead opposite the service hatch and he caught himself. Panic hammered in the back of his brain, but there was no time for that, and he ground it under a ruthless mental boot heel. He couldn't do anything about the rapidity of his pulse, yet he straightened his spine and squared his shoulders as he pushed away from the bulkhead which had arrested his fall. He tugged at his tunic sleeves, Johnson’s arms had been shorter than his, and looked casually in both directions, and his pulse slowed just a fraction as he realized there was no on in sight.
Well, there shouldn't be anyone down here, he told himself. This passage was normally used only to service the docking and umbilical arms of Boat Bay Four. If small craft operations had been underway, there would have been an excellent chance of running into someone, but there were no launch orders on the schedule Harkness had pulled out of the main computers. Even if there had been, they wouldn't have used Bay Four... unless Cordelia Ransom had decided for some reason that she had to make an all-up assault landing on StateSec's own prison planet.
Clinkscales actually felt himself grin at the thought, then drew a deep breath and moved off with a calm expression and a steady tread which he found distantly surprising... and which anyone else who had ever known him would have found amazing.
Andreas Venizelos looked at the bulkhead in front of him, then down at the memo boards display, and muttered a venomous curse. Andrew LaFollet’s head snapped around at the sound, and the focused purpose in the armsman's gray eyes hit Venizelos like a fist. That purpose came dangerously close to desperation, if it stopped short of that at all, and Venizelos reached out to grip the other mans shoulder hard.
"We're doing the best we can, Andrew," he said quietly. "Don't you go taking any stupid chances on me. I need you, and so does Lady Harrington."
LaFollet nodded curtly, but his eyes held Venizelos', demanding an explanation for the commanders curse, and the Manticoran sighed.
"There's a discrepancy in the schematic," he explained. He took his left hand from LaFollet’s shoulder to point at the alloy which turned the ventilation duct in which they stood into a "T" intersection. "According to the plans, that ought to be a four-way intersection, and the one in front of us ought to lead right to the brig. As it is..."
He shrugged, and LaFollet’s grip tightened on his heavy flechette gun. "So which way do we go instead?" he asked harshly, and Venizelos pointed to the right.
"That way. But it looks like they did an even more thorough job of sealing the brig off from the rest of the hull than Harkness thought. This..." he nodded once more at the bulkhead that shouldn't be there "...must've been an add-on. I'm guessing that when they decided to hand Tepes over to StateSec, they decided to cut off all the cross connected ventilation shafts as an additional security measure. They could probably get away with that, because this section backs right up against one of their environmental plants. All they'd really need is supply and return ducting to that; anything on this side of the brig would be part of the distribution system for the rest of the ship. But if they were paranoid enough to seal ventilation ducts, you can bet they did the same with the service ways."
"Which means?" LaFollet demanded.
The armsman hated being dependent on someone else to plan his Steadholder's rescue, and it showed. But despite all the time he'd spent aboard starships with Lady Harrington, this wasn't his area of expertise. It was Andreas Venizelos', and Venizelos recognized fury born of devotion when he heard it. He kept his own voice calmer and more level than he'd really believed he could and squeezed LaFollet’s shoulder again.
"Which means we're not going to be able to sneak in on them the way Harkness did on our guards," he said, and punched buttons on the memo board. The display shifted scale, losing detail but showing a much wider area, and he pointed into it. "We're going to have to cross this passage here to the lift, then take the shaft down a deck to the brig. If they're on their toes, they may have cameras in the shaft, in which case they'll be waiting for us. We know they've got cameras in the cars, but Harkness didn't turn up any sign that the shafts themselves are wired. If they aren't, we should still have the advantage of surprise, but we'll be going in blind whatever we do."
"Hm." LaFollet grunted, chewing unhappily on the implications of a blind assault against an unknown number of enemies. Venizelos hadn't had to tell him the change in route was going to put them behind schedule, either. Using the lift shaft should help a little in that regard, it would certainly be faster than moving the same distance through these cramped tunnels, but he didn't like coming into the brig from the most predictable direction. The advantage of surprise should make up for a lot, assuming they actually had that advantage when the mo
ment came, but it was still going to be iffy.
"All right, Commander," he said after a moment. "We'll do it that way, but give your flechette gun to Bob." Venizelos' eyebrows rose in question, and LaFollet bared his teeth in a grimace no one would ever mistake for a smile. "He'll trade you his pulser, but when we hit the brig, you and Commander McGinley will bring up the rear." Venizelos started to open his mouth, but LaFollet cut him off with a brusque gesture. "You and she are naval officers. You'll be more useful if it comes to picking alternate ways out of here than me, Jamie, or Bob, so if we have to lose someone..."
Venizelos didn't like it a bit, but LaFollet’s logic was unanswerable. So instead of protesting, he slid the flechette gun's sling off his shoulder to hand it to Robert Whitman.
Carson Clinkscales walked briskly up the narrow passage, and the hatch at its end opened at his approach. He strode through it, trying to look completely at ease... and hoping no one would wonder what a ground force trooper had been doing wandering around down amid the controls for the docking arms.
There were twenty or thirty people in the bay gallery. It looked as if some of them were carrying out routine maintenance on the pinnace at the head of the bay, and two or three men in flight suits stood in idle conversation near the docking tube that led to one of the enormous armored assault shuttles which filled the rest of the bay. Clinkscales glanced around casually, trying to get his bearings quickly. Harkness had briefed him as well as he could, but actually picking up the access slot without ever having been here before was harder than he'd expected.
There it was! He turned a bit to his left and walked onward, reaching into his tunic for the minicomp which Harkness had turned into such a lethal weapon. He pulled it out with a calm he was far from feeling, and the display blinked as the coupling mated with the slot and the connection brought the minicomp on-line.
"Hey, you!" The shout came from his left. He turned his head, and his heart seemed to stop, for a StateSec sergeant stood twenty meters away, glowering in his direction. "Just what the hell d'you think you're doing?" the sergeant demanded.
He sounded more irritated than alarmed, but the ensign felt a moment of total and absolute panic. But then, as suddenly as the panic had come, he felt something entirely different. It was if the universe's entire time scale had just shifted, and a cold, crystalline sense of purpose replaced his choking terror. He was still afraid, but now he was only afraid, and the fear was a distant thing, small and unimportant beside his absolute certainty of what he must do.
His finger depressed the function key Senior Chief Harkness had told him to press. The minicomp’s display flashed as the stored commands poured through the interface, but Clinkscales wasn't even looking. His attention was on the sergeant, his expression one of casual interest, and he strolled to meet the older man. Their mutual angles of approach turned his right side away from the sergeant, and his right hand fell naturally to his hip. It settled on the butt of his bolstered pulser, and he smiled, cocking his head as if to ask the sergeant what he could do for him while the singing, frozen tension in his brain wondered how the hell long it was going to take Harkness' programs to activate, and what would happen when they did, and, Sweet Tester, that sergeant was getting close now, and...
PNS Tepes shuddered violently as the first explosion reverberated through her iron bones.
Boat bays aren't normally considered especially dangerous places. True, they offer ample ways for someone to do himself in, but so do a great many areas aboard any starship, and the things that pose dangers to the ship, like the connections for things like hydrogen and emergency rocket propellant to fuel the ship's small craft, or the stores of ammunition and external ordnance kept in nearby magazines, are safeguarded in many ways. Proper training in operation and maintenance is the first defense, and so is physical separation, keeping one danger source as far from any other as the boat bay's servicing requirements permit. And in addition to all human safeguards, computers monitor the danger points continuously.
Unfortunately for Tepes, however, her computer net had been compromised. None of her crew knew it... and none of the computers cared. They existed only to carry out their human masters' orders, and the lines of code Horace Harkness had altered made just as much sense to them as the right instructions would have made.
The programs already buried and waiting in the main system began to activate as the execution commands flashed into the net from the minicomp plugged into Boat Bay Four's number five access slot, and all overTepes officers and ratings stared at their consoles, first in confusion, and then in alarm.
CIC went first, and the senior tracking officer swore as her holo display went suddenly blank. It was hardly a life-threatening disaster when the ship was safely in orbit around Hades, but it was irritating as hell, and there was no logical reason for it.
Except that there was one. The display had died for the simple reason that there was no longer any input to drive its imagers. For just an instant, the tracking officer felt relieved by the realization that the display's sudden shutdown hadn't been her people's fault, but then her forehead furrowed in fresh, and deeper, consternation. What in heaven's name could cause every sensor system to go down at once?
The program which had shut down Tepes' sensors finished the first part of its task and turned to the second. In the flicker of an eye, far too rapidly for any human operator to realize what was happening, it used CIC's computers as a launching pad to invade the Tactical Department's central processing system, established control... and ordered the system to reformat itself.
The tac officer of the watch gaped in disbelief as his panels started going down. It began with Tracking, but from there the failures leapt like wildfire, and display after display blinked and went dead. Radar One, Gravities One and Two, Lidar Three, Missile Defense, Main Fire Control... the nerve center of the ship's ability to fight, or defend herself, died even as he watched. Nor was the damage something which could be quickly fixed. The computers would have to be completely reprogrammed to put them back on-line, a nightmare task in a Navy with so few fully qualified technicians, and it all went so quickly the tac officer barely had time to realize it was happening before it was done.
Other programs capered and danced, exploding through the net like a plundering army. Internal alarms and central communication systems became so much useless junk as the software which ran them was reduced to meaningless gibberish. The ship's helm and drive rooms locked down. "The Morgue," in which every suit of battle armor was stored, suddenly sealed itself... and the subprocessers which monitored the ready suits of armor to be sure they were always prepared for instant use sent power surges down the monitoring leads to lobotomize their onboard computers and render them totally useless until teams of technicians spent the hours required to reprogram their software.
And while all that was going on, the computers responsible for monitoring the fueling needs of the ship's small craft received their own orders. Valves opened, and in Boat Bay One a technician who'd happened to be working on a minor glitch in Umbilical Two gaped in horror at what was happening. He leapt for the manual controls, trying to override, but there wasn't time... nor would it have mattered. For even if he'd been able to keep the emergency propellant from venting and mixing in Umbilical Two, it wouldn't have stopped precisely the same thing from happening in Umbilical Four.
The binary-based fuel was hypergolic, and even as the service tech screamed and turned to run, he knew it was pointless. The components mixing behind him were too... voracious for that, and Tepes bucked like a wounded horse as Boat Bay One blew apart. Twenty-six members of her crew and every small craft in the bay were ripped apart in the explosion, and alarms wailed as the blast blew back into the hull as well. Bulkheads shattered, and another forty-one men and women died as atmosphere belched out of the hideous wound in an almost perfect ring of fire.
Blast doors slammed, more alarms screamed, and officers and noncoms tried to shout orders over the com systems. But the co
m systems no longer functioned, and then the ship heaved again as Boat Bay Two blew up, exactly as Boat Bay One had done.
The sergeant walking towards Clinkscales staggered as the first explosion shuddered through the ship's hull. He threw his arms out for balance, lurching through a dance to stay on his feet which would have looked ludicrous under other circumstances. But there was nothing humorous about these circumstances, and as Clinkscales threw out his own left arm, bracing himself against the bulkhead, he saw the sergeants eyes dart past him to the minicomp still plugged into the access slot. There was no logical reason for it, but it didn't matter. The sergeant didn't know how it had been done, or why, but in that instant of intuitive insight, he knew who had caused it. It was as if his mind were somehow linked to the ensign's, for even as the sergeant guessed Clinkscales had somehow caused whatever was happening, Clinkscales knew he had.
There was no sign of the clumsy youngster who'd boarded GNS Jason Alvarez with Lady Harrington in the tall young man whose left hand thrust him suddenly away from the bulkhead. His push propelled him towards the sergeant, who was still fighting for balance while he opened his mouth to shout an alarm. But he never got it out, for even as he started to yell, Carson Clinkscales' left fist caught the front of his tunic and jerked him close. The two men went down, with Clinkscales on the bottom, and the sergeant felt something hard dig into his chest. He looked down into Clinkscales' eyes, confusion giving way to hate, but he still hadn't figured out what was pressing into his chest when Clinkscales squeezed the trigger and a burst of pulser fire ripped his heart apart.
The body convulsed atop Clinkscales, drenching him in a scalding rush of blood. He thrust it aside and rolled up on one knee just as the ship lurched to the explosion of Boat Bay Three and Horace Harkness' amplified voice blared through the galley of Boat Bay Four.