Virago One: A Hard Science Fiction Technothriller (Ace of Space Book 2)

by John Triptych

  “I’m outside the room where she locked herself in,” Lawson said. “If you can get CAIN to unlock the hatch, I can go in after her.”

  “Negative, stay there,” Ruthven said to him before tapping Vlad on the shoulder. “Can you get me a camera feed on that room where the intruder locked herself in?”

  “Wait a minute,” Vlad said while typing in commands on the AI console. “There.”

  The video feed showed the woman inside a small storeroom with a very narrow alcove surrounded by large cabinets from top to bottom. She was rummaging through the closets, trying to find materials to barricade the hatch. Ruthven reached over the Russian and sorted through the console menu until he got a detailed report on what the room contained.

  “Colonel, I can take her,” Lawson said over the com-link.

  Ruthven shook his head. “Negative. We don’t have the time to dig her out right now. She’s in a small storeroom and there’s no other way out. I’m going to have the ship’s AI seal her in so she’ll be neutralized until we deal with the Chinese.”

  “Roger that, Colonel,” Lawson said. “What do you want me to do now?”

  “Head over to sickbay and see if you can help Ganz and that Chinese guy,” Ruthven said. “Once the wounded man is patched up, I want you all back over here.”

  “Right away, Colonel,” Lawson said. “Over and out.”

  Ruthven placed his head beside Vlad’s ear. “I want you to have CAIN seal that storeroom so there’s no way she can get out. Then I want you to cut off the life support. She’ll probably have twenty minutes of air in that little cubbyhole at the most.”

  “Da, okay,” Vlad said as he started typing in commands. He still wasn’t feeling well, but at least he could put his mind on a task that would distract him from the constant sense of nausea that continued to float around at the back of his head.

  Chapter 22

  Right after she had wedged several plastic boxes into the rim of the hatch, Darian looked around. Sure enough, at the upper corner of the small room was a surveillance camera embedded into the bulkhead. Using the butt of her pistol, she broke through its transparent cover and smashed the camera lens into little bits of floating glass. Reaching into the device, she began tearing at the internal wiring until she was sure it no longer worked.

  Now they can’t see me, she thought. Nevertheless, there wasn’t much else she could do. Even though she was surrounded by large cabinets, the actual area she was floating around in was the size of a broom closet.

  Vlad was momentarily startled when his video feed to the storeroom went dead. He had not left the Virago’s battlesphere since the launch. “Ty che blyad? That woman is fighter.”

  Colonel Ruthven was already back sitting in his command chair. “What happened?”

  “She broke camera in storeroom,” Vlad said while continuing to type in his console. “Now we cannot see what goes on inside.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Is she locked in there?”

  Vlad nodded. “Da. I have engaged emergency seals for room. There is no way she can get out with a pistolet. It will take more than that to shoot through heavy duty hatch.”

  “Fine, now cut off her air supply.”

  “In minute,” Vlad said. “Way system works is I can only depressurize all inner compartments, except battlesphere, or I cut off life support to everything. So now I have to make special script that would allow CAIN to only cut off air in little room.”

  “Okay,” Ruthven said. “Just get it done as quickly as possible. Don’t forget you still have to work on getting the arming codes for the casaba howitzers. We need those before we hit the Chinese.”

  “Da, da,” Vlad said. “I am still little dizzy, so have some patience.”

  Ganz floated back into the battlesphere’s bridge area, followed closely by Herbert Eng Wu and Major Vince Lawson. Once the three of them were inside, Ruthven pushed a button on his virtual keyboard, sealing the inner airlocks of the compartment.

  Lawson floated over to his command chair, wedged himself into it and started strapping down. He was somewhat disappointed in having to hold up until after the attack on the Chinese space station before they had to deal with the intruder, but he had quietly vowed to himself never to second-guess his superior. The girl would have to wait, even though having an armed enemy in their midst was bothering him.

  Ganz grimaced as he slowly made his way back to his assigned chair. His shoulder was still numb from the extended dose of anesthesia, but some feeling had returned to his left arm. The fleshy part of his right leg had a number of staples on it to close the wound, and the holes in his skinsuit had been patched over. Being numb in two places filled him with intense frustration and anger. As he began to place himself into the chair, his partially medicated leg bumped against its side, sending a spasm of pain shooting up his spine. Ganz let out a muffled curse.

  Herbert floated over beside him. “Here, let me help.”

  Ganz turned and angrily pushed him away, sending the young fusion engineer tumbling backwards before he crashed upside down into the side of a chair at the opposite end. “You yellowbelly bastard! You were right next to her. You could have done something- instead you raised your hands like a goddamned coward and begged for mercy!”

  “She pointed the gun at me,” Herbert said meekly as he began to righten himself. “She could have killed me.”

  Ganz got out of his chair and began to float towards him. “You could have tried to make a grab for her weapon. Now I’m going to make you pay for not doing that.”

  Ruthven glared at the two of them. “Enough. Ganz, get back to your station.”

  Ganz was still fuming, but he realized that his actions were becoming counterproductive. He turned around and used his right hand to flip himself back into his chair, but not before giving Herbert a menacing stare. “When this is over I’m going to deal with you.”

  Herbert gave a pleading look at Ruthven. “Please, make him leave me alone!”

  Ruthven rotated his command chair so they could see the seriousness in his eyes. “You will all behave yourselves accordingly from now on. There’s a lot of things happening, and unless we work together, we’ll all end up dead. Do I make myself clear?”

  Ganz was still angry at Herbert, but the colonel’s words made sense. Gritting his teeth, he nodded silently. Herbert did the same.

  Vlad shrugged with resignation while continuing to check the lines of code in his view screen. “Pity, we don’t have Kate with us anymore. I wonder what happened to her.”

  Lawson rolled his eyes at the obvious rhetoric. “What do you think happened to her? She’s probably dead by now.”

  “Da, it done,” Vlad said as he executed a command line in the spacecraft’s AI. “I have cut off life support for little storeroom. That includes lowering air pressure.”

  Lawson glanced at his watch. “I’d give her about twenty minutes of air before she suffocates. Shall I head over there after an hour just to make sure, Colonel?”

  Ruthven shook his head. “Negative. We’ll get her body out once we take care of the Chinese. In the meantime, all of you sit back and relax. Nobody goes out of this module for the time being.”

  Darian sensed it. There was a sudden stillness in the air, indicating that the life support in the storeroom had been cut. They either want me to come out and surrender, or they just want to kill me remotely, she thought.

  Double-checking the lever on the exit hatch, she quickly realized that it had been remotely locked when a steel bolt from the side had been extended to cover the rim. Well, that confirms it, she thought. They want me dead. Making some rough calculations in her head based on the size of the room, Darian figured she had no more than fifteen minutes before using up all the oxygen in the place. There was a small oxygen cylinder built into her helmet, but that only gave an additional five minutes of air the moment it would activate.

  Her forearm still hurt while she began to rummage through the cabinets for anything useful. The room seem
ed to serve as extra storage for shipboard repairs. There were plenty of tubing and sealing materials meant to fix and patch up the hull. Darian was able to place two small composite pipes along her right forearm and she wrapped adhesive patches around it to form a crude splint. She could barely get a grip with her right hand, but it would have to do in the meantime.

  With the splint in place, Darian started looking for anything that could somehow extend the room’s air supply. For a short while, she nervously combed through the boxes of supplies, her desperation increasing by the minute. In the bottom of one of the containers was an old Vika oxygen candle that had apparently been used and discarded- perhaps during a test- and inadvertently left there.

  Darian wanted to yell out in triumph, but she needed to make sure it could still work though. These life support “candles” were named as such because they were cylindrically shaped canisters that contained a liter of lithium perchlorate, and would nominally provide a day’s worth of oxygen once ignited. Originally invented by the Russians almost a century before, these simple devices were still being issued as emergency life support equipment in case of system-wide failures.

  Running her hand along the side of the oxygen candle, Darian checked to see if it still had fuel. While it looked like the lithium perchlorate filling was still intact, it seemed that the igniter had failed. One of the technicians must have tested the device to see if it worked during the construction of the spacecraft’s hull and inadvertently left it there. With her euphoria rapidly dissipating, Darian hurriedly examined the fuse. The flash igniter had apparently corroded away, leaving only a used firing pin.

  Darian grimaced. That was it then. She was going to die in a matter of minutes unless she could somehow work a miracle. But what could be done? There had to be a way of making oxygen with the materials she had. Wait a minute.

  Turning around, she let go of the oxygen candle while plucking the floating gun from the air. Releasing the magazine from the pistol’s handgrip, she took out a bullet and examined it. The ammunition was a 9mm caseless cartridge, with a lower half made out of solid propellant that vaporized when the gun was fired. The pistol itself used an electric charge to fire the cartridge, eliminating the need for a percussion cap. That was the solution. If she could remove the corroded igniter fuel from the top part of the candle and replace it with the bullet propellant, then it ought to create enough combustion to react with the lithium perchlorate filling to produce oxygen.

  Using the mini wrench on her multi-tool, Darian began to separate the metal bullets from the solid propellant before placing them in a partially opened cargo container to prevent the pieces from floating around in the microgravity. She had twelve such cartridges left, and figured that each successive burn should give her an additional ten minutes of air. In the end she disassembled all the remaining ammunition from the weapon.

  Realizing that the ones in the battlesphere might find out what she was doing, Darian located the smoke alarm and ripped out its power cable. After another minute of searching, she found a hidden backup detector and used plastic sheeting from one of the cargo boxes to cover up its sensor.

  With the room being rapidly depleted of oxygen, Darian furiously scraped away the corroded fuel from the igniter before replacing the upper part of the candle with the caseless propellant. A small alarm emanating from her helmet momentarily startled her, before she realized that the skinsuit was now using the emergency five-minute cartridge of oxygen. This is either going to work or I’ll be dead.

  Working quickly, Darian disassembled the pistol, leaving the barrel and top slide floating in the now unbreathable air while she pushed the rear part of the gun that contained the electrical striker in deeply along the sides of the candle until it could conceivably ignite the embedded propellant. Bracing the cylinder in between a cabinet door, she leaned back as far as she could and pulled the trigger.

  The detonation happened instantly. The Vika candle had somehow ignited, filling the small room with a mixture of oxygen and caustic grey smoke. The resulting small explosion had thrown Darian backwards, and she collided with the barricaded hatch. She had perhaps overcompensated with the use of too much propellant, and the side effect produced a burning stench that obscured the room, but at least the miasma had enough breathable air in it to sustain her for the time being.

  With her skinsuit’s internal oxygen depleted, Darian lifted the visor of her helmet and breathed it all in. She began coughing furiously less than a second later. The smell was horrible, and the dust in the air irritated her lungs. It was a small victory, but at least she was still alive for the time being, and that’s what mattered most of all.

  Chapter 23

  Formed less than thirty years ago, the Space Force had the distinction of being the newest branch of the People’s Liberation Army. Much of the service’s officer corps had been transferred directly from the PLA Air Force and the Strategic Support Force. This nucleus of officers was given a completely new directive: to ensure Chinese military superiority in space. Due to a lack of technical expertise and professional experience in aerospace operations, much of the branch’s evolving doctrines had to be done by trial and error, and by careful study with regards to the space militaries of other nations. Only two military space academies had been set up in the mainland over the past three decades, and many of its instructors were recruited from the China National Space Agency. Despite all this, the Space Force quickly became the most prestigious branch of the PLA, and the demand for recruitment and transfer to this particular service far outstripped the positions that were available.

  While the militaries of other nations began to use NERVA rockets as their initial warships in space, the PLA Space Force bided its time, spending most of its resources in building up their infrastructure at Lagrange-5 in cislunar space. Even though the Chinese military eventually deployed two NERVA spacecraft for their fleet, these ships were used more for crew training purposes than as actual armed patrol vessels. Within a span of ten years, the Space Force had an operational space station and drydock in their exclusive Lagrange point, despite vehement protests by other UN members who claimed that the area should be freely accessible by all nations. The Chinese leadership merely shrugged their collective shoulders and ignored the complaints, their military warning away anyone who came too close to their orbital installation. In time, the other countries realized that the Chinese would not be vacating their claim over the Lagrange point, and nothing short of a war would force them out.

  Western intelligence services and numerous international space agencies soon reported that the PLA Space Force had begun construction of two very large spacecraft in their floating drydock. It was obvious to just about everyone that the Chinese were building warships. When the UN attempted to force a resolution to deploy an inspection team over to their space station, the Chinese, being permanent members of the Security Council, naturally vetoed the motion. Not long after, the US Air Force had expanded its own military infrastructure program at Lagrange-4, and the world’s attention was gripped by this new arms race in space. In the end, the rest of the Earth could only watch while the two most powerful militaries of the world began to outspend each other when it came to building more powerful assets in this new frontier.

  The United States still had a slight technological and economic advantage over the Chinese however, and their military station in Lagrange-4 soon had better capabilities, since the space militaries of the United Kingdom and Japan helped out with their construction efforts. In time, the Anglo-American-Japanese alliance, as it was called in the media, soon became a signed, mutual-defense space treaty amongst the three nations, while the Chinese quietly continued to go about their own way. The other countries of the world, led by the European Union and India, also continued to protest against the militarization of space, and used their combined influence to endlessly enforce the nuclear test ban treaties in cislunar space. Eventually bowing to heavy political and economic pressure, both the United States and China co
ntinued to observe the terms of the treaty, and had yet to deploy their Orion spacecraft using nuclear detonations. Both sides knew that once an Orion used its actual drive, it would bring the world closer to a military conflict of unimaginable proportions.

  Tian-fu Space Station in Lagrange-4 consisted of the habitat modules and the adjoining drydock. The former was a haphazard assembly of cylindrical capsules mated together by adaptor hatch links, looking much like a child’s building block toy floating in the darkened void. The drydock was nothing more than a long, narrow access tube along a skeletal support pier, with attached outer rails to ferry large modules back and forth for assembly and maintenance. The station had two operational Orion battlecruisers, with a third halfway in completion. The crews had already been briefed on what happened when the Virago had shot out of Earth’s atmosphere, and were on full alert.

  Senior Colonel Jiahao Shen and his crew were already manning the command bridge of the Xin Long, the first ever Orion battlecruiser deployed by the Chinese military. The spacecraft itself was still attached to the drydock, but all airlocks and compartments were sealed and ready for immediate deployment. Unlike the bullet-shaped Orion warships of the US Air Force, the Orion spacecraft of the PLASF had spheroid hulls, resembling gigantic white tennis balls attached to a set of giant pistons, ending with a thick circular plate mated to its end, looking much like a memorabilia stand.

  Born in Henan Province, Shen had first joined up with the PLA Air Force, where he graduated first in his class at the Air Force Aviation University in Jilin Province. Moving steadily up the ranks, he had become an executive officer in the 2nd Fighter Division by the time of the Spratlys conflict. His proven skills as a pilot and leader easily got him a transfer to the Space Force a few years later, and in due time he was selected to command the country’s first Orion warship. Shen wasn’t very political, yet he was forced to play the role of loyal Chinese Communist Party member in order to get to where he was now. He didn’t particularly like it, but he knew the rules of the game.