by E. R. Mason
Chapter 22
We were still very well equipped from the previous assault on the cable drop area. One swat member had brought a satchel with medium velocity charges to have been used to open hatchways, if necessary. They would serve well as booby-trap explosives.
We went over the plan and divided up the weapons appropriately. The phony people trap would be set up with no visible giveaways at all. They would take their time and do it right before the false internet messages went out. Nira even had a short hologram video module of her family, which would be set up to repeat in the designated area to make it look like people were there waiting.
The first team of two swat members moved into the corridor with weapon lights, using the bait and hook method to cross the dicey areas. One would emerge into the open while the second covered him. At the first sign of conflict, the backup team member would saturate his field of vision with firepower, being careful not to hit his teammate. They would use all the hidden access tunnels and cable drops and only risk open corridors when absolutely necessary. Fearfully, we watched them move out and successfully disappear through a service crawlway a short distance away.
I took Perk aside and went over our plan. I nicknamed it “Pipe Dream." He listened with fire in his eyes, as though he couldn’t wait. “You understand there’s not much likelihood of us coming back from this. You don’t have to come along.”
“Screw that! Try to stop me.”
“I figured. I just had to say it. We need two suits and a way outside without opening an airlock and setting off every damn warning indicator on the ship. That’s critical. If they think any of us have left the ship they’ll be on alert everywhere. We want them to stay relaxed and overconfident. I’m thinking maybe we can get out through the cooling fluid waste dump.”
“Shit out the bottom of the ship. How appropriate.”
“Ever been submerged in a space suit and come out of it into vacuum?”
“Good one, Adrian. You’ve managed to find the one thing I haven’t done.”
“That’s because I don’t think it’s ever been done. We’ll need Pell to set up the dump and make it look like a routine purge so we don’t attract any attention. We can’t use EVA suits because we need to stay away from the main airlocks, and we don’t want them noticing any spacesuits are missing. We’ll have to use flight suits. O2 will be no problem. We can plug into the ports outside all we want. It’s only registered on the suit telemetry and we can override all of that. We’ll have to decompress in the suits since we can’t use any of the airlocks. We can access the coolant control area through the main hangar bay. That’ll be the riskiest area to cross, but since they think they have level two secured, maybe we can use that to our advantage. We’ll use the suits for the scout craft. We’ll have to carry all the crap we need with us. We’ll also need some small remote control charges to take out their control panels if the opportunity arises, but we can’t go near any of our armories. It’d be too risky.”
“No problem there. The geology guys have a supply depot with those kinds of charges. It’s off the B-deck hangar bay, practically on our way.”
“So, can two men really move a Hercules motor?”
“I did a twelve-month tour collecting Earth orbit space garbage. We collected the stuff into scows and then attached Hercs to put the crap in low orbit around the sun. I got paid good, plus community service credit. Most of the Hercules work was done with tugs. Can you and I move them? I’ll bet you a bottle of scotch you and I can.”
“It’ll probably be a bastard. I know they drop out of the tubes with their maneuvering thruster packs armed and ready, but it’s usually done by preprogrammed computer control. We’ll have to be at each end, squirting those jets manually. It‘s quite a bit of mass. We can hide within touching distance of the belly of the ship, but there’ll be a big gamble crossing over to the other ship. We could be seen.”
“Yeah, that will probably be a thirty-second window.”
“I don’t know anything about the docking procedure, do you?”
“Chemical weld. There are two controls on the attachment fixture. Dock and Anchor. You get the thing in place and hit Dock, and a long docking clamp opens up. You hit Anchor and a heater comes on and mixes the chemical. It eats into the surface you’re mating to. You are locked in place after three minutes, and in twenty minutes no force known to man will separate that motor fixture from its cargo.”
“We’ll have to do it twice. We can’t risk one being enough.”
“I’m free the rest of the day. I don’t have anything better to do.”
“You’re something else, you know that?”
“That’s what my mother always says.”
“I’ll hold you to that bottle of scotch, by God.”
“It’s in my quarters, under my pillow.”
“Wow, great minds do think alike.”
When we told Pell what we needed, he looked at us as though we were crazy. Having Pell look at you like you’re crazy is an extremely unsettling thing since he’s the one that usually looks strange. Because the comms could not be used, everything had to be set up on a timetable. With all that we had to do, timing came down to a wild guess.
We strapped on our weapons and gear, and as we headed for the door, the others looked up from their level two attack-huddle and watched us exit. The door slid shut behind us, leaving only the empty surrealism of total darkness.
Three separate, independent attacks. Success with any one would be gratifying. It gave me pause for optimism for the first time since the nightmare had begun. Let the enemy bask in their self-assurance and revere their superior weapons. We were now terrorists, with attitude. So, first stop, the hangar on level two, the level they thought they controlled, to pick up the suicide suits we needed.
We stealthed the dark corridors as safely as possible, wishing we had infrareds, thinking the enemy surely did. We used our weapon lights as little as possible which made the journey even more macabre. Though the corridors were deserted, they were sporadically littered with an assortment of items, some left over from the loss of gravity, others abandoned by those on exodus to the tail. Without speaking, we took turns leading and finally reached the closed doors of an elevator. We quietly forced them open with our gloved hands and squeezed through onto the service ladder. It was easy enough to climb down to level two in the dark, a touch harder for only one of us to force the doors apart while the other waited on the ladder above.
In the light, the level two environment was even more cluttered and foreboding. I hated skulking around but our plan was long shot enough, so we crawled through a service tunnel that paralleled the corridor to the flight crew ready room. Access to the ready room was through a swinging service door on the curved wall near the floor. To our dismay, it creaked loudly no matter how carefully we tried. Had there been any intruders waiting, they would have been alerted.
Amber light was strobing on and off in the darkened ready room from an emergency light which had malfunctioned. The deflated suits and helmets were in lockers against the wall. We stayed low in the flickering light, reaching up only high enough to open the locker doors to empty them.
It quickly became apparent that carrying suits, helmets, weapons and satchels would be difficult. We carefully considered which to leave behind; quickly decided nothing could, and went about strapping everything on ourselves until we both looked like street people with guns. Perk held up one finger and ducked out the door to the highbay. He went scooting across the floor in the dim light, accessed a scout ship, and returned a moment later with two beautiful infrared goggles. We quickly pulled them over our eyes and switched on. The green world came blissfully into view.
The shadowy highbay of the hangar was deserted. Between the scout ships and support equipment, plenty of cover existed for our crossover. We could then get into the geology explosive storage compartment using the Ex/O codes and crawl our way above
the ceiling to the coolant purge control room. After that came some stuff I didn’t want to think about.
We zigzagged through the hangar to the alcove housing the support storage rooms. There were three doors, all with keypads. I wasted time opening the first only to find lifting fixtures and component parts. The next one was the one. Inside the door, another door with the big explosives symbol painted in red. We ignored the antistat straps and warning signs hanging alongside and barged in.
The search took longer than hoped. Finally, Perk came up with a tiny portable remote control strapped to a wallet-sized explosive. We took a dozen. You can’t have too many wallet sized explosives when you’re about to attack a spacecraft you know nothing about.
We found access to the ceiling between the two doors. With both the outer and inner doors closed, we felt safe, for the moment. We raised our infrareds and switched on weapon lights.
“Adrian, I don’t believe we made it this far!”
“For God’s sake, don’t say stuff like that.”
“Obviously we can’t fit through this ceiling hatch.”
“One of us goes up first. The other hands up all the packs.”
“After you. It’s your plan.”
“Gee, thanks. It looks like about a three-foot crawl space. We’ll have to drag everything the whole way.”
“Yeah, but think of the fun when we get there.”
“I’ve been trying not to. We’re ahead of schedule, I think. One hour, forty-five minutes before Pell floods the disposal tubes.”
Perk smiled in the wavering light. “We’re just too good.”
The crawl was even worse than expected. Everything is supposed to be secured on a starship. There should have been nothing loose up there. Instead, we had to maneuver around wire bundles and over fiber junction boxes. It developed into a pattern of crawling haphazardly for a minute or two, lighting up the area to be sure we were following the right structural landmarks, then dragging suits, helmets, weapons, and satchels up in front of us. Then, do it again. I was thanking God the whole way the gravity was not still one and a half G’s. It was exhausting enough as it was.
We knew we were in the right zone when a portion of large tube blocked the way ahead. Beyond it, several other tubes lay in parallel. Perk went left; I went right, in search of an access way down. At that point any would have done. A few minutes later Perk hit me with his light on and off and I knew he had found it. I crawled over to meet him and we listened quietly, not expecting anyone to be in the area below.
Perk was just about to twist the latch to let the access cover fall open when there was a loud clang from below. We froze.
A scuffling sound followed, then silence.
We waited.
Five or ten excruciating minutes passed and we began to hear whispering; human whispering. Through the infrareds I saw Perk shake his head. I silently agreed. He twisted the latch and strained to hold the cover by it. He lowered it just enough to see part of the room below. Nothing. He slowly lowered it further.
He called out in a whisper, “Hey down there. It’s okay. We’re the good guys.”
Silence.
He let the door fall open fully, but from years of combat training, did not stick his head in.
A female voice finally whispered back, “Who is it?”
“Special forces. Show yourself.”
“You show yourself!”
“Do you have any weapons?”
“No.”
“Well, put them away, okay? We have explosives with us.”
“Oh, okay.”
Perk pushed himself up and looked at me. “What’d you think?”
“Where else we gonna go?”
He pulled one suit forward, stuffed it into the open hole and let it drop to the floor. Nothing happened. He dropped one satchel down. Still nothing. He looked up at me, saluted, pushed his legs down into the opening, and dropped down into the room. I watched from above as he surveyed the area, switched on a light, and then signaled me for the rest of the gear. After carefully handing down the last helmet, I followed along.
They were two female crewmen. They looked disheveled and scared to death. One held a plasma pistol and had no idea how to use it. Her long brown hair fell just above the data processing badge by her name tag, Brenna Hurt. She fidgeted with the gun as though nothing on earth would ever set it off. Like her companion, the makeup was pretty smeared and there had been plenty of tears. Her short redheaded friend stood partly behind her, as though the gun would protect them both. Terra Rogers, also data processing.
Perk finished organizing the gear and stood up. “I’ve sealed our stuff in the waterproof compartments. How much time, Adrian?”
“Sixty-five minutes. We’re still early.”
Brenna asked hopefully, “Are you here to help us?”
I tried to look compassionate in the dim light. “In a manner of speaking. I’d say you’re pretty safe right here for the time being.”
“If you knew what we’ve been through.”
“We have an idea.”
“There were six of us. It was supposed to be safe on level two. There were lights on there. Lesha was supposed to come back and tell us it was okay. She never did. The others went there anyway and they never came back either. We hid in a storeroom waiting for them. Then the awful ugly things went by. We ran in the dark. We got lost for hours, but we found this gun on the floor in a corridor. Then we ended up here.”
“What ugly things?”
“It looked like people in plastic bags all hooked together, being towed someplace by someone or some machine we didn’t see. It was terrible. I can’t stop thinking about it.”
“Well, you two did well getting here. That took a lot of courage. Perk and I are about to see if we can do something about the bad guys. You two can help us get ready if you want. It would be a big help.”
And they were clearly happy to help. Anything to get mentally away from the dread that had been shadowing them. There is a curious storeroom for tragedies we all possess; a special accessory to our consciousness. When things have happened that are so brutally bad we can’t stop thinking about them, it is a space for temporary storage so we can continue with tasks of more immediate priority. Put-aside storage is an attribute designed to allow us to remain temporarily rational, even when our surroundings have become absurdly ludicrous. It could be considered management of the bizarre, leaving us to eventually end up with two dark rooms to deal with, the one on the outside and the one on the inside. It is very difficult to say which is worse, although you can at least shut your eyes on the outside.
We began the suit up process wondering if Pell had been successful with the computer purge commands. There was also the question of how bad the inflow of coolant would be. Would it crash in on us, or come gradually up like in a sinking ship? The coolant engineers would know. We did not. It was another chance on a long list. Plus, the orange flight suits were never intended to be used for open space work. They utilize a chest plate and belly-packs to accommodate a pilot in a tight control seat. They are thin-skinned with few bells and whistles and were certainly not intended for submersion. The little emergency suit jets would be just fine. The packs were the problem. They wouldn’t be under the antifreeze coolant for long, but could they take it at all?
I began to doubt myself for avoiding the main airlocks. Maybe we could have used one and not been detected. We would have needed decompression time in there. We’d have been sitting ducks. You can’t run a space suit at fourteen point seven pounds per square inch of pressure, Earth standard. You can, but you look and feel like the Pillsbury doughboy, all puffed up and barely able to move. To get any flexibility in the suit at all, the pressure has to be set way down, and that means special gas to breathe. So you sit in the airlock and acclimate. I could imagine being stuck in there waiting and have the wrong face look through the inspection window. Given that, or this, I’d take this way every time. Even
if it did mean as Perk said, being shit out the underside of the ship.
We pulled our black suit liners out of the suits and stretched them on, being sure to keep the coolant tubes in their holders. With help from Terra, I opened the flexible flatpack on the suit-back and stepped into the legs. The coolant tubes and telemetry lines snapped into place. With a little wrestling, my hands slid into the gloves and worked themselves into place. I had done this dozens of times, but this time felt different. It was an odd feeling. In all the previous mission suit-ups our very lives depended on the suit being right. Nothing ever seemed more important than that. This time we were using pilot suits and this suiting suddenly felt more important. Not just one life depended on it. The lives of all remaining souls on board did.
Behind me, Terra closed the flatpack and latched it. I turned and found her holding my helmet. We looked at each other and I could tell she was wordlessly praying. Silently, I joined her. She held out my helmet, and for a moment I’m not sure I was ever closer to anyone. She smiled and seemed to know if she saw me again it would mean things were okay.
I turned to find Perk, suited up, flexing his right glove. He looked up at me approvingly. “You wanna pressurize before we access the tube, or after, Adrian?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never done this before. Can we get the tube hatches open either way?”
“It’s the clean-out entrance. It’s pretty big. It’s just outside the door behind you. Let’s the four of us go see how it opens. We can decide then.”
“Fifty minutes. We better get to it.”
Outside on the tube, the clean-out hatch looked like the door to a submarine: big lever to throw, big wheel to turn. To my surprise, Brenna and Terra handled it. I started to raise my helmet and paused to look at Perk. “External telemetry send and receive off. Closed com, private.”
Perk nodded, “Roger.”
We capped off, reached under the chest plate and hit the master power levers, tapped the gradient pressurization key on our sleeves, and heard the suit pumps whine. We stepped passed our new friends, into the purge tube, and turned to watch them close and seal it behind us. On my sleeve LCD display, the suit came up to thirteen pounds and then went into its slow let-down mode. There were no alarms, no red Xs, and the power cell was topped out. Perk's appeared to be running okay as well.
We maneuvered around and took seats as best we could on either side of the tube, facing each other. I glanced over at the inlet port on my right. It was near the bottom of the tube, possibly a good sign; hopefully, a moderately fast fill up, rather than a waterfall of pressure. On my left, about thirty feet away, was the big exit door, closed and sealed from space, waiting to open and flush us out.
We had a forty-five-minute wait. Perk squelched in over the com, “Well, what’d you wanna do now?”
“Wake up?”
“Yeah, maybe if we click out space suit boots together three times….” Perk looked down at his sleeve readout, then back at me. “You know, trying to get this far, I almost forgot.”
“What’s that?”
“That those bastards are out there right now killing our people.”
“It’s why we’re here.”
Perk adjusted his position and glanced at the timer on his suit sleeve again. “I know you’re a high time pilot, Adrian. Why are you here rather than in a left seat somewhere?”
“Couldn’t get what I wanted. Lost some credits in a poker game.”
He laughed. “I fly. Not so much time in yet. I’m working my way up. Tell me, what’s the dumbest thing you ever did with a control yoke in your hand, and I’ll bet you I top it.”
“Hmm, there’s some choices there. Let’s see. One that sticks out, I was getting checked out in a Lancer. They look just like a manta ray with no tail. They're touchy. A little control goes a long way. I was practicing dead stick stalls. Straight up, kill the engine, let it nose over, then recover. Lancers like to roll wicked to one side when they nose over. That day it kept rolling left. So I got this idea if I kicked in full port thrusters for a few seconds I could make the thing actually do a sort of falling leaf type dive. Nobody told me that was a bad thing to do. So I take the Lancer straight up, and at the pitch-over kick in the port thrusters. That thing flipped over to starboard so hard I couldn’t tell if I was upside down and falling or right side up and diving. And to make matters worse, the thing went into a spin nice and flat, too. All I could see out the windshield was a green blur. So many G’s I couldn’t lean forward to look for the sky. I just couldn’t tell if I was spinning upside down or right side up. I did not want to eject upside down, and I did not want to eject from a perfectly good aircraft and then have to explain it. I had to hold the controls at neutral, because obviously if you’re upside down the controls are reversed, and you can really screw things up if you put in the wrong corrections.”
“So how’d you fix it?”
“I didn’t. It spun down for almost ten thousand feet, and then came out all by itself. It came out in a nose down dive at the ground, but it went back up when I asked. Every part of me was puckered up as tight as it could go, all the way home.”
Perk’s squelch kicked in and out with his laugh. “Okay, mine’s not as glamorous, but it will win on stupidity. I was flying a T280 trainer. As I’m sure you know, it’s a twin with those little astro jet engines. I was practicing flying on one engine. You can’t take off with just one engine in those, they just don’t have enough power. So if you have to land with just one engine, you don’t get to go around and try again. You have to make it the first time. So I kill one engine and when I’m done practicing, the thing won’t spool up. I was really worried about not making the landing in just one shot. I set up perfectly for the landing, doing everything I could to bring it in over the threshold right on target. And I did.”
“So?”
“Forgot to put the gear down.”
I had to catch my breath to stop my own laugh from squelching on. “Aw, that’s not so bad. You know the worn out joke about there’s two kinds of pilots, right?”
“Oh yeah, the ones that forgot and the one’s that are gonna. But that didn’t seem like much consolation to the FBO officer. I wouldn’t tell anyone that story, except now it don’t seem to matter that much.”
In a sobering moment, we both paused to look at the empty inlet port.