Beginnings-eARC

by David Weber

  “Okay, but if they were—I figure there's got to be some manual release, right, Skipper?”

  It was reassuring that, only two months into his first year on his deep space tour, senior crewmembers were calling him “skipper.” “Well, in the event that the subassembly is, for some reason, frozen in place, there are ways for technicians to jettison it manually. But that would be a suicide mission, given the exposure levels.”

  Finder had removed the bolts, and drifted a curved section of tube outward, revealing a narrower, rectangular passageway beyond. Half a dozen meters on, it turned to the right.

  Roderigo Burns peered over Lee's shoulder. “Is the airlock around that bend?”

  Lee shook his head. “Still no airlock. Just beyond that corner, there's another access panel that will put us in a safety-venting and access conduit that runs all around the unit. Then two double access panels before we reach the interior. Now, let's go—unless you want to increase your exposure time.”

  Burns' eyes widened and, kicking off from the opposite side of the tube, he jetted into the exposed passageway.

  “A good officer always knows how to motivate his men,” drawled Finder, “After you, Lieutenant.”

  * * *

  When they turned the bend in the narrow passageway, they found a plainly marked access panel in front of them. Hazard hatchings of yellow and black surrounded the six orange-colored bolts securing it in place.

  Lewis was staring at the panel. “So, in order to get inside, we have to trigger these six explosive bolts and let this hunk of metal shoot straight into our faces?”

  Lee shook his head. “Those six orange spots aren't explosive bolts, Lewis. They're frangible nuts. We can trigger them ourselves, one at a time, from the outside. That will not only control the release of the panel, but allow the inert gases on the other side to bleed off without blowing us halfway back down the ejection tube.”

  Burns turned to stare at Lee. “Hey, Skipper how do you know all that stuff?” He sounded genuinely respectful, even a little relieved.

  “I know it because I read the specs less than an hour ago.”

  “And,” added Jan histrionically, “it is also because he is a hand-picked officer, and a member of our beloved Customs Patrol: humanity's most elite formation of misfits, political undesirables, and problem children. All hail the Customs Patrol.”

  “All hail,” echoed Burns and Lewis with a level of enthusiasm that they usually reserved for latrine duty.

  “That's the spirit,” Lee drawled with a grin at Finder. “Now, let's get going.”

  * * *

  The terminal access panel—the one into the engine room itself—was still responsive to commands. Lewis hot-wired the keypad and bled out most of the atmosphere while Lee deployed the rest of the team for an assault entry. “I'll take point,” he said, glancing back at Finder. Who apparently understood from that look not to debate the point. “The Sergeant will provide covering fire while you follow me in, Burns. We skim low and to the center of the room. There's plenty of cover around the power plant itself.” Burns nodded nervously, probably more at the notion of proximity to a nuclear reactor than armed adversaries. “Lewis, we go on three. One, two . . .”

  On “three,” Lewis triggered the panel release; it swung out toward them. Lee angled around its opening arc, got low, kicked hard. He skimmed across three meters of deck, reached the reactor housing, and curled himself behind a control panel. A moment later, Burns jammed himself into the same space. “Okay, Roderigo,” Lee muttered, “you check our twelve; I'll scan our six.”

  They peeked around the manifolds, control surfaces, and shielding of the nuclear rocket. No movement. Lee chinned open the circuit to Finder. “Sarge, talk to me.”

  “I would if I saw anything, L.T. All quiet.”

  “Okay. You and Lewis enter, seal the panel behind you. Then sweep the room from opposite directions. Burns and I will provide bases of fire.”

  “Aye, aye, Skip.”

  Twenty tense seconds later, the engine room was secure, and Finder was able to report a whopping three millirem per hour exposure level.

  “So no leaks,” breathed Lewis gratefully.

  “And no bodies,” Finder pointed out. “What next, L.T.?”

  Lee glanced at the entry to the passageway that ran the length of the ship's keel-boom, up to the habitation modules. “We go forward. Right down the middle of that damned fifty-meter shooting range.”

  “Right,” said Finder quickly. “Okay, now listen up, ratings. L.T. says we're going forward. Burns, swap weapons with Lewis; I want you on point with me for this one. Lewis, you use the bullpup to provide a base of fire. You follow the lead element at ten meters. Stay close to the outer wall of the passageway; no reason to line ourselves up like duckpins. Right, L.T.?”

  Lee nodded while he wondered, what was Finder doing? Granted, Lee had indicated the next objective, and tactical deployment was the top kick's duty, but Finder had jumped in too quickly, as if he wanted to make sure that his deployment outline was the one used. And besides, Lee thought, toggling the private channel with his chin, Burns, not Lewis, was the best shot with the bullpup carbine they had brought. “Sarge,” he began—

  Finder's response on the private channel was curt. “Trust me, L.T. I know Lewis isn't the better shot, but that's not what's important here.”

  “Then what is importa—?”

  “L.T., trust me. Please.”

  “All right, Sergeant—with the proviso that we're going to have an after-action chat.”

  Finder nodded. “You're the boss, Boss.” Finder switched back to general address. “Okay, Lewis, since you're our base of fire the rest of the way, you're our point-man into the passage. Get to the side as soon as you're in, and once the entry is secured, tuck down to the right; L.T. you'd go in last, and tuck down to the left. Sir, we go on your count.”

  Lee nodded. “Lewis, you go on ‘three.' One, two—”

  On “three,” Burns tripped the door release and Lewis drift-stepped into the passageway, Lee felt a fumbling at his left hand. Looking down, he saw Finder sneaking an odd-looking pistol into it. Well, pistol was a charitable term. It looked like a long, anorexic tube with a magazine at the rear and the manufacturing characteristics of a zip gun.

  “What the—?”

  Finder's voice on the private channel was a fast hiss, “Eight rounds. Gyrojet ammo. Recoilless for zero-gee. Don't use your ten-millimeter. Stay alive.” And then Finder was popping through the entry after Burns, barking orders. Lee was still so surprised he almost forgot to follow.

  When he did, he discovered the rest of the team towing themselves down into crouched positions; Lee did so too, tugging his body into a ball to the left of the door.

  “All clear, L.T.,” reported Finder. “Pretty quiet, for a hijacking.”

  Lee kept his eyes up the corridor that dwindled away from them. “Yes and no. I wasn't expecting to find any bad guys back here, only crew bodies. One of which may be there.” Lee pointed.

  Burns, squinting, nodded. “Yeah. Looks like a floater. Almost at the other end of the tube.”

  “Twenty-three meters away,” reported Lewis, who was just taking his right eye away from the carbine's laser rangefinder.

  “Active sensors off, Lewis,” Lee snapped. “They may not be patrolling this part of the ship, but they could have seeded with automated detection systems. So from here on, we go in old school: no sensors, no comm, hand signals only.”

  “But L.T.,” Burns began.

  Lee made a throat-cutting gesture with the edge of his left hand. Burns got the idea and shut up.

  Finder nodded, pointed to Lee and Lewis, made a push-back gesture with his palm, raised all his fingers, held out a stationary thumbs up and waited.

  Simple enough. Finder was simply reconfirming the order that Lee and Lewis were to follow at a range of ten meters. Lee replied with a thumb's up.

  Finder nodded, tapped Burns on the shoulder and pushed firm
ly off the deck at a shallow angle, drifting to the right. Burns copied him, but drifted to the left. Lee waited until they were about eight meters away, then nodded to Lewis and copied Finder's jump.

  However, being the only native Dirtsider in the team, Lee's free-jump was not as precise. He had to push back from the wall just before reaching the spot where the dead crewman was floating, Finder had already sent Burns ahead to secure the entry into the inhabited areas and now pointed at the corpse's wounds. Lee squinted through a diffuse cloud of small red globules. A small crossbow bolt had hit the crewman just above the hip. But that had not been the fatal injury. The two stab-wounds to either side of the sternum and the slashed neck were the obvious causes of death.

  Lee tugged himself lower so he could see the shoulder tabs on the corpse's coveralls. As he suspected, an engineer, who'd probably been baby-sitting the reactor when the hijacking began. Either he had heard calls for help and was hustling forward, or the hijackers had baited him out. Either way, he had been surprised and probably disabled by the crossbow hit. Then his attackers had finished their job up close and personal. And since they had used a knife in zero-gee, it made it quite likely they were not Earth-born. Zero-gee melee was a very exacting skill, possessed only by those who already had a great deal of experience living and working in low or no gravity environments.

  Finder leaned over until his helmet's faceplate touched Lee's. Through the glass, he heard the sergeant's voice, hollow and muted. “This was the work of Upsiders, no doubt about it.”

  “Yes—this one killing was. But that doesn't mean that all the hijackers are Upsiders.”

  Finder raised an eyebrow, then nodded. “True enough, L.T. Now, we're going to leave Lewis a little farther behind, okay?”

  “More for us to chat about later on, then.”

  Finder shrugged, smiled, turned to Lewis, and made a push-back gesture holding up ten and then five more fingers. Then he tapped Lee on the shoulder and readied to jump. As soon as Lee had postured himself identically, Finder nodded and they pushed off, gliding down the remaining corridor at waist-height.

  Lee's jump was a little better this time, partly because he felt there was less reason to stick close to the wall. Reading the unfolding evidence, he doubted that the mutineers felt any need to patrol this part of the ship. Indeed, their absence here suggested that they were confident they had accounted for all the passengers and crew. And that prompted a number of surmises that began to coalesce into a coherent tactical picture.

  Firstly, the attackers were clearly willing to kill the crew given little or no cause to do so. There was no sign that the dead engineer had been carrying a weapon. Or that he had been moving to help the other crew or passengers. Or that he had intended to hole up in Engineering, where he could have plagued the attackers with environmental shutdowns, bulkhead lockouts, and a dozen other things that would have made their takeover both dangerous and uncertain. On the contrary, it seemed far more likely that the attack had been so quick and fierce that none of the crew had had the chance to warn him. The unrumpled condition of his clothes and still-combed hair supported the conclusion that the floater had been accosted and bushwhacked by someone he trusted enough to come close to.

  Which farther suggested that some of the crew were in on the mutiny, either as the ringleaders, or as accomplices to the attackers who had masqueraded as passengers. And since there was no sign that anything had gone awry with the hijacking, that prompted Lee's last grim conclusion: that the mutineers had not been interested in hostages. They had not made any demands for ransom or concessions in exchange for the hostages. Indeed, the mutineers had not contacted the authorities at all. The only reason Lee had known to investigate was because the Fragrant Blossom's captain had missed a privately arranged check-in call with his friend, Callisto's Chief Administrator for Outbound Operations. By deduction then, it seemed unlikely that there were any passengers or crew left to rescue.

  Arriving at the entry to the hab modules, Lee stopped his forward glide with an outthrust left hand. Finder signaled for a huddle; they leaned their helmets together. “Okay,” he said, “what do you want me to do next, L.T.?”

  “Not a lot of choice, Sergeant; we go room-to-room. And we go fast. I don't think they've bothered with guards, except in the forward section where they'll be manning the bridge and watching our ship. And waiting for their ride.”

  “Huh?” said Burns.

  “Their ride,” repeated Lee. “If they meant to take this hull somewhere, they wouldn't just be drifting here. Since coming on site, we've ascertained that they've got control over enough systems to keep the airlock sealed against us, and that their engines are in fine working order. So if it was part of their plan to take this ship somewhere else, they'd already be doing so. Which means that there's company coming.”

  Lewis and Burns exchanged wide-eyed looks. Finder merely smiled. “I see we got lucky and drew a good CO. For a change. What else, sir?”

  “Their lack of contact with us, and particularly their failure to warn us off by threatening the lives of hostages, means they probably don't have any left to threaten. So I suspect that we are in a free-fire situation. However, we can't be sure of that, and we definitely want to take these bastards alive, both because that's in accordance with regulations, and because we really—really—need to interrogate them.”

  “What? Why?” Lewis asked.

  “Because even among the few cases of deep-space hijacking or mutiny on record, this one is the odd-ball outlier. They're not after hostages, or the ship itself, so they're playing some other game—and we need to talk to a few of them if we're ever going to learn what that game is. Set up our entry, Sergeant.”

  “Yes, sir. Burns, you will lead the room breaches using the spray-gun.”

  Roderigo was already pulling what looked like a wide-muzzled, sawed-off grenade launcher off his shoulder.

  “Open the choke for maximum dispersion, and use the heavy tranq rounds.”

  “Uh, Sarge, the chemical warfare experts told us that if a target is small, wounded, or has a coronary condit—”

  Finder fixed Burns with a sharklike stare. “If the bastards die, the bastards die. We'll take every precaution, but with that tube of yours set on wide dispersal, you can't count on multiple hits. One gel bead is going to have to take any target down. So today you're serving up double-strength sleepy-time cocktails.”

  “Roger that, Sarge.”

  “The L.T. and I will be carrying the lethal firepower to clear the passageways, moving forward by leapfrog advance.”

  Lewis frowned. “What about me?”

  “You keep a tight hold on that carbine, Lewis. You're our ace in the hole. If the spray gun jams, or we bypass some hostiles and they come out on our rear, you're going to be our fire brigade. As needed, we'll call you forward to outflank them, or add your heavier firepower to ours.”

  “So I stay all the way back here?”

  “Yes—which also guarantees that if everything goes south and we have to beat ass out of here, you're holding the exit open for us.”

  Lewis shrugged. “Yes, Sarge.”

  “Good. Lieutenant, whenever you're ready, just give the word.”

  Lee nodded. “The word is given.”

  * * *

  It was pretty much what Lee had expected. They entered the forward decks unopposed—except for the silent scrutiny of reangled video pickups, and the accusing stares of floating bodies.

  The hijackers had killed crew and passengers alike. One of the latter—a Loonie, judging from her unnaturally lean build—couldn't have been more than fourteen years old. Maybe not even that much. Lee clamped his molars down hard and pushed on through the mid-air sargasso sea of corpses and blood globules.

  Tagging closed stateroom hatches with small opening alarms to alert them to anyone emerging into their rear, they propelled themselves toward the bridge at best speed—

  And were met halfway by two ill-shaven men who had obviously seen them c
oming on the realigned security cameras. The good news was that the enemy's armament was fairly light. One had a regulation ten millimeter pistol, the other had what looked like a repeating compressed air spear gun made out of spare parts. The bad news was that they were in their space suits: Roderigo's spray gun would be useless unless it hit them in the face.

  Damn it, Lee thought, even as he shouted, “Burns, switch to lethals. Fire at will.”

  As in most meeting engagements, most of the shots went wild. As in most zero-gee combat, the shots were wilder than usual. Burns was late swapping weapons, got a small spear cum crossbow bolt in the left shoulder of his hard-suit. It was impossible to tell from his grunt whether it had penetrated or merely thumped him mightily. Either way, he was now trying to correct a modest backward tumble.

  Finder pitched forward, so that he was aimed face-and-shoulders first at his attackers. Lee did the same, appreciating how this nonregulation “prone posture” both minimized his body's silhouette, and put it in line with the recoil of his weapon. There would be push-back, yes, but little if any tumble.

  And that seemed to be helping Finder's marksmanship. As the enemy's own ten millimeter rounds spanged and sparked overhead, the sergeant fired twice, paused and then fired a third time. The pistol-wielding thug went backward, struggling, trying to bring his pistol around to bear again. Finder ended that attempt with a fourth shot.

  But Lee was too busy to see the outcome. Sighting down through his own weapon's basic peep sight, he lined up the man with the spear gun and fired. The gun didn't kick at all, but there was a brief wash of pressure on both the inner and outer surface of his gloved wrist. It was the angled back blast from the charge that kicked the round out of the barrel, equalizing the propulsive force both forward and back. An instant later, the tail of the round lit up like a tracer as its gyrojets kicked into life and sent it jumping forward.