by Jim Graham
The rebel’s brutal leader was now standing over a console. His friend, the one he referred to as “Birdie”, was watching a grey-haired officer play with a 3-D schematic of the emergency systems. Several of the crew were sitting on the floor with their backs to a curving console, hands on their heads. The dimly lit cabin wasn’t particularly impressive.
It then went suddenly silent: someone had at last turned off the fire extinguishers and tannoy alert. From behind him, he heard the rush of air conditioners sucking up the gases and pumping fresh oxygen into the ring.
He stepped inside, taking care to announce himself to Goosen. Then he saw the dead Commander, his head resting on the console, attached to his body by a thick rump of flesh. There were two large holes in the commander’s lower neck. Bone and gristle lodged in the console where the shotgun rounds had passed through. Blood still drained onto the floor beneath his seat.
Story or not, he had absorbed as much atmosphere as he was able. He retreated into the gravity ring corridor and threw up against the far wall.
If he lived to tell this tale, he would blame it on the gas.
91
While Goosen paid close attention to the captive cabin crew and the grey-haired officer ran through the scaled-back pre-ftl checks, Scat ran the situation through in his mind.
They had taken control of the V4’s command cabin and acquired a cabinet full of lethal weapons. Outside was a confused crew, ex-cops, the security guards forcibly removed from Trevon against their wishes, some political prisoners, maybe some fare-paying civilian passengers and an unidentified cargo. The fire doors in this section of the gravity ring had sealed off the command cabin when the fire retarding gases kicked in, but they would reopen soon.
The greatest danger lay in what Scat did not know about the crew.
There would not be many, and they would be shuttle pilots, cargo handlers and technicians, not trained soldiers, but he wasn’t sure if there were any Outer Rim Force still on board, and that was his real weak point. If he didn’t follow through quickly, there would be a standoff: the rebels would hold the command crew and the cabin, and the ORF would hold the prisoners.
Someone would want to trade, and Scat didn’t want to.
‘How many ORF still on board?’ he asked, throwing the question around the room.
‘10,’ replied one of the V4’s crew, unguardedly.
Scat looked at him. The man was already looking at the floor as if he regretted speaking up.
‘And where are the prisoners?’ Scat asked him, before the man’s boss could object. By way of encouragement, Scat pointed the barrels of his Grand American at him and put his finger inside the trigger guard. The man tensed.
‘They’re in the accommodation quarter on the opposite side of the ring,’ he replied.
Scat turned to the officer. He wanted to know who had already made it on-board. He did not expect any more of the shuttles to come on up to the V4, now it was in rebel hands.
‘Where’s the current passenger and cargo manifest?’ he asked.
The old man didn’t answer. He was still glowering at his colleague. Scat nudged him with his newly acquired neural disrupter.
‘One more chance, then you’ll be handing control of this baby to one of your colleagues.’
‘Welks: throw up a copy,’ the officer ordered reluctantly.
Another member of the original flight crew—a youngster; no older than a boy—tapped a few keys on his console. The manifest appeared on a curved screen on the outer wall out front. It highlighted those who had made it on-board, listing those still on Trevon with numbers against their names, representing shuttle numbers and flights.
‘Birdie, do you recognise any of these names?’ Scat asked.
Goosen ran through the list.
‘Several. There are five that I know of that are downright secessionists, maybe some more who are sympathetic, and half a dozen or so who’ll just be pissed off that a faceless bureaucrat is disrupting their lives. Mind, I’ve no idea why anyone would think them to be sympathisers. They aren’t.’
‘OK,’ Scat said turning his attention to the officer. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Matheson. Yours?’ The tone was bitter.
‘Scat.’ Scat let the name hang for a moment, but the old man showed no sign of recognition. ‘Look, Matheson, we’re in a hurry. We don’t want to keep your ship, just borrow it,’ he lied. ‘When we’re done you can have it back. Right now I want whoever Goosen here tells you to get up to the command cabin, up here without interference. Get it done—now!’
Goosen highlighted the names on the screen. Matheson sat down, flicked a switch and made an announcement over the tannoy.
As Matheson put the mike down and sat back in his chair, Scat leaned over his shoulder.
‘I want you to tell everyone that the ftl flux-drives are unstable, they can’t be operated, and that we’re in charge of the command cabin. Tell the ORF not to use their PIKLs. If they do, it’ll make the flux-drives even more unstable. You then tell them to stand down.’
Matheson looked around at him. His eyes flickered with concern.
‘They won’t believe me,’ he said.
Scat shrugged.
‘Look, Bud, I could go down to the flux-drives and discharge one of these things if you want. We don’t have much to lose. You have a couple of flux-drives worth zillions hanging in the balance here. It’s up to you.’
When Matheson spoke into the mike, he felt his initial anger give way to extreme frustration.
His egotistical boss had allowed a news team to come on board, leading to the hijack of one of Earth’s most expensive interplanetary tankers. His own name would be associated with this and yet there was nothing he could do that would reverse the situation; at least, not with a better than average chance of living to see it succeed. They had been bested by an antique shotgun and pure aggression: a gazillion dollars’ worth of the V4’s technology had proven useless in its own defence. And Lynthax had just lost a major resource.
He tried to think of a previous hijacking of an ftl-capable ship, and he couldn’t think of one. This was the first.
Security was tight at both ends of a journey. They worked out their travel plans months in advance. They vetted, accepted or declined potential passengers according to all sorts of security and commercial considerations. His ship wasn’t a fortress. It was a civilian tanker, manned by civilian technical specialists, designed for delivering much-needed resources to Earth. It was only occasionally hired out to those fools at the Inter-Space Regulatory Authority—the same fools who relied on the private sector for just about all of their interplanetary transportation needs; a private sector that pared everything to the bone to squeeze the last dollar of profit from every assignment.
Now they were paying for that foolishness.
So was he.
‘Stand down, damn it!’ he ordered the Outer Rim Force detachment commander over the intercom.
There was no reply. From behind, Scat nudged him again with his sawn-off.
‘Now!’ Matheson added, red-faced with increasing irritation.
There was a moment of silence, and then a response. It was a question:
‘Where’s the Commander? I can’t see him.’
‘He’s dead,’ Matheson answered. ‘Very dead. I’ve assumed command.’
‘But you’re not in command of anything, sir,’ the ORF commander replied, seemingly not convinced he was still subject to Matheson’s authority. ‘We can see they’ve taken you prisoner.’
Matheson took a quick look at the manifest and then looked up at the camera in the corner of the cabin. He spoke directly into it.
‘Like it or not, Corporal Tunny, I’m the ranking officer on this vessel now, and I’ll charge your arse with mutiny if you don’t comply. And, just in case you’ve forgotten your articles, in the Outer-Rim that’s a capital crime still.’
‘You wouldn’t dare, sir. If we stand down you lose the ship—a
nd everything on it. Do you want that?’
‘Look, I’m going to make it easy for you,’ Matheson said through gritted teeth, scrolling down his screen and speed-reading a document. ‘I’ll send you a copy of the articles, and you can tell me what it says in section seven, … paragraph 12, point 4. If you can’t read, get one of your grunts to read it out aloud.’ He pressed send.
Behind him, Scat shook his head. Nothing had changed. Soldiers still couldn’t take a piss without referring to one code of conduct or another. Scat remembered a wadi in the Sinai and the long wait for air support.
It wasn’t long before Tunny replied. He sounded a little desperate, and more than a little confused.
‘But this relates to piracy, sir, and only when civilian lives are in danger, not for an act of war.’
Matheson looked up at the cabin camera again.
‘If you want to take it to court then you can,’ he replied, tersely, ‘but until then the order to stand down is valid. There are civilians on board this vessel, and the circumstances are the same. If you stand down now, it won’t go on your record. If you take a stand, and it goes wrong, I’ll make damn sure ISRA covers your record in shit, and we’ll sue your arse for every cent of damage done. And then we’ll sue everybody at ISRA who’s ever known you.’
Matheson let the threat hang in the air. He knew he was on dodgy ground. Tunny was right. The lawyers had written the ordinance to accommodate acts of piracy, not for a full-scale interplanetary conflict. However, he was making a point: Tunny could surrender his men in accordance with established protocols and the corporal’s career would be unaffected by it.
There was a long, nail-biting silence.
‘Why is he taking so long?’ Scat asked. ‘If it’s as you say it is, it’s a no-brainer.’
Matheson spoke without looking back at him. He kept looking up at the camera, willing Tunny to see sense.
‘He’ll be working out how much it might cost him to prove me wrong. He’ll get there eventually. At least, I hope so.’
The intercom squawked. Tunny finally agreed.
Matheson let out a long sigh of relief.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now stay in your quarters until I say otherwise. We can’t have a shooting war in the corridors, so, don’t give these farks an excuse. I’ll get back to you shortly.’
He cut the link to the ORF quarters and stared at Scat, his eyes seething with hatred, both hands trembling.
At last, the gravity ring’s fire doors opened, and Goosen’s picks arrived outside. He led them off to the briefing room next door where he briefed them on what had just happened. He didn’t need to use the thumb drive that Scat had given him: he had asked for volunteers and most had stepped forward. Scat could hear the yelling and whooping through the walls.
As the noise next door died down, Nettles, Marvin and three other political prisoners joined Scat in the command cabin. Scat noticed that Nettles was a little distracted by the blood that had pooled on the Commander’s console and around his chair, but otherwise he looked composed. He also looked remarkably well groomed for a man who had just spent a few days in jail, despite his bruised and yellowing eye.
Scat stood with his arms folded, gun in each hand, the Grand American in his right hand loosely trained on the back of Matheson’s head, the neural disrupter in his left pointing at the floor. He glanced around the cabin, saw what Nettles saw and began to feel pleased with himself.
He waited on a thank you.
Nettles circled the console, avoiding Scat’s stare. As he looked back over at the dead commander’s chair, he recalled what Marvin had told him: that once Scat was unleashed, he would prove difficult to control; that he needed to assert his leadership very quickly. If he didn’t, Scat would decide the tenor of the next action, and that might not be a good thing.
Looking back up from the blood, Nettles took the bull by the horns.
‘Thank you Scat. It’s good to see you again,’ he said, as crisply and as evenly as he could. ‘Conference,’ he added, before turning on his heels and walking towards the door. ‘I’ll be in the briefing room when you’re done here.’
As Nettles left the room, Marvin looked at Scat for a reaction, but there wasn’t one. Instead Scat nodded hello, told Goosen to hand him a couple of spare neuro disrupters, and then turned his own ND on Matheson.
‘I’ve changed my mind about the knee capping,’ he told him in a cold, firm voice filled with menace. ‘You’re one minute closer to having your nerve cells scrambled, Matheson. Get us moving.’
92
Forty-three ex-cops and security guards had volunteered for rebel service, all but a few of them known to Goosen personally, or were vouched for by those among them that Goosen knew. They were at least reliable, if not competent.
Nonetheless, they were still vulnerable. Aside from a counter-attack, Scat was worried that a renegade shuttle jockey or crewmember might sabotage the ship’s critical systems. Before he headed to the briefing room to meet with Nettles, he told Goosen to deploy his new recruits around the ship.
‘Sorry it took so long, Terrance,’ he said as he entered the brightly lit briefing room for the first time, ‘but the ORF needed some reassurance they would be dropped off, rather than be knocked-off.’
Scat looked around him as he walked up to the raised platform where Nettles, Marvin and several others had gathered, sitting and standing around a long table equipped with microphones, monitors and a hologram device, generally waiting to see what was to happen next. Scat recognised only a few of the faces: the ones who were Trevon House representatives and always stayed close to Nettles; the rest were senior-looking administrator types. They were probably influential sympathisers.
‘And will they? Be dropped off, I mean,’ Nettles asked.
‘Of course! What were you expecting?’
‘I’m not sure, Scat. This is unfamiliar territory for me,’ Nettles replied, looking around at everyone who had assembled there, ‘and for the rest of us, no doubt.’
Several heads nodded in agreement. Violence of this magnitude was rare in their circles. The rest just fidgeted nervously, looking down at the floor. In the background, they could still hear the new recruits as they ran up and down in the ring outside, shouting and excitedly passing on orders. For some of the ex-prisoners, it appeared to be an unnerving distraction.
‘Well, we’re up and running,’ Scat reported. ‘We’ve gotten ourselves a tanker complete with 18 shuttles, some weaponry, and a few more recruits: just over 40 of them.’
Marvin was smiling. Nettles nodded his understanding.
‘So where to next, Scat?’ Nettles asked.
‘We hit back. Hard and fast. We take the initiative.’
‘Understood. But what of the politicals? They—I mean we—can’t be involved in the physical rebellion.’
Scat looked at Nettles wondering why he should be so concerned. They had already arrested him for sedition. How was he to remain above the fray?
‘I can send you all back to Trevon, but what would be the point. You’d all be rearrested.’
No one disputed the fact. They all looked quite worried.
Scat tried to offer some reassurance.
‘What I suggest is we drop you off somewhere else, once things die down. Perhaps you can offer to discuss matters with the Earth Delegation directly; maybe you can turn yourselves in under some form of agreement. Or we get Reggie to work on doing a deal with that Cohen character.’
‘How long will it be before things cool down?’ Marvin asked.
‘I haven’t the foggiest! We’ve stirred up a hornet’s nest up here, but Trevon might not even know we’ve taken the vessel.’ Scat looked at his graf. ‘We’ve been in charge for less than 20 minutes or so, and I’m not sure the Commander got a message off before he passed on.’
‘Any idea at all, Scat!’ Nettles asked.
‘None, I’m sorry, and besides, things won’t settle down for a little while. We didn’t take the V4 to si
t in space and let Lynthax get its act together. We’re going back in to cause some serious mischief. Once that’s done, maybe we can spend some time on working out how to get you back to a more civilised environment. In the meantime, consider yourselves guests of the rebels. You can even claim to be reluctant guests. I don’t really care how you spin it.’
There was an uneasy silence. Scat sensed that Marvin fully appreciated it was his intention to take the rebellion forward at a lick, but the politicos were a harder bunch to read. He doubted they were ready for the inconveniences to come, and might be alarmed at the prospect of being associated with his upcoming actions—whatever they thought they might be. He smiled and was about to speak when Marvin cut across him.
‘Then we consider ourselves your “prisoners”, Scat, and we promise not to be of any bother to you. Just please try to keep Nettles and Co out of harm’s way, and allow us to be at least somewhat convincing when we claim we were dragged along for the ride!’
Several heads nodded in agreement.
‘What do you intend to do first, Scat?’ Nettles asked.
‘We’re still conducting an inventory of our resources, Terrance, but I’m pretty convinced we should hit back directly at Lynthax, and not Earth. Beyond that, I ain’t saying. You’re out of the loop if you want deniability.’
Scat waited on a response, but, again, there was none. Their stares were mostly blank, and he was wasting time he didn’t have. There were things still to do. He swung around to leave the politicos to worry about their political image, or to indulge their correctness—whatever it was politicians did when soldiers got on with it—but as he made his way up the aisle, he beckoned Marvin to follow him. When they were out in the corridor, he laid out the new order for him.
‘Marv, Reggie and I came to an understanding about this rebellion. The politicos stay clear of the violence. And we don’t discuss our actions with them so they can stay free and clear at all times. If I want anyone to know what we’re up to, or need help locally, I’ll call Paul. He then talks directly to the Coordinating Council led by Reggie. The Coordinating Council sits between the politicals and us. Somehow you must get Terrance to see that his influence stops on Trevon: it’s for his own good.’