He reappeared in the opening, extending a hand to her. “All clear, but I warn you, it isn’t pretty.”
Apparently, not all the crew of the doomed liner had been as incompetent or as craven as their captain. Several corpses in SMT uniforms lay on the deck beside the nearest of the two jettison control panels. One man’s swollen, hideous hand clung eerily, stubbornly to the lever for activating the final stage of cryo pod unit release. The bodies were beginning to decompose, adding to the overall foulness of the atmosphere.
Mara choked off an exclamation of horror, hand over her mouth, trying not to be sick.”Blasted.” Nick stood close to one body, not touching it. “Shot in the back. I’d say this poor guy and the others were trying to do their duty, trying to save these passengers, and then Bonlors or someone working with him murdered them all.” He holstered his blaster. “I need to move this body so we can finish the job he started.”
“Do you need my help?” Mara asked, averting her eyes from the gruesome murder scene. “I’m willing to do whatever’s called for if it will get this mission over anymore quickly.”
“I’ll manage, no problem. Why don’t you take position at the other control, there by the corridor bend?” Nick pointed to a spot behind her, the other direction from the grav-tube access. “I’ll come show you the sequence in a minute, and then we’ll release the pod on my count.”
“Fine.” She located the controls, which were set chest high into the inner bulkhead. Green and amber lights flickered, interspersed with a few red. “Should we be concerned by red indicators? Are the passengers still alive in there?”
“Let me run a diagnostic,” he said over her shoulder, making her jump and swear. He’d moved so quietly she hadn’t noticed him.
“What’s the matter?” Nick asked.
She stretched, trying to loosen her muscles. Unwillingly, she took a deep breath. “I’m just tired.”
“It’s the bad air,” he told her. “Probably not enough oxygen content. Let me know if you feel faint.”
“Oh, I will,” she retorted. “And you do the same, all right?”
He gave her a sardonic smile, acknowledging her point. He was just as vulnerable to the bad air. “I had to reset the panel over there, because when the guy fell, he dragged the lever out of sequence. The whole thing was frame locked. We’re going to have to wait a few minutes while the programmed instructions cycle back to the ready state.”
“We what?” Mara was horrified at spending even extra seconds on the Dream. “Define ‘few’ for me?”
“About nine more, now.” Nick was apologetic. “Mara, I’m sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for being scared, sick to my stomach – I’m sorry I’m not a damn Special Forces operator like you, or like Rafferty and Casey used to be. We’d probably be done and on our way to the Dragon by now if I was.”
“Hey,” he said softly, taking her in his arms, alarmed by her self-directed tirade. “It’s all right. You’re doing fine. You’re doing better than fine.” He tilted her chin up so he could see her deep-blue eyes.
Mara blinked, meeting his stare calmly. “If anything goes wrong, if anything happens to you because of me, because I screw this up –”
“We’re a team, a damn good team. I’d rather you hadn’t had to return to this nightmare with me, but honestly, there’s no one I’d rather have backing me up right now, okay? I mean it,” he said, giving her a tiny shake.
“Oh sure, you’d rather have scared, civilian me, than say Khevan, or Rafferty –”
Nick kissed her firmly. “We’re here, we’re going to get it done, we’re going to get it done together – believe in us. I do.”
“All right.” Finally, she nodded. “What do we have to do?”
Releasing her, he moved to the control panel, saying over his shoulder, “That’s more like it. I’m going to run a diagnostic now. You keep watch down the corridor. Any attack would likely come from the stairs, since we’re the only ones having use of the grav lifts. If there’s any trouble, you get in there and head for Level Nine.”
She glanced at the entrance. “And you?”
“I’ll be right behind, I promise.”
Entering his now-well-used Special Forces access code, Nick embarked on a series of rapid queries, each new answer from the AI leading him to input another question. Mara stood guard as asked, facing the stairs, flinching at the slightest noise. All around them, the Nebula Dream strained and groaned, her hull creaking as the unbalanced stresses she had never been designed to endure worked their damage. Nick felt the deck under his feet shifting occasionally, which was an unnerving sensation, to say the least. The adrenaline flow was making him twitchy.
“Well, not great, but not catastrophic,” was Nick’s eventual report. “Some cryo pods are out. Those passengers are dead. But there are over seven hundred sentients alive, which makes this trip worthwhile in my book.”
“Mine, too,” Mara assured him, answering the implicit question. “Are we ready to jettison?”
“Yes. I’ve told the AI to release all remaining lifeboats at the same time.” Nick swallowed hard, jaw clenched.
Mara said softly, “What?”
He shook his head. “The AI –”
“What about it?”
“The AI understands it’s going to die when the ship dies.” He gazed into her eyes. “It’s a registered sentient itself, you know.”
Hand to her mouth, Mara glanced at the blinking readouts and then at him, tears glistening in her eyes. “I never thought about the AI’s fate tonight, but on a ship like this, of course, it would have had to be at full consciousness – how awful.”
“It tried to make a joke, said it wished I’d let it show me the full list of amenities once, before they all got destroyed. But, it said, at least we played chess.” He closed his eyes for a second, leaning his head against the bulkhead, tired anger at all the unnecessary waste of life and sentience sweeping over him. “One more thing to chalk up against Bonlors and Yankuri. I hate their stinking guts. All I want is to be on Sector Hub when those two sail in, smug and full of lies.”
“We will be,” Mara assured him, rubbing her hand over the tense muscles of his back.
Shaking his head, Nick straightened up again, pushing off from the bulkhead, ready to get on with the plan.
“Okay, so the AI has the full picture and it will help us as much as possible. Let me show you the sequence for the jettison command.” Nick ran through it three times, before he felt confident Mara was ready. “I’m sorry,” he apologized as she bit back a sharp comment on his request for her to mimic the sequence yet again. “If we aren’t in exact synchronization, then we’ll get frame lock again. I’ll have to reset, we lose ten more minutes –”
“And we can’t afford any delays.” She nodded. “I know. I’m sorry. So, it goes like this –”She ran her fingers a bare half inch above the console, “and then this, right?”
“Correct. You’re a quick learner.” Nick walked to the other control unit, about ten yards in the opposite direction.
“On my count, ready,” he said crisply, raising his hand. “Enter the first string of code on three. One, two, three!”
Mara’s fingers danced over the panel, pressing the correct symbols this time. At his console, Nick did the same set of entries. “And enter the second string – now! Pull the release lever NOW!”
As they worked in perfect unison, downshifting their respective levers to the activated position, there was a deafening clamor of warning sirens. Red lights flashed all along the corridor. A prerecorded, female voice recited a stern warning in Basic to evacuate the level, followed by the same dire communication in each of the five major languages of the Sectors. The voice continued to drone on, counting down the time till the level would jettison. The calmness of the tone only heightened the tension in Nick’s opinion.
“Come on!” Grabbing Mara by the hand, Nick dragged her, stumbling, to the grav lift. Stabbing at the controls, he keyed
it open and basically threw her out into the flow of the anti-grav, leaping into the tube above and behind her, as the access panel snapped shut on his heels.
“We have to get out of the tube and into Level Ten before the cryo pod blasts free!”As soon as his boots hit the bottom of the tube, Nick cycled the access door open and pushed Mara out into the relative safety of Level Ten ahead of him, making sure the door closed behind him.
“Now where?” Mara was gasping for breath. “I’ve never been on this level, you know.”
“I have. They gave me the full tour. This way!” Blaster out, Nick led her to the left at a dead run. “We may have to take the stairs up to Level Nine when we’re finished here, you know, to get to The Sigrid. The grav-lift integrity will probably be compromised by jettisoning the cryo pod. The poor ship is so stressed structurally now, the AI couldn’t make me any guarantees. It’s going to try to hold the artificial gravity for us, though.”
Stopping at the engine complex doorway, Nick punched in his code. He had to enter it twice, as the access panel was shorting in and out. He pulled Mara inside and the door slid closed behind them just as there was a gigantic explosion up on Level Six. The entire ship shuddered, twisting violently as the cryo pod blasted away from its doomed parent. Nick and Mara were thrown to the deck by the opposing forces of the giant ship’s inertia and the pod’s violent exodus.”Not good, not good,” Nick said, getting to his knees and waiting while the Dream spasmed through more unpredictable gyrations. “Definitely a bad sign.” He extended his hand to Mara, who had stayed sprawled full length where she fell the first time, wisely deciding she stood a better chance of avoiding injury on the deck while the Dream shook and shimmied. “Come on, we may have less time than I was counting on. I need the ship to blow up, not merely break apart on its own.” He grinned without much humor. “The Mawreg are too damn good at reassembling things. They like puzzles.”
Leaning on each other, they headed down the narrow access corridor, emerging in the engine compartment where McElroy and Nick had stood, so long ago, and watched the complex interplay of energy between the four massive Yeatter engines.
“I never wanted to come back here,” Nick told Mara as they stepped through the half-open door and into the chamber.
Raising her eyebrows in surprise, she clutched at his arm to avoid tripping on the threshold. “Why not?”
“Stare at the engines too long and you see things, uncanny things.” He didn’t elaborate, going over to the engineering console and rapidly checking the settings and data displayed there. “Damn designers kept the ship’s AI out of the loop on the engines,” he complained as he worked. “Otherwise, I could have done this from anywhere on the ship – patched into the AI’s neural net and told it what I needed done. But no, we had to come in person. I’m never traveling on any untested ships again as long as I live.” He ran a few more sequences. “This is a pain in the butt.” Setting the blaster on the counter, he searched for a chair. Grabbing the one that had fallen and slid across the chamber, he took it to the console and sat, concentrating on his demolition task. “You doing okay?” He glanced up from his work to check on Mara.
She’d been leaning on the edge of the observation bay, staring out at the Yeatters, apparently half listening to Nick’s running commentary as he worked. Three of the engines were still humming and exchanging their energies, even in standby mode, the fourth silent and dark. Despite Nick’s warning about the tricks the human eye would play after too much exposure to the Yeatters, she was totally fascinated by them.
Surprised by his direct question, she flashed a chagrined expression at him. “Sorry, what did you say? Some commando I am! Did you want me to go guard the door?”
Nick shook his head, smiling but keeping his attention on the controls. “No, I don’t want you trying to fight off pirates or looters single-handed. Although I don’t imagine there’s anything on this level to interest any of them.”
He stood up, kicking the chair away impatiently. “I’m nearly done.”
Mara swiveled to have a better view of the engines. “Oh, yes, I can see a change – all the activity is intensifying. How much time are you allowing for us to get to The Sigrid and make our escape out of range?”
“Half an hour. It’ll be tight, but doable.”
“No time to search for any other survivors, then,” Mara commented somewhat sadly. “I was thinking you could ask the ship’s AI if anyone else is left on board.”
“I did,” he admitted with a trace of reluctance.
“And?” she prompted, when Nick failed to elaborate.
He frowned, staring at the controls beneath his hands, before raising his gaze to her. “After we escaped, the pirates moved any other prisoners to stasis prisons in their ship.”
“So when the Dragon blew the pirate cruiser up, all those people died, too?” Color draining from her face, Mara was aghast, and she swayed a little, clutching at the console.
He nodded slowly, once. “There weren’t many, according to the AI, but yes, they died. They’d have been in stasis, so they didn’t feel a thing when the ship exploded. They didn’t suffer. Probably a mercy, because there wouldn’t have been any possibility of rescuing them from the pirates.”
“Not even if the admiral you’re expecting had arrived sooner?” Mara was surprised. “Surely he could have tried something?”
Nick shook his head. “No. The Shemdylann kill themselves rather than be captured, and they try to take as many of their enemy with them as they can. Admiral Reston never would have made a deal with them for the hostages. That’s another standing order for at least the past two hundred years or so – no negotiating with the enemy over prisoners. We got burned too many times, trying to free someone through a prisoner exchange and finding out too late it was a Mawreg trap. So, chalk up another fifteen or twenty deaths to Bonlors and his boss Yankuri.”
There was a faint chiming sound. Nick checked the console. Apparently, whatever request he had encoded was now done cycling and the engine AI controller was ready for further instructions. “Okay, I’m going to enter the last sequence and then we can get out of here. If you’re ready,” he teased.
“Am I! You have no idea.” Mara stretched, rubbing her abdomen. “My stomach is in knots from sheer nerves, but you were right, I got used to the various smells.”
“Done,” he announced, picking up his blaster with a flourish. “We have twenty-nine minutes and counting to be as far away from here as The Sigrid can travel.”
“Let’s go then.” Mara cast a last glance at the engines and stopped. “Did you reactivate engine Number Four?”
“No.” He looked for himself. Sure enough, small flames of energy were coruscating around the fourth of the big Yeatters. Nick grabbed at Mara’s elbow. “Come on – this place is too damn spooky for me.”
She stared at him a bit strangely but followed his lead. They traversed the short corridor inside the engineering territory and then Nick opened the access door to the main corridor beyond, where the grav-lift entry was located. He took one step into the corridor and stopped so suddenly Mara ran into him. Head up, he was alert, sniffing at the air suspiciously, hand out to hold her back.
“What? What is it?” Mara retreated a step, sampling the air herself.
He turned to her. “Mawreg. There are Mawreg on this ship now.”
“How do you know? How can you be so sure?” she whispered, staring at the deserted corridor in puzzlement.
“Don’t you smell it? A faint, sickly sweet scent? Like a night-blooming, rotting flower? It’s faint, I grant you, but once you’ve been near enough to them to smell it, you never forget it. Come on, we have no time.”
Running to the grav lift, Nick yanked the door open, sticking his head over the threshold to stare upward cautiously, blaster at the ready. Seems safe enough. He decided to risk it. “I’ll go first. You stay close. Thank the Lords we only have to get up the one level. Hopefully they’re preoccupied with the bridge and the passeng
er decks.” He stepped into the grav flow, staying unusually close to the wall of the tube. Mara followed him, her blaster out, safety off.
Nick was drawing even with the threshold of Level Nine when suddenly the lights blinked out and the anti-grav mechanism power failed.
Emergency generators kept the artificial gravity working, unfortunately.
Mara screamed as she plummeted in free fall to the bottom of the shaft, in the total dark. Nick groaned as he landed on the deck a second later, managing somehow not to fall on top of Mara.
“Are you okay? Can you move?” he whispered, frantically. “We have to get out of here. Now.”
Huddled where she had fallen, Mara felt blindly for the weapon. “I lost my blaster. I think my arm’s broken. What happened?”
“The Mawreg cut the power. They probably terminated the AI completely. Artificial gravity and life support must be running on emergency.” He crawled across her to get at the access door, locating it by touch alone. Setting his blaster at the lowest setting, he burned through the controls.
“Be ready to move,” he said, wishing the damn metal would melt faster.
“Do they know we’re here?” she whispered.
“No idea. I hope not. Nearly done with this.” He holstered his blaster and worked to push the door open.
Harsh, glaring white light poured into the shaft from a level much further up the grav tube.
Nick glanced upward involuntarily and swore, grabbing Mara and bundling her through the partially opened door. Two globes of intense green light came floating down, moving under their own power. About a yard in diameter, rolling and drifting around each other like huge leaves or seed pods, caught in a nonexistent breeze, the devices fell.
“Green death grenades,” Nick said after one more horrified, swift glance. He shoved through the opening after her. “Run, run for the engineering quadrant!” With one hand, he hauled her roughly to her feet. “I’ve got to get this door closed again before those grenades land.”
Wreck of the Nebula Dream Page 24