Aces

by Alanson, Craig

  “Sorry, kids, I’m fading again.”

  Kaylee thought fast. The pirates were aboard the ship. Any plan they came up with had to start with the fact that they could no longer stop the pirates from getting into the cargo bays. The pirates were going to take what they wanted- “Jen, you need to give us your codes, the ones that make this card work.” She held up the access card, which she had removed from the chain around Jen’s neck.

  “What are you doing with that? Give it to me.” Jen said weakly, and tried to lift her hand, but she didn’t have the strength.

  “You want us to hide, right? We need your card to unlock doors, find places to hide. We don’t know where the pirates will be.” Kaylee said, with a serious look on her face.

  “Hide? Yes, I need to hide you somewhere.”

  “Jen, you can’t hide us. You’re sick, you need to rest. Give me the code, please.”

  Her brother caught on. “Please, Jen, I’m scared.” He said, his lower lip quivering. “I want to hide somewhere the pirates will never find me.”

  Only one of Jen’s eyes was working, through a blur she turned toward Manny, who looked like he was about to cry. “All right, don’t hide in any of the passenger cabins, that’s the first place they will look. Go to cargo pod 2, and find someplace quiet, then turn off the lights. Stay there until somebody comes for you.”

  “The code?” Kaylee prompted once more.

  “Oh, the code. It’s Cozumel43, only the ‘O’ in Cozumel is a zero, and the “L” is a one. C-zero-z-u-m-e-one-four-three, got it? My favorite place to vacation, when I was your age.”

  “That’s it?” Manny said, sounding disappointed. “I thought the code would be more complicated.”

  “This isn’t a warship, Manny, it’s just a … a transport.”

  “Jen, we’re going to go now, is there anything we can do for you?” Kaylee asked., while looking around the sickbay.

  “Just let me rest. I’m so tired. And hide, hide someplace safe. Hurry.” Her voice was just a whisper.

  “We will. There’s a big bottle of orange juice on the table next to the bed, if you get thirsty. Come on Manny, let’s go.” Kaylee tucked the access card in her pocket.

  Manny blinked away a tear. “Thank you, Jen, we’ll be back. I promise.”

  “I know you will.” Jen said, and let her head fall into the pillow. In a moment, she was asleep again.

  Kaylee led her brother into the main sickbay compartment, then closed and locked the door to the compartment Jen was in. She rummaged through a cabinet, looking for anything useful. Another drawer held hyposyringes, plus bottles labeled as sedatives. Kaylee knew what a sedative was, these had all kinds of warning labels stating how strong the particular substance was. She added several hyposyringes and sedative bottles to her backpack. Before they left, she turned off all the lights. Anyone poking their head in would, she hoped, think the sickbay was unoccupied.

  “We got the card!” Manny said excitedly, when they were in the corridor.

  Kaylee stared at her brother, who didn’t look at all like he had just been on the verge of crying. “You big faker!” She said accusingly.

  Manny winked. “It works with Mom.” He said. “Where are we going?”

  Kaylee held up the card and studied it. It was obviously well-used, the logo was scuffed and only partially readable, the electrical contacts on one end were worn and shiny. It didn’t matter, as long as it worked. “We're going to cargo pod 1, deck 3, section D, bin number 14F,” she recited from memory, she wasn't ever going to forget that address. “That’s where the alien thing is, the thing the pirates want. We’re going to get it first, and then we’re going to make the pirates rescue Mom and Dad, or we’ll smash it.”

  “Yeah!" Manny shouted. "But, I thought we were going to hide?”

  Kaylee shook her head angrily. “Forget that. I’m not hiding in a closet while Mom and Dad need us. Are you with me?”

  Manny tugged the straps of his backpack tight, and held up both thumbs, shaking only slightly. “Let’s go.”

  “Okay, we’re here. How do we get in?” Nelson asked, staring at the door of the hut. Like everything else on the surface of the planet, it had a fine coating of red dust.

  Sam pounded on the door, leaving pink smudges on the surface. They had walked all this way, and couldn’t get inside. “Who puts a lock on a door way out here? And what kind of moron actually locks it?”

  Rick studied the door and the lock. “I’ll bet the lock is automatic, and the door is intended to keep the local wildlife out. We happen to be on a planet with no indigenous life, but this structure is probably a standard model that comes with a lock.” He bent down and looked more closely at the door. “The hinges are recessed here, if we can get the cover off, we can maybe pop the hinges, get the door open.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, good idea, Rick.” Sam looked at the plate covering the hinge. “Let’s see what kind of tools you have in that bag, huh?”

  Sam had to improvise with Rick’s small kit of tools, so the task took him fifteen minutes to get the door open far enough that they could look inside. Sam shone Rick’s light around. “Nada. Damn! It’s just a cover protecting the top of a survey well they drilled. No life support at all.”

  “At least we know what direction the main camp is.” Nelson said as he helped Sam stand up and brush the dirt off his suit. “Look at all those crawler tracks, they all go in one direction.”

  “The Yellow Brick Road.” Rick said quietly.

  “Huh?”

  “It’s a story, a video, a real old one, that my daughter used to like. There was a road lined with bricks made out of gold, it led to, well, kind of your promised land, Sam.”

  “Then let’s get walking, man, we don’t have all day. This here is more like the Red Dust Road.”

  “This says it’s section D.” Manny pointed to the large orange letter painted on the bulkhead door in front of them. The paint was discolored and scratched, it probably had not been repainted in the thirty years since the ship was put into service.

  Kaylee opened her mouth to make a smart remark to her brother, something along the lines of what a genius he was, that he could read a two-meter high letter painted on a door. She looked at him instead. Two years younger than her, shorter, smaller. A pain in the neck. They had little in common, other than having the same parents and living in the same house. She remembered back when he was cute, toddling around the house, happy to play tea party with his big sister. Then he developed his own personality, and became a general pain in the neck. Now she was responsible for him. “Section D.” She said simply. “Let’s get this door open.” She inserted the card, then glanced up at the status panel to make sure the other side of the door was pressurized, remembering Jen’s safety lecture. With Jen’s code entered, the door cracked open and slid aside.

  Jen had only once taken them to this particular area of the ship, it looked like any other cargo compartment, a tall, dimly lighted space lined with grey cabinets on both sides, with a wide center aisle. Cargo that wasn’t in its own storage container was held in compartments like this.

  “No pirates.” Manny whispered.

  “What?” Kaylee whispered back nervously.

  “We got here first, the pirates aren’t here.”

  “Oh, right. Let’s find the thing.” Kaylee walked down the right side, Manny took the left, until they realized the even numbered cabinets were on the right. Manny ran ahead, and pointed to 14D. “Here, Kaylee!” he shouted excitedly.

  “Shhh! Don’t shout. The pirates could be right behind us.” The small cabinet wasn’t locked, she pulled it open. Inside was an unimpressive, dull metallic silver box. Kaylee pulled it out, and set it down on the deck. She was about to close the cabinet, when Manny stopped her. “No, Kaylee! Take a box out of another cabinet, and put it in there. The pirates will think they found what they want, and give us time to hide somewhere.”

  Kaylee’s mouth dropped open. A smart idea from her little brother? �
��Good idea, Manny.” She looked through three other cabinets, until she found a similar box, put that box into cabinet 14D, then closed all the cabinet doors. “Let’s go.”

  Manny looked at her, puzzled. “You don’t want to open the box, see what it is?”

  “No, let’s find someplace to hide, then we can open it.” She added it to her backpack, it made a square bulge. Moving quickly, they walked back through the bulkhead door, and Kaylee closed it behind them. Where to next? The pirate shuttle was, Jen said, docked on pod 3. They would go to pod 2. They had been there before with Jen. “I know where to go, follow me.”

  The three men tramped along the road, trying to stay in the crawler tracks, where the soil was compressed, and kicked up less dust when they stepped on it. Their legs were all red, above the knees, their e-suits were pink.

  Sam brushed dust off the face of the clock on his left wrist. It smeared, obscuring the numbers. “Damn this soil!”

  “Regolith.” Rick said.

  “Huh?”

  “Regolith. Soil has organisms living in it, this doesn’t, so it’s called regolith. Like the surface of the moon.”

  “Oh. I didn’t know that.” Sam shrugged.

  “It’s completely useless trivia.” Rick sighed. “I’ve got a million of them. Still, I wonder why this planet doesn’t have any life? It’s almost the same size as Earth, and this star isn’t that much hotter than the sun.”

  “I actually know the answer to that one.” Nelson answered, without enthusiasm. One foot in front of the other, left foot, right foot, all the way to the mining camp, unseen somewhere ahead of them. How far? “I read somewhere, another star passed through this system, something like two billion years ago. Boiled off the water here before oceans could form, stripped off most of the atmosphere, disrupted the orbits, left this red, dusty rock.” He checked his oxygen supply and frowned. “That’s my useless fact for the day. What I really want to know is, how far to the mining camp?”

  “Section D!” Dooley shouted, gesturing with his gun.

  “Keep your voice down.” Valjean barked. “D, really? You must be a genius. Did you figure that out all on your own, or did your tinman help you? Get the door open.”

  Dooley stifled a reply. He walked up to the access panel, flipped it up, inserted his card, and plugged a cable from his notepad over the protruding end of the card. “Just a minute, Boss.” The notepad cracked the simple security code quickly, and the bulkhead door slid open. “Transport ship,” Dooley said disapprovingly, “their security sucks.” He ducked his head in, then gestured for Rocko to enter first. The compartment was empty. “There’s 14D.” He pointed, and hurried ahead.

  “Wait!” Valjean shouted. “Nobody touches it.” Holstering his gun, he pulled the cabinet open, and extracted the box. He turned it over, checking that the Customs seal attached at Oceania was still intact. It was. He tore the seal, opened the box, and extracted the object.

  It didn’t look like much, encased in a plastic bag, it was a dark green, corroded piece of what looked like a circuit board with a small, metallic cylinder attached to one end. Valjean held it up to the light, smiled, and let it drop to the deck. He crushed it under his foot.

  “Boss!” Taney exclaimed. “What are you doing?”

  “This isn’t it, you idiot!” Valjean snarled. “Somebody got here first, and switched containers. Look at the serial number on the box, this isn’t the one we want!”

  The three pirates frantically tore open cabinets, looking for the right box, scattering boxes on the deck. When half the cabinets had been searched, Dooley paused, his right hand on the handle of a cabinet.

  “What are doing, sleeping? Keep looking!” Valjean ordered angrily.

  “I will, Boss, there’s a better way to do this. This ship is mostly automated, right? She’s only got a crew of seven. To load and unload the cargo, they use robot pallets. Those pallets can only work if each box has a radio ID tag, so the pallets know where everything is supposed to go.”

  “Your point?” Valjean asked impatiently.

  “As long as the thing we want is still in the box, I can find it, track the box’s radio ID tag through the ship’s computer.”

  Valjean rolled his eyes, and snapped “Why didn’t you say that before? Get on it!”

  “Yes, Boss.” Dooley grinned, and walked over to plug his handheld notepad computer into the wall panel. Valjean occupied himself by kicking boxes open and stomping on the contents, until Dooley shouted “Got it! It’s in cargo pod 2, deck 1, section A. No, now it’s in section B. Must be moving.”

  “How much control do you have over ship functions with that gizmo? Can you turn off power and gravity to that section, let the air out?” Valjean suggested. They were already way behind schedule. Eventually, that Navy frigate would get suspicious and come to investigate.

  “No, I don’t have the codes for higher-level functions like that, this tub does have some security. If I had enough time, I could probably crack the codes, but we’re talking days, not minutes.”

  The trek to the hut, and the effort to open the door, had been, the three shuttle survivors thought, useless for them, but that’s all. They were wrong. It had been useful to someone. Forcing the door open had set off an alarm at the main settlement, an alarm being monitored by the one man the pirates had left behind after they took over the mining camp. His name was Seamus MacGonagal. Nobody called him Seamus anymore, not if they wanted to keep all their teeth. They called him Mac. Tall, broad-shouldered, with crew-cut red hair and pale grey eyes, he was hard man and looked it. Nobody messed with Mac, was his own personal motto. In truth, he was a small time criminal, a punk, mostly burglary, sometimes he worked as muscle for shakedowns and extortion, but he preferred to work on his own. Valjean and he went back aways, had done time in the same prison, later Mac had worked with his current boss on an electronics theft that turned out to be just as profitable as Valjean said it was. So when Valjean called on short notice for this job, a big score, Mac had said yes. They had arrived at the mining camp, claiming to be company inspectors, and had quickly seized control and shut down communications. It was Mac’s voice that was heard on the distress call, that is, a digitally altered version of Mac’s voice. Then the other pirates had got back into their shuttle and flown away, leaving Mac behind to mind the store, was the way Valjean had said it.

  Now Mac was worried. Things had not gone according to plan. That was not how working with Valjean was supposed to be. The Nightengale had been damaged. The freighter’s shuttle had been shot down, but the crew apparently survived. That crew must have walked through the night, because they had just broken into a hut only a few kilometers from the mining base.

  Mac’s problem was that the base was scattered all over the plateau they were on, with dozens of buildings. The miners were held prisoner in three of the buildings, although the only thing keeping the miners locked up was that the pirates had taken away their environment suits, so they had no way to go outside. And the pirates had used laser cutters to slice through the walkway tubes which connected the buildings, letting the air out. The shuttle crew could still cause trouble, they could get into any of the buildings, arm themselves with equipment like laser cutters, they could commandeer a crawler, they might even manage to free some of the miners, and then all hell would break loose. Mac needed to prevent that from happening. He knew that if the miners were free, Valjean would not be dropping down in a shuttle to pick up Mac before the Nightengale departed.

  When Mac got the warning signal from the hut, he knew Valjean would expect him to handle the situation by himself; Mac would go outside, find the shuttle crew, and finish the job the missile had started. Mac checked the map, there was a route, almost a road, between the dome and the camp, it was frequently traveled by crawlers. The shuttle crew would, logically, be walking down that road. Mac debated, in his slow way, whether to go out in a crawler himself, until he decided that would just raise a cloud of red dust, and alert the shuttle crew that he
was coming. He would go out on foot. Go out hunting.

  CHAPTER 11

  “Here.” Kaylee announced as they entered a cavernous cargo bay, lined on both sides twenty meters high with large boxes and crates, and stretching back, Kaylee didn’t know how far. Longer than a soccer field, she thought. Much longer. “This where we will hide, there’s plenty of places to hide in here.”

  “Yeah, but, Kaylee, there’s only two ways in or out, the two big doors at the ends.” Manny protested. “We could be trapped here.”

  Kaylee’s lips curled up in a sly smile. “No, there are other ways to escape from here if we need to. Remember when we came here with Jen, and she had a problem with a sensor-“

  Manny nodded. “An oxygen sensor, I remember! She had to go into a maintenance tube, and she said they go sideways between sections. Yeah, Kaylee.” He looked admiringly at his big sister.

  Kaylee was pretty proud of herself. She had this all thought through, the whole plan. “Lock that big door behind us, then run ahead and lock the other one. I’ll find the hatches that lead to the maintenance tubes.”

  By the time Manny came back to report that he had locked both doors as best he could, Kaylee had located both access tube hatches. She decided not to open either hatch, in case that would set off some sort of alarm, she remembered Jen saying something like that. So that they could find the hatches quickly if they needed to, she borrowed Manny’s black marker and drew an 'X' on the crates near the hatches. She was quite proud of herself for thinking ahead like that. The pirates wouldn’t know what the 'X' was for.

  “Now what do we do”? Manny asked as he tucked the marker away in his backpack.

  “Now, we negotiate.” She had seen this in a video. That story had worked out well for the hero. Except for all the shooting.

  “Isn’t there a faster way to get there?” Valjean asked angrily, as Dooley stopped to plug his keycard into an access panel to force yet another door open. It was slow, too slow. Every door they came to was locked with a code, Dooley had to crack the encryption before he could control the door.