Manny looked at the control panel. “There’s a button to close it.” He looked at the door. “I don’t know if I can hit the button, and jump in, before the door slides closed.”
“We need to flip that little door closed, too, or the pirates will know where we are.” She had an idea. From her pack, she pulled out chewing gum, and a pen. She put the gum in her mouth and chewed, to make it soft and sticky. “Here,” she handed the wad of gum to her brother, “stick this on the inside of the control panel door, then stick the pen into it, so the other end of the pen will hit the close button, when the door swings closed.”
Many took the gum and the pen. He looked admiringly at his sister. “Wow, that’s really smart, Kaylee.” He crouched down, positioned the pen, then stuck the gum in place. Then, he lowered himself into the tube, leaning far over, to hold the control panel door open with his fingers. “Ready?”
“I’m-“ There was a clanging sound, like a hatch opening. “They’re coming!”
Manny let go of the control panel door, it swung down, and the pen, slightly off-center, hit the button. The deckplate door began to slide closed, and Manny ducked his head and arms inside just in time. “That was close!”
Kaylee only nodded, her mouth was too dry to speak. The tube was very dark, with only small emergency lights every ten meters. They couldn’t see the bottom, as they began climbing downward. It looked like the bottom was a very long way down.
Dooley squeezed his way out of the hatch, following the children. Valjean had sent him in by himself. Rocko couldn’t fit, the robot was too big and inflexible to get into the tube between compartments. He froze, listening. There was a sound, like gears spinning, or a door sliding closed. He jumped to his feet and raced to the open area, looking both ways. The doors at both ends were closed. Which way had they gone? Picking a door at random, he ran to his right, and checked the door control panel. Had it been used recently? He couldn’t tell. The door was locked, and he’d left his notepad behind. Dooley ran to the other door, and checked it. Nothing. Next, he squeezed through crates to the opposite hatch. The children hadn’t been there, the dust on the deck was undisturbed. So, they’d gone through one of the doors. Which one? Dooley’s shoulders slumped. What else could go wrong?
Dooley never looked down to notice the discolored section of deck plating beneath his feet, or the short blue fiber sticking out of a gap between plates, where the edge of the sliding door had snagged the top of Manny’s backpack.
“They’re gone, boss.” Dooley shouted down the tube ahead of him, looking forward to Valjean’s cruel face, framed in the open hatch. “They went out one of the doors, I couldn’t tell which one.” Dooley added as he crawled out, stood up, and brushed the dust off his knees. Before his boss could say what an idiot he was, Dooley added “They have an access card, boss, they can unlock a door in seconds.”
Valjean frowned. For once, he didn’t reprimand Dooley. The technician was right, and without Dooley, they wouldn’t have gotten anywhere in the ship. He handed Dooley’s notepad to him, and gestured toward one of the doors. “See if you can locate that box again. We’ll get another shot at them, next time, we’ll come at them from all sides.” The smile Valjean gave Dooley made that man swallow hard. Valjean, Dooley concluded, shouldn’t smile too often. It was creepy.
While Dooley plugged in his notepad, Valjean walked over to the intercom and plucked the microphone out of its cradle. “Attention, children. This is the pirates. Sorry about that, we didn’t mean to shoot at you. We stumbled across you, and were startled, that’s all it was. We were afraid you’d shoot at us first. And, we didn’t know you were children.”
The pirate’s words rang out, reverberating in the confines of the access tube. Kaylee and Manny halted in their climb down the tube. Only ‘down’ wasn’t the correct word anymore. Since they were moving between cargo pods, they were also moving between artificial gravity fields. The place where they were now, almost halfway down the tube, was in almost zero Gee. Manny warned they needed to turn around soon, and start climbing ‘up’, not ‘down’.
The pirate continued. “I have sent my shuttle to rescue the people from the command section. When the shuttle returns, I will contact you. In the meantime, I suggest you find a safe place, and stay there. This ship is damaged, and moving around is not a good idea.”
“Shut up, you big liar.” Manny said under his breath. His left hand still tingled. “He wasn’t startled when he shot the hatch handle while I had hold of it.”
“Come on, Manny, let’s go.” Kaylee sighed. “I want to get out of this tube.”
Dooley’s brow was furrowed as he worked on his notepad. Valjean walked over almost casually, checking the energy charge in his pistol. “Did you find the box?”
Dooley gave a careful answer. “The last place it was located was in that compartment, but it’s not there now. I’m getting a signal, but it’s weak, and the signal is being picked up by more than one sensor.”
“What does that mean?” Valjean asked impatiently.
“I don’t-“ Dooley fiddled with the controls, trying to determine which sensor was picking up the strongest reading. “Damn! Got it! They’re moving between cargo pods. There’s no sensors in those access tubes. Boss, they’re beneath our feet.”
“How did they get there?” Valjean demanded.
“An access tube? Boss, I don’t know. But I know how to get there, two compartments from here, there’s a junction, it connects all the cargo pods.”
Valjean frowned. “All right, move out. No more slip-ups. You hear me? No more slip-ups.”
Manny climbed out of the tube, rolling onto the deck. This cargo pod looked exactly like the one they’d left. His arms were shaking, and his fingers cramped, from holding onto the railings, all the way down, then up. He reached over to open the control panel door, and pressed the button to close the deckplate door behind them. They’d seen no sign that pirates were behind them in the tube.
“We’ll stop-“ Kaylee paused to catch her breath, “here, for a minute.” The combination of fear and frantic running had her panting, and shaking slightly. She hoped it wasn’t obvious to her brother.
Kaylee felt like a fool, a gullible, foolhardy child. She felt every month of her fourteen years, and no older. What had she been thinking, she asked herself as she stared at her feet? I’m just a kid, she thought, a teenager. She had no business trying to deal with pirates, hardened criminals. What she felt like doing was find a dark, safe place and hide. Not with her brother around to watch, not while her brother needed her. Maybe that was what being an adult was all about, she considered sourly. Doing things you don’t want to do, because you have to. Because it’s the right thing to do. Because other people are counting on you, need you.
She stole a glance at her brother. He had also been out of breath, and was now sitting slumped on the deck, next to a cargo-moving robot pallet. Manny, at only 12, was not crying. He appeared anxious, but not scared anymore. Maybe he’d gotten numb from being scared.
“I feel like smashing this thing.” She said angrily, pointing to the box in her backpack.
“Don’t, Kaylee. That’s the only way we’re getting Mom and Dad back.” Manny said wearily. “Maybe he’s lying about sending the shuttle away, but if we smash it, we have nothing to bargain with.”
Kaylee nodded. Her brother sounded wise beyond his years. Getting shot at seemed to have changed him. She was tired. She wanted this over, wanted her life back. But mostly, she was angry. Angry at being chased, angry at being shot at. She could see it in Manny’s face, too. Something had changed, something inside them. “I’m tired of running.” She said, surprised by the words coming out of her mouth. “I don’t want to run anymore. I want to hit back at them.”
“Me too.” Manny got a determined look on his face. Her brother could be immensely stubborn. He had that familiar look now.
“Can you let the air out of a compartment?”
“Kill the pirates?” Manny aske
d, startled by his sister’s sudden bloodthirstiness. “I don’t know how to let the air out. Kaylee, I hate them too, but if we kill them, how do we get Mom and Dad back?”
Kaylee’s eyes flashed anger. “He’s lying. He didn’t send his shuttle! I’ll bet their shuttle never left. That’s why he’s chasing us, because he knows he won’t have anything to trade for the thing.” An inspiration came to her. “Can you fly their shuttle?”
Manny was taken aback. “Kaylee, I’m just a kid. I’ve never flown anything.”
“You fly spaceships in your sims all the time!”
“Those are sims. This is real. I don’t even know what kind of shuttle they have. And I’ve probably never flown that type of shuttle in a sim. The controls are all different.” He protested.
Kaylee considered. “If you got into their shuttle, you could call Seth, and he could tell you what to do.”
“I don’t know.”
“Manny, we have to try! At least, if you got there, you could, I don’t know, lock the doors, or smash the controls, or something. Make sure the pirates can’t leave this ship, so they’ll still be aboard when the Navy gets here.”
That seemed doable. “I guess. Yeah, I could do that. Kaylee, we need a plan. Like, what do we do if the shuttle really did leave, to rescue Mom? And how do we get there? What if we run into the pirates?”
“If the shuttle has left, then we don’t do anything. You know what we need? A diversion, something to keep the pirates busy, so we can sneak over to their shuttle.”
“A diversion? Yeah.” Manny frowned in disgust, and kicked the robotic cargo pallet that sat inert on the deck next to him. “I wish we had robots, combat robots, like the Army has.”
“Could we turn these robots on, the ship’s robots?”
“No, they need the ship’s AI to control them.” Manny said, in a ‘doesn’t everybody know that’ tone of voice. “That would cool, though, huh? We could send the robots chasing after-“ Manny didn't finish that thought, because another, much better thought was forming in his head.
“What?” Kaylee tugged on her little brother’s arm. “What are you thinking?”
Manny jumped to his feet. “We don’t need robots. We’ve got Tinos!”
Kaylee couldn’t help rolling her eyes. For an all-to-brief moment, she’d hoped her brother had come up with a good idea, an idea to get them out of this mess. The mess she’d helped get them into. “Manny, that’s a stupid idea. The Tinos are all asleep.”
“Not if we wake them up!” Manny walked in a circle, gesturing with his arms, as he thought through his idea. “They’re just drugged, to make them sleep, right? We did that with a mouse in my biology class.”
Kaylee paused. Her biology class had done the same thing, at Manny’s age. They had kept the mouse in hypersleep over a long weekend, then the teacher revived the rodent, and it had scampered around as if nothing had happened. Remove the drugs, increase the temperature, and the animal would wake up. “Ohhhkaay, so what happens if we wake up the Tinos? Won’t the pirates just shoot them?”
Once again Manny looked at his sister, disbelieving that anyone could not know this stuff. He faced her, hands on his hips. “Kaylee, nobody brings high-powered weapons onto a spaceship.” He had seen that fact mentioned on many Star Patrol episodes. “You can’t risk shooting a hole in the ship, the air would suck you right out into space.” The pirates had directed-energy weapons, like stunners, or blasters. Probably it was a blaster that had hit the hatch handle while he’d had hold of the other end, his hand still hurt. While a blaster could be powerful, the beam was just charged particles. “A blaster bolt would bounce right off a tino’s armor.” He speculated aloud. “Yeah, yeah, this will work! Kaylee, think about it, the ship is mostly dark, with the emergency lights on. The pirates are going to come around a corner, and, bam! Right in front of them, there’s a Tino! The pirates will forget all about us, and we can get to their shuttle.”
Kaylee looked elated for a moment, then her face fell. “Manny, that would only work if the pirates came into the compartment where the Tinos are. Tinos can’t open doors, the pirates could just lock them into a compartment, and not have to worry about them.”
Manny’s eyes narrowed, and he stared off into space, remembering something. There was a time when he had been able to see almost the whole length of a cargo pod, stretching on for what seemed like forever. He could picture it in his mind’s eye, section after section, stretching into the distance toward the aft of the ship, with the tall bulkhead doors open. “We can open all the doors in this pod, and pod 3, where the pirate’s shuttle is.” He said quietly. “Remember, Kaylee, when we were with Dad, and Jen and Seth let us watch the cargo loading at Oceania? Jen said she had all the doors locked open, so they didn’t have to stop at each section when they were moving cargo.”
“Do you know how to do that?” Kaylee asked skeptically. Her little brother was full of surprises.
“No.”
“And all I know how to do is open one door at a time.” Kaylee held up Jen’s access card.
“I don’t know now, but I’ll bet I can figure it out, Kaylee.” Manny walked over to the computer terminal on the wall. “Jen didn’t open them one at a time.” He said, trying to remember that day, when he had been excited about the animals, not boring details of cargo loading procedures. “She used one of these terminals. I could try it, Kaylee. It can’t be that hard, remember, Seth said the controls on this ship are made simple, so they are easy to use in an emergency.” He said hopefully.
“I don’t know.” She was so uncertain. How did adults know what to do?
“We have to.” Manny pleaded, then folded his arms across his chest.
“If all the doors are open, what if we run into the pirates again?”
Manny held up Jen’s card. “I can still close and lock the doors, one at a time, lock the pirates out of anywhere we are. I don’t know how the pirates got the doors unlocked, but I’ll bet it takes a long time.”
“OK, we try it.” she agreed without enthusiasm. What else could they do? Wherever they ran, the pirates somehow found them.
“I’ll figure out the doors, but then we need to find the Tinos first, and start waking them up. Then we open all the doors.”
“Because, without the Tinos, having all the doors open just makes it easier for the pirates to catch us?” It felt odd to Kaylee to be thinking behind her brother.
Manny nodded vigorously.
“Manny, you’re in charge of this.”
“For real?”
“Really. If you can get all the doors open. I don’t know how to do it.”
Valjean accessed Nightengale’s computer through his notepad. The connection was poor, with the signal having to travel through the walls of the cargo pod. Tigershark had called Atlas Challenger over and over, asking for status of the rescue mission, demanding an answer. From the tone of the messages, the frigate was growing impatient and concerned. From the timecode on the messages, Valjean could tell the frigate was still far away, searching for the phantom ship Isaac Newton. The Navy was no threat to him, no threat, unless, that is, he wasted too much time finding the damned alien artifact. Which he certainly wasn’t going to do.
“What’s up, Boss?” Dooley asked, as Valjean put his datapad back in his pocket.
Valjean shocked Dooley not with a rebuke, but with an icy smile. “Everything’s going well, Dooley, everything’s going well. That frigate is screaming bloody murder, but they’re still wasting their time looking for our ghost ship. We’ll get what we came for, Jump, and be long gone before the Navy decides to investigate. By the time the Navy gets all this sorted out, we’ll be on a beach, drinking rum punch and deciding how to spend our money, huh?”
Dooley shot a look at Valjean’s back as the pirate leader strode away down the cargo bay. Valjean was never friendly, he would never be sitting on a beach with any of them. Which meant he was up to something. Something Dooley wouldn’t like.
CHAPTER
13
When Mac first saw the three shuttle survivors, they were walking down the hard-packed red dirt road like he expected, walking in the tracks the crawlers had made. It was not, he saw immediately, a great place for an ambush. The whole area around the mining camp was flat, with only a few craters here and there. Off to the north there was a boulder field, too far away for Mac to get a good shot with his rifle. He needed to be closer to the road. Where? He could try to hide in a crater by the roadside, let the three targets get close, then pop up and let them have it before they could scatter. No, a crater wouldn’t work. Without sticking his head up, he couldn’t see how close they were, and in an environment suit, he sure couldn’t hear them. The craters by the road were shallow anyway, the men may see his legs before he could see them.
There. To the south of the road, there was a structure, kind of a tall, skinny hut. Mac didn’t know what it was, he didn’t care. It was a bit far for a certain good shot; Mac fancied himself as an excellent marksman and looked at it as a challenge. He crawled backwards into a crater, ducked down, and ran toward the hut.
Sam was in the lead by a few meters, not by plan, he simply tended to walk faster. He was the first to see the top of the domes which made up the mining camp. The camp itself sat on a plateau. “Hey guys, I see the camp, we’re almost there.”
“All right.” Nelson said, and added “Let’s be careful.” They hadn’t yet decided what do to once they reached the camp. Ahead of them to the south there was a hut, a tall skinny structure, the purpose of which Nelson couldn’t guess. Equipment storage, probably, certainly the hut didn’t look airtight. “Sam, Rick, hold up here. I don’t think we should stay on this road.”
“I agree.” Rick said. This close to the camp, the ‘road’ they were on was now one of many, for the whole area, except for a boulder field to the north, was crisscrossed with crawler tracks. All the tracks seemed to converge up ahead, leading toward a large structure with two big doors, Rick assumed that was the garage for the crawlers. There weren’t any crawlers out today, none in sight, and no dust plumes in the area. There was a light breeze blowing, the sunrise had warmed the thin air, and occasionally they saw a weak, short-lived dust devil whirling close to the ground. Rick thought he’d seen a dust cloud near the tall, skinny hut, stirring up the surface dust. “There are no crawler tracks in that boulder field, and those boulders come right up close to the outer buildings,” Rick suggested, “we’d have cover until we were almost there.”
Aces Page 15