by Allen Steele
“The tape! The tape!” Ugly yelled from behind them. Dobbs felt a hand release his wrists. Instantly, he attempted to struggle loose, turning himself half-around… then a balled fist connected with his chin and he staggered back again, his eyes going out of focus.
A few moments later he felt something cool and sticky being applied to his wrists. He was being bound with something that felt like duct tape. He realized that four hands, not two, were restraining him. Glancing up, he could see that another person besides Ponytail was behind him, a guy with a scraggly mustache, who had apparently been waiting outside the hatch.
The hatch. Dobbs wondered if it was still open. “What do you guys want?” he asked, turning his head around to see if the hatch was open, while hoping to distract his captors with a stupid question.
“Yours is not to ask but only to wonder,” Ponytail replied in a near-whisper. The tape made a final revolution around Dobbs’ wrists, then he felt a final tug as it was cut from the roll. Someone gave it an experimental yank to make sure that it was tight.
“Good enough,” Ponytail said. Dobbs bit the inside of his lip to keep from laughing or even cracking a smile. Good enough, like hell! The tape was not that tight. Given a few seconds, he knew he could work his wrists free. Wait, he told himself. Pull your shit together—stay calm, and just wait a couple of minutes for them to get even more careless.
The one with the ponytail was looking anxiously around the module, apparently searching for some function on the consoles arrayed along its walls. He pushed himself off and drifted to the console where Dobbs had been working. He studied the keyboard for a moment, then pulled a folded sheet of paper out of a thigh pocket of his suit and consulted something written on it. Dobbs watched him as he tentatively pushed a key which cleared the screen, then looked over his shoulder and grinned as he spotted the module’s communications board.
“Popeye!” he shouted. “How’s it looking?”
A second later the one with the mustache reappeared in the hatchway. “Coast’s clear,” he said. “And I found the wardroom just down the tube. It’s vacant.”
Ponytail nodded. “Good.” He checked his wrist chronometer. “Okay, let’s move it. Popeye, help me out in here. Bruce, take these guys to the module and…” He stopped and looked at Dobbs and McGrath. “I dunno, just do something to keep ’em out of the way. Haul ass.”
“Okay, just a second.” The one called Bruce pulled the roll of duct tape out of a pocket, slid behind McGrath, and sealed his mouth with it in a single, swift movement which caught the little man by surprise. As Bruce stepped toward Dobbs, ripping out another few inches of silver tape, Dobbs turned his head toward Ponytail, the one who seemed to be the leader.
“Just what is going on here, anyway?” he asked calmly. What the hell; it couldn’t hurt to ask.
“Putting a banana in your Big Ear, my friend,” Ponytail replied. Then the tape was spread over Dobbs’ mouth, its sticky gluelike taste making him want to gag. That, plus the realization of what these men wanted to do, made him feel sick.
They were after the Ear. But with that revelation came questions. Even though they had somehow managed to get aboard the station undetected and had managed to take him and McGrath by surprise, it seemed to Dobbs that these men were not exactly professional terrorists, even if the swarthy one, Bruce, looked sinister enough to be a summa cum laude graduate of a Palestinian terrorist school. Enough of that, he commanded himself. If they’re not pros, then you’ve got an even better chance of getting away.
“Okay, boys, let’s go,” Bruce pushed them one at a time toward the hatch, where Popeye—not exactly a name for a terrorist, Dobbs noted with brief amusement—grabbed first McGrath, then Dobbs himself, and guided them through the opening. Bound as they were, Dobbs and McGrath were little more than long, cumbersome parcels in the microgravitational environment.
Out in the access tunnel, with his back momentarily turned away from Bruce, Dobbs began to quickly, furtively wiggle his wrists against the duct tape. He’d been right; he could work his wrists free. Good; only Bruce was escorting them, leaving the other two inside the module. His captor was beginning to look genuinely nervous now. Looking quickly back and forth along the access tunnel, he grabbed the back of McGrath’s shirt and kicked off the wall with the tip of his boot, heading for an open hatch just twenty-five feet away. Left alone for a few more moments, Dobbs began to wiggle his wrists frantically against the tape. C’mon, c’mon, c’mon—!
Snap! there went the tape, along with a little bit of his skin. Dobbs was glad that the tape was still on his mouth; it kept him from crying aloud. Bruce’s back was turned to him, he was trying to push a futilely struggling McGrath through the hatch. But the way to the command module was that way, past Bruce.
No time to even think about it. Dobbs pushed himself against one wall, doubled his knees, balled his fists and, with a violent kick, lunged straight at Bruce, sailing through the air like a human lance.
He was able to do it only because he took Bruce by surprise, with his back turned and distracted by McGrath. Dobbs fell onto Bruce, depending on his mass and momentum to do what his weightless condition could not. His right fist slammed into the back of Bruce’s neck, his left into the side of his ribs. Bruce grunted as his head bounced off the side of the hatch and, for a moment, Dobbs thought he had knocked him senseless.
Then Bruce’s right hand grabbed his left ankle and his left fist flew toward Dobbs. Dobbs twisted at the last moment and the fist struck his pelvis instead of his stomach. Damn, the son of a bitch was tough! Already Bruce was recovering, trying to grab him again…. Dobbs arched his right knee back, took half a second to aim, then kicked hard into Bruce’s face.
Bruce’s head and torso flew backwards, striking the open hatch, and his hand let go of Dobbs’ ankle. Not waiting to see if Bruce was going to recover as swiftly this time, Dobbs propelled himself off the wall and flung himself down the length of the tunnel. He heard a sudden yell from behind, from the Ear module. Damn it! They were onto him! Not only that, but his nearest place of safety, the command module, was at least fifty or seventy feet away!
But just ahead of him was the access tunnel hatch, the emergency hatch which could be manually or automatically shut in case of decompression. That was it. Dobbs grinned in spite of himself, kicked off a tunnel wall again to increase his momentum, and threw himself through the hatch. He flung out his hands and slapped his palms against the walls to stop himself, whirled around and faced the hatch.
Bruce was already pushing himself, clumsily and in obvious pain, toward him, his dark eyes glinting with fury. Dobbs didn’t let himself wonder at the man’s stamina. He hastily sought out and found the hatch controls on the wall beside the opening, flipped open the cover, and stabbed at the red switch marked “Emergency Override.”
The inner emergency hatch began to quickly iris shut, but not before Bruce, only twenty feet away, got in one last howl. “You goddamn son of a—!”
Clang! The hatch sealed shut, and an instant later Dobbs heard a heavy thud as Bruce’s body smacked into it from the other side. Dobbs felt his muscles sag. He felt suddenly nauseous and fought against it—goddamn zero g, goddamn spacesickness—and for the first time heard the brash honking of the warning Klaxon, set off automatically when he had pulled the emergency override switch.
Dobbs reached up and carefully peeled the tape off his mouth, feeling it rip against the skin of his lips. He licked them gingerly with his tongue and murmured, “Your momma.”
“Hey! What the heck is going on out here?” Dobbs looked around, saw a station crewman in a blue jumpsuit emerging from an open hatch a short distance away. Dobbs recognized the hatch. It belonged to the station’s command module.
Felapolous found the command center in complete chaos. Along its tiered levels—lit in surreal shades of blue from the computer screens and red from the emergency lights—some of the personnel were moving frantically, yelling into their headsets, their hands movin
g in blurs across their consoles. Others were frozen in disbelieving inactivity, staring at the havoc which had broken loose around them. The doctor closed the hatch behind him, and hung for a few moments to a handhold as he tried to figure out what was going on. He listened:
“Modules 31 through 38, no signs of them, sir…”
“All modules report stable pressurization. Repair crews on standby.”
“Vulcan reports that construction is on standdown status, awaiting final…
“Bigthorn says that Module 10 is vacant. He’s proceeding to Lunar Resources and the astrophysics labs for a check…”
“Modules 11 through 18, nothing there, sir, but they’re still…”
“Meteorology reporting, sir. They have something to report on Hooker’s recent activity.”
“Patch it through to me, on the double!”
Hearing Wallace’s voice, Felapolous’ eyes whipped around the huge, weirdly lighted compartment, trying to locate the project supervisor. He spotted him near the communications station, hanging upside down to Felapolous’ perspective, a headset clamped over his skull. He stared intently over the shoulder of Joni Lowenstein, the shift com officer, as he listened to something being said to him through the headset’s earphone. As Felapolous began pulling himself up a “fireman’s pole” to Wallace’s tier, he saw the corners of his mouth suddenly turn up in a wide, unsettling smile.
“Very good!” the project supervisor shouted. As Felapolous climbed to his level, Wallace turned and winked slyly at him before shifting his gaze again in the direction of Lowenstein’s station. “Very, very good! Thank you for communicating that, we’ll be in touch. Command out.”
Wallace touched a stud on the headset control attached to his belt and turned to face Felapolous, his face red and radiant. “Great news!” he boomed at Felapolous. “The NSA boys… that is, the men down in Meteorology…” Suddenly self-conscious, he dropped his voice a few decibels before continuing. “They tell me they’ve been suspicious of Hooker for the past couple of days, and also Hamilton, and that they took it upon themselves to check into their FBI files.” Wallace’s teeth clenched together within his smiling lips, and his voice dropped further. “Well, Hamilton’s been involved in subversive activity groundside, and Hooker was once involved in a criminal investigation in Florida relating to…”
“Henry, what’s going on here?” Felapolous asked, staring into Wallace’s eyes. “Why have these people been put on emergency alert?”
Wallace’s eyes grew wide and his mouth dropped open. His lips moved soundlessly for a moment, as if his mind could not react to an absurdity which had been flung in his face. “These… this station has been put on alert, Ed,” he said slowly, speaking to the doctor as if Felapolous were a backward child. “There’s a mutiny happening here. Hooker, Hamilton, that scumball they call Virgin Bruce… they’re plotting to take over the station, or sabotage it. As the project supervisor, I felt it was my duty and in my power to put Olympus on…”
Felapolous quickly shook his head. There was no point in asking for Henry’s reasons. “Have you told these people what they’re on alert about?”
Wallace’s eyes shifted warily toward the communications station. “Didn’t you hear what I told you in my quarters?” His whisper was barely audible over the hubbub around them. “Lowenstein is with them. If I tell everyone here what’s going on, she might tip off her fellow conspirators and they might…” His thoughts seemed to wander. “They might…”
“Flee?” Felapolous interjected. He felt himself getting weary of Wallace’s paranoid fantasies. He realized that at one time he had been entertained—shamefully, that was the right term—by observing Wallace’s private universe, but now he knew that the worst-case scenario had abruptly come about, and it was his job to inject some sanity. In that role, Felapolous was quickly becoming frustrated and angry. “Where are the conspirators going to flee, Henry? We’re thousands of miles above Earth.”
“No! Not flee!” Suddenly Wallace was shouting again, but his eyes pleaded with Felapolous for understanding. “That’s why I’ve had the inspection and repair crews mobilized! They might be planning to stick limpet mines around the station so they can blow it all up, or threaten to hold us hostage while they…”
“Gimme that!” In a convulsive move born of frustration and disgust, Felapolous found himself reaching out and tearing the headset off Wallace’s head. Wallace reached forward with both hands and tried to grab it back from Felapolous, but the doctor angrily shoved him aside. Wallace fell against a couple of crewmen seated nearby, who fumbled to stabilize the station’s head officer. Several other command-deck personnel had turned to stare at the sudden violence, including Lowenstein.
“Hold him!” Felapolous shouted at the crewmen hanging onto Wallace, as he pushed the headset onto his own head and pushed a button on the headset. Impulsively, he whistled a soft but shrill “C” note into the mike and observed with satisfaction that all the heads in the command center bobbed up at once, a few of the faces wincing in pain.
“Okay, now hear this,” he said with forceful calm. “This is Edwin Felapolous speaking. The station is no longer… I repeat, no longer on alert status. You’re all to revert to previous operating status, and recall all emergency proceedings, and uh…”He glanced around the compartment and saw many sets of eyes fastened on him from tiers above and below. “… and, uh, go back to normal. Just do your jobs, ladies and gentlemen. I’m afraid that…”
He looked around, and saw Wallace’s hate boring into him like a laser beam shot from Hell. Felapolous blinked, and said, “I’m afraid the captain isn’t feeling too good today.”
If he had made a joke, he wasn’t aware of it. He was surprised, then, to hear a few unseen people quietly chuckling. Felapolous winced, with embarrassment for both himself and Wallace.
The project supervisor, however, was no longer glowering at him, but was staring intently at something off to his side. Felapolous followed his gaze to the communications station. A red light was flashing on the console, and as Felapolous watched, the printout on its LCD screen suddenly disappeared and a single line of electronic type replaced it: 0169 PRIORITY INTERRUPT—EMERGENCY TRANSMISSION, FREEDOM.
Lowenstein made no apparent move to acknowledge the signal. She stared straight at the screen, her hands resting on the console a couple of inches from her keyboard. She didn’t seem to be paying attention to the crisis happening behind her—the only person in the command center who wasn’t—but she wasn’t making any effort to respond to the message.
“Acknowledge the transmission, Lowenstein,” Wallace said, staring at her back. “What’s the matter, woman? Don’t you see a priority message coming in from Freedom Station?” His voice took on a taunting edge. “Why don’t you do your job, Communications Chief?”
“Cut it out, Henry,” Felapolous whispered.
“Don’t you see!” Wallace snapped at the doctor. “She’s one of them. She’s part of this whole…” Suddenly, Wallace’s face turned pale and his eyes went wide open. “Of course! The Ear! They’ve gone after the Big Ear! They’re on Freedom Station, and they’re going after the Big Ear!”
Felapolous became confused. What the hell was the Big Ear? He swiftly glanced around the command center and saw nothing but bewildered pairs of eyes. Then he looked at Lowenstein again and noticed that she had not yet turned to look at Wallace, even while Wallace was accusing her. She was trying to look calm, but her hands were shaking and she was beginning to sweat…. What in the Lord’s name did she know about…?
Suddenly he heard a loud, pained gasp, and he looked back at Wallace. The crewman who had been holding him was doubled over in pain, holding his solar plexus, where Wallace’s elbow had apparently jabbed him. Free now of his restraints, Wallace was straightening up and thrusting his right hand into an inside pocket of the utility vest he had shrugged on when he’d left his quarters.
“Shit!” the doctor snarled as he tore open his belt pouch, fumbling
for the syringe gun filled with fast-acting sedative he kept for the rare but recurring freakout situations. As time seemed to slow down, he saw Wallace’s hand whip out and point a strange-looking weapon at Lowenstein, who was just beginning to turn around….
Felapolous propelled himself headfirst toward Wallace, the syringe held straight out in front of him. He was a half-second too slow. Wallace squeezed the trigger of his odd-looking gun, there was a high, metallic twang!, and something red, blue, and silver shot through the air. As Felapolous collided with Wallace and shot a compressed-air dose of sedative into the other man’s neck—no time to cleanse the spot with alcohol, he silently apologized to Wallace—he heard Lowenstein scream.
“Grab him!” he shouted at a crewman, chopping at Wallace’s right wrist with the edge of his palm. The gun spun away from Wallace’s fingers, and Felapolous immediately grabbed it before it floated away. Two other crewmen were already on Lowenstein, and as Felapolous pushed himself toward her, he saw thick, spherical droplets of blood rising up from the wound just below her left collarbone. He shouldered one of the crewmen aside—Tate, he recalled irrelevantly, the joker who always sprains his ankle while trying to jog on the catwalk—and quickly examined her wound.
A dart, one of those used in the rec room dartboards, was sticking out of Lowenstein’s upper chest. She was still conscious, but was pale and in danger of going into shock. “Get her down to sickbay,” he snapped at Tate and the other crewman who had jumped to her aid. “Don’t remove the dart until Maynard can deal with it. I’ll be down there in a minute.” The two men nodded and began to carefully carry Lowenstein toward the airlock.