Ounimbango shook his head as he studied the readout of the security logs. “Damn Petrova,” he spat. “Should have known she would become more trouble than she was worth.”
“You think she’s escaping?” al-Ansari demanded.
“Of course,” he agreed.
“How is that even possible?” he replied.
Ounimbango frowned. “She’s a resourceful one,” he mumbled. “There haven’t been any landings in the hangar recently, have there?”
Al-Ansari pulled out his tablet, punched in a few commands and shook his head. “No landings other than the runabout and the Grey Vistula,” he confirmed. “Security did not report any unauthorized landings.”
“We would have seen them,” Ounimbango said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Could there have been someone we missed?” he mused, rubbing his eyes as he pondered. “She couldn’t have gotten out of the brig on her own. I want guards on her ship.”
“Essential areas were staffed by security immediately,” al-Ansari said. “Hangar, engineering, the bridge…”
“No!” Ounimbango shouted. “I want extra security guarding the Grey Vistula. If Petrova got out of the brig, she’ll be heading straight there. Pull men off the engineering section if you have to.” Al-Ansari relayed his orders without question as Ounimbango continued to try to put together Petrova’s plan.
“General,” a stern voice announced as Overseer Pahhal’s face appeared on the communications section of Ounimbango’s monitor. “What is happening?” he demanded.
Ounimbango explained the situation including that he had just ordered more guards to the hangar bay.
Pahhal nodded. “I want plasma cannons and interceptors armed and torpedo banks flooded,” he said. “If they do make it into space, I want it to be the last thing that they do, general.”
“Yes, Overseer, it will be done,” Ounimbango said as Pahhal signed off. He hit the comm section of his computer again and relayed Pahhal’s orders to the weapons and firing teams. He then turned back to his executive officer. “Colonel, I want to know what the hell is going on in security.”
“Security Chief Jacobson just reported in,” he answered. “Access to security has been cut off. The lift is not responding and there is no access from the stairs.”
“What’s wrong with the stairs?” Ounimbango demanded.
“Someone unleashed an explosive device in security, collapsed part of the ceiling,” al-Ansari reported. “The corridor from the stairwell to the stationhouse is impassable.”
“You tell Chief Jacobson that I expect the stationhouse to be back under my control immediately, do you understand?” Ounimbango spat. “And the prisoners will be placed back into their cells. Immediately!”
3
“Problem?” Michelle Williams asked as Pahhal stepped away from a communication panel in the Intrepid’s supplies corridor and led them back to the elevator.
“Not especially,” he responded as he pushed the button for the lift. “Anastasia Petrova is proving her resiliency once more, escaping from the clutches of these pathetic idiots you humans call leaders. She will be captured and then killed or simply killed by the TGF. There is nowhere for her to go.”
“We don’t call them our leaders,” Michelle countered as the lift arrived and she stepped in. “You do.”
Pahhal chuckled slightly, but ignored her comment. “Yes, quite resilient,” he said, referring back to Petrova. “An attribute Captain Jennings could have used more of, don’t you think?”
The elevator arrived at the officer quarters level, and Pahhal led her out into the hallway, his mocking words still ringing in her ears. “Of course, Captain Jennings displayed a great deal of… What’s the human word? Tenacity?” he continued as he led her down to the entrance to his quarters and began going through the security measures needed to enter. “Yes, very tenacious up until he died.” Pahhal let out a sigh that Michelle was fairly certain was fake. “I tried to be Captain Jennings’ friend,” the Gael continued as the door slid open and he stepped in. “But he was more interested in fighting for the honor of a silly little girl.”
There was the sound of a plasma pistol priming and a voice said, “I’ve got enough friends.”
Chapter 34
1
Alarms were sounding, red lights that had descended from the ceiling were flashing and everywhere people seemed to be scrambling to get somewhere as Matthew Jennings and Selena Beauregard walked briskly down a corridor through the officer’s quarters. He was studying a readout from Minerva on his wrist monitor, trying to get them into a position where they could intercept Pahhal and Michelle. When they had entered the lift, Michelle had been in an isolated section of the ship’s supply depot, but had been on the move since then. Jennings had tried to beat them to the elevator so they could stage an ambush inside, but Michelle had gotten their first. Minerva had reported that the elevator was set to come to the floor they were on, the officer’s quarters deck, but they could not start a fight in the middle of a hallway crowded with TGF officers and security personnel. They needed to figure out where Michelle was being taken. Jennings had tasked Minerva with the job and despite protestations to the low probability of success, she had found a room which had security measures designed to keep any human being out. It was not an X on the map with GAEL FOUND HERE stamped on it, but it was close enough as far as Jennings was concerned.
Leading Beauregard to the Gael’s quarters, Jennings found himself in a mostly unoccupied corridor with large spaces between each quarter’s doors. “Must be the VIP section,” Jennings muttered. “Ounimbango, the Gael and maybe a few rooms set aside for high ranking officers or diplomats.”
“Which one is his?” Beauregard asked.
“There,” Jennings pointed at a door with additional security items built into the console to the right of the door. He led her over to it and studied it for a moment. “Minerva, anyway you can get this thing open?” he asked.
“Negative, captain,” she replied in his earpiece. “There is no TGF subroutine in place for the opening of that door.”
“The Gael likes his privacy,” Jennings muttered as he left the door and trotted back down the hallway to the next door down. “How about this one?” he asked Minerva.
“Stand-by,” she replied. “Working.”
Jennings took a look down at the monitor which showed the location of Michelle. She was getting a lot closer. “Minerva,” Jennings said insistently as he readied his weapon.
“Processing,” Minerva said.
Beauregard took up position in the doorway across the hall, dropping to one knee. “We’re going to have to hit them in this hall,” she whispered.
“Three dozen men will be down upon us as soon as the first shot is fired,” he hissed back. “Minerva!”
“Processing,” Minerva replied as the monitor showed Michelle about to round a turn in the corridor. She would be in sight in less than ten seconds. “Complete,” Minerva said as the door slid open.
Jennings darted through with Beauregard right on his heels. “Find a shared wall,” he said as he leapt over a coffee table and then a couch and headed into a room on the right.
The room was a bedroom that had been left in disarray, apparently someone had left in a hurry. Clothes lay about on the floor and the bed was unmade, all illuminated by the starlight coming through a large porthole set against the far wall. There was another door set in the wall ahead of him and Jennings headed forward as Beauregard entered the bedroom behind him. The room was a bathroom, large by spaceship standards, but still rather small. More importantly, its wall was almost certainly shared by a wall in the Gael’s room.
Jennings grabbed the grenade launcher off his back, but hesitated for a moment as he felt Beauregard’s hand clamp gently but firmly on his shoulder. “We’re too close to the hull,” she said. “Plus, there are better ways.”
Standing on one foot for a moment, Beauregard grabbed her boot with her hands and unscrewed the heel of the sole. In
side was a tiny compartment containing a little bottle of some sort of pink gel. Jennings recognized it as Merquand blood. The blood produced by humanity’s water-dwelling sentient ally, while harmless to them, could burn through just about anything.
“Why didn’t you use this to get out of the Grey Vistula’s brig?” Jennings asked as he climbed into the shower and sprayed the Merquand blood out in a ring on the wall large enough for them to fit through.
As the acid began melting through the tile immediately, Beauregard shrugged and said, “They took my boots. Thankfully, they were kind enough to keep them nearby.”
Within fifteen seconds, the wall in between the bathroom in which they stood and Pahhal’s had been melted completely through and fell into the Gael’s shower with a loud crash. Water gushed out onto the floor as they had apparently cut through a pipe as well. Feeling very lucky that it was water and not sewage, Jennings knelt and stepped through the opening, Beauregard right behind him.
In the Gael’s quarters, Jennings could hear the door opening and the Gael saying something about how he had wanted to be Jennings’ friend. Moving through the bathroom and an empty office, Jennings stepped out into the main room and primed his weapon.
“I’ve got enough friends,” he said as he pointed the weapon at Pahhal’s chest.
“Must you take the time to be witty,” Beauregard demanded as she too stepped forward and aimed at the Gael.
Immediately Pahhal reached out for Michelle and thrust her body in between him and Jennings. He raised his right hand as if to display the controller for the slave collar for them to see and slowly tried to back toward the door. Michelle planted her feet into the ground, and both Jennings and Beauregard crept closer.
“Mr. Jennings, you’re becoming quite irritable,” Pahhal said as he came to a stop. “Now, drop the weapons or I fry your little friend here.” Beauregard tensed as if she were about to fire, but Pahhal tsked and said, “Ms. Beauregard, you might kill me, but not before I push this button and send enough charge to electrocute Ms. Williams. Your friend Mr. Jennings would not appreciate that.”
Beauregard lowered her weapon but did not drop it. Jennings seemed to be considering the situation for a moment, but he did not lower his pistol. Pahhal tightened his grip on Michelle and a slight sob escaped from her lips. This seemed to bring Jennings back into the moment. Very slowly, he lowered his weapon.
“Intelligent decision…”
With lightning fast speed, Jennings leveled the weapon and fired, interrupting Pahhal and, more importantly, blasting apart the slave collar control on his hand. The force of the blast sent Pahhal spinning around, forcing him to let go of Michelle as he fell, still spinning, into the hallway. Jennings was already stalking forward as Pahhal spun, firing constantly. Two shots struck Pahhal in the back as the Gael continued to spin and fall back into the hall, eventually crashing back first into the door for the quarters opposite him. Pahhal’s breath came in ragged gasps as Jennings came closer, moving with celerity. Stopping in front of Pahhal, he leveled his pistol at the Gael’s chest and unloaded the entire charge at him. Pahhal’s eyes rolled back into his head and his body slumped over.
Jennings eyed the body for a moment before turning back around to look into the Gael’s quarters. Beauregard had just finished picking the lock on the slave collar and she let it drop to the floor. Michelle bounded out into the hallway and flung herself around Jennings. He returned the embrace, unaware that he was patting her on the back with his plasma pistol.
After a moment that seemed far too short, he heard Beauregard say in a cautioning voice, “Those shots are going to draw attention.”
“Right,” Jennings said as he let Michelle go. He changed out the charge in his pistol and holstered it, then grabbed the rifle that was hanging from a strap around his neck and readied it. “We’ve got to get to the hangars,” he said to Michelle. “Fix and Lafayette are working on a distraction and they’re going to meet us there.”
“Wait,” Michelle insisted as they started to walk away.
“No time,” Jennings said as he grabbed her arm gently and tried to lead her away.
“We’ve got to help them,” she said, breaking free of his grip.
“Who?” Jennings demanded.
“The other one hundred and ten,” Michelle responded.
2
Remy Lafayette was in the lead of about a dozen people, ten and a half of which he did not trust. Fix might be on his side right now, but he never really knew what was going through that man’s mind. They were crawling their way through a ventilation duct that ran from the security monitoring room to a central ventilation hive, a vertical corridor that ran the entire height of the Intrepid and was equipped with a maintenance ladder for any technicians who had to work in the vents.
A horrible acrophobia gripped Lafayette as he arrived in the hive and stared down the long shaft that would be the death of anyone who fell. At least a dozen more ventilation ducts led from this level of the hive to the rest of the ship, but their destination was one floor below.
“Get a move on!” someone snapped from behind Lafayette.
Muttering in Acadian French to himself, Lafayette grabbed hold of the ladder with both hands and tried to find a way to work his body out of the ventilation tube. There was not enough room for him to get adequately turned out or even crouched so that he could get both his arms and feet out of the tunnel at the same time. Gritting his teeth and tightening his grip on the ladder, he pulled himself out into empty space, relying on his arm strength to keep him from falling. His legs stretched out to find purchase and landed on one of the ladder’s rungs. He sighed with relief and relaxed his arms for a moment just as his foot slipped on some condensation that had formed on the ladder and he felt a horrible feeling of weightlessness for a moment as he started to fall. Lafayette cried out, his arms flailing in the air before his hands caught the ladder and his body slammed into the side of the hive. Cursing loudly, he managed to hold on and get his feet safely on the ladder. Breathing heavily, Lafayette looked up and saw that he had fallen about ten feet.
Fix’s head popped into view. “What are you yellin’ about?” he demanded.
“Nothing,” Lafayette rasped back.
“Well, keep it down,” Fix replied as he too swung out onto the ladder. “Do nae want you costing us the chance of surprise.”
Feeling annoyed, but also too relieved and suddenly too fatigued to retaliate, Lafayette started making his way down the ladder. It was a short climb down to the duct that Minerva had told them to take, but the duct was on the other side of the hive. There was no way to jump that far, he realized with a sinking feeling, but there had to be some way to get over there, he thought. How did the maintenance people get to the right duct?
“Hold on up there,” Lafayette called upwards as he looked around for something, anything that might help them. Then he noticed a small control panel just to the left of the ladder, between where he hung and the nearest duct to his left. There was only one button on the panel. “Well, here goes nothing. Hang on,” he said as he pushed the button.
For a moment, nothing happened, but then Lafayette felt himself moving. The entire ladder was rotating around the shaft. It stopped at the next duct and he hit the button on that panel, causing another small movement. He repeated the process until the ladder was where he needed it to be so that he could crawl into the duct Minerva had directed them to.
Calling up to Fix, he said, “Just have whoever’s next press the button on the panel in the shaft to call the ladder back once we’re off.”
Lafayette heard Fix pass along the message as he managed to make his way into the duct and began crawling forward. He could not wait for the others at the hive as there was little room in the duct. He would just need to press on and try to keep an eye on the people filing slowly in behind him.
After what felt like an interminable crawl through the bowels of the ship, Lafayette at last saw light ahead of him and quickened his pace as
best he could. After checking with Minerva to confirm that the room he was about to appear in was still empty, Lafayette punched out the metal grating and squeezed out into a room that was full of work tables, smaller machines, tools, parts, soldering guns, and even a ceiling mounted fusion laser. The room was cluttered and messy, but completely devoid of people.
Fix arrived next and Lafayette offered him a hand up, which he accepted. Two of Petrova’s men came out next and they moved over to the workshop’s only door, taking flanking positions on either side of it. Every few minutes, another four men would arrive and take up ready positions in the workshop, their spacing timed by the number of men who could fit on the ladder and the length of time it took to rotate it, get four more men off, rotate it again and get another four on. Ten minutes had passed from the moment Lafayette had entered the room to the point where Vosler and then Anastasia Petrova emerged from the ventilation system. Begrudgingly, Lafayette extended a hand to help Petrova up.
“Vhat’s our status?” she demanded of him as she straightened her clothing and tried to recapture her sense of professionalism and order.
Lafayette studied his tablet for a moment. “We’re about fifty meters from the engine room, but we bypassed the entrances to engineering where security should be strongest,” he said. “I would recommend we leave a couple of men to hold this room. It will be convenient for any prisoners we have to take.”
“There are more convenient vays to deal vith prisoners,” Petrova responded darkly.
“We’re not executing anyone,” Lafayette countered. He raised his voice loud enough for all to hear. “Kill if you have to. Self-defense only.”
“Your funeral,” Petrova muttered. She looked over her men and said, “Singh. Ingarsson. You’ll hold this position. Everyone else is vith us.” Holding back with Lafayette for a moment, she said, “You do have a plan to get out of here, da?”
111 Souls (Infinite Universe) Page 33