by Rick Partlow
"Excellent," Tyya feigned more enthusiasm than he felt. "We need to be away before anyone on the surface realizes what has happened." He turned to the technician who had taken over the bridge's internal security station. "Is there any resistance? Any crew left on the ship?"
"Commander," the young male said, his face troubled and apologetic, "I'm sorry, but I still can't access the internal security monitors. None of the optical, thermal or sonic sensors seem to be working."
"Did they not accept our access codes?" Tyya asked, concerned. If the codes weren't good, this whole mission was over before it began.
"The codes were accepted," the technician explained, frustration in his tone, "but the actual, physical systems don't seem to be working." He made a gesture of surrender. "It's as if they've all been blocked somehow."
He didn't bother to question the male further; it was obvious he didn't understand the problem. Instead, he touched a control on his 'link to connect him to all the other Tahni he'd brought with him to take the ship through the intership communications system.
"Report in," he called. "All squads report status."
"First squad clear," came the report from the group he'd sent to secure Engineering. Their squad leader had fought in the war, and his report was concise and firm, his voice sonorous even through the bridge speakers.
"Second squad clear." The report was as concise as the first, though the voice was tinged with excitement. V'tar-Chal had seen much fighting in the insurgency, but he was an ideologue more than a soldier. He saw this as a great honor rather than likely suicide. His squad was stationed on deck four, guarding the ship's armory and the auxiliary bridge.
"Third squad, Talv-Ban here, everything is normal." That was the team just outside the bridge, guarding the various approaches; their squad leader was a younger male with no military experience, which was why Tyya had kept him close.
Nothing is normal, he thought in counterpoint to Talv-Ban's statement but didn't say. Else we wouldn't be here.
"Fourth squad?" he transmitted after waiting a moment. "Fourth squad report." They were stationed at the docking bay.
"Commander," the leader of fourth squad replied, "I think there's a malfunction with the airlocks. We received no notice of a ship docking but the lock seems to be cycling..."
Tyya felt fear and panic rising inside him and fought it down with effort, fingers digging into the padding of the acceleration couch. "It's an attack! Disable the lock, force the outer doors open!" He didn't wait for the squad leader to do it, instead turning to the Operations station and the technician there. "Open all external locks now! All of them!"
With the external doors open, the internal locks wouldn't be able to budge against the pressure of the ship's atmosphere. They could still burn through but it would take time.
"It's too late," the technician told him, voice grim as he looked up from the display. "The lock is open."
"We're under atta..." The squad leader's voice broke off in mid-word as the boom of flechette guns going off warred with the whining crackle of laser pulses in the background.
Tyya spat a curse and stabbed a finger at the Operations tech. "Seal off the docking bay from the rest of the ship! Do it now!"
"But our people will be stuck there...” the male protested weakly, hands hovering over the controls.
Tyya growled deep in his chest and pushed over to the station, thrusting a hand into the holographic display and pulling the control to the correct position. Lights flashed red in the readout as the emergency seals slammed into place across the lift car shaft and the access tube. He took a brief but discerning look at the rest of the schematic, then shut the emergency seals for each deck above deck six, all the way to the bridge.
"Our people will win the fight or die before help could get to them," he said harshly to his bridge crew. "This mission can't be allowed to die with them if they fail. Helm," he said, turning to the male strapped into the couch at that station, "take us out of orbit now, one gravity acceleration."
"Yes, Commander," the Helm officer said with confidence.
Tyya barely had time to strap himself into the Captain's chair before the fusion drives ignited and a standard human gravity pushed them all downward towards the deck with a force a bit less than the gravity of Tahn-Skyyiah. Caught off guard, the troops stationed throughout the ship might be injured, but there was no help for it. He cursed again, this time aloud. He'd hoped for more time, more confusion, hoped that it would all be enough to keep any counterattacks away until they could enter Transition space.
There was a human saying that his father had taught him, one the old General had learned from their intelligence experts: "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy." He could see the wisdom in that now. You had to be fluid, to ride the waves of chance the way one of the great marine predators rode the ocean waves towards the shore to hunt down the dwellers in the shallows.
"Commander Tyya-Khin." The voice chilled his soul with its weakness and despair. It wasn't the fourth squad leader, that he could see on the readout of his 'link. It was a younger male, one he didn't know but whose name he recognized as the son of a priest.
"Yes, F'lar-Ton?" he said urgently. "What is your situation?"
"There were at least two of them," the male related, pain in the words, as if each cost him minutes of life. "They were so fast I can't be sure..." A coughing fit that last precious seconds, then gasping, wet wheezes to regain breath. "They're gone now. They made it out before the emergency seals closed."
Tyya snarled under his breath, but kept his tone light and encouraging for F'lar-Ton. "It is well. Once we have them secured, we will send help for your wounded."
"No, Tyya." The last word was barely understandable, choked out through a wet cough. "There's no one else...they're dead, and I..."
The transmission cut off and Tyya-Khin let out a long breath. "Flar-Ton?" he said, not expecting an answer. There was none. He turned to the Security station, gathering himself so that he wouldn't sound as shaken as he felt. "We have enemy soldiers on board, at least two. They're contained for the moment, so our priority is to get into Transition space as quickly as possible. Once we're out of reach of Commonwealth spacecraft, I want you to take as many people as you need and get those security scanners running so we can pin them down and kill them."
"Yes, Commander," the male said, saluting smartly. Tyya could see the doubt in his face, though. He was fairly certain it mirrored his own.
* * *
Holly Morai limped slightly as she stepped out onto Deck Six, but she tried to ignore it: the flechettes hadn't actually penetrated her Reflex armor, just bruised her leg all to hell. She swept back and forth with her pulse carbine, but saw nothing, just like every deck they'd checked on their way down from the docking bay. It had been a bitch climbing down the emergency ladders in the access tunnel while under acceleration, too.
They'll have Engineering sealed off, just like the bridge, she transmitted to Kara McIntire. And once theyTransition this bucket of bolts, they'll come hunting for us, or just blow out the atmosphere and wait till we die. So what's your plan?
"Son of a bitch," she heard Kara's muffled curse through her hood as the DSI agent forgot to use the neurolink in her frustration. She knew why: the door to the ship's computer core maintenance station was covered with a hardened emergency security seal which had lowered from the overhead and could only be released from the bridge.
Holly pulled her facemask off, shaking her head. "Well, we aren't burning through that with these," she said sardonically, motioning with her pulse carbine.
Kara didn't respond other than to curse again, louder this time. She slammed a fist into the tungsten door in futility, then pulled off her own facemask and glared at Holly. "We aren't burning through that with anything less than a ship-to-ship laser. That Tyya-Khin isn't your typical thinks-with-his-balls Tahni commander; he did just the right thing."
"He's got to see us on the security scanners," Holly said,
frowning. "I don't know why he doesn't flush the atmosphere..."
Both women were in motion, moving wide and swinging their pulse carbines around before either registered the sound they'd heard that had set off their internal alarms. It was a small maintenance hatch set into the wall beside the sealed computer room and it was slowly sliding open. The face that stuck out through the opening turned white at the twin carbine muzzles, and he almost jerked back before visibly realizing that sudden movements would be a bad idea.
He was a younger man, a junior officer in Security from his uniform markings, with a rounded, doughy face and soft, dark eyes opened wide with fear.
"Are...” he stuttered, tried again. "Are you..." He broke off, obviously not knowing who or what they were.
"I'm Major McIntire, DSI," Kara told him, lowering her weapon. "You're Lieutenant Velazquez, ship's security?" Holly figured she was reading the ID chip in the man's uniform.
"Yes, ma'am," the younger man nodded gratefully. "Damn, I'm glad to see you...or anyone." He looked around behind them. "Where are the rest of you? Have you retaken the ship?"
Holly snorted at that, lip curling with dark humor. Kara shot her a quelling glance before turning back to the junior officer. "Unfortunately, we're it," she admitted to him. "We had a very last minute warning something was happening, and we barely got on board before the ship left orbit." She shook her head. "The bastards sealed us out of Engineering, the bridge and," she motioned next to them, "the computer maintenance room. Once they get into Transition space, they'll be able to track us down with the security scanners and..."
"No, they won't, ma'am," Velazquez smiled for the first time. "I made sure of that." He looked around again, tensing. "I don't know about you, but I don't want to be standing out here in the open any longer than I have to." He backed away from the doorway, motioning for them to follow.
Holly shrugged and ducked into the tiny hatchway, her shoulders scraping the sides. It widened slightly inside, but not by much. The right hand side of the dark corridor was nothing but thickly-armored bulkhead, which made sense since it was protecting the holographic computer core of the ship. The left side was inlaid with bank after bank of solid-state storage, the backup system for the ship's main computer in case it was damaged or powered down. Unlike the main computer room, the backup storage banks weren't considered mission-critical enough to seal it away during an emergency.
Once Kara was inside, Velazquez sealed the hatch behind them, then led them deeper into the pitch-black corridor, making his way by feel while the two women followed using their enhanced vision. The passage continued for another fifty meters, curving around with the hull, until it came to another windowless hatch, as small as the first. Velazquez palmed an ID plate next to it on the bulkhead and it hissed open with a flood of light that made the young man cover his eyes with a hand.
Holly blinked instinctively, but her built-in optical dampers kept her from being blinded. The light was bright only by comparison with the total darkness previously, coming from a single overhead panel, but it was enough to illuminate the tiny work room. Packed with rolls of superconductive cables tied into routers to provide a constant stream of data from the main computer core to the solid-state backups as well as a small box of nutrient bars and several bottles of water, there was very little extra space left in the tiny chamber, but they managed to squeeze inside, squatting on bare spots on the deck while Velazquez closed the hatch behind them.
"I tapped into the system through here," he explained, jamming himself between them to indicate a jury-rigged junction box wedged into place between a pair of routers and spliced into three different conduits. "It's pretty crude and I'm not a netdiver, but I do know the ship's Security systems---and my boss' override codes." He shook his head. "I couldn't close out the system from bridge control, but I could crash it. All the security scanners are dead until they're manually rebooted."
"That was smart work," Kara told him. "Is there any way you can get us into the system? Commander Morai," she nodded at Holly, "has certain netdiving...skills," she decided to put it, "that could help us take control of the ship."
"There's no wireless access in here," he said apologetically. "Security reasons. Unless you have the equipment with you to rig it up..."
"Unfortunately no," Holly remarked, scowling. "We came on short notice."
"What are they going to do with the ship?" Velazquez asked. "Are they going to try to attack the base?"
"If only," Kara muttered, jaw set in frustration.
"They're taking her to Earth," Holly told the young man. Before she could say another word, there was a jolt that sent them all floating towards the overhead as the fusion drives cut off.
They'd barely had time to push themselves back down before reality twisted briefly around itself and gravity returned with a crushing certainty. Kara looked at her with something approaching panic in her eyes, an emotion Holly was sure that the DSI agent wasn't used to.
"We're in Transition space," Velazquez said, rubbing his back where it had impacted equipment when the ship's artificial gravity had kicked in---it only worked in T-space.
"It's 256 hours from here to the Solar system," Holly said, staring at the bulkhead as if she could see the unreality beyond it. "That's how long we have to figure out how to disable this ship, or get past the emergency seals and take out the rest of the Tahni insurgents."
"I don't think we'll have to wait quite that long." Kara's voice was fatalistic. "Now that we're in T-space, they'll be coming for us."
Chapter Twenty-One
Commander Wilhelmina Forrester pushed through the door to her apartment, letting it automatically swing shut behind her. She stripped off her uniform jacket and dropped it and her work tablet on a table in the entrance hall as the lights rose to a comfortable level to adjust her vision from the exterior night. She brushed a strand of hair out of her face, then stepped through the short hall and into her living room.
She stopped short there, a cry of alarm forming on her lips as she saw the figure in the shadows at the corner of the room, sitting on one of her chairs. The cry died unborn as the figure leaned forward and she saw that it was Reggie Nakamura.
"Jesus Christ, Reggie," she said, a hand going to her chest as she mimed a heart attack. "You could have called, you know!"
"Sorry, Billy," Reggie said, but he didn't move and his voice was as flat as his expression. "Didn't mean to scare you. I just didn't want the word to spread that I was around."
"Why?" she asked. "What's up?" She started to take a step towards him, then paused. There was something about the set of his shoulders, the narrowed darkness of his eyes that wasn't particularly inviting.
"The last time I was here," Reggie went on as if she hadn't spoken, "I asked you who was making the calls about the response to the Tahni insurgency. Later that day, I went out to meet an intelligence source outside the city. I was followed by a hit squad."
She started to interrupt with a surprised exclamation, but he raised a hand abruptly to silence her. "They were totally scrubbed, no ID files in the system, erased from existence. A little creative interrogation of the only survivor," his voice turned harsh, "discovered they were a deniable black ops team. Hired by a screen corporation but run by Fleet Intelligence." He stood up in one, smooth motion that was so sudden it made her step back instinctively. "Run by your office in Fleet Intelligence, Billy."
Her eyes went to his hips, his hands, but she saw no gun, holstered or held. Not that the absence of a firearm made him any less dangerous, she knew. She surreptitiously pressed a finger to a red square on her wrist 'link before raising her hands pleadingly in front of her.
"Reggie," she said quickly, "I swear to God, I had no idea..."
"If you're waiting for the help you just called to arrive," Reggie raised his voice slightly to speak over her, "don't hold your fucking breath." The corner of his mouth quirked humorlessly. "How do you suppose I got in here without setting off any security alerts? Remembe
r the crowd I roll with sweetheart."
Billy flinched at the phrase, remembering the last time he'd said it. "Babe, it's not what it looks like," she insisted, backing slowly away, hoping she could make it back to the handgun she had stashed inside the decorative table by the couch. "All I did was report the question to my superior...I'm sorry, I know it's shitty, but it's my job!"
"That's what I thought at first," Reggie admitted, nodding as he matched her step backwards with one of his own forward. "That's what I told General Murdock when he clued me in to the hit team. I didn't want to believe you'd do anything to hurt me, not after all the years I've known you." He grinned, an expression totally devoid of warmth or friendliness. "That's the thing, though, sweetheart. I don't really know you, do I?"
Billy moved. Part of her knew that there was no way she'd make it, but she had no choice, literally. Something compelled her to move, to strike out with no hope of success. She grabbed at the drawer set in the table, yanking it open and reaching in as she watched him...not move at all. Her hand touched bare wood and she looked around to see that the compartment was empty.
"Were you looking for this?"
The voice wasn't unfamiliar, though she hadn't heard it in a long time. The face was very recognizable: the man was a legend. General Antonin Murdock stepped out of her kitchen, her hideout gun held casually in his right hand. She felt a chill run up her spine at the sight of the man. This wasn't just a personal grudge from Reggie feeling betrayed, then. They knew.
"How much of what's in there is the real Billy?" Reggie asked her, his voice hurt and bitter.
She laughed at the question. It was so damned ridiculous. "How the hell would I know?" she returned, not bothering to deny it.
There was motion, and thunder, and then blackness forever.
* * *
Reggie stared down at the body with grief he knew somewhere inside him was misplaced. Billy hadn't just died; she'd been murdered months ago, most likely, replaced with a preprogrammed duplicate.