by Tammy Salyer
“Erikson. Would you mind doing us both the favor of calming the fuck down? Someone is going to hear you.”
Though his words pierce through my straitjacket of panic easily, my brain takes a minute to catch up to the fact that it’s really him, Quantum is standing in front of me—not my father.
Even as I realize it, the only thing I can think to say is: “What the hell took you so long? I nearly started this show without you.”
He looks up and down the storage bay as he responds in a hushed voice, “You aren’t smart enough to do this on your own. Now come on.”
Still too shaken up to be pissed off at his statement, I lean heavily against the wall beside the storage box for a second, trying to regain some calm. Avoiding a last look inside its hateful interior, I reach in and feel around until I clasp the butt of my ’80 and withdraw it. With a glance around, I take in row upon row of the soil amendment compound drums, all lined up inside the storage bay like sleeping soldiers of the plague, awaiting orders to inflict mass destruction on innocents. Reaching into my jacket, I run a finger along the tiny detonating unit La Mer had passed me. A click of its button would unleash hell.
Not waiting, Quantum steps outside the exit hatch, then turns and motions for me to follow him. I’m okay, I tell myself and tighten my grip on my carbine with slightly trembling hands. But after I take a single step forward, the hatch suddenly slides closed—me on my side and Quantum on the other.
Van Heusen steps into view from behind a row of drums, nonchalantly pocketing the remote hatch controller he carries. “I knew that bastard was up to something, but I’ll deal with him later.”
The nasal growl of his voice, compliments of the broken nose from Karl, makes my teeth want to grind. My carbine is already aimed center mass, but, insanely, he’s stepping toward me.
“Go ahead, Erikson. Take a shot.” He sees my indecision and laughs. “That’s right. You know this ship, don’t you?”
I can’t shoot. He knows it. The discharge of a weapon aboard will trigger the ship’s alarms, and this mission will be over before it starts.
“Stay the fuck away from me, Van Heusen.”
“But that’s not what I have in mind at all. I’ve been waiting to get some time with you for a while. Scav or not, you still look tasty to me.”
His words barely register as I assess my options. Between his greater size and his body armor, a hand-to-hand encounter has a low chance of ending well for me. I can’t blow what he has for brains out, and there’s nowhere to run but deeper into the storage bay, but then where? Fleetingly, I think about the detonator in my pocket. No, not that. Not yet.
He takes another step forward, and I add a little more bend to my knees, the carbine not wavering. Surprise ripples across his face. He pulls a knife from his equipment vest. The overhead lights flash dazzlingly along its tang. I flick my eyes over his shoulder toward the hatch, hoping to see it opening.
“He can’t get in,” Van Heusen says, reading my glance. “It’s just the two of us.”
“Do you know what this stuff is, Van Heusen? What it will do?”
He takes a half step forward, but I remain firm. Backing down isn’t going to gain me anything.
“Do I look like someone who cares if a bunch of weak citizens get turned into fertilizer? That’s all any of us are anyway. Worm food—”
He takes another step as he speaks, and I drop to a knee and roll into his legs, forcing him to career to the side. He reaches out and belays his fall with a hand against one of the compound drums, then spins around. I’ve already scrabbled to the hatch control panel and jam the “Open” command.
Not happening.
He comes at me fast but light, a boxer’s approach. But we’ve had the same training, all Academy soldiers did. I dance away from a jab from his left to my ribs, and block the knife coming toward my chest with the carbine. The thud of his wrist against the stock tells me the nerves there will be sizzling, and I let his next left make contact against my cheekbone as I drive the carbine barrel into his right armpit and knock the knife in his weakened grip free. It flies toward the cargo crate and hits the side with a dull echo, but my senses are busy trying to come to terms with the buzzing pain in my cheek and temple.
With his right arm temporarily numb, he uses his body to smash into me, forcing me up against the hatch. I can’t move enough to strike or leverage my carbine, but there’s nothing between my teeth and his face.
He screams as I bite into the skin below his eye and tries to pull away. As he does, I grab him around the shoulders, letting my carbine fall to the side and hang by its strap, and wrap my legs around his waist. He wanted a close-up-and-personal, that’s what he’s going to get. Stumbling backward with me attached to him like a rabid dog, he loses his balance and goes down on his ass. My weight coming down on top of him pushes him flat and compresses the breath out of his lungs in a high-speed purge, and I release my bite, rear back, and smash my forehead into his injured nose. This time, blood pours from it like a fountain instead of a trickle, and he grips his face with both hands, unable now to even scream, rocking his body from side to side in blunt, brutalizing anguish.
I walk to the knife and pick it up almost leisurely, then move back to him. His eyes, which had been squeezed shut, now open a sliver—in time for him to see the kick I launch into his midsection below the base of his torso armor.
He grunts, and I rear back for another one. “What’s that?” Kick to the gut. “Did you say you’re enjoying the time we’re spending together?” Kick to the wedding tackle. “Well, good. So am I.” Kick to the head. This one lays him out cold.
“You done, Aly?” Quantum’s voice pulls me out of the moment, and I spin around to face him. The hatch is open again; no doubt he’d found some way to bypass it. After assessing me for a brief moment, he says, “Let’s put him in the cargo box.”
Van Heusen won’t be awake for a while, if ever, and he definitely won’t get out of there on his own. The metallic-electric taste of adrenaline coating my throat and tongue is unpleasant, but the surge of it in my bloodstream wiped out the last of my jitters from being stuck in the container. Task complete, Quantum and I speed out of the storage bay and down a corridor toward a bulkhead about ten meters distant. Quantum keeps his eyes forward, and I watch our rear, thankful the remaining area is empty. When we reach the hatch, instead of opening it, he climbs (surprisingly nimbly) up the adjacent wall using the housing of an electrical console and pushes a 1 x 1 ceiling panel aside, then pulls himself up. His hand drops through and waves at me to follow.
“No. No way,” I mumble, my throat already tightening the way I imagine the walls will if I get in there.
His head drops through the hole, a sneer plastered across his mouth. “Get your ass up here. Or would you prefer to see all your friends smeared from one end of KL to the other?” His voice is gravelly and uncompromising. “You know I’ve never liked you, Erikson, but we have a job to do.”
The comment almost makes me laugh. Since he and his companions had kidnapped me on the streets of Tunis City almost two years ago, I’ve never exactly teemed with affection for him either. The scar on my left hand from his oh-so-unsubtle way of driving his intentions home while interrogating me looks almost like an arrow pointing to my middle finger. Thinking of it, I stifle the urge to put that finger on display in a similarly unsubtle message. Instead, I say, “The feeling is mutual. But I’d say we’re in a situation where what we think of each other”—or how strong our urge may be to strangle the shit out of each other—“is irrelevant.”
He nods, as if I’d simply capitulated, says, “Then shut up and quit stalling,” and retreats back into the vent.
“Wait!”
“I don’t have time for th—”
“No, hold on. Do you know anything about my crew? Did they make it away from Obal 6?”
It seems like an hour ticks by before he answers in a voice that betrays absolutely nothing, like the voice of an android, “Yea
h. They made it.”
I could press him for an answer, make him say something that will assure me of the truth, one way or the other, but a different part of me—the part that might simply give up if they hadn’t—isn’t really ready to know. Convincing myself that Quantum’s strangely toneless response was merely because he doesn’t actually care if my crew is dead or alive is easy enough; he has no stakes in their survival. But the other problem isn’t so easy to resolve—how am I going to do this? Crawl from one tiny space into another? It’s like being liberated from hell just to be flung into an incinerator. Figure this out, Aly. Too many people are counting on you for you to indulge in phobias. Put yourself in someone else’s shoes. How would Karl make this happen?
Thinking of Karl helps. I imagine his eyes, the way his smile reaches them when I run my fingers through the hair on his chest, and the trick starts to work—helped along by whatever tranq residue still swims in my bloodstream. It just has to last a little longer, I tell myself. Keeping a mental picture of Karl’s face in front of me, I push the carbine around to hang on my back and grasp the electrical console. Like getting on an elevator. No big deal. My knees and the joints in my shoulders protest as I try to copy Quantum’s monkey impression, even with my hefty dose of adrenaline. I knew I’d be a little stiff, but if this doesn’t fade quickly, I’ll be an easy target once the real ship takeover begins. As I reach over the opening’s lip to pull myself up, my grip starts to slip on the slightly oily surface. Just before I fall, Quantum grabs the straps on my vest and hauls me over the edge with a grunt. I lie still on my stomach for a moment, listening—almost hoping—for the tromp of boots below us.
“How you like me now?” I rasp.
“Less and less.”
“Fuck you, Quantum.” The anger helps, and I take a second to wonder if he’s provoking me on purpose. The man has never shown much skill in the social interaction department, but right now I don’t care. I need to get through this. I could get through this.
It could happen.
He rummages through his jacket, then passes me a new VDU. “I’ve reconfigured it to block tracking signals and piggyback onboard frequencies so we can communicate without being ‘seen.’ Wear it so I can reach you.”
He turns and begins crawling down the vent shaft.
“Wait. Where are we going?”
He doesn’t stop. “You’ll see.”
We push through the ventilation system for twenty minutes, enough time for me to vacillate between panic and control half a dozen times. Every time it starts to get bad, I randomly berate Quantum for leading us on a wild goose chase, for getting us lost, for being too slow—anything I can think of to get him to respond with equal rancor in that grating hiss he has and yank my mind out of its spiraling descent.
He stops crawling all of a sudden. My focus elsewhere, my hand comes down on one of his ankles and twists it roughly.
“Pay attention!” he barks as I shift backward.
“Sorry.”
Looking at his VDU, he ignores the insincere apology, then grabs the edge of another panel and pulls it aside. Without a word, he lowers himself. The sound of his boots hitting a metal floor doesn’t echo. Wherever we are, the space is small. Fantastic. But it has to be better than this vent shaft.
Once I drop inside, he informs me it’s an anteroom to the bridge’s main electronics pipeline. The space is tall enough to stand in, with enough room for two people to sit side by side if their arms are touching—except Quantum has filled half the floor space with electronic panels and two portable control terminals. He’s brought in an ammo crate from somewhere and uses it as a bench, leaving only enough room for me to stand behind him.
It’s clear he’s been busy. In the year-plus I’d been a crewmember on the Celestial I hadn’t even known this was here. “Let me see if I have this right.” Though the space is dark, the consoles’ screens illuminate enough of the area to give me my bearings. It feels a little like being in the cockpit of a one-person scout between stops on a planet-to-planet hop. “You started setting up…whatever it is you’ve set up, long before shit went down with Bogotan.”
“Right.” The impatience and sarcasm sizzle on his tongue like nuclear bacon. “I already told you, I always have a plan. Now do you want to play some more catch-up, or are you ready to hear what comes next?”
“There’s something I want to know first.” A sound in my tone catches his full attention, and he turns, laying reptilian eyes on me. “So why do you?”
“Why do I what?”
“Trust me.”
He snorts. “I don’t trust you, Aly. I don’t need to. Because you’re predictable. That’s why I wanted you on board with me.”
A rare moment of thoughtfulness settles over me, and I comment quietly, no challenge or anger in my voice, “Quantum, you gotta know, when this is all over, we can’t just let you go. You’re going to have to answer for some of the things you’ve done or let happen.”
His pale brown eyes glitter, but no words pass through his thin lips. He’s going to play this till the end. Hell, he probably already has a plan for how to escape not just the Celestial but the rest of us, too.
So: “What do you have in mind?” I finally ask.
He returns his focus to the consoles, commenting dryly, “Those who cannot use oxygen responsibly will have it taken away.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
The plan is impossibly simple. Full frontal assault, take no prisoners. After studying the armory through onboard surveillance cameras, linked into by Quantum, and identifying the security personnel guarding it, I loaded directions on my VDU (this time I insist on making the trek by using stealth and going through regular corridors, not the ventilation system), and now stand before the vault to the one weapon that can actually give us a chance at stopping Medina and saving KL.
The trick will be getting to the bridge, where the most rigorous onboard security is concentrated. But that’s where Quantum’s wire-rat genius will save the day. With partial to full control over most of the ship’s systems, he’s managed to route their nerve-agent tank lines—a Corps favorite for maintaining crowd control during a riot—to their main life support air lines. Exchanging the agent for their air, he’ll knock out everyone in the main hull of the ship and buy me a surprise-free trip to the bridge, which, with its own separate and unlinked ventilation system, will still contain awake crew. The good news: I’m only going to have to kill the eight to ten people on the bridge. The bad news: I have to make sure I don’t damage too many of the ship’s controls if we’re going to salvage it. KL will never have to worry about defense again if the Celestial belongs to us. And once I suppress any resistance from the flight operations crew, between my nav skills and Quantum’s piloting and programming skills, the two of us will be able to control the Celestial for as long as it takes for the Nebula and more settlers from KL to get here and back us up. With their help, we can revive the Celestial’s remaining personnel but keep them firmly controlled until we decide the best course of action for dealing with them. No one wants unnecessary bloodshed. If we’ve learned anything, it’s that we have to live by justice, not revenge, not power, not rule. Another war like the last will be the end of us.
Jesus, I’m starting to sound like Whitmore.
As the access door to the weapons vault tries to slide closed, it catches and hangs on the left boot of the crewman I’d assaulted to get inside, now lying unconscious on the ground. He’ll have a hell of a headache, but he’ll live.
“Dammit, Quantum, this sonofabitch is heavy. Give me a second to get him inside before you close the door,” I whisper through my throat mic.
The hatch slides open again, and I give the guard a solid heave. His body clears the door, leaving only a small smear of blood from his split scalp outside. I need a few minutes to suit up. Hopefully no one wanders by and notices it.
And there they are. Fourteen bugsuits hanging in their ready harnesses. But one is all I need to wipe out the crew on th
e bridge. I haven’t worn one in months, but these machines are basically self-operated. It’s just a matter of ensuring their plasma catalyzer tanks are topped off. Usually a remote operator runs the bugsuit installation program for outfitting soldiers, but they can be donned solo if one is limber and determined enough.
The interior of the bay is laid out in a minigrid along the fleet ship’s bottom level. A cruiser sports twenty to twenty-six bays, ranging in size from a typical shopping-center warehouse to the gargantuan hangar where surface fighting crafts are stored. Each separate bugsuit vault has on hand the quota intended to outfit one attack ship for a quick-assault op, and the contents of a single bay of this size are usually all that are needed to get the job done.
There’s no better single-combat weapon for a lone fighter with plans to take on a small army. As long as those plans include potential suicide and a high probability of personal injury.
The suit is made of a lightweight composite breastplate, backplate, and reticulating arm covers with flexible-fiber full sleeves. The fine mechanism and wire system that controls the user’s motions nests between a solid outer plate cover made of the same composite construction material, and an inner graphene mesh that covers the user’s skin. Individually, the arm units weigh about as much as a carbine—no big deal.
The weapon’s weight factor comes from the energy pack in the backplate. The generator, battery, and materials for creating plasma projectiles add about fifteen kilos, and the helmet another eight. It’s not that much to carry, but it’s a shit-ton when speed and agility are necessary. The designers, of course, knew this, and given the rarity of foot soldiering on the modern battlefield, there’s no longer much need to manufacture small arms that prolong firefights. The bugsuit isn’t made for drawn-out contact and leapfrog advances. The bugsuit is made to wipe out every living being within a ten-klick radius in the shortest amount of time possible. A suit operator can potentially stand still in a moderately protected location and plant plasma projectiles into walls of opposing forces in no more time than it takes to drink a canteen of water. And the accuracy of each shot is flawless. The suit’s full-auto feature takes the guesswork of a human’s brain out of targeting and leaves it all up to the helmet’s optical processor—which is where it gets the name “bugsuit.” Using a system of bug-eye lenses and autonomous computing, the suit identifies objectives and sends signals to the user’s central nervous system through sensors and stimulators in the graphene-mesh sleeves and helmet connection points. The lenses have the ability to focus on things panoramically and at different depths simultaneously, much like a fly’s compound eye. This allows it to calculate risk and choose optimal targets and evasive maneuvers for the user and then stimulate the body to bring the arm-mounted weapons into position or get out of the way of potential incomings, effectively turning the user into an autonomously controlled extension of the suit.