She took her seat and faced Garotte from the other side of the glass. He tapped record on his slidepad and cleared his throat.
"Good evening. I'm Dr. Cisco. I'll be asking you a few questions today. Let's start by stating your full name for the record."
"Sgt. Jessica Margo Winters," she said in a gentle, almost shy voice, with just a hint of Midwestern.
"Sgt. Winters. I have a few aliases that you've operated under. Please let me know if they are accurate. Julia Springer."
"Yes."
"Layla Smith."
"Yes."
"Silo."
She blinked. "There are people who called me that."
"Thank you. Now, you introduce yourself as Sergeant. I have it here that you were discharged from the Earth Coalition Marine Corps some seven years ago. Is this correct?"
"Yes," she said, her voice slightly harder.
"Why do you continue to introduce yourself with the rank."
"Once a soldier, always a soldier, Doctor."
"You were dishonorably discharged after you caused 'collateral damage in extreme excess of mission requirement.' Does that mean that you killed civilians?"
"No," she said, sternly.
"What then?"
"I demolished an office building that was undergoing renovation in the field of operation."
"Why did you demolish the building?"
"A foreign liaison who was operating with our squad suggested that I would be unable to do so with my current equipment," she said, her voice carefully held steady, as though she'd wanted to say it a good deal more forcefully.
"And what was your current equipment at the time?"
"I was armed with a shoulder fire, 60mm multiple grenade launcher."
"Was this weapon equipped with demolition in mind?"
Winters shook her head. "Standard concussion grenades. Six count."
"And you succeeded in demolishing the building with six rounds?"
"It only took five," she said flatly.
"How did you achieve this?"
"Three internal supports, one natural gas line, one tanker truck parked near the north wall."
"And you did this merely due to a suggestion on the behalf of this liaison?"
She narrowed her eyes and replied with a tone of irritation. "It was more of a dare, Doctor."
"Sgt. Winters, I believe I have a program I would like to recommend you for. Care for a change of scenery?"
"With all due respect, Doctor? No, I wouldn't."
Garotte raised an eyebrow. "Really? You'd have a chance to collaborate with your peers."
"Collaborating with my peers is what got me here."
"Do you like it here, Sgt. Winters?"
"No, I don't like it here, Doctor. But that's not why we get put places like this, is it? We get put places like this because we belong here, and I do," Winters said, eyes locked on his.
"I think that being a part of this program will be of great help to you."
"I've got plenty of help here. I've got a therapist, a counselor."
"This new setting would provide you with group therapy, and I don't feel that the group would be complete without you."
"I don't think that any group that would be completed by me is one that needs to be complete at all."
"I'm sorry to hear that you feel that way, Miss Winters."
"Sgt. Winters," she corrected.
Garotte leaned forward, staring at her intently. "It seems to me that you aren't a soldier anymore, Miss Winters."
A scowl briefly twisted her features, but she managed to wrestle her way back to composure. The intensity stayed in her eyes, however. Garotte nodded and tapped at his slidepad, then leaned on the mute button of the intercom on the window.
"I'm going to ask a few more questions. Would you be able to get the Warden in here? I think it might be time to discus travel arrangements," he said to one of the guards.
The man nodded and touched a finger to his headset, activating it. "Yeah, communications? Can we get Warden Menlo into Interview A? … Affirmative. It will be a few minutes. He is on a call."
"Not a problem," Garotte nodded.
#
In the control room, Johnson closed the connection and took the appropriate precautions to send another subversive message. This one was simple, and directed to the ship filled with his comrades. "The operation is go. Phase 1 initiating." His face was a mask of duty as he pulled a tool belt from the corner of the room, selected a wire cutter, and cut first the alarm cable, then the main power for communications. As the lights and indicators on the control panel slowly faded away, he left the room and locked it behind him, marching toward a room marked "Security Relay."
#
In orbit, the seemingly unoccupied Armistice was sitting in the hangar. Ma had remained in her hiding place, having a great deal of difficulty interacting with her slidepad in the weightless environment. She'd resorted to capturing it between her front paws and tracing out shapes with her nose, which turned out to be a remarkably efficient method after a bit of practice. She'd just completed a sentence she was greatly anticipating putting to use when her sensitive ears picked up the sounds of some sort of alert message blaring over the PA system of the space station. She clutched the lanyard in her teeth, braced herself within the confined compartment, and tried to work at the latch from the inside. After considerable effort, the door sprung open and she went tumbling into the weightless interior of the ship.
It took a bit of scrabbling and bouncing off of walls before she managed to find something she could wrap her paws around to bring herself to a stop. The funk's brain, she had quickly discovered, was phenomenally swift and efficient at calculating trajectories for her leaps. Adapting it to zero gravity had been much easier than doing so for low gravity, so hitting a target was simplicity itself. Finding some way to hold onto it was another matter entirely. She ended up clinging to the headrest of the pilot's seat. From her tenuous vantage there, she was able to make out spinning warning lights. With a cautious nudge, she drifted to the control panel wrapped herself in an inexpert grip around the currently inactive control stick, and tapped precariously at the access screen. Landing indicators flipped on and off, thrusters shifted and twitched, and the wipers for the view windows deployed and retracted before she finally managed to enter the correct command, flicking on the radio to the emergency frequency.
"... deactivated for the entire facility, and all communication is down. Repeat, security measures have been deactivated for the entire facility, and all communication is down. Get to disaster stations and prepare to launch a shuttle craft to contact the surface. If any of you have got personal communication devices, please report to the command bridge so that we can attempt to contact the surface. This may be a priority one breach. Repeat, potential intruder situation," the security lead instructed.
Ma let herself drift free for a moment, clutching the slidepad and nosing out a message. Routing it through the ship's transmitters so she could be sure that it would be powerful enough to reach the surface, she delivered it to Garotte, then entered the commands necessary to give her remote control over the ship's functions via the pad, authorizing it with a tap to the access screen again. The severe difficulty of the entire situation caused her to log a personal note to herself: If prolonged activity is required in a weightless environment, favor a physical vessel with a prehensile appendage.
She had only just managed to latch onto the control stick again when she saw something else outside the view window. The door to the catwalk had opened, and in slipped a member of the station crew, dressed in a standard issue jumpsuit. From the looks of his nervous glances back out the door before securing it behind him, he was doing something he didn't want others to see. When he turned toward the ship, it became clear why. In his hand was a small-caliber ballistic pistol, and the hand clutching it was pinning a dangerous looking device to his chest. It featured a conspicuous timer and a bundle of plasma pistol clips. A hastily constructed
makeshift bomb. Ma's eyes opened wider and her mind quickly ran through the options. She glanced to the door, then to the folded manipulator arm recessed into the ship's ceiling.
Outside the ship, the saboteur was continuing the work that his partner on the surface had started. As the only well-funded enterprise on the whole miserable world, the prison and its orbital section were the only facilities with the infrastructure to communicate long range. Cutting the power to both transmission arrays had completely silenced the entire planet, and cutting the security feed had blinded it. Even with the coordinated assault, though, it wouldn't stay down forever. It might not even stay down long enough for their seek and destroy mission to complete. Thus, a secondary distraction would be necessary, something to keep them busy. The current plan called for a bomb to be placed on the target's vessel. Nothing large enough to destroy either the vessel or the station. Just something large enough to disable the ship, thus preventing his escape, and to make it appear as though he was to blame for the other attacks. His current order of business was to find an appropriate place to position the bomb. He floated up to affix it to one of the maneuvering thrusters when the door hissed and began to open.
Cautiously he tucked the bomb under his arm and held tight to the external grip beside the door, pistol poised in the other hand, ready to unload it into the first person to exit. Curiously, when the door fully deployed, nothing else happened. After listening closely and hearing nothing, not even breathing, he peeked his head inside. The interior was deserted. The only indication that the ship had ever been in use was a few bags held down with elastic bands and an overhead compartment that was slightly ajar.
Convinced that there were no surprises on the way, he clipped the pistol to a loop on his jumpsuit and began to prep the bomb. If it was planted inside, the explosion would be even more certain to disable the ship without threatening the space station too badly, and would make the ship's owner the prime suspect in the sabotage. He wasn't foolish enough to think that the door had opened by itself, but he only needed a few seconds to plant and prime the bomb and make his escape. After that it wouldn't matter why the door opened. The timer was set, and his arm extended to hurl it inside.
In a blur of motion, the manipulator arm extended, bashing the man's arm with enough force to dislodge the explosive device from his grip. The bomb wobbled in place, like a plate on a table after the tablecloth had been pulled from beneath it. The man, on the other hand, cried out in pain and released his grip to cradle the almost certainly fractured arm. When the initial shock wore off, he looked up to see the manipulator arm inexpertly attempting to grab the drifting bomb. Just as he reached for it, a poorly judged jab of the arm sent the improvised device twirling out of reach of both man and claw. He jumped after it, but a moment later Ma burst from her hiding spot in the compartment. A single, well-aimed usage of her prodigious leaping ability drove her full momentum into the small of his back. A quick pivot and leap, pushing off of him, sent him off course and directed her toward the bomb.
The saboteur struck the catwalk and held as tightly as he could with his injured arm. With a skill that betrayed formal training, he aimed and fired. Ma felt something sail by her ear before striking an interior wall of the station. This was fortunate, because like the deGrasse dormitory, a hole in the exterior wall would be a very bad thing indeed. Granted, the well-built space station was built with far better design considerations than the dirt-cheap dorm. That meant one or two stray bullets probably wouldn't cause explosive decompression, but 'probably' is an unpopular word when a hard vacuum is a part of the equation. The zero-gravity ricochet sent the bullet rattling about the bay, denting wall panels and railings until it lost enough energy to simply spiral through the air. Meanwhile, the recoil jerked the poorly braced saboteur aside, forcing him to reorient before attempting another shot.
When he was ready to fire again, he looked up to see Ma wrapped around the bomb, eyes darting madly over its workings. She had anticipated the need to manipulate electronics, and had included a truncated version of her data module on the subject when she'd constructed the mental download. Power source, timer, interface buttons... The weapon was set for forty-five seconds, and there had only been minor design considerations made to complicate deactivation and disarmament.
"Drop it!" cried the injured foe.
Ma looked up. His weapon was pointed steadily and surely at her. With a careful and skilled push from his feet, he sent himself drifting slowly toward her. The options clicked through her mind. Feasibility, risk/benefit, success ratio, and a dozen other factors made their way through carefully developed algorithms. The massive and nuanced calculation reduced down to a single motion. Just before he reached her, she reached down and clicked the activation button for the timer. The saboteur's eyes opened wide in panic, but zero gravity has the nasty habit of making you stick with your trajectory once you've launched yourself. Ma planted her feet on the bomb and shoved off, sending it bouncing off the wall and sending her back toward the door of the ship.
The infiltrator finally reached a wall, grabbing a support strut and quickly surveying the situation. The bomb was on a spinning, twisting journey around the bay. With his injured arm, he couldn't be sure that he would reach it in time, but reaching it didn't matter. It would go off, and it would do so in the bay. That was good enough. All he had to do was get out before it did so. Tossing the gun, he made his way quickly along the hand holds installed in rows along the wall until he reached the door and slipped out, locking it shut behind him. When he turned to make good his escape down the hall, he found himself facing a full security team, sent to investigate the scream and gunshot.
Back in the docking bay, Ma had reached the inside of the ship and made a few more precision leaps, eventually making it to the compartment where her slidepad was carefully wedged. She tapped quickly at the screen, retracting the arm, sealing the door, and transmitting an emergency disembark command. If the station had been under normal operation, it would certainly have denied the command, or at least raised a flag. The damage that the saboteur had caused was sufficient to prompt an immediate departure clearance. The airlock hissed open, sucking the bomb into space. Ma initiated the main engine start sequence and directed the ship's autopilot to exit the hangar while the primary thrusters ran through their warmup cycle. A few moments later, the light patter of shrapnel and a faint sizzle of plasma against the sturdy hull heralded the detonation of the bomb. Without an atmosphere and a confined space, the explosion wasn't nearly sufficient to be a threat to ship or station. The Armistice oriented itself and shuddered along until its engines finally fully flared to life.
#
"Any word on the Warden?" asked Garotte, checking the time on his slidepad.
Confident though he was in his disguise and credentials, every false identity had a time limit. He hadn't had much time to prepare this one, so he'd been forced to construct it with speed in mind, rather than longevity. Periodic automated security sweeps would eventually find the entries he'd made, and depending on the database, investigations would begin regarding the validity. He'd estimated fraud alerts and security holds wouldn't start for at least two days, but considering the fact that his estimate was based primarily on wild guesses and intuition, he would rather be long gone well before then.
The guard touched his headset again. "Communications, can we... Communications?"
Suddenly the PA system began to blare an alert. "Attention, all personnel. Situation Blue. Switch to point to point communications and await further orders."
The message repeated itself once before the power suddenly dropped away, plunging the room into darkness. An instant later flashlights clicked on.
"What's this about?" Garotte asked, convincingly pretending to be a man who was pretending not to be afraid.
"Stay calm, sir. We have procedures for this," the guard said unsteadily as dim red emergency lights clicked on.
"Oh, well, that's alright then," Garotte said, crunching on o
ne of the mints from his pocket, then clicking open his cane's compartment and dropping them in. "As long as you've got procedures. I presume all of your doors lock in the event of a power failure?"
"Yes."
Garotte clicked on the flashlight built into his cane and shined it around, then appeared to nervously play with the pair of buttons. A moment later the already nervous guard furrowed his brow.
"What's that noise?" he asked, hand instinctively moving to his stun rod.
"What is it? Sort of an edge-of-your-hearing whine? Heading up in frequency and down in volume?" Garotte asked.
"Yes."
"Probably just a large capacitor charging."
"Where is it coming from?"
Garotte leaned to the side, as if listening closely, then slowly raised the tip of his cane toward the glass.
"I think... it may be coming... from the basement," he said slowly.
At the sound of the final word, Winters slid quickly from her seat and rolled beneath the counter. Before the men on her side of the glass could react, there was an earsplitting clap, Garotte nearly toppled over backwards, and the entire surface of the glass marbled with intricate cracks and disintegrated into small, jagged pebbles. The avalanche of glass was, to say the least, highly distracting. Both Winters and Garotte took full advantage. He flipped the cane around, grasping the end and swinging the handle with pinpoint precision at the base of the neck of the first guard, crumbling him to the ground. The second guard swung at his head with the stun rod, but he stooped below, snatching up the matching weapon from the downed partner and delivering a swift, incapacitating jolt. Winters managed to get to her feet, despite the high gravity and wrist restraints, and was standing on the counter of her side of the broken glass wall before the guards on her side had gathered themselves enough to take action. The first one to approach got a swift kick to the bottom edge of the face mask, popping his helmet neatly off and uncovering his face for a thrust kick to the nose. The other tried to apply his stunner to her legs, but she leaped toward him, driving her knees into his collar bones and riding him down to the ground, where the gravitationally enhanced maneuver kept him there.
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