Caitlyn Morcos

by M H Questus

  “Having difficulties, marshal?” asked Di Mercurio, smiling up at the younger Morcos as she tapped away at her holodisplay. “They say that the king never sits easy.”

  “Well, this queen is comfortable in the position but reconsidering her throne.” Morcos chuckled back, adjusting her headset so that her voice carried easily without having to raise her voice. “Deputy Kobayashi, please put me through to Command.”

  “Aye, Marshal.” Kobayashi nodded as he tapped the holographic buttons floating before him. “You have solid link.”

  “Command, this is the Interplanetary Government Ship ‘Courageous’ requesting permission to disembark.”

  “Courageous,” came the smooth reply, the husky voice of Vice-Senior Marshal St. Clair clearly carrying over the group’s headsets, “this is Command. IGS Judicator has beaten you to the punch, Marshal, and received clearance to depart Scorpii station a full minute and a half before you.”

  “I figured I’d let her win something, Command.” Morcos said.

  “I heard that, Morcos.” Smith’s voice was joyful, but Morcos could hear the same edge of fear in it that currently she was trying so desperately to suppress. “Consider this the first in a long line of uninterrupted victories for the Judicator.”

  “I’ve got a bottle of Sabaeus greampa that says the first arrest goes to Courageous.” Morcos said effortlessly. She hated the stuff, but it went for several thousand credits a bottle for some unknown reason and would make a fine wager at least.

  “I’ll take that bet, Marshal. I’ll put my uncle’s bottle of ‘27 bourbon on the line for that. Good luck out there.”

  “Right back at you, Smith.” Morcos watched her viewscreen as the Judicator slowly began thrusting away from drydock. “Good hunting.”

  “Courageous, this is Command. You are clear to depart after Judicator is through the launch doors.”

  Morcos noticed that her entire crew was watching the slow departure of the Judicator, its sleek lines and fresh paint making it almost seem to glow in the drydock’s overhead lights. The fusion thrusters pulsed blue-green, slowly moving the massive ship towards the enormous airlock doors at the far side of the drydock.

  Morcos shifted one more time, finally finding a position that wasn’t torturously uncomfortable.

  “Airlock doors are closing.” The traffic controller at Command sounded nervous, perhaps picking up on the energy that this was no regular departure he was overseeing.

  With a few taps and a quick scrolling of a few buttons, Morcos sent the external cameras of the Courageous to watch the last few moments of the Judicator, hovering in front of the equally enormous external airlock doors, before the internal doors completely shut.

  Mere seconds before the airlock doors sealed the Judicator exploded.

  There was a moment of stunned inactivity as the Courageous rocked from the shockwave of the explosion. Morcos saw the massive internal airlock doors buckle outwards from the force of the blast, and tongues of flame licked through as pieces of starship rained through the now warped and damaged doors.

  Morcos shook her head, trying to clear it. She felt like she was suddenly submerged in cold water. She couldn’t breathe, everything seemed to be moving in slow motion. She fixed her attention for a moment on a single piece of debris that flew in an extended arc from the ruined inner doors, spinning, slowly, the blackened inner side contrasting sharply with the still strangely pristine silver paint.

  Morcos flinched as the piece impacted on the drydock deck under the Courageous. A quick glance at the chronometer on her holodisplay showed that less than two seconds had passed since the explosion. The wreckage of the Judicator was spitting fire and shrapnel, the bulk of the ship crashed onto the floor of the massive airlock. Twisted metal and smoke reached up like grasping hands.

  “Di Mercurio!” Morcos snapped her head up. “We’re drifting! Get the ship on the ground, quick and safe. Kobayashi, get Command on the line, let them know what happened and then contact emergency crews, co-ordinate their efforts! Chatterji, get suited up! We’re going out there.” Morcos threw herself to her feet, the bridge erupting in activity.

  It took her almost three agonizing minutes to get into her combat armour, the helmet sealing with a hiss as she cycled the airlock controls. Chatterji seemed to have less difficulty getting her gear on, the mirrored faceplate already in position and the dull blue armoured plates securely fastened over the interlocking nanoweave armoured suit underneath. The armour would protect them from heat, extreme cold, hard vacuum, and even small arms fire and many explosives, but it was unusual to wear inside a spacecraft at any time except heading into battle. The odds that any of the crew of the Judicator happened to be wearing theirs…

  Morcos shook her head to clear the thoughts as the airlock door opened and she ran out into the drydock. The overhead lights were pulsing red while warning klaxons wailed softly through the audio filters in her helmet.

  “Kobayashi, talk to me. How are the emergency response teams coming along?”

  “Still five minutes away, sir.” Kobayashi’s voice was steady. “I’m currently arguing with Dock Control to not open the airlocks to extinguish the fires due to the open inner doors.”

  Morcos shook her head at the standard levels of bureaucratic idiocy that seemed endemic across human space. Procedure said to vent oxygen to extinguish fires, and there are always people that will try to follow said procedure even if the result is that the inner airlock doors happened to be open and half the oxygen on the station ends up in space. Idiots.

  “Inform Dock Control that we will happily put a plasma cannon shot through their front windows if they even think about venting the airlock.” Morcos kept her voice hard. Her mind was whirling through the possibilities: bomb, piloting accident, catastrophic system failure…

  She and Chatterji had reached the ruined remains of the inner airlock, the massive, three meter thick metal warped from the blast, at the same time as the emergency hovers finally arrived.

  Morcos took a moment to take in the scene. Firefighting hovers blasted water and carbon dioxide at the twisted wreckage of the Judicator while ambulance vehicles stood nearby with paramedics rushing forward with gurneys. Morcos could see three construction walkers heading towards the crash.

  She mentally thanked whatever fortune was responsible for the Judicator being closer to the internal airlock doors rather than the external ones as she ran up to the still burning starship. Trying to coordinate any rescue efforts in hard vacuum would’ve delayed everything unacceptably, assuming that it hadn’t blown the ship straight out of the spacestation immediately and made any rescue efforts almost completely pointless.

  The entire back half of the Judicator was a mangled mess of engine components and molten metal. The explosion had obviously damaged the fusion containment ring and plasma had ejected out backwards before the reactor shut down. The remaining fires being battled were mostly contained in the front half of the ship, secondary explosions caused by detonated munitions or venting oxygen from inside the ship.

  Morcos and Chatterji reached the starboard airlock at the same time as a squad of constables from the station. They were struggling with the door controls.

  “Forget the controls.” Morcos set her helmet to general broadcast, and suddenly her ears were filled with the voices of all the nearby emergency workers. “The explosion seems to have been close to the reactor, which means the mainframe is probably vapour. We’ll have to force it!”

  The three constables nodded as Chatterji and Morcos joined their efforts to push open the doors. A few moments of strained grunting and the door started to haltingly slide into the bulkheads to either side.

  Morcos and the two constables helping her gave one last shove, and the external airlock door was open.

  There, laying on the floor of the airlock, was Deputy Haley. She seemed mostly intact, although her eyes were closed and the left side of her face was covered in blood.

  “Medics!” Morcos was call
ing as Chatterji scooped up the unconscious Deputy. She headed towards the paramedics as they rushed forward. Morcos made a mental note to thank Chatterji for her initiative.

  “You men in the construction walkers!” Morcos pointed at the towering robots. “Cut off anything still burning on the ship and move it away from the rest. No plasma torches, just drills and saws!”

  There was a chorus of consent as she turned back towards the airlock. “Right, you three are with me. Stick together, visors set to infrared. We’re heading for the bridge.”

  More agreements and nods. Morcos took one last look at the chaos around the ship, and headed in.

  Chapter 7: Into the Breach

  The hallway was full of smoke and the moaning of tortured metal. Bright sparks illuminated the corridor, occasionally overwhelming the infrared imaging of her helmet, washing everything out with an electric green that slowly faded into the background.

  Morcos realized she was standing where she had asked Smith to see the now-obliterated Tau engine less than four hours ago. The hallway was unrecognizable.

  “Right, the bridge is this way!” Morcos called to the constables behind her. They had their heads down, helmet glass glowing from within, shoulders hunched up and arms tucked close to their sides.

  She put her head down and started navigating through the rubble. The ship was gently vibrating, a roaring-popping sound muffled through layers of deck-plating. The walls and ceiling glowed a soft green under the infrared imaging installed in her helmet, and through that glow she was able to carefully pick her way through fallen pipes and crushed bulkheads.

  “You sure this is safe, Marshal?” called one of the constables from behind her. “I don’t want to sound critical, but what are we doing here if everyone is obviously dead?”

  “We don’t know that yet,” Morcos said with more certainty than she felt. “The bridge is the deepest, safest part of the ship. They might still be alive, but every second matters!”

  Each of the doors they crossed had to be slowly, painstakingly pushed open enough to let them wiggle through, their armour scraping against both sides. It felt like they had travelled kilometers, but if Morcos turned to look back down the hallway she could still see the bright square of the airlock door. It was almost mocking her, each meter of strained effort forward taking forever.

  The filters on her suit whirred loudly in her ears as Morcos forced open yet another door. It creaked and groaned in protest, scraping open at an agonizing pace.

  She lost track of time completely. The square of distant light of the airlock disappeared as the damaged and warped hallway twisted into the heart of the ship. The rumbling timbre changed, the higher notes of the drills and saws outside no longer able to penetrate through the ship.

  She was crawling under a fallen piece of hull, dragging her sore and bruised body through an opening barely wide enough to fit her shoulders, when the ship groaned like a monster in pain.

  Morcos felt the weight against her shoulder and back suddenly increase. She gasped in pain and surprise, the groaning growing louder.

  “Pull me back!” she shouted over the noise, and felt hands grasping her ankles. “Pull me back!”

  The air was crushed out of her lungs and she stretched her arms flat against the floor. There was a moment of panic as nothing happened except for the weight increasing.

  And then she was free, the sound of metal scrapping on metal overwhelming the groaning for a moment.

  The hole she had been wedged into disappeared, and the four of them stumbled back a few meters away, watching as the hallway warped further by the strain.

  Just as suddenly, the groaning and shaking stopped.

  Morcos stood, breathing heavily, her back and chest sore, her arms strained, her legs aching.

  “Right. Let’s find another way around.”

  She had turned back when a bone-jarring crash sounded. Unlike the groaning, it was sharp and abrupt, over almost as quickly as it had started, filling the air with metal clanging and then gone.

  She turned, and the hallway was almost clear. The floor had given out beneath where she had been pinned, opening up a space above the debris. She could see the bridge doors on the other side.

  Sparks and pops filled the air from below, the wiring and pipes ruptured, and a fine mist of what she hoped was water was slowly filling the lower part of the corridor.

  “Never mind finding a different route,” she breathed, eyes riveted to the distance bridge doorway. “Nice and easy now, folks.”

  She placed one hand against the wall to her left and carefully probed forward with one foot.

  “Marshal,” said one of the constables, his voice wavering.

  She nodded, mostly to herself, and held her other hand up. “You,” she said, pointing at the constable that had spoken, “Go back to the airlock, get some long planks we can use to cross this. Double-time.”

  The constable’s frame slumped for a moment in relief, and then he turned and moved back up the hallway.

  “Anyone else want to help him?” Morcos said, keeping her voice as level as she could. “This is beyond your pay-grade.”

  “Saving people is our pay-grade, marshal,” said one of the two constables, her voice wavering from exhaustion or fear. “Let’s get moving before I come to my senses.”

  The last constable nodded once.

  Morcos smiled, despite the fact they couldn’t see it, and resumed probing forward on the gnarled pieces of metal that now formed the imperfect, tortured floor that connected where she was standing to the bridge.

  She took a step, and the metal underfoot held. Her boots, thickly armoured on the soles, helped considerably, but they also made it difficult to determine exactly where she was placing her foot. Behind her she could sense the first constable carefully following her footsteps, putting her weight on the same beams that Morcos had.

  The final meter had no convenient pieces of debris, and so Morcos just jumped, throwing herself forward with a grunt. She landed in a crouch, and then turned to help the constables cross the last leap.

  The doors to the bridge, the paint warped and chipped, screeched open as the three of them clawed at the handles.

  The air was thick with smoke, the room nearly pitch black even using infrared. There was a puddle of heat a few meters away, and Morcos carefully moved forward, the smoke curling around her.

  It was Hendor, seated at his console, head tilted towards her. His mouth was moving, but whatever sound he was making, Morcos couldn’t hear it.

  She rushed to his side, ducking under a bundle of thick cables that had fallen from the bridge ceiling.

  His uniform was coated in thick blood, a pool of it cooling by his feet. His console had exploded, and several shards the length of Morcos’s arm had pierced straight through the deputy, impaling him to his chair.

  She grasped his hand, his arm twitching for a moment. He blinked at her, unlikely able to see her at all with the darkness and thick smoke.

  His eyes closed and his chest twitched once.

  He was dead.

  “Marshal, I have another one over here. He’s gone.”

  Morcos let go of Hendor’s hand. She carefully rotated, facing one of the constables. The constable pointed to a chair obliterated under massive piece of the ceiling, smears of uniform and chunks of deputy scattered in a circle around the impact site.

  “That’s Njenga,” Morcos said, pointing at the majority of a hand near the constable’s foot. “I recognize his ring from earlier today.”

  “This one is alive!” shouted the other constable, and Morcos rushed over immediately.

  Smith was conscious, her eyelids fluttering open and closed, her mouth slack. Streams of tears ran down her face, cutting rivets through the grime that coated her cheeks.

  Morcos knelt next to her. Smith was laying on the floor on her side, her left leg pierced through her thigh with a metal fragment the size of spear. Blood had sealed the wound, and only a trickle was currently leaking fr
om her.

  “Hey Krissy,” Morcos said, quickly checking Smith’s breathing, shallow but steady, and pulse, which was rapid and weak. “You’re not allowed to die on me.”

  Smith was covered in burns, her face an almost unrecognizable mass of blisters and torn skin, and her left arm was twisted in a way that suggested it had been broken in at least two, possibly three places.

  One of the constables had fetched the first aid kit from the remains of one wall, and Morcos grasped it desperately.

  “The medics are on their way, sir!” shouted the female constable. “They’ll be here in a few minutes!”

  “Hear that Krissy?” Morcos nodded and turned her attention to the prone Smith. “You are most definitely not allowed to die on me now.”

  Smith blinked and focused, her hands brushing the spear impaling her leg. She placed a hand on Morcos’s chest. Her eyes rolled back into her head.

  “Oh no you don’t,” Morcos muttered fiercely. “You are going to have to do so much of my laundry if you die before I say you can.” She pulled a needle full of emergency stabilizing nanos out of the first aid kit and injected it into Krissy’s shoulder.

  “We need to get her ready to move!” shouted the constable by Morcos’s shoulder. “That leg is stuck!”

  Morcos looked at Smith’s leg. The constable was right, the shaft of metal ran straight through the floor as far as she could tell, and extended into the ceiling above.

  “Give me your sidearm, constable!” she shouted over the roar of fires and groaning metal.

  The constable handed it over, a heavy laser pistol designed to punch through armour and bone with lethal ease. Morcos put her head on the floor, her helmet pinging off the plates with a dull clink, trying to see if there was enough room to slice through the pipe.