by M. D. Cooper
“Where are we going? Mars?” Cara asked, immediately imagining the conversation that might follow.
“For God’s sake, not Mars. You know High Terra a little bit, right? We’ll make it High Terra.”
Petral shouldered the hatch closed and spun the lock. She had seemed absent-minded for the last part of their run and Cara assumed she must be doing something over the Link. She’d caught enough of Petral’s cursing and griping under her breath to understand that everyone was running for the ship, but the ship was about to get put on lock down. If that happened, there was no way they were getting off Mars 1. If they didn’t get off Mars 1, it was only a matter of time before they ended up in Heartbridge custody.
They were sprinting down another narrow corridor, this one lined with what looked like communications conduit, when Petral stopped at a side door and pulled Cara inside with her. They found themselves in a small storage room full of service drones and crates of cleaning chemicals. The air smelled like dust and ammonia, tickling Cara’s nose. Cara put her hands on her knees, breathing hard.
“We can’t just run,” Petral said. She crossed her arms, then let her arms drop and ran her hands back through her hair, which had become a thick black mane during their run. She was more anxious than Cara had ever seen her.
“What else can we do?” Cara asked. “Rabbits run.”
Petral gave her an arch look. “I’m not a rabbit. You’re not going to be one anymore, either.”
Cara could only look at her, not sure how to respond.
“We need to take advantage of our position,” Petral said. “We’re not the ones being chased here. They don’t even know about you and me.” She raised an eyebrow. “Maybe they know about me. Somebody does, anyway. Our bailiff proves that. But we’re not the main effort.”
Cara did her best to follow Petral’s leaps of thought, not quite certain if the woman was talking to her at all. The fact that she was speaking out loud indicated she wanted to have a conversation. But whenever it seemed like she might want a response, Petra charged ahead with another burst of words and ideas.
Another minute passed as Cara lost track of what was being said and found herself wondering what her dad was doing right then, if he was all right, and how Tim had convinced him to buy a dog of all things, when she realized that Petral had fallen quiet.
“Well?” Petral asked.
Cara looked up into the tall woman’s sharp blue eyes.
“I missed the question,” Cara said.
“We need to sabotage the Protectorate garrison. What are your ideas? Let’s go.”
Cara quailed inwardly. Why would she have ideas about harming the Mars Protectorate garrisons? Everything she knew about the Marsian military was based on one lieutenant she’d talked to for five minutes. He’d sounded cute, though. Cara stopped herself. Why did it matter if he was attractive?
“Give me some ideas,” Petral pressed. “Don’t stand there like a post. Say something.”
“Bomb?” Cara tried.
“We don’t have materials. I thought of that. It would take too long to get everything together.” Petral pressed her fingers into her temples and squeezed her eyes closed, as if willing her mind to work. “Think!” she said tightly. “What do we have?” She opened her eyes. “What do we have, Cara? Start there.”
“We have…” Cara began. “We have access to a secure area. Full of soldiers in their bunks.” She looked around and screwed up her nose. “We’ve got a bunch of cleaning drones and chemicals.”
Petral nodded, looking around as if she hadn’t paid attention to the room. “That’s good. What else?”
“You’ve got your Link, right?”
“That’s hardly a help right now. It might be more useful that you don’t have a Link. They can’t monitor you.”
Cara tilted her head. She hadn’t thought of that. “I saw a whole lot of communications lines in the corridor. We could cut them.”
“Communications lines,” Petral said, nodding to herself. “Plumbing lines. Sealed corridors, barracks rooms. I’m getting an idea.”
“I don’t want to kill anyone,” Cara said, thinking she knew where Petral’s thoughts were going.
“Who said we were going to kill anyone?”
“We’re not going to drown people in their rooms, are we?”
Petral gave Cara a feral smile. “That’s a brutal idea,” she said. She tapped Cara’s nose with a long index finger. “We probably shouldn’t commit an act of war against the Protectorate.”
“We’re not a government. We can’t commit an act of war.”
“Don’t be so sure. Terrorism then. We are definitely not terrorists.” Petral nodded. “No, we’re not going to drown people. But we could convince their system to think that’s going to happen. We kill enough sensors and their maintenance system will go into lockdown and every soldier in the area will need to respond to the emergency. We could start a fire, but that would be too difficult to control. Now, a general technical malfunction of the environmental control system, including plumbing, that’s interesting.”
“How do we do that?” Cara asked.
Petral tilted her head. “You’re asking me? How would you do it? And you can’t assume I can use my Link.”
“There’s a control section for the environmental control,” Cara said. “We need to go there.”
“Very good. How do we find it?”
“Can you access the maintenance maps?”
“No Link, remember.”
“You’re making this unnecessarily difficult and my dad’s in trouble.”
Petral’s face grew hard. “How?” she demanded.
Cara stared at her, not understanding why Petral would be so obtuse. There wasn’t time to make things more difficult. Then she knew the answer. “We follow the control conduit and look for onboard schematics. There should be something on the physical cabling at junction points. That’s what Sunny Skies has.”
Petral raised her eyebrows. “So do it, then,” she said.
Cara glanced around the storage room. “We should take some of these chemicals. I smell ammonia.” She opened a nearby crate and pulled out a container labeled ‘Latrine Cleaner’.
“That’s concentrate. Grab that over there too…yeah, the one labeled HCI. That should do the trick,” Petral said. “Now, show me how you’re going to read the signs on these cables.”
Cara grabbed two of the spray bottles and ran back into the hallway. She scanned the rows of conduit on the wall near the ceiling, then spotted the first arrow indicating the closest control junction. It was back toward the barracks area.
“We already passed it,” she said. “It might be on the other side of the barracks.”
“Should we go the other way then?”
Cara jogged a few meters down the hallway, checking the markings on the wall for electrical, plumbing and communications. Most were standard but she found one handwritten line left by a technician in a marker on the jacketing alloy that read ‘bypass’, with an arrow pointing in the opposite direction.
“Here we go,” Cara said. “This way.” She didn’t wait for Petral to answer as she clutched the two spray bottles to her chest and sprinted down the hallway, glancing up for the technical symbols arriving every five meters.
She began to worry she’d made the wrong decision when they came to a narrow, recessed door in the wall. Electrical conduit ran through the bulkhead above the door. Cara fumbled to hold the bottles with one arm and tried the latch.
“It’s locked,” she said as Petral ran up beside her.
“Mechanical or maglock?”
Cara set the bottles on the floor and squinted at the lock. “Looks magnetic.”
“So what are our choices?”
Cara bit her lip, thinking back to the various magnetic lock systems for the cargo on Sunny Skies. What systems had failed and disabled all the cargo locks?
“Power,” she said. “Relay malfunction. Software failure. Kinetic malfunction.”
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“Kinetic malfunction?” Petral said. “What’s that supposed to be?”
“That’s what Dad calls a crash.”
Petral chuckled. “Of course, he would.” She dug in a pocket a produced a metal cylinder. “We’re short on time, so use this.”
Cara caught the tossed object and immediately recognized it as a magnet. It smacked the door as she moved it close to the lock but was attracted to the interior components, not the alloy surface. The magnet made scraping sounds as she dragged it below the latch.
After a minute of experimentation, Cara shook her head. “I can’t make it work.”
“Fine.” Petral moved her out of the way and knelt beside the door. She moved the magnet closer to the doorjam. “You start closer to the edge where the physical locking point should be. Then you work your way in.”
In ten seconds, Petral had overridden the maglock. The door swung inward as she slid the magnet back in her pocket.
“You think it’s got an alarm?” Cara asked.
“Should it?”
“Yes,” Cara said. “So we don’t have much time.”
“How much you think?”
“The access alarm is probably going off somewhere right now, so we’ve got however long it takes someone to get here. Or they might be lazy and send a drone.”
“They’ll send a drone,” Petral agreed. “And we don’t want that drone to get visual recognition on us, so let’s hurry this up. Toss me one of those bottles.”
Petral stepped quickly into the maintenance closet and Cara watched her check the racks of systems control panels. It all looked like standard environmental control to Cara. A few of the boxes were em-waveguide junctions. Those would be data and comms. Petral must have found what she was looking for and began dousing a rack in the latrine cleaner. She splashed it inside vents and opened doors to soak circuitry.
At first nothing seemed to happen. Then Cara smelled a bit of acrid smoke above the ammonia.
“Get in here and dump the HCI on the same stuff. But don’t breathe. And squint your eyes,” Petral said.
Cara followed her inside. There was barely space for the two of them to stand back-to-back. Cara splashed her solution on the same systems Petral had soaked, and the slight acrid smell bloomed, creating a pungent mix with the stench of chlorine and ammonia. Something hissed and popped. Out in the hallway, a deafening alarm started blaring. Cara clapped her hands over her ears.
“That’s it,” Petral shouted. “Let’s go!”
They dropped the bottles and ran out in the hallway as smoked poured out of the room behind them. Warning lights flashed from the ceiling, turning everything scarlet and bright white. Petral turned away from the barracks and ran ahead. Cara held her hands over her ears as she ran, which made the sound of her breathing rage in her head.
They turned a corner about twenty meters from the maintenance closet and a drone raced past them in a black blur, its red sensor eye glowing angrily. They didn’t stop running.
The alarm seemed to go on forever as Petral led the way through the circuitous maintenance tunnels, everything flashing red and white. No turn she chose made the sound decrease in volume. In fact, it seemed like they were running toward the alarm.
Cara’s head began to ache and she felt dizzy. She stumbled around corners, silently begging for the sound to go away.
They reached a maintenance lift and Petral ran inside. Cara slipped in behind her as the doors were closing. They fell against the walls, breathing hard as the sound was abruptly deadened by the closed doors. Then it cut off altogether.
Cara’s ears continued to ring.
“The drone must have reached the closet,” Petral said, her voice sounding dull. She stared into space for a second, then looked at Cara. “I think we mostly accomplished our goal. Enough of the garrison has been redirected to the barracks for fire response.”
Petral flashed one of her feral smiles. “All those lovely young soldiers running around in their underwear.”
Cara made a gagging face.
Petral laughed. She ran her hands through her hair to smooth it down and let her head fall back against the lift’s wall as she relaxed. “We’ll talk in a couple years,” she said, smiling at Cara with what seemed like fondness.
Cara didn’t allow herself to trust the expression. She couldn’t read Petral’s eyes. What would Grandpa Charlie say?
Petral finished patting down the many pockets her leather outfit. Apparently satisfied, she nodded. “Now,” she said, fixing Cara with her blue eyes. “Let’s talk about the shuttle we’re about to steal.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
STELLAR DATE: 09.17.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Mortal Chance
REGION: 433 Eros, Mars Protectorate, InnerSol
The repairs on the Mortal Chance took another two days. In that time, the last remaining crew member quit, and Alys Harm hired on a Marsian technician named Chafri Hansen, a hyper kid barely out of his teens with the upper body of a gorilla and bright blue hair. The new navigator was a woman named Rina Smith, who wore a faded TSF surplus shipsuit sealed all the way up to her neck every time Brit saw her. She had curly black hair and brown eyes that might have looked sympathetic if her favorite pose weren’t scowling with her arms crossed.
The last position Harm should have hired was cargo handler, but she hid her inability to fill the position in a speech about each of them getting a bigger share. Brit didn’t mind the possibility of moving crates outside the ship—though it was the most dangerous part of freighter work—but the others complained until Harm told them to go suck a duck if they didn’t like it.
“Suck a duck?” Brit asked. They were all standing in the small galley of the Mortal Chance, barely large enough to fit all of them around its single table.
“It rhymes,” Harm said.
“A lot of ducks on the surface of Mars 1; filthy things,” Chafri said. “Which end do you suck? The beak end?”
Brit watched the captain. It was obvious Harm wanted to smile in spite of herself. Her normally ruddy face was pale with a hangover.
“I heard if you lick a frog you can hallucinate,” Chafri said with a grin. “I haven’t heard nothing about ducks.”
“It’s a saying,” Harm shouted. “Shut up about it.”
“We got our course yet?” Rina asked, apparently not interested in teasing the captain about fowl.
Harm nodded, then groaned, placing a hand on her temple. “Yeah, Heartbridge sent it over this morning.”
Brit relaxed slightly. She had been perseverating over how to work the question about Heartbridge into the conversation.
“Where are we going?” Chafri asked. “Mars? I just came from the M1R.”
“Jovian Combine,” Harm said. Brit watched her dull-silver gaze move from face to face. “Some object about four weeks out, deep in the near Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids.”
Rina gave an irritated sigh. “Trojans are retrograde from us right now. We won’t have enough fuel for a round trip if you want to make it out there in four weeks. Where we gonna stop to refuel? Mars or Ceres?”
“Ceres,” Harm said. “It’s closer to the route we need to take, and fuel prices aren’t bad—not like the ass rape you get here on Eros. We won’t have to deal with the Marsians, either.”
“Eros is run by the Marsians too,” Rina said.
Harm nodded, slowly this time. “Exactly. I also picked up an extra few crates of something or other destined for Ceres, we’ll all make a bit of extra scratch off Heartbridge’s costs.”
“We’ll have to deal with the Anderson Collective,” Rina said. “Anybody been to Ceres?” She raised his hand. “I’ve been to Ceres. They’ll run an inspection up your rear end if you let them. They want to know everything.”
“Is this cargo legit?” Brit asked. “I’m not looking to cross any local law enforcement.”
It was a reasonable question a pilot would ask. Still, Harm glared at her as though she had asked something fooli
sh. The captain squeezed her temples and closed her eyes for a few seconds.
“The cargo’s sealed,” Harm said, eyes still closed as she seemed to search inside her headache. “We won’t have anything to do with it except move it from points A to B.”
Rina shook her head. “That means it’s probably something dangerous. Aren’t you an independent contractor for Heartbridge? That means they don’t have to disclose anything to you.”
“Why are you so worried?” Chafri asked. “They’re just crates, right? Could be anything. When would you normally go opening up cargo?”
The curly haired woman shot him an irritated glance. “These bio-tech firms are always doing work on the edge of ethics. But they still need people like us to take care of their day to day. Did you hear about that station full of kids hooked up to some mainframe? Word is they were using the kids to build sentient AI, and when they were done the kids were just shells; their nervous systems rejected their own bodies.”
Brit swallowed, keeping her gaze on the table in front of Harm. Memories of 8221 immediately flooded her mind and she fought the wave, tension making her muscles ache.
“And then there was the Magnificent Intention, a freighter out of Mars One that went off the grid during a run. They found her later with her crew turned into giant spores. Part of their cargo hadn’t sealed properly and the crew spent three weeks breathing in modified fungus. Apparently, it was something that attacks ant colonies, waits in their brains until they wake up, makes the ant climb to the highest point it can find, then bursts out of its skull to send out more spores. You can imagine what that looked like. Not that anybody actually looked at it except drones. They nuked that ship from a million klicks away.”
“And some crews just get themselves high and forget to adjust their atmospheric controls so they all asphyxiate,” Captain Harm said. “We’re not going to sit here and bellyache about the cargo. If you don’t want part of the run, pack your shit and head for the airlock. It’s simple.”