by M. D. Cooper
They sat beside each other as the train took off toward a station that would place them six kilometers from the A1 dock where the Excelsior waited.
With all the other maglev trains offline an easier route would have been to take a shuttle from the A3 dock, but when Collins left he had destroyed the other ships and much of the dock.
It was going to be a long hike to the Excelsior.
They hadn’t spoken much since the decision to include Tanis and her discomfort at the silence was turning to annoyance. In the military, rank dictated decision-making. If you had a lower pay-grade, you shut up and did what you were told. The extra dynamic of a relationship added exhausting nuance to every conflict.
“Why am I getting the silent treatment?” she finally asked. “I thought you were OK with my coming.”
“I’ve been waiting for you to explain why you are so insistent on coming,” Joe replied. His tone was level, giving little away, but Tanis knew that meant he was upset.
“It feels silly; I know that logically going with you is not the right choice.”
“You’re right, it’s not.” Joe’s voice was harsh and his expression softened. “Sorry, that came out stronger than I meant...”
“I seem to remember doing that myself from time to time.”
“Who you?” Joe grinned and Tanis gave him a light punch on the arm. “I’m still worried, though. A seventy-g burn will make you weigh over six-thousand kilograms. Even in stasis that’s a lot.”
“I know,” Tanis agreed. “It’s not going to be comfortable, but I just found you—figuratively speaking—I’m not going to lose you.”
Joe locked eyes with her. “I spent a long time chasing after you too. I don’t want to lose you either.”
Angela interrupted.
“Do tell,” Tanis said.
“That sounds a…bit risky,” Tanis said, looking down at the matte grey armor tightly adhered to her skin. “Do I really need something like that? I already have a lot of structural enhancements. It’s not like this is all flesh and blood in here,” she said as she patted her stomach.
“See, my concerns are not completely unfounded,” Joe said. “I think you should do it.”
Tanis clasped Joe’s hand. “Just the way we like it.”
Neither said another word as the train continued to their stop; their hands didn’t unclasp.
When the maglev stopped the doors opened into a pitch-black station. Even the emergency lighting was offline.
Joe had been listening in. He caught her eye and nodded.
“They must have had a contingency plan in case any of us got out of stasis,” Joe said.
Tanis nodded as they walked across the platform into the station’s central plaza. She cycled her vision to a combination of IR and UV. The setting picked up enough ambient heat and background radiation to generate a picture of the room. Her navigation overlay filled in the rest, providing a false color representation of what the station looked like.
Joe’s vision didn’t have the UV pickup, so she sent him a point to point feed to help improve his sight.
“Thanks, there are some looooong drops on this ship.”
“You’re telling me. When they built it they really didn’t give a lot of consideration to how hard it is to get between places on foot.”
Priscilla gave the mental equivalent of a snort.
Tanis signaled her agreement and nodded to Joe. They both unslung their pulse rifles and set them to an EM burst. It was a dangerous thing to use on a ship, but with everything offline there was little chance of secondary explosions.
“Servitors should show up pretty clearly on the IR,” Joe said as they moved cautiously across the plaza. The station had several balconies and some large spaces with no cover. Tanis would feel a lot better once they were through it.
“Don’t count on it, this room has a lot of reflective surfaces. Make sure you filter out your own image or you’ll be shooting at ghosts.”
“Not my first time using IR,” Joe said with a smile.
Despite every hair on Tanis’s neck tingling, nothing happened. They exited the station and began their journey down a long series of pitch-black corridors.
Unlike her mad race after Collins and Amy Lee, Tanis was acutely aware of her surroundings. The darkened halls took on a sinister cast and she found herself imagining twisted shapes lurching out from the shadows.
She shook her head to clear the images from her mind.
“You OK?” Joe asked.
“Yeah, just too many bad memories from darkened ship corridors.”
Her augmented vision showed Joe nodding and he put a hand on her shoulder. She was glad he didn’t ask for details. She didn’t want to think any further on those past events.
Crew quarters and duty stations slid by on either side; after the first kilometer those were left behind as they moved into a region of supply depots and workshops.
“Well that’s not handy,” Tanis said as they came to a bank of lifts at the end of a corridor. “There’s supposed to be a way to get down to deck 114B from here.”
“What I’d give for a flashlight right now,” Joe said while looking for an access hatch to a ladder shaft.
“Give it a second, I have my nanocloud doing pings, they’ll find the opening.”
Seconds later the nano spotted it and the hatch lit up on their HUDs. Tanis pried it open and slid down the ladder to the next deck; she put her back to the wall, scanning the cross corridors while Joe leapt through the opening and landed beside her.
“Such a show-off,” Tanis said, worrying for a moment that it was the wrong thing to say.
Joe grinned. “Gotta keep limber
.”
They landed in an intersection and the corridor they needed was lit up on their HUDs. The path took them between entrances to massive workshops where machines lay dormant, prepared to fashion whatever ship’s components were needed. Many of them would also assist in building the New Eden 1 space station on which the habitation cylinders would mount.
Joe stopped and put a hand on Tanis’s shoulder. “Did you hear that?”
“Over my own breathing? No. It’s weird to have the ship this silent.”
“I could have sworn I heard something come from that opening ahead to the left.” Joe gestured at the gaping doorway with his rifle.
“Then let’s go nice and slow-like.”
The pair crept through the corridor. Tanis never thought she would be in the dark, creeping down a hall in the Intrepid, worrying about being attacked by the machines that were supposed to build her future home.
A clang echoed out of the shop ahead.
“I heard it that time,” Tanis whispered.
Another metallic sound sliced through the silence behind them.
“Fuck stealth,” Tanis said. “Run!”
The corridor was featureless and indefensible; if they were going to be attacked from both ends they would be cut to ribbons. Ahead, the maps showed the corridor terminated in a sorting warehouse filled with various semi-autonomous robots, but at least it offered some cover.
The screech of metal on metal came from all around and Tanis spread her nanocloud further ahead. Not a moment too soon, a molecular welder moved into view from an angle they would have missed in their mad dash.
“Duck!” Tanis hit the deck a moment before Joe as a plasma beam shot over their heads. She rolled onto her shoulder and sent an EM pulse at the machine. Sparks flew and the plasma arm swung wildly, slicing through a part of the deck before finally going dead.
She swung her head to see Joe firing bursts at a series of light hauler mechs coming out of an adjacent shop. They crashed to the ground, but more of their brethren were assembling in the shadows.
Without another word they both got back to their feet and picked up the pace. The sorting depot was only a hundred meters away. Tanis checked on her AI to see that Angela was launching exploratory probes to attempt a signal intercept on whatever was controlling the robots.
Battling rogue AI was one of the reasons she and Angela had been paired to begin with, their skills suited one another quite well.
Several of the robots moved into the corridor ahead of them but then turned back once under Angela’s control. As they dashed by, Tanis could see Angela’s bots doing battle with those under control of the rogue AI.
Moments later, Tanis and Joe burst into the sorting depot. They skidded to a halt as Tanis let her nano probes fly high to get a good view of their surroundings.
“Looks like it’s powered down.” Joe looked around, the tone in his voice indicating he wasn’t too certain of his words.
“Just like those machine shops, eh?” Tanis said.
“Let’s hope it’s not just like them.”
Tanis led the way while Joe kept an eye on the depot entrance, his rifle ready to send an EM pulse into the first non-sentient creature to appear.
“Then let’s not be here in two minutes,” Joe said.
“Seems logical to me.”
Their HUD overlays updated with a new route when they entered the depot. It led them past silent machines, and autonomous haulers, all the while praying Angela would be able to suppress activation of these robots.
As they passed, a few of the haulers stirred to life. The motion startled the pair at first, but Angela showed her plan on their virtual space. She would leave the haulers on pre-programmed paths and mission sets, and then fry their wireless receivers. It would effectively make them unhackable as well as provide a barrier to pursuers.
“Someone is going to hate us later when they have to clear up the mess that’ll make,” Joe chuckled.
“I’d pay to see the expression on their faces.” Tanis smiled.
She rounded a suspension field sorter and found herself face to face with a closed door.
“That doesn’t look good,” Joe said.
“No power, no entrance.” Tanis prodded the access panel.
“Aren’t these things supposed to have manual overrides for when the power’s out?” Joe looked around for a manual pump.
“Well that’s an annoying oversight.” Joe stepped back and looked around. “There’s a catwalk up there, map shows exits off it.”
“Then that’s where we’re going,” Tanis said.
They started climbing a seven-meter tall crane that rose near to the catwalk. It made the skin on the back of Tanis’s neck crawl as she imagined the clear shots anything at the shop’s entrance would have of her and Joe.
As if she were prophetic, the sound of robotic battle down the corridor ceased and was replaced by the sound of equipment rumbling over the decking.
“Move it, Commander. We’re gonna have visitors.”
“You mind if I at least make sure I don’t fall?” Joe asked. He was at the end of the crane, getting ready to jump.
Tanis bit back another admonishment for haste and Joe leapt across three meters of open air. It looked like he wasn’t going to make it, but he managed to hook an arm around the lowest bar in the railing.
Letting out the breath she hadn’t been aware she was holding, Tanis ran up the last two meters of the crane and leapt across the space, landing on the top railing.
“Now who’s the show-off?” Joe said through gritted teeth as he hung on. “Mind lending me a hand, Miss Monkey?”
Tanis leaned down and clasped Joe’s outstretched arm, pulling him up and over the railing.
“More with the showing off!” He smiled, while rubbing his forearm where it had caught the weight of his body.
“I have this amazing new prosthetic arm, I may as well use it.” Tanis grinned and then pointed toward an open doorway. “There’s our way out of this mess.”
They sprinted down the catwalk as the machine shop robots rumbled into the depot. Angela’s haulers moved forward to block them, but even with the interference, several of the plasma beams came far too close for comfort.
Tanis dove through the door, and Joe slammed it shut behind them, pulling his hands away as several parts of the panel glowed white-hot from plasma impacts. He gave Tanis a hand and pulled her up.
“So it looks like we just added a half a klick to our trip.” Tanis sighed.
“Damn evil AI,” Joe grunted. “They’re always messing things up. We’ve only got five hours to get to the Excelsior and prep it and there are still three klicks of space’s-got-it between us and there.”
“Let’s get a move on, then,” Tanis said.
18:05 hours to Intrepid escape maneuver
4:47 hours to end of Excelsior mission launch window
Captain Andrews surveyed the bridge. His primary crew sat at their duty stations and everyone was briefed on the status of the ship and the plan. Commander Ouri reported in that Commander Brandt and two platoons were out of stasis.
;
He cut the connection and checked on Amy Lee’s status. She had a group of ship’s security officers clearing out servitors surrounding the ramscoop. They were making good progress and engineers would be able to diagnose the damage first hand within the hour.
Andrew’s stomach fell.
He would give her another hour. Tanis had been through far worse and come out unscathed. However, she had also come out very scathed from time to time. He still remembered seeing her return from her encounter with Trent on Mars 1, her left arm and a fair bit of her upper torso missing. Later, when she had merged her mind with the ship and the fighters to stave off an attack, she had nearly died but somehow pulled through. She would make it through whatever was going on down below.
He could imagine her grunt of annoyance at the interruption.