Critical Asset

by Ian Tonnessen

  Two hundred and twelve people were on the station, one quarter of the station’s normal number. It was early afternoon and everyone was already awake, but it was also Christmas Eve. With most people on Earth for holiday leave, only a few dozen were in the Hub or the Labs doing any work. Most were enjoying personal time in the Accommodations ring. None of them had ever heard a PA announcement like that before. All the drills Dirac held involved either fires, hull breaches, or Lab accidents. People began rushing around, looking out the windows at the incoming ships, then searching for places to hide. In the Ops Center the internal comms screens blinked with incoming calls from people wanting to know details about what was happening as if Trevino could have told them anything more than he did.

  * **

  “XO, the boarding team,” Pierce said. “Get them ready to go at the main airlock. I want them through the moment we’re moored. I’ll be there as soon as we are.”

  “Aye, ma’am!” Yates jumped out of his seat and took off running.

  “Helm,” Pierce said, walking back to Tech Officer Morelli. “Can we get there any faster? Seconds might count here.”

  “No, ma’am, not unless you want to risk smashing the airlock on our cargo bay. It’s not designed for anything so rough.”

  “Alright, then just as quickly as you can. And magnetic pads only once we’re there. Don’t let anyone engage the station’s mooring clamps. I want us to be able to detach and leave this place in a hurry.”

  * **

  “Ten seconds,” Vorontsov said, his voice detached from his emotions. “Speed is six-point-nine meters per second. Five more seconds… three… two… one…”

  The Kostroma’s mooring pads slammed against the station’s pads, and the ball joint at the base of the ship’s airlock adjusted for the slight angular difference. The crash shook the MAKs waiting in the ship’s forward airlock off their feet, and all two hundred and twelve people onboard Dirac felt the shudder as the ship shoved the station sideways. On the bridge, Pavel Vorontsov powered down the main engines, keeping the maneuvering thrusters automated so the ship would be pinned against the station even without the dock’s mooring clamps.

  The magnetic pads held. The station’s clamps hadn’t locked Kostroma into place – that would require cooperation from inside Dirac – but the pads would suffice until the MAKs could get through the airlock.

  “Mike, come on!” Fuller yelled, standing halfway out of the Ops Center. “They’ll be through that hatch in a minute!”

  “One last thing to try,” Trevino said to himself, trying to focus on the console in front of him. He was in a full cold sweat now. “Maybe I can shake it loose.”

  “I’m heading for Life Support!” Fuller yelled. “Don’t stay in here. You know they’ll be coming this way!”

  Trevino nodded to his friend, then brought up Dirac’s maneuvering functions on the op center’s main screen. The four heavy VASIMR thrusters were still available, having just powered down from the 1.3% setting they had been on for over two weeks as they countered Venus’s tug. Trevino authorized human control over the propulsion again, and he sent the four main thrusters surging towards 100%. Picking up any real speed with VASIMR engines would take time, but a good jolt might be all that was needed.

  Colonel Terzi felt a mild earthquake as he was at the Kostroma’s outer bow hatch, waiting for the station’s airlock to equalize pressure with the ship’s airlock. Someone had over-pressurized it, but that would only cost him a minute. Bulkheads shuddered all around him, and there was an odd sideways motion under his feet. For a moment it seemed as if the docking seal was about to give way and suck them all out into space.

  But it was too little. Kostroma’s computer, still in maneuvering mode since the clamps had not yet locked the ship onto the station, compensated for the move with her own thrusters. Big as the ship was, it was still far more agile than the gigantic Dirac. Terzi grabbed the handle with both hands and spun it open. He and the others, including the six Russian crew being manhandled with MAK pistols to their necks, rushed into the airlock.

  Over the cargo bay’s cameras, Trevino could now see men dressed like soldiers through the windows of the inner airlock door. There was no time to try anything else. Leaving the station’s maneuvering controls as they were, he sprinted out of the empty operations center. After running downstairs, he ran down one of the two wide corridors which led to the Labs.

  One of the corridors leading to Accommodations would have been a safer way to run, he knew. But he was trying to think of what they could want. Whatever it was, it wasn’t going to be in Accomm and probably not even the Hub. He sprinted aft, towards the Labs.

  CHAPTER 12

  Dirac Station

  1318Z, 24 December 2065

  The outer airlock was sealed, and Sergeant Kervan spun the wheel on the inner airlock door. The MAK team and their six hostages raced into the Hub’s cargo bay.

  “As fast as you can, blue and red!” Terzi yelled to Yilmaz. “Get there quickly!”

  Weapons drawn, Major Yilmaz and seven other MAKs sprinted out the rear doors of the cargo bay and down the starboard access corridor towards the Labs. Demirci ran with them.

  Colonel Terzi, Captain Avci, and Sergeants Cetin and Ekici ran upstairs to the abandoned Ops Center. The two officers went to the controls stations while the other men stood outside the two entrances which led to the center. They quickly switched off the alarms which had been blaring in the space, and there was not a soul in sight. Cetin and Ekici made the Russians lie face down on the floor while Terzi and Avci looked over the station’s maneuvering controls.

  “This looks simple enough,” Avci said, looking over the propulsion controls. “Access to the thruster functions is still open.”

  “The fellow who was sitting here ran off in quite a hurry,” replied Terzi. “I don’t think he took the time to lock it out.”

  Avci powered down the station’s four main thrusters. The two men felt the change in their feet as the whole station shivered.

  “A good thing for us that he didn’t,” Avci said. “Dirac was starting to pick up some speed. We still had a while, but if we get too far out of position the self-destruct automatically kicks in.”

  Terzi nodded, remembering the mission training. It wasn’t well-known on Earth, but Dirac Station had a fail-safe hardwired into the Hub’s computer core in case the station moved too far away from L3. Once the Hub’s computer determined that the station was nearly out of a safe position and that the movement was unrecoverable, it would shut down all electrical conduits which ran from the station’s Helias reactor to the antimatter storage modules, including the automated backup systems. Minutes later, magnetic containment would fail and the Powder Keg would earn its nickname.

  “Done,” Avci said, watching the thruster power finally reach zero. The station was still moving away from position at eighty kps, but that number slowly dropped as the Lagrangian gravity from behind the station tugged it backwards. There would be no chance of the fail-safe activating.

  “We’ll maintain our position and await reports from Yilmaz,” Terzi said. “There’s only four of us here, so hunting through Accom for hostages will have to wait.”

  * **

  As Major Yilmaz and the eight men with him ran past the Engineering section of the Hub, through one of the two long corridors that led to the Labs, they encountered their first locked door. Someone, probably one of the men who had abandoned their post in the Ops Center, had closed and voice-locked the heavy entrance hatch separating the Hub from the Labs section. It was one of the “sealer” hatches, 20cm thick and completely airtight, capable of protecting either side of it from the vacuum of space. These existed in between archways every twenty meters along the walls of the main, four-meter wide corridors of the station, though they were normally left open and able to close automatically if the hatch edge’s sensors detected in-vacuo. Through the small window in the middle, they could see that the next one was also shut.

 
“Breach one!” Yilmaz barked. The MAKs didn’t have to discuss what that meant. They had long since planned for it. Warrant Officer Toprak raised the nozzle of his helium-4 gun, a cumbersome device resembling a flamethrower complete with containment tanks on his back. As the others stood behind him, he let loose a stream of liquid onto the door, spraying it into a circle two-meters wide. White clouds of steam emanated from where the liquid struck the metal. In seconds, the dense titanium alloy of the hatch near this circle of liquid creaked and crackled as the intense cold rendered it brittle.

  Sergeant Kaya stood next to Toprak and pointed his sono-gun at the affected metal. It was an equally bulky device attached to a cylindrical spout that discharged a high-powered concentration of ultrasound. The sound produced cavitation in the walls, disintegrating the now-brittle metal as millions of microscopic bubbles were expanded and compressed until they imploded. A spray of metallic froth spewed out from the circle, leaving a rough indentation a foot wide and a foot deep around the ring. The hatch’s metal was brittle enough for hammers to do the job, but this was far faster.

  Toprak sprayed a second torrent of liquid into the circular gash, followed by another dose of focused ultrasound by Kaya. A round chunk of jagged metal fell noisily to the floor, and the nine intruders jumped through the hole and ran into the corridor beyond. The whole process took thirty seconds.

  One heavy hatch was down, and the MAKs knew there would be four more between them and the accelerator control room, though only two more before the Lab-side dock. Their plan assumed they would all be shut and locked.

  * **

  Markus Fuller had just enough time to watch the hatch break apart and the nine intruders run through after he switched on the internal cameras in engineering’s Life Support section. He arrived there from the Ops Center, but wasn’t sure if Mike Trevino would follow him if he even fled his post in time. All around him was the machinery used to keep the environment inside the station habitable. In the middle of the large room was a single, arc-shaped control desk outfitted with a dozen display screens.

  Nobody else was in this section of engineering. It didn’t need twenty-four/seven manning, as everything ran by automation. But he was one of the Hub’s engineers, and during the desperate moments he experienced during the Kostroma’s forced docking, he came up with an idea.

  Fuller could see that all the sealer hatches in the starboard corridor between the Hub and the far end of the Labs had been shut, five in all. It must have been the route where Trevino had run. He didn’t know which section of the Labs his friend was heading to, but he knew he wasn’t still in the corridor between the second and third sealer hatches. Fuller opened the atmospheric regulation controls and began raising the pressure of that section. He had well under a minute before the intruders would breach the hatch just as they had done to the last one, but in that time he could boost the air pressure in the adjacent corridor from them. The gauge on his display began at 101.3 kPa, standard Earth air at sea level, and increased by ten percent every second.

  He then shut all the remaining sealer hatches everywhere else in the Labs and the Hub, seventy-four in all. He said a brief prayer as he did so. For all he knew, he was trapping people who would need to run from these armed invaders. Then he locked out all remote accesses to the life support machinery, sealer hatches included. As an engineer, he was one of the few authorized to do it. Again he had to hope for the best, this time for himself. Sooner or later, the intruders in the Ops Center would notice that they couldn’t control those functions from there.

  From Life Support he couldn’t tell how close the Lincoln was to reaching the Labs’ dock, but he knew it was only a couple minutes away.

  * **

  Yilmaz and the MAKs reached the second sealer hatch only seconds after rushing through the first. Looking through the small window, they saw that the next one was closed as well. So were the side hatches which led to the secondary dock, inboard and on the right, and the exomatter research labs, outboard and on the left.

  Again, Toprak raised the nozzle of his helium-4 sprayer and created a two meter-wide circle over the thick hatch. Again, Kaya blasted out the first spray of metallic debris, and again, the two repeated the process.

  What they did not notice, and hadn’t been concerned about, given the emptiness of the corridor beyond, was the atmospheric status display on the access panel on the archway to the right of the hatch. As Kaya fired his second ultrasound blast at the hatch, Demirci saw that one of the numbers on the display panel reading for the next hall was blinking. It read 2.8 MPa.

  “Wait!”

  Too late. A jagged chunk of metal two meters wide shot backwards at Kaya and Toprak like a champagne cork. The sudden rush of air tossed all the MAKs backwards and off their feet, though the depth of the corridors and the open air vents behind them kept the pressure shock from being lethal.

  That didn’t matter to Sergeant Kaya. Only three meters away from the hatch, the upper edge of the piece struck Kaya on the bottom half of his face before falling to rest over his torso. Toprak was struck in the right shoulder and spun around, falling sideways onto the corridor wall. He was unconscious for only seconds and looked up to see his comrades pulling the metal slab off the bloody mess that was the sergeant.

  “Halim!” Yilmaz yelled as he knelt down and looked into the sergeant’s blank eyes, unsure if the man could hear him. Kaya’s faceplate was caved inward and half of Sergeant Kaya’s face was gone, everything below his nose caved inward in a jumbled mess of bone, tissue, teeth and blood. Master Sergeant Dogan, the team’s primary medic, cradled the sergeant’s head as he worked to identify all the damage. He could feel that several of Kaya’s neck bones were crushed.

  Kaya’s eyes suddenly widened and looked around, twitching left and right as the wrecked part of his head made a strained gurgling sound. None of his limbs moved though, and before Dogan could do anything further the sergeant’s head stopped moving and his eyes stared vacantly ahead.

  Yilmaz got back on his feet and began shouting commands. “Yazici and Kervan, secure that corridor! Check the status panels, and make sure nobody is on the far side of any of the doors! Dogan, have a look at Toprak, make sure he’s fit to carry on. Erkan, move Sergeant Kaya off to the side and take his equipment. Lieutenant Erdem, take Kaya’s gear. You’re on breaching duty now.” The major ignored Aydin Demirci, who seemed physically well albeit shaken as he stood to the side. Yilmaz switched on his headset to the command frequency.

  * **

  In the Ops Center, Colonel Terzi watched the scene play out on the internal camera displays.

  “Bok! Avci, get those doors open! Can you tell what happened?”

  “No, sir. I’m trying to access the controls for the sealer hatches, but it’s not working from here.”

  Terzi realized the problem, and winced. It wouldn’t have been a problem if the original two-team plan had stayed intact and he had more men available in the Hub. “Sergeant Cetin! Go to area six, and capture anyone in that space. Force them to unlock remote access to the environmental controls. Quickly!” The sergeant ran off towards the engineering spaces.

  “Sergeant Ekici, go to area fourteen,” the colonel said, giving him the team’s code word for the communications array access room. “Post yourself there, and stay hidden until I call back. Capture or kill anyone who tries to enter. Captain Avci and I will hold the Ops Center ourselves.”

  Terzi’s headset beeped. On the cameras, he saw Major Yilmaz waiting to speak.

  “This is green team, go ahead.”

  “Man down, Top,” Yilmaz said, not looking up towards the camera. “Rock is gone. We’re proceeding now with a slight delay, but it would be helpful if you could get these doors opened remotely, over.”

  “Stand by, we’re working on it. I think I figured out the problem, but for now just continue breaching where possible, over.”

  “Copy. Interrogative ETA on the warship, over?”

  Terzi kept one eye on the docking
approach screens. “Four minutes. Out.”

  * **

  Watching the cameras from Life Support, Fuller’s stomach rose in his chest upon seeing the results of his idea. One of the intruders was now a mutilated corpse thanks to the over-pressurized corridor section, and the floor behind the second breached door was covered in blood.

  He looked over at the door leading to the lower Hub interior corridor. It was the only way in or out of Life Support, and it was unlockable. Sooner or later, someone would come through it. He drew a sweat as he forced his legs to stay put and not make a run for it.

  From the corridor the intruders were now entering, they had four options for which sealer hatch to breach next. They could breach the interior corridor to their right, which led towards one more hatch and then the Labs dock in the middle, or they could continue down the starboard corridor ahead, which led towards the far end of the Labs where antiparticle research and the accelerator control room were located. Or, they could force their way into the exomatter labs to their left along the outboard hull, or the nanotech labs inboard to their immediate right.

  Fuller figured they might breach all four, if not all at once, then sooner or later. He didn’t have four options, though. He had only two. He surged the air pressure in the two adjacent corridors, knowing nobody was inside them. He could do nothing about the individual lab spaces. His display showed that there were seventy-three of the station’s personnel inside the Labs. He couldn’t see anyone inside the exomatter or nanotech labs on the cameras, but unlike the corridors there were plenty of places for people to hide inside the workshops. If he tried his pressurizing ploy in there, he would kill innocent people.