Critical Asset

by Ian Tonnessen

  * **

  Lieutenant Commander Beth Yamada’s voice came over the ship’s 1MC for all compartments. “Time to dock, three minutes.”

  Thirty of Lincoln’s crew, over half the total complement, were gathered in the ship’s galley. Commander Yates stood on a chair to see everyone.

  “Alright, we’re almost there! Is everyone clear on how to use these things?” he asked, holding up one of Waters’s hydro-bombs. He received a smattering of yes-sirs and nods.

  “I know none of us is trained for this, and we’re improvising as we go, but fighting it out with whomever came onboard that station is what our duty demands. For now, here’s our plan: we contain their access to the station’s Labs section as much as we can. Toss these as grenades if you see them, but otherwise use the wires and set up these bombs as booby traps so they don’t get past them. Speed. Is. Everything. Move fast and spread out.”

  Chief Maria Sandoval spoke next. “Remember the layout of the station. We’ll be docking above the middle of the Labs. The main corridors in this section are on a single level, shaped like a big block-A. The dock connects the two middle interior corridors, which run between the port and starboard corridors. Both of the main halls lead to the aft corridor.”

  “We’re split into three teams,” Yates said. “My team will take the port corridor and whatever labs are on that side, and Chief Sandoval will take the port side. Lieutenant Clark’s team will go straight aft from the dock through the antiparticle lab and then on to the accelerator. Nobody goes into the Hub without the Captain’s orders.”

  Yamada’s voice came over the 1MC again. “Time to dock, two minutes.”

  * **

  On the camera displays, Markus Fuller saw the man running through the engineering hall towards Life Support before he reached the door. As fast as he could, Fuller locked access to the control station in the center of the room and ran behind the primary water filtration tank.

  Sergeant Cetin entered the Life Support space, weapon drawn. It was a large area, crowded with heavy machinery, piping, and electrical conduits, and there was nobody in sight. He ran to the control console in the center of the room. He saw on the access hatch control display that all the sealer doors in the Labs and the Hub were shut. He tried to use the controls to open them, but the screen displayed a message box: LEVEL TWO AUTHORIZATION REQUIRED FOR ACCESS.

  Cetin spun on his heels, darting his eyes around the machinery.

  “I know you are in here! Come out now, or I’ll kill you when I find you!”

  Behind the filtration tank, Fuller held his breath and froze.

  * **

  In the Labs’ starboard corridor, Yilmaz was ready to breach the hatch leading to the interior corridor. His mission was to reach the dock before the Lincoln, but the status panel next to the hatch showed the air pressure on the other side to be 240 kPa and rising. And there was one more hatch at the end of the interior corridor, beyond which was the Labs’ dock.

  “I can’t open it from here!” said Captain Yazici. “Local access to the doors is locked out.”

  “Can you bypass it?” Yilmaz asked.

  “We’ll see,” Yazici said, unrolling his tablet and plugging a cable into the panel’s access jack.

  Colonel Terzi’s voice came over the team’s communicators. “One minute to warship docking.”

  “Nevermind that!” Yilmaz yelled to Yazici. “Toprak and Erdem, breach that door and stand to the side when you do it. Everyone else, back off!” Yilmaz now counted seconds instead of minutes.

  Toprak raised the nozzle of his sprayer and began dousing the hatch in a circular pattern.

  * **

  Markus Fuller couldn’t see where the intruder was, and he dared not stick his head up to peek. He was crouched in a squat, ready to dash towards the door if he was lucky enough to be able to run that way. Then he felt the smash of a rifle butt on the back of his head.

  Fuller fell prone to the floor but remained conscious. A blinding pain raced through his skull.

  “You, get up!” a man shouted as a fist grabbed the collar on the back of his neck. “Up!”

  Markus stood on wobbly legs as the man pushed him towards the room’s control console.

  “You will unlock this!” he said, pointing to the display of access hatches. “Now!”

  “I… I can’t…” Fuller lied.

  Sergeant Cetin held on to the back of Fuller’s shirt and smashed his nose twice with his weapon. Fuller dropped to his knees, but the fist clenching his shirt kept him from falling. Cetin pressed his weapon into the back of Fuller’s neck. “Do it now, or I kill you!”

  * **

  In the starboard Labs corridor, a slab of jagged metal blasted inward and slammed against the other side of the hallway before falling to the floor. It passed within a meter of Lieutenant Erdem, who had used Kaya’s sono-gun to complete the breach at an angle. He and the other eight men ran through the hole and into the corridor which led to the Labs dock. One last sealer hatch remained.

  Major Yilmaz knew that the breach had taken too long. Demirci knew it too. They’d had to be careful not to kill themselves, and the whole thing took twice as much time as it should have. And the Lincoln would complete its docking any second now.

  CHAPTER 13

  USS Abraham Lincoln

  1324Z, 24 December 2065

  Thump-th-th-thump.

  Lincoln’s four magnetic mooring pads touched against the station’s pads, and the ship was docked. The engines shut down to standby mode, and for a moment there was a stark silence in the C2C. Jaana Pierce stood from her chair and gave a quick order before she left the room.

  “Flight crew, stay at your stations until you get orders otherwise! I want us to be able to leave on short notice if we have to.” Yamada and the others in the space acknowledged the order as their captain ran off towards the cargo hatch.

  Abe’s voice came over the ceiling speakers near the cargo bay’s outer hatch. “Mooring seal complete. Exterior pressure, gravity, and temperature are stable.”

  The opening was not a door but a large rectangular hatch in the deck as the Lincoln couldn’t dock laterally. Chief Sandoval spun the hatch and was the first to climb through the opening. She slid down the access ladder and ran through the Dirac airlock, thankful that she at least didn’t have to adjust to a ninety-degree change in gravity, and opened the lock’s interior hatch.

  The Labs dock was devoid of people. It was a large space for the station, nine hundred square meters, and the secondary dock also served as the station’s second cargo bay. Only a few pallets of supplies and equipment were clustered in a corner, with the rest of the space being wide open. Video screens covered the aft walls, except for one large hatch which led to the antiparticle research labs. The other two heavy hatchways were on the port and starboard bulkheads leading to the interior corridors. All three accessways were shut. With crewmembers rushing down the ladder behind her, she ran towards the starboard hatch, one hand holding a stun gun and the other ready to grab a hydro-bomb off her belt.

  An odd hissing noise seemed to be coming from that hatch. Looking through the small window in the middle, she could see wisps of what looked like white steam emanating from the other side. There was someone in the corridor beyond the hatch, doing something to the door. She grabbed a hydro-bomb off her belt as she ran and readied her finger on the switch.

  * **

  Markus Fuller, his head throbbing in pain, face dripping with blood, and feeling a gun’s barrel shoved into the back of his neck, entered his voice code to unlock the station’s emergency containment hatches. Sergeant Cetin pressed the command to open them all across the station. Then Cetin threw Fuller to the floor, pulled out his stun pistol, and tased the engineer into unconsciousness.

  The large door in front of Chief Sandoval slid open, retracting into the wall. The other two sealer doors in the cargo bay did the same, though someone inside the antiparticle center immediately closed the one leading to their labs.
<
br />   A man came into view from behind where the starboard hatch had been. He was tall and powerful looking, with a short beard and a slightly olive complexion visible through the faceplate of his helmet. The man was dressed in black tactical kit and carried rounded cylindrical tanks on his back, and the tanks were connected by a hose to a large nozzle held by both hands. The moment their eyes met, the man instantly jumped back and ran out of her line of sight, yelling “Contact!”

  Sandoval flipped the switch on her hydro-bomb and threw it into the hallway at an angle, letting it bounce off the far wall. She darted to her left, not daring to expose herself by running directly in front of the open hall. A second later, Lieutenant Clark threw another charge in the same manner.

  On instinct, the MAKs ran back around the corner of the interior corridor and back into the starboard hall. They had no idea how many seconds they had before detonation, and other than Toprak none of them were close enough to try and kick away the two charges. With his heavy equipment on, he barely had enough time to save himself and join his comrades on the other side of the corner.

  Sandoval’s device burst with a loud clap and caused Clark’s to explode in the same instant. A dazzling burst of brush discharge erupted from the charges, sending out thousands of jagged filaments of static electricity, large enough to fill the interior corridor with the man-made lightning. The static discharge remained in the air for three seconds before it dissipated, though it looked far more lethal than it really was. Left behind on the floor were remnant chunks of the fuel cells, not on fire as Jake Waters had predicted, but smoking.

  “Move, move!” Yates yelled to his shipmates. He and a dozen others had made it into Dirac before the charges exploded, though most of them dropped to the floor in astonishment and fear upon seeing the static discharge. Every one of them ran with hydro-bombs in their hands towards the other hatches to their assigned areas.

  * **

  “They’re spreading out!” Colonel Terzi shouted over his communicator to Yilmaz. He had seen the detonation on the camera displays and was now watching the Labs dock as dozens of the warship crew emerged from the airlock and ran in two directions towards different Lab sections. “Twenty of them so far and still counting. Major, switch your two priorities!”

  * **

  Yilmaz and his MAKs clustered in the starboard corridor behind the turn towards the dock. “Blue team, find the door for us! Red team, we’re going to our objective!” Aydin Demirci was confused, but the others understood: “finding the door” was a special forces term used when a team faced a bad position and a stronger enemy. It normally meant one or two men laying down covering fire, so others could fall back in retreat. Here, it meant some of them keeping the Lincoln’s people pinned in the dock and away from the starboard corridor while the rest of the MAKs ran aft to the accelerator control room.

  Master Sergeant Dogan leaned around the corner with his submachine gun raised towards what he could see of the dock. At a glance he saw two of the Lincoln’s crew, men running through the far interior corridor towards the port side. Dogan fired his weapon, and the men dropped in a spray of red mist. Dogan continued firing in short bursts past the aft wall of the dock, preventing anyone else from running into view.

  Captain Yazici jumped into sight of the middle of the interior hall and lobbed a stun grenade into the dock. Behind him, all of his comrades were turning their heads, plugging their ears, and squeezing shut their eyes, and the red team got ready to run past on their way to the far end of the Labs.

  * **

  “Get down!” Sandoval yelled at the sight of the charge bouncing across the floor, which she thought to be a standard frag grenade. She had just enough time to drop to her stomach behind a large plastic cargo container and cover her head with her arms when the flashbang exploded.

  The charge released a piercing 175dB clap and a momentary burst of light eight times brighter than the sun. The charge was designed for use in spaces much smaller than the docking area, but the effect was similar. The blast deafened everyone in the space, and it temporarily blinded those whose eyes were open or even shut but facing in its direction. The detonation also disturbed everyone’s inner ear fluid, causing extreme dizziness.

  Chief Sandoval lay on the deck next to the sealer hatch, just inside the wall from the corridor, though most of her body lay behind a container from the hatch. Unlike many of the others in the docking area, she was still conscious and could still see through blurry eyes. She looked up between the wall and the container and saw the hazy view of an intruder appear in the hatchway, weapon held in front of him. He fired burst after burst of three-round shots into the prone bodies of her shipmates lying on the dock’s wide-open floor, and despite the muffled ringing in her ears, she still heard both the shots and the screams of others in the dock.

  On reflex, she raised her stun gun in the man’s direction, hoping that she could aim well enough at the man who was only ten feet from her. He sensed the movement from behind the container to his right and spun to fire at her, but it was too late. She fired first, hitting him in the shoulder with a pulse of fifty-thousand volts. He dropped onto one knee and then onto his face, twitching and unconscious.

  The room spun all around her and everything she saw left trails as she moved, but she had enough agility to bring herself onto her knees. She staggered to the sealer hatch access panel and slapped a large red display, though her eyes were too blurred to read the HATCH SECURE label on it. The sealer door shot out from the side of the dock entrance and slammed shut. Fighting the deep vertigo, she held her hand there.

  * **

  Major Yilmaz led the way as the MAK’s red team turned the corner from the starboard corridor to the lateral aft corridor. They moved fast but weren’t running. Already they had encountered a couple things they hadn’t expected, and they came at the cost of one man dead and another either captured or dead.

  Neither of the two sealer hatches in this corridor were closed. Sixty meters away, he could see the right turn for the port-side corridor. He and the others kept their weapons drawn in front of them, expecting to see Lincoln crewmembers rounding the turn. But the entrance to the accelerator control room was only half that distance on the left.

  From the access door to the control room, a head peeked out. The man saw the intruders coming fast in his direction, and he had just enough time to pull his head back before bullets ricocheted off the wall next to him. The MAKs saw the control room’s access door shut in front of him.

  What none of them could see was the trap that the man had set.

  After Mike Trevino had fled the Ops Center, he decided against joining Markus in the Life Support section or hiding in Accommodations. Instead, he ran to his workshop in the nanotech research labs and grabbed the most recent project his team had been working on: a sample picofilament line. It was a graphenylene carbon tube cable less than one thousandth the width of a human hair, ten times narrower than any other filament ever manufactured, but as durable as a centimeter-thick steel cable. The sample was wrapped like thread around a fuel cell spool with an outer casing of electrified fullerene diamond, one of the few materials the filament could not cut through. One end of the wire was affixed to the spool, with its loose end encased within a graphite cylinder the size of a pencil. On his way out the door, he grabbed a roll of duct tape.

  He made a guess about where the intruders would go, and he was right: the particle accelerator. The antimatter produced by Dirac was the most powerful and valued material in the station. Once he realized they were coming down the starboard hallway, he affixed the cylinder end of the picofilament to the wall behind the sealer hatch archway in the aft corridor between the turn and the control room entrance. He held the cylinder there at a mid-torso level with the duct tape. Unspooling over four meters, enough to stretch across the wide corridor with a little slack, he taped the spool end to the opposite wall, behind the hatch’s opposite side archway. No human eyes could see the wire stretching across the corridor,
and nobody would see the spools taped to the walls until they were already past them.

  Nor did they. The MAKs approached the center of the hall at a jogging speed, with Yilmaz and Lieutenant Erkan in front. Running past the archways of the first sealer hatch, the major looked down at his legs as they seemed to stop moving properly. In the next instant he tumbled to the floor as the upper half of his frame fell forward off his lower abdomen and legs, his body cut clear in half by the wire. Erkan met with the same fate as the other three men behind stopped in place, stunned at the horrific scene in front of them.

  Both men were conscious but gasping open-mouthed at the sight of themselves, their two bodies lying in four pieces in a growing pool of red. The filament had divided them across their middles, every bit of tissue and bone sliced as if by a giant scythe, with blood still spurting out of their sheared top halves. Their clothes and body armor were sliced as well, and even the barrel of Erkan’s submachine gun was cut in half, its metal cylinder cut on an angled plane smoother than glass.

  Yilmaz attempted to speak, but only managed to produce a labored “Uhh… Uhhh!” He tried to point at a patch of duct tape behind the hatch’s archway, but his arm fell as his vision faded into blackness.

  Toprak stepped backwards, holding one arm out to the side to signal the others right behind him not to come any closer. Kervan instinctively did the same to Demirci, keeping the back of his hand on the civilian’s chest.

  “A wire…” Demirci thought aloud, staring at the bodies. “There has to be some kind of filament wire there…”

  “Thank you, Doctor!” Toprak snapped. “How do we find it?!”

  “It has to be held up by its ends! The archway… they must be behind the sides.”