Yates peered down the sights of his weapon and fired a single shot into the woman’s shin. She screamed and crumpled from her feet but remained off the floor. Ekici, holding a fistful of her hair, returned a spasm of fire towards Yates and violently yanked the woman behind him into the cafeteria’s automated scullery room.
“Stay on him!” Pierce yelled, watching the scene unfold on the Vespid screens. ‘Shorty’ shut the scullery’s door behind him, but the closest drone flew towards the room’s large open window facing the main dining area. The Vespid flew around the dividing wall blocking the cafeteria’s view of the interior scullery then entered the room to see Shorty crouching in a corner, hurriedly changing the magazines in his submachine gun. The wounded woman sat nearby, upright against a wall with both hands clutching at her bloody lower leg.
From the distant background the drone drivers heard Yates’s bellowing voice. “Everyone out! Everyone out! To the Labs dock! Go!”
Ekici looked up, hearing him as well. The sergeant set down his weapon and grabbed his detonator switch. As he tapped out the codes to rearm the gas bombs, the woman recognized the device used to threaten her and the others. She leapt at the man’s hands.
“Firing!” shouted the drone pilot over the comms net. “Hit!”
It was a perfect shot. The microdart struck Ekici in the neck and the triprenorphine entered his bloodstream.
Despite the flood of adrenaline and the struggle with the woman, the sergeant somehow felt the pinprick and saw the tiny hovering object in the room, a little black pea suspended in midair. The pinprick must contain some type of poison, he knew. It was too small to do anything else. Whether it meant sleep or death or something else, there wasn’t much time left.
The stocky man wrested the device back from the woman’s hands and smashed her across the face with the back of his hand, sending her tumbling to the floor. He began typing in the bombs’ access sequence again when a familiar-looking object came flying past the dividing wall into the scullery. It was one of the warship crew’s electrical charges.
Yates sprinted back towards the cafeteria exits after he threw the device. He heard a woman scream from inside the scullery as he did, but Yates didn’t break from his run.
Ekici tossed the detonator to the floor. There wasn’t time to finish that job anyway. He flung open the scullery door, weapon drawn and shouting a shrill cry to God, and pulled the trigger to empty his magazine at everyone he saw. He got off a few wild shots at the fleeing crowd before the hydro-bomb exploded and filled the area with its bright filaments. The electricity coursed through his body and through the woman on the floor behind him, and both fell dead within a few agonizing seconds.
* **
The power flowing through the conduits from the fusion reactor added its own roar to the noise of the thrusters. Demirci’s own adrenaline coursed through him in the same way. Twenty-two gigawatts of electricity surged from the station’s fusion reactor through the VASIMR control room to the superheated plasma thrusters. The entire station was shaking from the thrust, he figured, but the main engineering spaces were surely getting the worst of it.
Even over the immense groaning of the hydrogen lines and the power cables, Demirci recognized the snapping noise of automatic gunfire elsewhere in the Hub. The cafeteria, no doubt. The noise was audible through the ventilation ducts. Something about the ducts struck him as wrong, but there was work to do.
One task remained, and Demirci had all the instructions he needed thanks to General Candemir’s American contacts. He opened the access panel under the control center’s desk and used his pistol to shoot through all power lines to the console functions. Next, he grabbed a heavy wrench from a supply cabinet and smashed the primary and backup actuator rods on each of the control valve motors. The flow of hydrogen to all four engines was stuck at maximum. Then he dropped the wrench and stood still.
Mission accomplished…?
He didn’t believe it when he heard the thought cross his mind, like someone making an announcement. There were no more options to anticipate, no more tasks to do. Unless the warship captain was indeed crazy enough to fire on the thrusters like she threatened, there was nothing left in the way of success. He barely took notice of the burning pain in his left arm, which by now was coated in blood down to his fingertips.
“Time for you to go, my friend,” he said to Markus Fuller. The engineer was still sitting on a chair, watching everything this invader was doing. Demirci brought the man to his feet, keeping ready to grab his sidearm. “Go to the secondary dock, in the Labs section. That’s where you’ll find safety. Feel free to tell them what I’ve done. There’s no undoing it. And tell them to leave quickly, and that I hope you’re all able to have a safe passage home. I suggest you run.” He had Fuller open the hatch and step into the empty corridor. After a moment of confused hesitancy, with Demirci pointing a gun at him, the engineer took off running down the hall.
Demirci left the room once Fuller was out of sight and walked to the fusion reactor room. The flow of thruster propellant can’t be stopped, but if others are desperate enough they might try to sabotage the flow of power. Once inside, he electronically locked the door and prepared a tripwire device inside the access point.
Dirac station picked up more and more speed. The forward end of the Hub, which normally faced the Sun, was turned almost ninety degrees away, thrusting along the station’s orbital plane and moving Dirac towards the edge of its safety zone. The four massive thrusters expelled their bright blue trails of superheated plasma and drove the station ever faster, but various small pulsed-plasma engines located around Dirac’s exterior produced their own force to offset the torque felt by the seams of the superstructure. This included the array of eight thousand storage containers, now being dragged aft of the Labs. Normally arranged in a vast semi-spherical polyhedron linked by power cables, the containers were now towed behind the station in long string-of-pearl rows.
Demirci sat by the control console and stared up at the huge reactor. This is it: Plan B is finished. I have no need to go any further. All that was left was to guard the reactor and wait for the explosion to kill him, but it still didn’t feel final.
Perhaps it’s just because of the wait. He had long since calculated that he’d have about fifty minutes from the time the thrust began to the time the hardwired self-destruct sequence activated, and then another four to eight minutes before the actual detonation. The station already drifting out of place due to the earlier stunt might decrease that time, but only by seconds.
The vents.
When I spoke to the warship captain earlier, she was talking to people off-screen about targets they were seeing. She said something about vespids to them. Wasps? They had eyes on Yazici and Erdem in the accelerator room! At least in there, maybe elsewhere. That’s how they had “targets”. They must have gotten something in through the vents. Tiny little reconnaissance drones? He chuckled at the ingenuity. Not that it matters now.
He walked around the bulkheads of Helias Control and found the duct closest to the aft section of the room, the one closest to the Labs. If only the MAKs had considered this possibility, they might have stood a chance. Of course, I didn’t think of it, either. He leaned back against a large pipe and watched the ventilation grate.
* **
“One of ours wounded,” Lieutenant Clark reported upon arriving with his group in the Labs dock. “Ensign Greene was shot twice in his legs, but nobody’s dead except the two soldiers in there. And twenty-eight hostages from the accelerator area were rescued. We searched the space and confirmed nobody else there.”
“Well done, Lieutenant,” Pierce nodded, knowing the cafeteria report was going to be much grimmer. “Get all the civilians aboard right after Greene. When you bring him up to sick bay, tell Doc Ford to prepare for more casualties coming in soon. She may have to triage. If Ford can spare anyone to go to the cafeteria and help, do it. And it looks like we’re going to be leaving here very soon.” The rum
bling of the floor and walls continued all around them, a mild vibration coupled with a persistent hum.
The cafeteria group arrived next, a large crowd of shaken people led by Tech Officer Garcia. “Commander Yates and nine others are still behind, Captain,” Garcia reported, his voice trembling. “They’ve got four wounded and five dead to deal with. Dirac people and ours.”
Pierce put one hand on his shoulder. “Thank you, Alex. Well done. I’ll get up there when I can. For now, get everyone here aboard ship.”
She already knew from the Vespid videos that there were fatalities. How I wish I could go to the cafeteria now and help. But there’s one more thing to supervise from here before I can leave.
“Approaching engineering areas,” Waters reported. Most of the other pilots had switched off their drones and left to get Lincoln ready for transit, but the last six were flying their Vespids through Hub ducts towards engineering.
The lead drone reached the ventilation grate and turned to peer into VASIMR Control. They decided that it was deserted, and on Schaube’s advice moved on to the fusion reactor. The lead drone peered through the grate, and for a second it showed the image of Demirci, staring at the camera and pointing a handgun at it. The screen went blank as the other Vespid screens blared the noise of the gunshot.
“Ah, shit! He’s onto us. The rest of you, spread out to other entryways. He can’t watch them all at once.”
The comms screen nearby chirped with an incoming call from Helias Control.
“Please don’t bother coming after me, Captain,” Demirci said as soon as Pierce answered. Unlike in the earlier call, he was wearing his helmet. “I told you to flee as soon as you can, and I meant it.”
“This station is worth trillions. Its destruction will mean war, and my ship might not be able to escape in time anyway. You know we have to try and stop you.”
“I know it will mean war,” Demirci said. He held up his Terzi’s detonator. “Captain, I showed you this the last time we spoke. I hope you were able to rescue some personnel when I deactivated those bombs. But please understand… if anyone comes near the engineering spaces, I’ll know it. If you have anyone or anything besides those tiny drones heading towards me, I’ll set off the gas. Even if the cafeteria is now empty, the ventilation system would spread it around most of the station before you’d be able to leave. That’s why I have my helmet back on. So… just leave.”
The team in the cafeteria went in wearing gas masks. Yates replicated a bunch when he was gearing everyone up. We’ll get almost everyone onboard the Lincoln and the ship ready to go, and then I’ll send a team against this guy. Pierce replied with a beaten tone. “Give us twenty minutes, and we’ll detach.”
“You have it. And fly any other tiny drones you have out of here. If I see one, I’ll blow the bombs early. Good luck, Captain.” They both switched off the screen.
Pierce went back to her Vespid drivers. “I want one to stay behind a grate and keep an eye on him. Stay hidden in the shadows. The rest of you, switch off and get to your stations on the Lincoln. That means you too, Cheng. We’re leaving.”
The captain ran out of the Labs dock. Two of her crew, deputized corpsmen who had been helping Doc Ford, emerged from the dock’s airlock and ran through the starboard hall behind her towards the Hub.
CHAPTER 23
Dirac Station
2058Z, 24 December 2065
The cafeteria doors were open, and the first thing they saw was the blood. Immediately inside the room, splashes of red contrasted with the white walls, and streaks on the gray floors led to a small row of bodies along the rear bulkhead. Two of the dead wore charcoal-gray of Lincoln uniforms. From inside the large space, they heard wounded people moaning in distress as others tended to them. The two corpsmen ran to assist two civilians who looked to be in the worst shape while the captain found her XO.
“Five dead, two of them ours,” Yates reported. “Seven if you count the two bastards in here. We lost Fletcher and Halpern. And four more civilians wounded when one of the guys sprayed gunfire at the crowd.”
Pierce nodded as her stomach twisted, no different than when she first walked into the dock. “How bad are the wounded? We’ll need to move them soon. In fifteen minutes, in fact.”
“They probably look worse than they are. Nothing seems critical, a few shots through limbs and such. We’re getting dressings on them here before we move them to the sickbay.”
“Use ours on the ship, not Dirac’s. We’re leaving with everyone. Before we do, can you spare a few people for another combat team? The man in engineering, I want to try and take him down. There may be a chance we can stop this thrust.”
“There’s nine of us including me.”
“Not including you. We’re getting the ship ready to go, and I’ll need you there as soon as you can. I want a small team, three people who can move fast and quiet. If we can’t capture him with three, we can’t do it at all. They’ll need to have their gas masks back on. Have you found the bombs in–”
“Captain! Captain, come in!” shouted Hunter Lynch’s voice over the communicator.
“Go ahead.”
“One of my people just came in here from engineering. He was in there with this man Demirci and tells me that the sabotage can’t be undone. The operating console and the bloody control valves are all wrecked! Please forget your idea of sending people after this man. We must evacuate right now!”
Pierce and Yates both cringed. “Copy that, we’ll get everyone here onboard. Can you make an announcement to the station? I suspect there’ll be some stragglers in hiding.”
“Will do, Captain. Please hurry!”
Pierce paced for a few seconds, then turned back to Yates. “I still want that team assembled. Robert, there’s going to be a war over this. Regardless of whether we can reverse what he’s done, I want to try and capture that man. Have you found the bombs in here?”
Yates turned away from his captain. “My team! Assemble on me, now!” Eight crewmen separated themselves from the groups tending to the wounded civilians.
“Sure have,” he grumbled, walking Pierce over to one of the tables. They looked underneath to see the charge stuck underneath the tabletop, a small brick of plastic explosive attached to a pill-shaped tube and an electronic device. An exposed wire ran from the electronics to a mashed chunk of doughy adhesive keeping the device stuck to the table. “Here’s one of the two. Tech Officer Garcia had a look a couple minutes ago. We’ve got two remotes off the two dead savages in here, but we don’t know the access codes. And prying it loose might set it off. So, yeah, we’re trying to evacuate as soon as we can.”
The other eight gathered around Yates and Pierce, waiting to hear why they were called away.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Pierce began. “This vibration and the noise you hear is because the station is thrusting itself out of its orbit, and it’ll self-destruct when it gets too far. It looks like we won’t be able to stop it. We’re getting everyone onboard the Lincoln and the ship ready to detach and get underway in fifteen minutes,” she said, looking at her watch, “because that’s when these bombs are going off. Before that happens, I want to see if we can get three volunteers into main engineering to capture the guy responsible for this thrust, even if we can’t reverse it. But if you go there and you can’t see a way to take him, don’t risk your lives. If he even sees you, he’ll detonate these things. So those who are going will need to get their masks back on.”
“Why so soon?” one asked. “What difference will it make if the gas goes off and the only people on the station are the group of us wearing these?”
“Because the bombs are still made with some kind of plastic explosive, and I’m not going to have my people anywhere on this station when they go off! We’re going to clear these last people out of here, and then I’ll give you the word to go. Engineering is not even a minute’s run from here. Get yourselves ready.”
Hunter Lynch’s voice came over Dirac’s pu
blic address system, broadcast into every compartment on the station. “Attention all personnel! This is acting station director Hunter Lynch. The hostage situation is over, but the station is being rigged to self-destruct. I want everyone here to board the warship moored at the Labs dock. I mean everyone! Most are onboard already. Wherever you are, start running now. You have fifteen minutes before the ship must depart.”
There were no people still hiding in the Accom section to do as he instructed. Terzi’s earlier announcement had been intimidating enough to bring everyone outside the Labs to the cafeteria. The only person driven into motion by the announcement was Will Groves. He ran alone from the dock to Molecular Dynamics, determined not to abandon the station without one crucial item.
The corpsmen removed the last of the wounded from the cafeteria, one with gunshot damage to her legs carried between two people. The bodies of the dead, including the two invaders and the scorched woman in the scullery, were dragged by a handful of strong Dirac volunteers.
All eight of the surviving crew volunteered for the capture team, and Pierce picked her three.
“Take one extra mask, in case you need to force it onto Demirci before his own gas gets him.” A bit optimistic, Pierce thought. Demirci sounds like he’d shoot himself before being captured. But then again this whole idea to capture him is optimistic.
She followed everyone else as they departed and then gave her order to the capture team. “Alright. Wait another two minutes for us here to get to the dock, then enter engineering. And whether you can get to him or not, I want you all back on the ship in thirteen minutes!”
“We’ll get him, Captain,” Chief Sandoval said. Her shaky voice revealed that typical confidence was weakened, but it was still there.
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