Critical Asset

by Ian Tonnessen

  The team ran off through the Hub corridors while the captain left the cafeteria. She was the last one out; the room now empty of everything except blood stains and a pair of bombs.

  * **

  One of the former hostages stood in the corridor outside the dock’s entrance as the others entered. He waited for Captain Pierce to follow the last of the crowd, then approached as she walked inside. He spoke in a Russian accent.

  “Captain, please, I think I can help.”

  “Sir, we’re doing all we can. Please get aboard the ship with everyone else.”

  “My name is Pavel Vorontsov. I am captain of the supply vessel Kostroma berthed at the primary dock. These intruders who hijacked my ship, they’re thrusting the station away from its Lagrange point, correct?”

  “One of them is, yes.”

  “I cannot stop that, but if you can’t either, then perhaps I can buy more time for your ship to escape. Kostroma’s engines are still running, set on automated station-keeping ever since we docked under duress. The station’s main thrusters are pointed aft. Since we’re docked at the forward end of Dirac, my ship can provide a counter-thrust.”

  Jaana’s eyebrows shot up at the idea. I should have thought of that. “How much thrust? Surely you can’t offset the whole station.”

  “Up to fifteen hundred teranewtons, minus the ship’s own thrust-to-weight ratio, though it’ll also take more time than we have to reach that much power. Against Dirac’s thrust and the inertia of its mass, it will be like a truck pushing against a locomotive. We cannot stop it, but we can slow it down. I’ll need to remain onboard at the pilot controls to help adjust the lateral movements and keep the Kostroma attached. The torque stress at the mooring point will be tremendous, and if the ship tears away from the dock then it’s of no more use.”

  Incredible bravery. And sensibility. Has he really thought about what’ll happen to him, or is he trying not to? “You understand what staying onboard means for you?”

  “I do. But Captain, after this misfortune, it’s the least I can do to help. I’m qualified at the pilot’s station. No one else from my crew needs to come with me.”

  “What about the mooring point? Is your ship hard-docked or only on the magnetic pads?”

  “Yes, you’re right. We’re only on the pads. It would help to have someone inside the station complete the docking sequence before I begin the push.”

  The two walked up to Hunter Lynch, who was supervising the last of Dirac’s people boarding the Lincoln, and explained the idea to him.

  “I’m not qualified with the docking controls myself, but I think I have just the man to help.”

  A minute later Mike Trevino emerged from the Lincoln and, like Vorontsov, was outfitted with a gas mask.

  “It’s time to return to your watch station, Mr. Trevino,” Lynch explained. “But I’m sure that Captain Pierce will wait until you return before we depart.” Pierce nodded her agreement.

  “Do hurry,” Lynch said as they left for the Ops Center. “Captain, the storage capsules outside… there’s far more power in them than you know. I still doubt we can get away in time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’ve been producing much more than antihydrogen. For the Pioneer Project, we’ve been stockpiling other materials, including anticarbon. Very compact, very powerful. Altogether, there’s four hundred thousand metric tons’ worth in all those pods.”

  Pierce tried to grasp the numbers and couldn’t. “Regardless, we’ll either stop this self-destruct from happening or we’ll be underway soon enough. My ship is awfully fast. We’ll open up a lot of distance before this place goes.”

  Lynch shook his head. “I doubt it will be enough.”

  * **

  As the Vespid pilots watched and reported, Demirci sat alone by the control stations near the raging main reactor, saturated by the near-deafening noise of it and its ancillary machines. The Helias, the heliac advanced stellarator, was running at full power, with eighty gigawatts coursing through the huge toroid ring in front of him.

  He wasn’t looking at the controls. Caution demanded that he keep his eyes on the vents and on the entryway, even in this last hour of life. Still, his family insisted on invading his thoughts.

  Sandoval’s assault team crept low through the halls, keeping their heads away from the windows present on each doorway. The drone pilots, viewing the room from two meters above the entryway, reported that Demirci was seated and facing the direction of the door. He was holding a large assault weapon with his one good hand, resting it on his lap. Once the doorway opened, he’d be fully exposed to Sandoval’s team.

  The chief knelt in front of the door, her head just below its window level, and pointed her weapon forward. One of her team did exactly the same right next to her with one of the ship’s stun guns. Her plan was for her to aim for Demirci’s detonator or his weapon, with the stun gun aiming for him. The third member knelt to their side, below the door’s access panel, and entered Lynch’s code for administrator access to all spaces.

  The door slid open, and a small object clanked on the floor in front of them, having fallen from the interior door edge. Sandoval instantly recognized what it was and knew there wasn’t time to do anything about it. In the split second she had, she aimed her weapon in the general direction of Demirci and pulled the trigger.

  The flashbang grenade exploded within spitting distance from Sandoval’s team. None of them saw or heard the blast before they lost consciousness. Sandoval’s shots went wild, striking walls and machinery and display screens, but not Demirci. When she passed out she fell backwards, still clutching her trigger, and the rest of her magazine ricocheted down the empty corridor behind them.

  Demirci crashed to his knees and saw only a bright, painful blur which soon became a dark one. He tried to stand but fell over onto his injured left side, the entire pain-filled world silent and spinning around him. After thirty seconds he heard a thought pass through his head. I’m alive… and I’m awake.

  Using Kervan’s flashbang charge as a tripwire was a crude trap, and after his last call with the captain he doubted the need for it. But it worked perfectly. Now, you must get up before they do. Damn that captain for her deceit, and damn her for making me do this. Get up, get up…

  Demirci couldn’t stand upright, but he could sit back against a console and point his weapon at the accessway. Within the blur he could make out the shapes of people lying on the floor in the hallway beyond the opened door. They were not moving.

  You should fire. Fire every round at them. Stop pitying them and just shoot them all. He ignored that voice in favor of the other one in his head, the one telling him that his life no longer mattered. His mission was over, and the only thing that counted now was the outcome.

  He crawled across the spinning room on two knees and one hand, unable to use his shattered left arm. The new pain radiating from his head matched it. The others in the corridor, two men and a woman, came into better view as he approached them. All were still unconscious, and it seemed clear that shooting at them a minute earlier probably wouldn’t have worked. They wore some sort of advanced armor, and the weapons they carried were powerful assault firearms as cutting edge as the ones the MAKs carried, if not more so. With his one good arm he tossed them inside the VASIMR room, careful to have his hand ready on his own pistol.

  They look so young and strong. Just like everyone here, just like their captain, younger than they ought to be. It’s those drugs they all take, the ones that help them cheat time. Such a shame they were declared haram in my country.

  Sandoval’s eyes flickered, and she sensed the tall man crouched above her. She reached out and managed to grab at his neck, and he responded by slapping her arm away before reaching for his sidearm. Another grab towards him clutched at the bloody wound on his left arm, and he let out a loud yelp and jumped backwards. As he did, his reflexes fired a round at the woman.

  Demirci stumbled backwards into the engineering ro
om and re-closed the door. Standing again and leaning all his weight against the door, he looked through the window to see the two men beginning to wake. The woman was alive but writhing on the ground, with a wound between the folds of her armor above her abdomen and flecks of red coughed from her mouth onto the glassy insides of her gas mask. One of the men saw the tall man peering down at them and he reached to grab his weapon, only to find it missing. Demirci held his detonator in front of the window to show the dazed men what he was doing, then tapped two quick commands into its screen.

  The pair of devices in the cafeteria detonated simultaneously, each as powerful as a mortar shell. In an instant the galley became unrecognizable as debris scattered everywhere and every light source shattered. Everyone left on the station heard or felt the booming noise, including Pierce and those left around her in the Labs dock, still trying to see into the reactor area. A Novichok A-263 liquid nerve agent, now rendered into fine aerosol, drifted into open vents and through the station’s ducts.

  Demirci looked at the three masked attackers and summoned what strength he had left to yell through the window. “Now get back to your ship! Save yourselves!”

  The two men pulled Sandoval up and helped her to her feet. A piercing pain accompanied the wheezing and gurgling noises coming from her torso, the obvious signs of a sucking chest wound. But Sandoval would survive the few minutes they needed to stagger back to the Lincoln.

  They made it as far as the entryway to the Labs before the chief began coughing blood uncontrollably, followed by seizures from her spasming diaphragm. The masks protected her airways as they did for her two shipmates, but the gas had entered her lungs straight from the wound. She collapsed to the floor and shook for a few more fighting seconds before the nerve agent ended her life.

  * **

  Mike Trevino ran sweating into the airlock, having sprinted from the Ops Center while wearing his gas mask. The sight of two dead intruders there was unsettling enough, though Pavel Vorontsov didn’t seem to care. He ran through to the airlock and the Kostroma without saying a word. But the run back to safety brought out a cold sweat even before the exertion took hold. The walls of the station continued their humming vibration from the heavy thrust power, but there was also a frightening quiet to the wide corridors. He knew he was the last person onboard.

  “The hard-dock is complete,” he reported nearly out of breath to Pierce and Lynch. The captain and the acting station director were the last two in the dock. “Captain Vorontsov said he’d begin his counterthrust once your ship is away.”

  “Well done,” Pierce said in a somber tone. “Let’s go.”

  Like the three Lincoln crewmembers –one of them dead– who had gone up to the ship a minute earlier, the airlock treated the last onboard to a triple scrub from its anti-contaminant measures. A series of high pressure air and decon foam sprayers hosed them down until their clothes and the air around them were devoid of nerve agent. Finally, they entered the ship and took off their masks before giving the airlock door inside Lincoln’s cargo hold a final seal.

  The hold was crowded to standing room-only with Dirac personnel, attended to by Lynch, Schaube, and the other station leaders. Two crewmen were at one end of the hold by the armory, checking in the ship’s stun guns and hydro-bombs as well as all some weapons and gear synthesized by Dirac’s replicator, though most of that had been left in the dock. Will Groves sat in a corner, clutching a small object in one hand. He made it onto the ship only minutes before it left, having run alone to Molecular Dynamics and back in the final minutes.

  Elsewhere in the ship, the captured intruder was kept bound and under armed guard in an empty stateroom. In the ship’s sickbay, Doc Ford and others tended to the wounded. The dead were piled on top of each other inside the sickbay’s refrigerated storeroom, a makeshift morgue created out of grim necessity.

  Pierce didn’t have time to take stock of all that. Within a minute of boarding she sat in her command chair in C2C, next to a pallid-colored Beth Yamada.

  “Captain, all sections report ready for departure. I’ve had Abe run simulations on escaping based on a Kostroma counterthrust like you mentioned–”

  “Don’t tell me the details. Get us underway, and we’ll re-compute once Kostroma lights off.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  While Yamada and the crew went through the motions of detaching the ship from its magnetic mooring pads and maneuvering it away from the station, Pierce leaned into her command console and spoke to the ship’s AI.

  “Abe, how safely could we disable Dirac’s VASIMR thrusters by destroying them with our coilgun? Calculate the probabilities of collateral damage.”

  “This is unadvisable, Captain,” Abe responded. He displayed a schematic of Dirac’s major engineering systems and animated it as he spoke. “Dirac’s four primary thrusters are hydrogen-fueled variable specific impulse magnetoplasma rockets. All fuel lines run between the storage tanks and the engines with control valves in place to govern the hydrogen flows. These valves are insufficient to prevent a fuel ignition in the engines from extending to the tanks. I calculate a seventy-two percent probability that a kinetic shot into any one thruster would likely result in such an ignition and cause a significant thermal explosion in a hydrogen storage tank. This would subsequently destroy all other tanks and cause catastrophic damage to the station itself, including to some of the eight thousand containment pods. This would in turn result in the complete destruction of the Lincoln due to our proximity. Shots to all four thrusters would raise the total probability to ninety-nine percent. If the ship had its directed energy cannons available, the results would be similar.”

  Demirci was right about that, and so was Lynch, she thought. Pierce assumed they were but still wanted Abe’s opinion.

  The ship maneuvered free of the station while Dirac continued its acceleration away from L3, the vast array of containment pods being towed like a barge behind the main body of the station. Dirac was moving at eighty kilometers a second, and Abe calculated it would increase to six hundred by the time it initiated its self-destruct protocol. Without a counter-force, Abe estimated that the station would explode within thirty-six minutes.

  Yamada directed the helmsman to lock in a course for Earth, circumnavigating around the Sun as closely as the ship’s heat and radiation tolerance allowed. As she did, Kostroma’s thrusters ignited with an intensity bright enough to make everyone in the C2C take notice of the ship on the display screen. Yamada asked Abe to re-calculate the ship’s prospect for a successful escape.

  “Detonation has been delayed by approximately eleven minutes. Dirac Station will now reach a no-return zone and initiate self-destruct in forty-six minutes, with detonation occurring within eight minutes after that time. Lincoln will be ready to commence high-g acceleration in four minutes. Assuming all containment pods are full, with maximum acceleration we will not reach minimum safe distance on our flight path.”

  All of the crew inside the C2C gasped at the navigational chart displayed by Abe. He estimated the blast’s lethal range against Lincoln at eighty million km. With under an hour of head start time, the ship wouldn’t even get halfway out of range before the energy wave hit them.

  Pierce stared at the chart and thought aloud.

  “Venus,” she said. “Venus is nearly in line with the Sun. It’s why Dirac had been thrusting at low power the last few weeks. We can probably get around Venus in time.”

  Yamada ordered the helmsman to alter his heading but shook her head at the captain. “Ma’am, we still won’t have enough time. We’d have to spend half the trip decelerating before we could get into an orbit.”

  “No, not an orbit… I mean flying behind the planet and using it as a shield. We’ll use its gravity well to arc our course around to the sunward side. Then we’ll do our flip and start decelerating.”

  “At the speed we’ll be flying by the time we get there–”

  “It’ll have to be damn close, not far outside the atmospher
e. Here’s the really dangerous part: without a telemetry update since we arrived here, we’ll have to fly the approach by deduced reckoning and just wing it. Keep too far away, and we won’t alter course enough and won’t have the planet as a shield. Intercept too closely, though, and we’ll either slingshot too far around and put ourselves back in the blast zone, or we’ll hit the atmosphere and die. But it’s our only shot.”

  Jake Waters called over the intercom from main engineering. “All systems ready for high-g thrust.”

  “TAO aye,” Yamada called back. She looked at Pierce as if her captain might have gone crazy.

  “Lieutenant Commander Yamada, let’s do it.”

  CHAPTER 24

  White House Situation Room

  Washington DC, USA

  4:11 p.m. (2111Z), 24 December 2065

  Most of the National Security Council was still in the room, few having left the White House since their first meeting that morning. The council chatted in front of a chart of the central solar system displayed on the room’s primary screen, showing the positions of Dirac and the inner planets. Communication-wise, the station was nine light-minutes away from Mars, which itself was nineteen light-minutes away from Earth. The president and her chief of staff walked into the room too fast for everyone inside to stand at attention.

  “Talk to me,” Loughlin announced on the way to her seat. “What’s going on?” She already had a damn good idea what the answer would be, as would three others in the room. How many others knew beyond those three, she had no idea. That thought grated her nerves as much as what Diandra Stone was about to say.

  “SPACECOM has received a datalink and message from Arcadia Base on Mars,” Stone said. “Bear in mind this data is time-late by twenty-eight minutes. They’re tracking Dirac Station moving away from its standard position, and moving at an increasing speed. The station must be thrusting under its own power. Just to remind everyone here, the station’s systems will initiate a self-destruct sequence on their own if Dirac moves too far out of position.”