He leapt through an upside down hatchway, realising even as he did so that it should have been closed. Belatedly, he realised that all the doors were standing open. The Fourth had done that somehow to ensure open routes throughout the station. If they were coming after him, there would be nothing to slow them down.
Trying to work out speeds, distances and odds, Durb scrambled up a ladder to go down a deck. He wasn’t cursing, now, but saving all his breath for running. Gravity was not only reversed, but increasing. It felt like a nightmare in which he was trying to run from some nameless dreadful thing but his legs wouldn’t move. He was getting heavier with every passing second.
That was no illusion. One of the worms planted in Karadon’s computers was increasing gravity at the rate of 0.1g per second. It would level off just before four gee, a medically safe level for vertical g-force. It would not be pleasant, though. Many of those on the station were not spacers, with no training or experience in handling variable gravity. They would be struggling, weighing nearly four times as much as they did ordinarily and experiencing some grey-out with blurring of vision and dizziness as blood was pulled away from their brains.
That would not affect the Fourth’s boarding parties at all. Their cyber-suits would make light work of running in a lot higher than four gee. They would also compensate automatically for gee force, increasing pressure around arms and legs to maintain blood flow to the brain.
Durb Jorgensen was a spacer, but it had been quite some years since he’d exchanged life as cargo-master on a freighter for a job on Karadon. It had been more than ten years since he’d even been in freefall.
It was too late now to regret that he hadn’t insisted on gravity drills. It was too late to regret all those times he’d intended to go to the gym but had gone for a drink instead. All he could do was struggle on, panting. He was only a couple of hundred metres from the marina. A couple of hundred steps. He could do that.
Three hundred steps later he was almost on his knees. Every step was a desperate battle of wills between him and his body, dragging aching, trembling legs to push him on a little further, hanging on to freefall bars to pull himself along. His steps were no longer striding out a full metre but barely inching a few centimetres each time. His breath was coming in tearing, wheezing gasps. He had tunnel vision, now, a grey fog blurring out everything except a little circle straight ahead. What little vision he had left was focussed on the entrance to the marina. He was close enough now to be able to see the entranceway with the Speedstars Marina sign and a poster announcing an upcoming race. There was a window into the clubhouse, with a sign in it inviting members to come in for Happy Hour Specials.
Durb hauled himself another painful few centimetres towards it. He was too frantic and disoriented now even to work out that if the Fourth had been able to do all this to the station there was no way they would leave airlocks to potential escape craft enabled. At some level he believed that his command codes would still work. This was his station, after all. It had been his, in his opinion at least, far more than it had ever been Chok Dayfield’s. Dayfield had never been more than a public face, hired for his distinguished looks and ability to charm the media and the human cargo that infested the Leisure decks. Durb Jorgensen was the real authority here. It was inconceivable to him, even now, that the Fourth could have taken all control of his station away from him.
Whooping for breath, he clawed his way towards the entrance, still convinced that once he got there he’d be able to board a courier and make a getaway.
He never even heard the cyber-suited boarding party coming up behind him. The first he knew of their presence was when a silver hand appeared in his narrowed vision, taking his gun away. He tried to hang onto it but he might as well have tried to arm-wrestle a crane. The pistol was plucked out of his hand, his convulsive effort to press the trigger closing onto empty air. Before he could even start to fight back he was laying face down on the ceiling, his arms being pulled behind him and cuffed. Pretty lights were dancing all around, geometric shapes flashing and whirling on the ceiling and the walls. He would only work out later that this was his own suit-light reflecting off the mirrored surfaces of the Fourth’s armour. At the time he felt as if the universe was swimming away from him. Then he felt his spacesuit helmet being removed, with a rush of cool air on his sweat-beaded face. A young woman’s voice spoke, calmly, from amidst the spinning lights.
“Durban Jorgensen, I am arresting you on suspicion of murder, drug trafficking and piracy. I am required to inform you...”
Chapter Twenty Four
”All secure, sir,” Buzz reported.
Alex glanced across his command screens. Three groups of Karadon security had been disarmed and handcuffed. They had surrendered very quickly. However much they were being paid, it was not enough for them to keep on fighting when communications were down and they were in the dark on a station that had apparently been flipped upside down.
Matters had been rather more complicated in the offices. Finding that the high pressure hatches they’d been relying on as a barrier against the Fourth were standing open and couldn’t be closed, some had tried to run, some to hide, and others had turned on one another. As eight silver-suited figures stormed the offices, several of the people inside attempted to take one another hostage. There was one classic moment that would go down in spacer legend in which four of them were pointing guns at one another, yelling silent threats at the incoming boarders.
A burst of flash grenades took care of that. Buzz was now standing over the last of the prisoners taken in the offices. Arie McKenna had arrested Durban Jorgensen and was reading him his rights. She and her team had already put Hale Ardant into a stasis bag, just in case Rangi Tekawa could do anything for him.
Alex glanced at the time. It was two minutes fourteen seconds from the moment Buzz had set first foot on the station. He’d be disappointed that they hadn’t cracked two minutes – their best time for this in simulation had been one minute sixty four. Two minutes fourteen was more than respectable, though.
“Excellent,” said Alex, and speaking both to Buzz and the Intel teams, “Go for system reset in ten seconds from my mark…” a final glance at all the command screens, ensuring they were all good to go, “mark.”
“Sir,” several voices acknowledged simultaneously, and the process of reversing what they’d done to Karadon got under way. Lights came on and sirens stopped screaming at once. Comms were restored, too, and gales stopped blowing round the station. Doors closed quietly, and calm returned to Karadon.
Putting the gravity the right way up was a rather slower process. First they had to ease off the g-force at a rate that wouldn’t make people throw up, bringing the station back into freefall. Then, allowing time for the Fourth to get themselves and their prisoners oriented the right way, they brought gravity back on line, just as gently.
Blinking in the suddenly bright lights, the prisoners landed back on the floor. As gravity stabilised, the prisoners were already being led off to board the shuttles that would take them to the Heron.
“System reset, skipper,” Dan Tarrance reported, as all the viral worms that the Fourth had introduced wiped themselves out of Karadon’s systems.
“Thank you,” Alex said, and hailed the CO of the ISiS Karadon forces, still waiting aboard their shuttles. They had wanted to be rather more in on the action than waiting on their shuttles with the airlocks closed, but Goph Murchson had accepted with good grace Alex’s telling him that they would only get in the way. The Fourth had been preparing for this operation for months, even before they’d left Chartsey for Therik. Like many things that looked easy, it was the result of a tremendous amount of effort, planning and training. The last thing they needed was more than a hundred people with no idea what they were doing, bumbling around in the dark.
They really did, however, need them now. The Fourth just couldn’t even consider taking over the running of the station. Their only option, if ISiS Corps was unable to take ove
r, would have been to shut it down entirely.
“Clear for secondary boarding, Lt Commander,” Alex told Goph Murchson.
“Thank you, sir,” the Lt Commander responded. He was trying to sound crisp and professional but there was a stunned note in his voice that gave him away. Nowhere in any Fleet manual for boarding operations did it suggest turning the gravity upside down. Goph Murchson was still struggling to come to terms with the fact that they had actually done that.
He and his people did their part, though, boarding the station in an orderly fashion and each proceeding to their assigned areas. There was no centralised command deck or control room on Karadon. The nearest they had to a control centre, the equivalent of city hall, was the boardroom.
It was there that Goph Murchson went, accompanied by administrators who’d help him take charge of the station. Buzz went to meet him there, officially handing over to him as the Fourth withdrew.
“I’m afraid there’s rather a mess in corridor T397,” he apologised.
Goph Murchson did not need to ask why. Buzz had been providing him with a heatscan and audio feed from his own helmet, so the Lt Commander had been able to follow what was going on. He was aware that Durb Jorgensen had shot Hale Ardant, that Ardant had been reported as a level eight casualty, and that his body was now being taken to the Heron.
Lt Commander Murchson grinned. He tried not to, but he just couldn’t help it. The Fourth had just stormed the biggest station in space. It had taken them just two minutes to take everyone prisoner, with the only casualty shot by one of the other drug traffickers. They were now handing back the station, brightly lit and fully functional. Anyone else, Goph thought, would be expecting cheers and grateful thanks, not apologising for the mess.
In fact, there would be rather a lot of cleaning up required. Many of the facilities on the Leisure Decks, particularly the shops, had a rather relaxed attitude to freefall precautions. Some of the mess up there would take days to sort out.
“Don’t worry, we’ll take care of that,” Lt Commander Murchson shook hands with Buzz as warmly as was possible when Buzz’s hand was encased in duralloy and the face he smiled up into was projected onto the visor of a cyber-suit. “Thank you, sir. That was … astounding.”
“It’s what we do,” said Buzz, modestly, but with a slightly mischievous eye to media reports. He knew very well that that reply would be repeated to the journalists who were already hammering at the airlocks to get in on the story. “It’s What We Do” would be headlines across the League. If there was any justice, Buzz felt, the public would see from that that the Fourth were not, after all, either champagne-swilling louts letting dangerous criminals run rampage in society, nor brutal human rights abusers using criminals as cannon fodder. They were just a task force drawn from the best of the Fleet, including some who’d made mistakes and were getting a second chance to make good.
Buzz would not hold his breath hoping that people would realise that, though. Too many people were entrenched in their beliefs about the Fourth to make those beliefs go away. As always, people would believe what they wanted to believe, and the media would work up the drama any way they could.
“All yours, Mr Murchson,” Buzz said. Then, having exchanged salutes with the other officer, he strolled off contentedly, leaving him to it.
Chapter Twenty Five
Just over forty minutes after that, Alex took a call from Quill Quilleran.
He didn’t take it immediately. He had a lot going on aboard the Heron and wasn’t taking social calls. Bringing an additional sixty seven prisoners aboard was putting a strain on the Heron’s resources, even with all the preparations that they’d made.
There was nowhere near enough room in the brig for so many, of course. They already had the four prisoners from the Demella Enterprise in there, Leo Arad and Logan Tantrell, and the ten prisoners taken from the Pallamar.
Decisions had to be made, with priority in the brig given to those who were considered the highest security, and provision made elsewhere for the others.
The Heron had come prepared for this. The simulator gym where they’d spent so many hours training for those boarding operations was in the sealed-off high security section of the ship too. It didn’t take much conversion to turn it into a mess deck. Screen panels were set up against one wall, with three-tier bunks clipped onto them and lockers set across the ends to make bunkrooms. The gym already had its own shower block. Folding tables and chairs created a dining area at one end of the remaining space while the rest was already set up with exercise equipment. The League Prisons Authority had helped the Fourth with this, too, advising them on it as a low-security custodial facility. They’d even inspected and certified it as such.
Checking in sixty seven prisoners at once would have stretched the capacity even of the biggest custody unit, however, and the LPA could only have said that the Fourth was doing their best. They’d set up a process with people being moved along a row of tables being security and medically checked and issued with emergency kit. It was all taking time, particularly as some of the prisoners were rather more cooperative than others. It didn’t help that some of the people already in the brig had been recategorised and moved into the gym so that higher security prisoners could be put in their cells.
Jervais Clemens, the skipper of the Demella Enterprise, took great exception to that. He’d been comfortable, even quite happy, in his cell. It was a lot nicer than his quarters aboard the Demella, for a start, and wonderfully peaceful. There would be no more frantic scrambling to try to keep his horrible ship functioning and pay off at least some of the money he owed. There would be no more having to carry drugs for people who frightened the life out of him. He could just relax, be bankrupted and go to prison. It was very liberating. Rangi Tekawa had been working with him, too, putting him on a regime of healthy eating and gentle exercise and taking him to sickbay every day for counselling sessions. They’d sat on the grass drinking herbal tea and Jer Clemens had talked to Rangi as he hadn’t been able to talk to anyone for years.
Now that comfortable routine was thrown into the air as he was told that they needed his cell for somebody else, and he was taken into the gym. It seemed crowded and noisy, full of angry strangers. Then they showed him to a cubicle which he was going to have to share with five other men, instead of the single with en-suite facilities he’d been enjoying.
Alex was dealing with his complaints when the call came in from Quill. Quill was using his priority call-code but Alex disregarded that, assuming that his friend just wanted to congratulate him on the boarding ops and dig for whatever details Alex was able to give.
“No, you are not entitled to a single cabin or en-suite facilities,” Alex told the irate skipper. “This is not a liner. You are in custody, Mr Clemens. You don’t have any say in what accommodation you have. And, given that you are likely to be in prison for some years, you should start getting used to that.”
“What about if I punch you in the face?” Jer Clemens demanded. “Would that get me put back into the proper brig?”
Alex looked back at him silently, allowing his icy grey stare to do all the talking necessary. Jer Clemens became suddenly aware that he was talking to a man who could slam him onto the deck in two seconds flat.
“All right, all right,” he grumbled. “But it’s not fair!”
He stomped off moodily and Alex turned to the next problem awaiting his attention. This was Rangi Tekawa, waiting to speak to him. Alex’s wristcom was bleeping again and this time he saw that Quill was flashing “Urgent!” on his call. Rangi, however, was practically hopping up and down with impatience, so Alex put Quill’s call on hold.
“Make it quick, doctor,” he requested.
“I need some help operating on Hale Ardant,” Rangi told him. “Can I ask for the medic on the Stepeasy to come over?”
Alex blinked at him. He’d seen the preliminary medical report on Hale Ardant. His heart, both lungs, three of his ribs and one of his kidneys had been
completely destroyed by the explosive bullet Durban Jorgensen had fired into his chest. It had also snapped his spine. Alex had taken it for granted, seeing that, that the death certificate would be filed in due course.
“What do you mean, operate?” he queried. “Isn’t he dead?”
“Only technically,” Rangi assured him. “There are no injuries to his brain and they got him into stasis so fast there’s no brain damage from oxygen deprivation, either. So long as we can hook him up with brain support fast enough when we take him out of stasis, the rest of it is just, well, repairs and replacements. I’ve got all the parts I need to fix him up, but it’s really a two surgeon job. There’s a top class ER surgeon on the Stepeasy, so can I ask for his help?”
Alex didn’t ask how Rangi had found out that there was a top class ER surgeon over there. Medics had their unofficial networks too.
“All right,” he nodded. “And if they can’t help, get someone from one of the liners.” He was looking at Rangi with slightly surprised respect. He knew that Rangi was a good doctor – he wouldn’t have asked for him otherwise – but he valued Rangi for the everyday care he provided for the crew. He had never really seen him as someone who could look at a body in that condition and say so confidently that he could fix it.
“Thank you, skipper,” Rangi said, and hurried off looking relieved, already making a call.
Alex held up a hand to the petty officer who was next in line to speak to him, answering Quill’s call instead.
“What’s up, Quill?” He did not say “This had better be important” but it was implicit in his tone.
Karadon (Fourth Fleet Irregulars) Page 39