by Rick Cook
The lock was one of the engineering locks designed for use in transferring medium-sized loads. It lay aft of Spin in an area of cargo holds. It was not designed to be opened from the outside, but that didn’t matter. It opened before they reached it and a single space-suited figure beckoned them in.
“Quickly,” Andrew Aubrey urged. “You must move quickly.”
Nearly twenty-five space-suited raiders moved past him and set off in a springy, alien stride.
Unerringly, the aliens moved down the corridor to the lift shaft and in threes and twos launched themselves up the shaft toward the ship’s core. The raiders had excellent maps and they had gone over their mission again and again on their journey out to Meetpoint.
Albers was in Wadsworth’s office when the lights flickered, dimmed and went over to emergency lighting.
“What in the hell?” he exclaimed. Both men rushed into the main lab just in time to see Lulu Pine dog the door.
“Lulu, what’s wrong?” Wadsworth demanded.
The technician turned toward them, her pasty face lit by an unholy glee. “It’s the day of divine retribution,” she chortled. “Hallelujah, it’s the time of judgment. When the elect are saved and the rest condemned to the eternal fires of hell!”
She fumbled in her dress and pulled out a knife, the kind they used in the kitchen to carve meat. “Vengeance is mine!”
Albers tried to shove past her to the door, but he massed barely half what she did and for all her dumpiness she was very strong. Wadsworth shrank back against the wall and whimpered.
Communications had been cut to the bridge, but some of the auxiliary engineering circuits were still working—to an extent.
“Mr. Clancy.”
“Here, sir.”
“Where the hell are you?”
“Forward in Spin, sir.”
Ludenemeyer swore under his breath. “Get the hell back here. We’ve got a fire in Shuttle Bay One.”
The chief engineer cut the connection and did a quick calculation. The order to search the ship had completely disrupted Engineering. Instead of a full watch, the spaces were manned by himself and the two guards the captain had posted. Almost all his people were well away from their assigned damage control stations. He knew the crew would be in the same fix. That left the passengers, and Ludenemeyer had no confidence at all in their ability to handle an emergency without skilled assistance.
He swore again, out loud this time. At best, it would take Clancy time to get back and get things organized and that fire needed fighting now.
He suppressed the urge to head for the shuttle bay himself. If that shuttle blew he was going to be needed here in a big way. Instead he gritted his teeth and hit the communicator again.
“Lieutenant Kirchoff, report immediately.” He waited a moment, fuming. “Kirchoff, dammit report!”
“Here sir.” There was no visual.
“Where the hell is ‘here’?”
“660-18—ah . . .”
“Never mind that. We’ve got a major fire in Shuttle Bay One and Clancy’s unavailable. Get up there on the double and take charge of firefighting and damage control.”
Lulu Pine’s “packages” had been smaller than Jewett’s and were less destructive. They were intended to disable the nexuses of communication in Spin. The aliens had given her very specific instructions on precisely where to plant them, but Lulu was as unreliable an agent for them as she was an employee for the imaging section. She had “planted” most of the charges in storage lockers along the Central Corridor through Spin, meters from where they were supposed to be.
Nevertheless, they were destructive enough. They blew the lockers apart, destroying power, communication and control lines that ran through the trunks that paralleled the central shaft. One of them cut an oxygen line that ran through its own trunk and oxygen hissed out onto hot metal and organics.
In theory, almost nothing in Spin would burn, especially not in critical areas like the Central Corridor. In practice, there is very little that will not burn when pure oxygen is played on it. The aluminum-magnesium supports went off like Fourth of July sparklers. The composite panels of the corridor warped, melted and began to burn, filling the air with choking black smoke.
Once more alarms shrilled, indicating a mortal danger to the Maxwell. Automatically emergency doors slid into place throughout Spin, cutting the entire rotating section of the ship into hundreds of smaller compartments.
By Earth standards it didn’t make much sense to compartment off all of Spin because of a fire in just one region. But the men and women who designed the Maxwell didn’t think in Earth terms. They thought like Spacers, and Spacers have a pathological and very well-founded fear of fire in space.
The emergency systems in the Maxwell’s shuttle bays were both autonomous and automatic. Sensors reported the hot spots and told the computers that hydrogen and oxygen were burning in Bay One. The computers sized up the fires, realized they were beyond the ability of the firefighting systems to control, and opened the shuttle bay doors, venting the atmosphere in the bays.
That would have stopped a normal fire, but the shuttle carried its own source of oxygen as well as fuel. The fire raged on unabated.
The concussion slapped Mike Clancy in the back as he pulled his way down the central corridor. The force of the blast knocked him off balance and for a moment he twisted in mid-air, trying to get purchase. What the hell . . . ?
His hand brushed a wall and he quickly planted himself, clinging to the wall on all fours like a spider. Then he looked forward along the corridor just in time to see yellow flames and dense smoke pouring out of a section of the corridor wall before the automatic doors slid into place, cutting the corridor into segments.
Clancy looked back toward the aft section. His emergency station was in the engineering spaces. Abstractedly he realized there wasn’t much chance he was going to make it. Acrid smoke curled forward and reached his nostrils. The engineer coughed and realized there was at least a fair chance he wouldn’t make it out of here alive.
“What happened?” someone yelled further down the corridor. Still clinging to the wall, Clancy swiveled around and saw he wasn’t alone. There were a man and a woman in the same section of corridor. The woman was wearing a dark blue crew coverall with the patches of a pilot and pulling herself along like someone who had experience in zero-G. The man was wearing street clothes and standing shakily, obviously unused to the environment.
“We’ve got a fire in the next section forward,” Clancy said as he scuttled along the wall to meet them.
“But fire won’t burn in zero-G,” the man protested. “There’s no convection so the flame smothers in its own waste gases.”
Clancy grinned mirthlessly. “In practice, that’s a damn nice theory. It only works if the air’s still and it’s never still on a ship.”
“What do we do?”
“We get the hell out of here. Come on. Let’s try an alternate passage.”
“I think I remember seeing an emergency hatch a little further down the corridor,” the young woman said.
Clancy looked at her for the first time. He’d seen her around. One of the shuttle pilots, what was her name? Carol? Carmen? He’d thought she was cute and a little standoffish. Now she looked young and very scared.
“Sounds good. By the way, I’m Mike Clancy from engineering.”
The pilot looked a little relieved. “Carmella O’Hara, shuttle pilot.”
“I’m John Martin,” the man said. “I’m a spectroscopist.”
The lights in the corridor went out, replaced by the glow of the emergency lights.
“Glad to know you,” Clancy said as if nothing had happened. “Now let’s get the hell out of here before something else blows up.”
They moved out with Clancy in the lead and Carmella helping Martin along.
“Just a minute, ma’am.”
Iron Alice DeRosa had almost reached the Central Corridor that ran down the center of Spin when
the four men stopped her. Two were obviously vacuum jacks and the other two looked like technicians. She didn’t recognize any of them. All of them were wearing white armbands, torn from sheets, with “PSC” crudely lettered on them.
Iron Alice looked at the men. “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Ma’am, we’re placing you under arrest by order of the Provisional Ship’s Council,” the big one in front said, almost politely. “You’ll have to come with us.”
DeRosa shook her head. “I didn’t think Aubrey had the balls for this.”
“Dr. Aubrey’s got nothing to do with it,” another smaller man said. “We take our orders from the provisional council. Dr. Aubrey and the other members of the old council are already under arrest.”
“Come along, ma’am,” the big one said and eased closer.
Iron Alice DeRosa let him get almost close enough to put his hand on her arm before she kicked him in the groin and used the momentum to carry her back into the wall near the ceiling of the corridor.
A fight in zero-G is very different from a fight in a place where “up” and “down” mean something. As soon as the trouble started, the two technicians were worse than useless. One of them instinctively lunged forward, lost contact with the floor and flailed helplessly in mid-air. The other stood rooted, his club floating lazily out of his slack hand.
The vacuum jacks knew about rough-and-tumble in zero-G, but they didn’t know anything about Iron Alice DeRosa.
While the second vacuum jack was coiling to spring, DeRosa flipped over, planted her feet on the ceiling, lunged off and flipped again so she descended on the men feet first. The vacuum jack launched himself just in time to put his head in direct line with Iron Alice’s booted feet. His head snapped to the side under the impact and he went drifting away head over heels as DeRosa landed, sprang and rammed the heel of her hand into the man’s nose. He yelled as bones crunched, but DeRosa was already spinning away again, using the push to change her direction and miss a clumsily swung club in the hands of the other technician. She twisted her body and lashed out with her foot to strike the man in the solar plexus before he could recover from his swing. He whuffed and went slack. One more twist and a push with her toe on the wall and Iron Alice went flying past the first vacuum jack. A well-aimed kick to the side added to his agony.
A final push and somersault and Iron Alice DeRosa was standing on the floor again, almost where she had been when the fight started. One of the vacuum jacks was doubled over clutching his ribs and retching feebly. The second vacuum jack and one of the technicians were out cold. The other technician floated back against the wall, moaning and holding his broken nose with both hands.
“Breathe through your mouth or you’ll suffocate,” Iron Alice told him coldly. “Take your friends here down to sick bay. Then put yourselves all on report.”
With that she turned and kicked off down the corridor.
About halfway between the fire doors there was a small oval door with a light over it. It was perhaps one and a half meters high and maybe a meter wide.
“Emergency scuttle,” Clancy said as they came up on it. “Leads to the service corridor that parallels the central corridor.”
Martin pushed forward to open the scuttle.
“Wait a minute!” Clancy commanded. He pulled himself up and put his palm flat on the door. It was so hot he yanked it off almost immediately.
“We’re not going that way,” he told the group. “Now, what’s the best alternate?”
“Is there a service corridor on the other side?” Carmella asked. Most of the Maxwell was ruthlessly radially symmetrical, especially in Spin.
Clancy thought hard. He carried a map of the engineering spaces in his head but no one could possibly remember the complete configuration of a four-thousand-foot-long spaceship. Spin was alien territory to him and he had only a vague notion of this area.
“No,” he said finally. “There’s too much stuff that has to run along the central axis so there was only room for the one service run.” He rubbed his chin. “I think the best bet is to open the door at the other end of the corridor and go out that way.”
“I thought they couldn’t be opened,” Martin said.
“How the hell do you think emergency crews can get around?” Clancy said. “If there’s air and no fire on the other side, I can open the door.”
The smoke was getting thicker in the corridor and they were all coughing by the time they reached the aft door. Clancy popped up an unobtrusive panel set in the wall and punched a number into a keypad. Then he frowned and punched in another number. The door stayed closed.
“Damn!” Clancy pounded his fist on the bulkhead.
The override was supposed to let the door open unless the conditions on the other side were unlivable. There was even an override on the override so that space-suited emergency workers could get through when things on the other side were unlivable. However, all those overrides depended on a measure of central intelligence and, thanks to DeLorenzo’s sabotage, that was not available. The door stayed closed.
The other two looked at him as if they were afraid to ask what happened next. He scowled and tried to dredge every fact he could about the Central Corridor out of his memory.
Maybe the little puke had the right idea after all, Clancy thought, memorizing the whole fucking ship. Well, the little puke wasn’t here and he’d have to make do with what he knew.
Think of a wheel, or a tin can rotating around its axis. The axle of the wheel, or the center line of the tin can, was the Central Corridor. It ran straight through Spin at the center of rotation.
Now imagine a straw thrust down the center of the axle. That straw would be the corridor that Clancy and the others were in. The Central Corridor was more than just the corridor. It was a whole complex of cable runs, piping, conduits and shafts enclosed in a larger axle that carried the enormous load of the rotating Spin section. It was one of the most complex parts of the ship.
“Where are the emergency crews anyway?” the pilot asked.
“Probably spread all over the fucking ship,” Clancy told her. “Everyone was out searching and then we got hit with a whole series of emergencies. This is the second fire we’ve got on board.”
And that puke Kirchoff is back there leading the crew fighting the one in the shuttle bay. Ludenemeyer must be shitting bricks. Well, I hope he’s doing better than I am.
Kirchoff struggled into his emergency gear. Twice he made a mistake in the attachments and cursed to himself as he undid them.
The most important thing is to keep command, he reminded himself. A leader’s job is to lead, firmly and decisively. He must know what to do and see that it is done. That had sounded wonderful when he was memorizing it in a classroom on Luna. Making his way down a darkened corridor in a badly fitting spacesuit he suddenly wasn’t so sure.
Kirchoff reviewed his map of the ship. Aft of Spin, most of the ship was taken up by six enormous pressure cylinders, each more than seventy-five meters in diameter and hundreds of meters long and each holding either enriched hydrogen or oxygen. The shuttle bays sat inside the main hull nestled between the curves of those cylinders. If that shuttle blew . . .
He shook off the thought and concentrated on getting to his destination.
“What the hell are you doing back here?” Jenkins demanded when Iron Alice DeRosa kicked her way onto the bridge.
“Couldn’t get through. The emergency doors in Spin closed before I had a chance. I’ll have to go through the spaces between Spin and the hull or out over the hull. Oh yeah, I met four bozos back in the corridor claiming to represent the Provisional Ship’s Council or whatever.” She smiled wolfishly. “They tried to arrest me.”
Jenkins didn’t bother to ask what had happened to the bozos. “Mutiny too?”
“Looks like.”
Jenkins swore savagely and then sobered. “Well, we can worry about them later. I’m glad you didn’t get through. The doors on the shuttl
e bays are all open and there’s a hell of a fire in Bay One. We can’t button up until they get that beat.”
DeRosa nodded. Any hole or discontinuity in the hull would keep the drive from working. “You got communications back?”
“We’ve got a relay of space-suit radios, but all the regular channels are out. That looks like sabotage too.”
It was DeRosa’s turn to swear. “What about the Central Corridor?”
“Explosions and fire. We’ve got a scratch team trying to fight their way through from this end and we’re trying to get one organized to hit it from the other side. We think we got most of the people out of the corridor.”
“God help anyone left in there,” DeRosa said fervently.
Mike Clancy took a deep breath. “Okay, people, there’s something else we can try.”
“Another scuttle?” Carmella O’Hara asked.
“Not that official. There’s a water main that parallels this corridor and there’s a crawl way that runs along it. It’s tight but we can get through.”
“How do we get to it?”
Clancy fished in the pocket of his coveralls and held up a thing that looked like a screwdriver with a funny tip. “With this,” he said.
The trio worked their way back up the corridor with Clancy leading the way and counting panels on the walls. The smoke stirred sluggishly as they pulled themselves along, but it didn’t seem to be getting any thicker. The corridor grew noticeably warm as they moved in the direction of the fire, but it wasn’t uncomfortable.
At last Clancy stopped in front of a section of wall seemingly indistinguishable from the rest and applied the tool to it.