Limbo System

by Rick Cook

  The only sound was Sharon’s ragged breathing. As if she was not there, Sukihara Takiuji brought the sword over his head and then flicked it down and to one side, just exactly as she had seen him do hundreds of times in the gym. Too-bright blood sprayed off the blade and splattered onto the wall.

  “Called ‘gama’, ” Suki said to Sharon casually. “Means ‘bullfrog’.” He brought the blade up and sheathed it with the same unhurried fluid motion he always used in practice.

  Just like in the gym, Sharon thought dazedly. Like he’s explaining something in the bloody gym!

  The Japanese picked up his wakazashi, the short that was the mate to the long sword already in his belt. Sharon thought briefly of grabbing one of the dead aliens’ lasers but the thought of touching one of them revolted her and she realized she had not the least idea how to use the weapon.

  “Now come quickly,” Suki said, drawing the long sword again. “We must be away.”

  There was no one in the corridor outside. Suki gripped his unsheathed sword and looked carefully both ways before letting Sharon follow him out.

  “You must go forward, quickly, to the bridge,” Suki told her.

  “I’ll not run from a fight,” Sharon said indignantly.

  “Not to run. To warn. The captain must be told. Now go quickly.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I must destroy books and paper. Then I follow you.” Sharon looked dubious. “Go. The captain must know. And be careful!”

  She nodded and set off down the corridor at a near-run. Suki stepped over the bodies and crossed to the bookshelf next to his bed. His professional library contained a great deal of information about the KOH drive which was not in the ship’s computers and his notebooks had even more. It could not be allowed to fall into the Colonists’ hands.

  Quickly, he pulled several electronic books onto the floor and ground them under his feet. The plastic cases cracked and the delicate crystal membranes inside ruptured, rendering them effectively unreadable.

  The paper books and his notebooks made another pile in the center of the room. He started to pile them on the hot plate he used to brew tea and then stopped. The room’s sprinkler system would automatically douse any fire. Instead he carted the load into the bathroom and used his short sword to cut everything to pieces in a few flashing strokes. Then he flushed the shreds and the pieces of the electronic books down the toilet.

  Satisfied, he stepped out over the dead aliens again and padded off down the corridor.

  At every corner Suki stopped and listened. He was almost at the main shaft when he flattened himself against the wall and whipped out both his swords. There were voices coming up the corridor. Human voices.

  Suki waited until the men were almost on top of him before he stepped out in front of them, swords lowered to either side.

  Both men jumped back and one of them raised a pistol halfway before he realized who it was.

  “Jesus buddy, don’t do that!” the man with the gun said.

  The pair were wearing the green coveralls of the life-support section. The one with the pistol was short and dark with a sheen of sweat beading on his face. His companion was larger, fairer and equally nervous. He was carrying a half-meter metal bar like a club.

  “I am very sorry,” Suki told them. “But what are you doing here?”

  “We’re from Life Support. When everything went to hell they sent us to find out what was going on. Then Spin compartmented and the regular codes wouldn’t open the emergency doors,” the man said with a trace of panic in his voice. “There’s a fire in the Central Corridor and we think there are Owlies on the ship!”

  “There are.”

  “Oh God!”

  “How long since you came down the shaft?”

  “I dunno, half-hour maybe.”

  Suki nodded. “Then come with me.” Resheathing his swords he started down the corridor. “Come,” Suki ordered. “Quickly.”

  With the ship compartmented off, the aliens had to have come down the shaft and it was obviously the way the raiders intended to go out.

  Like all the main shafts, the door of this one was round, man-high and thick as a bank vault’s. It wasn’t nearly that heavy, Suki knew. Most of the thickness was insulating foam with between layers of metal and sealing compound. But it was thick enough that no one was likely to shoot through it successfully with any kind of hand weapon.

  Suki flexed his thighs experimentally. The gravity here was ship-normal. Weight enough so that conventional tactics would work. There was no sign of life at the lock.

  Suki turned to the two men behind him.

  “We must secure the lock,” he whispered. “Else the enemy escape.”

  “I got a better idea. Why don’t we just let them go?”

  Suki looked at the man.

  “Well, it was just a thought,” the crewman muttered.

  “I will go first into the lock and you follow. Be ready to shoot as soon as they show themselves.”

  “The lock’s empty,” the crewman whispered.

  “It is not,” Suki told him.

  Without another word he loosened his sword in its scabbard and padded forward. The two men looked at each other and then set out after him.

  Suki hugged the wall of the corridor until he was a few feet from the door. Suddenly he whipped out his blade and charged through.

  Without apparently looking, the Japanese thrust to his right and cut to his left in a sweeping arc. There was a cacophony of shrieks and roars from the lock and two brilliant flashes of laser light.

  The crewman took a tighter grip on his pistol and ran forward, toes barely touching the matting. The other man followed him.

  As they came through the lock, Sukihara Takiuji was just wiping the blood off his long sword. There were three more alien bodies on the floor.

  “Oh my God,” the man with the pistol moaned.

  “The door,” Suki commanded. “Quickly, close it halfway.”

  The other crewman, still shaking, pulled the heavy circular barrier partly shut.

  “Excellent. Now they are trapped.” Suki slid down the wall and squatted back on his heels. “Now we wait.”

  “Hey,” Francis said, “we got company.”

  Carson shook himself out of his daze to see DeLorenzo striding down the gore-smeared corridor carrying a submachine gun.

  “You’re needed on the bridge,” he snapped as soon as he crossed the threshold. “I’m to guard the engine room.”

  “We haven’t been properly relieved,” the engineer protested.

  “Dammit man! The ship’s under attack and communication’s out. Now go!”

  The engineer looked doubtful, but DeLorenzo shifted the submachine gun significantly. “I relieve you,” he said.

  Carson looked over at Francis and the cook shrugged. For the first time in years Carson saluted.

  “Sir, I am relieved.”

  “Good. Now get up to the bridge. And be careful. We may not have all the Owlies off this ship.”

  For Sharon Dolan, speed was more important than stealth. So when she came around the corner she literally ran head-on into the main Colonist raiding party.

  The alien in the lead was as surprised as Sharon, but he recovered quicker. Before she could back away, the Colonist grabbed her and thrust her back to the aliens behind him.

  Damn, thought Sharon Dolan as she was hustled back to the rear of the group. Damn, damn damn! By the time she reached the knot of human prisoners huddled under guard, she was crying from anger and frustration.

  Once the crewmen were gone, DeLorenzo shut and dogged the main access hatch. A check of the boards showed all the other entrances to the engineering space were sealed and a quick search showed he was alone. That done, DeLorenzo slung his submachine gun and got down to the second and final phase of his plan.

  It isn’t difficult to unbalance a fusion reactor. The astonishing thing is that it stays in balance as well as it does. There were interlocks and safety f
eatures, of course, but DeLorenzo had spent weeks working around them. Now he needed only a few minutes to activate his program and to keep anyone from reversing his handiwork for the hour or two it would take for the reaction to destroy the Maxwell.

  DeLorenzo had an alternate plan, one that didn’t require his presence in the control room. But that would have only blown the ship to pieces. DeLorenzo wanted to make sure there were no pieces left for the Owlies to analyze.

  The only drawback was time. It took a while for the unbalanced forces within the reactors to override the system’s natural homeostasis. How much time was unpredictable. But unless someone could get to the controls in the next couple of hours the Maxwell was doomed.

  What Major Autro DeLorenzo intended to do next had nothing to do with the destruction of the ship, but it was important to him personally. With a couple of quick modifications through his compad, he reactivated one of the circuits to the bridge. Very quickly someone would be trying to reach him, and DeLorenzo had every intention of telling him what was in store and why.

  There were about a dozen human captives with the aliens, all of them in spacesuits. As soon as Sharon was handed back among the other prisoners, one of her captors thrust a spacesuit at her and motioned her to put it on. Sharon looked at the garment dubiously. It was a man’s suit and much too big for her to wear comfortably.

  She started to say something to the Colonist, but he silenced her with a ferocious gesture and raised his weapon threateningly. The protest died in Sharon’s throat and she tried to fit into the suit.

  By pulling the adjustments as tight as she could, she more-or-less got the suit to fit. Her hands didn’t reach down into the gloves, the legs bunched and bagged at the ankles and the air-pack hung down over her buttocks in back, but at least the suit would stay vacuum tight.

  Once Sharon had the suit on, the guard gestured her back to join the other prisoners, most of them in equally ill-fitting suits. Obviously, the Colonists had grabbed the suits from a lock area without worrying about getting the right ones.

  One of the other prisoners in an ill-fitting spacesuit shambled up to her.

  “Hello Miss Dolan,” Father Simon said. “They got you too?”

  With the prisoners in the rear, the raiders made their way toward the section’s main shaft. As the first of them rounded the last corner, a shot rang out.

  The bullet went high, zinging evilly over everyone’s heads as it ricocheted down the corridor. The Colonists in front scuttled back around the corner just ahead of a second, lower, shot.

  Using a fiber-optic periscope, the raid commander peered around the corner. The door to the central shaft was partly open and he could see shapes inside. Switching to infrared, he saw that there were at least two humans in there and at least one other cooling mass which was obviously one of the guards he had left at the lock. A human force strong enough to eliminate his blocking party must have retaken the lock and they obviously intended to make a fight of it there.

  The alien leader considered his options. The lock was clearly strongly held and he couldn’t afford the men and the time to take it. With the ship compartmentalized, reaching another lock would mean blasting through a series of pressure bulkheads and doors. Again that would take time. A more direct approach was in order.

  Beckoning his group, he led them back down the corridor away from the lock. Several twists and turns later, they came to a larger room used as an informal lounge. The human prisoners were herded into one corner and the Colonial commander pointed to a spot in the center of the floor. Two troopers moved forward and placed several packages around the area. Then everyone moved out of the room and several yards down the corridor.

  The commander waited, obviously counting off time. Meanwhile two of his men moved among the humans, checking their spacesuits and making sure their visors were down.

  The commander signaled and the entire ship rocked and bucked as the explosive charges ripped a hole through the bottom of Spin, the outer hull and into space. The charges slashed through the Spin floor, ripping huge metallic petals outward to stab into the hull beneath. The jagged edges tore into the outer hull and with a lurch that shook the entire ship, Spin stopped spinning. At the core, the motors heated and smoked at the sudden overload. Everywhere in Spin, people and things lurched, slammed against the spinward wall and began to float away from the floor.

  The shock of stopping Spin knocked Sharon and several of the other humans off their feet. The air whistled and screamed around the aliens and their prisoners as it rushed out the hole. Sharon felt her ears pop and her suit inflate as the pressure dropped. Around them she could hear the banging as the secondary emergency doors throughout the section had automatically sealed, locking their inhabitants inside.

  The alien commander gestured and the Colonial soldiers hustled their prisoners forward, toward the hole and deep space beyond.

  Stopping Spin threw the two crewmen to the floor of the lock. Suki, who was already sitting on the floor, had to put out both hands to brace himself.

  “What was that?” one of the crewmen demanded, picking himself up. Under the impulse of his push he floated clear of the floor.

  “It was Spin!” the other crewman said wide-eyed. “Spin’s stopped!”

  The first man did an expert flip and planted his feet on the floor again as the alarms howled and the secondary doors started to bang closed. “We’ve lost pressure in this section!”

  The other man clutched his pistol more tightly. “The aliens must have blown their way into the ship.”

  “More likely they blew their way out,” Suki told the men. “Is this shaft airtight?”

  “Yes,” one of the crewmen told him, looking at the indicators above the elevator door. “There’s no power to run the elevator, but it looks like the shaft is clear and under pressure all the way up.”

  “Good,” Suki rose and grasped his long sword. “I do not think the Colonists will come this way again. If they do, it will be in numbers too strong for us to stop. The captain needs to be told what has happened. Can we climb up this shaft?”

  “Captain, we are here as representatives of the Ship’s Council,” C.D. MacNamara said rather sententiously.

  Jenkins eyed MacNamara and his companions coldly. “If you want to complain about the search, do it later, please. I’m very busy now.”

  “That’s not why we’re here,” Winston Chang said.

  “The Colonists know that we have problems and they have offered to help.”

  “I’ll bet they do know,” Jenkins said. “Since they caused them.”

  “That’s hardly proven. Captain,” MacNamara said. “But in any event the ship and everyone on her are in danger. The Colonists want to help. They can have ships here very quickly from Meetpoint and they are offering us assistance.”

  “Surrender, you mean,” DeRosa bit out.

  “Assistance,” MacNamara repeated firmly. “Captain, there is simply no rational reason to refuse their offer.”

  None except you’ve been bribed to turn over the ship, Jenkins thought angrily. You and half your goddamn council. But it would be worse than useless to say that. They’d simply deny it and who would care?

  “Dr. MacNamara, that is simply out of the question. We cannot allow Colonists—more Colonists—aboard the ship.”

  “Captain, we have been willing to acquiesce on this point in the past, but I am afraid the time of pandering to your phobias is gone. Need I point out that we can open the locks ourselves? We are prepared to do so.”

  DeRosa ran her hand slowly along her waist to the holster on her hip. “First you’ve got to get off this bridge alive,” she said quietly.

  “Commander DeRosa, please!” Jenkins cut in.

  But MacNamara was right and they both knew it. The crew, disorganized and immobilized by the fighting, was outnumbered by the Council and the people who supported them.

  Before he could say anything he was interrupted by two new arrivals on the bridge, both in spaces
uits and both wearing pistols.

  Carson saluted and Francis mimicked him. “Reporting as ordered sir,” Carson said.

  “As ordered?” Jenkins asked, ignoring MacNamara and the others.

  “You’re supposed to be in the engine room,” DeRosa cut in. “Who the hell is standing watch?”

  The engineer looked confused. “Major DeLorenzo, ma’am. He relieved me when he told me I was wanted on the bridge.”

  “DeLorenzo ordered you forward?”

  “Yessir,” said the engineer, relaxing slightly. “Well, he relayed the order. He came to the engine room with a submachine gun and told me I was to report to the captain up in control.”

  “Shit!” Iron Alice muttered and spun for the comm system.

  “I don’t see . . .” MacNamara began.

  “You couldn’t see to pour piss out of a pressurized boot,” Iron Alice snapped, punching the button savagely.

  “Hello, Captain,” Major Autro DeLorenzo said. He looked as calm and unruffled as if they had met by chance in the cafeteria.

  “Just what do you think you’re doing?”

  “Saving humanity from slavery.” He smiled and the tension showed through the surface calm. “You wouldn’t take precautions against these creatures? I did. The ship’s mine, Captain.” He held up his control box. “I’ve got cutouts on all the communications and control circuits. I’ve also seen to it that the Maxwell will never fall to the aliens, no matter what Aubrey and the rest of the whores on the Ship’s Council want.”

  “What have you done?” Jenkins asked hoarsely.

  “Don’t worry, Captain, no one will feel a thing. Pretty soon we will all disappear in a blaze of light.” He stopped, as if for a new thought. “Oh, and don’t bother trying to get me out of here. I’m armed and I’m not at all afraid to die a little sooner than the rest.” He reached out and the screen went blank.