Mission Pack 3: Missions 9-12 (Black Ocean Mission Pack)

by J. S. Morin

  Amy’s voice came back instantly. “Where are you?”

  “I’m in the room with the murder squad.”

  “Shit! Stay down. I’ll send backup.”

  “The door said Xenopsychology or something,” Carl said. “In case that helps.”

  “There’s no Xenopsychology. I’ve got a Xenobiology, Xenolinguistics, Xenophysiology, Xenozoology…”

  “Back up one. Xenophysiology. That’s the one.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because Chuck Ramsey is your official next of kin.”

  Carl seethed through his teeth. “Just send a bunch of blasters my way with some arms to carry them.”

  The conversation by the door sounded like it was reaching a decision. Carl switched to lethal fire and snapped off a few shots, aimed intentionally high. Hopefully that would be enough of a deterrent to buy him time to get rescued. At the very least, it started a new round of the bickering as to who was going to confront him.

  # # #

  It was a strike team of four, except that it wasn’t. Roddy and Shoni were armed, but their goal was to head down to the engine room and override the controls from the bridge. While the captain could order just about anything from her command center, without the systems on the other end playing along, nothing would happen. Rai Kub carried a blaster rifle in one hand, its trigger guard cut away to allow him to get his finger on the trigger. It still looked like a toy in his hand. But his role was only to guard the two laaku as they made their way through the ship.

  The real strike team was Mort. He strode down the cargo ramp in his robe and chain of office, staff thumping against the steel floor in time with his stride. The only break in the illusion of an ancient sorcerer was the squeak of his sneakers on the glossy surface of the Bradbury’s hangar.

  Roddy put a finger to his ear, pressing the earpiece in place as Amy’s voice was piped in. “Change of plans. Carl’s pinned down in Xenopshysiology.”

  “That’s not some euphemism for us having to drag him out of some Zheen girl’s bedroom, is it?” Roddy asked.

  “Move it! He’s under fire.”

  Roddy sighed. “Roger that.” He turned to Shoni and Rai Kub, who had been on the same channel and already heard the same thing. “We gotta go bail out the idiot again. Let’s lay ions.”

  “But who’ll disable the ship?” Shoni asked. “We can’t let the plan fall apart or they’re going to use the internal scanners and who-only-knows what else they have for tricks in store. Why, they could—”

  “Leave it to me,” Mort said.

  Roddy saluted with the barrel of his blaster. “Just don’t do anything permanent. Remember, we own this baby now.”

  They parted ways. Three headed out the side exit of the hangar. Mort set his sights on the very bowels of the Bradbury.

  # # #

  Mort stalked the corridors of the Bradbury, cracking the annoying klaxons with the head of his staff each time he came upon one of the overzealous eardrum rupturers. He’d be damned if he was going to listen to that racket the whole time he was aboard. It was already as if he’d shrunk down small enough to walk inside a living computer. Technology closed in around him on all sides. Mort had never imagined hell to be a place of fire and brimstone—those were old friends of his. No, true damnation would be an eternity locked within the bowels of some technological beast, all gleaming surfaces and walls that listened to your thoughts.

  His stealth-free march caught the attention of one of the local hooligan bands. Three with blasters and one in the kiddie-cloth robes of a star-drive mechanic sprang from concealment like trick-or-treaters back home. Boston Prime got the best little rascals begging for candy, because wizards respected the heart of the ancient traditions. But Mort had seen more frightening costumes on those late October evenings than those now arrayed before him.

  Mort stopped to fix them with a long-suffering glare. “You’ve got to be joking.”

  “Drop the weapon and lay down on the ground,” one of the blaster-toting jelly-brains shouted.

  “I really don’t have time for this nonsense,” Mort muttered, resuming his pace and heading straight for the Bradbury’s unwelcoming party. The wizard ducked behind the corner, but the three armed men opened fire. The shots veered wildly as Mort twisted the air before him. “For the record, I was willing to try this Carl’s way.” Even as they continued firing, two of the guard exchanged puzzled looks. But those puzzled looks vanished in an instant, along with their flesh, as a wave of fire rolled down the corridor.

  In the wake of Mort’s arcane torrent, the lights and even the distant klaxons went dead. Mort smirked to himself as he sidestepped the smoldering corpses. There were only three. When he peered around the corner, the star-drive wizard was wetting himself just a few yards down the adjoining hall. At the sight of Mort, the wizardling squeezed his eyes shut.

  “Good Lord, man. Pull yourself together. If I’d meant to kill you, you’d be dead already.” It wasn’t true in the strictest sense. Mort hadn’t noticed the fellow take cover. “Not like I can’t make a bit of fire swing a hard right. Go find the booze on this ship and drink yourself stupid. I find you again sober, you’re going up like a moth in a monastery.”

  Mort waited as the syrup-witted wizard processed what was happening. With a frantic nod, the man backed away a healthy distance before turning and running the other way.

  “Hold it!” Mort shouted after him. The wizard skidded to a halt, not daring to turn and face him. “Which way to the engine room?”

  The star-drive mechanic turned slowly and extended a shaking finger. “Th-that corridor. T-t-take the lift at the end down two decks.”

  Drat and be bothered. “Change of plans. You’re coming with me. And you damn well better keep those piss-soaked boots of yours away from me.”

  Mort pressed the spigot-bladdered dullard into service as a lift operator. They shared an acrid and unpleasant ride down to the deck that housed the Bradbury’s main engines. Not until he’d gotten sufficiently detailed instructions did Mort release the man once more, reiterating his command to drink until he was no longer a threat to a kitten.

  If there was one thing Mort couldn’t stand, it was showy technology. Bad enough to have the science gremlins working in secret to power holo-projectors and shoot starships every which way through space. But the engines of the Bradbury were something out of a modernist nightmare holo. Giant translucent cylinders pulsed and hummed, casting eerie blue-white light and setting his teeth resonating respectively. The ceiling and walls were choked with cables, pipes, and tubes. Computerified flatvid screens beckoned with unsolvable riddles that promised to unlock the functions of the vast network of mythological science all working together to make the starship a starship.

  Mort struck his staff against the steel floor with a rattle. It seemed his footing wasn’t entirely fixed in place. But far from letting it deter him, the grated flooring inspired an idea. Garbling a few profane syllables, Mort overcame the overconfident machine’s scientific inertia and lit a bonfire in the techno-guts lurking just beneath the floor. A combination of the fiery aftermath and the sudden swerve in the laws of physics sent the engine room into darkness, all except for the roaring flame that warmed Mort’s face and chest. After blundering around in the controlled ship environment, it felt primal and real.

  “Much better,” Mort mumbled to himself as the darkened engine cylinders stuttered and faltered until finally falling silent.

  Making a circuit of the donut-shaped room that surrounded the byzantine monstrosity, Mort lit three more fires similar to the first. Then he staked out a position and waited for someone to show up to do something about him being there.

  # # #

  Captain Dominguez paced the bridge, hands clasped behind her back. The ship was falling, slowly but surely into the hijackers’ hands. Wizard Jasper’s team had failed to report in. Now Wizard Theresa’s detachment had gone silent as well. Her thoughts kept tugging at her to
abandon the bridge, to disperse the command crew with sidearms, and to delay the boarders in whatever ways they could. But so long as Wizard Bellamy was out there, her best course of action was to coordinate the ship’s defenses from right where she was.

  “Power blackout on deck six, sections Sierra Niner through Victor Eight,” Petrov reported. “Smaller blackouts on decks five and seven.”

  “Dispatch Bellamy to deck six,” Captain Dominguez ordered. “If they’ve got a wizard, that’s where we’ll find him. About time Bellamy earned that ransom we pay him.” Somewhere in the dark, spiteful reaches of her mind, Dominguez had always wondered just what the blowhard would do if backed into a corner. The Convocation was so proud of its overpriced magical dampening specialists. The mere presence of one deterred wizardly attacks, so the logic went. If this wasn’t a false alarm—some nanobot trick, perhaps, meant to look like a magical disruption—it would be the first time in her career that a ship’s wizard had earned his pay the hard way.

  “Someone’s using Lift Seven.”

  “Belay that previous order. Send Bellamy to the engine room.” This was it. The boarder’s plan spread out before her. So long as the ship was under Harmony Bay’s control—her control—then it was an asset to use against the boarders. Most of the internal scanners were offline. Several systems had been manually overridden. But in the end, anything left functioning on the Bradbury was under her control… at least until some wizard got down to the engine room and blew out power to the entire ship. Even if the damage was permanent, the salvage value on a ship the Bradbury’s size was immense, not to mention any scientific experiments that survived the wanton magic being used aboard.

  “Wizard Horace’s team reports that they’ve got one of the boarders pinned down in Xenophysiology.”

  “Shit! What are the risks if any of the live specimens get loose?” The last thing the Bradbury needed right now were a bunch of experimental creatures running around the ship unchecked.

  “None, sir. The xenos were evac’ed in the escape pods.”

  Captain Dominguez set her jaw. That was a health and safety violation, not to mention taking escape pod space away from human crewmembers. Still, better than the creatures escaping within the ship. “Fine. I suppose that’s the best news we’ve had all—”

  The lights went out. Silence reigned on the bridge as the background hum of the engines and the soft notification chimes of various workstations all ceased in unison. A soft blue glow cast everything in shadows, courtesy of the ship’s bioluminescents. Their wizard had beaten Bellamy to the engine room.

  # # #

  The lights went out. Carl had worked with Mort long enough to suspect the wizard of having affected the sudden change in the ship’s tech. Now that he considered it, the floor hum of the engines had vanished from beneath his buttocks as well. An eerie, pale blue brightened just enough to navigate the room by. Some sort of emergency backup lighting, probably not as P-tech as the phosphorescents on the Mobius but similar in function.

  Since this was part of the plan, Carl wasn’t caught off guard. He hoped that the Bradbury crew was. Poking his blaster around the crate, Carl squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened but a faint click. He squeezed a few times in rapid succession with no better result. Yanking the blaster back behind cover, he checked the energy pack level. Nothing. Not empty. There was no reading at all.

  “Dammit, Mort!” Carl whispered to himself. “For once in your life, can you fuck up just the right amount of tech?”

  By the murmurs at the door, his wasn’t the only weapon malfunctioning. But unarmed, Carl didn’t like his chances one against four. There was only one thing he could think of to even those odds. Carl stood. Angling the dead indicators on his blaster away from casual view made him hold it like a holovid gangster, but he pointed it at the doorway anyway. “All right. Come out where I can see you. My blaster’s wizard-proofed, so unless you plan on throwing those plastic toys of yours at me, you’ve got nothing over there. Come on now. Nice and slow. Play it smooth, and no one needs to get hurt today.”

  There was a grunt from the closed door Carl had come in by. With no power, it was stuck shut, but someone was on the other side was trying anyway. Good luck trying to slide a smooth steel panel into the wall with nothing to grip it. Carl put it from his mind as he kept a hawkish watch on his four prisoners. They filed into the room, blasters raised, one at a time. Carl snickered as even the star-drive punk came in, empty hands up, wide sleeves pooling around his elbows.

  “Now, just set those blasters down, nice and slow…”

  The first of the guards did just that, bending at the knees and keeping his eyes up as he lowered his weapon to the floor.

  Carl noticed something that the guard obviously didn’t. A power level indicator on the Harmony Bay-issued blaster flickered to life. A quick glance at the hidden side of his own weapon told Carl he wasn’t so lucky. His was dead as disco.

  “Hurry up. No stalling. You should be thanking me. In a few days, you’ll be back home instead of drifting through Disputed Zone space.”

  He had to keep talking. Keep them distracted. Keep their eyes off their…

  One of the guards noticed. A glowing light must have caught in his peripheral vision as he held the weapon aloft. He dropped the blaster to a firing position.

  Carl shook his inert blaster at them. “Pew, pew, pew,” he shouted at them, startling the guard enough to spoil his first shot.

  The side door slid open, accompanied by a bestial roar of defiance. Carl ran for the cover of his crate, but he’d wandered a few steps toward the door. He should have begged for a three-step head start, but it was too late for that. Shots fired. Carl cringed, expecting at any moment to feel the searing pain of one of those needle-thin lances of plasma to bore into him.

  The floor shook. Shots continued to fire. A huge, irresistible mass forced Carl to the floor and pinned him there. More shots. Then another set, their discharge a different frequency than the ones from the Harmony Bay force.

  “All clear,” Roddy called out. “You can get off him.”

  The bulk removed itself from Carl, and massive hands hoisted him to his feet. When he turned around, a wall of Rai Kub rose nearly to the lab ceiling. Smoke rose from the side of his shirt.

  “Thanks. You’re on fire, by the way.”

  Rai Kub looked down and patted at the garment. “My sister gave me this shirt for Christmas,” he said in obvious dismay. Carl wasn’t sure which he found more amusing, the fact that stuunji had adopted their conquerors’ holiday or that he cared more about the shirt than what those blasters had done to the flesh beneath.

  Shoni must have been thinking along the same lines, because she handed her blaster to Roddy and rushed to the stuunji’s side. “Find me a working scanner. This is a physiology lab. There must be basic medical equipment.”

  Rai Kub lifted the left half of his shirt and craned his neck to peer at his wounds. The leathery gray flesh was scorched, but there wasn’t the sort of major trauma Carl has suspected. This would have been the part of the holovid where the tough-guy hero finally noticed his life-threatening wounds and collapsed, only to be saved by the friends he had just rescued. Instead, Rai Kub brushed at the carbonized char, and it flaked away, leaving lighter skin showing beneath, surrounding a tiny, burned hole. “Just stings a little.”

  The four Bradbury crewmen lay on the floor, senseless from Roddy and Shoni’s stun blasts. Carl was intact, and while power indicator on his blaster was still dead, there were three working models lying on the floor. He scooped one of them up and tucked his own blaster back in its holster. “Come on. We’ve got a ship to secure.” They were in the home stretch. It was all coming together.

  # # #

  Esper caught up with Bellamy Blackstone as he headed for the Bradbury’s engine room. The sudden power outage had left the chief wizard’s team stuck at the door to the lift. By the soft tint of emergency lighting, Esper raised her hands as her surprise appearance drew aimed
blasters in her direction.

  “Don’t shoot!” she shouted.

  “Hold your fire,” Bellamy said, gesturing for the men to lower their weapons. “Where is your escort?”

  Esper slowed her pace and steadied her breathing. “Their ear dealies went dead. The intruders have a wizard with them. I sent them up to guard the bridge; they’re no good in a magical fight.”

  Bellamy grunted. “You may be right. Davis, take your men up to guard the approaches to the bridge. Wizard Theresa, you’re with me. Now back up and give me room. Opening these doors without further damage to the ship will be—”

  Esper shouldered her way past the burly wizard. The sooner she put him in front of Mort, the sooner this whole mess would be over. Watching him stand there simmering his stew on low heat until a solution came to a boil was unacceptable. She jammed her fingers at the spot where the double-action doors met, convinced the universe the doors couldn’t possibly be that stuck, and pried them open with her bare hands. There was an emergency ladder built into the lift shaft, and she swept a hand toward it as she stepped aside. “Laddies first.”

  Bellamy glowered at her but started down the ladder ahead of her. She waited until he reached the bottom, then grabbed the ladder by the two vertical rails and slid down after him.

  “I doubt you’d have reason to come down here,” Bellamy said in a low voice. “Remain here unless I call for you. Don’t let anyone past.”

  Esper gave him a curt, military nod, and Bellamy crept down the corridor toward the engine room. It was comical that such a big man would make an attempt at stealth, hunched at the shoulder and walking on tiptoe. Esper smirked after him. She’d keep her word. No one was going to get past her. No one.

  # # #

  Mort heard the creaking in the grated floor and the shifting of the loose sections of plating rather than the footsteps themselves. He rose, stretching and working loose a kink in his back. The chair he’d chosen was meant for a techno-minion’s backside, not a wizard’s. As he watched to see who approached, he idly dusted the seat of his pants free of anything that might have rubbed off.