Severance

by Chris Bucholz

  “Or maybe the spread’s not wide enough,” Linze said quietly.

  “I was just thinking the same thing.”

  §

  Trespassing beneath the mayor’s mammoth desk, Koller shifted his weight, shaking his forearm to try and regain some feeling in the tingling limb. For seven hours, he had been peering out of the open window in the back of the mayor’s office, methodically scanning the rooftops and streets arrayed in front of him.

  It was work that could be done better and faster by the myriad of sensors mounted in the garden well, but of late those had started exploding. It was because of those dwindling sensors that the sensor he was using himself was attached to a smart rifle, which had certain abilities inherent in its design that the regular surveillance monitors didn’t. And if necessary, those features came with orders to use them.

  When Thorias had approached Koller specifically for this chore, Koller hadn’t had to ask to know the chief was stretching his authority. For the last couple of years, every time Thorias approached him personally with orders, they were of the kind that weren’t supposed to be written down. Things that needed to disappear. People that needed to be scared. That poor, dumb technician in the Bridge mechanical room who needed a bit more.

  This was a trickier job than any of that. How the Othersiders got their hands on a smart rifle wasn’t a complete mystery. It was clearly the one stolen during the Breeder raid years earlier. Which evidently still worked, to judge by the steadily shrinking supply of high altitude surveillance sensors in the garden well. Whoever was shooting it was still a mystery, although solving that was easily done — shooting him, then reassembling his various pieces.

  Koller just had to find him first. The hard way to do that was what he was trying now. Slow, tedious searching of every rooftop and window in the garden well, looking for someone that didn’t hang out in one spot for very long.

  The easier way was what Koller was really banking on, but it would require some patience. One of the smart rifle’s features was the ability to recognize and pinpoint muzzle flash. If the enemy sniper fired again, and within his line of sight, his rifle would spot the flash, and calculate a return trajectory within fractions of a second. If the Othersider didn’t know about the feature — and Koller wouldn’t have known about it himself if he hadn’t read the documentation — he would be in for a very small, very fast surprise.

  But for that to work, the Othersider would have to shoot first, and for the last half–day, he had been stubbornly refusing to do just that. Koller gave up on the rooftops and began scanning the wall at the far end of the well. Left to right in broad sweeps, moving up or down after each sweep and heading back the other way, working a rough grid. Every nook and crevice on the wall was examined in both light amplification and IR. Maintenance corridor — clear. Ventilation shaft — covered, probably clear. Odd–looking panel — odd–looking, but completely solid. And so on.

  He nearly jumped out of his skin when the gun chirped in his hand. “What the heck?” he said. He blinked and looked into the viewfinder. A bright red arrow on the left of the screen. “Ohhhhhhh.” The counter–sniper sensor, telling him where the shot had come from. He rapidly panned the rifle to the left. The arrow moved to the right of the screen. Swears filled the spot under the mayor’s desk as he corrected to the right, overshooting again. Taking a deep breath, he tracked back to the left at a more measured pace. Finally, the arrow turned to a dot, hovering over a dark room on the far end of the garden well.

  The sensor automatically adjusted the gain on the light amplification, revealing an observation room overlooking the garden well, seats arrayed on a gentle slope like in a theatre. One of the many rooms on the ship that had seemed like a good idea to whoever had designed it, it hadn’t been enjoyed much by the actual citizens of the ship and had fallen into disuse over the past centuries.

  Not complete disuse, however, judging from the movement in the back of the room. There, a figure struggling in the low–gravity, trying to haul a bulky object up the stairs to the door. Koller moved the reticule onto the door the figure was moving towards and hit the targeting button. A blue arrow appeared on the side of the screen. He knew what that was and slowly began panning towards it, until a blue reticule appeared almost in the center of his viewfinder. He settled the crosshairs on the blue reticule, took a deep breath, and pulled the trigger. The rifle shuddered beside him, snapping the projectile out with a pleasing sound.

  Panning back to the observation lounge he watched as the door shut behind the retreating figure. A split second later a fist shaped hole appeared in the door accompanied by an explosion of plastic and metal splinters. Koller watched the hole for another several seconds. The fragments of the door wafted around the room, plastic and metal and foam, taking a long time to settle in the low G. The splinters were not, sadly, accompanied by any noticeable amounts of blood or gore. “Fuck!” he yelled, swinging the gun back and forth across the room in hurried, jerky movements.

  §

  Stein held her breath as Bruce pulled the massive hatch open. It had already been slightly ajar when they had found it, and although there were no sounds coming from within, they had approached it carefully, nonetheless. Bruce’s shoulder sagged slightly. “Empty,” he said.

  They were on the 20th level, getting close to the central axis of the ship. Gravity was present but was more of a suggestion than a law. Getting there without being seen or shot had taken a ridiculously circuitous route involving a great deal of crawling, skulking, stairs, and complaining about stairs.

  Bruce stepped inside the disconnect cavity, Stein moving to the entrance to look inside. There were the two clamps, just like the others they’d examined, this set still grasped tightly together. Bruce’s terminal light flickered around the cavity, casting odd shadows on its curved walls. To Stein’s eyes, the disconnect didn’t look obviously bent. But their stolen notes indicated that it had indeed jammed. Someone would be getting to it soon.

  “There’s a hatch on the other side,” Bruce said.

  Stein stepped into the cavity, bracing herself against one of the big clamps with one hand, stepping carefully in the awkward gravity. She turned on her light and moved around the disconnect. Sure enough, there was another hatch on the far side of the cavity, clearly connecting to the aft core of the ship, the part that would ultimately separate. “Is it open?” she asked.

  Bruce nodded. “A crack, yeah.” He froze, then flicked his light off.

  From the far side of the hatch, the sound of voices as people approached. Stein froze as well, turning off her own light. The voices stopped, just outside the hatch. “We’ll have a better angle at it from this side,” one of them said. “I’m going to start it up out here. This thing’s a bastard to maneuver in low G, and I don’t want to cut my foot off.”

  Stein swore under her breath and started backpedaling away. Standing nearly in front of the hatch that was about to open, Bruce crouched under the threshold, grabbing for his pistol. Stein reached for her own weapon, but with the terminal still in hand, she fumbled it, sending both the terminal and gun spinning away in the darkness. The access hatch opened, casting a dim light on them. A loud buzzing noise, and then a flash of light, as a blue blade shot into the room.

  Blinded, Stein realized she was taking cover behind the thing that was about to be sawed in half. She pushed off, sending herself to the side of the cavity, scrambled for a moment before bouncing again, this time coming to rest on a small ledge directly above the access hatch that had just opened. She blinked, rubbing her eyes with her free hand. The strange, malformed letters shimmered in the center of her vision. Dammit Vlad, this is not the time. She looked down, using her hand to shield the blade from her eyes. Below she could see Bruce prone on the floor, unable to reach his gun, the blade of the torch directly above him. The engineer, still having not seen them, planted the edge of the blade in the disconnect and began sawing through it. Sparks rained down over Bruce, who pressed himself against th
e floor, willing himself to be thinner.

  Suddenly, the fuse torch shut off. “Who’s that?” Stein heard the voice ask from the threshold, presumably confused as to why an idiot would be lying on the floor in front of a fuse torch. Beneath her, she watched as the torch was withdrawn from the entryway and was replaced with a head and pair of shoulders. Seeing her opportunity, Stein pushed herself downward off the ceiling, planting a foot against the back of the engineer’s head. An anguished cry, the engineer fell forward, smacking his face on the threshold of the access hatch. As Stein completed her own only marginally less clumsy dismount, the engineer fell backwards out of the access hatch, swearing loudly. Outside, Stein could hear the other one, sounding exactly as bewildered as she would have been in his position. Scrambling in the low–gravity to regain her feet, she managed to get upright enough to see through the hatch as the uninjured one stared back at her, mouth hanging open. At his feet sat the engineer she had kicked, rubbing the back of his neck, goggles twisted around his face. He looked up and pulled off the goggles. Stein’s mouth fell. Curts. She had just kicked her boss in the head.

  The uninjured one reached for the fuse torch. On all fours, Stein planted and sprang upwards as the blade flared to life and swung murderously back into the cavity. Again, the light and mysterious words blinded her, but growing more comfortable in the cavity, she coolly bounded off the edge of the disconnect clamp and returned to her perch above the door. She blinked and shook her head, squinting downwards. She doubted she would get another chance to jump on anyone’s head again.

  Two shots thundered in the cavity, abusing her senses further. The fuse torch snapped off. Stein blinked, shifting her head around, trying to look around the dancing letters in her vision as Bruce lunged forward. Moving like a torpedo, he slid through the access hatch, pistol in front of him. She heard three more shots as her friend/projectile subdued Curts and his colleague a bit more.

  Her vision finally returning to normal, she dropped down to the floor of the cavity and looked around. Spotting her pistol and terminal, she scooped them up, then looked outside.

  “Do you know who I just shot?” Bruce asked.

  “I do! How’d that feel?”

  “Like nothing. Really disappointing.” He shook his head. “If shooting your boss doesn’t feel awesome, then what else is there to believe in?”

  “A question for the philosophers, buddy.” She poked her head out of the hatch and looked around. The far side of the cavity opened out onto a hallway, running uphill in both directions. They were now in the core, the part of the ship that would actually detach. It looked like the engineering deck, but she hadn’t been up here in years.

  Bruce picked up the fuse torch and smacked it against the wall a couple of times. “Yeah! Escape to Destruction! Let’s go mess something else up.” He spun around in a circle. “Where are we?”

  “The engineering deck, but…”

  “Great! The engineering deck! Let’s go find the reactor and kick it!”

  “Bruce,” she said soothingly, not sure how much of this was an act. “I think our luck is sufficiently pushed.”

  A strangled gasp from down the hall punctuated that thought, Stein turning to watch a wide–eyed naval engineer staring back at her. A pair of shots from Bruce thudded into the wall beside him, which sent him scurrying down the cross–hall he had come from. “No!” she yelled, reaching out of the hatch to grab Bruce’s arm as he set out to chase after him. “Let’s go!”

  He stopped, glaring at her. “I could have got him,” he said, allowing her to pull him back inside the cavity. Once in, he reached back outside and slammed the hatch shut behind him.

  “I know,” she said. “Come on.”

  They bounced across the cavity and out the far side, shutting the hatch on that side as well, hand–tightening down a couple of the fasteners. “You are like my least favorite person right now, you know that?” Bruce said as they ran back the way they had come. “No, Bruce, don’t shoot the guy. Don’t kick the reactor. Thanks a lot, mom.”

  They rounded a corner, Stein pulling to a halt in front of one of the elevators. “Well, because you’ve been such a good boy, I’ll let you use the elevator on the way out,” she said, jabbing the button. Bruce stopped, grabbed her by the wrist and yanked her away. “Hey!” she yelled.

  “They’ll be able to stop us in there,” he said, dragging her towards the stairwell. “Trap us,” he added, giving her a push down the first flight of stairs. She squawked in protest, but floated down the drop elegantly enough in the low–gravity. “Besides, this way is more fun,” he said, leaping down the flight himself.

  Hurling themselves down the stairs became progressively more reckless as they went, and they soon found themselves descending more or less normally, at which point Bruce’s interest in the elevator rose again. There was another problem with that, she realized a few floors later. They were almost directly above the fortified barriers right now — any elevator down to street level would deposit them in the middle of a group of amused security officers.

  They were forced to slow to a tip–toe when they reached the fourth floor. These stairs extended all the way to the four street levels, emptying out to locked doors, emergency exits normally inaccessible to the public. The doors were locked and closed when they had come up this way, but if alarm bells were ever going to ring, this would be the time. And indeed, by the time they reached the second floor and started prying off the loosely fastened grate covering the pressurization duct, voices could be heard not far above them.

  They quickly moved inside the ductwork, Stein gently closing the grate behind her once inside. As quietly as they could, they set out through the substantially–sized ducts, necessary for pressurizing the stairwells in case of fire. More footsteps and shouting from behind them, though thankfully no one saying, “They’re in the ducts!”

  Stein let Bruce take the lead, as he led her downhill, taking an obviously different route than the one they had arrived from. To Stein’s sense of direction, they were heading away from the barricaded doors they wanted to head to. “You did have an escape plan for this, right?” she asked his ass, bobbing and weaving in front of her as the big man crawled away.

  “Oh, yeah,” Bruce replied from somewhere ahead of his ass. “Actually, that reminds me.” He stopped, provoking an unseemly collision and fumbled around in his webbing. “E?” he eventually said into his terminal. “It’s Horatio Q. Pseudonym. We’re on our way out, probably around the Africa–1 area. We could use some big distractions if you’ve got any handy.”

  “Ellen?” Stein asked when he shut the call off. “Aren’t you resourceful?”

  “One of my many traits,” Bruce confirmed, setting into motion again. “Resourceful, irresponsible, gassy, reckless, recklessly gassy…”

  Stein sniffed the air. “Oh, come on.”

  “What?” Bruce stopped, this time Stein managing to halt herself in time. Bruce sniffed the air ahead of her. “I swear that wasn’t me.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “I’m being totally serious. But I think it means we’re close.” Bruce set out again, Stein reluctantly following. The smell got stronger as they went, Stein finally realizing where Bruce was leading her: into the meat farms.

  Bruce stopped again, fidgeting around with something in his webbing. He finally found what he was looking for and rolled onto his back. Shimmying forward a bit more, Stein could see a diffuser directly above him, a faint light trickling down into the ducting. Bruce pressed a tool against the edge of the diffuser and began cutting into the thin metal with the plasma blade. The diffuser itself was far too small for them to pass through, so he spent the next few minutes expanding it. Finished, he pounded his fist a couple of times into the middle of the diffuser, punching his way through the floor above. “Oops. That one was me,” he said.

  “What one was you?” she asked, smelling the answer a moment later. “Oh, come on.”

  Bruce clambered up out of the hole he
had made, then reached down to help Stein through. On her feet again, Stein looked at the meat trees around her, suddenly remembering that she hadn’t seen Mr. Beefy in almost a week. He was just a cute little guy compared to these monsters, who generated the bulk of the ship’s protein. Up close, an orchard full of meat trees was decidedly not very cute.

  “What now?” she asked Bruce, who had wandered down another row of the orchard.

  “Basically, we run for it,” he said. “Hoping of course that they don’t know where we are.”

  This did not turn out to be the case, as they discovered a moment later when the door on the far side of the farm opened up, three security officers streaming in, not asking questions. A flurry of shots just missed Stein as she hurled herself to the floor in a hail of exploding meat, shards of awful confetti raining to the floor around her. A tremendous thump on the far side of the room, Bruce presumably using his stockpile of grenades. Collecting herself, Stein crawled to the end of a row of planters and peeked around a corner. Looking at the door through a tangle of meat trees, she thrust her own pistol out in front of her and crept forward. A helmeted head appeared behind a bench of meat seedlings, and she shot at it, missing, but causing the head to duck back down. A grenade sailed through the air and landed on the far side of the bench, exploding with a thud.

  On the far side of the room, a burst of gunfire. She saw a female security officer standing, pistol blazing, presumably firing at Bruce. As Stein raised her own pistol to fire, a roar from the far corner as an enormous wad of meat charged forward, Bruce taking cover behind it as he ran. The security officer fired wildly, charged particles thumping into the meat uselessly. A fraction of a second later, an awful collision, Bruce, officer, and meat crashing to the floor in a heap. Some more thuds. Stein ran over, her pistol ready, only to see Bruce straddling the now unconscious officer. He looked up at Stein and smiled. “Did you see that?”