The gun chirped. He spit a chunk of meal bar out and rolled behind the gun, spotting the bright red arrow on the edge of the screen and rapidly panning the gun to the right, chasing the arrow. No overshooting it this time, the arrow changing to a red reticule in the center of his screen. It was the roof of a building in the garden well, covered in rooftop shrubs, swaying in a slight breeze. There. The motion of the foliage highlighted the stillness of the long rectangular object concealed within.
He tagged the gun, then began tracking to the left, already anticipating the smart rifle’s response. Only the second time around, but already much, much faster. “I got you this time,” he hissed and breathed once more. He settled the crosshairs on the blue reticule.
§
Griese laid on the ground, covered in an IR cloak, itself covered in a piece of gray felt roughly matching the shade of the roof surface he was lying on, part of a rather attractive rooftop garden. He breathed in, slowly, held it, then began to exhale, stopping half way through. Everything was still. He pulled the trigger, hearing the crack, feeling the gun smack his shoulder in response.
He immediately rolled out of the way, abandoning the gun, ducking behind the edge of the planter. Three seconds passed before he felt the planter shake beside him, accompanied by another sharp cracking sound and a cloud of dirt and gun parts raining down on him. They were way quicker this time! Three more seconds passed, the longest three seconds Griese had ever felt. Another sharp crack, much closer, coming from the other side of the roof.
“Got him!” Ellen shrieked. Not doubting his wife, but knowing he wouldn’t get a ‘told ya so’ if she was wrong, Griese crawled behind the planters along the edge of the roof until he reached the safety of the penthouse. He sat up, back against the wall, and looked at the shrapnel littering the roof, the shrapnel that had very nearly been parts of him.
He had been using a dummy rifle, cobbled together with the help of a team of amused fabrication nerds over the past few days. It had turned out to be pretty straightforward, a combination of three of the linear motors used by the ship’s elevator systems. Not quite the same as a real smart rifle; although it could still whip a projectile at a hell of a good speed, it wasn’t going to hit anything it was aimed at, lacking the advanced optics and tracking software that made smart rifles actually useful.
It had taken another read through the manual to figure out what had happened their last time out. Helot had his own smart rifle and sent it hunting for them. The wise plan at that point would be to hang up their rifle and never speak of it again. The dumb plan, baiting their hunter into exposing himself and then shooting him back, was, well, dumb. But it was an interesting kind of dumb.
Griese would have probably gone for something less interesting if he was deciding for himself, but Ellen was in one of her not uncommon moods where she wasn’t going to be talked out of things. So, it was going to happen. And if it was going to happen, then he wasn’t going to let her fill the dangerous role.
“You okay?” Griese asked, still not seeing his wife return from the supposedly safe role. Finally, Ellen appeared around the corner, dragging the smart rifle carelessly behind her. She slumped to the ground beside him.
“I got him.”
“I heard. Are you okay?”
She shook her head. “I got him.” Her eyes were watering. He reached out and took her into his arms. “I shouldn’t have looked,” she said, starting to shake. “But I did. I got him.”
“It’s okay. He was going to do the same to us. They’re all trying to do the same to us. That’s what you said. They started it.”
She nodded, now crying uncontrollably. “I know. I know. It’s just…” Griese held her tight as she let go with another full body shiver. “I got him.”
“They started it, they started it, they started it,” Griese said. “Say it.”
Ellen gasped, a choked intake of air. “They started it, they started it, they started it.”
“Just keep saying it.”
“They started it, they started it, they started it.” More shaking, accompanied by a long, noisy sniffle. “They started it, they started it, they…”
§
It was the most spacious room on the ship that wasn’t the garden well. Enormous ductwork hung overhead in the center of the room containing the primary air handlers. Inhaling air from the massive return vents mounted on the end of the garden well, the primary air handlers filtered, treated, and redistributed it throughout the ship via another braided set of massive, room–sized ducts.
Stein bounced across the floor of the room to the fan control center and examined the controls there. Kinsella’s paranoia had been spot on; from his cozy little nest in the ship’s asshole, Helot could shut off every other critical system aboard the ship. Heat pumps, circ fans, carbon dioxide scrubbers, everything. He had a gun pressed against their head, and the only reason no one had noticed it yet was because it was too big to see.
During the Sunset Surprise, as the feeds were now calling it, she had examined her own terminal to see how Helot had done it. It hadn’t taken long to find the settings for the garden well lighting controls, nor to find out that their regular programming had been overridden by a custom schedule. A custom schedule she was prevented from changing, according to the error message identifying that access for that system was limited to Curts.
Overriding such a block from afar was impossible. But the very nature of the ship’s systems meant that anyone physically at a piece of equipment could lock it out from the ship’s central controls, useful for preventing a fan from turning itself on when a technician had his arm in it. Normally, this isolation functionality was used to isolate a unit in the off position, but there was no reason it couldn’t be used to keep equipment permanently on, which Stein had spent most of the morning doing in each of the light towers. She did the same again on each of the main air handling fans. “My ship, now,” she muttered.
She stepped away from the controls and floated down to the end of the massive room, where the return air was run through the carbon dioxide scrubbers. Cartridges packed with engineered life, which sucked up electricity and carbon dioxide, turning it into oxygen and some kind of smelly, sugary crap which got shunted to farms on the first level. She locked out these as well, even if she had a hard time imagining Curts being crazy enough to mess with the ship’s supply of oxygen. That said, the company Curts was keeping these days seemed to be in no short supply of crazy.
She took the side door out of the air handlers into the auxiliary reactor room. It was deserted, just as she had expected — Max was a naval officer, and would have certainly been recalled to the aft before the detachment. Which stung a bit — she had liked Max.
She sat down in the chair behind the primary control panel for the reactor. She had never driven the thing before and spent a few minutes trying to familiarize herself with its controls. She was a little surprised to see that she had full access to the system — she had assumed she would be locked out of the naval equipment. Helot must have unlocked the system prior to the botched disconnect, so that the leftovers could tend their own power supply. But even with access, most of it was incomprehensible to her, all flux ratios and Planck whatsits. One screen was dominated by a graphic of an extremely important looking donut, pulsing with intent. The reactor was still obviously operating; Curts hadn’t dared shut this off from afar, if he even could. And she could find no way to turn on any safety interlocks to stop him from doing so. She slumped back in the chair; she was way out of her depth here.
She looked at the reactor embedded in the floor, physically and functionally opaque to her. If Helot was successful, if her loser half of the ship was going to carry on drifting through space, they would have to find someone who knew how the reactor worked. How often does the thing need to be repaired? She remembered the last time she was here, with the school tour and the little wiener kid. There had been a couple of naval technicians here then, working on the thing. She wouldn’t know
where to begin with something like that. What kind of laser–genius did you need to be to spin wrenches on an antimatter reactor?
“What were they doing on this thing, anyways?” she asked aloud, pivoting in place. She recalled that they were mostly just standing there, not in itself an unusual thing for a technician to do and something that she hadn’t paid much attention to at the time. Thinking back on it now, she guessed they were waiting for the tour group to leave before they got back to work.
Purely to satisfy her own sense of curiosity, Stein then tried to figure out what they had been working on. Pacing around the room, she tried to get her bearings, tracing out the general layout of the reactor. The auxiliary fuel pods were behind the far wall. Fuel lines would probably run beneath her feet. She bent down and started prying up the floor panels.
She found it under the third panel she tried. The part they had replaced was sitting in a cavity on the floor, humming slightly, fuel lines extending out either side to the fuel tank and the reactor. A pressure regulator or perhaps a throttle. It otherwise looked wholly unremarkable, just another object in the room that she only vaguely understood.
But even to her untrained eye, there was something about it that looked a bit odd. There wasn’t any dust or grime on it, like the rest of the cavity, which made sense if it was a new part, just replaced. But the more that she looked at it, the less new it looked. It looked more like it had simply been wiped down recently. Out of curiosity, she withdrew her terminal and inspected the component under a variety of wavelengths. It was old. She could see corrosion spots along one of the fittings and stress marks along its entire length. Maybe they hadn’t replaced it yet? But then why wipe it down? No, they had definitely been working on it recently. There were fresh tool marks on the fittings.
Stein sat back and folded her legs under herself. So, had they replaced the existing pressure regulator with a worn out one? Why? Given the sinister plots already in progress at that point, she didn’t put a lot of faith in it simply being a coincidence. Those were naval technicians, acting under Helot’s orders. Were they trying to sabotage this reactor? She couldn’t see the point in Helot ordering that. She tilted her head and looked at the pressure regulator again. Maybe they needed the one that had been here. Stein ran a finger along the regulator as she tried to piece together her theory.
The navy guys hadn’t been repairing anything — they had been taking spare parts from here and moving them to the aft. To replace theirs? That made sense — the bow and aft reactors must have been nearly identical. And they might not have had time to make their own replacement parts. Everything in this room must have been incredibly tricky to manufacture. The aft core would have some fabrication capacity, just maybe not enough to fab up another pressure regulator in time for the detachment.
Well, there’s a thought. If the aft reactors were broken, Helot couldn’t detach, not if he liked electricity, or propulsion, or all those other good things antimatter reactors did. Stein drummed her fingers on the floor, thinking through the details. Destroying the reactors completely was out of the question, assuming she didn’t want to annihilate the entire ship. It would have to be some kind of carefully planned sabotage, enough to disable, but not destroy. Kick them, in Bruce’s terms. Then, with the only source of spare parts a long way from where Helot could get his hands on them, Kinsella and his idiot brigade would have a tremendous amount of leverage. Certainly enough to bargain for a better seating plan. A seating plan which might have room for the girl who came up with the idea.
A beep from her terminal startled her. A call from Dr. Berg. An annoyed sound passed her lips before she slapped the terminal, taking the call.
“Hi, Laura. How’s your arm doing?”
She blinked in surprise and looked down, realizing she was holding the terminal in her damaged right arm. “Still hurts, I guess. But I’d stopped even noticing.” She flexed the arm in its healing wrap, testing its strength.
“Want to come down and have me check up on it? We can also, uh, talk about that other thing.”
What other thing? Stein remembered their chat about her parents, and felt her shoulders slump.
“I’ve found something you might be interested in. But, uh, we should talk in person. It’s kind of weird.”
Now, I really don’t want to know. She sighed and looked around the reactor room, deciding she had saved the ship enough for one day. “Fine. I’ll be there in a bit.”
§
The light towers faded out, legitimately this time, although it was a nervous sunset for much of the ship. Indeed, the streets were all but empty as Bruce approached the entrance of an apartment building in the mid–well. Far enough north that it should have avoided the fighting, the building still sported several broken windows and a shattered front door, the result of an impromptu session of target practice by Kinsella’s idiots, or perhaps just some spectacularly inaccurate cover fire.
But with no one actively shooting at it now, Bruce crossed the street and stepped inside, carefully bypassing chunks of shattered glass. Making his way up the back staircase to the third floor, he found the suite he was looking for at the end of the hall. He rang the buzzer. A formality, as he was certain this particular apartment was empty. Not waiting for a response, he cast one quick look over his shoulder, then with a twist of his arm, allowed the plasma cutter concealed in his sleeve to drop into his hand. Pressing it against the side of the frame, he cut into the lock of the door — there was no subtle way into this particular apartment. With a pop, the lock gave way. He tugged the door out of the way and stepped inside.
Tidy and dull — just like the owner. He clipped his terminal to his jacket, the value–scanning application running, and began looking around. Curts would have had plenty of time to move all of his most valuable belongings long before the detachment process. But there was always the chance he had forgotten something — he had been living here right up until the day of the detachment. Besides which, there was nowhere else Bruce could burgle right now. Whatever ethical lapses he had, looting during a war wasn’t one of them. But he felt pretty comfortable stealing Curts’ stuff. “Assuming the prick has anything worth stealing,” he said, looking at a crystal statue of a duck which the terminal was not impressed with.
He wondered how Curts was doing. How involved had he been in the detachment failure? Maybe his boss was in trouble with his boss. Having to scramble around now to find some new way to split the ship apart. Hunched over a desk, sweat dripping off his brow, furiously trying to invent a huge crowbar.
The thought of Curts’ slick forehead made him remember the little maintenance robot he had left behind in the aft, running around with its micro–planer. He supposed it would have run out of lubricant by now, if it was still alive. He should check on it. He flopped down on the couch and called up the robot’s controls on his terminal.
An image appeared of a sidewalk, shot from a sensor about ankle high. He was impressed; he had been certain someone would have caught the little guy and put a shot through its brain box by now. It was hard to tell where it was, but the robot was still moving, so he sat and watched for a while. There was a sign post. Blue. Still on the fourth level, then.
Amused, Bruce sat and watched the robot for the next hour or so, hoping it would see something interesting. He had given it a few targets — spots close but not too close to the barricades, the base of escalators, and so on — but had told it to self–navigate to those locations using its own judgment. The robot would be biased to do most of its traveling in the belowground passageways, to keep it out of traffic, but spent at least some of its time above ground. Bruce got a few distant looks at barricades and security troops but nothing else of interest.
There was no way to check the status of the anti–friction planer, but Bruce was certain it was out of lube. He didn’t have any other bright ideas for the robot right now, but with it still alive, decided there was no point letting it run around above ground any more than it had to. After spending
a couple seconds looking at a map, Bruce took over manual control of the robot and instructed it to drop the tool. He then directed it to turn at the next corner and go down the street, towards the nearest access point for the belowground crawlways.
On the screen, where a barricade should have been, there was nothing, just the last rays of sunlight setting in the garden well. He stopped the robot, confused, zooming in, finally seeing the dispersed fortifications staggered a block out into the well. It was America, the site of the hilariously one–sided battle from a few days earlier.
Now, why are they hanging their asses way out in the garden well? It seemed far more vulnerable than the other barricades, all well back from the garden well. He spun the robot around, looking back down America. As he did, it panned past the ornate doors of the Bridge. He stopped, getting it.
They were protecting the Bridge. And he knew why. The Bridge was one of the few places on the ship where you could walk into a room at street level and from there move up to the fifth floor and beyond. You could even walk right up to one of the fucking disconnects. Bruce groaned, recalling his earlier adventure.
Absentmindedly, he spun the robot around, moving it back into the safety of the crawlways. Done, he leaned back on the couch, quietly impressed with Helot’s tactics. There were a half–dozen ways to infiltrate the aft from within the Bridge; it was no wonder they’d secured it. Which was also why they weren’t moving into the garden well anywhere else. Other than the elevators and a handful of emergency staircases — all already behind the barricades — the Bridge was the only place in the aft you could move upstairs from the fourth level.
His body stiffened. Except for the wall–punchers!
Now, that was a hell of an interesting idea. Getting to it would be a little stupid. But stupid in a fun way. Stein wouldn’t go for it, not at first. He would have to bring it up delicately. Seduce her with the stupidity. Tease her with it.
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