by Rod Walker
The doors to the bridge finally came into sight. The bridge was sealed off by a pair of massive, reinforced blast doors, and both of them were closed and locked, the control panel shining red. The purpose of the doors was to seal off the bridge from intruders, and I wondered if Hawkins had managed to trigger them before it was too late. On the other hand, it was also possible that Captain Williams had locked the bridge crew in to keep them out of the way while Ducarti’s men boarded the ship.
Closer to us, on the port side of the corridor, was the door to the emergency generator room. The generator for the computer system would be in there. On the starboard side of the corridor, closer to us, was an external airlock. The lights on the airlock’s control panel were flashing, turning from red to green and back again.
That meant the airlock was cycling.
“Murdock,” I hissed, pointing at the airlock.
Murdock stopped, scowled at me, and then looked at the airlock.
“They’re already here,” he muttered.
“They’ll come through there, won’t they?” I said, wondering if the two of us were going to try to hold them off with our pistols. I didn’t like our odds. Apparently, neither did Murdock.
“I thought they’d cut their way through the hull,” said Murdock. “But if the captain’s letting them in, no need to bother.” He shot a quick look around the corridor. “We can’t stop them. This way! Go!”
I started to say that we could make the generator room at a sprint, and then a hiss came from the airlock, accompanied by the groan of laboring hydraulics.
Someone was opening the airlock from the other side.
I followed Murdock as he ducked into the nearest door on the port side of the dorsal corridor. We ran into a large rectangular room with a long table hosting a pair of computer consoles, and high windows of transparent metal offering a splendid view of the stars. It was the upper observation lounge. In theory, if the navigation computer was destroyed, the navigator could work out our position from the stars. In practice, the senior officers used the room as sort of a club house. Corbin had been in here a few times, but I never had.
“What are we going to do?” I said, looking around for cover and failing to find anything. We could hide under the table, I supposed, which would keep Ducarti’s men from finding us for maybe three seconds. “There’s nowhere to go from here.”
“I know that,” snapped Murdock. “Just close the door and lock it, now!”
That seemed like a good idea, so I hurried to the door and hit the release. It slid shut, and I locked it. The door had a small window at eye level, and as I stepped back, I caught a glimpse of the first of Ducarti’s soldiers.
Ducarti might not have had many men aboard that troop transport, but what his commandos lacked in numbers, they made up for in sheer amount of armaments. The men I saw wore black body armor, layers of ceramic polished to a high sheen to refract and diffuse laser blasts and blunt the impact of kinetic firearms. They had black helmets with visors and air filters, making them look like humanoid insects. I wasn’t an expert on guns, but I knew enough to recognize the kind of rifles the commandos carried: Tanith-Mordecai K7 full-automatics, with long 120-round magazines. They also carried pistols and grenades and things that looked like shaped charges.
We had clearly done the right thing by running. We wouldn’t have lasted five seconds in a firefight with them.
I slipped away from the window. I knew Hawkins and the bridge crew wouldn’t be able to put up a fight either. The crew generally didn’t carry sidearms. I think Hawkins might have had one, but one gun or burst laser pistol was going to be useless against the kind of weapons the invaders were carrying.
“Murdock,” I said.
“Yeah, I know, we’re screwed,” he said. He knelt next to the wall, working on something with his multitool. “They’ll find us here unless we move. Which is what we’re going to do, right now.”
“How,” I started to say, and then Murdock wrenched at the wall. An access panel popped away, revealing one of the narrow maintenance walkways that threaded its way between the inner and outer hulls of the Rusalka.
“Get in,” said Murdock.
“That doesn’t go to the generator room,” I said, hurrying across the lounge.
“It gets us out of here,” said Murdock. “And that’s good enough for now. We can take the access tunnel under the corridor and come up on the other side, get to the generator room that way. Get in!”
He stepped back the access panel, and indicated that I should climb inside. I took a deep breath and squeezed into the narrow maintenance walkway. The floor was metal grillwork, thick coils of wire winding underneath us. Ducts and pipes and more wires hung in racks along the walls, though technically the wall on my right was the inner hull and the wall on my left was the outer hull. It was odd to think that only a meter or so of armored metal separated me from the vacuum on my right, though the inner hull didn’t add all that much thickness.
“Move over,” said Murdock as he followed me inside. He pulled the panel back into place, but since the mounting bolts were on the outside, there was no way he could secure it. He had pocketed the bolts, but the panel wouldn’t stand up to a close investigation. For that matter, if the Socials had the right kind of sensors in their helmets and masks, they would be able to detect us moving between the hulls.
Murdock straightened up with a grunt, and I pressed against the wall again to let him move past me and take the lead. I followed him along the narrow walkway, the dim LED lights throwing tangled shadows against the wires and pipes and ductwork.
“Just a little further,” Murdock muttered. A few yards ahead a cylinder opened in the wall on my left, revealing an access ladder that descended to the next level of maintenance walkways. He gripped the first rung on the ladder and started to swing himself into the shaft.
I grabbed his shoulder. “Wait,” I hissed.
Murdock glared at me, then heard the footsteps below.
He swung back onto the walkway, and just in time, too. The ladder descended five meters to the next deck, which if I remembered right housed the senior crew quarters. About a half second after Murdock got clear, I saw the black-armored form of a Social Party commando stroll past, his K7 cradled in his arms and his finger on the trigger. Another half-second more and he would have seen Murdock. It would have been all-too-easy for him to spray the high-velocity, rubber-coated projectiles the Tanith-Mordecai fired up the ladder.
“How did he get in there so fast?” whispered Murdock. He rubbed his jaw with his free hand, thinking hard. “Wait. That means some of them must’ve gone to the crew quarters at once. Some of them are probably rounding up the crew and herding them into the galley, or somewhere big enough to hold everyone. That would make it easier to kill them all. Just seal the compartment, turn off the air, and wait for everyone to asphyxiate.”
“Now what?” I said. “Is there another way to the generator room?”
Murdock shook his head. “Just this and the main dorsal corridor. Unless we want to go EVA and cut through the hull with a torch, but that’s not an option. Their ship sensors would pick up any external movement.”
“Maybe we can wait here until he passes,” I said.
“There’s not enough time,” said Murdock. “The Socials will start killing the crew as soon as they have control of the ship. If we wait here for more than an hour, we might be the only ones left.”
“Then what do we do?” I said.
“Climb down the ladder and see how many are down there,” said Murdock, much to my disbelief.
I just stared at him.
“You’re lighter than I am,” he pointed out. “You’ll make less noise.”
He had a point. I didn’t like it, but it was still a good one. I sighed, made sure the second pistol’s safety was on, and it jammed it into my belt to join the other. Then I gripped the ladder and went down a few rungs, and then kicked my legs out, bracing my boots against the sides of the shaft while
my hands held a rung. It was like some sort of dangerous workout position, and I couldn’t hold it for very long, but it did permit me to look down into the next deck’s maintenance walkway without anyone seeing me.
I saw the back of the commando a dozen feet away. The man stood motionless, his K7 still cradled in his arms. I couldn’t hear anything coming out of his helmet, but I had the distinct impression he was listening to something over his radio. Maybe Ducarti was giving a speech. Or maybe he was listening to his favorite ship-boarding tunes, I don’t know.
I pulled myself back into the maintenance walkway.
“There’s just the one,” I said. “He’s facing the other way. I think he’s getting orders from someone.”
Murdock nodded. “All right. Set your pistol to maximum.” He shut off the safety on his gun and turned a dial, and I followed suit. A little readout on the back on the gun informed me that at maximum power I would only get sixteen shots off before depleting the power. “Aim for his center of mass, and don’t stop shooting until he goes down. You take the ladder.” I swung back onto the ladder. “I’ll drop down.” Murdock perched on the edge of the shaft. “Ready?”
My mouth suddenly felt dry as dust.
I managed a nod.
Murdock nodded back. “On three. One. Two…”
I gripped my pistol in my right hand, my left holding a rung of the ladder.
“Three!”
I slid down the ladder and Murdock jumped. He landed into the next level about a second before I did, his boots clanging against the grillwork of the floor. The Social Party commando heard it loud and clear, and he spun, bringing up his K7 rifle to fire.
A lot of things happened in a very short time and space, and I remember all of them as clear as day.
I swung my gun towards the commando and fired. A laser-burst pistol is silent, has no recoil, and issues an invisible blast, but firing a handgun while hanging one-handed from a ladder isn’t exactly ideal accuracy. My first blast missed him, and I knew it missed him because a patch of the inner hull behind him glowed white-hot from my gun’s discharge.
Murdock had more skill, or maybe better luck. His first shot hit the commando in the right hip, and the ceramic armor there burned away with a flare of hot fire. The commando staggered, which saved our lives because it threw off his aim. The burst of full-auto gunfire that he directed at us would have cut us in half instead of splattering harmlessly against the wall behind us.
I’d dropped to the walkway and was now in a proper shooting stance, one knee down, both hands wrapped around the pistol’s grip, just the way Nelson had taught me in his endless security drills. I squeezed the trigger again, and this time the blast burned through the armor on the commando’s stomach. Murdock had recovered his balance, and he shot once more, the blast hitting the commando in the chest. I squeezed my trigger a third time, and another hole in the armor appeared next to the one Murdock had made.
One of the blasts had burned through the armor and through the commando’s heart. He staggered forward, bounced off the inner hull, and fell upon his face.
I had just killed my first man. Or helped kill him, anyway, which was the same thing.
I know you’re supposed to feel bad when you kill someone, that it’s supposed to be a shattering experience that gives you nightmares and regrets and maybe post-traumatic stress disorder, but I didn’t feel any of that. I mostly felt furious that he’d shot at us, and annoyed that my first shot had missed him. I suppose I should have felt bad that I had killed someone, but let’s be real. If he had been given the chance, he would have shot me in the head and not blinked an eye, and for all we knew, his friends were getting ready to murder the entire crew.
“Here,” said Murdock, passing me a black pistol he had taken from the dead commando. “Better firepower. We’re going to need it.” The gun was a lot heavier than my burst laser pistol, probably because it held actual projectiles instead of a capacitator. I didn’t know how many rounds a gun like that held. Twenty? However, the safety lever and the trigger were in the same place, so I figured I could use it.
“The collision alarm,” I said as Murdock helped himself to the dead man’s K7.
“Exactly,” said Murdock. “Those rounds hitting the hull will have showed up in the system just the same as debris hitting from the outside. That’s hard-wired into the system, and even Williams couldn’t lock it out.”
“Which means,” I said, “they know exactly where we are now.”
Murdock nodded. “Move. And stop pointing that thing at me! Last thing I need right now is to get shot in the back.”
We hurried down the walkway, the metal grill clanking, the gun’s grip cold and heavy against my hands. At last we came to a T-junction, and Murdock went left around the corner. The corridor terminated in another ladder. If I remembered the ship’s layout properly, we just had to climb up, make our way twenty or thirty meters to the generator room, and Murdock could do a hard reboot of the computer system.
He came to a stop.
I started to ask what was wrong, and then I heard the noises coming from above. Boots clanked on the deck, and I heard the sharp metallic clank as the end of a gun bounced off the wall.
Someone had noticed the collision alarm, and sent more than one Social to investigate.
Murdock spat out a furious curse, raised his K7 up the ladder shaft, and started shooting. The gun’s chattering roar sounded deafening in the enclosed space, the muzzle flash throwing stark shadows against the maze of wiring and pipes on the wall. I heard someone shout above, and then something metallic bounced off the floor near my foot. It was a cylinder of black metal about four inches long, capped on either end, and the commando we had killed had been carrying a bunch of them.
Grenade.
My first thought was that the idiots were blast open a massive hull breach.
My second thought was that the grenade was going to blast open a massive hull breach right after it had finished ripping me to bloody shreds.
I drew back my foot to kick the grenade away, hopefully further down the maintenance walkway.
There was a brilliant flash, and a noise so loud that it seemed to feel it across my entire body. Then something hard slammed into my back and the back of my head, and I realized that I had just hit the wall with considerable force.
I felt the metal grillwork of the floor pressing into my face, and then everything went black.
Chapter 5: Hardball Negotiation From the Weaker Position
I was pretty hazy for a while after that.
I think I dreamed. Like, fever dreams, you know? Everything was all disjointed and out of place. For a while I thought Sergei and were working on the Rusalka’s maintenance drones, except that didn’t make sense because Sergei was dead and had been dead before I had ever set foot upon her.
Then I was talking to my mother. We were standing at a colony Rusalka had visited a few trips back, a hellish desert world only habitable near the poles. She stood in the blazing sun and was eagerly lecturing me about the future, but then, without warning, she melted in the sun, her skin and muscle and fat turning to burning slime and sliding from her bones. She stood in front of me, still talking, even though she was nothing but a blackened skeleton. Then the desert caught fire, burning the way that building in New Chicago had burned the day the bomb had gone off, and I heard her screaming for me out of the flames.
I screamed with her.
There were a half-dozen more nightmares. I don’t remember them all, which is probably just as well. For a while I had the sensation of floating. Or I was being carried. Maybe the explosion that had killed Mom and Sergei and God knows how many others had thrown me into the air and I was flying… until I crashed into ground and splattered like a package of hamburger dropped from a balcony. For a while, I was convinced that Ducarti’s bomb had also destroyed the Rusalka, that the ship was careening out of control into one of NR8965’s stars, which was why I felt so hot.
Then I felt something
cool and hard underneath me. It felt nice.
Angry voices began to echo in my ears, which was rather less nice. It seemed someone was having a loud argument nearby, accompanied by a lot of cursing. I heard something beeping. An instrument panel? No, I recognized the sounds. They were from the various stations on the bridge. That was it. I was lying on the metal floor of the ship’s bridge.
One of the angry voices got louder. Maybe they were angry that the ship had crashed into the star and melted the crew? That didn’t make sense.
“Where is the key?” said a man’s voice. That didn’t make any sense either, but after a moment my scrambled brain recognized the voice. It belonged to Thomas Williams, the captain of the Rusalka… and the Social Party traitor.
“What are you talking about, you moron?” snarled another voice. It sounded like John Murdock. “What key? You locked the computer yourself. The boy doesn’t even know who he is! Look at him!”
Wait. Murdock was dead. He had gone into the maintenance walkway, and one of the commandos had had thrown a grenade down the ladder shaft. The explosion in that enclosed space would have killed him.
And me. I remembered that I had been with him. The grenade exploded right near me. That meant I should be dead, too. Only, as near as I could tell, I wasn’t.
Huh. Guess that had been a stun grenade, not a fragmentation one.
Then the memories of what had led up to the explosion rushed back into my head, and I couldn’t help groaning. Everything hurt. With some effort, I forced my eyes open.
I was right. I was lying on the deck, and I really was on the Rusalka’s bridge. I saw four Social commandos standing guard, as motionless as statues in their combat armor, their black facemasks reflecting the blinking lights from the bridge consoles. Hawkins and the other bridge crewers were on their knees, their hands held behind their heads. They were all lined up in a row; one long burst from a K7 could kill them all, one after the other. Murdock was kneeling away from the others, and Captain Williams stood over him, a projectile pistol in his right hand and a look of livid fury on his face.