by Rod Walker
“The Socials usually do,” said Nelson.
Murdock shook his head. “You should have warned us, Rovio. You shouldn’t have gotten us involved in this sort of thing.”
“I didn’t know it was this sort of thing,” said Corbin. He sighed. “If I had known Williams was with the Socials, I wouldn’t have risked this. I thought we would just transport the grain to people who could decode it, and that if a troublemaker like Ducarti showed up, we would blow his ship away. All our lives are at risk, and I’m sorry about that, but right now it’s more important to decide what we’re going to do to get out of this mess.”
“Sure,” I said. “So what are we going to do now?”
“We start,” said Corbin, “by making a phone call. Still got that helmet, Nikolai?”
“Yeah,” I said, holding it up. I still had it in my left hand.
“Good,” said Corbin. “Nelson, Murdock, watch the door.”
“Oh, so you’re in charge now?” said Murdock.
Corbin stared him down. “I’m trained for this sort of thing. But if you have any bright ideas, I’m listening.”
Murdock stared at him for a moment, then made a rude gesture, but he turned to watch the door back to the dorsal corridor. Nelson did the same, but without comment, complaint, or gesture. Corbin nodded, then knelt next to one of the consoles, pulling open the access panel, and started to disconnect some wires.
“Open up the back of that helmet, Nikolai,” said Corbin. “There should be a release latch at the base, and inside you’ll see an access jack for the helmet’s computer and radio.”
I nodded, fumbled with the helmet for a bit, and popped open the access panel. The helmet had a surprising amount of electronics packed into it, including a nanocomputer, a radio, and a HUD for the visor. Corbin passed me a slender cable, and I plugged it into a jack in the helmet’s computer. The display on the console flickered, and suddenly switched to a command line interface for the helmet.
“Williams has got the ship’s system locked down,” said Corbin, typing a string of commands, “so we’ll borrow the helmet’s computer. There’s a scrambler in this console, so when Ducarti gets the call, he won’t be able to pinpoint the location… ah, here we go.”
He hit a button, and Ducarti’s voice crackled over the speakers.
“Report, X-22,” he ordered, his irritation plain. “Report in! Have you disposed of the operator and the boy yet? If you have, join the others in cargo bay five. They’re having some trouble with the robotics there, and they require reinforcement. Once that’s dealt with, we need to find Corbin Rovio. The reactionary is hiding somewhere on the ship–”
“Captain Ducarti! You’ve found me,” said Corbin. “I bet that was easier than you thought. Guess you’re historically inevitable after all!”
For a moment there was silence.
“Corbin Rovio,” said Ducarti, his voice calm and self-assured. “The traitor himself. You could have risen high in the Party, you know. Your brother, at least, understood the value of loyalty. Had he lived–”
“But he didn’t. He blew himself up,” said Corbin. “He was loyal to the wrong people.”
“I’m sure you know all about that,” said Ducarti. “Your nephew just learned that the hard way.”
I blinked and looked at Corbin, who raised a finger to his lips.
“What do you mean?” said Corbin.
“He was loyal to you, and he choose poorly,” said Ducarti. “Alas, the brave young fool refused to give up your secrets. So I had my men dump him out the stern airlock, right into the drive trail. I understand he begged and screamed for his life until the end.”
Corbin gestured to me as Ducarti continued his nasty little monologue. I looked at him and saw him mouth the words “be annoying” while pointing at the console.
Annoying? Right. I definitely could manage that!
“Hey, moron,” I addressed the console. “Remember me?”
Ducarti suddenly fell silent.
“I have to ask you one thing,” I said. “That accent. All those rolling Rs. Is that fake? I mean, it has to be fake. Do the revolutionary babes fall for that or something? See, I think you’re not taking it far enough. Have you ever considered changing it up, you know, just a rrrrittle, for the rrrradies?”
Someone burst out laughing in the background. I wasn’t sure if it was Hawkins, a bridge crewer, or one of Ducarti’s men.
“Ah, Rovio the Younger” said Ducarti. “I suppose that explains where you got that radio. Ran off to rescue your little nephew, did you? How very bourgeois of you, Corbin.”
“You can call stopping an attempted murder whatever you like,” said Corbin. “But I know you Social Party psychopaths enjoy killing men, women, and children for no reason. If you were sane or competent, you wouldn’t have joined the Party. Of course, indulging in your lunatic murder sprees sometimes has unforeseen consequences. If you hadn’t killed off all your competent geneticists, we wouldn’t be having this conversation…”
“Save your breath,” said Ducarti. A little of the smooth polish had come off his voice. “If you’re so very keen to save lives, Rovio the Elder, I suggest you surrender yourself and give me the code sequence to the junk DNA. If you don’t, I will order my men to start executing your fellow crew members, one every minute, until you come to your senses.”
“I wouldn’t do that, Ducarti,” said Corbin.
“Oh? And just why not?”
“Because I don’t know the decryption key,” said Corbin. “No one on the ship does. That’s just basic operational security, if that isn’t too bourgeois for you. Also, I should warn you that you’re going to have much bigger problems in about seven hours or so.”
“Such as what?” Ducarti demanded, suspicious. He was starting to sound rattled now.
Corbin grinned mercilessly at the console. “You really should have shut down the Vanguard’s hypermatter reactor. Too late now.”
There was silence for a full thirty seconds on the console.
“I see,” Ducarti said at last. “Very clever, Rovio. I deduce that you’ve removed the processor from the Rusalka’s regulator?”
“We seem to have a bit of standoff,” said Corbin. “Boarding a hostile ship with your hyper-reactor still running isn’t the greatest idea.”
“We will simply shut down our hypermatter reactor,” said Ducarti.
I couldn’t help but laugh aloud at that. “Good Lord, did you ever even read a technical manual, Ducarti?”
Corbin smiled and gestured for me to continue.
“See, once a hypermatter reactor is entangled, it can’t be shut down,” I said. “The only way to stop the reaction is to reactivate the regulator on the first reactor, bring it back to the green zone, then shut them both down.” I remembered one of the taunts Ducarti had thrown at me back on New Chicago, the day he had murdered my mother and my brother. “If you had bothered to learn the skills of a mere tradesman in service of our oppressive overlords or whatever, you might not have done something so stupid.”
“So I have an offer for you,” said Corbin. “Evacuate your men back to the Vanguard and your troopship and get off the Rusalka. Dump your weapons, and move off to a distance of five million kilometers. Then I reinstall the regulator, and you can depart with your lives.”
“A fine offer,” said Ducarti, some of the mocking poise returning to his voice. “Unfortunately, you have overlooked one small detail. The troopship does not have a hyperdrive, and therefore no hypermatter reactor. We will simply board it and move to a safe distance before both vessels explode.”
I blinked. No hyperdrive? Then how had the troopship gotten here? The Vanguard must have towed it.
“This system is deserted,” said Corbin. “If you blow up both hyperdrive-capable ships in the system, you’ll be stranded here a long time before someone finds you. Certainly longer than your supplies and life support will last.”
“Another Social Party vessel is scheduled to pass through NR8965 in
ten days to check on the status of our mission,” said Ducarti. “Ten days is a long time, but we will be long gone before anyone realizes what happened to Rusalka. I would, of course, prefer to decode the junk DNA in the hold and learn the identity of our traitors, but destroying the ship will be a satisfactory outcome. Certainly it would cause a great deal of economic distress to the nest of reactionary traitors upon New Sibersk.”
“You could simply surrender now and save everyone a lot of trouble,” said Corbin. “A lot of lives, too.”
Ducarti laughed. “No, Corbin, I need to do nothing at all. You’ve signed your own death warrant. All I need to do is wait. You may have entangled the hypermatter reactor, but I have control of the Rusalka’s computer, and without that you can do nothing else. All you can do is wait for the ship to explode. Now goodbye, Corbin Rovio. I leave you to die in the knowledge that the Revolution has defeated you.”
The connection ended with a burst of static.
“Well, that was unexpected” I said. “And disappointing. Now what?”
“Yeah, good question,” called Murdock from the doors. “Any bright ideas before we all die?”
“I have a plan,” said Corbin. I doubt the others believed him any more than I did.
“And if it doesn’t work?” said Murdock.
“Then I have a fallback plan,” said Corbin.
“That’s such a huge relief,” I said.
“You’re too young to have such a smart mouth, Nikolai” said Corbin. “Listen, all of you. Our first objective is to save our lives. To do that, we have to move fast. We’ve got to storm the bridge, overpower Ducarti’s men there, and take Captain Williams prisoner. Once we have him, we can force him to unlock the computer, and then we can blast the Vanguard and the troopship to pieces.”
“He won’t want to give up the codes,” said Nelson.
Murdock snorted. “Then we’ll hit him with a wrench until he changes his mind.”
“Won’t Ducarti just shoot Williams first?” I said.
“Probably,” said Corbin. “But Hawkins has some unlock codes that should work once we free him.”
“Really?” said Murdock, scowling as he watched the corridor. “I thought only the captain has those codes.”
“Normally, yes,” said Corbin, “but I have some friends in the home office at Starways, and I persuaded them to give Hawkins more access than usual.”
Murdock snorted. “Friends?”
“Ducarti might shoot them both if he realizes it,” I said. “He’ll kill anyone who gets in his way.”
“If he does,” said Corbin, “then the backup plan is to kill as many of the commandos as possible and seize control of the Vanguard and their troopship. If we do that, I can stabilize our hypermatter reactor and keep the ships from exploding. After that, we’ll have to send some men aboard the Vanguard to get help, since the computer will still be locked, but we’ll have enough supplies to wait here for a long time.”
“God knows we have enough grain,” I said. “We could grind some flour and make some bread.”
“That’s pretty thin, Rovio,” said Murdock. “They’re better armed and armored than we are, and they have control of the ship.”
“We have more of us,” said Corbin, “and they don’t have control of the ship. They’ve locked the ship, and if they unlock it for any reason, we can get back in with Murdock’s access. And we know the ship better.”
“Or we’ll all get killed,” said Murdock.
Corbin shrugged. “Ducarti would kill us all anyway. Are you in or not? If you are, we need to move now.”
Murdock blew out a long breath. “It’s not as if I have any better ideas. All right, Secret Agent Rovio, what’s our move?”
“Hit the bridge, rescue Hawkins, capture Williams, and preferably kill the enemy leadership in the process,” said Corbin.
“They’ve got the dorsal corridor buttoned up pretty tight,” said Nelson. “If we try and charge up the corridor to the bridge, they’ll mow us down.”
“If we go to the ventral corridor,” said Murdock, “they’ll have men down there securing the sensor arrays and the weapons grid.”
“Undoubtedly,” said Corbin, “but I doubt they’ll have many men in the cargo bays themselves.”
“Ducarti said they had a problem in bay five,” I said.
“That’s the port side of the ship,” said Murdock. “We had better take the starboard side.”
“Or,” said Corbin, “we take the port bays and catch Ducarti’s men from behind while they’re distracted. Some of the damage control team was down in bay five when Williams locked us out of the computer. If they’re holding up Ducarti’s men, we have a chance to hit them from behind.”
“Aren’t the bays in vacuum?” I said.
“They are,” said Corbin.
“Wonderful,” said Murdock, looking more sour than usual.
“The equipment lockers have suits,” said Corbin, “and the locks aren’t computer-controlled. We’ll cut across bay seven and see what’s happening in bay five. Nelson, Murdock. Barricade the doors, and then we’ll take the maintenance walkways to the port-side cargo bays. Nikolai, give them a hand getting the doors closed.”
Nelson handed me something, and I realized that it was a folded gun belt, with a holster for my stolen machine pistol. I made sure that the safety was on—if I shot myself in the leg with that thing, the bullet would shatter my femur and turn my leg to hamburger. On the plus side, I would bleed to death pretty quickly, but then, it was too soon to give up hope. We still had more than six hours before the ship vaporized, after all.
I donned the belt, holstered the gun, and helped Nelson and Murdock pull the door to the dorsal corridor closed, and then heaped equipment cases in front of it. When Ducarti and his men came to kill us, it would take them at least a few minutes to get through the door. Given the large quantities of flammable and toxic materials flowing through coolant pipes and conduits in the floor and ceiling, I doubted he would dare to use explosives to blow the door open.
Once the door was blocked, we headed single-file into the maintenance walkways. Corbin took the front, and I took the back, not that it would have done me any good. The rounds from those Tanith-Mordecai K7s were designed for use in ships and would fragment upon hitting metal, but would punch through all seven off us without much difficulty. Fortunately, we did not encounter any commandos in the walkways, and after descending three levels, we reached the access airlock to the port side cargo bays.
“Only four of us are going to fit in that airlock at a time,” said Murdock.
I opened the equipment locker and started passing out the pressure suits. They weren’t that heavy, thanks to their handy carbon-weave material, and would fit over our clothes. Boots and gauntlets had pressure seals, as did the helmet with its clear visor. A heavy pack held the supply of air and the life support equipment. Unfortunately, the suits were bright orange. That helped rescuers find injured crewers in an emergency, but it would also make us easy targets for Ducarti’s men.
“I’ll go first,” said Nelson. “You, you, and you with me.” He pointed at the three techs. “We’ll make sure the airlock is secure and then bring the others.”
We suited up and took a moment to synchronize the suits’ radios. Fortunately, each suit had its own on-board computer, disconnected from the main system, so they could still communicate with each other. I pulled on my own suit, following the directions I had memorized in various technical manuals. The gauntlets and the boots locked to the cuffs, producing an airtight seal, and slung my gun belt around my waist, the fake black leather stark against the orange material of the suits. Once I was done, I locked the helmet in place, and the suit booted up. Low-resolution letters and numbers appeared on the suit’s cheap HUD, and after a moment, all systems flashed green.
“Ready?” crackled Corbin’s voice in my ears.
“Aye aye!” We acknowledged him, and Nelson and the three techs went through the airlock first. Ne
lson signaled all clear on the other side, so I followed Corbin and Murdock into the airlock. The door closed with a thump, and I felt the humming vibration as the pumps sucked all the air out of the little chamber. A light flashed red on the control panel, and Corbin hit a button.
The door slid open in silence, thanks to the new vacuum, and we stepped into cargo bay seven.
It was huge. Like I’ve said, the Rusalka could carry half a million tons of cargo, and all that cargo had to go somewhere. I’ve seen pictures of cathedrals upon other worlds, and cargo bay seven looked like a massive cathedral of dull steel, the ceiling far overhead, the walls lined with metal racks. Hundreds of shipping containers filled most of the space, stacked in orderly rows, each one stamped with the official seal of New Sibersk. There was enough grain to feed tens thousands of people for months stacked all around me, and as I looked at it, I felt a flicker of admiration for the exiles on New Sibersk. They had taken their list of Social Party sympathizers and hidden it inside quadrillions of kernels of grain upon the ship.
It was a brilliant idea, but it was a pity they hadn’t thought to split up the shipment between multiple ships.
“This way,” said Corbin. We started down the central aisle, the stacks of shipping containers rising overuse like cubical metal hills. Bright arc lights had been mounted on the ceilings and the walls, but the bay was so vast that the lights only made the place seemed gloomy, as shadows struck curious poses everywhere.
Overhead, bolted to the distant ceiling, hung a variety of tracks and tubes. A massive cargo handling drone hung from the tracks, looking like a giant wasp of black metal. A dozen arms and manipulators of various sizes hung from the underside of the drone, and banks of sensors mounted its sides. When Arthur had them programmed properly, they could zip back and forth from the cargo shuttles to the bay proper, stacking the cargo containers as quickly as I had built towers out of toy bricks when I had been a kid.
Except each bay was supposed to have two cargo drones. One was missing.
I looked down, and saw a flash of light from the other end of the bay.