“Are we sure this babe is alone?” asked one of the crew.
“No, we’re not. That’s why I’m not letting us split up. It’s unlikely that there are more than two or three, but you guys in the rear keep a close look out behind us.” There were a few mumbled acknowledgments and he could nearly hear the heads swiveling to look back. He sure hoped he was right about the numbers they faced. Everything pointed to this woman being alone or with only one or two confederates, but it was all speculation. Possibly all wishful thinking.
If it was one of the major powers behind this, then it might very well only be one person. Hebyrna would have found it difficult to smuggle in a whole team. Andera’s other serious rivals, Venance, Eddan, and the Jecovan Republic, might have had more luck in that department, but it still would have been difficult. Security for the expedition had been unusually tight. No, if there was more than one saboteur, it was most likely the plot came from within the Protectorate itself. The Protector and the men who backed the expedition had made more than a few enemies over the years. No, Crawford sincerely wished—for a lot of reasons—that this woman was alone.
He checked the next corridor, the one that led to the bridge, and it seemed to be empty, too. Sheila had informed him that there was no more fire coming from the point defense lasers and that there was no sign of anyone in the gunners’ bubbles. So if she wasn’t manning a turret, she was probably somewhere around…
“Hey! There!”
“It’s her!”
“Look out! Ahhh!”
The shouts came from behind him and he spun around to see the rear of his party under attack. A figure had emerged silently from a side corridor and was blazing away with a laser pistol in each hand. Three of his people were already down and the rest were diving for cover. Well, most of them were. VanVean stood there and took very deliberate aim with his stunner and fired into their attacker point blank.
The figure lurched back a step but did not fall. It turned one of its lasers on VanVean and fired. The beam was hard to see in the bright corridor lighting, but a faint red line momentarily linked the pistol to VanVean. There was a flash and a puff of vapor as part of the man’s vac suit—and the flesh underneath—vaporized. The big man collapsed to the deck. “Greg!” shouted Crawford in dismay.
“Shoot her!” someone was screaming.
“I am! It’s not stopping her!”
Combat armor!
The woman was in combat armor. It wasn’t powered like real battle armor, nor did it have built-in weaponry, but it was almost completely insulated against ordinary stunner bolts. Crawford’s blood went cold when he realized that their weapons would be useless.
God, she’ll slaughter all of us!
“Fall back!” he shouted.
The men, the ones still on their feet, bolted past him. Another tried to scramble away on hands and knees, but the woman shot him in the back and he went down with a cry. Frichette came up beside him, brandishing his dagger—now that could penetrate her armor if he could get close enough to use it. Citrone came on and Crawford could see her clearly through the faceplate of her helmet now. Her eyes were like the camera lenses on some droid; cold, lifeless. He fired his stunner into her and she staggered slightly. The armor wasn’t completely proof against his weapon, but it was enough. He had gotten her attention now; perhaps he could keep it long enough for his men to escape or for Frichette to get close enough to strike. She strode forward and the laser pistol in her right hand swung his way. He fired again, but she stepped over one of the bodies littering the corridor and the laser was pointing right at him now.
Suddenly, the still form of Greg VanVean moved. A huge hand closed around the woman’s ankle and the man surged to his feet. The woman fell forward and for the one instant longer that Crawford could look through her faceplate, her eyes were very human and very large in utter shock. She hit the floor and one of the pistols flew out of her grip. Then VanVean grabbed her ankle in both hands and swung her around one hundred and eighty degrees, like an Olympian with a hammer, and slammed the woman, full force, against the bulkhead. Her other pistol skittered away and her armored form crashed to the deck with an impact Crawford could hear through his helmet. She didn’t move.
VanVean stood there looking slightly puzzled. “Damn, they don’ make saboteurs like they used to,” he groaned. “One good whack an’ they break.”
“Greg, are you all right?”
“Jus’ a scratch. Had worse ‘n this a hunnert times…” But the man was swaying on his feet. The lasers didn’t actually do all that much damage compared to a lot of weapons, but even when they did not hit anything vital, they tended to send the victim into shock. VanVean was clearly on his way.
Still, he was alive. Crawford moved to see if that was the case with the other casualties. Amazingly, they all were. Two were not in bad shape, but two more were unconscious and clearly in need of attention. VanVean slowly slid down the bulkhead into a sitting position, all the while insisting he was fine.
“Jameson, get over here with that medkit,” commanded Frichette. The next several minutes were taken up in bandaging wounds that, fortunately, were mostly cauterized, and injecting stabilization drugs. Crawford commed Neshaminy to report his status and they informed him that another shuttle would be dispatched with reinforcements along with Doctor Birringir as soon as possible.
Once things were under control, Crawford looked around, half in a daze. The adrenaline rush was fading and he really wanted a nap. But there was no time for that. He collected the two laser pistols the woman had dropped, kept one and gave the other to Frichette, who’d been standing guard over Citrone with his dagger. He then pulled the helmet off the mysterious woman. She was alive, but unconscious. A bandage on her head had come loose and she was bleeding slightly. Not knowing what else to do, he had Pawli Samms use some wires from his tool kit to tie the woman’s arms and legs and left her for the doctor. With a groan, he turned and headed for the bridge, Frichette and the others on his heels.
“That was wonderful the way you stood up to her, sir,” said Frichette. “That was really brave.”
“Not brave. I was too scared to run. But you did a good job, yourself, Ensign. You stood there, too, with just that zig-sticker of yours.”
“Too scared to run,” said Frichette and they both laughed.
“Careful now, the bridge is just ahead.”
He was nervous, but not really expecting to encounter anyone else. Surely if the woman had allies they would have attacked at the same time she did. Still, he held the pistol at the ready as the hatch slid open.
The bridge was empty.
He sighed with relief. He supposed that there could be other enemies lurking somewhere, but it seemed even less likely now. “Pawli, take two men and go down to the cold-sleep compartment. See the status board, there? It will show you the route. Don’t touch anything once you’re there, but take a look around. See if there are manual revival buttons on the capsules like ours have. And stay sharp, we don’t know if that woman was alone.”
“Right away, boss.” The man selected two others and departed with Crawford’s laser pistol. Except for the two men he had left with the wounded, Crawford now only had Frichette and one other man with him. His party kept shrinking and shrinking. He slumped down in the captain’s chair. It was amazingly comfortable and he forced himself to get out of it before he dozed off. He couldn’t remember ever being so tired. Frichette, on the other hand, was eagerly surveying the control stations like a kid with a new toy. He’d been tempted to send Frichette to the cold-sleep compartment, but he was grimly certain that all the officers there would be dead and he wanted to spare the boy that. They could get the enlisted crew revived and let the navy take care of the rest of this mess. He sure hoped that they could.
“Tell me, Ensign, do you think the enlisted crewmen will be able to run this ship—or the others—if the… if there aren’t any officers to lead them?” Frichette turned to face him and looked thoughtful.
“Not sure, sir. If they are veteran crews—and I think most of them are—they will have the necessary training and skills to handle almost any of the posts. Well, astrogation and weaponry might be a problem. B-but I’m not sure about the leadership question. Without a real officer around to give direction, I’m not certain…” he trailed off and flicked a glance at the one remaining crewman from their party.
Crawford nodded and chewed on his lower lip. Yeah, that could be a real problem. Andera—like most places—had been, for all intents and purposes, a feudal state for over a thousand years following the fall of the UW. The surviving soldiers from the Great Revolt had become a ruling class and had run things ever since. The lower classes had been beaten down and reminded of their inferiority for so long, that they instinctively looked to the nobles and officers for all their decision-making. Things had loosened up a lot in Andera since the War of the Four Families, but it was still a tradition and mindset hard to break. The enlisted crews of these ships would not be well-suited to step into the positions left by the dead officers. Well, damn it, they would just have to get…
“Mr. Crawford!” The speaker in his helmet suddenly came to life and he jumped.
“Crawford here, go ahead.”
“Boss! T-this is Pawli. I-I’m in the cold-sleep compartment. C-could you come down here?” The tone of the man’s voice brought him to full alert.
“What’s wrong?”
“I think…I think you better see for yourself, sir.”
“All right, I’m coming.”
He left the bridge and walked aft, Frichette trailing him again. Halfway there he suddenly realized that perhaps there had been additional saboteurs after all. Perhaps Pawli’s party had been captured and this was a ruse to draw him into an ambush. That might explain Pawli’s agitation. He pulled out his stunner and advanced much more cautiously. Frichette took the cue and had the laser pistol and dagger ready as well. He heard a faint electronic wail from up ahead. But when he reached the compartment, his men were alone and uncaptured. They were also standing like statues. Not saying a word.
“All right what’s the…?” Crawford stopped in mid-sentence. He looked. He looked again.
“Oh, dear God in His heaven…” he hissed.
He’d been expecting the officers’ compartment to look like this, to look like the one on Neshaminy, but this wasn’t the officers’ compartment! All of them? Surely not all of them…? He splashed through the goo on the deck to inspect the other rows of capsules. Not all, surely not…
All of them. Crawford could feel the sweat on his forehead and his gasping was beginning to fog his helmet visor in spite of the recycling unit. He wrenched it open and then slammed it shut again as a sickly sweet smell assaulted his nostrils. He hadn’t wanted to vomit in a vac suit since he was a trainee, but he wanted to now.
Mercifully, the capsules themselves were all fogged up from inside. He could not see any of the bodies inside clearly, but he had no doubt that each one was a corpse. His men were trailing behind him as if they were afraid to get too far away from him in this chamber of the dead.
“W-why? Why would she…why would anyone…?” Pawli gasped.
“She didn’t have the access codes,” said Crawford with grim certainty. “Just like on Neshaminy, she couldn’t reset the revival dates and she couldn’t allow them to wake up. But here she didn’t have any of the codes. So she, so she…” Oh God. He hit his com button. “Crawford to Neshaminy! Urgent!”
Chapter Five
Dead. They were all dead. All the navy personnel in the entire fleet were dead. And all the officers on forty-eight of the civilian ships—including everyone on Governor Shiffeld’s command ship! Charles Crawford still couldn’t get his head around this. Nine thousand men and women on seventy-eight ships, dead in their cold-sleep capsules. Well, nine of them on Exeter had been killed outside their capsules, but they were just as dead. The crew of Neshaminy, and the crews they’d revived on the other civilian ships, had spent the last four days searching through the Rift Fleet and it had been the same hideous story everywhere they went. Nearly everywhere; Citrone had not gotten to twenty of the civilian ships. Twenty ships out of ninety-eight still had officers.
Of personal concern to him, Sir Douglas Mueir was dead. Mueir was Baron Dougherty’s official representative on the expedition and Crawford’s titular boss. Mueir was a businessman, not an engineer, and would not have had any involvement in the actual construction job, but Crawford still answered to him. Or did. Crawford wasn’t sure who, if anyone, he answered to now.
Was there anything he could have done to prevent this? He’d asked himself the question a hundred times since this began and even though the answer was certainly and undeniably no, he still could not stop asking. At least he hadn’t been with the poor bastards who’d had to search all the ships to confirm the disaster, but he’d seen some of them coming back; seen the expressions on their faces.
Stop torturing yourself. Most of them were dead before you even woke up. The rest were being killed when you could not possibly have even known about it. That was probably the worst: he’d been sitting in his office, looking at plans, for days while Citrone was busily murdering people. If he’d just looked out a window and spotted the shuttle car moving. If he’s just had the nerve to check in with Exeter when he woke up. If, if, if…
Crawford sighed and forced himself to put it behind him. This wasn’t doing anyone any good. He still had a job to do and the fact that it seemed to have become very much more complicated did not change the basic fact that he had a gate to build. The largest, most powerful and longest-range gate ever constructed. He had chosen a ten year exile, given up a reasonable shot at becoming master of his guild, left some special friends behind, all for a chance at this job. He wasn’t going to let anything—not even mass murder—stop him.
He glanced at the other people in the supervisor’s lounge. They all seemed as dazed as he felt. The numbers were hard to grasp. Nine thousand dead. Not much of a casualty count compared to a real war, but it was all far more immediate, far more horrible somehow. Anyone who went into a cold-sleep capsule inevitably had a nagging fear that they would never wake up again. Nine thousand people had not awakened again and everyone here could not help but feel that it might have been them instead. The only good news at all was that the family transports had not been touched. He turned as Doctor Barringir entered the compartment.
“How’s Greg?” he asked immediately.
“He’ll live,” she said as she grabbed a mug of coffee and sat down.
“I never had any doubt of that. It would take a lot more than a laser shot to kill that ugly s.o.b. But how is he, really?”
“Not too bad. He was hit in the chest, but not near the heart. Came close to one of his lungs, but he has so much natural padding, it soaked up most of the blast. He’ll need a little regeneration before he’s his handsome self again, but he’s not in any danger.”
“What about the others?”
“Two of them are in worse shape. They will need some surgery and extended convalescence, but they will recover. The other two were even less serious injuries than Greg. I have them all well taken care of—since I appear to be the ship’s doctor now, too…” Crawford nodded, nearly all the doctors in the fleet had been with the officers; they were seriously short-handed in that department, too.
“How about the bitch who did all this?” snarled Fred Kimmal. “She been spaced yet?”
“No,” said Barringir, looking simultaneously annoyed and embarrassed. “She’s actually in a worse way than any of the others. I’ve never seen anyone—not even the most overtime hungry rigger—so strung out on stimulants. If she’d kept it up for even another day or two she probably would have killed herself.”
“Saved us the trouble.”
“I doubt she’ll be spaced anytime soon,” said Crawford. “We’ve got a lot of questions we need answered first.”
“I’d be happy to help with the que
stioning,” growled Kimmal. He was echoed by several others. Crawford shifted uneasily. The shock from the deaths had lasted for a few days and now it seemed like the anger was about to begin. He had no love for Carlina Citrone, but he could not let her be lynched—at least not until they had gotten some answers out of her.
Another thought struck him. “Doctor, is everything…secure…in your sick bay?”
Barringir looked at him over the rim of her coffee cup and he could see that she understood what he was really asking. “All ship-shape, Charles—except for that guard Mr. Frichette posted there. He has been getting in my way. He seems to think Citrone needs watching, even though she probably won’t wake up for another two days.”
“Good.” Citrone wasn’t going anywhere, but hopefully the guard could handle anyone thinking about taking justice into their own hands. He was glad the guard was there and impressed that young Frichette had thought to provide one. Frichette was impressing him in a lot of ways.
In the past five days some semblance of organization had begun to appear in what was left of the Rift Fleet. Everyone who was still alive had been revived from cold-sleep and given a sketchy briefing on what had happened. Their reactions had varied widely. Fortunately, the bulk of the people were in the construction crews for the gate and the supporting infrastructure and there had been no casualties among them at all—except for the officers of the ships carrying them—and aside from being understandably worried, had taken the news well. The crews of the ships who had lost their officers had taken it the worst. Young Petre Frichette had been right about the problems that had arisen. The loss of lawful authority had left them dazed and barely responsive. They were simultaneously unwilling to take orders from unfamiliar faces or to take any initiative on their own. Fortunately, for the moment, the ships were following automatic controls and would be until their destination was reached. After that…
Across the Great Rift Page 7