Makaio couldn’t understand it. “They have to be seeing this in the MCR. There are cameras everywhere in here!”
“Unless the shooter had the chance to take them out first, before he came in here. Or else he doesn’t care, and he’s just killing everyone who happens to stumble in.”
Makaio kept his voice low again, “Could be minutes before they can scramble a security team with weapons. We can’t just sit here waiting for him to happen by. We either have to get the hell out of here or figure out how to stop this fucker.”
Garam’s eyes widened. “We’re not going to hunt this guy down! And what if there’s more than one?”
Makaio shook his head, “Call it instinct. Or maybe something from my tactics classes are leaking through. But this feels like one guy. One shot at a time, one angle at a time.” He grimaced. “If I had a rifle, I’d hunt him like a wild boar. But I don’t. Then again, we can’t exactly run away either. Unless you’ve forgotten, this whole station is going to smear across the surface of Proxima in a few hours!”
“Yeah, I know. But we can bring back help, can’t we?”
“How many doors lead out of this place?”
“Three. He can’t be covering them all.”
Makaio’s lips hardened into a line at the terrible odds. “Worst lottery game ever. I hate not taking the offensive!”
Garam gripped his arm. “What if we can?”
Makaio scowled at him. “How?”
“I can’t give you a rifle, but what if I could take away his?”
***
Jona caught sight of another engineer rushing along a platform a deck up from where he was stalking along. In tormented pain, he whispered, “Why don’t you all just stay away!”
He aimed the rifle through tears, and he had to crack off two quick shots before he saw her crumple to the ground. Muttering a curse under his breath, he glanced up and down, left and right, still looking for more. He set off again down the walkway he was on, deciding to check again on the lowest entrance. He had missed it on the last round. “Please, no more. Just stay out and let it happen!”
His only consolation was that he was putting them out of the misery of the long fall and the desperate rush that would come when they all tried to scurry off the station like rats. Again, he spoke aloud, only to himself as he slowly drove himself insane, “Go now! Run away. Why are you still coming in here? Leave!”
Far off in the distance, two decks down, a plasma cyclone engine spun into life.
Jona gasped, “No. No no no nononononnoNO!” How? How had anyone gotten one of them working? And why? It was a critical element to bringing the orbital thrusters back online, but it was the tenth step and completely useless until they cleared the power interrupts he had caused.
Whatever the reason, it meant someone was in here and knew what they were doing!
He ran to the end of the walkway and took the steps down three at a time. He came out on the right deck and scanned around. No targets. His hands shook with nerves as he pushed forward. He would have shot at anything, he was so nervous. Even a flickering shadow would get a CRO round. It was why he had the rifle dialed down to one of its lowest power settings. Enough to kill a person, if only barely, but it would cycle almost instantly in case he missed.
The noise from the cyclone generator grew louder as he approached, washing out his hearing and any trace of his own footsteps on the metal deck.
***
Garam watched him come, wedged in a little nook above the thrust collimator. From the moment he saw the shooter peek around the corner, he hadn’t dared to breath. Snug in his hole, he was tucked in so tightly that he could barely move, an easy target even for a terrible shot.
He absorbed the Navy uniform on the shooter, seeing his puffy face and horrified expression. Had he been crying? Garam had no idea why, but he squashed even the smallest trace of sympathy that might crawl out. Not after what he had done.
‘Come on, just four more steps. Three. Two. Just one more. Now!’ Garam had his back flush against the wall behind him, and now used that leverage to shove off using his feet with as much power as his tall form could generate.
Even then, it was barely enough. He had unhinged the huge durasteel plate on the side of the collimator, but it still weighed a couple of tons. He had held a brief fantasy of pushing it over and crushing the madman with the rifle, but he couldn’t tip it over far enough to make it fall outward. All he could manage was to make it skip free of its mounting and slide with a tremendous crash down past the catwalk, landing heavily below.
But the panel revealed the inner workings of the collimator itself, including the now unshielded and staggeringly powerful electromagnet at its core.
Jona didn’t manage anything more than a grunt of surprise before the rifle was torn from his grasp. Fortunately for him, the buttons and other pieces of his uniform were true silver, so didn’t get torn away. But he was disarmed before he even knew what was happening.
Makaio didn’t hesitate. The massive midshipman stormed out of his hiding place and hit him like a bull. Pushing him a good three meters with his shoulder, he slammed Jona up against the wall of another machine, trying to blast the wind out of him.
Jona cried out in pain, then kicked out a leg on instinct. He wasn’t a specialist in unarmed combat to be sure, but he was from Trinity, and he had grown up in a 1.6g gravity well. He ended up shoving Makaio with his foot instead of kicking him, but it was enough to send the bigger man staggering backward onto his rear.
Bouncing back, Makaio closed with him again. His ham-sized fists bludgeoned in on Jona’s face twice, raising huge welts and closing one of Jona’s puffy eyes.
Lost in his world of desperation, Jona didn’t surrender. Ducking Makaio’s third blow, he drove his fist into Makaio’s gut hard enough to wind him. He punched out again, this time the fierce impact cracking against the big man’s ribs. With a shoulder rush of his own, he lifted Makaio just a couple centimeters off his feet and gave as great a battle roar as he could. It came out as a ragged croak, but that didn’t stop him from running at the nearest edge of the catwalk, aiming to send Makaio tumbling down to his death.
Stunned at the smaller man’s strength, Makaio stopped fighting muscle on muscle. At the last second, he grabbed Jona’s shoulders and rolled with the momentum of their charge. He managed to twist them both sideways, and when they hit the railing of the walkway, Makaio added a quick flipping motion that tossed Jona right over his hip as his Academy Kravat Mar instructor had taught him.
Acting Lieutenant Jona Cradlin blurted out a brief cry as he sailed over the edge and took the fall intended for Makaio. He smacked against a sharp metal edge halfway down, then fell in silence until smashing into the lowest deck far below.
Makaio leaned heavily against the railing, struggling to find his wind.
Garam called down to him, “You alright?”
Makaio waved at him impatiently, finally managing to gasp, “Just get down here and get these damn thrusters working!”
Garam managed to get free and jumped down to the catwalk. “I’ll try, but you need to get me some help. Can you tell the engineers it’s safe and get more in here?”
“I will if he didn’t kill them all.” Shaking away that dark thought, Makaio ambled off, not letting the fact Jona had broken a couple of his ribs slow him down.
That left Garam alone. He turned to look at the mountains of machinery surrounding, far too much of it dead and lifeless and barely familiar. With a sigh, he let out a sarcastic comment with the universe as his only audience, “How much time do I have, again?”
Chapter 29
“How’s our clock looking, Johanna?” Dianne asked through her radio.
“65 minutes until orbit is unrecoverable,” came the response from Johanna’s shuttle, still warming up back in the bay.
Dianne muttered under her breath, “Stupid linear time.”
Sam gave a dark laugh from the co-pilot seat. “Not always. Don’t they s
ay time flies when you’re having fun or terrified out of your mind?”
“Let me know which you think this is!” Dianne pitched the shuttle on its side, and punched the throttle to send them right at the station.
Sam eyes went wide as dinner plates as he saw the docking ring swell in their viewscreen like the ramparts of a castle with the drawbridge fully up. Certain they were about to be smeared across the outer durasteel plating, his fingers clawed into the armrests of his seat and closed his eyes tight.
At precisely the last second, Dianne flipped the ship and kicked in the emergency burn cycle to kill their velocity. She kicked his chair. “Sam! Manual docking cycle! You need to ping the receivers and engage the clamps yourself, remember!”
‘Hey look! We’re not dead!’ Sam was thrilled about that, though he’d remember to deal with Dianne later for her death-defying stunts. Reminded to breathe and think again, he started the process. “Was that necessary?”
“We’re trying to save time, aren’t we?”
The radio came to life, “Shuttle T-Main-4, This is T-Aux-Crown. What are your intentions, over?”
Dianne smacked the console. “Yes! They’re transmitting again. That has to be a good sign.” She recognized the call-sign for the auxiliary transport hub’s ground control, but she had no explanation for why her borrowed shuttle had the IFF for a shuttle from the main transport station up in higher orbit. In the end, it hardly mattered. She opened her end of the connection, “Crown, this is Four. Good to hear you online. We’re trying to dock to your planet-side. If we can get a good lock, then we’ll use our thrusters and try and give you a push.”
“Four, this is Crown, that is ill-advised. If your thrust is off -”
“Yes, Crown. We’ll end up as a black smear across your hull. We’ll try to be careful.”
There was a long pause. Then, a different voice came on. “Four, this is T-Aux-Actual. Be very careful. Don’t scratch my paint.”
Dianne flushed red, realizing the station’s captain had been copying every word. She should have known better. “Aye, Sir. We’ll double-check our calculations before we burn. I don’t assess we’re going to buy you more than a few extra minutes.”
“Understood. Do what you can. If we can’t get power, we’ll be starting evacuations in 30 minutes. Any more than that, and we won’t get everyone out. Other shuttles are being scrambled from the surface and from the main transport station to close our position and assist.”
“We’ll do our best, Sir.” She cut the connection and looked Sam’s way. “Was I lying?”
Sam shrugged. “We’ll find out. The station has picked up a very small nutation, but we should be able to account for it. Ready to burn on my mark. Five, four, three, two, one…mark!”
***
Johanna sensed the smallest of shudders ripple through the station. Summoning the variables into her mind, she adjusted the station’s altitude to the moment of new thrust and projected the nominal output of the shuttle’s reaction drive. A few seconds later, she had decided on a resultant assist vector.
Unfortunately, she was sure it would not be enough to arrest the station’s fall. The shuttle was simply too small. It would take multiple hard-docked shuttles to make a significant difference; more than there were actual docks to receive them. She calculated an increase of nine minutes from the 62 which had been left when Dianne began her burn. They were back up to 71. That was all the time they had unless Johanna could add another shuttle to the effort.
But it wasn’t working.
Johanna couldn’t understand it. She only rarely had occasion to bring a shuttle out of cold standby, and always in the controlled confines of a classroom. But their lessons had been robust, her memory was perfect, and the checklist was not complicated. The governance routines for lighting off the miniature fusion drive packed into the back of the shuttle were not just glitching. They were simply erased.
‘Deliberate.’ She reached the conclusion as surely as the bullets that were whipping past Garam and Makaio had helped them decide. ‘The failure of the escape pod launch systems was suspicious enough. This must be deliberate. Someone is trying to trap the whole crew on board while the station dies.’ It wasn’t enough that the crash would cost billions of marks. Someone wanted to generate a true catastrophe.
She abandoned the shuttle. Without hours of regenerating the underlying code, it was a multi-ton brick. Wasting no more time on it, she slipped out through the cabin and down the back ramp. Johanna then broke into a jog over to a third shuttle; she was already mentally summoning the check-list, resetting it to zero, and hoping against hope that she could find one the unknown saboteurs had missed.
Pff-Hissss-THWAP! A sizzling flight ended with the wet smack of metal clipping flesh.
Pain blossomed in Johanna’s left arm as a subsonic RVN bullet clipped her on the bicep. The rubber-coated, velocity-dependent, non-lethal projectile was designed to injure instead of killing when fired at a low enough power setting from a magnetic acceleration weapon. That was exactly what it did, breaking her humerus bone and whipping her around into a tumbling spiral.
Trying to save herself from a wicked impact, Johanna used what remained of her shattered balance to curl in protectively around her ruined arm. She still hit hard enough to spread a nasty bruise along her back, then raised a raw rash along her leg and hip as she skidded to a stop near the shuttle’s strut.
Her senses tracked the source, but still couldn’t pick anything out. Whoever was shooting had done it from total concealment from inside one of the rooms accessible from the upper utility walkway that ringed the shuttle bay more than five meters above the deck.
Rolling sideways, she tucked herself behind the support leg of the shuttle a mere second before a second RVN ricocheted off the ground to clatter against the shuttle’s base.
Realizing his vantage point was ineffective, it was only then that Glen Sanders stepped from out of the darkness. “Shuttles again, eh Summer? We really need to stop meeting like this!” He took aim and snapped another round a centimeter from Johanna’s leg that she tucked quickly out of sight even as he pulled the trigger. He snarled at her, “How do you do that, you freak!?”
Pinned down, Johanna tried to find her center past the searing pain in her arm. Glen was moving along the walkway, trying to find the best angle to tag her again. Her only advantage was that he was using non-lethal rounds that couldn’t punch through her meagre protection. If he wanted to kill her, she’d be dead. A single lethal CRO round at high velocity would tear right through the strut. If the bullet didn’t end her, then the collapsing shuttle would squish her into the deck. With whatever awareness she had that the pain wasn’t blinding, she extended it out to predict his next shot and keep metal between him and her.
Glen’s frustration continued to boil over. “You know what you are! Do you know what you’ve cost me, freak? Do you? Do you know what you’ve cost me? What I’ve had to do? I’ll never get my life back! But I can damn sure ruin yours and everyone who has ever hidden you!” Letting his anger simmer over the edge, he fired off a rapid SNAP SNAP SNAP! series of shots that peppered the ground around her.
He took visible hold of his temper, knowing he didn’t have unlimited time. He stalked sideways, his sharp eyes watching for the perfect angle where she wouldn’t be able to hide.
CRRAAAAAACCK-SSSS-BANG! The hypersonic cacophony that ripped open the air inside the dock was a totally different animal from the shots Glen had been firing. It came from a MAAC pistol dialed dangerously high, enough that an errant shot might punch right into space and kill them all.
But the shot wasn’t random. It wasn’t perfect, missing Glen by over a meter, but it smashed through the walkway supports and twisted a full three meters of the walkway into nothing but warped metal.
Louisa stopped sighting along her pistol’s sights, taking a step sideways, trying to pick out Glen amidst the wreckage. ‘Did I get him? Did I?’
Rattled by the shock wave, Glen had
leapt clear over the ripped guard-rail, aiming for the top of the nearest shuttle to avoid falling all the way to the deck below. A fall like that would have crippled him for sure. As it was, he hit the shuttle’s roof hard, spending his momentum by curving into a combat roll over one shoulder.
He came up to one knee and aimed down his rifle. His training didn’t fail him. He didn’t recognize the homely little woman was in his scope, nor how a random Navy lieutenant had stumbled on this scene, but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that her pistol was even now tracking down, finding Glen after his desperate jump. She looked scared, uncertain, and her pistol moved like one who wasn’t used to firing it in battle.
Glen didn’t think about it, no more than he had when he had gunned down Adrienne Ryan. He fired off a RVN that slammed into the interloper’s forehead. Head shots were fifty/fifty lethal at the speed he had used, but guaranteed to put her lights out.
Louisa was snapped backward and collapsed against the nearest bulkhead. She hit hard, and her pistol skittered away into the darkness of a nearby corner.
Glen jerked his rifle back toward Johanna, only to find the strut she had been hiding behind empty.
Johanna hadn’t wasted any time, either. How Louisa had come by a MAAC pistol wasn’t clear, but she had just saved Johanna’s life. It took all her control to not scream out when Glen dropped her, maybe killing her where she stood. In that moment, Johanna’s mind went clear and hard as crystal.
Glen’s voice roared over the empty space, “We don’t have time for this! You let your friends take the only shuttle that works in here! The only way we’re getting off this heap before it crashes into the planet is to talk your little friend into returning and giving us that bird!”
There was no reason to listen, so Johanna ignored him. He was wasting time. Breath. Space. Thought. All of it was a medium, all of it finite and precious. She stole behind the bulk of another shuttle, pulled open a power panel, and charged a system that would generate an electrical short. She guessed she had maybe twenty seconds before it blew back on her. She ignored a warning light as she opened a valve into a hydrogen line one panel over. The computer promptly told her that there was no way it was going to release hydrogen with a nearby electrical source malfunctioning. She frowned and placed a warm palm over the interface. Her teeth clenched, and she focused her will on the electronic brain that governed the shuttle’s systems without conscious thought, driven totally by that odd clarity of instinctive certainty. She knew she could do this.
Of Bravery and Bluster Page 28