“Skugs, man,” Wincott said a few feet behind him. “Get your gung-ho ass over here.”
“We got ‘em, right? All of ‘em?” Skugs asked without turning around completely, just a pivoted head so that they could see his left cheek.
“They’re no more than bad dreams, now,” Connell said.
Palmer was still out in the open, furthest in front of them all, facing Skugs. He slowly moved toward them, carrying both his Seighty and wounded left arm with equal weight. Felina briefly wondered the myriad of emotions he could perceive in Skugs’ eyes.
Or just a tight handful.
Pain, grief, disappointment.
When Trent Skugs finally turned to face everyone, Felina struck those off the list and replaced them with their opposites. He grinned ear-to-ear, although it flickered like a dying lightbulb, and took a step forward. In the same instant he collapsed forward, legs twisting slightly, so that he landed supine.
Palmer and Wincott rushed to him. Connell dropped to a knee and kneaded his brow, eyes shut.
“We’re almost there,” Cassel said, her voice burdensome. Her right hand squeezed Connell’s left shoulder. “Another hundred feet or so, past the corner.”
“Then we are there,” Connell sighed, and stood up. He raised his voice. “Let’s move, people!”
“But Caelen, what about his body—” Wincott pressed, tears already drying on his cheeks. He looked up at Connell, but was immediately interrupted.
“Move out,” Connell’s voice sounded like liquid anvils.
Wincott perceived his gaze as heavier. He swallowed a lump in his throat and stood, but not before ripping the name and USBM patches from Skugs’ vest. He pocketed them, wielded his weapons, and slung the dropped Tenor; the TG-24 was empty.
“We’ll be right behind you,” Cassel said to Connell. “C&S the next corridor, please. Landham and I will regroup the others.”
Connell nodded, mute, and proceeded.
“Oh, and Connell,” she said, her voice as dire as her expression. He paused and turned, his gaze haphazard like inaccurate weapons fire. “I’m sorry about Skugs. And Arevalo…”
“That’s Asher’s line, Elena,” he replied dryly. “We did all we could here. Let’s just…keep the rest of us alive.”
“Challenge accepted,” Cassel nodded. What she brandished was as close to a benevolent smile as she could muster given the circumstances. And then, as it was carried off on swift wings, Connell turned to join the rest of his comrades—save for Landham—to proceed.
Felina turned just in time to pass Landham, who immediately paused to assess the damage. She flashed him a sincere look of dread and grief, then knelt beside the headless Ngo. She retrieved his USRD tag, just the laminated pendant, which she ripped free of its bloodied lanyard.
“What’re you doing?” Calloway asked, walking past her with Zometa’s arm around his neck, her leg wound bleeding but not critical.
“Hoping that we make it off this vessel alive,” Felina said, her voice low, “their names shouldn’t be forgotten. Their faces, not forgotten. Their purpose…why we came aboard in the first place…”
Calloway nodded, waving his free hand as if to say she needn’t elaborate any further.
“You’re a good seed, Sabartinelli,” he said. “One day you’ll grow into a field.”
With that, Calloway smiled weakly—his own eyes glossy—and proceeded to help support Zometa during their slow progress. Felina imitated a similar facial expression, his words sinking deep into her, then she continued. She collected the ID tags from Godunov and Wisniewski, the prior had blood and strips of skin on it that she disgustingly wiped off. As she pocketed them, she stood and was greeted by Landham closer than she could’ve expected.
“You know the USRD has all of your passports on file for this venture,” he said, lips barely moving.
Felina couldn’t see over his shoulder, but just barely around the tree of a man she noticed Cassel guiding the others slowly down the corridor. Connell and his Remoras had long since turned the corner up ahead; she heard no gunfire or calling out. This was good; an awkward placation settled in her nerves. She looked back to Landham and reoriented her composure, foremost the fortification in her voice.
“But let’s be honest, Mikhail,” she said, the flow of her words without a single hitch. “After everything that’s happened today…that’s been happening aboard the Manticore…do you really expect me to wholeheartedly or even half-assedly trust the USRD again? Or the MB, for that matter? They provided us with abundant details regarding this vessel—from blueprints to crew manifests. And yet MALBO—nowhere to be found, nor all the additional personnel down there. Ninety-percent of the personnel aboard this thing hadn’t a clue about the Xeno Project. But…now they do, and it’s damn near too late. So yeah…I’m trusting these pieces of plastic over the vast computing systems of the USRD. Just like your man Wincott does the patches of his comrade’s vest.”
Landham nodded, a microscopic smile twitching the left corner of his mouth. Dimples appeared quickly before vanishing.
“Our camaraderie is complicated by friendship,” he said hoarsely. “But I know you mean well. Carry on, then.”
Landham turned his back and walked down the corridor. She followed quickly, the last of their group to advance. Eventually they navigated the corner and were pleased to see emptiness—except for the rest of their group, of course.
Cassel was several steps from the access auto-door to the bridge, avoiding the reach of its facial-recognition scanner until everyone was regrouped. With the addition of Landham and Felina to their mass, Connell gave Cassel a nod before shouldering his Seighty and anticipating the worst.
Which was, unfortunately to even imagine, that the bridge was overrun with Xeno carnem.
And then Cassel stepped forward, her Spitfire in both hands but lowered at an angle; the auto-door opened, she spearheaded the group’s entrance, and immediately there was disorder.
Fortunately, no creatures beside humans were involved. And Captain Keyes was still healthily alive, although this was instantly recognized as a negative aspect.
Standing alone on the pulpit that arched over the orrery hologram, Liam Keyes brandished two weapons—a Deci in his left hand and an expression of tyranny. Although the latter had not shot and killed Irene Birch, who bled from a 10mm bullet hole between her eyes, slouched over her intercom console, Felina imagined that it was at least half as dangerous.
Afterall, Keyes could not shoot everyone working the bridge, supposing a mutiny were to arise. There were four bridge personnel attending their terminals on the main floor—two on either side of the pulpit, although there had once been three each to amount to six. One of the two missing was now standing behind Brennan, holding him gunpoint. The other was lying lifelessly on the floor next to his computer terminal, a bullet wound in the throat and chest. The remaining two women and two men were all submissive to their Captain’s armed authority.
“You always were a persistent one, Elena,” Keyes said, his pistol’s aim sweeping the personnel below him. It was not a gunman’s aim—more lackadaisical than anything, which unfortunately did not ease Felina’s mind. To see this man, of all the amicable personnel aboard the Manticore, act this way now truly perturbed her to the core. Given, she had harbored minor skepticism about him since the beginning, but even a notion of corruption wouldn’t have led her mind this far.
“I’m not Ensign of this vessel for no reason,” Cassel replied, her voice firm but calm, albeit pressed through grinding teeth. Her gun was still aimed low, while the rest of the group fanned out behind her. The Remoras had her sides, and immediately their weapons raised, shouldered, to target the enemies.
Keyes, as terrible as that reality was to even think about, and his lone cohort. The other man had the same uniform as the other personnel at the terminals—he was thin-haired, deeply-dimpled, bulbous-nosed, and a little paunchy. He was probably in his thirties, but the age of his recent experiences put
him upwards of sixty. He wore it ruggedly on his face—regret, dread, confusion. But the presence of oppression and control overrode these humanly redeeming emotions.
“True as that might be,” Keyes continued, “you’re second to me. I am the Manticore’s Captain, and I have final say on its direction.”
And then Felina noticed a sudden crookedness in Cassel’s expression, including her body language. Her gaze dropped from Keyes to the orrery and Felina, too, peered at it with squinting observation. The hologram’s mapped trajectory for the USRD Manticore was Dingir, with an ultimate destination for Earth.
“Dammit, Liam, have you gone mad!?” Cassel exclaimed, her voice cracking. “You cannot possibly believe a quarantine with Dingir will save this vessel!”
“Oh, the Manticore might as well be wreckage, Elena.” Keyes practically smirked, but Felina refused to acknowledge it as that. What she couldn’t avoid, however, was hearing Asher’s words come out of his mouth. “It’s the Xeno carnem that needs saving. Preservation. Incapacitation, obviously, but not eradication. We’ll dock with Dingir, they’ll sweep the vessel to neutralize what they cannot subdue, before rescuing us and returning it to Earth. There, it’ll be stripped and processed.”
Cassel face-palmed with her free hand, then ran her lanky fingers through sweat-glistened hair.
“I know the procedure, Liam, but this…this is beyond preservation. You cannot—will not—dock with Dingir. The Manticore—and its Captain—are past the PSR.”
Captain Keyes became rigid all of a sudden. His gun slowly transitioned to point at Cassel, who tilted her head and gave him a look that could probably shatter stone under any other circumstance.
Past the point of safe return, or PSR, Felina knew.
She had unwillingly, albeit expectedly, become part of a mutiny. She just couldn’t have anticipated such belligerence from the Captain himself.
“You shot Birch, didn’t you?” Cassel asked under her breath, barely audible. They were officially at a standoff now, she and Keyes holding each other gunpoint while some of the Remoras aimed up at him and others at the man behind Brennan. Cassel’s voice lilted unpleasantly, but remained below regular volume. “Or was it your teacher’s pet over there?”
“Beck is a wise man, more than I can say for the others present, but I understand their lack of confidence in the situation. All this is…is just a little persuasion. I don’t press them for any charges, however—Birch and Lewis were mutinous. Worlds apart, as it were they expected me to believe they only had glances to scheme their overthrowing of me. Foolish, really, as much as I hate to speak of Birch that way; but I was ultimately right…they had been communicating through their terminals, already a mutinous act.”
Beck, Felina thought. Her mind raced. She recalled, even amid the rising tension of the situation at hand, that name on the Manticore’s crew manifest. Beck…Beck…
Christopher A. Beck, bridge operator. Terminal four.
It came back to her, alright—useless information. Something was better than nothing. She felt herself distracted for a moment, and had lost track of Keyes’ narration.
“…upon his return to the bridge,” the Captain continued, “Beck had my Deci but Lewis was most impatient. He stood up to declare mutiny, or something of the like, and Beck hit him. Not a great shot, I’ll admit, but he got the job done. Then Irene, the poor woman, sprang out of anger and I made sure she had a smoother death.”
“Smoother!?” Cassel screamed. The vocal outburst snapped everyone into a premature state of action—nobody fired, but everyone became tenser, including Connell who stepped forward to occupy her left side. Her voice growled shrilly. “You fucking monster, you’re no different—”
“Than the beasts at our door?” Keyes said, his smug grin wavering, insanity pressing through the cracks.
“I was going to say Thomas Asher,” Cassel regained a fragment of her composure, gun lowering. In one quick yet smooth motion, her elbow tapped Connell as her next words were punctuated by his Seighty’s gunfire. “But that works, too.”
Connell’s aim was pristine. The Seighty’s accuracy could at least be praised on behalf of the USMB—they were doing something right. Keyes took the three-round burst to the right shoulder, spinning him like a top. Exit wounds out the back of his shoulder blade misted the cerulean orrery hologram red, while the Atrium echoed with not only gunfire but Keyes’ howling. He staggered down the pulpit, Deci still in his hand somehow, and his balance just as miraculously salvaged.
In this same instant, Beck was caught in a warp between where he’d like to be and reality.
The passage of time might have been molassic for him, but for Felina and undoubtedly everyone else it was blink-of-an-eye fast. Wincott’s Tenor, as taken from Skugs’ corpse, reported Beck’s execution from twenty feet away. Blood splatter from Christopher Beck’s face sprayed the navigation terminal as well as Brennan’s scalp and nape. He sat at the terminal, frozen in shock and disgust.
Meanwhile, Cassel aimed after the Captain but did not shoot. He ran with unsure footing down the ramp leading to his personal quarters. As the auto-door opened, Felina took a deep breath and broke free from the group. She squeezed past Connell and Cassel, rendering a most confounded reaction from the latter, while the Remora called after her.
“Go!” Cassel barked behind Felina.
As Felina reached the ramp, she glanced over her shoulder to see Connell jogging after her, Palmer in tow. And then Felina’s attention was back on the route before her—and the 10mm Deci pistol in both of her hands. She skidded through the auto-door’s threshold and into the sub-corridor beyond it. The stretch was long and linear, a straightaway for at least two-hundred feet before its first corner.
Keyes hadn’t gotten far. His shoulder wound was worse than they thought—Connell’s burst was clustered, each of the three bullets hitting flesh. One chipped the top of his shoulder, the second right in the center, and the third closer to his sternum. Blood frothed from his quivering lips as he panted and struggled to breathe. Finally they caught up with him, Palmer close behind.
“Secure his quarters, we got this!” Connell shouted over his shoulder.
“On it!” Palmer spun around.
Down here the theme was as bland as it could be. The bulkheads and ceiling were all one uniformed mess of tubing and piping. This particular sub-corridor was a catwalk of sorts with a thin space below them that traversed more exposed fixtures. The floor of it was metal grating, and it had barred guardrails. Everything was a drab brown-gray that matched rusted gunmetal. Exposed fluorescent fixtures lined the ceiling every ten feet.
The intermittent shadows in the corridor no longer seemed as bad as they had in the rest of the vessel. Perhaps it was because in this one the only hostility they faced was human.
“Okay,” Keyes suddenly croaked, losing his balance and toppling midstride. He caught himself on the right guardrail about three-quarters the way down the corridor. There was a loud clang and he groaned out in pain, his knees walloping the catwalk before being pulled across it as he struggled to maintain some kind of progression. Despite this, he still announced his surrender, and just the same kept that Deci in his left hand. “Okay…okay, I’m done.”
By the time the Captain of the Manticore—who had come quite a ways in Felina’s eyes over the past few days—had turned to face them, he was finished.
Blood more than just bubbled from his lips. His eyes were bloodshot, his complexion wan. That once impeccable uniform was now beyond stained, and ravaged by the right shoulder. He had spun slightly so as to hook his left arm around the middle guardrail and keep his body close to it; the Deci had transferred to his right hand. Although he held it up, he didn’t brandish it at them.
“Put the gun down, Keyes,” Connell said, Seighty shouldered. “It’s over. You’re relieved.”
“Alas,” Liam Keyes sighed gauzily. “Thank you.”
The Deci’s muzzle met with his temple to halve the report of the shot.
Keyes’ body went limp, blood particles in the air where they did not splash the bulkhead. The Deci clattered to the catwalk.
Felina had yelped but barely heard it herself. Connell cursed under his breath but all in all didn’t appear terribly fazed. He turned away from Keyes with a wrinkled-face expression, disgruntled to say the least, and speechlessly beckoned Felina to follow. When she didn’t at first, he used his voice—nothing loud or imperious, but fatigued.
“C’mon, Sabartinelli. Let’s see what Palmer’s got.”
Felina finally lifted her gaze from the Manticore’s first and last Captain. She joined Connell into an eventual jog that landed them back to the start of the corridor, where Palmer stood by the auto-door entrance of the Captain’s quarters.
To their left, the one leading back up the ramp into the bridge remained open thanks to Palmer’s regional presence. Felina observed with a quick glance—their group was fanning out, conversing in small clusters. Lemaître and Zometa occupied separate seats while Wincott and for whatever reason Schuman tended to Brennan. Ochoa and Landham separated to confirm the statuses of the bridge personnel survivors.
Cassel barked Connell’s name, briefly transferring his attention from Palmer to the bridge.
She held out her left hand, enclosed to a fist with her thumb pointing out. She let it hover there, thumb sideways, neither up nor down.
With a sigh, Connell extended his hand and gave a thumbs-down. Cassel, expressionless, nodded and returned a thumbs-up gesture before turning her back and approaching Brennan. Connell smirked dubiously before it faded entirely, and he walked past Felina to join Palmer.
“Heartless toward the heartless,” she heard him mutter to nobody in particular. He then arrived at Palmer’s side, in the threshold of the seemingly locked-open auto-door. He shook his head and chuckled under his breath. “Well I’ll be damned.”
Felina still hadn’t neared Palmer enough to peer into Keyes’ quarters. When she did, now, she smiled contentedly. She certainly hadn’t forgotten about them, keeping the men’s wellbeing in her hopes this whole way.
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