by Chris Kuhn
Son of a bitch.
Walking to the middle of the room, I ripped the environmental sensor from the ceiling. I cracked the sealed casing and stared inside.
It was empty, save for a tiny circuit card and a slab of weighted metal.
It's a fake, I realized in horror.
Recalling my earlier encounter with Yvans, I started to process the full scope of my discovery. Every sensor on the ship had been 'upgraded' in the past twelve hours, and if this one was any indication, all of them were fake.
On orders from the Chief of Maintenance, Micheal Byers.
The same Chief of Maintenance who'd prevented me from fixing the reactor earlier. The same Chief of Maintenance who'd been conveniently unreachable. The same Chief of Maintenance with unlimited access to ship's systems. I remembered the dead reactor. The heat with no heat source. The odd series of failures that had preceded it.
I stared down at Coates, realizing that he was almost certainly dead by now.
And he's probably not the only one.
With increasing horror, I pulled up the environmental readings for random compartments aboard the ship. Bridge, mess hall, sickbay, cold storage. Every room had identical readings.
Which meant, quite possibly, that everyone on the ship was now dead.
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I ducked into the adjacent tool room. It had always been a good place to think, and I sure as hell needed to do that.
It didn't happen.
No thinking occurred. Instead, I stared at the walls.
They were gray walls, and I suddenly realized that I hated them. Gray is a bad color. There was no reason to paint things gray in space - it just soured everyone's mood.
But now everyone was dead. Probably.
I was the only one left, and I was standing in the tool room and critiquing the walls. That probably didn't help. I should do something else, something productive. My eyes moved to the tool racks. They were also gray. Everything was gray. There was just no reason for it.
Enough. Be useful.
With a minimum of brainpower at my disposal, I started simple. There was something wrong with the air. The sensors were lying. Dishonest sensors. I needed the truth.
I was in the right place.
In addition to tools, the room contained test equipment. Test equipment was our collection of boxes - also gray- that came with buttons and screens and flashy lights. Things with long names. Things to analyze problems.
I had a problem.
I moved to rack number nine and grabbed an E-sensor. Good. Useful. The E-sensor was used to check for certain compounds in the reactor's exhaust flow. It wasn't typically used to check air quality, but it sure as hell could. I grabbed the sensor, intent on analyzing the room's atmosphere. The device fell out of my hands, however, and I realized for the first time that they were violently shaking.
Shit.
I opened and closed my hands several times, but to no avail. Instead, I simply left the E-Sensor on the rack and activated it. After a minute of re configuring (and a couple of clumsy keystrokes), I had what I wanted.
The readings it displayed were radically different from what the wall panel had shown. Oxygen was almost gone, and CO2 was off the charts. It was possible, I supposed, that the atmosphere processors had gone offline.
No, it's not that simple.
Even if all three units had been shut down, there'd have been residual oxygen in the ship. It would have taken hours - days?- to reach the levels I was looking at now. People would have noticed. The only way to screw up the atmosphere this badly in such a short time was to reverse the processors. Make them convert oxygen to CO2. It wasn't what they were designed to do, but they could surely be hotwired, given the proper access and knowledge, and some poor new lizard technician who was just following orders.
Byers had all three.
Yvans had been working for hours, no doubt, and I had helped him finish the job.
Nice work, sweetheart.
If I was right, then Byers had spent days sabotaging the ship - or manipulating others into doing it... myself included by way of helping Yvans... but the sabotage had only kicked in during the past few hours. We'd also been attacked during the same time period. Not a coincidence, I was certain. He could surely have arranged for the ship to lose a fight. Why he'd have done it was another matter, but not one I cared to speculate about at the moment.
I suddenly realized that I had no idea how the battle had ended. Had our attackers grown bored and left the area? Had we gotten a lucky shot off and destroyed them?
Had we even been firing?
I needed information, and I would not find it in the tool room. What I would find, however, were tools.
I strapped one of the tool kits to my back and stuffed the E-sensor into my suit's cargo pocket. I also picked up a micro torch and signal analyzer, the most commonly used tools that didn't come standard with the kits. I loved tools. Tools fixed problems. I needed a lot of tools.
I also needed information. And a way to not get found.
Surely Byers hadn't killed himself. He was out there somewhere, and as soon as I started moving around, my survival would cease to be a secret.
The Pridemore had tons of internal tracking systems. Video, thermal, motion-sensing - you name it. I didn't know what they all were (or where they all were), but I'd stumble past one eventually.
Not good.
There was one place on the Pridemore where I could accomplish multiple goals simultaneously. I'd be able to see what was going on (at least partially), acquire some type of weapon, and disable the internal sensors.
Security Office.
It was actually three places in one: There was the armory (which would be useful), the brig (which I never wanted to see again), and the sensor room. From there, every alarm and internal sensor on the ship was accessible (and, you know, disable-able). If I wanted to move around without getting dead, I'd need to pay the place a visit.
It was two decks up, and maybe two hundred meters forward of my present location.
I placed my hand on the cool metal door separating me from the corridor.
Conundrum.
I had to open the door. I didn't want to. It seemed stupid. I wanted to lock the door and weld it shut. I wanted to turn off the lights and curl up in whatever tiny space I could find. But that was stupid. This room where I worked - and could normally be found - was probably the worst place for me to be right now.
I had to open the door.
Log 007: Security
I grabbed the handle and eased it down. It squeaked. It always had, but I hated it being so damned loud when it did. I slid the door aside and looked out into the corridor.
The only illumination came from the red strips in the ceiling - self-powered emergency lights. I frowned. The main lights shouldn't have been off. They didn't need the reactor. They ran off of the battery grid and consumed minimal energy. The only way the lights would be off is if someone had turned them off.
I stepped into the dark corridor. I was breathing heavily and forming little white clouds against the faceplate of my suit. I turned up the oxygen. It helped. I moved further down the corridor and became aware of things. Sounds. The whisper of the fans in the background, pumping the now-toxic air. I heard the humming, the high frequency noise of the gravity plates beneath the deck. I heard squeaks and groans of metal.
Normal.
I crept down the corridor, trying to keep my breathing under control. My eyes scanned everything as I walked, every nook and cranny and dark crevice, looking for shapes and shadows that didn't belong.
I looked for the slightest sign of my would-be executioner.
Not that I expected to find him. Byers surely had a plan. He would be on the bridge now, or the engine room, or wherever his plan required him to be. He wouldn't be slinking through the dark corridors or lying in wait with a sadistic gleam in his eye, wringing his hands like cinematic villa
in.
That made no sense.
Neither does moving slowly, I realized.
I imagined how ridiculous it would look if I crept silently down the hall to avoid detection, passing multiple cameras and thermal sensors in the process.
Yeah, okay.
I picked up speed. I reached the stairwell and held back for a second. The stairwell was in the center of the ship, a key intersection point.
Fuck. How did I not think of that? Why didn't I use the crawlspaces?
But I knew why.
Crawlspaces were locked and alarmed, like other sensitive parts of the ship. Any hatch I'd opened would have thrown a flag. At some level, my brain had worked that out.
I moved up the stairwell, the thick metal plate bending slightly as I walked. There were more sounds in the background - beeping and whirring and humming. Perfectly normal. Somehow, they all sounded malevolent.
I reached the top of the stairs and made my way to the front door of the security office. I paused, my glove on the handle. I had a pretty good idea what I'd find inside, and I was in no hurry to see it. On the other hand, I couldn't stay exposed in the middle of the corridor.
I pulled down on the handle, slid the door aside, and stepped into the security office.
There were dead people everywhere.
They were sprawled over desks and lying on chairs. There were no emotions on their faces. No pain, no shock, no anger. It was peaceful in a please God, get me the fuck outta here kind of way. Presumably, they'd passed out from the lack of oxygen and never woke up. I felt no urge to vomit or otherwise react to the sight. Maybe Coates' death had sucked up all of my emotional energy.
Probably a good thing.
I walked to the Law Enforcement desk at the center of the room. This was where all criminal activity aboard the ship was normally tracked, and where the ship's chief of security would sit when he wasn't occupied with other matters.
The sensor room was directly behind it. I'd hoped the door would be open for some reason, but of course it wasn't.
I stared at the thumb pad next to the door, realizing what I'd need to do.
The thumb pad would function the way all thumb pads did - by opening the adjacent door when an authorized person placed their finger on it. There were better methods for securing doors, of course, but the biggest problem on the Pridemore had never been door security. The biggest problem had been forgetfulness. People forgot things - keys, codes, passwords - things they were supposed to remember. In the midst of combat, it was unacceptable for someone to be locked out of a place they needed to be. The Navy had determined that this was a far greater threat to the ship than imperfect door security.
Maybe they'll rethink that now.
I selected the skinniest security guard and dragged him over to the door. With all my strength, I hoisted him up and prop him awkwardly against the frame. Keeping pressure on his body with my hip, I dragged his arm forward toward the touchpad.
"Gonzalez, Nathaniel P. Security Enforcement Technician, Second Class."
The door clicked and slid aside, revealing the sensor room. There were two dead people inside. One was a male in his early twenties that I'd seen but didn't know. I glanced at his uniform. Higgins.
The second person was my roommate.
Alicia.
I should have been overwhelmed with grief. Or anger. Or fear.
I felt nothing.
Nothing.
I stood there in the room, looking at my now-dead roommate, and waited for the rush of emotion. It didn't come. Am I that fucked up? Alicia is dead. Everyone is dead. What the hell is wrong with me?
The noise from the sensor console distracted me from my psychological deficiencies.
Every alarm seemed to be going off at once. That was good for my health, since it meant I'd probably gotten here undetected. On the other hand, it made no sense. These sensors had nothing to do with combat. The alarms were telling me that people had entered sensitive parts of the ship and were tripping various sensors.
Survivors.
As carefully as I could, I moved Higgins out of his chair- it somehow seemed wrong to move Alicia - and plopped down behind the console. The chair, like the door in the reactor room, squeaked a little. Needs lubricant. A massive coffee cup was resting on the desk. Between Higgins and Coates, it seemed that no one had respect for the Navy's no-beverage policy.
How can I find that funny? How the hell can I find anything funny?
Maybe my sense of humor was ignoring instructions. Maybe it was tied to a circuit breaker that had failed to trip. Maybe I could fix it by repeatedly banging my head against something. If I worked hard at it, I might be able to give myself a concussion. Concussions weren't funny. They were the opposite of funny. Maybe that would fix the problem.
Focus.
I flipped through the video feeds that corresponded with the alarm locations. In the first two areas I found nothing. In the third video feed (a corridor adjacent to cold storage), I found a minor problem.
A Firian was standing there with a rifle. Not Yvans. Not a member of the crew.
My skin went cold.
It wasn't survivors that the alarms were showing me. It was intruders.
Substandard fucking development.
I stared at the screen. At the Firian. Cargo pants. Turtleneck. Orange camouflage. Metal Insignia. A uniform?
No.
It was almost a uniform. The camouflage on his shirt was slightly lighter than that on his pants - the result you'd expect from dyeing clothes of different fabrics yourself. It was a makeshift uniform, not something any real military would issue.
Free Trader? Maybe.
Free Traders weren't all pirates, even if the Coalition treated them as such. The truth was that each ship had its own rank and file, so it was often difficult to know if you were dealing with a planet's government or a well funded group of privateers.
It still didn't make sense.
The leader of the Free Traders was a madman, but even he had to know that it wasn't smart to pick a fight with the largest unified military force in existence.
Right?
Analyzing the the lizard-soldier on the screen, I realized that there were two different symbols on the collar of his turtleneck. The first kind I didn't recognize, but it was probably some type of rank.
The second symbol I had seen during the Captain's briefing - Free Trader's Legion. I snorted. Apparently, I'd given them too much credit for their sanity.
Next question: how did this asshole get aboard my ship?
There weren't too many possibilities.
I scrolled through the video feeds, hoping there were hull-mounted cameras pointed at the Pridemore's docking ports. There weren't. Instead, I found a camera monitoring corridor S-12, which had a window adjacent to the starboard docking port.
A ship was docked with us.
I stared stupidly the screen, attempting to process this discovery.
The vessel was a Pit-Fiend Class cruiser by the looks of it, presumably having been bought from Morning Star Technologies. It was small compared to the Pridemore, and wouldn't have been a serious threat if I hadn't shut down Anna at the worst possible moment. It was two hundred meters long, including some kind of custom cargo pod connected to the main superstructure of the cruiser.
Okay. I advised my overtaxed brain. Let's start simple. Big problem. Military problem. Think military.
There were Free Traders - bad guys - aboard. They were armed and presumably hostile.
Military problem. Military analysis. There's a thing. A word. A word for describing specific bad buys. A word where the letters-
An acronym.
SALUTE.
The acronym was SALUTE. I'd heard it in basic training. Years ago. Never used it. Shouldn't remember it.
I did.
“S” was for size. How many bad guys were there? I couldn't tell from the alarms. There were dozens of them, but that didn't mean anything. Once triggered, an alarm would st
ay active until it was disabled. One person could trip multiple alarms. I supposed I could manually search through all of the camera feeds, but that seemed like a logistical nightmare. People might be moving, or I might not have a good enough view to distinguish one from another (particularly if they were all wearing the same clothes). I guessed that there were twenty or so people, but the margin of error was so high that the guess was almost meaningless. Some amount greater than zero.