by Chris Kuhn
Neato.
In the moment, I had to make sense of it. Had to process it. Had to ensure that I was no crazier than the situation dictated. If I was losing my mind - truly losing it - then I had to stay put. I had to sit here in this maintenance locker until my sanity returned. There were people who'd want me dead. They weren't nice people, but they seemed to be in full control of their faculties. If I wanted to survive, I couldn't be wandering through the corridors and doing random irrational shit.
The rifle was lying next to me.
I picked it up and opened the outer case. There were lots of parts inside. I wanted to disassemble the rifle, arrange the pieces on the deck, and study them. I decided this was a bad plan. Instead, I closed the rifle back up and practiced balancing it on my palm. It was tricky, because the weight wasn't evenly distributed. Given enough time, though, I decided it was a skill I could master.
I started practicing.
Of all the things that could have wandered into my brain at that point, a lousy childhood memory was the least expected.
There'd been a cat involved.
Sam.
Sam's fur had gotten all over the house and pissed off my mom. But my mom wasn't part of this memory, or any that would come afterwards. I'd been crying on Sam, pouring tears into the long fur that had gotten all over the house. Then the front door opened, and my brother had come in. I'd hated him then. I'd never been more furious. His face had been tanned. He'd had something - fishing gear - in his hands. He'd been out on the lake.
With friends.
Having fun.
I couldn't grasp it.
"Why aren't you sad?" I'd demanded, hitting him with my balled fists. "You're supposed to be sad!" He'd grabbed my fists gently and made me stop. We'd gone back to the couch with Sam. My brother told me that he wasn't ready to be sad, that it was too soon. That if he became sad, the emotions would consume him.
Later - weeks later - the grief had arrived... and hit him like a truck. It had been hell for both of us, but especially him. The only saving grace was that he'd had no responsibilities back then. No obligations. My brother could afford to wallow, to drown in whatever bottle was in front of him. He probably hadn't known that he'd never pull out of it. That was his way - his very substandard way - of coping. There were as many different ways of doing so as there were sentient beings in the universe.
Mine, apparently, involved balancing a rifle on my palm. I forced myself to put it down and took a few deep breaths.
My first thought had been the shuttle. That was good. Escape. But there were other possibilities. I could send out a message, hide in a corner, and wait to be rescued.
Maybe I can find a blanket and pacifier somewhere.
I stepped out into the corridor to the computer interface on the wall and pulled up a systems display. Transmitters were down, both FTL and conventional. No surprise there. But the screen said the things were disabled. That meant that they knew they were offline. They still had power, but they'd been ordered not to socialize with other communications systems.
That was potentially fixable. If I were standing in the communications room, I could probably get a message out.
But will it be detected?
It was a hard question to answer.
There were possibilities. They might work. They might not. They might appear to work and then screw me later. Even if they did work, I still had a problem. I could hide outgoing signals - maybe - but I couldn't do anything about the ones coming in.
The nature of my message - Dear Coalition Navy, your warship has been stolen - might prompt a reply. Someone might have questions.
Maybe whoever was on the other end would exercise restraint and good judgment. Or maybe they'd lose their shit and go careening around the office like a ferret on crystal meth. Maybe they'd assume it was a prank and send a nasty reply.
How would I react?
Even if they believed me (and kept the ferrets away from the keyboards) I didn't know how long I'd have to wait before another ship - the Melbourne? - could swoop in to save me. The Captain said we had a window of 14 hours, but I didn't know how long I'd been asleep or how long we'd been above Dakarta... or if we even were above Dakarta.
It suddenly dawned on me that there were a lot of things I didn't know.
What I did know was that if I transmitted a message and the bad guys found out, then stopping me would become a serious priority for them. This Udo guy didn't really seem like he was down for trading bad accents while we waited for the cavalry to arrive.
How long could I outwit them if they were actively hunting me down? How did that compare to the arrival time of reinforcements?
I banged my head against the wall.
Clunk.
Too many unknowns.
Clunk.
Have to do something.
Clunk.
What was there to do?
I could try to kill all of the bad guys somehow. Whatever else she might be, the Pridemore was a spaceship. There were ways to kill people on spaceships. Byers had found one. I thought of locking myself in one compartment and pushing a magic button that vented the rest of the ship to space. But there was no such button. The Pridemore liked her crew alive. Individual airlocks could be screwed with, I supposed, and it might be possible to trick one into opening. If that happened, though, pressure doors would slam down in adjacent areas of the ship. The wound would self-seal.
What else?
Heat?
Nope. Takes too long. Kills me also.
Air?
It sounded nice. Poetic, even. But unlike Byers, my software permissions were limited. I had no command codes. I had no authority. I couldn't just tell the system to do massively lethal things. I'd have to wander around the ship and rewire the air processors, which could take hours. Even if I did, the bad guys had masks.
The shuttle was still my best option. The problem was not getting blown to bits in the process.
Gotta solve that.
The Pridemore's guns were still offline - for the moment - but I doubted the same could be said for the Pit-Fiend. I could probably manage to keep the Pridemore between myself and the Pit-Fiend as I launched...but my victory would be short-lived.
Once the cruiser undocked - assuming it did - it would be a matter of minutes before they were on top of me. Without faster engines, the shuttle was as good as dead.
And so am I.
There was an obvious answer, but it created at least as many problems as it solved.
Log 009: Seat of My Pants
The shuttle was designed for short-range missions across solar systems at “super-cruise”, just above light speed, but at sub-light speed it took a week to reach even a close by moon. There was a nifty device on board that would help it go faster... a lot faster; A device that would let the shuttle go from a slow creep, in terms of space travel, to faster than most space fighters.
That device was called the RATU; Rapid Assist Transit Unit.
Pronounced "rat-you", it was a small generator core tied to a flight computer and a bootstrapped sub-light engine. Designed to be mounted to the roof of just about anything smaller than a house, the RATU can pick up a cargo container -or shuttle- and get it from the ground and into space or back again. It's not designed to move people, but now wasn't the time to bother with such pesky little details.
That was the good news.
The bad news was that the RATU was stored in the forward missile bay. This presented two problems. The first was that I'd have to get the bulky and heavy contraption from one end of the ship to the other without getting caught. The second was that Udo and company were probably en route to the missile bay, and I wanted to stay as far away from them as possible.
Unless I don't.
My natural instinct was to avoid bad guys, but there was a certain logic to doing the opposite.
Any escape plan involved risk. In the short term, the safest move was to hide and wait for help. Even without a distress signal, the Na
vy would eventually come looking for their wayward destroyer. I had oxygen. I could access water and food without serious effort. There was a very strong case to be made for sitting on my ass.
Unless something bad was about to happen.
If the bad guys were just here to steal something (and then leave), it made sense to wait things out. On the other hand, if they intended to take the Pridemore into combat or use her for some sort of suicide mission, escape was a risk worth taking.
I had to know what their plans were, and I couldn't find that out while ensconced in the maintenance locker. Even though I just walked back in, I felt like I had been in this closet forever, thinking in circles. I may have been in shock, but I had to make a decision.
Fuck it.
I'd take the crawlspaces up to the missile bay and attempt to do some snooping. If I determined that escape was in my best interest, I'd be in the right place to commandeer the RATU. How I'd pull that off was another matter, but I decided to take things one step at a time.
Missile bay it is.
First I had to leave the maintenance room, which I wasn't thrilled about. Looking for anything useful before leaving, I began opening the maintenance cubbies and lockers, and I found something that was neither useful, nor what I was expecting.
At the end of the row of storage lockers, as I opened the door, the dead body of the other reactor tech, Johnson, hit the floor. It looked like it had been dead for over 24 hours, because the decomposition was more advanced than all the other bodies I had seen that day.
“I guess now I know why he wasn't showing up for shifts.”
Maybe Johnson had discovered something wrong with the air scrubbers Yvans was replacing, took the issue to Byers, and got stuffed into a locker for his troubles. At least the bullet hole in the back of his head made it look like it was quick.
I don't know why, but I took a moment to close his eyes.
Leaving Johnson, I grabbed my gear and moved to the door. I hesitated. There were bad guys out there, but the odds were in my favor. Pit-Fiend Class cruisers were only crewed by a couple dozen people at most, and Free Traders were known for running on skeleton crews as often as possible to save money. Say it's twenty bad guys. Or even thirty. The odds of anyone being outside a particular door were pretty low. At some point, I'd have to start taking those kinds of chances.
Holding the rifle in front of me, I unlocked the door and slid it open.
The corridor was empty.
I made my way to the nearest access panel, hopped inside the crawlspace, and moved toward C-1, the tunnel that ran down the centerline of the ship. Crawlspaces were useful on a regular day. Today they would save my life. The Pridemore had kilometers of piping, wiring, conduits, waveguides, and fiber lines. All of that spaghetti had to be isolated from the crew - it wouldn't do to have drunken crewmembers urinating in reactor conduits. To avoid this problem, the spaghetti was contained in crawlspaces. It took about twenty minutes to get to the weapons bay, and I was sweating bullets by the time I arrived.
Now for the fun part.
The access panel was above me, in the deck of the weapons bay. A blinking red light reminded me of a basic fact that I'd forgotten - the panel was locked and alarmed. The missile bay was restricted to certain personnel, and I wasn't one of them. The sensors I could ignore - they ran back to the coffee-infested Law Enforcement desk monitors - but the lock I'd have to deal with. It wasn't complex. There was the latch itself, which basically functioned like a door handle, and a restraining bolt that kept it from moving until it got the proper code.
I had to cut that bolt.
Easy enough.
I withdrew the micro torch from my tool-kit and fired it up. A white-hot flame spat from its tip, nearly blinding me in the darkened space. I killed it immediately, cursing at my latest memory lapse. You were supposed to wear eye protection when operating the torch, but I'd cleverly forgotten to bring any. Instead, I visually lined the torch up with where I needed to cut, then shut my eyes and triggered it. Even through my closed eyelids, the light was intense. After a few seconds of cutting, I checked on my progress. I'd gotten about halfway through the bolt. Not bad. I repeated the procedure until I felt the metal give way.
I replaced the torch and unlatched the access hatch. It was a heavy lid-like contraption that rotated up into the bay above. I raised it up a few centimeters. I then twisted my head to the side, peering into the bay with one eye. It wasn't a fantastic view, but the bay looked empty.
Empty of people, anyway.
There were two missile launchers that extruded backwards from the front wall. Half of each device was contained in the bay, and the other half penetrated through to the outside of the ship. The missiles themselves weren't visible - they were stored in vaults beneath the floor.
I propped the hatch open with the micro torch, then waited. After a minute, my neck started to cramp. I decided to ease back down into the crawlspace. I could wait in relative comfort for Udo and his merry band of assholes.
The minutes passed, and nothing happened. Had they changed their minds about coming here? Had they already come and gone? I wasn't sure. Udo had said they were making stops, but I didn't know what those stops had been.
I stood back up and examined the bay once more. Missile launchers. Maintenance benches. Various tools and mechanical accessories. On the far side of the bay was a partially disassembled rocket motor. Lying slumped beside it was a body.
A body I recognized.
Craig.
For the first time since things had gone to hell, I felt a hint of genuine emotion. Craig had been a decent guy, really. He hadn't deserved this. Of course not. None of them did.
I thought back to the encounter from last year. He'd been so... loving.
My thoughts were interrupted by a grinding noise. The main door to the missile bay was opening.
I yanked the micro torch from under the hatch, and let the thick piece of metal rest on my head. It hurt a little, but I didn't want the torch to give away my presence. Not that it probably would have. With the room's complex space and poor lighting, It was highly unlikely that anyone was going to see me.
Highly unlikely. Yeah.
Five people entered the room, two of whom I recognized. The first was Grenade Boy. He was still wearing the goofy bandolier.
The second man was Udo.
The third and fourth guys I hadn't seen before. One of them was carrying the hexagonal box from the armory.
The last person to enter the room was female. Sorta. I had only seen a male Rogga before, but if this female was any indication, other than the boobs it was open for discussion.
The race known as the Rogga had only recently joined the Coalition following a bloody war on Mars. A war they wanted to fight, not because they were our enemies, but because to them war is prayer. Having once been Human, the Rogga had been changed over the course of a few generations by their deity... or so they claimed. Most of them didn't even look remotely Human, and this one was no different. Her muscular frame towered over the others, making her almost three meters tall, and her long, kangaroo-like face sneered as she made her way into the room.
Her white athletic gear was obnoxiously form-fitting, but I suspected it wasn't her figure she'd been trying to draw attention to. The fabric stretched across waves of toned muscle. The muscle was like a separate entity, an organism that clung to her body and moved in unison with it. I didn't know if she had implants or enhancements, but she looked like the kind of high-dollar mercenary someone would pay a steep price for.
Since I didn't know her name, I decided to call her “Testosterone Girl”.
Testosterone Girl slithered over to a tool bench and sat, a bored expression on her face.
Udo moved to a tiny console in the middle of the bay and withdrew a translucent blue cylinder of some kind. I didn't recognize it, but I had my suspicions about what it might be. He inserted it into the console and made a quick movement with his hand.
I heard the s
low whir of heavy electric motors. As I watched, a series of recessed hatches began opening in the deck, each one sliding back to reveal a sleek black object approximately two meters in length.
"Okay," Udo said, clapping his hands together and sounding almost mockingly Russian. "I want six of these - two rows of three - right here." He pointed to the deck in front of him.