by J. R. Mabry
Leif’s feeling of claustrophobia was magnified every second he was frozen. To not be able to move, to not be able to wipe a bead of sweat, to not be able to speak…or scream. He strained against his immobility and an irrational panic began to rise. He felt his heart rate increase, heard the driving thub, thub, thub drumbeat in his ears.
He was struggling so hard, he barely noticed when the robot backed out and the door slid shut again.
Like someone letting go of one end of a stretched elastic band, he felt his body lurch as the immobilization beam was shut off.
He met Alison’s eyes, and an understanding passed between them. The robot had failed, but people were coming. They were coming for his disruptor and they would not be gentle or kind or pleasant. Alison pivoted so that she faced him, sitting on his lap. Her eyes stayed locked on his as she removed his disruptor from its hiding place in the small of his back. Blocking as much of a view as she could between their two bodies, she passed it around to his groin, then up, under her shirt, moving it into place just above her breasts.
He nodded. He had no idea what she was up to, but he trusted her. If she had any ideas at all, it was more than he had. She climbed off of him and began to roll and crawl her way toward the door.
She is one badass motherfucker, he thought. And that’s just sexy as hell.
Marcia Chi felt paralyzed. The comm link with the Eisenhower had just broken off, leaving her looking at the exterior hull of the great Authority war ship. They were outgunned, outmanned, and whatever plan their captain might have had was disintegrating like an unshielded probe on re-entry. That was when she realized that every eye on the bridge was staring at her, demanding something of her—something she did not have.
Tash was moving his hands furiously over his console.
“Uh, Captain Chi, I looked up protocol Zed 8593.”
Marcia’s head jerked around to see Tash Liebert’s hopeful expression. She realized just how thirsty she was for that hope. “And?”
“It’s not a surrender protocol at all, sir. It’s an emergency docking protocol.”
“Is that a mistake?” The last thing they needed was for their untried captain to be mixing up her protocols. But with everything else going wrong, it wouldn’t surprise her for a moment.
Then she saw Liebert smile. “Oh, no sir, it’s no mistake. It’s…kind of fucking brilliant.”
“Epworth station in four hours, sir.”
“Thank you, Mr. Pho.” Jeff felt paralyzed in his command chair. He was keenly aware that he was in the saddle of what was essentially a superluminal bomb. And they were riding that bomb right into a densely populated area. If Danny…or Tal…wanted to effect a terrorist strike against a target in the neutral zone, a strike that would not reflect back on them, this would be the perfect setup. Blame it on the strangers from another galaxy—if there were anything left of the Kepler, it wouldn’t be traceable to anything from Authority space.
It was almost too perfect, and Jeff admired it…if that indeed had been the plan. There were too many unknowns, however. How did they intend to detonate it? And exactly what was the target—what would trigger the detonation? Proximity to…what? Or did they simply intend to blow the Kepler to hell after they cleared Authority space? The epoxy could, he knew, blow at any moment. It made the hair on his arms stand on end.
“Mr. Pho, bring us to a stop.”
“Sir?” Pho turned around, his youthful face long with surprise.
“Just…stop.”
Pho’s eyes darted back and forth. “Stopping sir.” He turned back to his station and a moment later, Jeff felt the dampened lurch of a starship exiting C-space.
“Stopped, sir. Drifting.”
“Anything we should be concerned about around here?”
“No sir, nothing but open space for a couple hundred thousand kilometers.”
“Good.” He knew Pho wanted an explanation. But he didn’t need to explain everything.
A moment later, Nira stepped aboard the bridge, followed by Emma. Emma flashed him a warm smile and went to her science station. Nira paused by his chair. “Permission to speak in private, sir.”
Jeff rose and gestured toward his ready room.
Nira walked ahead of him, and as soon as the door slid shut behind them, she held her palm out. “Found it.”
In her palm was a poly patch, approximately four centimeters square, no bigger than a mouse. Four wires hung from one side of it like a tail. “It has a flexible bio-chip embedded in it.”
The whole patch was easily bendable. Jeff could even have rolled it, had he wanted to. “Where was it?”
“Fastened to the interior wall of the tertiary hull. Since there’s no metal, it wasn’t detectable by the imager. I inserted a worm-cam into the holes and looked around—found this just above the middle-most hole. I figure they rolled it up, stuck it through the hole, and then, using tweezers or something, stuck it to the near wall inside the tertiary hull. It wasn’t perfectly flattened out, which supports my theory—but it was stuck there pretty good. And the leads were embedded in the explosive.”
Jeff examined the leads. They weren’t wire, but a superconducting polymer they called fibrex in his universe—who knows what it was called here?
Jeff nodded, sighing his relief. “Have you had a chance to scan the bio-chip?”
“Yes. It’s set to trigger in proximity to a neural code.”
“What code?” Jeff’s face looked haggard, drawn, haunted.
“TDP3079317.” She glanced up to check her neural. “It belongs to a Captain Joleen Taylor.”
Jeff felt his legs buckle under him. He reached to steady himself against the table.
“You knew her, didn’t you, Captain? In our world, I mean?”
“I did know her, number one. She was…a close friend.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
Jeff pulled back a chair and eased himself into it. His hands were shaking.
“Are you all right, captain? Do you need anything?”
Jeff didn’t answer. A moment later Nira set a glass of water in front of him. He didn’t want it. He took it up and downed it. He couldn’t look at her. The heat of shame rose from his neck. He didn’t want his XO to see him like this.
Danny had mentioned Jo, had mentioned that she was one of the rebels, that he’d love to see her in the brig. Apparently he also wanted to see her dead, and his old friend didn’t mind sacrificing Jeff and his crew to accomplish that. With friends like these… he thought.
“They’d been lovers,” he said.
“Permission to sit, sir?” Nira asked.
Jeff nodded and she pulled back a chair.
“Who had been lovers, sir?”
“Danny—Captain Hightower and Captain Taylor. Just out of the academy. For a short time—”
“Begging the captain’s pardon, but I’d heard a rumor that you and Captain Taylor….” She didn’t actually say it.
“That’s not a rumor, that’s true.” He didn’t smile at her. He didn’t even look at her. He simply stared into space. “I love…loved her.” He couldn’t believe he’d said that out loud.
“I understand,” Nira said, although she couldn’t possibly understand. Could she?
“I fell in love with someone. A couple of years ago. She was…she wasn’t perfect, but she was perfect for me. I had to make a choice—”
“Between your career and your sweetheart,” Jeff said.
“Yes.”
“Maybe you do understand.”
Jeff felt numb. He stared at his hands. “I know what betrayal feels like. Whoever sent those commands…” he stopped himself. Catskill was classified. He didn’t need to say more. “Danny…my Danny…couldn’t have done this.”
“Were you in love with Captain Hightower, too? I mean, in our world?”
Jeff blinked and looked up. “Huh? Oh, no. I mean…I loved him. But not…not like that. We were both interested in Jo, though. She picked me, and then she picked the CDF.�
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“Did your friendship with Captain Hightower survive it?” Nira asked.
“Yes…we had some rocky patches. We had a fistfight. We ended it laughing our fucking heads off.”
“I would have liked to have seen that fight, sir.”
“It was probably still floating around on some of the file-sharing sites before—” Before our universe was destroyed. Before we destroyed it.
Jeff opened his fist and let the poly patch tumble onto the table. “Find the rest of them.”
Nira pulled something out of her pocket and held it out to him. “Already done, sir.”
He put his hand out and received the square, the detonator mouse, this one’s tail curled into a tight circle. He looked at Nira and cocked his head.
“Only two? Are you sure this is the last of them?” he asked.
“Absolutely, sir. I’d say I’d stake my life on it, but I actually am.”
“Heh,” Jeff chuckled, despite the gravity of the moment.
Nira waited for him to say something, but then broke the silence. “Sir, I don’t know how to say this…”
“Say what, commander?”
“This one…it’s wired different.”
“Different how?”
“This one isn’t a proximity trigger. It’s live, keyed to another neural.”
“Meaning whoever it’s keyed to could just access their neural and detonate it?”
“Right.”
Jeff felt a chill run through his bones. “Whose?”
Nira swallowed and held his gaze. “It’s one of us.”
Chapter Twelve
Alison crawled toward the door, then positioned herself beneath the “A” formed by Tyson’s knees, drawn up nearly to his chin. Alison’s head was beneath one knee, the disruptor beneath the one nearest the door. She checked the safety and made sure it was powered up. She checked the battery—80%. That would give her about five minutes of steady fire—more time than she’d actually get.
A disruptor was a poor excuse for a weapon when compared to a blaster. It was more of a neural disruptor than anything else. Its power was low, and it wasn’t instantaneous. Victims didn’t even necessarily feel anything when fired upon until their nerves started shorting out. But they couldn’t kill anyone—not unless they caused a heart attack. The only thing they had going for them was that they worked through any non-conducting material. If someone was wearing a metallic exoskeleton, they were useless, unless you could directly target some skin, or an area of clothing not covered by the exoskeleton.
“Disruptors are a good tool to have in your kit,” Alison remembered her drill sergeant saying, “But they are a sorry excuse for a primary weapon.”
But it’s all I’ve got now, she thought, fitting finger to trigger and willing herself to relax.
Two minutes went by…three. Sweat dripped from her eyebrow into her eye. She wiped it with her left hand, then returned it to steady her right. She was grateful to have the floor to rest them on—if she’d been standing up, her arms would be screaming with anaerobic exertion.
Then the white-frosted door slid open, and she was staring down the barrels of a dozen blasters held by Authority pricks in riot gear. She flattened herself as much as possible and, aiming as low as she could, squeezed the trigger on the disruptor.
She was relieved to see they weren’t wearing space boots, but the same leatherette service boots they all wore aboard ship. She aimed for the ankles of the men on her far right and, keeping up a steady beam, she slowly panned to the left. She had set the beam to be as horizontally wide as possible, but also as vertically narrow as possible—a setting she knew would tax her unit’s charge much more quickly than a simple spot-beam. But it was what it was. It took about twenty seconds to achieve neural disruption, so she panned slowly.
“Back up from the door!” one of the guards in the back barked—probably the one in charge. Of course, no one moved—no one could. “One by one, you’re going to come into the hall to be searched. You! Out here now!”
He pointed at Mussorgsky, who put his hands up and stood. A couple of the security guards backed up, giving him space to step into the hall. He hesitated.
As Alison had hoped, none of the security personnel noticed the beam. None of them noticed a tickling on their ankles. None of them noticed anything amiss until it was too late.
The first of the guards fell to the floor and began to jerk about as his nervous system collapsed into involuntary epileptic shudders. Alison kept the disruptor steady and continued panning—it would take them a few seconds to figure out what was happening to them, seconds she would put to good use.
When half of them had collapsed, she shouted, “Now!” and was relieved to see her shipmates launch themselves into the hallway. They were careful to stay to her right, trying to avoid the beam. But by then it was moot, as the power failed and the disruptor became nothing more than a useless gun-shaped pile of poly.
But it was enough. Mussorgsky was the first into the hall, the first to grab a blaster. He threw himself on the ground next to the gun’s owner, and forcing the owner’s twitching thumb to cover the ID pad, began to fire upon the last few guards still standing. Others mimicked his strategy, and before long every one of the Authority guards were either twitching on the ground or dead.
Without anyone needing to call the shots, they began to turn the blasters on the twitching men. Then, working together, they narrowed the blasters’ beams and shot off the hands or thumbs of the fallen security personnel, holding or even binding their grisly trophies to the ID pads of their stolen blasters. It could have been quite a production, but adrenaline and the urgency of their situation made them both ruthless and efficient.
Alison estimated that their coup took all of three minutes to execute, from the sliding back of the door to the jerry-rigging of the last of the blasters. She caught Leif’s eye and winked at him.
Good job, he mouthed at her. She smiled.
Once everyone was able to stand and move and had retrieved all the working blasters, the first thing they did was to locate the cameras—or where they suspected cameras might be—and shoot them out. Leif pointed to one of them—he knew they would still be listening—and waved them down the hall. Alison understood. Their first stop—central security. She hoisted her blaster, pressing the severed thumb tight to the ID pad with her own, toggling off the safety, and making sure it was cocked and ready to fire. They needed to light the place up and kill every fucking officer monitoring security on that ship. Yep, she thought, I’m fucking ready for that.
Aboard the Talon, Shell Ditka kicked her boots aside and stared at her toes as she waited. All around her were what was left of the security personnel aboard and every other crew member capable of picking up a blaster. But they didn’t have blasters now—they had poly disruptors. She made sure hers was primed, the plastic shells aligned in the transport bridge. To tell the truth, she hated these things—they were flimsy and she was always afraid they would blow up in her face. But there was no time to question it.
She heard the access alarm go off and fixed her eyes on the viewer set into the wall near the door to the docking bay. She held her hand up, and everyone around her went silent. She glanced down the corridor, at nearly forty women and men, all of them readying their weapons, all of them barefoot.
She returned her gaze to the viewer as the docking bay doors slid open. Shell saw fiberglass pallets and scraps of packing material whisked into the vacuum of space. A boarding tube hovered just outside, waiting. When the door widened enough, the tube snaked in, coiling slightly on the floor of the docking bay. Inside, Shell knew, Authority forces were checking their blasters and saying their prayers. Who knew how many there were? The outer tube detached and withdrew, leaving a windowless segmented snake behind.
Shell saw one soldier emerge wearing a space suit. He marched to the manual controls, overrode the security protocols, and closed the space doors. He glanced at the gauge built into his sleeve until the
pressurization was complete. He looked around. Is he disappointed? she wondered. He had probably been expecting a fight.
The pressurized door on the deposited section of the boarding tube twisted open, and men began pouring out, weapons brandished, primed, and at the ready. Just as the last of them hit the docking floor, the man in the space suit removed his helmet and readied his own rifle, nodding—probably at his team captain.
The man who seemed to be the team captain motioned for them to fall into line behind him as he made for the interior dock doors.
“Now,” Shell said. She grinned as she saw the Authority team captain freeze. The entire boarding party froze as their boots stuck fast to the surface of the dock.
Their forward momentum caused some of them to pitch forward, falling amid screams of pain as ankles and tibias snapped. Others issued howls of frustration as they tried to lift their feet.
Shell entered the access codes into the keypad, then looked into the eyes of her warriors. “Let’s kick some Authority ass,” she said. She flipped the safety off her poly weapon, flimsy as it was, and heard the whine as it charged to full power. Then the door slid open and she rushed through, raising her voice in a ululating whoop of challenge and victory.
Her bare feet pounded the magnetized steel floor of the bay. She shot four of the Authority soldiers before she reached them and took out another with an elbow to the teeth. Those soldiers that were still upright were shooting now, but there was no way to duck their shots. She just kept going, a blonde berserker firing and striking at everything clad in black metal. She didn’t need to go for the kill, she only needed them down—the gravity assist, turned up to three times its normal magnetic power, would keep them down and render their weapons unusable as well.
She chanced a glance over her shoulder and saw her team, streaming over the bodies, their weapons ablaze, their eyes filled with bloodlust and triumph. “HAAAAA!!” she screamed, plunging her weapon into the eye of one of the few remaining upright soldiers, drunk on ecstasy as she watched the blood spray from his face, watched him flail, watched him fall.