by Jake Elwood
He nodded and took aim. Alice turned her attention to the wall of the corridor. She'd seen everything she needed, though she hadn't noticed it at the time.
The panel she wanted was painted bright red, but still she almost missed it in the jumble of pipes and fixtures. Fire Suppression Gas Control. Emergency Use Only.
There would be detectors somewhere in Secondary Maintenance that would trigger the fire suppression system if they sensed enough heat and smoke. Given enough time, she could also persuade the ship's computer to turn the system on. But there was no need, with the manual controls right there in front of her.
A smart panel on the top of the hatch came to life when she grabbed it, flashing dire warnings about the danger of suffocation. She ignored them all, examining the controls inside. They were both simple and mechanical, designed for use by a terrified crewmember during a catastrophic accident that might fry the electronic systems. None of it matched any fire suppression system she had encountered on other ships, but she had no trouble figuring things out. A big red switch rested behind a transparent plastic cover. She had to pull the cover up and then turn it sideways to get it out of the way. She pushed on the switch, couldn't move it, and gave it a clockwise twist instead. It unlocked with a loud click, and a red light flashed just above the switch.
“The hatch is about to close,” Alice said. “If you're inside, close your faceplates.”
She sealed her helmet and flipped the switch. The corridor darkened as the hatch behind her slid shut. An alarm blared, muted by her helmet.
“What did you do?”
She looked at her four squad mates, wondering who had spoken. “I triggered the fire suppression system.” She grinned. “We've all got vac suits.” She gestured toward the corner of the corridor. “They don't.”
“Are you sure?”
“I've seen four of them,” Alice said. She closed her eyes, replaying the brief glimpses she'd seen of the woman with the pistol and the thick-shouldered man in the doorway. “None of them had suits.”
A long moment passed in silence. A different voice spoke, a man who sounded young and nervous. That would be Roberts, junior navigator on the Drifting Pollen. “Is it working?”
Alice shrugged, though no one would see it through her suit. “I assume so. It'll be an inert gas. Probably argon. Maybe halon. We won't be able to see it.”
Roberts lifted his hands in a plaintive gesture. “How will we know if it's there?”
“Well, the gas is heavier than air. You could open your faceplate, get down and your hands and knees, and see if you can breathe.”
He gave her a dirty look. “Ha ha.”
Alice fiddled with the controls on the sleeve of her suit, turning on the microphone and speakers on the outside of her helmet. The wailing of the alarm became much louder. She imagined the Dawn Alliance crew listening to the alarm, knowing the room was slowly filling with a suffocating gas. How long until panic drove them into a suicidal charge? She realized she'd set her rifle down in order to activate the fire suppression system. I have to pay more attention to where I leave that damned thing. I really need a pistol. Then I can just shove it in the holster and always know where it is.
She found the rifle and picked it up. Cheng still waited near the corner. She put a hand on the back of his shoulder and edged past him until she could peek around the corner.
The broad-shouldered man still stood at the corner a few paces away, but he didn't fire.
“You need to surrender.”
The rifle in his hands, trained more or less on her face, didn't so much as waver as he raised his eyebrows and shook his head.
He can't hear me over the alarm. The helmet speakers don't amount to much. Well, if he's still on his feet, the gas can't be very high yet.
She opened her faceplate. The blare of the fire alarm, annoying enough through the speakers in her helmet, was almost painful. She shouted, “You need to surrender!”
“We’ll die first.” The words were defiant, but his body language and tone of voice were anything but. He sounded weary and defeated, like he was making a simple statement of fact.
“You sound like you’d rather quit.”
He managed to shrug without moving the rifle. “It's not my decision.”
Behind him, a woman stepped into view. She wore the same dark uniform as the other soldiers, but she carried herself with a bristling arrogance that announced she was the one in charge. She was young, but the hard, uncompromising expression on her face made her seem older. She held a blast pistol in her right hand. “Shoot her!” she cried, then raised the pistol and snapped a shot at Alice.
Alice flinched back, and a shot punched a hole in a pipe on the corridor wall. Water dribbled out and pooled on the floor. A moment later another shot came, scorching the paint on a steel fixture. Judging by the angle, the second shot was from the broad-shouldered man with the rifle.
“Bloody hell.”
She didn't realize she'd spoken aloud until McDougall said, “What's happening?”
“It looks like most of them see reality,” Alice said. “But there's one fanatic.” For the benefit of her squad mates she said, “We better be ready for a suicide rush.”
“You should get out of there,” said McDougall. “We'll close the door behind you and wait for them to suffocate.”
“We can't do that!” It was Roberts. “Some of them want to surrender.”
“Fine,” said McDougall, sounding thoroughly tired of the whole mess. “If they come after you, open the hatch and hit the floor. We’ll blast them from here.”
“Roger that,” said Alice. She was breathing quickly, and she tried to decide if that was stress or oxygen deprivation. I'm afraid for my life. I should be breathing quickly, right?
How long does it take for a room like this to fill with gas, anyway? She brought a hand up to the faceplate controls on the side of her helmet, then hesitated. I need to be able to hear them if they surrender. Or if they charge.
“We need a mirror,” said a voice over the helmet radio. “Then we could peek around the corner without getting shot.”
“Wait a minute,” said someone else. There was silence for a minute. Then a man said, “Here. Pass this through to them.”
“But the gas-”
“Just open the door, pass it through, and close it quick. Not much will get out.”
The corridor brightened as the hatch behind Alice slid open, then darkened again as the hatch closed. The men in the corridor passed something from one to the next, until finally the last man handed Alice a small bundle.
“What’s this?” She examined a palm-sized screen with a meter-long wire connecting it to a lump of metal the size of her pinky finger.
“Tool screen,” said a voice on her helmet radio. “Basically a camera on a wire.”
She found a power switch on the side of the screen, and it came to life, showing her a distorted view of her own leg. She moved the little camera around and watched the image on the screen change.
Quick experimentation showed her that the camera and screen had magnetic contact points. She snaked her hand around the corner as discreetly as she could, fastening the camera to the underside of a steel pipe. The screen showed a tilted view of the room beyond. She stuck the edge of the screen to a flat section of corridor wall and stepped back.
The tool screen showed seven men and women in a huddle around a workbench in the middle of the room. Only four of them were armed. Their voices came to her as an unintelligible murmur, low and urgent.
“No!” It was a man's voice, too upset to speak softly. “We can't just run at them. The corridor’s too narrow. It's suicide.”
Alice stuck her head around the corner. “He's right,” she called. “We can see you coming. It would be like shooting fish in a barrel.”
The hard-faced woman swung her pistol in Alice's direction. Alice pulled her head back.
“The gas must be getting pretty deep,” said a voice on the radio. “The shorte
st ones should start dropping pretty soon.”
“Hey out there!” It was a man's voice, hoarse and frightened. “New Panama troops! We surrender.”
Alice looked at the tool screen. The hard-faced woman had a pistol pointed directly at the camera. The broad-shouldered man had a rifle to his shoulder, taking aim down the corridor.
“Put down the rifle and the pistol,” Alice said. “Or you can stand there until you suffocate.”
The woman holstered her pistol. The man leaned his rifle against the bench.
“Take the pistol out of your holster,” Alice called. “Drop it on the floor. Lay the rifle on the floor too.”
The woman drew her pistol, tapped the side of it to turn on the safety, then dropped it at her feet. The man bent over, laying his rifle on the floor. When he straightened up he was panting. The fire suppression gas was at least waist-deep, then.
Alice stepped around the corner, pointing her rifle at the group. She could think of a dozen things they might try, from hidden guns to another prisoner waiting just out of sight. “Everybody on the floor,” she said. “Hands behind your heads.”
The older woman, the one who reminded her Alice of her mother, promptly knelt. Her mouth opened and her chest heaved as she fought for air.
“Damn it. Stand up. Somebody turn off the gas!”
The broad-shouldered man had to help the woman to her feet. She clutched him as she gasped for breath.
The alarm went silent. “Got it,” said a voice over the radio. “You want me to open the door?”
“No.” The gas gave the colonists a major tactical advantage, and she didn't want to give it up. The prisoners looked docile enough, but her instincts screamed at her that she was still in danger. The hard-faced woman was staring at Alice with murder in her eyes.
This fight wasn't over.
Alice stuck her head out of the corridor and into the maintenance room, glancing quickly left and right. No one waited to ambush her. There were no booby-traps that she could see.
“Hurry up,” said Cheng over the radio. He nudged her shoulder from behind for emphasis. “The sooner you get out of the way, the sooner we've got two guns on them instead of one.”
That sounded sensible to Alice. She stepped into the maintenance room and moved to her right. Cheng stepped through and moved left, and a third colonist came forward.
The hard-faced woman continued to glare.
“Whatever you're thinking,” said Alice, “It won't work. Don't die for nothing.”
“I brought tie straps,” said Cheng, and holstered his pistol. He pulled a bundle of long plastic strips from a cargo pocket on his thigh. “Cover me.”
He walked toward the group of prisoners, and Alice moved forward with him. Behind her, the other members of her squad moved left and right so Alice and Cheng wouldn't block their line of fire.
Alice brought her rifle to her shoulder, taking aim at the hard-faced woman. If she was truly a fanatic, this would be her best opportunity to do some damage. If I was nuts, if I knew a frontal attack wouldn't work, if I was absolutely determined to kill someone before I died, I might do it like this. Pretend to surrender, to lure them in close.
She was the only real threat, Alice was sure. The others didn't look defiant. They looked scared.
In fact, the older woman looked downright terrified. Her head was up out of the gas, but she was still panting, her eyes wide and her hands opening and closing, opening and closing. Does she think we're about to kill her? That doesn't make any sense. If we wanted her dead we could just asphyxiate her.
She knows something. She knows that something is about to happen, and it terrifies her.
Alice said, “Cheng-”
Cheng stretched out his hand, taking the hard-faced woman by the left forearm. He set the bundle of plastic ties on the bench, selected one, and brought it up to her wrist.
Her hand was clenched in a fist. As the tie circled her wrist she smiled and opened her hand.
A grenade tumbled from her palm and clattered onto the floor.
Chapter 4
Alice didn't see Cheng move. She just felt the impact when his shoulder slammed into her, driving her back and behind some standing pipes. She landed hard on her right shoulder, her helmet slamming into the deck plates as the grenade exploded. She wasn't sure if the flash of light she saw was from the grenade or the impact.
Cheng landed on top of her, his weight driving the air from her lungs. She couldn't inhale, which was just as well, because there would be no oxygen at floor level. His face appeared directly above her, just a handspan away. She could see his lips moving, but she couldn't hear a thing over the ringing in her ears. His hand fumbled at the side of her helmet, and her faceplate slid shut.
He rolled off her and rose to one knee, a laser pistol in his hand. She heard his voice, sounding distant and tinny. “Get the door open. We've got people down. And there's holes in my suit, so I'm not airtight.” He looked at Alice. “Rose has a hole in her boot, too.”
Alice looked down the length of her body and was startled to see a red circle on the top of her right foot. She felt no pain, but as she watched, blood welled from the red circle and dribbled onto the floor.
She shifted her gaze to Cheng, and her stomach muscles tightened. The left side of his vac suit was a mess from hip to ankle, tatters of fabric mixed with blood and exposed muscle. He tried to stand, then sank back onto his knee.
Alice sat up, finally managing to take a painful breath. She did a quick inventory and decided she was probably unhurt, aside from her foot. Her rifle was nowhere in sight. I must have dropped it when Cheng tackled me.
Groaning, she grabbed a standing pipe and pulled herself to her feet. The pipes, scored and gouged by shrapnel, seemed to have protected her and Cheng from the worst of the blast.
The rest of the room seemed far away, shrouded in a gray haze. She recognized the effects of adrenaline overload, and spent a moment breathing deeply and wiggling her fingers and toes. It was a trick Fagan, her old captain, had taught her. Concentrate on something trivial, something you could control. Shift your focus to something other than terror.
It worked, more or less. Her vision cleared and she scanned the room.
The rest of the squad stood in a semi-circle around the bench where the grenade had detonated. They still held weapons at the ready, but the tension had gone out of them.
More troops came in from a hatch on the far side of the room, faceplates closed and weapons up. They took in the carnage, standing frozen for a moment, then lowering or holstering their weapons. A man hurried toward Cheng. The others stared at the mess around the bench.
Bodies littered the floor. The deck plates were wet with blood. At first Alice thought all the soldiers were dead. Then a man sat up, one hand clutching the side of his face, blood leaking between his fingers. It took Alice a moment to recognize the first man she'd seen, the one who'd been sitting on the bench. His eyes were closed, and he panted for breath. A couple of colonists grabbed him by the upper arms and hauled him to his feet, then sat him once more on the bench. One sleeve was torn and bloody, and the side of his uniform was shredded at the waist and hip.
Another soldier got up on his own, a fat man on the far side of the bench. He was wide-eyed, and his chest heaved, but he seemed to be uninjured.
The older woman was dead. She lay on her back, staring up at the ceiling. Her face was untouched, but her chest and stomach were a bloody mess. The broad-shouldered man lay still, but he must have been alive, because a couple of spacers picked him up and laid him on a counter along the side wall.
The hard-faced woman who'd caused so much carnage was dead. The grenade had gone off pretty much at her feet, destroying her lower legs. It was the blast shot to her upper chest that had killed her, though.
I did that. Alice shivered. She had no memory of pulling the trigger, but the wound was exactly where she'd been aiming when the grenade appeared.
“This is stupid.” The voice
came over Alice’s helmet radio. “We should have just used grenades. Now Cheng’s got shrapnel wounds and we have a bunch more prisoners to take care of.”
“I told her that,” said McDougall. “These DA soldiers are all crazy. Bunch of damn lunatics willing to blow themselves up for-”
His voice cut out as Alice unsealed her helmet. She pulled the helmet off, set it on a console, and sighed. She didn't know if McDougall and the anonymous woman were right, but she damn sure didn't want to listen to them.
A man and a woman without vac suits pushed their way into the room carrying bulky medical kits. As they did triage Alice found her rifle on the floor. For a moment the sight of it repelled her. I just killed someone with that thing. But it needed doing. If people like me won't fight back, people like her get control over everything.
She picked up the rifle and slung it across her back.
There was a circle of blood the size of her palm on the deck plates beside the rifle. She followed a line of red blotches across the deck to the standing pipes. Oh, God. That’s my blood. There’s a lot of it, too.
“You're leaking,” said a voice behind her.
She turned to see a woman in a green jumpsuit with a med kit in one hand. The woman dropped the kit and grabbed Alice by the upper arms, which seemed odd until the whole room tilted and Alice fell. She landed on her side, her head lolling.
“There’s still some gas.” The woman’s voice echoed strangely, like she was speaking into a barrel. “Let’s get you sitting up.” She heaved Alice into a sitting position, then dragged her sideways until her back was against a standing pipe. “There we go. Can you breathe?”
Sure. I’m fine. You should help someone who’s actually hurt. Alice formed the words in her mind, but for some reason her voice wouldn’t work.
“Wow. That’s nasty. Looks like the boot took most of the damage, though.”
The woman held Alice’s boot in her hands. When did she take my boot off? The sole was wet with blood, and a chunk was missing where the ball of her foot would be. The boot tilted, and Alice caught a glimpse of light. There was a hole in the top of the boot as well.