by Dan Thompson
“Only after I get—”
Michael cut himself off as he saw the gun move. It was now or never. He threw the cup across the office toward the outer door. The man with the gun ducked out of instinct, but it was hardly necessary. Michael’s throw had been intentionally high. It went out through the door and clattered down the cross-corridor.
He did not get to see what happened next. Instead he felt something pound against his chest like a fat ball of bricks. It pushed him hard against the side wall of his cabin, slamming his head against the wall.
The last thing he saw as he slumped to the floor was the door sliding shut with the plate of food on the other side.
Nick lowered his weapon as the door slid shut. “Stupid kid.”
Alex stood and went to retrieve the food from the floor. “Mr. Carrillo warned us he would try something, but to be honest, I thought he’d make a jump at us.”
That was when Nick smelled it, acidic and burning in his nose. He jerked his arm up to cover his mouth and did what he could to breathe through the fabric of his sleeve. Then he turned to look back down the hall and saw the expanding cloud. He did not wait for it to reach him. He turned and dashed down the hall toward the galley instead.
He heard shouting behind him, but he did not pause until he got there and sealed the hatch behind him. Only then did he key his headset. “Gas in the hall, emergency vent!”
There was a pause before Perry responded from engineering. “Shit, it’s coming down the stairs. Where’s the control?”
“Environmental!” came Stefan’s answer.
“I’m already there,” Perry replied. “It’s all dials and readouts, and ... okay, I see an emergency panel, but it’s labeled by section. Which section?”
“All of them!” Stefan roared. Nick heard that through the hatch as well as the headset.
Silence stretched out for forty-five long seconds before the fans kicked in on high.
“All right,” Perry said, his voice ragged. “It’s going.” He coughed twice into his microphone. “Should be clear in another minute or two. What was that?”
“Their captain threw something into the hall,” Alex replied.
“It looked like a glass of water,” Nick explained, “but when I saw the cloud I smelled chlorine.”
“Chlorinated water?” Alex asked.
“No, chlorine gas.”
“Whatever, it’s clear now. Let’s give it another minute and meet up at the junction and see what caused it.”
Nick agreed, though he waited a full minute and a half before cracking open the seal and returning to the cross-corridor. The others were already there with Stefan kneeling down by the now empty glass.
He held up a blackened piece of metal about three centimeters square. “What do you make of this?”
Nick knelt beside him to look. “Can you turn it over?” he asked. He did not want to touch it.
Stefan flipped it over. “Does it look familiar?”
He nodded. “Yeah, it’s a battery case.”
“Is that where the chlorine came from?”
“Probably. Might be some combination of ammonium-chloride or zinc-chloride, sometimes some manganese. It looks like he must have pried it open to expose the paste. This stuff doesn’t react well to water, especially if it was a salt solution.” He grinned and shook his head. “It’s not really all that dangerous with the quantities we’re talking about, but it sure made an impression.”
Stefan nodded and set it back on the ground. “Like I said, his old man was crafty, and I guess he is too. I presume you discouraged him.”
“Damn straight,” Nick replied. “Right into the wall.”
Stefan stood. “All right. Now we all know to be careful with him, but if he pulls another stunt like this, we’ll do more than discourage.”
They all stood as well, and Perry went back down to engineering.
“Should we feed the rest of them?” Nick asked.
“Sure, I don’t expect any of the others to be this inventive.”
Stefan returned to the bridge, while Nick and Alex went back to the tray of plates in the hallway. The navigator was next. Alex knelt down and triggered the navigator’s door while Nick stood back with his pistol aimed at chest level. The navigator was nowhere in sight. Nick gave Alex a nod, and he pushed the food in with the rod and then triggered the door closed again.
“Did you see him?” Alex asked.
Nick shook his head. “I’d guess he was hiding in either the closet or the bathroom. Smarter than his captain … kept himself out of the line of sight. He might be one to look out for.”
They moved down to the next door, the musician’s. Nick placed the next plate on the floor, stepped back, braced himself and aimed the weapon. Only then did Alex enter the code using the rod. The hall was narrower here, so he had had to shorten it to only a meter.
The door slid open to reveal the musician standing on the opposite side of the room. Nick grimaced at him as Alex slid the food in.
Dieter raised his arms slowly. “You want to tell me what the hell is going on?”
“A little detour,” Nick said. “Stay cool, and you’ll come through this fine.”
“I want to talk to the captain.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Nick replied, “but it may not be possible.”
Alex gave a little snort. “I doubt he’ll even want to talk to you.”
Confusion played across Dieter’s face. “Huh?”
Alex laughed. “Yeah, he thinks you’re one of us.”
“What?” It was more accusation than question.
Nick took one step forward and activated the door. When it had closed, he turned to Alex. “You shouldn’t have said that.”
Alex shrugged. “Like it matters, locked in his cabin.”
Nick shook his head. “It’s bad policy. Don’t give them any information you don’t have to.”
Alex stood and faced off against him. “Yeah, what’s he gonna do with it?”
Nick grumbled. “I don’t know, but if you hadn’t told him, I wouldn’t even have to be wondering about it.”
Alex frowned but took a step back. “Okay, I see your point. So who’s next, the environmental guy or that drives lady?”
“The other engineer, Vivian Ward,” he said pointing to the door.
Alex nodded, and they set up. Vivian gave them no trouble as she remained sitting on her bed the entire time. The environmental guy was even more compliant, sitting at his desk, facing away with his hands held high in the air.
“Who’s left?” Alex asked.
“The cook, back on the other hall next to us.”
“That’s right, your tiny terror. Maybe we should bring some backup. You know, in case she comes at us with her mad fighting skills.”
Nick merely shrugged. He had stayed alive in this business for almost thirty years. He did not need to justify his paranoia to this kid. They circled back around through the cross-corridor.
Alex sniggered the whole way, almost giggling toward the end. “Oh, come on man, you’re not still worried about her, are you?”
“All I said was that she looked like the woman at the fight, and I still say she does.”
They got to Winner’s door and set up, but when the door opened, the girl was not charging at them. She was not even standing. Instead, she lay on the floor between her bunk and desk. Her head was out of view, but her right leg was twisted up at an odd angle.
“Hey, little girl, it’s dinner time,” Alex called. There was no movement. He pushed the plate over the threshold. “Come on, aren’t you hungry?”
Nick rolled his eyes and almost missed seeing Alex start moving forward. He reached out fast with his free hand and grabbed him by the shoulder. “Don’t.”
Alex shrugged him off, stood, and closed the door. “What’s the deal?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t want to go in and find out.”
“Yeah, but maybe she’s hurt. Hell, she could be dead for all we know.”
Alex scoffed at him. “Where’d you lose your sense of adventure, old man?”
Nick did not laugh. He just turned and walked away saying, “You’ve got galley cleanup tonight.”
Carlos threw another wet washcloth through the wall at Michael. This one actually hit him in the face, but he got no reaction. Carlos grumbled. At least the kid was still breathing, and there was no obvious sign of bleeding. Jansky guns could knock you out for a while, but the way the boy had hit his head on the wall, Carlos worried it might be a concussion or worse.
He returned to his bed and pulled his tablet out from under the pillow. He swiped his thumb across it and peered at the navigation display. So far, so good. They had veered back to rimward again, struggling to find a good seam through the shock fronts Carlos was throwing at them. It was not much yet, but it was enough. He did some quick math in his head. It was rough, of course, not knowing the actual destination, but he figured they were already twenty to thirty minutes behind in the last few hours.
He made a few minor adjustments and tucked it beneath his pillow again. That was when he heard the thump. It was not from the bathroom. It was from around his bed. He stood up and heard the next one and then two more in rapid succession. They were coming through the wall.
But this was not the wall he shared with the captain. It was Dieter’s wall.
More thumps followed with different spacing, and strangely, even with different pitches. There was something familiar about the pattern. Slowly, he realized it was a musical rhythm, but it was not until it repeated that he recognized it. It was a crude approximation of the tune Dieter had played a few days before when they dined in the Guild Hall with the captain.
Carlos smiled at the choice. Dieter could have attempted any pattern, or for that matter, any music, but he had chosen one that had been played when they had all been together, just the crew. He pounded the wall back twice.
The wall answered back with two more thumps.
He stood and looked at the wall. It was covered in a tightly woven carpet, not that different from what was on the floor. It was fairly sound absorbent, but it could probably be removed. He did not see any seems, but there was bound to be a way to tear it at the corners.
He went to the bathroom and scanned over the tools he had been using there, but did not see what he wanted. The footlocker was in his closet, so he went there next. He flipped it open, and the lid banged against the back wall. He smiled at that. This wall was bare metal. He rapped it with his knuckles, and it gave a satisfying clang.
A moment later, it clanged back.
He leaned forward and cupped his hands between his mouth and the wall, doing the best he could to form a seal. “Dieter?”
He pressed his ear against the wall, heard some shuffling, and then heard the reply, distant and distorted, but it sounded like Dieter. “Hell yes, it’s me, but I didn’t do it.”
Carlos cupped his hands again. “Didn’t do what?”
He put his ear back to the wall. “Was Richard. Hit me in the head with my sitar.”
He cupped his hands again. “Are you okay?”
“Broke it off at the neck. Gonna kill that bastard.”
Carlos laughed. Only Dieter would have answered by talking about the instrument instead of himself. “Richard is with the hijackers?”
“Think so. Not me. No way.”
Carlos nodded. He never really believed it had been Dieter. Richard, on the other hand, was snooty enough to pull this kind of stunt. He thought back to the tune Dieter had been tapping out on the wall. Indeed, the entire crew had been there, all but Richard.
He cupped his hands on the wall again. “Never thought it was you. Sit tight. Skipper and I are working on something.”
“Will do” was the reply.
Carlos looked back at the bathroom. Now, all he needed to do was wake the boy up.
Elsa knelt in the corner of the cramped computer bay and shook her head. For all of Captain Gallows’s bluster, his security aboard the Fat Grizzly was lax. Back when she had commanded the Blue Jaguar, she had kept a guard posted outside the main computers. On top of that, the access door required both a passcode and a concurrent signal from the bridge. Here on the Grizzly, there had been no guard, and the passcode was the same as for the weapons locker.
She logged in under her guest account, opened a command window, and ran one of her favorite utilities. It promptly crashed the shell she was in and dumped her down into recovery mode. Had she done this in her quarters, it would have simply reset the terminal and offered her another login prompt, but the maintenance terminal in the computer bay was different. The designers presumed that if you were in recovery mode here, it meant you were dealing with a larger problem and trivial matters like passwords and security were the last thing a dying crew should have to worry about. In this case, of course, there was no larger problem, but the terminal responded as if it were in the midst of a larger systems crash, even as the rest of the system carried on with normal ship operations.
That was why Elsa had always kept tighter control of the Jaguar’s computer bay.
The first thing she did was go to the command records. Gallows was listed there, of course. Celeste Davies showed up as the second-in-command, and two previous captains were listed as well, though their accounts were marked as inactive. Elsa shook her head. That was simply sloppy.
She opened the alternate page of records and found a veritable who’s who of the Yoshido senior captains. Four members of the actual Yoshido family were there, along with six other captains. Four of those had moved up to operations, while two remained on active duty. One was Derek Vaughn, whom most of the syndicate called the Dark Rider, and the other was herself.
Gallows had made this too easy. The first thing she had done upon taking command of the Blue Jaguar had been to clear this entire page of anyone not directly in her chain of command. Here, however, all she had to do was change one flag, and the Winged Lady’s command authority was marked as active. It would not move to the primary page until she asked the computer to recognize it as such, but that was all it would take.
As far as the Grizzly’s systems were concerned, they were ready to commit mutiny on her command.
Michael awoke to the impact of a wet washcloth on his face. His head rolled to the side, and he nearly vomited. There were three other wet cloths balled up on the floor beside him.
“Skipper?” It was Carlos’s voice.
He looked around, unsure of where he was. It was his cabin. He was aboard the Sophie. There was clearly something wrong, though. His head pounded, his chest ached, his entire body was tingling, and he was asleep on the floor next to his door.
“Are you awake?” It was Carlos again.
Michael looked up to the source of the sound. Through the bathroom door, the pipes in the wall beneath the sink were exposed, and Carlos was peering into his cabin with one arm extended through the gaps. Rather than finding it odd, mostly he recognized that there was something important about it.
“I think I am,” he replied at last.
“Good, ’cause I think it’s working.”
“What’s working?”
“The storm.”
“What storm?”
“Captain, do you remember what’s happening?”
He looked around and immediately regretting moving his head. When the room finally caught up with him, he swore not to do that again. “Maybe you’d better fill me in.”
“Do you even remember the hijacking?”
That sounded familiar. He blinked a few times. “I think they shot me.”
“They sure did. Crap … Skipper, I need you to feel around your head. Are you bleeding?”
Michael ran his hand back through his hair. The hair was dry, and there w
as no sticky residue of matted blood. There was, however, a large bump on the left side near the back. “No blood, but a bump. Hurts.” He looked at his hand. The skin felt like it was under running water, but it looked perfectly normal. “Feels weird.”
“Better bumps than dents, sir. The rest is probably aftereffects of that Jansky at close range. Take one of those washcloths I gave you and press it over the bump. It’ll be cool, and that’ll help.”
Michael did as he was told, too tired to debate it. “Hijack, you said?”
“Yeah, we’ve been hijacked. I talked to Dieter through the wall, and he said it was Richard.”
“Dieter … who’s Dieter?”
Carlos sighed. “Look, Skipper, you rest for now, but if you talk to Richard again, don’t trust him. And don’t tell him we’ve been talking. Got that? Don’t trust Richard.”
The cool cloth felt good against Michael’s head, and he started to slip away again. “Got it. Thanks, Richard.” He heard the voice objecting, but before long he was asleep.
Stefan reached for his empty coffee mug and decided it was time to get it filled again. Normally, he would have gone to get it himself, but this was far from the normal situation. He toggled the mic on his headset. “Hey, Perry, can I get another coffee? I’m empty up here, but the winds are a little too active for me to step away right now.”
Perry acknowledged, and a few minutes later, he came onto the bridge with a fresh pot. In that time, Stefan had already made two minor attitude adjustments.
“So, an ill wind blows?” Perry asked as he poured the coffee.
“Not so much ill as stormy. At least, I think it’s a storm.”
Perry leaned forward to look at the navigation display. “If you say so. I never learned to read these things.”
“Not even on drives?” Stefan took a sip, but kept his eyes glued to the third derivative spin. That thing had been twitching for almost an hour.
“Not really. I mean, I know how to run a sail generator, but I spent most of my engineering tours managing the reactor.” He took another look. “It looks active enough. So, a storm?”