by Joshua James
Back home, in Mississippi on Earth, his mother had told him she didn’t think the military was good for him. There was no use risking his talent, she’d told him. If he died, it would all be wasted. Instead, she’d wanted him to get his doctorate and someday become a tenured professor. To be sure, if he’d worked in a university, he wouldn’t have had this kind of crazy pressure, where the lives of every crew member on the ship depended on him.
Chang clenched his fists. That was it — the lives of the entire crew here depended on him. He brought his mind back to the present moment, and focused on the task at hand.
He’d already hacked the lock, so nothing could get in without blasting through. The only way to open the door was to scan the private barcode he’d created on his wristwatch. He’d generated the numbers from memory, so no Arstan could find any hidden codes lying around or anything like that.
Chang stood up and crouched down next to the FTL-warp engine. On the surface, it looked like a box with a cylinder leading out from it into space. He opened the hatch on the top of the box and examined the inside through the safety glass. The plasma cannon that had hit it hadn’t punched a hole through to space, but the heat had melted one of the sixteen cylinders so that a gash opened up into the nitrous-oxide cooling system that connected the rest of the engines on the ship.
Chang took a deep breath. There was a leak, and he couldn’t fire up the FTL-warp without frying every engine on this ship. Not just that, but the cooling system wasn’t shielded against explosives. He’d have to lock off this room; otherwise the whole ship would get destroyed during the jump. Even then, once they FTL-warped, the ship would never fly again.
So much for becoming an engineer to fix things.
The gunfire outside seemed to be getting louder and more frequent. The Arstans would get here soon, but he felt like he had no other choice. For a moment he considered contacting Captain Olsen on the channel he’d kept open and asking for his feedback, but if the Arstans had overtaken the bridge, he might reveal their location. Better he operated under their radar.
He moved to the side of the box and opened the electrical panel. It only needed a little rewiring to circumvent the safety mechanism. After that, he could program in the warp coordinates directly on the panel on the side of the engine. No one ever seemed to acknowledge it, but engineers were among the most powerful people on any ship in service.
Chang gritted his teeth, clipped a grounding cable to his sleeve, and got to work. As he worked, he tried to ignore the sound of gunfire outside and the nagging voice of his mother in his head, telling him he would have had a better life as an academic.
34
Kota, Redrock, Turgin, and Riley made their last stand against the Arstans right in front of the CIC. They’d taken down another five Arstans, and from what Kota could see, there were about six left. But she hadn’t accounted for the second inbound boarding-module, as well as the countless number of Arstans who served on the enemy fleet outside.
She’d deployed another four fire-shields, placed strategically: two at the center front and two at the rear sides, to protect the entrance to the CIC. Turgin and Riley had the front shields manned, while Kota and Redrock took the rear.
The Arstans had dislodged the shields from further down the ship, and also carried them for protection. This made it very hard for either side to get purchase, and it was only a matter of time before the enemy got close enough to spear the four humans alive.
Dammit, Kota had no choice. Especially since Redrock and Riley were running out of ammo.
“We’re going to have to use explosives,” she said. They might end up punching a hole in the bulkhead, but fortunately, they were nowhere near the hull walls.
“I was hoping you’d say that,” Riley said. He took out his high-intensity grenade.
“No,” Kota said. “No high-intensity. Just standard-issue.”
She ducked out from under cover and threw a grenade right at the enemy shields. It landed in front of the foremost one and exploded, stopping an Arstan in its tracks. Riley and Turgin also used the opportunity to throw out some grenades, but the Arstans skillfully maneuvered their shields to deflect the grenades off them. As soon as they exploded, they used the shields to push away the flames and charge forwards.
“Shit,” Kota said. “Fall back. Form a defensive perimeter inside the CIC.”
They couldn’t take shields into the CIC, and so hopefully the entrance would create a bottleneck. She and Redrock entered the massive room first, followed by Riley and Turgin. Before the Arstans moved forward, they tried letting off a grenade, but Turgin saw it in time and kicked it back between the shields.
In a previous life, Turgin had wanted to be a professional soccer player. Now, he had scored a goal. The explosion blossomed, creating a brilliant flash of light, roaring out in both directions before dying down.
Behind the doors, two juniors joined in with pistols, which in all honesty wouldn’t do much against these Arstans. Kota checked over her shoulder to make sure the rest of them were still alive. Everyone was there, and Kota caught sight of Olsen for a brief second, his eyes wide but his jaw set. She didn’t look at him long before turning her attention back to the wall of smoke between the shields.
The first Arstan emerged, and she let off a burst of fire. But her shots went wide, and her rifle clicked to indicate she’d also run out of ammo. That was her last clip. Turgin’s shots hit true and took down the Arstan, but shortly after, his rifle also sputtered dry.
“That’s it,” Kota said. “We’re out.” She took the pistol offered to her by one of the juniors. Better than nothing, she thought.
Shortly afterwards, there came a bleeping sound from behind.
“Sir,” Cadinouche said to Olsen. “The rear admiral is hailing us again.”
The captain’s sigh was so loud, it echoed around the room. “Put him on screen.”
A few more shots from Kota’s pistol depleted it, so she put down her weapon and watched the Arstans approach out of the corner of her eye, backing towards the center of the room with her crew. She turned to the screen as she did. The rear admiral of the Arstan fleet came up on it.
“Aarsh,” Olsen said.
The Arstan didn’t hesitate getting to his point. “It’s clear now, Captain Olsen, that you’ve lost your battle. Now it’s time to make your choice. Will you surrender your crew, or will you forfeit their lives?”
35
Aarsh had given Olsen two options, but he was only interested in an unspoken third one: buy time.
Olsen had checked the cameras, and Chang was still down in the engine room, working away at the FTL-warp engine. If they warped, and he turned the magnetic flooring low enough, he could maybe knock their Arstan captors off balance, giving his crew time to react.
Of course, Olsen couldn’t alert anyone to the plan, which meant it would be a complete gamble whether it worked. But there was nothing new there.
Olsen looked up at Aarsh. “You have to understand, Rear Admiral Aarsh” — now, it was probably wise to use his honorific — “this is a tough decision, and I need time to discuss it with my crew.”
“I haven’t time for your games, Captain Olsen,” Aarsh replied, as his massive nostrils flared out. “Either you make your decision now, or I’ll make it for you.”
Meanwhile, at the door, Olsen noticed the Arstans were so well clustered together that they could easily be dispersed by a stray grenade. Olsen rested his right hand and his watch on the armrest and tapped away with his fingers.
He wanted the Arstan to think he was nervous. But he also had another plan.
“Rear Admiral Aarsh,” he said, “it seems the best option for the both of us is our surrender. But it only makes sense if we make it conditional. My crew is to be given fair treatment, and not, for example, sent to work in any asteroid mines.”
He could almost hear the shock amongst his crew. How could our captain hand us away to the Arstans? he knew they were thinking. He could also
see the anger in Aarsh’s eyes. He could hear the chittering voice in his mind: How dare he make demands of me in such a situation?
Yet no crew member uttered a word, and the Arstan only nodded his head and said, “Very well.”
Olsen knew Aarsh wouldn’t keep his word. He felt his wristwatch vibrate, and focused on the sensation for a moment. He paused for a while, again tapping rhythmically with his fingers. After a moment, he stood up slowly.
“That’s that, then,” he said. “One by one, I want you to file out and do as the Arstans command. That is an order.”
His crew stood up and turned around to look at him with astonished eyes. Santiago, Schmidt, Cadinouche, Redrock, Kota, and all the non-commissioned crew seemed to hate him right now. Only Rob and Novak didn’t show any emotion.
Olsen hoped to hell that Ensign Chang had understood his message. Because the fate of the entire ship was in his hands.
36
In school, Chang had seen the value in learning Morse code. Few others had, but Chang believed in collecting curious things, and a language where one could communicate without moving the tongue or the lips intrigued him.
He’d only told Olsen once that he knew the language, but the captain had been so pleased about it that Chang knew he wouldn’t forget. So when Chang heard the loud tapping from his wristwatch, he immediately recognized the ‘dot-dot-dot dash-dash-dash dot-dot-dot’ of an S.O.S. So he tapped out an O.K. on his wristwatch. He then waited for the rest of the message. And it came, spelled out short and sweet. “WARP ASAP. THROW GRENADE CIC.”
The rest of it, he’d heard on the open channel: Aarsh demanding a surrender and later, after Olsen had sent the message, accepting the surrender. But Chang surmised he might be the only person on the ship to know that Olsen in fact had other plans.
Chang had already programmed the ship to warp to the Ripley sector. He could hardly breathe now — the malfunctioning warp engine was also sucking out oxygen from the room. And with all the gunfire, he thought he would eventually suffocate in here rather than have to face the Arstans. An easy way out.
But now, he had to find the energy to get up and fight.
He flicked through the display on his wristwatch to find the barcode he needed to scan for the lock, and he opened the door. As soon as he did, he took a breath of stale air. He’d heard the grenades, and so the flavor of smoke did not surprise him.
Chang stumbled down the corridor, a little short of breath from the lack of oxygen before. He moved away from the CIC towards the armory and lunged through the doors. There were all kinds of different explosives here, but Chang had already decided not to take anything incendiary. To destroy their ship’s systems before they got to the Ripley sector would be suicide. They might enter without engines, but they would still need shields, weapons, oxygen regulators, and magnetic floors.
Instead, he found the box labeled ‘EMP’ and took one of the spherical bombs out of it. These grenades didn’t explode as such, but let out a pulse of energy so strong it disoriented living creatures and temporarily disabled machines.
Chang knew speed was of the essence, but he also didn’t want to alert any Arstans to his existence. So before he left the armory, he applied some oil to his boots. Then, he moved with as much haste as possible down the corridors, keeping his mag-boots at a low enough setting that he could skate along without making much sound. The corridors were eerily silent. The red lights had stopped pulsing, and Chang couldn’t hear a single beep of machinery.
He reached the CIC within two minutes and saw the Arstans clustered around the doorway. They had their rifles pointed towards Olsen and the crew, who had formed two neat lines.
Chang took the pin out of the grenade, counted to three, and threw it. It landed on the floor, in the center of the Arstans. They turned to it and shouted out, but Chang had timed it perfectly. The EMP blew, sending the Arstans to the floor.
What happened next was a blur. Kota and Riley dove for pistols on the floor while Turgin and the new commander, Novak, kicked two of the nearest Arstans back out of the CIC, smashing them headlong into their fellow warriors. Two more still in the CIC were dispatched by Kota and Riley with headshots at close range.
The others began to untangle and crawl to their feet. One saw Chang and pointed at him. There was more fire from within the CIC. Another Arstan fell, but at least one of them was rushing down the corridor toward Chang.
Then the corridor shifted and everything seemed to stretch out before him. He lost his balance, but his mag-boots held him firmly in place.
Just as he started to black out, he saw the back of the Artisan’s head explode, then the creature stumble and fall. He got a glimpse of Kota’s hard features framed around the pistol in her hand. She was shouting something, but he couldn’t understand it.
All Chang could understand, as his vision narrowed and the walls around him kept shifting unnaturally, was that the ship had finally entered FTL-warp.
37
When they emerged from FTL-warp, Olsen’s head was against the hard steel floor. Usually he’d ramp up the magnetism before they jumped, presuming they didn’t have time to harness themselves in. But he hadn’t had time, and from the way the lights were flashing blue, it appeared that a lot of systems had gone down. From where he lay, he could see the head of a downed Arstan, green blood flowing from its thick-skinned temple.
Chang had thrown the EMP grenade as he’d asked, and the plan had worked. Olsen turned his head to see Novak standing over him, offering him her hand. He took it, and she pulled him up with a surprising strength, given her slight frame.
“Thank you, Commander,” he said. He turned to see Chang approaching him on unsteady feet. His eyes were wide and a bit unfocused. “Well done, Ensign. Once this is over, I’ll recommend you for a medal.”
The young engineer rubbed the back of his neck in a daze. It seemed to take him a second to register Olsen’s words. “Sir, there’s something you should know.”
“Spit it out.”
“Activating the warp engine had consequences. I had to fry the engine room, meaning this ship can’t go anywhere again. The engines are dead, sir.”
Olsen grunted. He’d feared as much. Still, he allowed himself a wry smile. To see his crew performing in such ways made him proud. “Your first executive decision on my watch, Chang. And it was a damn good one.”
Kota and her men were stripping the dead Arstans of weapons, but otherwise left them where they fell. There wasn’t time to deal with them right now. The officers in the CIC had now returned to their stations. Most screens weren’t working — the EMP grenades had a much wider area of effect on electronics than they had on living things.
But the viewscreen was working, and it displayed the splendor of the Ripley sector’s star, burning and raging bright. Olsen could also see the Okranti on the viewscreen, working away on their mission. It had gathered several engineering-modules, deployed around one massive missile: a warhead with red highlights from the star dancing across its surface. Olsen didn’t need to check any references to know it was composed of metrinium. Only that rare metal could survive the strains put on it in the center of a star.
Fortunately, the Okranti was so busy that they hadn’t noticed their beaten and weathered enemy in the vicinity. That was a good thing, since the Tapper’s weapons and shield systems still hadn’t come back online.
“No!” shouted Chang.
Everyone in the CIC spun around at the sharp word.
“No, no, no!” Chang shouted again. He’d pulled one of the control panels right off the wall behind Schmidt and must have done some kind of power rerouting, because it was glowing with data.
“Ensign, what is it?” Olsen asked.
Rob was standing next to Chang. Apparently the white-faced cyborg had been enlisted to help Chang reset the console. Now it was he who spoke up. “It would seem that the situation in the engine room is worse than anticipated. The explosion in there caused a chain reaction in one of the engi
nes.”
“What does that mean?” Olsen said impatiently.
Chang turned, and his face was almost as white as Rob’s. “We have around ten minutes until the ship is completely destroyed, sir.”
38
Olsen felt like he’d been punched in the gut. For a moment, his mind was a jumble of thoughts that seemed to paralyze him. But one fact kept clawing its way through.
Thirty billion colonists.
He glanced around the CIC. It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that Olsen had seen more flashing red lights than he had normal lights over the last forty-eight hours.
“Then we’ve got ten minutes to figure out a way to stop that bomb,” he said. “Suggestions?”
He looked from Rob to Novak, and then along the line of bridge officers. He could see the wheels turning, but nothing was coming out.
“The Extractor,” said a weak voice behind him.
He turned to see Redrock standing next to Kota. His color was coming back, but he still looked bruised and battered.
“The shuttle?” Olsen said. “Can she fly?”
Kota looked skeptically at Redrock. “It’s in worse shape than you are.”
“She’ll fly,” Redrock said firmly.
“I think so, too,” Chang said. “In fact, I’m sure of it.”
It sounded to Olsen like Chang was trying to convince himself, but nonetheless, options weren’t plentiful. “Chang, take any junior crew you need and get down to the Extractor, and get her back in operation. I don’t have to tell you how much time you have.”
As Chang bolted out, Olsen noted that systems were slowly starting to come online, at least, and most of the screens were now flickering back to life.
He turned to Cadinouche. “What is Kraic up to?”