“It’s still not a plan.”
“Your confidence is infectious,” Jrill said. “Anyway, we allotted for a half larim in the schedule to finish the evacuation. If we need less, all the better. The pressure door’s just ahead. First, you’re up.”
First pulled her deck out of the oversized beach bag she’d bought to try to blend in with the other passengers. They’d tried to snag some crew uniforms from a laundry cart to make breaking into the engineering levels easier, but it was surprisingly difficult to find appropriately sized clothes for a human, a Turemok, and an Ish in a random pile.
So instead they wore their vacation clothes and, if challenged, would just have to play the naïve tourists looking for a bathroom card. They’d already left the polished veneer of the passenger decks behind for the service levels, the network of kitchens, laundries, storerooms, machine shops, and recycling plants invisible to the guests above that kept the ship’s illusion going.
That had been as easy as distracting a steward and snagging his pass card. But coming up was one of the massive pressure doors that formed a nigh-impenetrable wall separating and protecting the service and passenger decks from the engineering section and all its dangerous high-energy physics. It would require more than a key card to reach the other side of it.
Fortunately, First had a plan for her part of the operation. She took out her handheld and called up Navigator, then set it onto the surface of her deck to link the two.
“Hello, VALUED CUSTOMER, how can I…” The cartoon Fenax mascot paused. “Oh, it’s you. Aren’t you on the wrong ship?”
“I realized I’d had so much fun, I decided I didn’t want it to end yet, so I booked another cruise right away,” First lied.
“See, if you’d have signed up for our Shalikan Cruises Membership Rewards Account when I suggested it the first time, you would’ve saved—”
“Yes, yes. You were right, I was wrong. But I need help right now. My friends and I got lost and need directions back to our cabins.”
“You’re outside the engine room!”
“We got really lost.” First glanced at the status readout on her deck. A linked team of half a dozen different cracker apps, ghosting programs, and piggyback viruses she’d spent the last three days recoding and hot-wiring to work together busied themselves attacking Navigator’s security firewalls. Their attempt remained undetected so far, but the risk of discovery went up with each passing moment. First needed to keep Navigator distracted from what she was actually trying to do.
“C’mon, help us out here. You’re a Navigator, aren’t you? So navigate us back to the all-inclusive bar so I can get another one of those sweet gourd drinks with the little toy burgeron for an umbrella.”
“You know,” Navigator said smugly, “there’s one thing you could do to thank me for my help.”
First rolled her eyes. “Ugh, fine. I’ll sign up for your stupid rewards program.”
“Ask politely.”
First’s teeth ground. “Navigator,” she said without her jaw moving.
“Yes, VALUED CUSTOMER?”
“I’d like to register for my own Membership Rewards Account.”
“…”
“Please.”
“That’s better. You won’t be sorry, I promise you.”
No, but you will be, First thought.
“First name?” Navigator asked.
“Firstname.”
“Last name?”
“Lastname.”
“Excellent,” Navigator said. “Permanent resident address?”
“What, no clever jokes or incredulous questions about my name?”
“People feed me bad info all the time. My performance review metrics aren’t based on truthfulness, just total new accounts registered. You could tell me your name was Eagle Independence and I wouldn’t give a glot. Address?”
“Junktion, Qua level, Blue sector. Apartment Three Seven Zoko.” First dutifully reported her old apartment that even now Quarried Themselves was in the process of moving out of. Not that the cruise line would survive long enough to send the new tenants any junk mail.
“And your HighWeb account name?” Navigator asked.
“I don’t know,” First waffled. “Do you promise not to spam my in-box with junk?”
“I can promise you anything you want.”
First sacrificed one of her trash accounts. “[email protected].”
“Thank you, Firstname Lastname. Your Membership Rewards Account is now active. You will receive a confirmation message shortly explaining your—”
“Yes, yes,” First said impatiently, one eye still glued to her deck’s status display. “I’m sure it will reward me beyond my wildest hopes and dreams.”
Jrill leaned in to whisper at her. “What the kark are you doing messing around with that VI?”
First put a hand up to Jrill’s face, inviting her to talk to it instead. One firewall remained, and her sappers picked away at it like gold prospectors thirsty for the night’s booze-and-whorin’ money.
“So will you guide us out of here now or what?” First asked the little cartoon Fenax.
“Of course! I’m your Navigator. I’m here … to…” The last firewall fell. “You piece of glot. You were trying to sneak into my back door this whoooole tiiime. Yooouuu cooouuld haaave bouuught meee diiiiinnneeeer, Fiiiiirss … Navigator function temporarily unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience. Five hundred BONUS POINTS have been credited to your Membership Rewards Account.”
First watched in rapt attention as the Matron’s VI attendant system rebooted. If her plan worked, they were in. If it didn’t, well … they’d find out really quickly how good Jrill and Sheer were in a fight.
The now-familiar Fenax cartoon reappeared on her handheld’s screen and waved a ganglion. “Hello, Firstname Lastname. I’m Navigator. How can I help you?”
First drew herself up. “Navigator, I’d like you to open this door behind me, then forget I asked you to and delete our position data from the ship’s memory,” she said with as much authority as she could muster.
“No problem!” her version of Navigator said enthusiastically. Never one to miss a moment, First set her deck down, spun around, and spread her hands in time to the opening door like Moses parting the Red Sea.
“Yeah, yeah,” Sheer said, twirling her pincers and pretending to be underwhelmed. “We’re on the clock here.”
First held an arm out to the engine room and bowed an invitation. “Your lair awaits, madam.”
Sheer took her own oversized beach bag filled with tools and diagnostic equipment and scuttled inside, where her part of the plan awaited. The trouble with evacuating several thousand people from a place they’d paid a considerable number of credits to be was providing the right motivation.
With very few exceptions, no living creatures in the explored galaxy were big fans of hard gamma radiation. That was enough stick to persuade even the most hardheaded passengers to vacate their cabins. The trouble there was, as First quickly discovered, the radiation alarm systems on the Monarch and Matron were hardwired into the command cave and off the ship’s local network, making it impossible for her to hack into it to trigger a false alarm. Further, rad sensors were in almost every compartment. Even tricking one of them with a low-dose gamma source would only trigger a lockdown of that single compartment while the decontamination team was dispatched to clean up the spill.
In the end, the only way anyone could think of to trigger an alarm that would empty the entire ship was to cause an actual radiation leak at the one place nobody would dare ignore it: the ship’s matter/antimatter reactor.
Which is where Sheer came in. The Ish had evolved on a world dotted with volcanic archipelagoes circling a small, relatively young red dwarf star, prone to frequent, intense solar flares. Their tough shells protected them against not just the pressure of the ocean and the claws of their competition but against the radiation their sun occasionally rained down on them.
Making her the ideal candidate to sneak into the reactor and cause a small, easily reversible gamma ray leak.
“You want us to come with you and play lookout?” First asked. “Until you’re ready to open the taps, that is.”
“No point risking it,” Sheer said. “If either of you are spotted, the game’s over anyway. Better just spin the wheel and take my chances. Just make sure that Fenax is plugged into the command cave when it happens. I’m not karking doing this twice.”
“In that case, good luck,” Jrill said.
“Navigator,” First said. “Close the engine room door.” First waved as the thick door slid shut like a stone on a tomb. Sheer waved back, nervous mouthparts quivering ever so slightly. The door sealed and locked.
“This is a bad plan,” Jrill said.
“But you said—”
“I said it for Sheer’s benefit. The last thing she needed was to go in there and stick her eyestalks into an antimatter annihilation reactor thinking her plan was nuts. But it is. Totally bonkers. I still can’t believe Loritt went along with it.”
“Yeah, well, it’s our job now to make it work.”
“Don’t tell me my job, hatchling.”
First shrugged. “Someone needs to. You seem to forget now and then.”
“Just go secure the Fenax for transport and wait for my signal to proceed,” Jrill growled.
“Okay, okay.” First put up her hands and headed back up to the cabin where they’d stashed their pilot. Jrill would take up a position near the command cave and make sure the way was clear.
Meanwhile, still on the nearly deserted Monarch, Loritt, Hashin, and the “real” Fenax stood by with a splice into the public-address system, waiting for their signal.
Sure enough, halfway back to First’s cabin, the radiation alarm went off. Now, the clock was really counting down. There was just one problem: Sheer had been a little too impatient to sabotage the reactor. As First watched with growing concern, the doors in the hallway leading to her cabin flung open as panicked life-forms in varying stages of dress, carrying children or other valuables, stampeded into the hall even as the captain’s voice boomed over the intercom to urge a calm and orderly evacuation.
Within seconds, First was caught up in the current of alien bodies moving in entirely the wrong direction.
“Coming through! Make a hole!” she shouted, but it fell on indifferent ears, antennae, and so on. She moved to the edge of the crowd and ducked into the first open cabin door she came across and waited for the crowd to pass, but after several long minutes, it was still going strong with no signs of abating. Jrill had been right: the reality of an evacuation was anything but orderly. Gripped with mortal terror, beings pushed, shouted, and shoved. People tripped over each other in their haste to get ahead, causing backups and logjams that only slowed the process further. Eventually, First pulled out her handheld. “Navigator, I need an alternate route back to my cabin.”
“How alternate are we talking?” Navigator asked. First turned the handheld around and pointed its camera at the surging throng she’d been caught up in. “I see. Go back into the hall and go to the right, then take the first corridor to the right.”
First obeyed, this time allowing herself to get swept along instead of fighting the current, even pushing along the edge herself. Thirty meters of rooms later and she came to the corridor and turned right. Here, she had to fight the flow again, but it was a much smaller tributary, and she had an easier time pushing against it.
“Stop here,” Navigator said. “Okay, it’s unlocked.”
“What’s unlocked?” First asked, then looked down at a half-sized door barely higher than her waist. “You can’t be serious.”
“Hey, you said alternate.”
First sighed and crouched down. “So I did.” The door slid open at her touch. She tried to bend over and walk, but it was just a smidge too low to allow it, so all fours it would be. She made it all of one shuffle before something clammy grabbed her ankle.
“Let me come with you!” something with five blinking eyes and a mouth at the end of a trunk said from the doorway. Frist recoiled from the unexpected guest, but their wormy grip on her leg held fast.
“Ah, no.” First flipped over and braced against the walls of the narrow passage with her arms, then pushed the intruder’s squishy face away with her free foot. “Navigator, close the door!” she yelled as soon as she managed to push them back across the threshold. Not wanting to lose a hand along with their opportunity for escape, the alien released First’s ankle and pulled back just as the door snapped shut.
“Sorry,” she said as the door locked again. She could still hear them pounding as she crawled away. It was completely dark now that the light from the hallway had been cut off, so First flipped on the flashlight app on her handheld. The tunnel ahead was grimy. Her palms were already full of soot. It smelled of a contradictory mix of sweat and detergents.
“Navigator, where am I?”
“Laundry service tunnel.”
“The maid doesn’t come down here much, huh?”
“No one ever comes down here except automated carts.”
“Like a dumbwaiter?”
“I wouldn’t call them ‘dumb,’ exactly,” Navigator said. “Just single-minded.”
“No, it’s a thing from Earth. It means … never mind. How do I get to my cabin from here?”
“These tunnels go to every cabin on the ship.”
“So long as I don’t get run over by a single-minded laundry cart,” First said.
“Laundry service has been suspended. Just follow my directions.”
Twenty long, dirty, wasted minutes later, First spilled out of the laundry chute and into her cabin.
“You’re late,” the Fenax contract pilot said from their tank perched by the window.
First stood up and wiped her filthy hands on a towel, then threw her ruined sarong back down the laundry chute. “Had to take a detour.”
“To do what? Sweep a chimney?”
“Okay, seriously. How can you know I’m dirty? You don’t even have eyes.” First threw a thick, plushy towel over their tank. “I’m changing clothes. Don’t peek.”
“You know we breed through spawning clouds, right?”
“Don’t care,” First said as she wiggled out of her wrecked top. Shame, every article of clothing she owned was made to order out of necessity, and it had been a really cute top. Whatever. The money from this job would buy her ten thousand cute tops. Eyes on the prize.
Somewhat presentable again, First put her hair up with her last scrunchie and grabbed the Fenax’s tank. Fortunately, a compact counter-grav coil built into its base took up most of the work of hefting it. She opened the door and rejoined the finally thinning crowds in the hallway and headed for the command cave.
“Boss,” First said, connecting with the team’s encrypted link. “I have the pilot in hand, and we’re on the move. Make your announcement.”
“Cutting it awful close,” Loritt said impatiently.
“Slow is fast,” First said. “Or so I hear.” She cut the link. The next step was for Loritt to announce to the few crew members left on the Monarch that his group of ecoterrorists took credit for the “attack” on the Matron and they had an eighth larim to clear out before he’d blow their ship, too. It was also First’s deadline to plug her Fenax into the pilot’s seat.
While the crowds were thinning out, they were also moving faster and more desperately. A particularly brutish Gorolon down on four legs and moving with a head of steam came crashing down the hallway, knocking other passengers down and leaving them skittering around the floor like spinning bowling pins.
“Oh, shi—” is all First had time to say before one of their tree trunk legs struck her hard in the torso with a wet crack and sent her bouncing off the wall. A constellation of stars burst across First’s field of vision as she hit the floor, along with a white-hot stab of pain in her side. The impact knocked the Fenax tank lo
ose from her grip and sent it rolling down the hall like an oversized coffee tin. A dozen other feet, hooves, and paws kicked it in their mad dash for safety, spinning it on two axes and even farther away from where First lay sprawled on the deck, moaning along with the throbbing pain.
Broken rib, has to be, she thought. First had never broken a bone before but guessed someone snapping a stick wrapped in a wet towel was probably what it would sound like. With great effort, she righted herself against the wall and used it to slide back up to her feet. Anything more than a shallow breath sent an electric shock of pain through her entire left side.
“This is a bad plan,” she said to no one in particular, then set off down the hall after her wayward charge with a hand held tight to protect her side. It wasn’t easy. The tank continued to bounce from one foot to another like a horizontal game of Plinko until it finally settled in a doorway.
First gingerly squatted down to retrieve the pilot.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“If I could throw up, I would,” the Fenax said as it spun around inside its own little self-contained tornado. “Please stand me back up.”
First obliged, then tried to lift the tank, which sudden felt like it weighed a ton. “What the hell? Did you put on weight in the last two minutes?”
“The counter-grav coil in the base of my environmental unit is damaged.”
First sighed. Sighing hurt. She cursed. Cursing hurt, too.
“That fits.” She tipped the cylinder back over again. “Sorry, jellyfish, but the spin cycle isn’t over yet.”
Without ceremony or sympathy, First kicked the tank with a heel down the corridor and chased after it like a goal-starved midfielder hounding a soccer ball.
“THIiiss … iiSSss … nnOOtt … ppAARRttt … oF The … deEAAall!” the whirling Fenax shouted impotently as they trundled down the hallway in a blur.
“Circumstances have changed. We’re improvising. Isn’t it fun?” Frist asked.
“NOOooo … ooOOoo … ooOOoo!”
First shrugged. “Can’t please everybody.” She spotted an elevator and curved toward it. Her destination was twelve decks above. Fortunately, the main evacuation route wasn’t, so the car she called was completely vacant. Breathing hard, the fractured rib stabbing her with every inhalation, First loaded the two of them into the elevator and jammed the button for the command deck.
Starship Repo Page 14