Atlantia Series 1: Survivor (7 page)

‘Easy now,’ he said, his voice rolling like boulders toward her down the corridor. ‘I just wanna talk.’

She watched him, kept the rifle pointed at him as he shut the security door behind him and stood in the corridor. His eyes seemed bright white against his dark skin, clear and steady as he watched her.

‘I know that you can’t talk,’ he said as he took a pace toward her, ‘so this is going to be a one way thing.’

She tensed, pulled the rifle into her shoulder and gently squeezed the trigger. The pulse–chamber hummed as it activated and the big man froze.

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘it’s still a two way thing.’

She gestured with the rifle barrel, jerking it down twice. The big man slowly got down onto his knees, his hands still held out to his sides. She moved closer, focusing on the man’s face, then stopped moving and waited.

‘My name’s Qayin,’ he said finally. ‘You’re Alpha Zero Seven, out of the maximum–security containment facility.’

She jerked her head over her shoulder, and Qayin nodded.

‘The stern section of the prison hull,’ he said, ‘reserved for the most dangerous convicts. Looks like somebody decided one of you was a bit too dangerous, put a bomb in the hatches between your wing and ours. It went off a couple of hours ago, severed the wing from the rest of the ship and sent it into the atmosphere of that planet we’re orbiting.’

She kept the rifle pulled tight into her shoulder, looked over Qayin’s head to the security door.

‘Got fifty of my guys in there,’ Qayin said, ‘fifty more up front in case the hatches to the Atlantia open. Our cells were closest to the blast, aft of the cell block. The damage ruptured some of our cell gates and we got out before the fire really got goin’. Fought our way into the control tower and got out just before the governor ordered the entire block evacuated, an’ I don’t mean of prisoners.’

She looked at Qayin, seeking any hint of deception, but the big man’s gaze was steady.

‘They flushed the cell block,’ Qayin went on, ‘bled out all the air. Most o’ the guys died where they were, fighting or bleedin’ out. We made our way up here, got as far as the command centre before the Atlantia cut us off. The prison hull fusion core’s been compromised, no power comin’ from it. Cell block’s connected to the Atlantia by a single passage, and all our power and life support is comin’ from them too through the tethers. One wrong move and we’re all history.’

She remained still as Qayin spoke, the big man gesturing with a nod of his big head to his right.

‘Nice lookin’ planet down there, somewhere to start over, some are sayin’. We’ve got the captain by the balls, took hostages in the fight. Whole ship’s losing orbital velocity and droppin’ toward the atmosphere. They don’t give us what we want, we’ll drag ‘em down to hell with us.’

She raised her head slightly, a questioning gesture.

‘Freedom,’ Qayin said. ‘They let us aboard the Atlantia, we’ll bring the hostages with us and they can cut the prison hull loose. Everybody wins.’

She watched him for a moment longer, thinking hard.

Qayin was a convict, for sure, and from somewhere in the deepest recesses of her mind a phrase sprang to mind, something that she remembered. The big man’s glowing tattoos signified his gang or crew: the
Mark of Qayin
.

‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ Qayin said.

She took a paced closer and let the rifle drop slightly. She shook her head once.

‘You want in?’ Qayin asked her.

She looked at him for a moment and then turned her masked head slightly and looked up at the black eye of a camera high up on the wall of the corridor.

‘Yeah, we saw everything you did to the pirate crew,’ Qayin said. ‘They got what they deserved.’

She turned slowly back to Qayin, and he appeared to sense rather than see the rage concealed behind her featureless mask.

‘They’s fools,’ he said, ‘shoulda known better. Right now this ship is doomed so we all gotta watch each other’s backs, right? Or there ain’t none of us getting out alive.’

She watched him for a long time. He could see the shape of her breasts rising and falling beneath the fabric of her uniform and he was clearly forcing himself to maintain eye contact with her, to fix his gaze on the thin slits in the metal mask. She knew that nobody on the block had seen a woman in years. It was probably just their damned luck that the one who did show up was the most lethal person on the whole vessel.

‘You in?’ Qayin asked again.

She slowly lowered the rifle and pulled it in to port–arms. Qayin lowered his hands and got to his feet.

She was tiny compared to him, the top of her head not even reaching as high as his armpit. It appeared hard for Qayin to believe what she was capable of, what she had done, so hard was he scrutinising her. Qayin gestured with a thumb over his shoulder.

‘Fifty men in there an’ none of ‘em seen a woman in years. You ready?’

She turned her head to look at the security door behind Qayin, and then she shouldered the rifle. He saw something bright and sharp flicker in her right hand, a blade or shank of some kind that had been concealed inside her sleeve.

Qayin turned and banged on the security door.

‘Open up, we’re good!’

The door clunked and then swung open again and Qayin stooped inside, hiding his discomfort at having Alpha Zero Seven immediately behind him with a concealed weapon in her grasp. He strode toward the governor’s command platform and turned as she made her way inside.

The silence in the control centre deepened as the men around Qayin got their first close–up look at her. A live current seemed to flicker across them, volatile emotions of desire and uncertainty about the newcomer and her featureless mask.

The security door was pushed closed behind her by one of the convicts, who sealed it and then turned to look at her from behind. Qayin saw his eyes drift down to her ass and legs, and then the convict stepped forward and one hand settled on her ass.

She moved with remarkable speed, spinning around as the back of one forearm swiped up and under the convict’s jaw and spun him sideways and over onto his front against a control panel. She grabbed the convict’s wrist with one hand as the other, the shank flickering in its grasp, flashed through the air and drove the weapon straight through the convict’s palm and deep into the plastic control panel.

The convict let out a scream of pain and two of his closest companions moved toward Alpha Zero Seven. As Qayin watched they backed away again as she smoothly unslung her rifle and charged the pulse–chamber, the faint hum filling the control centre.

‘Are we done assaulting our guest?’ Qayin asked.

The convict pinned to the control panel groaned in agony as he tried to pull the shank from his hand. Cutler walked across to him, reached down and yanked the weapon out to a fresh yelp of pain. The convict slumped to the floor, cradling his bloodied palm as Cutler turned and handed the shank out to Alpha Zero Seven. She reached out and snatched the weapon back, flipped it over and it vanished up her sleeve as quickly as it had emerged.

‘Are we done here?’ Qayin asked again.

The other convicts relaxed, their eyes off the woman and back onto Qayin. He turned to a convict manning the communications terminal.

‘Contact the bridge,’ he ordered. ‘It’s time to end this.’

Qayin turned to see Alpha standing on the edge of the platform, her back to the convicts lower down. She was either entirely fearless or psychologically adept: none of the convicts moved toward her, and the man she had injured was still whimpering as he bound his wound with strips of grubby clothing torn from his fatigues.

‘Bridge, this is cell block.’

The convicts listened and waited. They didn’t have to wait long.

‘Cell block, bridge.’

Angry. Uncompromising. Probably a senior officer, Qayin guessed, trying to maintain the hard line. The Word. Qayin pressed a button on the governor’s chair and the communications link opened up onto loudspeaker as he replied.

‘It’s time to negotiate,’ Qayin said.

‘There will be no negotiating. The Word does not…’

‘The Word is irrelevant here,’ Qayin interrupted. ‘You have a choice. Either you allow us access to the Atlantia or we pull you all down to certain death with us.’

‘You seem to have forgotten that we can send men out to cut you away at any time we choose.’

‘Then why haven’t you?’ Qayin asked. ‘Is it, perhaps, because you left a few people behind?’

A long silence echoed down the communications channel.

‘How many of our people do you have?’

Qayin’s grinned.

‘The only way you’ll find that out is if they walk across with us, or we finish sending all the pieces of them.’

‘How many?’

‘Several,’ Qayin said. ‘We will bring them with us provided you do exactly as I say.’

‘I want proof of life.’

‘You want?’ Qayin asked, smiling broadly. ‘
You
want. Do we have somebody here important to you?’

The channel clicked and a new voice appeared. Captain Idris Sansin’s brittle, rough tones were clearly audible over the link.

‘Now you listen to me, scum. We give the orders here. The Word will decide what happens.’

Qayin did not respond. He put his fingers to his lips as he looked around the control centre. Nobody made a sound.

‘Do you hear me?!’

Qayin made a cradle for his chin from his interlinked fingers and listened for a moment.

‘I’m talking to you, scum! Do you have any idea what will happen to you when the Word finds us and…’

‘If they find us, captain,’ Qayin replied, ‘which won’t happen before we’re all pulled down into the planet’s atmosphere. Do you want to live, or die?’

A long silence and then the gruff voice replied.

‘I’ll do whatever I have to do to ensure the safety of my passengers and crew.’

‘Including murder?’ Qayin asked. ‘Surely, that would make you no less criminal than us. I’m surprised we have so much in common, captain.’

A ripple of low chuckles wafted around the control centre.

‘We have nothing in common, Qayin,’
came the reply.

‘We are in danger,’ Qayin shot back. ‘We are in crisis. None of us wants to die. We have much in common and we must work together. We don’t like it. You don’t like it. Our hostages sure as hell don’t like it but it’s happening.’

Qayin stood up and strolled across to Governor Hayes’ grisly severed head. He picked it up by the hair and carried it across to one of the observation monitors, gesturing to one of the convicts as he went.

‘Open the feed,’ he said.

The monitor flickered into life and Qayin thrust the decapitated head into view. A gasp of disgust whispered down the channel.

‘You’re animals,’
came the captain’s response.
‘You don’t deserve to live.’

‘That’s what the governor thought when he cleansed the cell block,’ Qayin replied as he tossed the governor’s head aside and beckoned Alpha across to him. She walked across the platform to his side. ‘Got somebody for you to meet. You don’t give us what we want, we’ll put her to work on the hostages.’

Qayin stood to one side and Alpha moved to stand in front of the screen. Another gasp of disbelief.

‘Her? They were terminated!’

‘All but one,’ Qayin replied. ‘And she’s already killed four of my men. I’d like to say I control her, but in truth, she’s got her own agenda. You did fire plasma charges at her escape capsule, didn’t you captain, after the blast? We saw them.’

Another long silence and then Qayin spoke loudly.

‘You have one hour, captain, or I’ll broadcast what she does to the hostages live across the whole damned ship.’

***

Captain Idris Sansin sat in the commander’s chair on the bridge, watching the surveillance monitors arrayed before him. Two showed the tattered remnants of the tethers between the prison hull and the Atlantia, two more the only intact passage which was currently guarded by twenty of his best marines on permanent rotation under Bra’hiv’s command.

‘Status report?’ he asked his first officer.

Andaim, a young lieutenant and fighter pilot upon whom Idris had found himself relying in these troubled times, called out his reply from across the bridge. ‘All life–support systems active, repairs ongoing to the hull, but we can’t access the prison hull from here. The only way in would be via shuttle, maybe through the damaged stern section.’

The captain dragged his weary frame out of his chair and strode to the aft section of the bridge. There, a spiral staircase led up to a viewing platform, a smaller room surrounded by windows that afforded the captain a broad view of his vessel.

He climbed the stairs and stood inside the platform, examining the spectacular panorama arrayed before him.

Below him was the Atlantia’s main hull, a long and angular construction typical of ship–of–the–line frigates of Colonial design. Strictly speaking the Atlantia was an out of commission warship assigned to the prison service, stripped of many of her weapons and with a large portion of her hull given over to accommodation for the families of both military and correctional officers attached to her. Almost three hundred men, women and children lived in the sanctuary, protected by a hundred or so sworn military officers. Another hundred or so correctional staff carried out their duties in the prison – or rather, they had done until the blast that had caused such terrible carnage.

The Atlantia’s hull was almost half a mile in length. At its bow was a vast scoop that drew in the hydrogen that floated in immense yet tenuous quantities throughout the cosmos, obtaining fuel sufficient to provide light and heat for the entire vessel. Those scoops also fed the enormous ion engines attached to either flank of the Atlantia on vast wing–like structures, although the frigate was incapable of atmospheric flight.