Fatal Boarding (20 page)

"Why are all of you here? Some of you
should've headed back to the tail."

R.J. replied, "It was coincidence, Adrian.
Nira came up to fill you in on the suit and weapon. Perk stopped
the Doctor from going back to sick bay, and brought him here under
protest. Pell wanted to tell you about the net. It happened so
fast, it was kind of like we got caught by low tide."

"Any idea how many of the crew made it to
the tail?"

Before anyone could respond, Perk waved his
hand in an irritated gesture to the right. "Adrian, you're in my
line of fire." I looked behind and realized I was between him and
the door. I winced and moved off to one side.

R.J sat back down but remained stiffly
postured. "There's no way to know how many made it until we get to
the tail ourselves."

Perk spoke, "Adrian, you know we can't use
the escape pods. They’d pop off the tail boom and drift around
until the bastards came by to pick us up like Easter eggs. Plus,
there’s no place close enough to go anyway."

Pell looked up at me with a haggard
expression. His face was drawn, and his coveralls looked several
days old. "You know the Com's out. Well, they're using the net,
too. That's part of the reason the computer stations are still
operating. They're sending out messages that tell everyone to
disregard previous instructions and report to level two. They're
saying that level two has been secured and is now a safe area. I’m
afraid to think how many have gone there."

Perk stood up abruptly, held his weapon
pointed at the floor with one hand and shook his fist with the
other. "We've gotta go down there and torch the place, Adrian. Just
saturate the corridors with fire, burn their asses. We won't need
to see them. Fight fire with fire!"

I raised an eyebrow and shook my head.
"Perk, the torches wouldn’t last long enough. That’s a last ditch
effort. As bad as it is, we’re not that bad off yet. Let’s see if
we can become really annoying victims, instead of easy prey. Do we
know for sure how many are aboard?"

Nira answered, "There were four left on the
last scan. We know how they work. We're not helpless."

Doctor Pacell stood, leaned back against a
console, and folded his arms. "I'm not sure I agree. From what I've
seen they're far ahead of us technologically. And, if you'll
forgive the metaphor, they have no hearts!"

Nira stared up at him. "What?"

"Just what I said. They have no hearts.
They've got some kind of temperature-sensitive sludge for blood. It
circulates convectively. They are the closest thing to the walking
dead I have ever seen. I do not know how they live."

"Are they vulnerable to cold, Doctor?" I
asked.

"How would I know? I had no live tissue to
examine, and no history of this form of life to refer to.
Personally, I am puzzled by the method they have chosen to abduct
us. Why haven't they just gassed the ventilation system, or drugged
the water supply. That's one of the reasons why I'm skeptical that
we really know what we're up against."

Perk snapped back, "Well bullshit. I don't
care how advanced they are. You give a hunter a laser-sighted rifle
and a good tracking dog, and that's still no guarantee he's going
to find the deer. I'll bet you I’d take at least one or two of them
out before they got me!"

Doctor Pacell snarled, "Who'll be around to
collect?"

R.J. interrupted. "Doctor, gas or drugs
would be far too hit or miss for their purposes. People would be
falling from ladders, and disrupting ship's control systems. A
variety of undesirable impacts would result. They would be required
to collect their unconscious prey. Their planning is quite
admirable, really. Many victims are doing the work for them."

I took a seat beside Nira. "What else did
they learn in Life Sciences before the evacuation?"

She nervously rubbed her forehead. She
looked at me and smiled affectionately. "The suit's a light
absorber. It seems to be able to dissolve and absorb anything that
comes in contact with it. Nothing is reflected back. We don't
understand how it becomes transparent. It's not impervious, but
almost. It was just luck that the Life Science scans picked them
up."

"It has no other properties at all that we
can detect?"

"No signals that we could find. They take up
space, that's all we've got."

"But we exposed one with the CO2 wand."

"Probably only because the wearer was
unconscious or dead, and unable to adjust the suit."

"And the weapon?"

"The weapon was even more interesting. It
has a biological core. Please don't ask me to explain that. The
power source is an unknown purple crystal that glows continuously.
The weapon has a range of only about ten feet, and it’s just a
stun. We have no idea what it radiates. It's not measurable. We
don't know if it is effective against them, or can penetrate their
suit. We only know what it does to us. I don't have to tell you.
You experienced it yourself.”

The Doctor cut in, “You see what’s happening
here don’t you, Adrian? We’ve been subjected to two different types
of mental assault. The two men in propulsion had some sort of mind
control imposed upon them that made them fight. Many of the
nightmare reports and other hallucination psychosis reports I’ve
had were the same type of intrusion. On the other hand, this stun
weapon just shuts down brain activity for a certain amount of time.
You wake up, don’t remember a thing, but are essentially unharmed.
That’s what happened to you on the catwalk. It’s a cone-shaped gun
that neutralizes conscious brain activity.”

Nira continued, “After we finally got the
guts to fire it, one of the lab techs volunteered as a guinea pig.
It turned him into a vegetable for seven minutes. That was from a
point-five second burst. We think the longer the exposure, the
longer the resultant effect. I don’t know if the thing will be much
use to us, except for what we learned from it. When the lab was
evacuated, I brought it with me. It's in my satchel."

"So if we could stay twenty feet away from
them, we'd be safe."

"Safe from the stun, at least."

"I have reason to believe there will be no
further mind control attacks. And, I think I can see which way we
should go from here.”

RJ took notice. “No further mind control,
how’s that?”

“It’s too complicated to go into. I’ll fill
you in later. I think we can assume that the crew that made it to
the tail will be safe for a while. Our four ugly little intruders
are probably busy processing their victims and expecting more. What
that means is; we have a small window of time.”

Perk sounded doubtful, “To do what?”

“Confuse them, disrupt them, make their life
a living hell, and when the time is right, kill them.”

Perk smiled, “Okay…”

RJ rolled his eyes, “Oh brother…”

Nira snarled at RJ, “What’s your
problem?”

RJ clasped his hands together. “You don’t
know him like I do.”

I turned to Pell. “There's one other thing
that might help us. Pell, you can still transmit on the net,
right?"

"Sure, but it goes out and never gets a
response."

"If they’re sending out false messages to
the crew, then they're monitoring it. Could you tap into the system
in such a way as to make it look as though a group of poor
desperate humans were hiding and trying to communicate from
somewhere on the opposite side of the ship?"

"You want them to go looking in the wrong
place!"

"Exactly.”

"Hell, I can brew one up that will be
interactive. If they answer, they'll think they're talking to
someone who's really there!"

“Beautiful. These false people have managed
to mask their physical signatures from scans, and desperately want
to come to level two, but they’re afraid. They want security to
meet them. It’s a fairly large group”

“No Problem.”

“We set this up so that there is only one
way to get to these people, and before we transmit the fake
communication we’ll booby-trap the passage way that leads there. It
will be far away enough that the intruders who do not go to help
collect the prey, will not know what has happened to their
comrades.”

Nira gave a short laugh. “That’s nasty,
Adrian!”

“I looked around at the swat members
standing around me. We’ll need two volunteers to do that. I have a
different job for Perk and me.”

RJ grumbled, “Here it comes…”

“Perk, we carry a few of the big utility
Hercules solid rocket motors aboard, right?”

“Yeah, they’re kept in the zero G external
aft compartments for easy deployment. They’re unguided and all, and
they’re huge, as long as a tour bus. They’re only used to help move
very large mass items. What the hell do you want with them?”

“I want to move a large mass item. Okay,
just one more thing. They want everyone to come to level two for
the party, right? Wouldn’t it be nice if all of a sudden there was
no way off of level two?”

This time RJ laughed. “It’d be a big job.
There’s a lot of access. But I’d just love to see that happen.”

“I would suggest that while the other two
ops are in progress, maybe the rest of you could sort that out.
Even if you didn’t lock out everything, you could sure make it a
bitch.”

Nira smiled. “We could use the service
access tunnels for most of it. We’d only have to cross over the
main corridors.”

Pell joined in. “The cable drops can be
squeezed through. They run everywhere.”

“You all need to be armed, but not all of
you have weapons training. Try not to shoot each other, okay?”

I had intended it as a joke, but they all
looked at me insulted. No one laughed.

Chapter 22

We were still very well equipped from the
previous assault on the cable drop area. One swat member had
brought a satchel with medium velocity charges that would have been
used to open hatchways, if necessary. They would serve well as
booby trap explosives.

We went over the plan and divided up the
weapons appropriately. The phony-people trap would be set up with
no visible give-aways at all. They would take their time and do it
right before the false internet messages went out. Nira even had a
short hologram video module of her family, which would be set up to
repeat in the designated area to make it look like people were
there waiting.

The first team of two swat members moved
into the corridor with weapon lights, using the bait and hook
method to cross the dicey areas. One would emerge into the open,
while the second covered him. At the first sign of conflict, the
backup team member would saturate his field of vision with
firepower, being careful not to hit his teammate. They would use
all the hidden access tunnels and cable drops, and only risk open
corridors when absolutely necessary. Fearfully, we watched them
move out and successfully disappear through a service crawlway a
short distance away.

I took Perk aside, and went over our plan. I
nicknamed it “Pipe Dream”. He listened with fire in his eyes, as
though he couldn’t wait. “You understand there’s not much
likelihood of us coming back from this. You don’t have to come
along.”

“Screw that! Try to stop me.”

“I figured. I just had to say it. We need
two suits and a way outside without opening an airlock and setting
off every damn warning indicator on the ship. That’s critical. If
they think any of us have left the ship they’ll be on alert
everywhere. We want them to stay relaxed and overconfident. I’m
thinking maybe we can get out through the cooling fluid waste
dump”

“Shit out the bottom of the ship. How
appropriate.”

“Ever been submerged in a space suit, and
come out of it into vacuum?”

“Good one, Adrian. You’ve managed to find
the one thing I haven’t done.”

“That’s because I don’t think it’s ever been
done. We’ll need Pell to set up the dump and make it look like a
routine purge, so we don’t attract any attention. We can’t use EVA
suits, because we need to stay away from the main airlocks, and we
don’t want them noticing any spacesuits are missing. We’ll have to
use flight suits. O2 will be no problem. We can plug into the ports
outside all we want. It’s only registered on the suit telemetry and
we can override all of that. We’ll have to decompress in the suits
since we can’t use any of the airlocks. We can access the coolant
control area through the main hanger bay. That’ll be the riskiest
area to cross, but since they think they have level two secured,
maybe we can use that to our advantage. We’ll use the suits for the
scout craft. We’ll have to carrying all the crap we need with us.
We’ll also need some small remote control charges to take out their
control panels if the opportunity arises, but we can’t go near any
of our armories. It’d be too risky.”

“No problem there. The geology guys have a
supply depot with those kinds of charges. It’s off the B-deck
hanger bay, practically on our way.”

“So, can two men really move a Hercules
motor?”

“I did a twelve month tour collecting
Earth-orbit space garbage. We collected the stuff into scows, and
then attached Hercs to put the crap in low orbit around the sun. I
got paid good, plus community service credit. Most of the Hercules
work was done with tugs. Can you and I move them? I’ll bet you a
bottle of scotch you and I can.”

“It’ll probably be a bastard. I know they
drop out of the tubes with their maneuvering thruster packs armed
and ready, but it’s usually done by preprogrammed computer control.
We’ll have to be at each end, squirting those jets manually. It‘s
quite a bit of mass. We can hide within touching distance of the
belly of the ship, but there’ll be a big gamble crossing over to
the other ship. We could be seen.”

“Yeah, that will probably be a thirty second
window.”