Mutiny in Space (13 page)

“Rodriguez,” said Corbin. “Can you have the drone to come low over the deck, like, say, a meter? Have it swoop down towards the commandos, and then head for the ceiling?”

“Yeah,” said Arthur. I saw him type something on his console. “Yeah, I think so. The antigravs are working well enough for that.”

“Good,” said Corbin. “Get that going. Nelson! The commandos are going to hit the deck when the drone dives toward them. When they do, we’ll open fire.”

“We’re just going to shoot them all in the back?” said Nelson.

“Exactly,” said my uncle.

“If it troubles your conscience, try to remember they were going to kill everyone on the ship,” said Corbin. “Rodriguez, you ready yet?”

“Just a second,” said Arthur. The commandos sent another volley of fire at the office window, and I saw Arthur duck under the console for a moment. “Hang on… yeah. It’ll execute as soon as I hit the button. Tell me when.”

“Do it on three,” ordered Corbin. “Everyone, as soon as the commandos take cover, start shooting. Shoot to kill, and don’t skimp on the ammo or the charges. We can get more from their dead bodies. Rodriguez?”

“Standby!” said Arthur, ducking to avoid a burst of concentrated fire. The window to the office absorbed the volley, but the transparent metal was bending backwards out of its frame. If one of those Socials had the bright idea of throwing a grenade through the damaged window, it was over. “All right! Three!”

He hit something on the console and ducked.

The cargo drone spun back into sight, all its arms and manipulators in motion, and it plummeted towards the deck. Some of the commandos opened fire, but the drone continued its rapid descent, and the rear antigravs pulsed, tilting the drone’s nose towards the crouching commandos. For a moment it looked as if the big machine had lost control and was about to crash into the deck at full speed.

The commandos threw themselves down, ducking behind the damaged shipping containers and other debris left over from the fight. I could hardly blame them. Even from my vantage point, it looked terrifying and it wasn’t about to land on my head.

But they were now in the worst possible position to deal with an attack of prepared gunmen from the rear.

“Open up!” said Corbin.

I raised my machine pistol in both hands and started shooting. The thing had a nasty recoil, but my gauntlets helped me keep my grip. I aimed for the head of the nearest commando, but I hit him in the lower back instead. The bullet punched through his armor and his torso, and I saw blood spatter across the deck beneath him. Around me the others had also opened fire, and a hail of bullets and invisible laser blasts slashed through the vacuum of cargo bay seven.

The commandos didn’t have a chance. Two of them lived long enough to turn, and one of them even got off a burst from his K7, but it came nowhere near any of us. A second, equally furious volley cut them down, and they joined their motionless comrades on the floor.

I gripped my gun, breathing hard, but it was over. All the commandos were down.

“Anyone hit?” said Corbin. “Everyone acknowledge now.”

One by one we checked in.

“Good work, everybody,” Corbin praised us. “Nelson, search the dead. We’ll need all the weapons we can carry. Do it quickly. I want to be on our way to the bridge in another five minutes. Murdock, take the techs and keep watch. I don’t want to be surprised like our dead friends here. Rodriguez, it’s safe. you can come out now.”

“Rovio, I’m stuck,” said Arthur. “The bullets messed up the airlock. I need someone to release it manually from the outside.”

“Nikolai, do it,” said Corbin. “Rodriguez, were you using the office’s portable terminal?”

“Yeah.”

“Bring it with you,” said Corbin. “A working computer’s going to be real useful soon.”

“I’m on it,” I said, switching my pistol’s safety back on and shoving it back into the holster. I got it in on the third try. Funny that it was easier to shoot the thing than to holster it while wearing pressure suit gauntlets.

I scrambled up the metal stairs to the cargo office, taking care to keep my balance. There were a lot of metal fragments on the stairs, bullets deformed from ricocheting off the wall, along with pieces of the cargo drone’s outer casing. The drone had taken a beating, but it was still flying. Whatever Starways had paid for the thing had been well worth the investment.

I reached the top of the stairs, and saw Arthur through the damaged window. I also saw the displays on the office’s main console. Like all the displays in the engineering room or the bridge, they read SYSTEM LOCKED, but Arthur had a laptop-sized portal terminal on the desk, a maze of wires coming off the back. Usually drone operators had five or six full-sized displays, but he had been making the cargo drone dance with a little 14-inch screen.

I knocked on the window, realized that was stupid, and then activated my suit’s radio. “Arthur?”

“Nikolai?” said Arthur. “You’re there?”

“Who else?” I said. “Ready?”

“Hang on,” he said, mashing his fingers against the laptop’s keyboard. Below the drone swerved, and then flew back up to the ceiling, rotating itself into one of the cradles. “Just wanted to put that thing on standby. I dumped so many overrides into its task queue that I don’t want it to go berserk and start loading us into shipping containers or something.”

“That would be a bad end to the day,” I said, examining the door controls. The commandos had shot it up pretty badly, but the manual release was still intact. “I’m going to try opening the door now… there!”

The door shuddered open. Had there been any air in the bay, it would have made a horrible squealing noise, so it was just as well we were in vacuum. The door managed to get about two-thirds of the way open before it gave up, so I squeezed through it and into the cargo office.

“Ready yet?” I said. “Corbin wants to move out. We’re going to hit the bridge.”

“Just about,” said Arthur, stuffing the laptop and its attendant cables into a bag. It looked like he had spare charges in there as well. It would not be amusing if we finally found a working computer only for the power to run out on us. He slung over the bag over his shoulder. “Okay. I’m ready.”

“Great,” I said. “Let’s go.”

“I’m just glad I get to leave at all,” said Arthur as I turned towards the door. “I thought I was going to die in here like a drone with a faulty… oh, wait!”

“What is it?” I said, turning, my hand dropping to my holstered gun.

“Almost forgot,” said Arthur, picking up a flat black portable drive from the console. A piece of silver cargo tape had been affixed to the side, marked with the handwritten letters GT. “I’m out of pockets. Can you take that?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said, slipping the drive into a pocket of my suit. “What is it? Drone code?”

“Our savegames,” said Arthur.

I blinked several times.

“If we live through this,” I said, “we’re totally going to finish the main campaign.”

“Nikolai! Arthur!” said Corbin, his voice cutting into my helmet speakers. “Hurry up!”

“On our way,” I said. “Come on!”

We squeezed through the door and scrambled down the stairs. The others were ready, and bore considerably more weapons after looting the corpses. One of the men stepped forward, and I saw my uncle’s face behind the helmet’s faceplate.

“Rodriguez, great work,” said Corbin. “You may have saved the ship.”

“What’s happening, sir?” said Arthur. “These guys with guns. Pirates?”

“Not exactly,” said Corbin. “Nikolai can fill you in. We’re heading to the bridge. Nelson?”

“Better arm yourself, son,” said Nelson, handing Arthur a folded gun belt with a holstered burst laser pistol. “There was fighting behind us, and there’s going to be fighting ahead of us.”

“Fantastic,” said Arthur, taking the belt.

“Good work with the drone, Rodriguez,” said Murdock.

“Thanks. I wish we could take it with us,” said Arthur. “I thought you were dead, Murdock.”

“He’s too cranky to die,” I said.

“Everyone, shut up,” ordered Corbin. “We’re moving out. I’m on point. Nelson, Nikolai, keep an eye on the back.”

We passed through the remaining port-side cargo bays without encountering any more trouble. Corbin hot-wired the airlock, and we filed into the gloomy maintenance walkways. They were pressurized, so we could take off our helmets and our gauntlets, though Corbin and Nelson insisted we keep our suits on in the event of a hull breach. Fortunately, the suits’ belts had a magnetic grip for the helmets, which in turn made a handy bucket for holding the gauntlets.

“Now what?” said Murdock.

“We retake the bridge, rescue Hawkins, and capture the captain,” said Corbin.

“And then shut down the resonance in the hypermatter reactor,” said Arthur. I had filled him in our adventures, and while he seemed unfazed by the prospect of getting shot to death, the thought of the ship blowing up troubled him far more. He always did like machines better than people.

“That’s the plan,” said Corbin.

“I suggest we split up,” said Nelson.

“Why?” said Murdock.

“Once we get to the bridge one team can go through the main blast doors, and the other can go through the access hatch to the maintenance walkways. If we catch the commandos in a crossfire, our chances of success will improve considerably.”

“Agreed,” said Corbin, “but we’ll have to split up long before we get to the bridge, if I remember right…”

“Junction 17,” I said.

They all looked at me.

“That’s where the maintenance walkways split up,” I said. “One goes to the bridge, the other goes to the dorsal corridor. If we split up, that’s the best place to do it.”

Corbin looked at Arthur, who nodded, fished his laptop out of the bag, and started pulling up a map of the ship. All our personal devices had been disabled when Williams had locked the computer, so we couldn’t just check with them.

“He’s right,” said Arthur.

“Of course I’m right,” I said. “I had to memorize the ship’s schematic for one of my certification tests.”

“Good,” said Corbin. “We’ll do it there.”

“And if we run into more of Ducarti’s men?” said Murdock.

“We might not,” said Corbin. “That troop carrier could only hold thirty or forty, which means he’s lost anywhere from twenty-five to forty percent of his men by now, especially after that last fight. That’s not a lot of men to hold a ship this size, especially since he’ll need to focus on the bridge and the engineering sections.”

“He probably sent some men to the engineering room,” said Nelson, “after you taunted him over the radio like that.”

“That,” I said, “and he needs the CPU for the hypermatter regulator before the ship blows up.”

“Exactly,” said Corbin. “The
Rusalka
’s a big ship, and he won’t have enough men to crawl over every inch looking for us. Especially if any other of the crew put up a fight. He’ll probably be on the bridge to keep an eye on Williams and to oversee his men. If we strike hard and fast, we might be able to overwhelm his men and seize control of the bridge.”

We stood in silence for a moment.

“Well,” said Murdock finally. “It’s not as if I have a better idea.”

“That’s the spirit,” said Corbin.

“We’re all in single file here, and those K7s are powerfu. One good burst would kill us all. We ought to send someone ahead to scout around the corners, make sure we don’t walk into an ambush.”

“Excellent suggestion, Rovio” said Corbin. “Lead on.”

Right then and there I learned a universal truth—if you point out a problem, you’re the one who gets to fix it. So I sighed, slipped off the safety on my machine pistol, and took the lead.

“Nelson, go with him,” said Corbin. “Back him up.”

“All right,” agreed Nelson. At Arthur’s suggestion, we took a moment to remove the radio modules from our helmets and clip them to our ears. Since the ship’s computer was still locked, our phones wouldn’t work, but the helmet’s radio modules would let us stay in touch when we split up.

We made our way through the narrow walkways. Nelson and I took the lead, proceeding forward to every junction, and summoning the others once the way was clear. We made good time, and began climbing up the ladders between decks, ascending to the dorsal level. As we passed the crew deck, I saw many familiar equipment nodes. Most of the life support machinery occupied the crew deck, and so I had spent a lot of time down here, fixing the endless things that could go wrong with carbon scrubbers and air filters and the waste recyclers.

So I was very familiar with the equipment in this area of the ship. That saved my life.

I peered around the corner, keeping my head low. Nelson said that most people didn’t bother to look down, and rarely looked at things below their eye level. I didn’t know if that was true or not, but it made sense. The maintenance walkway around the corner looked little different than the others. Bundles of cables hung in racks along the walls, and beneath the metallic grillwork of the floor ran a dozen thick metal pipes, each of them marked with dire warnings. A dozen more pipes followed the ceiling, each of them labeled with the same warnings. I had once spent several days checking pipe integrity, because if coolant got into the air circulators, it would kill a lot of people, so I knew this particular length of walkway pretty well.

However, I did not remember a lump of black metal clinging to the ceiling about twenty yards down the corridor. It looked kind of like a big metal spider, but with a number of lumps upon its back. In fact, one of those lumps suddenly began rotating around rather quickly.

“Anything?” said Nelson, impatient. “What is–”

“Back!” I shouted, shoving him. Nelson barked a curse, and a dozen shouted questions came from the others.

Right about then, the thing clinging to the ceiling pipes opened fire.

I was already moving, which was the only reason I didn’t get cut in half. I glimpsed the stuttering muzzle flash from the black spider-thing, and I heard the loud clang as bullets struck the wall and bounced off, accompanied by the flash of sparks as one of the shots chewed into a wiring box. Something hot and painful ripped along my left temple, pain shooting down my neck, and I fell backwards with a grunt as dizziness washed through me. I heard Corbin shouting orders, and then someone grabbed my arms and dragged me backwards. I blinked and looked up as Arthur and Nelson pulled me back.