Severance (41 page)

“Got him!” Ellen shrieked. Not doubting his wife, but
knowing he wouldn’t get a ‘told ya so’ if she was wrong, Griese crawled behind
the planters along the edge of the roof until he reached the safety of the
penthouse. He sat up, back against the wall, and looked at the shrapnel
littering the roof, the shrapnel that had very nearly been parts of him.

He had been using a dummy rifle, cobbled together with the
help of a team of amused fabrication nerds over the past few days. It had
turned out to be pretty straightforward, a combination of three of the linear
motors used by the ship’s elevator systems. Not quite the same as a real smart
rifle; although it could still whip a projectile at a hell of a good speed, it
wasn’t going to hit anything it was aimed at, lacking the advanced optics and
tracking software that made smart rifles actually useful.

It had taken another read through the manual to figure out
what had happened their last time out. Helot had his own smart rifle and sent
it hunting for them. The wise plan at that point would be to hang up their rifle
and never speak of it again. The dumb plan, baiting their hunter into exposing
himself and then shooting him back, was, well,
dumb
. But it was an
interesting kind of dumb.

Griese would have probably gone for something less
interesting if he was deciding for himself, but Ellen was in one of her not uncommon
moods where she wasn’t going to be talked out of things. So, it was going to
happen. And if it was going to happen, then he wasn’t going to let her fill the
dangerous role.

“You okay?” Griese asked, still not seeing his wife return
from the supposedly safe role. Finally, Ellen appeared around the corner, dragging
the smart rifle carelessly behind her. She slumped to the ground beside him.

“I got him.”

“I heard. Are you okay?”

She shook her head. “I got him.” Her eyes were watering. He
reached out and took her into his arms. “I shouldn’t have looked,” she said,
starting to shake. “But I did. I got him.”

“It’s okay. He was going to do the same to us. They’re all
trying to do the same to us. That’s what you said. They started it.”

She nodded, now crying uncontrollably. “I know. I know. It’s
just…” Griese held her tight as she let go with another full body shiver. “I
got him.”

“They started it, they started it, they started it,” Griese
said. “Say it.”

Ellen gasped, a choked intake of air. “They started it, they
started it, they started it.”

“Just keep saying it.”

“They started it, they started it, they started it.” More
shaking, accompanied by a long, noisy sniffle. “They started it, they started
it, they…”

§

It was the most spacious room on the ship that wasn’t the
garden well. Enormous ductwork hung overhead in the center of the room containing
the primary air handlers. Inhaling air from the massive return vents mounted on
the end of the garden well, the primary air handlers filtered, treated, and
redistributed it throughout the ship via another braided set of massive, room–sized
ducts.

Stein bounced across the floor of the room to the fan
control center and examined the controls there. Kinsella’s paranoia had been
spot on; from his cozy little nest in the ship’s asshole, Helot could shut off
every other critical system aboard the ship. Heat pumps, circ fans, carbon
dioxide scrubbers, everything. He had a gun pressed against their head, and the
only reason no one had noticed it yet was because it was too big to see.

During the Sunset Surprise, as the feeds were now calling
it, she had examined her own terminal to see how Helot had done it. It hadn’t
taken long to find the settings for the garden well lighting controls, nor to
find out that their regular programming had been overridden by a custom schedule.
A custom schedule she was prevented from changing, according to the error message
identifying that access for that system was limited to Curts.

Overriding such a block from afar was impossible. But the
very nature of the ship’s systems meant that anyone physically at a piece of
equipment could lock it out from the ship’s central controls, useful for
preventing a fan from turning itself on when a technician had his arm in it.
Normally, this isolation functionality was used to isolate a unit in the off
position, but there was no reason it couldn’t be used to keep equipment
permanently on, which Stein had spent most of the morning doing in each of the
light towers. She did the same again on each of the main air handling fans. “My
ship, now,” she muttered.

She stepped away from the controls and floated down to the
end of the massive room, where the return air was run through the carbon
dioxide scrubbers. Cartridges packed with engineered life, which sucked up
electricity and carbon dioxide, turning it into oxygen and some kind of smelly,
sugary crap which got shunted to farms on the first level. She locked out these
as well, even if she had a hard time imagining Curts being crazy enough to mess
with the ship’s supply of oxygen. That said, the company Curts was keeping
these days seemed to be in no short supply of crazy.

She took the side door out of the air handlers into the
auxiliary reactor room. It was deserted, just as she had expected — Max was a
naval officer, and would have certainly been recalled to the aft before the
detachment. Which stung a bit — she had liked Max.

She sat down in the chair behind the primary control panel
for the reactor. She had never driven the thing before and spent a few minutes
trying to familiarize herself with its controls. She was a little surprised to
see that she had full access to the system — she had assumed she would be
locked out of the naval equipment. Helot must have unlocked the system prior to
the botched disconnect, so that the leftovers could tend their own power
supply. But even with access, most of it was incomprehensible to her, all flux ratios
and Planck whatsits. One screen was dominated by a graphic of an extremely
important looking donut, pulsing with intent. The reactor was still obviously
operating; Curts hadn’t dared shut this off from afar, if he even could. And
she could find no way to turn on any safety interlocks to stop him from doing
so. She slumped back in the chair; she was way out of her depth here.

She looked at the reactor embedded in the floor, physically
and functionally opaque to her. If Helot was successful, if her loser half of
the ship was going to carry on drifting through space, they would have to find
someone who knew how the reactor worked.
How often does the thing need to be
repaired?
She remembered the last time she was here, with the school tour
and the little wiener kid. There had been a couple of naval technicians here
then, working on the thing. She wouldn’t know where to begin with something
like that. What kind of laser–genius did you need to be to spin wrenches on an
antimatter reactor?

“What were they doing on this thing, anyways?” she asked
aloud, pivoting in place. She recalled that they were mostly just standing
there, not in itself an unusual thing for a technician to do and something that
she hadn’t paid much attention to at the time. Thinking back on it now, she
guessed they were waiting for the tour group to leave before they got back to
work.

Purely to satisfy her own sense of curiosity, Stein then
tried to figure out what they had been working on. Pacing around the room, she
tried to get her bearings, tracing out the general layout of the reactor. The
auxiliary fuel pods were behind the far wall. Fuel lines would probably run
beneath her feet. She bent down and started prying up the floor panels.

She found it under the third panel she tried. The part they
had replaced was sitting in a cavity on the floor, humming slightly, fuel lines
extending out either side to the fuel tank and the reactor. A pressure
regulator or perhaps a throttle. It otherwise looked wholly unremarkable, just
another object in the room that she only vaguely understood.

But even to her untrained eye, there was something about it
that looked a bit odd. There wasn’t any dust or grime on it, like the rest of
the cavity, which made sense if it was a new part, just replaced. But the more
that she looked at it, the less new it looked. It looked more like it had
simply been wiped down recently. Out of curiosity, she withdrew her terminal
and inspected the component under a variety of wavelengths. It was old. She
could see corrosion spots along one of the fittings and stress marks along its
entire length. Maybe they hadn’t replaced it yet? But then why wipe it down? No,
they had definitely been working on it recently. There were fresh tool marks on
the fittings.

Stein sat back and folded her legs under herself. So, had
they replaced the existing pressure regulator with a worn out one? Why? Given
the sinister plots already in progress at that point, she didn’t put a lot of
faith in it simply being a coincidence. Those were naval technicians, acting
under Helot’s orders. Were they trying to sabotage this reactor? She couldn’t
see the point in Helot ordering that. She tilted her head and looked at the
pressure regulator again. Maybe they needed the one that had been here. Stein
ran a finger along the regulator as she tried to piece together her theory.

The navy guys hadn’t been repairing anything — they had been
taking
spare parts from here and moving them to the aft. To replace
theirs? That made sense — the bow and aft reactors must have been nearly
identical. And they might not have had time to make their own replacement parts.
Everything in this room must have been incredibly tricky to manufacture. The
aft core would have some fabrication capacity, just maybe not enough to fab up
another pressure regulator in time for the detachment.

Well, there’s a thought.
If the aft reactors were broken,
Helot couldn’t detach, not if he liked electricity, or propulsion, or all those
other good things antimatter reactors did. Stein drummed her fingers on the
floor, thinking through the details. Destroying the reactors completely was out
of the question, assuming she didn’t want to annihilate the entire ship. It
would have to be some kind of carefully planned sabotage, enough to disable,
but not destroy.
Kick them
, in Bruce’s terms. Then, with the only source
of spare parts a long way from where Helot could get his hands on them, Kinsella
and his idiot brigade would have a tremendous amount of leverage. Certainly enough
to bargain for a better seating plan. A seating plan which might have room for
the girl who came up with the idea.

A beep from her terminal startled her. A call from Dr. Berg.
An annoyed sound passed her lips before she slapped the terminal, taking the
call.

“Hi, Laura. How’s your arm doing?”

She blinked in surprise and looked down, realizing she was
holding the terminal in her damaged right arm. “Still hurts, I guess. But I’d
stopped even noticing.” She flexed the arm in its healing wrap, testing its
strength.

“Want to come down and have me check up on it? We can also,
uh, talk about that other thing.”

What other thing?
Stein remembered their chat about
her parents, and felt her shoulders slump.

“I’ve found something you might be interested in. But, uh,
we should talk in person. It’s kind of weird.”

Now, I really don’t want to know.
She sighed and
looked around the reactor room, deciding she had saved the ship enough for one
day. “Fine. I’ll be there in a bit.”

§

The light towers faded out, legitimately this time, although
it was a nervous sunset for much of the ship. Indeed, the streets were all but
empty as Bruce approached the entrance of an apartment building in the mid–well.
Far enough north that it should have avoided the fighting, the building still
sported several broken windows and a shattered front door, the result of an
impromptu session of target practice by Kinsella’s idiots, or perhaps just some
spectacularly inaccurate cover fire.

But with no one actively shooting at it now, Bruce crossed
the street and stepped inside, carefully bypassing chunks of shattered glass.
Making his way up the back staircase to the third floor, he found the suite he
was looking for at the end of the hall. He rang the buzzer. A formality, as he
was certain this particular apartment was empty. Not waiting for a response, he
cast one quick look over his shoulder, then with a twist of his arm, allowed
the plasma cutter concealed in his sleeve to drop into his hand. Pressing it
against the side of the frame, he cut into the lock of the door — there was no
subtle way into this particular apartment. With a pop, the lock gave way. He
tugged the door out of the way and stepped inside.

Tidy and dull — just like the owner. He clipped his terminal
to his jacket, the value–scanning application running, and began looking
around. Curts would have had plenty of time to move all of his most valuable
belongings long before the detachment process. But there was always the chance
he had forgotten something — he had been living here right up until the day of
the detachment. Besides which, there was nowhere else Bruce could burgle right
now. Whatever ethical lapses he had, looting during a war wasn’t one of them.
But he felt pretty comfortable stealing Curts’ stuff. “Assuming the prick has
anything worth stealing,” he said, looking at a crystal statue of a duck which
the terminal was not impressed with.

He wondered how Curts was doing. How involved had he been in
the detachment failure? Maybe his boss was in trouble with
his
boss.
Having to scramble around now to find some new way to split the ship apart.
Hunched over a desk, sweat dripping off his brow, furiously trying to invent a
huge crowbar.

The thought of Curts’ slick forehead made him remember the
little maintenance robot he had left behind in the aft, running around with its
micro–planer. He supposed it would have run out of lubricant by now, if it was
still alive. He should check on it. He flopped down on the couch and called up
the robot’s controls on his terminal.