Severance (48 page)

§

Outside the bulkhead door, the mayor was a shrieking mess,
stamping his feet like a child. “What do you mean you can’t open it?” he
shouted.

Stein hauled back and slapped him. It was the fourth time he
had asked it, and a hand upside the face was the only response she hadn’t tried
yet. “There is a vacuum on the other side!” she said, repeating responses one
through three again to see if they would sink in this time. She pointed at the
flashing red light on the control panel that read, ‘Vacuum.’ She tapped at it
just to be sure he was looking at it. “The safety interlocks won’t let us open
the door.”

Kinsella’s voice rose several octaves. “Well, then disable
them! Or blast through it somehow!”

“And what, then? Do you know what a vacuum is? We open that
door, and all the air in the rest of the ship gets sucked out through that hole
in there. It will kill us all.”

“Well, then figure something out! I’m the only one here
coming up with solutions!”

A closed hand slap was the only solution she could
immediately think of, but Stein exhaled slowly, controlling herself. No need to
push her luck too far; it was already a small miracle that she and Bruce had
slipped the trap themselves. At some point during their escape from the upper–decks
she had reopened the wound on her shoulder, and after making it back to the
first floor and sprinting across the street to safety, Bruce had taken her to
the field hospital that had been set up a few blocks north of the initial
attack. It was here, while getting a fresh healing wrap set around her arm that
they’d heard the rumbling noise of the closing bulkhead door.

“We’re working on something. Just give us some time,” she
told Kinsella, stepping away from the horrible man before he could say
something else. She crossed the street to where Bruce and Griese were standing.
“So?” she asked. “We are working on something, right?”

Bruce stared at her blankly. “I’ve sort of roughed out an
idea for a makeshift airlock. But we’d need a bunch of tools we don’t have. And
it would probably kill whoever went through. And everyone else on the other
side. And over here.” He glanced at Griese, whose eyes were red and raw. “So,
no.”

A crowd of soldiers gathered around the bulkhead door, no
less helpless and dumbstruck. One of the medics — a conscripted doctor — had
been fending off questions from the mayor, asking how long people could survive
in those rooms before the air became too stale to breathe. The doctor could
only guess. Anywhere between four and forty–eight hours. Depended on the size
of the room, how many people were in it, how much they were breathing. Outside
one of the rooms? The doctor looked like he was about to laugh, before he
caught himself.

“Even if we could get on the other side, getting — what,
4000 people — all out through an airlock would take days,” Stein said.

“We don’t need to get them all out.” Griese said.

Stein looked at her shoes. “Yeah. No, you’re right. Good
point.” She chose not to say what she was actually thinking.
If Ellen wasn’t
inside
…

Bruce’s face lit up. “Where was the hole, again?” He looked
at the map that they had pieced together from Hogg, who was safe inside for the
time being, busy sending them information. “What if we close these two doors
here?” Bruce asked. “Isolate the area where the hole is. Then we could open
this door,” he waved at the bulkhead door beside them, “and re–pressurize the
whole area.”

Stein was careful to keep an even expression on her face,
not wanting to shoot his idea down. “Okay. But we can’t do that remotely. We’d
still need to get in there somehow.”

“No, we wouldn’t.”

§

The maintenance robot trundled down the vents and stopped
just in front of the closed duct membrane. It extended a manipulator arm
against the duct wall to brace itself, then used its plasma cutter to carefully
poke a hole in the membrane. A hiss announced the loss of atmosphere, and air
rushed past the robot and out through the incision. Somewhere upstream, another
membrane closed shut, limiting the total loss of air. After a couple of minutes,
the sound of the rushing gas had quieted down to a small hiss, and the robot
resumed its work, cutting a hole large enough for it to pass through.

A few minutes later, the robot dropped through the ceiling
above Africa, landing in the center of the street. The robot turned and
scurried south, making its way to the area where they had figured the hole in
the hull was. Atypically, it chose to travel in the center of the street, its
collision detection system noticing several obstructions piled up on the edges
of the street, around the sealed entrances to rooms.

§

“Are those bodies?”

“Yeah.” Bruce said. “Jesus.”

§

After a few minutes, the robot reached its destination. A
non–descript stretch of street that happened to contain a set of bulkhead doors
— the first of two sets that needed to be closed to isolate the hole in the
hull. The robot climbed up the wall to the control panel. Reaching out, it
activated the panel, paused, and then pressed the button that would close the
door. Its sensor pivoted to watch the door slowly slide shut.

§

“That was easy,” Bruce said, watching the door on his terminal.

“Yeah. Huh,” Stein said.

§

“Why did that door just close?” Helot asked. He had been
watching the area in vacuum ever since the attack. Othersiders trapped in the
streets, banging on doors, clutching their throats. He had made himself watch. He
was trying not to think about how little he felt. He was pretty confident he
should feel a lot worse than he did.

Manipulating the controls on his display, he zoomed in on
the door and scanned around the nearby street, eventually spotting the answer
to his question.

§

The maintenance robot traveled the short distance to the
second bulkhead door. Lying across the plane where the door would slide shut
was a body. After a few seconds of consideration, the robot cautiously moved
forward, grabbing the dead soldier by the collar. Slowly the robot reversed,
trying to drag the body out of the way. But as the corpse started to move, the
collar gave way, torn apart by the manipulator. Another few seconds passed
while the robot reevaluated the obstacle. Eventually, it backed up a short
distance, reversing in a curved line until it faced the body squarely. It then
charged forward, slamming into the corpse. The friction holding the body in
place gave way, and the robot and body slowly slid past the door.

§

Helot fumed at Curts’ idiocy. He would probably know how to
disable the robot remotely, if he wasn’t off in fucking space somewhere.

He watched the robot and its pallbearing learning curve.
Beside him, one of the security officers said, “I’ve got an idea.” Helot looked
at him, vowing to learn his name the next time someone casually mentioned it.
The officer moved over to a different panel and found the right set of
controls. “Now, this will require some timing.”

§

The robot had mounted the wall beneath the control panel and
slowly reached out to press the button. The bulkhead door slowly started to
close. The robot retreated to the floor and backed up to watch the door slip
into place. Its sensor rotated around to view the first door it had activated,
just visible behind the edge of a building corner. The door had opened again.

§

“What?” Bruce and Stein said in unison.

§

The robot returned to the original door, climbed up, and
shut it again, watching it close carefully. The door slid into place, and the
robot climbed down, taking a minute to inspect the door’s perimeter to ensure
it stayed shut. It did. The robot turned to look at the second door.

§

“Oh, son of a bitch!”

“They’re fucking with us,” Stein said, looking at the second
door, now opened again. “We should have done this the right way from the start.”

§

“Hehehehehehehehe,” Helot said. “Dummies.” He looked at the
other people in the room, who stared back, blankly. It occurred to Helot that
he was laughing at a desperate attempt to save people’s lives. His smile
evaporated. Turning back to the screen, he said, “They’re going to figure it
out soon. How long until your guy is ready?”

“He’s ready now.”

§

The robot pried off the access panel underneath the controls
and delicately extended its plasma cutter. With a short, sharp burst, it
severed the link between the door mechanism and the controls, locking the door
in the closed position. It descended the wall and made its way over to the
second door for the final time. There, it climbed the wall, pried off the
access panel, and exploded.

An e–suit–clad figure, rifle held somewhat awkwardly at its
hip, walked over and kicked the remnants of the robot. Another shot into its
guts. Satisfied, the figure retreated around the corner, entering the room with
the puncture. He carefully sidestepped the hole into the rest of the universe, and
made his way to the temporary airlock installed in the neighboring room.

§

Bruce smashed the terminal on the ground. “Why is nothing
easy? Why does everything have to be so fucking hard?”

Stein stared at the largest piece of the terminal, which had
come to rest on her foot. They had lost contact with the maintenance robot and
had spent the past five minutes trying to reconnect. “I don’t get it,” she
said.

“They blew it up,” Bruce said, balling his hands into fists.

“How?”

“I don’t know. Wizard magic? But robots don’t just drop
offline like that. I’ve never seen that happen.”

Stein pulled out her own terminal. “So, it’s not worth
sending in another robot to try again?”

“What’s the point? They’d just break that, too. Besides, it’d
take hours to get one into position.”

Stein cocked her head at him. “Well, what else are we doing?”
She stared at Bruce desperately, mainly so she didn’t have to look at Griese,
whose gaze she could feel on the back of her head. A chirp from her terminal,
from everyone’s terminal. She looked down to see an incoming message from
Helot. A fraction of a second later, Helot’s voice erupted through the ship’s
PA system.

“Attention, Argos. This is Captain James Edward Helot.
Recently, a large group of armed men and women attacked and killed several
security officers stationed on the anti–terrorism perimeter. These attacks,
these
murders
, are appalling. They cannot go unpunished.”

The captain paused, his last words echoing slightly in the
streets. “Our remaining security forces moved quickly to apprehend the villains
responsible for these crimes. In an attempt to escape, these attackers caused
an explosive decompression to occur in the aft of the ship. This accident has
left many of them trapped, in imminent danger of suffocation and death. I’m
inclined to think it’s a fitting end.

“However, these men and women can be saved. But not by the
man behind this attack: Eric Kinsella. If it was up to him, these men and women
would die. Only I can save them.”

“Crap,” Stein said, seeing where this was going.

“And I will save them. But before I do, Kinsella must put a stop
to all hostilities. No more attacks on security officers will be tolerated. Any
and all weapons must be surrendered.

“To the citizens of the Argos: the reason I am showing you
such mercy following these unprovoked assaults is because I know that these men
and women have been lied to and misled. The true criminals are the ones who
organized this attack, the ones who tricked you and sent hundreds of people to
their deaths. As I have said many times before, the stories told to you have
been lies. And these lies have gotten your husbands and wives, sons and
daughters, trapped, and about to die.

“To Eric Kinsella: if you surrender immediately, your people
will be rescued. They will be held in detention until order is restored but
will not be harmed or prosecuted. They will live.” Helot waited a beat before delivering
the kicker. “Or you can ignore me, and leave your people to die.”

The PA system clicked off. Stein, as well as everyone else
present, turned to look at the mayor. Kinsella stared straight ahead, wide–eyed,
face covered in sweat. Beside him, one of his bodyguards was speaking urgently
into his terminal. He abruptly grabbed the mayor around the shoulders, and
hurried him off to the north.

“Wait, what?” Griese said, watching the mayor’s retreat. “Is
he going to surrender or not?”

“I would probably say so,” Stein said. “He’s a dead man if
he doesn’t.”

“He might be a dead man either way,” Bruce said.

“So, Ellen will be okay?” Griese asked aloud.

Stein looked at Griese. She held his gaze for a moment,
still unable to say it. A moment passed, and then she didn’t have to; Griese
collapsed to the ground, his body wracked with sobs. She looked away, numb.

§

Hogg felt sticky. It was too sweaty in there.
This is no
way to die.
Gross and sticky.
He levered himself up to a sitting
position, with his back to the wall. Too much sweat, too many people: there
were twenty–seven soldiers in the apartment. That made sense: it was one of the
closest rooms to the bulkhead door. Of course it was going to fill up with
people, sucking up all the air, dooming each other. Linze should have known
better. She should have picked somewhere else to hide. But Hogg knew that was
being unfair. Linze had acted, he hadn’t. Someone, hopefully, somewhere, will
have survived thanks to Linze’s quick thinking. Just not here.

He supposed there was still a chance they would be rescued.
Kinsella had surrendered. That had gotten everyone excited, again using too
much of their precious oxygen. And Helot had said rescuers were coming. But
Hogg knew it would be a slow process reclaiming the ship from vacuum. And he
doubted Helot’s rescuers were going to work that fast.