Ends, Means, Laws and an Angry Ship

by Lyn Gala

  “Then it’ll be two levels above the command room,” Plat said. “But it’s a long walk because it’s near the opposite end of the ship. That could be an advantage.”

  Joahan grimaced. “I’m afraid I might know where the breach was. Wirki warned us over the radio that something big was headed our way. He said he would cut it off.”

  When grief twisted Joahan’s features, Tyce’s stomach dropped. Wirki and his brother were co-leaders of Foxtrot unit, and they handled heavy fighting. They were the first ones to advance during open combat, and if other teams got in trouble, they would tear through heaven or hell to save shipmates. It hadn’t been more than six or seven months earlier that a member of Foxtrot had set off a bomb in the corridor of a supply ship they had been raiding to stop the assault unit waiting to ambush the boarding team.

  “What do you mean by ‘cut it off’?” Plat asked.

  Joahan grimaced and his gaze darted away before he answered. “Wirki planned to use the spiral staircase to get between this new enemy and the shuttle level. If it was hostile, he was going to try to stop it before it reached our level.”

  “How the hell can you tell whether an alien is hostile without getting yourself killed?” Plat laughed nervously.

  Tyce silently prayed for Wirki’s soul and his corporeal body. “The crew does have a bad habit of letting someone else take the first shot,” Tyce finally said. Of course, Tyce was only alive because of that tendency. So it was more than a little ironic that it frustrated him so badly now. “What do we know?”

  “When Wirki called in again, he was in the middle of a firefight. He told everyone to clear the decks, that whatever the thing was, weapons fire wasn't slowing it down. He said he hoped to stop it before it could get to the lower levels.” Joahan’s face was an impassive mask, but his voice broke, and he took a shuddering breath.

  Christ. Tyce closed his eyes and struggled with the overwhelming weight of guilt. Wirki must have used his explosives. It was the only thing that made sense with a hull breach. “Does his brother know?” Tyce asked softly.

  Joahan didn’t answer immediately. He took another deep breath. “Kiwir was listening at the time.”

  Tyce ran a hand over his face. “Christ.”

  “I'm fairly sure Christ had nothing to do with what happened. But you know Wirki would have done anything to protect the shuttles. I tried to get back down to him.” Joahan cleared his throat. “The levels right above our shuttles... the doors won’t open.”

  “Are you saying your guy was carrying enough heavy ordnance or heavy explosives to blast a hole in the side of the ship?” Plat sounded confused. No doubt he associated explosives with highly trained tech teams who came in with expensive robotic equipment to transport and maintain the ordnance. If someone had to stay behind to set off a charge, it would’ve been the robot, not the tech. Tyce wished he lived in a reality where that was true. Then Wirki would be back at the ship complaining about the paperwork he had to fill out when he blew up an expensive piece of equipment. But that was a fantasy. There hadn’t been any robot.

  “It makes sense that he tried to disable or kill the Imshee, and he accidentally tore a hole in the side of the ship.”

  “Or he blew a hole in the ship to isolate the lower levels, to expose the corridor to vacuum and kill the enemy,” Joahan said.

  “The shuttles. Are they...?” Tyce was too afraid to ask.

  “They’ve all reported. I think we’ve decided to ignore the scatter order. Sorry.” He shrugged and tried to smile, but the expression twisted, and he ended up blinking hard and fast.

  “What the hell?” Plat blurted. “How much explosives do you carry?”

  Tyce had a moment where he felt caught between two worlds. He was a Ribelian who believed a soldier should carry whatever he might need. If supplies were dangerous or corrosive or poisonous, that was the chance a soldier took. But he was also an Earther, used to jobs being separated, delineated. A soldier wouldn’t stand too close to ordnance because it was dangerous. Both points of view were so logical and so mutually incompatible that he lost himself in a tangle of emotions. It took him a second to sort them out well enough to answer. “He wouldn't have been carrying enough to breach the hull of an earth vessel, but this is an organic ship.”

  “When we were trying to tear a hole in the side of the ship, it took every bit of firepower we had in our attack ships,” Plat said. A ripple of pain travelled down Tyce’s shoulder so strongly that he grabbed it, certain he’d been shot. He hadn’t. Plat had his back turned, so he kept talking. “This hull is damn tough. Tougher than anything Earth puts together. The weapons we threw at it would have torn through an Earth ship, so it’ll take a lot to breach.”

  Tyce ignored the concerned look Joahan was giving him. “But the ship is organic. It's designed to shield from outside forces. Everything inside is soft, vulnerable.”

  “Not great ship design,” Joahan said.

  Plat glanced over his shoulder. “We agree on that.”

  Tyce pushed his emotions aside and focused on the tactical situation. Nothing Joahan had said changed their need for information. “We’re supposed to be moving fast, so let’s get to the surveillance room and find these assholes.”

  “Shaabaas,” Joahan said, his enthusiasm present if a little brittle and fake.

  “What?” Plat asked.

  “Hoo rah,” Tyce translated. He headed down the corridor, passing Plat as he headed, hopefully, toward their goal.

  Chapter Twenty

  EVEN IN THE WATERY display, the black of space and the distant twinkle of stars were evident. “Holy fuck.” Tyce whispered the words like a prayer. He had no idea what else to say.

  Joahan leaned in until his nose nearly touched the vertical display. “What the hell is that?”

  “What are you guys going on about?” Plat abandoned his post at the door to peer over their shoulders at the camera angle. They had used the camera to check the adjoining corridors and no one was near, but Plat had insisted on standing guard. Tyce appreciated his willingness to volunteer, because giving a Command sergeant orders could have ended badly.

  “Holy fucking shit! Did your guy do that?” Plat backed away as though suddenly afraid to be in the same room with Ribelians. “What the hell are you carrying in your gear? Fission material?”

  The size of the hole made nuclear armaments possible. “Nothing we have would do that kind of damage. Absolutely nothing.”

  The alarmed expression on Plat’s face didn’t change, but Tyce didn’t have time to reassure a nervous Command soldier. He slid the controller down and the camera views zipped through several levels until they were looking at complete darkness. Too far. He moved up more slowly this time. Eventually he saw the level with the abandoned water purifiers and protein synthesizers rigged into the wall. A shuttle door was visible in the camera shot, but the leather wall of the ship had half grown over the shuttle door.

  “It doesn't look like they've taken any damage on that level.” Joahan said in clear relief.

  “Let's hope it stays that way.” Tyce moved the camera view back up into the sections that were exposed to space. Nothing up-ship of their position had cameras, but at least they could survey the damage from the blast. An elevator had overinflated, plugging the hole created by the elevator shaft. Sphincter doors had closed over the hallways. But, weirdly, the doors leading to individual rooms were twisted and warped and sometimes ripped right out of the frame, leaving individual rooms exposed. If anyone had tried to take shelter there, they would've had an ugly surprise.

  Tyce prayed Yoss had not been in one. That would have been a horrific minute or two ending in a brutal death.

  “Does it occur to anyone else that whoever designed this ship didn't understand space that well?” Plat returned to the door to stand guard.

  Joahan spoke softly. “Or the ship is designed to void entire levels at once if there’s some sort of explosion. If this ship belonged to pirates, that level could have bee
n used for contraband and a simple blowout would get rid of all the evidence.”

  Tyce had already considered the possibility, but it wasn’t the most likely or the most horrifying option. “Then why would the level have individual rooms?” Tyce hated to even think it, but he suspected the people who had built the ship had kept prisoners on that level. A single breach would get rid of them at once. The Ribelian intelligence network had gotten wind of the few Earth ships doing that with prisoners.

  The free alliance could never get evidence, but certain prisoners vanished—no records, no death certificates, no notifications to families. Nothing. And while that wasn't conclusive, the prison transport ships sometimes returned to Landing or Paititi weeks before schedule. They hadn’t bothered flying all the way to their destination before they unloaded the prisoners. The idea made him ill.

  Joahan pressed his fingertips together in prayer, so maybe his thoughts had followed a similar path. “Nothing Wirki carried would've caused that kind of damage, so are we assuming the ship had some sort of protocol? Maybe Wirki was unlucky enough to trigger something when he was trying to stop the Imshee from going into the lower levels. Or maybe he was unlucky enough to set a charge near some source of nuclear energy.”

  For some reason, Tyce had the feeling that both was and wasn’t true. Maybe the aliens could use the damn probes to communicate with their ship, but the technology didn’t work on human brains because all Tyce got were vague impressions. He didn’t even know how Joahan’s suggestion could be both true and not true.

  He settled for saying, “Maybe.” He panned the camera through the level as fast as he could without the image blurring, but he couldn't find any Imshee. If one had been heading for Dragon territory, Tyce couldn't find it now. Hopefully Wirki’s soul knew he had protected the others.

  “So where are the Imshee?” Joahan asked.

  Tyce didn’t even have a vague feeling. Maybe the ship didn’t know or perhaps the ship was taking pity on him by not shoving half-formed and unhelpful thoughts into his brain.

  “Maybe there was only one,” Joahan suggested.

  Plat answered from his spot near the door. “I'm not feeling that lucky.”

  Joahan guffawed. “And now we found something else we agree on, but I don't see any Imshee.” He tried to move the camera controls, but nothing happened. Joahan frowned and looked at Tyce. This was not a conversation Tyce could have at the moment, so he shrugged and twitched his fingers so the camera rolled through the area. To find the Command crew, Tyce had only thought about them, so he tried that. He focused on the image of the insectoid monster with its ratty green hair. The camera bobbled for a moment before stilling.

  “Try moving toward the shuttles,” Plat suggested. Now Joahan was openly studying Tyce, his gaze calculating. On a Ribelian ship, secrets were normal. If someone was captured, they wouldn’t want more information than necessary because no one withstood Command interrogation forever. No doubt that was why none of the crew had radioed Ama or him to let them know they were ignoring the scatter order. But right now Joahan might as well have a bubble over his head with the words floating in it. He assumed Tyce and Ama had figured out how to control the ship and were hiding that from Command.

  Joahan even moved so his body blocked Tyce’s gestures if Plat turned toward them. Tyce regretted not telling the crew about the brain probes. At the time he’d wanted to avoid any pity, but given that clue, Joahan would figure out the truth.

  Tyce focused on the image of that huge, mangy insect. He could not imagine a universe where that became the dominant species of any planet. The camera angle twisted and tilted before it shot up.

  Joahan gave him an odd stare but then he glanced over toward Plat and held his tongue. No doubt, if they were alone he would have more than a few questions, but he wasn't willing to say anything in front of a Command soldier. Thank God for small mercies. The camera stopped and stabilized.

  “Where is this?” Joahan asked.

  Tyce shrugged because it didn't look familiar. The corridors were long, and straight unlike in any part of the ship he had seen. “Plat, does this look familiar to you?”

  Plat asked Joahan. “Watch the door?”

  Joahan moved to take his spot. “Yeah, I've got it.”

  Only then did Plat check the display. “Those long straight corridors, that's what we saw when we came through the first set of doors off the shuttle bay. The closer the corridor is to the shuttle bay, the bigger it is and it slowly narrows and starts to curve. That looks like it's about halfway between the shuttle and the command deck. Maybe. The different levels might get smaller at a different rate, in that case, I have no fucking idea where that is.”

  That was less than helpful, but at least he was honest in his assessment. “But you think it's likely closer to the shuttles?”

  “My gut says yes. That’s the only part of the ship we’ve found with straight lines. It has to be a psychological thing because it doesn’t make much sense.”

  Tyce suspected human preferences for straight corridors made less sense. When this ship’s gravity had failed, the crew avoided massive casualties by sliding around the curves instead of taking a hard fall onto a solid metal surface. This ship might have less reliable gravity fields. Just because an alien species had highly advanced weaponry didn’t mean it couldn’t be behind Earth in other fields. But that begged the question of why the corridors near the shuttles were straight.

  “Are the Imshee there?” Joahan asked.

  “No idea,” Tyce admitted. “I can’t figure out most of this equipment, and I can’t get the cameras to show the outside so we can search for the Imshee ship.”

  “This technology is pretty damn alien, even for an alien ship.” Plat looked around the room in disgust. “I’ve seen vids of Rownt ships, and they look like ships. They’re too big and whoever decorated them has weird taste, but they’re ships. This place...” He shook his head.

  “The engineers say the ship uses fluids for nearly every function. They think some of the curve is to prevent fluids from moving too quickly in any given direction. Fluid lines even have muscles around them so they can change diameters. They’re pretty amazed by the engineering and biology.” Joahan kept his eyes on the corridor while speaking.

  Plat grimaced.

  “Okay, let’s take what we know and head back up,” Tyce said. If he couldn’t get the cameras to give them any useful information, this was a waste of time.

  “We don’t know anything,” Joahan protested.

  “We know we can’t find the Imshee. Let’s get back up-ship and start talking strategy.” Tyce wanted to see if any of the Dragon crew had made it up to Ama. If any of them had been in the damaged level, Ama would be arranging more celebrations of life. Tyce had attended too damn many of those. Tyce closed his fists and the display went dark. “Let's move. It makes me nervous that I can't get eyes on the Imshee.”

  “You and me both,” Joahan muttered. Without any discussion, Plat took point, and Joahan quickly followed. “So, sergeant, what sort of manpower do you guys have, and are any of your guys any good at shooting a gun?”

  Plat paused and snorted before he continued down the hall. “Do you expect me to discuss our tactical position with rebels?”

  “Family ship, not rebels,” Tyce corrected him. If they all survived this, Tyce would only be able to talk John around a few corners if there was some plausible deniability. After all, they had possession of the control room, and Tyce had no illusions about what John would do to maintain that. He would have Dragon crew guard the perimeter, not maintain inner security. And that meant Tyce had to consider long-term options.

  Maybe he could get John to drop them off at Mars. They were a little friendlier to colonists than Earth, even if they had sided with the home world during the war. Or maybe they could break a few shuttles loose and send their most vulnerable to the Cyrillic Union. After the Anla war, they had refused to get involved in the conflict.

  “Right.” P
lat’s voice dripped with disbelief. “And a family ship chose to have a fugitive officer from Command as their captain. I would think a family ship who wanted to avoid conflict would've dropped you off at the nearest uninhabited planet.”

  “We considered,” Joahan said, “but he kinda grows on you after a while. Sort of like scum on a water tank.”

  “Gee, thanks,” Tyce said dryly.

  Joahan grinned over his shoulder. “You're welcome.” He turned his attention back to the front and Plat. “Now what about the relative strengths and weaknesses of your people and their ability to fire guns? If we’re fighting together, I would like to know who I have at my back. And, in case it's escaped your notice, our crew is much more prepared to defend itself than yours. We got through the initial contact with the ship with our shuttles intact. You, however, seem fairly screwed. And now your own people have a split. So even if we get rid of the Imshee, you're going to be fighting yourselves.”

  Plat hunched his shoulders. “This is an issue for the commander, not me.”

  “Joahan, drop it,” Tyce ordered.

  Unsurprisingly, Joahan ignored him. “Just like Command. You people are so fond of your rules and regulations that you don't stop to consider appropriateness of time or place. If we don't work together, your people won’t survive.”

  “He can’t talk to you about this, so drop it.” Tyce snapped.

  Joahan turned his attention to Tyce. “You've been up there. What's your general assessment?”

  “Their medical staff appears competent, but the soldiers who were most willing to take risks seem to be the ones who consider Ribelians a bigger threat than the Imshee.”

  “So, the morons,” Joahan summarized.

  Tyce shrugged. He doubted any lack of intelligence motivated them. Soldiers on the front had to stop seeing the enemy as people in order to avoid the psychological pain of killing. “Unless John had all the weapons locked down securely, my guess is his crew doesn’t have much left.”