by Brian Smith
“Damn it, chief, let me look you over! It’ll only take a minute. . . .”
“Stow it!” Chief Hogan growled. The strain in his voice was palpable, as if he were on the verge of tears. “I already told you—the blood ain’t mine! I’ve got shit to do here! Get lost!”
“Chief! Just let me—”
Chief Hogan twisted expertly in free fall, activating his magboots and landing on the deck in front of the startled corpsman. Hogan had an imposing bulk and gave the corpsman a sharp nudge in the chest with the heavy tool he was holding. “Beat it, Doc—that’s an order! Every minute we’re coasting, we risk blowing our cover—if we haven’t already! I ain’t gonna tell you again—the fucking blood ain’t mine!”
Ford put a hand on the corpsman’s shoulder. “Doc, go and see if Marshal Hutton needs a hand with the prisoners. The chief isn’t wounded—the blood isn’t his.”
The corpsman had to take a couple steps in his magboots to turn and see who was speaking to him. When he did, he nodded inside his faceplate. “Can do, XO,” he said.
He clumped past them without another word—even through his marine-issue combat suit, his body language said he was plenty pissed. Corpsmen, especially the greenside ones working with the Marines, were held in high regard—the reaction he got from the chief wasn’t what he was used to or deserved.
Chief Hogan tried to stare down the XO as well. “Anything for me, sir?” The way he said “sir,” Ford could tell Hogan was really saying you can leave me the hell alone, too. Ford understood why, so he let it go and instead kept his own tone neutral and even.
“What’s the verdict, chief? Can we get her up and running again? Don’t sugarcoat it.”
Hogan blinked once, then blew out a breath and looked at Ford with red-rimmed eyes.
“You can tell the weapons department they deserve a gunnery pennant—they hit it right on the nose without absolutely wrecking the place. We need to print a few parts back on Reuben James. Our ready spares won’t work on this reactor, but we can get the specs for those parts out of this ship’s computer. I’ve got a crew working on getting the APUs reset. I’ll know more in an hour or so, but it looks good.”
“Right. I’m sorry about Chief Miller—he was top shelf. We’ll mourn him properly when the job’s done, but we need to get it done. You good to go?”
“Yes, sir.” Hogan turned his back on the XO and went back to work without another word.
Ford spent a minute or two looking around the compartment himself, comparing what he saw with the chief’s statement. Then he headed forward again, to find the corpsman waiting outside in the corridor.
“Both of us need a travel buddy,” he grinned at the XO. “Your own orders, sir.”
Ford nodded. “Fair enough. Don’t mind the chief, Griggs. We lost a member of the goat locker during the fight. Chief Miller’s battle suit got shredded when an electrical panel blew, and we lost him. Those two graduated from Great Lakes together and have been shipmates their entire careers.”
“That’s hard,” Griggs agreed. “Real hard. I thought he was wounded, sir. Sorry.”
“No worries—you were doing your job.”
“You have time for a question, lieutenant?”
“Sure.”
“I don’t understand—why didn’t this ship just go up like a nova when we hit her reactor?”
“Laser-fusion reactors generally don’t work like that,” Ford explained. “It’s possible to overload one or to damage it in a way that you vent plasma through the hull and slag the ship, but they generally don’t blow up. You can make one explode, but it takes a lot of deliberate action. A laser-fusion reaction is hard enough to sustain as it is. If you knock the hardware out of alignment or disrupt the supply of fuel pellets to the igniting lasers, the whole thing just fizzles out. That’s what we were aiming to do, and it worked pretty well.”
“With a whimper rather than a bang, eh?” Griggs remarked. “I didn’t know that.”
“Laser-fusion reactors are among the safest forms of power production ever devised—they can’t go critical on you like a fission pile, they don’t produce radioactive waste, and they generally can’t overload. If something goes haywire, they basically just switch off.”
“Now we need to get this one to switch back on,” Griggs remarked casually, stating the obvious.
“Sooner rather than later, too,” Ford added. “If we can’t get a deceleration burn going in the next few hours, the gomers on that asteroid are definitely going to know something’s up. Not sure we’re going to be fooling anyone as it is, at this point. We weren’t expecting to duke it out with a pair of corvettes. If they were watching, it was quite a light show for a few minutes.”
“Well, sir, you’re the astrogator. Do you guys sit around on the bridge and stare through the telescopes all day long?”
“No, we actually don’t,” Ford admitted thoughtfully. “I like how you think.”
“I’m guessing the chief is going to have that plant back online too, come hell or high water,” Griggs added confidently.
“Come hell or high water,” Ford echoed, wishing he felt as confident.
***
Hours later, Jim Ford sat in the captain’s chair on Aurora’s bridge, sipping a bulb of hot black coffee and wishing he could do nothing but sleep for the next three weeks. They were under thrust again, but even their comfortable 0.6-g burn was enough to set most of his body’s tissues screaming in protest. He’d doped himself with more antipain meds and stimulants, knowing that there was going to be a price to pay later for all the chemical pick-me-ups. It was the warmth and smell of the coffee that did more than anything else to calm his mind.
He turned and looked as the bridge doors opened behind him to admit Diane Hutton. She was walking tall, apparently none the worse for wear after the combat burns and subsequent hours of work aboard Aurora.
One tough lady, Ford thought with admiration.
Over the past week, Ford had admitted to himself that he was strongly attracted to her. In his eyes she was the whole package: smart, competent, tough, and damn good looking. He thought so even now, even though her armored exosuit bulked her up and disguised her figure. She smiled tightly at him as she approached, running a hand through her halo of hair, which was only slightly matted from the hours it had spent mashed under her helmet. He caught a glint of something in her eye and realized he was staring at her like a schoolboy.
He cleared his throat slightly, trying to mask his self-consciousness at being caught out. One of the first things he’d noticed about Hutton was that she didn’t miss a thing. “How’s it going down there?” he asked. “Anything useful?”
“Some. We’ve got three women who were definitely original crew members—they’ve had a bad time of it, and they’ve been helpful in sorting out who’s who. Of course, my motto is ‘In God we Trust—all others get run through the asshole sifter.’ They’ll stay confined until your ship is renetworked to the world and I can verify identities through my agency’s files. Doc Griggs looked them over; that wasn’t a happy moment for anyone—those three don’t have much use for men of any stripe right now.” She paused, perhaps searching Ford’s features for a reaction, but he just nodded mutely, his lips pressing into an angry line. Her eyes fixated momentarily on his coffee bulb.
“Any more of that around here?” she asked.
Rather than direct her to the large carafe they’d set up on the bridge, Ford jumped down from the captain’s chair and led her over to it, grabbing a bulb and charging it for her. Behind his back she smiled slightly at the personal service. Her features were carefully neutral again when he turned and handed it to her. She sipped at the coffee appreciatively, cupping the warm bulb in both hands even though the bridge wasn’t the slightest bit cold. Ford recognized the gesture—it was simply a comfort thing after a long day. He tried not to let her proximity distract him—too much.
“I think we’ve nailed down at least a half dozen of the truly bad actors, but
aside from mouthing off about their loyalty to the MIM, they aren’t talking. A couple of the crew may be genuine converts—more than just Stockholm syndromers, and at least one of original crew members turned rapist on his former shipmates when the opportunity came up. A few others cooperated to avoid being spaced, but what I’m finding is that only some of those folks are what we might have considered lily-white to begin with. I’ve also got one genuine wanted fugitive on my hands—nothing related to what we’re doing out here, but she popped up in my own personal data partition when I ran my initial checks. Seems she thought a new career with the MIM would keep her out of reach of the law. I don’t think she’s all that idealistic about Martian independence—she just needed a place to run. Anyway, like I said, I’ll get them all sorted for sure by the time we get them back to Mars.”
“I take it your two fugitives from Vesta aren’t here?” Ford asked.
Hutton shook her head. “No way they should have been, based on our intel. They’re either down there at 5111 Omega or they’ve moved on. If it’s the latter, hopefully we’ll find enough intel to catch up with them again. Letting them run was a risk that seems to be paying some dividends, but I hope it’s worth it in the end, because they probably know a lot. Speaking of what we know,” she added, “how are we doing up here?”
“Well, obviously we’re on the burn again. We haven’t received any communication attempts from 5111 Omega. At this point we don’t know if they suspect anything or not. As one of the Marines pointed out, we don’t spend all day looking through our telescopes, so why would a bunch of pirates? As noisy as it was to us, the entire fight was only a few minutes from start to finish, and if they weren’t watching right when it happened, they missed it. As for the disabled reactor, we were down for only six hours. We’re flying a line astern with Reuben James—she’s behind us with respect to the asteroid, far enough back to not irradiate us with her plume, and we’re shielding her from visible detection with our own bulk and torch plume. She’s still running at EMCON, and in the end it’s going to be a child’s game: she’s simply going to hide behind us when we arrive, unseen and undetected. We can pass messages back and forth with low-power masers using the signal book and Morse—no networks for now. Chief Warrant Officer Ayers has access to the computer, ship’s logs, and all the data partitions, so we’ll be going in with some solid intel, including the layout of the place and a schematic of the systems.”
“We’ll have more than that when the time comes, if we’re lucky,” Ayers added cryptically. “This mission is turning into a real windfall in terms of solving cold cases,” she added. “Are you familiar with the names Hitachi Maru or Cumberland?”
“Those sound like ship names,” Hutton replied. “No, I’m not familiar— My job is bringing in fugitives. Missing ships are more y’all’s thing.”
“That’s exactly what they were: missing ships with Earth registries. I think we’ve found both, or at least whatever’s left. Sifting through the data, it looks like both ships were cannibalized to provide the base infrastructure of this MIM habitat and facility down there on 5111 Omega. It’s a depot of some kind, sure enough, with a decent-sized manufacturing facility attached to it. They’re making stuff down there—probably weapons of some sort, according to the intel you came to us with. The one thing we haven’t been able to sort out yet is why this ship was running empty on the inbound: any facility like that is going to need regular supplies of air, water, green-wall organics, foodstuffs—you name it.”
“I can clear that one up,” Hutton supplied. “One of the former crew heard some of the others talking about it. This trip was a rush job, an emergency. They were supposed to fly in, clean out the depot, and take everyone off.” She paused, looking like she’d bitten into something very sour. “It appears that the MIM knew we were coming or would be coming at some point. Aurora was on an emergency-evacuation run. If we’d shown up a week or two later, I suspect we wouldn’t have found much down there.”
“That’s . . . interesting,” Ayers said, going glassy-eyed for a moment. “XO, where was Aurora coming from?”
“Ship’s log had her all the way out around Saturn, believe it or not.”
“And, marshal, how long have your people been tracking those two a-holes out here?”
“A few weeks, if you go back and start at Vesta. Almost all the way back to the date of the Tongling massacre, if you backtrack it all the way to Mars. A couple months. Yeah, I can see what you’re thinking: we’re leaky somewhere, or one of our data systems has been hacked. Someone figured out early that we knew about 5111 Omega, but that shouldn’t have been possible until my two fugitives left Vesta to come here. The MIM’s response time for getting the Aurora down-well from Saturn to this location is pretty damn impressive. The more we see, the less like a fringe group the MIM seems like, and the more like a professionally led and equipped outfit.”
“Could be interesting times ahead,” Ayers remarked, turning back to her console. Speaking over her shoulder, she added, “If it doesn’t break any rules, Marshal Hutton, why don’t you send me a timeline of your agency’s investigation, starting from the date of the massacre, along with a list of investigative milestones you’ve hit along the way? A list of which parties were involved and had access to pertinent data would be a huge help. I can chew on it in my off time, see if anything interesting emerges from the data stream. Maybe I can at least localize your breach if it was a system hack and not a human mole.”
Hutton glanced at Ford as if to say, Is she serious?
That was expensive consultant-level work Ayers was offering to do, but basically as a hobby. Ford nodded emphatically; he knew he’d never know enough about cyber warfare to properly appreciate how good Ayers was at her job.
“That’s a generous offer,” Hutton replied. “When this is over, I’ll definitely look into it.”
***
“Here goes nothing,” Ford remarked several hours later. “Mr. Hagen, sound the acceleration alarm and throttle down on the mark.”
“On the mark. Aye, aye, sir,” the pilot replied.
The acceleration alarm sounded through the ship, different from the klaxon aboard their own frigate. Ford watched the chronometer count down to zero, and the pilot killed their thrust. Aurora came to an almost perfect stop relative to the rocky asteroid looming on her port beam.
This far out in the solar system there wasn’t much ambient light; to the naked eye, the lump of rock was barely visible at all, and sensitive equipment had to be pointed toward exactly the right spot to detect any signs of human presence at all.
Ford had one of Aurora’s optical telescopes pointed at the odd-shaped crater that the ship’s charts marked as the entrance to the MIM depot. Another was pointed at Reuben James, which throttled down and was taking up station in order to remain hidden from any optical observation made by 5111 Omega.
CW3 Ayers was seated at the auxiliary console, working her magic. As their cyber-warfare expert, she was leading the assault in a nontraditional but very twenty-first-century way. On command from Ford, the freighter’s recently repaired comm dish swung out and oriented itself toward the asteroid. It sent out a single electronic ping requesting a network link, encrypted via the corporate software package used by the MIM at this locale. None of the prisoners would cooperate in granting access to the system, but Ayers had hacked it within a few hours of hooking up her equipment.
Obviously, their arrival was anticipated; it took only a few moments for a reply to come back and, just like that, Aurora was networked into the depot. The ensuing communications were handled by text; Ayers conducted them based on having read past communications logs. With some AI computer assistance, she could mimic the style, mannerisms, and formatting used by the former captain. In the meantime, a cybermole of her own design slipped down the network and was already infiltrating the depot’s computer systems, armed with the MIM’s own security and encryption codes to make the job that much easier.
Petty Officer Sim
s from her division was plugged into Ayers’s station with a second portable computer, but in the confined space there was nowhere for him to sit. He had to activate his magboots to stop himself from floating away from the station once they cut thrust, and now he diligently hammered away at his own virtual keyboard in concert with his boss.
DEPOT: YOU’RE BEHIND SCHEDULE. ANY PROBLEMS?
AURORA:MINOR COMM-ARRAY REPAIR THAT WE NEEDED TO GO FLOATER TO GET AT. STILL NOT 100%.
DEPOT:WE AREN’T RECEIVING A VISUAL FEED.
AURORA:NO SHIT, SHERLOCK! I JUST SAID, “NOT 100%.” ARE YOU READY FOR LOADING AND EVAC?
DEPOT:YOU’RE CLEARED IN.
AURORA:GOT A COUPLE OF HOT FEMS TO KEEP YOU ENTERTAINED ON THE OUTBOUND—EVERYONE CONTRIBUTES TO THE CAUSE IN THE END, EH?
DEPOT:LOL. SICK BASTARD. SEE YOU SOON, CUZ. FREE MARS!
AURORA:FREE MARS!
“Really?” Hutton said, looking disapprovingly over Ayers’s shoulder as she typed.
“Sorry,” Ayers grumbled. “That was the AI offering its two cents. They bought it, though. XO, we’re good to go.”
“Good work, Cheryl,” Ford replied. “Mr. Hagen, you have the conn. Take us in for rendezvous.”
“Pilot has the conn,” Hagen echoed, reaching for his gyrogrips. “This is going to be like flying a giant brick,” he grumbled to himself. Ford sent the keplers, and Hagen began working the gyros and thrusters. In space, the massive freighter pirouetted slowly and began her cautious approach to docking. They would ease into a deep crater and then translate sideways under a large rock overhang, essentially entering a gigantic cavern within which the depot was located.
