by Mark Wandrey
“Okay, but I’m sending Stodden and Feldman to look for an open access area.”
“They’re ordered not to attempt to interface with any of the systems,” Jim instructed.
“Understood,” Hargrave replied.
“How’s the suit look, Splunk?”
“One minute,
“Okay, okay, don’t get in a huff.” While he waited, he examined the damage. The airlock had decompressed, and that was a good thing. The explosives might not have been enough to kill him in his suit, but if it had gone off in a pressurized air lock it probably would have blown the exterior door clean off and launched Jim like a rocket into deep space. The force would have been transmitted to his suit a thousand times over, as well, and that would have killed him. He considered himself lucky he hadn’t triggered the airlock repressurization, which was manual. You need to be more careful.
The interior and exterior walls were deformed outward from the blast, which appeared to have originated in a panel on the left wall facing the exterior door. He glanced at the control section and saw the little spider bot waiting patiently, having weathered the blast with no damage. He triggered the recall function, and it returned to the storage compartment.
“All done, Jim,
“Thanks, buddy,” he said, and she gave a little trill before returning to the safety of the thigh compartment.
He considered. The charges were clearly meant to take out anyone before they entered the station. Which probably meant there wouldn’t be any on the inside bulkhead. Maybe.
Jim selected a control and a put a hand against the wall. His Mk 7 was equipped for ship boarding. Along with the robot, it included a number of extra tools. A drill extended from under the suit’s wrist and chewed through the inner wall. It only took a second to penetrate. Once through, the drill expanded to make a seal, and sensors checked the other side. A red indicator told him the other side was in vacuum, too.
“I’m cutting through the inner wall,” Jim said. “No sign of further booby traps.”
“Leave a repeater,” Hargrave instructed. Jim nodded; that was a good idea. He pulled one of the hockey puck-shaped radio repeaters from the suit’s equipment belt and slapped it on a wall, where the magnets latched on. The repeater went active immediately. “Good signal,” Hargrave said. “Be careful, son.”
“Will do,” Jim agreed. He selected the medium laser built onto his suit’s left arm, dialed the power down, and went to work on the wall. Firing in half-second pulses, he cut a dotted line pattern in the wall from floor to ceiling, across, and back down. He paused once to replace the magazine on the chemical laser and shook his head—he only had two more! This wasn’t supposed to be an assault operation. After all, he owned the place!
Finished with the cuts, Jim magnetically clamped himself to the deck, leaned backward, and swung the CASPer’s arms with full force. The impact rebounded through his suit with a crunch, and the wall gave some. He hit it again and again. On the fourth hit, a large section of wall failed. He released one foot and kicked, sole first. The entire section of wall crumpled in and down. Jim released the magnets, and with a puff of his maneuvering jets, he was through.
“I’m in,” he relayed. Now to find a connected computer link.
Jim had been in more than a few fights since he’d taken over Cartwright’s Cavaliers, but soloing wasn’t one of his specialties. The reality was he just didn’t have the experience. One thing he didn’t lack, though, was courage. He knew someone, or something, was in the station, and they were willing to use deadly force. But staying outside and letting them muster a deadlier response put his people at risk. That wasn’t something a commander tolerated.
“Jim,” Hargrave called before he’d gone far. The signal sounded weaker.
“Go ahead.”
“Stodden and Feldman confirm the next closest lock is rigged also.”
“Understood. Do not attempt any more entries. I’m going to try and see if the facility central computer is still connected. If I don’t restore contact in…” he checked his system, “one hour, inform Bucephalus to breach the main bay and enter in company strength.”
“Be damned sure you’re nowhere near there in fifty-five minutes,” Hargrave said, his voice sounding like steel.
“Oh, I won’t be. Be sure Captain Su knows I want this station intact? Try not to punch a hole end to end.”
“I’ll pass it along.” Jim grinned and moved further into the station.
Within a couple minutes, he began to conclude the maps provided by the Tek Consortium were less than accurate. None of the side passages went where they should, and there were walls where none should have been. “How old are these schematics?” he wondered to himself. Splunk’s only response was a light snore.
Jim continued to move through the station. He consulted the map but no longer relied on it. Instead he used his CASPer’s auto-mapper and began to build his own. He’d been in the station for 30 minutes when he started to see a pattern.
“I think they’ve mirrored the deck plans,” Jim said inside the cockpit. He clamped himself to the deck and played with the provided map for a while. Yes, that seemed to be it; the plans he’d been given were mirror images. There were still a few changes; he’d expected as much from a 20,000-year-old space station, but now it lined up, mostly. He used his pinplants to generate a new map and uploaded it into his suit’s system.
“So,” he mumbled, “if I’m right, there should be a T intersection right up here with a series of pressure doors.” He skipped along in the super-low gravity for a minute and came to a T intersection. One branch sported a huge open pressure door. “Bingo.”
“Bingo,
“A lot of help you’ve been,” he chided her, then smiled. She more than pulled her share of the load, but exploring dusty old relics of the Great Galactic War wasn’t her forte. She preferred taking them apart.
Jim moved through the pressure door, and, before the next barrier, he found a manual control. Also, the indicator showed pressure beyond. Nodding to himself, he opened the control panel, and again, found it inoperable. He was beginning to think this station was going to cost him a lot of money to fix. He also hoped he got to “thank” whoever had torn everything up.
Jim looked at the simple instructions and did as they described. The first lever closed the door he’d passed through. He checked his rear monitor to verify it was indeed closing. The next lever tripped the pressure spill valve. Immediately the suit’s instruments told him pressure was climbing. So far, so good. A simple tube with a float in it indicated when the chamber had sufficient pressure to have normalized with the other side. The last lever was the opposite door release, and he pulled it. The inner door began to rise.
Not sure what to expect, Jim armed his laser again, this time at full power, and locked the magnets in his feet to the deck. If trouble was waiting, he intended to dish it up in kind. Hearing the weapons come online, Splunk became more alert and moved into the torso area of the suit. It took an agonizingly long time for the hatch to open, only to reveal nothing except open corridor.
“This is Jim. We’re into the pressurized section of the station,” Jim broadcast. He had no way of knowing if they could hear him or not. Big steel structures sometimes did funny things to radio signals. He kept broadcasting on the off chance they could hear him.
Jim released the magnets and gently hopped forward. He was getting used to the microgravity, and only needed to use his suit’s thrusters occasionally. His suit’s status showed he had just over eight hours of life support left and plenty of jump juice, which the maneuvering thrusters used as well.
He reached the end of a corridor lined with open doors. Each room he’d passed was either empty or contained the remains of machinery. It was pretty obvious the station had been gone over pretty thoroughly over the eons. Of course, he hadn’t bought it for salvage; he had other plans. At the end of the corridor was another pressure door an
d a terminal…but this terminal was powered.
Jim released the little workbot again, and this time backed down the hallway about 20 feet. He’d rather lose the robot than get blown to shit. The panel came free, and he observed through the machine’s eyes as it examined the internal workings. It was connected to a network cable. Score, he thought, and he ordered the robot to connect a wireless interface. Within seconds, he was finally into the station’s computer. About damned time.
While Jim wasn’t a natural born merc—what fat kid was?—he excelled at technology and computers. He’d gotten his first pinplant at sixteen by traveling to the Houston Startown and forging his mother’s permission (his father was already gone). It cost him nearly every credit he’d manage to hoard away, but it opened an entire new world to the bookish young Jim Cartwright III. With unlimited access to the Aethernet, Earth’s far less capable version of the Galactic Union’s GalNet, he’d taken the reins of his own education and went far beyond what the schools had to offer.
Jim attacked the interface and, in an instant, was through the pathetically laughable firewall. He’d seen a dozen like it in Union computer systems. Mostly old ones. Nobody had updated this system in all those centuries? He found the central system and began to pillage. It was just as simple as he’d seen from the firewall and other protective systems. The first thing he did was download the current station map, which was updated with the most recent additions and annotated by the most recent previous owner.
Using the new map, Jim set course for the main control center, which, happily, wasn’t far from the main hangar deck. The map file contained a lot of data. Jim set one of the processors in his pinplants working on organizing it into a less “alien” format. Then, to save time, he used part of his CASPer’s Tri-V display to put up icons and control functions of the station computer, which were in the weird hybrid polygon system most older alien computers used.
Splunk gave a curious hoot, and he glanced down to see her just below his head, intently watching the moving symbols. He knew she understood programming, though not to what degree. For a being from a backwater world largely bereft of any visible technology and living in caves, she possessed some pretty amazing skills.
“Do you understand this?” he asked her.
“Splunk understand,
Jim pondered his little friend as he worked through the operating system and “space walked” down the station halls. Fifty minutes had elapsed since he’d gained entry. He only had ten minutes left before Captain Su started punching holes in his new station.
“Control center is just ahead,” he said a minute later. Then Splunk gave an alarming chirp. He’d only heard her do it a couple times, and it was never a good thing. “What is it?”
“Look this, Jim,
He examined the system’s layouts through its graphical representations. Programming in Union computers was a little like a collectible card game, where each card was a module in a program. The program indicator Splunk had pointed at was a thick set of program cards. In fact, it was larger than every other module in the station’s computer!
Jim pulled it to the forefront with his mind and clicked on it. It flashed green and nothing happened. In the Union, green was a color used as a warning, unlike Earth, where it was a “proceed” or “good” color. Another click, same result. He sent the access codes he’d gotten for the station; still nothing.
Jim accessed his pinplant stores of code-breaking software. “Wanna play it that way?” he said with a grin, “Fine, we’ll play it that way.” He set to work on it.
“Jim, we go,
“In a minute,” he said as he used all the modules at his disposal to quickly build a custom code breaker.
“No, we go now,
“Splunk, what’s gotten into you? I’ve almost got this.” He added the last component to the tool set and unleashed it on the program. The system he was assaulting was elegantly designed, but Jim was already inside the main system’s firewalls. What he turned loose on it was like firing a rocket launcher at a bathroom door. It crumbled, instantly. Jim moved his mind into the system…and had half a second to realize the defenses had fallen a little too easily as the trap sprang.
Waves of razors lashed at his consciousness like a thousand chainsaws, threatening to shatter his personality into pieces. He’d experienced the so called “Black Ice” counter-security systems on Earth’s Aethernet, and even a few alien-made ones. They could be dangerous, but he’d learned early on how to take the right precautions. You never, never, never went directly into a system without covering your own core system.
A program of nearly infinite power plowed over his net presence and invaded his own pinplants like a tidal wave. His reality went dark, and he felt simultaneously like he was drowning and being crushed by a sheet of steel. He had a fleeting second to realize he’d fucked up. I’m dead! he thought in an intractable moment between life and death. The attacking program took the full measure of what was Jim Cartwright and went for his neural cortex with a flaming sword of attack programming.
AKEE!
The voice was a thunderclap, shaking the invading program and bringing the attack to a shuddering stop. Jim was too shocked to completely understand; he only sensed the inconceivable force as it swept through his brain and scoured the alien black ice away like it had never been there. This presence was immensely more powerful and just as alien, yet comforting at the same time.
For the briefest instant, Jim had complete control of the program he’d originally tried to enter. Not the black ice defense, which was so cunningly hidden under a simple subroutine, but what it was guarding. Exabytes. No, zettabytes. No, yottabytes of data! As the invader was flung back, and his savior pulled Jim’s consciousness home into himself, he reached out and grasped what he could. He was a drowning man being pulled into the lifeboat while trying to grab a treasure chest on the way out.
He felt frustration and anger from his savior, but he held on, and the force pulling him back increased in both force and urgency. Jim could feel his physical body wracked with pain and crying out, yet he put all his will into holding on and helping the friendly entity pull him back. For an inestimable period, he hovered there between his own mind and the abyss. Then, he was back.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he said, shaking like a leaf in the wind. Splunk was behind him, gasping. He was afraid he’d smashed her against the back of the cockpit in his wild spasms. “Are you okay?”
“I okay,
Looking from the status board to all the program icons still floating in the mind’s eye of his pinplants, he saw the view outside his CASPer. The blast door to the station control
room was already half open, sliding into the roof. It was dark inside. With a couple finger twitches in his suit gloves, he brought up the CASPer’s external lights.
They didn’t penetrate as far as he’d thought they would. The control center appeared to be filled with massive, dark machinery which was in motion. What the hell? he thought. Then the collection of machinery turned and resolved into a single shape. A shape from nightmares.
“Oh…fucking hell!” he moaned.
“Jim, run,
“What is it?” Jim asked and fired again, with the same effect.
“Adversary, run,
He turned and fired his jumpjets just as a beam of scintillating energy passed through the space he’d occupied a fraction of a second earlier. His instruments hiccupped, and alarms sounded. Static crackled off the suit’s control panel, and he lost control of his trajectory, rebounding first off the floor, then the ceiling as another energy beam burned past him.
“Is that a god-damned particle beam?” he screamed as he fought the suit. “A portable particle accelerator?” The haptic feedbacks weren’t working properly, so he took control with his pinplants. He’d heard the Golden Horde did it this way but had always liked the direct feel of the suits over the less physical sensation of using his pinplants. He wanted combat in a suit to feel like real life, not a freaking video game. There were no extra lives or respawn in real life. “Splunk, help; haptics are down.” He could feel her, unmoving, behind his head. “Splunk!” She jerked, then raced into motion.
