by Terry Mixon
Brad led the charge into the shuttle and found two more men on the floor of the main compartment. They weren’t moving, so he ran for the cockpit. That compartment held the first man they’d seen in a suit. He had his helmet on and was seated at the controls.
“Hands up,” Brad shouted, aiming his pistol at the back of the man’s helmet.
The man didn’t move. In fact, his arms hung limply at his sides.
Brad turned the pilot and looked into his helmet. All he saw were dead eyes floating in a haze of yellow. The man had sealed the poison in with him and his suit had failed to scrub it.
“Shuttle’s clear,” Brad said over the general channel. “Let’s go!”
He strapped into the copilot’s seat and started checking the readouts. Some of the systems were showing yellow, probably from exposure to the acidic air, but they’d just have to hope the shuttle held together.
Pitt raced in and threw herself into the pilot’s chair. “Shuttle sealed. Opening main airlock doors.”
The massive doors ahead of them opened, revealing a chamber large enough for the shuttle. Once they were inside, the inner doors would close and the outer ones would open.
“Here we go,” Pitt said as she hit the engine controls.
Nothing happened.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Pitt howled as she started running her eyes across the controls. “Seriously?”
Brad checked his timer. “We only have seven minutes until this base goes boom. What’s wrong?”
“The engines are locked out. There has to be an override here somewhere.”
She searched franticly, cursing all the while. Then she unstrapped and levered herself out of her seat, bending over the dead man in the vacuum suit.
“There’s a manual key,” Pitt said. “He has to have it on him.”
Moments later, she triumphantly held up a key on a bright red ribbon. “Got it!”
She threw herself into her couch, inserted the key into a slot he hadn’t noticed, and twisted it. Several lights on the console changed from yellow to green.
Pitt manipulated the controls. “Engines coming up. Everyone strap in. This could get rough.”
“I have the controls,” Brad said. “Strap yourself in.”
He wasn’t the best pilot in the system, but he could move a small craft around when it suited him. He slowly brought the shuttle into the lock and hovered as Pitt finished strapping back in and resumed control of the shuttle.
“Cycling the lock,” she said.
He couldn’t see the hatch behind them close, but he saw the one in front of them start to open. Once again, the yellow atmosphere of Venus poured in. Then the shuttle was moving out over the plateau and up into the deadly sky.
“Can we get coms with Oath or any of our other ships?” he asked.
“Probably not,” she said. “I can’t imagine how that wrist-comp punched a signal all the way through. A regular shuttle com can’t.”
“Maybe this one isn’t normal. The pirates have been working down here for a while. It would be useful to be able to talk with their friends.”
He activated the communications systems and switched to the frequencies his ships used. “Oath of Vengeance or any Vikings ship, this is Commodore Madrid. We’re on our way up in an enemy shuttle. Please respond.”
Nothing but static met his call.
“No joy,” he said with a grumble. “We’ll just have to hope the shuttle makes it all the way up.”
She ran her eyes across the controls. “Things seem to be in decent shape, so I think we’ll make it. They’ve obviously been using this shuttle to get up and down for a while. I’m more worried about what kind of self-destruct charge they’re using. The Venusian atmosphere is thick and will transmit shock really, really well.”
He hadn’t considered that. If the charges were standard explosives, they’d be clear by the time they went off. If they were nuclear, that would be chancier. Under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t have been as concerned, but a small tear in the hull would flood the compartment with poison gas.
Brad opened the private channel to Saburo. “You might want to look for emergency oxygen bottles. If we have a hull breach, you don’t want to be breathing that stuff.”
“Don’t teach your grandmother how to suck eggs. We’ve got enough to go around, and I was just about to bring some up for you two.”
“Touché,” Brad said with a grin. “Thanks.”
The door behind them slid open and Saburo handed him two emergency masks. They looked like old-style gas masks, with clear faceplates and straps to hold the masks securely in place. Short hoses ran to small cylinders made to clip to one’s belt.
“This won’t be good for long,” Saburo warned. “Looks like about twenty minutes. They’re designed to allow someone in a breach to get to somewhere with air. They won’t protect your exposed skin if we have a breach, either.”
“Then let’s hope we don’t have any problems like that,” Brad said. “I don’t want to have to sit here while Venus eats my skin off. Strap in tight and get the masks ready. Leave the hatch open and I’ll shout out when it’s time to get them on.”
The time left paradoxically seemed to rush ahead and simultaneously drag. When the timer was down to twenty seconds, Brad turned his head toward the open hatch.
“Masks on and hold on tight.” He got his mask in place and opened the oxygen feed.
Nothing seemed to happen when the timer reached zero, but he knew that it took some small amount of time for a blast wave to propagate. Since he had no way of calculating how long a blast wave took to travel through this atmosphere, he’d just have to wait and see what happened.
“The clouds are getting brighter,” Pitt said, her voice tight. “I doubt that comes from normal explosives, so we’d best brace for a nuclear shock wave.”
As soon as the words left her mouth, something seemed to smash into the shuttle. Not in the figurative sense, either. An alarm began screaming in the cockpit and the air began turning yellow in front of his eyes.
“Hull breach,” Pitt said coolly. “We’re losing atmospheric pressure and taking on that crap.”
Brad felt the skin on his exposed arms start to itch.
Thankfully, the sensation on his exposed flesh didn’t get much stronger. They’d risen high enough that the overall pressure was falling rapidly. Higher than the floating cities, in fact. In front of them, the sky was transitioning to the black of space. It seemed he wouldn’t be melting today.
Of course, that meant they had less than twenty minutes to get another source of air or they’d all die. As the atmosphere slowly bled away, taking the tainted atmosphere with it, he again tried signaling any of his ships. With the low pressure, he wasn’t sure if they heard him, and he couldn’t tell if he’d gotten a response. Sound was useless without air to transmit it.
Brad unstrapped and floated back to the open hatch. One glance told him his people had made it through without further injury.
He also saw the breach: a hole about the size of his hand in the ramp that allowed him to see the planet behind them. The blast had actually sent a piece of debris after them with enough force to penetrate the hull. He supposed they were lucky that it was something small. It could’ve been a boulder.
Saburo touched his faceplate to Brad’s, almost making him step back because the man was in his personal space so deeply. The Colonel’s voice, when he spoke, sounded odd in his ears, being transmitted by vibration through the masks.
“That was crazy. We heard it hit the shuttle and then something was bouncing around inside here like a bullet. It’s a bloody miracle that it didn’t hit anyone.”
“That might not end up being such good luck. We’re in space now. If someone doesn’t come find us in short order, we’re going to suffocate—assuming the vacuum doesn’t freeze us to death.”
Saburo grinned. “Even in shirtsleeves, freezing before we suffocate isn’t going to be a problem. Someone will come for us, jus
t you wait and see. Hell, this is the kind of thing we’ve been watching for. A shuttle racing away from the planet? We’ve got to look like smugglers for sure.”
Brad laughed. “I hope they don’t take our silence as a reason to open fire, then. Without air or a helmet, I can’t interface with the radio.”
“Go forward and keep watch,” Saburo said with a smile. “If I’m wrong, well, I guess you’ll get to brag about finally beating me at a bet in the afterlife.”
“You’re incorrigible.”
Brad made his way back to his couch in the cockpit and gave Pitt a thumbs-up. Then they waited.
Five minutes before the air supply ran out, he saw a shuttle racing in from in front of them. He started flashing his shuttle’s running lights to tell them who they were and that they only had a few minutes of air remaining.
The other shuttle immediately passed directly overhead toward the rear of his shuttle.
Brad gestured for Pitt to follow him out. Once in the main compartment, he opened the ramp and saw that the Vikings’ shuttle was suspended directly behind them. Its ramp lowered as he watched, and someone in a vacuum suit gestured for them to jump across.
All of them managed the jump without issue and the crewman closed the shuttle’s ramp as Brad’s air started getting foul. He’d run out of oxygen.
He controlled his breathing and waited with what patience he could as the crewman opened the valves and started flooding the compartment with breathable air. Once the crewman started undoing his helmet, Brad pulled off his mask and took a deep breath of sweet air.
They’d made it. Now they just had to hope they’d gotten enough information to follow the pirates to their new hideout.
Chapter Fifteen
As soon as they docked with Oath, Kirabo Terzić had them in his sickbay, checking them over while a worried Michelle hovered over his shoulder. The doctor gave his wife a repressive glance. “We don’t exactly have room for more people in here. Can’t this wait?”
“No,” Michelle said. “I’m Commander Hunt right now, not his wife. I need information to guide the company.”
The man looked at her for a moment and then nodded. “Stand over against the wall, then. My people need the center of the compartment to do their jobs.”
Brad turned to face Michelle as she moved and filled her in on what they’d found as quickly as he could. It didn’t take long to let her know that almost all the pirates had escaped before using a nuke to destroy their base.
And that Brad had lost four troopers in the fighting due to what he considered lack of foresight on his part. If he’d just have made sure they had the right gear and sealed their heavier weapons in something that could keep the Venusian atmosphere out, this might have turned out differently.
“Stop that,” Michelle scolded him. “Who was it that taught me that I can’t prepare for every single potential outcome or I’d never accomplish anything? You had no reason to suspect that they had heavy anti-air weapons on the surface.
“I’m sorry that we lost people and we’ll learn from that, but we need to focus on figuring out where the Cadre went so we can cause them an even worse day.”
Brad sighed as Terzić started spreading some lotion on the reddened skin of his arm. The burn he’d been feeling immediately started to fade. Thankfully, he hadn’t had his eyes or lungs exposed to the acid or vacuum.
“We found the Agent, too,” he said. “She was dead. We also found her wrist-comp in a Faraday cage. My guess is that they tortured her to open it and she used a code on the lock screen to send a call for help. They rushed it back to the cage and then finished her off as painfully as possible.
“Someone wasn’t satisfied with their efforts, though. Riddled them with bullets and left the corpses behind when they ran.”
Michelle grimaced. “I was afraid of something like that after the Cadre captured me. I blew up some of their ships, so needless to say, they were less than pleased with me.”
Brad well remembered that time with rage and agonized terror. First, he’d thought she’d died in the fight. Then he’d learned that the Terror had her and was holding her hostage until Brad found him. Torture had been a distinct possibility.
“Just one more reason we need to kill these bastards,” he said. “To keep them from doing this to anyone else. Did our ships pick up any unusual shuttle activity from the area where they had their base?”
Michelle shook her head. “No activity at all. They must’ve moved quite a distance away while staying at low altitude. Or they have another base on the surface.”
“They’re like cockroaches,” he muttered. “Turn on the lights and they scatter. Then you can never find them all.”
“Cockroaches with nukes,” his wife said with a grim scowl. “Even for them, that’s way out there. Even if it is Venus, that’s a planetary surface. A big raise in the stakes. Why? What’s changed?”
She shook her head. “I can’t help worrying that this means their plans are further advanced than we’d like, and we still don’t know what they intend. Were you able to use your codes to access the Agent’s wrist-comp?”
“I was a little busy with armageddon coming. Saburo, toss me the wrist-comp.”
The Colonel, who was being treated on the other side of the compartment, dug the wrist-comp out of his suit and tossed it to Brad.
It looked like a standard unit, but it couldn’t be. It had a transmitter capable of punching a signal to the aerostat cities above the base from the surface of Venus. That was impressive and something he’d love to have his people study for a bit. It might come in very useful at some point.
He used his own wrist-comp to attempt every code he had without success. The unit remained locked and unresponsive. He sighed. That was only to be expected, he supposed.
“No joy,” he told Michelle. “We’ll have to ship it back to the Agency. They can pry out its secrets and then give us any relevant data. I do have one concern, though. Something feels off.”
Michelle frowned. “I don’t follow.”
“Agent Mulroney was a prisoner before we even got orders to Venus. She wasn’t signaling us for help, but she used Agency codes in her transmission. Who exactly did she expect was going to come to save her?”
Michelle opened her mouth for a moment and then closed it again, obviously thinking before she answered.
“There’s another player,” she finally said. “Someone was already on Venus that she could call on. Someone from the Agency.”
“The possibility was mentioned,” he said. “We’re going to need to find them and ask a few pointed questions. Like why they didn’t contact us.”
Michelle shrugged. “It’s not as if anyone outside the company knows who you are. Like you said, Mulroney disappeared before we were ordered here. The remaining assets had no way to know, did they?”
“The Agency contacted us,” he said. “They also knew that Mulroney had been missing three days when they ordered us to Venus. They’ve had plenty of time to let the asset know and send them to meet us. Either they haven’t chosen to do so or the asset just hasn’t done it. We need to know which.
“As soon as the good doctor is done with me, I’ll send an update off to Earth and see what information I can shake loose. Hopefully, we’ll get the contact information for the remaining asset and they’ll know something useful.”
“If the Cadre doesn’t have them, too,” Michelle muttered darkly.
“Let’s hope not. We really do need a lead if we want to exterminate the bastards.”
He was still waiting for a response from Earth when a shuttle with Governor Ngu aboard rendezvoused with Oath. Brad could only imagine what the man was going to say. Someone had set off a nuke on the planet he was responsible for.
Odds were good the governor would blame Brad. First an assassination attempt, and now this. He’d have to be wondering what the next escalation would bring.
The large man extended his hand as soon as he boarded. “Commodore Madrid. I�
�m pleased to see you whole and hale. I understand you lost people on the surface, and I’m very sorry to hear that.”
Brad shook the man’s hand. “I appreciate that, Governor. I doubt a man as busy as yourself came all the way out here just to extend his condolences, however. If you’ll accompany me to my office, we can talk more privately.”
He led the man to his office and closed the hatch behind them. “Would you care for something to drink?”
Ngu shook his head and sat in one of the chairs. “I’ll have to decline. As you said, I have a lot of things on my plate today. Our business won’t take long, but it’s not something I’d trust to even an encrypted channel, and you deserve to hear this from me in person.
“Succinctly put, I’ve come to thank you for your work and declare your contract completed. I’m declaring you’ve met all the stipulations and adding in a hefty bonus for going well above and beyond in your efforts. Venus thanks you for your service.”
Brad felt his eyebrows rise as he sat. “I have to say that I don’t understand, Governor. We haven’t captured the people responsible for the hijackings. Even though we cost the pirates their base, we killed less than a dozen of them. They’re still here and they will keep attacking your people.”
“As much as it saddens me, I’m only the first among equals here, if you know what I mean,” Ngu said, spreading his hands wide. “A governor without real teeth. The Governing Council makes all the decisions here, and they have voted to mark your contract as completed over my objections.”
Leaning back in his seat, Brad considered the governor for a moment. “Curious. If they were going to be convinced to let us go without actually stopping the marauders, why did they vote to hire the Vikings to manage the customs duty in the first place?”
Ngu smiled slightly. “A well-thought-out question, Commodore. The vote to hire you was close, turning on a single vote. One that now seems eager to send you packing, even in the face of strong evidence that the hijackings will likely pick back up as soon as you’re gone.”
