The Proteus Bridge

by M. D. Cooper

  “I don’t like slaves, boss,” Karcher said.

  Ngoba glanced at the bodyguard. “Me neither, my friend. Here’s how I see things. I’m more worried about the crew than any researchers, but I don’t want to take chances. The fact that no one was here to meet us could mean nothing, or it could mean dereliction, so I’m thinking we just find our way to their command section and take control the ship. I’d be surprised if they fight us at all.”

  Karcher grimaced. “You promised me a fight, boss.”

  Ngoba slapped him on the shoulder and winked at Fugia. “We’ll see what we can do for you. I don’t want to cause Fugia any undue stress now. She hasn’t really seen us at work yet. For all she knows, we might be liars.”

  Fugia saw her face reflected in Karcher’s silver aviator’s glasses as he turned to look at her.

  “We’re not liars,” he said dryly.

  “Deeds over words,” Ngoba said. He pulled his rifle off his shoulder and walked across the cargo bay, pausing to check the transport sled. Finding it operational, he nodded to Karcher and then led the way through the access door on the far side.

  Entering the corridor into the ship, they found a mostly orderly collection of crew quarters. A lift led to the command section, or the labs in the opposite direction.

  “Up we go,” Ngoba said.

  On the next level, the corridor opened into several larger chambers, including a galley with coffee-stained tables and a game room. A dartboard hung on one wall.

  Ngoba walked more slowly now. While he physically scanned each new space they approached, Fugia followed the schematic in her visor. The world around her was a wire model, with beads of glittering information flowing along the lines. She adjusted her maps as they passed, verifying the various systems and looking for anything that seemed out of the ordinary.

  So far, everything was as she had expected. Soon they would be on the command deck, where the HVAC check systems told her they would find the five crewmembers. While it was strange that none of them had been in their quarters, they might have gathered in the command section when the proximity alert from the Hopsotch Devil came in.

  …But if they cared enough to gather in the command deck, why didn’t anyone meet us down in the cargo bay?

  Fugia focused on the corridor in front of her. In another ten meters, they would be making a right turn into the command deck airlock, which should be open based on its sensors.

  “Careful, Ngoba,” she said in a low voice. “We’re almost there.”

  “I’m always careful,” he said, continuing forward. “Sometimes I’m careful in dangerous situations, so it just looks reckless. Other times I’m careful in a hurry. I even have careful dreams when I sleep.”

  “You should do stand-up, boss,” Karcher said.

  “I should,” Ngoba agreed.

  “I meant no, you shouldn’t,” the bodyguard added.

  “That hurts, my friend.”

  They continued like that until Ngoba reached the corner. He waited in silence, listening, then glanced back at Karcher and Fugia and nodded. He slid around the corner. Fugia followed.

  Her visor gave her the five heat signatures inside the command deck, sitting at stations throughout the rectangular room. The command deck had more data layers than any other place in the ship aside from the engine section, and she sorted through systems as she walked, building the story of how the ship had been designed, updated and patched, or in other areas, left vulnerable.

  Walking slowly down the short corridor, which had the weapons locker she had seen before and the oval hatch to an escape pod, Fugia caught sight of a workstation through the open airlock, and someone in a red shipsuit sitting at its console.

  Everything was strangely still. They should have heard voices or the sounds of movement.

  She waited as Ngoba paused, rifle at his shoulder, then followed him into the command deck.

  The five crewmembers were there, each leaning awkwardly in their seats. Ngoba stood just inside the door, looking down his rifle’s sights at each person, until he relaxed slightly and glanced back at Fugia.

  She gave him a slight shrug.

  she told them over the Link.

  Ngoba ordered Karcher. Then he approached the nearest crewmember, who appeared to be the captain, and shoved his shoulder with his rifle muzzle.

  The grey-haired man slumped forward in his seat, forehead against his console.

  As Ngoba went to the next crewmember at the communications console, Fugia noticed a new signal in the room. It had a regular wave form and was localized almost to each workstation.

  “Stop!” she shouted.

  Ngoba froze with his arm extended, as he was about to touch the sleeping woman.

  “Local neural bomb,” Fugia said. “Don’t get any closer or you’ll go out, too.”

  “Where?” Karcher said.

  “At the workstations. They don’t appear to have been harmed, but somebody knocked them out.”

  “I thought you said there were service logs?” Ngoba asked, pulling back toward the door. “When was the last update?”

  “An hour ago,” she said.

  She ran back through the maintenance logs, frowning to herself. It wasn’t until she had gone back five days, to when a crewmember repeated the same complaint, that a pattern jumped out at her.

  “They’re faked,” she realized. “I should have caught it.”

  Karcher ran a quick functions check on his rifle and then counted the grenades slung across his chest. “Can you tell us who did it?” he asked.

  Angry with herself for missing the counterfeit logs, Fugia measured her breath and ran back through the ship’s schematic she had built, rechecking everything. If she had been fooled, there was a mistake somewhere, but there also had to be a trap.

  Did whoever fake the logs want us to come to the command deck first?

  As soon as she asked herself the question, the airlock slid closed, and the command deck vibrated with the heavy locking sequence.

  Karcher glanced at Ngoba. “Can I blow it up?” he asked.

  Shaking his head wearily, Ngoba unclipped his helmet. “Just once, I’d like to board a ship and not have to blow it up. You do what you need to, man.”

  All business, Karcher only nodded. He nudged Fugia. “You better put your helmet on,” he said. “It might get smoky.”

  SLEEPING BEAUTIES

  STELLAR DATE: 04.15.2979 (Adjusted Years)

  LOCATION: HMS Harmon’s Place

  REGION: Hellas Asteroids, Jovian Combine, InnerSol

  What Fugia often forgot about space was how bright it could be. It was also a chaos of uninhibited signal noise. While playing with the polarization on her faceshield, she looked through both her visor and her EV helmet, taking almost a minute to adjust her filters so that the thousands of bits of information available to her settled into a usable overlay.

  The outside hull of the Harmon’s Place was covered in support material: junction boxes, conduit, cooling coils, antennae, sensors, all defined by her visor as she looked at them.

  Its scan paused ten meters ahead of her, the visor kept asking if she wanted to hack the control system on Ngoba’s EV suit, which hadn’t been updated since its manufacture date. She didn’t figure now was a good time to bring up his security status. Besides, she had to worry about her magboots locking correctly with every step she took.

  She wasn’t afraid of EV; it just wasn’t something she did very often. She was aware of space and vacuum, just as ancient people had been aware of Earth’s sky. Even inside airplanes, they probably hadn’t worried about altitude, cloud masses, temperature, or oxygen levels; they had pilots to worry about those things. Which was fine, until a person had to jump out of a plane.

  Release and lock. Release and lock. Fugia stepped over a knee-high strip of conduit and continued to follow Ngoba, who was headed for the aft airlock just above the engine secti
on.

  She was still irritated with him and Karcher for making the unilateral decision to blow a hole in the side of the ship, rather than let her override the airlock, but at this point, she saw the value in taking action that the enemy might not expect.

  Since leaving the command deck through Karcher’s fine hole, Fugia had been studying everything she could monitor in and around the Harmon’s Place. Now that she knew the first story the ship had told her about itself was false—or at least false in specific areas—she approached the information from new angles. She verified crew manifests and flight plans against maintenance logs. She checked the ship’s overall mass against its engine output and velocity graphs. While trying not to fly off the ship’s treacherous hull, she ran a fine-tooth comb over every bit of data the Harmon’s Place generated, and looked for all the places the information didn’t add up.

  Her first realization had been that the sensors were lying to her. Interior water usage showed her the activity of another toilet in the lab section of the ship, and it had been used while they were in the command deck.

  She could have stopped then, but the chase was on. If there was one person, why not two? Further verification proved there was only one human, but she picked up on additional movement.

  “Hey,” she said, catching the attention of Karcher and Ngoba. “I think there’s a good chance we’ll be facing drone fighters when we get back inside.”

  “What model?” Ngoba asked.

  “What load out?” Karcher added.

  Fugia bit her lip, fuming. “ ‘Gosh, thanks, Fugia. That’s a useful heads-up. We appreciate you doing three things at once while we walk across the surface of a spaceship’.”

  “I wasn’t aware you were doing three things at once,” Ngoba said. “You look like the only thing you’re doing is stumbling and cursing—I guess that’s two things.”

  “Well, I am,” she grumbled. “I show an additional human and what I think are drones.”

  “Puppetmaster and puppets?” Karcher asked.

  “I’m almost there,” Ngoba said. “Can you see if the airlock is clear?”

  “The interior sensors are offline,” she said. “I’ll try something else.”

  “I have more grenades,” Karcher said. “And you’ve got those sticky bombs you made. We should use one of those.”

  “They’re EMP grenades,” Fugia said. “They won’t open the airlock.”

  Karcher seemed to consider that. “You could use the EMP, then I could use the high explosive. That way we all get a turn.”

  After checking the airlock self-test cycles, which would return a fault if anyone was within the safety lockout zone for the doors, Fugia felt fairly certain the airlock was clear. She told Ngoba so.

  “Our friends are going to know when we come back inside,” he said.

  “They’re not our friends,” Fugia said.

  “That’s why you don’t have many friends,” he told her.

  “I have friends,” she shot back.

  “She sounds defensive, boss.”

  “We’re in a high-stress situation,” Ngoba said calmly. “It’s to be expected.”

  “I’m not the one who doesn’t know how to deal with stress,” Fugia said. She had another five meters to go until she’d be standing beside Ngoba at the airlock.

  “Now what makes you say that?” he asked.

  “I remember plenty of times when I saved your ass, Ngoba Starl. I’m the cool-headed one, and you’re the passionate heart.”

  “Did you hear that?” he asked Karcher. “She called me a passionate heart.”

  “I don’t think the other syndicates would call you a passionate heart, boss.”

  “I’m passionate about my work. I love people. I have a vision for the future of Cruithne. Does that make me a passionate heart? If that’s the badge, I’ll wear it with pride.”

  Fugia groaned in frustration. “Will you open the door already?”

  “Is it safe?”

  “It’s as safe as it’s ever been.”

  “If a drone blows my head off, I blame Fugia,” Ngoba said.

  “That’s not a nice thing to say, boss,” Karcher admonished him.

  Ngoba faced the airlock and activated its control system. On her wire diagram, Fugia watched electrical pulses flow through the door as one side of her vision tracked the code running in the lock.

  So far, so good.

  The exterior door slid open, and something struck Ngoba in the center of his chest, knocking him backward. His magboots held to the hull, and he bent at the knees, his helmet smacking into a junction box.

  “Ngoba!” Fugia shouted.

  Out of the open airlock floated an ovoid attack drone. There were four cannons mounted along its center line, which swiveled independently as small thrusters pushed the drone in jerky motions.

  “Get down!” Karcher yelled.

  Fugia stared at the attacker. She had no place to go. Her visor immediately scanned the drone, but it blocked her attempts with active shielding. It was a blank spot in her field of view, with the ghost of its actual appearance moving behind it.

  Several of Karcher’s projectile rounds ricocheted off the body of the drone as the thing bounced sideways, then shot upward and arced overhead, firing on Karcher.

  Fugia barely had time to watch Karcher move sideways, then forward, making the same evasive maneuvers as the drone. He fired as he moved, transitioning with cool control.

  Awkward in her clunky magboots, Fugia navigated to Ngoba as quickly as she could. His bio-monitor told her that he was alive… The sensors were malfunctioning from the strike, though, so she had no indicators of neural activity or potential internal trauma. His suit was scorched on the front but didn’t appear to be leaking atmosphere.

  He was floating limp when she reached him, and she knelt next to his still form, shaking his arm. “Ngoba!” she said. “Can you hear me?”

  His eyes fluttered, and he turned his helmet slightly to look at her. His wide mouth broke into a smile.

  “Fugia,” he said, sounding dazed. “You’re in space.”

  She nearly collapsed with relief. “Can you move?” she asked. “Tell me if you feel pain anywhere.”

  “I feel like an elephant sat on my chest.”

  “Let’s get you upright. Karcher’s holding off the drone, but we need to move.”

  He groaned and shook his head. “Help me up,” he said. Fugia pulled his arm around her shoulders and got him upright, and he immediately pointed at the open airlock. “We need to get inside while we can.”

  “What about Karcher?” Fugia asked.

  “He’s doing what he does best.”

  “I think I’ve got another option,” she said.

  Reaching inside her satchel, she grabbed her EMP grenade and gripped it in her gloved hand. She held it up for Ngoba to see.

  “If we attach this to one of those boxes over there, and you and Karcher can get the thing over the top of it, I can set off the grenade remotely.”

  “I like that plan,” Ngoba said. “I knew we brought you along for a reason. Do it.”

  “Is it safe to leave you?”

  “I’m locked to the hull. Go.”

  Karcher had drawn the drone about twenty meters away. Watching it bob and weave as an icon on her visor, Fugia speed-walked in the opposite direction, crawling over another giant collection of conduit and nearly catching herself the blades of a low cooling fan she hadn’t seen from the other side.

  She planted the EMP and sent the location to Karcher’s HUD. “Get it over here!” she shouted.

  “I heard the conversation,” the guard told her calmly. “You get away from there.”

  He didn’t have to tell her again. She ran awkwardly back to the airlock, click-release, click-release, where Ngoba was now standing inside the exterior doors.

  As they watched, Karcher sprinted back across the hull, firing over his shoulder. The drone seemed to anticipate that he was headed for the airlock and fired
ahead of him. Karcher jerked to the side before he ran into the drone’s line of fire.

  It wasn’t until he had led the drone one direction and then jerked the opposite way that Fugia realized what he was doing. In another two moves, he would have the drone within range of the EMP without having led it directly there.

  However, before he made his last misdirection, the drone stopped in place, matching spin with the ship, and hung there. Its cannons moved slowly, obviously tracking Karcher.

  “It stopped,” Fugia shouted. “Did you catch that?”

  “What?” Karcher said. He looked back. “Dammit. I think it spotted the EMP.”

  “Let’s see if it spots this,” Ngoba said. He moved around Fugia with a grenade in his right hand. He activated its detonator and flung it toward the drone.

  The grenade didn’t make it ten meters before the drone destroyed it in flight. Karcher took the opportunity to throw two more, which the drone also shot down. Ngoba threw another one.

  With the drone occupied, Fugia pulled her last EMP grenade from her satchel. She set the proximity fuse. When Ngoba threw his third grenade, she flung the EMP after it.

  She watched, holding her breath, as Ngoba’s HE grenade exploded in mid-flight, providing a debris field for the EMP to sail through. The drone’s cannon swiveled as another of Karcher’s grenades exploded beside it. The drone shot downward, evading flak, just as the EMP popped.

  The drone sparked in Fugia’s visor. It’s active defense mechanism failed, showing her its manufacture type and a military operating system with origins on Terra. She sent the cracking attack a few seconds later, and set the drone to self-destruct.

  “I got it!” Karcher yelled as the egg-shaped death machine blew itself apart.

  “Excellent work,” Fugia said.

  Once they were inside the engine section of Harmon’s Place, Fugia spent five minutes inspecting Ngoba’s EV suit. It had dissipated most of the pulse blast from the drone, but still transferred enough kinetic energy to cause deep bruising across his chest. He winced as she pressed his ribs through the suit.

  “They’re probably broken,” she said. “We need to get you in an autodoc.”