by M. J. Konkel
“Are you crazy? We can’t fly a starship,” Enceladus exclaimed.
“I can,” I said.
“All by yourself?”
“That’s a corvette,” I said. “It can be flown by a single pilot. Although I can’t fly and man the guns at the same time.”
As we approached the chain link fence, I estimated it to be about seven meters high. Even with the suit on, I didn’t think we could jump that, and the fence was topped with a razor roll. Our suits would protect against cuts but not against getting tangled up. I scanned along the fence for any way we might get to the other side.
Downhill, across from us and in the middle of the gap, a trail stretched through a gate and out about a klick to the pad where the ship sat. A trio of guards stood at the gate, staring at the collapsed mine far behind us. But it was too far across open ground to the gate for us to attempt that. We could probably have taken out the guards from where we were at, but we wouldn’t even make it down to gate before back-up arrived for the Spits. Not to mention getting out to the ship.
“This way.” I turned left. A short distance up the hill, a boulder had rolled down into the fence. No doubt the boulder had also been dislodged by the explosions under the hill. It had not flattened the fence but had bent it over enough for our purpose.
I dashed past the boulder and up the ramp that the fence had become.
“Oh, you got to be kidding!” Drummer exclaimed.
I leaped over the razor roll. My arms and legs whirled, struggling to maintain my upright posture, as I sailed through the air. I hit the ground and lost my balance. I rolled forward and returned to my feet. Despite the complaint, Amerigo and Drummer did the same. Enceladus even somehow managed to remain on her feet after landing.
I glanced toward the distant guards at the gate. They appeared not to have noticed us. Perhaps all the dust gave us enough cover, or perhaps they were still too fixated on the collapsed mine.
I raced down the hill toward the starship and then ducked behind a large boulder at the foot of the hill. As the others caught up, I zoomed my vid screen to max and peeked out over the boulder toward the ship. I saw only one guard standing at the foot of the ramp that went up into the belly of the craft.
“Alright,” I said. “Only a single guard. We’re about two klicks away. We need to get closer. Really close so we can get aboard before those on the ship realize something is wrong outside and close the ramp and lock us out. Follow me, but make sure you’re only moving while the guard is looking elsewhere.”
I glanced at the guard who was marching in the other direction.
“Now!” I turned left and sprinted to a boulder twenty meters away. The heavy footsteps of the others behind me told me they followed.
We sprinted from boulder to boulder or to rubble pile until we were 800 hundred meters behind the craft and facing the rear thruster ports. We were as close as we were going to get using the rubble of the hill for cover.
“We got to get to that ship,” I insisted.
“What if someone is watching from the ship as we cross?” Enceladus asked.
“Then we’re fricked,” I replied. “If we don’t get aboard somehow, we’re fricked anyway. Let’s get moving before it takes off, or those back there figure out we were not in the scout with Marla.”
“They’re probably too busy with their video games to be watching for us,” Drummer said. He may have been closer to the mark than he knew. But for whatever reason, neither those inside nor the guard did anything to indicate what had happened on the other side of the hill was of any concern to them.
We dashed across the open sandy basin. The ship was between us and the gate at the fence, so we didn’t have to worry anymore about those guards spotting us. The guard outside the ship was on the other side of the ramp and out of sight. We had covered about half the distance to the ship when I spied the guard coming around the ramp.
“Drop!” I fell flat to the sand. I heard the thuds of the others hitting the sand as well. Luckily, where we dropped there was a small dune just high enough to hide behind.
After a few seconds I peeked over the dune, and the guard stared in our direction.
“Shit!” I said.
“Did he spot us?” Enceladus asked.
“Maybe,” I replied. It probably depended on whether he had his vid screen zoomed out or not.
“I’ll take him out right now,” Drummer said.
“No, wait,” I said. “Give it a few seconds.”
I peeked again. The guard ambled under the craft and, as I continued to peek, returned to the front of the ramp.
“It’s clear again. Let’s go,” I said.
We all sprang to our feet and dashed toward the backside of the ramp. In our suits we quickly got up to speed and crossed in no time.
As we approached the ramp, the guard reappeared. He lowered his rifle, but too late.
Flechettes from both Drummer’s and Amerigo’s rifles drilled through his mid-section. The guard flew backward onto his back. We hoped whoever was inside the ship had not been monitoring the guard too closely.
I raced up to the fallen guard and flipped off his helmet, intending to exchange mine with it. However, the guard was a woman. I stared down at her for an instant.
“Here.” I handed the helmet to Enceladus. “You’ll have to do this.”
“Wha.. me?” Enceladus stuttered.
“We, uh, have a little problem,” Drummer said. “The hatch is closed at the top of the ramp.”
“What the hell are we going to do now?” Amerigo yelled.
“Let’s hope that had been closed before, and those inside have not seen us. You’re going to have to convince them to open it,” I said to Enceladus.
“Shit!” Enceladus exclaimed. “I can’t do this.”
“There’s no choice,” I said. “It’s either you, or we try to make a run back to those hills.”
“I knew I should have taken acting in those school plays more seriously.” She slipped the helmet over her head. The faceplate was up.
“Don’t say anything to them,” I said. “We don’t know what this guard sounded like. Just make weird crackling noises. Then go out to there where they can see you from the front ports and point to your helmet to make them think your com is not working.”
“Like back at Gumdrop Hill,” Enceladus said.
“Yeah, just like at Gumdrop,” I confirmed.
Enceladus waited while the rest of us hid underneath, along with the body of the guard. I saw tiny cameras eyes everywhere on the surface of the ship, but there was a blind spot under the bottom thrusters. I just hoped nobody aboard had seen us during all of our action. And I really hoped the thrusters were not activated while we were under them.
Then Enceladus took the stage.
I had thought the Spits were so relaxed about security. At one point I had believed they were stupid about things like that. But then I concluded they weren’t stupid. Their forces were just spread too thin because they didn’t have that many soldiers. Yeah, 90,000 may sound like a lot, but not when spread over an entire world. And the Bahramians had thinned those numbers down a little. It was those destroyers in orbit that made it even possible for the Spits to consider taking over the world with so few troops. That and that most worlds didn’t have anyone that knew how to fight back.
The Spits were also just so frickin’ arrogant they couldn’t believe anyone else would have the audacity to raid one of their ships. This world was going to change some of their thinking in that regard. A lot of their thinking.
After a minute we heard the creaking of the hatch opening.
“Well, don’t just stand there,” a man yelled. “Get the heck in here.”
As Enceladus ambled toward the ramp, we heard the man grumbling to himself at the top of the ramp.
“Hurry up,” the man griped. “I don’t have all day.”
“Nope, if fact, you’re out of time,” I said as I sprang out from behind the ramp.
T
he man’s eyes opened wide as I fired a flechette through his chest.
Drummer and Amerigo raced past me and up the ramp. Enceladus and I followed.
“Don’t shoot at anyone else unless you have to,” I warned. “Especially up on the bridge. Bust through control panels up there, and we might have to flap our arms to get this ship off the ground.”
“Which way?” Drummer asked.
“To the front of the ship,” I replied. “We need to take control of the bridge.”
Drummer turned when he reached the short corridor toward the bridge. The hatch into the bridge already started to close. We raced at it and then banged up against it an instant after it closed. It had clicked shut and did not budge. They must have reacted as soon as they heard my rifle fire.
It was my fault. If I hadn’t been impatient and had let Enceladus reach the top of the ramp before I shot the Spit, she would have reached the bridge in time.
But now we were locked out.
Chapter 19
“Alright, plan B,” I announced.
“I didn’t know until now there was a plan A,” Enceladus said. “I thought we were just winging it.”
“That’s Plan C. Always Plan C. Plan B is we take the reactor room.” I spun around. “We need to be quick about this.”
I charged to the rear, and the others followed. The hatch remained open as we scrambled up to it. Apparently, the communication of our raid had not reached anyone in engineering. I stopped at the entrance and swept my rifle left and then right.
No one inside. That explained why nobody slammed the hatch on us. I flipped up my faceplate and removed my helmet. I started to remove my armor and warned the others to stay very close to the outer wall.
“Someone, close the hatch and jam it with a rifle,” I ordered. Unlike the hatch to the bridge, this one did not lock from the inside. “Everyone, stay back against the outer wall.”
Amerigo was closest to the hatch and followed my order.
“What are we doing?” Enceladus questioned.
“Taking the ship,” I replied. “Just trust me on this. Okay?”
“I’m with you.” Enceladus nodded.
I looked at Drummer and Amerigo. They both nodded. Drummer took a step toward me.
I shot my hand out at him. “Stay back! What you see in the center here is the ship’s fusion reactor,” I said as I moved over to a panel. “It’s a different design and produces a lot more power than the one on your truck. A lot more. Extremely powerful magnetic field, and, even though it is a contained field, enough of it leaks out to yank anything that is ferromagnetic, like your rifles, to it. Maybe parts of your suits too. If there are any steel parts in your body, it will rip those right out of you.”
And that could disrupt the plasma helixes in the fusion core. No, that wouldn’t blow up the ship. But it could throw the engines off-line which I absolutely did not want to happen. I also needed to hurry so those on the bridge didn’t do that for us.
I hopped over to one side of the room and pried off the cover to a panel. I gently pulled out a thick bundle of wires.
“Shit!” I swore. “Which one?”
“You sure you know what you’re doing? Enceladus asked.
“Ah, yes,” I said to myself. “This is the one.”
I separated one of the connections and then a second one. Then I went to a panel on the opposite side of the room and pulled out another couple of sockets with wires.
Then I pushed down a com button to the bridge.
“Hello up there,” I said. “This is your flight attendant. The temperature outside is a balmy 37 degrees with a light breeze from the south. Remember to keep your --”
“Who the heck is this?” Someone demanded from the bridge. I presumed the ship’s captain.
“If you care to check your ship’s status reports, you’ll see that the controls to the engines are now off-line to you. I left the monitoring lines alone so you can see my progress,” I said.
“How would a coot from this dust ball know anything about my ship?” the captain demanded.
“That’s on a need to know basis, and you have no frickin’ need to know,” I replied. “What you do need to know is that I have control of your engine. And the generator.” I moved over to a control panel and fiddled with the dials. “And right now the capacitors to the wormhole generator are being charged.”
“You can’t do this? How do you --”
“I can, and I am doing this,” I interjected.
“You can’t enter coordinates from there.”
“For our purposes, we don’t need to. It will take a couple of minutes to charge the capacitors. In the meantime, think about what happens to this ship when I try to open a wormhole in such a deep gravity well. You know, I bet it leaves a big enough crater, even the tantalum mine will go missing in action.”
I glanced at the others. I definitely saw fright in Enceladus’s eyes. I couldn’t tell for sure with the others, but I would have bet I had them freaked out too.
If I actually turned on the wormhole generator in such a deep gravity well, there would be a failure to establish the wormhole. Instead, the generator’ core would be crushed until its atoms collapsed into neutrons. And then those neutrons would collapse down to an infinitely small point, a singularity. But the singularity would be too light in mass to survive the quantum fluctuations of the space after the collapse. It would expand. It would blow apart with a force equivalent to an anti-matter bomb. All this would happen in a tiny fraction of a second.
“You’re crazy!” the Captain shouted.
“Uh-huh, a lot of people have told me that, and I think they might be onto something,” I replied.
“You’ll die too,” the captain needlessly pointed out.
Too bad he couldn’t see me roll my eyes. “Yep, Captain Obvious. I will. Remember, I’m crazy.”
“Maybe we can work something out.” I could hear the fear in his voice.
“There is only one way out for you. That is for all of you to leave the bridge and the ship,” I replied. “Before those reinforcements that you called from the base get here.”
“I don’t think you’re really crazy. I think you’re bluffing,” the captain stated.
“You haven’t met fighters like Bahramians on any of the other worlds you’ve invaded, I guess,” I asked. “We’re willing to die for our people. Are you? It looks like you have about … oh … two minutes left to decide. I believe the buttons I need to push are the green ones behind panels A12 and B12.” I cut the com.
“Are you serious?” Amerigo asked.
“Go watch out the window in the hatch,” I said to Enceladus. Then I turned to the others. “Look, I don’t want to die any more than any of you. But if they get their hands on us, they’ll execute us anyway. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. If we have to die, at least we can take out a bunch of them, one of their ships, and a mine that is their means to making a lot more of their ships. But don’t worry too much. I’m pretty sure the captain and crew will leave.”
“What makes you so certain?” Enceladus questioned from the window.
“The captain thinks he can outsmart me,” I said.
“Are you sure he can’t?” Enceladus muttered.
As the two-minute mark approached, the captain’s voice came over a speaker. “Alright, you win. We’re leaving the bridge. Just don’t be foolish and push those buttons.”
“The hatch to the bridge is opening,” Enceladus confirmed. “And they’re leaving through the outer hatch. Three of them.”
“Is that it? Only three of them?” Drummer asked.
“Most of the crew were probably not aboard,” I said.
I moved over next to Enceladus and peeked over her shoulder through the window until I saw what appeared to be the last Spit from the bridge leaving the ship. Then I pulled Amerigo’s rifle out and handed it back to him with one hand. I opened the hatch in front of us with my other.
As I swung the hatch open, Enceladus jumped
out. I followed right behind her and picked up my rifle while I left my armor behind.
“Secure the hatch to the outside,” I ordered. Drummer and Amerigo jumped to it while I followed Enceladus to the bridge. It was empty, and I thanked the cosmos for not seeing any surprises.
“Check behind all the doors,” I told everyone. “Make sure no one else is aboard.”
I dashed back to the engine room and reconnected the controls and back-up controls to the bridge and retrieved my armor.
“Trite, the Spits seem to be all gone,” Drummer reported as I headed back for the bridge.
“You sound a little disappointed,” I said.
“Yeah, oh well. I should mention there are two doors in the back that are locked tight from the outside.”
“Those are most likely storage rooms,” I said.
“We’re flying out of here, right?” Enceladus questioned.
“Yeah,” I confirmed.
“Well, whatever you gotta do, you better do it pretty damn quick,” Enceladus said, staring out through the front port.
I glanced out of the port. Near to the ship, the Spits we kicked off the ship jogged away from us, but, in the distance, dust was being kicked up from vehicles headed in our direction.
I leaned over the front main control console and typed into it. The console flashed Access Denied.
“The captain locked out the controls with a password,” I announced.
“Oh, you got to be kidding,” Enceladus exclaimed. “Tell me you know his password.”
“Nope,” I replied.
“Frick! We’re as good as dead,” Drummer sighed. Amerigo just slumped into a seat on one side of the bridge.
Chapter 20
“Actually, I expected that,” I said.
“What?” Enceladus exclaimed.
“In fact, hoped for that,” I said.
I popped open the panel below the console and started working under it as I explained. “I told you the captain would think he could outsmart me. I was pretty sure he would lock us out. I would bet that as soon as I reconnected the control wires in the reactor room, the wormhole generator controls in the back were locked out as well. I’m pretty sure I can no longer go back there and simply engage the wormhole generator to blow everything up. He also made a call over to the base and sent for help. He plans on us not being able to take off, and they will bring cutting tools to board us.”
