Solfleet: Beyond the Call

by Glenn Smith

  “Let’s hope that feeling proves unfounded. Thank you, Rhea. Security out.” He tapped the pad three times in rapid succession. “This is Major Ross to all security patrols. Be on watch for a Doctor David Baxter. Male Caucasian, mid- to upper-eighties, gray hair, blue eyes. About six feet tall and slender. Last seen on his way to Medbay and in that vicinity, but he never arrived there. Be advised, he may be ill and possibly contagious. He appeared extremely pale when last seen, and a little dark around the eyes, as if he were overly tired. Take appropriate precautions. All patrols acknowledge.”

  One-by-one patrols throughout the facility acknowledged. As soon as the last patrol had responded, Ross switched channels and hailed the Command Deck.

  “Operations. Suarez here,” came the response.

  “Emil, it’s Frank. I’ve got my patrols looking out for an elderly gentleman by the name of Doctor David Baxter. He’s a civilian contractor—starship design engineer new to the shipyards. When I passed him in the corridor a little while ago he said he was on his way to Medbay for his post-flight physical, which he was overdue for. He didn’t look well at all, Emil, and Doctor Zapala just told me that he never arrived. You might want to find out exactly when and from where he came in and get the results of his transfer physical from there. If this facility’s been exposed to something serious, I’ll want to initiate quarantine procedures as early as possible, unless or until Rhea says otherwise.”

  “Thanks, Frank. I’ll get right on it and call you soon.”

  “Thank you, Emil. Security out.”

  * * *

  Dylan stepped from the aerobridge, through the opened double airlock doors, and into the dimly lit personnel staging area aboard the Albion. He rushed over to the controls console and closed and sealed the airlock, plunging himself into utter darkness. And then he relaxed, just for a moment. He’d done it. He’d gotten aboard. Now for the hard part.

  He used the faint lights of his handcomp to find the doors that led into the ship’s interior, but they remained closed at his approach, just as he expected them to. He called up the command functions menu again and made the necessary adjustments to the ship’s door control program so that it bypassed the subroutine that controlled the lights, then activated it. The doors parted, and he stepped into the corridor. He stood still for a moment after they closed behind him, and then waved his free hand back and forth through the air. The dim illumination didn’t increase at all. Good. The bypass had worked.

  Of course, there was a downside. With the ship’s power remaining on safety standby—an absolute necessity if he was going to avoid being detected, there was so little light that the more distant part of the corridor to his left remained virtually hidden in the shadows. He knew it made a ninety-degree turn to the right at the far end, but he couldn’t see it. It was a lot darker than he’d expected it would be, and conditions were going to be the same all throughout the ship, making it hard for him to find his way around. With the little bit of light that his handcomp emitted and the slightly higher than normal light sensitivity level built into his biotronic left eye, he had little doubt that he’d manage to make his way to the engineering deck, but when he got there he was going to need a lot more light to install the microlarm. Even his biotronic eye wasn’t that good.

  After all his careful planning, how could he have forgotten to bring something as simple as a flashlight with him?

  He stepped back into the staging area and walked over to the field equipment lockers. It took some doing, a lot of searching through submenus, but he eventually managed to command one of them to open, only to find that it was empty. He sighed. Of course it was empty. The ship had been emptied of any and all useful equipment as soon as it had been dry-docked. How stupid could he be? How could he have overlooked such an obvious detail? He must have been more tired than he realized.

  He commanded the locker door closed. He had to find something. But what? What might the dock workers have left onboard that he could use as a portable source of light?

  The answer hit him like a bullet to the head. An environmental suit. Of course. While the rest of the supplies and equipment had been offloaded, the environmental and EVA suits would have been left aboard in case any emergency work had to be done inside the depressurized areas of the ship. And Solfleet environmental and EVA suits were all equipped with independent lights attached to their helmets and both forearms.

  He held the handcomp out in front of him and used its meager rainbow of lights to guide himself back into the corridor. He found an environmental suit locker to his immediate right, and this time he only needed to tap the button on the wall to open it. He found what he was looking for and more. At least half a dozen suits and helmets, independent respirators, a pair of toolkits containing both polarized electronic and standard hand tools. He’d hit the jackpot.

  He grabbed one of the toolkits and strapped it to his belt, and hung one of the respirators around his neck. Then, with a little effort, he managed to detach a wrist-light from one of the suits. He would have preferred one of the much brighter helmet lights, but they were built-in and he really didn’t want to lug a bulky helmet around with him. And even if he managed to detach one of them, he wouldn’t be able to hold it in place while he worked. A wrist-light, on the other hand, was small enough that he could hold it between his teeth if he had to—he only wished the wrist straps were detachable instead of being built into the suit—and would still give him enough light for the close-up work he was going to have to do.

  At least he hoped it would give him enough light. He switched it on, just to make sure, and found that it was a lot brighter than he’d expected it to be. Then, with his immediate problem solved, he switched it back off and then backed out of the locker and closed the door.

  * * *

  Major Ross leaned back in his chair with his feet propped up on his desk, crossed at the ankles, unconsciously slapping the palm of his hand with his stylus over and over and over while he waited for Commander Suarez’s call. What could possibly have been taking his friend so long to get back to him, he wondered as he watched the dissipating steam rise from his untouched cup of coffee? If anyone understood the importance of...

  “Operations to Security,” Suarez’s voice called out suddenly.

  Ross tossed the stylus to his desk and barely missed kicking over his coffee as he dropped his feet to the deck and sat forward, then reached out and slapped the answer pad on his comm-panel. “Major Ross here,” he answered expectantly.

  “Frank, it’s Emil. You were right, sort of. I think we’ve got a problem.”

  From the way he’d said it, Emil didn’t just think they had a problem. He knew they had a problem. Ross prepared himself to hear the worst and asked, “What do you mean, I was right ‘sort of,’ Emil? What’s he got?”

  “An acute case of false identity.”

  “What!” Ross exclaimed as his internal alert status jumped another level.

  “There’s no one by the name of Doctor David Baxter assigned to this facility, Frank. As a matter of fact, there’s no David Baxter working for any starship engineering company anywhere that the fleet currently has under contract, or for the civil engineers for that matter. Whoever you ran into this morning, he doesn’t belong here.”

  “Well I’ll be a son-of-a-bitch,” Ross mumbled. “Thank you, Emil.” He slapped his panel, hitting three different pads at once. “Major Ross to all patrols and security sections. Reference the BOLO on Doctor David Baxter. Condition yellow. The individual purporting himself to be Doctor David Baxter is an imposter. Continue to exercise all precautions, but if he’s found not to be in need of medical attention, apprehend and transport to Security Control.”

  Ross closed the channel and flopped back in his chair. “Damn it!” he grunted. “I had him! I had him by the hand and I let him go!”

  Chapter 33

  There was a lift directly across the corridor from the staging area. As Dylan approached it, the doors opened onto a car, which did him
no good. The lift systems were still offline, so that car wasn’t going to go anywhere, and while activating them would certainly make navigating his way through the ship quicker and easier, it would also result in a significant increase in power consumption, which would likely trigger an alarm in Dock Control. As it was, he’d already taken a huge risk by opening and closing the airlock doors and accessing the computer to modify the door control program. Of course, in those cases he hadn’t had any other choice. With the main power offline the airlock had provided the only access to the ship, and if the doors didn’t work his ability to move through the ship would have been extremely limited. This time, however, he had another option and he didn’t want to push his luck.

  He turned on the wrist-light and headed down the corridor, which turned right at the end, just as he’d known it would. He rounded the corner and hurried past the senior officers’ quarters and two side corridors to where the main corridor turned right again. He kept going, and when he’d gone halfway across the ship from port to starboard he finally came to the other pair of lift doors that he’d known would be there, at the forward most end of that same horizontal shaft. He approached to within their sensor range, but they didn’t open. Good. That meant there was no car on the other side, which was exactly what he’d been hoping for.

  He pulled the access plate down off the wall and set it aside. Then he reached up into the cavity, felt his way around until he found the manual controls, and then pulled down on the lock release lever. The doors separated a few inches, releasing a blast of stale, dank air. He choked and started coughing and then reached for the respirator when he started feeling lightheaded, but he finally managed to catch his breath and steady himself before he had to use it, which was just as well. He had no way of knowing how long it might last or whether or not he might have more need of it later... or even if its cylinder still contained any oxygen for that matter, now that he thought about it. He probably should have checked when he grabbed it. He took a moment to do so. He switched it on, only to find that the charge indicator display on the cylinder didn’t work. Not a good sign. He bit down on the mouthpiece and started the air flow, and found that it did still contain some oxygen, though he had no way of knowing how much.

  He stopped the flow and turned off the respirator, then slipped his fingers in through the narrow opening between the doors, pushed them farther apart, and then squeezed between them and stepped into the dark, empty shaft beyond. He drew a deep breath, decided that the air was good, or at least good enough, and then started walking carefully forward... or rather aft, toward the rear of the ship.

  Roughly twelve meters in he came to a vertical shaft. He shined his light up, then down, and knew right away that he’d found the main vertical shaft—not that he’d had any doubt—the one that ran all the way from top to bottom through the center of the ship. It ascended for three levels above him, and although the small wrist-light wasn’t nearly bright enough to illuminate the bottom of the shaft far below, he knew from having studied the blueprints so extensively that it descended into the darkness for another eight levels. He’d only have to climb down half that distance, thank God, but as tired as he felt at that moment, even half of that distance was going to be a challenge.

  He shined his light to the left side of the shaft and found the imbedded ladder. He reached out and grasped one of rungs good and tight, and then stepped out into the emptiness…

  ...and lost his grip.

  Somehow, either due to the sudden surge of adrenaline that raced through his veins or in spite of it, he managed to grab hold of one of the next few lower rungs as he started to fall and hang onto it long enough to turn his body into the ladder and grab on with his other hand as well, nearly dropping his light in the process. He clung to the rung as though his life depended on it, which he had no doubt it did, found footing on the ones below, and then hung there and waited for his heart to stop trying to pound its way out of his chest.

  Eight decks, he ruminated as he tried to calm down, still holding onto the rungs as tightly as he could. Had he fallen he almost surely would have been killed. Humanity’s future as a conquered race had almost been sealed, right then and there.

  He drew a deep breath and exhaled slowly, and very unsteadily. He still had a good case of the shakes. He drew another one, and another, and continued to do so until he finally calmed himself down. Then, very carefully, he began the downward climb.

  By the time he reached the long horizontal shaft that ran the entire length of deck eight’s forward half, breathing normally was starting to get difficult and he was beginning to feel a little lightheaded again. The stale, low oxygen atmosphere in the shafts was beginning to take its toll on him. He reached for his respirator and found that it was gone. No doubt the strap had broken and it had fallen to the bottom of the shaft, just as he nearly had. He hadn’t heard it hit bottom that he could remember, but then again he’d had more important things on his mind at the time, like not falling to his death. A quick check told him that he still had the toolkit.

  He aimed his light down the shaft again, but he still couldn’t see the bottom well enough to make out specific shapes. If his respirator was down there somewhere, he was going to have to climb the rest of the way down there to find it. He thought for a moment about doing just that, but he worried that what little strength he had left might not hold out long enough to safely make the descent, so he decided against it. Better to just get out of the shafts altogether.

  A lift car blocked the doors to his immediate right, so he stepped off the ladder to his left and started walking forward, up the horizontal shaft.

  By the time he finally reached the end, only to find those doors blocked by a car as well, he could barely still put one foot in front of the other without tripping over himself. He turned around, intending to find another route, but then he lost his balance and fell backward against the wall, and then slid down until he found himself sitting on the floor.

  He drew another deep, unsteady breath and let it go. He was tired. No, not just tired. He was exhausted. He was exhausted and the air in the shafts was dangerously thin. He wanted to lie down right there and go to sleep, but he knew that if he did that he might not wake up again, and if he didn’t wake up again he would fail to complete his mission. And if he failed to complete his mission... No. Failure wasn’t an option. He had to complete his mission. To do that he needed to find air, desperately, and quickly. Otherwise he was a goner. The freedom of the human race was a goner. He shook his head vigorously. He was losing it. His thoughts were... erratic. He needed air, and that air wasn’t going to come to him. He was going to have to go get it.

  He had no choice. He had to go on. The fate of mankind depended on him.

  He forced himself to act. He struggled to stand up and then plodded onward, zigzagging back and forth, back down the long, dark shaft.

  * * *

  Ensign Bu’Tan felt bored nearly to death. His duties were a bore. The Martian shipyards were a bore. Hell, his entire life ever since he left home had been a bore. He’d hoped that as the newest of what were still a very few Boshtahri in Solfleet—there were fewer of his people in the fleet than there were of any other non-human race, including even the Naku—he might get lucky and draw an assignment aboard a starcruiser. Instead, he’d spent the first several months of his post-academy career warming a chair in Dock Control, conveying departure clearances, sorting out and issuing docking assignments… basically, sitting by and watching while others piloted the mighty starships of the fleet into space. Even running the routine security scans of all the berthed vessels, an exercise that had served as a welcome distraction early on, had of late become just one more part of the monotony.

  Having been born into a lower-class clan and raised to work the land, he’d left Boshtahr at his first opportunity, on the very day of his flesh ascension, and had joined the Terran space fleet with the hope that it might provide him with a myriad of other opportunities that he’d otherwise never ha
ve had. He’d worked hard to become fluent in the Terrans’ dominant language and gain admittance into the academy, and harder still to earn his commission, but so far he’d been sorely disappointed in the fruits of his labor.

  He turned in his chair and looked up at the board with indifference. There were only three bays left containing ships that he hadn’t scanned yet—numbers six, eleven, and twelve. He chose one at random and read down the list of the berthed ships’ names, and wasn’t at all surprised to see the same names that he’d seen yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that, and so on, and so on, etcetera, etcetera. He keyed on one with a sigh and started running the scan.

  * * *

  Dylan opened his eyes. He could barely see his own arm laying just a few inches in front of his eyes in the near total darkness, but he felt fairly sure that his arm was in fact what he was looking at. His left one, though he wasn’t real sure how he knew that.

  His head hurt. No, not his head. The right side of his face. He lifted his head up off the cold surface of the shaft floor and turned it to look the other way. His neck hurt, too. He rolled onto his side and stood up, then checked himself out as best he could for any injuries. Then, once he felt satisfied that he was relatively all right, he picked up the wrist-light and looked around.

  A car stood several meters ahead of him. Or was it behind him? He turned and shined the light in the opposite direction, but it didn’t help. Which way was he facing, relative to the ship? He couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t even make an educated guess. He didn’t know where he was or in which direction he’d been laying. He was totally disoriented. The only thing he felt pretty sure of was that he’d lost consciousness and fallen into the vertical shaft. But how far had he fallen? Surely not all the way to the bottom. Not the whole four decks. He’d have been killed, or at the very least badly injured if he’d fallen that far.

  He shined the light upward. Just one level above him the shaft split into two horizontal ones that ran in opposite directions, so it was possible that that was the deck he’d been on before he passed out. He shined the light down at his feet and was surprised to discover that he wasn’t standing on the shaft floor at all, but rather on the top of another car.