Solfleet: Beyond the Call

by Glenn Smith

  How was that possible? The lifts were offline, so how had it gotten there? It hadn’t been there earlier, had it? He’d looked down into the shaft twice, he recalled. Once from eight decks above the bottom, and again from only four. He hadn’t seen anything the first time. The bottom of the shaft had been hidden in the murky darkness. But the second time… he could have sworn then that he was looking at the bottom of the shaft, four decks below.

  Then again, the air in the shafts was thin. Had oxygen deprivation affected his perception to such a degree by that time that he hadn’t even realized what he was really looking at? That was certainly a possibility. Lack of oxygen had a way of doing funny things to people. Whatever the case, the car was there and had probably saved his life.

  But why was he still alive? If the air was so thin that the lack of oxygen had distorted his perceptions and eventually caused him to pass out, he should have used up what little remained while he was unconscious and then suffocated. Why hadn’t he?

  He started feeling a little lightheaded again. He shined the light down in front of him and turned around in a circle, looking for an air vent or a damaged oxygen line, or something else that might account for his survival. He spotted a respirator, presumably the same one he’d taken out of the locker and then lost when he almost fell off the ladder, laying near where his head had been. He picked it up and inspected it, and discovered that the airflow valve was open slightly, allowing its precious contents to escape. That little bit of oxygen flow had apparently saved his life. God’s grace must have been with him.

  How much valuable time had he lost, he wondered as he tied the broken ends of the strap together in a square knot, adjusted the air flow to its most minimum setting, and then slipped it on over his head and bit down on the mouthpiece. He looked at his watch and was shocked to see that it was nearly 1330 hours. “Well,” he mumbled to himself through the respirator, holding it in with his teeth, the word coming out barely unintelligibly, “at least I got some rest.”

  Yes, he’d gotten some rest. But now that his head was beginning to clear he had work to do. Hopefully the respirator would last long enough for him to finish it.

  He tossed the wrist-light up onto the deck one level above, then backed partway down the shaft, took a running start, and jumped. He grabbed the lip of the shaft floor overhead—thank God its edge wasn’t sharp—swung forward and slammed against the wall. His muscles screamed in protest, but he succeeded in pulling himself up. In fact, it took much less of an effort than he’d expected it would, considering how tired and banged up he was.

  He picked up the wrist-light, then stood up and looked around. Yet another lift car stood behind him and a pair of doors stood just a few meters ahead. This wasn’t the deck he’d been on earlier after all, which meant that he’d fallen at least two.

  He shined the light upward again and saw the back of a car and the beginning of another horizontal shaft right behind it. A shaft that ran perpendicular to the short one he was standing in. That had to be the deck he’d fallen from, which meant that he was now on deck nine—the lower engineering level. He’d wanted the upper level, but since he already knew that there was no way out of the shaft above, there was no point in climbing up there. Instead, he’d stay on the current level. Once he reached Engineering it would be simple enough to access its upper level.

  Taking a short running start, he leapt across to the other side of the shaft, forced open the doors, and then stepped into the corridor. But which corridor—port or starboard? He shined the light up and down its length, but both ends were too far away to see in the dark, so he just picked a direction and started walking. He soon passed a door on his right with a sign posted on the wall beside it that read “THEATER.” He knew then that he was headed in the right direction.

  He took the respirator out of his mouth and tested the air in the corridor as he walked. It still smelled a little stale and musty, but not nearly as bad as the air in the shafts. He waited for several more seconds to make sure he didn’t start feeling lightheaded again, then finally closed the valve on his respirator and slipped it into his pocket.

  He came to a pair of unmarked heavy-duty blast doors and knew that had to be it. They opened at his approach and sure enough, he’d found the lower-most level of the engineering decks. He stepped through the doors and maneuvered around a number of personnel stations and various pieces of loose equipment until he found the gangway that led to the upper level.

  * * *

  Ensign Bu’Tan hadn’t run a scan since he returned from lunch. In fact, he’d hardly paid any attention to the ones he’d run before lunch, having known full well that they weren’t going to detect any abnormalities anyway. They never detected any abnormalities, and he’d long since begun to wonder why they even bothered looking for any. Maybe the brass just wanted to give him and his comrades something to do to take their minds off how mundane their duties were.

  As he thought about those duties, he couldn’t help but wonder which of his class’s gods he’d offended so badly that they’d seen to it he was given the most routinely boring assignment available. And how had he offended them? Had he taken too long to graduate from the academy? Had he chosen the wrong career path? Had he been too timid in Officer Basic, failing to stand up to the instructors the way he should have when they stripped him of his dignity in front of his fellow cadets? That was a distinct possibly, but he’d had no choice. He’d had to keep his temper in check in order to avoid being recycled and reassigned to a less advanced class, or even worse, expelled from the academy altogether, which would have offended the ancestor-spirits to a much greater extent.

  Perhaps he’d offended them by leaving Boshtahr in the first place.

  Another idea suddenly occurred to him, almost as if his thought patterns up to that point had been so far off base, to use a Terran term, that his Guardian-spirit had found it necessary to whisper into his ear in order to guide them back to their proper path. Maybe his assignment had secretly been a soul-test all along. Maybe the gods wanted to see how well he would perform his duties before they blessed him with a better assignment. If he could please them, then surely they would intervene on his behalf and see to it that he was provided with ample opportunities more appropriate to his inherent skills and intelligence. Yes! Of course! That had to be the answer!

  Ensign Bu’Tan sat straight up in his chair, filled with a renewed sense of purpose, and initiated a new series of scans with enthusiasm.

  * * *

  It took a little longer to locate than he’d hoped it would, but Dylan eventually found the panel he was looking for. He pulled it from the console, flipped it over, and laid it down on the deck, then knelt beside it and, holding the wrist-light between his teeth, went to work.

  He identified the circuitry he was looking for fairly quickly. At least, he hoped he had the right circuitry. He’d never been much into tinkering and all that technical schematic reading stuff was even newer to him than the reality of time-travel itself. He was a Military Police Security Forces troop turned Marine Corps Ranger, now an Intelligence agent. He was not and never had been an engineer. He could disassemble, service and repair and then clean and reassemble every small arms weapon in the Solfleet inventory, but when it came to going wrist-deep into the guts of other modern technology, he was as good as lost.

  And speaking of modern technology, how he’d managed to spend so much time onboard, moving from deck to deck without being detected was beyond him. Maybe all the thanks he’d sent God’s way throughout the course of his life was finally paying off. Whatever the reason, he was thankful for that, too. Hopefully it would last for at least a little while longer.

  * * *

  Lieutenant Commander Suarez tossed the last bite of his second candy bar into his mouth and washed it down with a mouthful of coffee without even chewing it first—coffee from his fourth cup. Or was it his fifth? He wasn’t sure. He’d stopped counting after two. He didn’t really care anyway. All that mattered at the mom
ent was apprehending that Doctor Baxter character. It was all he could do resist contacting Major Ross to ask him how the search was going. The only thing that was stopping him was the fact that he knew Ross as well as he did. The man was a good officer and an even better security police commander and would have things well in hand. The last thing he needed was the chief of operations checking up on him.

  But with a spy or terrorist or saboteur running loose in the facility while so many of the fleet’s few remaining starships were berthed there, he was feeling totally on edge—a feeling that he realized all the chocolate and coffee he was eating and drinking was probably only making worse, but still he indulged. Each of those vessels contained at least two nuclear fusion reactors and a few of them had four. If a saboteur were to gain access to one of them and rig it to blow, the results would be catastrophic. The entire facility, all of the vessels within it, and all of the tens of thousands of personnel would be lost in a chain reaction of nuclear detonations. And who could even venture to guess what the long-term effects of such a cataclysm might be on colonies spread across the surface of the planet below, assuming their domes survived the rain of debris?

  He sighed and shook his head, then gulped another mouthful of coffee. All this sitting around and waiting was starting to drive him crazy. If only Ross would give him a call. Just a quick update to assure him that all the ships were secure and that his patrols were closing in on the target. Then, maybe, he could relax and get some work done, at least for a little while.

  “Dock Control to Operations,” came a voice over his comm-panel.

  “That’s not the call I’m waiting for,” Suarez told the panel as he reached for it. Then he answered, “Suarez here. Go ahead.”

  “Sir, dis is Ensign Bu’Tan in Dock Control. I was just conducting a routine scan on de starcruiser Albion. Dere is some kind of activity aboard.”

  “The Albion?” Suarez asked, wanting verification. “She’s in mothballs, isn’t she?”

  “Sir?”

  “An Earth expression, Ensign,” Suarez explained. “The Albion is decommissioned and in dry-dock for the long term, is she not?”

  “Yes, sir, she is,” the ensign immediately confirmed. “She has been for over six years.”

  “Her reactors are still cold?”

  “Cold as ice, sir, but dere should not be anyone aboard that ship.”

  “Can you tell what kind of activity you’re seeing?”

  “I can tell you only dat dere appears to be one person alone aboard. I cannot read dat individual’s personnel tracker, most likely due to de scanner and communications work going on aboard de Lexington in de next bert. It is interfering greatly wit my scanners. However, if dat work were to be temporarily shut down...”

  “I think I can arrange that,” Suarez told him. Then he asked, “Can you tell exactly where onboard that person is located?”

  “Somewhere around de Engineering area.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “Not wit de interference from de Lexington, sir.”

  “All right, Ensign. I’ll take care of that problem for you right now. Good work.” Suarez switched over to another channel. “This is Lieutenant Commander Suarez in Operations to the Lexington refit supervisor.”

  “Lieutenant Commander O’Hanlon here, sir,” the engineer quickly responded.

  “I need you to shut down all operations over there immediately, Commander. We have an intruder aboard the vessel right next to you and whatever you’re doing right now is interfering with our scanners.”

  “Understood, sir. Mind if I ask for how long? We’re in the middle of a pretty sensitive sensor alignment procedure right now.”

  “Sorry, Commander, I don’t know. We’ll clear you to resume work as soon as possible, but right now I need you to shut down as quickly as you can.”

  “Aye, sir. Right away.”

  Suarez switched channels again. “Lieutenant Commander Suarez to Security.”

  “Ross here, sir.”

  “We might have found our Doctor Baxter, Frank. We have an uninvited guest aboard the Albion. One person, in or around the engineering section. That’s all the information I have at the moment, but I should be able to give you more in a couple of minutes.”

  “All right, Emil. I’ll get my people on it right away. Ross out.”

  Chapter 34

  Dylan finished particle-bonding the last two splices and then secured the optical filaments back in place, completing the microlarm transmitter’s installation. All he had left to do after that was to make sure that it worked. As soon as he finished that he could reinstall the panel and then get the hell off the ship.

  Using the flat end of a microprobe as a conductor, he closed the test circuit on the back of the transmitter to simulate the activation of the ship’s propulsion systems. The receiver that he’d injected into his biotronic shoulder earlier responded instantly, routing a series of rapid impulses along the length of its anchor strand and into his sensory input processor. The resulting sensation was not unlike a minor electrical shock and made his arm jump.

  Satisfied that he’d installed the device correctly, and that it would work, he snapped the protective cap down over its circuitry, then stood up and picked the panel up off the deck.

  A loud noise echoed suddenly through the cavernous room! A noise very much like that made by a pair of heavy-duty blast doors when they unlocked and started to open! Someone was coming! They knew he was there!

  Dylan dropped the panel back into the console and locked it into place as quickly as he could while the clatter of several pairs of hard-soled boots running across the deck below echoed off the walls and the towering machinery housings like voices shouted into a canyon, making it virtually impossible for him to guess which direction, or directions, they were coming from. He grabbed the wrist-light out of his mouth and took off toward the door that led into the aft-starboard thruster compartment—the only possible escape route he could think of. Problem was, he was going to have to run across the top of the gangway to reach it, and that would put him in the open, making him vulnerable for a good two or three seconds.

  “Halt, Security Police!” a man shouted from below as Dylan broke into the open.

  A pulse round whizzed across the backs of his shoulders—he felt it more than he saw it—missing his head by mere inches and dissipated harmlessly somewhere on the ceiling high above as the thruster compartment’s door slid open ahead of him. The rapid clang-clang-clang-clang of all those boots on metal steps—at least two pairs, but probably more than that—followed as the SPs charged up the gangway behind him in hot pursuit.

  How the hell had they gotten such a clear shot from down there? They must have been a lot closer than he thought.

  He ducked into the pitch dark compartment as another round whizzed by behind him.

  “I said halt!” the same man shouted again as the door closed, cutting them off... at least for the moment.

  Dylan broke to his left and kept on running, tripped over something and fell headlong to the deck with a thud that knocked the wind out of him, but then kept scrambling forward on his hands and knees like a panicked animal fleeing a ferocious predator until he finally managed to regain his footing and jumped back to his feet. He maneuvered quickly but much more carefully through the energy converter section, gambling that his pursuers wouldn’t risk firing an errant shot so close to the dangerously volatile machinery, even if they did manage to get a clear line of sight on him.

  “Halt, you son of a bitch!”

  The voice sounded a lot closer. They were gaining on him fast.

  He spotted another set of blast doors ahead—the only other exit… and his only chance of escape. They were slow to react to his approach and had barely begun to open when he reached them, forcing him to slow down almost to a stop and turn sideways and squeeze between them to get through. When he did, he found himself in another dark corridor. He looked one way and then the other, and then ran. It didn’t matter
in which direction.

  “There he goes!” another of the SPs shouted to his comrades.

  Another shot rang out. The round whizzed by his left ear so close that he felt the heat as it passed. And then his luck ran out. The next shot grazed his right thigh before dissipating into the base of the wall ahead of him, sending waves of searing pain pulsing through his entire leg as he collapsed to the deck. He jumped back up immediately but collapsed again with the next step. He grabbed hold of his injured leg and... He couldn’t feel his hands on it! His leg had gone numb and he could hear the SPs closing on him. If he could only have a few moments to recover...

  He set the wrist-light down on the deck and aimed it back at his pursuers, hoping… no, not just hoping... praying that its meager light might be sufficient in the otherwise dark corridor to effectively blind them to his next move. He pulled his left leg, his good leg, in underneath him, struggled back to his feet, and limped forward.

  The corridor turned to the right just ahead. He rounded the corner and managed to hobble a little farther forward before his leg almost gave out on him again, then ducked into one of the unlit cross corridors and pressed himself back against the bulkhead, just inches from corner. He concentrated on slowing his breathing while he waited, listening carefully for his pursuers at the same time. He reached into his pocket for his respirator, but then realized that Security Control would already have directed Dock Control to power up the ship’s environmental systems before sending their own people in, so he left it in his pocket.

  The SPs’ footfalls suddenly fell silent. They had stopped running and were moving much slower—being a lot more cautious. As a matter of fact, all Dylan could hear at that moment was the steady whisper of air blowing in through the vents and he began to wonder if they might have stopped pursuing him altogether. But then he heard a footstep. It was lighter and much quieter than before, but was unmistakably a footstep. He heard another one, and then another.