Junker Blues: Mars: Junker Blues series

by Lon E. Varnadore

  Lash peeled away another part of her skirt that Marcus hadn’t seen ripped and coming away wet with her dark blood. She sprayed more disinfectant spray on and let it work. Marcus watched as it hardened and caused a gel-like seal over her second wound. That one looked more like a knife wound.

  Marcus took a half step closer before he looked up, annoyance stamped on his face. “How did you get that?”

  “When I knocked them all out. One had a knife out and was able to stab me as he fell. I was lucky it wasn’t too deep.”

  Yeah, lucky, He didn’t remember seeing any of the troops with a knife, but everything was such a blur in his head that he couldn’t pin down much of what happened. Marcus’ thoughts then pondered what else she had said. “That’s all you got from the Ministry guys? They are looking for something. Kinda vague, Lash.”

  “That’s it,” she said, not even looking up and continuing to look at the far medbay bulkhead.

  Marcus growled, then shifted his eyes upwards in an old habit. “Gideon, you online, yet?”

  “Soon,” Lash said, still looking away from him.

  “Damned AI is as close to useless as tits on a bull,” Marcus said, looking away from Lash.

  “That’s hurtful, Marcus,” the AI said with a sulking tone, jolting Marcus and making Lash laugh.

  “Gideon, where have you been?” Marcus asked the ship.

  “I was offline, thanks to the Ministry tools,” Gideon said. “They sent out a pulse when they docked that knocked me offline. And the deck plating as well. I am sorry that—”

  “Are you fully back online?” Marcus asked.

  There was a long pause. “Yes,” Gideon finally said. “Fully functional.”

  “Current position?” Marcus asked.

  “Point zero-zero-zero-five AUs from Mars,” Gideon said.

  Slag. “Way too close for comfort,” Marcus said with a groan. “We need to—”

  “Incoming message from Mars. For Lash,” Gideon said with a hint of surprise.

  Lash started with “Don’t open—”

  “Open it Gideon,” Marcus said, crossing his arms and staring intently at Lash. “Do I need to give an override command?” He asked, eyebrowed arched, looking at Lash.

  Lash looked up as if she was about to argue, instead yanked her left wrist from the cuff, grinning without humor as the computer gave a warbling beep of warning about proper procedure. She copied Marcus’ crossed arms, making sure to make the wrapping of her hands on the tops of her own humerus bones more exaggerated, hoping to piss off Marcus. “No.”

  “One moment,” Gideon said. “Decryption running…”

  As they glared at each other, Marcus watched as Lash grew more and more agitated. “Gideon, don’t,” Lash shouted, pushing herself to stand and wincing in pain. “It could be—”

  “Belay that, Gideon. Open it,” Marcus said, drawing his thrower and pointing it at Lash. “I will—"

  “Don’t do this, Marcus. Mars is filled with more than one kind of Spider,” Lash said, her face creased with worry.

  Marcus cocked his head. “What do you—”

  Marcus was cut off as klaxons blared ship wide. The lights flickered, and, for a moment, Marcus was weightless again. He looked around and saw the confused look on Lash’s face as well. Then he felt the deck plating treble its power, slamming them into the floor. Lash was more prepared than he was.

  She lunged for his thrower, which spun out of his hand when he landed on the deck plating, face-first. In slow motion, the two crawled towards the weapon, Marcus saw Lash’s face was a rictus of pain. Her thin, Martian body wouldn’t be able to withstand 3Gs for long. Neither could he, but his MDF training allowed him more tolerance than Lash. He pushed for the thrower again, forcing himself to move.

  “Gideon, purge the deck plating—”

  “Already on it,” Gideon said, snapping back at Marcus.

  The moment the AI spoke, the deck plating went offline. Lash and Marcus both lunged and grabbed for his thrower at the same time. She wrapped her hands over the barrel, Marcus grabbed the pistol grip. For a moment, the two stared at each other. As they floated, Marcus tried to pull the thrower away from her, but she had a tight grip on it. His eyes focused on her hand, not wanting to see the hurt he knew was on her face.

  “How did you know?” He asked.

  Lash did not look good. Small droplets of green blood started to leak out and float around from her wound where the sealing bandage hadn’t had time to fully set. She was still getting over being crushed by three times Earth normal, which was too much for her system on the best of days. There was a sudden grim set to her eyes. “Those troopers could have sent it. Bounced it off a rely on Mars to make it seem like it was coming from the planet. Some other person. Who knows? Thought it was to simply foul up—”

  She coughed, a wet hacking cough. A small blob of green oozed from her mouth as her free hand tried to cover her mouth. “Marcus, I—”

  “I’m not letting go. You have to trust me, Lash.”

  “Trust you?” Lash shoved the gun instead of trying to pull it towards her, surprising Marcus. As he went spinning away, she kicked forward. Marcus tried to recover as Lash struck out with a fist, missing by a scant inch. She followed the first with an elbow to his jaw that struck him hard.

  Marcus saw stars for a moment and released the weapon. Lash hovered over him, trying to say something, yet the klaxons on the Junker were going off again, louder than before.

  “What is going on?” Marcus shouted out— or thought he did. He didn’t hear his own voice over the volume of the klaxons.

  Chapter Ten

  The klaxons suddenly shut off.

  At first, Marcus was happy with the sudden quiet. His ears were still ringing from the constant noise. As he floated there, he felt something was off. “Gideon, what is—”

  Lash also noticed that something was wrong. She looked at Marcus, concern plain on her face. “Something is wrong.”

  “Very wrong.”

  Marcus was the first to puzzle it out. The thrum of the engines. They were off. He kicked off towards the cockpit, and Lash lagged a moment behind. The fight a moment ago was set aside in Marcus’ mind. Survive first, then deal with that slag pit.

  Marcus let out a curse when he saw that the cockpit consoles were dead. He’d hoped that was his imagination, but Lash confirmed it a moment later when she asked, “What’s going on with the instruments?”

  “The entire system is dead. Junker is dead in space,” Marcus said. He struck out at the nearest bulkhead, sending him closer to the pilot’s chair.

  “What in the Hells happened?” Lash asked. Then she pulled out her handheld, her fingers flowing over the handheld device. “The message probably had some kind of worm or something embedded in it. It shut down Gideon and took the Junker’s backups offline.” She looked up from the handheld with a grim look. “It will take time to reboot the whole thing from a cold start up.”

  “How long?”

  Lash shrugged. “An hour, three. I have no way of telling. The immediate concern is environmentals. They’re offline. We have maybe two hours of air before we suffocate.”

  “We can get into suits and conserve what we can,” Marcus said, moving for his suit.

  “That is a temporary solution. We are also going to bleed heat too.”

  “So, it’s going to get really cold in here. Freeze to death or run out of air first?”

  Lash’s fingers danced over the controls again. Her eyebrow ridges furrowed with concern. “Fifty-fifty. Suffering from hypoxia might win by a few minutes.”

  Marcus let out a sigh. He floated there for a moment, trying to gather his thoughts. “What else can go wrong?”

  Lash let out a laugh. “With that attitude, we could get pulled into Mars’ gravity well and—”

  Before she could finish, the lights of the cockpit started to turn on. They flickered to life in ones and twos, and soon the entire place was active. As if nothing had happened. �
�Well, that was not—”

  A loud, discordant gibberish came through the speakers where Gideon’s voice usually came through. Marcus gritted his teeth. “What in the name of—”

  The gibberish went away, and there was a stillness in the air that caused Marcus’ spine to crawl with ice. “Lash, tell me what is—”

  “Something has taken control of the Junker,” she said. She and Marcus looked at the instruments as they started to flicker, a screen popped up on the main display, a new course was plotted in. Both Marcus and Lash looked at each other with a grim look.

  “Who put those coordinates in?” Marcus asked, watching in shock as he watched the course being plotted. The ship was still headed towards Mars, but now towards the sparsely populated southern hemisphere. Something looked off about it. He then saw the numbers and realized it was going to land on the surface, Junker was going to try to bury itself in the desert plains of Tharsis.

  “Why would the Ministry make us go there?” Marcus asked, trying to move toward the pilot chair. He reached out to kick off the deck. It was weak, but he was moving toward it.

  “That is a no-man’s land,” Lash said with a shrug. “A small ship graveyard—and little else.”

  “That’s the ‘Bone Yard?’” Marcus asked. “Thought that was a myth.”

  “How would you know about it?” Lash asked.

  Marcus looked away for a minute. “Never mind that. We need to get control of this ship. Any way you could—”

  Before he could finish his question, the ship started its course. Marcus and Lash were launched backwards as the engines ignited. They struck the bulkhead of the back of cockpit, hard. Marcus heard something crack from where Lash landed. He himself thought he’d at least bruised a few ribs. His back radiated nothing but pain.

  He watched as new data screens flared to life. The plotted course glowed in dull green. Marcus winced, seeing they would go right by a defense satellite. “Well, we are truly slagged.”

  “What do you mean?” Lash gasped out; her own body was being crushed by the acceleration of the ship. She had not seen the new course.

  “We’re travelling within a hundred klicks of a cluster of MDF satellites.” They will fire on us as soon as we’re in range since we don’t have authorization.

  “Bollocks!”

  Marcus cocked an eye at the expression.

  “Not really the time. Can you move?” She sent. Even the voice in his head sounded pained.

  Marcus was about to yell at her when he realized it was easier for her to speak this way. A little. I think the acceleration is going to slack off in a few seconds.

  “Move your right hand a few centimeters to your left,” she sent.

  Why? When he got a glare speaking volumes, he did so. His hand touched a small button. I feel—

  “Push it!”

  Marcus did so without thinking. There was a momentary pause in the acceleration. The engines shuttered for a moment. Marcus and Lash dropped from being plastered to the bulkhead to hanging in mid-air as the ship lurched to a stop and the deck plating was still off-line. “How did you—”

  “There is a kill switch for the Junker. While you were trying to do something else,” she sent, revealing that she had touched three buttons on her side of the cockpit. If it weren’t the Ilas doing it, they would have needed a third person to get one of the switches. “You hit the last button in the sequence.”

  “Now what?” Marcus asked.

  Lash looked around. “Well, it’s all off-line again. We might be able to defrag some of Gideon and do something with the engines. Or thrusters to get us off this immediate course.”

  Marcus nodded and launched himself off the bulkhead to maneuver to the command chair. He pulled out his own handheld. When he reached the chair, he pulled himself in and started to work on an arm of the chair.

  “What do you think you are doing?” Lash shouted.

  “I’m trying to get the engines going. The chair has the best access,” Marcus said, reaching forward to access the engine subsystem controls.

  “And, that would be where the worm would have buried itself. That and in Gideon itself,” Lash said, moving closer. “We need to access the auxiliary controls and get some kind of navigation or something first. Take the suicide course off-line before—”

  Marcus cut her off. “We’re dead in the water because of the kill switch. And even environmentals are on low at the moment. I’d rather—”

  “Marcus, you still don’t trust me?” Lash asked.

  There was a beat where Marcus said nothing, shoving the mind-worm into place again. He heard Lash let out a grunt of pain before she glared at him. “Fine, I’ll do what I think is best, and you—”

  Marcus stopped her with a word. “No.” She looked at him, her jaw set in a taut straight line. “We need to focus on something together. Otherwise we’re both dead.” He took a long, deep breath and tried to think, calming himself. Which would work better? He drummed his fingers on the side of the command chair, feeling as though he knew the answer even before he started.

  She’s got a better idea than you, dummy. “Alright, Lash,” he said while moving around in the chair. “Let’s dig into the auxiliary controls and see what we can do about the suicide course.”

  Lash let out a breath. “Thank you.”

  She reached out a thin, bony fist, making Marcus smirk. “Thought you hated that?”

  “Just do it,” she said with an exaggerated eyeroll.

  He reached out to fist-bump her. “Let’s get to work,” she said.

  It took almost a full standard Earth hour, but they were able to get the Junker’s systems partially working. Environmentals were the first thing fully restored. The engines wouldn’t be of much use, but they were able to get maneuvering thrusters working, which is what they needed more than the full engines. Nudge the course a little here and there, and they’d be off the run straight into the MDF satellites that would destroy them with maser fire. They also got most of the instruments working again.

  Good thing too, since we were scraping that dioxy line, Marcus thought while checking the readings of the air supply.

  “I don’t think we would have,” Lash said while finishing up a tweak of wire splicing.

  Marcus gave her a raised eyebrow, and she smiled with an innocent look plastered on her face. “I wasn’t in your head. You are relieved that environmentals are working. Same here.”

  “Yeah, but you were built to work with less oxy than humans,” Marcus said, testing the control he had over the engines.

  “True. But, if you’re dead, I can’t get Gideon to work properly,” Lash said while standing and planting hands on her hips.

  “Or at all,” Marcus said. Lash smiled, and so did Marcus. Both shared a small laugh. Without a word, he felt his distrust ebbing away. Maybe I’m being too hard on her?

  “Marcus, are you sure we can trust Hazon with that piece of pre-Crawl tech?” Lash asked, jerking her head towards the docking bay.

  “No idea,” Marcus said, stretching as best he could, which sent him spinning in a slow circle. He knew that the deck plating was a big draw on the engines, but it would have helped with some of the repairs. He stopped himself by grabbing onto the command chair. “But he’s better than drifting in space without a place to go and slowly starving.”

  Lash nodded. “We should have—”

  There was a sound of a klaxon going off for a moment. Marcus turned and started to key in a sequence. He brought up a display and cursed. “This day can’t get any worse!”

  On the screen was a proximity report of the Ministry Defense Force satellites locking on. He knew that an incoming maser attack would be incoming before they could react. Before either could do anything, the masers would strike the ship and probably fry both of them.

  He closed his eyes, waiting for the end.

  Chapter Eleven

  It was a glancing blow, one that still took out the starboard engines and part of the shield generators of
the Junker. The ship shook and rattled harder and harder from the glancing impact. Marcus pulled himself into the command chair as Lash made her way towards the auxiliary pilot’s seat. She pulled herself in and was able to strap in as the ship’s movements caused it to start to fall towards Mars in a slow tumble. The thrusters they did have control of weren’t enough with the tumbling movements of the Junker. There wasn’t enough power to slow the spin. Without engines to try and escape the gravity well, the ship plummeted towards the planet.

  “This is going to be bad,” Marcus shouted over the rattling and crackling of power relays blowing up. He heard something that could have been Gideon’s voice piped through the ship. It was too soft, and it didn’t make any sense. “Salty lime Jello for Daissssy and I.”

  Lash looked like she was trying to do something to the ship. Marcus could not tell what. He was focused on not dying.

  As Junker went hurtling towards the red planet, Marcus looked at the growing red-orange disk and found himself slipping into an eerie calm. His mind worked out what he needed to do to try and survive the crash. Most of the electronics were shot. Still, he was thankful the Junker had ceramic shielding. Even though Mars didn’t have much of an atmosphere, there was enough to burn his ship up if they entered at the wrong angle. A corona of fire started to engulf the ship, and Marcus knew they were trying their best to take the heat of re-entry.

  He called out to Lash while he pulled at the release to bring forward the command chair, pushing it forward and engaging what were a few levers for the barebones controls with the few thrusters they could control with the levers. Also, he had some control over the yawl control of the ship, though he would need Lash to help with that.

  She nodded, already scrambling towards the controls herself. When he looked over, the sight of her thin, lanky frame bent over the controls made her look more like a Spider than ever. He shook the horrid image away, continuing to focus on getting the Junker down in as few pieces as possible.