by Zen DiPietro
“Outlaw to Nefarious and Roosevelt. The Stinth is on our side, so please take care of it. I’m preparing to board Jamestown.”
“See you there, Outlaw.” Ross sounded entirely professional, but that didn’t mean the ship had suffered no damage. She could only hope for the best.
“We’ll keep you covered, Outlaw.” The voice from the Roosevelt wasn’t familiar, but there was no reason it should be.
“Grateful for that, Roosevelt. I’m your new biggest fan. Outlaw out.”
She’d already maneuvered her ship wide of the melee, out of weapons range. No sense in getting taken out by a potshot now. She focused on what she’d come to do—end this madness once and for all.
The docks were locked down. She’d expected that. Raptor had written a handy little program to gain access. The airlock pressurization had been disabled, but she’d come prepared, wearing a pressure suit.
She needed only a few minutes to force the airlock to open. Once on the other side, she had to put it into emergency containment mode so it would close itself again.
Her first discovery was finding that this part of the station had been repressurized. She wondered how much of Jamestown had been. The lights were on, in emergency mode to conserve energy. As she moved through the station, lights turned off behind her when they sensed an unoccupied area. It was an odd thing, the lights snapping to life ahead of her and clicking off behind. She existed in a small radius of light that adjusted itself to her as she made her way toward the heart of Jamestown.
As the first on board, her job was to get to engineering and assess the station’s situation. Once the single-channel comport in her ear let her know her team had arrived, she’d switch tactics and head to crisis ops control. Colb was almost certainly hiding out there. It was where she’d be in his position—the most protected place on the station.
She was glad he’d pressurized it. It would make her work easier. It was chilly though. Temperature bled off quickly in space, only to be regained by time and great effort. In another ten degrees it would be comfortably livable.
Being on the empty station was eerie, but no more than during her first visit. At least it was more hospitable to life now. She was surprised when she made it to engineering with no issues. She’d expected to encounter resistance, but no one had blocked her way, and Colb apparently hadn’t wanted to booby-trap the thing he was trying to repair.
She shed her pressure suit and replaced it with her stinger dissipator. Now she was ready for a fight.
A survey of the station’s systems showed that the place remained a husk. No communications, no information systems. But Colb wouldn’t have needed much more time to lock out the other PAC officials. Which would give him the upper hand with the PAC, allowing him to establish himself as the de facto leader of the entire alliance.
She’d been worried that she was already too late, but now she’d made it aboard and she wasn’t leaving without him.
She studied the engineering readouts, trying to figure out what all he’d done and how she could thwart him. Lock him out somehow. But she was a fighter and a pilot, not an engineer. Security systems were nothing like systems operations. She needed an engineer.
Her earpiece came to life with Raptor’s voice. “Docking now. Expect to receive Wren to engineering in ten minutes. Krazinski and I are headed to crisis ops.”
She touched the broadcasting mechanism at the top of her ear. “Docking bays aren’t pressurized, but the rest of the station is. Cold but tolerable without a pressure suit. Minimal but sufficient lighting.”
“Understood. See you soon.”
Colb would know the docking bays had been accessed. He wouldn’t know where she and the others were, though, or how many. And he wouldn’t be able to pick up their transmissions.
So far, she’d found no evidence of anyone being on the station. She’d expected to meet resistance in the form of some mercenaries or perhaps a team of subverted BlackOps once she got through the airlock. Either he was keeping his protection closer to his actual location, or he hadn’t trusted even his own flunkies to board Jamestown.
Peregrine and Hawk arrived with Wren. They quickly peeled off their pressure suits.
“You all in good shape?”
Hawk grinned. “No problem. The Roosevelt came in and gave us the royal treatment. Kind of nice, for a change. You?”
“Not even a little crispy.”
“You must be getting better.”
Wren ignored their byplay, going immediately to the systems displays when she got her suit off. Her hands flew over the controls, and for a few minutes, the rest of them could do little but wait. Fallon had never seen such take-charge intensity in Wren before.
Finally Wren twisted around to face them. “Colb has managed to get the station into lockdown mode, which reroutes all commands, even engineering, to crisis ops. I can’t make any changes from here.”
“Can you do it from another location?” Peregrine asked.
“Yes. Any mechanized system has moving parts that I can physically alter. I just have to get to them.”
Raptor’s voice came over the comport again, quieter this time. “He’s in lockdown mode. Crisis ops is like a fortress. Is there anything Wren can do?”
Fallon looked to her. Wren nodded, her mouth set in a determined line.
“We’re on our way,” Fallon said.
“Hand me the decoupler.” A minute later, Wren added, “Now the laser torch.”
Fallon waited in silence, encased in a small service conduit. As the smallest of the team, she’d been selected to serve as Wren’s assistant while the others scouted out the rest of the station. So far they hadn’t turned up a single person working for Colb. Unless he had someone locked inside crisis ops with him, he must have been too paranoid to trust anyone. Which was probably wise. Colb had as much interest as she did in preventing the public at large from finding out about the true state of affairs.
On the other hand, if he had no one to cover him, that worked just fine for Fallon.
“Think you could do something like when you busted Colb out of the brig?” Fallon asked Wren.
“Wow, thanks for reminding me about that. But unfortunately no. The Dragonfire brig was meant for keeping people from breaking out. We’ve got the opposite situation here.” Wren’s voice grew muffled halfway through.
Fallon knew that, but she’d hoped Wren could work some engineering magic for her. Plus, she’d grown tired of lying in a conduit listening to various scrapings and scufflings while Wren worked.
Wren grunted, and her feet shifted. “I can’t get it. Do you think you can squeeze up here and help me?”
“Maybe. I’ll have to crawl up over you. Probably won’t be comfortable for you.”
“Try it. I’ll be as flat as I can.”
Fallon turned onto her stomach and dragged herself up the conduit. Whoever had designed these things had not expected them to be accessed, it seemed. The security conduits on Dragonfire were cramped, but nothing like this.
She tried not to hurt Wren as she dragged herself over, then carefully lay on her. “Can you breathe?”
“Yes. You’re not that heavy.”
“This reminds me of going sledding with my brother when we were kids. I’d tickle you, but you’d probably thrash around and hurt us both.” Fallon spoke softly. Sound was already too loud in such a small space, and her mouth was right behind Wren’s head.
“Do you joke around this much when you’re on a mission with your team?”
“Yes, actually. It cuts the tension. Peregrine doesn’t joke as much as we do, but she’s…” She didn’t know how to finish that sentence in a way that wasn’t unflattering to Per.
“As much fun as a bag of dead kittens?” Wren supplied.
“Definitely more fun than that. So what am I supposed to be doing here? Or did you just want to get all horizontal with me?”
She felt Wren sigh in exasperation.
“See this?” Wren wrapped her
fingers around an air-intake grate above her.
“Yep.”
“Help me pull it out.”
Air supply seemed like a dicey thing to tinker with. “Assuming we get it out, will we still be able to breathe?”
“Yes. For about two minutes. We need to get out of here and hit the emergency stop in the containment tank before the system detects contamination.”
Fallon kind of hated to ask the next question. “What happens if we don’t?”
“The system will recognize that the intake has been polluted and begin a decontamination cycle. Unfortunately that’d be pretty deadly for us, with the acid gas and all.” Wren seemed a little too chipper about explaining that.
“So let’s definitely not do that,” Fallon said.
“Agreed. Ready? On three. One…two…three.”
They pulled. It was difficult to get much strength behind the pull from a prone position reaching ahead of them. Fallon gave it everything she had and all at once the grate gave way, coming at them so fast it hit them both in the face. But there was no time to rub her smarting nose or her elbows where they’d smacked into unforgiving conduit. She scrambled over Wren into the tank, which was probably the last place she ever wanted to be on a space station.
Fallon had no choice but to slide down the wall of the tank on her stomach. She was sure she left a layer of skin on the hard metal as she went. On the bright side, it was crazy cold, which soothed the ouch a little.
The tank was too deep for her to save Wren from the same fate, so she had to stand by and watch her slide down the same way, groaning as she went.
“How does maintenance on this stuff usually get done?” Fallon helped Wren up so they were both standing in a metal tank the size of a large house.
“Bots. Now we need to run!”
Fallon chased after Wren to the other side of the tank, where a red emergency button was next to an access ladder. She didn’t know how much of the two minutes they had left when Wren smacked it, but she doubted it was much.
“There! Easy!” Wren said through gasps for breath. She wasn’t much of an athlete.
“Now what?” Fallon eyed the ladder.
Sure enough, Wren pointed to it, too winded to talk.
“I’m guessing there’s a time element involved with that too.”
Wren nodded, waving at the ladder.
“Nope,” Fallon answered. “You’re going first.”
Wren stepped onto the ladder and hauled herself up.
“You need to work out more. Hurry up, or I’ll start poking your ass with my harpoon gun.”
Finally they reached the top and stepped up onto a walkway. A small maintenance door stood between them and safety from whatever inhospitable reaction was about to occur in the tank.
Wren tried to activate the door but it remained closed. “Locked,” she gasped.
Fallon stepped in and looked at it. The door wasn’t exceptionally reinforced, and it had only a basic code unlock. “It’s low security. I can probably crack it, but it may take more time than we have.”
“I got it. Old engineer’s trick. The wall alongside a door is usually far less reinforced than the door itself. That’s definitely the case here.” Wren dropped her backpack, rummaged around in it, and pulled out the laser torch Colb had given her. At least the thing had turned out to be useful to them.
Wren cut a roughly circular shape in the wall beside the door. The cutter went through with relatively little resistance. When she had a hole big enough to get her shoulders through, she returned the torch to her bag and pulled out a thermal blanket. She shoved the cutout circle to the other side, then laid the blanket over the bottom of the hole.
“Careful. It’s hot, and the metal’s sharp.”
After pushing their backpacks and weapons out the other side, Fallon helped Wren go through head first, arms up so she could catch herself as she tumbled to the floor. Then it was Fallon’s turn. She ignored the bite of the metal digging into her stomach, grateful for the durable fabric of her jumpsuit.
As she got to her feet on the other side, Fallon heard the whir of a turbine starting. A red light began flashing above the door.
Wren grabbed the blanket and dropped it, then reached for the metal cutout. “Hurry, help me!”
They shifted it around to find the right fit for the irregular shape, then slid it into the hole. Wren used the same laser cutter to fuse the metal. It warped and bubbled unevenly, but she achieved a seal on their side of the wall.
“There.” Wren turned off the cutter.
“What would’ve happened if you hadn’t sealed it?” Fallon put her weapon belt back on as she asked. She felt naked without it.
“That’s the batch tank for the air supply. Since we averted a decontamination cycle when we hit the emergency button, it’s now preparing a fresh supply of the perfect formula of air. If we hadn’t sealed the hole, the unmixed gases would have leaked into this corridor, causing a potentially dangerous mix.”
“Which would have set off an alarm and informed Colb of our location. Gotcha.”
“Also, we might not have been able to breathe.” Wren picked up the blanket and returned it to her backpack, then put on the pack. “But yeah, the alarm thing too.”
Fallon consulted the station’s schematics in her head. “Where do we need to go next?”
“The service conduit next to the air distribution duct. You’ll have to get past the security though. That’s a highly restricted area, since it goes right to crisis ops.”
“Right. That’s this way.” Fallon went to the left.
“So this is what you really do?” Wren asked as they went.
“More or less. There’s often a lot more shooting involved.”
“And you like that?”
Fallon took a left, and a right, which led them to the conduit they needed. “Yeah.”
There were a lot of things she could say to add to that, but she stopped herself. Most of those details would probably not be helpful in seeing Wren through this experience.
They kneeled next to the entrance to the conduit. While Fallon worked on getting it open, Wren said, “We could adjust his air mix and kill him. That would make it easier to take crisis ops.”
“It would.” Fallon frowned at the code sequencer, which was proving harder to crack than she’d hoped, even with the small device running Raptor’s program. “But if he’s dead I can’t get the answers I need about what he’s done.”
The right code finally came up and she sighed with relief as she got through that layer. Next, she input a master command authorization code, which Krazinski had given her. Nope. Colb had changed that too. She reset Raptor’s device to work on that code.
“Not to mention that you want to ask him why,” Wren added.
“Why what?”
“Why he’d do all this. Why he chose you.”
Fallon frowned at the device, still running through thousands of possible codes every tenth of a second. “It would be nice, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that a lot of people are dead because of him. You saw some of the bodies, but there are a lot more that you didn’t see. Most were probably good people who had been led astray by someone they trusted. Those were our people, and if they were largely innocent, their records should reflect that. And their families should know it.”
“Yeah.” Wren sounded sad.
“And he had an entire station of scientists doing research on illegal tech, hidden away on a little moon base. They fought, and they died. I want to know about them. To clear their names if they were coerced. To let their loved ones know what happened to them.”
She wished the code-cracking device would hurry. For all she knew, Colb knew they were on the station and was preparing to destroy it and everyone on it.
“Does it matter if they were coerced or not?” Wren asked. “They were still doing things that broke our treaties.”
Fallon kept her eyes locked on the device. “You broke some major PAC laws helping
Colb. You’d be in a brig somewhere right now if not for your intentions, and someone to explain them for you.”
Wren’s voice was barely audible when she said, “Right.”
“Don’t let it get you down. You’re making up for it now.”
Wren pursed her lips and nodded.
The code clicked into place. “Yes! Got it.” She removed a hair-width wire from her backpack and threaded it through the DNA scanner’s input port. She backed away slightly, and with what sounded like a computerized sneeze, the scanner went dark. “Hah.”
“What was that?” Wren asked.
“DNA scanners are extremely touchy devices. They’re a weak point in any security system because of that. If they’re disabled from the command side, they disengage and leave the rest of the security in place until they’re recalibrated.” The wire was one of her favorite Blackout tools. Fortunate for her that Krazinski had supplied her with some.
She opened the conduit, but before going in, she activated her comport. “Status request.”
Raptor replied almost immediately. “No other souls found on board. Proceeding now toward crisis ops to try to force our way in.”
“Hold off on that,” Fallon ordered. “It’s unlikely to work and the attempt would be incredibly loud. I’m hoping to be able to take him quietly by surprise. We’re making our way in via conduit, where there’s a hatch into control ops. Once we get inside and secure Colb, first order of business will be shutting down lockdown mode and opening the door for you.”
“Any chance we can follow your route in?”
“Negative. You’d never fit through the conduits. They’re meant for bots, not people.”
“Understood. Waiting for your signal. Blood and bone.”
“Blood and bone.” She ignored Wren’s curious look. “I’ll go first this time.”
Half crawling, half dragging herself through fifteen meters of conduit was not kind to Fallon’s body. She knew Wren had to have it even harder. Though she had a slim build, Wren was a good bit taller.
Finally they made it to the hatch, which mercifully was surrounded by a wider space, giving Fallon enough room to pull herself into and sit up, if she kept her head down.
