by Kal Spriggs
It was a risk. For one thing, that would escalate matters. Warp missiles were expensive and it wasn't likely that the corporate security that ran those ships would use such an expensive round themselves without such provocation. Firing one of their own would likely be just such provocation.
Besides that, the missile might well hit the massive ship if they didn't intercept it. That wasn't the plan, but once they launched it they wouldn't have real-time control over it, and even if Fenris fired to miss, there was always the chance that it would still hit.
Lastly, a Halo-class destroyer didn't carry many of the rounds and in theory, that represented a big expense for any pirate. It was also a huge expense for them, since the things were extremely expensive, but Mel wasn't worried about that so much as blowing the operation.
On the other hand, the warp missile would probably draw both ships back to protect the mining platform. The huge ship represented tens of billions of dollars of corporate infrastructure and if either of those ships’ captains thought for a moment that it was in danger, they would do everything they could to protect it. Their careers and probably their very lives depended on it. It wasn't too hard to believe that someone up higher in the food chain might arrange for a negligent captain to step in front of a train like the late security officer for Odin Interstellar.
“Do it,” Mel said.
The single warp missile lanced out, ejected clear of the drive field and it's warp envelope initiated perfectly. The two Carnivores reacted exactly as Mel had hoped, the one moved back into close proximity of the station while the other maintained a defense in depth. The first one engaged the missile before it could get past. The antimatter warhead detonated with a pinprick flash of light, tiny at this range.
“Both ships are maintaining station,” Fenris said. “I'm detecting alerts to the Guard Fleet picket, however. They'll be moving to intercept me soon.”
“Do you have your data?” Mel asked.
“I'm good,” Swaim said, “We can go now.” The young hacker looked pale and Mel didn't miss how his blond hair was damp with sweat.
This life really isn't for him, she thought, as soon as we get the chance, we'll get him back out of this kind of thing, let him live as normal a life as he can manage.
“I've obtained all the sensor data I need,” Fenris growled. The warship sounded irritated, though Mel thought that stemmed from the fact that he couldn't fight back.
“Then let’s get the hell out of here,” Mel said. Before she finished speaking, Fenris engaged FTL warp.
That was too close, she thought as she watched the system recede, and someone nearly blew the operation.
***
“It couldn't be anything but sabotage,” Mel snapped and pointed an accusing finger at Bob, “and you know damned well who has the best knowledge of how to do that aboard this ship.”
“I'm telling you, it wasn't her!” Bob yelled back.
“Look,” Mel said sharply, “The port sensor array went active, it didn't just glitch on, it pulsed out a pattern, at a high enough rate that Fenris estimates it transferred at least three hundred megabytes of data in only ten seconds. Who else would have the technical expertise to do that?”
“Uh,” a deep voice said from the door, “If you guys are accusing us of something, maybe we could defend ourselves?” Tank stood in the doorway to the bridge; behind him were Claude and Aldera. Aldera's cold expression flickered for a moment as Mel leveled a glare at the woman.
“I'm not sure I can trust what you have to say,” Mel said honestly. “Fenris is still trying to run a full diagnostic, but it looks like something must be spliced into the system somewhere, and this didn't become a problem until you three came aboard.”
“I'm not with them,” Claude said and raised his hands.
“Thanks,” Tank said without looking at the other man, “I don't want to be grouped with you, either.” He glanced at Mel, “Can you at least tell us what's going on, before you start leveling accusations?”
Mel scowled but she gave him a nod. “Fine.” She took a deep breath, “Fenris, do you want to explain?” She didn't know if she could master her emotions enough to lay it out without venom. Besides that, she wanted to watch their expressions to see if she could read them. Certainly she had her suspicions about the source of the troubles, but that didn't mean she was right.
“I have detected certain anomalous activities in my secondary systems over the past few weeks. Power fluctuations, secondary systems coming on and shutting off at random times. It has since moved into some of my primary systems at an alarming rate. The pattern matches that of hardware installations, but I haven't found where it's been installed. Until a few days ago, I thought it might be one saboteur... but then the pattern happened in two separate locations at the same time.”
Tank nodded slowly, “So there's two of them.” He gave a big smile, “Well, it can't be me, I don't know squat about engineering.” He said it as if it proved his innocence and Mel wished she could believe him.
“You might say that... but I have no way to prove it,” Mel said. The look of hurt on his face made her feel sick to her stomach, yet she forced herself to continue. “For that matter, if you were working with Aldera to do it, she could probably show you an easy enough way to install something she designed, I'd guess.”
The iron-faced woman gave her a slight nod, “That would make sense. I could probably design something like that. I assure you, however, it isn't the case. I want this operation to succeed. Indeed, you won't find anyone aboard the ship who wants it more.”
“I kind of doubt that,” Mel said as she thought about how it would feel to be free again, without the need to look over her shoulder. She couldn't imagine that the woman felt that same dread. She was too calm, had been too calm since the very beginning.
“She's right, Mel,” Bob said, “She hasn't got a motive.”
Mel shot Bob an angry look. Just what was his problem with the woman? It had to be because of how damned beautiful Aldera was, men seemed to go all stupid between the ears around beautiful women.
“What about money?” Mel asked. “I bet Odin Interstellar would offer a lot of money to prevent a security breach.”
Aldera shook her head, “I don't care about the money.” For the first time, her cold mask cracked and Mel thought she saw raw emotion in the woman's eyes. “I...” She broke off, “I can't talk about it.”
It almost made Mel believe her... except she didn't buy a sob story. She couldn't afford to, not when their entire plan was at risk.
“Well, then,” Mel snarled, “I guess I'll have to go investigate the sabotage myself.”
“Mel...” Bob trailed off as she leveled an angry look on him. “You,” she pointed at him and them jabbed her finger at their new crew, “stay here and watch them.” She pointed around the lounge, “Everyone else, stay here.”
Bob made a face, “Right.”
“Fenris, I'm going down to check the port sensor array,” Mel said. Her hand went absently to the Tyvex Autopistol tucked under her jacket. She hoped she wouldn't need it.
***
“Anything?” Mel asked. She had suited up, just in case she had to go into one of the depressurized compartments, and she'd moved her pistol to a holster strapped on her leg. Her eyes burned with exhaustion and she was well aware of the fact that she'd been up for almost thirty hours at this point. Yet she didn't have time to rest, not until she got to the bottom of this.
“I have localized some of the anomalous readings down the access shaft another dozen meters,” Fenris said over her com. She was deep in some of his narrow machinery spaces, and he didn't have an intercom system here. She saw a pair of his repair bots scurry away ahead of her. “Your bots notice anything out of the ordinary?”
Fenris didn't answer for a moment. “Mel, I do not have repair bots in that area.”
Mel froze. “I just saw a pair of them, you sure?”
“I am absolutely certain, Mel,” Fenris' growl was
confident, yet she could hear confusion in his voice, as if he wasn't sure that she was telling the truth.
Mel felt a sudden chill. What if this wasn't someone else... what if it was Fenris? She had already seen the AI go crazy once. Granted, that had been a result of Swaim and her brother meddling with his core programming, but what if he had contracted a virus of some kind? What if this were some side effect of that first incident?
For that matter, Artificial Intelligences were notoriously unstable; that was one reason that the Guard Security Council had forbidden them. What if Fenris had simply lost it, if he had sabotaged himself and didn't even realize it? If that were the case, he might attack Mel or the other crew, driven mad by paranoia caused by his own actions.
I'm all alone down here, Mel thought. It was not a reassuring thought. There was one thing she could do. “Fenris,” she said, “I'd like you to do me a favor.”
“Yes?” he asked, his gravelly voice puzzled.
Mel bit her lip, “Run a full diagnostic on yourself. Verify that you are still stable.”
“Mel...” Fenris trailed off. “I do not think that is the issue, but I will do as you ask.”
“Thanks,” she said. “oh, and do a full inventory of your repair bots, see if any are missing.”
He didn't answer, but she knew that his diagnostic would take up most of his attention. Hopefully her suspicion was wrong. Mel crawled forward down the access shaft. Even though she had traveled much of the vessel in the fight over it with the terrorists and the time since, this wasn't an area that she was familiar with.
According to her mental map, she was actually near the supply room where she and the others had done much of their planning, just a single level up from where she had killed Giles. She shivered as she remembered the look of panic in the man's eyes as he died, killed by a ricochet from when she had shot one of Fenris' security robots.
As she thought about that, the lights ahead of her flickered. For just a moment, she flashed back to her encounter with Giles' corpse in the dark. “Fenris,” she asked, “did you ever track down what happened to Giles' body?”
Fenris didn't answer.
Mel bit back a curse. This is stupid, she thought to herself, I'm all alone, I just tied up Fenris in analyzing himself, I'm crawling around in the dark, this is just asking for trouble. She paused and stared down the access shaft. She could see the pair of repair bots, again, just out of reach of her suit's helmet light. “You two,” she said, “better not be part of this.”
She hated the spider-like robots, especially since Brian and Marcus had used them to try to make her “properly” paranoid. For that matter, she hadn't much liked them when they had tried to kill her when Fenris had been insane.
“I've had enough of this,” Mel said. She started to back up. Just then, the hatch behind her slid shut. Mel kicked at it, then brought up her comm again, “Fenris, the door to access shaft twenty-two just shut.” She waited. Surely he had finished his diagnostic by this point. “Fenris?”
She heard a burst of static on her comm... and then it went dead.
I am so screwed, she thought, even as her gaze went back down the shaft to the pair of repair bots. They hadn't moved, but as she angled her head back to put them in the light, they shifted back into the shadows.
Mel drew her pistol. In the suit's gloves, it didn't feel quite as alive to her, but Maggie's heavy weight comforted her a bit. She leveled the pistol in the direction of the two repair bots and started to crawl forward. If she couldn't back up, there was only one way to go.
***
Bob stood at the back of the lounge. He sweated in his environmental suit, which he had donned just in case Mel needed help. She shouldn't have gone alone, he thought, yet he didn't see any other option. None of the others were particularly happy, he could tell. Swaim sulked in the corner near the door, the young hacker apparently upset that Bob and Mel hadn't brought him in on their worries about a saboteur.
Johnny Woodard seemed more distressed that they distrusted him, though Bob could understand that. The big man seemed trustworthy enough, yet Mel had a point. They didn't know what he had done to go on the run, but he'd signed on to the mission because he wanted to start over. That in itself suggested that he wasn't trying to clear his name, so he probably wasn't innocent.
Claude just seemed annoyed that he hadn't been able to talk his way out of it. The man had brought up a game of some kind on his handheld. The smooth-talking, handsome man had irritated Bob from the first, though, so he actually enjoyed seeing him so irritated.
Bob really hoped if there was a saboteur then it was Claude, just so he could punch him in his too-pretty face. Knowing my luck, he thought, it won't be him. The man had bragged about his many conquests of women... and Bob knew only too well how a man like that treated women. He would bring them up and then send them crashing down after he had what he wanted from them. Bob had picked up the pieces left over often enough in his line of work.
Aldera, though, was something else. Bob had seen past her icy expression from day one. He wanted to tell Mel what she had told him of her past, yet she had asked him to keep it a secret. She looked at him with a mix of betrayal and despair, all wrapped tightly in the cold expression she showed the world. I do believe her, Bob thought, but all the same, Mel does have a point, she does know enough engineering to pull it off and I don't know her that well.
For that matter, given his assignment, it didn't matter how well he knew her. It didn't matter how well he knew anyone. It wouldn't be them that took the actions, it would be the person who controlled them. Was this the sign, then, he wondered, had his prey finally revealed itself?
He felt a cold suspicion as he thought about it. Mel had seemed so certain it was a saboteur... but what if it was what he was after? It matched some of the parameters... yet so had some of the clues aboard the Guard Free Now vessel and Bob hadn't found any further signs after those first hints.
What if it's here, Bob thought, what if it slipped aboard Fenris and hid in the shadows...waiting.
If that was the case, then Mel was out there... facing it alone. He activated his comm, “Mel, this is Bob, I need you to come back to the lounge, there's something I need to tell you.”
For a second, he heard nothing, then there was a burst of static and his comm went dead.
“Shit,” he said. This was bad, really bad. If his sudden realization was correct, then not only was Mel in a lot of trouble, but he might well have failed in his primary mission already.
“What was that?” Swaim asked as he rubbed at his ear.
“That means we're in a lot of trouble,” Bob said. He patted the butt of his Magnum Research BFR and took a deep breath. “Fenris, Mel said she was headed down to the port sensors array, is she still there?” Bob closed his eyes and quietly hoped.
There was a delay before Fenris spoke, “Yes... I think. I'm having an issue with my internal sensors in that area...” he trailed off. “Odd, I'm seeing additional heat sources. Several have appeared throughout the ship. I'm not certain if it is a glitch in my sensors or–”
“It's not a glitch,” Bob interrupted. “They're hostiles. Extremely dangerous. Use whatever force necessary to take them down.” He nodded at Woodard. “You've got any weapons on you?”
Woodard gave him a nod, “Of course.”
“I want you to hold this lounge, shoot anything and anyone that tries to force its way inside, and don't stop shooting until it stops moving,” Bob said. “Don't touch whatever attacks, either, have one of Fenris' bots drag it out. Try to avoid getting any fluids on you, if at all possible.”
He looked at the ceiling, “Fenris, you space any of the hostiles that we down, do a full decontamination of the area afterward. Ultraviolet, hard radiation, whatever you can do to kill organics.” He put his helmet on and then locked it in place. He just really hoped he was wrong.
He glanced at the others, “If your suits are handy, put them on.”
“Mine's in my quar
ters,” Swaim said.
“Mine too,” Claude said nervously. He fiddled with his silver coin, rolling it across his fingers.
Woodard bent over his backpack and a moment later he pulled out his suit and a collapsible carbine. The others looked at him in surprise and he said, “What? I like to be prepared.”
“Suit up,” Bob said. He passed his spare pistol to Aldera, “Cover the door, I'm going to find Mel.” He hesitated, “Be careful.”
Bob toggled open the hatch, “Fenris, where's the nearest of those enemies?”
Strak stood right outside. The dead mutant's face was gray, his eyes were lifeless, but his hand moved with viper speed to catch Bob by the throat. Well, Bob thought, this isn't going at all to plan.
***
Mel scrambled out of the access shaft and into the small space beyond. From her mental map, it was part of the small environmental system that fed the minimal life support for the section.
It was also heavily covered in some kind of growth. Mel didn't know if it was some kind of bacteria, fungi, or algae, but clearly something was wrong with the system. For that matter, the air was hot and humid and condensation covered her helmet visor; things were well out of norm.
She spotted the two repair bots as they slunk away out of sight, they had some kind of biological growth attached to their backs, tendrils of which went into open maintenance plates on them.
“This is really damned weird,” Mel said. She'd never seen anything like this. It wasn't some kind of bacterial growth gone out of control, this stuff almost looked like it was designed.
“Hello, Mel,” a familiar voice said from behind her.
Mel spun and brought her gun up. She froze, though, as she saw the man who stood behind her. There was something familiar about his face. It wasn't the harsh planes or the sharply defined cheekbones, nor was it the cruel smile or the cold arrogance in his eyes. It was something about the shape of his mouth and the angle of his eyes.
“Giles?” Mel gasped.
