by T. R. Harris
Now with half the guards out of the fight, it was a piece of cake for Copernicus to take out the others. A couple of accurately placed fists in the faces of the civilians, along with an open palm slap into a chin of the prison guard, and the fight was over. Coop relieved the second civilian guard of his MK-17 before standing. He flinched when someone ran up beside him. It was Aric.
6
“You were sensational!” the alien complimented.
“You weren’t so bad yourself.”
Coop looked at the still-stunned inmates. They had backed away, forming a circle around where the fight took place; however, with the guards taken out, they just stood there. None of them would take advantage of the situation. What would they do if they tried? Fortunately, no alarms were sounding, not yet. But they would at any moment, alerted by other guards or from the inmates themselves.
Coop took Aric by the arm, pulling him into what the kitchen prisoners called Factory Row.
This corridor was three times as wide as the others, having been carved out of the crater wall by huge excavating machines. Along the way, there were wide openings that led to the six main factories operating at the Panorius facility, all located on the right side of the corridor. That must be the way out, through any of the factories, and to the loading docks at the other side. Coop didn’t linger. He entered the first factory, and with Aric in tow, began racing through the huge open bay, filled with long tables and overhead hoses. A hundred inmates or more sat at the tables, each with an assortment of tiny objects laid out in front of them. Once an item was completed, they would place it on a conveyor belt that ran along the center of the table and off to packaging and then delivery stations. The scene reminded Copernicus of pictures he’d seen of forced labor camps in China and elsewhere.
The ruckus at the main entrance was filtering through the complex, and now inmates were rising from their seats to see what was going on. Civilian supervisors, alerted to the work stoppage, were moving among the rows, heading for the interior entrance.
Coop and Aric were halfway through the factory before alarms began sounding, and more healthy and armed civilians began moving along the factory floor. The escapees weren’t hard to spot; they were the pair running awkwardly in the light gravity, bounding up and down more than they were making progress forward. Copernicus had experienced this before, being too long ago for him to remember how he solved it. The gravity was so light, that instead of his feet propelling him forward they did more to push him up and down. The key was to lean forward radically as one ran, shifting the upward motion into a forward direction. With the gravity here equivalent to that of Earth’s moon, Coop recalled the hopping motions the astronauts made to get around. He did his best to emulate them.
Mostly, all it did was cause him to topple forward a couple of times, taking Aric with him. By then, Coop had the taller alien draped over his back, which at the time seemed like a good idea. But Copernicus wasn’t able to run at Human speed, so he didn’t need to carry Aric. He slipped him off his back and told him to hop. Now it became two creatures, hopping between rows of startled inmate workers, bounding along for a while before face-planting to the stone floor.
Fortunately, the pursuing guards were having just as much trouble chasing after the escapees. But they did have guns. Flash bolts began to streak by. The notorious bad aim of aliens saved Coop and Aric, and the targeting computers in their weapons were useless against moving targets. Still, someone could get lucky. If a level-2 bolt hit the Human, he would be pissed. If one hit Aric, he could die.
They were nearing the end of the assembly bay and about to enter another section of the factory where the finish products were boxed and then loaded onto starships. A phalanx of civilians stood in their path. Fortunately, not all were armed. As he ran, Coop focused on the four that were and blasted them without missing a hop. The rest of the defenders fell back or ducked for cover.
With one final push off the floor, Copernicus went airborne and cleared a work counter at one of the pressure doors leading to the loading dock. Behind it was a couple of civilians. One had a gun, prompting Coop to take both of them out from above. He landed and then rolled, coming up on one knee, scanning the interior of the room for hostiles. He only had four shots left; he had to make them count.
Aric came through the door a moment later, but rather than rolling with style and grace, he fell forward and smacked his face once again onto the floor. His nose and mouth were already a bloody mess from previous falls, making him appear as though he’d just come out of a bare-knuckle prize-fight.
Copernicus was relieved to find that very few of the civilian factory crew were armed. They didn’t need to be, at least not before today. Coop took the MK from Aric. It still had nine shots remaining. They would need them as they commandeered a spaceship.
The rear cargo bay to a mid-size freighter was stuck into the loading dock, airtight seals replacing the need for an airlock. These specialize membranes were common in land-based commercial facilities which required constant docking and undocking of vessels. A ship could be backed in and the material would fill every nook and cranny, forming the seam. When the ship departed, the material would reform. Coop was wondering how fast the sheet would reform because he would be leaving in a hurry. Hopefully, the factory had safeguards against catastrophic pressure loss. He wasn’t anxious to hurt any more of the pitiful inmates than was necessary.
Copernicus led the way into the cargo hold, instantly recognizing the vessel as a Type-L service freighter. Various planets manufactured the ships, and he’d spent many an hour working on their engines for a variety of clients. There were a few inmates inside the hold, securing cargo with ties. They were aware something was going on inside the prison, now they found out what.
The skeleton crew aboard had been alerted to the breach and were arming themselves when Copernicus entered the spine corridor leading to the upper decks and the bridge. Normally, a vessel like this carried a crew of twenty. With no rec facilities at Panorius, most would still be aboard.
“Here!” Coop said, pulling Aric into a chamber on the right. “This is the main engine room. We need to clear it of any crew.”
Only one creature was in the room, and he wasn’t armed. As Coop shot him dead, he was thinking the alien should have armed himself.
Then the pair left the room. Coop stopped at a control panel on the bulkhead and made a few adjustments to the controls. Aric looked at him with a question on his dark face.
“I’m locking out the crew. All we’ll need then is the bridge to be secure. We’ll be long gone before they can get into the engine room and shut down the drive.”
A flash bolt singed Coop’s back as he stood facing the control panel, having come from up the corridor. The Human ducked and aimed his weapon. Heads were peaking around a hallway intersection about thirty feet away. He placed the barrel of one of the MKs against the smooth metal wall and sighted to where he’d seen one of the heads. A moment later, it appeared again. Coop fired. The brilliant ball of plasma energy seemed to hug the bulkhead, elongating but remaining on course. It contacted the alien head a split second later, frying through thin skin and bone. The creature tumbled out in the central corridor. For good measure, Coop aimed more conventionally for the second crew member across the hallway from the other. He missed, but the alien got the message and ran away. No other shots came their way.
They were moving along the corridor now. At that point, the crew decided that discretion really was the better part of valor and chose to let Coop and Aric reach the elevator leading to the bridge. There was a circular ladder compartment on the right, but that would be even tighter and more confining for the escapees. The elevator was big and would afford them at least a little cover when the doors opened.
The bridge of a Type-L freighter took up a large bulge in the topside hull, with a forward curved design and a squared-off back. The elevator opened to a narrow pressurize lobby with the bridge entrance directly ahead.
&nbs
p; Coop was crouched down on the left side of the elevator door, with Aric tucked in safely behind him. Undoubtedly, the crew would make their stand here. They knew Copernicus intended to steal the ship, and he could only do that if he gained control of the bridge.
As soon as the elevator door slid open, the interior filled with half a dozen plasma bolts. The problem with that many being dumped into such a small space was that the hot plasma had a tendency to splash around before it cooled and evaporated. However, although the flash was bright and impressive, the actual size of an MK bolt was quite small. Still, a drop of the star-hot plasma managed to land on Aric’s leg, burning through his tunic and scorching his skin. Aliens had a much lower tolerance for pain than did Humans, so even this small amount was enough to send him into mild shock.
For his part, Copernicus hunkered down against the wall as more bolts filled the elevator. He couldn’t go shooting into the white haze that was forming in the air outside the elevator. He only had a combined ten shots left in his two weapons. He would have to make them count. He decided to bet on another of his natural Human abilities to save them.
“Stop shooting!” he called out. “We surrender!”
The incoming bolts died off.
“Stop! We surrender,” he repeated.
“Reveal yourself!” said a voice from outside.
Copernicus stood up, holding the MK that had one remaining shot in his left hand and his right, the other with nine. He held them high above his head as he stepped out into full view of the bridge defenders. He left Aric in the elevator. He was too overcome with pain to either protest or to help.
Copernicus stepped into the lobby, taking a quick inventory of the defenders. There were six of them, all armed, three on each side of the portal leading to the bridge. Their weapons were aimed at the Human, yet Coop noticed half of them were waving them around, movements that would break any target lock they may have had. That left three with rock-steady hands.
“Come closer,” a blue-skinned alien in a maroon uniform ordered. The other crew was dressed in red uniforms. Coop smiled. Five red-shirts and one maroon colored. Close enough, he thought.
Concentrating first on the three aliens with steady grips, Copernicus brought the weapon in his right hand down in a flash and lit off three quick bolts, appearing almost simultaneous in their release time. Without needing a computer to sight his targets, each bolt found its mark. Then he turned his attention to the other three. They were frantically trying to line up their weapons. It would only take a second, but they didn’t have that long. Coop took them out with another lightning-fast barrage of ballistic gunfire.
With the opposition down, Copernicus ran onto the bridge, checking to see if anyone was hiding inside. It was empty. He then returned to the elevator and carried the semi-conscious Gracilian onto the bridge and placed him in a seat at the comm station, buckling him in before he took the pilot seat. With a flick of a button, the bridge doors closed and sealed. He initiated the security protocols, locking them inside.
Aric was coming to his senses.
“Can you fly this vessel?” he inquired in a labored voice.
“No problem. I cut my teeth on ships like this. Are you okay?”
By now, Aric had learned to ignore most of Coop’s Human colloquialisms. “The pain is subsiding,” he answered. “That was quite an experience. I have never been shot before.”
“And you still haven’t. That was just a fragment. Now brace yourself, we’re heading out.”
Certain pre-liftoff procedures were required before the ship could move. Besides that, the freighter had been manually positioned into place at the loading dock. The gravity generators were cold and the chemical engines required charging before they could be fired.
That was unless you were Copernicus Smith.
7
Copernicus knew the inner workings of most starships like the back of his hand. He knew all the shortcuts and workarounds.
First, he activated the manual fuel feed into the liftoff engines, flooding the combustion chambers with a small amount of fuel. Then he accessed the engine computer controls and ran a bypass around the ignition safeties.
“Hold on,” he said to Aric. “This is going to be a bit bumpy.”
He ignited the aft combustion chambers.
A Type-L service freighter is a huge, gangly metal cylinder over three hundred feet long and half as high. It wasn’t easy to convert alien weight into Human metric tons, but Coop did it for this type of vessel years ago, during an especially long bout with boredom. The craft came in at four hundred thousand metric tons, in Earth standard gravity. On the Panorius moon, it was considerably less. But it did have mass, and that mass took an effort to get it moving. And move it did.
The rear reaction rockets fired almost directly into the prison factory, vaporizing anyone in the loading bay and sending the spaceship scraping along the grey surface of the moon. Coop was thrown back in his chair, held in by the harness. Aric let out a screech before once again passing out. The Human pilot now had to be careful. He had the ship moving but in a straight line across the rocky and dusty moon. He couldn’t angle the aft nozzles down to give them lift because that would bury the nose of the ship into the ground. And to angle them up would plant the aft end of the ship into the surface and possibly scrape off the gravity generators. He needed to get the forward jets going—and before the ship slammed into the rapidly approaching hill of an adjacent crater sitting dead ahead.
He tried the same priming maneuver with the forward jets, but the ride they were experiencing was so bumpy that he couldn’t keep his fingers on the computer pad. They hit a particularly rough patch that knocked his hands completely off the control console. They weren’t going to make it. Even shutting down the engines wouldn’t stop their forward momentum.
Forward! They’re going forward. That was the key.
Copernicus was able to hold onto the small lever for the aft jets. He angled them not up or down, but to the side, steering the huge ship sharply to the left and into a clearer part of the surface between the craters.
The problem: It was too sharp of a turn.
The spacecraft began to roll sideways before Coop could correct the angle of the nozzles. When his hand slipped off the controls again, it was lost.
The ship rolled over completely, darkening the bridge as the bulge on top of the hull became the bulge at the bottom. Emergency lights came on, but sight was the least of their problems. The ship was still rolling, making a complete rotation before beginning another. The only thing that saved them from being crushed was the gravity of the Panorius moon.
Copernicus fought to grasp the attitude controls to the aft jets again. He had an idea, and it might work if he could get control.
As his body swayed from side to side, he managed to grab the control toggle with his left hand. He used his right to make sure it stayed there. Then he waited, feeling the roll of the ship until he had it timed right. Then he angled the jets down, but only slightly. The bucking stopped, although not the spinning. They were off the surface, but not by much. When the ship spun again, the grey dust that was obscuring the viewport fell away. They were upside down, and only about twenty feet off the surface. Coop angled the jets again, and the cigar-shaped ship began to rock back in the previous direction. He continued to tweak the controls as the ship gained altitude. At a point where they were more than the length of the ship off the surface, Coop sent the lifting exhaust straight to the rear. The ship was still spinning slightly, but it was climbing, appearing almost like a bullet rifling from a barrel in extreme slow motion.
Another thirty seconds and they were in space, at which point Coop was able to stabilize the ship. He began a quick system check, grimacing at what he found. Although both gravity generators were still attached to the ship, the port side unit was crushed and out of commission. They would have to get by on one generator, which meant a shallow well capable of barely entering an event horizon for faster than light speed. Al
so, the rear cargo bay was open when they shot out from the loading dock. The pressure door had sheared off and the chamber was now open to the cold of space. Other than that, most other compartments were airtight. At this point, he had no way of knowing how the remainder of the crew faired during the rough and tumble takeoff. He was sure some would have preferred an MK flash bolt to the head rather than what they just experienced.
He looked over at Aric. He was alive, and just now coming to. The damn alien seemed to faint a lot, which, when Coop thought about it, did spare him some pain and anxiety. At least temporarily.
“Welcome back,” he said when Aric’s eyes focused on him.
“Are we away?”
“That we are.” Coop raised his eyebrows. “Away to where is another question.”
Aric quickly recovered and turned to the console in front of him. With expertise, he initiated a communication link, placing the built-in earphone in his ear before speaking. Coop couldn’t hear what he was saying. When the conversation was over, he turned back to Copernicus.
“I just sent you coordinates. Take us there. We will be met.”
Copernicus was startled by Aric’s sudden change in tone. He was much more commanding than before. Even so, Coop programmed in the coordinates.
“Where is this?” he asked.
“Not far, just beyond the outer boundary of the system.”
“What’s there?”
“A ship, another ship.”
“One of yours?”
“Yes.”
“You had a ship waiting for you? Why?”
“In case I was pardoned or a situation such as this arrived. They were not to wait long. Fortunately, they are still there.”
Coop responded to a proximity alarm at his console.
“That’s good to know because we have company. I hope your ship is a warship. We have one closing on us fast.”
