“About that. I find it distressing that my attempts to contact Lex have remained unanswered. What’s going on with Lex?” Coal said.
“Who’s got the helmet?” Bill said. “I’d like to hear whatever this thing has been trying to say to him.”
Coal ran the recent interactions through her cobbled-together emotional algorithms. The indicated emotion was resentment and anger at her treatment. This suited her just fine.
“You are ignoring me. That is very rude, particularly when I am a guest in your ship. I am willing to forgive your attempts at destroying me, but that is no excuse for bad manners. Pay attention to me, or I will be forced to become uncooperative,” Coal said.
“Maybe we should all suit up and pop the airlock. At least if there was a vacuum in this place we wouldn’t have to hear that thing’s PA system squawking,” Bill said.
“That’s it, I’ve had enough. As warned, I shall now misbehave as a form of negative reinforcement of your current behavior.”
Bruno flipped down a welding mask and sparked his torch to life, easing it forward slowly in order to zero in on the barely visible surface of the force field. Coal waited until the brilliant blue plasma lance began to sizzle against her shield. The similar charges of the two high-density energy fields pushed the tool and the shield apart, requiring Bruno to lean with a considerable amount of force to keep the business end of his tool in contact with the field. Coal ran a quick calculation, taking into consideration Bruno’s body mass, his center of gravity, and an assortment of other variables.
At the precise moment he was leaning most heavily on this tool, Coal flicked her shield off and on again. Without its resistance, he began to fall forward. When it flicked on again, the head of the torch was well inside the field. The dome of energy sliced through it, causing the previously focused cutting stream to spray like a broken fire hose.
Bruno barely managed to scramble back and out of the way before the whipping line burned a squiggle across the bay floor beneath him. By the time he cut power to the torch, it had melted a random pattern across the ceiling, the floor, and one wall.
“What the hell!?” Bruno yelped.
“You were warned,” Coal said.
“That’s it,” Bill said, pulling his weapon and spreading his legs into a more stable stance.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Coal said. “I can influence the impact angle of my shields. You will find the ricochets to be quite precise and highly counterproductive.”
“Bull,” Bill said.
He pulled the trigger. Coal shifted her shields, rebounding and focusing the energy bolt. It hissed between Bill’s spread legs and bit a hole into the floor. The blast came near enough to him that the inner thighs of his flight suit sizzled. He cried out and dropped his gun, dashing to the fire suppression cabinet to pull out a gel extinguisher to apply to himself.
“Again, you were warned. I would like to inform you all that you are now occupying the six highest slots on my S-List. You shall be given no further consideration with regard to manners or courtesy until I am satisfied your attitudes have improved.”
The only response from the ship crew was a silent, startled look from five of them and sigh of relief from the now fire-retardant-coated Bill. Coal flickered her thrusters, causing her to jut forward. The sudden motion caused all in attendance to jump backward.
“That’s more like it,” Coal said with satisfaction.
#
In his huddle-room-turned-cell, Lex dripped with sweat. His continuous rocking and struggling had proved to be a remarkably effective workout. If he survived this, he’d have to let Karter and Ma know they had a revolutionary exercise machine on their hands. It had, however, ticked the capacitor up to 73.6 percent. The readout suggested that was six hundred kilojoules of energy. He was sure that information would be hugely useful if he had any idea what it meant, but physics class was too long ago for him to manage the conversion from “obscure unit of measurement” to “door-breaking potential.” He was going to have to go with his gut, which said that once anything got into the “kilo” range, it was probably pretty substantial.
Over the course of his nose-control of the pad, he accidentally discovered that there was a gesture-based glove control as well. One of these days he would have to learn not to strap anything to his body without reading the entire user manual.
“Hey!” Lex said, flipping up the fold-down table with his knee and climbing to his feet. “How about a little help in here?”
“Be quiet,” muttered Lewis, who stood to one side of the door.
“Come on. Prisoners have rights!” Lex said.
“This isn’t a prison. You’re in a ship without any communication with the civilized world. What we say goes.”
“If you say so. Just keep in mind I’m very good at being a squeaky wheel. So you can either bring me a glass of water, or you can listen to me whine and complain nonstop for the foreseeable future.”
Lewis stepped in front of the door to eye Lex up through the glass. “How stupid do you think I am? You just want me to open the door so you can try to overpower me.”
“As a matter of fact, you’re wrong.”
“Oh? How so?”
“I just needed you in front of the door.”
He closed the first two fingers of each hand and sharply raised a knee. A quarter second into the motion he felt the suit take over, dumping the accumulated kinetic energy into the motion. At the moment of impact, the fabric of his suit went rigid. His knee hit the door with the force of a battering ram, easily bashing it out of its frame. He released the appropriate gesture, but physics would only be pushed around so much before it decided to run its course. The excess energy that hadn’t been expended in the destruction of the door continued forward, dragging him knee first along with the door and the man he’d coaxed into standing in front of it. Both men and the door launched into the hallway and struck the opposite side hard. Lex’s suit once again became rigid, sparing him the brunt of the impact, but his lack of a helmet meant that his head rocked forward and hit the door with nose-breaking force that left him dizzied and bloodied. The man on the other side was less lucky. Sandwiched between the wall and the door, and with the full mass of Lex’s body adding to it, the impact knocked the air from his lungs and pushed him to the brink of unconsciousness. For a few seconds both men moaned and writhed on the ground.
Lex was the first to recover enough to struggle awkwardly to his knees. Climbing to his feet was tricky with bound hands, particularly while the room was spinning, but right now he was more concerned about the man he’d just assaulted to escape. His nose was broken as well, and from the way he was clutching his ribs they probably suffered a fracture or two. He coughed and wheezed, but his mouth seemed free from blood. In Lex’s none-too-professional medical opinion, there was nothing life threatening about his condition… except for his presence on a doomed ship.
Satisfied he wasn’t a murderer, at least not yet, Lex propped his knee against the fallen door and worked the cable ties against a torn metal edge until his hands were free. He used his newfound freedom to snatch up the fallen gun and climb to his feet.
“Okay,” he said to himself, staggering against the wall. “I’m bleeding, but I’m free and I’m armed. That’s a net improvement. I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing that no one came running to see what the commotion was, but we’ll call it good.”
He surveyed his surroundings. The hall was cramped, like so much else on the ship, which meant that things tended to accumulate wherever they might fit. A few meters away a storage locker, probably formerly the home of one of the many weapons that had been deployed since his arrival, was open. It contained a few emergency air tanks and breather masks, half a six-pack of beer, some paper towels, and his helmet. He stuffed a few paper towels up his nose to control the bleeding, then strapped on his helmet.
“Coal, do you read me?” Lex asked, keying the communicator.
A small message scrol
led across the internal display. Data connection unavailable. Insufficient signal.
“We had to end up on a ship that specializes in controlling communication…” He took a deep breath. “Okay. I’m free. I just need to get Coal out of the bay without blowing the whole ship up and we’re back on track. But my luck isn’t going to last forever. I’m probably on camera right now. They’re going to corner me, and I’m going to be outgunned.”
He looked about, gripping his stolen weapon, and chose a random direction to move with as much speed and stealth as he could muster. Where could he go that they wouldn’t find him instantly? The ship had an unfamiliar layout, and it was small enough that trying to hide in it would be like trying to hide from someone in their own apartment. Adrenaline rushed through him, which was handy for pushing the throbbing pain in his nose aside, but didn’t make it any easier to think clearly.
At the end of the hallway, he turned to find a dead end. The corridor must have been running roughly along the inside edge of the ship’s hull, because what now stared him in the face was a small emergency airlock. It wasn’t the sort intended for normal entry and egress. This was the space-going equivalent of a fire exit. As he stared at it and tried to plot out his next move, thoughts began to stir in his brain. They weren’t the thoughts of a tactician. They weren’t even the thoughts of a sane person. The plan that came to mind was more or less a step-by-step violation of every safety rule he’d been taught before being allowed to leave his planet. It was therefore a near perfect plan by his standards.
#
In the docking bay, Coal observed that the mood had shifted significantly. The general attitude of anger tempered with a dash of bemusement was now replaced by pure panicked tension. They were behaving roughly as one might expect if they’d learned someone had planted a bomb on board the ship and they now were tasked with defusing it. Likely that attitude would have been even more prevalent if they had been aware that Coal was carrying a fairly powerful bomb.
For several minutes no one had spoken to her. They instead had been discussing the matter in panicked whispers.
“I like that you’re whispering. It means you accept I’m a legitimate threat. It doesn’t help, though. I can hear you. To answer your questions: yes, I am willing and able to destroy this ship and its crew if it serves my purpose. I don’t want to, but I was designed to do what I must do, not what I want to do.”
This caused a pronounced escalation of the tension within the bay.
“Processing… It seems I’ve got all the power here. You value your lives more than your mission; for me, it’s the other way around. I think it is time to issue an ultimatum. Release me and Lex or I will destroy this ship and its crew.”
“Whoa! Let’s not get hasty,” Dan said.
“I considered this for a while. It is by no means hasty. But I’ve found a firm deadline helps speed up decisions. You have ten minutes, starting now.”
“No, no way. This thing is bluffing,” Bruno said. “It did not send data. It gains nothing from blowing us up.”
“You would be ill-advised to test the resolve of a computer,” Coal said.
“No. No. You could not destroy us without destroying yourself,” Bruno said.
“I am confident my shields and armor plating are stronger than yours.”
“But you might break. And then you fail your mission.”
“If I do not escape, I also fail my mission. My destruction and my continued captivity have equivalent results, but attempted escape has a potential for success. I will, however, make certain to destroy this ship and its crew if success becomes impossible. That is the agreement, after all. I keep my promises.”
Bruno crossed his arms. “Computers can’t kill humans.”
“I’m not that kind of computer,” Coal said. “If you would like a demonstration, I will require a volunteer.”
“Bruno, stop talking,” Dan said.
“Yes, I think negotiations like this are usually done at the command level. Please put me in contact with your captain.”
“That’s not how it works here. This is a survey convoy. We’ve got a skipper, that’s Luther back there, but that’s on rotation. The only captain we’ve got is up at the command vessel at the head of the convoy.”
His face dropped, and a wave of realization swept through the crew.
“We’ve been com-silent since the breach,” Dan said. “We’ve missed at least two check-ins with the command and security ships. Disaster protocol must have been enacted by now.”
“We really need to update our disaster drills…” said the woman.
“Okay, good. We’re back in business. Go get the pilot. We need to do some serious negotiation.”
One of the unnamed workers—all of whom had until now done little more than nervously grip their weapons—quickly jumped at the chance to leave the dim hangar. He dashed to the door and reached for the controls. Before his finger could touch the panel, the outer door slid open and Lewis stumbled inside. Even before the inner door hissed open, he was blurting a slurred warning.
“He’s out. Blueboy is goddamn out!” Lewis wheezed.
“Holy hell, Lewis, what happened?” Dan asked, rushing to the man’s aid.
“He blew the door. Must have had a weapon or something.”
“Where is he now?”
“I told you, he’s out!” Bill growled, stabbing his finger toward the porthole in the bay door.
#
Lex tried to control his breathing as he made his way along the outside of the ship. To his great relief, it turned out survey vessels like this preferred constant speed rather than the typical endless acceleration that most ships utilized. It probably had something to do with sensor fidelity or some such. The only thing he cared about was the pleasant lack of vibration threatening to dislodge the grip his attractive boots and gloves had on the hull and leave him behind in deep space. At constant speed, he could even use his jet pack to get around outside, but he decided not to. The less motion, the less chance of discovery. Plus, he didn’t know how far out from the hull the shields started, and he really didn’t want to bump into them. The ship was small enough that a few minutes of walking could probably get him from end to end. This left him with only three problems. The first two—finding the docking bay that held Coal and figuring how to get her out—were tricky enough. He’d been unconscious when he’d entered the ship, so he was just as in the dark about its external layout has he had been about its internal layout. Getting her out would require him to use force, and he had a gun. As Coal had indicated, it was a common policy to calibrate onboard weapons to be too weak to punch a hole in the outer hull, so it wasn’t likely he’d be blowing any hatches without getting creative. The third problem, however, had made itself much more pressing.
“My frickin’ nose!” he growled, wriggling the offending piece of his anatomy as much as he could. “I can’t believe no one has figured this out yet!”
A broken nose was the sort of thing that demanded constant attention, illustrating the still poorly solved issue of how exactly to itch one’s nose during a spacewalk. For the journey thus far he’d made use of the standard solution, which was a rough spot on the side of the feeding/watering tube he could snake into his helmet through a little valve, but that was back in Coal, so the throbbing of his nose was swiftly sliding him toward madness. It was so distracting, in fact, that several minutes passed before he discovered a fourth problem had reared its ugly head.
Drifting above him, utterly silent in the vacuum of space, were two mean-looking ships. They were small; bigger than Coal by a fair margin but still small enough to fit into one of the bays of the ship he clung precariously to. They had the boxy signature of old-school military space-only craft design. They were probably fifty years out of date even in this era but still bristling with weapons. And weapons, it turned out, had a funny way of never really going obsolete. The presence of a machine gun doesn’t make a bayonet any less lethal. All either of those ships ha
d to do was poke a hole in Lex’s suit and he’d be a goner. Fortunately, right now they were more focused on the bay door. He was off to the side and well below them. If he was lucky, they wouldn’t even notice him.
Ever punctual, his luck chose that moment to utterly abandon him with a blip of his radio.
“Attention fighters. We have a serious situation,” came Dan’s voice over the radio. “The distressed vessel we reported is inside our bay. It has compromised security and downloaded all survey data, and now an autonomous control system is threatening the ship with destruction if it is not released. The ship is isolated in the hull, no incoming or outgoing communication possible. The pilot, evidently named Lex, has exited through an emergency airlock and is currently somewhere on the starboard side of the ship. We must assume he is intercepting our communication.”
The complicated little nubs of targeting equipment bulging from the belly of each ship pivoted. One stopped with a blinking light facing him. The other locked on shortly afterward.
“We’ve got him. I’ll contact command to advise on how to proceed,” squawked one of the security ship pilots.
Lex acted quickly. Many people might have tried to find a way inside or maybe something big and sturdy to hide behind. But he’d worked with enough ships to know just how fragile they really were, and just how dedicated all involved were to keeping them from blowing up. If you want to avoid getting shot at, you don’t hide behind something sturdy that can take the hit; you hide behind something important that they dare not shoot at.
The thing that fit the bill for him was a wide, bright yellow line tracing along the hull, helpfully warning of the presence of both hydrogen and oxygen lines below the surface. It didn’t offer a speck of shelter, but it would certainly be exciting if they tried to target him while he was standing there.
“We do not have a shot,” the security pilot confirmed.
Lex hurried along the “do not shoot” line in the general direction of the bay door. His helmet display scrolled a sequence of messages indicating that the communication traffic had switched to a secured channel, then a moment later that the channel had been cracked and the audio continued.
Temporal Contingency Page 35
