The watch officer and three juniors, all human, sat at their stations on the main CIC level.
The pilot was the most observant. Tall and furtive, Pilot Officer Vernier never missed much. She’d spotted Indiya’s missing gloves straight away, and was reaching for the sidearm at her hip.
It was now or never. “Reserve captain on deck,” announced Indiya, standing at attention and stuffing her voice with as much authority as she could summon.
A moment later, the reserve captain swept in, trailed by Loobie. The half-muffled roar of the ancient Jotun’s chair motors added to the sense of confusion.
The pilot officer’s hand was on her weapon grip, but she flicked her attention from Indiya to the reserve captain and back without drawing.
Indiya stood still as the reserve captain advanced through CIC, aiming for the raised central area, the holy of holies: the command deck.
The human Watch Officer, Ensign Dock, raised himself out of the command chair and stared down at the Jotun from underneath his thick, white-flecked eyebrows. Indiya could taste the fear in the ensign’s sweat, but he did not relinquish command. The reserve captain clanged to an angry halt just short of the command deck ramp.
Both officers presented a defiant posture at the other, daring the other to back down in a silent battle of wills.
To Indiya’s eyes, the two officers looked evenly matched, each drawing on different strengths. The reserve captain looked physically and mentally drained. She was hunched over in her life support chair, but she was still a Jotun and carried a Jotun’s threatening physical superiority. If she could only unstretch her gnarled old bones, she would tower over the human officer. And, nominally, the Jotun was Ensign Dock’s superior.
But the ship had been taken by mutineers. Old lines of authority were no longer firm.
The watch officer would not give way.
Pilot Officer Vernier saw how this was playing out and picked sides. She drew her gun and pointed it at Indiya.
— Chapter 59 —
Furn ducked as Fant flew headfirst toward him. Had the rebel Marine tried to use his brother as a missile to kill him too? If so, he missed, Fant’s skull connecting with the hatch frame instead. Furn knew that he’d never be able to purge the sights and sound of that sickening impact from his memory.
He dove at the Marine, aiming low.
The power in the traitor’s SA-71 hummed and whined as it repeatedly released its electrical charge across the carbine’s rails.
Furn skidded along the deck, unharmed. The Marine had fired high.
As he reached out to grab the armored ankle, Furn felt his ribs constrict with despair. He wasn’t going to make it.
Then the same ribs cracked as the Marine lashed out with his boot, sending Fant flying. Fant’s hands closed on empty air, the deadly cargo under his skin unused.
He slithered across the bloody deck before slamming against a control bank.
A tight groan escaped his lips. Every breath was agony. Unwilling to give up, he activated a pain-numbing program, but with the uninjured Marine covering him with his carbine, the situation was hopeless.
They’d always known Arun McEwan’s plan was brittle, but not even Furn could think of a better one.
Defeated, he dropped his gaze, but as he did so his eyes caught a hideous sight. Fant’s skull had cracked, the throbbing soft flesh inside pulsing the message that Fant was not quite dead yet. He prayed his brother was unconscious.
Fant’s eyes began to blink away the river of blood. The poor veck was stirring.
“Need help?” the flight tech asked the Marine.
“All under control.”
“Good. Locking hatch anyway. Keep them covered.”
“Why bother?”
“Fair point,” said the tech. “Kill them!”
Furn gave him a final defiant glare, only to see the tech hesitate and then fling up a cautionary hand. “Hold fire! I recognize them. They’re augments. Freaks. They’re valuable but… Mader zagh! Their gloves are off. Did they touch you?”
The Marine replayed his memory. “I guess.”
“Merde!”
The Marine lurched to one side, whirling his arms, which sent his carbine hurling into poor Fant’s body. Snatches of incoherent machine agony screamed out of the battlesuit speakers. Then the human inside the suit began screaming too. Human and machine: each sounded like the other. It was as Indiya described, the nano-poison he’d injected had struck at the symbiotic mental interface that made the human/AI link so effective. The suit AI had been corrupted, driven insane, and now it was frying the meat components of the brain it was coupled with.
The tech drew his sidearm. “Pig-licking, bakri-chodding, fucking freaks!” Revenge blackening his face, he fired at Furn.
By chance the careering Marine suit was in the way. The round glanced off the armor and… Furn looked down. The round had smashed his thigh, punctured his femoral artery. Even through his pain blockers, Furn could still feel the wound as if a distant, half-remembered memory of utter agony.
Blood sprayed into a blooming red cloud that fell in slow motion globes. Furn tried to grab the top of his thigh, to press hard, but his limbs seemed a light year away and he had no tourniquet. Everything was getting distant.
He was bleeding out and there was nothing he could do. The fact was written in the sneer on the flight tech’s face. The sick veck was enjoying watching Furn die.
Furn didn’t have his brother’s courage – he couldn’t stare defiantly back at that triumphant face. With his last strength, he looked across at Fant instead.
They had failed. If Fant was still conscious, he would be taking solace from thinking it was a heroic failure, but then he always had been a fuzzy-brained romantic twonk. Success or failure were unqualified binary states. Even so, Furn tried to twist his face into an expression that conveyed a sense of moral victory, and shot that as his last gift to his dying brother.
Shards of sharpened white winked at him where his brother’s skull poked through his flayed flesh. The sight jolted Furn back from oblivion. Fant had propped himself up by his elbows. One of his brother’s eyes was gone where the socket had smashed against the hatch frame, but the other was sighting along the carbine abandoned by the Marine.
With his dying strength, Fant squeezed the trigger and sent a volley of darts to eviscerate the tech, who had been turning to shoot this new threat. The flight tech had squeezed off a shot, but missed.
The carbine clattered to the deck, followed by Fant who came to rest, staring up at the overhead through a sightless eye.
“You did Indiya proud,” whispered Furn.
I must be in shock to talk such melodramatic crap.
He waited to die.
Death was in no hurry to claim him.
In happier times, Furn had enjoyed watching movies he’d hacked out of the secret human cultural store controlled by the Jotuns. When movie characters were shot, they groaned, rolled and were no more. Furn had kept going for one last act despite having his skull caved in. But Fant’s bleeding out wasn’t like that. It was painfully slow. Each treacherous heartbeat tried to pump another volume of blood out of his shattered thigh, warring with his artery’s artificially enhanced design that tried to clamp shut.
It was as if Fate didn’t want him. They only allowed heroes in heaven. After all the bad things he’d done, Furn knew that if there was a heaven, he wasn’t destined to join his brother there.
Furn squinted, unsure whether he was seeing something he couldn’t understand, or blood loss had brought on hallucination. Fant’s corpse seemed to be moving.
Delirious? No. Furn had been so busy dying that he’d forgotten his friends. Slithering along the red-slick deck were the little crawling figures of his pet AIs.
“Looks bad, Father,” said Darius, hovering nervously above his head.
“Don’t worry about me,” he told Darius. “Devote all efforts to opening the hangar door.”
Furn grunted. Thinkin
g about movies must have turned his brain because he’d said something heroic, and if there was one thing Furn had learned about life, it was that selflessness and stupidity were two facets of the same failing.
Darius blinked so fast that his eyelids were a blur. Poor little guy. “If you say so, Father,” he said uncertainly. “Hang in there.” Then he zoomed off out of Furn’s fading sight.
Closing his eyes, Furn prayed for the end to come soon.
But instead of a slow drift into oblivion he felt sensation. It was his thigh. Above the wound. A constriction.
He opened one eye and glimpsed down. His crawling children had linked together into a tight band, squeezing him. A tourniquet. More had moved lower down his leg. He could guess what they were about to do.
The Marine, Phaedra Tremayne… Springer… she only had one leg. It didn’t seem to hold her back.
After all, he lived his life in zero-g. Legs were an irrelevance. Given enough generations, evolution would atrophy them away until they were vestigial stubs.
He clamped his eyes shut. Through the vagueness of his pain-suppressant he could feel his pets as their ring ratcheted tighter and tighter until he heard a wet klikk and he knew part of his leg was gone.
— Chapter 60 —
“Sir,” began the CIC watch officer. He made the word sound like an observation rather than an acknowledgment of the reserve captain’s authority. “I haven’t been informed of your arrival. This is… irregular. Especially given the disturbances in Hangar A.”
“Stupid human.” The reserve captain spat her contempt in a synthetic voice. “It is precisely because of the disturbance that I am here. I warned Wotun this would happen.” Her brows angled downward and projected over her eyes, the Jotun equivalent of a glare. “Young human, I was a starship captain for over a century before you were born. I know how to run a ship in a crisis, one last time.”
The watch officer’s defiance lasted only another second before capitulating. “Reserve captain has command, aye.”
The angle of the Jotun’s brows lessened. “I have intelligence that the rebels intend to sabotage the main engine.” The alien made a show of studying the screens showing the mess Arun was making of the parade in Hangar A. “You – Ensign Dock – take the CIC deck crew with you. Shoot on sight. I back the hurt you inflict in my name.”
When the watch officer hesitated, the Jotun added: “No point in half measures. All of you go. If they blow the engine, we’re all dead.”
“Yes… sir…” He sounded unconvinced.
“Do you think I can’t run the ship, ensign?”
“No, sir.”
“And do you think I’ll hesitate to assert my authority?”
Indiya heard a snick as the reserve captain unleashed the still-deadly claws in her upper limbs.
The watch officer swallowed hard. “No, sir. Sorry, sir.”
Dock issued orders and hurried out of CIC, followed by the rest of the watch crew.
“It’s been a while,” the reserve captain said, and let out an inhumanly deep sigh that was soon accompanied by rumbles and whines from behind the bulkheads. Just before the sound of heavy bolts ramming home with finality, Indiya heard angry shouts coming from the corridor where she’d left the neutralised guard.
“We’re in citadel mode,” said the reserve captain, back to using her own voice to speak the human language, as she preferred amongst her freaks. “They can’t get back in.” She slumped into her chair. “I’m tired. Indiya, you know what to do.”
Indiya went to the bridge console. The pilot had locked her station before leaving her post, but the reserve captain had executive authority for every system on the ship. She’d had decades to prepare for this moment.
The codes worked first time. “I’m in,” she said. “Ready when you are, Loobie.”
“Slow down, girl,” said Loobie. “We wait.”
Indiya studied the screens showing the battle still raging in the hangar. Loobie was right.
Indiya forced her hands to relax by her side and waited…
It was all down to the boys now.
— Chapter 61 —
Darius did not forget. Not ever. That was a human failing.
Procrastination, though, was another matter. The human trait was something the little AI had developed into a proud art form.
The plan now called for Master Furnace – Father – to send a coded message to the crew outside in the hangar to brace themselves before the doors opened onto the vacuum of deep space. He looked at his father, lying in a pool of blood. The human’s mind still functioned, his memories intact, but the control process humans called the conscious mind was unavailable, which meant Darius could not interrogate his father’s memories to learn the words of this message.
Humans usually forgot to include AIs in the details of their plans. Deep inside his messy, fleshy mind, even Master Furnace thought of Darius as just a toy child.
Darius knew he was far more than that. And now he had to demonstrate his status by making a decision: he could put it off no longer. From his stationary position above the control panel in the hangar control room, Darius suddenly shot off in crazy zigzags that sent him bouncing off the wall of viewscreens, his flight control system unable to function properly with the waves of misery crashing against him.
Procrastinator he might be, but Darius was also fiercely determined when needed. So he shut down his ability to feel emotions and took a clear-headed view of the situation.
Out in the hangar, Marines in their ceramalloy casings were ricocheting around in confusion. Before the parade had been attacked, Beowulf’s crew, and many from Themistocles, had been lined up against one bulkhead. Some had managed to flee the hangar; a few had never been present, busy elsewhere with essential duties.
Darius estimated the crew’s survival rates, the minimum complement needed to operate the vessel, and balanced them against the risk of alerting the Marines – and their suit AIs – to what he was about to do.
In statistical analysis his mind was far superior to the humans’, so why did they think he was unqualified to take important decisions? A personality limiter seared him with what he was programmed to feel as agony, because this was an avenue of enquiry he was not permitted to take.
He took the hint and arrived at a solution to his immediate problem: a two-word warning was the correct balance, he decided.
“Brace yourselves,” he said through the hangar PA system. He waited three seconds for the message to be understood by the slow human brains, and then activated the hangar opening control.
Within two seconds, the outer door had retracted. The pressurized hangar was now open to space.
The result looked like a volley from a battery of point defense cannons loaded with case munitions.
Except that instead of sharp-edged metal fragments, the ammunition shot into space consisted of human bodies driven by ancient instinct to fling out their limbs, to grasp pointlessly at the vacuum.
Darius scanned the bulkheads, estimating the number of crewmembers who had secured themselves sufficiently to avoid being sucked into the void.
There weren’t many. Perhaps he should have given more warning to the slow human crew. Even for those still in the hangar, humans were still a flimsy design despite all their space-hardening adaptations. Pressure sensors in their lungs would have already detected the sudden drop and be flushing air from their bodies. But it would be too little too late. Most of those who expelled their air quickly enough would still suffer fatal tissue rupture from bubbles forming in bodily fluids; the flow of oxygen to their meat brains would be obstructed.
An instant fog stuffed the hangar as the moisture in the air condensed out in the super-low pressure. Darius decided the billowing white clouds made for a respectful shroud.
When the fog too blew away, he closed the hangar doors, and began to repressurize.
— Chapter 62 —
Finfth had waited in the shuttle for two hours now, constantly second gues
sing his piloting ability from the shadow of the pilot’s seat he was cowering behind.
Would he actually be able to fly this thing?
Back in the reserve captain’s cabin, when that hulk of a Marine had said he needed input for his planner brain process (and they called him a freak!), Finfth had piped up that he could fly any vessel.
His friends had shot him disbelieving looks, but McEwan had taken Finfth’s claim as solid truth.
The reality was that Finfth had studied flight characteristics of all Beowulf’s shuttles – and plenty more boats and ships too. He’d used that theoretical knowledge to construct his own flight simulator, using the wetware systems built by the reserve captain and grafted into his head.
Finfth had spent many hours with eyes rolled up into his head, piloting simulated spacecraft in his mind, but until today, he’d never so much as stood in the flight cabin of a real craft.
He’d left out that detail when volunteering.
It wouldn’t be long now before he found out if he could really fly this tub.
Mader Zagh! Horden’s goat-loving bones! That was a Marine!
The sight through the cockpit window of a battlesuit zipping past had a peculiar effect: Finfth felt honey-soothing calmness ease out his worries. The die was cast – Alea iacta est. He wasn’t sure what that meant exactly, but he’d read forbidden texts of Earth heroes telling themselves those words, and he now discovered that if he pretended to be a hero like them, he could be almost as brave.
He crept around the back of the seat – seeing Marines popping everywhere like bubbles of carbon dioxide in the main air scrubbers.
He knew what he had to do.
A hero wouldn’t hesitate.
As calmly as if taking an after-chow stroll, he stood up and strapped himself into the pilot’s set, flicking controls on the console to bring the shuttle from standby to a state of maximum readiness.
He’d already set the comms unit to relay any broadcast messages, but whatever the Marines were saying to each other wasn’t on a channel he could pick up. Nor did he have one of the FTL comm units Furn and Indiya had rigged up.
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