by M. D. Cooper
Jessica glanced around the room, recounting those present. Seven specialists on the far wall managing comm, a dozen scan officers to her left, a batch of ensigns that were prepared to function as backup coordination officers, the general, admiral, a passel of colonels and majors, and Harry’s central column.
And of course, the four soldiers with pulse rifles and ballistic sidearms.
She gave Trevor a sidelong look. Even unarmored, he could take out one, maybe two of the soldiers. She had watched him take down enemies in powered armor before. Then an idea hit her and she reached a hand over to him, carful to maintain the fiction that her hands were still locked together by the restraining cuffs.
She touched his leg and made a direct Link.
Trevor gave her a mental wink and a nod.
Jessica stood with a slight bounce and an embarrassed look. “I really gotta hit the head,” she whispered to the guard that spun and leveled his weapon at her chest. “Seriously, I’ve been holding it forever. I didn’t want to go before, because I didn’t want to miss anything, but now I know that if I don’t get it over with, I’ll have to run out during the grand finale.”
The guard shook his head. “Sit.”
“Are you serious?” Jessica asked, raising her voice. “I’ve gotta go number two! I’m going to shit my pants—it’s gonna stink, too. Do you think the brass over there wants to smell poop during their moment of victory?”
“What is going on over there?” Admiral Fenton asked from the far side of the holotank.
“Admiral Fenton, sir. The prisoner needs to use the head,” the soldier replied.
“What is this, primary school?” Garza growled without turning. “Go! Just don’t take your eyes off her.”
The soldier grabbed Jessica’s shoulder, spun her about, and shoved her toward the door. She was impressed by his fluid movements in the powered armor, and a little worried that she didn’t stand a chance against him.
They reached the door, and when the guard leaned forward to palm the panel, it all happened.
To her left, Jessica saw Trevor jump up and race across the room, lowering a shoulder as he closed on the column containing Harry’s node. The guards were as quick as they feared, and two pulse blasts hit Trevor as he ran, though it wasn’t enough to slow his three hundred twenty kilogram mass as it slammed into the AI’s column.
While Trevor was speeding across the room, Jessica crouched, wrapped an arm around one of her guard’s arms, and yanked on his weapon, pulling it toward another soldier.
She knew that if she tried to grasp and fire the weapon, it would discharge an electrical shock into her body. But slamming her fist into the guard’s finger, forcing it past the trigger guard—that might work.
By some combination of shock and surprise, the maneuver worked, and Jessica managed to get the weapon to fire at the next guard at the same moment Iris killed the lights, holotanks, and all the consoles just as Trevor smashed through Harry’s column.
The guard whose weapon she had forced to fire jerked his arm, and sent Jessica flying—directly into General Garza. She cycled her vision to an IR/RF mix and slammed an elbow into his jaw before flinging herself across the table at Admiral Fenton, who was drawing his sidearm.
Her boots hit him in the chest and throat, knocking the man to the ground. His sidearm went spinning, and Iris highlighted it on Jessica’s vision.
Jessica launched herself across the floor and snatched the handgun. The thing had a serious heft to it and it looked like the clip would hold at least nine shots.
She put one into the chest of a man who was lunging at her—one of the colonels who had been standing at another holotank—and then a second round went into an ensign who thought he could save the day.
Jessica scrambled toward Admiral Fenton and pressed the gun’s barrel against the back of his head, finger on the trigger.
“Everyone FREEZE!” she screamed, satisfied to see the room fall silent while Iris brought the lights back up.
“What in the damned core do you think you’re doing?” Garza yelled as Jessica pulled Fenton to his feet and backed against a wall.
One of the soldiers brought his rifle up and flipped its firing mode to a particle beam.
“Go for it,” Jessica goaded the man. “My AI is watching your trigger fingers, and mine is on auto. You may get me, but the admiral here will bite it.”
“Lower it!” Admiral Fenton barked at the soldier.
“No! Fire!” Garza countered. “We have a larger goal here than one man’s life. Take her out.”
This was where Jessica prayed her gamble would work. The entire time they had been sitting in the CIC, she had watched the general and admiral interact. She had also picked out which of the personnel in the room were on their separate staffs.
Without question, Admiral Fenton’s people were in the majority. It made sense since this was his flagship and his CIC. Garza, for all intents and purposes, was just along for the ride.
Even so, when the soldiers finally lowered their weapons, she breathed a long sigh of relief.
“Toss ’em,” Trevor said as he walked toward the soldiers while rubbing his shoulder. “Helmets off.”
The soldiers paused, but Fenton nodded and they complied.
Once the soldier’s rifles were in a pile at his feet, the helmets beside them, Trevor approached one of the soldiers and drove a fist into the side of the man’s head.
“Good aim with the rifle,” he said as the man fell unconscious, his armor still holding him erect. “Too bad my fist is a better weapon. Now, one at a time, the rest of you three get out of your armor. You first,” he said to the woman on the end.
Everyone in the room stood stock still, tense and unmoving as, one after the other, the soldiers’ armor split open and the men and women moved to the side of the room where the comm techs were standing.
“This is ridiculous,” Garza said as he shook his head. “You can’t stop what’s happening here. Even if you kill us all, your people are doomed.”
“Boy, you sure would like to know our plans, wouldn’t you?” Jessica asked with a smirk as Trevor crouched down over the pile of rifles and deposited a passel of nano on them to disable their bio-locks.
He stood a moment later with a rifle in each hand—one configured to fire pulse blasts, the other a particle beam.
“OK, Ogies, everyone over there, and on the floor. I want you bastards prone with your hands over your heads. You have ten seconds before I start shooting.”
Trevor’s tone of voice seemed to convince everyone present that he was deadly serious, and before his allotted time was up, everyone in the room, excepting Garza and Fenton was face down on the deck.
“You too,” Jessica said to Fenton and gave him a shove toward the group on the floor.
Fenton didn’t say a word, but his gaze spoke volumes. Jessica nodded to Trevor, who reached out and slapped Garza across the back of the head.
Trevor’s slap was like a punch a smaller man, and Garza’s
head fell forward and his face slammed into the surface of the holotable.
“That was a bit harder than I wanted,” Jessica said with a sigh.
“I didn’t expect him to be so spindly,” Trevor shrugged. “Thought he’d have spinal mods or something.”
Jessica held out a hand, and Trevor tossed her a pulse rifle before picking up another. They approached the group of Orion Guard personnel on the ground, glanced at one another, and opened fire.
* * * * *
“Hey, whoa,” Usef said as he raised his hands. “I can see how you probably don’t like interference, but this is a bit extreme.”
“You’re damn right I don’t like interference,” Phyla said with an ugly sneer. “So, which are you? Transcend or a colonist?”
Usef glanced around the engineering command center, and saw that several specialists were holding weapons on Misha and Cargo.
“Great plan,” Misha called out. “Sure glad we followed your lead.”
Usef gave his best smile. “I don’t know why you think we’re colonists, or Sendies, for fucks sakes, but we’re not, we just transferred off another ship to augment the old man’s staff. Look us up, we’re on the roster.”
“I looked you up, all right,” Major Phyla replied. “Your orders seemed a bit off, so I tossed a tightbeam over to the Sword of Orion, and sure enough, they’ve never heard of you.”
“Major Phyla! We’re running silent. No EMF at all, you’ve just breached a directive from the admiral. I’m going to have to report this…along with behavior unbecoming of an officer in the Guard. I’ll leave out the part where you’re holding a firearm on me if you put it down right now.”
Phyla cocked her head and widened her eyes in mock distress. “Oh, will you? Oh sir that would be so wonderful…. Now, drop your fucking sidearm and get on the ground!”
Jamie replied.
An instant later, all but four of the Orion Guard engineers fell. Cargo and Misha wasted no time in firing pulse blasts at the enemy while the element of surprise was in their side.
“Kinda thought our little fiction would hold up longer than that,” Cargo said as he approached Usef. “We usually had better luck out in Perseus.”
“Seriously?” Misha asked as he fired a pulse blast into the torso of an engineer he passed. “Have you forgotten half the shit we went through in Perseus?”
“Why’d you shoot that woman?” Usef scowled at Misha.
Misha shrugged. “She was moving. The HC probably didn’t work on her and she was faking. I shot her in the chest, not the head. She’ll be fine.”
“I’m not worried about her, just stay focused,” Usef said. “No games, no heroic shit. Jamie is running through their logs looking for some issue we can fake that requires running a reset on some system that will explain why no one is communicating down here.”
“Good. I lifted Phyla’s tokens when we took her out, so I can mimic her for basic status reports—though I didn’t get anything that will let me access higher-level feeds,” Usef added.
“I’ve got the door,” Cargo said as he walked to the command center’s main entrance. “I may have to let insistent people in, so be on your toes.”
“Never understood that saying,” Misha said as he moved to the room’s rear entrance. “I think that being on your toes would just be painful and distracting.”
* * * * *
Iris twisted her avatar’s lips in their minds.
Trevor brought a system up on the holotank. “What about this, can we trigger it remotely, say, in the engineering command center?”
“Trevor, you’re a genius!” Jessica grinned.
“I do have my moments,” Trevor replied. “I don’t know how to trigger a remote fire alarm, though, but the system doesn’t have a lot of security on it.”
Red strobes began flashing on the bulkheads and a call went out over the ship’s audible announcement system. “Fire fire fire, say again, fire in the ECC, all response crews to emergency stations, secondary ECC, prepare to come online.”
“Hmm…” Jessica mused, “that may have been too much.”
Trevor gave her a broad smile. “Well, at least there’s no way they can miss that.”
* * * * *
“What?” Cargo asked. “What fire?”
“Maybe one of these assholes is still conscious and triggered it,” Misha suggested.
“It’s the signal from Jessica,” Usef said. “Let’s make sure none of those teams get in and let the AIs steer this tub out of here.”
“I bet that captain on the bridge is having kittens right now,” Misha chuckled.
“I see a system here,” Usef offered, “but we don’t have the encryption keys to access it. The damn thing’s locked out.”
“General Quarters, General Quarters, we have intruders in the primary ECC,” the audible systems boomed. “Maintain low EMF ship-wide—the fleet is still on target.”
“Well, looks like we’re going to get to do our part now,” Cargo said with a grim smile.
* * * * *
“They have a secondary one?” Trevor asked as he took up a position behind a holotable, two rifles aimed at the CIC’s door.
“We’re not going anywhere,” Trevor said as the CIC’s door began to glow.
“Going to have to hope that they get this bird out of the fleet before Tanis does her big move, then,” Jessica replied grimly as she checked her rifles, setting them to fire kinetics at whomever came through the door first.”
FALL BACK
STELLAR DATE: 04.01.8948 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Landfall Space/Air Traffic Control Center
REGION: Knossos Island Carthage, New Canaan System
Ouri shook her head as she fired another round from her weapon’s slug thrower at an onrushing enemy soldier. Whoever was in charge out there had no compunctions about spending their soldier’s lives in an attempt to take the SATC tower.
If she were a betting woman, she’d put money on the company CO being on the transport Henderson had shot down, and that some fresh out of OCS second lieutenant was running the show out there.
The enemy soldiers fell back again, but this time, no further sounds came from outside. Ouri counted to thirty—that was the threshold she had set in her mind for how long it would take them to move heavy weapons to the fore.
It was a guess, really; the external cameras were all down, and the enemy had set off three EM blasts, knocking out most of her nanoprobes.
Her count hit thirty and she signaled for Sammy and Bill to get up to the third floor. She peered out from behind the CFT, prepared to give them cover, when her fears were confirmed.
