by M. D. Cooper
Harl handed Andy a disc-shaped mine and he walked toward the airlock. He made a surprised sound when the external door slid open. Andy immediately dropped to one knee with a pistol in his free hand.
The airlock was empty.
Lyssa said, sounding overly cheerful.
Andy walked into the airlock. Since only one set of power armor would fit in the lock at a time, they would have to take turns for the entry. Petral went in with Andy. Harl went next.
Brit stared up at the sparkling sky overhead as the airlock cycled. She wondered how many of those lights were Heartbridge ships and how quickly they could get here for backup once they realized no one on the Resolute Charity was responding to queries. She swallowed. That was yet another problem they hadn’t planned for back on Sunny Skies.
“Hope isn’t a plan,” she muttered to herself as the exterior door opened. Brit stepped inside the airlock and waited until the interior door opened. She stepped into a narrow maintenance corridor with pipework and bundles of filament running the ceiling.
She gave Andy a thumbs-up and he turned to jog down the corridor in the direction of the command deck. When they reached a main corridor, they immediately found groups of people in Heartbridge uniforms slumped against the walls. Some still stood in groups with their heads together, arms wrapped around shoulders, as if whispering secrets to each other. One woman looked at them with bleary eyes and then slid down the wall to rest on the floor, head lolling to one side. One man stumbled along the side of the corridor, hanging on as if he thought he was going to slide away as he kept half-falling.
Brit walked around a woman moaning in the middle of the floor and passed through the doors at the end of the corridor. On the other side was a wide, round space that made up the command deck. Two levels of floor dropped to the main holodisplay where a model of Jupiter currently hung, glowing malevolently. Crewmembers sat in various states of disarray around the room, some hanging onto their consoles while others were on their hands and knees, dry heaving onto the floor. They all looked to be lower ranking officers.
Andy moved a man away from the first pilot’s console and pulled off his gloves.
Harl warned.
He tapped feverishly on the console and activated the flight plan.
A screeching sound filled the air. Brit raised her rifle and scanned the room, looking to see if one of the crew had activated an emergency claxon. The sound was coming from the holodisplay. Jupiter had disappeared and now the form of a woman in a green shipsuit stood in the middle of the tank. Her face was a mask of rage. She pointed at them, gesticulating angrily, but no words came out of her mouth.
Petral barked a laugh.
Andy laughed.
Petral let out a low whistle.
Lyssa stopped mid-sentence.
Brit met Andy’s gaze.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
STELLAR DATE: 10.02.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: HMS Resolute Charity
REGION: Europa, Jupiter, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
The high-pitched sound of a woman laughing cut through the low roar of conversation in the broad room. Cal looked in the direction of the sound. It wasn’t that wild laughter was inappropriate at a stuck-up party like this, populated by governmental functionaries and private industry vampires, but it was coming about two hours too early. Everyone was comfortably drunk or altered at this point, still discussing business opportunities over cocktails. The debauchery wouldn’t happen until later, so people had something to blackmail each other with.
Cal frowned. Maybe she had drunk too much too fast, but something about the quality of the laughter put his teeth on edge. The crowd shifted as someone obviously stumbled into someone else, which brought on more laughter, followed by the sound of someone dry heaving loudly.
Taking a sip of his drink, Cal realized the back of his throat had become scratchy. Was he catching a cold? He glanced at Gala, who was still deep in conversation with the captain of a larger ship Heartbridge had been using for PR runs.
“Hey,” Cal said, trying to get her attention. He paused, coughing, and took another drink to soothe his raw throat. He looked around and noticed other people feeling at their throats, sipping drinks as they frowned. A man put his arm around another man’s shoulders as he started to list to the side, suddenly more drunk than he had been
a moment before.
Cal looked at his drink. Had they been drugged? He sniffed the liquor. There was a metallic smell in the glass but when he took his nose away from the liquor he still smelled the scent. There was something in the air.
He resisted the urge to shout that something was happening to the environmental control. That would start a riot. Cal grabbed Gala’s arm and pulled her toward him. He searched the far wall for an exit and found a doorway half-hidden behind a curtain. Perfect.
“What’s your problem?” Gala demanded, but couldn’t finish her question when she started coughing. Cal continued to pull her along with him. She didn’t resist enough to make a scene. They looked like lovers running off for a private spot. There was also the fact that everyone around them was caught up in their own journey of discovery that something was wrong in the room.
When they reached the door, Cal swiped the curtain out of the way and activated the panel. He had to use the special security token Jirl had given him to override the lock. The door slid to the side and he pushed Gala into a service corridor, then ensured the door slid closed behind them, shutting off his view of a room that was about to erupt in stumbling panic.
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” Gala demanded, still coughing slightly. She took a deep breath and frowned. She grabbed at the wall to steady herself.
“There’s something wrong with the air,” Cal said. “My guess is oxygen poisoning. The back of my throat feels like sandpaper. I feel nauseous. People are out there stumbling. Before long they’re going to start passing out and the brain damage is going to set in.”
“No,” Gala said. “We have to do something. I’m going to call the ship.”
“Where are they?” Cal asked. “Are they still trying to get fuel?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t had an update since the whole price fiasco. I think the last station was out when they got there.”
“I think we’re under attack,” Cal said plainly.
Gala’s hand went immediately to the pistol at her waist. “Where?”
“Not here,” Cal said. “If they’re smart, they’ll be hitting the command deck or the engines. It depends on what they’re trying to accomplish. I knew it wasn’t a good idea for Heartbridge to put so much of their fleet in one place. This is what happens when a bio-company tries to play at politics.”
“I don’t know about that,” Gala said.
“Yeah?” Cal asked, raising an eyebrow. “Want to make a bet?”
“Not when you get that look on your face. Before we start talking system politics, how about we find our own way out of this mess.” She coughed again and spat a glob of phlegm on the deck. “I need an EV suit, I’ll be damned if this is going to knock me out.”
“My thoughts exactly,” Cal said. “We need to find some suits. Have you got the schematics for this ship? This looks like some kind of maintenance corridor. If there’s an airlock nearby, there should be suits.”
Gala nodded, coughing, and got a distant expression as she checked her Link. She glanced at Cal. “This way,” she said, and turned to jog down the corridor, away from the ballroom.
“So if you go down,” Cal asked, “does that arm keep fighting?”
The captain gave him a sideways smirk. “It grabs on and won’t let go. I wish anyway. It’s got a neural control, so if I’m unconscious it isn’t going to do anything. That way it can’t be used against me.”
“I’m glad somebody thought of that.”
“Probably happened to some other sucker in the past.”
The corridor hit a T-intersection and Gala turned left. From the warning markers on the wall, they were at the hull. The air tasted stale but Cal figured that was a good thing. It meant whatever was happening in the more populated areas of the ship hadn’t reached here since the air wasn’t recycled as often. In any case, he took short breaths.
A maintenance airlock appeared, along with a cabinet with four EV suits hanging inside. They quickly grabbed the suits and pulled them, including the cylinder-shaped helmets, on. Cal rummaged back in the cabinet and pulled out a handheld tap welder that released a bright blue spark when activated.
“What are you going to do with that?” Gala asked.
“It’s better than trying to bite them when my pulse pistol goes dry.” He clipped the welder to the EV suit’s harness and checked the joint seals. The suits were cheaply made and certainly not designed for combat. He wouldn’t want to trust them more than a few hours in vacuum. He activated the internal environmental control and plas-scented air flowed into his helmet. Cal sucked a deep breath, then eased off, checking the gas levels.
“Looks like I’ve got enough for three hours,” he said. “How’s yours?”
“Same,” Gala said. She adjusted her helmet’s neck seal, then turned to face Cal. “First order of business needs to be communication. We need to get an emergency call out and then try to determine who’s attacking the ship.”
“They might not even be on board,” Cal said.
“I don’t understand why the failsafe didn’t kick in. The onboard AI should never have let this happen.”
“I would imagine they have control of the AI.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Evidence indicates otherwise,” Cal said.
Cal considered the options. The problem was that they didn’t really know who might be on board. He suspected Brit Sykes but if she was going to attack the same way she had on Clinic 46, she would have opened with some debilitating attack on the ship, not the crew. What they had done left the crew to deal with later. Unless they all died of oxygen poisoning, which was still on the table.
he said.
Cal raised an eyebrow but didn’t respond. She sounded like she was getting attached, which was the last thing he wanted. He turned in the direction of the command deck, which had to be at least forty decks above them, and started jogging.
Scanning the side corridors as he moved, Cal composed an update for Jirl with the new information. She might have better info on other entities that would want control of the Resolute Charity or any local players who didn’t like the Heartbridge presence. A few dangling threads pulled at his thoughts. He didn’t like how the Sykeses seemed to have been a step ahead of him during the breech mission on the Worry’s End. He didn’t like how the shuttle had picked up Tim Sykes, when that seemed like the most remote possibility.
Tim’s situation should have distracted them, not led Brit Sykes back to the clinic. Their actions indicated they were getting help, maybe even help from within Heartbridge. He debated adding these questions to the update. He didn’t want to make it sound like events were getting out of his control but he wasn’t ready to admit that they were. For a month now he had been reacting rather than leading events, and he hated it.
He remembered six months ago when he’d learned Jickson had disappeared and his first thought had been that the pasty researcher had finally drunk himself to death in some filthy spacer bar. When Jickson turned up on Cruithne, having managed to get halfway across InnerSol with both company propert
y and his oversized heart still beating, Cal had wondered just how Jickson could have done that on his own.
While Hari Jickson was a genius when it came to what he had called theory of mind, he hadn’t been the best at simply existing. Half the time his suits didn’t match or they smelled like they’d been kept at the bottom of a vodka bottle. He was the kind of person who immediately irritated Cal, someone who had depended on others their whole life to keep them from disintegrating. The world was a blur around the brilliant focal point of Jickson’s ideas.
If some person or agency had been assisting Jickson, then there was no reason they should have stopped when the scientist died.
Cal decided to leave out the notes about why he thought the Sykeses might be getting help and instead ask Jirl to focus on Jickson and how he’d reached Cruithne in the first place. The attacks on Clinic 46 and the Resolute Charity indicated that some greater force was acting against Heartbridge than he had the scope to see. Cal hated the idea of being a pawn. He wanted to strike back, to counterattack, to make them feel confused and anxious. He wanted to punish them for assisting Jickson.
The maintenance corridor ended on a doorway that led them back into a regular work area. The rooms were marked as repair facilities and then a dormitory. Crew stumbled in the corridors or leaned against walls, holding their heads. A few reached out to Cal and Gala as they walked past, looking more like pained ghosts than humans.
They reached the level’s central lift and stepped inside the car. Somehow, in the closed space, Cal’s breathing in his helmet seemed louder. He kept his gaze fixed on the display panel showing the level numbers as the car rose. His vision blurred slightly and he shook his head. The metallic taste had come back into this mouth.
