The gaps presented the greatest vulnerability for the assault team. The primary danger was being detected by a pirate craft patrolling the area. Less likely, but no less fatal in consequence, was being struck by a rogue asteroid or meteoroid. Even a fist-sized rock traveling at sufficient speed would punch through the thin hull of the vessel and potentially kill everyone aboard.
The final, and perhaps most likely risk, was that of mechanical breakdown. The crew had limited fuel and only so many oxygen tanks. If—for any reason—they didn’t get inside the pirate fortress before their forty-two hours of air ran out, they were just as dead as if the pirates found them and blew them out of the sky.
It would be a hungry forty-two hours as well. Because the skiff was unpressurized, no one could open their suits to eat. The suits could provide sips of water and some food paste, but that was all. It would keep them alive, but wouldn’t do much to fill their bellies. The team’s utility belts contained protein bars, weapons, and replacement power packs. But that was for later, once they got inside Smuggler’s Cove.
If they got that far.
“Mr. Ishtawahl, this is Dr. Felmendar.”
The voice on the intercom sounded tired, weak—as if the doctor might not make it many more months. But that wasn’t Ishtawahl’s problem. As long as the scientist kept the nukes coming on schedule, Felmendar could drop dead the day after the last one was completed, for all the Alberian cared.
“Yes, doctor, what is it? I am very busy. Is there a problem?”
“No, no problem. You asked to be kept informed of the progress of the nuke. I just wanted to let you know that I am running diagnostics on it as we speak. I do not anticipate any problems; it should be ready for pickup in two hours.”
“Good. Thank you, doctor. I will have my people come for it then.”
“Thank you. I need to free up the space to start working on the next one.”
“Jern, have you figured out yet where those damn escapees are staging from?” Penrod sat behind his desk, while Ishtawahl stood before him.
“Yes and no.”
“That’s informative. Care to explain further?”
“We know they’re coming from somewhere deep in the warren of unused tunnels the miners left behind. But we don’t know where. I suspect we have not found them because they keep changing their hiding place so they can attack from different quarters each time.”
“Okay, but why can’t you just flush them out? Send most of our guards in and sweep the whole place.”
“Tarl, you haven’t been in there. I have. There are literally hundreds of kilometers of tunnels in three dimensions. You can start on one level and end up going up or down several more levels. This was a working mine, riddled with tunnels, not a preplanned office building. Everything is irregular, haphazard, unorganized. The tunnels meander wherever the veins of ore went. We have no blueprints of the unfinished area. Undoubtedly the prisoners know the routes better than we do, and equally likely they have the main passageways booby-trapped. If we take an armed contingent in there, we are just asking to be slaughtered. Plus, we do not have enough people to keep the prisoners from doubling back after we have gone through an area.” He frowned. “We have discussed these issues before.”
“Yes, and I wasn’t any happier with the answers then than I am now. All you’re giving me is excuses. I’m tired of excuses. I want results. Fine, so you can’t sweep the whole warren. How about bricking up all the exits from the areas we’re using? Pen them in so they can’t get to us. Let them starve in there.”
Ishtawahl sighed and shook his head. “That is not feasible either. There are no specific “entrances” to wall off. There are tunnels we use that we simply left unfinished beyond a point. There are main corridors that have dozens of side passageways that we do not use. We would have to seal off hundreds of tunnel mouths. That would take weeks—months even—and the prisoners have the explosives to blow up the walls we erect faster than we can build them.”
The vein in the center of Penrod’s forehead began to pulse. “Damn it, Jern, quit telling me why you can’t do everything I suggest. Tell me what you can do!”
Ishtawahl’s own voice turned cold. “Look, Tarl, given the personnel I have, the size of this facility, the armed, organized nature of the opponent, the intelligence of the opponent—led by a veteran Unity officer—and all the limitations I was saddled with by your reluctance to spend the money I said we needed for security, there is only so much I can do. Right now, our best hope is for Captain Jeffries to make a fatal mistake that allows us to wipe out a significant portion of his force.”
Penrod’s eyes bulged in their sockets, his face flush with anger. He stood, shoving his chair back hard enough for it to hit the wall behind him.
“That’s it? That’s the best you can do? You have nearly two hundred guards at your disposal that you can use to hunt down the prisoners and the best you can do is sit on your fat ass and wait for Jeffries to screw up?”
Ishtawahl straightened to his full 2.3 meter height and bared his 120 razor-sharp teeth. “Watch your words, human. I will take only so much abuse from you. You have handcuffed me from the very beginning. This fiasco is of your own making. Had you allowed me to design and equip this facility as I recommended initially, we would not be having these problems today!”
“You’re going to stand there and blame me for your incompetence, you scaly son of a bitch?”
“Incompetence? No one calls me incompetent!”
Ishtawahl lunged for Penrod before stopping cold, talons outstretched. Mere centimeters beyond his reach, Penrod held a blaster pointed at Ishtawahl’s face.
“Back away, Jern.” He waited while Ishtawahl took two steps back. Without taking his eyes off the Alberian, he used his other hand to operate the intercom.
“Mek, please bring a security detail. You’ve just been promoted to my second-in-command. Take Mr. Ishtawahl to a holding pen.”
“Yes sir. Be right there.”
“Thank you.” Penrod disconnected the call. “I’m sorry it had to come to this, Jern, but you left me no choice.”
A moment later, MekFensal arrived with two guards. All three held blasters on Ishtawahl.
“We will take it from here, sir,” MekFensal said.
“Good. Thanks,” Penrod replied. He put his blaster back in the under-desk holster from which he’d pulled it.
When he looked up, the three blasters were now aimed at him.
“Did you forget?” Ishtawahl gloated. “I hired the security staff. They are loyal to me.”
Penrod clenched his jaws in anger.
“Now,” Ishtawahl continued, “put your hands up and come around the desk.
Penrod did as he was ordered. “Bastard.”
Ishtawahl’s chuckle sounded suspiciously like a growl. “I know who my male parent is. Do you? Besides, I am only doing what you tried to do to me a moment ago. I had intended for this to happen at a more opportune time, but….”
He shrugged and turned to MekFensal. “Take Penrod to a holding cell. He is to be processed with the other slaves.”
“Yes sir,” MekFensal replied. He gestured to one of the guards to place the prisoner in shackles.
“I’ll kill you for this!” Penrod shouted over his shoulder as the two guards led him away.
Ishtawahl stood in the doorway, grinning evilly through all those teeth. He called to Penrod. “Keep telling yourself that, while you are cleaning animal pens on the backwater planet where I am sending you. It is quite frigid there. It is an embargoed world where they still live in stick huts and use wood fires for heating. Maybe rage will keep you warm at night. There are no modern conveniences, electricity, or medicines, unfortunately.”
Penrod paled at the thought. If there was anything in the universe he feared, it was being poor and powerless again. Jern knew that, the son of a bitch. As a child, Penrod had lived in squalor, hungry and fearful of being beaten on a drunken whim. When he escaped slavery by stowing away on
that freighter, he promised himself that he would die before allowing himself to return to slavery. And now, after accomplishing so much, after raising himself from the mudpits of Albezon to the corporate penthouse, he was about to lose it all and return to the conditions he’d fought so hard to rise from.
Hell no! No matter what happens, I’m not going back. I’ll make them kill me first!
Ishtawahl wasn’t yet done gloating. “I do hope you do not come down with some unpleasant native parasite. That would be a most ignominious way to die: the pirate king laid low by a tapeworm or flesh-eating virus. Ha!”
“Laugh all you want. This isn’t over!”
Ishtawahl chuckled. “Not for me, perhaps. But for you it is quite over.”
By this point, Penrod and the guards had nearly reached the far end of the catwalk by the entrance. Looking down into the Pit, Penrod caught the eye of one of the technicians there, a Sestran, and winked.
A moment later, the king of the pirates and Chairman of Buck-An-Ear Corporation was hustled out the blast doors at gunpoint and led in the direction of the holding pens.
The skiff continued to skim the shadows of asteroids on the way to its destination, the area containing the shell of shield asteroids guarding the fortress. Hal had no idea where the designated safe passages were in the jigsaw puzzle of floating rocks. Picking the wrong ingress point would mean certain death at the hands of the automated defenses. If even heavily armed and shielded Unity ships couldn’t make it through unscathed, the tiny skiff had no chance. Not knowing the minimum threshold the sensors were set up to detect and react to, Hal couldn’t count on the skiff slipping through undetected.
Fortunately, it didn’t have to make it through the shield wall. It merely had to get its passengers to the wall.
Only another hour. And then comes the hard part.
Two minutes after leaving the command center, Penrod and his guards reached an intersection and turned right. As soon as Penrod, with the two guards behind him, turned the corner, he ducked. A split-second later, twin blaster beams licked the guards, who crumpled dead to the ground.
One of the Sestrans standing before him handed a blaster to the now-smiling Penrod.
“Thank you, gentlemen. Let Berv know, when you talk to him, that he has a promotion coming—to Security Chief. MekFensal, the traitor, forfeited his right to that title. You two will be rewarded handsomely as well.” His face hardened. “Now, someone get these shackles off me.”
“Yes sir,” one of the technicians responded.
Jern isn’t the only one with troops loyal to him personally.
“Thank you.”
Sometimes it pays to be paranoid.
His lips tightened in a cold smile. “There’s a lot of work to do. We have some revenge to plan.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Less than an hour from the shield wall, Hal veered the skiff to starboard. Without the vast array of ship sensors he’d had to draw on aboard Adventurer, he was forced to rely on his own senses, and his field of vision was limited by the framework of the skiff around him, as well as by his suit helmet.
He brought the skiff to a crawl and nestled into a shadowy crevice in the nearest asteroid.
Mynax leaned over and touched helmets for sound conduction—they couldn’t chance a stray radio signal giving away their position.
“What is it, Hal?”
“Not sure. I saw movement. Not an asteroid; something else. Something shiny. I think there’s a ship out there. Maybe looking for us, maybe just passing by. But we can’t risk it. We have plenty of air, so it’s safest to lie low for a while and let him cruise past. If he doesn’t know we’re here, he has no reason to take a closer look. If he does know, well we’re dead either way, I guess.”
Mynax snorted. “Well, isn’t that comforting.”
“Not really,” Hal said in all seriousness. “But we don’t have any other choice. We’ll hole up here for an hour. That should give him plenty of time to get bored and continue on his merry way.”
“Okay. I’ll let the others know.”
With no radio, the others in the skiff had no idea why they’d stopped—only that they wouldn’t have without some threat. With no indication of the seriousness of the potential danger, tensions threatened to escalate beyond endurance. At least, knowing that stopping was merely precautionary lowered the tension level to something tolerable.
For a submariner, waiting and wondering whether the ship above might start dropping depth charges on your boat isn’t half as bad as waiting while it does and wondering whether the next one might be your last. Those aboard the skiff were in much the same circumstances.
They settled in to wait.
“Captain,” Missile Chief Warren called over the ship’s intercom, “the new nuke is aboard and stowed away with the repaired one. We are fully operational and awaiting orders.
“Excellent, Chief,” Captain Tro replied. “We leave tomorrow. I just learned that our departure has been delayed by another matter.”
“Aye, Captain.”
Tro then hailed Security Chief Klosretahl.
“Blesh, round up your staff and report to Tarl Penrod in Blue Section, Corridor 43, Room 14, in one hour. Penrod has requested the assistance of our security team in helping to quell a rebellion among some of his staff, so take everyone.”
“Are you sure, Captain?” Klosretahl replied. “After the attack in the other hangar—?”
“Penrod has assured me that we are secure here in the hangar, with extra guards protecting both ships.” He paused a moment. “On second thought…leave two guards at the hatch, just in case. And recall the crew out on shore leave. Let us be ready to leave quickly should things go awry here.”
“Very good, sir. The security detail will rendezvous with Mr. Penrod in an hour.”
“Thank you, Chief. Go kill some rebels.”
“Will do, Captain!”
After an hour with no sign of another ship, Hal decided it was time to move out, slowly, cautiously. The movement of the skiff was greeted by its passengers with cheers, even if they weren’t audible outside each individual suit. It meant that they hadn’t been discovered and the mission was still on.
Fifty-three minutes later, the skiff was as close as Hal dared get to one of the entrances Fleet Intelligence suspected the pirates used to get through the shield wall. If FI was wrong about that, no ship would come near enough to the skiff for Hal’s plan to work, and they would all die of asphyxiation.
He parked the skiff in the shadow of the nearest asteroid and leaned over to Mynax to touch helmets. “From here we have to hoof it, so to speak. Tell everyone to grab their packs and their spare tanks and get into position. Make sure they have their radios set to receive only.”
“Right. I’ll pass it on.” Mynax proceeded to do just that, touching helmets with the others within reach, who in turn forwarded the message to those behind.
Hal opened the side of the skiff and everyone got out. After helping one other don their maneuvering packs, they positioned themselves behind Hal and followed his lead. In less than three minutes, the assault team was jetting toward the next shield wall asteroid, each of them towing a mesh sack containing spare air tanks. Would the anti-intruder sensors register them and blast them all into their constituent atoms? The next few seconds would be crucial.
The closer they got, the stronger the itch between Hal’s shoulder blades grew, all the more maddening because he had no way to scratch. He felt like he had a bull’s-eye painted there and expected to feel the jolt of an APC blast at any second. That was silly, he knew, because he’d be vaporized before feeling anything.
Amazingly, to him at least, the few minutes it took to arrive passed without incident. The team secured themselves loosely to the surface with friction grapples wedged into crevices. Then came the hard part: waiting for an opportunity that might never come.
At least, not before their oxygen ran out.
“What are you planning to do after
shift tonight, Freylem?”
Freylem Jor looked both ways down the corridor outside the room they guarded before answering. “Do not tell anyone else, but a few of us are getting together for a floating prax game at 2500 hours.”
“Prax?” his companion repeated in surprise. “But did Ishtawahl not ban prax?”
Jor grunted. “Yes, but what he does not know cannot hurt us.”
“Perhaps not, but I suspect there is not much of what goes on in this place that he does not know about.”
Now Jor chuckled. “Well, we have managed to keep it from him since—” He never finished the sentence.
A scrape and a click caused both Melphim to look to their left. Bouncing down the corridor toward them came a grenade.
“Bomb!” Jor shouted. Both Melphim ducked below the top of the sandbag walls stacked on either side of the doorway. The explosion was both blinding and deafening. Disoriented, neither guard saw nor heard the attackers who approached from the opposite direction and shot them both as they raised their weapons expecting an attack from the other side.
Moments later, the ex-prisoners shoved the corpses aside as they went inside the power substation. One was killed by the guard inside, who got a shot off before being cut down.
It took only moments to plant the satchel charge where it would do the most damage.
“Let’s go!” Kalen shouted.
Those inside cleared out of the room, split up, and joined those keeping watch at either end of the corridor. By the time the bomb blew and took out the power for a quarter of the fortress, the Kadre was long gone.
Hal awoke with a start to find Mynax shaking his shoulder and touching helmets.
“Yes?”
My Other Car is a Spaceship Page 30
