Wasteland of Flint

by Thomas Harlan

  The door hissed opened and a man—a crewman with short, sandy hair and an armload of briefing binders in his arms—stepped through into their midst.

  Hadeishi froze, startled. Felix smashed the butt of the Whipsaw into the man's face without so much as a heartbeat's hesition. The miner jumped back with almost equal speed and the gunstock slammed into his binders. They flew everywhere in a spray of paper and diagrams.

  "Intruder ... urk!" The man's scream was cut off abruptly. Felix seized the throat of his braided jacket, lifted him bodily—an easy task for her suit—and flung him back through the hatch. Tonuac had already leapt ahead—the map showed a cross-passage leading to a maintenance shaft which rose to the bridge deck—and slewed to a halt, cursing.

  Instead of a narrow, pipe-lined corridor, there was a ready room with an entertainment center, a wet bar and four very startled-looking miners. The clerk crashed past the Marine and took out a card table in a clatter of shattering plastic and plywood. The other men leapt up, shouting in alarm.

  "Other way," Hadeishi and Felix shouted simultaneously. Tonuac short-stroked the trigger on his shipgun and jumped back through the doorway. A sharp bang! flung a room-suppression munition into the compartment. The miners scattered away from the bouncing black sphere.

  "Portside," Felix shouted, shoving Hadeishi past her. Maratay darted ahead, still concentrating on the hardwire spooling out in a silvery ribbon behind him as he ran. The heicho cranked a round from the Whipsaw into the access panel for the compartment door. A violent, concussive boom followed and smoke billowed out of the wall. A second, muffled whoomp followed hard on its heels as the room suppression munition blew apart inside the ready room.

  "Schematic is offset ten meters," Hadeishi commented into his throat mike as they charged down the corridor. "Reset and relay to my handheld."

  Maratay skidded to a halt at another compartment door "This one?"

  "Knock it in," Felix shouted, waving Clavigero past. Tonuac had already dashed ahead of the chu-sa to take flank-point. The little Rajput Marine swung the comm relay onto his shoulder, hoisted up his gun and jammed the access keypad with the muzzle. The door cycled open.

  An alarm began to blare, filling the corridor with eardrum-crushing noise.

  Maratay sighed. The maintenance corridor was stacked floor to ceiling with crates. "No go!"

  "Keep moving," Felix said, shoving her chu-sa ahead. "Go to access route plan three."

  They jogged forward and suddenly a wide cross-passage opened to the right. Men in dark-blue uniforms were running toward them, overhead lights gleaming from steel-gray weapons. Hadeishi leapt aside and back—there'd been a compartment door—shouting "Sureshot! Sureshot!"

  Tonuac and Felix had already spun to cover the new threat. Both froze as the chu-sa's order registered. Maratay threw himself out of the line of fire, staying on task, but Clavigero skidded into the open and his shipgun twitched sideways automatically. His finger clenched tight and a burst ripped from the weapon, filling the side-corridor with a stuttering series of sun-bright flashes.

  Hadeishi threw the wardroom door aside with his shoulder and rolled in. A man rose in surprise from a computer station, a still-smoking tabac dangling from his lip. Maratay rolled the other way, flipping the hardwire around the doorframe. Mitsu realized no one else could deal with the miner and sprang across the table separating them.

  The man shouted, fell backward over his chair and Hadeishi jammed him to the deck with the point of his elbow. The suit-magnified blow slammed the man's head into the carpet, stunning him. Encapsulated in complete, unhurried calm, Hadeishi rolled the miner over and pinned him with a knee. "Maratay—restraints?"

  The Marine tossed over a set of zipcuffs from a pouch at his belt.

  Outside, the echo of Clavigero's shipgun had been swallowed in a roar of beam weapon fire. A lurid red glow flooded the hallway. Felix and Tonuac dropped through the door and swung to covering positions. A smoking, scarlet beam licked past, searing a three-meter scar on the opposite wall. The heat of the blast singed Hadeishi's combat suit, but his hands did not pause in securing their prisoner.

  "Chu-sa?" Felix hissed, gesturing for Hadeishi's attention. 'We've got to break out of here. Get ready!"

  "Wait one," Hadeishi said, making a sharp quelling motion. "Clavigero?"

  Here, kyo. The man's voice was harsh with adrenaline. I'm in the main corridor, fell back to the last space-frame.

  "Hold position, Marine." The chu-sa clicked his throat mike, Koshō, how many men in the cross-corridor?"

  Six, two down. Susan's voice was refreshingly cool in his earbug. He had a very clear mental image of her in the command chair on the bridge of the Cornuelle, watching the combat v-feed with dispassionate, professional interest. More will reinforce from the galley area.

  Hadeishi caught Felix's eye. The heicho was very tense and seemed ready to leap out into the corridor and take the miners on with her bare hands. "Sureshot, Heicho. No casualties."

  "Two down now, Chu-sa" she replied, eyes flicking between his face and the angle of the corridor she could see. "Their blood will be up. N is high."

  Hadeishi nodded. Fleet training assumed every operational plan would reach a point of failure at an indeterminate point of time offset from the 'go' moment. The possibility of failure was termed "n", which began accumulating even before operational kickoff. Some planning officers believed n accumulated for individuals as well—eventually your day came and there was nothing you could do to erase the failure-debt you'd accumulated. "Clavigero—suppress the backside corridor. Felix—exit options?"

  The heicho dragged out her handheld, scanning through the level schematics. Outside, there was a sharp coughing sound as the Marine in the passageway fired two RSM rounds down the main corridor toward the galley. Hadeishi could hear men shouting in the distance, but their voices were drowned out by a heavy whoomp-whoomp!

  "We're backed up against a bulkhead here, kyo." Felix pointed at the rear wall. "But both sides lead into other compartments.... What's he got?"

  Hadeishi rolled the unconscious miner over. His name tag read gemmilsky and the tag for his ship department indicated he was a system tech. Eyes narrowing in consideration Hadeishi rose, stepping to the miner's computer display.

  "Ship's librarian," he said slowly. "Maratay—get the relay over here and jack in. Felix, we need some breathing room."

  "Hai, Chu-sa!" Felix signed to Tonuac. The Zapotec craned his head to look outside, muttering under his breath to Clavigero. The Marine out in the hallway replied, but Hadeishi was concentrating on disassembling the desk. Maratay reached in handing him a spare multitool and between the two of them they had the tabletop unscrewed as fast as humanly possible.

  "Susan," he said, stripping a dust cover away from the comp unit hidden in the desk, "get Smith on this circuit. We need to break into their shipside comm."

  Understood. A soft chime sounded as the midshipman came on channel. Standing by.

  Hadeishi identified the comm interface and Maratay handed him a cluster of adhesive leads. Been a long time since I had to do this, Mitsu thought, his thoughts blurring into action as quickly as he could find the circuit ports and nudge the leads into place.

  Under the watching snout of Felix's Whipsaw, Tonuac darted out from the door and across the passageway to the opposite bulkhead. Parts of the deck and junction facing were on fire, spilling a bitter, acidic smoke into the air. The intruder alert continued to blare, now joined by the honking of a fire alarm. The hallway leading toward the galley billowed with sleepgas from Clavigero's RSM rounds. Tonuac's visor adjusted automatically, shifting into multispectrum range. The resulting gray-tinted image showed him unconscious men scattered in the corridor. No one seemed to be moving that way.

  "Mop up," he hissed at Clavigero, waving the Marine toward the ready room. "Sureshot, remember. Use tanglewire."

  As the private loped off into the smoke, Tonuac glanced over at Felix, received the go-ahead and plucked a spa
re-eye from his belt. Sliding the hair-thin video camera around the corner, he watched the feed on a heads-up inside his visor. The enemy was gathering—the two men Clavigero had knocked down were gone, dragged away—and at least twenty miners were crouched along the walls. They had an amazing number of weapons to hand—but Tonuac didn't see a single man with a rocket launcher or in armor.

  "Waited too long, my friends." Tonuac laid the eye down on the floor so it could continue to transmit. He checked to make sure his shipgun was set to fire RSM, caught Felix's eye—she nodded, the Whipsaw raised—and poked the muzzle around the corner.

  Instantly, the air curdled with the snap-snap-snap of beam pistols. The wall beside his head blew apart as plastic and light metal atomized. Tonuac felt the Shockwave slap his shoulder and neck, but the absorptive composite of his suit shrugged the blow aside. His shipgun coughed twice and he scuttled back before someone hit him with something big enough to punch through his armor. Felix waited for him to clear her line of sight, then overhanded a tanglewire grenade into the adjoining corridor.

  The whoomp-whoomp of the RSM rounds detonating amid the miners was drowned by a chorus of exited yelling. More thick gray smoke flooded the passage, disguising the detonation of the tanglewire. The grenade bounced once and then shattered. Thousands of monofilament spools unwound at near-supersonic speed. Adhesive thread-ends blew in all directions and dug deep into the bulkheads, overhead and deck on impact. Within six seconds the corridor was blocked by a misty, half-seen web of magnetically active wire. Wherever the strands touched they adhered and fused solid.

  The tone of the fire alarms changed, dropping in urgency. Flame suppression foam flooded from vents in the ceiling smothering the fires licking along the walls.

  Tonuac held position, waiting for Clavigero to return. On general principles, he fired an RSM round down the odd branch of the main hallway. More sleepgas and smoke billowed up, making sight difficult for anyone not already in combat armor or using goggles tuned to the 'clear' wavelengths designed into the Imperial smoke.

  "Four minutes at the most, Chu-sa," Felix reported, watching the v-feed from the spare-eye. The miners were milling about confused by the smoke. Some of them had fallen down, overcome by the gas.

  "Get me a directory." Hadeishi attached the last of the relay leads to the desk. Now the local network could be directly accessed by the Cornuelle. "And update our floorplans if you can."

  Understood. Smith's voice was already distracted, concentrating on overwhelming the refinery ship's security systems. Five minutes.

  "Maratay—we need a way out." Hadeishi consulted his handheld, then pointed at the upship-side bulkhead. "Through there."

  The Marine nodded, slinging his shipgun. Between the two of them, they ripped away racks of data packs and printed books to get at the wall. Maratay dug into a thigh pouch and produced a reel of cutting gel. Hadeishi stood back, letting the private sketch the outline of a door.

  "Kyo—they've seen the tanglewire." Felix was still watching the corridor. Her chrono was spinning, counting the seconds. "Someone's taken charge—they're falling back with a guard left behind. They'll flank us left, right, up, and down."

  "Smith-tzin?" Hadeishi started to scan through the schematics of the level above and below their position. They were inside the main hab area, which meant the overhead—in particular—was the deck of the room above. Their own floor lay atop a maze of service ducts.

  Working . .. the midshipman replied. We have comm access. And registry information.

  "Master's name?" Hadeishi crouched down, turning away from the upship-side wall. Maratay knelt as well, then triggered the electrostatic charge in the gel. Felix, still covering the outside passage, didn't even flinch as the bulkhead ruptured with a rippling, strobe-bright wham-wham-wham!

  Ketcham, Tristan, R. Born Chatham, Duchy of Kent, Lower Skawtland, forty-three years old.... Kyo, he's ex-Fleet! Discharged nine years ago.

  "Clear," Felix barked and Maratay knocked the broken section of wall into the next compartment. Hadeishi waited for the Marine to sign the room was safe, then ducked through the opening. The new compartment was filled with racks of comp equipment. Some of it was on fire, ignited by the blast. "Tonuac, Clavigero—let's go!"

  Hadeishi stood aside, away from the burning equipment, while Felix slid into the room, her Whipsaw drifting from side to side, a tireless shark. "Smith, pull his service record. I need reason for discharge. And get me those deck plans."

  Working.

  Tonuac bounced in, his armor spattered with smoking, still-molten plastic. Maratay and Felix were already at the far side of the room, trying to clear racks of equipment away to get at the wall. In the first room, Clavigero darted in and spun into cover. Stabbing bolts of beam weapon fire followed, setting the walls alight again. The Marine found a refractive grenade on his belt, pitched the stubby cylinder into the passage and rolled forward through the breach in the wall.

  Another crump! followed and the main passageway filled with a cloud of metallic flakes.

  Nozzles opened in the overhead of the equipment room and Hadeishi's environment sensor started to squeak about lethal levels of carbon monoxide outside his suit. Ignoring the alert, the chu-sa strode to the far end of the room. "We've got to go up," he snapped at Felix. "Schematic says there's a laundry on the other side of that wall on this level. We'll never get through."

  Susan's voice interrupted his train of thought. Kyo, we have a tap on their shipside comm. Ketcham took a voluntary discharge after being denied promotion to command rank. Hadeishi heard a pause in her voice, and guessed the rest even before she continued in a clipped, angry voice. He filed a letter of protest with Fleet, claiming a Méxica officer of lesser demonstrated ability received command of the heavy cruiser Dundee in his stead. Thai-sa Four-Mountain was named as the other officer.

  "Understood." Hadeishi understood perfectly. He'd even met the captain of the Dundee once. A fine example of the high-clan patronage endemic to Imperial capital ship squadrons. Four-Mountain wasn't a bad commander today, but he would have been very, very inexperienced nine years ago. Probably best suited for an exec's slot, not an actual Fleet command. For an aggressive commander, for a man wanting to make his life in the Fleet, being passed over in such an obvious way would have been hard to swallow. Ketcham was neither the first nor the last officer who'd left the service after being snubbed in favor of someone closer to the Seven Hundred Clans.

  While he was thinking, Felix and Tonuac had made a hand-and-hand brace. Maratay climbed up, bracing one leg in their grasp and the other against a rack-array of data packs. The little Rajput drew a fresh circle of cutting gel on the ceiling.

  "Wait one," Hadeishi said to Felix after Maratay dropped down to the deck again. "Stand by. Smith—patch me onto the shipside comm, direct channel to Ketcham if you can pick out his ident code."

  There was a pause. Things seemed to have quieted down outside. Mitsu presumed this meant the miners were preparing to attack their position by some means. He unsealed his sidearm holster.

  You are in-circuit, Susan said and a confused babble of voices flooded Hadeishi's earbug.

  "Not here, Paulson," Ketcham barked, turning on the riggers crowding the hallway behind him in their z-suits, gloves clutching beam cutters and wrenches. "Go round to the 6-D gangway and up to level thirty-six. Secure the rooms above the 78-H junction and make sure they don't burn through the roof and move up a level."

  Confused but spoiling for a fight, the riggers turned around and ran off down the passage.

  The refinery captain swore to himself, peering around the corner into the H-port-side hallway. A round dozen crewmen were at his side, most armed with sidearms or beam cutters, though none of them were in armor. The passageway ahead was entirely choked with clinging black smoke. There was no sign of the tanglewire blocking crossway 78.

  Ketcham grabbed the nearest shift leader. "Termovich, send a runner to get me a handheld. We need plans of this level and all the ro
oms. Leave two men forward here on watch and then fall back a frame—and send someone else to get pressure masks or even z-suits if they can find them."

  Men melted away from the gang of miners, eager to make themselves useful and get away from the sound of the guns. Ketcham ran a hand through thick blond hair, thinking furiously. He figured they'd already exhausted the day's ration of luck by having him within shouting distance of the firefight when it started. Hardly anyone else aboard had any military experience, though you couldn't deny they were game for a fight.

  "No heavy weapons inside," he muttered, "barely anything like combat armor. Miners, technicians, shuttle pilots.... Termovich, where's the nearest emergency engineering panel?"

  "Back two frames, sir." The Novoya Rossiyan looked scared to death, which only mirrored Ketcham's own gut-twisting fear. Someone—Company mercenaries? Pirates?—had entered his ship undetected, in combat suits and armed to the teeth. Tanglewire and RSM rounds didn't come cheap. But what could they want? To steal the whole ship? Why sneak aboard?

  "Get over there right now and drop the bulkheads all round this section and on the level above and below. We'll seal 'em off."

  Captain Ketcham? An unknown, unfamiliar voice intruded. Ketcham started and stared around before realizing the voice was coming from his earbug. There is no reason for further conflict.

  "Who the hell is this?" Ketcham's bellow caught Termovich by-surprise, but the Rossiyan bolted away from the captain's volcanic glare. "Identify yourself!"

  Chu-sa Mitsuharu Hadeishi, IMN Cornuelle, at your service.

  "Fleet?" Ketcham's voice choked in astonishment. Then his brain—which seemed to have stumbled into tar—kicked into gear. He slapped his comm unit, scrambling the channel. "Override six-twenty-six," he shouted, desperate for even ten seconds of clear air. "Bridge, this is Ketcham. A Fleet Marine assault team has entered the ship. Lockdown all levels and accessways, seal the bridge and—"