“Yes, I’m afraid it is.”
“This isn’t the last you’re going to hear from us,” Morris said before wheeling about and stalking out.
Noah grabbed Tennyson by the arm before the man could follow the other three out and said, “Getting excited won’t do anyone any good. We don’t have a choice here, so if you can, just keep things calm, and you’ll all get taken care of at Reece Station.”
The man started to say something, hesitated as if changing his mind, then said, “It’s not up to me. Things are getting . . . um . . . stressful.”
He pulled out of Noah’s grasp and followed the other three out of the bridge.
“Sergeant Hilborn, wake Tenine and get him here to the bridge. Full battle rattle. Then you get to engineering,” Noah said.
“You think that’s necessary?” Captain Peaslee asked.
“I don’t know. But something is brewing. I feel it in my bones.”
Captain Peaslee stood silent for a moment, chewing on his lower lip. Finally, he looked up at Sturdevant and said, “Follow Sergeant Hilborn to berthing and wake up Pristeen and Jackson. I want everyone either here on the bridge or in engineering. We can sleep at our stations.
“After you wake up the other two, I want you, Hilborn, and Tenine to pick up two portable fabricators and some Base A. I want one here and one in engineering.”
Noah grimaced despite himself. Even a portable fabricator could gin up some adequate food, but with only Base A, that meant sustenance bars, as nasty a source of calories as had ever been invented.
“I think I should get to engineering,” Noah told the captain.
It made sense. They could run the ship as long as they controlled the bridge and engineering, and with the captain on the bridge, Noah thought he’d be better placed with the engineers.
“Wait until Hilborn gets back. I don’t want you wandering around alone.”
Noah didn’t think anything would happen for the time being. If something bad were going to take place, it would be after Morris and the lawyer reported the results of their meeting. If he moved right now, he could get down to engineering without a problem. But the captain was in charge, so he nodded. He walked over to the purser’s suite where displays pulled up the ship’s spaces. As a full-fledged, working cruise liner, the purser held the ship’s number 3 position, and the suite was extensive. When the ship was downgraded, most of the suite had been pulled out. Still, Noah could pull up the main galley. It was crowded with what had to be the bulk of the passengers, and within a minute or two, the crowd parted to let Morris and the other three through and up to what had been the captain’s dais in better days.
“I spoke with the captain of this ship,” Morris yelled out before shouts of “We can’t hear you” drowned him out.
It took a few moments, but someone handed him a PA with loudspeaker capability.
“As I was saying, I just spoke with the captain of the ship. He flatly refuses to take us back home.”
There were shouts of anger among the crowd.
“Sir, you might want to watch this,” Noah said to Captain Peaslee who came over to join him.
Together, they watched as Morris and Madigar address the crowd, which seemed to get more and more agitated. No one had made a call for violence yet, but Noah had a feeling it was only a matter of time.
Hilborn, Tenine, Sturdevant and the two off-watch sailors entered the bridge carrying the two fabricators. Noah took one more look at the screen before taking Hilborn and Jackson to head to engineering.
“Keep your head down, Sergeant Major. And keep the comms lines open,” the captain said.
With Jackson carrying the fabricator, Hilborn led with Noah in the rear. Both Marines had their M90’s at the casual ready, trying not to look too aggressive, but still able to bring the weapon to bear if needed. The bridge was towards the bow of the ship; engineering was aft. The main passage aft passed the galley. The three could have changed decks, to avoid the galley, but that would have had them following a rat’s maze up and down, and that would have taken time. Noah thought a quick passage would serve them best.
“Pick up the pace, Hilborn,” Noah said as the rumble of the crowd reached them.
They passed the fore starboard entrance without incident. Noah glanced through the open hatch, from where Morris’ voice reached them. The passengers he spotted were all looking back to the dais, and no one saw the three as they passed.
The middle hatch was closed, which left only the aft starboard hatch. Once past the main galley, it was almost a direct shot, 70 meters aft, to engineering. Noah held his breath as they walked past the hatch, and they were in the clear. He just started to let down his guard when three men exited one of the heads, right in front of Sergeant Hilborn.
“Hey, it’s them!” one of the men shouted.
The lead man didn’t say a word but charged the three. Hilborn barely moved his feet, but just as the man reached him, he brought the butt of his M90 in a textbook butt-stroke. The man crumbled bonelessly to the deck, out cold. Instantly, Hilborn had his weapon raise, aimed right at the other two men.
“You two, freeze where you are,” Noah said. “Sergeant Hilborn, proceed aft.”
The muzzle of Hilborn’s weapon never wavered from its aiming point smack dab on the next man’s forehead. He swiveled as he passed the man, keeping him covered. EM2 Jackson gingerly stepped past the two men, looking like he was ready to toss the fabricator at them if they so much as flinched. And then it was just Noah.
“Don’t even think it,” Noah said as one of the men glanced up the passage to the galley entrance.
He passed the two, the muzzle of his M90 20 centimeters from them. This was bad, bad form. He had a weapon—they did not. He should be standing off, not getting close to them, but they had to get past, and the passage was only so wide.
He kept the two covered, switching to back-stepping as he followed Jackson and Hilborn. The two men looked at each other, then at Noah several times before they broke in unison and ran for the galley. Noah could have dropped them. Maybe he should have. But they weren’t the enemy. They were contract workers caught up in a situation beyond their control.
“Run!” he told the other two as he swung around and bolted forward.
It didn’t take them long to cover the distance to the engineering spaces, but he heard shouts from behind while Jackson scanned his eye to open the space. Noah took a glance back and saw 20 or 30 people pouring from the galley and start running toward them. The three slipped into the admin space and closed the hatch before the crowd had covered half of the distance.
Jackson was breathing hard, but it was the breathing of excitement, not fear.
He doesn’t know any better. If they had reached us . . .
The admin space was small, barely 2 X 2, and held shelves with printed back-up copies of manuals. The hatch leading into the space was locked, but it was not designed to withstand a concerted effort to get inside, an effort that had just commenced judging from the pounding on it.
“Let’s take it in,” Noah said.
The inner sanctum was much more secure. The ship’s designers didn’t want curious passengers poking around vital spaces. Jackson scanned the hatch open, and the three entered to where the chief and EM3 Juarez were anxiously waiting.
“What’s going on out there?” Chief Bostick asked.
“The natives are restless, so it looks like we’re staying here for the duration.”
“Well, fuck me royal,” the chief said, sinking down into a stool.
That about says it, Noah thought as he took a seat of his own.
***************
“It looks pretty bad, Sergeant Major,” Captain Peaslee told him. “I see at least ten bodies.”
Noah had hoped that with the bridge and engineering secured, things would quiet down for the duration. Fat chance.
Three hours ago, the passengers in the galley had broken out into fighting. Noah didn’t have eyes on the galley withi
n engineering, but Captain Peaslee told him there had been disagreements on where they wanted to go and what they would do to effect that. Now, a good portion of the passengers were roaming the ship in gangs while the rest tried to find places to hide.
“Not much we can do about it now, sir. We’ve got . . . hey, Chief. How much longer until we drop out of bubble space?”
“Six hours, fourteen minutes.”
“We’ve got just over six hours. Do you have the message ready to send out?”
“Ready and waiting, Sergeant Major.”
The Calypso Queen had seen better days, and much of her equipment had been stripped since then, and that included her meson comms. As per space regulations, she had a message torpedo, but that had been used to report the piracy, and she didn’t have another. So, for them, while the were in bubble space, there wasn’t a way to let anyone know what was happening.
Chief was going to drop them out of bubble space within the red zone, and the second they emerged, Captain Peaslee would send out the message. If they were lucky and the station security on the ball, they could expect help within another two hours. That left something over eight hours for the passengers to kill off more of themselves.
“We’ve got another fire,” Jackson said as he watched his displays.
“Where’s it at?” Chief asked as he stood and moved to the displays.
“E-2-23.”
Four fires had already been started by the passengers. None had threatened the integrity of the ship, but smoke put a strain on the air systems, so Jackson, with firefighting on manual control, had methodically put each one out.
“Hit it,” the chief told him.
With a flip of the switch, Jackson flooded the space with Borophylioxide, an artificial gas that smothered the fire. BPL was an effective firefighting substance, but it was also toxic in strong enough doses, which was why Jackson was on manual and the chief approved each release. Noah didn’t know why space E-2-23 was important enough that the threat to life and limb was acceptable, and he didn’t ask. As far as he was concerned, they set the fire, and if fighting it was going to result in a long recovery for any of them, so be it. After the first fire, Noah had gotten on the 1MC to pass that BPL would be used to put out fires and what the consequences were to exposure to it, but that hadn’t seemed to make a difference. They still started fires.
A pounding on the outer hatch caught Noah’s attention for a moment, and he dismissed it until Sergeant Hilborn called out, “Sergeant Major, you might want to hear this.”
There’d been pounding several times, and twice what sounded like some sort of tool trying to penetrate the hatch, so Noah wasn’t sure what was different about this time. He walked up to join the sergeant, and outside her could barely hear shouting. With a shrug, he turned on the speaker.
“ . . . kill us, please, let us in for God’s sake,” a man’s voice said.
Noah looked up and Hilborn, who had a conflicted look on his face as he asked, “Is that for real?”
“Please, we’ve got women and children. You’ve got to help us.”
Noah leaned forward and pressed the speaker button, saying, “Who’s trying to kill you?”
“Oh my God, you’re there. The Solzentians, the ones who want to go back, that’s who. They’re taking over the ship!”
“And who are you?”
“We’ve got two men, three women, and two kids. Please, you need to help us. We can hear more of them outside, but they’re trying to find something to break in, so they’ll be back. Please, sir, let us in!”
Noah looked over to Chief and Jackson. Both had come closer, and both looked worried.
“What do you think? He sounded real to me,” Noah asked.
He knew the man could be part of a trap. They hadn’t been able to break in, and they could be trying to trick them into opening up. If it was, all four of them were at risk.
“I don’t know,” the chief said. “I . . . just . . . ” he said, his words trailing off.
“Oh, God! Please! I think they’re coming back now!”
“Grubbing hell,” Noah said, unslinging his M90. “Hilborn, take the right. Jackson, on my command, open the hatch.” He positioned himself on the left and told the sergeant, “If there aren’t three women and two kids out there, cut every single one of them down.”
He took a deep breath, took his M90 off safe, and said, “Open it.”
A man was standing right up to the speaker—and behind him were the women and children.
“Get in, get in!” Noah shouted as they made a mad scramble inside. “You said two men! Where is he?”
“Jeorg went back out to try and delay them. You have to wait for him.”
Noah hesitated a second, then said, “Sorry, I can’t. Close it!”
Immediately he spun around and covered the man. “Hands up. You, too, ladies. I mean it.”
Sergeant Hilborn stepped up beside him to add emphasis to his order.
“Jackson, I want you to carefully check each one of them, children, too.”
The little girl was probably four years old, and she looked up at Noah in wonderment. The little boy, who had to be her brother, was quietly snuffling tears.
Jackson stepped up and patted the man down.
“His junk, too, Jackson. Check everywhere on him.”
“He’s clean, I think,” the sailor said when he was done.
“Step over to your right,” Noah told the man. “Jackson, now check the women. And same thing, check everywhere on them.”
If the women were uncomfortable about the big sailor groping them, they only showed relief. That alone helped convince Noah that they were the real deal. Not enough to forego checking the two children, however.
Once he was convinced, he slung his weapon and asked, “What is going on out there?”
“Is Jeorg going to be OK?” one of the women asked.
“Hush, Lyza. You know Jeorg and his gift of gab. He’ll be fine. He’ll want to know you and the kids are safe,” an older woman said, taking her hand.
“Sergeant Hilborn, go back to the hatch and listen. If this Jeorg comes back, let me know.”
“Oh, thank you, sir,” the woman named Lyza said as she pulled the little boy into her grasp.
“So, once again, what’s going on?”
The older woman, with a confidence that surprised him, said, “Some of the passengers . . . well, maybe most of them, got cold feet after the damned pirates came. They said that the Sunshine Ahead people couldn’t even protect us in space, so how were they gonna do it on Fortuna. We’d end up indentured.”
“There are no more indentured citizens,” Noah said.
“Indentured, contract workers, same thing. They’ve got you by the balls. Then the lawyer, Geste, she said we can sue for damages. We can get money and not have to work away from home. Lots of folks liked that.
“So, there’s us—we’re Solzentians—and the Rubbles, and some want to go home, and some want to honor our contracts. And then that Rubble hit Hank Agnew over the head with a chair, and things sorta came apart at the seams, if you can imagine that. We became animals.
“It was the Rubbles’ fault, them and the ones who wanted the money,” the man said, his first word spoken since he’d been searched.
“Some of us Solzentians wanted the money, Terrance. You saw that. It weren’t all Rubbles causing the problems.”
“So why did you think they wanted to kill you, and who exactly is ‘they.’”
“Cause they killed Lacy and Kris, that’s why. They woulda killed us if Kris hadn’t slowed them down. As to who’s ‘they,’ it’s everyone else. No one knows who’s on what side. If you aren’t with them, you’re the enemy.”
Noah looked at the six people, wondering how society could break down so quickly. And all because of the pirates? That didn’t make any sense.
“Well, you’ll be safe in another eight hours, so why don’t you relax the best you can. We should be safe until then.”
Four hours later, Noah wasn’t sure about that. There’d been some muffled sounds outside the hatch, which didn’t alarm Noah too much, but had caused Lyza to run up, asking if it was Jeorg. Dylan, the older woman, had to come up and take her away to her two kids. After fifteen minutes, however, the sound changed to heavy pounding—not the pounding of fists, but of tools. Chief came up and put his hands on the hatch for a minute or so, then shook his head and assured Noah it would hold.
After another ten minutes, the pounding ceased, and Noah thought they were home free until Jackson reported a fire in the admin room, but extremely localized. He and the chief looked at the readouts, trying to figure out what was happening when an alarm sounded.
The chief put his hand on the door, then said, “Sons of bitches are trying to burn through the hatch!”
“Can they do it?” Noah asked.
“If they had the right tools, yeah. This is a cruise liner, not a Navy ship.”
Noah had to feel the hatch for himself, reaching out before snatching his hand back in pain.
“Told you so, Sergeant Major.”
“Jackson, what would happen if you flood the space with BLP?” he asked, sucking on his fingers.
“Won’t work if they’ve got a torch. The O2 for combustion is inside the fuel lines, not in the air,” the chief said.
“He doesn’t mean that, Chief. He wants to lay them out!” Jackson told him.
The chief looked confused for a moment before it dawned on him what his engineer had said, and a smile crept over his face. “I like the way you think, Sergeant Major,” he said, then, “Do it,” to EN2 Jackson.
With a wicked-looking smile on his face, Jackson flipped his lever. The alarm went quiet almost immediately.
“I wish we had a visual on what’s going on out there. I bet they’re shitting bricks,”
the chief said.
“Not the ones who are out cold,” Jackson said with a laugh.
“Are the bad men coming to get us?” a soft voice asked from behind them.
Noah turned to see that the passengers had stood up and were watching their every move. Tara, the little girl, was standing in front of Lyza, who had her arms protectively around her.
The United Federation Marine Corps' Lysander Twins: The Complete Series: Books 1-5 Page 113
