Counterweight

by A. G. Claymore

  Faces began to show alarm as he leveled the weapon, aiming at the departing figure in the green overalls. He pulled the trigger. A sharp, brutal hum emitted from the weapon as the mini rails launched a disintegrating canister of shock balls. He knew it would hit several innocent pedestrians as well but the effects were rarely permanent.

  They spread out as the canister reacted with the air and evaporated. Just before they made contact, a man in a business tunic turned to look back at the dark-haired-man, no doubt wondering why such a shabbily-dressed individual was entering a neighborhood that was well above his pay level.

  His curiosity saved the target.

  The businessman took the three balls that would have struck the agent and he went down like a sack of water. The target turned at the fresh screams. He saw the twitching bodies behind him and looked up to see his pursuer.

  Until now, it was uncertain whether the Krorian was aware of Graadt and his team or pretending ignorance in an attempt to keep his pursuers on a passive footing. There was no doubt now as he turned and raced for the entrance to the glazed neighborhood, knocking the security guard aside with a push to his throat.

  Graadt tossed the empty weapon away and raced after his quarry. Passing the choking guard, he spotted the Krorian angling around a stand of decorative trees and ducking down a side alley.

  This was definitely a bad choice of neighborhoods to go to ground in. This zone was home to the mid-level cargo brokers who needed to spend their lives in close proximity to the planet-side tether station.

  When an unexpected ship came in, whatever the cargo, the first ones at the station usually made the best deals and this zone was directly next to the station. Appearance was everything here. Showing wealth was a way of displaying success and the houses were all constructed of glazing – the better to show others what that wealth was being spent on.

  It didn’t make for very good cover.

  Graadt set off after his target, not wanting to fall too far behind. The walls might all be glass but the slight greenish hue tended to add up and, with a few layers in the way, he might lose sight of him altogether. As it was, the target was moving in and out of sight as he ran past structural elements or interior partition walls.

  Graadt angled to the right, intending to intercept the Krorian from the side as their paths intersected, but he lost sight of him again as he disappeared behind what appeared to be a storage room. He put on a burst of speed, rounding a corner that was mostly obscured by a large, carved spice-wood screen strategically placed in the corner of the room to maximize its visibility.

  His arm came up almost of its own accord, his body conditioned by years of brutal childhood and adolescence. His own son, a stranger to him these last five years, had already made three kills on the training grounds before his tenth year. The Krorian’s knife attack was unexpected and reasonably well-executed, but Graadt was better.

  Much better.

  He’d blocked with his left forearm and he got his right hand onto his enemy’s wrist in a heartbeat. Sliding his left hand down to the man’s elbow, he rotated the Krorian’s arm back before thinking had anything to do with it and shoved it into the angle where neck meets shoulder cutting the carotid artery.

  His enemy’s eyes began to glaze and the body began to sag, giving up a lifetime of fighting against gravity.

  Graadt cursed, slamming a bloody palm against the glass wall, the print barely visible against the dark wood in the room.

  He’d allowed adrenaline to make the decisions. The thrill of taking another life had eclipsed his need for information. In that split second after recognizing the threat, he’d allowed reflexes to take over when he could have just as easily disarmed his opponent after the initial block.

  It would have meant a higher risk but combat always came with risk and Graadt knew he’d failed himself. Worse still, he’d failed his son. In killing the Krorian, Graadt had deprived himself of a valuable resource, one who, with the appropriate ‘encouragement’, might have led them to their real target.

  Capturing or killing the Human agent would be a reminder to the Dactari that the Stoners were able to get things done. Things they couldn’t do. More importantly, his people on Oudtstone would have to publicly acknowledge him after such a feat.

  Tied to the Mast

  The Foxlight II, En Route to Chaco Benthic

  Rick woke with a start. Something had just moved. Distant impacts and vibrations transmitted through the fabric of the ship, becoming muted sounds in the small atmosphere of his suit.

  He desperately tried to pull his wits back together. His last attempt at sleep had been interrupted by the couple who had discovered him.

  That was it… He was still aboard the smuggler’s ship but the crew were dead and, from the sounds, the raiders were separating their boarding clamps. He felt a wave of nausea and, though he’d never experienced it first-hand before, he understood from his training that he was feeling the effects of pitch exposure.

  The raiding vessel was using their pitch drive to push away from the distortion envelope they currently shared with the Foxlight II. An alarm began its warbling tone inside the helmet and Rick sub-vocalized a command to bring up the diagnostics menu.

  Before he had the chance to find the issue, his mind told him he had bigger problems to contend with. He set his suit’s mag plates to full strength just as the raider vessel angled away, leaving the Foxlight II on its own.

  A new alarm sounded, indicating an emergency reactor scram. With the fusion reactor going off-line, the distortion generator failed as well and the ship tumbled back into normal space. The bodies on the bridge bounced off bulkheads and ceiling panels and the captain’s corpse hit a stanchion with such force that he was almost torn in two at the waist.

  Cushioned inside his suit, Rick was unscathed, though he was suddenly glad he’d been caught while sleeping in the shuttle. He’d been brought before the captain on an empty stomach. If it hadn’t been empty then, it certainly would have been now. The wild motion, combined with the sickening effects of an emergency drop-out, wreaked havoc on his body. Rick fought to control the heaving of his guts, deprived of the slim comfort of being able to double over.

  At least he had a clean helmet. As his body recovered, he turned his attention to the damage-control telemetry. What he saw was hardly reassuring. Every compartment in the ship had been vented, often from the inside. No doubt the boarding party had fired through the hull as they cleared the ship, ensuring that unsuited victims wouldn’t be able to pose any problems for them.

  More disturbing was the data coming from the Engineering compartments. Several magnetic field emitters had been damaged by interference from the raiders’ pitch drive, causing the emergency scram. Without those emitters, the magnetic torus used to contain the fusion reaction would be incomplete, allowing plasma to spill out at more than seven million degrees Celsius. He was reasonably sure, without needing to consult his training as an engineering officer, that such a leak would be a bad thing.

  The ship was still rotating and drifting, dead in space, but he had to forget about that for the moment and hope it didn’t find an asteroid or planet before he could fix the engine. Though the ship was spinning, his inner ear was using the vessel’s gravity as a frame of reference and he knew he would be able to walk easily enough.

  Rick released the mag plates, knees bending slightly as he found his footing. He took a deep breath, let it out and headed for the same hatch he’d last walked through as a stowaway. He now passed through it as the ship’s master, though whether he would actually be able to control the smuggler ship was a question to which he still had no answer.

  He approached the main hatch to Engineering but it failed to open at his approach. Even though there was no atmosphere on either side of the door, the safeties were still set to prevent proximity opening. Rick nodded in approval. The Canal was programmed the same way – there was always the chance that loose debris might find its way into the engine room and play
havoc with sensitive gear.

  Falling back on his pod training sessions, he scanned around himself to ensure no foreign objects were waiting to roll through the door. Satisfied, he stepped over to the door actuator panel and hit the red button. The door slid open, revealing a dead Tauhentan in a pool of blood, his weapon on the floor near his left hand.

  Rick considered closing the dead engineer’s eyes but realized the futility. The man was frozen stiff. Still, he couldn’t leave loose debris lying around the engine room. Muttering a silent apology, he knelt by the man’s feet and pulled gently until the frozen blood gave up its grip on the deck plating. He dragged the corpse with its halo of blood out into the companionway before coming back in and sealing the door.

  Without the distraction of his dead predecessor, the next thing he noticed was the capacitor bank. The CB was a standard part of every ship, storing enough energy to restart the fusion reactor in the event of an emergency. No crew would ship out on a vessel without a CB.

  Until now, Rick had been counting on N’Mid’s mention of spare parts. If the captain had any sense, he’d carry more spares than reactant. The reactant had a short shelf life, so limiting extra was just common sense, but most parts would last for years if left inert. Computer cores and peripherals were exceptions as they needed life support systems and, even then, they tended to fail after a few months if they weren’t installed in a ship. Engineering supplies tended to have longer shelf lives.

  Mag-field emitters, for example, would last for decades in storage and they were crucial to crew survival so Rick knew he’d find some. He just wasn’t sure there would be enough.

  But now, he forgot about the emitters and treated himself to a good solid bout of angry cursing.

  The CB racks were empty.

  It made sense, after he calmed down and gave the matter some thought. Raiders probably wouldn’t want to waste their profits on items they could steal. Their crews would resent any reduction in their shares, even for ship maintenance – they didn’t own the ship, after all; that should come out of the captain’s share.

  The raiders’ ship probably had faulty capacitors in its bank and so the crew had helped themselves to what they needed before leaving. Understanding why didn’t help Rick. Without those capacitors, he didn’t have the start-up energy necessary to get the reactor back online.

  He shook his head. One of the first rules of damage control was to concentrate on what could be done. That way, his mind could work on the bigger problems while his hands took care of the small ones.

  He looked around the room, trying to guess where the parts might be stored, and felt a flush of relief when he knew he’d find them in a small storage alcove behind the reactor array.

  Pre-cog ability was a definite advantage when it came to work like this. Instead of searching the entire compartment for the parts, he only had to decide to search each location. As long as each area was reachable within fourteen seconds, he was able to know the results without having to perform the actual search.

  He walked around the fusion plant, based on the venerable Tokomak, designed and built by Russians more than two centuries ago, and he went straight to the racks where the emitters were stored. They at least had enough parts to repair the array. He just didn’t know if it would ever be used.

  Carrying the parts, he approached the reactor. “Okay,” he crooned soothingly. “Tell me where it hurts.” He moved around to the port side and took a coil tester from one of the stanchions. Without actually using it, he continued to circle, testing and, yet, not really testing the emitters until he found the three that had failed.

  Replacing them was child’s play.

  He stepped back and looked around for the initiator station. He walked over and familiarized himself with the particular sequence for this plant. Holding his hand over the panel, he considered pressing the final command – the one that would commit power to the containment emitters before energizing the reaction itself.

  He saw, in his mind, that the magnetic shield would stabilize to a point where it could contain the reaction. Though the full start-up of the shielding was beyond his ability to see, he knew there wasn’t enough power in the reactor’s continuous power cell to do the job. That cell was just there to buffer against any fluctuation in the main power source from the reactor itself.

  It certainly didn’t have enough juice to fire the microwave initiators for the main reaction.

  He chewed thoughtfully at the inside of his lip. It was an old habit that somehow shifted the gears of his thought processes. He pushed his ear against the side of his helmet in a vain attempt to relieve an itch. If the hull wasn’t breached, he’d have less distraction right now…

  He stopped all movement, ear pressed against the small speaker on the right side of the helmet, eyes glazing as he sought to firm up his grip on a sudden thought.

  The life support systems were still running. They were designed with their own back-up power against the chance of a long-term reactor failure. A crew could survive, adrift, until they were rescued or their food ran out.

  Because there was no air left, the atmo cyclers had shut down. The heat and lights were both still running. The heady flush of salvation washed over him. He could feel a slight tingle in his limbs.

  There might be enough power in the life support cells to get the reactor running. He shut down the heating systems and killed the shipboard lights, switching them to proximity activation.

  Life support usually drew its power from the fusion plant, so that meant the system could serve as a link between its own back-up and the fusion reactor. He looked back down at the panel and brought up a holo screen. Stretching it out, he managed to trace the schematics and find the cut-out switch.

  The cut-out isolated life support from the reactor, preventing the bleed of vital energy into a dead containment array. He took a deep breath and reached up to deactivate the cut-out.

  Looking down at the imitation panel, he saw a row of amber indicators. Green would have been nicer but, like his dad used to say, “You can tell the universe what you want till you’re blue in the face but, sooner or later, you gotta roll whatever dice you have.” All he could see was a working containment field; he had to act on faith.

  Almost on impulse, he committed the sequence.

  He turned as the shielding grew in strength, glowing blue through the gaps of the emitter array. After twenty seconds, the first microwave initiator fired, the rest following in sequence. The hum of the initiators began to build, filling the compartment with the comforting sound of a starting reactor.

  Rick moved around the outside of the plant, following each firing with a growing elation until there were only three initiators left. That was when the juice ran out. He stood there in shock as the hum died out.

  All that juice, wasted. Three lousy initiators. He knew there was enough power in one of the shuttles to fire three emitters but it was too late for that now.

  He frowned. The shielding hadn’t faded yet. If the power had run out before the last three initiators fired, then where the hell was the containment system getting its power?

  The hope surged back. It was drawing power from its regular source – the reaction. He ran to a control panel and dragged the containment power control down by ten percent.

  Sure enough, the slight reduction in draw was enough and the last three initiators fired. Rick tore his finger away from the panel, letting the containment field snap back to full power in time to contain the growing reaction.

  Throwing up his arms, he screamed in triumph and winced almost immediately as his ears took the brunt of the celebration. He danced a little jig, imagining how the early cavemen must have felt the first time they managed to make fire.

  He wasn’t going to die out here in the dark after all.

  He looked around the room. The ship was riddled with hull breaches. Was he going to have to spend the entire voyage clamped to the back wall of the bridge in an EVA suit?

  Damage Control
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  Tsekoh, Capital of Chaco Benthic

  Callum left the small shop with a coffee in his hand. A real, honest-to-goodness coffee. He strolled over to the curve in the railing where the city turned back on itself. The pedway had been extended into a cul de sac where the MoonSilver franchise had set up a patio. He picked a seat where he could see the pedestrian flow in both directions and looked down at the black gold in his mug.

  Bit by bit, the Republic was being infiltrated by Human culture. Earth music was now on an almost even footing with its alien counterpart, thanks largely to the capture of a single Human officer.

  Commander Gabiola, one of the founders of the Long Range Space Group, had been the only survivor seized when her vessel fell prey to the enemy on a deep mission into some Republic backwater. Though not the first source of Earth music, her iPlant was loaded with the largest and most diverse collection yet seen by the enemy.

  It had only been a matter of time before one of the analysts decided to make a copy of her files and smuggle it out of detention for personal use. From there, it was a straightforward, exponential progression as the music was showed off to several friends at a time and copies passed along.

  Cal had arrived on Benthic with the full complement of music. It was so common as to make him stand out by its absence. He couldn’t afford not to listen to it because Human music was the kind of thing a Human agent would be expected to avoid.

  He had resisted the urge to splurge, however, when coffee first made its appearance on Benthic two years ago. Several plantations had sprung up in Republic territory and the price of the beverage was slowly coming down, thanks to an aggressive market push by MoonSilver – Republic, but it was definitely the kind of thing the enemy would watch for – at first.

  They knew from MoonSilver – Alliance’s sales that the oddly flavored drink was immensely popular with Humans. All early adopters of the beverage in the Republic probably had an augmented surveillance file. It was a decent bet that Human infiltrators would be drawn to a taste of home.