Severance

by Chris Bucholz

  “Hurry the fuck up, Curts.”

  “Right. So, my plan is, we close the bulkhead doors here, here, here…” He drew lines on the map, drawing in bulkhead doors, tracing out an enclosure that encompassed the Othersiders’ main force. “Now, look at…” he said, his finger tracing over the map, searching for something. “This room here.” His finger stopped over a room near the Othersiders’ perimeter. “We c–c–can get people in here without them seeing. So, we send in a team of engineers with a fuse torch, and,” he swallowed, hesitating. “And we c–c–cut a hole in the floor.”

  That got Helot’s attention. He stood up straighter, waiting for Curts to continue.

  “If we cut a big hole — say a meter or two, in this room here, and then blow open this door somehow…”

  “You’ll suck all the air out of that section of the ship,” Helot finished his thought. “Just that section, right?” Maybe he didn’t want to go all the way crazy. That was a good sign.

  “Uh, just that section, sir. Once the pressure starts to drop, there’s no way they’ll be able to open these bulkhead doors. The vacuum would be c–c–contained.”

  “How long would it take for the air to evacuate?”

  “From the streets? A few minutes. There would be air pockets in all of the rooms and buildings, of course, once the membranes shut. There’d be enough air in there for a few hours — maybe a day — of breathing.”

  “So, they die quickly, or they die slowly,” Helot said, nodding slowly. “But they’d die.”

  “If they like breathing air, yes.” Curts stared at the map. “If we wanted to, with some c–c–careful control of the bulkhead doors, we could reintroduce air to this section small bits at a time. Enough for security to rush in and overwhelm anyone t–t–trapped in the rooms. To capture them.”

  “How long would it take you to do this?”

  Curts took a deep breath. “Maybe a c–couple hours?”

  “Then you should have started a couple hours ago.” The static seemed to fade from his hearing. Helot felt a shudder as the adrenaline started to leave his system. “Good work, Curts. It’s refreshing hearing something positive from you for once.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Helot nodded. “Now, don’t fuck it up.”

  §

  Curts maneuvered the fuse torch slowly and deliberately in the enviro–suit, not wanting to take any chances. He hadn’t worn an e–suit in years. Move slow, that was the rule of thumb. Leavened in this particular case by the urgent need for haste the captain had impressed upon him. Don’t fuck up, indeed.

  Curts shut off the blade and moved to his right a bit, grabbing at the heavy cord secured to his waist and dragging it with him. The tethers necessitated even slower movement than normal, although he wouldn’t have done the job without them. From his waist, the thumb–thick cord snaked across the floor and out the door to a neighboring room, where it had been fastened to the floor with massive bolts. He had watched the installation of those very carefully.

  There were other people more qualified for this, more capable with the fuse torch, more experienced working in e–suits. But the job was risky, and it was his idea. And, not long ago, he had been kicked in the head. That angered up the blood a bit.

  Truthfully, he had been looking for an opportunity to do something like this. He had weaseled his way into this plot, betrayed everyone around him for the chance to touch real dirt. And everyone knew it. He was tired of the looks he got, from Helot, from the security officers, from everyone else around him. They knew he didn’t belong and let him know with every sneer. A miserable life awaited him on the surface of Tau Prius living with these people. He needed a chance to prove he had earned his ticket.

  Another wedge of rock loosened, he turned off the torch while two naval engineers crawled into the hole. They were almost two full meters below floor level now, just past the sandwiched insulation layers. Anywhere from one to five meters to go. The navy guys wrestled the rock out of the hole, fighting with their own tethers. Hopefully, those would just be safety measures. Hopefully. The plan wasn’t all the way crazy, just very close.

  The chunk of rock removed, he climbed down into the hole, slightly deeper this time, and aimed his fuse torch at the lowest spot. He hit the trigger, and a bright blue blade shot out the end, the facemask of his suit immediately darkening to obscure it. He twisted the blade around, slicing into the rock. He waited a few seconds for it to penetrate to its full depth, then slowly dragged the blade around, chopping another wedge of rock out of the ground.

  A tremendous hissing noise filled the room. Curts let the fuse torch blade snap shut and scrambled back out of the hole as fast as he could. Everyone watched the hole anxiously. There was nothing to see, but the sound told them volumes. A tiny sliver had been chopped clean through the hull of the ship. Above them another sound, as the membrane above the door snapped shut, sealing the room off from the street outside. Curts sat back, and took several deep breaths. This was good news. It meant the two rooms would depressurize slowly. Beside him, he watched one of the other engineers monitoring the air pressure on his terminal. He gave a thumbs up and went into the neighboring room to examine the emergency airlock they had sealed around the door there.

  After five minutes, the two rooms had almost completely emptied of air. Curts tested the tether again, then set back to work with the fuse torch. He could afford to move a little more quickly now and started sawing away at the hole. Working in the deepest part, he cautiously sawed out another small chunk of the floor. He felt rather than heard the crunching sound as a little piece broke loose and fell away, rocketing through the floor and out into space. He looked down; there were stars in the floor.

  Now that they didn’t have to pull the chunks out of the floor by hand, he began slicing off larger pieces from the perimeter, letting them drop through the floor on their own. In short order, he had quickly expanded the perimeter of the hole until it was almost a meter in diameter. He stepped back, admiring his work. Good, but probably not good enough yet — he had calculated that they needed a hole almost twice as big to drain the air fast enough for their purposes. Confident in the work now, he began making even larger slices. The hole grew progressively wider.

  While bending down to make a cut at an awkward angle, the worst feeling: movement. The ground was sliding out from under him. Leaning back, Curts screamed, as one foot completely gave way. He fell backwards, spinning around, hand flapping, desperate to gain a solid purchase on something. The blade of the fuse torch was still glowing, his hand on the trigger, refusing to let go of anything solid.

  He watched in slow motion as the blade sliced through a loop of thumb–thick cable.

  Everything after that was just math, as the chief engineer fired out of the floor of the Argos at almost forty meters a second.

  §

  Hogg lingered at the edge of the room, watching Kinsella vibrate in rage. “Can you try again? Find another way?” the mayor shouted into his terminal.

  “No, we can’t try another way!” Stein shrieked back, her voice audible even to Hogg. “Weren’t you listening? They were ready for us! They will remain ready for us. Fuck you, you f…” She presumably went on like that, but with a tap of the finger, Kinsella ended the call.

  “Bad news?” Hogg asked. Judging by the expression Kinsella directed at him, Hogg decided that he had better stop speaking for a while. Kinsella had finally felt it safe enough to come visit the forward command post and arrived a half hour earlier wearing an extremely tight, vaguely military–looking uniform. Chevrons everywhere, multiple layers of epaulets, that kind of thing. He had expected to be told that he was now the undisputed ruler of the ship. Which he wasn’t. What he was — overdressed — didn’t satisfy him, and he had spent the last half hour making the command post a very unpleasant place to be.

  Kinsella whipped his terminal across the room, smashing it against the wall. “Yes, Hogg. It was bad news. All the way bad,” he said, his voice
remarkably even. “They’re fucked. Those two tits managed to escape, but the rest of your team’s captured. Or dead. Or whatever.” Hogg’s hands clenched — those were some of his friends that were now ‘whatever.’ Kinsella pointed a finger at him. “This is your fault somehow. You fucked me. You waited until I turned my back, and you fucked me.”

  “I’ve done nothing but try and win this fight for you.”

  “Then why do you keep losing?”

  “Because you gave me an army of losers!” Hogg winced when he said it. A large number of those losers were within earshot.

  Kinsella pointed at one of the losers and snapped his fingers. “Your terminal.” While the young soldier fished his terminal out of his webbing, Kinsella turned back to Hogg. “Yeah, well, I gave you a lot of them.” He snatched the terminal out of the hands of the young soldier and poked something into it.

  “What are you doing now?” Hogg asked.

  Kinsella looked up at him. “You’ll see the same time everyone else sees. Because the hell I’m telling you any more of my plans in advance, officer.”

  §

  What an idiot. Helot felt his face flush, watching the white–faced security officer who told him about Curts. “What an idiot,” Helot said, deciding to not keep the thought to himself. “Why in hell would he do that? Doesn’t he know how to delegate? I mean, holy shit, Curts.”

  “Everything else is done, though,” the security officer reported. “The charge is in place. Everything’s ready to go on your order.”

  “On my order…,” Helot repeated. He took a deep breath. It was a hell of an order to give.

  His original plan had been perfect. No one had to die! The ship would have been in two before anyone even noticed. Everyone gets to live. His new plan was not perfect. People had to die. They already were dying. He really shouldn’t be speeding that up, should he?

  His terminal vibrated. He looked down at it, curious. Only a handful of people on the ship could contact him directly, most of whom were in this room, or recently deceased, or…

  “Mayor,” he said, taking the call on speaker.

  “Ahh hello, Captain,” Kinsella’s voice slithered out of the terminal. “I’m doing quite well, thanks,” he said, answering a question Helot hadn’t asked. “And yourself? Awfully, I hope.”

  “I admit, I’ve had better days, Eric.”

  “That’s a shame. Whatever’s the matter?”

  “You, killing people,” Helot said. “That’s kind of ruining my day. Is it not ruining yours?”

  “This isn’t going over the feeds Helot, so I’d like to take a moment to ask you to eat my shit. You started this, remember? Don’t complain to me.” A long pause. Helot gritted his teeth. Get to the point, you asshole. “Now then,” Kinsella said, ending the foreplay. “You are open to negotiations. Correct?”

  “What sort of negotiations?”

  “Well, I’d suggest we start with a ceasefire. No further hostilities.”

  “Wasn’t that how we started today? How did this begin, again?”

  “Eat my shit,” Kinsella suggested again, apparently running low on even token insults. “Along with the ceasefire, you will surrender, unconditionally. All further efforts to damage or separate this ship will halt immediately. In return, I promise that you, all naval and security personnel, and every civilian currently located in the aft will be left unharmed.”

  “That’s not really negotiating, is it?”

  “It is what it is. Because if you don’t surrender, we will run you down. We outnumber you twenty to one. It’s taking everything I have to hold them back. They hate you, Helot. I’ve told them some awful things about you. They’ll pull your throat out and drop it at my feet as a gift.”

  Helot felt sad. This was going to happen. He hit the mute button on the terminal. “Can he do that?” he asked the security guy who seemed least afraid to speak. “Do they outnumber us twenty to one?” Seeing the slow nod, Helot closed his eyes. “Dammit.” He took a deep breath and stood up straighter. He unmuted the terminal. “Kinsella, I’m going to need some time to think about this.”

  A lengthy pause from the other end. “Well, then I suggest you think quickly. You’ve got ten minutes.”

  The terminal went dead. A sea of faces in the control room, all watching their captain paint himself into a corner. He had become everything Kinsella said he was.

  “Blow the charge.”

  §

  Leroy shook himself, struggling to stay alert. For two hours he had sat, watching the back of a guy who was watching another guy fifty meters away watch him. Commander Hogg had told them to stop and watch, so that’s what they were doing.

  Leroy didn’t know why they had stopped shooting but wasn’t happy. Having a gun had actually gotten kind of boring. He hadn’t even fired his yet, not this time. He had been near the back when the attack started. By the time he had gotten close enough to the front to see where bad guys might be, everyone was telling him to stop. The bad guys were shooting too much. So, he had stopped.

  Moore ducked behind the counter again. Leroy could hear him there, rummaging around in the mass of tattered and dusty plastic plants that filled the florist’s shop they had taken cover in. Eventually, Moore reappeared beside the counter, sitting on the floor. He extracted a meal bar from one of his pockets — the third meal bar he had eaten since they had arrived. “We’re not here to eat, genius,” Leroy said. Moore sneered at him but got back to his feet, leaning on the counter, mouth working on the meal bar.

  “Oph scphit,” he said, spraying food across the counter.

  “What?” Leroy asked. Moore swallowed, and Leroy crawled over beside him, peeking over the edge of the counter. There was no one across the street anymore. “Where is he?”

  “He disappeared,” Moore said. “Oh, well.”

  Shithead. Leroy scanned the neighboring windows, looking for movement. Nothing. He raised his pistol and moved out from behind the counter. Walking closer to the window, he peered down the street to the south, just barely catching sight of a figure running around a corner. He stepped out the front door and scanned up and down the street. There were a couple of good guys in the front door of a massage parlor. But no bad guys.

  Stepping back inside, he tapped his terminal. “Command, this is Leroy at Slate and 6th. I can’t see any more bad guys. They ran away.”

  “Okay. Sit tight.”

  Leroy stared at the terminal for a moment, trying to decide what the most soldiery way to sit tight was. He really wanted to shoot some guys and go home. He took up a position by the doorway, practicing soldiery ways to look down the street. Nothing to see, nothing to shoot. The only sound was Moore grazing behind the counter.

  A sudden rumbling to the south caused Leroy to leap back inside, falling on his ass. He lay still for a while, until his embarrassment coaxed him into action, eventually getting up and returning to the doorframe. The bulkhead doors a block south were closing. Still no sign of the enemy. More rumbling, closer by. He took a deep breath and broke cover, jogging to the corner, where he could see down the street to the west. Another bulkhead door closing. He ran back inside. “Command, Leroy again. I’ve got bulkhead doors closing to my…” He was interrupted by an explosion to the south.

  Again, he threw himself backwards into the store, landing ass first, less embarrassed this time. He sat there for a moment, hearing no other explosions or gunfire or really anything at all, until Moore started eating again. Leroy clambered to his knees and returned to the door, looking outside carefully. There. Down the street, the door of an apartment was bulging out, just this side of the bulkhead door that had closed. Leroy held his breath and listened. A strange noise could be heard coming from that direction.

  “Command, we just had an explosion down here. Still no sign of bad guys. Orders?”

  “Hold position for now, Leroy.”

  For thirty seconds, then a minute, he stood in the doorway, listening to the sound. It didn’t get louder, but he definite
ly wasn’t imagining it. Beyond that, nothing seemed to be happening at all. It had suddenly become, of all fucking things, boring again. He made a decision. “Hey, foodbag. Cover me. I’m going to go have a look.”

  Moore swallowed and nodded, moving over to the door himself. Leroy set out walking as quietly as possible, swinging his pistol left and right as he crossed the intersection, imagining how much like a soldier he looked. Still no one to be seen on the streets. He slowed down as he approached the broken door. It was bulging out from the center, like it had been punched by an angry giant. One of the corners had come loose. The wall on one entire side of the doorframe was run through with cracks, and he could see chunks of the wall lying on the floor. The sound grew louder as he got closer, some kind of whistling. He stopped, directly across the street from the door and tried to decide what to do next.

  He felt a breeze.

  Light breezes and gusts could be felt in the garden well, for reasons Leroy had never cared to learn, but they weren’t common in the lower decks. There was something important about that, he decided. I should definitely tell someone about this. Having made that decision, Leroy turned away from the twisted door.

  Before he could move more than a couple steps, the door frame imploded, taking the door and half the wall with it. Leroy was yanked off his feet, tumbling backwards towards the opening, twisting around as he fell, barely catching a glimpse of the room beyond. The entire floor of the room was gone, replaced with a huge gaping hole the size of the whole universe. Leroy screamed, but the sound didn’t travel far. He was spared the indignity of being the second involuntary astronaut in Argosian history when he cracked his head on the edge of the hole, dying instantly. The void vacuumed up the mess without complaint.

  §

  Hogg gaped helplessly as the bulkhead doors crept across the street. They had heard the rumbling as well, the entire command center running into the street. It was a wide street, and the door was taking its time, many of them dashing across the threshold to the presumed safety of the north, others dashing across the threshold to the presumed safety of the south.