Severance

by Chris Bucholz

  Kinsella didn’t hesitate; he went north. “Not you,” he said, stopping, pointing at Hogg. “You win me this war.”

  “Sir, I think something really nasty is about to…”

  “Hogg,” Kinsella said calmly. “I order you to win me this war. You take your little soldiers, and you shoot Helot until he stops being nasty.”

  Hogg stared helplessly as both sides of the door rumbled closer together. “Sir, this is bad. You can’t.”

  “Hogg, I order you to win this war.”

  “Ohhhhh kaaaaaay,” Hogg said, not really sure why. The doors met in front of him with a thundering sound.

  Linze had stuck with him and looked skeptically at him. “Now what?” she asked.

  Hogg wasn’t sure what the answer to that was or if he would have much of a say in it. He returned to the command post to find one of the communications officers waiting for him. “We’re getting reports from all over. Bulkhead doors are closing on all sides. In the escalators, too. All visible security troops have retreated.” Hogg tried to visualize this. Helot was boxing them in. Containing them. That wasn’t so bad. They would get to sit this out for a bit.

  “He’s cutting off our ways of escape,” Linze said behind him. Hogg hadn’t considered that interpretation. He didn’t like it as much as his own.

  “Okay, order everyone to hold positions for now,” Hogg said. The communications officer nodded and ran back to the dining room.

  Hogg’s peace didn’t last long. “Sir, there’s been an explosion near 6th and Slate!” the communications officer shouted a moment later. “Still no signs of enemy movement.” Hogg crossed the room to lean over the map. That was in the southeast corner of their perimeter. Far from where the main bulk of the security troops were. “Who saw the explosion? Put it on the speakers,” Hogg asked.

  A panicked voice shrieked out over the desk speakers. “Holy crap! He’s gone! Leroy is gone! He got sucked through the hole! He got fucking sucked through the hole! Command? This is Moore! Leroy just got sucked through the hole! Oh, shit.”

  Hogg mashed his hand down on the transmit button. “What hole? Soldier! What are you talking about?”

  “The air is moving! The air is moving! It’s wind!” came the confused response.

  Hogg stared at the screen for a few seconds, the gears spinning. His heart stopped. Oh, no, they wouldn’t. Oh, holy shit. He strained to think of something to say, an order to give, but he couldn’t. He felt like he was choking.

  “They trapped us in here and are sucking out all the air,” the communications officer said slowly, vocalizing the problem Hogg couldn’t.

  Hogg’s brain snapped back into motion. “Order all troops to fall back to the 9th and Africa blast doors. We’ve got to open them now!” He ran outside to the bulkhead door, furiously pounding on the control panel. Soldiers streamed into the street behind him, masses of them. They stopped at the door, leaving space for him as he beat on the work–shy controls. Where was Stein? She’d know how to open these things. He gave up and turned around, looking at the expectant faces staring back at him.

  His heart sank as he realized what he had done. They were all going to be trapped out in the street.

  Somewhere in the crowd, Linze’s voice, shouting orders. “They’re sucking the air out of the streets! Everyone get inside! Take cover indoors right now! Get inside! Now dammit!”

  Mayhem. Not prone to good behavior at the best of times, the Loyalist forces stampeded away from the doors, trampling over the ones too far away to hear Linze’s advice. Linze fought her way to Hogg’s side, grabbed him by the arm, and led him back into the command post. Hogg let himself get placed in a chair, and watched as his second in command took over, doing what he couldn’t.

  §

  The image on the screen shifted and moved. It was a face. Yes. She could tell it was a face. But whose face? Whoever it belonged to, they were saying something. But there was no sound. There was something wrong with the terminal. Where had the sound gone?

  Ellen had known something was up before almost everyone else, having watched the security officers retreat from her vantage point. When the bulkhead doors closed, she was already on her way out, taking the stairs of the apartment two at a time, banging the heavy smart rifle against the walls as she descended, finally dashing out into the street. She wasn’t the only one with that idea, finding herself surrounded by panicked soldiers outside, making their way to the Africa Street bulkhead door, too late. There they watched Hogg and his saucer–eyes pound on it helplessly.

  “Get inside.” Ellen had been close enough to hear Hogg’s lieutenant and managed to avoid being trampled in the resulting stampede, though she did drop the smart rifle in the crush, not caring. She returned to the apartment she had been shooting from, two soldiers on her heels, thinking she looked like she knew what she was doing. Inside, she had sprinted upstairs, bypassing the sitting room with its shattered windows, and slammed face first into the bedroom door. It was locked. She pounded at the door controls hopelessly. The door had locked automatically when the outside air pressure dropped past a certain point. She was too late.

  The other soldiers had fled, leaving her alone, sitting on the floor. A short and awful terminal conversation with her husband had followed. Panic in his voice, calmness in hers.

  That’s who the face belonged to! It was Griese. She knew him. He was her husband. He was shouting something at her, but she couldn’t hear what. Something wrong with the sound. She closed her eyes and tried to focus on her breathing. In through the nose. Hold. Hold. Hoooooooooold. Out through the nose. Hold. Hold.

  It was exhausting work, and she soon fell asleep from the effort.

  §

  Outside the bulkhead door, the mayor was a shrieking mess, stamping his feet like a child. “What do you mean you can’t open it?” he shouted.

  Stein hauled back and slapped him. It was the fourth time he had asked it, and a hand upside the face was the only response she hadn’t tried yet. “There is a vacuum on the other side!” she said, repeating responses one through three again to see if they would sink in this time. She pointed at the flashing red light on the control panel that read, ‘Vacuum.’ She tapped at it just to be sure he was looking at it. “The safety interlocks won’t let us open the door.”

  Kinsella’s voice rose several octaves. “Well, then disable them! Or blast through it somehow!”

  “And what, then? Do you know what a vacuum is? We open that door, and all the air in the rest of the ship gets sucked out through that hole in there. It will kill us all.”

  “Well, then figure something out! I’m the only one here coming up with solutions!”

  A closed hand slap was the only solution she could immediately think of, but Stein exhaled slowly, controlling herself. No need to push her luck too far; it was already a small miracle that she and Bruce had slipped the trap themselves. At some point during their escape from the upper–decks she had reopened the wound on her shoulder, and after making it back to the first floor and sprinting across the street to safety, Bruce had taken her to the field hospital that had been set up a few blocks north of the initial attack. It was here, while getting a fresh healing wrap set around her arm that they’d heard the rumbling noise of the closing bulkhead door.

  “We’re working on something. Just give us some time,” she told Kinsella, stepping away from the horrible man before he could say something else. She crossed the street to where Bruce and Griese were standing. “So?” she asked. “We are working on something, right?”

  Bruce stared at her blankly. “I’ve sort of roughed out an idea for a makeshift airlock. But we’d need a bunch of tools we don’t have. And it would probably kill whoever went through. And everyone else on the other side. And over here.” He glanced at Griese, whose eyes were red and raw. “So, no.”

  A crowd of soldiers gathered around the bulkhead door, no less helpless and dumbstruck. One of the medics — a conscripted doctor — had been fending off questions f
rom the mayor, asking how long people could survive in those rooms before the air became too stale to breathe. The doctor could only guess. Anywhere between four and forty–eight hours. Depended on the size of the room, how many people were in it, how much they were breathing. Outside one of the rooms? The doctor looked like he was about to laugh, before he caught himself.

  “Even if we could get on the other side, getting — what, 4000 people — all out through an airlock would take days,” Stein said.

  “We don’t need to get them all out.” Griese said.

  Stein looked at her shoes. “Yeah. No, you’re right. Good point.” She chose not to say what she was actually thinking. If Ellen wasn’t inside…

  Bruce’s face lit up. “Where was the hole, again?” He looked at the map that they had pieced together from Hogg, who was safe inside for the time being, busy sending them information. “What if we close these two doors here?” Bruce asked. “Isolate the area where the hole is. Then we could open this door,” he waved at the bulkhead door beside them, “and re–pressurize the whole area.”

  Stein was careful to keep an even expression on her face, not wanting to shoot his idea down. “Okay. But we can’t do that remotely. We’d still need to get in there somehow.”

  “No, we wouldn’t.”

  §

  The maintenance robot trundled down the vents and stopped just in front of the closed duct membrane. It extended a manipulator arm against the duct wall to brace itself, then used its plasma cutter to carefully poke a hole in the membrane. A hiss announced the loss of atmosphere, and air rushed past the robot and out through the incision. Somewhere upstream, another membrane closed shut, limiting the total loss of air. After a couple of minutes, the sound of the rushing gas had quieted down to a small hiss, and the robot resumed its work, cutting a hole large enough for it to pass through.

  A few minutes later, the robot dropped through the ceiling above Africa, landing in the center of the street. The robot turned and scurried south, making its way to the area where they had figured the hole in the hull was. Atypically, it chose to travel in the center of the street, its collision detection system noticing several obstructions piled up on the edges of the street, around the sealed entrances to rooms.

  §

  “Are those bodies?”

  “Yeah.” Bruce said. “Jesus.”

  §

  After a few minutes, the robot reached its destination. A non–descript stretch of street that happened to contain a set of bulkhead doors — the first of two sets that needed to be closed to isolate the hole in the hull. The robot climbed up the wall to the control panel. Reaching out, it activated the panel, paused, and then pressed the button that would close the door. Its sensor pivoted to watch the door slowly slide shut.

  §

  “That was easy,” Bruce said, watching the door on his terminal.

  “Yeah. Huh,” Stein said.

  §

  “Why did that door just close?” Helot asked. He had been watching the area in vacuum ever since the attack. Othersiders trapped in the streets, banging on doors, clutching their throats. He had made himself watch. He was trying not to think about how little he felt. He was pretty confident he should feel a lot worse than he did.

  Manipulating the controls on his display, he zoomed in on the door and scanned around the nearby street, eventually spotting the answer to his question.

  §

  The maintenance robot traveled the short distance to the second bulkhead door. Lying across the plane where the door would slide shut was a body. After a few seconds of consideration, the robot cautiously moved forward, grabbing the dead soldier by the collar. Slowly the robot reversed, trying to drag the body out of the way. But as the corpse started to move, the collar gave way, torn apart by the manipulator. Another few seconds passed while the robot reevaluated the obstacle. Eventually, it backed up a short distance, reversing in a curved line until it faced the body squarely. It then charged forward, slamming into the corpse. The friction holding the body in place gave way, and the robot and body slowly slid past the door.

  §

  Helot fumed at Curts’ idiocy. He would probably know how to disable the robot remotely, if he wasn’t off in fucking space somewhere.

  He watched the robot and its pallbearing learning curve. Beside him, one of the security officers said, “I’ve got an idea.” Helot looked at him, vowing to learn his name the next time someone casually mentioned it. The officer moved over to a different panel and found the right set of controls. “Now, this will require some timing.”

  §

  The robot had mounted the wall beneath the control panel and slowly reached out to press the button. The bulkhead door slowly started to close. The robot retreated to the floor and backed up to watch the door slip into place. Its sensor rotated around to view the first door it had activated, just visible behind the edge of a building corner. The door had opened again.

  §

  “What?” Bruce and Stein said in unison.

  §

  The robot returned to the original door, climbed up, and shut it again, watching it close carefully. The door slid into place, and the robot climbed down, taking a minute to inspect the door’s perimeter to ensure it stayed shut. It did. The robot turned to look at the second door.

  §

  “Oh, son of a bitch!”

  “They’re fucking with us,” Stein said, looking at the second door, now opened again. “We should have done this the right way from the start.”

  §

  “Hehehehehehehehe,” Helot said. “Dummies.” He looked at the other people in the room, who stared back, blankly. It occurred to Helot that he was laughing at a desperate attempt to save people’s lives. His smile evaporated. Turning back to the screen, he said, “They’re going to figure it out soon. How long until your guy is ready?”

  “He’s ready now.”

  §

  The robot pried off the access panel underneath the controls and delicately extended its plasma cutter. With a short, sharp burst, it severed the link between the door mechanism and the controls, locking the door in the closed position. It descended the wall and made its way over to the second door for the final time. There, it climbed the wall, pried off the access panel, and exploded.

  An e–suit–clad figure, rifle held somewhat awkwardly at its hip, walked over and kicked the remnants of the robot. Another shot into its guts. Satisfied, the figure retreated around the corner, entering the room with the puncture. He carefully sidestepped the hole into the rest of the universe, and made his way to the temporary airlock installed in the neighboring room.

  §

  Bruce smashed the terminal on the ground. “Why is nothing easy? Why does everything have to be so fucking hard?”

  Stein stared at the largest piece of the terminal, which had come to rest on her foot. They had lost contact with the maintenance robot and had spent the past five minutes trying to reconnect. “I don’t get it,” she said.

  “They blew it up,” Bruce said, balling his hands into fists.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. Wizard magic? But robots don’t just drop offline like that. I’ve never seen that happen.”

  Stein pulled out her own terminal. “So, it’s not worth sending in another robot to try again?”

  “What’s the point? They’d just break that, too. Besides, it’d take hours to get one into position.”

  Stein cocked her head at him. “Well, what else are we doing?” She stared at Bruce desperately, mainly so she didn’t have to look at Griese, whose gaze she could feel on the back of her head. A chirp from her terminal, from everyone’s terminal. She looked down to see an incoming message from Helot. A fraction of a second later, Helot’s voice erupted through the ship’s PA system.

  “Attention, Argos. This is Captain James Edward Helot. Recently, a large group of armed men and women attacked and killed several security officers stationed on the anti–terrorism perimeter. These attac
ks, these murders, are appalling. They cannot go unpunished.”

  The captain paused, his last words echoing slightly in the streets. “Our remaining security forces moved quickly to apprehend the villains responsible for these crimes. In an attempt to escape, these attackers caused an explosive decompression to occur in the aft of the ship. This accident has left many of them trapped, in imminent danger of suffocation and death. I’m inclined to think it’s a fitting end.

  “However, these men and women can be saved. But not by the man behind this attack: Eric Kinsella. If it was up to him, these men and women would die. Only I can save them.”

  “Crap,” Stein said, seeing where this was going.

  “And I will save them. But before I do, Kinsella must put a stop to all hostilities. No more attacks on security officers will be tolerated. Any and all weapons must be surrendered.

  “To the citizens of the Argos: the reason I am showing you such mercy following these unprovoked assaults is because I know that these men and women have been lied to and misled. The true criminals are the ones who organized this attack, the ones who tricked you and sent hundreds of people to their deaths. As I have said many times before, the stories told to you have been lies. And these lies have gotten your husbands and wives, sons and daughters, trapped, and about to die.

  “To Eric Kinsella: if you surrender immediately, your people will be rescued. They will be held in detention until order is restored but will not be harmed or prosecuted. They will live.” Helot waited a beat before delivering the kicker. “Or you can ignore me, and leave your people to die.”

  The PA system clicked off. Stein, as well as everyone else present, turned to look at the mayor. Kinsella stared straight ahead, wide–eyed, face covered in sweat. Beside him, one of his bodyguards was speaking urgently into his terminal. He abruptly grabbed the mayor around the shoulders, and hurried him off to the north.