Mutiny in Space

by Rod Walker

  “You traitorous rat,” said Murdock to Williams. “You’re going to just stand there with that stupid expression on your face and let him execute your crew one by one?”

  Williams smirked. “You’re enemies of the Revolution. You made your choice.”

  The commandos looked at Ducarti.

  “Proceed, gentlemen,” he said. Then he turned around, without so much as a parting sneer at me or Murdock. He really was a cold-hearted bastard.

  The two commandos hustled me and Murdock to our feet, herded us out the blast door to the main dorsal corridor, and pushed us along.

  Later, this was the part that gave me nightmares.

  Not shooting that one commando in the maintenance walkways. Not all the other stuff that happened. Walking down that corridor, just walking with my hands behind my back, was the part that gave me bad dreams. Knowing that I was slowly, inexorably, getting marched to my death and that there was nothing I could do to stop it, nothing at all… that leaves a mark on your mind.

  I still wake up shaking from it sometimes.

  Death by vacuum isn’t really a fun way to go. I won’t describe all the grisly details, but if you’ve ever seen corpses pulled in from vacuum, there’s a reason they look like they died in agony. As painful as that was, death by radiation burns was much worse. And the direction they were taking us, towards the rear airlock, would jettison us fatally close to the ship’s drive.

  There was a reason the sublight drive had all kinds of armor and shielding around it. At least it would be quick. The lack of air would kill me before the drive radiation finishing cooking my innards like a cheap meal in a microwave oven. A few months ago I had tried to eat a frozen burrito for lunch, and had hit the wrong buttons on the microwave in the technicians’ lounge. The thing had exploded all over the inside of the microwave, and Corbin had made sure my task for the next week was to repair every microwave oven on the ship.

  I wondered if I would explode like that burrito.

  I was so scared, definitely the most scared I had ever been in my much-too-short life.

  We reached the end of the dorsal corridor, with the doors to the engineering section on the right. The rear airlock waited at the end of the corridor. Murdock let out a steady stream of furious curses, and I realized that he was going to attack the commandos even though his hands were bound behind his back. That would be suicide, but getting shot through the forehead by a K7 round was a quicker and less painful way to die than asphyxiation accompanied by radiation poisoning. And wasn’t it better to go out fighting? If I was going to die, I would rather die fighting than begging like a coward for my life.

  I had one last thought. I don’t know if there’s an afterlife or not, and I had never given much thought to religion. But the Social Party was entirely atheist, and they’re wrong about everything else, so I assume there must be a God. If I saw my mom and Sergei in the afterlife, I would finally get to tell them “I told you so” about Alesander Ducarti.

  Cold comfort, that.

  We stopped before the airlock. The commando guarding me stuck his rifle’s muzzle into the small of my back. With his free hand he reached over and hit the airlock control. The control panel flashed, and the inner door slid open with a quiet hiss. Beyond it I saw the thick gray metal of the outer door, all that separated us from the vacuum of space and the lethal radiation coming from the Rusalka’s drive.

  “Inside, now,” said the commando.

  I hesitated, and the commando gave me a sharp jab with his rifle. It’s really hard to keep your balance with your hands bound behind your back, and I stumbled forward and bounced off the frame of the inner door.

  “You, too,” said the second commando, stepping back several steps and leveling his K7 at Murdock. One good burst from the rifle would kill Murdock and me, or leave us bleeding to death in the airlock.

  Murdock tensed, and I realized that he was about to attack them. I braced myself to follow suit. I hoped the commandos would shoot us in the head and make it quick. Of course, they could also just shoot us in the knees or the stomach. Then the commandos could drag us into the airlock and let us enjoy a few extra moments of agony until we died.

  “Last chance to die like men,” said the second commando. “Now get in there yourselves, or we’ll do it the hard way.”

  Then the first commando suddenly jerked, and the nasty smell of burning armor flooded my nose. The other commando whirled, started to raise his rifle, and then both men fell. The second one got off a burst of gunfire that ricocheted off the hull a few inches from my left leg. Smoke rose from the prone commandos, the stench of melted armor mixing with the greasier odor of charred flesh.

  Someone had just cooked them both with lasers.

  The door to the engineering room had opened, and I saw my uncle standing there with a laser pistol in his hand. Security Chief Nelson stood next to him, scowling at the dead commandos, and three of Corbin’s techs were with him, all armed.

  I was too weak with relief to say anything.

  “About time,” said Murdock sourly.

  “Either of you hurt?” said Corbin.

  I managed to shake my head. “No. Just a bit foggy from the stun grenade.”

  “Excellent,” said Nelson. “That gives us two more combat effectives.”

  “And two less for them is plus four in all. It’s a mutiny, gentlemen,” said Corbin. “We’re going to take back the ship from Williams and Ducarti. Care to join us?”

  “Oh, God, yes!” I said.

  Chapter 6: Automated Cargo Handling For Fun And Profit

  Nelson and Corbin searched the dead commandos, stripping them of their weapons with practiced movements. After a moment Corbin produced a key from one of the commandos’ belts, and undid our handcuffs. They were mechanical handcuffs, not electronic. I suppose that made them more secure. It’s a lot harder to hack a good mechanical lock than something electronic. You would literally need a hacksaw or a cutting laser to cut through a metal lock.

  My thoughts were bouncing all over the place. The aftereffects of the adrenaline, I suppose. That, and escaping certain death.

  “Here you go, son,” said Nelson, handing me one of the dead commandos’ machine pistols. Nelson didn’t smile as he said it. I suspected he called everyone under the age of fifty “son”.

  “Thanks,” I said, making sure the safety was on. I took a deep breath, trying to get my racing heart and rapid breathing under control. I suddenly felt the need to throw up, and once again I was grateful I hadn’t eaten anything today. If I puked on Nelson’s boots, he would probably recite every regulation relating to the disposal of shipboard biohazards, and I didn’t want to listen to that right now.

  “So,” said Murdock. He helped himself to one of the dead commandos’ K7 rifles. “I think I have a question or two for you, Corbin.”

  “I imagine so,” said Corbin. He glanced at me. “You too, Nikolai.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Ducarti was asking us about junk DNA and lists of secret agents hidden in the grain. Was he telling the truth, or is he chasing a red herring?”

  “Not here,” said Corbin, glancing along the corridor. Far in the distance, nearly a kilometer down the dorsal corridor, I could see the closed blast doors that sealed off the bridge. If Ducarti realized what had happened, he could simply open the doors and spray gunfire down the corridor until we were all dead. “Engineering room. We’ll be safer there.”

  “Will we?” I said. I supposed Ducarti wouldn’t want to start shooting in the engineering room, given all the various machines and devices that could explode. Shooting a conduit of coolant or drive plasma is a really, really bad idea.

  “Given that I’ve rigged the hypermatter reactor to explode, yes,” said Corbin.

  Murdock and I stared at him.

  “How is that safer?” I said at last.

  “What?” said Murdock.

  “Come on,” said Corbin. “This isn’t the place to talk about it. Wait, Nikolai—grab his helmet. We m
ight need it in a few minutes.”

  I shrugged and pulled off the helmet of the nearest dead commando. The face beneath the mask was slack, the eyes glassy and staring. I suppose I should have felt something, a pang of emotion, a flicker of feeling at our shared mortality, but the guy had been planning shove me out an airlock to die, so I was just glad not to be in his place.

  “Move, people,” snapped Nelson, keeping his newly-acquired K7 pointed towards the distant bridge blast doors. I tucked the helmet under one arm and followed Murdock and Corbin and the other techs towards the engineering doors. A mass of wires dangled from the doors’ control panel.

  “Computer lockout,” said Corbin in response to the unanswered question. “The captain sealed the doors to the engineering section. So we ripped out the network connection and used the manual override.”

  Murdock grunted. “Bet it made a lot of noise.”

  “It did,” said Corbin. “Of course, we knew it would, so Mr. Nelson and a few of the techs laid an ambush. When four of Ducarti’s commandos showed up, we surprised them and relieved them of their lives and their weapons.”

  “It was regulation-smooth,” said Nelson, which was probably the highest compliment he had for anything.

  We headed into the engineering room. It was a big room, twice as large as the bridge, and stuffed with consoles and instrument tables. At the moment, all of the consoles and instrument tables showed the same SYSTEM LOCKED message I had seen in the computer room and the bridge. Nelson dispatched two of the techs to guard the doors back to the dorsal corridor. Both men had K7 rifles taken from dead commandos, and anyone trying to force their way into the engine room would meet a hail of gunfire.

  “All right,” said Murdock. “I think you’ve got some questions to answer, Corbin.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Like junk DNA and secret agents.”

  “First things first,” said Murdock, cutting me off, “Are you really going to blow up the ship, Rovio?”

  “I hope not,” said Corbin. He reached into a pocket of his jacket and drew out a flat black box. “Nikolai. Recognize this?”

  My head was still aching and it took a moment to get my brain into focus. “That is a… reinforced computer processor. Shielded against EMP pulses and radiation and stuff like that.” Some of the charts I had memorized for my certification tests swam up to the forefront of my thoughts. “There’s only a few of them on the ship. So that means…”

  I blinked. Then I swallowed. Hard.

  Murdock let out a few curses. Somehow, he never seemed to repeat himself.

  “You took that out of the regulator on the hypermatter reactor,” I said, resisting the urge to send a nervous glance at the metal deck beneath my feet. “That means the reactor is destabilizing, right now!”

  “It will explode,” said Corbin, tucking the processor back into his pocket. “Eventually. Not for another six to nine hours, though. It will take that long for the hypermatter reaction to destabilize sufficiently.”

  “What good does that do us?” said Murdock. “You do know we’re actually on the ship you’re blowing up, don’t you?”

  “Oh,” I said as the realization came to me.

  “Explain it for Murdock,” said Corbin with a faint smile. “Computer guys deal with software, and they aren’t used to the nuts and bolts of the real world.”

  Murdock scowled. “I’ll tell you what you can do with your nuts and bolts.”

  “If two operating hypermatter reactors get too close to each other,” I said, recalling the prep material for the certification test, “they can become entangled on a quantum level. Like… tachyons, that’s it. The regulator is supposed to keep that from happening. Except Corbin pulled out the regulator’s processor while the hypermatter reactor on Ducarti’s ships are still running.”

  “Which means,” Corbin broke in, “that when our reactor goes up, the reactors on the Vanguard and the troop transport will go as well. Doesn’t matter how far they run, or even if they make it to hyperspace. Once two hypermatter reactors are entangled, if one goes, they both go.”

  “Wonderful,” I said. I suppose it would be poetic justice if Ducarti was blown up unawares, just as he had done to my mother and brother. I didn’t particularly want to blow up with him, though.

  “Fine,” said Murdock. “So we’re going to particulate in nine hours unless you put that processor back into the regulator. But what about the rest of it, Rovio? Ducarti seems to think that there’s some sort of secret list of Social Party agents encoded into the junk DNA of the grain shipment.”

  There was silence for a moment.

  “He’s not wrong,” my uncle finally said.

  Murdock swore loudly and threw his hands up. “I don’t mind the dangerous cargoes. But cloak-and-dagger nonsense, Rov? I thought you had left the military. We all did!” He waved a hand in my direction. “What’s next, you’ll tell me that the kid is actually a trained infiltrator or something?”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “What Mr. Rovio just said, although not in so many words,,” explained Murdock, still steaming, “is that he’s an intelligence officer with the Coalition navy.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “I’m afraid so,” said Corbin.

  “And you never told me?” I said.

  “The point of being a secret intelligence officer,” said Corbin, “is not to tell anyone, though I expect it’s a little late at this point. After I finished my term in the navy, the intel division recruited me. The main focus of Coalition intelligence for years has been the Social Party, and as you can imagine, I have something of a grudge against the bastards. Working for Starways gives me an excellent excuse to travel around the Thousand Worlds, and there are always little errands that need doing here and there.”

  Murdock’s eyes narrowed. “Wet work? Black ops? Offing agents of the Revolution?”

  Corbin didn’t blink. “Sometimes. If need be. Not often, though. Killing a man usually makes a bigger mess than just leaving suspicious funds in his account, or delivering the contents of his phone to the local police.”

  “All right,” said Murdock. “So this business with the list encoded in the junk DNA. Was this your mission?”

  “Not originally,” said Corbin. “Some of the exiles on New Sibersk thought it up. The colony is mostly refugees from Novorossiya III, from when the revolutionary government went berserk and began the mass executions before it finally collapsed. Consequently, exiles and refugees from other worlds the Social Party has trashed tend to wind up there. Some of them were former members of the Socials’ intelligence and secret police apparatuses, and they had a lot of information their former higher-ups didn’t want falling into the wrong hands.”

  “So why junk DNA?” I said. “That seems like a horribly over-complicated way to do it. Why not send an email? Why not just write it down on a piece of paper and mail it the old-fashioned way?”

  “Politics,” said Corbin.

  Murdock groaned. “Oh, for God’s sake. Always with the politics. This is why I got out of the navy, you know.”

  “The situation is complicated,” said Corbin, “but to sum it up, the Social Party can’t attack New Sibersk without drawing serious repercussions, nor can any of the Party’s clients or proxies. Furthermore, the Party knows that some of its sensitive information has been lost… but it doesn’t know how much of it, so the Reds haven’t really been able to prepare. They’ve been spying on New Sibersk for years, so the exiles don’t dare to send the list out electronically. A paper copy can be stolen or destroyed. So some of the exiles hit on the idea of encoding the list in the junk DNA of the grain harvest.”

  “Why junk DNA?” I said.

  “Because the Social Party lacks the scientific expertise to decode it,” said Corbin.

  “Really?” I said. “Why?”

  Corbin’s cold smile held no mirth. “Because a few years ago, they purged most of their competent geneticists for political disloyalty after a faile
d harvest.”

  “Typical,” said Murdock with a contemptuous snort.

  “We arranged for Starways to get the contract for the harvest,” said Corbin, “and for the harvest to go aboard the Rusalka. The easiest solution for the Social Party’s problem was to simply blow up the ship, but the Rusalka has the armaments of a small capital warship, and the blockade runners and stealth frigates the Socials use on missions like this wouldn’t have a prayer against her guns. In a straight fight, the Rusalka would have blasted the Vanguard and the troop transport out of the sky in about a minute.”

  “Except,” I said, “you didn’t know that Williams was Social.”

  “Or did you know that he was one of them?” said Murdock, a dangerous edge in his voice.

  “I didn’t,” said Corbin. “I knew he was crooked. I knew he was selling information to some shady agents with Social connections, but he was selling it to anyone who would pay him. That was why I had you and Hawkins keep track of him. I never thought he would leak information that would endanger his own ship to someone like Ducarti. I thought he was corrupt at best and an embezzler at worst. I didn’t know he was actually a revolutionary.”

  “I bet it was Ducarti,” I said. “Ducarti sold him on it.”

  Nelson frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I heard Ducarti speak on New Chicago before the bomb went off,” I said. “He’s persuasive. I thought he was full of it, but my mom didn’t and my brother didn’t, and he got both of them killed. The audience for his speech was full of guys like Captain Williams. Fat old professors and bureaucrats with easy enough lives, but they all thought they’d been screwed. Then along comes Ducarti with his big words, and they think they get to be heroes of the revolution or something. He takes advantage of that.”

  “So why didn’t you fall for it?” said Murdock.

  “Nothing he said makes sense,” I replied. “I mean, engines make sense. Fuel goes in, thrust and power come out. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Everything has to be paid for. Ducarti just talked a lot of nonsense that he made sound good.”