Crisis

by David Drake

As a cruiser commander, Talley had received orders like this a dozen times before, but usually with a top priority disengagement code. Priority one authorized breaking off hostilities, if necessary, to make the rendezvous. Code two allowed for the abandonment of distressed or disabled ships, while code three only provided for completion of necessary repairs before departure for rendezvous.

  It was obvious that something big was on at last in the war with the Syndicate, and that every available ship in Khalian space was being called in to help. Talley guessed from the low priority of his call-up that he would be part of some diversionary tactic, probably a feint at the Syndicate flanks. It was a little risky–strategic defense initiatives always were–especially if they blundered into the path of a Syndicate “Star Crusher,” one of their ultra-heavy battleships.

  Still, even the most experienced Syndicate commander might be expected to withdraw if an unexpected armada suddenly appeared on his screens. If they really were warships, then sticking around for sensor readings could be fatal–and the Veg-o-whatever was larger than the biggest dreadnought. Trouble was, they didn’t have any weapons–but the Syndicate wouldn’t necessarily know that.

  Talley turned back to Rooney. “Acknowledge receipt of order, and signal our immediate compliance.” Catching the eye of a communications rating, he gave another command as he headed out the door and back to his cabin.

  “Find Mr. Huntley and have him report to my cabin at once.”

  * * *

  The small beeper next to the pool buzzed quietly as Huntley’s wet arm groped for it in the pile of his clothes. He found it and pressed the small red button on its top.

  “Lieutenant Commander Huntley here.”

  The small screen lit up, and he recognized the chubby communications rating on the bridge. “Skipper wants to see you in his cabin right away. It’s important.”

  “Roger that. Out.”

  Huntley tossed the beeper back onto the pile of his clothes and hoisted himself out of the pool. As he hunted for a towel, Lieutenant Bermann admired his slim swimmer’s body, the indirect light of the pool casting the most seductive greenish glow across his lean thighs. As Huntley quickly dried off and dressed, she revised her impression of the executive officer earlier that day: cute, but dumb. To that, she idly thought, she could now add one other important attribute.

  Huntley was dried, dressed, and at Talley’s cabin within fifteen minutes. The corridors and gangways of the ship were strangely quiet, and twice he stuck his head in–once at the chow hall and again at Bear Country–to rooms only to find them totally deserted. Figuring that all hands were probably at stations, he hurried on to Talley’s cabin.

  “Come in,” Talley replied to the knock at the door.

  Huntley entered and saluted. Talley nodded back, and indicated that the executive officer should sit down.

  “This is the situation, Mr. Huntley. We’ve been ordered to rendezvous with Fleet near the left flank of the Syndicate force.”

  The color drained from Huntley’s face.

  “What I want you to do,” Talley went on, “is see to it that the crew doesn’t panic. Keep ‘em calm. There won’t be any fighting, and in all probability we’ll be in and out faster than a pickpocket at a convention. Got that?”

  Huntley’s “aye-aye” was a good deal less than enthusiastic.

  “Good,” said Talley. “Let’s get back up on the bridge.”

  Talley settled into the command seat and punched up a visual scan of the sonar readouts. He immediately saw the small blip that hung in the wake of the 621-J. Pressing the button on his intercom, he asked Central Log for a readout on how long the mysterious “blip” had been following them.

  On the hangar deck Dr. Purvis surveyed the main shuttle and decided that it would easily hold all of the crew. Getting them on board might be difficult, especially Commander Talley, but–well, that would just be too bad. If he didn’t abandon ship, with the rest of them, then he would just have to face the Syndicate raiding party alone. That really wasn’t her worry. Her job was to get the crew on the shuttle, get them off the ship, and let the boarding party in. They would take care of any stragglers.

  Up on the bridge, Talley didn’t like the look of things. The “blip” had been shadowing his ship for nine days, ever since the “accident” that had taken out the previous commander. You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to suspect something was up. Just as he was about to make a crew announcement, the first explosion rocked the ship. Seconds later a second shock wave reverberated through the hull, and complete pandemonium broke out.

  In the confusion caused by the two explosions, Dr. Purvis was able to hit the emergency override switch in the hangar deck and sound the Abandon Ship alarm. In a matter of minutes the hangar deck was packed with almost the entire crew, struggling to get aboard the crew shuttle. On the bridge Talley was knocked down by the wave of crewmen streaming through the exit, and only barely managed to avoid being trampled in the stampede.

  Talley was furious. There had been no damage report, and he had not given anyone the order to sound Abandon Ship. A quick visual scan of the hull did not reveal any damage, and internally the only activity seemed to be on the main hangar deck.

  Talley left the bridge, intending to cross to the hangar deck by way of the ship’s hospital. As he entered the hospital’s waiting room, he was confronted by Dr. Purvis stuffing last-minute supplies into her black bag. She glanced back at him and, without stopping, shouted, “Hurry up, or you’ll miss the shuttle. Try to keep them from taking off without me.”

  Talley walked up to her and laid his hand on her shoulder. “They aren’t taking off.”

  “Oh, yes, they are,” said Purvis–and plunged a syringe into Talley’s chest.

  Before Talley could do more than gasp, everything went black and the floor rushed up to him. Purvis stepped over the crumpled form of her commanding officer and ran through the operating theater to the rear exit of the hospital complex. Below her, on the hangar deck, the last of the 215 members of the crew were fighting their way aboard the Veg-o-matic’s shuttle. As she reached the top of the stairs leading to the gangway, the last of the crew climbed aboard.

  Purvis had just made it to the airlock door when the shuttle banged down its hatch and the main hangar door opened in the side of the hull. Purvis watched in disbelief through the airlock porthole as the shuttle fired its thrusters, nosed out of the hangar deck, and silently vanished into space.

  Two miles away, the commander of the Syndicate raider watched the shuttle as its pilot hit the main drive engines and the craft rocketed out into the void. Pressing a flashing green button on the bulkhead, he signaled his own men to climb into their sled and seize the abandoned cargo transport.

  In the hangar bay of the Syndicate raider, eight mercenaries climbed into the tight confines of the sled that was to take them into the ship lying immediately off their port bow. The deck tilted down in front of them, and the electromagnetic catapult launched them into space.

  The “pocket-rocket,” as it was referred to by the men on board, had small directional thrusters in the nose, and enough of a capacitive discharge drive unit to propel it back to the raider if anything went wrong. Usually, nothing did go wrong, and once the captured ship was secure and any stragglers killed, the raider would pull up alongside the captured vessel and simply dock in its hangar deck. The pilot would then take over command of the captured ship and bring it back to whichever of the Syndicate families had hired him. Piracy hadn’t changed all that much; only the equipment had become more sophisticated.

  * * *

  Cadet Talley struggled in the bushes, desperately trying to escape from the fulsome embrace of Thelma Ruel. She seemed to smother him, demanding more than any man could be expected to perform, especially under the conditions of this particular tryst. He tried to push her away, but to no avail; she loomed over him, her moist red lips pressing down hard on his own. Somewhere in the distance he heard voices . . .

  �
��Do you think he’ll make it?” It was the executive officer speaking.

  “Hell, yes, he’ll make it. I’ve been giving him CPR since I found him, and he’s started breathing on his own. . . .” Chief Commissary Officer Ruel leaned back over the recumbent Commander Talley and reinflated his lungs with a mighty puff, then began compressing his chest once again.

  Talley groaned as his dream swam blearily into his consciousness and then adjusted itself into sharp focus, revealing the chief commissary officer about to once again deliver the “kiss of life.” Mustering all of his strength, Talley just managed to avoid Thelma’s lips. Coughing, he pushed himself up into a sitting position and looked about the room. In addition to Chief Commissary Officer Ruel, Huntley and Bermann were also present.

  “Where’s Purvis?” Talley asked.

  “She must have made it to the shuttle,” Bermann volunteered.

  “I don’t think so,” Huntley offered. “I was monitoring the operation from the control tower, and I didn’t see her come in. In fact, I was looking for all of you when I heard the shuttle leave.”

  Talley tried to stand, but his knees buckled. Thelma scooped him up and propped him against the wall, holding him in place with one of her catcher’s mitt-sized hands. Talley shook his head, trying to clear it from the effects of the syringe, and from the nagging feeling of affection that he was beginning to develop for Chief Commissary Officer Ruel.

  “Okay, everybody. listen up. Here’s what we’ve got to do . . .”

  * * *

  From her vantage point in the airlock above the hangar deck, Purvis watched as the pocket rocket skidded across the landing pad, its front thrusters on full. From the sides of the small sled, exploding darts were driven into the steel mesh of the decking, helping to anchor the slithering craft. As the carbon fiber line played out, the pocket rocket slowed, nearly coming to a full halt before it crashed into the side of the hangar.

  Inside, there was a moment of stunned silence following the crash of the impact. The Khalian pilot spoke first, his tail twitching with annoyance.

  “I hate short deck landings.”

  “Not as much as we do,” someone said. Hoots of derision went up in the small cabin of the sled.

  “Cut the crap and put on your helmets.” The voice came from a badly scarred human. One eye socket was empty, and to judge from the blast scars, most of the teeth and jaw were military-issue plastics. He was thickset and heavily muscled. The silence his voice enforced left no doubt about who was in command of the raiding party.

  “Okay, Geek,” he spoke again, “open the friggin’ door.”

  A young Thalmud opposite the disfigured human turned and manually levered open the hatch. Carefully, his carbine at the ready, he stepped out onto the deck. The nothingness of space seeped into the hangar through the open escape door, and the Thalmud could feel its chill through his thin life-support suit. He attached a carabiner to the side of his ship and carefully made his way around to the emergency control panel on the wall opposite from where Purvis watched.

  ”Ellis.” The Thalmud’s voice was dull in the disfigured man’s ear. “I’m at the panel. What do I do?”

  Ellis’s remaining eye ached. “Look, Geek. Like I told ya. One: open the panel; two: pull the big blue lever; three: tell your mother to come to my bunk tonight. Now get it in gear, or I’ll shoot it off.”

  Geek opened the panel and pulled the lever. The hangar-bay doors grated shut, and the room began to pressurize. Then the pirate trotted back to the sled and pulled off his helmet, a shower of golden droplets flying everywhere as he shook his head.

  “All clear.”

  Inside, the others pulled off their helmets and Ellis gave the order to “hit the streets.”

  Up in the airlock, Purvis counted as six of them formed up in front of Ellis before heading out in twos and threes to clean up any loose ends. She shuddered slightly at the thought of what would happen to her if they found her here in the airlock. Her best move would be to stow away in the cargo hold until someone from one of the families arrived to confirm her identity. The option was to sit around and wait for the goons to find her, and hope that one of them had enough intelligence to hear her out instead of passing her around to his buddies before they killed her.

  Picking up her black bag she headed back into the ship toward the side cargo-bay. On the way, she almost ran into Bermann and Ruel, only barely ducking back out of sight without being noticed. She briefly considered warning them about the raiders, but then decided that her own chances for survival were greater if no one else knew of her presence on the ship. In the freight elevator, she pushed Storage Facility 17 and sank to the floor as the gondola moved silently within the hull of the ship.

  The door opened, and Purvis, lying flat on the floor, stuck her head out, peering both left and right before standing up and making her way down the aisle in front of her. A hundred yards down the aisle she came to exactly what she was looking for: a consignment of portable field loos.

  Well, she thought, like the Marines say, the three most important things in life: comfortable boots, a cold beer, and a dry place to hide.

  Opening her bag, Purvis pulled out a scalpel and jimmied the lock on the field toilet. Inside, she set her bag on the shelf and was about to close the door when she spotted a small cluster of violets growing next to one of the bulkheads.

  She walked over to the flowers like a little girl in a park. She looked both ways to make sure no one was watching, and then she picked several of them and brought them back to her hideout. Climbing in, she closed and locked the door, confident that she and her flowers were perfectly safe from detection.

  On the bridge Commander Talley carefully keyed in the last of a series of commands to the central computer, sealing all exits and locking all doors–standard procedure in abandoning ship, and something that should slow down the advance of the raiders, giving Talley a chance to deal with them on an individual basis. Then, picking up his sword, Talley left the bridge and began to work his way down to the hangar deck.

  In the main corridor Huntley was busy lifting up the last few meters of rubber decking and, stacking it neatly against the wall. Looking back, he was satisfied with the job. Eight meters of metal gridwork lay exposed, its rubber matting carefully stacked to one side. To complete the picture, Huntley carefully laid a metal wrench in the center of the corridor.

  Belowdecks, the galley slave had rigged a massive deadfall consisting mostly of frozen broccoli and dehydrated eggs–and had covered the floor of the galley with rehydrogenized cooking oil.

  Finally, in her office, Flight Information Monitoring Officer Nancy Bermann sat at the keyboard of her computer, crooning softly to a small hydroponic satellite as she transferred control of the onboard closed-circuit television to the Veg-o-matic down in the pond.

  * * *

  Ellis was leaning against the bulkhead, chewing on a blade of grass as the two men with him heaved and grunted, trying to open the locked door. Finally, it gave way and the three were able to scramble through and into the passageway on the other side.

  As they moved down the passageway, Ellis carefully tried each door. Locked. All of them locked. Feral creature that he was, Ellis sensed that something wasn’t right. After a few minutes’ deliberation, he decided to go forward, and to try to reach the bridge before checking on anything else.

  Two decks below Ellis, the Thalmud and a human named Barish were moving along a corridor that led from the flight deck to the forward crew quarters. As they occasionally stopped to try a door, always locked, they finally came to a recess in the wall where a hydroponic tank was overflowing with sweet, succulent clover. Barish stopped in his tracks.

  “Hey, Geek. You ever have any of this stuff back on your planet?”

  “No. What is it? Some sort of plant?”

  The Thalmud made a face at his last remark. Their diet was fairly simple: lots of meat and not much more, washed down with a thick beer made from animal fats.

 
; Barish pulled one of the flowers from the bunch.

  “Look, see, you pull the petals off of the flower here, like this, and then you chew on them. They’re sweet. Go on, try one.”

  As Barish munched on the clover, the closed-circuit camera zoomed in for a close-up, his features being digitized and stored in the memory banks of the computer. In the pond a clover plant sent out shock waves of pain, tinged with the horror of having one of its satellites shredded and eaten. This was recorded by the tremors running through the surface tension of the pond, and stored in the same memory bank that held Barish’s picture.

  A few yards farther down the corridor Geek and Barish heard the sound of one of the doors being unlocked. Carefully the two advanced down the hall, testing each door handle until they found one that yielded when the locking plate was pressed.

  Crouching low, Geek kicked in the door with his foot while Barish covered him with his carbine. It was a small room, a broom closet really, and empty except for the things needed to clean up in quarters. On one wall was an opening nearly two feet square, and Geek motioned toward it.

  Carefully Barish advanced and peered into the opening. It sloped downward and seemed to be some sort of access chute. Barish considered it for a moment, then reached into his pack and brought out a flashlight. Carefully he shone it in the chute, but as far as he could see there was nothing.

  Maybe whoever went in there found another shaft leading up or across from this one, Barish thought. Aiming his carbine in front of him, he climbed into the access chute.

  At the other end of the chute, a small hydroponic satellite detected the additional weight on the conveyer belt that formed the floor of the garbage chute Barish had entered. As soon as it sensed that the chute was in use, it automatically turned on the conveyer that would bring garbage down to the shredders and compactors in the very keel of the ship.