by Jason LaPier
“Trajectory of the Drake suggests intercept course,” Katsumi said. Despite how much she always talked about wanting some action, her voice was beginning to waver in the face of it.
“Go to yellow alert and make sure our guys aren’t in their tubes yet,” McManus said. If they were, they were going to have to take shots to wake back up. He didn’t envy the hangover they’d have. As he unstrapped, he added, “And warm up the turret.”
As the yellow lights flashed, he picked his way out of the bridge and up through the narrow hole of a passageway that led to the turret capsule. He could have sent one of the boys up there, but he only brought brutes, in case he ran into resistance on that damn independent moon. Of the crew, McManus was the best to operate a turret-gun; and he was pretty damn good. As he strapped in, he shook his head to chase away the knowledge that he’d never shot at anything other than drones.
Katsumi’s voice came over the comm. “Drake contact incoming. Definitely on an intercept course.”
“Range?”
“Four K and closing fast.”
“Shit,” he cursed under his breath. “Go to red alert.”
He stabbed at the console to get the turret extended. Katsumi had activated the core systems, but thanks to all the damn safety features, the functional components needed assurance that the turret operator was properly authorized and qualified and also comfortable to some unnecessary specification, to ensure accuracy and optimal decision-making. He’d never heard of anyone being comfortable while firing plasma blasts at an incoming fighter travelling thousands of kilometers per hour, but the damn thing wouldn’t let him take one shot until it was convinced he was in the right state of mind.
He leaned against the back of the chair and looked between the contact map and the small, blank viewport before him. He took a deep breath, held it, then released slowly. He could feel the heat rising up inside him, coloring his skin red, but he held it together enough for the machine to let him do his job. The turret extended and the viewport revealed the black of space.
The Drake was coming in fast. He plotted a solution through the computer and then nudged some of the shots a few degrees this way and that, purely based on instinct. His preferred strategy wasn’t about trying land every shot, but like a good bombball pitcher, he wanted a few misses to get the target moving in the right direction before hitting it with a blast straight down the strike zone.
The target came into range and he let it rip. Through the viewport he could see the balls of orange light flashing as they sang forth from the pair of barrels at the top of the turret. The Drake dipped and wavered predictably and he waited for the series to play out. By the time the fifth blast was away, the target was right in its path.
“Now I gotcha—”
There was an explosion a second too soon and the Drake kept on going. In its wake was a cloud of dust. He anxiously scanned the monitors for any sign of a hit, but there seemed to be no damage done to the target. He tapped through the scanners and got a quick light-refraction analysis on the cloud to see if anything worthwhile had been hit, but it turned out to be ice and rock.
“An asteroid?” McManus sputtered. “I hit a goddamn asteroid? That lucky jerk! The nearest asteroid field has to be a million K from here!”
Then his world lurched.
“Incoming fire!” Katsumi shouted through the comm. “Taking evasive action!”
The icons on the contact map spun on all three dimensional axes. He wrestled with the firing controls but the damn thing had lost its target.
There was a shudder then and all the lights turned red. The damage monitor showed small hits all across the bottom.
“Katsumi! He’s below us,” he spat into the comm. “You have to get turned over so I can get a shot at him.”
“Aye, Sarge!”
The world lurched again and the targeting computer bleeped happily. He whipped up the quickest solution he could, mostly random shots in the vague direction of the Drake. Once again, orange flashes lit up the viewport.
He watched the Drake’s icon zip around the contact map. He was good, whoever he was, but McManus only needed one hit to do major damage to such a small ship.
“Come on … come on …”
Pulse after pulse rang out and the damn Drake eluded them all. It started to make its way back down.
“Katsumi! Keep him above us!”
Again the sporadic shuddering and again the damage monitor lit up, showing hits along their bottom.
The ship continued to lurch, dip, and roll. The comm came back to life. “Sarge, he’s too fast and this goddamn Black Maria flies like a tank!”
“You’re lucky it’s built like one or we’d be dead by now!”
The universe spun and black clouds gathered at the edges of his vision. He heard the target computer chirp and he laid on the guns, minimizing power in favor of maximum spread and rate of fire. The guns screeched above him with terrifying anxiety.
The targeting computer bleeped a new tone. He blinked away the blackness as much as he could and squinted at the monitor.
“I got him! I clipped him!”
Then the ship shuddered hard and lurched. The red lights dimmed so suddenly that McManus thought he was blacking out, but then they came back up just as quickly.
“Sarge, he got us in the tail!”
“What?” he blurted, mostly to himself. He looked at the damage monitor. “Oh fuck. Primary thrusters? Katsumi, what’s our status?”
“I’ve got stabilizers and buffers but no thrust. We can spin and push but we can’t maneuver.”
“Dammit. Well, at least turn us so I can take another shot at him.”
“Aye, Sarge.”
The ship started to spin more slowly that it had before, and just as the targeting computer beeped, there was another shuddering hit. This time the damage monitor showed a red rectangle somewhere in the rear of the ship.
He took aim and released everything they had left, squinting in anticipation of the bright orange flashes that would light up the viewport.
But nothing happened.
The targeting screen read, SAFETY LOCKOUT: POWER LIMITATION.
“Katsumi, I can’t fire!” he bellowed into the comm. “What the hell happened?”
The response was slow in coming. “He punched through to the main power plant, sir.”
“We have reserve power …”
“I know, sir, but the safety overrides have kicked in. In the event of any damage to the power plant, all high-drain systems are deactivated so that there is guaranteed power for life-support systems.”
“So we can’t move and we can’t shoot? What good is life support going to do when they blow us to smithereens?”
“Sarge, the other ship is on the move. Intercept course.”
He punched at the useless controls, cursing them to come back to life. “What is the fighter doing? It’s not firing on us anymore?”
“No, sir. Just seems to be taking position behind us.”
Ready to blow them away if they tried anything funny. “Katsumi,” he said, hearing the resignation in his own voice. “Secure the bridge for full lockout. I think they intend to board us.”
“Oh,” the cadet said over the comm. “Crap.”
CHAPTER 19
Jax awoke in a coffin.
The top slid away with a musical series of beeps when he spasmed and flailed at the sides, hitting an unseen button, some kind of release mechanism. He immediately put his head out and vomited over the side.
It took several minutes of panting and heaving before Jax’s vision would cooperate. His memory only went back as far as opening the lid. To make up for the lack of other faculties, his sense of smell seemed to be in overdrive, and he gagged at the stench coming from his own mouth. It wasn’t just bitter bile, there was a chemical taste that was like chlorine mixed with the tart flavor of medicine.
The floor was only a foot away, so he ventured an attempt at climbing out of his tomb. After a moment of bl
urred struggling, he was once again staring straight up at the ceiling, but at least he was out of the coffin. He looked at the side of it, squinting until the shapes became letters and numbers. Sensible Securitube – 595. Below that, smaller, requiring harder squinting, Sensibly serving your secure organic transportation needs.
When he was able to stand, he took a look at the rest of the room. It was cold and dark, lit by a single dull bulb poking out of the ceiling a meter or so above his head. There wasn’t much room for anything other than the desk and chair in one corner, the sizable puddle of vomit, and the tube he rode in on.
There was a note on the desk. He ignored it.
Aside from the metallic walls, there was a windowless door and with a numerical security pad next to it. The door had no handle, so his fuzzy mind presumed a code would unlock it. He typed in 12432, which he thought was random. The panel beeped sourly and blinked red. He frowned and remembered that 12432 was part of his address. His house on Terroneous. His home.
The note flashed impatiently yellow.
He sighed and stepped over his sick to the desk. The note was a small rectangle of epaper, and seemed to be affixed to the desk. Next to it was the inexplicably anachronistic presence of a wooden pencil and a paper notepad.
The top of the epaper note read, ESCAPE. Below that was a series of letters and numbers. There was no pattern to them, but after a moment of staring dumbly, Jax realized that they used all ten numbers but only the letters “A” through “F”.
“Hexadecimal,” he muttered. He was tempted to smile at this small mental victory his mud-filled brain had accomplished, but he quickly lamented. “What the fuck am I supposed to do with this?”
ESCAPE, the stupid note said.
He tipped his head back and sighed, then on a hunch looked around at the corners of the ceiling, hunting for cameras. Maybe this was another chance for Jax to be on reality HV. But no. No cameras. Nothing.
Then it all came back, like a drowning flood. Granderson and his stupid holofilm. Flying to the desert. Hiding in the depths of an underground facility. Lealina in trouble.
Lealina …
He looked at the tube. Remembered getting in it. They had released Lealina – he’d seen them let her go when they brought him out of the TEOB facility. Fucking ModPol. Why couldn’t they just leave him alone?
The note continued its slow pulse, the patternless code awaiting his attention.
“What the fuck,” he quietly said aloud. Then he raised his voice. “What the fuck? Where’s my lawyer?”
He walked over to the door and barked at it. “Hey. Hey! I want my lawyer.” He pounded with a fist. “Come on, you assholes. I want my lawyer. I want my call.”
Silence rang in response. He raised his hand again to hit the door, then closed his eyes and took a deep breath. There was no point to it. He opened his eyes. Had he heard laughter? He shook his head. “Fucking assholes,” he whispered.
He paced the room, coming again to the desk. “Yeah, yeah, escape, escape. What am I supposed to do with this? Hexadecimal. Do they think I’m an android or something?” He sat in the chair and stared at it for several minutes. Trying to distract himself with the puzzle before him. Bright-blue eyes appeared in between byte pairs and he sat back.
He wanted to cry. He didn’t want to be here, he wanted to go home. Why were they doing this to him? Why would ModPol stick him in this room with this note—
“Why would ModPol do this?” he asked himself out loud. “ModPol?”
Maybe it wasn’t ModPol. Maybe it was some of X’s people that came and took him. How could he be so stupid? Of course, that had to be it!
If it was X, then maybe he’d better listen to the note: ESCAPE. But he wasn’t about to stare at those letters and numbers. He took inventory of the room one more time. No ventilation, which he confirmed by the staleness of the air. No drain in the cold metallic floor, which he confirmed by the unrelenting presence of his breakfast drying at his feet. No bed and no toilet, so it wasn’t a cell. Whatever it was he was meant to be doing in here, it wasn’t expected to take days. That gave him a little bit of hope – maybe if he just sat there for a few hours, eventually someone would let him out. He let that hope go as the thought of that someone being X came to mind.
“Hello, door panel,” he said, getting up close to the keypad. It had only numbers zero through nine, no other keys. “Let’s see how you work. Beep boop beep,” he echoed while prodding keys at random. “Bzzzt. Well, looks like you take five numbers. That’s only 100,000 combinations. I could brute force you.”
Was that true? He tried 00001. When the tiny screen turned red, it stopped accepting input for about five seconds. That meant up to 500,000 seconds of waiting. He decided not to do the math because it reminded him too much of programming COMPLEX in the subdomes. He knew an hour was 3,600 seconds, that much was burned into his brain. What a useless piece of knowledge.
It occurred to him that there was a lack of biometrics on the lock. It reminded him of Terroneous. Back on B-4, in the domes, every lock was biometric – fingerprints or retinal scans – but on Terroneous, most people didn’t like them. Numbers were just as easy to remember, they said, plus convenient when you needed to share them, like when you needed a neighbor to water your plants. And the most paranoid of them were afraid of determined thieves that might resort to digit severing or ocular extraction. In terms of administration though, biometrics made the most sense because an individual could be granted or denied access to any lock in the system from central management. All of this was a train of thought that led Jax to think he was definitely not in a ModPol facility.
On one edge of the panel he noticed a small bump in the plastic: a triangle. He felt the side next to it, and indeed, there was a small divot. “If I had a screwdriver …”
He didn’t have a screwdriver, but all he needed was a small wedge. The tube was no use, as it was probably made of indestructible material. The desk was a thin metal and looked sturdy. The chair on the other hand was cheap, molded plastic.
He took it by the legs and slammed it into the top of the Sensible Securitube.
One shot was enough to splinter several small pieces of plastic from the rails that formed the backrest. He chose one that was narrow enough to fit into the side of the panel. After a few seconds of wiggling and leveraging and cursing, the panel cover swung open with a pop.
The keypad remained where it was, but it was as though the clothes had come off around it. Just below there were three unlabeled buttons. On a sticker on the back of the panel cover he saw some instructions. He scanned through them, skipping the setting of timers and configuring for multiple codes and read straight to:
To reset door code: Hold button #1 and button #2 together for five seconds. When screen blinks green, enter administrator password. Enter new door code. Hold buttons #1 and #2 for five seconds to confirm. Screen will go solid green to confirm.
On the sticker, someone had scrawled 11111 next to the word “password”.
He held the buttons and when the screen blinked, he tapped in 11111, then typed in 12432. He held the buttons again and the screen went solid green, just as the instructions predicted. He closed the panel cover and snapped it shut. He took a deep breath and punched in 12432.
The panel chirped and the door slid open with a shush.
“Psycho Jack!” On the other side of the door was a man decked head to toe in brown leather, jet-black hair spilling at length around his shoulders, and one arm in a sling. He stuck the other hand out. “Congrats, brother! I’m Barndoor.”
“You’re what now?”
“Barndoor,” he said firmly, twitching his unshaken hand.
“Did you just call me ‘Psycho Jack’?”
“Yeah, she said—”
“Who said?”
He cocked his head and narrowed his eyes, letting the hand drop. “Dava.” He took a step forward and got close enough for Jax to smell his breath. “You know who Dava is, doncha Jack?”
“In our secret base.”
“Uh, okay. So you mean, in Space Waste’s secret base?”
The man called Barndoor blinked. “Man, I thought you were some kind of genius. Yes, Space Waste. Did you decode the message on the table?”
Jax stared at him. Was it a trick question? Should he lie? He felt paralyzed. “What?”
“I mean, you must have, cuz you got the door open. That was a special test that our other hacker designed.”
Dava. Space Waste. Jax’s brain tried to correlate the unexpected flurry of data it was receiving. He tried to look past the other man. “Is – is Dava here?”
“Yeah, she’s around. She said to make you an offer if you passed the test.”
“And I passed?”
“You got out, didn’t ya?” Barndoor revived his attempt at a handshake. “Congrats, man!”
This time Jax took the offered hand and gave it a short shake before pulling back. “Thanks. Um. Barn. Barndoor,” he said. “Wait – what offer?”
“To join Space Waste. We need a hacker because our other one got arrested.”
Jax pinched his nose with his fingers, the headache returning. “Barndoor, please,” he said. “Can you tell me how I got here?”
“Oh right,” he said. “Shit man, I’m sorry. I forgot about that part. We rescued you from the ModPol Black Maria.”
“Black Maria?”
“Yeah, you know. The paddy-wagon.” He looked at Jax, perhaps scanning for registration, then added, “The prisoner transport ship.”
“You … rescued me?” Jax felt a sudden lightness as it dawned on him that he wasn’t in ModPol custody. His mind allowed him thoughts of Lealina. “Can I go back to Terroneous?”
Barndoor’s face fell ever so slightly. “Well, I wouldn’t say right now. See, we do need a hacker.”
