Debts of My Fathers (Father Chessman Saga Book 2)

by Dan Thompson

  Feeling around on the inside, he found the hidden switch and felt a satisfying thunk when he pressed it. The padded bottom lifted up and revealed the prize within: four Jansky-28 force guns, resting in belt holsters. He pulled one out and strapped it on. He had gone too long without a weapon at his side. He had almost forgotten how good it felt.

  He hoisted two more over his shoulder and held the other in his left hand. He walked back to Nick and tossed him the one in his hand. Nick caught it with ease and strapped it on.

  Stefan took one last look at Dieter, bound and unconscious on the floor. “We’ll be back for him soon enough.” He keyed the headset. “Perry, I’m coming forward with the weapons. I’ll meet you on the bridge.”

  He went forward, back up the ladder and across the corridor. He did not bother to look both ways. In theory everyone else was asleep, so there was no reason for undue caution. Still, he kept his right hand on the butt of his pistol.

  Perry stood ready to defend the bridge with his bare hands, while young Alex had already settled into the navigation station. Perry took the offered weapon, and by the time Stefan had given the final one to Alex, Perry had it strapped on and drawn. With a nod to Stefan, he took point and moved fore toward the bridge.

  Stefan followed him. “Portside, first door on the right.”

  They moved forward, keyed open the captain’s office, and stepped in. The door to the cabin was closed, just as he expected. Perry took position in the doorway and began a constant scan back and forth between the cabin door and the corridor outside. Stefan slid behind the desk and logged in to the computer. Normally he would have been challenged by the security system, but weeks ago the boy had left himself logged in overnight at the pilot’s station on the bridge. Richard Mosley’s account had gained a wide variety of privileges that night.

  Once in, he opened a command window and brought up the lock overrides. This was not something you could do from the normal interface, but then again, it was rarely something you would ever want to do. Cabin doors were meant to be locked from the inside with a key combination required to open them from the outside.

  The numeric keypads were only on the outsides of the doors, of course, with a single open key on the inside, but as Stefan had read, all electronic locks are essentially two-sided. All he had to do was activate the code requirement for unlocking from the inside, and anyone in their cabin would suddenly find themselves trapped. Normally, that would be enough, but Stefan was not going to take any chances. He disabled all the existing codes and put in his own. Even if they managed to hack into the cabin side of the locks, their codes were not going to work.

  He executed the final command and stood. Perry began to question, but Stefan silenced him with a gesture. They headed out into the hall, and he said, “Everything should be locked now. Sweep the rest of the deck. Make sure no one else is up and about. I’m going to go lock out the cabin terminals and the intercom.”

  Perry headed off, and Stefan returned to the terminal. One by one, he put the other cabin computers into lockdown mode and blocked them from accessing the main computer. After that, he locked down the cabins’ intercoms. They could receive a call, but they could not open one. He left his own fully functional along with the bridge and engineering decks.

  Perry returned from his sweep as Stefan was finishing up. He stood and followed Perry out into the corridor. “All clear,” he told him.

  “Excellent,” Stefan replied. “The ship is ours.”

  “And when do we inform the old crew?”

  “Five-twenty. That’s when our little mouse wakes up to start breakfast.”

  “Do you know what you’re going to say?”

  Stefan shook his head. “More or less, but it’s going to be you who says it.”

  “Me?”

  He patted Perry on the shoulder. “Yes, I’ll be trapped in my cabin like our dear captain.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “You see, it was the engineer with the damn banjos that sold them out, not the loyal first officer. It’ll be even more convincing when I heroically hack the intercom to tell him so.”

  “I see.”

  “The kid may be crafty, but I’ll keep him running in circles long enough for us to reach the rendezvous.”

  Perry nodded. “That’s sharp thinking.”

  Stefan grinned. “I’ve been looking forward to it. Now, let’s get our treacherous engineer tucked away in his cabin and get this ship pointed in the right direction.”

  Carlos rolled over on his bunk and tried to settle into a more comfortable spot, but ultimately his bladder woke him. He padded over to his little bathroom to relieve himself. The clock display in the mirror read 05:14.

  He cursed quietly. He did not mind waking up on his own, but he hated waking up during that last hour before his alarm was set to go off. That was forty-six minutes of sleep he was never going to get back, and he had no one to blame but his own traitorous body.

  He finished in the bathroom and went back to his bunk. The thought of lying back down and attempting to at least rest for a while briefly passed through his mind, but there was no point. He was definitively awake, and there was no going back. He pulled his tablet out of the bedside compartment and looked at the navigation chart. It was an old habit, and one he saw no harm in.

  But what he saw this morning looked wrong. The winds were blowing smoothly, but that was not the problem. It was their orientation. In this part of the galaxy, there was always a slight dominant push from the general direction of galactic south. For their course toward Arvin, it should have been coming from aft and port, but it was not. It was coming in from above and dead-even starboard. He crosschecked the position of a few nearby reference stars, but there was no mistaking it. They were not merely off course. They had changed course.

  He set the tablet down and reached for the intercom, punching in the code for the bridge. All he got was an error beep. He tried the captain’s cabin and got the same error.

  Shaking his head, he went to the closet and pulled on a fresh uniform. Normally he would shave and brush his teeth first, but to hell with it. He went to the door and toggled it open.

  Except it did not open. Instead, he got the same error beep he had gotten from the intercom. He tried it again only to get the same result.

  He glanced around his cabin. Power was running, and the plumbing had worked, ensuring the environmental pumps were still active. Finally he crossed back to his desk and stabbed a finger at the larger computer display. It came to life with a simple red text on a black screen. “This terminal has been deactivated.”

  “What the hell is going on here?” he asked.

  As if to answer, the ship’s klaxon sounded briefly over the intercom, only to be replaced by an unfamiliar voice. “Good morning, everyone. This is your captain speaking. Rather, it’s your new captain.”

  Michael woke to the sound of the emergency klaxon. He was halfway into his emergency suit when it was replaced by an unfamiliar voice. “Good morning, everyone. This is your captain speaking.”

  Captain?

  “Rather, it’s your new captain.”

  Michael recognized the voice now. It was one of their passengers. He kicked off the leggings of the environment suit and headed for the door. It did not open.

  “Before you hurt yourself trying to go through a door, I should tell you that you’re all locked in quite thoroughly.”

  Michael jammed his finger at the switch again, but all he got was the little lockout buzz.

  “For those of you still gathering your wits about you, this is a hijacking. You foolishly let the wrong passengers on board, but you shouldn’t blame it all on the inexperience of your captain. Your musical engineer, Mr. Merkel, was ... shall we say, instrumental in our success and will share handsomely in the profits from this endeavor.”

  Michael shook his head. He could imagine this from the passengers. At least, he could imagine it now, locked in his cabin, but Dieter? That was hard to believe, b
ut then again, how well did he know Dieter anyway? How well did he know any of them?

  “We are diverting from Arvin toward a suitable rendezvous where the original crew will be handed off to other associates. Mr. Merkel will remain with us in taking the ship to its resale location outside the Confederacy. If you cooperate, you will be released unharmed after we depart. It’s that simple. However, if you do not cooperate, things will become much more unpleasant.”

  Michael started thinking about what weapons he had on board, but the truth was he had none. Malcolm had never been a big believer in guns, saying that if he ever needed one on board, then he had already screwed up badly enough without punching holes in the wall. In fact, the closest thing he had to a weapon was Malcolm’s old utility knife. It was sharp enough, certainly, but at a diminutive four inches, the blade was hardly intimidating.

  “I strongly encourage all of you to cooperate. The only one who has anything to lose is your captain, and he’s a young man with a long road of prospects ahead of him. He can replace his ship much more easily than any of you can replace your lives. Think about that before you do anything foolish.”

  Michael jammed his finger at the door button once more in frustration. But what scared him he most was that the hijacker was right. He was the only one with anything to lose, and his entire crew would have to agree.

  Chapter 22

  “Yes, a captain has a lot of power, but without his crew, he’s just a guy in a funny suit.” – Peter Schneider

  CARLOS SAT ON THE FLOOR of his cabin with his tools laid out before him, trying to decide what to try first. Cracking the lock on his cabin door seemed the obvious place to start, but once he was out, what could he do on his own? The intercom seemed another likely target, but even if he could enable it, anything he said through it could be monitored. The computer terminal at the desk was a lost cause. He could not even force it into the local diagnostic mode.

  The fact that his little tablet was still giving him navigation updates was a fluke. The process he had left running on the bridge kept the connection open, but he could not do anything else with it locally. No communication, no command windows, not even a damn movie.

  “If you cooperate, you’ll be released unharmed,” he grumbled.

  That was almost as likely as Dieter selling them out. Carlos shook his head. He had seen Dieter play at one of the clubs. Guys like that, everything was about their music, never money. Unless the hijackers could swing him a gig in the Hamilton opera house on Latera, no way was he ever going to flip. He could have believed it of Hector, maybe, but not Dieter. Hell, he could even see Richard or Vivian signing up before Dieter would.

  He glanced back and forth between the walls. Dieter was on one side. The captain was on the other.

  He allowed himself a small grin. “But the skipper ... yeah, no way he hijacks his own ship.”

  Stefan yawned. Perry sat across from him in the galley. “You doing all right?”

  He nodded. “Long day for me.”

  “Well, it’s been four hours, and apart from a few shouts from that lady engineer, they’ve been pretty damn quiet.”

  “Like I said, not a single fighter in the lot. Hell, I picked most of them.”

  “And the boy?”

  Stefan yawned again. “Yeah, I think I’ll go give him a quick call and catch some rack time.” He stood. “Be sure to wake me up for their dinner. I figure if we do it only once or twice a day, we can have all four of us up and ready.”

  “And who’s cooking?”

  “Cooking?” Stefan laughed. “We can get by with some instant stuff for a few days, but for them, fuck cooking. They’re getting leftovers and cold food.”

  Michael rocked back and forth on the edge of his bed. He had to think of something, but he was not coming up with anything. The last time he had been trapped this way had been on the Blue Jaguar, but his escape then had depended on sneaking out through removable partitions and access ways designed for power and environmental systems.

  Unfortunately, the Sophie’s Grace was built a little too solid for that. It’s not like his cabin was surrounded by bulkheads, but most of the wall plates were welded in place. The only access he had was to a few pipes in the bathroom, and even that wall plate was held tight by heavy bolts. He remembered how hard it had been opening them up to fix the toilet in his old cabin years ago. And even then, all it gave him was a tiny window to access a few pipes—a far cry from the crawlspaces he had used on the Jaguar.

  Some of the other crew might have better luck with their floors. He knew that there were some access panels under the carpet in some of the rear cabins, but this far forward, he was over some kind of fuel ballast tank. He shook his head at that. Malcolm had known the ship inside and out, and Michael thought he had as well, but even now, he had to admit that he still had no idea what a fuel ballast tank was for.

  He thought about the layout. Carlos was next to him, and he would be as stuck as Michael was. The same could be said for Richard and Winner over on the starboard side. The two passenger cabins—hijacker cabins, he amended—were the only ones with a chance of access on the other side, and over here, it would be Victor, Hector, and Dieter.

  He made a fist thinking about Dieter. Had he been lying the whole time, or had he simply been complicit at the moment of opportunity?

  “Captain?”

  Michael froze. It was Richard’s voice.

  “Captain, can you hear me?”

  He looked over and saw the light on the intercom.

  “Richard?”

  “Oh good,” came the reply. “I was worried I might be hitting one of the common rooms.”

  “What do you mean? And how the hell are you calling me?”

  There was a hint of laughter on the other end. “I hacked the intercom, or at least, I’m trying to. Right now it looks like a disemboweled computer, all wires and circuits.”

  “Can you reach anyone else?”

  “Eh, it’s pretty tricky, sir. I got the galley a few minutes ago—I recognized the flash heater’s little ding. So far, you’re the only one I’ve gotten, and I’m literally pushing a bare wire against a circuit to do even that.”

  Michael cursed silently, but he had to admit that Richard had accomplished more than he had. “That’s good work, Richard. What about Dieter? Do think he’s really in on this?”

  “Damn straight, sir. He told me he was bringing up my lunch, you know, right around midwatch, and the next thing I know, he’s got a gun to my head while one of the other bastards is tying my hands.”

  “What kind of gun?”

  “I don’t really know, sir. It was a pistol with a closed barrel, so I assume it’s a force gun of some kind. Anyway, they grabbed me, threw me into my cabin, and by the time I could work my hands free, my door was locked.”

  “And you’ve been working on the intercom since?”

  There was hesitation. “To be honest, sir, I didn’t think of it until they made their announcement this morning.”

  “No problem, Richard, it’s still a good idea no matter how long it took you to think of it. Can they actually run the ship with just four of them?”

  “If they have the right mix, and I’d bet they do. If two of them are navigators, they could do it. Add an engineer, plus Dieter, and they could cover the critical shifts for a while.”

  “But they’d still need an environmental guy.”

  “Not for a few days they wouldn’t. As long as nothing goes wrong, they can ignore any maintenance for a week.”

  “That tells us something, at least,” Michael said. “Their destination is close, but not in the immediate neighborhood.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Without environmental, they’re limited to eight or nine days of travel before they have to reskin the scrubbers. They probably won’t count on the full duration, so call it five. But if you’re right about their mix, then it means they knew they needed to cover multiple sailing shifts, so it’s more than a single day aw
ay. Two to five days, that’s our window.”

  “Are you planning something, sir?”

  Michael gritted his teeth. He wanted to do something, but what? “Yeah,” he said at last. “But I don’t know if the crew will back me.”

  “Well, I’m with you, sir.”

  “Thank you, Richard. I appreciate it.”

  “Well, something else about the timeframe, sir. We all have water in our cabin sinks, but five days is a long time to go without food. If they’re serious about keeping us alive, they’ll need to feed us.”

  “Yeah, they probably will.”

  “That might be a good opportunity.”

  “It might at that.”

  “So, what’s the plan, sir?”

  He could hardly say that he had been rocking back and forth in panic with no plan at all. “Keep working on that intercom. See if you can reach the rest of the crew, especially Hector or Vivian.”

  “Why them?”

  “I’ve got an idea, but I’m still working on it. You just get hold of them and let me know. Failing that, check back with me every few hours.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “Good. I’m counting on you.”

  Elsa lingered in the officer’s wardroom of the Fat Grizzly. Captain Gallows had left early, though his sour mood had remained. The systems chief had followed a few minutes later, but the engineering chief had lingered, sharing a joke with Celeste Davies at the captain’s expense. Elsa joined with quiet laughter, but the conversation limped forward with no energy. When the engineering chief finally left, Elsa motioned the steward out of the room.

  She focused her gaze on Davies. “So tell me, that little joke about hibernation, is that common?”

  “The joke or the hibernation?”

  Elsa smiled. “Either.”

  “We don’t see a lot of Captain Gallows while we’re underway. He’ll sit a few bridge shifts, but it’s never on the schedule. He’ll simply appear at random and relieve you for the rest of your shift. But other than that, let me say that the ship is aptly named for him. Poke him with a stick and he’ll rip your arm off, but other than that, he spends a lot of time sleeping.”