by Kal Spriggs
Mel picked up one of the submachine guns. “With a bullet to the brain if someone asks too many questions. This is an awful lot of firepower.”
“The crate has two more MP-11s.” Brian said. “The machine gun isn’t assembled.”
“Leave them.” Mel shrugged. “You and I to the engine room, and get Giran to stand down. When he finds out we’ve got the ship under control, he’ll have no choice but to surrender.”
She tried not to think about what he might have done to Rawn. Time for worry and panic later.
***
“You’re throwing your lot in with them?” Mueller demanded of Leon, his face red with fury. “A bunch of smugglers and worse?” He strained at the bonds that held him in the chair. It seemed absurd that the slacker had taken him unawares. Clearly he had underestimated Brian Liu.
Apparently, he thought, not as much as I underestimated my former mentor.
“They haven’t killed anyone. I know you have. I think I know why you brought us out here. Why you wanted us to be the ones who transmitted the program. That ship is going to kill Vagyr for certain now, isn’t it?” His mentor's voice was cold, leached of emotion, and Mueller recognized the tone as one he had heard before... and it made him shiver a bit.
Best to not show any sign of weakness, he thought. “You know politics,” Mueller said, his voice cold. “If you can get that decrepit brain of yours thinking again, think how it will look if a Preserve-built ship decimates the population of an entire world?”
When someone goes public with records that show that they kept the ship as a secret weapon, when expert witnesses comment on the piracy levels that the Preserve had to lower. The public outcry will force the Fleet to attack the Preserve. None of their allies will support them. Two threats to the security of human space ended with one blow.”
“Millions of innocents dead. I swore when I left that I’d never take another innocent life, and now you’ve made me break that oath.”
The self-hatred in his voice gave Mueller a sense of relief. As long as this man was focused on his own self destruction, he wasn't nearly as dangerous.
“I didn’t make you do anything. Did you really think this was a mission of mercy? Come on, JP. You knew all along. Jean Paul Leon was one of the best agents that ever lived, he realized exactly where this was going, but he was too sunken in self pity to do anything about it. You understand, don’t you? The work we do is essential. It is vital to preserve the security of the Human race.” Give him an out, a cause, he thought, and he will see how important all this is, he'll come back to the fold.
The man who had once been Agent Leon shook his head. “Wheels within wheels.” He pulled a steak knife out of a drawer in the galley. “This was a recruiting mission as well. Bringing in potential agents and lost agents in all at once. Nothing like a lot of guilt and a little blackmail to reel in new workers.”
“So, tell me what was in that code.” The man punctuated the question with a jab at Mueller’s arm. “Giran must be a prior agent. Not like me though. Discarded probably, when a mission went bad. What are the other additions to the code?”
“We have to come to an understanding, first. You can threaten all you want, but I know too much for you to kill. And if you don’t treat me better, I might just let something slip to the others.” Mueller gave the other man a smirk. He knew, despite the posturing, that he was really in charge.
Agent Leon shook his head, “Mueller, you don’t know anything.”
***
Mel finished loading the magazine of the gun when she heard the scream. She and Brian looked at each other and then rushed toward the noise. The galley was located aft of the cargo bay, on the lower deck. Mel ran down the stairs two at a time.
She and Brian stopped in the doorway.
Agent Mueller wasn’t going to be answering any questions.
“Why’d you kill him?” Mel snapped.
Strak looked up from where he stood over the body. “I didn’t. I was upstairs checking the engine room door. I was worried Giran was going to use the manual override on the door.” He gulped, “I didn’t want an armed nut-job on the loose.”
Which was apparently what they had. Agent Mueller lay in a spreading puddle of blood. The weapon, a steak knife, stuck out of his chest. From the amount of blood, Mel guessed any kind of first aid would be too late.
“He looks surprised.” Marcus’s voice came from behind them. “So… which one of you did it? Not that I’m complaining, but this will make getting pardoned a whole lot harder.”
***
The five of them stood in the cargo bay. Stasia with a small data pad, searched through layers of code. Now and again she’d stop and shake her head. She also cast suspicious looks at all of them, Mel noted. Though, Mel thought, I can't really blame her.
“So, one of us murdered Mueller, for an unknown reason. Mueller tampered with the code, maybe with Giran’s help. Giran and Rawn are locked in the engine room, Giran is armed. Oh, and a homicidal warship is headed for an inhabited planet.” Marcus finished ticking off the points on his fingers. “Suddenly, it looks like we should take the money and run.”
“We’ve got to stop that ship.” Mel said.
“How?” Stasia asked, flatly. “I’m not even sure what was sent, yet. How does freighter stop a warship?” Her Russian accent had thickened the words to the point that Mel barely understood her.
“First we need to take control of this ship. We need Giran out here,” Brian said
“Where he can be murdered?” Marcus asked.
“Stop.” Mel snapped. “First thing. From now on, we stick together. No one goes off on their own. If we’ve got eyes on each other, whoever the murderer is, isn’t going to slip away or do unto someone else.”
“Fine thing to say if you are armed, da?” Stasia asked. “I was alone in the cockpit when this happened. How do I know that you all didn’t do it together, and want me as some kind of alibi?”
All of them stared at the mousy little woman. “That’s crazy.” Strak answered.
“True,” Marcus shrugged. “Four people can make just as good an alibi as five. If we were all working together, we’d probably have killed you too.”
“That’s enough.” Mel snapped. She cast a dark glare around at everyone. “First thing, we take charge of this ship. There are three more guns in Mueller’s cabin. Unfortunately, the engine room is just the place we don’t want to shoot up. We have to convince him to surrender.”
When nobody spoke, she continued. “What I propose is getting him on the intercom, telling him to come out, surrender. We don’t mention what happened to Mueller, that will panic him.”
“You don’t want your brother perforated,” Marcus drawled.
She fixed him with a glare. “Exactly.”
***
They once again assembled in the cockpit. The five of them squeezed into the tight space.
Their breathing seemed abnormally loud to Mel’s ears. She frowned. Mel looked around with a puzzled expression. “Something’s wrong.”
The others looked at her questioningly.
Marcus gave a curse, shifting over to run a hand in front of the air vent. “The bastard’s cut life support.”
In the silence, all of them could hear their breathing come quicker as heart rates picked up and fear began to take hold. Mel broke the silence, “We’ve got time. Every ship’s rated for eight hours minimum without active life support.”
“This one’s good for sixteen hours,” Marcus said, quickly regaining his confidence.
“What happens after sixteen hours?” Stasia asked.
Mel shook her head, “It doesn’t matter. We capture Giran, one way or another, before then.” She looked around at the faces, “We need to appear confident or else Giran won’t pay any attention to us whatsoever.”
Brian nodded his agreement first, “And then we’d have to do things the hard way.”
Mel turned on the security screen for the engine room. There was
no sign of Giran or Rawn on any of the cameras. Then again, Giran had certainly had time to position himself outside of view of the sparse coverage of the engine room cameras.
Mel activated the intercom. “Giran, this is Mel, we’ve got control of the ship.”
She started as Giran’s voice crackled out of the speaker, “Do you really? You’ve got the ship’s controls, certainly. We’re the ones in the engine room. I’m the one in charge, no matter what you think you know.”
“Surrender, Giran. I don’t know what you thought you were doing with Mueller, but it’s over now.” Marcus snapped. “No matter what he told you, he’d betray you just as quickly as any of us.”
Giran chuckled. “Mueller? I could care less what he thinks he’s done. You’ve obviously taken care of him, and I do hope it was something… permanent.” There was a slight pause. “Here are my terms. First, you will tell me exactly how much of the transmission was accepted. Second, you will unlock the engine room door. Third, you will go to your cabins, except for Melanie Armstrong, who will lock down the vessel from the cockpit and fly the ship to coordinates I will provide. If you do those things, you’ll be rewarded with twenty thousand Guard dollars, new identities and you will be dropped off on a non-Guard world, free to go about your lives.”
No one spoke in the silence. Mel felt confusion take hold. Giran spoke again, “Oh, and if Agent Mueller isn’t dead... make him so.”
“Why should we trust you?” Stasia’s voice was nervous.
Mel slammed a hand on the intercom, cutting off the conversation. “No way in hell we’re dealing with him!”
“Why not hear what he has to say?” Stasia’s voice was harsh. “We didn’t want to do this in the first place. This will get us out of it. The Guard can take care of this mess, and whoever Giran is working with—”
“Whoever Giran is working with?” Marcus snapped. “Don’t be stupid. I really only see two possibilities. Either he’s a pirate, in which case he’ll probably rape you women and sell all of us into slavery, or he’s Guard Free Now, in which case he’ll kill us whenever convenient.”
Mel’s world seemed to stop. “Guard Free Now?”
Marcus shot her a look, “Now is not the time to go ballistic.”
“We need to know more.” Brian Liu turned the intercom back on.
Evidently Giran hadn’t realized they had cut him off. “…are your only alternatives. And Thornhell is where they would send us. Besides, you can’t really trust anyone else on the crew. I was an agent for Guard Intelligence. Mueller told me there was another one he was trying to rehabilitate. I gather the guy was something of a loose cannon, did things that even Guard Intelligence thought were excessive. Since Mueller wanted to send that ship to Vagyr to wipe out most of a planet’s populace, that tells you something about the other agent who’s no doubt sharing that cramped cabin with you.”
There was a pregnant silence. Minds went to the corpse still tied to a chair in the galley. Mel saw the others searched the one another's faces in the cockpit as everyone tried to match a face to the described psychopath. Mel didn't see anyone look guilty. Everyone looked scared.
“I don’t really have time for a long stalemate, so look, I’ll even turn the air back on as a gesture of goodwill.” Giran’s spoke with a tone of benevolence and civility.
The hum of machinery and the soft hiss of airflow brought the tension down. Even Mel, who had pushed the limits of environmental systems before aboard the Kip Thorne.
Giran spoke again after a moment, “Now, why don’t you tell me how much of the transmission went through?”
“The orders went through, and thirty percent of the programming upload.” Brian said, his eyes narrowed, head cocked. He raised a finger to his lips when Mel’s hand went to the switch to cut him off.
“Fuck!” Giran’s voice went harsh. “What did it say?”
Brian smiled slightly, “It said it would not be hijacked. What does Guard Free Now want with a warship like that?”
Giran’s voice was sarcastic. “What do you think we want with a warship—“ There was a squelch of static, no doubt as the terrorist cut himself off.
Mel felt anger surge, felt her breathing become ragged. Her brother had hunted for those who’d murdered their parents on every world they visited. She’d very nearly dedicated her life to hunt them from Guard Fleet. She’d stopped because she didn’t want to become a person dedicated to vengeance.
That didn’t mean she didn’t want revenge.
“Thanks for the information, Giran, got anything else to say?” Brian’s voice mocked. Gone was any semblance of the brash, flamboyant man, replaced with an almost alien arrogance. At his side, Strak seemed somehow diminished. Brian turned off the intercom and turned to look at the others. “Does anyone feel like trusting him now?”
Mel shook her head. She felt slightly light headed, she figured it was emotional shock. The others looked dazed.
Marcus looked over at Brian, “That was smooth.” It almost sounded like an accusation. Mel looked at Marcus and saw an angry, almost betrayed expression on his face. Marcus had served aboard Brian’s ship, did the other man’s change of personality startle him as well?
Mel frowned; did Marcus think Brian was the other agent? That was impossible; he’d been with her when Mueller was murdered. Unless someone else killed Mueller, she had to acknowledge. The others stared at Brian. She noticed, in a detached sort of way, that they all breathed more rapidly. She put it down as tension at sharing such close confines with a possible sociopath renegade agent.
Brian shrugged, “I’m not and never have been an agent of the Guard or Guard Intelligence. I can give you proof of that quite easily.”
Mel tried to slow her breathing, feeling her stomach churn. She couldn’t seem to catch her breath. She looked over at Strak, whose hand went to his forehead as if in pain.
Brian Liu blinked, swayed, and then slumped.
Mel’s eyes widened and her hand shot for the emergency shutdown switch on the environmental controls. Her lunge turned into a sag as her body failed to respond. Her arm flopped loosely, and her body sagged in her seat. Her head struck the corner of the control panel and her vision filled with stars. She heard dull, muffled thuds, almost as if several objects fell to the deck. She felt warmth run down her face from where she’d struck the panel. She felt pain there too, but the pain seemed distant.
Her vision tunneled out, as even the stars receded. Why were they going away? Where were they going? Why were they leaving her alone?
Why was everything always going away and leaving her alone?
***
The voices seemed to come from far away. Perhaps they came from that same tunnel down which the stars had receded.
“Will she be all right?” The voice seemed familiar, seemed right.
“They’ll all be fine. I upped the oxygen content as soon as they went unconscious. We don’t have long though.” That voice sounded familiar too, but it seemed wrong, somehow. It wasn’t a welcome voice at all. “I’ll secure them. They don’t know you’re involved. If things go wrong, you can make sure we get the ship.”
What ship? Did they want the Kip Thorne? A jolt of fright went through her, shocking her out of her dazed state.
She opened her eyes.
One eye didn’t seem to be working, didn’t seem to want to open. The other only saw her right arm. It dangled down toward the deck plating below her. Her world was canted crazily, and she groggily realized she leaned over in the pilot seat. Her head still felt disconnected. It took several moments to make sense of the situation.
The memories came back in a dazzling rush. She was aboard the John Kelly. The Kip Thorne was destroyed, crashed. The Guard Intelligence Agent who’d shanghaied her and her brother was dead, presumably killed by a psychopath who might be a renegade Guard Intelligence Agent. Or was that a renegade Guard Intelligence Agent who might be a psychopath?
Another former agent and now Guard Free Now terrorist was also
aboard the ship. He’d first bugged the code going to a rogue AI controlled warship that could destroy worlds. Then he’d taken her brother hostage. Finally he’d pumped carbon monoxide into the cockpit, and perhaps the rest of the ship, to subdue opposition.
As her mind connected that last piece with her current position, slumped against the control panel, Mel realized that something pressed into her side.
It wasn’t the seat restraints, she fuzzily realized. She hadn’t worn them, which was why she’d hit her head. The seat didn’t have arms, so it couldn’t be those. What had she tucked into her belt?
She heard a grunt behind her, and that same familiar but wrong voice from before. It was the voice of Giran, she realized.
“Not so smart now, are you?” She could hear the strain in his voice as he lifted something. “Well, I was going to keep you all tied up, but your reputation precedes you. Not to mention, you’ve put on some weight, what with your addictions. So, Marcus, I think I’ll dispose of you before things get too inconvenient.”
Her mind still struggled with what was poking her in the side as she heard the sound of a pistol being cocked. That sound brought her back to Brian Liu when he tackled Agent Mueller when he’d drawn his pistol. The GI Agent’s pistol had slid to her feet. I picked up Agent Mueller’s pistol, she thought.
There was a Guard Free Now terrorist standing behind her. He had a pistol. He was about to kill Marcus, who she didn’t hate so much any more. In fact, she wasn’t sure she really hated him at all. Giran might have already killed her brother. Giran might be the one who’d killed her parents.
Mel didn’t push herself up. She didn’t struggle to her feet. She surged to her feet. Mel pivoted even as her dangling hand pulled the pistol out of her waistband. She moved in one fluid motion.
The pistol, which had seemed so large before, felt absurdly light as she raised it.
The tip of the barrel was only inches away from Giran’s face when she pulled the trigger. The cramped cabin seemed to collect the noise and concentrate it into her ears. Each time she squeezed the trigger a concussive wave of force seemed to pillow her head, and bash its way down her ears and into her brain.
