They were running late for the resumption of the conference, stuck waiting for the elevator to the core along with a bunch of
Wisconsin
security personnel in the midst of a shift change.
“That was pointless,” Valentine said.
“It confirms Parvi’s interpretation of what Shane was trying to say.”
“You mean those two ‘scientists.’ ” She managed to articulate the quotes around the word.
“Why are you so hostile to the idea?”
“I don’t like baseless hopes masquerading as strategy. It cost us the
Khalid
.”
“That was one ship among thousands.”
“One ship with a radically improved tach-drive. Would you sacrifice your one suit of powered armor just because you have an army covered with chain-mail and good intentions?”
“We just have to—”
The elevator arriving interrupted him. They filed in with a group of a dozen of the blue-suited security personnel. None of them paid him, Valentine, or their conversation any mind as they chatted among themselves.
Again, he was apprehensive about the lack of professionalism he saw.
No wonder they haven’t found Stefan yet . . .
“We just have to what?” she asked him.
Mallory shook his head. “Go forward with what we have now. At this point it doesn’t matter if Parvi’s expedition was a mistake or not.”
“I know. I was just telling you why the subject pisses me off.”
Mallory nodded. His attention had shifted from their conversation to the group of guards here with them.
They rolled upward, the apparent gravity decreasing, and the floor seeming to tilt with the Coriolis effect, as they neared the axis of rotation. The view of the
Wisconsin
slid by the large windows, capturing Valentine’s attention. She stared out at the stars while Mallory stared at the guards.
“Even if the Dolbrians left something, why didn’t the Proteans do anything with it? How do we know it would even be comprehensible?” She snorted, slightly fogging the window next to him. “Even to someone with an advanced degree in cultural anthropology—”
Mallory placed a hand on her arm and said, “Shh.”
“What?” She turned around.
One of the guards, across the elevator from them, was staring at a small comm unit and shaking his head. “Hey?” he called out after a moment, “any of you guys having trouble calling upstairs?”
“I was talking to Harris a few minutes ago,” someone responded, pulling his own comm unit. After a moment he had the same puzzled expression. “That’s funny, no answer.”
The elevator began sliding home, and then the lights flickered.
Someone said, “What?” just before the elevator stopped moving with a horrid mechanical crunch and the lights failed completely. The elevator was nestled in the body of the central core, so the walls of the elevator shaft blocked the windows, and the only lights were from the telltales on the two comm units.
“Shit!” one of the guards said, “power failure.”
“Get back,” Mallory whispered harshly to Toni, pressing her against the window behind them. He caught her by surprise and they slid to the ground.
They hit the ground, and light flooded the elevator as the doors creaked open.
Someone said, “Good, now we—”
He never finished the sentence. The air filled with the sound of gunfire as three shotguns fired through the doorway and into the mass of guards. In a matter of seconds, the elevator was choked with the smell of gunsmoke and blood. He whispered into Toni’s ear, “Don’t move.”
One of the guards fell down next to them with a breathless groan, trying to hold his blood-soaked stomach together with his hands. The gunfire stopped, and the only sound was ragged uneven breathing and someone softly cursing over and over.
From outside, a harsh voice called out, “Move your ass, get their weapons.”
A skeletally thin woman in a dirty shirt and ragged khaki pants stepped inside, and stared at the massacre.
Outside, the voice called out, “Hurry up.”
The woman lowered her own weapon and started picking up guns from the fallen guards and tossing them out the open door. When one of the guards, probably unconsciously, hung on to the butt of one of the weapons, the woman put her boot on his wrist, raised her shotgun to the man’s face, and pulled the trigger.
Mallory saw that, closed his eyes, and tried not to breathe.
“Is that it?”
“Guns? Yes.”
“Then move it. We can’t waste time here.”
He heard some sounds of movement, then only the groans of the wounded. After nearly a full minute, Toni whispered, “I think they’re gone.”
Mallory nodded and pushed himself just upright enough so he could survey the damage. He needed to help these people, but one glance told him that was hopeless. All of them had been hit in the upper body or the gut, most multiple times. The man with the stomach wound next to them had already stopped breathing, and groans of the living had faded to be nearly inaudible.
He rose, and Toni stood up next to him. “What the hell?”
“A refugee revolt, judging from the woman who came in,” Mallory answered.
Toni bent down to look at the victims, but the elevator was now almost silent. “This is . . .” She shook her head, failing to find a word. “You think Stefan had a hand in this?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.”
She reached down and retrieved one of the comm units. “They left these?”
Mallory edged toward the door and said, “They’re disorganized and under-armed. They may not even be thinking in terms of cutting off communication.” He crouched, so when he peeked around the edge of the doorway his head wasn’t at eye level. The loading area by the elevator was largely empty, except for one blue-suited corpse lying on the ground halfway between them and the nearest exit. He ducked back around and faced her. “They had the sense to cut power to the elevator.”
“Isolating the core from reinforcements.”
Mallory nodded. “During a shift change, so this probably wasn’t an isolated attack.”
She looked at the comm. “There’s probably no one left up here to call.”
“We have to assume that these guys decapitated security’s command and control. The guards were having trouble calling back to base already. Trying to alert
Wisconsin
security will probably only let the bad guys know we’re here.” Mallory let out a long breath. “And if the bad guys have control of the security systems, they’ll know we’re here as soon as we pass a security camera.”
“Good lord. We’re fucked.”
“Maybe not. Can you raise other channels on that?”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Reformation
“The intent of all insurrections is to bring chaos out of order.”
—
The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“The revolutionist . . . knows only one science, the science of destruction.”
—MIKHAIL A. BAKUNIN
(1814-1876)
Date: 2526.8.7 (Standard) 350,000 km from Bakunin-BD+50°1725
Toni II had spent the last forty-five minutes in the makeshift gym her younger twin had set up in an empty cargo compartment in the
Daedalus
. The gym consisted of a powered hardsuit tethered to the floor and ceiling, with the joint resistance jacked up to about three hundred percent normal. It had been necessary during their long stint in zero-gee, and it still was, now that they were docked. The ersatz microgravity here in the
Wisconsin’s
core was just enough to give her inner ear a cue to up and down.
She ran in place, the tethers keeping the suit from flying into a bulkhead.
Her daily routine bore an eerie resemblance to her long stint on the observation platform in orbit around Wormhole Sigma Draconis III. Wake up, spend a shift checking the ship’s status, then go work out.
The world has been turned upside down, the Stygian Executive Command probably no longer exists, I’m a ghost, a pirate, and second-in-command to myself—and nothing seems to have changed.
She was perilously close to wishing something would happen, when the comm on her suit buzzed for her attention. “Yes,” she responded, using the chin switch to open the channel without breaking her stride.
The voice was from of one of the Salmagundi crew working the bridge.
“We have an incoming transmission from Captain Valentine.”
She slowed herself as she said, “Okay, I’m coming up.” She wondered what her twin wanted, and why she’d waited until this late to call in.
“No,”
came the word from the bridge,
“I’m routing it to you now.”
“What?” She realized that the Salmagundi tech sounded seriously spooked.
“Toni?”
Her sister’s voice was a whisper, distorted by the guy on the bridge upping the gain to make her audible.
“What is it?” Toni II asked, slowing her pumping legs to a standstill.
“We have a serious problem.”
Ten minutes later, she was down in the
Daedalus’
air lock, shouting orders. She had seven of the remaining crew down here, three of the Salmagundi militia and four of the Caliphate techs. That left enough people manning the bridge to radio to the other ships docked here, and to pilot the
Daedalus
away if need be.
The rest of them donned the eight hardsuits they had, the two heavy-duty utilitarian models that the Tonis had brought on board, plus the custom-painted ones that had served Karl’s crew before the Tonis had hijacked his ship. The powered suits were designed for heavy-duty EVA work, and weren’t the best armor, but it was what they had.
Her impromptu squad was a garish sight. Karl’s crew had been creative in painting their suits to be identifiable at a distance; one had a blue-on-orange tribal pattern, another had clusters of large purple eyes on a crimson field, another had a lemon-yellow and lime-green jigsaw puzzle pattern, one suit had a cherry-red flame job, another seemed wrapped by the tentacles of some alien creature, and the last one had been painted to resemble a bat-winged, goat-footed demon whose mouth gaped open to accommodate the suit’s visor.
“Is everyone on the same channel?” she asked, once her people were suited up. She got seven assents.
She looked at the insane suit patterns, and the near-random assortment of weapons, and hoped that she knew what she was doing.
At least I probably have more military-trained people behind me than in front of me.
“Bridge, once we’re through, evacuate the air lock and keep it depressurized.”
“Got that.”
It was a minor obstacle, but it would prevent anyone forcing entry short of overriding the mechanical systems. And if anyone tried that, the
Daedalus
could just decouple from the docking ring. With the air lock depressurized, they could do it cleanly even if the outer door was open.
“Bridge? Anything on the external monitors?”
“Nothing in our field of view.”
Which didn’t mean much. While docked, the cameras on the air lock could only really see into the
Wisconsin’s
air lock, not beyond.
“Said,” she called to the man in the other gray Stygian hardsuit, “You lead out the air lock and give the all clear.”
Said grunted an assent and stepped though the air lock. She had him lead because he had the plasma cannon—and no one wanted to be between it and the enemy.
He made it through the interlock, and out the
Wisconsin’s
air lock, and after a quick look back and forth, waved them all forward.
“Quiet,” Mallory said, pressing himself against the wall. He and Toni were across from the elevator now, a few meters from the main entrance to the loading area in what seemed the only obvious blind spot from the security cameras. They had held position here for only fifteen seconds, and Mallory already heard motion in the hallway, coming closer.
He pulled out the comm he had liberated from one of the dead guards and whispered, “Give me yours.”
Toni handed over its twin. Mallory opened a quiet channel on full, set the device on the floor, and kicked it so the small communicator slid across the floor all the way back to the elevator entrance.
The loping low-gravity footsteps came closer. It was hard to tell numbers, but it was more than one person. He held up a hand in front of Toni, spreading his fingers; he pointed at himself, then at the finger closest to the elevator.
I get the first one.
He pointed at her, and then at the finger closest to the entrance.
You get the one bringing up the rear.