By Other Means (23 page)

Unfortunately, Harrowitze was pretty near certain that he just wasn’t that lucky.

*****

Sorilla scowled as she marched down the corridor, they were now out of the blackout zone, on the first of seven Engineering decks, and the place was a madhouse. She supposed that she shouldn’t be surprised, a major fault with the warp systems would be something sure to be taken seriously. Still, she grabbed the nearest man in Engineering green as he tried to go around the armed group.

“What’s going on down here?” She growled, making him pale and look like he dearly wanted to crawl into one of the maintenance shafts and pull the door shut behind him.

“We don’t know, Ma’am!” He stammered out, “Something is interfering with the singularity! The computer is running on automatic, and we can’t shut any of it down!”

Sorilla let him go, “Have you seen any of the Alliance races on these decks?”

“The Aliens ma’am?” The Engineer blurted, eyes sliding over to where Kriss was standing silently, “Just that one.”

“Get back to your duties.”

Happily willing to comply with those order the man scrambled around them and bolted down the hall. Sorilla glanced back, “We need to figure out where they’re hiding. Sentinel Kriss, do you have any idea what they’re using?”

“I am no expert on gravity drives,” The Lucian admitted, “however I have been trained on gravity weapons. One such is used to destabilize a drive, normally to force it from Jump Space as you call it. It can also be used to cause a drive to collapse on itself, however that it rarely an option as it requires much closer positioning to the drive.”

“How close?” Krieg demanded, calling up a schematic of the ship on a tablet one of his men handed him.

Kriss started to answer, then paused as he realized that he didn’t know any form of measurement that would mean anything to the Terrans. He considered for a moment, then looked over the shoulder of the Colonel and pointed, “No farther than that.”

Krieg whistled, “That’s close. We’re talking… twenty meters, not much more than four decks. Still a lot of space to cover, unfortunately.”

“They had to go somewhere they could control,” Sorilla pointed out, “otherwise we’d have reports of aliens coming out our ears.”

“Maybe not,” Krieg shook his head, “Power may be on here, but comms are down.”

Sorilla tilted her head, considering that. Taking out the ship’s internal WAN was easy enough, she supposed. The Wireless Access Network could be jammed the same as almost any wireless communication system. The hardline network, however, was a very different story. Barring a few nearly apocalyptic methods, she could only assume that they’d managed to disable the major nodal points in the optical fibres.

The problem with that theory was that the ship used a very similar network design to the one in use by SOL system’s information grid, and that was designed specifically to route around blacked out nodes as seamlessly as possible.

Come to think of it, that EMP of their’s shouldn’t have taken out through comms in the first place. Optical signals don’t give a damn how much energy you pulse through the area, so what the hell did they do?

“Sentinal Kriss,” She spoke, turning in the Lucian’s direction, “How would you disable communications on a ship like this?”

Kriss stared into the blank helm of the woman across from him, considering the question and his response carefully.

“That would depend,” He said finally, “With their, presumably, small numbers and need to remain hidden… I would likely be forced to use a combat algorithm, anything else would attract too much attention.”

“Combat…” Sorilla trailed off, “A hack. You wrote exploits for our hardware…”

She shook her head, “Of course you did. Colonel, who’s your best commtech?”

“Evans, front and center!” Krieg snapped.

Corporal James Evans stepped forward automatically, “Sir!”

“The enemy has most likely introduced an exploit into our hardline systems, likely the ship based wireless network as well,” Sorilla told him, “Can you find it?”

“Ma’am, an exploit like that would need to be introduced through a specific terminal,” Evans said, thinking furiously. “You would need to hardline it in, or the network wouldn’t accept it and you’d only knock out one node.”

“In that he is correct,” Kriss affirmed, “Our procedure was to pick from one of approximately thirty such terminals on the ship.”

“Alright, how many on this deck?” Sorilla asked, very cognizant of the ticking clock they were under.

“Three,” Evans offered instantly, before Kriss could speak. “Another eight within range of the Warp controls.”

He shrugged apologetically, “We are in Engineering country, Ma’am.”

“Damn. We don’t have time to search them all,” Krieg growled.

Sorilla looked over at Kriss and gestured to the tablet, “Where would you strike?”

The Lucian considered the schematics of the ship while bringing his own version of such to mind as well.

“The weapon they are likely using will function best if they ca get it as close as possible to the core,” He said stiffly, well aware that he was sharing classified intelligence with a people he’d only recently warred against. “I would go… here.”

Sorilla looked over the section on the map, noting that it was two decks below them. If they cut straight there, they’d bypass several other possibilities, but they didn’t have the time to check them all. She hesitated for a second, then nodded firmly.

“Colonel, I think we should go for it.”

The Marine Colonel considered it for a moment, but didn’t really have a better option. He nodded, turning to the commtech, “I want marines hitting every single one of those terminals as fast as they can kit up. We’re taking this one.”

“Yes sir, Colonel!”

“Let’s move.”

*****

Admiral Ruger stood firmly in place, arms clasped behind his back as he looked out through the giant observation windows. The Mexico was still accelerating wildly away from the Alliance world and station, but there were ships pacing them now and he knew that as tense as the situation was one misstep could turn it right back into a shooting war.

And we’re bloody well outnumbered at the moment.

The diplomats had been screaming at each other and, more often, him since the gravity surge damn near broke everyone’s legs. He’d been able to quell that once news got back, but now the mess was literally out of their hands, and he could see the tension starting to get the best of both sides.

“I believe we need to adjourn the discussions until cooler heads prevail,” Ruger said firmly, unwilling to let the future of SOLCOM and Earth ride on diplomats looking to pin blame on someone when they were the only people in sight.

“My people will…”

“Will be our guests until we locate and neutralize the
saboteurs
you brought on board,” Ruger growled. “If you and your diplomatic team wish to leave, you’ll have to wait until we’ve managed to restore power to the flight deck… which is something I’d like to have words with you about, since you apparently brought a potentially disastrous gravity weapon on board a SOLCOM vessel…”

“We had no idea!” The Ambassador objected.

“That doesn’t make me feel any better, Ambassador. I generally prefer not to work with incompetents.”

“Admiral,” This time it was the human Ambassador who was calming him down, “That isn’t going to help.”

Ruger nodded stiffly, “My apologies, Ambassadors.”

He took a breath, “Unfortunately, we really cannot launch any craft at the moment. Forgetting the danger of launching while under such high acceleration, whatever the saboteurs did completely blew out power for twelve decks, including the flight deck and airlock systems. No one is leaving the Mexico.”

One of the Alliance people stepped forward, putting a hand on their Ambassador to calm him in turn. Ruger recognized him as the potential spy master they’d sussed out early on. He leaned in and whispered in the Ambassador’s ear, far too low to be heard unfortunately. Whatever he said had an effect, however, and the other alien slumped.

“We will wait here for repairs to be made,” Sienele said simply. “Do you have any more news on the situation with the rebel faction?”

“No.” Ruger growled, this time not so much at the company but at the situation. “We have marines searching every area they could have used to slip that exploit into our systems, but they’ve not been found yet.”

“I see,” Sienele said, taking a seat beside the Ambassador. “Hopefully they will be located soon.”

More than you know,
Ruger kept that thought to himself.

His eye implant had a clock running, the amount of time they had to live if the assault on the gravity core of the ship wasn’t halted. It was running down far too fast.

Twelve minutes and counting.

*****

The doors of the elevator nearly exploded in their faces as they reached the floor they were interested in.

“Get down!”

Sorilla, Kriss, and the Marines all hit the floor of the, thankfully, large military lift as explosive pulses of energy tore through the air where they had been.

“I’ve got eight of them on my HUD,” Sorilla called, drawing one of her pistols. “Hold one!”

“Holding.” Krieg growled.

Sorilla pressed herself against the wall, trying to stay out of the line of fire, but slowly pushed her weapon around the edge and looked through the camera on the gun itself to determine the positions of the enemy.

“Eight confirmed. Haloing targets.” She said, tagging the enemy and then sending the data to the Marines.

“Roger. We have Halos,” Krieg replied, “Kirk, Bradly… they’re yours.”

The two marines crawled forward, pushing their rifles ahead of them. Using Sorilla’s targeting data they just pointed the weapons in the general direction and kept their own heads down.

“Sending!” Kirk Barret called, just before the two man fire team pulled the trigger on their weapons.

The heavy automatic cannons roared, shaking everyone in the enclosed space to the bone as both magazines emptied in just seconds. The heavy rounds didn’t have much space for their guidance systems to work in, but  there was enough for them to make up for the awkward angle they had to aim from.

“Go! Go! Go!” Krief ordered, “Secure that hall!”

Sorilla was out of the lift before he finished speaking, the Marines hard on her heels. She drew the second pistol in mid sprint, putting both weapons on computer control, trusting her implants to discriminate targets. It wasn’t how she preferred to operate, but in the tight confines of the ship’s corridors, with the clock running down, she didn’t have seconds to waste.

The Marines’ barrage had taken out some of their foes, forcing the rest to hit the ground, and the time it took them to recover was all the time Sorilla had to close the range and eliminate the threat. Her M-Tac pistols barked, sending half inch diameter rounds tearing through the corridor as she ran, but she bother to watch whether they connected or not.

When the first enemy popped his head up, an Alliance pulse cannon already aimed right down the hall at her, Sorilla dropped like a stone. She hit the floor in a foot first slide that barely slowed her motion, and struck the enemy combatant in the skins with a snap kick that broke bones.

She just had a glimpse of his face, the pain and shock that was suddenly eclipsed by a halo of blood as she fire five rounds up into him, then he was gone as she slid past and twisted into a roll that brought her to a stop and to her knees just as he hit the deck and remained unmoving.

Silence fell for a moment as Sorilla checked her six and cleared the corridor.

All the enemy combatants were down, most weren’t moving and the few that were showed no signs of becoming an immediate threat. She rose to her feet, kicking weapons away from the bodies as the Marines ran up around her and secured the area.

“Section clear,” Sorilla said, breaking open both M-Tac weapons with a flick of her wrist, shifting one gun to hold both in her right hand, and ejecting the partially spent barrel assemblies over her shoulder. “I think we’re in the right place, Colonel.”

“Major, the day I need the army to tell me we contacted the enemy is the day I take a walk out on the Mexico’s hull without a suit.” Krieg told her in no uncertain terms as he and Kriss joined them. “We’re down to less than ten minutes, let’s not waste what we’ve got.”

Sorilla nodded, reloading both her weapons before seating them firmly back in the cross draw holster. “This was their tripwire, it’s only going to get worse from here.”

“She is right,” Kriss rumbled, eying the bodies and weapons on the ground. “I see Sturm Gav weapons here, this is bad.”

“What’s so bad about that?” Krieg scowled, “The Sturm are one of the main races in the Alliance, right?”

“Yes, but they do not sell their weapons.” Kriss said, “Like the Ross, very advanced, very… internal. They do not, how is you say it? Play well with others.”

“So these guys have an in with a major power,” Sorilla nodded, “yeah, that’s bad. So, are the Sturm supplying them directly, or is there a black market?”

“That we will find out,” Kriss predicted, “if it is from the black market, then it will not be worse than this. However, Sturm strategic weapons are as bad as those of the Ross.”

Krieg groaned, “The Ross destroyed a
planet
!”

“Yes, and the Strum stopped them dead in their trajectories.” Kriss said, “Neither race are those even I would care to engage in combat with… and I
enjoy
combat.”

“The more I learn about your damn Alliance the less I want to have anything to do with the whole lot of you,” Krieg muttered, shaking his head. “Alright. Let’s move, we have a job to do people.”

*****

Horrowitz stomped over to where Parker had setup the external diagnostics instruments, glaring at the crewman.

“So?” he growled, “What the hell is going on?”

“I don’t know, these readings don’t make any sense.” Parker admitted as he checked the information coming through the sensors.

Harrowitz only had to glance at the display to see that the external systems were showing the same readings as his hard line ones were.