Dominant Species (14 page)

"It's coolant Major, the damn lake is coolant." Merlin began to reel off his discoveries at an accelerated pace, the words racing as fast as the young engineer's mind. "Whatever punched through the hull tore open the coolant reservoir for one hell of an engine. We found signs of at least five different attempts to re-seal it, but they all crapped out for one reason or another."

The grey-armored hands snapped a series of fiber-optic cables into a translucent coupling as Merlin continued. "Loss of coolant would have left the crew with two pretty crappy choices; sit offline and freeze to death, or run the drive till it overloaded and things got toasty warm, to the tune of a million degrees or so."

With the destruction of Cathedral's reactor still fresh on his mind, Ridgeway was clear on the latter implication.

Merlin continued to ramble while he worked. "But these bastards were clever, oh yeah, real brainy little fuckers. They couldn't maintain a frigid containment inside the ship, but they had nothing BUT cold outside the ship."

"So they routed the coolant through Papa-Six and used the cave floor as a giant heat-sink?"

"Bingo!" Merlin confirmed as his left hand fished among a set of relays. "The engines didn't need to push the ship through space, so they probably had voltage to spare. For some period of time, and I am talking a long while based on the wear and tear down here, this baby cranked out amps like there was no tomorrow. Then the shit hit the fan."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, for some reason--"

A loud bang echoed in the room and Merlin's view spun to the right. Riding his gaze, Ridgeway saw Monster lug a refrigerator-sized piece of equipment through the door. Tentacles of wire hung from its base, dragging along the steel floor.

"That'll do." Merlin motioned with a short wave. "Set it over here and start pulling the main fiber trunks. No, just the 4-gauge, yeah."

Merlin's attention swung back to the wires in his hands. With scarcely a moment to shift gears, he resumed his narration. "For some reason the crew needed to bug out, and from the looks of things, it wasn't an orderly evac. Just about anything that could make or store power was ripped out by the bolts. Generators, batteries--"

"APUs," Ridgeway injected.

"Right again," Merlin said with a nod. "The whole game is action and reaction. An antimatter drive can produce a ton of power, but if it shuts down, you need some tiny source of power to fire it back up. Without a kick-start, the next time the drive system scrammed, it was down for the count."

"I'm good so far, but if the core's been offline, what's heating up the coolant?"

"Latent antimatter reaction. These puppies never really die unless you flush the core into space, and that didn't happen. If you ignore one long enough, it'll back off to near-zero production; the equivalent of shifting into idle. The core is designed to crank out just enough juice to maintain its own containment field, otherwise matter and antimatter meet and, well, that gets ugly. It's been a fundamental safeguard for years now. We're not talking much in terms of power, but it generates a bit of heat along the way.

"And there's our fog." Ridgeway said, grateful that at least one of a million questions had been answered.

Abruptly, Ridgeway's second-hand gaze snapped to the right. He listened as Merlin directed Monster to connect a series of couplings that ran between the growing collection of parts. "Just follow the color code, blue to blue, red to red. They've got to be in the right order."

A convoluted assembly lay strung out in Rube Goldberg fashion across the sloped floor. Ridgeway remained silent as he focused on the odd chain of components cobbled together on the floor.

The largest piece was a field-grade Auxiliary Power Unit; a small, self-contained generator. Trails of soot marred the dull red sheet-metal sides.

Tracking along the path of tangled cable, Ridgeway followed through a series of jury-rigged amplifiers, a heavy surge suppressor and a compact step-up transformer that for some reason preceded the APU in the chain.

"What's with the transformer?" Ridgeway was no engineer, but clearly the component was out of proper sequence. Everything should start with the APU and go up.

A trace of hesitation suddenly tainted Merlin's reply. "Well, the only APU we could find is frapped. It looks like somebody smoked the capacitor array."

"In English, Merlin."

The younger Marine paused for an instant as he spliced the last wires into a power connector that struck Ridgeway as oddly familiar.

"I told ya Major, it's always the same game. Even an APU needs a good kick in the butt to power up. Normally, it'll charge itself with a trickle of current over time. The juice is stored in an array of capacitors that can be discharged in a single jolt. That jump-starts the APU, which in turn starts the core."

Ridgeway's attention was glued to the connector in Merlin's hands, the familiarity nagging. "So what did you find to replace the cap array?" An odd sense of foreboding crept up his spine.

"Not a damn thing, Major." Merlin's voice was stone cold. "Anything on this ship that had a prayer of firing the core is long gone. The Lieutenant is out of options, so it's time to improvise."

Ridgeway's gaze was pulled down to the open access panel on Merlin's breastplate. The engineer held the connector up for a final inspection. In that instant, Ridgeway realized where he had seen it, or at least one just like it. Marine issue; a charger interface for juicing armor in the field. Before he could speak, Merlin snaked it into his own armor and pressed firmly. It seated with a distinct click.

"Merlin, what the hell…?"

The corporal reached over his shoulder and pulled the CAR from his back. The covalent rifle surged to life, pulsing with its own power. Merlin tightened his grasp on the pistol grip where control and feedback contacts met those in his glove.

The powerfeeds meshed as well. While the rifle would normally draw power from the armor, in a pinch the flow could be reversed. Merlin threw a switch and with a sharp descending whine the CAR flushed its entire charge back into the Marine's armor. The power readout on Merlin's TAC spiked almost fifteen percent, cresting past one-hundred and into the overload range.

"Needed a last bit of juice to max out," Merlin explained mechanically, "we only get one shot at this, and Monster had given me everything he had."

Sweeping through a blurred arc, Merlin's view settled on Monster. The huge sergeant was braced against the sloping wall, a makeshift control box in his hand. Ridgeway did not need the TAC to know that Monster's armor, as well as the Gatling, were all but drained of power.

Ridgeway heard Merlin's voice, flat and detached, utter the single directive. "Hit it."

Somewhere to the right, the APU hummed, awaiting the surge of power from Merlin's armor that with luck would breath life into long-dormant wires.

Or burn them out completely.

Ridgeway shouted at Merlin to stop, knowing he was already too late.

With a fierce "Semper Fi," Merlin threw the switch.

CHAPTER 13

Stitch was slammed against the wall as the sloped floor of the command deck bucked violently. Rolling with the impact, he crabbed to his feet and stared out through the broad window.

The Lobby twitched like a patient hit with a defibrillator. Arcs of neon lightning danced along the walls, leaping from floor to floor. Like a radiant mold, pinpoints of light appeared randomly across the inside of the hull-- specks at first, aggregating into complex pathways of incandescence. Just below the command deck, a huge section of superstructure tore free from it's moorings and plunged into the darkness below.

Stitch felt more than heard the thrum of a huge machine as it surged to life. All around him, screens rippled with random patterns of color as countless systems struggled to awaken from an ancient, frozen sleep. Synthetic voices stuttered unintelligibly as static fought with streams of text and graphics in a raucous assault of light and sound.

One of the overhead lights exploded, showering the room with sparks and shredded acoustic tiles. Stitch threw himself across the prone sniper, using his body to shield the open panel in Darcy's armor. As another tremor shuddered through the floor-plates, Stitch wondered if the ship was coming completely unglued.

"We've got fire!" Stitch snapped around at the sound of Ridgeway's voice, his gaze following the senior Marine's upraised hand to a twisted coil of flame that convulsed in the ruptured ceiling. The angry electrical buzz was barely audible over the hiss of compressed gas.

"Move, move!" As he heard the words, Stitch felt two hands clamp down on the back of his armor and heave him into the turbolift shaft. The medic hit the open doorway at a forward tilt, propelled by Ridgeway's strength and the downhill slope of the floor.

Stitch jumped, launching himself to the far side of the shaft where his hands clawed frantically for purchase. The sheet metal walls flexed beneath his weight as he hit.

One hand closed on the rung of a service ladder as the dull CRUMP of a gas explosion struck like a hammer. The flash of blazing orange backlit a dark, multi-limbed silhouette that hurtled through the doorway.

One side of the over-stressed ladder tore free and Stitch grappled wildly. Three feet of the side rail peeled away from the metal wall with a sudden shriek.

Metal! As the recognition flashed, the medic swung his legs up and stomped, driving the magnetic-soled boots against the wall. Both feet stuck solidly.

One arm rising over his head instinctively, Stitch looked up, wary of debris plummeting from above that could tear him from the wall. The shaft overhead held nothing but darkness. Shifting his weight further away from the bending ladder, Stitch reached out to the mangled section of wall that had buckled into the shaft. With a groan he pulled himself level with the doorway and peered over the ledge and into the Command Deck. Flames filled the room.

"Major!" Stitch shouted into the inferno.

"Down here." The voice was strained and groggy.

Stitch almost slipped as he looked down to see Ridgeway hanging from a lone climbing blade driven through the far wall. Ridgeway's right hand held fast to Darcy's ankle. The two forms swung like a huge, lazy pendulum.

With a jolt, the pair suddenly lurched downward as the climbing blade carved a growing furrow in the flimsy wall. Metal squealed like a dying pig as the blade was dragged inexorably down by the weight of the double load. Ridgeway's helmet rocked up as his form coiled. Stitch heard him snarl only one word--

"Catch."

Ridgeway heaved with a grunt and Darcy swung up like a rag doll. The throw lofted the sniper only a short distance before her speed bled off to a stall. In that instant before she fell, the medic's gauntlet darted out and grabbed her shoulderplate.

"Got her!" Stitch barked triumphantly.

His gaze flicked down the shaft and the small measure of relief evaporated. The force of the throw had torn Ridgeway from the wall and Stitch could only watch helplessly as Ridgeway swiped at the wall with both blades. They whistled through nothing but air and Ridgeway began to pluumet into the darkness below.

"Major!" Stitch screamed over a sharp bark and metallic pang.

Defying both gravity and inertia, Ridgeway's trajectory broke abruptly as a powerful yank threatened to peel Stitch from the wall as well. Reflexively the medic jammed his feet hard against the wall. At least for the moment, he held fast.

Sucking in a ragged breath, Stitch looked down to see Ridgeway hanging half-inverted, limbs in an awkward tangle. The Major's right arm was drawn across his chest, it's blade impaled once more into the wall.

Stitch blinked rapidly, trying to understand what had happened. His eyes tracked up from Ridgeway and caught a fine line that stretched all the way up to the sniper's extended left arm. The wire twanged like a guitar string, a note reverberating down to the small magnetic grapple affixed to Ridgeway's hip.

"Nice shot," Stitch grunted through clenched teeth.

"Shootin's what I do…" the sniper wheezed, a wet gurgle stifling the last of the comment.

CHAPTER 14

"What the bloody hell was that?"

Pinned beneath a toppled rack of electronics, Taz cursed relentlessly as the tremor subsided.

With a grunt, he bench-pressed the heavy rack off his chest. The wide metal framework groaned in protest, rising from the floor just enough for Taz to draw his legs up and into play. The powerful limbs acted like a forklift and drove the bulky mass even higher. Metal squealed as the rack bent in half, folding back on itself. One leg now completely free, he stomped the last of the confining debris into a crumpled freeform sculpture.

Taz scowled behind the faceless mask as he climbed to his feet and looked around the room. Evenly rectangular, the grey room was dominated by floor-to-ceiling columns of computer equipment. Rainbow shrouds of fiber optic cable had been woven around each stack. Throughout the tangle of wrecked equipment, countless tiny lights flickered.

Power.

"Well I'll be buggered!" Taz shook his head and uttered the words aloud, "The bloody little bottler actually did it." A genuine note of awe suffused his naturally irreverent tone. For an armored Marine, power meant life.