Mutiny in Space (17 page)

I muted my mike and started up the ladder, trying to keep quiet. I doubted that anyone in the engineering room would be able to hear me from this distance, but it was best to be careful. I went up the ladder rung by careful rung, then slowly stuck my head into the crawlway.

That saved my life.

The maintenance crawlway was a narrow tunnel about four feet in diameter, the walls and ceiling lined with pipes and bundles of wires. The first thing I saw was the sleek black shape of a security drone just to the right of the ladder cylinder, clinging to the ceiling overhead. The gun turret on the metal spider’s back started to turn, the barrel of its weapon swinging towards me.

I reacted on pure instinct. I couldn’t get my gun up in time to fire, so I didn’t even try. Instead I pulled myself up the ladder, slamming into the wall, and the barrel of the turret gun whacked across my chest.

That hurt. A lot.

If someone has ever hit you with a length of steel pipe, it felt exactly like that. Pain just exploded through my chest, and I was pretty sure that I had cracked or broken a rib. I was mashed between the wall and the barrel of the drone’s gun, but that meant the drone couldn’t bring its weapon to bear. For a moment the barrel pushed hard against me, squeezing the breath from my chest as I fumbled with my machine pistol.

The drone’s AI realized that it would have to move to shoot me, so it skittered backwards along the ceiling, the turret on its back rotating. But the with barrel of the gun gone from my chest, I could lift my machine pistol.

I opened fire. The noise in the enclosed crawlway was immense. The bullets ripped down the side of the drone, punching through its metal shell and hammering into its guts before it managed to get any shots off. The drone shuddered and then went limp, falling from the ceiling with a clang. I put three more shots into it for good measure, but it didn’t move.

The smell of gun smoke and charred electronics filled the crawlway.

I took a deep breath, which hurt a lot. Something was flashing and wondered if I had somehow gotten a concussion in the process, and then realized that someone was texting me. I pulled my comm off my belt and saw that Corbin had sent me message consisting of a single question mark. I replied awkwardly—KILED DRNE—and then crawled past the dead machine, making my way down the passage. My chest felt tight with pain, and crawling wasn’t pleasant, but I managed it, forcing myself along.

The question. Did I dare continue, given that I had just alerted everyone in the engineering room below that someone was up here? I didn’t really have much choice, I realized, considering that my uncle and the others were about to storm the room. I had to gamble that the men below would assume the noise had been the drone doing its job.

I took a deep breath, asked every deity whose name I could remember and the nameless spirit of hyperspace to help me out, if they were so inclined, and continued crawling.

Soon I was over the engineering room.

Every few yards along the crawlway were access hatches that opened in the engineering room, both for maintenance and emergency escape from in case of a chemical leak or a hull breach or something. I brought up my phone again, connected to the security subsystem, and accessed the engineering room camera. As before, the image was terrible, and even worse on my phone’s little screen. Yet I could see that the commandos had set up an impromptu barricade by the doors, sheltering behind stacks of crates, and another group waited halfway across the room, ready to reinforce the men guarding the door. It was a reasonable defensive formation, and it meant the commandos were separated into two distinct groups.

So much for dropping a single grenade on their heads.

I crawled forward, counting off the distance in my head. I reached a point about halfway through the engineering room, and I switched my gun’s safety back on and holstered it. I pulled out four stun grenades and set the timers on each grenade to four seconds. Then I checked to make sure that I could hold two grenades in one hand

The timing was going to be everything.

I dug out my multitool and undid the release on the nearest hatch. I took a deep breath, gripped the handle, and pushed, sending the hatch swinging downward on its hinges. It swung in silence, thank God. About eight meters below me I saw the engineering room, lights flashing on the various system consoles. There were quite a lot of red lights. The system was evidently not happy that Corbin had taken the regulator’s CPU.

I could also see the commandos waiting for Corbin’s attack. Fortunately, none of them had looked up just yet. Any minute one of them would happen to notice the opened hatch in the ceiling, and I had to be moving by then. I returned the multitool to my belt and took a deep breath to calm myself, which was probably a bad idea because it sent a wave of pain through me.

Now or never.

I withdrew, seized two grenades in each hand, leaned over the edge of the hatch, and threw them. The grenades in my left hand I threw towards the commandos guarding the door. The grenades in my right hand I flung towards the men waiting in reserve.

The movement caught one man’s attention, and he looked up and shouted a warning, his Tanith-Mordecai K7 snapping towards me.

I threw myself backwards just as a volley of automatic fire ripped up through the hatch. The bullets missed me and tore into the ceiling, bits of insulation from the pipes and the wiring falling onto the grillwork. The floor shivered beneath me as the bullets struck the metal, and rows of sharp bumps appeared all around me. The metal was strong enough to cause the rounds to fragment, but only just, and if one of the commandos had the bright idea of firing a laser at me, I was finished.

Then the stun grenades went off.

A brilliant flash of light blazed through the opened hatch, and even from this height I felt the vibration shoot through the metal. Then the shooting began in earnes, accompanied by the sounds of men screaming in rage and terror and agony. I crawled back towards the opened hatch and peered into the engineering room. It was all smoke and chaos, with the muzzle flashes of weapons visible in the gloom, and there was enough smoke that I could see the beams of the burst laser pistols.

A commando ducked for cover behind the console dedicated to managing the ion thrusters. It gave him excellent cover from the doors, but terrible cover from my position, so I lined up my pistol, sighted along the end, and pulled the trigger. Even with my sub-standard gun skills, I hit him in the helmet, and his head jerked before he slumped to the ground. Another commando noticed, looked up, and started to take aim at me, but before he pulled the trigger, a laser burst hit him in the chest and he spun.

I moved back and took cover, since I couldn’t see through the increasingly heavy smoke and I couldn’t see any likely targets.

But after another two or three exchanges of roaring gunfire, the engineering room fell silent. I peered over the edge again, trying to see what was happening.

“XO, this is Rovio,” said Corbin’s voice in my ear. “Engineering secure. I repeat, the engineering room is secure. Everyone, check in. We’ve got some men down.”

“Nikolai here,” I said, tapping my earpiece. “I’m all right.” I shut the hatch, crawled over it, and made my way to the access ladder. I heard Nelson check in, followed by the other men. Four of the men didn’t check in, which meant they were dead or too wounded to speak.

I reached the ladder and clambered down to the engineering room. The room smelled of gun smoke, burned armor, and blood, and the black-armored commandos lay sprawled over the ground. Nelson and two of the techs were moving over the dead men, methodically stripping them of guns and grenades. I spotted Corbin standing near the console that controlled the hypermatter reactor.

“Any word on what they were doing down here?” said Hawkins.

“Looks like they were getting ready to eject the hypermatter reactor,” said Corbin, scrolling through lines of text on one of the displays.

“Did you get Ducarti?” said Hawkins. “Or the captain?”

“Nelson’s still looking,” said Corbin, “but I don’t think either of them were down here.”

I stopped by the console, and Corbin looked up, smiling.

“Nikolai,” he said. “Good work. They were well and truly stunned when we stormed the room. They put up a fight, but less than I expected.”

“Yeah,” I said, looking at one of our own fatalities. He lay near a set of storage lockers that held vacuum suits for hull repairs. I hadn’t known him well, but we had worked together on a dozen repair jobs, and now he was dead. “Well, at least we’re not all dead… yet.”

Corbin nodded, glancing back at the display. “You all right?”

“Didn’t get shot,” I said. “I might have broken a rib drone-wrestling. Suppose I had better wait to visit the infirmary until the men who got shot have been treated.”

“Afraid so,” said Corbin. “Did you see where Ducarti and the captain went?”

“I didn’t see them at all,” I said. “Maybe they went to the crew decks.”

“XO?” said Corbin. “What’s going on up there?”

For a moment there was silence, and then my earpiece crackled again.

“The commandos just surrendered,” said Hawkins, and I let out a long sigh of relief. “Looks like they realized the writing was on the wall. The chief engineer wound up down there, and he’s taking charge. We should have the commandos secured and the crew back to their stations within the hour. I think we’ve managed to successfully take back the
Rusalka
, Rovio.”

“Do you have Ducarti or the captain?”

“No sign of them.”

“They’re not here either.”

“Then where are they?” said Corbin, his voice sounding strained. “Rodriguez, Murdock. You there?”

“We are,” said Murdock, his rough voice cutting into the channel. “Rodriguez is bringing full life support back. I’ve got most of the systems back on line. Still working on weps. Got shields, though.”

“Good, they can’t hole us if they’re on
Vanguard
now,” said Corbin. “Get on the internal sensors, Rodriguez. Find Ducarti and the captain. They have to be somewhere and they’re probably heading for the airlock to the troopship.”

“Maybe they’re going to steal a cargo drone,” I said. Corbin squinted at me, puzzled. “Both the troopship and the
Vanguard
are docked along the
Rusalka
’s dorsal corridor, right? If they’re going to make a run for it, they can’t use the dorsal corridor because we’d shoot them dead. So maybe they’ll take over a cargo drone and ride it to their ship.”

“I doubt it, neither of them are technical,” said Murdock. “Here, Rodriguez. I’ll get on the other console. You take the infrareds, I’ll use the weapons detectors.”

I listened with half of an ear as they talked, my eyes returning to the dead crewman on the floor near me.

The dead crewman, and the open lockers behind him.

The lockers that should have been closed. The lockers that should have been holding pressure suits.

The empty lockers.

“Uh oh,” I said.

My uncle frowned.

“I think I know where Ducarti and Williams went,” I told him.

“I should have thought of it sooner,” said Corbin, slapping his palm against the console.

We had gathered around the master console in the engineering room, since it had the biggest displays. Arthur patched in several views from the external cameras, and the main display showed a good view of the
Rusalka
’s exterior, the big freighter’s running lights throwing the cylindrical hull into stark relief. It meant we had an excellent view of the two vacuum-suited figures making their way across the hull towards the closer of the two ships attached to it, the
Vanguard
. One of the figures moved with the easy grace of long zero-G experience, while the other lumbered along with clumsy steps.

Williams and Ducarti.

“A distraction,” said Nelson, shaking his head with contempt. “That’s all this was. He sacrificed all ten of his men in here and the five on the crew deck to cover his escape, the coward.”

“Trust me, Chief,” I said. “That’s his style.”

“It’s over, then,” said Hawkins. “He gets into the
Vanguard
and escapes, and that’s that.”

“No, it’s not,” said Corbin. “Our reactors are still entangled. I’ve got the hypermatter regulator back online, but it will be another four or five hours before the reactor is stable enough for a proper reboot. Ducarti has decided to cut his losses. He’ll go for the troopship. He can wait in-system for a week for the Party rescue ship to pick him up after we blow.”

“Then why are they headed for the
Vanguard
?”

“Probably to prevent our access to it,” my uncle had a grim expression on his face as he answered the XO. “Ducarti won’t want to let us board it and either disentangle the regulators or use its weapons to take out the troopship before he can get clear.”

“And we’ll all be dead,” said Murdock over the phone.

“Not if I can help it,” said Corbin. “Any chance of getting any weapons online?”

“None,” said Murdock. “Williams left them locked, and there are no backdoors that I know about. It wouldn’t matter until he uncoupled anyway. It’s not as if any of our guns can target anything on the hull.”

“A cargo drone,” I said.

They all looked at me.

“What about my drones?” said Arthur with alarm.

``They can maneuver in zero-G. So we send one to ram the troopship.”

“That’s crazy,” said Murdock. “It has an armored hull. Those cargo drones are flimsy little boxes with antigrav units, ion thrusters, and a bunch of manipulator arms. Hitting the ship with a drone won’t do more than put a dent in it.”

“No,” I said, “what if we hitched a ride with the drone?”

They all looked at me again.

“Are you seriously suggesting,” said Nelson, “that the drone carries us out to catch Ducarti?”

“Why not?” I said. “We’ve got suits. We can’t catch up with them spacewalking, but we can ride.”

“Not anymore,” said one of the other techs. “It looks like Williams destroyed all the spacesuits when he left.”