Mutiny in Space (7 page)

Actually, he would shoot a lot more people than just me.

“We can’t surrender,” I said, the words tumbling out of me. I was badly frightened and trying not to show it, which meant I wound up talking real fast. “If we surrender, he’ll kill us all. He’s Social Party. He killed five thousand people on New Chicago. He’ll kill everyone on the ship!”

“Rovio,” said Murdock, doing something with one of the laser pistols. “Shut up!”

“Will the XO surrender?” I said. “We have to warn everyone.” I crossed to the console and hit the phone switch, but it was dead. The entire console was dead. I pulled my phone from my belt, but the display only read SYSTEM LOCKED: COMMAND OVERRIDE.

“Rovio,” said Murdock again, putting down the pistol and picking up a second one.

“That troop transport will land at the port airlock, probably,” I said. “Maybe if we block it we can keep them from landing.”

“Rovio!” bellowed Murdock. “Stop babbling and listen to me!”

I came to a stammering halt, blinking.

“Of course we can’t surrender, you idiot,” said Murdock. “They’ll kill us all.” He checked something on the last laser pistol and nodded to himself. “They’re a Social strike force. When they take a ship, they kill the crew and make propaganda videos out of it. That bastard Williams! If he hadn’t turned traitor, we could have blown the
Vanguard
to atoms. I knew we should’ve listened to Corbin.”

“He knew?” I said. “You knew?”

“He knew. We suspected,” said Murdock, shoving one of the pistols into his belt and taking the other in his right hand. “Corbin was sure of it, but Nelson and Hawkins and I weren’t so certain. We knew he was an idiot, but a Social sympathizer? That seemed impossible. But we started watching him.”

“That file you kept,” I blurted out. “You thought he might be a sympathizer, so you were collecting evidence!”

Murdock gave me a flat look. “You knew about that?”

I shrugged. “I found out by accident. I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t know what it was for. I thought you were just trying to get him fired.”

“For a start,” said Murdock. “If it turned out he was a Social, we would have gotten him sent to prison. Guess we figured it out a little too late.”

“What are we going to do?” I said. I was so frightened I could feel tears threatening to spill from my eyes.

Murdock handed me one of the laser pistols. “You know how to use one of these?”

I hesitated, staring at the pistol’s grip. I had never actually fired a gun at anyone. Granted, I had fired a gun plenty of times, thanks to Nelson’s endless safety drills. More than once, I had grumbled about it, and Arthur and I had made fun of the dour Security Chief quite often.

Now, I was very glad he’d made me do it.

“Yeah,” I said, taking the pistol and checking the power pack. The weapon was fully charged, which on a short-burst pistol like this one, meant about thirty shots. “Yeah, I do.”

“Good,” said Murdock. He gestured at the blank displays. “The captain has command codes that override everything on the ship. He’s locked the system down, which means we’re sitting ducks for Ducarti and his thugs. So I’m going to manually power down the computer, and lock it before it loads the operating system. That way I can take control of at least some systems and keep Williams from getting his fingers into anything.”

“Can you do it from here?” I said.

“Nope,” said Murdock with a grimace. “The idiots who designed this ship gave the computer its own power generator.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?” I said.

“Most of the time,” said Murdock, “but the generator’s all the way on the other end of the ship.”

I grimaced. “That’s not far from the bridge.” We both knew that meant it would also be close to the most likely entry point for Ducarti’s troops.

“You see the problem,” said Murdock. He handed me a second pistol, so I turned the safety on the first one he’d given me and stuck it into my belt. “Let’s move.”

I nodded, gripped the pistol in the way Nelson taught me, and followed him out the door.

We stepped into the ship’s main dorsal corridor. I didn’t see anyone, but that wasn’t surprising. The
Rusalka
was a huge freighter, and the crew was usually scattered the ship at their stations or on the crew deck. The main lighting had been turned off, and the emergency lights glowed in their rounded metal cages, throwing stark shadows over the metal walls and floor.

“He turned off the lights, too?” I said. At least Williams had left the gravitics on. He probably didn’t want to have to maneuver his fat backside in zero-G.

“Zip it,” snapped Murdock under his breath.

I started to defend myself, then realized that I was being an idiot, and shut up. My mind flashed back to the various instances of petty vandalism I had perpetrated with Sergei on New Chicago. He’d often told me to shut up on those little adventures too. Suddenly I found myself missing my older brother with a pain that felt almost physical… and a spasm of rage followed the grief.

If I got the chance, I vowed then and there, I was going to shoot Alesander Ducarti right in his haughty, sneering face.

Another part of my mind, the more efficient part, observed that wallowing in grief or rage right now was an excellent way to get killed, and that I’d better keep my wits about me if I, or any of the crew, was going to live through this mess.

So I zipped it and followed Murdock as silently as I could as we hurried down the corridor. For a computer operator, he seemed to know what he was doing. I’m not an expert on this kind of thing, but he was pretty quiet for a big man, the muzzle of his burst pistol swinging back and forth as he covered the corners. I suppose he had been in the Coalition navy with Corbin, so the navy would have trained him how to handle guns and move around a hostile ship. The
Rusalka
had a bunch of little battery powered carts for technicians to move around in a hurry when necessary, but they were tied into the ship’s network, and Williams had locked those out as well. It was probably just as well. Sitting in those stupid little carts, we would have been sitting ducks for any Social commandos with halfway-decent aim.

The doors to the bridge finally came into sight. The bridge was sealed off by a pair of massive, reinforced blast doors, and both of them were closed and locked, the control panel shining red. The purpose of the doors was to seal off the bridge from intruders, and I wondered if Hawkins had managed to trigger them before it was too late. On the other hand, it was also possible that Captain Williams had locked the bridge crew in to keep them out of the way while Ducarti’s men boarded the ship.

Closer to us, on the port side of the corridor, was the door to the emergency generator room. The generator for the computer system would be in there. On the starboard side of the corridor, closer to us, was an external airlock. The lights on the airlock’s control panel were flashing, turning from red to green and back again.

That meant the airlock was cycling.

“Murdock,” I hissed, pointing at the airlock.

Murdock stopped, scowled at me, and then looked at the airlock.

“They’re already here,” he muttered.

“They’ll come through there, won’t they?” I said, wondering if the two of us were going to try to hold them off with our pistols. I didn’t like our odds. Apparently, neither did Murdock.

“I thought they’d cut their way through the hull,” said Murdock. “But if the captain’s letting them in, no need to bother.” He shot a quick look around the corridor. “We can’t stop them. This way! Go!”

I started to say that we could make the generator room at a sprint, and then a hiss came from the airlock, accompanied by the groan of laboring hydraulics.

Someone was opening the airlock from the other side.

I followed Murdock as he ducked into the nearest door on the port side of the dorsal corridor. We ran into a large rectangular room with a long table hosting a pair of computer consoles, and high windows of transparent metal offering a splendid view of the stars. It was the upper observation lounge. In theory, if the navigation computer was destroyed, the navigator could work out our position from the stars. In practice, the senior officers used the room as sort of a club house. Corbin had been in here a few times, but I never had.

“What are we going to do?” I said, looking around for cover and failing to find anything. We could hide under the table, I supposed, which would keep Ducarti’s men from finding us for maybe three seconds. “There’s nowhere to go from here.”

“I know that,” snapped Murdock. “Just close the door and lock it, now!”

That seemed like a good idea, so I hurried to the door and hit the release. It slid shut, and I locked it. The door had a small window at eye level, and as I stepped back, I caught a glimpse of the first of Ducarti’s soldiers.

Ducarti might not have had many men aboard that troop transport, but what his commandos lacked in numbers, they made up for in sheer amount of armaments. The men I saw wore black body armor, layers of ceramic polished to a high sheen to refract and diffuse laser blasts and blunt the impact of kinetic firearms. They had black helmets with visors and air filters, making them look like humanoid insects. I wasn’t an expert on guns, but I knew enough to recognize the kind of rifles the commandos carried: Tanith-Mordecai K7 full-automatics, with long 120-round magazines. They also carried pistols and grenades and things that looked like shaped charges.

We had clearly done the right thing by running. We wouldn’t have lasted five seconds in a firefight with them.

I slipped away from the window. I knew Hawkins and the bridge crew wouldn’t be able to put up a fight either. The crew generally didn’t carry sidearms. I think Hawkins might have had one, but one gun or burst laser pistol was going to be useless against the kind of weapons the invaders were carrying.

“Murdock,” I said.

“Yeah, I know, we’re screwed,” he said. He knelt next to the wall, working on something with his multitool. “They’ll find us here unless we move. Which is what we’re going to do, right now.”

“How,” I started to say, and then Murdock wrenched at the wall. An access panel popped away, revealing one of the narrow maintenance walkways that threaded its way between the inner and outer hulls of the
Rusalka
.

“Get in,” said Murdock.

“That doesn’t go to the generator room,” I said, hurrying across the lounge.

“It gets us out of here,” said Murdock. “And that’s good enough for now. We can take the access tunnel under the corridor and come up on the other side, get to the generator room that way. Get in!”

He stepped back the access panel, and indicated that I should climb inside. I took a deep breath and squeezed into the narrow maintenance walkway. The floor was metal grillwork, thick coils of wire winding underneath us. Ducts and pipes and more wires hung in racks along the walls, though technically the wall on my right was the inner hull and the wall on my left was the outer hull. It was odd to think that only a meter or so of armored metal separated me from the vacuum on my right, though the inner hull didn’t add all that much thickness.

“Move over,” said Murdock as he followed me inside. He pulled the panel back into place, but since the mounting bolts were on the outside, there was no way he could secure it. He had pocketed the bolts, but the panel wouldn’t stand up to a close investigation. For that matter, if the Socials had the right kind of sensors in their helmets and masks, they would be able to detect us moving between the hulls.

Murdock straightened up with a grunt, and I pressed against the wall again to let him move past me and take the lead. I followed him along the narrow walkway, the dim LED lights throwing tangled shadows against the wires and pipes and ductwork.

“Just a little further,” Murdock muttered. A few yards ahead a cylinder opened in the wall on my left, revealing an access ladder that descended to the next level of maintenance walkways. He gripped the first rung on the ladder and started to swing himself into the shaft.

I grabbed his shoulder. “Wait,” I hissed.

Murdock glared at me, then heard the footsteps below.

He swung back onto the walkway, and just in time, too. The ladder descended five meters to the next deck, which if I remembered right housed the senior crew quarters. About a half second after Murdock got clear, I saw the black-armored form of a Social Party commando stroll past, his K7 cradled in his arms and his finger on the trigger. Another half-second more and he would have seen Murdock. It would have been all-too-easy for him to spray the high-velocity, rubber-coated projectiles the Tanith-Mordecai fired up the ladder.

“How did he get in there so fast?” whispered Murdock. He rubbed his jaw with his free hand, thinking hard. “Wait. That means some of them must’ve gone to the crew quarters at once. Some of them are probably rounding up the crew and herding them into the galley, or somewhere big enough to hold everyone. That would make it easier to kill them all. Just seal the compartment, turn off the air, and wait for everyone to asphyxiate.”

“Now what?” I said. “Is there another way to the generator room?”

Murdock shook his head. “Just this and the main dorsal corridor. Unless we want to go EVA and cut through the hull with a torch, but that’s not an option. Their ship sensors would pick up any external movement.”

“Maybe we can wait here until he passes,” I said.

“There’s not enough time,” said Murdock. “The Socials will start killing the crew as soon as they have control of the ship. If we wait here for more than an hour, we might be the only ones left.”

“Then what do we do?” I said.

“Climb down the ladder and see how many are down there,” said Murdock, much to my disbelief.

I just stared at him.

“You’re lighter than I am,” he pointed out. “You’ll make less noise.”

He had a point. I didn’t like it, but it was still a good one. I sighed, made sure the second pistol’s safety was on, and it jammed it into my belt to join the other. Then I gripped the ladder and went down a few rungs, and then kicked my legs out, bracing my boots against the sides of the shaft while my hands held a rung. It was like some sort of dangerous workout position, and I couldn’t hold it for very long, but it did permit me to look down into the next deck’s maintenance walkway without anyone seeing me.