Tactical Error (19 page)

“You will need a com link,” Bill reminded her, stepping around
close and popping open his computer interface access panel.

Lenna reached in and removed one of the small com units. The one she took
had only limited range, but it was also designed to look like a perfectly
ordinary pen to the point that it could actually write. Its limitations would
not be a problem to her, under the present circumstances. The access panel
began to close.

“Be off with you, now,” she told the sentry. “You be very
quiet and very careful, the best you’ve ever done. I know that you can do
it.”

“I will be careful,” Bill promised her as he prepared to turn
away. Then he paused, as if in a moment of contemplation. “Sure now, and
you be careful to keep your bony ass out of trouble as well.”

Seemingly quite pleased with himself, the sentry then hurried away on his
errand, leaving Lenna to contemplate the arcane complexities of Kelvessan
computer technology. Somewhere, from out of the muddled depths of his primary
processors, Bill had considered that bout of nonsense logical.

Lenna turned back to her work, looking about for convenient mayhem. One
interesting point that she noted immediately was the close proximity of the
crates to a major power link. There were five separate levels of power
available at this cluster of outlets. The lowest setting was meant for power
tools and other pieces of portable equipment. The highest was intended only to
jumpstart the total conversion generators of small spacecraft. The more
powerful connections were occasionally known to short out, the high levels of
energy they contained sometimes arcing across the two poles of their
quick-connect socket. She knew that for a fact; she had in the past encouraged
many such shorts.

As spectacular as such an electrical short could be, they were not usually
very dangerous and were easily brought under control as soon as coordinating
computers detected the power drain and shut down the line. Lenna meant to
encourage things to get a little more out of hand, by moving the lightweight, but
quite flammable, plastic shipping containers and their equally-flammable cargo
just a little closer to the outlets.

Bending over the cluster of outlets, she used the manual shutdown switch to
close off power to those lines. A single, slender strand of copper wire, as
thin as a hair, was all she needed to encourage the short between the positive
and negative connections of the direct current lines. The most difficult part
of the process was simply removing the six screws of the main access plate over
the cluster of power links. After that, she would slip the length of copper
wire between the connections and replace the access plate. When she restored
the power, the arc would strike. The beauty of the system was that the arc
itself would remove all evidence of her tampering when the wire was melted...
along with a large portion of the connection itself. “Here, what are you
doing?”

Lenna paused, and frowned fiercely. Things had been going so perfectly for
so long, she should have been suspicious. She glanced over her shoulder, and
saw two pairs of black boots. Looking somewhat higher, she found that her fears
were justified. Two of the biggest men she had ever seen, dressed in the dark
uniforms of security, were standing over her, staring at her with expressions
that were more confused than suspicious.

“Didn’t you know that this is a closed security bay?”

Lenna’s rather candid expression indicated that this tidbit of news
came very much as a surprise, and by no means a welcome one.

Things proceeded rather better from that point than Lenna could have hoped.
She was handcuffed and searched, then taken to the nearest security substation,
where her idents were fed into the terminal for a very thorough processing.
What encouraged her was the fact that the two guards appeared to be giving her
the benefit of the doubt. They were treating her very nicely, obviously working
on the assumption that her idents would check out clear and she would be sent
on her way, the victim of a simple misunderstanding during the confusion of
shutting down the base. They had not even submitted her to a strip-search, and
that was a common enough practice even in polite company.

She had been rather looking forward to it.

As far as it went, she was not particularly worried. Her idents were real
enough, and the computer records on her were quite extensive. She was high
enough in rank that she was ordinarily answerable only to written orders. They
even knew her in Technical Support, where she had put in regular appearances
and a very real eight hours of trouble-shooting each day. What she did with her
free time was entirely her own affair, not to the extent that she had used it,
but no one at this base would know about that. When nothing came up on her
ident check, she would be released with vague warnings to be more careful.
Under the circumstances, a strip search would have been the high point of
this little adventure.

She would have been feeling very good about the whole affair, except that
she was very worried about what the Starwolves might be thinking, and what they
could well be doing in her absence. She was very much afraid that Bill would go
ahead and open the overhead doors on bay twelve, not waiting for orders. She
doubted that Bill possessed the intelligence or complexity of thought to
contact the Methryn on his own initiative, but she did believe that they would
contact him and determine his latest orders. If she was lucky, she would be
released before any of those dire things could happen.

“We’re to take you to the tram,” said the senior of the
two guards, identified to Lenna only by the name Barg on his ident tag, as he
entered the room where Lenna sat politely handcuffed to a chair. It was, at
least, the most comfortable of the four chairs in the room. The other guard,
Salgey, had sat brooding in one of the other chairs.

“Why is that?” Lenna asked just a little nervously, wondering if
something was going wrong. Years of experience had taught her that the person
she was supposed to be would have been expected to be just a little nervous by
this time, wondering if she was about to be run over by the ponderous, uncaring
wheels of military bureaucracy for a mistake that she did not consider to be
her fault.

“Standard procedure,” Barg explained as he released the
handcuffs from around the arm of the chair. “A security tram is being
sent around to take us to Main Security, if the officer on duty thinks that
it’s necessary. It’s most likely that he will just ask you a few of
the usual, stupid questions and send you back to work.”

Lenna stood up, and her hands were again cuffed. At least this time her
hands were cuffed in front, less awkward and much more comfortable. She was
taken through the corridors to the tram station, not the smaller passenger
trams, but the wide, double-tracked tunnels of the immense freight trams. One
small, single-unit tram, like a flattened silver oval resting on its massive
magnetic tracks, was pulled up to the loading platform. The front and rear of
the top of the tram’s armored hull were dominated by its massive turrets;
at need, the machines could be rolled out onto the surface tracks to repel a
major attack. Lenna was directed through its main door.

Inside, the tram was fitted with benches along its outer walls and in small
islands in the center, leaving a considerable amount of open space between.
This was a transport for security forces, with room for supplies and for guards
to get into their gear. Lenna was directed to the enclosed control cabin in the
front of the tram. From there, the operator could set the tram’s
destination with the central computer control, or guide the vehicle directly
through remote-control switches at the track junctions.

“Here we go,” Barg said, directing her to the seat before the
communications panel. “You can speak to the old bastard here.”

“Don’t let him hear you say that,” Lenna warned him, with
a noticeable respect for the wrath of superiors.

“Oh, not to worry,” he insisted. “The com is on standby
from our end.”

He pressed a single button, and the small monitor in the center of the unit
came to life. A middle-aged man with a rather gaunt face and large nose
afforded her the briefest of glances before looking back down at something he
had been reading. “So. Kalen Makensee, lately of Balarn. Nineteen years
of impeccable service in technical support. Graduated with honors with a degree
in engineering from the Service Academy.”

“Ah, only seventeen years, sir,” Lenna offered the correction as
she recognized the simple trap, hoping that she remembered the facts of this
alternate persona properly.

“Yes, my mistake.” He glanced at her only briefly, turning back
to the hard copy that he now held within view of the monitor. “It says
here that you have been at this base for only four months. Long enough to know
better, I would assume.”

“Sir, the bay was not properly sealed for security,” she said,
which was all perfectly true. “There were no standard lights or signs,
and the doors were all wide open.”

“That is right, sir,” Barg offered.

The officer turned off the sound at his end for a moment while he spoke to
someone she could not see. He glanced back at Lenna, this time a somewhat hard
stare. “Just what were you doing in that bay anyway? Admitting that you
are assigned to random trouble-shooting, what led you to start tampering with
high-power outlets?”

“I’ve known those outlets to short, more than once,” she
explained. “A little dirt or moisture in the connections, and you have
quite an arc on your hands. Starts fires about half the time, since a lot of
fools on the deck will stack goods too close to the things. And I wanted to
double-check all of the connects in the base, seeing as how we’re
supposed to be putting everything in hold for a long time.”

“I see,” the officer agreed vaguely, then turned off the sound a
second time while he listened to some brief report. He turned back to her in a
somewhat more congenial frame of mind. “Yes. Well, the mistake does seem
to be our own, and everything does seem to check out just fine. I’ll go
ahead and clear you to finish your work in that bay.”

Lenna was hardly aware of muttering her thanks; her mind was already on her
next problem. Actually, her problems existed very much in the significant
plural. She had Starwolves waiting for her to create a diversion in a hurry,
and she hardly knew how she could arrange that while she was very much in the
eye and mind of Base Security. She was considering whether she should go ahead
and arrange that same power outlet to short when she put it back together.
Maintaining her cover would no longer be important, once Starwolves entered the
base. Then this whole installation would explode into confusion, and
Valthyrra’s cannons would finish the task soon after.

“Told you there was nothing to worry about,” Barg said as he
bent to remove her handcuffs. She braced herself for the inevitable, knowing
what was to follow when the guard looked awkward and uncomfortable. “You
know, I really hate to have done this to someone your age.”

“Oh, I... “ It suddenly registered with Lenna just what he was
saying, and her mouth fell open. She had never felt more insulted in her life,
all the more so for knowing that those words had been impolite but hardly
untrue. And she had been sitting there, waiting for this polite young man to
put the moves on her old bones.

A sentry unit thundered through the main door of the tram at that moment,
turning to bring all of its weapons to bear on the control cabin. Lenna glanced
over her shoulder, harboring certain nasty suspicions about just whose sentry
that was.

“Freeze, bastards!” Bill roared.

That left absolutely no doubt at all. Lenna had years of experience with the
quirky logic of the semi-intelligent, at least where that term applied to
automatons, and she threw herself to the floor.

As she had predicted, the two guards did not freeze. They were too confused
and startled out of their wits to freeze, and Bill was not prepared to accept
anything less. He opened fire with his forward arsenal, a deadly barrage of
weapons powerful enough to bring down a Union fighter. Fortunately he had not
seen the need to use full power, but his bolts still made quick work of the
control panel. The two guards ducked their heads and, by some miracle, escaped
out the small forward door.

Bill had, of course, been listening through Lenna’s comlink, which had
not been removed from the pocket of her uniform’s tunic. In all of the
many possibilities that she had considered, Lenna had never dreamed that Bill
would elect to run to her rescue like some four-legged knight in ceramic alloy
armor, just in time to turn an unexpected victory into resounding defeat. Bill
talked a line about machine efficiency, but he always seemed to do everything
the hard way.

When the two guards ran out the forward door, Bill, for reasons that were
equally mysterious, elected to run after them. Lenna continued her own crawl
into the safety under the main control panel, which was already beginning to
spark and burn, as the sentry crashed through the forward cabin and out the
door. Lenna paused a moment to listen. She heard a few more scattered shots
from Bill’s main battery, but she assumed that he must have missed his
target when the ponderous thumps of his heavy legs continued.

Musing what the two guards must be trying to make of this matter of being
chased by one of their own sentries, Lenna braced herself against one of the
chairs as she tried to rise. It was awkward enough handcuffed, although much
less so than if her hands had been behind her back. Then she hesitated a second
time, feeling the vibrations of machinery through the metal floor. The tram was
moving.

Lenna had always been particularly fascinated by that aspect of her work,
how little things could go wrong in unexpected ways. So far she had found a way
to get herself out of even the worst trouble but, as her young friend had
recently reminded her, she was also getting old. She looked around, finding the
key that the guard had dropped in his surprise and haste to get out of the line
of fire. Fortunately it was a simple mechanical lock, still the most difficult
type to force open without the key but about the easiest to open with one. Even
so, it took a certain amount of dexterity and experimentation to get the key
into the lock. Sitting with her back against the driver’s seat, she was
at last able to hold the key in her teeth as she carefully maneuvered it into
the lock.