Unstable Prototypes (28 page)

She took her seat and faced Garotte from the
other side of the glass. He tapped record on his slidepad and
cleared his throat.

"Good evening. I'm Dr. Cisco. I'll be asking
you a few questions today. Let's start by stating your full name
for the record."

"Sgt. Jessica Margo Winters," she said in a
gentle, almost shy voice, with just a hint of Midwestern.

"Sgt. Winters. I have a few aliases that
you've operated under. Please let me know if they are accurate.
Julia Springer."

"Yes."

"Layla Smith."

"Yes."

"Silo."

She blinked. "There are people who called me
that."

"Thank you. Now, you introduce yourself as
Sergeant. I have it here that you were discharged from the Earth
Coalition Marine Corps some seven years ago. Is this correct?"

"Yes," she said, her voice slightly
harder.

"Why do you continue to introduce yourself
with the rank."

"Once a soldier, always a soldier,
Doctor."

"You were dishonorably discharged after you
caused 'collateral damage in extreme excess of mission
requirement.' Does that mean that you killed civilians?"

"No," she said, sternly.

"What then?"

"I demolished an office building that was
undergoing renovation in the field of operation."

"Why did you demolish the building?"

"A foreign liaison who was operating with our
squad suggested that I would be unable to do so with my current
equipment," she said, her voice carefully held steady, as though
she'd wanted to say it a good deal more forcefully.

"And what
was
your current equipment
at the time?"

"I was armed with a shoulder fire, 60mm
multiple grenade launcher."

"Was this weapon equipped with demolition in
mind?"

Winters shook her head. "Standard concussion
grenades. Six count."

"And you succeeded in demolishing the
building with six rounds?"

"It only took five," she said flatly.

"How did you achieve this?"

"Three internal supports, one natural gas
line, one tanker truck parked near the north wall."

"And you did this merely due to a suggestion
on the behalf of this liaison?"

She narrowed her eyes and replied with a tone
of irritation. "It was more of a dare, Doctor."

"Sgt. Winters, I believe I have a program I
would like to recommend you for. Care for a change of scenery?"

"With all due respect, Doctor? No, I
wouldn't."

Garotte raised an eyebrow. "Really? You'd
have a chance to collaborate with your peers."

"Collaborating with my peers is what got me
here."

"Do you like it here, Sgt. Winters?"

"No, I don't like it here, Doctor. But that's
not why we get put places like this, is it? We get put places like
this because we belong here, and I do," Winters said, eyes locked
on his.

"I think that being a part of this program
will be of great help to you."

"I've got plenty of help here. I've got a
therapist, a counselor."

"This new setting would provide you with
group therapy, and I don't feel that the group would be complete
without you."

"I don't think that any group that would be
completed by me is one that needs to be complete at all."

"I'm sorry to hear that you feel that way,
Miss Winters."

"Sgt. Winters," she corrected.

Garotte leaned forward, staring at her
intently. "It seems to me that you aren't a soldier anymore, Miss
Winters."

A scowl briefly twisted her features, but she
managed to wrestle her way back to composure. The intensity stayed
in her eyes, however. Garotte nodded and tapped at his slidepad,
then leaned on the mute button of the intercom on the window.

"I'm going to ask a few more questions. Would
you be able to get the Warden in here? I think it might be time to
discus travel arrangements," he said to one of the guards.

The man nodded and touched a finger to his
headset, activating it. "Yeah, communications? Can we get Warden
Menlo into Interview A? … Affirmative. It will be a few minutes. He
is on a call."

"Not a problem," Garotte nodded.

#

In the control room, Johnson closed the
connection and took the appropriate precautions to send another
subversive message. This one was simple, and directed to the ship
filled with his comrades. "The operation is go. Phase 1
initiating." His face was a mask of duty as he pulled a tool belt
from the corner of the room, selected a wire cutter, and cut first
the alarm cable, then the main power for communications. As the
lights and indicators on the control panel slowly faded away, he
left the room and locked it behind him, marching toward a room
marked "Security Relay."

#

In orbit, the seemingly unoccupied Armistice
was sitting in the hangar. Ma had remained in her hiding place,
having a great deal of difficulty interacting with her slidepad in
the weightless environment. She'd resorted to capturing it between
her front paws and tracing out shapes with her nose, which turned
out to be a remarkably efficient method after a bit of practice.
She'd just completed a sentence she was greatly anticipating
putting to use when her sensitive ears picked up the sounds of some
sort of alert message blaring over the PA system of the space
station. She clutched the lanyard in her teeth, braced herself
within the confined compartment, and tried to work at the latch
from the inside. After considerable effort, the door sprung open
and she went tumbling into the weightless interior of the ship.

It took a bit of scrabbling and bouncing off
of walls before she managed to find something she could wrap her
paws around to bring herself to a stop. The funk's brain, she had
quickly discovered, was phenomenally swift and efficient at
calculating trajectories for her leaps. Adapting it to zero gravity
had been much easier than doing so for low gravity, so hitting a
target was simplicity itself. Finding some way to hold onto it was
another matter entirely. She ended up clinging to the headrest of
the pilot's seat. From her tenuous vantage there, she was able to
make out spinning warning lights. With a cautious nudge, she
drifted to the control panel wrapped herself in an inexpert grip
around the currently inactive control stick, and tapped
precariously at the access screen. Landing indicators flipped on
and off, thrusters shifted and twitched, and the wipers for the
view windows deployed and retracted before she finally managed to
enter the correct command, flicking on the radio to the emergency
frequency.

"... deactivated for the entire facility, and
all communication is down. Repeat, security measures have been
deactivated for the entire facility, and all communication is down.
Get to disaster stations and prepare to launch a shuttle craft to
contact the surface. If any of you have got personal communication
devices, please report to the command bridge so that we can attempt
to contact the surface. This may be a priority one breach. Repeat,
potential intruder situation," the security lead instructed.

Ma let herself drift free for a moment,
clutching the slidepad and nosing out a message. Routing it through
the ship's transmitters so she could be sure that it would be
powerful enough to reach the surface, she delivered it to Garotte,
then entered the commands necessary to give her remote control over
the ship's functions via the pad, authorizing it with a tap to the
access screen again. The severe difficulty of the entire situation
caused her to log a personal note to herself: If prolonged activity
is required in a weightless environment, favor a physical vessel
with a prehensile appendage.

She had only just managed to latch onto the
control stick again when she saw something else outside the view
window. The door to the catwalk had opened, and in slipped a member
of the station crew, dressed in a standard issue jumpsuit. From the
looks of his nervous glances back out the door before securing it
behind him, he was doing something he didn't want others to see.
When he turned toward the ship, it became clear why. In his hand
was a small-caliber ballistic pistol, and the hand clutching it was
pinning a dangerous looking device to his chest. It featured a
conspicuous timer and a bundle of plasma pistol clips. A hastily
constructed makeshift bomb. Ma's eyes opened wider and her mind
quickly ran through the options. She glanced to the door, then to
the folded manipulator arm recessed into the ship's ceiling.

Outside the ship, the saboteur was continuing
the work that his partner on the surface had started. As the only
well-funded enterprise on the whole miserable world, the prison and
its orbital section were the only facilities with the
infrastructure to communicate long range. Cutting the power to both
transmission arrays had completely silenced the entire planet, and
cutting the security feed had blinded it. Even with the coordinated
assault, though, it wouldn't stay down forever. It might not even
stay down long enough for their seek and destroy mission to
complete. Thus, a secondary distraction would be necessary,
something to keep them busy. The current plan called for a bomb to
be placed on the target's vessel. Nothing large enough to destroy
either the vessel or the station. Just something large enough to
disable the ship, thus preventing his escape, and to make it appear
as though he was to blame for the other attacks. His current order
of business was to find an appropriate place to position the bomb.
He floated up to affix it to one of the maneuvering thrusters when
the door hissed and began to open.

Cautiously he tucked the bomb under his arm
and held tight to the external grip beside the door, pistol poised
in the other hand, ready to unload it into the first person to
exit. Curiously, when the door fully deployed, nothing else
happened. After listening closely and hearing nothing, not even
breathing, he peeked his head inside. The interior was deserted.
The only indication that the ship had ever been in use was a few
bags held down with elastic bands and an overhead compartment that
was slightly ajar.

Convinced that there were no surprises on the
way, he clipped the pistol to a loop on his jumpsuit and began to
prep the bomb. If it was planted inside, the explosion would be
even more certain to disable the ship without threatening the space
station too badly, and would make the ship's owner the prime
suspect in the sabotage. He wasn't foolish enough to think that the
door had opened by itself, but he only needed a few seconds to
plant and prime the bomb and make his escape. After that it
wouldn't matter why the door opened. The timer was set, and his arm
extended to hurl it inside.

In a blur of motion, the manipulator arm
extended, bashing the man's arm with enough force to dislodge the
explosive device from his grip. The bomb wobbled in place, like a
plate on a table after the tablecloth had been pulled from beneath
it. The man, on the other hand, cried out in pain and released his
grip to cradle the almost certainly fractured arm. When the initial
shock wore off, he looked up to see the manipulator arm inexpertly
attempting to grab the drifting bomb. Just as he reached for it, a
poorly judged jab of the arm sent the improvised device twirling
out of reach of both man and claw. He jumped after it, but a moment
later Ma burst from her hiding spot in the compartment. A single,
well-aimed usage of her prodigious leaping ability drove her full
momentum into the small of his back. A quick pivot and leap,
pushing off of him, sent him off course and directed her toward the
bomb.

The saboteur struck the catwalk and held as
tightly as he could with his injured arm. With a skill that
betrayed formal training, he aimed and fired. Ma felt something
sail by her ear before striking an interior wall of the station.
This was fortunate, because like the deGrasse dormitory, a hole in
the exterior wall would be a very bad thing indeed. Granted, the
well-built space station was built with far better design
considerations than the dirt-cheap dorm. That meant one or two
stray bullets
probably
wouldn't cause explosive
decompression, but 'probably' is an unpopular word when a hard
vacuum is a part of the equation. The zero-gravity ricochet sent
the bullet rattling about the bay, denting wall panels and railings
until it lost enough energy to simply spiral through the air.
Meanwhile, the recoil jerked the poorly braced saboteur aside,
forcing him to reorient before attempting another shot.

When he was ready to fire again, he looked up
to see Ma wrapped around the bomb, eyes darting madly over its
workings. She had anticipated the need to manipulate electronics,
and had included a truncated version of her data module on the
subject when she'd constructed the mental download. Power source,
timer, interface buttons... The weapon was set for forty-five
seconds, and there had only been minor design considerations made
to complicate deactivation and disarmament.

"Drop it!" cried the injured foe.

Ma looked up. His weapon was pointed steadily
and surely at her. With a careful and skilled push from his feet,
he sent himself drifting slowly toward her. The options clicked
through her mind. Feasibility, risk/benefit, success ratio, and a
dozen other factors made their way through carefully developed
algorithms. The massive and nuanced calculation reduced down to a
single motion. Just before he reached her, she reached down and
clicked the activation button for the timer. The saboteur's eyes
opened wide in panic, but zero gravity has the nasty habit of
making you stick with your trajectory once you've launched
yourself. Ma planted her feet on the bomb and shoved off, sending
it bouncing off the wall and sending her back toward the door of
the ship.

The infiltrator finally reached a wall,
grabbing a support strut and quickly surveying the situation. The
bomb was on a spinning, twisting journey around the bay. With his
injured arm, he couldn't be sure that he would reach it in time,
but reaching it didn't matter. It would go off, and it would do so
in the bay. That was good enough. All he had to do was get out
before it did so. Tossing the gun, he made his way quickly along
the hand holds installed in rows along the wall until he reached
the door and slipped out, locking it shut behind him. When he
turned to make good his escape down the hall, he found himself
facing a full security team, sent to investigate the scream and
gunshot.