Unstable Prototypes (62 page)

"Looks like our furry little hacker did the
job," Silo said.

"Damn it, fix it! I want to be firing those
things in thirty seconds, you hear me?!"

"You're really going to do it," Marx
realized.

"Quiet!" Purcell demanded.

"You are going to endanger all of those
lives!?"

"We will do what is necessary to preserve our
future. Now quiet! That is an
order!
"

He raised his weapon. "I know all too well
that unwillingness to adapt is a death sentence, but I will
not
be one of the executioners. I will not-"

Purcell turned and fired. For a moment the
man remained standing, his face plastered with a look of agony and
betrayal, the overpowered weapon having easily left a smoldering
wound over his heart. Finally, the man crumbled to the ground.

"Does anyone else feel their loyalty to our
cause wavering?" Purcell hissed at her men.

In a swift motion, Garotte disengaged his
shield, pulled her arm to the small of her back, and put his pistol
to her head.

"Not really relevant anymore, I think,"
Garotte said. "How's that coming, Silo?"

"Hard to say, really."

"Well hurry, because-"

Purcell hooked her leg behind his ankle and
pulled him off balance. He wrenched her wrist as he stumbled,
pulling her gun free from her hand. She pivoted, her fingers
tearing at his belt and ripping the shield generator free. Her
other hand caught his wrist, twisting it painfully, forcing the
weapon from his fingers. Garotte pulled free and kicked both
pistols away. The flurry of motion left Garotte and Purcell on firm
footing, facing each other. Rather than retreating, she drew the
knife from her belt and advanced.

"Switch!" Garotte said, backpedaling.

Silo stood and put the muzzle of her rifle to
the Commander's face.

"Look who brought a knife to a gun f-"

Purcell swiped, the knife emitting a tone as
it sliced easily through the barrel of the rifle.

"-udge!" Silo finished.

The commander attempted a second slice, but
Silo pulled back, and the two began to battle in earnest. It was a
symphony of threatening sounds, with the knife humming like a
mosquito through the air and the remains of the rifle whistling in
vicious swings. Silo knew that a single slice from that knife would
likely end the battle, and her life along with it. Purcell learned
a similar lesson when a wild swing of the rifle struck the wall and
left a deeper divot than most of the weapon blasts had. As a result
of a few years on Manticore, any blunt object was a deadly weapon
in Silo's hands.

Attacks flew faster and closer, each woman
dodging the other's blows by narrower and narrower margins. On one
side, the smattering of remaining soldiers held their weapons ready
but refused to fire out of fear that they would hurt their
commander. One of them tried to move in and lend a hand in the
melee, but a screeching stray slice of Purcell's knife cut through
several very useful bits of anatomy. Witnessing this event gave the
surviving soldiers a healthy respect for the danger the swinging
weapons posed. They kept their distance. On the other side, Garotte
worked at the door to the weapons bay.

"This bloody thing is warped. The mechanism
is fused," he growled.

"Quit making excuses," Silo huffed.

At the commander's belt, her communicator
chirped.

"-sense they would put a com panel on this
thing. Boss Lady, you hear me?" Karter's groggy voice remarked as
the battle raged on. "I gotta say, I'm
really
liking this
transporter of yours. And that was a pretty clever idea, putting
targeting transmitters in your ships for emergency rescue. In
related news, I'm all out of grenades, and you have one ship
left."

Purcell roared in anger and managed a
desperate strike that Silo couldn't dodge. The demo expert raised
her rifle-turned-club to block, and the knife sliced neatly
through, missing Silo's fingers by millimeters. Now left with a
uselessly small remnant of her former weapon, Silo threw the
remaining portion aside and grasped the knife hand by the wrist,
easily overpowering her with a squeeze that nearly shattered
Purcell's wrist, forcing the commander to release the weapon. As it
fell, still active, it slipped past Silo's arm, effortlessly
opening a long slit in her suit and a shallow gash in her flesh
before sinking hilt-deep into the floor. Silo cried out and
released, and the women separated, each clutching an injured arm.
For a moment, each eyed the other tensely, eyes darting briefly to
the weapon as it screeched its high-pitch wail and vibrated in its
self-carved slot. An instant before either attempted to grab it, a
voice rang out from the other side of the hall.

"Nobody move!"

All eyes turned to the source of the order.
There stood Lex among the fallen soldiers at the end of the hall
nearest to the heroes, energy pistol in one hand and motionless Ma
tucked under one arm. Silo seized the moment to grab Purcell, spin
her around, and immobilize her arms.

"Excellent timing as always, my boy. Hand
that over, would you?" Garotte said, quickly turning from the door.
He caught the pistol as it was tossed to him. "Right now, let's
think about this logically, shall we? This is a military crew, and
you are running this like a military operation. Those CMEAs are
clearly
weapons of mass destruction, and in a military
operation, things like that need command authorization to fire,
thanks to computer fail safes, yes?"

Purcell did not answer.

"
Yes?
" Garotte asked more insistently,
placing the gun to Purcell's face.

She nodded stiffly.

"And am I correct in assuming that, at this
point,
you
are the only one on the space station that has
command authorization?"

Another stiff nod. Karter's voice crackled
out of the radio on her belt. "Getting bored now."

"So in theory, all I need to do is blow your
head off and the crisis is averted, but there is still the tiny
matter of making it out of this alive, which is a very appealing
outcome for me. Thus, here is what is going to happen. You fellows
are going to stand down. I happen to know you've got a few holding
cells in this place. Find them and climb in. I'll be keeping the
commander here, for my own safety and hers, until we can reach the
missiles, disarm them, and wipe the design from your systems. Then
we'll be taking her with us as we exit."

"... Oh, hey. There's another transport
target," Karter's voice observed.

Garotte continued to dictate his orders. Lex
paced over to the others, but he couldn't quite shake the feeling
that something was wrong.

"... This ought to be interesting. Radius
set," Karter said.

Lex's eyes shot open, and he fumbled with his
free hand in his pocket. Inside, he found the target Karter had
tossed to him. It had managed to activate while it was in his
pocket. Juggling the device and the sleeping funk, he tried to get
his panicked fingers to twist the top into the off position, but he
lost his grip, causing it to fall and skitter along the floor.

"Target set," Karter continued.

"Scatter! Get away from that thing!" Lex
yelped.

"Antimatter cartridge loaded..."

A moment of utter chaos, something that Lex
realized was happening far too frequently these days, followed. In
the space of a few heartbeats Purcell thrust an elbow into Silo's
stomach as the hero tried to drag her away. The blow, combined with
the sudden need to dodge was enough to allow the commander to
escape. She snatched up her knife and rushed toward her troops
while Lex, Silo, and Garotte retreated.

"Engage."

A flash filled the hall, accompanied by a
rush of wind strong enough to hurl all present to the ground. The
roar of wind came with a thunder clap and the screech of metal. The
first to recover was Lex, who managed to squint through the purple
and blue blotches in his vision to see... Frankly, he wasn't sure.
It was a mass of metal and glass. Where it met the walls and floor,
both the object and the structure had buckled, twisted, and fused.
The edge that faced the heroes was bulged outward, layers of metal,
sparking wires, leaking tubes, and twitching components having been
clipped off by the transporter into an almost beautiful random
design. It completely filled the hallway, with the exception of a
few inches from the ceiling, where the spherical shape was rendered
irregular by a few flat surfaces of glass.

"What
is
that?" Silo asked.

"Well, the other target was inside the
ship... I guess that's a spherical hunk of the ship?" Lex
surmised.

Working off of that theory, the glass at the
top
did
appear to be part of a cockpit, though glancing
through it indicated that if there was a pilot,
most
of him
was on the other side of the wall, which clearly hadn't been a
terribly healthy experience.

"I must not have been paying attention. How
did it get here?" Silo asked.

"They have a transporter, and Karter is at
the controls," Lex explained.

"... That is the most terrifying thing I've
ever heard," Silo uttered.

"Did that do something interesting?" Karter's
voice asked. "I expected an explosion or something. And I'm all out
of antimatter for this thing, so I can't do any more."

The next sound they heard was Purcell
smashing her radio in anger.

"We've still got a chance. The door is on our
side," Silo said.

"I'll try to get it open, but it is clearly
built to withstand an internal explosion, and the mechanism is
fused," Garotte said, making his way to the door and beginning his
efforts anew.

"Go around the other way and stop them,"
Purcell ordered from the other side of the blockage.

The troops hurried through the hole she'd cut
in the door, the commander close behind.

"Lex, try to find some weapons from the pile
of failed security guards there that aren't too badly damaged.
We're about to have company," Silo advised. "I'm glad they didn't
decide to do that earlier."

"They probably needed her knife to cut
through all of those locked doors," Garotte guessed, "Or they are
idiots. Equal likelihoods, I'd say."

The pilot tried to rummage through the
wreckage and remains without thinking too hard about the fact that
they had been alive a few minutes ago. He also refused to put Ma's
sleeping body down to do it. They had managed to turn up three guns
which had a reasonable chance of working when they heard the
pounding of boots.

"Commander! Tactical here," came a voice over
the station's damaged PA system. "We're getting some partial
computer control back. I think I can give you voice interface."

From her cover in an adjoining hallway,
Purcell snatched a communicator from one of the soldiers.

"Activate voice interface!" she bellowed.

"Voice interface active," replied a low-grade
computerized voice.

"Launch CMEA! Command Voice Code Six eight
eight three."

"... No," the voice said.

"Damn it! Repeat, Launch Coronal Mass
Ejection Activator, now! Command Voice Code Six eight eight
three."

"Your coarse language is not called for,
Commander Purcell," said a very familiar voice.

"Ma!?" exclaimed all three of the heroes,
with equal confusion, back at the door.

"My control program has been loaded onto the
space station's core system. I am currently decompressing, and
attempting to gain control over the subsystems," Ma explained over
their radios.

"So you aren't dead!? Not even
this
you?" Lex said, indicating the funk.

"No. I was able to break encryption and
transfer a duplicate of my full data image prior to critical
corruption. But I appreciated your concern. It was very sweet."

"Yes, yes. A tearful reunion after thirty
seconds of separation. Lovely," Garotte said. "Can you open the
door to the weapons bay, or perhaps destroy the missiles
remotely?"

"Negative. There is a mechanical fault in the
door mechanism, and the CMEA is not coupled to any station system
besides the launch apparatus."

"Can you maybe tell us why we aren't getting
shot at by soldiers?" Silo asked, eyes still trained on the
unobstructed hallway, weapon raised.

"Most of the surveillance on this deck has
been destroyed, but an emergency storage locker in an adjoining
corridor has been accessed," the computer informed.

"What were the contents?" Garotte asked.

"Medical equipment, water, nonperishable
food, one space suit, and supplementary oxygen," she said. "There
is now an attempt to access a secondary airlock."

"... She's going to go external. She's going
to access it from the outside," Garotte realized. "The schematics
show that there is a massive external payload door on the
space-facing side of the bay for loading ordinance."

"Can't Ma just lock her out?" Lex asked.

"I have not yet completely taken control of
all systems, and even if I had, manual overrides exist for both
door control and weapon launch. If she reaches the door, she can
open it, and if she reaches the launch controls, she can fire the
weapons," Ma stated.

"I think we're going to have to consider
finding a way to blow the whole station," Silo said gravely.

"That may not be possible in the time
available. I do not have deep enough control to produce a
catastrophic failure, and am unlikely to gain that level of control
prior to the launch of the weapons."

"All we need to do is find a way to set off
the weapons inside the weapons bay."

"With the exception of the CME Activators
themselves, which are non-explosive, there are no weapons in the
weapons bay."

"... What?" Garotte said, expression
blank.