Warpath (31 page)

“Oh boy,” he heard
Liara say as she caught up to him very quickly. He caught her by the
arm and they split their momentum, drifting forward through the
airlock and towards the ceiling. He stretched his free arm towards
the line and caught it firmly, stopping them both from tumbling out
of control and pulling her close in the process. They lightly
collided, her faceplate bumping into his. “Nice catch,” she said
with a nervous smile. “I’ve never done this before.”

“What? Investigate a
ghost ship?” Remmy asked. “Or get to see an engineering nerd up
close. That glow you’re seeing isn’t his charming personality,
it’s side effects from the reactor room.”

“Weightlessness,”
she said as she grabbed the line above Finn’s head. “Thank you,”
she said to him before pulling herself ahead.

“You’re welcome,”
Finn replied suppressing the urge to correct Remmy on his assumptions
about radiation, and reactors.

“I think Remmy is
trying to compete with you,” Agameg said on a private channel
between him and Finn. “He will fail, I will make sure of it.”

Finn switched to their
private channel. “Don’t worry about it, this isn’t a mating
dance.”

“Finn, take a scan,”
Stephanie said as the group reached the centre point of the ship.
There were smaller corridors leading to the sides with airlocks at
each end, and a larger corridor leading fore and aft. The only light
came from the safety line. Much of the details in the hall were in
shadow, but Finn could see the outline of a floating corpse down the
aft end of the hall. He pulled his high-powered scanner out of his
pocket. It was an oval shaped device with a simple screen, a short
ranged holographic projector, and dense plating on the outside. Small
doors opened up along the sides of the centimetre thick device so it
could take air samples and other ambient readings. He linked up with
the Clever Dream’s sensor suite for a broader sweep. “I’m
seeing normal radiation readings, no sign that there are any systems
building up a charge, and the Ensign, he’s still trying to get
through the vault door.”

“Do you think we’re
clear to run power from the Clever Dream, get some lights and gravity
on?” Stephanie asked.

“I don’t recommend
it,” Finn replied. “Not until I can see that the D-Drive isn’t
still trying to draw power. If we turn the lights on when that
thing’s trying to activate, it could wipe out anyone without
serious protection, or worse.”

“Good thinking,”
Stephanie said. “Let’s catch up.”

Finn and the rest of
the group followed her down the line as fast as they could,
controlling their considerable speed by keeping both hands on the
strand running down the middle of the hallway. Three corpses drifted
past. None of them had their vacsuits sealed, and one looked like he
was dressed for bed. It struck him then that they were probably all
on their night cycle when the device that killed them released its
charge. A glance at his scanner proved his theory. Most of the
corpses were in their bunks. He looked up just in time to slow down
at the main vault door and land beside Stephanie.

“I’ve got something
on my security scanner,” Agameg said, forwarding it to the group. A
silhouette of three vacsuit protected corpses appeared on Finn’s
heads’ up display. Their bodies and heads were drifting separately.
“That did not happen because of an overload,” he replied. “Or
an other-dimensional event.”

“What happened
there?” Liara asked.

“There’s someone
dangerous aboard,” Stephanie said. “Intensify scanning.”

They arrived at the
vault door and Stephanie immediately yanked the Medical Technican
around by the shoulder so he faced her. “Okay, explain why it is so
important for you to get in ahead of us.”

Finn stopped himself
against the vault door and shifted to the control panel. “He’s
been trying to pry this open,” he said, looking at the edge of the
control pad. “Can’t get in that way.”

“Those marks aren’t
from me,” Ensign Rinett said. “Well, a couple are.”

“Everyone shield up,”
Stephanie said.

Finn activated his own
shield and checked to make sure everyone else’s were working. Liara
was last to get her shield up. “I don’t like this,” she
whispered as she joined Finn against the Vault door. Agameg,
Stephanie and Remmy drew their rifles and formed a half-circle around
them, leaving Ensign Rinett the Medical Technician outside. “Get in
there, I’m signalling for backup,” Stephanie said.

Finn hurriedly pulled a
portable power cell from his left thigh pocket. “I’m going to
have to pull a Valent,” he said.

“What’s ‘a
Valent?’” asked Liara.

“Oh, I remember,”
Alaka said. “He is going to use a pair of circuit infiltrators,
like long needles, to connect to the door system. They are very thin,
and fit between the keys and the bezel.”

“Oh, I think I saw
that in an old sim once,” Liara said.

Finn was keenly aware
that he was being watched as he slipped two thin, needle like
infiltrators into the keypad so they touched a powered circuit. “It’s
a good hack, as long as you get the power and location right. If you
get the location wrong, you’re just not connecting. If you get the
power wrong, you can burn out the door mechanism.” He scanned the
circuit and adjusted his battery cell to match the power
requirements.

“You could also
trigger the vault security mechanism,” Remmy added. “So the door
panel gets disabled forever. Don’t mess up.”

“Thanks for your vote
of confidence,” Finn said as he activated his power cell. The door
panel’s number keys lit up. “Now we just need the codes.”

“The first sequence
is-“ the Medical Technician started.

“No, just tap them
in,” Finn said.

“Oh, and hey,”
Stephanie said over her shoulder to Ensign Rinett. “If you enter in
a remote deletion code instead, we’ll know. I have one of the top
communications officers in the fleet here. Then we’ll see what
Captain Valent will do with you. Remember the last time someone
really pissed him off?”

“I do,” Agameg
said. “He strapped them to the front of a shuttle and used them to
test their vacsuits on re-entry. I think one of them survived.”

“Don’t worry,”
said Ensign Rinett. “Here you go.” He punched in a sequence of
twenty-four numbers and stepped away as the vault door opened. Finn
caught him touch a button on the power unit he’d brought with him,
a small palm sized square, and saw the overload warning appear on the
side. He grabbed the Ensign’s arm and knocked the power unit out of
his hand. It went spiralling into the lab inside the vault, bouncing
against the front of a workstation. He didn’t wait to tell anyone
what was going on, just grabbed his own power unit, yanking the wires
free from the door panel and pushed off.

“That battery is on a
power build-up!” Agameg said.

Finn caught the small
power unit against his chest, clutched it with his hand. He did his
best to ignore colliding with the workstation and tied the lead wires
of his power unit to the posts on Ensign Rinett’s. “Make a hole!”
he said, trying to twist in the air so he could see the vault door.
The power unit the Ensign brought was more powerful than the one he
had, he knew there was a possibility that it would still overload.

Stephanie and Remmy
pushed on each other to get out of the way, and Finn tossed the two
connected power cells down the hallway. It made it past the drifting
corpses and out of sight before his suit registered a power transfer
from one power cell to the other along with a low-powered electronic
pulse. His pack was fried, which was no matter, he could get another,
and Ensign Rinett’s was fully discharged.

“Wait,” Stephanie
said. “Everyone replay your scanner logs. I think I saw something.”

Finn set his scanner to
replay the previous five seconds at a tenth the speed and half way
through he glimpsed what she saw. It was the shape of a woman in a
stealth suit that didn’t look like the type of vacsuit anyone he
knew used. He was about to report it when Stephanie’s shields
registered a hit from a nano-blade.

She opened fire in a
burst in front of her only to have her rifle knocked aside. The
tether keeping her rifle attached to her chest kept it from spinning
away from her, but her assailant was grappling with her, the stealth
functions interrupted by Stephanie’s shields.

Remmy took aim.

“Shoot the bitch!”
Stephanie shouted as she tried to hold her assailant’s arm away and
find leverage while they twisted together in the microgravity. “I
have shields, she doesn’t!”

Remmy and Agameg opened
fire in bursts, mostly hitting Stephanie’s assailant. The suit she
was wearing managed to resist several bursts before it was breached,
and the rounds of their rifles tore through the woman’s lower torso
before they could stop. The rifles were made to break through heavy
armour, to kill framework soldiers. Finn never wanted to see what
they would do to an unprotected human, but he did then. After only
one burst from Agameg and a half-burst from Remmy, Stephanie’s
assailant’s torso and legs were only held together by a thin strand
of flesh. Blood began to fill the doorway of the vault.

Liara finally managed
to get out of the doorway, and Finn caught her as she drifted into
the lab. “You okay?” he asked.

“It’s going to take
me a while to forget that,” she replied.

“Where’s our
backup?” Stephanie asked on the security channel, her side of the
conversation was carried over proximity radio. “There is Citadel
aboard, you get here and start scanning now.” She moved through the
vault door, directing Agameg and Remmy to do the same. “Grab him,”
she told Remmy.

The emitters in Remmy’s
armoured suit, hidden under rows of horizontal armour slats and
usually used for shielding, brightened as he used them as
micro-thrusters to move to Ensign Rinett. “You’re coming with
us,” he said as he grabbed him by the arm then put restraints on
his wrists with a practiced hand. “C’mon,” he said as he pulled
him through the vault door.

“Circle up, softies
in the middle,” Stephanie said. “That means you, Finn, Liara and
Rinett.” Once they were in the middle of a small circle formed with
them in the centre, Alaka, Remmy and Stephanie on the outside, they
waited.

Finn took a look at the
interior of the vault section of the ship over Alaka’s shoulder. To
him, it looked like a large research lab. If someone wasn’t told,
they may not realize it was a vault at all. It only had three
antennae reaching outside that could be cut off when the vault was
sealed, and one door. That, along with a consistent layer of armour
around the entire lab, made it the largest vault he’d ever seen
outside of one that was made for a cargo hauler. He took a scan of
the D-Drive inside the rear of the vault and saw no power readings.
“The D-Drive is completely discharged. I can see its settings from
here too. If I were to guess, that Citadel spy we caught set it to
overload, then deactivated it when the crew were killed.”

“So are you guessing
that it’s deactivated, or is it completely turned off?” Stephanie
asked.

“It’s off. She
turned it off.”

“Triton security
here,” they heard over their communicators. “We heard that, Chief
Finn. Can we activate systems?”

“Yes, go ahead,”
Finn replied.

“All right. Lights
and gravity are coming back on, get those feet pointed at the deck.”
The lights came on in a flash, and Finn concentrated on not looking
at the gore at the door. The gravity followed gradually, and Liara
grabbed his hand.

“Okay, never done
this part,” she said. They slowly descended the half metre that
separated their feet from the floor. “Oh, that’s better.”

The first squad of
fourteen Triton Fleet security officers entered, rifles at the ready,
in black armoured uniforms. They moved directly down the main hall to
the vault door. “Here as ordered, three more squads behind us,”
Commander Victor Davis reported.

“Start your
volumetric scans,” Stephanie said. “Vault first.”

“Aye,” he said.
“Split to port and starboard sides, scan slow.” He ordered. He
turned back to Stephanie, stepping over the corpse carefully. “The
Triton did a close range scan of the rest of the ship. We discovered
a cloaked equipment case in compartment EG-11, but that’s it. Looks
like Citadel only managed to get one aboard yesterday. The British
are spreading their ships out, scanning for the agent’s ship, but
that’ll take a while.”

“So you can confirm
this is a Citadel agent?” Stephanie asked.

“Yes, Ma’am,”
Victor Davis replied. The armour she’s wearing matches what we have
on record exactly. Do you know what she was after?”

“I have an analyst
and a pair of engineers here who might be able to find out.”
Stephanie said. She pulled a flexible, hard strip from the collar of
the dead Citadel agent after a moment of struggling and handed it to
Liara. “Hook this up and start trying to find out whatever you
can.”

“It’s probably got
some pretty serious security, but I’ll get something for you,”
she said.

“Finn, Agameg, you
two check the D-Drive, get as many details as you can on its
operation, and disable the controls that can activate it from outside
the vault.”

“We already have a
full analysis from the Triton Engineering team that studied it before
they started building one,” Agameg said.

“I want to know if
this Citadel Agent changed anything, so do what you have to.” She
turned to Commander Davis. “Do you mind if your people stick around
while I finish my mission?”

“Not at all, we’ll
even help you catalogue this place.”

“Remmy,” Stephanie
said. “Get into the computer system and see if you can find out
what the Ensign was trying to hide. Don’t let him out of your
sight. Oh, and see if you can find evidence that the D-Drive was used
as a weapon on purpose.”