“The jackpoint has been inserted,” Jen said over the comm link. They were ready for all the air to make a sudden departure from the station as soon as Askit could manage it, and that meant Vacuum Suits. Uncomfortable and bulky, they didn’t do much to transmit sound unless you used the low quality communicators built in, so even if you were face to face with someone it still sounded as though they were speaking through a bag of gravel.
“I have control,” Askit replied shortly. “Next up I’ll… oh.”
Jen shared a glance with Adrian. He’d been awkwardly standing nearby since she’d come out for the basic task of plugging in a dongle, on the excuse that he felt more comfortable being around in case any more of the robo-slugs decided to try their luck. The five machine-clad corpses that haunted the room hadn’t been particularly lucky, but the supply of ammunition for the Earth-based weapons was limited and there was no telling how many of them were aboard.
“You want to elaborate on that, mate?” Adrian asked. “We might be able to help.”
“You’re going to have to help,” Askit said. “The kinetic systems are on a different network. There was some talk recently about hardening systems against intrusions but I hadn’t expected to see it implemented here yet.”
Adrian looked at Jen, his raised eyebrow barely visible through the face plate. “What’s that mean?”
Jen sighed in frustration. “It means that it’s not going to be as easy as we’d hoped. He can’t turn off the kinetics.”
“I do have the station specs though,” Askit added. “They’ve got a primary kinetic system and a backup. Widely spaced as you’d expect from redundant systems.”
“I thought kinetic technology was limited to individual emitters?” Jen asked. “What do these systems do? Manage them?”
“Yes,” Askit replied. “Although I’m not familiar enough with kinetic technology to tell you whether both need to be deactivated.”
“They do,” Margarita interjected. “The specifications on the technology force the backup to take over in the event the primary shuts down or begins to adopt settings beyond what the systems consider safe. It’s intended to stop anyone from accidentally doing what we would like to do on purpose.”
There was a brief pause of surprise from all parties.
“Not just a pretty face,” Margarita added with great self satisfaction.
“So if I get this right,” Adrian said, setting aside the matter of Margarita’s expertise and possible treachery for the time being. “We need to go out into a ship full of soldiers who are expecting us to shut down some systems that are nowhere near us?”
“Is that going to be a problem?” Askit asked.
“No problem,” Jen replied, glancing at Adrian. He was frowning, but gave her a single nod in reply. “It’s just helpful to know how much of the brown stuff we’re all in.”
+++++
There hadn’t been any choice for the three humans but to split up, and as much as he would have liked it to be otherwise he had not been able to accompany Jen to her target. It had been all that he could do to get her to accept Margarita along, and that had turned into a short argument and an increasingly perturbed Spanish dwarf.
Jen had been worried about Adrian being further injured due to the state of his arm, and he hadn’t been able to say much against that argument. In hindsight he might have been a little dismissive of her argument.
He paused at the sound of footsteps – he had slid open the helmet after nearly stumbling into an earlier group, hoping he’d be able to close it in time should all the air start rushing out – and slipped into the cover offered by one of the minor access corridors that ran between blocks of rooms. He listened, and counted their number. Unlike human troops, there was no possibility for soldiers of different species to move in step, and as a result they did not try.
He counted ten, and he caught three on his first swing of the fusion blade he’d held on to as he fell upon them. They hadn’t been looking for him, and they hadn’t been ready for a fight.
That was why they died screaming as they fumbled for their weapons. He was too close, too fast, and he was amongst them like a wolf amongst lambs. They had their anti-tank weapons, but they found those unwieldy and unsuited for close quarters, and they had their fusion blades too. Not one of them managed to draw a blade, and Adrian made damned sure to turn his blade first upon those who tried.
It was grim work, and he took none of the joy in it that he had as he’d killed the robo-slugs. Those had been dangerous, the hard place for his rock, and they had made him want to kill every last one of them.
These men were not dangerous. They were nothing more than simple soldiers, and poorly trained ones at that. These were the men that weren’t sent into that mincer of a war, men who had never seen combat and had no idea what to expect. They’d been given weapons that could hurt, and even kill, a human, but they were like toys in the hands of children.
He made short work of them, and didn’t let them linger; he may be a killer, but he didn’t need to be a monster.
And then he paused to recover his breath and his wits, and to make sure that nobody else was going to come running. This had been the third group he had taken in this way, and he thought that by now they must be starting to notice, that there should have been more resistance. He couldn’t believe that they were simply that incompetent.
There hadn’t been any more of the robo-slugs at least, and that had been a reassurance. He doubted that it would last indefinitely, but for now it meant that his progress was faster and quieter than he had dared to hope. If there was a traitor – and in his opinion that was a big ‘if’ – they certainly hadn’t done much of a job informing the station what he was up to.
He decided to take another moment of rest, and to open a communications link to Jen. Just to make sure she was alright and wasn’t in some kind of awful danger. Not just because he wanted to hear the sound of her voice. “Jen, do you copy?”
It took about two skipped heartbeats longer than he would have liked before she responded. “I’m a wee bit busy here. What’s wrong?”
“Just checking in,” Adrian replied, trying to keep at least some of the relief from showing in his voice. “I’m seeing only a little resistance on my side.”
Jen grunted with effort over the link. “That must be nice!”
“Is everything alright over there?” he asked her, glancing back the way he came. It’d be a long trip if he had to go and help.
“Just a little resistance from the Corti military,” she assured him. “Everything is fine. I’ll talk to you again once we get to the controls.”
She ended the link, and Adrian found he was still bothered. Obviously she had been engaged in some effort during the short conversation and he worried that maybe she and Margarita were up to their necks in it. But he couldn’t help them from here, and if he didn’t complete his own mission they’d have no hope of escaping, so he had no choice but to carry on.
Besides, she’d said everything was fine.
+++++
Everything was not fine. Jen and Margarita had had a clean run until they’d gotten about half way to their destination, and then it had turned to complete shit. The ambush had been a little surprising, and if it wasn’t for her sharpened reflexes it may well have worked. The soldiers had been in position, they had been ready, and they had fired as soon as they had seen her.
But Jen had seen them sooner, and by the time they were pulling their triggers she was already in cover and her brain was playing catch-up on just what the hell had happened.
That had just been the first ambush. There had been a second, and a third as the soldiers kept the pressure on while more forces could be brought to bear. And as they’d taken cover from the main defenders, they’d been flanked from side corridors they’d thought were clear.
There was a lot more resistance than she’d been expecting, to be sure. One hell of a lot more, but not so much that with Margarita’s help she couldn’t handle it.
It had taken her three ambushes to understand why. Adrian had argued with her until she had given in, he had been determined that of the two of them he should be facing the most danger, and given that he had formal training, and despite the broken arm, she had accepted that. Both of them had assumed the longer distance would be the more dangerous.
He’d even gone so far as to put Margarita with her as backup, a decision she’d at first considered to be almost a joke, but Jen hadn’t expected to see the middle-aged Spanish dwarf ‘brassing up’ alien soldiers with the kind of mad cackling normally reserved for storybook witches. This Margarita seemed at odds with the thoughtful and kind woman Jen had enjoyed spending time with, and made her wonder if there was some kind of secret history of casual and excessive violence buried in the older woman’s past.
There was little wonder now why she got along with Adrian so well. It almost seemed as though they’d been cut from the same cloth, even if Margarita had been the smaller piece. On this point alone Jen doubted the woman was the traitor; it seemed they both had a strange set of personal morals, and neither could abide violating them.
Or maybe that was just wishful thinking.
“I think I know why we’re getting put through all of this,” Jen shouted over the hammering of kinetic gunfire on bulkhead. Margarita didn’t answer right away, distracted as she was by a sudden need to kick a nerve jam grenade back where it came from before it activated.
Its sudden return generated a commotion of alarm followed by silence and blinding pain behind Jen’s eyes, and with the inconvenience of the vacuum suit helmet she couldn’t even nurse her head in her hands.
That was the first time she’d actually experienced one and she couldn’t say she was looking forward to another.
“Fucking hell,” was what she said instead.
“Just like Ronaldo,” Margarita said, looking pleased with herself even if she shared Jen’s extremely painful headache. She was certainly leaning against the wall to let it support much of her weight, and Jen had never seen anyone do that unless they were trying to recover from something. “You were saying something?”
“Aye,” Jen continued, blinking back the water welling from her eyes. “I was about to ask if this was the way to the command deck?”
“Damn,” Margarita replied, “I think you could be correct. I hadn’t even considered that.”
Neither did Adrian,” Jen said. “If he had, do you not think he’d have wanted to go this way instead?”
“He’s very good at what he does,” Margarita told her. “Better than any other human I’ve worked with out here. He has the luck of the Devil, and his anger too. It worries me.”
“He’s not all bad,” Jen said, not wanting to let Adrian go undefended even if she actually agreed with what was said.
Margarita sighed. “Bad enough, and if he ever turns that rage on you, young lady, you’d best be putting him down like a mad dog. Take it from someone who didn’t.”
There was more of a story there, but Margarita didn’t tell it. She just sighed again and put her weight back on her feet, and as they were in the middle of a gruelling advance on enemy barricades Jen didn’t think it was the time to go pushing for answers. She was curious, but not that curious, and maybe Margarita didn’t know her well enough to let her in on those kinds of concerns.
You didn’t go and get curious around people with machine guns either.
“Keep moving?” Jen asked expectantly. She’d been glad to have had the opportunity to catch her breath, but she was under no illusions that those few minutes wouldn’t have allowed their enemies to do the same.
At least, wherever he was, Adrian was having an easier time of it.
+++++
Adrian was no longer having an easy time of it. Whatever the aliens had been doing up until now, they’d been preparing a response at the same time. It hadn’t surprised him that they’d finally gotten their shit together, it was the quantity of the shit that had been gathered.
Today he had learned that you could deactivate Nerve-Jam grenades by hitting them with fusion swords, which if you thought about it was the same way pretty much everything could be deactivated.
He’d been pinned down in a side corridor as well, with the main corridor defended by five guys behind barricades with anti-tank guns. It’d only take one hit and he’d be done for, but right now he hadn’t taken a hit.
He stabbed at the latest Nerve-Jam grenade to land nearby, melting it into a mess of metal and silica. He couldn’t keep that up forever, though, and sooner or later he’d miss one before it activated, and that would be the end of Adrian Saunders. It was a little disconcerting to think that he could survive an anti-tank rifle, but these button-sized objects could take him out with a single hit.
“Fuck this for a joke,” he muttered. With just the one good arm, he couldn’t draw a gun without putting down the fusion blade. If he put down the fusion blade, he couldn’t kill any Nerve-Jam grenade that dropped beside him.
He glanced back down the side corridor, and still found it empty. There were sounds from up that way, though, and he knew that the troops were taking up position to hit him as soon as he fled that way, because they knew as surely as he did that he couldn’t fucking well stay where he was.
What they had forgotten, however, was that he had a fusion blade, and that gave him options he wouldn’t otherwise have had. Options like making a new door into the adjacent room. He’d been cutting it a bit at a time between Nerve-Jam grenades, and now he just had to wait for the next one before shoving his way in.
The Nerve-Jam grenade dropped on cue, and he stuck his blade through it as it landed.
Then he shoved at the wall until it moved, and stumbled into the gloomy darkness of a room lit only by the fusion blade he held and filled with absolutely nothing of interest. He didn’t waste any time in pushing the wall back into place, hoping that Nerve-Jam grenades didn’t work through walls.
Not that he gave himself the opportunity to find out. He was soaked with sweat from the warmth of the vacuum suit and the effort of breaking through the wall, but he forced himself to keep moving.
He found the way out, and then he found himself behind those fucking arseholes who’d been dropping Nerve-Jams on him. They were too focused on their terse conversations to hear him coming, and even to the last of them he had just been a furious blur of death.
“Askit,” he said, opening the communicator link. “How close am I to this fucking thing?”
“I’m picking you up at about (50 metres) from your goal,” Askit replied. “The room should be marked with technical symbols, but you’ll find the heavy security door to be helpfully unlocked. You have yours truly to thank for that, by the way.”
“What would I do without you?” Adrian asked as he pushed onwards.
“Well,” Askit considered, “I imagine you’d be standing outside a heavy door with a confused look.”
“How are Jen and Margarita doing?” Adrian queried. “It sounded like they were having some trouble.”
“If they were it didn’t slow them down much,” Askit said. “They’re just stepping through their own heavy security door.”
+++++
Jen went to the terminal while Margarita took up position at the door and shot anyone who showed themselves, although they’d mainly stopped making that mistake.
The terminal was encased in the kind of protective casing that worked against aliens and not against humans. With a grunt of effort Jen tore it free from its mountings and gained direct access to the interface it had been protecting from casual interference.
“Askit,” she said, connecting the communicator link. “I’m in front of an important looking terminal in the room you described. What do I do now?”
“Well you don’t get to get angry and kill it with a fusion blade,” Askit said dryly, and Jen didn’t need to guess what had brought about that kind of statement.
“That won’t cause any problems for me, will it?” she asked. “He had the backup unit, right? So it won’t be able to take over.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Askit replied. “I guess we get to find out for sure! First you need to hit ‘Grij’.”
Jen looked at the keyboard and blinked in confusion. “I just realised I can’t read your language. Does this come in English?”
“Does it…” Askit began, incredulous. “Of course it doesn’t! Does Margarita read Cora?”
Margarita looked over at that, and Jen realised that Askit must have patched her in. “Of course I can read Cora,” she said. “I have spent twenty years on your world.”
“Then I suggest trading positions,” Askit told them, and not in a way that sounded like any kind of suggestion.
It was not lost on Jen that the violent Spanish dwarf had been switched to computer activities while the Irish I.T. girl had been forced to take up position at a doorway and shoot people. She was at least glad to have brought an anti-tank weapon with her, because the Earth gun was almost out of bullets and she wanted every last one of them in case the robo-slugs came back.
“Here we go everybody,” Askit announced, in all likelihood patched through to everyone. “Helmets on and take a deep, deep breath.”
Jen glanced over to Margarita as she made one last keystroke, paused, and then slice straight through the terminal with her own fusion blade.
There was no going back now, but for a moment nothing occurred and Jen began to wonder if they had somehow failed.
Then gravity went away, and the air began to move.