Hodgepodge, Pirate Cruiser, Far Reaches
It had been about fifteen minutes and Roman had managed to make it the rest of the way to the command deck without anything killing him. Things had certainly tried, but he was completely paranoid about this horror-movie of a starship and his adrenaline was up; the few robots and traps that had been set against him had been responded to with speed and precision.
Roman had taken it slow, he had kept eyes on every direction, and he had somehow managed to survive. More nerve-jam drones, more plasma bots, more turrets – some that shot lightning bolts! – and another narrowly avoided gravity trap had all made the list of things that had nearly killed him but didn’t.
“Sergeant,” he said, breathing heavily, “I’m coming up on the command deck now. How are you doing?”
“As before, Captain,” Valery responded, pain all through his voice. “Feels as though we’ve been kicked by a dozen horses, all of them pissed off.”
The Sergeant’s squad had come out of the gravity trap to find themselves pinned down by anti-tank kinetic gunfire, which was extremely painful even through hardened combat vacuum suits and the protective gear they were wearing underneath. As Roman understood it they’d barely managed to avoid getting cooked by a nerve-jam grenade, and that was when they’d deployed grenades. Now they were recovering in the hallways with possible bone fractures all over, and Roman was effectively alone in getting the job done.
Which was fucking fantastic; he’d need a whole ocean of vodka to forget about this one.
“Everybody down!” he shouted as he burst onto the command deck. He put a round through anyone with a weapon who didn’t comply within two seconds, and the rest made a real hurry of it. Part of him wanted to finish the job, but Roman had no idea how to fly a starship and he wasn’t in the mood to try and learn.
“Who is in command of this Starship?!” he demanded, and pointed at the nearest alien, some kind of raccoon creature. “You! You will tell me!”
The raccoon creature looked up, plainly terrified. “C-Commander Zripob!” it stammered, and its voice marked it as a male.
“Which of you is he!?” Roman asked, looking between the various space monstrosities. “Which!?”
“He’s not here!” the raccoon guy continued. “He used the life pod to go and disable the gravity spike on the frigate.”
“On the frigate!?” Roman asked, turning to stare in the direction he thought it was. It seemed strange for a commander to go and do such a thing, but anybody capable of putting his men through what they’d been through was almost certainly more useful at that kind of operation than the mewling lot now kissing the floor.
That was the man that Roman would have to destroy, if he ever wanted to sleep well again. “Once the gravity spike is disabled, destroy the life-pod and go into FTL.”
“You want us to abandon him?” the raccoon man asked, then appeared to think about what he’d said. “I… think we’d all be fine with that.”
Roman barked a laugh. It seemed his foe’s own crew liked him about as much as Roman did. “Then see to it!”
The command crew, shaken but obedient, rose and returned to their duties, averting their eyes from any comrades with bullet holes in them.
“Gravity spike is disabled,” said one of them, some sort of blue giraffe, after just a few minutes. “Firing on life pod.”
“Life pod has been destroyed,” another said impassively, this one some sort of frog creature. “Commander Zripob has no way back.”
“Now set FTL for the nearest Alliance planet,” Roman commanded. With his team the way they were, there was just no way that he was going to be able to take on a whole pirate base. He had terrible premonitions of a space station filled with more deadly traps, set up with the idea of killing absolutely anything that dared to go aboard.
“FTL systems are not responding,” another blue giraffe said, and he sounded genuinely surprised. “We are locked out of all Command systems.”
“The Commander must have transferred those functions to his datapad,” the raccoon guy determined, and sounded rather angry in doing it. “But the FTL isn’t part of the Command system.”
“Get it working!” Roman grated. He didn’t much like the idea of being adrift in space for god knew how long, and especially not with absolutely no other way out.
“It’s under some sort of override!” the blue giraffe protested, turning to face Roman only to shrink away from his angry gaze. “I can’t get it working until that’s lifted!”
Roman was about to say he didn’t give a shit when he was interrupted by the raccoon.
“Sensors show something else has entered local space,” the raccoon guy said. “It’s a Salvage runner.”
+++++
Zripob supposed he should be glad that they hadn’t started firing at the frigate itself, but that didn’t help when it came to getting off the doomed ship. All of the life pods were either irreparably damaged or had already ejected and were quickly pushing on towards the boundaries of the gravity spike.
“Things are not looking good,” he mused, but they were still looking worse for the Hodgepodge. He’d seen one of the intruders reach the command deck and then some of the life signs on the deck had disappeared. Going back there was probably a creative way to commit suicide, and Zripob had never been one for self-sacrifice.
That was when the Salvage runner had appeared in local space – the ship id’ed as Kefani’s vessel – and set an intercept course for the Hodgepodge.
Nothing good would come of that; if she boarded that ship she’d probably die, and she’d give the human soldiers a way off. The soldiers were in command of his crew, and it was likely she’d never even see it coming.
He did her a favour and disabled their access to the Hodgepodge’s communication system, switching it over to be used through his datapad. “Kefani,” he said, activating a link. “This is Commander Zripob. Do not go aboard that vessel. Dock with the frigate instead.”
The voice that answered him was not Kefani; it was probably the worst voice he could have expected to hear around that time, and that included anyone from the Celzi Alliance military. It was the voice of Adrian Saunders.
“G’day mate,” the mad human said cheerily, “I heard you were in a bit of a fucking bind, but I’m guessing you had to bail on your ship?”
Zripob hesitated. He wasn’t sure how much he wanted to get involved with this particular human again; Adrian had a habit of attracting vast amounts of unwanted and unexpected trouble, and Zripob had gotten tired of only barely surviving it. There had to be a way out of this that didn’t include Adrian Saunders ‘rescuing’ him.
Well… there was one.
“Adrian,” he said, forcing some cheer into his voice. “I’d never thought I would hear from you again. Come and get me quickly.”
“Sit tight mate,” Adrian replied. “What’s going on in the Hodgepodge anyway?”
“The enemy had control of the weapons, they just blew up my life pod,” Zripob explained. “I’ve locked them out of those controls for now.”
“I’m just docking now,” Adrian told him. “Come aboard, and then we’ll figure out what I’m going to do with you.”
Zripob did as he was bade, and was glad to see the inside of a functional vessel in spite of the terrifying presence of Adrian Saunders. “I take it you’ve stolen this vessel from Kefani?”
Adrian frowned. “More like borrowed for an indeterminate amount of time, but I just need to get to Cimbrean and back.”
“You’re going to the colony there?” Zripob asked in surprise. “I did not think you had any desire to return to Earth.”
“I don’t… I didn’t know there was a colony there until you told me right now,” Adrian said, and this seemed to bother him. “This might not be as easy as I was hoping.”
Things were rarely easy as far as Adrian Saunders was concerned, Zripob thought to himself; the prospect of joining with him on yet another one of his inevitable misadventures was unpleasant to say the least, and Zripob had no intention of doing so.
“Now that I’m aboard, I’ll tell you what happened aboard the Hodgepodge,” he said, considering how to spin the story. “We were boarded by eight human soldiers, and seem to have managed to disable three and kill four. That is an astounding victory, or it would be had the last of them not gained control of the ship by reaching the command deck.”
“How many crewmen have you got on there?” Adrian asked. “It’s a big ship…”
“I would say that there are twenty survivors at the moment,” Zripob said, “but that’s likely to diminish quite suddenly once the self-destruct activates.”
Adrian stared at him in horror, which seemed pretty judgemental from the guy who’d ignited the Great Hunt. “You’ve… you’ve turned on the self-destruct with twenty of your own men inside!? What the fuck kind of plan is that!?”
“It was a practical one,” Zripob defended, but this conversation was going exactly the way he wanted it to. “Now that you’re here, perhaps you can assist me by re-taking the ship? Then I won’t have to destroy it.”
Now Adrian was glaring at him. “Great… fucking great. Alright, we’ll do your shitty fucking plan, and then you can escort me to Cimbrean.”
That had been easy. “Agreed,” Zripob replied.
There was now no way that he could lose. If Adrian won, the ship would be restored to Zripob’s command and he could claim his actions had been pure strategy. If Adrian failed, then he, the human soldiers and anyone who might give conflicting reports about the situation would be dead, and Zripob would make it out with his reputation intact. They would all mourn Adrian and the rest of the crew, but life would go on.
Well, Zripob’s life would go on, and that was what mattered.
“I remain in control of various systems,” he said. “If you go in I shall monitor them from here and provide assistance where possible.”
“Nice to see we’re going with Plan B,” Adrian replied bitterly. “Although at least this time I don’t have to kill everyone.”
Zripob honestly didn’t care if he did or he didn’t, but a smile seemed to suffice in place of words.
They docked with the Hodgepodge as Adrian wisely suited up. He had his own combat hardened vacuum suit now – a Celzi uniform from the styling of it – and Zripob wondered what could have transpired to provision the man tasked with raiding them with one of their uniforms.
“Wish me luck,” Adrian said as he stepped forth, bridging the space between ships in a few short steps. He was not sounding particularly optimistic about what was ahead of him – and perhaps he shouldn’t be – but he was approaching it with a sense of resignation.
“Good luck,” Zripob said with a wave, and then he shut the door.
A moment later he’d released from the larger vessel and was pulling away with all the speed the kinetics would give him.
A few moments later he sent a message through to Adrian Saunders, and punched into FTL.
+++++
Hodgepodge, Pirate Cruiser, Far Reaches
Adrian Saunders stood in the first corridor of the Hodgepodge and re-read the message. The facts it presented were that Zripob had just bailed on him – claiming he was at risk of weapons fire again and stealing Keffa’s salvage runner in the process – and the Hodgepodge was protected by a large number of automated traps that Zripob had not disabled. Traps from the minds of Zripob, Chir and Jennifer Delaney, many of which had been adapted from ideas Adrian himself had arrived at.
“This fucking bullshit is why I have trust issues,” he muttered to himself. “Space… nothing but arseholes.”
There wasn’t time to reflect on the situation, nor on his own gullibility that had led him into it. The clock was ticking, and every moment spent fucking around instead of doing something put him one moment closer to floating around in space thinking about how fucked he was.
If he ever got five goddamned minutes of time not spent dealing with or recovering from some colossal clusterfuck he’d have to sit down and seriously reevaluate his life choices.
“Well,” he said, starting down the corridor with considerable trepidation. “Let’s see what all those demented minds could come up with…”
He walked carefully, and as he walked he mentally assessed the resources available to each side. Zripob’s brief description of the human soldiers suggested automatic weapons, grenades and probable sidearms. Adrian on the other hand had a fusion cutter about three inches long.
Shitty fucking plan. Little wonder Zripob bailed, but if Adrian somehow managed a miracle he’d be having some pretty fucking interesting words with that glorified toad if they ever met again.
He removed his helmet and kicked it along the floor ahead of him, judging that the reduction to his senses was a lot more likely to get him killed than a sudden lack of air, and if it set off a trap instead of him then it was a price worth paying.
When he kicked it past a service passage only to have it suddenly turn away to the right he figured he’d been correct. “Invisible traps are the fucking best,” he observed, wondering exactly what it was that was going to try and kill him.
There was only one way to find out, however, so he stopped at the corner and held out his arm only to be entirely unsurprised that some arsehole had turned a long fucking corridor into a long fucking drop. To his left he saw a rope hanging across the passage showing where someone had managed to cross, and to his right a corpse showing where someone hadn’t.
“Too wide to jump it?” he asked himself, casting an eye over the gap and the structural reinforcements jutting a short distance out from the corners. In a human-built ship those would be full of rivets and could give plenty of grip, but on the Hodgepodge – and all Celzi ships for that matter – they were smooth and shiny and looked exactly like the last thing you’d want to bet your life on.
The problem was he didn’t have enough time to turn back and find another way, and realistically he wasn’t sure he even had enough time to go this way. He looked to his right; there was only one way that was going to get him to the command deck with time to spare and he was looking at it.
He fished the fusion cutter out of his belt and stared at it for a moment, hoping that it was up to the task about to be demanded of it. “This is a fucking bad idea, Saunders,” he told himself. “Really fucking bad…”
But he’d seen it done in some old movies about pirates, so how bad could it be? Adrian Saunders planted the fusion cutter into the floor and swung himself out onto it with both hands. It sliced downwards as he’d expected, but with considerably less resistance than he would have enjoyed.
“Fuuuuuuck!” he screamed as the doors flashed past him, all of his focus put on holding that cutter in a death grip. A long molten gash streaked behind the blade, vanishing upwards as he fell.
He twisted the blade in the wall, veering himself towards a wall in an effort to slow his mad descent, and the impact slammed him so hard that he very nearly lost the blade. Adrian Saunders hadn’t often been thankful for what Cruezzir had done to him, but he was thankful right now; there wasn’t a doubt in his mind that without the strength it had provided he would have fallen to a very unpleasant kind of death.
With gritted teeth he turned the blade the other way, zig-zagging his way down the corridor and cursing every inch of the way. He was still about fifteen metres up when the fusion blade burned out and stopped.
He hung there, breathing heavily, and looked down. It was still a long drop, and the dead man lay sprawled across most of the bottom of it. “Fuck, that’s about five stories… can I drop five stories onto a dead man?”
He considered that for a moment and then shook the thought from his head. “That’s fucking retarded, Saunders… there’s doors… just fucking use one!”
There were doors, and one was very nearly within reach. He swung himself gently, praying that the cutter would hold for a few moments yet. One swing… nearly. A second let him tap it lightly with his foot. The third kicked it open, and the cutter blade snapped under the force of the swing.
“Jesus!” he cried out, his right arm extending only just in time to grab the frame. He slammed into the wall again, holding on only by one arm and breathing short, shallow breaths. “Holy… holy fuck…”
With a burst of adrenaline fuelled energy he pulled himself over the door frame and collapsed on the floor of the room on the other side. “You know, Saunders,” he berated himself as he staggered to his feet, “it’d be really fucking nice if one day you stopped doing stupid shit!”
He glanced around wildly at the room he was in, totally unprepared for any kind of threat if there happened to be one. There wasn’t, however, because it was a storage room. “Fucking storage rooms,” he laughed wildly, wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his vacuum suit. “Let’s see what this one’s got.”
What it didn’t have was any weapons, any tools, or any other way out. What it did have was coils and coils of spare conduit cabling, something that would serve pretty damned well as a rope, at least if he used enough of it and only for the short distance remaining to the bottom of the corridor.
“Oh yeah…” he said, “we’re back in fucking business now.”
Three minutes later he was the rest of the way down the corridor and was crouching over two shattered helmets and an equally broken corpse. The corpse had held an AK-9, a Russian issue assault rifle, along two extra magazines and three fragmentation grenades. He wasn’t sure what he might end up doing with those, but he felt a shitload better just by having them.
Maybe he could make this miracle happen yet.
+++++
Captain Roman Kaminski watched the life sign move incredibly quickly down the corridor before coming to a sudden halt, just shy of the end. This, he saw, was how the aliens had always been prepared for them, no matter which way they had elected to go. It was hard to get ahead of your enemy when they knew what you were doing at all times.
“Sergeant,” Roman said, speaking to Markovic. “There’s somebody in your general area, but I’m not sure who they are.”
“Would you like us to check it out, Captain?” Markovic asked, pain still heavy in his voice but now matched by determination; it seemed that the time they had spent resting had been time well spent.
“What is your status, Sergeant?” Roman asked. He wasn’t going to send injured men to investigate anything that could move that fast.
“Nothing we can’t walk off,” Markovic lied.
Roman didn’t call him on it, he really needed the team to put eyes on what was coming in their direction, regardless of how risky it was. “Then I’ll direct you as to where you can set up an ambush.”
He did so, urging them to move as quickly as they could so that they could head the new intruder off, and turned to the command crew for further help. “What do you have that can stop this intruder?”
The raccoon was first to speak again. “With the exception of the hover cameras, the drones have all been destroyed by you and your men. If that intruder is to be stopped, you will need to hope that the traps or your men manage to do it.”
Roman turned back to the display, seeing where the life sign fit in on the ship and figuring that neither he or his team had passed through the area. “What trap is the intruder headed into next?”
“That area contains plasma vents,” the raccoon advised. “I doubt the intruder will get through there alive.”
Roman nodded, grimacing at the memory of Denis Lagunov burning in a pillar of flame. There had only been a split second to make the decision to fire upon the pop-up turrets, and not everyone would have been able to manage it. That sort of thing needed reaction times that were found in only a few gifted individuals, such as Roman Kaminski himself, and he doubted that this intruder would have the same kind of speed.
“Sergeant,” he said, speaking to Markovic once again. “When you think you’re getting close, just listen for the screams.”
Markovic acknowledged, and Roman focused intently on the view screen, sparing only enough awareness to make sure the command crew didn’t try any funny business. The little blip was in the passage way, and there wasn’t anywhere for him to go but into the fire.
He swallowed nervously, watching the group of his own men negotiate the corridors that were deemed safe, on their way to meet a man who would very soon be barbecued.
Any moment now…
Roman heard the distant explosion rattle the ship, noting the flicker of the lights as power was very briefly disrupted. It happened a second time before what had happened became apparent. The little blip had not disappeared but had continued moving down the hallway.
“Markovic,” he radioed when he saw his team getting close, “what the hell was that?”
There was a hesitation, but Markovic came through after a moment. “Sounded like a grenade,” he said. “there are two large holes in the walls spilling some sort of gas… I am reluctant to attempt passing through.”
“Whoever was ahead of you managed it,” Roman replied sharply. “Find another way around! I don’t intend you to-“
The ship shook violently with a thundering explosion, the lights flickering madly as it rolled through the vessel. Roman held tightly to the nearest fixture – in this case an overly-padded seat – as the shuddering came to an end.
When it finished, all of the blips were gone, including those on the command deck. That system was down, and it didn’t look like the only one. “Sergeant…” he radioed. “Valery, are you there!?”
“Captain,” Markovic replied, panting. “The gasses… they just ignited…”
“What is your status?” Roman demanded with a sinking feeling. An explosion like that on a ship like this? There was no way it was going to end well.
“We barely had enough time to get into any cover at all,” reported Markovic. It was clear he was under heavy strain. “The shockwave… I have multiple… I think one of my legs is broken. Sokoloff isn’t responding, but I think he’s still alive. Not sure where Yakovlev is, the air is all full of this red haze… Hard to see.”
“I take it that there is no sign of the intruder?” Roman asked, glancing at the view screen every few seconds to see if the systems were back up yet. They weren’t.
“Not that I could see,” Markovic responded. “Captain, I’m going to try and move Sokoloff and myself into one of these rooms. I’m still not getting anything from Yakovlev.”
“Understood, Sergeant,” Roman said, terminating the contact.
Roman Kaminski steadied his breathing, and ran his tongue over dry lips. “Alright,” he said, back in the game, “come and get it, Mister Blippy.”
+++++
The explosion had not been intentional. Or at least the big one had not been intentional, the smaller ones had been very intentional indeed. Adrian had seen the heat rising from those ‘vents’, the first and hopefully only time his freaky eyes would prove useful. A pair of grenades had destroyed the mechanism, and there shouldn’t have been any ignition with that part destroyed.
He’d been outside of the blast zone when something had sparked and set the gas mix off in a rush of atmospheric plasma, and he supposed he should be thankful that the vapours hadn’t spread further before it had happened. With no helmet he would have suffered considerable consequences.
“Some demented fucking arsehole thought it was a good idea to pump plasma down a hallway,” he commented to himself, making the comment about himself. The big plasma cutters on the Zhadersil had been extremely effective at clearing the decks, and he didn’t doubt that whatever those vents were intended to do would have been just as effective. He was really coming to hate just how effective he’d been in those early days.
There wasn’t much more distance to go before he’d made it to the door to the command deck. It was closed, but he doubted it was locked, and inside there waited some kind of Russian military man – at least one Russian military man – who probably wanted to shoot him.
Adrian had an assault rifle, he had one fragmentation grenade. He figured he could toss the grenade in, wait for the explosion, and then follow up with-
No! No, no, no! He ran his hands through his hair, altogether too aware that his judgement was unreliable. That plan was reckless, too reckless when the only cover might as well have been made of tissue paper. He didn’t know the situation either, only what Zripob had said and right now Zripob didn’t seem like the most trustworthy of guys.
Less aggressive… some sort of calm option… talking! Talking could be calm! It seemed like it might be worth a shot if actual shooting was the only alternative.
He gritted his teeth, knowing that this was probably a stupid plan as well but knowing he couldn’t trust what he thought.
“Hello?!” he shouted, wincing with the expectation of suddenly being shot. “Is there a human in there?”
He really hoped the answer wasn’t going to be gunfire.
+++++
The internal sensors had come back online just in time to show Roman that Yakovlev was alive but immobile, and that the intruder had made it to the door of the command deck. He fingered his AK-9 nervously, keeping the barrel levelled at the door the intruder would have to enter by. The mood on the command deck was tense, and Roman was waiting for the moment he’d have to shoot.
He figured it might be better to err on the side of caution with this one, especially given the explosion.
That was when he heard the voice. It spoke in English, but the accent was sharper… American perhaps? No… that wasn’t right. Whatever the case, his translator turned it into perfect Russian.
“Hello?!” it had shouted, a husky male voice with a twist of desperation. “Is there a human in there?”
Roman paused, cocking his head to the side as his tension was replaced by confusion. A human was, technically speaking, a much greater threat than an alien, but at the same time it could also mean something entirely else. He was a little bit hesitant to go shooting a human who had arrived in his own starship in their time of need, and who thus far hadn’t started shooting at him.
“There is,” Roman called back. He made sure his gun remained pointed at the door in case of any trickery, but he was readying for the other man to enter without them trying to kill each other. “Who are you?”
There was a half-crazed laugh, and Roman bit his lip nervously. Whoever this guy was, it seemed like he was on the edge and that could be dangerous.
“I’m a guy in a real fucking hurry!” the man replied. “The Self-Destruct has been activated by the commander of this ship.”
Roman was aware that this was news to the command crew, because there was an immediate flurry of activity as they rushed to confirm it. He kept an ear on them as they worked, picking out phrases like ‘Not running’, and ‘Something’s running’ and ‘Silent mode’. Those phrases seemed to get progressively more serious in nature, to the point when Roman decided he was going to believe the man.
“Thank you for letting us know,” Roman called back. “We will be sure to get this turned off.”
“We can’t turn it off,” the raccoon guy informed him. “That system is in lockdown.”
“Is there another way?” Roman demanded. He was a highly trained soldier, but the idea of dying on a starship that was destroying itself in the depths of space scared the shit out of him.
“I don’t know…” the raccoon guy replied. “I’m not an engineer…”
“I’m an engineer!” the voice offered. “Can I come in?”
Roman bit his lip again. He didn’t think that he had much of a choice, even if he really didn’t like the idea of some random human turning up to help him. It seemed like that was a great way for things to go really badly wrong. “Come in, but know I will have my gun pointed at you.”
The door opened slowly, and a man in Celzi Alliance colours entered. He was scruffy and powerfully built, with dark hair and beard running as wild as his eyes. He had the look of a man who was standing on the precipice of snapping, and as he was carrying an AK-9 he had all the firepower he’d need to really fuck up everybody’s day.
That didn’t exactly fill Roman with happiness, but it wasn’t being pointed at him so he guessed that was something.
“G’day,” the man said. “I’m Adrian. Can you stop pointing the gun at me so we can unfuck ourselves?”
He was Australian then, Roman determined, and after a moment he lowered his weapon slightly. “Captain Roman Kaminski. Where did you get that gun?”
“I picked it up off a dead guy,” Adrian replied candidly, “figured he wasn’t using it anymore, and I didn’t know whether I was going to be shooting you or not.”
“I’m thinking not?” Roman asked, raising an eyebrow. “I would not recommend the attempt.”
Adrian nodded. “I’m hoping we can come to some sort of compromise here where nobody else gets shot and we can all fuck off back to where we came from. Sound good to you?”
“Sounds good to me,” Roman confirmed. “First though, what did you do to my men?”
Adrian’s expression of utter cluelessness told Roman all he needed to know on that one. “What men?”
“Near the explosion… I had some men,” Roman told him, grinding his teeth as he thought about it. “Fortunately for you they are still alive.”
“Well, thank fuck for that then,” Adrian said, at least some measure of his relief appearing to be genuine. “But if we don’t get this sorted out, we’re all fucked. I don’t have a helmet for floating around in space, so I reckon that’s my motivation. Everyone here like breathing?”
The consensus was that everyone did, but Roman couldn’t help but notice that the command crew were all far more nervous now than they had been before the human had entered. At a better time he’d ask why that was, but right now there was a fairly major problem that needed dealing with.
“What do we need to do?” he asked.
“If you guys can’t unfuck it from here, I need to get to engineering,” Adrian told him. “Can you turn off all those fucking traps?”
“We can’t,” the raccoon guy ventured, far more timidly than Roman had been spoken to. “That system is locked out.”
Adrian rubbed a hand across his face and ran it back through his hair. “Just… fucking reboot whatever needs rebooting. Can you at least get me past the areas with traps?”
“Yes,” the raccoon guy confirmed. “You’ve got a datapad there, we could set up a link…”
“Do it,” Roman ordered. “Are you sure you can do this, Adrian?”
Adrian stared at him. “Mate, I’m not sure I can do it alone.”
Roman would be surprised if this man could manage much of anything on his own at the moment, but he kept that comment to himself. “What do you need me to do.”
“It’s the FTL that’s going to fuck us,” Adrian explained in brief. “I’m going to trip the power to it. The conduits will auto-off for safety, and when I do that I need you to yank it.”
“You’re sure this will work?” Roman asked, eyeing the crazy-looking Australian.
Adrian gave his best reassurance in reply. “Not fucking sure of anything right now, but it should work. If it doesn’t, we’re all probably going to die anyway.”
With a deep breath to steady his nerves, Roman nodded. Like the Australian said, they effectively had nothing to lose. “In that case,” he said, “you had better lead the way.”
+++++
Adrian was leading the way, although he was letting his datapad do the actual navigating. He figured that it might have been easy for the command crew to send him directly into a trap, but aliens weren’t stupid. They knew that they had exactly one survival prospect, and it was Captains Adrian Saunders and Roman Kaminski.
They ran, or at least Adrian ran and Roman pushed himself to follow. He was breathing heavily in the lighter atmosphere to which Adrian’s body had become accustomed, and Adrian was forced to slow his pace to allow the Russian to catch up.
“How do you not tire?” Roman demanded between heaving breaths.
“Alien mutant juice,” Adrian replied, laughing at his joke. “Works fucking wonders for the body.”
“Mutant juice?” Roman asked, staring at him. “You do not look like a mutant.”
Adrian knew that was true, because what he looked like was a space hobo. Everything that was wrong with him was completely invisible, and who knew what kind of effects the Cruezzir was having that the doctor hadn’t picked up on? He shrugged. “You’d be surprised.”
Then, when Roman had managed to catch his breath, he turned to run again, albeit at a slower pace this time. This time the Russian managed to keep up and they were at the Engineering section within ten or so minutes.
It was bigger than Adrian had been expecting, but he tried not to let his surprise show. It was important to seem confident when doing this, otherwise the Russian Captain might stop him. If that happened, they’d all get to find out what suffocating was like.
“There’s the reactor!” he said, pointing it out to Roman. “And over there is the FTL. They’re smaller than you’d expect, but don’t be fooled… it’s all in how much power you put through them.”
Roman stared at him intently. “Are you up for this, Adrian?”
“Mate, I’m not having the best day, but I can do this,” Adrian assured him. There wasn’t anything he was doing now that he hadn’t accidentally done back on the Zhadersil, except this time it wasn’t going to be by accident.
And once he was done he’d be able to have some sort of fucking rest between now and the next goddamned disaster. At some point he’d actually manage to get to Cimbrean and he’d actually manage to see Jen again; he just had to keep going.
“Go check for the release,” Adrian instructed the Russian. “There should be an access panel on the drive container.”
“What will you be doing?” Roman asked, already turning to do as instructed.
“I’ll be fucking around with some cabling and a goddamned quantum resonance reactor,” Adrian replied. Not that he had the slightest knowledge of what he was doing when he was dealing with the latter, but he knew enough about the infrastructure it was hooked connected to in order to get by.
“Then it seems I have the easy job,” Roman mused, walking over to his station and starting to look around.
“Actually,” Adrian called out from the reactor, “if this goes really fucking sideways, we’re probably both going to get cooked by plasma.”
“I have every confidence in your ability to avoid that, Adrian,” Roman replied, and Adrian started to get the feeling that he was being treated with kid-gloves.
“Good news!” Adrian shouted out as he discovered that the infrastructure was familiar to that of the Dominion vessels. “This is basically the same as the ships I… accidentally made not work.”
“Is that intended to reassure me?” Roman called back. “Adrian… there is no access port, this is all sealed.”
“That’s impossible!” Adrian replied, jogging over to where Roman was peeking around wall units and protective plates. A quick examination showed that the FTL drive on this ship had been sealed into its housing and could not be removed.
Nothing about it could be accessed.
“Well,” said Adrian, staring at the giant monkey wrench in his plans, “that’s no fucking good at all.”
“We could blow it up!” Roman suggested. “That would stop it.”
“I don’t want to be stuck here on a dead ship,” Adrian replied. “There’s not much help this far out, unless you fancy engaging the service of some really pissed off pirates?”
“Then what do you suggest!?” the Russian demanded. “Since you seem to know everything!”
“I’ve just got to burn out specific sections of the conduits,” Adrian replied. “You push enough power through them in the wrong way and they whip around in lines of pure plasma.”
“That sounds incredibly dangerous,” Roman objected. “You would have to be insane to do that!”
“Don’t worry mate,” Adrian replied with his most reassuring grin. “I’ve actually done it a few times.”