Authors: Steve Wheeler
Out of sight of the Hauler, he fired a few laser bursts through two of the partially exposed fuel lines and down into one of the external backup pumps, simulating a micrometeor hit, something that was rare for an individual ship, but happened every day somewhere in the fleet. Fuel started to vaporise from the holes immediately, which he knew would trigger an alarm somewhere, so he pulled himself over to the nearest airlock and waited. A few moments passed before it opened and two maintenance and repair drones flew out, allowing him to slip inside and wait pressed up against the wall.
Ten minutes later the hatch closed and the airlock recycled to allow a third drone to enter with lengths of spare pipe and pump components. As it came in, Marko slid out and into the main engine room of
Crystal.
With his secure inter-unit comms system, he sent a call to Glint hoping that he had spread a few of his micro-relays throughout the ship.
‘Marko! We’re in trouble. Very great trouble. This colonel is nasty. She killed the lieutenant and the other sergeant and they were both nice people. She actually destroyed their Soul Savers as well.
Crystal
is very strange; she does not like us and wants to eject us into space. She calls us created abominations.
‘Where are you?’
He flashed Glint his location as Glint continued. ‘Here are the layouts of this ship. We’re being very well behaved, Marko. The evil woman crushed my tail, snapped Flint’s legs and broke Nail’s neck. We are OK, of course, but we wonder how she could do such things. She is not human, Marko. She wants to dismantle Stephine. She says that she is not human either and is an enemy of humankind. I am afraid, Marko. Be very careful, Father.’
Oh, shit, he thought. Not human. Great! He activated the advanced ICE bioware that Stephine had concocted for them. All it did was make him feel normal, but that was better than feeling below par from the virus. He looked around the engine room to find something suitable for a ‘failure’, so the pumps that fed the damaged fuel pipes came in for a little treatment. A drone arrived a few moments later and he encouraged that to fail also by spraying it with fuel and then igniting it. All the fire suppressants came online so he backed a few of them up and encouraged a few more pump failures. He worked long and constructively, creating a cascade of failures until, finally, the colonel herself arrived in an armoured suit to find out what was happening.
Marko did not believe in giving vermin any chances. He deployed the molecular chain-linked diamond blades down his forearms which folded themselves up out of the suit and extended them for their full length past his hands. As she walked past him in the haze, he reached out and sliced her head off. Immediately he saw that Glint was right; she was not human. She was a hybrid human-urchin. The body calmly turned and advanced on him, trying to grab him. As each piece presented itself, he chopped it off while his engineer’s mind tried to fathom how — without a head — it knew where he was. The whole front of the suit opened, revealing numerous tentacle-like structures which continued to reach towards him.
As his mind went into overdrive and searched for options as to how to deal with this thing that was becoming more like a hydra than a human, he activated the suit’s lasers, destroying the middle of its torso. He then fired two micro-missiles into the tops of its thighs. It finally fell to the floor with various parts seeming to act independently, thrashing towards him until he realised that he was running out of time, with not one part but dozens trying to attach themselves to him.
Quickly looking up, he identified the main fuel feeds overhead, locating the oxygen lines and severing them with one of his blade arms. As the entire engine room filled with pressurised oxygen, all the parts of the alien stopped moving, no longer able to attack or attempt to reassemble. He carefully stepped over the parts to seize the alien colonel’s head sealed inside its helmet.
He looked around, found a crynogenics container and dropped the head in, its lips still moving and eyes glaring at him. He flooded it with liquid hydrogen and sealed it shut. Carrying the container and sealing the engine room door after him, he moved down the main corridor towards the bridge, until a Games Board monitor challenged him. Without waiting for an answer, the monitor deployed a small rotary cannon which looked exactly like the one that Jan had designed for
Basalt’s
crew months before.
Without thinking, Marko lasered the caseless ammunition magazine of the weapon which then detonated severing the monitor’s weapon arm and destroying most of its chest. As it slumped against the wall, another monitor rushed up behind him. The suit’s proximity and other warnings went off, showing Marko that lasers were being powered up. He reacted to eliminate the threat, launching tiny short-range missiles which, when they struck the monitor, showered its electronics with a wave of focused neutron beams and destroyed them. The smoking monitor promptly crashed to the floor. It reached up with its hand and opened up the faceplate.
‘You are not to interfere,
Chrysanthemum
crew member,’ the prone monitor instructed. ‘This is not within your jurisdiction. This is Games Board business. Leave now and nothing more will be said.’
Marko brought up the exterior suit controls in his head and activated the external speakers. ‘Why would you think that I am the Hauler ship crew member?’
‘It is logical,’ the damaged human-machine hybrid replied. ‘The
Basalt
crew have been incapacitated as planned.’
Marko suddenly felt very old, terribly tired and a little despondent. ‘Really? Maybe you are wrong. I shall deal with you later.’
Marko left the motionless monitor and went to find the
Crystal
AI housing. It screeched abuse at him as he brutalised it, tearing its casing apart. He smiled grimly, noting that the Gjomvik manufactured components were much easier to break than the biologically grown ones on
Basalt,
which had originally been created by the Haulers. After lifting out the primary brain segments, he extended sensor and investigation probes from the ends of his artificial fingers, pushing them into the web of electronic and biological parts and demanded the AI tell him where its remote parts were. As soon as the answers started to register with the internal map of the ship, he locked down all the doors, then systematically dismantled the units, isolating each part of
Crystal.
When he finally identified her core nodes he activated a small unit — Fritz had taken many months to perfect it — which took control of any computer accessed data blocks. Finally satisfied that the AI was no longer a threat he went looking for the ACEs.
~ * ~
He was cross, tired, full of a virus and generally not paying complete attention when he passed a wrecked cabin door. A black-suited figure hurtled out, knocking him down. He rolled against the wall and flipped over onto his back when whatever it was hit him very hard in the throat. The thought flashed through Marko’s head that had he been wearing a standard suit he would have been out of the fight, then and there. As it was, the iron fist of whatever it was knocked the wind out of him as it punched him in the stomach. Marko was grateful that Veg, Harry and Jan had not been nice instructors. This sort of serious rough and tumble was bearable; only just, but still bearable.
He allowed himself to sag and as the thing came in again to have another go he flashed open the full blade past his left elbow. The block was not so much of a block, but rather allowed the black suit to simply chop off its own arm, which bounced off its chest and rolled across the corridor. As Marko’s opponent sprang backwards, with blood spraying out from the stump, he brought the other blade into play, trying to thrust it up between its legs. But his opponent was quick and leapt up, hitting the wall on the other side of the corridor.
A weapon was deployed from the right flank of the black suit, which Marko immediately responded to with two microneutron missiles, knocking the black suit down hard as its electronics and weapon controls were fried by the energy pulse from the impacting missiles. He brought the pulse laser up then blew the weapon off the side of the black suit as it raised its remaining hand and signalled a halt. The suit sealed off the severed stump and the figure stopped bleeding all over the wall. Marko waited as he could not see any other weapons on the suit and besides, the little pulse laser that he had trained on its head was just plain nasty in its capabilities and he demonstrated this by slicing the soles off his opponent’s boots just to get its attention. The figure slowly touched a seal and the faceplate opened to show an ashen-faced Colonel White.
‘Who are you and why are you on my ship?’ the colonel demanded.
He brought up the menus in his display and activated the external speakers of the suit after deliberately changing the timbre of his voice and adding an old-world Italian accent for good measure.
‘It does not matter who I am, Colonel. I am considerably more interested in you and this ship. Strip out of your suit. I know its type. Then lie down on the floor, extend your arms, um sorry, your arm, and your legs to their fullest extension.’
The suit peeled off her, leaving her naked. As soon as she was down, he picked up her severed arm and allowed his suit to take a blood and tissue sample. After a few moments it reported that she was one hundred per cent human and not carrying any immediately dangerous pathogens. However, it did identify alien proteins and unidentified material in her nervous system.
‘Get up and take me to the
Basalt
ACEs,’ Marko ordered.
‘I bet you are a member of
Chrysanthemum’s
crew. You have no jurisdiction here and you should leave immediately.’
‘Really!’ Marko barked out. ‘Try this for an indication of my interest in you.’
As she stood up, he leant across and injected a rather unpleasant drug into her from a tough needle built into the end of his left index finger. Her face went bright red and she started to vomit after a few seconds. He felt a twinge of guilt because he knew there was nothing more debilitating than uncontrollable vomiting, but immediately swept empathy aside, reminding himself that he really did not know what he was dealing with. The colonel proceeded to curse him between heaving and staggering ahead. That little tool had been one of Jan’s more interesting contributions to the suit, although there were a number of others as well, all medical, most good, some deeply unpleasant.
A small reception of defence drones waited for them outside the medical suite, but as Marko had fervently hoped they did not react to him. Technology, you have to love it, he mused; remove the communications, and then the ability to self-administrate, and it is stuffed.
Colonel White was leaning against the wall and weakly said, ‘I demand to know who you are.’
Marko shrugged. ‘You’re not in a fit state to demand anything, Colonel. If you do not cooperate, I’ll make it worse for you. I shall leave that to your imagination. Open the door.’
The colonel leant against the wall dry-retching, obviously having nothing further to vomit. Marko could see that the severity of her stomach’s contractions was starting to break the seal on her stump. He pulled a patch off his suit and slapped it over the bloody stump; the material locked down into the colonel’s skin, sealing it. As Marko stepped closer to help her up, she lashed out catching him in the upper thigh with her foot.
He grunted, stepped inside the next kick, swept her legs out from under her and kicked her as hard as he could in the crotch, knowing it was not only males who were sensitive in that region. Although he didn’t want to, Marko mentally dialled another drug into the hypodermic and slapped it into her neck. She rolled, then fetched up against the wall, moaning loudly with her whole body spasming out of control.
‘Now stop pissing about, Colonel. I am giving you an antidote which, if I do not boost within three minutes, will make things much much worse for you. Open the door, now!’
He seized her ankle and injected the next drug into her calf muscle. She groaned and as the convulsions stopped, she reached up and keyed in the access code.
The door swung open with the lights coming on, and there were the ACE trio, looking very sorry for themselves. Nail could not lift his head, Flint could not move and Marko’s son, Glint, had had both forearms broken and his tail pulped. The poor wretches were extremely pleased to see him, calling their greetings to him once he’d switched back to the secure unit comms.
‘Shit, what a mess! I’m here now and we will make you all OK.’
‘Is Harry all right, Marko?’ asked Flint.
Marko felt great sympathy for the mechanical spider, and also great pride that all Flint worried about was Harry. ‘No, Flint, he is very sick and in the chiller.’
The soft voice of Flint sounded anxious. ‘But you can fix him, can’t you, Marko? You are very good at fixing broken things.’
He seized the colonel by both feet and dragged her across the floor, kicking the door closed behind her.
‘Are you responsible for this, Colonel? I have already killed one of you. Your other head is in this container. Explain what has happened here or your current head will be joining it.’
She sobbed. ‘I am compromised. The entity that you destroyed was grown from me when I first located the Iris-class Hauler,
Cactus
3. I was ambushed and the ship taken over. There is something in my central nervous system, but it is no longer controlling me. I know that the construct that was made from me must be dead, as I am no longer aware of its presence. Please stop me from being sick, I beg of you. I still don’t know who you are.’