The Santana Nexus (Junkyard Dogs Book 3) (41 page)

Chapter
63.

Santana Nexus Station, tenth ring, January 13, 2599.

Immediately a
fter the Sheik and his entourage witnessed the spectacle of Carlisle unexpectedly defeated Fahada by virtue of using her tether as a weapon, the Sheik's meeting dissolved into chaos. The Sheik stormed out of the room in an obvious hurry, saying that he would resume the meeting only after he had checked on the welfare of Fahada.

In the confusion generated by Fahada's defeat and Carlisle's escape, the Sheik's men were dashing about in a near panic
all over the tenth ring hub area. They could find no sign of Fahada's opponent, that dangerous little Spacer woman, but they did manage to find an unconscious and tied up Fahada after about ten minutes of frantic searching. The Sheik delayed his return to the meeting until he had been assured that his Champion was fine. Given the intensity of the blow she'd taken to the head, the doctors told him it was best that she remain unconscious for a time.

Meanwhile
Captain Kassad of the
Hercules
had used the diversion created by the spectacle for his own purposes. While everyone in the meeting room had been on their feet to see the finale of the contest, He had nodded to one of his Lieutenants who was standing along the wall with the rest of the guards. The Lieutenant had sidled up next to his Captain and slipped a pulse pistol into his Captain's hand. Kassad was ready to take drastic action but the Sheik had left the room in a rush before the Captain could do anything.

A half hour or so later, the Sheik returned to the room to resume the summit meeting. He took his place at the podium in the front of the assembly. Meanwhile,
Captain Kassad eased his way through the crowd until he was only two meters in front of the newly announced Prince.

"I do not recognize this man as Prince Merrikh of Jasmine!
" shouted Kassad, so that all could hear, "He is obviously an imposter!"

With that, the Captain raised the pulse pistol and fired a three pulse burst directly into the Sheik's chest. The crowd watched in
stunned silence as the newly revealed Prince Merrikh of Jasmine tottered to the floor, mortally wounded. To ensure there would be no recovery, Kassad took two steps towards the fallen prince and fired another three pulse burst into his head. The shocked silence was shattered by an uproar of angry shouts and curses.

This time there could be absolutely no doubt whatsoever. The Sheik of Barsoom, Prince Merrikh of Jasmine
, leader of the Glorious Islamic Revolution, was completely, irrevocably and very publically dead. Captain Kassad's men immediately attempted to take control of the room before any more shots could be fired.

"You should be thanking me,"
shouted Kassad, "I have saved us and our glorious revolution from this pompous blustering fool!"

"You miserable
dog!" shouted the Sheik's Guard captain, "You've killed the true heir to the throne of Jasmine!" In an instant his own pulse pistol was out and blazing. The Captain of the
Hercules
, shot in the head at close range, joined the prince and crumpled dead to the floor. Suddenly the entire chamber was crisscrossed with pulse bolts as the room erupted into total chaos. A number of people were cut down in the crossfire before they could take cover. Within the next thirty seconds at least a dozen guards from opposing factions were ducked down behind furniture, exchanging shots with one another.

Suddenly
the tenth ring of the station, the one they were all on, was shaken by a ponderous shudder. In an instant, all of the fighting ceased.

There was a lurch and everyone could feel a pull to
wards the north side of the ring.

At that very moment, the lights went out.

***

Santana Nexus Station, somewhere in the tenth ring hub
, January 13, 2599.

Carlisle
was still making her way through the ventilation ductwork towards the ninth ring hub when she felt the first lurch indicating that the ring ten separation sequence had been initiated. She fought down another wave of panic as she realized that she had maybe thirty seconds or so until the ductwork she was in would no longer be holding air! She was still not close enough to the ring nine hub to be able to get to safety there in the limited time remaining. To make matters worse, she was deep enough into the junction between the two hubs that the portion of the ventilation shaft she was in would be closed off from the rest of ring ten when the ventilation ducting was forcibly disconnected by the separation.

If that happened, she would have nothing to breathe but vacuum!

She used the quantum knife to cut through the screws holding the nearest ventilation grating in place and dropped out into the compartment below. Fortunately, it was a small compartment that was also unoccupied. She was not yet out of danger, however. There was a high probability that this compartment would also be exposed to vacuum when the ductwork above was automatically shut off from the rest of ring ten. She had to get out of the compartment and secure the hatch behind her.

To her immense relief, she exited the compartment into an unoccupied corridor. She
was dogging the hatch behind her when she felt the entire structure of the ring give another lurch. She could hear the atmosphere rushing out of the room she had just vacated.

The lights went out.

She had escaped that trap but how was she going to get to safety from the now detached tenth ring?

Find
a spacesuit, Tamara
, she told herself,
if you can get outside, you can call someone to come and get you
. A check of her wrist computer schematic indicated that there was a spacesuit service compartment just a short way down the corridor ahead. She needed to get there, find a suit of some kind that was even remotely the right size, and get off from this ring of the station. She might even be able to get past the Sheik's men in a spacesuit. In the silvery competition suit she was still wearing from her contest with Fahada, they would know who she was immediately and she would either be shot on sight or taken prisoner again!

Using her computer display as a kind of makeshift flashlight, s
he made her way as quickly as she could in the low gravity of the still empty corridor and into the prep room. She knew that as soon as people figured out what had happened, some of them would want the extra security afforded by a spacesuit and would be seeking out this same room. Some of them were probably on their way already. She looked frantically around the prep room in the poor lighting for something that might fit her and spotted a small reconnaissance suit on the end of one of the racks. A temporary tag attached to the suit indicated that it had been serviced and was ready for use. As she took it down and began to slip into it, she realized that it almost had to be the same suit that had belonged to her arch enemy, Fahada!

S
he quickly pulled the reconnaissance spacesuit on over the telltale silver competition suit.

She was just securing the helmet when several of the Sheik's men came rushing into the room.
As she had hoped, they ignored her as they too began to frantically select suits for themselves. Carlisle just pushed past them and out the door. Dressed in the suit and in the dim light they hadn't bothered to challenge her!

She checked her schematics again
, looking for a likely place to exit the tenth ring. She found a compartment that had been right at the junction of rings nine and ten before the separation. The compartment had a bulkhead on either side and, more importantly, both bulkheads also were equipped with a hatch. She floated and pushed her way there as quickly as she could, entered the compartment and then closed and secured the inner hatch behind her. To remove the atmosphere she used the quantum knife to punch a hole in the outer bulkhead. As the air rushed out, she could see particles of dust and tiny bits of detritus, inevitable byproducts of human habitation, streaming rapidly towards the opening she had created and out into space.

W
hen the atmosphere had bled out of the compartment, she opened what was now an outer hatch and was rewarded with a breathtaking, straight up bottom view of the Santana Nexus Station, still majestic even with only nine rings remaining. Though the station appeared to be slowly receding, it still took up almost half of the expanse of space that she could see. She drank in the spectacular sight for a few moments before she took a deep breath, pulled herself though the hatch, coiled her legs against the outside of the bulkhead that the separation had exposed to the hard vacuum of space and shoved off towards the nine-ringed station.

She soared out into space,
free of the Sheik and his men but far from being out of trouble!

Chapter
64.

Santana Nexus Station, January 13, 2599.

With the entire tenth ring now without power, there was full-blown panic everywhere. The ring continued to maintain its rotation, so at least the people trapped on the ring didn
't have to deal with any sudden changes in the simulated gravity but that was about the only thing that remained normal. Battery powered emergency lighting here and there shed some much needed light but anything that needed doing down on ring ten now had to be done in dim, surrealistic surroundings.

On the North end of the station, the combined forces
of the Federation were able to gain control of the airlock area with a coordinated attack. With the Sheik's forces in that area in temporary disarray, the
Dingo
, the
Donegal
and the
Glendaloch
pulled up to the big force-curtain airlock on the North end of the Santana Nexus Station to unload troops.
Dingo
had it the easiest, she just used her docking tube to quickly disgorge all of the fighters on board. The two mining ships, showing some very fine piloting by their Captains, actually needed to poke the front portion of their craft through the force curtain far enough so that the airlock door was in the pressurized area and unload that way.

Glendaloch
was just finishing up the process of unloading her fighters in this fashion when the
Samak
, one of the Sheik's remaining undamaged destroyers elected to rejoin the fight. The warships of the Junkyard Strike Force were all occupied trying to keep track of a half-dozen damaged ships while keeping one eye on the boarding operations. The Captain of the
Samak
thought he could use the distractions to disrupt the Federation boarding process.

As Captain
Patrick pulled the
Glendaloch's
nose out of the force curtain and began a swing to starboard to clear the airlock for the
Donegal
, the
Samak
brought her front battery to bear on
Donegal
who was standing by waiting her turn to unload. Two pulses strobed out and struck the battered nose shield of the mining ship. The pulse beams were powerful enough to do some minor damage. A portion of the heavy metal shield near the bottom edge was actually blasted loose by the impact!

Seamus O'Connell
, Captain of the
Donegal
had been taking his guard duties seriously and while overseeing the unloading of his sister mining ship, he had kept his ship's 10,000 gigajoule mining laser fully charged and ready.

Just in case.

O'Connell swiveled his ship ten degrees to starboard, centered the front battery of the recalcitrant destroyer in his sights and cut loose with a laser blast that flared the destroyer's shield to near incandescence. Meanwhile, Patrick on the
Glendaloch,
who had kept his laser capacitors fully charged as well, also drew a bead on the destroyer and triggered the powerful beam. With her shield already overloaded by the blast from the
Donegal,
Glendaloch's
follow up blast utterly destroyed the front battery of the
Samak
.

The now badly damaged
Samak
surrendered for good shortly after.

Now the two mining ship captains could each boast that they had defeated a destroyer in battle!

After
Donegal
pulled into the force curtain and unloaded her fighters, the combined forces of the Junkyard Dogs, the Piedmont miners, the Patagonian Militia and the Nexus Station Resistance deployed throughout the upper nine rings of the station and got into position as quickly as they could. As the tenth ring continued to slowly drift away from the other nine rings of the station, the combined forces launched coordinated attacks on all of the Sheik of Barsoom's personnel still remaining in the nine upper rings of the station.

The
Resistance forces from the Nexus Station itself, with support from the Patagonian Militia, concentrated their efforts on the Sheik's personnel who remained on any of the internal rings of the station, rings two through eight. The Revolutionary Forces were really pretty thin on these rings and the Federation forces met with only token resistance for the most part. The most intense fighting occurred in the spoke elevator areas of the rings which was where the Sheik's men headed in an effort to access the spoke elevators, get to the central spindle and eventually to what they thought would be safety on the tenth ring.

Most of them had no idea that there was no longer a tenth ring to escape to
!

The Station Resistance forces herded the Sheik's men towards the spoke areas, right into the waiting arms of Juan Carlos and the Patagonian Militia. Caught in that vise, most of them surrendered after a few of their companions were killed or wounded and they found out how formidable the opposition they were facing was.

As expected
, the Sheik's forces on most of the upper nine rings of the station were relatively light with no more than twenty to thirty of them interspersed thinly within in any of the rings.

There were
two places in the remaining nine rings of the station where resistance was stout enough that the Revolutionaries were not all subdued within the first half hour following the separation and they were, as expected, at the two opposite ends of the spindle. In the North end of the spindle, there was a concentration of the Sheik's men that gathered in an effort to retake the big commercial airlock. Chris Hartmann and a contingent of Piedmont miners were tasked with handling those forces. The south end of the spindle was probably where the greatest level of resistance was encountered. Many of the remaining revolutionists had fled southward towards the tenth ring when the hostilities had broken out. Here Kelly and his marines, seven of them in full battle armor along with hand-picked men from all of the various Federation forces, made ready to challenge the concentration of the Sheik's men who gathered. Neither of these pockets of resistance was unexpected nor did anyone get overly concerned. It was only a matter of time, after all, the Federation forces now controlled virtually everything.

***

Military spaceship docking area near the Santana Nexus Station, onboard Federation prototype cruiser
, Foul Beastie
, January 13, 2599.

In the middle of all the action, Oskar Kresge on the
Beastie
got an unexpected call.

"Commander?" said the
Beastie's
communications officer.

"What is it?" replied Kresge.

"I have someone on a spacesuit radio who is asking for you."

"Do you know who it is?"

"I'm not sure, Commander. She says her name is Carlisle but she's calling on one of the Sheik's frequencies."

"
Carlisle? For Heaven's sake, put her on!"

"Go ahead, Commander."

"Carlisle? Is it really you? Where are you?"

"Yes, Commander.
I'm drifting between the two parts of the station in a borrowed spacesuit."

"What in the
hell are you doing outside in a spacesuit?"

"
I was on the tenth ring when it separated. You didn't know that I had been captured?"

"
Um...no, we didn't. Are you alright? How did you get captured? How did you get free?"

"I'm fine, Sir and
I promise I'll tell you all about it but right now I need someone to come and pick me up. I'm free-floating out between the two parts of the station but I didn't realize how fast the tenth ring was receding and I'm getting further away from the main part of the station by the second."

"I'll send someone right away!"

"Thanks, Commander."

Kresge was on the intercom immediately. "Harris?"

"What is it, Sir?"

"It's Ensign Carlisle. She's free
-floating between the two sections of the station. I need you to get suited up right away and take our two-man sled and go get her."

On the off chance that they might need some kind of small transport capability, the Junkyard Dogs had loaded one of the Scrapyard's two-man sleds on to the
Beastie
.

"How did she wind up there?"
asked Harris.

"I don't have any details yet, just go and get her!"

"Aye, aye, Sir!"

Harris was suited up and ready to depart in less than
five minutes. He took the sled and headed out into the ever-widening space between the two portions of the station. He had to force himself to remain calm as he searched frantically for the Ensign.

***

Santana Nexus Station, ring one spindle area, January 13, 2599.

"Central? This is
Chris Hartmann up at the North Airlock,"

"Go ahead,
Chris."

"I've got maybe twenty-five revolutionaries holed up in the receiving area just outside the north airlock.
They're pretty well armed and putting up some pretty stiff resistance. We need to soften them up a bit. Any chance you could start lowering the temperature up here?"

"No problem,
Chris. How does minus twenty-five Celsius sound?"

"That ought to do the trick,
" replied Hartmann, "we've got them cut off from any of their spacesuits and none of them are wearing much more than the light coveralls that everybody wears. I'll let you know if we need to go any lower."

"Initiating cooling sequence for North Airlock
area...now!"

"Thanks, Central."

"We aim to please! Central out."

About a half hour later a call came down from the North airlock area.

"Central? This is Hartmann. It's okay, you can return the heat to normal. These guys just surrendered. Seems they need to warm up a bit. Can't say I blame them!

At the South end of the Station, the fighting
continued to be intense. Kelly and his battle-armored contingent had managed to push the enemy down to the lowest levels of the spindle but with several of the enemy soldiers also outfitted with battle armor, the situation rapidly settled into a stalemate. Kelly, realizing that he and his forces had the enemy effectively bottled up, decided to simply wait. The enemy wouldn't be able to hold out for too long. Meanwhile three of his battle-armor equipped marines began to set up their 5.5 gigajoule assault cannon. If Kelly ran out of patience, perhaps he could use it to break the stalemate!