Deadshepherd (Tales of the Final Fall of Man Anthology Book 1) Page 16

  But when you were in a war, it was okay to kill more than four. That was the point. Enemy combatants, them or us, glorious victory, military targets, the safety and liberty of the people back home, take your pick. It was a veritable smorgasbord of redemption.

  Çrom had once spent more than four years in a set of tiny interconnected thermal pods with Drago Barducci. He knew that giant bastard slept like a baby.

  Still, he had his method and it usually worked out. They had fought their way through a few knots of mixed humans, Bonshoon and Blaren, and had killed meh-number of them before reaching the oxygen farm level below what they had guessed would be the Captain’s dome, on account of it being the Captain’s dome on the A-Mod 400. It had seemed like the safer bet, since they knew the Captain was gone, so no coin-tossing had been necessary. Plus, Dool had served his last meal in the officers’ dining room only a couple of levels down, which suggested that was the side of the modular’s exchange they were on.

  Resistance had been reasonably professional, and alarmingly heavily-armed, but the enemy had been clearly distracted and wanting for orders and leadership. This deficiency grew even more acute after a series of shudders and lighting fluctuations marked Commander W’Tan’s assault and – with any luck – the cutting off of any reinforcements or retreat to and from the Nope, Leftovers. Çrom was pretty sure none of the people left alive in the modular knew where the infiltrators were, or how few they were. The oxygen farm was bloody freezing, after all, and his own crack team had demonstrated admirably just how easily its strategic value could be overlooked.

  “Gunton and Constable, stay here and hole up,” he instructed, forcing his teeth not to chatter. Nothing ruined heroic Captain-talky-time like a set of chattering teeth, although he could do nothing about his nipples inexorably freezing and drawing everyone’s attention towards them, starting with his own. There had been three thermals near the access hatch, all of them Molranoid in design, but they still worked for humans. Gunton just looked funny with two extra sleeves hanging out under his arms, and Constable looked adorable with the garment all bunched up and dangling. No big deal. The important thing was that they didn’t freeze. “Find the main oxy-block processing and replacement port. It will have a maintenance panel that connects to life support and basically includes shutdown controls for most of the main systems. You want to be able to switch shit off when you’ve got highly-volatile oxygen-enriched algae thawing out in the system. You can use it to control things remotely if you’re not too fussed about causing major headaches for the repair crews down the line. But the panel will be well-hidden.”

  “Copy,” Gunton said, tucking his extra sleeves into his belt.

  “Blue, Melvix, with me,” Çrom continued. “Let’s go and take out the subluminal drive. Or undo the long-term docking blocks that have been put in place, or … I don’t know, something. Cut away the caked-on shit that’s turning this thing into an annexe. Keep ourselves busy.”

  “Subluminal drive core should be near the recycling plant,” Blue said, checking her weapons. “Five levels down, if this modular keeps on not surprising us.”

  “Let’s plan for her to surprise us, but hope for her not to,” Çrom suggested. It seemed the Captainny thing to say.

  They killed another four or so people on their way to the recycling plant.

  XIII (Meanwhile, Again)

  The subluminal drive core was where they had expected it to be, which was fortunate. It was also nearly-unguarded, mainly due to the fact that most of the people they’d intercepted on their way down to it had also been on their way to defend it. Or at least to intercept any potential saboteurs. As it turned out, they’d intercepted them sooner than expected, and had in the process gone from being interceptors to interceptees.

  The ongoing ship-to-ship fight outside, and the relative confusion and lack of guidance on board the Nope, Leftovers was still working in the A-Mod team’s favour – for now.

  “Okay,” Çrom said as Blue cut her way into the armoured chamber using the scattergun. They were inside one of the crew quarters rather than attempting to get into the core directly through its access doors, which was probably another thing helping them avoid interference. “Get in there, neutralise anyone hanging around guarding the core, and get busy stripping the regulator plating off.”

  “Copy,” Blue said, baring her fangs as the gun grew too hot to touch. She released the firing stud, dropped the hissing weapon onto the carpet, and kicked the cut-away interior hull segment to send it crashing into the chamber beyond.

  “Did you pick up that howling gorgon from the guy we met at the last deck access hatch?” Çrom asked Melvix.

  “You know I did.”

  “Set it for a staggered overload,” he instructed. “Then take it around and into the recycling plant and put it up under the main processing interlink. Give us fifteen minutes,” Melvix was looking at him strangely. “What?”

  “I’m just wondering if that blow to the face rattled your brains,” Melvix said. “Won’t a full-bore overload do more damage if we put it in the subluminal drive regulator? When you told Blue Persephone to take off the plating–”

  “We can take out the regulator with the other weapons we have,” Çrom said. “We don’t need the gorgon. Trust me, it’ll be more effective at the interlink,” he squinted at the Molran. “You’re still looking at me funny.”

  “This is how I look at humans when they start making monkey-noise.”

  “Honestly. Haven’t you ever thrown a cherry bomb into a toilet?”

  “I have no idea what that is.”

  “Then I shall forever relish this day as the day I taught Gonon Melvix a new thing about stonking up an enemy starship from within. Go.”

  Without further discussion Melvix nodded, pulled the heavy subsonic resonating device from the strap over his upper shoulders, and trotted away towards the plant.

  Çrom and Blue entered the core, killed the pair of Bonshooni who were blundering their way towards the unexpected incursion point, dismantled the regulator and were quickly replacing its casing when the gorgon’s first-stage overload hit the recycling machinery’s waste processor. The interlink uncoupled, hiccoughed, and the second-stage overload sent thousands of gallons of putrid, acidic bio-matter back into the modular’s recycling pipelines. On the third and final stage the gorgon exploded like a very small but hideously-loud anti-vehicle mine and the starship’s digestive system went into full reverse, regurgitating her stomach contents from a hundred major waste receptacles and five hundred minor personal chutes. As far as doomsday weapons went it was a bit low-key, but it was seriously distracting.

  And that was before the ship’s health and safety measures – measures Dool and his crew had probably forgotten about – automatically fired up and did their stupid, earnest best to deal with the problem.

  There would be no getting back out of the core through the crew cabins, but fortunately they could now go directly to the core access doors and open them from the inside. Melvix was waiting in the corridor. The sound of alarms and shouts, of slamming quarantine barriers and the roar of antiseptics canisters firing from janitorial drone fixtures could be heard in the distance.

  “That,” Melvix said, “was truly nasty.”

  Çrom reached up and scratched the left side of his head with his right hand. “Ook ook,” he responded with a perfectly straight face.

  XIV (Meanwhile, Again)

  “You realise, don’t you,” Melvix said, while Çrom industriously fired his stolen heat-baton at the edges of the core access door they’d just closed behind them, “that as soon as they mow through the quarantine plates the entire crew will be congregating on the recycling plant. And they will be extremely annoyed.”

  “And don’t forget smelly,” Blue added.

  “Well golly,” Çrom said, still playing the baton methodically over the hinges, “maybe we’d better not stick around.”

  “Yes,” Melvix said, “so what are you doing? You’ll ne
ver cut through that access door using a heat-baton – and besides, we were just in there, and we just locked it behind us.”

  “I know,” Çrom said. Somewhere down the corridor, a janitorial began reminding nobody in particular about basic quarantine and sterilisation protocols in a loud, clear voice. Its programming must have informed it that somebody had dropped the sanitation ball in a major way, and so the machine was doing its lumbering best to pick up the slack.

  “You’re making it look as though we tried to get in, and failed,” Melvix concluded, “and had to settle for that … gag … you had me pull in the recycling plant.”

  “Bingo.”

  “Won’t they know we were in the subluminal drive core because their friends on-duty in there are dead?”

  “Maybe,” Çrom twirled the baton happily, and stuck it back in his belt. He examined his handiwork. There were streaks and smudges of blistered cladding across the door and frame, and some very minor warping in the fixtures. Perfect. “But they’ve got a lot of other problems right now.”

  Melvix clearly gave up. “Did you take care of the subluminal drive?” he asked.

  “It’s firing up now,” Blue replied as they trotted off down the corridor, “and it should burn out as soon as any major effort is taken to direct the ship – not that it looks like they’ve even tried to keep the flight controls working since they docked her. Nothing short of a full strip-down and rebuild will correct the alterations, and with any luck they won’t see that we’ve made them anyway.”

  “Especially if they think we never got in there,” Çrom said, pleased.

  “And the sludge explosion will keep people out of the crew quarters,” Melvix said with grudging admiration, “so they won’t find the hole we actually did cut. You devious bastard.”

  “They might find the hole from the core side,” Blue said, “I mean, I just shoved the section back into place. But this is all a question of temporary distraction anyway, right?”

  “Right,” Çrom agreed, as they arrived at a ceiling hatch. Blue leapt, caught the monitoring bumper with her lower hands, punched the panel open with her upper hands, and heaved herself inside with spidery ease. “We’re going to destroy the ship anyway. And the alteration to the subluminal drive will still allow us to nudge her a little from the maintenance panels on the freezer level, as long as we stay inside the precise tolerances that only we know about, because we input them,” he glanced expectantly at Melvix.

  “Captain?” the Molran raised hairless eyebrows. “Did you want more praise?”

  “No, I want a boost,” he pointed at the ceiling. “You think I can jump all the way up there and pull myself into that hole?”

  Blue Persephone braced her lower arms inside the hatch and lowered herself back down into the corridor, extending her upper arms to catch Çrom’s wrists.

  That was about when the remainder of the Nope, Leftovers’s crew appeared.

  XV (Meanwhile, Again)

  It was a rather compromising position to be in, Çrom reflected philosophically. Dangling in the middle of a modular’s corridor by the arms when a large group of enemies began to file around a corner. Dangling in the grip of a bright-red Blaran, no less, who was poking out of the ceiling while a slightly blood-soaked Molran stood flat-footed in front of you.

  Well, Çrom thought, at least I have a shield, even if it could stand to be a bit broader.

  The crowd, the full extent of which was difficult to establish at that point, were clearly following some sort of emergency evacuation or assembly drill, and had begun swiftly marching in their direction from some presumably-stricken part of the modular. The humans and Bonshooni in the lead faltered in surprise for an instant when they saw the scene in the corridor ahead of them. Çrom, harried and distracted though he was, also couldn’t help but notice they were all clearly marching away from the area he and his crew had just gone to the trouble of hitting.

  Why they were doing that instead of moving into an intercept-and-attack net around the recycling plant to catch the intruders was anyone’s guess. Along with why in the name of Karl’s glorious bunghole this corridor had to be the one they were filing down.

  Still, at least Melvix didn’t hesitate.

  “Fire in the hole!” he bawled, and flicked a gleaming, hand-long, wrist-thick cylinder over the heads of the first few rows of enemy crewmembers before turning and pelting back down the corridor at a dead sprint, raising his upper hands to cover his ears. Blue Persephone hauled Çrom effortlessly up into the ceiling just as Melvix tore underneath them. There was some weapons-fire, and a lot of shouting, and a couple of confusing minutes passed as Blue bodily pushed her illustrious Captain into the maintenance and ventilation labyrinth between the floors.

  Human, Blaran and Molran met up again just a couple of corridors over, in a raw materials supply chamber for the evidently-abandoned recycling plant.

  “‘Fire in the hole’?” Çrom said, as he lowered himself out of the ceiling and rubbed his elbow where he’d whanged it on a corner. “Seriously?”

  “I heard you say it once,” Melvix shrugged one shoulder and continued to watch the entrance.

  “Uh huh,” Çrom said sceptically. “Did I say it while throwing a portable flashlight into a crowd of people with guns?”

  “They didn’t know it was a flashlight. And it distracted them.”

  “I’m not debating that. How many were there?”

  “I didn’t get a good look. I’d estimate about forty humans, twenty Bonshooni and a smattering of Molren and Blaren. They all scattered, but by the time I doubled back around through that crew cabin and climbed into the hole and hid inside the drive core, none of them were actually following me. I came back out through the access door again, and none of them were–”

  “You’re shot,” Çrom pointed at Melvix’s leg, which was sporting a neat black-rimmed hole in the uniform material and a corresponding black patch on the thigh beneath.

  “Yes, I did notice that,” Melvix rubbed the wound – clearly an exit would, from a nasty heat weapon of the sort this crew seemed to favour – with an irritated flash of his fangs. “Thank you, Captain. It’s not serious, just a heat-fracture,” he went on. “The leg will still hold my weight.”

  Fucking Molren, Çrom grumbled to himself, then frowned. “Wait. They gave up that easily?” Melvix nodded, and Çrom smacked his own forehead. “Damn it,” he said, “we’ve been looking at this wrong.”

  “How so?” Melvix asked.

  Çrom pointed out into the corridor, where contamination alarms were still blaring merrily. “These guys are shit.”

  “I’ve been looking at it right the whole time,” Blue remarked.

  “Yes,” Çrom agreed patiently, “but what do shitty bounty hunters do when infiltrators get onto their ship and smash the Hell out of it, and an enemy vessel is outside getting ready to mini-whorl their arses right out of reality?”

  “Damn it,” Melvix breathed, echoing Çrom’s outburst of moments before. “They go for the escape pods.”

  XVI (Meanwhile, Again)

  Sidestepping the occasional aimlessly-trundling janitorial and pausing to deactivate a couple of quarantine panels, human, Molran and Blaran made their way back to the oxygen farm where they’d left the rest of their team. They didn’t encounter any more crewmembers from the Nope, Leftovers. Presumably they’d all proceeded in an orderly fashion to the escape pods and made their getaway.

  Çrom regretted that it was – if all went well for their side – only going to be a temporary getaway. He was all in favour of taking prisoners and avoiding total carnage where practical, but the main players in this little drama could not get word back to their employers. Nak Dool had made it abundantly clear that at least he and his inner circle suspected entirely too much, and any survivors would greatly complicate things for the mission.

  The ship had to be destroyed, and that meant the people in the escape pods were going to die very slowly out in space … unless the A-Mod 400 did t
he merciful thing.

  “Captain,” Gunton said as they crunched back into the frigid farm ring, “we managed to get a bit of life support and basic control, we were just debating letting it warm up in here.”

  “Forget it,” Çrom said, “we’re moving out as soon as we’ve set the flight controls. Were you able to get into the comms system?”

  “Still locked out – battle stations,” Constable replied, tugging her sleeves back into position for what must have been the seven hundredth time from the frustrated force with which she did it, “although we did see the acknowledgement and launch signals from the pods. Was that the crew, or did you launch them?”

  “Pretty sure it was the crew,” Çrom replied, glancing at Melvix. The Molran nodded and stepped across to join Gunton at the panel. “What about the maintenance subtext?” he continued.

  “You mean the messaging system the drones and ables use?” Constable said. “We might be able to send short messages to other access panels on the ship, but what good’s that going to do us?”

  “Our crew will be tuning in to that frequency,” Blue said. “Providence and Segunda have amped up the hexagon to peep in through all sorts of windows.”

  “Right,” Çrom said, “and they need to know about those escape pods, just in case they’ve managed to jettison under some sort of cover. Send a priority fix message with a double HLCF event code – it’s one of the double-code errors permitted by the template but it’ll get Seg’s attention – and mark down the escape pod bays for–”

  “Captain,” Melvix looked up.

  “What?”

  “Looks like we have a compartment on the nearest crew deck–”

  “You mean the deck we just left?” Çrom said beseechingly. “The recycling plant level? You want us to go back there again?” Melvix made a decidedly ambivalent gesture with his dry-blood-smeared lower left hand. “What’s so special about this compartment? Is it a treasure compartment?”