Mapped Space 1: The Antaran Codex (25 page)

I wondered if a human engineer could
have dealt with the threat as effectively as Izin. Tamphs weren’t just smarter
than humans, their minds were faster because their segmented brains allowed
them to think in multiple simultaneous streams – a little trick evolution had
so far denied
Homo sapiens
.

When I reached the
Heureux’s
processing core, in the dim
red light it seemed even more spacious than I remembered. Although larger than
the
Lining’s
compact equivalent, it
was less sophisticated. Marie’s old freighter was equipped with the bare
minimum of what it needed to get the job done and almost every system was overdue
for replacement. By contrast, my EIS background had given me a taste for
sophisticated tech, which was why the
Silver
Lining
was a technological treasure trove with a tinkering tamph engineer
constantly making improvements.

My helmet beam revealed the central
processor’s access panels had been removed and were now adrift in the
compartment. The loose panels weren’t the result of sloppy maintenance, but an attempt
by the crew to stop whatever had commandeered their ship’s processing core. Considering
the state of the
Heureux
, they’d
clearly failed.

I glided into the compartment towards
the octagonal control console in the center of the room. As I neared it, the
form of a man floating face down, close to the deck beyond the console, came
into view. He wore a pressure-suit and his head and arms were wedged inside the
console where he’d been working when he died. A magnetic shifter, a long
wrench-like tool to remove panels, floated close to his body. I pulled myself down
to him, then eased him away from the panel, turning him so I could see his
transparent faceplate. His skin was swollen and purple from decompression and
trickles of freeze-dried blood had crystallized around his nose and eyes.

“I’m in the processing core,” I
reported. “Marie’s engineer’s here. He’s dead.”

He’d been trying to do exactly
what Izin had asked me to do, sever the central computer’s connection to the
rest of the ship. I checked his suit, finding a tear in the right leg below the
knee. It wasn’t the ragged tear symptomatic of accidentally snagging the suit, but
a straight line, blackened at the edges as if a cutting torch had sliced it
open. Inside the tear, the engineer’s leg was burnt, seared to the bone.

Decompression may have killed him,
but it was no accident.

I grabbed the magnetic shifter
out of the air and kicked away from the processing core, spinning in mid flight
to angle my boots towards the wall, cursing myself for not having brought my
P-50. While I drifted towards the bulkhead, I swept the compartment with my
helmet light. An eight legged hull crawler was creeping across the ceiling
towards me like a predatory spider stalking its prey. It had been almost
overhead when I’d kicked away from the central console. The crawler was an older
model than the type Izin used, but just as impervious to hard vacuum. It
carried a plasma torch in one of its leading arms which suddenly glowed to life,
adding a harsh, flickering yellow tint to the compartment’s dim red emergency light.

I switched on my boot’s magnetic
clamps moments before they touched the bulkhead and stuck fast. Holding the
mag
shifter like a club, I was acutely aware that as a
weapon, it was greatly inferior to a burning plasma torch.

“Ah . . . Izin, how good are hull
crawlers at zero-G combat?”

“Hull crawlers are not designed
to operate unanchored to fixed surfaces, Captain,” Izin replied, “however, they
are programmed with basic Newtonian physics in case they become separated from
an anchoring surface.”

The crawler picked its way
carefully across the ceiling towards me. It seemed to be sizing me up,
preparing to attack. But that was stupid! Hull crawlers were dumb maintenance
machines, not tactically aware battle bots.

“Could a hull crawler beat a
human in zero-G combat?”

“Of course, Captain, with the
proper programming.”

How about an ultra-reflexed human
with a
mag
shifter?

“Humans are not well adapted to
zero gravity,” Izin continued, “whereas hull crawlers are able to coordinate
their extremities with a precision impossible for biological entities. Why do
you ask?”

“I’m facing an octo with a hot
plasma torch!” I replied. “It killed Marie’s engineer and I’m next.”

“I’ll be right there, Skipper!” Jase
yelled.

“Stay on the sensors, Jase. If
those Ravens come back, take the
Lining
and get out of here fast!”

“But I can get there in–”

“No! If the
Lining’s
destroyed, we’re all dead.”

Jase fell silent, then Izin said,
“I will come, Captain. I can restore the
Heureux’s
systems faster over there.”

It would take Izin at least five
to six minutes to suit up and reach me, but I didn’t have that long.

“OK Izin, you come,” I said,
watching the meter long machine creep towards me.

I switched off my boot magnetics
and kicked off, gliding away from the crawler. Seeing I was about to escape, it
scurried across the ceiling and down the wall, slashing at me with the torch, scalding
the metal base of my boots. It could have caught me if it had jumped, but it
chose not to lose contact with the wall. The crawler might have had better zero-G
moves than me, but it clearly didn’t like to use them. Having failed to cut
open my pressure-suit, it ran down to the floor and scuttled after me as I
glided away.

I tumbled, then using my legs
like springs, bounced off the bulkhead and glided diagonally across the room
away from the octo. It ran up onto the central console and stabbed after me
with the glowing torch. I rolled again, this time activating my boots long
enough to clamp onto the bulkhead and swing towards the entrance.

The octo anticipated my move and
tried to cut me off as I launched myself at the hatchway. It reared up on its
back four legs, lunging at me with the torch, but I swatted it away with the
mag
shifter, sending myself spinning out of control. My
helmet crashed into the ceiling, then I reverse tucked to offset the spin and caught
the edge of the hatchway with my free hand. My body slammed clumsily into the
wall, almost knocking the air out of my lungs, then I pushed off with my knees,
pivoted around my hand and flew backwards through the hatch. The eight legged killer-
bot
rushed after me as I floundered across the corridor
until a toe of one boot caught the ceiling. I pushed sideways, out of the
crawler’s sight, then walked across the ceiling to the wall near the hatch.

The octo scuttled into the
corridor, lifting a leg to climb the wall as I swung the shifter down onto its
fragile sensor dome. The transparent hemisphere and the fragile optics within
shattered, blinding the murderous bot. I pushed off the wall, tumbling clear as
the crawler swept the torch wildly over its head, then performed a fast, zero-G
somersault followed by a rebound off the opposite wall that sent me hurtling
back at the crawler. I crushed its body with a ferocious, two handed hammer
blow that sent me careening away, leaving the octo shorting out behind me. By
the time I got a magnetized boot to a metal surface, the octo was drifting
lifelessly in the corridor, eerily lit by its burning torch.

It hadn’t been pretty, but I
still remembered enough of my zero-G training to be dangerous. I made a mental
note to start practicing again, as soon as possible.

“So much for Newtonian physics,”
I said. “The crawler’s dead.”

“Good job, Skipper!” Jase exclaimed
with relief.

“I’m entering the airlock now,
Captain,” Izin informed me.

I floated to the dead octo, switched
off the torch, then returned to the systems control console. It didn’t take
long to find the dead engineer had been close to disconnecting the processing
core from the rest of the ship. Whatever had infected the
Heureux
must have summoned the crawler to protect it. I quickly
finished what the engineer had started, then as I floated up from the control
console, I saw a second crawler standing in the corridor, watching me through
the hatchway. It lifted one of its legs to reveal an electro welder, which
burst to life.

“Not another one,” I muttered.

I lifted the
mag
shifter like a club, ready to do battle, then the crawler’s central torso exploded.
Legs and bits of its body casing drifted apart. One leg tumbled end over end
into the compartment past my helmet. Presently, Izin appeared carrying his six
millimeter shredder. It looked like a toy pistol with a disproportionately long
barrel, but in his inhumanly steady hands, it was a weapon of lethal accuracy.

Izin floated into the compartment
carrying a small tool box and my P-50 slung over his shoulder. He holstered his
gun and threw mine to me.

“Thanks,” I said, strapping it
on, glad to be rid of the shifter.

“There are other hull crawlers
inside the ship, Captain. I destroyed one near the airlock and another in the
corridor.” He turned towards the central computer. “I’ll clean their computer’s
hardware, then reinitialize the system. It’ll get them to Axon, but they’ll
need to do a full rebuild later.”

“Getting
atmo
back is the priority.” I’d feel better once the ship was pressurized again and
the crawlers couldn’t kill me just by puncturing my p-suit.

I left Izin to clean house and started
towards the lifeboat bay. I saw no more crawlers as I glided through gloomy
corridors, then as I approached the lifeboat compartment, Izin announced he’d
scrubbed the
Heureux’s
processing core
back to clean metal, and was beginning the emergency rebuild.

The large hatch to the lifeboat
compartment was open, but the space door was still closed. It could be chemically
blown from the hull in an emergency, but either the crew hadn’t wanted to leave,
or hadn’t been able to.

The
Heureux’s
lifeboat was a rugged, stretched egg-shaped craft with no
capacity for superluminal flight and enough supplies and power for months
adrift in space. It was equipped with a small cockpit window for the pilot to
eyeball surrounding space, although the underpowered thrusters were only useful
for docking. Highly sensor reflective material coated its thin hull,
complementing two long range emergency beacons, although the chances of rescue
if no one was looking for you were virtually zero.

Light from the small cockpit
window spilled into the bare metal compartment. I was about to push myself
towards it when a spindly shadow charged out of the darkness. I fired once,
shattering the hull crawler into a dozen pieces and discovering Izin had loaded
my gun with explosive slugs. I caught one of the crawler’s legs as it tumbled
past, examining it for a moment, then floated towards the front of the lifeboat.

My heart was beating as I
approached the window, worried at what I might find inside. Or not find. At the
window, I relaxed when I saw Marie floating inside, talking with her barrel
chested
copilot, Gadron Ugo, and several other men and one
woman wearing crew suits.

I holstered my gun and rapped on
the window.

Marie and her crewmen looked up
surprised, then she kicked off a chair and came gliding towards me with a fearful
look. She started motioning with her fingers, miming spider movements, warning
me about homicidal hull crawlers and pointing frantically into the darkness behind
me.

I was delighted to see she was
genuinely worried about me, so I played dumb. I smiled and pretended I thought
her spider miming was a wave, so I waved back, grinning like a Cheshire cat. She
shook her head and gestured even more frantically into the dark, growing
rapidly alarmed and frustrated that I didn’t understand I was about to be torn
apart by a murderous hull crawler.

Finally, I held up the leg of the
destroyed hull crawler. Surprise flashed across her face, then I showed her my
P-50 with a knowing look.

She relaxed, giving me a relieved
smile and blew me a kiss.

* * * *

By the time Izin had restored life to the
Heureux
, the Raven scout had begun
edging back towards us, probing the Shroud with powerful long range scanners
making me anxious to get underway. Finally atmosphere returned, allowing me to remove
my helmet and the lifeboat’s hatch to be cracked open.

“I knew you’d find us!” Marie said
as she jumped out, wrapping her arms around my neck and kissing me with gusto.

When I came up for air, I said, “Just
business my love?”

She smiled coyly. “You know how
it is Sirius, a girl’s got to make a living!”

“So where’d you hide the Codex
after you stunned Jase back on Icetop?”

“Under the bed.” The same bed
we’d put to more pleasurable pursuits only hours before! She saw the look on my
face, adding apologetically. “I didn’t have time for anything else! I was going
to tell you Vargis stole it, but when he walked in, I had to blame Bo.”

“Anything to get me out of the
way!”