Merkiaari Wars: 03 - Operation Oracle (42 page)

He was ready to get to work.

Ready he might be, but he had to wait for the enemy to unload the shuttles and clear the bay. He counted time as the crew went about its business, and braced himself when it was his crate they unloaded. He used the time to scan his surroundings.

Computer: initiate full spectrum security scan. Range out to 200 metres.

>_ Sensors: full spectrum sweep in progress.

The raiders worked on, diligently moving boxes and palettes quickly out of the shuttles. His crate was one of the bigger ones. They chose to store it in one of the cargo holds first and then pile everything else on top.
Dasher
class ships like this one were designed for short hauls. Legitimate users earned a living transporting goods between a planet’s surface and the stations orbiting those planets. They did have foldspace drives—marketing would have had an impossible job selling the things without them—but they were underpowered. They were slow in foldspace, but made up for it in normal space. They needed power to boost cargo out of the gravity well. Multiple holds, big ones for ships that could enter an atmosphere and land, were just one of the selling points that had made the
Dasher
class cargo ships so popular at the turn of the century. Newer models had since superseded them, but all that had done was strengthen the used ship market. They were a popular choice out in the border zone where money was tight, and of course there were other uses for fast ships with the ability to land. Raiders loved them.

Eric busied himself reading the results of his security sweep. It didn’t make for good reading. The ship had a larger crew than he had expected. Gina had killed four and eight had come calling upon the base to find their buddies. That was twelve. A ship this size didn’t need many more than that to run efficiently, yet he counted over twenty moving about and his sweep didn’t cover the area outside the ship. Because he was a big believer in pessimism—pessimism had never killed anyone, but optimism often did—he decided to double the number to forty plus hostiles. That was pushing even his abilities, and he considered going directly for the bridge. He could use the ship’s more powerful transmitters to contact Gina. Together they could handle it. He fighting on the inside, Gina hammering them on the outside. Yes, together they could take the ship even from so many, but that meant leaving Liz and her people uncovered. Not something he would have considered just yesterday, but he had the file now. The mission had changed to getting it back to Snakeholme not protecting civilians who would all die anyway if he failed to take the ship.

A stealthy attack would be best. A dagger thrust to the bridge, a call to Gina, and then a short victorious war to claim a way off this snowball. With luck, the civilians would survive and all would be well. It was a vague plan at best, but he deemed it viable. As always, the devil was in the details. His route to the bridge, the opposition he was likely to encounter, counters from the raiders, and any number of things needed to be factored in. If the raiders raised the alarm he could find himself in trouble. All it would take was one sensible man on the bridge sealing it, and he would be screwed. The hypothetical crewman could call all the crew in from outside to surround and overwhelm him, and he with no way to contact Gina for aid.

Eric frowned as he worked the problem using sensors and old database entries to map the interior of the ship. He hadn’t ever had this precise scenario occur before. Surprising really. Going through the motions and following his programming, had been his existence for decades. It sometimes felt as if everything he did was just a variation of a theme. Scenario A occurs and respond with scenario B... all is programming.

He shook his head at his distraction and concentrated on the problem at hand. His database had most of what he needed. This wasn’t his first time on the
Dasher
class of ship. Had he ever been crew on one of them?

Working...

Eric sighed and scowled into the dark. Damn literalist computers anyway. Couldn’t he even think a rhetorical question without interruption now? Obviously not. He let the blasted thing run its search and busied himself building an ops plan.

So, he was in cargo hold three, the closest to the boat bay. Made sense. No one wanted to shift cargo further than they needed to. The enemy had simply shoved everything they’d stolen into the first available space. That was fine, but it made his job that tiniest bit more tricky. He had been stored in a busy part of the ship. The raiders were constantly in and out of the bay heading outside to do whatever, and coming back in to unload cargo or fetch things. He didn’t need someone spotting him so early in the plan. Hopefully no one at all would spot him until Gina came on scene, but he couldn’t guarantee that. The best he could do was minimise the risk of discovery, and that meant not using the ship’s decks to reach his objective. It had to be the service ways then.

Negative.

What the hell? Oh right, the search was negative. He hadn’t been crew on one of these tubs before. He knew that. Didn’t matter in the least. His sensor map was getting nicely detailed and his database had the basic layout of the
Dasher
class for him to use. With luck, the enemy hadn’t bothered to modify their ship any further than beefing up its weapons and ammo carrying capacity. That was the usual pattern. Raiders didn’t usually spend money on interior layout changes. The bridge was the bridge, environmental was environmental, and engineering was engineering. That sort of thing. Where changes might occur would be in areas such as crew berthing, cargo areas, and other places that wouldn’t influence the actual function of the ship. Additional magazines for missiles for example could be created in any empty section, but unless he needed to move through such an area to reach another, he couldn’t see how it had any effect on him.

He mapped a safe route through the ship using the service ways and ventilation tunnels. Safe, as long as the alarm wasn’t raised. Ships, no matter the class—military or civilian it didn’t matter—had things in common. Things like keeping the air in! In cases of emergency they all had blast doors that would seal off sections of the ship. The section seals everyone saw daily when walking the decks of any ship or station, were lifesavers, but few realised the complexity required of such systems. Section seals and blast doors in personnel areas were relatively simple things, but imagine having to seal every maintenance tunnel, every ventilation shaft, every possible way for air to escape while maintaining a ship’s systems to all areas through the myriad of pipes, wires, and god knows what. It made Eric’s head hurt. Ship design was not in his future that was for sure. The point here was that a single alarm could seal every deck and service tunnel to the bridge. He had to reach it absolutely undetected.

That was going to be hard. Very hard indeed.

Eric kicked his way out of his confinement. He couldn’t just lift the lid. It was buried under all the other cargo the raiders had piled atop it. His boots thudded into the side of his box with the power of pneumatic jacks. Thirty seconds and repeated blows later he was out and stripping off his environmental suit. It was a relief to be out of the smelly thing, but not because of the stink. It just made movement and combat easier.

He drew his pistol in a lightning fast move, his enhanced muscles performing the task smoothly as always. He holstered it and adjusted his belt. He drew again. Yes, that was perfect. He holstered the pistol again and checked his rifle. All was as it should be. Calling up his much-annotated map, he orientated himself and headed deeper into the cargo hold to find his initial access into the guts of the ship.

It was a maintenance hatch like any other. There were hundreds like it on the ship, needed for engineers and their remotes to service the ship and make repairs. Anything that moved or could fail in any way at all needed an access point like this to repair or replace it. Some of the service ways were too narrow for even the smallest engineer to navigate, and those were used exclusively by droids and remotes. That fact had made his choice of route harder because there simply wasn’t a way to reach the bridge without emerging into the ship proper. He had made allowances, trying to minimise those emergences and making them in rarely used parts of the ship. He used his combat knife to pry open the cover over the controls and used them to open the hatch.

The first leg of his journey to the bridge was a simple matter of following the service way to the first vertical junction. He was careful to close the hatch behind him, but he didn’t need to take any further precautions. He was well insulated deep in the guts of the ship that few people, if any, ever saw. No one would hear him clambering about. He encountered only a single repair mech on the way, and it had stowed itself in its charging bay. Not that it would have mattered if it had been active. It was the autonomous kind, not the type requiring a tele-operator to function.

The service way was large enough for him to walk if he doubled over. He chose to do that at first, but soon resorted to a crawl. It was easier and frankly he preferred to keep his head up and looking ahead rather than down. Despite keeping his sensors sweeping ahead, he was still Human enough to prefer seeing where he was going with his own eyes. Crawling slowed him, but he had time. No one knew he was aboard. He could take the entire day if it meant reaching the bridge undetected.

The vertical shaft allowed him to stand, but it presented another difficulty. Mechs had anti-grav. He did not. He looked for a way to climb, but the designers had decided not to include a ladder or rungs. Probably expected the engineers to use remotes for manual inspections and any maintenance would be handled by droids and mechs equipped with anti-grav.

Eric slung his rifle on his back out of the way and tested the cable trunking and pipe work lining the shaft. It creaked as he pulled but held. He gave it a little more and one section pulled free with a bong sound ringing through the walls. He scowled and tried one of the other control runs. Surely they weren’t all held in place by spit and bailing wire? He tugged and this time the pipe held. Good enough. He began climbing, his legs kicking free beneath him.

The
Dasher
class ships were small freighters when compared to their multi-million ton brethren. They were the minnows in a sea swarming with leviathans, but for all of that the climb was still something like four stories. Eric made it to the right junction and into a cross tunnel that he followed for only a short distance. He had reached the first of his exits. The service way continued on and if he followed it, he would have eventually run out of room far from his destination. The hatch he contemplated would allow him to exit on Deck3E. The E stood for engineering, and ordinarily he would be delighted, but this wasn’t a normal infiltration. He could cause mayhem in engineering, but he needed the ship intact, so no fun and games breaking delicate things today. His visit would be purely that and just a waypoint on his way further forward.

The hatch unsealed smoothly and Eric emerged. Sensors reported crew working nearby, but not within visual of him. He resealed the hatch and crossed the compartment quickly and out the door into the corridor. He ran. The burst of speed had him at the right door in seconds. He ducked inside just as a woman appeared around a corner, but she either didn’t register him or thought he was crew. She walked passed his door and didn’t raise the alarm. Lucky for her, because she would have been dead the second she tried.

Sensors reported all clear. He was in the auxiliary control room used for monitoring the fusion plants. It wasn’t manned. Usually someone would only be stationed at the controls during jumps to and from foldspace to monitor the draw of extra power needed at those times. He had gambled the raiders would be occupied elsewhere and wouldn’t be performing maintenance. It had worked out.

There were no service ways leading from this compartment to anywhere he wanted to go, but all areas of the ship needed air. He found the grill covering the environmental duct and used it to enter the airways. He didn’t need to go far. A blessing because the air ducts were confining. He had to lay prone and pull himself the few hundred yards he needed to reach his next waypoint. He reached it quickly but sensors alerted him to a problem. The compartment he needed wasn’t empty.

Two red icons glared balefully at him. He eased forward until he could see through the gaps in the grill and scowled. A man and a woman were performing an intimate inspection of each other instead of the ship they were meant to be working on. Their clothes and tools were scattered all over the compartment, and it seemed unlikely they would finish any time soon. Eric watched the woman energetically riding her friend where he lay upon the deck exploring her breasts with roaming hands. The show didn’t move him at all except in how he needed to deal with the situation.

Sensors reported only these two near enough to hear a commotion. Not that he planned to allow one, but he wouldn’t take chances. He drew his knife and gently pried open the grill. He allowed it to fall and burst into the compartment, his legs thrusting hard. His dive sent him across the room and he executed a roll back to his feet that brought him up behind the woman. She cried out, reaching her climax just as the knife entered the back of her neck just below her skull. The sound instantly died with her, the knife severing her spinal cord. Her partner’s eyes had been closed, but he must have felt her go limp. He looked up in time to see the knife plunging for him. He didn’t have time to scream.