Severance (46 page)

Helot didn’t really recall what happened for the next few
minutes, although by the way people treated him afterwards, it may have
involved a little bit of going completely berserk. He definitely
recalled some screaming. He also may have tried to flip over the tactical
table, the seven ton behemoth that wasn’t just fixed to the floor as much as it
was an essential part of the floor. And he definitely recalled ordering
everyone to go kill everyone else, an order which thankfully wasn’t acted on.
Even once the scope was clarified —
“Kill them, you fools!”
— someone
probably pointed out that that was impossible. There were too many of them.

Whether he calmed down, or simply ran out of gas, Helot
eventually found himself on the floor, leaning against the unflipped tactical
table, Curts gently reminding him that they only had another few days left to
finish cutting the disconnects. They could dig in. Hold off the Othersiders. This
didn’t sound berserk enough to Helot, but it had a certain appeal, in that it
was the only plan they had.

And then someone informed him that the Othersiders had
almost snuck into the core. They had actually been two decks
above
Helot. Where they were setting off bombs and killing more people.

Another short spell of berserking, more calls for everyone
to kill everyone, now accompanied by a strange, deafening static noise, which
he later realized was probably the sound of his brain failing. Again, Helot woke
up to find himself staring at Curts’ uselessly flapping jaw.
Why wasn’t he
out killing everyone?
What was so important to say that he had to stop
killing everybody?

“Sir?” Curts said, his voice trembling.

Helot jabbed a finger into the engineer’s chest. “What? What
is it? We’re about to be overrun by bomb–throwing morons, and you’re standing
there burbling like an idiot.”

Curts flinched, looking away. Not meeting Helot’s hate–filled
gaze, he said, “I’ve got an idea. How to stop them, I mean.” He fidgeted with
something on his terminal. “It’s a little crazy, though.”

“Good. Make it crazier,” Helot said. “All the way crazy.”

“Sir?” Curts blurted, looking confused. Helot felt a pain
shoot up the right side of his face, then realized he was clenching his teeth
too hard. He waved his hand in a circle, beckoning the engineer to continue.

“Okay.” Curts moved forward to the tactical table, bending
over the map. He zoomed the screen out until it displayed the entirety of Level
1. “Here’s where th–th–the Othersider forces are,” he said pointing at the
shaded semicircle that was the source of Helot’s troubles. “Okay, here’s my
idea. We still have c–c–control over the bulkhead doors. All of them — across
the ship.” He tapped on the map to indicate a bulkhead door on Africa Street
just past the barricade the Othersiders had blown through. “They could have
disabled our controls, but I don’t think they’d have done that. Can anyone else
think why they might?” He looked around the room as a sea of blank faces looked
back. “Anyways, I don’t think they have yet.”

“Hurry the fuck up, Curts.”

“Right. So, my plan is, we close the bulkhead doors here,
here, here…” He drew lines on the map, drawing in bulkhead doors, tracing out
an enclosure that encompassed the Othersiders’ main force. “Now, look at…” he
said, his finger tracing over the map, searching for something. “This room
here.” His finger stopped over a room near the Othersiders’ perimeter. “We c–c–can
get people in here without them seeing. So, we send in a team of engineers with
a fuse torch, and,” he swallowed, hesitating. “And we c–c–cut a hole in the
floor.”

That got Helot’s attention. He stood up straighter, waiting
for Curts to continue.

“If we cut a big hole — say a meter or two, in this room
here, and then blow open this door somehow…”

“You’ll suck all the air out of that section of the ship,” Helot
finished his thought. “Just that section, right?” Maybe he didn’t want to go
all the way crazy. That was a good sign.

“Uh, just that section, sir. Once the pressure starts to
drop, there’s no way they’ll be able to open these bulkhead doors. The vacuum
would be c–c–contained.”

“How long would it take for the air to evacuate?”

“From the streets? A few minutes. There would be air pockets
in all of the rooms and buildings, of course, once the membranes shut. There’d
be enough air in there for a few hours — maybe a day — of breathing.”

“So, they die quickly, or they die slowly,” Helot said,
nodding slowly. “But they’d die.”

“If they like breathing air, yes.” Curts stared at the map. “If
we wanted to, with some c–c–careful control of the bulkhead doors, we could
reintroduce air to this section small bits at a time. Enough for security to
rush in and overwhelm anyone t–t–trapped in the rooms. To capture them.”

“How long would it take you to do this?”

Curts took a deep breath. “Maybe a c–couple hours?”

“Then you should have started a couple hours ago.” The
static seemed to fade from his hearing. Helot felt a shudder as the adrenaline
started to leave his system. “Good work, Curts. It’s refreshing hearing
something positive from you for once.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Helot nodded. “
Now, don’t fuck it up.
”

§

Curts maneuvered the fuse torch slowly and deliberately in
the enviro–suit, not wanting to take any chances. He hadn’t worn an e–suit in
years. Move slow, that was the rule of thumb. Leavened in this particular case
by the urgent need for haste the captain had impressed upon him.
Don’t fuck
up, indeed.

Curts shut off the blade and moved to his right a bit,
grabbing at the heavy cord secured to his waist and dragging it with him. The
tethers necessitated even slower movement than normal, although he wouldn’t
have done the job without them. From his waist, the thumb–thick cord snaked
across the floor and out the door to a neighboring room, where it had been
fastened to the floor with massive bolts. He had watched the installation of those
very carefully.

There were other people more qualified for this, more
capable with the fuse torch, more experienced working in e–suits. But the job
was risky, and it was his idea. And, not long ago, he had been kicked in the
head. That angered up the blood a bit.

Truthfully, he had been looking for an opportunity to do
something like this. He had weaseled his way into this plot, betrayed everyone
around him for the chance to touch real dirt. And everyone knew it. He was
tired of the looks he got, from Helot, from the security officers, from
everyone else around him. They knew he didn’t belong and let him know with
every sneer. A miserable life awaited him on the surface of Tau Prius living
with these people. He needed a chance to prove he had earned his ticket.

Another wedge of rock loosened, he turned off the torch
while two naval engineers crawled into the hole. They were almost two full
meters below floor level now, just past the sandwiched insulation layers.
Anywhere from one to five meters to go. The navy guys wrestled the rock out of
the hole, fighting with their own tethers. Hopefully, those would just be
safety measures. Hopefully. The plan wasn’t all the way crazy, just very close.

The chunk of rock removed, he climbed down into the hole,
slightly deeper this time, and aimed his fuse torch at the lowest spot. He hit
the trigger, and a bright blue blade shot out the end, the facemask of his suit
immediately darkening to obscure it. He twisted the blade around, slicing into
the rock. He waited a few seconds for it to penetrate to its full depth, then
slowly dragged the blade around, chopping another wedge of rock out of the
ground.

A tremendous hissing noise filled the room. Curts let the
fuse torch blade snap shut and scrambled back out of the hole as fast as he
could. Everyone watched the hole anxiously. There was nothing to see, but the
sound told them volumes. A tiny sliver had been chopped clean through the hull
of the ship. Above them another sound, as the membrane above the door snapped
shut, sealing the room off from the street outside. Curts sat back, and took
several deep breaths. This was good news. It meant the two rooms would
depressurize slowly. Beside him, he watched one of the other engineers
monitoring the air pressure on his terminal. He gave a thumbs up and went into
the neighboring room to examine the emergency airlock they had sealed around
the door there.

After five minutes, the two rooms had almost completely
emptied of air. Curts tested the tether again, then set back to work with the
fuse torch. He could afford to move a little more quickly now and started
sawing away at the hole. Working in the deepest part, he cautiously sawed out
another small chunk of the floor. He felt rather than heard the crunching sound
as a little piece broke loose and fell away, rocketing through the floor and
out into space. He looked down; there were stars in the floor.

Now that they didn’t have to pull the chunks out of the floor
by hand, he began slicing off larger pieces from the perimeter, letting them
drop through the floor on their own. In short order, he had quickly expanded
the perimeter of the hole until it was almost a meter in diameter. He stepped
back, admiring his work. Good, but probably not good enough yet — he had
calculated that they needed a hole almost twice as big to drain the air fast
enough for their purposes. Confident in the work now, he began making even
larger slices. The hole grew progressively wider.

While bending down to make a cut at an awkward angle, the
worst feeling: movement. The ground was sliding out from under him. Leaning
back, Curts screamed, as one foot completely gave way. He fell backwards,
spinning around, hand flapping, desperate to gain a solid purchase on
something. The blade of the fuse torch was still glowing, his hand on the
trigger, refusing to let go of anything solid.

He watched in slow motion as the blade sliced through a loop
of thumb–thick cable.

Everything after that was just math, as the chief engineer fired
out of the floor of the Argos at almost forty meters a second.

§

Hogg lingered at the edge of the room, watching Kinsella
vibrate in rage. “Can you try again? Find another way?” the mayor shouted into
his terminal.

“No, we can’t try another way!” Stein shrieked back, her
voice audible even to Hogg. “Weren’t you listening? They were ready for us!
They will remain ready for us. Fuck you, you f…” She presumably went on like
that, but with a tap of the finger, Kinsella ended the call.

“Bad news?” Hogg asked. Judging by the expression Kinsella
directed at him, Hogg decided that he had better stop speaking for a while.
Kinsella had finally felt it safe enough to come visit the forward command post
and arrived a half hour earlier wearing an extremely tight, vaguely military–looking
uniform. Chevrons everywhere, multiple layers of epaulets, that kind of thing.
He had expected to be told that he was now the undisputed ruler of the ship.
Which he wasn’t. What he was — overdressed — didn’t satisfy him, and he had
spent the last half hour making the command post a very unpleasant place to be.

Kinsella whipped his terminal across the room, smashing it
against the wall. “Yes, Hogg. It was bad news. All the way bad,” he said, his
voice remarkably even. “They’re fucked. Those two tits managed to escape, but
the rest of your team’s captured. Or dead. Or whatever.” Hogg’s hands clenched —
those were some of his friends that were now ‘whatever.’ Kinsella pointed a
finger at him. “This is your fault somehow. You fucked me. You waited until I
turned my back, and you fucked me.”

“I’ve done nothing but try and win this fight for you.”

“
Then why do you keep losing?
”

“Because you gave me an army of losers!” Hogg winced when he
said it. A large number of those losers were within earshot.

Kinsella pointed at one of the losers and snapped his
fingers. “Your terminal.” While the young soldier fished his terminal out of
his webbing, Kinsella turned back to Hogg. “Yeah, well, I gave you a lot of
them.” He snatched the terminal out of the hands of the young soldier and poked
something into it.

“What are you doing now?” Hogg asked.

Kinsella looked up at him. “You’ll see the same time
everyone else sees. Because the hell I’m telling you any more of my plans in
advance,
officer
.”

§

What an idiot.
Helot felt his face flush, watching the
white–faced security officer who told him about Curts. “What an idiot,” Helot
said, deciding to not keep the thought to himself. “Why in hell would he do
that? Doesn’t he know how to delegate? I mean, holy shit, Curts.”

“Everything else is done, though,” the security officer
reported. “The charge is in place. Everything’s ready to go on your order.”

“On my order…,” Helot repeated. He took a deep breath. It
was a hell of an order to give.

His original plan had been perfect. No one had to die! The
ship would have been in two before anyone even noticed. Everyone gets to live.
His new plan was not perfect. People had to die. They already were dying. He
really shouldn’t be speeding that up, should he?

His terminal vibrated. He looked down at it, curious. Only a
handful of people on the ship could contact him directly, most of whom were in
this room, or recently deceased, or…

“Mayor,” he said, taking the call on speaker.

“Ahh hello, Captain,” Kinsella’s voice slithered out of the
terminal. “I’m doing quite well, thanks,” he said, answering a question Helot
hadn’t asked. “And yourself? Awfully, I hope.”

“I admit, I’ve had better days, Eric.”

“That’s a shame. Whatever’s the matter?”

“You, killing people,” Helot said. “That’s kind of ruining
my day. Is it not ruining yours?”