The Twelve Stones (57 page)

Vicktoria had been questioning him about his work so often, he hadn't even noticed how pointed her interrogations had been until now. At first, her inquiries about his work had felt like normal pillow talk between two lovers, perhaps one overly interested in the minutia of each other's lives, but normal nonetheless.

Tonight had been different. The sweaty lovemaking had been quicker than normal (Sinjakama had been understandably distracted), and Vicktoria wondered aloud why he hadn't been able to satisfy her as he usually did. He had confessed to her that an irregularity in the programming he was working on earlier that night had been on his mind, and had been consuming his thoughts.

He thought that he was being obtuse enough so that she wouldn't know what he was talking about. But when he mentioned the programming error within the navigational controls, her face had changed in a way that he hadn't expected. Ever the professional, she had purred and played dumb, but it was too late, he had seen the mask slip off. She knew. They hadn't admitted anything to each other of course, you never admit to your opponent in chess when you make a terrible mistake, and unspoken as it was, his blonde ideal had briefly revealed the viper beneath, who was ready to kill him at any moment.

He loved women. Sinjakama wasn't ashamed of that. The way they looked, how their warm bodies felt cuddled up to his, the smell of their hair, the way their faces lit up when they saw you bringing them their favorite flowers, all of it was what dreams were made of to Sinjakama. He had never seen women as a problem before, but the fact was, if Vicktoria was working for either Koschei or Rincon (the two most dangerous men on the station), unless he escaped, she would soon tell the man responsible for his discovery and his life would be worth nothing.

Sinjakama rounded the corner and found the communications room. Just as he was about to open the door, it exploded and Sinjakama was blown back across the hallway, crashing into the hallway wall. Fire raged inside the small communications room as Sinjakama sat up dazed not entirely sure of what had just happened. Blood rang from his right ear and he knew that his eardrums had been busted. Gingerly, he rose, and inspected himself. A few cracked ribs to be sure, and blood was running from his right ear, but he was alive. In one stroke, someone had tried to kill him and remove any ability to communicate with the Homeworld from Rosetta. Sinjakama limped towards the communications room, to see if there might be anything left for him to use.

The door was busted open and inside, he could see arcing electricity and sparking consoles. The fire was slowly dying and heavy smoke choked Sinjakama as he looked closer at the electronics within. He could see that the communications consoles were scorched black, the
equipment now rendered useless. As Sinjakama stepped out of the scorched doorway, a deep seed of panic began to take root within the bottom of his stomach and he felt the hallways (which were not especially spacious to begin with) close in on him. There could be no doubt now, Vicktoria was working with the man responsible for the rogue program.

It wasn't clear what had set off the explosion in the communications room, but plan A of sending a message to The Consortium was clearly kaput. His only shot to escape was through the station's mass driver system by ejecting a life-pod towards Earth. Six months in a tin can didn't sound appealing, but at least the life-pod had its own communications array and he could use that to contact the proper authorities once he was far enough away from Rosetta.

Four men approached him from the opposite end of the corridor. They were wearing the black power suits favored by Koschei's private security force. The primary called out after him.

“Dr. Sinjakama, could you come with us please?”

Sinjakama froze. Without knowing who had planted the errant subroutine in the mainframe, he couldn't trust anyone, including the security teams that he had once relied on for his safety. He continued down the hallway ignoring the Alpha's calls for him to stop. He reached a bulkhead separating the hallway and the tunnel leading down to the Pit and the mass driver when they caught up to him.

“Mr. Rincon would like to see you in his office in Downtown.” The closest security guard placed his arm on him attempting to keep him from moving too much. Sinjakama stared at the man through his helmet. He couldn't see the man's face or eyes which made it all the harder to know if they were there to help, or kill him.

“I cannot at the moment. There's an emergency in the Pit. I'm needed there immediately.”

“You and I both know there is no emergency Dr. Sinjakama, otherwise I would have been notified.” The security guard's voice became markedly less friendly. “Come with me now, if you please.”

Sinjakama's eyes began darting back and forth as his mind raced for a plausible excuse or some way to escape away from Rincon's people. Should he be taken into custody, Sinjakama feared he wouldn't live much longer than it would take for Rincon's goons to escort him to the nearest airlock. At the moment, surrounded as he was by the imposing security force employed by Rincon, Sinjakama decided to meekly follow the four men down the corridor.

Ahead he spotted an emergency blast bulkhead a few feet in front of the group escorting him. A plan began to formulate within his head. Used while building the internal corridors of the enormous mining colony, a series of emergency bulkheads had been installed every five hundred feet or so, partitioning off sections of the asteroid so that they could slam shut on a moment's notice in case of explosive decompression. It was an antiquated system no longer used since the central life support systems had been brought online, but, so far as Sinjakama knew, they were still in perfect working order.

The first two security men ducked through the bulkhead and Sinjakama moved as though he was going to follow them through, when suddenly he threw his body to the side of the hallway. Using the security guard behind him's momentum, he pushed the guard on his right
into one of the men in front of him. Sinjakama gut-checked the other guard to his left as the two guards in front of him were taken unaware by his quick movements. Grabbing the man's shock baton out of its holster, Sinjakama zapped the first man he had gutted and smashed the emergency bulkhead alarm with his other, engaging the system.

The two men on the other side of the bulkhead turned to restrain Sinjakama when the bulkhead slammed down on their bodies cutting them both neatly in half. The last security guard standing looked down in horror at his friend's blood that splashed all over his uniform and Sinjakama wasted no time zapping him with 75,000 volts from the shock baton. The man went down hard, smelling faintly of urine.

A klaxon alarm began to ring loudly as a result of the emergency bulkhead being engaged. Sinjakama held his hands over his ears cursing the damn thing for being so bloody deafening. Turning, he sprinted down the corridor until he reached the entrance to a Tun. The tunway were what the moles in downtown called the vast network of tunnels that had been carved throughout the asteroid to make travel easier for the population of Rosetta. Most traveled from one end to the other using Rampets - tiny pod-like cars large enough to seat two people comfortably. Rosetta wasn't a large asteroid by many standards (only around one hundred and eighty-eight miles in diameter), but it was certainly ample enough to make movement from one end to other a hassle without the tunway and Rampets.

Opening the Rampet's cover, he got in quickly and set his destination. Two more security guards, alerted by the klaxon, rounded the corner and saw Sinjakama getting into his Pod.

“Stop!” One of the guards cried out. Sinjakama ignored their shouts and slammed the canopy shut, accelerating out of the station, through the tunway and towards The Pit and engineering a few kilometers away.

Behind him the two security guards jumped into a pod that had popped out behind Sinjakama's and they accelerated after him, hoping to catch up to the rogue scientist.

Sinjakama looked at the heads up display and directed the camera in the back at the two security guards giving chase. The computer informed him that the Rampet behind him was gaining on him rapidly. He was only minutes away from The Pit, but he would need to shake the guards off his tail before they could catch him. Security would soon recapture him unless he could lose them within the extensive tunnel system of Rosetta.

His Rampet rocked violently, sparks flying from the rails as the wheels came up and off before settling back on their tracks. The two security guards giving chase had rammed his pod with their own. They were moving at incredible speeds up and through Rosetta's tunnels flipping one way to the other navigating the twisting tunnels that snaked through the vast asteroid. Sinjakama knew the Rampets weren't designed to take much damage and he feared that his pod would come loose from the rails and crash in a spectacular explosion against the burned out walls of Rosetta's tunnels. Sinjakama had helped bury many men who had succumbed to the same fate, and those Rampets had been operating at peak efficiency. The panel behind him overloaded and exploded as his pod was rocked violently once again. The damage being inflicted by the security guards on his Rampet was beginning to take its toll. He needed to do something fast, before he ended up as a red smear on the walls.

His heads up display was flashing red warning lights and the computer's voice began to urgently warn of total systems failure. Sinjakama tapped quickly on the computer's panel as he disabled the Rampet's safety protocols. He knew this was going to be a high risk, high reward sort of move. Sinjakama grabbed a Rebreather suit out of the emergency kit that was stored in all Rampets and quickly put it on. If Rincon's security was bent on killing him, they'd have to try a lot harder than this.

Sinjakama snapped the Rebreather suit closed and pulled the emergency release cord on the hatch.

The canopy blew off his Rampet as it screamed down the tunnel. The cover from Sinjakama's pod crashed on the rails behind him and caught the Rampet's front right wheel giving chase in a perfect million-to-one shot. The security guard's Rampet flipped up and over, crashing spectacularly as bright red and yellow flames filled the tunnel behind him.

Sinjakama's pod slowed, as the damage inflicted by Rincon's security finally proved to be too much for the delicate craft. The fusion generator on his Rampet failed and the power output quickly diminished to nothing. Fortunately, he was only a few thousand feet away from the Pit and the momentum was enough to carry him to the mass driver that would take him home.

Sinjakama's pod limped into the Tunway station for The Pit and Sinjakama exited quickly making his way over to the Mass Driver's main control panel on the opposite side of the room. The Pit was what the miners had nicknamed the enormous hole in Rosetta where the largest vein of ORI had been discovered. ORI was the reason they were all there on Rosetta. Valuable, expensive, and rare, ORI was a mineral that combined three rare earth elements; Osmium, Rhenium and Iridium. For the modern economy, there was nothing more valuable than ORI, used as it was in nearly every electronic system, ship hull and rebreather suit in the system.

The Pit was usually quiet this time of night. None of the maintenance workers were up and moving as they usually did during the rush hour in the mornings. Daysol wasn't for another half-hour at least. It was only four in the morning on Rosetta, and all the workers were still fast asleep in bed, save for the skeleton crew required to keep Rosetta running through the night and a few enterprising souls who might be just now waking up and getting ready for their shift.

Each morning just before Daysol, the station's clocks and computers were resynchronized to UDT (Coordinated Universal Time), and it was during this daily maintenance that Sinjakama hoped to launch his life-pod while the computers reset and updated themselves with all available data transmitted by the Consortium back on the Homeworld. With the vagaries in special relativity, it was sometimes difficult to keep a synchronized day with Earth and Mars, and a daily time check kept their systems in synch. It kept the trains running on time as his father used to say.

He hoped that the re-synch would last long enough to give him sufficient time to get away from Rosetta so that Rincon would be unable, or unwilling to pursue him. If he was lucky, they might not even notice him missing for a day or two, though after his confrontations with Rincon's security guards and his big mouth around Vicktoria, this was unlikely.

Sinjakama worked quickly lowering a nearby life-pod deep into the Pit and loaded it into the Mass Driver a few thousand feet below the control console. The life-pod wasn't large by Consortium spacecraft standards, but it would be enough for the six weeks it would take for him to travel back to Earth. The tiny ion engines weren't as powerful as the ones he had worked on while on Rosetta, but they didn't need to be to get him up to a cruising speed fast enough to make the journey between Rosetta and the Homeworld in a few weeks as opposed to a few years as it once had taken his grandfather.

The ion drives were marvels of modern engineering. They were simple machines really when it came down to it. It worked by accelerating tiny ions to ninety-nine percent of the speed of light within its engines and used that momentum to propel the craft to fantastic speeds, nowhere near the speed of light of course, but it was the constant acceleration that was its true value - the longer he kept the engines on, the faster the craft would travel. It was this technology that had made space travel feasible for human beings to expand within the solar system. By the time he got close to the Homeworld, his craft would likely be traveling at a top speed of 1,000 meters per second. Not bad for an engine that only needed a few BB sized pellets of ORI.