Waypoint Kangaroo (33 page)

Gotcha, you son of a bitch.

I move out of the corner, getting closer to Bartelt, upstaging Santamaria. “What do you know about the hijacking?” I ask.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Santamaria shoot me a burning look. Yeah, he thinks I'm being an idiot, panicking and giving away information when we should be trying to get it out of Bartelt. I hope he'll catch on and follow my lead.

“Hijacking?” Bartelt says. “I don't know anything about that.”

He's replaced his grin with a very convincing frown. Convincing, but not perfect. He wasn't prepared for me to volunteer such an important piece of information. I can tell he's lying. And if I can tell, the captain can tell.

Santamaria puts a hand on my shoulder. I turn my head and hope he can read my expression.
I'm not
really
an idiot, Captain. Come on, put it together!

His eyes are dark, bottomless pools, and I can't read them. I raise my eyebrows and flick my eyes upward, as if looking through the ceiling, up where Jemison went to help with the evacuation.
Lifeboats. Escape. Come on!

Santamaria leans in close to me and says, “I'll handle this.” He's turned the right side of his face toward Bartelt, in profile, and he gives me a quick wink with his left eye.

I do my best not to exhale or otherwise show how relieved I am.

Santamaria turns to face Bartelt. “You know who I am. And I know who your boss is. Let's not waste time. What are his demands?”

Bartelt chuckles. “Wrong game, Captain.”

“He's threatening to kill half of Mars,” Santamaria says.

“Actually, you are,” Bartelt says. “To no one's surprise, the hero of Elysium Planitia is still bitter about what happened on that battlefield. Your manifesto is quite eloquent. It'll be the top story on every news service tomorrow.”

Santamaria grits his teeth. “So he's completely insane.”

“Like many Independence War veterans, you disagreed with the terms of the armistice,” Bartelt says. “You never stopped fighting for your beliefs. Even if it had to be in secret.”

“And what beliefs are those?”

“Humanity united.” Bartelt says it solemnly, like a pledge. “One people, many worlds.”

“There's no guarantee Earth would win another war,” Santamaria says.

“Once again, we disagree. But it doesn't matter.” Bartelt grins. “The war's the thing, Captain. Have you forgotten all that history you studied? Armed conflict advances civilization. Nothing spurs innovation like the fear of violent mass murder. Everybody wins.”

“I'm intrigued,” Santamaria says. “Tell me more. Is it too late for me to switch sides?”

Bartelt stops smiling. “Open this cell or your man dies.”

Mike's eyes are wide, and I can't tell if it's from lack of oxygen or fear of dying. He looks from me to Santamaria to Danny. His fingers haven't stopped scrabbling against the wire, but he can't get any purchase. The line is digging into his neck. Small droplets of blood are starting to form around the incipient cut. I don't know if the filament can actually slice through bone, but I'm sure none of us is eager to find out.

Santamaria takes a step back. “You'll have to release him before we can open the door.”

Bartelt shakes his head. “No deal.”

“Do you see any hinges on these panels?” Santamaria says. “They retract into the ceiling. If you've still got that wire around his neck, it'll drag both of you up.”

“I'll survive,” Bartelt says.

“You have to release the wire to exit the cell,” Santamaria says. “That will leave you vulnerable to being stunned.”

“No,” Bartelt says, “because your other guard is going to give me his stunner.”

“Why would he do that?”

I can see Bartelt's annoyance increasing. “He can't tag me through this Faraday cage anyway—”

“What's a Faraday cage?”

“Don't insult my intelligence,” Bartelt snaps. “His stunner's useless. And I'll kill his friend if he doesn't hand it over.”

Santamaria stares at Bartelt for a moment longer, then turns to Danny.

“Do it,” Santamaria says.

Danny hesitates.

“Do it!” Santamaria repeats.

Danny flinches and lowers his arms. His hesitation wasn't long enough to merit a barked order like that, but I know what the captain's doing: he's creating the appearance of dissension within his ranks. I started it by seeming to volunteer information, and Danny's reluctance is continuing to sell our performance. I hope Santamaria's got a good finale planned.

The stunner leaves Danny's hands and tumbles to the floor.

“Good,” Bartelt says. “Now open this door.”

He's collected both ends of the garrote in his right hand, leaving his left hand free to grab the stunner. I briefly wonder how he's going to get through the Faraday cage, but then I remember that the conductive mesh isn't terribly sturdy. It wasn't designed to be used on its own; both in the cargo container and here in the holding cell, it needed structural support from another, stronger enclosure. Once the cell door slides away, Bartelt can just punch through the mesh and grab the stunner.

Santamaria makes a show of inhaling deeply and then sighing. He raises both his hands and says to Danny, “Go ahead.”

“Yes, sir,” Danny says in a tight voice. He swipes his thumb against the lockpad and enters an access code.

The next few things happen almost too quickly for me to follow.

First, the clear panel of Bartelt's cell hisses open. The door doesn't move very quickly, but it's fast enough to surprise me. Mike and Bartelt are both dragged upward by the wire around Mike's neck, just as Santamaria predicted, but Bartelt releases his hold on the wire before his own head hits the top of the cell.

As Mike bounces off the ceiling and falls forward, Bartelt dives toward the stunner on the floor. Santamaria, Danny, and I have also started moving. I'm the closest one to Mike, and I need to catch him and get his body out of the way of whatever Santamaria is planning to do. Danny behaves like a good security guard, going after his weapon before it falls into the wrong hands.

Santamaria rockets toward Bartelt, using his right arm to intercept Danny and knock him away. Santamaria extends his left arm and reaches the edge of the Faraday cage at the same time Bartelt rips through it.

Just as Bartelt's hand touches the stunner on the ground, Santamaria's fingers grab his hair and jerk his head backward. Bartelt grunts as both men fall away from me and crash into the back wall of the cell. Danny grabs his stunner. Mike slams into me, and I wrap my arms around him and spin myself backward, cushioning our fall.

Mike's weight knocks the wind out of me, and it takes me a moment to refocus my eyes and look around.

Santamaria has his right arm around Bartelt's neck in a chokehold. He's kicking and struggling, but the captain is holding him tight. I can see Bartelt's face changing color. He'll be unconscious in a matter of seconds—unless he's got some crazy body modification that lets him hold his breath for hours.

Fortunately, he doesn't. Bartelt's body goes limp, and I relax a little when Santamaria releases his head and lowers his left arm. But he keeps Bartelt in the chokehold, and then I see Santamaria's left hand come back up holding what appears to be an antique hunting knife with a ten-centimeter blade.

I'm too confused to say anything until Santamaria puts the blade to Bartelt's shoulder.

“Whoa!” I say. “We can't question him if he's dead!”

Santamaria shoots me the absolute epitome of a dirty look. “I don't murder people.”

I hold up my hands. “Okay, then, what's with the knife?”

“I'm going to remove his communications package,” Santamaria says.

I blink. “You're going to cut out his shoulder-phone?”

“Yes.”

“With a hunting knife and no anesthetic.”

“I need you and Danny to hold him down.”

“With all due respect, Captain, you need your head examined.” In my peripheral vision, I can see Danny and Mike moving closer, and I wonder if they'll agree with me. This is a civilian vessel, but it's still insubordination if they disobey a direct order. “If you want to keep him from using his comms, I can jam his frequency with my own transmitter—”

“For fuck's sake, Rogers,” Santamaria says, “why do you think he wanted out of the cell?”

“To get off the ship, right? Because he knows—”

Santamaria frowns at me. “This was a suicide mission. Neither of these men expected to walk away.”

“He wanted to get out of the Faraday cage,” Danny says. “So he could use his comms.”

There's only one person Bartelt could talk to via his shoulder-phone. And there's only one reason Santamaria would want to remove Bartelt's shoulder-phone instead of just jamming it.

Even I've never had an idea this bad before.

“He's going to know it's us,” I say.

“Not if you do your job right,” Santamaria says. “Danny, hold his legs. Mike, are you well?”

“Yes, sir,” Mike says. His voice sounds hoarse, but there's no hesitation in his tone. “Want me to grab his arms?”

“Please.”

Danny and Mike move into position, pinning down Bartelt's limbs. Santamaria drags the knife across Bartelt's shirt. The fabric tears open, and Santamaria rips it away to reveal Bartelt's skin underneath.

“Okay, let's stop and think about this for a second,” I say. “That comms package is a very specialized piece of hardware. You can't just take it up to the radio room and plug it in. You're going to need something that can interface with—”

Santamaria's smiling now. It's really unsettling.

“I think we need to involve a medical professional at this point,” I say.

 

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Dejah Thoris
—Deck D, Sickbay

23 hours until we hit Mars and everybody dies

The surgery doesn't take long. After expressing strenuous objections on the record, Dr. Sawhney puts Bartelt and me in adjoining beds, administers a local anesthetic, and then makes matching shallow incisions in our shoulders. I flinch as nanobot-filled blood bubbles out of my body and the doctor siphons it away.

“Almost done,” he says, misinterpreting my discomfort.

We're joined by a crewman with short brown hair, dark eyes, and a slim build. Santamaria introduces him as Fritz Fisher, the acting chief engineer. Fritz sets up a portacomp to which Sawhney attaches the data cables leading from the subcutaneous access ports on Bartelt's and my comms implants.

“How do you feel, Mr. Rogers?” Sawhney asks, setting the portacomp on a tray clipped to the railings between the beds.

“Like I've got a hole in my chest,” I say. I look down at the bandage covering my left collarbone. There's a small spot of blood seeping through the gauze.

I really hope those nanobots aren't going to do anything weird in the trash.
Can't worry about that now. Ask Surge later.

While Sawhney gets me closer to the enemy than I ever wanted to be, Mike opens an access panel on the wall next to me and attaches the device from Bartelt's closet to the network cables inside. The portacomp lights up, and I access the other shoulder-phone.

“Phones are connected,” I report.

This is still a long shot. Bartelt does have an agency-standard comms implant, same as I do—the diagnostics confirm that—but it's entirely possible that he's not using any of our standard encryption keys. How paranoid is Sakraida?

The display in my left eye flashes, and then letters and numbers flash and scroll past my vision. I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding.

“I'm in,” I say, and start sorting through the contents of Bartelt's data pod.

Santamaria orders Mike and Dr. Sawhney out of the room, then closes the door and asks Fritz to mirror my display on the tablet connected to the portacomp. I put a hand over the tablet before Fritz can grab it. “Are you sure about that, Captain?”

He nods. “I need to see what they were saying to each other.”

“Yeah,” I say, “but you have a dog, Captain.”
This might blow your cover.

Santamaria stares at me. “There are twenty million people living on Mars.”

I hand over the tablet.

The messages between handler and agent are easy to pick out from all the comm logs. Bartelt's shoulder-phone hasn't been sending to or receiving from anybody else for the past few days. And all the messages are text-only—less data, easier to hide in a network stream. We learned that trick from the Martians during the war.

I scroll through the logs slowly, reading everything carefully, looking for any phrases that might indicate a code or give away some information about how Wachlin took over the engineering controls so quickly. It appears that Bartelt was feeding Wachlin instructions at each step. Either their recruit wasn't very good at remembering things, or the handler didn't want to divulge any detail unless absolutely necessary.

I allow myself a smile when I see Wachlin getting chewed out after setting the fire in his stateroom. That's what happens when you ask for obedience without granting trust.
Zealots need to be micromanaged.
But Bartelt doesn't hold a grudge; he stays focused on their mission. He tells Wachlin exactly where to hide to avoid the ship's security cameras, and when to move during the crew's shift changes.

A few seconds later, I have to stop reading. I look away to clear my head.

“Sick bastard,” Fritz mutters. He's been reading over Santamaria's shoulder.

“No, Mr. Fisher,” Santamaria says. “These men are professionals. They're executing a plan.”

“This guy, maybe.” Fritz jabs a finger toward the unconscious Bartelt. “The other one's a fucking psychopath.”