Cold Sleep, page 11
Adrenaline drives me back up, bringing the deckgun round even as I twist first one foot, then the other free of the floor. Zed—or whoever it is—slashes again but I pull the trigger. Without being anchored the shot from the deckgun sends me hurtling backwards, tumbling head over heels and spinning crazily. Consciousness slips away for another moment, leaving me in the dark place where only logic still clings to awareness.
Not Zed. The only thing that can change its face is an ITF assassin. One of the fabled killers under the military arm of the nascent UN World Government. A techno-murderer beyond equal who serves only the International Task Force. As far above my big brother, Cal the void-marine, as his training and gear put him above an unskilled colonist armed with a pointy stick. A myth yet one you can’t dismiss as a conspiracy theory when Superstate leaders and Corporate officials are well known to demand DNA verification of anyone who comes near them and never trust a familiar face. Ghostfaces. It’s said they have nanotech that allows them to alter their features and hack any security… like a QI virus…
Blink back. Pain returns to my shoulder. A savage tearing at my sanity but I cling to it, dive into the agony to hold onto consciousness. As I spin through the air, I see the Ghostface has kicked off towards me. Knife held against the back of his forearm, ready to slice me apart. Now, I’m facing away from him but I bring my deckgun in line with where he’ll be when my rotation brings me round again. There. Straight in line. I jerk the trigger, once, twice but my spin takes him out of sight again. Dully, it dawns on me my spin hasn’t changed—my trajectory through the air remains the same. The gun didn’t fire.
He grabs me and jerks me round to face him as we turn and tumble. His knife hand comes up in an arc to end my life and my vision goes dark. It takes me a moment to feel the wetness on my face. Not the light spatter of blood droplets against my skin but a thick wet layer covering the lenses of my rebreather and blots out the world. His hand isn’t gripping me anymore.
In darkness, world turning around me in sickening jerks, I slam into a hard surface. Scrabble madly for a handhold as I bounce away and feel the stikpadded tips of my toes on one foot catch something solid. My body whiplashes against that hold and my ankle, already strained from dodging the first fatal thrust, pops in searing agony. But the stikpad holds. Using what little strength is left to me, I fight my body’s movement and bring my other foot down beside the first.
Voices… but they’re so far away. The pain rises again in a tide and carries me away.
CHAPTER 10
* * *
Light hurts my eye. Not both of them—the left one. It goes away. Fingers prise my right eyelid open and again searing brightness burns into my brain.
“Will she live, Doctor?” M’Benga’s voice.
“Yes. I’ve repaired the severed artery and sealed her wound. What with the synthetic blood I’m pumping into her, she should make a full recovery.”
“A pity. But we need the traitorous bitch.”
“She can probably hear you, Lieutenant. And I do not appreciate such talk about one of my patients. Certainly not when they are ranking officer on board.”
A metallic thudding comes, loud and shocking.
“They aren’t giving up,” Hiroki says.
“I will deal with it, but I need you to wake her. I need to know what she’s done.”
“That might not…”
“Shut up and do as I tell you.”
I groan, trying to form words. “M’Benga.” It sounds slurred to my ears, but it’s recognizable as her name.
“See… I warned you she could hear.”
“Give her something, I need her to speak not drool and groan.”
Thudding again, louder this time. A prickle at my neck and shock runs through me. Eyes leap open on agonizingly sharp light which swims in and out of focus. I try to sit up. A hand presses firmly on my good shoulder, holding me down.
“Easy, Kara, easy,” Hiroki says.
My déjà vu is shattered by another bang.
“Hiroki,” I mumble, mouth clumsy and full.
“Give the stimulant a chance to work. You’ll find you feel better quickly but you mustn’t believe it. You need rest though our Chief of Security doesn’t seem to understand that.”
“We’ve no time for this. Out of my way.”
M’Benga steps into my field of view, pushing Hiroki aside. She leans in close, staring into my eyes.
“You…” I begin.
“We have no time. The Captain is dead. The revenant I saved you from killed her. What was she trying to do?”
It’s a struggle to grasp what she’s saying. A thousand thoughts collide in my head, setting off chains of ideas and images, leaving everything as a blur between what’s real, and what’s imagination. Like I’ve been hitting a wedge of the polymetamine so beloved of slumrats like Zed. Zed…
M’Benga shakes me and I wince in expectation of pain but all that comes from my shoulder is a dull ache—as if I’d strained it while training in the officer’s club gym, back on Earth.
“Focus, malaya. Focus!”
“Help me sit up,” I gasp.
“I really don’t adv…” Hiroki says.
“Shut up, Hiroki.” M’Benga snaps.
Her arm comes round behind me and eases me upright. It’s only then I realize we have gravity again. My head spins leaving me blinking to chase away the dizziness.
“Don’t you pass out on me. I need you, kukaribisha!” M’Benga starts shaking me again.
“Stop. Stop it!” I shout, my voice a harsh rasp but I’m stronger. Clearer in the head. I swing my feet round to hang from the medical couch, ignoring Hiroki’s clucking.
M’Benga draws a breath to speak again but I hold up a hand. “Siyanda, maybe I owe you my life, but if you shake me again, I swear I will pull your fucking arms off.”
Her eyes widen and she rears back. My words may be absurd but my tone holds a cold certainty—the attitude which’d gotten me through Officer School despite the daily attacks of my competition.
I massage my neck above my wounded shoulder. “The Captain is dead?”
“Yes. After we killed the revenant attacking you, I checked on the engine port. Could see her pulling herself towards the access airlock. Struggling to open it but the door was jammed. I tried to undo the damage he’d done before we got him…”
“And?”
“There was no time, someone else was there—a revenant. It grabbed her… then the engine restarted.”
M’Benga falls silent. The shock of what she said runs through me. Dominguez, an ice-cold killer of an officer who’d have happily spaced any of us if we’d given her cause, had died to save us.
“We have a chance,” I say. “Thanks to Captain Dominguez, if we can defeat the revenants, we can still stop Charon in time.”
The clanging noise again, this time it’s clear someone’s striking the door to the medibay.
“What was the Captain’s plan?” M’Benga asks.
“Plan? She didn’t have a plan. At least, none she told me.”
“Then we are fucked,” Hiroki says.
“Stow that talk, doctor or I’ll put you on a charge. We are not fucked!” M’Benga bellows at him.
“No, we’re not,” I say. There’s nothing left to lose. Nothing left to gain except my life and this ship which I’m now captain of by default if not by merit. “Lieutenant M’Benga…” another crash at the door interrupts me.
“Yes,” she says.
“That’s ‘Aye, ma’am,’ Lieutenant. Or do you dispute I am acting Captain by virtue of seniority?”
She hides her frustration well, you have to give her that. “No… ma’am.”
“Good,” I say, not believing she’ll let her suspicions fall away. “Do we have a route to the command section?”
“No, ma’am.” Another booming clang from outside. “Revenants have trapped us in here.”
“Weapons?”
“Two deckguns, three magazines.”
“How many revenants are we talking about?”
“A hundred, a thousand. Didn’t have time for a headcount.”
“Sarcasm is not appreciated, Lieutenant. Now, Hiroki. You have an uplink to the main computer here?”
“Yes, but it has limited functionality. We can’t access any of the command protocols.”
“Lieutenant M’Benga, in your assessment of this situation, do you agree it is unlikely any crew survive except those in this room?”
M’Benga stares at me, her eyes hard and her expression unreadable. She sighs. “Aye, ma’am. Couldn’t raise any of the crew on their radios, then I got Dawkins. He was under attack. By the time I got there… it was too late.” She closes her mouth, her jaw muscles working.
“Meecher was with us when we found you but she was pulled into a vent when we were fighting off the revenants to get back into the medibay,” Hiroki says. He blinks and a tear runs down his cheek.
I reach for my pocket to retrieve the QI-virus but the top half of my wearall has been cut away. Another bang comes at the door and a splintering sound as if the viewport’s giving way. M’Benga spins, aiming her deckgun at the door.
If she’d found the link-key with the virus on it, she’d have used it to justify usurping my place in the chain of command. I catch Hiroki’s eye, raise an eyebrow. He nods at me, no more than a slight shift of his head.
“Ma’am,” M’Benga says, the word still strained. “The revenants can’t break through the medibay door, though they could damage its mechanism so we’ll not be able to open it,”
“Understood, Lieutenant. Your team was slaughtered, wasn’t it?”
She hangs her head. “Yes ma’am.” Another reason she’d not pressed to take leadership—guilt. Pathetic.
“Yet you escaped. How?” I ask.
“Climbed into a ventilation shaft. They narrow to a point where the revenants had to crawl to follow me. I was able to leave them behind.” Her eyes meet mine, challenging me to criticize her actions or mock her stature. But command now rests on my shoulders and it fits me well.
“Quick thinking, Lieutenant.” Another bang at the door, shaking my nerves. “The air vents link throughout the ship, right?”
“Aye, ma’am. But they have pressure seals between compartments. And the VIP module has its own air processing.”
I suspected as much but it still leaves me with an idea.
“Lieutenant, what happens to the vents if there’s a sudden loss of pressure in any section of the ship?”
“They lock down.”
“All of them?”
“No, just the affected sections.” M’Benga scowls, maybe seeing where I’m going with this.
“What if we jammed the pressure seals open?”
“They couldn’t stop the ship from depressurizing. I see,” she says, a grin breaking across her scarred features.
“It’d take some time to kill them all,” Hiroki says. “They’ve displayed quite a startling level of intelligence so far. Perhaps, they would understand what we were doing and stop it.”
“But if they are mzuka then how do we know it will kill them?”
Both of Hiroki’s eyebrows shoot up, I hope in disbelief that M’Benga still clearly believes the Captain’s ghost story. He tilts his head, almost as if he’s asking my permission to educate her.
I sigh. Shake my head. “The Doc here found nanotech in the revenants’ brains. Nothing supernatural, OK?”
I look to Hiroki, expecting him to chime in and back me up with some science, but he stays silent, a troubled expression on his face.
M’Benga grunts and from the look on her face it’s obvious she hasn’t changed her mind—she fears these revenants are a supernatural threat, from being “beyond the protective light of the stars.” Out in the dark where dragons lurk or some such horseshit. You could die laughing, but I have to stop myself. It’s not the command response.
“Listen to me, both of you. I know our former Captain was willing to turn to superstition to explain this.” No point in telling them about Dominguez having a code to activate the nanotech, or about the code not working. “I agree it’s hard to explain why this has happened, but these things die easy enough when you unload a deckgun in their faces.”
“Not easy,” M’Benga grunts. I ignore her.
“The “revenant” you saved me from was nothing of the sort.”
“What?” they both croak.
“It was a Ghostface.”
“That’s… impossible.” Hiroki says.
“Siamini hivyo,” M’Benga says. I quirk my eyebrows at her. “They’re a myth, one I do not believe in.”
“Yet you’ll believe ghosts or demons lurk between the stars, waiting for a vessel full of cold-sleepers to pass by. So what if Dominguez was right and we’re all dead in cold-sleep…”
“An over-simplification,” Hiroki says. I shoot him a look and he falls silent.
“As I was saying, if we were all vulnerable then why hasn’t it affected the crew? Hmm? Not one of us.”
“You’d lost a lot of blood, maybe you imagined it,” M’Benga says.
“Well, why don’t we choose logic over superstition? And since I am in command, we’ll assume this madness, whatever it is, has a physical, mundane cause. No more spacer’s tales. Understood?” I let the last word snap, even though it makes me desperate to cough. I fight it back until they both salute.
“Lieutenant M’Benga. Clear the door. Then hold the nearest vent. We’ll be going through shortly.”
“Aye, aye, ma’am.”
“Doctor, give me the link-key you recovered from the revenant’s corpse.” He looks at me with a shocked expression.
“The one you found warrant officer Hong’s fingerprints on.” Hiroki’s eyes narrow. Now’s the time he might betray me. When you bluff, best keep your expression relaxed and neutral—you learn that playing cards and surviving the drill-sergeants at the Academy. If I’ve judged him correctly, Hiroki’s feelings of friendship towards me will sway things. If not…
“Yes. Yes, I have it here somewhere.”
The medibay door opens and M’Benga’s deckgun begins its song. I ignore the screams and roars of pain, focusing on the task at hand. Activating the medibay computer, I insert the link-key into the terminal jack. Within moments, the QI virus uploads. Have to hold my breath as I order it to batter down the barriers preventing command access.
If Stengler was in on this whole thing—a corporate patsy or worse an agent for the UNWG—then now would be the time. Or would it? Maybe the virus had been programmed to do no more than wake the Ghostface, or Revenant Zero, or both. Maybe it hadn’t been involved at all. I doubt I’ll ever know.
The display jumps and blurs. When it clears, the core command menu opens before me. Speed, ship orientation, time to midpoint and the fatal burn of the fusion rockets—all laid out. The system is easy enough to navigate, quickly bringing me to its root menu. In the meanwhile, M’Benga’s gun has fallen silent and the howling of dying revenants has stopped.
Pulling up the command overrides to set the VIP module to eject with a countdown of thirty minutes takes only two command lines. The countdown is silent but gives us long enough to crawl into the forward section, jam the vents open, and get ourselves into hard voidsuits. I confess to a flicker of emotion at consigning the people within to an eternity lost between the stars. But two things calm me.
If we can regain full control of the Charon, it can maneuver and dock with the lifeboat.
If we can’t, well, every sleeper in the ’boat is directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of hundreds if not thousands.
So… you know. Fuck them.
“Help me up, Doc,” I say.
Hiroki throws an arm under my good shoulder and gets me to my feet. We stumble along together and I lean into him, trying to enforce his feelings of responsibility for me—to make him feel my reliance on him. Sealing his loyalty and his silence.
The vents are cramped, with many smaller tubes running off the main shafts. The constant rush of air brings a range of odors—ozone from the engines, grease and grime from the cargo bays and, underlying the rest, a charnel reek. Progress is slow. Will the half-hour’s grace I’ve given us be enough?
M’Benga takes the lead with me in the middle and Hiroki bringing up the rear. He’s begun muttering to himself in Japanese—too quiet and too fast for me to understand. He has to hold it together, but right now I’m too wrapped up in my own plans and worries to find words of comfort for him.
The vents tighten until we’re forced to wriggle along on our bellies. Here, M’Benga struggles the most. She’s far more muscular than either the doctor or myself and her shoulders brush against both sides of the shaft as we go on.
“Why aren’t we seeing revenants in here?” I ask, my voice low but still echoing all around us.
“Shh.” M’Benga hisses. She stops and looks back at me under her arm, making a gesture I interpret to mean our voices will travel. Makes sense. The vents are hollow tubes for carrying air. And that’s all sound is, I figure—vibrating air. They’d probably been the real reason the booming of the caskets striking the cargo bay decks could be heard all over the ship.
I draw up short, only for Hiroki to bump into my feet. Why aren’t we still hearing caskets falling?
Grabbing M’Benga’s ankle before she can move off, I get another of her glares. It’d be comical, but the situation doesn’t allow humor. I wave her back. There’s not enough space for any of us to turn around, but she rolls onto her back and scoots towards me. Realizing she plans to move under me, I press myself flat against the top of the vent. Bit of a strange position to find myself in, stuck as close as a lover to someone more enemy than anything else. But it brings her face near to mine. Hiroki murmurs behind us but his voice is lost in the susurration of the airflow.
M’Benga’s breath warms my cheek. “What is it?”
“No sounds from the Revenants. They’ve stopped dropping caskets. Why?”
“Perhaps we got them all.” Is she being sarcastic?
“No, there’s no way it’s that easy.”
