The last enemy, p.2
The Last Enemy, page 2
part #3 of A Time Traveller's Best Friend Series
“I can work while I walk, sir,” the boy said eagerly, as his other men saluted and headed off in search of their evidence. “I think I could be useful to you.”
“Do you?” asked Sergeant Gormley, fascinated. He didn’t know what he was doing or what he was looking for; he wasn’t sure he could be useful. Nor was he used to being looked at with quite the amount of eagerness that the corporal was looking at him. He hated to think that he would have to either live up to that eagerness or bitterly disappoint it. “I suppose you’d better come along, then.”
Fortunately for Sergeant Gormley’s already frazzled nerves, the boy could and did walk as he worked, even when climbing up through the gangway. He seemed to have some sort of sixth sense for what was around him, and avoided people and obstacles alike while tapping away at his little console.
When they drew nearer to the place where the Time Corp sloop was docked, however, the boy’s footsteps seemed to slow.
“You said you wanted to talk with the commanding officer of the Resilient, didn’t you sir?”
“If that’s the Resilient,” said Sergeant Gormley, pointing at the maxiplex windows, through which part of the Time Corp sloop hull could be seen, “then yes.”
“Yes, sir,” said the corporal, tapping again at his little screen. “Only I don’t seem to be able to raise anyone. I think they’re ignoring me.”
Sergeant Gormley was about to give his opinion on members of the Time Corp who thought themselves above their counterparts in the WAOF, but his comm blinked at him.
“We’ve got the evidence, sir,” said one of his men, over the comm. “But some of it is a bit wilted—the plant matter, that is. It might be a bit hard to preserve it properly. Should we try to preserve a few specimens rather than the whole lot?”
Sergeant Gormley frowned. The evidence that they needed to collect had been back down on the cargo deck, which was usually pretty well temperature-controlled due to the cooling needed for the reception and output of some of the more volatile types of fuel. Under normal circumstances, plant matter should have been well and truly healthy.
He hesitated, then said, “Do a temperature check.”
He might not have ordered it on any other day. He liked to think he would have, but on most days, a little extra nosing around was all the difference between getting back to the station in time for the best of what was in the mess hall, or missing out.
Today, however, was different.
Today, a very angry little girl was depending on him to make sure that something that wasn’t meant to happen, didn’t happen.
And today, there was someone in a very poor representation of a Time Corp uniform messing with the interface outside the hatch where the Resilient was docked.
“You there!” yelled Sergeant Gormley, lurching forward into the heavy, juggernaut run that had scared many a malefactor into running for it by pure instinct.
The figure was not one of that kind: instead, it stayed where it was, typing furiously, intently, until he was just a few metres away. Then it slapped shut the hatch and ran for it.
“I’ve got him, sir!” yelled the corporal, sprinting past the sergeant with all the vigour of his youth.
Sergeant Gormley stopped by the hatch in some relief, sweating, and hoped that he could understand enough of the systems to be able to see what the man had been doing. Luckily for him, the language was set to Universal and seemed to have been designed with people of Sergeant Gormley’s ilk in mind: that is, it was delightfully simple.
The sign-in log was the first thing he accessed, but it had been cleared just moments before; no doubt the final thing the malefactor had done before being caught. Sergeant Gormley heaved a huge sigh of discouragement, and thought very hard. What could someone have been trying to get at from a standard portal on the passenger deck of a fuel station? Certainly someone could access all the systems if they had the appropriate credentials, but it wasn’t likely for persons unknown to have those kind of credentials. Especially the kind of persons unknown who ran at the first sign of trouble instead of sticking around to try and face it out.
If they did have that kind of access, someone must have given it to them.
Alarmed, Sergeant Gormley tried to enter the change logs. If the runner had access to the sort of things he oughtn’t to, anything he had tried to do in the system should be listed in the change logs.
Access denied popped up on the screen. Below it, System Password Reset blinked steadily at the sergeant, turning the sweat cold on his brow. If they had reset the system password as well as changing stars knew what on the system, Sergeant Gormley was not sure what he could do.
He stopped to think again, laboriously, and a sparkling idea lit in his mind. Exiting the change logs, Sergeant Gormley accessed the last day’s worth of system searches instead. A list flashed up on the screen, ten lines deep: five of them from the last half hour.
“Sir,” said a voice on his comms, as he did so. “The cargo deck—it’s—the temperature is ten degrees above recommended down here, and someone has broken the thermostat control to keep it that way.”
“I see,” said Sergeant Gormley, who could think of only a few reasons why that might be happening, none of which were heartening. “Gather all the evidence you can; take specimens and take anything you can fit in your kits and in your pockets. One of you scout around the cargo deck.”
“Yes sir,” said the comm. “What are we looking for?”
“Explosive,” Sergeant Gormley said grimly, because between the system searches he could see and the temperature controls being so far above what they ought to be, he had a pretty good idea what the Time Corp pretender had been up to.
There was a beat of silence. “Sir?”
“Look for explosive!” barked the sergeant, scanning the search logs once more, then pulling up the cargo lists. “The cargo runner dropped something earlier today, and we just had a runner in fake Time Corp kit fiddling with the system to find out where it was kept. Someone also accessed the hatch locks—I’d guess they were looking for a way to get it in safely. If we’re lucky, we can get to whatever explosive was left before they arm it.”
“If they’ve got temperature control on it, it’s probably already armed, sir,” said one of his men. “I mean, it’ll be decreasing in stability as it goes, and I bet they’re really sure about how quickly it destabilises at this temperature, too.”
Sergeant Gormley wiped his brow with one ham-like hand that shook a bit. “Look for time stamps,” he said. “Anything from this morning: anything the size of a small pallet. And one of you look for a way to lower the temperature on the cargo deck.”
He went back to the portal, desperately trying to make more sense of what he was looking at. The cargo he now suspected to be explosive had been on board since before the Time Corp sloop logged in: had been there, in fact, since the earlier docking of the cargo-runner, which had brought it. Why had the fake Time Corp runner first searched to make sure it was there, then checked on the outer hatches in the system? Surely that was something that should have been done much earlier, to see if there was another way of getting the explosives on board? Why, in fact, was someone pretending to be Time Corp when the real Time Corp was nearby, and why wasn’t anyone from the Resilient answering comms?
Sergeant Gormley closed off the portal and broke into a trot once again, heading for the gangway that led back down to the cargo deck. “Corporal, do you have the runner?”
His corporal, panting, came on the line to say, “He killed himself, sir.”
“He what?” asked the sergeant blankly.
“He killed himself,” the boy said again, bitterly. “I tried to get him to spit it out and he wouldn’t.”
“Good lad,” said Sergeant Gormley, barrelling down the gangway and startling passing staff. “No need to worry; you did what you could. Can you clean it up?”
“Yes, sir.”
Sergeant Gormley, jogging across the cargo dock, found his men clustered around a small pallet that barely came to his knee. If it was lacking in size, it wasn’t lacking in menace: a vague yellow discolouration seemed to hang over the whole.
“Report!” he barked.
“It’s explosive, sir; Geumbang. Morliss estimates that we’ve got about twenty minutes before it goes, with the state it’s in.”
“Can we vent cooler air—”
Morliss was already shaking his head, so Sergeant Gormley turned directly to him. “What about it, Morliss?”
“My brother-in-law works with this stuff, sir. It’s already giving off gas: you can’t reverse the amount of degradation, and you can’t stop it from keeping on degrading. It’ll blow no matter what we do.”
“Can we get it off the deck?”
“No, sir. We try to move it and boom. I’ve seen what happens when you try to shift it with a disintegrator, too; it’s not pretty, sir. The explosion gets really big.”
There was a moment of silence in which Sergeant Gormley was quite certain his men could hear him sweating.
One of them said, after another moment, “What now, sir?”
“Evacuate,” said Sergeant Gormley.
“Sir, they’re Fifth Worlders, and there’s no one in authority on deck.”
“I know,” the sergeant said, on a groan. Fifth Worlders in crisis milled like bees without a queen to direct them.
“It’ll be pandemonium!”
“Better than a slaughterhouse,” said the sergeant grimly, and touched his comms button. Better get the station officials to direct this lot if they wanted to save anyone today. “Control Room. Control Room. Sergeant Gormley of the WAOF cutting in: you’ll need to evacuate.”
There was no reply.
To his men, he said, “You four, get to the upper deck and be ready to direct the evacuation up there.”
They said a brisk yes sir and left.
More sharply, Sergeant Gormley said into his comms, “Station Control Room. Do you copy? There are explosives in the cargo dock. You need to start evacuation protocols.”
A breathless voice answered him. “They’ve beggared off, sir!”
“Corporal? What are you doing in the Control Room?”
“Had a suspicion, sir.”
“Well done, Corporal. They’ve run off?”
“All of them, sir. I’ve initiated the evacuation protocols.”
Overhead, sirens began to wail: a series of lights lit up on the decking, pointing to the closest exits. “Good man. Hopefully this lot knows how to use an emergency exit.”
To his relief, they did. The crowd split into two, surging toward the two escape pod exits, and milled at each one, never seeming to grow smaller, though each half of the crowd did seem to grow more frantic.
“Why aren’t they getting out?” Sergeant Gormley asked the two officers still flanking him, frowning. “Go check on the hatches; open them manually if you have to. Get everyone onboard the escape pods and come back when you’re done. Each of you to a side.”
They did as they were told, threading through the crowd, and Sergeant Gormley forged his way through to the airlocks instead. There was something uniform and not quite right about them: it wasn’t until he was closer that he realised that the unfamiliar uniformity of them had to do with the serried ranks of plastic explosive that had been dotted across every join and every potential weakness in the hatches.
Sergeant Gormley’s heart sank as he gazed at the orderliness of it. When had that been done? He remembered someone working on the hatches, but he had assumed it to be a repair person. Each line of explosive ended in a small, tidy detonator that was far too small for the sergeant to think about removing, even if he had had the stomach to do it.
He couldn’t see a timer on them, but if he had had a guess, he would have guessed that they were set to explode just before the main load, maximising panic and preventing any chance of disarming the main load while everyone tried to stabilise the airlocks before they gave way to pressure.
“Sir, you should see this,” said one of his men, appearing by his side again.
Sergeant Gormley followed the man across the deck, wading into the seething panic closest to the emergency exits and wishing that his own brain was seething a little less.
It was a tight squeeze close to the emergency exits, but once there, the sergeant found himself even more breathless than he ought to have been.
The hatches were locked. Not only were they locked via the main system, they were physically locked from the other side. Nor, if his straining eyes were to be trusted as he peered through the glassy window into the area that ought to have led to the escape pod but was worryingly dark, were there escape pods attached to the station any longer.
And the sergeant finally understood. The searches he had seen in the console hadn’t been the attempts of persons unknown to open the airlocks and allow in an unknown craft. No; the explosives had already been onboard. The Time Corp pretender hadn’t been trying to blow anything up: he had been trying to prevent anyone from escaping from the station once the trouble began. He had known about the attack, and he had been determined that no one should escape it.
Sergeant Gormley began to sweat again. He was not good at swift movement of the brain; his forte was in stolidly obeying orders and staying exactly where he was told to stay. He had thwarted many a criminal by doing exactly that, but in this case, where the foe was faceless and already several moves ahead of him, the sergeant had no idea of where to turn.
Nor, it seemed, did the people aboard the fixed-orbit station: Fifth Worlders milled everywhere, a surging, whirling mass that pushed one way and then another in search of somewhere safe to go, or at least some potential exit.
“Corporal,” he said to his comm, huskily. “Can you get aboard the Time Corp sloop?”
“Yes sir,” came the answer, swiftly.
Sergeant Gormley wouldn’t have been surprised to find that the boy was already halfway there.
“What do you want me to tell them, sir? If they’re still there, that is.”
“Tell them that you’re commandeering the sloop.”
“Yes, sir!”
Sergeant Gormley had a truly impressive bellow, and hitherto he had been able to accomplish all he needed to accomplish upon commencement of the same. This time, he was singularly unsuccessful, his roar lost in the turbulent rumble of the crowd, and he was left with the frustration of knowing exactly what needed to be done without any idea of how to achieve it.
“I don’t think it’s going to work, sir!” yelled one of his officers through the comms, from across the room. “And those airlocks—!”
“Get the gangway open,” the sergeant said. “Up to the passenger deck: manually, if you have to. They’ll come rushing as soon as they see it open. We can still get them up on the passenger deck and herd them toward the sloop, even if we can’t use the escape pods. You four up on deck—get ready to receive refugees: direct ’em toward the Time Corp sloop if you can.”
Rather to his relief, he was correct: as soon as the flashing light above the entrance signalled that the gangway was clear, there was a surge toward it; then a steady flow through it.
Sergeant Gormley didn’t hear the small popping of explosive going off, but he heard the shrieks from those closest to the airlocks when they did, and nothing could disguise the sound of the weakened airlocks when they made a loud, booming crack above the crowd as they strained to hold.
The sergeant cast an anxious eye over the rapidly dwindling crowd.
The airlocks cracked again, ominously loud, and he hung back behind the last of the crowd, uneasy. There were still too many people appearing out of nowhere; popping up onto the cargo deck as if emerging from quarters or jobs further down in the station.
Even after the bulk of the crowd had filtered through and the silence of their departure made the shrieking of the airlocks more painful to the ears, he lingered still.
A Fifth Worlder sprinted across the decking, darting past him and up the gangway to relative safety, and for the last time, Sergeant Gormley hesitated. The airlocks hissed and howled, and if this deck was lost to the vacuum of space without the gangway being sealed, all the people on the upper boarding deck would be lost, too; but there were still people running across the loading dock.
“Airlocks, sir!” yelled one of his men, from the upper hatch. “They’re about to go! Everything’s flashing purple up here!”
A crack of sound split Sergeant Gormley’s ears as he whipped into the gangway and slammed shut the hatch. He stayed for a moment to set the manual lock as well, his ears popping, then barrelled up the gangway and through the upper hatch.
His men were there to heave him through, quick and panicked.
“The manual lock’s stuck, sir! We can shut it, but we can’t seal it!”
Sergeant Gormley heaved shut the manual close with a roar, scattering Fifth Worlders nearby. He shook his head, bearlike, as if he’d received a blow to the ears, and salt water flew. Below, the last few who hadn’t made it up to the boarding deck were sucked out the airlocks: he saw one through the maxiplex windows on deck, and another wail rippled through the Fifth Worlders as they saw the figure, too.
“Corporal!”
“Not to worry, sir,” said that voice cheerfully in his ear. “I’ve got ’em. They’ve got a nice lot of toys onboard this sloop, and the stragglers aren’t coming out too fast to catch. So long as their lungs can take it for a second or two, they’ll be fine. Have you got the rest of them?”
“For now,” the sergeant said grimly, swiping the back of his hand across his face to collect the remaining moisture there. He had no idea how he was supposed to get this gaggle of Fifth Worlders safely into the Time Corp sloop and away before the whole lot of explosives below went off.
