A Taste Of Despair (The Humal Sequence) (30 page)

Once they had located it, it took a further forty minutes to get the others there after laying in a length of monofilament. Jones was struggling badly by the time they reached it, but the thought of being inside a structure once more kept him going. His heart rate and breathing, however, were telling indicators of how close to the edge he had gotten.

At the lock, they forced Jones to relax before he got to work on bypassing the alarms. The black man seemed much calmer once he had plugged in his suit’s optical datalink cable and got to work. Working seemed to keep his mind occupied and off the thought of how vast space seemed to him. All of the electronic equipment and tools he would have normally used to perform his security work had been duplicated in the suit’s software. Much of it was already present in the software suite available to the Marines, who occasionally had need to force entry through an airlock. Jones’ more sophisticated tools were easy to replicate and add to the software.

It took him longer than normal, of course. Working in a suit, even with the digital tools available to him, took longer than doing everything physically. The suit’s projected display worked well, responding to eye movements and blinks to make selections and move between screens, but it was not Jones’ natural way of working and he didn’t want to blink at the wrong moment and pick the wrong option. So he took his time.

Twenty minutes after he had started, however, the airlock door slid open obediently whilst the activity lights within remained dark, the monitoring equipment still convinced the lock was closed and sealed. Without waiting for the others, Jones unplugged himself and piled in.

Hamilton and the rest followed, the lock more than big enough for the six of them at once. Hamilton had assumed Jones had rushed within in order to get away from his space-fever, but the black man was already plugged into the inner door’s datalink and was waiting for them to get safely inside.

As they did so, the outer door slid shut and air began to fill the lock. The lights remained off, comfortingly reminding them that nobody was aware of their presence.

Hamilton’s suit registered the rising pressure outside and adjusted itself accordingly, making his movements easier.

“Gravity’s coming on in a few seconds.” Jones warned them.

Sure enough, the familiar pull of standard gravity reasserted itself moments later as the gravity plating activated.

At almost one atmosphere Hamilton removed his helmet. The suit complained about it, but it let him do it anyway. It was a piece of military equipment, after all, and its users frequently had to do things that were not safe under normal circumstances. He felt his ears pop as the helmet seal relinquished its hold on the suit.

The air was cold, of course. It would have been held in a pressurized tank someplace near to the lock. Expansion from that compressed state was always accompanied by a cooling effect. It was one of the first things you noticed during zero-gee training of any kind but it surprised most people unfamiliar with the principles.

The chilly air was also one of the things you grew to love about the end of a zero gee excursion. The air was probably manufactured and had never even been on a planet, but the crispness to that first breath always put Hamilton in mind of frosty mountain air. It was that invigorating, especially after a sweaty time in a suit.

The others began removing their helmets, enjoying the frostiness as much has he did, but none more so than Jones, who, his work completed for the moment, had slumped against the inner door of the lock.

The man’s face was covered in sweat. It looked like he’d just run a marathon.

“I’ll be alright.” He muttered in response to Hamilton’s unspoken question. “Just let me rest a while.”

Hamilton nodded. “Any chance you can get that inner door open without setting off any alarms? I can scout around whilst the rest of you relax.”

Jones nodded and pulled his helmet back on long enough to eyeball the relevant controls. The door opened obediently.

Beyond, a long corridor vanished into the depths of the terminal. As before, lighting was non-existent.

“I guess they only put the lights on when it’s being used.” Klane observed, coming up to stand alongside Hamilton.

“I guess.” He agreed. “At least we know we haven’t been detected.”

“Not yet, anyway.” She nodded. “Shall we?”

He nodded. “Let’s take a look around.” Turning to the rest of the group he said. “Klane and I are going to look around. The rest of you stay here and recover. Don’t do anything to attract attention. We’ll be back shortly.”

Klane was already walking into the darkness, her prosthetic eye allowing her to see perfectly well. Hamilton hurried to catch up, replacing his helmet and activating the suit’s infra-red illuminator in order to see his way.

Almost immediately beyond the lock, a wide slideway filled the corridor.

“This is a bit old hat.” Klane remarked as she walked along it. “I thought everyone used grav pallets these days to move goods?”

Hamilton nodded. “They do. This place was probably built before that became commonplace, though. Odd, really. They built the place to mimic a planetside operation, with grav plating, slideways and so on.”

“Not everyone is trained in zero-gee activities.” Klane stated. “I suppose it was easier to do it this way than train people to work in a gravity-free environment.”

The corridor gave onto a large marshalling chamber. A number of robotic cargo loaders lay idle there, of differing sizes. Another three corridors like the one they had emerged from led off towards the outer hull. A single, larger corridor led deeper into the station.

Klane glanced around with her cybernetic eye. “Doesn’t look like any cameras or other sensing equipment in here. We might be lucky and traverse the whole station without being seen.”

“I’d be happier traversing the outside of the station.” Hamilton muttered.

She nodded. “Me too, but Jones would never make it. Did you know he would react that way?”

Hamilton shook his head. “No. I recruited him planetside, remember. I didn’t exactly have a full psych workup on him.”

Klane shrugged. “Well, what’s that old adage about the best laid plans..?”

Hamilton agreed. “Yeah, they often go awry.”

“How are we going to find a ship bound for the surface in all this?” She demanded.

“We’ll have to get Jones to call up a schematic of this place, along with vessel movements. We should be able to put the two together and find us a nice freighter heading down to the surface.”

She frowned. “It’ll probably be manned. At least a pilot and a couple of cargo handlers.”

Hamilton grinned up at her. “That’s what we brought the stunners for.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

In the end it was easier for Jones to find the information than they realized. The terminal’s core computer was happy to provide the layout and shipping schedules to them.

Getting to their chosen cargo vessel, the
Seraphim
, was a lot harder.

Although the interior of most of the terminal was camera and sensor free, the main freight sorting area was heavily covered by such devices. The various cargos that were unloaded all ended up there, before being routed to their vessels for onward shipment. The place was a fine example of seeming chaos. No human could have coordinated the constant shuffling and moving of freight with even a fraction of the efficiency that the terminal’s computer managed. However, even here there were occasional mishaps as loads fell over or robots got themselves jammed trying to load a six foot wide pallet into a five foot wide space.

So the entire area was covered in cameras so that the maintenance staff could manually take over and fix things. Going through it was an impossibility without being discovered. So instead, they had to endure a long crawl through a series of emergency access conduits in order to bypass the area entirely. Even then, they made a wrong turn someplace and came out in the wrong corridor, requiring a backtrack for some distance.

By the time they emerged into the correct corridor they were all dirty, sweaty and in varying degrees of bad temper with the situation and each other.

But they had little time to waste. The
Seraphim
was loading cargo by the time they emerged from the conduits, the corridor’s slideway carrying the grav-palleted goods along to their right. Down that way, perhaps another hundred and fifty meters, was the loading lock the
Seraphim
was attached to.

Hamilton divided them into two groups. Himself, Klane and Carl in the first group, the rest in the second. Hamilton’s group had removed their suits and now clutched their stun pistols as they crouched down behind one of the six foot square pallets as it rumbled serenely along the slideway. The second group crouched behind a pallet three places back, clutching the suits that the first three had removed.

As their pallet moved towards the Seraphim, Klane leaned across Carl to mutter to Hamilton. “Just like old times, huh?”

“I bloody well hope not!” He murmured back, then to both of them. “Wait for my signal and remember to be sure and shoot first and ask questions later, the pair of you!”

They nodded and waited, clinging precariously to the back of the pallet. As each pallet reached the end of the slideway, a sensor caused it to stop. A few seconds later, once the cargo handlers had attached the pallet claw and removed it, the slideway started up again. It took the pallet less than two minutes to go the hundred odd meters to the end of the slideway and the loading lock. Clearly the freight handlers knew their stuff. Equally clearly, there had to be more than one of them.

At the end of the slideway the pallet hiding them stopped. There was a moment when nothing happened, then the pallet claw slid down either side of the pallet and clamped itself to the grav-pallet. There was a hum as the claw, a small vehicle really, powered up the grav-pallet, then the whole thing rose a few inches and began to move onwards, towards the lock and the ship.

Hamilton and his cohorts waited, watching the ceiling overhead change from corridor, to lock then to the interior of the
Seraphim’s
cargo bay.

“Now!” Hamilton called.

He and Klane went either side of the pallet, guns drawn, searching for targets. Karl heaved himself up on top of the pallet and similarly looked around for someone to stun.

There were three cargo handlers, each piloting a ride-on pallet claw vehicle. The one to Klane’s side was waiting on their pallet driver to get clear of the lock. His look of surprise changed to one of intense confusion and pain as she shot him from only a few feet away. He slumped over his control, twitching spastically.

The other one, on Hamilton’s side, never saw what happened, as he was still parking the pallet previous to theirs. Hamilton’s blast took him in the back and he actually threw himself off his pallet claw in his violent, uncontrolled thrashing.

Their own driver, seeing the flashes of the energy weapons, looked around in panic and then he too was flopping about like a fish as Carl’s shot caught him in the top of the head.

For a moment there was silence, then the three of them were heading towards the obvious exits to the cargo bay, metal stairways at either end that led up to a central catwalk that ran the length of the bay, suspended some thirty feet up.

Klane headed aft and Hamilton forward , whilst Carl remained in the bay to quickly hide the bodies and make it look like nothing had happened. The interruption to the steady loading progress was bound to be noticed soon.

“Bay secure.” Carl’s deep voice rumbled over the comms gear they were wearing. A moment later Klane’s added. “Aft section secure.”

As it happened, their rapid reactions were not needed. The sole other occupants of the
Seraphim
were the captain-pilot and his duty engineer.

Hamilton found them both enjoying a little “down-time” with each other in the single, courtesy cabin the little freighter sported.

His snort of laughter at the sight of the man’s hairy bottom pumping up and down went entirely un-noticed by the pair. His stunner blast, however, they could not ignore.

“Bow area secure.” He said. The pilot was bouncing around on his female companion in a frenzy of uncoordinated muscle spasms. Sadly for her, she didn’t look in any state to appreciate the extra attention.

“Roger that.” Klane acknowledged. “How do you want us to proceed?”

“Back to the cargo bay. We’ll need to keep loading before the terminal notices the stoppage.”

“Affirmative.”

Back in the cargo bay, Carl had already manned one of the pallet claws and was getting to grips with it. Klane was just climbing into the second one. The rest of his gang had come forwards from the corridor and were watching bemused as the Enjun and the cyborg resumed loading the cargo.

“Philip!” Hamilton called down from the catwalk. The pilot looked up. “Get up to the cockpit and check everything out. I don’t want any surprises!”

LeGault nodded and started up the stairs to the catwalk two at a time, passing Hamilton who was on his way down.

“What do you want us to do?” Jones asked, indicating himself and Johnson when Hamilton reached them. They both clutched their stunners nervously, as if expecting more crew to leap out at any moment.

“Find out where Carl hid the three cargo handlers, then make sure they are secured safely. They’ll stay stunned for the best part of an hour, but better safe than sorry. Tie them up, use tape, plastic ties, whatever you can find, so long as they can’t get free. Likewise the pilot and engineer are in a cabin just by the cockpit area. Make sure they are secure, too. If in doubt, stun them again.”

He thought about mentioning the nakedness of the pair of crew in the cabin, but decided both Johnson and Jones deserved the right to that discovery themselves.

“What are you going to be doing?” Johnson asked.

Hamilton put his stunner on top of a nearby crate. “I’m going to muck in with the cargo loading!”

*****

The loading of the remaining cargo took another two hours. It wasn’t hard work – the pallet claws did all the work, really – but it was dull. However, if they had failed to finish loading the cargo and just undocked it would have set alarm bells off. As far as possible, they wanted the terminal, and Mars, to think that everything was normal.

Jones and Johnson gave Hamilton some scowls when they returned from securing the crew. They’d dragged them all up into the little cabin, bound them hand and foot and disabled the comms and door locks within the room. They had draped the naked pair in covers from the bunk to protect their modesty even though they had blindfolded and gagged everyone concerned.

Once the last pallet had been removed from the cargo slideway and pulled inside the
Seraphim
, the terminal’s inner lock door shut of its own accord. Hamilton suspected the last pallet had some sort of embedded transmitter in the labeling that triggered the closure, rather than any obvious monitoring by the terminal itself.

Leaving Carl to park the last pallet in the bay, they all hurried up to the single person cockpit.

LeGault looked round at them as they tried unsuccessfully to cram themselves into the tiny hatchway.

He shook his head. “We ready to go? I’ve got the green light from the terminal to leave whenever the cargo is secured.”

“We’re good to go.” Hamilton told him. “You figured out where this thing is supposed to be heading?”

LeGault nodded. “Straight to Mars Olympus starport! That’s both the good, and bad, news.”

“I’ll bite.” Klane asked. “What’s the good and bad?”

“Good news is that it’s only ten klicks north of Olympus itself, so not far for us to go to our destination.” LeGault responded. “Bad news is that it is a major starport. Security will be extremely high. We’ll have a hell of a time getting out of the starport.”

“We’ll figure something out.” Klane told him. “We’ve gotten this far against the odds.”

“I have a suggestion.” LeGault offered.

“Let’s hear it.” Hamilton told him.

“We could have a gravitic drive malfunction on the way down. SOP is to immediately put down at the nearest safe point in such emergencies. We could effectively pick our own landing site in those circumstances.”

Hamilton and Klane exchanged glances. “It sounds like a good idea, but I’m not sure it would be in the long run.” Klane frowned. “The emergency services would respond to it quickly. We’d need to get well away before they got there and it would ultimately alert them to something going on when they board the ship and find the crew.”

Hamilton nodded. “At the moment no one knows there’s anything untoward going on. I’d like to keep it that way for as long as possible.”

“What do freight crews normally do when they land at starports?” Johnson asked.

Hamilton shrugged. “Unload their cargoes, I imagine. I expect there’ll be a designated landing spot assigned with a cargo slideway and a few robotic load handlers. Essentially it’ll be the reverse of what we just encountered here on the terminal. After that, I guess it’s down to whatever work schedule they have. Either back up for another cargo run, or knocking off, handing over to a secondary crew, that sort of thing.”

“According to the schedules I’ve seen,” LeGault added. “It looks like this is the last run for this crew for a few days. A replacement crew is due tomorrow to resume duties.”

“So we’ve got a few hours from landing before the new crew shows up?” Jones inquired.

LeGault nodded. “About seven hours, or so, looking at previous hand-overs. Officially, we’re not supposed to leave the ship until the new crew arrives and we hand it over to them.”

“So nobody is going to be suspicious if we stay aboard after landing and unloading?” Klane nodded thoughtfully.

“Basically.” LeGault agreed. “It’s a privately owned company vessel. Apparently it’s a sackable offence to abandon the ship.”

“I’m guessing the crews only leave one person aboard, normally, whilst the rest go and play.” Hamilton suggested. “However, at least we don’t have to rush and it won’t be noticed if we all stay aboard.”

“I have an idea, if anyone’s interested?” Johnson said brightly.