Boundary 2: Threshold (34 page)

This time the gun barrel cracked heavily against Alescio's temple. He went down like a dropped sack of potatoes and didn't move. Horst paused a moment, breathing hard and letting some of the shaking die down. He was lucky this had happened in the habitat section of
Odin
. Without gravity, he was pretty sure he'd have lost the fight. He thought he felt the deck quiver under his feet, but there was no way to be sure right now.

He went over to LaPointe. "Anthony, are you crazy?"

"So it is crazy to be rescuing your friends? Then, yes, I am completely mad." The English-French astronomer's left arm was bleeding profusely from multiple holes; clearly he'd taken the edge of the initial shot. There were several other small wounds, mostly on his scalp and face, that Horst presumed were the result of ricochets. Fortunately, most of the energy had been lost by those projectiles before striking LaPointe. Only one of them was bleeding, and not badly. The other ricochet wounds were bruises.

Horst bound the arm tightly, tying a tourniquet high up on the bicep. The bleeding appeared to stop. "Thank you, Anthony. I would have been dead."

"That is exactly what I was afraid of once I saw Fitzgerald had taken off. So I left the bridge and came here as fast as I could. It did not take a genius to know what he would want done to you." He grunted in pain as Horst pulled him upright, but he stood reasonably steadily.

"So it's happening. I can't believe it." Horst peered out of the doors. No one in sight at the moment. "We've got to get to your cabin, then find out how we can help the general . . . unless he's working with Fitzgerald?"

"No, not a chance. He was about to make a deal with the
Nebula Storm
that would have saved the mission—but not, obviously, Fitzgerald's career. In fact, the bastard would probably have wound up serving a long prison sentence once we returned."

Now, there was a pleasant surprise. Too bad he didn't have time for the story yet. "Then let's see what we can do to make sure that happens. Can you keep up?"

"I think I shall have to. Lead on."

Gun still gripped in his hand, since it was the best club he had available, Horst Eberhart moved out into the corridors of the mutiny-wracked
Odin
.

"Either help me or get out of the way, Svendsen," Fitzgerald said. "Or I'll bloody well have you shot."

The Norwegian engineer glared at him. "You can't afford to shoot me."

Say whatever else you would about Svendsen, she was not cowardly—and there was enough truth in her statement that Richard wasn't about to kill her casually. He sighed as he continued to maneuver the heavy cylinders toward the loading area. If it had been in an area with acceleration, he'd have needed forklifts and assistants. As it was, he had to be careful not to end up crushed by them.

"You're right. I can't quite be shooting you when I'll be needing the engineering talent to run this beast," he conceded. "But I
can
have my boys work you over and lock you in a closet. Which I'll do if you don't either help or sit down and shut up, because I have to get this done fast." He had no doubt that Baker and the rest of the Ares crew were working hard to shut down the coilguns.

Mia Svendsen glared again and looked like she was going to spit at him. Instead, she settled for something presumably insulting in Norwegian before strapping herself into one of the seats—away from any critical controls. He nodded at Johnson, currently the only other person present to keep Engineering secure. There were about a hundred people on board
Odin
, and he had less than ten percent of them on his side. Admittedly, they had all the weapons and most of the combat training, but right now things were stretched really, really thin.

He glanced at Mia again and shrugged.
I could have used the help but I suppose it's just as well; she might have tried to bugger things up at just the wrong moment.
And with
these
loads for the coilguns, it would not be a good thing to have anyone screw up.

The other concern was Eberhart. Poor Alescio was still out, so no one knew exactly what had happened. But it was clear that either he'd screwed up and somehow Eberhart had gotten the drop on him—unlikely, in Fitzgerald's opinion—or that someone else had arrived in time to turn a simple execution into a fight. Since no one had reported securing LaPointe, Fitzgerald was willing to bet that it was the astronomer who'd buggered up that little part of the plan.

But the most critical thing was the
Nebula Storm
. She had the data, and in a few hours she'd be transmitting it. The whole mission would then be over—unless she never transmitted.
I'll bet you think you're nice and safe, thousands of kilometers away. Well, old Richard and his friends have a few more surprises for you.

Weaponry had been one of his specialties from way back, in his days in the military. As soon as he recognized the limitations of the coilgun, he'd had people looking for ways to at least minimize those. And then he'd tailored the best ideas for application in the scenarios he thought might eventually emerge.

It was nice when your careful planning paid off in the end.

Anthony and Horst burst into Anthony's cabin. Horst glanced around, looking for something to tend to Anthony's arm. Something about the window caught his eye. He drew in a shocked breath as he realized that he had not, in fact, imagined the deck quiver under his feet as the ship's orientation changed. As if to confirm his realization, another rumble passed through the
Odin
.

"Oh, God," he breathed.

"What is it, Horst?" Anthony followed his gaze. "Do you think . . . ?"

"Fitzgerald's going to fire on
Nebula Storm
!" Leaving Anthony to search for his own bandage materials, Horst sat before the room's terminal and brought up his own access.

"But does it matter?" Anthony said painfully, starting to clean out the wounds with the cabin's first-aid kit. "You know how little they must move to avoid the projectiles."

"Yes, I do. But Fitzgerald knows that, too." He brought up the work he'd begun weeks ago. Now that there was no more need for subtlety . . . "Time to disable the guns for good."

But when he saw the results, he hissed. "That bastard has his own application suite!"

"Yes, he would. Not taking chances with General Hohenheim locking him out."

"It just means I'm having to improvise a bit more, and on a lower level, with the shutdown." Horst frowned in concentration, then began to grin. "But I think I will beat him. He's still loading the guns. Just a few more minutes."

Fitzgerald slammed the port shut, sealed it, and activated the loading cycle. "Now we're ready to go, my friends. A little gift from the
Odin
for you all. Actually, four little gifts, each with something extra."

The coilguns—one on each of four support ribs—signaled readiness. Even as he pressed the final button that started the firing cycle, Richard's eyes registered that one of the status lights had just gone amber. But his finger was already in motion, and sluggish neural impulses could not be recalled.

The first coilgun cycled, magnetic fields synchronizing in perfect timing, grabbing the shell and accelerating it outward with immense force, hurtling directly toward the
Nebula Storm
at over fifteen kilometers per second. The next gun also cycled, neither A.J.'s Faerie Dust nor Horst's last-minute interventions quite able to affect it. The third would not have fired at all if Fitzgerald had relied on the original control suite, which was by now totally crippled by Horst and by the general, who had just locked the system down. As it was, one of the embedded controllers failed and the acceleration rings associated with it shut down. As the firing cycle had already begun, however, the following rings tried to compensate, mostly successfully. Now it was the fourth and final shell's turn, and it too began to accelerate at hundreds of gravities. But there were now no fewer than three different agencies trying to control the coilgun, at levels ranging from parts of the hardware up, and the embedded controls were no longer receiving reliable signals.

Halfway down the acceleration ring, the field inverted, unstably reversing twice. The shell's own controller, minimally complex in order to survive the hellish environment, miscued and took the sudden deceleration and heat to be impact. And did what any good armed shell should do in that situation: it detonated.

The explosion tore apart the
Odin
's fourth mass-driver support rib like a firecracker on a straw, blasting shrapnel throughout the area. Some of that shrapnel was from the rib itself, but the rest was payload—high-density depleted-uranium pellets, coated to enhance penetration. The semi-smart shell had not had time to set for a directed blast, but at that short range the
Odin
still covered a huge fraction of the sky; there was no way to miss, and thousands of pellets did not.

Like the blast of a monstrous shotgun, the storm of armor-piercing bullets ripped into
Odin
, both the main body and the wide-flung habitat ring. Never meant for atmospheric entry,
Odin
's hull was strong enough to take micrometeorite impacts. It also had design contingencies, alarms, safety features, and emergency procedures meant to deal with one or two unexpected larger holes. But this was not just one or two holes, and the personnel who might normally have been in a position to respond were busy with a mutiny, on one side or another.

The explosion and impact were puny compared to the mass of the huge ship. It did not reel under the blow, was not sent spinning and fracturing; it continued relentlessly on its way, outwardly almost unchanged.

But the interior of the
Odin
had become a charnel house.

"Almost . . ." A.J. suddenly sat up. "Oh, that's bad."

"What?" Jackie looked worried.

A.J. ignored her for the moment. The status reports for the coilguns had stopped abruptly. The Faerie Dust was probably cycling, looking for more data, until it met another contingency to act on. But the last data he'd gotten . . . 

"Something bad's happened. I can't tell what, though. I
think
we've been fired on, but something went wrong with the fourth shot."

"They got off
three shots
?" Madeline said, in a tone of mild reproof. "You seem to be slipping, A.J."

"Gimme a break," he muttered as he tried to redirect the motes on
Odin
to new assignments. The responses were not encouraging. "Fitzgerald had his own control protocols, as well as the original layer, and someone—I'll bet Horst—was trying to shut him down on their end. The combination was like having a four-way duel with blindfolds."

"I got them on radar," Joe said. "The shots, that is. They're pretty darn close for quick shots, but none of them are coming anywhere near us. Well, on a cosmic scale Fitzgerald was dead-on, but on a personal scale he's still way off."

"How close?" Madeline asked.

"Kilometers off, all of them. We won't even have to dodge. My guess is that even though A.J. and Horst weren't able to stop the firing, whatever they were doing probably screwed up the targeting. Even just a little nudge would be enough."

Some of the Dust finally responded with some data. And it looked like . . . 

"Larry, give us a close-up of
Odin
," A.J. said, feeling a coldness begin to seep into his chest. "Fast."

"Second that." Joe's voice suddenly had no humor in it. "I'm picking up other targets near
Odin
. Looks like debris."

The screen blanked, then returned. At the current range, even with the highest-resolution imagers A.J. had been able to put in
Nebula Storm
's systems, the huge ship looked like a diatom. But they could make out enough detail to see that the perfect symmetry of
Odin
was no longer perfect.

"What happened, A.J.?" Jackie demanded. "Are they going to be okay over there?"

"I can't be sure what happened, exactly," A.J. said. "Not at this range. Not with all the other crap going on, when I'm having to get low-bandwidth answers to my questions. Something went badly wrong on the last shot. I'd guess that Fitzgerald's last shell blew up in the middle of firing, probably because we were all screwing around with the controls at the same time. Hell, it might not even have been the shell. If the magnetic drivers went wrong, they could probably have fired the shell the wrong way or something like that. I don't know the details. Everything that was going on shut down a lot of the Faerie Dust, too. I've lost a lot of it—I knew it'd happen with it being that close up to the firing, but still . . . Anyway, I'm trying to get more info. I'm really worried by the fact that they haven't reestablished communications. That means that whatever Fitzgerald set up wasn't just a temporary glitch."

"You can't tap into their comm systems and get them working?" Helen asked.

"I wish. I know I pull off a lot of crazy stunts sometimes, but there really are limits. It's not like TV and movies where the super hacker is really a magician who uses techno-jargon. Wish it was. I could just spout off some obfuscating phrases and hey, presto, I'm running all their systems. But all I have access to right now is Faerie Dust which isn't even in the right locations and that can't communicate anything to me except in short low-bandwidth pulses, and we're still far enough off that we've got fractions-of-a-second comm lag, though that's shrinking. I've given the Dust some instructions to concentrate in some of the other systems I know something about. But since the Dust doesn't come with jet engines or rockets, it's going to take a while for it to get there."

"I see." Madeline's brow furrowed for a moment. "Can you get anything out of our sensors?"

"Lemme see what I can coax out." He shifted to the onboard sensors of
Nebula Storm
, which included visible, ultraviolet, infrared, radar, and a number of others. A picture of the space around the distant
Odin
began to build up. Filter . . . spectroscopics . . . Oh, not good.