Prison Ship (26 page)

“It doesn’t matter now,” Peters snapped. “Hurry, before it’s too late.”

BRICKET chuckled like a giddy child who had pulled the ultimate prank. On the screen, purple hair whirled as Princess spun in place, then leapt into the air.

Sam wondered what the Separatist crew might be feeling as they watched her prance around their tactical readouts. Astonishment? Fear? Exhilaration?

“How did Rick get a code that could do all this?” Sam asked. “I had the feeling he was holding something back.”

Bricket’s mouth crinkled. “I’d rather not think about it now. He may have saved all our—”

A red light flashed on top of the central unit, stopping Bricket cold. He muttered something, then typed out commands rapidly.

“What’s wrong?” Sam asked.

The bartender seemed too preoccupied to answer.

Then the control board died into darkness. Princess faded from its screen. Bricket turned toward an unused console at the far end of the room. It sprang to life, with the dancer continuing her stage show. In the same heartbeat, she vanished as the machine erupted into a shower of burning embers. Bricket pressed a keypad on his darkened board, resurrecting Princess on the screen above him. The purple-haired beauty shook her hips as if in celebration.

“What happened?” Sam asked.

“The Separatists sent a destructive program through the link, but I was too quick for them. I diverted it so that it missed us.”

“Then they’re wise to us?”

“Yeah, but don’t worry,” Bricket said with a smirk. “They know we have them by the throat.”

“ACCESS the weapons,” Peters shouted.

“I can’t, sir,” Niles replied. “The virus wasn’t successful.”

“Send another one then,” he barked.

The small U.S.S. spacecraft lunged at them again, raking into their shields. Each shot ate away at their already weakened defensive grid. He couldn’t allow his mighty
Conqueror
to be defeated by a ship half its size.

Peters grabbed Horace, the communication officer, by the sleeve. “Tell the gunners to operate their weapons manually until we have our systems back online.”

“Yes, sir,” Horace stammered, then relayed the order.

Niles turned around. “The second virus failed, sir.”

“Keep sending them,” Peters shouted, slamming his fist into the console.

STEINER couldn’t understand why the enemy warship hadn’t fired a shot in defense of itself.

“The battlecruiser’s defensive screen has collapsed,” Tramer announced.

Steiner was astonished. Victory lay within their grasp. From there on, every direct hit would cause damage to the other vessel.

At that moment, energy streaks hammered into the
Marauder
’s hull. The ship heaved to the side, throwing Steiner from his chair. He crashed against Simmons’s communication console, then propelled himself back into his seat. Less then a second later, he had his harness strapped securely around him. Mason rolled them clear of the assailing bolts.

“Damage report,” Steiner ordered, rubbing his shoulder where it had hit the console.

“Nothing severe,” Tramer replied, remaining perfectly erect despite the pitching of the ship. “We weren’t hit by any of the megacannons. Only normal artillery fire. The pattern of the shots was too random to be a computer-guided assault.”

“Do you think their network is down?”

“No. It must be occupied.”

Steiner wanted to shout for joy. Bricket must have broken through, somehow.

ANOTHER console exploded five meters away from the main terminal. Sam covered his face against the tiny metal bits that sprayed him and Bricket. The bartender routed the power back to his darkened control board, then looked over at the smoking ruins of the other console.

“I can’t keep this up much longer,” he grumbled. “There are only two operational units left.”

Sam tightened his grip on the bartender’s chair, fighting to keep himself on his feet despite the jolts. “What happens when there are none left?”

Bricket frowned. “We lose.”

Then they both heard it.

An explosion echoed from somewhere inside the ship.

BLACK smoke billowed from deep within the reactor chamber.

Daniels checked the instrument readouts to see what damage had been done. The cooling system for the reactors had overloaded. If the temperature inside any of the cores rose above nine hundred degrees, a meltdown would occur. The engine chamber had to be sealed and the emergency hatch blown. The vacuum of space would quench the blaze and cool the reactors.

“Code Zero,” he yelled into his headset to the other engineers.

Spider, J.R., and Andrew rushed into the control cubicle. Two others were still unaccounted for.

“Don’t leave us,” a cry sounded from Daniels’s headset. It was Charles, one of the missing men. “Fred was injured by the blast. I can’t get him out alone.”

With all speed, Daniels snatched an extinguisher from the emergency cabinet. “I’ll try to contain the fire long enough for one of you to help them,” he told his colleagues in the cubicle.

“I’ll do it,” J.R. replied, then sprinted into the dark cloud.

Slinging the canister over his shoulder, Daniels hurried after him into the forbidding haze.

Visibility dropped to several feet beyond the curtain of smoke. Even though the fumes tried to choke the air from Daniels’s lungs, his pace never slowed. He was determined to save his two colleagues, no matter what happened to himself.

The deck shuddered from an impact against the outer hull.

God, grant me the time to save my friends,
Daniels prayed.

Finally, he reached the edge of the fire. Flames licked the top of the high ceiling. Intense heat singed his skin. He aimed the nozzle and activated a powerful stream of chemicals. The blaze consumed the extinguisher liquids without any effect to itself whatsoever.

A second stream of chemicals joined his hopeless attack. Daniels turned to find Spider beside him, firing an extinguisher. The aide smiled faintly. Daniels never expected him to come. In the past, Spider had always been afraid of hazardous situations. His loyalty must be stronger than his fears.

A cough broke through the black smoke to his right. Daniels could barely make out the vague forms of J.R. and Charles helping Fred to safety.

“Daniels,” Mike shouted over the headset. “The temperature gauge is reading eight hundred degrees and rising. The core is going critical.”

Time had run out. The engine chamber had to be sealed for decompression.

“Go now,” Daniels screamed at Spider.

The man paled, dropped his extinguisher, and ran back into the black smoke.

Daniels continued to aim his stream of chemicals into the white of the flames. He shielded his tearing eyes from the heat with his arm.
A few more seconds,
he promised himself.
Give them time to escape.

“Eight hundred and fifty degrees,” Mike shouted in the headset.

Daniels knew he couldn’t stretch it any farther. Every fiber in his being was telling him to run. Perhaps it was a message from God. Dropping his extinguisher, he fled. He had no idea what direction he was heading in. He coughed and gasped for breath. How could he possibly make it back like this? Yet he kept running.

“Phillip,” J.R. said in his earpiece. “We’ve reached safety.”

“Seal the pressure door and blow the hatch before we lose the reactors,” Daniels shouted.

“You’ll be trapped.”

“Do it now.”

A motorized whine echoed from somewhere ahead. Daniels used the noise to get his bearings. He still had a chance of making it before the barrier shut. It took twenty seconds to close completely.

As he barreled ahead, each of his feet found solid ground somehow. One misstep would result in death.

Directly ahead, faint lights showed through the haze. A descending wall of darkness covered half the opening. He still had a chance to beat it.

He skidded to an abrupt stop at the foot of something in his path. It was Spider, curled into a ball and whimpering hysterically.

“Spider,” Daniels cried, pulling the other engineer to his feet. “We’re almost there.”

The man sobbed something in reply.

Daniels heaved him over his shoulder and stumbled ahead with all his might. His head began to spin, the first sign of asphyxiation. He knew he would black out soon. He forced each leg forward in short strides.

The world seemed to be falling away from him. Shadowy silhouettes gathered under the shrinking gap. He reached out as if to take hold of them, but they were too far away. He felt himself floating through air, then his face struck something hard and cold. He tried to move but found his body numb.

As he drifted off into a sea of blackness, he felt the sensation of being pulled somewhere. Voices spoke to him, but he couldn’t understand what they said. The last thing he heard was an echoing thud.

Within the silence of the darkness, he saw the faces of the people he had assassinated, looking at him through the gloom. Then he saw her. His last victim. A government official he had been contracted to kill. He saw himself standing by the sleeping woman’s bed after administering an absorbent poison to her skin. Before she died, she woke up and looked at him. She opened her mouth and started to say something.

“Phillip?” A voice cut through the vision. “Can you hear me?”

Daniels blinked his eyes and saw J.R. smiling down at him. Daniels inhaled deeply of the pure oxygen flowing through the mask over the lower half of his face.

“That was a close call,” J.R. said. “Both you and Spider are going to be fine.”

Daniels couldn’t help but feel guilty. After all the terrible things he had done during his lifetime, he didn’t deserve to live.

STEINER sighed with relief as he watched Daniels and Spider begin to move on one of the security monitors. A neighboring screen showed the decompressed engine chamber icing up.

Once the fire had broken out, Mason pulled the
Marauder
back to a safe distance until the engineers could get the situation under control.

“The drive systems have stabilized,” Tramer announced. “We are ready for another run.”

“Haven’t we put up enough of a fight?” Sanchez asked. “Let’s flee while our enemy is disabled.”

Steiner looked at Mason, who shook his head. “The dimensional drive is down,” the pilot replied. “We can’t run.”

No one argued.

“I doubt we can take many more hits,” Steiner told Mason.

“They won’t touch us again,” the pilot replied. “I’ll make sure of it.”

“Then take us in for another pass.”

Mason dove the
Marauder
back toward the
Conqueror
.

CAPTAIN Peters stared in horror as the tiny U.S.S. ship made another destructive pass. Explosions rocked the bridge, and the interior lighting started to fluctuate. Power reserves were almost depleted. Soon they would be at the mercy of their opponent. He caught another glimpse of the woman on the tactical screen, removing her top.

“She’s stripping,” Horace muttered.

Before Peters could stop himself, he punched Horace in the face. It felt refreshing to release some of his pent-up anger. He grabbed Niles by the collar. “Send more viruses.”

“It’s useless, sir. No matter how many we send—”

He didn’t let the young officer finish. He shoved him away from his station.
They’ll pay for this,
he swore as he sent another virus through the connection.

BRICKET’S hands raced across the control board so quickly that Sam couldn’t tell what keypads Bricket pressed. On a small screen below the one where Princess danced nude, lines of text scrolled so fast Sam couldn’t read them.

The main terminal was the last operational unit left in the room. The air stank of burnt wires from all the smoldering consoles.

“If they send another virus, we’re finished, aren’t we?” Sam asked.

“Not if I can help it,” Bricket replied, without losing rhythm in his rapid pace. “I’m planting Princess into the Separatist ship’s own computer network, so that they will think that we still control their systems, even after they have destroyed our capability to do so. The only problem is where to put the program so they won’t find it.”

“Wherever you put it, do it fast.”

“Aha, Refuse Control.”

The red light above the terminal flashed.

“Bricket,” Sam shouted.

“I know—I saw it,” the bartender said, working more frantically to finish.

The glowing indicators on the entire board dimmed, warning of an impending overload. With all his strength, Sam pushed Bricket back just as the terminal exploded. They both toppled in a heap as flaming debris rained down on them.

The bartender patted out the patches of fire on his clothes.

“Were you able to finish?” Sam asked.

“I hope so.”

The
Marauder
had just completed another charge across the bow of the
Conqueror
when all the instruments in the command center went dark.

“What happened?” Mason said.

“I don’t know,” Steiner answered. “Use the manual controls to get us out of range.”

“On my way,” the pilot said, putting distance between them and the other vessel.

Steiner looked back at the weapons officer. “Mr. Tramer, are any of your systems online?”

The weapons officer pressed a few keypads, but nothing happened. “Everything is inoperative. It appears we’ve lost the computer room.”

“Try to contact Bricket.”

The cyborg nodded and went to work on it.

Steiner stared out the front viewport at the
Conqueror
, motionless in space. Small fires emanated from the battlecruiser’s hull where the
Marauder
had hit it. It looked badly damaged, yet it still outmatched them.

“Captain,” Bricket answered over the ship’s intercom. “I succeeded in deadlocking the battlecruiser’s network, but it cost me every terminal I had.”

“Every unit?”

“Except life support.”

“Without the computers, we can’t find our way back to across the border,” Palmer said.