* * *
Clive spent a long time searching through the generator room for a way out with no success. Most of the wall space was taken up by a confusion of pipes and power conduits, junction boxes and display panels. The only breaks in the walls were a number of small air vents that were barely large enough to stick his arm in. Since the room they were in was buried under more than fifty meters of solid rock they couldn’t even blast a hole through one of the walls to escape. If they were going to get out of here they would have to do something unexpected.
He had just completed a full circuit of the room when a deep, vibrating hum reverberated through the structure of the base and the lights dimmed. At the same moment that the main lights had dimmed, Clive saw bright flashing coming from the far side of the room. It was a brief burst of intense, white light that cut off as abruptly as it had started. It was as if lightning had flared inside the room for a moment.
He knew what it was immediately. Particle cannons emitted a short blast of high energy plasma. By passing the ionized gas through a powerful magnetic field the plasma was concentrated into a coherent beam that could be accelerated to near light speed. But the plasma itself was too powerful to be constrained for long. Although theoretically it could be held inside a magnetic bottle indefinitely, the power cost was prohibitive. Instead, large gas reservoirs known as flash chambers were used to store vast quantities of hydrogen. By passing a powerful current through the gas it was quickly excited to the point where its electrons were stripped away, creating in an instant the charged particles needed to power the weapon. Once created, the plasma was compressed into the force chamber of the cannon from which it was released in a single burst. Given the size of the guns the pirates were using, the flash chambers must be immense. The flash of the ionizing gas was the only thing that could cause the intense burst of light he had seen.
The image of a pair of thick hatches immediately came to mind. Clive remembered passing the twin doors during his circuit of the room. One had been midway along the wall on this side of the room. The other had been in the middle of the opposite wall, right where the flashing had come from. Warning signs posted on each door had made it very clear that an extremely hazardous environment lay beyond. He had briefly examined the doors as he made his way around the room, but paid them little mind. Through the small, thick windows set into each door he had seen long, narrow passages that led deeper into the body of the asteroid. Way down at the far end of each of these passages was another heavy door which gave access into the isolation silos where the flash chambers were contained.
Given the critical importance of the magnetic containment system that kept the volatile plasma away from other matter, there was a slim possibility that there might be a maintenance access of some kind leading out of the silo to allow workers to inspect the system. If so, it might be possible for them to escape that way. But it was not an option he would take if they had any other choice. Temperatures inside a flash chamber reached nearly ten thousand degrees Celsius. Even with the gas insulated within the flash chamber itself, the heat that escaped into the isolation silo could raise the ambient temperature around the chamber to more than three thousand oC. Anyone inside the silo when the cannon was fired would be reduced to ash in the space of a heartbeat.
But no other options had presented themselves and Clive found himself forced to make a difficult decision. They could barricade themselves in the generator room and try to fight off whatever forces the pirates sent in after them, or they could dare the risky trip through one of the isolation silos and hope that the cannon wasn’t fired while they were inside.
Under normal conditions the four of them would be able to hold off a force much larger than theirs indefinitely from inside the generator room. The narrow hallway that led into the room would force anyone who tried to come at them to bunch up in that bottleneck, making them easy targets as they got in each other’s way. But the blast shields the pirates had used in the security lobby swung the odds solidly in their favor. Tucked in behind those shields the pirates could send an overwhelming force against them with impunity—which left Clive with no real choice.
He had only been standing there for a few seconds when the sound from the generators deepened again as the lights dimmed once more. This time the flashing came from the door on the near side of the room.
Before the generators had spun back up to full speed he was moving, his mind made up. Given the size of the guns, he estimated that the flash chambers had to be large enough to hold at least a thousand cubic meters of gas. It would take time to refill that much space before the cannon could be fired again. Enough time hopefully for him to examine one of the isolation silos to see if there was in fact a maintenance access to the outside.
He hurried to the hatch whose small window had recently been ablaze with fierce light and pressed the door control. The oval doorway was less than a meter wide and just over one and a half meters tall. Once the thick door had retracted into the wall, Clive squeezed himself through the opening. It was a tight fit in his armor but by turning sideways he was able to squeeze through. As soon as he had cleared the doorway the hatch sealed itself behind him to protect the environment of the generator room. He hurried along the narrow passage and soon was standing before the inner hatch. He noticed that the air was warmer at the far end of the passage. He took a quick look through the hatch window and could see the immense shape of the flash chamber on the other side. When he thumbed the open switch for the door a blast of intense heat slammed into him. The exposed skin on his face prickled as if he were standing in front of a blast furnace. He recoiled from the searing temperature, instinctively clamping his eyes closed and raising his hands to ward off the heat. After a moment he found that he could open his eyes to narrow slits and he leaned forward and poked his head warily into the space beyond.
Clive found himself peering into a circular shaft that ran for at least fifty meters both above and below him. Suspended in the center of the shaft was the flash chamber itself, a translucent cylinder inside a heavy metal-ceramic framework that was encircled by thick magnetic constrictor bands spaced at one meter intervals along its length. He estimated that the flash chamber had to measure at least three meters in diameter. Given these dimensions he calculated that the reservoir could actually hold closer to three thousand cubic meters of gas. He had trouble imagining the destructive power of a cannon that was able to loose that large a concentration of ionized matter in a single burst, but knew that the shields of even the largest Fleet ships would not be able to withstand that much firepower.
Looking above and below him he found a series of rungs set into the wall of the silo. There was no artificial gravity field in the shaft and it took him a moment to mentally reorient himself to see the tube as inverted. Above his head, which was actually the bottom of the silo, was a dead end. Beneath him was the top of the silo. There he could see that the flash chamber was coupled to a plasma conduit which disappeared through the ceiling. And set into the ceiling just above where the ladder ended he could see a circular hatch. That was their way out.
Although it was still incredibly hot in the silo, he found that the searing temperature of a few moments ago was beginning to recede. He felt the air moving around him and realized that the hot air was being drawn out as refrigerated air was pumped in to reduce the temperature in the silo. The wall was still much too hot to touch with bare skin, but they would be safe in their armor—as long as no one fired the cannon while they were still inside the silo.
Closing the hatch he quickly retraced his steps back to where Bobby sat propped against the wall beside the entrance passageway. At first he thought the young man was unconscious but Bobby raised his hand slowly and flashed him a thumbs up as he returned.
“All quiet so far,” Bobby reported softly as Clive knelt down beside him and flipped open the monitor panel on his suit. Bobby’s vital signs had dropped over the
past few minutes.
“So what’s the verdict?” Bobby asked weakly. “Do you think I’ll ever be able to play the piano?”
“You’ll be playing the piano before you know it,” Clive said with more conviction than he felt.
“That’s good. I never could play the piano before.” Bobby smiled weakly at his own jest.
“That joke is older that I am,” Clive said.
“Nothing like a classic,” Bobby said, then grimaced as a spasm of pain lanced through him. When the pain subsided and he could breathe again, he asked, “By the way, did you happen to find a way out? I’d kind of like to get back to the ship.”
“As a matter of fact I did. It’s going to be a tight squeeze but we should come out in the tunnel not far from where we left the scooters.”
“That’s … good,” Bobby said. His voice had begun to slur. “I don’t think I could ever play the piano before. You know, before like when it was before and I saw the tree on the roof.” His voice trailed off and his eyes rolled back in his head.
Clive grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him as he called his name. Bobby mumbled something incoherent but was otherwise unresponsive. Clive looked at the bio monitor panel again and saw that his blood pressure had taken a sudden drop. He realized that Bobby must be hemorrhaging internally. There was no choice now. He typed in the code to have Bobby’s suit place him in stasis and pulled his helmet back on. As soon as the helmet was sealed to the suit’s neck collar, the autodoc injected him with the chemical compound that would slow his body functions and lowered the internal temperature of the suit to just above freezing. They were now in a race against time.
Clive pushed himself to his feet just as Bruce and Jimmy were returning. After completing his security sweep of the room, Jimmy had gone to help Bruce plant the charges. Clive could see that the bags attached to their belts were now empty. As they returned they both looked down at Bobby’s unmoving form.
“I put him in stasis,” Clive explained, answering their unasked question. “We need to get him to a medical bay soon if he’s going to have any chance. How did it go with the charges?”
“Everything is in place,” Bruce said. “Since the pirates know we’re in here I couldn’t do what I had originally planned and I had to get a little creative. They’d have found the stuff I was going to plant with a quick search. Once I thought about it I didn’t have a lot of options.” Bruce paused and Clive could sense his discomfort.
“What are you trying to tell me?” Clive said.
Bruce took a breath and continued. “I decided that the only way to be sure the guns are out of action is to take out the main transfer nodes in the generators. I found an access panel and planted a small charge inside each of the nodes. The only way they could find it would be for someone to open the housing and stick his hand inside the chamber and feel around for it. Since it’s not on a timer there’s no electronic signal for them to detect. They’ll never even know it’s there. Of course they’d be fools not to check the generators over for sabotage, so we also planted timed charges in the obvious places. They should be able to find and disarm those easily enough. If they’re not careful when they go to remove them they could still do the job for us but that’s not what I’m counting on. When they go to fire the cannons the power surge will be more than enough to detonate the charge I planted and that will take out the transfer node.”
“Is that going to be enough to take out the guns?”
Bruce smiled. “Oh, yes sir. The explosion itself won’t destroy the generator but the node will be completely ruined. And without the transfer node to direct the power flow all that energy won’t have anywhere to go. There’ll be a chain reaction that should send both generators up. In fact,” Bruce said, glancing around the room uneasily, “we need to be as far away from here as we can before it blows. If it works like I think it will, we’re going to want to have as much solid rock as possible between us and this bunker when that happens.”
Clive understood what had Bruce so uncomfortable. They no longer had control over the destruction of the guns. The pirates would destroy their own weapons, and the control bunker as well, the next time they tried to fire them. And if they hadn’t made their way out of the generator room by then, they would go up as well.
At that moment they heard a muffled explosion from the entrance corridor. The pirates had decided to blow the security door. They waited for several moments but there was no sudden outrush of atmosphere. The bunker had not ruptured. One potential disaster had been avoided. And with their men now entering the generator room, it was unlikely that the pirates would fire the guns again until they had searched for booby traps. The window to make their escape was now and they needed to hurry.
Clive picked up his helmet. “I’ve found our way out. Seal your suits and stay close.”
They all drew on their helmets. Bruce and Jimmy each took one of Bobby’s arms around their shoulders and supported him between them as they followed Clive to the nearest silo hatch. It took them a bit of maneuvering to pass his limp body through the small doorway but they eventually managed to get him into the narrow passage. As the hatch closed behind them they could hear the pirates approaching the generator room through the corridor that led back to the bunker.
They moved as quickly and as quietly as they could along the narrow tunnel. Soon they came to the end and Clive opened the hatch into the isolation silo. Leaning through the opening he pulled himself into the gravity-less environment then turned to help the others maneuver Bobby through behind him. Once they had him through Clive started along the ladder, tugging Bobby behind him with one hand as the others pulled themselves into the shaft. Bruce was the last one into the silo. As he closed the second hatch behind him he saw that the pirates had not yet thought to check for them here. He hoped their luck would hold long enough for them to make it back to their scooters. As he stared at the confined space around them and the volatile flash chamber a few meters way he felt decidedly uneasy. This would be a really bad place to be ambushed.
The climb up the shaft went fairly quickly. Without a gravity field to drag them down they ascended rapidly, pulling themselves along the shaft by the rungs set into the silo wall. When they reached the hatch they found that it could be opened manually by simply pulling on a release handle set into the door. The hatch opened easily, swinging smoothly down into the silo.
On the other side of the hatch was an airlock. Through the small window set into the outer hatch they could make out what appeared to be the tunnel that led into the asteroid. They were almost out.
But there was a problem. The airlock was too small for more than one of them at a time. This would not have been more than an inconvenience if the hatch could be operated from the outside, but from the configuration of the door it was obvious that it could only be opened from inside. It was no doubt a security measure to prevent unauthorized access into the bunker, but it meant that they would have no way to get Bobby through since he could not operate the lock controls himself.
Clive immediately ordered Bruce and Jimmy through ahead of him.
“But, sir…” Jimmy started to object.
“No arguments,” Clive said quickly, cutting him off. “I’m not planning on leaving anyone behind. You two just be ready to help me with Bobby when we cycle through.” One of the fiercest traditions among marines was that they did not abandon comrades.
Bruce cycled through quickly and soon Jimmy was entering the chamber. The airlock was so small that cycling through took less than a minute. Clive watched through the circular window inset in the door as Jimmy exited the chamber a short time later. As soon as he closed the outer hatch the airlock automatically began to repressurize.
As air cycled back into the lock, Clive reached for the clips on the shoulders of Bobby’s suit that held his backpack in place. He released them quickly, then reached around his waist for the matching pair of release cl
ips there. In the gravityless environment it was a simple matter for him to pull the pack away from the suit with one hand. The backpack housed the suits’ air tanks and main power cells. Small, emergency batteries would continue to power the armor for another ten minutes or so which was more than enough time for them to cycle through the lock, but with the backpacks removed they would have only the air that was trapped in their suits to breathe. Clive hoped it would be enough.
Once he had disconnected Bobby’s backpack he checked his face quickly through the helmet visor. Frost had begun to creep in from the edges of the faceplate and Bobby appeared to be resting peacefully. The bio monitors in the chest panel confirmed that he was in deep hibernation. With his metabolism reduced to a fraction of normal, the air in his suit should be able to sustain him for quite some time.
Once he had seen to Bobby, Clive checked the airlock and found that the cycle had completed. Pulling open the door he guided Bobby’s limp form up into the circular chamber then tucked his backpack against the wall to one side. He was just reaching up to undo the first of his own suit’s shoulder clips when a blaster bolt slammed into the ceiling near his head.
He started, the sudden motion sending him tumbling against the silo wall. He grabbed the nearest rung of the ladder with one hand to steady himself and looked down. A number of pirates had entered the silo fifty meters below. A pair of them was struggling over something that Clive quickly realized was a blaster rifle. After a moment one of the pirates took a swing at the other, connecting with a solid blow to the mouth that sent the second man floating out into the silo. A moment later one of the pirate’s arms brushed against the outer casing of the flash chamber. The man shrieked and spasmed violently as the hot alloy burned him. As he recoiled from his contact with the chamber casing, his companion gestured at him emphatically and pointed at the flash chamber. The shooter had been reckless enough to actually open fire inside the isolation silo. Fortunately his shot had missed the flash chamber or none of them might be here now. All he had done was to alert Clive to their presence.
As the pirates began to swarm up the silo wall after them, Clive quickly released the remaining clips and struggled out of his backpack. He pushed the pack ahead of him into the airlock then pulled himself in after it. Wriggling and squirming his way into the small chamber he found that he was just able to squeeze into the claustrophobic space. He started to reach down and close the hatch behind him but found that he couldn’t bend enough to reach it with their suits pressed against each other. Icy fingers clutched his stomach when he realized that he wouldn’t be able to close the hatch.
Looking between his feet he saw the pirates climbing rapidly up the silo wall. They would be on them in moments. He stared down the silo impotently as the enemy drew closer, his mind spinning as he tried to come up with a way out of this predicament. He quickly realized that there was no way he could save them. But there was another option. He could see to it that the pirates were stopped here.
With calm acceptance he extended his arm and prepared to open fire with his gauntlet blaster. If they couldn’t escape he was going to take as many of the pirates with him as he could. The airlock should protect Bruce and Jimmy from the blast when he ruptured the flash chamber. Then they would be free to return to the ship.
As he sighted along his forearm, taking aim between his boots, a though struck him: Boots?
In a sudden flash of inspiration he activated the magnetic soles. Extending one leg down through the open doorway he pressed the bottom of his foot against the open hatch and pulled it closed behind them just as the first of the pirates reached the top of the silo. The control that worked the cycling pumps was a simple handle set in a groove in the wall that he had to grasp and pull down. Deadbolts slid into place around the rim of the inner hatch with a solid thunk, locking their pursuers out, while the pumps began evacuating the atmosphere inside the chamber.
Thirty seconds later a small light glowed red beside the outer hatch. Clive pulled the release, pushed the hatch open with one hand and began working Bobby’s body up through the narrow opening. Jimmy and Bruce reached for Bobby as soon as he started to emerge from the hatch and quickly pulled him out. As they drew Bobby’s limp form out of the small chamber, Clive reached down and grabbed the two backpacks. He passed them up to the waiting hands overhead and started to pull himself out when he realized that it was starting to get hard to breathe. He found himself taking deeper and deeper breaths yet was beginning to feel like he was suffocating. He started to get light headed and his limbs began to feel heavy and sluggish as he struggled to pull himself up through the circular opening. He felt himself growing sleepy as darkness began to close in from the edges of his vision. For a moment he wondered where he was. There was something important he was trying to do but he couldn’t remember what it was. He sensed that someone seemed to be pulling him, turning him around. He allowed the strange hands to move him, letting the swaying motion lull him deeper and deeper into—
The sudden taste of fresh air snapped him back to his senses.
“Colonel!” he heard Jimmy’s voice call him.
He found himself standing beside the open airlock hatch, his magnetized boots holding him in place. Jimmy had him by the shoulders as he looked at him in concern.
Clive drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly as the darkness retreated beyond the edges of his vision. “I’m okay,” he said. “Thanks.” He clapped Jimmy on the shoulder.
Glancing around he saw that they were in a wide, funnel shaped depression. Beside the hatch they had just emerged from a thick plasma conduit rose from the circular floor of the depression. The ribbed, black tube extended straight up over their heads for several meters then bent and ran off at an angle, disappearing out of view past the edge of the funnel.
A sudden motion behind his men caught his attention. The hatch was beginning to close. He realized that there must be a control inside the silo to close the hatch. Once it was closed the pirates would be able to cycle through after them.
Clive snatched the empty munitions bag from Jimmy’s belt and launched himself toward the hatch. He stuffed the bag into its hinge and hoped that the material was durable enough to withstand the pressure of the hatch mechanism. The hatch slowed and ground to a halt, leaving a gap of a few centimeters.
“Let’s move,” Clive said.
Clive had Jimmy take the lead while he and Bruce each grabbed one of Bobby’s arms. Using their suit thrusters they started up out of the funnel. As they emerged over the lip of the depression they could see the looming shape of one of the particle cannons overhead. The immense gun had been run out into the middle of the tunnel on an enormous manipulator arm, its great maw aiming out of the tunnel’s mouth. The pirates were in for a nasty surprise the next time they tried to fire that weapon.
They turned away from the great gun and made their way to the cluster of machinery where they had hidden their scooters. They unstrapped the scooters quickly and used the magnetic ties to lash Bobby to the rear seat of Clive’s scooter. As soon as he was secured they activated the stealth emitters and started off into the tunnel.
Clive adjusted his visor setting to the frequency for the beacons they had left behind them to mark their way. A series of lights appeared on the heads-up display of his face plate, pulsing along the tunnel to where they disappeared around a turn in the distance. Clive accelerated his scooter away from the bunker, keeping well clear of the giant cannons as they retreated into the depths of the tunnel. Minutes later they were negotiating the first turn as they made their way back through the labyrinth of passages.