That explained why Johnson was so big. ICAR Teams were the Navy’s InCursion And Rescue squads sent in to recapture pirated vessels. They weren’t as versatile as Special Forces, but they were the best at taking back a ship from pirates, terrorists, or mutinous crews. The Nebula had been one of ICAR’s worst defeats; the team forced to pull back and let the pirates keep the ship. “I read about that. Bad day for the Navy.”
Johnson shrugged it off. “Bad day for us right now if we don’t find a way out of here. We’re cut off from the world and the guys on the other side of the hatch ain’t exactly choirboys. You’ve got a ship. Let’s radio Lunar Command from there. This hatch won’t hold these animals forever.”
“That hatch is half a foot of solid steel. It’ll hold.” Besides, he wouldn’t let Johnson near the Prowler until he got some answers. “Walk me through what happened here.”
Johnson looked out the hatch’s porthole. Hands slapped at him from the other side of the glass. “Like I said, I’d just gotten the alert that the transmitter was off line when all hell broke loose. I didn’t have a chance to look into anything before everything rebooted and I heard them coming through the door.”
That didn’t make any sense. The keypad was a local terminal. It wasn’t tied in to the rest of the prison network and it had its own power source. The hatch to the prison shouldn’t have opened, even in a blackout. And the diagnostic he’d run at the hallway monitor didn’t show anything about a blackout.
Mackey motioned to the console. “Pull up the log and let’s get a rundown on what happened. Maybe we can fix that transmitter from here.”
“You do it,” Johnson grabbed the hatch’s wheel. “These bastards are still trying to get in here and I don’t trust this door.”
Mackey didn’t like that. “You’re the officer of the watch. Only you have access to this part of the system.”
“And I ain’t leaving this hatch,” Johnson said. “I told you it’s busted.”
“It would take a welder hours to get through that door with a laser torch and there’s nothing like that in this facility.” Mackey moved his hand to his belt. “Let’s look at that transmitter.”
But Johnson didn’t move. He kept looking out the porthole at the angry prisoners kicking and pounding the door. “And I’m telling you I don’t trust this door, man. You want a diagnostic, you run it.”
Mackey went to the terminal himself and brought it out of sleep mode. All internal cameras of the facility were functioning and none of them showed good news. Every cell door was opened and every inmate running free. In the event of a system reboot, all cell doors would’ve been locked, all beds and sinks should’ve retracted into the walls and all glass fogged over to black; effectively placing each prisoner in solitary confinement until the problem was resolved by the system or by the tech drones.
But nothing like that had happened here. Inmates had begun to strip their bed sheets and pool their resources in the common area in the middle of the circular prison module. They were beginning to organize for something, but for what, he didn’t know. There was nothing in the prison they could use for weapons. All piping was too thick to be ripped free and all joints were located in the maintenance corridors behind the prison’s internal superstructure. There were no rough edges in the cells or common areas where prisoners could fashion shanks or weapons and all utensils were biodegradable plastic that liquefied soon after contact with human body heat. All books were read via the display terminal in their cells, which itself was behind six inches of bulletproof glass.
In the fifty years since Fra Moura opened, no inmate had ever fashioned a weapon out of anything in the prison. Any violence had been the old fashioned hand-to-hand variety and quickly subdued by nerve gas and drones.
Nothing like this had ever happened before. It shouldn’t have happened now. Not the way Johnson had described it. Because if it had, these prisoners would’ve all been locked down in their cells.
Mackey tried to get access to the main system. He asked Johnson, “Are you sure you’re telling me everything that happened here?”
Johnson held onto the hatch wheel like a sea captain of old held a ship’s wheel during a storm at sea. “Like I pushed a wrong button or something? Is that it? This is all gonna come down on my head, isn’t it?”
“There’s no one button that could’ve done all of this,” Mackey said, “but I need to know what happened so we can try to fix it.”
“There’s no fixing it,” Johnson said. “Goddamned place is ancient. Plumbing don’t work. Water’s always brown and climate control’s all fucked up. Had a mold problem on D-Block last week. Ought to just shut it down and sell it for scrap.”
Mackey looked at him from the console. “I thought today was your first day.”
“I’ve been keeping up with the service logs,” Johnson said. “You want to waste time digging around in there about why things went wrong, be my guest. I say we hop in that bird of yours and call for back up. Come back here with force to subdue this shit because the two of us against four hundred of them ain’t gonna cut it.”
Mackey went back to the console. He knew he could access the system, but didn’t think his captain’s clearance covered prison facilities. He brought up the login screen so he could enter his own information.
But when he saw the log in screen, he understood exactly what was happening.
Marshall Owen Johnson’s face hadn’t been uploaded to the network, but it had been uploaded locally to this particular terminal.
And Johnson wasn’t black. He was a young Eurasian man of about twenty three years old.
Mackey grabbed for his slug gun as he stood, but the man who’d been playing Johnson wrapped his thick arms around his chest and ripped him up from the chair. Mackey’s arms were pinned to his sides. He couldn’t breathe and the grip got tighter. He didn’t have any room to move his arms. He didn’t even have enough space for half a breath. His legs were high above the deck and away from the walls, so he couldn’t get any leverage to push off anything.
The more he moved, the tighter Johnson squeezed. His right arm went numb and the slug gun hit the floor.
“That’s it, fly boy,” Johnson said into his ear. “Don’t fight it. Just go to sleep and I’ll take care of everything. And by the time you wake up, those boys will be in here making you their bitch. Your head will look real nice in one of their cellblocks as soon as I’m gone.”
Mackey brought his head back hard into Johnson’s nose. He heard the cartilage crunch as the big man’s grip broke enough for him to fall free. He hit the ground and grabbed the slug gun as he rolled clear and aimed it up at Johnson.
“Where’s Johnson? The real Johnson.”
The big man forgot all about his broken nose. He laughed again as blood streamed down over his mouth and onto his green jumper. He didn’t bother to wipe it away. “Dead. Or at least he is by now. I got him to tell me the code to the door before I fed him to those animals out there. Didn’t tell me I needed the code to lock it, though. Thanks to you, I got the door closed before they could get me, too.”
Mackey had never met Johnson. He didn’t even know the kid existed until a few minutes ago. But he still felt like he’d lost a brother or a dear friend because, in a way, that’s how the Marshall Service was. “Who the hell are you?”
“Elgin Staxx at your service, Captain.”
Mackey recognized the name. Staxx hadn’t been lying about being on the Nebula. He’d only lied about which side he’d been on. Staxx and his men had repelled the Navy squad and took the freighter of Martian ore for themselves. “I’ve heard of you.”
“Likewise,” Staxx said. “Heard you’re the best there is. Would’ve liked to have met you out in the vac myself. See who would’ve been better. Too bad I got ambushed by a goddamned Martian Space Guard unit instead and wound up in here. Kept it all real quiet out of fear my men would break me out of wherever they put me. They found me anyway and figured out how to hack the prison’s network and
spring me loose. When they come to pick me up in a little bit, we’re going to take you with us.” Staxx winked. “We’re gonna have a lot of fun with you, Captain.”
Mackey squeezed the trigger, but the slug gun didn’t fire. He checked the status bar, saw it was functional. He squeezed again, but nothing happened. Then he remembered why.
Staxx did, too; pointing to Johnson’s green jumpsuit he was wearing. “Safe guards against friendly fire, remember? You can’t kill me while I’m wearing Johnson’s suit and you’re not going to be able to stop me from hopping in your bird and linking up with my ship. Comms are dead so you can’t tell anyone about it because only Johnson has access.” He looked back at the door, then at Mackey and grinned. “And Johnson’s not talking.”
Mackey put his sidearm back in the holster on his leg. Staxx was too big to stop and there was no way he’d make it to the Remington in time before Staxx could get to it first.
But there were still ways he could ruin the big man’s day.
“Your ride out of here wouldn’t happen to be the Opal, would it?”
“Never heard of it.” But the look on his face said otherwise.
“That’s good because I just blew it apart right before I came down here.”
Staxx laughed. “A Prowler can’t take out a freighter.”
“My boss said the same thing, but that’s what happened. Besides, how’d you know it was a freighter?”
Staxx wasn’t smiling anymore.
“I’ll bet it was actually the Nebula with ghosted ID tags to make it read like the Opal. Wasn’t it? You assholes did a real shitty job of retrofitting pulse cannons to the core. You can’t just plug them in without some serious recalibrations, which takes time. And time is something men like you never seem to have.”
The veins in the black man’s thick neck bulged. “No way you took out that ship, man. No fucking way.”
“I knocked out the engines with my mini-cannons and the missile launcher on the aft section. Dead engines and the sudden loss of the launcher caused a hiccup in the core’s energy flow, which was already taxed enough by the pulse cannons and she went boom. Made a beautiful blue sphere, too. Too bad you missed it. I’m thinking about using the image on my Christmas cards next year.”
Staxx took a couple of steps closer. Away from the hatch to the prison. “Bullshit!”
“Why would I lie?” Mackey said. “You’re stuck here same as me. I had to burn a lot of life support buzzing away from Opal’s missiles and my Prowler’s systems are damaged from the radiation waves from the Opal’s core blowing up. Shields are at a minimum, too. The only place you can go is Earth and when Lunar Command tracks my Prowler heading away from base and they’re not able to raise me on the radio, protocol says they’ll blow you right out of the sky. And if there’s one thing my boss loves, it’s protocol.” It was a lie, but Staxx didn’t know that.
Staxx took a couple of more steps toward him. “I can make you fly us out of here.”
Mackey forced himself to not look at the Remington. He beckoned him closer instead. “Let’s see you try.”
Staxx charged and Mackey waited until the last millisecond to dive away. He landed on his chest and slid along the slick floor toward the Remington. He grabbed the shotgun, aimed at Staxx, and fired. The blast caught Staxx in the center of the chest and sent him back against the console. All Marshall jumpsuits were Kevlar, so he doubted the wound was fatal, but the impact should be enough to bring the big man down.
Mackey ejected the spent cartridge and racked another round.
Staxx recovered much quicker than he should have, lumbering to the door to the hallway leading to the airlock where Mackey’s Prowler was parked. Mackey fired again, but Staxx dove beneath the blast and slid on his chest, like Mackey had done, and skidded to the keypad. He quickly tapped in the code and the door hissed open.
Mackey racked another cartridge and fired just as Staxx pulled the door open. The blast caught him flush in the back and threw him out into the hallway.
Given that it led to an airlock, the door automatically closed behind him, but Mackey knew it wouldn’t lock until the security code was entered.
Mackey racked another cartridge as he ran across to the door. He tried to pull it open, but it wouldn’t budge. He tried to spin the wheel, but it only gave a couple of centimeters.
Then Staxx’s bloody face appeared in the window. He was smiling again, blood from his broken nose and from the pellets ruining the left side of his head. His ear looked completely gone.
That’s why the wheel wouldn’t budge. The son of a bitch was holding it from the other side.
Staxx was still smiling when he entered the security code Johnson had given him; sealing the door shut from the other side. Mackey entered the code immediately, but got a red warning sign. He knew why. This was a bulkhead leading to an airlock. It couldn’t be opened again until the airlock had been disengaged and the integrity of the hall insured. It was an old safety measure, but it couldn’t be over ridden. Not before Staxx reached the Prowler and got away.
Mackey pounded the door and screamed at the convict. He doubted Staxx could hear him through the thick plastic and steel, but the message got across. The pirate waved before trotting down the hall toward the airlock.
Chapter 4
Mackey stopped pounding the door. That wouldn’t get him anywhere. He’d read about Staxx’s exploits for years; how he’d pirated everything from star freighters to mining equipment and even a few military vessels from the scrap yards near Luna. There were no security protocols on the Prowler to keep him from taking it because no one stole Marshall equipment. No one had ever dared.
But Staxx wasn’t just anyone. He was one of the most ruthless people alive.
Mackey leaned his head against the door as he heard the airlock reseal as the Prowler disengaged and took off. He figured Staxx would try to fire on the prison from orbit, but just as the slug gun wouldn’t fire on another Marshall, the Prowler wouldn’t fire on a Marshall facility – or any other Marshall fighter in the vac.
For Staxx, the Prowler was nothing more than a jumped up getaway vehicle. But it was Mackey’s vehicle. And Mackey had let him get away.
Polanco would crucify him for this. If he lived long enough.
Mackey knew he was in a bad way. He was trapped in a lunar prison facility with the worst criminals around. He’d sent a good number of men to Fra Mauro in his career who’d love to get their hands on him.
He couldn’t let that happen.
He did have one thing in his favor. Polanco had stored Velda in the annex on the other side of the facility. If he could get to her, he could radio Lunar Command and let them know what had happened. All he had to do was get past four hundred of the worst convicts alive first.
And he couldn’t do that by just standing there.
He set the Remington aside and went back to the console. He tried again to log in under his own credentials, but Johnson had locked the system before Staxx had thrown him to the wolves.
There was only one thing he thought might work. A twentieth century solution for a twenty third century problem.
He turned the console off, waited a few seconds, then turned it back on.
The facility’s life support and electrical systems weren’t affected by the reboot. They ran automatically, changing only when commands from the console told them otherwise. The console came to life quickly, cycling through the hundreds of millions of protocols to re-establish connections with the various systems. Within five minutes, a new prompt came up asking for his user name and password.
He entered his Marshall identification and password and hoped to God it worked. It logged him in as a guest, giving him access to the broader Marshall network and limited access to the prison diagnostics, but he couldn’t directly activate the nerve gas or any of the prison’s other systems.
But he had enough access to get a better sense of the facility’s condition.
It only took him a few clicks t
o realize his situation was as bad as he’d feared. The external communication transmitter had been fried. External cameras showed it was still standing, but had been overloaded by whoever had helped Staxx escape. The prison cells looked like they had been locked open and encrypted to stay that way. He couldn’t have undone the encryption even if he had Johnson’s code. Whoever had hacked the prison’s system had done a very good job. Staxx had quite an impressive network. No one had ever hacked a federal prison before. Someone knew what they were doing.
Surprisingly, the riot suppression protocols such as the nerve gas weren’t locked down, but he was only logged in as a guest. He didn’t have the authority to activate any of the facility’s systems or drones.
He checked the module’s locker in the hopes of finding a space suit so he could simply pop the airlock and walk across the surface to the hangar three hundred yards away. He found plenty of guns and even more ammunition, but no spacesuit. There should’ve been one, but there wasn’t. He blamed inefficiency for that, not Staxx.
He had enough ammunition to shoot his way out – if he’d had a squad of Marshalls with him. Ten men against four hundred would’ve been tough, but doable with the kind of firepower in the locker. But he didn’t have a squad. It was just him. They’d be on him in no time.
He went back to the console and pulled up the prison’s infrastructure specs. Air vents and waste ducts and conduit lines that made the complex work. His limited access only gave him a general view of the prison, but it was enough to help him chart a course between the command module and the hangar.
The main air vent flowed through the core of the prison, above the common area and the cells, all the way to the opposite end of the complex to the storage facility serving as Velda’s hangar.
The vents were also two hundred feet off the deck and weren’t built for human weight. Vents were maintained by maintenance drones that ran on tracks along the sides of the vents; keeping them clear of pests and other debris so the air wasn’t contaminated. They were also alerted when anyone gained unauthorized access to them to prevent convicts from using them as escape routes. Even if the vents held his weight, the drones could be a problem.