“It doused me!” he gasped disbelievingly. “I finished, and it just—it wet me!”
With an annoyed snort, Annen jammed his gun back into its holster. “We’re wasting time,” he growled. “Come on.”
“A minute,” Sjette said, lifting his hands and distastefully eyeing the water dripping from his fingertips. Stepping back toward the corridor wall, keeping well back from the Disabler, he lifted his arms and gave them a firm shake downward. A cloudburst spattering of raindrops chattered into the walls or plopped into the growing puddle at his feet—
And suddenly, with a violent thunder crack, Sjette was encased in a brilliant flash of blue-white fire. Annen had just enough time to gasp—
And then the fire vanished, and the corridor’s lights all went out.
Leaving only the sound of Femte’s startled curse, the pounding of Annen’s own heartbeat, and the wet slap of Sjette’s body collapsing onto the deck.
Forste’s grip on Bob’s upper arm was like a lockclamp as he hurried the ranger along at a pace just short of a flat-out run. “What’s happened?” Bob asked for the fifth time since Forste and his men had hauled him out of their makeshift prison.
For the fifth time, Forste ignored the question. But at least now Bob had a good idea where they were going: sickbay.
Something about Cummings?
They reached the medical center, and Forste all but shoved Bob through the door. Three of the other terrorists were there: two standing grim and armed, the third twitching half-unconscious on one of the treatment tables. Over the whole group hung the pungent aroma of singed flesh. “There,” Forste said, pulling his gun out of Bob’s ribs and jabbing it toward the corner where Cummings was sleeping peacefully in his medpack cocoon.
“Shut it down and get him out of there.”
Bob shook his head. “I can’t.”
Forste’s gun was suddenly in his face. “I said shut it down.”
“But I can’t,” Bob protested, his knees suddenly going wobbly. “It doesn’t have a cancel switch. Once it’s running a program, it can’t be shut off until it’s finished.”
“Don’t svark us,” one of the terrorists snarled, his knuckles white where he gripped his gun. “That’s a Galen R-225. Galens are designed better than that.”
“This one isn’t,” Bob said. “And it’s a Galen R-224. They didn’t put in the cancel switch until the 225.”
The terrorist had been starting toward Bob, murder in his eyes. Now, abruptly, he froze in midstep, doing a hard right and striding over to the medpack. “Well?” Forste asked as he crouched down beside the ident plate.
“It’s a 224,” he confirmed in a voice like grinding walnuts. “What kind of idiot designed this?”
“Probably the kind who got fired while they rushed the 225 into production,” Bob said.
“From what I heard, they only made a few hundred 224s before they figured it out and canceled the model.”
“So why do you have one?” Forste demanded suspiciously.
Bob waved a hand around the room. “Why do you think? The Park Service got them cheap.”
Forste’s mouth worked, but it was clear he couldn’t find an answer to that one. “What if we just shut the thing off, pull Cummings out, and put Sjette in?”
Bob shook his head, “You pull the plug in the middle and you might not be able to get it started again,” he said. “You’d have to erase the current program, which means purging the memory; and with this thing there’s no guarantee you wouldn’t crash it and have to reboot off the recovery disk.”
“What if we just shoot Cummings, then?” the other terrorist suggested tightly. “That ought to end the program.”
“It would probably also end the medpack,” Bob pointed out, trying not to shudder at the thought of such casual murder. “And your friend will still be burned. Look, why don’t you instead let me see what I can do to help him?”
“You have medical training?” Forste asked.
“Nothing official,” Bob admitted. “But I know how to handle burns and basic injuries.
We’ve all had to learn first aid, pretty much in self-defense.” He nodded over at the 224.
Forste puckered his lips in disgust. But there wasn’t anything he could do about it, and he and everyone else knew it. “Go ahead,” he growled.
Fifteen minutes later, with much of his body covered in burn foam, the injured terrorist was snoring gently on a cot. “The foam works best if the subject is asleep,” Bob explained as he put everything away. “I just gave him enough for a ten-hour nap.”
“Yes, I know,” Forste said coolly. “I was watching the dosage you measured into the hypo. Just as well for you that you didn’t try to put him under for, say, the next four days.”
Bob shivered slightly. The thought had occurred to him, actually, to do exactly that. A good thing he hadn’t acted on it. “Is that it, then?” he asked.
“That’s it,” Forste confirmed. “Annen, take him back to his cell. And then get back to work.”
So, Bob thought to himself as he was escorted back down the rusty corridor. One down.
Eight more to go.
Space Fort Jefferson, it appeared, was on a roll.
“What do you mean, it’s not working?” Forste’s voice came tartly.
“It’s not working, that’s all,” Fjerde shot back. “I’ve run it fifteen different ways, and it’s just dead.”
“What do the diagnostics say?”
Fjerde snorted. “What diagnostics? This comm system must have been built in the last century.”
“I don’t care if it’s three days older than dirt,” Forste snapped. “If we can’t get up-to-the-second positioning data from our friend aboard the escort ships, we haven’t got a chance of pulling this off. How fast can you fix it?”
“I’m not sure it can be fixed,” Fjerde protested. “The antenna array alone—”
“You’ve got twelve hours,” Forste cut him off. “Get it operational, or it’s your own head.” He clicked off without waiting for a reply.
For a moment Fjerde glared at the antiquated comm system with its joke of an antenna array. Then, cursing under his breath, he started taking it apart.
Considering the rust and mildew evident elsewhere in the corridor, Sjuende thought, the locking wheel on the door to the Number Four Torpedo Launch Center was suspiciously easy to turn. The place wasn’t on the tourist route; could the rangers have some private use for the place?
Or could it be that the missing Ranger Wimbley was hiding in there? Getting a grip on his gun, Sjuende pulled the door open—
To be greeted by a puff of moist and oddly fetid air. “What’s that smell?” Attende asked uneasily from behind him.
“I don’t know.” Sjuende reached for the light switch, twitched his hand back again as he remembered the faulty electrical circuits that had fried Sjette. Using the edge of his insulated flashlight instead, he flicked on the lights.
He was expecting to see the drab gray and the grim, no-nonsense metal and ceramic of a Space Force weapons room. What he got instead was Garden Club Headquarters.
“What the hell?” Attende gasped, crowding in beside him.
“It’s a hydroponics room,” Sjuende said with a twist of his lip. He glanced across the row of torpedo tubes “Uh-oh,” he muttered.
“What?” Attende demanded. “—oh. Oh.”
“Oh, indeed,” Sjuende agreed tightly. All eight tube covers had been flipped all the way back to accommodate extra rows of various vegetable-looking plants. Even from across the room, he could see that years of neglect and careless watering had rusted every single cover solidly in place.
“Let’s try another room,” Attende suggested. “Numbers Two, Seven, and Eight are still available.”
“Hardly,” Sjuende said, shaking his head. “Two’s tubes are open to space, which means the covers are pressure-sealed; Seven is being used as a junk storage room, with more stuff in there than we could possibly move out in three days; and Eight has no floor.”
