“If that magazine was loaded with high explosive rounds you'd 'ave killed yerself, yer gunner an' at least two mechanics. Prolly woulda disabled two other guns while ye were at it.”
“What magazine?”
“Just step outta the armour,” Frost repeated, at the end of his patience.
“Yes sir.”
For some reason he glanced behind him just then, and regretted it. Even across a depressurized gunnery deck, even with her blacked out transparesteel faceplate up, he could tell Stephanie was absolutely enraged. Her shoulders were square and her stance was set firmly, as though she were ready for a fight, or spoiling for one.
“Lildell, take over here, I've got a meeting,” Frost ordered.
“Aye, sir,” came the reply from his second in command.
Stephanie wasn't setting foot on the deck and he read that as meaning she didn't want to say whatever she needed to in front of his crew. He strode to the heavy express elevator, large enough for heavy equipment, and stepped inside. As soon as his foot cleared the doors she closed them and sent the car downward, towards the command deck.
“Thought we weren't visiting each other on shift,” Frost said, trying to bring some levity into the large express car.
“Not here,” she said flatly over proximity radio as she activated the pressurization systems so they could step out of the lift as soon as it reached a section of the ship with full life support.
He waited for the car to finish its short trip to the command deck and repressurize before breaking the thick silence. She was out of the express car before the doors were finished opening and continued on right across the hall into one of the smaller briefing rooms. Frost followed right behind her.
When the door closed behind them she deactivated her headpiece. The faceplate rolled down into her collar and the rest folded down into a small hood between her shoulders. “You don't even know what you did wrong, do you?” she asked quietly.
“Burke? He had it comin',” he said simply as he stopped to stand behind the chair at the head of the short black top table. There were eight chairs around it all together, and no windows in the dark blue walled room.
“Had it coming? This isn't the Samson, Shamus. You don't get to decide who has what coming to them.”
“Most o' the time, sure, but not for him. Samson, Triton, hell, even on the bloody Queen Mary, I get my sights on 'im and his ass is mine,” Frost said calmly. He was being honest, he wouldn't do anything differently if he had to make the choice all over again. “He alive?”
“Barely. They had to treat him with nanobots and the first thing the automated medic did was take off most of his fingers and a whole foot. He'll need to have them grown for him and without a doctor aboard, well,” she threw up her hands. “I know Burke burned you, and I got your message about him giving up the Samson for Wheeler, but tell me you understand why you shouldn't have gone around me on this.”
“You'd have had 'im all cozy in the brig before anyone got anythin' out of him. Bet you wouldn't 'ave gotten anythin' out of him either.”
“Damn right I would have! Do you think Captain gave me this post as some kind of reward? I've led some of his hardest boarding actions, even when he knew not all of us were coming back! He knows I can handle this and even though he's been running jobs for half as long as either of us, he's a better judge than both of us combined!”
“Sorry lass, you've never been the interrogating kind, not that I've seen.”
“That's just it, I'm nothing but a wee lass to you, am I? Tough enough behind a rifle, sure, but when I'm face to face with someone you don't think I'm smart or hardened enough to handle you get in my way.”
“I've no problem givin' you a chance at bringin' info outta someone, just not Burke, got it? He took everythin' I had, betrayed Captain, the crew and he had what he got comin' an' worse!”
“Give me a chance?” she shouted in furious disbelief. “I don't need a chance, Shamus, I'm running the show! I don't care how badly he pulled one over on you, and it couldn't have been too hard, but you don't get to play police whenever you want to! Trust me to do my job, I'm good at it.”
“Aye, and with anyone else-”
“Fine, so you'll let me do my job until someone else steps on Shamus Frost's toes, then you'll get angry and prove once again that you're nothing more than a brainless thug!”
“I just don't think you should handle my business. It's my business!” Frost shouted.
“You're just… guhhh! ” she shouted at him in exasperation.
“This was between Burke and I, he crossed me and I got him in turn, that's the way he and I always ran.”
“You see where that landed you? Maybe you should try doing things some other way?”
“What, your way? What would you have done?” Frost asked impatiently.
There were a dozen responses to that question, but she couldn't seem to pick one so she just stared at him crossly and folded her arms.
“If the interrogation was anythin' like this, he'd have talked by now, so maybe I should have just handed 'im over!” Frost laughed.
“That's it. We're done,” Stephanie marched for the door.
He grabbed her arm. “Done?”
She freed herself, put her foot behind his and elbowed him in the chest just hard enough to knock him into the nearest chair. He fell perfectly seated. “Don't come calling tonight, don't follow me to the pub, and don't try to force your way back into my good graces. Ash might have put up with it for a year from a distance but I won't deal with your crap at point blank.” Stephanie finished before storming out.
Oz and Jason Go To Pandem Part III
They were forced into the open. Servant and maintenance bots wearing frozen expressions, armed with tools that threatened to tear nearly overtook them. The worst was a female android who started wailing and screaming after Jason managed to escape her harsh grasp and shoot her several times in the torso, disabling her legs and splitting her chest open. Her reaction was a surprise and human enough to draw sympathy.
The stone Jason and Oz hid behind was overtaken quickly, each of them was only able to take a few shots with their rifles before it became a melee. Their vacsuits hardened under the crushing pressure of grasping hands and other appendages while Jason and Oz were forced to switch to their sidearms and fire on their half dozen assailants at point blank range. After a few seconds they had won free from most of them.
“Run! There are more coming!” Oz shouted over his intermittently functional proximity radio.
“I'll split right!” Jason replied as he fired several rounds into the main chassis of a short cleaning bot. The operating lights on its body flickered out while its upper arm held fast to Jason's thigh. He took a shot at the elbow, blasting the joint apart as he started running. The limb remained clamped onto the hardened section of his vacsuit for several steps before it finally let go.
The desperation of their situation became evident as they left cover. Oz counted sixteen various machines who were about to reach their former refuge and they all turned to give chase as quickly as their legs, wheels and tractor treads would allow. They crossed the paved surface and rounded a ruined fountain with the mechanical pursuers gaining before they reached another section of unpaved sand.
“Those military bots aren't firing.” Jason announced through the crackling proximity radio.
Oz looked back to see a group of military bots making their way across the sand in the distance. He'd never seen their type before, but judging from their angular, thin, half humanoid shaped builds and the barrels built into their white and black camouflaged torsos he guessed that they were within range despite the hundreds of meters between them. “I'm going to try something!” he replied as he tossed a nearly empty clip into the air.
The mechanized troops opened fire on it after it was to the left of the various bots chasing them. A trail of light traced the cartridge as it arced through the air and finally landed in the sand. “They're afraid to hit the service bots behind us.”
“Interesting, if we can keep ahead of them we might survive,” Jason called back.
As soon as the service and luxury bots chased them from the paved surfaces to the sand most of them
