locals very nervous for some time. The explosion of the ship itself would take out the entire freighter bay complex. She did not consider that very likely, but she would not worry if things did get out of hand.
Accompanied by Bill, she took the trams through the installation to the freighter bays. They had been in the heart of enemy territory for some time now, and the complete lack of trouble they had encountered had bred a certain lack of concern on her own part. This was an uninhabited world in a remote system, a fact that had apparently led to a complete lack of suspicion among the base personnel. According to simple logic, no one could possibly be here who did not belong. She had taken advantage of Bill’s enhanced ability to interface with the simpler Union computers to have herself established in the roster as a technical support lieutenant and even assigned a very nice apartment in officer’s territory. Her rank and area of specialty gave her the run of the base, credentials that she could now prove beyond any doubt.
“What about it, Bill?” she asked as they took the tram to the hangar bay. “Do you think that we should set a fire beside that ship?”
“No,” Bill answered, simply and frankly. She glanced at him.
“Why not?”
“It is not safe.”
“Then what do you think we should do?” she asked.
“We should do that. It is safer than other things.”
Lenna sat back in her seat and sighed. “Why do I even talk to you?”
Bill’s diligent little processors contemplated that very question for several well-considered nanoseconds. “Because you have no choice.”
The tram transversed many unseen kilometers deep beneath the ice and rock, through the maze of corridors that Lenna was beginning to know very well and to detest with a passion. She had been wandering about in this warren of high technology with a fairly high degree of impunity, having realized very early on that security was almost non-existent on the inside. Once the Starwolves started on their way down, things were going to become very different in a hurry.
Lenna paused to look about. Fortunately all Union military installations were perfectly alike in one respect; the instructions were written on the walls. She sometimes wondered if they built these things from kits, with everything labeled. She followed the arrows down the corridor for a few dozen meters and entered a wide door on her left, finding herself on the observation deck overlooking the hangar bay. The freighter filled the nearer half of the bay, surrounded by shipping crates stacked together in small groups.
“Munitions?” she asked.
Bill stepped up close to the window, aiming the lenses of his cameras at the scene below. He had the advantage of telescopic vision, with the ability to computer-enhance a frozen image that was too far away for simple optics to identify clearly. “Not many munitions. Those groups of long crates nearest the ship’s middle bay doors are labeled as missiles. The remainder are standard personal supplies and environmental stocks.”
“Like paper?” Lenna asked, in a tone of voice that indicated she had something in mind.
“Paper supplies are stacked well to one side, presumably to reduce the risk of fire,” the sentry explained. “One group is labeled as personal paper supplies.”
“Personal?”
“Very personal,” Bill explained. He was a very discreet machine indeed. Lenna wondered about that. He had been rebuilt and programmed by Starwolves, who were not entirely discreet.
“That might be a very good place to start,” she commented to herself, then turned to the sentry. “Shall we go and have a look, my good automaton. Lead the way.”
Although there were crews on the deck, she saw no more than half a dozen or so cargo handlers. Lenna elected that a bold assault was probably the best course. She doubted that anyone would cast a suspicious thought at a technical officer in the company of one of their own automated sentries. Sneaking about was out of the question. One thing that Bill had never learned to do at all well was to sneak successfully.
The shipping crates were stacked neatly near one wall, well away from the front of the ship or any of the major corridors leading into the bay. Everything looked very promising, so far. The crates themselves were of light plastic, not the metal for heavier cargo, and their tops were locked down by simple spring clips. Lenna checked the labels on the ends of the crates and chose one that indicated the paper products that Bill had succinctly described, releasing the clips to look inside.
“Yes, this will do nicely,” she commented, then glanced at Bill. “I’ll be all right. You go over to freighter bay twelve and see what you can do about opening the overhead doors. You’re to go ahead and guide the Starwolves down when I send you the word, whether I can get there before they land or not. We are going to have to move quickly when things start.”
“You will need a com link,” Bill reminded her, stepping around close and popping open his computer interface access panel.
Lenna reached in and removed one of the small com units. The one she took had only limited range, but it was also designed to look like a perfectly ordinary pen to the point that it could actually write. Its limitations would not be a problem to her, under the present circumstances. The access panel began to close.
“Be off with you, now,” she told the sentry. “You be very quiet and very careful, the best you’ve ever done. I know that you can do it.”
“I will be careful,” Bill promised her as he prepared to turn away. Then he paused, as if in a moment of contemplation. “Sure now, and you be careful to keep your bony ass out of trouble as well.”
Seemingly quite pleased with himself, the sentry then hurried away on his errand, leaving Lenna to contemplate the arcane complexities of Kelvessan computer technology. Somewhere, from out of the muddled depths of his primary processors, Bill had considered that bout of nonsense logical.
Lenna turned back to her work, looking about for convenient mayhem. One interesting point that she noted immediately was the close proximity of the crates to a major power link. There were five separate levels of power available at this cluster of outlets. The lowest setting was meant for power tools and other pieces of portable equipment. The highest was intended only to jumpstart the total conversion generators of small spacecraft. The more powerful connections were occasionally known to short out, the high levels of energy they contained sometimes arcing across the two poles of their quick-connect socket. She knew that for a fact; she had in the past encouraged many such shorts.
As spectacular as such an electrical short could be, they were not usually very dangerous and were easily brought under control as soon as coordinating computers detected the power drain and shut down the line. Lenna meant to encourage things to get a little more out of hand, by moving the lightweight, but quite flammable, plastic shipping containers and their equally-flammable cargo just a little closer to the outlets.
Bending over the cluster of outlets, she used the manual shutdown switch to close off power to those lines. A single, slender strand of copper wire, as thin as a hair, was all she needed to encourage the short between the positive and negative connections of the direct current lines. The most difficult part of the process was simply removing the six screws of the main access plate over the cluster of power links. After that, she would slip the length of copper wire between the connections and replace the access plate. When she restored the power, the arc would strike. The beauty of the system was that the arc itself would remove all evidence of her tampering when the wire was melted… along with a large portion of the connection itself. “Here, what are you doing?”
Lenna paused, and frowned fiercely. Things had been going so perfectly for so long, she should have been suspicious. She glanced over her shoulder, and saw two pairs of black boots. Looking somewhat higher, she found that her fears were justified. Two of the biggest men she had ever seen, dressed in the dark uniforms of security, were standing over her, staring at her with expressions that were more confused than suspicious.
“Didn’t you know that this is a closed security bay?”
Lenna’s rather candid expression indicated that this tidbit of news came very much as a surprise, and by no means a welcome one.
Things proceeded rather better from that point than Lenna could have hoped. She was handcuffed and searched, then taken to the nearest security substation, where her idents were fed into the terminal for a very thorough processing. What encouraged her was the fact that the two guards appeared to be giving her the benefit of the doubt. They were treating her very nicely, obviously working on the assumption that her idents would check out clear and she would be sent on her way, the victim of a simple misunderstanding during the confusion of
