One Good Soldier

His tool belt hung on the cabinet door's handle, slamming the door against his back.

'Shit.' Andy cursed at his clumsiness and told himself to be quiet. Then a thought hit him.

Bebe, those marines are in armored e-suits. They'll be bumping into hatches and shit all the way. They'll have to take the outer and larger corridors to get where they want to go without damaging the ship. And we know they don't want to do that—after all, they are U.S. Marines, right? So can you extrapolate from the motion you are detecting which likely big hatches and passageways they would be taking to potential targets?

Sure, Andy. Here. Then his AIC highlighted three new paths in his mind. The three groups weren't going for different locations. Well, one of them was going for Engineering and was already knocking at the door. Nothing he could do for Joe and the rest of the Engineering team. But the other two were headed to the main elevator shaft internal to the upper deck tower located midship, which led to the bridge. Then he noticed one small line on the maintenance schedule that he had almost missed. The line read:

Main Tower Elevator Repulsor-Field Generator Recalibration, Upgrade, and Checkout.

The main tower elevator shaft was the only internal passage to the bridge and the command crew. Andy didn't have to think about what to do any longer. He had to shut off that elevator shaft somehow. He started running as fast as he could go in the direction of the forward main elevator. He made a point to stay in the tighter hallways. He also made it a point to beat those red-team marines to that damned elevator.

Patch me through to Joe.

Done.

The Engineering team had managed the patches around the confused and failed damage diagnostics hardware of the DCAS, and just in time as a squad of red-team AEMs started knocking on the doors three levels out. At first they tried hacking the protocols on the locks. When that didn't work, they went to high explosives—simulated high explosives. The sim boxes that attached to the door made a pop like a firecracker, and if the box was set to simulate the right level of HE, then the AIC referees running the simulation would open the hatch. It took the AEMs several tries on the first hatch. Joe knew that they wouldn't make the same mistakes a second and third time.

What the hell can we do? he thought to himself, not necessarily to his AIC.

Too bad they're in suits or we could gas them, Debbie added.

Hey, do it anyway! Maybe they don't have their faceplates down. You know how AEMs are about breathing real air anytime they can. That might buy us some time. Joe thought more about that approach. They didn't have much heavy firepower, but they did have the power equivalent to a miniature neutron star trapped in the Main Prop hyperspace-jaunt projector tube.

'Everybody on me!' Joe said in his voice of command. The full complement of the Engineering team and the supporting seamen and firemen and fireman apprentices converged on him as he made his way to the center of the room underneath the four meter in diameter pink and purple swirling tube that ran the length of a major portion of the ship. He reached up with his hands and tapped the bottom of the conduit to the projector tube. Then he addressed his team with a somewhat wacky idea. Hell, it wasn't that wacky—he'd actually done it before. Last time he did what he had in mind, it worked, but—and there was always a 'but' in these situations—it had nearly killed him and his first engineer's mate.

'Listen up, everyone. We haven't got but a few minutes maybe. We're going to pull a cable from that power coupling on the jaunt drive projector here'—he pointed at the now-infamous Buckley Junction—'tie it around the junction housing, and then drag it to both exit doors and then over here to the power unit for Aux Prop. Get to it!' The team scurried about to set up the makeshift power conduit rerouting. The enlisted men and women began pulling the heavy flex-conduit that was several centimeters in diameter and heavy as hell. The senior techs and engineers began rerouting power flow and making certain things were connected, they could get a power-flow circuit that would work, and that every breaker in the ship wouldn't blow.

'Keri!' Buckley grabbed his main propulsion assistant (MPA) by the shoulder. 'Listen—when this thing is triggered, the backup systems and breakers will try to shut it down. You have to make certain that they don't. You and your AIC have to stay ahead of the ship's