Honor Bound

“The intercom should still work, sir,” the Sergeant waved at a panel on the wall next to the door.

“Good.” He touched his ‘link and called Security. “Lt. James, be ready to open the hatch on my word.”

“Yes, sir, Colonel,” James responded.

“Antonov,” McKay said, hitting the speaker control. “This is McKay.”

There was a long pause and McKay thought maybe it was too late, but then the speaker made a scratchy hiss as someone inside the engineering section activated it. “So, you’ve figured it out, McKay.” The voice was Mironov’s, but the mannerism, the tone… they were very familiar to McKay from historical recordings and from the brief time he’d spent with Sergei Antonov. “You’re more intelligent than I gave you credit for. Although that wouldn’t be too difficult.”

“I think I have a pretty good idea of what’s going on, General,” McKay replied, ignoring the barb. “You gave me the hint yourself. The ‘rumor’ you heard about duplicating people with the alien technology. At first, when I pieced together that it was you, I thought you’d had restruct surgery, changed your looks. But you would never take that big a risk with your life… unless you had more than one life to risk. You’ve copied yourself and you figured out a way to give the copy your memories.”

“And that’s not the end of it, is it, Colonel?” Antonov’s voice was playful, taunting.

“No,” McKay agreed grimly. “There’s no way you could have known we’d capture you on that ship… so, at a guess, there are multiple copies of you. One in each system maybe? One on every ship even?” He remembered his conversation with Podbyrin about why Antonov hadn’t used more ships in the invasion. “Just in the last couple years I’d imagine, to make sure your ship captains don’t get any ideas. And you even went to the trouble of hypno- imprinting each of them to resist chemical interrogation. “

“Well, you are the bright boy,” Mironov/Antonov cackled. “And do you know the wonderful thing about being effectively immortal, Colonel McKay? That I don’t even care that this body will be atomized when my ships and missiles catch up with it.”

“But you know I do, General. You know I’m going to have to open that door and come in and try to set things right, don’t you? So, the question is, would you rather kill a couple of engineering officers before I put a bullet in you, or would you rather surrender and get to watch us go through the futility of trying to get out of this alive?”

McKay glanced up as the Security Sergeant-his name tab read “Aubrey”- motioned for him, then shut down the voice pickup for the door speaker and pushed over to the man. “Sir,” Aubrey said, holding up his tablet, “we got the visual feed back up.”

McKay took the tablet from him and saw that Mironov/Antonov was against the far wall of the chamber, one arm around the neck of a female engineering officer, a gun-a real firearm, not a stunner-held to her head. The others floated helplessly, their hands and feet secured by rigging tape and strips of it across their mouths.

“You present an intriguing argument, McKay,” the Russian admitted, a smirk on his face that McKay felt an irresistible urge to wipe off with a punch. “But I think that smacks of making things far too easy on you.”

“How about this, then?” McKay suggested, keeping his voice light despite the savage grimace on his face. “You move away from the hostages and I come in the door alone. You get the chance to take a shot at me, and we’ll finish what we started on the bridge of your flagship.”

“McKay,” he heard a voice in his ear from the ‘link. “It’s Patel. Keep him distracted. We’ve launched shuttles to recover the antimatter fuel canisters; hopefully we can get them back on board before their integral batteries run out of power for the containment fields.”

“Ah, McKay,” Antonov laughed. “You do know how to reach my heart. I will tell you what, Colonel, I will do this. You may come in… just you, hands empty. I will stay where I am, and I will have a hostage, just to insure it is just you. You will shut the door behind you and I will seal it, and then we can talk.”

“Don’t do it, sir,” Vinnie whispered behind him. McKay started; he hadn’t realized Mahoney had come up behind him while he was talking to Antonov. “He’ll kill them anyway.”

“Of course he will,” McKay agreed, muting the speaker. “But at least this gets me inside.” He pulled his 10mm from its belt holster and checked the load. “And I’m sure as hell not going in empty-handed either.” He hit the speaker control again. “All right, Sergei, I agree to your terms. I’m coming in, alone.”

“I await you with baited breath, tovarisch.”

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” McKay said as Jock came up behind Vinnie, a carbine cradled in his arms- he’d made a stop by the ship’s armory along the way, apparently. “When that door opens, we’re going to be against the wall over there.” He pointed to the section of bulkhead opposite the vacuum hatch. “I’m going to go inside first and draw his fire, and Sergeant Aubrey, you are going to keep that door open-do not let Mironov close it. Jock and Vinnie, you two will follow me after a count of two and if I haven’t done it already, you will take him out, no matter how many people you have to shoot through to do it. Are we clear?”

“Got it, sir,” Jock confirmed. Vinnie looked as if he wanted to argue, but he knew it was useless, so he just moved over to the wall opposite the door.

“You ready, Sergeant?” McKay asked the Security NCO as he moved into position.

“Yes, sir,” Aubrey confirmed with a nod, looking at his tablet. “He’s still against the far wall. It’s about ten meters from the hatch, sir.”

“It’s gotta be a trap of some kind,” Vinnie muttered, a sour expression on his face.

“It doesn’t need to be,” Jock pointed out, his voice and manner as calm and matter-of-fact as if this were a training exercise. “We’re surrounded by enemy ships, in the middle of their home system, our antimatter is ejected and our reactor is shut down. What the hell does he care if he dies now or when we blow up?”

“Open the door,” McKay ordered, gritting his teeth, bracing his feet against the wall.

Sergeant Aubrey touched a control and the vacuum hatch slid open, then McKay sprang away from the wall and floated towards the door. He had time to think I wish I’d done more zero-g combat training before we left, and then he was through the hatch, his 10mm held in front of his chest in an Isosceles stance.

McKay had heard others who’d been in combat describe the feeling of time slowing down for them: tachypsychia the experience was called. They could describe in great detail every second of a firefight, see every move they’d made in their head. McKay had been in combat more than most Marine officers, much less Intelligence officers, but he could barely remember a second of any firefight he’d ever experienced. Flashes of blood and gut-punches of fear that threatened to turn to panic were the only memories he had, though nightmares sometimes revealed more details.

This was no different. It was so fast he didn’t have a conscious idea of what was happening even as it happened. He yelled “Antonov!” to distract the man, to get the gun pointed at him instead of the hostage, but he couldn’t tell if it worked. He couldn’t see the gleeful, delighted smirk on Antonov’s unfamiliar face as the Russian started shooting, and he wouldn’t remember the panicked tears on the face of the apprentice engineer that the duplicate was using as a human shield. All he would recall was a silhouette-like outline of a human head in the electronic pop-up sight of his pistol and the recoil of the 10mm driving him backwards towards the corner of the room.

He did see a haze of blood misting off the entangled figures of Antonov and the apprentice engineer, but before he could determine from whom the blood had come, he had drifted out of the line of sight, behind a locker. He could see Vinnie and Jock bouncing into the room behind him, but they were quickly hidden from view as well. He tucked to do a roll in mid-air, putting his feet against the wall and pushing off back towards the open part of the engineering bay.

Jock was already cutting the tape off Chief Engineer Kopecky, while Vinnie was pulling the apprentice engineer away from Mironov’s body.

“We’re all clear in here!” Vinnie called out to the Security outside the room. “Get us some medics now!”

As McKay came closer, he could see that Antonov… Mironov… whoever it was, was dead, a bullet hole through his forehead, the back of his skull shattered and exploded outward, a cloud of brains, bone fragments and blood hanging over his body, some of it already spattered on the wall and the hostage he’d held.

“Casualties?” He asked, reholstering his pistol and trying to get his breathing back under control.

“She took two to the chest,” Vinnie reported grimly, turning over the apprentice engineer that Antonov had