“They don’t build ‘em like this anymore,” I muttered. In large part, they didn’t build them like this because we were no longer at war. Though we did still have an impressive military fleet on standby. Just in case.
The alien armada had appeared on the edge of known space almost a century ago and broadcast a single message in Earth-tongue:
“We are the Ulthavi Yulori and we declare war on the dry-skins in the name of our glorious creator.”
Ulthavi Yulori translates as ‘people of the amphibian god’ or something like that. Most people just called them Gators because that’s what they looked like. They walked upright and wore battle armour, but they looked like alligators. More or less. Official accounts of the conflict state that this was an unprovoked declaration of war. But given mankind’s past history, you’ve gotta suspect that someone somewhere did something to swazz them off. The aliens probably sent an emissary with an olive branch and some redneck turned him into a handbag and a matching pair of high-heel mules for his honey.
A lot of good people – and a fair few disreputable ones – sacrificed their lives to defeat the Gators. The War lasted for fifty years.
No one has seen or heard from the Gators since before I was born. Some folk think they are off somewhere preparing for a second invasion. Others say we wiped them out completely with a haemorrhagic virus cooked up in one of our labs. Official accounts neither confirm nor deny this. But again, referring to mankind’s past history, genocide cannot be ruled out.
And now there was a real risk that one of our own battleships was going to wipe me out. That would be a cruel twist of fate given the fact I played no part in the conflict. If I’d been alive back then I would have been a black market profiteer, I’m sure.
I went to the inner hatch and peered out through the glass porthole. There was only darkness out there. I pressed the lens of the flashlight to the glass to try and see what lay on the other side. I wasn’t too worried about the light triggering the weapons, the door and the thick glass window in it were designed to endure rapid depressurisation and re-pressurisation and were sturdy enough to withstand a few close-range bullet hits. The round glass in the door was like a lens, distorting what lay on the other side. I could make out a larger chamber but the light didn’t penetrate far enough to show me the presence – or absence – of machine-guns on the wall opposite the hatch.
I had to proceed on the assumption that there were wall-mounted weapons outside the airlock, primed and ready to fire at me as soon as I opened the hatch. They were probably triggered by motion-sensors or heat sensors or perhaps both. That’s what I would have used. Simple but effective.
I could try opening the door a few inches and stick my arm out, try to shoot the guns off the wall. But not knowing the precise position of the weapons made the chances of success pretty slim. And the risk of having my hand blasted off made this option even more unattractive. A thief, like a pianist, values every one of his fingers.
If I could see the gun mechanism, it would probably be possible to see the limits of its movement and range. There might be a gap that I could sneak through that the bullets couldn’t reach – by crawling out on my belly, perhaps. But even then there was the danger of being hit by shrapnel or ricochets.
How do you disable the weapons so you can open the door when you need to open the door to disable the weapons?
I could throw open the door and send out a fake moving target – Mr. Skellington, for example – and stay in hiding until the guns had exhausted their ammunition on him. But how would I know when or if the guns were empty? And again, there might be shrapnel and ricochets.
The drones were another option. I could send one out to draw the fire while I went out and headed the opposite way from the moving drone. But I didn’t really want to sacrifice either Gnat or Mozzie. Not this early in the game.
A shield? I could use the laser cutter to remove a piece of hull plate. But that would take ages, even assuming the cutter had enough power to finish the job. And if I was going to cut a hole that big, I may as well cut myself a new doorway to walk through. Though knowing my luck, I’d walk straight into another airlock and face the same problem all over again.
I used the toe of my boot to ease the dead man’s holdall away from his bony fingers. A quick glance inside told me that he was even more poorly equipped than me. He had schematics of the ship too – printed on paper. They showed nothing that wasn’t on the images I’d already seen.
I sat down and popped open another can of instant coffee and chewed on another protein bar – a roast duck scented slipper this time – and tried to think of some way to avoid being killed. Escaping from tricky situations was supposed to be my speciality. Despite the caffeine boost, I drifted off to sleep. That should have been my first warning that something was wrong.
I was woken minutes later buy an insistent buzzing and chirping from Trixie.
“Warning! Oxygen levels at thirty-eight per cent of normal and falling,” she said.
It seemed that the ship had grown tired of waiting for me to trigger the guns. She was bleeding the air out
