Star Soldier

The commander cursed in old Angelic. Sometimes he took his historical excesses to extremes.

“Now what?” Osadar asked.

“Ajax crashed! Do you know how much time I put into him?”

“Ask the AI why he crashed.”

“AI isn’t responding.”

Osadar’s stomach clenched. She tried the AI. The ill feeling grew, producing a touch of nausea. Then her eyes, those worried dark orbs, glistened with fear. The AI couldn’t answer because its entire ram was being used. What in the devil was going on?

“Ask computing what’s wrong with the AI,” the commander told the LS officer.

“…Can’t, Commander. Something’s jamming inter-ship communication.”

Fear stabbed Osadar’s heart. She tore off her VR goggles and shucked off the gloves. Breathing deeply, she tried to control her panic. Then she unbuckled herself and floated to a portal.

“What are you doing?” asked the commander.

Osadar grabbed a float-rail and pressed her palm on the lock. Nothing happened. She floated to the other portal. It, too, refused to open. She bit back the moan that tried to rush past her teeth. As calmly as possible, she flipped a terminal-head and punched in override. Then she cranked open the portal by hand. On impulse, she set the locks so it couldn’t slide shut on her.

“Commander, I’m getting a red reading in computing.” The pink-faced LS officer looked up in confusion.

“Osa?” asked the commander.

“I’m going outside to manually override the laser-link. I want Dominie Banbury to hear about this.”

“Do you really think that’s warranted?”

“Don’t you?” she asked.

The commander pondered a moment and nodded. “Wait a minute, though. I’m going with you.”

3.

Toll Seven allowed himself a faint smile. Ship’s AI had succumbed to his program. The Master Plan went forward with flawless precision.

He shook his bald head—he looked like a robot with plastic flesh, with a shark’s dead eyes. He used inner nanonics to dump chemicals into his brain’s pleasure centers to dampen his joy. Neither fear nor happiness must mar the smooth working of the plan. Clean concentration was paramount. That blood globules floated past him, under him, over him and behind him meant nothing. The raw stench of gore influenced him not at all. Even more importantly, the adrenaline that had surged through his body when he’d fought ship’s security had been carefully drained away by his inner nanonics. The enemy bio-form floated head-down behind him, a trickle of blood still oozing from the torn throat and adding to the floating hemoglobin.

Toll Seven issued the next command through the leads in his fingertips. He’d plugged his first three fingers into computing slots. The converted AI obeyed and locked all inner ship’s doors. Toll Seven then slipped a computing cube into the security key. He checked his inner clock. Nine seconds to gassing. Once the IH-49 crew was immobilized, all eighteen of them, he would begin transferring their bodies to his stealth pod. Nothing would be wasted.

“Attention, First Rank,” said the AI.

“Yes?”

“Three crew members have exited the ship.”

With his broad, seamless face as smooth as ever, Toll Seven slipped a VR monocle over his eye. “Transmit image.”

Through virtual reality imaging, he saw the bulky vacc-suits and the twinkling stream of hydrogen spray that propelled them. With a flawless knowledge of the ship’s layout, both inner and outer, he realized that they jetted to the laser-link.

His nanonics dumped extra chemicals into his brain and throughout his body. Anger and bewilderment weren’t allowed. He considered his options. Gassing would commence in two seconds.

He gave the AI its instructions. Then he pushed off, floated through Homo sapiens blood and headed for an airlock. He would have to dispose of these three personally.

4.

Despite the gnawing uneasiness in her gut, the near certainty that Fate had given her this pilot position only to shaft her more deeply, Osadar was awed once again by the sheer gall of her job—no one traveled farther out of the Solar System.

The vast bulk of IH-49 contained fuel for the ion engines. Huge magnetic fields were needed to contain the reaction mass. Thus, fully eighty percent of the ice hauler was fuel tanks and thrusters. It was a long trip into the Oort Cloud to plunder ice comets. The majority of those comets coasted slowly one hundred thousand AU from the Sun. Earth was one AU from the Sun. Neptune was 30.06 AU away. Of course, most of the journey to the Oort Cloud would be made while asleep. Once there and in the name of the IHC, they would crawl over the space debris like a virus, attaching engines, setting up fuel feeders and placing automated missile launchers. It would take many years for the comets to arrive at IHC Pluto Receiving Station. The long history of inter-solar commerce (and piracy) demanded the automated missiles. It was tough work, lonely work, but it would pay well.

The forward part of IH-49 contained the spherical crew hull. To Osadar it seemed as if someone had magnetized the hull and run it over a junkyard. Landers, pods, jacks, missile tubes, coil lines, thruster modules, endless bundles of Wasp 1000 Missiles and a host of engines that would be frozen into the comets had all been attached to the outer hull.

Far to her left winked a green light atop the laser-link. Behind it, dominating space, hung blue Neptune with its few, wispy white cirrus clouds. Triton, the biggest moon, was a black speck against the blue gas giant. The endless space habitats, the majority of them built out of weird ice, weren’t visible against Neptune’s bulk. Even so, in 2350 A.D. this was humanity’s newest frontier, unless one counted the few commercial and scientific outposts on Pluto and Charon.

“Commander!”

“Yes, yes. Spit it out.”

Osadar heard both the commander and Technician Geller in her headphone.

“I just lost contact with the LS Officer,” Technician Geller said. The LS Officer had remained within the ship.

“What? Impossible.” Hysteria edged the commander’s gruff voice.

Osadar tried the channel. Zero. She squeezed shut her eyes and forced herself to remain calm. She was gladder than ever she’d taken time to don a zero-G worksuit. Back at the airlock, neither the commander nor Technician Geller had wanted to take the extra effort to get into one. They had donned simple vacc-suits, no doubt figuring a quick look and a wrench could fix what was wrong.

She looked back. Both men dangled in space in their silver vacc-suits. Geller had strapped on a propulsion unit and a tool kit, the commander only a tether. Both men allowed themselves to be dragged by her. Which was simply common sense.

Her worksuit was practically a miniature spaceship. She wore a rigid pressurized cylinder and a transparent helmet dome. The worksuit had an integral thruster pack that contained three hundred seconds of acceleration. Perhaps as importantly, three waldoes—remote-controlled arms—were attached for heavy-duty work. The third waldo mounted an integral laser torch, the other arms had power-locks made to grab onto a ship’s hull.

She was beginning to wonder if the worksuit’s two weeks of life support wasn’t going to be its most important feature.

“Try again,” shouted the commander.