Zach Hughes: Pressure Man

He considered trying to make a break, to seek help from J.J.’s sector. But they had Doris, Larry, and Art. They were in the computer room.

He knew what he had to do, and he couldn’t take time to stop and think about it or he’d freeze. He left Doris’ quarters and used branching corridors to circle the computer room until he reached a small, flush door which was almost invisible in a wall. His palm opened it. He climbed a narrow flight of steps, palmed open a hatch. The hatch led into the repair and service sections of the vast computer, which towered from floor to high ceiling of the computer room. He entered at mid-level. He was not in sterile suit, but a bit of dust from him would harm the computer less than was intended, he felt sure, by the terrorists. He walked service aisles between banks of equipment in the guts of the computer. At the front, he could look through the facade of the machine through a small port.

There were three bodies lying on the floor, all three in marine blue. A fourth marine was leaning against a wall, a white look of shock on his face, his arm blown half off. The other two marines held automatic weapons and shared the room with five men in dark body suits and black hoods.

Doris, Larry, and Art were in a tight grouping, guarded by the two marines. The five men in the Earthfirster combat garb were unpacking back carriers, stacking neat packets of explosives. Two members of the Firster team were placing charges at the base of the control console. Already detonators were in place and activated. The charges were of a type to be detonated by radio signal from a safe distance. The men in the room below Dom must have known they had little chance of escape, but Firsters were known best for fanaticism. With Firsters, escape would not be the prime objective. They would be more interested in selling their lives dearly, although, in Doris, Art, and Larry, they had very important hostages. It might go either way. They could try to buy their way out by using three of the most valuable members of the TTS team for bargaining, or they might use them as shields in order to take down as many men as possible before they were killed.

Dom had always considered terrorists as the supreme egotists of the universe. The elite suicide squads of Earthfirsters had pulled off some impressive stunts, including the assassination of a President and a head of the defunct CIA, but how could one man, or several men acting in concert, believe that sacrificing a life and then giving their own would change anything? The terrorists just could not see that their actions as individuals, or even as a small, cohesive group, would not affect in any way the inertial rush of society toward devouring itself through overproduction.

The way Dom looked at it, man, as a race, had enough against him. He still had to contend with the basic forces of nature in the form of flood, fire, earthquake, snow, hurricane, volcanoes. Nature was capable of making all of man’s bloody past seem amateurish. If natural disaster didn’t get you, then nature still got you in the end. Nature seemed intent on killing the race, having instilled a lemminglike breeding instinct that wouldn’t stop until starvation got everyone. Man had enough opposition without fighting himself. If death was the only objective, just let old mother nature take her course. Then, as Robert Frost once said, death could come along as a nice surprise.

Dom thought he recognized one of the hooded Firsters as an electronics expert taken onto the team on the recommendation of DOSELUN. The man was good, good enough to have been able to cut off the communication and alarm systems.

The two men placing explosives were moving, shouldering bags of explosives. They started to mount the crawl ladders on the facade toward an entry port on Dom’s level. It would take only three or four charges, placed properly, to destroy the work done to date on Folly .

Dom concealed himself behind a bank of memory tapes at the entrance to the port. He was wondering if he was not being as egotistical as the Firsters, thinking that he, one man, could stop seven armed and well-trained terrorists. He was a spacer, a hull engineer. He’d had a few weeks on the combat range back at the Academy, and he’d taken hand-combat courses as a part of keeping physically fit. But he was no trained killer. In his favor was the fact that he was still in fairly good shape, in spite of the months of desk work.

And he was quick. One of the things against him was the fact that he’d never tried to kill a man before.

The human head is a tough nut. It’s built to survive blows which are astonishingly powerful. Dom, knowing this, overdid it. He swung the stock of the rifle with all his strength. Both of the Firsters had entered the bowels of the computer and moved past him. The head of the trailing one burst, making quite a mess which would have to be cleaned up before the computer could be functional again. Dom was moving fast, the backward swing of the rifle taking the second man as he turned, a gout of blood spurting through the nasal holes in the dark hood. Dom’s reaction time, fastest ever recorded at the Academy, was aiming a second blow at the falling face and white teeth flew and there was more blood and the stock squished down to be sure.

He was still crouched. There was no sound of alarm from below.

He was surprised at his lack of reaction to having killed two men. He was panting as he looked for signs of life. The second man jerked a bit and tried to breathe through the pulp which had been his face, but then he was still. Such men lived only to be killed, he thought, and he’d obliged them. The original mistake in handling terrorists was in not recognizing the basic fact that terrorists considered themselves to be expendable and this made them less than human, to be expended by society as forcefully as possible.

But he was not judge and jury. He was not, after all, hardened to killing. Shock came to him as the second man’s legs did a dying tattoo on the padded floor. And there were five more of them down below. Also below were Art, Doris, Larry. All three would die, without mercy, if he weakened, shocked by the quantity of blood in a man’s head.

He stepped over a body and looked out the port. They were waiting below with an alert but stoic patience. One of the terrorists was smoking. Dom calculated the chance of taking all five of them with a blast from the port. No way. The shots would also take one or more of his three friends. He moved back, jerked the mask from the ruptured head of the Firster who had been first to die. He cringed at the wetness, but fortunately the blood was mostly on the back side of the mask. He took a deep, shuddering breath and pulled it over his head. He stuck his masked head out of the port and made a hissing sound. They all looked up at him. He pointed to a hooded man and made a come-up-here motion. The man shouldered his weapon and came scampering up the ladder.

The plan was to have them come up one or two at a time, but it didn’t work. The man on the ladder saw the bodies of his companions and started to yell out. Dom clubbed him. He fell, half in, half out of the port. A burst of explosive rounds shattered the facade of the computer. Dom leaped to the view port and swept the room below with rifle fire, careful not to fire too close to the tight group of Art, Doris, and Larry. The two traitor space marines went down along with two of the Firsters.

Art Donald, moving with surprising swiftness, jerked Doris down, fell atop her behind a subconsole. They were out of the line of fire. Larry was not fast enough. He was seized by one of the two remaining men. The other one moved to stand on the other side of Larry, the three of them up against the control console below Dom and out of his line of fire. One of the terrorists began to shoot up the face of the computer with methodical thoroughness. Both of them stayed close to Larry. Dom was unable to fire. He had to dodge the fire which swept across the facade. The explosive missiles did not penetrate, but they sent small pieces of shrapnel flying.