Rebecca Levene - Kill or Cure

Ingo had memorised the timetable. Eidetic memory, he told us. Asperger's I would have said, but not to his face.

The ship was as quiet as the night of that first aborted escape attempt. So quiet that our footsteps, the gentle rustle of them in the threadbare carpet, felt like an offence. The ship wanted to rest, and here we were waking it up.

Empty too. We'd chosen to do this when two different grab teams were out on missions, and another batch of soldiers was on St Martaan for R amp;R. As we walked down a flight of stairs, across a deck, through the echoing emptiness of the casino, down more stairs, I thought that perhaps we wouldn't see anyone at all.

Not possible, of course.

I recognised the woman's face as we rounded the corner to see her leaning up against the closed lift door, sneaking a fag that she must have been hording for weeks until she could enjoy it away from the grasping hands of her colleagues.

She looked up at us, startled but not afraid, and I remembered suddenly that her name was Jeannine. I'd heard someone shouting it across the mess, maybe two weeks ago. For one paralysed moment I just stood there. But then her eyes began to narrow in suspicion, her hand inched towards her gun, and as soon as it became her or me the choice was that much simpler.

A harsh exhalation, muffled by the silencer, and the bullet took her through the throat. Not where I'd been aiming, but it did the job. The jet of arterial blood splashed the lift door, droplets of it landing on my cheek and in my hair. Her hands came up to cover her throat, uselessly. She had that look of shock young people sometimes get when they're dying. Disbelief that their lives really can be ending this way.

I felt Haru's hand pulling at my arm and I realised that I was standing frozen, wondering how I could possibly treat her. If I could cure her.

Once a doctor, always… but not really. I couldn't call myself a doctor now.

I let Haru drag me away, down another flight of stairs and through the dim, endless corridors, like players of a particularly lacklustre first-person shooter. We were running now. Once the first body was found it was game over.

The next person I shot I didn't stay to watch die. The bullet struck him in the head this time, and there wasn't enough left of his face for me to recognise anyway.

With the third person the bullet went wide, and the sound it made as it hit the bulkhead was too damn loud. The next shot took him in the chest, his own gun still tucked into the waistband of his shorts, but the damage was done. Anyone in earshot would have known exactly what that sound was. I could already hear raised voices, the first inkling that an alarm might be raised.

We were just ten paces from the door when they got to us. They were expecting resistance this time and they knew that I was armed. There were no silencers on their guns and they roared as they spat their bullets at us. The one that missed my head by two inches deafened me, ringing in my ear long after we'd dived through the open bulkhead and slammed it shut behind us, spinning the wheel that would lock us in one of the few rooms on the ship that was designed to be defended from the inside.

The server room looked like something out of a seventies sci-fi movie: big silver boxes and lots of flashing lights. There were six dull thuds against the door as someone unloaded their gun into it. Tough shit. That thing was designed to resist pretty much anything bar heavy duty explosives.

Haru was flicking frantically through his sketchbook. "Shit. Shit! Where is it?"

"It's in that picture of the giant robot – the New York skyline."

"I know what it is!" he shouted. I realised that he was terrified. His face was dripping with sweat, his breath was panting and ragged.

Seeing his fear made me notice my own for the first time. "It was the last sketch," I told Haru, my voice suddenly shaky and weak. But I was right. The skyscrapers on the skyline had a careful pattern of light and dark, an exactly blueprint of which cables we needed to pull and which needed to be left. My hands were shaking as well as my voice. Everything inside me was saying for fuck's sake hurry, they're right outside, but I clenched down hard on the panic and continued to slowly, methodically work my way down the side of each server, each router.

We couldn't afford to disable the wrong equipment. We'd need it later.

Outside, the banging had stopped, but I could hear the muted sound of more voices. They probably would bring some explosives, pretty soon. But they'd think a while before they used them, because the servers in here were pretty much irreplaceable. Besides, they knew that we'd have to come out eventually.

Only we wouldn't. When you put a whole load of delicate computer equipment in the bowels of a ship you'd better be pretty damn sure that you can cool it – and the ducts that let the air in were just big enough to let people out. The hatch was in the far corner of the room, just above head level. It took a minute to unscrew and then we were out.

Jesus, the tube was narrow. I tried to force my body through a space that was only meant to take air, my face pressed up against Haru's thighs as he forced his way through ahead of me. I felt the walls pressing in around me, squeezing the air out of my lungs. I tried not to think about the fact that Haru was bigger than me. If he got jammed there'd be no way forward and no way back.

Behind me I heard the sudden sharp sound of an explosion and a second later felt a wash of painfully hot air rocket through the shaft. I'd managed to prop the cover shut behind us, but it wouldn't take them long to figure out where we'd gone.

I hoped they didn't have the schematics anywhere to hand. If they did they'd know exactly where we'd be emerging and we'd be sure to meet a welcoming committee on our exit. I saw the autopsy table again, the neat little grooves carrying the blood away.

But maybe we wouldn't be getting out at all. In front of me, Haru had stopped cold. I could hear the harsh sound of his breathing and I could smell the acrid tang of his sweat. He was panicking, on the point of losing it.

"Keep moving!" I shouted, the sound muffled by our bodies, almost lost in the short distance from my mouth to his ears. "They're right behind us."

"It goes up," he shouted back. "I can't… I don't think I can get up there."

"Well try!" I shouted back. Behind me, louder than our voices, I'd heard the screech of the cover being moved. The duct had run straight, up to that point. As soon as they pointed a torch in they'd be able to see us.

Haru just wasn't moving. Frantic, I reached my arms out in front of me, pressed my hands against the soles of Haru's shoes, and pushed.

Instead of moving him forward, the pressure moved me back. Laws of physics I'd known since I was ten. Behind me, only a few feet behind me, someone else was starting to climb into the duct.

"Fucking move!" I screamed at Haru. And finally, somehow, he did, bending his back at an impossible angle and pushing himself forward with his toes. I slithered after him, desperately. But when I reached the kink in the pipe, almost forty-five degrees up and then only a foot later forty-five degrees back to flat again, I instantly knew why he'd found it so hard. My shoulders jammed in tight against the roof of the passage, my knees pressing agonisingly against the metal floor. My head twisted at an angle one degree away from snapping my neck. And now I wasn't moving. Ahead of me, Haru was opening up a gap, moving faster now, body flattened to the metal. Behind someone was closing on us fast. A voice I recognised as Curtis' shouting "Stop! Come back!" but there was no way in hell that was happening. I didn't really know how I did it, but suddenly I was up and over the bend and the shot that rang out through the duct behind me took the last of the hearing from my good ear but the bullet passed harmlessly beneath me. Curtis was a big guy too and there was no way he was getting round that bend after us.