David Weber - In Enemy Hands

"Hey, you!" The shout came from his left. He turned his head, and his heart seemed to stop, for a StateSec sergeant stood twenty meters away, glowering in his direction. "Just what the hell d'you think you're doing?" the sergeant demanded.

He sounded more irritated than alarmed, but the ensign felt a moment of total and absolute panic. But then, as suddenly as the panic had come, he felt something entirely different. It was if the universe's entire time scale had just shifted, and a cold, crystalline sense of purpose replaced his choking terror. He was still afraid, but now he was only afraid, and the fear was a distant thing, small and unimportant beside his absolute certainty of what he must do.

His finger depressed the function key Senior Chief Harkness had told him to press. The minicomp's display flashed as the stored commands poured through the interface, but Clinkscales wasn't even looking. His attention was on the sergeant, his expression one of casual interest, and he strolled to meet the older man. Their mutual angles of approach turned his right side away from the sergeant, and his right hand fell naturally to his hip. It settled on the butt of his holstered pulser, and he smiled, cocking his head as if to ask the sergeant what he could do for him while the singing, frozen tension in his brain wondered how the hell long it was going to take Harkness' programs to activate, and what would happen when they did, and, Sweet Tester, that sergeant was getting close now, and—

PNS Tepes shuddered violently as the first explosion reverberated through her iron bones.

Boat bays aren't normally considered especially dangerous places. True, they offer ample ways for someone to do himself in, but so do a great many areas aboard any starship, and the things that pose dangers to the ship —like the connections for things like hydrogen and emergency rocket propellant to fuel the ship's small craft, or the stores of ammunition and external ordnance kept in nearby magazines—are safeguarded in many ways. Proper training in operation and maintenance is the first defense, and so is physical separation, keeping one danger source as far from any other as the boat bay's servicing requirements permit. And in addition to all human safeguards, computers monitor the danger points continuously.

Unfortunately for Tepes , however, her computer net had been compromised. None of her crew knew it... and none of the computers cared. They existed only to carry out their human masters' orders, and the lines of code Horace Harkness had altered made just as much sense to them as the right instructions would have made.

The programs already buried and waiting in the main system began to activate as the execution commands flashed into the net from the minicomp plugged into Boat Bay Four's number five access slot, and all over Tepes officers and ratings stared at their consoles—first in confusion, and then in alarm.

CIC went first, and the senior tracking officer swore as her holo display went suddenly blank. It was hardly a life-threatening disaster when the ship was safely in orbit around Hades, but it was irritating as hell, and there was no logical reason for it.

Except that there was one. The display had died for the simple reason that there was no longer any input to drive its imagers. For just an instant, the tracking officer felt relieved by the realization that the display's sudden shutdown hadn't been her people's fault, but then her forehead furrowed in fresh—and deeper—consternation. What in heaven's name could cause every sensor system to go down at once?

The program which had shut down Tepes ' sensors finished the first part of its task and turned to the second. In the flicker of an eye, far too rapidly for any human operator to realize what was happening, it used CIC's computers as a launching pad to invade the Tactical Department's central processing system, established control... and ordered the system to reformat itself.

The tac officer of the watch gaped in disbelief as his panels started going down. It began with Tracking, but from there the failures leapt like wildfire, and display after display blinked and went dead. Radar One, Gravitics One and Two, Lidar Three, Missile Defense, Main Fire Control... the nerve center of the ship's ability to fight—or defend herself—died even as he watched. Nor was the damage something which could be quickly fixed. The computers would have to be completely reprogrammed to put them back on-line—a nightmare task in a Navy with so few fully qualified technicians—and it all went so quickly the tac officer barely had time to realize it was happening before it was done.

Other programs capered and danced, exploding through the net like a plundering army. Internal alarms and central communication systems became so much useless junk as the software which ran them was reduced to meaningless gibberish. The ship's helm and drive rooms locked down. "The Morgue," in which every suit of battle armor was stored, suddenly sealed itself... and the subprocessers which monitored the ready suits of armor to be sure they were always prepared for instant use sent power surges down the monitoring leads to lobotomize their onboard computers and render them totally useless until teams of technicians spent the hours required to reprogram their software.

And while all that was going on, the computers responsible for monitoring the fueling needs of the ship's small craft received their own orders. Valves opened, and in Boat Bay One a technician who'd happened to be working on a minor glitch in Umbilical Two gaped in horror at what was happening. He leapt for the manual controls, trying to override, but there wasn't time... nor would it have mattered. For even if he'd been able to keep the emergency propellant from venting and mixing in Umbilical Two, it wouldn't have stopped precisely the same thing from happening in Umbilical Four.

The binary-based fuel was hypergolic, and even as the service tech screamed and turned to run, he knew it was pointless. The components mixing behind him were too... voracious for that, and Tepes bucked like a wounded horse as Boat Bay One blew apart. Twenty-six members of her crew and every small craft in the bay were ripped apart in the explosion, and alarms wailed as the blast blew back into the hull as well. Bulkheads shattered, and another forty-one men and women died as atmosphere belched out of the hideous wound in an almost perfect ring of fire.

Blast doors slammed, more alarms screamed, and officers and noncoms tried to shout orders over the com systems. But the com systems no longer functioned, and then the ship heaved again as Boat Bay Two blew up, exactly as Boat Bay One had done.

The sergeant walking towards Clinkscales staggered as the first explosion shuddered through the ship's hull. He threw his arms out for balance, lurching through a dance to stay on his feet which would have looked ludicrous under other circumstances. But there was nothing humorous about these circumstances, and as Clinkscales threw out his own left arm, bracing himself against the bulkhead, he saw the sergeant's eyes dart past him to the minicomp still plugged into the access slot. There was no logical reason for it, but it didn't matter. The sergeant didn't know how it had been done, or why, but in that instant of intuitive insight, he knew who had caused it. It was as if his mind were somehow linked to the ensign's, for even as the sergeant guessed Clinkscales had somehow caused whatever was happening, Clinkscales knew he had.

There was no sign of the clumsy youngster who'd boarded GNS Jason Alvarez with Lady Harrington in the tall young man whose left hand thrust him suddenly away from the bulkhead. His push propelled him towards the sergeant, who was still fighting for balance while he opened his mouth to shout an alarm. But he never got it out, for even as he started to yell, Carson Clinkscales' left fist caught the front of his tunic and jerked him close. The two men went down, with Clinkscales on the bottom, and the sergeant felt something hard dig into his chest. He looked down into Clinkscales' eyes, confusion giving way to hate, but he still hadn't figured out what was pressing into his chest when Clinkscales squeezed the trigger and a burst of pulser fire ripped his heart apart.