Thorarinn Gunnarsson - Tactical Error

Seemingly quite pleased with himself, the sentry then hurried away on his errand, leaving Lenna to contemplate the arcane complexities of Kelvessan computer technology. Somewhere, from out of the muddled depths of his primary processors, Bill had considered that bout of nonsense logical.

Lenna turned back to her work, looking about for convenient mayhem. One interesting point that she noted immediately was the close proximity of the crates to a major power link. There were five separate levels of power available at this cluster of outlets. The lowest setting was meant for power tools and other pieces of portable equipment. The highest was intended only to jumpstart the total conversion generators of small spacecraft. The more powerful connections were occasionally known to short out, the high levels of energy they contained sometimes arcing across the two poles of their quick-connect socket. She knew that for a fact; she had in the past encouraged many such shorts.

As spectacular as such an electrical short could be, they were not usually very dangerous and were easily brought under control as soon as coordinating computers detected the power drain and shut down the line. Lenna meant to encourage things to get a little more out of hand, by moving the lightweight, but quite flammable, plastic shipping containers and their equally-flammable cargo just a little closer to the outlets.

Bending over the cluster of outlets, she used the manual shutdown switch to close off power to those lines. A single, slender strand of copper wire, as thin as a hair, was all she needed to encourage the short between the positive and negative connections of the direct current lines. The most difficult part of the process was simply removing the six screws of the main access plate over the cluster of power links. After that, she would slip the length of copper wire between the connections and replace the access plate. When she restored the power, the arc would strike. The beauty of the system was that the arc itself would remove all evidence of her tampering when the wire was melted… along with a large portion of the connection itself. “Here, what are you doing?”

Lenna paused, and frowned fiercely. Things had been going so perfectly for so long, she should have been suspicious. She glanced over her shoulder, and saw two pairs of black boots. Looking somewhat higher, she found that her fears were justified. Two of the biggest men she had ever seen, dressed in the dark uniforms of security, were standing over her, staring at her with expressions that were more confused than suspicious.

“Didn’t you know that this is a closed security bay?”

Lenna’s rather candid expression indicated that this tidbit of news came very much as a surprise, and by no means a welcome one.

Things proceeded rather better from that point than Lenna could have hoped. She was handcuffed and searched, then taken to the nearest security substation, where her idents were fed into the terminal for a very thorough processing. What encouraged her was the fact that the two guards appeared to be giving her the benefit of the doubt. They were treating her very nicely, obviously working on the assumption that her idents would check out clear and she would be sent on her way, the victim of a simple misunderstanding during the confusion of shutting down the base. They had not even submitted her to a strip-search, and that was a common enough practice even in polite company.

She had been rather looking forward to it.

As far as it went, she was not particularly worried. Her idents were real enough, and the computer records on her were quite extensive. She was high enough in rank that she was ordinarily answerable only to written orders. They even knew her in Technical Support, where she had put in regular appearances and a very real eight hours of trouble-shooting each day. What she did with her free time was entirely her own affair, not to the extent that she had used it, but no one at this base would know about that. When nothing came up on her ident check, she would be released with vague warnings to be more careful. Under the circumstances, a strip search would have been the high point of this little adventure.

She would have been feeling very good about the whole affair, except that she was very worried about what the Starwolves might be thinking, and what they could well be doing in her absence. She was very much afraid that Bill would go ahead and open the overhead doors on bay twelve, not waiting for orders. She doubted that Bill possessed the intelligence or complexity of thought to contact the Methryn on his own initiative, but she did believe that they would contact him and determine his latest orders. If she was lucky, she would be released before any of those dire things could happen.

“We’re to take you to the tram,” said the senior of the two guards, identified to Lenna only by the name Barg on his ident tag, as he entered the room where Lenna sat politely handcuffed to a chair. It was, at least, the most comfortable of the four chairs in the room. The other guard, Salgey, had sat brooding in one of the other chairs.

“Why is that?” Lenna asked just a little nervously, wondering if something was going wrong. Years of experience had taught her that the person she was supposed to be would have been expected to be just a little nervous by this time, wondering if she was about to be run over by the ponderous, uncaring wheels of military bureaucracy for a mistake that she did not consider to be her fault.

“Standard procedure,” Barg explained as he released the handcuffs from around the arm of the chair. “A security tram is being sent around to take us to Main Security, if the officer on duty thinks that it’s necessary. It’s most likely that he will just ask you a few of the usual, stupid questions and send you back to work.”

Lenna stood up, and her hands were again cuffed. At least this time her hands were cuffed in front, less awkward and much more comfortable. She was taken through the corridors to the tram station, not the smaller passenger trams, but the wide, double-tracked tunnels of the immense freight trams. One small, single-unit tram, like a flattened silver oval resting on its massive magnetic tracks, was pulled up to the loading platform. The front and rear of the top of the tram’s armored hull were dominated by its massive turrets; at need, the machines could be rolled out onto the surface tracks to repel a major attack. Lenna was directed through its main door.

Inside, the tram was fitted with benches along its outer walls and in small islands in the center, leaving a considerable amount of open space between. This was a transport for security forces, with room for supplies and for guards to get into their gear. Lenna was directed to the enclosed control cabin in the front of the tram. From there, the operator could set the tram’s destination with the central computer control, or guide the vehicle directly through remote-control switches at the track junctions.

“Here we go,” Barg said, directing her to the seat before the communications panel. “You can speak to the old bastard here.”

“Don’t let him hear you say that,” Lenna warned him, with a noticeable respect for the wrath of superiors.

“Oh, not to worry,” he insisted. “The com is on standby from our end.”

He pressed a single button, and the small monitor in the center of the unit came to life. A middle-aged man with a rather gaunt face and large nose afforded her the briefest of glances before looking back down at something he had been reading. “So. Kalen Makensee, lately of Balarn. Nineteen years of impeccable service in technical support. Graduated with honors with a degree in engineering from the Service Academy.”

“Ah, only seventeen years, sir,” Lenna offered the correction as she recognized the simple trap, hoping that she remembered the facts of this alternate persona properly.