Thorarinn Gunnarsson - Tactical Error

“Yes, my mistake.” He glanced at her only briefly, turning back to the hard copy that he now held within view of the monitor. “It says here that you have been at this base for only four months. Long enough to know better, I would assume.”

“Sir, the bay was not properly sealed for security,” she said, which was all perfectly true. “There were no standard lights or signs, and the doors were all wide open.”

“That is right, sir,” Barg offered.

The officer turned off the sound at his end for a moment while he spoke to someone she could not see. He glanced back at Lenna, this time a somewhat hard stare. “Just what were you doing in that bay anyway? Admitting that you are assigned to random trouble-shooting, what led you to start tampering with high-power outlets?”

“I’ve known those outlets to short, more than once,” she explained. “A little dirt or moisture in the connections, and you have quite an arc on your hands. Starts fires about half the time, since a lot of fools on the deck will stack goods too close to the things. And I wanted to double-check all of the connects in the base, seeing as how we’re supposed to be putting everything in hold for a long time.”

“I see,” the officer agreed vaguely, then turned off the sound a second time while he listened to some brief report. He turned back to her in a somewhat more congenial frame of mind. “Yes. Well, the mistake does seem to be our own, and everything does seem to check out just fine. I’ll go ahead and clear you to finish your work in that bay.”

Lenna was hardly aware of muttering her thanks; her mind was already on her next problem. Actually, her problems existed very much in the significant plural. She had Starwolves waiting for her to create a diversion in a hurry, and she hardly knew how she could arrange that while she was very much in the eye and mind of Base Security. She was considering whether she should go ahead and arrange that same power outlet to short when she put it back together. Maintaining her cover would no longer be important, once Starwolves entered the base. Then this whole installation would explode into confusion, and Valthyrra’s cannons would finish the task soon after.

“Told you there was nothing to worry about,” Barg said as he bent to remove her handcuffs. She braced herself for the inevitable, knowing what was to follow when the guard looked awkward and uncomfortable. “You know, I really hate to have done this to someone your age.”

“Oh, I… “ It suddenly registered with Lenna just what he was saying, and her mouth fell open. She had never felt more insulted in her life, all the more so for knowing that those words had been impolite but hardly untrue. And she had been sitting there, waiting for this polite young man to put the moves on her old bones.

A sentry unit thundered through the main door of the tram at that moment, turning to bring all of its weapons to bear on the control cabin. Lenna glanced over her shoulder, harboring certain nasty suspicions about just whose sentry that was.

“Freeze, bastards!” Bill roared.

That left absolutely no doubt at all. Lenna had years of experience with the quirky logic of the semi-intelligent, at least where that term applied to automatons, and she threw herself to the floor.

As she had predicted, the two guards did not freeze. They were too confused and startled out of their wits to freeze, and Bill was not prepared to accept anything less. He opened fire with his forward arsenal, a deadly barrage of weapons powerful enough to bring down a Union fighter. Fortunately he had not seen the need to use full power, but his bolts still made quick work of the control panel. The two guards ducked their heads and, by some miracle, escaped out the small forward door.

Bill had, of course, been listening through Lenna’s comlink, which had not been removed from the pocket of her uniform’s tunic. In all of the many possibilities that she had considered, Lenna had never dreamed that Bill would elect to run to her rescue like some four-legged knight in ceramic alloy armor, just in time to turn an unexpected victory into resounding defeat. Bill talked a line about machine efficiency, but he always seemed to do everything the hard way.

When the two guards ran out the forward door, Bill, for reasons that were equally mysterious, elected to run after them. Lenna continued her own crawl into the safety under the main control panel, which was already beginning to spark and burn, as the sentry crashed through the forward cabin and out the door. Lenna paused a moment to listen. She heard a few more scattered shots from Bill’s main battery, but she assumed that he must have missed his target when the ponderous thumps of his heavy legs continued.

Musing what the two guards must be trying to make of this matter of being chased by one of their own sentries, Lenna braced herself against one of the chairs as she tried to rise. It was awkward enough handcuffed, although much less so than if her hands had been behind her back. Then she hesitated a second time, feeling the vibrations of machinery through the metal floor. The tram was moving.

Lenna had always been particularly fascinated by that aspect of her work, how little things could go wrong in unexpected ways. So far she had found a way to get herself out of even the worst trouble but, as her young friend had recently reminded her, she was also getting old. She looked around, finding the key that the guard had dropped in his surprise and haste to get out of the line of fire. Fortunately it was a simple mechanical lock, still the most difficult type to force open without the key but about the easiest to open with one. Even so, it took a certain amount of dexterity and experimentation to get the key into the lock. Sitting with her back against the driver’s seat, she was at last able to hold the key in her teeth as she carefully maneuvered it into the lock.

Tossing aside the handcuffs, Lenna rose quickly and slipped into the seat. She could not immediately determine whether the tram was being directed remotely or was simply out of control. At least the major portion of the tram’s operating controls had been spared from Bill’s rather indiscriminate attack. The com station, where she had been seated only moments before the attack, was a complete ruin. Just thinking about it made her a little nervous, although she was certain that Bill knew his business with the precision of a machine and would not have hit her.

All the same, the wreck of that half of the control panel assured her of one thing. This tram could not have been under remote control even if they had wanted. The internal control indicator light was clearly lit, but certain other readings were contradictory. The tram was supposedly locked into predetermined settings, but other indicators insisted that it could not possibly be in motion. For not being in motion, however, it was already doing a very healthy, if not hair-raising, 140 kilometers per hour, and all efforts to disable or slow the machine on her part proved hopeless.

Well, when travel became inevitable, one could always attempt to determine the course. She called up the map for the freight tunnels on the main monitor, and saw a clear junction coming up in a matter of seconds. When she selected the alternate course, the tram very obligingly turned off the original track onto that new heading. Encouraged by her success, Lenna bent closer to the map and chose a destination. For the sake of speed and simplicity, she decided to make a quick loop and go back to where she had started. She began selecting junctions that would take her back, reasonably certain that the main routing computers would not switch her down a tunnel that was previously occupied. Theoretically, she knew that the traffic was invariably one way. She was less certain that even the computers could slow this monster if it was about to overtake another tram.