Steven Campbell - Suck My Cosmos

Now he was concerned with what he saw and tried to duck back into the room.

Both Garm and I hurried over to him.

As I was thinking of some tough guy threats to spew, Garm grabbed him by the head.

She had a knife blade up each of his nostrils, one pressed against each of his eyes, and two fingers crisscrossed with knife blades inside the man’s mouth.

Whoa. I hadn’t gotten past, “hey, buddy,” in my mental speech before she had done all that. She had even twisted her legs in his to prevent him from moving.

“Hey, buddy,” I said, but that was all I had.

“Where is the flight control of this ship?” Garm asked.

The man couldn’t even blink and his mouth was full of knives.

“Ease up, Garm,” I said.

She glared at me. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to use her real name?

Garm swung her left leg up and kneed the man in the side while still maintaining her face-clamp.

The man grunted and looked like he really wanted to cooperate. If we were selling something, he was buying. Garm loosened her knives from his mouth.

“I don’t know any flight controls! I’m a ventilation engineer.”

“You seen any bald guys?” I asked.

“What?” he said.

Garm glared at me again.

“Where are the engines?” Garm asked, after kicking him in the right side.

“I don’t know! The back? I’ve never seen them,” he said.

I reached down and picked up a piece of food that had come out of my pocket. I brushed it off and began eating.

“How far does your security clearance get you in this ship?” she asked, after a brutal kick to the man’s stomach.

“I’m not sure. I swear. I’ve only been working here a week,” he pleaded.

“Give us your ID card and access code,” Garm said.

“770472047,” he said.

Garm looked at me as I was eating.

“Hmm? 7-what?” I said, wiping my hands.

I wrote it down on my tele after getting him to confirm it a few times.

The guy didn’t know much—except about ventilation. He had been working through an intermediary and assumed it was still Education Sector. He certainly didn’t know about Shelter moving.

I was about to give him another tough guy talk on keeping his mouth shut, but Garm just thwacked him on the base of the skull and he crumpled, unconscious.

“Do you know how to fly a dreadnaught?” she asked me.

“I don’t even know how to drive a car,” I said.

“So that’s a problem. If we stop who is behind it, we still can’t stop the ship.”

“That’s not the problem. Just because we can open more doors doesn’t mean this ship got any smaller. How do we find them?” I asked.

“We need Delovoa. Should we tele him again?” she asked.

“No. I don’t want him to get pissy and stop working,” I said.

“Would he do that knowing a dreadnaught is moving in the Sector adjacent to his home?”

“Oh, yeah.”

We unlocked door after door and moved randomly through the ship.

“Why don’t they have a directory anywhere?” I complained.

“Because it’s a military vessel not a shopping mall.”

We found two more engineers who didn’t know anything despite sharp blades inserted into their various orifices.

“Let me talk to the next guy,” I said.

“You could have talked to the others. Did you think they were lying to us?” she asked.

“No. But maybe not telling us everything. You come across differently than I do,” I said.

“What’s that mean?” she asked.

“Just watch.”

It took another fifteen or so minutes but we opened a door and found a guy in the hall ahead.

I held Garm back and stepped forward.

“Yo, buttwad!” I yelled, pointing at him.

The man immediately turned and ran.

“Hey,” I added.

Garm tried to get past me, but my bulk and the torch got in her way.

“Move, idiot!” she said.

I backed up and pivoted and did more harm than good. She finally scrambled between my legs and past, hurrying after the scientist.

He reached a spot on the wall and pulled a handle. The halls were bathed in blue lights and a rather annoying siren.

Garm knocked the man out a second too late.

She turned back at me and I was sure she was going to say something but she just gave me a smug look.

Which was a lot worse.

“See? It all worked out,” I said later.

Because of the lights and siren people began to flow from their workshops and labs and construction areas, assuming they had to evacuate the ship. We just had to catch them when they appeared and interrogate them.

I let Garm handle it.

We got a pile of ID cards and passcodes and a very rough approximation of the ship.

But our original guess was right. If the ship was moving, that could have been executed directly from the engines or from flight control. The two areas were hours apart in terms of distance.

“So, guys,” Delovoa called, “I think I figured out what Shelter is doing.”

“Yes?” I asked.

“It’s turning to face Belvaille.”

Shelter didn’t move very fast. At least in its current state.

Delovoa guessed another hour or so for it to be aligned with Belvaille.

But then what? Was it going to shoot the station? Did it even have working weapons? Was it just a threat—an extension of the coup?

In any case, we classified the movement as “bad” and knew we had to try and do something about it if we could.

We figured we would likely find more and more security forces the deeper we went. It was all well and good to have nothing but engineers and mechanics out here in the far reaches, but whoever was behind this wasn’t going to repair the ship just to leave its controls undefended.

The other alternative was the Ontakians were behind it.

Either way was rough. Fighting through a few hundred soldiers or two super mutants to arrive at a bunch of systems we didn’t know the first thing about.

At least the siren stopped. Or more accurately, we outpaced it. A ship this size didn’t have one global alarm, or at least not one located in a hallway someone could pull. An accident in one room didn’t mean crap to people literally ten miles away across the vessel.

Still, it might have popped up on whatever monitoring display the ship possessed. We could only hope Shelter had a skeleton crew. I mean it had to, right? How many skilled dreadnaught sailors were left in existence?

“I’ve got more bad news,” Delovoa said.

We waited but he was silent.

“Just tell us!” I yelled.

“I picked up two unscannable areas in what I think are the main engine rooms.”

“The Ontakians,” I said.

“Not only that, but you guys are slowly accelerating,” he said.

“Accelerating turning?” Garm asked.

“No, forward.”

“Are we going to hit Belvaille?” I asked.

“Unless you got some really adventurous pilots on board who are just showing off, yes.”

“What will happen?” Garm asked.

“Well, it depends on how much faster you get. Shelter has a lot more mass than Belvaille. But Belvaille has a shield. If I had to place a wager, I’d say it would be a draw.”

“What’s a ‘draw’ mean?” I asked.

“Everyone dies,” he clarified.

“How long do we have?” Garm asked.

“I don’t know. At the speed you’re going now, probably a few days. But I think you only got one engine activated at low power. If the others get switched on and turned up, it could be a matter of hours.”

“Belvaille can move. It has thrusters. Can you get out of the way?” I asked.

“Belvaille’s speed makes that ship look like a beam of light by comparison. It’s only designed for small adjustments,” he said.