The transfer tube from the engineering module to the shuttle wasn’t very long in physical terms, only six or seven meters. But to Jian, in that moment, it might as well have been a kilometer.
Although no one in the maintenance and flight ops divisions knew it yet, the shuttle Buran was only minutes away from making an unscheduled departure. Or Jian was only minutes away from getting dragged out of the command chair by his snatch handle and thrown under house arrest until the court-martial finished deliberating which lock to throw him out of.
One of the two.
As he floated down the short airlock, Jian gripped the “tablet” in his right hand even tighter. It took a conscious effort to keep his breathing measured. The sweat beading up on his palms and forehead however, he had no control over.
In relation to the shuttle, Jian was falling headfirst towards the floor. This was because nestled inside their docking cradles, the immense craft faced inward, making it both easier for maintenance crews to tend to them, and to keep the ablative ceramic tile reentry shields facing outwards to space as an extra layer of protection against micrometeorite impacts. So when he reached the “bottom” of the tunnel, he spun around his own vertical axis one hundred and eighty degrees and faced the hatch that led into the command deck from the cargo bay.
Even docked to the Ark, all of the lock doors remained buttoned tight until they were needed. Jian was glad for the precaution, as he wore merely his cloth flight suit, not the vacuum-rated skinsuit that would keep him alive long enough for recovery ops to snatch him back aboard in the case of a violent decompression.
Being outside the Ark’s protective shell in just his longjohns made him uneasy, but there were appearances to maintain. He wasn’t here to steal the Buran, after all. What a crazy suggestion. He was just doing a completely routine pre-flight inspection to make sure everything was shipshape before heading back up the tube to get sealed in and squared away for the actual flight.
The pressure equalized with a small hiss as the light above the hatch turned green. Jian hit the release and the hatch swung inward. For just an instant, Jian could’ve sworn he felt the tablet in his hand shiver.
“Oh, hello, commander,” came a voice from the other end of the flight deck. Jian froze in place as he drifted through the lock. There wasn’t supposed to be anyone else aboard. His timeline was too tight to deal with interlopers. If he couldn’t come up with something to shake off the tech in the next ninety seconds, he’d have to–
“Sir?”
The question snapped Jian back into the moment. “Hmm? Sorry, what did you say, technician?”
“I just said hello.” The young tech gave him a concerned glance. “Are you feeling all right? You look a little pale.”
Jian’s heart raced. She suspected something. He needed to brush her off fast, or else… He put on an awkward smirk. “It’s just nerves. I’ve never flown with a nuke before.”
The tech answered with a knowing nod. “I hear you. I helped wire that thing up, and just between you, me, and the bulkhead, it gives me the creeps.”
Jian smiled with genuine relief. “I won’t say anything if you won’t.”
“Thanks for that, sir.”
“Is that what you’re doing here? Working on the nuke?”
“Yes, I’m just finishing up final network integrity tests. Make sure it actually goes boom when you press the button.”
“From many tens of kilometers away in orbit,” Jian said. “Preferably.”
“Ha, you’re brave. I’d be halfway back to the Ark before even thinking about setting it off, signal strength be damned.”
“It’s that powerful?”
“No, not really. Its yield is only in the five-kiloton range, and most of the yield will be pointed straight down into the rock. Without any atmosphere to transfer the blast energy, you could probably be standing on Varr’s surface only six or seven klicks away without getting your suit dusty. I’d just feel better with a three-kilometer-wide ablative shield between me and it, you know?”
Jian nodded. “I do indeed. Hey, I just realized I left my test kit back up the tunnel, and I really need to get started on my preflights. If you’re done, could you pop up and grab it for me? I’d really appreciate it.”
“Sure thing. I’m just running out the clock down here anyway. Gotta look busy for the boss, you know?”
Jian chuckled. “I do indeed. Thanks, Miss…?”
“Claiborne,” she said as they floated past each other. “I’ll just be a minute up there, sir.”
“No worries, take your time,” Jian said. She smiled at him as she moved into the lock. Jian thought he saw a flicker of attraction in her gaze, but it was fleeting. The hatch bolted shut behind her. “You’re about to have the rest of the day off.”
There was no time to spare, he’d already wasted over a minute with Claiborne that he’d have to make up somewhere in the countdown. Jian kicked off hard for the command chair, pushed down with his arms, and landed squarely in the seat hard enough that he had to grab the armrests to prevent himself from bouncing back out again. Five seconds later and he was not only strapped into his chair, but linked into the Buran’s network through his plant. He could see all of the ship’s systems sitting in standby. Fully prepped and green for launch.
A launch that wasn’t supposed to be coming for another two hours.
The moment Jian started toggling over the shuttle’s system icons from Standby to Ready status, someone was going to know something very wrong was happening and try to shut him down. Which was why he waited for twelve, eleven, ten…
Several hours before, Jian had uploaded what on the surface looked like a harmless software update into the Flight Operations Center. But, instead of fixing bugs in the fleet’s onboard navigation systems interface with the GPS network, it had a more nefarious purpose. The malware was a rush job that wouldn’t have survived any level of scrutiny if Jian hadn’t uploaded it by hand directly into the engineering module’s network, using his credentials to bypass at least a half-dozen layers of security.
It had cost Jian most of the credits in his savings. By the time it had been routed through a dozen fake accounts, ghost routing numbers, and shady middlemen, the programmer who actually wrote it would end up with less than sixty percent of the total. And after a few days of digital forensic investigation, it would almost certainly mean they would be spending quite a long time in a dirtside jail cell.
Just the cost of doing business on the black market.
…three, two, one. EXECUTE.
Throughout the rest of the shuttle fleet, the first stage of the three-part worm sprang to life. Avionics and navigation computers booted up, and immediately set about tearing themselves apart. Every file, every program, every byte of data stored in memory was relentlessly purged, until all that remained was the foundational operating systems themselves, which on instructions from the worm, deleted themselves before shutting off the lights.
With that, the Ark’s entire shuttle fleet was dead in space. Their computer banks empty, barren, inoperable. No physical damage had occurred, of course, and the data as well as the operating systems were thoroughly backed-up inside the Ark’s own memory core. But the process of restoring them to flight-ready status would take hours, perhaps an entire day. By then, the intercept window with Varr before the moon’s motion took it out of range for the rest of the orbit would have closed.
For every shuttle except the Buran, that is.
Jian furiously flipped the shuttle’s system icons over to Ready status as the blood pounded in his ears. Clicks and whirrs sounded through the flight deck as the sleeping bird began to wake and stretch its wings. Warning alarms were doubtlessly blaring across Flight Ops as well as up in the Command Module, but Jian was confident they’d be lost among the alarms for all the other shuttles that were doubtlessly flashing angrily across displays and plant interfaces throughout the ship. At least Jian hoped they were.
But in case they weren’t, Jian needed to cut the data uplink between the Buran and Flight, or else they would take remote control as soon as someone spotted him. That would end his little grand theft shuttle adventure before he’d even gone a kilometer. But first, he needed to release the external clamps which kept the shuttle locked into the cradle.
Normally, the release command came from Flight, not from the command deck of the shuttle, but Jian had planned for that as well. With a flicker of his eyes, he toggled his plant interface to a new screen, only a few hours old. It was the second part of his package from the hacker that had already knocked out the rest of the shuttle fleet. Jian said a little prayer in hopes this patch was just as effective as the first one, then pressed the icon that would open the backdoor into Flight’s operating system.
There were supposed to be at least three firewalls preventing him from doing this. Jian had no idea what vulnerability his anonymous hacker had found to exploit, but in less than a second, a new virtual console appeared within the augmented reality environment overlaid on his field of vision by his plant.
For clarity’s sake, it exactly matched the physical console sitting less than a hundred meters away in the Flight Ops Center. Jian knew it well, having spent several weeks of his pilot training sitting strapped into a chair learning all of Flight Op’s systems so he knew what their capabilities and limitations were while he was out in the black, sometimes separated by light minutes.
So he knew exactly where the Buran’s cradle release was. He clicked it, breath frozen in his lungs.
A thundering heartbeat passed, then another. But just as Jian was about to hit the icon again, the shuttle shook with the familiar vibration of clamps popping free. The cabin lights flickered as the umbilicals followed a moment later and the Buran switched over to internal power.
Relieved and exhilarated, Jian grabbed the shuttle’s controls and opened up the taps on the dorsal thrusters. Instantly, dozens of liters of water flash-boiled into superheated steam and came screaming out of the shuttle’s nose, tail, and wingtips at almost a thousand kilometers per hour.
With a mighty heave, the beast pushed away from its lair on pillars of clouds.
Jian didn’t wait around to savor the small victory. The moment the Buran cleared the cradle gantries, he was already out of his seat and floating for the com station. With practiced familiarity, Jian popped open the panels protecting the sensitive electronics suite that made up the shuttle’s communication’s system. With little fanfare, Jian tore out the trio of modules that formed the triple redundancy of Flight’s data uplink.
All he had left was the shuttle’s whisker laser. And only he controlled where it was pointed and who it talked to.
System warning alarms flashed across his vision as well as the shuttle’s command consoles. Jian disarmed them and settled back into his seat to warm up the Buran’s mains. He needed to burn hard and fast for Varr if he was going to hit his window.
As the bank of a half-dozen rocket motors spooled through their start-up sequence, an incoming call icon blinked at the upper left corner of Jian’s plant overlay. His father. The plant link was short range without the data links, and couldn’t directly interface with the shuttle’s systems. Still, Jian wasn’t in the mood for a lecture. He dropped the call and returned his attention to the task at hand.
His father’s call came through again, except this time he didn’t bother with the courtesy of ringing.
<What the hell do you think you’re doing?> Chao demanded.
<I’m a little busy right now, dad. Signing off.>
<No, wait!>
Jian almost cut the connection again, but the tone in his father’s voice had shifted from authoritarianism to desperation. He couldn’t help but feel a pang of sympathy for the old man.
<Be quick.>
<Just answer my question, please,> Chao pleaded. <What are you doing?>
<I’m executing my mission.>
<And what is that, exactly? Because it’s clearly deviating from the mission profile you were briefed on.>
<That’s an understatement. I’m going to use the facility to find Benexx.>
<No, Jian, I won’t allow it!> A paternalistic tone crept back into his voice.
<You can’t prevent it, dad. I’ve pulled the plug on the shuttle’s data links. As soon as I’m clear of plant range, you’re not going to hear from me again until this is all over.> Jian took a deep breath. <Actually, it’s already over. Because I’m not going to help you break our treaty with Benexx’s people just to destroy a priceless piece of technology.>
<I don’t fucking care about the treaty, son.>
<Obviously.>
<Just… shut up and listen. This isn’t about us anymore. If you come back right now, maybe, MAYBE, I can cook up something to bury this. A power surge, data corrupted by a solar flare. Something to save your career. But, if you light off your engines, Jian, that’s mutiny. And I can’t protect you from the consequences anymore.>
Jian grit his teeth and exhaled through his nose, hard. <I’m not asking for your protection, dad. I don’t need you to hold my hand, or bribe the other parents to bring their kids to my birthday party anymore. This is my decision, and you are on the wrong side of it. I’d like to think you know you are, but it doesn’t matter. I’m hanging up now and burning for Varr.> Jian glanced down at the “tablet” he’d brought aboard, stowed in its own little crash webbing. <Oh, and tell your people they can stop ransacking the ship looking for Polly. He’s here with me. I’m taking him home where he’ll be safe. Commander Feng, out.>
<Jian, I lov–>
The link dropped before Chao could finish his sentence. Not that he needed to. Jian knew what his father was trying to say. Just, given the circumstances, he had some trouble believing it.
Jian put the thought out of his mind. All the Buran’s engines showed green. For a bird that entered her third century decades ago, she was in excellent health. A testament to the skill and dedication of the maintenance crews who even now were probably staring slack-jawed at their displays while Jian stole all of their hard work.
Without a moment’s reflection or hesitation, Jian firewalled the throttles. With only Jian aboard and very little cargo in its hold besides the nuke and a few weeks’ worth of food and water rations, the Buran took off like a shot from a gun. Jian’s body pressed into the back of his chair at six gees, seven, eight, going from eighty kilos to more than five hundred in seconds. As it cleared the parabolic blast shield at the aft end of the Ark, Jian began another countdown.
The Ark was a massive beast of a ship. And like any beast, its teeth were housed inside its head. An array of navigational lasers, each powerful enough at full-output to burn a meter-wide hole through an iron asteroid, studded the front of the ship. For two centuries, they had been used to clear the path ahead of the ship as it barreled through deep space at five percent lightspeed. For the last eighteen years, they’d been busy clearing the space around Gaia of orbit-crossing meteors and other proto-planetary debris.
And as soon as that head spun around to face him, Jian was as good as charcoal. Unless he could blind it. The only drawback to the Ark’s immense size was its ponderous rate of movement. It would be eleven minutes from the moment the captain gave the order to burn the Buran out of the sky until it was in position to fire. This wasn’t normally a problem with asteroids they could see coming from months or even years away, but Jian wasn’t a normal problem.
Nor was his solution. After ninety-three seconds on full burn, Jian cut thrust to zero. The elephant sitting on his chest stood and wandered away. He took two deep, gasping breaths to clear the stars from his vision, then unstrapped and headed for the cargo hold.
“Crazy, Jian. This is stone fucking crazy.” He snapped his helmet visor closed as he gazed down at the nuke sitting in its transfer cradle. Jian grabbed up the remote detonator and hit the cargo bay door release. Above him, the bifold doors peeled back, exposing the black of space and the milky arm of the galaxy beyond.
Hurriedly, Jian unbuckled the tie-down straps holding the nuke fast to the deck until it floated gently a few centimeters off the plating. Five minutes twenty left. Too close, much too close, he thought as he lined up the bomb’s front with the Ark behind him. He needed the nuke’s destructive blast cone pointed squarely back at the Ark and the hell away from his shuttle. With immense care not to impart any rotational inertia, Jian gave the case a gentle push out of the cargo bay. He watched it go for five, ten, twenty seconds, until he was sure it wasn’t going to spin back around on him.
Satisfied, he hit the toggle to close the doors and returned to the fight deck where he strapped back into his chair. An external camera feed confirmed that the package was still floating in the proper orientation. Two minutes ten until his goose was cooked.
Angling the Buran’s aft slightly off-bore to keep the package out of his exhaust plume, Jian firewalled the throttles again. He needed to put space between his shuttle and the bomb. The further the better. Fifty seconds.
Jian tried to lift the detonator in his right hand, but it felt like trying to lift a shuttle by himself. Reluctantly, he backed off the throttles, down to five and a half gees. Just enough that the detonator budged. With great effort, he inched it upwards where he could punch the code into its keypad with his other hand. Why they hadn’t just linked the damned thing into his plant network was beyond his reckoning. Thirty-five.
The detonator display went green, confirming it was armed and ready to send the signal that would convert several kilos of plutonium into fire and fury.
Six.
Five.
Four.
Three.
Jian pressed the button.