“Captain, what next?” Lingenfelter asked urgently over the comms. After securing the spine’s security doors, she had requested further instructions twice without a response. The calamity one deck below had muted only slightly and the terrible racket of bullets pounding thick alloy still carried easily to the bridge. “Captain?” she shouted again over the din.
Lochlain exploded onto the bridge. He rushed toward the captain’s panel, forcing Lingenfelter to retreat several steps back.
He fired commands into the control panel, hands dancing over the console with dizzying speed. Lingenfelter could not keep up with his inputs but noticed when he overrode three, separate system warnings including a lose-license safeguard. He finished by slapping down harshly on a button that had just appeared on the touchscreen. “Not on my ship!” he cried triumphantly as his hand came down.
Zanshin wailed in response to her captain’s assault. An escalating whine whistled throughout the freighter. Lingenfelter recognized the sound as a decompression alert and stirred from her shock. She raced to the bridge door to seal the compartment. “Did you just decompress the ship?” she blustered in astonishment, pivoting toward her captain.
Lochlain’s hands no longer entered commands but still shook noticeably. He took several moments before he was capable of offering a response. “Yes, but only the forward spine,” he finally said. His voice shook as badly as his body.
“How?”
“I opened the forward hold, opposite from Mercer’s quarters. That hold still has external access,” he answered between unsteady breaths. He squelched the decompression alarm and Zanshin returned to an unnatural quiet. It was the silence of a crypt.
“Won’t that damage the ASA’s training equipment in there?”
Lochlain ignored the question. “Mercer,” he called over the ship’s 1-MC, “are you okay?” The sounds of gunfire had ceased. In fact, all sounds had ceased. He waited through the interminable quiet.
The reply came from Truesworth. His voice was rock steady and upbeat. “She’s been hit, twice, but had the good manners to seek cover in the medical bay. Does this auto-doc work?”
Lochlain exhaled a great sigh of relief only after hearing Brooke’s voice answering Truesworth in the background.
Her voice was tight but steady. “It should. Can you help me get this off?”
“What about Munn?” Lochlain asked staring at the speakers at his console. He waited briefly for an answer before growling and slapping his panel. “Elease, stay here and answer any calls we get.”
“I… I snuck onto Zanshin because I couldn’t afford a room anywhere,” Lingenfelter offered pitifully, still wide-eyed as her captain stomped toward her and the exit.
Lochlain ignored her confession and continued, “Tell anyone who calls that we had a minor accident with an internal hold. Nobody got hurt and no cargo was damaged. If they want more, patch them through to me. Got it?”
She nodded. There were tears in her eyes. “I’m sorry, Captain.”
Lochlain saw her shaking uncontrollably. He thrust out a hand and gave her a “thumbs up” along with a large smile. “If you promise to save my ship like you just did then you can sneak aboard any time you want.” He left the bridge at a ramrod pace.
In his wake, Lingenfelter felt an enormous grin take hold of her as she collapsed into the captain’s chair.
Lochlain took the stairs three at a time and approached the medical bay seconds later.
Naslund was standing in the hallway, peering inside the compartment. He whipped his head around when he heard Lochlain coming at breakneck speed. “Captain, what’s going on? You called me to the mess and after I got there, all hell broke loose.” His face was pale and his eyes were wide.
“I’m not entirely sure yet. Mercer’s been shot so you’re the acting chief engineer right now,” Lochlain said bluntly. He pointed toward the aft of the ship. “Get down to Engineering and start prepping Zanshin to cast off. Wake the power core up and cut the shore power. Prepare to break the smart and spring lines but wait for my command.”
Naslund pushed away from the door and began to pass by his captain. Lochlain stopped him by placing his hand on the young man’s shoulder. He looked the engineer in the eyes and said, “Casper, breathe. Just breathe. It’s not always this crazy. Just follow your checklists and do your job right. You’ll be all alone back there. There’s nobody to catch your mistakes.” He kept hold of the man until he was sure his engineer was not going to melt down.
“Yes, sir,” Naslund answered after taking several deep breaths.
Lochlain released him and entered the medical bay. Brooke was sitting on the bed of the auto-doc. The top half of her shipsuit pooled around her waist and her blue and gold Gamblers t-shirt was marred with a wet patch of dark red. Truesworth had just removed her last boot and was tugging at the legs of her shipsuit. She winced as she leaned on her hands to lift herself off the bed. The shipsuit slid off her hips. She pulled self-consciously at the hem of her t-shirt to cover black panties.
“You certainly have better legs than my last chief engineer,” Truesworth teased with an easy grace but the privateer turned smuggler courteously averted his gaze.
“I see how it is,” Lochlain scolded from the doorway. “Jack’s not on board five minutes and he’s already got your pants off.”
“I will shoot you,” Brooke said through gritted teeth. She mewled under the pain of slipping her left arm into the auto-doc’s monitoring sleeve. Actuators within the sleeve spun it to orient correctly with her arm and it expanded suddenly as an airbladder filled within. Her vital signs appeared instantly on an overhead screen as she felt the bite of a needle penetrating her arm.
Truesworth dropped the shipsuit and moved to the auto-doc panel. His fingers glided over the screen and the machine’s twin, mechanical arms began to whirl with life. “Standard Brevic military training,” he said and a slight smile appeared on his lips. “Uh, how to run an auto-doc, I mean.” He commanded the auto-doc to perform a patient evaluation. “Now, charming a beautiful woman out of her pants is one-hundred percent, pure Truesworth,” he added with a wink.
Lochlain moved to Brooke’s side and took her left hand firmly. Half of her shirt was covered in dark blood. Further down, a stream of blood flowed from her calf, down her foot and dripped onto the deck. “Mercer, how bad is it?”
“Bad enough to take the wrapping off the auto-doc,” she hissed, “but I’ll live. My calf stings like a bitch but the bullet didn’t hit bone.” She tried to ease herself back to lie on the bed but gasped out in pain. “I don’t know about the shoulder. It’s too high to have hit my lung but it hurts so bad that I don’t know what it did hit.”
Lochlain gently guided her down. The medical sleeve pulsated as the mechanical arms traveled down the sides of the bed to her calf.
“It’s giving you some pain relief, Miss Brooke,” Truesworth stated from behind the control panel. A detailed scan appeared on its screen with various callouts annotating her injuries.
“I think we’re at the point where you can call me Mercer, Jack.”
“Here’s the verdict from the auto-doc,” Truesworth announced. The motion around him stopped completely. He read the first line to himself and nodded. “It says you’ve been shot.”
“That machine’s worth every credit we spent on it,” Brooke muttered sarcastically under her breath. She brought her good arm up to cover her eyes.
Truesworth continued. “Your calf is a simple gash wound and it’s already applied plasti-skin to it. The other bullet nicked your clavicle but missed the subclavian artery. The brachial plexus is untouched. You have a nice hole through your trapezius muscle.” Truesworth used his index finger and thumb to zoom the scan. “There’s no bullet in you and there’s an obvious exit wound but the auto-doc says you have synthetic cotton inside the wound. It’s probably from your t-shirt. It recommends minor surgery to remove the foreign material as well as a bone chip before filling and stitching up the muscle.”
The machine’s mechanical claws were already back to her shoulders. Each held the proper instruments for the first step in the procedure. They hovered ominously over Brooke, whose arm no longer covered her face. Her head rested on the auto-doc’s pillow. Lochlain recognized a “shiver stick” in one claw but not the sharp instrument in the other.
“It’s waiting for permission to continue and wants to know if the patient wishes to be conscious for the procedure,” Truesworth stated. “Total surgery time is seven minutes.”
“A local will do,” Brooke answered with a slight slur. “Whatever it’s already given me might be enough.”
The ship’s main channel sounded. “Captain? This is Elease.”
Lochlain punched the communications panel near the bay’s exit. “Go ahead.”
“Orbital Control just contacted us. They asked if we decompressed a hold. I told them we did a routine test purge to evaluate our environmental systems. I hope that was okay.”
“Did they buy it?” Lochlain asked.
“I think so.”
“Then it was okay.” He turned to Truesworth. “Start the surgery. We need Mercer up and lucid.”
Truesworth gestured at mechanical claws moving with only a machine’s unwavering certainty and precision.
Lingenfelter’s voice carried through the speakers again. “Captain, I called down because you have a personal comm request. It’s not from Control but from someone named Isett.”
“Mercer, are you going to be all right?” Lochlain asked. He hated that he would have to leave the medical bay.
“Oh,” Brooke sighed dreamily with hazel eyes closed, “I think so. Just let me know when it starts, Reece.”
“Put Isett’s call through to the ship’s mess, Elease,” he ordered. He turned to Truesworth and gestured at Brooke. “Please keep an eye on her.” Lochlain stepped over several shell casings on his way into the hall. He glanced at the sealed security door dividing the common rooms from the forward spine. It was pockmarked with circular bulges.
Inside the mess, a counter drawer had been ripped from its rails and silverware was scattered across the tiled deck. He pounded the comm panel to join the call and accused in a vicious tone, “Was this you, Cindi?”
“Has someone already taken the contract?” Isett asked urgently. “Listen, Reece, a major contract just came out of the ether, targeting your ship. Every underworld organization was just asked to destroy Zanshin.”
Lochlain felt his jaw unhinge. He had assumed that the men now dead in the spine were professionals carrying out a job but he had no idea the job was this big. “Who?”
“The employer is only a serial number,” Isett answered. That was not unusual.
“Then why me?” Lochlain spluttered. Would Larsson really go to such lengths to eliminate him?
“It doesn’t say although I don’t think they’re after you specifically, Reece. The contract is for Zanshin, not Reece Lochlain.”
That seemed to eliminate Larsson. “W-wait,” Lochlain stammered in confusion, “that makes no sense. If someone wanted this ship destroyed, they could’ve done that for any number of years while it was in the graveyard. Hell, the owners were advertising the ship. It’s not like Zanshin was hiding out.”
“Look,” Isett said loudly over his protest, “I’m just letting you know there’s a hit on your ship so large that I considered taking it. In fact, I still could. Ditch your ship, Reece. Come to me and I’ll have my people take out Zanshin. We can split the payment.”
Lochlain felt his stomach drop as he processed that he was not personally the target. “They were going to blow up my ship!” He ducked his head out to the corridor and back in. “Cindi, I’ll call you back but thanks for the warning. I gotta go now!” He ran down the hallway to the central stairs. Bounding up them toward the top deck, he screamed for Lingenfelter. “Elease, seal the forward hold and refill the spine with atmo! I need to see what’s inside that black container!”
He heard the navigator’s assent and spun in place to run back down the stairs. Taking a hard right out of the stairwell, he ran to the battered security door.
Truesworth poked his head from the medical bay. “Everything okay, Captain?”
Lochlain pressed a hand up to the portal and cursed before asking, “Did you ever see what was inside that container, Jack?”
Truesworth’s eyes bulged. “Uh, I’m guessing not puppies.”
The portal opened with a viper’s hiss, and the pressure difference popped Lochlain’s ears. He plowed forward, up the half-flight of stairs. The temperature inside the spine was below freezing and he saw puffs of breath in front of his face. Gruesome figures with clawed hands lay motionless on the deck. Lochlain vaulted over two of the bodies to reach the large container. He searched for a locking mechanism before realizing the cover was not sealed.
He lifted it gently. Amber numerals greeted him. The countdown flashed through 15:42 on its slow, methodical trip toward zero.