Chapter Twenty

The Captain of the shuttle Base Line Twelve was holding a calm appearance as he saw his two officers fighting to hold the small ship together.

They had taken great care to avoid the distant meteorites, but evidently, the small ice chunks were too small to be picked up by their radar and scans. They had been hit at least three times, and one had been tiny but pierced the outer skin letting air stream out until an automatic patch was in place.

One bumped and knocked the airlock open on the outside, but in checking it, the soldiers got the door closed, the lock sealed, and air full. They went in and checked the system to make sure the outer door was safe. Everything was in top shape, so the Captain approved it and told the soldiers to close the inner door with the standard safe stamp.

At last, the Captain checked with his people, ten regulars who served with him on the shuttle, that all systems were gone. It looked like they had made it through the debris field and were now back on a direct route to a particular location. The Captain had made this trip three times and made a profit each time. The Transformed people paid generously and in advance.

There were rumors that the people at the head of the Transformed group were making offers of purchasing the shuttles for full-time use. The Captain and his crew owned this ship and one more shuttle, and they had hopes of adding more to their small fleet. They would not be happy to sell their ships, but they would accept more coin in an offer to do more business with the Transformed. So, he would listen to the leader if the man made an offer.

Basically, these ships or shuttles were just big open barrels with a small command cabin in the nose and a powerful engine along the bottom with the exhaust in the rear. The rest was just bare large rooms to be converted for use. Under the right conditions, the entire section could be one large storage area for something big to be shipped wherever the strong engines could take them.

Right now, it was broken up into several levels and many rooms with bunks and workout areas along with two galleys. It was handling the movement of a couple of hundred Transformed troops in a reasonably comfortable situation.

The Captain had picked up groups of soldiers from four different locations. At each place, the number varied in small groups. This had happened on each of his trips. He had to wonder why the strange mix-up of groups and their locations. How loyal could these soldiers be if they just got inducted and trained and didn't know each other or their leaders?

But he did see that they took orders, moving fast at the words of any leader. Even on the ship for the tedious trip, locked together with not much to do, the leaders kept them under control, getting them to do exercises in turn and talking to them in groups about the greatness of a world run by the Transformed.

One thing the Captain noticed, as he rode the ship with a full load, was that the leaders stayed away from each other. They did not gather for comparison or planning sessions. He had been a grunt in the Marines in the Organization of Worlds for one short stint.

Officers always ate together and walked along in twos or threes, quietly talking as if there was some secret life to having those special marks on their uniforms. Among the soldiers of the Transformed, the officers hardly spoke and seemed to find other areas to stay or be with soldiers instead of officers. There seemed to be some strange competition in place that kept them apart.

The Captain shook his head at his thoughts as he watched his pilot bring the ship slowly into the dock at the satellite. There were many old docks on the satellite, but only two that could be used. Once a shuttle was unloaded, it would move over to one of the damaged docks and hold on until they were released to return to pick up another load.

Soldiers piled out of the large side exit that was open on both sides of the airlock of the shuttle. Each soldier had a tote and a long weapon with a small standard pistol high on their waist attached to their belt. The tall Sub-leader pushed his way through the soldiers, trying to get off the ship.

His long legs were taking him down into the dark hallways of the satellite. Keenan's thoughts were that he didn't like these older metal coffins. Before the stronger transparent metals had been made cheaper, so many of the older satellites were just closed up long halls with doors and rooms, all attached like a warren for mice.

There were many problems now that Keenan was on the space station. First, he had no idea where Nor was located. There was also the fact that a Sub-leader was not high enough in the status to have access to the High Commander of the entire military group.

If he couldn't get to Nor, he had Plan B. His team had done some real magic in getting him ready to join the Transformed. First, Thea had to find just the right shuttle in the correct position on its trip with a full load of soldiers.

The meteor had been a problem for several shuttles on their trip over to the metal box where Nor was collecting an army. Then Bruno coaxed the right size of small ice to nudge a certain shuttle. The bumps meant the people running the shuttle didn't notice the big stealth ship clamp-on, while Poly forced the shuttle's outside door lock open.

The rest was up to Keenan, who entered the airlock, closed the outside door, and floated to the ceiling. When air filled the airlock and the soldiers opened the inside door, no one thought to look up. They just came in to check the seal on the outer door.

Removing his breather, Keenan dropped down beside some of the soldiers, nodded, and left to continue down the large room to be with many more people in brown uniforms.

What he needed to find now, as he wandered the depressing dark metal halls, was the engineering department. Keenan had his long gun over his shoulders and was holding his small standard tote in one hand as he pushed on, looking as if he belonged and knew where he was heading.

On a big old space station, where would the working engineering department be located? Where was the mechanics that ran the electrics, the water, and the atmosphere? Where was the real heart of this satellite? On the modern built metal monsters, the heart was in the center, and everything just continued to grow out from the place that kept it active.

But on the old ones, things were done differently due to maintenance and importing parts, along with engineers to help run the machines. Now, Keenan decided he needed to find some way to make his way to the bottom of all these rooms and halls with flicking or dead lights. He would find stairs and go down a couple of levels, but the stairs would end into some big room in the area that he needed, and he had to find another dirty, rusty hallway, hunting for more stairs.

There were no working elevators here, but when he reached an elevator that had its doors jammed open, it gave him an idea. Looking both ways to make sure he wasn't being watched, he entered the elevator box. Looking up, he jumped, and with a hand above his head, he pushed one of the panels aside. Getting up on the metal railing that ran waist-high around the lift, he stepped up high enough to grab the edge of the upper opening.

From there, it was easy to pull himself up onto the top of the elevator lift box. He carefully replaced the tile, and in the shady area showing a couple of distant red lights, he saw a ladder on one side. Yes, a way to the bottom. The metal ladder was inset into the wall so that even if the elevator was moving, it was safe for someone to be on the steps. Still, these boxes had not moved for years.

He started down the long climb that was nothing but a dark hole below him. He adjusted his items, the rifle over one shoulder and the tote over the other. With hands-free and sure feet in heavy brown boots that Poly saw to be a good fit, he went down at a steady pace.

Even for a male as strong as Keenan, with the help of the mother earth for assistance, the climb was wearing him out, and he had to stop a couple of times. He would step into the side ledges that would have been openings to levels but didn't open the doors. He sat down on the ledge and leaned back, bringing out a bulb of water from one of his many pockets. One time he even pulled out a chew of dried meat.

After each break, he again was on the ladder, heading for his destination. He lost track of time; on one of his breaks, he had pulled on gloves to ease the movement of his hands.

At last, he was at the point wherein the dim light, but with his better sight, he could see the dirty, rusty, full of debris, bottom of the elevator shaft. He needed to get out on the final floor, so he stopped at that point, and with one foot on the ladder and the other on the ledge by the double door, he began to push against the opening. Slowly one side did give, so he used more strength to push against it and soon had the door back into the wall. He stepped out and was pleased that it was not another hallway.

There was the flickering of lights above, in the high ceiling. He was looking into a large endless room full of massive machines, some of which were operating. Taking a moment to rotate his arms and stretch his legs after the long climb down, Keenan was now where he needed to be for Plan B.

He pulled the tote off his shoulder and shifted it to carry it in one hand as he began to walk through the engines and apparatuses. He didn't need the most important unit in the department that stretched forward among so many devices. What he wanted was a mechanism that ran on a volatile fuel. He was going to help something blow up and destroy the entire satellite.

What he found was a fuel tank near the outside wall. It took him a moment to understand that it was an exterior wall, as it was difficult to get an idea of how this space station was built so many years ago. Then it made sense, as the fuel was brought in from the outside by ships and pumped into a holding tank.

In a short aisle away stood an immense machine that spread out for yards and yards and reached almost to the ceiling. It was running, and Keenan had absolutely no idea what it was handling for this metal building. But it was precisely what he was looking for, with the pipes that ran from the machine back to the holding tank of fuel.

Kneeling where two large pipes fed into the noisy machine from the fuel tank over by the outside wall; Keenan sat his tote down and opened it. He tilted it to dump the few items out on the floor, then he took the empty tote and began to stretch it out until it lost its shape and couldn't be recognized. It was just a long soft strange piece of light brown malleable product.

From the items on the floor, he took up what looked like clay, which most would recognize as some explosive, and began to break the bricks up to push them against the pipe, where it attached to the big shaking machinery. What Bruno had done was to disguise the entire tote as a bomb. Once he got all the extra clay in place, he inserted a couple of strange-looking small devices that had small red lights blinking. These were the items that would cause the initial and immediate explosion. The last thing to be put into the clay was something that looked like a small square comm unit.

Finally, he picked up the strange rubbery flat piece that had been the original outside of the tote and wrapped it around everything, making sure it was tight and up against the machine. After it was in place, he carefully pulled out a small flamer from his pocket and touched the tip of the flame to the edge. This caused the entire wrap to turn black, the color of the pipes and the machinery.

Basically, the explosive he had built was now invisible to the eye. It just seemed to be part of the entire pipe and machinery, only a little thicker than the other pipe.

Plan B was in place. If he never got to Nor to kill the man with his own hands, he could eliminate the entire army. That would leave the Transformed without a military force to try to overpower anyone.

Keenan had to work his way back up in this rusty metal monster. If the working parts were at the bottom, the brain would be at the top. Somewhere either near the docks or at the top and there would be a place where the military leader was staying.

As compared to most of the artificial spaceports, this one was a smaller one, mostly forgotten, as it was off the path to the busy colonized planets. On the other hand, when you were on something that was still big enough to support the lives of many thousands of soldiers and had so many levels and boxes built, one on the top of the other, it felt immense.

The long ladder that Keenan had taken down to the machinery wasn't even half of the depth of the satellite. So, his first movements were to get to the dock area and check for rumors of the military leader.

There was no choice but to climb up the dark ladder in the elevator shaft. He decided that with the power running, there were probably some of the units running in parts of the different sections of the construction. What he needed was information. That usually came from gossip, and soldiers always were full of gossip. It was what they filled the time with when they weren't training or fighting.

After a couple of hours and a quick rest, he was back at the dock area and listening to the orders being given to the new ship that was unloading newbies.

"Go to seventeen twenty-one. Seventeen twenty-one. Take your stuff and go to seventeen twenty-one. Go to seventeen twenty-one." A tired-looking Sub-leader was repeating the words over and over as the soldiers came off the side airlock of the shuttle.

As the last of the soldiers came off, Keenan walked over and spoke to the Sub-leader. "Stupid work that they assigned you."

"Yeah. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The officers are all hiding, so no one will give them any work. Assholes."

"I know what you mean. I'm avoiding the whole fucking group." Keenan nudged the guy with a gentle touch of his elbow.

"Well, since the idiots took over the cafeteria on four, I just stay on the lower levels." The guy went over to a stand and punched some buttons.

"I know what you mean. Gotta' go." Keenan waved at the talker and headed down the metal hall after the confused new soldiers who were trying to read the notices on the walls.