CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
AIDEN
“Corporal Hill! Come back here!” Major Tolvorez shouted after Jai, as the door closed behind him. “Commander? Where the hell is he going?”
“He had some urgent business to deal with,” I replied, not feeling any need to explain myself to Tolvorez. His attitude was beginning to grate on me, and as concerned as I was about Jai’s safety, I was running out of patience.
I heard the clomping of magnetic boots, then a far more welcome presence arrived beside me. “Where’s he going?” Bryce asked, his tone far more reasonable.
“To take the bridge,” I replied. In my defence, Bryce was currently my team leader, for all that Tolvorez still out-ranked me. “He was trained for high risk solo missions. I seriously don’t know if he can do it,” I admitted, worry gnawing at my gut. “But he’s pretty convinced he can.”
“That’s a suicide mission,” Tolvorez declared. “If any harm comes to him, I’ll see that you’re held responsible, Commander Hill. As a soldier under your command, you have the responsibility to-”
“Shut the fuck up,” Bryce snapped at Tolvorez.
Thankfully, being a major himself, he wasn’t going to get into trouble for talking back to a superior officer.
“Aiden knows more about the relationship between a master and his dimari than anyone on this planet. And we have a very limited amount of time to get control of this ship before the pirates get the engines running again and jump us through the wormhole into heavens knows what sector of the galaxy. Here,” Bryce added, handing me a metal rod about half a metre long – likely some sort of spare part for one of the mechanical systems that kept the ship running.
It wasn’t great, but it would do as a makeshift weapon.
“A couple of the engineers are helping Sergeant Jens hack into the ship-wide communications system,” he explained, nodding down the hallway to where a small cluster of people were working feverishly at a panel on the wall.
“The idea is that if we can put a trace on every comm on the ship, we should be able to map out where all the pirates are and get the jump on them.”
“Doesn’t that mean they’ll know where we are, as well?” I asked.
“Jens is going to code us in. Only the people with the right code will be able to see the map. Or that’s the idea, at least,” he admitted, not sounding entirely confident about it. “Given the time limit, it might be a bit hit and miss. But right now, it’s still the best option we’ve got.”
“Any chance we could patch Jai in on that function as well?” I asked. If he could see the pirates coming, that would greatly increase his chances of success.
“Let’s go ask Jens about it,” Bryce said. “Tolvorez, how about you get the rest of these soldiers armed as well as possible and get them ready to move out. Anyone with significant injuries can stay here with the crew.”
Tolvorez huffed, but made no more complaint than that. “Very well,” he said grudgingly, then turned around to go and round up more of the recently freed soldiers.
Bryce and I clomped down the hall to the cluster of engineers, and in light of the noise from our boots, I immediately understood why Jai had disabled the magnetic function.
The way the magnets worked was to pull our feet towards the floor once they were within an inch or so of the metal walkways, and that necessarily meant our steps landed with more force than usual.
Operating with stealth while walking in zero gravity was almost impossible.
But there were significant risks to going completely weightless, the worst being that if we misjudged a jump or a landing, we could get stranded floating in the middle of a room with no way to get back to a wall.
The only way out of that sort of scenario was to try throwing something in the opposite direction from the way we wanted to go, and hoping we gained enough inertia to eventually reach a solid surface again.
As much as I told myself that Jai would have been given rigorous training in zero gravity manoeuvres, I couldn’t help the knot of worry sitting tight and uncomfortable in my chest.
“How’s it going?” Bryce asked Jens, as we came up to the panel they were working on.
“It’s going to be dirty,” Jens replied, without looking away from the panel.
“I’m only generating one code to access the system.
Everyone here will have to enter it manually, and they only get three chances to get it right.
After that, they’ll be locked out of the system.
That’s to prevent the pirates running codebreakers on it.
Aside from that, I can’t guarantee it’ll pick up every comm on the ship, so don’t go thinking you have an iron clad guarantee that you’re going to see any enemies coming.
And it will, of course, miss anyone who isn’t wearing a comm.
Pirate tech tends to have a fair few stealth capabilities, but I’m not trying to get into their devices.
All we need to do is detect their presence, so hopefully that will work in our favour. ”
“That’s a lot of ifs and maybes,” Bryce said.
Jens shrugged. “If I had three hours to engineer the whole thing, it would be a lot cleaner. You’ve given me ten minutes,” he said, shooting Bryce a wry look. “So you’re getting what you pay for.”
“I was hoping we could patch Jai into the system,” I said, as Jens continued poking at the console, the engineers occasionally offering tips as to how to get the system to respond.
“He’s gone on a solo mission to try and take the bridge.
He was specifically trained for that sort of thing,” I added, at Jens’s startled look.
“Brave kid,” Jens muttered, and I let the ‘kid’ reference slide.
For all his young age, Jai had more experience than soldiers who’d been in the Alliance military for three or four years.
“Like I said, he’d have to enter the code manually.
And there’s no way in hell I’d let you send it to him, even if it’s encrypted. ”
“Fuck,” I muttered. Knowing where the pirates were would make his job a hell of a lot safer. And easier, and quicker. I thought about how to solve the problem. “Can I send him any message at all? Would that alert the pirates to our location?”
“Shouldn’t do,” Jens said. “There’s plenty of comm static on a ship like this at the best of times. A short message wouldn’t stand out against the background noise. It would have to be in code, though. And I don’t mean encrypted. Military encryption is top notch, but so is pirate hacking tech.”
Bryce stepped in then. “Is the code you’re going to create autogenerated, or can you choose what it’s going to be?” he asked.
Jens paused in his work, looking at the pair of us fully for the first time. “I can choose it,” he answered succinctly.
“Is there some way you can tell Jai what it is without actually telling him what it is?” Bryce asked me.
“Is it numbers, or letters, or what?” I asked Jens.
“Whatever you like. Should be at least six characters long, for security, but like I said, the pirates will only get three tries each before it cuts them out. If there’s twenty pirates on the ship, that gives them maybe sixty combinations. To pick the right one with those odds would be a miracle.”
“Let me think about that for a second.” I took a few steps away, trying to figure out what message I could send to Jai that would mean anything to him, with some number or letter combination that he could decipher from a few cryptic phrases.
It would have to be numbers only, I realised a moment later.
Letters in the Eumadian script operated on a completely different system from Alliance script, so any code using spelling would be lost in translation.
But what numbers would mean anything to him?
I tapped at my comm, noting down phrases, then deleting them, then trying again.
Finally, I had something I thought was workable. “Ready when you are,” I told Jens.
“Give me two seconds. Nearly ready…”
“Route the scanner through here…” one of the engineers said, pointing to a point on the console. “Then select all the security sectors… And we’re good to go.”
“What’s the code?” Jens prompted me.
“Eight, one, seven, three, one, five,” I recited.
Jens nodded and entered the code. “Eight, one, seven, three, one, five. Got it. The rest of you, start entering that into your comms, then go tell the rest of the crew.” He closed the console, then turned to Bryce with a look of grim determination. “Right, then. Let’s go cause some mayhem.”
I fired off the message I’d constructed to Jai, desperately hoping that he managed to decipher it.
There were two fairly serious problems with this plan.
Firstly, I didn’t know how we’d know if he’d figured it out.
At worst, he’d fail the three attempts he had, but that wouldn’t leave him any worse off than he was now.
The bigger problem was that I had no idea how we were meant to pick Jai out from among all the glowing dots that had appeared on my comm map.
He’d had ten minutes or more to start making his way towards the bridge, so he could be in the thick of it with some of the pirates by now.
And while he’d had a good headstart on us, it wasn’t impossible for us to catch up to him at some point.
I didn’t want the slightest risk of accidentally killing him if we mistook him for one of the pirates.
Unfortunately, that was largely beyond my control at this point.
We spent several minutes making sure everyone, the crew included, could access the map.
The plan was for the crew to stay here, armed with metal rods and a variety of hand tools.
The entrance to the storage area created a natural bottleneck that would be the best spot available to hold off the pirates if any of them came back this way.
The rest of us were going to join Jai’s efforts to retake the ship. The problem with that, though, was that we didn’t have any long range weapons.
“I propose we split into two groups,” Tolvorez announced, the instant the rest of us joined the soldiers by the door. “One group can take the lower floor-”
“No,” Bryce cut him off. “That didn’t work last time, and it’s certainly not going to work now. We need to make up for our lack of fire power with an excess of numbers. We go as one team. Yes, we’ll split into two groups, but we’re staying close to each other.”
Tolvorez looked shocked at the way Bryce was stomping all over his plan. “Excuse me, but I think I’m more qualified to be-”
“Shut up,” I snapped at Tolvorez. “Bryce is right. The only thing on our side right now is numbers.”
“I agree with Major Preswood,” one of the other team leaders said, a Denzogal Commander.
“This is a mutiny!” Tolvorez spluttered. “I outrank both of you-”
“But you don’t outrank me,” Bryce snapped at him.
“We have a ship to save and a distinct disadvantage in our options to do so. This first group of pirates is guarding the way to the upper deck,” he said, pointing to a small cluster of lights on the map.
“So we come at them from both sides. My team will distract them from the right. Hill, you take the other half of our team around here, to flank them.” He pointed to the hallway on the other side of the cluster, where we could get relatively close to them before we’d be spotted.
“If we’re lucky, you’ll be able to sneak up behind them and take them out while they’re distracted.
And for god’s sake, remember that hitting things in zero gravity works totally differently, even if you’ve got mag boots on. ”
“We should turn them off,” I advised, having seen the way Jai moved so silently out the door. “There’s a certain risk involved, but it’ll mean we’re a hell of a lot quieter.”
Carver spoke up next. “Once we take out the first group, we can take their weapons. That should make it easier to even the playing field against later groups.”
Bryce nodded. “Teams one and two, you go with Commander Hill. The rest of you with me. And Tolvorez, you’re coming with me as well.”
“I’ll be filing a report against you once this is finished,” Tolvorez promised.
“You do whatever you like,” Bryce replied. “All right then, we-”
“Fuck,” I cursed, unintentionally cutting Bryce off as my comm vibrated quietly against my arm. A short message from Jai appeared on the screen. Bouncing ball.
I looked at Bryce as he read the message over my shoulder. “What the hell does that mean?”