Engineer: A Sigma Sector Story Read online

  After locking the door again, Reeves slunk towards the jump drive, feeling his way forward with his hands outstretched. Twice he took the corner of a cabinet or work table in the groin, but he muffled his screams of agony and pressed on.

  Where the hell was Melissa? Should he be suspicious or worried that she wasn’t here? Had she betrayed them after all?

  He sat down by the jump drive control housing and turned on his light. If pirates were lurking and waiting to kill him, they needed to get it over with. He had a job to do. The false sense of bravado lasted about two seconds before a cold sweat broke out. Reeves swiveled around the room with his light blazing, but saw no movement other than the most frightening shadows imaginable. Of course, it was all in his head.

  Right?

  He had a lot of circuit boards to replace and probably a bunch of sensors too, but he was far too scared to work. Maybe Melissa was hiding. That would make sense. He pulled out his link and called her.

  No response.

  Sweating like a Taltec at tax time, Reeves resigned himself to the fact that he really needed to check the expansive room for his colleague. Or pirates. Either one would work.

  Crouched close to the floor, Reeves felt his way forward with his hands, occasionally whispering Melissa’s name. With each step, he half-expected to place a clammy hand on a cooling dead body. The darkness engulfed him as he forced himself to continue. His heartbeat banged so hard that his ribcage struggled to restrain it.

  Reeves concentrated so intensely on his search that he didn’t even notice the presence behind him until a finger tapped his shoulder. He shot up. The back of his head cracked against the underside of a workbench. Dazed, he stumbled backwards and fell on his backside, flinging a bag of tools across the floor. Only then did he raise his hands in front of his face, ready to get pummeled to death by his assailant.

  “It’s just me, Graham.”

  Melissa.

  “YOU SCARED THE SHIT OUT OF ME!”

  “Shhh,” she insisted, anxiously looking all around the dark room. “They might hear you.”

  Reeves righted himself and waited for his heart to get back down out of his throat. “Who might hear me?”

  “The pirates. The captain said they were onboard, so I hid.”

  “But your link is off, I just tried—”

  “Oh, sorry,” she said as she tapped a finger against the link on her wrist. “I must’ve accidentally turned it off after talking to the captain.” A little green light flashed on and then off again to back up her story.

  “So you didn’t hide because you’re the saboteur?”

  Her face screwed up in disbelief. “No, no! No, I was terrified.”

  She started to cry and Reeves immediately regretted his accusation. But was that why she was crying? To throw him off the scent?

  On the other hand, if she’d wanted him dead, she could’ve easily done it a minute ago, and she hadn’t.

  On the other, other hand, maybe she needed him for something else, and wanted to let him live for a bit longer.

  In any case, Reeves figured he wasn’t going to die right then and there, so he suggested that the two of them work together to get the jump drive fixed. That seemed to calm Melissa down. They went at it side by side, Reeves always keeping an eye on his junior engineer, hoping she wouldn’t prove to be a traitor. He’d hate to have to punch her in the face if she stabbed him in the back, but he felt like he was on edge enough to do it.

  Toiling in the pitch-black room unnerved Reeves a lot less with someone else to share the experience. In the glow of her work light, Melissa’s face vacillated between abject paranoid terror of the dark and stern concentration towards her work. Reeves had never visited a cave before, but he suspected that pioneer spelunkers wrestled with these same feelings.

  They pressed on in silence for a few minutes. A brief hissing noise floated in the air as Reeves installed the final new circuit board. His heart skipped a beat, and then picked up the pace to make up for the disruption in service.

  “Melissa?” he whispered.

  “Yes?” she whispered back.

  “Do you remember where the ladder to the between-decks maintenance shaft is?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “We need to run there.” He jumped to his feet and dragged his frantic assistant with him. “Now!”

  Chapter 4

  With all the grace of a rhinoceros on a potent aphrodisiac, the two engineers tore through the looming darkness. A small work-light on each of their chests pierced the absolute gloom with a bright, unsteady beam that jerked all over as they ran. Reeves really wished that they’d sprung for the military grade, self-leveling lights.

  One thought pervaded as they hastened towards their only means of escape: How had the pirates opened the door? Reeves could’ve sworn he’d locked it.

  In the discombobulation of their flight, Melissa tripped and clattered through a pile of boxes with a scream. Reeves flipped around and ran back to her, trying his best to ignore the pair of large lights gaining ground at an alarming rate. Embarrassed more than hurt, Melissa got on her feet and the two kept running to the ladder. Hopefully the EMP hadn’t knocked out the automatic latch for the door in the ceiling.

  That thought became slightly moot when a bullet ricocheted off of a large toolbox right as Reeves passed it. He’d never been shot at before, but he had a newfound understanding of the phrase scared shitless. A few more rounds battered around the fleeing pair as Reeves’s heart rate raced faster than his feet. With each report of the guns, the muzzle flashes coupled with the disorienting illumination of their work-lights to reveal a huge pair of cabinets standing ahead, creating a bottleneck in the path. Reeves made a mental note to bitch about the health and safety violations of such an obstacle in the evacuation path if he lived through the minor inconvenience of being shot at.

  Out of breath and out of options, Reeves ducked to the right behind one of the large obstructions. As Melissa plowed through the narrow gap, Reeves grabbed her and pushed her behind the left cabinet. Reeves’s light heaved with each ragged breath, but he could see Melissa plainly enough. She looked terrified and confused, and as completely exhausted as Reeves felt. As usual, she looked to him as if he better have a plan here. He glanced around, his frazzled brain trying to beat back the stress of the moment to think straight.

  Then he saw them. The pair of antiquated, oversized pipe wrenches. He couldn’t remember why he’d ordered the extremely dated tools, but he now thanked his lucky stars for them. Each armed with a heavy piece of steel, the two engineers took posts against the cabinets, waiting for the intruders to walk by. As an afterthought, Reeves clicked off his light and Melissa promptly followed suit. The entire room plunged into complete blackness.

  In the silence that followed, Reeves worried that the pirates would wait them out, guns trained on the small gap between the cabinets. Leaving was definitely not an option. The sound of a foot scuffing on the ground tensed Reeves in ways he didn’t think possible. His arms ached with the strain of the raised wrench. What if Melissa wasn’t strong enough to swing the thing?

  The pirates had killed their lights too, but Reeves could barely hear the breathing of someone closing in. He held his own breath, trying not to give himself away. Surely the bastards knew where the engineers were and wouldn’t risk sneaking through the space between the cabinets, even if no one could see.

  With his back against the cabinet, Reeves felt more than heard the touch of a hand against the metal enclosure. Coiled like a spring and fearing he’d lose his nerve, he stepped around the corner and swung his wrench with all he had. A sickening crunch filled the air as he made contact with something. The accompanying scream let him know he’d hit the mark.

  An immensely heavy object struck him in the chest, driving him onto his back. The hard ground accepted his body’s weight with a brutal thud. His weapon flew away into the dark. Not knowing what to do, and pinned to the floor, Reeves clicked on his chest light to full in
tensity, startling the bastard straddling him. After blinking away the light, the man reared back to club Reeves in the face. A metallic flash caught the assailant in the side of the head.

  The sickening, mushy impact launched the man right off of Reeves. He lay there in stunned silence as Melissa screamed and lifted her wrench again, driving it into the face of the first guy, the one Reeves had knocked down a second ago. Reeves hadn’t even realized the man’s agonizing cries had been going on this whole time until Melissa’s strike killed him dead as a stone. She pulled her weapon high over her head once more, but Reeves leapt up and caught the wrench before she could swing it again.

  “You got him, Melissa,” he said. “You got him.”

  In the wavering light from his chest, Reeves could see the mashed features of two men that he recognized. Two men who were supposed to be dead. Melissa looked at the two, then snapped out of her ferocious streak and raised both hands to cover her mouth.

  “Oh my…,” she stammered. “I killed Jim and Joe O’Brien.”

  An irrational part of Reeves resented the notion that Melissa had actually been the one to kill both men. He’d been so worried that she wouldn’t even be able to lift the wrench, and now she’d shown him up. Twice.

  Looking at her horrified expression, Reeves let that weird thought pass and put his hands on her shoulders. The gesture didn’t immediately resolve her guilt, but her eyes had an expectant look to them.

  “They were going to kill us,” he said.

  She shook her head frantically. “What if they thought we were the pirates?” she insisted, approaching hysterics.

  “No, Arkady told Sturm that the O’Brien brothers were dead.” Melissa stared at him. “Before now, I mean.”

  The junior engineer frowned, now distracted by deeper thoughts than murder. She shrugged away from Reeves and wandered off a bit. Absently, she raised a hand to turn on her light. In the focus of the beam, a gun lay on the floor. She picked it up and looked to be examining it, but then she turned to Reeves.

  “But why would the security officer tell the captain that his two guards were dead?” she asked.

  “Honestly, I don’t know. But I’m starting to think we can’t trust anyone anymore.”

  Melissa sat down on a storage container, staring at the floor. “What do we do now?”

  Reeves averted his eyes from Joe O’Brien’s mangled face as he knelt over the body. With reality settling in now, the idea of being next to a fresh corpse threatened to unleash the contents of his stomach. His gut growled, and Reeves wondered when the last time he’d eaten was. He removed Joe’s link and tinkered with it.

  “What are you doing?” Melissa asked as Reeves peeled the back cover plate off the device.

  “Removing the tracking device in their links so no one comes looking for them.”

  “Oh,” she said, sounding like she’d just woken up from a dream. Reeves wasn’t a doctor, but he wondered if his colleague was going into shock. Killing two men in the dark could probably cause that.

  As Reeves removed the tracking device from the other guard’s link, Melissa seemed to come to. “We should take the tracking out of our own links, too, so they can’t find us.”

  Reeves agreed, but he really wanted to know who they were. He’d originally suspected a rogue JE in Fabregas, but now the only two security guards onboard had tried to shoot him. So if the O’Briens didn’t die at the shuttle dock like Arkady, or Sturm, claimed, what the hell was going on?

  “What do we do now?” Melissa asked.

  That was a good question.

  “I don’t see the point in fixing the jump drives until we know more,” he said. She seemed to agree with that. “We’re only going to know more if we sneak up to the science decks. Sturm said that she hadn’t been able to reach the science team since all this started.”

  “Did you try to call Alicia?”

  Reeves searched her drawn face for any ulterior motives in the question, but didn’t see any.

  “No,” he responded. “We shouldn’t use our links to call anyone right now.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because if these two idiots were sent to kill us, then whoever sent them will think we’re dead, at least for a little while. Using our links could give us away.”

  She nodded. Both engineers turned off the communication function of their links, just in case. Melissa pointed to the wall.

  “So we’re going up the maintenance ladder still?”

  “Looks like it,” Reeves said, grabbing the first rung. “I hope you’re not afraid of the dark.”

  ***

  “Where are we going?” Melissa whispered from behind Reeves.

  The two of them were hunched over at the waist, walking along the maintenance shaft. Every step, the motion sensors picked them up and turned on the bank of lights for the next section of the tunnel. At the same time, the lights dimmed to black in the rear as they passed into a new section.

  “The next access ladder will take us up right across the hall from the main science lab on SD2,” Reeves explained, grunting with the effort of walking while bent in half.

  It wasn’t always like this, traveling in the maintenance shafts. Usually there was a trolley that he could lie down on and direct to wherever he wanted to go. Unfortunately, it seemed like the power supply for the magnetic rails that the trolley glided on was taken out by the EMP earlier. They’d tried everything to get the damn thing to move, but even a stiff kick in the backside hadn’t budged the stubborn thing. So instead of traveling in comfort, they found themselves breaking their backs in a tight space.

  Each time a new set of lights kicked on, Reeves’s heart jumped, anticipating Security Chief Bryan Arkady standing before them with a weapon drawn. Both of the engineers now carried firearms, borrowed from the corpses of Jim and Joe O’Brien. Neither of the security guards would need them in the deep pit of hell that they hopefully now inhabited. Of course, neither engineer had ever fired a gun before.

  “I wouldn’t have thought the O’Briens would be the bad guys,” Melissa said quietly.

  Jim had cultivated a bizarre crush on Melissa for a while, but the JE had been too naïve to notice. Reeves had considered letting her know about it, but both O’Briens were such jackasses that he felt he was doing Melissa a favor by sparing her from them.

  “I don’t think they were pulling the strings.”

  “They had access to the entire ship,” Melissa pointed out.

  It was true. As security for Kerubi’s Scythe, the brothers did have the ability to go almost anywhere they pleased. That included unlocking the locked door to the jump drive room.

  “It’s their boss I’m worried about,” Reeves said absently as he pulled up at the next ladder.

  His back cracked and popped as he straightened himself out, reaching up slowly to grab the rungs of the ladder. Would the company spring for a deep tissue massage if he managed to save the non-backstabbing crew members? That would be the least of his demands.

  Ascending the ladder, Reeves felt like a torpedo gliding through a launch tube. The walls encapsulating the ladder didn’t quite rub against his shoulders and elbows as he climbed, but the passageway was a claustrophobe’s nightmare. Before long, a landing containing a door marked Science Deck 1 – B passed by. Only one more level to go. Sure enough, only moments later, with his arms starting to burn from the effort, Reeves reached his destination.

  Without a second thought, Reeves put his palm on the door control and stepped through into the bright white hallway. After the relative dimness of being below and between decks, his eyes took a moment to adjust. Melissa piled out after him and pushed him towards the opposite wall. The two slunk down the hall to the main lab, the first window of which opened to the hall five meters away.

  Reeves stopped at the sound of voices. The door to the lab was open, and the occupants could be heard chatting from Reeves’s vantage point. He slowly poked his head up and looked in through the window. His breath caught in
his chest.

  Restrained to three lab chairs, Ally, Tilda, and Matt looked disheveled and defeated. Matt especially. His face was a mess. The big man hadn’t gone down without a fight. Deep bruises purpled on his face, but Reeves suspected the redness on the tech’s cheeks sprung from anger more than anything else. From where he was now, Reeves couldn’t quite make out the blurry figures standing guard over the prisoners.

  Nodding to Melissa, Reeves slid farther down the hallway, carefully keeping his head under the sill of the windows. Closer to the open doorway, Scientist Murray Banion’s voice rang clear as a bell.

  “Nehru, grow a pair. I’ve got it all under control.”

  Confused at hearing Banion’s voice, Reeves raised his eyes over the lip of the window above him and clearly saw Nehru Vendra, Murray Banion, and a stranger standing there, facing away from the door. The chief science officer for Delta Sector looked extremely uncomfortable, even from behind. The man’s posture, his slumped shoulders, his hands jammed in his lab coat pockets, it all pointed to nervousness.

  The stranger on the other hand appeared quite aloof, as most Zhusaana tended to. The dark-skinned humanoid had the tall, lean musculature of his race, but Reeves knew that appearances were deceiving. As skinny as he looked, that Zhusaana would easily overpower most humans in hand-to-hand combat. Theirs was an old warrior race that was traditionally allied with the UTF. Reeves got the impression that this particular Zhusaana was allied with only one human.

  Banion.

  “Nehru, listen,” Murray said, cocky as ever. “Larry here piloted in the pirate shuttle. We let him in. He’s not an intruder. I don’t know why you can’t grasp this concept.”

  Uneasily, Vendra started to talk, but his subordinate cut him off. “When the money from Schumacher is transferred over, we all get into the shuttle, and Larry will fly us to safety so that we can split the money and go our separate ways,” Murray said. “I don’t even care if you go back to Schumacher and tell them you were a captive against your will. They’re dumb enough that they’d probably keep you on as CSO.”