Dark Echoes - Part 23

Aaen braced against a shudder with one arm in the engineering maintenance tube, clutching his particle pistol sidearm with the other, continuing to crawl into the seemingly endless tube. This sucker was built like a space station!—Maybe a lot tougher! He opened what looked like a computer access junction, tried to access the ship’s main computer to find a map of the place. Surprisingly, it wasn’t restricted information—

The away team’s faces were light to moderately singed as they struggled to file into the bridge. The doctor directed them to the medical bunks, performed triage, then administered treatment. Most of the injuries were easily healed—burns from close-call particle shots. They had just gotten out of a firefight, but they seemed to have accomplished what they set out to, and came back alive, so that would mean ‘mission accomplished’. Now the crew needed to get patched up and sent back to their muster stations—Wilson was starting to look tired at all of these radical evasive maneuvers. Even the doctor was wondering how long they would be able to evade all of that fire from the dreadnought; one hit in the right place and—

The crew braced for another series of sharp shudders.

“The Valiant’s drawing most of their fire! They’re not giving up on trying to find us, though!” Jones declared.

Wilson rolled again sharply to port, angling the hull to yaw hard to starboard to take them under the belly of that beast! A lightning-like pulse hammered the dorsal section of the port side translight nacelle, sending Odyssey on a sharp tumble on both axis’. The ship behaved like it had taken a sharp blow to its would-be left shoulder and tumbled away along the floor—

The dreadnought’s tactical radar flashed thrice as a blurry anomaly suddenly appeared, “Sir, I think I might have something,”

“Gotcha!” Aaen thought sharply. The bridge was 69 decks up, and positioned slightly forward of the would-be navigational array—the data suddenly disappeared, replaced with, “DATA UNAVAILABLE - LEVEL 10 CENTRAL COMPUTER LOCKOUT IN EFFECT.”

Shoot, Aaen gasped, they must know I’m here and they’ve probably traced the connection. Security’s probably on its way. Shoot! He reaffirmed his grip on the pistol’s grip.

He had to find a way to get to the bridge. The mental picture of the ship’s internal diagram was still fresh in his memory. The route wasn’t going to be easy, but it was tactically feasible—the exit was only a hundred meters or so ahead, and a few brief turns away. The hull shuddered again as if some kind of carpet bomb had impacted. He started crawling faster. A ship like this was going to have plenty of well-trained, experienced military-grade operators onboard in case anyone they didn’t want on board happened to find their way in.

There was only one way he was going to get out of here alive—he subconsciously questioned his odds. His thoughts raced with tactical possibilities; all were very risky, none of them were strictly favorable. The ambient temperature felt like it had nearly doubled in the last seeming few seconds. He began to feel perspiration building on his forehead and face as he thumbed the force setting on his pistol to high stun. He was coming up quickly on the exit. He anxiously aimed around each corner as he crawled through the bowels of this monster. With any luck, he wouldn’t have to increase the setting into the red zone. 

Before he knew it, he was at the exit hatch of his choice—

*****

Steve H. of Portland, OR told Jordan Foutin, "You are the next Tom Clancy. You really are a gifted writer."

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