Chapter 7: Deep Space Operations (part. 7)

The corridor lights seemed to have been dimmed by half. The floor was spotless, and the ventilation ducts hissed.

Ulga led the way, carrying a short-barreled explosive shotgun, with Gorgon bringing up the rear. Jasmine walked quietly between them, her steps light.

The girl held her hands clasped over her chest. Her handcuffs had been removed before they boarded. After confirming there was enough oxygen in the cabin, she had opened her helmet, apparently unable to stand the stuffy air inside her work suit. But the chill in the corridor reached her as soon as she opened it, and she instinctively hunched her shoulders tighter.

• “I’ve finished scanning the nearby routes. I’m marking the duty room closest to you now. You’ll need to bring me inside to get the structural map,” Selin’s voice came through the communicator.

“Lead the way,” Gorgon said quietly.

The service door ahead sensed their heat sources and slid slowly open after a brief delay. A thin layer of dust had settled in the door track. It looked like no one had passed through normally in a long time.

Beyond it was an even narrower maintenance corridor. Tool racks lined the left wall, with a few commonly used pieces of equipment still neatly secured in their slots. On the right stood a cart loaded halfway with small parts. Its front end was crooked, as though someone had abandoned it mid-task.

Ulga entered first, raising her shotgun to check the two corners of the ceiling before looking at the floor.

“It’s too clean. Doesn’t look like anything happened here.”

Gorgon said nothing and gestured for her to continue.

They went another dozen meters before Jasmine suddenly recoiled and stumbled backward, bumping into Gorgon. She covered her mouth with one hand, her amethyst eyes trembling.

She had seen something lying just beyond the corner ahead.

Ulga took a step forward and leaned halfway around the wall. The next moment, she tensed up too.

“A body,” she said.

Gorgon moved past Jasmine and walked forward. But Jasmine’s gaze remained fixed beyond the corner. She didn’t look away at once, as if she were still trying to understand what she had seen.

It was a humanoid crew member in a maintenance uniform, lying beneath the corridor wall in a strange position. It looked as though they had tried to reach for the control panel beside the door, but lost their strength before they could raise a hand. An inspection tablet lay at their feet. Three evenly spaced burn holes marked their chest, their edges charred black, with no other visible damage.

He crouched and examined the wounds, then looked toward both ends of the corridor.

“This wasn’t done by a person,” Gorgon concluded. “It was a fixed gun emplacement.”

“He was still working…” Jasmine stood behind them, staring at the inspection tablet on the floor as she spoke softly.

Gorgon glanced down and pressed the tablet to turn it on, but before he could see what was on the screen, Selin’s voice came through the communicator, low and urgent.

“Wait. The corridor ahead leads to the duty room, just past one more corner. But there’s a security path node beyond that corner.”

Ulga stood and raised her shotgun again. “Is there something over there?”

“I don’t have access, so I can’t see its current status. I only know a patrol unit would normally pass through there. Anyway, you…”

Before she could finish, a faint sound came from deep in the corridor.

Something on a wheeled base rolled out from behind the corner.

Ulga abruptly shoved Jasmine back and braced herself across the corridor. Gorgon stepped back at the same time, giving himself a clear line of fire.

The next second, a security robot slid around the corner.

Its design was as restrained as ever. Its lower half was a low-profile, omnidirectional magnetic track base, while its upper half consisted of a compact sensor array and a weapons turret. The Engineer Association’s standard paint job was still visible on its hull.

After turning the corner, it didn’t fire immediately. Instead, it stopped where it was. The sensor with a red strip of lights swept over the body on the floor, then over Gorgon and Ulga, before pausing on Jasmine for one second.

Just one second.

“Unregistered moving target. Stop moving within three seconds and await identity verification.” A calm mechanical female voice came through the speaker, its pronunciation so precise it almost sounded gentle.

Ulga bared her teeth.

“I hate it when they’re polite.”

Rumble—

Ulga flipped over a cleaning cart beside the corridor and kicked it forward. The cart screeched as it hurtled toward the security robot.

Whoosh—

The next second, several short bursts of particle beams fired. Red light from the two barrels almost joined into a single arc, slicing from the front of the cart to the back. The entire cleaning cart was cut in half in under half a second.

The cart’s upper half spun into the wall, while the lower half kept sliding forward for several meters before tipping over.

As the cleaning cart blocked the first volley, Gorgon moved. The three-meter-tall giant lowered his body and charged along the right wall, raising his large-caliber pistol. His target was clear: he bypassed the armor plating and aimed for the connection between the sensor and the weapons turret.

Bang!

A large-caliber impact round detonated to the right of the sensor before the turret could turn back into position. The entire robot jolted slightly from the blast, then immediately swung its turret to the right.

That was the moment Ulga had been waiting for.

She took several long strides over the shadow of the cleaning cart’s wreckage, raised her shotgun, and pressed its barrel almost directly against the robot’s face.

Boom—

Flames burst out. The blast caved in the robot’s head casing and the weapons cover on its left side. Its base slid backward half a meter, scraping a wide spray of sparks across the floor.

It didn’t stop.

The backup sensors took over, and the weapons turret began recalibrating.

“It’s still running!” Selin’s warning rang out through the communicator.

The turret had barely risen halfway when Gorgon’s second shot hit.

Bang!

The shot went straight into the gap around the pivot on the side of the weapons turret. The impact round detonated inside the machine.

With a sharp crack, the turret’s mechanism jammed.

Ulga gave it no time to restart. She slammed into it, grabbed its upper body with both hands, and drove her knee into the base. Using her full weight, she flipped it onto the floor. The magnetic track base kept spinning in the air, its four drive wheels skidding wildly and scraping against the floor with a shrill grinding noise.

At that instant, several short lasers fired without aiming. As the turret crashed to the floor, their trajectories carved several erratic, scorched arcs through the corridor. One shot passed straight by Jasmine, cutting off a lock of the girl’s gray-blue hair.

The girl jolted, as if she’d only just come to her senses, and took two steps back. Slowly, she raised a hand and touched the ends of her hair.

Her fingertips found the uneven edge where it had been cut. There was no blood, just a lock missing.

The girl stared at the robot struggling to turn on the floor, her face a little paler than before.

Ulga planted a foot on its overturned base, forced the muzzle of her shotgun down against it, and fired again.

Boom!

The point-blank blast tore off half the outer shell of its base. Two drive wheels stopped, while the remaining two twitched uselessly. The female voice from the speaker hadn’t stopped, though. It had only begun to distort, stuttering as it spoke:

“…Awaiting… identity… verification…”