“ Yeah, your probably right prettyboy.”
Prettyboy was Siccio’s nickname, ever since the crew used to make fun of how long he spent in the mirror, Siccio was the ships pilot and sometime helper, he modelled himself on the classic brylcreem boys of the 1950’s and was vain to a fault.
Siccio left the cargo hold and headed back in the direction of the station, while ‘Frankie’ made his way towards the command centre. Once there he met up with the transports commanding officer, Lieutenant Pryce.
“ What’s our status?” he asked.
“ All supplies have been stowed onboard, everyone is accounted for, Siccio has just popped over to the station to get his flightplan approved, then we should be all set.”
“ Good, as soon as Siccio returns I want to get underway,” Pryce said nodding.
“ Understood.”
Half an hour later Siccio had returned, and the transport began to get underway.
“ Contact Delta base control and request permission to depart,” Pryce said as he settled in his cracked and worn command chair, letting out a small yawn, he had done this a thousand times, the monotony was unending.
“ Delta base confirms,” Frankie replied after a few seconds.
“ Release docking hatch and back us away from the station, ten percent reverse thrust.”
The crew complied and the comparatively tiny transport began to back away from the gargantuan station, navigation lights and the light from observation platforms played gently across the outer hull of the small vessel, its twin forward thrusters shot out streams of super heated hydrogen, forcing the vast bulk of the transport into reverse.
When the transport was clear, the rear thrusters briefly fired to kill the reverse motion, and then the rear port and front starboard thrusters fired simultaneously to gradually turn the transport away from the facility.
Once a safe distance away, its much more powerful inter-system engines blazed into life and accelerated the transport away from the station.
Lathiel crouched motionless in the maintenance corridor, he could feel the ship accelerate through the gentle vibrations in the deck plating under his feet. He knew his time had almost come, they would soon enter into plasma drive; and then he would act.
The transport continued on its course away from the station, until what was a gigantic near spherical structure with its outer defence perimeter surrounding it like an enormous halo, was just a tiny metallic gleam, glinting far in the distance.
Finally, Pryce gave the command with all of the tiny amount of enthusiasm he could muster, “activate plasma drive.”
Siccio keyed in the controls and a single incandescent beam of bright blue energy shot forth from the transports plasma emitter and opened the familiar swirling energy of the plasma wake directly ahead of the transport.
“ Enter plasma drive,” Pryce said.
The ships inter-system engines roared once more, and it gradually disappeared inside the wake, the energy quickly collapsing behind it.
“ Now it’s this all the way to Barnards star.” Pryce said, slouching in his command chair.
Lieutenant Pryce was a full blooded E.D. F naval officer, or that was what he thought, he should be serving on one of the huge and powerful warships of the fleet patrolling the front lines, getting in on the action.
Instead, he commanded this flying rust bucket, it was degrading. Truth be known, Lieutenant Samuel Pryce wasn’t nearly as clever as he thought he was, poor results at the academy meant that he wasn’t chosen to be a serving officer in the fleet, and when war broke out he was posted to this transport vessel, dashing his dreams of front line action overnight.
Only when the elderly former commander Ben Howard died four months ago, was he even placed in command of the ship.
As soon as the transport had leapt into plasma drive Lathiel acted, he cautiously made his way along the tight confines of the maintenance corridor, stopping at the hatch at the end, gently pressing his ear against its cold steel. He could hear nothing, so he took a calculated risk and quietly forced the hatch open. The corridor was clear.
Replacing the hatch, he continued to cautiously advance down a larger, more brightly lit corridor. He could hear footsteps approaching, looking around the corridor, he noticed a door was ajar. Diving into a smelly, dimly lit room, he silently unsheathed his stolen knives. The room happened to be a communal toilet block, he entered a cubicle and closed the door behind him.
“ Man I gotta pee,” a voice said as its owner noisily burst into the room, the sound of footsteps went past the cubicle and stopped. The familiar sound of a zipper being undone and then liquid splashing against a hard surface gave Lathiel all the clues he needed.
While the man was busily relieving himself, Lathiel silently and very gently opened the cubicle door. The man had his back to him, taking great care Lathiel silently stalked the man.
His target, completely unaware of his impending doom went to zip himself back up, when he felt a sharp, agonizing, searing pain in his lower back, as though something had bitten into him. His hand went to feel the source of the pain, and it returned slick with blood.
He staggered around, and to his incredulity saw another E.D. F officer, smiling, and brandishing a combat knife, coated in blood.
As the mans vision began to fade, he spluttered. “you?….who the hell are….you.” The victim gave up his struggle for consciousness and flopped face first onto Lathiel, who picked up the man in a firemans lift and seated the body on the toilet.
“ Death,” Lathiel replied with a sadistic grin, gently brushing his hand on the man’s pale cheek as he activated his crodes gland. With a roar of agonizing pain, slowly but surely took on the form of the man he had just murdered in cold blood.
He took the I.D. card from the corpse and learned that the mans name was Bryan Fletcher, and was another engineering assistant. Lathiel gently closed the cubicle door on the corpse of the real Bryan Fletcher.
The Krenaran assassin washed his bloodstained knife in the toilet sink, hid them back inside his uniform, and left the toilet. One down, eleven to go, he thought as he headed to engineering, eager not to arouse any undue suspicion.
The transport continued on its journey through the swirling vortex of plasma drive. On the command centre, Siccio was making minor course corrections and Lieutenant Pryce was getting increasingly bored. However down in engineering Lathiel was already planning his next move.
“ At last, glad you could join us, how long does it take to go for a piss,” a dark skinned man said.
Lathiel guessed the man to be in his forties, he was slightly greying at the sides of his short fuzzy looking hair, and he didn’t like the mans tone. Something he would remedy later, however at this moment in time he was stood in the middle of a wide-open engineering bay and there were witnesses.
“ Listen Fletcher, the main power conduit on deck seven has come loose again, things a pain in the ass. I need you to go help Jackson fix it.”
“ Yes sir,” Lathiel replied.
“ You feeling okay Fletcher?” The man asked.
“ Yes sir, why do you ask?”
“ Because you never call me sir it has always been lieutenant.”
“ Sorry lieutenant,” Lathiel replied, mentally chastising himself.
With that, he left engineering and headed straight for deck seven, a few minutes later and after a short journey on the elevator, he had arrived.
Finding that there was no power anywhere on the deck, Lathiel’s Terran eyes found it hard to adjust to the gloom, however he could just about see the beam from Jackson’s torch in the distance.
Lathiel drew his knife again, and steadily advanced, like a panther stalking its prey, waiting for the exact moment to make the kill.
Jackson was busy working on the coupling, the conduit had worked its way loose from a vital connection. It was to be expected, he thought. The ship was nearly thirty years old after all.