The ship jostled for a second.
“Are our inertial dampeners okay?” Silver asked.
“They're fine, the hull was vibrating.”
“That's because I just exposed another rear compartment, big decompression.”
“No signs of life there, before or after,” Finn confirmed.
“Good, because I'm about to light it up.” Frost said as he turned the plasma torches onto the open wound.
“We're starting to pull them off course. Whatever you did reduced their engine power,” Ashley reported.
The results of Finn's scans came up on his tertiary holodisplay and he started looking through the schematic, reading dozens of marked sections. “Okay, aim the cutter up seven degrees and fire for a focus on two point three meters.”
“I can only give you five point nine degrees, plating's in the way.”
“Go ahead.”
Frost turned the cutters and refocused the jet of cutting plasma. “What am I diggin' for here?”
“Just readjust to focus on three point five meters when I say,” Finn replied.
“Yessir,” Frost retorted with a smile.
“Do it now.”
Frost worked the controls and a moment later the stress on the Samson's hull dropped, he could see the differences on Finn's station out of the corner of his eye. “What did I hit lad?”
“A main power conduit, we have at least an hour before anyone can repair that, and they'll have to do it in a vacsuit while you're messing around in their faces with that maxjack.”
“Confirmed, they have no engine power. We're in control of their course,” Ashley very nearly cheered. “Towing them away from the station.”
“Well, that's all our hard work. Now it's up to the Captain,” Silver said as he checked the navigational data for the area.
A Dark Spirit
Moments after the Samson made contact with the Vesuvius Jake pushed off from the aft airlock. His cloaksuit was active and if his pet project was worth the time he had spent on it over the past two years no one would be able to pick him up on sensors, hear, see, or so much as smell him. The sound dampeners were something he designed into all his vacsuits, that was easy. The rest was hard to design, had to be built component by component from scratch. The suit used a lot of power, generated different kinds of radiation and in order for it to work all that by-product energy had to be stored somewhere. There was no time for an elegant solution, so the radiation was kept within.
He made contact with the upper aft hull of the Vesuvius and started crawling towards the nearest airlock. Instead of using magnets to cling to the hull, he moved with the aid of an adherent that would wear off after a few minutes. A magnetic field would make him easy to pick out in a scan.
He made it to the airlock hatch and took a small tool kit from a thigh pocket then affixed it to the hull right beside the entry keypad. The lock had to appear to have shorted out during the maxjack's drilling and prying.
He took a small cutter from the tool kit and started to work at the control panel and as though on queue the maxjack started working twenty meters above his head. He could feel the vibrations of the hull damage as he carefully started to remove the face plate.
When he cut the control panel's face plate loose he tossed it over his shoulder. He pulled the button pad out of the way and cut several wires. Putting back the cutter, he pulled several powered bridge wires out of his tool kit and affixed them to the freshly cut lines inside the small control box. He clamped a remote circuit onto the bridge wires and pressed a button on his arm command unit. The outer airlock door opened.
He retrieved his tool kit and pulled himself inside, closing the door behind him by remote. He waited a moment after the door closed, looked inside and didn't see anyone. Without further hesitation he busted open the inner control panel and cross wired it so the door would open and stepped through, leaving a remote circuit there as well. Looking around, he closed the door behind him and inspected it. There was no way to tell it had been tampered with unless you were to step inside the airlock.
The overlay display in his vacsuit showed an outline of where people were based on motion detection, infra red, shifting air pressure and sound. He made his way down the main hallway towards the aft lift. The map on his visor display told him the main engineering level was two decks down. Stepping in behind a tall female crew member he followed her to the lift where she pressed the call button and waited for it to arrive. She was responding to something in her earpiece. “They're in our blind spot! We have to board them by force or wait for them to take boarding actions and fight our way onto their ship.”
She shook her head at whatever the response was and stepped through the opening shaft doors. Jake walked in with her and turned the sound amplification up so he could hear both sides of the conversation.
“…no communications with them so far, they're not replying, not demanding anything. For all we know they just want to destroy us section by section!”
“Okay, so unless you can magically mount a gun pointing right at our blind spot, we'll have to board them. That's the only solution I have for you,” she replied.
“Fine, get a party together. If we can't make the station's protected area, you're clear to mount a boarding action.”
“Yes sir,” she acknowledged, sounding pleased with herself. The lift car slowed down, the doors opened and she got off.
Jake waited for the doors to close and pressed the button for the engineering level. While he waited he pulled up one corner of the control panel's cover and slipped a wireless control mole inside. It was nothing more than a tiny transmitter, receiver chip and if it worked it would patch in to the lift controls and wait for instructions from him. The lift stopped and he stepped out as soon as the doors opened, two crew members working near by stopped what they were doing for a moment and looked into the empty elevator car, then shrugged. They were busy working through a problem.
He headed straight for main engineering. Before long a few important facts started becoming painfully evident. They were following a military structure. In the space he had travelled just in engineering he had also seen over a dozen people and he hadn't gotten to the reactor yet. When he arrived in the center of the engineering section a sense of dread came over him. There were over twenty people working in the various levels of that section. The antimatter reactor core was five decks tall and grated metal decking encircled it. The only way there were fifty people working that ship was if over half were in engineering, and that just couldn't be. The Vesuvius had changed, and he had to find out how.
He walked over to an unused console and looked around. No one was nearby or looking in his direction so he attached a high yield sensory overload grenade to the console and ran around to the other side to stand beside another computer console. Just as he stepped in front of it the grenade went off, he barely noticed. His vacsuit blocked out most of the sound and shielded his vision from the light. The same wasn't true of the engineering crew who were absolutely disabled.
He quickly called up the ship's registration information. He was aboard the TSS Vesuvius, high priority armed cargo transport. He dug a little deeper and discovered their current assignment. It wasn't secure, the entire crew knew what they were doing there. They were to transport captured scientific research stock to an asteroid work camp.
He had heard of companies using people for scientific research, knew that it was possible that he was subjected to it himself. These people were most likely spared that only to be sent to a massive work camp. There was also a labour force in tow with an acceptable death rate of fifty percent during transit. He checked the security level of the orders again just to be sure and shook his head. Anyone aboard had access to them, he didn't even need to hack in to see them.