Chapter 2: Springing the Trap

The trek took far longer than it should have, partly because of the difficulty that the giant aliens had traversing a space that was cramped and uncomfortable even by human standards, but also because Eriksen was intentionally slowing them down as he made exaggerated and unnecessary attempts to avoid obstacles. She might be able to smell his fear, but he could feel the annoyance radiating off her in much the same manner, the bulky alien finally clearing the access tunnel and stretching up to full height. Her crew emerged one by one behind her, fanning out to examine their new surroundings. They were in the engineering section of the ship now. The upper section housed the reactors and the energy-hungry superlight drive while the lower one was the engine module which contained the conventional realspace engines. The jump drive was a self-contained unit that looked like a large oil drum, painted white and lying on its side on a pedestal in the middle of the room, fat power cables trailing to it from the six nuclear reactors that surrounded it. This section of the ship was far more spacious, it had to be. The massive reactors were stacked floor to ceiling, and there was barely enough space for them even then. He could feel the heat coming off them. Most of it was vented into space, but it still made the engine room feel like a sauna, he was already starting to sweat as they bathed the room in their blue Cherenkov glow.

They all gave the jump drive a wide berth, nobody but the most qualified theoretical physicist would dare to crack that casing open. Doing it wrong might catapult you a hundred light years away and deposit you inside of a sun, or swallow you up in a singularity, or fry your brain and turn you into a gibbering basket case. Who knew how the damned things worked. If you don’t know how something works, don’t fuck with it, they should print that in all the manuals.

This place was a maze of massive electrical cables and coolant pipes, it looked like some kind of industrial factory that a giant had crushed like a soda can, as if everything had been condensed into far too small a space. That was partially true, because the number of nuclear reactors that you could fit on a spaceship determined how far it could jump, and they had crammed as many of them into the space as humanly possible. Freighters and carriers housed six to eight, and the smallest classes of jump-capable vessels housed just one. Beyond that point trying to miniaturize the technology or use lower output reactors resulted in diminishing returns. The ships just couldn’t get far enough in one jump to make it worth the effort.

The relatively tiny jump drive would completely drain the reactors of power, using the energy to create a breach in space not unlike a black hole, sucking the vessel and everything in its immediate vicinity into a higher dimension of space and time where the laws of the universe operated differently. A massless object could travel faster than the speed of light, time ran faster or in strange ways, and who knew what other odd quirks that could be leveraged to exceed the limitations of our paltry three-dimensional universe.

The laws of nature, or maybe it was fucking God himself, eventually rejected the foreign object and deposited it a varying number of light years away depending on how much energy had been expended. The reactors then had to charge back up and prepare for the next jump, where the same maneuver would be repeated over and over until the vessel reached its intended destination. Long journeys still took weeks or months, but it was a damn sight better than taking tens of thousands of years slowboating in realspace.

The Borealans looked out of their element, unsure and wary of the technology that they didn’t understand. Eriksen felt mostly the same way, he didn’t know any more about how a nuclear reactor or a superlight drive worked than they did, but that meant he could bluff his way through this.

“Okay,” he announced, clapping his gloved hands together and startling one of the underlings. “Now we just need to find the power conduit for the cockpit module and interrupt the flow of electricity. That should disable the motors on the door and then you should be able to just pull it open.”

“Should?” she shot back angrily. “What do you mean should? Haven’t you done this before?”

“When would I ever have?”

“If you made me crawl all the way down that tunnel only to tell me that you don’t know what you’re doing I’ll have you begging for death before the hour is through.”

“Calm down, I’ve got this. We just have to find the cable, and you’ll be home free.”

She snatched him off the ground, wrapping her furry fingers around his head and lifting him clear off the deck, his boots dangling a foot off the floor as her black claws pressed against his cheeks. Damn she was strong, he felt like a doll in her grasp, she could have crushed his head like a tangerine in her fist if she had wanted to.

“Do not tell me to calm down,” she snarled.

“Okay,” he wheezed, feeling one of her pointed talons break the skin. “Feel free to uh ... remain agitated?”

She dropped him unceremoniously, and he fell to his knees, wiping the trickle of blood from his cheek with his sleeve. What a hardass. Her patience seemed to be running thin, better spring the trap before she got so pissed off that she swiped his head from his shoulders with those dinner plate sized hands. Swallowing a snide remark about steroid abuse, he rose to his feet and set off into the maze of pipes, ducking and weaving between them as the aliens watched. The captain barked something at her men, and one of them scrambled to follow him, Eriksen attempting to look like he wasn’t choosing the longest and most awkward route possible. The male Borealan struggled to keep up, too large to fit through the same gaps as the smaller human, Eriksen gaining ground on him without looking too much like he was escaping.

“Stay where we can see you, rat!”

Eriksen ignored her as he ventured deeper, taking in his surroundings and trying to identify as much of the equipment as he could. While he wasn’t a nuclear physicist and nor was he much of an engineer, he had undergone basic maintenance training as the sole pilot aboard the ship. He could fix most simple problems on his own in a pinch, at least those that didn’t concern the vessel’s more arcane technologies. There were so many accidents that could happen in this industrial setting, and he was about to orchestrate one.

Coolant pipes, spent fuel rods, electrical cables, heavy machinery, boiling steam in the turbines, and highly combustible liquid fuel. There were a dozen ways for someone to be grievously injured or killed in here. The problem was finding a way to involve all of the aliens at once, and to do it quickly enough that they couldn’t react in time to prevent it. A good old-fashioned explosive decompression should do the trick, none of these jokers were wearing pressure suits. He could zip up his hood and blow the idiots out into space and then just walk out of here. Shouldn’t do any damage to the equipment, it was all self-contained.

How to cause a decompression though? He could break a coolant line on one of the fuel tanks, the unstable propellant would rapidly overheat, and the explosion should be mostly contained to the aft engine compartment. He might lose a couple of engines, but it shouldn’t stop him from slowboating to his destination. There was a security door that would automatically lock down the hab module to prevent it from losing atmosphere, but as the only one with a pressure suit, he could wait until the pirates died of hypoxia and then walk back up the access tunnel at his leisure to disengage it.

That was it then, as good a plan as any. No explosion could be considered controlled under these circumstances, and so he would have to ensure that he was out of the line of fire lest any debris hit him. He’d also need to be anchored to something sturdy so that he didn’t get spaced. Fortunately, emergency pressure suits had a tether for that very purpose.

“Hurry it up,” the captain called to him, “you’d better not be stalling for time. We’re blocking your distress calls, nobody can hear you as long as the Black Claw is in range of your freighter.”

“Yeah, I couldn’t help but notice it,” he replied as he scanned the room for the fat coolant pipes. “It’s a Warden, right? Where the hell did you get it from?”

“I bought it,” she replied tersely, “from a human ship dealer.”

“You know it’s illegal to sell on retired Navy vessels, right? He probably bought it for scrap at an auction and was supposed to recycle it, but decided to sell it to you guys instead. I bet you paid too much for it as well, the thing looks barely spaceworthy.”

“My ship does what I require of it, now stop talking and accomplish your task before I decide to take you back with me and give you a personal tour of her brig.”

“You got like a pirate torture dungeon set up in there or something?”

“Yes.”

That shut him up and he directed his full attention to finding the coolant pipes. They should be trailing along the floor somewhere, carrying liquid nitrogen to the fuel tanks in order to keep the propellant stable. If he severed one of the lines, the unstable chemicals in the tank would turn from a liquid state into a highly combustible gas within about thirty seconds as they heated, then the pressure would cause them to violently explode. The coolant lines were thick and padded with insulation though, perhaps he could trick one of the captain’s lackeys into doing it for him.

He finally found one, a white cable about as thick as his wrist, cold to the touch even through his gloves.

“We need to cut this electrical line,” he called back to the captain, now out of view. “It’s too thick for me to do it alone.”

As he had hoped, she barked an order at the male who had been tailing him, the Borealan squeezing through the jungle of pipes and cables to join him. He crouched to examine the cable, looking to Eriksen for instructions. The captain must have told him to do whatever Eriksen asked of him. Perfect.

“We need to sever this cable,” he said, lifting the heavy tube off the deck with some difficulty. “Don’t do it with your claws, you might get electrocuted. Do you have a knife or some kind of blade?” The alien seemed to understand him well enough and drew a wicked Bowie knife from his boot. “Okay great. The handle is rubber, right? That should be fine, cut right here,” he said as he pointed to a random spot on the cable. “Really jam it in there, don’t be scared. I’ll ... uh, get out of your way.”

He started to inch backwards slowly as the clueless Borealan raised the Bowie knife over his head, preparing to stab the coolant line.

“What’s going on back there?” the captain called, “did you idiots cut the power yet? If I have to come back there and get you I’ll-”

There was a sound like a gunshot that rang out in the compartment, followed by a blood-curdling screech of surprise and pain as the Borealan brought his blade down on the cable, piercing the insulation and releasing the liquid nitrogen coolant. It boiled instantly on contact with the air, turning into a rapidly expanding gas as it sprayed him in the face like a jet of steam. At somewhere below minus two hundred degrees Celsius, it seared his exposed flesh like fire, the alien rising to his feet and stumbling backwards looking as if he had been covered in third-degree burns. He clutched his blistered face and wailed, Eriksen pulling his emergency hood over his head and fumbling for the cable on his belt. He wrapped it around a nearby pipe and then anchored his arm around it too for good measure, he couldn’t have more than twenty seconds before the tank blew.

“You’ll die slow, human!” he heard the captain shout. “I’m coming in there to find you, and then I’m going to flay you alive, you little bastard. There are five of us and one of you, what the fuck are you going to do now?”

He could hear their claws scraping on the deck as they rushed forward, but the machinery slowed them, they were too large to get through the cramped space in time. His heart hammered in his chest, and he closed his eyes, preparing for the blast as one of the pirates reached a clawed hand through the piping. It stopped an inch short of his plastic faceplate, grasping at him, the alien snarling and straining to get closer as the utility cables tangled its limbs.

There was a flash of light and heat as the fuel tank exploded, rocking the ship and hitting him with a blast of hot air, then just as abruptly everything went silent. Wind rushed past him, buffeting him like a hurricane had formed inside the engine room, tearing his arm from the pipe and slamming him against another as all of the atmosphere in the aft section rushed to the newly formed breach in the hull. His tether caught him, jolting him as it pulled taut and strained to prevent his body from being sucked out into space.

He caught a glimpse of one of the pirates as it shot past him, flailing as it tried to get a grip on the deck, and in a second it was gone. It didn’t take long for the compartment to vent its atmosphere into space and Eriksen soon found himself in a cold, silent void. The gravity was still on, the AG field generator was located towards the middle of the ship, and it wouldn’t be affected by a decompression. He stood patiently, waiting a couple of minutes to give the Borealans time to suffocate and freeze. When he was sure that enough time had passed, he unhooked his tether from the pipe, nursing his bruised ribs where he had been battered around by the rushing air and making his way slowly back towards the access tunnel. He couldn’t see any movement, and as he cleared the industrial machinery and looked over his shoulder at the breach, he saw a starfield beyond the jagged hole that the explosion had torn in the hull. He had lost two engines for sure, maybe three, but the damage seemed to be remarkably localized considering the violence of the blast. There was shrapnel damage all over the place but nothing stood out to him as requiring his immediate attention.