Free Koban 5: A Federation Forged in Fire by Stephen W. Bennett

rifles were activated as they strode right past the closed hatch. These were obviously Krall rifles, because the humans typically used a silent multi-beam weapon system built into their armor. She had already noted that the inoperative rifles they had taken from her, and her dead crew, activated normally for humans. She learned this the hard way, because they had left one where she could get her hands on it for one of her attempted surprise attacks.
    She snatched up the weapon she had seen one of them deactivate, and pressed a talon on the recessed button but it remained dead. One of them whirled around in a blur and powerfully tore it from her hands as he kicked her in the abdomen, and then broke another one of her teeth with the rifle butt. He powered it on for her in a clear demonstration, aimed it at her head, then shut it down with a snort of humor and placed it farther away from her.
    Afterwards, they insultingly ignored her, discussing in Standard what they would use her for with the Prada slaves after they had control of the small dome. The smallest one of them, her original captor, had then bodily carried her, despite her strenuous but futile resistance, to this compartment and locked her inside.
    She’d heard a single lower portal whoosh open before they’d descended. The group clumped across the deck of the lower hold, then, her compartment suddenly went dark in visible light. From the silence after that, she knew they’d made their exit. She went to the still softly glowing warmth of the keypad for at least the sixteenth time, and tried yet another rapid code combination to try to get the hatch to open. As on previous attempts, she failed to find the new code. This time though, she realized they had powered down not only the light circuits, but had killed a completely different secondary circuit for the keypad power. She knew this because she felt no tactile feedback from key presses, as sensed when the panel had power.
    With a flash of insight, she hoped they had made a mistake due to human unfamiliarity with a clanship. To prevent her from testing for random door codes, they may have used the main power disconnect to simultaneously disable the keypad and lights, instead of using the independent secondary circuits, leaving the keypad powered. She quickly pressed against the door panel at its base, and then pushed out and upward, and felt it shift slightly. Success!
    This hatch opened on a narrow companionway, and rather than open out on hinges, it was powered and slid into a slot in the thick armored bulkhead.
    In excited exhilaration, she pushed two toe talon tips under the small gap formed at the bottom, and then repeated the outward and upward press to lift the hatch a few millimeters again. She shoved the two toe talons deeper under the wider crack at the base to hold it up, and repeated the push and lift until she felt a slight click through the hatch surface. Then she pushed and pulled to the left and the hatch shifted almost a talon thickness sideways into the receiving slot. With the fingers of both hands, she gripped the hatch edge to push up and pull left with all her strength, and the hatch abruptly slid all the way left and dropped down into the locked and open position.
    This emergency manual hatch release technique would never have worked with power applied to the hatch mechanism nor if there were a vacuum on one side and atmospheric pressure holding the door sealed against air loss. However, on a fully pressurized deck, with a complete power loss from battle damage, the manually operated slide bolts, one set on the inside and another one outside of the hatch, could keep the hatch from being slid open with this push and lift method. The hatch was designed to keep an intruder out of the compartment, or to hold a captive inside, if all power had failed. The humans obviously didn’t know this. They didn’t understand these ships as well as their rightful users.
    Feeling very clever, Phordot