Free Aries Revealed by Mina Carter Page A

was in station.
    “Just my fucking luck,” he grumbled as he beat feet across the balcony and headed back into the corridors. The first time he’d gotten some action in months, finally getting his elusive mystery lady into bed and freaking hijackers turn up to ruin all his damn fun. Well, he’d see about that. All he needed was to find a computer console…there had to be one somewhere along here.
    There. His gaze fell on one of the nameplates on the doors along the corridor. Cargo Masters office. Perfect. The ship’s CM would need mainframe access to load and unload, controlling the host of mechanical loaders remotely. The lock on the door was a simple one that would take him mere minutes to crack, but he didn’t have minutes. Instinct and the feeling in his gut told him that something bad was going down, and if he’d learnt one thing during his long and brutal career as a combat cyborg, it was to trust the feeling in his gut. It had saved him too many times for him to do anything else.
    Two hard blows hammered into the lock in quick succession, the pain as his skin was damaged relegated to irrelevant as the smashed box dangled by its wires from the wall and the door slid open. He was through it like a shot, shaking the cut hand absently as he rounded on the quartermaster’s desk. It was the work of a second to boot the console up, the blue glare washing over his features in the darkness of the room and casting his own reflection at him from the glass over the ship schematic on the wall opposite.
    Ignoring the user interface currently displaying on the screen, Johnny grabbed the keyboard and hauled it toward him. His fingers were lightning fast as he typed in combination after combination from his long-term memory storage.
    “Come on, come on. You can’t be that difficult to crack…you’re only a civvie transport,” he muttered as he searched for the combination that would allow him access to the ships internal sensors, at least then he’d be able to see what was going on. But the system stubbornly refused to allow him access, blinking error codes at him on the screen in a smug way.
    Okay, he really was losing it if he thought a comp was being smug. An ordinary comp, not an up-its-own-ass AI either. AIs were a bastard to deal with and he hated them with a passion, but a normal comp shouldn’t be beyond his capabilities as long as he targeted specific systems. If he were a Virgo class like Cyn or even a Cancer class with their massive onboard capabilities, he could have wrestled the flame’s computer into submission easily, but he wasn’t, he was an Aries, which meant he was way better at blowing shit up than coercing a reluctant mainframe to cooperate. But without Cyn here or any way to contact her since the ship had no access to the station comms network, he was going to have to do it himself.
    “You fucking awkward piece of shit,” he hissed after his last attempt failed. Sweat rolled down the hollow of his spine as his onboard ticked away the seconds. His sense of dread increased. “Believe me, if anything happens to Milly, I’m gonna find your core and introduce you to some ZX-fourteen. Let’s see how you cooperate with all your memory crystals fried, shall we, hmmm?”
    As if it could hear his threats, the last combination worked and the screen cleared to allow him access to the sensor system. The code scrolling over the screen would have been incomprehensible to any human looking at the screen, but the part of Johnny’s brain that wasn’t human easily deciphered the gobbledygook.
    Quickly he maneuvered around the system, triggering several displays of various corridors until he found movement on one of the sensors. An image of the bridge displayed before him, two men he’d never seen before moving across the camera’s field of vision. A frown creased his brow as he noted their appearance. Dock loader’s uniforms, not particularly good ones either. Even he could see that the color was slightly