Free One Good Soldier by Travis S. Taylor Page B

other side of the ship.
     
    Good. Andy thought about it for a moment and then started reading through the maintenance schedule in his head. Bebe, plot that track on a deck-overlay map for me and keep it up in my visual. Might as well start heading toward the ones going for Engineering. Pass this map along to the bridge.
     
    Aye, Andy. Though I'm not sure we'll make it to Engineering in time.
     
    We'll see. If we don't, we don't.
     
    Andy crawled out of the wiring cabinet and adjusted his orange coveralls. His tool belt hung on the cabinet door's handle, slamming the door against his back.
     
    "Shit." Andy cursed at his clumsiness and told himself to be quiet. Then a thought hit him.
     
    Bebe, those marines are in armored e-suits. They'll be bumping into hatches and shit all the way. They'll have to take the outer and larger corridors to get where they want to go without damaging the ship. And we know they don't want to do that—after all, they are U.S. Marines, right? So can you extrapolate from the motion you are detecting which likely big hatches and passageways they would be taking to potential targets?
     
    Sure, Andy. Here. Then his AIC highlighted three new paths in his mind. The three groups weren't going for different locations. Well, one of them was going for Engineering and was already knocking at the door. Nothing he could do for Joe and the rest of the Engineering team. But the other two were headed to the main elevator shaft internal to the upper deck tower located midship, which led to the bridge. Then he noticed one small line on the maintenance schedule that he had almost missed. The line read:
     
    Main Tower Elevator Repulsor-Field Generator Recalibration, Upgrade, and Checkout.
     
    The main tower elevator shaft was the only internal passage to the bridge and the command crew. Andy didn't have to think about what to do any longer. He had to shut off that elevator shaft somehow. He started running as fast as he could go in the direction of the forward main elevator. He made a point to stay in the tighter hallways. He also made it a point to beat those red-team marines to that damned elevator.
     
    Patch me through to Joe.
     
    Done.
     
     
     
    The Engineering team had managed the patches around the confused and failed damage diagnostics hardware of the DCAS, and just in time as a squad of red-team AEMs started knocking on the doors three levels out. At first they tried hacking the protocols on the locks. When that didn't work, they went to high explosives—simulated high explosives. The sim boxes that attached to the door made a pop like a firecracker, and if the box was set to simulate the right level of HE, then the AIC referees running the simulation would open the hatch. It took the AEMs several tries on the first hatch. Joe knew that they wouldn't make the same mistakes a second and third time.
     
    What the hell can we do? he thought to himself, not necessarily to his AIC.
     
    Too bad they're in suits or we could gas them, Debbie added.
     
    Hey, do it anyway! Maybe they don't have their faceplates down. You know how AEMs are about breathing real air anytime they can. That might buy us some time . Joe thought more about that approach. They didn't have much heavy firepower, but they did have the power equivalent to a miniature neutron star trapped in the Main Prop hyperspace-jaunt projector tube.
     
    "Everybody on me!" Joe said in his voice of command. The full complement of the Engineering team and the supporting seamen and firemen and fireman apprentices converged on him as he made his way to the center of the room underneath the four meter in diameter pink and purple swirling tube that ran the length of a major portion of the ship. He reached up with his hands and tapped the bottom of the conduit to the projector tube. Then he addressed his team with a somewhat wacky idea. Hell, it wasn't that wacky—he'd actually done it before. Last time he did what he had in mind, it worked, but—and