Sleepers — Part 3

Ship’s Log — Security Division Stardate 3142.8. Mercer was dreaming about the fence when the ship changed. Not the alarm. The alarm came later. First it was the air. He woke up in the dark of his bunk and lay still and didn’t know why. The ventilation was running. The deck was humming. Somewhere down the corridor somebody was snoring in a way that should have been a disciplinary matter. Everything was normal. Mercer stared at the ceiling. Something wasn’t. He had learned that from Kane. Problems rarely announce themselves loudly. He sat up. Across the compartment, Ox was already sitting up too. They looked at each other in the dim light. “You feel that?” Mercer whispered. “Yep.” “What is it?” Ox tilted his head. “Don’t know.” Then: “Engines sound wrong.” Mercer listened. He couldn’t hear anything. Then he could. A very small change in the pitch. A note under the note. As if somebody, somewhere far below, had put their hand on the ship and pushed. The intercom clicked. Mercer was already reaching for his boots when the voice came. It wasn’t the bridge. It wasn’t anybody. Just the click. Then nothing. Ox stood up. “That ain’t good.” The duty room was dark when they got there. Not powered down. Dark. Emergency lighting only. The terminal screens blank. The weapons locker sealed, its status light a steady, sullen red. Kane was already there. Of course he was. He stood at the dead terminal with a hand-light, working the panel with the patience of a man trying to wake something that did not want to be woken. Rainer came in behind Mercer half dressed and fully armed. Mercer had no idea where she’d gotten the phaser. Kane didn’t ask either. Hale came last, running, padd in hand. “Bridge isn’t answering.” “I know.” “Engineering isn’t answering.” “I know.” “Internal sensors are locked. Command override. Not ours.” Kane turned. “Whose?” Hale looked at the padd. Then at Kane. “I don’t know. It’s using the captain’s codes and it isn’t the captain.” Nobody said anything. Mercer felt the floor of his stomach go. Rainer was the one who said it. “He read the manuals.” Kane closed the terminal. “Armory.” “Locker’s sealed,” Hale said. “Then we go to the armory.” “Deck six.” “I know where it is.” Rainer checked her phaser. “One weapon. Five people.” Ox raised his hand slightly. “I got a snack.” Rainer stared at him. Ox lowered his hand. “Just saying. If it’s gonna be a long one.” Kane looked at all four of them in the red dark. “Nobody plays hero,” he said. “We don’t know how many. We don’t know where. We don’t know what they can do.” “They,” Mercer said. Kane looked at him. “He didn’t wake up alone, Rook,” Rainer said quietly. “He had a whole ship of friends.” Mercer thought about the rows of sleepers. The ones that hadn’t failed. He hadn’t counted. He wished he had. They found the night guard on the way. He was lying at the base of a ladder well on deck five, propped against the bulkhead like somebody had set him there carefully and then forgotten about him. The card player from second section. Mercer knelt beside him. Breathing. Alive. A bruise was rising along the side of his face that looked like it had been delivered by something heavier than a fist. His phaser was gone. His eyes came open when Mercer touched his shoulder. “Don’t,” the crewman said. “It’s Mercer. Security.” “Don’t go up there.” Kane crouched beside them. “What happened?” The crewman’s eyes moved to Kane. He tried to sit up. Kane put a hand on his chest and kept him down. “What happened, son.” “He came out.” The crewman’s voice was thin. “He came out the door. I said stop. I had my weapon up. I had it up, Sergeant Major. I had him dead to rights. And he just—” He stopped. “He just what?” “He just took it.” The crewman stared at nothing. “Like I was a kid. Like it was a toy. I never even saw his hand move.” Rainer’s jaw tightened. “The woman,” the crewman said. “The historian. She was with him.” Nobody spoke. Mercer remembered McGivers walking out of dinner with her eyes bright. Looking back. Always looking back. “She opened the door,” the crewman said. “She opened it for him.” Kane stood. “Ox.” “Yeah.” “Get him to sickbay.” Ox looked at the corridor ahead. Then at the injured man. Then at Kane. “Sickbay’s that way,” Ox said, pointing up the ladder. Kane followed the finger. So did everybody else. Sickbay was up. So, probably, was everything else. “Then we all go that way,” Kane said. They met them on deck six. Mercer didn’t hear them coming. None of them did. That was the thing he would remember afterward. Not the fight. The silence before it. Five Security Division personnel moving through a dark corridor the way they had moved through a hundred dark corridors, angles covered, approaches watched, every sense open— And then there were three men in the junction ahead of them. Just standing there. As if they had been waiting. As if they had known exactly which way Security would come, because they had read the same manuals Security had. They wore the clothes from the sleeper ship. They were not large men. They didn’t need to be. The one in front looked at Kane. Then at Rainer’s phaser. Then at the injured crewman leaning on Ox. He smiled. It was the same smile. Not his own. Borrowed. “Put it down,” the man said. Rainer fired. Mercer had never seen her fire that fast. The beam hit the man center mass. He staggered. He did not fall. He staggered. Then he kept coming. “Oh, shit,” Rainer said. Everything happened at once. The second man was on Hale before Hale finished raising his hands. Hale was good. Hale was fast. Hale had trained in hand-to-hand until his instructors told him to stop showing off. None of it mattered. The man caught Hale’s wrist, turned it, and Hale went into the bulkhead hard enough to shake the deck plating. Rainer fired again. The first man took it in the shoulder, twisted, and slapped the phaser out of her hand like he was brushing away a fly. Then he hit her. Open hand. Almost casual. Rainer went backward over a maintenance case and didn’t get up. Mercer was moving. He didn’t remember deciding to. He went for the man standing over Rainer and the man turned and caught him by the front of his tunic and lifted him. Off the deck. One arm. Mercer’s boots kicked at nothing. The man looked at him the way you might look at a fish. Mercer swung. He connected. It was like punching a wall. The man’s expression didn’t even change. Then Ox hit him. Ox had set the injured crewman down very gently against the wall first. Mercer would think about that later too. Then Ox hit the man from the side with his whole body, the way you would hit a fence post you wanted out of the ground, and the man went sideways and Mercer went sideways with him and all three of them landed on the deck in a pile. For one second Mercer thought it had worked. Then the man got up. Ox got up too. They stood there looking at each other. Same height. Ox was wider. It didn’t matter. The man hit Ox three times. Fast. So fast Mercer only saw the second one. Ox staggered, and grunted, and didn’t go down, and the man looked genuinely surprised. Then he hit him a fourth time. Ox went down. Kane hadn’t moved. Mercer saw that from the deck. Kane was standing in the middle of the junction with his hands open at his sides and the third man in front of him, and neither of them had moved, and the third man was smiling, and Kane was not. “You’re the old one,” the man said. Kane said nothing. “He told us there’d be an old one.” The man tilted his head. “He said you watched him.” “I did.” “He respected that.” “I’ll put it on my tombstone.” The man laughed. Then Kane hit him. It was the best punch Mercer had ever seen. Short. Ugly. Everything behind it. The man’s head snapped sideways. He took one step back. One. Then he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, looked at the blood, looked at Kane, and smiled wider. “Again,” he said. Kane looked at him. Then at his team. Hale against the bulkhead, holding his wrist. Rainer on the deck beyond the maintenance case, moving now, slowly. Ox on his hands and knees. Mercer on his back. The injured crewman watching all of it with wide, wet eyes. Kane lowered his hands. “No,” he said. The man looked almost disappointed. “No?” “You win.” Rainer’s voice came from the deck, slurred and furious. “The fuck he does.” Kane didn’t turn around. “Rainer.” “We can—” “We can’t.” Silence. Kane looked at the man in front of him. “Nobody else gets hurt,” Kane said. “You want the corridor, it’s yours. You want us out of the way, we’re out of the way.” The man studied him. Then nodded. “He said you’d be sensible.” “He doesn’t know me.” “He knows everyone.” Kane didn’t answer that. They locked them in a cargo compartment on deck seven. Five of them. Plus the night guard. Plus nine crewmen from the night shift who had been collected along the way, all of them bruised, two of them bleeding, none of them dead. The door sealed. Mercer heard the lock engage. He heard footsteps leave. Then nothing. Rainer was sitting against a crate with her head in her hands. “You surrendered.” Kane was checking Hale’s wrist. “Yes.” “You never surrender.” “I’m alive. You’re alive. That’s the job.” “The job is the ship.” Kane looked up at her. “The job is to still be here when it matters.” Rainer glared at him. Then she held up her middle finger. Kane looked at it. “Noted.” She kept it up a moment longer. Then let her hand drop. “They took a phaser to the chest,” she said. “Full stun. He walked through it.” “I saw.” “What the hell are they?” Hale was flexing his wrist and wincing. “Not normal,” he said. “No shit, not normal.” “I mean genetically.” Everybody looked at him. Hale stopped flexing. “They’re stronger. Faster. They absorbed stun like it was weather.” He looked at the sealed door. “That’s not training. That’s design.” Ox was lying flat on his back on the deck with his eyes closed. “Hit hard,” he said. Mercer crawled over to him. “You okay?” “Nope.” “Anything broken?” Ox thought about it. “Snack.” He pulled the ration bar out of his pocket. It was in four pieces. Ox looked at it sadly. Then held it out. “Anybody?” Mercer stared at him. Then started laughing. He couldn’t help it. It hurt his ribs. Rainer started laughing too. Then the crewmen from second section. Then Hale, holding his wrist. Kane didn’t laugh. But Mercer saw him take a piece of the ration bar. Time passed. Mercer didn’t know how much. The emergency lighting never changed. Once the whole compartment shuddered, deep and long, as if the ship had been struck from inside. Once they heard voices in the corridor outside. Not crew. Confident voices. Laughing. Once the air went thin. Just for a minute. Everybody felt it. Nobody said anything. Somewhere on this ship, Mercer knew, people were being hurt. Somewhere on this ship, the bridge crew were in somebody’s hands. Somewhere, the captain. And they were sitting in a cargo bay eating broken snacks. He looked at Kane. Kane sat with his back to the door, eyes half closed. Not sleeping. Listening. “Sergeant Major.” “Mm.” “What would she have done?” Kane opened his eyes. He didn’t ask who. “She’d have gotten us out of here an hour ago.” “How?” Kane looked at the ceiling. “I don’t know. I never knew. That was the point.” He closed his eyes again. Then, very quietly: “She’d have been angry.” “At them?” Kane was silent for a long time. “At something.” Mercer opened his mouth to ask what that meant. The ventilation hissed. Everybody looked up. It wasn’t the normal sound. It was louder. Deliberate. Outside the door, somebody coughed. Then somebody else. Then something heavy hit the deck in the corridor. Then another. Then silence. Kane was on his feet. So was Rainer. Hale stood slowly, cradling his wrist, staring at the vent. “That’s—” “Yeah,” Kane said. The lock on the cargo door clicked. The status light went from red to green. Nobody had touched it. Somebody, somewhere, had just given Security Division its ship back. The door slid open. In the corridor, two of the sleepers lay on the deck, perfectly still. Breathing. Out cold. Rainer looked at them. Then at Kane. Then slowly, almost lovingly, she smiled. Kane looked at the open door. At the dark corridor beyond it. “Move,” he said.