As St.i.tch hefted the limp orange form across his left shoulder, one of the rubbery arms flopped oddly as though having two or three elbows. A dull moan drifted out, m.u.f.fled by the suit's dense rubber skin.

The constant flex of unstable fractures was chewing steadily through the Rimmer's drug-induced haze. A screaming prisoner was an unacceptable compromise and soon Ridgeway would have to decide between burning additional drugs to keep him quiet, or silencing him for good. But the question of him having possible intel had yet to be answered. For now, the Rimmer would have to tough it out.

Darcy pushed herself away from the rail and one foot slipped in a sudden lurch that threatened to send the sniper sprawling. Grabbing the rail, she straightened as St.i.tch approached, leading the way with forced authority. Their boots rang solidly against the metal floor as they headed towards the Tower.

Ridgeway watched them go, knowing all to well the burden of responsibility that Darcy carried. She would march farther and fight longer for the men who depended on her than she would for herself. An ugly truth, but one that Ridgeway counted on.

As they fell into formation, Ridgeway keyed another private ComLink. "Taz, I need a sickbay and I need it now."

"On the way, Majah."

Overhead, the Aussie's plated form accelerated up the angled Tower like a carbon-composite spider. The Marine had gone from picking hand-holds to the brute force method of climbing spikes. With each hammering motion, Taz drove a thick blade into the sheet metal wall of the Tower, pulling himself up with relentless speed. Chunks of shattered ice cascaded down the side of the Tower, a pac.h.i.n.ko rattle set to the steady beat of blades screeching through metal skin. So much for stealth.

Ridgeway called up Darcy's life signs on the TAC and noted her vitals with alarm. He toggled another private ComLink. "You holding up Lieutenant?"

"Feelin' strong, feelin' mean" she hissed back, quoting from a boot camp cadence. But what Ridgeway heard through her voice spoke louder than tough words. The wet rattle was unmistakable, a crackling wheeze that grew thicker with every labored breath.

"Hang in there Marine," Ridgeway instructed, his voice firm.

She coughed once. "You never let me down yet Major."

Ridgeway grimaced, wondering if that would still be true in six hours.

CHAPTER 12.

"Dammit Merlin, can you get it running or not?"

Ridgeway slammed his fist down on the smooth console and a spider web of cracks fanned out across frost-covered plexan.

"s.h.i.t," he snarled, immediately regretting the outburst. He side-stepped across the sloped floor and looked out through the gaping hole in the wall of the Tower. Merlin was somewhere between the Command Deck, where Ridgeway now stood, and the surface of the lake some sixteen floors below.

A hoa.r.s.e cough drew Ridgeway's attention and he turned back into the room. Darcy was slumped on the floor, the front of her armor gaping open once more. Steam rose from her body and curled in the frigid air. St.i.tch kneeled beside her, trying to offset the bleeding that relentlessly filled her lungs.

There had been no emergency sickbay on the command deck, only a small eyewash station and a first aid kit whose contents had long since been removed. Thus far the Marines had found no medical supplies at all.

Just beyond the rec.u.mbent sniper, a pair of mangled turbolift doors lay on the floor. Taz had ripped them out of their frame, using the elevator shaft as a faster route to higher floors. His trail wasn't hard to follow.

Although the room was just as cold as the rest of the cave, the volume of ice had decreased dramatically. A layer of crunchy frost coated most surfaces but this could be swept away with a pa.s.s of the hand. Sealed from the Lobby environment, at least until Taz carved his own doorway, the Command Deck had resisted the glacial progression seen outside the Tower.

Ridgeway could hear Taz moving above. The aussie's search method had eroded to charging down one dark hallway after another, kicking frozen doors out of the wall. They had run out of time for finesse.

He glanced at the chronograph that ticked relentlessly on the TAC. Almost four hours had elapsed since the Marines had entered the ship and they were still without power or sickbay.

Leaning forward, Ridgeway looked out the window and made a routine check on the figure in the orange suit. The Alliance driver lay in a heap on a retractable section of catwalk that extended no more than ten feet from the tower. On what amounted to a short plank high above the surface of the pool, the now-conscious trucker had nowhere to run. Not that he could run far on broken legs if he tried.

A mournful plea for help echoed for the hundredth time from outside the window.

Suck it up, pal, Ridgeway snarled inwardly. The incessant whining grated on his nerves. For the hundredth time he questioned the decision to drag the Rimmer along. A dubious source of information at best, the broken trucker had already proven to be a bothersome parasite. As the wails droned on, Ridgeway found himself sorely tempted to toss the orange-clad figure over the ledge.

He shook his head and shifted his attention to a neural switch. In a sudden blur, telepresence took him to a dark room where Merlin struggled with a tangle of equipment.

Through borrowed senses, Ridgeway a.s.sessed the scene. The cramped engineering room lay somewhere in the belly of the ship, its walls encrusted with switches and valves scattered among a tangle of heavy pipes. Ridgeway could see breaker boxes, fire extinguishers and a wide control panel. Glistening condensation beaded on every surface and droplets of water fell through the room in a slow, erratic percussion.

Water, Ridgeway realized, not ice. The room was warm.

As if they were his own, Ridgeway watched Merlin's hands rapidly splice paired wires pulled from a thick trunk of cable. Muttered curses drifted to Ridgeway's ears. "Come on you sonofab.i.t.c.h!" Merlin coaxed as his armored fingers moved with amazing dexterity.

"What've you got?" Ridgeway asked quietly.

"It's coolant Major, the d.a.m.n lake is coolant." Merlin began to reel off his discoveries at an accelerated pace, the words racing as fast as the young engineer's mind. "Whatever punched through the hull tore open the coolant reservoir for one h.e.l.l of an engine. We found signs of at least five different attempts to re-seal it, but they all c.r.a.pped out for one reason or another."

The grey-armored hands snapped a series of fiber-optic cables into a translucent coupling as Merlin continued. "Loss of coolant would have left the crew with two pretty c.r.a.ppy choices; sit offline and freeze to death, or run the drive till it overloaded and things got toasty warm, to the tune of a million degrees or so."

With the destruction of Cathedral's reactor still fresh on his mind, Ridgeway was clear on the latter implication.

Merlin continued to ramble while he worked. "But these b.a.s.t.a.r.ds were clever, oh yeah, real brainy little f.u.c.kers. They couldn't maintain a frigid containment inside the ship, but they had nothing BUT cold outside the ship."

"So they routed the coolant through Papa-Six and used the cave floor as a giant heat-sink?"

"Bingo!" Merlin confirmed as his left hand fished among a set of relays. "The engines didn't need to push the ship through s.p.a.ce, so they probably had voltage to spare. For some period of time, and I am talking a long while based on the wear and tear down here, this baby cranked out amps like there was no tomorrow. Then the s.h.i.t hit the fan."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, for some reason--"

A loud bang echoed in the room and Merlin's view spun to the right. Riding his gaze, Ridgeway saw Monster lug a refrigerator-sized piece of equipment through the door. Tentacles of wire hung from its base, dragging along the steel floor.

"That'll do." Merlin motioned with a short wave. "Set it over here and start pulling the main fiber trunks. No, just the 4-gauge, yeah."

Merlin's attention swung back to the wires in his hands. With scarcely a moment to shift gears, he resumed his narration. "For some reason the crew needed to bug out, and from the looks of things, it wasn't an orderly evac. Just about anything that could make or store power was ripped out by the bolts. Generators, batteries--"

"APUs," Ridgeway injected.

"Right again," Merlin said with a nod. "The whole game is action and reaction. An antimatter drive can produce a ton of power, but if it shuts down, you need some tiny source of power to fire it back up. Without a kick-start, the next time the drive system scrammed, it was down for the count."

"I'm good so far, but if the core's been offline, what's heating up the coolant?"

"Latent antimatter reaction. These puppies never really die unless you flush the core into s.p.a.ce, and that didn't happen. If you ignore one long enough, it'll back off to near-zero production; the equivalent of shifting into idle. The core is designed to crank out just enough juice to maintain its own containment field, otherwise matter and antimatter meet and, well, that gets ugly. It's been a fundamental safeguard for years now. We're not talking much in terms of power, but it generates a bit of heat along the way.

"And there's our fog." Ridgeway said, grateful that at least one of a million questions had been answered.

Abruptly, Ridgeway's second-hand gaze snapped to the right. He listened as Merlin directed Monster to connect a series of couplings that ran between the growing collection of parts. "Just follow the color code, blue to blue, red to red. They've got to be in the right order."

A convoluted a.s.sembly lay strung out in Rube Goldberg fashion across the sloped floor. Ridgeway remained silent as he focused on the odd chain of components cobbled together on the floor.

The largest piece was a field-grade Auxiliary Power Unit; a small, self-contained generator. Trails of soot marred the dull red sheet-metal sides.

Tracking along the path of tangled cable, Ridgeway followed through a series of jury-rigged amplifiers, a heavy surge suppressor and a compact step-up transformer that for some reason preceded the APU in the chain.

"What's with the transformer?" Ridgeway was no engineer, but clearly the component was out of proper sequence. Everything should start with the APU and go up.

A trace of hesitation suddenly tainted Merlin's reply. "Well, the only APU we could find is frapped. It looks like somebody smoked the capacitor array."

"In English, Merlin."

The younger Marine paused for an instant as he spliced the last wires into a power connector that struck Ridgeway as oddly familiar.

"I told ya Major, it's always the same game. Even an APU needs a good kick in the b.u.t.t to power up. Normally, it'll charge itself with a trickle of current over time. The juice is stored in an array of capacitors that can be discharged in a single jolt. That jump-starts the APU, which in turn starts the core."

Ridgeway's attention was glued to the connector in Merlin's hands, the familiarity nagging. "So what did you find to replace the cap array?" An odd sense of foreboding crept up his spine.

"Not a d.a.m.n thing, Major." Merlin's voice was stone cold. "Anything on this ship that had a prayer of firing the core is long gone. The Lieutenant is out of options, so it's time to improvise."

Ridgeway's gaze was pulled down to the open access panel on Merlin's breastplate. The engineer held the connector up for a final inspection. In that instant, Ridgeway realized where he had seen it, or at least one just like it. Marine issue; a charger interface for juicing armor in the field. Before he could speak, Merlin snaked it into his own armor and pressed firmly. It seated with a distinct click.

"Merlin, what the h.e.l.l...?"

The corporal reached over his shoulder and pulled the CAR from his back. The covalent rifle surged to life, pulsing with its own power. Merlin tightened his grasp on the pistol grip where control and feedback contacts met those in his glove.

The powerfeeds meshed as well. While the rifle would normally draw power from the armor, in a pinch the flow could be reversed. Merlin threw a switch and with a sharp descending whine the CAR flushed its entire charge back into the Marine's armor. The power readout on Merlin's TAC spiked almost fifteen percent, cresting past one-hundred and into the overload range.

"Needed a last bit of juice to max out," Merlin explained mechanically, "we only get one shot at this, and Monster had given me everything he had."

Sweeping through a blurred arc, Merlin's view settled on Monster. The huge sergeant was braced against the sloping wall, a makeshift control box in his hand. Ridgeway did not need the TAC to know that Monster's armor, as well as the Gatling, were all but drained of power.

Ridgeway heard Merlin's voice, flat and detached, utter the single directive. "Hit it."

Somewhere to the right, the APU hummed, awaiting the surge of power from Merlin's armor that with luck would breath life into long-dormant wires.

Or burn them out completely.

Ridgeway shouted at Merlin to stop, knowing he was already too late.

With a fierce "Semper Fi," Merlin threw the switch.

CHAPTER 13.

St.i.tch was slammed against the wall as the sloped floor of the command deck bucked violently. Rolling with the impact, he crabbed to his feet and stared out through the broad window.

The Lobby twitched like a patient hit with a defibrillator. Arcs of neon lightning danced along the walls, leaping from floor to floor. Like a radiant mold, pinpoints of light appeared randomly across the inside of the hull-- specks at first, aggregating into complex pathways of incandescence. Just below the command deck, a huge section of superstructure tore free from it's moorings and plunged into the darkness below.

St.i.tch felt more than heard the thrum of a huge machine as it surged to life. All around him, screens rippled with random patterns of color as countless systems struggled to awaken from an ancient, frozen sleep. Synthetic voices stuttered unintelligibly as static fought with streams of text and graphics in a raucous a.s.sault of light and sound.

One of the overhead lights exploded, showering the room with sparks and shredded acoustic tiles. St.i.tch threw himself across the p.r.o.ne sniper, using his body to shield the open panel in Darcy's armor. As another tremor shuddered through the floor-plates, St.i.tch wondered if the ship was coming completely unglued.

"We've got fire!" St.i.tch snapped around at the sound of Ridgeway's voice, his gaze following the senior Marine's upraised hand to a twisted coil of flame that convulsed in the ruptured ceiling. The angry electrical buzz was barely audible over the hiss of compressed gas.

"Move, move!" As he heard the words, St.i.tch felt two hands clamp down on the back of his armor and heave him into the turbolift shaft. The medic hit the open doorway at a forward tilt, propelled by Ridgeway's strength and the downhill slope of the floor.

St.i.tch jumped, launching himself to the far side of the shaft where his hands clawed frantically for purchase. The sheet metal walls flexed beneath his weight as he hit.

One hand closed on the rung of a service ladder as the dull CRUMP of a gas explosion struck like a hammer. The flash of blazing orange backlit a dark, multi-limbed silhouette that hurtled through the doorway.

One side of the over-stressed ladder tore free and St.i.tch grappled wildly. Three feet of the side rail peeled away from the metal wall with a sudden shriek.

Metal! As the recognition flashed, the medic swung his legs up and stomped, driving the magnetic-soled boots against the wall. Both feet stuck solidly.

One arm rising over his head instinctively, St.i.tch looked up, wary of debris plummeting from above that could tear him from the wall. The shaft overhead held nothing but darkness. Shifting his weight further away from the bending ladder, St.i.tch reached out to the mangled section of wall that had buckled into the shaft. With a groan he pulled himself level with the doorway and peered over the ledge and into the Command Deck. Flames filled the room.

"Major!" St.i.tch shouted into the inferno.

"Down here." The voice was strained and groggy.

St.i.tch almost slipped as he looked down to see Ridgeway hanging from a lone climbing blade driven through the far wall. Ridgeway's right hand held fast to Darcy's ankle. The two forms swung like a huge, lazy pendulum.

With a jolt, the pair suddenly lurched downward as the climbing blade carved a growing furrow in the flimsy wall. Metal squealed like a dying pig as the blade was dragged inexorably down by the weight of the double load. Ridgeway's helmet rocked up as his form coiled. St.i.tch heard him snarl only one word-- "Catch."

Ridgeway heaved with a grunt and Darcy swung up like a rag doll. The throw lofted the sniper only a short distance before her speed bled off to a stall. In that instant before she fell, the medic's gauntlet darted out and grabbed her shoulderplate.

"Got her!" St.i.tch barked triumphantly.

His gaze flicked down the shaft and the small measure of relief evaporated. The force of the throw had torn Ridgeway from the wall and St.i.tch could only watch helplessly as Ridgeway swiped at the wall with both blades. They whistled through nothing but air and Ridgeway began to pluumet into the darkness below.

"Major!" St.i.tch screamed over a sharp bark and metallic pang.

Defying both gravity and inertia, Ridgeway's trajectory broke abruptly as a powerful yank threatened to peel St.i.tch from the wall as well. Reflexively the medic jammed his feet hard against the wall. At least for the moment, he held fast.

Sucking in a ragged breath, St.i.tch looked down to see Ridgeway hanging half-inverted, limbs in an awkward tangle. The Major's right arm was drawn across his chest, it's blade impaled once more into the wall.

St.i.tch blinked rapidly, trying to understand what had happened. His eyes tracked up from Ridgeway and caught a fine line that stretched all the way up to the sniper's extended left arm. The wire tw.a.n.ged like a guitar string, a note reverberating down to the small magnetic grapple affixed to Ridgeway's hip.

"Nice shot," St.i.tch grunted through clenched teeth.