Battleship Raider by Paul Tomlinson (book recommendations website .txt) 📗

set of an old science fiction movie. And I wasn’t the only actor on stage.

My co-star looked a lot like Mr. Skellington, except that he had much shorter arms. And no hands. He was also a little better preserved – mummified almost. I peered at him more closely. Presumably, he was another of Old Jack Sterling’s crew who had made it further than his teammate. But how could he be a thief if he had no hands? Then I realised that the brown stains splashed around the vault were his blood. He’d had hands when he came in here but somehow his arms had been chopped off just below the elbow. Just the thought of it made me shiver. I had to figure out what had happened to him. Because I wanted to be sure it didn’t happen to me.

The brown stains were heaviest around the Navigator’s coffin. My guess was that Mr. Hands-Free had opened the lid and reached inside – only to have the lid slam shut like a high-tech guillotine. The would-be thief had bled to death in here, unable to do anything to help himself or to summon help. I promised myself that I would be very, very careful about where I put my hands.

I had hoped that shutting down the cooling system would have caused the Navigator to switch over to passive cooling. The top of its casing was designed to rise about half an inch to serve as a vent. With the top raised, it would be much easier to break into. But it was still sealed tightly. I was going to have to warm things up a little more. Unfortunately, that would mean burning up some of the remaining oxygen.

“Is that wise?” Trixie asked as I pulled the blow torch out of my backpack. “Forget I asked that, no part of this plan is wise.”

I lit the blowtorch and set it on the ground so that the flame was aimed at the side of the Navigator’s casing. In an ideal world, I would have brought a more sophisticated form of heat generation, but I’d been limited to what I could scrounge up on the wreck. I wasn’t sure how long it would be before things warmed up enough inside to get it to pop its top.

“Let me know if the Navigator sends any messages to the ship,” I said. “If either of them suspects we’re doing something naughty, things might get a little... interesting.”

“How interesting?”

“They’ll fire the lasers at us.”

“And if that happens, our plan is to...?”

“Er... hide in the Navigator’s coffin?” I said.

“Best get a move on with the opening of said coffin, then, eh?”

When Trixie was right, she was right.

There was a pale orangey spot on the outside of the casing where the blowtorch was pointed at it, but the top of the case was still firmly sealed. The Navigator was probably protected by a layer of insulation – maybe even the sort of stuff they put on the outside on spaceships to stop them burning up when they enter a planet’s atmosphere. The blowtorch might not make much impact on that.

I could try firing my pistol at it, but the casing was armoured – thick enough to protect the Navigator if the laser weapons built into the vault were fired. Any projectile I fired at it would probably bounce off and take my eye out.

I looked around the room at the points where the lasers were fixed to the walls. They seemed innocent enough – more like cameras than guns. They would be fitted with tamper-prevention devices. If I tried to disable them, the one I was working on would probably blow up in my face and the others would fry my body as it fell, just to be sure.

As I looked around the vault, I saw one of the video cameras following my movements.

“Something’s happening,” Trixie said.

“The cameras are back online – they’re watching us, not the pre-recorded video loop.”

“What will happen now?”

That was a good question. If the ship had been fully-manned, a security guard in a monitoring station somewhere would have seen us on his screen and manually triggered the lasers. But at this moment I didn’t know who or what was watching the video feed. If the ship was seeing us now, there was no way of telling how she had been programmed to respond. What I did know was that between the falling oxygen levels and the waking of the ship’s security systems, we were rapidly running out of time. I ought to concentrate my efforts on getting the escape hatch open.

I looked back towards the Navigator’s coffin. Having gotten this close, I really didn’t want to give up on my quest. Not until it became a choice between success or death. But how would I know when I reached that point?

Chapter Eleven

What I was facing here was, more or less, a locked metal safe inside a locked bank vault. I’d managed to get inside the vault. Now all I had to do was crack open the safe. But there was an additional complication here. I wasn’t simply trying to get something valuable out of a locked box. This was more like trying to get at somebody who had locked themselves inside a box. To get them out, I had to pick the lock that was inside the box. There was no external keyhole.

The most elegant way of tackling this would be to trick the person in the box into opening it, which you could do even with a super-smart artificial sentience given the right circumstances. You just had to convince it that you were someone it wanted to interact with face-to-face. Failing that, you had to pick the lock. From the inside. This was going to require a combination of brute force and finesse.

My original idea was to heat up the metal casing with a blowtorch so that the ‘person’ locked in the box opened the lid a crack to let the heat