Project Charon 2 by Patty Jansen (brene brown rising strong .TXT) 📗

Or they could create a diversion and hope that the pirates would be too undisciplined to keep an eye on them.

“They only look stupid,” Evelle said. “They aren’t stupid at all.”

Tina agreed. “We shouldn’t underestimate them, especially not the mutants. They can flick those tentacles across the room and can hear what you say from a long distance off. There’s also some indication that they’re resistant to low-level laser weapons.”

Aliz said, “I wouldn’t want to use a Q-blaster inside a station. That’s going to blow a hole in the hull.”

“We’d need smarter weapons,” someone said.

Evelle said, “No. We need knives or something to harm them physically.”

“Bows and arrows,” someone else said.

That triggered a cascade of ideas. The mutant pirates might not be susceptible to laser weapons, but they wouldn’t have the same protection against physical weapons. No one was going to shoot bullets inside a space station either, and no one should get too close to the mutant pirates, but spears and knives might keep them occupied for long enough that the women could escape. And arrows. Where would they get those kinds of weapons?

Then Tina remembered Jens and his catapult. That was a perfect weapon. It wasn’t going to injure or kill anyone, but it would distract them. “Does anyone have any elastic?”

It went quiet for a moment.

Margot asked, “What do you want that for?”

“I have an idea. See if you can find elastic. I’m going to see what else I can find.”

Tina climbed back up to the open panel. With a lot of yanking, she managed to take another panel off. The space underneath was filled with wires, many of them inside insulation tubes. It took three women to pull loose a couple of the tubes. Tina hoped that the wires they disturbed didn’t trigger any warnings.

The tubes were made of tough plastic with a foam insulation inside. Tina managed to snap one in half, and tied the resulting two segments in a cross with a piece of wire. By this time, someone handed her a slightly stretchy length of fabric.

“What’s this?”

“Tights. It’s all we have in the way of elastic.”

That wasn’t going to do the job. She explained she needed something more robust than that.

Evelle said, “The door seal.”

That was an excellent idea, but they could only get it out when the door was open, and at that time they needed to hurry.

That meant first they would need to provide everyone with a weapon of some sort, even if it was only a stick, and would need to find objects to pass as ammunition for the catapult.

Tina opened another panel, which opened the wall down to the floor of the room. They ran out of tubing that they could pull out, but a metal strut came loose, and builders had left a box of unused rivets in the wall space. They were about the length of her thumb, with a blunt end and a sharp end. Tina gave each of the women a hand full and put the rest of the box in her pocket.

With all the rummaging they had done inside the wall space, and the cables they had untied, the security control screen was now hanging at shoulder height.

Tina went to the door and listened. The gallery space on the other side with four floors of prison cells was quiet except for the occasional knocking or a muffled voice inside one of the other rooms. “Do you know where the guards normally sit?”

“They tend to walk around a lot,” Evelle said. “Mostly on the ground floor. You can hear them talk to each other.”

The fact that there were no guards patrolling the gallery probably meant some sort of electronic system was in place. Those systems usually relied on the heat of bodies to check for the presence of people. Movement sensors was another possibility, but they only operated at close range, while infrared systems could see at a much greater distance. On top of that, someone was likely to monitor the prison from a remote room. They would turn up at the slightest indication of trouble.

It was time for action.

Tina explained what she was going to do and what the members of the group should do once the door was open. “I’ll contact my friends when we’re ready. It’s quite likely that whatever they do will open all the locks of the surrounding rooms as well, so there will be chaos outside. It’s our focus to get out of here to the SF Manila. As soon as the door is open, we’ll pull out the door seal and cut it into lengths to make as many slingshots as possible. Use the rivets as ammunition if necessary. Pick up anything else we can use as ammunition. Aim for areas where it’s going to be annoying. Their faces would be good, or if you can, damage their equipment. Take their weapons if you can get them, but don’t fire them.”

Aliz said, “For now, until we get back to a Federacy ship or base, your usual rank and command structure is dissolved. You will take orders from Tina, with myself and Evelle as second in command.”

“Understood,” someone said, and others agreed.

Tina continued, “We’ll make for the docks via the shortest route. Don’t get distracted by what you see, because you will see disturbing things.” She was going to have to take them through the labs. “Don’t get distracted thinking you might be able to help crewmembers. We might be able to help them, but not if we don’t succeed in getting out ourselves first.”

The women accepted that.

Aliz then spoke about what they needed to do first when they arrived at the ship. “I’m going to have to turn up the engine as much as possible without triggering warnings about overheating of the engine chambers. The ship needs to shed power as quickly as possible. Preferably without frying anything important.”

She assigned some tasks which the crewmembers understood.

A couple of women had questions about what to do when