Beginnings

Beginnings - By David Weber


Four days out from Hygeia, August 12, 2352 AD (250 PD)



The ship's youngest rating, Brian Lewis, sighed so heavily that the inside of his faceplate fogged for a moment. “So, that's it, Skipper. We're locked out.”

Lieutenant Lee Strong stared at the uncooperative external airlock door in front of them.

The other rating, three-year veteran Roderigo Burns, asked, “Well, why don't we just set some charges and blow our way into the ship?”

Lee's senior NCO and EVA specialist, Jan Finder, made a reply that was more growl than human speech. “Because, idiot, if we blow a hole in the side of this tin can, we can't be sure who'd be left alive inside.”

“But the internal door—”

“Listen, recruit, and listen good. Since we can't see into the airlock, we can't know that the inner hatch is dogged. And we can't assume what we can't see. Even our green looey here figured that out—and a whole lot more, besides.”

Which was exactly the kind of backhanded—and therefore, safe—compliment Lee had come to expect from Finder. He'd watched how most NCOs worked with new lieutenants. If they hated them, it was all respectful formality to their face and subtle undermining behind their back. On the other hand, if they liked the new officer, they ribbed him gently at first—like this—but always in a way that reminded the ratings that even though their CO was a newbie, he was a smart newbie, and they'd better respect both his intelligence and his rank.

Burns sounded obstinate. “Well, even if the airlock's inner hatch is open when we blow the hatch, then when we blow the outer hatch, the environmental sensors will detect the exposure to vacuum and seal the emergency bulkheads automatically.”

“Only if the internal sensors are still functioning, Roderigo,” Lee said quietly. “And since we know this ship was seized violently, we've got to assume that any of its systems could be compromised.”

“Uh . . . well, yeah, Sir. I guess there's that.”

Lee heard the smile behind Finder's affirming grunt. He glanced at his overage top kick, whose squat, powerful form was a black silhouette against the starfield, with Jupiter an intensely bright star staring over his left shoulder. “Your thoughts, Sergeant?”

There was no sign of motion in the floating black outline. “We could try cutting.” The silhouette shrugged. “It's safer. But it takes longer, so they'll know we're coming. Not good.”

“Sounds like you're speaking with the voice of experience, Sergeant Finder.”

“Yep. When I was a green recruit, an officer tried doing that in a situation like this.”

“And the hijackers heard you coming and killed the hostages?”

“Worse than that, Lieutenant. They let us get on board, then executed a young girl right in front of us. Threatened to shoot more if we came any closer. That suckered our officer into talking, negotiating. Meanwhile, they worked most of their men around behind us, using the environmental conduits. They killed half our team.”

“And no hostages rescued, I'll wager.”

“You'd win that bet, L.T.—if you could find someone stupid enough to take it. Now, Burns here is none too smart, but he's said to be a betting man—”

“Hey—” complained Roderigo.

“That's enough,” Lee ordered. “We can't use demolition charges, and we can't use cutting torches.”

“So, we're stuck outside,” Lewis repeated in a voice full of quiet vindication. “We're done.”

“No, Lewis, we're not,” corrected Lee. “There's another way.” He studied the length of the outsystem passenger liner. Extending aft from the forward collection of habitation and command modules where they were floating, there was a midsection girdle of sausage-like fuel tanks and then a long, thin boom, bracketed by four support trusses. They all terminated at the rearmost engine decks. Pointing aft, Lee uttered the timeless, two-word order that junior officers had been uttering for millennia: “Follow me.”

He pushed off the hull of the liner—the Fragrant Blossom, two weeks out from Mars—and used his suit jets to angle astern, toward the engine decks.

* * *

They stared “up” into the large black hole in the belly of the liner's primary thrust module.

“You're not serious,” breathed Roderigo Burns.

“You might say he's deadly serious,” Finder quipped.

“I don't think you're helping matters, Sergeant,” Lee said.

“Sorry, sir. But this is nonstandard.”

“‘Nonstandard'?” Brian Lewis croaked. “Sirs, this is directly against regs. This is a class-one radiation hazard, and if—”

“Lewis,” Finder said from far back in his throat where he apparently cached a ready supply of gravel, “shut up. Those regs are superseded by emergency rescue ops. And don't you ever call me ‘sir' again. I'm not an officer; I work for a living. Now, you will give your undivided attention to the L.T. or I will give your ass the undivided attention of my boot.”

Lee was inspecting the edges of the large black hole. “No signs of recent wear. Probably hasn't been used since they did the post-production trial run.”

“Great,” muttered Lewis with a shiver.

“Calm down, Brian,” said Lee. “That test is performed with an inert core. It's just to prove the ejection system functional. Sergeant, get me a REM reading.”

Finder rumbled assent.

Roderigo Burns looked dubious, his eyes wide through the tinting of his photosensitive faceplate. “But sir, I thought they used this hole to vent radioactive wastes.”

Lee suppressed the urge to declaim the official fear-mongering that the Earth Union called “truth.” “No, Burns. A nuclear drive's core-ejection tube has one use, and one use only: to dump the business part of a malfunctioning reactor.” Which, as an automatic protocol, was pretty stupid in and of itself. But that was the Earth Union for you. Ever since the Greens and Neo Luddites had come to power almost two centuries ago, the words “nuclear power” had become functionally synonymous with “demonic arts.” The notion of exposing a human body to radiation of any kind had become such an object of fetishistic fear that many of the extreme Neo Luddite groups refused any medical diagnostics that involved X-rays (or even magnetic resonance imaging, despite repeated assurances that such tests did not involve any radioisotopes). Consequently, their life expectancy statistics were usually about ten years less than other groups living in the same communities.

Finder put away his palm-sized combination Geiger counter/radiance sensor. “Readings indicate eighteen REM per hour, holding steady.”

Lee turned to the ratings. “We'll be in and through in ten minutes. That a total exposure of three REM, tops. No physical effects.”

Burns and Lewis tried to look reassured but failed miserably; a lifetime of indoctrination was not overcome in a single minute.

Finder edged closer. “Okay L.T.; we go in the hot pipe. Then what? Sure as hell there can't be an airlock at the other end.”

“No, Sergeant, but there are access panels. Now, follow me.”

The carrier signal changed subtly; another subaudial hiss had popped into existence alongside the general tactical channel. “Sir,” said Finder, using the private link reserved for NCO-officer communications. “I'm the EVA expert. And I'm the meat-headed Sarge. So let me go in first, okay?”

Lee fought two contending reactions: a wise readiness to accept respectful advice from a career sergeant versus the powerful desire to show his men—by example—that he'd do anything he asked them to do, and that in this case, there was no danger in what he was ordering. Well, not from radiation, at least.

But Lee managed to resist that second, stronger impulse. He cleared his throat, and used his chin to shut off the private channel, sending his next statement to the entire team. “Sergeant Finder, on second thought, you lead with your radsensor. If it gets any hotter as we go, we'll want to know right away.”

“So we can bug out?” asked Burns anxiously.

“No: so we can double-time it to our objective.” Lee unholstered his large-framed ten millimeter handgun. “Let's go.”

* * *

The core ejection tube showed no sign of wear—or maintenance. Evidently, the fearsome legends of the nuclear dragon residing at the other end of this man-made cave had kept visitors away—even the ones whose duty it was to periodically check that the tube was unobstructed and functional. It was yet another example of the dangers of the excessive fear often inculcated by the Greens and Neo Luddites. As the terror of a technology became primal, the maintenance of it devolved into a collection of dread rituals, not clear-eyed technical practices.

Had the Greens found any other technology to provide inexpensive and swift space travel beyond the moon, Lee had no doubt they would have seized upon it. But, unwilling to focus either public attention or funds upon advances in new technology, the Green leadership in almost every country had reluctantly agreed to approve nuclear thermal rockets for limited use beyond cis-lunar space. Unfortunately, that approval came with so much dire rhetoric of the technology's implicit dangers that all too few people born on Earth had the interest—indeed, the courage—to master it. So it was left—as so many dirty jobs were—to the Upsiders, that very small population that lived either on the moon, on Mars, or in the rotational habitats. It was they who maintained the satellites, mined the belt, or helped to build the slower-than-light starships that sent feckless, and usually obstreperous, bits of the human race off to colonize other star systems.

Of course, that still didn't mean there were a lot of vessels with nuclear plants. Even now, there were probably not more than four dozen operating in the system, all marks and missions included. But whereas cargos could be shuttled from one far-flung point of the system to another with VASIMIR drives, and shorter trips could be made by slightly higher power magnetoplasmadynamic thrusters, deep space personnel movers had to be equipped with nuclear thermal rockets. Otherwise, journeys that currently took a few weeks would take months, even years, to complete.

But since the leadership of Earth always viewed nuclear rockets as a deal with the devil, they never became comfortable with them. If anything, their necessity was an infuriating goad to the Greens and the Neo Luddite camps alike, prompting a steady derogation of anything—or anyone—having anything to do with them.

And so, trailing at the rear of the four-man boarding team, Lee Strong watched his otherwise technically competent ratings—Burns and Lewis—superstitiously flinch away from contact with the sides of the tube. Lee half expected to see one of them make a warding sign in the direction of the fission plant itself.

At the end of the tube, Finder counter-puffed his suit jets until he hung motionless before an oversized hatch fitted with immense bolts. On the private channel, he reported, “REM now up to twenty-three an hour. Rising slowly. What now, L.T.? I didn't bring a big enough wrench to unbolt this monster.”

“We don't need one. We're not going in there.”

“No?”

“Nope. Look to your left. See the panel, flush with the wall?”

“Yeah. Okay. Recessed bolts. But it looks like we'll need a special key wrench to unlock them for manual removal, and I don't—”

“You don't have the right shaped wrench-head,” Lee completed for Finder as he drifted forward between Burns and Lewis. “But I do.” He undid a small velcro-sealed pocket on the inside of his left wrist, and carefully withdrew the lanyarded key-wrench.

“Huh.” The sergeant had gone back to the private channel. “Guess that's why you're the officer.” Finder's quick smile sent a glint of teeth even through his semi-tinted visor.

“In this case, yeah. The big wigs in Geneva don't like advertising anything about nuclear access. Particularly a backdoor like this one.”

“So they entrust it to a lieutenant who'd never seen a nuke pile before leaving Luna. No offense, sir, but a lot of you guys from Earth—well, you're not exactly brimming with good sense. Current company excepted, of course.”

“Of course. And I can't say I disagree with you, Sarge.” Which was not just polite banter with the NCO whose help or hindrance would either save or undo him during his first year in deep space. In this case, the sergeant's Upsider prejudices were sadly accurate. After ensuring that every child grew up hearing an unceasing flood of invective against the dangers of technology, of space, and of nuclear power, the Earth Union's Space Activities subdivision had a hard time finding enough capable young men to serve as officers. Women were not permitted to work in the Customs Service or any of the other official spacefaring divisions of the Earth Union. Their ovaries had to be protected from the electromagnetic rapine of spaceside radiation exposure. And among the men, Lee had to admit that few of his training class had showed half as much technical aptitude as political shrewdness. Consequently, although they often failed to grasp the practical realities of life in space, they understood full well why, in services populated almost exclusively by native-born Upsiders, only natural-born sons of Earth were allowed to wear the gold braid of the officer ranks: they were the watchdogs of Dirtside interests. They were to ensure that those lesser humans born in space, and who performed all the dirty work there, never found themselves unsupervised long enough to consider turning the tables on their terrestrial masters.

Lee had finished unlocking the bolt covers with the key wrench. “They'll give to hand tools easily enough, Sarge.”

Burns' voice was hushed as he asked on the other circuit, “L.T., if the mutineers, or hijackers, or pirates, or whoever took over the Blossom hear us back here, could they—well, could they wash us out of this tube with radioactive gases?”

Resisting the impulse to shake his head at the depth of ignorance implicit in the question, Lee toggled his mic back to the general circuit. “No, Roderigo. That's not how these engines work. A particle bed nuclear rocket is designed so that all its radioactives are sealed within a shielded subassembly. At need, that ‘core' can be jettisoned through this tube, but it's a fairly specialized process, and the activation codes are only known to a few crewmembers. And I doubt any of the criminals currently in control of the hull are hanging back here in the Engineering section.”

“Okay, but if they were—I figure there's got to be some manual release, right, Skipper?”

It was reassuring that, only two months into his first year on his deep space tour, senior crewmembers were calling him “skipper.” “Well, in the event that the subassembly is, for some reason, frozen in place, there are ways for technicians to jettison it manually. But that would be a suicide mission, given the exposure levels.”

Finder had removed the bolts, and drifted a curved section of tube outward, revealing a narrower, rectangular passageway beyond. Half a dozen meters on, it turned to the right.

Roderigo Burns peered over Lee's shoulder. “Is the airlock around that bend?”

Lee shook his head. “Still no airlock. Just beyond that corner, there's another access panel that will put us in a safety-venting and access conduit that runs all around the unit. Then two double access panels before we reach the interior. Now, let's go—unless you want to increase your exposure time.”

Burns' eyes widened and, kicking off from the opposite side of the tube, he jetted into the exposed passageway.

“A good officer always knows how to motivate his men,” drawled Finder, “After you, Lieutenant.”

* * *

When they turned the bend in the narrow passageway, they found a plainly marked access panel in front of them. Hazard hatchings of yellow and black surrounded the six orange-colored bolts securing it in place.

Lewis was staring at the panel. “So, in order to get inside, we have to trigger these six explosive bolts and let this hunk of metal shoot straight into our faces?”

Lee shook his head. “Those six orange spots aren't explosive bolts, Lewis. They're frangible nuts. We can trigger them ourselves, one at a time, from the outside. That will not only control the release of the panel, but allow the inert gases on the other side to bleed off without blowing us halfway back down the ejection tube.”

Burns turned to stare at Lee. “Hey, Skipper how do you know all that stuff?” He sounded genuinely respectful, even a little relieved.

“I know it because I read the specs less than an hour ago.”

“And,” added Jan histrionically, “it is also because he is a hand-picked officer, and a member of our beloved Customs Patrol: humanity's most elite formation of misfits, political undesirables, and problem children. All hail the Customs Patrol.”

“All hail,” echoed Burns and Lewis with a level of enthusiasm that they usually reserved for latrine duty.

“That's the spirit,” Lee drawled with a grin at Finder. “Now, let's get going.”

* * *

The terminal access panel—the one into the engine room itself—was still responsive to commands. Lewis hot-wired the keypad and bled out most of the atmosphere while Lee deployed the rest of the team for an assault entry. “I'll take point,” he said, glancing back at Finder. Who apparently understood from that look not to debate the point. “The Sergeant will provide covering fire while you follow me in, Burns. We skim low and to the center of the room. There's plenty of cover around the power plant itself.” Burns nodded nervously, probably more at the notion of proximity to a nuclear reactor than armed adversaries. “Lewis, we go on three. One, two . . .”

On “three,” Lewis triggered the panel release; it swung out toward them. Lee angled around its opening arc, got low, kicked hard. He skimmed across three meters of deck, reached the reactor housing, and curled himself behind a control panel. A moment later, Burns jammed himself into the same space. “Okay, Roderigo,” Lee muttered, “you check our twelve; I'll scan our six.”

They peeked around the manifolds, control surfaces, and shielding of the nuclear rocket. No movement. Lee chinned open the circuit to Finder. “Sarge, talk to me.”

“I would if I saw anything, L.T. All quiet.”

“Okay. You and Lewis enter, seal the panel behind you. Then sweep the room from opposite directions. Burns and I will provide bases of fire.”

“Aye, aye, Skip.”

Twenty tense seconds later, the engine room was secure, and Finder was able to report a whopping three millirem per hour exposure level.

“So no leaks,” breathed Lewis gratefully.

“And no bodies,” Finder pointed out. “What next, L.T.?”

Lee glanced at the entry to the passageway that ran the length of the ship's keel-boom, up to the habitation modules. “We go forward. Right down the middle of that damned fifty-meter shooting range.”

“Right,” said Finder quickly. “Okay, now listen up, ratings. L.T. says we're going forward. Burns, swap weapons with Lewis; I want you on point with me for this one. Lewis, you use the bullpup to provide a base of fire. You follow the lead element at ten meters. Stay close to the outer wall of the passageway; no reason to line ourselves up like duckpins. Right, L.T.?”

Lee nodded while he wondered, what was Finder doing? Granted, Lee had indicated the next objective, and tactical deployment was the top kick's duty, but Finder had jumped in too quickly, as if he wanted to make sure that his deployment outline was the one used. And besides, Lee thought, toggling the private channel with his chin, Burns, not Lewis, was the best shot with the bullpup carbine they had brought. “Sarge,” he began—

Finder's response on the private channel was curt. “Trust me, L.T. I know Lewis isn't the better shot, but that's not what's important here.”

“Then what is importa—?”

“L.T., trust me. Please.”

“All right, Sergeant—with the proviso that we're going to have an after-action chat.”

Finder nodded. “You're the boss, Boss.” Finder switched back to general address. “Okay, Lewis, since you're our base of fire the rest of the way, you're our point-man into the passage. Get to the side as soon as you're in, and once the entry is secured, tuck down to the right; L.T. you'd go in last, and tuck down to the left. Sir, we go on your count.”

Lee nodded. “Lewis, you go on ‘three.' One, two—”

On “three,” Burns tripped the door release and Lewis drift-stepped into the passageway, Lee felt a fumbling at his left hand. Looking down, he saw Finder sneaking an odd-looking pistol into it. Well, pistol was a charitable term. It looked like a long, anorexic tube with a magazine at the rear and the manufacturing characteristics of a zip gun.

“What the—?”

Finder's voice on the private channel was a fast hiss, “Eight rounds. Gyrojet ammo. Recoilless for zero-gee. Don't use your ten-millimeter. Stay alive.” And then Finder was popping through the entry after Burns, barking orders. Lee was still so surprised he almost forgot to follow.

When he did, he discovered the rest of the team towing themselves down into crouched positions; Lee did so too, tugging his body into a ball to the left of the door.

“All clear, L.T.,” reported Finder. “Pretty quiet, for a hijacking.”

Lee kept his eyes up the corridor that dwindled away from them. “Yes and no. I wasn't expecting to find any bad guys back here, only crew bodies. One of which may be there.” Lee pointed.

Burns, squinting, nodded. “Yeah. Looks like a floater. Almost at the other end of the tube.”

“Twenty-three meters away,” reported Lewis, who was just taking his right eye away from the carbine's laser rangefinder.

“Active sensors off, Lewis,” Lee snapped. “They may not be patrolling this part of the ship, but they could have seeded with automated detection systems. So from here on, we go in old school: no sensors, no comm, hand signals only.”

“But L.T.,” Burns began.

Lee made a throat-cutting gesture with the edge of his left hand. Burns got the idea and shut up.

Finder nodded, pointed to Lee and Lewis, made a push-back gesture with his palm, raised all his fingers, held out a stationary thumbs up and waited.

Simple enough. Finder was simply reconfirming the order that Lee and Lewis were to follow at a range of ten meters. Lee replied with a thumb's up.

Finder nodded, tapped Burns on the shoulder and pushed firmly off the deck at a shallow angle, drifting to the right. Burns copied him, but drifted to the left. Lee waited until they were about eight meters away, then nodded to Lewis and copied Finder's jump.

However, being the only native Dirtsider in the team, Lee's free-jump was not as precise. He had to push back from the wall just before reaching the spot where the dead crewman was floating, Finder had already sent Burns ahead to secure the entry into the inhabited areas and now pointed at the corpse's wounds. Lee squinted through a diffuse cloud of small red globules. A small crossbow bolt had hit the crewman just above the hip. But that had not been the fatal injury. The two stab-wounds to either side of the sternum and the slashed neck were the obvious causes of death.

Lee tugged himself lower so he could see the shoulder tabs on the corpse's coveralls. As he suspected, an engineer, who'd probably been baby-sitting the reactor when the hijacking began. Either he had heard calls for help and was hustling forward, or the hijackers had baited him out. Either way, he had been surprised and probably disabled by the crossbow hit. Then his attackers had finished their job up close and personal. And since they had used a knife in zero-gee, it made it quite likely they were not Earth-born. Zero-gee melee was a very exacting skill, possessed only by those who already had a great deal of experience living and working in low or no gravity environments.

Finder leaned over until his helmet's faceplate touched Lee's. Through the glass, he heard the sergeant's voice, hollow and muted. “This was the work of Upsiders, no doubt about it.”

“Yes—this one killing was. But that doesn't mean that all the hijackers are Upsiders.”

Finder raised an eyebrow, then nodded. “True enough, L.T. Now, we're going to leave Lewis a little farther behind, okay?”

“More for us to chat about later on, then.”

Finder shrugged, smiled, turned to Lewis, and made a push-back gesture holding up ten and then five more fingers. Then he tapped Lee on the shoulder and readied to jump. As soon as Lee had postured himself identically, Finder nodded and they pushed off, gliding down the remaining corridor at waist-height.

Lee's jump was a little better this time, partly because he felt there was less reason to stick close to the wall. Reading the unfolding evidence, he doubted that the mutineers felt any need to patrol this part of the ship. Indeed, their absence here suggested that they were confident they had accounted for all the passengers and crew. And that prompted a number of surmises that began to coalesce into a coherent tactical picture.

Firstly, the attackers were clearly willing to kill the crew given little or no cause to do so. There was no sign that the dead engineer had been carrying a weapon. Or that he had been moving to help the other crew or passengers. Or that he had intended to hole up in Engineering, where he could have plagued the attackers with environmental shutdowns, bulkhead lockouts, and a dozen other things that would have made their takeover both dangerous and uncertain. On the contrary, it seemed far more likely that the attack had been so quick and fierce that none of the crew had had the chance to warn him. The unrumpled condition of his clothes and still-combed hair supported the conclusion that the floater had been accosted and bushwhacked by someone he trusted enough to come close to.

Which farther suggested that some of the crew were in on the mutiny, either as the ringleaders, or as accomplices to the attackers who had masqueraded as passengers. And since there was no sign that anything had gone awry with the hijacking, that prompted Lee's last grim conclusion: that the mutineers had not been interested in hostages. They had not made any demands for ransom or concessions in exchange for the hostages. Indeed, the mutineers had not contacted the authorities at all. The only reason Lee had known to investigate was because the Fragrant Blossom's captain had missed a privately arranged check-in call with his friend, Callisto's Chief Administrator for Outbound Operations. By deduction then, it seemed unlikely that there were any passengers or crew left to rescue.

Arriving at the entry to the hab modules, Lee stopped his forward glide with an outthrust left hand. Finder signaled for a huddle; they leaned their helmets together. “Okay,” he said, “what do you want me to do next, L.T.?”

“Not a lot of choice, Sergeant; we go room-to-room. And we go fast. I don't think they've bothered with guards, except in the forward section where they'll be manning the bridge and watching our ship. And waiting for their ride.”

“Huh?” said Burns.

“Their ride,” repeated Lee. “If they meant to take this hull somewhere, they wouldn't just be drifting here. Since coming on site, we've ascertained that they've got control over enough systems to keep the airlock sealed against us, and that their engines are in fine working order. So if it was part of their plan to take this ship somewhere else, they'd already be doing so. Which means that there's company coming.”

Lewis and Burns exchanged wide-eyed looks. Finder merely smiled. “I see we got lucky and drew a good CO. For a change. What else, sir?”

“Their lack of contact with us, and particularly their failure to warn us off by threatening the lives of hostages, means they probably don't have any left to threaten. So I suspect that we are in a free-fire situation. However, we can't be sure of that, and we definitely want to take these bastards alive, both because that's in accordance with regulations, and because we really—really—need to interrogate them.”

“What? Why?” Lewis asked.

“Because even among the few cases of deep-space hijacking or mutiny on record, this one is the odd-ball outlier. They're not after hostages, or the ship itself, so they're playing some other game—and we need to talk to a few of them if we're ever going to learn what that game is. Set up our entry, Sergeant.”

“Yes, sir. Burns, you will lead the room breaches using the spray-gun.”

Roderigo was already pulling what looked like a wide-muzzled, sawed-off grenade launcher off his shoulder.

“Open the choke for maximum dispersion, and use the heavy tranq rounds.”

“Uh, Sarge, the chemical warfare experts told us that if a target is small, wounded, or has a coronary condit—”

Finder fixed Burns with a sharklike stare. “If the bastards die, the bastards die. We'll take every precaution, but with that tube of yours set on wide dispersal, you can't count on multiple hits. One gel bead is going to have to take any target down. So today you're serving up double-strength sleepy-time cocktails.”

“Roger that, Sarge.”

“The L.T. and I will be carrying the lethal firepower to clear the passageways, moving forward by leapfrog advance.”

Lewis frowned. “What about me?”

“You keep a tight hold on that carbine, Lewis. You're our ace in the hole. If the spray gun jams, or we bypass some hostiles and they come out on our rear, you're going to be our fire brigade. As needed, we'll call you forward to outflank them, or add your heavier firepower to ours.”

“So I stay all the way back here?”

“Yes—which also guarantees that if everything goes south and we have to beat ass out of here, you're holding the exit open for us.”

Lewis shrugged. “Yes, Sarge.”

“Good. Lieutenant, whenever you're ready, just give the word.”

Lee nodded. “The word is given.”

* * *