Mech Zero: The Dominant Read Free Page A

sitting crewmen. Ensign Theller sensed her approach. Her vacc suit crinkled as she drew near and paused.
    He waited for her to move on, but she didn’t. He thought of attempting a false snort or similar action, but decided against it. Grandstanding never made an act more convincing. Still she paused, silently hovering over him. A trickle of sweat began under his armpits. Did she suspect he had shirked his required sedation? He waited longer, but she remained there. He could feel her eyes upon him, those strange, surreal orbs. He wanted nothing more than to crack one eye minutely—just for a second—to see what she was doing. But he held firm. He played the part of the sleeping dead, breathing evenly, shallowly, even while his heart pounded in his chest and he thought he might suffocate.
    His heart , he thought. Could she hear it? He knew some mechs were fitted with superb auditory pickups. If she could pick out the sound of his accelerated heartbeat, perhaps that would explain her odd behavior. Still he waited, determined to maintain his façade until the last possible instant. He willed his heart to slow and grow steady…and to some degree, it did.
    At last she moved on. Her hip bumped him as she slid by between the seats. He felt the contact and under different circumstances, would have craned his neck around to stare at her as she walked away. Not today, however. Today, he had bigger worries than Captain Beezel’s fine posterior.
    She left the chamber and went down the tube to the lower decks. Theller’s hand was on his buckle in an instant. It hesitated there and did not unfasten the buckle.
    This was the moment of truth. Thus far, he had done no wrong—or at least nothing serious. He was not a man who broke rules often. It was not in his nature. But today was different. He did not want to die so easily, so pointlessly.
    Theller popped open the metal buckle. The belts slid away into the seat with a rasping sound. He climbed out of his seat and moved down the extremely narrow aisle. He bumped the various drugged crewmen along the way, but didn’t worry about that. They wouldn’t awaken for hours.
    He reached the tubes and he passed them by. He could not afford to be seen by Captain Beezel, and the ship wasn’t so big that he could expect to escape notice if they were on the lower deck together.
    Theller opened a hatch and entered the engine compartment. His eyes slid this way and that. What could he damage without arousing suspicion? Something small, reparable…but absolutely required for battle.
    He quickly decided to change the oxygen mixtures by altering the manual-overrides on the tank valves. This would cause a slowly growing problem that shouldn’t even be noticed by the computers until the carbon levels exceeded what the scrubbers could take out of the pressurized cabin. When the alarms went off, he was sure his lax crewmen would attempt to repair the situation using the automated systems. They were not the type to handle an emergency directly, and would be loath to get out of their chairs and head back to check on the manual settings.
    He put his hand on a valve, then paused. He could be wiped for this—sentenced to mental evacuation. Afterward, he would only be an oddity in the park, drooling over his social-wellness rations. After a full minute’s hesitation, he reminded himself if he did nothing , he would be a splatter of atoms in the outer reaches of the system. He twisted the valve a fraction. Then he twisted all the others at random.
    Sweating, he glided back toward his seat. He froze at the hatchway leading to the prime deck. Captain Beezel stood in the forward crew section, staring at his empty seat. In that terrifying second, he knew he’d been discovered. He wanted to confess, to have a quiet argument with her, to somehow make her see reason. They could slip away so easily. The star system was vast and the universe was infinite. They could hide among the gas haulers or asteroid mining bases