Encounter on Majestic 611

Fiction: A star-hopping rogue battles communist robots and chitinous beasts during a heist.

Dirk Maxtrim always ran hot. On spacewalks, his breath inevitably fogged the interior glass of the EVA helmet. When business took him to Earth or Luna, he preferred to stick to the chill of the northern poles. Only women, or a fat enough bounty, could lure him into the clamor of equatorial swelter.

For the moment, Earth and her heat were a long way away. He was alone, as he often preferred to be, configuring a bulky autopilot inside his XC-80.

The XC-80 ultra-long-range shuttle was nicknamed ‘The Bitch’ by starhoppers and greasemen. It was temperamental, tough to diagnose, and liable to complain when you pushed it hard in a chase. For stealth runs, though, there was no better vessel for the price point. Stealth was what Maxtrim needed today.

He gritted his teeth as he reached behind a panel to connect an oddly-shaped cable. Aftermarket nav components never hooked up easy. With a click, he got the male end into the female, and the third-party autopilot blinked to blue-screen life.

The ship rocked as the nav module patched itself into the engines. Then it resumed its max-throttle course toward asteroid Majestic 611. In a few minutes, on current trajectory, the shuttle would come to a sudden end slamming into the tumbling space rock.

Dirk had no plans to go out like the kamikazes of old. He put on his airtight helmet, strapped a rocket pack onto his back, and clunked toward the cockpit in his light reconnaissance spacesuit. True to form, the XC-80 was bitching loudly about the impending collision. “Easy, babe,” he said to the machine, pulling the throttle back and tilting the wheel to create a slingshot trajectory. On this new course, The Bitch would swing low over Majestic 611 before hurtling back into space.

He returned to the autopilot module. “Time delay, six hours,” he said, watching the screen with annoyance to make sure his words were understood. He hated these natural language interfaces. They were too imprecise for spaceflight.

“Six hours,” said the nav module, and he gave it the rest of the plan. When six hours passed, the XC-80 would ping his suit and return to the rock for another flyby pass. He’d be waiting with the rocket pack to intercept and clamber back aboard.

Six hours was enough time to reach the rockside scientists, earn their trust with his ‘lost spaceman’ routine, and steal the cloning data from their central computer. That was the job, stealing the data. If he pulled it off, he’d have more than enough to trade up The Bitch and take a month off at the Pleasure Illuminarium. Easy money in an afternoon. That was Dirk Maxtrim’s cosmic specialty.

A proximity alarm sounded. More bitching. With a heavy lever pull, the blond stargoer depressurized the shuttle interior. Immediately the beeping turned to silence. With a gloved fist, he slammed the ‘RELEASE’ button, hanging onto a rail with his other hand for stability.

The cargo bay floor receded to reveal a sunlit asteroid surface racing by a hundred yards below. With each second, the rock grew closer. Trusting his math, he assured himself that impact would not come.

His suit timer bleeped. It was his past self informing him that now was the time to jump. What else was there to do but trust his own plan? Crossing his arms like a pharaoh, Dirk Maxtrim kicked out of the shuttle’s cargo bay and into the vastness of space.

The craters didn't match the maps he’d bought. Damned scam artist cartographers. Facing an unexpected hole in the ground, he blasted his rocket pack to reduce his speed before impacting in white silicate.

Without a powdery asteroid surface, a landing like this would have left him a blood-and-bone pancake. At least the map man had been right about the mineral composition.

Extricating himself from a silicate heap, Dirk Maxtrim stood. Overhead, the XC-80 was already careening away. He’d catch it in six hours’ time, returning with his prize.

A burning orange streak flew over his head. Then another, closer and lower. Anti-armor rounds. Someone was firing anti-armor rounds at him!

Dirk’s survival sense kicked in just in time to send him leaping into a crater. A third shot, landing short, provided temporary cover in a roaring granulated plume.

In the whiteness of the silicate plume Dirk grabbed his digi-binoculars. He didn't have a gun. He didn't have anything but a rocket pack and a personal oxygen tank. This was a science base, for heaven’s sake! Who was shooting on sight at a man in a recon suit?

As the dust cleared he saw a twenty-foot automated mech lumbering toward him. It was a ways away, but closing steadily. Its form was a lumpy, industrial design he’d never encountered before. Then he saw the sigil, a hammer and sickle emblazoned on the anti-tank robot’s chest.

Soviets!

Dirk racked his brain. Soviets, here? This was neutral space. Had they captured the science base? Was his intel wrong? A fourth AT bolt hit the crater’s edge and nearly blew his face off, knocking him back with a ringing in his ears. He knew the next one would kill him if he stayed.

Crawling over burnt flakes of his own armor, he scouted the landscape. Ahead, sticking out of a rock protrusion, was an airlock door of American commercial manufacture. That had to be the underground lab.

There was no cover between the crater and the airlock, but Dirk wasn't in a position to be picky. He took a deep breath, his helmet predictably fogging, as the stupid Soviet robot loaded another round into its AT cannon. Then it fired and he leapt ahead.

As he hoped, the round impacted behind him, launching him forward through the airless day of the asteroid's surface. Shrapnel ripped through his rocket pack with a sickening screech, totaling the unit. At least it had spared his organs.

Dirk’s feet touched down in limited gravity. He dashed to the airlock. In God’s grace, it opened. He punched the ‘SEAL’ button as soon as he got inside, shutting the door between the pressure chamber and the exterior void.

As air flooded the chamber, he disconnected his trashed jump pack and kicked it across the room in anger. “That’s never gonna fly,” he grumbled, watching it clatter apart. A new way to rendezvous with The Bitch would have to manifest.

The atmosphere stabilized. Dirk raised his fogged helmet glass to breathe in stale station air. Then a green light flashed. The inner doors opened. To his shock, a dismembered, fleshy scientist’s corpse flopped before him.

“Lord,” Dirk murmured, kicking at the dark-skinned man with holo-glasses and no arms. This was some nasty work, not what he’d expect from a Soviet infiltration team. Maybe some kind of concussion weapon had blown the researcher apart.

Dirk Maxtrim stripped the body of its security keycard. “Blue moon,” he quietly sang to himself, breaking up the stillness of the complex. “You saw me standing alone…”

A creaky servo interrupted his refrain. It was a Soviet mech harness, designed for agriculture and modified for planetary combat. Without its driver, it idled at the end of the hall in sentry mode, watching for threats.

“Where’s your operator?” Dirk wondered as he observed the unit. It was easy enough to stay out of its automated laser-detection beams. Outflanking the soldiers who brought it here would be a harder task.

Dirk pressed on through the halls of the base, finding only scientist flesh and bullet holes. A gun would be nice, he thought to himself. A gun would really hit the spot.

Near the railgun-wrecked cafeteria he saw something move. It was large, scaly and tough with a gelatinous carapace coating. Its wet front pincers were harvesting meat from a Soviet shock trooper’s corpse.

Maurs here? This was not good. A full-sized maur was an asexual, egg-laying, man-eating, metal-ripping pain in the ass. If they’d been breeding in the depths of the base, a full-blown infestation could have broken out in mere weeks. “Maybe that’s what happened,” said Dirk, pieces connecting in his head. “Maybe the Reds responded to a local distress call.”

The maur stopped. It raised its many-eyed head, probing the air with antennae. Dirk stunk, and the maur could tell. Rattling its segmented form, it rose to kill.

Shit. Shit! Dirk, still gunless, hauled ass down a narrow corridor. The maur, somehow flexible despite its chitinous armor, squeezed through behind him in voracious pursuit. Dirk didn’t have long to act. Desperately recalling the layout of the base, he cut across a briefing room and doubled back toward the side airlock hall.

The mech harness and its light machine gun were still waiting dutifully for master’s return. Dirk dashed into its scanner path, pausing just a second to really catch its interest. Then he dove for the airlock.

The maur burst into the hall just as the mech armed its LMG. With a shredding torrent, the Soviet harness unloaded on the beast. To Dirk’s astonishment, the maur did not immediately fall. It turned, charging the mech in dying blood rage, and slashed the creaky machine in two before succumbing to its wounds.

A pile of useless metal, hot casings, and acrid maur guts hissed on the hallway floor. Beyond it, a supply room keypad blinked with a red error screen.

Dirk stood. An error screen? It didn’t look visibly damaged. Someone, he realized upon inspection, had hacked the door control.

He pulled out a pin from his jammer kit and hard-reset the keypad. On reboot, it flashed blue, and he tapped the scientist’s keycard against the scanner pad. “No maur eggs, please,” he appealed to the divine as he entered.

“Ya svoi!” a woman’s voice shouted from inside the supply room. She was in her early twenties, pale skinned with a black cadet’s fade. Her eyes were pale, piercing blue, framed by freckles and grease stains.

Dirk sized her up in an instant. She was a hair shorter than him, with a white tank top hanging loose. Soviet dogtags on an old chain lay it. From the navel down, she wore gray morskoy camouflage fatigues and an empty holster. Her hands were raised as if to say, ‘Don’t shoot!’

She realized with confusion, then fury, that he was not a Russian savior. He was American, unarmed, smiling with amusement in his black-armored scout suit. Fast and bitter, she dropped her hands and grabbed her Volkolak-91 rail rifle.

He was faster still. “Wouldn’t do that,” he said, pressing the woman’s own pistol barrel into her side. She’d made the mistake of leaving it loaded atop a ration crate. “Drop the railer.”

“Suka blyat,” she cursed. He knew those words well enough. She looked down at the pistol, considering her next move. In her hesitation, Dirk socked her. The rail rifle clattered away, and he grabbed her by the arm to stop her from chasing after it.

“Are you gonna behave?” he asked her, resealing the supply room door. Her arms were toned, but her strength was a shadow of his. It wasn’t hard to keep her in his grip. “Are you gonna behave?” he asked again.

“Vashi glupye uchenye pozvolili mauram razmnozhat’sya zdes. Oni ubili moyu komandu. My pytalis pomoch,” the woman seethed, incomprehensible.

“Mauram,” said Dirk. “Maurs. Yeah. Sons of bitches.”

“Sons of bitches,” said the Soviet mechanized trooper. Then she spat on the metal floor of the storeroom.

Dirk put her in the corner. “Stay,” he said, keeping a palm toward her as he collected the Volkolak rifle. Methodically, he ejected the ammunition and locked it in his suit’s hip compartment. “Got any more?” he asked, and she stared blankly. “Bullets? Any more bullets?”

The storeroom was sweltering. He could see why she’d taken off her jacket. “Don’t try nothing,” he said, and slowly removed his gloves and helmet. He could see her spying all the while, devious thoughts sparkling in her eyes.

Dirk unbuckled and took off his torso armor. He searched her bags, finding mechanic’s tools and a mech suit control pack. “Sorry about your harness outside,” he said. “It went out doing its job.”

She remained in the corner. Without his chest armor, Dirk looked more her match, sweaty white undershirt sticking to his chest. Words, he realized, were pointless. With open palms he searched her, finding duct tape and a grenade in her cargo pockets. “Well, comrade,” he muttered, confiscating the grenade. “I guess it’s just the two of us. Your crew, they’re all dead? I saw one guy out there.”

“Mertvyi, dead. Dead,” said the Russian. “Idioty.”

“Idioty, who, me idiot? Them idiot?” Dirk tried to clarify. She pointed outside, and he agreed. “Yes,” he said. “Very idioty. But not us, babe, we’re smart. We’re gonna get out of here just fine.”

With the rifle mags secured and the pistol on his hip, Dirk felt confident enough to let the Russian woman sit with him at a crate while he planned their grand departure. Referencing holographic plans of the station, he drew a map of the level and a course to the escape pod bay. “Are there still pods?” he asked her, pointing to that section of the map. He pantomimed a pod blasting off.

She nodded affirmative. He chose to believe her. Better to take an escape pod, he thought, than to try and find whatever junkpile Russian shuttle had brought her here. Tracing the route in pencil, he added a stop at the central computer. “Vor,” she said, watching him intently. For the first time she smiled. “Thief.”

“Thief? No. I’m a collector of bounties and items of concern for paying buyers,” said Dirk, rising from the table. “If we’re timing this escape to catch The Bitch we’ve got about—”

“Thief, good,” she said, pointing to him with an index finger that touched his sternum.

“Oh, you like a thief,” said Dirk, looking her over again. “Well, honey, if we’re a team, there’s two hundred grand if we grab those files.”

She blinked, not comprehending. He liked having a companion he could blather secrets to, one who wouldn’t talk back or critique his planning. “Kosmova,” he said, sounding out ‘Космова’ emblazoned on her uniform.

“Kosmova,” she said back.

There was an hour to go until The Bitch returned. That meant it was time to get moving. With her helmet and chestplate back on, the trooper extended a hand. “Volkolak,” Kosmova said, indicating the rail rifle and its ammo, “i magaziny.”

Dirk scowled. It was one thing to plan an escape with the woman. It was another to give her a weapon. In this case, though, the weapon was hers—although her commander would have said it belonged to the Soviet people. Her commander was currently maur-chow, so his opinion could be safely discarded. What of Dirk’s own philosophies? On the practical side, he knew he could not shoot his way through a maur nest alone. After a moment he gave her back her rifle.

When she got the mag from him, she locked it in. “Vzryvchatka,” she said, patting the side.

“Sure, you too,” said Dirk. He checked the mag of the pistol. Twelve high-velocity sidearm rounds would have to do. For good measure, he retraced their plan on the pencil diagram. “Leave here. This hallway. Boom. Boom. Computer bank. Up here. Escape pods. Got it?”

She nodded. He put his own helmet back on. “Hey,” she said, to his surprise. From her kit she pulled a green transmitter and clipped it to his chest armor like a boutonnière.

Dirk eyed it as best he could. “Russkie IFF,” he said, “smart. Your big AT poppa out front nearly cooked me when I touched down.”

Kosmova and Maxtrim moved down the hall with purpose. The base power generator was less than happy, and the lights seemed ready to plunge toward final darkness. “Good thing we’re bugging out now,” Dirk remarked.

A lanky security robot, American issue, shuffled toward them. “Present ID or prepare to be—”

Dirk downed it with a pistol slug. Eleven rounds to go. “This way,” he whispered, hearing the noxious scuttling of maurs in the paneling below. Miraculously, they managed to reach the main computer without incident.

A Soviet crowd control robot, squat and wide, was waiting near the main computer access. Dirk paused, but Kosmova approached the machine with confident authority. It turned to salute her arrival.

Dirk went to work on the central terminal. This, he was actually prepared for. He navved through some login bullshit, plugged in a scraper card he’d bought to drain the archives, and watched six petabytes of cloning data begin to transfer.

Kosmova shouted something. Dirk swiveled to see what had happened. Walking toward them from the personnel quarters was a lumpy, pimpled man of maybe thirty-five years. "Is it done?" he asked, his voice shaky. "Did you destroy it?"

The Russian robot looked like it was ready to blast him. Kosmova gave it an order, and it stood down.

"Destroy what, the nest?" asked Dirk. "No, they're still crawling all over the place. Come with us, we're going to the escape pods."

The lumpy man saw what Dirk was doing with the transfer drive. "You're taking it with you?" he asked, astonished. "The cloning data, it needs to be destroyed. I explained it all in my emergency broadcast."

"That's not my call," said Dirk. "I work for the buyer."

"You don't understand," the scientist shouted, impotent. "This work we're doing, if the technology gets good enough, people are going to start selecting their genes, selecting their children's genes. People like you or me, imperfect people, we won't exist anymore. It's horrific. That's why I brought the eggs here."

"You brought the eggs here?" Dirk demanded. The Russian woman looked to him, clearly concerned by his tone. She did not know what the two men were saying.

"Yes," said the lumpy scientist, rage in his weak, vindictive eyes. "And if you don't stop what you're doing, I have no choice. I'll call them here."

"You wouldn't dare," said Dirk. He should have shot him right there, but he was soft. The man looked so pathetic, so miserable. He wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt that he'd come to his senses. There was no sense in such men, though.

"Come to me, angels!" the crazed scientist shouted, bellowing in an unflattering screech to call the maurs from their nesting grounds. "Come to me, come to me!"

As he said it the third time, Dirk shot him dead. The bullet went through his throat, silencing him, and his eyes went wide and bloodshot as he toppled backward.

The damage had been done. The creatures had heard him. "We need to get the hell out of here," said Dirk, turning back to the alarmed woman with the rifle. He checked the progress of the transfer. Only thirty percent. This wasn't going to be good.

Kosmova heard the maurs coming. So did Maxtrim. “Get that robot over to the door!” he said, pointing to the source of the scurrying sound. She gave it an order, and it clanked to position, extending a heavy blade from its wrist and arming a snub-nose cannon. He owed the Russian bot for this one.

At sixty percent he saw the first Maur. “You get the escape pod ready,” he said to Kosmova, pointing at the exit hallway. She looked at him blankly, afraid. She did not go.

The crowd control robot engaged the first maur in the doorframe, physically blocking the rest of the swarm as it wrestled with the orange-crusted beast. The robot’s knife plunged between plates, and its arm cannon blew fat chunks of limbs and antennae away.

Still, inch by inch, the suicidal swarm pushed the stalwart robot back. Soon they would flood the computer room. Seventy percent complete. The Russian raised her rifle, and with discipline she switched to single fire.

Blam! The first shot from the Volkolak blew a bowling ball hole through a maur. “Explosive rounds?” Dirk laughed, astonished. “You were holding out on me!”

She took three more shots, one of which damaged the cannon arm of the robot. She cursed as she saw it leak oil. With one last stab, the bot pushed forward, and Dirk knew at once what he had to do. He threw the Soviet grenade.

Kosmova covered when she saw it, so he figured he should cover as well. It was a roaring blast. A chitinous screech. Then quiet. In the smoke and bug guts of the aftermath, Dirk saw the transfer completed. “Go!” he shouted, pocketing the drive. He did not wait to see how many maurs were left.

The two ran to the escape pods at Mercury’s pace. “Eto zaymet, vozmozhno, tridtsat sekund,” said Kosmova, activating the lifeboat control system. He let her work, and turned his attention to the hall behind.

Above, a lifeboat was lowering toward them. Its servo rumble mixed with a new sound, one as revolting as the maurs’ crawl but higher and more choral in tenor. It was a swarm of their larvae growing near.

“Baby, give me the rifle,” said Dirk. “Kosmova! Volkolak!”

Climbing a ladder to open the lifeboat hatch, Kosmova dropped him the weapon. He caught it just as the wave of ravenous, gooey larvae crawled into view. “My God,” he sneered at the sight, and with the rest of the explosive rounds in the mag he started blasting them to skittering hell.

His suit timer pinged. The Bitch was coming in fast. “We gotta go!” he shouted, looking up. He watched from below as the Russian fought with the lifeboat hatch, leg muscles tensed in her fatigues. With a grunt, she got it open, and he followed her inside.

They shut themselves into the escape pod, and the hangar doors to space cracked open with a depressurizing woosh. Even from here he could see the shuttle coming in. They didn’t have much time.

“I’m a pilot,” he said, shoving her from the chair to take it for himself. He bypassed a dozen safety checks and hit the gas as hard as a shitty lifeboat engine would allow. With a tinny roar it blasted off from Majestic 611. The getaway was clean. The stars ahead shined bright.

Brighter still was the anti-tank round arcing straight for the XC-80 shuttle. On autopilot, The Bitch did not evade. “No!” Dirk shouted, red in the face, watching his investment explode like a dashed chandelier. “Your stupid goddamned AT robot! You stupid Soviets! That was our getaway ship!”

With Dirk’s Soviet IFF, the lifeboat was not at risk of additional AT robot fire, but in every other way it was well and truly screwed. It had no fuel to make it out of the asteroid field, or to turn around and land back on 611. It could only trundle out of that robot’s firing range, then wait for rescue in deep space.

“The best laid plans,” Dirk sighed. He flicked on the American distress beacon built into the lifeboat. Rising from his seat, he saw that the Russian trooper had done the same—with her Soviet emergency transponder.

“Posmotrim, kto otkliknetsya pervym,” said Kosmova. He realized, aboard a computerized ship, he could actually translate whatever the hell she was saying. ‘Let’s see who responds first,’ the translation read, referring to the dueling distress calls.

“Yeah, let’s,” said Dirk, removing himself from his black plate armor. The microgravity of a ship without a stabilization generator provided its own unique challenges. “For now, we’ve got time to kill.”

Dirk stashed the data drive safely away. In his underclothes, he mag-strapped his armor in the back. Then he turned to the dark-haired young woman with the pixie cut.

Her eyes told a straight enough story. He wasn’t through with her yet. He pushed over to her, bumping panels as their bodies connected. He pressed his palm against her leg as she gripped him, biting his neck with a smile.

Some time later, Dirk Maxtrim slid his hand up to caress the back of her head. He kissed her, and in the same moment made an imperceptible move to disable the Soviet distress call. For today, at least, it was all going to be alright.

---

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