No Surrender - Jeff Mariotte [16]
At some point, she believed, the rest would try to overcome the comparatively few da Vinci crew members on board. Corsi had had five more of her people beam down, but it was still a drop in the bucket when you compared the numbers. She wasn’t sure what would happen if the prisoners got unruly. Maintaining order on a Kursican prison station wasn’t her responsibility. She could—and she was certain that Captain Gold would back her up on this—simply pull her crew off and turn the station over to the prisoners if it looked like they were becoming unruly. But she hoped that a little show of force would prevent things from getting to that point, and that the Kursican authorities would send a replacement staff as quickly as possible. To that end, she had decided that every member of her team who wasn’t specifically involved in medical treatment or an engineering task should keep weapons visible at all times. Going along with that was the necessity of remaining alert—the last thing they needed was a prisoner getting his or her hands on one of their phasers.
Soloman approached her. Like the others, he had removed his environmental suit in order to move more freely, and his uniform was stained and torn in a couple of spots. He had been in and under and through nearly every component of the station’s operations center during the course of the day. P8 Blue was keeping things running, while Soloman concentrated on repairing the damage that had been done and trying to figure out exactly what happened. Now he had an expectant look on his face.
“What is it, Soloman?” she asked.
“I’ve been working on re-creating the sequence of events that led to the damage to the station’s systems, Commander,” he said. “I’ve been able to access station logs, which have given me some information, and by working backward through the system failures, I’ve been able to determine the sequence of damages.”
“And what have you found out?” she asked. Instead of looking directly at him, though, she looked past his head, toward the prisoners, making sure they could see that she remained armed and observant. A few meters down the hall was Drew, and Duffy beyond him, and where the line of prisoners awaiting treatment turned a corner, Hawkins was stationed.
“There were saboteurs in place on the station, presumably in crew positions,” he said. “Security on the station was such that only crew members could possibly have had access to some of the more sensitive controls. Since those controls were accessed and altered, the only reasonable assumption is that some crew members were actually working for the opposition.”
“Do we know who the opposition is?” Sonya asked.
“No, Commander. But we know what their goal was—to remove all the station’s crew, any visitors, and the one prisoner, Augustus Bradford, from the station.”
“So my guess would be that Bradford was the main target. They wanted to break him out.”
“That’s a reasonable guess.”
“Go on,” she said.
“The saboteurs disarmed the station’s defenses and altered life-support systems, decreasing the amount of oxygen in the air. The saboteurs must have been equipped with artificial breathing devices, so they could maintain consciousness while everyone else who breathes oxygen—which includes all Kursican guards and crew and most of the prisoners—lost consciousness. With the guards dormant and defenses down, two shuttles approached the station, and the first one docked in the shuttlebay. Several humans came off that shuttle, heavily armed, but the saboteurs’ efforts had already paid off and there was no resistance to them. They beamed the unconscious guards and staff onto the two shuttles—even the ones on duty in the cell