The Tartarus Directive

Chapter 16

The elevator doors slid open. The main lighting was off so the corridor was illuminated only by dim red emergency lights.

"Attention. Attention. All A-level personnel. Emergency containment procedures have been activated," a garbled, robotic voice repeated.

Griff reached into his coat to draw his gyrojet. He felt around in the empty holster for a few seconds, realizing he was entirely unarmed. He stepped out into the corridor, the elevator doors closing behind him. The eerie darkness here reminded him of the corridors in the wreck of the Atlas.

He took only a few steps forward before his boot slipped in fluid on the floor--blood. His eyes adjusted to the darkness and he could see the bodies of security officers and residents littering the corridor floor. These corpses and long, black, still-warm burn marks on the floor and walls were all that remained of the firefight that had occurred recently.

Traversing the floor with care, he tried to open each of the automatic doors as he came to them, all of which were rendered inoperable due to the lockdown. The wail of the sirens and the looping message were punctuated by the drip-dripping of blood and low rumble of the ship's systems.

Griff came upon the body of a kitted-out security officer and searched her for a weapon. He turned her over and felt around in the dark until he pried her gyrojet pistol out of her hand and found a couple of loaded magazines.

His first objective was the A level security office. From there, Griff thought he might find clues as to Mavros' whereabouts. Given the bloodbath in the corridor, he was rightly convinced that Mavros had escaped, most definitely with the help of his surviving underlings.

The darkness was disorienting, but he nevertheless found the security office. Unlike the other doors, Griff found the security office's had been forced open and its electronic controls ripped out of the wall clumsily.

The situation in the security office was no better than the corridor--the dead everywhere, the armory raided, and the cells devoid of prisoners. Nothing there gave Griff any clue as to where Mavros was besides the plain and simple fact that he had escaped custody.

Griff flipped through the frequencies on his communicator but was met with nothing but static. He could not get through to anyone. The only explanation he could come up with in the moment was that there was some kind of jammer somewhere on the ship. Even if this was the case, he knew he did not have time to find the jammer and stop Mavros, wherever he was.

Though the A level armory had been more or less picked clean, he managed to scrounge up some more gyrojet magazines and a vest of body armor that had been buried underneath overturned furniture and empty cartridge boxes. Given the number of armed people who had been killed by Mavros and his goons and the weapons stolen from the security forces, Griff expected nothing short of heavy resistance.

Next, Griff headed for the bridge to continue his search. The Tartarus Directive would be an unnecessarily complex route to go if Mavros could simply seize control of the ship. It took Griff only a few minutes to reach the bridge. He was relieved to find the doors thoroughly sealed. The intercom next to the door was still functioning so he called the bridge to check its status.

One of the officers on the bridge responded, telling Griff that Mavros' men had attempted and failed to take over the bridge and that the bridge crew sealed themselves inside by welding the doors shut. Both Griff and the officer ignored the fact that the bridge crew had trapped themselves inside, though it was clearly the only conceivable way to ensure the bridge's safety.

The private elevator to Commander Rowland's quarters told a different story entirely. The lockdown on the elevator had been overridden using the RFID badge of the security officer assigned to the elevator who had the misfortune to be on-duty during the attack. Griff boarded the elevator, riding it up to the commander's quarters.