by Andrew Beery
Judging from the layout and various access panels I was seeing on the sides and ceiling of this shaft… I suspected that it served a function similar to our Jeffries tubes on the Gilboa.
I knew I needed to find a hidey-hole soon. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out I was in the ventilation system. The faster I could move out of them and truly obscure my position, the better the chance I could avoid detection long enough to figure out how to escape and get back to the Gilboa. There were numerous ventilation grates. Some were even in the open position. The problem was the spaces on the other side were always jet black. I had no way of knowing where the floor was… I could be crawling out a shaft that was thirty feet in the air and falling to my death and not know it until my knees drove thru my chin.
There was another concern. The tube I was in was getting progressively warmer. Several times I would head down a branch and run into a sealed hatch. I avoided the temptation to try and open one because I was willing to bet my last dollar such an action would show up on a monitoring system somewhere. I did, however, notice that several of them were quite warm which led me to believe whatever was on the other side of ‘said hatch’ was not environmentally suitable for two-legged bags of meat like myself.
These dead ends were becoming more frequent and to be honest… they were pissing me off. Every time I would run into one I was forced to make my way back up one of the shafts I had just crawled through.
I don’t know. Maybe it was the bumps and bruises acquired when I was thrown across the bridge in that last fire-fight. Maybe it was the banging of my head into the gorgeous face of that Merab clone. Maybe it was the hours of crawling on my now thoroughly skinned hands and knees… but I was getting tired of being in this ventilation system. I decided I needed a change of venue.
The next time I arrived at one of those ventilation grates leading into a room… whether it was a dark room or not… I was going to give it a go. I figured at this point I had very little to lose. If I fell to my death because I crawled out of a vent with a two-story drop at least, I would not have to explain to my wife how I got into this mess. I had learned over the years that the simple fact that my current predicament was in no way my fault… would have very little bearing on her wrath. A point in her favor… after she got done dressing me down and speculating in great detail as to the likely origins of my genetic heritage… we would spend several hours making up. For the record, I was a fan of the making up.
As it turned out, I didn’t need to worry about a fall. As soon as I opened the first vent, I arrived at… the chamber it led into lit up. My guess was there was some type of motion sensor in the room that triggered the lights to come on.
While it was nice to know that the floor was only about a meter below the opening, the lights coming on presented me with two problems. First, my eyes had adjusted to the relative dark of the conduits I had been crawling through. The sudden illumination effectively blinded me. The second issue was the one that worried me more.
Would the automation systems that ran this facility notice the lights turning on and send somebody to investigate?
As soon as my eyes cleared, I scanned the room. It appeared to be some type of machine room. Now that being said, I still had no idea what the room was used for. There were a few control surfaces scattered here and there but other than that it appeared everything was automated. This wasn’t really a surprise given that the driving force behind the whole Defiler situation seemed to be a set of artificial intelligences with mommy and daddy abandonment issues.
The next few rooms seemed to be virtually identical to the first. This gave a limited clue as to what was going on. Whatever the purpose of these machines, it was something that needed to be scaled up by replication of facilities.
That in itself was interesting and told me a little about what was going on. If you needed to do more of something… whatever that something was… you typically had two choices. You could build a bigger machine to handle the task, or you could build more machines to handle the task.
It seemed the Defiler AI had chosen the second approach over the first. This realization piqued my interest. It was a logical approach if you needed the redundancy of multiple mechanisms more than you needed efficiency… or… if what you needed to accomplish did not scale. For example, if you were producing a clone army… more clones were preferable to bigger clones.
None of that mattered for the moment. I had been crawling around air shafts for hours. I was tired, sweaty, cut up, hungry and thirsty. This last with a big capital T. I needed to find a source of food and water. Without them, it was unlikely I would last long enough to make good my escape.
The next chamber I entered was different on a number of levels. First, the shape of the room was different. It was much larger both in terms of width and depth but also in terms of height. It could have easily been one of the larger shuttle bays on the Gilboa.
Second, and perhaps more concerning, this room was not unoccupied. Six of the Neanderthal-Human hybrids that we had first encountered around the Taserite homeworld of Faqqa were busy moving a pallet of drums from one section of the room to another. They were being directed by one of the Saulite B’Elanna clones.
I felt a sudden pinch at the base of my neck. I put my hand up and felt a small scar. Suddenly I had a really bad feeling about things. I remembered the slight pain in about the same location when I first awoke in the room with Ktan. Had she done more than simply heal my injuries? Had she planted some type of device in me? And if she had, what was its function? Tracking? Control? Some combination?
My worst fears came true a moment later. The redhead running the show across the large bay turned in my direction. As I was pretty much behind some fairly sizable pieces of noisy plumbing and she was about four hundred feet away, I was reasonably sure she hadn’t heard me. The fact that whatever the hell it was in my neck woke up and she turned to look right at where I was hiding in exactly the same moment represented a pretty high degree of correlation in my not-so-shabby mind. I could see the woman’s mouth move as she spoke to her companions.
They dropped what they were doing and started to move in my direction. There were a lot of things going through my mind at that moment. Top of the list was a sudden a fervent wish that I had stayed in the ventilation shaft. Sadly, that was water under the bridge. I was going to need to adjust my strategy.
The way I saw it, I had three choices. I could scramble back into the ventilation shaft. I could remain where I was and hope that their walking straight at me was all a coincident and they would stop short of my position. Or third, I could hope I could run faster than any of them.
After a moment’s careful consideration, I decided all three of the primary options were unlikely to lead to success. That left option four. The biggest advantage to option four was that it was not options one through three. The biggest problem with it was that there was no option four.
At the rate the neander-thugs were approaching, I figured I had about twenty to twenty-five seconds to craft a hypothetical option four. Sadly, inspiration was not forthcoming. In the end, I decided to make a mad dash for a door to my left… at least running gave me something to do while I contemplated the possibilities.
I must have made it a good ten feet before my head exploded in pain. To my credit… I made it another ten feet before I passed out.
2100.1207.2045 Galactic Normalized Time
Stealing her cloaked shuttle was easier than it should have been. Merab had argued passionately with Colonel Morrison to mount a rescue effort. She knew better than most what the Defilers would do with the Admiral if they had the time to work on him in earnest.
Officially the Colonel was forced to stand behind the orders of the First Officer and now acting captain of the Gilboa. Unofficially, he agreed that some risks were worth taking. Commander Shelby was a fine officer, but she was not Dog Riker.
Frustrated, Merab had gotten ready to leave the Colonel’s office in defeat. Before she could
rise from her chair, he coughed to get her attention. He had opened a folder on his personal digital assistant. The folder in question contained the guard rotations for various stations around the ship… including her captured shuttle.
The Marine Colonel then very carefully placed the PDA on his desk where she could easily see it. He made a point of carefully looking at his watch and said he needed to step out for three minutes… no more and no less… all the while giving her a steady look.
She took the hint and reviewed the schedule the moment he was out of the room. At first, she was unsure of what he wanted her to see. Then she spotted it. It seemed there was an unexplained five-minute gap between the guard shifts responsible for monitoring her shuttle.
Chapter 15: Hair of the Dog…
Some headaches define description. This was one of those. I kept my eyes closed… not so much as to feign unconsciousness, but rather as a matter of simple survival. I knew that to open my eyes would be to subject myself to horrible knives of pain as my Mark-One optics started sending signals to the raw gray matter that was my well and truly abused brain.
I heard voices and realized that wherever I was… I was still being carried. I also realized that I was not yet restrained. The mush in my head wasn’t functioning at full capacity, but I knew that once I reached wherever it was, they were taking me it was game over. The likelihood of my escaping again was somewhere between none and non-existent.
It was now or never… and never was not really one of the options. I don’t know. Call me obstinate, but I just didn’t feel like being cooperative at the moment. I rolled to one side in the liter they were using to carry me and then rolled quickly to the other side… swinging my foot and using the momentum of my roll to kick the head of one of the neander-thugs holding the liter.
There was a satisfying crunch, and the homo-non-sapient collapsed like a sack of potatoes. At this point, I was somewhat committed, and as I result, I opened my eyes. The experience was everything I had been expecting. I gritted my teeth and kept moving. I wasn’t sure where I was going yet, but I had been winging things all my life… and while it was true that the day was still young… I wasn’t dead yet.
I felt a stabbing electric pain in my head. If I had to guess, I would say my new friends were trying to tame me again. Sadly, for them, this dog didn’t take well to training. Relative to the massive hurt that was already going on in my head… this wasn’t bad at all… especially as I had been expecting it.
That might have accounted for why I was able to keep functioning for a few seconds after they started the electro-shock therapy. One of the neander-thugs was holding a small device which I guessed was the control for the pain module in my noggin. I kicked it out of his hand and continue my rotation to follow thru with a strike to his ugly nose using the palm of my hand. I wasn't gentle. There was another satisfying crunch, and another sack of potatoes collapsed.
With the agonizer off for the moment and the single remaining neander-thug trying to untangle himself from both the gurney and his two best buds, I decided it was an excellent time for a vigorous run. Yup… stretching the old legs was just the thing to take my mind off the fact that a malevolent AI had kidnapped me, an army of clones was hunting me down, and help was nowhere to be found. Just me and myself against the world – let’s attack!
At first, the run felt good. My legs had been cramping because of all the crawling. Stretching them was just what the doctor ordered. Sadly, it seemed the events of the last day or so had sapped my endurance. I didn't see a lot of places to hide, and it was getting harder and harder to keep running at full tilt. I knew the one clone I had left standing would be chasing after me soon… if he wasn’t already. The thought drove me to keep pushing myself when every fiber of my being wanted nothing more than to stop for a fiver.
What I failed to appreciate was that my brother from another mother was a lot closer than I realized. It seemed the short, stocky legs of a neander-thug did not greatly impede his ability to chase down bruised and battered Admirals of the homo-sapient variety. I might have made it about two hundred yards down a disgustingly straight and unobscured corridor before a set of excessively hairy and powerful hands wrapped themselves around my lower legs.
Now it was my turn to go down like a sack of potatoes. It took me a moment to catch my breath. I struggled feebly, but the neander-thug was a heck of a lot stronger than I was. Unfortunately for him, I was trained in a number of hand-to-hand combat techniques. Strength was often over-rated in fights. I eventually managed to get to my feet… despite my friend working hard to restrain me. I should point out that in the midst of life and death struggles I’ve been known to fight dirty. It’s a failing I know, but we must all live with our own set of faults.
It seems inserting your fingers into the nostrils of a neander-thug makes them especially compliant. As my friend was desperately trying to decide what to do about the aforementioned fingers up his ‘snoze’… I applied a well-placed uppercut to the base of his chin.
Who knew that neander-thugs had glass jaws? Sadly, I think I might have torn his nose a little in the process of breaking ‘said jaw.’ There was a copious amount of blood present as he hit the floor. I resolved to apologize should we ever meet up again.
I took the opportunity to resume my dash down the corridor. I had this sneaky suspicion that my lone surviving ‘escort’ was not going to be in a very sociable mood.
After about another hundred yards or so I finally began to pass what I assumed were doors. Most were closed. I started periodically trying them. There seemed to be a slight depression in the sliding panel. As my fingers touched the indentations, there was a slight haptic feedback… but the door remained closed.
The good news was the corridor had finally begun to turn ever so slightly. This meant that if I ever was to find a door that would open… my furry friend… the one that I had left after administering an impromptu rhinoplasty, would not see where I went.
Finally, as my fingers brushed the tenth or eleventh panel, the haptic response was different. To my temporary relief, the door panel recessed into the wall. I rushed into the room hoping to find it empty but ready to take on all comers if need be. What I wasn’t expecting was what I found.
The room had a very familiar look to it. In fact, my uniform was still folded and laying on a very familiar table. I was back in the medical bay I had awoken in several lifetimes ago. It seemed Ktan was in the room as well. This time she was wearing a Galactic Order uniform of her own.
I nodded my head at the Saulite doctor and tried to act nonchalant as I looked for a way of taking her out before she could activate the agonizer thingy-ma-bob in my neck.
“So, what’s the deal with the uniform? You planning on paying a visit to the Gilboa? You should know my marine commander runs a tight ship. There is virtually no chance of your getting onboard without being detected… especially now that we know how to see through your cloaking technology.”
Ktan smiled. She truly was gorgeous, but I wasn’t going to be falling for any of her games. She seemed no worse for wear from my head-butt maneuver from earlier in the day. This was surprising in that I was pretty sure I had broken her nose. Of course, the Defilers had access to some pretty good medical tech, so I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised.
I started to move to the side. There was a rack housing various medical type devices as well as supplies. I was sure a properly motivated person could find something useful for incapacitating a deadly Saulite ginger. It was then I spotted the second person in the room. My jaw hit the floor… metaphorically.
“Good morning Admiral.”
“Mike?” I asked with a certain sense of incredulity. The Gilboa’s Marine Commander was certainly not someone I was expecting to see… at least not here in this place.
“In the flesh sir! I’m happy to see you did us the favor of finding us, so we didn’t have to go find you.”
“How… why… ?” I mumbled.
Mike turned to the S
aulite doctor with a questioning look on his face.
“He’s been through a lot. Some confusion is to be expected.”
I’ll admit I was operating on half a tank at this point… especially in the brainpan department. I finally realized that the woman was Doctor Merab and not Ktan as I had originally feared.
“To say I’m glad to see you both is probably an understatement. Where are the rest of the troops? I’m surprised you convinced Shelby to authorize such a mission. She’s not a risk-taker. Maybe I’m finally rubbing off on her.”
“Yeah… about that sir. We’re kind of flying under the radar here… from both sides,” Mike said under his breath.
“Well then,” I said with a smile, “here’s to flying under the radar.”
Seeing the general state of disrepair of the medical garb I was wearing, Merab tactfully suggested I don my uniform as it was both clean and in good repair. I have to admit, it felt good to be wearing something that was both familiar and not tattered by endless hours of ‘spelunking’ through ventilation conduits.
Before I changed, Merab used a surgical kit to carefully remove the thingy-ma-bob that her sister clone had embedded at the base of my skull. The topical anesthetic was only marginally effective, but at least the bad guys wouldn’t be able to use their electro-shock therapy on me again.
As I sealed the last seam on my collar, I stepped out from behind the privacy partition and addressed my rescuers.
“I assume there is more to your plan than simply locating me. You have a plan for getting us out too… yes?”
“Oh ye of little faith sir,” Morrison chuckled. “Our chariot awaits on the roof. We borrowed the cloaked shuttle the good doctor was kind enough to provide for us. The J’ni with a little help from Whiskers tweaked the field emitters to do a better job hiding the guy. I doubt the Defilers will be able to detect her even given their understanding of their cloaks.”