by A. K. DuBoff
“You should hand yourself over now, if you want to live,” Kaen told the alien.
“Whyever would I do that? I’ve won.”
“They’ll have the door to the bridge open in a matter of minutes.”
“A course has already been set. By the time they override the controls, we’ll be among my people.”
A bang sounded on the door.
Kaen knew they’d never try to bust through the steel. That was an alert for him, if there was any part of himself. His friends were coming.
“I sense you getting your hopes up,” Nox said. “You’re only setting yourself up for disappointment.”
“Where are you going to meet your people?”
“Gaelon.”
“Ah, so that’s why no one goes to that system.”
“One of the reasons.”
“And the others?” Kaen prompted.
“I’m surprised you don’t know already. It’s—”
The door flew open, and he was on the ground before he had a chance to react.
Kaen-Nox struggled against Major Sandren’s grasp on his arms while Kira grabbed his ankles.
“Just need a little more time,” Nox said. “How about something to keep them busy?”
— — —
Kira swiveled her hands to better hold Kaen’s writhing form. “The cuffs, Major?”
“Working on it,” Sandren grunted while slipping one of Kaen’s hands through the stasis cuffs they’d grabbed from the supply locker outside the airlock.
The first cuff cinched around the colonel’s wrist, and Sandren hurriedly jammed the man’s hand into the other.
Kira was just about to force his knees up so they could lock his ankles when Kaen’s booted feet kicked free of her hands. One foot struck the side of her head, and she tumbled toward the wall. Sudden anger welled in her—disproportionate for the action. Her limbs started to burn.
No, don’t transform! You can’t now! She willed herself to calm.
The colonel grunted, slamming a fist into Sandren’s face.
Blood poured from the major’s nose, but he threw his weight against Kaen. “Kira, the cuffs!”
Still fighting back the impulse to shift, Kira dove onto the colonel’s legs and forced his knees to bend. The physical aggression was the perfect channel for the raw emotion flooding through her, and the burning started to diminish.
Sandren strained against the writhing colonel, reaching out the tether to loop around his ankles.
Just a little more… With a surge of strength, Kira got Kaen into the necessary position, and the cuffs cinched tight. She dropped the anchor to the deck, locking Kaen in place.
Kira scrambled backward. “All right!”
The major rested on his knees. “You had me worried there. Your eyes were starting to get glowy.”
“Yeah, not sure how I avoided transforming. Maybe I’m getting some control.”
“I hope so.”
Kira rose to her feet. “You know, all in all, that actually went better than I expected.”
Sandren wiped the blood from his upper lip. “Easy for you to say.”
She looked at the flight controls. “Never mind. I retract my statement.”
CHAPTER 11
Kira groaned. Well, that’s just fantastic.
“What is it?” Sandren asked.
“The ship is on auto-pilot, preparing to make a jump to the nav beacon outside the Elvar Trinary—but the destination is in the Gaelon System,” Kira replied, returning her gaze to the navigation screen.
“So?”
“Aside from the part about the unwanted jump, that’s a… bad place to go.”
Kaen writhed on the floor, jangling his cuffs.
Sandren frowned. “You need to be more specific.”
“I don’t know what’s there, Major,” Kira admitted, “but everyone in the Elvar Trinary knows not to enter Gaelon. It’s the adjacent system.”
“It doesn’t matter. We’ll cancel the jump and have the ship turned around in no time.” He looked over Kira’s shoulder at the controls. “Oh.”
“Yeah, I was about to get to the part about a nav override triggering a life support failure.”
“How in the stars did he rig this so quickly?”
Kira grimaced. “He didn’t get to be a colonel for nothing.”
“Fok!” Sandren scanned the panel. “Can you undo it?”
“Honestly? I’m not sure, sir. But in the interest in being productive, yes.”
“I’ll take it. What can I do to help?”
“I don’t suppose you have study notes from the nav system programming final exam on hand, do you?”
Sandren shook his head. “Nope.”
“Well, then I guess we need to get into the communications system.”
“Now that I might be able to help with.” Sandren leaped over Kaen so he could access the communications console on the side of the room. “I’ve had to rewire these a time or two in my day. I should at least be able to get a distress call to base.”
“If you can manage it, Nia or Kyle might be able to talk us through how to create a back door into the system so we can undo the nav lock—or at least keep us from jumping to subspace. Six minutes until we’re in position for the jump.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
While Sandren got to work, Kira tried to regain control of the ship.
She tended to think of the colonel as being mostly a paper-pusher, but she had to admit that the work on the system had been genius. Tying the life support to navigation was no small feat, especially in such a short time. But, being a rush job, the work was imperfect.
“Sir, I think I may have something,” Kira said.
“Good, because I was able to get a distress signal to base, but any kind of text or voice communication is a no-go for now.”
“I think we can do a system reset to wipe out the current destination without permanently disabling the ship like he intended,” Kira continued. “Problem is, that means we’ll lose life support for that time—but at least it would cancel the jump.”
“How long for a reboot?”
“Eleven minutes.”
Sandren smiled. “No problem! Plenty of air and temperature regulation won’t be a problem for a lot longer than that.”
“Yes, sir. That’s not my concern. Trouble is if the system doesn’t come back on afterward.”
“The Guard will have a ship here before that becomes an issue. Besides, we have our suits.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I sense another ‘but’.”
Kira nodded. “Whoever the alien was going to meet, my guess is they’ll want him back.”
“You think they’ll come for him?”
Him… or me. “We don’t know anything about this enemy, sir.”
“You’re right, we can’t rule out any possibility. But we need the facilities at the base to figure out how to get the alien presence out of him.”
Kaen stared up at them. “He said he can’t be removed,” he stammered.
“Colonel?” Sandren leaned down toward him. “Are you—”
Kaen cried out in agony and spasmed. “He’s mine now. You’ll all be.”
Sandren straightened. “Kira, hold on that system reset. I have another idea.”
— — —
Kaen writhed on the ground as Nox regained control.
“Never betray me again or there won’t be any of you left,” Nox snarled in his mind.
Clearly, the alien still didn’t understand the Guard even after spending three years in Kaen’s head. A soldier wouldn’t be consumed so easily.
Above him, Kira and Sandren were talking urgently. As much as Kaen wanted to listen to their conversation, it was taking every bit of his concentration to maintain his place near the front of his consciousness.
Kira bent down and looked him in the eyes. “Colonel, are you in there?” she asked telepathically.
“You can’t help me,” Nox replied on
his behalf.
Kaen shoved him aside. “I’m here! Don’t let him tell you otherwise, Kira.”
Kira smiled. “You’ve got it, Colonel. I’ll do whatever I can to help. But right now, you need to help me. How do we undo the navigation lock?”
“Don’t you dare try to tell her,” Nox threatened privately to Kaen.
“You have no leverage, Nox. There’s nothing you can do to this ship that won’t kill you, too, or Kira—and I know how important she is to you.”
“Sorry, Nox, but I have to side with the colonel on this one. I see you for what you are.”
Nox’s surprise was palpable. “You can hear us?”
“Yeah, the whole telepathic thing.” Kira cocked her head. “Don’t understand us bipedal types as well as you thought, huh?”
“Your abilities won’t get me out of him,” Nox spat back.
“Maybe not, but guess what? I don’t need Kaen to tell me anything. Push him back as much as you want. I can see your recent memories, Nox, and everything I need to know about the nav system is right there. I know exactly what I need to do.”
“You… you can’t!” the alien stammered. “How…?”
Kira shrugged. “Maybe modifying me wasn’t such a good idea after all.”
— — —
Sandren watched Kira as she bored into the colonel’s mind, her gaze as intense as he’d ever witnessed.
He had no idea if she was making any progress, but it was worth a shot—no sense in risking a reset if it wasn’t necessary.
“The nav command…” Kira said, her voice strained.
Sandren came to attention. “What do we need to do?”
“Go into the main nav directory and enter the following code.” She listed off an alphanumeric string to him.
“One sec.” Sandren did as he was instructed. As soon as the final digit was entered, a command window popped up. “There’s a prompt for contingent relays. I have no clue what that means.” He frowned at the screen.
“Is there a default setting?” Kira asked.
“Yes.”
“Okay, select that. Then things will get tricky. You need to do a physical bypass of the life support system using the wiring under the console.”
Sandren nodded. “Just don’t tell me we have to reverse the polarity.”
A smirk curled Kira’s lips. “If only that worked as well as it always seems to in movies.”
The major dropped to his knees and peeked under the nav console. The metal plate covering the circuitry had already been removed, and it looked like several wires had been spliced together with crude junctures.
“I think I see the problem,” he muttered. “Which ones do I change?”
Kira frowned. “I keep getting an image of a blue wire.”
Sandren swore under his breath. There were at least four blue-ish wires he could see. “You’re going to have to be a lot more specific.”
“You know, the blue—”
“Kira!”
She tore her gaze from Kaen’s prone form. “I’ll have to look at it myself. I can see it, but Nox keeps trying to cloud my perception.”
“Nox? Is that the thing that took over the colonel?”
“That’s what it calls itself. It’s some sort of conscious presence, but I can’t tell what kind of physical form it might possess.”
“We can deal with that later.” Sandren pointed to the hanging wires. “First, what do we do with that? Only two minutes before we jump to subspace and it’ll be too late for a reset.”
“Right.” Kira dropped to her back and began sorting through the wires, her brow furrowed.
Sandren sat back on his heels and allowed her to complete the task without interruption. He was fortunate to be surrounded by such talented colleagues, and Kira was truly one of the best. If he had to be stuck with someone on a ship headed into unknown territory, she was at the top of his list for a partner.
After a tense minute and a half, Kira finally dropped her hands to her side and sat up. “Okay, I think that should do it.”
“How sure are you?”
She shrugged. “Enough that I’d rather try to power on the system and see if this works than find out why Gaelon is off-limits.”
“We’re almost out of time, anyway. Proceed.”
“Here it goes.” Kira took a deep breath and activated the control panel. She half-closed her eyes as though bracing for an explosion.
Sandren took a step back.
The console beeped, and blue lights illuminated across the display.
Kira grinned. “Good news, sir. We’re not going to die.”
“Have you regained control of the nav system?”
She tapped on the menu and nodded. “It appears everything is responding. Jump is cancelled.”
Sandren took a step toward the pilot’s chair. “Well done. Let’s get back to—”
An alarm sounded, echoing in the compact chamber.
“What now?” Sandren’s pulse spiked.
Kira’s face drained. She began cycling through the ship’s systems to identify the issue. “Sir, we’re venting atmosphere.”
“Where? How?”
On the floor, Kaen chuckled to himself. “Stop trying to override the nav controls and I’ll halt the leak.”
Kira scoffed. “Have you forgotten about our suits?”
“You might want to look at it more closely,” Kaen replied.
Sandren looked down at his suit and was horrified to see a gash running along the side of his torso. It must have been ripped in our fight earlier, or maybe when I landed, he realized. So much for having a functional pressure suit.
“You’ll die with us,” he told Kaen.
“Oh, no. This physical form is convenient, but it is not my only means of being. If you don’t want to die, then stop resisting.”
“Too late. Course is already set back to the Guard base,” Kira replied.
“Is it, now?” Kaen smirked. “Then why haven’t we turned around?”
Sandren ran to look over Kira’s shoulder at the controls. “The destination is still set to Gaelon.”
“I changed it!” Kira re-entered the Guard base and the system reset again. “It keeps overriding it. Why haven’t we jumped?”
Fok! Sandren took a steadying breath.
“Oh! The nav console is resetting,” Kira realized. “Shite, that means we’ll probably jump as soon as it finishes.”
“What are our options?”
“We could try the full system reset, but after seeing this, I’m not sure it will work. At a minimum, I imagine we’ll lose life support, like we feared.”
“Do it.”
“But, sir, your suit…”
“I’ll get the patch kit. We can’t risk a jump to subspace,” Sandren said with a tone of finality.
Kira nodded and turned her attention to initiating the reset.
Sandren leaped over Kaen to access the back storage area of the ship. The patch kit was where it should be in a cabinet near the entry airlock. The materials hardly looked like something that would hold up long-term, but it would have to do. He hurriedly placed the adhesive strips along the tear. By the time he was finished, Kira had completed the preparations for the reset.
“Ready?” she asked.
“You’re making a mistake,” Kaen objected from the deck.
“If you don’t want us to do this, then that means it’s exactly what we should be doing,” Sandren shot back. He nodded to Kira. “Proceed.”
“Here it goes.” She initiated the restart sequence.
All the mechanical and electrical systems cut out, leaving the cockpit in darkness. The artificial gravity released, and Sandren slowly floated upward. His stomach turned over, but he took calming breaths to settle his senses.
He waited to the count of sixty before concern began to set in. “Why hasn’t it come back on?”
“I don’t know,” Kira replied through the black to Sandren’s right.
Great, we’re going
to be floating out here until we die. That kind of thinking wouldn’t solve the situation. “How visible are we out here powered down?”
“Not very.” Just the slightest hint of concern edged into Kira’s voice. “Do you think the Guard will have sent a rescue ship by now?”
“That’s my hope. I did get off the distress call before the shutdown.”
“Good, and we haven’t altered course.”
“All the same, we’re a speck in the black. We need to activate the emergency beacon.” Sandren shook his head. “Which was probably right below the patch kit. I wasn’t thinking.”
“We all have a few things on our minds. Don’t worry about it,” Kira assured him.
Feeling his way through the dark, Sandren worked through the door into the open area surrounding the airlock. He followed his mental map of where he’d just been, feeling in front of him for a latch to the cabinet. There was no way he’d be able to locate and activate a beacon on feel alone, but there was one item he knew exactly how to find if he could just get the cabinet open.
His hand found the handle and pulled. He ran his fingers along the inside panel of the door, and a cool cylinder met his probing touch.
“Watch your eyes,” he warned Kira. With his own eyes closed, he activated the flashlight.
Red light illuminated the cabin, casting an eerie glow in the small space.
Sandren checked below the patch kit, finding nothing. He moved on to the adjacent cabinet.
“Who outfitted this place?” he grumbled aloud.
“I don’t think this ship was ever meant to venture out on its own,” Kira replied from the adjacent room.
Sandren opened another cabinet, and his light found its mark: an orange box with all manner of emergency markings. “Got it!”
Without hesitation, he activated the beacon.
He carefully propelled himself back toward Kira in the cockpit. “Now we wait.”
Kaen scowled below where he was secured to the bottom deck.
“What will we tell everyone about the colonel?” Kira asked.
“I’ll think of something. Maybe that he was exposed to a contagion and needs to go into quarantine,” Sandren suggested.