by Paul Teague
The Thirtieth Ship
Zadra Nurmeen prowled through the Ops Area as if he was now the King of the Jungle. He owned this place, it was now his domain. He was quick to take control.
He sent updated objectives directly to The Queen who cascaded them immediately to the Troopers: hunt down the escapees and kill on sight; terminate all humans on board, including the twins, but bring their spines back, he’d need those. They would contain enough genetic data to take out the Zatheon population. When the time was right.
He then contemptuously turned off the holographic screens projecting the faces of the world’s leaders. He didn’t require their presence any more. As far as he was concerned, they were now dead.
They were actually in stasis on the Earth’s surface, their consciousness now turned off. Like the rest of the planet’s inhabitants, either they would never wake up from their sleep, or they would be revived from stasis to find that Earth’s greatest battle had been fought without them.
He checked on the nuclear arsenal that the twins had helped them to launch and noted that the first bombs would start to fall very soon. An excellent bonus – the Helyions thrived in a radioactive environment; it was like pure oxygen was to a human being.
Zadra Nurmeen picked up his own weapon and shot the remaining two human slaves that Pierce had procured. They’d been keeping their heads down, as they had for the past five years in captivity, trying to survive, desperate not to be noticed.
Something beeped on his wrist and he responded to a message on the communication device which he’d been using earlier. He used an alien language – nobody on board The Nexus would ever have been able to translate the content of that conversation.
On Earth there were twenty-nine Helyion ships clustered around Lake Karachay. There was still one ship missing. It would soon dock with The Nexus and be boarded by Zadra Nurmeen’s Helyion army.
He would not require the Troopers for much longer, but he would retain a hundred or so, as a backup plan. Deactivated of course.
It would be a short time until the cloaked ship docked with The Nexus. Just enough time to tie up a final loose end. Zadra Nurmeen grabbed Harold Pierce by his hair and dragged him, unceremoniously, to the airlock.
He didn’t utter a word. He was not like the unstable Henry Pierce – a true despot feels no need to explain himself. Zadra Nurmeen threw Harold into the airlock, turned his back on him, and nodded his head to one of the Troopers. He didn’t even look back as the Trooper closed the door, activated the external doors and blasted whatever wasn’t secured in that area out into space, directly into the path of an approaching Helyion ship.
The doors were open for twenty-two seconds, but that’s all it takes to jettison something – or someone – out into the oblivion of space.
Chapter Five
Remnants
The Queen knew that they were on board the ISOCell – she felt their presence as they arrived.
The last remaining part of her that was not yet dominated by the machine that Henry Pierce had constructed to restrain her, struggled to focus on these two people. It was a woman, younger than her, and a boy. The woman was human, but there was something special about the boy.
Hundreds of messages clouded her thoughts; she was tapped directly into the minds of the entire Trooper army. She was receiving commands via the console on The Nexus but now something strong was coming through.
The boy … he was not entirely human. She felt a Zatheon connection with him, and it was strong.
As she fought to focus on this single train of thought, among hundreds of voices in her head clamouring for attention, she struggled to work out her connection with this boy. She flashed through her fading memories which were now subjugated by the atrocities which Pierce and Zadra Nurmeen had inflicted upon her.
Then she caught it, only for an instant. She knew this boy, she recognized his Zatheon trace. A strong maternal reaction surged through her body, but it was quickly adjusted and was extinguished by the machine to which she was attached. The boy was her son. She’d seen it just for a moment, in a precious glimpse of memory, before her mind was clouded by a thousand thoughts and feelings from her Trooper army.
Viewed as she was now, crucified on this machine which controlled every part of her, she looked like an abomination, a monster created in a lab.
But The Queen was capable of emotion – this was an evil thing that had been done to her.
And had anybody been watching, they would have seen a single tear run down her cheek before those memories were obliterated by her distant Master.
Impetuous
As the Transporter door opened to Quadrant 3 and seven laser targets fixed on the two figures inside, the security team were taken aback to see what was going on.
‘Kneel down and show us your hands!’ the security chief had shouted, nervous about an impending Trooper attack, even though Pierce’s recent announcement had denied that it would now happen.
The two figures inside the lift completely ignored him. They were fighting.
They recognized one of the figures as Doctor Pierce, the man who’d addressed them in the past hour via his Ops Area on The Nexus.
Yet here was Nat, pounding his face with her fists, and clearly doing a good job of it.
Like all bullies, Henry Pierce was just a regular person. Once you removed his weapons, entourage and support network, he was nothing.
Caught in that Transporter together, it was just Nat and him. And once Nat recognized who he was, she had some catching up to do.
Henry Pierce was only in his early fifties, but the force of a sixteen-year-old, six-foot girl launching at him without warning had come as a bit of a shock to him. Particularly as he was already struggling to recover from a wound in the fight that had just taken place in the Ops Area.
Nat was angry, very angry, and she didn’t stop to think how valuable this new captive might be.
With only fifty minutes of life left, this is how she’d decided to spend it. While her twin was risking his life to bring resolution to the problem which was destroying them, Nat was creating a delay which might kill them both.
So hard were Nat’s blows, so violent was her rage, that she had left Henry Pierce a bloody mess on the floor of the lift. It took three security guards to pull her off – she continued punching and screaming even once she’d been restrained.
Henry Pierce’s wounds were so bad that by the time he’d arrived in the MedLab, he’d sunk into unconsciousness.
Had he been awake, Xiang could have shown him how he too was in peril from the NanoVirus that had been released into the bodies of the hybrids, himself included, and perhaps worked towards a swifter solution.
But now, because of Nat’s rage, they were no further forward and he was useless to them.
Interception
The missiles with the shortest distance to travel would fall on the Kremlin in Moscow.
Viktor thought of his own family. They would be among the first to perish in their apartment on the outskirts of Moscow. He had thought when this mission began that they would be safe, deep in sleep after the darkness fell and secure in their family home.
Now they would be among the first to die. Maybe that would not be such a bad thing, they would feel no fear and know no pain.
But Viktor was not about to send his own family, or the people of Moscow, to the grave without a fight. He’d activated The Global Defence Matrix thanks to the data supplied by Mike and he was making headway.
He looked at the missile projections on his screen. There were three minutes before the first nuclear detonation took place.
He forced his mind to focus – if you looked at all the missile trajectories currently shown on his screen, you’d just curl up in a ball and give up. Somehow he had to take out all of these nukes, their destructive capability was immense. If they reached the bunkers it would be ‘game over’ – there would be nobody left to fight.
An all points alert came over his Comms-Tab. Apparently they’d go
t Henry Pierce in the MedLab now, but the crisis situation still remained.
In all his concentration, Viktor had missed an earlier text alert.
‘Two minutes to detonation,’ came the voice on his console.
He glanced at it and gave it a quick scan, noticing the words ‘Lake Karachay’. He’d return to it later; his fingers were working furiously at his screen.
When President Ronald Reagan had imagined this Global Defence Grid in 1983, it is unlikely that he ever conceived that it would be used as it was on that day. One man, alone, trying to single-handedly save the world from destruction. While his friends – he felt that he could call them that now – struggled in their own battles:
Xiang to save the twins, Mike to get a breakthrough which might end the sabotage, the twins to fight for their very existence and Amy who was battling to save her children.
Even if he stopped this attack, Viktor knew that the war was not yet over, the enemy would remain undefeated.
‘One minute to detonation,’ came the voice on his console.
A circular clock countdown appeared at the bottom of his screen. Sixty seconds – fifty-nine seconds – fifty-eight seconds ... that’s how long his wife and daughter had to live. Thousands, if not millions of people would die when that first bomb fell.
Viktor typed furiously at the screen.
He was in, he could target each nuke individually now.
Forty-five seconds – forty-four seconds – forty-three seconds …
Where is the activation system, what’s the code?
‘Mike, do you have any codes in your data set for the Defence Grid?’ he spoke down his Comms-Tab, calmly but urgently.
He felt sweat all down his back, a drop trickled from his forehead onto his workstation.
Thirty-four seconds – thirty-three seconds – thirty-two seconds …
Above Moscow, four nuclear weapons separated off at right angles and fixed on their final coordinates.
‘A-1-00-JKL-4897 … that’s Alpha, One, Zero, Zero ...’
Viktor cut Mike off as he completed the code. ‘Got it, thanks!’ and he quickly typed in the information.
No time for pleasantries now, in just seconds the detonations would begin.
As Viktor keyed in the data he recalled an event that had happened in his own military life, before he’d even had a family that he cared about. A gun held to his head, a terrible game of Russian roulette by a spiteful prison guard and a dead colleague at his side. Viktor had stayed calm then, in spite of seeing his friend’s head blown away right by his side. He’d stayed calm, waited for his moment, and survived to fight another day.
Fifteen seconds – fourteen seconds – thirteen seconds …
The code was accepted, The Global Defence Matrix was activated. On his screen, a red grid appeared around the graphic representation of the globe. Each nuclear weapon was marked and tracked by a yellow symbol on the screen.
Nine seconds – eight seconds – seven seconds …
Viktor slammed the activation button at his console and watched his screen. The red grid illuminated and from each nodal point on his screen a green line mapped to each of the nukes and indicated that every weapon had been targeted in an instant.
One by one, the yellow symbols disappeared on his screen.
The Defence Grid disabled the closest to detonation first, then took out the nukes which had furthest to travel.
Two hundred nuclear weapons blown out of the skies in an instant. There would be some injuries on the planet surface as missile debris hurtled to the ground below, but nowhere near the millions of lives that would have been lost on that day had Henry Pierce and Zadra Nurmeen succeeded in detonating those nuclear bombs.
Viktor sat back in his chair, the sweat on his shirt and forehead the only indications of the intense stress that he’d just been under.
A huge cheer went up in the Control Room. Viktor had been so focused that he hadn’t realized that everybody around him had been watching him, praying that he’d be able to make this right.
Viktor closed his eyes and thought back to the Cold War of 1983 which had caused President Ronald Reagan to create the Star Wars programme.
And he took a moment to thank his country’s former enemy, because without that Defence Grid they would all have lost their lives that day.
Failure
At last, Xiang made a breakthrough. Mike and Magnus had determined that the Trooper in the MedLab room was actually the twins’ natural father.
She could only imagine how difficult that must have been for Mike to discover, having raised Dan and Nat as his own kids, but she knew him well enough already to know that today would not be the day for petulant obstructions.
Dan and Nat would be his dead kids if they didn’t all work together. They were down to their last forty-three minutes of life now.
She’d taken a moment to celebrate the news from Viktor that the nukes had been disabled, but it was far from over yet.
She drew blood from the restrained Trooper – Jeff, as they would have to get used to calling him now.
He was in an extreme state of desolation – whatever had happened to him since his helmet was removed was causing some problems.
It had been difficult for Xiang to take the blood that she needed. Jeff was wriggling and squirming on the MedLab bed, in spite of full body restraints, and his mutterings were just not making any sense.
Xiang left him to the MedLab staff. She moved through into the larger room that her team had commandeered to help to save the lives of Dan and Nat.
Had it been anybody else but Xiang, this might have looked sinister and threatening, but this equipment and these tables had been set up to heal, not to harm. There were two operating tables, two HoverTrolleys and a bed.
It was the best they could do. Whoever had equipped these bunkers had not anticipated the need to carry out any complex processes like this. Xiang needed to be ready for the worst case scenario – or the best case scenario – depending on which way you looked at it.
She knew that potentially she had two groups of hybrids – Dan and Nat and the Pierces – as well as The Queen, the twins’ birth mother. She now had access to the father too. She’d run some tests quickly to see if she could make a breakthrough.
She needed to determine very quickly if she would be able to eliminate the NanoVirus that had passed between the hybrids by accessing the uncontaminated blood from the human parent.
The fate of the Pierce brothers was less certain. She was sure that she could make it work for Dan and Nat if she could access the same hybrid DNA from a parent, but she wasn’t so sure that she could do the same for the brothers though. Not now that both of them seemed to have been infected by the NanoVirus.
She received a message via her Comms-Tab – it was an update, the MedLab had incoming casualties. Nat was being brought in by the security team, and there was one other person with her who may be of interest to Xiang.
It was one of the Pierce brothers, but he was wounded.
Two of these empty beds would now be full. She’d start to wire everybody up and begin running tests. With live subjects to work on, she could surely make a breakthrough now.
She would have to work fast. Dan and Nat had only thirty-four minutes of life left.
Survivor
When the airlock doors had opened moments earlier, there had been a violent and terrifying rush of air out of the area. He’d counted when the first poor soul had been flushed out into space.
He estimated that the process took no more than twenty-five seconds. He’d struggled to remember that part of his degree study. How long was it that a human with no breathing apparatus or protective clothing could survive in space?
It was many years ago that it had come up in his studies, but he was sure it was thirty seconds. When it came to it, he knew that he’d have very little time.
There was a cluster of pipework and wiring in the corner of the airlock. He would never be able to hang on in
a zero gravity environment.
But he was carrying a gift that had been given to him by a Zatheon friend many years ago. Then it had been a token of trust and friendship. At that moment it was to be the thing that saved his life.
The minute he’d been thrown into the airlock, he’d torn the tie from around his neck and wrapped the noose tightly around his wrist, pulling the knot firm.
As the airlock doors slid shut and he heard the activation process begin through the strengthened glass, he tied as many knots as he could around the pipework.
He managed three. Would it be enough to hold onto a man of his size in a zero gravity rush? He wasn’t sure, he would soon find out.
Harold closed his eyes, took a deep breath and started to count. He heard the airlock doors open and as they did so his entire body was pulled with an almighty force to a horizontal level.
As the last oxygen vacated the area, the violent tugging on the tie around his wrist stopped and he began to float. He dared to open his eyes and look out into space, but his mouth remained tightly closed.
By his count it was nineteen seconds – surely the doors would close again soon?
He could feel his internal organs pounding, his tongue was beginning to burn and he was struggling to maintain consciousness. As he stared out into space, he felt himself fading fast. The outer doors slammed shut once again on his count of twenty-two seconds.
The vacuum was replaced with an injection of oxygen and the return of gravity and his body slumped gracelessly to the floor. His wrist was red raw where his body had been pulled violently towards the nothingness of space. He was bruised and sore, no longer just from the beatings of his own brother.
Harold Pierce had survived an attempt to flush him mercilessly out of The Nexus, and now he was going to start to fight back. Only he could reverse the sabotaged terraforming process, but if The Nexus was destroyed, there would be nothing that anybody could do to save the planet. It was The Nexus that controlled the programming of the Shards.