by L S Roebuck
“North,” Kimberly said sweetly. “So good to see you. I’m sorry but…”
North saw Kimberly reach for what appeared to be some holstered weapon, and his instincts kicked as he pushed his weapon close to Kimberly’s face. “It’s true then?”
The Chasm leader slowly moved her hands away from her gun, and that’s when North noticed Dek, and more importantly, that he was carrying Amberly.
“Amberly!” North shouted. “Let her go, Dek!”
“What!? She’s not my prisoner,” Dek replied, nervous at the gun that North was brandishing. “She came of her own accord… and now she is one of us.”
“No, that can't be,” North said, but he didn't quite convince himself.
Kora popped around the corner with Lydia in tow, and her gaze fell on her mother.
Her face went white. “Mom! Mom? You… are… alive? I don’t understand. You were dead. How...” She was dizzy and confused and thought she might faint. Kora then saw Dek with an unconscious Amberly stretched between his two arms.
Gathering her strength, Kora ran toward Amberly, and Dek slowly lowered her to the floor. “Amberly!”
North kept his weapon trained on Kimberly, and the Chasm leader sighed. Kora listened for Amberly’s vitals and then stood up, and took note that North had his weapon pointed at the mother she thought had died six years ago.
“She’s fine, Kora,” Kimberly said, seemingly unfazed by the assault rifle pointed at her and unemotional over the fact that she was reunited with her eldest daughter after her six-year exile.
“I don’t understand…?” Kora said, tears running down her face. Kora started to move forward to embrace her mother, but North forcefully said, “Stop.”
“Wha... why are you pointing your gun at my mom?” Kora said.
“Kora. Your mother is Chasm,” North said. “In fact, we have reason to believe she is the leader.”
“North, that’s my mom,” Kora said, her voice trembling. “Don’t you remember her? Mom, tell him… tell North.”
“Ask her where she’s been all these years?” North said, re-aiming his gun from Kimberly’s torso to her head. “I bet hiding out on the Spencer Belt. You think it’s a coincidence that she just reappears as this crazy Chasm cult is trying to destroy us all. Ask her what happened to Amberly!”
“Is that what you think?” Kimberly said calmly, without giving away any emotion in your voice. She didn’t know what North knew, and she didn’t want to give him any additional information.
“North, are you sure about this?” Lydia stepped up and asked. She had her stun gun in hand also, but was still aiming it down. “The Kimberly Macready I know, she was a woman of science, not murder.”
“Don’t science me, Lydia,” North said. “Millions have been killed in the name of science.”
“And religion,” quipped Dek, who was half squatting over Amberly’s resting body. He stood up and took a step toward North.
“You shut up and stand down!” North said. He didn’t take his gun off Kimberly, but his focus was clearly burning on Dek. Dek stopped, realizing that North wouldn’t hesitate to drop him with his assault rifle.
Dek wasn’t ready to die yet. He had to be patient, and maybe the odds would get better. He also suspected Raven One was working on some plan as well. He decided to wait for her lead.
“You think my mom is one of the people who want to kill us all?” Kora looked like she was going to reach to grab the gun out of North’s hand. Tears ran down her face. “This is my mother. I don’t know how she is here, and I don’t know why she is here, but … I don’t understand.”
“You could never put things together as well as your sister,” Kimberly said.
“It’s over, Kimberly,” North said. “Jayden told us everything.”
“You knew mom was alive?” Kora said to North, sobbing between words. “You knew she was alive you didn’t tell me?”
“Kora, we only just found out,” North said, “before we came over to Rick’s.”
“Jayden, typical male, all bravado and no backbone,” Kimberly rolled her eyes. “How did he break? Did he give up everything for the promise of Moreno’s amnesty, precious little that will be worth when my work is done here.”
As she was finishing the thought, Twig and Leo sprinted up. Twig saw that North had his weapon drawn on the dark-haired woman, so he followed his training and pulled his stun gun and aimed it in the general direction of Kimberly and where Dek had returned to kneeling above Amberly.
Kimberly didn’t like the way things were unfolding. Her mind was furiously working to find a way to escape and complete her mission. She had to get to the command center, to provide an escape for the loyal Chasm operatives, and make sure Magellan was not only temporarily out of commission, but utterly destroyed. The umbilical cord had to be completely severed, she knew, for Arara to rise. And with the apparent failures of the team at Waypoint Cortez, the Scorched Earth protocol was the only way to guarantee the gap was big enough to eliminate the influence of the mother planet on Arara.
Escaping from North and a pair of civilians, one of them her less than brilliant daughter, wouldn’t be too hard, but the arrival of Twig and the Marine Leo meant she was going to have to process a new plan. She had hoped to exploit a wedge between Kora and North while Kora was emotionally vulnerable, but North appeared to know too much about Kimberly’s Raven One identity to let that happen. She had one more card to play to avoid being incarcerated and probably executed by the Magellan Marines. She’d just have to stall for a minute now, maybe less.
“Actually, Jayden broke in the airlock,” Twig said. “Kimberly Macready, I presume. Also known as Raven One. And ugly over there must be this Dek I keep hearing North pledging to offer a free facial rearrangement.”
Dek gritted his teeth, but said nothing. North took a step toward Amberly.
“I want you both to clasp your hands over your head and step away from Amberly,” North said and waved his gun at Kimberly and Dek. “Slowly.”
“Didn't you hear Dek? My daughter, she’s with us,” Kimberly said. “Didn’t you know, she’s with Chasm. She is now part of the triumvirate of leadership.”
“Liar,” Lydia, who had been silent in the background, spoke up. “Amberly would never be a part of this madness.”
“Tell me, North,” Kimberly smiled, “How did Mr. Tigona here steal the runabout needed to pick me up from my secret base without an access card? Did Amberly happen to borrow a card from you?”
North cursed.
As if on cue, Amberly started to rouse. She opened her eyes and was surprised to see North’s face. For a moment, she wondered if this had all been some bad dream she was just waking up from. Then she noticed the gun in North’s hand, pointed at … she turned and looked, her evil mother.
Kora was really confused now. Her first reaction was to run to the side of Amberly, her beloved sister, now that she was rising, but North’s command to stay back was still ringing in her ears. And Amberly had been acting strange and secretive since the American Spirit put into port, spending a lot of time with this strange Dek fellow, even running off with him to some sort of secret rendezvous in the topside gardens.
Amberly was still too groggy to understand what was going on, so she let her mind rest. Other people would work things out. She was just happy to have survived the space jump.
“Let me tell you what is going on here,” Kimberly said, hoping to stall North and his Marines another 20 or 30 seconds from putting her and Dek in binders, and maybe Amberly, too. “You are all part of the greatest single moment in human history. Are you sure you are on the right side? What are you fighting for? Enslavement to mother earth?”
“You’re crazy, Kimberly,” North said. “Where’s your husband?”
Raven One ignored him. “We are going to build the perfect society, where everyone is truly equal and people are free to improve humanity: where we put the good of the whole over the good of the individual. Where is the evil in that
? The evil is fermenting in your hearts and the hearts of all men who resist the natural evolution of humanity. They fear change. They cling to a false sense of security through conserving the dated past. No more. Join the right side of history. Come with us on the American Spirit back to Arara, North. Let’s not shed any more blood today. What do you say? Will you join me and fight for what is best for all, or will you stand with —”
Booooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom.
The lights flickered and so did the artificial gravity.
North looked worriedly at Twig, giving him a what-the-hell-was-that look, and in that instant he took his eyes off Amberly’s mother.
In a snap, she shot her arm forward, knocking the assault rifle out of North’s good arm and sending it flying toward Twig. North instinctively leapt for his gun, as it fell to the floor, and Raven One gave him a much more powerful leg swipe than he would have thought her capable of. North hit the floor hard on his injured arm and yelped in pain.
Facing the opposite direction, Dek took a step toward Twig and the pilot took aim at Dek’s head, and Dek stopped, slowly raising his hands and stepping back. Twig held the gun and looked over to check on his fallen comrade, when he became aware of Kimberly flying toward him, clenched fisted. Twig brought up a hand to block Kimberly’s punch, but he was too slow and spun off her fist. Twig was shocked at the amount of strength Kimberly had in her punch.
Sensing Twig was off balance, Kimberly bum rushed him and knocked him down. She pulled his stun gun from his grip in one quick motion and aimed it at Leo and discharged the weapon. Leo fell to the ground, convulsing.
Kora, still recovering from the shock of seeing her mother again, snapped into her medical training, and automatically went to Leo’s side to care for him. Deciding she had to act, Lydia finally took aim at Kimberly with her stun gun, when she was sharply hit in the head by a flying infopad. Dek had flung the electronic device like a flying disc and was now charging Lydia. She dropped her gun as her hands reflexively went to the point of impact on her head.
Lydia was almost 20 centimeters taller than Dek, muscular and fit. Dek knocked her back, but she did not lose her footing. She shoved Dek off onto the floor. Kimberly shouted to Dek as Lydia stumbled, bleeding from the head.
Lydia attempted to focus on Kimberly who was charging her now. Lydia threw a punch at the smaller dark-haired woman, but Kimberly expertly stepped out of the way. Raven One crouched and expertly performed another powerful leg swipe that took Lydia off her feet and to the floor.
Kimberly had found her opportunity for escape. She ran past the fallen Twig, toward the hallway they came from, pushing Kora out of the way, and then breaking into an impressive sprint.
“Lydia!” North shouted as he tried to get to his feet, still struggling with Dek. “Shoot her!”
“No! You can’t shoot my mom!” Kora pleaded.
The tall blonde picked up her gun and took four shots at Raven One, but her stun bolts did not find a target.
Twig looked at North, who waved him off to indicate he was okay. “Go get her!” North said as he struggled to get this his feet. “If she makes it the command center, she could destroy us from the inside!”
Twig took off after Kimberly.
For an instant, the command center shook violently as a booming noise rippled through Magellan and oscillated every loose object in sight. Then the power flickered and the gravity jolted, giving private Inon a brief nauseating feeling in the pit of her stomach.
She blurted several profanities. “They rammed Firebird into the reactor!” the white-haired woman’s yell was full of shock.
“These guys aren’t bluffing,” Skip said, holding on tightly to a rail next to the console he sat at on the first floor of the command center.
Moreno stood in the well in the middle of the command center in full crisis response mode. She turned to a civilian tech on the second balcony. “Shut down the reactor, now, please.” Her voice was cool and commanding.
“Please enter your biometric authorization,” the tech responded to the acting commander. Rita raised her palm in front of the magnetic screen at her station, and it accepted the input. “Okay, it’s shutting down.”
Corporal Horner flanked Moreno in the well. “XO, how long can we last without power?”
“Several months on back-ups with some assist from solar panels, assuming Chasm hasn’t sabotaged the batteries,” the tech answered without being asked.
Moreno was frustrated. She didn’t think she needed to be justifying her perfectly sensible decisions to her underlings. “If we keep operating the antimatter reactor, and it is damaged; it could explode and take the whole station with it. Or it could leak lethal amounts of radiation. Either way, we have to take it off-line until we can verify that there is no potentially fatal damage.”
Skip spoke up again. “It will take a least another hour for the cool down and shut down to complete, and then another hour for the anti-matter core to be securely stored.”
“Inon, check the internal diagnostics. Are they giving you any readings?” Moreno asked. The private swiped at the three-dimensional rendering floating in front of her.
“I know that the shutdown command has been received and the process is starting,” Inon reported. She double-checked her screen and uttered her favorite profanity again. “Looks like the service room has been depressurized. Probably exposed to space from the collision. But debris or damaged hydraulics or the sudden depressurization could have damaged the containment units, and we wouldn’t know about it until after the shutdown process failed to complete.”
“So we are blind without a visual inspection?” Skip asked.
Moreno turned to the young corporal standing behind her. “We need to know how bad the damage is, Horner. We need to verify the shutdown was successful.”
“I’m on it, ma’am,” Horner said, offering a salute.
“See if you can find the chief engineer.” Moreno suggested. “But, take Inon and Skip along – if you don’t mind. Between the two of them, they might have enough technical expertise to get us the information we need.”
A sharp beeping sound came from the tech’s panel. “Shoot. Radiation alert in the Jeffries tube 43c. That’s the one connecting to the reactor tower. I don’t know how high above normal.”
“Sounds like we’ll need to pick up some radiation suits then,” Skip said nervously.
“Do you know where Engineer Zelma is?” Horner asked.
“The chief last reported in at the State power relay station, but that was before the Chasm assault began,” the civilian tech muttered.
Moreno was worried that even if they could incapacitate the Chasm revolt, with a damaged reactor and destroyed garden dome, Magellan may already be a doomed waypoint. She forced the worry down. Now is the time to show confidence, she thought. It’s what Anderson would have done.
“Better double-time it, Horner,” Moreno said. “I’ll radio North’s team to join you once they lock down the topside garden situation.”
She punched a few buttons floating in the air in front of her.
“North,” Moreno said. “North, status report. North, do you copy?”
Dek and North were both struggling over North’s assault rifle. Dek had his hands on the butt of the gun, while the hand of North’s good arm gripped the barrel. North struggled to point the gun away from him while not releasing it to Dek.
Dek reached for the trigger, and North forced his injured arm to clasp Dek’s would-be trigger hand. North pushed back on the barrel with his good arm and then twisted Dek’s fingers with his bad arm. Dek howled. If North’s arm wasn’t injured, he probably could have broken Dek’s fingers in his grip. However, the searing pain in his arm kept him from doing any real damage.
“Give up, Dek,” North said, “and maybe Moreno will stay your execution.” North gave a quick jerk on the gun, and flung it from both of their grasps. Dek and North both scrambled to their feet, with about two meters between them.
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Dek charged North, and they both went flying down the hall together away from the others. The pair struggled for several more meters before the Marine found the space to land a blow.
North swung his good elbow hard into Dek’s gut and almost knocked Dek’s wind out. Dek grunted, took two steps back, then one step forward and following his forward momentum swung his right fist into North’s jaw. The hit smarted. North was shocked. He would never have suspected that Dek could throw a serious punch.
“You think you are good,” Dek said, with a sincere condescension, as North recovered. “You think you can save Amberly. You are wrong. Only I can save her now. She doesn’t love you. She never will.”
“You think I don’t know that?” North parried. “I know I am not a good person. Just forgiven. Hopefully for this!”
North stepped up and punched at Dek’s lungs. Dek managed to bring his arms to block, but he still was knocked back a few feet. The swift punching movement caused North’s injured arm to jolt with pain, but he ignored the shrill feeling.
“I know that I am nothing to Amberly,” North said as Dek struggled to catch his breath. “She made that perfectly clear to me when you showed up in her life.”
It was Dek’s turn to take a swing at North. The Marine dodged Dek’s jab, but he was unprepared for the stealthy uppercut that followed and caught him in the chin. The impact caused the unsuspecting North to bite his lip hard, and his bite drew blood.
North jabbed back at Dek, who stepped back, fast enough to defuse most of the energy from the blow.
“I know she took advantage of my feelings for her to help you,” North said. “Doesn’t matter. I still care for her. I will save her home. Magellan is where she belongs.”
Dek sidestepped to stay out of North’s punching range, and then took two steps back to put more space between him and his adversary. “If you love her, you’ll let her go. You’ll let her come with us, with me and her mother.”