by L S Roebuck
“The gardens are gone. The reactor is breached. Magellan is doomed. Nothing can stop that now. Your only chance to survive is to join Chasm and escape with us on the American Spirit. I have complete control of the ship. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough room for everyone, so only a lucky thousand or so will make it off alive.”
Moreno stood in the command center well, listening to the elder Macready. “She’s going to start a waypoint-wide panic. People are going to eat each other alive. We’ve got to get control of the PA.”
A tech looked up at Moreno. “She must have cracked the command codes. We’re locked out.”
“Here is what you have to do, people of Magellan, to survive. If you want to live and join me on the new paradise on Arara, I need you to help me get into the command center. The Chasm forces are already on their way to the hangar. Bring me the Acting Commander Rita Moreno’s head on a platter, and you will get access to paradise. The Marines may try to stop you; but we are many, and they are few. Join the Chasm forces that are heading to the hangar right now. Help us take over the command center and clear a path to the American Spirit, and you can leave with us. Don’t be indecisive, don’t delay, or you will be left behind, and you will perish here.
“To my Chasm siblings who are listening now, I give you this proverb from Arara’s new wisdom: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. You are worth more together than you are apart. We’d tarry three eternities before abandoning you. Raven One, out.”
Kimberly sat and meditated, her eyes voluntarily rolling back into her head. She had set the appointed time for the death of Magellan. As she thought about what the waypoints represented, she knew their loss would be bittersweet. Without the waypoints, humanity would never have dared venture to Arara. Without Arara, there was no path to human perfection. All things must end, she thought. Well, all things except the coming new order. It will last forever.
Her meditation was interrupted by footsteps. She swung around to exit, and no fewer than twelve Magellan residents lingered just inside the doorway. They carried an arsenal made of various fabrication tools and culinary knives, decorative rods and bats made from chair legs. Kimberly’s first reaction was a fight or flight consideration. Standing in front, a stout woman, maybe in her thirties with short blonde hair, was waving some sort of metallic bar. She spoke first.
“I am so glad we found you Raven One,” the woman nodded her head in respect. “Alice Upton, Chasm code beta tango one four zeta. May we have the honor of escorting you to the command center?”
Kimberly smiled.
“Three hours,” Dek said. “That’s how long Raven One will wait before she leaves the stragglers behind.”
“How do you know that?” Amberly asked.
“It was in the open code,” Dek replied, twitching his arms against the tightly secured zip-cuffs.
“Are those cuffs uncomfortable?” Wong asked sarcastically, “Well, too bad.”
Amberly ignored Wong. “What open code?”
“The proverb. There are no Araran proverbs. She was telling the Chasm operates and supporters we have three hours before the ship for Arara leaves. It’s our way of encrypting communicating over public channels.”
“Clever,” Wong said.
“Can you communicate with the command center?” Dek asked.
“Yes, but we’ll be there in less than 15 minutes,” Wong said.
“We don’t have that much time,” Dek said. “I need to talk with Acting Commander Moreno now.”
Wong looked over at Amberly to see if she was going to weigh in. “Every minute is going to count,” she agreed.
The Marine pulled a small infopad out of his pocket and punched up a communication channel with the Command Center and spoke toward the devices built-in microphone.
“Command, this is Private Wong. I need a priority encrypted connection with XO Moreno, urgent.”
A civilian tech answered. “She’s been waiting to hear from you; I’ll let her know you are on the line, urgent.”
A deep olive-skinned woman with dark eyes and dark hair appeared on the info pad’s screen. “XO Moreno here. We heard from Boro that North is in surgery at the Science Quarter medicenter. Are you still en route with the prisoner?”
The mention of North in surgery hit Amberly in a crushing wave of guilt. North would not be flirting with death if she had not insisted he stand down during his fight with Dek, or if she hadn’t taken advantage of North’s feelings for her to steal his pass card. Her evil mother would still be chilling somewhere on the Spencer Belt instead of threatening the 10,000 lives aboard Magellan.
Still, she suspected that with or without her help, eventually Dek, Joti and Sparks would have found a way to recover her mother. And maybe they would all have ended up dead without a chance. And after the way she crushed North’s heart, Amberly hoped now that Dek had something worthwhile to offer them, something that could save them. Getting his assistance had come at a horrible price.
“We are, but the prisoner claims to have vital information that could save the station in the next few minutes. He’d like to speak with you.”
“Put him on, Wong.”
“Ummm… commander Moreno?”
“What is it, Mr. Tigona? You are going to have to account for the lives lost today. Do you realize how many good pe—”
“Everyone on Magellan is going to die if you don’t listen to me,” Dek interrupted with a raised voice. “Raven One is coming and she is coming in force. If you think you can repel a force of 400, you might survive. I know we had several hundred operatives that made it aboard from the American Spirit. And there may have been that many or more among your ranks on Magellan. And your guess is as good as mine how many people from the mob will join her cause, desperate to live and betting she is the only way. A thousand? Two thousand?”
“I know Kimberly Macready, and I won’t underestimate her,” Moreno said. “We used to have a regular chess date before she went missing. She was quite good – one of the few people who could occasionally beat me.”
“Occasionally?” Amberly butted in. “Maybe she was letting you win.”
Dek couldn’t believe this conversation was happening. He shouted, “We are running out of time! I have two things that will help you. The first is I can tell you how to disable her codebreaking box. She made it so Chasm could use it to hack Magellan during her self-imposed exile. She doesn’t need it to hack anything where there is a terminal — her brain is like a computer. But it does help when she wants to hack something without a terminal, like a door. The box will wirelessly interface with most any Magellan coded device.
“It also helps when someone else wants to hack something when she is not around. Like me.”
“You said we could disable it?” Moreno asked.
“Yes. It is only protected by a two-word code which you could use to access the box the next time she ties it into the network. If she uses the box, you could send the remote shutdown command.”
“Let’s cut to the chase, I suppose you want some special considerations for this infor—”
“No!” Dek said, yelling at the infopad held by Wong. “I don’t think you realize how precarious the situation is. Get a tech so they can be ready to shut Kimberly down the next time she tries to login.”
Moreno muted the conversation. Her hair was messy, and her eyes were tired. The command center was organized madness. Most of the people working on the three-level decks were coordinating police and military responses to the distracting acts of terror being carried out across Magellan by the now revealed Chasm cells.
Next to Moreno stood Governor Thor, who looked concerned but didn’t carry the weight of leadership at this moment. Thor was content to let Moreno lead them through this crisis. He felt no need to accelerate his aging with this supreme stress. He nodded to Moreno to indicate that he thought cooperating with Dek was the right path.
Moreno waved a tech over to the well and gave him instructions. “Start monitoring f
or a hacking device and get ready to issue the following shutdown code the second it logs into our systems—” she paused and took Dek off of mute. “Go ahead with the passcode and the shutdown command.”
Dek’s voice seemed to project from his picture on the three-dimensional magnetic imaging screen in the command well. “Password: Bye Alroy. Shutdown command passphrase: Unity and equality forever.”
The tech punched in the codes and nodded at Moreno. “If she uses her box again on any system connected to central command processes, we’ll be able to shut it down. At least until she figures it out and changes the password.”
“Mr. Tigona,” Moreno said, her voice dripping with all manner of unspoken threats, “what happened to Alroy Macready?”
Dad, Amberly thought, Alroy Macready, I wish you were here now. You’d make everything right. Amberly was looking squarely at Dek. She hadn’t thought to ask him if he knew the fate of her dad.
Dek dodged the question. “Now is not a good time for that, ma’am,” he replied. “Can we discuss that when we arrive? I need to tell you my second idea to help.”
Dek, still in zip cuffs, along with Amberly and Private Wong stepped into the President’s Commons, a large, open eating area that also served as a waiting area for boarding the tubes. Hundreds of people packed the area, filling the metallic cavern with the sounds of discord and conflict, and the smells of fear and desperation.
“Can’t you use your rank as a Marine and get us through this and onto the tube?” Amberly asked Wong.
“It wouldn’t matter,” Dek said as he pointed to the tube car door. Someone from the mob had tossed several supply crates and some furniture into the tube path, and a passenger car had collided with the debris, shutting down the tube.
“Moreno, this is Wong,” the Marine said into his infopad microphone, “The tube is out of commission. We’re going to have to walk the extra two kilometers to get to you. And from the looks of it, there’s a large crowd headed along the same path straight for you.”
“Understood Wong,” Moreno said. “Gather up as many loyal Marines as you can and get back here.”
Dek butted in as they trio backtracked to the alternant route to the command center. “I can help you with your crowd problem, commander.”
“I am not sure I trust you, Mr. Tigona,” Moreno’s voice projected from the infopad. “How can I be sure you are not playing us?”
“Because I only want what is best for Amberly,” Dek said plainly. “And what she wants is for us to save Magellan. Even with my help, we may be beyond that point.”
“You’ll need to hold the line, XO,” Wong said. “We are trying to get out of traffic here.”
The main corridor leading from the President’s Quarter Commons to the outer loop passage was thick with people, running in all directions. Some were trying to rendezvous with loved ones. Others were clearly trying to get to the hangar to attempt to board the American Spirit, and still others, anticipating danger at the hangar, were moving far away from it. Wong was trying to lead his group to use the outer loop as a bypass to get to the hangar and command center, and he was trying not to draw attention to himself as a Marine. Wong decided to try dropping to the sub level. The corridors were thin and twisty, but likely there were less people to navigate through. He found a floor portal and entered in his Marine passcode, and the portal yielded to him.
“Come on,” he said.
Amberly dropped through the portal first, and Wong lifted Dek from behind and lowered him down because Dek was still zip cuffed and couldn’t use his arms to help his descent.
Wong then followed and secured the portal above them. They were in a maintenance tunnel in life support — on one side of the tunnel were hundreds of oxygen scrubbers, on the other side, water purifiers. No one was to be seen. Wong got his bearings and pointed toward the command center.
“This way,” he said as he took off down the hallway. “XO Moreno, are you still on the line?”
“I copy you.”
“Here’s Tigona again.”
Dek spoke with enhanced tension. “Listen to me, right now the Chasm loyalists are in Scorched Earth mode. Their orders are to destroy and retreat. But there may be a way we could change the protocol to stand down mode, and trick the Chasm cells to stand down.”
“Well, give me the code, and let’s end this,” Moreno said.
“It’s not that simple. The code must come from a Chasm leader of rank, or it’s generally thought of as invalid. And if there are conflicting codes, Chasm operatives are supposed to follow the highest-ranking issuer.”
“Macready,” Moreno swore.
“Exactly,” Dek said. “However, if you were to, say, get three ranking Chasm agents to issue the stand down codes, that would certainly introduce some confusion in the ranks and thin out your opposing forces.”
“Three?” Moreno asked, then it clicked. “You mean, you, Johnson and Jayden.”
“Correct.”
“This smells like a double cross to me,” Wong said, as he led the trio down the thin, dark corridor. “I don’t like it.”
“It’s not a double-cross,” Amberly spoke up. “Commander Moreno, Dek is doing this for me, because he loves me and he knows that this is the only way we can be together. When Dek had the upper hand and was about to execute North, I asked him to stand down, and he did. He surrendered of his own accord as you can see. I want nothing more that to stop my mother’s insane plan, and I —”
“Amberly Macready,” Moreno said, with a hint of condescension, “I understand that it’s because of you that we are in this mess. I am not sure what the legal ramifications are for your … actions, but we’ll sort it out if we survive this. I’m not interested in your love life. God knows what North sees in you.”
Amberly remained quiet. She was ashamed and embarrassed. She felt naïve and young. Surely Rita Moreno would understand the choices she made.
“Wong,” Moreno said, “Get those two down here on the double. I’ll have someone fetch Johnson and Jayden, and well see if we can get them to help us.”
“On our way.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“I am fine,” North said angrily, pushing Boro’s arms away.
“You are not fine,” Kora said, “You have been stunned, stabbed and shot multiple times today. You’ve lost blood. Have you even slept or eaten in the past 22 hours?”
“It doesn’t matter,” North said, pulling IV needles from his arm. He reached for his shirt and pulled it over his broad, muscular shoulders. He grabbed his blood-soaked body armor, made of advanced carbon fiber, and snapped it over his wounded torso. “Boro, where’s my helmet and rifle?”
Boro sighed and begrudging left the clinic recovery room to retrieve the items.
“North, Kora is right,” Lydia said. “I didn’t carry you all the way here to save you so you could just go and kill yourself.”
“Do you know if Amberly is safe?” North asked. “No? Didn’t think so. You guys don’t understand. This is it. If we lose, we die. I can rest when I’m chilling with the Almighty. Until then, I plan on running this race to win. No giving up.”
Boro returned and handed the gun and helmet to his superior officer. The doctors had placed a flex brace over North’s wounded arm, allowing him limited use of the injured limb. He took his assault rifle in one arm, placed his helmet on his head, and activated the built-in radio.
“North calling command. Moreno do you copy,” he said.
“North, Tricia here,” said Moreno’s staffer, “We’re taking quite a beating here. We have several hundred people trying to take the hangar and get to us here in the command center. The XO is working with Dek Tigona and Amberly on some plan that involves Johnson. We’re having to put down a lot of civilians, North. This is madness.”
“Moreno is trusting Dek?” North said, bitterness in his voice. “That is madness.”
“Amberly vouched for him,” Tricia said, “for whatever that’s worth.”
T
he words unintentionally stung North. He had trusted Amberly — he still cared for her, but he would never trust her again.
“North, it’s really bad here. We need all the help we can get. What’s your status?”
“I can walk and aim a gun,” North said. “Boro and I are heading that way stat. I’ll check in when I get to the quadrant border.”
North looked at Lydia and Kora.
“We’re going with you,” Lydia said.
“Like hell you are,” North countered. He picked up the stun gun Lydia had been previously carrying and handed it back to her. “You guys should head to Kora’s place and lock yourselves in. I’ll comm you when I get to the HQ.”
“How are you even going to be able to get past the hangar and into the command center?”
“Back door. Now go. Take care of each other.”
Kora jumped forward and hugged North, tears streaming down her face. “You are such a good man, North. I am so sorry about Amberly. About Dek. I don’t know what happened to Amberly, but please bring her home. And make sure you come home, too. We’ve lost too much already.”
Boro nodded his head in respect to Lydia, and she returned a smile; then he and North retreated into the access corridor.
Sparks had taken command of the American Spirit, which had picked up the escape pod from the doomed Firebird. She had efficiently ordered the 100 or so non-Chasm passengers still onboard into the cargo hold and then sealed them in, threatening to vent the chamber if they tried to escape.
She was unable to communicate with Raven One via the radio because of the massive interference being generated by the American Spirit’s rigged communication array, so she was forced to turn off the signal jammer.
It doesn’t matter now, thought Sparks as she instructed two of the American Spirit engineers to disable the jamming device. By the time anyone gets a distress message, Chasm will have done its work.
Sparks surveyed the bridge of the American Spirit, luxuriously spacious for an interstellar ship, richly adorned in crimson and gold hues. She sat in the command chair, a rare faux leather seat, issuing commands to the fully-loyal Chasm crew.