by Aer-ki Jyr
But it didn’t stop there. It continued on out beneath another building, and another, and another until it eventually wrapped back around on itself, leading them in a big circle.
“Did I miss an entrance somewhere?” Jet asked as they stopped near to where they began.
“Wait a second,” David said, holding still and stretching out his Pefbar as far as it would go and condensing it down into a spotlight to better examine the tunnel. In his mind’s eye he could only ‘see’ a small column, like a flashlight beam, and ran it along the piece of tunnel beneath them. They weren’t far from the source of the mind, which was considerably lower than the tunnel, meaning that if there was a connection below it would probably be near here.
“There,” David said, spotting a tiny connective shaft…or rather a tiny piece of it before his Pefbar range fizzled out. “A downspout.”
“Where?”
“Below the tunnel.”
“Ah…how do we get to the tunnel?”
“One thing at a time,” David said, walking off to follow the tunnel again…this time staying directly over top of it so maximize his limited psionic range, meaning he had to go into a lot of dead end rooms and keep constantly backtracking in order to scan every meter of it from as close as he could get.
It took him three buildings and a few hundred meters away from the source of the mind before he found a small deviation in the tunnel…a side shaft, less than a third of the tunnel’s width.
“Can you see that?” David asked Jet, stopping directly over top of the junction.
“What am I looking for?” the Archon asked, concentrating.
“A tiny connection on the left. It’s hazy even for me.”
Jet dropped down to all fours and pushed his head as close as he could get to the floor. “Maybe a little. My Pefbar is junk at that range. I can only see big objects.”
“Mine’s not much better, but we need to follow that shaft. Go across to the next building and as deep as you can get. See if you can pick it up. I’ll try to find where it goes under here. If it takes a turn I’ll redirect you.”
“On it,” Jet said, jogging off as David moved into the next room and focused hard again to mentally chart out the next few meters of the side shaft. When he got to the wall he had to backtrack and work his way around to the opposite room and pick up the trail there. After that he didn’t have to go far before the shaft made an abrupt turn to the left and interconnected with an equally tiny vertical shaft.
“Jet, never mind. Get back over here,” he said, ducking out of the room he was in and crossing over to another where the shaft came up…but when he got inside there was no visible entrance, just a ghostly ladder shaft behind what appeared to be a solid wall.
David walked up to it, getting a better resolution with his Pefbar the closer he got, and saw a faint line in the wall moving off from it. He followed the line, which he guessed was a wire, keeping his head less than a meter away so he wouldn’t lose it, and followed it around the corner and into a set of wall shelves just as Jet came in.
David pointed towards the spot on the wall, but kept his eyes on the wire until it finally stopped. He pulled a box off of the shelf in front of it and spotted a small shiny circle on the wall behind it. He touched it, with no response, then he removed his glove and did so again…also with no effect.
“Hold contact,” Jet suggested, and David put his thumb back on it. After a couple of seconds the wall segment broke apart on a nearly invisible seam and pushed out into the room in two halves, splitting down the midline.
“Well now,” Jet said, seeing the ladder at the back of the tiny closet.
“Rikku, I think we’ve found our rat hole. What’s your status?” David said as he followed Jet over to the ladder and placed a waypoint on the battlemap to mark its location for the others.
“City is clean as far as we can tell. Still got a lot of buildings to check, but psionics are coming up clear save for your guy.”
“Any booby traps?”
“No, but we haven’t been able to find the controls to open the other two doors either. The computers appear to have been wiped and if there’s a manual release we haven’t found it yet.”
“I have a feeling Mr. Wizard might have the key. Get back to you in a bit.”
“Copy.”
“No door keys,” David told Jet as he grabbed hold of the ladder rungs and followed the Archon down. “The other teams are going to have to fight their way in unless our dude is controlling the defenses.”
“My credits say he is,” Jet said as he stooped down to crawl into the side shaft that was barely a meter tall. “I’ll bet this guy stayed behind to run the turrets and mechs while the others bolted. I just hope he isn’t sitting on a self-destruct.”
“You read my mind,” David agreed, getting down on all fours and crawling in after Jet. Now that he was down level with the tunnel his Pefbar was giving him a lot more detail, and he could see ahead that the tunnel they’d been chasing was full height as opposed to the shaft they were crawling through.
When they got to the junction there was no door or grate blocking them, just a pitch black tunnel that they stepped out into, using their armor lights and Pefbar to see their way.
“You see anything else down here?” Jet asked as they began walking off down the half of the tunnel that headed towards their Word mind.
“Nothing,” David said as a panel fell shut over the shaft they’d just crawled out of with a loud clank.
“Oh shit,” Jet said as a number of tiny vents opened up at intervals down the hallway releasing more toxic gas.
“Move,” David prompted, with both Archons running towards their target as their filter locks kicked in. They got a few dozen meters before another panel pulled out of the wall in front of them and cut off the tunnel ahead.
“It’s shallow,” Jet said, seeing the panel’s width in his Pefbar before he walked up to it and kicked hard, putting a sizeable dent in it.
“Can you sense him from here?”
“Yes,” Jet said, kicking it in again.
“Fornax range?”
Jet paused, measuring the distance. “Pulse range I think. Want me to keep him occupied?”
David pulled out one of his last two grenades as an answer and activated it in his right palm. Jet backed up several steps and took a knee, facing away from the panel as he stretched out his mind and sent a Fornax blast off into the distance and down, followed by another a couple seconds later as David tossed his grenade towards the panel and telekinetically tucked it up into the right corner at the bottom before blowing it.
Bits of debris hit both Archons’ armor, but the blast broke the panel free and blew the large pieces down the tunnel. David ran through the gap with Jet following as he continued to send repeated Fornax blasts into the not so distant mind as they closed in.
When they got around the next corner in the tunnel they ran up against another panel, with David pulling out his last grenade as the poison gas continued to flow in. He chucked it down into a corner again and blew the barrier out, then ran on up to the next one, whereupon he began punching and kicking dents into it as Jet continued his mental distraction, easier now with closer range but more difficult to continue with each repetition.
It took some 40+ hits/kicks to warp the metallic barrier enough to pop a corner free, then David leveraged his knee into the gap and pushed, bending it aside enough for him to slip through. Jet followed, sensing they were getting close, but finding another panel in their way blocking their access to the vertical shaft that led down to their target.
“Switch,” Jet said, elbowing past David, who took up the Fornax blasts while Jet pounded the panel, one resting his mind while the other rested his muscles. They both knew they only had a few minutes before they ran out of oxygen, so neither Archon was going to waste a second of time.
When Jet had the panel down it proved to be the last, with them climbing down the ladder and coming up to a very solid door into a
small room with a man lying on the floor on the far side, visible via Pefbar. While David kept him down Jet searched the opposite side of the door, seeing no latch, lock, or handle on the outside. It took him a few seconds, but he found the interior latch and telekinetically pulled up on it, moving it about half an inch.
“Some help please,” Jet said, pulling again as David added his own telekinetic tug while still maintaining the Fornax blasts. The latch pivoted up and the open sequence activated, with the door pushing in and swinging open.
The two Archons moved inside, David going for the downed man while Jet closed the door behind them, hoping to keep the gas out. It closed slowly, but locked in place with a satisfying hiss.
“Air,” David said as he pulled out his stinger pistol and pumped two green paintball into the man’s chest, knocking him unconscious.
Jet slid into the control chair, around which were three walls’ worth of monitor screens showing everything from the city streets to the base entrances and the poison-filled tunnel they’d just came in through.
“Working on it,” he said, sifting through the controls trying to find the life support systems for the room as he got a ‘low air’ warning on his helmet’s HUD, indicating that he had 60 seconds of air remaining.
David stood up and looked around the room, trying to find something to help with mechanically. He saw a couple of vents in the ceiling, and now that they were inside a lighted room he didn’t see the toxic clouds, but knew enough had gotten in when they opened the door that their filter masks wouldn’t open up.
That meant their friend here was in trouble, but at the moment he didn’t care. He and Jet needed air, and fast.
“Got it,” the other Archon said as David heard the air start to cycle. “Purging protocol.”
“Let’s hope it works fast,” David said, trying to slow his breathing and stretch his air out a few extra seconds…but he needn’t have bothered, for a moment later his mask unlocked, allowing him to draw air directly from the environment, along with his suit starting to replenish its oxygen backup supply in the same manner.
“That was close,” Jet said.
“No kidding.”
“No, I mean this…”
David looked where Jet was pointing and his eyes narrowed when he saw the trigger mechanism for a series of huge gas containers buried deep under the city…enough to flood the entire dome and well out into the three connecting tunnels.
“Why’d he wait?” Jet asked.
“Let’s find out,” David said as he knelt down next to the man whose nose had already started bleeding. He took off his glove and pressed his fingers against his head, resisting the urge to put his forearm on his neck to pull out some of the lingering stun energy to get a better read, but if the man was going to die he might as well do it unconscious.
“David, do you copy?” Nathan’s voice asked over the comm.
“We’re here,” he replied, focusing on the mental link while pointing a finger at Jet, then his own helmet.
The other Archon joined in on the party line, seeing that it involved Nathan. “David’s a little busy. What do you need?”
“We lost contact with you, and there’s a barrier over the shaft you marked.”
“Probably signal loss from being so deep…and the plate you’re referring to is holding back poison gas, so don’t go busting it open just yet.”
“Are you guys trapped?”
“That was the idea, but we got to the rat first. He got a breath or two of his own medicine, but we’ve got the control room now.”
“Good news, because we’ve got a team outside wanting in. Can you open the doors?”
“Hang on,” Jet said, twisting his chair around and looking through his control options. This computer hadn’t been wiped like the others had, but there were also a number of manual controls on the board in front of him. He pulled up a diagram of the base/city with one of them, then highlighted the doors, with his vid screen views changing to show a group of vehicles waiting outside…along with the remains of the turrets that had been defending it. There was also a small hole in the doors that they were apparently communicating through.
With a little exploring he found the open button and triggered all three to open up…then looked for the life support systems for the dome, hoping to initiate its own purging program to get rid of the lingering gas from the tunnel they’d entered from, and probably the other one as well.
“Got it,” Jet said as David released his hold on the man who was continuing to bleed out.
“Who showed up?” David asked.
“Devin’s team is the one held up. Assad’s group came through our door already. Devin’s got prisoners they captured on the way here, a lot of them.”
“Really?” Jet asked, feeling better already.
“They’re holding them back so the gas doesn’t get to them, but they want to evac at least one guy out the drill shaft. Devin says he’s got the Primarch.”
6
March 5, 2451
Solar System
Earth
The Primarch woke up staring at the wall of his cell and blinked off some of the post-stun haze he’d gotten used to over the past few days. Every time the Archons moved him locations they made sure he was unconscious, letting him wake up in a new place with no knowledge of how he’d gotten there.
He rolled over, feeling with his left hand the edge of the bunk he lay on, and twisted enough to see the blue energy field constricting him to a small cell with a pair of Star Force personnel on the other side.
“Morning,” David offered, leaning against the far left wall. The energy field was nearly transparent, with only a slightly colored tint to make both prisoner and guests aware of where the barrier lay.
“Where are we now?” he asked, swinging his legs over the side of the bunk and sitting up. He reached back a hand and massaged a slight crick in his neck, then ran his fingers up through his salt and pepper hair, trying to judge from the feel of it how many hours it’d been since his last shower. Apparently quite a few.
“Atlantis,” the other man said from the edge of the small table he was sitting on.
The Primarch squinted, recognizing the voice more than the face. “Director…you’re looking well for your age. You really should let the press update your photo profile. You’re getting younger by the decade.”
“They say they’re photoshopped anyway,” Davis replied as he stood up and walked forward, stopping a few inches shy of the energy field. “Some people just don’t understand the concept of self-sufficiency.”
“And where does your ambrosia fit in?” the Primarch asked, standing up and facing off with Davis.
“It’s a supplement that aids training with a mix of structural components and energy enhancements. Sort of a ‘super sugar.’ It doesn’t create the self-sufficiency, and many of our lower level self-sufficient personnel don’t have access to it.”
“But you use it?”
“I do.”
“Then your youthfulness is unnatural.”
“Define natural.”
“That which was predetermined by our genetic code. Alterations to the plan set in place are unnatural.”
“Artificial limbs?”
“Tools…though in Star Force’s case they seem to never be needed. Also several severely disfigured individuals have been miraculously healed after a clandestine visit.”
“Is that a complaint?”
“Such things imply an unnatural medicine, and where there is a deviation from nature there are always consequences. Some unforeseen.”
“You would leave them mangled?” Davis asked as David merely watched from the sidelines, intending to stay out of the conversation.
“They had their chance and it was wasted. Nature will see them replaced with the renewing of each generation.”
“You assume a commonality.”
“Humanity is a commonality.”
“Comprised of individuals.”
“Basic
building blocks.”
“That must be bound together by force or choose to operate in concert. The commonality isn’t default.”
“It is default,” the Primarch argued. “The dynamics of connection must be maintained. If they aren’t, fragmentation occurs and your vaunted ‘individuality’ arises.”
“Which you’ll have ample opportunity to study during your 1000 year sentence. As you well know, Star Force prisons operate under isolation protocols. You won’t have any commonality to link with. You’ll have to operate as an individual.”
“Being disconnected from the commonality doesn’t make me any less part of it. We work for the advancement of Humanity. Much of that work is in isolation.”
“We’ll see,” Davis said, knowing from past experience that the isolation protocols forced many individuals through a cleansing fire of silence that resulted in them reverting to a learning state similar to childhood once society’s influence was removed. Like a narcotic, some had more difficulty adjusting to its absence than others.
“After my interrogation?”
“It won’t take as long as you think.”
“If you think I’m going to cooperate, you’re gravely mistaken. I won’t betray The Word.”
“The Word is already dead,” Davis said emphatically. “You’ve been captured, along with all 12 of your Masters…save one, who managed to get to his kill pills before we got to him. We’re interrogating them as well, and as you probably already noticed, we’ve been hitting a lot of your facilities…or did you notice? It hasn’t exactly been on the news.”
“We noticed, but what we didn’t notice was the leak that led you to Olympus.”
“Arrogant name.”
The Primarch raised an eyebrow. “Coming from Star Force I find that statement overly hypocritical, especially since we’re standing in Atlantis.”
“Olympus was the home of the gods. Your insistence on your natural function and limited existence make the name incompatible.”
“I may not live forever, but the Primarch will. Thus the leader of The Word is immortal, as is our cause and function within the commonality.”