Captain's Captive

by C. F. Harris

  Flin appeared on the other side of the car and pointed his weapon at the other cop. Both of them held their hands up and got out.

  "You're crazy lady," one of them said. "You're going away for a long time for this."

  "Carjacking a cop? Are you serious?" the other one said.

  "I want both of you to shut up and go running in the other direction. Find a nice donut shop or something."

  Both of them looked at one another. Neither looked happy about what they were about to do, but both of them started running in the opposite direction anyways. Neither one of them would probably ever know that I'd most likely just saved their lives by sending them away from a war zone.

  "Get in the car Flin," I said.

  "Yes ma'am!" he said, sketching a quick salute. "I have to say I really like this new ‘take no prisoners’ attitude you have."

  "Just you wait," I said. "This is for the whole planet, after all."

  I stepped into the car and looked around at everything. There was a multitude of buttons, and I had no idea what the hell half of them did. There was also an angry radio squawking about a stolen cop car.

  I squeezed my eyes shut. Damn it. That was probably us. How many other cop cars had been carjacked in the last five minutes, after all?

  "We’re about to have some company," I said.

  "That's fine. Get us to those towers and I can guarantee you won’t have to worry about the authorities on this planet for long."

  "Right. I've always wanted to drive one of these things."

  I started flipping buttons, and after a moment lights started flashing. I figured that would do well for getting traffic out of our way. At least until the other cops showed up.

  I felt dizzy. Dizzy from stealing a cop car. From firing off this weapon which I absolutely loved. Dizzy from the sheer overwhelming craziness of everything that happened to me tonight. Everything that was still going to happen.

  After all, there was still a very good chance that I could wind up dead or captured before the evening was through, but that was later. Right now I was still very much alive, I had the sexy captain Flin next to me, and I had a stolen cop car that I needed to get up to that cell tower farm so we could save the world.

  17

  Flin

  My stomach lurched as the wheeled conveyance went up over a hill and flew through the air. Something told me these devices weren’t designed to go flying through the air, and that was confirmed when it landed with a loud thump and a squealing of metal as the undercarriage raked against the street below.

  "Are you sure you know how to drive one of these?" I asked.

  "Absolutely sure," Melissa said with a cheery smile.

  She had a crazed look on her face. I realized with a sinking sensation that she was enjoying every moment of this. It was a look that I recognized all too well. A look I'd had on my face from time to time. Particularly when I was about to get involved in something very dangerous, much to the chagrin of my crew.

  "Are you sure you know how to get to those towers?"

  "Positive. We just take a road that goes up."

  That didn't sound very promising. And yet at the same time I thought of all the times I'd said something similar to a member of my crew and things had worked out. Yeah, I’d found something of a kindred spirit in this Melissa woman. It was terrifying, but it was exhilarating at the same time.

  And so I trusted myself to her. To those same instincts that had served me so well time and again, only they were manifesting in another person this time around.

  "Looks like we have company," Melissa said.

  She was looking in one of the mirrors that allowed her to see behind her. Nothing like the three hundred sixty degree holo displays I was used to piloting small craft, but it was crude and effective. I suppose the same could be said for just about every bit of technology I'd seen on this planet.

  I looked in the mirror beside me and sure enough there were flashing red and blue lights behind us. I could almost hear the wail of the sirens as well. The local authorities weren’t taking too kindly to someone stealing one of their vehicles. Not that I would have expected any less from them.

  My stomach lurched as she swerved suddenly. I looked forward in time to see two lights heading straight for us, a loud horn sounding. Then she was around the oncoming vehicle and dodging other traffic coming right at us.

  "What are you doing swerving into oncoming traffic?" I asked.

  "Traffic in our lane wasn't getting out of the way fast enough," she said as she tore the car over a bump in the middle of the road and then we were back in our own lane with traffic going in our direction.

  "You know I had a brief stint as a flight instructor at the Academy," I said.

  "Really, that's interesting," Melissa said as she swerved around another vehicle that was moving too slow for her liking.

  "I lasted three days in that position before it got to be too much for me. Flying in ships that could go an appreciable fraction of the speed of light with trainees who had no idea what they were doing, no thank you."

  "Is there a point to this story?" Melissa asked.

  "I was less terrified of flying in those ships with new recruits than I am right now riding around in this wheeled vehicle with you!"

  She turned, looked me up and down, and then raised her middle finger at me. I cocked my head to the side. I had a feeling that gesture had special meeting on this world. I had a feeling that special meaning wasn't anything nice.

  "Well mate you too," I said.

  She looked at me for a moment in confusion, and then she realized what I was talking about. Damn it. I think I'd used the wrong word. Oh well.

  She shook her head and laughed, and turn her attention back to the road just in time to swerve around another vehicle that was in our way.

  "We need to shake those cops somehow," Melissa said.

  I'm not too proud to admit that I screamed as we went over another bump in the road and there was a rather large vehicle that looked like it could easily crush ours in our path. Melissa expertly swerved around the thing and let out a triumphant yell that wasn’t too dissimilar from the war cries I’d heard on other less technologically savvy worlds.

  "Are you having fun yet?" Melissa said.

  "I trust you," I said. "But that's about as far as I'm going to be able to go here."

  "Come on! This is a blast! I've always wanted to do something like this," she said.

  I looked into the mirror behind us. The road had cleared out. There was a wall of red and blue lights flashing behind us. If we didn't find a way to get rid of them we weren’t going to be able to do much of anything when we reached those towers. The locals might have primitive weapons by the standard of what I was used to, but as with the spears, primitive weapons could kill just as easily and effectively as a disintegrator ray when used appropriately.

  As though to drive that point home something pinged against our vehicle. I looked back and there were flashes coming from those vehicles. They were shooting at us! And why not? After all, we had threatened a couple of their men and showed off weapons that probably wouldn't exist on this world outside of military applications for a good century if not longer.

  "Things just got a little more interesting," I said.

  "So what do we do?" Melissa asked. "It seems wrong to fire on cops. They're just doing their jobs."

  I grimaced. She was thinking along exactly the same lines that I had been. Shooting those guys who were just doing their jobs wouldn't sit well with me, though I would do it if it became absolutely necessary. After all, this was the Origin and we were well and truly fighting for the entire world.

  As cold as it might seem, the lives of a few locals paled in comparison to the horrors that would be visited on this planet if the Imperium discovered this was in fact the Origin.

  I pulled my disintegrator ray out. Put it on the stun setting and then flipped it back just as quickly. That was a stupid thing to do. The stun setting wasn't going to
work on their vehicles, after all, and the disintegrator setting could very well blow the vehicles right out from under those guys, likely killing them in the process.

  Damn it.

  I looked in my mirror again. Just in time to see one of the cars go up in a spectacular explosion. It flew through the air, cartwheeling, and landed on the side of the road before smashing into a shop along the side of the street.

  "What the hell was that?" Melissa shouted. "Did you fire on them?"

  "That wasn't me," I said. "I think we have much bigger problems than the locals chasing after us now, though."

  Sure enough, as I looked in the mirror again a second cop car blew up and went flying through the air. Another one had a small explosion of electrical lightning under the vehicle and went swerving off the side of the road. Behind it there was another vehicle. No flashing lights on this one, but there were blasts of energy shooting out from every direction.

  Apparently our pursuers from the Imperium had commandeered one of the local vehicles. It looked larger than the rest. And Imperium pirates were leaning out of the windows on all sides and even out of the one on top of the vehicle firing their weapons at the cop cars to clear them out.

  "Are they in a van?" Melissa asked.

  "I don't know what you're talking about," I said.

  "That looks like a VW Minibus they’re driving!" Melissa shouted. “Well let’s see if you bastards can do ninety!”

  And she buried the accelerator sending me back in my seat.

  They were giving a good chase, but they weren't gaining on us. And it didn't look like any of those blasts were going to hit our vehicle. We had enough of a lead on them and it seemed the engine in our vehicle was a little more powerful than theirs. Plus we weren’t loaded down with several people and lots of heavy weapons. All of the shots went wild by the time they reached us.

  "What do we do about that?" Melissa asked.

  "You drive as fast as you can, and hand me that screen device of yours."

  "Right," Melissa said.

  She fished it out of her pocket and handed it over. I went to work on the thing. I'd had a couple of courses on primitive computer science back at the Academy, but it had been so long since I'd dealt with a world that had anything more advanced than the bow and arrow that I was a little rusty. Still, most primitive computers were riddled with backdoors and mistakes the creators didn’t even know were there. Those could be taken advantage of and they were usually the same mistakes across multiple worlds, there were only so many ways to skin a digital cat, and the more I poked around on the device the more familiar it felt.

  I smiled. Torvan’s Theory of Convergent Evolution of Semi-advanced Computer Technology was going to save my ass.

  Maybe. I glanced at that vehicle behind us with blasts firing from it. We still had to get this thing to work when we got to those towers. I had to have a message ready.

  So I got to work.

  Everything was mostly in order by the time the antenna farm loomed large in front of us. If I had a little more time and preparation I might've even been able to do this remotely, but as it was being on-site was going to make success a lot more likely. I looked up as we slammed through a chain link fence as though it was nothing.

  "Get as close to the center as you can," I said.

  "What happens there?"

  "Hopefully I’ve set this up correctly and your machine will be able to take control of the towers long enough to shoot out a signal."

  She skidded to a halt on some gravel. I looked around. Antennas as far as the eye could see in every direction. I just hoped this worked. I looked down at the screen and pressed my thumb on the small program I'd set to run.

  "How did you do all of that so quickly?" she asked.

  I looked up at her and grinned. "I assume your a military people take survival classes. How to make it in primitive situations?"

  "Well… Yeah? I guess they do."

  What I just did utilizes similar training, only our survival training for primitive situations includes a healthy dose of comparative historical computer science ."

  "What does that even mean?"

  "It means that everyone who graduates from the Fleet's officer candidate school commits to memory a couple of really simple but effective programs that will give us access to just about any computer system on a primitive world. It utilizes a bunch of complicated stuff that your computer scientists probably won't even discover for a couple hundred years. Sort of the digital equivalent of trying to use a bow and arrow to defend against a guy with one of your bullet weapons."

  "So it’s sort of like uploading a virus that you just wrote to a completely alien computer system and praying that it actually works?"

  "Yeah, pretty much," I said with a grin. "It sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? But it will work! I hope."

  "None of that makes any sense," she said. "Then again, computers were never really my thing."

  "All you have to know is that this should hopefully work. And then we have to hope that the signal gets out in time of for a rescue."

  The device was still running the program. And it was getting hot. Really hot. So hot that I rolled down the window and tossed it out. And not a moment too soon. The thing burst into flames on the ground and I cursed. Hopefully that wouldn’t ruin the program I just set in motion.

  I looked down at my arm. My hair was standing on end. I glanced over to Melissa and she looked ridiculous with her hair standing up. I peered out of the window and rolled that same window up. I figured if things were about to get messy then I wanted to have something between me and what was going on out there.

  "Flin? Why's your hair standing up like that?"

  "If everything I just did was correct, you're about to see some serious shit," I said.

  Several of the towers around us started to glow and pulse. The lights on them suddenly went crazy, flashing rapidly.

  A moment later electricity arced back and forth between the towers. Bolts of lightning flashed down and I grimaced. I hoped this metal box would be enough to protect us from any errant strikes. The electric light show seem to mostly be happening well above us, but I wasn't going to test it by stepping outside into the middle of said show.

  The lightning reached a point where it was almost a blinding solid light above us and then there was a massive blackout. Everything went dark around us. The city, quite visible from our vantage point on the hill, went dark. That was going to get some attention down there. I could only imagine frantic people working for local utilities trying to figure out what the hell just happened, and how an overload on a couple of communication towers managed to knock out the electricity for the entire city.

  Well, it managed to knock it out because I needed the power to signal my ship.

  It was entirely possible they could pick up a transmission from some of the weaker equipment I’d found earlier, but that would take time and adjustments and there was the very real chance the Imperium picked it up before my guys did. No, I wanted to make sure I sent out something powerful enough to be noticed by anyone out there. Of course it had the added effect of being very noticeable to the Imperium ship if it was out there, but I figured they were already following behind us so it’s not like I was advertising anything they didn’t already know.

  Lights came back on. And we were surrounded by angry men in Imperium uniforms, their "bus" that Melissa had pulled up behind us and I’d been so busy focusing on the light show above that I hadn’t noticed. Stupid. They all had their weapons pointed at us.

  "That was a nice try Flin," Rethvar said. "Now if you could kindly step out of the vehicle?"

  I looked at Melissa. "Probably ought to play along for the moment."

  She nodded, her eyes wide. She didn't look happy about this, but then again neither was I. This was getting dangerously close to Rethvar winning the day. I'd never had someone actually beat me. That signal had gone out, though. I figured there was still a chance I could come out on top.

  At
least I figured there was a chance right until Rethvar pointed his weapon at me and pulled the trigger. I saw a blinding white light, and then darkness.

  18

  Melissa

  I screamed as I watched Flin melting in front of me. It was accompanied by a whining noise that seemed different from all the other disintegrations I’d heard this evening, but that didn't register. No, I was more focused on the horrifying sight of watching him fade away.

  I fell down to my knees. The man holding the weapon, the same guy from the pawn shop, turned his weapon to bear on me and smiled.

  "So do you plan on killing me now?"

  He took a step forward, but he never kept his weapon away from me. Probably a good thing, I still had my own weapon in hand, though it wasn't pointed at anyone. He also didn’t make any move to have me drop my gun. That's probably how little of a threat he thought I was.

  Damn it. Damn him.

  "Killing you would be far too easy," he said.

  He moved down and grabbed my hair again. Pulled it up and sniffed it, his eyes squeezed shut. He let out a shudder that made me want to puke. It almost made me want to bring my weapon to bear on him and fire, but I didn't. No, my sense of self-preservation was kicking in, even though I hated that it was.

  Even though it looked like I was facing a life of slavery, and perhaps facing down the destruction of my world on top of that once this guy realized what they had.

  "No, I have all sorts of plans for the beautiful woman who caught the legendary Captain Flin's eye. I'm going to have quite a lot of fun with you, and I think I'm going to allow my men to enjoy the fun as well."

  He put a hand on my cheek this time. There was no warmth in his smile. No, that was the cold and calculating grin of a shark looking at a delicious morsel. I shivered as I realized that I was about to be the centerpiece of an interstellar gang rape. I almost would have cried. I did decide that I was going to use this weapon on as many of them as I could before it came to that.