by Terry Mixon
“I’d hardly call you regular,” Queen said dryly. “You’ll be at the head of the top ten most wanted list. Every man and woman in law enforcement will be looking for you and your accomplices.
Jess could believe that. “Let’s go sit down and talk, then. I’m sure you have a very interesting story to tell. Someone will get you settled on Freedom Express in the area we use for meals while I change.”
Getting out of the pressure suit only took a few minutes, so they’d just gotten tea when Jess joined them. Sandra was leaned up against the wall nearby, so Jess felt relatively confident of her safety.
“Your sudden arrival has my full attention,” she said. “How did you get here and who are you?”
Cabot sipped her tea and launched into her explanation calmly. “My associates and I are descendants of people that fled from the Mars base and this ship about a thousand years ago. We’ve come to warn you of a great danger.”
“That’s quite a claim,” Jess said, “but your ability to use the quantum tunnels certainly lends credence to it. Why haven’t you shown up before now? And why kidnap Secretary of State Queen? If that’s who this guy really is.”
Queen looked amused rather than offended.
“We didn’t have a gate controller or power supply,” Cabot said. “Once I became aware of the investigation into Kathleen Bennett, and what they’d found, I took steps. Taking him seemed like the easiest way of making contact with the US government while I did it.”
“But not exactly in a manner calculated to earn trust,” Queen said. “I’m very much afraid that all of you have some explaining to do and the US government is going to demand some changes to what is happening out here. You can’t just claim all of this for yourselves. This is now classified as top secret/SAP and falls under the control of the US government.”
Jess gave him a steady look. “Do you know where you are? No? Let me clue you in. Space. Far beyond the outermost planet. This might take jurisdictional overreach to new heights.
“So, let me make our position plain. Your opinion means very little out here. Those things called borders mean something for a reason. Humanity Unlimited is incorporated in a country not called the United States and even it doesn’t control what we do out here. Is that plain enough for you?”
He shook his head with more than a hint of sadness in his expression. “That’s naïve at best and foolish at worst. Even as we speak, US military forces are taking Clayton Rogers into custody. This is over.”
Jess laughed. “You think that’s enough to stop us? Harry doesn’t even particularly like his father. Even if he did, the articles of incorporation make clear what happens in that kind of situation. We don’t negotiate with terrorists. And that’s what the US is acting like. This situation is not yours to dictate.”
Queen’s expression hardened. “You can act this way now, but circumstances change. At some point in the not so distant future, we’ll be out here with you and we’ll take all of this away. By force, if need be. Corporate or personal greed will not dictate national policy for the greatest democracy on Earth.”
“Now who’s naïve? Corporate and personal greed have been dictating US policies since before any of us was born. You’ll do whatever lines your prospective pockets the fastest.”
Cabot cleared her throat. “As entertaining as this is, you should save it until later. I need to warn both of you about what you’re getting involved with. As powerful as the US is, it’s in just as much danger as everyone else. I’m talking about an extinction level event.”
Jess made a point of turning her attention away from Queen. “This has something to do with all the fighting that took place back then, I’m sure. It pains me to ask this, but can you prove any of your story? You have to admit, it does sound a little Dan Brown.”
The other woman smiled. “I understand how ludicrous this sounds. One of my distant ancestors was assigned to this very place, I believe. One of the old stories revolves around the huge chamber at the center.
“The gravity is steady all the way around, so you could look up and see people walking over your heads. The elevator let out in the center and stairs headed off in a number of directions like a spider’s web. Am I close?”
Jess nodded. “That’s all accurate, and not something we’ve shared, so I suppose you have to be telling me the truth.” She shifted her attention to the large, squat man. “Excuse me, but are you somehow related to the heavy-worlders?”
“My name is Jackson,” he said. “And yes. One of my ancestors was a wounded heavy-worlder. They called themselves something different, but that’s not relevant right now.”
“So, they were human.”
He nodded. “Yes, with a little tinkering. I’m not going to step on Brenda’s story, but they’re humans modified to live and work in heavy gravity. The genes are dominant, so I still have all the traits.”
Jess felt her eyes widen. “So, you can move around in the 3G environment on the ship we found out here? It’s abandoned, but operational. We’re not sure what it’s doing out here.”
“I’d have to try, but almost certainly. I suspect that I’m woefully out of shape for that kind of thing, though.”
“That’s my cue to jump in,” Cabot said. “That ship represents a huge danger to everyone in this solar system. They left it here to monitor us, and if certain criteria are met, it will go tattle. Then the heavy-worlders come back to finish what they started. Only this time, they kill every single human in this system.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
Nathan watched the enemy form up for a minute before heading back down to the lowest level. Once that bastard figured out where the entrance was, they’d come in faster than he could stop them.
Too bad they didn’t have a real clue how the systems in this base worked. That gun mounted near the elevator would be very helpful right about now. At least he could use the other weapons to even the odds a little.
He’d closed the outer door, so maybe they wouldn’t find it at all.
It only took a few minutes to gather his men and issue weapons from the armory. They had no trouble grasping how they worked in practice. A few bursts each at the far wall proved that. Their professionalism would make a difference against semi-trained illiterates.
The armor was straightforward, too. If it was made to protect against these high-powered weapons, it would do well against regular bullets.
As soon as the first group was ready, he sent them up to relieve the men at the entrance. Within fifteen minutes, everyone was armed and armored.
He put most of the men down at the lowest level, but he led the troops at the entrance himself. His hopes of going undiscovered only lasted half an hour. Then someone started pounding on the door. Based on how thick it was, maybe they were shooting it.
It would probably stand up to a few blasts, but nothing was indestructible. He sent most of the men down to the lowest level and set up shop in the elevator. That gave him some distance from explosions and an easy way of getting out of the fight when the time was right.
After a short pause, the door slid open on its own. The bastard had gotten in!
The hallway rapidly became a target rich environment. One that he and his people used ruthlessly to their advantage, mowing down the screaming idiots as they charged in.
The weapons were significantly more effective than he’d imagined possible. A single burst killed half a dozen men. With the three of them firing, the entrance became a pile of bodies in no time at all.
They weren’t unmolested, though. A round bounced off Nathan’s shoulder armor. The unlucky man next to him took the ricochet in the side of the head. The other man took a shot to the face a moment later.
Time to head for greener pastures.
He hit the button for the lowest level and unloaded as many shots as he could before the doors closed.
Nathan stripped the men of their weapons and ammo. They’d moved all of the ammo to the lowest level, figuring the weapons left behind
would be useless without them.
It pissed him off that they’d lose the ships on the lowest level. That was a given now. The enemy would pin them down unless his mother had figured out how to open the portals. And hopefully to somewhere more hospitable than the surface of the moon.
How did that work, anyway? Shouldn’t space suck the air out of the base?
When the elevator doors opened, he shot up the controls and dragged one of the dead men to block the doors from closing. Let the savages use the stairs.
His men had made barricades with good fields of fire on the stairs. They’d make the bastards pay for every inch.
His mother waved him over. “I have a code to somewhere safe, I think. It was on the papers you found. We should retreat before they get here.”
“Where does it go?”
“Who cares? It has to be better than staying here.”
The stair doors banged open and a man stuck his head out. His men took it off for him.
He grinned at his mother. “They know where we are, so I guess we should look at making an exit. After you.”
Nathan expected them to be hesitant after the slaughter upstairs, but that only seemed to make them rush in faster. Someone led the way with a grenade, which got his people ducking. More men flooded out, found cover, and opened fire on them.
His mother was under cover in the cockpit of the ship. Bullets bounced off its armored hull. She painstakingly entered the code.
“Here goes nothing,” she said as she pressed the last button.
The arch nearest them filled with mist and lightning. It cleared to show a room made of metal, like on a ship at sea.
Several of his men rushed through the portal and he heard gunshots from the other side.
“Great, bad guys over there, too,” he grumbled, grabbing his mother and ignoring her scream of pain as he yanked her out of the fighter. “Time to go.”
His men followed along behind him as he ran through the open portal. His scouts were exchanging shots with someone in a corridor beyond the room. Two people in spacesuits lay sprawled on the floor.
Nathan wished he had time to figure out what was going on, but the enemy pushed through the open portal right behind him. They seemed determined to chase him to ground and kill him.
Thankfully, there was another exit from the room. He ran through it with his mother before more people came rushing out of a second arch. At least these new people were shooting the terrorists.
As far as he was concerned, they could kill one another off.
It was Harry and his people. It had to be, with the familiar spacesuits. Time to close this fight off.
He set his mother down and pulled off his pack while she clutched her foot and moaned. He’d stuffed it full of goodies before they’d left Paris.
Like the disposable anti-tank rocket he pulled out.
He opened the launcher and leaned out long enough to fire the weapon at the portal the bad guys were coming through. The mighty river had slowed to a trickle. The bad guys were in the room now. He couldn’t see anyone past the moron standing in the open portal, looking like he wanted to turn around and run.
The rocket hit the top of the portal and riddled him with shrapnel. The metal wall reappeared instantly, cutting the idiot in half.
Well, that was gory.
That blast sent his brother’s people retreating toward wherever they’d come from. Since they were still shooting up the terrorists, Nathan let them take their casualties and go. The less people that stayed, the fewer trying to kill him later. He used a second rocket to blast that portal after they were gone.
By now, he was taking heavy fire from the remaining bad guys. He had to pull back. Just before he yanked his head clear, he saw the bastard that had cut off his mother’s toe directing men to go around through the other exit.
He had no idea of the layout, but neither did they. He’d make do.
* * * * *
The unexpected attack caught Harry completely off guard and he cursed himself for not taking steps to prepare for it. The people from the past had locked their quantum tunnels to keep people from coming at them without warning. If he and his people made it clear, he’d best start doing the same.
He’d spotted his brother carrying his mother and lined up a shot, but as much as he hated her, Kathleen Bennett was still his mother. In the end, he let them escape. Probably a mistake he’d regret later, but he couldn’t make himself do the unthinkable.
Then some idiot used a rocket launcher to destroy two of the three portals. Thankfully, after his people had made a clean escape. The men pulled their injured and dead with them on the retreat.
Now all Harry needed to do was get clear with the people left on the ship. He had them rendezvous near the airlock where the lifter sat on the hull. Thankfully, everyone was in suits. That was going to save their lives.
A few at a time, they cycled out onto the hull and into the lifter. A message to Freedom Express got him the information that everyone was accounted for.
He went over his helmet video as the lifter was detaching. Who were the people Nathan was fighting? He hadn’t heard a word about new players in the game. Were they associated with the people that had the secretary of state?
Probably not, they looked an awful lot like they came from the sandbox. If so, Nathan had opened things up to some very dangerous lunatics.
“Harry, the ship is moving,” the pilot said.
He made his way forward in the lifter and saw the ship was getting smaller very quickly. In fact, in less than twenty seconds, he couldn’t see it anymore.
“Where’s it going? Toward Earth?”
The woman shook her head. “The other direction. The map that Jess showed us had something marked further out. I think it might be going that way.”
“Get us down and safe as quickly as you can.” He switched channels. “Freedom Express, this is Liberty Six. Over.”
“Go, Liberty Six.”
“We’re coming in hot. As soon as we land, I want you to take off after that ship at max acceleration. We need to keep it in sight and find out what it’s doing and where it’s going.”
“Copy that.”
The lifter came in quickly, settling into the landing bay the older humans had used. The outer hatch closed and the gravity came up to normal.
“Everyone, go get checked out by medical,” he said. “I don’t care if you feel fine. That’s an order.”
One he should obey, too, but he had more pressing business to attend to. He impatiently took the elevator down to the core and made his way to the main control console. The woman sitting there was one of the pilots assigned to Liberty Station.
“Can you drive this thing?” he asked.
“As well as anyone,” she said with a shrug. “The handheld translates for me, but I don’t know where a lot of the screens are. This is simple, though. I just selected the ship as the destination and ramped up the speed.”
“Are we keeping pace?”
“Not even close. We’ll get where he’s going, but not in time to do anything about it. Not that I have a clue what we’d do if we caught it. We don’t have any weapons.”
He smiled grimly at her. “This entire comet is a weapon. If we catch them while we have a speed advantage, we can swat them like a fly being run over by a watermelon.”
“Nice visual. At this rate, he’ll be at the area on Jess’ map in less than twenty minutes. It’ll take us at least twice that long.”
“That a lot faster than I expected.”
She smiled and shrugged. “What can I say? This thing moves faster when you know how to give it the gas.”
“Harry.”
He turned to find Jess and a bunch of people he didn’t know standing behind him. Rex and Sandra had a security team watching over them. He suspected Jess hadn’t considered that and gave Sandra a nod.
“Harry Rogers,” Jess said, “meet Brenda Cabot and Josh Queen. She’s a former FBI agent and claims to be part of a
secret organization made up of descendants of survivors from this ship and the Mars base. Mister Queen is the secretary of state for the United States.”
“Agent Cabot, Mister Secretary,” he said politely, “I’m sorry to be rude, but I’m a little busy right now.”
Cabot took a step forward. “That’s the reason we’ve come to you. That ship is dangerous. You must stop it or humanity is in terrible danger.”
He shrugged. “That’s out of my hands. Once my brother and the people he was fighting came on board, we lost all control over there. We don’t have anyone aboard and it’s on its way out of here. Not toward Earth, but something further out. Can you tell me what it’s going toward?”
She shook her head. “Our people passed down as much information as we could through writings and oral tradition, but we only knew what the survivors knew. They said there was a ship belonging to the Asharim watching the system. I can’t recall anything about bases far out in the system like this.”
“Who are the Asharim?” Queen asked. “What’s their beef with humanity? What kind of trouble have you people gotten us into?”
Cabot turned toward him. “The Asharim are aliens. Humanoids from a relatively low gravity environment. They discovered humanity about 900 CE and took samples from various areas of the planet.
“Their intention was to harness humanity as a subservient race to work for them as something of a cross between slaves and indentured servants. I’m not certain that my ancestors really understood the details correctly.”
Harry nodded. “We found icons in the gravity controls that must have been for them. Even here, on Freedom Express. Obviously, something went wrong. What happened?”
“Rebellion,” she said. “The Asharim were in conflict with other races out there and some of them made contact with humanity. They armed and trained us to take control of our own destiny, or so they said. I’m a bit skeptical. I’ll bet they had their own plans for us.
“The Asharim don’t have the same moral system that we do. To them, humans are bugs. Or farm animals. Our sentience means very little to them. They only respect someone that competes at their level.