My job here is still the same. He thought to himself as he opened the access panel right beside the computer terminal and placed a small high yield explosive inside. He set it for thirty minutes and looked around as he closed the panel.
The engineering crew were still stunned, some just starting to groggily move around. One of them looked straight at the access panel. Jake took two steps over to him, picked him up by the belt and collar then tossed him over the railing so he fell three decks down. Someone across that level of engineering saw his crewmate fall over the side and looked down over the railing after him. Chances were he didn't see Jake, but he waited and observed for a moment just in case.
The crewman never even looked towards the access panel with the bomb behind it. Just to keep them disoriented Jake walked over to the sensory overload grenade, beating a crewman to it and pressed the detonation button again.
The room was flooded with light and sound once more. Jake looked around at the for a moment and shook his head. It might not have been a purely military vessel, but the crew had a military designation, took orders from officers and he would have to treat anyone in his way as though they were an enemy soldier.
He blindly pressed the control to open the elevator doors and the car was still there. He stepped inside and the main power failed. A moment later the lights came on dimly and he mentally crossed his fingers as he pressed the button for the deck eleven. Nothing happened.
He sighed and adjusted the sensors in his suit to scan through the thin metal sheeting of the elevator car. Luckily there was a maintenance space the height of the lift tube. After making a few adjustments to his sidearm he stood back as far as he could and fired at the wall facing the empty space in the shaft. The weak metal almost gave way under the white hot shot spread over a space three quarters of a meter wide. He fired one more time and made a hole large enough to crawl through.
There was no gravity outside of the elevator car, but he still used the ladder to guide himself along and always had one hand on a rung. Even though there was no gravity at the moment, there was always a possibility of it coming back on.
The level he needed was only three levels down and he was relieved to see the standard emergency crank for the doors. After a few pumps of the lever the doors were open enough for him to squeeze through. His sensors told him that there were two armed men down the hall between him and the entrance to the cargo train. They had obviously seen the doors pump open and were waiting for whoever did it to come through. Neither of them were stepping forward to inspect the elevator shaft.
Jake waited for three minutes silently, watching the seconds tick by on the chronometer built into his display and the two men stood stock still with their rifles pointed at the door the entire time. With a sigh he turned the sound dampeners on his suit all the way up, made sure that the rest of the cloak was still functioning then swung through the open doors. He stepped to the side, ducking behind a computer console and waited a moment.
The guards didn't move, they hadn't noticed him. He ran down the hall towards the access doors leading out to the cargo train. The guards were in full military vacsuits. He stopped right between them, took a firm grip of their rifle stocks, yanked them out of their hands and tossed them over his shoulders. He took several steps backwards, drew his sidearm and shot the first in the head. The second ran forward, trying to ram whatever invisible thing was there.
Jake stepped aside, tripped him, knelt down on his back and pressed the barrel of his gun into his shoulder. The guard didn't stop trying to get up so he fired.
“Now you're going to unlock the doors,” Jake ordered.
The guard stopped struggling. Jake stood and let the guard get to his feet. He looked around for a moment, hesitating and favouring his injury.
“I'm here, trust me. I will shoot you in the face if you do not open the door,” the voice coming through the disguiser inside his cloaksuit was not his own, but the twisted, distorted voice of another person entirely.
The guard turned around, walked back to the doorway and stopped.
Jake kicked him hard in the back of the leg, forcing the guard to his knees. “Open it!”
The guard didn't enter a code, but simply pressed the OPEN button.
“No code? You guys really don't care who gets in, do you?”
“We only make sure no one gets out,” replied the guard through his clenched teeth.
“You've reported me, haven't you?”
The guard shook his head vigorously in denial.
“That's all right, in a few minutes none of that will matter. I've planted a bomb in the forward lift. When the power is restored it'll head straight to the bridge and the entire command deck will be destroyed,” he stated ominously before running down the hall leading into the cargo train. He pressed the OPEN button there and the doors parted. The inner airlock doors opened as the outer doors closed.
Jake brought up a security screen on the computer console on the other side and set a restriction code on the door so no one could come after him. The controls to decouple the cargo train from the Vesuvius were standard, and with the pull of a safety lever and the command punched into a console the locks securing the train to the ship released. A few seconds later the thrusters fired, pushing the train slowly away from the Vesuvius so the Samson could get in position and haul the cargo into hyperspace. He turned his cloaksuit off and injected himself with a treatment for radiation poisoning.
The Vesuvius's main computer was still functioning and the chip he had left in the elevator car still had access. There was no security in place to guard against access on those lines so he began to download their navigational data and cargo manifests. There was something very strange about this job. Even though he knew they were getting paid a premium to do it and not ask questions, he couldn't help investigating.
Cargo
The Samson had no difficulty hooking up to the long cargo train and hauling it into hyperspace. Jake waited the entire time in the forward control car trying to review the data he had retrieved from the ship but the files were encrypted.
He wasn't going inside without a boarding crew. Stephanie took point with Ramirez and Price close behind. “Welcome aboard,” he welcomed quietly.
“Last boarding action sir, I'll miss our time together,” she said casually.
“We'll all miss you chica,” Ramirez commented from behind.
“Do we have hostiles?” She asked Jake.
“We might, the guards they put on the door seemed more worried about what might come out than anyone going in. Better to be safe. I can handle a lot, but even invisibility and in impact armour can't hold back a mob. Did you bring the stunners?”
“Yes sir.”
“Good, sling your rifles and draw those. Hand me one while you're at it.”
They switched from particle rifles to the stun hand guns, slinging the former across their backs and locking them in place. Their vacsuits were provided to them by the Captain. They were the same as his. Sealed from the neck down with oval face plates on their form fitting head pieces. Over top they wore full combat armour, mixed and matched beige and grey parts of larger plates attached to centimetre thick resistive insulated fibre. Their heads were covered by impact panels with under padding that clicked in place behind the face plates.
“Okay, time to crack it. Start scanning through the door,” Jake ordered. Agameg Price stepped up with a hand scanner and began gathering data as the Captain popped the control panel open and began to carefully draw wires away from the main circuit board. “Nothing special about this,” he said to himself.
“Breathable air inside, thousands of small power supplies, one large one at the back. No interior bulkheads for the first two kilometres then there's a hardened partition. I can't get through it.”
Jake felt nausea wash over him and straightened up for a moment, hoping it would pass. It was the radiation poisoning, it must have been much worse than he thought. He was glad the power supply and high pow
ered circuitry for the cloaking field were both deactivated, if he could medicate through the sickness and counter the cellular degradation he would be home free. Jake took a few deep breaths and finished patching into the control panel. “Any more information?” He asked Price
“Can't be sure, sixteen degrees inside, good pressure, equal to this room.”
“Good, let's go,” Jake said as he pressed a button on his arm control and the doors opened. He stepped inside first, it was pitch black. He looked to his arm command console. There were no lights to control through the door console hack he had just made. The cargo cars were just massive spaces with nothing but a temporary life support system. “Light it up for us.”
Ramirez took a small round cylinder out of his pocket and rolled it straight in front of him. The boarding team could hear it rolling further and further away until Ramirez turned it on.
Several hundred meters ahead were illuminated and Captain Valance gasped at the sight. Hanging in racks above and below the catwalk, as far as the eye could see in front of them were thousands of pods exactly like the one he emerged from years before.
Nausea washed over him once more. This time he couldn't hold it back. He pulled his vacsuit headpiece off and stepped back inside the smaller compartment, opened a disposal drawer and heaved his lunch and dinner inside.
“Captain!” Called out Stephanie, she was behind him in seconds.
“Cloaksuit, radiation-” he was able to get out before another set of heaves. As soon as he stopped vomiting he switched to the medical controls on his arm command unit and injected himself with anti nausea medication. The exposure reading he glimpsed was well beyond lethal, he hoped it could be countered.
“Are you all right sir?” Stephanie asked.
“I'll know in a moment,” he replied, checking his status. “I was exposed to a bit more radiation from the suit's power supply than I expected, I'll be fine in a few days,” he said as he raised the dosage of radiation treatment medication. “If not, you'll have to fight Frost for command.” The remnants of nausea were gone and he took a deep, slow breath then let it out.
“I'll never question what you're willing to sacrifice for our safety, sir,” commented Ramirez.
“Sacrifice? I'll be fine, I don't know about you though.”
“Why's that sir?”
Jake put his headpiece back on. “You're taking point.”
Ramirez chuckled and took up the forward position with Price and his scanner behind. They moved slowly down the catwalk made to fit two side by side. None of them could shake the eerie feeling as they passed thousands of silent sleepers, all in stasis tubes filled with yellow or blue fluid. Captain Valance buried any visible sign of the sympathy he felt for those people, concentrating on safely exploring the massive space.
“Are they alive?” Asked Stephanie.
“According to this there have only been two failed pods so far out of a couple thousand. The entire first three kilometres of the cargo containers are filled with them. There have to be more than what we expected here, more like thirty.”
“Weren't there only supposed to be ten sir?” Asked Ramirez.
“Anything not in stasis coming up?” Asked Jake, ignoring the point man's question.
“Nothing in this compartment so far.”
They kept walking in silence, after a while Ramirez dropped another light cylinder and they could almost see the other end of the compartment.
The Captain tried to run a decryption program on the files he had downloaded from the Vesuvius but it estimated that it may take approximately six years. He shook his head and opened a channel to the bridge of the Samson. “Have Frost pay a visit to Burke. Tell him he'll get a fair share if he decrypts something for me. I'm sending the files now, make sure he gets them.”
“Yes sir,” Cynthia replied.
“And tell him he's got two hours,” Captain Valance added before closing the channel.
“There's active life past the next bulkhead sir,” reported Price. “Various conditions as far as I can tell, not many humans.”
“How many?”
“I can only scan about two hundred meters deep right now, but as far as I can tell there are at least a thousand on eight decks.”
“In just a couple hundred meters? Are you reading that right?” Stephanie asked quietly.
Price checked again, resetting the scanner and performing a fresh cycle. “I wish I weren't, but I am.”
They arrived at the doorway and Captain Valance put a hand on Ramirez's shoulder. “I'll go first, don't point your stunners at anyone unless we're charged by a group.”
He stood in front of everyone else and opened the double doors. The darkness inside was like a wall. At first they couldn't see much of anything. Then there were only rough shapes and Ramirez was just taking another light cylinder out of his pocket and Jake took it from him. He turned it up just enough to cast a little light on the surrounding ten meters.
Ramirez choked at what he saw and turned away.
“Oh my God,” Stephanie whispered.
Agameg Price was silent as he lowered his scanner.
There was a pile of non-human corpses in various states of decomposition. Jake raised his hands and said something that no one expected. “We're here to help.”
He stepped around the pile of bodies, at least thirty, and started to see frightened faces. There were issyrians, some of whom looked mostly human and nafalli, their big round eyes looking out from furred faces. Most of them were holding their flat noses with both hands or were leaning forward, putting weight on their large, furred hands.
“It's all right, we'll try to transport you somewhere you can get some help. I need you to know we don't have any doctors on board and we are a very small ship. We don't have room for you, but we can get you somewhere that might have the facilities to take care of you,” he said calmly as he got a little closer to the semicircle of fearful onlookers. A couple of them started to move towards them.
The issyrians stepped forward slowly and lightly touched Jake at first, but then they touched Agameg Price instead. He had reverted to his native state, and his thin, delicate features with short strands of skin covering his narrow face and long, thin neck were plain for all to see. “We'll do our best to help you, spread the word and tell everyone to stay very calm. We are not equipped to handle emergencies,” he whispered to them quietly. Several touched him or another member of the party and then walked off into the darkness.
“Why are they reaching out to us like that?” Ramirez asked quietly.
“My race enters a dream state when we're near death and we touch objects nearby to keep us focused on reality in order to prolong life.”
“Valance to bridge,” Jacob said, verbally opening a channel instead of moving to touch his arm control. “We need the rest of the boarding crew here with all the medical supplies we have and the instructions that go with them. Be efficient, but don't rush so you'll forget anything on your way. It's important that they bring everything that we can teach others to use. Do you understand?”
“Yes sir, I'll tell them right away,” Cynthia replied.
“Confirm through repetition.”
“Sorry sir. The boarding staff are to gather all the medical supplies and equipment they can. They have to bring the instructions and be prepared to teach others how to use it all. They are not to rush, but to efficiently make sure they bring it all.”
“Good, patch me through to Ashley.”
“Here she is.”
“What's going on sir? Is everyone all right?” Asked Ashley.
“The boarding crew are fine but we've found some people in need. Set course for Thadd and get us moving as fast as you can without going over safety limits. Have Silver chart the quickest route out of this territory possible. As soon as we've crossed the territorial line start broadcasting on emergency channels and contacting emergency organizations. Several thousand refugees rescued, in need of medical assistance, various races. Send our
expected point of arrival to Thadd.”
“Yes sir, I'll be down to help as soon as-”
“No. You stay up there. Keep this boat together along with the entire cargo train. I don't want it falling apart on the way there.”
“Yes sir.”
One of the refugees, a nafalli with brown fur and yellow stripes, cocked her head and blinked for a long moment before opening her big dark eyes wide. “Captain Jonas?” She asked with a lovely voice that was strained to a squeak.
Jake Valance looked at her, and her eyes widened. “Captain Jonas from Zingara, Captain of the First Light!” She lurched ahead and grabbed his hand. “Please!” She shouted.
He recognized the mewling and huffing sounds she made immediately. She was crying, near hysterics. “Don't do anything!” He shouted to Stephanie, who had her stunner pointed at the nafalli who was dragging him deeper into the makeshift complex. “Ramirez, with me!”
It took him a couple seconds to react, but he followed the nafalli and his Captain, looking right at them and ignoring everything else.
“You can calm down, I'll follow you.” Captain Valance said in a calm tone as he was hauled through a maze of makeshift blanket and refuse nests, triple bunks, cloth partitions and exhausted or very ill people. The state of the place was unbelievable. They had barely any form of light, he could see emergency ration wrappers lying around and there were stands of water tanks every fifty or so meters but most of them were empty.
She stopped at a nest made of blankets, parts of a bunk, its mattress and several other things he didn't take the time to identify. Laying right in the middle of the small nest was a seven foot tall nafalli. His hair was falling out, his breathing was shallow and his dry, cracked nose was seeping blood and pus. “Captain Jonas is here Oomal, he has come to rescue us.” The nafalli said soothingly, stroking his patchy grey fur. She made a soothing purr sound and he lifted his head slightly.
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