With one finger hovering over the Big Surprise's remote trigger he watched the hangar through the Samson's external sensors. No one was coming for him yet, and Captain Wheeler was focused on the Cold Reaver as the gangway lowered.
Wheeler was disappointed. The person his security team was escorting down the ramp was certainly not Valent. He was too short for a start.
“I told you Valent was about six feet tall,” he said as he opened the captive's long coat. “And this is a woman!”
“I'm sorry sir, she had everything you described Valent with. Even his sidearm.” One of the security officers said, offering him the heavy handgun.
“Not to mention other accessories that don't come with a male captive,” Wheeler said sourly as he reached for the weapon. His hand was just about to touch it when he felt the ominous shape of a round barrel press up against the back of his head. Without a thought he dropped to his knees, drew his sidearm just enough to clear the holster, and pointed it backwards, firing several times.
He caught one of his own security team in the chest, but hit whoever was behind him three times. The cloaking field projected by Jake Valance's armour failed and his body became visible. One shot had caught him just under the chin, the next squarely in the stomach and the third had caught him in the groin. “Now that is Valent.” Wheeler said as he held his hand out towards the charred body, taking a medical reading with sensors imbedded in his palm. He checked the readout displayed on the surface of his forearm's skin. “Dead. I'll probably lose my cash reward for this,” he concluded. “Helm, set course for Pallanous four.” Wheeler ordered as he reloaded his pulse weapon.
Finn watched the whole thing and stared at the display in complete disbelief. He could hear Wheeler declare Captain Valance dead, he could see the massive damage to the man's body. Somehow he seemed invincible, indomitable, but now he was dead. They were dragging the body like a bag of garbage to an elevator and he was still in his trance of disbelief.
Wheeler put his sidearm right up against the impostor's faceplate. “I grew up wearing vacsuits a lot like the one you're hiding behind. That's why when I knew I was going after Valent I modified this pulse weapon to discharge a third of its power, about five hundred rounds worth, in each shot. I didn't consider whether or not it would work against the faceplate. Move and I'll give it a try.” She struggled as the guards at her sides held her in place. “Time to tie up loose ends. Kill the rest of the Samson crew. Hunt them down, use grenades, flush them out into space, I don't care how, just do it!”
Finn panicked. He activated the Big Surprise and every electrical system near the hangar was hit will the massive electromagnetic explosion. Every unshielded fine circuit, lighting fixture and active piece of technology sparked, overloaded and burned out. The Ion engine right behind him started making a deafening, squealing, whining sound. He reached down, grabbed the manual crank and struggled with it. The heavy doors barely moved. As he pulled the lever with both hands with all the strength he had he could see parts of the bare engine turning white. The heavy blast doors parted a few millimetres before the explosion.
Frost had expected the Big Surprise to go off, he was ready. Seeing the Captain killed like it was child's play had him rattled, but more angry. He carefully lowered himself down the landing strut and when the emergency lights came on, shedding just enough ruddy yellow illumination to see distinct shapes he leapt for Wheeler.
Lucius pulled his trigger and nothing happened. Instead of taking another shot at Stephanie he levelled his pistol at Frost's head and pulled the trigger again. The weapon emitted nothing but a hollow click. Frost laughed and brought one big fist down on Wheeler's face like a sledge. The first blow broke the man's perfect nose. A security officer knocked Frost off and his Captain scrambled to his feet, holding his face and started running for the elevator.
Frost kicked the security officer's knee then swept his other foot out from under him. In a split second he was on top of the guard, grabbing hold of his vacsuit's face plate. He drew his head up a few inches, gripped his jaw and wrenched the man's head hard, cracking the support that kept his neck from turning too far. He whipped the man's head the other way and back again. Without the resistance of the support, the soldier's neck snapped.
Stephanie had flipped one of the security officers onto his back and crushed his windpipe with her foot. The other tried to grab her again and she spun, sweeping his legs out from under him. The moment he hit the ground she kicked him in the face, partially dislodging his helmet. She kicked him in the teeth as hard as she could, sending his helmet across the deck and brought her leg all the way up then crushed the heel of her armoured boot onto his temple with a grisly crunch. It was then she acknowledged Frost. “You made it.”
“Aye,” he replied out of breath; “Wheeler's gettin' away.”
The pair looked towards the elevator where a pair of guards tried to get the shaft open. They had dropped Jake Valance's body behind them. Wheeler was running towards it, hunched over, holding his face. His broken nose was bleeding freely.
Stephanie and Frost started running after him but stopped dead in their tracks at a sight neither of them would forget for the rest of their lives. Captain Valance stood in one smooth motion. They were watching the dead come to life as he started walking towards Wheeler, who didn't run, he just dropped his hand to his side and shook his head. “You were burned through, right in the neck.”
“I was.” Came Valance's cold reply.
“You're a framework, they made you a framework,” Wheeler said as he staggered backwards.
Jake didn't reply, but turned towards two oncoming guards, ducked one and rammed the other with his shoulder, bowling him over. He spun on his heel and caught the other guard's head in his hands. With one swift yank his helmet was off, and in the next instant Jake used it as a weapon, smashing it into the guard's face once then backhanding him with it hard, sending his opponent straight down to the deck.
The Captain rounded on Wheeler then, tossing the helmet aside. “They did a lot to me. Now you're going to tell me what it was like before.” Jake said as he took the next few steps between him and the other man. “While you watch me buy your crew, take your ship, and make everything you value my own.”
Frost fell to his knees. He kept staring at the perfect, bare skin where the Captain's fatal wounds had been. The awe he was in was understandable, but the relief at seeing that man alive was profound. The depth of it would be something Frost would ponder for many days to come.
Awakening
Alice could see perfectly in the maintenance spaces between the decks and walls. Her mechanical eye amplified the little available light and measured the densities of objects ahead to construct a mid day perfect picture of what lay ahead. Her implants were working perfectly except for one little glitch. Ever since Lewis was transferred to a storage chip and sub processor unit buried in the back of her jaw her right earlobe would periodically itch. “You should stop scratching and tugging that. It'll eventually become all red and sore. You might even bruise it.” She heard him through her neural communicator.
“You know, it's funny, I never use the implant you're living in. It only started when you made the transfer.”
“Why did you have me download myself here? I could have hid away in one of the Clever Dream's subsystems. They'd never find me.”
“Yes, but there's a good chance that they'll eventually deactivate or destroy her. She's probably torn the hangar up something fierce and prevented anyone from so much as opening the door but she'll eventually run out of fuel and be unable to fire her guns let alone generate more ammo for the missile launchers,” Alice replied mentally as she squeezed around a large pipe.
“It will take over a year for her to expend all the fuel in the tanks by firing all five guns. The materializer systems could generate over four hundred fifty missiles each before exceeding their warranty coverage. Who knows how long they'll last afterwards.”
“They'd probably fail rig
ht after the warranty expires. That seems to be the way of things.”
“Not with that ship. It's top of the line remember? I miss her already.”
“Well I need you here. Two heads are better than one.”
“I'm not nearly as quick in this little micro computer. It's only five hundred twelve bit, after all.”
“Oh boo hoo. A few hundred years ago that kind of power would have weighed ten kilograms. Now it fits into a half centimetre squared biochip. I just wish it wasn't tapping a nerve or something for its power.” Alice said as she tugged her earlobe. Looking around, it was difficult to believe she was in the bowels of a ship. There were vessels that had hallways as cramped. Cables, tubes, circuit boxes and pipes were everywhere, certainly, but most ships ran those along their main hallways anyway. “What an incredible waste of space. I mean, the First Light only had one section with panelled walls and that was the Officers quarters. Not even all the officer's quarters were that way either, just the senior staff section. Man, what I'd do to serve on that ship,” she stopped and looked at a group of intersecting wires. “These are the mechanical door control leads for this section right?”
“One moment please.”
“Oh, come on. It can't be that hard to look it up.”
“Shh, I'm searching. The schematics you downloaded were primarily for waste management. It's hard to guess based on what I'm seeing. You're right though, those must be the power lines and control cables you're looking for.”
“Oh, you think it's both? Not just the power?”
“That's my best guess. I can say for a certainty that two decks won't be able to activate waste recycling as well. That's eleven toilets slowly filling up.”
“Not a pretty picture. Okay, here's hoping you're right about what these wires do.” Alice said as she spread coarse green paste across the ribbon cables. It would take half an hour for the chemical compound to eat through the wires.
“So what exactly are you going to do? Inconvenience them to death?” Asked Lewis.
“I'm just spreading a little extra chaos to disguise my true purpose. Since the main hangar doors are on lockdown and there's no way the Clever Dream will blast her way through, I'm going to find one of the computer cores and dump you inside.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?”
“Whatever you like. You could always start singing Birdhouse In Your Soul while playing five trillion games of sudoku. Anything to distract the ship sensors from what I'm up to.”
“Ah, Birdhouse In Your Soul, it took hundreds of years and many emotional artificial intelligences to understand its meaning. Even after the accomplishment was made no AI could actually convey the simplistic meaning on any level.”
“I know, sometimes I wish I were still software so I could fully understand it from your perspective.”
“Well, I'm sure I can provide a distraction. What will you be doing again?”
“You'll know it when you see it,” Alice replied as she began climbing up a long, narrow shaft packed with various cables and wires.
“Will you come back for me?”
“Oh, don't worry, I won't leave you behind after all the work I put in. Once I'm on my way out in the Clever Dream I expect you'll transmit yourself to her. You'll be safe and sound, back home.”
“That's a relief. What if I can't transmit?”
“Well, I'll work on some insurance.”
Several decks later she came to a broad junction with more room for internal infrastructure management. She climbed into the service walkway and laid her hand on a thirty centimetre thick bundle of cables. A small display came up on the visor of her vacsuit. “Here it is. The primary data cable for the secondary computer core. Ready to have some fun?”
“Oh yes. I love talking to strange computer systems.”
“Just tell me if you don't get control of the core before a defensive AI gets on your trail.”
“Will do.”
She carefully stabbed a small tool into two data cables and uploaded Lewis into the system. Transmitting complex data was always a strange sensation. It was like reading ten thousand pages in the space of five seconds and not remembering a single word.
“Oh, they'll never see this coming,” Lewis transmitted to her.
“Good boy, confusion and inconvenience, as much as you can manage.”
“I've taken control of the secondary core. The defensive AIs didn't even notice until it was too late. Going silent until you need me,” Lewis said gleefully.
Alice started to run down the narrow passageway towards her main objective. She was half way there when Lewis broke comm silence.
“Alice, you need to know this. Jonas is here.”
“What?”
“Jonas Valent. The real one, he's here. He's alive. He's in a suite three corridors down.”
“They captured him? How? He's sectors away.”
“No, it's all in the database. That is an experiment, a copy that failed regardless of how many times they tried to copy Jonas' consciousness. The copies kept on refusing to cooperate, suppressing or deleting the copied memories. Along with his experiences they all seemed to inherit his spirit of defiance, the will fight Vindyne, even if it meant sabotaging themselves. The being they have in custody here is the real Jonas Valent, however. His memory is intact and he has been awake for sixty three days.”
Alice felt as though her entire world had tipped on its head. “Show me.”
A flash of images flipped by on her eye implant and she read them with ease. Over the passage of seconds she knew exactly what she would do. Revenge will have to wait. I'll be back for you Gabriel, she thought to herself. “Lewis, I'd like you to look up a subprogram called dementia.”
“I have it, I did not know it was part of my program.”
“Please activate for fifteen minutes and extend immunity to myself, your core program, Jonas Valent and the Clever Dream.”
There was no response. Once dementia was activated there wouldn't be. Lewis was busy doing other things.
She ran down the passageway until she came to an access panel. She switched to sonic and thermal sensors so she could see through it into the next room. There were two people, one of them was standing in front of a materializer and Alice couldn't help but smile at herself. She knew what was about to happen.
The order was; “two stacks of pancakes with extra syrup and whip cream.” Instead the materializer exploded with fire suppressant foam, instantly engulfing the crew member. The foam continued to spill forth at an incredible rate as Alice kicked the access panel out and walked through the room, past the other crew member who was near panic and on her way out of their quarters.
Alice ran full tilt down the hallway outside, taking in the information coming to her through her electronic eye. There were three crew members fighting off a maintenance drone around the corner to the right, another crew member trying to call in the malfunctions but only getting through to the intercom for that stretch of hallway.
She rounded another corner with her sidearm at the ready. There were two guards there trying to understand why the lift doors would close whenever they came near. Her first shot took the nearest in the shoulder, wrecking the bone beneath and his right chest cavity. Her second shot took the other guard's head off his shoulders. With the energy settings set so high on her sidearm, it would continue to be just as effective, but run out of ammunition in only thirty more shots, but under the circumstances, she'd have to make sure every shot counted, no matter what weapon she decided to use.
Alarms went off. That system was obviously still working. She unslung her rifle and begun to run. No one was moving just yet, but she had over three kilometres of hallway to go.
After rounding several corners and making it half way she came upon a storage area that was left wide open. It looked like the bots within were playing murder ball with packages and crates, several hapless crew members had gotten in the crossfire. A rifle shot narrowly missed her and she glanced to her right. Th
e shot had come from a security team on the other side of the massive storage area. They were braving the bedlam to get to her. There was cover everywhere, and as she rolled behind a sturdy looking crate while several more shots rang out. They weren't using stun weaponry.
Hesitation was for the weak. It was something she had overheard Jonas Valent's drill instructor shout at him during basic training over twenty years before. From her inside jacket pocket she produced a strap of ten high yield disruptor grenades and ran around the corner as she tossed them across the storage area.
The fuse was set to three seconds, everything in that hold would be damaged or reduced to unrecognisable scrap. Her thermal readings told her that there was an entire squad of guards coming around the next corner and she began to fire.
Her particle acceleration rifle tore pieces out of the walls, the deck, and when she ran through the intersection of the hall it tore into the soldiers who never had a chance. The grenades went off.
The sheer force of air rushing from behind knocked her off her feet. She rolled and skidded down the hall, catching a corner awkwardly with her foot. “Pain meds, right ankle,” she told her suit, she knew she at least had a bad sprain.
It only hurt for three steps, then she was fine. It was a price she'd pay later. There was a group of soldiers coming towards her from another corner. From the other side of her jacket she pulled the second and last belt of grenades. As the lead soldier peeked around the corner she tossed the twenty centimetre long belt straight at his head. It looped around his neck, the six second fuse counted down.
In all her life she never ran so fast. She was almost there, just another corner and two hundred meters. The corner came up and she dove behind it, landing on her back, thanking the creators of the impact resistant vacsuit she wore. For a whole breath she looked into the visors of a pair of guards whose hesitation must have been a symptom of their surprise.
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