‘Tredd’s not back with Eddie yet,’ Evie said, but didn’t receive any indication from Henning that he had heard her. ‘I can’t leave this place without them.’
‘There it is, all done.’ Henning grabbed the card from its holder and slid it back into his breast pocket. ‘I’m really sorry about your friends, but the navy squad will be here any moment, and I’m not going to sink with this ship. I’m a researcher, and my research goes with me. Come on, Aino.’ He started heading towards the door, Aino following right behind him.
Researcher, whatever, Evie thought. How can he be so selfish as to leave his people? Perhaps he’s not the leader I thought he was. Evie was close to saying something nasty, but kept it to herself because of Aino. She was the one the Dawn Alliance wanted. Perhaps escaping with her was not a selfish act after all. She wanted to go too, but felt bad about the thought of leaving Tredd and Eddie behind. She owed them more than that. ‘Wait! I don’t want to leave them behind… Can’t we just hang on a little longer? Why doesn’t the computer know where they are?’
‘The physical sensors and the network hubs have suffered massive damage and have become unreliable. I must take Aino to safety now. If you want to join us, you too must leave now. It’s up to you.’
Aino looked up at Evie like a puppy asking for a favour. Evie knew she wanted her to join them, and she wanted it too. The idea of escaping and leaving Tredd and Eddie to the hands of the Dawn Alliance Navy felt terrible. But she could not risk it for herself and Aino. Perhaps that was also what Tredd would have wanted her to do.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
TREDD RAN through the dark green corridor, and entered a stairwell through a door. He checked his coordinates to make sure it was the right one. With all the doors and corners around, the base was like a maze. He darted up the stairs.
Tredd was sure they were going to be overrun. No matter how many fighters Henning shot down, the navy could keep new troops joining the battle without an end. They had to leave Avalon, but he was not going to leave without Eddie.
It was a leap of faith to leave Aino with Henning and Evie, but it had to be a safer place for her. He had started to trust Evie – the girl had proven herself – but had trouble making up his mind about Henning. Everything Henning did was with integrity, and his manners were solid. Perhaps it was all too good, and that made Tredd feel like the man was hiding something.
He ran up dozens of floors and checked his map. It was the right floor and he ran out from the stairwell to another similar dark green corridor. Up there, while still muffled, the sounds of the battle were louder. Tredd realised he must have been deep underground. Nevertheless, this looked like the right place.
He found the entrance to the presence rooms. The corridor away from the rooms had collapsed, leaving only one of the rooms accessible; the rest lay beneath the debris. He peered in, but the presence room was empty and broken, just a blank grey slate lit up with the same ghastly green lighting. Tredd tried to log in to the system to see if there was any log of Eddie’s activities, but the presence functionalities were offline, and he could not access any of them.
Where has Eddie gone?
Tredd ran back to the corridor and stared at the rubble beside him. If Eddie was there… ‘Eddie! Are you there?’ He stopped to listen, but there was no reply, not even an echo in those muffled corridors.
If Eddie was beneath the wreckage, there was nothing he could do. But there was also a chance he was not there. One presence room was intact. Perhaps Eddie was in the room when the corridor collapsed and its functionalities shut down. That would have made Eddie seek shelter.
Tredd entered the closest stairwell. Looking up, he saw it had collapsed as well. There was no way up. It didn’t look good. Eddie might have been buried under the rubble, or gone up where Tredd could not follow. Damn. Of course, there was a small chance that the stairwell had already collapsed before Eddie left. Then there was only one way to go: down.
Tredd began running down the many flights of stairs. Perhaps Eddie had done the same. Tredd hoped he had. He exited the stairwell again to a similar looking green corridor. This one had arrow signs such as ‘Sigma 3300–3400’ on the wall.
Tredd listened, but heard no sound other than the occasional rumble from above. The green lights and the heavy air made an eerie atmosphere. No people anywhere; he was surrounded with locked doors and meaningless signs towards myriad ways to go.
He thought he heard something, and stopped to listen: irregular footsteps and panting. He followed the sounds along the corridor. At the end of the stretch, he peered around the corner. His heart jumped when he saw them.
A little girl, perhaps around the same age as Aino, was dragging a body along the floor. The body was heavy – the girl was struggling with it – and even though he was lying face down on the floor, Tredd recognised him. ‘Eddie!’
The girl stopped, turned around, and looked up at Tredd. When their eyes met, she turned back and started running.
‘Hey, wait!’ Tredd called, but the girl didn’t stop. Her hair bounced from side to side as she ran away.
For a moment Tredd thought it had been Aino, but that wasn’t possible. She was with Evie, and besides, she would not have run away. The girl was too quick to leave. Something weird’s going on.
Tredd touched Eddie. ‘Hey, buddy, you all right?’
Eddie moved his arm, then turned on his side, and looked up at Tredd. ‘Wha… Where…’ He stared at Tredd with his mouth open.
‘Let me help you up. What happened?’
‘I guess I blacked out,’ Eddie said as Tredd pulled him up into a sitting position.
Tredd remembered clearly how Eddie had fallen unconscious in the cockpit. ‘Again? You should get yourself checked out.’
Eddie grunted and pushed himself to his feet. Then his face fell, like he’d had a bad recollection, and he grabbed Tredd by the shoulders. ‘We cannot leave Aino here. These are copies and copies… It’s sick, man, sick, so sick.’
Tredd felt stumped. ‘What are you talking about?’
A loud rumble shook the corridor, making the green lights flicker and walls squeak. White sprinkles of dust fell from the ceiling.
Eddie brushed dust from his hair. ‘Where’s Aino, is she safe?’
‘She’s with Henning and Evie.’ Tredd glanced down at his shoulders and wiped off a speck of dust. They had to move fast before this whole maze came down.
Eddie looked at Tredd under his heavy brows. ‘Where? Is it safe?’
‘For now it is, but not for long. We have to get out of here. Henning has an escape shaft and a pinching ship waiting for us. Come with me.’
Eddie nodded. ‘Before we go, you have to see this, it’s right here.’ He beckoned for Tredd to follow him.
While he wanted to leave as soon as possible, Tredd was curious. Eddie would not hold them up without a good reason. ‘OK, what is it?’
‘Explaining won’t do, you have to see it.’ Eddie said as he hurried along.
‘All right then, but quickly,’ Tredd said as they paced along the corridor. ‘By the way, did you see a girl here?’
Eddie stopped by a door. ‘That’s what I’m saying… She’s a copy. There are hundreds.’
Hundreds of copies of a girl? It had to be something extraordinary, because Eddie was all flustered about it. Seeing the sign on the door – ‘Grid Room’ – Tredd remembered Henning saying it was the safest place for Aino.
Eddie opened the door, and they stepped inside a small room with metal railings for the floor and the ceiling, and detailed wiring diagrams on the screens on the walls. A red blinking indicator light on one of the diagrams caught Tredd’s eye, but Eddie continued on through the room to a vast storage facility full of capsules.
‘What is this place?’
‘Think about it,’ Eddie said, and stepped back.
Tredd did, and it only made more questions arise in his mind. Turning a
round, he saw Eddie had stepped out and was closing the door, leaving Tredd in the room with the capsules.
‘Hey! What are you doing?’ Tredd shouted. He tried to pry the door open, but couldn’t.
‘Open the door!’
There was no reply from Eddie.
ABOVE THE ROLLING hills of temperate Eura, the Dawn Alliance Navy command ship floated slowly towards Avalon, a harbinger of doom to anything that stood in its way. Fighters and assault crafts passed the command ship on their way, and behind the command ship, more and more navy crafts – drones, fighters, bombers, transporters, support, the whole battalion – were organising in systematic waves.
Inside the command ship, Jill sat in her robotic chair in what looked like stoic calm, but inside she was about to burst. Tristram, the whole focus of her life now, was in Avalon, on their home planet, just below them. As she looked at the ships flying past, delivering destruction, the walls of Avalon crumbling down under their force, she felt a terrible urge to do something, anything. She wanted to break free and race to Tristram, but she was stuck; stuck in her immobile body and this ship. The only thing she could do was watch, and wait.
The big guy hanging beside her started to feel less and less human. Something was going on with him. Was what he had said true? Was he really turning into a monster? Whether she liked it or not, it seemed she was going to find out soon enough. There was nothing she could do but wait.
Vice Admiral Vorlar Block sat on his seat in the middle of the bridge, and rubbed his palms together. ‘It is all coming together,’ he said with a smug smile. ‘We have secured the external premises, and soon, very soon, we will capture the renegades. How is Mr Parkes doing?’
The doctor leaned against the railing and looked down at her personal terminal. ‘He is quite unstable, but now he’s back online and transmitting.’ She took a few steps towards Vorlar and showed him her screen. ‘See. This is him. He’s alone, but I’m expecting him to join the team now that he’s back on.’
Jill had been trying to understand what they were talking about, and so far she had inferred that the doc had some kind of a connection with Eddie.
‘Good,’ Vorlar replied. ‘Please update me as soon as contact is made – I want to see it.’
‘See it… Yes, of course,’ the doctor said, stepping down from the platform. Before returning to her post, she stopped by Jill and pushed her screen in front of her face. It had a blurry video image of the screen itself, multiplying to an infinite corridor of screens.
‘Live video stream directly from your visual system,’ the doctor said with a rotten snigger. ‘Pretty accurate, ain’t it? There’s even a feedback loop, wanna see?’
Jill felt a kind of lightness, like a weight had been taken from her. The doctor pressed a few buttons, which made the clasps holding Jill’s hands open up. Then her hands rose up in front of her and pulled towards her face, and up to her cheeks. She could feel the coolness of her hands on her cheeks, and the warmth on her palms. She felt as if she was controlling her hands herself, happy about the movement, but when she wanted to move them, she couldn’t.
‘Pretty neat, eh?’ the doc said. ‘Now, let’s put those hands back where they belong.’
Jill’s hands returned to her sides. ‘You’re moving my hands?’ It felt terribly unsettling to have someone else control her body.
‘That’s right, darling. I can make you do anything I want, and you will feel it is you who is doing those things. Mr Parkes also let me inject him with a bunch of nanobots that delivered a string of altered bio-code through his blood-brain barrier… Well, he didn’t explicitly let me, but there they are, just as they are in your system now. You’re my little dolls—’ She was interrupted by a beeping noise from her terminal. She lifted it up and peered at the screen. ‘It looks like there’s some action with our friend on the ground – if you’ll excuse me, I must tend to this… but we’ll be sure to play later.’ The doctor bent down, pressed a few buttons on Jill’s chair, and went off snickering as the clasps turned down and locked Jill’s paralysed hands to the armrests.
Again Jill had lost control and feeling to her arms. She tried to move them, but nothing happened. They were like someone else’s. She moved her head from side to side, just to feel it moving.
She looked up at Berossus. His face was strained.
‘How are you holding on?’ Jill asked.
He didn’t reply. Jill wasn’t sure if it was because he was uncomfortable or if he didn’t understand the question. A low grunt came from him, and then he looked down, meeting Jill’s eyes. Something passed between them at that moment, and as a result, Berossus started making more incomprehensible noises and jerking his massive body about.
Jill gulped. The clasps that held Berossus were strong, much stronger than hers, but still, to Jill, his thrashing around started to feel threatening. His skin was getting darker, and it looked like – but it could not really be – like his body was expanding.
Jill felt a chill. ‘What’s happening to you?’
Vorlar turned to look, as did the doctor. Both stared at Berossus in horror. It was real, and it happened in just a few seconds. His belt popped, and his trousers tore apart. One of his shoes fell to the floor, and the other dangled, broken, around his ankle. His shirt stretched and ripped. The clasps holding his hands above his head broke with a metallic crack, and with a heavy thump he fell to the floor, landing in a squat. He looked around, a pulsating crimson mass of muscle and sinew.
This is not good, Jill thought. She couldn’t even move.
The crew scattered from their posts, trying to get away from Berossus. The doc ducked behind her desk. Only Vorlar stood still, studying Berossus like he was a scientific specimen. ‘This is unexpected, but interesting.’
The next few seconds were a blur. Berossus – no, it was not he anymore, he had become something else, a monster – darted towards the closest officer, a young cadet. It grabbed him by the arm and threw him to the ceiling; his limp body fell half on a chair and then to the floor. Then the monster took hold of a corporal’s head in its massive claw and banged it through a screen, deep into a desk. A lieutenant on the spot pulled his gun, but the monster ran over him, grabbing his head and turning it around more than 180 degrees. The sound of his spine cracking made Jill gag.
The doctor screamed as the lieutenant fell onto the floor, his face pointing towards his back. The monster turned around and scrambled over a chair. It grabbed the screaming doctor by the arm, and swung her around in the air.
The doctor’s scream turned in to a wail.
The monster let go.
The doctor flew over the chairs, and fell to sudden silence when she hit the wall. Her face drew a grotesque line of dark red blood on the white wall as her limp body slumped to the floor, lifeless.
Jill held her breath as the monster turned its head and scanned the room, fixing its focus on Vorlar.
With a calm but swift motion – practised perhaps millions of times – Vorlar pulled out his Hotblade. He stepped back with his right foot and pushed the blade up between him and the monster. A metre before impact, Vorlar took a quick sidestep and swung the long blade in a wide vertical arc.
The monster ran straight past Vorlar as the swinging blade cut its arm. The severed arm thumped on the floor, while the rest of the monster tumbled across the chairs and desks.
The monster looked at its stump of an arm in wonder, and struggled to stand up. It groaned in what sounded like a mix of anger and pain. As it scanned the room, just for a moment, the monster’s eyes fixed on Jill’s, as if silently communicating a mutual agreement. At least, so Jill thought, but in a moment it was gone, and the monster fixed its gaze back on Vorlar.
Is Berossus still somewhere inside the monster? Did he try to say something to me? The monster shook his head, like shaking off the last encounter, and started to stride towards Vorlar again.
Without hesitation, Vorlar pulled a gun from his hip and raised it up as the monster charged fierc
ely toward him. When the monster was just a few metres from him, he shot three calm shots. As the shots battered into the monster’s chest, it let out a grunting sigh and leaned backward. With a grimace of pain on its face, it fell and slid on its knees on the floor. It stopped in front of Vorlar, looked up like a confused deer and with a sad groan, fell face first on the floor.
Jill gasped, and silence fell.
Vorlar knelt down by the massive body, and stared at it with keen interest. He glanced up at Jill, and said, ‘I’ve only tranquillised him… He has the kind of energy we need. Lieutenant Benoit, please organise the transfer of the body to the research facility.’
Only tranquillised, Jill thought, he’s missing an arm! He’ll have one big ache when he comes to his senses. The officers who were run over by him won’t be so lucky. Still, somehow Jill found herself to be very indifferent, like she didn’t care about those people, even if they were her colleagues. Well, her former colleagues. She was an outcast, a renegade, an enemy of the state, but those officers were still normal folks, trying to make a living, have a career, serve humanity, whatever their motivation was. They were not the ones she fought against. Still, she could not bring herself to feel anything for them.
As the crew gathered around the doctor’s body, Jill felt a sensation of lightness, of happiness. Being indifferent was one thing, but celebrating loss of life was sinister. Thinking through it, she found no good reason to be happy about what had just happened – it didn’t change things – but seeing the doctor dead made her feel better. It gave her hope for seeing Tristram again, however morbid that might be.
Vorlar was giving orders. A number of busy crew members buzzed around, organising chairs, picking up fallen equipment and accessories, rubbing blood from the white surfaces, and carrying out the bodies, including the doctor’s. Vorlar now held the doctor’s personal terminal, with her bloodstains on the back of it, and peered into it. ‘The mouse is on the move,’ he said, and placed the terminal on the desk. ‘Search for an outpost, a distance of ten kilometres from the fort. It may or may not be visible.’
Starcrasher (Shades Space Opera Book 1) Page 36