by Korza, Jay
Three men broke off and went for the stairwell. He continued, “Reaper, casualty report.”
Reaper was still moving among the men and checking them out. It wasn't uncommon for a soldier to get wounded during a battle and not even know it. “We have three who aren't leaving and four with serious but survivable injuries. Of those, two can still move on their own after I finish patching them up. I applied some blood stopper to them but I still need to do some advanced work on them. I'll be done in ten minutes.”
Surgeon saw Reaper move to one of the casualties who he assumed was one of the three that weren't leaving. He was still alive but his wounds were horrendous. He had been opened up by one of the warrior's blades and chunks of flesh and body parts were torn away from his body. Surgeon knew Reaper would give him a sedative to slip away in a euphoric haze.
As he was surveying the room and looking for anything important that he might have missed, Surgeon received a comm from the recon team he sent out. “Sir, the prisoners are on the next floor. The area seems to be clear of enemy contact, but you need to get down here with everyone possible.”
When Surgeon arrived on the next floor with Seth and Shar'tuk in close tow, he found rows upon rows of tubes holding their shipmates in obvious states of torture. “Cadet, get them out of these things.”
“Yes, sir.” Seth pulled Shar'tuk towards a command console that was along a nearby wall. “Damn. This one is locked out too.”
Shar'tuk moved to one of the tubes and started looking over it as though he knew something should be there. Seth stepped up. “What are you looking for?”
“The torture tubes are the ancestors to the surgical beds my people created a few hundred years ago. The designs are similar enough that I hope it has an emergency shutdown protocol that's manually activated in case of software malfunction.”
Shar'tuk was feeling around the tube while shining his light around the back side. “I think I have something.” He grabbed a handle that was near the back of the tube, pulled it out of its recessed location and twisted it.
The tube began to flash yellow lights and the surgical gear seemed to be retracting from wherever it had been inside its victim. The person in the tube, Seth recognized as one of the mess hall chefs, became obviously less agonized and relaxed just a little.
Seth pointed his visor towards the handle and put its image out to the rest of the unit. “Find this handle on each tube, pull it out and twist it. We think it's a manual emergency shutdown. Do it to every tube as quickly as you can.”
Team members began moving down the rows, deactivating the tubes as they went. As more tubes were deactivated, Seth noticed that some of them were flashing blue instead of yellow. He knew the blue lights were bad but didn't know what their context was in this particular situation.
As Seth was disengaging his eleventh tube, he saw that it began flashing blue. He hadn't been taking the time to look at the faces in the tubes as he went along; he didn't want to get distracted or slow down if he saw someone he knew as a friend and not just another shipmate.
The flashing blue lights made Seth turn and examine this tube's occupant more clearly. Almost instantly Seth thought he knew what the blue flashing meant: the occupant wasn't going to survive the shutdown process. The person he was looking at now was completely unrecognizable. One arm and both legs were missing. One eye was hanging out of the socket while some sort of probe was retracting from somewhere deep inside the victim's skull. The skin and most of the muscle had been removed circumferentially from the entire torso and the rib cage was opened to expose the interior organs. Seth couldn't even tell the gender of this person.
He couldn't stay any longer; he had to move to the next tube. As he turned to move on, he felt a wet sticky hand attempt to grab his arm. Startled, he turned back to see the flesh-stripped hand trying to hold onto his own forearm. The science project-looking face spoke in a raspy voice. “Cadet.”
“General?!” Seth thought he recognized the voice.
“Yes.” The gruesome husk did his best to continue. “Ship. Still here. Save our people. As many as you can.”
“Yes, sir. We're getting them out now. I promise we'll save them.” Seth didn't know what else to say. For a brief second, he thought about calling for help to get the old man out but he knew it was a futile gesture. He looked into the general's remaining good eye and tried to come up with something profound or comforting to say before he left.
The general beat him to it.
“Seth, I'm not a pussy.” His desiccated lips tried to curl back into a smile. “Just fucking go already.”
Seth came to attention and saluted. “Yes sir!”
Seth stepped out of view of the general, pulled his sidearm, and shot his hero in the head.
Seth opened the company push. “That shot was me, no enemy contact. I found the general. He didn't make it.” Seth was certain Surgeon would make the correlation between Seth's gunshot and the general not making it but he would still detail him in later.
He continued, “I'm fairly certain now that the blue flashing tubes means its occupants won't survive the shutdown process. We should focus our evacuation efforts on the yellow flashing tubes first and if we have time, come back for the blue ones.
“The general had time to tell me that he thinks the ship is still here. I'm guessing it's in a below-ground hangar because we didn't see any hangars or airfields on the surface.”
Surgeon cut in, “I sent our scouts down farther and they found a floor below us with more prisoners, not as many as in this room but some. There are five floors of tubes like these but the last three are empty. The scouts are heading down floor by floor; hopefully, they'll find the hangar bay soon.”
Joker spoke up. “I've been thinking: how did they get all of the crew members up here? I doubt they walked them up one by one. There has to be some sort of freight elevator or something to get large groups of prisoners up here.”
Seth had finished with his row. “I'm done on my side so I'll start looking for that. It makes sense that there should be something like that around here.”
“Take Emperor with you. He might be able to read a sign or something you might miss.” Surgeon was also shutting down tubes while trying to oversee the operation.
The room was roughly the size of a football field so it had taken some time to get to the back of it as Seth had been stopping every few meters to shut down another tube. He decided to check along the back wall first and almost immediately found what he was looking for.
“Surgeon, I found an elevator.” Seth pressed a button that he figured was a call button; some things were fairly universal concepts among sentient beings. “It is along the back wall, that's why we didn't see it until now. It's fairly big. I'm guessing by just the door size we can easily get fifty people in it at a time.”
Reaper spoke up. “That's great but you need to remember that a lot of these people aren't going to be ambulatory. We need to find or figure out a way to get large numbers of people to the elevator all at once or we'll be here for hours.”
The three men on the scout came up. “We haven't seen anything that could help with the evac but we'll add that to our list of things to look for. And no hangar so far.”
The elevator doors opened and Seth and Shar'tuk had their weapons trained on it just in case it brought more warriors with it. The interior was fairly huge as Seth suspected. They found a control panel with symbols on it. Seth looked to Shar'tuk.
“Sorry, I can't read any of this. It could be a numbering system or it could be actual descriptions of what each floor contains.” He reached out and pushed a button; the doors began to close. “Let's hope the universal constant of elevators is the same here. The bottom button goes to the bottom floor and the hangar should be on the bottom floor.”
Seth agreed with that concept. If you were building a base with an underground hangar bay, you always put the hangar on the bottom level. You don't want hundreds of thousands of metric tons upon hundreds of tho
usands of metric tons of ships and equipment to be over your head at any given point. You want that weight to be supported by the ground floor. Not to mention that when a ship lifts it creates a lot of downward force, and again, you don't want to have that force on a floor above your head.
So they descended farther into the complex. When the elevator stopped and the doors opened, they were rewarded with a huge hangar bay and their ship towards the back wall. Seth hadn't even thought about the size of the hangar before seeing it, but had he, he still wouldn't have imagined what he saw. To be able to ground a ship as large as theirs, it would have to be massive. Based on what he saw, this was either a hangar for ships easily five times the size of his own or it had been home to hundreds of smaller ships.
Next to the elevator, Shar'tuk found several large cages that seemed to be prisoner transport modules. The cages had a fairly low tech steering mechanism and could even be moved manually if need be. Together, Seth and Shar'tuk loaded two of the transports onto the elevator and hit the button to send them back to the floor they came from.
Seth got on the company push. “We found the hangar bay; it's the bottom floor. We also found prisoner transport pods and we sent two of them up. Recon team, how far down are you?”
“Well, we didn't have a nice elevator so we're still humping it to you. How many floors do you think you went down?” They must have been pushing it pretty hard as Seth could hear the slight raggedness in the operator's voice as he spoke.
“We counted thirty-three buttons between the floor we were on and the button we pressed. If that correlates with a standard elevator then we went down thirty-four floors.” Seth received an affirming nod from Shar'tuk.
“Copy that. We're just passing level twenty-four. Some floors are different heights. We passed two so far that had double the stairwell heights of the other floors. I think it will be quicker to stay in the stairwell than try to find the elevator on one of these floors. Not to mention we could run into resistance on any one of them.”
“Agreed. We'll see you in a few.” Seth turned his attention to the hangar bay and addressed the team leader. “Surgeon, our ship is here and it looks intact. Can you send down a few guys, with the first round of survivors, to get it prepped for launch? Emperor and I—”
“I already hate that.” Shar'tuk sighed.
“—need to find controls to open the hangar”, Seth finished.
“Sounds good. I'll send Joker and Smoke.” Surgeon was feeling a little more optimistic as time passed and they hadn't all exploded yet. “I plan to remote detonate our stealth craft before we leave. I want to glass this side of the hemisphere.”
“With most of the structure below ground, I don't think it will do that much damage.” Seth understood the desire for as much destruction as possible in this situation. “I guess it couldn't hurt to give it a try, though.”
The comm line went silent and everyone went on with their assigned tasks. Seth turned to Shar'tuk. “I'm going to take a look in one of these troop transports they left behind to see if there is a remote switch for the hangar bay. Look around to see if you can find a control room or something to open it up. If you don't find anything, come to the transport in ten minutes.”
With just a nod between them, both operators took off in opposite directions. Shar'tuk found the control room fairly fast but it was of no use. All of the control panels were locked out and flashing a steady blue message. He went back to Seth.
“The control panels are completely locked out. I can't access anything.” Shar'tuk was looking over Seth's shoulder at functioning displays in the cockpit. “It looks like the base is locked out but this craft isn't tied into the main computer system of the complex.”
Shar'tuk moved Seth out of his way to get a better look at the control display. “I can't pick out any useful words here. The configuration looks very distantly like some I've seen in museums of our oldest warships.”
Shar'tuk settled into the extremely oversized pilot's seat and thought out loud. “OK, I'm a four-armed fucker with two central-ish arms that look like they would control this panel here.” He motioned to the panels in front of him and a terminal between his knees.
“While I'm accessing the panels with my central arms, my upper arms have the flight controls here...” He put his arms out to the sides. “So, a natural start-up sequence might be somewhere in this area.”
Shar'tuk moved his hand over the panel and touched a button. Seth thought it was more random than anything but it did get a response from the ship. The screens all blanked for a quick second before blinking back to life, this time in a different language.
“Holy shit.” Shar'tuk was hovering his hand above the panel, moving it from bottom to top. “This is a very ancient Nortes dialect. It was used by the royal family. It's now only taught in our version of your seminary schools. I think it sensed my DNA or something and knew I was Nortes. That’s why the controls changed.”
“Please tell me you're a religious man.” Seth was looking at the new configuration.
“We all are. Deeply.” Shar'tuk started to push buttons in a much more knowingly manner. “But that doesn't mean we all went to seminary school. Though I can grasp enough of this panel to get it to work.”
A button began flashing yellow and Shar'tuk leaned forward to look out the viewport. Up at the top of the hangar, he could barely see some distant blue flashing lights. Happy with the results, he grabbed the flight controls. “Here we go.”
As the craft lifted Seth comm'ed Surgeon. “We have an enemy troop transport operational and the hangar doors are opening. We're going to take a look outside and make sure our path is cleared for the ship.”
“Copy that. We're moving the crew fairly fast. Reaper thinks we'll be done in about forty minutes.” Surgeon was helping to load a poor soul onto one of the transports.
Seth looked at his watch. “That puts us at roughly fifty-six minutes since the warrior put that command into the system. I'm starting to question whether or not it was a self-destruct command. I wouldn't think a self-destruct would be set for that long of a period of time.”
“Regardless, I don't want to stay here any longer than needed.” Surgeon sighed and then added to the rest of the team, “We won't have time to get the dead and dying from the facility. Only evacuate the yellow flashing tubes. Leave the blue ones as they are.”
One of the operators posed a question. “Can we at least help them out?”
The question was obviously to get permission to end their suffering, with a bullet. Reaper jumped in to take the burden off his friend. “No. We don't even have time for that. I've noticed that most of the blue flashers are dying pretty fast after the tube disengages and those that don't, are being allowed to go unconscious. The system isn't keeping them awake anymore.”
With that, the discussion was over. The transports kept moving and the living, though some barely, were being taken to their ship. Surgeon allowed himself a slight bit of optimism but was still prepared for the other shoe to drop and take action if necessary.
As the troop transport headed to the top of the hangar bay, Seth was once again astonished at the sheer massiveness of the facility. Some facilities in the Coalition came close but were still maybe only two-thirds this size. Light spilled into the transport's canopy and Seth could see the surface of the planet falling below them as they cleared the hangar doors.
They had approached the facility from the other side of the planet and they had stayed as close to the ground as possible to avoid detection. As they rose several thousand feet above the facility, Seth was able to get a much better perspective on the area.
The facility had two distinct sides to it. The one the team had approached from seemed to be the front and now they were looking at the rear. The base had its back to an expansive and extremely lush jungle-looking landscape. Seth could easily pick out wild animals running below and jumping or swinging from tree to tree as the transport's engines scared them out of hiding.
Seth comm’ed Surgeon. “The exterior looks clear on initial inspection. No reinforcements heading here by ground and we think we've got our sensors on line and they aren't showing anything.”
“We've got our ship prepped and ready. Start-up sequence is almost done and we should be ready to lift before the last of the crew are brought on board.” Joker wasn't used to piloting something this large but luckily the ship's AI and intuitive systems allowed someone with basic piloting skills to get away with what they were attempting to do.
Surgeon was just stepping onto the bridge when Joker finished his sit-rep. He nodded to his friend. “Good job. Cadet, don't rely on just the sensors; they might know how to fool their own systems. Circle the base and make a spiral sweep out to five kilometers. Be ready to land that thing in our shuttle bay after we launch.”
“Copy that.” Seth pointed to an edge of the facility. “Start there. I want to check out that odd building that's separated from everything else.”
As the transport flew over the area Seth had indicated, what he had thought was a building was actually an open structure that looked sort of like an outdoor playhouse like the ones you would go to for a Shakespeare in the Park play. Closer still, he could see there were horizontal and vertical bars randomly placed around blocks and tunnels of different heights along with randomly placed hazards to be avoided or conquered.
“That looks like a training area, and obstacle course of some sort.” Shar'tuk was making a lower pass over it before heading out to the jungle.
“I see blood all over down there. Some blue and some red.” Seth had a flash of anger as he realized that some of their friends may have been made to fight and die in there.
“There are also some cages along one wall.” Shar'tuk could see something moving in one of them. “That one has a pretty big animal in it. Maybe they practice hunting in here. With the seating area at the top, I think it's obvious they had spectators for whatever they did use it for.”