21escape?
With the red automacube, SA56, a smoldering hulk, and the return fire from a weapon just like she held in her own hands, Larissa considered her options. She had taken the smugglers by surprise and two of them were down. Her magnification viewer showed they were not the two she was tracking. “Two less smugglers are two less insurgents to cause me problems,” she said to herself.
She caught sight of others as they jumped across the hallway. There also were strange things visible through the doorway where the insurgents had been surprised and killed. Larissa seriously considered having the remaining red automacube, SA55, just sterilize the entire corridor, but if that happened she would not know for certain what the smugglers and insurgents were doing at this location. And personally, the people who had injured her had not actually paid for their crimes, yet. Also, incinerating the whole corridor would not reveal how many others were with them. Obliterated bodies were hard to identify. She had seen at least five, with possible several others still in the strange room. Besides, it looked as if they were trying to escape, and if the corridor was incinerated, the evidence of where they went would be lost.
“No, I need to kill them individually. All of them,” she said.
She fired several more times, aiming at the corner which was providing cover for her enemies.
Piff, piff, piff.
Sections of the permalloy were torn loose, or chipped, but there was no return fire.
“Advance!” Larissa ordered.
SA55 rolled out from behind the hulk of its destroyed companion and surged forward.
Larissa suspected a trap and watched carefully for any sign of the enemy popping out from around that corner. She knew how powerful the weapon was, as it had destroyed the red automacube with only two shots.
No one fired back as the security automacube advanced.
When SA55 reached the corner it swiveled on its six wheels and halted.
Larissa looked back and saw YA1 still stationary in the protected part of the hall behind her. She then sprinted toward SA55, her weapon in hand. Reaching the corner, she walked watchfully around it. A pressure door was partially open, and beyond that was a wrecked gray automacube. The damage was fresh as fluids were still leaking out of it. Larissa wondered why the smugglers destroyed that gray automacube, but she dismissed the question quickly.
“An elevator!” Larissa said in disgust. She punched in an override code attempting to stop the elevator, but there was no response.
“Now I will need to wait for the next update on the tags to know where they went.” She then turned to SA55, “Have YA1 come to our location and gain whatever information it can from the elevator’s log and surrounding equipment.”
“Affirmative.”
Larissa walked into the workshop where the androids were located.
“What manner of smuggling are they planning?” Larissa said as she stepped over the dead bodies of Eleonora and Zoya. Her eyes assessed the android bodies, the body parts, and the tools. “This is very unusual.”
Larissa took out her multiceiver and started to record what she had found in the workshop in detailed format of visual, audio, and tactile. Larissa also examined the two dead bodies. Neither had habitat markings, so she was certain they were smugglers. Nothing else was remarkable about them.
YA1, the yellow automacube, had rolled into the elevator’s foyer. It had jacked into the control panel of the elevator and was attempting to interface with the log to uncover where the people had gone.
“Alert! Alert!” SA55 sounded from where it was parked outside the workshop.
Larissa shut down the multiceiver and stepped back into the hallway, weapon drawn. Looking back down the rubble strewn hall to where the wrecked red automacube sat, Larissa saw a legion of rats, all their eyes aglow in hostile orange, scuttling down the corridor toward her. There were also several infected raccoons, and a small feral hog. All of the tagalongs were obviously infected, and were a danger to Larissa.
“They smell the blood!” Larissa said as she stepped back into the elevator’s foyer. “Neutralize that threat!” Larissa punched the security codes, and the pressure door ground shut with a shudder.
SA55 rolled out and sprayed the flammable gel down the hallway. The tagalong animals were about a third of the way, when the automacube ignited the gel. The hallway became an inferno of fire. The rats, raccoons, and hog squealed and shrieked in agony as they were consumed, killed, and cremated in a matter of moments.
SA55 sprayed fire suppression gas into the hallway. The fire choked itself out, and the far end of the hallway was charred and blackened. Ceiling vents dilated and air flowed out of the hallway, while side wall ducts opened and pushed replacement air in to reestablish homeostasis.
When the passage was safe, SA55 jacked a cable into the pressure door, and it slid partway open again.
“Munitions supply report,” SA55 said in its emotionless and mechanical voice. “Incendiary-ten percent. Fire suppression-ten percent. Projectile-sixty-two percent. Lachrymatory gas-one hundred percent. Stun capacity-one hundred percent. Request resupply?”
Larissa looked at the automacube. “Harvest whatever supplies you can from that workshop. Then come back here.”
The red automacube rolled into the android workshop and went about scavenging for supplies. Larissa walked over and inspected the yellow automacube and looked at the log readings it had found.
“So they are heading for the hanger bay. That makes sense, to them. I hope they are unaware of the defense system which is being set up.”
22losing the tags?
Gretchen and Paul all slid to the floor of the elevator as it moved away. They were exhausted, traumatized, and fearful.
“We have failed miserably,” Paul lamented. “Those women are dead.”
“How did Larissa know where we were?” Gretchen asked.
“Gretchen, we are failures! We came to the Vanguard to save our people in Dome 17, and we failed. We tried to help Zoya save her mother and we failed. We are just failures,” Paul put his head in his hands and wept.
Gretchen put her hand on Paul’s shoulder and gently squeezed. “I am in this with you. I feel our failure.”
Brinley was at the control panel of the elevator. “I have disconnected this elevator from external control, it is all manual here. There is a symbol for a hanger bay. I am not sure which hanger bay that is, but we are headed there.”
“What does it matter?” Paul cried. “We wanted to save Zoya’s mother and we found her, and had her healed. Just to see them murdered! What does it matter where we go now?”
Brinley hit a lever and stopped the elevator from progressing any further. She then squatted down and took Paul’s face in her hands. “Paulie, it matters. You are not responsible for what Larissa did. You did not kill them. Larissa did. Do you hear me?”
“I did not save them either,” Paul said.
“None of us could save them,” Brinley stated with a true edge in her voice. “I should have killed Larissa when I had the chance when I freed you two last winter. That would have saved so many people.”
“Brinley? How did Larissa know where we were?” Gretchen asked again. “We were deep in the bowels of this old ship, and she came from a biological habitat. How did she do that? Why did she do that? How did she know where we were?”
Brinley scrunched up her pretty face as she stood back up. “I do wonder that myself. Give me a moment to calm my emotions. My rage is burning at her right now.”
Brinley took some deep breaths and slowly let out the air in between. She did this for several minutes.
Unable to take the silence any longer, Paul sobbed, “If Larissa knew where we were, she will know where we are going. So what is the use of it all? We did not keep Zoya or her mother alive. We might as well have stayed on Inaccessible Island.”
“I wonder?” Brinley muttered. She dug in her tool belt and removed a small scanning device. “This diagnostic scanner measures outputs, an
d impurities for shuttle engines and thrusters.”
“So what? There is no shuttle here,” Paul stated flatly.
“Well, Paulie, if I wanted to track someone, and I admit this is just a wild guess. But if I was doing the tracking of someone, and did it without their knowing it, I would put some radioactive materials on them. The Vanguard has onboard sensors, especially in the decks and around the solar mimicry power-plants.”
“Radiation?” Gretchen said startled. “Radiation?”
“Oh great! So she has killed us already? Just a slow death by radiation,” Paul said. He gritted his teeth. “Better to die like Zoya and her mother did than from radiation.”
“Not lethal levels. Just enough to trip the sensors, but not enough to alert someone they were being traced. My understanding is that the lattice scans the deck sensors every so often, and it would pick up the radiation signatures. If the artificial intelligences in the lattice were programmed to track that, they could make some pretty good conjectures on where someone was going, and would know for certain where someone had been. So let me scan you.”
Brinley used her scanner, which was only about the size of her thumb, and took it slowly across Paul’s body. When she got to his shoulder and neck, the sensor spiked on an obscure form of low level radiation.
“I was right. You have been tagged.”
“What?” Paul said. He rubbed his neck and back looking for something.
Brinley then scanned over Gretchen. “You too have been tagged. Sort of an ingenious choice of radiation. Could be delivered by a mere drop. Might not have stayed off your skin too much except for your special clothes. They absorb radiation, right?”
“Yes, that way we are protected,” Paul said. “So this radiation was absorbed, but still traceable?”
“Yes, in your clothing,” Brinley said. She then used the scanner again. “And the radiation left a residue on the skin.”
“So get it off me!” Paul threw his shirt down on the floor. He rubbed at his neck.
“Paulie, it is not a lethal level. Your clothes protected you from it anyway. The clothing has a much higher concentration than the residue on your skin. Had you not been wearing this special kind of clothing, which absorbed the radiation, it would have stuck on you severely. I imagine Larissa thinks your body has been marked, and not just these clothes. So it looks like Larissa knows less about you and your clothing than I would have thought.”
“So why not just kill us when the radiation was put on? Just give us a lethal dose?” Gretchen pulled off her shirt and threw it on the floor of the elevator. “Brinley, do you have extra clothes I can wear?”
Brinley dug through her backpack and unfolded a shirt. “It may not fit, but here you go. As to killing you, she sure tried not long ago. Maybe she wanted to track you first? Or maybe wanted to see who was helping you? Remember, I was there too when she murdered Governor Muravyev.”
Gretchen pulled Brinley’s other shirt on, and it was snug, but not too bad.
“So we just leave these here?” Gretchen said. “That will be the end of her tracking us?”
Paul looked up. “No. We cut the radioactive parts into pieces, and find a way to send them somewhere else. Larissa cannot follow four different tracers, right? Make a patch of each part of the radiation, and let her chase them.”
“Great idea Paulie!” Brinley replied.
Using Brinley’s scanner they were able to see the affected areas of each shirt. Then using a molecular saw, they severed the RAM clothing into four patches. Each of those patches showed a traceable level of radiation. When compared to the residual on their skins, the newly cut radioactive patches were eight times as powerful.
Paul used the left-over non-radioactive parts of Gretchen’s and his shirt to make a sort of vest for himself.
“So I say we get off the elevator at the next deck. Leave one patch in the elevator and send it along its way. Then on that deck we look for other places to send the patches,” Paul suggested. He was feeling more confident now that they had a plan.
“We will still need to find a way back to Oasis,” Brinley said as she reactivated the elevator. It moved for just a few moments and then the door opened.
Brinley hid the patch inside the control panel of the elevator and set the controls to stop at every level as the elevator continued onward. They stepped out into a large room.
It was fairly dark, so Gretchen activated the light on the fusion pack. The room had two large machines in it, which were not making any noise, nor were they illuminated in any way.
“What is this place?” Gretchen asked.
“It is an auxiliary gravity manipulation initiator facility. That corridor probably leads to an engineering outlet.” Brinley pointed to the passageway which led away. “It is all part of the redundant systems which keep gravity normal on the Vanguard. If it is like the others I have heard about, there will be a living quarters for the operations crew, probably behind the apparatus,” Brinley replied. “It obviously is not in use now.”
They walked around the large machines, and there they found the living quarters. It consisted of a small, but efficient apartment, and a toileting area.
“Well we can get more water supplies here,” Gretchen said.
“And use the toilet,” Paul stated. “Not just for normal stiff, but to put one of those patches in and send it away. These are water powered toilets, right? Those are the only kind I have seen on the Vanguard.”
“Great idea Paulie!” Brinley said. “I was going to suggest putting one of the patches in the ventilation system of the apartment. The air flow will tumble that one along, while the one you suggest will be washed away. I think this will work!” Brinley smiled a wide and dazzling smile. “We must escape, for Zoya and Eleonora.”
Paul placed the patch in the toilet and sent it away, after he used the toilet. Brinley found the air duct which carried air away from the living quarters, and she tossed in the radioactive patch.
Gretchen refilled their water supplies. She said, “That RAM clothing is irreplaceable.”
“There are some more supplies on the scout ship,” Paul replied. “If we could get back to it. Speaking of that, I will try Tiffany again.”
He opened his backpack, and put the comlink on his ear. He looked regretfully at the broken medical kit. “Tiffany? Tiffany? Can you hear me? Please respond.”
There was no answer.
“I wish we knew what became of Tiffany. So we now have three reasons to find the scout ship. Get the replacement medical kit, contact Tiffany and see what happened, and get more RAM clothing,” Paul said. “But we lost that possible finding back in the automacube. Now we again have no idea where Tiffany and our scout ship is!”
“I will be happy to just get back to Oasis, and Inaccessible Island,” Gretchen said.
“I am pondering how to do that,” Brinley stated. “But first we need to find a way to get rid of that last patch.”
“There are still Roe and those tagalong animals about, right?” Gretchen said.
“Yeah, great, the Roe are still around,” Paul said.
“Except for the safe zones and the biological habitats, the Roe roam all the decks and passageways,” Brinley replied.
“If we encounter a Roe and get hurt, we have no way to get healing,” Paul said in fear. His confidence was slipping again as he recognized the danger they were in. “No Tiffany. No medical kit. No Doctor 147. Our friends are all dead.”
“Those tagalong animals eat the dead bodies, right?” Gretchen said. “So we soak this last patch in blood, or even urine, and that might be a good lure for some tagalong to carry it off to who knows where.”
“Just so long as we do not attract those animals, or the Roe. We need to keep clear of them now more than ever,” Paul said. “No medical kit!”
So Gretchen used some body fluids to wet the patch, and then she cut her finger and dribbled blood onto it.
“Just leave it on the floor and some infected rat will car
ry it away,” Brinley said. “Great work everyone. Now we just need to figure out how to get back to Oasis.”
“And not get killed by a Roe on the way,” Paul added.
“Paulie, how many rounds do you have for your handgun?” Brinley asked.
Paul looked at it, “Nine.”
“I just reloaded mine with the last twenty I have,” Brinley said.
The Colony Ship Vanguard: The entire eight book series in one bundle Page 65