Randolph Lalonde - Spinward Fringe Broadcast 08 - Renegades

by Randolph Lalonde

  With a woman held up on her toes and Jake promising a hell not even he could imagine, a malicious side of Valent was openly on display. This was all the man’s hate, the nightmare version of him, and Minh believed that Jake could follow through with his promise.

  “I need my console,” she said. “In the chair.”

  “You unlock everything, you have ten seconds,” Jake said before he shoved her toward the command seat.

  She stumbled and fell, but scrambled into the tall chair, accessing one of the arms and pressing her hand against a bio-reader. “I don’t know if this’ll work while I’m under stress, there are detectors.”

  “Try,” was all Captain Valent had to say, his tone stated the rest.

  Red lights stopped flashing on the bridge, and the screens began displaying the status of systems across the ship.

  “Thank you,” Jake said as he closed his eyes. “Take all but the captain here into custody, bind them and stuff them into as few escape pods as you can. Any crewmembers who don’t surrender in the next thirty seconds using the ship comm system will be killed.”

  Minh-Chu and Moira watched as the rest of the squad followed orders. The remaining bridge staff didn’t resist. “Are you in?” Moira asked Jake.

  “Yes, she unlocked everything. Worst captain I’ve ever met. She barely did her job, spent her time in observation,” Captain Valent replied. “Bind her and lock her up there, it doubles as a holding area with an emergency purge door.”

  “What? So the observation room is made to be vented directly into space?” Moira asked.

  Minh-Chu had nothing to say about how the bridge was taken. He’d seen a side of Jacob Valent that he didn’t like, so he took the task of binding the captain upon himself just to get a few moments away.

  “That’s the kind of ship this is. A machine to deliver human tools to war,” Jake replied. “It doesn’t need much of a captain, just a herd of armed zealots. I’m checking their officer-level communications logs, one minute.”

  “They’ll get you, the Order is immortal,” the captain said as Minh-Chu approached her at the foot of her seat.

  Jacob Valent opened his eyes and fixed his hateful gaze down at her. “The Order and its followers are worthless, just like this war. You’re nothing but the flesh I have to cut to excise the cancer of the galaxy, and once that’s done, the real war starts.”

  “You’re crazy!” the captain said, pushing away from Minh-Chu. “That doesn’t make sense!”

  “The Order exists to maintain control of large sections of space so they can hide Edxian colonies that feed on people who don’t make it into the illustrious military or aren’t privileged enough to be saved. Your leaders think they can control them, but they’re not here just for revenge. They’re here to spread, the way insects do. That’s what I’ll be fighting against once I break or kill every Order of Eden zealot freak I can find. Now shut up while I reassign command of your ship.” Jake pulled a grenade from his jacket and tossed it at the captain. It exploded at her feet, enveloping her in a self-contained blue web and stunning her into unconsciousness. It caught the tip of Minh-Chu’s fingers and it took him a moment – and all the strength enhancement in his vacsuit – to pull free.

  A squad member dragged her off the bridge, chuckling at the muted captain.

  “Eve is on her way to Sogarian on a recruiting drive with two spokespeople. I’m going to make sure I’m waiting for her,” Jake said. “I’m going to assassinate her.”

  “You just learned this from the communications logs?” Minh-Chu asked.

  “Yes, it’s all wide open,” Jake replied, wincing at something Minh-Chu couldn’t see. “There’s a lot of data.”

  “We have to take a breath, get everything here out of the area and back to Tamber,” Moira said.

  “I’m going to take one of their ships and a few people with me. They won’t suspect one of their own transports, that’ll give us a chance to get there and blend in. It’s a poor world. I’ll need a good pilot.”

  “We’ve won a mixed victory here with no losses,” Minh-Chu replied. “Overreaching is a mistake.”

  “You don’t like anything I did here,” Jake said. “I understand, you’re a good man, Minh, you always were, but these people are already lost. The people they trust to command this ship are true believers; they swallowed the whole Order of Eden line completely, without a doubt. Maybe there are crewmembers who are worthy of mercy, but the people on this bridge? They’re wasted life already,” Jake said before falling to his knees.

  Minh-Chu was at his side in an instant and could see Captain Valent was sweating, all colour drained from him. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m disconnected from the ship, my node is dead.” He gnashed his teeth and squeezed his eyes shut. “Something’s wrong,” he managed before he lurched onto the deck into a convulsive fit.

  Minh-Chu rushed to his side and ran a high-resolution scan. “He’s crawling with nanobots matching the ones the Knight had, it’s some kind of attack. My medical unit doesn’t know what to do, we have to get him back aboard the Warlord.” He activated the stasis system on Jake’s suit and watched, with growing dread, as Jake’s body rejected the cocktail of drugs.

  “The Warlord is charging up its wormhole systems, we have to get this ship moving,” Moira said.

  “You take this ship, I’ll save him,” Minh-Chu snapped. “I just need one volunteer to help me get him to an airlock.” Jake’s convulsions were calming, but the anguished expression on his face told him that there was more going on.

  “You’re staying here,” Moira told him. “We don’t have time to get him to the Warlord.”

  “Fry it all,” Jake said through his molar-crushing grimace. “Suit, E-“ he managed before involuntarily twitching and curling into the foetal position.

  Minh-Chu couldn’t believe what Jake was telling him to do, but he was already opening the back of Jake’s suit before he had a chance to second-guess his old friend. He pulled an EMP grenade from the inside pocket of his jacket and lowered the setting. He bent down to Jake’s ear. “It’s set just high enough to disrupt a framework’s recovery system.”

  Through pain-filled grunting and twitching, Jake managed to say, “Forty percent.”

  “That’ll kill you,” Minh-Chu said. “Don’t know if I can bring you back from that.” He glanced at the bio-scans and saw something that made what was going on with his friend clear. The nanobots that attacked him from the inside were severing the framework systems from Jacob. Micro-shocks and chemical compounds generated during the process were killing biological matter as the process continued.

  Minh shoved the grenade into Jake’s suit and sealed the armour over top, remotely ordering the helmet to seal as well. The EMP blast went off three seconds later, contained within his heavy armour. Jake’s body tensed then relaxed, and then he was still.

  Minh-Chu tried to remotely activate the medical system in Jake’s suit and realized that it was destroyed as well. “Didn’t think that through,” he said to himself as he pulled an emergency cutter from his jacket, made for cutting through the hulls of starfighters and other small ships. He focused it beneath the comm unit on Jake’s wrist, where he knew there was a tiny seam in the armour.

  “What did you do?” Moira asked as three soldiers returned to the bridge.

  “Burned the framework systems and the nanobots in him with an EMP grenade. Killed him too, but if I can get into his suit, my medical unit can get him back.”

  “That’s not going to do it in time,” Moira said.

  “You’re right.” Minh-Chu’s infantry training kicked in as he dropped the welder, drew his Violator Handgun, and began stripping the weapon’s barrel and firing mechanism. Like any officer worth his weight, he knew his weapon inside and out. He didn’t even have to think about the task of pulling the weapon apart until the igniter was bare. It felt like he was moving in slow motion, but the complicated mechanisms actually came apart in four seconds.

&nb
sp; He held the igniter up to the side of Jake’s vacsuit armour and pulled the trigger. The suit sparked and hissed violently as he drew a line of fire along the captain’s side and hip. The armour was showing damage after it burned out, but it wasn’t open, so Minh-Chu repeated the process, shaking his head. “Sorry Jake.” He knew it would burn him. “Someone get a biogel pack ready, now please.”

  The exothermic oxidation-reduction reaction changed colour as it finished burning through the armour, Jake’s vacsuit, and began burning skin. Minh-Chu didn’t wait for it to go out before pushing his hand into Jake’s armour and activating his own suit’s revival systems.

  With Jake’s armour open, Minh-Chu could see that there was residual brain activity – just enough to bring his friend back – but there was no activity from nanobots or the framework system. The burning compound hissed out, leaving a blackened line along Jake’s hip, but Minh couldn’t focus on that. “Tell me you’ve got one life left,” Minh-Chu said as his medical system reported that it was ready to attempt to revive Jake. He activated it and carefully placed micro-charges were sent across the captain’s nervous system, forcing his body to begin functioning. There was serious damage from the electromagnetic pulse, but the recovery system found working pathways all the way up Jake’s spine regardless, and he started breathing with a shuddering gasp.

  Brain activity increased a moment later, and Minh-Chu injected Jake with stasis medication. To his relief, it worked, but it was localized; he would have to inject him in several more places. He did his best, and was satisfied with reaching everything except for his arms past his elbows and legs past his knees. Minh-Chu hoped the slow circulation in Jake’s system would carry the stasis medication the rest of the way. There was nothing else he could do. “Cover his burns with gel and get him into an emergency suspension bag,” he said as he retracted his arm from Jake’s suit. “Let’s fly this thing out of here.”

  CHAPTER 48

  The Taking of the Sunny Shifter

  Remmy watched it all happen, Captain Valent ruthlessly leading the charge, executing crewmembers, and collapsing. It was the beauty of being a high-functioning multitasker, but he also suffered from the curse that came with it. When Valent fell and Minh-Chu struggled to keep him alive, Remmy was deeply distracted, and all other thought came to an utter halt.

  “Sergeant!” Bell Dul shouted over a private comm channel as she punched his shoulder. “Are you with us?”

  His thoughts returned to the present, to the corridor leading to the bridge. They’d laid traps – pressure mines rigged to two airlocks set to flush any intruders into space – and his second, nicknamed Dotty, was brandishing a skitter who was about to go on an adventure. “We’re ready to go, do you want me to tell him to run down the hall?” she was asking.

  Remmy glanced at his tactical display by reflex, checking on the positioning of his people. Four of his Ranger squad were guarding Kann Berin, their pilot, as he controlled most of the ship functions from the engineering section. The rest were around Remmy, at the neck of the last corridor leading to the bridge of the large hauler ship. “Set him loose,” Remmy said. “And lock your boots to the deck.”

  Dotty dropped the skitter. “Sorry, little guy,” she said as they watched the small bot with a shiny half-shell walk down the hall on six fine legs. It stopped on the verge of the first pair of pressure mines’ sensor range for a moment, then flattened out as much as it could, its six exposed limbs retreating into its shell as much as they could before moving on.

  “Oh, if he makes it through to the other side without triggering anything, I’m gonna be pissed,” Dul said.

  “You disabled its higher functions, right Dotty?” Remmy asked.

  “Oh, no, I didn’t. I thought they might be useful if something interesting came up, little guy might have to improvise.”

  The skitter straightened up after ducking under the first pair of pressure mines’ sensor radius and getting past them successfully. It hesitated a moment, as though considering the next pair of mines, then sprung upwards and forward, almost striking the ceiling. “Well, you’re not wrong, but now that thing is aware of its mortality,” Bell Dul said. “If there’s a way for him to get through without getting-“

  The skitter almost made it through the second set of pressure mines sensors when they went off, crushing the little robot. The airlocks just past the no-man’s-land opened just long enough to draw the atmosphere and the bot out into space. “Well, the point’s moot now,” Remmy said.

  “Poor thing,” Dotty said.

  “Shoot the mines out while they’re recharging,” Remmy said, firing at the nearest mine, melting it after a few shots with his pulse rifle. “Quick, we don’t have much time. Their shields are already coming up.”

  His squad exceeded his expectations again, moving swiftly but in formation, taking care to keep their boots affixed to the deck. They shot the four pairs of pressure mines well before the shields were too charged up to be vulnerable to their rifles. As soon as they reached the double-wide hatch to the bridge, Anton Zwarif slapped a transmission plate onto the hatch, a small audio patch that would vibrate the metal enough for sound to come through the other side.

  “If you surrender the bridge and the command codes for your ship, you will be loaded into escape pods and jettisoned,” Remmy said. “If you do not open the doors in ten seconds, I will superheat the hatch and break the doors down. Your bridge will survive, but I doubt your suits will protect you from thirty-four hundred degrees as the door melts.”

  To Remmy’s surprise, his scanners indicated that the locking mechanism on the bridge was deactivated. “Get to the side,” he ordered, and he was the last to take a position to the right of the hatchway.

  The doors slid open, revealing an irate looking crew of seven. Three of them knelt on the floor, while four had their pistols out, pointed at the back of their heads. “The ship and her captain are yours,” shouted a short man with his weapon pointed at the man kneeling in the middle. “We’re just contractors, we didn’t ask for this.”

  “All right, then,” Remmy said, making sure his shield was fully charged before he stepped out into the open. He pointed his rifle at the group and was followed by the rest of his squad. “We’ll take it from here, just give us the command codes and cooperate while we load you into escape pods.”

  “What?” asked one of the standing crewmembers. “We can’t get rescued, we mutinied as soon as you took the main control column for the ship!”

  Remmy thought for a moment.

  “Maybe we should recruit them?” Dotty asked.

  “Shh,” Remmy said, “I’m thinking.” He checked the mission status and saw that the Warlord was ready to open a high compression wormhole; they were out of time. “Right, we’re locking all of you up.” He took aim at the short one in the centre of the group with his rifle, making an obvious show of it. “You have fifteen seconds to slide your weapons over here, and to take those company vacuum suits off.”

  “Strip? What the-“ objected one of the crewmembers at the back.

  Remmy fired several shots at a seat to the group’s left. It exploded in a puff of stuffing. He took aim at the remaining crewmembers again. “You spend this trip naked in the brig, or dead. I’m going to start counting now.”

  The weapons came sliding through the door and the crew’s clothes came off before Remmy counted down to three. He walked to the captain, who was resuming his former position, on his knees, and took a command chip from around his neck. His glove made a connection with the small gold coloured data chip and confirmed that it contained all the command codes for the hauler, ship manifest, and their inventory. “Brand new ship with old school security,” Remmy said. “Thank you, Regent Galactic, for setting a low standard for security systems everywhere.” He turned towards Dotty. “Do a thorough scan of the bridge and shut down all the systems here. We have to make sure nothing will interfere with Kann Berin’s system control team in Engineering. We’ll take this lot to t
he brig when we’re under way.”

  CHAPTER 49

  Iron Head Nebula Departure

  The damaged section of hull was visibly warped and weakened above Alice’s head. A damage control team was moving in right behind her and the security members with her, hastily emptying the crew quarters and storage area and closing off sections behind them.

  It was unusual for a security team to check damaged areas of the ship, but there were momentary sensor readings that no one could clearly interpret in that section of the hull, and Alice was getting restless waiting for all the boarding teams to report in.

  “My scanners aren’t penetrating the hull,” Alice reported over the ship’s interior comm system. “But there’s nothing unusual inside. There’s only one cabin left, the forma reserve.”

  Alice tried to open the hatchway but the panel beside the door didn’t respond. “Any word from the Barricade?” she asked.

  “You’ll know as soon as they finish resolving the situation there,” Kadri replied.

  “Okay, fine.” Alice opened the small hatch covering the emergency door crank and pumped it several times. The pressure on the manual piston built up, but the door didn’t budge. She looked to her companion. “I’m reading good containment in the next section, no atmospheric issues.”

  “Uh, there’s a shadow on my density map,” he replied. “Looks weird.”

  “If it looks weird, then we really have to check it out,” Alice said. “Step back, cover me just in case.” She pumped the lever several more times. The door swiftly shuffled to the side, and a wave of viscous green-grey fluid overwhelmed her. When it stopped flowing only seconds later, she was chin deep in it. “Bridge? Looks like the forma in this storage bay was overheated, burst through containment, and liquefied. Maybe not in that order.”