A boom echoed in the sky. The group collectively looked up at the recognizable sound of a ship speeding through the atmosphere at a rapid descent. Two livian fighters had already scrambled and flanked either side of a tiny speck in the sky.
“What the hell is this?” Mach grumbled under his breath, pissed off at being interrupted during a moment of mourning for his friend.
The ship appeared to be on autopilot. It didn’t carry out any sweeps or tilts and smoothly descended toward the landing strip in front of the hangars.
Mach unslung his Stinger and looked through the sights for a better view. As the ship came closer, the shape became clear, but he couldn’t quite believe it.
“Who is it?” Lassea asked. “Lactern, horan?”
“Holy fuck… No, it’s none of them. I can’t believe it.” Mach’s jaw dropped at the sight.
“What is it, then?” Adira said.
“The Intrepid’s fighter drone!” Mach couldn’t believe his own words despite watching the craft slice through the atmosphere like a spirit.
“Our fighter drone?” Adira said. “You’re kidding, right?”
“If it L-jumped moments after us,” Babcock said, “the arrival matches with calculations based on its engines.”
Mach zoomed the sights and watched the drone gently land on the strip. He couldn’t see into the cockpit, but the identification marks on the side were enough.
“I don’t believe it,” Lassea said. “How’d it get back here? Some programming to follow the Intrepid perhaps?”
The fighter drone bumped down and came to a halt on the concrete. No landing crew approached. Mach couldn’t detect any signs of movement inside the cockpit.
“Let’s get down there,” Adira said and stepped forward. “Before any of the livians lay claim.”
Mach held his arm across her chest. “Wait a minute. The ship could be filled with phane eggs… or worse.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Mach sprinted alongside Adira, heading through the gathering crowd on the shipyard’s dock area. The fighter drone still smoked and buzzed from the heat of re-entry. The back of it was charred almost completely black, obscuring its Intrepid markings.
Two livian dock guards approached the craft, their rifles trained on the cockpit. They spun round to face Mach and Adira as they approached. Mach had to resist the temptation to aim his Stinger in response, but they were only doing their job. He knew one of them, a human woman by the name of Celstra Stein, on account of her flirting with him the night before. She hadn’t taken kindly to his harsh brush-off at the time, but when they locked eyes, she lowered her rifle.
“Carson,” she said, “looks like this is one of yours.”
“Yeah, it’s one of the Intrepid’s drone fighters. You might need some backup.”
“What do you mean?” she said, raising an eyebrow.
Mach realized then that he and his crew, along with Morgan and the OreCorp hierarchy, were the only ones to know what truly happened. The phane threat wasn’t common knowledge, and Mach didn’t want to start the barrage of questions now by explaining.
“Just do it,” Mach said, pushing past her and stepping toward the drone’s cockpit. Although not strictly designed for piloting, it was designed to allow a human, vestan, or whatever to take control for navigational purposes only, mostly for when surveying planets with difficult terrain and weather.
Adira, Lassea and Babcock joined Mach around the cone of the fighter. Mach connected to its systems via his smart-screen. The internal systems were offline, meaning he couldn’t patch into the cameras or use the scanners. “I can’t detect anything inside,” Mach said.
Babcock tried from his smart-screen and got the same result.
While they discussed what to do, a squadron of twenty-five armed livian security forces dispersed the crowd and surrounded the fighter. Celstra Stein approached Mach from behind, placing a hand on his shoulder. “What now?” she asked.
“We’ll have to open the cockpit manually. I can’t say what might be inside, but all I will say is, shoot everything you’ve got at it on my say-so. Understood?”
“I got it,” the security officer said, relaying the orders to her squad.
Mach’s throat became dry as he stepped closer to the fighter. The manual-release lock was at head height. All he had to do was reach up, tap in the security code, and pull the lever…
He held his SamCore Stinger in his left hand and reached up with his right, punching in the five-digit code and activating the release. A hiss of pressurized air sounded. The dull gray metal canopy slid back into the craft’s hull. Mach stepped back on his haunches, bringing up his rifle. Adira had taken her pistol out of its holster and trained the weapon on the black space of the cockpit.
It seemed as though the entire planet held its breath, waiting. Only the single whistle of a quell warbler in the distance filled the tense silence. A sudden commotion of scuffed footsteps behind Mach pulled his attention away.
“Tulula?” he called as the vestan engineer came sprinting across the dock, pushing her way through the ring of security and toward the fighter.
“It’s back!” she said. Her eyes were puffy and she looked gaunt. “Is it… him?”
At first Mach didn’t understand, but when he turned his head back to the cockpit of the fighter, it all made sense. A human form rose from the black cockpit and slumped over the side, blood dripping down onto the concrete. “Sanchez!” Mach screamed, dropping his weapon and reaching up for his old friend. He took his head in his hands and lifted it up so the two men were staring at each other.
Tulula cried and reached up for him, placing her hand on his thick bicep as his arm lay over the side, unmoving.
Mach turned to Celstra. “We need emergency medical help, right this minute!”
Sanchez groaned, coughed blood and tried to speak, but his lips wouldn’t move and his breath came in low gulps.
“Don’t try to talk,” Tulula said. “We’re getting help.”
Adira and the rest of the crew came to help, lifting Sanchez’s bulky body out of the cockpit and placing him on a hover-gurney that one of the security officers had brought forward. A team of five medics in their yellow jumpsuits rushed forward with their armory of scanners and medical equipment.
Sanchez laid on his back, staring up, his face twitching in strange ways. His hair was sodden and stuck to his forehead. Sweat pooled in the wrinkles around his mouth and nose. In his left hand, he held something chrome and shiny.
Mach reached out for Sanchez’s hand, placing it between his. Sanchez uttered something unintelligible, barely opening his eyes. He released his fingers, dropping the metallic object into Mach’s hand.
“It’s Squid Two!” Babcock said, joining Mach by Sanchez’s side.
Mach deposited the destroyed remains of the drone into Babcock’s hands. Sanchez began to wheeze and cough; a dark liquid sprayed from his mouth.
“Everyone get back!” an elderly medic shouted. “We might have a contagion here.”
Tulula at first refused to leave Sanchez’s side; tears streaked down her face. Adira and Lassea had to haul her away so the medics could do their job. The crew all stood there by the drone fighter, watching their friend being rushed into the hospital bay.
Mach turned to the vestan engineer. “Where have you been, Tulula? We were all worried about you.”
“I… I… needed time to… Oh, what’s happening to him? I thought he was dead. How did he get back here?”
Babcock studied the remains of his drone companion. “I think Squid Two still has a role to play in all of this. Let’s get to my lab and check out Squid Two’s memory. I suspect Sanchez saved it for a reason.”
“One moment,” Adira said, clambering up the side of the fighter and pointing her gun into the gloom. After a few moments, she lifted her head up. “It’s all clear. I’ve got the flight-recorder chip.”
“Anything else in there?” Lassea asked, referring to the phane.
That’s Sanchez, Mach thought. Despite his illness and desire to die, the old bastard refused to go quietly into the night. It brought a smile to Mach’s face, even though he had that terrible hole of grief reopen inside him. He just hoped he wouldn’t have to grieve for a second time.
“Celstra!” Mach called out before the officer could follow the medics inside.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Can you let me know as soon as you know what’s going on?”
“Of course, just give the medics time and space to do their work.”
They shared a look then turned away. Celstra knew how much Sanchez had meant to Mach. Before the flirtation had begun, Mach had spilled it all out to her, finding it easier to talk about Sanchez with a stranger than with his own crew.
“Come on,” Adira said, taking Mach by the elbow. “Let’s go see what data Squid Two might have. They’ll do their best for him, I’m sure.”
“I hope you’re right.”
Mach pulled his attention away from the squat, flat-roofed hospital on the east side of the dock and headed toward the Intrepid with the others, their mood a strange mix of euphoria, confusion, and fear for their fellow crew member.
***
Mach and the others surrounded Babcock within his lab inside the Intrepid. Mach had told the engineers working on its repairs to give them some privacy. It took Babcock a few minutes to disassemble the blackened, dented remains of Squid Two and remove his data store. Babcock connected it up to the main viewscreen and began the decryption process of the log files.
“Here we are,” Babcock said a minute or so later, indicating the collection of files displayed on the three-dimensional holographic display. “Most of the data is intact from the time we left.”
Mach and the others leaned closer as the scientist ran some search parameters on the data.
“Do we have video?” Tulula asked. She had managed to compose herself and was now thinking more logically, as befitted her skills.
“We do, let me just install the codec… there, this is the last ten minutes of footage recorded,” Babcock said, playing the video.
Squid Two’s recording showed Mach and Adira leaving the mines and running out of shot; then it swept back to face the mines. Hundreds and thousands of phane soldiers flooded out after Mach and Adira. A few minutes later when it appeared empty, Squid Two floated closer to the mine. A dark shape appeared in the shadows.
“It’s Sanchez,” Tulula said, catching her breath.
She was right; Sanchez came sprinting out of the darkness of the mine and skidded to a halt by Squid Two. The drone chirped something before translating into Salus Common for Sanchez—something Mach had never seen before, though he knew the little drone was more than capable of talking in almost any language, due to Babcock’s programming brilliance.
Squid Two said, “Follow me. You can still get off in time.”
“We’ve got no more than a few minutes till the weapon detonates,” Sanchez said. His face at this point was red and covered in sweat. His limbs trembled, presumably with adrenalin and the effects of his illness.
“Follow,” Squid Two chirped and floated away from the mountain. Sanchez had to sprint to keep up, but eventually Babcock’s creation had brought Sanchez through a system of valleys and cracks in the mountain until they came to the fighter drone that had been shot down earlier.
Sanchez grinned and rushed over, initiating the release procedure for the cockpit. Once inside, the hunter looked over to Squid. “Wait, I can’t pilot this thing. It’s tethered to the Intrepid—assuming it’s in any fit state to fly.”
“Squid will help,” the drone said, flying over to the cockpit. Although they couldn’t see anything happening, Babcock informed them via a log file that Squid managed to disconnect the fighter craft from the Intrepid’s control protocols. Then, in a show of staggering initiative, the little drone recoded the fighter’s engines and navigation system to follow the Intrepid.
“You go, now,” Squid said, hovering away from the craft. It turned suddenly then. A phane soldier burst out from a narrow cut through the mountain rock and launched at Squid, striking it down with one of its bone-colored limbs.
“No!” Sanchez screamed as the fighter’s engines kicked in. The craft entered an autopilot sequence. But Sanchez jumped out from the cockpit, pulled a rifle from his back and fired it at the soldier’s head. An entire magazine emptied into the creature, but only had the effect of knocking it back and stunning it, but that’s all Sanchez needed; he scooped up Squid Two and got back into the fighter’s cockpit just as it began to take off.
“He was so close to not making it,” Lassea said. “He was so brave to save Squid like that.”
“That’s Ernie for you,” Mach said, beaming with pride over his friend’s actions. The group watched in awe as the fighter drone followed the Intrepid, all the while dodging the gunfire from the phane’s weapons, most of their attention directed at the Intrepid, giving Sanchez a fairly clear run away from the planet.
Once out of the planet’s atmosphere, the fighter’s L-jump engaged.
“Squid Two finally powers down here, but there’s some from the flight recorder chip,” Babcock said. The few brief seconds of recording before Sanchez disappeared into the interstitial trans-dimensional space of an L-jump showed a massive white light of explosion coming out from the mountain, destroying, burning and vaporizing all phane on the surface. The great mothership attempted to leave the planet’s atmosphere, but it was too heavy and too slow. The blast caught up with it.
The final frame of the video showed the planet erupting into a ball of dazzling light. After that, there was nothing but blackness, the flight recorder only recording the autopilot data of the L-jump as the fighter drone took its coordinates from the Intrepid.
“The tolerances for failure were crazy thin,” Lassea said, reading the log files. “Literally seconds. If Squid Two hadn’t got Sanchez off the planet when he did, there was only a four-second window before they would have lost the signal to the Intrepid.”
Mach clapped Babcock on the shoulder. “It looks like your little friend saved Sanchez,” he said. “I never knew your AI had that much automation and initiative thinking capability.”
Babcock wiped a tear from his craggy face. “Neither did I.” The scientist looked down on the lab table at the dented, charred fragments of Squid Two. “This means…” He trailed off, lost in thought.
Tulula prompted, “Means what?”
“Means the Squid software has achieved a kind of consciousness,” Adira added, the statement silencing everyone.
“She’s right,” Babcock said, his attention back on the holodisplay as he scrolled through Squid Two’s programming. “It’s changed… on its own.”
“And we’ve lost it,” Mach said, shaking his head at the loss. Something like this would be huge, and it meant that Babcock’s friendship with the little drone wasn’t just a charming affectation, but born of something real, tangible.
“Not necessarily so,” Babcock added, the glint of excitement returning to his eyes. “I can rebuild; I had the software backed up after losing Squid One.”
“So you can build Squid Three?” Lassea said.
“I… think so. If I can get the parts.”
“Let’s go into the capital and see if we can do just that,” Mach said. “It’ll give the engineers time to finish off the repairs here, and we can drop in on Sanchez and see what the doctors are thinking.”
***
Mach and the crew had to wait another four hours before they were allowed to see Sanchez. The group waited nervously in the mess hall, drinking filthy sludge and fidgeting each time someone entered, hoping it would be the head surgeon who was working on their friend.
Eventually, Mach got the call from Dr. Yiao, the surgeon, and they made their way to Sanchez’s room. S
anchez was unconscious, still out cold from the extensive surgery.
Yiao stood at the side of the bed, looming over his patient. He was wearing his yellow medical shift. The bright color glared off his bald head. He looked up at Mach and the others with ice-cold blue eyes. “He is a very lucky man,” he said, his voice deadpan and monotone.
He struck Mach more as an efficient killer than a life-saving surgeon.
“He don’t look so lucky,” Tulula added.
Sanchez was almost gray in pallor. If it weren’t for his broad chest rising and falling, it would be all too easy to assume he had been dead for quite some time.
“If we hadn’t got to him when we did, he would surely have died,” Yiao said. “His internal injuries were unlike anything I have ever seen.”
“The symbiosite?” Babcock asked.
“No, it wasn’t a symbiosite that caused the injuries.”
Mach and Adira shared a confused look before returning their attention to the surgeon. “What do you mean? He told me himself what he had. He wasn’t making it up,” Mach said, more forcefully than he intended.
The surgeon stiffened his back and raised his chin in defiance. “I know what I saw, and what I did to save your friend. Are you suggesting I’m lying?”
“Of course not,” Lassea said quickly, defusing the tension. “We just don’t understand. Please, go on, explain.”
“Okay,” the surgeon said, leaning his back against the windowsill of Sanchez’s private room. “We did remove a large piece of organic matter, and I do believe that it might have been a symbiosite at one point, but by the time we reached it, it had definitely morphed into something else, something… alien.”
“What?” Tulula said. “What kind of alien? What about Sanchez? Is he okay? Will he live?”
Dr. Yiao lifted his arm and projected a three-dimensional, rotating image of the thing they removed from Sanchez. It appeared to be a thick-bodied worm about twenty-five centimeters long. The thing was off-white and had muscular ridges down its underside. Its tail was curled and featured thin hairlike protrusions that Yiao informed them were how it connected to Sanchez’s nervous system as it wrapped around his spinal cord.
The Lost Voyager: A Space Opera Novel Page 21