One officer cowering behind the raised control station cried out and jumped to his feet, both hands holding his backside as he hopped around while still vocalizing his pain.
Cole saw a small red stain spreading between the hopping man’s hands but otherwise paid the people no mind as he stomped into Detention Wing C.
Cole encountered no further officers as he made his way to Detention Block C-12. Upon arriving, Cole once again tried the door and found it uncooperative. The corridor here was three meters wide, so he couldn’t run at the door…and besides, it opened out into the corridor.
Wait…it opened out. That meant the interior surface of the door was pressed against the exterior surface of that ridge all doorframes have. Cole stepped back to examine the doorframe and nodded, which was unseen inside the armor. He moved into position, settled himself, and put all his enhanced strength into a kick aimed at the door’s handle and, equally, its latch.
Cole’s kick flattened the door’s handle. It had no resistance to the powered servos in the leg of Cole’s heavy armor. The door and latch stood up far better, though. The doorframe, however, did not. Cole’s kick snapped the anchor bolts in the doorframe and drove both the doorframe and door into the detention block, the door and doorframe bending inward against their design in another rending screech of tortured metal. Cole now had access to Detention Block C-12.
Detention Block C-12 turned out to be three rows of six cells stacked one on top of the other. Cole looked at the—to his eye—flimsy metal stairs and felt relief upon seeing Cell 5 as the second from the right on the ground level. Cole stomped over to the door to Cell 5, contemplating how to open the cell without harming Talia. His eyes landed on the cuff port that doubled as an ingress/egress port for food trays.
Cole could only guess what Talia thought upon seeing the four metallic fingers of his right ‘hand’ enter the cuff port and fold down on the door, his arm at full extension, but it wasn’t important. Cole set himself once more and pulled his right hand toward him. The cell’s door did not break free of its doorframe, but the doorframe broke free of the concrete. As Cole dropped the cell door and frame to the ground in a clatter, a small cloud of masonry dust showered down to the floor.
Cole stepped into the opening that was now just large enough to fit while still touching all sides and laid eyes on Talia Thyrray for the first time. Her hair was more of a dirty blond, compared to her sister’s honey gold, and her build was more of a lithe, runner’s build. She wore a bright red jumpsuit with white socks, a white T-shirt, and red shoes. Her hands were chained to her waist, her feet chained at the ankles.
Talia cowered as far back from the cell’s doorway as she could on the bed, which was not more than a thin mattress on a concrete block, and she waved her hands as best she could, knees drawn to her chest and tears streaming down her face as she screamed, “Don’t hurt me! Please, don’t hurt me!”
Cole used his implant to activate his armor’s external speakers and said what Sasha had told him to say, “Sooshie sent me.”
The change in Talia was immediate. She relaxed and put her feet on the floor, allowing Cole to see the word ‘INMATE’ running down the right leg of her jumpsuit in bold black letters. Her expression shifted from sheer, unmitigated terror to hope, saying, “Where is she? Is she here?”
“She’s on the ship. She couldn’t exactly come with me—circumstances being what they are, and besides, we could only fab the one suit of armor in the time we had.”
Talia’s eyes went wide. “You fabbed that suit of armor?”
“Not me…I’m the pilot. Now, we should go.”
Talia stood and shuffled out of her cell. Cole and Talia departed Detention Block C-12 to the accompaniment of seventeen other inmates shouting, “Me, too! Take me too!” through the doors of their cells.
By the time they traveled the short distance to reach the control station, Cole knew it would take forever to reach the shuttle as long as Talia remained chained…but he was afraid he’d harm Talia if he tried to remove the restraints with the heavy armor. Heavy armor wasn’t known for its manual dexterity.
The injured officer wasn’t hopping around anymore, but he still held his backside. Cole saw the red stain had spread across the entire seat of his uniform pants, and as the man turned, his expression suggested a moderate level of discomfort.
“Keys,” Cole said, using the external speakers and pointed at Talia.
The standing officer’s expression shifted to a mixture of anger and disgust. “The Aurelian Commonwealth Division of Prisons does not negotiate with terrorists!”
“Who said anything about negotiating?” Cole asked as he drew the one stun pistol to survive his charging entry into Detention Wing C and shot the officer. Cole’s aim was a fluke, the stun charge striking the officer’s head, and the officer fell to the floor twitching.
“What about you?” Cole asked, addressing the other officer still cowering behind the control station and whose reflection he could see in a convex mirror mounted in the far corner at the ceiling.
Nothing.
“I can see your reflection in that mirror, you know.”
A trembling hand extended above the surface of the control station, holding a key ring.
“Hey, stupid…I’m in heavy armor. Yeah, I can open doors, but I’ll just snap those keys like small pieces of wood. Get out here and unlock these restraints before I lose my patience.”
The external microphones transmitted a soft shuffling sound, and soon, Cole saw the remaining officer crawling around the control station on his hands and knees. He scurried over to Talia’s feet and removed the ankle chain, then started to turn away, still on his hands and knees.
“Hands, too,” Cole said.
The officer hesitated but stood, and Cole saw a large wet spot dominating the crotch of his trousers. Cole almost felt sorry for the poor guy. The officer fumbled through unlocking the bracelets securing Talia’s wrists to the chain around her waist and shuffled around behind Talia to unlock the waist-chain, removing it. When he was finished, the officer held up the waist-chain as if to offer it to Cole.
“Why would I want it?” Cole asked and fired his stun pistol once more. This stun charge, at least, struck the officer in the torso; the officer collapsed to the floor unconscious, amidst a clatter of chains, but without the overloaded neurons that produced constant twitching.
Talia stopped rubbing her wrists, saying, “May we go, please? I really want to leave. Besides, I think the twitching officer voided into his pants. It smells kinda bad in here.”
Ouch, Cole thought as he retrieved the stun pistol from the officer at his feet and handed it to Talia. I never meant for that to happen. Sucks to be him.
Cole moved over and retrieved the stun pistol from the twitching guard to replace the one that didn’t survive and led the way out of Detention Wing C. Cole turned the corner mere seconds before Talia and found a cluster officers waiting in riot gear. As they fired their riot guns and other weapons, Talia screamed and ducked back around the corner. The Ping! P-P-Ping, Ping! P-Ping, Ping, Ping! of the officers’ weapons fire ricocheting off the heavy armor was an almost pleasant melody inside the armor, like the steady rhythm of a good rainstorm on sheets of tin. Alas…Cole couldn’t stop and enjoy it; he had light-years to go before he slept.
Wading into the officers, Cole ripped their helmets off with one hand and stunned them with the other, intending those stun charges to strike heads. One officer had his finger on the trigger of his weapon, and when Cole stunned him, his finger twitched on the trigger, peppering the officer beside him and eliciting screams until Cole stunned the wounded officer. Cole ejected the weapon’s charge pack as the officer’s finger continued to twitch on the trigger, and once the hallway was secure, he called Talia to follow him.
Cole and Talia encountered no more resistance on their trek back to the shuttle, and they found it was still storming outside.
Cole slapped the control to raise the shuttle’s bo
arding ramp as water from the storm streamed down the armor. Talia looked like a drowned rat. Moving to one alcove set aside for armor charging, Cole activated the sequence to open and shut down the armor. He turned and found a soaked Talia, her lips curled in a goofy adolescent smile as she lifted her eyes to meet his.
Cole gestured to the fifty unoccupied seats in the troop shuttle, saying, “Pick a seat, and strap in.”
He turned toward the cockpit, but Talia took a tentative step toward him, the smile still dominating her expression. “May I sit with you?”
Cole shrugged. “If you want to…just don’t touch anything.”
He led the way to the cockpit and slid into the pilot’s seat. Talia moved to the co-pilot’s seat, and Cole noticed she kept glancing his way. Her clothes actually squished, rivulets of water running down to the floor as she tightened the straps around her torso.
The cockpit speakers chirped, and Srexx said, “Cole, the governor has ordered units of the planetary militia to your area. They are setting up heavy weapons and mobile anti-air platforms on the ridge overlooking the detention center now.”
Cole keyed the commands to bring the engines online from hot standby, saying, “Srexx, where is Sasha?”
“She is in the command chair on the bridge, Cole.”
“Put me through to the bridge, please.”
The speakers chirped again.
“Sasha?”
“Cole! Is Talia with you? Is she okay?”
Cole grinned. “She’s a little water-logged, but she’s fine otherwise. Sasha, I need you at the weapons console. This shuttle handles like a pregnant whale on dry land; I can’t evade weapons fire. I will try to talk them down, but if it comes to a fight, I’ll need you to fire on the militia emplacements if you want your sister on the ship.”
Silence.
“Cole,” Sasha said, her voice shaky, “they’re members of Aurelian military forces, same as me, like I already told you. I…I don’t know if I can do it.”
“Sasha, you have to make a choice. If they fire, it’ll be your sister or them. Are you willing to continue supporting a government that put a dead-or-alive bounty on both you and your sister and allow your sister to die?”
More silence.
“Maybe they’ll stand down?” Sasha asked, her voice soft and tentative.
Cole didn’t think so, but he had other things to do right then. “Srexx, can you give me the frequency for the Aurelian militia units that have deployed?”
A comms frequency appeared on the shuttle’s HUD.
Cole keyed that frequency into the shuttle’s comms system and pressed ‘Transmit.’ The comms system put his active call with the ship on ‘mute,’ displaying the text ‘Channel Opened’ before Cole said, “Attention, Caledonian militia…”
“Who is this? This frequency is for official military use only. You risk imprisonment if you persist.”
“Well, I’m the pilot of the shuttle about to lift off from the detention center. Transmitting on a restricted frequency is the least of my concerns right now.”
“I don’t know who you are, but you’d be well advised to power down your shuttle and surrender. Nobody has to die, son.”
“You’re right about that,” Cole said. “I have a ship in low orbit over this region right now with battleship-grade starship weapons. If you fire on me, my weapons officer will wipe your people, your vehicles, and your gear off the face of the planet. I have no quarrel with Caledonia, the Caledonian militia, or any of your people. My only goal is to retrieve someone who has been unjustly accused and sentenced to death. Your life—and the lives of your people—are not worth this one-sided fight.”
When no response came, Cole closed the channel, and the comms system reverted to the open link to the ship. He tapped the shuttle’s console to select the ship as his destination and keyed the lift-off sequence. The shuttle was about fifty meters into the air when the high-pitched wails of missile alarms erupted from the console.
“Missile launch!” Cole said. “We have multiple missile launches!”
Cole’s fingers flew over the console, initiating evasive maneuvers and priming what limited anti-missile defenses the shuttle had. He then took the second or two necessary to highlight the missile platforms that had fired and transmit their coordinates up to the ship.
The evasive maneuvers pressed Cole and Talia into their seats, as Cole watched the missiles move ever closer to the shuttle. The maneuvers and defenses were just not going to cut it.
Just as Cole drew breath to say, ‘brace for impact,’ multiple spires of green energy stabbed through the atmosphere from the ship’s point-defense laser batteries, striking the missiles and vaporizing them.
Cole exhaled his relief.
Not even a second later, spires of green energy thicker than the shuttle was long struck one flank of the militia’s deployment and swept up the ridge to the opposite flank, much like a barkeep wiping a towel across the bar. Cole gaped at the sight of starship-grade energy weapons being used for planetary bombardment; most ships carried dedicated bombardment weapons to avoid the energy beams dissipating into the atmosphere.
By the time the shuttle was leaving Caledonia’s atmosphere, a massive cloud of dirt and debris had been thrown into the air above the detention center, despite the torrential downpour…and the ridge where the militia units had deployed was wiped clean, down to the bedrock.
Chapter Seventeen
Low Orbit, Caledonia
Caledonia System
4 July 2999
The ship grew larger in the forward view, a matte black shape almost invisible against the backdrop of space. It floated immobile, occupying a geosynchronous orbit above the detention center and its region. The only light came from the green-tinged forcefields that maintained atmosphere on the flight deck.
Doctrine across Human space mandated that arriving craft come in from the aft end of the ship, as departing craft would exit from the bow…but the ship only had one shuttle. And Cole was piloting it. There weren’t any other small craft to exit…or an air-boss, CAG, or whatever designation you wanted to apply to the officer in charge of small craft operations. So…since he was staring at the bow of his ship and saw no point in taking the few extra seconds to circle to the aft ingress port, Cole defied centuries of piloted flight doctrine and pointed the shuttle at the forward egress port.
The chirp of an open comms channel heralded Srexx’s voice, “Cole, reconsider your current flight path.”
“Why is that, buddy?”
“The bow forcefields are impervious from outside the ship to protect the flight deck from space dust and micrometeorite impacts during powered flight.”
The ship was very close now, and Cole’s fingers flew over the shuttle’s console as he threw the shuttle into a nosedive that pushed him and Talia back against the straps holding them in their seats for a moment. Cole leveled out the shuttle as he passed below the ship and, passing the stern, turned back to the ship using a maneuver still referenced in pilot jargon as an Immelmann.
The cavernous expanse of the flight deck almost matched the profile of the cargo hold. It claimed the vertical space of an entire deck, the entire length of the ship, and three-quarters’ the entire beam of the ship’s decks. Even the most massive cargo shuttle flying in known space could use the flight deck and ingress/egress ports with ease.
Cole returned the shuttle to the lift that would take it back to the hangar deck, settling the craft onto its landing struts and powering down the shuttle as he lowered the boarding ramp. Talia fumbled a moment with the straps’ release before she leapt up from the co-pilot’s seat and almost sprinted out the back of the shuttle. After all, her big sister was waiting for her.
Except she wasn’t…waiting, that is. Sasha was nowhere to be seen.
Cole watched Talia’s shoulders fight between being squared with pride and being slumped in despair. He guessed an internal conflict between determination not to show weakness and disappointment and hur
t that her sister wasn’t here was becoming quite the battle royale. Cole used his implant to instruct the ship’s computer to lower the shuttle into the hangar deck and secure it there, and he soon caught up with Talia where she’d stopped when she realized Cole wasn’t with her.
“Come on,” Cole said, walking past her toward personnel hatch. “She’s probably still on the bridge, making sure the Caledonians behave.”
Cole led Talia off the flight deck and to the nearest transit shaft, marked with a symbol he learned was equivalent to the ‘Up’ arrow from human culture. The transit shafts spread throughout the ship carried the ship’s crew between decks. Cole wasn’t sure how the cylindrical shafts did their work, but certain shafts carried people up and others carried them down. A pair of mind-bogglingly large square shafts on the port side of the bow and starboard side of the stern conveyed large objects between the decks; these freight elevators used forcefields to create platforms for carrying cargo or equipment to the deck where it was needed.
Talia giggled like a small child as she floated up through the ship, even though she almost clutched Cole’s hand. In short order, they stopped on Deck Eleven, where Cole led her to one of the main transit shafts that served the rest of the ship. From there, they floated up to Deck Three, which held the bridge, ship’s offices, and the Captain’s and XO’s day-cabins…among many other compartments. Cole stepped out of the shaft and turned left, leading Talia to the center of the deck.
The starboard hatch to the bridge irised open at Cole’s approach, and after passing through the passageway and stepping through the second hatch, he stopped as he took in the empty bridge. Cole took the few steps necessary to bring him to the weapons console and saw it was still in an active state, the ship’s weapons—all of them, not just the bombardment units—still online and ready to fire.
It Ain't Over... (Cole & Srexx Book 1) Page 14