“My internal batteries will need a moment to recover from the energy I’ve expended. Might we find a safe place to rest for a moment?” Aloysius asked.
“Absolutely. Hunker down here for a moment while I contact the Icarus,” Draco said as he reached down to pull the comm unit Jaxon had given him from his thigh holster. The comm unit came out in pieces.
The weight of the rubble had crushed it completely.
Draco had lost Ava, Vynce and Jaxon, and now they had no way of contacting the Icarus.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Rhken wanted to cry. She could feel the mass murderer breathing down the back of her neck. He could have killed her right then and there, but he didn’t. He let her live, because she could be useful. She began to think of ways that she could alert her father and her sister that Veck was out of his cage. Doing it without his knowledge was going to be the hard part.
Then, everything changed. A message blared out all over the ship’s broadcast system.
‘Attention all crew members of the Icarus, Veck Simms has escaped from his cell. Repeat, Veck Simms has escaped from his cell!’ That was Arak’s voice. He was watching from the bridge!
Veck sighed and squeezed her arm hard enough to hurt. “I knew I should have disabled the comms system. What happens now?”
“I- I don’t know.”
“Don’t lie to me. Your Captain would have emergency protocols in place for this kind of situation. Who else is on board, and what little defense protocols will they be acting out?”
“The ship would go on lockdown.”
“Yes, and?”
“Invaders get spaced.”
“Ah, then I consider myself lucky to have run into you. They won’t open the airlock if you’re with me, will they?”
Rhken swallowed. No. They probably wouldn’t. Her Dad would have put the engineering bay on lockdown too. Any invading force needed access to the bridge and engineering to take command of the ship, and those were the two places that were occupied by Icarus crew members. Thank the void for small favors.
“How did you get out?” Rhken asked.
“I don’t want to bore you with the details,” Veck said.
“You shouldn’t have been able to do that.”
“I know, but I’ve always had a knack for doing the impossible. Tell me, are there any people on this ship that are going to try to hunt me down?”
“I don’t know what other people are going to do.”
“The ship’s log shows that your Captain, along with four other crew members left in the shuttle. Which leaves four remaining crew members. Arak Nara, Rhken Otema, Reban Otema and Nook Otema. Well wouldn’t you know it, three of the people left on this ship are family. They wouldn’t risk hurting one of their own, would they Rhken?”
Rhken swallowed.
“Yes, I can access the ship’s files on every single one of you. I know you as well as Draco does now. Just like I know your father. And your sister.”
“How? Those aren’t accessible even by us. They’re locked away in-” Suddenly Rhken realized what had happened. Somehow Veck Simms had co-opted the artificial intelligence. That was the only way he would have been able to access personnel files and shut down the defense protocol designed to fry him.
“This ship is mine,” Veck said. “It’s only a matter of time until everyone else realizes. The harder they fight, the more of them will die. You don’t want your father to die, do you Rhken?”
“No.”
“How about your sister? You want her to live?”
“Of course, I do.”
“Then you’ll answer any questions I have and do exactly what I say. Otherwise, I’ll kill you and use your corpse as a warning to any others that might try to be heroes.”
“You’re just a man, even after all you’ve done. You’re just one man.”
Veck reached forward and showed her his forearm. The skin covering the outside of the cybernetic arm was indistinguishable from real skin. It was covered in pores, hairs, and tiny imperfections. In one swift motion it split apart. A telescoping blade shot out of the center of the arm and gleamed under the cool lights.
“I am not a man. I am a weapon,” he said in a low voice. “I am exactly what they made me.”
The fear welled up inside Rhken then. She swallowed nervously.
“Take me to the bridge,” he said.
Arak would already have it on lockdown, so taking him there wouldn’t actually put Arak in danger. If anything, it was clearing room between Veck and her family.
As they walked, Veck spoke. “I feel like we’re off to a bad start. I’m only here because your Captain took me prisoner, and all I want is my freedom. I don’t want to hurt any of you.”
“Then why are you holding my arm so tightly?”
Veck released her from his grip.
She was free!
Rhken wondered how far she would get if she tried to run before Veck eviscerated her.
Not far. There was no way she would be able to overpower Veck, but she might be able to outsmart him.
“I had to be sure that you wouldn’t do something stupid,” Veck said.
“I’m not known for doing stupid things.”
“Good. I will not harm any of you unless you force me to act. People serving under Draco Goldwing tend to buy into his whole hero act. They might even think that a noble sacrifice is worth the risk, but I’m telling you right now that it isn’t. You know how many corpses I’ve left in my wake, and none of their deaths mattered.”
That wasn’t true, but Rhken wasn’t going to say it. Every single body that Veck Simms left behind in his wake was a catalyst for the resistance. Those bodies lit the fire under those who refused to allow another tyrant to rise from Old Earth’s ashes.
Veck embodied all of the worst attributes of humanity. Pride, vanity, and ambition. He was sure that his vision was the only one that mattered. He didn’t want peace. He wanted to subjugate all non-human life in the galaxy.
“Is there any other way off this ship?” Veck asked.
“Captain Goldwing took the shuttle.”
“I know. Are there any other ways off this ship? Hidden ways? I can access most information about this ship, but there are some null sectors that even I can’t access.”
“There are the escape pods, but those won’t get you very far.”
“No, I imagine not. Can the shuttle be called back from the other ship by remote?”
“No. Well, it could, but the trip to the nearest gateway would take months in that shuttle. It doesn’t have the inertial dampeners that the Icarus does and can’t go ask fast.”
“A pity. If that was an option, I’d take the shuttle and leave you all alone. Are you sure there’s no way we could get the shuttle back?”
“No. There’s no way.”
Veck sighed. “Very well. I supposed I’d better head to the bridge and take control of this ship. Lead the way, little mouse.”
Rhken shuddered. Little mouse. The way he said it made her skin crawl.
But what did mice do best? They hid from predators and survived. She would stay quiet, only squeak when she needed to, and put her mind to work. Rhken started off towards the bridge, knowing full well that it would be locked down when they arrived.
As they walked, Veck couldn’t help but talk. He sounded like he loved the sound of his own voice. “Is there anything you’d like to ask me, little mouse?”
She turned to face him. Tears welled up and threatened to spill onto her cheeks. “What are you going to do with us?”
Veck smiled.
“I don’t want to do anything to you or anyone else on this ship. The only thing I want to do is leave. Peacefully. Now, if anyone on this ship has an aversion to letting me leave peacefully I’ll be happy to demonstrate my reputation to them first hand, but I would prefer not. The Galactic media wants people to believe I am a psychopath who kills without reason. That is far from the truth. They do manage to get one thing right about me, though. I believe that
humanity deserves a privileged place among the galactic species. What do you think, little mouse?”
“I don’t know,” she said. Rhken had lots of thoughts about the pro-human dogma that Veck spouted, but here she was talking to the font of hate. There was nothing she could say that would change anything now.
“You’re young,” he said with a sigh. “I can’t hold you responsible for that. I can’t expect you to have seen the things I have seen, or to understand the galaxy as I do. But I can help to open your mind if you’d like.”
His voice was soft, but his eyes had the hungry cold stare of a great white shark.
Against her better judgement, she nodded. She would let him monologue for as long as possible. The longer she could delay him, the better.
“As an engineer, you would know what an arc reactor is,” he said.
She nodded.
“You would also know that the arc reactor was invented before the exodus of Old Earth. Without it, the Children of iNet would not exist. We are the reason they exist, and our technology is how they can live for thousands of years. When it comes down to it, that entire race is our creation. We created it. There’s no denying that. As a species, we ourselves created another fully functioning, fully sapient form of life. Our technological advances are leaps and bounds over the other species in the galaxy. The Vartalen were still using giant reservoirs of fossil fuel in order to fly through the stars until they stole our arc reactor technology. Even though we’re the newest species to join the Galactic community, it’s undeniable that we are the most advanced. That is why our own government is trying to kill me. The Galactic community is not ready to accept our dominance.”
Rhken had thoughts flying through her mind. She was tempted to mention that the creation of the Children of iNet was against Galactic law, and other species had suffered enormous penalties for undertaking artificial intelligence research.
She also wanted to mention that their species was responsible for inciting violence and racial hatred across the galaxy at a level unheard of before humanity’s coming to the stars. They were the newest kids on the block, yet they had shown up and acted as though they owned the place.
From his little speech, Rhken knew now that he was nuts. The man might be charismatic, but he was a complete whack job.
“I can see you’ve got a lot on your mind. What do you think?” Veck asked after Rhken didn’t respond to his rant.
“I think that if we had the technological superiority over the other races in the galaxy, and we could improve their quality of life by sharing it with them, then I think we should.”
Veck moved too fast for Rhken to comprehend. All she felt was pain explode from her abdomen. One moment she was standing face to face with a calm man, and the next she was doubled over in agony.
She screamed as he pulled her back to her feet by her hair.
“That’s the kind of fucking attitude our government wants our unthinking populace to have. You must ignore their attempts at controlling your mind and see the galaxy for what it really is. It’s a food chain of predators and prey, and we’re not just swimming around the middle. We’re at the top.”
Rhken whimpered. Veck was unhinged! The way that he snapped just because she dared to disagree… She’d let his disarming charm work on her too easily.
“Say it. We’re at the top!” he bellowed at her.
“We’re at the top!” she said. She didn’t believe the words she said, she just wanted the pain to end. She would do anything, say anything, just to make the pain stop.
Veck released her, and Rhken slumped to the ground. She held her head in her hands and cried. Her scalp arched from where he grabbed her.
“Get up,” Veck said with quiet menace.
Rhken’s strength had been drained out of her. She didn’t know whether she even had the energy to stand.
“Get up, or I will pull you to your fucking feet again,” Veck said.
Rhken’s eyes went wide. Somewhere deep down inside herself she found the energy to stand. She rose shakily to one knee at first, and then braced herself on the wall of the corridor to get back to her feet.
“Good little mouse. Now scurry on. Take me to the bridge.”
They walked on.
For a moment, Arak believed that Veck may have actually been civilized, but that idea had flown out of his head when Veck attacked Rhken. He brutally punched the young girl in the stomach and lifted her off the ground by her own hair. Arak had seen many things that would make a normal man sick. But what he had seen Veck do to Rhken was almost at the top of the list.
Arak frantically tried to decode the encrypted signal that Captain Goldwing had used to contact him on before. After it had disappeared, the only thing he could think of was that it had encrypted itself. But why? Arak knew a thing or two about encrypted comm signals, but he was not the genius code breaker that Raze was.
Evie had her own encryption breaking cycles she could run, but she had not been responding since Veck’s escape. Arak had a sinking feeling that Veck had somehow disabled Evie’s security system, but he couldn’t work out how he had managed to do it. He had to contact Captain Goldwing somehow, but Arak hadn’t the faintest idea how. There was no way he could instigate contact with Captain Goldwing. He could only wait for Captain Goldwing to contact him.
Veck grew close to the locked door to the bridge. Soon, Arak would have to make a choice. Flee, or die. But on a ship the size of the Icarus, there weren’t many places to flee to.
If Veck had managed to find a way to get past Evie’s security measures, it was likely that he could get past the locked door to the bridge. If he could do that, he could commandeer the ship and strand the rest of the crew over on the Metropolis Seven.
There was only one option.
Arak got up from the pilot’s seat and climbed up to the central command station. He swiped his fingers across the clear glass display, which brought up a list of options. Arak touched a number of seemingly unrelated options one after the other. It was a set of instructions that Arak hoped he would never have to use.
Captain Goldwing had that that it was only to be used in dire circumstance, and things couldn’t get much worse. The ship was without its Captain, and a hostile force was coming to commandeer it. After Arak finished the sequence, the display went dead.
Arak spoke, “I have flown too close to the sun.”
The command center broke apart. Parts moved and shifted until the command center was split into two. It revealed a small hatch, which Arak lifted. Underneath the hatch lid was a ladder leading down underneath the bridge. There was nothing but darkness down there, but if Draco had told it true, there would only be one path for Arak to follow.
Arak climbed down the ladder. He couldn’t see the rungs, but he could feel them with his feet. He grabbed the hatch and pulled it back down into place.
He heard the command center reform in place after the hatch was closed. A number of dull green lights began to brighten inside the shaft. There were two dull lights on each ladder rung, and more running down the sides of the walls. Arak climbed down until he reached the bottom of the access tunnel. He carefully stepped down onto the metal floor, conscious of how much noise echoed in the small chamber.
Arak pivoted. The tunnel continued on and became a small room with a very low ceiling. A row of full green lights formed a circle around a central pillar that ran from the floor to the ceiling. Arak crossed the room and ran his hand across the smooth surface of the pillar. The moment he touched it, dull green lines of light began to appear from where he touched it.
A sudden unexpected voice in the chamber made him jump.
“Have you flown too close to the sun?”
Arak’s heart raced, but he managed to speak. “There is a hostile force aboard the Icarus. Captain Draco Goldwing is currently trapped on another ship, and I don’t know what to do.”
“Draco’s not here?” the voice asked.
“No, he is not.”
“Tha
t’s a pity. I had hoped to talk to him one last time.”
“Forgive me for my ignorance sir, but who am I speaking to?”
“Just one second,” the voice said.
The lights around the pillar brightened. A bright green holographic projection formed in front of Arak’s eyes. For a moment he thought he was looking at a recreation of Captain Draco Goldwing himself, but then saw that the eyes and the chin were wrong.
“I’m Draco’s father, Samuel,” the hologram said, “Well, I’m not really him. He’s been dead for years. I’m just the leftovers. I am his programming, his voice and a list of regrets as long as your arm. An avatar of a long-dead servant of humanity.”
“I’m sure that once Draco is back on the ship I can arrange for him to come down and speak with you. I am sure he would be glad to hear his father’s voice, even if you are just an echo.”
“Well that would be nice, but if you’re down here, it’s not because you wanted some company, is it?”
“No sir, it is not.”
“You’re in some deep shit, and Draco gave you the access phrase, so that must mean you’re someone he trusts. I guess that means I should trust you too.”
“You can trust me. I owe Draco my life.”
“Did Draco ever explain to you what this place is?”
“No sir. He just said that if I was out of options I should come down here and I would find something to turn the tide.”
“This is the heart of the Icarus, son. There are three things that can only be used from inside this room. The first is a self-destruct process for the Icarus. You trigger that, and you’ve got five minutes to get on the shuttle and get clear.”
“The shuttle is currently aboard another ship, with Captain Goldwing.”
“Seeing as that’s not an option, the second choice is an electro-magnetic pulse, or EMP for short. Be warned, it won’t just fry an enemy ship. It’ll fry the Icarus too. It’ll leave you dead in the void while the systems reboot.”
Arak nodded. The EMP could incapacitate Veck for long enough to restrain him once again, but it may also affect the Metropolis Seven. Because of the complete comm silence, Arak did not want to risk it. They were well outside the gravitational field of Krakaterra now, but there was faint enough gravitational force from the binary star system that it could pull them back in. There was no way to be sure.
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