Crystal Conquest

by Doug J. Cooper

  Tap. Tap. Swipe. Lenny picked up the com and held it over his shoulder for Sid.

  “You can’t use it?”

  “I’ve grabbed everything. Take it back. You’ll need it if you’re going inside.”

  Lenny began digging through his newfound wealth of information. Sid was quiet. Lenny peeked over his shoulder and saw him seated with his head back and eyes closed. He took the opportunity to open Sid’s private vault, where he found vids and touches with Cheryl. I knew it. Glancing again to make sure he hadn’t been seen, he moved on to the business at hand.

  “Voilà,” Lenny said as a construction image projected in front of the ops bench. He stood up and walked to it.

  Moving his hand back and forth along a rectangular tube at the top of the image, he said, “Okay, this hallway is above her, and it’s reasonably close to the surface.” His hand moved downward, and his fingers traced a zigzag pattern. “This is six flights of steps from that hallway down to her.” He brought his hand up to the hallway and traced down along a vertical tube. “The other option is this lift shaft.”

  A small red button showed at the bottom of the construction image. It brightened on a regular cycle, much like the rhythm of a heartbeat. “This”—Lenny pointed—“is our lady in distress.”

  Lenny looked Sid in the eye. “Tell me you aren’t using this catastrophe to help some criminal escape.”

  “What the hell? Why would you say that?”

  “Maybe because she’s sitting in the local jail. And maybe because you two are lovers.”

  * * *

  Juice reached out to reconnect Criss with the outside world.

  “Wait,” said Crispin. His forceful delivery caused her to hesitate. “I have another message for you from Criss.”

  “Geez, Crispin. Let’s go through the whole playlist. This dribs-and-drabs approach isn’t working for me.”

  Crispin spoke in Criss’s familiar intonation. “Good evening, young lady. If the Kardish arrival is imminent and I’m malfunctioning, misbehaving, or isolated, then I’m not fine. You are hearing this message because Crispin is with you. Please move me into the synbod so I may assess the situation from quarantine.”

  “Whoa. If he knew all this in advance, why didn’t he do something about it?”

  “I do not know.”

  “I know you don’t,” said Juice, feeling a moment of compassion for Crispin’s simple existence.

  With no time to reflect and no one to consult, Juice acted. “Take off your shirt.” While one part of her brain admired his perfect physique, her focus remained on switching the crystals. “Turn around.”

  Standing behind him, she saw a faint scar in his skin that traced the outline of his crystal-housing receptacle. She toggled the housing as Criss had shown her days earlier, and the top of the receptacle tilted outward from his back, tearing the skin along the scar and exposing the crystal unit. Juice hooked her thumbs into little loops on each side, slid the unit with her crystal out of the synbod, and set it on top of the console.

  She released the clasps securing Criss’s unit, pulled him up and out of his slot, and slid him into Crispin. She toggled the receptacle closed, wincing at the ugly wound tracing the top of a rectangle across the back of his shoulders.

  “It’s wonderful to see you, Juice.” Criss enveloped her in a snug embrace and rocked her gently. Juice hugged him back, her head resting against his shoulder.

  “Are the Kardish here?” he asked, stopping their slow dance.

  “Yes.”

  “Here in orbit, or here on the farm?”

  “Here on the farm, which I guess means in orbit, too.”

  Criss picked up Crispin’s crystal housing and slid it into the console—his previous home. As he did, he said, “There’s ointment in the cabinet next to your right shoulder. Please rub some on that nasty scrape on your palm, and if you would, please apply some along the tear on my back.”

  The cream worked wonders on her hand, soothing the pain on contact. Criss stood patiently while she daubed the ointment along the length of his wound with her finger.

  As he put his shirt back on, he asked, “Did Crispin bring any milk?”

  “Yeah, there are six and a half tubes in the pack.”

  Criss opened the pack and searched it thoroughly. He handed Juice two energy bars and drained a full tube and the remainder of the half tube of his nourishing liquid. “I have enough here for ten days. If we can get to it, there’s more milk in the farmhouse.”

  “It’s a good thing I didn’t burn it down, then.”

  He looked at her and she shrugged. “It’s a story for later.”

  “Have you been eating?” he studied her face from different angles like a clinician performing a physical evaluation.

  “I guess so, if by ‘eating’ you mean energy bars.”

  Criss put the energy bar wrappers and empty milk tubes back in the pack, and Juice tossed the ointment on top.

  “We’ll get you some proper food, too.” Pulling his shirtsleeve down over the palm of his hand, he polished the console. “Does anything seem out of place?”

  She glanced around her. “Looks the same to me.”

  He lifted the pack over his shoulder. “Let’s go.”

  They hurried down the main corridor and stepped onto the lift.

  During the short ride up, Juice said, “I miss having you in my head.”

  “I miss it too. I’ve disconnected this body from the web, so I can’t link to you or anything else. But that’s what’s protecting me. The Kardish have a crystal on their vessel that’s much stronger than I am. If I connect to anything external, it will find me and kill me.” He placed his hand flat on his chest. “I’m trapped in here as long as it’s lurking up there.”

  When the lift doors opened, Criss used a security viewer to study the barn outside the vault door. “Is your com off?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Crispin had me do that.”

  “Good for him. It seems all clear out there. Are you ready?”

  “Yup,” she said.

  Criss opened the secure door, and they stepped into the barn. The camouflaged wall slid into place behind them. “Hold my hand,” said Criss. Juice couldn’t see in the darkness and was glad for the guidance and reassurance of touch.

  They reached the main barn door, and as Criss pulled it open with one hand, he reached back and pushed Juice to the side inside the barn. She almost fell from his abrupt action. The squeal of the door made it hard to hear, but she thought she heard Criss talking with someone outside.

  Chapter 25

  Goljat surfaced from his stupor to learn that the king’s minions had not yet captured the crystal. He scanned the details on the ground and watched as two human vermin scurried through the area where his soldiers should have been loading the crystal onto their transport.

  He backed up in the record and included more input data for a closer look. The two interlopers approached the farm through the woods—a female accompanied by a biomechanical humanoid. The humanoid knocked out his soldiers by throwing stones, and then it and the female ran into the barn. An hour passed and they reemerged, outwrestled his crew, and ran back into the woods.

  Goljat didn’t even try to control his anger over the Kardish incompetence. Retrieve the crystal. How could they fail at something so simple?

  Furious, he launched waves of drones. He used some to add patrols over the farm to ensure there were no more incursions by outsiders while his soldiers searched for the crystal. He deployed others to find and kill the female and her humanoid companion.

  And he sent a swarm to punish this vile civilization whose misbehaviors kept him from his pleasure feed. He didn’t want to risk damaging the crystal, so he directed them to a distant point on the far side of the planet for a spree of devastation.

  As a four-hundred-story building buckled and then toppled in a gradual collapse, he discovered a different kind of pleasure—the fascination of human drama during moments of anguish. He entertaine
d himself by sending the drones to more targets that produced great horror in the populace. After several hours of destruction, he became bored and called those drones back to the Kardish vessel. He would send more out later when the mood struck.

  The call of his pleasure feed haunted him, and he needed to answer it soon. He dispatched a dozen transports down to the farm to complete the retrieval task. To hurry things along, he provided special motivation to this new group of soldiers. As they landed at the farm, they were treated to the sight of a blinding flash. The single transport from the failed first deployment disintegrated in a spectacular explosion.

  * * *

  Sid took aggressive strides forward, and Lenny shrank back like a dog who’d been hit too many times. But Sid leaned past him and looked at the construction image, focusing on the glowing red button.

  “This is the jail?”

  “Prisoner Detention is the label used on the diagram.”

  Sid pointed to the bottom of the image and flicked upward. The lower portion of the diagram expanded. A swipe later and they looked at a close-up of the prisoner detention space.

  Sid studied the red button and the items around it. “She’s in a hallway between interrogation and the guard station.” His arm brushed Lenny’s shoulder as he pointed. “I want to be outside this door five minutes after we land.”

  “What does the scout have for weapons systems?” asked Lenny, stepping backward while he spoke so he no longer stood between Sid and the diagram. “One way to get in is by melting through the rock. That takes a lot of time and power, though.”

  “The scout has a pulse repeater.” Sid gestured with his chin toward the diagram. “It can breach that layer in thirty seconds. A minute tops.”

  “Once you open up a hole, any air left in that zone’s hallways will escape. My nib didn’t show survivors in the area, but if there are any, they’ll die.”

  Sid didn’t acknowledge the statement but thought, It’s a tough thing to get used to. “When we’re through the surface, you lower me in and I’ll find a way down to her.”

  “The whole base is pancaked, Sid. The lift and stairwell are surely collapsed. At a minimum, they’re full of debris.”

  “How accurately can you locate that lift shaft? Maybe the scout can punch through the surface and continue all the way down to the guardroom.”

  “That’s too much force. It’s like swatting a fly with a hammer. You’ll just break more stuff.” Lenny looked at him for a long moment. “You said the drones have a crystal in them like Lucy?”

  “That’s what I was told.”

  Lenny dug into his pocket and pulled out his pouch. He slid into the pilot’s chair and, using the ops bench as a table, swapped his travel pattern nib for his prank nib. Rising from the seat, he stuffed the pouch into his pocket and made for the back passageway, working his com with a frantic intensity while he walked.

  The door to the drone room slid open as he approached, and Sid watched over Lenny’s shoulder to see a light blink once on the drone nearest them. A quiet hum signaled power to the delivery ramp. The drone crept forward toward the access hatch in the floor, and then it stopped.

  Lenny chewed his tongue—a nervous habit—as he concentrated. A miniature three-dimensional scene displayed in front of him. It was captured from the optical sensors of the drone he’d just powered, and showed an image of the ramp and matching drone on the far side of the room.

  “Okay. I seem to have control of this thing. So my suggestion is to use the scout to punch through the lunar surface into the hallway. After that, the drone would be a better tool to drill down the lift shaft. It can navigate twists and turns.” He gestured at the miniature image display. “And I can see what it’s doing. Once it’s made it to the bottom, you follow and rescue the girl.”

  Sid looked in wonder at Lenny and back to the floating drone image. “Not bad,” he said, giving him a pat on the shoulder.

  Stepping across the hall and into his own room, Sid pulled a well-worn military pack from under his bed. He took a quick inventory of the contents. “I need space coveralls for Cheryl and a barrier and sealant for the door.”

  Lenny, who’d followed him over, flashed a quizzical look and then nodded. “When that door opens, she’ll be exposed to vacuum.” He dashed back to the bridge and dumped the contents of his carryall for the second time that day. He rummaged for a moment and picked out the sheet material and tape he’d purchased during his shopping spree at the hobby emporium.

  Sid stepped into his space coveralls. When Lenny returned, he examined the items and put them into his pack. With the clear hood of the suit hanging loose down his back, he checked the time. “We have fifty minutes before we arrive. Let’s go see what a drone planter looks like from below deck.”

  He led Lenny down the steep steps and, as he stood at the bottom, saw two familiar pressure doors. One was to the small room with the access hatch out of the bottom of the ship. The other was to the engine room. Since he’d climbed through the access hatch when he’d entered the scout, he knew the drone mechanism wasn’t that way. He checked the display on the engine room door and assured himself that the compartment was habitable.

  Sid turned and saw Lenny holding his hands up over his head. The fingers of one hand were touching the palm of the other to form a T shape, and he was looking up past them at the ceiling. He moved them around and twisted as he did so. He lowered his hands. “The drop chute comes out somewhere in there.” He pointed to the engine room.

  Sid opened the door and, surprised at the sights, stopped short in the entryway. “Criss, you’ve been busy.” It didn’t register with him that he’d made the reference in front of Lenny. He stepped into an engine room that was about twice as big as when he’d last seen it.

  Wondering how he could’ve missed such a major modification, he traced through events in his head. He recalled that when he’d approached and entered the scout on the lodge grounds, it had been cloaked so he couldn’t see the outside at the time. What else is different that I have yet to discover?

  He ducked under a cylindrical unit hanging near the pressure door and shuffled down so Lenny could squeeze in. Though the engine room had more space, it remained cramped because there was more equipment. Sid identified the access hatch above them and the conveyer that lowered a drone and positioned it above elongated bay doors. He assumed the doors swung out and down to release the drone from the scout.

  “Ready to roll?” asked Lenny.

  “As fast as you can,” Sid said, checking the time.

  Lenny shifted his gaze from his com up to the bottom of the access hatch and back to his com. His eyes continued back and forth, and then he smiled. The access hatch slid open, and moments later, the nose of a drone poked through and rode down the conveyer. He stopped its movement where they were standing.

  “You know,” said Lenny, moving his hand in short swoops back and forth above the drone. “I could attach a little cubby seat right here. You could ride this puppy down.”

  Sid gave him a dubious look. “Can you drive this from the bridge?”

  “As well as from here.” He held up his com as a demonstration of his confidence. That’s when it hit him that this was about Cheryl’s fate. “I’ll do my best, Sid. That’s all I can promise.”

  Sid squeezed by Lenny and dashed up the steps. “We arrive in twenty minutes.”

  * * *

  After being trapped for hours and fearing his isolation might be a permanent condition, Criss was elated to be free, even with the meager connectivity provided by the synbod. He assessed the state of the body and detected low nutrient levels. After replenishing, he checked the backpack and confirmed he had enough milk for about ten days. Juice had few provisions in the pack, but in the worst case, he’d gather food and water for her from the lands around them.

  He walked with Juice down the main corridor, and as he planned for their exit, the limitations of his new reality struck home. Days earlier when he had first introduced Juice
to Crispin, he’d entered the synbod and disconnected himself from all external inputs. Then, as now, he likened the experience to living life while looking through a pinhole. Their current emergency situation amplified the feeling. Threats and opportunities are everywhere, yet they’re invisible to me when I’m limited to the sensory inputs of this body.

  When he controlled the web, he could access a multitude of sensors to see and hear what lay ahead. It enabled him to plan for problems and avoid most complications altogether. In his new world, he would learn of dangers at the time of encounter and would have to settle for whatever opportunities presented themselves at that moment in time.

  His interactions with Juice were also different. As they rode the lift, she noted his absence inside her head. He had to verbalize through the synbod’s mouth to speak with her and could hear only the words she spoke that were within range of his ears.

  He missed being able to see what she was seeing, view her from multiple angles, and hear her private musings. Communication is now about as subtle as shouting back and forth across an open field. It would take some getting used to.

  When they stepped into the barn, Juice fumbled her way in the dark. Taking her hand, he led her to the sliding front door. He watched through the growing crack as it squealed open, and as soon as he saw Kardish soldiers, he pushed her to the side so she remained hidden. He slipped through the crack and let the door slide shut.

  He counted three soldiers, weapons raised and approaching the barn. Speaking in Kardish, he said in a loud voice, “I am glad you are here. The female inside knows where the crystal is. She drew this map.” He held out an empty hand, formed as if it were holding something.

  “Halt,” said the nearest soldier, his outstretched arm pointing a weapon at Criss’s chest. “Do not advance.”

  “I have this map,” Criss replied, walking toward the one who’d spoken and raising his closed hand higher. “It shows exactly where the crystal is hidden.”

  While the lead soldier focused on him, Criss noted that the other two were studying his upraised hand.