by Jessica Cole
“The fuck is going on?” Aeronth hissed. The video froze on a frame of the terrifying masked figure. “We need to keep moving. We only have a minute or so left.”
They sprinted to the MP station; Jana’s lungs burned from smoke inhalation.
“This doesn’t make sense,” David remarked. “If they were going to plan this big invasion of the colony, why send anyone to a random bar? That was an extraction team. Who were they looking for?” Aeronth clenched his jaw and kept running. They made it to the MP station, but it was empty. “Where is everyone?”
“Worry about that later.” Aeronth pulled the door open and hopped the counter. It was a small, square room with a white counter and two doors along the back wall. Aeronth ducked into one of these open doorways and Jana overheard scraping sounds. She went into the other room where a line of unoccupied desks sat undisturbed. There would be a gun cabinet somewhere around here, but what Jana needed was information. One of the terminals was still logged into the colony network.
“David!” he poked his head into the room.
“It doesn’t look like anyone is outside at all.”
“Find out what happened. Where did the Reconstructionists dock, where are the soldiers who are supposed to be here?” She left him there, and went to find the gun locker. There were more rooms branching off from the office area, with automated doors between each. Jana could see the front entrance from her position. Aeronth pushed a heavy metal crate into the open doorway. Good thinking...I should have remembered that. During lockdowns, certain buildings had security codes that enabled them to override the emergency protocols. Police stations, fire stations, medical centers, and a select few others. Without an access code from one of the soldiers, they couldn’t override the system.
Moments later, the emergency floodlights came on and the flashing stopped. A blast door cranked down onto the crate with a squealing crunch. The motor stopped. The crate was slightly bent out of shape, but held against the blast door. They had about two square feet of space on either side of it to get back out of the building.
“It’ll hold,” Aeronth said, nodding. “For a time, at least. Have you found the gun locker?” Jana shook her head, frowning. “It might be in that room, there.” He pointed behind him into the room he’d emerged from. “I think I saw it when I scanned the room for something to hold the blast door.”
They found it there, an upright steel cabinet with a hand scanner. She pressed her hand to the squishy gel pad. Nothing. This is a small police station. Without the outside connection to the Net...“Without the Network connection, it won’t recognize our handprints because the data isn’t stored locally. Only soldiers stationed here are going to have access.” She inspected it, but didn’t see a way to break it open by force. “Do you think we can bypass the lock manually somehow?”
“Not without a drill. Maybe David can think of something?”
“DAVID! Get in here!” Jana shouted over her shoulder.
He rounded the corner, tapping away on a wrist augment he’d found in the offices, like the one he’d had on Earth. “I think I figured out where they went, the soldiers. Is that the gun cabinet?”
“Yeah, and we can’t get in. Is there a way to manually override it?”
She could almost see the gears working in David’s mind. He leaned in closely, examining the touch pad, the way the base of the slanted arm joined the bulk of the cabinet. “There’s no way to break it open,” he finally said. “There are redundancies in place to keep that from being possible.”
“Then we’re screwed.”
“Not quite.” David held his arm with the augment up next to the scanner, punching commands in rapid succession. “Jana, hold your hand up to the scanner.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m artificially making you a registered user.”
“How? My file isn’t even local, it’s on the Network.”
“You lived here, so there’s a citizen’s record for you. It would be much more difficult to change,” he said, pausing for her to try. Jana pushed her right hand into the gel pad once more. It beeped, and the cabinet hissed, seal broken, “if they hadn’t cut the connection to the Network.”
“You are amazing.” Jana wrenched open the doors and finally, something was going their way. For the first time since their whole ordeal started, they had a chance. “You were saying something about the soldiers stationed here?”
“It’s not good, Jana.”
Her hands wrapped around the barrel of a sniper rifle, and she thought of Lexi. She would have been useful in this. That gun went to Aeronth, along with a handgun for each of them. Jana took two, and a thigh holster. One glance at her tattered dress was enough to make her cringe. She reached back and pulled the mess of her hair out of the ponytail, ran her fingers through the matted, dirty locks, and put it up in a bun.
“Status report.”
David cleared his throat and hastily stuffed the handgun into the small duffel he’d found. “There was an alarm pulled.”
“That’s no reason for everyone stationed here to abandon their post and go. That makes no sense at all.” She gathered up the few useful supplies they’d found and tossed them to David. Flashlights, flares, handcuffs...
“Could it have something to do with that building you had me tap into?”
Jana whirled around. “What?”
“135 South, 610 West. Number 73. You told me to send a distress signal from that location, so I did.” Jana’s shoulders dropped. We pulled them away with the distress signal from inside the bar. “What is that place, Jana? Why would the entire military force on this colony go there when I sent the distress call from outside? What alarm did I trip?” David’s eyes were narrowed at her, demanding answers.
“The residence of Senator Michael Darren.”
David’s mouth twisted into disgust. “We did this FOR them. WE pulled the soldiers from their post because you had me send an SOS from a fucking senator’s house. We led them out into the open and now who knows what’s happened to them. Now we have no backup and we’re going against who knows how many of these...Reconstructionists, or whatever the hell they are.”
Jana shivered, clenched her teeth, and looked him dead in the eyes. “Did you get the signal out?”
“Yeah, Jana, I did.” He was furious. I didn’t consider the risks. I didn’t weigh the options. I made a snap judgement and it was the wrong one.
“YOU can call me Lieutenant Darren. And don’t worry about my father. The man could survive a nuclear holocaust. That’s what cockroaches do.” He shut his mouth, but didn’t break eye contact. “Let’s go.”
“What’s our best bet for where they’re holding up?” Aeronth asked.
On the right wall of the main lobby area was an enlarged map of the colony, blocked out by district. It was a crescent shape, the surface level cluttered with housing, parks, grass, industrial areas, food processing...the lower levels were dominated by water treatment, the reservoir, vents, ducts, tunnels, and infrastructure.
“The control tower.” David looked pale. “How did they get access to the control tower?” He checked and double checked, growing more concerned by the second. Colony control towers were the most secure building there. There were fail safes for redundancies for fail safes in place to keep out unwanted intruders. The control tower looked plain enough, a black building that resembled a lighthouse. But inside, it was a bunker. This whole time, they’d been under the impression the Reconstructionists had managed to tap into the security and communications from an outside source, like they did themselves.
“That’s not possible.” Jana shook her head, brows furrowed. “You don’t just take over a control tower unless you already have access. And that takes YEARS of training and vetting and working your way up. There has to be some explanation.” Beside her, Aeronth was silent. Jana saw something behind his stony expression, behind his eyes.
Aeronth knew something.
Jana stepped back from him. “Wh
y did you bring a gun to dinner?”
“I bring one everywhere.” It was a reasonable explanation, but something inside Jana wasn’t sitting well with the information he’d given her. “Jana, you’re being ridiculous. We need a plan, and we have to go.”
I’m paranoid. Am I paranoid? If you have to ask yourself, you are. Jana sighed. “If they have the control tower, there’s no way for us to take it back alone. They had to have gotten here somehow. Some kind of ship?”
“If they’re the strike team, it’s probably a dozen or less of them. They could have gotten here on a skiff from a larger ship. They go in with a small team to disable the defense system. Then, if it’s a full-scale hostile takeover, they’ll have a much larger second team that can handle any military ships that do get past the salvo from the warship while they do...whatever it is they’re here to do. The Government won’t authorize the destruction of the colony where a hundred thousand civilians and a senator are being held. And if the warship stays close enough to the colony, and the men in the control tower disable the shields, they won’t fire on the warship. They said something about ‘sacrifice’. I think they’re hoping the Government does authorize direct conflict in the hopes that they can use the footage of the Government destroying their own colony to destabilize their control. A warship’s shields could survive a few hits. A colony without shields is a sitting duck.”
“How do you know all of that?” Jana asked nervously.
Aeronth didn’t flinch. ”Because that’s how I’d do it.” Sometimes Jana forgot he was trained in black ops. This was a stark reminder to her.
“That’s a big if. And what about that extraction team?”
“They were looking for someone, but it’s anyone’s guess who. Probably hoping to take them alive, or at least know for sure they were dead. That would explain the pulse grenade, anyway. Try to get in and out on a skiff before the military showed up.” Aeronth pursed his lips.
“So our best guess is that if we can’t take the control tower to stop the shields from going down, we are at risk of our own Government opening fire on the colony because to them the risk of letting the Recons escape is worse than letting a whole colony be destroyed? You have to be kidding me. That doesn’t exactly leave us with a lot of options,” David grimaced. “If we sabotage the ship they docked on the colony with, they won’t have a getaway for when the military shows up. But it could be anywhere, and the colony is too big for that.”
“They won’t care about losing a few of their people to prove a point,” Aeronth insisted. “That won’t work. It won’t matter if they can’t leave. These people have already accepted the fact that they’re probably going to die.”
Jana’s mind was reeling, searching desperately for a way out of the situation. “Then we have to make sure they can’t drop the shields. But the only access point is through the control tower, which we can’t get into. The Government won’t fire on the colony if my father’s here. We have to trust that. They wouldn’t abandon all these people to their death.”
“That’s a big gamble. For all they know, the entirety of the Reconstructionist forces are on that warship, and taking care of the problem here will be the end of all their troubles. And losing a senator to a terrorist attack? That seems to me like the perfect opportunity to bolster defenses and increase military presence near the Hub, circle the wagons.”
Aeronth was infuriating, but he wasn’t wrong. No matter what she did, Jana couldn’t see a way out of it. This is your whole job! This is what you were trained for. It’s not just about those few people in the reservoir anymore, it’s everyone here. Thinking about the number of people relying on her was terrifying. I can’t save everyone. I can’t take all that on my shoulders. Jana thought of the people at the reservoir, the old man who took their picture, Dana...
“There’s no way to evacuate everyone. We lost. Game over. No matter what we do, people die. And the whole galaxy is going to watch it happen.” Jana sat on the floor, back upright against the counter at the MP station, and cradled her head in her hands. “Wait a second...watch it happen? That’s what all this is about.” David and Aeronth both turned away from the map to Jana. “They want everyone to see it. They want to broadcast it out. That’s what this is all about. If they can’t show that the Government was responsible, or negligent, they don’t get anything out of it. They’re trying to prove a point. If the closest signal relay were somehow destroyed...say by a military vessel on the way over here? The Recons here dying would be for nothing. The colony dying would be for nothing. And they might think twice about it.”
“There’s a problem, then.” David interjected, “How do we destroy the relay? Do you have any idea how far away that is? We don’t have a ship. And even if we did, the Recons would shoot us down before we got anywhere near it.”
“We create a distraction. The warship hasn’t had nearly enough time to get into position. The colony’s long range scanner would have picked it up and signaled the alarm before the strike team had a chance to dig in here. David, is there a way to cut the power to the control tower without dropping the systems?”
“Theoretically? Sure. You could cut the power to the actual control panels and the individual systems would remain unharmed. And until they managed to prime the generators manually, they wouldn’t be able to touch any of the systems. But we’d need to be in the access tunnels on the maintenance levels. And we’d need to find a ship, and someone has to pilot it out of here, out of the range of the communication dampeners, and signal the military from there. And I don’t know if you’ve counted lately, but there’s three of us.”
Aeronth spoke up before Jana had a chance to say anything. “You two get down to the power access for the control tower. I’ll take care of the situation with the ship.”
“No, you can’t just leave me!” Jana caught herself saying, but clamped her mouth shut. “You shouldn’t go off alone.”
“One of us is going to have to, and it might as well be me. I have a hell of a lot more training.” He brushed his thumb across her cheek. “You’ve been through enough lately. Let me do this.” Jana closed her eyes, took in the feel of his skin on hers, and swallowed hard.
“Okay. David and I will go down to the access. How long do you need to get a ship and get out of range?”
“Ten to get to the ship. Five minutes to get out of range.” He looked to David, who nodded solemnly. “Yeah, that sounds about right. But we have to get going, Jana. We’re losing precious time standing here, and you know it. Do you know where the access hatch for the maintenance tunnels are?”
“I used to play down there as a kid. I’d pick the locks and sneak in, pretend I was a ship captain.” She felt her resolve fading, and threw herself into Aeronth’s arms. “Let’s go.” They gathered their scrounged supplies and slipped out the front door of the police station in the little space between the crate and the doorframe.
Jana said only two words to Aeronth before they parted ways. “Don’t die.”
They made quick work of the access hatch, and Jana forced herself to focus on the task. The thought of never seeing Aeronth again, leaving so many things unsaid, was grating to her soul. You don’t have time to worry about him right now, or you’ll get him killed, you idiot. Once they were inside, David did his thing and scanned the tubes and wire housings for what they needed. He explained there was a specific line that was just for the control tower, and it was going to be separate from the rest of them. Jana took a flashlight and began searching as well. A roar above them started her, and she nearly smacked her head into a pipe.
She froze a moment, realizing what it was, and then returned to work. While they were in the police station, the Recons began to replay the video on loop. It lasted two minutes. From below, it was louder than she’d expected, but at least they had a way to time Aeronth. She was more afraid of letting him down and getting him killed than the other way around.
“This is going to kill the dampener too, isn’t it?”
&n
bsp; David nodded, flashlight in one hand, leaning over a particularly large bundle of cables. “Here it is, I found it. And yeah...that isn’t a colony system, just something they plugged in up there, like a lamp into an outlet.” When he spoke, he turned towards her. The beam hit Jana directly in the face, and she shielded her eyes. “Oh, sorry...”
“Cut the subspace signal. Now.”
“Excuse me?”
“If the Recon ship does a scan upon arrival, which they will, they’ll see that the dampener is down. If we can time it right, we might get lucky. They could just get spooked, thinking that something didn’t go to plan, and leave. When all the systems are up, the beacons are off, and the subspace SOS is off, they have no way of knowing their cohorts succeeded in the takeover. The power will be cut to the control tower, so their buddies won’t be able to signal to them to tell them any different.”
“You want to play possum with a terrorist group?”
Jana grinned. “Yes.”
39. Love, and Leaving
Everything had changed. On Earth, and in the hospital, there’d been too much going on to think about what happened, what she’d done. Being around Aeronth had a way of making everything else fall away. But here, alone in the dark, sitting in a transport on her way back to S-311M, there was nothing but time. I killed someone on Earth, and it didn’t even bother me. Am I just that heartless? He tried to kill someone I care about. He hurt me. Who knows how many people he would have hurt if I hadn’t killed him. I don’t even know who I am anymore. She clenched her fists and relaxed them again.