George quickly replied, “Sorry Moog, but we really do not have time. This is a critical need. I would like to know when you might have the antennae in the diagrams ready for pickup.”
Moog apologized and pressed the comm button on his desk. “Krill, please send in Jeop Bool. This is an immediate need so please have him hurry if possible.”
With that Moog looked up at George. “Again… my apologies. I will have Jeop look over your needs after which I should be able to provide you with an answer.”
Jeop Bool soon entered the room. He was tall and lanky for an Omrin. The ridge running across his forehead, just above his eyes, had a bright red glow to it. It was an obvious sign of an Omrin being nervous.
Moog spoke, “Jeop, please look over the client’s drawings. We need a quick estimate on how long it will take to manufacture these antennae. Take a moment and please offer your best evaluation.”
Jeop fumbled through the papers provided, nodding his head and running his left hand through the thick brown fur on his chest. An awful stench quickly filled the room.
Jeop looked up with an embarrassed expression on his face. “My apologies.”
Moog spoke, “Jeop. Please take the diagrams into the outer office and review them there.”
The embarrassed engineer quickly left the room. “He is the best engineer I have, but he comes with a psycho/physiological impediment. When he gets nervous he passes gas. If you noticed he was stroking his chest fur, it was an attempt to calm himself.”
I spoke, “I would have to say that was an epic fail. That is an almost toxic smell!”
George stepped into the conversation. “We are in immediate need of the antennae in question Moog. Expense is not an issue. And we will need 1,200 of these.”
Moog sat up in his chair. “1,200! That is a large array George. I will have to see if I have the materials readily available. I wish you had given some advance notice of your needs.”
George replied, “You and me both Moog. We only learned of this a few days ago, but our need is urgent.”
When Jeop returned Moog hit him up with the 1,200 number. A timeframe of six weeks was settled upon giving us access to the antenna at a time similar to the pulse-flex ion generators.
As we exited Moog’s business to hail a cab I caught sight of a figure standing in the shadows of an alley across the street. It was a cloaked figure that quickly turned and moved away. I wasn’t sure, but my instincts told me that it was a Durian.
I grabbed George by the arm as a transport pulled up. “Let’s pay Moog another visit. I think I just saw a Durian and I think he was tailing us. We need a cover story for those antennae for Moog to pass along to anyone who is interested. We’ll tell him to say that it’s for a deep space sensor array we are building. That should send them in a wrong enough direction.”
George replied as we walked back into the building. “If that was a Durian, we will need to leave in another manner. If he makes our ship he could follow us back to the others. We need to leave quickly and quietly before he has a chance to organize.”
The cover story was given to Moog and Jeop. They agreed to only give the phony information up after a struggle, and for a generous amount of compensation. If the Durians wanted the information, the difficulty they would have in obtaining it would at least add to its perceived legitimacy and value.
Moog spoke, “Follow me. I will take you to my private garage. A company transport will be waiting to take you wherever you like. I will drop a story that you requested to be taken to the main government offices, but the driver dropped you on the street before arrival at the destination. It is not a deep cover, but it should be sufficient to rid you of any tail. I have had dealings with the Durians once several years ago. I do not trust them, or their motives.”
I replied, “Whatever you do, do not allow them on your premises. They will leave micro-bugs everywhere and will know every in and out of your business. Thank you for your assistance today Moog. I will see to it that you receive the means necessary to sniff out their bugs. It may come in handy as they expand their influence in this sector.”
Our transport lifted out of Moog’s garage and made its way towards the main government buildings. Two avenues before our arrival the transport dropped us on the street corner. A new transport was hailed and we made our way back to our hangar at the capital space port. As we approached the entrance to the hangar George spotted two suspicious characters milling about.
George grabbed my arm and spoke, “Don, come this way. Our hangar is being watched.”
George pulled me to the side, out of view of the hangar entryway.
I whispered, “If they are with the Durians we may not make it back to the ship.”
George replied, “We will make it back. I have been in and out of this port enough times to know who I can trust and how I can leave quietly. I just need to make a few comm calls.”
George turned and quietly spoke on his comm link. After several minutes a port patrolman came over to the two men and began to question them. They revealed government badges and the patrolman nodded and moved on about his duties.
George huffed and leaned against a back wall. “Government agents will make this difficult. The people I deal with will not get involved if I am already hot. They have to live here and heat from those agents could make their lives miserable.”
I replied, “How do we get on that ship?”
George thought for a moment and spoke, “We need a diversion. It may not be an original or inventive idea, but if it gets us on that ship it won’t matter. We need to find two teen Omrins. I will pay them a handsome sum to run to the agents yelling about Humans acting suspiciously in the restroom. If they are like most, they will take the bait and abandon their post. That will be our chance to sneak by.”
I replied, “And if they don’t leave?”
George smiled, “Then I am out a few hundred credits and we look for another way.”
I pulled out my blaster and George grabbed my hand. “We don’t want to use those. We would never have the chance to pick up our generators or antennae. These are Omrin government agents not Durians. They are merely being used by the Durians to make our lives difficult. We do not want to kill innocents.”
I responded, “Hmm, would have been nice to have one of those dart guns we used to stun the guards with on the Grid.”
George shook his head, “It would be best if we have no interaction with them at all. They will lose interest if we slip away without being questioned about whatever bogus information the Durians fed them. If we interact with them at all, we will be wanted from that point on.”
George was right. We were not in need of a confrontation with the Omrins. We needed the technology we had purchased earlier in the day and we would have to return to retrieve it. George took the initiative and found two willing teen Omrins. We waited as they approached the agents from a different direction and then began yelling to them about the Humans.
The agents moved away from the entryway, George and I slipped past and boarded the Wren. In less than a minute we were hurdling up through the atmosphere on our way to the Fasture. Our transponder gave out a Marcon code. We would not be followed.
Chapter 8
In the weeks following our return from Omrin the situation on the Grid took a turn for the worse. Reports from our team told of McKinzey setting up a grand celebration and award ceremony for the military in which all personnel were called in from every ship in the fleet. The end of the Milgari conflicts and the neutralization of the Humans who called themselves the Nation of Defiant, along with detainment of Admiral Zimmerman and his “rogue” force, were all cause for celebration.
The Grid ships were shut down and every crewman and soldier stationed on them returned to the Grid. Only key personnel would remain in position to counter any potential threat. The Admirals of the Defense Council protested, but assurances were given and under the Grid constitution, orders h
ad to be followed. The personnel who remained were loyal to McKinzey and his misguided cause.
Communications to Zeta-4 had been taken offline as McKinzey offered a grandiose speech. By the time his speech had concluded, the giant blast doors that separated the Zeta section from the remainder of the Grid had been closed and sealed.
Once the 876,552 active military personnel and the 1,244,326 veteran retirees were on lockdown, Dakar and Prassi ships, under the leadership of the Durians, surrounded the station. Without a shot from the great ion cannons of the Grid being fired, their troops had come aboard to take control. A handful of skirmishes took place between the invaders and the remaining patriots who were not in attendance, but those patriots were soon overwhelmed and neutralized.
Humans were now restricted to their quarters unless performing vital tasks. A worker performing agricultural duties was to call for an escort when moving from their quarters to a duty station. Humans without an escort were quickly arrested and jailed. Any attempt to resist was met with a severe beating, which occasionally went too far.
The more than 600 million Humans were now prisoners on the great station they called home. The scientists who had previously worked to unlock the secrets of the gravity drive were now forced to continue their studies under the direction and control of 350 Durian scientists and engineers. The Durians were intent on having their gravity drive prize.
Dakar and Prassi soldiers numbered over a million and patrolled every corridor. Random headcount checks at residences were a common happening. The great ion cannons that ringed the station were taken offline and sealed shut. The SCore offices were raided and the remaining agents placed under arrest. Key personnel who had knowledge of critical systems were kept at their stations.
Comm systems were closed off, except for official occupant use. A single video station remained on the air, its broadcasts limited to instructions and propaganda. McKinzey had turned out to be a Durian imposter. Once complete control had been taken, the imposter who had been trained to be the President, had been placed under house arrest. There would be no governorship of all Humans for him to administer. After realizing how foolish he had been, the imposter McKinzey committed suicide by setting himself and his apartment on fire. It was a fitting end to his traitorous and selfish actions.
When the word of the lockdown leaked out, our team aboard the Grid sealed off the entryway to their offices. Patrols checking the hallway would only find an unlocked door leading to a largely empty storage room. False, soundproof walls kept our brethren hidden. Stockpiles of food would last months, but replenishment would be needed.
Morale on the Grid had gone from elation over the end of the Milgari wars, to disbelief and then on to despair. Our defenses were down. Our halls were occupied by the enemy. Our military had been disabled and locked away. There was only one hope for the Grid and that was us, a handful of citizens of Defiant.
The Durian’s motives for keeping mankind alive were unknown. There was speculation that until the secrets of the gravity drive were revealed, we would be kept alive. Others reasoned that the Durians had promised us to the Dakar and Prassi as slave labor. Whatever their reasoning, I was thankful. A tiny crack of opportunity remained in the door of hope. I would do my best to exploit that opportunity.
I stood in front of our remaining Council of Governance members and spoke, “We are the last hope for our kind! For those of us who are Human this occupation is a bitter pill to swallow. For those who have joined with us it is a major blow to the prospect of a free sector and a free galaxy. Once the Durians have the secret of the Grid’s gravity drive, every world will be conquered and enslaved.”
“The last line of defense has already been breached. We are the scattered few who remain to fight for freedom. It is imperative that we take advantage of the resources we have available to us. We have to try to get back control of the Grid. We need ideas people, ideas that will at least offer hope.”
I continued, “Since we left our home around Jarhead the Durians have had two separate sets of ships enter and scan the area. We did an excellent job of leaving nothing of value for them to find. Our mission for the coming week will be to send a transport to the surface of Jarhead to recover some of our wealth that is stashed there. It will be needed in the coming months while there is still a free sector surrounding us.”
“I don’t expect that freedom to last long, so we need to take advantage of it while we can. We must establish ourselves for the long haul. We must become self-sustaining. I want two committees, one to focus on our continued existence here on the Suppressor and one to plan for repatriation of the Grid.”
Votes were taken and committees formed. George would lead up our sustainment while I would head up our efforts on the Grid. I envied George as his task would add peace of mind while incrementally improving our lives. My job would come with hard decisions that put lives in jeopardy, but such was sometimes the burden of the leader of a free nation, a task which I had fallen into and openly accepted as my duty.
Frig stood before our committee. “In a short time we will have available to us a portal onto the Grid. The portal, for the foreseeable future, will remain relatively small and short lived when open. It will provide us with the means to transfer items of approximately 20 centimeters in width or less directly on to or off of the Grid.”
“At the moment, our wormhole technology only allows a microscopic portal to be established. Through this we can communicate, run partial scans, or deliver small amounts of a gas or plasma such as the Milgari cure. With a larger portal we are in need of ideas for making use of this resource. We are asking for anything that might lead us to taking back the grid. I understand that it is a monumental task, but we do not have a choice.”
George spoke first, “I can manufacture quantities of sleep agent. Just tell me how you would like it delivered. We could go canisters or even as the slug for one of our conventional rounds, shoot it at a wall and for anyone around the corner it’s lights-out.”
Jeb added his thoughts, “Our conventionals will fit through there nicely, but they are only effective if the ion power is off. Maybe Gy or Rita could rig us a negative ion bomb that we can use in a confined area.”
Rita spoke, “The NIB is easily scaled down. With a fist sized grenade you could knock out any ion activity for a hundred meters in any direction. The effects would only last a couple minutes tops though. The field fades first from the outer perimeter from where it was detonated and then moves uniformly inward. At that hundred meter mark you will probably only have 15 seconds of downtime.”
I replied, “So, we can get conventional arms on there and we can knock out the power?”
Gy responded, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Knocking out power on the Grid may be tricky. That station has all kinds of strange shielding and we don’t yet know how it will react. Just as with the gravity drives, there are a number of subtle technologies that we don’t understand. I would say we should test the effectiveness of the NIBs on there before relying on them.”
Rita spoke, “This is true. Maybe we need access to one of the sealed off sections to run some tests. We would at least not be putting anyone at risk by doing that. Once we start setting off NIBs in the occupied sections there is no telling what we might run into. Such as, anyone reliant on medical implants would find them shut down for what could be several minutes.”
Major Rand Thomas, one of the Colonel’s Intel officers then spoke, “I have an off the wall idea, well, maybe it’s on the wall. If we can open these portals anywhere on the station, we should be able to place sensors in any corridor or hallway we want. Make a small box, painted the same as the walls and place it high up by the ceiling. No one would know it was there.”
I replied, “Don’t we have access to the sensors on the Grid already? I thought you guys had hacked into that system.”
The Major replied, “We have, but there are a number of areas that those sensors don’t reach. Also, I donâ€
™t know that we want to be reliant on them. With the Durians on that station those hacks might get shut down at any time. If we can get our own network of sensors running it could give us a big advantage.”
Rita spoke, “We could run them on negative power and a negative comm channel since they are such low power devices. If we fire off a NIB they would continue to broadcast. Also, the detection gear I have used in the past was all standard positive ion based gear. We might be able to run this network without detection. That is a giant guess on my part, but it is possible.”
I replied, “How soon do you think you can have one or more of these sensors ready to test? We could set up a few of them here and organize teams, who don’t have knowledge of them, to go out and try to find them. That would at least give us an indication of their viability.”
Rita replied, “I can have a half dozen boxes ready by tomorrow. If everyone here keeps knowledge of this experiment limited to the people in this room, I’m sure the Major can put together his best team to send out searching for them. Major. Just tell them there is a comm system hidden on the ship and it’s their job to find it.”
The Major replied, “I can do that. We could even slant things a bit in their favor to add a sort of ‘test of luck’ element to the search. I can assemble our best in about an hour and start them searching once we are ready.”
Over the coming days we hashed out a number of ideas for using the new portal. The manufacturers on Omrin had been busy and George soon had several transports heading their way to pick up our cargo. The new prototype generators were a thing of beauty. Testing would be performed at their final resting place on the Suppressor. Gy was tasked with overseeing the installation.
Gy spoke, “We have the first one installed. The riggings for connecting it to our power conduits are being put in place now. I looked over the specs. If they perform as expected we will have the power we need for that portal and maybe a little more.”
AMP Rebellion Page 7