Carbon Life

by HR Ringer

  Bringing up the 3-D station map on her omni-tool, Sam punched in Buchanan’s locator code… The result was not encouraging. Deleting his code and closing the tool, she whispered to Xiùlán, “He’s on level five, C-Pat detention area. Still alive, so not hurt too bad.”

  “We need to get up there, Sam,” Xiùlán hissed back. “We have got to get him away from the batarians before they kill him.”

  “Them killing Griff is the least of our worries. They’ll pump him full of Rattazan first; he’ll have no choice but to tell them about us.” Traynor studied Xiùlán’s eyes before continuing, “We will have to do this quickly and quietly. Once they’re aware there are two more of us out here, we’ll have one ‘ell of a time getting to Griff…”

  “…and even more trouble getting off this station,” Xiùlán finished for her. “How do we proceed? Going to be difficult for two human women to stay hidden on this station. These features…,” Yuán indicated her own face, “…are not commonly seen in the abyss. I’d have an easier time blending in with your features, or Griff’s scar… or both.”

  “Your features are just one of the many things I love about you, Xiùlán,” snarked Sam. “There’s a two-meter high utility tunnel between C-Pat and the level four comm center where I need to go… that’s where we’ll bunker down. I’ll help you grab Griff out from under them, then hack their comm systems and call the Ionsaí for pickup while you two go to ground between levels. I’ll keep ‘em off you long enough for our lifeboat to arrive.”

  “Sounds like the body count is going to be up there.” Xiùlán was uneasy. “Sure you’re up for this?”

  Samantha grabbed Xiùlán’s hand, quickly brought it to her lips and kissed her knuckles. “Let’s grab Buchanan so we can get the bloody ‘ell outa this shithole.” She headed out the door and turned left.

  The passage was 25 to 26 meters long, with inspection hatches on the left at regular intervals. Reaching the end of the hall without encountering anyone or setting off any alarms, Traynor hacked the locked-out elevator controls, then pressed the ‘call’ control. Nodding to Xiùlán, Sam powered on her cloak and positioned herself beside the door, back and left shoulder hard into the frame, with Yuán positioned and cloaked similarly on the other side.

  Time slowed to a crawl for Traynor… she could hear the faint sound of the car floating down the shaft, could sense the displaced air seeping past the edges of the segmented doors. As the car reached their level and slowed to a stop, the pair crouched, ready to leap. They waited as the door segments slid into their receptacles, followed by two C-Pat guards sauntering out of the elevator.

  Each was quickly on the floor as Yuán and Traynor simultaneously pounced like a pair of dragons… one guard was looking straight behind him as he fell, the only sound a slight gurgling from his twisted windpipe. The other one grabbed at his crushed larynx for a moment before falling to a hammerfist strike that shattered his sternum, driving the pieces into his heart. The women dragged their unfortunate victims back into the elevator and closed the doors.

  “We need to find a trash ejector big enough for these two bodies, plus whatever else gets in our way,” Xiùlán whispered. “Up in C-Pat, perhaps?”

  Traynor powered up her omni-tool and checked for ejectors. “None where we need to be. Have to stash ‘em somewhere along the way. Can’t leave ‘em in here… or maybe…” Traynor looked at the ceiling of the car they were in. “Escape hatch!” She powered on her ME generator as she said, “Boost me up.”

  Xiùlán interlaced her fingers and held her hands down for a step, which Sammy used to reach the ceiling of the car. She opened the panel and quickly climbed through to the top of the elevator. Crouching by the opening, she reached down to grab each of the dead guards as Xiùlán shoved their ME lightened bodies up to her waiting partner; Traynor then laid them out alongside the energy couplings that propelled the cars through the shafts. After making certain neither would accidently roll into the power couplings, she eased her body back down through the access hatch, placed a boot in Xiùlán’s waiting hands so she could close the hatch cover, then dropped lightly to the floor.

  “Dammit Xiùlán, C-Pat is working for the bloody pirates. Found this on the second guard,” she hissed through her teeth as she held up a crumpled piece of paper. Xiùlán was not surprised to see a promise of payment for the capture of any and all Alliance agents. “They’ve all been bought… the whole bloody station; even the dock workers have been warned to be on the lookout for all three of us.”

  “That must be why the little blue bitch in the bar tried to send me in the wrong direction,” Xiùlán replied, almost to herself. “We’re going to have the devil’s own time getting our asses out of here.”

  “Let’s get up to the C-Pat detention center… grab Griff before they force him to sell us out,” Traynor replied. Looking at station specs on her omni-tool, she grumped, “This car is locked out from accessing the utility tunnel between levels,” Sam said. “Give me a couple…” Sam was furiously entering code into her omni-tool; finally, she had the solution. “…press and hold four and five simultaneously. It’ll stop at the access door for the tunnel.” Xiùlán held both ‘keys’ on the haptic interface until the car stopped moving.

  Sam forced the inner doors open; they were now between levels with a locked security hatch barring their way forward. She terminated the station’s control of this car, plunging them into darkness for a moment before the power cell operated emergency light switched on, casting a sickly blueish glow from above. Xiùlán activated the light on her omni-tool so Sam could deal with the hatch.

  “Looks like there’s an alarm switch here… disconnected now. This lock might take a bit of finesse.” She began entering commands into her omni-tool; after twenty seconds it chirped. Sam’s frown looked rather ghastly in the harsh light of Xiùlán’s omni-tool.

  “Bring your arm over by mine,” Sam said. “I need to link the processors if I’m going to get through this bloody thing.”

  With Xiùlán’s omni-tool linked in, Sam again entered commands on her own tool’s interface; fifteen seconds later the hatch responded to Sam’s hacking routine by unlocking and swinging inward. Sam said “Come on,” as she unlinked their tools and carefully stepped across the gap into the utility tunnel. Xiùlán reached in and grabbed Sam’s hand as she navigated the gap and stepped into the tunnel behind Sam. “There are no motion detectors or cameras in this compartment. We should be okay as long as we aren’t seen coming or going.”

  “You’d better power up and release that car before they start sending maintenance techs to see why it’s not responding,” Xiùlán whispered.

  Sending a series of commands to the station’s server, she had it repower the car and send it back down to level one, then closed and latched the entrance hatch to their level. “I’m using a new code to lock this thing… won’t have to spend so much time on it again, and the batarians will have to spend a helluva lot more time to override it. Oh, and the car won’t remain stationary… soon as someone starts to hack that lock, down goes the car, even if its powered off,” she finished with a smirk.

  “That should really piss them off, Sammy,” Xiùlán replied as she sent a quick command to the server to disable the work lights mounted in the overhead, then removed her electronic ‘fingerprints’ from the server. “Now, let’s find access to the level five detention level and grab Griff.”

  Xiùlán and Sam were in total darkness… with the work lights disabled in the tunnel, they could safely put on their night vision visors. Setting the lights in their omni-tools to infrared, the tunnel and its contents now reflected eerie shades of grey… heat producing items appeared almost white to light grey, cold items almost black. Xiùlán took point, moving ahead of Sam as they silently crept deeper into the tunnel. “Dust on the deck is pretty thick,” Sam whispered on the comm. “Doesn’t look like anyone’s been through here since the station was completed.”

  Xiùlán touched the switch on the comli
nk in her ear and replied quietly, “Acknowledged.” Their progress was hampered by having to go under, over and around electronics cabinets, conduits, transformers and ducting. After twenty minutes of carefully moving forward, Sam whispered, “Hold up a moment.”

  Turning around to look back, Xiùlán could see Traynor casting the light from her omni-tool to her right. Checking the station map, she hissed, “This way,” over the comlink.

  Turning to her left, Yuán paralleled Sam towards the target in her heads up display.

  Arriving together, they extinguished their lights and removed their visors as they both examined the grill set in the overhead, from which a faint glow of light could barely be seen filtering in from above. “Return air grill,” Xiùlán observed. “Helps keep people’s ears from popping every time a hatch is sealed or unsealed. Looks like half-a-meter square.” Pointedly leering at Sam’s chest, she snarked, “Bit tight for you with that rack on your chest! Want me to go first?”

  Sam grinned as she grabbed her boobs through her armor and pressed them towards her body. “There’s a bit of ‘give’ available there,” she said innocently, then looked down at Xiùlán’s upper legs. “What about those hips?” she snarked back. “There’s no way you can narrow those down far enough!” After a pause, she continued, “Okay, you go up first. How’s the charge on your shield generator?”

  Xiùlán checked the readout with her omni-tool. “43%… Yours?”

  “39%. We’re going to have to change out power cells pretty soon.”

  “Agreed. Boost me up.” Xiùlán energized her ME generator as Sam interlaced her fingers and held her hands at knee level; with her mass mostly negated, Xiùlán was able to stand on her lover’s joined hands without placing undue stress on them. With her head just under the grille, she found and released the retainers on the underside and pushed the grille up just enough to take a quick look around. It appeared she had come up inside a storage area… there were shelves on the walls, stacked full of small containers all labeled as to contents. Sliding the grille to one side, she leveraged herself up using her arms; receiving a push from below, she drew her legs up and crouched at the edge of the opening.

  She quickly reversed her ME generator, effectively doubling her mass in order to better anchor herself as she reached back down for Traynor; a pair of gloved hands came up, which Xiùlán grabbed and pulled. As Sam’s head came up through the opening, Xiùlán let go of her hands so Sam could place her arms on the edge of the opening. Xiùlán powered her ME generator down and moved to straddle Sam crossways; crouching, she placed her hands under Sam’s armpits and started straightening her muscular legs as she pulled Sam upward.

  Xiùlán grinned at her as she whispered, “Wǒ xiǎng tíxǐng nǐ…” [我想提醒你... – I would like to remind you… when it became apparent Sam’s chest was slightly hindering her as she twisted her body back and forth to squeeze through the 15cm thick opening. Finally clearing the edge as Xiùlán grabbed her belt and pulled, the whispered protest that followed was not unexpected. “I didn’t have someone pushing my feet up from below.”

  Xiùlán set the grill back in the opening, then looked around. “Don’t hear any voices,” she whispered. “Did we just get lucky, or is all ‘ell about to break loose?”

  She watched as Sam brought the station map up on her omni-tool, then studied the graphics alongside her for several moments. Sam remarked, “We got lucky,” as she shut the tool down. “Buchanan is in an interrogation room just down the hall, probably singing like a canary. We need to replace the power cells in our shield generators.”

  “I only brought one spare with me,” sighed Sam. “Wish these things didn’t suck so much power… their eezo cores pull more power than the cells can provide.”

  Xiùlán had been studying the labels on the containers all around them, when she stopped at one labeled ĉelo potenco. “Look at this,” she whispered. Opening the container revealed several power cells neatly packed inside. She examined one and was delighted to see it was compatible with her own shield generator’s power requirements. She grabbed another and tossed it to Sam, whispering, “Swap your power cell with this one.” Swapping out her own depleted cell with this fresh one, she was thrilled to see it was at 98%. ‘Tián!’ [甜！– Sweet!] she thought. Placing the nearly depleted cells in the container, she resealed it and placed it back on the shelf after pocketing the other two from the container, then joined Sam at the sealed hatch.

  As she’d done on level three, Sam hacked the security cameras in the passageway outside the door. There were heavily armed guards at either end of the 10-meter passage. The room they needed to breech was down the right side and across, two-and-a-half meters or so. “We need a distraction at the other end, to the left. I have the server recording the video of this passage. Just before we send the guards off on a wild goose chase, I’ll cut the recording, loop it and play it back for the security office.”

  “What happens when the guards return?”

  “They’ll have to either hack the incredibly complex algorithm I use to lock things, or blow the doors. Either way will take them a lot of time,” Samantha said. “Breaking into or out of station security is not an easy thing to do. There’ll also be cameras and mics in the interrogation room – the server in there is already recording what’s going on, so I just need to loop the recording without audio. In all the confusion, we’ll snag Griff and bring him back in here.”

  “Sounds like you got this all sorted. How do we get out?”

  “We go to ground in the tunnel. They may figure it out in time, but I still have to get to the comm system on level four, hack it and call the Ionsaí to pick us up.”

  Xiùlán shook her head, a concerned look on her face. “You’re bound to be seen on level four, especially once we’ve poked the hornet’s nest up here”

  “First things first. We have to get Buchanan out before he spills his guts, ‘cause as soon as they have what they need, they will spill his guts.” Sam entered several commands on her omni-tool, then looked at Xiùlán and asked, “Ready?”

  “Wǒmen kāishǐ zuò ba!” [我們開始做吧！– Let’s do it!]

  * * *

  * CARTAGENA STATION • LEVEL FIVE, C-PAT DETENTION AREA *

  Sam made one final entry, closed her tool’s interface and engaged her cloak. Closing her eyes, she visualized the batarian running towards her as she counted down from nine. Reaching ‘one’, she swiftly opened the door and used the outer edge of her right hand to crush the guard’s larynx as he ran past the door at full speed from the right… his legs and body rose in an arc with his neck as the pivot point. Momentum carried him a half-meter further before he fell like a discarded rag doll.

  Xiùlán moved past Sam as she grabbed the dying guard and dragged him back into the compartment with assistance from her ME generator as Sam remotely sealed and locked every hatch along the length of the passage, including those at either end.

  Xiùlán punched the call interface on the hatch to the interrogation room; the hatch opened to reveal one of the biggest, ugliest batarians she’d ever seen. As he started to reach for her, Xiùlán kicked him in the crotch with enough force to lift him off his feet.

  As he reacted to this unexpected assault by hollering in pain and doubling over, his attacker slammed her elbow down on the back of his neck, dislocating one of his vertebrae far enough to sever his spinal cord in two places. This effectively stopped his pain and his hollering. She pushed him back into the compartment as he fell; following the carcass into the room revealed yet another C-Pat interrogator reaching for a sidearm.

  A swift swinging motion of her forearm revealed an activated omni-tool, which fabricated and let fly a shuriken; this hit the batarian full in the face, where one of the five razor sharp points buried itself in his lower left eye. The scream of pain quickly faded as the fast acting poison coating the blades paralyzed his diaphragm and stopped his heart, killing him before he collapsed to the deck.

  Samantha cou
ld not help herself as she entered behind Xiùlán. “Better not let Griff see that one, Love!” she said with a snarky grin. “He already thinks we’re too dependent on blades.”

  “Whatever gets the job done, Sammy.” She looked at Buchanan, unconscious, stark naked, wrists tied together and hung from an overhead hook so his feet barely touched the deck. He was bleeding from multiple small cuts all over his torso, arms and legs; there were also numerous burns, as if applied with some kind of hot knife. Worse, a bare wire hooked through an electrical transformer and switch were wrapped around his genitals, and he was soaking wet.

  “Dammit Griff, you’re a gāisǐ de xuèxīng [該死的血腥 – damn bloody] mess!” Xiùlán said. Knowing they were running short of time, they went to work… Yuán grabbed him under his hips and lifted until Traynor could release his hands. They eased him down into one of the chairs his former interrogators had been using.

  “Find his clothes, Sam,” Xiùlán said as she gently removed the leather straps binding his wrists. Removing the electrical wire at this point was problematic. Voltage and amperage were the same things, no matter the race. It appeared enough amps had been applied to severely burn the skin the wiring was wrapped around.

  There was no painless way for her to remove it, so she carefully cut the lead on either side of Griff’s scrotum, then applied some disinfectant and medi-gel to the area; she left the wires that had burned into his flesh for the asari doctor to sort out once they were safely back on the Ionsaí.

  Sam came back with what was left of Griff’s pants and shirt. “Let’s get ‘im dressed before I puke… Fuckin’ batarians. Glad you kicked that big bastard in his nuts, Xiùlán. Hope it still hurts him in ‘ell!” They hurriedly pulled Griff’s pants up his legs; Sam leaned him forward in the chair while Xiùlán put his shirt on and secured the remaining fasteners. Sam attached an ME generator to his collar; powered on, it enabled her to stand him up from the chair, allowing Xiùlán to finish pulling up and fastening his pants. “Boots?” Xiùlán asked.