Suddenly, there was a flash of light and the image of a bright red button materialized on the outer surface of the black cube. I thought it was a hologram, but Kalaya’s were so real looking it was impossible to tell without actually feeling it.
The Captain and I each stared at it for a few seconds. “Do you know what it does?” I whispered. He didn’t answer me, seemingly preoccupied with his own thoughts. Finally, with a deep sigh of finality, he slammed his ham-like fist down on the button. The onyx cube dissolved like a sugar cube in water, breaking up into an army of small spider-like robots. There were hundreds of them sprinting in all directions. Instinctively, I let out a shriek of terror and leaped up to stand on my chair. I watched as they regrouped and poured out of the doorway until they reached the outer door. There, they used unparalleled amounts of teamwork to climb on each other’s back and open the door. A few seconds later, they were gone and I could hear more screams of terror reverberating down the passageways. “Where do you think they are going?” I asked aloud.
“No idea, but sometimes a leap of faith is in order, Laree,” the Captain said, shaking his head, still stone-faced throughout all of this mayhem. It was almost as if he knew all along what was going to happen. Snapping out of it, he turned back to me.
“Now is your chance, Laree. Pack a small bag and make for the shuttle bay. Security will be too occupied to stop you.” He stood up and snapped a crisp salute. “It’s been a privilege to have you with us, Laree; I wish you the best of luck. Now you better get going. Here make sure you take your pixie and your t-shirts, but I’m keeping the coffee maker!” He sat back down.
I saluted him back. “Thank you, Captain, it’s been an honor!” I scooped up my belongings and ran out the door, taking one last look back at Captain Kumeiga. He sat there in complete silence, sipping coffee as all hell broke loose on his ship. Yet, my only thought was to thank him for everything that he had done for me and for letting me go home.
Chapter 19
I power walked back to my room to grab a few personal items, not wanting to attract undue attention. Once I got past the area around the bridge, things seemed to be normal. There was no trace of the spider bots, and people were going about their regular business. A few stairs and passageways later, I breezed into the crew quarters with a new determination.
Opening the door to my room, I found Elleen curled up in the fetal position on my bed sobbing quietly. “Laree, your brother was here. I probably shouldn’t have let him in, but he said he needed to get something. He took everything that you brought back! I’m sorry, I tried to stop him, but he’s just too big.”
“I know, Elleen. It’s all right, no worries. He didn’t hurt you, did he?” I asked, hurriedly grabbing a small pack out from under the bed. I threw open the drawers to my hutch and started tossing underwear and a few personal remembrances of my parents into the bag, carefully wrapping the pixie figurine to avoid damaging it. I wasn’t worried about the rest of my clothes; there are far better outfits to be had on the Aurora. I threw in my work computer as well; no reason to leave my life’s work behind, even if was to be a very short life.
Elleen crawled off the bed and eyed me with interest. “No, he didn’t hurt anything but my feelings. You know, he wouldn’t be bad boyfriend material if he wasn’t such a jerk.”
“Who?” I returned absentmindedly.
“Your brother.” Boyfriend material? Oh, wow, that takes a paradigm shift in thought to comprehend. The notion that he would actually view a woman as anything but an object to leer at was beyond my capacity to fathom. I shook my head to banish the irrelevant alien thought pattern and continued to madly fill the backpack. “What are you doing?” she followed up shakily.
“I’m leaving and I don’t have much time.”
“You’re leaving? To where? Wait, are you going back down to the planet? Take me with you!” she pleaded, actually grabbing onto me. “I don’t want to die here; you have to take me with you!”
I didn’t have time for this. “Fine, you can come but we need to leave now, so pack your bags.” She darted over to her bed and dragged out a backpack similar to mine that was already packed and had a light jacket bungeed to it. She slipped it onto her shoulders and stood ready by the door with a hugely relieved smile on her face.
“I’m ready, let’s go. Shuttle bay?”
I nodded. “You keep a bag packed and ready to go at all times?”
“Yup, of course, don’t you?”
“Obviously not.”
Elleen clicked her tongue in evident disapproval. “Well, hurry up, Laree!”
How the hell did the situation turn to her waiting on me? Well, I’m done here anyway. What the heck, I’ll throw in the two t-shirts while I’m at it; if I’m gonna die, I might as well be comfortable and have a silly grin on my face. As I headed for the door, Elleen briefly rummaged in the closet and handed me a piece of equipment that looked like a plate with a long handle and earphones attached to it. Wires and pad inputs hung out of it at odd angles. She grabbed a second for herself.
“What are these?”
“Portable geologic surveyors, silly!”
“What are we supposed to do with these?”
“I assume you don’t want everyone to know what you are planning to do, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, in my experience, Laree, if you put the properly worried expression on your face and carry one of these babies with you, no one, and I mean no one, is going to pay any attention to us at all. Trust me; I have a long track record of proven experience at being ignored.”
I had absolutely nothing to say to that, so I grabbed my device and followed her out the door. You know, she was absolutely right. When people saw us coming, their eyes glazed over and they instinctively moved out of the way. It was like magic!
We made it most of the way down to the lowest deck that held the launch bay when I felt a tap on my shoulder from behind. Crap, our cloak of invisibility had been penetrated! I peeked over my shoulder to see Hannah striding behind me.
“Hannah, what the hell?”
“I saw you two marching along, obviously up to no good, so I figured you were up to something exciting. Something most likely involving the shuttle bay that you’re headed for; tell me I’m wrong,” she smirked.
I sighed, there was obviously a lot more going on in that annoyingly pretty head than I had given her credit for. “So are you going to try and stop us?”
“Only if you refuse to take me with you.”
Ugh. “Fine, Hannah, you can come. But this is most likely a one-way trip, you know.”
She shrugged. “Better a chance to grab the golden ring than wait to become space dust. Besides, you might need a doctor where you’re going, and I came prepared.” Hannah turned sideways to display the slightly larger backpack with the medical corps symbol on the patch.”
“You’re already packed?” I asked in disbelief.
“Of course, I always keep a packed bag by the door; doesn’t everyone?” Seriously? I must not have gotten the memo.
Suddenly, Hannah’s hands shot out and grabbed both of our pack handles, dragging us backward and pulling us up short. “Shush…there’s a disturbance up ahead!”
Around the corner of the passageway, it sounded like there was a confrontation going on. “We want to know what the Captain is going to do about the fleet’s threats!” one person shouted, and there were murmured agreements with that statement. “If we’re going to die, you should just let those of us who want to, go down to the surface. We’d, at least, have a chance down there!”
“No one is going anywhere! The Captain has this under control!” came a response from what I assumed was either a junior officer or security.
“Yeah, well, we’d like a little more reassurance than that!” the crowd pressed, growing more strident.
Hannah drew us in close and whispered, “I don’t think it’s wise to try and get past all of them. Come on, I know a shortcut to the hangar bay th
rough Engineering.”
“Engineering? But we’re not allowed in there!” Elleen protested as the two of us dragged her through an open hatch and slammed the doors behind us.
This was another area of the ship that I had never seen before; but frankly, compared to what I’d seen on the Aurora, it was a bit underwhelming. There were banks of computers, the smell of burnt grease, cables, and wiring running every which way, but it all had an inorganic, closed in, sloppy feel to it. My two companions were impressed, however.
“Wow, this is so cool!” Elleen gushed. “I wonder why they never let us in here.”
“Cool?” I snorted. “More like pathetic. Trust me, girls, this place can’t hold a candle to the Aurora, literally.”
“Is it truly that advanced?” Elleen asked.
“She eats stars for breakfast.”
Her face contorted as she thought about that. “Nah, you’re kidding, right?” she said, looking at Hannah for backup.
The Doc just shrugged and remarked, “Well, I guess we’ll know shortly, won’t we?”
We progressed through a few more hatchways, stepping over parts and pieces as we walked. Farther in, we came upon the chief engineer sitting at a console with his back to us. On the screen in front of him, we could clearly see the face of the Captain, who still seemed to be sitting at his desk.
“Captain, what do you mean, we are to do nothing? Do you have any idea what is going on down here? We had a swarm of spider creatures come out of the very walls around us and start taking apart our machinery! You seriously just want us to stand around and watch?” the engineer shouted, on the verge of panic.
The Captain, looking as calm as ever, responded, “Engineer Neeson, what exactly does it seem they have desecrated in your holy bay of engineering thus far?”
“Well, it’s hard to say. It’s not like they are explaining what they are doing.” Abruptly, alarms started blaring, and the overhead lights changed to red light conditions. “Captain, the two pulled fusion cores have been reinstalled but not fully activated! No, that’s not possible!”
“What isn’t possible, Chief?” Kumeiga pressed.
“Captain, it generally takes a week or more to get them up to generating capacity, but from the readings I’m getting, it looks like they could be fully operational in minutes. They’re not outputting, just idling. That goes against every principle of physics that I’m aware of! Fusion reactors don’t idle, the energy has to go somewhere, unless they’re back feeding into a black hole, storing it somehow, or shunting it somewhere else!”
”And to outward appearances? Say, for example, the fleet, what would their scanners detect?”
Neeson ran a hand feverishly through his sweaty hair. “Damned if I know, Captain. Technically, we have only one reactor putting out recognizable power so I would have to say they wouldn’t notice. That would be my best guess, sir. Damn, now they’re into my drives!” The man’s head was bobbing back and forth like a child’s toy as he tried to look at all the screens and readouts at once. Hannah walked up behind the engineer, and retrieving something from her pack, pressed it against his neck. With a slight hiss, something was injected and he sat back in his chair considerably calmer.
“What? He was going to have a stroke if he kept going like that,” she said defensively. “He’ll be fine, just a lot more mellow.” And indeed, the engineer sat back up, still ignoring us, but his hands were now calmly moving across his instruments checking readouts without the drama.
The Captain’s face on the screen oriented on the three of us. “You best get moving, Laree,” he remarked, and then the screen went blank.
“Come on, we have to go!”
We ran the rest of the short way to the shuttle bay, somehow managing to get through the rat’s nest of passageways and access tubes that was Engineering. With a sigh of relief, we climbed past the last hatchway into the hangar, slammed and locked the airtight hatch. My relief was short-lived, however, as there was one more sad obstacle to overcome.
My brother, Max, was leaning up against the shuttle holding a caster rifle.
“Max…”
“Laree, why are you doing this?” he growled, straightening up and moving toward us.
I didn’t like where this was going. My brother had never been known to make a smart decision while handling a weapon of any kind. I didn’t care; now was time to show my metal. I paused for a second and looked around at the last remnants of the life I’d lived for years. A beat up hangar with gouges in the flooring and equipment that looked like it went into service before any of us were born. Barrels and tubes of foreign-looking liquids, all strapped down to keep it in place when the air was evacuated and the doors opened to black space. This just didn’t look like home anymore.
“Max, I need to do this.”
“But why? You don’t owe them anything!”
“But I do! I owe them more than I can ever explain or that you will ever understand. They gave me something tangible that I haven’t had since our parents died. It’s as if I have just been going through the motions of life, numb to everything around me. Down there, something inside me woke up, looked around, and decided that it liked what it saw. Sure, we had some moments of pure horror and terror; but we survived with the help of our new friends and became stronger for it. So, Max, you have a decision to make. You can either shoot your sister where she stands or you can walk away. This is something I need to do for me! I love you and hope you can understand, but I have to go find my own destiny.”
He was silent for a few moments, and I wasn’t sure I had gotten through to him until I saw the tear tracing down his cheek. He slung the rifle over his shoulder and looked at me. “You know, Laree, if you go down there, the military will count you as a traitor and most likely kill you on sight.”
“I don’t care, Max. I would rather die with my friends than be a specimen in a lab for the rest of my days. Now, are you going to try and stop me?”
He grinned sheepishly and wiped the tear off his cheek. “You gave me two options, Laree. I think I’ll be taking option three.”
“Option three?”
“Yes, I’m coming with you. For better or worse, you are still my sister, and you gave up most of your own life to raise a jerk of a brother after our folks died. I guess that says something; it’s time I paid you back a little. Besides, I still don’t trust that she-devil to keep you safe, even if she is really hot.”
Tears flowed down my face as I scooped up my brother in a big hug. I should have known he would never let me do something like this alone. He has always been by my side, and I wouldn’t change a thing.
With a startling hiss, the main hatch of the shuttle just a few feet away popped open and started to rise, and a familiar face peered out.
“Drik?”
“It’s about time you showed up,” he said, his faced wreathed in a smile.
“Are you coming along, too?” I breathed, releasing my brother.
“The Captain doesn’t think remaining on board would be good for my health, and from what we seem to be learning of the fleet’s intentions, I would have to agree. I’ve stocked the shuttle with some stuff we might need and pre-loaded the launch sequence into the shuttle’s computer. I couldn’t take the chance of getting exact coordinates from the bridge without someone getting suspicious, but she’ll get us out the door and on our way. After that, we’ll have to wing it.”
“Wing it?” Elleen gasped.
“No time to explain. Don’t worry, the over-ride codes from the Captain are already punched in.”
With Drik’s help, we stowed our gear and climbed aboard. After activating the door to close and seal, we strapped ourselves in the front seats while Drik took a jump seat in the far back. Instantly, the bay lights changed from white to red, and we could hear the pumps evacuating all the breathable air out of the hangar. Once we had a vacuum, the main doors started to creep open and the shuttle’s main engines began to whine.
Looking at the wan faces of my
companions, I smiled cheerily and asked, “So, does anyone know how to fly this thing?” They looked blankly at each other for a few seconds, and then finally Hannah piped up.
“Well, I’ve dated a few pilots in my time. How hard can it be?”
We were so dead!
The shuttle’s auto-launch sequence fired without a hitch and small, but powerful electromagnetic rails set into the bay floor pushed us out sideways away from the Jeff. Within seconds, we found ourselves drifting at a rapid pace away from the ship. Of course, not toward the planet.
“So…now what? Kudos for getting us out of the ship, but unless one of you have hidden flying skills that we don’t know about…” Elleen voice trailed off despairingly, her face practically plastered up against the port window.
“I’ve never even sat in the pilot's chair,” I admitted.
“Nope, I can’t even drive a ground car without getting a ticket,” Hannah confessed. “Of course, I usually get off with a warning and my comm pad number.”
“I don’t think you will have to worry about cops out here.”
“Oh yeah? I think there will be a whole fleet of bad cops here in a few hours. And somehow, I don’t think Hannah batting her eyes at them will make a difference this time.” Elleen sniffled softly. “And how does that even work? I’d be interested to know sometime.”
“Ok, calm down,” I pleaded. “There has to be a solution. The Captain is too smart to just throw us out the door with no way to get down.”
Max puffed himself up and cracked his knuckles. “Alright, ladies, step aside and let a man handle things.” Hannah rolled her eyes and frowned, but she unbuckled herself from the pilot’s seat. The shapely doctor floated straight up, and with the tip of her boot, elegantly pushed off from the main viewing glass. Slowly, she floated back over the top of the seat, and grabbing bars made for that purpose, lowered herself into the seat just vacated by my brother. In a few moments, they had switched spots, and Max was flipping switches and making adjustments rapidly.
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