He looked up at the flames pouring off the exploded wall. He knew a lost cause when he saw one. "This isn't gonna work. We're not getting out of this."
He sat up, gently shifting her aside, and rose to his feet. He headed for the bridge.
Explosions popped all over the ship as weapons fire pounded the Icarus. On the bridge, space whirled around the window as Scarlett fought to stay ahead of the attack. A fireball outside sent Chetaara flying to the ground, and she cried out in pain. He rushed to help her into the co-pilot's chair.
Scarlett yelled, "We've lost shields on port and aft! Can't take much more! How's the hyperspace jump coming?"
"It's not." Byron pointed at the comm screen. "I need to talk to General Deth."
Chetaara began tapping keys. "I-I can do it, Scarlett. You focus on flying."
Scarlett looked up at him. "You gonna tell him to fuck off?"
"No." Byron nodded. "We're gonna surrender."
"What? Are you fucking kidding me?"
General Deth appeared on the comm screen. "Ah, Byron Jones. I was wondering when you would give up. Not as quickly as I expected. Good job."
"Yeah, we give up. Call off your dogs."
Deth raised a hand.
The thunder of gunfire on the Icarus ended almost at once. The Death Wing fighters continued to cluster around the Icarus, but kept their weapons trained without firing.
Deth looked at something off-screen. "You will dock at hangar four. We're sending the landing pattern now. You will be escorted, of course, and you will die if you deviate from the pattern."
The Necralia general vanished, leaving a black screen.
OBJECTIVE FAILED
Byron stared at the words that lit up in front of him with a sinking feeling.
Scarlett tapped her controls. "Okay, well, this should be fucking interesting."
Chetaara ran her fingers down Byron's arm. "I hope you know what you're doing, Master."
Byron narrowed his eyes. "So do I."
Chapter 24
MOLLY BROWN settled back from the computer. She felt overwhelmed by all she had learned.
The site talked about the phenomenon happening all over the world. Dozens of people were being found in white chairs like the one in Byron's living room. Nobody knew what they were, and nobody could get the people out of the chairs without killing them. In one case, someone managed to connect a power supply to the chair so it could be taken to a hospital, but nothing worked to wake them up.
Some people had apparently analyzed the chairs, because a section described them in detail. The chairs created a field around the headrest that stimulated brain activity. In the arms, needles injected fluids into the person sitting in it. That seemed to be a form of life support. Other than that, much of the mechanism inside the chairs couldn't be analyzed.
In all cases, the people and the chairs had quickly disappeared. No one knew how or where.
She leaned in to try another website when she heard a knock on the door. She got up to open it.
Two men in white overalls stood at the door. They had some sort of wheeled cart between them.
One man said, "We're here to take the pod."
It wasn't a question.
She blinked at them. "What?"
"We're here to take the pod." The man pointed over her shoulder. "That's it right there."
She swallowed as she felt tears building up as a lump in her throat. "Who are you people?"
"That's not your concern." The man gave her a cold smile. "We're just here to collect our property."
Molly breathed quickly, feeling like something had gone out of her control. The thought of these men taking the pod before she had a chance to find out what it was threw her into panic. "Wait, you can't just barge in here. This is my brother's apartment. It's his property."
"Actually," the man in the white jumpsuit said, "it's our property. And we have an authorization to collect it."
He held out a piece of paper that she snatched out of his hand. It looked like a delivery order form with Byron's name and address. Under the form for contents, it reads, "MODEL VO-738 VR" which she didn't make sense of. At the bottom, it had a signature that looked like Byron's.
She looked up. "Okay, I need to know what's going on here. Who are you people and what is that thing?"
The man shrugged with the same cold smile on his face. "That's not our department, ma'am. We're just here to pick up the equipment. Excuse me."
The second man held out what looked like a remote control and pushed a button.
The white chair hissed as the curved walls folded up over it, turning it back into the egg-like shape she had first seen.
She also realized they hadn't taken him out of the pod, which meant they planned to take him with it. She remembered what she had read about people and chairs disappearing. "No, you can't do this!"
The second man reached out and firmly moved her to one side. She tried to block the doorway, but he had no trouble shifting her so the first man could walk into the apartment. The deliveryman dragged the cart along with him.
She still managed to duck around the second man's arm to run over to the first one. "Hey, you don't have permission to enter. You can't take this. My brother is inside it."
"Again, not our concern." The man crouched and pulled a lever at the base of the pod, causing the white egg to rise off the ground somehow. That allowed him to slide the cart under the pod.
"I don't care what people you have. This is trespassing and theft. I'm calling the police." Molly took her phone and began dialing 911.
The first man dragged the cart behind him with the pod mounted on top of it. He headed for the front door, hauling the massive egg along with him. "Go right ahead."
She felt a desperate panic that made her start hitting the man on the head with her fists and smartphone. "I won't let you take him!"
Something wet hit her face with a hiss. It smelled sweet and made the room spin around her.
She woke up on the floor of Byron's apartment. Her nose and mouth tingled like they had gone numb. The men had sprayed something in her face and knocked her out.
She stumbled to her feet and ran to the window of his apartment. When she looked out, she could see a white van pulling away from the curb.
"No," she screamed. She ran out of Byron's apartment, and down the staircase to burst out of the front door of the apartment building.
The van had already made its way to the corner and begun to make a left turn. In the passenger side of the van, she could see the man who had taken Byron's pod, grinning back at her.
"No!" She ran down the street, shoving people on the sidewalk aside, ignoring their complaints.
She wouldn't make it. She reached the corner, and saw the van already had made it to another corner. She quickly pulled out her phone and took a picture of the license plate before the van turned again and disappeared from view.
She couldn't hold back tears that blurred her vision. Her brother and the pod were gone. The only thing she knew about the men who had taken her brother was the license plate.
She shook her head and went to her photo gallery to find the photo of the van. Zooming it in gave her the license plate number.
She knew it was typically illegal to trace someone's license plate, but there were ways around that. She quickly went to an online identity search database and put in the plate number. After paying a fee for the reverse lookup, it came up with the name of the owner, which made her even more confused.
It read, "Venus Computing Solutions."
Coming Soon:
Hard Drive (Venus Online 5)
From the Author
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This is a work of fiction. Any names or characters, businesses or places, events or incidents, are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Mine Shaft: A LitRPG Sci-Fi Harem Adventure (Venus Online Book 4) Page 17