Crystal turned around and stopped, placing her hands on her hips. “There's a question I need to ask them.” She turned back around and kept walking toward the hallway. She was on her way to find Tech Quarters.
Daf and Diana gave each other a look. Diana crossed her arms and called after Crystal. “Stop leading me, girl—if there’s a question for Tech, it's a question for me!”
Crystal continued to walk, not bothering to look back as she yelled, “I need to see our earliest specs! The enemy Mechs are identical to ours so someone has either given the enemy our Mech blueprints or we somehow got ours from them!”
Episode 5
The Kill Off
Sphere 6 Overseer, Savanna Levens, was sitting in her office, gazing through a large observation window overlooking Matrona's biosphere. Teary eyed, she watched as a waterfall cascaded down a rock precipice.
She held papers in her hand, feeling lost and imprisoned by the unrelenting grip of sorrow, having spent the last few days in an endless sojourn of weeping and crying, interspersed with the necessities of survival.
First, her son had died in an attack killing tens of thousands of people. It came and went as if enemy marauders were just passing through on a joy ride, killing and leaving once their fun was over.
Second, and adding to her melancholy, someone who had demonstrated himself to be a true friend time and again throughout the years, Fleet Admiral James Byrd, was being tried as a traitor. And, if found guilty, he would be executed on the morrow. She had attempted to see him, but each time was told he wasn't accepting visitors.
She squeezed her hand, crinkling papers, but quickly eased up and looked down at them—yet another reason for her tears.
I have to keep going. Life doesn't end here, Savanna. You have an entire population to keep safe, she told herself.
“The Kill Off? I guess it's a fitting title,” commented a young man sitting in a chair on the other side of Savanna's ebb rock desk. His voice was low and tense. Savanna was sitting with her back to him and turned around in her chair, eying the young man. His name was Devon Gray, an assistant of hers and a savvy technician who knew the ins and outs of HDC mainframes like no one else. Last night, she had given him the task of intercepting all messages to and from Zim's HDC, with the sole purpose of helping Admiral Byrd by finding anything he could on the Prime Director.
At first the messages were hack proof, hard encrypted through the com lines. But within a couple of hours the tech genius had broken into the holographic mainframes, deciphered the encryptions, uncovered the cryptography and translated them. And the codes weren't just a bunch of random messages like Devon and Savanna had first thought. They were correspondence labeled “The Kill Off” that were related to a series of events already set in motion, and were to finish playing out over the next two weeks.
Savanna pressed her hands onto the window, her palms open and fingers splayed flat on its cold surface. Two weeks—only two weeks? Then she turned back around and pulled a handkerchief out of her pocket to wipe her tears and blow her nose, which she did as quietly as she could. She returned the soggy cloth to its pocket and rested her hand along the windowsill, again staring at the waterfall. “It's heartbreaking to think that this place—our starbase—won't be here much longer.” She turned around again to face Devon. “The animals, the plants, the people…who would want to end all of this? And why?”
With both hands, Devon curled his fingers around the base of his neck, pulling his forehead down to the surface of his desk to brainstorm. After a moment he looked up, his face red. “Let me display these papers all over the vid channels. I can do that. We may even get a minute of air time. If some of them believe us, then we can escape from Matrona, somehow.”
“Devon. We don't have an escape plan. How are we going to get hundreds of thousands of people off Matrona? After the attack, we have 700,000 survivors. We don't have enough transports for all of those people, and where would we go if we did? We don't know of any planet capable of sustaining human life.”
Devon shook his head, his shaggy hair waiving between his eyes and the frame of his glasses. “At least we can save some people.”
“We'd just cause a panic and gridlock.”
Devon threw his hands up in the air, completely confused. “Isn't that the point? Don't we want to stir the pot and get this information out to as many people as we can? If some of us can survive, then why not do it?”
Savanna looked into Devon's eyes, dark blue and innocent. He was so young, not yet old enough to enter the Suficell Pods. Savanna had already been through five age reversals in the pods. She had nearly 175 years on him, yet he did things with technology that she could only dream about doing, even if she could live a thousand more years. He understood how a micro impulse traveled through one holographic synapse to another. He could completely disassemble a mainframe and rebuild a better one. But, he didn't understand life, how society functioned, how politics cheated, lied, and moved walls that didn't exist, and fabricated “truths” that weren't even there. But, that's where she excelled. She had mastered the technique of being able to convince her fellow politicians and business associates that something should be passed when there was no proof, only her own intuition. She knew people and could predict their actions and reactions. Nonetheless, she merely shrugged her shoulders at his comment. “And if we tell the inhabitants of Matrona, then what?”
“They will know, maybe even riot. We'd stop the damn kill off.”
“Zim and his...whoever they are...would just let this happen?” Her heart was sinking. He didn't understand.
“It doesn't matter what they—”
Savanna raised a hand into the air, interrupting Devon. “Look.” She spread the crinkled papers on her desk, counting them. “There are over twenty pages of this kill off and there are hundreds of pages going over the HDC waves that we haven't translated yet. They've probably had this planned over 800 years, Devon. It's their plan, whomever they are, and that's why we need a plan. If we do as you suggest and broadcast our findings to everyone on Matrona, then who’s to say they couldn’t simply flip a switch and kill us all, just like that.” She snapped her fingers in the air.
“If they had that capability, don't you think they would have done it already?”
“I don't know why they’re waiting two more weeks, Devon, but they are. Let's not entice them to speed up the process.”
He looked down to stare at his shoes and started biting his fingernails. He felt heavy, as if complete responsibility for the starbase and all of its inhabitants had just landed on his shoulders. “I don't know what to do.” His face looked strained as tears started welling up in his eyes. “My parents…my sister…I just want to get them out of here. At least give them a chance. Give you a chance—give everyone a chance.”
Savanna rubbed the desk with her fingers, thinking. “Then, let's come up with a plan. We bring the papers to Captain Stripe. She's the only one I know of who isn't on board with the witch hunt being perpetrated on Admiral Byrd. Everyone knows that after watching her interview, so she probably doesn't know about the kill off. In the meantime, uncover everything you can. Decode as much as you can. If we can understand their plan, we can use it against them, or at least gain enough information in order to stop them.”
“But how?” asked Devon.
“We won't know that until we have more information. Do you understand? We have to know why they’re waiting two more weeks to kill us. If we can extend that time further out by understanding why they’re waiting, then that would be very important information to have, don't you think?”
Devon sighed. “I don't know if I can stay awake much longer.”
Savanna looked at her HDC and it was one o’clock in the morning. Shocked by how much time had slipped by unnoticed, she stood up and said, “I've got to find the captain.”
Devon wanted to go, too. He was tired, but something else inside of him was pushing him to leave, which he thought was odd, but then again everything that had occu
rred during the last few days had been more than just odd. “I'm going to go home. I can pick this up again tomorrow.”
Savanna sighed, her mind racing. She had vital information that no one else had on Matrona, other than Zim and his cronies. This wasn't a time to rest or to do things out of convenience. This was a time for action and right now, sleep wasn't an option. “I'm almost 200 years old. If I can stay up this late, then you can, too.” She walked around her desk heading for the door, but then looked over her shoulder. “I'm going to the captain's quarters. I know this is a trying time for you Devon, but you are all I got. You're all that the human race has got.”
Savanna walked out the door and silence filled the room, which was a lot more silence than Devon would have preferred in order to stay awake. He yawned, rubbing his eyes, and then he slapped his face. “Just get on with it, Devon,” he said out loud.
He stood up and did a long stretch, then walked over to Savanna's desk and sat in her chair. He'd been sitting at the Overseer's desk since the night before and most of the day, decoding supposedly non-existent messages. If anyone would have told him a couple of days prior that he'd be sitting in an Overseer's chair, he would have laughed in their faces, thinking how stupid they were. And now, here he was decoding his race's fate in one of those chairs. This was all just too much.
He cracked his knuckles and expelled a long breath of spent air as he stared at the HDC. He removed his glasses and wiped the fatigue out of his eyes. Here we go again.
He pressed a button. “HDC, enter code eleven-seven-nine-four-delta-bravo, complete. Send to Zim Nocki's back-end mainframe for holographic dialogue interface.” The HDC computed the numbers and displayed a line connecting Savanna's HDC to Zim's. Then a graphic bubble materialized within the line and moved from Savanna's HDC all the way over to Zim's, then back to Savanna's.
“Complete,” blinked on the HDC in front of Devon.
He slapped his hands together as he whispered in a low, guttural voice, “I'm back... and badder than ever.”
The HDC in front of Devon ran computed dialogue that to the untrained eye would resemble nothing more than inconsequential junk data streaming across the interface. In college, that's how he and the other techs were trained to interpret it, to think of it as incoherent information traveling from one interface to another, merely unreadable specks of HDC trash, en route to deletion by the HDC system in order to grant more space for new, more important data streams.
The night before, while hacking into Zim's back-end mainframe, they had come across a gigantic slew of this junk data, and that’s all there was; which in itself struck them as odd. No personal messages, no top secret notes, nothing—just an enormous amount of junk data. And since there was nothing else to examine and Savanna was desperate enough to grasp at straws, she had asked Devon to break it down, and that’s how they had discovered that it meant much more than what anyone had been led to believe. And, within it, they had discovered the most unimaginable, worst possible information that could ever be concealed from a population.
“Okay, junk data, time to translate you,” Devon whispered under his breath.
He pressed a couple of more holographic buttons, highlighting the dialogue coming in and out of Zim's HDC. In seconds, letters appeared out of the dialogue stream forming thousands of discombobulated sentences on the HDC screen. He waved his hand in front of the sentences—a command that also highlighted everything—and spoke, “Program Distinguish software into HDC, now.”
The night before, he had needed a way to take all of the discombobulated words to successfully convert them into readable sentences. The program he created did this in a matter of seconds, compiling pages and pages of endless messages. When he was naming the program, he was interrupted by Savanna saying that Program Distinguish is what it should be called. When he asked why, she simply shrugged her shoulders and sighed, saying that it was the first thing that came to mind. He felt there might be another reason, but he kept his mouth shut. He thought he'd rename it something more stylish later on, something like Program Diabolic or Program Impress. Because it was impressive, he thought, to create something in such short order.
And now, in less than five minutes, he had dozens of pages of information imaging on paper and exiting from a print spool next to the HDC.
He grabbed the papers as more spooled out. The first page was titled “The Kill Off”. He skimmed the following next few pages, adding the rest to make a tidy stack that he tapped neatly into place on the desk top. Then he sat down and picked up where he’d left off, until he bit down on his thumb about half way down a page. He placed his index finger on a single word, not knowing what it meant. He mouthed, batrachotoxin and shook his head. He'd never heard of such a thing. He clicked on the com link. “Sally Gray in Chem Lab, Sphere 9, com link.”
A pause, then Sally popped up on the screen, overlapping Program Distinguish’s translations with the print spool still spewing papers in the background. “This is Sally.” Her face widened into a smile. “Well, long time no chatty, big brother.”
Devon smiled in return, but then bit a fingernail. “Hey Sis, I have a question.”
Sally's face quickly changed to worry. “What's the matter? You’re biting your nails again. Are you perspiring?”
He touched his forehead, surprised. He nodded, but didn’t comment about it, getting down to business. “Can you tell me what batrachotoxin is?”
Sally stared into Devon's eyes, examining them. “Are you alright?”
He nodded his head again. “I'm fine.” But then he gasped and froze in place when a door slammed somewhere outside of Savanna's office, startling him. He held up his index finger. “Just a second, Sis.”
He stood up and walked over to the doorway and looked down the hallway. He didn't see anyone. Perhaps someone had just left, but who? It was late, and everyone had gone home long ago. No one should be in the office, unless...
“Savanna?” he uttered down the hallway, but no answer. “Hello?” Silence hung in the air. He backed away and said “close”. The ebb door slid shut and he clicked in the code on the wall, locking it. No command could gain access now unless it was by Savanna or himself. He walked back over to the desk and sat down.
“Okay, Devon, you're acting a little strange.”
“I'm fine, Sally. Can you ask someone in your lab what that stuff is?”
She shook her head. “I'm the only one here.” She tilted her head, narrowing her eyes as a grin formed. “Are we our father's children or what? Workaholics—that's why we're still single, you know.”
“Yeah,” he looked at the closed door, faintly hearing something beyond it. Did someone drop something? He couldn't quite tell. “Any idea what batrachotoxin is?”
“Well, it's obviously a toxin. I don't know what it does, though.”
“If a toxin gets into the air or water supplies, how bad could it be?” he asked.
“I'm not an expert, Devon, but it wouldn't be good, that's for sure. And it depends upon what type of toxin, and how much is released and/or consumed. Some toxins, like tetrodotoxin, can kill a person within four to six hours. You'd feel paralysis creeping throughout your body while releasing body fluids, and even though you'd be fully aware of it, you'd be unable to do anything about it, except die. It's not the nicest of toxins. Or, there's cyanide, it does—”
Devon held up his hands in surrender. “Best guess?”
Sally leaned in closer. “You're scaring me. What's going on?”
A heavy bang against the door jarred Devon out of his seat.
“Devon, what's going on?”
“Uh...I gotta go, Sis.” Devon shut off the HDC and desperately looked around for help, his eyes scanning the biosphere through the window. Then he turned and half stood, staring out the window, until he realized that his heavy breath was obscuring his view by steaming up the clear ebb. Then another loud pound sounded from the door.
He slid down, under the desk. Zim had no doubt found out that someon
e from this location was hacking his system. Devon should have left the office and gone home like he had wanted. He should have followed his intuition, but Savanna wouldn't allow it, instead pushing the responsibility for all of humanity onto his shoulders, and for what? If he was going to die, right here and right now, everything would be for nothing. He had to do something.
He moved out from under the desk and touched a few holographic buttons on the HDC. The door shook.
“Patch me into the Matrona Network News mainframe.”
“Access Denied,” blinked across the HDC and that's what he wanted. He had moved in and out of the network's mainframe many times before.
“Hijack,” he said. A small rectangle appeared below the blinking access denied with type password next to it. He and his friends had created this many years ago to watch movies, but that’s about all they did. It was innocent stuff.
“Poontang,” he said, and watched as the word appeared and was accepted, allowing him to view every synapse and link inside of the network’s mainframe by pressing the button, which he did. Thirteen icons came into view, one for each twelve spheres and one icon that said all, which is the one he wanted. He pressed on it.
Another pound hammered the door again, creating a crack across the top of it. Devon chose to ignore it, but realized that the pounding had been going on the entire time he was hacking into the Network.
Two more icons materialized on the HDC, one asking for a specific time and the other that said live. He pressed live.
“Tie all broadcast streams into one and reroute to Savanna Levin's office,” he blurted. His face suddenly appeared online. If he was doing things correctly, which he knew he was, his face would appear on every HDC and vid screen in every network out there. The only problem was that it was a little past one in the morning and he hoped that at least one person was up late to hear his speech, whatever it may be.
He held up some papers, seeing himself do so on the HDC in front of him. He moved the papers in closer to the HDC, pointing with his index finger at the words, “The Kill Off”. They were being shown clearly on all vid screens throughout the remainder of Star Guild.
The Veil Rising Page 15