“Alright then. If there are no more delays, let’s go,” I dropped the head bag onto my face, waiting for it to seal and then hooking the oxygen hose up to the mask. “Good enough for you?” I asked sarcastically and then putting words to action headed out of the Flag Bridge. Behind me, I could hear the low urgent voices of my royal armsman team as they liaised with ship security but this time no one tried to stop me.
I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but I had every confidence that they would keep me and my family safe to the best of their abilities.
****************************************************
Malcolm Sagittarius frowned as he observed the heavy and obvious security presence outside what hacked security files had listed as the children’s quarters on the command deck—Vice Admiral Montagne’s children.
For a moment, the man who had been a crew chief for the better part of the last year hesitated with a slight hitch in his step all that was obvious on the outside. The Vice Admiral had to be stopped and he was the man to do it, but the idea of waging war on children, who would almost certainly fail to survive the administrations of the weapon in his hand, turned his stomach.
It was one thing for a man to say he would do anything to stop the return of the AI’s, and slay the servants of the latent machine gods that had literally helped the artificial intelligences enslave all of humanity. It was another entirely when the only path to stopping one of those men passed through the bodies of not yet one year old children.
Biological warfare was a dirty business, even when you were assured the agent you were using would only target members of a specific bloodline and leave all others unaffected.
Because of the heightened security presence, the crew chief knuckled his forehead as he passed the guards outside the children’s quarters and kept walking. He didn’t mind selling his life to reach his objective, but there was no point in throwing his life away if he wouldn’t even be able to make it through the door.
He would go to the Admiral’s quarters first and, if he was unable to find his target there, he would return here and make his final decision. At this point, walking away was still an option.
With a slight spring in his step, the crew chief whistled a jaunty tune under his breath as evidence of his immediately improved attitude. He decided that, regardless of the real situation when he returned, unless he could see his target he would later report security was too tight and he was unable to complete his mission.
The man known as Malcolm Sagittarius didn’t make war on children, he thought with conviction. It was as if a great weight had been lifted and, when he rounded the corner, it was as though the space gods themselves had decided to reward him for the rightness of his decision because right in front of him was his target.
****************************************************
My team had confirmed their location, and I was almost to Akantha and the children and still moving at a ground-eating pace. Our current speed was mainly to assuage both my security team’s concerns and my own. They were worried for me and I was worried for the kids. The odds that the bio-agent was targeted on Akantha I viewed as highly unlikely.
And it was just as unlikely that any of the mutineers had made it up to the level of the command deck. But that was the problem with mutineers: they were supposed to be on your side so they could be anyone and anywhere. I gave myself a shake; that way lay an almost crippling paranoia because once you were genuinely convinced that anyone could be out to get you it was a short step until you were suspecting everyone around you.
I caught sight of a crewman rounding the corner of the hallway. He looked up, meeting my gaze through the bodyguards that surrounded me. At first he looked surprised, and then he smiled and extended his hand for a handshake and stepped forward.
“Vice Admiral!” the crew man, a chief petty officer from his rank tabs, said while looking genuinely pleased. “Let me be the first to say that this is sure a surprise and a real pleasure, your Highness.”
I nodded at the man and held up a hand indicating I was busy and intended to bypass him—then my armsmen sprung into action.
“I’m reading a slight elevation on the bio-sensor,” one of the older armsman reported.
“Get down. Now!” shouted Sean, taking hold of my shoulder and shoving me to the ground while the rest of the armsmen in my personal guard immediately moved to make a wall between myself and the crewman.
There was the sound of something metallic hitting the metal grating of the floor.
“Grenade!” shouted an armsman, throwing himself towards it.
There was a muffled crump and a cloud of fog-like mist poured out of the grenade.
“There’s something in the—” the man on top of the grenade gagged, twitched violently, and then fell off the grenade slumping to the side and allowing the cloud to more rapidly fill the hall.
Blaster fire started echoing down the hall but, with my face pressed against the wall, I couldn’t see the action very well.
“Suffer not a machine to live!!” shouted the crew chief and there was another metal clang
“Plasma Grenade!” yelled an armsman, kicking forward. There was an explosion and the smoking corpse of the armsman came flying back—minus a leg—with his entire front a black, smoking ruin.
I yelped and swore as tiny blobs of plasma landed on my thigh, lower legs and forearm. I twisted and smacked at the still-burning flesh with my hands, only causing more damage—and pain.
“Pull back! Get the primary out of here,” shouted Sean, taking aim and firing into the inferno as two more pairs of hands started dragging me backward.
“Gah!” cried the crew chief as he was riddled by three separate blaster bolts yet, despite this, he still managed to backpedal and stagger around the corner of the hall.
“Faster!” said one of the two armsmen, dragging me away from the mist—which, thanks to the plasma grenade, had been reduced to half by incineration but was rapidly returning to its former size and now only feet away from me.
“Blast it, get this stuff off me!” I snapped to no avail. I was furious. I was injured because they’d restrained me at the first sign of danger and wouldn’t let me defend myself, then people had started dying, and now I was covered with still burning plasma. I don’t know if you’ve ever been burned, but I had been in the past and was again right at that moment. And until the nerves were completely burnt out, the agony never stopped.
A pair of armsmen, one of which was Sean D’Argeant, surged around the corner in pursuit of the mutinous assassin while the other two pulled me away from the scene of the attack. As soon as we passed through the first pressure door, the armsmen activated the door's lockdown, sealing off the region of the ship behind us and hopefully isolating the aerosol bio-agent.
“We need to get you down to Medical fast, your Highness,” said one of the men, leaning down.
I opened my mouth to respond when the other man went to town with his combat knife, scraping burnt and still-burning areas clean with the blade.
“Murphy, that hurts,” I snapped, trying to hold still. I was helped in this by the knife-wielder’s partner, who held me down, “Warn me next time.”
“Your safety is our first priority, Sir,” said the first armsmen, his words sounding like agreement but his tone indicating the exact opposite. Apparently they were going to do what they thought was in my best interest, whether that involved what I wanted or not.
Which was extremely irritating. If I hadn't needed a professional bodyguard team, I would have fired them immediately and had them replaced.
“Did we get him?” I hissed as they finished scraping clean the last of my burning wounds.
“He got through two patrols of Marines to reach you. Right now we have Lancer teams moving to intercept him and reinforce us,” the armsman reported tersely.
“What about my family—my mother?” I demanded as they helped me to my feet.
“As far as we can tell, everyone’
s safe. You were the target,” he said, hurrying me toward the lift.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“We need to get you down to Medical to make sure you haven’t been infected. Remember your children share many of the same DNA markers as yourself,” reminded the armsman, “the last thing we want would be for you to infect someone with a weak immune system.”
My half-hearted notion of turning back to check on things died stillborn, and I allowed the armsmen to escort me to Medical. It wasn’t just the right move for me, but for everyone around me.
“Order a full decontamination unit up here and prepare to transfer my family to the Lucky Clover. I don’t care if they have to be rolled out of this ship in six foot tall isolation bubbles in order to ensure their safety, I want them off this ship and in a secure location until we can determine the extent of the rot inside this fleet,” I said severely.
“Sean will want to run a decontamination first, and we’ll need to go over the shuttles before using them, Highness,” said the armsman.
I frowned. Sweet Murphy, but I was tired of this.
Fortunately, it was a quick ride in the lift up to Medical, Shortly after that, I was thrust into a decontamination unit and they were drawing so much blood and taking so many scans of my body that I didn’t have any more time to brood.
****************************************************
Malcolm Sagittarius swore as he backtracked his original route onto the command deck. If meeting the target like that had been a gift from the gods then the full team of royal armsmen had been the punchline of a divine joke. He grimaced, looking down as he trailed blood from a blaster wound in his thigh that had torn itself open from all the strain he’d put it through. As he moved, he tried to ignore the smell of burnt flesh permeating his surroundings—his burnt flesh.
He felt a wave of dizziness sweep over him and had to reach out a hand to steady himself against the wall as the pain in his right side became almost crippling. It helped with the dizziness by almost incapacitating him, but it did help.
“I think I got him,” he muttered to himself, “I’m sure of it.”
It had been close, but he was all but certain the bio-agent had enough time to reach the Admiral. The only wrinkle was that when he was sure the Royal Armsmen were going to kill him, his training had taken over and he’d found himself throwing a plasma grenade into the mix.
He’d gotten at least two of them, which filled him with pride at overcoming one of the people’s most intractable foes: the security service that protected the Royal House during war, assassination and internal strife. However, even though he’d taken down two armsmen that still left the rest of the prince’s team and the prince himself.
“I’m sure I got him,” he gasped pushing off the wall. Now all he needed to do was make it into a lift. After that, the builder’s codes built into every single Dreadnaught-class Battleship—which had been provided to him courtesy of his ministry contact—would see him out of range of his current trouble.
After what seemed like a lifetime, he could finally see his destination. If he could just reach the lift he would cover his tracks using those same builder's codes, go anywhere on the ship without being tracked, and get off this—
The quad of Lancers that appeared between him and the lift instantly crushed all his hopes and dreams. If he had been in better shape he could have run. If he’d been better armed and armored he might have been able to fight his way through, even as wounded as he was.
Sadly that, was not to be. Like agents before him, he’d been called by the space gods to make the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of the people. For a second, his shoulders slumped before they straightened.
If he was doomed to die then he would do it as a man, not a rat scurrying from shadow to shadow. The time for hiding in the shadows was over.
If he was going to die then he was going do it in style. Reaching down into his pockets, he grasped his last two grenades and clenched them with all the strength left in his weakened body.
“Hello, my name is Indigo Montoya; the Royal Family killed my father during the Reconstruction; prepare to die!” he shouted, pushing his body forward into a staggering run.
He only hoped to get close enough to do some damage. Maybe if these were green, half-trained recruits pressed into service due to the crippling losses the fleet had suffered over the past months, he would have a chance. That’s all he asked of the gods: was a chance.
When the first two Lancers dropped a knee and took aim while the two behind them presented their blaster rifles with smooth efficiency, he knew it was not to be. The gods have forsaken me, he thought, right when an oxen kicked him in the chest and he found himself staring up at the ceiling. It took him a dim moment to realize he’d been hit by blaster bolts.
“They giveth, and they taketh away,” he whispered, feeling blood on his lips.
He barely had the strength to pull his hands out of his pockets.
“Grenade!” shouted one of the Lancers.
He smiled, knowing he’d had a good run. As he released the triggers on both of the grenades, the world erupted into a brief flash of fire before going dark.
Chapter 49: Medical Foam and Akantha
“Sweet Crying Murphy, how did an assassin reach all the way to the command deck!” I demanded as soon as I’d received word that my family had successfully transferred on a cutter to take them over to the Lucky Clover 2.0.
“Admiral, if you could just sit still in there while we run another decontamination process, we would appreciate it,” said Dr. Presbyter.
“No, I will not sit still until I know for sure that—” my words were cut short by the liberal administration of a face-full of decontamination foam.
“There’s a good patient,” Presbyter said with satisfaction while I struggled to breathe, “we’ll just run a few more cycles while we prep you for transit back to our medical research station.”
“I’m issuing a direct order,” I said, spitting out a mouthful of foam, wiping my face clean, and using a free hand to guard my eyes from flying foam. “Get me out of here and back to a com-terminal.”
“The situation is being contained, and the Captain of this ship has things well in hand. The most important thing right now is first to make sure you do not die because of a bio-terminator, and secondly,” he said lifting a finger to cut me off when I went to speak, “to make sure that if you are infected so you do not expose anyone other than yourself. The last thing we need is a lethal pathogen sweeping the Flagship. So it looks like you’re going to be here for a while, Admiral.”
“You mean to tell me the mutineers have successfully removed this fleet’s commanding officer from his post?” I asked expressionlessly.
“The way I hear it, the Admiral of this fleet was the one who overruled his security team, placed himself in danger, and effectively removed himself from command, hmm?” Dr. Presbyter drawled, unperturbed by both what and who he was saying it to. “Might want to consider the needs of the fleet next time you find yourself in a similar situation. In the meantime we’re just going to have to follow Confederation Fleet bio-containment protocols. We’ll get you out of here as soon as possible, Sir. Don’t worry.”
I grit my teeth and sat back down. Clearly I was getting nowhere fast. At this point the only thing I could do was further degrade my esteem in the eyes of anyone in Medical who saw or heard me impotently raging.
Silently fuming I stood, turned left, turned right, circled, bent over, scrubbed and generally did whatever they told me as they ran me through the third decontamination cycle.
****************************************************
“Good news: you weren’t infected, Admiral,” Presbyter said as soon as I was released—seventy two hours later—before sending me a medical release file and promptly leaving the room. Clearly, he thought he had more important things to do than deal with his commanding officer.
“Now wait just a minute,” I barked at his retre
ating back, “what do you mean 'I wasn’t infected?' I went through three rounds of procedures and so much testing I was practically turned into a pincushion that I—”
A large, moving object knocked the wind out of me as I was grabbed, spun in a circle, and swept off my feet.
“You had me worried!” Akantha said as she abruptly set my struggling form down to better take a look at me.
“I had you worried?!” I exclaimed.
“Yes, you,” she said punching me in the arm.
“Ow! That hurt,” I said, swiveling my body to pull my arm away from her.
“Don’t be such a baby,” Akantha instructed.
Before I realized it, the good doctor had made good his escape and it was only at that moment that I realized how sly and underhanded Presbyter really was.
I sighed.
“I see you’re not happy to see me,” Akantha shook her head.
“I’m always pleased to see you, baby,” I said, placing a hand around her back and leaning in for a kiss.
“Stop—” her words were cut off in the most effective way possible.
“That’s better,” I said with a grin as I pulled back. And at the sight of her slightly bewildered frowning face I couldn’t help but add, “You wouldn’t deny a warrior his proper reward for risking life and limb in defense of his family, would you?”
Akantha snorted loudly. “The children have been missing you,” she informed me.
“The kids, is it?” I smiled.
“I have a shuttle prepared,” she said, gesturing toward the door and then smirked, “unless you’d like to stay here for a while longer. I can always come back.”
“No, that’s quite alright. I’m ready to go now,” I said, quickly snatching up my uniform jacket and hurrying after her. “So tell me how things have been.”
Admiral's Nemesis (A Spineward Sectors Novel: Book 11) Page 40