Spinward Fringe Broadcast 7: Framework

by Randolph Lalonde

  With a thought, the door stopped pressing down for a half second, enough time for him to get out from beneath it. He could feel the lifts ahead, and see a pair of heavily armoured Order Knights, trained framework soldiers that he’d never seen before, but he had the details he needed to know they’d slow him down. They could even kill him if he assaulted them head on. They had the firepower. He tried to communicate with their control nodes, but discovered they had the ability to resist him, and they sensed him trying to assume control.

  They were coming.

  Jake rushed the lift doors firing all the way, weakening the metal. The Order Knights surged into the centre from an adjacent hallway firing high-powered energy rifles that raised the ambient temperature to over six hundred degrees after the first volley. Two struck Jake’s shields, reducing them to twenty percent power.

  He didn’t bother firing back, but tossed a pair of inferno grenades in their direction before bursting through the red-hot elevator door. Jake fell down the shaft, missing the car two levels below and falling on top of the car four levels down to its right. Fire filled the shaft, an aftermath of the primary explosion that would either completely incinerate the Order Knights or force them to regenerate for several minutes. At the very least they’d return to life with no armour or weaponry.

  Jake was unscathed; his suit was made to compensate for long falls, hard impacts, and the heat he was exposed to. His shields were slowly recharging. The car he landed on started moving up rapidly, and Jake leapt to an emergency ladder. Another small lift was moving into place between him and the entry to the third level. He commanded it to move, and found Hampon in the system. “I’ve been waiting for this for a long time,” he said through Jake’s communicator. “Those Knights are a result of what we’ve learned from you, and soon they’ll add the intelligence and leadership the rest of our framework soldiers are lacking.”

  Jake felt Hampon connect to his neural node. It was as if a crushing hand was closing around his mind. “Looking to get your nose bitten off again?” he asked. Hampon’s hold weakened and the pressure disappeared.

  Jake reached back the way Hampon’s signal came and struck a solid data wall with heavy password protection. He was hiding behind the mobile garrison’s main computer. He could see it on the fourth level, behind a pair of Order Knights who took cover behind a powerful one-way energy shield.

  “You lose concentration when you get emotional,” Jake said to distract Hampon as he drew his nanoblade hilt. He turned it on, the long black blade came into being and Jake activated the fourth level doors. He cloaked and swung into the hallway.

  “A cloak suit won’t help you, I can see you wherever you go,” Hampon said.

  “I’m betting you didn’t give your Knights the ability to use computer systems. That’s too much power to give a pawn,” Jake replied as he ran along one side of the hallway. “They won’t see me coming.” There was only a small glimmer of hope that he was right, but he knew it was foolish. Instead of charging into the middle of the data systems centre, he took a left into an open compartment. The schematics told him the interior walls were thin, that there were several rooms adjacent with similar features. It would give him space to manoeuvre. More importantly, it would give him a place to frustrate Hampon.

  Putting his sense of urgency aside, he switched his cloaking systems to shied mode and calmly sat down on the bed. “If I were a complete idiot, I’d charge in there. Instead, I’m going to wait them out. I can’t approach this situation while you have the advantage.”

  “What?” Hampon replied. “Your people are dying,” he said, offering a feed of what was going on outside. Five order Knights led an assault against the marines from the Warlord. The Warlord crew made their own cover with energy shields and trenches dug with shaped charge grenades. Half the marines were dead, their ravaged corpses near the main entrance to the compound.

  Beam weapons fired by three Order Knights super-heated one of the Warlord’s engine pods as it swooped in to support the troops, forcing it to retreat. His daughter was amongst the Order of Eden soldiers, jumping between them at close range, firing her pistols constantly as she used them as cover.

  “How long can they survive?” Hampon asked. “How long can your daughter keep moving as she has since she landed on Tamber? The Knights will eventually fire into their own soldiers to kill her, then they will return her corpse to me so she regenerates in one of my prison cells. I could learn a lot by dissecting her.”

  He tried to compartmentalize his emotions as he watched Stephanie and Agameg lead the marines they had left into a round of return fire that took out dozens of Order soldiers. It wasn’t enough, there were over a hundred left, and the armour of the Order Knights repelled most of their fire. Grenades were thrown, but they got butted back or shot out of the air by circular attack drones hovering overhead.

  Alice was caught in the open for less than a second, but it was enough for an Order Knight to fire his beam weapon and sever her left arm. It didn’t stop her. She surged at the Order of Eden soldiers as her arm regenerated, screaming savagely as she put soldiers between her and the Knights and killed her way through their ranks.

  Blocking the transmission was the hardest thing Jake had ever done, but the final image it had to share with him was Agameg, leaning over to assist a fallen soldier. He didn’t see the grenade fall right behind him, and in a flash, there was nothing left but a scorched hole in the ground.

  Jake raged, surging to his feet.

  “I’ll spare them, halt the attack if you surrender to me, give me full access to your neural node,” Hampon offered.

  “There’s something you don’t understand,” Captain Valent said. “You forgot to install a soul when you built me, and anger found a home where that should have been.” Jake let his anger steel him, drive him to concentration, and he reached out to the entire garrison until he could feel all the systems at once. “Jonas lived with anger after getting back from his first war. He learned how to temper it on the First Light, and I learned how to be angry on the Samson. I’m at my best when I’m furious.” He could feel Hampon in the system, reaching out through the main computer. Jake clutched the systems surrounding it and reduced Hampon’s reach as if he were a flaming taper that he only had to grip in his fist to reduce to an ember. “I’m coming for you.”

  He stuck a pair of shape charge grenades to the ceiling, set the timer for five seconds, took the rest of his incendiary grenades out of his pocket then ran across the hall, throwing all five of them at the foot of the shield protecting the Order Knights. Jake turned all the garrison’s systems on, drawing power away from the shield protecting the main computer core and ducked behind a primary bulkhead.

  Explosions ripped through the garrison, and Jake knew the shield for the computer was down. He could sense that the diminished shield was enough to protect the Order Knights from the explosion. They were ready for him.

  The thin walls between the administration rooms and crew quarters were misshapen and shredded by the force of the explosion. Jake ran as quickly as he could, firing between the Order Knights towards the computer core’s main column.

  The enemy soldiers fired rapidly, scoring several shots on Jake through the gaps in the walls. The last pair of energy rounds struck Jake in the shoulder and arm, overheating his armour and burning him to the bone. His framework system shut the surrounding nerves down while he regenerated, but not fast enough to keep him from feeling the initial pain and screaming.

  He forced himself to leap towards the hole he’d blasted in the celling in the cabin across the hall, and barely caught it with his working hand. He hurriedly pulled himself up and scrambled away from the hole.

  The shots he’d fired at the computer core had hit their mark. Jake could reach Hampon directly. He was no longer hiding behind the ship computer, or manipulating the communications systems leading outside. He stood up and marched down the hall towards him. “I’m coming to grant your death wish, Hampon,” Jake said,
fighting for a grip on the neural node he felt inside the man’s mind.

  An Order Knight stepped into view at the end of the hallway. Its mind was completely invisible to Jake. He narrowly dodged a searing bolt of energy, ducking into a side room. He knew he’d find no lengthy reprieve there. Jake turned up his suit’s strength augmentation and charged the thin wall between him and the Knight, ripping through the cheap metal as though it were tissue paper.

  One shot struck Jake in the side. His armour protected him from most of the burn, but pain shot through his left side. He collided with the Order Knight and caught him behind the knee with his foot as he pushed him to the deck. Jake followed him down, shoving his rifle aside and rapid firing his sidearm at the neck of the soldier.

  The Order Knight punched upwards and caught Jake full in the faceplate. The single blow dented the protective metal inward and snapped Jake’s head back so hard that he felt it in his shoulders. He struggled to get control of the soldier, and needed all his strength to pin its arms against its chest as violently sparking rounds from his pistol burned through the Knight’s armour. The Knight twitched and writhed as the thermite burned into its neck and chest.

  Jake picked up the fallen Knight’s rifle and shot at it until it was reduced to a white hot smouldering pile. It took less than twelve seconds. He tried to turn towards the hall leading to Lister Hampon and discovered he couldn’t move.

  “I have you, Jacob. Rage may fuel you,” he said as he commanded Jake to walk down the hall into the dark seating area, “but violence distracts you.”

  Jake struggled to regain control, fighting the vice holding his mind. “You won’t imprison me for long,” Jake said. “I’ll always find a way to escape, and I’ll never stop hunting you.”

  “I know.”

  He became aware of his hands moving over the rifle, changing the settings on the Knight’s weapon to overload and explode in a contained area.

  “That’s why I’m going to destroy you,” Hampon said. “Some of us need to kill for our freedom. You never had to. You could have walked away from your fight at any time. You could have been free, but you turned on your old masters like a rabid dog instead.”

  The rifle’s power systems began to transfer energy to the pulse emitter, building a charge that would go critical in less than a minute. He didn’t allow himself to be baited into the conversation Hampon was trying to start. Jacob Valent had few regrets, and they were none of Lister Hampon’s business.

  He looked at the man standing in the middle of a room made for dozens of crewmembers to control and monitor a small army. He was as tall and angular as Jake remembered, perhaps a little younger. Hampon had a talent for looking composed, that hadn’t changed, and it gave Jake an idea. “You’ve always been alone, haven’t you?”

  “What?” Hampon asked, caught off guard by the off-topic question.

  “On the Overlord when I met you, at the head of the Order, and even before, always alone.”

  Jake felt Hampon’s control slip a little and regained control for long enough to move his arms and twitch in another direction, but Hampon had him again before he could throw the rifle and run. He’d have to try something else that didn’t take as much time.

  “You’re so much more intelligent than anyone could have expected,” Lister said, laughing. “I think that’s why-“

  “Never got married, never had children, probably goes back all the way to a child on the playground alone, watching the other kids and imagining what it would be like to-”

  “You have nothing we haven’t given you!” Hampon burst.

  It was just enough of a slip for long enough for Jake to force his framework body to destroy his neural node. Jake deactivated the explosion radius limitation on the weapon’s control panel and tossed the rifle at Hampon.

  Jake sprinted for the hole he’d crawled out of. The Order Knights he left behind were ready for him, firing as soon as his feet hit the deck. He took a shot in the left shoulder but ran for the elevator shaft, jumping and catching the ladder with his right.

  A wave of pressure and heat washed over him, crushing Jake through the side of the elevator shaft.

  Chapter 55

  Three Days Later

  “I see armour!” shouted a Sunspire soldier from one of the rubble pits. The explosion that decimated the large escape ship three days before caused a chain reaction within, unleashing enough force inside to reduce it to scrap and slag. There wasn’t a single hallway or compartment intact. Alice and most of the Warlord crew hadn’t left the site.

  Stephanie ran over to the soldier. “Don’t shout out, use comms, we need to see what we’ve found for sure before we get a crowd,” she said. “Besides, it could be another one of those super-soldiers.”

  Alice ran towards the pit and was stopped by Finn and Agameg. “You might not want to see this,” Finn said. “Remember what our scans found.”

  Frost walked over in tall, mechanized armour, carefully stepping around the debris. “I’ve got a detailed scan, there’s a girder in the way. I’ll move it so we won’t have to cut him.”

  Alice watched as Frost bent down and pried at the metal slowly. “I have to see him. He’s going to be alive, and I know he’ll want to see me.”

  Frost pulled at the tip of a twisted girder, the sounds of metal scraping on metal and bending steel making most of them cringe. “I’ve got it, pull him free,” he said.

  The soldiers pulled at something carefully and an outcry surged from the onlookers as they backed out suddenly, with what exactly, Alice couldn’t see. She concentrated enough to get a scan and panicked as she realized they’d pulled nothing more than a bit of his spine, shoulder and his upper cranium free.

  “Don’t let her through!” Stephanie cried.

  Alice wouldn’t be stopped, and, regardless of tear-blurred vision, she managed to push and squeeze her way past everyone. “You don’t understand!” she screamed as Stephanie and Ayan caught her. “We’re not human. We don’t even play by the same rules.”

  “She’s seen,” Frost said sullenly. “Let her in close so she can say goodbye.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ayan said through her own tears. “I know you were hoping.”

  Alice pushed her off and fell to her knees beside her father. “Please, please tell me there’s enough,” she said as she touched Jacob Valent’s exposed skull through his broken headgear. She couldn’t feel anything.

  “We tried,” Ayan said. “I’m so sorry, Alice.” She was repeating herself, something a lot of people had been doing around her for the last several days.

  “There’s got to be something left, the top of his head is here,” Alice said. “We can heal people, especially each other.” A thought occurred to her, and she retracted her vacsuit gloves.

  Alice gingerly touched the surface of exposed bone and gasped. “He’s still here, the framework did it, his mind’s been preserved.”

  She touched the exposed flesh beside his spine and jerked her hand away. “Ew, that bit’s been dead awhile.” Alice put both hands on the exposed part of his cranium and tried to block out everything around her. “I’m going to bring him back,” she whispered as she felt the framework system preserving his brain. The instant she sent power into it, the few emitters left inside his skull surged to life, using all the energy she could provide to rebuild other emitters, to grow the framework system.

  Alice channelled all the power her vacsuit could provide, and heard the crowd gasp and shift as oddly coloured bone began to form. She looked to her right, where Frost stood in his suit and said. “I need more, a lot more.” She pointed at a power socket on the left leg and said. “There! That! Take the cap off!”

  Stephanie hurriedly pulled the cap off and Frost stepped in closer. Alice jerked as she touched the socket and channelled the energy through a circuit in her framework body into Jacob Valent’s. In seconds he regenerated, appearing freshly whole in the middle of the crowd. His regeneration was faster than she expected, much like her own
framework system.

  Jake struggled to remove his headgear, and Alice helped him pull it off. The rest of his face reformed, and he looked up at her, stunned.

  “You remember me, right?” Alice said hopefully, sniffling and crying. “Please tell me your brain isn’t too scrambled! Look at me, and just say the first name that comes to-“

  “If you’ll let me answer,” Jake said. “You’re Alice.”

  She bent down and squeezed him. “Thank you for not leaving me, thank you so much for not dying.”

  Applause and cheers went up as the news of Jacob Valent’s survival spread through the crowd.

  “I’ll never leave you,” Jake replied, embracing her. Agameg came through the crowd and smiled.

  “I thought you were dead?” Jake said.

  “I thought you were dead,” he replied, cocking his head at Jake.

  “I saw a feed of you getting killed by a grenade,” Jake replied. He realized then that it could have been an illusion. “Fake. There was never a counter-attack,” he said.

  “After you went in?” Stephanie asked. “There was, but it was small. One armoured framework and a couple of squads of troops. We didn’t lose anyone.”

  Alice withdrew and helped Jake to his feet, her eyes widening as she realized that the only armour he had was a shoulder and neckpiece. She turned and backed into him to offer some modesty. “Um, awkward,” Alice said.

  * * *

  “He’s alive,” Captain Gregor McPatrick said as he entered the bridge of the Triton. Crewmembers were busy calibrating systems, coordinating repair crews, and doing any number of a hundred different things that contributed to the resurrection of the ship.

  Captain Terry Ozark McPatrick didn’t turn around, but let his uncle sit down on a command seat beside him. “I know, I got the message.”