by R J Johnson
Seconds after Tate left, Emeline rushed to take advantage of the enormous porcelain bath there and soaked in the bubbles.
She had to admit, it was a beautiful apartment they had set herself up in. But it didn’t matter how pretty the gilded cage was – it was still a prison and she was being prevented from contacting her people.
Emeline had been exploring options for escape, but without her armbar, it was slow-going. There was no way to unlock the thumbprint reader within the apartment. Even low-tech tricks like using plastic-wrap and glue were useless against the professor’s security.
Her next thought had been to try and attack one of the guards who brought her food and take her chances. But she discarded that option after realizing that even if she managed to escape her room, she was still in the middle of the deadly Martian Outback with no way to get back home safely.
Instead she decided her best option was to wait and find out what was going on at Shangri-La. Being kidnapped was just another part of the mission, that’s all. Whatever experiments Dr. Hahn had been preparing to run on her were probably the same type of things that had been happening to Roxanne’s other disappearing employees.
The next question was – if the people who came here before Emeline weren’t famous like her, what happened to them? Where were they now?
Unfortunately, that was a mystery for another time. Until they let her out of this luxury apartment, there wasn’t much point to wasting energy worrying about things out of her control. When she saw an opportunity, she would take it.
She spent a sleepless night staring at the ceiling making and discarding plans.
When the morning came, she decided that she was going to make a move. She couldn’t allow the professor to keep her hostage like this.
She was working on the keypad to the door, trying to short it out when it beeped, and the door opened.
Emeline looked up to see Professor Benson and two security guards holding weapons.
“Good morning Ms. Hunan,” the professor said, his face lit up. “Were you able to sleep well?”
“I got no complaints,” she said, without opening her eyes.
“I don’t mean to disturb you,” the professor said, entering her room. “But, as I said, since you are our guest -”
“I feel a bit constrained for a guest,” she shot back.
His smile faded and he cleared his throat. “I promised you an explanation. I thought I could give you one as we take a tour of our home here?”
She wanted to get out of this hotel room and stretch her legs but appearing too eager wouldn’t help. It was better if she allowed him to impress her.
“It’d be nice to know why I can’t go home yet,” she remarked calmly.
The professor’s face lit up once again. “Excellent.”
He offered a hand, “Please, if you wouldn’t mind, follow me.”
She rose effortlessly off the bed and moved to exit the room and walk into the hallway, watching the guards carefully as she did so. The professor noticed her discomfort and gave her a gentle smile.
“They’re as much for your protection as they are for mine,” the professor said gravely. “I’m afraid there are quite a few of my people who believe you to be a threat to our way of life. They wanted me to put you to death the moment you arrived.”
“But you said no, huh?” she asked, not bothering to hide the edge to her voice.
“Part of being a leader means making unpopular decisions,” he said, indicating she should follow him down the hallway. She complied and fell into step next to him as they walked and talked.
“Besides, things were far worse during our early days when we had a massive drought to contend with. We spent three months with only three liters of water per person per day. That was only until we could get the recyclers back online, let alone have enough to finish the well.” He shook his head. “That was an unpopular time for me.”
He stopped for a moment and winked at her, “I even stared down a coup.”
She remained silent, hoping it would provoke him into revealing more.
“Then there was the time I told them what I planned,” the professor said, turning to continue to walk down the hallway. “That made me unpopular at first. But as we progressed closer to our goal, all their doubts and fears fell away. Now, I can ask my people to do anything for me and they would do it. Because I’ve earned that kind of respect.”
“It must be a nice validation after working so hard over the years,” she said.
The professor chuckled forlornly. “You have no idea.”
They arrived at a double door, and he pushed his thumb to the grey metal plate located next to it. The massive steel door slowly opened to reveal a massive park.
She gasped in shock, staggering at the sight in front of her.
She had seen Homeworld parks before (public spaces designed to mimic the greenery of the Homeworld for homesick Martians), but nothing like this. Thousands of trees, from every part of the Homeworld were planted everywhere. Dozens of birds, animals and wildlife wound their way through the thick underbrush.
It was all she could do to keep from sobbing at how beautiful everything was.
“This is incredible,” Emeline managed after a moment.
The professor watched her react to the natural beauty he’d cultivated on Mars. “It was a long road. This is only a fraction of what my wife and I have been building here over the last fifteen years. Would you like to see more?”
She looked down at the green carpet of grass below her gaping in awe. She looked back at the professor, her eyes shining.
“You bet your ass I want to see more.”
He was about to say something when an alarm began sounding through the complex. She looked the professor who grimaced and then checked his armbar.
“You’ll have to excuse me for a few moments. Our complex is under attack.”
“Attack?” she felt confused. “Who even knows you’re out here?”
“Barbarians,” he said. “Third-party pirates. There are many who want what we’ve built without doing it themselves.”
“Are we safe?” she asked.
The professor patted her arm. “Without a doubt. I’ve fortified our defenses here, making Shangri-La one of the most secure locations on the Red Planet. If you’ll excuse me…”
“Of course,” Emeline said.
The professor excused himself and moved over to meet with several of his aides who began whispering urgently to him. He glanced over at Emeline and back at them.
She didn’t like the look he gave her, feeling more precarious about her situation than ever before.
The professor walked over to her, a grim expression on his face.
“Ms. Emeline, I’m afraid you’ll have to come with me.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing… yet,” he said ominously. “Please follow me.”
The professor walked out the door of the Homeworld park, exited into the hallway where he looked back at her expectantly.
She swallowed and silently wondered to herself if she was about to wind up as one of the professor’s experiments – again.
Chapter Seventeen
Brace Yourself
Meade moved into position near the guard tower that protected the main entrance to Shangri-La. He tapped his comm device and looked back up to the rock outcropping.
“You ready?”
Two clicks back on the radio receiver told him that Kansas was set. He gunned the engine to the aerocycle and swallowed.
This was a gamble, but for Emeline, he was willing to do anything.
He opened the throttle, sending the aerocycle down the slope full speed toward Shangri-La’s gates. The guards saw him coming and shouted, activating the alarm.
A stream of .50 caliber bullets chewed up the red topsoil in front of him, barely missing him as he pulled back on the throttle, artfully moving the vehicle in a sidewinder S through his approach to the gate.
Meade could al
most see the guard’s individual features as he drew closer to the colony’s wall. At the last possible second, he yanked the throttle back and pulled up, forcing the aerocycle into a steep climb up and over the wall of the outpost.
The outpost’s turrets couldn’t keep up with his maneuvers as he dodged every lethal round coming at him. It was a close match between his skills and the processor on the defense turrets. The A.I. was basic and didn’t have much room for improvisation, but the longer he was out there playing with the turrets, the better the computer would get at predicting his movements.
Fortunately, he only needed to do it for a few minutes so Kansas could hack in and shut down the entire security system using Emeline’s virus.
A round pinged dangerously close to his aerocycle and he swallowed. Meade opened the comms to get an update from Kansas on his attempt to hack into the complex’s computer.
“Kansas, you get in yet?”
“Boy, give me some time,” the old man’s voice snarled over his headset.
He decided to swallow back the retort about how he was the one being shot at. He needed to concentrate, not throw out digs at people who were trying to help. The turret’s A.I. was catching on to his patterns faster than expected and found himself barely able to outpace the stream of bullets coming at him.
A .50 caliber round impacted the rear stabilizer to his aerocycle, and it nearly knocked him off the vehicle.
“Kansas!” he shouted. He didn’t care if he was bothering him. He didn’t have much time left. The security system’s A.I. was about to tear his aerocycle to shreds.
“Got it!” Kansas said, sounding triumphant. “You’ve got your window, use it.”
He didn’t wait for another minute. He opened the application on his armbar and hacked into the turret defense network. The turrets that had been tracking his aerocycle suddenly stopped firing and powered down.
“Nicely done Kansas,” he shouted in joy over his comm. “Come join me at the entrance and we’ll go in to find Emeline.”
“Meade?”
There was something off about Kansas’s voice and he found himself losing all the confidence he felt.
“Boy, they rigged the system, get out of here!” Kansas shouted over the comms. “It’s a trap…”
There was a hiss of static, and then nothing.
He glanced over to where Kansas had set up his outpost to hack the security system. A fiery-red bloom had appeared over the area where a missile had exploded. He could see several of the complex’s drones hovering overhead as the side of the canyon gave way. Rocks, boulders and dirt slide down the slope, covering the area where his mentor was set up.
Meade screamed in rage, knowing his friend couldn’t have escaped that in time.
And that was his mistake.
Without Kansas’s hack into Shangri-La’s transmitter, the security system rebooted and his aerocycle became exposed to the turret systems once again.
Several streams of .50 caliber rounds came his way, turning his vehicle into swiss cheese. The engine sparked, and failed, the aerocycle plummeting to the ground. Meade closed his eyes, as the vehicle crashed into the Martian regolith, throwing him clear of the doomed vehicle.
His body thudded to the ground, painfully and then bounced several times, scraping across the Martian dirt several times.
Alarms went off in his rebreather suit, telling him it had ripped and was losing pressure. He grabbed the stayputty from a tab on his belt and opened it, hoping to seal his suit before it was too late.
Meade sat up, looking down at his torso in dismay. There was no erosion on Mars, which meant rocks and dirt on the red planet retained their sharp, jagged edges. When he landed, the Martian regolith was able to tear through his rebreather suit like tissue paper.
He applied the stayputty wherever he saw a tear on his suit until he emptied the container, still too many rips left in his suit. He sat back, leaning his head against a rock, knowing the air in his suit was about to run out and he didn’t have many options left for rescue.
This looks like as good of a place to die as any, he thought to himself.
That’s when he saw three figures in rebreather suits approach from an open door in Shangri-La. He fumbled for his weapon, but the lack of oxygen was making his fingers thick and impossible to use. Meade dropped the gun, as the three figures loomed over him.
That was the last thing he remembered seeing before passing out.
Chapter Eighteen
Specimen One
Meade woke suddenly in a white room, completely naked save for a blanket thrown over his crotch haphazardly. He screamed, his last memory that he was about to die.
And for a moment, he believed he WAS dead.
He tried moving and winced, feeling a broken rib and several lacerations complain about the attempt. That was encouraging. He was clearly in too much pain to be dead.
Besides, he didn’t figure on the afterlife looking like an operating theater.
He was completely immobilized with straps securing him tightly to the operating table attached to his wrists and ankles. Whoever had brought him in from the Martian cold didn’t want him going anywhere.
Meade glanced around, trying to take stock of the room he was in. It was empty, save for the operating table he was lying down on and some mysterious looking medical equipment. He looked for his armbar, pants and hat, but they were nowhere to be seen.
“Anyone here?” he called out. It stood to reason someone was watching him. It was either that, or he really was dead.
The outline of a door appeared behind him and he craned his neck to see who was coming in He managed to make out the outline of a petite blonde woman, with a security guard behind her.
“Is the specimen ready?” the woman asked, fixing him with a cold stare.
“The specimen doesn’t even know who the hell you are,” Meade replied, trying to make light of his situation. “I seem to have lost my pants, but don’t worry, that’s not the first time that’s happened.”
She ignored him and turned to the computer on the side of the operating table, working with it. The hulking security guard, which he mentally nicknamed “Lurch,” loomed over him, growling.
He grinned up at the brute, hoping to make friends.
“Nice day, innit?” he asked, trying to sound conversational. “Seemed like a good day for me and my friends to take a ride out to the outback. Then of course, we stumbled on your little operation here, and my oh my, we had to get a closer look. I imagine that’s why you’ve got me all tied up like this.”
Lurch circled the table until he was looking down on him, watching him talk. The blonde woman snapped her fingers. The guard grabbed his lips, closing them.
“My name is Doctor Julie Hahn,” she began, turning toward him. “As you know, Coalition laws are quite strict on matters of piracy. Your attack on our outpost was a flagrant violation of those laws and as such, your life became forfeit the moment you stepped onto our land.”
She paused and cocked her head, as if examining a curious specimen. “You aren’t like the other Barbarians we’ve had in here. You’re much more refined. A recent refugee from New Plymouth perhaps?”
He didn’t respond, only staring back at her, wanting to see what she did next.
“Suit yourself,” the woman in the lab coat said. “It makes no difference whether you want to talk or not. The experiment proceeds.”
She turned back to the computer and began typing some more. “Kudos for installing such robust security software on your armbar. There aren’t a lot of people out in New Plymouth who know enough to take such measures. Because of that, I don’t know your identity. Would you mind telling me?”
Meade stared at her for a moment and narrowed his eyes. He wouldn’t tell this woman anything resembling the truth. But if he gave her something, perhaps he could get her talking and he could find out what happened with Emeline.
“Kansas Grayborn,” he said through gritted teeth. Kansas’ armbar was p
robably a hunk of twisted metal at this point. They wouldn’t know he was lying.
“Excellent,” she made a note on her pad. “Mr. Grayborn, welcome to Shangri-La. You’ve been selected to participate in an exciting new experiment that will eventually help to change the balance of power in the system.”
“Seems like everyone wants to do something about the Coalition and Consortium, but they always seem to truck along making people’s lives miserable,” he replied.
Dr. Hahn chuckled. “That demonstrates your short-sightedness Mr. Grayborn. The things we’ve been able to accomplish during our time at Shangri-La would turn your hair white.”
“I’m happy with my current hair care color,” he muttered.
She ignored him and pressed a button on the side of the table that stood him upright. She placed a syringe against his arm and inserted it into a vein. Blood began filling the reservoir as he winced.
She returned to the desk and placed his blood sample into the machine next to the computer.
“Mr. Grayborn,” she began. “In the interests of full disclosure, I thought you might be interested in what your sacrifice will help us accomplish.”
“Oh good,” he said, laying the sarcasm on thick. “And here I thought you people only like me for my blood.”
She ignored the quip. “The biggest problem our species faces right now is the rule of mediocrity over intelligence and logic. Because of humanity’s inherent tribalism, the only people able to rise to the top are the extraordinary bland or the incredibly extreme. Both are beholden to their base, making dialogue between the parties impossible. Humanity’s choice to embrace mediocrity has placed us all in mortal danger. We live in a world where those who rule us, fail us, constantly and in every conceivable way.”
“That’s a long walk to make the point that people and politicians suck,” he said.
“The problem becomes,” she said, ignoring his interruption, “the mediocre and corrupt damage our system a little at a time until events eventually spiral out of control and something like the Last War or Rosetta happen, and humanity is nearly wiped out.”