Velocity Rising

by Angie Arland

  “Okay, okay, I get it. Look, if we don’t reconnect comms soon, Aiden will come looking for us and the point will be, as they say, moot.”

  “Too late!” Noah swung his rifle around and shot down a black spherical shape hovering in the doorway. The drone shattered apart, fragments floated off in the low-gravity. “Freck. I hope those things don’t live feed.”

  Ryder came to stand beside him. “Wonderful. You just blew up one of our nav-drones. We’d better turn comms back on. Now. They’re going to want to know what just happened.”

  Karson looked at her imploringly. “Okay, but are we clear on this? We keep it from him?”

  Ryder sighed. “Fine. I don’t like it, but we’re agreed…for now.” She lifted her forearm to access the comms, and they both heard the distinct clicks as external communications reconnected.

  “I said ‘do you copy?’” Aiden’s voice blasted through the comms.

  “We copy. We’re fine, sir,” Karson said in a hurry.

  “One of the drones disappeared off scope near your location—”

  Noah swore to himself. “Yeah…about that, sir…I, uh, this is embarrassing, I…discharged my rifle when I saw the drone. It came up on us, and I was spooked. I am spooked. This place is kind of creepy like that, you have to admit.”

  “That doesn’t explain why you and Ryder were off comms for almost five ems.”

  “Maybe where we’re investigating has some kind of Faraday shielding? All these alien alloys and stuff. We didn’t find anything of interest though. We’re just about to head to the next deck. Uh, we still have Spero, and we were just going to keep her with us.”

  “Change of plan. You and Ryder return to our position. We need assistance.”

  “Sir?” Ryder cut in, concern in her voice.

  “We’ve found something…or someone, actually, inside a tank. They seem to be in stasis.”

  Karson looked at Ryder, their gazes meeting. If Aiden had found a tank, the possibility that it contained one of the Sam clones sent a shiver down his spine.

  “On our way, sir,” Noah said and hoped like hell he had made the right decision.

  “Grimes, Mason, you copy?” Noah called over direct comms.

  “Yeah, we copy,” Mason answered.

  “You guys find anything…out of the ordinary?” Noah was fishing, trying not to be too obvious.

  Ryder listened in, but she was trying to encourage Spero to come with her out of the dark lab. The dog didn’t want to leave the vats of Sam clones, so she was struggling with the tether.

  “Apart from a few frozen squids, nothing. These compartments are identical here though, a metal slab in each, but no labs to speak of.”

  “Yeah. We found pretty much the same,” Noah lied. “Karson out.”

  “Hang on,” Ryder said. “Karson, how do we explain ourselves when the recovery crews arrive and find the Sams?”

  “We’ll blast the controls and seal the door from the outside. No one will be the wiser and the crews can cut through the door. They’ll never know we were here.”

  Ryder stopped tugging at Spero and gave Karson a shake of her head. He could tell she was uncomfortable with this deceptive stuff. He knew it was against regulation and way out of her comfort zone, but Aiden was his friend. Sometimes you lied to protect them.

  Thirty

  A nav-drone in stealth mode had hovered for a few ems behind Weapons Specialist Karson and Communications Officer Ryder. Even though it emitted a low buzz, the silence of space enabled it to drift unheard; the darkness, to pass unseen—for the most part.

  The drone had streamed footage of a room lined with sealed glass receptacles, each containing a juvenile human. The drone amplified its receiver, transmitting the conversation between the two humans inside the laboratory.

  It interested Flea, the conversation. Why did they withhold information from their superior? The Cendent smiled, determining she would keep this bit of leverage to herself to inflict as much damage as possible. Her long fingers danced on the controls as she ran an encryption and transferred the footage to her personal holo.

  She recoiled when an alarm bleeped on the signals console and hurried to disable it before anyone was alerted, hoping it wasn’t too late. The long-range sensors had picked up a Terudithan escort vessel advancing on the hulking wreck. Flea tapped in the command sequence—the one Exodus had left to be used only for emergencies—and proceeded to remove the sensor logs. By the time the Terudithan ship reached its destination, she and the AEV Mark-I prototype would be far away, leaving the humans stranded.

  That would mean leaving the one named Harper behind as well. Flea pondered her choices. She had less than three ems to decide whether to let these humans live or die.

  Thirty-One

  Ever since he had run out of O2 in the LC, Aiden felt a little paranoid. He checked his levels, just like he had every five ems since leaving the ship. He strode around the perimeter of the room and arrived back at Kellanie and Harper.

  “How’s it coming?” he asked.

  “Same as last time you asked. We haven’t started the download yet,” Kellanie said, staring hard at the computer core. “We need to be patient. We’re dealing with alien tech here.” She turned to Harper and said, “Anything resembling a transfer port would be lovely.”

  “If there is one,” Harper muttered, then quailed at both their glares. “I mean, yes ma’am, I agree. I’m still looking.” Harper’s rifle floated on its tether while he crouched, searching through his backpack, which was magnetized to the floor. He removed a set of compact light-emitting diodes and placed them on the alien computer core. “Here come the lights…I hope.”

  “Wait,” Kellanie said. “Harper, I’ve found what I think is an access port.” She was floating, her boots about three feet off the ground. “Come look.”

  Harper moved to her position and turned down his boots, rising just enough to come alongside her. She indicated a small console near a large odd-looking panel.

  From what Aiden could tell from his viewpoint, the whole thing had what seemed to be old-fashioned nobs and dials. “Found something?”

  Harper glanced down. “I’m not sure that our interface is compatible. Grab my backpack, would you, sir?”

  Aiden fetched it and handed it up. Harper removed a short silver instrument and ran it over the access point. “These readings are hard to decipher.”

  Aiden used his holo to scan for life-signs again. The claw marks on the door were still in the forefront of his mind, and it wouldn’t let him relax for one frecking moment.

  “Try that one,” he heard Kellanie say.

  “I already did,” Harper replied.

  “We have to have the right adapter,” she said, hovering beside Harper.

  “Oh, we do? When was the last time you tried to hack Terudithan tech, may I ask?”

  “Just do your job.”

  “I would if you’d let me!”

  “Look here, you twerp…”

  Aiden tuned out and left them to their bickering while he checked on the tank. The girl…well, the woman—maybe she was a girl, maybe she wasn’t—hadn’t gone anywhere but, hell, he might as well ponder how she had ended up in the tank until McNeill arrived. He studied her in the semi-transparent green gel.

  Frozen in time on a derelict, torn apart squid ship. That’s my sort of luck, he thought.

  If the readings were correct and the green substance dated over thirty-cycles, then she’d been in stasis since the before the war. McNeill’s instruments would, of course, confirm this.

  “Here we are. Coming, coming,” came the doctor’s voice over the comms.

  Aiden turned to find the doctor approaching him, a medical scanner in his hand. “Nice of you to join us, Doctor McNeill.”

  “Yes, well, my, it appears you were right, Mister Lomax. This does seem to be worth the trouble.”

  “I’m hoping you can shed some light on ‘tank girl’ for us.”

  “Is that what we’re call
ing her?” Reece asked, standing nearby and unhooking a backpack. “Because to me, the green goo looks more like lime jello. I think I’m going to call her Jello-Girl.”

  McNeill held a white and silver device that was running arcs and beams of blue light across the…Tank Girl, Jello-Girl, whatever. “I’m picking up some tissue degradation,” he said, “but the subject is most definitely alive. The substance she’s submerged in is undisturbed from my initial scans. You are correct in assuming that the woman has remained inside for more than thirty cycles, perhaps as many as thirty-five.”

  “Great. Can we take her out?” Aiden asked.

  The doctor moved around the tank, scanning up and down with the device. “It’s risky. Have you found a mechanism to open it?”

  “Not yet. What if we just smash it open and pull her out?”

  Doctor McNeill shook his head. “Organ failure, depressed reflexes, lack of cognitive response due to prolonged low brainwave activity, all of which can result in stroke, seizures, failure to engage the cerebral cortex, full body paralysis, these are just to name a few potential outcomes.”

  “Okay, let’s get it on board. Fleet can work out how to open this thing.”

  “The whole tank?” Kellanie said through his earpiece. “Just no.”

  “No? Isn’t it our job to assist fleet scientists in finding a solution to the Terudithan plague?” Aiden’s let his anger get the better of him. Kella blocked him every step of the way and he wasn’t about to leave one of their own behind. He stood closer to the tank and looked up at the dark-haired woman inside. She looked so peaceful.

  “Over-reacting as usual,” Kellanie said, anchoring to the floor and approaching them. “I said no because we have no recovery equipment onboard. Who’s going to carry it?”

  Aiden bit his tongue. “I have Karson and Ryder on the way to help detach the thing and move it to the ship.” Aiden didn’t want to say it out loud, but he asked them to the computer core, not Mason and Grimes who were the real muscle in the crew, because he wanted Spero with him.

  How frecking selfish am I? he wondered.

  “This is mind blowing,” Doctor McNeill blurted, scrolling through readings on his medical scanning device.

  “What is?” Reece asked.

  “This green substance, it’s transmitting and receiving electro-chemical signals!”

  “Meaning?” Kellanie asked.

  “Meaning it’s potentially a two-way communication of sorts. I’ve never come across anything like this before, ever. I’m positive Fleet Command will want samples, at the very least. That is, if we are unable to transport it.” He locked eyes with Kellanie.

  “What is this green stuff anyway?” Reece asked. “It’s not jello then, huh? I didn’t think so.”

  “It’s merely an observation,” McNeill continued, looking at the tank, “but my guess is the substance supports and connects the barrier between human and whatever these artificial neurons are.” He leaned over to show Reece the holographic images hovering on his device.

  Reece, of course, appeared clueless.

  McNeill stared at the tank and the female inside. “It’s an open neural network with thousands of neurons firing at once—so fast they’re undetectable to the human eye. The applications for this are endless: science, medicine, physics, engineering. This ‘jello’ is a type of organic super-computer with the capacity to hold millions of terra-quads of data; in fact, this theoretically supersedes the quantum standard.”

  Aiden didn’t understand all of what the doctor said, but he did pick up enough to know it was imperative they get the tank aboard the AEV Mark-I. He’d prefer it with the woman inside the thing.

  “We leave the tank for the recovery crews,” Kellanie said. “I haven’t heard from fleet, but my guess is they’ll send a couple of haulers to pick this cruiser clean.”

  Aiden shook his head. “I’m not leaving her,” he said.

  “By all accounts, this is a fully-enclosed life support unit,” McNeill said before Kellanie and Aiden got into it. “It may weigh an absolute ton, but if we can remove it from the housing of this core, we won’t need to worry about the mass until it’s in the airlock; then the ship is quite capable of partitioning the gravity array to compensate for the extra weight.”

  “I agree with the doctor on this one.” Aiden tapped the transparent outer shell of the tank, half-expecting the woman inside to open her eyes.

  Karson and Ryder entered the hub with Spero between them. “What the hell did that to the door back there?” Karson asked.

  Spero pulled Ryder across the compartment to Aiden, and he knelt to receive her. “You had me worried, girl! Don’t run off like that again!”

  The hound panted and lifted her paw to his arm, her way of either apologizing or maybe telling him he needed to relax.

  “Trying to light the way for fleet recovery crews?” Karson laughed as he pointed to the lighting Harper had arranged around hub. “Maybe we should set up a table and invite some squiddies to play a round of poker.”

  Harper was too engrossed in the enormous computer core, where he now had wires and cables floating in coils around him like a giant bird’s nest. Kellanie had hovered back over to him and seemed to be dishing out unwarranted advice through direct comms.

  Aiden smirked. Kellanie was the opposite of Lauren in so many ways.

  Harper appeared to be complaining to Kellanie, pointing and making other hand gestures as he spoke. Aiden hoped like hell the SigsOp knew what he was doing. At least they wouldn’t be returning to the Fleet empty-handed, not this time; finding the tank was a genuine breakthrough for his crew.

  “Who have we got here, sir?” Karson joined him at the cryo-tank, while Ryder seemed to be avoiding his eyes, having moved off to talk with Reece.

  “Reece is calling her Jello-Girl,” Aiden said, “but I kind of prefer Tank Girl.”

  “How did she end up here? On an enemy cruiser?”

  Aiden glanced at the occupant of the tank. “Not a clue, but I’m hoping she can tell us.”

  “Maybe she could do with a more appropriate name, like Jane.” Karson tilted his head to the side as he studied the woman. “She looks like a Jane. Don’t you think?”

  “Jane? Fair enough. Okay…” He opened wide comms. “From now on, we’re calling her Jane.”

  McNeill grumbled something about it being of no consequence.

  “Jello-Jane?” Reece said with a chuckle.

  “No, Reece. Just Jane.” Aiden viewed the tank again. “Did you find anything in the labs?” he asked Karson.

  “Just rows of identical rooms. Each one contained a metal slab-kind-of table. No equipment of any kind or anything of interest…nothing like Jane here, that’s for sure. Nope, nothing like this. Isn’t that right, Ryder?”

  A small hesitation, then merely “nope” as a response to Karson.

  “That’s a shame,” Aiden said. “I was hoping we’d find something worthwhile in the labs too. We have Jane at least. Maybe Harper will get the download happening before we all die from CO2 intake.”

  “Working on it,” the SigsOp responded, an exasperated sharpness in his voice.

  Aiden motioned to the tank. “Anyone up to brainstorming a way to detach this and guide it to the ship without harming the contents?”

  Ryder stepped forward. “Sir, what if we used the mapping drones?”

  He peered at her and she looked away. “The drones?”

  “They use sixteen micro thrusters to maneuver, and they’ve mapped most of these corridors down to the debris. We’d need to create a program, so they work in unison and attach them at intervals around the tank, decrease their velocity and recall them to the ship, accounting for the tank’s dimensions. It’d be far easier than us pushing it while trying to navigate the dark and debris, sir.”

  “You came up with that on your own?” Doctor McNeill sounded impressed.

  “All by my little self, doc,” she said, snorting derisively.

  Ryder looked at Karso
n, and Aiden sensed something pass between them. He wasn’t sure if it was something romantic or otherwise, but everyone needed someone, especially out here in the endless reaches.

  He looked down at Spero, sitting at his feet and tethered to his EVA suit. She seemed quite settled after her little jaunt down the dark corridor.

  I have my someone right here, he thought.

  Thirty-Two

  The frozen corpse of a Terudithan soldier floated in the dark corridor a few feet ahead of her. Small Arms Specialist Zoe Grimes shined her plasma rifle’s light-beam at the squid. Its internal structure was exposed, as though uniform and flesh had been eaten away by a mass of microscopic organisms. She shuddered inside her EVA suit, hoping the bastard had died a slow, agonizing death. By the look of its half-torn face and bulging eyes, it did.

  “I think we should at least check out the shielded section,” Mason said in her earpiece over their dedicated channel.

  Grimes wasn’t resistant to the idea, but she didn’t want to piss off their C.O. either; she held a lot of respect for Aiden Lomax. He’d gotten them all through some hairy shit.

  “That’s not what we came for,” she said, prodding the alien’s frozen eye with the muzzle of her rifle. Without warning, the corpse exploded. Grimes jumped back as shards of frozen alien chunks hit her armor. The barrage lasted a few seconds.

  Mason’s laugh echoed in her earpiece.

  She realized then her partner had put a frecking plasma slug in the squid’s torso. She spun on Mason with her rifle aimed at his chest. “You bloody, frecking idiot! You could have killed me!”

  “Was worth it just to see the look on your ugly face,” he said with a grin. “Point that thing somewhere else.” Mason pushed the muzzle of her rifle aside.

  “Don’t ever do that shit again, man! Ever!” Zoe said, trembling with adrenaline and anger. She whirled about and stomped into the darkness, not even caring at that moment if Mason followed her. Checking her holo, she found the shielded room only twenty-five yards from their current position.