by Jay Allan
“Very well, Lieutenant. Continue. And report anything you find immediately. Anything.”
“Yes, sir.” Javais gestured for Bescalon to continue, and he followed his subordinate closely. The section of carved rockface continued on for another ten meters.
Suddenly, Bescalon stopped. Javais almost admonished the private, but then his own eyes focused on what had halted the Foudre Rouge. It was a door, a glimmering silvery metal showing in the light of the portable torches, one that showed no signs of rust, nor even of age.
Imperial alloy.
The door was a find, of course, almost incontrovertible evidence that they had found some kind of ancient facility. But that wasn’t what gripped Javais’s stomach, what overrode decades of antifear conditioning and left the veteran Foudre Rouge officer barely able to remain focused. It was nothing more than a small light that did that.
Imperial artifacts were sometimes the merest scraps, while others were more substantial ruins. But there was something on the door in front of him different from any find he’d ever heard of. It was a small indicator light, no more than two centimeters in diameter.
And it was on, glowing in a soft red color.
Whatever was behind the door in front of him, whatever remains from imperial times, it was still operational, at least on some level.
As dangerous as the mission had been, the hazard level had just increased tenfold. Javais stood in place, struggling to return to the shelter of his conditioning, to regain the iron-hard control expected of a Foudre Rouge officer. Then he tapped his comm unit again, activating the main line.
“Agent Caron, we found something. I think you need to see this, sir. Immediately.”
* * *
This is amazing…
Caron stepped into the corridor. He was scared to death, but curiosity—and the realization of just how much power and advancement would be his if he was able to return to Montmirail with the artifacts that almost certainly lay inside the imperial facility—kept him going. He’d been stunned to see that the entrance from the cave had appeared almost as new, and even more shocked when he’d actually set eyes on the small status light. The Foudre Rouge had found more than a bit of well-preserved imperial alloy. They’d found a system that was still under active power.
And that meant the facility had some kind of energy generation, a reactor still functioning after centuries without human activity.
He’d considered trying to blast the door open, but he didn’t dare deploy explosives powerful enough to destroy an armored door constructed of imperial alloy. He couldn’t risk flooding the facility…or bringing the towering rock wall down on his people.
Then, he’d reached out and touched the door, and realized almost immediately that his hand had passed through some kind of sensor field. The door opened at once, triggering another duel between Caron’s lust for power and his cold fear.
He’d gestured toward the first Foudre Rouge trooper, and followed it up with a direct command. “Go in, Private. See what is inside.” To him, Foudre Rouge were almost manufactured resources, created to be used, and if necessary, expended.
The private hesitated for just an instant, an attestation to the fact that Foudre Rouge, while massively conditioned, were still human, and as such, not utterly without fear.
Caron watched the soldier step inside, and he peered in, his eyes picking up what they could as the trooper’s helmet lamp lit up the murky blackness. It was a small compartment, no more than two meters square. An airlock, Caron realized. He wondered if it was still completely operational, and he decided it probably wasn’t…right before an interior light flicked on.
Caron felt as though his heart skipped a beat, and he stood still for a moment, regaining control over his emotions. A functional imperial facility was a find that could change history, and lead not only to victory in the next war with the Confederation, but to total annihilation and conquest of the hated enemy, even dominance of the entire Rim. The rewards for those who made it possible were almost too immense to calculate, and once again, Caron’s greed for position and power overcame the terror working around the edges of his mind.
“Let’s go, Lieutenant.” Caron had regained a grip on himself, enough not only to push the Foudre Rouge along, but to go with them. The realization of just what his people had possibly found drove him forward. Still, he was cautious, on edge. A working airlock and a few lights didn’t mean there are imperial bots waiting in there, weapons charged.
But then, something happened to the other expeditions.
He waited until the lead private and Javais had stepped inside, and then he followed them, turning and watching as the last two troopers came up behind. He looked around, his eyes focusing as Javais said, “Here, sir. It looks like an airlock control to me.”
Caron nodded, realizing it was mostly a gesture to himself. He took a deep breath, and then another, becoming a little lightheaded from the oxygen rich mixture in his suit. “See if it works.” He fought back the fear, and the haunted feeling that seemed to descend all around the small party.
Javais poked at the controls, struggling for a few seconds with his large cumbersome gloves. Then, the outer door closed. There was a loud sound, like metal sliding across metal…and the water level in the tiny room began to drop. It took perhaps twenty seconds, and then the five men stood there silently.
Javais felt a little wobbly for a moment, until his suit adjusted to the relatively sudden pressure reduction. Then, perhaps ten seconds later, the door in front of them slid open, revealing a corridor beyond.
There were lights on the ceiling, or at least illumination coming from some kind of panels there. The fixtures themselves looked like the rest of the metal roof, save for the light they emitted. It looked like about half of them were functional and half were dark, though that was hard to ascertain for sure when he could only see about eight or ten meters.
The entire group stood for a moment, looking out on the long hallway in front of them with varying degrees of astonishment. Then Javais gestured toward the nearest private and snapped out a command. The Foudre Rouge stepped out of the small compartment and into the corridor.
Caron could see from the seemingly damaged light panels, the facility wasn’t entirely functional. But there was no doubt there was still active power generation, and that much of the structure appeared to remain functional and more or less intact.
“Check atmospherics, Lieutenant.” Caron was doing that himself, but he wanted confirmation. A moment later, he had it.
“Human normal, within one point three percent, sir.”
Caron’s numbers were the same. The air in the facility was not only breathable, it was closer to human ideals than Montmirail’s. He was still suspicious, though his bio detectors read negative across the board for harmful pathogens—for any pathogens. There was no trace of any gas, any fumes, any substance at all harmful to human life. But Caron still hesitated. It felt safer to stay in the suits…but the undersea survival gear was even more unwieldy in the dry corridors, and staying on bottled air would place a sharp time constraint on their exploration.
“Private, pop your suit.” It was cold, arrogant, to expect the Foudre Rouge to test the air like some kind of scanner. But the soldier obeyed without question. And Caron would never have imagined he should hesitate to risk one of the clone soldiers before himself.
The trooper stepped out of his suit and breathed deeply, looking entirely unscathed. Caron waited perhaps another minute, long enough to be sure the oxygen was real and to confirm the absence of any deadly gasses or the like. Then he popped his own suit.
He repeated the soldier’s actions, confirming to himself the strange freshness of the air, so much cleaner and crisper than the recycled mix pumped through the Union’s spaceships. He waited as the others stepped out of their own suits, and then he looked down the corridor.
It was time to explore. Time to see just what kind of wonder they had found.
Chapter Seventeen
Free Trader Pegasus
Somewhere in the Endless Sea
Planet Aquellus, Olystra III
Year 302 AC
“Andi!” Gregor swung again, his massive arms, one of them now mechanical and even more powerful than the enormous hunk of muscle remaining on the other side, hurled the massive prybar into the door. He’d been struggling to get onto Pegasus’s bridge, and his initial efforts to open the shorted out lock mechanism quickly gave way to a primal fury. Gregor tended to fall back on brute strength whenever anything else failed, most likely because that had usually worked for him.
But it wasn’t working this time. The armored door protecting Pegasus’s bridge had been Captain Lorillard’s doing, the response to an incident…what was it, five years ago now?…when rivals had almost managed to hijack the then-Nightrunner. It had been the kind of thing that seemed to make sense, but Gregor couldn’t remember it ever being useful, and now it was actually threatening Andi and Barret, and maybe all of them.
He swung again, a blow so titanic it actually dented the reinforced chromium-alloy door, as well as letting out an almost-deafening clang. But the door held. It had been designed to resist forced entry, and any power a human being could exert against it, even a towering giant like Gregor.
“Let me up there, Gregor.” Lex Righter was crawling over the wall turned temporarily into a floor. He almost stumbled on one of the antigrav handholds, but he caught himself and came right up behind Pegasus’s largest crew member. “You’re never going to bash your way through there, not in the time we’ve got at least.” Righter put his hand on Gregor’s arm and pushed the giant aside, something he could only encourage and not force, he knew. If Gregor didn’t want to move, nothing Righter did was going to move him.
Gregor turned and glared at the engineer for an instant. Righter realized what a tightly knit group Pegasus’s crew was, and also that he was the newest member…if he really was even a member.
But he also knew he was the one most likely to get into the bridge in time. To save all their lives.
The others had all listened to his instructions, with reluctance in some instances, but in the end, they’d been able to patch up the leaks in the engineering section and the lower deck. But unless they could get onto the bridge and finish the job…and activate the navigational auxiliary control circuits from there, they were all going to die. Pegasus’s systems were badly damaged by the water, and the bridge controls were the last hope.
He reached out, his fingers moving across the electronic locking system. He was risking a shock, perhaps a dangerous one, but he figured they had maybe four minutes to get the positioning jets firing to stabilize their depth. After that, it would be a very short time, perhaps only seconds, before the increasing depth and water pressure crushed the ship and they all died very unpleasant deaths. Cold realities like that made it far easier to prioritize concerns. And worrying about electrocution from soaking wet circuits was surprisingly low on that list just then.
He reached inside, his finger trying to reach a small cable. He could feel it at the end of his index finger, but he was having trouble pulling it in. He was making wild guesses, on what to do, how to get the door open as quickly as possible. If he could pull the small wire out, and reroute it the way he wanted to, it would short things out worse than the water had, but his gut told him it would also open the bridge door.
He was far from sure it would work, but he gave it two chances out of three, and considering the lack of other options, he’d gone all in on that one.
If he could pull the wire in. He looked around, even as he pushed his finger in farther. There were no tools nearby, nothing that would help. But he almost had it. He managed to pull it a few millimeters, and then his finger slipped off the wet casing.
Damn!
He reached in again. Gregor was still standing right behind him, but he didn’t think the huge man had a chance of shoving his fingers into the small opening. And everybody else was finishing up the patching job, all of them doing the jobs he’d laid out for them, pushing aside any resentment they still held for a chance, however tenuous, of survival.
If anyone is going to get onto the bridge, it’s you…
He pushed his fingers back in, jamming his hand painfully on the jagged metal around the opening. He could feel the sharp edges slicing into his flesh, his palms became slick as blood poured out into them. He ignored it all, the pain, the fear. He had to succeed. He had to do it for himself, because it was his only chance for survival. And he felt a driving need to save his new shipmates, though none of them seemed especially fond of him.
He had to save Andi, too…because he knew, however much he resented her more or less kidnapping him, or how she’d thrown him into the hold and beaten and threatened him, deep inside, he knew one thing with irresistible certainty.
Andi Lafarge had saved his life. And the sober, more or less functional Lex Righter paid his debts.
He stretched his fingers out, struggling to get a tenuous grip on the errant cable. It slipped from his grasp, once, twice…and then he managed to get ahold of it. He pulled, moving slowly and cautiously, despite the fact that he was almost out of time. If the thing slipped away one more time, it was over. He knew that with a certainty so heavy, it felt like a neutron star.
He felt the cable moving closer, and he managed to press it against the inside of the lock mechanism. He slid one finger from his other hand inside, grabbing hold, and pulling it through the small opening. He gripped it hard, not allowing himself to forget it could still slip back inside. He reached around, grabbing for the small clippers in his pocket, and he stripped the tiny cable, exposing the live metal below. A hundred ways to deal with the lock slipped through his mind, his vast pool of engineering knowledge mobilizing to face the problem at hand. But there was only one thing he could do quickly enough. Connect the two leads together and burn out the mechanism.
And hope that the door froze in the open position and not closed as it was then.
Also, that I don’t fry myself…
He took a deep breath and moved the wires, closing his eyes at the last second as he pushed them together.
He fell backwards, a wave of pain, followed almost instantly by numbness, ripping up his arm. He landed on his back, on the wall about two meters from the lock. He was stunned, verging on the edge of unconsciousness for a few seconds. But something held him there, a realization that only he could save them all. His chest rose up, and he filled his lungs with air, ignoring the considerable pain that accompanied the act.
He started to get up, and he turned his head toward the door, almost afraid to check and see if he’d succeeded.
“You got it open!” The voice was Anna’s, a startled shout as she stumbled up onto the small deck outside the bridge.
Righter was never sure if he’d seen the open hatch first, or if Anna’s shout had informed him his gamble succeeded, but he quickly decided it didn’t matter.
It was open. They still had a chance.
He dragged himself up to his feet and staggered to the hatch, realizing from the flow of water coming out that the bridge had probably taken more damage than the lower levels. “Gregor, you’ve got to get those leaks patched up. Anna, find Andi and Barret. I’ll get the auxiliary control circuits activated.” He hardly realized he was snapping out orders to them both, despite the fact that neither of them likely considered him a real comrade, much less a superior. But he knew what to do. Whatever chance Pegasus had, it was in his hands…and they seemed to understand that.
He tried to keep his focus on the controls he had to reach. A quick glance at the bridge told him the workstation he needed was going to be difficult to access. But, despite the urgency of the situation, he spared an instant to scan the bridge, to find out what had happened to Andi and Barret. He saw the patch job, ugly as hell, but still holding. Wherever Andi and Barret were, one of them at least had managed to do partial repairs.
Then he saw them, Andi l
ying on her back, clearly unconscious, her bodily reflexes fighting back against eh water lapping up around her, trying to fill her lungs.
Barret was about two meters from her, in much the same situation. Righter had to fight the urge to race over, to save the woman who’d saved him. But Anna was almost there already.
You have work to do. What’s the point of saving her only to be crushed by the pressure?
He leapt up, trying to grab hold of the workstation chair, but he fell short and landed on the wall, splashing water all around. He jumped back to his feet, trying to forget about the new pain in his legs.
It can’t be too bad…you can still stand…
He crouched down, ready to leap as hard as he could, when he felt a giant pair of hands under him, shoving hard, and practically throwing him up to the workstation. He reached out, grabbed the chair with both hands, and managed to force himself into a somewhat stable position. He muttered, an almost indistinguishable grunt intended as a thanks to Gregor. He hadn’t actually seen who had helped him, but there was only one person on Pegasus who could throw him around like a rag doll.
He reached out, his hands moving over the workstation’s controls. He’d been focused on getting there, but the realization suddenly set in that he was making a wild bet, that he was hoping against hope this piece of equipment, unlike the others he’d tried, would work. It was possible—much of Pegasus remained operational amid the scattered system failures—but all of a sudden, it seemed a very tenuous thing to be the arbiter of whether they all lived or died.
He hesitated a few seconds, the fear and uncertainty that often plagued him, that had contributed to his control issues, rising up inside, threatening to freeze him in place. He knew where it all came from, the disastrous failure—his failure. His comrades had all died that day, every one of them. And Lex Righter had spent the next five years reliving the nightmare, and drowning his guilt at failure, and at life’s sick twist of making him the only survivor, in oceans of alcohol and endless flows of whatever hallucinogens he could lay his hands on. He’d even lied to Andi, told her he’d been depressed about a girl. He’d never managed to tell anyone the truth, to share his great shame and regret with another human being.
