The console exploded and took out the entire arm, shoulder and half of the face of the Zarlack, who fell dead, flat on the floor. Glass shrapnel was thrown around, and one piece perforated Leonidis’ left shoulder.
Leonidis heard the growl of another incoming Zarlack approaching from behind. He ripped the glass from his shoulder, determined to use it to bring down his next foe.
But almost as soon as he had the bloody shard of glass in his hand, a scaly tail wound around his neck and cut his airflow. Soon, Leonidis’ legs were no longer touching the floor.
The Zarlack who held him by the throat brought him nearer. Razor-sharp claws extended from its fist. Leonidis fought through the pain and lack of air supply and, in a desperate move, planted the bloody glass shard into the Zarlack’s left eye.
The lizard screamed from the pain but didn’t release its grip on Leonidis. Before Leonidis could extract the shard and go for the second eye, he felt a strong pain in his chest.
Blood rushed upward from his chest and into the back of his throat. He spat blood uncontrollably onto the Zarlack’s tail. Leonidis looked down and saw that the Zarlack had punched through his ribcage with its hand. He felt the hand going through him and saw his own heart being ripped out with it.
Leonidis felt dizzy and his vision blurred, though he was able to see the Zarlack close its fist, crushing his severed heart. His last thought before his entire world faded into eternal darkness was of his wife and son.
When Spiros arrived in engineering, he was surprised to find the place empty. The engineers had probably tried to leave or hide throughout the station. Which was exactly what Spiros hoped to achieve, as well. But he needed a viable hideout; one that he could use for both short-term and long-term hiding.
Without wasting time, he hacked into the computer core to access the self-destruct mode. A simple command override wouldn’t work. The procedure was layered with multiple security fail-safes to make sure it couldn’t be stopped once started, except with the right vocal code spoken by the station’s commander and no one else.
Trying to run a fake vocal signature and finding the code would take too long. Spiros only had three minutes to disarm the self-destruct. That wasn’t enough time to hack the fail-safe manually especially with slow holo-control inputs. Spiros reached for a cable in his pocket and connected one end to a port on the back of his neck and the other end to the holo-console’s port.
He closed his eyes and started hacking the Damocles-3’s main computer. Soon, he had all the CPU processing power at his fingertips. There were ninety seconds left on the clock when Spiros started hacking full force. The first three fail-safes mostly required a brute-force approach.
The next two were slightly trickier, but Spiros had a myriad of tools to hack almost any system loaded in a hidden partition inside his implant. Being slightly paranoid by nature, having hacking tools inside his brain felt like the best way to get out of a sticky situation, if one arose.
Spiros never thought he would be using it in such dire circumstances. The last fail-safe was the most difficult, and he was running out of time. Brute force wouldn’t work in this case. It would take too long. Forty seconds. The only way to make this work was to bypass the last power node, making sure the trigger was without power when the countdown reached its end.
Twenty seconds.
He located the power grid, isolated the correct zone and drilled down to find the exact node responsible for triggering the explosive that would set off the catalyst explosion, resulting in a systematic destruction of the station.
Ten seconds.
Spiros identified the power node and re-routed power around it, making sure the secondary backup circuit was also severed.
Three, two, one, zero. Nothing happened, and Spiros let out a long sigh of relief.
Stopping the self-destruct procedure was only part of his plan. He was still far from safe.
15
Spiros moved toward the back of engineering, behind the power core. He had been part of the crew that came on board to supervise the final build-up of Damocles-3. He knew everything about the station and, in this case, where the best place to hide was.
That was in an abandoned staging room behind a series of bulkheads that ran behind the main power core. After the core was brought online, and due to the radiation in that area, it had simply been abandoned as lost space when the engineers realized it would take too much effort and energy to shield the room efficiently for it to be converted into either quarters or a depot.
The trick now was to make it invisible to everyone else prodding in the system in the future. That meant going inside the computer, altering the blueprints, making sure to disable the sensor coverage in the area, and setting up a dedicated network. He had to redirect power there without attracting any attention if scrutiny was applied by whoever had control of the Damocles-3 computer. He also needed to install a force field around the room to prevent radiation from slowly killing him.
He took a deep breath and started applying the changes using the entirety of the computer resources at his disposal. Right now, nobody was using it, so he had carte blanche, but that would surely change soon, so he had to hurry.
Spiros heard footsteps in the distance and thought he would have a heart attack, but they continued to wherever they were going, without entering engineering. That was a lucky break, but Spiros knew it wouldn’t last.
It took ten minutes to set up the changes inside the main computer. By then the station wasn’t firing on the ships outside. That particular battle had ended, and the Zarlacks were now focusing their efforts inside the station.
Once the blueprints and sensors were dealt with, all that was left to do was find some equipment to set up a mini-lab and then reroute power inside the hidden room. He would mirror station-wide sensor data to his hiding place to know what was happening all over the station, like locating enemy life signs. He would need this information to go on errands, in order to avoid being caught. However long it took him to formulate an escape plan or to be rescued by the Star Alliance, he would have to leave the hiding place from time to time, if only to gather food and supplies.
Spiros returned to the main engineering control room and took several holo-pads, portable processing units and engineering tools back to the hidden room, which was about a hundred square feet in area. It was cramped, but it would allow him to set up a mini-lab, and eventually a bed.
Time for the power connections to be installed. Spiros rerouted all the power he could with his implant, turned on a temporary force field and added a trigger command shortcut inside his brain implant to easily turn it on and off. Once the final power patch was done, he would redistribute the power accordingly.
The tricky part now was to hide the power extension he was setting up from the core to behind the bulkheads where his hideout was.
Spiros entered a few holo-commands, and a square of the false flooring lifted and slid to the side. Spiros stepped under the false flooring and crawled the fifty yards to where he connected one side of the power extension cable into the power node under his hidden room. Now all he needed to do was to connect the extension to the node near the power core. He crawled back and grabbed the extension, but before he could plug it in, a hand grabbed him and lifted him through the hole in the false flooring.
A Zarlack held him by the clothes and growled before throwing him against the nearest wall. Something snapped inside Spiros’s chest, followed by a sharp pain.
Spiros’s heart started to beat faster than it ever had. He was so close to finishing setting up his hiding place, but now a monstrous beast stood in front of him, intent on killing him. His mind raced. He grabbed the square of false flooring near him just before the Zarlack struck him once more. He threw the square, metallic plate with all the force he could muster. It impacted right in the middle of the Zarlack’s throat.
The Zarlack stumbled backward, holding its throat, wheezing heavily and desperately gasping to get some air into its lungs.
It was now or never. Spiros jumped and skidded on the floor next to a power panel near the station’s power core. He opened it and ripped a cable at random off its socket. It sparked, and the lights in engineering flickered briefly.
This power fluctuation could get him detected if the enemy was already within the system. But Spiros had more pressing problems. He approached the Zarlack from behind with the cable.
Before he could hit the beast with its lethal current, the beast slashed its tail and hit Spiros’ hand. Spiros dropped the cable to the floor, where it spewed large sparks. The Zarlack turned around and roared.
Spiros’ blood pumped heavily against his temples. He glanced at the power cable. He wouldn’t reach it before the Zarlack reacted. Zarlacks were fast. He had seen their speed and agility firsthand when they had taken out his security detail.
Spiros extended his arms in front of him in a non-threatening way and took a step back. The Zarlack, still holding its throat with one hand, snarled and took a step forward. From its other hand, three sharp, metallic claws extended between its finger bones. Its clawed hand was right above the power cable.
It’s all or nothing.
Spiros over-clocked his brain implant by fifty percent to accelerate his next command. He accessed the shortcut he had created earlier, activated the force field and extended its size in real time.
The Zarlack had its back turned against the incoming force-field bubble and never saw it coming. Spiros was forced to take another step back. Before the Zarlack could attack, the force field touched the power cable, which triggered a large arc of electricity that shot from the cable to the metallic claws of the Zarlack, sending lethal current throughout its body.
Lightning bolts of electricity sizzled around its body, and it fell on its back. The ever-expanding force field passed through the Zarlack’s head, and it exploded. Spiros dialed down the force field to its original position, but not before taking several steps back to make sure he wasn’t struck by another spark when the force field passed over the power cable again.
The room smelled of charred meat, and Spiros forced himself not to vomit at the sight of what was left of the beast’s head.
Once the force field had been retracted fully, he quickly finished his power connections. He dropped the Zarlack’s body inside the false flooring before closing it, but the square was slightly dented. He cleaned up the purple blood from the floor and made a mental note to replace that flooring square later, once he was fully set up. Doing it now would be too risky. Trying to properly dispose of the body would be risky, too. He used his brain implant to crank the ventilation and have it run at two hundred percent, and soon the charred-meat odor dissipated.
More footsteps came his way, so he entered the bulkhead through the ventilation shaft, crawled through to the hidden room and started working on a holo-projection field at the end of the shaft. It would project to the exact position where the force field was to mask the entry to his hiding place, both physically and visually. Hopefully, nobody would try to go this way. No systems of importance were located behind the bulkhead. Spiros had altered the blueprints anyway to make sure nobody would ever be interested in this stretch of bulkhead and ventilation shaft.
Once he was in the room, he double-checked that the minimum safety features had been correctly set up, and then he let himself fall on the floor and rest a moment.
He had escaped death on many occasions today, but the same could not be said of other people around the station. From time to time, he would still hear the cries from someone getting caught and brutally killed by the Zarlack. The delayed sounds echoed inside the ventilation shafts.
Even after all that had happened today, he knew the real struggle was only beginning.
Epilogue
It had been three days since Damocles-3 had fallen at the hands of the Zarlacks. An Obsidian starship had just left after a one-day visit, confirming to Spiros that they were allies with the Zarlacks, which explained how the Obsidian Empire had managed to overthrow the Star Alliance and wipe them out so rapidly.
Spiros had recovered his data, though it had been tricky. It had required him to leave his hiding place and recover some additional hardware, all the while staying undetected. At the same time, he acquired a small mattress and whatever food he could fit inside a backpack. He had also properly disposed of the dead Zarlack’s body and replaced the square of dented false flooring that could have given away his location.
He imagined he could stay there for at least two weeks, even though the lack of facilities would surely make the smell in the place unbearable. To avoid that, he started working on jury-rigging a toilet system of some kind.
His sensor scan had confirmed that not a single member of Star Alliance personnel had survived. Some had been tortured for information, and Spiros wished he could have helped them, but there was nothing he could have done. He had watched them being tortured and eventually when it became clear they didn’t hold any relevant information, they had been executed in gruesome ways.
It had been turning Spiros’ stomach for the last twenty-four hours. Perhaps today he would be hungry again. But it mattered not. He needed to work on a plan to get out of here and, until that day came, to gather as much intelligence on the Zarlacks as he could. Having lost the data Tassos had gathered, he had set up his own secure array of sensors by installing hidden partitions and concurrent software atop the station’s sensor array. The data from the new sensor array wasn’t using the station’s internal network but the dedicated one Spiros had cleverly put in place.
They would only work and give him data when the array wasn’t fully in use, so as to not arouse suspicion of his presence should the sensor report an overload of system resources. If that happened, it would probably result in a manhunt, ultimately resulting in his execution.
Spiros wondered if by stopping the self-destruct he hadn’t given the Zarlacks time to reverse-engineer his weapons. To honor Leonidis’ last wish, Spiros swore he would find a way to poison-pill the technology with random bugs, thus making it too much trouble to reverse-engineer.
But the data he had saved would allow him not only to continue his research but also to identify weaknesses in the superior Zarlack tech that could prove vital one day to defeat this formidable new enemy.
Spiros let himself drop onto his mattress and tried to sleep. Up till now, sleep had eluded him. He was too scared of getting captured, and the only times he had managed to close his eyes for just a little while, he had had terrible nightmares.
Life as he knew it had been turned upside down. Four days ago everything was still normal. He was laughing and joking with his friends and co-workers. Then everything had turned to chaos.
In mere hours his entire perception of reality and normalcy had reversed upon itself, and he had lost nearly everything but his own life. He wondered if it would have been better to perish alongside the others. It would certainly have been easier. The one thing that was quickly getting to him though, what devoured him from within, was how terribly alone he now felt.
THE END
Into the Fire Part I_Requiem of Souls Page 35
