The Initiative: Book One of the Jannah Cycle

by D. Brumbley

  Orion nodded and started off toward the shuttle, waving Anna with him. Logan came out a few moments later with Mikkelson and one of the other crew members, and Orion waved them over as well. “You’re with me, big guy. Two medical pods on the shuttle to get back to these two. We need to move fast.” He was jogging toward the far side of the shuttle where they could get to the medical pods. “Mikkelson, is everybody out?”

  “Not many left to begin with. Diego and Abha are rounding up the rest.” He looked back at the building and hastily did a sweep of the parking lot as well just to make sure there were no other threats coming out of the woodwork. The emptiness of the world around them seemed suddenly less peaceful than it had just a few minutes before. “Diego said there are reports from some of the other sites. He didn’t have time to say what kind.”

  Orion shared a suspicious look with Anna, since if there were attacks happening around the world, all at Jannah launches, then it certainly wasn’t just some random psycho with a baseball bat. “All the more reason for us to get in the air and now.” They ran on board through the cargo doors and quickly dislodged the medical pods Orion had always known were there but had never had a reason to use. He and Anna got one, and Mikkelson and her husband got the other, carrying them quickly out of the shuttle and across the lot to Mercury and Patel. He just hoped it wouldn’t be too little too late.

  While Orion and the others went to get the pods, Mercury set Carl’s jaw and then put him in a neck brace that was in her kit before she examined his eyes to see if she could see any signs of brain damage. His eyes dilated appropriately, which was a relief in itself. He was out of it due to the painkiller, but she still ran a gentle hand over his cheek. “Hang in there, big guy. Orion doesn’t need to lose another brother.” She sighed before she looked over at Dr. Patel, who was still shaking out of shock, and so she scurried over to help Johnson. The woman’s breathing was shallow and her pupils were not responding at all. “Come on, we’ve got to get her in the pod, alright? Just take a couple of deep breaths, Doctor, and pull it together. We can handle this.”

  Dr. Patel nodded, but she was still frantically looking around as if someone was going to jump out and attack them. In her entire life she had never once faced any kind of bodily harm or threat, certainly not on her home station or on Station Seven where she had been trained as Dr. Finnegan had. Violence and attacks were so unheard of that what happened on Station Nine had been a cruel wakeup for all of them. There were still people out there that wanted to hurt them. “I…what if…”

  Mercury just shook her head. “Here they are with the pods. Did you give her pain medication? A sedative?” Mercury looked at the kit at Dr. Patel’s feet and saw that most of it was intact. She immediately grabbed it and pulled out the necessary items and injected Johnson before she looked up when Orion came back with the pods. “Hurry. We need to get her on oxygen.”

  Orion’s instinct was to help his friend first, but he knew Mercury wouldn’t have just left him on the ground to help Johnson unless he was stable or dead, in which case he would be beyond help. He and Anna brought the pod down next to Johnson and helped to lift her, gingerly, into the containment unit while the few remaining people streamed out of the building nearby, Diego and Abha whipping them in haste toward the shuttle. “Mercury.” Orion said as he and Anna worked to get Johnson secured in the pod for transport, “I want you and Dr. Patel once we’re out of the atmosphere, to go through every passenger and check on their zero gravity nausea. Do ID checks as you go. If we can’t delay take-off, then we can do the sweep while we’re in the air, we’ll have about four hours of hang time before we’re supposed to dock with Nine. Is that do-able?”

  Mercury nodded, since she knew that they would have enough time in the air, but it made her feel queasy just thinking about potentially taking someone who wished to do harm with them up into the air. “Yes, we can do that.” She looked over at her colleague who still looked shaken up, then sighed before she went to help with Carl and the other pod. Once Carl was strapped in and she had oxygen flowing for him, she went up to Orion. “Maybe I should do it alone.” She said in a lowered voice. “I don’t think Dr. Patel can handle it right now.”

  He just nodded, and kept from looking over at Dr. Patel. “You’re senior, do whatever you think is best.” He put a hand on her shoulder briefly just to let her know he trusted her judgment, then got back to work lifting up one end of Carl’s pod. To his surprise, Anna got the other end, and lifted it with him until the wheels could get under it to roll back to the shuttle. Mikkelson and Logan had the other one handled between them. “You’re stronger than you look.” He said as they walked the pod quickly back toward the shuttle, leaving the assailant with the bat on the asphalt behind them. No amount of medical attention was going to help him.

  Anna choked on a broken chuckle as she helped move the pod along. “Nobody’s exempt from hard work on a farm, it just doesn’t work that way.” She kept an eye out as they moved as quickly as they could without further injuring his friend. “I guess things really do work different down here than they do up there. Dr. Patel looks like she’s never been in a dangerous situation in her life.”

  “She probably hasn’t.” He agreed, though from the sound of his tone, he was much less surprised at that fact than Anna was. “She’s a doctor. They typically come in after the dangerous situation is past.”

  “Maybe up there. The doctors I know have seen it all.” Anna replied as she helped him get the pod into the ship and then secured into place, and though it wasn’t as easy for her as it was for him, Anna didn’t struggle too much. “It looks like one of your friends might be okay. The other…” Anna had seen enough people die to know, more or less, when someone was on their way out. His tall friend was beaten up pretty bad, but he was still breathing better than the woman. “Does the ship look okay?”

  “I’ve got one of my people running double-checks on everything. I’ve flown enough of these that I’ll know if something feels sketchy. Did I mention I’m the pilot?” He wasn’t honestly sure if he had mentioned that or not, but he kept moving once Carl was secure, running through the cargo bay of the shuttle toward the passenger section, where there was a lot of buzz and a lot of very concerned faces, all of which seemed to look back at him in unison as soon as he was through the door.

  The space was set up for maximum efficiency of personal transportation in zero gravity, and as such there were three tiers of seats stacked one on top of the other and interwoven so that more people could be packed into the negative spaces allowed by human comfort. It looked like the entire bay was full of people sitting on each other’s laps, but they only had to stay in that configuration until zero gravity. The seat configuration in orbit was much less crowded, since people could be turned upside down to get out of each other’s way. What he was left with at the moment, though, was a beehive of people all looking at him in some kind of accusation. He saw Diego and Abha at the other end of the room looking like they were trying to pacify the situation, but obviously not doing that great a job.

  “Two of our officers were assaulted.” Orion said in a booming shout that silenced everyone else in the corridor. Apparently his lungs were as freakishly mutated as his growth plates. “They are both seriously injured, but will be monitored for the trip up to Nine where they can be hospitalized. The assailant attempted to use lethal force on them, and was shot and killed. We do not, at this time, have reason to believe he was anything but an anti-Jannah protestor acting irrationally and alone. There have been reports of similar assaults at other project launch sites.”

  He strode through the cabin, unimpeded by the people gawking at him and his candor, whereas Diego and Abha had obviously been talking sideways about the whole thing to try and keep people quiet. “I’m your captain for this afternoon, Lieutenant Orion Al-Jabbar. If you got on this shuttle thinking you were headed somewhere without opposition and without risks, then let me speak on behalf of the Jannah Initiative and invite you to plea
se get the fuck off my shuttle and stay home. We’re on our way to take the biggest risk any person’s ever taken in the history of mankind. If you’re not on board with that, then you shouldn’t be on board.” He turned around once he reached the front of the cabin and looked everyone over, most a little shell-shocked at his speech. He took note of a few who weren’t. Resolute faces, committed, even amused. A thin man with a larger brunette sitting next to him, a few of the earthbound he’d seen earlier who still seemed to think the universe revolved around them, a brave and devout soul here and there. He hoped he would be able to remember those he saw. One of them could have been an accomplice of the man with the bat.

  “Takeoff is in ten minutes. You know where the door is, and you know where your seatbelt is. That’s how long you have to pick one or the other.” He ducked into the cockpit where Fitch was working at pre-flight checks, and finally let out a deep sigh when he was out of sight, balling up his hand into a fist to keep it from shaking.

  Fitch didn’t look away from the screen as she continued to get them ready for takeoff, but on a different monitor where they could see certain spots of the passenger area, she saw that some people were unbuckling and getting off. She shrugged and then kept tapping at the screens in front of her. “A couple less bodies we have to worry about. You okay, Cap?”

  “Yeah, I’m good, my best friend is just bleeding to death in the back. Another day in paradise.” He shook his head and stepped in to help with the pre-flight checks, but he could see that she had already run the full gambit on everything. “If there is more to baseball-boy, then it at least doesn’t look like it was sabotage. Any ideas?”

  “It looks like someone tried to get in to mess with wires, only to find that they’re not easy to get to. Everything else looked alright.” She pulled a flask out of a pocket on the side of her leg and handed it to him. “At least take a drink if we might die. It’ll calm your nerves.”

  Orion gave her a sarcastic look for the offer, but he took it anyway and took a swig, letting out a grateful sigh afterward as he handed it back to her. “Figures you’d be the smart one who remembers to bring alcohol to Earth. I’m glad one of us has our priorities straight.”

  He saw all the flight systems go green one by one, as the ship began to recalculate its take-off and atmospheric escape needs based on the current mass on board. Everyone had been instructed during processing to shed everything possible to keep their weight as light as they could, but Orion wasn’t worried about making it off the planet, just efficiency in doing so. “Finish off checks and let Nine know we’re about to be under way, I’m gonna check through the cabin and see about getting us a backup to replace Johnson. You alright up here?” It had been a first for everyone, actually running into resistance or being attacked, and he knew that was the only reason why Johnson and Carl especially had been harmed at all. He didn’t want any more surprises with his team or anyone folding the way Dr. Patel seemed to have done.

  “Yeah, I’m alright.” She looked over at Orion for a second and then she tapped the gun on her belt before she said anything else. “Do you think we can trust any of the mudders that we have on our ship? Maybe you can haul one of them into this mess.”

  “Might not want to call them that when they’re in earshot.” Orion said with a slight glare in her direction. “And yeah, I’ve got my eye on a couple I plan to snag for backup on the way up. Unless they hauled ass off the ship the moment I gave them the out, but they didn’t seem like the type.” He got to the hatch leading back toward the passenger compartment and paused. “Keep the door locked until I get back. Just in case.”

  “As you say, Captain.” Kameron walked up and locked the door behind him and then went back to work. She wanted to get the hell off of Earth and back up in space where her life wasn’t in so much danger.

  21

  Mercury made sure her two patients were as comfortable as unconscious, injured, people could be in the medical pods, then she cleaned up and grabbed a tablet, scanner, and a bottle of anti-nausea medication. She was nervous to go wandering through the crowd of people, but it needed to be done. They had to know if another threat was on board. Before she could do checks, though, she needed to be strapped in for liftoff, and so she took the seat next to the medical pods so that she could monitor both of patients. The vitals for both Carl Espinoza and Allison Johnson were lit up in the air above the pods, and Mercury could reach out and swipe through the hologram if she wanted to access more information. For now, they were stable, but even if they hadn’t been, she didn’t exactly have the kind of supplies an operating room would have if it came to that. She hoped it wouldn’t.

  Orion walked back through the passenger portion of the shuttle, looking closely at the people he had picked out earlier just to make sure their faces were fixed in his mind, but he brushed past them until he found the couple he was looking for. The Bickfords appeared to be working on getting settled in their seats, and he breathed a sigh of relief that they were even still on board. They were the only groundlings whose whereabouts he had been personally certain of at the time of the attack on Allison and Carl. “Glad to see you two didn’t take the out.”

  “We don’t have a ride home. Going to space is better than walking back to the plains district.” Logan teased without quite smiling up at the taller man. Things had been a little more interesting than he had really hoped they would be for their very first hour as a part of the Initiative.

  “That’d be a hike, I’m sure.” Orion looked down at the seats they were occupying, the next rank of seats just a few centimeters from their faces, especially for Logan, who was built much bigger than was typically considered normal for people who used the shuttles often. “I’ve got temporary jobs in mind for you two. Wouldn’t come with many perks or any pay, but I can at least give you better seats if you’re willing to help out for the next few hours.”

  “Why not?” Anna said as she shrugged and looked over at Logan, always one to jump into the fray. “Doing something to help would at least distract me from the fact that I’m not sure what the hell is going to happen now.”

  “Well, a few things are gonna happen now.” Orion stood back to let them out of their seats and into the aisle, then waved them to follow him back to the cargo area, where he was glad to see Mercury already strapped in and busy monitoring her two patients. No one else was back there with her, which didn’t make him happy, but the others were all busy helping people get strapped in and giving instructions for liftoff safety procedures. They all had known groundlings were going to take a lot of looking after, they just hadn’t known they were going to be in a hurry. “We’re about to lift off and we’re down two security personnel with a situation that may very well require some security personelling. Should I assume a farming background also comes with a comfort and familiarity when it comes to firearms?” As he spoke, Orion was working through a case strapped down farther along the compartment and he entered security codes to reveal a store of handguns and ammunition cartridges.

  “I mostly stick with bows and arrows, just by personal preference, but I’m a fair shot with a rifle or handgun.” Logan answered hesitantly, since he had never seen guns of the design Orion was pulling out.

  “Same basic principle, point and shoot, just don’t expect a recoil.” Orion closed and locked the case after pulling out a couple weapons, loaded up a cartridge in each sleek gun, and handed them over to Logan and Anna before pulling out his own and twirling it into his palm. Even in dire situations, he was incapable of taking things completely seriously. “Safety’s here, trigger it slowly the first time, release immediately unless you want a sustained shot. You’ll feel the trigger set the gun humming before you actually reach the firing point. Feels pretty weird the first few times, but you get used to it. Cartridge is good for a few hundred single-shots or a couple dozen brief sustained ones. Use sparingly.” He put his own gun back in its holster and pointed out the spots on their flight suits that were designed to hold firearms securely o
ut of the way along their ribs.

  “Doesn’t sound too complicated.” Anna replied as she looked over the gun. “Logan has always been more about the sport. I’m more about the kill, so I’m a little more familiar with guns. Certainly not these, though.” Anna looked up at the tall pilot again. She was familiar with hunting animals, not people, but guns didn’t scare her. “We can handle security detail. Just tell us where you want us.”

  Orion gave her a raised eyebrow. “Well, now you’re making me nervous, so work on making me not nervous about having just given you a high-powered firearm, please.” He wasn’t actually that nervous about it, but he had just met the woman, after all. If she was trigger-happy, handing her something to be happy with wasn’t something he wanted on his list of things he’d accomplished that day. “I want you with me up front on watch between the flight consoles and the passenger compartment. That’s usually Johnson’s job.” Orion looked over at Logan afterward, though he still looked back at Anna and the gun he’d given her just to make sure she knew he was nervous. “You, I’d like to stay back here and accompany Mercury when she goes to administer the nausea supplements and ID everybody. I’ll have Mikkelson and St. Pierre stay near you guys as well, but honestly, if we do find somebody’s ass on board who shouldn’t be here, you’re gonna be better suited to kicking it than they are.”

  “I can manage that.” Logan agreed, nodding at Orion and then back over at the doctor, to let her know he’d take care of things.

  Mercury looked at the man from Earth she’d just met, then looked at Orion afterward, everything about her usually-placid demeanor unsettled. “Be careful. Please.” She pleaded, since she didn’t want to be tending to Orion next. “I don’t want to see you hurt.”

  “I’ve got the easy job. Unless trigger-happy over here has it out for me, which I doubt. Normally people know me at least a week before they want to kill me.” He went over to Mercury and gave her a quick kiss to reassure her. “You be careful too. You find anybody shouldn’t be here, don’t make a fuss right away. Get away somewhere and let me and the rest of the crew know. We’ll handle it.” He left a caress along the side of her face, then stood back up and headed for the passenger compartment, where he stopped to wait for Anna.