by Frank Carey
"What’s wrong?" Tayla asked as Joshua stabbed the transmit button on his com.
"Jenna, this is Joshua. I need you in the computer room stat."
"On my way."
He explained as he feverishly typed commands. "The city's cloak and shield have been down since I was resurrected. If there's anything monitoring this planet..."
"Dammit," Jenna said while running over. "I missed that. Running orbital scans for non-League assets... Got something."
"What's happening?" Jacob said as he and Bryntana appeared.
"Honey, fill them in while I do some smuggler stuff," Tayla said as she took Joshua's place at the terminal. "Re-positioning probesat six and arming EMP pulse core at ten percent power. Detonation in three, two, one. Mark. Confirmed. Alien asset in orbit above city. Its transmitting something using some form of hyperwave."
"We got anything nearby we can bite it with?" Bryntana asked.
"Nada. Our plan didn't include fighting off alien stealth satellites. Wait a minute. Readings show a core energy buildup. Detonation imminent... She's gone."
"What just happened?" Bryntana asked.
"We've been made," Jacob explained. "That probe waited thousands of years in the off chance something was here. They now know the city exists, and depending on its sensors, it may even know about the depot."
"And they are?"
"That is the million credit question."
###
Felicity waited outside as Alex finished his conference call with the other colonies. With Jacob and Bryntana gone, she had been designated acting second in command. She stood at the window, watching the colonists go about their daily routine.
"Blast and damn! If it can go wrong, it will!" Alex growled as he stepped out of the residence's communications center.
"Things not going well, sir?"
"No, Lieutenant, things are not going well. We may be facing a visit from some nasty types, only we know neither when, or whom."
"Sir, aren't we nasty types?"
He stopped and looked at the tall Katalan. "A joke Lieutenant?"
"Maybe."
"You're right, we are nasty types, and I must remember that fact. I must also remember why we're here."
"Redemption?"
"Yes, redemption. Lieutenant, I need Lieutenant Nogar and Lieutenant Roust to work on making sense of the burst transmission that damn spy satellite transmitted before self-destructing. They may solicit help from the other colonists as needed, but we must get the first crop into the ground and the livestock pens in place, so we can't have everyone working on the crisis."
"Understood, sir. I will rotate people through so all tasks are completed."
"Thank you, Lieutenant. Your expertise is greatly appreciated."
"You're welcome, sir. Sir, you're enjoying all this, aren't you?"
He stopped, then whispered in her ear, "I am. Does it show?"
"Yes, sir. You're glowing with joy."
"As it should be. Good day, Lieutenant. Keep me posted."
"Yes, sir," she said as she watched him hurry off to deal with the next crisis on his list.
"Excuse me."
Felicity turned and nearly fainted. Standing in front of her was the love child of Thor, the Norse god of thunder, and an elf. Incredibly, she recognized him. "Lars Steele?"
"Lord, I do one photoshoot... Yes, I'm Lars Steele. And you are?"
"Lt. Felicity Zarn, Operations Officer of the Valera. Forgive me for staring, but I've read every romance novel you've modeled for. My God, this is such an honor. What can I do for you?"
"I'm looking for the governor, have you seen him?"
"He's heading to his office. Let me take you to him," she said as she took his arm.
"Thank you. So you've read all those books?"
"Yes, devoured them would be more accurate. Can I ask you a question?"
"Sure."
"How does a cover model get sent to a penal colony?"
"How does a beautiful woman get sent to such a place?"
"Smuggling."
"Ah. In my case I had to choose between accompanying my husband or getting a divorce."
"Alex and you are married?"
"Ten years now. I work for the elf diplomatic mission to Tralaska and he is, or was, a restaurant manager, at least that's what I thought."
"Ouch. Wait a minute, what about Bryntana?"
"Bryntana is his sister. He has taken care of her for a very long time, and even though they have terrible fights, he will protect her at all costs."
"Ah, here we are," she said as they walked up to Alex's office door, "but you already knew that, didn't you?"
"I enjoyed the company."
"One more question."
"Shoot."
"Are those real?" She asked while pointing to his well-developed pecs.
"Yep. I work out daily. Now, a question for you."
"Anything."
"Do you play bridge?"
"Why yes, I do. So does Lieutenant Commander MacKenzie."
"Splendid. Would you like to join us Friday night for a few hands?"
"I would love to, but I'll need to see what Mac is up to. I'll let you know."
"Excellent, I've been dying for a game since arriving here. Good day, Lieutenant."
"Call me Felicity."
"Good day, Felicity. It was nice meeting you."
He knocked, then walked into the office.
"This is soooo cool," Felicity said before heading off to tell Shelly and Raul about their new jobs.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Nordican fleet--yes, there were only ten ships left, but that still makes a fleet--slowly made its way through space about a light-week out from Alyson. In his office aboard the flagship Neesar, the fleet's leader, Trent, took another report from the stack and read it. Half-way through it, someone knocked at his door.
"Come in."
The door opened and Falan walked in. She sat down and handed him a drink. "Need a break?"
"Gods yes. Thank you," he said, taking the drink and sipping from it. "Falan, how did we end up in such dire straits?"
"I wasn't aware our straights were dire."
He handed her the status reports. "We're running out of nisium."
"Shit. I thought we had plenty."
He shrugged, “We hit a dry spell. Too many of these local civilizations know about us, so they're unwilling to trade.”
"What are we going to do?"
He took out a map and pointed to a planet. "Saguenay, about a light-week from here. According to the database we borrowed..."
"You mean stole."
"According to the database, its rich in high-yield nisium ore. We can use some of that mining equipment we borrowed..."
"Stole."
"We can use the mining equipment to extract enough fuel to supply our fleet for a few years."
"What if your information is wrong?"
"Then we have a new home where we can raise sheep and grow crops."
The intercom buzzed. "What is it?" Trent replied.
"This is Mersa. Something's happening down here in the hold which I think you need to see."
"Be there in five." He switched off the intercom. "Care to go for a walk?"
"Why not?" They got up and headed out the door.
"You know, we could put everyone in temporal stasis and head the fleet on a slow trajectory back to Earth," Falan suggested.
"Earth? Why there? Everyone we knew there is dead. Anyway, they may have not forgiven us for taking the BORIS project from them."
"It's been over two centuries. They've forgotten us by now."
"Yeah, and it's not like they could have discovered faster-than-light travel in this short amount of time. You know, that might not be a bad idea. Hell, that whole quadrant is probably ripe for picking."
"My gods, doesn't it bother you that we killed Joshua?"
"Joshua died a hero. So what if it was our mistake that killed him and the whole biocybernetics group? At
least we could borrow BORIS and look how well that turned out."
"You are unbelievable."
"Remember the Prime Rule: Don't get involved with the marks."
They walked into the cargo hold and found Mersa standing in front of a piece of equipment about the size of a refrigerator. Three of the lights on its front face were blinking. "It started doing this about five minutes ago."
"What is it?" Falan asked.
"According to the inventory record, it’s a receiver unit we borrowed from the Zexx about thirty years ago."
"So, what's it receiving?"
Mersa tapped the screen beneath the lights. It showed a city seen from orbit. "I would like to introduce you to the home world of the Jarrion weapons merchants."
"What did you say?" Falan whispered.
"That, my friends, is Lemura, the location of the lost weapons depot, and you know how much the people around these parts love weapons."
"Do we have a location?"
"Yeah, a planet about a light-week from here. A planet called Saguenay.”
"OK, you don't have to hit me in the head a second time. Computer, Bridge."
"Go for Quessel."
"Captain, set course for Sagenay and engage."
"Aye, sir, Bridge out."
"Now, that's what I call an improvement in our fortunes."
Outside, in the darkness of space, no one in the fleet saw the plate-shaped object attached to the dorsal surface of the Neesar begin transmitting.
###
One week later...
Joshua finished the final entry in the depot catalog he was assembling from records he found in the computer. Unlike the rest of the team, the computer was happy to respond to all his voice commands, a fact not lost on his companions. The young engineer was impressed at what he and his team had created. Over one hundred thousand items ranging from poison injector pens all the way to a space battleship the size of the USS Missouri, each carefully described, photographed, and counted. The sheer amount of death stored underneath the city was staggering. "Now, what are we going to do with all this shit?"
The question was an important one. Back in his day, weapons disposal was spread across a variety of companies and organizations depending on what type of weapon they were talking about. Chemical weapons went to one place, conventional another, and nuclear still another, none of which existed on Alyson. The colonists were not equipped to deal with neutralizing this much death. Those facilities were light-years away, assuming they had a way of getting there. His biggest worry was the Kojin virus running loose in the bioweapon sub-storeroom. He stopped and stared at the screen as his brain came up with a question. "They weren't stupid, just arrogant. They had to have a contingency plan, a plan which seems to have not worked, so what was it?"
He ran a simple search for emergency procedures, stuff that should have been on the walls in cute, little, yellow, wire racks. Instead it was hidden inside the computer.
He found the file in a folder marked "Facilities." It outlined what to do in the event of emergencies. There was a procedure for a robot getting loose--really? and ones for hazmat releases. He searched until he found a section labeled "Catastrophes."
"That works," he mumbled while scrolling through the pages. He stopped when he found the section on uncontrolled biological releases. From the numbering system, he could tell it was a new addition to the procedure list. His jaw dropped as he read the centuries-old text. "Dammit," he yelled before slapping the intercom. He had been instructed by Jacob and Tayla to have an escort with him if he left the confines of the computer center. "Charlie, it's Josh. Are you and Quint up for a stroll?"
"Sure boss. We'll meet you outside the center in five."
He clicked off the intercom and grabbed his pack, making sure his scanner and datapad were inside, along with a blaster. One could never be too safe in a depot full of death.
###
Joshua and his two companions stopped in front of the biologicals containment storeroom and waited while Josh got his bearings. "This way, he said as he headed off the path toward the back of the storeroom.
"Josh, what are we looking for?" Quint asked as she and Charlie panned their weapons around.
He showed them an image of a glyph-emblazoned rectangle. "It's made of cast adamantine steel, about the size of one of Valera's hatches. It will be embedded in the floor."
"What's its purpose?" Charlie asked next.
"It's an inspection access hatch."
"Inspection of what?"
"The underside of the depot floor. According to a safety manual I found, this whole depot was built over a giant volcanic caldera."
Quint looked at him like he had gone daft. "Why the hell would anyone do that?"
"Safety. In the event of an emergency, they could drop the depot into a pool of magma."
Quint stopped and pointed at the floor. "There's a pool of magma beneath us?"
"Yep. Unless my translations are way off, there's a seething pool of red-hot liquid rock about a hundred meters beneath your feet. The floor is ten-meter thick foamed adamantine steel alloy. with several dozen access hatches embedded in it."
"Access to what?" Quint asked.
"Access to inspect the explosive charges that will shatter the floor and send everything into the lava below in the event of an emergency. Ah, here it is."
"What kind of emergency?"
Joshua glanced back at the bioweapon storage unit.
"Right, got it."
Joshua ran his scanner over the cover. "No locks, no safeties, just dead weight. I'm reading one hundred ten kilos. Can you guys get this..."
Quint reached down and tore the door out of the floor, then threw it a few feet away. She gave him a little smile.
He smiled back. "Thanks." He walked over and peered in the hole. There was a stairway leading down into a well-lit space below the floor. "Shall we?"
He led them down the stairway into a room with walls made from thick glass. In the center of the room was a cube six inches on edge sitting on a table. A cable hung from the ceiling above it, but was tied-off to prevent it from reaching the cube. They walked over to the window and looked out onto a scene from hell. Beneath them was a vast lake of bright orange magma. The pool was constantly in motion as bubbles of superheated gases burst through the surface. The lake stretched out as far as the eye could see. In the distance, they could see another room hanging from the ceiling.
While the others looked out the window, Joshua returned to the cube and ran the scanner over it and the cable.
"I love this scanner," he said as he finished with it. "What I could have done with it in my lab."
"Josh, what did you find?" Quint asked.
He pointed at the cube. "This is some kind of plastic explosive, which is similar to C-4 from my time. It's extremely stable and requires a detonator to explode. The cable is supposed to ignite a small detonation cartridge buried in the cube, but it's gone and the cable shorted so as to fool the system into thinking the cartridge is present."
"How do you know this?"
"Because the computer continues to send the initiation command and there is no detonator attached to the bundle."
"Sabotage," the three said in unison.
"We'll probably find the whole system has been compromised," Charlie noted. "Can we leave it like this?"
"Yeah. The explosive is stable. I'll ask Tayla to reprogram the bug bots to scan for detonators, but I think they've all gone missing. The system has been active for ten thousand years, so I don't think we have anything to worry about. I think we may want to put our own initiators in place on key cubes just in case we need to blow the place. One never knows when a problem will occur."
"You used to be a safety person, right?" Quint asked.
Josh smiled. "It shows, doesn't it. Yes, I was the safety officer for my lab. Didn't have a lick of trouble during the year I ran the place. The problems happened elsewhere."
Charlie patted him on the shoulder. "We're gl
ad you're here now."
"Copy that," Quint said as she leaned down and gave him a peck on the top of his head.
"Thanks, guys. We should get this information back to Jacob and Alex and see what they want to do with it."
The three left, replacing the hatch before heading back to the computer center.
###
When they arrived back at the computer center, they found Tayla and Jacob waiting for them. "What's up, Boss?" Josh asked while Quint and Charlie tried to make a break for it.
"Stay! Josh, our deep space probe picked up a group of ten ships limping into the system. Jenna suggested I run the images past you before going to Alex."
"OK. You all know that the only spaceship I know is Virgin Atlantic's Spaceship Three and that was orbital. For my generation, FTL was the stuff of science fiction."
"Sweety, we know," Tayla said. She handed him a datapad. On it were ten very familiar ships. "Oh my God, those are Nordican ships. The lead one has the same markings as the one at Area 51, Falan's ship." He started to shake.
"Josh, stay with me," Tayla said. Though she had five times the strength of a human, she could barely hold him.
"You don't understand. Those bastards may have killed me. They stole my life and my life's work. They hurt my co-workers. They..." He collapsed as Jacob withdrew the injector from the engineer's shoulder. Tayla lowered him gently to the ground while Quint pulled out a medical scanner and ran it over Josh's unconscious form.
"His blood levels are completely out of whack, even for a human. Anybody know when he slept last?"
Tayla accessed his computer logs, gasped, then accessed the video logs from the cameras they installed when they set up the augmented terminal. "He... He took a nap five days ago.”
"Considering what he's been through since waking up, I'm surprised he didn't have an episode sooner. We've been leaning on him pretty hard. He needs sleep," Quint said as she picked him up and walked him over to a cot set up for him against the wall. It hadn't been slept in. She laid him down, and Tayla put a blanket over him. "I'll watch him."
"Good. Quint, Charlie, with me," Jacob said. "We've got to brief Alex. Tayla, we'll be in the truck if you need us."
