“What did you find, Minerva?” Jennings asked.
“I have a full layout of the ship and access to the internal sensors,” she responded. “It was after midnight standard ship time, so the hangar is mostly empty. Sensors show a large number of people leaving the hangar approximately two minutes ago.”
“That would be the prisoners,” Jennings reasoned.
“Currently, there are no mechanics on duty per the logs and only a half-dozen life signs,” Minerva reported. “All of those are located in a small room located off the maintenance bays. There is a high level of carbon monoxide and nicotine in the atmosphere.”
“Techs playing cards and having a smoke?” Lafayette suggested.
“What about security?” Jennings asked Minerva.
“Minimum security in place currently. Standard roving patrols and fixed guards in high security areas,” she responded. “A patrol should arrive in the hangar level in approximately ten minutes. Security cameras monitor the entire area however.”
“That will make things a little more difficult,” Lafayette said. “The minute we’re spotted this entire operation is blown.”
“Minerva, can you short out the cameras?” Jennings asked.
“I could, but doing so would trigger an ultraviolet alert,” she responded. “Armed security would be placed in all areas until video is restored.”
“Any ideas, Cap’n?” Fix demanded.
Beauregard sighed loudly and said, “Minerva, can you tell me if there a pilot’s ready room nearby?”
There was silence for a moment.
“Please,” she added.
“Yes,” Minerva answered. “Approximately two hundred feet from your current location.”
“Are the security cameras fixed or do they sweep?” she followed.
“Sweeping,” Minerva replied.
“Could you be a nice, smart computer and plot a course with a series of blind spots and hiding places so I can get to and back from that ready room?” she asked.
“Eighty-two percent chance of avoiding being seen, considering all variables,” Minerva responded after a moment.
“You can only give me eighty-two percent?” Beauregard chided.
“All of the variables are a result of your abilities, not mine,” Minerva responded coldly.
“Touché,” Beauregard said.
“You’ll need to start at the belly hatch in the center of the hanger,” Minerva said. “And you’ll need to give her a comm unit,” she added to Jennings.
“What’s your plan?” Jennings asked as he handed over an earpiece.
“Why spoil the surprise?” she said as she accepted it, placed it in her ear, and then jogged off toward the center of the hangar.
Opening up a hatch in the floor of the Grey Vistula, Beauregard saw the plain gray tarmac streaked with yellow dashes of paint of the Intrepid’s hangar floor. It was about an eight foot drop down to the ground and Beauregard crouched next to the opening.
“The underbelly of the Grey Vistula is completely invisible to the cameras,” came Minerva’s voice in her ear.
Beauregard immediately dropped down to the floor below, landing gracefully in a crouch. She was in the middle of a triangle formed by the Grey Vistula’s three landing legs. To her left was the Intrepid’s runabout and across from her was the large wall where all the Intrepid’s fighters were stored. The fighters were stacked two high except in one location. One of the fighter bays was covered in glass and had a door set into it next to the large window. That was the pilot’s ready room, she realized. There was not a lot of cover between where she now crouched and her destination, just a few drum barrels that probably carried avionics fuel and a couple of columns with Emergency Decompression lockers surrounding them.
“First goal is the column twenty degrees to your left,” Minerva said.
“Which side?” she whispered.
“You will need to get into the locker,” Minerva replied. “Next window in five seconds. Four. Three.”
Beauregard tensed her entire body and when Minerva said “Go,” she sprang forward, racing across the space between the Grey Vistula and the locker. As she approached the locker, she barely slowed, allowing her body to crash into the locker door. Hurriedly, she threw it open and forced her way inside, shoving aside atmosphere suits and oxygen tanks. Minerva had been giving her updates as she ran, but she had heard none of them. Beauregard reached back and closed the locker door, sealing herself in darkness.
“Well done,” Minerva’s voice appeared in her ear. “You made it with one point four seconds to spare. Do you need a moment to rest?”
“No,” she whispered.
“Very well,” Minerva responded. “Destination two is a set of aviation fuel barrels. There will be a very brief pause and then you will need to get to the second locker. Make sure you close the locker you leave,” Minerva added. “You don’t want to leave anything out of place.”
“Right,” Beauregard muttered.
“Now,” Minerva said.
Beauregard kicked open the locker door and slammed it shut behind her. Taking off at a sprint, she made for the set of black and green barrels and slid across the slick flooring as she approached them, popping up into a crouch as soon as she was in position. She had barely taken a breath before Minerva was telling her to go again and she raced across the hangar to the second set of lockers, throwing herself inside quickly and slamming the door shut.
“You’ll need to cross one hundred yards in fourteen seconds and key in the passcode at the pilot’s ready room door,” Minerva advised.
“And I trust you’ve hacked that passcode?” she replied in between deep gulps of air.
“Four-four-four-three,” she responded. “Not particularly creative. Window is in fifteen seconds. Are you ready?”
“Yes,” Beauregard answered as she tensed her body again and placed her hand on the locker door handle.
On Minerva’s word, she threw herself out of the locker and sprinted across the fighter launching lane, racing toward the ready room door. Crashing into the door hard, her hands fumbled for the control pad and she hit four-four-four-four, as her twitching muscles caused her to hit the four one time too many.
“They can see you,” Minerva said calmly as Beauregard rapidly punched in the combination and pushed open the ready room door. She slammed it shut behind her and leaned back against it, her chest heaving as she tried to catch her breath. “The good news is that no alarms have been sounded,” Minerva advised. “Whoever is keeping an eye on the video must not be as vigilant as they should be.”
“Any cameras in here?” she asked.
“Negative,” she responded. “Pilots get changed in here- they probably want to give them their privacy.”
“Right,” she muttered.
The room was rather large with rows of lockers and benches headed away from where Beauregard stood. Looking down one of the rows, she could see racks of bunks in the area beyond the lockers and what looked like showers even further back. The room was completely empty though. Beauregard started forward, opening lockers as she went, until she found what she was looking for. After seven lockers, she found it.
Quickly, she kicked off her boots, unzipped her flight suit and shrugged her lithe, muscle toned body out of it. Standing in her form fitting navy blue underwear, she grabbed one of the green Terran Gael Force pilot jumpsuits off a hanger and got dressed. She put her boots back on, tied her blonde hair back in a ponytail so that it was up to TGF military standards. From the same locker, she grabbed several more jumpsuits, discarded them as being either too large or too small, and grabbed several more. At last, she had what she needed and she stuffed the uniforms into a black duffel bag that she had found.
Looking like a TGF pilot now, Beauregard was unconcerned with the Intrepid’s surveillance as she strode back out of the pilot’s ready room and made her way across the hangar back to the Grey Vistula. Heading back to the belly hatch, she tossed the bag up through the opening
. Two hands appeared out of nowhere to catch it, and then Matthew Jennings’ face appeared in the hatchway.
“Minerva said you were on the way back,” he said as he extended a hand down through the opening.
Beauregard leapt upwards and caught Jennings’ hand, feeling surprised at how easily Jennings pulled her up through the hatch. He led her back to where the others were standing around a computer monitor that appeared to be sitting on a short easel. As she approached, she realized the Pasquatil was supporting it. The Cajun was talking animatedly with a disembodied female voice. The Pasquatil pulled the monitor back down to his eye level and started punching some commands into it.
“Overrode passwords. Installed better passwords,” Squawk reported as he saluted Jennings enthusiastically.
“What was wrong with the Tryst’s passwords?” he demanded.
“Not the Tryst, this ship,” Squawk retorted indicating the space all around them.
“Just in case, mon capitaine,” Lafayette said. “We wouldn’t want one of Petrova’s people stealing our ride.”
“I don’t have any intention of letting her out of the lock-up,” Jennings responded.
“What we intend and what happens is nae usually the same,” Fix pointed out.
“Good point,” Jennings said as he opened up the duffel bag that Beauregard had brought along. “Get these on over top of your weapons,” he said as he passed out the flightsuits. “We won’t stand up to more than cursory scrutiny, but we should be able to get to the brig at least.”
Jennings, Lafayette and Fix put the flightsuits on over top of their clothing and weapons belts. Jennings advised them each to put one of their plasma pistols inside the jumpsuits’ pockets. He collected the large automatic plasma rifles and threw them into the duffel, before slinging the bag over his shoulder. He noticed that Fix was doing the same thing.
“What’s in there?” he demanded.
“Symtex,” he responded. “Just in case.”
“Dis is a good fit,” Lafayette observed, pulling on the jumpsuit’s sleeves until they settled around his wrist where he wanted.
Beauregard laughed. “I know how to size up a man,” she responded. She threw her dark eyes toward Jennings, who suddenly looked uncomfortable and checked the charge on his weapon. She laughed again.
“Minerva has been providing us with the best possible path to the brig,” Jennings said. “We’re only two floors down from it.”
“There are a few problems though,” Lafayette added.
“With this plan?” Beauregard responded sarcastically. “You jest.”
“The brig is located in the heart of security,” he said. “So, we’ll need to deal with that. Plus, you have two very heavily guarded areas on either side of security. Engineering to the aft and storage to the fore.”
“Storage is heavily guarded?” Beauregard demanded sneakily.
“For some reason,” Jennings agreed. He picked up the computer tablet from Squawk and showed it to Beauregard. “This area especially for some reason. There isn’t even access from the security side. It’s a completely isolated room.”
“Fascinating, but not exactly pertinent,” she pointed out.
“We can’t go through it to get to security and we’ll have trouble getting through engineering without raising suspicion,” Jennings clarified.
“Then we walk in the front door,” Beauregard said.
They all looked at her for a moment. Lafayette looked at her like she was nuts, and Fix just had a muted stare, but Jennings had a smile crossing his face. “My kind of girl,” he said. Turning to Squawk, he said, “I want my ship in good working order by the time I get back.”
“That would be a miraculous miracle,” Squawk replied, but not without enthusiasm.
“And if I give you the order to do so, you take the ship and get out of here,” Jennings added, a slight tone of affection in his voice.
The Pasquatil looked confused. “You’re friends,” he said in a way that seemed to settle it.
“I want you to save yourself if there’s no chance for us,” he insisted.
“Can’t leave friends,” Squawk responded, shaking his head energetically. “No, no, no. You go get friend Michelle. All together we leave.”
A new surge of affection suddenly filled Matthew Jennings for his diminutive engineer. Lafayette was a friend of his certainly after all they had been through, and Fix was clearly an employee with his own strange sense of loyalty, but he never really considered Squawk. The Pasquatil was always willing to go with him, always willing to do what they said no matter how insane. Jennings had assumed that Squawk stayed with his crew because he enjoyed tinkering on the ship. Honestly, until Squawk had said that, he had never considered the Pasquatil a friend, but he had also never considered what the Pasquatil race’s definition of friendship was.
Nodding to Squawk, Jennings looked to the rest of his crew and said, “Alright, you heard the man… er… Pasquatil. Let’s go get her.”
Chapter 31
Pahhal led Michelle out of his quarters and back to the lift. He selected the level that was designated Storage (Authorized Personnel Only), Security (Authorized Personnel Only), Engineering (Authorized Personnel Only). Pahhal had to punch several codes into the lift’s control pad in order to get to the level he was leading her to. When the lift doors opened, she saw that this was just the beginning of the security. They stepped out and were in a small room that reminded Michelle of an airlock. There was a door in front of them, but the control pad next to it did not have any power until the lift door behind them closed. Once the elevator door was sealed, the control pad lit up, displaying even more security challenges.
Pahhal walked over to it, punched in a series of codes, had his retinas and fingerprints scanned, and then breathed into a small tube to provide a DNA sample. The door at last opened and he led her through. They were in a long, wide corridor lit faintly by halogen lights. To her left and right, there were doors with various signs indicating that there was clothing, food, water, parts and other items within. Each was locked and looked like it required multiple security accesses in order to get inside.
“They really don’t want people stealing food,” Michelle muttered to herself. “Is it that big a problem?”
“Not when everything is going normally, no,” he replied. “But imagine yourself on a ship with a thousand other men with no chance of resupply. Control of items, such as food and water, keeps control of the ship.”
Pahhal led on as they passed different storage rooms until the corridor terminated in another airlock. The Gael had to go through the same series of challenges to get into the airlock, and then once the door sealed behind them, he had to enter a second series of passwords to get back out of the security station. The door opened up into a short corridor and Pahhal grabbed her arm to keep her from entering.
“You must remain here, while I deactivate the security system for this corridor,” he said.
“What security system?” she asked.
“This part of the ship was specifically designed and installed by the Gael,” he said. “If a human being sets foot in the hallway while security is active, poison is immediately released, and you will be dead.”
“Would it kill you too?” Michelle asked as she took a step toward the corridor.
The Gael laughed coldly. “The poison is not harmful to Gael,” he pointed out. Michelle stopped moving forward. “Once a Gael enters the corridor, he has thirty seconds to traverse the length of the hallway and deactivate the security, otherwise plasma cannons will obliterate any lifeform in the corridor.”
“Right,” Michelle said. “I’ll just wait here then.”
Pahhal smiled and headed down the hallway quickly to where he once again entered a bevy of security measures. Turning back around to her, he called, “The system has been deactivated. Step forward and see what all of this is about. The answers to your questions are inside this room.”
The room they stepped into looked like
a warehouse, its ceiling approximately twenty feet high. There were rows running off to both the left and right, serving as walkways between twenty foot wide sections of walls that were glowing a cold, eerie blue. The room was freezing, and Michelle clutched her arms tightly around herself.
Pahhal passed her a jacket. “Every so often, I have to let human technicians in here for maintenance,” he said. “They too cannot tolerate the cold.”
“You treat this place so secretively,” she said. “I’m surprised that you would let even technicians in here.”
“They’re not given the opportunity to speak of what they have seen,” Pahhal responded ominously.
Michelle shivered and she did not think it was because of the cold. She turned to the right and headed down one of the rows, studying the walls carefully. The walls were not really walls at all, but were machines of some kind, stacked three high. Each had a control panel with a temperature readout, what looked like brain wave measurements, blood pressure monitors, pulse readings and what Michelle thought might be electrocardiograph readings. Those panels were to the right of a small door that reminded Michelle creepily of the time she had gone to the medical examiner’s office with her mother to identify her grandfather’s body. He had been kept in a refrigeration unit that the coroner had opened and rolled the body out of. The machine Michelle was looking at now looked a lot more complicated, and there was also a small window set inside the door.
Michelle was fairly certain what she would see when she looked through it, but she still had to. Inside the machine, there was a small child, maybe six or seven years old, a breathing mask placed over his face, his skin tinged slightly blue, a dozen or more sensors placed on his body, connected to wires that ran into the interior tube’s walls.
She wheeled on Pahhal and demanded, “A child?”
“It was not we who chose these people,” Pahhal retorted. “We are only doing as we must.”
111 Souls (Infinite Universe) Page 30
