“Alright, but you need to tell me what the hell is going on,” Jennings insisted as they strode past the various storage rooms.
As quickly as she could, Michelle relayed the details of everything she had been told: the Gael being banished from their dimension, the locked Great Gate, those that had expelled them hiding the key to the gate in the genetic material of one hundred and eleven humans, and that the Gael War had been their means to bring the human population under their control so they could capture the humans who held pieces of the key in their soul.
“Huh,” Jennings said, sounding as intrigued as if Michelle had just explained the virtues of a vegan diet.
“Is that all you have to say?” Beauregard demanded. “If she’s right, we could be rid of the Gael…”
Jennings whirled on her, and she almost crashed into him. “By sacrificing these people that the Gael want?” he demanded.
“There is such a thing as the greater good,” Beauregard replied.
“Something you know nothing about,” he spat, turning back around and resuming walking.
“You’ve never ordered those you commanded on a suicide mission?” Beauregard pressed.
Jennings turned quickly again, this time drawing his pistol and pointing it straight at Beauregard’s forehead. “I ordered grown men and women into impossible situations where their death was a foregone conclusion,” he said. “But those people volunteered to defend their world in a time of war. They knew what was being asked of them and they still gave their lives willingly. We aren’t at war anymore, and I’m not the Resistance. I don’t sacrifice innocent people just to get rid of a government I don’t like. If you disagree, then I’m afraid this is where our alliance ends,” he added darkly.
“I was just saying it was worth considering,” she said.
Jennings shook his head and holstered the weapon. “No, it wasn’t,” he replied as he turned and followed Michelle down the hallway.
2
Overseer Pahhal coughed and groaned as he tried to push himself off the floor and into a sitting position. Every part of his torso hurt, and his hand that had previously held the shock collar controller screamed in agony. The flesh was burned black in places and covered in red blisters. Compartmentalizing the pain away, he got himself into a seated position and looked down at his robes which were riddled with holes and scorch marks. With his good hand, he stuck some long fingers into the holes in the robe and yanked hard, ripping the material away, revealing the severely dented armor he wore underneath.
Tossing the robe aside as he stood up, Pahhal unfastened the dented armor and allowed it to fall to the floor in the hallway. He strode over top of it and entered his quarters, his body still encased in a one piece nylon body suit. He ran his good hand over his torso gingerly, noting a good number of sore spots that were almost certainly bruised if not sporting broken bones underneath them. Part of him wanted to thank Matthew Jennings for being kind enough not to shoot him in the face, but Pahhal compartmentalized that as well.
Jennings had the one hundred and eleventh soul, and he had to get it back. Walking over to a computer terminal set into the wall of the living room in his quarters he punched a series of buttons, a password to unlock a compartment that had been retrofitted from a closet in the living room. As the closet door slid open and a large gray locker emerged from the compartment as if on a conveyor, Pahhal called up the internal sensors’ life signs readings. He then overlaid the map with the location of every active person with a TGF transmitter and ordered the computer to filter out the results. The Gael had secretly had every member of TGF implanted with a microchip that transmitted their location for just these types of situations.
Of course, he had not expected there to be so many intruders on board the ship, but the filtering process worked as well as he anticipated. There were a dozen or so non-TGF lifeforms in the engineering section. Petrova and her escapees, he assumed. There were the one hundred and ten registering in the cryonics chamber, and there were three more headed through the supply corridors in that direction. Jennings was not only stealing one of the souls he needed, Pahhal realized. He was trying to take them all.
With a scream of fury, Pahhal marched over to the metal locker and yanked it open. Immediately, he began removing the contents and strapping himself into it. He would not allow anyone to come between him and his people’s destiny, especially not one foolish human, he thought to himself as he finished assembling the body chassis around himself and felt a surge of power as the machine interfaced with his mind.
3
Michelle led them through the supply depot’s corridors, stopping briefly only to grab three atmosphere suits from a locker that was labeled Emergency Decompression. “It’s lucky they have these all over the ship,” she commented as she passed them out.
“Well, vacuum does not have a pleasant effect on the human body,” Jennings pointed out. “And a hull breach is an unfortunate possibility on a warship. Why we need them now, I don’t know.”
“The entry to the cryonics chamber has a series of traps, once of which releases poison gas into the corridor if a human enters while security is still armed,” she responded as they resumed their trek.
“Wonderful,” Beauregard muttered.
Leading them deeper into the center of the ship, Michelle at last led them to an airlock that required more Gael security clearances that Minerva hacked through. They stepped into the airlock and the door swung shut behind them. Michelle immediately started putting her atmosphere suit on, and the other two followed suit wordlessly.
“We have thirty seconds to get down the hall and deactivate security,” Michelle said.
“Or?” Beauregard demanded.
“Pahhal said plasma cannons will obliterate anyone and everyone in the hallway,” she replied.
Beauregard looked to Jennings questioningly, and Jennings quietly asked, “Minerva?”
“The control for entry into that chamber is not tied into the general computer network,” she responded. “It’s not possible for me to de-activate.”
Jennings cursed before he turned to Michelle and said, “We have to abort. Getting killed will do nothing to help those people.”
Michelle looked like she wanted to protest, but just nodded tersely.
“I can’t believe I’m about to do this,” Beauregard said through gritted teeth. “I’ll get the bloody thing open.”
“How?” Jennings demanded.
“You don’t think the Resistance employees for my good looks, do you?” she demanded arrogantly.
“Certainly not for your personality,” Jennings fired back under his breath, but he was ignored.
With some difficulty, Beauregard managed to shrug her leg out of the atmosphere suit and yanked off her boot, not the one that had contained the vile of Merquand blood. She unscrewed the heel and a black flash drive dropped into her hand. She tossed it to Jennings for a moment as she got her suit back on, and then took it back from him.
“You can hack a Gael system with whatever’s on that?” he asked, disbelief evident in his voice.
“The person who sold it to me assured me that it could,” she responded.
“Why would you even need something like that?” Michelle asked.
Beauregard stared at her incredulously. “In case a situation like this ever came up, obviously,” she said. “Besides I don’t have a pet AI that can hack into government security systems without breaking a sweat. Where did you get that anyway?” she asked Jennings.
“Came with the ship,” he responded with a forced shrug and a tone of indifference that Beauregard did not believe for an instant. Jennings looked to Michelle and said, “You stay here.”
“Why?” Michelle asked.
“And why do you think I need your help?” Beauregard demanded.
Jennings turned first to Michelle and said, “Because if we die in there, you can still make it out of here.” He turned back to Beauregard, hefted his double-barreled grenade launcher in his
hand and said, “I’ve got a back-up plan to get the door open if need be. Besides, you’ll be busy with the hack. You’ll need someone to count the time for you.”
“You can count to thirty, can you?” Beauregard responded.
“Twenty-three,” Jennings replied. “Using my fingers, toes, and…”
Beauregard laughed and her eyes subconsciously dropped to about Jennings’ belt line. “Come on, captain,” she said. “We’re laughing our way to the grave.”
Minerva hacked her way through the second door, and Jennings and Beauregard sprinted to the far side as a purple-pink smoke immediately began billowing from the vents on the ceiling. Beauregard reached the control panel that had a warning flashing across its screen and slammed the flash drive into a computer port. Rapidly, she began punching commands into the monitor.
“Ten seconds,” Jennings said.
Her fingertips moving at a blur, Beauregard made no acknowledgement that she had heard him and continued to type away rapidly. Jennings warned her that twenty seconds had elapsed as the screen in front of them continued to flash with dire warnings and the door was still shut.
“Twenty-five,” he announced as he took a step back and leveled the grenade launcher at the door. “Twenty-six. Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight.”
The door suddenly slid open as the warning on the monitor vanished. The smoke ceased billowing from the vents, and a giant sound of suction filled the corridor for a moment. The poison was being pulled out of the atmosphere as the nebulous cloud was vanishing from the hallway. Michelle jogged across the short distance to meet up with the other two.
“Not bad,” Jennings said to Beauregard as she pulled her jump drive out of the monitor.
She punched a few commands into the computer and said, “The poison is completely out of the atmosphere.” Immediately, she began stripping out of her atmosphere suit and the other two followed her example. Free of the bulky suit, Beauregard pocketed the jump drive and said, “Well, let’s see what we just risked our lives for.”
All three of them stepped into the cryonics room, and Jennings let out a short whistle. Humans had experimented with cryonics prior to the development of Faster Than Light engines, but had never been able to make it work. They could keep people asleep certainly- that technology had been around since the twentieth century- but truly freezing people in place, halting aging while the user slept was one of the Holy Grails science had yet to provide. As much as Jennings despised the Gael, he could not help but marvel at the strides they had made from a technological standpoint.
Michelle was much less taken aback by what she was looking at because she had seen it once before. She turned to the control panel to the side of the door they had just entered and pushed a button that closed the door. Immediately she went to the nearest cryonics chamber and studied the readouts on the monitor for a moment before she rapidly pushed a series of buttons. The cool blue light inside the tube turned red. After a minute, the door to the tube opened, and the body slid out on a plastic slab as if it were on a conveyor belt.
Jennings stared at the young man with dark hair who was wearing what looked like blue pajamas. There was something familiar about the man, and he realized who he was just as the man’s eyes fluttered open and he sat bolt upright on the slab. His head jerked around, trying to take in his surroundings. He looked terrified.
“Easy, we’re here to help,” Michelle said.
The man’s eyes looked from Michelle to Jennings, to whom they locked on. “I know you,” he spat. “You’re the one who captured me.”
“And now I’m the one who’s rescuing you, Ciaran,” Jennings responded.
“Why should I trust you?” he demanded.
“No one’s asking you to,” Jennings replied. “But, I’m the only one of us with a way out of here, so if you don’t want to wait and see what the Gael have in store for you, I suggest you come with us.”
Ciaran O’Sullivan, the one hundred and tenth human captured as a part of Operation Aurora, considered this for a moment and then nodded.
Michelle looked back and forth to all of them and then said energetically, “Well, don’t just stand there. Start waking the rest up.”
They rushed down the aisles of cryo-tubes, punching in a few commands into each monitor before moving onto the next one. Jennings found that he was having to climb up ladders built into the space between every other tube to get to the third row of humans imprisoned in their cryonics chambers. He brushed aside all the questions he received from those who were awake, insisting instead that they help the other humans who were waking up and making sure that the ones on the top row did not fall to the ground.
O’Sullivan was going through the growing number of people milling about, all with the same question, and explaining what little he knew: that they were in danger and had been captured by the Gael, but these people were here to rescue them. Michelle joined him and asked everyone to remain calm and patient, explaining that they were on an enemy ship, but there was a plan to help them all escape.
Finishing her rows of people to awaken, Beauregard turned back toward Jennings, who had stopped and was talking to one of his crew via a comm line. She rushed over to his row and started awakening the last of the humans who were still in cryogenic freeze. Jennings said something about things becoming more complicated as Beauregard’s last chamber opened and an eight-year old girl opened her eyes.
“Where’s mom?” she asked with a scared expression on her face.
“We’re going to get you back to her,” Beauregard said with a soft smile, not certain if that was true, but not wanting the girl to cry.
The girl extended both her arms up in the air, a motion that Beauregard did not understand. The child had an expectant look on her face that turned into a more desperate and insistent stare. Realizing what the girl was looking for, Beauregard somewhat begrudgingly picked her up and carried her.
“We’ve got another one hundred or so prisoners we freed,” Jennings was saying into the comm.
Beauregard was fairly certain that she could hear the Cajun’s French cursing through Jennings’ ear bud.
“I know one hundred and twenty-five people traipsing through a TGF ship is probably going to get us caught,” he retorted. “Look, I don’t have time for this. We’ll meet you in…”
“Captain!” an insistent Minerva interrupted his conversation with Lafayette.
“Minerva, I’m in the middle of something…”
“There is something coming down the corridor to the cryonics room,” she said quickly. “Security measures are not responding.”
Jennings whirled toward Beauregard. “Can you lock him out?” he demanded.
Not taking the time to reply or put down the girl, Beauregard raced back over to the cryonics room’s one door and jabbed her jump drive into the control panel. She immediately began typing away.
“Hang on to me,” she said to the girl, and the child locked her arms around Beauregard’s neck, freeing her second hand to type into the monitor as well.
“Michelle, get them back away from the door!” Jennings shouted as he took up a point position ten feet from the door, and Michelle started trying to herd the large group of people toward the back of the room.
“Got it,” Beauregard said as she ripped out the jump drive and stepped back from the door.
There was silence for a moment, the atmosphere thick with anticipation and fear, and then there was a loud bang that seemed to jolt the entire room. A collective gasp escaped from the group as Jennings stared at the steel plated door that led into the room. The steel was being dented inward more and more with each blow that struck it.
“What the hell?” he whispered. “Minerva, is there a security camera in that hallway?”
“Affirmative,” came the reply in his ear.
“On my monitor,” he said as he let his rifle hang by its strap around his neck and he pulled his tablet out of his pocket. The tablet gave him a view of the corridor with a focus near the
security door that was being pounded on. Pahhal’s face was visible in the faceplate of a helmet made of black and gold metal, but the rest of his body was completely covered in shining black steel armor. Servos whirred on the elbows and the knees as Pahhal stepped back and punched out again and again at the door with metal fists utilizing the superhuman strength the mechanized arms had. Jennings knew all too well that on the back of the armor there was a shield generator that helped to protect the Gael within and that there were shoulder mounted plasma cannons and energy beam guns that could stun a human being into unconsciousness. He also knew that Pahhal’s helmet contained a heads-up display, auto targeting system and a cerebral connection system that allowed a Gael to manipulate the cybernetic armor with his mind.
Fear evident in his face, he dropped his tablet and said, “It’s an HK.”
Hunter-Killer was the name that human ground-pounders had given to the Gael armored infantry divisions during the war. The shield generators made them almost indestructible without artillery or weapons that were so large they could only be mounted on ships or tanks. They carried enough firepower to decimate Terran legions singlehandedly. The only saving grace in the war was that the Gael did not have enough of the armor to give to all of their soldiers. They would have waltzed through every colony that Earth had, not that it ended up making that much of a difference. Less than a hundred HK units were deployed by the Gael during the war and they were responsible for one hundred and twenty-five thousand casualties. Only one HK had been destroyed and that was by a squadron of bombers, who were aided by the sacrifice of a forty-eight Uula who remained in position near enough to it to paint the target and were killed in the carpet bombing of the area.
Beauregard gulped in fright and backed away from the door. “Have you ever fought one?” she asked, her voice quavering despite her best efforts to contain her fear.
“Once,” Jennings said quietly. “The Marquis and I were some of the only ones who walked away.” He started looking around the room as if searching for something. “We can’t go out the only door and there’s no other way out of the room,” he mumbled to himself before his eyes at last came to rest on the wall opposite the door. “Minerva, what’s on the other side of this wall?” he demanded suddenly.
111 Souls (Infinite Universe) Page 35
