Terror on the Trailblazer

by John Thornton

  Ken was puzzled as well, but responded, “Which is closer to here?”

  “There you go, Ken. Pretty, bright, and now pragmatic. Oh, yes, a man after my own heart. Be still my lusts! Come along, your homebase is closest to here. The old designation for that place was, RF56-IT7U.” Butterfield headed for the bulkhead door which led out of the hanger bay. “Come along, do not dawdle.”

  Janae and Ken followed, and as they passed out of the doorway, the pressure doors shut down, and the bulkhead doors sealed behind them. Offhandedly, Butterfield waved and said, “Fret not, if you need to get back inside, the code is blue, blue, green, green, white.”

  Ken looked at the nine-section color control pad which was flashing. “Why are you telling us that? How tactical are you thinking, now?”

  “Ken, my dear pretty man, I am always thinking tactically. I told you because I believe it in my best interest that you have easy access to this hanger bay.”

  “Or that is a code which summons someone to come and help you,” Janae added. “I do not trust you.”

  Butterfield shrugged, “Be that as it may, that code will get you into this hanger bay, which we call Hanger 9. It has an old designation as well, but that is of no concern to us. Up ahead is an elevator, and we best use my countermand device on it.”

  Janae reached up and touched Ken’s shoulder, “She might be leading us to a trap. If we let her use her gear, she will call for help.”

  “Janae, she might. Yet, she fears Diego. I can see that in her eyes.” He dropped his voice to a mere whisper, “I will try Kimberly again. Maybe she has self-repaired?”

  Janae blew out a breath but nodded.

  As they walked down the corridor, Ken touched the comlink and said, “Kimberly, report your status.”

  Kimberly’s voice came booming out of Ken’s comlink at three times the normal volume, “Ken, I am so very glad to hear from you. How are you? …are you? I am fully functional… fully functional… Please connect me to the nonphysicality so that I may… Onward! On! the chargers trample; Quicker falls each iron heel! And the headlong pace grows faster; noble steed and noble master, rushing on to red disaster… red disaster… red disaster… I am attempting self-repairs, encountering much… Where the heavy cannons peal. In the van rides Captain Neal; soldier stout he was and brave! His shining sabre flashes, as upon the foe he dashes. His face turns white as ashes, he has ridden to his grave… ridden to his grave… ridden to his grave…”

  Ken snapped off the comlink, but his ears were ringing from the loudness of Kimberly’s comments.

  “Oh, yes, your advanced Earth-based, Dome 17 technology,” Butterfield giggled. “Quite impressive, my pretty man. Quite impressive.”

  “Just lead us to our homebase,” Janae angrily retorted. “I suppose you can use…” But then her own comlink erupted in Kimberly’s voice, despite it being shut off.

  “Grandfather’s clock was too… Down he fell, prone from his saddle, without motion, without breath, never more a trump to waken… to waken… to waken… he the very first one taken, from the bough so sorely shaken, in the vintage-time of death… charge at Balaklava Ukraine… your pain… on 25 October 1854 in the Crimean War, a final cavalry charge… no baklava. It is baklava, not Balaklava, not baked lava. Baklava is made in a medium saucepan, combine one cup sugar, with a half… a half… In a moment, in a twinkling, he was gathered to his rest; in the time for which he waited—with his gallant heart elated—down went Neal, decorated, with a death wound… wound… wound on his breast.”

  Janae pulled the comlink off her ear, and thus disconnected it from her body, and its power source. Kimberly’s voice fell silent.

  Butterfield turned around, and said to them both, “Nice. I have heard of baklava, it is a pastry which is made from nuts and honey. The Benefactor likes it, I think it is far too rich and sweet, but maybe your friend has a better recipe? A robotic food processor that combines pasty with foretelling death. Ha! Yes, impressive technology, and such a nice volume too.”

  “Beware, Butterfield,” Janae retorted and then did not know how to finish.

  “Just take us along, and let us worry about our technology,” Ken interjected.

  “Why worry about it? Once a system is kaput, it should be broken down into its subcomponents and reclaimed for Reproduction and Fabrication,” Butterfield flippantly stated. “Throw out what is broken, deformed, or contaminated. Come along, and hand over my countermand device, or do we get more Dome 17 entertainment?”

  Ken dug out the device and handed it to Butterfield. As she took it from him, she rubbed her fingers along his hand in a subtle, yet seductive manner. She placed it against the side of the wall next to the blue hand-shaped symbol. Adjusting the controls on the countermand, it glowed yellow for a bit, and then the hand-symbol flashed three times, and changed to a deep yellow color.

  “The elevator awaits,” Butterfield said and gestured with a sweeping mock curtsey. “RF56-IT7U is a few levels over, and then just a short walk and some stairs. The ladder coming up from below was ruined by someone. I wonder who? What a mystery! Please, enter.”

  “Ken, you go in first, then Butterfield, and I will follow,” Janae instructed, “that way she cannot lock us both inside, and her out here, or she could lock herself in and escape.”

  “Such a lack of trust, oh, if I knew you meant it personally, I would be terribly offended. Yes, terribly offended.”

  Janae snarled back a reply, “And if I did not have compassion on you in your grieving and mourning for your Daddy, I might slap that smug look off your naked face.”

  Unconsciously, Butterfield did touch her face, where the red coloration usually was. Then Ken stepped into the elevator, which was clean, well-lit, and waiting. After a quick disconnection of her countermand device, Butterfield handed it to Ken as she too stepped into the elevator. Janae followed.

  The elevator doors closed, and the car moved smoothly and quietly along on its way. “Ida’s technology running nice and efficiently. Despite massive systems failures in the past, I do wonder how it has survived all this time, when newer and better systems just have lost their minds? We will arrive momentarily. Be sure to have one of your Dome 17 weapons ready. I might be leading you two into a springe, right? Ha! Oh, but you probably are not aware of nooses which snare small mammals, are you? Small animals—like rabbits and such—often get caught and hung by their necks.”

  “If it is a trap, Butterfield—I know what a springe is—one of us will shoot you. Be assured of that,” Ken warned, and something in his voice made Butterfield stop with her taunts.

  As they traveled, Butterfield adjusted the controls on the elevator, while it was under the influence of her countermand device, “Just like I did with Hanger 9, the security code for this elevator is now; blue, blue, green, green, white. It will not show up on anyone’s logs, or on any remote sensors, but entering that sequence will allow you or me to use this elevator.”

  The car stopped, and the doors opened. She stepped confidently out, then turned and headed away. “Even AI Heddlu cannot observe past the barrier my countermand has established. We are in a tertiary maintenance corridor, as you can tell by the smell. Musty, and unused.”

  There was a sign on the wall with an arrow and the label, “RF56-IT7U” and Butterfield gently touched that as she stepped past it. Some moments later, a few stairs, and a twist in the passageway, they came to a small door. She entered the same combination in its nine-section color control pad, and the door opened, sliding back into its pocket. Janae had her revenger aimed and ready, but the hallway beyond was empty, well-lit, and filled with fresh air. It smelled far better than the stuffy passage they were exiting.

  “This looks familiar, but we must have approached from a different way,” Ken said as he followed Butterfield though the doorway. From the opposite side of the door it was clear why he had missed it so long ago when they had left their homebase. The door fit securely into the wall and was unmarked, and without any visible seams.
“Over there is where my combination lock had secured that door.” The remains of the lock were hanging separated from each other, and the door was open.

  “This is RF56-IT7U, what you called homebase,” Butterfield stated. “I have brought you here, just like I said it would. Are you happy, pretty man?”

  Ken examined the broken lock he had made. The five cogs he had cut with the molecular saw were severed in a rough cut like a vibration saw would make. The other side of the lock was equally ruined. The doors hung apart, and light was on the other side.

  “Oh dear, I think someone visited here before we arrived,” Butterfield said cheerfully. “Oops! Another secret lost.”

  Janae pushed past Butterfield and entered the place they had stayed for so long, and where they had hoped to reconnect to the people of Dome 17. She thought about Riley and what they had witnessed through the orifice of the teleportation system, but she thought that only for a moment. The big chamber was empty.

  “Where is the receiving pad?” Ken gasped.

  Wall-to-wall, and end-to-end the chamber was empty.

  The trapdoor which led to a ladder down, was standing open, and Janae knew she had welded it shut. Several other doors which had been locked and welded shut by Janae, now stood open, and some had the doors completely disconnected. Only by looking around, did Janae notice that the disassembled doors were lying flat on the deck along the back wall.

  The banks of monitors which had been set against a sidewall were gone, but ghosts of their presence were on the wall itself as outlines, faded areas, severed wires, and discolorations of where the monitors had been. The workstation’s countertops were bare and vacant. For a moment, Janae wondered if they were in some wrong location, but across from where the monitors had been, there were familiar large pipes extending from floor to ceiling. She knew they were the same ones because of their labels, “Waste Water Seven” and “Hydrologic Sludge” and “Liquified Fertilizer for Biome” all in blocky, black lettering.

  “The frames for those lockers are even gone!” Ken said as he nodded toward the back of the room. “We used the permalloy from their doors for the receiving pad’s grid. It is all gone.”

  “Terror grips the mind when things happen behind your back, right, pretty man?” Butterfield asked with a barely-suppressed grin. “Oh, I know it is sad, I suppose, to lose more equipment, and honestly, I am surprised at the completeness and thoroughness of whoever stripped out this room.”

  Janae turned to her, “You did it! You knew it was here. Where did you take our gear?”

  “Me? I did nothing like that,” Butterfield held up both palms, “I was transporting you in a shuttle, then chasing you around Christianopolis.”

  “You arranged for your people to do this!” Janae screamed. “Quit lying to me!”

  Butterfield genuinely looked frightened. She backed up with both hands held up, “If I did that, why would I bring you here? I would have never told you I knew about this place.”

  Janae was shaking in rage. Her mind was whirling with ramification of the irreplaceable lost equipment.

  Ken stepped between Janae and Butterfield, “Janae, I too am appalled that the teleportation pad is missing, gone, but…” he turned around and looked at Butterfield, “I cannot figure out how she would have benefited from bringing us here. There was no trap, no one else here, and she genuinely looks surprised.”

  “Oh, Ken, shut up. You are just infatuated with her and her sexuality,” Janae snapped back, and saw a smirk rush across Butterfield’s face. Janae paused and then she took a few deep breaths. “So, Butterfield, take us to Hanger 5, right now!”

  “I could do that, certainly. I know where it is, and how to get there from here, but, I want to know what happened to your teleporter, or transporter system,” Butterfield replied. “I had nothing to do with this place being stripped out, and much as I hate to admit it, your technology is valuable, and it is in my interest to know who has it.”

  “So, tell us who took it.”

  “I do not know, but I can see if the surveillance system caught any records in its logs,” Butterfield answered. “I do not know what is recorded and what is not, but I can check using my countermand. I just need to connect into that aperture over there, above the door.”

  “So, you can summon some help? Or betray us?” Janae questioned.

  “No. I will do it so I can know if Diego has his grubby hands on technology which might come back to haunt me.”

  “Tell me how you would do it,” Ken stated, “and I will access the records.”

  “Ken! She… oh, just do it. If her people show up, she dies, and we fight it out,” Janae spat out the words, but in her heart, she was tired of the struggle.

  Butterfield walked over and reached up to the small aperture which jutted out a tiny amount from the wall. She placed the countermand on it, and adjusted the controls. She then asked for her multiceiver, which Ken gave her and she linked the two together. Yellow lights flashed on the countermand, and Butterfield fine-tuned the interaction.

  “There is a record here. Not every location is still reporting, since the lattice failed so long ago, but some of these apertures are still sending in signals just as if there was an AI waiting to oversee it. Here, this is what took place.”

  A projection came from her multiceiver and displayed a two-dimensional audio-visual record on the wall. Several engineering automacubes were disassembled the teleporter, but they were doing so in a careful, precise, methodical manner.

  “So, did you order your automacubes to steal our teleporter?”

  “Janae, those are not my automacubes, and, let me turn up the volume here, and I think you might better recognize this voice,” Butterfield simpered with a strange smile. “I wonder who it is?”

  “…tick-tock, tick, tick, tick-tock. Once again have I roamed through this old-fashioned colony ship, where my grandfather… grandfather… grandfather’s clock was too tall for the shelf… spent his ninety years. No, the Trailblazer has been in flight for one hundred and… and… and… There are strangers in charge, and the change they have wrought—oh! it saddens me, even to tears… tears… fears… bears… bruins… time is now! Dear old clock! When they found you, you were speechless from grief, then they went and swapped you off, case and all. For that vain, stuck-up thing… thing… thing…”

  “Kimberly?” Ken asked in wonder. “That is Kimberly.”

  Butterfield nodded, and looked at Janae, “Still think I did this?”

  Behind her the record kept rolling. The blue automacubes were disassembling the teleporter. With their manipulation arms they placed several of the components into the storage areas of two yellow automacubes which had joined them. All the while, Kimberly’s AI voice sounded more sing-song, static-filled, and utterly strange, “Time is happening…tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick… For that vain, stuck-up thing on the wall. While we talked of the old clock… clock… clock… they all ran it down. Though they claimed that it could not run. It was useless they said—it was quite out of style—and… and… and… connections to some number one… no, not one. Dome 17… Dome 17… Built, no doubt, just about the year one.”

  “Your system, the pride of Dome 17, is rampant,” Butterfield chided. “Our systems went rampant too, and the only thing to do was to shut them down. Like a horse whose leg is broken, put it out of its misery, but who am I to speak. I am but a poor dweller on the Trailblazer, not some advanced adventurer from Earth! Ha!”

  Kimberly’s rambling words echoed round, with a faint, mocking sound, “Time is now, time is here, time was there, time will be, time… time… time… As if someone had… has… having… will have… assent to it all; that vain, stuck-up thing, on the wall. Ninety years without slumbering, his life seconds numbering, it stopped short, began to fade, but the teleporter was something they made… something they made… something they made… Worse than teddy bears, time is now, when no one cares…”

  “Shut it down Butterfield,” Ke
n gently urged. “We understand what happened.”

  “Speak for yourself, Ken! I do not understand. Kimberly is rampant, strange animal things chased us across a frozen waste, tants and her,” Janae gestured at Butterfield and just shook her head. “I will never understand… If I could throttle Jubal, I would do it with my bare hands and smile the whole time!”

  “As I would with Diego,” Butterfield affirmed. “Daddy is dead, and I brought you here.” She disconnected her countermand, and then stated, “In case you care, the logs on one of those transport automacubes—the yellow ones—indicated that the disassembled materials were heading for Hanger 5.”

  “Then, that is where we go,” Ken firmly said. “Butterfield, lead us on.”