Cloaked

by Ell Leigh Clarke

  Molly nodded, thinking. “Ok, here’s what we’re going to do.”

  Aboard the Flutningsaðili, Level 2 common area corridor

  PIETER ARE YOU THERE? NEED HELP GETTING TO WHEREVER S&M ARE.

  SEND.

  Jack stood in the corridor typing out the message, wondering if she’d get shit from Pieter later for typing S&M in a message.

  Pieter responded almost immediately in her ear. “Hey. Yeah. I’ve got you. Oz has just finished mapping the areas we’re interested in. Can you get to the fourth floor?”

  Jack didn’t respond. Instead she turned and walked back down the way she had just come and headed for the main elevator.

  Pieter understood that she was just responding to the instructions without speaking. “Got it,” he said in her implant. “I’ll just talk, and if you need to query me or respond, I’ll look out for a holo message. Until you’re able to talk.”

  Jack tapped another message as she walked.

  CAMERAS?

  Pieter paused, tapping away on some keys. “Yes. Yep we’ve got your back. Oz is plotting your route and will have you disappear from the elevator on a passing floor.”

  Jack suddenly felt so much safer.

  Like completely safe. It was suddenly as if this were just a training exercise. She took a deep breath noticing what a difference it made to have her team in communication, backing her up.

  So much easier! And to think I wanted to be a lone wolf once upon a time.

  She wanted to kick herself for how she had been in the past, despite the intensity of the moment.

  The elevator arrived and she stepped in, hitting the fourth floor button.

  Pieter was talking to her again. “Oz is going to have the elevator take you down to floor seventeen where there is a medium amount of activity, and then he’ll do the thing on the cameras so it makes it look that you got off there.”

  There were a few other people in the elevator with her, and they got off at various floors, before the machine swooped her down to seventeen. The doors opened into a dark corridor.

  She didn’t move.

  After what seemed like an eternity they closed again and the elevator ran back up to four.

  “Ok, you’re up,” Pieter told her. “You want to step out of here and then head straight down the corridor. Then take the second corridor on the right, and then first left.”

  Jack followed the instructions, now at a jog. “Can you hear me?” she checked, relieved that she could now speak.

  “Loud and clear,” Pieter confirmed. “Ok, you’re approaching the restricted access area. You want to head to the panel and use the code to bypass…”

  “Got it,” Jack replied. She approached the keypad and tapped in 1234 ENTER.

  The door slid open, allowing her to step inside. The lights came up as she headed through. “Now where?” she said, seeing the dim outline of cargo boxes and stranger heavy-duty machinery.

  Pieter guided her through to the far side where the others were imprisoned in the meeting room.

  Maya saw her approaching first, and came to the window. “Hi Griselle, what are you doing here?” she said with a smile, making light of the now redundant fake names.

  Jack headed straight for the access panel to the room. “You know the code?” she asked, looking up through the glass at Maya and Sean.

  “No, they don’t,” a bone chilling voice came from behind her. “But I do…”

  Jack spun around to see a figure emerging from the shadows. It was Max Pike.

  “Time to let them go, Pike,” Jack demanded with authority. “We have a truce. Our people are coming to get us.”

  Pike shook his head. “They may be on their way, and yes, we did agree on an unsatisfactory truce. And once they are here they too will become subject to our containment method.” A smirk spread across his smarmy lips. Jack felt an urge welling in her. One which involved smacking him in the face right where his evil sneer was.

  She took a step towards him.

  A dozen of his security guards stepped out from the shadows of the heavy equipment in the room, and came forward, their weapons weighing heavy in the consciousness of the prisoners.

  Jack frowned. “So you plan to kill us all?”

  Max Pike smiled as he played with a key card in his hand. “Kill is such an archaic and brutal word don’t you think? I’m merely taking the necessary action to secure the interests of my client.”

  His holo beeped and he glanced down at the screen. “And there they are now. Right on schedule.”

  He looked back at Jack. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to go and tend to something, but I’ll be back shortly.”

  He waved at a couple of the guards to watch her, and then turned taking a couple of his guards with him.

  There was a sudden flurry of activity in the meeting room. Jack spun round, looking in, still unable to get through the door.

  “Ok, now,” Sean said quietly to Anne.

  The security personnel came forward. “Stop. What are you doing?”

  By the time Jack could see what was happening, she realized that Sean had managed to get the air vent in the room open, and Anne was being pushed up into it, her feet disappearing as she climbed in.

  The guards were over at the door getting it open. Jack could see Sean whispering instructions to the girl and then closing up the vent after her.

  The guards hesitated firing. They clearly had instructions to keep them alive for now. Jack used the moments of commotion to count up how many adversaries there were.

  Six.

  She stepped away from the glass as they came piling forward. They were all huddled in a smallish area now, and as long as there weren’t any more in the shadows she knew what to do.

  Coming up behind one she punched him in the neck, right where it would knock him out. He went down, and before he had hit the ground she had grabbed his weapon and turned it on their captors.

  She checked for the switches, knocked off the safety and shot two of the security guards in the head.

  Bam. Bam.

  The others turned, completely oblivious to what had just happened. They saw Jack, just a young woman to them, with one of their guns and moved to open fire… Except only the one in the doorway could get a clear shot. The others fired stupidly at the glass. The bulletproof glass.

  Their shots smashed straight into the material and stopped there, breaking up the clear surface, and rendering them inert.

  The one at the door received a shot through his throat. Blood exploded like a ketchup bottle, splattering over the body and around the doorway as it dropped.

  Sean had already moved into action, taking one guard who had been busy firing rounds into the window, and breaking his neck before he even knew there was a threat behind him. Without hesitating he did the same to the one next to him.

  That left one more in the room.

  Jack started to move forward, towards the door. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion. The Estarian guard was aware that there was now a threat inside the cell, and one approaching the door. Sean was closer. He started backing away. Just then, he felt his gun barrel being pushed up in the air. He turned and the last thing he saw was the other woman, Marissa, that had been one of the crew. She pulled her fist back, and then everything went dark for him.

  Sean stopped dead in his tracks, his grimace of combat turning to one of humor as he looked from the body on the floor and then to Maya.

  Jack’s run turned into a walk as she stepped over a couple of bodies to get a closer look.

  The two scientists in the room looked agasp at what they’d just witnessed. Their eyes were wide, and mouths moved but elicited no sound.

  Maya glanced down, regarding the heap of Estarian that she had just taken out with a single punch to the face. Her eyes lit up in excitement, and her jaw relaxed, turning her expression from one of determination into a celebratory smile.

  “Well,” Sean started, “looks like someone has been paying attention
in their hand to hand combat lessons.”

  Maya grinned. “I can’t believe it, I just saw the opening and did it. I never thought that I might be able to…”

  Jack took the last few paces over to the body. “You’ve knocked him out cold!” she announced proudly, prodding the body with her foot.

  Maya did a little dance on the spot, and then her expression changed to one of pain. She lifted her hand. “Owwww…” she said, looking at it. It was already starting to swell a little. “But it hurt like a motherfucker!” she said, clenching and unclenching it.

  Sean reached over to inspect it for her. “Lemme see,” he said flattening out her fingers, and feeling the knuckles and the bones on the back. “Hmm. Well, yeah. It’s gonna swell. It’s bruised. But the good news is you used the right part of your hand. Nothing broken. I’d class that as a win.”

  He patted her on the shoulder like she had suddenly become one of the boys.

  Jack was already onto checking her ammo and returning the gun to its safety. She surveyed the scene. “See, if they’d been using stun bullets or trancs they’d all be alive now. Karma is a bitch,” she added quietly.

  Sean shrugged. “They didn’t give us much choice.” He looked out across the darkened space beyond the meeting room. “Ok. Time to move. We don’t know if they have friends on the way.”

  Jack glanced over at him. “Pieter and Oz have had the cameras covered. As long as no one is monitoring real time we’re ok… thanks to Maya’s patch.”

  Maya looked up from her aching hand, and smiled… her expression no longer as exuberant on account of the pain.

  Sean nodded. “Ok. Let’s move. Pieter?” he called.

  “Here,” Pieter responded in his ear.

  Sean was already on the move as he issued instructions. “Let Brock know that he has one young girl, Anne, on her way to rendezvous with him. We’re going to try for the Empress on 25.”

  Pieter started tapping away on his holo. “Ok. I’ll let him know,” he reported back.

  Jack glanced back at Sean as they made their way through the rows of equipment. “Too late to call her back?” Jack asked.

  Sean nodded. “We have no way of communicating with her now. But she seemed smart, and I gave her my access card, so Oz can track her as she uses it… and grant her access. She knows someone is watching out for her in the computers, helping.”

  Maya was bringing up the rear, coaxing the bewildered scientists out with her. She sensed their hesitation at leaving.

  She remembered the experiments with heffelumps tied up by a tiny rope they could pull through easily, but because they’d learned they were bound at a young age, they never attempted to leave. She felt they had a similar resistance to stepping through the door, even though they made it out, over the bodies strewn around.

  Aboard the Flutningsaðili, Floor 25, Dock 26

  Crash and Paige had been mulling the possibility of Paige staying with the ship, but after careful consideration it was decided it wasn’t the best option.

  Molly put her hand gently on Paige’s shoulder. “Ok. Paige, you’re with us. Crash, I need your expertise on the stick. You may need to undock or respond in some other way.”

  Paige’s eye’s looked terrified. She patted Crash on the arm. “It’s ok. It’s probably easier if I’m with them. I wouldn’t know the first thing to do here, and if you’re not here then no one gets out of here alive.”

  Crash nodded, and watched them leave.

  Molly stepped out onto the hangar deck down the invisible staircase, her hands raised to show she wasn’t holding a weapon. Paige followed her down carefully.

  “Welcome aboard, Ms. Bates,” Max called, his voice reverberating around the dock. “I trust you had a comfortable journey.”

  Molly scowled at him. “Let’s dispense with the pleasantries,” she suggested firmly. “You’re holding my people captive. I’d like them back.”

  “Ah, yes,” he said, pulling a gun from behind his back and aiming it straight at Molly. “That’s not going to happen. No one strong arms me.”

  Molly had reached the deck. There was nowhere to shield herself. “We had an agreement,” she protested. “The hostages and my people off your ship, leaving you to continue your transaction with your client.”

  Max took a few paces forward, his tone becoming more and more patronizing. “Yes, well, you see, that’s just not going to work for me. I give you the hostages, my client will not be happy.”

  Molly tried hard to keep the sarcasm out of her voice. “I’m sure someone with your abilities would be able to smooth that over.”

  “No… Ms. Bates,” he argued, keeping his tone irritatingly even. “Alas, even I have my limits. My patience being one of them.”

  He raised his gun to her head. “Thank you for coming here and making the job of taking you out of the equation that much easier.”

  Paige stood glued to the spot, frozen in horror.

  Molly felt a calmness wash over her. It was as if she slipped deeper into being in the body and the present moment seemed to expand into eternity. Her muscles relaxed. Her whole being was relaxed.

  She felt completely at ease… and dare she say it, even a sense of bliss.

  Everything happened in slow motion.

  She was aware of the changing expressions on Pike’s face, contorted in meanness and anger. She could even see the hairs on his head move as he took the slight recoil of the pistol.

  She saw the bullet leaving the barrel of the gun.

  She watched the bullet traveling through the air, and was fully aware of Paige’s emotional reaction. She could feel her own horror on the surface of her being, but also felt her own sense of connectedness and complete peace with the moment.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Aboard the Flutningsaðili, Floor 2

  Brock slipped out of the closet where Jack had left him ten-Mississippis before.

  He rolled his shoulders to relax himself and tried to look as natural as possible.

  Reading off his holo he looked at the directions on the map that Oz and Pieter were feeding him.

  He could hear Pieter talking through his audio implant. “You need to get to level 1,” Pieter told him. Oz is working on getting into the system to find you a ship that is functional and will hold personnel. Most of these are tractors as you pointed out.”

  Brock didn’t respond, but headed off in the direct of the other elevator set, in the opposite direction to the ones Jack had headed towards.

  He passed a few people who he now knew by sight, nodding and waving casually as he hurried as fast as he dared.

  “Yo, Tallus,” a voice called from behind him. Brock turned around. “You up for that rematch, eh?”

  It was Auggie.

  Brock shook his head, scrambling for a legitimate excuse. “Not right now, man. I’ve got to go lie down. My head hasn’t been feeling right.”

  Auggie all of a sudden looked concerned. “You ok? What is it?”