“Our orders are official,” the man protested, “we’ve got to deactivate the launch mechanisms and transfer the warheads before this thing goes up.”
“What about the others?” Jericho demanded, briefly doubting his deductive reasoning skills.
“What others?” the operative asked with apparent confusion.
“The other E.E.V.’s,” Jericho replied, having drawn to within two paces of the other man. “What were you going to do about them?”
“There aren’t any other E.E.V.’s,” the technician said as he furrowed his brow in confusion and steadied himself against a nearby bulkhead with his hand. He was still floating in near zero gravity, while Jericho was wearing magnetic boots.
“Then either you’re too stupid to know what you were doing,” Jericho said casually as he took another step forward, “or you’re lying to me. Either way, you’ve cost me enough time.”
Just as the man made to inquire as to what he meant, Jericho snapped the butt of the plasma pistol into the base of his skull and sent him pinwheeling into the nearby bulkhead.
“We’re going to have to speed this up, Eve,” Jericho said hastily, “you should probably undock and—“
“Already done it, babe,” she assured him. “Follow the indicated path on your link and you should reach my sub-node in just a few minutes.”
“Ok,” he replied and set off at as fast of a run as he could manage with the boots. It wasn’t long and he came to the indicated corridor and he said, “Eve, now what?”
“Remove the panel marked ‘SN-3220’,” she replied through a thick blanket of static, and he quickly found the indicated panel. “It will open a crawlspace; go to the end and you’ll come to a hatch which leads to a thermally-regulated room. That’s where you’ll find my sub-node and, if you’re right, Benton’s instructions on how to kill this thing once and for all.”
Jericho popped the panel off and began to crawl through the tiny space, having to wriggle through a few choke points along the way which were simply too narrow for him to fit through without carefully accounting for his suit to avoid breaking its skin and exposing him to the station’s environs. While the two technicians had seemed convinced that the E.E.V.’s atmosphere posed no threat, Jericho couldn’t be sure how long that would remain the case.
After about fifty feet he came to a heavy, secure door with a series of markings which made no sense to him. “I’m here,” he said as he looked around for an access panel of some kind, “but I’m not seeing a way to open it.”
Static flared in his earpiece and he was barely able to make out anything but the hint of Eve’s voice. Then her voice crackled through the interference and she said, “Too deep, Jericho. I can’t walk…need to get the components yourse…unlocking the door now.”
The hatch popped open, and Jericho surmised that there was too much shielding this deep in the platform for the Tyson’s relatively low-powered comm. system to penetrate. If he had understood Eve’s broken words correctly, he was going to be on his own extracting her components. Doctor Maturin had already attached Jericho’s still-forming thumb to his reconstructed, left, arm but the digit was still less than dependable and had almost no tactile sensation.
So he carefully pulled the hatch open, using primarily his right hand, and crawled into a cramped, low-ceiling room which was barely tall enough for him to kneel and maintain a posture resembling an upright one. There were several pipes feeding super-cooled gas into the chamber, and the temperature was dangerously cold. Jericho knew that if his now-moist skin made any contact with the metal of the room, it would become inextricably frozen in place.
Thankfully his work suit protected him from the lethally cold material. Jericho activated his wrist link and called up the list of components which Eve had indicated, and sighted one of the numbered racks nearby so he crawled to it and examined the housing.
He carefully took a miniature multi-tool from his belt and grumbled, “I hate these things.” He flipped through its built-in options until coming to the proper, pentagonal screwdriver head he would need to open the rack. Once he had undone the screws, he carefully pulled the panel away and saw a nearly indecipherable mess of cables, wires, plugs, chips, and myriad other devices the purposes of which he couldn’t even begin to guess.
Jericho quickly sighted the first component—a cubical device connected to the primary housing via two large, X-shaped clamps. He checked the procedure for removing those clamps on his link’s screen, and very carefully followed the instructions while being careful not to touch anything else inside the apparatus.
The six-inch cube tilted forward after its clamps had been released, and Jericho took it from the housing and stuffed it into the duffel bag. He then moved down to another large housing shaped like a squat, vertical cylinder, finding the second device’s markings listed on the link’s readout.
There were six items in all that he needed to retrieve, and he actually managed to remove the first five without any real difficulty. The process required twenty two minutes to complete, but when he came to the last item he looked down at his link to confirm what it was, as well as how to remove it.
He noted with a small measure of surprise that there was a new addendum to the instructions on removing the cache, and he quickly realized those instructions explained how to access any potentially hidden messages inside the cache which Benton may have left.
“I wish you were with me, Eve,” he muttered as he opened the panel to reveal Eve’s tertiary cache housing. This was easily the largest component of the six, and Jericho knew it would weigh at least a hundred kilos. It was spherical with a narrow gap along its equatorial line, and was suspended within the housing via vertical supports connected at its poles.
Jericho accessed the small program attached to the addendum file in his wrist link and withdrew a thin, fiber-optic hard line from the wrist link’s housing. He then threaded that line through the chorus of wires near the southern support rod. There was a small diagnostic plug located there, and the wrist link’s hard line was thankfully compatible with it, so he inserted the line and executed the program.
The wrist link’s display flickered and switched off unexpectedly, causing Jericho’s stomach to twist into knots. “Come on,” he growled, gently tapping the link to no effect. “Stupid thing,” he muttered as he felt the deck begin to vibrate ever so slightly beneath his feet, “I don’t have time for this.”
He waited for thirty five seconds before deciding that the link would require a hard reboot, and made to unfasten it from his wrist when the display sprung back to life and Benton’s voice came over his earpiece, “I’m gonna go ‘head and assume this is Jericho, my elder-brother-from-another-mother. If it ain’t that geezer-ass has-been,” he quipped, “then I’ma go ahead and assume it’s Masozi, in which case: sup girl, how you been? If I’m still wrong then y’all are about to get fuckin’ popsicled, feel me?”
The door to the chamber slammed shut with a clang, and Jericho saw the pipes feeding the super-cooled gas into the room increase their output at least tenfold.
“Now, if you is who you s’posed to be,” Benton’s voice continued, “y’all know that annoyin’-ass shit Jericho likes to spit to newbies? I’ll make it simple for ya,” he said, and the wrist link’s screen switched to a virtual keyboard, “just pipe in that fogey’s favorite fuckin’ food and we’ll be good.”
Jericho knew that with so much super-cooled gas flooding into the room he had only a few minutes before even his suit would fail to protect him. He was already chilled far below the normal human range, and was afraid hypothermia would set in soon.
He punched in the three word phrase as he fought to keep his finger steady and his teeth from chattering. When he had finished he pressed the input icon and the gas ceased streaming into the room.
“My dawg,” Benton’s voice returned. “A’ight, so I ain’t got time to personalize this shit; this is either Jericho or Masozi so since you’re hearin’ this I’m already iced
and Eve’s fallin’ into the atmosphere. Since you’re here in the tertiary cache, you’re tryin’ to stop that from happening…unfortunately, ain’t nothin’ can be done to keep this bitch from an epic burn.”
Jericho saw the clamps disengage from the tertiary cache module and he quickly took hold of it before placing it inside the duffel bag and closing the double zippers.
“Of course,” Benton continued after a few seconds of silence, “y’all know I be too much man to let somethin’ like that kill my girl—let alone Virgin. I wrote a pretty simple program that I never got ‘round to testin’ because, well, it’s risky. I only give it a seventy percent chance to succeed completely, but we be lookin’ at a ninety seven percent chance the virus will neutralize all but one of these platforms. Still, that’s better than anything else I can think of by a light year so here’s what you’ve gotta do.”
The wrist link’s screen flipped through a sequence of images, and Jericho realized it was showing him the same room where Eve’s ‘progenitor program’ had fried the Imperial operatives.
“This console here,” Benton’s voice said as a big, red circle was virtually drawn around one of the seemingly identical consoles, “be the one you’ll need. Just get there, upload my virus, and keep them fingers crossed. I’m afraid we can’t do nothin’ about it if the program don’t work; we’ll only have about ten seconds before the other platforms receive the virus-modified instructions to their fire control systems. E.E.V. Five,” Benton continued, and an orbital perspective showing the six E.E.V.’s relative positions appeared with one of them flashing yellow, “is my best guess to reject the commands; I haven’t been able to get much work done on it due to some kinda damage to its comm. transmitters, feel me? Now if this be Jericho, I wanna hear it loud and proud, bro.”
Jericho knew all too well what the other man had wanted him to say since the first job they had worked together, but he had steadfastly refused to do so. It seemed the big guy would get his wish in the end, however, since Jericho suspected the voice inputs of his link would now require him to say those exact words. Sighing shortly, Jericho muttered under his breath, “You’re the man, Benton.”
“Louder, bitch!” Benton’s recording snapped, apparently having accessed Jericho’s earpiece and its audio pickup to check the volume of the desired phrase.
Jericho snickered as he took a breath and repeated, in a hard, significantly louder voice, “You’re the man, Benton!”
“That’s what I thought,” Benton’s recorded voice quipped smugly. “Have a good life, y’all; and be sure to keep my baby safe, ok? There’s more of me in her than most bigs ever give their shorties. Peace out, bitches!”
The wrist link reverted to its former readout and Jericho crawled back toward the hatch, relieved to find it had already been unlocked. He exited the computer core and began to crawl through the tunnel. He was halfway down the tunnel when his earpiece crackled to life.
“…richo, are you there?” he heard Eve’s voice ask with obvious worry.
“I’m here, Eve,” he replied, “where are you?”
“The Tyson’s holding position on the far side of the E.E.V.,” she said quickly. “Did you get my components?”
“Every last one,” Jericho said as he came to the end of the tunnel and paused before exiting. “How many visitors do we have?”
“I’ve adjusted the Tyson’s sensors and am able to read at least eight new life-signs inside the station,” she replied. “I have a couple of moves I can make to deal with them, but even if they go off perfectly that will still leave three of them for you—and they’re all armed. You should get to the nearest airlock immediately.”
“I have to get to that chamber you showed me in the record,” Jericho said with a shake of his head. “The place where you—no, where your progenitor,” he corrected, “killed the Imperial technicians.”
“So Benton did leave us a message?” she asked hopefully.
“He did,” Jericho agreed, “and all I have to do is get to one of those consoles, upload a virus, and we’ll have done everything we can. Can you make a secure connection with the Zhuge Liang?”
“Lemme check, babe,” she replied curtly before the audio feed went dead, and Jericho waited for half a minute until her voice returned, “yep; I’ve got a point-to-point right now but we’ll lose line of sight in thirty seconds.”
“Download the message from Benton in my wrist link and send it to them immediately,” Jericho said quickly. “It shows a priority target among the six E.E.V.’s; Benton thinks there’s a good chance that it will fire its crust-busters as soon as I upload the virus.”
“Downloading,” she replied promptly before adding, “file’s downloaded. I’m firing it over to the Kongming.”
Jericho was surprised to hear Eve refer to the Zhuge Liang by its human-given nickname, but he couldn’t waste time asking her about her word choice. “Send it as many times as you can to make sure they get the entire message,” he added, “and when you’re done with that give me a breakdown on where these new friends of ours are.”
“You got it, sugar,” she said. Several seconds passed and she said, “The entire message was sent seven times, and the operative graphic was transmitted eighty nine times; there’s a ninety nine point nine-to-the-seventeenth-decimal probability they got the whole thing. I’m downloading my latest updates on the hostile’s locations now, but you have to understand my sensors are pretty weak on this thing and we’re well within the platform’s jamming field—“
“That’s fine, Eve,” Jericho cut her off, “just send me what you’ve got.”
“Right, sorry about that, babe,” she said apologetically, “your link should be populated now. But if you’re ready to go, give me twenty seconds to clear out as many of them as I can.”
“How are you going to do that?” he asked warily.
He heard her giggle before she replied knowingly, “I’ve got a few tricks up my skirt.”
“Ok…go ahead and make your moves,” he said after considering the matter. Without body armor, there was little chance of Jericho surviving a shootout with eight of them. He could take one or two before the others even knew what was happening, but after that it would just be a game of marksmanship. And while Jericho was an expert marksman, he knew it would essentially be a game of dice.
“You got it,” she said hungrily. Just then a short, multi-armed maintenance bot went scurrying past the mouth of Jericho’s access tube using mag-treads to skim along the floor of the corridor. “Scutters, march!” she cried as though she was a general directing her troops from a hilltop.
Not long after that, Jericho saw flashes of light signaling weapons fire and heard a few unfamiliar reports as the lights of the E.E.V.’s corridor dimmed and then went out altogether.
“Eve?” Jericho asked with mounting trepidation.
“Hang on, babe,” she replied with a grunt, “almost got ‘em.”
There was another series of flashes, this one much more rapid and sustained, and then the lights in the corridor returned to their previous luminosity.
“You can come out now,” she declared, her voice heavily laden with static once again. “You should have a clear path to the Control Nexus; I’m reading three life signs inside and from the look of things out here, they’ve already gotten control of the E.E.V.’s warhead launch protocols.”
“How long do we have?” he asked as he set off at a mag-boot hindered jog. As he rounded the first corner, he came to a human corpse with a maintenance bot dragging it through the zero gravity corridor. Jericho allowed the bot to pass before asking, “How did those little maintenance bots kill them?”
Eve giggled. “I reprogrammed their target recognition databases so they’d think the humans were sections of depolarized power conduit,” she replied innocently. “It’s amazing how little current a human body can withstand if the potential is right.”
Jericho came to another junction and followed the indicated path. “Remind me never to cr
oss you,” he grumbled.
“Smart man,” Eve quipped as Jericho came to the final doorway.
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