Universe in Flames – Ultimate 10 Book Box Set: An Epic Space Opera Adventure

by Christian Kallias

  “Interesting bedside manners...” she muttered tearfully, hands trembling uncontrollably.

  Ryonna cursed herself for telling her about the bombs. She approached Johanna and put a hand on her shoulder.

  She looked up at Ryonna, her eyes widened by sheer terror.

  “I... I don’t want to die.” Her voice trembled on every syllable.

  “I don’t want to die either, Johanna. But understand this, survival is out of our hands. There is nothing you and I can do to fix that, nothing at all, you understand? But we can help.”

  She nodded nervously.

  “So please take a deep breath, and tell me more about the GPS information you’ve managed to find.”

  Johanna took three successive deep breaths, and entered a few more commands on her computer. The screen started displaying a map of Earth, superimposed by mad, converging lines all over. Ryonna looked at them and saw that they all converged to one single point.

  “Can you please tell me where this place is?” She pointed at the converging lines.

  “It’s in DC. Give me one moment to bring up the address.”

  “What information could you get from the camera, anyway?”

  “The file references a file that must still be on the original device. While GPS locations were embedded in the file, camera information must be stored in the original system.”

  “Does that mean that if I bring you the laptop, you could access this data?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “Alright, give me a minute and I’ll bring it to you. In the meantime, try to cross-reference the address you found with databases of known criminals, Earth Alliance employees and whatever else you think might be relevant.”

  “Cross-checking now.”

  Ryonna rose to her feet and crossed back to Cedric’s office.

  When she arrived, the sheer quantity of sweat dripping from his face wasn’t reassuring.

  “How are we doing on beaming away the bombs?”

  “Can’t talk. It’s gonna be right down to the second...”

  “Alright, I’m just taking the laptop we recovered. Johanna needs it.”

  “Whatever.”

  She could see his eyes going all over the place, interfacing with his neuronal link. She looked at the timer on the laptop when she grabbed it, counting down from two minutes and fifty-seven seconds.

  She hurried back to Johanna’s side, who started working on the laptop. Who had ever seen anyone type on a keyboard that fast? She was glad that she’d evidently regained her focus.

  “Is that the amount of time we have left?” she nervously chirped.

  “Yeah. I think Cedric will manage though. He seems competent.”

  “He’s the best!” she burst out. Her face quickly turned a shade of red, while she made a slight face.

  Ryonna permitted herself a half-smile.

  “Got it. Bringing up some of the photos, though it will take a few seconds for them to decrypt.”

  “What about the addresses and cross referencing?”

  “I’ve had one match, with an Earth Alliance employee.”

  “I didn’t expect that. Do you have his name?”

  “Hers.”

  “Alright… Is her first name Nina, by any chance?”

  “No, Sarah something...”

  Interesting coincidence? Ryonna wondered.

  “As long as it’s not Kepler,” she said.

  “Yeah. That’s her, Sarah Kepler.”

  “That’s impossible!”

  A cold shiver shot down Ryonna’s spine.

  Then a photo of Sarah appeared on the screen, followed by many others.

  “What are those?”

  “Pictures that the cameras from different laptops took over the past few days. I wonder why she’s present on each of them? That’s strange! Is she a friend? I think I saw her around.”

  “Are you absolutely sure she’s the one who worked on that file? I need one hundred percent certainty.” She stared at the timer now: one minute thirty-two seconds.

  “Yep, no doubts about it. It’s a shame. She seemed like such a nice girl.”

  Ryonna’s heart started pounding forcefully in her chest. She simply could not believe it. She shook it off.

  “Please send all this data straight to the Cronos. They’ll need to get this before this timer runs out.”

  “I thought you were sure that Cedric would diffuse the situation.”

  “If he doesn’t, it’s vital that Admiral Thassos gets this info before the planet blows up.”

  She bit her tongue. She knew she could very well send Johanna into another panic attack with these hasty comments. But it didn’t seem to stop her, or even give her pause.

  “I trust my Cedric,” she just said before adding, “Done! Cronos got the files.”

  With forty-two seconds left on the timer, she simply murmured, “Thank you so much for your help, Johanna.”

  Then she opened a channel to Admiral Thassos.

  “Admiral Thassos here. Ryonna, time is almost up. What’s the status? Is the ship still in orbit?”

  “Oh, c’mon you stinky piece of shite!” interjected a muffled voice from the other office.

  She made a face.

  “I’m... confident Cedric will manage... But there’s something else, Admiral. Please listen very carefully.”

  “Go on.”

  “I’ve sent you irrevocable proof that the acts of terror have been perpetrated by…”

  “By whom?”

  “Commander Sarah Kepler.”

  “You’re shitting me? Hang on, something is happening. The ship just entered hyperspace.”

  All lights and electricity-dependent systems on the premises started to blink intermittently and finally stayed off.

  She heard Cedric shout, “YEEEEEHAAAAA!”

  “Yeah, I’d say that Cedric has accomplished his task.” She laughed.

  She watched the timer counting down from three seconds, then resting silently over zero.

  “In the nick of time, I might add,” she burst, exhaling deeply. The tension and pressure in her muscles all abruptly relaxed at once.

  “Told you,” Johanna sung cheerfully, giving Ryonna a huge, surprising hug.

  “You did. Admiral?”

  “Yes, I’m still here.”

  “I wondered if our communications would have been affected by the power loss down here.”

  “These Alliance redundant systems aren’t connected to Earth’s power grid. They should still be running fine.”

  “You need to let Commodore Saroudis and Chase know this information ASAP. She could very well put both their lives and the mission in jeopardy.”

  “Absolutely. I’ll send a coded message via subspace immediately.”

  “Thank you, Admiral.”

  “No, thank you, Ryonna. I’ve misjudged you, and I want to apologize for the crap we gave you after the interrogation. A job incredibly well done.”

  “Thank you. Ryonna out.”

  Ryonna went to see Cedric. He was doing a weird, intricate sort of dance but no music was playing.

  “All good here?”

  “We’re still here, aren’t we?” he said, while continuing to wave his arms and legs around in broken circles, with a soulful look on his face.

  “Great job, Cedric, you saved the planet.”

  “Again! I keep doing that!”

  “I wasn’t there the first time around, but well done.”

  “Yep… I… saved the world. But now, I’m going on vacation for the next two months. I’m thinking Zakinthos. I hear it’s great this time of the year.”

  Ryonna smiled, but as she was about to leave Cedric added one last reminder.

  “You should go check on Tar’Lock. I think he lost consciousness after transferring the bomb’s signatures.”

  “I’ll swing by his last location. Thanks, Cedric.”

  “Oh, and Ryonna.”

  She turned.

  “Yeah?”

/>   “You’re one tough chick. I like you.”

  She couldn’t help but smile.

  “You have another admirer at the end of the hall.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah…”

  “Kewl!” He tripped on his pant legs, but played it off as part of the dance.

  “See you later, Cedric.”

  “See ya, Ryonna. Take care.”

  “You too.”

  Spiros opened his eyes. A familiar, repetitive buzzing sound slowly brought him out of his slumber. He no longer felt any pain anywhere, which was wonderful. He activated the exit switch from inside the regeneration pod, and the liquid slowly started to empty from the pod.

  With the first few breaths of air, he was himself again. The transition sensation was always just as weird as the first breath of regen fluid taken into the lungs, but he was glad to be back to the real stuff.

  The door of the pod slowly hinged open. Spiros paused, feeling unsure what he needed to do next. His thoughts still felt a little foggy. But that was a known side effect from using the regen tanks. Seeing the Zarlack cadaver on the ground sent a shiver down his spine and it all came back to him.

  Without stopping for anything, he ran out of the infirmary and towards his R&D lab. He passed countless Zarlack bodies strewn across the corridors, abruptly presenting zero threat. He reached the lab, but when the door didn’t spring open how it usually did he nearly crashed into it headlong. He paused, pressed the door controls again, and the door made a quiet whine but still didn’t budge. After swearing out loud, he opened the manual release hatch, reached inside and pulled the lever. He heard the satisfying click as the doors split open slightly, just enough to try prying them open by hand.

  He pulled as much as he could with both hands, exerting opposite forces on both sides of the splitting door system. When that didn’t work he decided to concentrate only on the right side of the door, with similarly meager progress. After some considerable effort it finally started to budge. A few moments later resistance finally gave out completely and the doors fell outward. An enormous Zarlack body came crashing down headfirst, directly in front of Spiros, who for a split second thought he’d surely have a heart attack.

  He looked at the dead body in front of him, reflectively. He wasn’t used to killing. He was a scientist, an inventor. Sure, some of that was sometimes used to kill, now that this was war. But typically he saw his inventions more as a way to help the Alliance better defend itself, rather than increasingly efficient killing machines for technology’s sake. But he knew full well that through all these years as a scientist, he had to fully convince himself of the moral sincerity to this inner argument.

  After all there were two sides to every coin! But he had long decided, whether consciously or subconsciously, that he lived life better by sticking to the side that gave him less daily grief and resistance. Plus, no humanoid oppressor had ever tried to bite him.

  He brushed the old conundrum aside. He entered his lab and sought out the troubleshooting bench immediately. He plugged a cable in the back of his head to access his neuronal augment implant, in order to salvage the precious files he had taken such risks trying to access. The diagnostics program immediately returned an error code, as he’d feared. He felt a pit forming in his stomach. He knew he could’ve very well fried the memory banks with his irresponsible over-clocking, though he still argued with himself that without it, he would never have decoded the file at all.

  He looked after old pet projects, trying to rearrange some sense of where his work had been disrupted. He opened some cupboards and, of course, precious ordering had all been messed up; many things were missing. He felt the indignant anger of a scientist slowly rising within him: he liked things neat and ordered. All he found in each new cupboard was more and more chaos.

  “What life forms in their right minds store explosive fluids near power packs?” He groaned out loud. He reveled in no longer feeling afraid or worried anybody would hear and barge in. He was the last man standing.

  After ten minutes searching, he managed to find the small crystal tube with a blue label. He put it under a scanner and gleefully confirmed that the nanites were still in the tube, and still operational. These particular nanites were designed to scan for data from implants or any data storage device and dump the results over the network, making an exact copy in a very little amount of time. The wonder was it worked whether the device was powered or not. He only hoped that there was still some coherent data to be recovered!

  They’d never been tested. He remembered promising himself to never ever play with untested nanites, after an accident twenty years earlier where some badly programmed nanites ran amok in his blood stream, almost claiming his life. He pondered as he looked at the crystal tube. He decided to sift through the code once more, in order to be certain.

  His mind was finally at full capacity again, and he relished it. He’d slept long enough in the regen tank to basically strip away the stress fatigue from the occupation, and it furthermore had given him a boost in energy he hadn’t felt in years. Unsurprisingly, around the same time he’d needed to use one of them again, as he… sort of… blew off part of his face—in another experiment gone wrong.

  Was he a reckless scientist? Perhaps. After five minutes sifting through his code, he decided to add a simple failsafe: a manual disable command for all nanites in his code. It was something that should have been there in all his experiments, he admitted to himself begrudgingly. He opened the lid of the crystal tube and placed it at the back of his neck entry port. Then he entered a command with his free hand on the terminal, and the nanites activated.

  Looking at the diagnostic logs a few minutes later, he could see that they had started copying data blocks randomly. A few of them had been selected to put the data back into a cohesive, coherent and usable data stream. One minute later the log reached its end; data had been sent to a network location, and the nanites went into sleep mode.

  He opened up a holo-display and recovered the data the nanites had duplicated. Some of it was his own implant operating system: some logs, and other assorted junk, like pictures he’d taken with his brain over the last few years. But he was happy that the data stored within his disabled implant didn’t seem to be corrupted. He’d still probably need to change the implant, and restore a backup from the data dump he was searching through.

  He brushed that thought away, as his eyes met with a file he didn’t recognize. At first the computer didn’t know how to display the file, but Spiros knew why that was. Thinking on his toes, he quickly installed a translation subroutine so the terminal could not only display but also translate Zarlack into Universum. Then an extremely detailed schematics rundown appeared of what looked like a gigantic installation located inside the Gatos Nebula.

  A feat in and of itself! he thought. File notes concerning the nebula’s composition made him wonder how they’d managed to construct anything in such a volatile environment without blowing themselves to kingdom come.

  One thing in particular caught his attention: an immensely powerful shield generator. But it followed, of course, that the whole shipyard’s construction would depend on this one thing. It must have been built first, and allowed them to not only shield themselves from catastrophe during the assembling of the rest of the facilities, but also helped reduce the nebula’s atmospheric particulate density within the shielded area. Surely it would take a major catastrophic explosion for any of the particles to ignite within the shielded area.

  It was an ingenious design, one he admitted he’d probably never have thought of. The shield generator was itself also protected by a self-generated shield engine, much more powerful than even the biggest Zarlack’s or Obsidian ships carried onboard. While his scientist mind was in awe of all the data he was observing, he had to remind himself that he had a job to do.

  But the plans and the highly resilient encryption confirmed him one thing: this installation was important to the enemy. If they left in such a
hurry, it could mean only one thing. Something or someone put their plans in jeopardy. Gatos was only a few hours away in hyperspace, at what was once the outskirts of Obsidian territory. The Alliance or any other power out there must have been in the process of attacking the facility. That meant that he needed to contact them at all cost, so he might be rescued from here. Once he’d found a way back to the Alliance, he could give them all his precious research to fight back at the enemy.

  He brought up a status of the station. Everything was running reasonably well, all considering; his station was fully operational. He considered opening a subspace transmission, and just flooding it with a distress call. But this might also attract the wrong crowd, and whether or not they could decrypt the message, they could probably still track it. So he decided first to install R&D upgrades into the station’s systems. The weapons would require some hardware upgrades to be fully upgraded to his specs, but some of his energy efficiency subroutines could probably give them a sufficient boost in power. His ace in the hole was that he’d already installed pretty much everything needed to make the shields at least stronger than anything Obsidian or Zarlack.

  An hour later, he was satisfied that he could defend himself and the station from even a medium-large fleet, should the enemy get the transmission before the Alliance did. He started working on his message. He also added anti-jamming subroutines into them, so they would cut through enemy jamming fields. He considered that part was vital, especially if Obsidian and the Alliance were fighting it out in the nearby Gatos system.

  He reviewed his modifications one last time and then hit the comm button on his terminal to start recording his message.

  Here goes nothing, he thought before he started talking.

  27

  The chaos after the rescue maneuver had left many aboard the Hope wounded or knocked unconscious. Chase called for medical emergency aid to the bridge but nobody arrived. Doubtless similar incidents had happened all over the ship. With most systems down when ripped from the nebula, they’d all felt the full brunt of abrupt acceleration, as well as the hasty jump into hyperspace.