whining sound. He reached down, grabbed the manual crank and struggled with it. The heavy doors barely moved. As he pulled the lever with both hands with all the strength he had he could see parts of the bare engine turning white. The heavy blast doors parted a few millimetres before the explosion.
Frost had expected the Big Surprise to go off, he was ready. Seeing the Captain killed like it was child's play had him rattled, but more angry. He carefully lowered himself down the landing strut and when the emergency lights came on, shedding just enough ruddy yellow illumination to see distinct shapes he leapt for Wheeler.
Lucius pulled his trigger and nothing happened. Instead of taking another shot at Stephanie he levelled his pistol at Frost's head and pulled the trigger again. The weapon emitted nothing but a hollow click. Frost laughed and brought one big fist down on Wheeler's face like a sledge. The first blow broke the man's perfect nose. A security officer knocked Frost off and his Captain scrambled to his feet, holding his face and started running for the elevator.
Frost kicked the security officer's knee then swept his other foot out from under him. In a split second he was on top of the guard, grabbing hold of his vacsuit's face plate. He drew his head up a few inches, gripped his jaw and wrenched the man's head hard, cracking the support that kept his neck from turning too far. He whipped the man's head the other way and back again. Without the resistance of the support, the soldier's neck snapped.
Stephanie had flipped one of the security officers onto his back and crushed his windpipe with her foot. The other tried to grab her again and she spun, sweeping his legs out from under him. The moment he hit the ground she kicked him in the face, partially dislodging his helmet. She kicked him in the teeth as hard as she could, sending his helmet across the deck and brought her leg all the way up then crushed the heel of her armoured boot onto his temple with a grisly crunch. It was then she acknowledged Frost. “You made it.”
“Aye,” he replied out of breath; “Wheeler's gettin' away.”
The pair looked towards the elevator where a pair of guards tried to get the shaft open. They had dropped Jake Valance's body behind them. Wheeler was running towards it, hunched over, holding his face. His broken nose was bleeding freely.
Stephanie and Frost started running after him but stopped dead in their tracks at a sight neither of them would forget for the rest of their lives. Captain Valance stood in one smooth motion. They were watching the dead come to life as he started walking towards Wheeler, who didn't run, he just dropped his hand to his side and shook his head. “You were burned through, right in the neck.”
“I was.” Came Valance's cold reply.
“You're a framework, they made you a framework,” Wheeler said as he staggered backwards.
Jake didn't reply, but turned towards two oncoming guards, ducked one and rammed the other with his shoulder, bowling him over. He spun on his heel and caught the other guard's head in his hands. With one swift yank his helmet was off, and in the next instant Jake used it as a weapon, smashing it into the guard's face once then backhanding him with it hard, sending his opponent straight down to the deck.
The Captain rounded on Wheeler then, tossing the helmet aside. “They did a lot to me. Now you're going to tell me what it was like before.” Jake said as he took the next few steps between him and the other man. “While you watch me buy your crew, take your ship, and make everything you value my own.”
Frost fell to his knees. He kept staring at the perfect, bare skin where the Captain's fatal wounds had been. The awe he was in was understandable, but the relief at seeing that man alive was profound. The depth of it would be something Frost would ponder for many days to come.
Awakening
Alice could see perfectly in the maintenance spaces between the decks and walls. Her mechanical eye amplified the little available light and measured the densities of objects ahead to construct a mid day perfect picture of what lay ahead. Her implants were working perfectly except for one little glitch. Ever since Lewis was transferred to a storage chip and subprocessor unit buried in the back of her jaw her right earlobe would periodically itch. “You should stop scratching and tugging that. It'll eventually become all red and sore. You might even bruise it.” She heard him through her neural communicator.
“You know, it's funny, I never use the implant you're living in. It only started when you made the transfer.”
“Why did you have me download myself here? I could have hid away in one of the Clever Dream's subsystems. They'd never find me.”
“Yes, but there's a good chance that they'll eventually deactivate or destroy her. She's probably torn the hangar up something fierce and prevented anyone from so much as opening the door but she'll eventually run out of fuel and be unable to fire her guns let alone generate more ammo for the missile launchers,” Alice replied mentally as she squeezed around a large pipe.
“It will take over a year for her to expend all the fuel in the tanks by firing all five guns. The materializer systems could generate over four hundred fifty missiles each before exceeding their warranty coverage. Who knows how long they'll last afterwards.”
“They'd probably fail right after the warranty expires. That seems to be the way of things.”
“Not with that ship. It's top of the line remember? I miss her already.”
“Well I need you here. Two heads are better than one.”
“I'm not nearly as quick in this little micro computer. It's only five hundred twelve bit, after all.”
“Oh boo hoo. A few hundred years ago that kind of power would have weighed ten kilograms. Now it fits into a half centimetre squared biochip. I just wish it wasn't tapping a nerve or something for its power.” Alice said as she tugged her earlobe. Looking around, it was difficult to believe she was in the bowels of a ship. There were vessels that had hallways as cramped. Cables, tubes, circuit boxes and pipes were everywhere, certainly, but most ships ran those along their main hallways anyway. “What an incredible waste of space. I mean, the First Light only had one section with panelled walls and that was the Officers quarters. Not even all the officer's quarters were that way either, just the senior staff section. Man, what I'd do to serve on that ship,” she stopped and looked at a group of intersecting wires. “These are the the mechanical door control leads for this section right?”
“One moment please.”
“Oh, come on. It can't be that hard to look it up.”
“Shh, I'm searching. The schematics you downloaded were primarily for waste management. It's hard to guess based on what I'm seeing. You're right though, those must be the power lines and control cables you're looking for.”
“Oh, you think it's both? Not just the power?”
“That's my best guess. I can say for a certainty that two decks won't be able to activate waste recycling as well. That's eleven toilets slowly filling up.”
“Not a pretty picture. Okay, here's hoping you're right about what these wires do.” Alice said as she spread coarse green paste across the ribbon cables. It would take half an hour for the chemical compound to eat through the wires.
“So what exactly are you going to do? Inconvenience them to death?” Asked Lewis.
“I'm just spreading a little extra chaos to disguise my true purpose. Since the main hangar doors are on lockdown and there's no way the Clever Dream will blast her way through, I'm going to find one of the computer cores and dump you inside.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?”
“Whatever you like. You could always start singing Birdhouse In Your Soul while playing five trillion games of sudoku. Anything to distract the ship sensors from what I'm up to.”
“Ah, Birdhouse In Your Soul, it took hundreds of years and many emotional artificial intelligences to understand its meaning. Even after the accomplishment was made no AI could actually convey the simplistic meaning on any level.”
“I know, sometimes I wish I were still software so I could fully understand it from your perspective.”
“Well, I'm sure I can provide a distraction. What will you be doing again?”
“You'll know it when you see it,” Alice replied as she began climbing up a long, narrow shaft packed with various cables and wires.
