wipe from the pouch on her hip and wiped the blood away from the four centimetre wide entry wound.
“He was surrendering to us,” Alaka said quietly. “Almost made it too.”
“Has that ever happened before?”
“No. Never.”
Iloona paused a moment and rested her hand beside the wound. Something was happening inside the corpse. With a flick of her wrist she opened a scanner and brought it to over the body. Her eyes widened in shock at what she saw; “This man's being rebuilt from the inside!”
“What?” Alaka placed a hand firmly on her shoulder and drew her away, putting himself and the old assault rifle he used as a sidearm between her and the body. Several other rebels drew a myriad of personal weaponry and followed his example.
“His heart's not beating, there's no harm in observing.” Iloona objected quietly.
“This could be some kind of trap, can you scan him for explosives?”
“There's nothing of the kind and he's unarmed.”
“We don't know that for sure, he could have knives for fingers for all we know.”
“Tsk, paranoid,” Iloona shook her head. She extended her arm out around Alaka so she could see what was happening from behind him and gasped at what her medical scanner told her. “His lungs, heart and everything else are almost completely regenerated. There's some kind of materializer suite inside him, inside his skeleton maybe. Still no weaponry or explosives.”
“Could he actually be alive?”
“Well, the same technology is keeping his brain in a suspended state so there's no cell death but no neural activity either.”
“So he's brain dead.”
“Right now, maybe not for long. This is amazing,” she whispered. The scanner displayed a pattern of electrification surge across the man's skeletal structure for a moment then he came to life, gasping and turning over.
“Don't move!” Alaka shouted, brandishing his assault rifle in one big armoured hand. The other ragtag soldiers were just as vigilant, making for fifteen barrels pointed at the surrendered West Keeper in all.
“Okay, I'm just going to take off my helmet,” said the man through hurried breaths. He slowly pulled the oval helm from his head and took a long breath of stale air as though glad to be free of its confines. “I'm not a Keeper. I killed one of their people and took their uniform so I could get closer to the fighting and switch sides. That magcycle outside was the distraction I needed to cross the line.”
“Why should I believe you?” Alaka asked, eyeing a resistance fighter to his right who glared at the prisoner with sheer, bare hatred.
“My name is Jacob Valance, I'm the Captain of the Triton and I came here to pick up a couple friends of mine, Jason Everin and Terry McPatrick. Most people call him Oz.”
“I can't believe it. I've always wondered what I'd do if I ever saw you,” said the dark haired fellow to Alaka's right through clenched teeth.
“What's up Vernen? You know him?” Alaka asked.
“He hunted down and killed my brother.”
“I've hunted a lot of people, but I haven't cashed in many death marks. Who was your brother?”
“His name was Barry, Barry Vernen.”
Jake nodded, regarding the man seriously. “I remember. I took his bounty, captured him on Tega Five and delivered him to the Jalara Commonwealth. He was wanted for fraud and murder.”
“They executed him!”
“I'm sorry you lost your brother but I didn't kill him.” was all Jake said, raising his hands and looking the man in the eye.
“Just as good as! I should blast you apart and see if you grow back just so I can do it again!”
Alaka put a hand on Vernen's rifle, forcing it down and away from Jacob. “It sounds to me like he was doing his job, and if your brother was guilty he got what he deserved.”
“He was out of Jalara territory! They had no jurisdiction where he was taken.”
“Did he do what he was accused of?” Alaka asked flatly.
Vernen slung his scratched and dented rifle and stalked away without saying a word, his worn boots clicking across the hard floor.
“That happens. Glad I retired from bounty hunting,” Jake said quietly.
“He's a hothead, self serving. I reattached one of his fingers after a firefight and he didn't so much as say thank you,” Iloona complained as she stepped around her husband and offered a hand to help Jake up.
He took it and was surprised at her strength as she firmly pulled him onto his feet. “Thank you. I understand if your people don't trust me to start, but I'm really here to help,” Jake reassured as he reached into the deep utility pocket on his thigh and retrieved his command and control unit. “I captured a command code transmission chip from one of the Regent Galactic Lieutenants. I was able to install it in my arm unit and tap into their communications.”
“We've been trying to monitor that ourselves. A few minutes ago they re-encrypted the whole system.”
A female voice called; “Fire in the hole!” into the long room and a second later everything rocked with the concussion of a massive explosion nearby. Only a little dust rolled in through the narrow door leading into the large maintenance room.
“You have good timing. We were minutes away from collapsing the tunnel,” The fur covering Alaka's long jaws split in a wide smile.
“Well, here's hoping my luck keeps getting better,” Jake replied as he looked at his command unit. It was true, the command frequencies were re-encrypted and his display only presented a data gate request that said; “The only poem we memorize and recite as children.” He raised his eyebrow and thought for a moment.
“What is it?” Iloona asked, scanning him from head to toe with a sweep of her small medical computer.
“Are Oz and Jason here?” he asked quietly.
Alaka nodded to the nearest of the resistance fighters. “I think Jacob here is looking out for our best interest, you can go back to work.”
“Looks like,” the fighter grinned wryly at Jake before turning away. “Let's get back to the dig boys.” she called over her shoulder.
Alaka returned his attention to Jake. “You're not the only one who came for them. Two others; Ayan and Minh-Chu came. When they saw that we needed their help they put a plan together to get a message out to the government so they could send a fleet. We haven't seen them since they left, but they managed to get a signal out.”
Jake sat down on an empty pallet and stared off into space. The lost expression on his face was plain for all to see, but he was the last to care.
Iloona put a hand on her husband's arm and whispered something in their own gentle language. His hand went up over his eyes and he cursed under his breath. She turned to Jacob and regarded him with sympathy. “I am sorry, sometimes my husband is a conversational blunt instrument. He had forgotten that everyone was under the impression that those two had died. It was something they told us that you were their long time friend, or a copy of their long time friend. The three of you are a confusing bunch. I'm sorry you found out this way regardless.”
Jake looked back at his command unit where the riddle waited to be answered. “Do you know how?” he asked quietly. “How are they alive?”
“Ayan said that she was reborn in a new body while Minh-Chu was only lost, not killed,”
For the first time in his short life Jacob felt a tear on his cheek. He tried to blink it away, but the memory of Ayan's last smile before dying surged back to the fore. The thought of where he was, on a planet that had been turned into a quiet, war stricken graveyard didn't help. He had seen the evidence of the wholesale destruction of thousands of lives personally and all around them that which was once alive and vital stood still. The very circulatory system of the city was a perfect example, how it probably ran every minute of every day shuttling thousands of people from one place to another for decades, perhaps centuries, but as they hid in a dark corner reserved for the maintenance of the city's veins there was an eerie silence.
The city was dead, but somehow, somewhere his best friend and the love of both Jonas' and Jacob's life were out there accompanied by two of the best people he'd ever known. As he began entering the poem that Jonas
