Myranda Kalis mbvalis@cedarcrest.edu or rhynn@hotmail.com Original Flavor (anime influenced) Please post to the archive R RULES OF ENGAGEMENT (Part VI: It's The Little Things That Get You) VI. IT'S THE LITTLE THINGS THAT GET YOU My hand flashed out and hit the bedside console a fraction of a second before the sweet, modulated computerized voice that would have told me it was time to get up and go started talking at me. I had discovered, two days into our little field trip, that of all the things that there were to detest about this situation, the artificial personality of the ship's computer was the one that I detested most. The concept of flying out to meet a Majestix battle station without the assistance of, say, an Apocalypse-class star destroyer, was a small problem that could be dealt with. The fact that we were several hundred light years off the beaten track and extremely far away from anything that even vaguely resembled a support facility was a scenario that was covered in my basic training index. Dansyr's continued interest in me was a minor distraction. But a bloody sweet and cheerful computer at 0400 hours was the sort of thing I was liable to shoot someone for if I ever had the opportunity. I pushed the covers down and rolled off my suspensor field bed, which only let me go with a struggle. Suspensor fields, like most products of warp field technology, carry with them a slight charge that causes metal to adhere to it like a magnet; needless to say, I detested suspensor fields for that reason. Real beds, however, were heavy, and so I had refrained from requisitioning one for my quarters--because death by sleep material is possibly the stupidest way to die. I had even smiled and denied Ulugh's request for warmed water pool in which to sleep, which didn't please my Dy'killian gunner very much at all, though his form of protest--turning up the heat and humidity in his quarters to the point where humanoids walked in and passed out--was significantly better than having to jettison the entire crew module if things got nasty. And the hotspot didn't even show on external sensors. Elyena and Dansyr, perhaps attempting to show exactly how far above all the whining, simply moved in and made themselves at home. Elyena, like most good mercenaries and spacers, could sleep in, on, or through just about anything as necessary in order to keep her essential bits functioning. I had never actually seen Dansyr sleep except on our one night together and I rather like to think she had reason to pass out. Technically, I only needed to sleep in deference to my organic parts; my cybernetics simply used the opportunity to regenerate and recharge during that time because it was more convenient than them telling me when I needed to shut down. "Coffee. Black. Hot." I muttered to the matter replicator. During a relatively brief tour in the Terran Confederacy, I had become completely addicted to coffee, despite my First Officers dark mutterings that they must have added something to it to make it so stimulating. Even after a complete chemical analysis he still insisted this, a fact which had amused the hell of me and the rest of my team. Being not a morning person, I simply spent a small chunk of my pocket change and had a small parcel of this heavenly beverage shipped to my headquarters every month. Khasamar thoroughly disapproved and absolutely refused to drink it, though the rest of my team was reduced to pathetic caffeine heads like their fearless leader before the end of a month. I stumbled away from the replicator as it started humming and into the refresher unit, pulling open the "shower" door and setting the interior controls for a fifteen minute, high-frequency immersion. Then I turned down my audio gain so I wouldn't be deafened by my morning ablutions. We weren't carrying water on this little jaunt except in survival stores or replicated as needed, because too much water would have weighed us down in much the same way too much unnecessary bedding would have. Instead of a water shower, which we all generally preferred, the showers were the standard sonic variety that used extreme high frequency sound waves to pummel whatever needed to be removed from your body off in a "scintillating wave of melody" according to the manufacturer. Unfortunately, most forms of cybernetic and metahuman hearing turned the "wave of melody" into the sort of high pitched sound one usually only gets when listening to certain species of alien life being shredded by a particle beam. So down went the audio gain, and Elyena wore sound-suppressors into the shower. A yawn crawled up my throat as I stood brushing my teeth with a packet of water from the sink side ration dispenser and I let it out, fighting not to fall back asleep on my feet. 0400 is just way too early for me, but I had drawn fourth watch on the bridge. Our little ship was nifty and fast and almost fully automated, but, even so, it occasionally required the presence of someone to make certain everything was running okay. The ship had a standard twelve hour shift rotation, so we had all drawn straws to see who would be sitting watch at what time and, you guessed it, Dansyr and I had drawn the ship's night-hours. I relieved her at 0600, a fact she usually cheerfully ignored and sat the whole twelve hour watch, a fact that aggravated me only a little. It was sometimes good, when sitting on the darkened flight deck, because that could be just as monotonous as any other project in which you're essentially useless; we were flying on auto most of the way through warp space, our target preloaded into the navigational computer, along with sufficient variability to the flight program that it could make any minor course corrections necessary. We were just there to make sure it wasn't correcting us into the event horizon of a black hole or something. It was during those pleasant, usually quiet times, that I got most of my writing and drawing done, because Dansyr, like me, occasionally had an artistic bent, and when she wasn't making sure that we weren't about to hit something, she was playing with the ship's many recreational programs, particularly the drawing ones. Something else we had in common. Yes, that's right. We were doing without real beds, real food, real water, and real showers, but not real recreational activities. I can tell you from past experience that, unless you're a warp systems engineer really in love with your work, there is absolutely nothing stimulating about a two and a half week long jaunt through hyperspace, except for the things you can do to kill the time. This naturally included more training sessions and simulations, but for the sanity of all involved, that can't be all you ever do--it'll drive even the most well oiled team to distraction eventually. So the main computer was loaded with entertainment programs: games, music, movies, things you could do just to kick back when you know you've done everything you can possibly do to prove your competence. I wandered out of the refresher and took my now slightly less than scalding cup out of the replicator, sipping in between articles of clothing as I got dressed. I sometimes think the replicators were deliberately set to define "hot" as "supernova" but that's just me. In order to avoid having to ask it for anything I else, I snatched one of the high energy protein rations from the emergency dispenser next to it and gnawed on that as I stepped out onto the night-darkened corridors and made my way to the flight deck. Dansyr looked up from her seat at the forward navigator's console as I came in, nodding slightly and clicking off whatever entertainment program she'd been running for the nonce, ready to report. "Where are we and what the hell are we doing there?" I asked, a wry smile tugging at my mouth, and Dansyr responded with a grin of her own. I decided that even if she hadn't forgiven me I was well on my way to forgiving her. "We downshifted out of warp at 0230 hours, as expected, and are on our approach vector toward our target. The stealth device is operational and scanners are working at their furthest possible sweep and modulation." Her tone had the same sweet, measured, dulcet quality as the ship computer's for a moment. "In short, we're right where we should be for what we calculated at the beginning, inbound to target, be within visual range in, say, twelve more hours, effective striking range a little after that. Encountering nothing particularly unusual." "Any activity picked up by our scanner sweeps?" I sat down at my own console, the main command and control throne at the center of the flight deck, surrounded by the U-shaped tiers of the secondary systems and backups. "Moderate. We detected several smaller ships emerging from what appears to be some sort of docking platform on the nightside of the object." We had early on determined that, yes, our target was planet-sized and planet-shaped at the very least, so we simply started referring to it the way we would a hostile planet--the side of the thing "facing" us on our approach vectors was the dayside; the side "facing away" from us was the nightside; the bit in between was the "terminator." It didn't have any exterior atmosphere that were could detect, nor was it actually orbitting a star--rather it seemed to be hovering at lunar distance from an uninhabited, roughly M-class planet. "What were they doing, or couldn't we tell yet?" My screens came to life as Dansyr transferred data to my station, relevant files marked. "They appeared to be making runs to the planet they're orbitting, a new one roughly every hour. Look on the long-range sweeps--one's about to return to the mother vessel." She pulled it up on the main screen and we watched as the icon representing the Majestix vessel lifted off from the icon representing the planet and moved in a swift, sure trajectory back to the object representing our target. "What the hell could they be doing down there? The Majestix, as a rule, couldn't spare a plasma lance for an uninhabited world." I refined the sensor sweep as much as I could, but we were still too far off to get more that a smattering of extra data. "Maybe they're branching out." Dansyr's tone was dry. "I've also monitored several of the smaller ships buzzing through the outer planets of the system, the asteroid belt, you name it, they buzzed it. I can't confirm, but I suspect they were dumping those sensor packages you told us about." Standard Majestix tactics when travelling through potentially hostile space include seeding the area with unmanned sensor drones that throw out a web of interlocking sensor sweep fields designed to detect just about anything. I had reprogrammed our noble little vessel's stealth package to respond instantly upon detecting such fields, to modulate out stealth effect to match their sensor frequency, and so appear invisible even to the sensor web. I was now glad that I had gone to the trouble. "No contact with any hostiles thus far?" "None." Dansyr tapped a command into her console and set up a schematic of the pattern she'd observed for the Majestix vessels. "We haven't even brushed the outer edges of their flight pattern yet. Estimate another two days before any possible contact if they maintain their current pattern." I nodded and leaned back in my chair, nursing my coffee. "If the Majestix have any weaknesses at all it's their usual predictability. Even if they expand their flight pattern it will only expand so much each time. Though I'd really like to know what the hell they're doing on that planet." "I'm sure you'll have the opportunity to ask them all about it." Dansyr smiled wryly at me. "Let's hope not. If I get close enough to ask them questions it means I'm also close enough to have to listen to their rant about how the Mecha Gods are trying to save the universe from death , disease, war, crime, poverty, bad grades in primary school, lines at the replicator, and the scourge of halitosis." I snorted. Dansyr laughed a little trilling laugh that did strange things to my central nervous system. "You sound like you're speaking from more experience than you've admitted to." "Suffice it to say that I've had to deal with enough wild-eyed unwashed fanatic Majestix commanders who would rather vaporize me, themselves, and everything for a two light year radius than admit the Mecha Gods might not be all right after all." I punched up the sensor log and began scanning it for anamalous data. "Believe me, if you've heard one religious zealot rant you've heard `em all, even if the religion being preached is actually different." "I'll make a mental note to never engage you in conversation about the fascinating religious manias of alien cultures." I could hear her smile even though her back was turned, and I found my own lips trying to match the expression. I'm so pathetic sometimes it frightens even me. For a moment I sat there surreptitiously looking at her while her back was turned, the dim secondary lights striking glints of gold from her auburn hair, her muscles shifting minutely as her hands ran over the control surfaces of her workstation. Her mind was closed to mine, locked away underneath her own layers of psychic shielding, and I found myself wondering what she was thinking about. I found myself wondering what the hell I was thinking about and yanked my eyes back off her, staring at my screen with deep fascination before she could look up and notice that I was staring at her. Neither of us wanted to deal with what that might provoke--well, I assumed that she didn't want to have to deal with it any more than I did. I still wasn't wholly certain that I hadn't made some form of psychic impression with her--not that I've had a lot of experience in this area, but the only other person with whom I'd felt such an intense psionic rush in a single night was Hunter. During my extremely brief time with Hunter, we had spent fully as much time wrapped in each others' minds as our bodies, and the pleasure of the sympatico union between our psyches had been even more intense than good old fashioned sensual abandon. I'd felt a glimmer of the same thing with Dansyr--and I was wildly curious as to whether or not she had felt the same, or if she was simply good at faking it. Asking her was totally out of the question; as I've mentioned before, she packs a wallop. The other option--recreating the experience--was probably only slightly more physically, mentally, and emotionally hazardous. I hate unsolved mysteries. They were, however, something I was beginning to get used to, particularly where she was concerned. She was probably already impressed to Nathan MacLeod and, for some reason, that thought made me want to shoot something. I told all this to Elyena a few days later as we sat together in the ship's lounge over dinner (something vaguely like Vamphyri blood pudding for her; something that might have almost once been peppered chicken for me). We were still a day out from effective scanning range on our target--effective for my needs and plan, that is. We had already sized the moon-sized vessel up on a fairly nice tactical model. It was, we were all agreed, the closest that we had seen to an actual operational Dyson sphere--and artificial planet containing its own artificial environment, complete with a sun and probably some sort of surface life inside it; nothing else could have tossed off the gravimetric field the thing was putting out without ripping itself to bits from its own gravitational stresses. How they had managed to do it was another matter entirely, because just about every space faring nation in Known Space had tried something like the infamous Terran design, and had run afoul of the aforementioned gravitational stresses. The Majestix have, I've noticed in the past, seemed to blissfully ignore the laws of physics when it suited them, and this little autoplanet was just the latest example. It was really starting to irritate the hell out of me. "Are you out of your mind?" Elyena asked me, a bite of blood pudding suspended halfway between her mouth and the plate. "No. I was out of my mind when I agreed to this happy little mission. This is something I need to know for the future." I pushed the chicken like substance around on my plate and wondered how long a person could really go on those little protein bars; I'd never actually had to put it to the test before. "Have you tried just asking her?" Elyena bravely took the bite and chewed it, visibly trying to keep her tongue out of the way. "I like my face, `Yena." I sipped the coffee I'd ordered up and quickly took a bite of my dinner--as I'd hoped, the hideous temperature of the drink temporarily killed my ability to taste anything. "If it's any consolation, so do I. Hrm. Well. Let me think." She took a sip of her own drink, and evidently found it more satisfying than I did mine. "Asking her's totally out of the question--she would probably take great offense and remove your face, and probably a few more body parts. Tried scanning her?" "She'd sense it if I tried her shields." "Accessed her personal logs?" "She's got an amazingly tough passcode. I think she changes the damned thing every three days just to be sure." "Read her file?" "I did--it's not in there." "I think you're screwed, my young friend." She took another sip from her tall, frosted glass. "You're such a comfort, Elyena." "I try." I muttered under my breath about the abundance of smartasses on this ship, playing with my dinner and finally shoving the whole thing into the matter recycler. "Have you found anything interesting on the sensor probe reports from the planet's surface?" When in doubt, fall back on the job, I always say. "The latest probe reports sent back pictures, as well--I've got the main computer doing image enhancement on them now, we should have some interesting sights by night watch. According to the newest survey data, most of the Majestix operations seem to be centered on the planet's southern continent. There's no apparent indigenous high-order life--nothing like people, anyway--the usual clutch of insectoids, herpetoids, avians, and oceans capable of supporting several thousand species of native marine life, as well as the requisite parasites, bacteria, and the like necessary to sustain general life." She pulled a wad of hardcopy out of her thigh pocket. "Oxygen content is a little higher than standard M-class, and the gravitation is a little lower. Ocean covers about 65 percent of the planetary surface, and have roughly the same mineral content as most other M-class worlds. Plants and critters appear to have a high boron-silicate skeletal structure rather than our own carbon-based life. It's got mountains, rivers, plains, lakes, forests, temperate zones across the whole spectrum, lots of geologic activity in belts where the tectonic plates aren't getting along too well, two geomagnetic poles and the accompanying polar ice caps. It looks like a perfectly nice, innocent little planet where nobody ever evolved or bothered to set up shop--until now." "What the hell are they doing down there?" I wondered aloud for possibly the thousandth time in the last few days. The closer we got, the less sense the whole situation seemed to make. "No one ever has managed to find out exactly what makes some of those Majestix technologies run," Elyena began slowly. "Our own analyses of their shuttles' exhaust wakes haven't exactly turned up any clear traces of what kind of fuel they're using in their warp or sublight engines, and there's no real data on it in the files we've got on them. Maybe this place is some kind of refueling stop? I mean, it must be taking an unbelievable amount of energy just to keep that space station in one piece, not to mention powering it and all their vessels and all the people that must be inside it. At least some of their crew complement must be semiorganic--they'll need to be fed somehow, and their purely mechanical crew must have to recharge their batteries or something?" "I'm not sure they actually run on batteries." I stood up and started pacing around the lounge. "You've only seen their mechawarriors and war machines in simulation--I've seen them up close and personal. It might be because I have a partially machine intelligence myself, but I swear I've sensed almost-human thought patterns off their more intelligent warmecha--the Annihilator and Devastator-classes. And I've seen their power cores inside a broken-open Annihilator chassis just before it blew up--it's like nothing I ever saw before. I swear the thing pulsed like a heart--and I felt the Annihilator's pain just before it was blasted to atoms." I shuddered. "I don't want to think about these things like they might be people, Elyena. I've seen what they're capable of doing and they claim to be better than us--better than imperfect human life that's so fatally flawed and limited." I wanted to say more but I couldn't think of the words that could perfectly encapsulate my horror at being even slightly like the Majestix in any way--because I knew I was, half-machine and half-human, and I'd had that argument pitched at my by a Majestix commander just before he detonated the power core of his starship in an effort to kill me, my team, my lover, and the rest of WildStrike for the glory of the Majestix. Elyena was looking at me with a kind of sympathy, and I suspected she understood what I was saying without the necessity of really saying anything at all. "I don't like this, Elyena. I really don't like this." I prowled over to the observation port; in the distance, my augmented vision could dimly pick out the fast-moving speck of light that was a Majestix sublight shuttle. We were lurking a safe distance from the activity surrounding that poor, almost certainly doomed planet, approaching our target in a giant ellipse that would swing us around the sun and up on the nightside of the terminator. "Neither do I." Her voice was quiet as she rose to join me. The sphere itself was more clearly visible, gleaming malignantly in the light thrown off by the star and by the planet it was parked over. "It's not too late to turn back. We've got enough information to basically declare that the situation untenable and opt to abort right now." "What about that little boy--Javan Seyt-Ashkelon?" I drummed my fingers on the reinforced plassteel observation bubble. "Did you ever meet him, `Yena?" Her translucent image, visible past my own, shook its head. "MacLeod keeps his personal and private lives as separate as a man in his position can. He never brought Javan to Luxura, and my responsibilities only extended over that planet. Iczer Prime was protected by a far more elite security force. I never even saw his dossier until this mission." "I wish I knew more about that kid and how he came to be here--the dossier was just a little sketchy about that, though I can understand why. Just the facts and only the facts, after all." My lips compressed in a tight line and I continued tap-tap-tapping on the window. "My former First, Khasamar, was Morahk, too. Khasamar Seyt-Enkidu. The `seyt' is the masculine prefix that indicates birth into the ruling House of the whole Clan. Khasamar was a Prince of the disgraced House of Shimura, the royal family of Clan Enkidu, which was cast out of the Morahk for some kind of extreme dishonor--Khasamar would never tell me what had happened, he just got this look on his face, this terribly sad expression in his eyes, and stopped talking about it." I chewed my lip and called up on my head up display everything I'd ever heard said about the Morahk. "If Javan's name has been rendered correctly, it means he's the sole surviving member of one of the Morahk royal families--of Clan Ashkelon." "Considering that the Majestix come from the same neck of the galactic woods as the Morahk, there's probably some sort of connection...the question is..." Elyena's voice trailed off, visibly considering. "What the hell is the connection?" I scrolled through the files I had on the Morahk and swore softly--my information wasn't exactly complete. "I feel like I should be seeing something here but I'm too myopic to look at it directly." "You and me both, Manslaughter." We were both wondering the same thing, more or less, three days later as we hovered, completely cloaked and evidently undetected, about five hundred thousand kilometers off the nightside of the Majestix space station, reviewing the last of our plans. A moderately detailed schematic of the station itself hovered in the war room's central projection tank, flagged in appropriate places with the markers that indicated gun emplacements on the outer works, ammunition and weapons hard points, maintenance tunnels, pressure bulkheads, main power transfer conduits and nodes, and any potential points of egress to the outer surface--not that any of us wanted to go strolling on the outside of this puppy if we could avoid it. Our sensors had proven strong enough to probe out quite a bit of the outer works of the station and a good four planetary layers besides; what we found didn't exactly surprise or thrill me, which was had been pretty much what I'd expected, anyway. The sensors had not, as I'd expected, had fine enough resolution to determine which level the detention blocks lay on, but they told me enough to realize this was just going to be even more fun than I thought. Dansyr was sitting on Turalev's knee, examining the holomodel from every available angle and frowning at what she saw; Elyena was sitting across from me, a dry little smile on her face, absently toying with the safeties on her sidearms. "As you can see," I began, my tone as dry as Elyena's smile, "Our sensors haven't exactly been able to penetrate the secrets of the universe." "That's putting it mildly--only four levels below the surface?" Dansyr's mouth formed a little moue of distaste. "We didn't want to try for too much--the more intense our sensors sweeps get, the greater the chance that they'll detect us before we can get our shot off." Elyena's voice was quiet, and Turalev clicked and whirred softly in agreement, poking Dansyr gently. "We don't need to see all the way to the core--all we need is a safe place to land." My own smile was probably out of place, but I couldn't help it--I was probably the only person in the room that had actually teleported before. I rotated the station's image, pointing out attractions. "Levels one through four are mostly systems geared toward running the station's outer hull--as you can see, there's quite a good sized number of gun emplacements on the outside, mass drivers, particle and plasma lances, hard shot weapons of all varieties, including anti-ordnance weaponry. I don't think anyone here ever seriously considered trying to land the Raptor on the outer hull, but what we have here really completely rules it out as an option. Which means we have to teleport in and out." The looks that crossed my companion's faces were a study in contrasts. Elyena took the news like a trooper, her face remaining professionally still and calm as she digested it, nodding slightly in acknowledgment--I had discussed the possibility with her the most thoroughly before hand and, of all of them, probably knew the most about the strengths and limitations of my little talent. She knew I had to have rock solid coordinates in order for it to work at all--to keep myself or any of us from materializing from the nonspace through which I transfer while teleporting into , say, a solid object, like a wall or another person. She knew we were taking a serious risk teleporting based on nothing but the scan results, to the coordinates that I had picked for our destination site, which I had never seen before, could only visualize from the dimensions indicated. Dansyr didn't know any of this, and the look that crossed her face was still one of supreme discomfort, eying me with the sort of trepidation I'm used to seeing on people who suddenly realize they might be going on a one way trip that involves having their atoms scattered across Known Space if something goes wrong in midtransit. Turalev was, as near as I could tell, a healthy mixture of the two: concerned, but not actively repulsed, as Dansyr appeared to be. I continued rotating the holomodel, pointing out the local attractions. "Each level has a main Command and Control center that probably interfaces with a main Operations center deeper inside the craft--they're located in a different place on each level to make it more difficult to hit them all simultaneously. Hopefully we won't have to hit a single one. The main weapons cache is located in a different place as well." I pointed to the icons indicating C&C and Weapons. "If you come into contact with anyone, they're more likely to be support and maintenance personnel--they keep the combat troops--the Galatican special forces units, the heavy war mecha, the majority of the Huntre units--down below on most Majestix starships and our scanners haven't picked up anything different here. There is one Huntre unit on each level, located in a holding facility near the weapons' dump, and under the direct control of the C&C bunker on each level. If we trip any alarms, we can expect to be swarmed with mindlessly kill-crazy mechawarriors in about fifteen seconds, anywhere from ten to twenty at a pop." I pointed to the Huntre icon. "Most of the maintenance tunnels that run through the outer works are relatively low priority unless there's been heavy action recently--we're lucky inasmuch as the planet they're so fascinated with didn't have anyone on it to put up a struggle, so most of their activity is centered around the main shuttle bays." I highlighted the shuttle docks. "This," I clicked on a small nexus point in the maintenance tunnels, "is a low priority, tertiary level maintenance point for Communications on the fourth level. It's about ten feet by ten feet, and ten feet clearance. We're going to come in here." "How are we going to avoid their sensors?" Dansyr leaned forward and scrutinized the image, picking out the icons that indicated sensor package placement. I tossed a small object down on the table. "That's a Network cybercloak--sort of like a personal stealth field. We turn those on before we teleport, and the Majestix internal sensors will ignore our existence." Turalev hiss-clicked out a question. "I picked the Communications nexus so I could plug myself into their network and get a better look at the level breakdown. Also, the maintenance tunnels are ideal access as long as we don't do anything stupid like get seen by something we can't blow away quietly." "Keeping track of our location on a standard motion detector/automapper?" Was Dansyr's next question. "Yes," Elyena replied. "We'll all take in one motion detector/automap, one cybercloak, and our armor and weapons. No frills. We're not going to be in there long enough to set up camp, so don't worry about emergency rations. Light field dressings, endorphin analogues, stimulant dermadiscs, and as much ammo as you can carry." "Sounds like a plan." Dansyr smiled. "Or something roughly similar," I smiled wryly. "Okay. Suit up. We're going in in exactly one standard hour." My team obediently broke and went on their merry ways, leaving me to sit in the darkness of the war room, already prepared. I had decided when the last of the scan sweeps had been completed that the situation wasn't going to get any better and we weren't going to learn any more by coming in closer. I didn't like going in with only four levels of solid data mapped out for me any better than Dansyr did, but some situations are inherently less than ideal, and this was one of them. I still had the itchy feeling in the back of my head that I was missing something big and important--and I still couldn't see what it was, less than an hour from contact. Consequently, I was edgy, nervous, and if I could sweat I would definitely have been doing so. I think only Elyena noticed how tense I was, and for that I was grateful, since she didn't say a word in front of the others, and still managed to be comforting. All the variables were rolling around in my head: what if they were waiting for us? What if they weren't waiting for us? What if they hadn't brought the kid here at all? What if there was more going on here than we knew or had discovered? Why the hell was every instinct that I had screaming that this was a trap? Elyena returned first, sheathed in her favorite armor-mesh jumpsuit and flexsteel armor, carrying sidearms, grenades, and one of the smaller pulse weapons, her hair bound up in a tight braid, looking thankfully calm and competent. She did wonders to settle my high strung psionic nerves. "There's something wrong with this situation, Elyena. I can feel it." "I know." She checked to make sure all the safeties on her weapons were fully engaged, dark eyes meeting mine. "You think we're going to get hit the minute we sit down?" "I don't know. But this has a feeling like the time my team and I thought was a quiet little Banana Republic on the fringe of Darkworlder space and discovered a full blown Majestix installation instead." My eyes were fixed on our landing site, silently envisioning the coordinates and trying to picture what the room would look like. "I somehow doubt we'll discover a Banana Republic under the Majestix installation," Elyena's tone was wry and coaxed a smile out of me despite myself. "Well, you never know, we might just get a surprise out of all of this...." I found a smirk loitering at the corners of my mouth and allowed it to stay there. "Hopefully the surprise won't cut us into little pieces." Dansyr came in, dressed in a manner closer to me than to Elyena, ghost grey armor mesh suit and mottled grey-black flexsteel armor, a darkness superiority scheme that I favored as an assassin. To my surprise, unlike Elyena, she had completely sheared off her waist-length auburn hair, and now less than a half-inch remained, clipped close to her head. Turalev was close behind her, having added a minimum of armor to his natural protections and carrying the largest weapon of any of his--his gigantic particle thrower, and large number of similar weapons hooked at strategic places to the weapon's rig. I looked them over one last time, and wondered silently which one of us was going to be dead before the day was over. I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach and more doubts than I wanted to think about before an operation as hairy as this. The image of Javan seyt-Ashkelon flashed across my scaneye's head up display and I rose from my seat, stepping toward the rear of the room. "Form on me." They did so, quietly, with no conversation or unnecessary motion. Turalev stood back to back with me, covering me since, as the command element, I was the theoretical weakest point in the chain. Target number one, as it were, because no matter who else they shot, stabbed, or killed, I was their way in and their way out and the one that told them what to do once we got there. Elyena took my right; Dansyr my left. Both held their weapons ready, flicking off the safeties and preparing to fire at a moment's notice. I closed my eyes and concentrated, on the coordinates that I had, on the dimensions of the room, making certain I had that place locked in my mind's eye. I took a deep breath and released it, whispering, "Hold on." Then I teleported. There's no real name for the place that I travel through when I teleport. There's really nothing there from what I've actually manged to discover about it. It's dark, and it's quiet, and it's utterly cold--there's no real sensation there, no sense of time or place, and it's probably very easy to get lost there if you don't know where you're going. I wouldn't know--I've never really tried a blind teleport, with no coordinates and no idea where I'm going, though I'm told it's possible to do so if you're motivated enough. Beau Jack Devereaux, Hunter's best friend and the First Officer of WildStrike, accomplished it when he teleported blind from Tevlar Kor a century and a half in the future to Darkworld in our present time in a desperate effort to stop the Majestix before they conquered everything. But Beau Jack's a special case, with more raw power at his command than any six telepaths and teleporters of my caliber, and I'm not going to pretend to understand all the things he's capable of doing. The leap I was accomplishing now, five hundred thousand klicks into a Majestix vessel was well within my capabilities--and as close to a perfectly blind teleport as I had ever come. I sensed Elyena's thoughts touching mine, and Dansyr's, and Turalev's, their instincts urging them to scream and fight against this weird sensation overlaid by a control bought by a lifetime of training and discipline. It felt good, and eased some of my own tension, and I just let the power flow over me and through me and rode the currents to the place where I knew we would come out-- Reality returned all at once in a burst of sensory input, the startled psychic exclamations of my team cutting my contact with their minds as we rematerialized. The room was, as advertised, ten feet by ten feet, with a ceiling clearance just high enough that Turalev, crouched over slightly, didn't crack his head or rematerialize in two pieces. Dansyr rocked back against me, slightly unbalanced by the return to sensory awareness, and I put my hand out automatically to steady her. On my other side, Elyena swept her weapon-mounted scanner and motion detector. "We're clean on this side." Elyena glanced over her shoulder at me, as Turalev called all clear at my back and Dansyr did likewise, somewhat shakily, on the left. "Break. Elyena, take the door. Dansyr, Turalev, cover me." All four walls were lined with the tertiary communications equipment our scans had led me to expect, panels humming cheerfully in the green; we hadn't, in fact, tripped any alarms by our uninvited entrance, a fact that I found highly gratifying. I slipped the plassteel cover of my scaneye up, cutting off my headup display and exposing the recessed data port located inside my artificial eye, the connections of which I extracted and began connecting to the main communications relay. "You're not going to get fried trying that, are you?" Dansyr asked over her shoulder. "Your systems might not be compatible--" "Oh, I'm compatible--way too compatible if you want to be really technical." I snapped the last connection into place, feeling the cybernetic chill of initial contact with the Majestix command network running through my own C3 implants. "I had the unmitigated joy of discovering that my generation of C3 wetware just loves to interface with Majestix communications technology when the Enforcer was trying to wipe my permanent memory back on Darkworld." "The Majestix almost wiped you?" Dansyr sounded half-incredulous. "Ninety-nine and nine-tenths complete when Hunter Cormier interrupted the procedure." My network came fully on line with the Majestix communications network, and I began entering queries, scrolling and clicking through the answers it gave me. "The Enforcer kicked my chrome grey butt." "Well. Will the wonders never cease." Her smile was half-wry, half-malicious, and my own lips quirked in response. "If you think that's a wonder, Red, wait till you see--woo! Hallelujah, praise Someone!" I pulled what I had found up on the main screen. "The main prisoner's block is on Level 42--three sections, Maximum, Intermediate, and Minimum Security and our boy is in....." I searched, scrolled, and pulled it up. "Javan seyt-Ashkelon is currently residing in the Maximum Security Block, section A?" "Whaaaat?" Dansyr and Turalev made roughly similar sounds of disbelief, and both looked at me with open incredulity. "Look, it's right here. They're keeping the kid in Maximum." I frowned and requieried, looking for clarification and confirmation and got both. "Yes. In Max, cell block A." "He's a twelve year old boy, why the hell do they have him in Maximum--?" Dansyr sounded as befuddled as I felt, trying to read the Majestix encryptions on his file data. "I can't break through the encryption on his main data file--they've got it layered on too deep. Why ever they've got him penned up down there, they don't want anyone with less than Super Top Secret clearance getting in to see it." I disengaged quickly from the communications network and reestablished my own link security, sliding the interface gear back into my head and slipping the scaneye cover back down. "Elyena, what's our status?" "Secure. Nothing's stirring, not even a cybernetic mouse." Elyena glanced at me. "Plan?" "Elyena, you're with me. Turalev, Dansyr, you both saw the layout on the tunnels between here and there?" They both responded in the affirmative. "Good. Take off and create a distraction--any kind of a distraction. Make it a couple of them and as widely spread as possible. Try to cause as much chaos and anarchy as you can but don't get yourselves damaged. We'll rendezvous back here in exactly one and a half standard hours." Dansyr smiled demurely and Turalev offered his most snaggletoothed grin; Elyena glided quietly to my side, a wry grin on her lips. "Let's move." I popped open the hatch leading to the network of tunnels that would take us down levels, Elyena popping her head in and scanning for any signs of hostiles before motioning for me to join her. I did so, rolling in and sealing the hatch shut behind me; the access tunnel was barely big enough to fit us both, Elyena automatically taking point while I covered her back, both of us crawling on our hands and knees until we came to a larger tunnel. I waited until we were relatively deep inside the tunnels and pausing at a T-intersection to reorient ourselves before I popped my big question. The barrel of one of my sidearms--the one loaded with the molecular depolarization rounds--I pressed into Elyena's ribs, and rested the other--the one loaded with explosive rounds--against her temple. "Why do they want this kid so badly, Elyena?" I asked quietly as I clicked the safeties on both weapons off. Elyena had the good sense to freeze and stay frozen, very nicely obedient to the fact that I was holding more than enough damage to kill her a few times. "You think I know more about this than you do?" She asked, voice even, dark eyes gazing at me from the corners, holding her head completely still. "It's not polite to answer a question with a question," I reminded her gently. "And, yeah, I do. You weren't exactly surprised to hear that they're holding him in Maximum Security. He's only a little kid--but what else is he?" She had the good sense not to keep denying it. "How much did your First Officer tell you about the Morahk?" "Enough. Who is he, Elyena?" "He's an Artificier, Manslaughter. As near as I can tell, the last of his line, and probably the most powerful." Her voice was calm and even and I felt the sudden urge to scream at her, but managed to keep my voice steady as well. "And just who the hell are you?" She sighed softly. "Elyena Demerath. Your friend and First Officer." "But that's not all you are." "And you're not only a clone of Jordan Odessa. None of us are what we appear to be, Manslaughter." "Save the fortune cookies for later, Elyena. Who the hell are you and what do you want with this kid?" I emphasized the point by pushing the muzzle a little deeper into her ribs. "My name is Elyena Demerath. I was sent here fifty years ago by the leaders of my community to contact any Tevlarian refugees who managed to reach this galaxy. Javan seyt-Ashkelon is only the latest, and he must be recovered from the Majestix at all costs. That is my mission. Not so very different from yours, is it?" She flicked a glance at me. "Where do you come from, Elyena?" I had the sneaking suspicion that I knew exactly where she came from, but I wanted to hear it from her own lips. "Starcross. I was one of the ones that survived the Exodus from Tevlar Kor. One of the ones that escaped the Majestix." She wasn't lying--there wasn't even a trace of deceit, but the damnable thing about Elyena was that there never was. She just didn't always tell the whole truth. "Why didn't you tell me this before now?!" I struggled to keep from letting her hear how upset I was, even though my hands were shaking. "What did you want me to say, Manslaughter?" Her voice was quiet. "`Hi, M, I think you should know that I'm a deep cover Majestix-hunter from two hundred years in the future and the kid we're looking for may be the last hope of his people'? I couldn't tell anyone. I have never told anyone! Even MacLeod doesn't know who and what I really am. Even Mi'iko doesn't really know." I growled the nastiest spacer obscenity I could think of at the moment and flipped the safeties of my guns back on, lowering them away from her vital body parts. "Dammit, Elyena--" My rant on why I was probably the one person in the universe she could trust with all this was cut off by a resounding metallic booming from farther along the intersection, in the direction we had just come, followed closely by a low ripple of snarling and a voice shouting orders, slightly distorted by the distance. Elyena and I exchanged a conference glance and took off down the tunnel we had selected to take us deeper into the complex. "Looks like we've been made, Number One. So, who's the Majestix operative, Turalev or Dansyr?" "Neither," Elyena replied absently, extracting the clip she had in her pulse weapon and replacing it with a new one selected from a different compartment on her ammo belt. "Those two are as close to exactly what they seem to be as it comes in this business, I think." "Well, there's a comforting thought." I brought my tactical combat network online, and pushed my inboard scanning rig to its maximum range and dispersal, the motion detector indicating a large mass of hostiles coming up behind us and closing in fast. "We've got too many behind us for me to distinguish individual readings." "Huntres?" Elyena cut right into a side tunnel and I followed her closely. "From the biotelemetry readings, yes. A couple Galacticans, too, riding herd." We skidded to a halt in another intersection, reorienting. "I'll run interference while you get the boy?" Even as the words left her mouth, there was a shift in air pressure in the tunnel, followed by the sound of a muffled explosion and a blast of superheated air that slammed us both into the bulkhead. "That was probably Dansyr and Turalev....still think we need interference?" The alarms came on, clearly audible through the bulkhead walls as we pushed ourselves to our feet. "Probably not," Elyena acknowledged as I sprinted past her, taking point and allowing my tactical network to do a far faster job of sorting the tunnels. "Where are we?" "Level 40 and closing...." I paused at the mouth of the maintenance tunnel and glanced around. Nothing. I looked back at Elyena, "Hold on, we're almost...." My view of my First Officer was suddenly cut off, as the pressure bulkhead between us slammed shut, nearly amputating my cybernetic leg as I jerked back to avoid it, slamming into the far wall of the tunnel and bouncing slightly. I tapped my subcutaneous communications implant and shouted, "Elyena!" The receiver in my ear canal buzzed with static, without even the hint of a reply. I tried focussing my telepathy, but as I did, my shields began buzzing softly, the distinctive sensation of something trying to touch my mind communicating through to me, and I spun to face the source. The maintenance tunnel, like most others of its type, was dimly lit with secondary lights that would only come up if a maintenance crew was coming through them. At the far end of the tunnel I caught a glimpse of an intensely bright white-gold radiance, really more of a pinprick, like a G-class sun visible from deep space. There was a flash and suddenly the light wasn't at a distance any longer--it was pouring over and around and through me like a living thing, spilling into every organic pore and mechanical molecule, and I could feel it stretching, ripping, tearing at the fabric of my being as though everything I was and would ever be was coming to a sudden, catastrophic end. I felt like pencil lines being smeared across paper by a particularly large and uncaring eraser; I screamed, because the pain was, let me assure you fairly hideous. It couldn't have lasted more than a second or two before, just as suddenly as it began, it stopped, and my body, which I had for a moment felt stretched to the point of almost complete nonexistence, snapped back into itself. I staggered--it surprised me that I was still on my feet despite that--and then I fell, hitting the floor with a soft sound of agony. My scaneye was flickering with incomprehensible data from the scanning sequence it got on the blast that just hit me and my mind was shuddering in shock from the reaction, my body, even the mechanical bits, twitching with the purely neurologic response. I heard footsteps, but was too wasted to think, let alone move, and I got a good look at the boots of the person standing over me, and the sound of her cold, metallic, hungry voice. "Amazing. He actually survived and is fundamentally intact. MacLeod was right." MacLeod. I let my eyes close completely and my head fall to the floor. There was the Majestix agent. Somehow it figured.