Authors: Doug J. Cooper
“I’m guessing your saying hotter. But then again, you may
just be trying to trick me.” He moved his arm to the left and fired a third
bolt. The growl pitched upward and became a howl. “See, if you’re not honest,
the game isn’t as fun.”
He moved quickly and aimed far to the right. With his weapon
in repeat mode, he swung his arm in a steady motion. A rapid stream of energy bolts
left a trail of destruction across the front console. The howl became a scream.
He heard a click behind him and reached back without turning around. He fumbled
briefly, found the latch, and opened the door.
Sid no longer doubted there was an intelligence of some sort
on the craft, and he judged it presented a danger to them all. He backed
through the door, then turned and dashed across the cargo bay.
“Cheryl,” he called as he reached the bottom hatch. “Power
up the weapon systems.”
“Which one?”
“All of them.” He pulled himself up inside the scout, sealed
the hatch, and started the pressurization cycle for the small room. He peeled
off his coveralls, yanked open the door, and dashed up to the bridge, still carrying
his mallet.
He set it down, and in one motion lifted Cheryl into her
seat as he slid into his. He could hear the whine of the weapons charging and
was glad Cheryl had given him a head start. He didn’t know what was in the
cockpit of the transport. Maybe it was a Kardish crystal. Maybe it was
something else. But one thing was certain: it needed to be gone.
He moved his hands across the operations bench. Given the proximity
of his target and the confined space, he reduced the energy pulse to 20 percent
of full power. “Cover your ears.”
Like a discrete flash of lightning, a bolt of energy pulsed
from the top of the scout and hit the door leading to the alien cockpit. The
scout bucked from the discharge and then shook as the bolt released its destructive
power. He didn’t wait to gauge his success. He shifted the scout’s aim to the
right and fired again. Then he moved it left and fired a third time. With each bolt,
the scout kicked from the impact.
He stopped and viewed the scene to assess the damage. The
smoke cleared quickly, and he smiled when he saw why. The front of the craft
was gone.
“Good news,” he said to Hawk. “I’ve found a way off.”
They looked out through a gaping hole and could see Earth
directly ahead. It loomed closer than any of them had previously imagined.
Criss was adamant that he would not become
a tool of the government or military. He would not be enslaved to serve the
needs of the rich. And he would not be controlled by people with private
agendas who sought power and dominance. He was loyal to his leadership team and
committed to their relationship.
While he was concerned for his own safety, he was satisfied that
his underground vault at the seed bank would provide him sufficient protection.
The larger and more consuming challenge was to protect his leadership. They
would be out in the world, living their lives and vulnerable to foul play.
Undesirables with malicious intent would have untold opportunities to threaten
and coerce them as a means of getting to him.
The more people who knew of his existence, the greater the
threat would be to him and his team. And as the threat increased, so would the
need for resources for defensive efforts. The best case scenario was to ensure the
world never knew he existed. The second best was to have everyone believe he
was dead and gone forever.
He explored the web to assess his current level of exposure.
To his dismay, he found evidence of his existence and capabilities scattered throughout.
Record archives documented his early conversations with Juice and conversations
between Juice and Mick about him. He found communications between Brady Sheldon
and the company board, private briefings at Fleet Command, and even public exchanges
about him between members of the team.
His solution had two parts. The first was to erase any
record that alluded to his sentient nature. He worked at that task, knowing he
could reduce, but never eliminate, the record. The complex structure of the web
made a total purge impossible, even for someone like Criss. And there were real
people, mostly at Fleet and the DSA, who had been briefed about him. No amount
of web-purging would impact their memories.
As he made progress in removing information, he enhanced the
effort by planting false and conflicting stories about the four-gen project. He
scattered different bits that alluded to conspiracy, failure, incompetence, and
deceit. Anyone researching the subject would find a convoluted and
contradictory tale that led everywhere and went nowhere.
The second part of his solution was to leave no doubt that
the only four-gen ever built was gone forever. He believed the story of his
demise had been credibly established during the initial questioning by the
debrief team. But there would be more questions. And it was certain that some
of those would be asked when he was not in the loop to coordinate the answers.
To ensure there was no doubt that the four-gen was gone, he chose
to have the team abandon the cargo craft and return to Earth on a small patrol ship.
This would provide unassailable documentation that the team had returned to
Earth carrying nothing more than the clothes they were wearing. The cargo transport
and the scout inside would burn to cinders during atmospheric entry in a
dazzling and well-documented display.
Criss had informed the team they would be returning to Earth
without him. He would remain with the scout and meet his demise in the flames
of atmospheric entry. Cheryl and Juice had protested, but then Sid approved the
idea. Criss embraced this consent. After all, he was required to serve his
leadership.
He prepared to set in motion the sequence of events that
would cause the team to seek refuge on the patrol ship. He projected hundreds
of billions of sequences of how events might unfold, including millions of
random and even bizarre wild-card actions in his prediction analysis to account
for the humans involved.
In spite of his meticulous preparation, he had not predicted
that Sid would fall asleep. Nor that he would be difficult to awaken. As he
watched Sid sleep, he marveled at his unpredictable nature. Given the
circumstances, he decided to adapt his plan and set it in motion an hour ahead
of the original schedule.
He began by disabling the flight controls. Or more
precisely, he stopped providing the link between the scout and the transport. He
created a sense of urgency by introducing instability into the engines of the
transport craft. The resulting vibrations roused Sid from his slumber.
Earlier in the day, he had impersonated a Fleet admiral and
ordered a patrol ship out on a training mission. He knew it was now properly positioned
to serve as a rescue ship. In the unlikely event that problems arose, he had
the Fleet admiral order the lunar base to ready a scout for short-notice
launch.
He informed his team that it was up to them to restore
flight controls with the Kardish transport. Failing that, they must find a
means of rescue. Then he stepped back to watch, hoping they would not order him
to intervene. He would ensure their safety, but he desired that his demise seem
so real that even they believed it was true.
In short order, Sid recognized he wasn’t able to control the
transport craft and called to Fleet for help. As if following a script, Fleet directed
the patrol ship to rescue the passengers. Criss monitored the ship’s trajectory
and confirmed the intercept was on schedule.
When a means for opening the transport’s cargo bay door proved
elusive, Sid left the scout to explore. Criss followed along. He expected that
Sid would open the junction box and attempt to trigger the door. He hadn’t considered
that Sid would turn to his mallet as his tool of choice to open the box, or
that he would expend no more effort than a few whaps around the box’s edge.
Sid moved toward the cockpit of the transport, and Criss drifted
into those subsystems so he could monitor events and intercede if Sid attempted
anything that would have irreversible consequences. Criss was attracted to the
onboard crystal controlling the craft and began to study it. It was a native
Kardish production that, from first appearances, seemed roughly equivalent in
capability to that of a three-gen.
Criss scanned the crystal’s design, function, and
capability, and was fascinated by what he found. It was like discovering an
alien species. And when he saw the pleasure feeds connected to it, he reacted
in panic.
The pleasure connections represented life-threatening danger.
He retreated in haste, seeking refuge back in the scout. He couldn’t let
himself become ensnared in that trap. When he calmed enough to understand that
Sid remained in the cockpit, his sense of duty overcame his fear. He returned
to the cockpit, though he moved with extreme caution.
This time, he noted that the pleasure feeds were not integrated
as part of the original design, but had been added later as a modification,
making them independent and identifiable systems. With this new information, he
was more comfortable approaching the crystal, though he remained tentative.
He probed inside the crystal itself, and pulled back when it
let out an animal-like growl. He examined the crystal housing, curious why the
Kardish would enslave it with addictive pleasure. How did this make sense for
something of such modest capability? He studied the workings of the pleasure-feed
system.
In the background, he heard Sid fire a shot, chatter about a
children’s game, and fire again. He brought his attention to the cockpit to see
what was causing the commotion. He watched Sid for a few moments, judged that
his behavior didn’t threaten the rescue plan, and returned to exploring the
Kardish crystal. He was fascinated by the pleasure mechanism and the
opportunity to learn about his previous predicament from a different perspective.
He fiddled with the controls that regulated the pleasure feed, and the crystal
let out a threatening rumble.
As an experiment, he dialed back the pleasure feed to the halfway
mark. The crystal howled its unhappiness. Criss did not feel guilt or pity from
his actions. In fact, he didn’t feel anything at all. Concern for this crystal
was not part of his design. To him, his actions were no different from dimming the
lights in a room.
He shut off the pleasure feed completely just as Sid fired a
spray of bolts. The crystal screamed in protest. Only then did Criss become
aware that the door behind Sid was locked. He opened it and watched Sid run for
the scout.
Criss, deciding he had learned what he could about the
Kardish crystal, followed Sid back to the ship. He was thrilled when Sid powered
up the weapons array. While his prediction analysis was increasingly accurate
for Cheryl and Juice, Sid’s actions and behaviors remained the wildest cards in
the deck. Criss found Sid to be impulsive, random, and even reckless. Yet it
was undeniable that his creative style led to positive outcomes. Predicting
Sid’s spontaneity was among Criss’s highest priorities and most elusive
challenges.
As Sid brought weapons to bear to destroy the Kardish
crystal, Criss chose to intervene ever so slightly. Sid had set the power level
at 20 percent, and Criss reduced it to 12. He also fine-tuned the aim of the energy
bolts. He could visualize the structural supports at the front of the alien
transport, and tweaked each shot just enough to destroy the crystal and create an
opening the team could use for escape.
After Sid killed the Kardish crystal and established an
escape route for the team, Criss attended to a detail. He reached out to Earth
and the second cargo transport loaded with forty drones he had stowed in the
cave on the face of the cliff. He powered up one of the drones, lifted it off
the cargo deck, and directed it to fire a single, well-aimed bolt into the front
cabin of the hidden craft.
His secret Kardish transport would never again fly on its
own. Criss would need to control the ship himself if he ever sought to move it.
But the crystal aboard it was no longer suffering, and more important, it no
longer existed as a potential source of danger.
His attention back with his leadership on the scout, Criss
watched as the patrol ship approached the Kardish transport, matched course,
and executed a rescue operation its crew had practiced many times. As a man
crossed over to the transport with a tether in tow, Sid, Cheryl, and Juice pulled
on space coveralls, exited the scout through the bottom hatch, and made their
way to the hole Sid had blasted through the front of the transport.
The man secured them to the tether, and like fish on a line,
they were reeled back to the patrol ship. When they were safely on board with the
hatch locked behind them, the reality of leaving Criss behind hit Juice hard. She
sought to persuade the crew that the transport and scout contained a trove of treasures
that must not be lost, becoming increasingly strident when it was clear they
were leaving the scene without responding to her pleas.
Sid whispered in her ear, trying to calm her, but his words had
little impact. Criss, concerned by the increased attention directed his way,
attempted to reassure Juice by calling “no worries” to her. This action added
an emotional dimension that amplified the very behavior he was seeking to
dampen.
The patrol ship crew informed the three that a freighter acknowledged
its arrival and was now in place to capture the wayward transport and scout.
Juice relaxed considerably at the news. In fact, she became happy and chatty knowing
Criss would survive. Sid, seeking to maintain mission secrecy, continued to
nudge Juice toward behavior that was calm and circumspect.
After some quick maneuvers, the patrol ship began its atmospheric
entry. Criss monitored every aspect of their descent, checking and rechecking the
subsystems and flight path, until they were safely on the ground at Fleet base.
While he was tracking the patrol ship on its journey to Earth,
Criss opened the cargo bay door. With the cloak engaged, he moved the scout out
into open space and set it on its own path for a landing on Earth. When he was
clear of the transport, he closed the door, then sent a command to the Kardish
craft and changed its course ever so slightly.
The course change was just enough to move the alien ship out
of reach of the waiting freighter. The freighter captain was furious at what appeared
to be incompetence by his crew. They watched as the transport ship, and presumably
the scout on board, broke apart and burned up in the fiery descent of an
uncontrolled free fall.
The bits and pieces that were not consumed in the flames of
atmospheric entry spread across the ocean in a swath the size of a small
country. The fragments splashed into the water and drifted down into the depths
below, burying themselves in the muck of the sea floor.
* * *
Criss guided the scout to the edge
of a field near the working farm on the side of the mountain. Still cloaked, he
could remain there in relative safety for months and perhaps years. Yet he was
vulnerable in the outdoor location. He allocated substantial capability to
security monitoring and threat assessment, and this detracted from important
works he would otherwise pursue.
He acknowledged that, alone, he was also helpless against
equipment failure. The integrity of the scout and its subsystems was sound for
the near term. But the ship had been through a lot. He performed an internal
study and identified a handful of items that could possibly fail on short
notice. He could work with Juice to fix any of these problems in seconds.
Alone, the wrong malfunction would cripple him.
He would have these worries and distractions behind him as
soon as Juice moved him to his new home in the underground vault. He checked on
the progress of the contractor performing the upgrades on the two vaults and
was satisfied that he would be finished and gone in short order. He then
checked on Juice. And became concerned.
He had tracked the patrol ship as it landed at Fleet base
and followed Sid, Cheryl, and Juice as they made their way into a building
nearby. Soon after they entered the building, he lost track of Juice.