Authors: Stephen A. Fender
When the two Kafarans had
made to the hull of the station, they sent a simple data transmission,
indicating that the charges were set and that they were moving to a safe
location.
“Brave men you have there,
Captain,” Shawn said with approval.
Ralath nodded to the
distant Kafaran spacewalkers. “For them, this is what they would call an
‘everyday occurrence.’ Brave? I do not know if that is the correct word. Only
one in every thousand Imperial Kafaran officers are chosen for such jobs. Such
troopers are a proud lot. Bravery has nothing to do with it.”
“Well, were we come from,
denoting them as brave is a way of honoring what they do.”
Ralath grunted, then looked
down to Shawn. “More human sentimentality, I see.”
Before Shawn could defend
his point, a bright explosion lit up on the hull of the station. A moment
later, a signal was received from the space troopers. “The doors have been
breached, Captain,” the communications officer relayed.
“Excellent. Instruct the
troopers to erect a temporary barrier. More troops will be sent over once that
is accomplished.”
“Temporary barrier?”
Melissa asked.
Ralath nodded. “A makeshift
airlock placed over the opening the troops just created. Not permanent by any
means, it is the quickest way to have our landing ship dock with incompatible
airlocks.”
“You coming with us?” Shawn
asked, although he knew the answer.
“I must remain here,
Commander. Major Fralok will lead the squad that will protect you. Be advised,
I will likewise be sending in my own technicians to accompany you.”
“You don’t trust that I’ll
share anything we find with you?”
Ralath’s ashen lips smiled
as his ruby-like eyes stared down nearly two feet. “My faith would tell me to
trust you, but my experience would not. Therefore, let us just agree that
multiple eyes are better than few.”
Shawn nodded in
understanding.
“Major,” the captain said
as he turned to the navigator. “Assemble your team. You leave immediately.”
Inside the cramped shuttle,
Shawn found himself sequestered in a corner, with Melissa and Doctor Uudon on
either side, and the gawky M-9 droid at his side. The rest of the bus-sized
interior was crammed with a dozen fully armed Kafaran troops, each wearing
protective breathing masks, and several crates containing various pieces of
equipment. Due to their close proximity to the alien station, the trip from the
Tangled Web
took only a few minutes. But they were tense minutes.
Expecting enemy weapons fire to rain down on them any second, Shawn had one
hand firmly grasping a handrail beside him, his other arm wrapped tightly
around Melissa’s waist.
As the ship slowed, the
guidance beams took over, and the docking operation was completed in less than
a minute. As soon as the airlock pressure was equalized, the armored troops
quickly filed out into the brightly lit interior of the alien station. Shawn
and Melissa followed suit, with Doctor Uudon trailing behind.
Inside the station, Shawn
was surprised by the clean lines of the corridor. All the bulkheads were made
of a highly polished metal, with multiple strips of lighting high above their
heads. The floor was a patchwork of metal grating, with colored and glowing
conduits below them. There was more than a hint of recognition as Shawn looked
about the corridor. Save for the occasional alien script on the walls or the
confusing-looking computer terminals, this could almost have passed for a
Sector Command space station. Even the doorways they came across were vaguely
human-sized, although they were circular in shape versus the preferred
hexagonal shape favored by Unified designers.
“Doctor?” Shawn asked as he
turned to Uudon, who was staring intently at one of the devices he’d brought
along.
Uudon waved the device from
side to side, then slowed as he turned to face a long corridor on his left.
“The signal is strongest in this direction,” he said.
Fralok wasted little time.
With rifles raised and ready, the team moved down the corridor as quietly as
possible. As other corridors were passed, the troops swept their weapons down
them, yet finding nothing to shoot at. As they came to the end of the corridor,
they were confronted by a set of large steel doors shut firmly. One of the
Kafaran troops attempted to use a nearby access panel to open them, but the
foreign design of the terminal made conventional entry useless.
Fralok gestured to the
trooper standing closest to Shawn, who immediately came forward and knelt by
the door. Knowing what the trooper’s intentions were, Shawn grabbed Melissa
with one hand and Uudon with the other. Stuffing them behind a nearby
outcropping, he draped himself over them. When the requisite explosion didn’t
come after a full minute, Shawn risked a glance back in the trooper’s
direction. A large circular hole had been neatly cut into the door, exposing
the conduits and circuitry within its frame. On either side, Fralok and the
other Kafarans were staring at Shawn’s huddled mass in disbelief.
“Were you expecting
something dangerous to happen, Commander?” Fralok said while chuckling, which
the other Kafarans joined in a moment later.
Embarrassed, Shawn felt his
face flush as he hefted Melisa and Uudon to their feet, then proceeded back to
the now-opened doorway.
“I will say this for you,
human,” Fralok said, still chortling. “You are a curious lot.”
“I aim to amuse,” the
commander muttered as he drew his weapon. “Shall we?” he then asked, motioning
to the door.
“Maybe we should go first,”
Fralok said into the eerily quiet compartment. “There may be something
dangerous in there. Perhaps you should take cover?”
Sighing, Shawn took the
initiative and entered the space. It turned out to be a large room, with a high
celling three times larger than the corridor he had just exited. There were a
number of steel tables laid out in a grid pattern, all about the four feet
high, and all completely empty. Around the periphery of the room were tall,
transparent tubes filled with a bubbling red liquid. Each pair of three-foot-wide
tubes had a computer placed between them, each flashing identical sequences of
data across their screens, but made no sounds. It was these computers that M-9
had taken a keen interest in. The android was studying the terminal with its
single large sensor-eye.
“Looks like some kind of
lab,” Melissa said in a hushed tone.
Shawn turned from the droid
and nodded. “But for what purpose?” Having dealt with Meltranians firsthand, he
didn’t think these terminals looked stout enough to take the kind of punishment
their claws could easily deal out. Likewise, the examination tables didn’t have
a scratch on them.
Melissa ran a hand over the
exceedingly smooth surface of the table. “Maybe this is where they implanted
that organism Doctor Finly found inside Jerry?”
Shawn quickly grabbed her
hand and pulled it away. “It could be. If that’s the case, we need to be extra
cautious. That means no touchy-touchy.”
She nodded, then moved over
to stand beside M-9 and examine one of the tall tubes. The red liquid was clear
enough to see through to the other side. Save for the bubbles, all the tubes
were empty. Leaving the droid to his studies, she went back to Shawn’s side.
“The signal continues
through this door,” Uudon said from the far side of the room.
After cutting the door away
as they had before, Shawn followed Fralok into what looked like a computer data
center. Of course, it could have been anything. But something told him this
was the room they were looking for. What worried him, however, was how easy it
was to gain access to the compartment.
“What are we looking for?”
Fralok asked from behind him.
“I’m not sure. That’s why
we brought the doctor.” Shawn then turned to Uudon, who was not where he
expected him to be. The doctor, with a second device held high, seemed to be
scanning a coffin-sized box encrusted with blinking lights. “Doc?” When Uudon
didn’t respond, Shawn stepped up beside him. “Find something you like?”
“This appears to be a
controller of some type.”
“But controlling what?”
Uudon shook his head. “I’m
not entirely certain, Commander. There appear to be a number of data connections,
feeding information into a processors, then forwarding them to another system.”
Shawn nodded. “So, whatever
this technology is made of, we can access it.”
Uudon looked at him
dubiously. “You’re a great one for making enormous leaps of conjecture. I can
scan this device, and I can tell what it’s doing in an extremely limited
fashion. To presume that any of us could attempt to access the data itself is
wildly presumptuous.”
Shawn wagged his head in
Melissa’s direction. “She’d agree with your assessment. And we’re not here to
walk on eggshells, Doctor. I need you to tell her everything you can about
these systems.”
“Her?” he said doubtfully.
“I do hold a level seven
clearance in computer operations.”
“
Covert
computer
operations, my dear Agent Graves,” Uudon was quick to correct, “and only when
working on mainframes known to the Unified government. Mind you, I know full
well what that means, and how utterly useless it might be to this system. This
is …” he said, then looked at the computer with reverence, “both remarkable and
highly alien.”
“Is the data binary or
trinary?” she asked, paying little heed to his underhanded comments.
Uudon didn’t so much as
look to his scanner. “It is neither, and it’s both. The underlying architecture
is multilayered … sometimes overlapping upon itself. It’s not at all unlike the
device I discovered on Torval.”
“But you said you knew how
that worked,” Shawn interjected.
“Knowing how something
works does not mean that I can fully utilize its components, Commander.”
“Look, Doctor, I don’t need
you to understand every little nuance of this damn thing. We don’t have the
time, and I don’t have the patience. All I need is for you to pull as much data
from it as you can. You can drool over it while you analyze back on the ship
once we’re well and clear of this.” It was then that Shawn realized that M-9
had not accompanied them into the compartment. Before he could inquire about
the robot, Uudon began speaking.
“And do that with what,
Commander? In case you’ve not noticed, I don’t see any storage devices
around—not that I’d know one if I saw it.”
Knowing the doctor was
right, Shawn looked around in frustration as a new plan began to form. “Major
Fralok, those containers back on the shuttle … the ones that came over with us.
What are they?”
“Nothing of consequence,”
the Kafaran answered. “Standard insertion equipment: explosives, energy packs,
environmental suits.”
“Send a few men back to get
them.”
Fralok looked at him in
confusion. “We don’t need that equipment right now.”
“Not the equipment, the
cases. I want them all emptied and brought here.”
By the time the four
Kafaran troopers dropped the cases on the floor, Shawn, Melissa, and Uudon had
already began to pull pieces out of the computers. The modular design, not too
dissimilar to Unified computer construction methods, made replacement of
damaged components simple.
“This is absolutely crazy,”
Melissa muttered. “We have no idea if we’re taking anything important.”
“Uudon seems to think that
we’re on the right track. Isn’t that right?” Shawn said as he looked to the
doctor.
“I’m far from an expert on
these, Commander, but I believe we’ve found what we were looking for. Based on
what I’ve seen, this is a storage processer node. While it may not tell us
everything we want to know, it will certainly give us more insight into whoever
constructed it and how to deal with them. Perhaps, once the Kafarans have
retaken this system, we can—” but his words were cut off as the entire space
was bathed in red light. A moment later, a klaxon began to sound loudly
throughout the entire station. “What is that?” Uudon asked.
“The universal sights and
sounds of trouble,” Shawn replied. “Hurry up and finish what you’re doing.” He
then stood and rushed to Fralok. “Major?”
“We just received a report
from the
Tangled Web
. There is a power buildup in the station core.”
“A self-destruct sequence?”
Fralok grunted. “We have
precious little time to collect any more trinkets, Commander. We must leave. Now!”
Shawn turned to Uudon, who
had fished laying a large piece of the computer into the storage container.
“Put a lid on it, Doc. We’re leaving.”
To Shawn’s surprise, Uudon
was quick to act. With Melissa’s help, he quickly secured the lid on the
container. Two Kafaran troops then moved in and hefted the crate out of the
compartment. Uudon ran to catch up with them, leaving only Shawn, Melissa, and Fralok
in the space.