Dominion (27 page)

Alis asked to be shown to a secure terminal at which she could compose her message. Reutan took her to a screen in the base of the tower, one of five at a single hub. The rest were not being used. He had given her the one facing the door, but she deliberately walked to the other side, behind which there was only a blank wall.

“It really is confidential,” she explained.

Reutan gave a friendly shrug.

“I won't take offense,” he said. “Perhaps you might like to join me for a drink once you're done?”

“A drink?”

“A poor imitation of cremos that we manufacture. We save the best for guests.”

They were making their own alcohol here? It just got better and better, Alis thought. Their procedures were so lax as to be nonexistent. Still, all of the guards carried pulsers, and while they may have been sloppy in their routines, they were still dangerous.

“I couldn't help but notice as we came in that most of the prison blocks appear to be dark,” she said, ignoring Reutan's invitation.

“We've moved all inmates to the first three blocks,” said Reutan.

“Why?”

“The prisoner population is too small to justify spreading it across all seven blocks, even with the addition of the Brigade intake.”

“You have Brigade troops on Krasis?”

Alis already knew this, but felt obliged to express surprise.

“It was felt that they represented a threat to Illyri stability. Their bases were closed. There was some resistance. The survivors were eventually brought here. Containing all these prisoners in three blocks is more efficient, and will make them easier to handle later.”

“Later?”

Reutan waved a hand at their surroundings.

“The facility is being deactivated. We've already begun the process of transferring whatever we need to the evacuation vessels. Soon this will just be an empty shell.”

“What about the prisoners?” asked Alis. “Where are they being moved to?”

“They're not going anywhere,” said Reutan. “They're staying here.”

“You're just going to leave them?”

“Our instructions are to disable all support systems before departure.”

“But the prisoners will die. They'll suffocate.”

“You sound very concerned for a bunch of murderers and rebels, Yallee.”

“They're prisoners, and they include troops conscripted to fight for the Illyri.”

“To fight for the
Military
,” Reutan corrected. “And in case it passed you by, we are at war with the Military.”

Reutan put away whatever small amount of charm he'd been attempting to use on Alis, figuring that it wasn't worth wasting his time on a bleeding-heart Illyri like this one.

“I'll leave you to get on with your communications,” he said.

Alis couldn't resist baiting him.

“What about my drink?” she asked.

“We just ran out.”

“That's a shame. Would you mind closing the door behind you?”

Reutan didn't just close it. He slammed it.

•  •  •

Alis rapidly inputted a series of letters and numbers into the coms recorder, and set it to randomly repeat. To the Securitats who were undoubtedly watching the text appear on another screen, it would look like code, and that would make them even more anxious to decipher the message it concealed.

Then she inched up her right sleeve, revealing one of the ports in her skin. She dug for the connector, and patched herself into Krasis's central computer using the coms system as a gateway. The initial rush of information was so immense that she jerked in her chair, and the back of her right hand slapped hard against the console, until she started to get a handle on the flow. She looked for life support, and isolated the cells in the first three blocks. That would keep their oxygen flowing.

Now for the tricky part. She found the oxygen monitors for the core, isolated them, and reprogrammed them so that all minus values became a plus below a set line. Somewhere in the prison, she guessed, was a screen showing oxygen levels, and the whole support system was linked to an alarm. She had already taken care of the alarm, but she didn't want the screen to show what she was up to. Now, if the levels fell below the new line she had set, the system would add bars to the display instead of removing them. As far as anyone monitoring the oxygen would be aware, it would appear to be more or less stable.

Finally, Alis took control of all the doors in the prison, sealing off the living quarters of the off-duty guards, and patched into the security cameras in the three active blocks. She locked the door to the communications room, and settled back in her chair.

Only then did she start disabling the core's oxygen supply.

•  •  •

Reutan was anxious to begin interrogating the prisoners as soon as possible. He wasn't sure exactly what he wanted to ask them, but he liked interrogations. Ever since the order had come through to close the facility, life on Krasis had become even duller than usual. The workshops had ceased production, and the humans were being kept in permanent lockdown. Like every other Securitat on Krasis, Reutan wouldn't miss the place one little bit. He'd been sent there as punishment for assaulting a Junior Consul during an argument over a particularly comely aide who, it turned out, was actually the mistress of a Senior Consul, and therefore wouldn't have had anything to do with either of them anyway. But the Junior Consul had influence, and Reutan had been packed off to Krasis with orders to keep his head low and his nose clean for a year or two. Once the fuss had died down, he would quietly be restored to his position in the Strategic Intelligence Section, the arm of the Security Directorate responsible for intelligence gathering through acts of blackmail, intimidation, and bribery. Reutan had always been a sneak and a liar, but the Securitats had given him a way to put his worst qualities to good use.

Now he sat before a screen and watched as streams of letters and symbols appeared before him. Lerras was to his left. He had just returned from checking on the newcomers.

“How is the girl?” asked Reutan.

“Conscious,” said Lerras. “She'll just have a headache for a while.”

“I thought she was a bit of all right,” said Reutan.

“If you like that kind of thing.”

Reutan wasn't fussy. He had been deprived of the company of the opposite sex for too long, and wasn't above spending time with a human in the absence of anything better. Especially since Yallee had turned out to be a cold one, which was a shame.

Lerras pointed to the screen.

“What does it all mean?”

“It's code of some sort. I'm running a cryptographic analysis, but so far it's come up empty.”

“It looks like random nonsense.”

Reutan gritted his teeth. The sooner he was off Krasis, the sooner he'd be able to distance himself from oafs like Lerras. He had to keep his temper, though. Lerras was one of the few Securitats on the base with whom Reutan remained on reasonably good terms. Reutan was not likable. But then, neither was Lerras.

“That's because you're not skilled in cryptography,” Reutan replied. “It's
supposed
to look like nonsense so that the unskilled will ignore it.”

“If you say so. I don't trust her, though.”

“I don't trust her either, which is why we're monitoring her communications.”

Lerras sat down in a corner of the guardroom, even though Reutan had not given him permission to do so.

“It's stuffy in here,” said Lerras.

“Then go somewhere else.”

But Lerras was right. It was growing uncomfortable in the guardroom, even though the door remained open.

Reutan's head started to throb. He was also beginning to experience some shortness of breath. He pulled up the oxygen monitor on an adjoining screen, but it was safely in the green zone. Something was very wrong.

Selec, one of the older prison officers, appeared at the door. He was struggling to breathe, but he still got his message out.

“First Officer Yallee has locked herself in the coms room,” he said.

And Reutan realized what was happening.

“She's hacked into the system,” he said. “She's cut off our oxygen. Break that door down!”

Selec departed. Lerras rose and followed him, but he was staggering by the time he got to the door. Meanwhile Reutan tried to undo the damage that Yallee had done, and restore their oxygen, but the system was telling him that there
was
no problem with the oxygen, and therefore was blocking his attempts to increase the supply.

The code being inputted by Yallee vanished, to be replaced by a message that Reutan could read without any difficulty at all. It said:

TOO LATE

L
erras wasn't quite the fool that Reutan took him for. He might have been a sadist, but the Security Directorate was no place for idiots, and Lerras was gifted with both cunning and a well-developed survival instinct. It was why he had remained close to Reutan, although Reutan was a nasty piece of work, even by the low standards of the Securitats. Reutan's survival instincts were almost as finely honed as Lerras's own.

Before Lerras tried to get to Yallee, he took a detour to the sterilization units and pulled out a handful of respirators. He put one over his own face and tossed another to Selec, who was already on his knees. He scattered the rest in the direction of the guards who were still conscious, but his priority was to get through the door and beat that sweet-faced little Yallee into oblivion. There would be time for questions later, or maybe not.

Lerras told Selec to blast the door, and that was exactly what Selec did.

•  •  •

Alis had learned a lot during her brief time with Meia. Meia had already been near legendary among the handful of surviving Mechs, even before her experiences on Earth, and she had proven willing to share her knowledge and experience with the younger model.

She had also shared some of her upgrades.

There was a loud bang, and the door was blown across the coms room, demolishing the hub of screens. Selec stood framed in the empty doorway, his pulser raised, Lerras to his right. Neither of them had made any effort to protect themselves from fire from within, because Yallee had been unarmed when she entered the facility, and had been given no opportunity to seize a weapon since then.

Thus it was a surprise to Selec when he experienced a painful blow to his chest, but the surprise only lasted for the seconds that it took him to die. Lerras heard the shot and ducked out of the doorway, but not before taking a hit to his left shoulder that spun him round and sent him sprawling to the floor. He raised his pulser to fire but the coms room was dark, and he could see no signs of movement. He sent a series of random pulses into the room, causing sparks to fly from what remained of the hub, but was just a fraction too slow in reacting to the flare of light that came in response. He felt a searing pain in his right elbow, and when he looked for the source he saw a smoking stump where the rest of his arm used to be. Beyond it lay his forearm and hand, one finger still gripping the trigger of the pulser.

Lerras's agony was so great that he didn't even see the remaining guards fall under Alis's withering fire, or notice that the doors to the holding cells had opened. Neither did he see Alis toss respirators to the human prisoners, battered but upright, who then made their way back to their ship while Alis restored the oxygen supply. Alarms sounded above his head, and a voice warned that all cell doors in Blocks 1 to 3 had been disarmed, but he barely registered what he was hearing. He reached for his severed arm, and with his left hand tried to work his own fingers from their grip on the pulser. He had almost freed the weapon when a shadow appeared above him, and a boot stamped painfully on his remaining fingers.

Yallee picked up his pulser and weighed it in her left hand. A hollow tube had erupted from between the second and third knuckles of her right hand. It was aimed at Lerras's head.

“You kicked my friend unconscious,” said Alis.

“Who are you?” Lerras asked, his words muffled by the mask on his face.

“It doesn't matter who I am. What matters is who you are, and what you've done. I accessed your records, Lerras. You like kicking prisoners. My friend can consider herself lucky that you didn't kill her, because you've killed a lot of others in the past.”

Alis looked up at the screens on the tower. She watched the liberated inmates battling to take control of their blocks. Some of the prisoners had been hit by pulser fire from guards who, like Lerras, had had the foresight to don respirators, but the sheer weight of human numbers was already overwhelming their captors. To her right, Steven and Rizzo reappeared. They were now armed with pulse rifles. On the screens, a handful of surviving guards were falling behind to the central core down two of the connecting arteries. The third, leading from Block 1, was empty, and Alis saw that the prisoners appeared to be entirely in control of it. Steven and Rizzo took up positions at the mouth of the other two tunnels, and started firing on the retreating Securitats.

Alis returned her attention to Lerras, who now understood the nature of his opponent.

“You're a Mech,” he said. “You're a damned Mech.”

“And you're nothing,” Alis replied. “When you're gone, no one will even remember your name.”

“Do it,” said Lerras. His face was contorted in pain. “If you're going to kill me, just get it over with.”

“I'm not going to kill you,” said Alis.

She stepped to one side so that Lerras could see the screens behind her, and the prisoners who were now streaming down the tunnels.

“They are.”

The guards in the arteries tried to hold off the prisoners while responding to the pulse fire from the core, but it was an impossible task. The tunnels were straight, and empty of any cover, and Steven and Rizzo picked the Securitats off with ease. Eventually, the guards tossed aside their weapons and raised their hands in surrender, but they were immediately lost beneath the swarm of escaping prisoners. Rizzo and Steven went back to rejoin Alis, and protect her. She might have been a Mech, and on the side of good guys, but she looked like an Illyri, and the Krasis prisoners didn't appear to be in the mood to make distinctions. Alis, for her part, was under fire from some guards at the top of the tower who had regained consciousness, and who were now fighting for their lives. Steven turned his pulser on them and fired a series of blasts that reduced the upper reaches of the tower to twisted metal and broken glass, and put an end to the shooting.