Extinction (70 page)

Seth saw an opportunity to get to the
console that was blinking blue. There was absolutely no indication of what was
going on with the flashing blue warning. He thought that even though he
couldn't read their language, a countdown timer would at least have a pattern
of characters changing at a constant rate. But there was nothing but characters
saying God knows what on a static display.

Seth was vaguely aware that the gunfire
had slowed from steady, to a trickle, to cleanup shots as men moved among the
fallen enemy, making sure they were dead. “Over here, Surgeon.”

Surgeon stepped up to look at the
console. “What have you got?”

“I have no idea other than it can't be
good.” Seth tried tapping a few of the keys on the screen but they wouldn't
respond. “They could've called for backup, they could've initiated a data wipe,
they could have done who knows how many different things.”

“But I'm guessing you have a predominate
theory.”

“Yes. I think it's a self-destruct
command.” Seth waved his hand in a frustrated gesture over the console.

Surgeon pointed at Shar'tuk, who was
looking at them. “Hey, Emperor!” Shar'tuk looked at him quizzically. “Yeah,
that's your new nickname. Get over here.”

When Shar'tuk was at his side, Surgeon
pointed at the console. “Obviously your people have some connection with this
that you're going to tell us about later, but for now, can you read any of
this?”

“Surgeon, I want you to know that I am
loyal to you, our men, and the Coalition. I will tell you what I know as soon
as we're out of here. It's important to me that you trust and believe in me.”
Shar'tuk looked a little more relaxed, as though the weight of carrying around
this huge secret had been partially lifted.

“I trust you, brother.” Surgeon put a
hand on Shar'tuk's shoulder. “Now, do we have to hug and kiss or something? Or
can you get back to work?”

“A hug, definitely a hug later.”
Shar'tuk turned to the console. “But for now...” He tried touching some keys
and nothing happened.

“The language isn't Nortes at all. Maybe
at one time it was part Nortes. I see some characters that are kind of familiar
but even if I'm correct about what those words are, they aren't contextually
important ones, so I don't know what's going on with this console.”

By now most of the team had started to
police the area and look for gear and supplies they could scavenge: Magazines
that had been changed out during a tactical reload would still have valuable
ammo in them. Dropped weapons. Packs. Anything possibly useful.

Surgeon addressed the team. “I need
three people to scout that stairwell and check the floor below. We all saw the
faces on the monitors so we know our people are close and I'm guessing below
us. I don't think they held any of their people in reserve but be careful
nonetheless; be ready for ambushes while you scout.”

Three men broke off and went for the
stairwell. He continued, “Reaper, casualty report.”

Reaper was still moving among the men
and checking them out. It wasn't uncommon for a soldier to get wounded during a
battle and not even know it. “We have three who aren't leaving and four with
serious but survivable injuries. Of those, two can still move on their own
after I finish patching them up. I applied some blood stopper to them but I still
need to do some advanced work on them. I'll be done in ten minutes.”

Surgeon saw Reaper move to one of the
casualties who he assumed was one of the three that weren't leaving. He was
still alive but his wounds were horrendous. He had been opened up by one of the
warrior's blades and chunks of flesh and body parts were torn away from his
body. Surgeon knew Reaper would give him a sedative to slip away in a euphoric
haze.

As he was surveying the room and looking
for anything important that he might have missed, Surgeon received a comm from
the recon team he sent out. “Sir, the prisoners are on the next floor. The area
seems to be clear of enemy contact, but you need to get down here with everyone
possible.”

When Surgeon arrived on the next floor
with Seth and Shar'tuk in close tow, he found rows upon rows of tubes holding
their shipmates in obvious states of torture. “Cadet, get them out of these
things.”

“Yes, sir.” Seth pulled Shar'tuk towards
a command console that was along a nearby wall. “Damn. This one is locked out
too.”

Shar'tuk moved to one of the tubes and
started looking over it as though he knew something should be there. Seth
stepped up. “What are you looking for?”

“The torture tubes are the ancestors to
the surgical beds my people created a few hundred years ago. The designs are
similar enough that I hope it has an emergency shutdown protocol that's
manually activated in case of software malfunction.”

Shar'tuk was feeling around the tube
while shining his light around the back side. “I think I have something.” He
grabbed a handle that was near the back of the tube, pulled it out of its
recessed location and twisted it.

The tube began to flash yellow lights
and the surgical gear seemed to be retracting from wherever it had been inside
its victim. The person in the tube, Seth recognized as one of the mess hall
chefs, became obviously less agonized and relaxed just a little.

Seth pointed his visor towards the
handle and put its image out to the rest of the unit. “Find this handle on each
tube, pull it out and twist it. We think it's a manual emergency shutdown. Do
it to every tube as quickly as you can.”

Team members began moving down the rows,
deactivating the tubes as they went. As more tubes were deactivated, Seth
noticed that some of them were flashing blue instead of yellow. He knew the
blue lights were bad but didn't know what their context was in this particular
situation.

As Seth was disengaging his eleventh
tube, he saw that it began flashing blue. He hadn't been taking the time to
look at the faces in the tubes as he went along; he didn't want to get
distracted or slow down if he saw someone he knew as a friend and not just
another shipmate.

The flashing blue lights made Seth turn
and examine this tube's occupant more clearly. Almost instantly Seth thought he
knew what the blue flashing meant: the occupant wasn't going to survive the
shutdown process. The person he was looking at now was completely
unrecognizable. One arm and both legs were missing. One eye was hanging out of
the socket while some sort of probe was retracting from somewhere deep inside
the victim's skull. The skin and most of the muscle had been removed
circumferentially from the entire torso and the rib cage was opened to expose
the interior organs. Seth couldn't even tell the gender of this person.

He couldn't stay any longer; he had to
move to the next tube. As he turned to move on, he felt a wet sticky hand
attempt to grab his arm. Startled, he turned back to see the flesh-stripped
hand trying to hold onto his own forearm. The science project-looking face
spoke in a raspy voice. “Cadet.”

“General?!” Seth thought he recognized
the voice.

“Yes.” The gruesome husk did his best to
continue. “Ship. Still here. Save our people. As many as you can.”

“Yes, sir. We're getting them out now. I
promise we'll save them.” Seth didn't know what else to say. For a brief second,
he thought about calling for help to get the old man out but he knew it was a
futile gesture. He looked into the general's remaining good eye and tried to
come up with something profound or comforting to say before he left.

The general beat him to it.

“Seth, I'm not a pussy.” His desiccated
lips tried to curl back into a smile. “Just fucking go already.”

Seth came to attention and saluted. “Yes
sir!”

Seth stepped out of view of the general,
pulled his sidearm, and shot his hero in the head.

Seth opened the company push. “That shot
was me, no enemy contact. I found the general. He didn't make it.” Seth was
certain Surgeon would make the correlation between Seth's gunshot and the general
not making it but he would still detail him in later.

He continued, “I'm fairly certain now
that the blue flashing tubes means its occupants won't survive the shutdown
process. We should focus our evacuation efforts on the yellow flashing tubes
first and if we have time, come back for the blue ones.

“The general had time to tell me that he
thinks the ship is still here. I'm guessing it's in a below-ground hangar because
we didn't see any hangars or airfields on the surface.”

Surgeon cut in, “I sent our scouts down farther
and they found a floor below us with more prisoners, not as many as in this
room but some. There are five floors of tubes like these but the last three are
empty. The scouts are heading down floor by floor; hopefully, they'll find the
hangar bay soon.”

Joker spoke up. “I've been thinking: how
did they get all of the crew members up here? I doubt they walked them up one
by one. There has to be some sort of freight elevator or something to get large
groups of prisoners up here.”

Seth had finished with his row. “I'm
done on my side so I'll start looking for that. It makes sense that there
should be something like that around here.”

“Take Emperor with you. He might be able
to read a sign or something you might miss.” Surgeon was also shutting down
tubes while trying to oversee the operation.

The room was roughly the size of a
football field so it had taken some time to get to the back of it as Seth had
been stopping every few meters to shut down another tube. He decided to check
along the back wall first and almost immediately found what he was looking for.

“Surgeon, I found an elevator.” Seth
pressed a button that he figured was a call button; some things were fairly
universal concepts among sentient beings. “It is along the back wall, that's
why we didn't see it until now. It's fairly big. I'm guessing by just the door
size we can easily get fifty people in it at a time.”

Reaper spoke up. “That's great but you
need to remember that a lot of these people aren't going to be ambulatory. We
need to find or figure out a way to get large numbers of people to the elevator
all at once or we'll be here for hours.”

The three men on the scout came up. “We
haven't seen anything that could help with the evac but we'll add that to our
list of things to look for. And no hangar so far.”

The elevator doors opened and Seth and
Shar'tuk had their weapons trained on it just in case it brought more warriors
with it. The interior was fairly huge as Seth suspected. They found a control
panel with symbols on it. Seth looked to Shar'tuk.

“Sorry, I can't read any of this. It
could be a numbering system or it could be actual descriptions of what each
floor contains.” He reached out and pushed a button; the doors began to close. “Let's
hope the universal constant of elevators is the same here. The bottom button
goes to the bottom floor and the hangar should be on the bottom floor.”

Seth agreed with that concept. If you
were building a base with an underground hangar bay, you always put the hangar
on the bottom level. You don't want hundreds of thousands of metric tons upon
hundreds of thousands of metric tons of ships and equipment to be over your
head at any given point. You want that weight to be supported by the ground
floor. Not to mention that when a ship lifts it creates a lot of downward
force, and again, you don't want to have that force on a floor above your head.

So they descended farther into the
complex. When the elevator stopped and the doors opened, they were rewarded
with a huge hangar bay and their ship towards the back wall. Seth hadn't even
thought about the size of the hangar before seeing it, but had he, he still
wouldn't have imagined what he saw. To be able to ground a ship as large as
theirs, it would have to be massive. Based on what he saw, this was either a
hangar for ships easily five times the size of his own or it had been home to
hundreds of smaller ships.

Next to the elevator, Shar'tuk found
several large cages that seemed to be prisoner transport modules. The cages had
a fairly low tech steering mechanism and could even be moved manually if need
be. Together, Seth and Shar'tuk loaded two of the transports onto the elevator
and hit the button to send them back to the floor they came from.

Seth got on the company push. “We found
the hangar bay; it's the bottom floor. We also found prisoner transport pods
and we sent two of them up. Recon team, how far down are you?”

“Well, we didn't have a nice elevator so
we're still humping it to you. How many floors do you think you went down?”
They must have been pushing it pretty hard as Seth could hear the slight
raggedness in the operator's voice as he spoke.

“We counted thirty-three buttons between
the floor we were on and the button we pressed. If that correlates with a
standard elevator then we went down thirty-four floors.” Seth received an
affirming nod from Shar'tuk.

“Copy that. We're just passing level
twenty-four. Some floors are different heights. We passed two so far that had
double the stairwell heights of the other floors. I think it will be quicker to
stay in the stairwell than try to find the elevator on one of these floors. Not
to mention we could run into resistance on any one of them.”

“Agreed. We'll see you in a few.” Seth
turned his attention to the hangar bay and addressed the team leader. “Surgeon,
our ship is here and it looks intact. Can you send down a few guys, with the
first round of survivors, to get it prepped for launch? Emperor and I—”

“I already hate that.” Shar'tuk sighed.

“—need to find controls to open the
hangar”, Seth finished.

“Sounds good. I'll send Joker and Smoke.”
Surgeon was feeling a little more optimistic as time passed and they hadn't all
exploded yet. “I plan to remote detonate our stealth craft before we leave. I
want to glass this side of the hemisphere.”