Sons of Abraham: Terminate (7 page)

              “It wasn’t that simple.”

              “It never is that simple.”

              “Joseph acted outside of his programming.  He killed a dignitary.”

              “He put an animal down, nothing more.  If he were one of my men, I would have him in the blue armor before the dog’s body grew cold.  There is the difference, Agent Calloway.  Your hands are bound by the laws of your people, and your ancient traditions and misguided sense of justice.  Here, on Eden, we use our laws to free ourselves, to punish the wicked who prey upon the weak.”

              “You’re missing the point.”

              “No, it is YOU who misses the point.  Perhaps I should not have called you.  Perhaps, I should have called the people who set Joseph free of his programming.  It sounds as though their blood runs red, rather than the green and black of most planets.”

              The metaphor wasn’t lost on Nathan, calling people from other planets greedy, or poor of heart.  He wanted to lash out at the arrogance of the man though he knew that the law prohibited him from acting against the laws of Eden.  It was difficult, the emotional roller coaster the man was putting him on, slapping him in the face one moment, then praising the actions of his lost friend.  Joseph was special, in more ways than just his breaking of his programming.  Perhaps, by sharing the tail, his memory would be praised rather than tarnished.  Still, he had a duty to perform, and slavers to save from execution.

              “I need to speak with your Queen.”

              “This is getting us nowhere,” Vanessa barked, turning to the next article that mentioned the Cyber known as Gabriel. 

              The last several hours had been spent by pouring over each article, trying to piece together a timeline for the life of Gabriel, in an attempt to locate the Cyber and his technology.  Thus far, they’d managed to confirm that Gabriel had left the Earth in 2592, and never reached a known destination.

              Jones worked at a separate terminal from the others, pretending to pour over the same articles while secretly downloading the surgery procedure for the second gen Cybers.  Twice he’d nearly been caught by the suspicious eyes of Sanchez, the small man refusing to allow the mysterious man to work in peace as the so-called ‘experts’ continued their research.

              “At least, we’ve confirmed what historians have suspected,” Keenan added.  “Gabriel was seen boarding a ship.  While the fact remains that he was never found afterward, we can still assume that he never returned to the planet.  Thus, we can rule out Earth as a location for the Cyber’s remains and research.”

              “The ship was never found either,” she replied.  “It was supposed to reach Taurus, but the manifest showed it never reached the large ring of the system.”

              “Then what rings did it reach?” Sanchez asked, barely able to stay awake.

              The two experts looked to one another, their eyes widening.

              “You’re kidding me.  You never thought once to track the manifest of every ring?  All you have to do is go through the archives.  Then you’d know what system the ship disappeared in.  Thought you were supposed to be smart or something.”

              The two went to work, their fingers feverishly sliding across the screen until they found the government’s connection to the Gabriel Rings.  It took a lengthy phone call to the capital before they were allowed access to the archive, but having the Vice President back your efforts made many doors open.

              The hours passed before they were able to locate the archives from the day of Gabriel’s disappearance.  They searched through each line, looking for the ship’s identification code, which both of them had memorized hours earlier.  They checked each system, one by one, ruling out various planets as they went.  Keenan had a star chart on his pad, placing a red ‘x’ over each planet as it was ruled out. 

              “There’s nothing,” he muttered. 

              “That can’t be,” she replied.  “That ship has to have shown up somewhere.  Are you sure you were looking for the right code?”

              “Of course, I’m sure,” he snapped.  “I’ve repeated it so many times that I can’t remember my own pad number.  The number simply does not exist on ANY of the archives.”

              “Perhaps someone erased it,” Jones offered, looking up from his screen.  “I’m sure this wasn’t the first time someone tracked the ID number of Gabriel’s ship.  If it doesn’t show on any of the ring archives, then either it never passed through a ring, or someone erased it from the archive.  Otherwise, we wouldn’t be sitting here right now, debating over where the Cyber disappeared.”

              “So what are we missing?” Keenan added.  “What is the one thing that no one else has thought of?  We can all agree that the ship never passed through a ring.”

              Vanessa jumped from her seat, frantically backing out of the archives.  Her dark fingers slid through multiple files, searching for the file that held her current thought.  Keenan looked at her, puzzled, then to Jones before standing from his workstation and walking to her side.  He peered over her shoulder, watching her frantically flipping through directories.

              “What is it?” he asked.

              “Jones already said it, and you just repeated it,” she muttered, still flipping through the directory.  Her hands stopped, finally coming across the file she was searching.  The screen showed the picture of the system-to-system Gabriel Ring.  Keenan’s jaw dropped open as he watched her open the archive, displaying the rows of pictures from inside the structure.

              “Each of the big rings is forty-seven miles long, and five miles in diameter,” she stated.  “They hold a crew of a thousand people, but they have to switch them out in a four-month rotation so they don’t get space fatigue.  Think about it, Kohl.  There're forty-seven miles of the last place we knew Gabriel went, left unchecked.  The crews swap out so often that no one would have remembered him being on the ring itself.”

              Jones perked up, uncertain if he liked what he was hearing.  His screen went dark as he strolled over to the group, huddled over the same workstation.  Even Sanchez had revived and was now standing on the opposite side of the station, eagerly waiting for them to reach a discovery.

              “Look at these schematics.  There are OVER a thousand bedrooms, perhaps ten thousand.  They never knew how many people it would take to operate the station, so they overloaded the facility, just to be certain.”

              “Actually, it was more than that,” Keenan interrupted.  “They weren’t certain if they would be able to work safely from Earth anymore, so they built onto the large ring, in case they needed to transfer this lab to it.  There are labs up there, bigger and better than this place.  I don’t think they’ve been used for centuries, but they’re there.”

              “Look at all this unused space,” she said, her finger tracing unnamed quadrants on the schematic.  “These areas aren’t marked as vital components.  There are no fuel cells, oxygen cells, water cells, or any types of wiring and technology that make the ring work.  Maybe they planned to put an army up there, or the entire government in case the Earth was to fall victim to war.”

              “That’s a ton of ground to cover,” Sanchez added, staring down at the schematic.  “We could spend weeks, maybe months up there with just this lot.  You’ll need more manpower if you want this done quickly.”

              “Will Jana give us what we need?” Vanessa asked, looking to Jones.

              He looked down at the schematic, running a calculation in his head.  To the group, he seemed to be thinking of what the Vice President’s reaction would be to request more manpower to their cause.  In truth, he was stalling. 

              “The President was adamant about keeping a low profile to this,” he replied.  “Asking for more manpower, and then parading them on board a ship to the Gabriel Rings could draw a lot of unwanted attention.  I don’t think she would be able to fulfill the request.”

              The group hung their heads, each attempting to discover a new way to search so many unmarked chambers.  The ring may have been forty-seven miles in length, but the majority of the structure was built for making the protective shield ships reach the next system.  In the grand scale of things, the actual area that would need to be searched was five miles long, and five miles in diameter.  However, there were a number of maintenance tunnels that ran the length of the ring, leaving an endless possibility of nooks and crannies to check.

              “What about the workers on the ring?” Keenan asked.  “Could she request that a dozen or two dozen of them aid us for a short while?  It would go much quicker if we used people who were familiar with the ring itself.”

              Jones tried to think of an excuse for Jana Wilkes to say ‘no,’ but he foresaw every counter-proposal that the group would make.  He ran the thought through his head, over and over, searching for a loophole that would make it impossible to search the Gabriel Ring.  All of his efforts came up empty.

              “That could work,” he finally replied.  “We could request no less than fifty workers.  There are just under a thousand people up there, but the bare minimal to run the ring should be no more than four hundred.  I imagine there are medical staffs, cooks, cleaning crews, security details, and a few other groups that I’m not thinking to mention.  The crews work around the clock, but I’m sure she could request a few of the off shifts work a little overtime to aid us.”

              “Then what are we waiting for?” Vanessa asked, springing from her seat.  “We should leave this place now and be on a transport tomorrow.”

              “No so fast,” Keenan replied.  “There’s around five hundred years of history lying within this facility that no one has seen since they sealed the place.  I wouldn’t be doing my job as a historian if I were to leave in such haste.”

              Vanessa frowned but nodded.

              “I guess a full day here wouldn’t kill me.  I think we should stop for a meal, though, maybe figure out where the bathrooms are, and then pool our resources to aid Mr. Kohl.  I’m guessing you want to take as much with you as possible?”

              Sanchez returned to the harrier, then came back twenty minutes later with a bag of supplies.  In his absence, Vanessa had managed to find the bathrooms.  They were disturbed to know that there were only two in the entire facility, but thankful that they were operational.  They ate in groups, the military escorts keeping together in a corner while the scientist ate and discussed what they imagined life had been like in the facility.

              “So why did Gabriel leave?” Vanessa asked a chunk of fiber bar still in her mouth.

              “No one knows for certain,” Keenan replied.  “The records of the archives show that the Cybers and the scientist of the many governments had a dispute about how to best save the planet.  The original idea was to use aircraft carriers, or floating islands, and line them with rich soil in order to grow crops.  The governments laughed at the idea, but the plan wasn’t to feed the billions that were starving on the planet.  The food was intended for key personnel, should the world ever collapse to famine or war.”

              Everyone in the room had stopped talking, their attention on Keenan as he gave them a lecture on Earth’s history.  Many knew of what the history archives told them, but there were always untold portions of stories to be known if one listened to the right person.

              “It wasn’t until the United States fell under attack that the Cybers thought to reach to the stars.  The Americans started pulling back their resources, taking away from the program.  The group of scientist looked to one another and realized that the minds needed for such an expedition were not within their group.  So, they branched out, started taking people against their will.  The first was an engineer from the American space program.  The man was making a breakthrough get the space shuttles to reach farther out into the system, in a shorter amount of time.  The obstacle he faced was the breaking of light speed.  He found it to be achievable, but not survivable.  Breaking light speed would cause the object to turn into pure energy, thus destroying the vessel and its crew.  Somehow, he needed to encase the ship in a structure that would allow for the dispersion of the energy, allowing for the vessel to break the speed of light without destroying it.  The poor man was forced to undergo the surgery, becoming a Cyber.”

              Jones paused, the words of Keenan weighing on him.  He had been attempting to reach the stream with one of his data pads, but the facility had no outside access.  Their message to the capital had been branched through the ship, but doing so would alert the pilots. 

              “A mathematician underwent the procedure as well.  The two Cybers broke the code to the dilemma, and thus, space travel was born.  The rings went under construction as four countries converged on the United States, bombing them with everything they had.  They broke the Geneva Convention, using various forms of chemical bombs that spread disease throughout the country.  The Americans had been on the verge of solving the cultivation and germination issue that the world was facing, but the facilities were destroyed in the war, leaving the world in shambles.”