Fury to the Stars (Universe in Flames Book 2) (27 page)

When she arrived, the sheer quantity of sweat
dripping from his face wasn’t reassuring.

“How are we doing on beaming away the bombs?”

“Can’t talk. It’s gonna be right down to the
second...”

“Alright, I’m just taking the laptop we recovered.
Johanna needs it.”

“Whatever.”

She could see his eyes going all over the place,
interfacing with his neuronal link. She looked at the timer on the laptop when
she grabbed it, counting down from two minutes and fifty-seven seconds.

She hurried back to Johanna’s side, who started
working on the laptop. Who had ever seen anyone type on a keyboard that fast?
She was glad that she’d evidently regained her focus.

“Is that the amount of time we have left?” she
nervously chirped.

“Yeah. I think Cedric will manage though. He seems
competent.”

“He’s the best!” she burst out. Her face quickly
turned a shade of red, while she made a slight face.

Ryonna permitted herself a half-smile.

“Got it. Bringing up some of the photos, though it
will take a few seconds for them to decrypt.”

“What about the addresses and cross referencing?”

“I’ve had one match, with an Earth Alliance
employee.”

“I didn’t expect that. Do you have his name?”

“Hers.”

“Alright… Is her first name Nina, by any chance?”

“No, Sarah something...”

Interesting coincidence?
Ryonna wondered.

“As long as it’s not Kepler,” she said.

“Yeah. That’s her, Sarah Kepler.”

“That’s impossible!”

A cold shiver shot down Ryonna’s spine.

Then a photo of Sarah appeared on the screen,
followed by many others.

“What are those?”

“Pictures which the cameras from different laptops
took over the past few days. I wonder why she’s present on each of them? That’s
strange! Is she a friend? I think I saw her around.”

“Are you absolutely sure she’s the one who worked on
that file? I need one hundred percent certainty.” She stared at the timer now:
one minute thirty-two seconds.

“Yep, no doubts about it. It’s a shame. She seemed
like such a nice girl.”

Ryonna’s heart started pounding forcefully in her
chest. She simply could not believe it. She shook it off.

“Please send all this data straight to the
Cronos
.
They’ll need to get this before this timer runs out.”

“I thought you were sure that Cedric would diffuse
the situation.”

“If he doesn’t, it’s vital that Admiral Thassos gets
this info before the planet blows up.”

She bit her tongue. She knew she could very well
send Johanna into another panic attack with these hasty comments. But it didn’t
seem to stop her, or even give her pause.

“I trust my Cedric,” she just said before adding,
“Done!
Cronos
got the files.”

With forty-two seconds left on the timer, she simply
murmured, “Thank you so much for your help, Johanna.”

Then she opened a channel to Admiral Thassos.

“Admiral Thassos here. Ryonna, time is almost up.
What’s the status? Is the ship still in orbit?”

“Oh, c’mon you stinky piece of shite!” interjected a
muffled voice from the other office.

She made a face.

“I’m... confident Cedric will manage... But there’s
something else, Admiral. Please listen very carefully.”

“Go on.”

“I’ve sent you irrevocable proof that the acts of
terrors have been perpetrated by…”

“By whom?”

“Commander Sarah Kepler.”

“You’re shitting me? Hang on, something is
happening. The ship just entered hyperspace.”

All lights and electricity-dependent systems on the
premises started to blink intermittently and finally stayed off.

She heard Cedric shout, “YEEEEEHAAAAA!”

“Yeah, I’d say that Cedric has accomplished his
task.” She laughed.

She watched the timer counting down from three
seconds, then resting silently over zero.

“In the nick of time, I might add,” she burst,
exhaling deeply. The tension and pressure in her muscles all abruptly relaxed
at once.

“Told you,” Johanna sung cheerfully, giving Ryonna a
huge, surprising hug.

“You did. Admiral?”

“Yes, I’m still here.”

“I wondered if our communications would have been
affected by the power loss down here.”

“These Alliance redundant systems aren’t connected
to Earth’s power grid. They should still be running fine.”

“You need to let Commodore Saroudis and Chase know
this information ASAP. She could very well put both their lives and the mission
in jeopardy.”

“Absolutely. I’ll send a coded message via subspace
immediately.”

“Thank you, Admiral.”

“No, thank you, Ryonna. I’ve misjudged you, and I
want to apologize for the crap we gave you after the interrogation. A job
incredibly well done.”

“Thank you. Ryonna out.”

Ryonna went to see Cedric. He was doing a weird,
intricate sort of dance but no music was playing.

“All good here?”

“We’re still here, aren’t we?” he said, while
continuing to wave his arms and legs around in broken circles, with a soulful
look on his face.

“Great job, Cedric, you saved the planet.”

“Again! I keep doing that!”

“I wasn’t there the first time around, but well
done.”

“Yep… I… saved the world. But now, I’m going on
vacation for the next two months. I’m thinking Zakinthos. I hear it’s great
this time of the year.”

Ryonna smiled, but as she was about to leave Cedric
added one last reminder.

“You should go check on Tar’Lock. I think he lost
consciousness after transferring the bomb’s signatures.”

“I’ll swing by his last location. Thanks, Cedric.”

“Oh, and Ryonna.”

She turned.

“Yeah?”

“You’re one tough chick. I like you.”

She couldn’t help but smile.

“You have another admirer at the end of the hall.”

“Really?”

“Yeah…”

“Kewl!” He tripped on his pant legs, but played it
off as part of the dance.

“See you later, Cedric.”

“See ya, Ryonna. Take care.”

“You too.”

*   *   *

Spiros opened his eyes. A familiar, repetitive
buzzing sound slowly brought him out of his slumber. He no longer felt any pain
anywhere, which was wonderful. He activated the exit switch from inside the
regeneration pod, and the liquid slowly started to empty from the pod.

With the first few breaths of air, he was himself
again. The transition sensation was always just as weird as the first breath of
regen fluid taken into the lungs, but he was glad to be back to the real stuff.

The door of the pod slowly hinged open. Spiros
paused, feeling unsure what he needed to do next. His thoughts still felt a
little foggy. But that was a known side effect from using the regen tanks.
Seeing the Zarlack cadaver on the ground sent a shiver down his spine and it
all came back to him.

Without stopping for anything, he ran out of the
infirmary and towards his R&D lab. He passed countless Zarlack bodies
strewn across the corridors, abruptly presenting zero threat. He reached the
lab, but when the door didn’t spring open how it usually did he nearly crashed
into it headlong. He paused, pressed the door controls again, and the door made
a quiet whine but still didn’t budge. After swearing out loud, he opened the
manual release hatch, reached inside and pulled the lever. He heard the
satisfying click as the doors split open slightly, just enough to try prying
them open by hand.

He pulled as much as he could with both hands,
exerting opposite forces on each sides of the splitting door system. When that
didn’t work he decided to concentrate only on the right side of the door, with
similarly meager progress. After some considerable effort it finally started to
budge. A few moments later resistance finally gave out completely and the doors
fell outward. An enormous Zarlack body came crashing down headfirst, directly
in front of Spiros, who for a split second thought he’d surely have a heart
attack.

He looked at the dead body in front of him,
reflectively. He wasn’t used to killing. He was a scientist, an inventor. Sure,
some of that was sometimes used to kill, now that this was war. But typically
he saw his inventions more as a way to help the Alliance better defend itself,
rather than increasingly efficient killing machines for technology’s sake. But
he knew full well that through all these years as a scientist, he had to fully
convince himself of the moral sincerity to this inner argument.

After all there were two sides to every coin! But he
had long decided, whether consciously or subconsciously, that he lived life
better by sticking to the side that gave him less daily grief and resistance.
Plus, no humanoid oppressor had ever tried to bite him.

He brushed the old conundrum aside. He entered his
lab and sought out the troubleshooting bench immediately. He plugged a cable in
the back of his head to access his neuronal augment implant, in order to
salvage the precious files he had taken such risks trying to access. The
diagnostics program immediately returned an error code, as he’d feared. He felt
a pit forming in his stomach. He knew he could’ve very well fried the memory
banks with his irresponsible over-clocking, though he still argued with himself
that without it, he would never have decoded the file at all.

He looked after old pet projects, trying to
rearrange some sense of where his work had been disrupted. He opened some
cupboards and, of course, precious ordering had all been messed up; many things
were missing. He felt the indignant anger of a scientist slowly rising within
him: he liked things neat and ordered. All he found in each new cupboard was
more and more chaos.

“What life forms in their right minds store
explosive fluids near power packs?” He groaned out loud. He reveled in no
longer feeling afraid or worried anybody would hear and barge in. He was the
last man standing.

After ten minutes searching, he managed to find the
small crystal tube with a blue label. He put it under a scanner and gleefully
confirmed that the nanites were still in the tube, and still operational. These
particular nanites were designed to scan for data from implants or any data
storage device and dump the results over the network, making an exact copy in a
very little amount of time. The wonder was it worked whether the device was
powered or not. He only hoped that there was still some coherent data to be
recovered!

They’d never been tested. He remembered promising
himself to never ever play with untested nanites, after an accident twenty
years earlier where some badly programmed nanites ran amok in his blood stream,
almost claiming his life. He pondered as he looked at the crystal tube. He
decided to sift through the code once more, in order to be certain.

His mind was finally at full capacity again, and he
relished it. He’d slept long enough in the regen tank to basically strip away
the stress fatigue from the occupation, and it furthermore had given him a
boost in energy he hadn’t felt in years. Unsurprisingly, around the same time
he’d needed to use one of them again, as he… sort of… blew off part of his
face—in another experiment gone wrong.

Was he a reckless scientist? Perhaps. After five
minutes sifting through his code, he decided to add a simple failsafe: a manual
disable command for all nanites in his code. It was something that should have
been there in all his experiments, he admitted to himself begrudgingly. He
opened the lid of the crystal tube and placed it at the back of his neck entry
port. Then he entered a command with his free hand on the terminal, and the
nanites activated.

Looking at the diagnostic logs a few minutes later,
he could see that they had started copying data blocks randomly. A few of them
had been selected to put the data back into a cohesive, coherent and usable
data stream. One minute later the log reached its end; data had been sent to a
network location, and the nanites went into sleep mode.

He opened up a holo-display and recovered the data
the nanites had duplicated. Some of it was his own implant operating system:
some logs, and other assorted junk, like pictures he’d taken with his brain
over the last few years. But he was happy that the data stored within his
disabled implant didn’t seem to be corrupted. He’d still probably need to
change the implant, and restore a backup from the data dump he was searching
through.

He brushed that thought away, as his eyes met with a
file he didn’t recognize. At first the computer didn’t know how to display the
file, but Spiros knew why that was. Thinking on his toes, he quickly installed
a translation subroutine so the terminal could not only display but also
translate Zarlack into Universum. Then an extremely detailed schematics rundown
appeared of what looked like a gigantic installation located inside the Gatos
Nebula.