Ilox Saga 1: Eris Monroe: More Than Human (9 page)

Eli felt much better. The
twenty-four hours he had been detained had helped his leg to recover. A port doctor had seen him an hour after he’d been taken off the Restov Kal. The doctor had made sure that his leg was healing adequately, even applying some new therapeutic nano-gel to bolster the process. Held in a cell complete with a comfortable bed to sleep on and a shower was luxury compared with the cramped space of a two meter by two meter cargo container. He had not been idle during his confinement – using his ability, he had been reaching out through databases to erase any information that could identify him. He had also set in motion a new identity which he would pick up soon after leaving the cell, and had also booked passage on a small vessel that would take him out of Republic space and into the Verge. The Algol station was a major commercial hub and dated back to the founding of Earth’s Republic; it was large enough to accommodate two hundred and fifty thousand sentients. The main thoroughfare, complete with shopping malls, hotels, food courts and high-priced condominiums was busy at all times, with thousands of people, aliens included, constantly moving about at all times. A station in space did not have a ‘day’ or a ‘night’ as the artificial lighting wasn’t ever turned off and people arrived from all over the galaxy at every minute of the hour. Eli was passing time gambling; playing the slot machines in a small casino not far from his departure hub. He had been watching people ebb and flow as he waited to board the passenger ship
Zheng He
which was scheduled to leave in thirty minutes, but the casino drew him in. All of the machines were hard-lines, not connected to any network that he could discern, but that didn’t matter to him. After ten minutes, he had accumulated over twelve thousand credits. He especially liked this casino, the
Tail Wind
, because it had panoramic windows looking out over the planet below.

“Nice view, isn’t it?” A
scantily dressed blonde haired woman had walked next to where Eli was gambling. She was gesturing at the reinforced plasteel windows across from him. She was dressed provocatively, with a low cut and extremely tight fighting white and gold dress that barely covered her breasts. She looked like a prostitute to him, but he wasn’t sure. More than a dozen ships could be seen in the distance maneuvering into position as they prepared to dock. The planet Algol B1 spun lazily below, yellow-white clouds blanketing the surface of the large world.

Eli was not shocked at all when she leaned over
, rubbing against him and whispered, “You’re a good looking guy…want to have a good time? I’m just a few hubs down the main corridor staying at the Hauptman Hotel.” Her breasts were practically popping out of her dress as she spoke to him. Eli couldn’t help but look right at them as he smelled her perfume, a hint of floral and spice.

Eli was immediately suspicious and
reached out
to see what type of neural implants she had. She had standard everyday implants such as
Location, communication and longevity nano tektites but also had night vision, rapid healing, acute hearing, acute vision, pain tolerance and a military grade version of total battle awareness; a very expensive suite of wetware more fitting to a special operations soldier.

“Uh, no thanks.”
He didn’t want anything to do with her.

“Your loss
,” She shrugged, adjusted her very short skirt and walked away. Eli continued to monitor her with his gift. If he’d had any doubts about her before they vanished as he intercepted her
communication link
and listened in as she was talking in her head to a partner.

“Maahir, h
e didn’t go for me, how do you want to proceed?
“ The woman’s communications were easy to eavesdrop on and Eli began tracing where the link was being sent. “
We’ll use the stunners on him
, replied the man, who continued, “
Fala, be careful with this one
.”

After six seconds
of effort, Eli had the man under surveillance with one of the numerous hidden cameras positioned all over the giant space station. The man Maahir was human and had all of the same neural implants as the woman did plus a few more. He was roughly one hundred meters distant and rapidly closing in on Eli’s position at the casino.

Oh shit.
Eli thought quickly. He decided to cause a distraction and try to lose those two in the resulting confusion. He hastily used his
machine control
ability
on a nearby security MEK, causing it to overheat and to cook off its energy-dense battery pack and super capacitors.
People started to notice when the MEK began smoking, and began yelling and running in a panic as it caught fire and small explosions popped off from the capacitors exploding. The security MEK also began walking unsteadily throughout the casino and then into the main part of hub forty-three exclaiming “Do not be alarmed. The situation is under control. Do not be alarmed.”

Eli began running along with all of the other
panicked people, but away from where the man and woman team were positioned. He had made it at least two hundred meters away and through a bulkhead when he thought he could relax a bit. He slowed to a brisk walk as onlookers nearby pointed and talked excitedly at all the commotion coming from where he had just been. The crisp acrid smell of an electrical fire and smoke had begun to seep out from hub forty-three. As security MEKS and personnel rushed past him, Eli felt safer. He was already interfacing with station computers booking passage on a different ship when he felt a vise-like grip pin his arm from behind.

“What the hell! Let go!” Eli saw that a K’Tosk
clad in plasteel armor had put an arm-lock on him. The K’Tosk said nothing, but reached for a small stun gun. Eli’s eyes widened. He was with
them
. Reacting instinctively, Eli
pushed
out against the K’Tosk with his telekinetic ability, yelling “Fuck you!”

The force was great enough to send the armored mercenary flying back two meters, but instead of landing in a heap, the K’Tosk gracefully rolled out
from the fall like an acrobat and landed on his feet with his stun gun pointed squarely at Eli. Just before he fired, an Evene woman with a huge mane of flowing red hair landed feet first against the head of the K’Tosk. There was an audible crunch. Eli had never seen an Evene up close before. Her golden fur reminded him of tigers he’d seen back at the old Earth zoo back in New York.

“Bow
Man, come with me!” She was out of breath and had bared her claws, which gleamed in the amber glow of a nearby advertising kiosk billboard. The K’Tosk was not out of the fight and had swung his weapon to bear on the Evene. She was fast and dodged his shot, then managed to disarm the mercenary with an agile kick to his hand. Infuriated, the K’Tosk charged her with both arms out in a great bear hug.

Eli had taken control of a security
MEK twenty meters distant and sent it against the K’Tosk. The MEK advanced on the mercenary mechanically declaring, “You are in violation of protocol,” and fired a laser carbine on full automatic, striking the mercenary twice, once in the shoulder and once in the leg. K'Tosk skin was a tough chitonous substance and he was wearing plasteel armor; nevertheless the mercenary felt pain from the high energy impacts and grunted loudly.

"Come on!" The Evene woman shouted, "I have a ship!" Eli made a snap decision to follow her as he saw more security personnel arriving at the scene.
The K’Tosk was busy taking cover from the MEK Eli had hijacked. He ran after her with the sounds and smells of combat receding in the distance. The Evene woman was running much faster than Eli. She noticed and slowed her gait considerably. At hub thirty-eight and dock seventeen, she finally stopped.

"Bow
Man, we must hurry. My ship is right there.” Eli saw through the window a small scout sized ship – its durasteel hull a somber black with the word
Valkyrie
stenciled on the nose in white. Eli hesitated.

“Wait…how do I know you’re not with them and this isn’t some kind of trap? Maybe you’re working with them!” Eli began to back away from her and heard and saw a squad of security personnel
coming towards the docking bay he was standing outside.

“Kizzara Amara Vis Sala does not work for Vortex scum!” She was becoming quite agitated and had opened the airlock bridge tunnel to her vessel. “If you wish to be taken by them, then by all means stay…but if you wish to be re-united with Eris Monroe, then come with me!” She ran into the airlock.

Eli looked at the onrushing guards and followed her. Once inside he saw how truly small the craft was, it only had two seats. Kizzara was seated in the pilots chair forward and Eli snuggled into the second seat behind her. Before he had even strapped in, the ship disengaged from the docking mechanism and maneuvered out swiftly away from Lutenko port. Eli used his ability to erase all security camera recordings of himself and the Evene woman just before he lost contact with the station’s computer links.

“This ship is scout
-sized; don’t you think they might follow us? Attempt to disable our engines? Blow us up?” He asked her with genuine concern.
Those Vortex guys weren’t going to give up so easily
. Kizzara replied, “No, Bow Man…this ship is the Valkyrie…and she is very special indeed!” She laughed as she engaged the stealth field and the ship shimmered and faded from all tracking scopes.

“Do not worry; we are headed to a DSD port not too far distant, only four jumps away.” We will be there in two hours.” He
listened
to the ship calculating jump point trajectories for a moment and then
scanned
the vessel’s computer systems to find everything out about it that he could. He was fascinated to learn that it was equipped with an experimental stealth field device that masked the ship from detection. According to the computer it had been tested numerous times and was undetectable.

“I guess I should thank you,” Eli’s adrenaline levels had finally dropped sufficiently whe
n he wasn’t in a
fight or flight
mode. “If you hadn’t hit that K’Tosk when you did, I think he would have had me.”

“I was just doing my job, Bow Man.” Kizzara had made the final adjustments for engaging the jump drive.

“My name is Eli
Bowman
…not Bow Man,” Eli corrected her.

“
Just so
, my apologies, I am still getting used to human names and customs - My name is Kizzara Amara Vis Sala…you may call me Kizz.” The Evene locked in the final coordinates and engaged the drive. The ship fell into the artificially generated
Lindstrom tunnel
and disappeared from this region of the galaxy.

Her team landed one point five klicks from the target area with hand-held energy detectors attempting to pinpoint the ancient installation that had been spotted roughly in this area.  Arneson stayed with the landing craft; standing by in case they needed to dust off and evac for any reason. Her men and women fanned out and moved with deliberate speed. The planet’s one point five gravity pulled heavily on them and the poisonous atmosphere was thick as pea soup. Eris had engaged the suits vision enhancement gear to compensate. Every soldier on her team had checked their gear, all re-breathers and oxygen generators were working at one hundred percent and all armor was sealed tight and made of heavy durasteel. They would be able to last several days without any extra equipment. Each member of her team normally carried a mass of thirty kilos of equipment, including gauss assault rifles. In the heavier gravity the weight of all the gear came in at forty-five kilos, a substantial burden.

Promise Okoro was at point when her team located the entrance to the Valdren facility.

“
Captain, we’ve found a closed access point,” panted Okoro, “How do you want to proceed?”

His voice was gruff over the co
mm as the men had been picking their way through rough, uneven rocky terrain for the last kilometer and a half. It had been more climbing than walking, and they had encountered nothing besides indigenous plant life and a few insects. The entrance was a massive hexagonal door set at the bottom of a fifty meter vertical cliff. In the reddish-orange mist of the tainted atmosphere it had an eerie quality. Visuals came through Eris’ suit showing the distinctive shape and green metal of the door; it was definitely Valdren technology.

“
Let’s see if we can get it open,” said Eris. “Sergeant Delantus, prep a drone to fly.” Moak would handle all of the surveillance for her team. It was standard procedure to use robotic drones to scout unknown situations and terrain. The robot should give ample warning to her team if something nasty was oncoming. She watched as Sergeant Delantus pulled a small drone from his backpack and released it into the air. It hovered and zipped around as he tested the sensors and flight controls.

"Angelis, crack open that door.
Let’s set up a ten meter defensive perimeter and wait for visuals from the scoutmek." Eris uttered her commands with rapid staccato bursts. Valdren doors had their locking and control mechanisms buried within the material of the door itself. The science teams back on Kanpur had figured out how to open them with a sophisticated algorithm.

Corporal Pascha Angelis took out her electronics toolkit and placed a probe against the surface of the door.
A minute later the door slid open with a hiss revealing a sloping corridor that angled downward. There were no lights and no movement could be discerned. The drone flew through the aperture silently.

“Negative on contacts,” boomed Sergeant Delantus’ voice
and face came through her comm link. “Let’s take a little look-see.” He was guiding the small MEK through his neural implants.

Eris moved to the front of her team and looked down the corridor. “Switch visual mode to Ultravision
Select.” She was clad in black heavy durasteel armor and carried her gauss assault rifle at the ready-fire position with safeties off. “Fire-team - let’s move out and search the area.” She motioned for them to follow her as she descended into the alien base. The floor and walls were pristine and without blemish; there were no signs that this structure was at least twenty-nine thousand years old. The Valdren built their structures to last. In the forty-five years since the first discovery that the ancient race had existed, no scientist had been able to learn exactly what the material was or how it had been constructed. However, almost all of the facilities that had been found throughout the galaxy in the past decades were in ruins – and no-one knew how they had been destroyed.

V
isual enhancement equipment was built into modern combat armor, and military grade specs were superb. Each soldier could see perfectly well in the darkness of the interior and receive precise feedback on direction, distance to targets and even the composition of materials being looked at. The information was being beamed to the landing craft in which Corporal Arneson had a view as well.

"
Jackpot; that definitely looks like Valdren metal," offered Captain Malcolm Shaw over the link. The Majestic was a viewing participant from five hundred kilometers in orbit above them. The ship only lost contact when they orbited to the far side of the planet, making radio reception impossible.

"
Captain, keep this channel clear." Eris was fixated on the path ahead and wanted to keep distractions at a minimum. After fifty meters the tunnel abruptly ended at a pit. Eris peered over the edge. There were blast marks on the sides of the opening, and it looked like some kind of elevator had been in existence but was gone now. Eris had an uneasy feeling. Her targeting sensors confirmed that the residue was
cyclotrimethylene-trinitramine, commonly called RDX. Someone had used plastic explosives on this structure. Her mission was to scout out and find any evidence of a Valdren base. She had accomplished that first goal. Her secondary goal was to make sure it was safe for the science team located up in the Majestic to come explore and investigate. Someone had been here before her team.

“Majestic, we have a
situation. Someone has already been here before us and used explosives to blow open an elevator shaft. How do you want us to proceed?” Eris waited for a reply.

“
Commander Monroe, Reese Langdon here. If you think you can continue you should do so at once. I am sure your team can handle anything that you encounter. After all, that’s why we brought you along in the first place!” Her team was checking their weapons in anticipation of combat. Eris nodded approvingly at their actions.

“Roger that.” Eris faced her team and mounted her gauss assault rifle on her back. “We’re going to continue down into the facility. Everyone stay alert and keep sensors on maximum
detection range.”

“Prepare a harness and a rope. Let’s see what’s at the bottom
,” Eris ordered. Specialists Grant and Zang prepared climbing gear harnesses and a rapeller – a device which had extendable durasteel ‘arms’ that could be locked in placed in a secure location. Zang used the three meter wide corridor to establish the rapeller and locked it firmly in place. Grant tested it with two solid pulls, it did not come loose. It was designed to hold two hundred kilograms of mass on a plasteel rope, which would easily hold the weight of each soldier plus equipment. Eris stepped away from the edge as the men uncoiled the rope that would carry her down the elevator shaft. “Arneson, do you copy?”

“Yes,
Commander, though the signal is weak,” replied Kyle. He was receiving all data streams from the team including audio, visual and telemetry on any materials that were
locked in
by a soldier’s eye. “You go any deeper into that pit you’re going to break up and the link will fail.”

“I can set up a
link-repeater to boost the signal. That should give us another klick or so of comm distance,” offered Mathias Jorstad, her communications specialist.

“Good point. Jorstad, see to it.” A few minutes later
Eris was descending into the depths of the shaft at one meter every two seconds…nice and steady. Her breathing was regular and her heartbeat never wavered from the slow rhythm of forty-five beats per minute. After three minutes, she reached an open platform at one hundred meters. A doorway had been blasted open similar to what was up above. She swung over to the jagged hole and clambered through. Looking down, she could tell that the shaft continued downward for at least another two thousand meters. The Valdren were incredible engineers. They had created this facility by boring tunnels through solid rock, straight down at least two kilometers. Even more incredible, their machines were still working as evidenced by the entrance door they had managed to get open. The lessons the Republic had learned at Dawson Slope had yielded multiple benefits. They would reap substantial rewards from this base as well.

“I’ve
found another corridor. Sergeant Delantus…dispatch the rest of the fire team down here. We’ll continue exploring this facility outward from my position,” breathed Eris. “Be advised, the shaft continues on for at least another two kilometers…I couldn’t get a solid read on the distance.

“
Roger that…we’ve rigged more climbing harnesses. I’m sending them down two at a time. Okoro and Visalis are headed your way now. They should make contact with you in a few minutes.”

Eris turned to survey her surroundings
as she unlimbered her gauss assault rifle. She examined where the elevator door had been blasted, finding twisted remnants of scarred metal scattered about. One large chunk was one meter long and five centimeters wide, blackened and burned. There was no evidence that this was recent however and no sign of whoever did it. Her
sensor suite
indicated the metal had a resting temperature of eighteen degrees centigrade. Valdren metal, even heated, rarely exceeded that threshold, but the metal could be destroyed if exposed to enough blasting force. The explosion could have happened three hours ago or it could have happened years before. The corridor she found herself in stretched to her left and right. The Valdren apparently were obsessed with hexagons which were reflected in their structures. Few of the surviving facilities that humanity and other star-faring species had discovered contained working artifacts, making this one on Domovik incalculably valuable. It was clearly a very large structure. What it was used for, Eris had no idea – that’s why the science team was waiting up on the Majestic.
It didn’t matter; she had to make sure this whole base was cleared before she could endanger any of the civilian scientists.

Promise Okoro and Enjeru Visalis arrived and unhooked themselves from their climbing gear. They
immediately took up positions, one facing north; the other south as they waited for the rest of the team to arrive. Eris was talking to her suit combat computer which had identified another portal ten meters distant to the north. After twenty meters, the corridor bent at a sixty degree angle to the left, obscuring her vision as to what lay beyond.

After ten minutes the rest of her fire team arrived. Eris stood in the middle of the group, imposing in her black armor. She rested her
gauss assault rifle barrel up as she addressed her soldiers.

“We’re going to
stay together and head north; I want Moak to use an airborne drone which will move south. We check out any entrances or portals we encounter. Whoever blew these doors with explosives may still be here. I want everyone focused. Stay in contact through comm link. Yell out if you see anything unusual. Let’s move!” Eris didn’t need to shout her orders. Her team knew she was calm - they had utter confidence in her leadership abilities. They trusted her.

“
You heard the Commander! Move out!” Moak rumbled over the link. “Anyone see any shit call out fast!"

The combat team encountered six rooms on th
e level, but nothing of value was located, just bare rooms and scattered Valdren furniture. The ancients had built pretty much everything out of the dark green metallic material that Republic scientists couldn’t duplicate. There was nothing functioning or portable seen in any of the rooms, which appeared to be living quarters. The combat team spent at least thirty minutes checking everything out and found nothing of consequence.

“
Commander, if there ever was something here before, it ain’t here now,” declared Moak. “We still have plenty of air in our suits, wanna keep looking?” Delantus was leaning against a wall. Eris could tell he was disappointed. The fire-team was still in combat ready stances, expecting anything.

“
At ease, we’re going to use drones to scope out the lower levels. This base is huge so we’re just going to have to do some more climbing.”Eris said. The soldiers visibly relaxed as Moak sent one of the drones off to scout the main elevator shaft. Eris had the team wired in and observing everything the drone’s sensors picked up.

Moak guided the drone to the next lowest level, located thirty meters below this level. Once again, there were blast holes where explosives had been used. A gaping hole existed and more corridors beckoned. The drone flew on, continuously providing sensor telemetry to the assembled men and women of the
Special Forces team. Eris watched in silence until the drone entered another, much larger hexagonal shaped room at least forty meters to a side. It seemed oddly familiar. There were box-shaped objects strewn all over the room ranging in size from five centimeters up to two meters. It looked like a tornado had picked up a hundred boxes of all shapes and sizes and scattered them all over the floor.

An image
came over the link of Science Director Langdon, though static broke up part of the incoming signal, “Commander, can you hold the drone there and initiate another sweep on the central interior of that room?” He had a worried look on his face.

Eris nodded
at Moak and then answered, “Copy that…Sergeant Delantus is holding it there and panning around to get a better view.” The telemetry was not showing anything unusual. When the camera had panned to the central part of the room, Langdon spoke again, “There! Move the drone over that spot to get a closer look. I recognize this room; it is very similar to the central processing core of the Dawson Slope facility on Kanpur!” His voice rose in pitch; the discovery seemed to have ignited his curiosity.