Warpath (5 page)

“What do you think?”

“Triton Flight,”
Ronin addressed, “estimated time on a rescue team?”

“We should have one
out there in nineteen to twenty two minutes,” replied the
communications officer.

“Not fast enough,
there are two life signs on this spaceliner, and they’re about to
go out,” Ronin replied. He took a closer look at the scans and
could see that the only living things on the ship were crowded into a
closet, connected to some kind of emergency support gear. “I’m
going aboard, the landing bay is open and my fighter will fit.”

“Wait for the rescue
team,” replied the communications officer.

“I don’t detect any
signs of a bomb, or anything else that could take me out. I’m going
in with a support kit,” Ronin said.

“I’m going with
you,” Joyboy said. “Triton can send a couple fighters to pilot
us, and I have emergency training.”

“Since when?”

“Finished the course
three weeks ago.”

“Oh,” Ronin
replied, turning his craft so it faced the small landing bay running
alongside the lower half of the ship. “Time to get you some
experience. Follow my lead going in.”

“Aye, aye, Sir,”
Joyboy said.

As Ronin approached the
landing deck he immediately recognized that the racks containing
emergency escape craft were all empty. His Uriel fighter retracted
all but two of his thruster pods, reducing the ship’s profile so it
could fit in one of the narrow slots for landing craft, and Ronin
touched down. There was artificial gravity in the starliner, but he
activated his landing clamps anyway. Nothing about the situation felt
right.

He climbed out of his
fighter, checking his sidearm before he reached behind the seat for
the rescue kit. It was a metal case he could carry using its handle
or easily affix to his back by touching it to his light armour. He
opted to wear the kit and drew his sidearm as he watched Joyboy touch
down with a thud. “Easy, this deck is so thin it may as well be
decorative.”

“Funny, ship looks
really good from the outside,” Joyboy replied. He was out of his
cockpit and geared up in under a minute.

“Sure,” Ronin
replied, “But these starliner companies cut corners wherever they
can. Why do you think we keep getting ghost ships arriving with
depleted oxygen supplies or bad heating systems? They still use
oxygen tanks and crappy scrubbers that only last about thirty trips,
but the emergency deceleration systems are in great shape, because
they couldn’t dock anywhere worth flying to otherwise.”

“Yeah, I get it,
they’re death traps if you don’t maintain them constantly,”
Joyboy replied. “Paula goes on about it whenever a ghost ship
drifts near the system.”

“Ah, right, sorry,”
Ronin said. “Didn’t mean to go on there.” They saw the first
corpse then, perfectly preserved in the vacuum of space in front of
the airlock leading to the ship’s interior. “Okay, we have a
high-powered plasma blast,” he said as the forensic suite in his
command and control unit analysed the body. “This one was killed
using a close range weapon.”

“Nearly cut in half
with one shot,” Joyboy muttered. “Looks like he was trying to
stop whoever was leaving?”

“Yeah, or whoever
launched all those pods,” Ronin said. “All right, we’re here to
rescue two people. We scan and record everything else, we don’t
have time to analyse the scene.”

“Aye, Sir,” Joyboy
replied. “Lead the way.”

Ronin plugged an
emergency power supply line from his backpack in to a jack at the
bottom of the airlock door and triggered it open. He wordlessly led
the way into the passenger area, where he and his wingman were
confronted by a scene Ronin knew Joyboy would revisit in his dreams.
The man was more trustworthy as a pilot and soldier by the day, but
he hadn’t truly seen anything like what was in front of them. Ronin
had seen worse, but not by much.

The desperate
expressions of the horror struck passengers were preserved by the
airless cold. “Someone evacuated the air here,” Joyboy said
sadly. “Was it the computer? Holocaust Virus got in from an old
inactive system somehow?”

“No time to analyse
the scene, remember? Stick to the mission,” Ronin said, sure that
what he was seeing wasn’t the result of a computer virus.

“Ronin, this is Oz.
Triton Fleet Command is watching. Our rescue team leader is staying
abreast of the situation and will be there in twelve minutes.”

“This mission clock
is ticking slower. The rescue team was supposed to be here in two
minutes according to the first estimate your man gave me,” Ronin
said. “That puts response time at over thirty one minutes, Oz.”

“That’s why I’m
giving you the official go-ahead. Rescue if you can, but if you
can’t, keep the situation stable if at all possible.”

“What does that mean,
‘keep the situation stable?’” Joyboy asked.

“It means that if we
can’t make the rescue ourselves, we shouldn’t screw it up by
making the attempt anyway,” Ronin replied. “Welcome to a real
rescue operation.”

As the scant minutes it
took to make it all the way to the front of the main passenger deck,
past over a hundred corpses that were frozen in poses of dismay,
anger and everything in between, it became plain to Ronin that
quieting Joyboy was a mistake. He could see the man’s stress
readings climbing through the Crewcast display in his helmet. “Looks
like it happened quickly,” Ronin said. “But you have to stop
looking every passenger in the eye, Joyboy. Stay aware of the
situation, there’s nothing we can do for these people.”

“Yeah,” Joyboy
replied, “Okay, yeah.”

Ronin was relieved to
finally come upon the closet where the faint life readings were
emanating from. He examined the doors and took a detailed close range
scan. “You seeing this, Triton?” Ronin said. “Two people,
crammed together in a support bag made for one. The air recycler in
there has almost had it.”

“All right,”
Captain McPatrick replied. “We see the scan, that bag is still
sealed, and one of them is conscious, but barely. If you get your
emergency bag around them, it will take over for what’s keeping
them alive right now.”

“Oh my God, that bag
only kept their heads and torsos warm,” Joyboy said. “And one of
them has no legs, looks they were cut off before they were put in
there. Who would do this?”

Ronin didn’t comment,
but got his emergency survival bag ready. It was a black self-forming
bag that could wrap itself around up to four people and seal in
seconds. It would provide heat, air, and medication to the people
inside. It was one of the devices everyone adopted once they were
found aboard the Triton in abundance, especially since they were so
easy to fabricate. “You open the doors, I’ll catch them.”

“What?” Joyboy
said.

“You open the doors,
step out of the way, and I’ll get them in here,” Ronin said as he
pointed to the bag spread out on the deck.

“Aye, aye,” Joyboy
said, all hesitation gone. He stepped in, spread the doors apart, and
then stepped out of the way.

Ronin caught the
intertwined passengers. The survival bag they were stuffed into was
transparent, and he saw things he wished he didn’t before he got
them onto the deck and atop the Earth technology style bag. He
watched as it enveloped them, sealed, inflated and shuffled as it
infiltrated the rudimentary life support bag the passengers were
found in. The readings on Ronin’s helmet indicated that the pair
were immediately put into deep stasis and would survive with serious
medical attention. Their major organs were intact.

He squeezed his eyes
shut and clamped his jaw, trying to shake the sunken feeling and
nausea as he mentally reviewed what he saw before his emergency
medical bag closed around the rescued couple. The woman had red hair,
fair skin, and was being cradled by the male passenger, who had broad
shoulders, was tall, and powerful looking. When the closet first
opened he thought he was seeing Ayan and Jake, the likeness was just
close enough.

“You okay, Ronin?”
Joyboy asked.

“No,” was all he
could say.

Since he’d arrived in
the Rega Gain system, Terry Ozark McPatrick had seen many things.
They ranged from the marvellous to the horrific, but he made sure he
observed everything he could, regardless of how much he might want to
turn away. The injustices visited upon the average Tamber citizen
outside of Haven Shore’s embrace were truly difficult to hear
about. The number of times he wanted to lower the Triton over a city
and wipe out the gangs so normal people could live in peace were
beyond counting but he had to pick his war carefully.

There were Order and
Regent Galactic forces slowly edging towards Rega Gain, testing their
perimeter, and finding that they could come a little closer to the
solar system each day. The Triton was ready, and in one week three
mid-sized ships would be ready to accompany the carrier when Oz
guided it towards Regent Galactic territory with the purpose of
pushing back. That was the war he chose, and everyone in the Rega
Gain solar system – gangster and citizen alike – would benefit if
they managed to hold.

He was a military man,
trained to be a problem solver, and he still enjoyed that kind of
problem. The kind of problem where there were only one or two enemy
flags to watch for, and the objective was to force the people
carrying them to retreat or surrender. That was the kind of problem
he enjoyed, not the kind of complicated situation that awaited him in
the Triton’s Medical Centre under heavy guard.

‘
They
are deeply traumatized, I’m helping to keep them calm,”
remarked
the Triton’s overseer, a being created in the Sol System to serve
as the ship’s heart and advisor. Oz had come to depend on the
telepathic link they shared.
Thank
you, Geist, I’m going to have to take it from here. I want to hear
the interview in their words before you play back any of their
memories for me.
Oz thought in response.

‘
You
don’t want these mental images, I do not want to do that to you,’
Geist replied.

The guards standing in
front of the male victim’s room parted and Oz stepped inside. He
was thankful that the man was covered by the medical support bed,
because the chart behind him marked that half of one arm, the better
part of a leg, and his entire other arm had been removed. Oz assumed
that they had frozen unevenly while he was stuck in the storage
compartment aboard the spaceliner. The fellow was awake though, and
noticed Oz right away.

“You look important,”
he said. “I’m Dom, short for Dominick.”

Oz pulled a rolling
stool to the man’s bedside and smiled. “Hello, Dom, short for
Dominick. I’m Admiral Terry Ozark McPatrick, you can call me Oz.
How are you doing here? They treating you well?”

“Well, just got a new
nose, they fixed my chin and cheeks, and I barely felt a thing.
Things are good. Well, except for a few other missing parts, but they
tell me they’re growing those for me, and I’ll be getting them
for free?” His question revealed uncertainty and doubt.

“You are, but if it
makes you feel better, you do have something you can trade for our
services. I need you to tell me what happened to you and your
partner.”

“The woman that
Wheeler person put me with?” Dom asked. “I only know her name,
Antonia Chandler. We never met before he put us together. Is she
going to be all right? No one will tell me.”

“She’s going to be
fine, but she got the worst of the injuries, even though, from the
looks of how you were found, it seems like you were trying to keep
her warm.”

“When we woke up in
that closet, she said that Wheeler cut off her legs so we would both
fit in that emergency bag together. I still don’t get that though,
that closet had dozens of bags and suits for decompression. The seats
even had decompression safety features built in.”

“Okay, can you start
at the beginning? From when the trouble started to happen.” Oz
would never forget the name, Wheeler. It belonged to a man who did
not care who he betrayed, as long as he did what he wanted and got
what he wanted.

“Okay, I was having a
great flight to the Rega Gain system. I wanted to apply to join
whatever fleet was forming behind the Warlord. I’m a structural
engineer, but I thought I could make my experience work for them, and
the British Alliance wouldn’t have me because I got caught stealing
a shuttle when I was fifteen. I didn’t think the Warlord staff
would care. The guy sitting beside me was coming here to work in the
jungle, he said he already contacted Haven Shore and they had a place
for him, he was a botanical technician named John. Kind of a nervous
guy, but nice, really smart. We’re talking about our families
before the virus, I think everyone does these days unless it’s too
fresh, but my husband has been dead since day one, my dad didn’t
make it through the first week, so I just do it to keep their memory
alive, but anyway,” Dom turned his head to take a sip from a water
tube near his cheek, and Oz helped move it into position. “Thank
you,” he said after a large gulp.

“No problem,” Oz
replied.

“All right, so we’re
talking up a storm, finally,” Dom said. “and this guy walks to
the front of the cabin and starts talking, saying that his name is
Lucius Wheeler, and he won’t be going all the way to Rega Gain with
us. I could feel the ship slowing down, not like gravity, but the
rumble of the retro thrusters. The safety restraints on our seats
turn on, and we’re all stuck there. He says he’s sorry that only
two people would be making it, and then singles me and Antonia out.
Four guys, big, cyborgs from what I could tell, pluck us out of our
seats, and drag us to the forward compartment where there were four
dead attendants. Someone had shot them, as best as I could tell.