Kella hit the ductwork below her hard. With the platform now positioned vertically, nearly a half mile of struts, ducting, piping, walkways and most of the distance she had just covered in her mad dash to the Praetorian lay below her. She’d only fallen a few feet, but she fell onto the metal pipes awkwardly, unable to brace her fall, and she felt the pain as the pipes dug in at odd angles along her back and shoulder. Groaning, she picked herself back up and resumed climbing, but now she was climbing horizontally rather than vertically. The Praetorian was still only a matter of yards distant. She still had time.
She quickly legged over the ladder well, now on its side, and pushed forward through the ductwork. As she did so, she heard a familiar sound that made her skin crawl. She looked towards the sky, trying to find the tell-tale purple spirals amongst the yellow clouds. Finally, she found a flight of three, and she swore to herself. They weren’t Cavaliers. They were sleeker, beefier. They were the newer Lancers, the big brother of the Cavaliers assigned to the top guns of the Military Mechanized Forces. They’d sent some serious heat her way over this damned plane.
The three Lancers were heading in on a spiraling course, clearing the airspace of any threats as they closed in on the platform. This gave Kella a few precious moments to get to one the landing struts of the Praetorian, a gaping maw of light and safety. From inside the strut-well, she could access the internal hydraulics bay with her passcodes – she still had them from before and Gavin hadn’t changed them. Ignoring the waves of pain from her shoulder, she jumped across the piping, her flat boots sliding dangerously on the piping.
She landed on a small panel that had been a vertical wind break. Now it was horizontal, and ran all the way to the platform. When she reached the edge of the panel, she came up against the bottom of the platform itself, and to her relief, was not far below a maintenance hatch, apparently used to service the wind break. She opened the hatch and looked out. Open space dropped away before her, and to her dismay, the landing strut was out of reach. She was too far towards the middle of the platform. She suddenly had a reckless thought, but it was the only way to get to the plane.
She walked back the length of the panel, and steadied herself. If she missed, it was game over. She had to make it in one shot. One jump. She closed her eyes in panic. Was she crazy? She couldn’t jump that gap. But there was no alternative. Gavin flashed in her mind’s eye, and her resolve again welled up within her. Her eyes snapped open, and she started to run.
“Launch position completed. We’re ready to go Major,” the man at the helm station said.
“Then let us say goodbye to this awful place,” Hughes said, strapping himself in. “Launch!”
Kella picked up speed, her boots thumping against the panel, and she reached the hatch, ducking through in a vault position, she jumped. For what seemed an eternity, she floated through the gap of nothingness between the Praetorian’s landing strut and the access panel. And then suddenly time caught up. She’d aimed perfectly, and she landed right inside the well.
She heard the engines spooling up and realized with alarm that the plane was about to launch. If she didn’t get inside the gravity protected interior, she’d be squashed into jelly by the acceleration. Moving faster than she ever thought possible, she whipped her d-com from her pouch and plugged it into the hatch access jack. Using her thumb only, she navigated to the passcode app in less than a second and hit ‘send’. She heard a sudden stillness, everything had gone artificially quiet and knew that the plane had just launched.
In the split-second of negative energy, she whipped open the hatch and threw herself inside. The acceleration caught up with her as she fell into the machine bay, and felt herself fall through the artificial gravity bubble of the Praetorian and then, leaving her stomach behind, fell 90 degree in another direction as the plane of gravity changed to match the Praetorian’s alignment.
Kella fell softly ‘upwards’ into the lower bay of the Praetorian. She lay there, on her back, for a long moment catching both her breath, and her inner equilibrium. She hated passing through gravity bubbles, they always confused the hell out of her inner ear. She fought the nausea creeping up her stomach and got to one knee.
She was on the lowest deck of the Praetorian, aft of her cabin, and just above the crawl space she’d used to get to the AI Core. Thinking back to what had only been hours ago, she got an idea, and made for her cabin. She carefully checked the small hallway, and quietly moved forward, checking every recess for threats. She reached her cabin without running into anyone, but slowed as she saw the door was hanging open. Someone had been in there.
She pushed up against the wall, and crept along, trying to make no noise. She pulled the small hold-out pistol from her vest and armed the cartridge. Making the doorway, she peeked around the edge and found the room empty. She quickly moved into the room and found the hatch. It opened as it did before, and she crawled down into the reddish gloom, closing the hatch behind her.
She cursed having to be in the crawlspace again the entire way through the center of the craft and into the AI Core. She pulled herself from the access hatch into the cold, clammy atmosphere of the AI Core. All of the partitions were open, so she had no trouble heading aft towards the Life Tube. She found herself slowing down as she approached the greenish glow not wanting to see what was beyond. If the Military had known about him, would they have killed him? She passed a remote, lying dark on the floor, where it had apparently fallen while it worked. The scene did not help her rising sense of dread.
Shaking her head to somehow disrupt the dark thoughts, she pushed forward. The greenish glow got stronger until the room was bathed in it, and she found herself once more staring at the floating body of Gavin Cross. It looked exactly as it had before. A monitor embedded in the life tube’s glass showed a green status, but a message flashing at the bottom repeated the word ‘Hibernation’.
Kella walked up to the tube and tapped on the glass. She felt rather stupid, but she pounded on the glass again. “Gavin!” she called out. Nothing stirred. She turned her attention to the monitor and hooked her d-com into the access port. She quickly gained access and began to explore the VI interface. It was complex, the system Gavin was tied to. It was almost too complex for her to sort out, and she spent precious minutes stumbling around through the interface.
Eventually she found a program mode that looked promising, and hoping it would work as she hoped, she punched up ‘autistic mode’. Nothing happened at first. But after a moment, Gavin’s body jerked in the tube. It twitched, and then almost violently seized. Fearing she’d killed him, Kella dropped the d-com in horror and pounded on the glass, calling out his name. Eventually, the body stopped moving.
Kella sank to her knees before the tube, her fists still resting on the glass, her forehead against her forearm in anguish and defeat. In her grief, she missed the monitor above her switch states.
“Kella…?” a voice came from the monitor.
Kella’s head snapped up and she looked up at the body. It still floated as before. She looked over to the monitor and saw that the status had changed from ‘hibernation’ to ‘autistic’. She stood up and walked to the monitor.
“Gavin?”
“Yeah, I’m here,” he said, slowly, as if suffering from a hangover.
“Oh thank god,” she exclaimed in relief quickly scrubbing at her eyes. “Are you ok?”
“I have no fekkin’ idea,” Gavin groaned. “Everything feels numb. What happened?”
“The Military. They found us,” she said. “I’m sorry, Gavin, it was me. I was sending out transmissions to,” she stopped, hating herself all the more for what she did now that she was confessing it. She just couldn’t be hated by Gavin. “I was sending out transmissions to the Deep Wolves. My Mercenary band,” she said finally, miserably.
“What? Oh I knew about that,” Gavin said, brushing it away. “I figured it would buy us some time, anyway. The Military wouldn’t have found us from that. No, they must’ve tagged us, or something. Damn it all, I think they used a Control Box.”
“A what?” Kella asked, lost, and completely dumbfounded by the fact that Gavin had known she was talking to Tenner.
“A Control Box. I designed them as a ‘just in case’. You know, in case the AI went mad, or something? A redundant defense mechanism. I never would have believed it would have been used on me. Kella, I’m going to need your help undoing it.”
“Gavin,” she started, “why didn’t you say something?”
“About what?” Gavin asked after a short pause.
“I betrayed you. I betrayed my promise to help you.”
Gavin sighed. “Look, I’ve known you for what, four days? You have you own worries, and I understood that. I would have done the same thing in your shoes. If you want, I can punish you later, but for now, I need you to focus for me. Can you do that?”
“Yes, I think I can,” she said, pushing down her guilt.
“Good. I’m amazed you’re here, and I really am not sure what would have happened otherwise, but to get out of this, I’m going to need you to do a few more things for me. Right now, I’m running in autistic mode, which, for an AI, would mean I’m separated from my environment. I’m in virtual limbo, you could say. To get past this, I’m going to need you to activate my control circuits, which the Control Box has rerouted. You can do this manually, with the physical circuits below this bay.
“To do so, you’ll need to get back down in the crawl space, and get below the Life Tube. Below that, you’ll see the AI housing, and all of the circuit connectors. There are ten switches around the base that you’ll need to cut over. If you hook the monitor to your d-com with a remote relay, I can walk you through the procedure. But you’re going to need to be quick because as soon as you start, the bad guys on the bridge will be notified. You follow me?”
Kella nodded, and picked her d-com up from the floor. She pulled out a small remote relay module and connected that to the access jack. She inserted the vox piece in her ear, and Gavin’s voice came over the channel.
“This will have to do for now,” he said in satisfaction and then let you a small chuckle. “I guess you’re my remote right now, huh? Will the wonders never cease?” Gavin laughed. Kella chuckled with him, and wondered how, in the darkest of moments, the man could still find his sense of humor.
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