Extinction (47 page)

“You were right to not send anyone back.
They wouldn’t have stood a chance. Set up a defensive position here and I’ll
head out to the core.” Daria had just finished performing a medical scan on her
head. She pulled the proper medication to help with her concussion out of her
kit and administered it. “I’m assuming no one out there needs medical
assistance, right?”

“No, you were the only injured.” Bloom
was trying to download all of his information into Daria’s visor. “I’m
downloading as much of my data into your visor as I can. If we lose contact,
then it might be able to help you when you get to the core.”

“I’m ready to head out. I’ll give you
five-minute updates. Bloom, can you calculate who will reach their destination
first, me or the droid?” Daria was putting her medical gear back and
repositioning her load.

Bloom tapped in a few variables into his
visor. “It should be you but only by a few minutes. That’s if you’re walking at
a regular patrol pace. And based on your current vital signs and medical
readout, I wouldn’t suggest that you double-time because you might pass out.”

“I’m the medic here. You let me worry
about that. Keep me updated if anything happens.” Daria began jogging down the
corridor towards the core.

About twenty minutes and nearly five
syncopal episodes later, she was there. Communications with Bloom and Snake had
been static-filled at best for the last ten minutes. She hoped that it didn’t
get any worse. “Bloom, I’m here. Now what?”

 “Te.. me wh.t you .ee” Bloom’s voice
was almost completely inaudible.

Daria looked around. “It’s empty. The
room is cylindrical in shape, about ten meters in diameter and thirty in height.
The walls, floor, and ceiling are smooth with some sort of radiant light
source. There are no controls or seams anywhere.”

 “Tr. lig..ing ..are and .oving it ov..
the .all” Bloom’s transmission seemed to be getting worse.

“Try what?” Daria hadn’t gotten the
whole thing. As she went over the broken words in her head, it became clear.
Try
lighting a flare and moving it over the walls.
The security protocols for
the facility might have closed up all of the access panels in the room. The way
to make those panels visible was to apply a heat source to them and make them
come out of hiding.

Out loud she said, “Lighting flare now.
Good idea, Bloom.” She had no way of knowing whether he even heard her praise
or that she understood what he said.

She made it about halfway around the
cylinder when a panel became visible to her. It was odd, though; instead of
being high on the wall, it was down at human level. All of the other controls
so far had been at a height that would be suitable for the aliens they had
encountered.

There was only one button to press; she
did. Nothing happened at first and Daria pondered the ironic anticlimacticness
of it all when the door behind her closed. “Those bastards!” she said out loud.
It seemed to Daria that they had purposely put the button on the opposite wall
so that whoever pushed it wouldn’t have a chance to get back to the door before
it closed.

“Bloom, they locked me in. I’m trapped
and there are no other buttons to push.” This time there wasn’t even static,
just complete, dead silence. That meant that her signal was not even leaving
the room she was trapped in.

A voice filled the room and Daria’s
visor translation program kicked in. It was buffering the translation as the
voice spoke so it took a couple of seconds before it showed up on her visor. As
the words scrolled across her screen, she suddenly heard Bloom’s voice again.
At first, she thought that he had found a way to get his signal through to her.
Then she realized that he had integrated his voice with the translation program.

The voice in the room continued, “You
have entered a restricted area. If you cannot supply the proper security
clearance codes, you will cease to be. State your name, rank, and access code.”

“Oh shit”, was Daria’s response. She
didn’t realize that she had said it out loud until Bloom’s program repeated it
in the alien language.

The voice in the room seemed to ponder
her comment before replying, “Those facilities will not be available to you
until you give the proper clearance codes. You have two minutes to comply.”

~

Jockey had finished going over
everything in the ship and was comfortable with the flight controls. There
wasn’t anything left to do but wait for Daria and her team to get the launch
bay doors open. He decided to go over the controls one more time, even though
he had promised himself a nap hours ago.

After the pre-flight check, Jockey
turned on the scanners to practice switching between the different types of
scans he would use during combat. At first, he thought that he must just be
more tired than he realized but then he double-checked the reading. It wasn’t a
mistake. Jockey ran to the forward hatch. “El-tee, Wilks, we have a contact in
the corridor twenty meters and closing. It seems to be a droid of some sort.”

“Jockey, get those weapons warmed up and
ready to go. Everyone else take cover inside the ship.” Emily was already
halfway up the ramp before she finished giving her order.         

Jockey looked to Emily as she came onto
the flight deck. “I’d love nothing more than to try those weapons out but I
can’t. There must be some sort of safety lock on them. I can’t operate them
while we are inside the hangar.”

“Can we at least use the ship for
shielding?” Wilks was now looking over the technical data the ship’s sensors
were sending to the monitors.

“Sure, but I don’t know what kind of
weapons the droid will have, if any at all.” Jockey looked thoughtfully for a
moment at nothing in particular before adding, “However, if we’re inside the
ship for protection, and the ship won’t allow us to arm weapons, then we’ll
just be sitting in here while that droid pounds us from the outside. Once the
shields are down, the droid will be able to damage the ship, maybe even to a
point where it won’t be space worthy anymore. Not to mention the fact that if
it is a security droid, it might have the codes to override our shields without
even firing a shot.”

Emily thought for a split second before
voicing her agreement with Jockey. “Wilks, get a defensive perimeter set up as
far away from the ship as possible. I don’t want to risk it taking any damage.”
Wilks nodded as he walked out of the ship, giving orders as he went. Emily took
a quick glance at the sensor readings for the docking bay. “Jockey, I want you
to stay in the ship, get the shields up, and then get to the top of the hangar
bay. We don’t know the potential weapons capability of the droid but maybe
you’d be high enough to be out of range. If we can’t stop the droid, try to
keep the ship out of range until Daria can get the doors open. This ship is too
important to lose.”

Jockey looked at Emily with hopeless
eyes.

“I know what you’re thinking, Jockey,
but I know that she and her team are still alive. Just because the droid is
here doesn’t mean that they didn’t get past it. Now take care of this ship.” Emily
patted Jockey on the shoulder and left the ship.

~

Daria was slowly going through all of
her options in her head. She didn’t want to miss anything that might save her
life. Daria tried searching through all of the information the database had
gathered until she got locked in the room. “OK, Bloom, don’t let me down.”

~

“What happened to Doc’s signal?” Snake
was looking over Bloom’s shoulder at the terminal he was working on.

“She seems to have entered a secure
room. Our comlink connection has been completely severed.” Bloom was trying to
break through the security code even though he knew it was pointless. Since
they had entered the complex, his program had been unable to crack the code. He
didn’t see why it would be able to break it now.

Snake could see the look of despair in
Bloom’s face. “Do you know what the purpose of the room is? Is she in danger?
Ahhhh!” Snake and Bloom both yelled out and grabbed at their ears as they tried
to stop the feedback that was screaming through their heads. When the sound
stopped, he looked at Bloom. “What the fuck was that?”

Bloom was reviewing the data logs from
the last few seconds and began running a trace program. “I don’t believe this.
When Doc entered the secure room, it initiated a separate security protocol
that’s different from the main one I’ve been trying to hack.”

“Is that good or bad? And why is my head
still ringing?”

Bloom smiled and clapped his hands
together in a gesture of triumph. “The security program detected Daria’s
comlink and is trying to figure out what it is. It’s sending a signal through
her comlink and the entire temporary network we’ve set since we got here.”
Bloom was working his console more furiously than Snake had ever seen.

“If I’m understanding even half of what
you are doing, it looks like you’re hacking the system by following the
security program back to its origin through the comlinks.” Snake began to read
through the information that his visor was displaying.

The background static that had plagued
the comlink system for the entire mission was suddenly gone. Bloom was able to
use the security feed to not only reestablish their comlink connection with
Daria but he was also able to use the security system to connect with any
comlink anywhere in the entire installation.

“Doc, are you there? Doc, this is Bloom,
can you hear me?”

Daria’s response was nothing shy of
completely ecstatic. “Thank God, Bloom! I’m about to be wasted if I can’t come
up with the proper security code for this room.”

~

“Keep laying down fire!” Emily could
barely hear herself as she gave the command.

Wilks was trying to direct fire from his
squad. The droid seemed to be unstoppable. Its shields were much stronger than
the personal shields the aliens had been using. The ammo was running low and
they were running out of cover. The droid’s weapons were pulverizing the
shipping crates and other items the soldiers were using as cover. Wilks didn’t
want to fall back into the control room because they would have nowhere else to
go, but he was quickly running out of options.

The droid was using a combination of
energy and projectile weapons. The droid had a pretty good knack for
ricocheting the rounds off the walls and into the soldiers. Luckily, none of
the rounds or their fragments had hit anything other than the soldiers' body
armor. It was still too close for Wilks’ comfort.

Wilks was taking another look at the
hangar to see whether he had missed anything that might help him out. Just as
he was returning his sights back to the droid, he saw Emily take a projectile
round to the chest. Emily stopped firing, looking down at her chest in
astonishment. Emily’s eyes locked with Wilks’ as a small rivulet of blood came
out of her mouth and flowed down her neck. Emily slumped to the ground.

“The lieutenant is down!” Wilks was
about to leave his cover and go for Emily when he saw Davies’ huge hand reach
out from behind cover and pull Emily to safety just as an energy bolt struck
where her head had been. The second energy bolt struck her in the leg just
below the knee.

“Jockey, is there anything you can do
from up there?” Wilks was about to lose his whole team if he didn’t do
something quickly. He decided that if Jockey didn’t have any new ideas, he
would have to risk losing the ship to save his men.

“I still can’t override the weapons
safety protocol. There is an emergency disengagement for the landing gear in
case they get damaged. I could try to drop one of the skids on the droid. I
really don’t think that I can be very accurate, though. If I miss and hit one
of you guys…” Jockey let the sentence finish itself in Wilks’ head.

“OK, I know what the el-tee said before
but we have to risk the ship. Can you bring her down with the landing ramp
facing away from the droid? That way we can use the ramp for a little bit of
cover while we board. Then you’ll just take her back up to the top and hope
that we can figure something out after that.”

“I can do that. Get everyone prepped to
move. I’ll be coming in hard and fast and I want you guys boarded in less than
thirty seconds from my mark.” Jockey gave Wilks a few seconds to organize the
retreat before he began his descent. “Get ready, guys. Thirty seconds on my
mark. Three, two, one, MARK!” Jockey pushed the throttle as far as he dared in
the confined space of the docking hangar.

~

As if on cue, the security system added,
“You have sixty seconds to enter the proper security code before you cease to
exist.”

“I caught that, Doc. I’m working on it.
I’m in the system; it’s just a matter of seconds now.” Bloom knew he was almost
there—he just had to focus and he would get it.

Bloom was tracing the program back to
its source and digging through the code on the other end. The graphic interface
of the alien computer system made it almost like playing a video game as Bloom
dodged security nodes and chaser programs. Bloom knew that he was getting close
to where he needed to be because he began to receive a feedback through his
comlink that got worse the deeper he probed. He was sure that it wasn’t an
intentional safety measure by the security program, rather a by-product of the
security system tapping into the comlink system.

Bloom dug deeper and fought through the
feedback. Every time the pain lessened, Bloom dug in the direction where he
felt the most pain. Bloom’s vision was so blurred from the pain that he
switched to direct neural input. Bloom didn’t like to use direct neural input
especially during a mission because it drained the user both physically and
mentally worse than if he had run a double marathon. But he had no choice; if
he couldn’t see the interface he couldn’t do his job.