Extinction (57 page)

T’Leh put his hands up to silence the
crowd. “In all seriousness, the little prince has an issue that needs to be
surgically corrected as soon as possible.” A slight gasp came from the crowd.
Again his hands went up in the air, and in a more reassuring voice this time,
he said, “Please don't worry. Dr. D’Bath says the issue will be resolved by
this evening and my son will sleep soundly his first night with us. We still
must make haste to start and finish this ceremony as quickly as possible.”

T’Leh motioned to the minister of war, who
then stepped forward with his chosen warrior. As the two stepped towards the
screaming baby, T’Leh and D’Bath held their composure with more grace than
either one felt they had. T’Leh forwent the ceremonial vows that were supposed
to take place and just presented the baby to the warrior. The warrior took the
baby in his lower arms and held him with a gentleness that defied all of his
genetic engineering and lifelong training for killing.

With his two upper hands, he peeled back
the ceremonial blanket and looked into the eyes of his future emperor and
touched one finger, from each hand, to the child's face. The touch sent a shock
of fresh pain into the muscle beneath the newly transplanted flesh; the prince
doubled his previous screaming effort and actually stunned the warrior for a
moment.

Whispering below the level of the podium's
microphone, D’Bath reassured the warrior that he should continue quickly so the
baby could be taken to surgery. The warrior looked to the war minister and was
given a slight, if not contemptuous, nod to continue.

The warrior could feel the baby's DNA
and knew he was of royal blood. But there was something wrong, something
different with this child. The DNA was clearly of the royal line but it felt
nearly identical to the emperor himself. The warrior had presided over the
touching ceremony for the current emperor on the day he was born and so he knew
that something was different than it should be. The warrior removed his fingers
from the baby and saw that the child's face was bruising and swelling where he
had been touched. With uncertainty he looked towards D’Bath.

D’Bath moved forward and immediately
knew that the pressure placed on the prince's skin, slight as it was, had begun
to speed up the degradation of the already dying tissue. Without skipping a
beat, D’Bath said, “What did you touch before you came here?!” He snatched the
baby from the warrior's hands. “He's having an allergic reaction to whatever
you have on your hands. I need to get him to surgery for his bowel and now deal
with this allergic reaction.”

He began to turn and leave when two of the
emperor's personal warriors stepped in front of him and blocked his path. They
both looked to the older warrior presiding over the ceremony. He knew something
was odd about the child but in the end, his job was to verify the DNA of the
baby and that had been done. He spoke to the warriors. “I welcome my new prince
and pledge my undying loyalty to him forever.” The warriors parted and D’Bath
left with the child.

T’Leh spoke for another ten or fifteen
minutes before excusing himself to look after his son. He was actually
surprised by the reactions of the assembled guests. He thought they would be so
self-important that they wouldn't appreciate his leaving to be with his son. He
actually received a spontaneous and nearly completely unison standing ovation. He
waved one last time and left the room.

M'Tawny was standing by the lifeless
form of their new baby. She could instantly tell what her husband was thinking
and rushed to comfort him. “He's just sedated, don't worry. I know he looks
otherwise, but D’Bath assures me he's doing better than can be expected.”

T’Leh began to reach down to touch his
son when his hand was stopped by M'Tawny and D’Bath spoke up from the other
side of the room. “Don't touch him, please. The surgical bed is just finishing
setting up the sterile surgical bubble and I don't want you interrupting the
process. I'm just about ready to start the procedure.”

D’Bath rolled a cart to the surgical bed
and connected the two together. The two apparatuses then began talking to each
other and a graphic on the main screen showed that the surgical field between
the two was now merged into one field. The cart held the little prince's
original skin, suspended in a gravity field. They looked like puzzle pieces to
the most gruesome puzzle ever created.

M'Tawny sat by the surgical bed and
tried to send her son all of the love she could. T’Leh was just about to get a
harsh reprimand from D’Bath when he finally snapped out of it and went to the
prep area and donned a surgical robe, followed by the cleansing process all
members of a surgical team went through before starting an operation. No other
medical personnel could be counted on to keep the secret or help with the
surgery, so D’Bath had given T’Leh a crash course in how to be a surgical
assistant. D’Bath planned to do everything himself but he wanted a second set
of hands prepped and ready to enter the surgical field in case he needed help.
After two months of coaching T’Leh, D’Bath was certain that the emperor could
handle some basic surgical assistant duties if the need arose.

The procedure went as well as could be
expected and the prince survived the operation. D’Bath was cleaning up and
erasing all digital records of the operation from the surgical suite's memory. “I've
given him as much sedation as possible but he is still going to be in a fair
amount of pain as the nerve endings try to repair themselves. The procedure was
very traumatic to him at a cellular level, not to mention the actual physical
aspect of what just took place. Keep him out of the public eye and obviously
never let a warrior touch him.”

D’Bath continued to talk as the proud
parents looked at their son. The voice faded and the scene swirled again,
telling Bloom that they were done with this portion of the history lesson. As
the image swirled, he saw glimpses of the prince as he grew up and the family
relocating to this sector of the galaxy. The images faded completely and Bloom
was nowhere. There was an absence of sound, light, feeling, perception of any
kind.

“There is so much more I would love to
show you. Even through all of the pain my people inflicted on portions of the
galaxy, we still created and discovered many wondrous things.”

“Can you download yourself into my visor
program? Then I could take you with us and you'd have time later to show me,
show everyone, all the good things your history has to offer.”

“Sadly, no. I'm not a computer program
to be downloaded. I am...” A slight pause as though the answer was just now
coming to him. “My name is Fouter.”

“Are you saying that you are the emperor's
favorite bodyguard from a thousand years ago? How is that possible? I could
understand if you were in stasis but obviously you aren't. Are you sure you're
not just a digital avatar or maybe a download of who Fouter used to be?”

“Yes, I'm sure. At least I am now.
Showing you our history has awakened my earlier memories. I have been evolving
emotionally and intellectually for the last thousand years, in a way that my
species was never designed to do. My body is in a torture tube in the main hangar
bay where the rest of your team is. The emperor put me in it when they were
escaping this planet. He gave the tube specific instructions to not torture me
and to keep me alive at all costs. His hope was to return for me one day and
free me if he could ever find a way to overcome my genetic programming to kill
him after his deception to the empire was discovered. The tube followed his
orders and has kept me alive ever since.”

Bloom was still in the ethereal
nothingness, which for some reason made this new information even harder to
comprehend. “I still don't see how that's possible or how that has allowed you
to enter my mind. Also, why don't you want to kill us like all of your friends
we've met so far?”

“As I said, I've evolved emotionally and
I realize how wrong my genetic programming was. I've had a thousand years to
review every piece of historical data the empire gathered. With the physical
changes the torture tube made to my body to keep me alive, I have moved past
what I ever could have been otherwise.

“With the base evacuated and no one to
limit what the torture tube could do, it used its vast programming to come up
with a solution to ensure it could follow the emperor's orders. It interfaced
with all of the computers in the base and used the security robots for manual
labor. Eventually it was able to create a neural network that allowed my mind
to flow through the entire computer system in this base. Don't confuse that
with a neural download. I'm not a program or even data in the system. My brain
is still in my body but I have access to the entire base.”

“That still doesn't explain how you
hijacked my mind, how we're going to help Daria, or why you can't just override
the security protocols. Or maybe you can?”

“Unfortunately I can't. I have become
'friends' with the artificial intelligence that controls the base but he still
won't let me override certain security functions. I would've liked to have
helped your team sooner but I am blocked from controlling certain functions.

“I was able to use our security
protocols to hack into your visor and communications to achieve a direct neural
link with you. That's how we are communicating now. As you were probing deeper
into our system and moving towards the pain you felt, you were getting to a
security point that would overload your brain if I hadn't stepped in. Plus,
without the direct access to your brain, all of the information I passed on to
you would have had to have been done in real time and obviously that isn't an
option. As it is, we've already spent almost thirty seconds in here and have
just about that much time left to save your friend. Once I sever the neural
link, I will stay in contact with you via your communications link.

“When I release your mind, you need to
go to the security door and place flares in these four positions on the wall.”

Bloom's mind was given an image of the
corridor and where the flares needed to go. In the image, he saw hidden control
panels open up and mechanical levers twist in place in a specified order and
direction. The hidden panels were just like the one they found in the hole at
the beginning of the mission.

“Okay, but how does getting through the
doors help Doc? We won't reach the control room in the next thirty seconds.”

“Many of the security measures the
Nortes employed used both a physical and verbal aspect. This particular
security node allows that once you remove the physical barrier, you can give
the verbal code to stand-down the alarm. The idea is that once a warrior
unlocked this door, he would then go to the control room and give the verbal
code. Because Daria is trapped in the control room, you'll need to go back to
your neural link once the door is open and then you will be able to navigate to
the same place I pulled you from before, but this time without the neural
feedback in place. Go, now...”

It was as though the vacuum of the
universe was reversed and every sensation possible came flooding back into
Bloom in an ever increasing wave of—everything.

Bloom first saw his teammates trying to
find a pry point on the doors. Then he heard them throwing out ideas of how to
get through the door. Then he heard Daria trying to calm and console her team,
telling them that it wasn't their fault if they couldn't get through to her.

Bloom sat bolt upright. “Everyone get a
flare now.” Although Bloom loved his team and thought they were the best in the
galaxy, he was still impressed when they experienced moments like this. Bloom
had been unconscious for over a minute and his first words got an immediate
reaction. Without hesitation, flares were passed out and lit. Bloom moved each
person to the proper spots on the wall and when the control panels opened,
revealing the levers, he pointed to each operator in the proper order. “Quarter
turn right. Full turn left. Half-turn right followed by quarter turn left. Two
full turns right.”

The doors began to open and Bloom
immediately laid back down as he entered into the neural link once more. The
path was already there from before and he entered near where he was pulled out
and saved by Fouter. He saw the node he needed and attacked it. As he did, he
could see an image of Daria in the sealed control room, kneeling down and
looking at a photo of her standing between Mike and Davies. Bloom could faintly
hear in the background a countdown from the control room. The countdown was
slowed down to an almost incomprehensible slur: “Eeeeeeeeeleeeeeeeeevvvvvvvvvvvvennnn.”

Bloom entered the node and made it his
bitch. The slurring countdown stopped and Bloom left the node and the neural
link. When he exited back to the real world, he could hear Daria. “Bloom, the
countdown stopped and a control panel is coming out of the wall. Can you get
here to figure this thing out?”

Bloom could barely sit up. “We're on our
way, Doc.”

“Bloom, is that you? Can you read me?”
Wilks' voice came over the comm link.

Bloom could tell by his voice that he
was in the middle of something intense. “Yes, sir. I was able to clear up the
comm problem. To be fair, I had a bit of help from a new friend.”

“I don't care how or what you did, right
now I just need your team to get back here and help us take care of a security
robot that's attacking us and the ship.”

“Wilks, we're almost to the control room
and I think I'll have better luck shutting it down from there as opposed to us
trying to engage it back at the hangar.”

No hesitation from Wilks. “I trust your
judgment. Just hurry it up, please. We're not in immediate danger right now but
the little fucker is getting creative and he might actually be able to do some
damage in a minute. And regardless of what's going on, send Doc back to the
hangar now. The lieutenant was hit; she's in bad shape.”