Hard Luck Hank: Delovoa & Early Years (15 page)

The next week they both failed to report for
work one day and activated the shuttle remotely. They hid in a storage closet
and listened to the radio.

“Yellow-3 base to transport XF-290. Report in
and state your flight plan.”

Delovoa and Dr. Ahmendt giggled in their shed.

“Yellow-3 base to transport XF-290. Report in
and state your flight plan. You are on an unauthorized trajectory.”

Hee hee.

“They aren’t answering, sir.”

“Destroy it.” They heard the flight officer
say.

While they couldn’t see or hear any explosion
or missile launches, it was clear that the scientists cared for their continued
existence far more than the military did. The Navy had at least some reason to
suspect the scientists were aboard the transport and they only asked twice for
identification before blowing it up.

And the transport wasn’t even capable of
portaling or equipped with an a-drive! It had no way of leaving the solar
system. The Navy couldn’t even be bothered to pilot a ship and go retrieve the
scientists.

That was just plain insulting.

When they tried to escape for real, Delovoa and
Dr. Ahmendt were not going to be able to give the Navy a shot at them or the
Navy would take it.

“We need to wake Specimen JY-O,” Delovoa stated
calmly to the base Commandant.

The man didn’t look up from his tele.

“And why is that?” he asked, sounding only
mildly interested.

“He is like a nuclear reactor. Merely looking
at him we can’t tell all of what is going on,” Delovoa added.

The Commandant regarded Delovoa.

“So you want him to actively use his
mutations?”

“He has to. We’re just looking at a sleeping
Colmarian,” Dr. Ahmendt agreed.

“One with incredibly strange biology, but we
can’t tell what parts control what,” Delovoa said.

“I’ve seen what Jyonal can do, ‘doctors.’ I
have been tasked with maintaining security at this installation and trying to
decipher Specimen JY-O’s mutation. I believe that not only are those two
objectives mutually-exclusive, but you two fruitcakes have about as much chance
of figuring him out as I do flying by farting.”

The Commandant returned to his tele.

The two scientists stood there, their elaborate
plan not nearly as elaborate as they thought. They mumbled something and left
the office.

So basically the base was a prison for Specimen
JY-O and the two scientists.

“How about that Dredel Led you have?”

“Shh!” Delovoa said, looking around. As far as
he knew, Dr. Ahmendt was the only one who knew about it. He didn’t want to get
in any more trouble.

“Well?”

“It’s broken,” Delovoa said.

Now that he had a tele, he could look up
ancient Colmarian words. Delovoa had already tried reactivating ZR3 and failed.
He had been a safe distance away when he tried…anything. Instructing it to walk
forward, raise its arms, run.

Delovoa believed that when he had ordered it to
self-sacrifice back in the desert, the robot had deleted its own instruction
system. It was still tens of billions of credits worth of valuable technology,
but he didn’t know how to get it out.

They were on a remote base on a remote planet.

It was fully militarized.

The only ships with a-drives would need
thousands of men as a crew.

The ships that could portal could be destroyed
by the much larger ships with a-drives before they ever reached a Portal.

The scientists had access to equipment, but not
so much they could build some mega-weapon without anyone noticing.

And the two men weren’t exactly combat trained
or combat unfrightened. They couldn’t dream of physically
overpowering…anything.

What they did have was the most powerful being
in the galaxy sitting a few buildings away. However, Specimen JY-O was in a
permanent induced coma and he was in that condition for everyone’s safety.

But the scientists also had two
highly-developed brains.

“What do you know about brains?” Dr. Ahmendt
asked.

“I have three.”

Delovoa had become aware of his own peculiar
biology some time ago.

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Well, how much do you know about brains?”

“Almost nothing, why?”

“We don’t have management over his sedatives,
but we might be able to wake him up by triggering his own biochemicals. Or have
him neutralize the sedatives.”

“Do you think he’s going to wake up after his
ten or so year nap, see us, and immediately do everything we say? Because we
look like nice guys or something?”

“You got any better ideas triple-brain?”

“I don’t like waking him up. But I like the
brain angle. He’s been continuously morphing his own body and that containment
center even in the lowest depths of anesthesia.”

“So?”

“What if he had nightmares?”

Dr. Ahmendt had dismissed the idea out of hand.

If Delovoa had been worried about controlling a
conscious Specimen JY-O, how would an unconscious, nightmaring version be any
better? Besides, neither of them knew anything about it.

So they elected to wait until they could come
up with a more realistic plan.

That is, until Dr. Ahmendt woke up screaming
one night.

Delovoa came inside shortly after.

“See? I knew I could do it.”

“What did you do to me?” Dr. Ahmendt panted.

“Induced night terrors.”

“With what?”

“This.”

Delovoa hefted a long cylindrical device that
was clearly electrical.

“How long have you been zapping my brain?”

“Few months.”

“Why didn’t you test on yourself or some
cadet?”

“Because I have three brains and Specimen JY-O
doesn’t, and if I got found out by a cadet, he might kill me instead of just
getting crabby like you.”

“Go away. We’ll talk in the morning!”

Dr. Ahmendt woke up screaming an hour later.

“Stop it!”

Getting all the parts without raising alarm had
been difficult. In fact, it had been impossible. So had finding places to hide their
machinations.

Finally, Delovoa decided they would just bluff
it. Delovoa told his partner to let him do all the talking since he was better
at lying.

Delovoa and Dr. Ahmendt stormed into the
Commandant’s office.

“We want a shuttle out of here and safe passage
through the nearest Portal,” Delovoa demanded.

The Commandant was eating at the time. He
slowly wiped his mouth, put his utensils down, and stood up. The Commandant was
not a small man, and Delovoa was pretty certain they were in for an ass-kicking.

Like most of Delovoa’s experiments, he wished
he could be many miles away when he activated his module, but he didn’t have
that luxury.

Immediately the world became black and white!

The formerly-green walls, green floor, green
desk—the Navy liked green—were all some shade of gray. And everything was
streaming trailers. Like bright lights shined into your eyes at night and then
moved around.

Except the trailers were real. You could touch
them. Feel them.

The Commandant stopped. His elite military training
was not prepared for a nightmare landscape.

“I suggest we go outside,” Delovoa offered,
“buildings are more danger than protection right now.”

“What did you do, drug me?” the Commandant
asked.

“Specimen JY-O is under our control,” Delovoa
lied, holding up the module in his hand.

The Commandant took a step toward Delovoa,
obviously with the intention of taking the machine away from the scientist. But
Dr. Ahmendt held up a similar module.

“Stop!” Dr. Ahmendt said.

“We’re on setting two out of ten right now. If
you want to be difficult, we slide this to ten,” Delovoa explained.

The Commandant followed the two scientists
outside.

The exterior was the same. The entire base was
in black and white and streaming ghostly images.

“Why would I let you take Specimen JY-O away
from here?” the Commandant asked.

“Why would we want to take him with us? We just
want to leave. We know how hazardous he is. This is him still sedated! I don’t
want to be around him when he’s conscious.”

“And you’ll just hop in a shuttle and portal
away?” the Commandant asked skeptically.

Delovoa took a deep breath to deliver his
speech.

“We have three devices hidden across the base.
They are triggering the equivalent of nightmares in Specimen JY-O. If our hand
modules are destroyed and the signals interrupted, the devices instantly
increase to maximum power. He is catatonic. So imagine the most powerful being
in the galaxy having the worst nightmares possible and unable to wake up.”

“And when you go through the Portal the signal
will be broken?” the Commandant asked.

“We will turn off the devices remotely before
we portal. So you guys don’t blow us up in space beforehand.”

“Aren’t you worried we’ll chase you?” the
Commandant asked.

“You can’t send a tele fast enough to reach any
areas we will portal to first, and we’ll portal a few more times. The only way
is if you had ships follow us from here. And do you really want to send your
ships all across the galaxy? Are we worth it?”

“Besides,” Dr. Ahmendt added, “we have left a
report on some of the inner workings of Specimen JY-O. It’s not a lot. But it’s
more than you had. And you might be able to use it with your next group of
researchers.”

“Here’s a suggestion: don’t keep them captive,”
Delovoa said.

“My problem is I don’t trust you. I’ve read what
both of you have done. Especially you,” the Commandant said, pointing at
Delovoa.

“Right,” Delovoa answered. “So you know I don’t
give a crap about you or anyone here. This is three.”

And Delovoa twisted the dial.

A million high-speed projectiles flew out in
every direction from Specimen JY-O, lacerating buildings, equipment, and
people!

“This is two!”
Delovoa declared,
ducking and resetting the dial.

The Commandant looked at the carnage wrought by
the volley and not only was he concerned with what the scientists might do, he
was suddenly anxious to make use of Jyonal. If that was only a moment of level
three, what military uses could Jyonal be pushed toward if given the right
incentives? Maybe these criminals had been useful after all.

“Where do you have this information on Specimen
JY-O stored?” the Commandant asked.

“It’s with one of the devices,” Delovoa said.

“Just a shuttle?” the Commandment tried to
confirm.

“And a promise not to follow us,” Dr. Ahmendt
said.

“And you need to load my baggage onto the
shuttle,” Delovoa added.

“Really?” Dr. Ahmendt asked.

“What?” Delovoa replied, “it’s valuable.”

The Commandant pointed at them.

“You have a deal.
If
you guarantee to
turn off the devices before you portal. Otherwise, I will instruct my
significant number of warships out there to follow you, into deep space if
necessary. And you will see what a shuttle does against a cruiser.”

“I promise,” Delovoa said.

“I don’t care about
your
promises. You,”
the Commandant asked Dr. Ahmendt.

“I promise too.”

“Fine. Turn this off so we can get you lunatics
out of here.”

The two scientists were extremely scared the
entire trip to the Portal.

They didn’t have three devices like they said.
Dr. Ahmendt’s module didn’t even work. They simply couldn’t steal enough parts
to make duplicates.

There was no continuous pinging from Delovoa’s
module that would trigger maximum power if destroyed. It didn’t remotely have
that range.

And the one device they had was sitting in
Delovoa’s quarters aimed at Specimen JY-O through the window—though the
curtains were drawn. All they had to do was walk in and kick it over.

But, as Delovoa hoped, it just wasn’t worth the
gamble for the Navy.

They portaled six times in the next four months
and stuffed as much food as they could fit with ZR3 taking up so much room.

“I think we should hide in some populated
city,” Dr. Ahmendt said.

“I think you don’t have three eyes or three
brains. You can hide a lot easier than I can.”