Spinward Fringe Broadcast 7: Framework (74 page)

Jake was unscathed; his suit was made to
compensate for long falls, hard impacts, and the heat he was
exposed to. His shields were slowly recharging. The car he landed
on started moving up rapidly, and Jake leapt to an emergency
ladder. Another small lift was moving into place between him and
the entry to the third level. He commanded it to move, and found
Hampon in the system. “I’ve been waiting for this for a long time,”
he said through Jake’s communicator. “Those Knights are a result of
what we’ve learned from you, and soon they’ll add the intelligence
and leadership the rest of our framework soldiers are lacking.”

Jake felt Hampon connect to his neural node.
It was as if a crushing hand was closing around his mind. “Looking
to get your nose bitten off again?” he asked. Hampon’s hold
weakened and the pressure disappeared.

Jake reached back the way Hampon’s signal
came and struck a solid data wall with heavy password protection.
He was hiding behind the mobile garrison’s main computer. He could
see it on the fourth level, behind a pair of Order Knights who took
cover behind a powerful one-way energy shield.

“You lose concentration when you get
emotional,” Jake said to distract Hampon as he drew his nanoblade
hilt. He turned it on, the long black blade came into being and
Jake activated the fourth level doors. He cloaked and swung into
the hallway.

“A cloak suit won’t help you, I can see you
wherever you go,” Hampon said.

“I’m betting you didn’t give your Knights
the ability to use computer systems. That’s too much power to give
a pawn,” Jake replied as he ran along one side of the hallway.
“They won’t see me coming.” There was only a small glimmer of hope
that he was right, but he knew it was foolish. Instead of charging
into the middle of the data systems centre, he took a left into an
open compartment. The schematics told him the interior walls were
thin, that there were several rooms adjacent with similar features.
It would give him space to manoeuvre. More importantly, it would
give him a place to frustrate Hampon.

Putting his sense of urgency aside, he
switched his cloaking systems to shied mode and calmly sat down on
the bed. “If I were a complete idiot, I’d charge in there. Instead,
I’m going to wait them out. I can’t approach this situation while
you have the advantage.”

“What?” Hampon replied. “Your people are
dying,” he said, offering a feed of what was going on outside. Five
order Knights led an assault against the marines from the Warlord.
The Warlord crew made their own cover with energy shields and
trenches dug with shaped charge grenades. Half the marines were
dead, their ravaged corpses near the main entrance to the
compound.

Beam weapons fired by three Order Knights
super-heated one of the Warlord’s engine pods as it swooped in to
support the troops, forcing it to retreat. His daughter was amongst
the Order of Eden soldiers, jumping between them at close range,
firing her pistols constantly as she used them as cover.

“How long can they survive?” Hampon asked.
“How long can your daughter keep moving as she has since she landed
on Tamber? The Knights will eventually fire into their own soldiers
to kill her, then they will return her corpse to me so she
regenerates in one of my prison cells. I could learn a lot by
dissecting her.”

He tried to compartmentalize his emotions as
he watched Stephanie and Agameg lead the marines they had left into
a round of return fire that took out dozens of Order soldiers. It
wasn’t enough, there were over a hundred left, and the armour of
the Order Knights repelled most of their fire. Grenades were
thrown, but they got butted back or shot out of the air by circular
attack drones hovering overhead.

Alice was caught in the open for less than a
second, but it was enough for an Order Knight to fire his beam
weapon and sever her left arm. It didn’t stop her. She surged at
the Order of Eden soldiers as her arm regenerated, screaming
savagely as she put soldiers between her and the Knights and killed
her way through their ranks.

Blocking the transmission was the hardest
thing Jake had ever done, but the final image it had to share with
him was Agameg, leaning over to assist a fallen soldier. He didn’t
see the grenade fall right behind him, and in a flash, there was
nothing left but a scorched hole in the ground.

Jake raged, surging to his feet.

“I’ll spare them, halt the attack if you
surrender to me, give me full access to your neural node,” Hampon
offered.

“There’s something you don’t understand,”
Captain Valent said. “You forgot to install a soul when you built
me, and anger found a home where that should have been.” Jake let
his anger steel him, drive him to concentration, and he reached out
to the entire garrison until he could feel all the systems at once.
“Jonas lived with anger after getting back from his first war. He
learned how to temper it on the First Light, and I learned how to
be angry on the Samson. I’m at my best when I’m furious.” He could
feel Hampon in the system, reaching out through the main computer.
Jake clutched the systems surrounding it and reduced Hampon’s reach
as if he were a flaming taper that he only had to grip in his fist
to reduce to an ember. “I’m coming for you.”

He stuck a pair of shape charge grenades to
the ceiling, set the timer for five seconds, took the rest of his
incendiary grenades out of his pocket then ran across the hall,
throwing all five of them at the foot of the shield protecting the
Order Knights. Jake turned all the garrison’s systems on, drawing
power away from the shield protecting the main computer core and
ducked behind a primary bulkhead.

Explosions ripped through the garrison, and
Jake knew the shield for the computer was down. He could sense that
the diminished shield was enough to protect the Order Knights from
the explosion. They were ready for him.

The thin walls between the administration
rooms and crew quarters were misshapen and shredded by the force of
the explosion. Jake ran as quickly as he could, firing between the
Order Knights towards the computer core’s main column.

The enemy soldiers fired rapidly, scoring
several shots on Jake through the gaps in the walls. The last pair
of energy rounds struck Jake in the shoulder and arm, overheating
his armour and burning him to the bone. His framework system shut
the surrounding nerves down while he regenerated, but not fast
enough to keep him from feeling the initial pain and screaming.

He forced himself to leap towards the hole
he’d blasted in the celling in the cabin across the hall, and
barely caught it with his working hand. He hurriedly pulled himself
up and scrambled away from the hole.

The shots he’d fired at the computer core
had hit their mark. Jake could reach Hampon directly. He was no
longer hiding behind the ship computer, or manipulating the
communications systems leading outside. He stood up and marched
down the hall towards him. “I’m coming to grant your death wish,
Hampon,” Jake said, fighting for a grip on the neural node he felt
inside the man’s mind.

An Order Knight stepped into view at the end
of the hallway. Its mind was completely invisible to Jake. He
narrowly dodged a searing bolt of energy, ducking into a side room.
He knew he’d find no lengthy reprieve there. Jake turned up his
suit’s strength augmentation and charged the thin wall between him
and the Knight, ripping through the cheap metal as though it were
tissue paper.

One shot struck Jake in the side. His armour
protected him from most of the burn, but pain shot through his left
side. He collided with the Order Knight and caught him behind the
knee with his foot as he pushed him to the deck. Jake followed him
down, shoving his rifle aside and rapid firing his sidearm at the
neck of the soldier.

The Order Knight punched upwards and caught
Jake full in the faceplate. The single blow dented the protective
metal inward and snapped Jake’s head back so hard that he felt it
in his shoulders. He struggled to get control of the soldier, and
needed all his strength to pin its arms against its chest as
violently sparking rounds from his pistol burned through the
Knight’s armour. The Knight twitched and writhed as the thermite
burned into its neck and chest.

Jake picked up the fallen Knight’s rifle and
shot at it until it was reduced to a white hot smouldering pile. It
took less than twelve seconds. He tried to turn towards the hall
leading to Lister Hampon and discovered he couldn’t move.

“I have you, Jacob. Rage may fuel you,” he
said as he commanded Jake to walk down the hall into the dark
seating area, “but violence distracts you.”

Jake struggled to regain control, fighting
the vice holding his mind. “You won’t imprison me for long,” Jake
said. “I’ll always find a way to escape, and I’ll never stop
hunting you.”

“I know.”

He became aware of his hands moving over the
rifle, changing the settings on the Knight’s weapon to overload and
explode in a contained area.

“That’s why I’m going to destroy you,”
Hampon said. “Some of us need to kill for our freedom. You never
had to. You could have walked away from your fight at any time. You
could have been free, but you turned on your old masters like a
rabid dog instead.”

The rifle’s power systems began to transfer
energy to the pulse emitter, building a charge that would go
critical in less than a minute. He didn’t allow himself to be
baited into the conversation Hampon was trying to start. Jacob
Valent had few regrets, and they were none of Lister Hampon’s
business.

He looked at the man standing in the middle
of a room made for dozens of crewmembers to control and monitor a
small army. He was as tall and angular as Jake remembered, perhaps
a little younger. Hampon had a talent for looking composed, that
hadn’t changed, and it gave Jake an idea. “You’ve always been
alone, haven’t you?”

“What?” Hampon asked, caught off guard by
the off-topic question.

“On the Overlord when I met you, at the head
of the Order, and even before, always alone.”

Jake felt Hampon’s control slip a little and
regained control for long enough to move his arms and twitch in
another direction, but Hampon had him again before he could throw
the rifle and run. He’d have to try something else that didn’t take
as much time.

“You’re so much more intelligent than anyone
could have expected,” Lister said, laughing. “I think that’s
why-“

“Never got married, never had children,
probably goes back all the way to a child on the playground alone,
watching the other kids and imagining what it would be like
to-”

“You have nothing we haven’t given you!”
Hampon burst.

It was just enough of a slip for long enough
for Jake to force his framework body to destroy his neural node.
Jake deactivated the explosion radius limitation on the weapon’s
control panel and tossed the rifle at Hampon.

Jake sprinted for the hole he’d crawled out
of. The Order Knights he left behind were ready for him, firing as
soon as his feet hit the deck. He took a shot in the left shoulder
but ran for the elevator shaft, jumping and catching the ladder
with his right.

A wave of pressure and heat washed over him,
crushing Jake through the side of the elevator shaft.

“I see armour!” shouted a Sunspire soldier
from one of the rubble pits. The explosion that decimated the large
escape ship three days before caused a chain reaction within,
unleashing enough force inside to reduce it to scrap and slag.
There wasn’t a single hallway or compartment intact. Alice and most
of the Warlord crew hadn’t left the site.

Stephanie ran over to the soldier. “Don’t
shout out, use comms, we need to see what we’ve found for sure
before we get a crowd,” she said. “Besides, it could be another one
of those super-soldiers.”

Alice ran towards the pit and was stopped by
Finn and Agameg. “You might not want to see this,” Finn said.
“Remember what our scans found.”

Frost walked over in tall, mechanized
armour, carefully stepping around the debris. “I’ve got a detailed
scan, there’s a girder in the way. I’ll move it so we won’t have to
cut him.”

Alice watched as Frost bent down and pried
at the metal slowly. “I have to see him. He’s going to be alive,
and I know he’ll want to see me.”

Frost pulled at the tip of a twisted girder,
the sounds of metal scraping on metal and bending steel making most
of them cringe. “I’ve got it, pull him free,” he said.

The soldiers pulled at something carefully
and an outcry surged from the onlookers as they backed out
suddenly, with what exactly, Alice couldn’t see. She concentrated
enough to get a scan and panicked as she realized they’d pulled
nothing more than a bit of his spine, shoulder and his upper
cranium free.

“Don’t let her through!” Stephanie
cried.

Alice wouldn’t be stopped, and, regardless
of tear-blurred vision, she managed to push and squeeze her way
past everyone. “You don’t understand!” she screamed as Stephanie
and Ayan caught her. “We’re not human. We don’t even play by the
same rules.”

“She’s seen,” Frost said sullenly. “Let her
in close so she can say goodbye.”

“I’m sorry,” Ayan said through her own
tears. “I know you were hoping.”

Alice pushed her off and fell to her knees
beside her father. “Please, please tell me there’s enough,” she
said as she touched Jacob Valent’s exposed skull through his broken
headgear. She couldn’t feel anything.

“We tried,” Ayan said. “I’m so sorry,
Alice.” She was repeating herself, something a lot of people had
been doing around her for the last several days.

“There’s got to be something left, the top
of his head is here,” Alice said. “We can heal people, especially
each other.” A thought occurred to her, and she retracted her
vacsuit gloves.