Path of Ranger: Volume 1 (56 page)

“Give it up, Ranger! You’re paralyzed!” watching joyfully as the alien thugs put JB down, Skyman slowly walked around.

“Hell, I will!” JB shouted.

With an upcoming rage, a new strength had awakened inside the mutant. His body twisted up in an impulse letting him cut through both of rahtiongs at once. The pressure dropped, along with that unexpected strength. JB went down. He saw as Eugene’s hand was lifting up a grenade launcher, while falling. In the very last moment, the ranger’s left hand covered his face, and the right one turned the power on the vest to its maximum. The inner plates squeezed him so much, he felt as blood pumped into the head.

First it was a click, then an explosion came through. The grenade’s trajectory got bent and it ended up in the wall, over the ranger's head. The concrete wreckage curved around the vest’s force field hitting the agents themselves. The nearest space got filled with a thick dust. It took a several seconds for the soldiers to snap back. By that time, JB managed to squeeze through the freshly made hole.

“Tina, nanobots,” Skymen rattled, trying to get up.

The last surviving rahtiong guard started battering the wall to make the hole bigger so he could go through. Fred had taken the least damage among all of the agents. He checked on the others. Skyman, Eugene, and El were getting up. Yet, Tina lay still. She had lost consciousness. A stream of blood coming from her forehead indicated that she had taken significant damage. The agent took her into his arms and rushed checking her with his personal diseaster.

“Is she alive?” El asked worriedly.

“Yes! I’ll take care of her!” Fred answered. His hands were already charging an injector with the right medicine. “I’ll take care of her! You get that bastard!”

Hearing the last words, the other agents exchanged looks. They all were tired and angry. Skyman nodded to others.

“Let’s go!”

The agents went to the other side of the wall, after the red soldier.

Fighting the pain and growing muscle weakness, JB was walking along the hinged track. As it appeared, the chamber behind that wall was something that looked like a giant cylindrical reactor. It was high and bottomless. A particle current streamed up from the bottom. These small glowing dots were flying towards the top as little fireflies. And the bottom looked like a solid blue glow. The perimeter of the chamber had these circle tracks with lots of prison cells inside the walls. Something was blocking the sound there. A soft hum coming from the bottom.

JB leaned over the railing to take a good look down. His wide sight caught hundreds of those cells. All of them were full. Lots of various creatures: from the local wild animals to the well-known alien species. The prisoners must’ve been held there for experiments, at least JB thought so. The ranger’s presence made some of the inmates agitated. They went howling, screaming, jumping around, hitting the bars and going crazy in that limited space of theirs. But it mostly was visual. The overall hum suppressed the noise.

Suddenly, the mutant felt a vibration. Someone heavy just jumped on the track, one lever upper. JB had managed to go down by a few levels since he got into that hole. Now it looked like his enemies were following him. No time to stop. The poison, injected by the soldier, would take over soon and then the ranger would be completely immobilized. He had to finish the mission, to transfer the data to his ship.

JB checked the communicator. Another surprise was waiting for him there. The screen was shattered by an explosion, as along with the projection lenses. He clutched the power button to get an overall feedback. The indicator blinked, so the device was still on. There was just one way left to use that communicator – voice control. But the hum wouldn’t let make that happen. Bridgers had to find a place quiet enough for his voice to be heard.

There was nothing suitable around at first sight: just walls and walking tracks. His last hope was to get a few levels lower, to gain some time, and try one of the cells.

The right half of his body was gradually numbing up. JB tried to walk to the nearest ladder, but his leg got blocked in cramps. He fell on the floor. The pursuers were closing up on him. Soon they were going to catch up.

If he couldn’t walk anymore, he had to cut his way through. The mutant pulled out his blade, sat up and stabbed it into the floor. The thin metal of the track’s plate was cut like butter. After finishing the hole, JB put the sword in its place. The wounded body of the ranger fell down from the three meters’ height on the lower level. The fall was pretty hard, but there was no pain. Another symptom of the venom’s effect.

When being on a new track, JB began repeating the procedure. He had to go just three more levels down to get to the first cells.

Soon the hero got the right story. He wanted to breathe out with relief, but another trouble came on him. His legs got completely paralyzed. His hands would probably be next. Using his last strength, JB took the injector with his barely moving hand. He moved it to the neck and pushed the needle in as hard as he could. A four times fix of the strength stimulator was released into his blood.

It should help me to hang on a couple minutes…

The muscles went seizing. It lasted for a few seconds. Then a sharp pain struck in his chest. It was his heart. Despite the pain, JB got up on his feet. He turned to the nearest cell. The darkness wouldn’t let see what was inside. In a second the sword cut through another portion of the metal. A huge piece of bar fell down on the ground. Now there was an open entrance.

JB walked inside, straight into the darkness. The hum got significantly lower there. But an irate growling sounded instead. The mutant recognized what kind of creature made that sound in a second. He squeezed the sword handle harder and charged in. In the next few seconds there was a loud animal noise, metal clatter and sounds of flesh punches. After the fight had finished, a dead body of messed up froll flew out of the cell. It landed on the edge of the outside light and the darkness of the room.

“J-16, voice check,” JB spoke to the communicator with a tired voice.

“Voice control activated,” a woman-like robotic voice came back.

“Backup data to the ship.”

“Transfer started.”

The cell deepened into a perfect silence. JB leaned against the wall, letting his body rest. The chemical processes would turn him into a vegetable soon. But he didn’t care much about that anymore.

In a couple minutes, other agents got to that place. The rahtiong guard picked up the dead froll to throw him over the railing, straight into the particle flow. At that point, JB was able only to watch and count seconds before that animal would come for him. He didn’t have enough strength to lift up his hand. So he pushed the reception button for the last time, keeping it on the floor.

“J-8!” he shouted out, for the ship to receive a command. “Go home!”

“The command received. Destination – Atlantis,” the device answered. “You have one unread message. The sender is John Merphy.”

“Who?” JB wondered. “What planet?”

“The place of…”

The conversation between the ranger and his machine was over when the guards stepped on his hand, squashing the communicator and some of the bones. JB tried to move his fingers, but the numbness wouldn’t let him evaluate how bad the damage was. The guard lifted the mutant’s body up to lay him on his shoulder. His eyes were shutting down. JB lost consciousness.

“As I’ve already said, you’ve lost, JB!” Skyman said arrogantly. His words were pronounced crisply as if he would have rehearsed them over and over in his head.

Even if the ranger wanted to reply with something, he couldn’t at that point.

“What? Are you passing out again? No-no-no! Get up!” Eugene shouted fiercely. He took a step forward, pushing his superior aside, the officer stung JB with a fix of adrenaline. “I want you to feel it all. Each moment of your failure, ranger.”

JB slightly moved his right hand, where the thermogrenade was. But his moves were so slow that it seemed even entertaining to the agents.

“You just never let go, do you?” Skyman shook his head hopelessly. “Okay, we’ll do it your way. No more surgeries.”

The visual picture of JB’s sight became clearer. And a pain was in his muscles. Eugene’s eyes were full of rage that moment. Perhaps even more than some wild animals had, which the mutant had met in the far corners of the galaxy. He couldn’t move much, he could just turn his head.

Soon the four agents brought the ranger on the upper level, where a bridge over the current was. They put him on the ledge. He managed to sit up, keeping at least a bit of dignity. The railing let him rest the back against it.

“It’s over, JB. You don’t need to resist anymore,” Josh was talking when squatting in front of his prisoner.

“You have no idea what you are doing, Skyman,” the big guy spoke for the first time in a while. “All this… How many beings are here? Two? Three thousand? All these experiments? Even on frolls…”

“We know about everything, ranger. About your betrayal. You’ve betrayed your own kind. The humanity!” the colonel started to get nervous, but then took a deep breath when remembered that he had won already. “But despite your best tries, you and your betrayal have lost. We are going to win this war! No matter what!”

“You don’t know jack, Skyman… You call me a traitor… Look at yourself. You kill your own friends. You send people to die… Have you ever given a thought why there is an intergalactic war? Or do you just execute the orders, never using your brain? Huh?” The ranger’s facial muscles were barely moving, but yet he had found the strength to express his hallmark smirk. “That’s what I thought. You know nothing, Skyman. Just another brainless marionette in the circus…”

A movement appeared from aside. Fred and Tina, who just had come, were going through JB’s old smartphone. Judging by their devastated looks, without significant progress.

“There’s nothing, Colonel,” Fred said.

“No data? Or it’s just hidden too well?” Skyman went thinking. “If you want to hide something, you do that where everybody can see it and you tell it to everybody. Right, ranger?” This time Josh shined with a broad grin. “Switch it into silent mode.”

“Idiot,” JB wheezed out.

Just as those thin fingers of Tina’s shifted the switch, the device lit up and exploded. JB had a brief moment of hope in his imagination. But when his vision came back to him, he saw that the agents were still there. Somewhere, over their silhouettes, a blue contour of a force field could be seen. It looked like they had geared up with a combat armor when Bridgers was out. Only Tina went down in pain. El was with her. Red splashes of blood indicated that the woman had lost her hand in that explosion, but that was it.

“You! All these tricks of yours!” Skyman got pissed off.

“Hey, ranger!” Eugene lowered down, next to the colonel. “You see? We did this to you! We! We have defeated the ‘undefeatable legendary hero!’ Lying bastard!” he looked at the others. Not Josh, nor El had such a spark in their eyes. “And about your employer, Aghastos Van Deen… We’re going to take care of him and his people!”

It took just one that name to hear for JB to think about Nea. She was the closest one the mayor of Atlantis. He wished that the burst of rage that emerged inside him came out. But it didn’t. All it caused was a more frequent breathing and a desperate look. The grenade he held for all that time fell out of his hand, it went down to the bottom.

The ranger took his last good look at each one of them. Finally, his stare stopped not at Skyman or Eugene, but at El. He saw shame in her eyes. A shame of the betrayal of the man who had saved all their lives once.

There was nothing more to say. Eugene stood up straight. JB thought that the agent was going to finish him. He didn’t. Skyman, along with the others moved back. He gestured to the guard to step up. The ranger shook his head expressing how pathetic he thought they were. As for himself, there was no resistance anymore. Not enough strength. The red skin guard brought JB over the ledge and held him there, waiting for the superior to give an order.

“Who knows? Maybe you are that special?” Eugene took his last say. “Maybe your blood is really the key. And you won’t be dissolved into billions of particles down there… Or, maybe, you’re just a ranger, a loser like every one of your kind…”

“See you in hell!” JB said using his last strength.

Skyman nodded and the guard’s grip loosened up. The mutant went into a free fall towards that white particle current. Deep at the bottom, there was a pure light waiting for him. The whiteout, which they considered to be a portal to another dimension.

No one even looked back. The shadow of their savior was gone, so was he. A hero. A space ranger.

I got few more seconds… Nea, I love you. I need a new plan… I’m still alive…