Randolph Lalonde - Spinward Fringe Broadcast 08 - Renegades (51 page)

Jake had been left
alone for years, lost his daughter, found her again, been under the
thumb of Regent Galactic, seen the horrific destruction on Pandem and
countless other places. He’d been betrayed, hunted, attacked,
watched friends and crewmembers die. The Samson and its crew were
shunned while others were accepted, and finally, the love of his life
had turned away from him with little explanation. Yes, Minh-Chu
understood Jacob’s rage, and he knew, listening to his voice as it
alternated between ice-cold tones and wrathful instruction, that
there was no stopping whatever was going to happen.

Ira repeated what Jake
told him with his eyes squeezed shut, sweat dripped from his chin.
“Surrender this ship with all the access codes for all systems,”
Ira blurted in a rush. “Or in ten seconds I won’t…” He
shuddered. “I won’t have a head.”

Jake whispered
something and Ira tried to look back at him. Captain Valent only
nodded solemnly.

Ira looked to his
fellow crewmembers and started counting with tears rolling down his
cheeks. “Ten, nine, eight…”

“Slower,” Jake said
with mock sympathy. “A little slower for your own sake.”

“S-seven.” He
paused to take a shuddering breath. “Six, five, four, please, Sir!”

“Keep counting,”
Jake barked.

“Three, two,” Ira
tried to struggle at the last moment and everyone flinched as Captain
Valent fired. In a flash of light, the cranium of his captive was
gone, leaving a gory stump. Before anyone could react, Jake strode to
the next nearest crewmember, and grabbed him by the hair. Then he
deactivated his own helmet and regarded the rest of the bridge staff,
who were all cringing in utter terror. Jacob Valent’s expression
was twisted in an expression of unhinged wrath that made the
artificial death’s head of his helmet seem like a comforting
alternative. “This is a lieutenant commander. I will not bother to
learn his name, because he is about to die!” he looked down at the
man in his grip and said, “Count down from ten!”

“Ten,” the
lieutenant commander started.

“Louder!” Jacob
Valent shouted with such violence that his voice rasped.

“Nine,” the man
said, ashen faced and shaking with fear. “Eight.” He would be a
tall man if he were on his feet. “Seven.” Cool blue eyes and a
traditionally handsome face would help him make easy friends. “Six.”
His uniform was in good order, clean and tidy.

“Jake, don’t do
this,” Minh-Chu said.

Captain Valent fixed
him with undiminished fury. “These people are objects, weapons that
the Order owns. It’s up to them to prove me wrong before I run out
of soldiers to break.” He turned to his captive and shook him.
“Keep counting!”

“Five,” the
lieutenant commander said, visibly losing hope. He closed his eyes.
“I don’t have the right codes, or I’d give them to you.”

“Who does?” Jake
asked. “Where is your captain?”

Minh-Chu looked at the
other crewmembers and noticed, for the first time, that the highest
rank was that of commander – there was no captain.

“She is,” the
Lieutenant Commander said, nodding to the woman closest to him.

She had a narrow face,
and wore her dark red hair in a long braid. “Traitor! Activate
reactor overload!” she shouted into the air above. The bridge
lights flashed red and an alarm sounded one whoop.

“Oh, no, we’re all
going to die,” Captain Valent said sardonically through his teeth.

Minh-Chu checked his
scanners and saw no change in the reactor status. Everyone waited
quietly for several seconds before Jake shrugged and said, “Guess
not.”

“We’ve had control
of the reactor room for six minutes,” Commander Stephanie Vega said
over the comm. “There was one Knight and a dozen crew guarding
engineering. We went around and incinerated them from behind.”

Captain Valent let go
of his captive and kicked him onto his side before dragging the
captain to her feet by the root of her braid. “No quick death for
you,” he said, nose to nose with her. “Life doesn’t mean much
to a monster like me, little girl. I’ll keep you alive while I rip
pieces of you off with my bare hands if you don’t give me what I
want. You’re an obstacle, and I don’t go around, I go through.”
He gave her a moment to reply. Her face turned red, and she started
to close her eyes. He shook her by her braid so hard Minh was afraid
it was about to come off and she screamed. “Stay here! Right here,
with me! You wanted command of a ship, and this is what that has
brought you to! I’ll fight my way through every captain and soldier
in the fleet to get to the real war and they won’t even leave a
stain on my memory.” She regarded him with wide eyes, one hand
trying to push him away, the other reaching for the wrist of the arm
that gripped her ponytail. “The question is, will I have to torture
you for a few weeks to get what I want?”

With a woman held up on
her toes and Jake promising a hell not even he could imagine, a
malicious side of Valent was openly on display. This was all the
man’s hate, the nightmare version of him, and Minh believed that
Jake could follow through with his promise.

“I need my console,”
she said. “In the chair.”

“You unlock
everything, you have ten seconds,” Jake said before he shoved her
toward the command seat.

She stumbled and fell,
but scrambled into the tall chair, accessing one of the arms and
pressing her hand against a bio-reader. “I don’t know if this’ll
work while I’m under stress, there are detectors.”

“Try,” was all
Captain Valent had to say, his tone stated the rest.

Red lights stopped
flashing on the bridge, and the screens began displaying the status
of systems across the ship.

“Thank you,” Jake
said as he closed his eyes. “Take all but the captain here into
custody, bind them and stuff them into as few escape pods as you can.
Any crewmembers who don’t surrender in the next thirty seconds
using the ship comm system will be killed.”

Minh-Chu and Moira
watched as the rest of the squad followed orders. The remaining
bridge staff didn’t resist. “Are you in?” Moira asked Jake.

“Yes, she unlocked
everything. Worst captain I’ve ever met. She barely did her job,
spent her time in observation,” Captain Valent replied. “Bind her
and lock her up there, it doubles as a holding area with an emergency
purge door.”

“What? So the
observation room is made to be vented directly into space?” Moira
asked.

Minh-Chu had nothing to
say about how the bridge was taken. He’d seen a side of Jacob
Valent that he didn’t like, so he took the task of binding the
captain upon himself just to get a few moments away.

“That’s the kind of
ship this is. A machine to deliver human tools to war,” Jake
replied. “It doesn’t need much of a captain, just a herd of armed
zealots. I’m checking their officer-level communications logs, one
minute.”

“They’ll get you,
the Order is immortal,” the captain said as Minh-Chu approached her
at the foot of her seat.

Jacob Valent opened his
eyes and fixed his hateful gaze down at her. “The Order and its
followers are worthless, just like this war. You’re nothing but the
flesh I have to cut to excise the cancer of the galaxy, and once
that’s done, the real war starts.”

“You’re crazy!”
the captain said, pushing away from Minh-Chu. “That doesn’t make
sense!”

“The Order exists to
maintain control of large sections of space so they can hide Edxian
colonies that feed on people who don’t make it into the illustrious
military or aren’t privileged enough to be saved. Your leaders
think they can control them, but they’re not here just for revenge.
They’re here to spread, the way insects do. That’s what I’ll be
fighting against once I break or kill every Order of Eden zealot
freak I can find. Now shut up while I reassign command of your ship.”
Jake pulled a grenade from his jacket and tossed it at the captain.
It exploded at her feet, enveloping her in a self-contained blue web
and stunning her into unconsciousness. It caught the tip of
Minh-Chu’s fingers and it took him a moment – and all the
strength enhancement in his vacsuit – to pull free.

A squad member dragged
her off the bridge, chuckling at the muted captain.

“Eve is on her way to
Sogarian on a recruiting drive with two spokespeople. I’m going to
make sure I’m waiting for her,” Jake said. “I’m going to
assassinate her.”

“You just learned
this from the communications logs?” Minh-Chu asked.

“Yes, it’s all wide
open,” Jake replied, wincing at something Minh-Chu couldn’t see.
“There’s a lot of data.”

“We have to take a
breath, get everything here out of the area and back to Tamber,”
Moira said.

“I’m going to take
one of their ships and a few people with me. They won’t suspect one
of their own transports, that’ll give us a chance to get there and
blend in. It’s a poor world. I’ll need a good pilot.”

“We’ve won a mixed
victory here with no losses,” Minh-Chu replied. “Overreaching is
a mistake.”

“You don’t like
anything I did here,” Jake said. “I understand, you’re a good
man, Minh, you always were, but these people are already lost. The
people they trust to command this ship are true believers; they
swallowed the whole Order of Eden line completely, without a doubt.
Maybe there are crewmembers who are worthy of mercy, but the people
on this bridge? They’re wasted life already,” Jake said before
falling to his knees.

Minh-Chu was at his
side in an instant and could see Captain Valent was sweating, all
colour drained from him. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m disconnected
from the ship, my node is dead.” He gnashed his teeth and squeezed
his eyes shut. “Something’s wrong,” he managed before he
lurched onto the deck into a convulsive fit.

Minh-Chu rushed to his
side and ran a high-resolution scan. “He’s crawling with nanobots
matching the ones the Knight had, it’s some kind of attack. My
medical unit doesn’t know what to do, we have to get him back
aboard the Warlord.” He activated the stasis system on Jake’s
suit and watched, with growing dread, as Jake’s body rejected the
cocktail of drugs.

“The Warlord is
charging up its wormhole systems, we have to get this ship moving,”
Moira said.

“You take this ship,
I’ll save him,” Minh-Chu snapped. “I just need one volunteer to
help me get him to an airlock.” Jake’s convulsions were calming,
but the anguished expression on his face told him that there was more
going on.

“You’re staying
here,” Moira told him. “We don’t have time to get him to the
Warlord.”

“Fry it all,” Jake
said through his molar-crushing grimace. “Suit, E-“ he managed
before involuntarily twitching and curling into the foetal position.

Minh-Chu couldn’t
believe what Jake was telling him to do, but he was already opening
the back of Jake’s suit before he had a chance to second-guess his
old friend. He pulled an EMP grenade from the inside pocket of his
jacket and lowered the setting. He bent down to Jake’s ear. “It’s
set just high enough to disrupt a framework’s recovery system.”

Through pain-filled
grunting and twitching, Jake managed to say, “Forty percent.”

“That’ll kill you,”
Minh-Chu said. “Don’t know if I can bring you back from that.”
He glanced at the bio-scans and saw something that made what was
going on with his friend clear. The nanobots that attacked him from
the inside were severing the framework systems from Jacob.
Micro-shocks and chemical compounds generated during the process were
killing biological matter as the process continued.

Minh shoved the grenade
into Jake’s suit and sealed the armour over top, remotely ordering
the helmet to seal as well. The EMP blast went off three seconds
later, contained within his heavy armour. Jake’s body tensed then
relaxed, and then he was still.

Minh-Chu tried to
remotely activate the medical system in Jake’s suit and realized
that it was destroyed as well. “Didn’t think that through,” he
said to himself as he pulled an emergency cutter from his jacket,
made for cutting through the hulls of starfighters and other small
ships. He focused it beneath the comm unit on Jake’s wrist, where
he knew there was a tiny seam in the armour.

“What did you do?”
Moira asked as three soldiers returned to the bridge.

“Burned the framework
systems and the nanobots in him with an EMP grenade. Killed him too,
but if I can get into his suit, my medical unit can get him back.”

“That’s not going
to do it in time,” Moira said.

“You’re right.”
Minh-Chu’s infantry training kicked in as he dropped the welder,
drew his Violator Handgun, and began stripping the weapon’s barrel
and firing mechanism. Like any officer worth his weight, he knew his
weapon inside and out. He didn’t even have to think about the task
of pulling the weapon apart until the igniter was bare. It felt like
he was moving in slow motion, but the complicated mechanisms actually
came apart in four seconds.

He held the igniter up
to the side of Jake’s vacsuit armour and pulled the trigger. The
suit sparked and hissed violently as he drew a line of fire along the
captain’s side and hip. The armour was showing damage after it
burned out, but it wasn’t open, so Minh-Chu repeated the process,
shaking his head. “Sorry Jake.” He knew it would burn him.
“Someone get a biogel pack ready, now please.”

The exothermic
oxidation-reduction reaction changed colour as it finished burning
through the armour, Jake’s vacsuit, and began burning skin.
Minh-Chu didn’t wait for it to go out before pushing his hand into
Jake’s armour and activating his own suit’s revival systems.

With Jake’s armour
open, Minh-Chu could see that there was residual brain activity –
just enough to bring his friend back – but there was no activity
from nanobots or the framework system. The burning compound hissed
out, leaving a blackened line along Jake’s hip, but Minh couldn’t
focus on that. “Tell me you’ve got one life left,” Minh-Chu
said as his medical system reported that it was ready to attempt to
revive Jake. He activated it and carefully placed micro-charges were
sent across the captain’s nervous system, forcing his body to begin
functioning. There was serious damage from the electromagnetic pulse,
but the recovery system found working pathways all the way up Jake’s
spine regardless, and he started breathing with a shuddering gasp.