Son of Sedonia

23

Mission

Minutes Earlier

KABBARD, ANDREAS, AND Nicks waded through the crush of Themis employees in the corridor to the Control Room. The alarms along the hall screeched in triplets, stoking fevered panic in the filtered air. Kabbard felt it too, but it underscored the next thing to do. Get to command. Get a sit rep. Organize all these bodies. They were out of shape. Slow. Drummond especially. All used to dealing with a completely pacified population of drones. But a real Class Four alarm? An insurrection? That meant that at least a handful of Rasalla’s hardest and fastest had somehow bucked the conditioning and gotten loose. The match in the gas tank. People were going to die.

Pushing past a few engineers, Kabbard entered the Control Room. Switched on his government Neural override and surveyed the scene. Technicians worked at several surveillance stations, searching through CCTV feeds on hovering Neural screens. Some of the servers had been cannibalized for parts or weren’t functioning at all. Desperate teams struggled in tangles of wire to get them back to limping. On the wall-sized screen at the head of the room, an overall picture emerged. Flashing red dots spread from section to section, radiating outward from the infirmary. The skeletal slum rat with the bloody fists flashed through Kabbard’s memory. He dismissed it.

Drummond hobbled from station to station at the call of his name. A tech would give a report or ask for orders and, before Drummond could answer, another shouted for him. The nervous breakdown was written on his sunken face. Worse, it was spreading.

“Everybody calm the f*ck down!” Kabbard shouted. The force of the command seemed to hit everyone in their chests. Stunned, they listened like guilty children. Kabbard paused, allowed the moment to settle, and pitched his voice clearly.

“Drummond. Sit rep, please.”

“I—uh…We—There’s been an incident in the Infirmary. Details are fuzzy, but a few—er—uh—a few assets have deviated from their programming. We are containing the disturbance now,” said Drummond. Andreas let out a chuckle. Swallowed it when Kabbard shot him a look.

“‘Assets’…‘Deviated from programming’…You’ve got T99s running amok in this corporate park you call a penal colony, and they’re waking up to the fact that they’ve been taken from their homes, shot into space, and turned into slaves. Call it what it is and deal with what it is. Now, I’m seeing movement in sectors Five, Six, and Seven. Are all those areas locked down?”

Drummond stiffened.

“Of—of course they are! Triggered by the Class Four as per standard operating procedu—”

“Sir,” a technician’s voice cracked as he interrupted, “I’ve been trying to tell you, sir, the doors in Sector Five weren’t triggered and won’t respond to direct commands!”

“Sector Five...” Drummond turned and looked at the big screen. Red dots spread into the corridors surrounding the sector. Kabbard bristled.

“There’s a direct path leading from Sector Five to this Control Room. Andreas! Nicks!” barked Kabbard. The two of them stepped forward in silence. They weren’t EXOs and they weren’t military, but scheming killers were more useful than stuffed shirts and new-hires.

“Move to intercept the inmates in the main corridor, and recruit any guard you find along the way, particularly those with stun batons or spurs. I’ll dispatch more to you over the Comms. Go.” The two of them hesitated. Looked at one another.

“I dunno, sir...going off mission?” asked Nicks.

“Yeah...Sato sent us here for the kid, not to go play hero. I’m not trying to get myself killed off the clock,” Andreas said. It took every ounce of Kabbard’s iron discipline to not knife-hand Andreas’ throat. A little extra when the bastard shrugged.

“Sato sent you here to follow my orders. You’ve heard them. Now go.”

They backed slowly toward the door. Technicians around the room nervously gestured to refresh their Neural keyboards. One of them shot up from his seat.

“Mr. Kabbard?! Mr. Drummond?!” the tech blurted, waiting to be called on like a school boy. Both men turned their version of a cold stare on the frail man too young to look this old. The words tumbled out of his trembling lips.

“P-perimeter breach...Main Hangar, Airlock Four,” said the tech.

“What?!” said Drummond. “That’s impossible. The disturbance is contain—”

“Full Screen, NOW!” shouted Kabbard. It seemed to blast the boy back down in his chair and flip him to face his station. A few keystrokes and the live feed appeared on the big screen. Kabbard squinted at it. Beyond the chaos of the scrambling workers, the Hangar looked fine. Except...Where’s the Zeus? The Furies sat parked where they’d left them. But Kabbard’s prize office perk and the cargo therein were missing. Andreas cocked his head.

“Where’s the—”

“Roll back the feed! Five minutes!” Kabbard commanded. The Tech scrubbed the feed backward. Eventually, Airlock Four opened and the Zeus emerged. It taxied in reverse to where Kabbard had left it. The canopy opened.

“No. F*cking. Shit,” said Andreas, almost laughing, as their prisoner crawled backward out of the cockpit and backtracked to the rear compartment.

“Freeze it there,” said Drummond. The low-res image of the Rasalla boy paused him mid-stride on his way around the rear of the craft. Kabbard gritted teeth behind tight lips.

“There is your culprit, Mr. Kabbard. Thank you for offering your services, but you have my leave to pursue your vessel,” a wry grin tugged at Drummond’s corpse-like face. “Rest assured, we have the situation well in hand,” he turned his back. Kabbard dug his fingernails into the meat of his palms.

“Let’s go, boss. His funeral,” said Nicks. Kabbard felt like he could breathe fire.

“It could be all of ours,” Kabbard said, taking one last glimpse of the panicked faces throughout the control room. He turned away. The three of them trotted off to the door as the buzz of activity resumed in the Control Room. Kabbard tried to ignore Drummond’s nauseating voice rising above the din.

“Organize what personnel we have to push the inmates back into Sector Five! Have some engineers accompany them to manually lock down the doors, then perform a gas purge on Five, Six, and Seven.”

“Vent the O2? Some of our own people are stuck in those sectors, we can’t—”

“Just long enough to stun, not enough to kill. Moron.” Hearing Drummond say that, Kabbard hesitated in the doorway. Kept walking.

“Sounds like they got a plan. What’s ours?” asked Andreas. Kabbard wanted to smash the man’s smug, mercenary teeth down his throat. Instead, he pointed the white hot rage at the end of the hall. Beyond.

“Get the Zeus, rip that little piece of Rasalla shit out of it, and burn him alive.”