Catherine Kimbridge Chronicles 7: Renegades (9 page)

Chapter 10: Mind Games

JD was still bored. Life had briefly gotten interesting for a few minutes when the station’s AI reported a series of unexplained sensor anomalies on one of the lower decks but the team he had sent to investigate found nothing unusual. In point of fact, his crew was so lackadaisical at this point that routine maintenance was often shoddy. This in turn led to periodic malfunctions which often showed up as little glitches. There had been a time when he would have never tolerated such inefficient behavior in his subordinates but those days had died with his once abundant sense of optimism many years ago. For the moment it was all he could do to arrive at his shift while sober and even that was becoming difficult.

He was sitting sideways in his command chair. He was about halfway through re-reading a paper copy of a quaint science fiction book called
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
, when the turbolift doors opened. He casually glanced over his shoulder to see who was coming up to the bridge deck. As far as he knew the entire shift had reported for duty already – which was in itself a minor miracle. Perhaps the excitement of a NEO encroaching Hupenstanii space had spurred some vestigial sense of duty.

Strangely, he saw no one enter the bridge. The lift doors opened and then closed.
Another systems glitch?
He thought to himself.  He was about to signal engineering when an iron-hard grip grabbed his arm before he could reach forward to toggle the intercom. At the same time three figures shimmered into existence. Two where obviously female and one was a much larger man. For JD, his life was about to become a lot less boring.

“Commander, I’d like to avoid any unpleasantries if I can,” a silver goddess said from his right side. As the woman’s cloaking field dissipated he could see the person holding his arm in a vise-like grip was a redheaded Admiral seemingly in her early thirties. Even isolated for a decade in the deepest backwater of the GCP, JD knew who this must be.

“Cat Kimbridge?”

“That would be Admiral Cat Kimbridge sir,” Sergeant Stone in a gruff voice as he held a fully charged Marine-issued pointer on the two other members of his bridge staff.

Cat nodded to Specialist Nobel and the younger woman waved Commander Dickerson out of his seat to stand with his communications and sensor officers with her own pointer.

Cat took the now vacated command chair and quickly brought up a station status display. The holographic display showed an alarming number of potentially compromised systems flagged in yellow. She looked at Commander Dickerson and raised a single eyebrow.

He saw the look she gave him when she looked at the station-wide overview display and he knew what she was thinking.
Hell, he would have thought the same thing six or seven years ago.

“No excuses Admiral,” he said firmly. For the first time in years he felt like he was part of the GCP again. “Ten years is a long time to twiddle your thumbs in the middle of nowhere but that is no excuse to fail to execute one’s duty,” JD added.

“If it makes you feel better Commander, as I’m no longer officially a member of the Coalition I will not be reporting you,” Cat said with a gentle smirk.

It was JD’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “Ma’am?”

Cat ignored him and toggled her internal commlink. “Ben, what’s the good word from the weapons bay?”

The Yorktown’s D’lralu First Officer responded a few tense seconds later. “Ah, Admiral we had a bit of a situation down here but it’s been resolved. It seemed the OIC was taking a nap under one of the launch tubes and we missed him on the first sweep.”

“Is the room secure?” Cat asked.

“Absolutely and I think we got to the lieutenant before he could raise the alarm.”

“Good,” Cat said. “Lock down the weapons system and have the Yorktown supply the encrypted release codes.”

Cat noticed the station’s commander was looking confused. He could only hear Cat’s side of the conversation but it was enough to realize her actions involved more than taking control of the bridge.

“Admiral, what in the name of all that is holy are you doing?”

“Commander…” Cat paused.

“Dickerson Ma’am. My friends call me JD.”

“Alright Commander Dickerson… JD,” Cat said with a faint smile. “We are currently at odds with the current leadership of the GCP. We believe whatever is going on that has caused the GCP to abdicate their responsibilities to the general welfare of the member worlds is somehow tied to the Hupenstanii.”

“The Hupenstanii are a contagion race. They have been isolated for our protection as well as their own.”

Cat shook her head. “I suspect the only disease they are suffering from is one of a political nature.” 

JD stood fractionally taller. “The Hupenstanii are plague carriers. I’ve been here on this station for ten years and I’ve seen it myself.”

“Really,” Cat said. “What have you seen Commander?”

“I…” JD paused to think.
What had he seen?
Videos purporting to be victims of the outbreak on some of the smaller in-system colonies.
He had seen the secretive BioOps team coming and going in their specialized hazmat suits. He had seen cultures of the virulent microbes that infested the Hupenstanii home world.

“You have seen what the power structures behind the Grand Senate have wanted you to see,” Cat said more gently. It could not be easy to hear your life and career have been wasted.

“So there is no disease?”

“Oh there is,” Cat acknowledged. “But if I’m right, it was manufactured and is most certainly curable.”

“Why?” JD Insisted.

“For the most basic of reasons,” Sergeant Stone interjected. “Greed. Pure and simple greed.”

Commander Dickerson turned to face the Marine. As he did so his hand inched ever so slightly towards a yellow button on the communications console he was standing next to. “How can infecting the Hupenstanii be profitable? It makes no sense. The cost of maintaining these outposts as well as the loss of a valued trading partner would greatly outweigh any economic value developing a cure could represent.”

He turned his head back towards Cat while at the same time using the motion to hide the movement of his hand that actuated the switch. It opened a communications channel with the BioOps department. “Surely you must know that Admiral.”

Cat nodded. “You are correct Commander but let me challenge you with this thought. Suppose the Hupenstanii had developed a means of repairing of Hyperfield jump capability to pre-war functionality?”

“You mean unrestricted Hyperfield jumps to anywhere, anytime?”

“Exactly,” Cat agreed.

“That would be outstanding!” JD acknowledged. “That would fundamentally change everything.”

“Exactly,” Cat agreed again.

JD paused. “That would fundamentally change everything… and those corporations who have built their empires on controlling jump point access would find themselves with a dead business model,” He finished slowly.
Good Lord! Could it be true? Could the GCP have isolated the entire Hupenstanii system just because patrons that supported the Grand Senate had the financial means and desire to do it? Was his entire life tied up in one massive lie?

That was as far as his thinking got before all hell broke loose on the Bridge. The doors to the turbolift flew open and six soldiers wearing solid black Mark-10 combat suits rushed onto the Bridge. Their uniforms held a single adornment. A blue-green image of Earth that was surrounded by the words “Biological Operations.”  As they entered the lights were immediately killed and the attackers sprayed the room with thousands of rounds from their mass driver rifles. Unlike the pointers Cat’s team carried, these weapons were designed to kill and not to stun.

Cat’s Heshe enhanced vision automatically switched to infrared when the illumination panels shut down. She saw the first of Commander Dickerson’s bridge crew get cut down by the weapons fire. She dove in front to JD at the last moment to intercept the rounds that were being fired in his direction. Apparently the soldiers were under orders to sanitize the Bridge and blue-on-blue friendly fire was not a concern. Had her people not been wearing their own Mark-10 suits they would have been cut down as fast as the normal Bridge crew was.

As she shielded the station commander with her body, Cat opened fire on the closest of the attackers. Her Pointer was not configured to deal with a Mark-10 suit but she knew from experience that the plasma beam would momentarily blind the occupant of said suit as its optics would darken to protect the wearer.

She used that brief moment to leap the ten feet between herself and her first target. She grabbed the soldier and threw him across the Bridge where he collided with the station’s bulkhead.

While the first man was still flying through the air Cat grabbed a second soldier. Unfortunately, he had had more time to react to Cat’s charge and was ready for her. Cat had expected her enhanced strength to easily overcome the man even with his Mark-10 suit. To her great surprise he seemed to be as strong if not stronger than she was. She attempted to disarm him but he pushed her back and pumped fifty rounds into her chest at point-blank range. Had she been wearing a combat suit like the others it would have been “lights-out.”

Fortunately her suit was a Heshe nanite enhanced shell studded with thousands of microscopic hyperfield emitters that were configured to reverse momentum. The result was the kinetic rounds bounced straight back and quickly jammed the rifle that was firing them.

With a curse the man threw the useless weapon away and charged after Cat. He seemed to be every bit as quick as Cat was. The two wrestled for a few moments when a loud force echoed through the Bridge.

“ENOUGH ADMIRAL OR THE OTHERS DIE HERE AND NOW!”

Cat stopped resisting. Sergeant Stone and Specialist Nobel had been forced to their knees. Four men held rifles to their heads. The fifth man –the one Cat had thrown across the room—was the one who spoke. His voice was oddly familiar. He walked over to Cat and removed his Mark-10 helmet.

Cat gasped. The man was Admiral Bud Faragon. “We left you on the
Yorktown
…”

“I’m sure you did,” the man laughed. “Gentlemen, let us show the Admiral what she’s facing.”

One by one each of the black-clad figures removed their helmets. One by one the exact image of Admiral Bud Faragon was revealed.

***

Fifteen minutes later Cat and the others found themselves in a security cell located on B-Deck. Surprisingly the station’s commanding officer, Commander “JD” Dickerson, occupied an adjacent cell.  Whatever the BioOps team was engaged in, it seemed it was above the Commander’s security clearance.

Two of the black-clad men stood outside the security screen to cell containing the
Yorktown’s
Bridge assault team. If there was any good news –it seemed their captors were unaware of the second team.

Looking at the two men Sergeant Stone turned to his commanding officer. “Clones?” He guessed in a hushed voice that should have only been loud enough for Cat to hear.

One of the men looked at the Sergeant. Obviously he had heard the hushed comment quite clearly. Cat filed that away with her other observations concerning these
men-in-black
.

“No but you are not far off the mark,” the first man answered
matter-of-factly
in a voice that was every bit that of Bud Faragon. “We would be more closely classified as replicants.  I was the first. The others,” he waved at the other black clad man in the room, “were my backups. I was bred and engineered to resemble and replace the man you know as Admiral Faragon. Unfortunately a mistake was made during our first and only attempt to replace him. He was accidently killed rather publically. He paused to smile at his compatriot. “Rather than waste a rather substantial investment our creators decided to employ our unique abilities in other ways.”

Cat listened to the somewhat cryptic reply. She was still looking for a way to salvage their operation. The force screen was not hindrance to her. Her Heshe enhancements could easily manufacture tiny field emitters that would nullify it.  The problem was Sergeant Stone and the Specialist. It was unlikely Cat could flee her confinement and neutralize her adversaries before they could attack and possibly kill her friends.

Since their captors were in a talkative mood she decided to play along. She signaled Ben with a subvocalized message through their subdermal implants… at the same time she prodded the lead replicant with another question.

“Unique abilities? I assume your remarkable speed and strength are genetically enhanced?”

The men smiled in unison. The sight was an eerie one. “Let us just say our creators developed some unique technologies. I think you’ll find we are more than a match for the infamous Catherine Kimbridge… and,” they said as one, “there are six of us.”

Chapter 11: Counter Measures

Commander Ben watched the two men guarding the prisoners. In point of fact, he was now three decks away but one of the unique abilities he shared with Admiral Kimbridge was the capability to share and utilize feeds from her optic nerves. This was made possible by his cybernetic makeup. It was an ability they rarely used but in this instance it provided much needed situational intel.

Because of his hybrid organic/AI brain he was able to partition the view from Cat’s eyes from those of his own. This allowed him to overlay a semi-transparent view of what the Admiral was seeing in one corner of his field of view while continuing to be fully aware of his own environment.

As he advanced covertly to Cat’s position, she continued to update him on her suspicions regarding the replicants. The good news was only two of the six were currently guarding Cat and the others. By all accounts they were tough to handle unless one could get close enough to take advantage of some of the weaker spots on the Mark-10 stark suits they were wearing. Fortunately Ben had a plan for getting very close.

Ben signaled the rest of his team to break off and head back towards the breaching pod. The station’s weapons had been locked down and because of the high degree of integration with the other Stations; the
Yorktown’s
AI had been able to infiltrate and take control of the weapon systems on the other orbitals as well. 

As his the marines headed for the pod, Ben turned towards the turbolift. If his plan worked, he would boldly walk right up to the security cell and release his colleagues. As he entered the turbolift he disabled his cloaking field and instructed the nanites flowing throughout his body to begin the process of transformation. Fortunately he had a full set of bio-scans to work with and his internal AI was well versed in reconfiguring his body to appear human.  

***

Cat watched through the shimmering security screen as a man wearing a BioOps black Mark-10 Stark suit exited the turbolift. His face was an exact duplicate of the two men who were guarding her cell. Cat knew that no unenhanced human should be able to tell this was not one of the six Faragon doppelgangers but the two replicants seemed to have no difficulty determining that the person approaching them was not one of their own. In point of fact, he was a D’ralu cyborg named Ben.

Her two guards reacted almost instantly. Fortunately, their distraction was exactly what Cat needed to put her part of the escape plan into action.

Her skin suddenly transformed into a metallic sheen as billions of nanites flooded to the surface and began to actively disrupt the security shield has she moved through it. For her the effect was not unlike stepping through deep water. It did not stop her but there was a definite drag as she moved through the field. The play of electrical energy off her skin was not a sight for the faint of heart. The mix of energies quickly shredded her combat fatigues but she continued to push through the barrier.

Before both of the replicants could turn to engage Commander Ben, Cat had reached through the barrier and grabbed the arm of the first. As before, Cat was amazed at his physical strength. He was every bit her equal in that regard.

The Faragon replicant closest to Ben managed to fire his weapon. Even with a Stark suit on, the energy beam would have been enough to stun and drop a normal man. Ben’s cybernetic systems, however, were well insulated and he easily shrugged off the discharge. 

This seemed to take his attacker by surprise as he had already begun to turn around to face the Admiral when he noticed his first target had not dropped in place as expected. The delay would ultimately prove to be his undoing. Ben reached him in two quick strides and planted a cybernetically enhanced fist in the man’s jaw. There was a decidedly loud sound as bone shattered. The man fell to his knees with the lower half of his face a mangled mess.

To Ben’s way of thinking that should have been the end of it but the replicant had other ideas. He lashed out with a foot sweep that should not have been possible given the blow to the head he had just endured. Ben toppled to the ground on top of the man and the two began to wrestle in earnest.

Cat’s opponent managed to reach security panel on the wall. He hit a quick series of three buttons and then turned to face Cat. The smile on his face did nothing to remind her of her friend and mentor Admiral Bud Faragon.

Cat heard a gasp and then a muffled scream from the security cell behind her. While still wrestling with the Faragon replicant; she glanced sideways at the cell she had just vacated. The sight was horrifying. An iris on the back wall of the cell had cycled open -- exposing the entire room to the hard vacuum outside. Cat could see bedding and other miscellaneous items floating free in space. Her two friends were among those items.

Sergeant Stone and Specialist Nobel were attempting to raise the emergency vacuum hoods that were built into their combat suits. Unfortunately those hoods were a 50-50 stopgap measure in the best of times – for use only when a soldier could not quickly reach their detachable HUD helmet. Having been caught completely off guard… It did not look like either soldier was going to be able to successfully deploy their hoods before the shock of being spaced rendered them unconscious.

Cat continued to scrap with her opponent. Time was not her friend. Cat knew the medical nanites that were a standard part of every soldier’s deployment load out would protect her people from permanent damage but only if they could get to them soon.

“Ben!” Cat shouted. “It may be time to end this.”

“Agreed Admiral,” he grunted back while trying to keep his opponent from driving a diamond edge blade into his torso. “Any ideas?”

Cat looked at the cell with JD in it. He was standing by the force field gesticulating wildly at the control panel the Faragon replicant had been accessing a just few moments before. He wanted Cat to see something.

Cat made a decision to end the fight. Her unique abilities had always made her an especially deadly foe and as a result she had been reluctant to utilize her abilities to kill but her current adversary had shown no such compunction. Given the need to rescue Sergeant Stone and the Specialist as well as the clear warning the station’s commander was trying to give her, she made the decision to terminate the replicant. It was not a decision she made lightly as ending a life was abhorrent to her.

While grappling with her opponent she worked her hand towards the neck seam on his combat suit. She knew from experience this was one of the weakest points on a Mark-10. When her hand was near her target she ordered the construction nanites in her fingers to rapidly extend in a force blade. When grim determination she pushed the blade through the weak spot and into her opponents cranium.  Her blade met an unexpected amount of resistance. She doubted an unenhanced human would have been able to drive the blade home. The result was what she was expecting however. Her opponent collapsed and was quite dead.

She spun around as Ben finally managed to take his opponent out. In his case he used his enemy’s projectile weapon at close range into the man’s face. The result was not pleasant but death rarely was.

“Is it my imagination or were they a lot harder to stop then they should have been?” Ben asked.

Cat’s only answer was to swipe her still extended finger blade down the side of the wall near the station commander’s cell. As a result of physically cutting the circuits supplying the security force field, the field dropped. JD stepped forward and immediately began to reach for the control panel on the wall.

Cat caught his hand before he could reach the controls. He struggled with her for a moment before protesting loudly.

“Admiral! You don’t understand. If I don’t override the system – everyone on the planet below dies!”

                                          ***

In the early twenty first century humanity perfected a gene-editing technology utilizing a CRISPR/Cas9 splicing suite. One of the first uses for technology, which literally allowed for the direct editing of living DNA, was to develop a gene-drive mechanism that could push a specific genetic change into to over 99% of a host’s sperm cells.   The idea was to create a mutated strain of mosquitos that would preferentially replace a native population. This new strain would include fully fertile males but sterile females. If the target organism was a malaria carrying vector then that vector could be eliminated when 99% of the population carried the modified gene that resulted in female sterility. This gene-drive genocide technology virtually ended malaria in Africa. Sadly the genocide gene jumped species and soon began to wreak havoc on other insect populations. It took humanity years to undo the damage and when it was finally over thousands of species of plants and animals were rendered extinct.

Laws were put in place to control the technology but sadly once the genie was out of the bottle there was little to prevent the unscrupulous from “weaponizing” the knowledge. It was this gene-drive technology that Cat suspected they were now facing.

The renegade GCP starship
Yorktown
had managed to identify and  destroy a series of missiles launched from
High Ground Station One
that were headed towards the surface of the current Hupenstanii home world. The station’s commander had insisted the devices were some type of genocidal weapon meant to wipe out the Hupenstanii people. The missiles appeared to be some type of reconfigured probes designed to carry a payload. Analysis of the probes indicated they contained a mechanism for dispersing an aerosolized form of a synthetic amino acid not found in nature.

Unfortunately, because the Yorktown was engaged in destroying the probes, as well as the concurrent open space rescue of Sergeant Stone and Specialist Nobel, Cat was forced to allow a high-speed shuttle fleeing the station to escape. The shuttle left the station at approximately the same time as the probes were launched.

Normally this would not have been a cause for concern because it was days to the nearest jump point but this particular shuttle apparently enjoyed the same jump technology as the
Yorktown
and was able to form an
ad hoc
jump point once it was well away from the planet’s gravity well. To make matter worse, it seemed the shuttle was carrying the four surviving Faragon replicants.

The existence of these replicants; the gene-drive experiments on the entire Hupenstanii population; the existence of a working ad hoc jump drive; as well as the apparent complicity of the GCP in the entire affair filled Cat with more questions then she cared to ponder. Who were the principle actors in this massive scheme? What were their ultimate goals? What other surprises where awaiting them?

Cat sat at the head of the conference table in the Yorktown’s ready room. Commander Ben First and Captain Kirkland sat on either side of her. Admiral Bud Faragon sat at the far end of the table. Commander JD Dickerson shared the middle of the table with two Hupenstanii – Elder Trifano and a biochemist named Doctor Triska’nar.

These last two had been invited when Cat had contacted the Hupenstanii home world with her suspicions. There were some initial trust issues but the fact that Cat and the
Yorktown
taskforce was currently at odds with the Galactic Coalition actually helped their cause with the Hupenstanii ruling council.

Elder Trifano leaned forward. His mottled feathery coat seemed especially ruffled. He was easily the oldest Hupenstanii Cat had ever seen.

“Analysis of the Aerosol weapon seems to indicate it would have been a harmless agent. An amino acid with a couple of extra thiol groups added.”

Cat nodded to the older man. “That matches our analysis as well. The operative words though are ‘would have been’.”

“Exactly,” the much younger Triska’nar added. “Unfortunately there has been an engineered genetic shift in the majority of our people. In a few more generations the mutation would have been in our entire population. Thanks to this seemingly harmless mutation the introduction of this amino acid into our biome would have had disastrous results.”

“In what way?” Cat asked.

“As in the death of every man woman and child on the planet,” JD answered. “That command code that… that whatever that thing was…” JD looked nervously at Admiral Faragon. “…that command code was taught to every member of our staff. If we were ever to believe we were going to lose control of the orbital, we were to enter that code and it would ensure the destruction of the Hupenstanii race.”

JD looked at the two Hupenstanii in the room with an almost apologetic expression on his face. “We were told that it was an option of last resort only to preserve the larger coalition with the GCP.”

“But how?” Admiral Faragon asked.

Triska’nar sat back as far as her nub tail would let her.  “Our best thinking is that the amino acid activates a dormant gene. Tests show in females of our species the gene regulates a progesterone precursor. Essentially, our females would become sterile.”

“Why in to world would they want to sterilize the Hupenstanii population?” Ken asked.

“Perhaps to control the spread of the Hupenstanii contagion,” Ben suggested.

Triska’nar trilled briefly in negation. “There is no contagion. At least nothing that can’t be easily cured. We have evidence that what my people carry is artificial and easily eradicated.”

“Then why hasn’t it been?” JD asked. “Why have I spent the last ten years maintaining a meaningless blockade?”