Earthman Jack vs. The Ghost Planet (27 page)

“Just trust me!” said Jack.  “It’s there!  I swear!”

Ganix exchanged a look with Rodham as Scallywag and Heckubus
approached the group.

“Do you know anything about this exit he’s talking about?” Ganix
asked Scallywag.

The pirate shrugged.  “The lad just woke up and started
saying he knew a way out.”

Ganix sighed.  “You were dreaming, kid,” he said as he knelt
back to his ammunition count.

Jack saw the other soldiers sullenly go back to their
current duties of being miserable, but he wasn’t about to let this go – not when
he knew he was right.

“Your mission,” said Jack.  “Your secret mission was to
protect Anna while she was on my planet looking for an Ancient artifact you
could use to fight the Deathlords.”

“What of it?” asked Ganix.

“Well, she found it,” said Jack.

Ganix looked up at Jack.  His pale eyes were tired, but
patient, as well.  “Did she, now?” he replied.

“It was a spaceship,” explained Jack.  “One built a long
time ago by the Ancients.  But it’s super-advanced.  Like, so advanced even the
Deathlords can’t figure it out.  That’s what we used to escape Earth before it was
destroyed.”

Ganix nodded.  “Okay…” he said.  “What does this have to do
with getting out of here?”

“Here’s the thing,” said Jack.  “Even though the spaceship
was built by the Ancients, it’s attuned to people from Earth, so the only
people who can operate it are Earthmen.  I was the one who had to fly it, and
while I was doing that, I noticed that it developed a kind-of… well, mental
connection with me.”

“You telling me you mind-merged with a kitten spaceship?”
muttered Sergeant Rodham.

“Look, I know it sounds crazy–” said Jack.

“That’s putting it mildly,” muttered Heckubus.

“But I’m telling you, the ship could read my thoughts,” said
Jack.  “It changed itself to make it easier for me to fly it.”

“Get to the point, son,” said Ganix.

“I’m saying, I think that mental link is still active. 
While I was sleeping, I had a dream I was on the bridge of the ship – but it
wasn’t like a normal dream.  It was like I was really there.  I think the ship
was sending me images of what was actually happening on it.”

“And what was happening?” asked Scallywag.

“The Deathlords, they were trying to interface the ship’s
computer with their mothership,” said Jack.  “They wanted to access the ship’s
secrets.  But I don’t think it worked.  I think, instead, the Earthship got
access to the Deathlord’s computer.  And now, it’s telling me exactly what I
need to know to get out of here.”

“Sounds like a kitten-ton of koo-koo to me,” grumbled
Rodham.

“Is it?” piped up Porter.  “I mean, who’d have thought
portgates were real until they were discovered?  Or hyperspace?  Or any of the
other technology we got from the Ancients?  Is it so hard to believe that maybe
they found a way to interface thought and technology together?”

Ganix pondered Porter’s comment for a second before looking
at Jack.  “Let’s say, for the moment, I believe you, Earthman.  What is this
ship telling you?”

“It’s telling me that we’re still on the Deathlord mothership,”
said Jack.  “The Pit, the whole thing, is like the ship’s core.”

“The ship’s core?” laughed Rodham.  “Why the blazes would
they dump us into the core of their ship?”

“Fuel,” said Jack.  “That giant pillar of light out there? 
That’s the ship’s power source.  It runs on the energy of living things.”

An uneasy look passed among the group.

“From what I can tell, the ship is designed to suck all the
life energy out of a planet before it hits the planet’s core, causing it to
explode,” explained Jack.  “In addition, any life-forms that are thrown in here
are meant to add their life force to it eventually, to help it grow.”

“Are ya saying when we die in here, our ‘life energy’ is
added to that pillar?” growled Scallywag, obviously not liking that notion.

“Exactly,” said Jack.  “But this place, it’s designed to
break down our physical forms so it can weaken our life energy enough for it to
be absorbed.  That’s why we’re getting sick.  Everything around us is trying to
break us down on some level, to weaken our will enough to allow our life energy
to be stolen.”

“Ah-ha!” said Heckubus.  “So theory 298 was right after
all!  I knew it!”

“Don’t even pretend ya had an idea of what was goin’ on,”
said Scallywag.

“It was one of my many theories,” rebuked Heckubus.  “I just
didn’t have any empirical evidence to back it up.  But if what the Earthman
says is true, then it all makes perfect sense.  The sickness and zombification
could come from prolonged exposure to radiation from the glowing veins in the
rock, deteriorating organic tissue enough to harvest the electrical forces of
life within you organic simpletons.”

“So the Deathlords run their ships on people,” muttered
Rodham.  “That’s just kitten great.”

“But don’t you see?” said Jack.  “We’re still on the ship! 
The same ship Anna and Shepherd are on.  The same ship my spaceship is on!”

Ganix raised his eyebrow.  “That means if we can escape the
Pit, and get to the Princess…”

“Then I can fly us out of here,” said Jack.

The other soldiers got to their feet, an excitement
beginning to stir within them.

“You sure about this exit, kid?” asked Ganix.

“Positive,” replied Jack.

“And what if he’s wrong?” asked Rodham.  “What if this Earthman’s
just crazy, and he’s making this all up?”

“Then we’re no worse off than we were before,” said
Scallywag.  “We might be dead a tad quicker, but it’s not like we got many
prospects sitting around this bloody cave waiting for the next attack.”

“The pirate’s right,” said Ganix.  “If we’re gonna die, we
die advancing.  Not stuck here like rats in a box.”  Ganix turned to his men. 
“Gather your things.  Bring as much ammo, food, and water as you can find. 
We’ll head out in one hour.”

The men jumped to, getting ready to head out.  For the first
time since Jack had arrived, he got the sense that there was some hope that
they might just live through this huge ordeal after all.

Ganix looked down at Jack.  “I’m putting all our lives in
your hands, Earthman,” he said.  “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

Me, too
, thought Jack.

Shepherd and Green strode down the
long curved hallway cautiously.  The sterile metal of the walls stretched out
for what seemed like an enormous distance, peppered with doors leading to
places they could only guess at.  At that moment, though, Shepherd was more
concerned with what might emerge from those doors rather than what lay behind
them.

After teleporting further into the mothership, it seemed to
Shepherd that they’d done little more than run and hide.  Though their
hologuises gave them some cover, if the two allowed any Deathlord to get too
close, the chances of them being discovered were just too great.  If a Dark
Soldier happened to emerge from a room too close to them, their gooses would be
cooked.

As if that weren’t bad enough, they were also hopelessly and
completely lost.  Without any frame of reference, it seemed as though they may
have been walking in circles a great deal of the time.  Though the mothership appeared
big from the outside, walking around on the inside made it clear just how
massive the vessel truly was.

The corridors the two found themselves in seemed to stretch
on endlessly, with curves and intersections at odd places, and hallways that
would frequently dead-end for no apparent reason.  The duo had gotten turned
around many times, since there were no real visual markings pointing out where
they were headed or what the rooms contained.

Also, more than once the two had seen groups of Deathlord
soldiers coming down the corridor they were in and, in an effort to avoid being
seen, had quickly had to take a turn down a different hallway or to move into a
room not knowing what it held.

Luckily for them, they had been correct in assuming security
on the ship would be light.  It was obvious the Deathlords had never had to
deal with an incursion within their own ship and had not been expecting it.  Even
if they had been prepared, could a ship this massive, Shepherd wondered, even be
staffed with enough Deathlords to sufficiently cover it?

Many of the rooms they entered were empty and seemed to
serve no purpose, not even as storage.  Very rarely did they see any Deathlords
who were on their own.  They always seemed to travel the ship in groups, and
even then, they did not see that many.  Green theorized that they used
teleportation to traverse their massive mothership, and after a few hours of
walking through its long, winding hallways, Shepherd agreed that was probably
the case.

Occasionally, they would run into what Green identified to
be an access panel to the ship’s systems.  Unfortunately, decoding the
Deathlord’s language proved just as complicated as the Professor thought it
would be.

Green had to mess around with the system to try to get to
its base computer code in order to decipher it from the ground up.  After all,
when one boils all computer languages down to their core, they’re just a bunch
of ones and zeroes.

But of course, just as it seemed Green would be getting somewhere,
Shepherd would spot a group of Deathlords approaching, and they would have to
abandon the console and spend time searching for another one, only to have to
start the whole process over again.

Each setback put Shepherd even more on edge.  The longer
they took, the greater the likelihood the Deathlords could discover them, and
the greater the likelihood the Deathlords could harm Anna (if they hadn’t
already).

After a few hours of evading the Deathlords while searching
for a new console to access, the two finally found what seemed to be some sort
of engineering room with a computer console tucked away from any direct
line-of-sight to the entrance.  Here, they would be able to hide if any
Deathlords entered, and they’d be out of sight from any stray soldiers
wandering around in the corridors.  Large pipes and generators hummed
monotonously throughout the room and would disguise any noise they made.  It
was the perfect place to do what they needed.  Since the coast was clear, they
both deactivated their hologuises and got to work.

As Green began tinkering with the panel, Shepherd stood
watch.  He tried to calm himself, but internally he was greatly worried.  He
wondered what was happening to Anna.  He cursed himself for letting her be
taken in the first place.  He did not know why the Deathlords wanted her, but
he did know that their reasons could not be good.  And the longer she was away
from him, the more danger she was in.  He didn’t even want to think about what
might have happened to Jack.

Meanwhile, Green hummed cheerily (a habit of the Professor’s,
which irritated Shepherd to no end) as he worked his way through the console
and the Deathlord’s programming language.  The Professor worked tirelessly for
hours, trying to crack the language while Shepherd was forced to stand aside
and feel useless.

Time to think was not what Shepherd wanted at that moment. 
All he could see in his mind were the many possible ways the Deathlords had for
torturing Anna, and he secretly cursed Green for taking so long to figure out
the Deathlord’s systems even though he knew what the Professor was doing was
incredibly complicated.

Finally, Green smiled and spoke up.

“Ah-ha!” said the Professor cheerily.  “I think I’ve cracked
it!”

“You can read it?” the Paragon asked hopefully.

Green nodded.  “Not fluently, but I’m able to get the gist
of it.  Once I was able to figure out the vowels and numbers, the rest somewhat
fell into place.  I think I know enough to be able to figure out what systems
to access now.”

“Good work, Professor,” said Shepherd, eager to get going.

“I must say, I could probably spend a couple of years
studying this language,” said Green.  “It is incredibly complex.  It rather
reminds me of the syntax used in Greater Halcyonian, only without all the
male-female tenses—”

“As long as you can find what we need,” interrupted
Shepherd.  “That’ll do for now.  What can you access?”

“Well, let’s see, shall we?” smiled the Professor.

Green began to tap a few keys on the console, the screen
before him updating with each keystroke.  Shepherd tried to decipher what was
going on but the language made no sense to him at all.  He only hoped Green
could make something of it.

“Curious,” said Green.

“What is it?” inquired Shepherd.

“Oh, nothing,” said the Professor whimsically.  “It’s just
that the more I learn about these Deathlords, the more questions spring to
mind.”

At that moment, Shepherd didn’t care a lick about the
Deathlords.  All he wanted was to know where Anna was being held and what the
quickest way to get to her was.  “Focus on the Princess and Jack, Professor,”
reminded Shepherd.

“Oh, don’t worry, I am,” said Green.  “There’s just so much
that’s hard to ignore, though.  For instance, don’t you find it odd that a race
of sentient non-organic beings such as the Deathlords maintain full life
support on their ships?”

“What do you mean?” asked Shepherd.

“Heating, oxygen, all of the elements needed to support life
are fully enabled on this vessel, and yet by no accounts do we believe the
Deathlords need any of these things to survive.  It’s as if the ships are meant
to be habitable to living beings, and lots of them.  But why?”

“Those are questions better left for another time,” said
Shepherd.  “Right now, I don’t care about anything other than finding the
Princess.”

“Yes, yes, your single-minded focus is admirable, my
friend,” said Green.  “But considering we have learned more about the
Deathlords in the past few hours than the entire Empire has learned in the past
twelve years, I would say someone should start caring.”

“The information is only valuable if we can share it with
someone off this ship,” said Shepherd.  “And we’re not getting off without the
Princess and Jack.  So table your questions for now and work on finding them.”

“Working, I am,” said Green cheerily.  “You’ll be pleased to
know that I’ve just figured out how to access the ship’s schematics and sensor
logs.”

“Finally,” breathed Shepherd.  “Can you determine where they
might be holding her?  Any detention centers?  Or some sort of brig?”

“Hmmmmm,” said Green as he scanned through the data on the console. 
“This is certainly odd…”

Shepherd didn’t like the sound of that.  “What?” he
demanded.

“The schematics for this ship… they are quite… weird,” the
Professor replied.

“Weird in what way?”

“Well, normally, ship design has to meet certain engineering
parameters,” said Green.  “For instance, if you were building a ship for
atmospheric flight, you’d have to take certain factors into account that
wouldn’t be necessary for a ship that’s strictly meant for space travel.  Not
to mention that most vessels are designed for symmetry and practicality, things
like that.”

“What of it?” asked Shepherd.

“Well, this ship… despite what it looks like from the
outside… is a complete mess.”

“Get to your point, Professor,” Shepherd sighed.

“My point is – it seems this ship is man-made based on the
areas we’ve been in, such as the hangar bay and the corridors, all of which are
made up of metal and electronics.  But according to these schematics, a great
deal of this ship is comprised of rock, and brick, and clay.”

Shepherd raised an eyebrow.  “What?” he asked.

“It’s almost as if the ship were built around some type of terrestrial
structure,” clarified Green.  “And a big one at that.  See this here?”

Green pointed to a large oval portion of the Deathlord
mothership’s schematic readout at the console.

“There seems to be a rather large area at the very center of
the ship constructed from such material.  It’s massive, miles and miles in
diameter in fact.”

“At the risk of sounding like a broken recording,” said
Shepherd, “what does any of this have to do with finding the Princess and
Jack?”

“This impacts our search because the areas of the ship that
are not constructed of advanced materials do not contain sensors,” said Green. 
“If the Princess or Jack is in any of these areas, we may not be able to find
them.”

More great news
, thought Shepherd grumpily.  “Well
then, focus on the areas we can get readings on.  See if we have any hits
there.  If not, then we’ll have to worry about checking out these
brick-and-mortar portions of the ship manually.”

Green tapped a few keys on the console and grimaced.

“Blast it,” he muttered.  “It would appear the Deathlords do
not place much stock in tracking life sign readings.”

“What do you mean?”

“Their ship’s internal sensors are set up to monitor energy
signatures unique to the Deathlords, not life signs unique to living beings,”
said Green.  “We can’t pinpoint the Princess based on her vitals I’m afraid.”

“Can you reprogram it to find what we need?” Shepherd asked.

“If I had a few weeks and a better understanding of the
language, maybe,” replied Green.

Shepherd grunted. 
It can never be easy, can it?
 he
thought.

“The scanners…” said Shepherd.  “They can tell us where the
Deathlords are?”

“Indeed,” smiled Green.  “That’s not a problem.  What are
you thinking, dear Paragon?”

“Show me where all the Deathlords on the ship are right
now,” Shepherd said.

Green tapped a few buttons, and various blips appeared on
the schematic layout of the ship.  Shepherd glanced over the placement of the
dots before settling on one group in particular.

“There,” he said, pointing at a small room with two energy
signature dots in front of it.  “That’s where we’ll find the Princess.”

“What makes you think she’s being held there?” asked Green.

“Two Deathlords standing stationary outside a small room,”
said Shepherd.  “Looks like guard duty to me.”

Green smiled.  “Well, I’ll be.  Simple, yet effective. 
Bravo, dear Paragon.  Shall we be on our way then?”

“No,” said Shepherd.  “I need you to continue monitoring the
Deathlord’s systems.  If I’m wrong, we may not have time to access them again
before they’re alerted to our location.  I need you to be my eyes while I
attempt the rescue.”

Green twiddled his fingers.  “Ah… is it wise to split up?” he
asked.  “I’m afraid I may not be of much use if I’m captured.”

“Wise?  Probably not,” admitted Shepherd.  “But necessary.  Based
on what we’ve seen, this ship is too big and difficult to navigate from the
inside.  I need a guide to get me to where I have to go.  If you can track the
Deathlords, you can make sure I can steer clear of them after I’ve found the
Princess and can lead us to a rendezvous point.  Worst case scenario you can
help me avoid capture if I’m discovered.”

Green nodded.  “Our emergency comm units should go
undetected until the Deathlords think to scan for them.  Even then, it may take
them a while to find the right frequency.  And I do suppose I could use the
time to learn more about the Deathlord’s technology…”

Green trailed off as he was speaking.  Shepherd could tell
something was bothering him.

“But?” asked Shepherd.

“I’m… ah… rather frightened of being on my own,” said Green
sheepishly.  “This place is quite scary, you know.”

Shepherd smiled softly.  “I know, old friend,” he said,
putting his hand reassuringly on Green’s shoulder.  “But I need you to be
brave, for the sake of the Princess.  I would not ask this of you if I did not
think it were necessary.”

“I know your logic is sound,” said Green.  “But shootouts,
space chases, and sneaking around on an enemy ship… I’m a Trundel of science,
not adventure.  I’m afraid all this is quite out of my league.”

“You’ve been doing fine with it so far,” said Shepherd.

“Because I’ve had no other choice,” said Green.

“Heroes are born from necessity, Professor.  Not choice.”