Ep.#4 - "Freedom's Dawn" (The Frontiers Saga) (28 page)

“Instructed by who?” Marcus asked.

“By your commander.”

Marcus grunted as he reached for one of the other energy rifles. “He ain’t my commander.”

“We must get moving immediately,” the crewmen said. “There are ten of us, so we will split into two teams of five. I will lead one group. Corporal Lewis will lead the other.”

“Who the hell put you in charge?” Marcus challenged.

“Do you have any military training, sir?”

“Well, no, but—”

“All of us do. Besides the two of you are our pilots, are you not? You should not be put at risk. You will follow us. We will protect you.”

“Well, when you put it that way…” Marcus agreed. “What do we call you?”

“I am Corporal Eckert.” The corporal turned to the men. “Everyone ready?” They all nodded their readiness. “Let’s move out.”

The men started filing out through the hatchway, their weapons all held ready. Marcus and Loki were the last two out of the brig.

“Pilot my ass,” Loki sneered. “If you were any kind of a pilot, we wouldn’t be here.”

“Shut up, kid.”

* * *

“Please tell me we’re there,” Deliza said, coughing, when Vladimir stopped in front of her.

Vladimir shined his light on the terminal box on the wall, checking the numbers on the box against the schematic on his data pad. “Yes, I believe this is the place.” He repositioned himself on his knees facing the metal box on the wall and began removing the four thumb screws that held on the cover plate.

Deliza collapsed on the floor of the tunnel, rolling over on her back. She had been crawling for what seemed like forever, despite the fact that it had probably only been about twenty minutes. She didn’t even care that she was lying in soot. After all, she had been breathing it the entire time, due to the fact the she had been following Vladimir as he kicked up the soot in front of her.

Vladimir had noticed her coughing when it had started nearly ten minutes ago. He knew that she had probably inhaled a lot of soot. They both had, but there was nothing he could do about that now. Perhaps, once they regained control of the ship, Doctor Chen could give her something to fix her up.

Vladimir laughed at himself on the inside. He had no doubt that they would regain control of the ship. The thought of failure had never entered his mind. He had always been that way, confident and self-assured. His mother had recognized this trait in him at an early age. When he was only a child, about five years of age, he had expected to go to the park on a Sunday morning, just as he and his father had always done. However, his father had been called into work unexpectedly and could not take him to the park. Undaunted, young Vladimir had announced that he was going to the park anyway, on his own. His mother, who was busy with his younger twin sisters had paid no mind to his proclamation and had continued going about her daily chores. Hours later, his father had been forced to leave work in order to search for his missing son. To his surprise, he had found him exactly where he said he would be; at the park, some five kilometers from their home on the other side of town.

His entire life, he had always set forth on each task with the absolute certainty that he would complete it successfully, and this time was no different, even if he didn’t have a plan of action just yet.

“So, have you figured out what you are going to do?” Deliza asked in between coughs.

“No, not yet. I will connect the data pad to the routing node and use it as an interface terminal. I will have to use the on-screen keyboard, so it will be a slow process. But I should be able to at least slow them down by rerouting command signals coming from the bridge. That might at least buy us some time.”

“Time for what?”

“Time for me to figure out what to do,” Vladimir defended. “Or time for help to arrive.”

“What help?”

“From the surface. Jessica will be trying to check in soon. If we do not answer, she will become suspicious and send help.”

“Are you sure? Maybe she’ll just think the comms are broken. Everything else is.”

Vladimir looked over at her lying on the floor, coughing. “You are not helping,” he told her, removing the cover plate. “She will become suspicious. It is in her nature; you will see.” With the cover plate removed, Vladimir was able to see the routing node with all its little green flashing lights. He pulled out the connector cable from the data pad and plugged it into the interface port on the routing node. Data began flashing across the pad’s screen as it began communicating with the routing node. Finally, after a few moments, the data pad was properly linked to the system. “There, it is connected.” He began shuffling through various screens of data, trying to see what commands were passing through the routing node.

“What do you see? Is there something we can do?”

“Ssh, I’m busy.”

Deliza’s curiosity overcame her discomfort, and she rolled over and moved closer to Vladimir, getting on her knees despite the pain. She wanted to see what he was looking at. “What is that?”

“They are command packets,” he told her. “Each one contains an instruction to be relayed to another place on the network.”

“How do you know what’s in them?”

“You have to open them and look.”

“That’ll take forever,” she objected. “There are millions of them.”

“Yes, but don’t look at individual packets. Look at strings. They have ID tags on them that indicate their point of origin, destination, type and priority. So we can set filters to only show us packets heading from bridge to engineering for example.”

“But that’ll only narrow them down to the tens of thousands.”

“True, but then we can apply more filters, like only show us priority flight commands. Then we can issue reroute instructions, sending them off to where ever we choose, even in an endless loop.”

“Nice,” she said. “It’s like hacking.”

Vladimir looked at her. “You have hacking on your world?”

“If you have computers, you have hackers. Why, don’t you?”

“Of course. How do you think I passed history?” he admitted with a smile.

Chapter Eight

“How many people are we talking about here?” Nathan asked as they hurried along the corridor.

“Several million, at least,” Tug told him as he followed behind.

“Several million?” Nathan said, stopping and turning to look at Tug.

“At least.”

“Well, at least I won’t be up their alone,” Nathan said as he continued down the corridor. “You’re coming with me.”

“Why me?” Tug asked.

“There are Karuzari out there as well. It might help if they knew you were here with me.”

“There are far fewer Karuzari on this world than you might think, Captain.”

“That may be so,” Nathan conceded as they turned and entered the media room, “but if this is going to work, we need to show them all a unified leadership. You, me, and the Prime Minister. We all have to stand together on this, or it doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell.”

“A what?” Tug asked, unfamiliar with the phrase.

Nathan and the others followed the Prime Minister and his entourage across the room and over to the podium. Behind it was a plain background with the same coat of arms that Nathan had seen on the side of the airship that had brought them to the command center.

Bright flood lights snapped on, nearly blinding Nathan for a moment until his eyes adjusted. A few meters away from him, several men stood behind large cameras mounted on stands that moved so smoothly across the floor that they almost appeared to float.

A man stepped up and aligned each of them. Nathan stood to the left of the Prime Minister, who himself stood directly behind the podium. To the Prime Minister’s right stood Tug. The Prime Minister’s translator stood to Nathan’s left.

“Any idea what you’re going to say?” Jessica asked him as she began to back away.

“Not a clue,” Nathan admitted nervously.

“Wing it,” she said with a wink. “That’s what you’re good at, Skipper.”

Nathan feigned a smile at her as one of the men standing behind the cameras began to countdown in Corinairan.

A red light atop one of the 3 cameras lit up, and a moment later the Prime Minister began speaking in Corinairan. He continued for several minutes, during which time the translator whispered the Angla translation to Nathan. Nathan didn’t hear half of what the translator said, as he was too busy trying to figure out what he would say when it was his turn to speak.

Before he knew it, his turn had come. Nathan stepped over to the podium as the Prime Minister nodded to him and stepped back out of the way. He looked into the camera as he cleared his throat. “People of Corinair, I am Nathan Scott, and I’m the captain of the United Earth Ship Aurora.”

Nathan paused a moment as he thought about his words. For years, his father had chastised him for not thinking before speaking. He could recall at least a dozen times when failing to do just that had gotten him into trouble. However, as often as it had gotten him into trouble, it had also gotten him out of it. It was a dichotomy of sorts that he never fully understood, at least not until this very moment. For now, Nathan realized that what had always worked so well for him in the past had been nothing less than the truth. Good or bad, in the end, the truth had always gotten him that which he sought. He wondered how that had come to be. He had grown up in a family of politicians: his father, his grandfather, and his great grandfather… All of them had been politicians. He had grown up watching his father massage the truth in order to achieve the results that each listener wished to hear, and somewhere along the way, Nathan had developed a dislike for the practice. In the end, that had probably been why he had such an intense dislike for politics. Perhaps that was also why he seemed to be a natural leader. It wasn’t just that he had a trustworthy face; it was because he was trustworthy. In fact, he could hear his mother’s voice saying
Oh Nathan, I can always trust you to do the right thing.
That’s when he knew what he had to say. “I am not Na-Tan.”

The Prime Minister’s aide, who was translating aloud for the benefit of the audience, most of which did not speak Angla, suddenly stopped his translation, looking to the Prime Minister for guidance. Nathan turned and glared at him. The Prime Minister bowed his head at the aide, indicating that he should continue to translate, which he did.

Nathan could see the look of concern in the eyes of everyone in the room: the cameramen, the technicians, the various aides, even the soldiers. All of them had the same look, except for Jessica, who had made her way quietly through the room until she was as close as she could get to the main camera without getting in the way. Somehow, she had known that Nathan would need a familiar face to get him through this, the face of someone he could trust.

“I am not a legend. In fact, until we accidentally ended up in this region of space, we knew nothing about your legends. We didn’t even know you were out here. But you are. Somehow, during the worst disaster in human history, your forefathers managed to start anew well out of reach of the plague that nearly destroyed us all. You all originally came from Earth; we all did, even the Ta’Akar. Even Caius, unfortunately.”

Nathan looked at Jessica again. She was smiling. “Your legends state that your people fled the core worlds of Earth in order to escape a great evil. That, in a sense, is true as well. But that particular evil has long since disappeared. However, there is always a new evil waiting to take its place. My world, Earth… well, we have our own evil. They’re called the Jung. Your evil goes by a different name—Caius the Great, ruler of the Ta’Akar Empire. As I speak to you today, his agents are stirring up trouble on Corinair. They’re pitting brother against brother, Loyalists against Followers, and the truth is they care about neither of you. They only care about what is best for them. They only want control of your world.”

Nathan’s posture changed, as if he had become more relaxed. “‘Then why don’t they just take it?’ you’re probably wondering. ‘After all, they are the most powerful force in the entire sector, are they not?’” Nathan paused again, this time for dramatic effect, just as he had seen his father do on many occasions. “Well, they’re not, actually. You see, they’ve been fighting the Karuzari for decades. And they’re down to a handful of ships. That’s why they’ve been abandoning their outermost colonies. That’s why they require
your
young men to serve in
their
military. That’s why they require so many of your resources. And perhaps that’s why only one ship came looking for us today.”

Again, the faces of the Corinairans in the room became concerned. “That’s right; the Ta’Akar came here looking for us. In fact, the captain of the Yamaro called me and tried to convince me to join forces with the Ta’Akar, because he knew that our jump drive was the key that would allow the Ta’Akar to conquer this entire region of space. If combined with their new energy source, they would undoubtedly be able to conquer the entire galaxy. But I refused his invitation. In exchange, he attacked your world. He knew that if he attacked only us, we would simply jump away. But if he attacked you, then I would feel obligated to defend your world. Well, he was right; I did. But that hardly makes me a legend.”

Again, Nathan paused, but only to collect his thoughts. “Maybe that makes me a great man; I don’t know. That judgment is not mine to make. It’s yours. The things that I chose to do today were chosen not because they were the right thing to do, but because they were the only thing to do. If this makes me a legend then so be it; I am Na-Tan. But I alone cannot save you. You have to save yourselves. You have to stop fighting each other, Loyalists and Followers, and you have to start working together. The Ta’Akar will return, sooner or later. We have to be ready to fight! We have to be ready to win! And we have to start now! Lay down your arms. Return to what’s left of your homes, and care for your loved ones. The time to fight will come. We will call for you soon enough.”