“Jenn, you're on point.” The words felt right even if he hadn't necessarily planned to say them in that order.
Mack was unsettled, their mission brief had been succinct, lacking necessary information, and, worst of all, dated. He suspected adding ‘heavily dated’ would have described it better. They still carried some some surprising advantages though, the Nano that had been injected in them had them running smoothly although the process itself had been fairly painful. He had directed most to increase Strength, Agility, and Endurance; for himself, he had distributed some of his Allocation into IQ as well. Thankfully present were bios of the entire squad which made the effort of getting organized and moving fairly easy, even if they didn’t have more than a handful of hazy memories between them all.
They were kitted out too, a strange liquid plastic peeled back and revealed preserved standard chemical firearms and extensive body armor. There was an overarching message that was present at the head of each of their briefs.
If they were activated, it was because everything had gone ‘tits up’, as Ramos had eloquently put it. He was apparently their heavy weapons man even if he didn’t know that himself, the shrapnel-based rocket was comfortably slung on his back as well as the way he handled the heavy machine gun spoke to extensive prior experience.
The Cryo-Laboratory was quiet, entirely too quiet. Unless it wasn’t. Freakish, overgrown ‘crabs’ covered in black chitin and mean. Real malicious things.
He wasn’t even sure if they could be classified as ‘crabs’ although since that was the closest resemblance any of them bothered with, the name stuck. Their threat level was reduced slightly by the fact that they were scattered and disorganized, despite that they were fairly resistant to projectiles unless you aimed for their open mouths or at the base of their eye stalks.
There were people too but they had quickly learned to not chase after them. Often armed and quicker than they looked, the scattered remains of whatever had transpired on board were not immediately hostile. They were also secondary to the main objective.
Get to the Bridge, figure it out from there.
Not just that, but the loudest thing that whispered terrible news into his mind’s ear was the fact that every single door was wide open. Based on what he saw looking into some of the room’s they passed, his squad had been activated just in time, or... too late.
He sensed that they were getting close to the primary Corridor, the widening and consolidating hallways pointed to that being the case.
Jenn's voice sounded tight with tension, “Mack, do you hear that?”
The ‘thump’ ‘thump’ ‘thump’ that had accented their trip through the Labs was louder now, interspersed with screams. The next turn made it come through clearer than ever. It sounded like footsteps, but… not. He motioned with his hand and the five sidled up against the wall and just before he peeked around the corner a harsh voice broke through from some distance down the hall.
“I know you are there, errant crew. Identify yourself.”
He was about to peek around the corner but a harsh cough of projectile fire scattered around to where his head would have been.
“We’re Security Personnel! Identify yourself!”
A static sound built and built, “I am the Head of Security. I do not have reports of rogue Security Personnel located in this section of my ship.”
“We’re not rogue, we're 'Emergent'. Was that you shooting earlier? Are there any other Security Personnel still active?”
“There is a mutiny on board. I am quelling it.”
That sounded bad but he didn’t miss that the voice didn’t answer his question. There was no answer but the distant *tap tap tap* of metal on metal echoing from different hallways around them.
Mack gulped and debated whether or not to show himself, he looked to the rest of his team and nodded.
“I’m coming out, don’t shoot. We’re on the same side aren’t we?”
Mack moved slowly and smoothly out, gun half-raised and stopped. His eyes trailed upward as a red grid of lasers scanned his face and body.
“Nominally.”
“By all that’s holy. What the fu-”
A flash as the lasers intensified and Mack dropped into laser-fine chunks to the floor.
Ramos smoothly adjusted closer to the edge and tossed out an entire belt of grenades around the corner, followed by an ear-shatter boom. A return shot ripped the entire corner of the wall, and Ramos, apart in a splash of jagged metal and gore.
They managed to get off a few shots but discipline was something honed over a lifetime. Difficult to maintain when a lifetime’s worth of memories are absent.
“Run!”
----------------------------------------
The Head of Security wasn’t careless. Deliberate, measured justice.
A spinning heavy gun sliced through a small grouping of haggard-looking, non-compliant crew.
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Bom, bom, bom, bom. New targets?
Security Personnel? I think not.
“Nominally.”
A criss-cross of lasers diced the deceitful man. Falsifying Security Authorization was a capital offense on his ship. An explosion rocked his body back half a step as fire started to come in from around the corner. More unrepentant crew. Mutinous even, for there could be no other conclusion when one falsely claimed to be Security Personnel.
He locked on to their position, the offenders were wrapped around the turn in the hallway the lying man had just emerged from. A massive, superheated shell ripped apart the wall, splattering on and exposing the hiding place of the others.
They scattered. No matter. He sent a command through the link to the real Security Personnel to adjust their course and pursue. He would quell this mutiny.
It occurred to him that perhaps this was ship-wide, he hoped so. The mutinous forces had subverted Security Personnel even. Perhaps a lot more, beyond the Cryo-Labs even. Only the Bridge could have subverted Security Personnel like this. The faintest shadow of a smile, more a twisted grimace than anything else, twitched in a corner of his mouth.
----------------------------------------
It was hard to judge the length of the tunnel, Jack felt like it took a long time but Jonah’s measurements on his portable dismissed that thought. He was just feeling jumpy from all the new information.
He pulled out one of his few remaining Ration Bars and started chewing. In the silence, it sounded loud. A groan piped up from next to him.
“What? You want one?”
First, a sigh, “Yes, I would like one.”
“Uhhh,” he fumbled with Leanne and his pockets, “I have a ‘Dark Chocolate MeltaSwirl’ and a… ‘Banana-Kiwi Crunch’. I thought I had more? I want the chocolate, but you can have the banana.”
Jack handed it over then stopped after a few paces, Jonah wasn’t by his side anymore. He turned back, “What now?”
“Do you know what these are?”
“Yeah, Ration Bars. Let me guess, you’re going to tell me they aren’t,” he looked at his Bar, ‘Sherbert Nougat’, it tasted sweet and nutty. Honestly a bit sweet for his tastes but decent enough. He preferred chocolate.
“This is a ‘Stem-Cell’ Ration Bar. How many of these have you been eating?”
“I couldn’t honestly say, but it’s pretty much been exclusively these.”
“Do you know what these Bars are designed to do?”
“Taste good? Make you not hungry? What else are Ration Bars supposed to do?”
“These are loaded with Universal Stem Cells. Essentially, you’ve kept your body in an extremely adaptable and malleable state.”
“Can you rephrase that? In Human?”
A painful, but not damaging, laser bit into the side of his head, “Stupid meat, he means that you’ve been learning and growing faster because of all of those you’ve been shoving down your mouth-hole.”
“So what? It’s made me smarter?”
Jonah gave him a look at that but its seriousness was distracted by the obviously pleasant effect that Banana-Kiwi Nougat was having on him.
“Hah! Smarter? You’re not even the smartest meat among the Rats. It’s helped you heal faster, learn faster, and transfer that knowledge into muscle memory, faster, more efficiently. Hah! Smarter.”
He gave Trash a look at that last part but was met with a dismissive cackle.
Through a mouthful of Ration-Bar, “I presume that it has been helping you fight and think faster while you do. Perhaps it has helped you recover some muscle memory from your time before Cryo.”
“Huh.” Time before cryo? He still had zero memories of that.
“So you’re going to get a new memory from eating that?”
Jonah was silent at that, “No! No, new memories…”
That was a… weird way to answer.
Jack spent the rest of the time processing what Jonah had said. Could that have explained how he was learning things so fast? He was surpringly good at fighting, he had dismissed most of to the fact that he was difficult to seriously injure and that most of fighting boiled down to trying to damage the opponent while avoiding damage yourself.
Being willing to take, what others considered, 'critical' damage as easily as he did made it a lot easier to hurt your opponent as well. It was a huge advantage. Tule had taught him some on the crab but still he needed every advantage he had. He'd had to keep an eye out for more of these Ration Bars. He was just glad that the AI had abandoned the 'Chit' system, at least for the most part. Was that what people had to deal with normally? It was a pain in the ass.
Soon enough they approached the Arkology Door.
“Of course it’s overgrown.”
Jonah’s response was to laser away the foliage around the door. It was an odd feeling, both experiencing a mood elevation from seeing plant life while it being tempered by the fact that it had overgrown. It seemed like a mixed bag.
Jack plugged in the AI and slapped his hand down.
Access Door Controls?
“Yes.”
Open Door?
Preliminary Scan prior to Defense activation shows SI-level Authority on the other side.
Engage Automatic Door Defenses?
Ship. “Will the Automatic Door Defenses do anything to it?”
Unlikely…
Jack got another odd feeling then, “What do you want to say?”
Perhaps subterfuge is the ideal course.
“Fuck that, just kill it, meat!”
Jack ignored Trash and thought about that, not about the AI, he was choosing not to think about the implications of the emerging personality of the AI Disk.
Sneaky this time, instead of straight into a fight? Yeah… he kind of liked the sound of that. He looked at the Disk, he’d need to get this in contact with the SI’s body. Like he had with the Cryo-SI. It clearly was a threat to SI's, considering it was one of the only things that would get the Trash-SI to shut up.
“What are you debating? Oh, subterfuge? Subterfuge what?”
He suppressed annoyance from the flurry of questions Jonah blurted out, instead, deciding to share the news, “There’s the Ark-SI on the other side of this Door and we need to get the AI Disk into contact with it.”
Jonah stroked his beard in thought, then pulled out his portable and then put it away again. He touched around different pockets of his robes until he shook his head in a start and pulled out his Algorathan Wrist Rocket. Yuma’s originally, but one he had long since repaired.
“This can fire just about anything, much like a coilgun.”
Jack had seen how fast things could fire out of that, “Will it be fast enough? SI’s are pretty strong.”
"That's right, fear me meat! We are powerful!"
“It goes a few times faster than a typical chemical projectile, if I keep it pulled back it will release the projectile at faster and faster speeds.”
“Upper limit?”
Jonah shook his head, “I haven’t had a chance to find it out.”
Perhaps there is a different course that we ca-
“Open the Door.” He nodded toward the AI disk and Jonah withdrew it from the handpad.
“On my signal,” he looked over at Jonah, “Can you hide it better? The SI’s usually like to talk.”
Jonah partially hid it beneath his robes, the AI disk resting in the pocket of the Wrist Rocket. Jack plucked some of Jonah’s robes to cover it a bit better.
The Door cracked open as it split down the middle. “Close enough, ready?” A raised eyebrow accompanied the question. Jonah looked tense, he could already see the sweat trickling down one of his temples.
“Hey! You ready?”
Jonah started then nodded.
What was he so nervous about? It was just an SI.