As soon as Benjamin's mag-rifle went off, Sarah and Carrie were charging out of the cramped confines of the elevator with Micheal and Bunny moving to follow them.

Sarah charged toward the left side of the gathered Rif'nay'fex as they tried to raise their weapons. Shield first, she hit them hard and bowled over the two she was dealing with on her side. Before either of them could rise or use their weapons, her spear flashed out and ripped open their throats sending blue blood that darkened to purple flying from both of them.

Carrie, with her shield raised, approached her Rif'nay'fex and, before they could do anything to stop her sister, sank the head of her axe in the closest one while swinging her shield's edge into the other one. Bleeding heavily from the wound in his torso, the first one she'd hit fell to the ground hard and nearly dragged her down with the wound in his chest. Before he could rise, Bunny had practically blinked up to him and was driving her daggers into his head and chest, killing them. Before she could stand up and help Carrie, the second was falling, eyes staring sightlessly, dead from the hole cleaved into her head deep enough to split her third eye.

Benjamin stepped forward, sweeping his rifle to all sides before declaring that we were clear and there were no more guards.

"We move forward," I told them all, "search for a sign that tells us where we are. Cai scanned the elevator and said that this was the lowest that one went. That means there's another or the controls for the gravity drives are on this level. We need to find which one it is."

"Bunny, you're with me," Carrie called out. "Mike, stay with Rickshaw, keep that prisoner alive. Ben, Sarah, I want you two to work on moving these bodies out of the way. If we have to run, I don't want to trip over them."

"I was thinking of leaving the prisoner in the elevator," I said.

"Bad idea," Carrie shot that down quickly. "We needed the access cube to get in, but once in we didn't have to worry about using it to make the elevator move. The prisoner would wake up and run if we leave them in the elevator, alerting everyone they could about us and making this job much harder."

"That is a point I hadn't considered," I admitted.

"I'm the second in command for a reason," she told me, "and it's not because I'm pretty."

"Come on Benjamin," I said, hoisting the prisoner back onto my shoulder. "Let's find somewhere secure we can leave this guy."

"I'm right behind you sir," Benjamin said, hefting his rifle into a more comfortable position.

While Benjamin and I moved away from the group, Micheal and Sarah began to drag the corpses to the sides and leave the way to the elevator clear so that we could avoid tripping on anything if we had to run. Likely Carrie would be trying to get them to stay there and guard our escape route, but I knew Sarah would argue that we needed more people searching for the next elevator or the controls.

Eventually, after running into two roaming pairs of guards, Benjamin and I found a door that was marked out with "Control Room." Looking to one another we shrugged and opened the door, after I'd placed our prisoner on the ground. Once the door opened, the frenzy of activity from the groups of engineers and technicians came to a halt when they saw us.

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"Converge on my position," I told the others over the comm line. "We've found the control room."

Before I'd finished speaking, the three guards in the room had managed to fumble for their weapons, prompting Benjamin to raise his rifle and fire three times, splattering their brains across the walls they stood beside. The sudden violence sent everyone else into a panic, which had more than a few become injured as they fell to the ground and were nearly trampled by the others trying to rush to the other side of the room to hide.

"Stay here," I told Benjamin. "Keep a lookout in case there's another guard."

With a nod to me, Benjamin took up post beside the door and swiveled his head from one end of the room to the other, slow enough to catch all movement.

"Cai, I need you to interface with these computers," I told my Cyber as I raised my hand and the interface tool appeared from the ports on my wrist.

"I find myself looking forward to the challenge," Cai told me as found a port to plug into.

While Cai was going through the database and learning how to stop the gravity drives from moving the false planet, Carrie and the other appeared and after placing Bunny on watch with Benjamin, they began to interface with the computers as well. Finally, the Cybers gave us news.

"This room is used to control one of the planet's gravity drives," Cai told me. "We can destroy this drive, which will only slow our quarry down, or we can use it to counteract much of their current speed, delaying their escape for another hour at minimum."

"I like it," I said, looking at the timer in the corner of my helmet's display that currently read less than forty-five minutes.

"Doing this will require us to stay here for five minutes while we create a program that will deny them all access to the drive's software controls and will tell the drive to act counter to all of the other drives," he explained. "We can complete this faster if we have Paladin Paulson and Wing Swans join us and give their own CAI access to the computers."

"I can give you one," I told him. "The rest of us aren't in a good position to keep lookout on the whole room, even if we divide it amongst ourselves."

"Very well," Cai said. "I reccommend Paladin Paulson join us. His CAI has more experience with technological interfacing and program insertion."

"Benjamin, over here. Bunny stay on watch," I told the both of them.

Once Benjamin had joined us and interfaced with the computers, his Cyber was immediately caught up with the others and they all began to create the program that they would use. All of them but Cai did anyway, he was using his larger size as a Cybernetic component to shield them from the safety programs that were attempting to remove the Cybers from the computers while they focused on their own work. Cai's larger size was something that I often complained about, but it wasn't something either of us could help. Since he'd been implanted in me with a small portion of the internet, Wikipedia and other similar sites, he'd been created with a larger base size that stunted his personality coding and made it difficult for other Cybers to speak directly to me due to the sheer bulk of filled memory that he contained in his base code. That size was very useful now though, since it allowed the other Cybers to hide in the gaps he left them while allowing them to connect with the computer's database and each other, all while shielding them from software that wanted to remove them.

"Done," Cai finally told me. "Please wait until the others have disconnected before you attempt to do so."

"Fine," I sighed. "Find anything cool in there?"

"The blueprints for the entirety of the Rif'nay'fex's constructed planet," he told me.

"So that means that you can lead us to the other gravity drives, so we can do this again," I said.

"No," he corrected me. "I will lead you to the safety shielding that protects the rest of the planet from the dwarf star that makes up the core of this planet."