FanFic - DP/UF - Crossroads [9]
MegaZone
------------------------------------------------------------------NINE
"Damn!" Scree, scree, scree. "Double damn!"
--Randolph Carter
"Well?" Kei asked when he returned to the knoll.
"He's isolating himself because he doesn't trust himself,"
Gryphon replied, a hard, sardonic edge to his voice. "He didn't
believe in me and he's whipping himself for it. He doesn't want to
lead us. He doesn't want to be a part of our lives again. He's
afraid of himself. As usual. I can't do a thing with him."
"What are you going to do?" Yuri asked him, tears streaking
her cheeks.
"Exactly what I can do. Nothing." He paused. "No...I take
that back. There is something I can do. Are there environment suits
in the Angel capable of handling the radiation inside the wreckage of
the Wayward Son?"
"I think standard heavy envirosuits should be able to handle
it...but why?"
"I'm going exploring. C'mon, Kei."
"Wait a second--how is poking around the wreckage of his dead
ship going to help MegaZone?" Kei demanded, getting up and following
him with Yuri hot on her heels.
"It's a surprise. Trust me. The only thing that can help him
may well be inside the radioactive wreckage of that ship. I just hope
it can be saved." He turned to Yuri, pulling a set of keys and an
identcard from his jacket pocket. "Yuri, here. Take your
repulsorswoop into Vesper. This card will get you into the spaceport
slip my fighter is in. Open up the cargo case and get Ziggy." Ziggy
was Gryphon's personal computer, which had started out as an Intel
i80386DX/25, way back when. These days it had a British-AnimeTech
88886XLi and a CLULESS AI driver, but that was another story entirely.
"Okay...but why?"
"You'll see. Set Vision up in the wardroom and get her up and
running. I'll be back soon, I hope with the cure for Zoner's
'condition'."
She looked at him warily, but trust won out. She had trusted
him even when no one else had; she certainly wasn't going to doubt him
now. She took the keys, and the card, gave him a quick hug and kiss,
and ran for the Angel.
Gryphon went part-way up the Lovely Angel's ramp and yanked
open a locker; inside was a heavy envirosuit, standard WWWA issue. He
pulled it out, put it on, and powered it up. It was made of a
marvelously compact material, an AnimeTech invention;
molecularly-scaled chainmail, basically, with an electromagnetronic
forcefield generator for rigidity and radiation shielding. The
headpiece was not a helmet, but rather a close-fitting hood, patterned
after the battle dress of Terran ninja warriors and the under-helmet
covering of Mandalorian Deathwatch troopers. Kei snagged another and
put it on, powering it up. Powered up, the suits also made fairly
handy battle armor. Always a plus for the 3WA agent on the go.
Gryphon pulled on his helmet and swung a leg over his J-9300,
starting up and revving the plant; Kei climbed on behind him and,
making sure her grip around his waist was secure, Gryphon took off
across the ashfields.
It was night, but that didn't matter to Gryphon; his eyes had
been in nightvision mode since dark. He rezzed up the HUD on the
inside of his visor, fed the helmet's computer all the data his own
memory had on the location of the Wayward Son, cross-referenced it
with the latest readings from the Musashi weathersat network
concerning global radiation spots, ruled out the former location of
Musashi City, and determined the ship's position. This took about a
second. Then he rezzed up a pipper on the HUD indicating the wreck's
location, steered to center it, and opened the throttle up all the
way, until the roar of the thrusters in his ears had almost drowned
out the scream that was boiling in his brain.
Presently, the wreck appeared, rolling up from the horizon and
looming silhouetted against the navy blue night sky. Twisted,
tattered, with gaping rents in its hide, but definitely recognizable,
it lay in the sands, horribly damaged but somehow still proud.
Gryphon suppressed the twinge in his heart at the sight of it; his
work place and home for nearly three centuries, broken and dead in a
crater of glass filled by the winds with sand again. He brought the
bike to a halt and climbed off, slinging the duffel bag he had brought
over his shoulder.
"What are we doing here?" Kei asked through the radios in
their envirosuits, as he picked his way along the aft quarter of the
vast hull, looking for a rent large enough to get through. (The
search didn't take long.)
"Looking," Gryphon replied, climbing through a largish hole
near main engineering. Kei followed, glancing quickly at the readouts
to make sure the suit could handle the radiation this close to the
wreckage of the Reflex furnace. (It could.)
"For what?!"
"Please...I'm trying to remember, it's been a long time." The
deck slanted at a good ten-degree angle, and the corridor off to port
ended in a tangle of once-molten metal. Beyond that mess had been
ReRob's engine room. He went off to the right, trying to recall the
ship's layout as he did so.
The turbolifts, of course, were not functioning, but he
managed to wrench open a Jeffries tube hatch and began to climb. His
course wound through the innards of the vessel, through sections
totally wrecked and sections nearly intact, and finally came to an
enormous, intact blast door marked "Computer Core Machine Room. NO
ADMITTANCE." Gryphon grinned.
"Good. This door isn't down. That's a good sign...now how
the fuck do I go about getting it open?"
Kei began to understand what he was doing. She smiled and let
him go about it; he was obviously enjoying this, serious business
though it was.
He popped the emergency access panel, tried a switch, and was
rewarded with a light. "Yes! The emergency batteries are still
functional." He crossed to the other side and tapped in his
Umbra-level clearance code. It failed. "Shit. I forgot--Class 3
lockout. Kei, you had Umbra clearance--try your code."
She did; with a creak of aging servos and a protest from the
slightly misaligned frame, the huge door slid haltingly open. Beyond,
as Gryphon shone his light in, they could see instrument panels and
drive arrays, mostly smashed. Gryphon stepped through the gap and
pulled open another emergency panel, crossing a couple of circuits and
throwing a switch. The emergency lights flickered on.
The core machine room was a mess. Panels had blown out in the
overload sequence, before the quantum-vector power distribution system
had failed; drives were smashed, and even an old magtape was ribboned
about the chamber. Gryphon ignored it and headed right for the door
in the back, which read (through the streaks of soot) "E.V.E. Central
Core Room-- AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY". Fiddling with the access
panel again, he got the red light for emergency batteries on, and then
tapped out a code Kei had never heard on the instrument panel.
Above the door, an LED message board flickered, then valiantly
displayed the following characters:
[neato-keen Klingon text and graphics sacrificed to ASCII]
The door hissed open smoothly.
"What the hell was that?" Kei asked as she eased into the room
behind him.
"My back door," Gryphon replied. "I created Eve; I wanted to
make sure no one could ever lock me away from her. So I built that
special function into the codelock. No one else even knew it could do
Klingonese." He popped another panel and fired up the room's
emergency lights. Kei let out an involuntary gasp when she saw the
room for the first time.
It was a small room, barely the size of a walk-in closet, and
contained only one thing; a black pedestal, about three feet high and
cylindrical, topped by a hexagonal black platform about a foot across.
Set into this was a large red crystal that glowed as if lit from
within. Leads from all three walls and the ceiling led to the
crystal, stopping at the glass dome surrounding it.
Gryphon's smile split his face from ear to ear. "I was hoping
as much. The backup cells are still operational. Hell, I designed
them to last ten thousand years, if necessary." He put his hand on
the glass dome; it flickered, but remained dark except for the glow of
the crystal. "Hmm...not enough power." He went to the wall, pulled
off an access panel, and messed around with some leads. There was a
fat blue spark. The lights went out. "There. Crossed over the door
circuits; we should be able to get some uptime now." He went back and
placed his palm on the glass ball.
It glowed to life like a plasma f/x ball, a blue glow like
Cherenkov radiation appearing around the crystal and leaping to touch
the glass opposite his palm. The glow illuminated Gryphon's face.
<<< Asia: Don't Cry >>>
On the wall opposite the door, a screen flickered into life
and Eve's face appeared on it. She opened her eyes, then blinked.
"Commander!" she exclaimed, her voice grainy. The image and sound
jumped periodically, barred by static. "Is the ship--"
"Unsalvageable, I'm afraid. How are you?"
Eve appeared momentarily introspective, then said, "98%
systems optimality. Remaining 2% dysfunction due to low power and
poor audiovisual interface equipment condition."
"Excellent. Authorization code tak'hklah mk'hra Ulath'ka;
total system shutdown for core crystal move."
Eve blinked. "It's that bad?"
"It's that bad. I'm sorry to put you in such a cramped
system, but until the new ship is ready, I'm afraid you're going to
have to spend some time in Ziggy."
"It's better than being in limbo for--" she paused, "--99
years and change." She paused, closing her eyes; then they opened
again and she reported, "All systems ready for shutdown."
"Good. See you in a few, Eve." He removed his hand; the blue
glow disappeared. Then the red glow from the crystal faded down to
the dullest glimmer. Gryphon removed the glass dome carefully,
removed the crystal from its holder, and put it into his duffel bag.
"Let's get out of here," he said to Kei.