Sons of Abraham: Terminate (21 page)

              “Running a bit late are we?” the thin man asked sarcastically as he loaded their information from their pads to his. 

              “Yeah, went to the wrong port,” Bearden laughed.

              The thin man worked quickly, finishing the data transfer in twenty seconds.  He nodded, handed the Sargent their data pads, then ushered them onto the escalator.  Janys stepped onto the automated stair, burying her head against Bearden’s shoulder as she watched the ground slowly grow further away.  She held her breath, expecting to see a white robe sprint towards them, a freshly purchased ticket on a data pad. 

              Her feet reached the deck, but her eyes kept watching the entrance to the hall.  A man pushed her back as the clear hatch drifted shut, the locking seal hidden behind two wide strips of metal trim.  The escalator was powered down as an open transport vehicle drove up to it, hooked the end to the back of the hitch, and then drove away with the staircase.  Tears threatened to unleash as the ship gently lifted away from the cliff.

              The air burst from her lungs as the docking port slowly became a dot, far, far below.  She felt an enormous hand squeeze hers.  She turned around, a tear of relief streaming down her face. 

              “Wrong port?” she laughed. 

              “My eyes aren’t what they used to be,” he muttered. 

              As the cruise ship rose to the atmosphere of Parasus, the former Corporal stood on her toes and planted a kiss of thanks upon the gentle giant’s lips.

              The two experts fumbled with their suits, still trying to understand how the flaps were supposed to latch as the transport ship broke away from the Gabriel Ring.  The Marines, along with Jones, watched from their bench seats as the two stumbled along like baby deer taking their first steps.

              “I can’t take it,” Sanchez snapped, unlatching his harness and stomping to the experts.  “Look, the bottom flap goes here, then this two buckle, the pack straps in here, then you pull this big piece over the whole thing and fasten these three.”

              Keenan looked like a child whose mother just geared them up for a day of sledding in the winter.  Vanessa tried to recreate the process, but Sanchez had gone too quickly for her to keep up.  He sighed, stooped in front of her, and then finished sealing off her suit. 

              “Useless,” he muttered.  “Completely useless.”

              The Marine flopped onto his seat and tossed his harness down over his shoulders, locking himself into place.  The experts avoided eye contact, both feeling helpless with the unfamiliar gear. 

              “So, we’re going to the little ring, huh,” Haynes stated, unable to withstand the awkward silence.  “Can’t believe no one thought to check it out before.”

              “Yeah, hard to believe,” Jones muttered, his eyes buried in his data pad. 

              “Is anyone having difficulty getting a message out?” Vanessa asked, looking down at her datapad in distaste.  “I’ve been trying to reach the Vice President, but it keeps telling me there’s no signal.”

              Keenan unfastened his harness and waddled to the bag storage.  He shoved through the cargo, finally returning with his own datapad.  The plump man returned to his seat, though ignored the safety harness he was supposed to refasten upon sitting.  His eyes squinted as he turned on the pad, then his mouth skewed to the one side as he confirmed Vanessa’s question.

              “No, no signal at all,” he muttered.  “Seems a bit strange, doesn’t it.  Worked fine before I put it away.”

              Sanchez grumbled as he pulled his pad out of the pocket on his thigh.  His lips moved, undoubtedly cursing the two experts as his fingers brought up the stream.  His mouth froze open as he backed out of the browser and tried once more.  His stubbornness persisted as he tried three more times before finally admitting that Vanessa was right.

              “Yeah, we have no feed,” he muttered.  “Hey, Pilot, you guys got a signal up there?  We’re all dead back here.”

              All dead.  The weight of the Marine’s words held much weight upon Jones’ heart.  He watched the group talk amongst themselves, all attempting to discover why they could not gain access to the stream.  He watched his own pad, seeing that the pilot had attempted to send a message to Command on Earth.  His program blocked the transmission, sending it to an archive in a separate folder. 

              “So what’s he doing then?” Haynes asked, leaning forward over Sanchez and watching Jones.  “If we got no feed, then what the hell is he doing over there?”

              “Looking at a map I downloaded earlier,” Jones informed him, turning the pad over and showing his screen.  “I’m trying to learn where to go to turn on the life support system once we reach the ring.  The less oxygen we use from our suits, the better.”

              “Hand it over,” Haynes ordered, unfastening his harness.

              “Let it go, Haynes,” Sanchez returned, kicking his leg out in front of the larger man.  “Just let it go.  If he had a connection, he’d be yapping on bout how stupid we are for not knowing the magic command to fix our pads.  Don’t give em the pleasure.”

              Jones’ fingers furiously tapped the screen, realizing that time was of the essence.  Two programs split the screen, which he continuously worked back and forth between.  The timing had to be flawless, as one program finishing before the other could yield unwanted results.  He started the program on the left, then paused it and began the program on the right side of the screen.

              “Nah,” Haynes continued.  “I just wanna see for myself.”

              “I have no feed,” Jones muttered, continuing his work. 

              “If that’s true, then let me see it.”

              “I can’t.  There’s too much-classified information on this pad.  I hand it to you and I lose my job.  It’s that simple.”

              “Then I’ll just fucking take it,” Haynes snapped, shoving Sanchez’s legs out of the way.

              Sanchez threw off his harness, his short but strong arm grasping the larger man’s chest, attempting to hold him back.

              “Back down Soldier,” Sanchez shouted.  “That’s an order.”

              “Orders my ass,” Haynes informed him.  “You said it yourself, something ain't right about him.  That means we’re stupid for just trusting him.”

              “Settle down,” Vanessa pleaded.  “It won’t solve anything.”

              Having completed his task, Jones started both programs in unison.  A pain screamed in his head as the program went to work.  The screen on the front of the device in his pack began to count down, mirroring the descending number of the left of the screen.  His vitals dropped, forcing him to acknowledge that he’d be unable to fend off the large Marine should Sanchez fail to return him to his seat.

              Fail.  The word passed through his mind as the passenger bay went dark, his eyes slowly sliding shut.  On one hand, he’d failed.  The group had made it closer to finding Gabriel than any other expert, technician, or historian in man’s history.  It had been his duty to prevent them from getting this far.  On the other hand, he’d succeeded.  The schematics for the second gen cybernetics had been lost for over four hundred years.  His failure had led to this success as the programs were safely stored away back home. 

              “What’s wrong with him?” Keenan questioned. 

              Sanchez stopped struggling with Haynes, his head snapping to look at Jones.  The tall man slumped in his seat, his eyes rolling back into his head as a stream of blood oozed from his eyes.  The two standing Marines forgot their quarrel, both diving over to the man who twitched like a fish gasping for oxygen on land. 

              “The fuck?” Haynes shouted, trying to slap the man awake.

              “He’s seizing,” Sanchez said. 

              Haynes let Sanchez attempt to determine what the man was suffering from as he took the opportunity to snatch the pad out of Jones’ twitching hands.  His brow furrowed as he flipped the device over, the timer smacking him in the face.

              “We got a countdown,” he shouted, shoving the pad in Sanchez’s face.

              The smaller man stopped working on Jones, seeing the timer for himself.

              “Shit, he started a bomb.”

              “A bomb!” Vanessa shouted.  “Well, stop it!”

              The two experts fumbled with their harnesses as Keenan shouted for the pilot.  Sanchez tore the pad from Haynes, attempting to access the program. 

              “Can ya get it?” Haynes asked, looking over his shoulder.

              “It’s locked,” he said, trying to get any inch of the screen to change. 

              “We gotta jet that bomb.  Look through his stuff.”

              “Forty seconds.  Move your ass!”

              The two men were joined by the third Marine, Garner, as well as Keenan and Vanessa.  The group tore through the luggage, dumping the contents of each bag onto the floor of the ship. 

              “Where is it?!” Vanessa yelled, looking at the mess on the floor.

              “It’s gotta be here,” Sanchez said, looking at the empty luggage rack. 

              “Maybe it isn’t a bomb,” Keenan offered.  “Maybe it was just something else?”

              “Maybe, but I ain't chancing it.”

              Sanchez looked around the ship as the others continued to rummage through the pile on the floor.  His eyes swept the seats, but he recalled reaching the ship long before Jones arrived.  He played it back in his head.  Jones wheeled the cart onto the ship and started passing out the space suits.  He said he had them in order by size, insisting that they let him unload the cart.  He picked his own suit last, then dumped his bag onto the luggage rack before shoving the cart outside.  Anderson took the cart, then Jones took his seat in the corner.  Never once did he disappear from his sight other than when he stepped outside with the empty cart.  Anderson had been waiting, so he couldn’t have fixed the bomb to the hull. 

              “His suit!” Sanchez shouted, diving towards the motionless man.  “Bastard handed us each one, kept the bottom one for himself.”

              He considered stripping open the suit, then quickly realized there was only one place to hide anything.  He shoved the man’s head into his own lap, exposing the top of the container that held his oxygen canister.  The latches unsnapped as he jammed and pulled each one, tearing open the corner of his skin and bending back one of his nails.  He didn’t flinch when he opened the top flap, seeing the timer counting down in front of his face.  His fingers grabbed the edges of the box, the timer already reaching to three seconds. 

              His eyes closed, knowing that it was too late.  The bomb in Jones’ back ignited, incinerating the passengers nearby.  The support beams of the ship buckled as the cabin filled with the growing pressure.  The hull cracked under the force, then snapped into pieces as the force of the bomb proved too much for the ship to handle.  The oxygen of the ship burned out as the pieces of the transport ship sprayed out into space, the passengers and flammable objects having already been reduced to ash. 

              In the distance, Anderson watched on the screen as a tiny spec of orange and white signaled their location.  It took twenty minutes to have a team onto another ship and passing through the debris of what remained. 

              In a matter of minutes, Jones had completed one mission and failed the other.  The explosion left little evidence to find as the device had engulfed the entire interior of the ship, rendering anything that wasn’t metal to ash. 

              Vice President Wilkes lay her head upon her arms, gently sobbing as the news poured in from the Gabriel Ring.  She hadn’t known if her efforts to remove her daughter, Emilia, from Eden had been successful, but she prayed and pleaded that her daughter would return home safely.  The blackmailers would not be pleased once word got out of Jones’ demise.

7 AFTERMATH

File received.  Installing…….

              Installation complete.  Beginning program and systems analysis……

              All systems: operational……

              Initiating startup sequence………

              Cryo-temperature rising………

              Thirty-two degrees……..Forty-five degrees……….Sixty-one degrees………..Seventy-nine degrees………Ninety-Six degrees…..

              Releasing restraints………

              The lungs expanded as the mirror surface eyes shot open.  The heart beat rapidly, desperately attempting to send oxygen to the dormant cells of the thawing body.  Two dark hands slowly lifted, waving in front of the cybernetic eyes.  The mouth closed as the breathing slowly regulated.  The man arose from the cryo-chamber.

              Two feet slammed down on the cold floor, the thin layer of dirt and dust grinding beneath the soft skin.  His naked form stumbled, forcing the hands to grasp the edges of the tank for balance.  The eyes focused ahead, the tiny light above the screen on the desk informing him that he was receiving a transmission.