Empire of Bones (25 page)

The lift took him to the medical center while he stewed in a dark silence. Doctor Stone was setting a broken arm on a crew woman who looked more than a little singed around the edges of her engineering jumpsuit. “How bad is it?”

The doctor turned to him, her face a mask of sorrow. “Twelve dead and a lot of walking wounded, Captain.”

The news made his stomach churn. The Pale Ones would pay for this. “As soon as you’re done with that we need to talk.”

“Vargas, take over for me.”

Stone handed over the work to one of the med techs and led Jared to her office. She closed the hatch behind them. “What’s wrong?”

“The Pale One ship that shot us took Princess Kelsey. She’s in their hands.”

The doctor swore. “Can we get her back?”

“Not right away. Baxter needs several hours to get the drives online. That means she might be implanted or at least in the middle of the process by the time we can get on her trail. If they do something to her, can you undo it?”

The Chief Medical Officer shook her head decisively. “Not a chance. I can’t even imagine how they implant those things into a human brain. I sure as hell won’t be able to remove one without killing her.”

Jared looked out the clear wall at the people working on the injured. “We have to do something. I can’t let her become one of them. That’s a horror I can’t begin to imagine. What about overriding the programming on the implants?”

“You’ll need to speak with the science team. Doctor Leonard was working on getting power to the implants of the dead Fleet marine we have on board. I haven’t heard anything about their progress. I know they pulled a lot of data off the dead Pale One. He might be able to do something.”

“Where did he set up shop?”

“Down in one of the cargo compartments that we converted to a lab. Jared, I’ll do absolutely everything I can to help her.”

He put his hand on Stone’s shoulder. “I know. We’ll get her back. You’ll need to be ready to go with the rescue team after we flip. Be prepared to restrain her in an augmented state. Take anything you might need. Grab as many people as you need to make it happen.”

“We’ll be ready.”

The cargo areas they’d converted were down in the bowels of the ship near engineering. Jared imagined the scientists had received quite a shakeup. When he walked through the hatch, he saw that he’d been right. They were busily putting equipment back up and recovering various bits of electronics.

Doctor Jerry Leonard saw Jared come in and walked over to meet him. “That was quite the unexpected shock, Captain. It’s a good thing we were all strapped in for the flip. Can we assist with damage control?”

Jared shook his head. “You have more important work to do, Doctor. The Pale Ones captured Princess Kelsey. We’re going after her as soon as we get the drives back online, but they might implant her. I need to know you can do something about that.”

The rail thin scientist blanched. “Dear God. Of course. We’ll do what we can, but the implants are in the brain. We just don’t have the technical ability to remove them without turning her into a vegetable or killing her.”

“Then tell me you can do something about the programming that controls them. The Captain of
Courageous
killed his entire crew to keep some kind of override in the programming from turning them into monsters. Tell me you have the code from the Fleet officers and can reverse what they did.”

“The implants are physically the same. Right down to the model numbers. With Doctor Stone’s assistance, we were able to access the programming code in the Pale One corpse. The units are internally powered and not readily accessible to recharge so they must last far longer than a person’s life span. We’ve disassembled the implants from the marine we brought with us, but hadn’t gotten to attempting to swap the power supplies.”

Jared gave the scientist a steady look. “Then you’d best get busy. We don’t have much time for you to find a solution.”

The man nodded. “It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to put them back together. We were worried they might be damaged if we attempted to power them on, but we don’t have a choice now.”

The scientist strode to a worktable. He opened several clear plastic bins. “I hope it doesn’t matter that we removed them from the bodies. If it tries to access the brains of the dead Fleet personnel and errors out there’s nothing we can do.”

He laid out the odd strands of hair thin wires and circular units the size of a small coin on the table. He put on magnifying goggles and picked up some delicate tools to work on one of the units. “We developed these tools when we saw how the other units had to be disassembled. The method is quite ingenious.”

Jared couldn’t really see anything, but he could determine the man’s progress when he removed a thin shell from each of the three units of the implant. The small object he removed from each with a set of tweezers was about the size of the tip on a writing stylus. If that was a power supply, it was incredible. Just like most things the old Empire had built.

Leonard took the tiny power units from another implant and put them in the first set of implants. Once he had the covers on the units, he grabbed a headset. It had a cable going to a standalone computer. As soon as he taped the last of the three into the headset, the screen started filling with long lines of what looked like gibberish.

“It’s attempting to boot,” Leonard said. “We don’t really need to attach them to the headset. They have effective short-range communication, good for perhaps ten meters, but the transmissions and data throughput are significantly quicker with the headsets in place. Probably why they wore them. It’s online! We wrote a program to access the code and this looks like it’s working.”

“Can you tell what the differences are? Perhaps we can find where the alterations were made and correct them.”

The scientist nodded. “Possibly. It will take a few minutes to collect all the code. If they are similar, we should be able to compare them. We still don’t understand the programming language, though. If the changes to the programming are widespread, I wouldn’t want to go mucking around with it in a living being. I can only imagine what that could do to them.”

“Can you make changes?”

“That remains to be seen. One would imagine there is a mechanism for updates. It probably isn’t something that could happen by accident or perhaps even easily. If I were designing something like this, the access codes to make changes would be hardware specific. Only authorized units could write to these. That authentication would need to be very complex. That said, it might not be impossible to read it directly off the hardware itself.”

“Would recovering installation hardware be helpful?”

The man nodded enthusiastically. “Absolutely! It would be optimal if you could recover reference material, the actual programming, or installation machinery. We should be able to access it and replace whatever malicious code we find. One of my graduate students is my coding expert and he’s the one examining the Pale Ones programming.”

“You brought a graduate student? I thought everyone on that ship was a doctor.”

“Carl Owlet is a true genius with computers. I’m surprised that Doctor Cartwright didn’t assign him to
Courageous
. He might once they are ready to bring the main computer back online.”

The computer beeped and Leonard examined the screen. “There are some rather significant areas where the code is different. I think we need to let Carl take a look.” He brought out his communicator and summoned the other man.

Make that boy. If Carl Owlet were old enough to shave regularly, Jared would eat his beret. The graduate student looked about sixteen standard years old.

Owlet listened intently as Doctor Leonard filled him in on recent developments and then sat at the computer. He typed on the remote keypad so quickly that Jared could barely see his fingers. He typed more quickly than most people spoke.

The screen split into two displays and began scrolling through the code. The computer had highlighted many areas. “This is definitely the same base code as in the Pale Ones, Captain. I can see what looks like version markers buried in the comments. The repetitive pattern of the matches tells me that someone compromised the original code. There also seems to be some extra code in this marine implant.”

“Can you tell what the extra code does?”

The boy shook his head. “No, sir. I’ll keep working on it.”

“Are there too many changes to correct the original code?”

The boy nodded. “Manually correcting the code requires understanding how it interacts with the hardware and I’m not there yet. I doubt many old Empire people really knew this in any detail. It would take teams of dedicated programmers working for many years to develop code of this complexity. I know that I wouldn’t want to trust my brain to something that hadn’t gone through rigorous testing.”

“But you think they did update the code in implanted hardware?”

“I’ve been examining the hardware for the last few days and found a method to make the memory writable. None of the equipment we have could do it, but something must exist. System updates after installation. Security patches, though obviously that didn’t work out so well.”

Jared considered that. “The old Fleet personnel were captured and their implants were reprogrammed. That makes it possible. Hopefully we can find the equipment in question. I hope we find Kelsey before anything happens, but we can’t count on that.

“Doctor, Mister Owlet, I want you both to be ready to assist Doctor Stone when we recover the Princess. Start thinking about how we update the programming because we may have to try.”

Reality slowly intruded on Kelsey’s oblivion. The first thing she recognized was cold metal pressed against her cheek. Painfully cold. It actually felt good compared to the throbbing in her head. She’d had bad headaches before, but this one threatened to crush her brain. Every pulse of her heart sent fresh agony through her skull.

She started to move, but stopped when she heard grunting. That didn’t sound like one of the marines. She doubted the Royal Fleet officers communicated that way, either. That only left the Pale Ones.

That meant she was in very, very deep trouble.

Kelsey cracked an eyelid and tried not to moan when a shaft of intense brightness burned her retina. Okay, the light only seemed bright because of her headache, but the pain made her eyes water.

Clarity came after a minute of focusing. A man’s arm lay in front of her face. The color of the uniform told her it was one of her marines and he wasn’t moving.

Definitely not good.

She looked over him and saw two men facing one another. Pale Ones, presumably. Both wore what amounted to filthy loincloths. Why they weren’t just naked she had no idea. Hideous scars covered their bodies. Red, puckered lines trailed down each of their limbs. Even their fingers had horrible scarring.

Both had long, matted hair that hung below their waists. If either of them saw a comb, she’d be willing to bet he tried to eat it. They were as filthy as their clothes. She could smell their stench from across the room.

They faced one another and communicated by snarls and grunts. At least she assumed they were communicating. Or they might be posturing for dominance. Maybe both.

The marine’s arm moved and he groaned. He rolled over and sat up. That got the attention of the Pale Ones. They both snarled in his direction.

The marine, Corporal Brand, climbed unsteadily to his feet. He reached for his weapon, but his holster was empty. He swore and staggered toward the Pale Ones, obviously intending to take them hand-to-hand.

That worked out surprisingly poorly for him. The nearly naked men fell into what looked like martial arts stances. One grabbed the marine’s fist as he swung it and twisted him around, while the other kicked low and swept the marine off his feet. The one holding Brand’s fist kicked him hard in the gut.

The Corporal tried to fight, but they simply tossed him back onto the deck beside Kelsey where he lay moaning.

“Brand? Are you okay?” She sat up, but didn’t climb to her feet. The two Pale Ones watched her, growling, but didn’t attack.

The Corporal clutched his stomach. “That guy kicks like an avalanche. They barely look like they can stand. How can they fight like that?”

“Was that some kind of martial art?”

“It sure looked like it, but that makes no sense.”

They waited and the rest of marines slowly regained consciousness. The Pale Ones had taken their weapons, both pistols and knives. She had no idea how a savage knew what a gun was.

The two Royal Fleet officers sat against the wall, terror clearly etched on their faces. Talbot eyed the Pale Ones for a minute. “We can take them together.”

Kelsey had been examining the room. It was obviously a ship’s compartment, but there were no furnishings. It was easily as big as the briefing room on
Athena
. They could pile dozens of people in here without too much crowding. The only exit was a single hatch behind the two savages.

One of the Pale Ones howled and beat his chest. That was definitely a challenge.

The hatch opened and a short woman stepped inside. She was also a Pale One based on her personal hygiene. She wore a loincloth similar to the males. She wore no top and it was evident she never had. She looked a decade older than the two males.

The woman shoved the man who’d howled, sending him staggering to the side. He postured at her, but didn’t counterattack.

The marines rose as a unit and charged the three Pale Ones. Sergeant Talbot actually laid a solid hit on the woman’s head.

It barely fazed her. She grinned and caught his second punch in her hand, stopping him dead in his tracks. Kelsey couldn’t see what she did, but it was fast. Talbot went flying over the woman’s shoulder and into the wall. The bone jarring impact made her wince.

The rest of the scene looked like a badly done fight vid. In less than twenty seconds, all the marines were on the deck, which only made them easier to kick.