He knew it was Alice. Jake wasn’t one of those people who were always conscious of how different people made him feel just by being in the room, but there was no mistaking the feeling his daughter transmitted to him as anything but what it felt like to be near her when she was alive as a human. There was a subtle difference he couldn’t ignore, however. She seemed more innocent. Jason’s message had come true.
The Warlord had done her job, bombarding the area then dropping off her full compliment of marines. Joyboy and a couple of other fighters on loan from The Skyguard meted punishment out to any enemy soldiers who ran from the crater, or managed to somehow escape the devastation of the initial bombardment.
“Warlord, head out, assist our air cover with clearing Port Rush,” Captain Valent said into his comm.
“On our way, we’ve got four more mines together, so we’re going to take care of a few drop pods,” Frost said.
“Just watch for survivors, I don’t want the Warlord to become known for collateral damage.”
“Aye, watch my aim, got it,” Frost replied as the Warlord’s engines fired, sending the battered ship towards the Triton settlement.
“Since when do you care about public opinion?” Stephanie asked, amused. She was supervising her marine techs as they hacked into one of the installation’s secondary doors.
“I had a spare second,” Jake replied.
“You know Frost doesn’t want collateral damage, either. He actually wants to be seen as a hero someday. He’ll never let on, but I think that’s more important to him than cash.”
Jake didn’t know how to respond to that, but his expression of surprise must have spoken volumes.
“Don’t tell him I said anything,” Stephanie said.
“No problem,” Jake replied. He spotted Alice running down the inside of the crater, firing several shots behind her with two pistols. A Ramiel fighter swooped down firing, taking care of whatever Alice was firing at.
Alice faced forward, and Jake could see her smile from over fifty metres away as she looked straight at him. She was all teeth, cheeks, and eyes.
“She’s speeding up,” Stephanie said. “And I’ve never seen anyone run that fast.”
Jake braced himself and deactivated the auto-hardening system in his armour.
“You’re sure it’s her?” Stephanie asked.
“Absolutely.”
“She’s not slowing down,” Agameg said, his eyes widening. “A collision is certain.”
An excited squeal a second before impact was the only warning. The force of her enthusiastic embrace pressed him two steps backwards, and he wrapped his arms around her. She was more than a full head shorter, and seemed so small, disappearing into his long coat with her arms tightly wrapped around him.
Alice breathed as though she was recovering from a very long run, and she rested against him. Everyone watched silently as father and daughter were reunited, until a surprised Agameg said, “You’ve shrunken. I’ve verified with scans. You are definitely smaller.”
She laughed and stepped away from Jake, wiping tears away, still out of breath. “I think the framework picked up on me wanting to have a childhood, so when I died here the first time, it made me a lot younger. I’m just glad I didn’t come back as a five year old.”
Jake looked at her and definitely saw someone who might be fifteen, perhaps sixteen. She held a pair of pistols like she was born to them though, and there were so many things about the way she stood, her general manner, that seemed familiar. He put his hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry no one got to you sooner,” he said.
“S’okay,” Alice replied, slipping in under his arm. “I’ll take a break here and head back out. Maybe not alone this time, but I know I can help clear up Port Rush and start rescuing people. There are a lot of trapped folk out there.”
Jake was surprised and irritated at the same time. “We’ll start arranging teams once we’re finished here,” he replied.
“That was your ‘and that’s an order’ voice,” Alice said, crossing her arms, taking a step away and regarding him defiantly.
“Whoa,” Stephanie said, almost stepping between them. “Okay, when we’ve cleared this bunker, we’ll get properly geared up with medical supplies and start clearing out Port Rush, helping some people. Until then, we’ve got a target in there.”
“Hampon,” Jake reinforced.
“You’re right, I want a piece of him. Killing Meunez wasn’t enough,” Alice said. She adjusted her vacsuit so two flimsy holsters formed and dropped her blade shooters into them. “Just get those doors open and me and my dad will go get ‘em.”
“We’re doing this carefully,” Jake said. “There’s no telling how prepared he is.”
Alice nodded and sighed. “As long as I get a shot in.”
The doors opened, and Jake turned towards them. “I’ll take point, you fall in with Stephanie and Agameg’s units,” he said, hoping that he wouldn’t meet more resistance.
To his surprise, she rushed in front of him, turned, popped up on tip-toes and kissed him on the cheek. “Aye-aye, Captain!” she chirped before falling in with Agameg’s unit. He pressed the confusion and surprise at the range of attitudes Alice displayed in less than three minutes to the side and activated all the features of his armour. He strode through the doors, drawing his sidearm and paying close attention to his tactical system.
No one came up on the scanners - not a single soldier, framework or crewmember - and his scan results reached down three hallways, into eight different compartments. The armoured entrance hatch slammed together, isolating him from everyone outside. The clank of heavy bolts inside the hull and the smell of smoke told him something worse was going on. He touched the door panel and discovered that the bolts securing the doors were in place, and an emergency security measure welded them there.
He turned and tried to pry the doors apart despite the pain of overexertion. His enhanced muscles made the surrounding flesh feel as though it was ripping. Even with the addition of the enhancements in his armoured vacsuit, he couldn’t get the doors to budge.
“Stephanie, check in,” he said over his comm.
“We’ve got hostiles coming from the other side of this thing, about two hundred,” she said. “Holding them off, but they’ve got-“ her communication garbled and the channel closed.
“They’re dead, Valent,” Hampon’s voice said over the intercom. “Unless you kill me and take control of the frameworks outside.”
He used the intercom system through the door panel to connect to internal security scanners and verified that he was talking to Lister Hampon. Hampon was standing in the absolute centre of the drop pod. Rows of crew seating surrounded a command where he calmly looked up into a security sensor.
Jake removed his hand from the door panel and whirled around. He set his sidearm to burn through metal and fired beside the doorway, where there were two thinner sections of metal to burn through as opposed to the solid door. The thermite rounds hissed, sparked, and burned.
“You won’t get through for another hour that way, the outside of this garrison ship is a metre thick,” Hampon said. “You’re going to have to face me if you want to save your people.”
“Watch what you wish for,” Jake said. He knew Hampon was right, and there were no other options. He reset his Violator Handgun and used his connection to the door panel to find a map of the installation. As soon as he knew how to get to Hampon, he rushed down the hallway, watching his corners. There was no telling how Hampon was manipulating the security systems. Jake could only see what his opponent wanted him to.
The darkened halls all led to the central lifts. An emergency shaft running parallel to them would take him down. He was passing into the central chamber when one of the bulkhead doors slammed down on top of him, driving him to his knees. He could feel Hampon in the ship systems, forcing the computer to override safety systems, and pushing the motors to press the heavy door down.
He heard his knees pop as the motors worked harder, his vacsuit warned him that the synthetic muscle built in was being pushed to near failure as he fought the door. “It’s time to stop using your body as a blunt instrument, Mister Valent,” Lister Hampon said. “Or is it Valance? I remember when you were just a pile of synthetic bones, an experiment waiting to happen.”
Jake hated the fact that he was right. There were so many things he could do that he barely understood. The motors in the door struggled, whining as he pushed back. All he could physically do was keep the door from crushing him for another minute at best, and hope the motors burned out.
“Use your comm node, Dad!” he heard his daughter in his mind.
“Don’t have one,” he replied aloud.
“No cheating!” Hampon said. “No outside transmissions!”
A mental image of Alice’s communications node appeared before she was cut off and he realized that it was the doorway to everything he needed. “Gotcha,” he said as he forced his framework body to create a node exactly the same as Alice’s. As soon as it came online he could feel his vacsuit, the systems in his command and control unit and so much more without any distraction. He was suddenly living in two worlds at once, connected to everything electronic and wireless as though they were nothing more than external appendages.
With a thought, the door stopped pressing down for a half second, enough time for him to get out from beneath it. He could feel the lifts ahead, and see a pair of heavily armoured Order Knights, trained framework soldiers that he’d never seen before, but he had the details he needed to know they’d slow him down. They could even kill him if he assaulted them head on. They had the firepower. He tried to communicate with their control nodes, but discovered they had the ability to resist him, and they sensed him trying to assume control.
They were coming.
Jake rushed the lift doors firing all the way, weakening the metal. The Order Knights surged into the centre from an adjacent hallway firing high-powered energy rifles that raised the ambient temperature to over six hundred degrees after the first volley. Two struck Jake’s shields, reducing them to twenty percent power.
He didn’t bother firing back, but tossed a pair of inferno grenades in their direction before bursting through the red-hot elevator door. Jake fell down the shaft, missing the car two levels below and falling on top of the car four levels down to its right. Fire filled the shaft, an aftermath of the primary explosion that would either completely incinerate the Order Knights or force them to regenerate for several minutes. At the very least they’d return to life with no armour or weaponry.
Jake was unscathed; his suit was made to compensate for long falls, hard impacts, and the heat he was exposed to. His shields were slowly recharging. The car he landed on started moving up rapidly, and Jake leapt to an emergency ladder. Another small lift was moving into place between him and the entry to the third level. He commanded it to move, and found Hampon in the system. “I’ve been waiting for this for a long time,” he said through Jake’s communicator. “Those Knights are a result of what we’ve learned from you, and soon they’ll add the intelligence and leadership the rest of our framework soldiers are lacking.”
Jake felt Hampon connect to his neural node. It was as if a crushing hand was closing around his mind. “Looking to get your nose bitten off again?” he asked. Hampon’s hold weakened and the pressure disappeared.
Jake reached back the way Hampon’s signal came and struck a solid data wall with heavy password protection. He was hiding behind the mobile garrison’s main computer. He could see it on the fourth level, behind a pair of Order Knights who took cover behind a powerful one-way energy shield.
“You lose concentration when you get emotional,” Jake said to distract Hampon as he drew his nanoblade hilt. He turned it on, the long black blade came into being and Jake activated the fourth level doors. He cloaked and swung into the hallway.
“A cloak suit won’t help you, I can see you wherever you go,” Hampon said.
“I’m betting you didn’t give your Knights the ability to use computer systems. That’s too much power to give a pawn,” Jake replied as he ran along one side of the hallway. “They won’t see me coming.” There was only a small glimmer of hope that he was right, but he knew it was foolish. Instead of charging into the middle of the data systems centre, he took a left into an open compartment. The schematics told him the interior walls were thin, that there were several rooms adjacent with similar features. It would give him space to manoeuvre. More importantly, it would give him a place to frustrate Hampon.
Putting his sense of urgency aside, he switched his cloaking systems to shied mode and calmly sat down on the bed. “If I were a complete idiot, I’d charge in there. Instead, I’m going to wait them out. I can’t approach this situation while you have the advantage.”
“What?” Hampon replied. “Your people are dying,” he said, offering a feed of what was going on outside. Five order Knights led an assault against the marines from the Warlord. The Warlord crew made their own cover with energy shields and trenches dug with shaped charge grenades. Half the marines were dead, their ravaged corpses near the main entrance to the compound.
Beam weapons fired by three Order Knights super-heated one of the Warlord’s engine pods as it swooped in to support the troops, forcing it to retreat. His daughter was amongst the Order of Eden soldiers, jumping between them at close range, firing her pistols constantly as she used them as cover.
“How long can they survive?” Hampon asked. “How long can your daughter keep moving as she has since she landed on Tamber? The Knights will eventually fire into their own soldiers to kill her, then they will return her corpse to me so she regenerates in one of my prison cells. I could learn a lot by dissecting her.”
He tried to compartmentalize his emotions as he watched Stephanie and Agameg lead the marines they had left into a round of return fire that took out dozens of Order soldiers. It wasn’t enough, there were over a hundred left, and the armour of the Order Knights repelled most of their fire. Grenades were thrown, but they got butted back or shot out of the air by circular attack drones hovering overhead.
Alice was caught in the open for less than a second, but it was enough for an Order Knight to fire his beam weapon and sever her left arm. It didn’t stop her. She surged at the Order of Eden soldiers as her arm regenerated, screaming savagely as she put soldiers between her and the Knights and killed her way through their ranks.
Blocking the transmission was the hardest thing Jake had ever done, but the final image it had to share with him was Agameg, leaning over to assist a fallen soldier. He didn’t see the grenade fall right behind him, and in a flash, there was nothing left but a scorched hole in the ground.
Jake raged, surging to his feet.
“I’ll spare them, halt the attack if you surrender to me, give me full access to your neural node,” Hampon offered.
“There’s something you don’t understand,” Captain Valent said. “You forgot to install a soul when you built me, and anger found a home where that should have been.” Jake let his anger steel him, drive him to concentration, and he reached out to the entire garrison until he could feel all the systems at once. “Jonas lived with anger after getting back from his first war. He learned how to temper it on the First Light, and I learned how to be angry on the Samson. I’m at my best when I’m furious.” He could feel Hampon in the system, reaching out through the main computer. Jake clutched the systems surrounding it and reduced Hampon’s reach as if he were a flaming taper that he only had to grip in his fist to reduce to an ember. “I’m coming for you.”
He stuck a pair of shape charge grenades to the ceiling, set the timer for five seconds, took the rest of his incendiary grenades out of his pocket then ran across the hall, throwing all five of them at the foot of the shield protecting the Order Knights. Jake turned all the garrison’s systems on, drawing power away from the shield protecting the main computer core and ducked behind a primary bulkhead.
Explosions ripped through the garrison, and Jake knew the shield for the computer was down. He could sense that the diminished shield was enough to protect the Order Knights from the explosion. They were ready for him.
The thin walls between the administration rooms and crew quarters were misshapen and shredded by the force of the explosion. Jake ran as quickly as he could, firing between the Order Knights towards the computer core’s main column.
The enemy soldiers fired rapidly, scoring several shots on Jake through the gaps in the walls. The last pair of energy rounds struck Jake in the shoulder and arm, overheating his armour and burning him to the bone. His framework system shut the surrounding nerves down while he regenerated, but not fast enough to keep him from feeling the initial pain and screaming.
He forced himself to leap towards the hole he’d blasted in the celling in the cabin across the hall, and barely caught it with his working hand. He hurriedly pulled himself up and scrambled away from the hole.
The shots he’d fired at the computer core had hit their mark. Jake could reach Hampon directly. He was no longer hiding behind the ship computer, or manipulating the communications systems leading outside. He stood up and marched down the hall towards him. “I’m coming to grant your death wish, Hampon,” Jake said, fighting for a grip on the neural node he felt inside the man’s mind.
An Order Knight stepped into view at the end of the hallway. Its mind was completely invisible to Jake. He narrowly dodged a searing bolt of energy, ducking into a side room. He knew he’d find no lengthy reprieve there. Jake turned up his suit’s strength augmentation and charged the thin wall between him and the Knight, ripping through the cheap metal as though it were tissue paper.
One shot struck Jake in the side. His armour protected him from most of the burn, but pain shot through his left side. He collided with the Order Knight and caught him behind the knee with his foot as he pushed him to the deck. Jake followed him down, shoving his rifle aside and rapid firing his sidearm at the neck of the soldier.
The Order Knight punched upwards and caught Jake full in the faceplate. The single blow dented the protective metal inward and snapped Jake’s head back so hard that he felt it in his shoulders. He struggled to get control of the soldier, and needed all his strength to pin its arms against its chest as violently sparking rounds from his pistol burned through the Knight’s armour. The Knight twitched and writhed as the thermite burned into its neck and chest.
Jake picked up the fallen Knight’s rifle and shot at it until it was reduced to a white hot smouldering pile. It took less than twelve seconds. He tried to turn towards the hall leading to Lister Hampon and discovered he couldn’t move.
“I have you, Jacob. Rage may fuel you,” he said as he commanded Jake to walk down the hall into the dark seating area, “but violence distracts you.”
Jake struggled to regain control, fighting the vice holding his mind. “You won’t imprison me for long,” Jake said. “I’ll always find a way to escape, and I’ll never stop hunting you.”
“I know.”
He became aware of his hands moving over the rifle, changing the settings on the Knight’s weapon to overload and explode in a contained area.
“That’s why I’m going to destroy you,” Hampon said. “Some of us need to kill for our freedom. You never had to. You could have walked away from your fight at any time. You could have been free, but you turned on your old masters like a rabid dog instead.”
The rifle’s power systems began to transfer energy to the pulse emitter, building a charge that would go critical in less than a minute. He didn’t allow himself to be baited into the conversation Hampon was trying to start. Jacob Valent had few regrets, and they were none of Lister Hampon’s business.
He looked at the man standing in the middle of a room made for dozens of crewmembers to control and monitor a small army. He was as tall and angular as Jake remembered, perhaps a little younger. Hampon had a talent for looking composed, that hadn’t changed, and it gave Jake an idea. “You’ve always been alone, haven’t you?”
“What?” Hampon asked, caught off guard by the off-topic question.
“On the Overlord when I met you, at the head of the Order, and even before, always alone.”
Jake felt Hampon’s control slip a little and regained control for long enough to move his arms and twitch in another direction, but Hampon had him again before he could throw the rifle and run. He’d have to try something else that didn’t take as much time.
“You’re so much more intelligent than anyone could have expected,” Lister said, laughing. “I think that’s why-“
“Never got married, never had children, probably goes back all the way to a child on the playground alone, watching the other kids and imagining what it would be like to-”
“You have nothing we haven’t given you!” Hampon burst.
It was just enough of a slip for long enough for Jake to force his framework body to destroy his neural node. Jake deactivated the explosion radius limitation on the weapon’s control panel and tossed the rifle at Hampon.
Jake sprinted for the hole he’d crawled out of. The Order Knights he left behind were ready for him, firing as soon as his feet hit the deck. He took a shot in the left shoulder but ran for the elevator shaft, jumping and catching the ladder with his right.
A wave of pressure and heat washed over him, crushing Jake through the side of the elevator shaft.