Operation Orion - Kevin Dockery [85]
“It’s another tunnel, LT,” the electrician’s mate explained. “It was concealed in a coded program, so it took a little searching.” He gestured to the diagram. “It leads from the lower level of this installation, about three klicks into—under, actually—the mountains. But the yeti was right: It’s an underground hangar, and according to this, it contains one fully fueled and space-ready shuttle.”
“All right.” Jackson was elated. He looked around the control room, thinking. “Did you turn up any more data on Tezlac Catal? Or the Pangaea?”
“Well, yes, sir. As to Catal, he’s on record as the CO of this place, but it doesn’t seem like he was here within the last six months. Still, it looks like those pirates were working for him; they’re not so much pirates as privateers, apparently. If they were able to return here with the ‘prize’—and he doesn’t say what that is—they were supposed to bring it to him in some place called the Darius system. I gather that he makes a lot of profit from his operations there; they’re centered on a station called the Bazaar. He moves a lot of slaves through, if I’m reading this right. With respect, he sounds like a real asshole, sir.”
“He is a real asshole,” Jackson confirmed. “Okay. What about the Pangaea?”
“Well, they don’t mention her by name, but they make reference to a target, and it seems to be an Earth ship. That almost has to be our big sister, doesn’t it, sir?” Jackson nodded, and Baxter continued. “All indications are that the ship jumped in the direction of the Darius system that they were talking about. If Catal doesn’t have her already, he might be chasing her.”
“Good work. Anything else?”
“Well, just this, sir. Some of these files were created by the savant himself, apparently. They have a different kind of signature, like he didn’t use keystrokes but just inputted the material directly onto the memory boards. There’s a hatch here on the drive that only he can open, as if he needed to get direct access to the disk without even a thin layer of metal in between. It sounds crazy, I know. Is it even possible? Can he really do that, sir?”
Jackson remembered Dr. Sulati’s speculation that the savant’s powers were in fact some type of electrical signals that he was able to broadcast. He certainly had the ability to interfere with the electrical signals in the brains of his listeners; Jackson had experienced that brutal pain firsthand.
“I’m not sure what he can do, to tell you the truth. But the SOB nearly made me piss my pants when he talked to me, so nothing else would surprise me.” Still, it was an interesting piece of data and suggested that somehow the savant’s powers were caused by creating some sort of electrical impulse with his mind. The question deserved further investigation, but now was not the time for that.
“What about the Eluoi who are still locked up?” Jackson asked Baxter.
The electrician’s mate shrugged. “Hard to say, sir. They’re still alive; you can see that by the IR signature on the schematic. But they have to be breathing some pretty skanky air. They’re not going to be any too lively.”
Jackson realized that the impulse to kill all the sons of bitches was no longer the compelling motivation it had been in the immediate aftermath of Mirowski’s death. He shook his head, suddenly ashamed of his merciless impulse: They were a defeated enemy and deserved to be treated as POWs. “Turn the air back on,” he said to Baxter. “But leave the hatches sealed. We’re getting out of here, and they can have this dump back when we’re gone.”
But then he went on. “Actually, I think the Kyne-Ursa are going to be in charge of this ice rock, at least most of it. They seem to have evolved to function in these conditions, and as far as I’m concerned, they’re welcome to it. And I think they’ll be kindly disposed toward the U.S. Navy if we ever get back here again. It will give them a leg up if we don’t leave the Eluoi a fully functional station. Let’s set a few demolition charges around