[Strategia_In_Ultima]

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---------------PART TWO: THE ABYSS---------------


-----CHAPTER ONE: SPIRITUS EX MACHINA-----

When Heggson regained consciousness several minutes later, he’d got a splitting headache and a major problem. He saw Tamarillho was not in the airlock anymore. OK. Two major problems. He saw she locked him in the airlock and disabled the comms panels in the airlock, and she took his. Three major problems. He looked in the tool compartment. No cutting torch. And anyway, there shouldn’t be a cutting torch here. He did, however, see a DHK-19 reactive interference device.

A super-flexible bouncing ball.

Oh well. At least they’d detect it from the bridge.

He immediately regretted using the ball after he’d thrown it at one side of the airlock. It now bounced all across the airlock with speeds exceeding that of the average interceptor.

By the time his crew got him out of the airlock, he had a splitting headache, two major problems and several hundred newly-acquired bruises. The DHK-19 needed to be destroyed by a round from a security guard’s rifle.

“Lock down all shuttle bays and lifeboat docks! I want security sweeps of the entire ship! Initiate broad-band wide-range internal scan! Now!”
“Sir?”
“We’ve got a ten-years-dead officer running around on the ship!”
“What?!?”
“You heard me! We’ve picked up Tamarillho!”

*****

Commander (as she still saw herself) Tamarillho, meanwhile, was pretty much panicking wildly. She had expected to find a shuttle bay near the airlock, but she couldn’t find one. On top of that, judging from the sounds of the reactor, the engines and some other device, she was headed for the inside of the ship, not the outside, where the shuttle bays, the lifeboat docks and her escape were. She knew she was captured, but by whom she had no idea. It must obviously be a ship in league with whomever ordered the Kent into the Devonshire system.

But why was the ship so empty?

And why did it look so strange?

It was like no ship she’d ever been on or seen images or design schematics of. The corridor she stood in looked like a normal starship corridor alright, but more modern. And what was this strange thing about the layout? She couldn’t make out at all where the hell on the ship she was, except for the fact that she knew she was headed to the inside of the ship. For all she knew, she was on a ship that wasn’t even known to the Commonwealth.

And speaking about strange things, what was the blue stuff outside the airlock’s outer seals?

*****

“We’ve got her! Human form in a nano-vacc suit headed roughly to the power room! Sector neg-B pos-5, C-deck!”
“Security to C-deck, sectors neg-C to neg-A, pos-4 to pos-6!”
“Team Beta here! We’ve spotted her!”
“Confirmed, Beta’s in neg-B pos-5 C-deck too, sir!”
“Apprehend her! Do not use lethal force!”
“Yessir! C’mon! Go go go go go!”

*****

Tamarillho was panting heavily. She was being chased by a detachment of security guards, with heavy rifles it seemed. Where the hell was she? How did she know there wasn’t another security detachment around the corner, waiting for her to run into their outstretched arms?

Answer: she didn’t. She did know, however, that if she stopped running, she’d certainly be killed, and she didn’t want that to happen.

So, she kept running, despite the fact that she was almost out of breath, and her legs were buckling below her.

Correction, her legs collapsed below her.

*****

“We’ve got her! Seems like she’s too exhausted to put up a fight!”
“Take her to the briefing room.”
“Roger.”

*****

Tamarillho was still exhausted when the guards took, almost carried, her into what seemed to be the briefing room of the ship. Sitting at the head of the briefing table was the same lieutenant she knocked out in the airlock. He had several rather large bruises in his face. She knew for certain she didn’t have that much power in her fists.

“Captain, take a seat.”

It took a while for her to process the fact that by Captain, the lieutenant meant her. She took a seat hesitatingly, then, once she was sure it wasn’t rigged with high explosives, crashed into the seat and slumped heavily.

“Do you know what has happened since your..... err..... demise?”
“Wh... wh... why?”
“Do you have any idea how long it has been since you rammed that Kent?”
“What... what do you mean?”
“Captain, you died when you rammed an unidentified modifier Kent warship threatening a civilian evac convoy..... ten years ago.”

Her mouth fell open as she tried to process what this young man had just said.

“Ten..... ten..... ten years?”
“Ten years.”
“But..... but how..... why.....”
“We don’t know. We just detected you in the Devonshire warp point.”
“But that’s not possible! You can’t read data from a scanner while you’re blued out!”
“That’s the beauty of this ship; it’s the first civilian – no, civilitary actually – ship with the new Tanner-shift compensators.”
“Tanner-shift what? Civilitary? What the hell are you talking about?!?”
“Tanner-shift compensators generate an insulation field that keeps the crew of the ship from bluing out.”
“Oh. But what about this..... civilitary thing?”
“Civilitary is a new phrase. After your run-in with that Kent, CC decided freighters needed more weaponry. This is the first ship that is a “hybrid” freighter-warship. It’s built like a freighter, and serves as a freighter, but has the firepower and armor of a smaller warship, and if necessary can serve as defence if there’s a sudden attack on the system.”
“So they’re going to refit the entire merchant fleet to become warships?”
“Not warships, heavily-armed freighters. But yes, in several decades the entire merchant fleet is going to be this heavily armed.”

*****

After several hours of getting up to speed with events and advances in the ten years of her death, Tamarillho went to her assigned quarters (the captain’s quarters, vacated by Heggson after her arrival – completely voluntarily, but with some regret) deeply in thought.

Ten years. Ten years. She still couldn’t comprehend it. Had it really been that long? And how did she come back to life? And what was the business with the nanos in her suit? Something strange was going on here. Definitely. Something very strange.

-----END OF CHAPTER ONE-----