The Technician's Fight, Draft 1, CH35

Jeremy kneed the woman who had stabbed him, then punched her in the face. He berated himself as she fell. He had claws. He should have gone for the throat. She didn’t get up, so he allowed himself to look around.

“Alright,” the special ops beta said in Earther, covering the people seated at the controls now that the five guards were dead or subdued. “Regardless of what you’ve been told about us, we are not monsters. You don’t cause us trouble, and we won’t feel compelled to claw you open. Please leave your posts and go through that door.” She motioned to the one Grisnir, and someone from the other pack stood on each side of and the operators did as instructed.

It would be a room without other exits, and someone would have made sure the systems there weren’t working. Someone might have asked him to deal with it, since it was Earther tech, if he hadn’t been fighting, but ripping out wires and boards didn’t require specialized skills.

“Yarika, find us where the prisoners have been taken,” the beta instructed, while Skaram stepped up to Jeremy, taking out her medical pack.

“My mistake,” he told Thur, as his beta joined them, “was that I let my anger cloud my judgment.”

“Evaluating mistakes is for training and after-hunt reports. How is he?”

Skaram checked her medical scanner. “Nothing vital pierced or cut. Molecular blade, so it’s good you brought her down so quickly. Moving with that in you would have opened you up. If she’d angled it correctly, the station’s gravity would have pulled it down and caused the same.” She sprayed a gel around the blade before pulling the knife out. Blood followed, but as soon as it came in contact with the gel, it foamed and expanded.

Jeremy winced as the pressure turned painful, but happy not to be bleeding out.

“Combat readiness?” his beta asked.

“The gel will expand in the wound and seal any nicks that could be a problem. Something for the pain and, so long as he ends up in medical within twenty-eight hours, he’ll be fine.”

“If we aren’t back on the Bane well before that,” someone said, “I’m going to lodge a complaint.”

“To whom?” someone asked.

“The gods, who else? I certainly haven’t pissed any of them to the point where they’d see to it I endure these narrow hallways for a day. Have any of you?” a bunch of negatives in a variety of colorful languages. “Then I’m going to demand to know what they’re doing letting me suffer like that.”

“I want to be present when you do that. I want to see what they do to you for that level of presumption.”

An injection, and the pain became a background sensation.

“Do what you can not to stress the wound,” Skaram said.

“Why, yes,” Jeremy replied. “I’m sure our beta will tell me to stay out of every coming fight.”

“Since I don’t want your Heart pissed at me,” Thur said. “I just might.”

“You even think of doing that,” Jeremy replied. “And I’ll be pissed at you.”

Skaram patted their beta’s shoulder. “I’ll share your bed until he gets over his anger.”

“You’re not supposed to side with him,” Jeremy complained. “He has rank, and we don’t.”

“Tell me that overshadows his skills in bed,” she replied, and Jeremy found himself without arguments to counter with.

“And here I thought,” the special ops beta said, grinning. “That you kept your pack all businesslike during hunts. Could it be that you have more of your namesake’s attitude than you like to claim?”

“My namesake doesn’t define me,” Thur replied, annoyed. “And this was stress relief while in a secured location.”

She patted his cheek. “You should let him, then. According to the stories, the father god knows how to have fun.”

Jeremy snorted. “Thur knows how to have fun. You can trust us on that.”

“Before you ask him for a demonstration,” Hunter Yarikaderimi Orshteriptar said, “I might have something.” A wireframe representation of the station appeared in the middle of the command center. Dots littered it, most in groups at intersections surrounding where their last battle had been before they’d taken the less direct, but more discreet, route here.

Jeremy’s attention was drawn to one section of the station by the complete absence of lights. Even the wireframe was dark.

“What’s that?” her beta asked, motioning to the dark area.

“That’s the something in question,” the hunter answered. “I can’t tell you what it is. There is nothing in the system on it. What I can tell you is based on what’s around. If it’s the same layout as the level above and below, that covers six large rooms. Around it are three medical centers, two greenhouses, a small meat-growing production, and three research centers. Haven’t dug deep enough for information on what they research.”

Eyes turned to Jeremy.

“I don’t know. But with them being close to medical, it’s got to be related biology related. I also don’t know about growing the meat and vegetables. There might be a market in them?”

“Maybe not all Earthers like printed meat.”

“Growing it tastes no better,” someone said. “It gets its flavor from the hunt.”

“The white dots are all station personnel,” the hunter continued with a tone of ‘how about we stick to work.’ “Oppositions would be in red.”

“Why are we still there, then?” Thur asked, pointing to the red dots in the center of all the white groups.

“That’s my doing,” a hunter from special ops said. He had something technological covering half his head, including an ear and eye. He had multiple tablets attached to an arm, and was typing on them. “Yol got me the sensor field frequency once we were on board, and I bounced into it, figuring out it worked and spoke to the other systems. When he opened the passageway, I started having it tell everyone we were heading in a different direction. Made sure not to cross them with people, and they’ve been shadowing those.”

“Why aren’t they just attacking?” someone asked.

“They don’t have to hurry, do they?” someone answered. “So long as they prevent us from heading back to the shuttle, they can take as long as they want.”

“And considering what we did to the last pack we encountered, the rest might prefer to let someone else take us on.”

“How sure can you be the prisoners are there?” the beta asked.

“Can’t be certain,” the hunter answered. “But short of them being dead, they’d show up on the sensors if they were anywhere else.”

“How accurate is the data?” Thur asked, studying the projection.

“I’m not changing anything other than our location,” the male said.

“Everything else is real time,” the hunter at the board added.

“They’re going to know the information this provides them is wrong the instant we have to fight one of the packs patrolling those corridors.” He indicated the moving dots around the black area. “Do you have enough information to give us a path that limits the chances we’ll cross them?”

“I’m going to need a lot more time to get this to tell me anything in its past. It doesn’t like talking to me.”

“I only work with the information I gained since Yol gave me access,” the male said. “And we haven’t been here that long.”

“We remove the sensors,” the special ops beta said, “and they don’t have a way to work out where we are.”

“Thank’s for the lack of confidence, Beta,” the male said without anger.

“But it tells them where we are,” Thur counters.

“Where we were,” the beta said. “I’m not saying we blind them now. My hunters can make that happen once we’ve left.”

“I take it back,” the male said. “You do have confidence in me.”

Jeremy agreed with Thur more as he listened to the special ops hunters. He enjoyed camaraderie, but the tone didn’t seem to carry the respect toward their beta and each other Jeremy thought was required for a pack to work well together.

“How likely is it we’ll be on a different path when they head here?” Thur asked.

“I can’t do anything once the sensors aren’t working.” The male said.

“Does it matter?” the other beta asked. “We’ll be closer to the target, and they aren’t going to be expecting it.”

“She makes a good point,” the special ops beta said. “Anything toward the target is an improvement.”

“Agreed,” Thur said. “Get ready to move. Grisnir, make sure they can’t leave that room.”

*

They fell on the Earthers before they had time to react and dispatched them before they could respond. A call for help had gone out, but they were on the move already. The next fight proved harder due to the increased people and them being on alert for an attack. By the time the fight was done, they had a death, three incapacitated hunters and two with injuries grave enough another fight would be deadly. They split the remaining hunters into two groups.

Thur, Trose, and Grisnir were the ones from Jeremy’s pack who continued with him, while Skaram, Natril and Iatirin stayed behind with the others to watch over the injured. With a smaller group, and hunter Yolarimal Rogrotref Karifter’s short-range scanner, they avoided all but the fight as they reached the blacked out section. Fortunately, that group was also low in number, letting them win without serious injuries.

Hunter Yarikkaderimi Orshteriptar overrode the lock, and they entered a medical bay with pods after pods containing people who seemed to be sleeping, but the displays told Jeremy they were in suspended animation; every species, other than Earther, that he knew of was represented.

“No one’s moving in this room or the ones on each side.” Hunter Yolarimal Rogrotref Karifter said. “But more of these.”

“How many?” Thur asked.

“In total, within my range, sixty-three. Just about every species is represented.”

“Earthers?” Jeremy asked.

“No, none of them.”

“What are you thinking?” Thur asked.

“Just that this is something directed at the Federation, so I’m wondering why I was the target of those pirates on the docks.”

“Maybe they just saw an opportunity?” one of the hunters asked.

“Would Earthers think of selling someone who looks like them?”

“If the money’s there, Earthers will do anything,” Hunter Yarikkaderimi Orshteriptar said. “What?”

“That’s rather specific knowledge to have on a species we only have Jeremy as reference,” Grisnir said.

“You watch enough Earther ballads, and you pick stuff up.”

“How can you stand them? I tried, and nothing happens for nearly all of it.”

“I put one on while I code. It’s a couple of hours of something in my periphery I don’t have to entirely focus on, except for the interesting parts.”

Jeremy chuckled. “Movies as background noise. Not something I’d ever think of doing with them.” His humor died as he walked among the unconscious people, noticing electronics on their temples.

“Why would they collect people from the federation?” someone asked.

“Data collection is the only thing I can think of,” another answered.

“Do you think the things attached to their heads access their brains?”

“That’s fiction.”

“No,” Thur said. “The Earthers have that kind of tech. They used it on Jer.”

“This?”

“It wasn’t like this,” Jeremy said. “They put me in a chair, bulky thing over my head. I don’t know how they made me see what I saw or programmed the fear and hate.”

“The scans of the components,” Hunter Yarikkaderimi Orshteriptar said, “indicate they used a form of electromagnetic broadcast to insert the information, but we haven’t been able to recreate most of the components used, so we can’t be certain.”

“I thought the Federation had forbidden access to that information,” Thur said.

The two special ops hunter exchange a look, then she said, “I convinced one of their techs to let me look at what they had.”

“Why?” Thur asked, sounding suspicious.

“Because I wanted as much information as possible to keep Hunter Jeremy Bradshaw safe.”

“I wasn’t a hunter then,” he pointed out, and questioned what she said. Recreating technology required more than taking a peek at reports.

“You are one of us, one of the crew, one of our people. We keep you safe. And to do that, we will get whatever we need. Do whatever we have to. And it’s not just you, because of who your Heart is. We will go this far for anyone of our people. You’re simply the first to find himself in something this odd. The few times before I’ve had to do work on Federation stations was part of getting blackmailers to stop targeting one of the civilians on the ship.”

Thur was looking at him, but shook his head before Jeremy could ask what that was about. “Let’s proceed—”

“Jeremy?” an Earther asked, standing in the open doorway.

Jeremy stared; the incongruity of seeing that male here making realizing who he was take longer than it should have.

“Omar?”