Arrival: Chapter 34

  By the time the sims and Armina arrived at the scene, there was already an all-out firefight taking place.  There seemed to be constant discharges of all three kinds of weapons in use, shotguns, laser rifles, and handguns.  Between gun powder residue and damaged electrical systems smouldering, there was a pronounced smoky haze in the air similar to that observed down in the engineering section, but far thicker.  There was shouting and yelling, but it was too chaotically sporadic for them to clearly make out what anyone was actually saying.

  At the end of the corridor leading out of the bridge, the hallway split into two opposing directions.  Halley and the two survivors he’d brought up with him were shooting from around one far corner past the split, and Wiremu and his people were approaching from the other direction.  As they rounded the last corner they saw Halley directly ahead of them and immediately retreated back around the corner from which they’d emerged.  Wiremu opened his scroll and then informed the others: “The mechanism which opens and closes the bridge door has been destroyed.  It’s stuck open and can’t be closed now… they’re just shooting at each other across the hallway and from behind corners.”

  “I wonder how Halley got Asari to open the door in the first place,” Armina asked.   “None of the people I saw there with Halley are technical experts.  From what I understand even if they were, the bridge door is designed to be essentially unhackable isn’t it?” she asked.

  “Absolutely,” Wiremu confirmed.

  “Given the state he’s in,” In-Su suggested, “I doubt it would’ve taken much.  They both wanted the fight didn’t they?  I imagine Halley just taunted him to confront him face to face, and if that didn’t work by itself… he’d probably only need to tell him about Aset.”

  “I could see it,” Neil replied in dismay, “taunting him about being responsible for the death of his son and his wife?”

  “Yeah I think that would do it…” Armina nodded in dark agreement.

  “And then once they’d opened the doors Halley only needed to shoot out the mechanisms in the wall to prevent them from ever closing again,” Wiremu concluded.

  “So?” Neil asked Wiremu, “how you wanna play this?”

  For a moment Wiremu considered his options.  There were no good ones.  “You and Armina backtrack and go flank Halley’s position up the other hallway.   Get a clear line of sight and then just wait for my signal.  When I give it, you distract them whether it takes just yelling at them or if you actually need to fire some warning shots around them.  Don’t shoot to kill unless it becomes absolutely necessary.  You know as well as anyone how invaluable to the mission every single human life is at this point… even their lives.”

  “Of course,” Neil acknowledged.

  They were all distracted by some piece of equipment exploding out of one of the walls in response to being shot at too many times.  The four all felt lucky that as a last resort bunker the bridge was buried in the centre of the habitat ring and was surrounded by multiple sections on all sides between this location and the outer sections which were adjacent to open space.  Fortunately there was very little chance that any of their weapons could penetrate all the way through to the outer walls and expose the section they were in to space.   The two sides enthusiastically shooting at each other sure seemed intent on putting this engineering principle to the test though.

  “Make no mistake that our lives are more important than theirs though,” Wiremu clarified.  “There is to be no sacrificing ourselves for the likes of these bastards.”

  “Naturally,” Neil again acknowledged, but this time with a wink of morbidly playful understanding between the two simulants.

  “At my signal, play your hand and distract them.  At that point In-Su and I will sneak past them and push our way through to the bridge door and get a clear shot on Asari and his people.” 

  The simulated man sighed in dismay.  “Sure wish I had a few flash bangs with me though…” he muttered to himself.  “Would sure make getting through a hell of a lot easier…”

  “Not that kind of mission,” Neil likewise sighed.  “Of course if we’d have somehow known ahead of time, then between the printers and the chemical reserves we certainly could have made one.  There’s a lot we could have done ahead of time if we’d have known to…”

  “I always knew this day would come…” Armina said with a smirk as she produced from her pocket a device which looked suspiciously like a flash bang grenade.   “Meet ‘Doug.’  I made it around the time we entered the system when I first started sensing that the whole mission might go completely sideways on us.   There were rumors going around that Halley might be up to something, and I had in retrospect now some very prudent paranoia.  I suspected Doug here might come in handy someday.”

  Wiremu patted her on the head with great approval as Halley and Asari’s people continued to shout and fire at each other.  “Nice,” he said.  “You’re now officially my favourite human,” he said with an approving smile.

  “So we distract Halley and company while you sneak onto the bridge with Doug’s help,” Neil recounted, “and then what?” he asked.

  Wiremu looked around the corner and thoughtfully threw the grenade up and down in his hand.  “We talk them down,” he plainly stated.

  “Really?   That’s the plan?  We talk them down?” Neil asked incredulously. 

  “Yes.”

  “Uhh… really?”  It was unusual for Neil to so blatantly challenge Wiremu.

  “You have a better idea?” Wiremu asked, getting defensive as he turned around to face his fellow simulant more directly.

  Neil sighed in frustration and rubbed his eyes.  “No.  Certainly not a less lethal one anyways…” he added with an exhausted look in his eyes.   “And if we can’t talk them down?” he asked.

  “Failure is just not an option Neil,” Wiremu coldly stated.  “Because as you just insinuated, Plan B is to just kill them all.”

  “Right…” Neil acknowledged grimly.

  “What about the kill switch?” In-Su asked.

  “Ironic again isn’t it?” Wiremu observed, “that I would insist on having one in the first place, only to now have it be a threat to me personally?”  Wiremu couldn’t help but acknowledge the humour in it, even in their current situation.

  “What kill switch?” Armina asked.  Another bright and loud explosion from out of one of the walls momentarily startled them all again.  They were becoming somewhat numb to the continuous weapons fire, but the occasional electrical explosion still considerably alarmed them if only momentarily.

  “I had a simulant kill switch installed on the bridge,” Wiremu explained.  “Well the original me did.  I, he… we had a bad experience with a sim once and was reluctant to have sims onboard without a kill switch for my safety.  His safety.  Whatever.”

  “You’re right, that is ironic.  Why didn’t I know about it?” she asked.

  “Only the captain, matriarch, and patriarch were ever supposed to know,” Wiremu answered. 

  “So what do we do about it?” Armina asked.

  “Well, we just hope that they’re sufficiently disoriented by your grenade, and that we get a clear shot on them before they realize what’s going on and think to make a move for the switch.  That’s why we need your Dougie here and can’t just try to scroll flash them unconscious; we couldn’t reach the guys on the bridge with it and they’d be tipped off to hit the kill switch.”  There was a function on their scrolls which allowed the device under the right conditions to rapidly flash in such a way that it overwhelmed a person’s visual cortex and knocked them unconscious. 

  “Does the kill switch permanently disable you guys?” Armina asked with understandable concern.

  “No, it basically just switches us off until somebody is kind enough to reactivate us.” Wiremu answered.

  “Would it affect Sadhika down on the planet too?”

  “No, it’s localized to the ship.”

  “Well shit,” Armina replied, not sure what else to say.

  “Like I said, we’ve got a lot of hoping to do,” Wiremu acknowledged.  “You two ready?” he asked of Neil and Armina, who nodded their heads in response.  “Alright, move out.”

  Neil and Armina retreated back down the hall the way all four had originally arrived, and then turned left down an adjacent corridor.  Just as they’d disappeared, a comm request came through Wiremu’s wrist scroll.  He flicked it open and saw Sadhika’s face on the screen.

  “Little busy here Sadhika,” Wiremu hurryingly said.

  “They’re alive!” she exclaimed with excitement.

  “What?   Who’s alive?” Wiremu asked, completely distracted from her in his current situation on the ship.

  “The… they’re alive!  Well some, only some of them are alive, but I thought they were all dead!  They’re not though!  They were just knocked out by them somehow; we think that they may have the ability to secrete a toxin or something through their skin that immediately knocks humans out!”

  “Who does?” Wiremu asked, now trying to catch up with her.

  “The… the indigenous, the squiddies!”

  “Okay well that’s kinda fucked up, but we’ll have to deal with that later…  Exactly how many are still alive down there?” he asked.

  “First it was just Søren, but now there are thirty-one more!  There’s almost a hundred dead on the planet in total…” she reported with a significant drop in her mood, “but not all of them, not all of them!” she reiterated.  “It’s enough Wii, do you understand?  Especially with the seventeen still at the alpha site!”

  “Yes… yes I do.”  He was quiet for a moment.  What she meant was two things.  For one, if everything turned out as well as it possibly could from here on out, there were enough people down there to raise the children left in the dining hall into adulthood as well as to have and raise their own children as well.   Secondly, forty-nine people alive and already on the planet also meant that thanks to their careful genetic diligence en route, if the New Horizon blew up that very moment, there were more than enough people with enough genetic diversity on the surface to theoretically parent a whole civilization if they could survive long enough.

  “Well that’s great, now all we have to do is save the ship,” Wiremu remarked as though that were the easy part.  “Please stand by Sadhika.  Neil and Armina are on their way to confront Halley; I have a feeling this information will help them talk him down.”  Sadhika nodded and was flicked off the screen by Wiremu as he retracted his wrist scroll screen.

  Wiremu turned back to look at In-Su.  “Well, you ready?”

  “No,” he replied in a hurt and scared voice.  “Not at all!”  It sounded like he was crying out to Wiremu.

  The leader looked back and saw In-Su holding his gun exceptionally uncomfortably.  He wasn’t even holding it by its grip.  “I don’t want to hurt anybody!  I’ve never hurt anyone or… or anything in my life!  This is madness!   How could this have ever happened Wii?   How could it all have ever gone so wrong?”

  “In-Su…” Given the situation, Wiremu was sympathetic, but only to a point.   “There’ll be plenty of time to worry about figuring all that out later.  Someday, when this is all long over, there will be plenty of time for analysis, but right now… right now we have to put an end to this conflict.  We can’t let either side win here, neither side can have what they’ve done be validated.  Frankly at this point I’d rather the whole mission be a total failure than to have it succeed by one side winning outright.  They’ve both been so radicalized…” he said, looking out at the continuing chaos again.  “If either side wins… the resulting colony will be far darker than even the other G.S.S. missions were.”

  “I know Wii, I know all that!  I’m just…”

  “Yeah, you’re scared.  I know…   So am I.”

  In-Su nodded timidly.

  “It’s a good thing…” Wiremu offered, trying to be comforting.  He put his hand on In-Su’s shoulder.  “I’d be really worried about you if you weren’t scared, it’s… it’s only human,” Wiremu remarked with a playfully raised eyebrow. 

  In-Su smiled despite himself and shook his head.  “Okay… let’s go.”

   

  “Ready?” Neil asked Armina from behind Halley and his two friends as they kept shooting down the hall towards the bridge.  They could now see that they had two large boxes of ammunition on the floor, and were only now almost through the first box. 

  “You kidding?” She asked with a quiet but confident laugh.  “I’ve literally been training my entire life for this.”

  “Don’t be too enthusiastic,” Neil scolded her, then eyed her a little harder than he had before.  “I’m still hoping we won’t have to kill anybody today.  I need you to have the same attitude.”

  “Yes, of course… I’m sorry.”  She almost seemed ashamed of her previous enthusiasm.

  “We’re in position Wii,” Neil reported through his EAR.  “We have line of sight on Halley and his two friends.  We’re good to go.”

  “We’re ready here too,” Wiremu answered back in his ear.  “One last thing Neil, Sadhika reports that thirty-two people survived the battle,” Armina, who was listening in on their channel through her own EAR squeezed Neil’s arm in response to the unexpected good news, “including Søren.” 

  “That could be very useful,” Neil observed.

  “Yeah, I figured.”

  Neil thought about it for a moment, and then said: “Alright, Wii.  We’re ready.”

  “Good.   Go.”