It is incredibly difficult to draw a breath through the pain and the sense of pleasure flooding into an aged body.
It feels as if every movement you make meets the wave of a turbulent river, whose waters and current surpass you in strength. They drag you along, making your mind boil with helplessness and rage at your own infirmity.
You can neither inhale nor exhale.
The body is seized by a cramp; the limbs turn ice-cold.
And after that, you will drown...
Except everything she was experiencing now only remotely resembled what her mind was picturing.
Her body was filling with strength; clarity of thought was returning. She could feel every particle of her body. But this same strength paralyzed her, not allowing her to even move.
Her vision, which had suffered from long and slow aging, was returning to normal, focusing... and then its clarity vanished. Her eyeballs rolled back involuntarily, preventing her from discerning what was happening around her.
Her hearing did not obey her; her sense of touch seemed to have vanished... That's what happens when you find yourself in a vacuum without protection. It's impossible to accelerate; there is no point of support; there is only silence all around, and no matter to be felt...
And then, everything stopped abruptly.
Only pain and a crushing sensation in the chest remained.
With difficulty, she managed to wrench her consciousness from the narcotic euphoria and focus her gaze...
...on vertical pupils looking straight into her soul. Pale green skin, hanging strands of snow-white hair, the snarl of almost transparent fangs lining the oral cavity...
"We didn't make it!" she realized. Her thought processes were still sluggish after stasis, but her reflexes had always been top-notch.
Her hearing returned almost simultaneously with the harsh sounds of an alarm. The faint flickering of emergency lighting and painfully familiar notes bit into her refreshed mind like a Wraith. Which was just then pulling its hideous palm away from her body. A lump tightened in her throat.
"Hello, Ancient," the Wraith rasped in her face, pulling its hand from her chest in an emphatically predatory motion and displaying its feeding sucker. "I received unforgettable emotions from you... Such power... You are likely the commander of this pathetic tub?"
Her advanced physiology allowed her to do many things unavailable to ordinary humans.
For example, twisting on the narrow bed of the stasis pod, crossing her legs around the life-sucker's neck. He only just tried to grab her ankles and yank her off him, stunned by the move.
"Stop!" the vertical pupils widened, and the Wraith's hands flew out to the sides. Oh yes, he recognized this move. Ancient carrion. "I am on your...!"
"Lady," a man in a strange gray uniform and a worried look stepped from the shadows nearby. Short haircut, economical movements—a fighter. Most likely an entourage from among the worshippers. "He saved..."
But she was already unstoppable.
Bending at the waist, the young woman slammed the heel of her open palm into the Wraith's nose. Simultaneously, as his nasal cartilage and bones crunched, the Ancient, in one leap using the Wraith as a point of support, moved to his right. All while carefully shifting the balance of their bodies...
The calculation was perfect.
Her body slid along the edge of a wall corner, but the Wraith slammed into it with the very characteristic sound of an impact.
A growl erupted, and the Wraith, now on his knees, gave her a look full of fury. A second before her spinning back kick sent him into oblivion.
"What are you doing?!" the man cried out, taking a step toward her. The Ancient acted without thinking.
A step forward, a sharp tilt of the body in the same direction. Her reflexes worked perfectly—she landed on her splayed palms, shifted her weight, and with all her available strength, kicked both feet into the man's chest and head. He flew back to the wall, tucking into a ball. And immediately, he lunged into an attack.
He hoped to catch her off guard as she rose to her feet, coming out of the roll.
A block of a straight punch to the face with her left hand, a counter straight punch to the face with her right fist. Again, and again. The opponent covered his face, but that was exactly what she wanted. A hook to the right kidney, a cry of pain, and the Wraith worshipper's body arched. His face involuntarily moved outside the guard of his arms.
A precise strike with her fingers to the carotid artery area, and the second opponent collapsed onto the deck. The senior officer stasis bay was cleared of enemies.
Senior Officer Trebal looked with a hint of sadness at the two other empty pods. The Commander's second and third assistants should have been sleeping here. But they had died. Ten thousand years ago.
Another man with a weapon and in the same uniform as the one she had just laid out appeared in the doorway.
"Kirik!" he exclaimed, rushing to the unconscious man. "What happened here?!."
He noticed the woman in the white Lantean uniform too late. Officer Trebal considered wasting her strength and combat skills on him unnecessary. That would have taken three seconds.
Paralyzing him with the stun weapon hanging at her waist took only one second.
Stepping over another senseless body, the senior officer of the battleship Aurora stepped out into the corridor. Looking around and finding no one else present, she listened to the audio accompaniment of the active self-destruct system.
"You will pay dearly for this, Mikhail!" she promised, approaching the nearest console. She needed information on the traitor's location.
And within two seconds, she was running toward the battleship's main computer bay.
***
"We only have seven minutes left!"
Ikhaar informed me of this just as I was removing the last set of data crystals from the cavity intended for the main computer.
"And?" I asked calmly. "Are we running late for something?"
"We need to pack the crystals, and for that, we need to find a transport container, material..." he started muttering.
"Snap out of it, kid," I advised, removing the crystals one by one from the holder and tucking them into my bag. "Everything we need is already on us."
Strange kid, this one.
Like the rest of the crew, except for the Commander, he was a representative of one of the younger races assimilated by the Ancients. Quite smart, quick-witted, and resourceful. His ideas for using the Jumpers to evacuate the Aurora's crew members had been extremely useful.
We managed to evacuate the depressurized section with the technicians—the maintenance staff, mechanics in our terms. Quite educated, technically literate, they know what to fix, how, and how to eliminate problems. Thirty-two people out of the thirty-five allotted by the roster for the depressurized section. Three more were killed during the flight by micro-asteroids.
Through the hangar and the transporter chamber, we pulled out another seventy-five just like them—the second and third sections on the ship. Moreover, I had assumed that only three, maybe four pods would fit in the transporter. Ikhaar demonstrated how to move six at once.
And now I understand why the Aurora's Commander said to bring him and his section back to life first. Roughly speaking, they were the best on the ship; they had quite strong Ancient genes... and they were also quite clever sons of bitches.
I would never have guessed what they actually did. The tenth person revived turned out to be the ship's pilot. Well, sort of a pilot... those functions belonged to the Captain and his assistants. But the defrosted guy had clearly taken starship piloting courses.
To be honest, I don't know whose idea it was to set up a conveyor belt for transferring people through the starships' hangars, but according to Alvar, who was receiving the pods in the Hippaphoralkus's hangar, that's exactly what it looked like.
If you have a breach in your ship's hangar, and a need to quickly and as fully as possible extract the entire crew from a doomed starship, what do you do? Right. While two of your people are saving their comrades in the open sections of the ship, two others are working on connecting the incoming pods on the Hippaphoralkus, weaving more and more new wiring on the fly because Chaya, for all her genius, had only calculated power systems for a hundred pods, then five others, including Ikhaar himself, are scavenging on the starship.
While Koschei is bringing the last and most important crew member to consciousness, Kirik is guarding him, and the Athosians are lugging pods on anti-gravs through the ship's corridors with their tongues hanging out (again, thanks to Ikhaar, who changed the pods' settings so they can now be moved at a running pace rather than a walking one), Ikhaar and four of his henchmen were taking the Aurora apart in one place and assembling something else in another.
What?
Well, they were turning the atmospheric shield, which creates an airtight seal in the hangar when the armored doors are open, into what they called an "atmospheric sleeve." For what? Well, because while I was in a meeting with the Captain, listening to his last will, Ikhaar had also returned to life with a mission.
From the auxiliary control room, he had reprogrammed the pods to speed up their movement, then ejected every single one of them from their cradles. Why hadn't we done that before, even though we could? Because we wouldn't have had enough time to transfer them all to the Hippaphoralkus in the forty-five minutes the emergency batteries were working. Loading and unloading the transporter chamber took two minutes—and that was at maximum human speed.
So the smart and inventive technicians made everything much simpler. They calculated how many pods could be sent through the transporter in the allotted time. And the rest they pushed into the Aurora's failing hangar. At first, Alvar thought they would load the pods into Jumpers and deliver them that way. Fortunately, we had several machines for flights, and the ones the Aurora had were also flying, more or less.
But no, it wasn't that simple.
That's why an engineer is an engineer—to turn a complex problem into a simple one. Thanks to the efforts of the guy who managed to bring the Hippaphoralkus almost "hangar to hangar" with the Aurora, Ikhaar and his people laid that very atmospheric corridor between the hangars. And thanks to the working life support system, they returned atmosphere to the Aurora's hangar. After which, they are sending the pods that won't have time to be transferred to the battleship via the transporter chamber through this atmospheric corridor into the Hippaphoralkus's hangar.
Now, while the Aurora was living out its final minutes, Ikhaar and his people had not only found a way to save an "extra" two hundred people but were also managing to strip the battleship for parts along the way. Small things, of course. Mostly quick-release units, power distributors on the emptied decks, crystals, data blocks from accessible labs, and so on. The boys clearly knew their way around looting.
Our main snag in saving the personnel was that we couldn't save everyone—too much time was spent loading and unloading the pods into the cabin, into the Jumpers, and so on.
Koschei had managed to bring ten people to consciousness and was now working on the eleventh, the last one for whom he had enough of his own life force. He's probably lying, but we'll deal with that later.
Thanks to Ikhaar, there's a chance to save everyone.
Almost everyone.
The fact that we had already saved two hundred and eighty members of the Aurora's crew by this point was partly tempered by the fact that I hadn't managed to cheat fate. The Captain hadn't advised me against dealing with those I couldn't deceive for nothing.
"Five minutes," Ikhaar stated the time, finishing the dismantling of the data blocks of several consoles in the bay. As I understood it, he was dismantling the backup control system for the command chair. The main one (what was left of it) had already been removed. A extremely rare item, worth its weight in a whole hyperdrive. By the way, its motivator, control crystals, matrix, and much more were also being dismantled. Right now. It felt as if after we left, only a not-quite-intact hull would remain on board the Aurora. But Ikhaar stated clearly—those were the orders he received from the Captain. And he had no intention of disobeying them. "We have to go."
"We have two minutes to spare," I reminded him.
The control time required for us to leave the ship had been calculated with a two-minute buffer. That's how much time we'd need to get as far away from the Aurora as possible. But we'd be doing it under fire from the Wraith. Which the engineer didn't like at all.
The reason was simple—in five minutes, the Hippaphoralkus would have to raise its shields to avoid being damaged during the bombardment by the enemy ships. And the Aurora's transporter simply wouldn't have enough energy to break through them. We'd tested this on Atlantis—to penetrate the city's shield, the chamber required fifty times more energy than usual. The load on the Aurora's ZPM was such that every scrap of energy counted. If we didn't make it, the Captain's plan wouldn't work.
And therefore...
"Traitor!" a bitch in a skin-tight snow-white suit appeared at the threshold of the main computer bay. Ikhaar, standing by the wall with wide eyes, clutched a set of crystals to his chest. I completely agreed with his behavior—such things are hard to manufacture even in a workshop, as the materials for production are rarer in the galaxy than kind Wraith. And we actually have a place to use them.
"Trebal?" I was stunned, seeing the girl rapidly approaching me. "What the hell are you doing here?! You were supposed to be delivered to the ship..."
I saw stars as soon as her fist connected with my jaw. But I managed to block the second blow. No, not with my wonderful martial arts skills: my personal shield, which I had recharged during my stay on the Hippaphoralkus, finally kicked in.
But the girl, like a Terminator in a fitted uniform, didn't even pay attention to it. I could see by her face that it hurt, maybe even bones were broken in her hand (who am I kidding?), but she had no intention of backing down.
By inertia, she landed a roundhouse kick to my head that would have made Chuck Norris himself envious. And only then, realizing what was going on, did she snatch the stun weapon from her belt. A shot—and from a rich green, my protection turned pale green.
Ideally, I should have reacted and blasted her with the pulse blaster I had on me. Except it was completely drained. Breaking through the doors to the section I needed had proven an impossible task. Because I'd broken through one door, using up all the charges.
But a second one still separated me from the stasis pods I needed.
"Trebal!" Ikhaar squeaked in a breaking voice. "What are you doing?!"
"Enter the override code!" the second shot completely drained my protection. "Now!"
Holy crap, what a stun weapon they have! Alvar had fired about a hundred shots from a Wraith weapon at me before the shield gave up. And here... TWO!
"Trebal, listen..." Ikhaar tried to intervene again.
"Shut up!" she snapped, poking that rod almost in my face. "Do you realize what you've done?! No, who am I asking?! You have no idea! Enter the override code immediately! We're getting him out of there!"
"We're not," I said, keeping my cool and looking into the girl's angry eyes. Well, now I understood what the Aurora's Commander meant about watching my jaw. Her punch was such that Mike Tyson would go down from one. Probably... No, well, at his age, yeah, of course he'd go down... "I entered the code the Captain gave me. He didn't give me any override code. And that code didn't work in principle! It activated the self-destruct from the virtual environment!"
"Lies!" the girl returned the weapon to her belt and struck me in the chest with half-strength. It hurt. "He wouldn't do that!"
"He could," Ikhaar spoke up, crawling along the wall toward the exit. "I checked everything. The self-destruct activated as soon as Mikhail's stasis pod opened. Trebal, he wouldn't have had time even if he wanted to. And he entered the code in front of me—the Aurora doesn't accept it!"
"He wouldn't do that!" the Ancient stood her ground. The emotional breakdown inside her was visible to the naked eye. This was just a woman who was about to lose... someone dear to her. I don't know what kind of relationship she had with the Commander, but... I'm not interested. "Not to me!"
"He could and he did," I snapped. "And you know it! You were arguing about it when I returned to the virtual world!"
The Aurora's Captain... turned out to be too smart for me.
He kept track of every time marker I gave him. And we talked with him until there was barely enough time left for the countdown. He stalled, realizing what would happen once I got out of there.
Moreover, he hadn't even lied... I hadn't clarified with him whether anyone exactly had the ability to influence reality from the virtual world. No one.
Except the Captain. And even then, in a limited way. For example, by activating the starship's self-destruct mode—that's exactly what he was doing on the auxiliary bridge while we were talking. He set the countdown so that the Aurora would prepare for self-destruction exactly ten minutes after he kicked me out of the virtual environment.
Most likely, in the show he couldn't do it because of the changes to the virtual environment made by the Wraith who had infiltrated it.
Yes, as it turned out, he was capable of that too. And the Captain's code... I checked—it doesn't work on any panel on the Aurora. The main computer doesn't accept it either. There's no access to the systems.
As soon as I got out of the stasis pod, I immediately rushed to the stasis bay next to the auxiliary command post, which contained the pods of the Captain and the entire bridge watch, excluding his assistants. The Ancients clearly had their own system for distributing people into stasis pods... As I understood Ikhaar's explanation, who found me there, or rather, was waiting for me while dismantling the main control circuit of the command chair, people were supposed to lie in pods strictly on the deck and in the section where they were assigned according to the battle roster. An identification system, so to speak... sort of like seatbelts in a plane—they won't save you in a crash, but it'll be easier to identify the remains by the tickets and the bodies still buckled in.
Officer Trebal's full, pinkish lips trembled, twisting into a grimace.
"You know the protocol," Ikhaar said quietly, addressing the Aurora's first officer. "Self-destruct without the Captain on board is impossible. The ship won't explode..."
"What a scoundrel you are," tears appeared in Trebal's eyes. Except, unlike her words, the tears weren't for me. "Just like that, you traded the life of a great man, whose boot lining you aren't fit to be, for a supply of drones on your ship?!"
"She doesn't know," it dawned on me.
The Aurora's Commander hadn't told her the real reason why he wouldn't leave his ship's bridge. Neither he nor the bridge watch.
She thinks I doomed him to death only because I want to keep the scarce self-guided drones! She's driven not by logic, but by emotions. She isn't analyzing; she doesn't understand. And she won't believe me that the Captain asked me to bring her back to life last of all.
Precisely so that she wouldn't have time to prevent anything.
Yes, Ikhaar explained to me while I was breaking down the door, the panel, trying to cause a short circuit and get to the stasis pods of the Captain and the bridge watch, what was what. And my blood was frankly boiling from it.
The ship can't be blown up as long as there's a living commander or one of the senior officers who knows the code on board. And all because there's a simple rule—the commander goes down with the ship. So that neither the Lantean, nor the ship's technology, nor the information stored in its data banks falls into the hands of the enemy.
If there's logic in this whole security procedure, I don't see it. At all. Then again, I don't see the logic in most of the Ancients' decisions. But it's there somewhere. Distorted by "great knowledge" and longevity, but it's there.
The Captain knew that if he left the Aurora, the Ascended wouldn't give him any peace. And us along with him. Because of his thoughts, which became the death sentence for the Aurora's crew.
He could have saved himself and the nineteen members of the bridge watch, but he didn't. I suspect not in secret from them. Ikhaar said the watch, like Trebal, were boundlessly loyal to him. But they "shared some of his convictions, the essence of which is unknown to me." But I can guess what those thoughts were.
The Captain could have saved himself. But then, we would have had to find another way to destroy the Aurora. Most likely we would have had to use drones, which we practically don't have...
The Captain... By sacrificing himself and his subordinates, he not only averted the threat of the Ascended from us but also gave us the opportunity not to waste exhaustible weapons. He knew everything I had told him in general terms about the adventures of the humans in the Milky Way and Pegasus. He understood how hard it would be to fight.
And he made a decision.
Trebal didn't know that. And I didn't understand the whole picture until Ikhaar explained. The Lantean, using manipulation skills, did exactly what we needed to do. But what we would never have done ourselves. Honestly, if I had the chance...
"If I could have broken into his section, I would have," I admitted. "I don't give a damn about the drones. He was the first Lantean I've talked to who didn't make me want to vomit. And I would have given anything for him to stay alive. But he outplayed me. He knew I'd try to save him. He kept me in the virtual world so we wouldn't have time to find another solution. Ikhaar," I looked at the engineer, "how much time do we have left?"
"Two minutes until the Wraith arrive and another two until self-destruction," he reported unerringly. His transmitter brooch came to life:
"Senior Engineer, we've finished transferring the stasis pods to the Hippaphoralkus," a voice came from the brooch. "We've delivered the hyperdrive parts and are starting the transfer. Hurry, there's almost no time."
"We'll be there soon," Ikhaar assured, looking at me and Trebal. The girl (yes, she's at least ten thousand years older than she should be, but I can't bring myself to call her an old woman) had already brought her emotions under control. But the glint in her eyes and on her cheeks... "It's time to go, time is running out."
"We won't be able to do anything anymore," I said, approaching Trebal and placing a hand on her shoulder. "There are battles we cannot win. That's what the Captain told me as we said goodbye."
"Go," the first officer said quietly but firmly, brushing off my hand. "I'm staying."
"That's not right!" Ikhaar declared. "The Aurora is going to explode soon and..."
"I think she knows," Trebal and I looked each other in the eye. It was clear without words—she wasn't backing down. "And we don't have the authority to stop her."
"But..."
"At least we agree on something," the Ancient turned sharply on her heels, her hair whipping across my face. The impact, combined with my aching and clearly broken jaw, felt like I'd been hit with a shovel. What does she have in her hair, metal? What kind of relative of Wolverine is this?! "I wish you success."
"One question," I stopped the girl, looking at a very interesting and undeservedly insulted object in my hands. "Is this button for exactly what I think it is?"
"I don't know what you're talking about," Trebal turned toward me.
But only to see the Lantean stun weapon in my hands. The Ancient glanced at her belt. Naturally, the holster was empty. What can I say, I wanted to be a magician in school for two years... The hands remember.
"Don't you dare...!" with a barely audible sound, I pressed the only key on the weapon. Trebal was jolted by the electric shock and collapsed to the floor in a senseless heap.
"When she comes to, she's not going to like this at all," Ikhaar assured me. "Believe me, Mikhail, in a rage she can be quite the..."
I don't give a damn what she thinks or says. The Captain said, "Take care of her." And now I understood who he meant.
You don't refuse a man who sacrifices himself and his subordinates for you. Even if the one he asked you to take care of is categorically against it.
"...can be quite the bitch?" I clarified, slinging the bag with the main computer crystals over my shoulder. I had to get the knack of picking the girl up in my arms, then slinging her over my other shoulder for balance.
"I didn't say that," Ikhaar shook his head.
"Well, I heard her ask me to test her own weapon on her," I said with a stony face. "And that's the official version. Got me, Igorek?"
The senior engineer looked at me with suspicion, behind which lay bewilderment.
"How do you know what my grandmother used to call me when I was a kid?" he asked, glancing around.
For crying out loud...
"That's a very long story, my friend," I assured him. "I'll tell you sometime later. But now, listen to my command..."
"What command? You're not an officer and I'm not obliged..."
"RUN!"
***
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