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| Generated by Google Gemini Advanced text-to-image AI software, powered by Imagen 2, and by Pixlr AI image editor |
Leona and Marie were in hock, and had been for the last five days. They
managed to return to their past, in the middle of the kasma, where they
hoped to be, but they were immediately scooped up by the Angry Fifth
Divisioner’s ship. As he was the one who deployed the technology needed to
seal up the membranes of the two sister universes, he could pass through
them freely using some kind of temporal skeleton key. They needed that key,
as well as the technology itself. They just had to escape first. In the
meantime, he was looking for their co-conspirators. He was convinced that
the rest of the team members were floating around here somewhere, and had
been on the search this whole time. It was only five days for them, but five
years for him. He would not listen to reason. Well, to be fair, he
had every reason to believe that the others were here too, but after all
this time, how could they still be alive?
“Maybe you two had to bail out in your suits, but your friends had personal
pods, or an evac shuttle.” He didn’t know that they had come back in time
from the future. He assumed that the Transit had managed to escape, but left
the team behind for whatever reason. There was no point in correcting him.
At best, he wouldn’t believe them, and at worst, it would make things harder
for them.
“Well, I think that you would have found them by now,” Leona told him. “They
would be emanating heat, and you could detect that heat, right? There’s not
much heat in the kasma naturally, is there?” She kept having to baby him,
and it was exhausting.
“No, it’s even colder than the vacuum.” He was right about that. Ramses
measured the mean temperature to be at 2.16 Kelvin. “So, where are they?”
“We don’t know!” Marie said for the upteenth time. “We got separated.” This
was technically true, even though her wording implied that it was not done
intentionally.
“So, what do you want me to do, let you out?”
“That would be a start,” Leona replied.
“You realize what you’ve done, right?” A.F. asked. “The only thing that was
keeping you alive was the prospect of being able to kill you all at the same
time. If no one else is here, I’m just going to cut my losses, and kill the
two of you alone. I’ll worry about the others later, I suppose. Your
execution will be scheduled for tomorrow morning.” A.F. said with
confidence.
“Problem with that,” Marie started to point out.
“We won’t exist tomorrow,” Leona added.
“Right.” A.F. tried to figure a way out of this glaring mistake. “Tomorrow,
Greenwich Mean Time. It’ll be later tonight local time.”
That was a dumb answer, but they didn’t push it. “Of course, sir.”
“I’ll go make the preparations. Say your final prayers to your god.”
“Yes, sir!” Marie saluted him sarcastically, but he took it genuinely. She
watched him leave. “Okay, your plan hasn’t worked so far, so can we just go
with mine now?”
“Yeah,” Leona answered her with a sigh. The original idea that Leona had for
their escape plan was to hack into the keypad on the cell door. They heard
the beeps when they were first locked in here, so they knew that they were
dealing with an eight-digit combination. She was able to covertly stick a
brute force strip underneath the pad, but in all this time, it had yet to
find the right answer. It was probably something absurd, like 99999999. The
strip was programmed to try them in order, so that would be its last guess.
Unfortunately, it might take up to another year or more for it to get to
that point, and they no longer had the time for that.
Obviously, when A.F.’s people captured them, they removed the outer layers
of their integrated multipurpose suits, leaving them only with the biometric
base. They stashed the response and armor layers elsewhere on the ship.
Ramses upgraded their suits in various ways, but they appeared normal, so
anyone here wouldn’t have felt any need to take any special precautions with
them. They just stuffed them in a drawer, and forgot about them for the last
five years. One special feature was the suit’s ability to become mobile on
its own. This was possible to some degree in all standard models, but it
would still need a user to be wearing it in order to provide physical
support. It was meant to allow the suit to carry its user back to safety if
they fell unconscious, or to their gravesite if they were dead. The original
engineers didn’t think that the suit would have any need to move around
completely on its own, but Ramses being Ramses, he did. It could indeed move
while totally empty, like something out of a cartoon. It was less
inconspicuous than a hacking strip, but it would work.
Marie placed her sleeve up against her temple to activate the remote neural
interface, and began to command the outer layers to climb out of their
drawer, and walk down the corridors towards them. The helmet was fully
attached as well, so it looked like a real person, but that didn’t mean it
had the authorization to go where it was going. If someone decided to stop
and ask for its ID badge, or something, the jig would be up. Fortunately,
that didn’t happen, but making it to them was the easy part. Dealing with
the hock watcher was the real challenge, and it was about to begin.
“Wait,” Leona ordered just before the empty suit could enter the hock
section. “This isn’t going to work.”
“It’s all we have, LeeLee.”
“Just give me a second.” Leona tried to concentrate, but she didn’t have the
power to see remotely. “Here, let me join.” She grabbed Marie’s free hand,
and placed the sleeve against her own temple. She closed her eyes to see
through the suit’s point of view. “I can do this. Throw your voice into the
helmet, but put a delay on it. For everything you say, make it come out of
the speaker ten seconds later.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m changing your plan so it actually works. Throw your voice.”
“It’s not my voice. It’s going to sound like A.F.’s.”
“Even better. Ten second delay,” Leona insisted.
The hock watcher opened the little window in the door when the suit knocked
on it. “Can I help you?”
“I need to interrogate the prisoners again,” Marie said through the speaker,
modulating her voice to impersonate the leader.
“Sir? You’re back so soon?”
“Yes. Open the door.”
“Why are you wearing one of their suits?”
“Because it makes me feel sexy, now open the goddamn door.”
The hock watcher was unconvinced, but that was okay. That was why Leona was
here. “I’m sorry, sir, but this could be fake. I’m going to need you to
raise your visor.”
Marie looked to Leona for guidance. Leona nodded confidently. She was ready
for it. “I appreciate your dedication to the job,” A.F.’s voice said to the
hock watcher. Marie raised the visor. Inside the helmet was A.F.’s face, in
holographic form, of course. This was why Leona needed the delay. Every time
Marie said something, Leona would need to match the hologram’s lips to it.
“Thank you, sir. I just want to be cautious.”
Of course, they didn’t want to make this any harder on themselves than they
had to, so from this point on, short answers only. “I’ll remember that for
your next evaluation.” Could’ve been shorter. Leona really struggled with
that, but it seemed to work. The hock watcher opened the door, and let the
deepfake A.F. in. “Go ahead and open it up.”
“Sir? That’s not protocol. You’re the only one who knows the code.” Shit.
Really?
“Uhh...use the master code.” A decent guess?
“Master code?” The hock watcher questioned. “Who are you?” He shook his
head. “This is a trick. I’m calling security.”
The suit reached up, and slammed the hock watcher’s head against the cell
wall. He was knocked out cold, which would delay the security team’s
response time, but someone would find him eventually, or he would wake up on
his own, and call them then. The fact was they were still locked in this
cell, and didn’t know the code. They were going to have to extend this
mission even further, and go find A.F. himself.
“Stuff the body in that cabinet,” Leona ordered.
“He’s not dead.”
“He still has a body. Put it in there, please.”
“You do it...Captain.”
“This is your plan!”
“You’re supposed to be the smart one. You should have come up with both Plan A
and Plan B. Now you’re going to have to impersonate someone else for A.F.,
and he’s going to be a lot less accommodating since he’s apparently the guy
in charge.”
“Well, we may have had more options if you hadn’t knocked him unconscious,”
Leona reasoned.
“I didn’t do that. You did.”
Leona was taken aback. She decidedly had not. Before they could argue any
further, though, the door clicked, and swung halfway open. The stared at it
for a moment. “Hm. The strip found the code.” She stepped out, and looked at
the keypad. Her guess was close. It was 88888888.
Marie saw it too. “All ones would have been easier on us.”
While Marie was putting her suit on, Leona dragged the hock watcher into the
cell, and locked it back up. She removed the hacking strip, and tucked it
back into her base layer, in case they ever needed it again. They also
didn’t want to let anyone know how they managed to get out of here.
Hopefully, they would just blame the hock watcher for the whole thing, and
not investigate any deeper. “I still can’t teleport. I think the power
blocker works all over the ship.”
“Well, you can obviously make yourself look like anyone, so I’ll continue to
be A.F., and you be the hock watcher. We’ll go down to get your suit, and
then get to work.”
“No, I don’t want to run into anyone else again. Let’s become invisible
instead.”
“That’s Olimpia’s forte.”
“We can all do it. There’s a mirror over there for us to practice with. I’m
sure no one will be back too soon.”
The door opened, and A.F. walked back in.
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