Taking Space

EXACTERS OF JUSTICE?

Daniel sat reading the comments on the hologram video of their assault on the battleship, which someone had put up online when Steven walked into the game room. “Do you know where Stephanie is at? I’m hungry.”

He looked over his shoulder at Steven. “Yeah, I think she and Cat are in the training room playing the training game we made.”

“Thank you. Still reading those comments, I see.”

The video already had over one billion views now, and the comments ranged in the tens of millions. Most of the original comments were either arguments about it being fake or the ships were being fake and how it couldn’t be the Lionhearted. Some of the more dramatic ones called for the death of the fakers, saying stuff like these Lionhearted fakes should keep their nose in their own businesses. Mostly though, they were just trash. However, a couple of days ago the comments seemed to have accepted the fact that the video was indeed real, and the newest comments were giving rather alarming and interesting information on criminal organizations, saying that the Lionhearted, if they have actually returned, should deal with these.

“Sure, I am! Some of the stuff is downright alarming, and I used your fake hacked police account to check it out, and most of it seems real. You know I really think we should act on some of these leads.” Daniel said excitedly.

Steven looked at the ground. “I’ve decided to stop reading them.”

“Why?”

“I read a comment about this guy and… Well, let’s just say it turned my stomach inside out. So I don’t really want to read anymore.”

Understanding crossed Daniel’s face. He had read that comment as well. “Oh, yeah I know what you mean; I read about that too. I thought it couldn’t be true, so I emailed John and asked him to look at it, and he told me he had already read the comment, and that it was most likely true, but no one can touch that creep because he is rather high up in the Almandine government.” Daniel swallowed, “What’s worse is that John told me the one who posted the comment was tracked and brought in for questioning and is now charged with some erroneous bull.”

“I’m not surprised,” Steven said morosely and walked out of the room.

***

Stephanie opened her eyes and broke her concentration for a few seconds, so she could say, “All right, the sensors say he’s in the bar. Are you ready?”

“Yes. Let’s do this.” Catherine said without opening her eyes, because she was not as good at controlling the android as Stephanie was, and she didn’t want to take the chance of losing control of it now.

Stephanie nodded and closed her eyes again.

She moved the android of David Kell down the space station’s hallway towards the door leading to the private bar keeping the three other robots closely formed up behind him. She looked over at the android of Zephyr that Catherine was controlling and nodded.

Zephyr nodded back. David Kell drew back his arm and punched the door.

The android’s strength caused the door to slam back, ripped off from its hinges, and rolled into the spacious room behind.

All the eyes inside the bar turned towards them.

“I am David Kell, and I have come for Malik T. Cox.”

A mutter of fear swept through the bar’s occupants. The room split like the Red Sea to reveal a middle-aged, finely dressed man sitting at a table with two scantily clad women. The man’s eyes grew wide; he jumped to his feet and bolted for the nearest exit.

David Kell jumped twenty feet through the air and landed beside the running man. He grabbed him by his head and pushed down hard, smashing him face-first into the ground.

Zephyr dashed across the open floor. She grabbed both of his arms, pulling them harshly behind his back and cuffed them.

The three droids ambled their way over and surrounded them.

David Kell stepped back. “You have been tried and found guilty of breaking the second Great Law: ‘Thou sell not steal.’ As you have stolen the right of choice away from the ones, you have sold into human trafficking. Under the Lionhearted edicts, these three droids shall exact your decree judgment upon you.”

David Kell and Zephyr turned and glared at the people as the three droids commenced in their work.

***

Steven walked into the training room to see both Stephanie and Catherine with their eyes closed. “Hey what you guys up to?”

Both of their eyes popped open, and they began to shuffle nervously.

Stephanie managed to speak. “Not much, just... just training.”

“Ah, I was wondering if there’s going to be any supper or should I just fend for m…” His voice trailed off as he noticed the androids for both David Kell and Zephyr were missing.

He looked around the room and realized one of his dimensional doors was opened to some type of air shaft.

“What are you two doing?”

“Ahh..” Stephanie muttered.

“Alf, please displayed visual and audio from ground unit 0069 8.”

A hologram displaying the visual image from the cameras in David Kell’s eyes appeared in the middle of the room.

Through it, Steven could easily see the wealthy onlookers in the private bar.

“Operation complete, Sir.” One of the droids said.

Stephanie turned the head of David Kell just-in-time to see one of the droids incinerated something. She accidentally made David Kell clears throat as he said, “Good, release him.”

The man curled up in a ball, and Stephanie regained her composure. She had David Kell clearly state. “No one is above the law, and we will be watching you.”

With that, she turned David Kell and began to walk to the door with the three droids closely behind.

Catherine managed to regain control of Zephyr and did the same.

Steven quietly fumed as he waited for Stephanie and Catherine to guide their droids back into the streets of the space station, where they made their way back to the small alley. Once they were sure they hadn’t been followed they crawled into the ventilation shaft and went through the dimensional door back into the training room.

As he watched, he realized they had not been on a space station, but rather on one of the small colonies, and they had used one of his drones to get there.

He quickly grabbed one of the training hats and took control of the drone, and began to check over its time logs. After a bit, he breathed a sigh of relief. At least they hadn’t been sloppy.

He turned to them. “What did you two just do?”

They both fidgeted a bit, then Catherine stood up straight. “There was a post on the hologram video that disturbed both us and I was able to find out with definitive evidence that it was indeed true. So we took care of it according to the laws and edicts of the Lionhearted.”

The post must’ve been the one he and Daniel were talking about just a few minutes ago. Steven thought to himself. “Wait what do you mean you took care of it according to the edicts of the Lionhearted?”

Neither of them said anything

Then Steven realized what they meant. “You... You didn’t!”

There was some more fidgeting, and Stephanie finally answered. “Catherine and I didn’t do anything; there was an operation program in the droids, and we just used it.”

“But still you… Didn’t you?!”

Stephanie stopped fidgeting and straightened her back. “We could have executed him because I’m sure he’s broken the first Great Law. However, both of us decided this was a more fitting punishment.”

“We’re going to talk to Michael about this,” Steven declared and glanced over his shoulder at the holographic lion that had appeared while they were talking. “Alf, where is David Kell now?”

“He is currently on the bridge, Sir.”

***

“Scan complete, Sir.”

“Analysis?” Michael asked.

“Heavy concentration of chemoids saturated with 1-aminoethyl and other questionable substances. It would appear that anonymous tip from the comments on the video was correct. I am ninety-five percent sure this is indeed an illegal chemistry lab, Sir.”

“Anyway, you can be one hundred percent sure?” Said Michael.

“My d**g database is over three hundred years old, and this chemistry lab seems to be making an altered version of an illegal substance that was called LOSE. However, I cannot be sure without connecting to the current galaxy net and updating the database.”

“Why haven’t you connected and updated your database yet then?” Michael pressed.

“Because I have been in stealth mode since my reboot, Sir. Making connections may jeopardize our location.”

“We are connected to the net all the time. It should be fine to go ahead an–“

“NO!” Steven half-shouted, as he rushed through the door into the bridge and to his designated station, hurriedly bringing up a screen and making sure Alf didn’t act on Michael’s comment. After he was sure the droid couldn’t connect to the net, he looked around the room and instantly noticed that Michael had one of his drones spying on some type of small mobile space station on one screen, while the other screen had a Starfighter ready and aimed at a closed dimensional hoop.

He looked back at Michael. “What are you doing?”

Michael tapped his foot on the curved floor, scratched the back of his head, then tilted his head up and gave Steven a goofy grin. “Well… twenty to twenty-five minutes ago some guy posted on the vid of us taking out the battleship saying that he had just escaped from an illegal d**g factory and if Lionhearted acted now we might be able to find it and destroy before it left the Florian system. I figured something like this information if it was true wouldn’t stay valid for very long. And well as you can see I believe I found it and from the looks of it it’s true.”

Steven sat down and began to check the time logs of the probe. It took him a bit longer because he wasn’t directly controlling it.

Stephanie and Catherine walked in and began to immediately ask about what was going on. But Steven held his finger to his mouth and said. “Ssh!”

They sighed and sat down. Steven finished looking over the logs, then turned to Michael. “Why in the world did you take the main starways? With all that traffic anyone could’ve noticed this drone and tagged it! You should have taken the older starways so you can monitor each ship and make sure they didn’t tag you. After you’re done here, I’m going to have to self-destruct this thing just to make sure we’re not tracked.”

“I figured time was of the essence. Plus, the old starways would have taken too long to get there. I am, or was, planning on self-destructing the drone when I was done as well.” Michael said in his defense.

Steven was not exactly happy with Michael’s statement. “These things don’t grow on trees, you know! We only have enough resources to make the stealth fibers for like four or maybe five more of these.”

Michael didn’t answer, because he was busy messing with his communicator.

“What in the world are you planning to do anyway? This one Starfighter can’t possibly destroy that, and if the poster really did escape from it that means that there’s forced labor in there so even if you could you wouldn’t want to!” Steven said.

“I know. Alf, please explain I’m busy.” Michael commanded.

The computer-generated lion appeared on one of the view screens. “Officially the Lionhearted have nothing against illegal drugs because they don’t break any of the three Great Laws, and because we can’t prove there is slave labor on that vessel, which would break the second Great law in that it steals their freedom, we can’t move in by force. However, Reina developed P987 codenamed ‘Blower’ specifically to deal with chemistry labs four hundred and six years ago.”

The image of the lion faded to be replaced by a blueprint for some type of weapon.

It looked like a spear with fins on it.

Alf continued to speak. “The weapon is attached to one of the laser mounts and is equipped with light sails, much like the original technology used in the Great Exodus. So when the lasers are fired, the light sails catch their light and speed the weapon up to almost that of light.” The fins on the blueprint of the weapon lit up.

“The lasers then burn through the sails and impact on a ship’s shields milliseconds before the weapon itself does. At which point, the massive capacitor releases its energy.” The shaft of the spear lit up. Alf continued, “Causing an EMP blast to disturb the shield just long enough for the tip of the weapon to make it past.”

A small animation showed the weapon being fired and the EMP blast going off right as it hit the shield. In slow-motion, the shield parted, letting the tip of the weapon through, then snapped shut again and cutting the shaft off.

“The momentum drives the head into the armor of the ship," Alf explained, "piercing it a few layers. At which point, the head shatters and releases its Nanobots. These Nanobots make their way to the ventilation airspeed regulator of the ship. They then cut into the wires immediately after the control unit and send a burst of energy through them. This causes a rather large gale of wind to sweep through each room in the entire ship.

Normally this would only be an annoyance to the occupants of the ship. However, on a chemistry lab, it blows the chemicals in the factory area all over the place. The ship’s auto anti-poison mechanisms detect the chemicals and instantly locks all ventilation shafts, except for the one where the poison is detected, and opens it to the vacuum of space, sucking all the air in that room out of the ship.”

“What about the people inside?” Catherine asked in alarm.

“Human occupants are too large to be stuck through the ventilation shafts. They may be tossed around a bit but not seriously harmed.” The AI explained.

“So basically the weapon tricks the ship into flushing the drugs into space?” Steven asked.

“Yes.”

“Interesting.” He commented.

Stephanie held up her hand. “Wait, this method only gets rid of the current batch of drugs being made. I thought the objective here was to get rid of the factory itself.”

Michael looked up from what he was doing. “Alf, tell her what you told me.”

The AI reappeared on the screen. “Typically the mobile station fights off our small attack force and retreats through a Starway. It will then send out a message saying it was attacked, and that it lost the current batch of drugs which is usually a sizable sum worth of credits. One of the Nanobots from the blower tracks this message and sends us the coordinates of the recipients. Predictably the recipients will send out a small spacecraft to go and check on the station. We track the spacecraft and ambush it in open space with overwhelming force, so the occupant's surrender. Then we use the spacecraft to infiltrate the space station.”

Steven’s eyes lit up, “Oh, brilliant!”

“Will that actually work?” Stephanie asked.

“The Lionhearted have used this method continuously with an eighty-six percent success rate,” Alf informed her.

“Okay. While Alf was explaining my plan, I used my communicator to log on to your fake police account and downloaded a dossier on illegal drugs and spices,” Mike told Steven and handed him his communicator. “Can you give this to Alf?”

Steven was not entirely pleased with this entire situation, but nonetheless quickly skimmed the document, and decided it was safe to upload the information to the AI’s mainframe.

As the file finished transferring, Michael asked. “Does that give your database what it needs?”

The lion looked at Michael, closed its eyes for a few seconds, and then said. “Yes, I can now confirm with one hundred percent certainty this is an illegal d**g chemistry lab.”

“Good. Unfold dimensional door.” Michael tapped a few controls, and the probe began to unfold the metal tubing.

“Do you have the weapon already on the Starfighter?” Steven asked.

Michael nodded. “Yes, there was some in storage in the second hangar.”

Catherine brought up another screen and flipped through a few sensor displays from the probe as it unfolded the dimensional door. “You would think something like this chemistry lab would have a small security detail of some kind, wouldn’t you?”

Michael turned on the Starfighter and started it towards the dimensional door. “No, I think something like this relies more on stealth and looking like it’s a normal rich man’s mobile mansion.”

The dimensional door opened. Michael’s Starfighter shot through its narrow portal, but he forgot to power down as he flew through. The massive influx of energy combined with the wavelengths produced by the hole-inside-a-hole phenomenon, the dimensional door spewed forth sparks, collapsed, and clipped off the very edge one of the rear maneuvering thrusters as it melted the tube structure into tiny cinders.

Steven clasped a hand over his eyes in exasperation.

“Oops, sorry,” Mike said halfheartedly as he left the destroyed door behind, flew towards the small mobile space station, and opened fire with the lasers. With a thrumming thrum and a flash the lasers impacted on the space station’s shields and one of the screens lit up, confirming the secret payload had just made its entry.

Michael smiled at them as he pulled up and started to fly around for another pass for good measure.

“Mike Lookout!” Catherine shouted, pointing at the readouts.

The bottom half of the mobile space station opened up to reveal fifteen missile launchers. In less than half of breath, five of them launched missiles.

Michael yanked on the controls, sending the ship up and swerving as fast and as hard as he could.  Yet try as he might, the missiles kept coming. He pushed and held on to the deployed flares button until the starry sky filled with tiny white flares and the button clicked, clicked repeatedly indicating it was out of ammo. Three of the five missiles collided with the sparkling dots and exploded. The ensuing explosion caught another one of the missiles on the side, and it exploded as well right behind the starfighter, causing the starcraft two flip front over end.

The last missile smashed into the starfighter.

The screen displaying the image from it faded to black, and they all watched from the drone’s view as the starfighter gave way into a crimson fireball.

“Ah, great. Now we only have seven left!” Steven moaned.

Michael put his hand over his eyes. “So much for something like this relying on stealth. Sorry guys that was ill piloted of me.”

At that moment, Daniel came running onto the bridge. “Guys, someone reported to having seen Cox on a small colony named Tallinn. There’s also another post saying that there is an illegal chemistry lab in the Florian system. I really think we should do something about both of the..ese…” His voice trailed off as he watched the dying fireball of the starfighter. “Uh guys, what was that?”

A weird cloud of rainbow-colored substance ejected from the small mobile space station.

“Well, at least that worked,” Michael muttered solemnly.

A few seconds later, the space station’s thrusters came online and began to move.

The lion nodded as if he saw something. “Message sent. Tracking, receiving end location.”

“Guys?” Daniel started.

Steven shook his hand at Daniel, telling him to be quiet.

“Message was sent to a large space station. The station is located in the Galeon system. However, the name of the space station is not in my database. Calculating the current directory of mobile space stations and possible rendezvous points if a ship is dispatched.”

The lion disappeared to be replaced by a giant map of old Starways. Five or six of the highways lit up in blue indicating probable routes.

Everyone but Daniel looked at them intently.

“This isn’t any good. Half of these suggested Starways don’t even exist anymore and it’s missing all the new ones.” Catherine said in frustration.

Michael glanced over at Steven. “Why haven’t you let Alf update his database yet?”

“Because I don’t know what it will do when it does! If it connects to some secret Lionhearted Intersite and re-downloads itself, we could all end up dead! And when did you end up on a first-name basis with it?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t think about that,” Michael confessed.

“Oh, you didn’t?!” Steven retorted.

“Steven!” Stephanie scolded.

Steven didn’t answer. He just brought up a screen and began tapping away at it.

“I guess there’s nothing we can do about this one then?” Catherine asked.

“No, I’m transferring the message tracking over to my own system with any luck I’ll be able to pinpoint the exact end of the transmission then I will use the surveillance inside the colony to watch any further messages from that location or movement. If they do send out a ship I will know and be able to mark it. Hopefully,” Steven added.

The room fell into silence as Steven clicked away.

Finally, Daniel had enough of waiting. “What in the world is going on?!”

Catherine stood up and walked over to him. “We are attempting to take care of the chemistry lab.”

“Oh, okay… Wait, without me?!”

“Actually Michael was doing it all by himself, and he almost got us all killed by having Alf connecting the StarNet!” Steven said, harshly over his shoulder.

“I understand you're worried. However, I believe your reprogramming of me is sufficient enough to keep me from killing you all.” The AI said in a comforting tone.

“Oh, shut yourself off,” Steven answered the AI.

The room fell into silence again except for the incessant clicking Steven was making.

Eventually, Daniel said. “That was awkward… So anyway, you were doing this, so does that mean we can take care this horrible Cox fellow too?”

Steven glanced back over his shoulder and smiled ruefully. “Cat and Steph already did that by enacting edict thirty-five on him.”

Daniel looked crestfallen as he asked Catherine, “You did it without me?”

She opened her mouth to answer when Michael realized what Steven had said. “Wait!” He spun his head and stared at Stephanie. “You guys enacted edict what!”

Stephanie shifted back and forth. “Ah, well, the droids had a program for it, and neither Catherine nor I wanted to kill him. Sooo, well a, there was nothing else we could do seeing as we don’t have prison or anything like that.”

Catherine, seeing a way to change the subject completely, grabbed the opportunity. “Speaking of which, if this works out, we will end up with quite a few people that need to go to jail in our custody. What do you plan to do with them?”