It's unbelievably hard to breathe through the pain and the sensation of pleasure flooding into an aged body.
It feels like every movement you make collides with a wave from a raging river whose waters and current overwhelm you. They drag you along, making your mind seethe with helplessness and anger at your own frailty.
You can neither inhale nor exhale.
Your body convulses, your limbs turn to ice.
And then you drown...
But everything she was experiencing now only vaguely resembled what her mind was conjuring.
Her body filled with strength, clarity of thought returned. She could feel every particle of her body. But that same strength paralyzed her, not allowing her even to twitch.
Her vision, damaged by prolonged and slow aging, was returning to normal, focusing... then blurring again. Her eyeballs rolled involuntarily, preventing her from making out what was happening around her.
Her hearing wasn't obeying her, her sense of touch seemed to have vanished... It happens when you find yourself in a vacuum without protection. There's no way to accelerate, no point of purchase, nothing but silence around you and no matter to feel...
And then it all stopped abruptly.
Only the pain and a pressing sensation in her chest remained.
With great effort, she tore her consciousness from the narcotic euphoria and focused her gaze...
...on vertical pupils staring straight into her soul. Pale green skin, dangling strands of snow-white hair, a sneer of nearly transparent fangs lining the mouth...
"We didn't make it!" she realized. Her thought processes were still sluggish from stasis, but her reflexes were always at their peak.
Her hearing returned almost simultaneously with the sharp sounds of an alarm. The faint blinking of emergency lighting and painfully familiar notes stabbed into her refreshed mind like a Wraith. Which was just pulling its ugly hand away from her body. A lump formed in her throat.
"Hello, Ancient," the Wraith hissed in her face, pulling his hand from her chest with a deliberately predatory motion, showing off his feeding probe. "I got unforgettable emotions from you... Such power... You're probably the commander of this pathetic bucket?"
Her advanced physiology allowed her to do many things ordinary people couldn't.
For example, twist on the narrow bed of the stasis pod, crossing her legs around the life-sucker's neck. He only tried to grab her by the ankles and pull her off, stunned by the move.
"Stop!" His vertical pupils dilated, and the Wraith's hands spread apart. Oh yes, he recognized that move. Ancient carrion. "I'm on your—!"
"Ma'am," a man in a strange gray uniform stepped from the shadows nearby, his gaze worried. Short haircut, economical movements — a fighter. Probably a retinue from among the worshippers. "He saved—"
But she couldn't be stopped anymore.
Bending at the waist, the young woman slammed the edge of her open palm into the Wraith's nose. As his nasal cartilage and bones crunched, the Ancient used one swift motion, using the Wraith as a pivot point, to move to his right. Simultaneously, she carefully shifted their balance...
The calculation was perfect.
Her body slid along the edge of the wall, but the Wraith slammed into it with a very characteristic impact sound.
A growl rang out, and the Wraith, now on his knees, shot her a look full of fury. A second before her spinning kick sent him into oblivion.
"What are you doing?!" the same man cried out, taking a step toward her. The Ancient acted without thinking.
A step forward, a sharp lean of her body in the same direction. Her reflexes worked perfectly — she landed on her spread palms, shifted her weight, and struck with all her available force with both feet into the man's chest and head. He flew to the wall, tucking into a roll. And immediately launched an attack.
He hoped to catch her off guard while she rose to her feet after a somersault.
Block of a straight punch to the face with her left hand, a counter straight punch to the face with her right fist. Again, again. The opponent covered his face, but that was exactly what she was aiming for. A side punch to the right kidney, a cry of pain and the Wraith worshipper's body arched. His face involuntarily came out from behind his block.
A precise finger strike to the carotid artery, and the second opponent crumpled to the deck. The senior officer stasis compartment was cleared of enemies.
Senior Officer Trebal looked with a tinge of sadness at the two other empty chambers. Here the second and third executive officers should have been sleeping. But they had died. Ten thousand years ago.
Another person appeared in the doorway, armed and in the same uniform as the one she'd just taken down.
"Kirik!" he exclaimed, rushing to the unconscious man. "What happened here?!."
He noticed the woman in the white Lantean uniform too late. Senior Officer Trebal deemed it unnecessary to waste strength and combat skills on him. That would have taken three seconds.
To paralyze him with the electroshock weapon dangling at her belt took one second.
Stepping over another senseless body, the senior officer of the battleship Aurora walked into the corridor. Looking around and finding no one present, she listened to the audio accompaniment of the active self-destruct system.
"You'll 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 compartment with the battleship's onboard computer.
* * *
"We only have seven minutes left!"
Ihaar told me this just as I was pulling the last set of data crystals from the cavity designed for the onboard computer.
"And?" I asked calmly. "Are we late for something?"
"We need to pack the crystals, and for that we need to find a transport container, material..." he muttered.
"Get a grip, kid," I advised, pulling the crystals one by one from the holder and putting them in my bag. "Everything we need is already with us."
This kid was strange.
Like the entire crew except the commander, he was a member of one of the minor races assimilated by the Ancients. Quite intelligent, quick-witted, resourceful. His ideas about using the jumpers to evacuate the Aurora's crew members were very helpful.
We managed to evacuate a depressurized section with technicians — service personnel, mechanics in our terms. Well-educated, technically proficient, they know what to fix, how, and how to solve problems. Thirty-two people out of the thirty-five authorized for a depressurized section. Three more were killed during flight by micro-asteroids.
Through the hangar and the transporter chamber, we extracted another seventy-five like them — the second and third sections on the ship. I assumed the transporter could only hold three, maybe four capsules at a time. Ihaar demonstrated how to move six at once.
And now I understand why the Aurora commander said to revive him and his section first. Roughly speaking, they were the best on the ship, with very strong Ancient genes... And they were quite resourceful sons of bitches.
I would never have figured out what they did. The tenth person revived was the ship's pilot. Well, "pilot" those functions belonged to the captain and his assistants. But the guy they thawed out had definitely taken courses on piloting star battleships.
Honestly, I don't know who came up with the idea of setting up a conveyor belt for moving people through the starship hangars, but according to Alvar, who was receiving the capsules in the Hippaforalkus hangar, that's exactly how it looked.
If your ship's hangar has lost its seal and you need to extract the entire crew from a doomed starship as quickly and completely as possible, what would you do? Right. While two of your people save their comrades in the ship's open compartments, two others work on connecting the incoming chambers on the Hippaforalkus, weaving new and new wiring on the fly because Chaya, for all her genius, only calculated power systems for a hundred chambers; meanwhile, five others, including Ihaar himself, are looting the starship.
While Koschei brings the last and most important crew member to consciousness, Kirik guards him, Athosians — tongues hanging out — carry the chambers on antigravs through the ship's corridors (by the way, thanks again to Ihaar, who changed the chamber settings so they could be moved not at walking speed, but at a running person's speed), Ihaar and his four assistants were dismantling the Aurora in one place and building something in another.
What?
Well, they were turning the atmospheric shield that creates the seal in the hangar when the armor door is open into what they called an "atmospheric sleeve." Why? Because while I was talking with the captain, listening to his last will, Ihaar had also been revived with an assignment.
From the backup command post, he'd reprogrammed the pods precisely to speed up their relocation, and then ejected every single one from their nests. Why hadn't we done that before, even though we could have? Because we wouldn't have had enough time to move them all onto the Hippaforalkus within forty-five minutes, while the emergency batteries were still working. Loading and unloading the teleportation chamber took two minutes — and that was at maximum human speed.
So the smart and inventive technicians made things much simpler. They calculated how many pods could be sent through the transporter in the designated time. And they shoved the rest into the barely breathing hangar of the Aurora. At first, Alvar thought they'd load the pods into the jumpers and deliver them that way. Luckily, we had a few ships available for flights, and even the ones belonging to the Aurora were flying, more or less.
But no, it wasn't that simple.
That's what an engineer is for — to turn a complex problem into a simple one. Thanks to the efforts of the guy who managed to bring the Hippaforalkus almost "hangar to hangar" with the Aurora, Ihaar and his people laid that same atmospheric corridor between the hangars. And using the working life support system, they restored the atmosphere in the Aurora's hangar. After that, they directed through that same atmospheric corridor the pods that wouldn't have time to be transported to the battleship via the teleportation chamber, sending them into the Hippaforalkus's hangar.
Right now, while the Aurora was living out its last minutes, Ihaar and his people had not only found a way to save an additional two hundred people, but were also managing to dismantle the battleship itself for spare parts at the same time. Small things, of course. Mostly quick-release assemblies, power distributors on the depleted decks, crystals, data blocks from the accessible labs, and so on. The guys clearly knew their way around looting.
Our main bottleneck in rescuing the crew was that we couldn't save everyone — a lot of time was spent loading and unloading the pods into the booth, into the jumpers, and so on.
Koschei had managed to revive only ten people so far, and was currently working on the eleventh, the last one he had enough of his own life force for. Lying, most likely, but we'd deal with that later.
Thanks to Ihaar, there was a chance to save everyone.
Almost everyone.
The fact that we'd already managed to save two hundred and eighty members of the Aurora's crew partly sweetened the fact that I hadn't been able to outwit fate. The captain hadn't advised me, for no reason, not to mess with those I couldn't fool.
"Five minutes," Ihaar announced the time, finishing the removal of data blocks from several consoles in the compartment. As I understood it, he was dismantling the duplicate control system for the control chair. The primary one — what was left of it — had already been extracted. An extremely rare piece, worth as much as a whole hyperdrive. Speaking of which, its motivator, control crystals, matrix, and many other things were also being dismantled. Right now. It felt like after we left, nothing but a not-entirely-intact hull would remain aboard the Aurora. But Ihaar made it clear — those were the orders he'd received from the captain. And he had no intention of disobeying them. "We need to leave."
"We have two minutes in reserve," I reminded him.
The control time we needed to leave the ship had been calculated with a two-minute buffer. That's exactly how long it would take us to get as far away from the Aurora as possible. But we'd be doing it under Wraith fire. Which the engineer absolutely did not like.
The reason was simple — in five minutes, the Hippaforalkus would have to raise its shields to avoid being damaged by enemy ship fire. And the Aurora's transporter simply wouldn't have enough energy to get through them. We'd tested this on Atlantis — to penetrate the city's shield, the booth needed fifty times more energy than usual. The load on the Aurora's ZPM was currently such that every grain of energy counted. If we didn't make it, the captain's plan wouldn't work.
And so, because of that...
"Traitor!" The bitch in the tight white suit appeared in the doorway of the compartment with the ship's computer. Ihaar, standing by the wall with wide eyes, pressed a set of crystals to his chest. I completely agreed with his reaction — even in a workshop, it's hard to make something like that, since the materials for production are rarer in the galaxy than kind Wraiths. And we actually had places to use them.
"Trebal?" I was also taken aback, seeing the girl rapidly approaching me. "What the hell are you doing here?! You were supposed to be delivered to the ship..."
Sparks flew from my eyes as soon as her fist connected with my jaw. But I managed to block the second punch. No, not with my wondrous martial arts skills: my personal shield, which I'd recharged during my layover on the Hippaforalkus, finally activated.
But the girl, like a Terminator in a fitted uniform, didn't even pay attention. I could see from her face that it hurt, that her hand bones were probably broken (who am I kidding?), but she had no intention of backing down.
On inertia, she threw a roundhouse kick at my head that even Chuck Norris himself would envy. And only then, realizing what was going on, she ripped an electroshock weapon from her belt. A shot — and my shielding went from rich green to pale green.
In theory, I should react and shoot her with the impulse blaster I had on me. But it was completely discharged. Breaking through the doors to the section I needed had proven to be an insurmountable task. Because I'd blasted through one door, using up all my charges.
But there was a second one separating me from the stasis pods I needed.
"Trebal!" Ihaar squeaked in a breaking voice. "What are you doing?!"
"Enter the cancellation code!" The second shot completely drained my shield. "Now!"
Holy shit, their shock weapons were powerful! Alvar had shot me about a hundred times with Wraith weapons before the shield gave up. But here... TWO!
"Trebal, listen..." Ihaar tried to intervene again.
"Shut up!" she cut him off, jabbing the staff almost in my face. "Do you have any idea what you've done?! Yes, who am I asking?! You have no idea! Enter the cancellation code immediately! We'll get him out of there!"
"We won't," I said, keeping myself under control, looking into the girl's furious eyes. Well, now I understood what the Aurora's commander meant by that phrase about me protecting my jaw. She had a punch that would lay Mike Tyson out cold in one hit. Probably... No, well, at his age, yes, of course he'd go down... "I entered the code the captain gave me. He didn't say anything about a cancellation code. Besides, that code didn't work in the first place! It activated the self-destruct from the virtual environment!"
"Lies!" The girl returned the weapon to her belt and hit me in the chest at half strength. It hurt. "He couldn't have done that!"
"He could," Ihaar chimed in, crawling toward the exit along the wall. "I checked everything. The self-destruct activated as soon as Mikhail's stasis pod opened. Trebal, even if he wanted to, he wouldn't have had time. And I saw him enter the code — the Aurora doesn't accept it!"
"He couldn't have done that!" the Ancient woman insisted. The emotional fracture inside her was visible to the naked eye. This was just a woman who was about to lose... a person dear to her. I didn't know what kind of relationship she had with the commander, but... I wasn't interested either. "Not to me!"
"He could and he did," I cut her off. "And you know it's true! You argued about it when I got back to the virtuality."
The captain of the Aurora... He turned out to be too smart for me.
He kept track of every time stamp I gave him. And we talked until there was barely enough time left for the countdown. He dragged it out, knowing what would happen once I got out of there.
Not only that, he hadn't even lied... I hadn't asked him if anyone had the ability to influence reality from the virtuality. No one.
Except the captain. And even then, in a limited way. For example, by activating the ship's self-destruct mode — that's exactly what he was doing on the backup bridge while we talked. He set a timer so that the Aurora would be ready to self-destruct exactly ten minutes after he ejected me from the virtual environment.
Probably, in the series, he couldn't do that because of the changes in the virtual environment caused by the Wraith that had infiltrated it.
Yes, as it turned out, that was also within his power. And the commander's code... I checked — it didn't match any panel on the Aurora. The ship's computer didn't accept it either. No access to the systems.
As soon as I got out of the stasis pod, I immediately rushed to the stasis compartment next to the backup command post, where the pods of the captain and the entire bridge watch, except his assistants, were located. The Ancients clearly had their own system for distributing people among the stasis pods... As far as I understood Ihaar's explanation — he was the one who found me there, or rather, was waiting for me, dismantling the main control circuit of the control chair — you had to lie down strictly on the deck and in the compartment where a person was assigned according to the battle station roster. A recognition system, so to speak... kind of like seat belts on a plane — they won't save you in a crash, but it's easier to identify you by the tickets and the remains of the belted bodies.
Officer Trebal's full, pinkish lips trembled, twisting into a grimace.
"You know the protocol," Ihaar said quietly, addressing the Aurora's first officer. "Self-destruct without the captain aboard is impossible. The ship won't explode..."
"What a bastard you are," tears appeared in Trebal's eyes. But unlike the words, the tears weren't for me. "You simply traded the life of a great man, who isn't fit to be a shoelace for your shoes, for a stockpile of ammunition on your own ship?!"
She doesn't know, it dawned on me.
The Aurora's commander hadn't told her the real reason he wouldn't leave his ship's bridge. Neither him nor the bridge watch.
She thought I'd condemned him to death just because I wanted to save the scarce homing projectiles! She was driven not by logic, but by emotion. She wasn't analyzing, she didn't understand. And she wouldn't believe me that the captain had asked me to bring her back to life last of all.
Precisely so she wouldn't have time to prevent anything.
Yes, Ihaar had explained everything to me while I was breaking down the door, the panel, trying to cause a short circuit and get to the captain's and bridge watch's stasis pods. And it made my blood absolutely boil.
The ship couldn't be blown up as long as there was a living commander aboard, or one of the senior officers who knew that code. All because there was a simple rule — the commander goes down with the ship. So that neither a Lantean, nor the ship's technology, nor the information stored in its data banks fell into enemy hands.
If there was any logic in this entire security procedure, I couldn't see it. Not at all. Well, I didn't see logic in most of the Ancients' decisions. It was there somewhere. Twisted by "great knowledge" and longevity, but it was there.
The captain knew that if he left the Aurora, the Ascended would make his life hell. And ours along with him. Because of his thoughts, which had become the death sentence for the Aurora's crew.
He could have saved himself and the nineteen members of the bridge watch, but he chose not to. I don't think it was a secret from them. Ihaar said the watch, like Trebal, were devoted to him body and soul. But they "shared some of his beliefs, the essence of which was unknown to me." But I had a 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 projectiles, which we practically didn't have...
The captain... By sacrificing himself and his close associates, he not only diverted the threat of the Ascended from us, but also gave us the chance not to waste our depletable weapons. He knew everything I'd told him in general terms about the adventures of the Earthlings in the Milky Way and Pegasus. He understood how hard the fight would be.
And he made his decision.
Trebal didn't know that. And I didn't see the whole picture until Ihaar explained it. The Lantean, using manipulation skills, had done exactly what we needed to do. But what we would never have done ourselves. Honestly, if I had the opportunity...
"If I could have opened the door to his section, I would have done it," I admitted. "I don't give a damn about the projectiles. He was the first Lantean I didn't feel sick talking to. 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 virtuality so we wouldn't have time to find another solution. Ihaar," I looked at the engineer, "how much time do we have left?"
"Two minutes until the Wraiths arrive, and another two until the self-destruct," he reported without error. His brooch-transmitter came to life:
"Chief engineer, we've finished transferring the stasis pods to the Hippaforalkus," a voice came from the "brooch." "We've delivered the hyperdrive parts, starting the next shipment. Hurry, there's almost no time."
"We'll be there soon," Ihaar assured, looking at me and Trebal. The girl (yes, she was at least ten thousand years older than she looked, but I couldn't bring myself to call her an old woman) had already brought her emotions under control. But the shine in her eyes and on her cheeks... "Time to go. It's running out."
"There's nothing more we can do," I said, approaching Trebal and putting my hand on her shoulder. "There are battles we can't win. That's what the captain said to me in farewell."
"Leave," the first officer said quietly but authoritatively, shrugging off my hand. "I'm staying."
"That's wrong!" Ihaar declared. "The Aurora will explode soon and..."
"I think she knows," Trebal and I looked each other in the eye. It was clear without words — she wouldn't back down. "And we don't have the authority to detain her."
"But..."
"At least in something we agree," the Ancient woman turned sharply on her heels, her hair whipping across my face. The impression, combined with my throbbing and clearly broken jaw, was like I'd been hit with a shovel. Did she have metal in her hair? What kind of relative of Wolverine was she?! "I wish you success."
"One question," I stopped the girl, looking at an extremely interesting and undeservedly insulted object in my hands. "This button does what I think it does?"
"I don't know what you're talking about," Trebal turned toward me.
Only to see the Lantean electroshock weapon in my hands. The Ancient woman glanced at her belt. Naturally, the holster was empty. What can I say, for two years I wanted to be a magician in school... The hands remember.
"Just try...!" With a barely audible sound, I pressed the only button on the weapon. Trebal was jolted by the electric shock and collapsed to the floor like a senseless sack.
"When she comes to, she's not going to like this very much," Ihaar assured me. "Believe me, Mikhail, when she's angry, she can be quite the..."
I didn't give a damn what she thought or said. The captain said: "Take care of her." And now I understood who he meant.
You don't refuse a person who sacrifices themselves and their subordinates for you. Even if the one he asked you to take care of is categorically against it.
."..quite the bitch?" I clarified, hoisting the bag of ship's computer crystals onto my shoulder. I had to adjust to take the girl in my arms, then throw her over my other shoulder — for balance.
"I didn't say that," Ihaar shook his head.
"Well, I heard she asked me to try her own weapon on her," I said with a straight face. "And that's the official version. You got me, Igorek?"
The chief engineer looked at me with suspicion, behind which lay confusion.
"How do you know what my grandmother called me when I was a child?" he asked, glancing around.
For fuck's...
"That's a very long story, my friend," I assured him. "I'll tell you sometime later. But for now, listen to my command..."
"What command? You're not an officer, and I'm not obligated..."
"RU-U-UN!"