Chapter 2

“Computer! Play 'Laser mommy' track seven.”, Ben said. The speakers in the launch bay began blaring out a dissonant tune, very popular on Ilian Prime the last time they had been there.

Ben pulled at the clinches again to make sure his suit was properly secured. Once, there had been a leak and he had had to hold his breath all through the transport procedure.

Lily had crawled into a maintenance hatch near the floor, next to the transporter tube and Ben heard her muffled mumbling—talking to herself as she often did when she was concentrating..

He began pacing back and forth, his shoes clanking against the floor. On a table opposite the transporter tube, lay a RTA-K100 and a belt which held five plasma grenades. Ben wondered what was taking so long, he wanted to get out there. As he went to check on his weapons for the third time, the music shut off and a voice echoed in the launch bay.

“Are you ready down there?” It was Marty's voice booming through the speakers.

Lily crawled out from underneath the transporter and stood up.

“Yeah, what's taking so long up there? We've been waiting for ages!” Ben said.

“How much space are we talking? We're having some pressurization problems down here. I think I can give you twenty, at most thirty. That enough?” Lily said, her eyes studying the weapons on the table without really taking any notice of them.

“What do you mean by 'pressurization problems'? We will be able to do this, right?” Ben said, his voice almost a whisper, “I will be able to get over there, right?”

“Don't worry big guy.” She looked at him and smiled. “Have I ever disappointed you?”

“Okay, I'll have to bring us closer. Transport in one minute.”, Marty said over the speakers, as he was trying to do too many things at once.

Ben ran up to the table, strapped on the belt and hung the rifle over his left shoulder, like a rock star with a guitar, ready to take the stage. Next to the table hung a helmet in the same gray colors as his combat suit. He grabbed it, checked his hair in the reflection in the visor, pulled on a few strands until he was pleased, then he put the helmet on.

Lily stood at the computer terminal next to the transporter tube, entering the parameters for the transport. The door to the transporter glided open, a white light shone out onto the floor, inviting him in. Ben glanced at Lily, she looked at him.

“Showtime, big guy!”, she said, her voice crackling out through the intercom system in the helmet. He loved this. As soon as he was inside the tube, the door slid shut and his feet were magnetically sealed to the floor.

“Fifteen seconds.” Marty's voice, this time through the helmet's speakers.

“Depressurizing chamber.” Lily's said. The white light turned red and began pulsating. Ben felt how the air was sucked out of the chamber. Sometimes he could hear the air getting sucked out, but not this time.

“Deactivating gravity field.” His arms floated up but he forced them down and held them close to his body. He swayed slowly.

“Transport ready!” Lily said.

“I'm inside their system and have taken control. Transport in five...”, Marty said, “Four... Three... Two... One... Launch!” Lily pushed a button; Ben looked up. Five metallic plates above him folded outwards and he stared into space. The black void. The space station floated into view. The floor suddenly jerked and shot upwards with incredible speed and just before it pulled his legs from their sockets, the floor released it's magnetic lock and he was catapulted out into space, straight for an airlock on the space station. A human torpedo.

“Shit!”, Marty shouted over the com system. “Some kind of watchdog system just kicked me out, I can't open the airlock!”

Ben watched as the space station came closer at an alarming speed. “Better do something or I'm gonna have to improvise.”

“No! No! No! Don't do that! I almost got it!”

Ben detached one of the grenades strapped to his belt. He pulled the pin without releasing the safety. If he threw a grenade at the right moment, he would be able to blow the airlock, hopefully without killing himself. That would get him inside, although not as stealthy as Marty would have wished, but he would be inside and thus able to complete the mission. Besides, Ben thought there was a certain kind of honesty in the direct approach. Man to man. That's the way he liked to deal with everything.

“Marty, you've got about five more seconds before I open that can myself! Come on!” Marty didn't answer. Ben readied himself. This had to be timed with precision or he would blow himself up. Just as he was about to throw the grenade, Marty interruped.

“Waahoo! Got it!”, as Marty spoke, the airlock in front of Ben opened, “Welcome to A741, Ben. Make yourself at home.”

Ben put the pin back in the grenade and reattached it to his belt. He glided in through the airlock and as it closed behind him he felt the artificial gravity dragging him to the floor. Air was pumped into the room and a light next to the door turned green; he was in.

Ben was crawling through a maintenance conduit. It was barely big enough for a human of normal size which made it way too tight for Ben. But he edged forward, sweating profusely inside his suit. His shoulders were sore from bumping into low-hanging beams and his rifle kept getting stuck in them. He really hated the stealth approach.

“Two more grates then you should be inside the laboratory section.” Marty's voice crackled inside the helmet.

Ben grunted.

A small metallic sphere hovered in front of him. It kept zipping back and forth between the walls. It bobbed up and down and sometimes without notice, it shot forward, stopping a few meters ahead and waited for Ben to catch up.

“Do you think you could make that camera act a little less... happy?”, Ben said, “Anyway, is this where I'm supposed to go in?” Ben tried to get his rifle but it was too narrow, he couldn't get it over his head.

“Yes, in the next room you will find—”

Ben smashed the grating with the back of his hand, making it fly out into the room. He crawled up into a ball and pushed away, flying out of the maintenance conduit. Once clear he quickly realized he was a bit higher up than he thought and he landed face down, knocking the air out of him. He grabbed his rifle and sat up, still trying to recover his breath.

He was sitting in a corridor with white walls and a gray, carpet-covered floor. White, glowing discs hung evenly spaced from the ceiling, creating an ambient light with very soft shadows. The walls were curved outwards, making the corridor look almost like a tube and the corridor itself was also slightly curved. There was no one in sight.

Ben got up.

“Why did you do that?”, Marty asked.

“If you tell me everything all the time, you kinda spoil the fun.” He pressed himself against the outer wall, trying to see what was beyond the curve. There was no one there. He started moving.

“But you interrupted me! What if what I was trying to say was 'in the next room awaits a bottomless abyss filled with angry Naans?'”

“An abyss on a space station?”

“They have one in the Grandia system.”

“How'd they make it bottomless?”

He was closing in on a four-way intersection.

“Turn right at the intersection up ahead. I guess they're generating some kind of dimensional rift to—turn left! There are two dots coming your way!”

Ben turned left and hurried through the corridor.

“There's an opening on your left. Go!”

He dodged into the room and stopped to the left of the opening, where he couldn't be seen unless someone came from the other end of the corridor. The room was lined with rectangular tables. Each table was covered with low, colorful plants. Closest to him was a table covered in red flowers, they seemed to sway slowly back and forth, as if they were under water. His suit prevented him from sensing if there was some kind of artificial wind blowing through the room, though he couldn't see anything which looked like it could push air around. Then he saw the plants on the other tables didn't sway in the same way.

“Ben, they're coming your way. They might be heading for the room you're in.” Marty said. Ben readied his rifle, flipped the safety, and then he waited. He only heard his own breaths, each exhale fogging up the lower part of his visor. The floating camera bobbed up and down on the opposite side of the opening, just outside of view for passers-by. The sound of voices came closer. The velusan languages consisted of a high-pitched chatter and it was now right outside.

“Ben,” Marty's voice was an exasperated whisper, “you're grinning!”

Ben realized he was actually grinning. He forced his face into an “alert”-expression.

“Do you want this mission to fail?”, Marty asked, still whispering.

“Come on, they're building planetbusters, would it really be so bad if I had to shoot some of them?”

“Yes, good idea, and what would you do after you've alerted the whole station?”

“Party?”

Marty sighed. Ben didn't hear the chattering anymore. He edged closer and took a quick glance down the corridor. There was no one there. Scanning the room he was in, he saw the red flowers still swaying to inaudible music. He walked up to the table. When he reached out with his left hand to touch one of them, they all instantly gravitated in the direction of his hand. Their stems were stretched as the flowers tried to reach him. He moved his hand across the flowers a few times, seeing how they all followed his hand.

“Marty, what are these?”

The camera hovered closer.

“Could be a biological experiment, or it could be the botany club's latest project. The corridor is clear, you can move out.”

Ben left the room and took to the right. He ran past three more intersections, each branching off in four directions. In each intersection there were glowing signs projected on the walls, one in each direction. The text on them was indecipherable to Ben, but that didn't bother him. If you wanted someone to read something, you'd write it so they can understand it—that was Ben's philosophy.

Finally, he stood in front of a red, metallic door. Something was written on it in the same language as the signs. Ben guessed it said “Keep out” or possibly “Top Secret Laboratory”. There was no handle on the door, just a metallic pad—probably a bioscanner keyed to the scientists who worked here.

“I'll get it open within a minute” said Marty.

Ben waited.

“There we go, it'll open in thirty seconds. I rerouted it through the timer regulating the exhaust ports for the ships engine. Clever, huh?”

“Yeah... I guess.”

“It's a lot more elegant than if I'd cracked it. With this method, there no way their integrity checks is ever gonna detect—“. A long pause, then: “Crap!”

“Detect crap?”

“A patrol is heading your way, they'll be at your position a few seconds after the door has opened.”

“Okay, I'll hurry in once it opens.”

“Well, ehm, it'll stay open until the exhaust ports restart their cycle. They are gonna see it's open. We have to find... Where are you going?”

Ben was moving towards the intersection, which was the only way into this corridor, except for the not yet opened door. He grabbed his rifle. “Are they coming from the left or from the right?”

“Ben, you can't shoot them, it'll trigger the alarms!”

“I won't! Left or right?”

“Left.”

He crouched down next to the left wall, a sign glowing above his head like an alien halo, naming the corridor he was in. The carpets which covered all the floors removed any sound of footsteps. He whispered: “Tell me when they're one meter from my corner.” He grabbed the front of his gun with both hands, holding it like a bat.

“Now!”, Marty whispered, as if they would be able to hear him otherwise.

He jumped out in front of the two soldiers. He smiled. They were startled, not expecting a giant, twice their size, to jump out from behind a corner they've passed hundreds of times before. Confused, they looked at each other, and then at Ben. At that moment Ben was in the middle of an earthly game of baseball and had just swung his rifle. The butt of the rifle hit the right soldier in the head, smashing part of his helmet, and without losing almost any speed the rifle hit the second soldier, throwing him into the wall. They were out cold.

“We have to hurry up. It won't be long before they miss these two.” Ben said.

At the end of the corridor, the red metallic door opened with a loud clank. He grabbed the soldiers and pulled them with him into the laboratory. The metallic sphere flew into the room before him. While he was dragging the soldiers, the sphere passed the door frame a number of times on it's attempt at discovering everything in the room at the same time.

Ben left the soldiers just inside the door, propped against the wall. The camera sphere shot by. “Hey, watch out! You almost hit me with that damn thing!” No response. “Marty?” Still no response. The sphere kept zipping around, sometimes stopping to inspect text labels on different bottles and glass tubes.

“This isn't it.”, Marty was puzzled, “This isn't it!”

“What? This isn't what?”

Marty didn't answer.

Ben looked around. According to their intel, this was the biggest lab on the station. It was two stories high and the room was dominated by a glass cage. Inside the cage were animals; velusan snorebears; perlexian huggers; and one animal the size of an earthen dog but with a long silly-looking snout. “A zoo?” Ben moved closer to the cage. All the animals were covered in large boils and sickly outgrowths. They crawled around in the artificially grown vegetation. It didn't look like they were going to live much longer.

“Biological research. Looks like a virus.” Marty said.

Ben and the hovering sphere stood and just stared for a moment. The creatures were horribly deformed. Some of them had outgrowths preventing them from walking. Others had been drained of strength by the engineered disease, making them sacks of meat with brains. One could almost see them evolving the wish for death as their life was slowly tortured out of them by their own infected bodies. The sound of the metal door closing, like a safe, snapped them out of it. “I'll contact head quarters for further instructions.”

“Can't we just blow it up?”, Ben said, somewhat disappointed that he wouldn't get to torch a bomb construction facility.

“There might be diplomatic concerns. I'll have to check with HQ.”

“Diplomatic concerns? Bah, since when have we ever cared about diplomacy?”

Marty was silent for a while, talking on a different com-channel.

“They want us to abort.”

“What?! But, isn't this”, he pointed at the glass cage, “illegal?”

“That's our orders, we're to get out of here as fast as possible.”

“What about all these cuddly, fuddly animals? We're just gonna let them continue to experiment on them?”

“We a special ops team, Ben, not the Interplanetary Animal Association.”

“I was thinking of feeding them a plasma grenade.”

“Oh. No, we can't do that, too much noise. You need to get out of there.”

Ben walked to the door, which still considered itself an integral part of the ships engine. The soldiers on the floor were still unconscious. “When will the door open?”

“Two minutes and thirteen seconds.”

Ben scanned the room. “How come there's no one in here?”

“The scientists are off duty. Station time says it's night.”

“So that's why they haven't began looking for these guys yet.” Then the alarm sounded, a low-pitched humming; the white glowing discs turned to a sick green and began pulsating. “I guess I kind of jinxed that one, didn't I?”

Marty sighed.