It is incredibly difficult to breathe through the pain and pleasure that flood the old body.
It feels like every movement you make is met by a wave of a raging river, whose waters and current surpass you in strength. They drag you along, making your mind boil with helplessness and anger at your own powerlessness.
You can neither inhale nor exhale.
Your body is seized by cramps, your limbs become icy.
And then you will drown...
But everything she was experiencing now only vaguely resembled what her mind was painting for her.
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 eyesight, damaged by long and slow aging, was returning to normal, focusing... And then its clarity disappeared. Her eyeballs rolled back involuntarily, making it impossible to distinguish what was happening around her.
Her hearing organs did not obey her, her sense of touch seemed to have disappeared... This happens when you find yourself in a vacuum without protection. It is impossible to accelerate yourself, there is no point of support, there is only silence around, and no matter that can be felt...
And then, everything abruptly stopped.
Only pain and a pressing feeling in the chest remained.
With difficulty, she managed to tear her consciousness from the narcotic euphoria, to focus her gaze...
... on vertical pupils that looked straight into her soul. Pale green skin, hanging strands of snow-white hair, a grin of almost transparent fangs adorning the oral cavity...
"We didn't make it!" she realized. Her thought processes were still slowing down after stasis, but her reflexes were always at their best.
Her hearing returned almost simultaneously with sharp alarm sounds. The faint blinking of emergency lighting and familiar notes pierced her refreshed mind like a Wraith. Who was just taking his ugly hand from her body. A lump formed in her throat.
"Hello, Ancient," the Wraith rasped into her face, with a deliberately predatory movement taking his hand from her chest and showing a feeding suction cup. "I got unforgettable emotions from you... Such power... You are probably the commander of this pathetic tub?"
Her developed physiology allowed her to do many things that ordinary people could not.
For example, to twist on the narrow bed of the stasis capsule, crossing her legs on the neck of the life-sucker. He only tried to grab her ankles and pull her off, stunned by the lunge.
"Stop!" her vertical pupils widened, and the Wraith's hands spread apart. Oh yes, he recognized this move. Ancient carrion. "I'm on your...!"
"Lady," a man in a strange gray uniform and a worried look stepped out of the shadow nearby. Short haircut, economical movements – a fighter. Most likely a retinue of followers. "He saved..."
But she could no longer be stopped.
Bending at the waist, the young woman slammed the heel of her open palm into the Wraith's nose. Simultaneously with the crunch of his nasal cartilage and bones, the Ancient, using the Wraith as a pivot point, moved to his right. While carefully changing the balance of bodies...
The calculation turned out to be perfect.
Her body slid along the edge of the wall, while the Wraith slammed into it with a very characteristic impact sound.
A growl was heard, and the Wraith, now on his knees, gave her a look full of fury. A second before her kick sent him into oblivion.
"What are you doing?!" the same man shouted, taking a step towards 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 spread palms, shifted her weight, and with all available strength, kicked both feet into the man's chest and head. He flew back to the wall, grouping himself. And immediately, he attacked.
He hoped to catch her by surprise while she was getting up on her knees, coming out of the roll.
Block a direct blow to the face with her left hand, a counter direct blow to the face with her right fist. Again, again. The opponent covered his face, but that's exactly what she wanted. A side blow with her fist to the right kidney, a cry of pain, and a bent body of the Wraith's admirer. His face involuntarily came out from behind the block of his hands.
A precise strike with her fingers to the carotid artery and the second opponent collapsed on the deck. The stasis compartment for senior officers was cleared of enemies.
Senior Officer Trebel looked with a hint of sadness at the two other empty chambers. The second and third commanders' assistants should have slept here. But they died. Ten thousand years ago.
Another person with a weapon and in the same uniform as the one she had just knocked down appeared in the doorway.
"Kirik!" he exclaimed, rushing to the unconscious man. "What's going on here?!"
He paid too little attention to the woman in the white Lantian uniform. Senior Officer Trebel considered it unnecessary to waste her strength and combat skills on him. It would have taken three seconds.
It took one second to paralyze him with the stun gun dangling from her belt.
Stepping over another unconscious body, the senior officer of the battleship Aurora walked into the corridor. Looking around and finding no one present, she listened to the sound accompaniment of the active self-destruct system.
"You'll pay dearly for this, Mikhail!" she promised, approaching the nearest console. She needed information about the traitor's whereabouts.
And two seconds later, she was running away from the battleship's onboard computer compartment.
***
"We only have seven minutes left!"
Ihaar told me this just as I was removing the last set of information crystals from their housing, intended 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 mumbled.
"Snap out of it, kid," I advised, taking the crystals out of the holder one by one and putting them in my bag. "Everything we need is already with us."
This kid is strange.
Like the entire crew, except for the commander, he was a representative of one of the younger races assimilated by the Ancients. Quite smart, resourceful, quick-witted. His ideas for using "jumpers" to evacuate the Aurora's crew were very useful.
We managed to evacuate the depressurized section with technicians – they are maintenance personnel, mechanics by our standards. Quite educated, technically competent, they know what to fix, how to fix it, and how to eliminate problems. Thirty-two people out of the thirty-five required by штату 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 of the same – the second and third sections on the ship. Moreover, I assumed that the transporter could only hold three, at most four capsules. Ihaar demonstrated how to move six at once.
And now I understand why the commander of the Aurora said to bring him and his section back to life first. Roughly speaking, they were the best on the ship, they have very strong Ancient genes... And they are also very clever sons of bitches.
I would never have guessed what they finally did. The tenth person revived was the ship's pilot. Well, pilot... These functions belonged to the captain and his assistants. But the defrosted guy clearly took courses in piloting star dreadnoughts.
Honestly, I don't know who came up with the idea of setting up a conveyor belt for transporting people through starship hangars, but according to Alvar, who received the capsules in the Hippaphoralkus hangar, it looked exactly like that.
If your ship's hangar is depressurized, and you need to quickly and as fully as possible extract the entire crew from a doomed starship, what will you do? Correct. While two of your people are saving their comrades in the open compartments of the ship, two others are working on connecting the incoming capsules to the Hippaphoralkus, weaving new wiring on the fly, because, despite all her genius, Chaya calculated the power systems for only a hundred cameras, then five others, including Ihaar himself, are looting the starship.
While Koschei is bringing the last and important crew member to consciousness, Kirik is guarding him, the Athosians with their tongues hanging out are carrying capsules on antigravs through the ship's corridors (by the way, thanks again to Ihaar, who changed the camera settings and now they can be barraged not at the speed of a walker, but of a running person), Ihaar and his four subordinates were dismantling the Aurora in one place, and assembling something in another.
What?
Well, they were turning the atmospheric shield that creates airtightness in the hangar with an open armor hatch into what they called an "atmospheric corridor." For what? Well, because while I was talking with the captain, listening to his last will, Ihaar also returned to life with a task.
From a backup command post, he reprogrammed the capsules to speed up their movement, and then ejected them all from their nests. Why didn't we do this, even though we could? Because we wouldn't have had time to transport all of them to the Hippaphoralcus in forty-five minutes, while the emergency batteries were working. Loading and unloading the teleportation chamber took two minutes – and that's at maximum human speed.
Therefore, the smart and inventive technicians made it much simpler. They calculated how many capsules could be sent through the transporter at the designated time. And the rest were pushed into the dying hangar of the Aurora. At first, Alvar thought they would load the capsules into the "jumpers" and deliver them that way. Fortunately, we had several machines for flights, and those that the Aurora had also flew with great difficulty.
But no, it's not that simple.
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 Hippophoralcus almost "hangar to hangar" with the Aurora, Ihaar and his people laid that very atmospheric corridor between the hangars. And thanks to the working life support system, they restored the atmosphere to the Aurora's hangar. After which, through this very atmospheric corridor, they are directing the cameras that will not have time to be transported to the dreadnought through the teleportation chamber to the Hippaphoralcus hangar.
Now, while the Aurora was living out its last minutes, Ihaar and his people not only found a way to save another two hundred people, but also managed to dismantle the dreadnought itself for spare parts along the way. Small things, of course. Mostly quick-release units, power distributors on the emptied decks, crystals, data blocks from accessible laboratories, and so on. The guys clearly knew their way around looting.
Our main snag in saving personnel was that we couldn't save everyone – a lot of time was spent loading and unloading capsules into the cabin, into the "jumpers," and so on.
Koschei managed to bring only ten people to consciousness and was now working on the eleventh, the last one, for whom he had enough life force. He's lying, most likely, but we'll deal with that later.
Thanks to Ihaar, there is a chance to save everyone.
Almost everyone.
Partly, the fact that we have managed to save two hundred and eight crew members of the Aurora so far, softened the fact that I failed to deceive fate. The captain was not for nothing advising me not to deal with those whom I cannot deceive.
"Five minutes," Ihaarr announced, finishing the dismantling of data blocks from several consoles in the compartment. As I understood it, he was removing the redundant control system for the command chair. The main one (what was left of it) had already been removed. The thing was extremely rare, 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 like only the not-quite-intact hull would be left aboard the "Aurora" after we left. But Ihaarr had clearly stated – he received such orders from the captain. And he wasn't going to disobey them. "We need to go."
"We have two minutes to spare," I reminded him.
The control time needed for us to leave the ship was calculated with a two-minute buffer. That's exactly 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 Wraiths. Which the engineer absolutely disliked.
The reason for this was simple – in five minutes, the "Hippaphoralkus" was supposed to raise its shields to avoid damage from enemy ship fire. And the "Aurora's" transport wouldn't have enough energy to break through them. We'd tested this on Atlantis – to overcome the city's shield, the cabin needed fifty times more energy than usual. The load on the "Aurora's" ZPM right now was such that every bit of energy counted. If we didn't make it, the captain's plan wouldn't work.
And so...
"Traitor!" Trebal appeared in the doorway of the compartment with the onboard computer, a bitch in a form-fitting snow-white suit. Ihaarr, standing by the wall, with wide eyes, clutched a set of crystals to his chest. I completely agreed with his behavior – it would be difficult to manufacture such a thing even in a workshop, as the materials for production were rarer in the galaxy than kind Wraiths. And we actually had a good use for them.
"Trebal?" I was stunned too, 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 her eyes as soon as her fist hit my jaw. But I managed to block the second blow. No, not with my miraculous 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 from her face that it hurt, maybe even her wrist bones were broken (who was I kidding?), but she wasn't going to back down.
By inertia, she delivered a roundhouse kick to my head that even Chuck Norris himself would have envied. And only then, realizing what was happening, she pulled an electroshock weapon from her belt. One shot – and my defense went from rich green to pale green.
Ideally, I should have reacted and fired my pulse blaster at her. Except it was completely discharged. Breaking through the doors to the section I needed turned out to be an insurmountable task. Because I'd only managed to break through one door, using up all my charges.
But a second door still separated me from the stasis pods I needed.
"Trebal!" Ihaarr squeaked, his voice cracking. "What are you doing?!"
"Enter the cancellation code!" The second shot completely discharged my defense. "Immediately!"
Damn, their shock weapon was something! Alvaar had fired a hundred shots from Wraith weapons at me, and only then did the shield give up. But here... TWO!
"Trebal, listen..." Ihaarr tried to intervene again.
"Shut up!" she cut him off, poking me with the same rod almost in the face. "Do you realize what you've done?! Oh, who am I asking?! You don't! Enter the cancellation code immediately! We'll get him out of there!"
"We won't," I said, keeping myself in check, looking into the girl's embittered eyes. Well, now I understood what the "Aurora's" commander meant by telling me to protect my jaw. Her punch was such that Mike Tyson would go down from one. Maybe... No, well, at his age, of course, he would go down... "I entered the code the captain gave me. He didn't tell me any cancellation code. And this code didn't work in principle! It activated self-destruct from the virtual environment!"
"Lies!" The girl put the weapon back on her belt and hit me in the chest with half her strength. It hurt. "He couldn't have done that!"
"He could," Ihaarr's voice came, as he crawled along the wall towards the exit. "I checked everything. 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 couldn't have done that!" the Ancient insisted. The emotional breakdown within 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 their relationship was with the commander, but... I'm not interested. "Not with me!"
"He could and he did," I cut her off. "And you know it! You argued about it when I returned to the virtual environment!"
The "Aurora's" captain... turned out to be too smart for me.
He kept track of every temporal marker I reported to him. And we talked until there was barely enough time for me to report back. He stalled, understanding what would happen once I got out of there.
What's more, he didn't even lie... I didn't clarify with him whether anyone could really influence reality from the virtual environment. Anyone.
Except the captain. And even then, it was limited. For example, by activating the starship's self-destruct mode – which is exactly what he was doing on the auxiliary bridge while we were talking. He set a timer so that the "Aurora" would prepare for self-destruction exactly ten minutes after he ejected me from the virtual environment.
Perhaps in the series, he couldn't do it because of changes to the virtual environment made by the Wraith that infiltrated it.
Yes, it turned out he was capable of that too. And the commander's code... I checked – it doesn't fit any panel on the "Aurora." The onboard computer doesn't accept it either. No access to the systems.
As soon as I got out of the stasis chamber, I rushed to the stasis compartment next to the auxiliary command post, where the captain's and the entire bridge watch's chambers were located, excluding his assistants. The Ancients clearly had their own system for assigning people to stasis pods... As far as I understood from Ihaarr's explanation, who found me there, or rather, was waiting for me, dismantling the main control circuit of the command chair, people were supposed to lie down in the chambers strictly on the deck and in the compartment where they were assigned according to the combat schedule. A recognition system, so to speak – like seat belts on a plane – they wouldn't save you in a crash, but it would be easier to identify people from tickets and the remains of buckled bodies.
Trebal's full, pinkish lips trembled, contorting into a grimace.
"You know the protocol," Ihaarr said quietly, addressing the "Aurora's" first officer. "Self-destruct is impossible without the captain on board. The ship won't explode..."
"What a bastard you are," tears appeared in Trebal's eyes. But, unlike her words, the tears were not meant for me. "You just traded the life of a great man, to whom you're not even fit to be a shoe lining, for a supply of shells 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 thought I'd condemned him to death just because I wanted to save scarce homing missiles! She's driven by emotions, not logic. She doesn't analyze, 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, Ihaarr explained everything to me while I was breaking down the door, the panel, trying to short-circuit and get to the stasis pods of the captain and the bridge watch, and it frankly made my blood boil.
The ship can't be blown up as long as the captain or any of the senior officers who know the code are alive on board. This is because there's a simple rule – the captain leaves with the ship. So that neither the Lantian, nor the ship's technology, nor the information stored in its databases falls into enemy hands.
If there's any logic in this whole security procedure, I don't see it. Not at all. However, I don't see the logic in most of the Ancients' decisions. But it's there somewhere. Twisted by "great knowledge" and longevity, but it's there.
The captain knew that if he left the "Aurora," the Ascended would make his life hell. And ours along with his. Because of his reflections, which became a death sentence for the "Aurora's" crew.
He could have saved himself and nineteen members of the bridge watch, but he didn't. I don't think it was a secret from them. Ihaarr said that the watch, like Trebal, were devoted to him. But they "shared some of his beliefs, the essence of which is unknown to me." But I can guess what those reflections were.
The captain could have saved himself. But then, we would have had to find a way to destroy the "Aurora" otherwise. We would most likely have had to use the shells, which we practically don't have...
The captain... By sacrificing himself and his close associates, he not only removed the threat of the Ascended from us but also gave us the opportunity not to waste our limited ammunition. He knew everything I told him in broad strokes about the adventures of humans in the Milky Way and Pegasus. He understood how difficult it would be to fight.
And he made a decision.
Trebal didn't know this. And I didn't understand the whole picture until Ihaarr explained it. The Lantian, using manipulation skills, did exactly what we needed to do. But what we ourselves would never have done. Honestly, if I had such an opportunity...
"If I could break into his compartment, I would," I admitted. "I don't care about the shells. He was the first Lantian I didn't feel sick talking to. And I would give anything for him to stay alive. But he outplayed me. He knew I would try to save him. He kept me in the virtual environment so we wouldn't have time to find another solution. Ihaarr," I looked at the engineer, "how much time do we have left?"
"Two minutes until the Wraiths arrive and another two until self-destruct," he reported flawlessly. His transmitter brooch lit up:
"Chief Engineer, we've finished transferring the stasis pods to the 'Hippaphoralkus'," a voice came from the brooch. "We've delivered the hyperdrive components, we're starting the transfer. Hurry, there's almost no time."
"We'll be there soon," Ihaarr 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 sparkle in her eyes and on her cheeks... "It's time to go, time is running out."
"We can't do anything anymore," I said, walking up to Trebal and placing my hand on her shoulder. "There are battles we can't win. The captain told me so when he said goodbye."
"Leave," the first officer said quietly but authoritatively, shaking off my hand. "I'm staying."
"That's wrong!" Ihaarr exclaimed. "The 'Aurora' will explode soon and..."
"I think she knows," Trebal and I looked into each other's eyes. It was clear without words – she wouldn't back down. "And we don't have the authority to detain her."
"But..."
"At least we agree on something," the Ancient turned sharply on her heels, her hair hitting her face. The impression, combined with my aching and clearly broken jaw, was as if I'd been hit with a shovel. Does she have metal in her hair? What kind of relative of Wolverine is she?! "I wish you success."
"One question," I stopped the girl, examining a very interesting and undeservedly insulted item in my hands. "Is this button for what I think it is?"
"I don't understand what you mean," Trebal turned towards me.
But only to see the Lantian electroshock weapon in my hands. The Ancient glanced at her belt. Naturally, the holster was empty. What could I do, I wanted to be a magician in school for two years... My hands remembered.
"Just try it...!" With a barely perceptible sound, I pressed the single button on the weapon. Trebal was jolted by the shock, and she collapsed on the floor like a lifeless heap.
"When she wakes up, she's going to hate this very much," Ihaarr assured me. "Believe me, Mikhail, when she's angry, she can be quite the..."
I don't care what she thinks or says. The captain said, "Take care of her." And now I understood who he meant.
You don't refuse a person who sacrifices himself and his subordinates for you. Even if the one he asked to take care of is categorically against it.
"...a bitch?" I clarified, slinging the bag with the onboard computer crystals over my shoulder. I had to get used to picking the girl up and then throwing her over my other shoulder – for balance.
"I didn't say that," Ihaarr shook his head.
"But I heard that she asked me to try her weapon's effect on her," I said with a poker face. "And that's the official version. Do you understand me, Igorek?"
The chief engineer looked at me with suspicion, behind which lay confusion.
"How do you know what my grandmother used to call me as a child?" he asked, glancing around.
Damn it...
"It's a very long story, my friend," I assured him. "I'll tell you sometime later. And now, listen to my command..."
"What command? You're not an officer, and I'm not obligated..."
"RUNNNNN!"