Starship Armstrong - Season 3

Part 32 - Family Ties (X)

Mitzner ran through the jungle like a hunting cat, able to duck and dodge through the growth at speeds no normal human could match. Even for all her natural abilities the terrorists were still well ahead of her thanks to their hoverbelts.

Twigs and thorns tore at her as she ran, but couldn't puncture her skin. Her nice dress, however, was quickly shredded to ruin and embedded with jungle debris.

Mitzner was highly familiar with McAfree's scent. She was able to pick it out from the background bouquet rather easily. That was her lifeline. The jungle growth meant she couldn't get a visual, the hoverbelts meant they left no trail, they were even wearing coolsuits of some kind as well because they weren't showing up on infrared. Under better conditions Mitnzer might still have been able to see McAfree's body heat but these weren't those conditions.

This was a professional operation. It was going to be a considerable waste of talent when she messily murdered each one of these self-condemning idiots.

McAfree's scent trail led Mitzner to a water access tunnel tastefully hidden by hanging vines and other vegetation. Even with her keen eyesight she would have missed it.

The shredded remnants of her skirt began to soak up the dirty water as Mitzner made her way down the tunnels. Things were looking up otherwise. Tunnels would negate a lot of the advantages hoverbelts gave her opponents.

Mitzner followed the scent easily through the maze of access tunnels, down simple metal ladders, and along wet stone hallways. She wasn't even sure what level she was on anymore.

Then it stopped.

The scent didn't fade away or peter out, it simply stopped. It went from strong to invisible. It didn't make any sense.

Mitzner began to look around franticly, trying desperately to use any of her other senses to figure out what was going on.

* * *

"My name," said the well-groomed old man, "is Hastoyar."

"I bet," said McAfree. "Ensign Yoshiko McAfree. So you're the asshole who had me kidnapped."

"I am that same asshole," Hastoyar admitted. "I understand you read my humble manifesto."

"Probably not," said McAfree. "I read a manifesto today but not any humble ones."

"Ha! I like you. What did you think of my manifesto, then, be it humble or braggadocios?"

"Well it certainly doesn't make the Queen's rule look very legitimate does it? As I was saying to the others it depends to what degree your demands are literal or rhetorical."

"They are quite literal."

"Sure, then I'd vote for you if they had an election. I'm not a huge fan of your kidnapping policies but politics is the art of compromise and I like the alternative less."

"I hope you understand-"

"Nope, stop you there, I do not understand or sympathize with anyone's motives for kidnapping me. You can all go to Hell for that part."

"Fair enough," said Hastoyar, "it's asking a lot."

"So are you going to let me build the signal booster so you can get in touch with the people who are, inevitably, going to be the ones to ransom me so we can get this over with?"

"How do I know you're not a Foundation spy?"

"You don't," admitted McAfree, "but if I am a spy I somehow tricked you into kidnapping me already. It sounds like if I'm a spy I'm the greatest spy who ever lived and you've already lost by bringing me back to your secret base."

Hastoyar smiled.

"Let her work," he said, turning and walking out of the room.

"You heard the warden," announced McAfree. "Bring me your portable communications array!"

Gar went bounding from the room, and quickly returned with a cylindrical communicator hub attached to a short tripod. He proudly handed it to McAfree, who began to inspect it.

"Yeah," she said. "This is garbage. First thing's first I'm going to need to pull this thing apart, clean all the parts, and then put it back together, you know, properly."

"You are not to take the communications array apart!" insisted Azar.

"Take it up with Hastur, he said I could work. You were there."

* * *

McAfree clicked the last piece of the new array into place. A large pile of unused components lay beside her.

"What about those?" asked Azar, pointing at them.

"Inefficient redundancies," said McAfree. "Look, don't worry so much. You're paranoid. What do you think I'm going to do, use your communicator to build some kind of a weapon?"

"I suppose not," said Azar.

"You'd need to be some kind of multidisciplinary genius with nerves of steel-" said McAfree.

"Yep," agreed Azar.

"-well read, funny, pretty but not in a delicate way-"

"What would that have to do with it?" asked Delili.

"No! Stop her!" yelled Azar.

It was too late. McAfree had already positioned the device so that she was in the dead-center of its area-of-effect, the eye of the storm, and activated it.

"MAY THE QUEEN REIGN A THOUSAND YEARS!" she shouted, defiantly.

The mutilated communicator flooded the underground base with an invisible mind-blanking field. For a split second everyone in the room besides McAfree lost the ability to form conscious thoughts. It would take their consciousness a little while to reform.

Gar fell limply to the ground. The others remained on their feet, staring blankly, drooling a little.

McAfree began to run through the base with purpose, trying to find the exit. She couldn't. There were no obvious exterior doors, no windows, nothing that could potentially lead outside. The dashed from room to room. It was the same everywhere.

The exit had to be hidden, McAfree reasoned. It was like a puzzle. She could work it out. She began inspecting the walls, moving her hands along them, looking for seams or any other sign of a hidden door.

She could hear the others begin to move around. The mind blank had been about as effective as she could have hoped but it was never going to buy her all that much time. She needed to find the exit.

McAfree tried to see if she could find any kind of control panel or console, something that could be used to activate the hidden door. She tried to guess which of the room's sparse contents was large enough to conceal a doorway.

Then she felt a cold hand on her shoulder.