Outbreak

Chapter 3: Unexpected Welcome

2004-11-09T14:04:00.000-06:00

The journey "home" had been mostly uneventful for Jax. He had had to speak with Artemis whom he had saved from the dying Nautilus, but that had been the highlight of the trip. A very boring highlight indeed. But, now he was getting paid. Always a plus.

Artemis sat in the co-pilot's chair, for no apparent reason other than to be in the cockpit during the return approach to Mars. The Hellcat needed no co-pilot, it could run under the control of a single skilled pilot, so the second chair served no real purpose other than to comfortably accomodate a passenger.

Had they been entering the atmosphere of the planet, they would have been strapped in, but fortunately they did not have to take that rough reentry. A large, circular space station orbited the red planet (Quickly becoming green and blue) and served as a headquarters for the planet as it became fully colonized and terraformed. The station was a dull grayish color, stripped of its original luster by decades of use. Hundreds of antennas and geometric structures extruded from its hull, along with multicolored lights that cast a languid radiance into the surrounding space. Coincidentally, this space station was their final destination, and the silver nose of the Hellcat was pointed directly towards it as it knifed through space.

Once they drew close to the perimeter of the large station, a robotic voice directed them to their destination, telling them to land at Bay Sixteen. Something about this entry point seemed strange to Jax, but he couldn't determine why; it had been several weeks since he had been here after all. Nonetheless, he complied with the orders and guided the nose of his vessel to the bay, one of several hundred, if that was any indication of the size of the station.

Chapter 2: Starlit Interlude

2004-11-08T20:45:00.000-06:00

The stars formed brilliant streaks of white in a spiral pattern around the Hellcat. Although exceeding the speed of light, Jax had no fear of traveling at such a great velocity. In fact, he wasn't afraid of much, other than spiders and crazy women; a story for a different day. When exceeding speeds greater than two-hundred million, seven-hundred and ninety-two thousand, four-hundred fifty-eight miles per hour, all matter, particularly spacecraft, became insubstantial. No one had ever discovered why exactly this happened, but most thought it had something to do with a vast increase in velocity. No shit, thought Jax, anybody with a brain could make that connection.

He sat in his pilot chair, his slender hands placed lazily behind his thick auburn mane as he watched the rays of light spiral around his ship. He nearly drifted off to sleep at many times during the flight, his thick boots resting comfortably on the control panel, had it not been for the occasional planet flying past the viewport.

The tap of boots across metal brought him from his rest, he was surprised to realize, and he didn’t need to turn his chair to know who stood behind him. The man stood passively behind Jax for a long moment before breaking the ice.

“Um … where am I? And who are you?” he asked.

This time, Jax did swivel in his chair to regard the youth. No, not youth he noted, this man was no younger than himself, perhaps nineteen or so.

“How was your nap?” Jax said, instead of answering right away.

“Fine,” replied the man, a hint of agitation entering his voice. He shifted his weight from foot to foot and gazed out the viewport for a moment, finally turning to look at this curious pilot.

“Your ship …” started Jax.

“The Nautilus,” he interjected.

“The Nautilus,” Jax began anew, “… it was utterly destroyed. Nobody survived.” He paused for a moment, noticing the pained expression on the man’s face. “I’m Jax. What’s your name?”

"Artemis,” he said, before briskly walking back to the hold where Jax had placed him after his rescue.

Jax gazed after the saddened man for a moment, then turned back to the solitude of the stars.

"What's his story?" he wondered aloud.

Sitting atop a sleeping pallet in the back of the Hellcat, Artemis dropped his head into his hands. His suspicions had been confirmed. They were all dead. He hadn't known the crew of the Nautilus all that well, other than his best friend, Jason, who had just wanted to see the stars.

No survivors...

Artemis suddenly raised his head and looked to the cabin of the ship, not twenty feet away, where Jax sat watching through the viewport. What was his part in this, he thought, suspicions raising in his mind. He shook his head in denial of the thought. If the man had anything to do with this, he wouldn't have rescued Artemis from the ship before the inevitable power failure that would cut off life-support to the cryo-bay.

There was a nagging ache in his chest, and for a moment he tryed futilely to rub it away. When it refused to relent, he dropped his head back into his hands, lost in thoughts of what had occured. Moments passed, and a loud voice from the front of the ship wrenched him from his thoughts.

"We'll be coming out of hyperspace soon," declared a familiar voice, "Just thought I'd give you a heads up."

Chapter 1: Wreckage

2004-11-01T18:26:00.000-06:00

The charred hull of the derelict cargo freighter was pockmarked with blast marks and strange, long gashes. Pieces of metallic debris and infrastructure floating in suspended animation around the wreck, as if vultures circling their unfortunate prey. In his many years of freelance work, the mercenary known only as Jax Khalis had seen many such shipwrecks, though this time an odd sense of foreboding seemed to fill his Raker-class gunship, the Hellcat. To an everyday day observer, the Hellcat was just another fast personal transport ship, but below its titanium plating, it was bristling with all manner of weaponry - a veritable gunship. Its primary weapon was a large photon cannon mounted on the underside of the ship, complemented by two smaller laser cannons in the front and several rotary missile launchers along the side.

Taking a cursory look out the viewport, Jax unclasped his harness and kicked off the floor, using the momentum to execute an aerial somersault backwards into the cargo hold. He quickly stripped off his combat jumpsuit and, after ripping open a storage locker, climbed into a pressurized spacesuit he found inside the compartment. Once he had donned the gear, he went back to his pilot chair in much the same way he left it, albeit a bit less dexterously in his bulky suit. He could easily have just switched on the artificial gravity inherent in the design of all starcraft these days, but he enjoyed the thrill of zero gravity too much for simple practicality.

A blinking red light flicked on in his control panel, signaling the close proximity of the Hellcat to the wrecked freighter. Well aware of that fact, Jax deftly piloted his triangular vessel between the debris, bringing it inches from the scarred hull before cutting his thrusters and activating several magnetic landing strips. He then lowered his suit visor, and he noticed for the thousandth time that he could see his bright blue eyes reflected back at him in the dull light of the Hellcat.

Three joystick movements and a keystroke later, he found himself floating through a hatch into the pressing darkness of deep space, armed with a laser cutter, a plasma grenade, and a few other surprises clipped to his belt.

Deep space was a very depressing place; once inside its unending maw, the all-encompassing darkness seemed to sap the light from your soul. But with no matter came no friction, and with no friction the depressed state of mind was offset by the feel and the freedom of walking on air.

Jax was careful not to let his mind wander however, and almost as an afterthought, pressed a button on his wrist that activated his comlink to the Solar Alliance central command base back on Mars. Static filled his headset for a moment, followed by silence once again.

A voice buzzed to life inside of his helmet; “Jax, what's going on out there? You better be doing this as we planned, you are being payed good money,” said the man, obviously irritated with Jax's lack of contact to the base thus far.

After considering for a moment, Jax made his reply: “Well, I just pulled up starboard to the freighter. According to the Hellcat's sensors, their distress beacon cut out a couple hours ago.” He paused for a moment. “Unfortunately, the craft is wrecked and there don't appear to be any signs of life.”

A brief heat scan confirmed his observations, but it wasn't really necessary. There were holes in the hull in several places, and few sentient species could survive in the vacuum of deep space without oxygen for very long. He guided his pressure suit around the wreck with his jetpack for several minutes, finally discerning that there were no hull fractures large enough to fit through. With an audible sigh, Jax took out his laser cutter, a blocky device similar to a chainsaw, but with an energy blade instead of a chain. He turned on his gravity boots to root himself to the ship, and sliced a man-sized, rectangular hole into the freighter with his cutter. Flipping on his helmet light, he gripped the newly cauterized door and swung inside, landing with a muffled thud on the metallic flooring. As with the exterior of the ship, little chunks of debris floated about inside. Normally, he would have paid the floating infrastructure no mind, but little droplets of blood and what appeared to be human tissue hung suspended alongside it.

Never one for such sights, his stomach lurched in protest and he quickly found something else to occupy his vision. He gazed around the vessel, the only illumination the beam of his built-in headlamp. The walls and ceiling were made of thick titanium plating and a foot or two of insulation, with pipes and cables running the length of the hallway he currently stood in. Spaced regularly along the wall were unlit computer screens and keypads, and the floor was a catwalk-like grating. When he examined the grating more closely, there appeared to be a foot or so of crawlspace beneath it, also filled with cables.

He started forward down the hall, looking for evidence as to who could have done this, why it had been done, and other various procedural details. A frantic voice coming across his comlink stopped him in his tracks.

"Stop there!" said an obviously older man than the one he had been speaking to, "don't touch the floating tissue!" The voice was strangely familiar, but Jax couldn't remember where he had heard it before.

Puzzled, Jax tapped his multipurpose visor and brought up a viral scan of the sickening chunks of flesh. Several moments later, the scan came up negative for infected tissue. "If I might ask why...," began Jax.

"Come now, every schoolboy knows about Andromeda Strains," replied the voice.

"Andromeda Strain ... why would you think there is an Andromeda Strain in here?" asked Jax, starting to get a bit worried, "There hasn't been one discovered in centuries, not until those miners opened up that stratum on Pluto."

There was a brief pause. "We have intelligence that points to the possibility of one on that ship. Just be careful," came the voice.

It took a moment, but Jax finally placed where he had heard that voice before. The famed scientist, Steven Valk, was known for his work on starship propulsion systems and gravity generators. Not to mention beam weapons of all varieties. Jax had heard the man speak over the nets concerning the implementation of new technology galaxywide. He also had a reputation for being a bit aloof and slightly off his rocker, although none of that showed in the conversation he had just had with him...

Though still doubting the accuracy of the information, Jax decided he wouldn't chance something as cool as living on his pride. He did a three-sixty degree spin and decided to turn into a passage branching off from his current location. As he walked deeper into the passage, the darkness seemed to thicken, despite the brightness of his headlight. Soon, he found himself grasping along the wall for balance, the darkness too complete to see even a few feet ahead.

About thirty feet into the passageway, he deftly managed to trip over a cable running across the durasteel floor, doing a faceplant into the smooth metal plating.

“Damn!” he exclaimed, frantically raising a hand to check for cracks on his visor, but thankfully, there were none. Even a single crack could spell death for the excitable mercenary. He reached down with one hand and pushed himself back up to his feet, mentally reminding himself to be more careful about where he stepped in the near future. Jax walked on for a few more minutes, which seemed like hours due to his agitation and the pressing darkness all around, until he reached an intersection with arrows pointing in all four directions painted in different colors on the floor. He realized the passage he had been travelling in was most likely a service tunnel, judging from the lack of light and crossing hallways.

A thin shaft of light flickered from the immediate right passageway, and, spurred on by the strange sight, Jax turned into the passage and jogged towards the light's source. Several meters down the hall, a sliding blast door stood slightly open, with the bluish-light flowing out of the open slit. A plaque hanging next to the door read "Cryo-bank". Jax flexed his corded muscles for a moment, then reached his fingers around the portal and pulled with all of his might. Stubbornly, the blast door refused to budge for the simple strength of a mere human. Jax sighed for the second time that day, and reached for a certain laser cutter clipped to his belt.

The doorway proved to be no match for the proton-powered blade, and the mercenary strode confidently into the room. The glow was coming from an amazingly still powered cryogenic tube. The rigid form laying inside was distinctly humanoid in shape, and Jax moved closer to get a better look. It was indeed a human, not one of the few other sentient species known, and he appeared to still live, by all indications on the medical screen to Jax’s left. The man's crimson hair was an oddity, but not unknown, and his thin face fit well with his sinously muscled frame.

Jax's comlink, strangely silent since his last conversation, buzzed to life again. "Is he alive?" asked Valk.

"Yes," replied Jax, "unless the equipment's screwed up, which I wouldn't doubt considering the recent attack. If that's what is was anyway."

“Can you get him out of there?” asked the scientist.

“Well, I could open up the cryo-tube, but he would die. Oxygen you know. See my predicament?” replied the sarcastic mercenary.

Predictably, no reply came, and Jax began to search the room for clues to aid in his predictament. The tube was bolted to the floor and - of course! If he could only unattach the tube from the floor, he would have several minutes to transport it back to the hellcat. Grudgingly, he pulled out his cutter once again.

"I better be getting paid extra for saving you," he said to the frozen man, and then set to work.