‘No,’ John screamed, his voice echoing and pitching through the room. With the robot gone, the magnetic pull that had been sucking him towards it had ended, and John took several shuddering steps forward.
She was gone. He'd told them only to lock onto the robot and transport it away, but they hadn't listened.
He's lost control of his face, the muscles slack, his mouth a thin open line.
‘Pegasus,’ he said in a voice that rang hollow, ‘report.’
He'd known the plan; lock onto the robot and beam it into space.
It hadn’t worked like that. They’d taken her too.
The woman would have gone with it. She would be dead. There would be no possibility of a comeback this time; the void of space would have killed her in an instant, sucking the air from her lungs.
Wincing and bringing his armor-covered wrist up to his head, John let it drop over his face and rest against his nose.
‘They lost control of the beam. Some kind of feedback. Sorry, John, they couldn’t separate their signals,’ Parka said in a low, respectful voice.
Sorry, yeah, sorry, John thought as he let out a fluctuating breath, staring up at the ceiling above.
He'd lost another one. Another person in this universe he'd failed to save.
‘Confirm that the robot is far enough away from the planet that it won't get sucked into the gravity field,’ John said, voice as controlled as he could make it.
‘Hold on, synching with the Aratova now. You can talk directly to them,’ Parka said.
There was a hum, a click, and then John straightened up.
He knew the captain of the Union Heavy Cruiser Aratova. A human woman who had a reputation for being the toughest out there and always getting the job done. John had a lot of respect for Captain Chan.
‘Commander, we lost control of that beam, what the hell happened down there?’ Chan snapped.
John took the opportunity to look around the room, his eyebrows dropped low over his eyes. What had happened was a nightmare. An Old Tech device had woken up out of the blue and tried to trash the place.
Stiffening his jaw and shaking his head, John cleared his throat. ‘We don't know the source of the feedback. It might have been the robot itself. Can you confirm that it rematerialized out of orbit?’
‘That's what I'm trying to say. We lost control of it entirely. We have no idea where it went. The beam redirected itself. It fried our systems too. We lost all bio records on that robot. We have nothing.’
John's face paled, his shoulders sagging. Then he stopped. ‘Use your long-range scanners to—’
‘Of course we are scanning the planet; you don't need to tell me how to do my job, Commander,’ Chan's voice resounded on that word.
It was a smack down, and a well-deserved one. But John was kind of under a lot of stress here. ‘Are they on the planet?’ he asked, knowing full well the scan would take at least five more minutes to complete.
‘I will tell you as soon as we get a lock. That is if it did materialize on the planet. Just before we lost hold of the transport beam, it registered an energy level off the charts. With that much power it could have transported right out of the system.’
John's nose crumpled at that, his neck feeling cold. If it had been anyone other than Captain Chan saying that, John would have figured they were joking. Chan, however, would never crack a joke while on duty.
‘How—’ he began.
‘We have no idea. I'll look after things up here, you get Block Prime sorted. I'll report when I have anything.’
‘Look for the woman,’ John added before Chan could cut the feed. ‘The transport beam locked onto them both. Wherever the robot landed, she'll be there . . . ’ John trailed off. He knew he should add something, try to clarify, but he couldn't find the words to do it.
‘Will do, Chan out.’
John stood there for a cold, silent moment, then turned to survey the damage. And damage there was.
Sparks were flying out of the consoles the robot had damaged, and the floor had buckled and broken in several sections.
No one was hurt though, and the security fields around the critical systems had held.
The woman in the hood had not been so lucky though.
John picked his way forward. Leaning down, he grabbed up a scrap of fabric. He recognized it. It was off her tunic.
Shaking his head he let it drop form his fingers. It fluttered to the floor as he waded into the mess before him.
He had not forgotten his duty as a commander of the Union Forces.