Remy dismissed Anders before disappearing into his room. “Give me an hour to get ready before we head down,” he asked. It suited the Lieutenant just fine. He figured it was a good idea to report to Colonel Freedom anyway before the old man became suspicious of their absence.
Finally alone again, Remy removed his gloves and retrieved the tiny interdimensional controller he had hidden. He darted about the room for the perfect hiding spot in case they needed to return to the ship. It was difficult to think, though, that if their defiance was discovered, there was anywhere within this room something could be hidden that the officers already weren’t aware of.
As he visually inspected the room, he caught the case containing the miners’ data chips. If it would be impossible to hide a tiny controller, he didn’t want to think about where he was going hide something the size of a briefcase.
He looked to the desk, noticing it was metal, and wondered if the controller could be affixed to the underside of the desktop or one of the drawers. If he had a magnet to affix to the tiny box, it could be secured, only he was certain the desk would be torn apart like the rest of the furniture in this room. He looked to the metal walls, figuring his chances that the room would literally be dissected to those bulkheads behind them.
It was a plan, but even taking the plans from his computer for a simple magnet, he couldn’t create one with the inhibitors up. In the other dimension he could. Then how would he get it inside the wall without cutting through? He spun the room, turning over the problem as if a brain teaser.
“A 400 pound man and his two 200 pound sons are taking a walk when they come to a river. The only way across is a rowboat with a 400 pound capacity. How do all three get across without exceeding the boat’s capacity?”
Then he had it!
Remy sealed the joints on his suit once again. Then he removed the frankensteined scrambler from the table and took up both of the dimensional controllers. In the secret dimension, he worked the magic with the scrambler to create his magnet, followed by a stick of sorts and a hook. The hook was nearly flattened and jammed into the end of the stick, still curved enough to hold the spare controller, but not so much that the magnet couldn’t pull it off when brought close enough to metal.
“The two sons cross the river first. The first son stays behind while the second crosses back. Then the father crosses leaving the first son behind. When he gets across, the second son goes back to retrieve his brother.”
Fortunately, the room next to his was unoccupied. Remy pushed through the wall with his contraption. When he was safely inside, he reinserted the stick into the narrow space between the rooms. As expected, once he pushed the button and brought himself and his invention back to his own reality, the stick was fused within the wall, but the controller was close enough to the wall panel for the magnet to latch onto the metal and pull the controller tight to the wall. Then it was a matter of taking himself and the stick out of phase again and returning to his own room.
He spied the case still on the bed and wondered if the same thing would work for it. The case, he admitted was too big to fit between the walls, but that secret room in the medical bay had walls that existed in this secret dimension.
Remy returned to the scrambler and created a larger magnet; one strong enough to hold the weight of that case. Then he took it to the medical bay. Major Sadile’s body remained where they had hid it, and Remy wondered how long it could stay there. With no atmosphere, he figured it would never decompose. Leaving it as they had might expose the murder should someone else discover this secret dimension and decide to go for a jaunt. Of course that was totally ridiculous when he played it out in his head. And if he thought somebody would find that corpse, he wouldn’t think this a good spot to hide the data chips in the first place. He attached the case to the outside of Sadile’s secret lab and returned to his own quarters without giving it further thought.
Back in his own reality, Remy replaced the scrambler at just the right time, for Anders had returned from the bridge.
“Freedom doesn’t suspect a thing. I told him you had taken a break and we were just about to get back to work monitoring and analyzing the telemetry from the field. I also told him you were getting hungry so he’d agree to take the inhibitors around the appropriate cargo pod offline briefly.”
“I thought you could do that without being noticed.”
“Yes, but the more I sneak around, the more chance we have at getting caught. If I can create an excuse, there’s no chance he’ll suspect anything if someone happens to be monitoring at that moment.”
Anders started putting his armored environmental suit back on, as Remy considered their options once they got to the planet. “Do we have a plan once we go down there?”
“I’ve been thinking, and I think we can get them off that world and away from here without being detected. We should be able to get them somewhere safe without Colonel Freedom figuring out how.”
It was too much of a dream for Remy, as he thought once again of Roxanne. A prisoner of those quarters, there was no escaping her misdeeds covered in the grease from his suit. But never mind any punishment she should face, it tortured him to think of her as a slave to that man’s lust in the first place. If Anders had a way to get everyone away from that dead world safely, then he had to free Roxanne and get her away from those horrible quarters.
“There’s someone else coming with us,” Remy announced to his companion. “Could you scramble up another suit while I get her?”
“Her?” Before Anders could press for an answer to his curiosity, Remy was already out in the corridor and in front of that door.
Roxanne opened once again. Her face sprung to life as a child who had feared missing her daddy on Christmas morning. “You’re back! Did you change your mind about me? About us?”
“In a sense. I want you to come with me. I’m taking you away from here.” Roxanne couldn’t have been happier. She giggled with delight as she took her savior’s hand and followed him back to his quarters. That delight was short lived when she found herself face to face with Anders.
“Who is this,” Anders stuttered as if he had never seen a woman before. It didn’t help she was nearly naked, and his imagination must have run wild seeing her delicate skin covered with filth.
“Her name is Roxanne. Your Lieutenant Pittman had her as a sex slave. If you can really get those miners to safety, then I want her to go with them.”
Anders looked them both over pitifully. “I’m not sure this is a good idea, but if you feel that strongly about it, I doubt I’m going to change your mind.” He waved to the newest suit spread out on the bed and waited while Remy helped her assemble it around her body. When everyone was sealed up, he signaled the bridge to drop the inhibitors, giving him the opportunity to scramble all of them down to the planet.