Banks stood at the landing pad of dash 11’s main defensive platform. Its walls looked like an industrial kitchen, solid brushed stainless steel matte walls that shot up forty feet into the air, at the top of the tower sat the deadly planetary defensive weapons. The phaser banks weren’t capable of striking him at that angle, still that didn’t mean the installation wasn’t equipped with macro lasers or disruptor’s hidden in the paneling. Looking around the landing pad floor he couldn’t make out any scoring from particle fire. This was the best sign he could hope for.
He zipped up the front flap of the survivor suit then clicked its belt into place he could feel its mirco fiber sensors reading all of his vital signs then, the suit started picking up environment data around him and was now feeding that information directly to his mind. He could feel the pressure of he air as clearly as the voltage running through the security panel of the platforms hull door.
Aldus marveled at the paranoia level of the Y’thulian commercial triangle when it came to the protection of their royal families. The suit was designed to give its wearer a full array of plasma armaments as well as full survivability in nearly any environment. Its material was still form fitting around his muscles as he watched the ZIG mini ship float away with his old leather and polylatex merchant rags. The new suits material looked like a combination of charcoal dust with diamond specked evenly throughout it. The belt wrapped around his chest and waist, in it housed the electronic brain that monitored the sensory input along with its hosts homeostasis, when needed it had a reflex built in that would allow defensive reflex actions. Powering all this is a small hydro fusion core or HFC, by extracting the sodium molecules then breaking them down with tiny controlled nuclear reactions it was capable of building and saving an endless and extremely dangerous supply of energy that was being stored at the small of his back.
Aldus held up his hand out at the panel, the fingers of his wrist wrench tingled as a new set of sensors started building synaptic bridges through his already existing wrist implant. He thought about the possibility of unwanted side effects this might be creating for a moment then, pushed the coming tide of anxiety down and focused on getting off the planet was the priority. His prongs shot out and fed directly into the panels input terminal. The synthetic alloy in his wrenches finger tips could interpret more now. Subtle electrical waves in the heat signature emanating from the filaments behind the panel started to feel like a pulse. He touched it with is hand to the panel and wave of data started flooding into his mind. The entire electrical layout of the security grid and the defensive computer hooked up to the door was now clearly visible inside his mind. He let his wrench fingers probe further inside the panel until he could feel the leads of where the doors encrypted key card would be fixed. Banks knew the door was never going to open with brute force hacking for a digital key so employed the crude age old method of generating a short in the terminal and just as it did the Defense mainframe because nervous and shot a stun burst through the terminal designed to knockout any would be intruder or curious animal. Aldus knew the mainframes action well in advance and had his wrist wrench rewire the terminal to blow its own panel.
It did. Aldus stood back, the shock wave came and fried its own system. Blowing the panel off its foundation and releasing the manual override control. It was an old old security glitch that space faring lock picks built into their own systems when, owners had the absentmindedness of leaving their key cards inside the mega fortress. The door gasped as it creaked open and released the recycled air trapped inside. “Like putting a screen door in a castle wall.”
Aldus Banks squeezed his way inside the building.
Inside the mood of the decor changed dramatically. Banks was now surrounded by industrial pipes and tubing crudely painted reds and blues shooting up from the ground into tighly cut out holes in the ceiling. A small stair case at the back of the hall was the only place to go, so he walked forward letting the wrenches tentacles rub up against the pipes as he passed them. Like a sixth sense he could feel the pipes shoot far down into the ground where the bases power generator was likely to be hidden under thousands of feet of rock and layers of mesophasic steel. A nasty material that could reshape itself from liquid to solid at the first sign of tampering.
Aldus made his way to the control room, there several alien green/yellow computer terminals that resembled vanity desks occupied the walls into a solid fixture. Metal beams with a green tint arced upwards into a vaulted ceiling. He stepped into the room and the screens came to life. A flurry of bleeps and chirps of whizzing screens lighting up echoed around the room then crescendoed away. The language on the screens were clearly Y’thulian and Banks was able to quickly identify the control screen. He slapped the command surface it bleeped back immediately. His wrist wrench fingers stretched out below the panel and tapped directly into the hardware as he tapped at the screen. A red window appears, he is about to tap it then stops. He postulates the situation for a moment. A memory floods back to him. The ship Idyll told him was scanning the surface for his ships wreckage. But everything that has happened suddenly seem to lose all credibility. The Survivor suit, the shock gel tank, the planetary defense system. Even the Tahlese pirates who boarded his original ship started to seem staged. Problem now was, why?
Suspicions began to form in his mind, the likeliest of which was that the Zig was part of some elaborate plot to frame Aldus leaving him the pawn in a Y’thulian industrial war. The entire thing made no sense. The clock was running. It had been running since.. the dabo game.