TWELVE

"Calling all ships, all ships," Arissa said into the transmitter, though she knew there was only one ship in the area. "All vessels, this is a warning. A flagrant system virus is being transmitted to all ships entering this sector. Avoid this area of space or risk computer infection."

Had Jack not known the plan, he would have thought it odd that they were warning their mark away from them, but now he was focused on a different negative aspect of the whole thing. He was dreading the part he was taking in the affair.

The Gunder gave no response, and Arissa repeated the call. This time adding, "We're looking at you, Gunder. This malware has real teeth. Steer clear of the area."

"Unidentified vessel," some grunty voice from the Gunder said. "This is an F.A. prison ship. Under no circumstances will we alter course or operating protocol without official orders."

Arissa did her best to sound annoyed while smiling with glee at the plan's success thus far. "Gunder this is merchant ship…Reggie. The circumstances call for an immediate course change. Some nut job has a concealed satellite out here and we still haven't found it. If you're not going to alter course at least shut down all communication and sensors until you're clear of this sector."

"Negative. We only accept commands from the F.A."

"We have immunization software. If you let us approach we can save you a lot of trouble. Or do you not let vessels approach without 'official F.A. approval?'"

"Stay clear or we will open fire. Gunder out." The line went dead, and Arissa looked to Talia.

"Are they close enough?"

"Just barely. I can flicker lights at best."

Talia winced, almost as if it was painful to reach so far and hack into such a secure vessel. "I have access. Their interior is basically a haunted house now. Flickering lights, loud sounds from the speakers, nothing actually threatening."

The crew of the Odin sat in silence, waiting for the Gunder's call for help. There was only silence. Arissa rubbed her eyes. "Damn the male ego. He can't admit his mistake."

Just then, the some grunty voice reemerged. "Reggie this is Gunder, what are the symptoms of this system infection?"

"Lighting and audio systems are the first to go," she said. "Next is…" she looked to Talia.

"I can get their toilets," the A.I. said.

"Toilets go next, Gunder. Then it's anyone's guess."

There was a pause, as the Gunder comm officer either discussed with his superiors, or swallowed his own pride. Then, "Reggie can we confirm you have immunization software?"

"Confirmed, though I'm not sure what good it will do you now. It could be too late."

"Understood. You have authorization to approach at low speed with cold weapons, if any."

"Gunder this is a freelance merchant ship, we do not alter course unless it's for profit."

Jack smacked her on the shoulder. Arissa snapped back.

"What? We can't appear too eager." The voice on the radio returned.

"Reggie if your solve comes through you will be compensated by the F.A."

Arissa smiled. "Appreciate that, Gunder. We're en route." She flicked off the radio, swung around in Jack's chair, smiled, and leapt to her feet. "There," she said. "Hazard pay."

Kane, standing on the sidelines, gave a grimace and a head tilt. "Not bad. Talia?"

"We're already on our way."

Jack looked just a touch miffed. "Talia? Could we please just wait for me to give you the 'go ahead?'"

The ship stopped. "Right. Of course, Jack."

He nodded, then pointed forward. "Go ahead."

The Odin resumed course.

Jack and Kane donned space suits, preparing for phase two of the plan.

"There aren't any holes in these, are there?" Kane asked.

Jack shrugged. "Not the last time they got used."

"When was that?"

"I don't know. I got them secondhand."

Kane seemed to just accept this fact as a new if not unexpected element to his own existence. Jack liked that. Perhaps he was beginning to enjoy having someone around that was as tired and careless as he was.

"You boys dressed in business casual, yet?" Arissa asked. "Because the office party has begun."

Jack looked past her, out the forward view of the Odin to see that the Gunder was right on top of them.

"I'd say that range is close enough," Talia said. "Should I start the mania?" She looked to Jack, and Jack appreciated that whether it was genuine or not.

"Go ahead."

Arissa jumped back into character, flicking on the radio. "Whoa, whoa. Gunder we're detecting a spike in symptoms. Man this is way worse than I thought. You're pretty far along. Better batten down the hatches. And by that I mean toilet lids."

Talia snickered, and begin to move her arms and fingers with delicate grace, as if she was conducting an orchestra. Arissa continued.

"Gunder we're sending the software fix pronto. Give us all your bandwidth. it's a big one. Recommend you drop all proximity sensors to slow the infection."

The Gunder's comm officer was actually shouting over the radio now. It must have been chaos over there. "Roger that, Reggie! Shutting down sensors!"

Arissa snapped her gaze to Jack and Kane. "Go."

The two men piled in to the airlock, sealed the interior door, and immediately opened the exterior. The force of the air pressure propelled them away from the Odin, directly towards the Gunder's massive engine system. As they drew closer, the black opening of the conical booster seemed to expand like a gaping maw. Jack tried not to think about what he was about to do.

The two men impacted the interior of the engine, and started a frantic scramble towards its deeper innards. Both were cool, calm, and collected, but neither had anything to prove in these circumstances. By grace, the desperate search for their salvation was brief. The opening was just barely large enough to fit them, one at a time. In accordance with a game of rock, paper, scissors they had played prior to leaving the Odin, Jack climbed inside first.

The duo was now scrambling through the fuel line of a Server class vessel that could get underway at any moment. If the engines fired, the two men wouldn't be burned alive, not immediately. The rush of fuel would send them back out the way they came with bone breaking speed, then that fuel would ignite and kill them with flames of agony.

The tube was scorched black, which made navigating its various sharp bends a matter of constant helmet bumping. Eventually, amazingly, they located a hatch that hopefully led to the engine room. It was also, hopefully, unmanned due to some kind of Talia-made systems failure. A lot of hopes, and if he had a view of anything other than his own hands, Jack might have turned to share a brief, "Here we go," look with Kane. Instead, he just opened the hatch.

The tug of artificial gravity brought him to a surprising plummet, straight out of the access tunnel and onto the floor. Before he could warn Kane, the act was repeated, which caused the mercenary to come down hard, right on top of the bounty hunter. Before they could get their bearings, the gravity in the room failed, which sent them reeling, grasping for something to stabilize their free-fall.

Only once they grabbed on to the room's hand railings were they able to look around. The room was, thankfully, empty. This probably had something to do with the fact that Talia had drained the room of its air supply. Just as Jack was starting to wonder how they were going to move into the next room without causing a massive vacuum in the ship, he checked the wrist read-out on his suit to see that the oxygen levels were returning to normal. He and Kane removed their helmets, then suits, then prepared for a mad dash through a prison ship that was in all likelihood completely falling apart. The door swung open and six inches of water poured into the engine room. The distant and echoing sounds of crewmembers shouting over noisy system errors coupled with Talia's haunted house effects turned the place into a strange metallic version of the bowels of Hell. Jack and Kane wasted no time getting out into the corridor and sloshing their way towards the belly of the beast.

Jack looked to the ceiling like he was talking to a god. "Talia? Can you hear me?"

The booming, angry voice of a man over the PA system shouted, "YEAH!" It was then followed up by a powerful drumbeat and the strike of a classic electric guitar. Talia had smartly accessed the Gunder's entertainment library to talk with the boys, so her responses seemed like random glitches instead of covert communications.

"Nice work," Jack said. "Can you track us?"

"YEAH!" Old rock and roll said.

"We need to thicken up the atmosphere. Got anything like that?"

"YEAH!"

The life-support system started leaking thick mist, dense enough that no one would notice the two strangers that were freely roaming the ship unless they were at kissing-distance; the setback being that Jack and Kane couldn't see a damn thing. The Gunder had become a complete maze.

The barely visible silhouettes of three mildly panicked crewmembers rushed past the two intruders, shouting something about a recycling droid that had started consuming the crew's riot gear.

"Maybe we could have broken him out after all," Jack said, amazed at how efficiently Talia was completely dismantling the ship.

"NOOO!" Talia shouted with a clip of drama from an unrecognizable death scene in a holo-movie.

Kane coughed mildly against the dense air. "Talia, we can't see a damn thing! Which way do we go?"

"IT'S JUST A JUMP TO THE LEFT," she replied, in song. Jack had to run his hands along the bulkhead so he could feel the door when they came to it. They stopped at the port only to see a red light above.

"Looks locked." Jack paused, waiting for another crewmember to rush out of earshot. "Can you get us in?"

"YOU CAN DO IT!" Judging by the cheering crowd in the background, the audio clip was probably taken from a sports movie.

Jack and Kane started groping around for a manual release. As soon as they found it, the touch triggered a warning from the Gunder's computer.

"Warning. Lockdown in progress. Door will re-seal with extreme force three seconds after opening regardless to health risks to anyone who remains in the portal. Door will only unlock from outside until lockdown has been canceled. Any persons moving through this door towards the ship's outer section during the three second opening will be tagged for re-capture. Have you listened to and agreed to the terms of opening this door?"

Talia answered for them.

"YEEAAAHHHH!"

The door opened. Jack and Kane immediately piled in with the motivation of fear that they might be mashed by the metal door during its closing with "extreme force."

"Now where?" Jack shouted.

"AND THEN A STEP TO THE RIIIIGGHHHT!"

The break-in process continued with a small measure of regularity a few more times with Talia directing left, right, and "STRAIGHT ON TILL MORNING." Within seconds, they arrived in the outer-most cellblock. Now all that was needed was to find Jaeek's home away from home. Things were looking ok until Kane stole a glance into one of the prison cells. The energy fields had dropped but the iron bars remained un-breached.

"Shit," he said. "How did we not think of that?"

"Think of what?"

"They've got matching jumpsuits. That's what."

At this point most of the sounds of Talia's fun and games were being drowned out by the raucous jeers of the inmates. The place was a discordant concert hall.

"Talia! We need a wardrobe change!"

"NO CAN DO, BUCKAROO."

Jack immediately started concocting a story that would allow them to blend in as prisoners despite the fact that they were dressed like a couple of space rogues. As they moved past the cells, Kane went about repeatedly shouting at the inmates, asking to trade clothing. With absolutely no motive to take the deal, the prisoners refused to hand over their neon-green jumpsuits.

Jack looked up to his electronic overlord. "How many more sections until we hit Jaeek?"

"TWO TICKETS TO PARADISE."

"It won't make any difference if we look like we came from another dimension. We need a solve.

"SHUT UP. I'M THINKING." That one came out in Talia's regular voice. She was apparently too frustrated to sift through the entertainment database. "WAIT RIGHT THERE."

Jack threw his hands high as he and Kane came to a stop. The whooshing sound of an air-filtration system kicked in. The ship was on the mend, cleaning the mist out of the air.

"Talia…"

"I KNOW."

"I'd like to move now."

"I KN—OW"

Kane gave a grimmer than usual look. "They're weeding her out."

"GOT IT. STR—AIGHT, LEFT, LEF—, RI— LE—."

She was gone. Jack repeated the broken directions out loud, committing them to memory and confirming them with Kane. The one-eyed mercenary nodded, and the men were on the move again. The air was getting clearer by the second and the six inches of water on the floor had already been reduced to two.

"We won't have time to find his cell after we change," Jack said.

"I don't even think we'll have time to change at all."

They came to a stop at their destination and read the sign on the placard.

"Is this really her solution, or just a joke?" Jack asked.

"She has a tendency to mix the two."

Voices were approaching from around the hall. Jack's pulse quickened, as it typically did when the only course of action was less than ideal. It was like his body's last-ditch effort to juice his brain and alter his fate.

"It's better than nothing, I guess." He opened the door, and both men stepped into their only hope, the shower room.

"You mean nothing is better than this." Kane tugged on his shirt.

Inside, both of them were pleased to see the room was divided up into separate stalls. They hurriedly stripped down and tossed their clothing in the trash bin, hoping it wouldn't be discovered until well after they were hauled out of the room.

Once he made it to his stall, Jack turned on the water, took some body wash from the dispenser, and started to scrub away. He wanted the show to look believable, but more importantly, this was his first chance to shower in a week.

"Maybe one of us should be singing," Kane said, his voice echoing from the next column of stalls over.

"Sure. Why don't you go ahead and start us off?"

Kane didn't have time to answer the dare. Before he could get a note out, five armed guards busted into the room, shouting, "HANDS AGAINST THE WALL!" Over and over, as if the command could possibly be misunderstood. Both men complied, but made sure to create more chaos by shouting nebulous threats. In their own words they each swore that if they found the guy that stole their clothes, they were going to kill him.