Three Square Meals Ch. 120

When they were in position, he offered Jade a hand, helping the Nymph from her seat as Faye took over control of the gunship. They headed for the grav-tube with the girls following behind, then dropped down to the level below. By the time John had lowered the forward-loading ramp, the Raptor was stationary over the clearing, retro-thrusters keeping the gunship hovering in the air ten metres above the ground.

John watched Jade shift into a green hawk and launch herself from the gunship in a swooping dive. He pulled on his helmet and activated flight mode as he stepped clear, the girls jumping off to join him in floating down to the ground. They landed in leafy ferns at the edge of the clearing, the enormous bulk of the crashed ship to their left.

"Freshly tilled soil," Tashana said, nudging the dark earth with the toe of her armoured boot. "Someone did this recently... maybe a few weeks ago?"

John tore his eyes away from the neat lines of colourful fruit and vegetables to stare at the black ship. "They're still here..."

*The airlock's this way,* Jade said, flying towards the lower section of the battered wreck.

"Weapons out?" Irillith asked, reaching for her Tachyon rifle as they walked towards the derelict.

He hesitated, then shook his head. "I don't want to do anything to provoke a fight. Keep your eyes peeled though..."

John took the lead, following the pockmarked hull until he saw the oval airlock. Jade landed a cautious distance from the airlock and shimmered in a rippling green haze, changing form into an armoured tiger. As John approached, he saw that the door was a couple of metres above ground level, but someone had built a ramp long ago, the surface of the small hillock now covered in grass.

Closing his eyes, he channelled his will into enhancing his vision, so that he could see straight through the hull, just as he had on Carolus III. When he opened his eyes again, he stared intently at the starship's glimmering black armour... but nothing happened. His X-Ray vision wasn't able to penetrate that mysterious metal.

"I can't see through it... the hull blocked my powers," John muttered in frustration.

"Let me try," Alyssa said, her eyes glowing brightly as psychic energy rolled down her arms to swirl around her hands. Crouching down, she touched the ground with her gauntleted fists and a pulse of light swept outwards, sweeping over the Progenitor vessel. She looked at him in surprise. "It's blocking me too!"

Dana stood beside John and examined the sealed airlock door, then suddenly clutched at her head and groaned. She stepped forward and touched one of the glowing runes, then the portal split open with a jarring rasping noise, the edges looking like serrated teeth as they swung back into the frame.

"No security?" Sakura asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Inactive..." the redhead replied, shaking her head to clear her vision of the airlock schematic. "Either the security server was destroyed in the crash, or the damage tore up the connections."

John walked up to the door and looked inside. The inner airlock door was jammed open, giving him a clear view down the dark passageway, which was dimly illuminated by red lighting set in the floor. The deck was slanted upwards at an awkward 20-degree angle and he frowned at the thought of trying to navigate their way around the sloping corridors. Stepping inside, he was startled to find he could stand upright without any discomfort.

"Artificial gravity must still be operational," Dana murmured, following him inside.

Unlike the spotlessly clean Ashanath-owned Legacy, dust and dirt had been tracked in through the doorway and along the corridor. It marred the harsh sterility of the sinister ship, somehow lessening the feeling of dread... for all but one member of their group.

"The walls scream out in torment..." Alyssa whispered, her eyes wide as she jerked her hand away from the glimmering black surface. "Thousands of voices echoing their agony over the millennia..."

Dana shuddered and frowned at her friend. "It's going to be scary enough going in here already; you know you freak me out when you say shit like that..."

"Maybe you coming in here was a bad idea," John said, placing his hands on Alyssa's shoulders and studying her unsettled expression with concern.

She shook her head, then looked at him obstinately. "No... I'll be fine."

Sakura squatted down by the tracks. "Female... male... a mix of armoured bootprints and shoe treads. Do you want to follow these inside, or perform a standard sweep and clear?" she asked, glancing up at John. The Asian girl gave him a tight smile and quickly added, "Hopefully, clearing will be unnecessary..."

"Let's follow the tracks," he replied, gazing down the gloomy tunnel. "If we don't find anyone wherever they lead, we can fall back to the airlock and carry out a systematic search. I want you to take point with the twins, Rachel and Dana cover the rear."

Just as they acknowledged his orders and moved into position, the airlock door slid shut behind them with a rasping clunk, the sound making the hair stand up on the back of their necks. After a few shared glances, they set off along the wide corridor, passing intersections as they headed deeper into the Progenitor dreadnought. The girls cast cautious glances about, their hands wavering near the hilt of their weapons, wary for the first sign of danger.

John watched Alyssa as they walked along, catching her flinching occasionally and averting her eyes from the path ahead. He darted an inquisitive glance at the black walls, then reached out and trailed his fingertips along the dark surface. He didn't experience any of the feelings of disquiet that had so unsettled Alyssa; quite to the contrary, this ship felt reassuringly familiar to him. Returning his attention to the telepathic blonde, John saw her eyes darting back and forth as she was confronted with a series of terrible visions.

"What can you see?" he asked quietly, studying Alyssa with concern.

She watched as a ghostly trio of crimson-hued, dark-haired women ran down the corridor ahead of them. The three suddenly let out tortured screams and pitched over onto the deck, their beautiful faces contorted with agony as the vitality was drained from their bodies. When they had nothing left to give, they were little more than withered husks lying contorted on the floor.

"I see thralls... having their life-force sucked out of them..."

"Are the thralls Maliri?" John asked, his voice catching. "Is this the rest of Mael'nerak's ship?"

"All the thralls I've seen so far had red skin and black hair," Alyssa replied, ignoring the psychic echoes to look him in the eyes. "I'm pretty sure this was Ranagon's ship..."

John froze and stared into the distance. "So Ranagon was my father..."

Tashana placed a hand on his arm and said in a gentle tone, "We don't know that for certain, John. What we do know, is that Mael'nerak's dreadnought was ripped apart in the blast; there was barely anything left of the original ship that the Ashanath used as the basis for the Legacy. If we're right and Mael'nerak did sabotage his wormhole generator, he might have simply been trying to wipe out the opposing thrall fleets. He could have abandoned ship and boarded Ranagon's vessel in an attempt to survive the explosion and confront his enemy directly."

Dana nodded her agreement. "Mael'nerak was an incredibly smart guy... I bet he had a contingency plan to save his ass. He's still a contender to have survived and met your mom."

John thought about that for a moment, then gestured for them to proceed. "You're right and it's pointless me guessing... let's find out for sure."

Sakura led the group down the corridor, following the faded tracks on the black decking. When they reached another cross-junction, the scuffed bootprints continued for another thirty metres and ended in... a pair of well-worn leather boots. They'd been left propped outside an open door and Sakura paused when she looked inside, a look of surprise on her face.

"What is it?" John asked quietly, striding over to join her.

He glanced through the doorway and understood what had brought Sakura up short. The room beyond was a large kitchen, furnished entirely in black, the red lighting making the place look eerie and foreboding. Despite that, the kitchen showed signs of extensive use. A wide assortment of vegetables had been harvested from the garden and lay piled on the worktop, with one of them left half-peeled on a wooden chopping board. Jars had been lined up against the wall, the names of exotic herbs carefully hand-written on their labels. In the middle of the kitchen table, a bouquet of bright tropical flowers bloomed in a jet-black vase, adding a cheerful splash of colour to the unrelenting gloom of the monochrome furnishings. The overall effect was to give the kitchen a surreal air of domesticity, where someone had obviously tried to make the forbidding wrecked ship feel more like a home.

"A woman's touch..." Alyssa said with a soft smile, stepping past John to gently brush a cornflower-blue flower petal with her fingertip. Her eyes started to glow with a bright inner light as she glanced around the room. "Jessica Blake... the kitchen is filled with her echoes..."

Sakura leaned down to study a half-peeled maroon vegetable, then spotted the moisture beading on the sharp knife. "This was freshly cut!" she exclaimed in surprise, looking up at John. "Jessica was here... only minutes ago."

John heard a now-familiar faint rasping sound in the distance and he froze, his eyes widening. "I heard something! A door opening!"

He squeezed past Rachel and bolted into the corridor, trying to picture exactly where the fleeting sound had come from.

"This way!" he called out, dashing to the right.

The girls sprinted to catch up, following after John as he headed into the bowels of the ship. When they reached another intersection, John skidded to a halt and glanced down the three corridors, unsure which way to proceed.

*I've picked up her scent,* Jade said, bounding past him, her big paws making soft thumps on the decking.

He set off again, activating psychic speed to catch up to the huge green tiger. *Is my father with her?*

Jade glanced his way, her big emerald eyes watching him closely. *Hers is the strongest scent I've detected so far... the rest are faint traces.*

The Nymph dashed after the trail with John at her side, then screeched to a halt by a large set of doors, her claws scratching against the deck. She sniffed around, then nudged the runic control panel with her nose, the broad doors peeling back into the frame with a grating rasp.

"They're not meant to sound like that," Dana grumbled with a disapproving frown as she caught up to them. "This ship's ten-thousand-years overdue a service!"

"That's the first thing I'll say when I speak to Jessica, tell her to remind my father," John said with a grin, his eyes alight with anticipation.

The redhead laughed, getting caught up with his excitement.

When the serrated doors finished opening, John stepped forward, but Jade's low growl made him halt in his tracks.

*I can smell blood!* she warned him, staring into the room with her hackles up. *Lots and lots of blood...*

The room was pitch-black, the crimson light that cast a blood-red pall over the rest of the ship curiously absent. John activated the external spotlights on his armour, then stared in shock at the gruesome scenes of carnage in the room beyond. He drew his sword then entered cautiously, with the girls following him inside a moment later, their Paragon suits illuminating more of the massacre. The floor must have been awash with gallons of blue blood, before it had dried around the mutilated black-armoured corpses strewn in every direction.

Irillith shone her lights over a disembowelled upper torso, revealing a light-green woman's horrified face contorted with agony in her death throes.

"Thralls..." the Maliri spat, her violet eyes narrowing with barely disguised loathing.

Tashana nodded, her expression twisting into a feral mask of hatred. "Scores of the vermin..."

Rachel's eyebrows climbed at the twins' surprising outburst and she turned to share a look of concern with Alyssa. The blonde nodded, then watched the Maliri as they prowled across the room, searching for survivors.

John was oblivious to their disconcerting behaviour as he stared at the mangled corpses, stunned by the savagery on display. It wasn't just the thralls that had been brutally eviscerated, the machinery in the room had also been torn asunder, while the walls bore huge gouges and battle scars.

A groan drew his attention and Dana wavered unsteadily, her attempts to clutch her head frustrated by her Paragon helmet. Rachel rushed to her side and put an arm around her girlfriend.

"What did you find?" she asked, instantly recognising the redhead's telltale sign of a technology breakthrough.

"Thrall armour!" Dana gasped, blinking in astonishment as she examined the new schematic. "Fuck me... the Paragon suits... I copied the damn things!"

"We were right about thralls using Reaper Cannons," Sakura called out, squatting by a dismembered corpse and prodding the cracked housing of an underslung cannon with the barrel of her Tachyon rifle.

Rachel squatted down by one of the corpses, studying the horrific wounds. "Judging by the state of decomposition, I'd estimate their death occurred... 6 days ago."

Jade had threaded her way through the severed limbs and piles of entrails to stand at the far side of the room. *Master... she ran through here.*

Roused from his shocked daze, John jogged over to the huge tiger, trying to avoid stepping on the remains of any thralls. Jade activated the glyph to open the door by bumping it with her nose and by the time he'd arrived, the jagged-toothed portal had spiralled open. She prowled through, sniffing the air to regain the scent, then turned and headed to the right. John glanced back into the room and saw the girls were hurrying after him.

*Keep going,* Alyssa urged him. *We're right there with you.*

He nodded and turned to follow Jade, but was startled at the impressive lead she'd managed to gain on him already.

*Jade... wait for me!* he warned her, sprinting to catch up.

*Her scent is fresh, Master!* Jade gushed with excitement. *Not far now!*

*Dana says we're over on the far side of the ship,* Alyssa cautioned him. *She reckons we're heading towards another airlock...*

John glanced at his Paragon suit's HUD and opened a comm channel to the Raptor. "Faye?"

"Hey, John!" she replied with a nervous smile. "Is everything okay?"

"Can you bring the Raptor around to the north side of the ship? We think we've found Jessica but she's trying to escape out an airlock!"

"I'll watch out for her!" Faye immediately agreed.

John followed Jade through another room, "Thanks, honey."

*The airlock is fifty metres away... take a right then a left and you it should be straight in front of you!* Alyssa informed him, relaying Dana's instructions.

Jade was already running in that direction, so he decided to just stick with her rather than rush ahead, not wanting to leave the Nymph alone on a potentially dangerous ship. Another grating squeal reached his sharp ears, but this time Jade heard it too. Her feline eyes flicked to him for a moment, enough time for John to nod in confirmation.

"I can't see any airlocks on the north facing hull," Faye warned him in frustration. "But more of that side is buried in dirt... I think the ship must have slid into this position when it crashed."

When John reached the airlock, he discovered that it was already open, leading into a dirt passageway. "Shit," he cursed under his breath. "I hope there isn't a network of tunnels under here!"

*We're very close now, Master,* Jade said, eyeing the tunnel. *But I might have to shapeshift to fit through there... I'm not sure I can fit as a tiger.*

"Let me go first," he said, striding through the airlock door and down the dirt passage.

Jade shifted into her humanoid form and hurried after him, the pair jogging along the tunnel to catch their elusive quarry. Suddenly there was a loud thump and the ground seemed to rise up to meet them.

"John!" Faye cried out in panic. "There was an explosion! Are you okay?!"

John stood with his hand upraised, a glowing dome of blue hexagons preventing the ceiling from collapsing. His other arm was wrapped around the Nymph, holding her close to keep her from harm. Ahead and behind them, the tunnel had caved in with the blast, leaving the couple trapped under tons of dirt.

"Fuck this..." he muttered, reaching for his runeblade. "Faye... get the Raptor clear of the ship!"

The runes started to throb and he drew his sword back before bringing it around in a sweeping slash, the ensuing force wave blasting out the side of the partially-collapsed hill in a shower of dirt.

"To your right!" Faye called out in warning. "She's making a break for it!"

"Go, Master!" Jade urged him, as they staggered outside. "Catch her!"

He sheathed his sword and rushed ahead, using his psychic speed to rapidly close the distance. He'd barely gone a dozen strides when he saw her... the brunette running for the jungle and casting a fearful glance over her shoulder. He stumbled to a halt as he locked eyes with his mother, the same ones he'd stared into hundreds of times in the past as he reviewed Jessica Blake's personnel file. She hadn't aged a day...

Jessica screamed in terror and ran faster, plunging into the foliage. Her frightened cry wakened John from his daze and he sprinted after her, his psychically enhanced speed letting him intercept her with ease.

"Jessica, stop!" he called out, rushing around to stand a dozen metres in front of the fleeing woman.

"You're one of them!" she blurted out in panic as she stumbled to a halt, darting glances either way to look for an escape route. "Leave me alone!"

A booming blast from back at the ship made her jump in fright and she tried bolting to the left, desperate to flee.

John rushed to cut her off again, appearing as a blur he was moving so fast. "I'm not one of them!" he protested, holding his hands up in a calming manner.

She looked at him with wild, disbelieving eyes, obviously suspecting some kind of trick.

He grimaced, realising how ridiculous his protestations sounded when he was quite blatantly using psychic powers. "I mean... I am... but I'm not; it's complicated. I promise I won't hurt you."

Jessica tried dashing back towards the ship this time, but she gasped in fear when she saw the white-armoured women emerging from a glowing hole blasted out of the hillside.

John swept around in front of her again. "Stop, Jessica... please!"

Something in his tone made her pause and she looked at him warily. "How do you know my name?" she demanded suspiciously. "Who the hell are you?"

"I know who you are, Jessica Blake," he replied quietly, lowering his hands. "My name's John and I've been waiting to meet you for 40 years. I'm your son..."

She gaped at him in shock, then her eyes rolled up and she fainted, collapsing to the ground. Or at least she would have done, if John hadn't lunged forward to catch her and scoop her up in his arms.

The girls ran over to join him, staring in astonishment at Jessica.

"Holy shit... you finally found your mom..." Dana said in a hushed voice, gaping at the brunette.

"She's beautiful..." Alyssa murmured, gently brushing a lock of brown hair from Jessica's face.

John sought out another brunette amongst the crowd of fascinated girls. "Is she alright, Rachel?"

The doctor blinked away her surprise, then shrouded the unconscious woman in her grey aura. "She's in a highly anxious state; that's what triggered her passing out. Her adrenaline levels are off the chart, but other than being under extreme stress, she's physically fine."