Spot IV pushed aside the shepherd mix's rifle before she could blast the intruder. A moment later the shape straightened to its full height and in the light of purple tubes, Will could see that the attacker was a bulldog. Its square head was the same mix of brown and white as Buster's, but its ears were pointed like those of a boxer. The bulldog wore ragged clothes and sported a scar along the left side of his face.
"Jake!" Buster shouted, but his brother could not hear him.
Jake launched himself at the nearest commando, batting its rifle away. "He's rabid!" the shepherd mix shouted.
"No he's not," Buster said. Will wasn't sure who was right; the bulldog certainly seemed aggressive enough but he wasn't foaming at the mouth. "He's scared."
Jake seemed anything but scared as he grappled with three commandos. They batted at him with the butts of their rifles, but he refused to go down. "You'll never take me alive, you bastards!" Jake shouted.
"Major, have your team remove their helmets," Buster said.
"We haven't tested the air—"
"Do as he says," Spot II said. "That's an order, son."
"Yes, sir." Spot IV took off his helmet, followed by his team except for those still fighting with Jake. These managed to back away enough to remove their helmets at well. For a moment Jake stared at them, breathing hard and fists still curled. Then he visibly sagged; Spot IV caught him before he collapsed. "We'd better get him back to the ship. Corporal, take two and get him back to the landing craft."
The shepherd mix saluted. She and two of the commandos who'd fought with Jake carried his unconscious body back to the landing craft. Buster sighed with relief and then turned to Spot II. "Thank you for your help."
"I know how it is to lose a brother," Spot II said. Will looked over at Tom; he too knew how it was to lose a brother, if only for a short time.
"Base, what do we do about this one?" Spot IV asked, tapping on the tube containing Vern Raccoon.
"I'd like permission to come aboard and study him," Nina Barker said.
"Granted," Spot II said. "Be careful moving him. I'm not sure what exactly is keeping him alive at this point."
"Yes, Chancellor."
Tom stared at the screen in front of him and then shook his head. "What the hell is going on here?"
#
The medical bay was one of the areas that had not been completed before the Cerberus left its dock. There were a few beds and some equipment, but not a full suite of gear. For this reason, Jake was taken to the Bulldog to recuperate. From what the doctors there could determine, he suffered only from dehydration and malnutrition. The doctors projected in a few hours he would regain consciousness.
In the meantime there were other pressing matters to attend to. A landing craft ferried Nina Barker over to the mining station so that she could examine the bizarre experiments the Black Ships had left behind. Though he was no scientific expert, Will already had a fairly good guess about what they were doing: they were replicating what he, Tom, and Jessie had done only in reverse. Instead of turning stuffed animals into real beings, the Black Ships were trying to find a way to turn real beings into stuffed animals.
To his relief, Spot IV confirmed that Jessie was not among the experiments. Nor was Whiskers. This brought a mixed reaction from Buster. At first he was relieved his wife had not been tortured in the lab and then he was angry that she was not on the mining station. "What about the computers? Have we found their base yet?"
"We're still trying to get the main computers online," Spot IV reported. "As soon as Commander Barker is done—"
"Yes, I know. Keep at it, Major." Buster whirled around to Spot II. "I'm going over to the Bulldog. I should be there when Jake wakes up."
Throughout everything, Zeke Raccoon had not moved from his place on the bridge. Since first seeing what had become of his brother, the young raccoon had stared vacantly at his displays. Will came over to put a hand on his shoulder. "He's going to be all right," Will said. He had no way of knowing this, but it was what Zeke needed to hear at the moment.
"What did they do to him?" Zeke asked.
"I'm not really sure. We'll find out and then we'll find a way to fix it."
Even without Dr. Ruff there, Will was already formulating a theory. He had only to think of what the doctor had said about theta energy and a fourth Creator. It seemed likely this rogue Creator, who had also given the Black Ships life, was behind what had happened to Vern. The faint traces of theta energy emanating from the lab supported this theory. He doubted Zeke would understand any of this, though.
Tom did, coming to many of the same conclusions when they met in the mess hall later. "Whoever this jerk is, he's trying to recreate things. That's what happened to Vern and those other—things." Tom pounded a fist against the table. "And he's got Jessie."
"He can't do anything to her," Will said. "She's a Creator." At least he hoped Jessie's beta energy would allow her to cancel out anything the fourth Creator might try against her. If not, then she might already be some kind of twisted freak like one of the failed experiments in the tubes. He didn't dare voice this to Tom, though he suspected his brother was already thinking it.
"We have to hurry up and find her."
"We can't just go flying around the galaxy, stopping at random," Will said. "We have to be patient."
"Easy for you to say."
"Jessie is my friend too." He didn't think the time appropriate to mention how badly he wanted to be far more than friends with Jessie.
"I love her. Don't you get that?"
"Yes. I'm just saying that I care about her too."
"Not in the same way."
"Let's drop it, all right? We both want her found, but we have to do it the right way."
"Yeah, sure." Tom picked at the ration meal that was supposed to be a spaghetti-like dish but instead looked more like a lump of red-and-white Jell-O. They ate in silence, locked in their private thoughts, though Will knew they were thinking of the same thing.
#
The landing craft deposited Buster on what had been his flagship. He wasted no time with formalities, having an ensign show him to sickbay. Jake lay on a bed, still unconscious. Various tubes were hooked up to him, dribbling nutrition into his malnourished body.
"I'm sorry, brother," Buster said quietly. His youngest brother looked much thinner than Buster remembered, robbed of much of the muscle he had accumulated after years of working in construction and mining. Early on Jake had showed no interest in following the rest of the family into the military or politics. Jake had been the best at athletics, with the physical gifts Buster had never possessed. Not even Jonathan with his military training could match Jake in an arm wrestling contest.
The entire mining company had been set up by Buster's father to give Jake something to do. Jake had no interest in running the company, preferring to leave that to accountants while he worked in the field. He started by drilling for oil on Bulldogovia. Soon he moved on to mining on Bulldogovia's moon. But Jake never liked to stay in one place for long. The prospect of asteroid mining sounded too exciting for him to pass up, so he had gone out to the flea circus to build the mining station.
Everything had gone well for years. Then came that fateful day when the station broadcast an automated signal warning of a gamma radiation leak. Buster had wanted to immediately dispatch the Bulldog to at least retrieve Jake's body from the wreckage. In the end his advisors had convinced him there was nothing to do until the radiation levels lowered, not unless Buster wanted to risk killing hundreds more. And then had come the war and there just weren't the resources to retrieve Jake, not when every ship needed to be on alert to defend the Bloc from the Black Ship invasion.
Yet all this time Jake had somehow survived. Buster took his brother's hand to give it a squeeze. "I should have come for you sooner. I'm sorry."
He nearly fell out of his chair when Jake's eyes opened. "They tricked us," Jake said. "They made us think there was a leak."
"Who?"
"Them. The black things. The monsters."
"They hacked into your computer systems and planted the leak?"
Jake nodded. "We went to the escape pods. That's when they took us." Jake went on to explain in a halting voice that the Black Ships, led by one wearing a sort of gold crown, lined up Jake's workers. One-by-one the workers were executed. But Jake had managed to use his physical gifts to overpower some of the guards. He ran for the mining ships, using one to make his escape from the station.
The tiny mining ships didn't have much of a flying radius and no communications gear strong enough to call for help. The Black Ship warriors had simply left him out there, assuming he would suffocate once the oxygen ran out. This might have happened to anyone else, but not Jake. Besides having exceptionally strong lungs, he had built the station; he knew how to sneak on board without anyone noticing.
There he had stayed, living in the shadows for five years while the Black Ships conducted their horrible experiments. He had been unable to directly intervene, having to settle for pulling the plug on some of those twisted souls to put them out of their misery. "Then they left," Jake said. "The one in charge said their work there was done, that they had bigger targets in mind."
"Whiskers," Buster said.
"They took her?"
"Yes. On Cattatonia."
"We have to go." Jake tried to sit up, but immediately dropped back onto the bed, still too weak from his ordeal.
Buster took his brother's hand again. "Jake, in all your time there, did you hear anything about where they came from? Where their main base was?"
Buster's heart fluttered in his chest when Jake nodded. He listed a set of coordinates. Buster had him repeat these into a recording device. "Thank you," Buster said. He stood to go, but Jake called for him to stop.
"Get her back, Buster. Before the monsters do something to her too."
"I will," Buster said. Even if he had to fly the Cerberus by himself, he would find the Black Ships base and get his wife back.
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