Star Fields

Chapter No.169 Possibility

Chapter No.169 Possibility

We did not expect this.

Molly, Alex and I were in the Explorer-1 class vessel that Brian and Janet had arrived in along with four thousand androids in charging stations.

"Ah, there's something wrong here," Alex said. "The antimatter mix chamber on this ship isn't right. It's no wonder it failed."

I looked it over. "Yeah, but I don't think it started out this way. This looks like it wasn't installed properly and failed after use. I would say that it was deliberate."

Brian and Janet came into the engine chamber on the engineering deck.

I turned to them. "It looks like Tyco deliberately sabotaged your warp engine."

"I'm not surprised," Brian said. "He probably didn't want us to make it back."

Janet frowned. "He probably didn't want to see his wife again."

We all turned to her with our mouths agape. "Wife?" I exclaimed.

She looked confused. "You didn't know that he got married?"

"Nope," I said. "Who did he marry?"

"Her name is Gretchen Werner. She was a former physicist."

"What happened to her?" I asked.

"She's in storage with the androids."

I turned to Molly and Alex. "I think we just hit the jackpot."

"I don't understand," Brian said.

"If she was married to Tyco, she might know what the hell his real plans were."

"Point her out to us," Molly said. "And, we'll revive her."

Janet showed us where she was stored, and we began the process of reviving her. She looked just like any of the other androids except she had dark red curly hair. We took her to Brian's quarters to question her.

"We're interested in what Tyco was planning," I said. "Why did you marry him?"

"He forced me to do it. He wanted me to help him with his plans to take over Space Command."

"What was his plan?"

"He was going to kill all of them and convert them to androids under his control."

"Did he convert himself into an android?"

"He was the first to do it," she said. "It allowed him to control all of Space Command's core processors."

"Why did he put you on the first warp mission?"

She lowered her eyes. "He didn't need me anymore."

"So, he killed you and resurrected you as an android."

She sighed. "He took special delight in doing that to me. His favorite method of killing people was to make them walk out on a plank over a large tank full of piranha, but his way of doing it was horrible. He liked to watch them plead for their lives before he made the plank slowly pull back into the wall. Then he would only introduce a few piranhas into the tank so that they would take bites out of their flesh but not kill them. Then, he slowly introduced more of those little devils to slowly devour his victims. He made me watch them suffer an agonizing death. Then the bastard did it to me."

I rubbed my face before turning to Brain. "Are you three the only human-based androids on this vessel?"

"No, there are four others."