Disclaimer: 'The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers' is copyrighted by Hearst Entertainment, Inc.
This is a work of fanfiction and I make no profit of it.
Set after "Psychocrypt", before "Renegade Rangers". Note that in my timeline "Sundancer" / "Gift of Life" is set earlier. For details of the timeline I use, see my profile.
This is mostly a character study. Any feedback welcome.
Thanks to Robyn for looking over this.
Goose was staring at his digital clock. The minutes were advancing toward 0200. He finally admitted to himself that he wouldn't finish his report today. Well, technically he'd finish it today, but not before he got at least four hours of sleep. Walsh had been adamant they finish their reports as soon as possible, but it wouldn't be the first time the commander was angry with him.
He stood up and started pacing the room. His concentration was gone, but he felt too much on edge to lie down. They had gotten Zach out of the Psychocrypt, but Eliza was still in stasis. Even if Zach seemed to bear it with his usual stoicism, the captain didn't deserve that kind of torment.
Goose snorted. Like he could do anything about it right now. Sleep deprivation could wear down a man fast; they had all seen that in Zachary. He wouldn't do his team any good by staying awake and wishing things were different. He sat down wearily.
Breaking into the Psychocrypt always left him high on adrenaline and made it difficult to get back to desk work. The Queen was deadly, and he never took it for granted they would escape. That would be a mistake that could all too easily turn out fatal for any or all of them. The trap had been even more obvious than usual, yet there had been no other possible course of action.
He wouldn't watch a teammate go insane, not if there was anything, anything at all, he could do about it.
The risk had paid off. Eliza was stable again. Yet her crystal remained in the Queen's clutches. Goose wished he could help Zachary more, but there was nothing he could do now.
He sighed. He felt exhausted – not so much from physical exertion but the emotional turmoil they had all been through. Their team had never been that close to being broken up. They needed Zachary. He kept them focused. Niko was the heart of the team and Doc contributed the humor they needed to stay sane, but Zach was the unifying force that made sure they didn't deplete their resources by striking too early and on impulse, yet he wouldn't let any outlaw get away if he could help it.
If Zachary lost it, they all lost.
Frustrated, Goose hung up his uniform and changed into a comfortable black T-shirt and jogging pants. It wouldn't do anyone any good if he kept thinking about things he couldn't change.
He needed to sleep.
When he finished brushing his teeth, the clock read 0211.
He wasn't really looking forward to sleep. Niko had scanned all of them thoroughly and declared them free of any psychic hooks that the Queen could use to induce dream sequences into their sleep, but he still felt uneasy about going to bed. It left him too defenseless.
Open to nightmares about a past he couldn't change.
He forced himself to lie down and to breathe deeply and slowly. He would focus on rest now. He never used the sleep stabilizers. They would slow him down against intruders if someone tried to take advantage of his resting period.
At least Zach still had his family.
In the past five months, he'd been sent out two times after a pair of smugglers who operated in a region of space from Mars to the Empty Zone. A man who took out his opponents on sight and a woman who seemed to be able to melt with the darkness.
Two times the trail had been cold. He didn't know what to hope for.
He finally switched off the light.
Sleep came quickly but not easily.
##
He was standing in a long grey corridor that resembled both Wolf Den and the Psychocrypt. It figured his subconscious would combine these two places into one hell. He realized he was dreaming, and it surprised him that he was aware of it. Maybe Niko's talks about relaxing and conscious dreaming were paying off?
The corridor seemed endless. It was illuminated by dim neon light and flanked by countless black sliding doors on either side.
Slaver lords were walking past him, but they ignored him. This place was actually an improvement over reality.
The doors were sealed and secured with hand print devices against unauthorized access. He tried several, but none would open.
The corridor reminded him of the lab section of Wolf Den, a place he'd only seen for medical tests and had always been glad to be out of again.
Max used to work here, a voice whispered. He looked around but could detect no one. He pushed the thought aside. Max was gone.
You used to visit him, and he helped you with chemistry, the whispering voice continued. He startled and reached for his blaster, but his hands came only in contact with empty air. He took a deep breath and reminded himself that this was only a dream. He would ignore things he couldn't change.
One of the doors to his right was open. He verified with a quick glance over his shoulder that no one was watching and then stepped through into what must be a genetic laboratory. There were work benches with vials full of nutrient solution, pipettes and microscopes. Some of the machines standing around he recognized as DNA sequencers.
A young woman in a white lab coat was working at one of the computers. She was half shielded by a giant metal cube that must be a heating or cooling chamber, and he didn't spy her until he was already halfway into the room. Even though he had made no sound, she turned around. Her face lit up with a bright smile when she saw him.
"Where have you been for so long?" she asked.
She had sand colored hair with white stripes and striking green eyes that were almost glowing. He took a deep breath. The resemblance to Darkstar was too obvious. Apparently his subconsciousness had done some calculation as to what a mixture of her phenotype with Stingray's would look like.
He suppressed the thought and tried to focus on the situation at hand. He had known for years Darkstar was with Stingray for some unfathomable reason. It wouldn't faze him now. He hoped the young woman had inherited Darkstar's calm intelligence and not Stingray's arrogance.
It was a ludicrous dream anyway. Supertroopers had been designed to be sterile
"What are you doing here standing around like that?" she asked, curious and defiant. The smile was her mother's, but the proud challenge in her eyes was all her father's.
"What are you doing?" he countered. Data on her screen display rotated in what he assumed to be a 3D display of some form of organic life in its early stages. He took a step closer to get a better look. It looked like an image of a human embryo.
She smiled when she recognized where his eyes were directed. "I'm making more of us."
Uneasiness started to stir in his stomach, but he ignored it.
"How?"
She tucked back her hair and swiveled her chair around to face him, prepared to give a long explanation. Her face was radiant like this was her favorite topic. Much like Darkstar's face had been in the rare moments where she allowed herself to enjoy life.
"Natural evolution provided us with all the genes, but they were distributed in too many individuals. There's a cost to these mutations under ordinary circumstances, so the genes were switched off until the breakdown of populations in the 2030s. When the gene expression was switched on again, we could detect them and splice those genes that were useful, combine them with the right markers, make our own chemical trigger and add a healing factor that would allow the carrier to survive. It's really simple in theory.
Gene engineering and epigenetics have been well studied for quite some time.
Bookmarking, imprinting, gene silencing, position effect, reprogramming, transvection, regulation of histone modifications and heterochromatin – it's all been known for a long time, but only the Supertrooper project applied it to humans. To create us."
He recognized the technical terms. They had been part of Darkstar's field of study. He'd looked over her shoulder often enough. He wondered why the topic came up now. Most of the surviving Supertroopers were frozen. The whole project had been killed. It was over.
Not entirely happy with his subdued reaction, the young scientist reached into a freezer to draw out a lilac vial.
"The methyl markers survive from one generation to the next. We hardly need an activator anymore."
His breath caught when he recognized the labeling of the vial: X-factor. Only after some seconds did he register that she had reached into liquid nitrogen and her arm had turned into organic metal.
"You're a BDC," he stated flatly.
She looked almost bored. "Of course I am. We don't waste successful designs. The Board has stopped the gene engineering of new models, but we have enough live models to continue the project. From here, it's all natural – at least as natural as you can get in a lab. Some probably wouldn't mind going all natural, but that's a bit difficult while they're in cryostasis, so we make do with live cells."
Her smile made him think of cat trying to decide which mouse she would eat – no, play with first.
And he realized Supertroopers had never been born or even conceived naturally. Whoever could get the means to continue the project already had plenty of genetic material to choose from.
He shivered at the thought.
He heard a distant ringing and for the first time in his life welcomed the sound of his alarm clock.
"Are you leaving already?" she asked, pouting. "We haven't even had time to talk about what you've been doing."
He deliberately turned away from her and the data screen with the Supertrooper embryo. This was a nightmare. The images would fade.
Waking up didn't improve things one bit, though. As he stared into his mug of coffee, Goose asked himself: what if? If Killbane could just walk into Longshot and steal Mindnet, who would notice an unremarkable scientific assistant taking some small samples from some forgotten and left for dead bodies in cryostasis?
He shivered. It had been a nightmare, but he couldn't convince himself it wasn't real.