Title: Egg Whisk
Chapter 4
By: X
X0832001@yahoo.com
Disclaimer: Still haven't gotten any ownership for these people, no need to sue
Back in his office Dylan looked at his computer. Two new messages, both were from the Commonwealth. The first were Harper's test results. In a heartless move by the Commonwealth Harper had taken an IQ test. There had been a rather pathetic investigation into the kidnappings and they had made him take the test. He'd been interviewed and explained the Elmarins had made him take an intelligence test. All the kidnap victims had been suspected geniuses, none tested. It was really all they had in common. So the Commonwealth, just like his captors, had tested Harper. It was a misjudgment in Hunt's opinion, needlessly traumatic. The results were clear. Harper was a certified genius. Math and deductive skills clean off the charts. He was completely brilliant. So were the other 2 survivors.
He called up the information the information the Salvation Cooperation had provided on what went on, on Lobas. There had been 7 kidnapped. The intelligence was the only binding factor. There was an organic chemist, a known assassin, and a mechanic. Even odder were the park ranger, the gambler and the history professor. Of the 7, only 3 had made it out. Seamus Harper, Lourna Phillips, and Toby Milosh. The rest were all neatly killed. Dylan looked through the documents. Apparently the rescue crew found these 3 still alive, sitting in their cells. Bodies filled all the rest.
The file included a picture from each successive cell. First was a young man, blood covered his forehead and disappeared into a mass of dark hair pillowing his head. Designs in green marker computed weight/ force ratios; lists of chemicals were on the wall behind him. It was Douglas Montgomery, the gambler.
Then in the next cell had been an equally dead Persid. Professor Chirion of Senti's top school. Crudely drawn red maps were all over the floor. His blood formed a lake that covered much of some planet's southern continent.
Despite how disheveled and mistreated she looked at least this next woman was alive. She was Lourna Phillips, the one who'd just disappeared from the institution. Extra chains bound her to the end of the cot. She was the assassin. Blue scribbling of diagrams surrounded her. Her face was badly bruised and her ratty long blonde hair was piled on top of her head and pinned in place. She was probably a pretty woman when she was all cleaned up. But Dylan was just glad it wasn't a photo of death.
It was a girl in the next photo. She was younger than Harper by a year or two, sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall where the force of impact had blown her fragile frame. Her head hung at a disgusting angle because her neck had been shot clean through, drenching her front with blood. Shapes, lines, C's and H's covered the bottom 2 feet and the floor. The red marker used to create them was loosely resting in dead fingers, poor little chemist. She was Dr. Patricia Wellis. By the Divine, she didn't look old enough to be a doctor. Since the shot had been low despite the splattering you could see her face. She'd been exhausted. Even dead she looked exhausted. She'd been too weak to stand, that's why she wrote on the floor. Over her head were the remains of past formulas written in blue and never fully erased. It would have been too much extra work to get rid of them.
The next cell on the line was Harper. He didn't need to look at those pictures again. He'd examined every inch of them trying to get some answers on what had happened to his engineer. It was unpleasant to look at pictures of dead and tortured strangers, but looking at what they had done to his friend was easily the worst. He couldn't stand to see the pain and fear in the eyes of the kid in the picture. Hunt hadn't protected his own and the result was in that picture. A young bruised and broken man he called friend and crew member, sitting in a white room with blue scribbles and sketches representing the rapid explosions of ideas from his mind.
Only two more Dylan told himself clicking to the next picture. He hoped these images unlocked some answers; give away some detail that would reveal what the Elmarins strategy had been. In the picture on the screen now was Toby Milosh. He was alive. But, even in the still photo you could see Milosh wasn't all there. He'd been a park ranger and they'd made him plan troop movements. He'd been a normal little park ranger and they'd made him insane. Milosh was tethered like the rest, but he was still on his feet. He still had the strength to stand and had drawn an amazingly complex map in blue marker surrounding him on all the visible walls. The look in his eyes was that of pure terror.
The last cell on the row contained the remains of Kurt Reynolds, the mechanic. Schematics in pale green covered the walls more than in any of the other cells. Kurt was apparently not one for erasing. He'd written so much he'd been running out of ink. In the end Reynolds had been shot in the head like the rest. Red, curly hair obscured the hole but the amount of blood made it clear it was under there.
Dylan considered the pictures. Why were those left alive, left? What made them different? There seemed to be no pattern. They hadn't started at one end and worked down. They hadn't left those with related objectives- assassinations, weapons-surprise attacks, and troop movements. There seemed to be no pattern. But, these 3 must have been saved for some reason.
These images weren't available to the public and Dylan was glad. Those that had died shouldn't be remembered as a blood stained, ripped apart corpse. Those that had survived shouldn't be looked upon as poor victims. Beka, himself, and as she was the computer; Andromeda, had seen Harper's picture but the rest hadn't. There was no need for them to see just how bad it had been. They'd seen him after his brief time with the Corporation and if Harper ever wanted to share the details it was his decision.
The news on what the Elmarins had done was only briefly reported. The images used were from the Elmarins own files. Just pictures of the prisoners, from the shoulders up, against the written on wall of their cell. Most of them looked a little worn around the edges, but much healthier than they would look later.
Dylan closed the file, revealing the list of files again. He'd been over all the information the Cooperation had supplied before. Then he noticed the name of the last one on the list. It was the test results of the prisoners. This could be it! What he had been looking for. Harper's test results for the Commonwealth hadn't been a fluke, super genius. There were a few other geniuses. Phillips, Milosh, Harper, and Whellis, Whellis broke the record. If they'd left the geniuses, why kill her?
Dylan closed the entire Salvation Cooperation file. There was still that second message from HQ. It probably was orders for Harper to go over to the Elmarin ship and make repairs or something else that would completely ignore the fact Harper had been brutalized. It turned out to be even better than he expected- the people of Billis were sending a delegation. The Elmarins and the Billisites, those involved in the Elmar-Billis conflict that had caused Harper to wind up on Lobas, were all going to be co-habitating on Andromeda! If that wasn't a recipe for disaster than nothing was. Maybe the Commonwealth leaders had simply lost their minds.