Liam's Apartment

The Flat Planet Cafe

Meanwhile

Sandoval had decided, on a whim, to come here first, before going to pick up the extra set of clothes for him and Augur. He wanted to get a look at the place Liam had called home. He had been surprised to find it so spartan furnished, only a padded chair and a couch in the main room with a low table in between. A few, overstuffed bookshelves on the walls and a rarely used kitchen. Upstairs a bedroom with bathroom and that was it. He went to study the book titles and came across a photo of himself, as well as one of Siobhan Beckett. A couple of facts added, some more parts clicked in the riddle that was Liam, all to support the suspicions he already had. He sighed as he took the picture of Siobhan down, studying it. It was a cut-out from a newspaper, taken in connection with his and Boone's investigations in Strandhill.

Now he understood Liam's reactions in the cave, when she had died, better. They had not been lovers as he had suspected at a point in time. She had been his mother. He slowly replaced the photo on the shelf. Right next to it was a completed Taelon puzzle. He smiled slightly. He had always thought of Liam as intelligent, but a completed Taelon Puzzle? Even Earth's greatest minds could spend months without solving one of these. But not his kid. His eyes widened in surprise. There, he had admitted it to himself.

Liam was his son. He needed to find him. To get his forgiveness for what he had done to him. But most of all, even if Liam could never forgive him, he needed to know, that his son was alive and safe. Then his eyes narrowed again, his face changing into a mask of pure determination. Liam was his son and God have mercy on the souls of whoever was behind this because he would have none. He quickly went to pack up a few of Liam's things, then left the apartment.

The Airducts

Beneath the Pentagon.

The ODK people were on the run. As Zeke and the others crawled through narrow tunnels, dragging the still groggy Bettis after them, Zeke started to make up plans. So far everything was going smoothly. They had managed to get their hands on a few hand weapons and to get into the ventilation system without anyone noticing.

Now all they needed was:

A: a way out

and

B: To locate Liam.

Problem B solved itself shortly thereafter as he saw Liam in a cell through an air vent. He was sitting on a bunk in a small cell, smaller than the ones he and his people had been in, cradling his head in his hands with a pained expression on his face, apparently trying block out the sound of the klaxons. Dear God, what had these bastards done to him? If it looked this bad from a distance, how would he look up front.

"Leave Bettis here for the moment. The rest follow me." He ordered his voice barely a whisper.

The Mans office

Beneath the Pentagon

He had just finished reviewing the tapes of the escape of the ODK people, which had taken place only minutes earlier. Very imaginative. They had to find somewhere safer to keep them when they re-captured them. And then he could get back to questioning the freak. His eyes narrowed. From the preliminary reports he had on their escape, they followed a highly unusual course through the complex. They hadn't headed up yet. What were they up to ?. What could be keeping them here ?

The other times they had attempted an escape, they had headed straight for some sort of an exit. This time, they had instead accessed an air duct. Colonel Kincaid was not a stupid man, or he would never have made it onto the ODK teams. It was almost as they were looking for something...

His eyes widened in shock as realisation struck. No that was impossible. They had no way of knowing ...

Slamming up the door of his office, he yelled out an order.

"Get security teams down to cell SL27 RIGHT NOW !"

Liam's Cell

His head was throbbing in agony. And the pain had returned almost in full. The sound of the Klaxons tore painfully through his head, making rational thought almost impossible to attempt. All he could do was try to block out the sound with his hands. He jerked backwards in shock as a heavy hand fell on his shoulder.

"Easy, Kid. Let's get you out of here." He knew that voice from somewhere. Opening his eyes slightly, he looked into the concerned, and very angry, face of Colonel Kincaid, one of the few people, he trusted completely.

Zeke was fuming as he took a good look at the Kid. These a**holes had done a good job on Liam. And the look in his eyes... At that moment, Zeke was ashamed to be American. This was not supposed to happen in the country of the free where everyone had a fair chance of making it on their own and no one was judged on their origins, but on their person. Look what they had done to this kid. Zeke could feel the same kind of rage, he was feeling, radiating off from the men behind him.

They all knew Liam. They all respected him. And they all wanted just 5 minutes alone with whoever was responsible for this.

"Common." He pulled Liam up from the bunk, supporting the wobbling figure with his own body. One of the others quickly moved over to help on the other side. Liam winced as his feet hit the floor. And Zeke noticed for the first time, that not even his feet had been spared the torture. Zeke's anger grew. Right now their main priority was to get Liam out, but later.. Someone would pay. In blood.

They moved slowly towards the air duct and had almost made it, when suddenly an ice-cold voice with an amused tone to it said from somewhere behind them:

"Going somewhere ?"

As the small party spun around, they saw several members of the security detail pointing pulse rifles, no doubt set to maximum damage, at them. There was no way of escape. The Air duct access, their only means of escape, couldn't accommodate them all at once and to pull an OK-Corral would only get them killed. Liam slumped against the older man's body. Caught. Again. And this time, others would be hurt as well. Again. Because of him. Again. Why couldn't he have been born human? Then none of this would have happened.

For a second, he hated Hag'el more than anything else. A small voice in his head tried to tell him, that Sandoval and multiple others would have been killed if he had been fully human, but he refused to listen. And besides, if it hadn't been for him, they probably wouldn't have gotten into those life-threatening situations anyway.

Zeke cursed inwardly in a dozen or more different languages. They had been SO close! But he took great care not to show his frustration. No use in giving these bastards to much ammo. And Bettis was still on the loose. But Liam worried him. By the way his body had suddenly seemed to lose the last of its strength, he could tell that the kid was giving up hope. And that was dangerous. Then one man, the apparent leader, moved towards them and started to speak.

"My dear colonel, you and your people seems to be a lot more resourceful than I expected. But have no fear, I will remember that when relocating you." The Man turned his attention to Liam "What I can't understand is why you risked your life, and that of your men as well, to rescue this freak of nature."

Zeke's voice took on an icy quality. "Liam's no freak. He is unique and possibly more human than any of us. He's certainly more human than YOU!" That remark earned him a hard punch in the stomach. It hurt, but Zeke would be damned if he showed it. He didn't even flinch. Liam, though, felt as if the punch had hit him. His worst nightmares were coming true. He was getting people hurt again. And he didn't know how to stop it.

The Man studied the Colonel and Liam for a while. And he did notice the slight reaction the subject had when he hit Kincaid. He studied It a little more intently. How had It succeeded in letting these people know where It was? Telepathy? That could also explain, why Colonel Kincaid had chosen to rescue It, or why he had defended It in the first place. Yes, some sort of mind control perhaps...

But it seemed to work two ways. At least on some level. Maybe if he... And the Colonel and his men had proven themselves weak by not being able to fight this kind of mental manipulation.

"Bring the subject and the Colonel to the interrogation room. The rest are to be locked up in their cells again." He smiled predatorily. Yes, if It would not talk to spare itself, maybe if he hurt one of it's minions. In his warped mind, he could not phantom the idea, that maybe the Colonel and his men had acted on their own accord out of friendship and care.

Because no one could be friends with an It could they?

"Oh, and find that last person, the one who got them out. Bettis, I believe he's called. I believe, they need some new test subjects in the CVI research department. And it would be such a waste if we couldn't find a better way of utilising his potential."

But when the goon squad went to search the air duct, Bettis was long gone.

Saint Michael's Church

Washington DC

Meanwhile.

Juliana had been so tensed up, that when the doors slammed open, she almost screamed in fright. But only almost. Instead, she acted on instincts developed by years of being in the resistance and constantly getting caught in firefights, and dove for cover. And that was what saved her. The two Kimera coming in the door fired simultaneously, thinking their commander in danger. The raw energy surged through the air, narrowly missing their target and whizzing closely past Anr'el herself before it hit a pillar and making it collapse.

"SHEER! (STOP!)"

The two froze to the spot at the very loud, very angry voice of their Commander.

"Seize at once! Have you learned so little in your time under my command?" Anr'el quickly moved over to the fallen human. If she knew ANYTHING, which could help find the Child, then she would be very useful indeed. And these two blunderheads had almost destroyed the chance of learning something new.

"Are you two hatchlings still, since you enter a strange place on a strange planet and, more importantly, an unknown situation, supposedly while undercover I might add, showing off your Shaqarava?" Thank the Universe! The woman appeared to be stunned, and slightly bruised, but not seriously hurt.

"Here, let me help you up." Anr'el tried to smile reassuringly, not to sure it was working and reached out her hand to the human.

Juliana looked at this being. The smile looked, well weird. Not artificial, just as if this person had not tried to smile before. Slowly she reached out her hand. And once again the silence was broken, this time by the sound of running feet as Augur and Street showed up, heavily armed with energy weapons pointed at the trio of aliens.

"Move away from her! Juliana, are you ok ?" Augur's concerned voice carried through the now silent church towards them.

"I am fine. Now put that thing away and lets show our new friends ?" she cast an inquisitive glance at Anr'el, who simply nodded. Anything to get the Child back." the lair. The noise of that blast is sure to call some spectators." Juliana grabbed the offered hand.

"My name is Juliana Belman. And you are ?"

"I am Anr'el, Commander of the Kimeran Warfleet and Captain of the "Justice". And these two blunderheads are Tam'el and Mur'el, SUPPOSEDLY amongst the best of my subordinates." She glared at them. The two mentioned Kimera looked very ashamed of themselves, but the message from Ca'el had been distressing indeed.

"We are truly sorry, Commander, but when the Commonality lost contact with you and the Child, Ca'el found it best to investigate. And when we saw..."Tam'el didn't finish. It was starting to sound like a really, really bad excuse. And they were both in trouble enough as it was. The Commander hated bad excuses.

"I will deal with this later. When the Child is safe. Now, give me a moment to reconnect with the commonality. "Anr'el said, closing her eyes and her human facade fading for a second as she sought, and found the mind of her second in command.

"Ca'el, I am safe..."

"Anr'el ! Thank the Universe! What happened ?"

"I was in direct contact with the child through his dreams, attempting to strengthen his connection to the Commonality. But something externally happened and broke the connection. And the shock of it made me break contact with the Commonality, purely by accident I assure you."

"It is good to have you back. The Child?"

"Alive, but not much more can be said right now. But thanks to our brief encounter in the dream world, I now know more about him."

She shared what little she knew with Ca'el, knowing that soon everyone would know what she knew about the Child: His name and his approximately looks. Anr'el came out of the link again, letting a relieved sigh escape as she felt the Commonality once again bleed away the pain of the Child. There was so much of it, it was hard to carry on her own. She opened her eyes.

"Tam'el, Mur'el, get back to your search. We now know, that this child's name is Li'am" She struggled a bit with the foreign name "And that he has the appearance of a grown man. I will take care of this." she waved a hand at the 3 humans. With that she turned to follow Augur and the rest of them into the bowels of the church.

The Air ducts

Beneath the Pentagon

OK, he was lost. No doubt about it. And he was almost blind as a bat without his glasses, which were now a psychedelic sculpture of metal and glass on the floor of his former "home". The power of that electrical surge had been a teeny little bit stronger than he expected. In fact a whole damned lot stronger. But he survived. And now he needed to get help from somewhere. The Colonel and the others, not to mention Liam, depended on it. Now all he had to do was to avoid getting caught.

Sighing, Bettis started to crawl on his hands and feet while idly wondering exactly how many miles of air ducts this place had.

The Interrogation Room

Beneath the Pentagon

Liam, handcuffed to a pipe over his head and barely touching the floor with his damaged feet, could only watch helplessly as the Colonel were strapped to the very same table on which he had had his own little "conversations" with the Man. He got a sickening feeling in his gut as he guessed at what was to come now. And his fears were confirmed as the Man turned to him and said;

"You know, what we want. Give it to us or this little brainwashed soldierboy of yours gets to feel a lot of pain."

"Don't say any..." That was as far as Zeke got before a vicious blow to his head left him seeing stars. He knew, and so did Liam if he stopped to think about it, that even if they got what they wanted, this piece of human trash enjoyed his work to much to leave it at that. Liam, on the other hand, was getting desperate. There had to be a way out of this !

"I can't tell you about Kimeran technology! I no longer have those memories! I'm human now !" Liam's frantic voice would, to a normal person, have left no doubt about his sincerity. This was what he truly believed. But the Man knew better.

"Oh? Human are you? Then how do you explain this ?" The Man called up the results of the bloodwork they had done on Liam when he was arrested. Liam's eyes went wide with shock. On the screen, the third strand of DNA, glowing almost like Taelon core energy, was clearly visible.

The Lair

Beneath Saint Michael's

She had been here, with these humans, a couple of hours. They were waiting for someone called Sandoval, apparently the last surviving human parent of the Child. While they were waiting, the one called Augur had shown her all the information they had on the Little One, from his birth to his "death".

She had dutifully shared all the information, she found necessary, with the Commonality. And she was developing a splitting headache. How these people could stare at these...computer screens ?...for a prolonged length of time, when they were obviously dangerous to one's mental capacity was beyond her.

But then again, this WAS humans she was dealing with here. A strange species indeed. On one side, they seemed to celebrate all the right ideas like equality, brotherhood and freedom for all (all one had to do was to read their so-called human rights bill), but on the other side, when they didn't understand something or things weren't going their way, they seemed to forget these very principles. Just take a look at how easily they had turned on Liam.

But also, their history before the Taelons had shown this weird double-edgedness in the human character. The world BC had been marred with wars, religious fights and racism just because of skin color. A dangerous species. An immature species.

She hadn't shared all of the information she had found with the Commonality though. She was afraid, that when it came to meting out the just punishment for what they had done to Liam, the complete facts of what they had done, not only to him, but also to the members of their own species, would cloud the collective minds of the Commonality. And her resolve to blast the Earth away was slowly deteriorating, letting a more sombre state of mind come to the fore.

The humans reminded her of children in some ways. Children who had been left without grown-ups for a very long time. But the Kimeran laws were clear. Ever since the Taelon-Kimera wars, and more pointedly the experiments the Taelons had run on the Kimeran children they had caught, there was only one possible punishment for harming a Child like this:

Total Annihilation.

The Kimera would not tolerate something like that to happen again. But with the humans behaving so much like children, wouldn't the Kimera, by following this course of action, also condemn themselves ? Her headache was getting worse by the second. Philosophy, she hated it. It was like running in circles, trying to figure it out. But at least there had been no more pain added to the child. But she could feel something else through the link.

Despair.

Despair, hopelessness and an acute sense of dread. Whatever was happening, it couldn't be good. She tried projecting encouragement through the link, but whatever was happening was causing the Child to sink so deep into himself, that she couldn't quit reach him even on this basic level. She frowned. If he could only fall asleep again.

Her thought was broken when a loud "BEEP" from the computer almost made her jump out of her borrowed skin. Augur came over right away, having studied this Anr'el character secretly from a the couch, as he and Juliana had told Street the story of William Boone's death and the full story on Liam's heritage (of cause with the scouts honour oath that she wouldn't tell Sandoval about his part in it until Liam was ready for it).

This one was weird, having said almost nothing, only soaking up knowledge like a sponge, not only on Liam but also on a multitude of other things when she had figured out how to look up information on the computer. But then again, she WAS an Alien and Augur guessed it was her prerogative to be weird. And her reading speed made even Boone and the other implants look like tortoises.

"Ah, the frequency search is finished." The others quickly stood up and went over to join him.

"Frequency search ?" Anr'el spoke up, for the first time in hours. Her voice was hoarse due to the lack of use.

"Yeah, I'm trying to locate Liam on his Commonality frequency. Holy..." He stared in awe at the results. The screen flared alive with green points of Commonality frequencies.

"There must be THOUSANDS!" Street was baffled. Not even when the Taelons population on the planet had been at its peak had there been this many aliens on the planet.

"Not quite, but close enough." Anr'el replied, a bit amused. "What you see, is the signatures of the Kimera currently planetside. There are much more on the ships."

Juliana felt her jaw slack but managed to stop it before it actually fell open. "I though the Kimera was all but extinct...Liam and Hag'el thought that they were dead completely...Then you guys show up and I thought, well maybe a couple of hundreds...But thousands ?" Juliana had a little bit of a hard time comprehending this.

"You, the Taelons and even our old allies, the Jaridians, only knew what we wanted you to know. The war with the Taelons was many millennia ago and we needed time to grow strong again. We are actually billions now. More accurately: 3 fully inhabited worlds and 2 still being...eh..terraformed I believe the correct phrase is. But this, one of our Children being hurt, changes everything. The Kimera will not tolerate this kind of atrocity! And there will be a punishment." Her final statement left an ominous silence. Whatever the Kimera had in mind, it didn't sound good.

"How long have you known about Liam ?" Sandoval asked, his voice breaking the tense silence. No one had noticed the lift opening.

"Only for a few days. He screamed and we heard." she turned back to Augur "We have a weak link with him. Very weak, I might add. I doubt that you will be able to find him using your frequency search, when we have not been able to localise him ourselves. But you are welcome to try." She turned back to Sandoval, not only because she sensed, that he had more on his mind, but also to study this man, that Hag'el had chosen as his human host a little bit closer.

"What will you do, when you find him ?" Sandoval had to ask. He needed to know. This was about his son.

"We will take him back to Kimera Prime. He has already been left on this planet far too long all by himself. And look what have happened to him!" Anr'el was getting angry again as she thought about the things which had been, and was being, done to this precious Child.

"But before going back there, we will meet out a punishment for this planet."

"You said, you have a weak link with him. Is he alive ?"Juliana let her worry shine through. Anr'el sighed. What was it about this planet, which had her shaking with anger one second and her being totally tired the next?

"Yes. Barely. But he's hurt. Badly. And he is giving up." Anr'el studied Sandoval's reaction to this news out of the corner of her eye. There were signs of distress, both in his eyes and in the way his body tensed up. But his face showed nothing. He spoke up.

"Then we better find him fast." Inwardly he thought: "Don't give up. We WILL find you, son."