Disclaimer in previous chapters. This chapter was officially too long to post as one chapter, but per my promise last chapter I have posted the content, just not as a single chapter. Hey, I can't help the limit restriction the site put on document length. Not my fault! So you get multiple chapters simultaneously, but the escape attempt is resolved. The chapters contain much action.

The wonderful feedback that has been so generously left for me has indicated some readers are a little confused as to what's going on. The following paragraphs summarize the past few chapters. Skip if you're not confused. Edits will be made to previous chapters to alleviate the confusion.

In chapter 16, Commander Gray schedules a meeting with Captain Faber and orders Dr. Shrew to euthanize G-101A (aka Vash the Stampede) at the conclusion of the days' tests, not to exceed four hours. Elizabeth makes contact with Meryl and Millie, and Doc confirms that Millie is probably telepathically linked with Knives.

In chapter 17, Meryl realizes she's been in a holding pattern, waiting for Vash all this time, and vows to take action. Millie confirms she now has access to telepathy by reading thoughts. The women realize they can take all the Plants off the ship, not just the twins, and learn from Private Asoaurd that Vash will be killed within the hour.

In chapter 18, the women take action. Millie hacks the computers, isolates the network, and locks down the infirmary. Meryl suggests lessening air pressure to knock out the crew. Millie begins work, but is distracted by Elizabeth's request that her men be located. This leads to the discovery of the apparent deaths of two crew members – Captain Faber and Commander Gray. Terry Asoaurd is discovered in the room, alive.

- . -

"Millie, calm down."

The big girl was shaking, transfixed by the dots on the screen, and Meryl reached around her, frantically hitting keys until the image changed to something else.

She hadn't lowered the air pressure yet. She hadn't even locked any of the doors but the infirmary yet!

"It's not your fault –"

" But Dr. Shrew couldn't get to them!" Millie almost wailed, ducking her face to her right shoulder, as though she wanted nothing more than to bury it in the light blue blanket. "I stopped the pages from going through! Oh, Meryl! What if-"

"There's nothing you could have done," Elizabeth said softly, and for once Meryl agreed wholeheartedly. "Millie, you didn't kill those two men."

Meryl rubbed her hands up and down Millie's arms in what she hoped was a soothing manner. Millie had to feel sick indeed if she was acting so subdued. As far as she knew, Millie hadn't ever taken a life –

Unless Knives had made her.

Millie tensed, and Meryl bit her bottom lip to distract her brain for any further thoughts along those lines. What's done is done. They had to focus and keep moving forward.

"There's a saboteur on the ship, Millie," Elizabeth continued, quietly but urgently. "They weren't sure it wasn't just Knives manipulating his sister Plant, but now it's pretty obvious it's a member of the crew."

Meryl silently thanked the other woman as Millie stopped cringing in on herself. She sniffled, then swallowed. "You . . . you think it's Terry. You think he killed those men?"

Meryl's mind fled back to the conversation they'd had with him, not twenty minutes ago. She didn't recall anything about him indicating he was about to go on a murdering rampage -

"I don't know," the engineer replied truthfully. Then she paused. "Although . . ."

He was certainly nice to them, Meryl reflected. He'd taken her aside and warned her about Commander Gray. He'd given her the very precious pieces of paper tucked into her jacket. He'd accidentally let it slip about Vash and that they were being recorded –

Meryl felt herself frown, and wrapped her arms a little tighter around Millie. What if it hadn't been an accidental slip? What if he'd warned them purposefully? But - "But he couldn't have. He barely left here twenty minutes ago, and he was on his way to Dr. Shrew."

"I agree." The engineer was still using a patient, soothing voice. "He probably just found them that way. But it means there's someone on the ship that has a high level of access, and they're killing people. We need to stop crew movement, Millie, and you and Doc are the only people who can do that. Doc is busy with Knives and Vash, so . . . that leaves you." Elizabeth offered what she probably thought was a friendly expression. "When you lock down everyone else, you'll lock down the killer."

Millie sniffled again, then took a deep breath. "Okay," she agreed in a very child-like voice, and slowly leaned forward again. Meryl kept her arms loosely around the bigger girl's waist, holding her steady on the stool and giving her something lean against.

Millie, please stay calm. It's okay. We'll get off this ship and we'll make Knives fix you up good as new. It took everything in her not to finish that thought with a threat on Knives' life, and Millie shook again.

But this time with a muffled laugh.

"Thank you, sempai," she mumbled, watching her hands typing away. Some of Knives' happiness had worn off, apparently – was that because Millie was more awake or because something had gone wrong?

As if some lunatic running around the ship killing people wasn't wrong.

"Millie, can you send out a broadcast message to the handhelds, or have you disabled that portion of the network already?"

She paused in her work, then sighed. "I . . . I really don't know, Miss Elizabeth. Can you look?"

The woman nodded, reaching forward and typing on the keyboard. Her uniformed sleeve pulled back enough to expose a beige splint, and Meryl recalled that her wrist had been broken. Her aching face was a memory; she barely noticed it anymore, but she wondered if the same was true for the engineer. If she was bothered, she didn't show it.

No time, she realized. They only had one chance to pull this off, but with Gray out of the way –

Well, what? It wasn't as though she'd even met the other man . . . Faber. There would still be guards after them. It was a military ship, after all, and she could expect it to run much the way the more traditional Feds did. Chain of command. It would probably fall to the large, bald general . . . Phillip Basil? Basil Phillip? She recalled he seemed kind, but he'd been very active in the role to stop Knives, which meant he was accustomed to military situations like this one. She couldn't expect the sausage-fingered general to go any easier on them than he would any other terrorist.

Then again, Asoaurd hadn't warned her about him.

Elizabeth toggled through the screens easily. "No, you didn't," she said, with no small amount of respect in her voice. "What did you do . . .?"

Millie fidgeted. "I . . . I really don't know," she started hesitantly. "I think . . . that I thought that it would be easier to just fool the other people on the network into thinking there was a big problem, so they'd be worrying a lot more while I did little stuff, and would be looking in the wrong direction."

Meryl rested her chin on Millie's shoulder and watched the screens on the monitor. None of them really made sense, even though they were in English. As Elizabeth went through them, she seemed even more mystified.

"You modified the servers and routers to fail to respond to packets originating from all the other consoles . . . which would make it look like the entire network was down when the infrastructure was actually still up and working," she murmured, as though in explanation. Not that that made any more sense than the screens themselves did.

"So you can do . . . whatever it is you needed to?"

Elizabeth shook her head. "I deal with plants, Meryl, not ships." She glanced at Millie hopefully, and the other girl smiled.

"What do you need?"

"We need to send out a message to warn Aaron and Sunjy of the air pressure drop. But if they get a message and no one else does –"

"They'll be in danger," Meryl finished. "Doc said it would take up to half a minute for everyone to pass out."

Elizabeth nodded. "So, I need you to also send out a broadcast message to all the other PDAs, so they all go off at once and say the same thing . . . "

"Except Aaron's and Sunjy's," Millie piped up. "Wow, that's a great idea. What should the other message say?"

Elizabeth shrugged. "It doesn't matter. Make something up."

Probably something about pudding.

"Don't be silly, sempai! Then they'd know it was me! Besides, I feel too sick for pudding," she added as an afterthought. Then she frowned. "I didn't know I could feel too sick for pudding."

Meryl commanded her brain to stop thinking so loudly.

"Once the crew is out, can you turn the PDA systems back on, at least? That way we can communicate without having to bother you."

Millie nodded wordlessly, and looked at her fingers for confirmation. They had been wandering around the keyboard apparently without her permission, because they paused for a moment before she started typing again.

They watched her for a few minutes, and then a series of alert messages flew to the fore of the screen, followed by the now-familiar diagram of the ship. Much as it had when Knives had been attacking, it rotated on an invisible axis, and most of the chambers inside were flashing red.

"Millie . . . what room is that?"

Elizabeth touched the screen, rather than the keyboard, and the image immediately zoomed in. Millie squinted a moment at it, as though she thought it would tell her, but another box on the side identified it as PBEEF 2E.

"It's a storage room for the ship engineers," Millie answered, though she still hadn't glanced at the room's label. "Why?"

Elizabeth blinked at her. "Well, it's not marked for depressurization . . ."

Millie shook her head. "Nope," she agreed.

Both women waited for more, but a further explanation never came.

"Why not?" Elizabeth finally asked, her voice the same one would use to lead a petulant child to explain why there were bits of crayon all over the floor and walls.

"Well, because no one is in it!" the tall girl answered. "And it's very dangerous, you know."

Meryl removed her chin from Millie's shoulder so she could talk more easily. "What do you mean, dangerous? To lower the air pressure?"

The girl nodded. "Of course. You know as well as I do that the Bernardelli Field Employee Handbook lists 'improper storage of non-rated battery cells in a high-altitude environment' as the number two cause of accidental explosions, on page 227, graph four. Lowering the air pressure in the rooms is the same as putting them way up high on a mountain range, isn't it?"

"Oh, of course," Meryl echoed unthinkingly. Wait . . . did that mean that they might cause explosions on the ship? She found herself wondering if the armories had been staffed at the time Millie had begun her lockdown. All this was for naught if the ship blew up!

"What was the first?" the engineer asked, whether to test her memory or out of honest curiosity, Meryl couldn't tell.

"Mr. Vash the Stampede," Millie answered. "Though I think they've republished it since his bounty was removed and – oh! We haven't been back by the main office to get another copy yet!"

"Later, Millie." It was her usual businesslike voice, and she was glad to hear it echo in her own ears. "What parts of the ship are most likely to . . . be like unrated battery cells?"

Millie pointed at the screen, tapping several rooms very precisely on the diagram. "But some of them had people in them," she murmured softly. "So I only lowered the air pressure a little bit in there."

"Did you also secure the hall outside those doors?" The engineer sounded alarmed.

Millie nodded. "It's just a few places. Don't worry, I'll watch them."

"What about the crew in the halls?"

Millie stared at the grey dots that were not confined to chambers of the ship. "If they try to go into rooms that aren't locked, they'll be locked in." She seemed to be getting a better grasp on what it was she was doing, Meryl noted. She wasn't sure if that was good or bad, but it seemed to give Millie a little more confidence.

"And the halls that I could seal up I did. If you guys need into one of those, I made yours and Sunjy's and Aaron's little computer things have the ability to open and close any door. You'll just have to hurry through so you don't get a headache."

Elizabeth's PDA suddenly chimed, and she glanced at it before smiling. "You told them to go to sleep?"

Millie shrugged. "That's what we wanted them to do, so I thought I'd ask first."

Meryl couldn't help a smile. As if anyone could obey a request like that. "So does that mean –"

Millie nodded, and the red lights flashing on the diagram of the ship changed to orange, each with a small meter that showed a decrease. They were far too small to read, but they all decreased at the same rate, and the computer obviously didn't like it one bit.

"The production Plant's room . . . was anyone in there?"

Millie tapped the screen again, and brought up a familiar-looking chamber. "There were in the control room," the girl responded after a moment. "But no one in the bulb room, so it's still the same pressure as outside."

Elizabeth nodded, and they watched the levels stabilize. At few at first, then more and more of the grey dots began to flash that same, odd yellow, and Millie took a deep breath. Meryl gave her a little hug. Elizabeth began to pat herself down, as though looking for something, then cursed quietly.

Meryl glanced her way when the woman simply began to walk away. "Where are you going?"

She waved a hand, which seemed a pretty dismissive gesture until Meryl realized it was to do something that she wouldn't understand even if it were explained. Probably something to do with rotos and packages. A muffled chime rang out over her footsteps, and Elizabeth picked up that little grey computer again. Then she spun on her heels, still backing down the hall towards Doc's room.

"I need to get some equipment to uninstall Knives," she called down the hall. "Can you send Sunjy a message and tell him to head out and uninstall the production Plant? He's closer than Aaron."

Millie nodded, turning back to the keyboard, and Meryl clamped down hard on her brain. Practical. Think forward. "She probably wants you to let him out, too." And Carter, otherwise they'd pass out. She wasn't sure how long they could hold their breaths, but it had already been a minute or more –

"Oh! Yes, I should, shouldn't I," Millie said in a worried voice. "Oh, sempai, what if . . ."

Meryl moved to stand beside the girl, and Millie shook her head. "Then I'll just have to write it now to make sure it still happens!" she declared, and bent her head to typing again. Meryl sighed, and glanced back down the hall. Elizabeth had already disappeared into Doc's room.

Her eyes trailed across the tops of all the other doors, soft red lights above the double-paned entrances. One of those rooms contained Vash. One of those rooms contained the doctors that wanted to kill him. Had Millie already stopped the tests – of course, when she took down the computers. Still, Millie hadn't lowered the pressure here, so . . . did that mean they also needed to make sure Dr. Shrew and her small army didn't find a way to get out?

She wanted to head down to Doc herself, find out what he was doing, but she didn't want to leave Millie alone. She turned to glance at the other girl, slumped so exhaustedly but typing with new fervor. She didn't respond to the thoughts, and Meryl kept her voice to herself.

- . -

"God damn it," one of them growled into the silence. There were a few affirming grunts.

Sunjy glanced up as the error flashed offscreen. They were basic time-out errors, indicating that the servers were responding extremely sluggishly or not at all. They had been quickly noticed, but were being shrugged off by the programmers, and he wasn't sure if he was supposed to be distracting them from them or pointing them out.

Of all the times for Miss Elizabeth to be that cryptic . . . obviously she'd found another exploitable weakness, and she was attempting something. But what? Taking down the servers was hardly going to improve their chances of escape. It would be a nuisance at best.

"How often does that happen?" he asked quietly, and the dark-haired one, Todd, turned his head ever so slightly in the olive-skinned man's direction.

"All the time," he replied. "We've been using these systems non-stop since the Fall, and they just weren't designed for it." He tapped a couple keys pretty forcefully before leaning back in his chair. "We were supposed to have progressed to industrialization by now, and if not, the Plants could have manufactured the parts."

Sunjy blinked, noting the frustration in the tone but choosing not to acknowledge it. These men specifically found dissatisfaction with their jobs, possibly because they had never been intended to perform nothing but maintenance on older systems. Like much of the other crew, they felt constrained, misled, and disenfranchised.

But something kept them in line, and he wasn't sure it was something as easily definable as military honor.

"You have a Plant – why not manufacture spare parts?"

Todd glanced at the man next to him, but answered. "We have a Plant. Just one, out of an original inventory of twelve. When this Plant is decommissioned, we're dead in the vacuum."

Of course. It was a military ship; they probably had originally had one Plant for every cannon, and several for shields. He'd seen enough of the ship to know it had sustained some pretty heavy damage on landing, and certainly would not be spaceworthy again. Particularly not after Knives had created his own front door.

And if they were down to one, they obviously hadn't noticed or harvested any Cherubs.

"You could always take one from one of the towns," he noted softly, as though apologetic for asking them to reveal something they shouldn't have. " Inepral City has had some luck in cultivating new Plants."

Todd finally swiveled in his chair, looking directly at Sunjy. "Considering you're one of the lunatics letting the few Plants we still have run rampant over the planet –" He stopped, with effort, and took a deep breath. "What do you care? You've spent the last two days in here doing worthless research and now you're acting like you . . . feel sorry for us!"

Sunjy didn't change his expression. The other programmers were facing their monitors, but it was obvious he now had everyone's attention.

"I understand the frustration of not being able to do your job," he said simply. "What few tasks I have been given by Miss Elizabeth, I have not been allowed to perform."

He delicately didn't add that was because they, along with Terry Asoaurd, wouldn't allow him enough access to the archives to do anything useful besides compute fairly easy arithmetic.

Todd almost laughed. "Two days, and you understand what it's like?"

Sunjy raised his eyebrows slightly. "If you've had more time, why haven't you solved the problem?"

Surprisingly, Todd dropped his eyes and his anger seemed to hesitate a little bit. "Until we've reached our goal numbers –"

"Who set them?"

"Hey, T."

Todd didn't even glance away, and Sunjy held his gaze mildly.

"Try to ping your router."

"Why."

"I can't ping mine."

Todd's eyes flickered to his right. "So?"

"I could about a minute ago."

"Sid, the network's down –"

"That's why I'm asking you to ping your router. You're on a different subnet."

Todd turned away from Sunjy dismissively, and he sighed quietly. So much for successfully distracting them –

"What possessed you to do that in the first place?" Todd grumbled to himself, typing in the command. He received another set of timeout errors. "Mine's down."

The other programmers were starting to mimic the motions, talking amongst themselves.

"I can't think of anything that'd cause the failure of four physically redundant routers besides power," Sid was calling over the general chatter. "I was just pinging it to make sure it wasn't my console, and it disappeared about a minute ago."

"No, it was always weird," another voice spoke up. "One of my routines was still running – see that green LED? It shows me hard drive activity on the server and it never went down. In fact, it's still not down –"

"Shit, don't tell me we've been sitting on this for ten minutes when we should've –"

"It's no good. The server's still giving timeout errors-"

"If the routers are down the server could be up and fine and still giving you timeouts."

"Surely NetOps already knows about this-"

"Do you think it's sabotage?"

"Who'd take down the routers?"

"It takes down the entire network –"

"Not if you leave yours up."

This caused a general silence, before there was a sudden flurry of activity. "Find the ones up. Everyone take the next consecutive three, starting with 20.145."

"If it's the Plant-"

"It's not the Plant!"

Sunjy turned to his own console, typing in a ping command and getting the same response. It was as though the router wasn't there. Or the switch simply wasn't passing on the packet. Either way, shutting down the network would also make it difficult for them to manipulate the systems to get out. It would slow the search parties, and prevent the crew from easily locating them on the ship, but once you went to the server itself or the sensor itself – it wasn't like the entire ship operated on a single network. There was all manner of redundancy, on the off chance half the ship was blown apart in combat.

In unison, all their PDAs chimed.

Including his.

Sunjy blinked, then unhooked the mostly useless device from his belt. Most of the programmers were doing so as well, though some were ignoring it utterly. Obviously it was a broadcast message, probably telling them what they already knew – the network had been pretty much clobbered. Of course, if the PDA system was working, the message servers were up, which meant that the entire network was not down, just –

But how could the routers be down if the messages had arrived at the correct PDAs? Or perhaps it really was a broadcast message, and that was why he'd gotten it as well?

He glanced at the screen, then deleted the message. The others didn't respond nearly as calmly.

"Please go to sleep?" one of them read dumbly. "What the . . .?"

"Told you it wasn't the Plant," Sid muttered. "Whoever this saboteur is, they're a real smart-ass."

Sunjy's ears popped, and he adjusted pressure in his Eustachian tubes, continuing to do exactly what his PDA had told him.

Hold his breath.

With the change in air pressure came an immediate and radical climate shift. The room temperature dropped at least fifteen degrees in a matter of seconds, and his ears continued to ache. He equalized pressure again by swallowing. The air pressure was decreasing rapidly; he hadn't experienced anything like this before. Usually it was the other way around, when you were a lift or falling from a significant height, and you had to blow air into your ears to equalize pressure.

The programmers hadn't gotten the warning to hold their breath, and as such were unprepared for the sudden drop of air pressure. Sunjy sat quietly as they made a beeline for the door, clutching their ears. Blood trickled between the fingers of some of them, indicating that their eardrums had burst. Water was beginning to condense on the still-lit computer screens, and it was now cold enough that Sunjy was starting to shiver in his light grey uniform.

Most of the men didn't even make it to the door; those that did were able to pound on it only once or twice before they, too, collapsed. Their gasping had done them no good; while there was still the same mix of oxygen in the air, there was just so little air to breathe it didn't make a difference. Every one of them was unconscious in under a minute.

Sunjy pulled out his PDA, ignoring a little ache in the bottom of his lungs, and typed a quick message to Miss Elizabeth.

Everyone's out. And it's cold. – S

He was getting too old for this.

It took a remarkably short time before he heard it; the sound that the muttering of the men had drowned out previously. Now that they were silent, he could hear air moving throughout the room. It was a light hiss, coming from somewhere high up in the ceiling. A familiar pressure began to build in his ears, and Sunjy pinched his nostrils and exhaled.

It took a little longer to regain pressure in the room than it had to release it, and after about two minutes he gave up and took a breath.

The air was thin, very thin, but breathable. His PDA chimed, and he picked it up.

We're keeping the air pressure low so everyone stays sleeping. Come to corridor NE-2200 – air pressure is normal there. Then Miss Elizabeth says to head for the production Plant room. Thanks!

- Millie T.

Very calmly, taking care to take deep, slow breaths, Sunjy walked over to the door. It opened immediately with a slight whoosh of air, and he stepped out into the secondary hall.

- . -

Doc looked over the scrolling data, keeping his expression mild. He wasn't in one of the observation rooms, of course, so it wasn't as though any of the crew could see his face anymore. But Millie still had her connection to the room open, and he certainly didn't want to make anyone curious or share what he was reading.

Heaven help them if Millie – and her new limb, Knives – had looked this over.

Doc sighed quietly as he went hunting through the file system. It was well-organized; he wished his research was this easy to traverse. And it was a good thing. He couldn't only concentrate on Dr. Shrew's files. Doubtlessly her apprenti-interns, he reminded himself, had been running their own tests. Or crunching data for her while she was looking into other things.

It was a huge amount of information, far more than he could safely send to his ship via a databurst, even if he could find their satellite. And most of it was the crucial information he'd been missing.

Most of it was what they'd done to Vash – and to human subjects – prior to his extraction from the bulb.

Doc didn't watch any of the footage. He could do it via a PDA once they escaped. He merely copied it all into a central folder he'd created at the root of the share, watching the overall size of the data as he continued to add to it. The most recent test results would be a treasure-trove of information, but they didn't have time to wait for that data to be analyzed and output by the applications. They were huge files, and specialized for the hardware on the ship. He copied the raw data anyway, on the off chance Knives had been scrounging or already had a cache of Lost Technology to utilize in Eden.

He certainly wasn't living the life of the content country baron, no matter what the striking engineer had seen. Though he'd never met Knives, he could be certain that Eden was anything but simple.

And in keeping with that theme, there was no telling what he might have installed to keep the pesky humans away. That was a major concern. He doubted they'd get the chance to wake Knives up and ask him, either. Hopefully whatever it was, the presence of Vash – even unconscious – would render it inoperable.

And if it were of the human persuasion, hopefully Elizabeth's men would be able to handle it.

Though again, it was unlikely they would be merely human.

And now was not the time to wonder at the genetic diversity of homo Sapiens on the planet. They would be modified or superior in some way to the normal flavor.

Perhaps tranquilizers were in order.

Doc watched the data copy, grabbing a few extra folders when he saw he had the space without bothering to check their contents. Their label alone made them interesting, and anything even possibly relevant needed to come with him now. He'd never get another chance to get this data, nor ask Dr. Shrew.

Ah, the woman was probably livid right now.

His doors pulled open, revealing the same slender, tall frame they had before. Elizabeth didn't seem surprised to find him where she'd left him. She glanced around the room a moment, then just flashed him a smile and headed towards his bed – and the drawers beneath it. He watched her rummage silently around for a moment before she withdrew several long, slender metal instruments in their sterile plastic and paper. He gave her a questioning look, but she just shook her head.

"I'm going to uninstall Knives – anything I need to know?"

He watched her very carefully for a minute, but she said nothing more. And no matter how he tried, he couldn't figure out why she needed tiny-headed forceps or light clamps. "He's been given a dose of the drug that stimulates activity of his Gate, but the single dose shouldn't do much, particularly if he's actively resisting. His coma in unrelated, and stable. You may treat him like a sedated Plant, but protective clothing will be unnecessary."

She nodded, then hesitated. "How's Vash?"

He pursed his lips. "Stable enough for travel."

She searched his face a moment, and he slightly raised his eyebrows. "I could go into detail if you like, but considering his Gate activity is almost nonexistent, I doubt any of it would be pertinent to one of the most renown Plant engineers of our time."

Elizabeth smiled slightly, and started for the door. "I deserved that."

He suppressed a chuckle. "Telepaths are quite annoying, aren't they."

Elizabeth stopped dead in her tracks and actually laughed, cocking her head back to look at him and reminding him how young she was. And so beautiful. It was so sad, that in a world such as theirs, she would have had to become this person just to survive.

"Yes," she agreed wholeheartedly. "I guess I just don't recall Vash-" Her smile slipped a little. "Or if he was reading my mind, he did a bad job."

Doc shook his head slightly, but didn't break eye contact. "Vash doesn't use his telepathy," he assured her softly. "At least, not with humans. He considers it an invasion of privacy."

She opened her mouth, then just closed it with a smile. "I suppose Millie just hasn't had enough practice yet."

Doc inclined his head and closed his eyes in assent, and after a moment the engineer nodded in return, turned on her heels, and headed back out the door.

No, Millie didn't have enough experience to filter things. And the engineer had no experience in hiding them. Luckily, he did.

He glanced at the progress of the file copy, opening a network browsing tool and looking around. The network was completely up and operational, just ignoring all but a few consoles. Knives knew how to cripple a ship well; this was perhaps something he'd picked up over a hundred years ago. It was astonishing that even in a coma, he could give Millie Thompson such exact instructions. That such a complex task was literally so simple he could do it in his sleep.

He burrowed into the Infirmary portion of the tree, looking at the various instruments that had network objects. Incubators caught his eye – doubtlessly the good doctor had done her share of tissue collection and testing. He doubted there was much she could do with those cells besides test further drugs on them, but he drilled down into the objects, opened their Directadmin portals, and set their temperature to maximum. They doubled as dry autoclaves, so the tissue samples would be completely cremated by the time anyone could stop the process.

Anything she put into cryogenics or the refrigerators, though – he'd have to get those manually.

Doc sighed, leaning off the counters and wincing in the anticipation of pain that didn't come. There was just a far-off impression, not the biting, aching thing it should have been, it would be. He'd need to make sure he was careful; an old man could puncture a lung with a free-roaming rib and not even notice with drugs like this.

A quick search of the room turned up a variety of useful drugs, including anti-inflammatories, antibiotics, more painkillers of varying types and strengths, and much to his amusement, calcium supplements. She was looking out for his old, brittle bones. He also netted a very nice, lightweight bag to toss his findings into, and the normal stock of needles in varying bore diameters and volumes.

Having emptied the room of anything useful, he returned to the console. The file copy had finished, and he cleared the screen and pulled up the whiteboard list of admitted patients in the Infirmary. It was pretty short, considering. Knives hadn't really injured anyone but Millie Thompson. Everyone else had been killed outright. G-101A – he assumed the G stood for Gunsmoke – was assigned to Observation One.

He hit a ship schematic and tried to unlock the door, surprised to find he could. Apparently all the consoles she'd left open were logged in as root admin, or at least an administrator of some kind. It saved him from having to bother her, and he brought up the communications window without speaking.

Millie Thompson looked much the same as she had before, though some of her hair was sticking to her face as though it had been pressed there, or perhaps she'd been crying. She was concentrating on something, but her eyes seemed glassy, and her expression slightly dazed. Of course, there was no telling how much effort she was putting forth getting that information from Knives, and he certainly wanted to keep that at an absolute minimum.

He frowned, wondering if he had the time, and then he windowed back to the files he'd copied and opened hers. The latest test results were well-labeled, and he glanced them over before closing the document explorer.

She was making herself worse. Every second she used her newly amplified psionics she was just damaging herself farther.

He sighed and tucked the information to the back of his mind, closing the folder and leaving the communications window up as he simply left the room. He stepped into the hallway, orienting himself with the shape of one Millie Thompson, slouched in a backless stool, bent over her work. Meryl Stryfe was beside her, one hand on her back as if to steady her, and neither girl looked up. He walked about four yarz towards them before making another immediate right into Observation One. It was good to know Meryl was close enough to help him push Vash out, but seeing him would be very hard on that girl. Very hard indeed.

- . -

Aaron Carter stepped into the hallway quickly, noting his body had barely left the doorjamb before the doors automatically pulled shut behind him. The pressure in the room would quickly drop back to whatever they'd determined it needed to be to guarantee unconsciousness, and the brief breath of air that had swept in as he'd left wouldn't be enough, in that large space, to bring them around.

He took the deepest breath he could, exchanging the stored air in his lungs with fresh, and glanced around for a moment before proceeding towards the lift. A glance at his PDA showed him where the free-roaming crew members were, and he was fine until he hit the cold generator level. Timothy and Roman had been kind enough to lend him their firearms, holsters, and spare clips, so on the off chance he encountered conscious crewmembers, the situation would still be salvageable.

"Meet me at the cold generation chamber. –E"

Surely Miss Elizabeth wasn't thinking of extracting Knives? Then again, apparently their plans had changed – radically. He'd been pretty sure he'd been in that storage room because they'd found him out; why else would they be asking him what he thought about large storage security? It wasn't as though their ship was crawling with lazy civilian contractors that couldn't be trusted with the badge on their uniforms, let alone with stock of value.

He attached the thigh holsters as he walked, noting the ship was as creepily still and silent as it had been when they'd originally entered it. It was truly huge; for such a tiny compliment, there was a vast amount of untapped space in the thing. And all of it couldn't have been large equipment storage. Surely they wouldn't have launched a ship not already loaded to capacity with the SEEDs project, unless it had been a last-minute addition?

The lift responded swiftly, and he had just checked to ensure he had a round chambered in each gun before it arrived. A glance at his handheld showed four men in the immediate vicinity of the lift console on level four. Probably trying to make it work. They'd have no display, so they'd have no idea he was about to arrive, but even so . . . he punched the button for the fifth level, which happened to be clear. Since the lift shaft was also completely capable of being sealed, they shouldn't feel or hear the wind of his passage, but there was really no telling.

As the lift doors opened on five, he tapped the door delay twice, then the button for level four, and sprinted for the stairs.

Since the stairs were only designed to be used during fires, power failures or other damages to the ship, there was nothing mechanical about them save their locking mechanism. They were purely manual doors. He yanked them open, unsurprised to find they opened for him, and hurtled through. He tugged them mostly closed before slowing and gently pulling them shut. He didn't want to announce himself, but he had to hurry. Running down a flight of stairs silently in the uniform he'd been issued was all but impossible, so he grabbed the handrails and took the stairs half a flight at a time.

He crouched on the landing, pressed his ear up to the door, and listened – whispers. The lift had beaten him there, and they were determining it was empty.

He drew both weapons, smiling slightly at the irony of using their own trick against them, and used his hip to push the door gently open.

All four of them had surrounded the lift, which was open and waiting. It might even take them to a different floor, though once they got out it would cease to function for them again. Only one of them appeared to be a security guard, and his single weapon was drawn and trained on the empty lift. The other three were science-types, judging by the white coats.

The console was in pieces, so clearly at least one of them had been trying an override of some kind. None of them were paying him the slightest attention.

He moved fully into the hallway, then whistled.

Aaron knew allowing the armed guard to completely turn would be a bad idea. Despite the fact that he was outgunned, he'd probably make the attempt. They had been trained on Earth – which was mindblowing – and had some pretty unusual ideas about what their lives were worth. He would take the shot knowing he would be shot in turn, but in the hopes his shot would take down his attacker.

And that was something Aaron couldn't risk.

His shot caught the man high on his right wrist, forcing his hand open and flinging the gun. Surprisingly, one of the science-types made a run at him, but he merely leveled his other weapon at the woman and she immediately pulled herself back.

So the scientists hadn't been brainwashed by military propaganda. Or at least not when it came to the security of their ship.

The other two had the good sense to merely cringe back, their hands raised, while the guard curled up on the floor, moaning softly and nursing his shattered wrist.

"All of you, over there." He jerked his chin in the direction of a door that probably lead to administrative space. Hopefully he could use his handheld to talk to Millie Thompson, get her to clobber air pressure in there as well. That way they could go ahead and sweep the halls while they were at it. It would make things a little safer. The stair locking mechanism could easily be overridden with a well-placed bullet, and then the loose crew would have the run of the ship as well.

"W-who are you!"

He ignored the question, motioning with the weapons when no one moved. That got their attention; two of them stooped to help their wounded comrade, but the woman that had almost rushed him didn't budge.

"You can't get away with this," she told him in a confident voice, her eyes flashing. "It's only a matter of minutes before this ship will return to crew control, and then-"

"Then we'll be long gone," he assured her in a low voice. "Move."

She stared him in the eye, and he might have been impressed if he didn't have places to go. Did she know what Miss Elizabeth had done? Was she right? Was their control of the ship only temporary? How the hell were they going to extract a Plant in a matter of minutes?

Unless they weren't extracting Knives.

Of course, if they weren't going to actually make it off the ship, he'd have liked a head's up. Dying was not on his day's list of tasks to complete. And he sure as hell wasn't going to let anything happen to her.

The guard behind her moaned again as he was forced to walk, and her iron mask cracked a bit. Reluctantly, she followed her comrades, standing in their line of fire as if to protect them. Obviously she thought he was just moving them into the cubicle farm to get their bodies out of the hall without having to haul them. Every face expressed surprise when he simply waved his hand in front of the access controls and closed the doors.

He holstered one of the pistols, using the PDA to navigate to the room in question. It took him a moment; he really hadn't seen this technology ever, let alone got to interact with it, and was startled when the door suddenly emitted a series of frantic thudding noises.

He backed up a pace, but kept looking for the level. When he finally found it, he noted his mistake.

The room had automatically depressurized as soon as it had closed.

That Millie Thompson was one smart cookie. Automating everything made it a lot easier.

And a lot more dangerous to screw up.

He broke into a light run, watching his PDA specifically for any crew members that had started trying to use the stairs. He saw several grey dots in the control room of the cold generation chamber, but they were flashing, so he assumed they'd already been taken out. It was a good plan, kicking down the air. It would lay everyone out, and give them one hell of a headache, but it beat a gunfight any day.

He jogged through a huge, silent chamber, ending with a sealed door that did not hiss when it opened – still pressurized. That led him into a lab of sorts, and he avoided the main control room, instead heading into the staging room. If Knives the Plant wasn't actually doing his Plant thing, they couldn't really kill him from the control room anyway. It wasn't like you could force a human into a Last Run.

A grey dot appeared in the fourth level corridor, exiting the lift.

Miss Elizabeth had waited for him to clear the halls. Good girl.

She also seemed to be in a hurry, and he watched her progress a moment, scanning to make sure there was no chance of her running into any interference. When he'd satisfied himself that she was safe, he walked across the staging area, waving a hand in front of the security panel into the bulb room itself. The doors slid apart smoothly, and he glanced around.

The bulb was dark, but the indicator lights on the maintenance entrance revealed it was occupied. So they'd tossed him in but he wasn't being useful yet. At least that would make him easy to pull out, if that was actually the plan.

He was getting really interested in hearing what the hell this plan was, and why he'd killed himself giving away all this free advice when the cleverest thing he'd ever done had totally been overshadowed by the girl everyone had said was a human vegetable. What the hell had that Plant done to her?

- . -

Author's Notes: Please proceed to the next chapter for Author's Notes.