First Draft - Escaping From the Ma'Rni Prision Asteroid

Zack began to regain consciousness trussed between two still fuzzy figures and being drug down a dimly light corridor.  He noticed the smells of harsh chemicals mingled with filth and refuge.  The deckplates were slick and appeared dank and degraded.  Zack’s neural processor was clearing its buffering and reinitiating his cybernetic limb controls.  The perceptible and uncontrollably twitching that always accompanied a buffer dump seemed to go unnoticed by the armored humanoids that were dragging him.  They seemed not to notices his large frame and the added weight that his dense molecular fiber limbs added to his body. 

The overload had occurred when the Ma’Rni boarding party’s stun weapon had hit him.  He assumed it had been a full charge but wasn’t sure because his systems were designed to utilize energy as an offensive weapon up to a point.  The fading effects allowed him to being focusing as they stopped in front of solid looking hatch.  Zack noticed the form to his right pull and manipulate a cube.  The door opened in an irising fashion receding into the walls ceiling and floor in a somewhat circular pattern.

Zack listened as they spoke.  The data packet the ship had transmitted during the initial hails for contact and boarding had proved to be a simple enough process for Zack’s hybrid neural processors to utilize.  Their voices were heavily mechanized, yet he recognized it as that of the banter of soldiers attending to menial labor.  The words however made no sense, it must be a different dialect or language all together.  He was certain they were human or closely related under their armor.  He remembered the face of the black robed man on the screen.  He had most definitely been human-like in many ways under his clearly augmented form.

His captors drug him across the threshold and roughly deposited him on the slime covered floor.  The both stepped back.  The dark cell’s door closed with a faint his and a clang as the metal seated itself in place.

The floor was cold and slick with sludge-like moisture of unknown origins that clung to his clothes and skin as Zack finally began to surface from the blackness inhabited his dreams.   The chaotic dream that kept repeating each time he closed his eyes.  The fiery princess and her pleas were fading and his mind began to take stock of his surroundings.  The voice in his head was insistent that he wakeup.  Then his nose was assaulted by the thick feted smell made him sick and caused his lungs to ache with each breath. Finally, as conscious thought returned Zack remembered the brutal events that had left him unconscious on the floor yet again. 

The cell door slid open on its multifaceted irising track.   Zack’s eyes slid open at the sound.  The Frankenstein monsters stood just inside the door of his prison cell again.   Zack looked at the two brutes and a frown crossed his face.

“It’s been a while boys! I had begun to think you had left me here to rot,” Zack said.

They both held their stun baton in their massive hands.  Both Mutt and Jeff, their real names Zack didn’t know.   They never spoke.  They held their stunners their eyes seemed to sparkle with the promise of brutal use.

“So glad you could stop by and play,” Zack said resigned to the beating to come and the pain to come.

The two stepped closer.  Their black long coats didn’t even ripple.  The smaller of the two struck him without a word of hesitation.  The voltage flowed. Zack instantly dropped to his knees.

The arcs of blue harnessed lightning jumped across his newly reconstructed neural pathways.  The burning and agony then vanished as Zack’s biofeedback loops triggered.  Zack’s eyes flared with intensity as he realized what his body was finally healed enough to respond as designed.  The voltage that arced now flowed into the filaments of his monomer muscles.  Zack felt instantly that the shunted potential energy was available to his hands.

Zack said, “Mutt! I am tired of this!”

Zack sprung from the deck and slammed the palm of his hand into Mutt’s boney chin.  The sparks that had once leapt from his stunner now completed a circuit and flowed into Mutt and he began to convulse as he dropped to the sludge covered deck.

Jeff instantly sprung forward and as his stunner made contact with Zack’s body the blue arcs flowed into him and Zack grinned.  The brutal impact wasn’t even felt, only the increased the potential energy.

Zack spun in place, his foot contacting the knee of Jeff with an audible crack.  Jeff stumbled past Zack.  Zack then struck cobra like at the receding neck of the more massive of the two bullyboys.  The contact dropped Jeff almost instantly.

“You will not be dragging my unconscious body down the hall to your mistress this time boys!”, Zack exclaimed as he knelt to discover what else Jeff had on his person.  Zack took the stunner from Jeff’s now slack grip.  Zack reached into the pocket of Jeff’s black leather coat and retrieved the strange cube that they used to iris open the doors. 

“I have the cube,“ Zack said to the voice in his mind.

“Good! Now press the left to buttons in the following sequence,” the voice in his head responded.