The Wars of Zegandaria by Atanas Marinov, Atanas Marinov, Atanas Marinov, Atanas Marinov (find a book to read .txt) 📕

- 'The workers would die! Interon fuel supplies could be in jeopardy!,' the technicians shouted, shaking their spacesuit helmets in surprise.

The teams mobilized to respond to this whole emergency. There was no doubt.

Nevertheless, Dislan clearly felt that perhaps now was his time. It was in order to take this rare chance and strike some blows at some points of the enemy defense without anyone noticing - at least not at first. Everyone was shuffling around, trying to give it their best shot. Dislan remembered that the only escape route before he was discovered, which he definitely would be after using the machine a second time, was to get home to one of the reserve pods. However, there were almost none in the Space Second Ring. The facility itself only had four spare escape pods, and they were only available in an alcove under the command bay. Dislan wanted to be sure he could escape, but it was too likely they would shoot him down even if he took off. The situation was relative. And he had to consider all possible risks.

Instantly the general mood shifted. All this shouldn't have happened. Dislan acted as if he were in a dream. He didn't care at all. At all. He was determined to punish those bastards.

He went to the anti-radar accelerator and surreptitiously inserted the wrong entries into the missing cell he had supposedly accidentally erased the previous time. This was definitely going to change the rules of the game. The entire mathematical paradigm depended on the shifted coefficients associated with the function responsible for aiming the weapon.

Then he also tried to redirect some of the power of the main generator and amplify its power. Once the direction changed a lot of lives would depend on his good will. He would at least be playing the role of a god for a bit!

According to the information received, the refinery catching fire was just a pretext for some of the troops to be stationed outside the city for reasons unknown. The deployment of this second front seemed a bit illogical to Dislan, not for any other reason, but because the facility was a key site that had determined the supply and demand of interron fuel until very recently.

Ennio Hammer, by chance, was a little off to the side and didn't notice Dislan. For the second time his luck was working. He was sure there definitely wouldn't be a third.

Somewhere out there was the vastness of space. The source of all this chaos. The very beginning of co-creation. Dislan was immersed in it though aboard the spaceship.

Soon he had set everything up. The technicians got the instructions they needed from him. And then he realized how wrong he had been. It had all been a set-up. Or so he thought at first.

Ennio Hammer had decided to remove it in a very subtle way. He'd probably even let it slip away with one of the shuttles. The only reason was that if he touched it, he would be held accountable for his actions to the Governor, and that simply meant death. Inevitable doom! No, he was going to grant him the right of free withdrawal. Mieru was in mortal danger. He didn't realize he was beginning to love this woman. Not with the love of a kid, but with the warm affection of a man who had seen and judged the characters of those around him. He had to fight for her. He had to win for her, but also for himself. That was the clincher. He did not have to think himself a hero! But just to give his all so they could both live. To live together. And to share the rest of their lives. She had to survive. They both had to survive.

He tried to find her, but she was nowhere to be found around the ship. It was all apparently arranged that way. Ennio Hammer had done his job perfectly. Just how well-mannered he was!

He remembered the secret garden. The door was slightly ajar. He didn't just walk in, he barged in. Somewhere in there, behind all that vegetation, he found her. Her frail body was still warm. Her eyes were closed. Tears dripped from his eyelids. He felt lost for her demise. He found a small note that she held in her hands that said, ‘Thank you for teaching me to live. A moment when I was free to define my life, independent of my husband. Your Mieru. I love you!’

The door closed behind him. Clearly they weren't going to let him in after all. He had done enough damage to many different speeders. At a rough estimate, they'd probably been more than ninety. And that meant a lot.

- 'I'm not going to let you play me, Tech Dislan. You've already done a lot of mischief and even stripped me of my wife.  And I'm an old man and it's a bit late to look for a new one,' came a slightly hoarse but well-mannered voice.

Dislan had little desire to turn, but he didn't want his opponent to think him a coward.

- I only showed you my garden because I knew you'd get this far. You wouldn't have given up the ship's plans for the world. But that hasn't mattered in a long time. Do the sensible thing. But now you'll tighten the noose around your own neck.

- 'The reserve capsule,' he whispered, grabbing Mieru's corpse. He would not leave his beloved even in the hour of her death.

He was at the other end of the garden, his would-be pursuers about twenty-five meters away. He had to outrun them.

^^^

They were just approaching him when he caught sight of a small door, half hidden by the surrounding lush vegetation. He decided to risk it, even if he ended up in a hall where he would fall victim to decompression. He simply pushed it open. Even tried to kick it. The door was firmly bolted. It had no effect. He only had a few seconds left before he would be cut down by Hammer's men, who, in addition to laser cutters, carried pneumatic elorium hammers with which to crush him like pythium. Suddenly, though, time seemed to stand still. It lasted for less than a second.

In his head, he heard Mieru's voice, 'You will be saved, beloved.'

The hatch opened and closed in a flash. Dislan jerked and almost got stuck in the narrow opening.

When they came to, Hammer's men looked around, but there was no sign of him. No matter how hard they pounded on the locked hatch, there was no result. They tried to cut it with a plasma torch. But it took quite a while and eventually, Dislan slipped out.

He didn't know how to leave the ship. Soon they would sense him and finish him off for good. They were just going to execute him.

'Fear not,' was undoubtedly Mieru's voice. Then he caught sight of a small recording device - the sound was coming from it. That little 'box' had saved his life.

Dislan knew something else, though. Ennio Hammer was hiding other secrets. He wouldn't be surprised if something else interesting turned up aboard this ship. He doubted that the ship's function was limited to simply monitoring and using the anti-radar accelerator.

Dislan even wondered how two people with such different personalities could become spouses. It seemed downright unbelievable to him. Suddenly he slapped himself on the forehead. What if Mieru was just an android. She was programmed to love him. But still, inwardly, she hated him to death.

She decided to test her hypothesis. He poked behind her crown, and before long, he spied the barely noticeable elonium cover of her skull, fitted beneath so-called synthetic hair that had been properly treated to mimic the real thing.

She tried to examine the integrated circuitry, which was connected in a very particular way to the rest of the components inside her head. It seemed to him that someone's skilled fingers had been touching, but they didn't seem to have had time to fine tune anything and had stopped their work prematurely.

'Damn, good engineers we have, if they even managed to sweep me. Just don't blame them.'

Out of respect for her help, he didn't disassemble it, but kept its integrity, as he found it more pleasant to look at in its complete form.

It would definitely slow him down if he had to carry her, much like his doomed club, but he couldn't leave her either. If they found her, they could easily smell his own footprints.

It seemed to him that he was like a red deer around which the wolf pack was narrowing the circle until they could corner him and break his back, watching the light slowly fade in his pupils. Quite a heartbreaking sight of a man caught in a complete standoff! But Dislan wasn't going to give in so easily to this band of scoundrels!

The gloomy room he found himself in, as he didn't stop walking even with the android on his back, didn't look like a hall or anything else. It was something suggestive of sorrow.

Dislan shed a tear. An android that hadn't even been programmed to love him, since he wasn't its owner or master, had gotten to know him in such a short time more than all of his coworkers he'd worked with for years.

Of course the danger to him still existed. Walking slowly along something resembling the aforementioned equanate 'casings' that were the ship's main arteries, he reached the engine room.

'Hell begins now!,' he whispered, and moved into the engine room.

He crawled and crouched, lest some bump nearby tear his suit's insulation. Then he suddenly realized. Sam had walked into a place with no way out.

Fortunately, Ennio's men, for some reason, didn't go to check the engine room first, but scattered to look around for nearby exits. They knew all too well that even if he had been inside, Dislan simply had nowhere to get out. Little by little they began to return.

Dislan could feel the temperature rise in the engine room, but he couldn't gag. They could just get him out of there at any moment.

Suddenly, Mieru's voice whispered to him 'Don't worry, they can't get to you. Just don't leave this place for a while yet.'

The Giamosan-enhanced spacesuits that the battlecordon wore on their backs prevented them from squeezing into the narrow synth hatch. They looked like a team of shish kebabs who'd had a good meal but didn't want to admit it.

They hadn't taken the torch they'd used to melt the previous hatch. And they didn't remember where they'd thrown it. Dislan knew this game of cat and mouse couldn't go on much longer.

Then suddenly it occurred to him to use something highly uncharacteristic. Mieru's voice. They'd hardly expected to hear the voice of a dead man. Even Hammer was superstitious enough to be startled. At least for a moment!

He tried to make the little box work, but it had no effect. It just remained mute. It was as if the spirit had evaporated and left him to sort it out as he knew how. Then he noticed that there was a tiny translator valve on the side of the device and he decided to press it. He switched on his suit's built-in microphone and shouted out in his low bass voice, 'Onguro Zenal.' The translator mechanism had transformed his voice beyond recognition, however. It was as if it came from Hell. Was this a quirk of Mieru's?

Above, the heavily armored soldiers began to look around uneasily. ‘What if there's a demon down there?’ they whispered.

Dislan preferred to think of it as a demon. But he knew the human psyche. It wouldn't take them long to come to their senses.

Though slightly odd, he had the time he needed to squeeze into one of the escape pods that was hidden just off to one side in the engine room. By the time they came to their senses, he rolled over and quickly pressurized the