Board Thread:The Company/@comment-24930445-20140615054833/@comment-25064783-20140629050401

Axin closed the door to the bedroom quietly, letting Jos sleep. A slight smile on his lips, he made his way over to the desk and sat down to flip through reports and to consider his next move. Lantis had sent a death squad after him. That hadn’t bothered him as much as the man being too much the coward to face him himself. Axin had always known Lantis was a snake, and he could live with that. The new brand of ‘coward’ was a disgust he could not stomach, however.

Axin had been mad enough at first to simply kill the man, but he hadn’t been in a hurry. He knew Lantis had nowhere to go as long as the Angel was in hyperspace. Sadly for Lantis, the past twenty four hours in Jos’ embrace allowed Axin to rethink his ideas. Killing would be too swift and too final. He needed something that Lantis would live with for a very long time to come.

As he flipped through the data, he noticed a report from the captain stating that they would be approaching the moon base in two hours. It had been sent an hour and a half ago. Thirty minutes to track the weasle down.

He left the rest of the reports on the desk and headed for the door, never realizing that the report he hadn’t read would be of great importance to the next several hours of his life.

His first stop was Lantis’ office, which was probably ridiculous, but it was a starting point. As he suspected, Lantis was nowhere in sight. Stopping the first agent, a young man with a severely blackened eye, he inquired about the errant commander of his unit.

The young man was nervous, but he snapped to quickly. “He received a report a few hours ago, sir. One of the drones had a glitch and he went to find out why from Doctor Talbot.”

Axin’s next mistake that day would be to not ask what the problem had been. He simply nodded at the other man and turned the corner headed for Dr. Talbot’s office.

Upon entering the obviously empty room, Axin sighed. He had been hoping the doctor would be able to point him in the right direction. To make sure, he poked around the various rooms, hoping to find someone, but the place was truly deserted.

Stopping at the doorway to the hall, Axin tried to decide his next move. Lantis knew the ship well, but so did he. Although the Midnight Angel was not nearly as big as the Vextis, it could be considered a small city in its own right. There were many hidy-holes and back alleys for anyone to buy, steal or trade anything… or anyone. Axin knew all of these places. He knew all the people who frequented these places.

Still, he took a different route, one he knew would also be a dead end but felt he had to try anyway. There was no answer on Lantis’ private door. Being housed in the security wing, it was an easy task to find an agent and commandeered his security pass. Although Lantis was the man’s commander, most of the personnel on the Angel felt that, being so close to Jos, Axin out-ranked the security chief so there was no hesitation on the agent’s part in handing the card over.

Axin was not surprised when the door did not open. All the access on Angel had been keyed so security could enter anywhere. Apparently Lantis had bypassed his own codes. Axin nodded to the man’s wrist comm. “Can you locate Lantis on that thing?”

“Normally, we could sir, but there seems to be a systems error preventing the tracking of our teams. I was just on my way to the main office to go over the coding of the main program.”

Axin nodded and let the man continue on his way. He frowned for a moment, berating himself silently. Giving Lantis time to stew was proving to have been a miscalculation. He knew the man wasn’t an idiot and Axin should have considered the lengths a cornered rat would go to in securing his escape.

There was someone else Axin had been letting stew for a while, he remembered. Katrylle was still down with the other prisoners. Maybe it was time to fish her back out before Joslynne realized she was there. As amusing as it could possibly be watching the two women fight it out, letting Katrylle be taken by Jos wouldn’t help him keep his promise to Ilrea, although if he thought about it, he had only told his daughter he would get her sister. No mention was ever made of Kat.

Axin started on his way down to the cells, pausing briefly when the bosun's whistle sounded. The captain’s voice followed, alerting the crew to the imminent drop to normal space. Axin would have to hurry. He kicked up the pace to a jog and boarded a lift just as the ship dropped out of hyperspace.

The lift came to a stop and Axin poked his head out. The hallway was deserted and Axin suddenly felt his self-preservation instincts kick in. The prison level was a secure area and there should have been guards posted at the access points, including just outside of the lift. He stepped into the hall and made his way cautiously towards the cell where the prisoners were being kept. Preparations should have been underway to transfer the prisoners to the moon but there was no one around.

Stepping to the door, Axin used the access card he had borrowed from the agent at Lantis’ door. He found himself just slightly surprised when it actually worked and the door slid back into the wall.

“Katrylle.” He looked over the sea of faces, searching for her.