Chapter 9 #2
By the time he had secured the rest of the royal family in their own stasis pods and had acquired a variety of Amplification energy tanks to run simultaneous tests from, Emil had realized that he’d struck gold with the princess.
He began diverting all her tanks, all her blood samples, to the successor project immediately.
He found the best genetic scientists in the system.
If their salaries weren’t sufficient motivation, holding their families at the working end of a blaster usually did the trick.
Those scientists were sequestered in secret labs throughout the galaxy, working on bringing about the future of their leadership.
Once it had chafed that the best of the best minds weren’t being bred on Bauder. No longer. You could take someone’s expertise as easily as you could take their crops or their natural oil deposits if you had the right tools.
With their scientists and the Amplification energy the princess provided, the successor was developing with precision accuracy.
Each benchmark was being met in a timely manner.
The long swaths of time spent in stasis were not affecting development negatively, and Emil suspected that the months spent in the Amplified environment were only speeding the evolution of his psionic powers.
The course of his life was one that Emil had planned down to the last detail, and all those plans took time.
While they waited, his scientists continued their experimentations.
Beautiful, efficient weapons had been created under his command, capable of stopping an enemy combatant in their tracks.
But now that precious, precious fuel that the Amplifier had provided for his project was gone. He would need to inventory the tanks on the ship, see how much was left. How vital her retrieval was to the successful completion of the successor project.
The ship docked at the medivessel without incident, jarring him from his thoughts. Emil fastened the helmet on his spacesuit and transferred ships. The re-pressurization was swift, and the doors slid open to display the destruction the kidnappers had left in their wake.
He took a moment to process his shock that Hills’ debriefing had not in fact been hyperbolic nonsense.
Emil was presented with a tower of mangled electronic limbs. He felt his eye twitch as he removed his helmet to get a closer look at the pile of droid parts obscuring the reception desk.
This is going to turn the budget upside down.
If the scorch marks on the ceiling were any indication, metal had hit metal so hard it had sparked. There was no way to disentangle any of the components without specialized equipment. It would be cheaper to melt the whole mass down and start from scratch.
What did this?
The level of force necessary to achieve this level of destruction was greater than any weapon Emil would have picked for a mission in space. Such a powerful extraction team and tools wouldn’t have come cheap.
He wanted to get his hands on that tech.
Placing his helmet in the cubby next to the airlock door, he removed his spacesuit and hung it up before straightening his suit and stepping forward.
He walked around the droid pile and logged into the computer to find the records Hills and the techs had brought up.
He read them again, making sure no detail was missed by less diligent eyes.
The security breach was a sophisticated one in its simplicity, as it seemed to rely solely on the introduction of the proper codes into the system. The records showed that the entry the kidnappers made read as a routine entry to do a weekly security sweep.
A leak? A hack?
Emil knew that this vessel didn’t do the standard weekly security sweeps; they weren’t necessary.
The ship was too well camouflaged. Or he had believed it was.
The system didn’t know that, though. The system just believed what it was told.
The benefit of computer intelligence he so prized — unemotional, unflappable, unquestionably compliant when an order was given — was used deftly against him here, and Emil grudgingly respected the move.
He filed it away for future use should the opportunity present itself.
Never let any defeat be less than an opportunity to best a future opponent.
As there was nothing else he was able to discern from the computer records, Emil stood, tucked the chair back in — precisely centered with the keyboard for the computation unit — and turned to check the labs.
Each lab seemed untouched. A strange strategic choice.
Why wouldn’t they take the labs apart? Amplifiers were not so rare that the research the Bauder scientific defense team was carrying out couldn’t be replicated.
The Alpertti’s cousins had spread throughout the sister sector, breeding happily on a dozen other planets.
The talent popped up infrequently, and other Amplifiers could be found — for a price Emil hadn’t been willing to pay.
Sentiment, or ignorance?
The kidnappers must have been strictly motivated to remove Evelyn Alpertti, rather than the research his scientists had been carrying out on her unique manifestation of Amplification power.
That interesting quirk had only been discovered after the round of testing that occurred after her family’s contributions had been added to the dataset.
Emil spent the rest of his search with half his mind on the implications of that fact.
The kidnappers did not waste time with tertiary goals.
They didn’t waste time with any destruction that did not directly impact their ability to escape the medivessel.
And when they did turn to destruction, they left a towering example of the power behind the strike.