Shawn and Zicon didn't hear what Peter and the three children were saying. They were already up to the kitchen with no signs of slowing down. Shawn peeked in the kitchen to make sure no one else was there before continuing. Beyond the kitchen were two rooms on the right side of the hall, opposite the kitchen, and another one on the left.
"You take the room on the left," commanded Shawn. "I'll take the ones on the right. We'll meet in the hall when were done."
"Sounds good to me," agreed Zicon.
Zicon entered his room and discovered it was somebody's bedroom. He guessed it belonged to the person in charge because of its size and because of the luxurious decorations inside. Next to the bed was a desk that was locked and quickly ran back in the hall to tell Shawn.
Shawn had just finished searching the first room when Zicon came running up to him.
"I found a desk that's locked!" Zicon exclaimed. Shawn quickly followed him into the room and used the same device he used to unlock the door to unlock the desk. Inside were several thousand credits, the most widely used monetary unit in the galaxy, a spare phaser, and about twelve computer disks. Shawn examined the disks closely.
"Zicon, I believe you hit the jackpot!" he stated excitedly. "They probably keep copies of these programs in their main computer. We need to find those copies and destroy them."
Zicon gathered what they had found in the desk and gave it to Peter while Shawn searched the other room. It was the bedroom of two of the subordinates and contained nothing of value. The officer kept anything important in his own room.
Shawn waited for Zicon to return before entering the room at the end of the hall. A light was coming from the room which probably meant it was occupied. Lie motioned for Zicon to stay where he was as he tiptoed toward the door. Cautiously, he tried to open the door. Just as he thought, it was locked.
Once again he used his unlocking device. It look a little longer, but the results were the same. The door was unlocked. Shawn slowly peeked inside and found only one person in the room. He threw open the door and fired his stun gun. The man in the Altair 7 uniform didn't even have a chance to react.
After making sure they were the only ones left in the spaceship, Shawn sent Zicon to get Peter and the others. They came running to the spot and immediately began sabotaging the lab. Peter noticed they had been taking blood samples and decided to sabotage that too.
"Could you take a sample of my blood?" he asked Shawn.
"What do you have in mind?" Shawn countered. "Whenever you get that look on your face, I know you're up to something."
"I'm going to replace their blood samples with samples of my own blood," Peter explained. "Since I'm from Earth, not Yopela, my blood will ruin their tests."
"That's what I like about you," complimented Shawn. "You always take things one step beyond what you have to do."
Shawn found a clean needle and took a sample of Peter's blood and Peter began to replace the blood of the natives with his own. He partially destroyed the blood samples so they wouldn't get suspicious but he made sure his blood was still usable.
Zicon and the other children began breaking things not caring if it was vital or useless. As far as they were concerned the more damage they could do the better. Peter began looking for other things he could altar without the people from Altair 7 knowing it arid Shawn began tampering with their computer.
He simply erased most of their data and when he couldn't he made slight alterations, an idea he learned from Peter. When he couldn't erase or alter the data, he tried to make it unaccessable, even to himself.
"We've done all we can!" warned Shawn. "Now we need to get out of here before they return!"
They put the finishing touches on their work then ran out of the lab. Instead of going directly back to the city where they could run into the enemy, they took the long way around. It would take over fifteen minutes longer to get back than it had taken for them to get to the lab in the first place, but it was well worth it. Shawn didn't even the slightest chance of running into trouble unnecessarily. As Peter had reminded him earlier, he wasn't even supposed to be on a mission this dangerous if he could avoid it.
TIME : 5:30 P.M. (17:30)
PLACE : The lab
As soon as the officer from Altair 7 returned with his two subordinates, he knew that something was wrong. The familiar background noise of the computers had vanished.
"Let's split up and search the lab," he commanded.
Before they even got to the lab, the officer almost tripped over the woman Shawn had stunned earlier. His face turned red with rage. The two subordinates knew how he could be when he was angry and took a few steps away for their own protection.
"This can't be the work of children!" the officer roared. "They don't even know how to open the door! This is the work of M.W.G.D.! They've discovered what we're doing!"
When they reached the lab he became even angrier. Their valuable equipment was shattered into hundreds of pieces. Nothing was working properly. Most of the computers were damaged beyond repair and the few that were working were showing only a blank screen. The officer hit the computer. The computer beeped briefly before turning itself off.
"Some of these blood samples are still usable," reported one of the subordinates.
"You'd better retest that blood!" warned the officer. "No telling who that blood belongs to or even if it is blood."
"We should get back at them for what they did to us!" cried the other subordinate. "They must be in the city! We can sneak up on them and ambush them before they even know what hit them."
"And what good will that do?" scolded the officer. "Thousands of M.W.G.D. officers are probably on their way to Yopela even as we speak. If we do anything to whoever sabotaged the lab, they won't rest until we're either captured or killed."
"We need to go to the other side of the planet, set up what's left of our equipment, run our experiments, and get out of here as soon as we can. Yopela is too far away from the Ruler's empire to offer us much protection."
The two subordinates agreed. They took the spaceship to the other side of the planet and began repairing their equipment. They were so busy trying to reconstruct their experiments that they didn't notice that they had been completely encircled by about a dozen ships from the Milky Way Galaxy Defense.
"We have you completely surrounded!" shouted the M.W.G.D. officer in charge. "We do not want to hurt you. Come out with your hands up. You will not be hurt if you comply in the next five minutes. After that we're coming in after you."
The two conscious subordinates came out dragging the other two subordinates with them. Only the officer remained inside.
"You have two minutes left," the M.W.G.D. officer reminded him. "We know you're the only one still inside. Be sensible! You can't possibly defeat all of us. If you cooperate with us, we promise to cooperate with you. Resisting us only hurts yourself. We'll all feel much better when this is over. You have ninety seconds and counting."
The officer felt the odds were overwhelming, but he didn't want to surrender. As far as he was concerned, being a prisoner of war was practically the same thing as death.
"How could they have found us?" he muttered out loud. "I made sure we weren't being followed, yet they surrounded us minutes after we landed. How can this be?"
His eyes focused on a small tracking device attached to one of the computers. On it was the name Shawn, the leader of M.W.G.D. himself. First he felt shock, then fear, then finally anger. He had underestimated his opponents, the same things he accused his subordinates of doing. Now he was going to pay for his mistake.
Clutching his weapon tightly he set it on the highest setting, total disintegration, and approached the door. M.W.G.D. was going to win, but he wasn't going down without a fight. By his estimation, time had already expired.
"Thirty seconds!" warned the M.W.G.D. officer. "Twenty seconds ... nineteen ... eighteen ..."
From where he was, the officer could see five M.W.G.D. soldiers approaching the door. Each one of them was coming from a different direction and, more importantly, each one of them had a weapon. He noticed that all five of them were facing the ship at all times and none of them dared to come near it. They were ready for him.
"... ten ... nine ... eight ..." continued the M.W.G.D. officer.
The officer from Altair 7 tightened his grip on his weapon. In a few seconds he'd see how many people from M.W.G.D. he could kill before they killed him. He watched the M.W.G.D. soldiers taking his subordinates inside one of the ships. He'd get no help from them.
"Cowards!" he yelled even though they couldn't hear him. "Three ... two ... one ...," counted the M.W.G.D. officer. "ZERO! Your time is up! Don't say we didn't warn you."
The officer from Altair 7 heard a strange hissing sound coming from one of the air vents. He recognized the sound. They were using some sort of gas. His vision was already starting to blur as he stumbled back to the lab in search of the gas masks. He stumbled three times on his way back to the lab. The third time he dropped his weapon, but he kept going. His weapon wouldn't do him any good if he couldn't stay awake to use it.
Inside the lab he opened the compartment that should have contained gas masks. All that was inside was damaged computer equipment. He fell to the floor and found himself unable to get back up. With horror, he recognized the order of the gas they were using. It was the same sedative he had given Guatamire. As he lay back on the floor and closed his eyes, he realized he was going to be asleep for a long time.
Copyright MCMXCIV, MCMXCIX
