Walker covers his eyes, moaning, as light bursts on, he is blinded for a moment. A thing from his left comes toward him, he can hear him or her shifting fast as he stretches out arm and fires staser indiscriminately.

A foot harnessed in a steel toecap connects with his stomach. A winded pain stifles his air yet Cutter recovers slightly, swinging about staser- it is knocked from his hand by the hard boot.

He slashes out a sai- it meets something hard where the figure's throat should be.

He finds he is fighting something humanoid shaped, six foot plus but an oddness about how it moves so quick and the manner of how it moves.

Strike! A blurred knock motion covers his nose as a familiar break is implemented. It strikes repeatedly on the nose, seeming to mash it further. Walker slashes, cuts, thrusts with karate technique (only difference being two sai in hands).

He is forced back as blows hit his legs, arms, nose dripping big and shock slowing him down.

The sai have no effect.

Drawing back from it he notices that around the walls there are signs that the area used to be living quarters for U.F. The clang of metal against metal makes it clear to him now, as it lashes out with kick boxing type fury, increasing energy output. The android is getting harder to block with the sai and Walker is running out of space. It attacks his arms and legs, making pain shoot up in dulling waves to his brain.

He pulls a bed across its path.

Then another, improving own strength and agility through sheer determination, spirit. Backing away, trying to recall any experience with androids. No experience. Androids too basic for normal duties, this one isn't basic. It fights better than a human. He returns sai for moment back into jacket.

The android moves in once more. Walker picks up a locker which the android kicks through with ease. Its leg gets stuck in crumpled metal. Ripping off blanket from bunk, dust exploding into musty air, he tosses it over robot's head.

Walker is one step a head of himself as he sets his sights on an upturned chair. He grabs it just as the android spins around, taking its leg out of locker and removing blanket.

Its head rocks to the left violently as the chair is brought hard across. On the second swing it stops his efforts abruptly, seizing the chair then throwing it over head. It kicks him straight, bringing knee up directly then turning body side on, leg locking out in straight line; a classic sidekick.

"UUUUUUUUUHHH!" Cutter flies backward through air from robot's kick delivered to body. The android withdraws kick and then follows after him, leaping over rubbish in room.

Winded, well and truly, he tries to think straight as a locker fall on top of him. He knows that the situation is getting totally out-of-hand. The robot discards the locker over its shoulder so as to get a better shot at Walker's face as he looks up at it.

Cutter kicks out with left foot and leg and body behind it to robot's midsection, doing it in such a way that it will be launched upwards and away- no point in trying to wind something which has no air in it. It flies backward but is soon back on its feet.

Walker makes a break for door, whole space erupting with sound as lockers, beds, tables, chairs, are tossed aside.

A door looms into view. The android tears apart a locker. It is within grasping distance of Walker as he almost gets to exit. He grabs locked digital handle. He is wrenched back by robot but tumbles out of fall, making for door again, this time with an idea to use the troublesome android's strength to release from the situation.

Cutter arcs around android that follows him with its head watching. A long blade slides out of its right hand, eleven inches of sharp metal. It leaps toward him as he just manages to get away with light slash across back.

"Nnnh," blood comes in a hot shock like being slapped.

The shock subsides. Pain continues only as a tingling pest in the back of his mind. Walker stands directly in front of door. It has a clear target. It lunges, extending shoulder fully.

He side steps. The android's blade prangs under intense force, almost breaking, it clashes against door. Walker grabs the robot as it hits the door fully and forces the machine into hard surface.

It spins around slashing with slightly blunted blade but fails as Walker digs in sai to 'eyes' of robot. The machine has already calculated next target, the unauthorized person's lower abdomen. He has already withdrawn sai and moves away.

The android is blind, slashing wildly, relying on sound alone. Walker swings to the left of it.

It stops, listening to his movement. He reaches exit. It tumbles over a table. He fixes a small explosive on lock. The robot hears the small click as Walker connects device to handle. It is near, he leaps and rolls as the machine performs its last actions blindly and by pure bad luck slashing down onto the primed explosive, small but efficient.

It explodes like hitting a firecracker. Bits of machinery are thrown against walls. The door wells open, a huge flood of water bursts into the room. Sweeping out fire from robot, knocking Walker backward.
*
"President.." the high ranking United Forces general looks uneasy at Seera.

"President...I have to report from post twenty and confirmed by mother ship Holen..." his words amble and flounder in regret, "..before we..lost contact, that..penal colony Dormando has been taken by Allied forces."

Seera sits back. She has nothing to converse with the man on the screen.

"Your.."

She clicks off the vid-screen, cutting channel short.

Rising from her chair, she is completely calm. Through long, austere pseudo art decor halls she wonders, walking at no rushed pace but with the grace of a super model, preened glamour. Thoughts flash in steady bursts, multiplying as each possibility is considered.

Flicking on intercom a small face of her chief officer appears on her wrist bracelet "madam."

"Move to code white," Seera orders.

"Madam," the little face disappears.

Through a large double bay of doors she passes into lower section of her mansion. Down far reaching corridors, the lights dim, yet still ample enough to see classic ornaments from Twentieth Century Earth.

Finally reaching a bare wall at very end, Seera stands before it. Instead of turning to the doors left or right of her, she faces a Rothko painting. She places her hand upon the surface Beneath her fingers the maroon colour begins to swirl and mix about her hand. The whole wall, in the space of a second, erupts into every pigment of colour- then- as soon as it started, breaks into the shade of all the other walls.

Seera takes her hand away. A hole morphs before her into an entrance. A passageway stretches out but very different from the decor of the mansion. She walks through. The entrance shuts behind her and the Rothko forms once more.
*
Walker shakes his head. The sudden shock of cold water has both stunned him and awoken his senses, after banging his head against something. His eyes regain their correct focus. The pain dulls as it did before, breathing through nose difficult, though he should be in absolute agony through busted nose.

'Must avoid taking anymore injuries. Too careless about body, lack of fear and super human resilience making me complacent,' he removes back up fire arm from strapped, sealed position on shoulder area, waiting for code to clear.

Aiming at wall before him, Walker sets the now operational staser to its lowest. A bolt of energy hits the wall from his weapon. It rebounds and comes back.

He drops down, quicker than the bolt. It whistles over him as the water splashes upward as he submerges in haste. The energy bolt dies eventually after playing a hectic game of ping-pong with itself.

Cutter wades to the wall, finding he has to start to swim as underfoot a slope climbs down, getting steeper and steeper to blackness.

He dives under water, coldness of liquid engulfing, he swims to lower darkness.
*
The interior is exactly the same as the vessel's. The same type of vessel that has aided the lost men from Holodern IV, the kind that picked up their Survival Cones from the R.C Longfox. The same smell, light, feel of Univarian craft, a counter-part under President Seera's control.

Seera sits at a main chair, like the one on Walker's bridge, quiet resting itself upon her mind. Light emanates in her particular taste and colour about the bridge, her own style of choosing which she bestowed upon human United Forces war ships. A voice, which is like hers but is distorted with intonation, flat, booms through gloom, "MADAM?"

"Why didn't you alert me?" Her voice is brash.

It really doesn't matter in this place of hers. A duplicate of Walker's vessel, it has always been her pinnacle of power. It has allowed her to be one step ahead of the rest (to her enemies it seemed like she had second sight). The computer allows her much more power, wisdom, forethought than even her developed brain can muster. Seera could have risen without it though, albeit more slowly. It would have been much more difficult.

'There must be others,' Seera senses it in such an abstract way she has difficulty considering the thought, 'and maybe more than one mind perhaps... maybe several of them. A vessel such as mine? Possibly. There would be one day. The Univarians inferred there might be, never pin pointing where or when.'

The computer has remained silent for a while as Seera steps through her own thoughts. It waits for her to speak or stop thinking.

"I am waiting for an answer computer," she does not distinguish between talking to it and her lowers, her infliction of voice showing a core of deep bitterness.

"YOU ARE REFERRING TO DORMANDO PENAL COLONY, ALSO MAIN HUB OF OPERATIONS FOR YOUR INNER COMPUTER NETWORK. DATA AND GATHERING INFORMATION SYSTEMS."

"Will of course I am! Do you think I desire to play tic-tac-toe with you all evening or shall we get down to business and find out what happened?" Her voice seers, like a charged bag of hormones.

"MADAM YOU ARE ALREADY FULLY AWARE OF WHAT HAPPENED FROM YOUR OFFICERS' REPORTS. YOU WANT A FULL EXPLANATION ON THESE PARTICULAR ADVERSARIES THAT ARE NOW SUCCESSFULLY UNDERMINING YOUR POSITION."

"'Adversaries'? More than one? Interesting…"
*
The weight of liquid is deep and colder than he first thought. Walker's muscles burn expending the energy necessary. Air is running short and his lungs are fit to burst. He has been submerged for nineteen minutes or so, another talent, but even it won't save him if air is not found soon.

A light from above winks at a spot to his right. He arrows up toward it, legs kicking out in hard thrusts. 'How much more? Time is very close before the whole prison will be destroyed. The database must be located. The vessel can't tap into it. It has to be done manually.'

Light bursts over him as rank air greets his nostrils. The database is before him.

He pulls himself onto platform in great heaving gasps.

Walker sits before console. His legs and arms burn from the strain of swimming, fighting automated guard, against U.F personnel, on landing and entering the U.F. prison complex.

"Walker to vessel," he speaks into radio set on wrist, voice sounding closed in, tapping fingers on centuries old keyboard.

The radio is silent.

"Walker to vessel..come in.."
*
"Interesting.." her thought rails off, spoken out loud they now fall to the silence, her vessel quietly hums, running tests within itself.

The President of the United Forces paws through the files of the eight presumed dead soldiers. After the Holodern IV incident, here for the first time for Seera are survivors from that strange zone. No one has returned there apart from the scout ships, which confirmed the devastation, only from afar- nothing in great detail, probes, lost in a fuzz and hiss of static. Not even her vessel could probe into Holodern IV's atmosphere.

She places the U.F files down. "So....once ranked:- Sgt. Reed, Lt. Chee, Pr. Dobrovowski, Pr. Irons, Pr. Walker, Pr. Webster, Pr. Lee and Corp. Ball...you are the ones responsible for the shut down and access of the mainframe system."

"CONFIRMED."

"And you chose not to enlighten me upon this distressing and somewhat..rather crucial matter? Not until now?"

"NO KNOWLEDGE OF THEIR ACTIVITIES DUE TO OTHER VESSEL'S SCREENING DEVICE."

"You are the same thing?! Couldn't you spot each other? How come you have them now?"

"DORMANDO COMPLEX SENSORS PICKED UP U. F GUARDS ENGAGING STATED MUTATIONS. RECOGNITION OF UNIVARIAN ALTERED HUMAN STATE. TRANSMISSION CEASED 1.8 SECS LATER."

Her mind twists to proportions that only it can twist. Turning each thought inside out, all the time, knowing, drawing up some kind of stratagem. Her anger is at her own foolishness. Where she thought she was untouchable in matters of forethought, clinical precision, it falls..wasted now by these new events. Time must be handled. Each step to be countered with the ultimate delicacy of intelligence.

"Computer...call in the chief of staff."
*
The vessel's booming automated voice comes through the tiny speaker set on Walker's wrist. The main grid of U.F has been entered. Every file of secret coded data tapped, like a waste bin of info'; a back up for the United Forces, all in ancient equipment.

"VESSEL RESPONDING. DATA BASE LINKED AS REQUESTED."

"Teleport."

A moment of silence and lack of action alert Walker. He rises from seat before computer terminal, his computer sauntering through information at an unwatchable speed.

"Computer..teleport," he stands like a lemon in the empty chamber.

"UNADVISABLE."

"Reason?"

"THE REST OF THE CREW ARE INCAPACITATED FROM TRANSFERENCE."

"Time left before United Forces prison auto-destruct?"

"3 MINS 2 SECS. COUNTING."

"Teleport. That's a direct order, regardless of consequences or I will cease to exist."
*
The blue planet revolves below. The vessel orbits the blue. Allied ships teem within space near vessel, battle formations forming, in prep' for United Forces response.

In. closer detail below, Dormando juts out from the waves. A tiny dot, visible as such from orbit, once moving in, details coming clearer. The prison sits like a huge walrus with its body half submerged. U.F craft have been scrambled to defend it. The vessel moves silently through Allies, set on own course.

Closer still, Dormando starts to rumble from below in its over extended guts, beneath the waves. Self-detonated charges explode through its empty corridors, blowing apart cells. Other charges set off other charges in a mass chain reaction, inside, the scene spectacular- an empty place, its structure ripped apart.

Then from the depths a great push of air upward in fire as noise and light fills, outside walls fighting to contain it, buckling as a mass explosion bursts through the water. The scattered rubble disappears under ocean, remaining mass sinking below. Ex-U.F prisoners and Allied personnel cheer as they observe place of incarceration totaled.
*
His head spins. He throws up. The teleport's energy feels hot on his skin like a prickly heat from electronic element. The discomfort is unbearable, even to his resistance to pain. Walker collapses onto Reed who lies unmoving on teleport floor. A smell of puke is rife. They have all brought their own little amount, some groaning- heads splitting.

The Slyth sits at teleport controls, unaffected by what they have suffered. Walking over to Cutter's struggling body, the alien mutters something in its own language, clicking words hardly audible. Raising a hand. Walker's vision is blurred and his head pounds with extreme pain.

The alien picks up one of his legs, body contorted at an angle. He is dragged away from the others by Slyth.