Integral by Julie Steimle (ready player one ebook .txt) 📖

looked around for a way out.

Her eyes fixed on the clean new models of fighter jets all around her first. These new ships were much like the old ones that had been abandoned in the bay during their escape, only the shape of these seemed altered, rounded and oval-like where the aerodynamic trends before were more angular, like arrowheads. Along the ground between ships were numerous tubes and wires used for servicing the crafts. Barrels of bright orange plastic rested in between these, matching the men who worked among them, most hefting and moving things with worn expressions of boredom in their eyes. Tacy ducked down and around several of the barrels, weaving away from her ship with a feeling that grew on her as she scurried for safety. Somewhere inside she could feel that man in the orange jumpsuit walk across the hall to the door. In a way, she could see him touch the inside of the compartment where she had slept for ages in the gel. Somehow she could sense that the ship itself was tired and in need of rest, but that she was not leaving it no matter how far her feet were taking her away from it.

“…a jerk. If I were you, I’d….”

Tacy ducked lower behind a set of barrels as two men passed by. Moving further from her ship, her heart raced. What were these feelings? Where was she? It looked like a ship hangar, but feeling around her from the ship she had been in, it was strange that the ship itself felt so settled in its spot. Peering over the barrels at it, Tacy blinked and lifted her head higher. Alongside it she saw number of experimental subspace fliers just like it. All of them were parked along a far wall, each of them marked with decorative pilot tags like ShaZaam, The King, and Wizard along with their serial numbers. Looking at her own ship as she ducked under a new model fighter to get farther away from it, she saw her own name printed on the side near the cockpit with a serial number like the rest of the subspace fliers. No fancy tag. Just Tacy.

Her arms shook from a cold that came from within. A dead feeling inside told her that more time had passed than she had wanted. How many years had it been now? How old was she now? Marka and Larke were undoubtedly dead.

“Hey! Why don’t you Integ’s look where you’re going?”

Tacy whipped around. Another orange uniformed man stood there glaring at her. She backed off.

“Oh. Newly hatched, huh? Wasn’t your handler supposed to take you to briefing?” The man rolled his eyes as he reached out for her arm. “Jeeze, do I have to do everything myself?”

Hopping back, green drips scattering as her bare feet landed on the cold concrete, Tacy pulled her arms close to her body. The liquefied goo from her hair started to drip into her eyes. She wiped it away looking to the right and then the left as she backed off from him.

“Come on. Who’s your handler?”

She shook her head, retreating further. “Get away from me!”

Inside her mind’s eye she caught sight of her ship hallway again. Her so-called “handler” had jumped out, peering around the bay with a look of ash white panic holding the canister still.

Ducking, Tacy dodged behind a large fight class jet’s triple barrel gun ports, hurrying away from the sour faced worker who rushed after her with a look of tedious annoyance not unlike a babysitter chasing a naughty child, swiping at her arm.

“Tacy!” She heard in the hangar as well as from around her ship sensors.

She jumped, hurrying farther away.

The man she had been dodging face suddenly changed, his expression going from annoyance to a look of horror as he stared at her dripping trail of green. “You’re Tacy?”

He reached out for her again.

Somewhere she saw it. A door. Darting from him, Tacy scrambled through a stack of barrels to the only way out. The far bay doors were shut and locked, and above to her left where she had noticed a landing with a railing dividing it from the hanger it overlooked did not seem to have a stairway. Barrels were stacked in front of it, but they looked too unstable to climb in her slimy condition. It was that door or nothing.

Her heart pounded as she ran over the concrete floor, jumping over the hoses and wires, weaving around the barrels and ships, hearing shouts echo after her. She would have thought standing in gel for years upon years would atrophy her muscles or something, but her adrenalin was driving her so much that she hardly even noticed the cold floor or the quick distance she had covered in seconds. She found the door, opened it with a twist of the knob and a jerk, and ran straight though. The bare hall she found herself in full of white lights shining so brightly that she could barely see. Along the sides she saw other doors, all leading to several rooms labeled with brass plaque, but she ran the length of it to the other side where there was yet another door.

Jerking that door open, Tacy discovered herself in yet another hallway with another series of doors.
Inside the back of her mind, from her ship she could see that orange suited man set down his canister as another man shouted for him to meet him at the far door. Their voices echoed strangely.

“She’s gone into the hallway! Come on!”

Hurrying as if the devil were on her heels, Tacy reached the end of the second hallway, yanking that door open. Here she entered into a cold concrete vestibule with five doors and no signs to indicate where they led. She opened one and saw a set of stairs. They went up.

Scrambling immediately up them, she rounded the first bend to the next floor. There she saw a sign. Basement level 3. Groaning, Tacy, hurried up the other steps, rounding again and passing the sign after two more levels for basement levels 2 and 1. Mid running up the stairs towards the ground floor, Tacy bumped into three people wearing white technician coats. One yelped, dropping something as another one swore at her, staring at his now green stained suit as if it were infected.

“Watch where you’re going!”

“It’s an Integ,” One of technicians growled out with a glare at her.

Cringing, the one who dropped her computer pad shook off the goop that was also on her arm, and declared, “Hurry up, you Integ! And put something on! You’re disgusting!”

Not asking what they meant by any of that, Tacy, only rushed up further to the set of doors on the main floor, yanking them open with relief that they had not chased after her also.

She staggered in.

First she saw the soft pile gray carpet under her feet. Next she lifted her eyes to the broad room this carpeting filled. Resting on the carpet in widest, highest tech room of computerized screens and cubicles, were just as many chairs with people seated in them. Only a few looked up at her when she entered, but then they turned their eyes back to their computer screens as if she were nothing more than an insignificant gopher in a corporate office. At the front of this rather substantial cadre of technicians in matching uniforms of pea soup green stood a mock-wood railing separating the tech area from an observation seating area filled with padded swivel chairs, the occasional chair seated with a man or woman in pressed suits.

Tacy staggered back, looking straightaway for another door. So far the only one she saw was across the room on the opposite wall several yards away.

“You! Why aren’t you dressed?”

Jerking her head to the right then retreating from a tall woman holding what appeared to be the electronic equivalent to a clipboard, Tacy’s heart raced. The woman walked over her on spiky heels making small indentations in the carpet as she approached.
Looking further to her right Tacy saw a man with glowing green stripes running all the way down his neck under his shirt like wire strips on a microchip, throbbing as pulsing veins. She could also see them on his arms, his hands, and up each of his fingers. He extended one of those hands to her.

“My name is Steven. What’s yours?” He smiled as the lines pulled from his face, flickers of light sparking in the whites of his eyes.

Still keeping her arms close her body, Tacy just stared at him. “Marka.”

“Marka?” He tilted his head, his eyes narrowing slightly. “That name is not a ship on file.”

“That’s the name of the ship thief,” the woman with the electronic clipboard said with bite, lifting one perfectly plucked and shaped eyebrow at Tacy in sharp inspection.

Tacy drew back, fixing her eyes on the woman as also she attempted to move closer towards an exit, sliding her feet nearer the technicians in their cubicles. “What happened to Marka?”

Narrowing her cold steely eyes, the woman lifted her pointed chin. “You must be Tacy. Your handler should have alerted us you were awake.”

“And hatched,” Steven said with a genuinely amused smirk on his lips as he looked Tacy up and down once more. His body’s green lines seemed to pulse more as if excited.

Recoiling, Tacy shouted it out again. “Where is my sister?”

Several heads looked up from their work, inspecting the cause of the noise. But the room reverted back to its silent hum. They turned their eyes to the computer screens again.

“Prison,” the woman said.

Steven’s smile fell, turning with a look to Tacy. “Sister?”

The room suddenly seemed cold. Her ears picked sounds up from far away, though inside they felt as near as her own heart beat.

“…Derned pirates. The ship barely is fit for use because of them. I tell you. If it had been up to me, they’d have been executed.”

“What for? They saved the ship didn’t they? Provided a surviving pilot too. What are the chances of that? Fifteen out of the seventy-five trained for it died.”

Inside her head she could see two men in blue uniforms standing outside her open hatch. One had a patch of gray hair on his temples where the other had shifted his hat over a bald spot just behind his ears. Their wrinkles and furrowed frowns she could only see from a high angle, as if she were standing over them.

Tacy shuddered, her eyes flickering on the open room and the far door.

The door behind her opened. Both men in orange jumpsuits came into the room. One sighed with relief though the other grunted with a turn and walked back out again as if satisfied.

“There you are.” The oppressively self-important woman marched past Tacy to the man she knew was her handler with a stomp in her step. “Get her some clothes and move her over to briefing.”

“The chances are low. I agree. Alright? But that ship could have been salvaged without a cadet at the controls.”

“Oh, come on. That entire hangar was destroyed by the Gardo. We wouldn’t even have it now if they hadn’t stolen it.”

“A pitiful reason