Blake’s Revenge
by D. G. Valdron

Avon's first blow shattered the guards nose inside his mask, the man's eyes crossed, and a thin line of blood trickled down.

He pulled the man inside, gripping his throat with one hand, elevating his elbow with the other. Avon fancied that he could hear the socket pop as the arm dislocated. Futilely the guard struggled to reach his
trouble button, as Avon bore him to the ground. With an almost casual movement, Avon twisted and broke his wrist. He pulled off the guards mask and helmet, and then smashed his bare head against the floor.

There was a satisfying crunch.

So he did it again.

Avon checked the guard's pulse. Weak but steady. He wasn't sure if the guards sported life signs monitors, but thought it likely.

He smashed the limp guards head into the floor one last time, and checked for pupil response. Good. He wouldn't be coming around for some time, if ever.

Working quickly he stripped the guard, searching carefully for electronic sensors or seals. The guard had been a little bigger than Avon, and the uniform wore loosely. There was blood on the inside of the visor, but most of it wiped away, leaving only a light smear. Still the scent of fresh blood lingered in his nostrils.

He stepped out into the corridor. He realized that his heart was racing. He hadn't been out of his solitary confinement for ten years.

Ten years of living confined to a box, three meters by three, and a light that never blinked off. His prison had been reduced to spartan simplicity. A wash unit, a toilet, a padded bench that served as a bed, a small
shelf on which meals might be eaten. Nothing else. No terminals, no books, no paper, nothing.

No human contact whatsoever. The masked faceless guards, never spoke, the few times he even saw them.

A lesser man might have gone mad, he reflected, as he walked down the hallway. He almost smiled. The shock of facial muscles pulling in now unused ways killed it.

Perhaps he had gone mad, he would know soon enough.

He turned a corner. There was a security directory, a floor plan, with coloured lights showing the status of each part of the complex. He studied it. Everything was green. Good.

Perhaps he had gone mad. With nothing to do and nothing to live for he had withdrawn relentlessly into himself. He had maintained his body through a rigorous program of calisthenics: Dozens of push ups, and
sit ups and jumping jacks slowly turning into hundreds, and inexorably into thousands. He barely noticed. His mind turned ever inward. Banned from real computers to work with, he made them in his head. Conceived impeccable and stylish programs of relentless precision. Slowly he formulated plans, awaited opportunities.

Who were in these other solitary units? He wondered as he marched past them.

He had an idea of where he was going now. Perhaps he should stop and check. Open some up. Talk to people. He wasn't sure if he still knew how.

Perhaps Blake was in one of these cubicles.

Perhaps the federation medical technicians had saved him after all.

He could be in any one of them. Avon's footsteps slowed. Perhaps that one right there.

With a mental effort, he stopped himself. Blake was dead. He'd killed Blake himself.

There was no time to waste.

He was at the elevators now. He keyed them with his card. The guards were covered head to toe, no opportunity for a hand or retina print, the mechanisms were simple card activated locks. That was how he had figured things out, if he had believed that a palm or retina were necessary, he would have taken them with him.

Ten years of biding his time, he thought. Waiting for them to make their inevitable mistake. He had none left of his own to make.

The lift took him to the second level, he stepped off. Guards were not usual on this level, and if it had been shift change, he would have been remarked upon. But it was not shift change, the corridors were
deserted.

This was the information processing section. Avon could almost psychicly sense the active terminals around him. Full of an aliveness he had been denied for so long.

He stepped over to a door, and coded for entry request. When the door slid open and the technician appeared, he shot him. The technician died instantly, dropping with a charred spot on his tunic. Avon locked the door behind him and then stooped to examine the technician, pulling away an identity card.

He sat at the terminal. It was locked of course. The security procedures would have required the technician to lock access any time he stepped away. Even for something as trivial as answering the door.

All that was accessible was the entry level access programming. Designed to respond only to entry codes. With a few keystrokes Avon created an electronic lockpick. A cunningly coded electronic serpent he had designed eight years ago, and periodically redesigned.

Within seconds it gave him access to non-security records. It wasn't part of the system normally accessible from this terminal, but all the systems were linked. He allowed the lockpick to continue working, and keyed into personnel records.

He found his file. He deleted it. He deleted all past records, references, power consumption, food allotments, anything that had even remotely to do with Kerr Avon vanished. He even deleted his cell from
the facility blueprints.

Then he, with equal facility, found first the guard he'd usurped and the technician he'd killed. He adjusted their files, neatly erasing them from existence. He altered the booths protocol to give him unlimited time
without discovery, the terminal alcove was now off limits to shift changes. He didn't think he'd need the time.

His fingers began to fly across the keyboards, almost of their own volition. He began building the program that had occupied almost seven years of his mind.

He remembered hearing a story, a long time ago, of a man who'd been a prisoner much like he had been. The man had, inside his mind, decided to build a clock out of cardboard. He'd sat there in his dark cell, slowly assembling the pieces in his mind. Finally, when he had been released, he had sat down and built it physically, having long ago worked out every detail of it in his mind.

It was like that, he thought, as his program took shape. He had spent years of endless aching solitude crafting it. Allowing himself to think of little else. There was little else to think of that was not too
painful to bear in any case.

Now, he realized, he scarcely thought in human language. He conceptualised in codes and integers, his vocabulary as much in the symbols of computer programming as in human language. He was no longer
sure if he could even speak in an understandable fashion. He didn't particularly care.

A wave of curiosity overwhelmed him.

What?

What about?

The impulse took shape awkwardly.

What about the others? What about the Liberator? The Scorpio?

Gann was dead, he allowed himself to remember that much, and was pleased to realize it caused him no particular pain.

Cally was dead. He remembered closing those dead eyes, and pressing his mouth to cold lips, allowing unseen tears drip onto unfeeling flesh. She had died for his mistakes. Abruptly, he shut down the memory.

Anna Grant. No. He shut the memory away, as he'd done a thousand times before.

Abruptly, he keyed himself into the federation financial systems.

He created a new identity for himself and gave it five hundred trillion credits. He locked the money into unshakeable physical assets, and then gave it a decades long history.

Nothing.

He felt nothing.

What about the others?

He ran searches.

Tarrant he discovered, had not been hit in that final shootout. That was why he died. The autopsy revealed extensive external injuries attributed to the crash landing. Blake had done a temporary patch-up job, intended to keep him functional and conscious until full medical attention could be delivered.

But Blake had died. He had killed Blake. The federation retrieval team, seeing no obvious blaster wounds on Tarrant had simply not treated him. Dead.

Dayna had been shot twice. But she had been alive. Medical intervention had preserved her life for almost four weeks. Then Servalan had executed her. Personally.

Soolin had been killed in the shootout. The only member of the crew to have been killed immediately as it turned out. He vaguely recalled her telling him that her parents had been murdered on Gauda Prime. Was
that true? She had said so many things. He could find out with a few strokes of the keyboard. No, leave it be. Leave her in peace with her parents.

Enemies and friends blurred together in his mind. He had shot Travis. Or was it Blake? No, he remembered Travis dying too well. He'd killed them both.

What of Servalan?

Almost two years after she'd captured them, the Federation security services had exposed her masquerade as Sleer. She and a small band of troops had been shot to death on a spaceport tarmac, trying to escape. On an impulse, he keyed in the images of her last desperate flight.

It occurred to him that he should feel some satisfaction on looking at her cold corpse there on the screen. One hand outstretched, as if she had never ceased to struggle. But he felt nothing.

After she had died, the Federation had lost interest in them. Even the interrogations had stopped. He was forgotten.

What was left to him, he wondered? Del Grant? Dead in some ill conceived rebel ambush. He flickered through names and faces, now all gone.

Vila Restal? Vila had dropped before the shooting started. He like Avon had escaped unscathed. He had spent a year and a half in interrogation, and in confinement with the politicals section. Then unaccountably he had been reclassified, sexual deviate, and transferred into violent criminals section, open population.

It smelled of one of Servalans schemes. Vila wouldn't talk, so she turned up the pressure. Let him know there were worse places than to be imprisoned with the politicals.

He had lasted another six months before he'd been knifed in a shower.

Vila was dead. Vila who'd always been so good at extending his life. Avon discovered he was weeping, great racking sobs. He watched himself cry, almost surprised to discover the emotion.

Then he stopped abruptly. I'm the last, he thought. I'm the last survivor of the Liberator, the last of the Scorpio.

No, there was one other.

He returned to his program, crafting it subtly, until it became a thing of beauty. Other programmers might marvel at it's symmetry, gasp at its perfection, but they wouldn't understand it. Only Ensor might have understood it, Ensor who had created Orac. Avon had come to understand Orac almost intimately over the years. He could have made a dozen Slave's or rebuilt Zen. Avon had achieved, through relentless concentration, a level of sublime genius that few could even comprehend.

A beeping announced that the serpent had completed it's work.

He depressed a key.

"Hello Avon," the screen blinked at him.

"Hello Orac," Avon said aloud. The sound of his own voice startled him.

Orac was the other survivor. Avon had hidden him in the most obvious place, Gauda Prime's computer core. He had programmed Orac simply to broadcast that it did not exist, that it's signal was a normal part of the operation. Every search, both manual and computer, had asked: Are you there? And each time, Orac had replied: No, I'm not.

Now Avon was back in communication with Orac on far away Gauda Prime. Speaking to it through the vast federation computer network. Avon fed it the program and the instructions.

The Program was a computer virus. It was unlike any other virus before. Vast, powerful, unrelenting, almost alive. It would insinuate itself throughout the federations computer network, and destroy it. Every bit of it. It would leave nothing. It would spread itself covertly, create copies of itself everywhere.

Spaceships, life support, entertainment, trade, communications, the military, everything depended on computers. The virus would destroy the federation, more surely than Blake could ever have hoped. More
certainly than aliens or plagues had ever done. The virus would destroy civilisation.

"Ready," Orac blinked.

Orac would be used to transmit the virus. It would be destroyed as surely as all the rest of the Federations computer systems.

"Ready," Orac blinked.

If I do this, Avon thought, if I do this, then there will be no one else left. I really will be the only survivor.

Abruptly, all their names and faces flashed through his mind. Blake. He thought. Always ready to sacrifice others for the cause. Let his death mean something. Let all their deaths mean something.

"Ready," Orac blinked.

Abruptly, Avon grinned one last time. He pressed the button. Blake's revenge, he thought.


The End