Divergence

<snip>
The group filed into the main command room from the station, the odd tremor and thunderous crash as the compound below was battered by the falling debris. As they entered, Cass walked over to Jay.
“Jay I’m so…” She began before catching Jade’s eye who frantically shook her head attempting to avert the emotional train wreck in progress. “So... sure that we are going to get Lindstrom.” She changed tact artfully mid-way through the sentence changing her expression from one of condolence to one of comradeship in anger.
</snip>
“Lindstroms’s a dead man” Jay snarled, his fingers unconsciously curling into fists as he spoke “He’s fucking dead”
Cass met his stormy eyes with silent understanding
She wanted to reach out and embrace him; to draw him into her tender arms and be the rock against which his pain and sorrow would break.
She couldn't believe this was happening.
Katrina, her friend, was gone, and Jay... Oh, Jay... If she could somehow shoulder the burden of his hurt alone, she would; but given their history Cass worried that even the most sympathetic of her words could be misconstrued
Instead she just nodded
“I’ll find him for you” she said in a low voice and turned away to towards one of the command desks “Coming?” she glanced back over her shoulder, her face writ with concern
“Yeah, whatever” Jay shook his head and followed her across the gloomy command deck

It didn’t take long to locate Lindstrom, the man’s cranial implants proving simple to triangulate across the communication network
“There he is” Cass murmured, manipulating the desk's controls to zoom in on a map of the prison, displaying his whereabouts
“Where’s that?” Jay asked stonily
“Level five twenty one, section four ninety at the moment” Cass threw a couple of visuals up on the main monitors “He’s on one of the trams”
Artemis stared up at the displays, his brow knitting into a frown “Where’s he heading?”
“Hard to say” Cassandra replied, her fingers moving over the desk’s controls, pulling maps and other schematics up onto the screens “Down there’s mostly engineering; we've got power plants, fuel depots, backup reactors, life support, ah...” she tapped the screen highlighting a level near the far end of the station “Time gate”
“That’s where he’s heading” Jay said with certainty “He's going to escape through time”
“It’ll take another fifteen minutes for him to get there” Cass murmured, mentally extrapolating the data from the telemetry readings
“Can we stop his tram?”
“Probably. One sec...”
The group gazed up at the monitors in silence as the marker indicating the tram came to a halt on the map
“Midway between five twenty three and twenty four”
“I’m going down there” Jay shouldered his assault rifle and turned to go
“Lindstrom's my fault” Artemis nodded “I’m coming too”
“We’ll all go” Jamie said firmly "We do this together"
“Do what you want,” Jay said dismissively “but I’m going to be the one who kills the fucker”
“Crap...” Cass frowned up at the monitors, her fingers moving over the desk’s controls “Lindstrom’s moving again”
"What!?"
"He must have some kind of admin override - He'll make the time gate long before we can get to him!"
"Fucking shit!" Jay kicked out at a chair, sending it careening across the room
"No..." Cass murmured, gazing up at the monitors as they blurred and flickered, displaying a wealth of information, almost too fast to follow "There..." she stabbed a finger onto the controls to hilight an area on the map "One deck beneath us. Two man escape pods."
She turned in her chair to regard the others
"It'll take one hell of a pilot to fly one through all the asteroid debris out there and get there before him, but you can manage that, can't you Jay?"
His eyes drinking in the information schematics displayed on the monitors, Jay just nodded
"There's room for one more in the pod" Artemis said "I say it should be me. Lindstrom's my fault, so I want to make sure he's dead at the end of this"
Cass shook her head
"I'd suggest either me or Plisken" she paused and frowned "Where is the old gimmer anyway?"
"We don't have time for this" Jay snapped and turned to head towards the exit "Make your mind's up - Who's coming?"
"Me" Cass was on her feet in an instant
"No, me!" Artemis insisted "The time gate will almost certainly be destroyed in the firefight, and we can't run the risk of the only two people who know how operate the time drive getting killed. We need a way out of here!"
Cass pursed her lips and scowled at this "Fine" she spat, unable to find fault his logic
Artemis turned to run after Jay, but before he could move, Cass grabbed a handful of his prison overalls and hauled him close
"Look after him" she said in a low voice "Make sure he comes out of this alive; because if he gets killed, I'll have no compunction in exacting my bloody revenge"
Releasing her grip on him, Artemis took a step away from her, his eyes widening
"Madam..." he began, indignantly straightening his overalls
"Go"
Artemis didn't need telling twice and turned to bolt out of the exit after Jay, leaving Cass to sigh and turn to regard the rest of the Dwarfer's
"We need our time drive back" she flopped back down into her chair and pulled the inventory system up "It's in storage down in the Core" she hilighted a record in one of the tables displayed the screens "Let's grab what we need from here and then take one of the trams down there"

Fifteen minutes later, the tram pulled into the station down in the Core, the doors hissing open to admit the sounds of gunfire outside
"Sounds like some of the other prisoners have the same idea as us" Jacky observed
"We can't let them get to the time drive" Cass said emphatically "We need it to get out of here"

<tag>
Over to you - While Artemis and Jay are doing their thing, let's get the time drive back
Who is it that's fighting out there?
I'm thinking tense stand-off's with other well armed prisoners, booby trapped vaults, desperate prison wardens, so let's have a few obstacles thrown in our way and not resolve it in one post - because where would be the fun in that? ;-)
</tag>