by Ian Cannon
He laughed, “You know what to do with them, honey.”
Toggin grumbled, “I want to do the guns, sweet cakes!”
She snarled, “Back off!”
Meanwhile, Nefrix, the proper Zyndo-Paxi male, stumbled over to the massive Prax-Noossian. Its enormous green-skinned body stood at the flight deck’s rear next to the Krutt’s bio tank platform. The tank was no longer there as it had been transported to the Knave’s Blade’s detainment suite, but Oonta Goomba steadied himself against the platform, still shaking his tusked head.
“Pardon me,” Nefrix began, “we may need weapons, sir. Are you aware?”
Oonta shook his big head swinging those blunted tusks to and fro and said, “Booba babba nunka.”
“Ah yes, I see, in deed,” Nefrix said being overly amicable. “I don’t speak … that … I’m afraid.” He looked over to the side. Shogun Star had come from his matter transport just as disoriented as the others, and had begun immediate meditation sitting legs crossed, hands together, eyes closed. Shogun was one of the final members of a monk sect from the Iotian Nid. His life was spent in search of his death from what the Nid referred to as the final testament, believing that death at the hands of one’s equal was the supreme act of valor and honor. Therefore, mind over body was paramount to Shogun’s very core. Nefrix stepped to him. “You there, have we weapons aboard this craft at all?”
One eye opened as Shogun looked sharply up at him and said, “I have only my mind.”
“Ah, very well, yes I see. Would it happen to be a weapon, by chance?”
Big footsteps approached on the quick and Rennick the Shark stormed by headed for the cargo bay, his big hanging overcoat swaying behind his feet. “What is this damn place and how’d we damn well get here?” he cried.
Tiffa Nora, still upset, followed quick on his heels and spat, “We were clearly transported, Renny, obviously! And you landed on me!”
“Awe, Tiff, I land on you all the time!”
They were followed very quickly by Lyra Noot, a feisty, skinny little, three-foot gnome creature from the Deridian moon, Relu. Nefrix watched the parade with growing interest and followed them into the big cargo bay. If this ship had weapons, they’d be back there.
Rennick’s heavy strides came to a stop as he gawked in reverence at the place. He let loose a whistle and said, “Would ya look at this damn place?”
Tiffa bumped him from behind followed by Lyra Noot, then Nefrix.
“Uh—why are we here, ya big lug?” she reminded him.
“Right!” Rennick looked around scanning every detail of the huge cargo bay before coming to the armory door. “What’s that?”
“Door,” she said logically.
He went to it and threw it open putting all his girth into it and froze. Weapons. Guns. Full racks of them. It made him grumble with laughter. “It’s like a damn dream.”
Nefrix went, “Oh yes, wonderful!”
Lyra Noot was the first one into the armory shooting forward under everyone’s feet, between Rennick’s big legs and into the bay, giggling like his spider monkey marsupial cousins from the motherworld of Deridea. He went to the biggest auto-repeller weapon he could find with a round plasma drum clip, its indicator glowing under full charge, and hefted it to the sky twice as tall as him, still snickering like a hatchling with a candy jar.
Tiffa was next, blowing past Rennick who still stood in frozen awe. She unclipped and threw open an armory chest and gasped with delight. Light-arms pistol blasters. An array of them. “That’s mine,” she said jamming one into a thigh holster. “That’s mine,” she said, filling the opposite holster. “That’s mine,” she said filling her breast holster. “That’s mine.” Her inner thigh holster. “That’s mine.” Her ankle hoslter. “That’s mine.” Her over-the-shoulder holster.
Rennick moved toward a stationary weapon covered over by a tarp. He threw it off and gasped, nearly fainted. It was a tri-mounted, spinner barrel, high-velocity repeater gun complete with plasma bandolier and hammer jack. He said with long, slow words, “A Mambalyberimum dasher/shredder.” Tears flooded his eyes as he choked up. “Damn.”
Tiffa corrected his pronunciation with a grin, “It’s Ma. Leh. Bree. An. Not whatever you just said.”
He hefted the weapon against his hip feeling the weight of it with his eyes glimmering like a child’s. “I never care how she’s pro-nounced. I only care how she bangs,” and jacked back the hammer with a loud—Slap! She smacked him punitively on his big butt.
A boom jolted the entire ship. Everyone in the armory stumbled into the wall trying to keep their footing. Vekter’s voice yelled from the flight deck, “They’re coming, back there!” All eyes went to the airlock. Incarcerum soldiers were trying to blow the station’s interior hatch and get through to the inner seal.
Rennick reached into his pocket, pulled up a mutilated cigar and clamped it between his teeth, grinning big. “Let them come!” He shuffled out into the cargo bay hefting his new dasher/shredder with him and positioned it squarely in front of the hatch. Its weight rested down on its tri-legs as Tiffa, Lyra Noot and Nefrix sidled up around him, each poised for a fight. Rennick bounced the big gun up and down on his thighs and said, “I got something for them!”
Big feet thudded into the cargo bay taking their attention as Oonta Goomba came striding madly toward the hatch. The huge beast planted his feet in front of the door and smashed his hands together making a big thunder clap. He was ready, too.
Rennick bayed, “Noossian!” He motioned wildly to his own dasher/shredder and said, “You’re in the damn way!”
Another explosion on the other side showered the airlock with debris. Through the window they could see security personnel storm inside the chamber about to explode the inner seal.
“Uh…” Rennick mumbled nervously. If they blew the airlock the whole place would decompress. One rip in the steel or one tiny breach in the exterior, and everybody would be blown out into space.
“Open the door!” Nefrix cried. They all looked at him. He said, “Yes, please do open the door!”
“They’ll get in,” Tiffa scoffed ridiculously.
“In deed yes,” he cried back, pumping his weapon over his head. “And then we’ll invite them back out while avoiding certain damages, see?”
Rennick, still chewing his cigar, said, “Damn, I like it! Noossian!”
Oonta nodded with a guttural grunt and flexed against the inner seal. It gave and slid open. The security team outside walked into a hail. Rennick’s gun bawled a long, solid note of thunder. Tiffa banged away with one of her new blasters, then the next, then the next, cycling through her arms in a rapid succession. The tiny gnome creature wailed in high-pitched, wild glee firing away as his gun slid him backward on his feet with each hammer strike, and Nefrix completed the quad with his own big banger.
When the ear-shattering pound of plasma repeater weaponry settled, there were no more security team members. All that was left was Rennick’s dastardly snickering. He said, “Took care of that.” Oonta grumbled slamming the inner seal shut and throwing the lock wheel.
Everyone took a breath grinning triumphantly to each other, and then—VWAP! Sympto appeared from out of nowhere three feet in the air and dropped straight to the floor with a—flump! They each looked down at him a bit numb. Rennick grunted, “Damn.”
Up front, Vekter checked his VR gage controls. He pounded on the thrusters making the cruiser jolt, but the docking clamp still held them down. Something beeped. He looked over, cried, “What is that?”
Toggin looked at a new 3-D display that popped up on his control panel and his eyes bulged. “Guns! That thing’s got guns!”
Vekter screamed, “Sindra, baby!”
She’d been studying the optics targeting array in front of her and swiveling the cruiser’s rail guns around, sliding them along the Karbatt cruiser’s entire flank. They moved quickly, placing themselves very intuitively with their operator’s commands. This was her wheelhouse—a systems
function tech operator. And she was very good. She could diagnose a schematics chart instantly, read a digital operation deck automatically, analyze a unit’s power flow with ultimate proficiency. Now, she scanned across Incarcerum’s bulk through the reticle device. Sure enough, a series of hatches sitting flush with the station’s exterior began sliding open with big-barreled cannons popping up from their insets on spinner mounts.
“Uh, yep, guns!” she said with alarm. “Firing!” She laid on her virtual trigger command and they could immediately hear the cruiser’s rail guns chatter through the ship like a rapid-fire ballpeen hammer clattering away. Her strike vector started tearing into the station and stitching big divots across the cannon deck. Cannons erupted as they swiveled over to aim, incinerating into space born junk.
“Hit the dock!” Vekter yelled executing another blast on the retros.
Sindra swiveled her 3-D hologun down—the actual weapon outside the ship following her instruction simultaneously—and hammered again. Vekter jerked the ship away as strike points splintered steel across their underbelly and ploomed twisted chunks into space, severing their dock locks from the station.
“We’re free!” he screamed, but something else—something much more damaging than a gun blast—slammed the cruiser like a wrecking ball. Vekter crashed out of the seat and smashed face first into the floor tasting blood in his mouth on impact. He looked up patting his lip. The viewport filled with asteroids. “Oh gods,” he cried and thrust himself back for the pilot’s chair. But someone had beaten him to it. He stood up and cried, “Rogan!”
Rogan, now taking the helm, spun on him, obviously still gripped by the neural mind-screw they’d forced on him, ripped the goggles off his head revealing those prodigiously huge eyeballs and screamed with way over-produced mania, “Don’t jack with me. Do not. Jack. With meeeee!”
He slammed the thrusters home and the entire vessel blasted into the rock field.
Vekter and Sindra made eye contact, both looking horrified. She bellowed, “Man the other rail gun, Vek. We’ll plow the road!”
Vekter dove into the other gunnery control station and fired up the hologun. It bloomed over him allowing him complete control. The two gunners started hammering away.
The Karbatt cruiser—long, narrow and powerful—slid like a spear through the tumbling asteroids propelled by the manic abandon of its pilot, spun head over heals in a flip-over tumble, then committed a spinning spiral maneuver no one had ever witnessed before, then whirly-birded between other space born boulders while zigging and zagging its way over, in and through the tonnage, all the while its rail guns sent florid streamers of tracer fire in spiraling fashion turning mountians into rubble and exploding others into vast, dusty starbursts of ore. And through it all, its pilot howled with psychotic glee wrenching his ride backward and forward like a madman while its crew sank ever deeper into urgent despair, wondering whether Rogan’s actions were driven by madness or some misunderstood sense of perfect clarity. They did, after all, make it through the asteroids before angling the hells away from Incarcerum and blasting the inner-warps wide open—BOOM—gone.
Sixteen
Ben’s eyes flurttered open. Everything was blurry forcing him to squint and blink. The world around him pulled into focus. He looked around. It was a white room with machinery that hummed dormantly, perhaps a laboratory of sorts. With sudden deflation it occurred to him. This was the laboratory.
The soreness of a stunner strike from that manotaur’s prod struck him in the side and back. It felt like a few ribs had been rhino stomped making him groan and adjust. That’s when he discovered his movement was severely diminished. He lifted his head, looked across his body. He was cuffed to a table, couldn’t lift his hands or feet. He plopped his head back down and muttered, “Great.”
He knew immediately—he was strapped to that big mind reader machine. A mind wiper. This situation was dire. What filled his stomach with an even deeper sense of dread was that he was all alone. No Tawny. Where was his wife?
He scanned around through the clearing fog in his head and froze.
Nope, not alone. That mechanical half-man, half-machine was standing at the doorway with that glowing sensor node beaming at him, arms crossed, face shield angled downward in a show of solemnity. Ben absorbed the creature’s appearance for the first time. His suit was an elegant combination of blacks with a helmet designed for the utilitarian purpose of life sustainment, but also to give a wicked presence to its user—an opaque visor molded with a vertical ridge dividing it into halves and crowned with that pulsing sensor node at the brow. A cowl framed the helm like a hood, lending to a cape that swept divinely across the chest and down his back, secured at the waist with a belt.
Ben forced a wry grin and said, “Hi.”
The creature parted his arms and stepped closer with slow, intended paces. He said through that digital voice, “Benjar Dash.” He stopped at the tableside and murmured, “Finally.”
Ben’s eyes went into slits. He didn’t like that word—finally. It smacked of an ominous intention. Had this entire ordeal been constructed solely to entrap him? Had this creature targeted Ben as his lone objective? Was this situation born of some evil design? He chuckled nervously and said, “That’s a funny thing to say.”
“Not in the eyes of truth.” The machine-man’s words were slow and perfectly sculpted, as if to punctuate each piece of his message.
Ben said, “Yeah, and I get the feeling you’re just dying to tell me the truth.”
The machine-man paced around the table as he spoke, “I have searched you out, Benjar Dash. Every home. Every harbor. Every friend. Every enemy. And much to my dismay—”
Ben interrupted quickly, “Don’t tell me. I just wasn’t there, right?”
The thing grunted without humor. “No, you were not. But now you’re here. Can you imagine my fortune?”
Ben scanned him up and down and offered a dismal expression. “Whoever you are, you don’t strike me as overly fortunate, so … no.”
The thing went—heh! Perhaps insulted. Pacing back around the table he said, “This moment has been a long time in the making, I’m sure you’d agree.”
“Buddy,” Ben said, “I don’t even know you.”
“No, but the eyes of truth do,” he responded. “The man you see is not all there once was. But true, heretofore, you have not known of me. I have been but another cog in the machine, a faceless point in the great void. But you, Benjar Dash—I know you. I have watched, and yes, I have seen. You have proven that our actions, no matter how innocuous they may seem, have irrefutable, often irreparable consequences. For you, I am that consequence.” Halting coldly he concluded, “And the debtor has come for his debt.”
Ben struggled with the feeling of anxiety trying to tug at his nerves. He said, “Yeah? Color me curious, pal.”
The creature kneeled down drawing very close to Ben and said, “I am called Specter, born into a world of agony, brought here, to this state, because of you.”
Ben stared closely into the creature’s glowing cyclops eye and said mockingly, “Oooh—dramatic.”
Specter pulled himself upright and continued his slow, ominous pacing. “Before there was this creature I was a man among my nation, serviced by the power I held from a mighty position. I was to be the savior of the Confederation. But my plans were laid to waste. A lifetime of achievement brought to rubble in a single moment.”
Ben’s gaze swept back and forth in thought—a lifetime of achievement. Brought to rubble. A single moment. The creature’s words connected in his mind with a sudden blast of realization, and Ben gasped, “Menuit-B. The moon cannon.” That job was still haunting him.
Specter nodded his mechanical head and said, “I led the charge, Benjar Dash. I was its overseer and its architect. I would have been the end of the war and the bringer of peace, if not for the toiling of lowly, cowardly miscreants like you. A king brought down by a pauper. It’s unjust. And now my name is disgrace.”
Ben felt himself fall into earnest curiosity. He asked, “Who are you?”
“Who was I?” Specter roared through his digicom voice. “I speak of that man. The man I was! So, ask again if you dare.”
Ben cleared his throat and said, “Okay. Who were you?”
Specter inhaled large filling his auto-lung and exhaling slowly. He sat in a chair and murmured, “It no longer matters. The monster you see before you is all that’s left of that man.”
Ben shook his head. “I didn’t do this to you.”
“Oh, but you did,” Specter insisted coolly. “With your recklessness and your thoughtless blundering.”
Still trying to piece the creature’s story together, Ben angled furiously in his head. This man’s curse had been forced on him like an injury, perhaps in battle. He could see explosions in his mind, the speed of combat. He’d seen it before. He knew all about it. Ben looked up and assumed, “You survived the battle with the Obsalom Order, didn’t you?” The creature’s head swiveled over to glare into him, that node beginning to pulse. That was a yes. Ben said, “I didn’t have a choice.”
“Survival is never a choice. It is merely what we do,” he said. “A part of me did survive that battle. But the other part was taken in an ocean of fire. Have you ever felt that, Benjar Dash? Have you ever felt flame and body become one? The screaming is intolerable, and then you realize it is your own. The agony rapes the mind of its sanity, drives it into the chaos of unfathomability, and all that’s left is the peace that might be found in death. A peace for which I was robbed.”
Ben said with a self-effacing air, “I guess that’s too bad, huh?”
Surprisingly, the creature agreed, “Yes, too bad.” He looked into Ben. “Rather, I was brought here to this place.” Specter stood with arms open presenting the laboratory to Ben. “They have a use for me here. The sway I held before can be had again, but with new direction. Within the undercurrents of war, an old politic has arisen with a new vision. Thusly, I was regenerated to serve its purpose. They gave me a new life with a new mission.”
