Contagion

by David Ryker

  The Centaurian ships continued toward them, their connecting rays slowly increasing in brightness.

  The Ofrans fired first, opening up all at once.

  I jerked in surprise. Huge pulses of power spat out of the top turrets while missiles flared out from countless portholes in the hull.

  I’ve done two tours of duty and seen a ton of battles, but I’ve never seen any display of force like that.

  The front Centaurian formations shattered, their little oval ships bursting apart and the connecting rays winking out. I almost cheered, but then saw that only three formations out of a score of them had been taken out, and now it was the Centaurians’ turn to fire.

  And what fire.

  The ships in formation seemed to act as nodes to some giant power system. The rays between them flared up, then focused in the center to send out great beams of power that tore through the massive Ofran ships. Metal ripped apart like tissue paper. Power supplies blew up in massive explosions. Within seconds the sky was alight with a dozen bursting ships. The vacuum snuffed out each flame as soon as the atmosphere inside dissipated, making it look like a series of sparks. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Ofrans died in each of those sparks.

  The Ofrans didn’t get a chance to fire again. More rays shot out, tearing ships in half or exploding them to pieces when they hit the engines.

  And then they hit the ship taking the video and it went black.

  The view cut to a scene from one of the cities on the surface. I saw gleaming glass towers connected by high walkways. Instead of streets, there were canals, with boats moving along their waters – like Venice back on old Earth, before the waterways turned into toxic sludge. Narrow walkways on both sides of the canals were filled with the Ofrans.

  They were skinny, brown, and gnarled, like they had been assembled from the limbs of old trees. Their limbs curved in strange ways, with knobby joints. Their hairless heads had flat faces with brown, liquid eyes. Their mouths were lipless slits.

  All those eyes were wide. All those mouths were screaming.

  The Ofrans were rushing down the walkways, the mob so chaotic that some fell into the waters. Smaller Ofrans, presumably children, got trampled underfoot. Boats sped along the canals, crashing into one another and overturning. Everyone was running toward and past the shaking camera.

  Then the Centaurian ships appeared, a long line of those black ovals linked by a shimmering green ray. As they swooped down on the city, they spread out, their line lengthening, the ray growing in thickness and intensity.

  And then, with a blinding flash, the ray sparked and formed a brilliant green wall that reached from the ships to the ground and moved across the city.

  That wall burned everything it touched. The glass towers buckled. The walkways shattered and fell. The crowd was incinerated. The green wall moved relentlessly forward, ash and slag in its wake.

  And then it hit the camera and the image blacked out.

  The lights in the meeting hall came up. Everyone remained silent for a moment. It didn’t matter what species they were, or what kind of brain or culture they had. Every man, woman, or thing in that room knew we were in serious trouble.

  At last someone spoke out. It was a Dri’kai.

  “We have no choice but to unite and fight,” it said. After a moment I recognized him as R’kk’kar. Not that I had suddenly becoming better at telling aliens apart—each species still looked all the same to me—but this particular Dri’kai had fresh bruises on his face. I have to admit I felt a bit proud about that.

  “We have enjoyed many wars between us in the past,” the Dri’kai said. “And we have always fought them with honor. We have never attacked children, as no doubt children were attacked on that planet, and we have never destroyed worlds. These Centaurians are a plague on all of us.”

  There followed a long discussion of just how to fight against such an obviously superior foe. No one had much of an idea. I hoped that would change soon, because estimates on the Centaurian fleet’s trajectory had them coming this way within a month at the outside.

  That gave us damn little time. It would take almost that long to get the Nansen completely fixed after the battering it had taken, and to resupply the ships with attack drones from the small factory the engineering folks had set up. Plus there was the communication problem. Even with high speed probes and a quick turnaround time from the various space stations and home worlds, we wouldn’t be able to summon much of a fleet. Some representatives suggested falling back in order to buy time, but since that would leave a couple of home worlds exposed, the idea was rejected.

  Then R’kk’kar said something that took me by surprise.

  “We need to arm the humans.”

  The bat thing hanging from the ceiling did a double take. Somehow it made it seem more human. Not much, but it helped.

  Silence.

  “Could you explain, General R’kk’kar?” the Vrimjlen standing by the screen asked, its long nose quivering.

  Oh, so I had been brawling with a general? All the fantasies I’d had as a grunt in the army had come true. Well, sort of.

  “The humans have proved to be a resourceful and energetic race. This is why we were so slow in defeating them.”—that earned a derisive snort from Foyle—“They have earned our respect, and General Mitch Ayers especially has shown great potential.”

  “We do not know them well,” someone from the audience cut in. “They are newcomers.”

  “It does not matter,” General R’kk’kar said. “They have saved many individuals from many races from the Centaurian parasite. They have proven their worth. They will be valuable in the fight to come. Plus, they have no choice but to fight. They may be strangers to this part of the Orion Arm, but they have no world to return to and they are carrying the last of their species in the ship they call the Nansen.”

  “How the hell did they find that out?” Commander Loftsdóttir whispered.

  Damn good question. Looked like the Dri’kai weren’t just space grunts. They were pretty good at gathering intel too.

  “We will need as many allies as we can in this fight. The Dri’kai will, of course, lead the war, but the stakes are too high not to call on all our potential resources. The humans will make a good addition to our forces. They are good fighters, almost as good as the Dri’kai, but their technology is inferior. Their ship is slow, their weapons crude, and they are greatly depleted after their defeat at our hands. We must speak among ourselves about what technology we are willing to share with them.”

  General R’kk’kar turned to us. “Commander Loftsdóttir, if you can take your officers out of the meeting, we will discuss this. It might take some time.”

  Commander Loftsdóttir rose. “Thank you for your consideration, General. We will return to our ship to await the result of the meeting. We have much work to attend to on board the Nansen.”

  “And it’ll be nice to breathe proper air again,” Foyle added in a low voice.

  Idiot. We got an interstellar war brewing and he’s complaining about breathing through a respirator?

  The commander ignored that remark. She was good at ignoring Foyle’s blunders.

  “We need to get back anyway,” she said. “It’s almost time for the trial.”

  My heart skipped a beat. Valeria went pale.

  Oh crap. The trial.

  I had been trying to forget about that.

  4

  The trial was of two Biospherists, members of a radical group who thought technology and industrialization were the reasons for the destruction of the Earth. They were right, to a point, but their idea of saving the human race was to take over the Nansen, kill all the officers, and set themselves up as some sort of revolutionary central committee. They then planned to land at our destination, Terra Nova, but instead of building a real civilization there they wanted to live in some sort of Neolithic la-la paradise.

  My assistant head of security, Li Qiang, had told me plenty about life in ancient times. History
was his hobby and he knew almost as much about the past as he did about various ways to beat the shit out of people, which was a lot. According to him, there wasn’t anything that looked remotely like paradise back then, just women dying in childbirth, people dying because of tooth infections, and kids having only about a fifty-fifty chance of making it to adulthood. Oh, and there wasn’t any toilet paper.

  I understood the Biospherists didn’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past—neither did we—but going that far back was just crazy. Especially since they had started on the path to their supposed utopia by slaughtering a bunch of innocent people in their stasis pods.

  They would have succeeded, too, except that by hacking into the source code of the Nansen’s computer in order to wake themselves up early they had caused a couple of serious glitches. One was that yours truly woke up with the rest of them, just in time to kick some serious ass, if I do say so myself. The other problem was they corrupted the source code, causing self-replicating and random errors that acted much like a computer virus. We still hadn’t managed to fix that.

  Thanks, guys.

  The two accused were Technician First Class Albert Lyncker and Assistant Botanist Rachel Hemmings. They were the only ones I didn’t kill after I woke up, and only because they had the good sense to surrender.

  Hemmings probably regretted surrendering. She got sexually assaulted by three of my security officers after I brought them out of stasis. I spaced them. Summary execution for felonious assault, dereliction of duty, and disobeying a direct order when the ship was in a time of crisis.

  Yeah, Hemmings and Lyncker were getting a trial and those three guys didn’t. That wasn’t sitting well with some elements of the crew. Everyone had lost friends in that attack, and now we were stuck in a hostile section of the galaxy more than two years from our destination. Everyone was saying that if we hadn’t been hijacked by the Biospherists, we would have peacefully sailed on to Terra Nova and never have even learned about this interstellar war we were getting sucked up in.

  I had my doubts. It looked like there was no getting away from this conflict.

  Or from this damn trial. We’d been putting it off, claiming we were interrogating the prisoners when in fact they didn’t say a damn thing to us except to spout revolutionary propaganda. The reality was we simply didn’t have the time for a trial. We’d been running ragged ever since I killed off the Biospherists and woken the rest of the crew up.

  Now we had a bit of breathing room, but even that didn’t look like it was going to last long.

  The trial took place in a large meeting hall with rows of chairs, a glassteel enclosure for the prisoners guarded by my second in command Major Li Qiang, and a high judges’ bench. The judges were a panel of all the high command: Commander Loftsdóttir, her second in command Executive Officer Tom Foyle, me, Chief Medical Officer Dr. Edward Stark, Chief Scientist Valeria Sanchez, Chief Engineer Andrei Iliescu, and Colonial Coordinator Tadros Barakat.

  The commander, of course, had the final word, but she was supposed to take our advice into consideration. We had to wake up two lawyers from among the 50,000 colonists who were still in stasis to work on the case. The prosecuting attorney was named Deborah Lockhart and the defense attorney was Edmund Waller.

  Neither had much work to do. The evidence was overwhelming thanks to security cameras, and the accused were obviously going to plead guilty. They were proud of what they had done.

  Lockhart read out the list of crimes—murder, hijacking, mutiny, treason, and a few more that didn’t really matter since the first four carried the death penalty—and asked how the accused pled.

  Both stood up in unison and shouted, “Not guilty!”

  Okay, this was my first trial. Maybe I was making a few wrong assumptions.

  Or maybe not. Lockhart blinked in surprise. Waller, the defense attorney, rolled his eyes and looked like he wanted to be put back into stasis.

  The judges all glanced at each other, unsure how to respond.

  Prosecuting Attorney Lockhart recovered before we did.

  “To clarify, do you plead not guilty to all counts?” she asked.

  Lyncker let out a sharp laugh, but it was Hemmings who answered.

  “We did all the things you said we did, but we are not guilty. We did them to save the human race, and if not the human race, then the rest of the galaxy from the contagion it has become. The only thing we are guilty of is caring for the natural order.”

  Her speech went on a lot longer than that, but she said nothing of value. It was the usual revolutionary crap. The Global Government was a failure and humanity had to be cleansed of its sins. I’d heard it all before—from radical communitarians, from crazy religious cults, from hopped-up anarchists, and from a dozen more groups besides. They all thought that whoever was in power was responsible for the decay of the world.

  The fact is, we’d all screwed up. Sure, those in power had more of a chance to put things right, and therefore more of a responsibility for when it all turned to shit, but to be totally honest, we were all responsible. We all wanted wooden chopsticks and let the last rainforests get cut down. We all wanted air conditioning as the summers got hotter and hotter. We all wanted to drive although our cities were choked in smog. We all wanted kids even after the population topped twelve billion. We all just kept living like it would go on forever.

  And then everything fell apart faster than we ever imagined it could, and we all blamed each other.

  That was the problem with these radicals. They thought they were special. They thought they weren’t as much a part of the problem as everybody else. They thought their ideology put themselves above the rest of the world and gave them the right to decide who lived and who died. I had seen that so many damn times.

  At last Hemmings finished her speech. In all her ranting she hadn’t even mentioned her assault. She didn’t mention herself at all. She wasn’t going to play the victim. In her final words, she wanted to make a statement. I had to admire her for that.

  Their defense attorney now addressed the bench.

  “My clients have been analyzed and deemed psychologically fit to stand trial, but I object that the psychologist, Dr. Gao, is biased because he lost several friends and colleagues in the attack perpetrated by my mentally unstable clients.”

  “Objection overruled,” Commander Loftsdóttir said. “It is impossible to find a certified psychologist, or indeed anyone in the Medical Division, who did not lose several friends and colleagues. In addition, Dr. Gao had the AI psychological program run an independent double blind examination of the defendants and it came to the same conclusion that they are mentally fit to stand trial.”

  “Objection,” Edmund Waller said. “Legal procedure requires that a double blind examination be conducted by two unbiased, human psychologists.”

  I had to hand it to this guy, he was doing the best with a bad situation. Waller had probably lost people in the attack too, but he was doing his job to the best of his ability. I had commanded men and women like that in the field—people who would toe the line even when cut off and outnumbered. Too bad Waller was a skinny little guy with arms like twigs. Otherwise I’d hire him for security.

  Commander Loftsdóttir glanced at a touchscreen.

  “Objection overruled,” she said. “In the case of Global Navy vs. Bell, it was deemed that any psychologist could be used if one could not be found that was unaffected by the case. In the case of Satech Asteroid Mining Corporation vs. Chang, it was ruled that an AI could be used in a double blind examination if a second qualified human psychologist was not available.”

  The defense attorney sat. Score one for the commander. She had obviously done her homework.

  That made one of us. I had been too busy overseeing attack drone production and getting into fights with horny Dri’kai generals to look into old legal cases from a civilization that had fallen.

  The next few minutes were just formalities. The prosecution and defense both rested. There was
no questioning the defendants’ guilt, and it was obvious what punishment they would get.

  And I’d have to carry it out. Damn.

  Then Commander Loftsdóttir threw a curveball.

  “Technician First Class Albert Lyncker and Assistant Botanist Rachel Hemmings, I find you guilty on all counts. Before I and the other judges retire to confer on your punishment, I will give you a chance to cooperate with the court in a way that will be considered in your favor. The two of you were caught with Senior Programmer Arnold Gilmore on the bridge hacking into the Nansen’s mainframe. Gilmore was killed in the fight. You subsequently claimed that he was the expert on the computer hack and you were assistants with little technical knowledge. This court finds that hard to believe. We suspect that you had some secret training in computer programming and hacking, just as some of your compatriots secretly trained in the use of small arms. Commander Ayers reported that the abilities of some of the Biospherists he engaged in combat was well beyond the basic training given to all crew members of the Nansen.”

  Damn right it was. I got hit several times and if I hadn’t gotten into a combat suit just in the nick of time, I’d be compost in one of the Nansen’s botanical pods.

  The commander went on.

  “As you know, your alterations to the machine code have caused numerous errors in the system and we have suffered several system failures and glitches. We are in an extremely dangerous situation and cannot afford to run on reduced capacity. If you share what you know about the hack, we will take that into consideration in your sentencing.”

  I took a deep breath. I had not expected her to extend an olive branch like that.

  I did expect the response, though.

  Both of the terrorists glared at Commander Loftsdóttir and said nothing.

  Typical. They wanted to be martyrs. They weren’t going to sell out now. That would make everything they did before meaningless.

  Commander Loftsdóttir took a deep breath and said, “Clear the courtroom of everyone but the judges, the attorneys, Major Li, and the prisoners.”