by B. V. Larson
“McGill, do you have any idea what they’ll do to me if they find out I’m sneaking you onto Blue Deck under false pretenses?”
“They’ll have to sew them back on first, Carlos. Open that door! She’s probably getting away even now.”
Sighing, Carlos showed his credentials to the guards and led me into the clinic area. That part was no big deal. Anyone could walk onto Blue Deck and get service, as long as they had an appointment.
Unfortunately, in my era, just believing you needed some medical help wasn’t good enough. Not anyone could just up and go to the doctor because they were feeling poorly. Our tappers monitored all our vitals, and something had damned-well better be wrong with the numbers they reported over the grid before any medical person would waste their time and money on some hypochondriac.
In the past, I knew this system had often been used to deny services. If you were sick, but not sick enough to be seriously ill, well, you could just frigging wait it out until you were really sick—or else you got better on your own.
Still, when we walked into the place the first set of guards didn’t blink an eye. Carlos was a bio specialist, and he had the right to march a man into the clinics. The next step would be harder.
We didn’t bother with the wards, the examination rooms or the dispensaries. We made a beeline for the back of the place, where they kept the serious equipment.
At the next set of doors was another pair of guards. These men weren’t like the white-suited beefcakes at the entrance, no sir. They were armed and armored. They didn’t look like they wanted spit from us, and they watched our approach with growing suspicion.
“Veteran!” I boomed at the nearest of the two. “Open that portal! We have reason to believe there’s trouble inside.”
“Excuse me, Centurion,” the noncom answered, “but who the hell are you?”
So far, so good. He hadn’t recognized me right off. If he had, he’d probably never let me pass. You see, I was a man with a particular reputation, a reputation that didn’t spark trust in guards and the like.
“Are you aware there’s an assassin aboard?” I demanded. “Our tribune was murdered moments ago.”
He shook his head, and I showed him my tapper. There the video I’d stolen from Galina’s security system played. He watched the critical moments.
“Wow, what can we do about it?”
“Let us into the revival chambers. We have reason to believe the assassin is in there.”
The guard hesitated. “Okay,” he said at last.
He turned around, but the other man stopped him. “We’ve got to call this in. We need permission to let two unknowns into the sanctum.”
“Yeah—yeah right,” the first man said.
Right there, that second guy had made a terrible error. The first guy had been reasonable. He’d been doing his job, but he’d been willing to bend the rules under extreme circumstances.
The same couldn’t be said of the second guy. He was a stickler. I hated those types, and so did Carlos.
The rules-lawyer had his back to Carlos. He was frowning at me, as I’d done all the talking up until this point. I could have told him from long experience that you didn’t turn your back on any bio specialist. They were among the worst of all the sneakiest bastards alive.
The stickler stiffened as a syringe penetrated a port on the back of his armor. Just as a testament to the unfair and dirty nature of all bio people, they’d lobbied to have ports embedded at strategic locations in all our armored suits. This was supposedly so they could do their jobs, helping the injured and such-like.
In practice, they could break-and-enter at will. The ports would only open at the touch of a member of their anointed priesthood, while even an officer like myself couldn’t open those same ports on his own suit of armor. It was all sheer evil in my book.
“What—?” the victim grunted, then he kind of stiffened up and pitched forward on his face.
The other guy wasn’t slow on the draw, I’ll give him that. He had his hand on his weapon, and he had it out of its holster in a flash.
Unfortunately for him, I had my bigger hand on top of his. When the gun went off, it shot a bolt down into his armored foot. The metal covering his toes sizzled. I think the boot had stopped most of it, but not all, judging by the bared teeth and growling sounds coming out of the guard’s face.
After that, Carlos and I made quick work of him. We beat him down, stuck him with needles—the works.
“Too bad about him,” I said. “He was a reasonable man.”
“Send him flowers in the morning. Come on, McGill.”
Carlos managed to get the portal open with an emergency code—again, something that bio people aboard ship generally had access to—and we raced inside.
We got lots of hateful looks and even a few snarls from the staff inside, but they didn’t try to stop us. There was blood on our hands, after all, and even the bio people knew enough about the animal nature of Legion Varus troops to stand clear.
We rushed to each of the of the revival chambers and threw open the heavy steel portals.
“Is everything all right in here?” I demanded.
“Get out!”
That was the universal outcry, but we hurried on, determined to check them all.
At last, I came to the one unit we had aboard ship that serviced the Blood-Worlder types. The Zoo legions needed a bigger revival unit, a machine so grotesque, so disgusting with dripping fluids and stench, that it could successfully give birth to a creature the size of a squid, heavy trooper or even a giant.
There, we found trouble. The staff of saurians were face down, tails stuck up—they tended to die like that when struck down by surprise.
“Oh, shit…” Carlos breathed. “Look at the machine!”
I did, and my horror grew. Now, I’m not an expert in these matters, but I could tell when a giant puddle of dark, blood-like fluids had pooled up under the outsized revival unit that something was very wrong.
The machine’s flappy mouth hung open, dribbling and slack. It looked dead to me. Now and then, the whole thing shivered a little, but that was it.
We approached, ready to fight, in case the assassin was still in the place. Out from behind the machine a figure emerged. He staggered unevenly.
It wasn’t any Shadowlander agent, however. It was another saurian. I knew him well.
“Raash?” I asked. “Are you okay?”
“No…” he said. “I have failed in my duties. My charges… they are all dead. I should die as well.”
“Hold on a second. Where did the agent go?”
He pointed with a scarred up arm. “They are in the next chamber. Be warned, McGill, there are several.”
We rushed out of the place and moved to the next chamber. It was the last one in line, and I knew in an instant why it was special.
The sign over the door said VIP Chamber. No admittance.
It was the room that they used to revive top officers and other important people. By all logic and reason, they’d be reviving Galina in there right now.
-31-
The portal was locked.
“Get this open!” I ordered Carlos. “I don’t care what it takes!”
“You owe me, big man.”
Carlos went to work on the lock, using every password he’d ever stolen from his superiors. In the meantime, I put my big mug up into the triangular window to have a peek.
There they were. Three of them, all wearing teleport harnesses and dark cloaks. Around them on the floor were the dead staffers. The bio-people had put up a valiant but hopeless fight to defend their sacred cow.
Fortunately, the revival machine didn’t look damaged. In fact, the three aliens weren’t trying to kill it—they were working it.
The machine’s mouth fell open as I watched. There was a nasty splash of fluids as the water broke, then a pair of bare feet hung out into the steamy air. They were feminine feet, and I knew who they belonged to right off.
&nbs
p; “Galina… hurry it up, Carlos! I think I know what they’re up to.”
“Just give me a second. I steal passcodes whenever I can—it’s a hobby of mine. But the systems keep making people change them.”
He typed in another code, but the door just beeped and rejected him. Carlos cursed.
Noticing my scrutiny, one of the aliens walked near.
It was the same female I’d seen before. The one that had killed Galina in the first place. She looked at me with curiosity, and I glared back. I made threatening motions, telling her visually what I was going to do to her scrawny neck if I got inside.
She seemed unconcerned, and she went back to cutting Galina’s umbilical cord. I watched as she was lifted, helpless, and held aloft in the arms of her assassin.
“What? Are they going to just kill her again?” Carlos asked. “What’s the point? We’ll print out another one.”
“Just get the frigging door open.”
“I can’t. This one is special—I don’t have any code that can open it.”
Frustrated, I looked through the portal again. I watched as the trio worked the console on the machine. They seemed to be doing something—something evil.
“Damnation,” I breathed. “I think they’re erasing her.”
“What?”
“Her body scans, her engrams… they’re hacking that unit. I don’t know how, but they’re messing with her files.”
“No surprise there. They built the damned things. Wouldn’t you put some special backdoors into the software if you’d designed our revival machines?”
I didn’t answer. Instead, I hammered my closed fist on the portal. The aliens barely glanced at me.
When they were finished with their dirty work, they gathered together, holding Galina like a ragdoll. At least I could tell she was alive. She was feeble, like all newborns, but she was trying to struggle with them. Watching her like that… it made me angry.
“I’m going to rip you little weasels apart when I get in there!”
There were shouts down the hallway now. It was Fike and his team of crack patrolmen, no doubt finally catching up with us. I didn’t care. I just stared at Galina and her captors. I was having some really violent thoughts right then, I don’t mind telling you.
“What’s that light?” Carlos asked.
I realized he was right. There was a glimmer and it was growing. The bluish light flashed rhythmically. It quickly became blinding.
“Oh crap, they’re getting away,” Carlos said.
I was banging on the door and raging—but it didn’t help. Fike and his team arrived, telling us to stand down and other nonsense. When they peered into the chamber however, their attitudes changed. They pushed us out of the way and worked the door, but long before they could get it open the aliens had teleported out and left us behind.
When they were gone, Fike grabbed me and shook me. He was big enough that this action wasn’t a joke, but it wasn’t impressive, either.
“Damn you, McGill. Where are they taking Turov?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t stop them. All these hogs got in the way.”
Fike turned his eyes toward the bio people. He’d just experienced the frustration of being unable to open an important door on his own ship.
“You’re right. This double-security nonsense on Blue Deck is bullshit. This ship belongs to Legion Varus—and to my support legion. Why do they need all these heavy portals and guards if they only serve to stop friendly troops, not real enemies?”
Carlos and I raised our eyebrows in appreciation. Fike was talking sense. That was a rare thing when it came to members of the brass.
To our further surprise, Fike left us alone and began kicking ass all around the place. He’d been on the spot during the actual kidnapping, I knew that was the key. Without that critical personal experience, he might have blamed the messenger for strange goings-on. Instead, he blamed those who had actually failed to stop the security breach.
The long and the short of it was I found myself at a meeting of brass up on Gold Deck about an hour later. The ship was in an uproar, and Fike had summoned all the key players to a conference room for what amounted to a group-spanking.
“All right. Let’s get this straight. It’s not entirely making sense to me.”
Graves spoke up. He was the only one with the rank and the balls to do so under the circumstances. “We were attacked. Our tribune has been taken hostage. It’s simple enough, the natives of 91 Aquarii have given us casus belli to declare war on them.”
“That’s true, but I want to understand their reasoning, Graves.”
Graves shrugged. The enemy’s reasons weren’t interesting to him. He wanted to get down to the business of destroying them and have done with it.
Fike was staring at me all of a sudden. I lowered my tapper and looked dumb. It didn’t work, he stepped closer anyway.
“McGill… you knew what was happening. How did you figure it out?”
“Uh…” I said. “It wasn’t anything special. Someone killed Turov, so I checked the security vids. When I saw that the assassin was fooling with their teleport harness, I knew they were adjusting the target coordinates—but not by much. Most rigs have a single button to return home, so I figured they were jumping to another spot aboard our ship.”
“Then you tried to catch her on Gray Deck, because you figured maybe her charge was low?”
“Yes, but I was wrong. They went to Blue Deck instead.”
Fike nodded. “Why did they go down there? Why didn’t they just kidnap Turov in the first place?”
I shrugged helplessly, but someone else cleared her throat. It was Centurion Evelyn Thompson. She was a big-wig on Blue Deck, which is why she’d been invited to the meeting. She and I had a history—but that was years back. Still, she made a point of not meeting my gaze.
“Centurion Thompson?” Fike asked. “You’ve got something to add?”
“We’ve been doing our own investigation. Mind you, we haven’t had time to figure everything out yet.”
“Of course not. Continue.”
She began reading from her tapper. It had to be a prepared statement. That made me wince.
“The Shadowlanders from 91 Aquarii manufacture our revival machines,” she began. “As you know—”
Fike made a spinning motion with his finger, indicating he wanted her to get to the point. I could have told him that sort of thing wasn’t in Evelyn’s nature, but I didn’t want to be rude.
“They hacked into the VIP unit—somehow,” she said. “We still aren’t aware of how such a thing could be done. But, speaking as to their motivations—”
“Centurion,” Fike said, “Turov is missing, and we’re about to make planetfall over a hostile world in… less than two hours. Can you please get to the finish line?”
Evelyn stiffened. “Certainly. I’m trying to say that they killed Galina—our tribune, that is—in order to trace the packets carrying her engrams. Once a person dies, you see, there’s a burst if at all possible to make sure the victim remembers as much as possible—like flushing a buffer, or closing a file.”
“Yes, yes…”
“So, Galina’s death essentially led them to the revival machines, which they vandalized. When she was reborn, they stole her physically and also erased her file—which was up on the console at that point. What it all means is that we can’t print out a new copy of her.”
“And if we do so anyway?”
Evelyn shrugged. “It will be a Galactic crime.”
“So they took our leadership, and they apparently wanted to be thorough,” Fike said, nodding. “We can’t get her back without negotiating with them. She’s a hostage, essentially. They must be looking for leverage in any upcoming conflict. It’s diabolical…”
My hand shot up.
Graves glowered, but I ignored him. Fike flicked his eyes to me, and finally, with seemingly reluctance, he called on me. “You have something else to add, Centurion?”
&nbs
p; “Just this, sir. I’ve been studying up on the Shadowlanders. They’re in constant conflict with the other tribes on their world. In order to maintain order, they frequently hold hostages from ruling families. The bright-side people and the night-dwelling types are all controlled in this fashion.”
Fike appeared surprised. “You researched this? On your own?”
“I surely did, sir.”
That, of course, was a bald-faced lie—but Fike bought it. Natasha had done all the grunt-work concerning 91 Aquarii cultures and habits. She’d come up with this business of hostage-taking, and it had sounded good, so I’d decided to run with it. It never hurt to impress the new boss once the old boss had moved on.
After all this nonsense about research, Evelyn and Graves both looked at me suspiciously. They both knew me better than Fike did, but they didn’t say anything.
“All right…” Fike said, “all right… I’m starting to get the picture. They think they have an edge on us. They think we’ll back down under the threat of a single permed leader. What fools. This is Legion Varus!”
“Uh…” I said, not liking the new direction of this talk.
Fike ignored me. “We’ll invade full-force. We’ll show these insects what it feels like to be crushed under a boot heel. As you said Graves, they’ve given us a firm reason to attack. Once we’re in control of the star system, we’ll deal with the Skay from a position of strength.”
I glanced over toward Graves. He was no longer frowning at me. In fact, I figured he no longer gave two shits about me and my truth-bending ways.
He was beginning to suspect what I already knew: that Fike enjoyed the taste of command. With Turov out of the way, this campaign was his baby. He couldn’t even be blamed for it, as the aliens had struck the critical blow.
I realized as the meeting dragged on into tactics and landing zones, that the Shadowlanders probably believed they’d prevented a war. Ironically, they’d ensured there would be one. If they dared to perm their captive, Fike would be overjoyed. He’d be given free rein to run wild, wrecking their planet.
The part of the situation that bothered me the most involved Galina herself. I hadn’t liked seeing her like that, all naked and drippy and helpless. They’d carried her off right from under my nose. The truth was, it had gotten my blood up. I wanted some pay back—and I wanted Galina back, too.
