Rebel Tribe (Osprey Chronicles Book 1)

by Ramy Vance

  “What is it doing?” Despite his proclaimed revulsion, Toner pushed himself a little closer to the water bear.

  Baby leaned over the thick gel of her petri dish and hummed. The vibration knocked lichen off her face, and she waved the dish through the air, catching the little flakes in the gel.

  “Hey.” Toner swam a little closer. “What do you have there, huh?”

  Baby growled and clutched the dish against her chest. She lifted her head to Toner, her face-hole dilating to show thousands of tiny sharp teeth.

  “Jeez.” Toner pushed himself away, hands up defensively. “Okay, fine. I’m not going to mess with your plate.”

  Jaeger pulled herself closer to Baby as the water bear turned her attention back to the petri dish. Her growling fell back to a pleasant hum. “Babydoll?” Jaeger asked gently. “What do you have there?”

  Baby gently nuzzled Jaeger’s chest, allowing her to lean forward and take a second, closer look at the dish. If she squinted, she thought she saw tiny dots swarming around the lichen flakes.

  She laughed and scratched the top of Baby’s head. Satisfied, Baby carefully replaced the lid of the dish and tucked it away again. Then she leaned against Jaeger, purring.

  “They’re her kids.” Jaeger grinned at Toner. “She’s a momma bear.”

  “Of course she is.” Deciding that he would have to fetch his own damn steak, Toner slipped by her and fiddled with the fabricator.

  For the first time in her brief second life, Jaeger felt the warm seed of peace nestling in her belly, nurtured by a generous helping of biscuits and gravy. She let out a satisfied sigh and let herself drift in the lounge, stretched alongside the warm flank of a purring water bear. “One hundred and thirty percent better,” she amended. Her eyes fluttered shut. “Now spare me a twenty-minute nap, and I’ll be ready to take on the world.”

  “I do believe that, whatever upset the foreign AI, it was in No-A,” Virgil said.

  True to her word, Jaeger had roused, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, after a power nap. She thunked through the stacks, studying the designations. Male. Cold storage augmentation. Tardigrade, subtype 6-A.

  Ahead, the shelves opened into the cathedral section. Toner drifted around the dais, examining the human-sized caskets. “These look like the embryo cold storage units,” he called. He tapped the glass. “But I think they’re empty.”

  Jaeger thunked her way up the steps to study the consoles.

  “What do you think, wunderkind? Is this where we grow babies into real people?”

  “Probably. Maybe more than that. What can you tell me, Virgil?”

  “Accessing files. As with most other systems, the No-A database has partial corruption.”

  “That’s all right,” she said, with patience to spare now that she’d gotten a good meal and a nap. “Work with what you have.”

  “The inventory list includes twelve incubation tanks suitable for humanoid forms, as well as three tardigrade activation tanks on the lower levels. Seven of the tanks appear to have taken some damage and gone into auto-shutoff, but the rest appear to be fully functioning and ready to activate crew members.”

  There was a brief pause. Then, sounding almost surprised, Virgil added, “Activation seems to require very little power. You could activate several crew members right now without significantly slowing down my repair operations.”

  “What do you mean?” Toner eyed the upper balconies. “Do you have a backup crew in cold storage somewhere in here?”

  “Yes,” Virgil said slowly. “In a manner of speaking. Standard activation protocol appears to include three decades of rapid-aging growth and neurological imprinting.”

  “Holy crap.” Jaeger stared at the thousands and thousands of embryonic storage lockers around them. “Virgil, how long does an activation cycle take?”

  “Five hours, thirty-seven minutes, fifty-six seconds.”

  “That’s…” Jaeger let out a low whistle. “Wow. They weren’t kidding about state-of-the-art gene editing.”

  “What?” Toner asked warily, as if afraid he might have to bully a layman’s explanation out of her once more.

  “I think those are the crew.” Jaeger gestured at the lockers. “They’re modified human embryos ready to be plugged into an acceleration tank. Bake for six hours and boom, you’ve got yourself a genetically modified super-crewman, with all the knowledge and training of a mechanic or engineer or biologist downloaded directly into his brain.”

  Toner lifted his cool gaze from the tank and stared at Jaeger. “And kind of a blank slate otherwise? Maybe with some basic pop-culture knowledge thrown in for flavor, but otherwise without any personal memories?”

  Strange how your stomach could still drop in a place without gravity. Strange how a few pointed words could turn the stomach into a knot so tight it threatened to push up the pulp of what had been a fabulous meal and now felt like a sour, wet bowling ball in the guts.

  It took a moment for Jaeger’s mind to start churning out resistance to Toner’s chilling implication.

  She swallowed the threat of vomit and shook her head. “No. I don’t think that’s us. I’ve got the video journals, remember?”

  “Oh, sure. You had a life before you became a space ranger.” Toner’s gaze fell back to the empty tank. He pressed his hand against the glass and sighed. “But I can’t exactly go looking for my bunk now that we’ve sealed off the general crew quarters, can I? I mean this—” he rubbed his gums and the too-sharp teeth they held “—isn’t exactly standard issue. Smells like genetic modification to me.”

  “‘Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither,’” Jaeger said gently.

  Toner cracked a grin, showing off all those inhuman teeth. “That’s true, too.”

  “You have a past,” Jaeger assured him.

  “Probably.” Toner rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m definitely modified. No denying that. But probably not one of these test-tube babies. Probably they wouldn’t bother programming King Lear into a pair of combat boots. Still. I’ll feel better when I find an old holo-recording of me on the high-school stage, screaming into a recorded storm.” His grin turned wistful. “And worse. I doubt I was a very good actor.”

  Jaeger wished he had normal teeth. She hated that every time she looked at him, she felt a little shudder of revulsion. Then she wondered if that was the point. If the genetic artists that designed the vampire template had intentionally made them look a little upsetting—just enough to keep juicy humans from getting too comfortable around them.

  “We should activate some of the crew,” she said, desperate for a change of subject. “We still have a lot of work to do on the ship, and it will go faster with help. Besides, if that saucer finds us again, having another pair of hands crewing the combat stations could mean the difference between life and death.”

  “Agreed.”

  “I’ve found a few possible solutions to our raw supplies problem,” Virgil said. “I’ve sent the proposals to your personal computer.”

  Jaeger brightened, latching onto the good news. “Perfect. I’ll grab more coffee and go over it in the lounge.” She nodded to Toner. “How about you recruit us an engineer and a combat specialist?”

  He drew himself up, offended. “I’m a combat specialist.”

  Thinking fast, she flashed him a cheerful grin. “And you’re so great to have around that I wouldn’t mind having another one.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “Looks like she made it out alive after all.”

  Seeker had his doubts. Tribe Six had been in a bad way when last he saw it.

  He’d blacked out temporarily after the raptor made her escape. The feedback flare from enemy lances against the observation deck had, unsurprisingly, also fried his systems, but not beyond the capacity of the limited ship’s AI to repair. With some help from his codebook, he’d been able to get the basic systems running again. His screens had come online to show him drifting in the debris field of the breached c
rew lounge. No whisper of Tribe Six or flying frying pan on scanners.

  Now, he studied Tribe Six as she drifted in the faint haze at the outer edge of the wormhole’s accretion disk. Once he’d gotten engines up and running, it had taken another hour or so to do a close sweep of the disk and locate the bird. As he’d hoped, the radiation camouflage did its job quite well. If he hadn’t known to look for her, he might never have found her.

  A squad of repair droids, tiny at this distance, crawled like lice over Tribe Six’s hull, spraying lines of emergency sealant over a fresh collection of battle scars.

  Seeker frowned at the busy droids. Sealant was a temporary measure—good for patching up a hull breach in an emergency, but it would crumple like paper under the strain of anything but the slowest of thruster power. Those droids should have been patching the breaches with reinforced alloy plates instead of foam. Even Seeker, who knew he was no engineer, knew that.

  Tribe Six must not have had enough raw material to fabricate true hull patches, and with that much damage, she wouldn’t last more than a few seconds at near-light speed—to say nothing of withstanding another battle or a trip through the wormhole.

  He tapped his fingers on the console. The raptor’s running lights were active, too, illuminating the call sign painted over her command column. The sight of her made Seeker’s cold, dead heart swell with pride. She was a miracle of engineering, even hurt like she was.

  And she was stranded, alone in unknown waters, without enough raw material to patch her hull breaches adequately.

  His comms screen blinked, informing him that it had finally detected Tribe Six’s local AI network. It offered to make a connection.

  Seeker considered the screen before denying the request. He activated the thrusters and brought his fighter within a thousand kilometers of the raptor. If the ship’s AI or comms network noticed his approach, it gave no indication.

  Either the hole had screwed up their sensors even worse than his, or the person at the helm was incompetent. Neither option boded well.

  Seeker cut his thrusters and let inertia carry him the last few hundred kilometers, right to the raptor’s port fighter bay. He drifted there, carefully hugging the hull. As long as he avoided a direct line of sight to the raptor’s sensor arrays, he was quite literally beneath her radar.

  Seeker studied the sealed cargo bay door looming ahead of him. He could call and request permission to dock, but his gut told him to lay as low as possible for as long as he could.

  He dipped a finger into his breast pocket and withdrew the vape pen, which he stuck angrily between his teeth, and the tattered Twelve Tribes codebook. The pages were comfortably worn, yellowed and dog-eared, stained in places with what could have been coffee or tobacco juice. The little book, no bigger than a pack of playing cards, had a nostalgic, comforting feel.

  Pinching the fragile paper between two rough fingers, Seeker began flipping through the index until he found master override codes for docking bay doors. The right override code, broadcast to the docking bay receiver, would open the blast doors without informing Ops.

  Seeker found the string of code and started punching it into his computer.

  Seeker didn’t understand what was going on in that ship, but she needed help. The people on board could be friends or foes. He would find out soon. The ship herself, that was the lost lamb in his motto—injured and limping out here in the wilderness where strange and hostile beasties roamed.

  One way or another, he was going to get in there and bring her home.

  Virgil had assembled a list of the raw materials required to make the Osprey wormhole-ready. Jaeger stared at the long, long list and despaired.

  “We can synthesize most of the required materials by recycling supplemental equipment,” Virgil said. “However, I don’t have the capability to synthesize the required iridium and lead, especially not at the quantities required to patch the hull adequately. The breaches aren’t massive, but they’re unfortunately at critical structure points. If we don’t patch them, the ship will not survive the extreme forces you expect to find within the hole, even with the proper shield modulation.”

  “Some of the interior bulkheads are iridium-reinforced.” Jaeger’s voice came out in a whisper. “What if we tore those out and fed them to the synthesizers?”

  “I’ve already run the calculations,” Virgil said mercilessly. “If we cannibalized every single part of this ship except for the hull, engines, shield generators, and essential life support, there wouldn’t be enough to make the hull stable once more.”

  Jaeger dropped her head against the cabinet and closed her eyes.

  Breathe. One step at a time.

  “The aliens fucked us,” Toner said flatly. “They didn’t get to destroy Noah’s ark, but they still fucked us.”

  Jaeger could almost hear the silent accusation in his voice. If they had allowed the aliens to destroy No-A, they might have left it at that. Jaeger would still be able to patch the hull. They might still have a hope of getting back to known space.

  At the low, low cost of nearly four hundred thousand potential humans.

  “Assuming your goal is to return through the wormhole alive and with your critical cargo intact, most certainly,” Virgil agreed.

  Jaeger wondered if she would have made that trade if she had known that all those lives were only bundles of cells, without memories or families or anything she could conceive of as feelings.

  Maybe. It was hard to say. The Tribes were on a mission to save humanity from a dying Earth. Those embryos might represent more than simple bundles of cells. They might represent one of the few seeds of humankind left. The last of a dwindling number of chances her race had of settling, and growing, and building something safe and stable and lasting.

  “Well,” Toner said, philosophically, “Osprey’s a seed ship anyway. Her whole goal is to find a new planet and start to build a new civilization. We could continue with that mission. We simply have to stay on this side of the wormhole.”

  “We are thousands of light-years away from known space,” Jaeger said hoarsely.

  “I mean, it sucks, but…” Toner shrugged. “So? Doesn’t mean we can’t continue with the mission. We’re just gonna be the ones that wandered off and got away.”

  Jaeger squirted the last of the lukewarm coffee down the back of her throat and commanded the drink dispenser to make her a double macchiato. “Half the point is to establish a base colony and summon the remnants of humanity to join us. We’re supposed to be building a trail for others to follow. Once that hole collapses, there’s no telling where or when another might develop. The others won’t be able to follow us.”

  “You didn’t seem all that gung-ho on the mission before,” Toner pointed out. “Let’s just mosey onward until we find a nice little planet and build our empire. A race of superhumans ruled by the ferocious golden-eyed queen and her vampire advisor.”

  Jaeger shook her head. “No.”

  “It’s all right. Denial is more than a river in Egypt, but it takes a while to swim.”

  “Shut up, Toner!” Jaeger’s shout made the drifting chunks of foam wobble and waver. Back in her nest, Baby stirred and rumbled. Toner stared at Jaeger, blue eyes wide and mouth clamped shut as she kept shouting. “Some of us have family they desperately want to get back to!”

  The drink machine offered Jaeger a fresh bottle of piping hot macchiato. She slapped it away, sending it tumbling end over end through the lounge.

  She spun and marched for the nearest AI interface. “Virgil, are there any comets or asteroids in range with the required materials?”

  There was a very long pause before the speaker activated. “The hole radiation is interfering with my scanners—”

  “Then take us out of the accretion disk,” Jaeger snapped. “As far as it takes to get good readings of everything in the neighborhood. Well, why not?” she shot over her shoulder as Toner was opening his mouth to protest. Toner’s mouth snapped shut.

&nbs
p; “You said we were fucked anyway. No matter what we wind up doing, Toner, we’re going to have to patch the hull. That foam will not last. Who knows? If we run into the saucer again, maybe they’ll be more willing to negotiate.”

  “Activating thrusters,” Virgil said tiredly. “It will take some time to clear the radiation, and I’ll need to redirect resources to repairing the long-range scanners.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know, Captain. I’m hardly the wormhole-radiation expert.”

  “Ballpark it, Virgil,” she growled.

  “Three or four hours.”

  It wasn’t terribly reassuring, but it was something. Jaeger turned from the interface and met Toner’s eye. She slumped. “One step at a time,” she said. “If we find a few mineral deposits, we can still do this. We still have a chance.”

  Toner hesitated. “Okay. If you’re determined about this, I can respect that. There’s just one more problem.”

  “What?”

  “I hate to sound like a spoilsport, Captain, but I’ve been thinking…what if something chased us through the wormhole? Look, all of the escape pods are gone, right? The ship took some damage. I wonder if we got into some kind of fight on the other side. What if whatever we were fighting is still there, waiting for us to come back?”

  Jaeger let her eyes fall shut. She nodded reluctantly. It was a fair point. They couldn’t go through all this trouble just to get blasted like a carnival whack-a-mole the instant they returned to known space.

  “I’ll work on it,” she murmured. “I think…there have to be some evasive maneuvers we can dig up to get us out of Dodge if it’s still hot on the other side.”

  “Sounds risky.”

  “Yes.” She sighed. “But staying here means never seeing…” she swallowed, fighting back the stinging image of a golden-eyed little girl beaming into an old camera. “Never seeing another human again. Not one that we didn’t raise in a test tube, at least.”