by Blaze Ward
“Oh,” Areen’s voice got small. “What if we killed him?”
“Then I own that, Areen,” Kathra replied simply. “It was my decision and my order. Hopefully he’ll forgive me for it instead of demanding that we end his contract and put him down on a TradeStation somewhere to get home on his own.”
“Would he do that?” Areen tore her eyes off Kathra to study the unconscious man laying between them.
Kathra shrugged.
“Nothing in his contract required him to do what I ordered him to do, just as nothing demanded that he beat a pirate to death, Areen,” Kathra said. “This male has shown unsuspected depths and talents, but I don’t know if I pushed him too far. It was necessary, but it might have been too much.”
“I hope he stays.”
“And I,” Kathra agreed. “I’ve known few enough women with his courage.”
“Then let’s not do that again, please?” Daniel groaned in a voice that sounded like the surface of an asteroid.
She looked closely and watched one eye open a slit and then slam shut again.
“Ow.”
“Too bright?” Kathra asked.
“Yes,” the chef replied in a quiet voice.
Kathra reached over and killed the overhead light, leaving only the normal night lights you needed inside a steel box in deep space. The room plummeted into near total darkness.
“Thank you,” he whispered.
“How much did you hear?” Kathra asked.
“Just barely enough,” he murmured. “God, my head hurts. What happened?”
“You tell me, Daniel,” Kathra said. “I watched you touch the corpse. The readings went off the charts, and then you screamed and passed out. We brought you down to your cabin and Areen and I have been waiting for you to wake up.”
“I was drowning,” he said, voice still only barely above a whisper. “But instead of water it was sound. Voices everywhere. Hundreds of them. Maybe millions. Clawing at my mind, demanding I let them in. Then darkness.”
“How are you now?” Kathra asked, aiming the Scrutinizer at the man and scanning him against the unconscious baseline.
Most readings similar. Heart rate elevating as she watched. Body temperature fluctuating.
“My head feels like someone used it to hammer nails into concrete,” he said. “I’m cold. My eyes are incredibly sensitive to light. Is that thing still dead?”
“Last I checked, yes,” Kathra said.
“Could you check again, please?”
Kathra nodded rather than argue. She would need him calm and cooperative right now, in spite of him being a mere man, the kind of creature prone to madness or whimsy.
“Iruoma, what’s your status?” she opened a line to the medbay and asked.
“He’s nearly dried out, from the scanner reading,” the woman’s voice came back quickly. “Smell has almost disappeared as well. How’s Daniel?”
“Awake and complaining of a headache,” Kathra shared a smile with the chef. “I’ll bring him up when he’s ready to walk.”
“Works for me.”
Kathra heard the click of the line closing.
“Daniel?” she asked, sliding her chair back as he seemed ready to at least sit up.
She could always send Areen for a painkiller if he couldn’t walk, just like Ndidi was already preparing to cook everyone dinner with him out of circulation.
She watched him take a deep breath and turn sideways off the bed, feet down and turning to sit upright like he was afraid his own head might fall off if he moved too quickly.
“Wow,” he murmured.
“Too much?” Kathra asked.
“Head hurts. Stomach is reminding me we missed lunch. What time is it?” He looked around.
“Ndidi is cooking everyone dinner now,” Kathra reassured him. “All you have to do is relax and recover.”
“Oh,” he said, snapping himself up onto unsteady feet as she rose, hands out to catch the man if he fell. “I think I can do that.”
17
Silence, mercifully.
Daniel had dreamt of cacophony. Endless waves of voices, most of them not even human. Hands reaching out and just on the verge of touching his skin but falling short.
Immense age. Millennia. Perhaps longer. That was what the creature was.
He stopped walking so suddenly that Areen had a hand on his shoulder and another on his hip, expecting him to pitch over face first onto the deck. He stared blankly up at her and blinked.
“Urid-Varg,” he whispered.
Even over the sound of his heart pounding, Daniel heard Kathra Omezi draw her pistol. Probably centered on the back of his head.
That would make it all better, probably.
“What?” Areen asked, dropping contact and stepping back just far enough and to one side that his brains might splatter on her, but the beam would probably miss.
Assuming the Commander shot him center mass right now.
“That thing had a name,” Daniel forced himself to stand perfectly still. “Urid-Varg.”
“How do you know that, Daniel?” the Commander’s voice was as cold as deep space.
He moved so slowly that they might think he was melting rather than turning, but today was already off the scales for weird, if he could manage to survive it.
It took him nearly two breaths to meet her eyes, intimately aware of the particle cannon in her hands.
“He’s not dead, I think,” Daniel whispered.
His eyes found a spot off to one side, as though he could see through all the intervening bulkheads to where the creature was dead.
“Not dead?” she demanded sharply.
He could also see her hand tightening on the grip of the thing that would kill him shortly. Maybe. Hopefully.
“There’s more than one of them in there,” he tried to explain. “Maybe all of them.”
“All of who?” Areen asked.
Her voice sounded less likely to kill him than the Commander, so Daniel turned to her instead. They had been intimate twice, but that just meant that she knew where he was ticklish, not that she would protect him now.
But she might listen.
Daniel took a deep breath and searched all the languages he knew.
“It has mental powers,” he said. “Had. This Urid-Varg. That was how he did what he did. But the bodies grew old, so he took new ones. I think. Rode them, like one does a horse or a skywyrm. Except he owned their minds as well as their bodies.”
“Does he own you?” Kathra Omezi rasped.
“I don’t think so,” Daniel offered. “I got the impression that being killed surprised him, so he wasn’t ready for a new host.”
“Host?” Omezi asked. “Like a parasite?”
“That’s what he is. Was. Something,” Daniel blinked too rapidly, but the air in here was making him faint. “A parasite. Sitting in his tower, watching each of his victims grow old and die until he takes a new one.”
“How do you know this?” Omezi demanded harshly.
“I don’t know,” Daniel pleaded with her. “It’s in my head, but he’s not. At least I don’t think he is. He almost woke up, but I passed out. Screaming, I think.”
“Screaming,” Areen agreed from off his right flank.
“And now?” Kathra Omezi asked.
“There are a thousand other men in that gem,” Daniel said. “Beings. Minds. All the ones he has captured and ridden over the centuries.”
He put a hand to his forehead, where it felt like Athena was trying to bash her way out with the pommel of a sword.
“I could really use a painkiller, or a drink,” he said, unsure if he was going to his knees, or just collapsing.
One hand found a hallway wall and that seemed like a good idea. Cold transmitted itself up his arm. Kept the darkness at bay.
Daniel blinked. Blinked again. Finally registered where he was standing.
It was as though all emotions had been standing patiently behind a glass wall as thick as he was
tall, as the wall slowly slid back and let them in.
“I know how to kill the salaud,” he whispered, eyes lighting up. Maybe he was angry finally.
Kathra Omezi hadn’t moved, a statue of Artemis carved in onyx. Except her bow was a pistol. And he was about to be turned into an ass. A real one, and not just the one he had been accused of being more than once.
Areen was behind him somewhere, probably lining him up for a long knife to the kidneys.
How the hell had they gotten here? And why me, you branleur? Enculer!
“Daniel?” Omezi asked as he got himself under control.
“He’s in his tower, calling my name,” he said quietly. “Demanding I come rescue him so he can ride me. Use me to reconquer a galaxy that has completely forgotten about him today.”
“How do we stop him?” Kathra asked. “Kill him?”
Daniel drew a bottomless ocean of air into his lungs, trying to drive out the taint of brimstone.
“Iruoma needs to use a waldo or something,” he said. “Nobody dares touch that gem except me. And I don’t dare, either.”
“Why not one of us?” Kathra asked.
“It’s gendered,” Daniel tried to explain. “Male. Tomcat. A female touching it would be…disrupted. Ended. Almost like he was, and almost as fast. Not even tongs will work.”
“Maintenance robot?” Areen asked.
Daniel spun to face her, watching the woman step half a stride back as her hands came up defensively. Her blade was pointed at his right eyeball.
“Yes,” he gasped, freezing in place. “That would work. Can you get one into the medbay, or do we need to very carefully drag him somewhere larger?”
“Why?” Omezi demanded.
“He’s in his tower, but we can burn the moat bridge,” Daniel found himself explaining.
The words barely made any more sense to him than they apparently did to the women, but he could see the entire thing in his head.
If he trusted his own mind right now.
Hopefully, none of the voices had managed to grab hold. Or he could just ask the Commander to shoot him now. She would do that for him. Might not even realize what a favor it would be.
“Oh, I know,” she smiled suddenly. “But I won’t.”
Daniel watched in shock as she holstered her pistol and stood straighter.
“Huh?” he asked.
“You’re muttering out loud, Daniel,” she replied. “One continuous monologue that is absolutely a chef from Genarde and not an alien creature.”
“Oh.”
Oh.
He remembered to breathe.
“I’m scared,” he admitted.
He could do that. All of these women were warriors born and proven, and already considered maleness to be a much weaker gender. They wouldn’t be insulted by male fragility.
“It’s okay, Daniel,” Kathra Omezi said. “We’ll protect you. Let’s get to the medbay and take a look at things.”
Another breath. Less brimstone. Maybe more air. Less screaming in his head, like someone had loosened a band squeezing his eyeballs backwards into his brain.
He just had to put one foot in front of the other. Make his way to medbay and confront an undead, psychic vampire that had already decided Daniel Lémieux would be his next victim.
Piece of cake. Right?
18
Erin looked around the crowded medbay with a jaundiced eye. Daniel refused to even set foot inside the room, standing instead out in the corridor with the hatch locked open where he had a view. Areen had been ordered, by Daniel himself, to knock him unconscious if he started acting weird.
Nobody had a good definition of weird.
Erin really couldn’t argue with any of them, though, after all she had heard.
Kathra and Iruoma were on the side of the bed closer to the hatch. Armed and keyed up for violence.
Erin was at the foot of the bed, out of the direct line of fire if violence happened, but close enough to the robot on her left to control it verbally and keep a close watch on everything. With a knife in her hand in case the dead thing on the bed in front of her stopped being dead.
They could have fit more of the comitatus in here, but this left everybody space to maneuver if things got strange. Stranger. Eight more of the women were out in the hallway, prepared for whatever Kathra thought might happen. Or Daniel, but his explanations made even less sense that Kathra’s.
At least Kathra’s instructions were easy. Kill it if it moved. Take Daniel down alive.
If possible.
The maintenance robot was an upright bollard on treads, like an old-fashioned, four-sided column about a meter and a half tall. Magnets in the treads could be locked to hold it to the outside of the ship if they couldn’t pull a Spectre into a bay for repair easily. A dozen arms of different sizes could be deployed out from the trunk to do anything from lifting a heavy piece of steel to soldering a pocket vox.
“System, come live,” Erin commanded.
The bot lit up and rotated its head once clockwise to measure the room. The brains were in the trunk, so the head part was just a pair of oversized optical sensors with big, glass lenses like chameleon eyes, moving independently of each other.
“Ready,” the bot’s voice said in a calm, mechanical voice.
They had once considered reprogramming all the bots to sound like women, but it was easier to differentiate voices inside a repair space if they hadn’t, so they didn’t.
“Extend arm number four for grasping,” Erin commanded.
Daniel had explained it all to her, but he was also on the soft edge of hysterical right now, so she was only doing it his way for now. She had other options handy.
One of the medium-sized arms came out, ending in a flat hand with four fingers arranged zygodactylly, like the feet of a bird facing each other two and two.
“Identify target,” Erin continued. “Power source on the body in front of you, at the top of the torso. White light. Platinum setting.”
“Target identified,” the mechanical voice replied.
“Scan the target for attachments,” Erin said.
A second hand deployed, telescoped up to nearly the ceiling, and then looked down. Erin was reminded of a scorpion’s tale.
“Target embedded in organic frame,” the bot said. “To a depth of seven-sixteenths.”
Stupid machine had been stolen originally from some mechanics in the Uwalu system before Kathra had traded for it. Hadn’t been worth the trouble to reprogram the stupid imperials back to standard metrics that the rest of the civilized galaxy used now.
Seven-sixteenths? So roughly eleven millimeters? Must have carved away bone at the top of the keel and replaced it with this thing.
Erin idly wondered if any of this tech was somehow organic, rather than mechano-electrical. Be a bitch to fix everything if that bastard had his own physics on top of everything else.
“Detect life signs,” Erin ordered the dumb bot.
Might as well get it locked in now that the thing was deader than a white dwarf.
“No life signs detected,” the bot responded. “Anomalous power source noted.”
“Daniel?” Erin called across the space. “Tower, moat, village?”
“More or less,” he called back in a shaky voice.
She suspected they were going to have to get the man drunk later, just so he could sleep. That, or hit him with enough drugs to drop a moose in its tracks.
“System, scan the gem and the setting as separate entities,” Erin said aloud. “Confirm.”
Or something. Daniel was having a hard time just standing still. Asking him to do orbital geometrics was probably more than he had in him today. And Kathra wanted it done now for reasons she hadn’t explained.
Didn’t have to. She was The Commander.
The gripper arm moved forward, over the creature’s chest, and then turned on an elbow to point at the thing’s head from just above his belly button. Assuming it had one.
The
square, blunt fingertips had lights on the ends. And other things. Those came live.
“Confirmed,” the bot said. “Setting contains the gem, but does not intrude into its volume.”
Huh. Just like a regular gem, if you wanted a glowing, white diamond as far across as her palm and almost as thick as her hand. Set in platinum, but ForgeStar routinely found interesting metals to smelt down into bars as the tribal squadron mined the shattered remains of proto-planets in uninhabited systems. Platinum didn’t impress Erin, except that with a little rhodium and some chrome, it would retain a mirror-polish for an inordinately long time.
“Daniel?” Erin called.
“It’s not really a gem,” he said with a shrug in his voice. “Or rather, expect a hardness rating of about sixteen and the ductility of good steel.”
Was that even possible? But then, was any of this?
“System, use a wedge to separate the gem from the setting,” Erin commanded the thing.
Another arm came out as the first gripper rotated over and above the stone. At least if the dead thing woke up now, he’d be more or less pinned in place by the bot’s arms.
Long enough for one of comitatus to kill it.
The second arm ended in a powered wedge. Just the sort of tool you needed to pry open something that had gotten slammed shut too hard by a rough landing or wild-ass maneuvering to avoid someone flying the wrong way.
Erin glanced over at Iruoma and watched the other woman’s eyes dilate slightly with blush and look down, as they shared a rude memory.
Gripper hand took hold of the gem. It wasn’t round, but maybe a square with enough facets to make it look round. She didn’t do stones, so she wasn’t up on all the nomenclature of the things. Didn’t matter, either.
Get a good handle. Pull. Slip a jimmy in and twist slightly.
Sure enough. The second hand entered at the bottom and tapped itself right into the tiny gap where the stone was resting on the setting.
