Humans

by A. G. Claymore

  Siri was still up against the bulkhead with a large wrench in her hand, the handle’s pointy end held out toward Davu. She shot a confused glance at Gleb, not knowing whether he was there to help her or simply join Davu and his minions.

  “You again!” Davu sneered at Gleb. “If you promise to behave, you can watch from there!”

  “Are you out of your fornicating mind?” Siri demanded. “You move one step closer and I’m gonna smash your head open!”

  “And then,” Davu replied, “Mel, here, is gonna suffer an ‘accidental’ but entirely fatal suit-overload. That what you want?”

  The room was a riot of emotions. Gleb felt Davu’s sickening anticipation for what he had planned, Mel’s shame at being the leverage that would make it all possible and Siri’s growing resignation.

  “Fornication!” she cursed, a little too appropriately, tossing the wrench aside. She activated the shutdown for her suit.

  Gleb was too busy to notice. He’d managed to locate the right spot in each of the four intruders and he willed their arteries to pinch shut, drawing all of the necessary heat from Davu for the difficult attempt.

  Just doing this on one target was hard enough but four was damned hard and the movement of physical matter took more energy than one might expect. He only needed a few seconds to shut down their brains but he held on for a little longer this time.

  He wanted to make sure it was permanent.

  He finally let go to find Siri, naked but still in the foot-pads of her now-folded suit. She was staring at the four bodies on the floor in clear bewilderment and not a little relief.

  He shrugged when she turned to him. “A sight like that could give any man a heart attack,” he told her with a friendly grin. “Not that I’m complaining,” he added significantly, “but I think you can go ahead and close up your suit now.”

  She twitched her heels as Gleb walked over to kick the suit-lock away from Mel’s back.

  Mel climbed back to his feet. “That was you,” he insisted, “but what the hells did you just do?”

  “I really don’t have time to go into it, at the moment. The question we need to ask right now is whether you trust me.”

  Mel and Siri exchanged confused glances.

  “Right, fair enough!” Gleb conceded. “I’ve only been here a few days. Maybe a better question is do you want to survive this situation?”

  They both looked down at the bodies.

  “They’re dead?” Mel asked.

  “They sure as hells aren’t taking a nap.”

  “Yeah, well…” Mel shrugged at Siri. “Sure, living sounds like a better idea than getting shot.”

  “Right.” Gleb grabbed the wrench from the floor and smashed the power couple for the data storage containment unit. With the magnetic fields collapsed, the data disappeared in milli-seconds. “Let’s get moving.” He tossed the wrench.

  “Stay calm,” he said on his way out the hatch. “The state you two are in, you’ll draw Quailu like cheevers to fresh grain.”

  “Where are we going?” Siri asked, rushing to catch up.

  “Mess hall for emergency rations,” he said, glancing to make sure Mel was keeping up, “then main comms to blind the bridge.”

  He held out an arm to stop them. A Quailu came strolling out from a side corridor, browsing messages on his wrist-holo. He couldn’t help but feel the heightened emotions from Mel and Siri and he looked up in alarm, one hand reaching for his pistol.

  Gleb twitched. He couldn’t think of any other description for it. It was if he’d suddenly jumped forward in time a few seconds. He was even a couple of steps closer to the Quailu, who now had his weapon pointed straight at him.

  “What are you filthy apes up to?” the junior officer demanded. “I can feel the mischief coming off you like reactor leak!”

  Gleb tried to reach out for the Qauilu’s cranial artery but it wasn’t working. He felt a momentary flare of panic. To experience the kind of abilities he had, only to lose them, was horrifying, even worse than going blind.

  He crushed the emotion, seeing the reaction to his fear in the Quailu’s eyes. He could feel the alien’s contempt, his curiosity…

  He could feel it!

  Gleb reached out again. He killed him quickly, starving his brain of oxygen, and snatching the pistol from his hand as the Quailu started slumping to the deck. He shivered, having forgotten to use his victim’s heat, rather than his own.

  Is this connected to what I did earlier, sabotaging the door? he wondered. I seem to be two people in one brain…

  And the other person in his mind didn’t seem to have access to his extraordinary abilities.

  He shook his head angrily. This wasn’t the time to dig into it. He was stumbling around the ship like a rank amateur.

  Detailed planning may not be his strong suit but he at least had to stop acting reflexively. He pushed the Quailu corpse over to sit with its back to the bulkhead, arms draped over its knees.

  Fortunately, they were on the middle watch and the ship was quiet but there were still three more Quailu that ended up sitting on the decking in the same pose as the first. Fortunately, he’d managed to remain in control of his mind the entire time.

  When they reached the mess hall, Gleb had to repeat the performance with a junior lieutenant who’d demanded to know why they thought they could just wander into the mess outside of meal-times. This time, Gleb left the unfortunate fellow in his seat, hands on his knees.

  Mel started shoving ration packs and water into a large duffel. “What the hells did you pose them for?”

  “They like to claim they aren’t superstitious,” Gleb replied, staring down at his latest victim, “but we’ve seen a major lord launch an ill-advised invasion against Sandrak based on the blatherings of an oracle.”

  Mel stared at him until Siri grabbed his shoulder and pulled him over to a meal supplement dispenser. “Who are you?” he demanded.

  “Their empathic connection to each other gives them a healthy respect for the supernatural,” Gleb continued as if Mel hadn’t spoken. He nodded at the body sitting in front of a cooling coffee. “When they start finding crewmen dead with no explainable reason, all posed the same, it’ll spook the hells out of them.”

  He turned and swept past them, ignoring the look they were giving each other. “That’s gonna have to be enough food. We need to keep moving.”

  He led the way up to main-comms.

  “Where the hells have you scum been?” a Quailu senior lieutenant demanded when they walked into main comms. “The bridge holos are riddled with glitch-haze. By the gods! I’ll see to it that all three of you are…”

  He slumped to the deck.

  Gleb raised an eyebrow at Mel who was dragging the officer over to one of the workstation chairs. The other man took the Quailu’s weapon and posed his hands on his knees.

  “What?” Mel demanded, shoving the pistol into his belt next to two others he’d already taken.

  Gleb held his hand out. “His pistol is a family heirloom,” Gleb explained. “It should do nicely.”

  He took the weapon from Mel and put it back in the dead officer’s hand. Putting the Quailu’s finger on the trigger, he fired one shot at the storage containment for the main system.

  The data scattered and the collator algorithms, a finely crafted network of sub-atomic spins, lost cohesion. Data from the sensor suite, collectors mounted on the hull, had nowhere to go. It just routed into this chamber and returned to relatively homogeneous energy.

  The ship was now blind.

  “Good luck figuring this out,” Mel muttered as Gleb put the dead officer’s hand, still holding the weapon, back on his lap.

  “Hangar,” Gleb said, leading the way back out into the corridor.

  They posed a petty officer at the bottom of the main ramp and a security NCO at the entry to the hangar.

  Gleb peered around the corner of the larger cargo door leading into the hangar. “Fornication!” he muttered. “Two Humans in
there with a Quailu officer.”

  He hadn’t minded killing Davu and his cronies but they had it coming. He didn’t mind killing the Quailu because he figured their species, with a few exceptions, could do with a little thinning out. The Humans in the hangar were another matter.

  He didn’t want to kill them but they’d be executed for sure if they lived while their Quailu PO didn’t. He stifled the urge to indulge in further useless curses.

  “Mel,” he whispered, “none of us are in the system, right? None of the Human crewmembers?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So they won’t know who’s missing when we’re gone?”

  “I doubt they’d bother trying to figure it out. We’re disposable.”

  Gleb had an idea of how to escape without getting the two Humans in the hangar executed. It was a bit over the top but the idea amused him and he couldn’t let it go. “When the Humans freeze, approach them from behind and tie their wrists behind their backs. Don’t let them see you. Put them face-down on the deck and make absolutely no sound. Stay with them; don’t come close to the officer. If he approaches, move away.”

  “Okay.” Mel stared at him, plainly wanting to ask several questions. “Then what?”

  Gleb grinned. “Then I use the superstitious tendencies that lurk just below the surface of every Quailu.”

  He checked again. The officer was standing at the hangar bay’s main launch portal, staring out at the other ships while the two Humans were moving cargo to a staging pad. He concentrated on them first, freezing them in place.

  Mel and Siri moved as quickly as they could though the rubber pads on the soles of their armored feet could only attenuate so much sound. It kept them to just under a jogging pace.

  They reached their targets, securing their wrists with the ubiquitous cable-tie dispensers that any comms tech had on their suit. They pushed both prisoners down onto their faces and Gleb released them to concentrate on the Quailu, who was starting to turn at the noise made by the surprised and now-released Humans.

  He’d been stopped halfway and couldn’t see past the pallets that hid the Humans. Gleb swung wide to get behind him unseen. He skirted around a row of shuttles, coming out behind the Quailu, who was starting to shiver, partly from fear and partly from the loss of body-heat.

  Gleb shifted into character.

  He was Nergal in the flesh, the lord of the underworld, the god of war and misery. The kind of god who’d kill you as soon as look at you.

  For Gleb, that last part wasn’t so much of a stretch…

  He wanted to kill this interfering Quailu, to rend his flesh from his bones for daring to get in his way. He let his mind explore the many ways he could destroy this puny creature in front of him.

  And he didn’t try to hide it from the immobile officer. The fear washed back over Gleb in shuddering waves.

  And then it happened again. He was suddenly two paces closer to the officer and he could feel nothing from him.

  Gleb had to improvise and quickly. He drew back a fist and smashed it against the rear of the officer’s skull, just where the transitory lobe connected the two hemispheres. He wasn’t sure whether the Quailu had survived the blow but he couldn’t wait for his ability to re-surface.

  He waved Mel and Siri over. “I don’t suppose either of you are flight rated? Never mind,” he whispered as they both shook their heads in surprised negation. “I actually had this part planned out. Get in that one.” He waved them up the ramp of a shuttle and followed them in.

  He ran to the pilot’s seat and opened the formation menu, setting the shuttle next to them to follow mode, a useful bit of programming for when a pilot found himself too injured to fly on his own. He fired up the engines on their shuttle and the other one whined to life as well.

  “Strap in, folks!” He took over manual control, not wanting any more interaction with the ship’s systems than was absolutely necessary. He managed to wobble his way across the deck without incident until he was passing out through the main launch portal. The belly of the craft hit the lower lintel of the opening with a screech, the following shuttle doing the same.

  Once outside, he parked them close to the hull of the Deathstalker before getting up and running back to his shuttle’s main data terminal. He linked it up with his suit. “Initiate scout-ship,” he said, activating the code that Noa had diffidently suggested might come in handy.

  The three helmets snapped shut and his two friends started with alarm as the hull began melting.

  “Get over here,” he urged. “Get between the attachments for the drive mounts. Those are the only sections of floor you can count on right now.”

  They didn’t need to be told twice. Having spent most of their time in the belly of a heavy cruiser, they weren’t terribly comfortable with the idea of a melting shuttle.

  “I’m turning these two shuttles into a fast scout-ship,” he told them, mostly to distract them from their fear.

  “So you have time to answer a few questions, then?” Mel asked, reaching out to grab a bundle of conduits that snaked their way down the outer shell of the pitch drive.

  “We do have a few minutes,” Gleb admitted.

  “You’re not one of us, are you?”

  Gleb chuckled. “Well, I’m not a free-born, if that’s what you mean.”

  “You’re from one of Mishak’s ships?” Siri asked in amazement. “Did you desert?”

  “No, I volunteered for this.”

  “No,” Mel countered. “There’s no way they’d trust a Human so far from their control, not even for free-borns and we get far more latitude than you.”

  “Do you really?” Gleb looked at them, waited until he could feel the doubt creeping in. “You’ve never been aboard a Human ship. All you know is what sphincters like Davu tell you.”

  The two shuttles were merging. The hulls opened up to show the drive from the other vessel sliding toward them, pulled in by long tendrils of nanites that flowed to join the growing deck plating as the gap closed.

  “A Human ship, you said?” Siri said. “You meant us to pick up on that, didn’t you?”

  The hull was mostly closed now and the fine-tuning was well underway, placing seats and terminals from the old shuttles in their new locations.

  “I did,” he replied simply, “and you did. So you can both count on employment when we get out of here because I like clever people and I can always find a use for good comms techs.”

  An icon began blinking in his HUD. “That should do for now,” he told them, stepping away from the drive. “Keep your suits buttoned until we get a chance to run some checks. For now we’ll just confirm the base calibration on our engines and then take our chances on a full acceleration run. I’d rather die trying to escape than die on my knees in that fornicating dung-hole of a cruiser!”

  He stepped to the newly placed data terminal, now between the two drives. The diagnostic showed an acceptable level of field coordination between the two pitch-drives. Gleb sighed. It also showed what Noa considered to be an acceptable output level for the grav compensators.

  He remembered the stories from early tests on the scout class. “Hope you two have strong stomachs,” he warned. “It’s gonna get pretty uncomfortable but you should survive, as long as you don’t drown in your own vomit.”

  “Well,” Siri said, moving over to the co-pilot seat and activating the restraints, “I suppose that passes for a reassuring chat where Gleb’s from.”

  Gleb patted the patrol commander’s seat, set between the pilot chairs but set back far enough to allow the pilots to squeeze past. “Sit here, Mel.”

  Gleb slid into the pilot’s seat and activated the restraints. He looked back to ensure Mel was secured. “Deep breaths, stay calm,” he advised, turning back to activate the nav panel. He selected Henx 12 as his primary destination. “This is gonna feel weird.”

  He activated the course and the small craft leapt away from the Deathstalker. He could see Siri’s arms come up to protec
t herself from the expected collision as the other ships of the fleet came racing their way at horrific speed.

  They darted around the ships, their bodies being pulled in several directions at once as the grav emitters struggled to keep up with the wild variations in acceleration. Then they were clear of the fleet and racing out toward the distant point of light that was Henx 12.

  It was a gas giant, which was why Gleb had selected it. If they picked up a pursuit, they should be able to shake it off in the dense gasses or at least wait until their pursuers’ patience ran out.

  “Feels like my chest wants to get up and walk around while the rest of me wants to stay put,” Mel complained.

  “Yeah, we use more emitters in this kind of ship,” Gleb explained. “Didn’t really want to waste time scavenging the other shuttles for spare parts, though. We were in kind of a rush to get out of there.”

  “Not a problem,” Mel replied, “just saying…”

  “We’re getting a hail from the fleet,” Siri announced.

  “That’s fine,” Gleb told her. “We’ll be in the soup in another six minutes. We’ll ignore them until we can’t hear them.” He pulled up a small holo of the sector and put it between himself and Siri. “Still no pursuit. I think we’re clear.”

  “What’s the plan?” Mel asked. “We hide in the gas for a while but what then?”

  “We’ll head to Henx Prime.” Gleb nearly lost his lunch and had to take a moment to bring his rebellious stomach under control. “You guys will be too recognisable so I’ll have to go on to the next phase alone.”

  Siri’s frown was barely visible through her visor. “How are we any more recognisable than you?”

  “You’d be broadcasting thoughts about your daring escape from the Deathstalker,” he explained. “The minute one of you got near a Quailu, they’d sense that something wasn’t right and they’d be on you like a patch of prime sweet-leaf.”

  “I still don’t see how that makes you…”