Triorion Omnibus

by L. J. Hachmeister

  “Enjoying the atmosphere,” Reht said, cocking his head at the nude dancers parading across the lower stage. The hooting and cheering only escalated as the dancers paired off and teased the crowd.

  Reht returned his attention to Sebbs. The Joliak’s nose twitched continuously. The dumb chak probably burnt out his nostrils sniffing crystal. “Be a doll and lower the knife, will ya?”

  Sebbs thought about it before slowly replacing his weapon on his belt. “Don’t know who to trust these days.”

  “Ain’t that the truth.” Reht nudged the prostitute draped over the table with his hip. “You had enough money to rent a booth, but now you’re ripping off the girl?” Only the gurgling sounds coming from her throat suggested she was still alive. Reht picked up her limp head and saw the white tinge to her tongue. Methoc overdose.

  “She was just with the one of the VIPs, so she’s loaded. And I didn’t do this—she did. Too drunk to realize what flavors she mixed. I need the money, Jag,” Sebbs said, resuming his frantic search. The Joliak mumbled to himself as he patted her down, his trembling hands not daring to descend into the dark crevice between her mountainous breasts.

  Jagger sniggered and stuck his hand into her cleavage, retrieving the large wad of cash. “Same old Sebbs. You can’t even have fun with the lukewarm dead ones.”

  Sebbs snatched the money from his hand, his eyes jittery wells of chemical need. He wondered how long his friend had gone without a hit as the ex-Dominion officer stuffed the cash down his pants.

  “Sebbs, you know this ain’t really my territory, so I’m risking my assino. You know why I’m here?”

  “N-no.”

  Reht rolled his eyes. It’s going to be the same old routine. The dog-soldier captain slapped him upside the head. “Because, ya dumb penjehto, you’re not only a wanted man in the slums, you’re also tagged.”

  Sebbs staggered into the table, looking hurt. “Don’t—don’t hit me, Reht!”

  Jagger glanced over his shoulder again to make sure they were still safe. The rest of the bar, entranced by the nude dancers spreading the show onto the floor, took no interest in their conversation. His own primal need throbbed between his legs, swallowing up his senses and calling for him to ditch the Joliak, but he turned away from the scene, even as one of the girls wrapped her legs around a patron’s neck and slowly gyrated. This was business, and his crew—his own life—depended on it.

  “Don’t you get it?” Reht repeated, his new frustration making its way into his voice. “You’re tagged. You’re dog meat. You’re dead.”

  “Tagged?”

  “Yeah. You’re wanted on all sides now, partner. And if they get you, then they get to me, and I don’t like that,” Jagger said, stabbing his smoke out on the hooker’s metal armband.

  Sebbs scratched his head and looked wildly around.

  “What kind of information are you selling, Sebbs, and to whom?” Jagger continued, taking a step closer.

  “Now look,” Sebbs stammered, drawing his knife. “I needed the money to pay off certain parties.”

  Jagger grabbed the Joliak’s wrist and pried his fingers off the blade. The weapon fell to the floor, the clink muffled by the musician screaming on center stage.

  Reht moved his hand to Sebbs’s throat, slowly squeezing down. The vein on Sebbs’ head bulged in the red light, on the verge of exploding.

  “Awhh, Sebbs, did you make some enemies going AWOL from the old Dominion?” Sebbs fought for every word. “I was captured on the run by loyalists. I had to tell them about an old supply depot for the USC rebellion you had mentioned—it was the only way I could avoid arrest!”

  Reht’s squeezed down harder on the Joliak’s neck. “Okay, okay!” Sebbs choked out, slamming his fists against Jagger’s hands. Grinning, the dog-soldier captain loosened his hold, but only enough to allow him to talk. “I told them about the message points where they could find informants. That’s all, I swear.”

  Keeping one hand on Sebbs’ throat, Reht withdrew a cigarette from his front pocket and lit up. “So that’s why the Alliance border patrol impounded my ship and my crew was interrogated for ninety days. It’s all coming together.” Jagger blew a puff of smoke into Sebbs’s face before holding the burning end of the cigarette two finger-widths from Sebbs’s right eye. “This is where you make a choice, Sebbs, as to which side you gonna play.”

  “Look, Jag—that was so long ago. And they had my fingers in a vice, my tongue in a spindle, and my—my—” the Joliak whimpered, glancing down at his crotch, “—was next in line for the chopper. I’d part with my life before I’d part with my parts.”

  “So you sold out your business partner. I’m crushed, really.”

  Jagger pushed the cigarette into Sebbs’s forehead. The Joliak screamed as a wisp of smoke rose from the charred flesh. Casually, Jagger put the cigarette back in his mouth, inhaled deeply, and blew out a ring.

  “Not only did you cost me my business with that Starways ratchakker, you killed all those chumps along the message points,” Reht said, releasing him. “I don’t care much about those assinos, but it reflects badly on me.”

  Sebbs collapsed into a chair and placed a quivering hand over the burn on his forehead. To Reht’s surprise, tears welled in the Joliak’s eyes.

  “I’m using this money to buy more time so I can get the information I need to stop all this,” he said, shivering and snuffling like a launnie.

  “What do you mean, ‘stop all this’?” he asked, grabbing the Joliak by his chin.

  A scream tore through the bar. Reht parted the curtain just enough to see two men breaking bottles over each others’ heads as a humanoid female tried in vain to push them apart.

  Unaffected, Reht let the curtain fall back. “Things ain’t so bad now. Business is pretty choice, the Alliance is pissing in the wind.”

  The Joliak pulled at a knot of his frazzled hair. “Things aren’t what they seem.”

  “Your acting skills can’t save you now, penjehto,” Reht said, shoving the dancer off the table. Her body landed in a gurgling heap, arm bent awkwardly over her head. Casually, Reht leaned against the edge of the table. “You disrespect our trust.”

  “Look,” Sebbs said, cautiously rising on unsteady knees, “I know who led the Dominion at the Raging Front, and I know who destroyed our frontiers and the Royal Interior—it wasn’t General Volkor! There is something terrible out there, but I need time to prove it!”

  Reht studied him a moment, trying to distinguish between the verbal vomit of a junkie and actual intel. The war that had raged between the Dominion and USC had ended, but the mention of Volkor pricked up his ears. The Slaythe. That piece of gorsh-shit the Dominion Core had force-fed the public during the war. Reht hated every last inch of him, from his cropped black hair and square-cut mustache to the booming voice that cut over every airway. Volkor was something out of a catalog, so perfectly crafted to fit the image of a battle-tested Fleet Commander that it sickened him. If it wasn’t for his military prowess, he would have thought it was some kind of joke.

  “This is going to sound crazy, but do you remember those launnies in the bar on Fiorah?”

  Reht’s mind rewound back to the time when he stopped off at the torrid planet at the end of the universe for the chance at a cheap arms deal. He remembered the wild little girl that spilled into the bar that night, bruised and disheveled, and then his gut kicked in. Her language, her confidence, her cunning—something unheard of in a child her age. He remembered how special she was, how much he thought he could have gotten for her.

  “Yeah, so?”

  “You were right about them being so valuable, Reht. You were right.”

  “I want explanations, you dumb jingoga,” Reht said, slapping him across the face.

  Sebbs nursed his jaw and scooted farther away. “They’re Volkor, you impotent chakker!”

  Reht chewed on the remnants of the nail on his left thumb. Even fully baked, Sebbs had always been one of his more reliable informants.
He found the idea of the launnies becoming Volkor inconceivable, and yet the impression she had made that night kept him from killing Sebbs.

  “Look, you junked-out piece of Dominion yaketo, I don’t need you alive to get my reward. Give me a reason not to slit your throat. You’ve got four minutes.”

  Sebbs massaged his eyes with his fingers, his voice trembling. “I know you won’t believe any of this—you’ll think it’s just a hallucination, a story I’m making up to get you to spare my life. But I’m not.”

  “Three minutes and fifty seconds. Time’s a tickin’, friend.”

  “Look, once I got stationed on Fiorah, I got in pretty deep in the scene. I started selling the new Dominion interrogation drug, Sidious White, to supply my methoc habit.”

  “Why would anybody want an interrogation drug?” Reht asked.

  “It was a sensory enhancer cooked up right before the Dissembler Scare. It chakked with neurotransmitters in the brain, gave the prisoners pleasure when they did what was asked. Regulars like it because it took away any kind of anxiety, feelings of consequence—any bad feelings at all. But it was highly toxic—I never touched the stuff.”

  “Don’t deviate, Sebbs. Get to why the kids are Volkor,” Reht said, flashing his incisors.

  “It was about a month after you came to Fiorah that I started dealing to a few superior officers, namely General Salshy. The poor bastard was always so strung out. I was really low on my own supplies, so I gave him a mixed dose of methoc and Sidious to pump him—he never knew what hit him. He started flapping his tongue like a streetwalker.”

  Sebbs paused, searching for something in his pockets. He produced several empty boosters and a balled-up packet of 45-nite. With an anxious sigh he tossed the cache over his shoulder and stammered on. “He talked about Fiorah, how much he hated the rock, wanted to nuke it, but he was charged with extracting as much Sapphire as possible. Salshy said that the Sovereign’s new war angle was bioweaponry, and Fiorah was the only known source of Sapphire in the galaxy.”

  Swallowing hard and scratching nervously at his grizzled, unshaven face, Sebbs continued. “I was always curious about Sapphire—where it came from, what was so unique about it—so I did some digging on Fiorah. I figured it would make a wicked drug to sell if I could get a deal going with the head guy.”

  Reht glared at the Joliak, grinding his knuckles together.

  “Y-yeah, so, I found out that Sapphire came from Yahmen Drachsi’s mines. Turns out the bastard’s business went sour and he figured out a new use for the ore—tweaked it, turned it blue and bottled it, named it Sapphire. It was pretty lethal, even in small doses, so he banned it for his own workers but sold it in the streets.”

  The Joliak took a drink of stale brew left over on the seat next to him. Lips puckering, he repeatedly wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. “But the Dominion had Drachsi’s number—there was no way for me to deal through him. Frustrated, I tanked Salshy again and tried him for his keycodes. It was dangerous, stupid—but I wanted access to the mainframe, the top secret files—whatever—I wanted in. I knew that whatever they were cooking up with Sapphire was going to be top notch, enough to keep me riding forever, enough to maybe get me a ticket out of the Core. But what I found was—was...”

  He didn’t finish his sentence right away. Mind splintered by the gestalt pollution of drugs, Sebbs’ bloodshot eyes searched the crowd behind Reht for someone with a hit. The raw need, the hunger for chemicals, was a dependency Reht loathed, but at the same time, one he had helped create.

  “Focus, Sebbs,” Reht said, slapping him across the jaw again.

  “I told you not to hit me anymore!”

  Reht crossed his arms across his chest. “I’m not playin’ this time, Sebbs.”

  Sebbs angrily pulled at the greasy knots of hair on his head. “Look, I-I found out about a project called ICE.”

  “ICE?”

  “Something... God, if I could only remember... it’s like in some root language. ‘Inhibitus cui Cerebres Excelsius, I think.”

  Reht thought it over. “Without conscience, the mind excels.”

  The Joliak made a clicking sound with his tongue.

  “Don’t look so surprised. I was once an educated man.”

  “I didn’t mean that—”

  “Continue, please,” Reht gestured. “And make it worth it to me, Sebbs.”

  The Joliak’s hands couldn’t stay still as he talked. “ICE was some secret Dominion project underwritten by the Sovereign himself. It was where Sidious White came from. The Sovereign was worried an arms war against the USC would take too long and potentially not go in his favor, so he approved the use of a silent chemical war. The intent was to take over the USC by manipulating its commanders and politicians. Sidious was a good induction drug, but it was lacking when it came to Sentients that possessed extracerebral abilities, like telepaths. Apparently it heightened telepathic abilities.”

  “Let me guess,” Reht said, “that is when the Dissembler Scare started. The Dominion cooked up that nonsense to eliminate those that wouldn’t be susceptible to Sidious White.”

  Sebbs slapped his hands on the table. “Yes! Exactly! And when Drachsi started leaking Sapphire on the market, the Core took interest. The junkies liked Sapphire mainly ‘cause it was like the purest speed ever—no other rush like it—but the Core investigated it for its properties as a focal core suppressant and amnesic.”

  “Focal core—?”

  “It made a person susceptible to suggestion.”

  Reht made a motion like was looking at his watch.

  “Okay, okay—this is the most important part: The Core did something nobody else would ever dare do—they hired the Motti.”

  “What?”

  “They needed their expertise in biotechnology and chemical conversion when they were unable to process Sapphire and Sidious White together.”

  “The Motti,” Reht muttered. His lips upturned, and he spat out the vile taste in his mouth. He had never actually seen one, but the nightmare had been described to him in sickening detail in the Underground bars: Thousand-year-old fermenting human bodies, pale and waxy like fungi, flayed and interwoven into spidery carriages, skittering around the organic innards of their biomechanical ships.

  Not much more else was known. Bar rumors pegged the Motti for Smart Cell experiments gone berserk, or the failed test subjects of a military experiment to recycle dead soldiers. Others swore that they were part of a dying race of outerworlders, and the easily pliable bodies of the Old Earth humans were their only means of survival. Either way, they were the Deadwalkers—the reanimated corpses of ancient humans—and even for someone like Reht who intermingled with the dark undertow of the universe, it got under his skin.

  The scene beyond the thin protection of the curtain got a lot louder, snapping Reht back from his thoughts. Listening to the ruckus, Reht deduced someone had lost a hefty bet on the other side of the bar. Sounds of breaking glass and bones forced him to raise his voice. “Alright, so? Get on with it Sebbs.”

  Fumbling with his hands, Sebbs continued. “The Motti came out with several different versions of the combined Sidious White and Sapphire, which the Dominion trialed on isolated populations, like Fiorah, until they perfected the drug. They named it Benign White. I saw Salshy’s notes on the drug—he observed many other officers sneaking snips of it for battles because it heightened their senses and focus—but most importantly—as he put it—it was like a ‘soul silencer.’ Allowed them to do the things they needed to do to win the battle without any sense of consequence.”

  “Yeah, but what’s the price on such a lady?” Reht said.

  “Heavy side effects—worst withdrawal symptoms ever recorded. I saw one vid of a guy they were testing. He scratched away his skin until he hit bone, screamed like his nerves were on fire.”

  Reht drew a communicator from the pocket of his pilot’s jacket after a chair flew past their partition.

  “Mom, you there?” he calle
d over the noise of the bar. The communicator crackled with static and Mom’s grumbling.

  “Prep the ship. This place is getting hot. I’ll be there with the package—dead or alive—in two minutes,” he said, closing the communicator and replacing it in his pocket. He cocked his head at Sebbs, encouraging him to get to the point.

  “Y-you know I defected just before the USC crushed the Core. I was making enemies with my debt and I needed fast cash, so with Salshy’s codes and some others I had acquired through my dealings, I hacked into the old Core mainframe again to research Benign White. I wanted my ticket out of a tight jam, and I thought the chemical base and proof that the Dominion was screwing with the Motti was enough, but I stumbled upon something much, much bigger.”

  Sebbs’s eyes nervously darted from side to side. “The Sovereign’s original deal with the Motti to perfect mind control drugs had turned into something else.”

  “Something else?”

  Sebbs forced a laugh. “None of us has ever taken the Deadwalkers seriously, yeah?”

  Reht didn’t know how to respond. The Motti and their dead army of biomechanical offspring, the Liikers, had always been pariahs among the Sentients. The Motti were garbage pickers, sifting through junkyards and graves on lesser developed worlds, stealing parts to cook up some new hoard of Liikers. At best, Liikers were low-priced trade on Fiorah’s flesh market, mainly fodder for fighting rings and not considered Sentient even among the Liberalist groups. But he couldn’t fully dismiss the Deadwalkers, not with his youngest crewmember, the little Liiker boy that drove him crazy, saving their crew almost every mission.

  “The Dominion orchestrated the Dissembler Scare, but the Motti masterminded something far more evil than arrest and detainment. The Deadwalkers convinced the Sovereign that they could strengthen his army by creating a telepathically networked chain of command.”

  “Using Benign White,” Reht inferred.

  “Exactly! They controlled the telepaths and linked them to key officers in the Core. Instant communication, entire units moving in complete unison without communication dead zones or real time delays.”