The Soldier: The X-Ship

by Vaughn Heppner

  None of that interested Quillian except in a cursory way. She wasn’t worried about exposure for her actions in releasing Halifax, Brune and the scout. The people who might expose her were dead. Some of the monetary transactions might become known if an IPO investigator dug deeply in the right directions or banks on Helos. What worried her were androids.

  Rohan Mars, the other silent two like him who Brune had slain, Tara Alor—where there was smoke there was fire. Androids must have destroyed the space station. There were two reasons someone like Rohan Mars would do that. The first reason would be to kill Brune and make sure he never reached Avalon IV. The second reason was the exact opposite: to cover the escaped Brune’s tracks and help him reach Avalon IV. Someone like Rohan might believe destroying the space station would hinder the IPO or the Patrol’s pursuit of Brune. That would mean, of course, that the androids would know about her helping Brune and Halifax.

  Quillian halted, withdrawing her hands from her pockets. There was a third possibility. Maybe the androids wanted the IPO and the Patrol to hunt diligently for Brune. Maybe there was evidence elsewhere on Helos pointing to Brune and Halifax—and evidence pointing to Group Six. Could the androids know about Group Six?

  The feeling of panic welled once again.

  Quillian glanced in all directions. She did not see anyone moving on the lake or hiking past pine trees toward her. She hunched her shoulders while standing perfectly still. She did not feel a sniper scope targeted on her.

  She had a good “sixth sense” for such things.

  With radiation drifting down from space, there would be a rush by many to leave Helos. That would clog the shuttle services and make tickets for starliner passage more expensive. Concord disaster workers would likely arrive in the system soon to help the sick and homeless.

  Quillian shoved just one hand under her jacket. She wrapped her fingers around the handle of her pistol, the one in the shoulder rig ready for a fast draw. She continued walking, heading for deeper brush. She wanted to hide and see if anyone came looking for her. Should she contact the others of her team? She had a communicator. The others were at the Corinth spaceport. They did not have access to sniper rifles or other missiles, however. Those supplies were near Sparta, an irradiated zone by now. The others had knives and brass knuckles. She was the only one with a gun.

  Was that by android design?

  Quillian quickened her pace, shoving past pine branches. She pulled out her pistol, an automatic. She ran lightly to bushes, shoving through and turning around. Squatting, pulling a branch back, she watched to see if anyone showed up after her.

  She remained like that for ten minutes. She was a hunter, which meant being patient when she needed to be.

  She shivered from the cold. The sprint had warmed her, but that was gone now. She almost rose and kept walking for the lake.

  She sucked in a fast breath. There was motion behind a pine tree. She caught the flash of blue, a blue that didn’t belong to the lake environs.

  She squinted, frozen, waiting and watching, only her eyeballs moving back and forth.

  Several more minutes passed. Could she have imagined the blue? No. She did not panic like that. When she panicked, people died. The back of her neck prickled. She did not move. The prickling feeling intensified. Someone targeted her. She could feel it—

  She launched leftward. At the same moment, a streak of red laser light struck the spot where she had been. The laser started a pine-needle fire, although the light instantly snapped off.

  Quillian dove through the bushes, running. She tripped over an old branch and grunted as she hit the cold pine-needle littered ground. She froze once again, closed her eyes and let her uncanny, highly honed senses feel around her. She didn’t detect anything. Opening her eyes, she slowly eased around until she was on her back. Through force of will, she released her death-grip of the pistol.

  Someone had just tried to kill her. She was guessing androids. Could she bargain with them?

  Quillian furrowed her otherwise smooth brow. She was the prey. The androids hunted her. What did that indicate? The first truth would be that the tech company knew about Group Six. But that did not necessarily hold. The androids would know she was a player in the game with Brune. They would not necessarily know about the Earth connection. Surely, they would want to know.

  A sour look came over Quillian’s features. She would sell out Group Six for the chance to live. But she did not believe for a moment the androids would agree to such a deal. If she were so foolish as to try to bargain, they would make her a prisoner and torture her to gain all the information they could. It was what she would do in their place.

  Torture—she had a great fear of torture. The reason was one of the oldest. Those who tortured others often learned to dread the same happening to them.

  It seemed as if the fire had guttered out. She smelled the smoky pine stench. The laser shot had come from behind. That might indicate the flash of blue had been to freeze her in place. That would indicate the androids did know about Group Six, and maybe knew her precise habits. How would they have come to learn that?

  Quillian didn’t know. It boded ill for her here. How did one survive an enemy that looked human but was many times stronger, perhaps almost indestructible in hand-to-hand combat? Androids would lack a human conscience and rigidly follow their programming.

  Didn’t such an android “brain” indicate very high technology? Yes, yes, her foes would have better tech. Quillian felt anger burn through her. She suppressed that. Anger was her form of fear, but she was a professional.

  “Damn them,” she whispered. She couldn’t lie here all day. If they had superior technology—might they have infrared tracking?

  Quillian rolled back onto her stomach and started to crawl across the pine needles. She needed better weapons. If only she had a Gyroc—

  “I have what I have,” she whispered. Wishing wasn’t going to help her. She was the best. The dumb bastard Brune had slain two androids. Could she do less?

  “Hello,” a man said.

  Quillian looked to the left and saw a small man in a black suit and thin black hair. He wore a pair of black-tinted goggles. She was in the process of raising her gun to fire—but the man had a laser pistol pointed at her. She froze.

  “Quick reflexes,” the man said.

  “Are you an android?”

  “Tut, tut, tut,” he said. “That is a nosy question.”

  The laser pistol had a long golden-colored barrel with a large round body behind it.

  “Are you going to kill me?”

  “That depends, Leona Quillian.”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “Release your gun.”

  Quillian didn’t want to die. She wished to live many more years. But she was sure the android would torture her if she allowed him to capture her. Besides, sometimes one could start firing. Reaction times meant it would take at least a second for the android brain to realize she’d fired at him. It might take more seconds before he pulled the trigger. Body shots likely meant nothing, as he could have an armored chassis. Headshots, eye-shots, would be most effective.

  “I will not ask a second time,” he said.

  “I have one question.” She raised her arm as she spoke, aligned the gun by instinct and started pulling the trigger.

  The man—android—sidestepped even as she aimed. Perhaps he had anticipated her and timed his move.

  The first two bullets missed. She realigned—

  A red beam stabbed from the laser pistol, striking her forehead and burning through the same instant.

  She got off one more shot just the same. Then, Quillian dropped like a potato sack—dead, as she sprawled onto the ground.

  She did not see the five-foot-four android approach. She did not feel his search or see him remove her wallet. She did not see him remove a flat item from his suit that he passed over her corpse. It beeped.

  He stopped, pulled out a knife and cut her flesh at her left
side. With bloody fingers, he removed a tiny pellet attached under a rib. The pellet he deposited in a small plastic bag. Afterward, he passed the flat device over the rest of her body.

  It did not beep a second time.

  Lastly, the android put a small grenade on her. He touched it, and it began to blink with a red light.

  The android walked away. After one hundred and sixty-eight steps, an explosion told him the burn grenade had done its job.

  The android did not smile or make any other emotional gesture. He would report to Rohan Mars that Quillian and her team had been eliminated. That would leave Brune to the Company or to the IPO or Patrol if ever the Company wanted to dispose of him that way. The android did not think any more about it. He did not care in a human sense. He obeyed his programming and would make the report. That was all that mattered to him.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Learning with complete certainty that he wasn’t Brune, but an imposter with implanted memories, the soldier spent the next several days in deep thought.

  Halifax activated the Descartes’s Intersplit engine so the green field surrounded the scout. Halifax piloted, finding the task grueling and time-consuming.

  The field didn’t set the scout in hyperspace or some other fanciful realm. It simply allowed the scout to accelerate past the speed of light, and that with relative ease. There were still eddies in space and other odd fluctuations that affected the field and thus disrupted the ship. At times, a loud hum pervaded the vessel, or the ship would begin shaking.

  At those times, Halifax raced to the piloting chamber—if he wasn’t already there—and manipulated controls or frantically studied the manual for further directions.

  “This is nothing like being a passenger aboard a starliner,” he complained.

  “The big liners must have better equipment,” the soldier said.

  Several times, Halifax crawled through access tubes into the main engine compartment. He watched the Intersplit engine, dreading each quiver, each high-pitched hum coming from it. Once, smoke trickled from a unit, smoke with the taint of electrical burning.

  Halifax raced back to the piloting chamber, slowing the ship’s velocity. “Theoretically, we can achieve high speeds with the Intersplit Field around us. Practically, the engine is old and thus can withstand less strain than otherwise. We must crawl through space instead of speed like a starliner.”

  The soldier accepted the verdict with equanimity. He had a ship able to cross deep space. That was enough for now. Besides, he was still contemplating his lot or place in the universe.

  For the past several days, the soldier read history files from the ship’s computer. He searched for everything he could find on the Old Federation and about Ultras, cyborgs and the various battles. Halifax had spoken truly. The details were sparse at best.

  Most of the time, the soldier stretched out on his cot and tried to remember details about his life. He knew to discount anything related to Brune. In contemplating, he learned that he lacked extended Brune memories—even though they intruded hardest upon him. He searched for anything he could conjure, concentrating on assault missiles and his name in particular.

  During that time, he recalled marching in a battlesuit and seeing tiny glittering devices in exploded human heads. In the dim recollection, he knew the devices as cyborg tools, driving the unfortunates against their wills.

  The memory search was frustrating. It galled the soldier. It enraged him and left him discouraged in turn. He resolved to remain positive, as negative thoughts only embittered him against everything.

  He closed his eyes on the fourth day of trying to remember and stubbornly sought to regain his name. Clearly he was a cipher, but did he have to remain nameless?

  Brune was out as a name. He knew it was false and thus rejected it. At times, he believed he could feel the cyborg device in his mind. He would touch the back of his head then, and through the process discovered the tiniest scar there.

  He had Halifax look at it.

  “Bone buildup,” the doctor said.

  “Meaning what?”

  “Likely that’s the area of your skull they removed and replaced later after inserting the device.”

  “You could dig the device out with a knife.”

  “The process would kill you, I’m certain.”

  The soldier motioned for the doctor to leave, which the small man did with haste.

  With his hands behind his head, with his unfocused gaze on the bulkhead, the stretched-out soldier let his imagination drift. He mentally floated into semi-consciousness as his unformed thoughts wandered aimlessly. He found himself imagining his battlesuit falling through a street cave-in. He hit bottom as his suit shorted. He used the escape system and climbed out of the broken equipment, looking up at the distant hole with a pink-hued sky above.

  Time passed in this semi-conscious drift. He heard voices. They called for—

  “Cade,” the soldier said, blinking in surprise, his voice stirring him from the half-dream state. He sat up. Was that his name? Was he Cade? Cocking his head, he considered the idea. Did he feel like a Cade? Yes… He believed he did. It wasn’t a ringing endorsement, but a possibility.

  “Cade,” he said, climbing to his feet. He began to pace. “I am Cade. I will refer to myself as Cade. I don’t know if it’s a first name or a last name. I don’t know if it’s my given name or a nickname. But until I learn otherwise, I am Cade.”

  The soldier—Cade—laughed.

  He rushed out of the cabin, strode the short distance through the corridor and entered the piloting chamber. The stars in the polarized window seemed normal, although there was sense of motion like extremely slow-moving clouds. A faint green haze added to the sight.

  Halifax turned with a sour look.

  “I am Cade,” the soldier announced.

  “What?”

  “You will address me as Cade.”

  Halifax shrugged.

  The soldier—Cade—scowled. He was ready to argue strongly. Something halted him. “What’s the matter?”

  “The engine has been buckling.”

  “I haven’t felt anything.”

  “It’s a tech term,” Halifax said, lifting the reader. “We wouldn’t feel it. The engine is under strain and jumps or buckles as it emits the field. That causes a field flickering.”

  “That can’t be good.”

  “It’s not,” Halifax said. “It means for a microsecond the field shorts. If we continue like this, we risk worse malfunctions.”

  “I thought they repaired the scout back at DMR.”

  “They did,” Halifax said. “I’ve read the receipts, which they logged in the computer. I also read a warning. The Intersplit engine is old. The DMR mechanics logged several suggestions for a new Intersplit. The cost would be prohibitive, of course. I’m beginning to think that was why DMR agreed to keep the scout.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The Intersplit engine is too old. No right-thinking person would purchase the scout for interstellar travel. That means there would have been no takers. We were the only reasonable way DMR would recoup their losses, and they were right—until the space station blew up.”

  “Can we still reach Avalon IV?”

  Halifax shrugged.

  Cade pinched his lower lip as he stared outside. “How much longer until we’re there?”

  “Depends on our velocity,” Halifax said.

  “If we cut speed in half?”

  “Three weeks.”

  “And a week and a half if we maintain our present speed?”

  “That’s what cutting the speed in half means, yes.”

  Cade put his hands behind his back, deciding to ignore Halifax’s sarcasm. “What do you suggest?”

  “That we head for the nearest civilized star system. We sell the scout—”

  “No reasonable person would buy it you said.”

  “We sell it to someone unreasonable. We do it on the sly so there are no presale insp
ections. We split the money—”

  “No.”

  “No to the money split—”

  “We keep going to Avalon IV at our present speed.”

  “And risk a breakdown?” Halifax asked.

  “That’s what ‘keep going’ means.”

  The sour look returned as Halifax muttered under his breath.

  “Go ahead. Have your say.”

  Halifax glanced at Cade. “All right. Let’s say we reach the Avalon System. It’s a proscribed system or has a proscribed planet, anyway. There are monitors in orbit around Avalon IV. I had Clarke check for me two and a half years ago. The monitors will sense us as soon as we reach the system’s Kuiper Belt. If we approach closer than a moon’s orbit around Avalon IV, the monitors will activate and launch missiles. If we make it closer, they will laser us, destroying the vessel.”

  “And?”

  Halifax gave him an incredulous look. “You want to land on Avalon IV. Given the facts I’ve just outlined, I’m wondering how you’re going to achieve such a miracle.”

  Cade nodded. “I understand. It’s a problem. I’ll have to think about it.”

  “Think about it? Look, let’s say you do land. I suppose you’ll attempt an orbital drop.”

  “Explain that,” Cade said.

  “Use the method Rohan originally proposed to Brune,” Halifax said. “You fall from orbit, parachuting into the lowest atmosphere. It will take a special suit, which I believe is in storage. Let’s suppose that works. You’ll want to land near the woman’s crash site. After two and a half years, though, she could be anywhere on the planet—if she’s still alive. Now, suppose you succeed on all levels. That will leave you stranded on Avalon IV, likely for the rest of your life. Are you sure that’s what you really want?”

  “No. I’m not sure.”

  “Well, that’s a relief, at least.”

  “Let me think.” Cade lowered his head as he stared outside. Did he want to rescue or reach the woman woken from stasis? The answer hit him immediately. He raised his head and turned to Halifax.

  “Oh,” the doctor said. “You still want to do it. Do you know why?”