by Wen Spencer
Her eyes widened at his quip, and then narrowed slightly. "I don't want to be part of your pride."
"No, no, you'd be my native guide. There's so much we don't know about this place, and that not knowing could get us killed. As I've already demonstrated."
She weighed the reader in her hand considering if it balanced out to a fair trade. "I can't translate. You need a Blue to do that, not a Red."
A Blue? To translate? Maybe she didn't mean the females genetically engineered to be beautiful sex toys for the wealthy. Or maybe 'translate' was their term for sex. "See, I didn't know that. And I have not a clue where to find a Blue."
"And I won't fight, not unless something comes at me personally. I'm not a meat shield."
"No fighting."
"And I won't be free to just anyone that wants some piston action."
It took him a moment to understand her. "No! No sex."
She glared at him for several minutes. Then she swept a look over the desolate ocean and the rubble. "Okay, Mikhail, I'll think about it."
He'd insist on "Captain" later, when she was a little less feral. "Thank you." To keep her from disappearing, he asked, "What's your name?"
"Eraphie." She put out her hand for a handshake that was strong and firm. "Eraphie Bailey of—" And she paused as sorrow filled her face. "Currently of nowhere."
"Currently? Until recently of . . .?"
"Of the Lilianna," she whispered. "But it's—it's gone. I'm the only survivor."
"What happened here?"
"I don't know," Eraphie started to stand.
He reached and caught her hand. "Please tell me what you do know."
Eraphie eyed him suspiciously for several minutes and then blew her breath out in a loud sigh. "It just happened so fast." She crouched down to be eye-level with him again. "One minute everything was same-old-same-old and then the next . . .everyone was dead. There was almost no warning. There was this noise, a deep hum, you felt it all the way down into your bones. I had no idea what it was or where it was coming from but it felt wrong. It felt like it was something you run from, but I didn't know which way was away from it. I was just standing there, scared shitless. There were some people—newcomers—that recognized it as a warp field setting up. They started to run down harbor, away from the engine that was out on a peninsula by itself, shouting at people to get away. One of them went past me. I didn't even understand what he was screaming, but it was like he cut me loose, and I was gone, running flat out, without a clue where I was going or why. Then the sound changed and I looked back and the sky had gone all purple, and then . . . I just remember a loud boom and being picked up and flying and the air was full of dirt and stone and people. I came to later, lying on a pile of rubble."
She pointed at the edge of the destruction which was probably why she was still alive.
Much as Mikhail wanted to know what happened to the colony, he'd seen all the end results. He wanted to hear about the things he didn't know. "So, you were born here? You've never jumped?"
Again the suspicious look, as if looking for hidden weapons. "Yes. I was born at Georgetown Landing. My grandfather was part of the crew. My mother is out of Zephyr Landing."
Georgetown was one of the ships he was researching. He'd pulled its name off the wall as a destination of the survivors. It matched up with the ship they had spotted, sitting in the ocean, thousands of kilometers away.
"If Fenrir's engine worked all this time, why hadn't anyone used it before now to warp back?"
She shook her head. "The engine didn't warp, it just imploded."
He opened his mouth to correct her, but caught himself. Why was she so sure? "It didn't warp?"
"No. Engines don't create a true warp field here. Power up your warp engine. See for yourself. It doesn't work."
Her calm assurance terrified him. What if she was right? What if he'd stranded his crew in this god-forsaken place?
"Warp engines are designed to operate in normal space," she explained. "They open a wormhole from point A to point B in normal space. We're at point C."
"But . . ." He was going to argue that the physics should stay the same. His eye was caught though by one of the huge floating land masses drifting the sky. Water plumed down from it in a waterfall, defying everything he knew about gravity. And if time was running differently here, then basic laws of physics could have different constants.
Certainly it would make sense that Eraphie was right. It went against all odds that none of the ships arriving had ever returned with information on this watery graveyard. Something was keeping them all trapped. Someone, though, had made a scientific breakthrough and sent back the Fenrir engine.
"Was someone working on the engine when it imploded?" he asked.
She shrugged. "I don't know. We're not from Fenrir's Rock. We arrived right before the engine leveled the town."
"We?"
Pain filled her face before she looked away. "My family owns . . .owned a salvage ship. We pulled into port just hours before. We weren't even going to stay more than a few days; the salvage was in Minotaur waters. My dad and mom and brothers and sisters . . ." She sobbed and pressed her palms to her eyes and sat hunched in silence.
It was like watching someone drown, afraid to go in to save them; lest they pull you under with them. Mikhail watched her fight with her grief, wanting to comfort her but unsure if he could survive the resonant pain.
"It sneaks up on you." She was still balled against her pain. "You think you're all done with it and put it behind you and then suddenly this big black hole opens up in front of you."
"I know." It was all he could offer her without risking himself. He distanced himself more by thinking back over what she had told him. "There were other survivors?" She nodded mutely. "Are there any others still here?"
"No." She uncurled and sighed, scrubbing tears from her cheek. "We were supposed to meet cousins here. They were coming from Georgetown Landing. We'd been at Ya-ya, selling scrap, so we had a shorter haul. After—After the blast, I wasn't thinking clearly. I just wanted to be with family so I decided to wait for them. I tried to give them a holler, but a radio was too dear to come by. They're late. They should have been here days ago. I'm starting to think they heard the news and gave us up as dead."
"Captain!" His guards had finally noticed Eraphie's presence. Trigger and Smoke had their rifles leveled at her.
"Hold your fire!" Mikhail got to his feet to make himself a more commanding figure. "Stand down."
Eraphie made another attempt to hand him the reader.
"Keep it while you decide." Mikhail needed her and so far the reader was his only successful bait.
For a moment she looked like she might fling it at him, but she controlled the impulse. With the muscles along her jaw tightening in defiance, she shoved the reader into her pocket. "I'll think about it."
She stalked off. People called Reds cats all the time, but this was the first time Mikhail had seen one walk with all the fluid grace of a lioness.
The United Colony had claimed to be panicked by finding unregistered Reds among the wreckage that showed up at Plymouth Colony. The Red's speed, strength, durability and ease of reproduction would make them a dangerous weapon in the hands of the enemy. At Plymouth Station, it seemed a valid fear. Having talked with Eraphie Bailey, Mikhail had to question everything from the moment he met Director Heward.
Eraphie's claim of being born to a mother made elegant sense. Male Reds weren't sterile and while extensively adapted, they could be human enough to breed with a woman. Turk's life was proof that there were even women that would welcome sexual activity with a Red. And checking through the reports, the "unregistered" Reds weren't numbered.
Any Red created on a production line would be numbered. Everything from taxes to inventory control to body identification on the battlefield required a number encoded into the Red's cells. That part of the automated system was tamper-proof, starting a data trail for the United Colonies to track every Red
ever initiated. It would be risky for the nefrim to tamper with the system just to remove the numbers.
The Reds that the United Colonies found with the engine were born in the Sargasso. Had Heward known? Perhaps. It could be why Heward chose Mikhail and Turk for the mission.
The real question was Eraphie related to the dead Reds?
All in all, he had a mountain of information to shift through and no real answers.
Mikhail opened the files that the United Colonies had supplied him. They had seemed thorough when they left Plymouth and were assuming that the nefrim were involved in Fenrir's disappearance. But the records only went back to the first recorded encounter of the nefrim, nearly fifty years ago. If the nefrim weren't responsible for the ships disappearing, there was nearly a hundred years since the development of warp drives not accounted for.
Luckily he had full data on Eraphie's hometown, the Georgetown. The battleship had been lost at the beginning of the war. It had been evacuating the Tau Ceti Space Station when nearly overrun and forced to jump. With the odd time dilation of this world, there was no telling how long it had actually endured.
Mikhail searched the crew list for Eraphie's grandfather, but there were no Baileys listed. Nor were there any on the Fenrir. It occurred to him that Bailey might have been a civilian evacuated from Tau Ceti. Heward had included the Space Station, a fact that struck Mikhail as odd until he noted that Tau Ceti had contained a crèche. Lo and behold, John Orin Bailey had been a White Star Creche employee.
Starting in the combat training area, John Bailey had been promoted up through the ranks. He had gained experience enough to be entrusted with the younger, more fragile Reds, until he worked in the decanting room itself.
If the Georgetown had rescued the White Star gene banks, and Bailey had survived the crash, then the Georgetown could still be producing Reds.
"At ease." Acting Commander Inozemtev's command to the Reds guarding Mikhail pulled him out of his research.
Inozemtev wasn't alone. He had Chief Engineer Tseytlin and Commander Kutuzov with him. By their dark looks, the three were bearing him bad news. Mikhail closed up his work with his stomach sinking.
The problem of a small ship was that information rarely can be kept secret. He'd asked Tseytlin to check Alpha Red to find out what really happened to Turk. Mikhail would have liked to have a chance to review the facts by himself. Getting Tseytlin in and out of Alpha Red required coordination with his fledging Red Commander, Inozemtev. Somewhere along the line, Mikhail's second in command, Kutuzov, became involved.
"What did you find?" Mikhail asked Tseytlin after Inozemtev had the Reds move out of ear shot.
"They killed Commander Turk," Tseytlin said. "Killed him in cold blood."
"How?" Mikhail asked even though he really didn't want to hear the details.
"They rigged both airlock doors to open at the same time. They started a brawl to lure him in. And then they took out the monitors so we couldn't see what was happening in the pit. They expected to space him. Since the atmosphere here is thin where we warped in, the results were just as deadly. It was a cold blooded ambush, the bastards."
"They?" Mikhail glanced to see again which Reds had been guarding him. Trigger and Smoke. Both veterans. "Not just Butcher?"
"It was all of the replacements, working together," Inozemtsev said. "A handful did nothing but participate in the staged riot, but ironically, they're the ones that drowned."
Most of this ran counter to typical Red behavior. Dominance fights were always one-on-one. Reds weren't taught how to bypass security. Nor should they have known how to booby-trap the airlock.
"Have you found out anything about their previous owner?" Mikhail asked. He'd asked Inozemtsev to confirm that the woman, Rebecca Waverly, had actually slept with some number of her pride. Until they knew which of her toms she'd introduced to sex, he'd ordered that none of the replacements be left alone with female members of the crew.
"From what I can tell, she was a crime boss on Paradise," Inozemtsev said. "She seems to have taught them a lot of nasty habits. They have dice and gamble off-duty."
There was no telling, then, what the replacements were capable of. Because of their strength, speed and intelligence, the most effective control over Reds was via their behavioral training that conditioned them to obey. Waverly might have seriously compromised her Red's training.
"Say we eliminate Butcher." Mikhail didn't want to say 'put down' like the man was just a sick animal. "Can you tell which of the Reds would make Top Cat?"
"In a fair fight, Coffee would be Top Cat," Inozemtsev said. "But I doubt if it would be a fair fight. Butcher is using his status as Top Cat to give the replacements first choice in everything. It's probably why they cooperated in killing Commander Turk. My guess is that the replacements would make sure Trixs replaced Butcher."
Mikhail didn't recognize the name, which meant Trixs was one of the replacements.
Kutuzov glanced at the Reds on guard and then lowered his voice to say, "We're going to have to isolate the replacements one by one and quietly put them down. There's no way we'll be able to deal with them all at once."
"We could just siphon the oxygen out of Alpha Red," Tseytlin said. "It would be fitting; that's what they planned for Commander Turk."
Cold revulsion washed through Mikhail at the idea of ordering a mass execution. Somehow the fact that it would be done quietly and secretly made it seem even worse. Mikhail lifted his hand and waved them off. "We can't afford to put down a third of our Reds."
"They killed your brother!" Tseytlin said.
"I know. I know. But the safety of this ship has to be my focus. Not vengeance for my brother. We have no idea what we will face in the following days. So far we've encountered a bio-weapon and a female Red who is most certainly not off any human ship. If there are more weapons, or if the Reds of this place are hostile, we're going to need all of our Reds. Even the replacements."
13
Red Gold
The Reds found an observation deck on the highest point of the island. From its height, the remains of the great spaceship Fenrir were visible under several hundred feet of crystal clean water. The island sat on the edge of a land shelf; beyond it the floor of the ocean dropped away dramatically. Only Fenrir's warp engine had landed on the shelf, and then sheered off as the rest of the ship sank in the deep water. The crew had platforms floating over the wreck where, apparently, they had still been salvaging parts of the ship. The gun batteries were gone. The antenna array too; but that was sitting behind him on the observation deck. The rail gun was in place, but the crew compartments were skeletal.
So ends the search for Fenrir, Mikhail thought as he gazed down at the object of his mission. What should he do next? Attempt to go back to Plymouth Station and report his findings? Not that he had any firm conclusions on what he found: a mystery place, seemingly outside normal space, not a world but something else, something that didn't obey the same rules of physics. Was that information worth Turk's life? It didn't feel like it.
So far, though, he'd found no signs of the nefrim being in this place. The Fenrir's crew seemed focused on a life of fishing and surviving the weather, not fighting aliens. Nor was there any indication of powerful overlords bringing human ships to this place. The ships seemed randomly placed and the humans roamed freely. The unregistered Reds were most likely born to survivors of various ships.
Nor did it seem likely he could get back to Plymouth Station. Moldavsky continued to find spaceships wrecked into the ocean and a goodly number still had their warp drive intact. Statistically, it was impossible that not one ship managed to send something back to normal space—unless the laws of physics were different here. Then Eraphie Bailey's claim that a standard warp engine couldn't create a true warp field in this place seemed extremely reasonable.
Whoever had sent back Fenrir's engine had made modifications to it. Those changes obviously adapted the engine to the physics of this place. He'd gone over the
scans of the modifications with Tseytlin, but his Chief Engineer couldn't even begin to guess what the odd equipment attached to the engine had done. Nor, without understanding the fundamental nature of this place, could Tseytlin start to make modifications of his own.
Their best hope for getting home was finding whoever made the changes to Fenrir's engine. Between the messages written out by the survivors, Eraphie's account of the implosion, and what they've found searching the island, Mikhail believed that a group of outsiders had done the work.
Fenrir's original engine crew was all dead and buried in a small cemetery that escaped destruction. While the Svoboba found evidence that the island kept up maintenance on the warp engine's power unit which they were using as their primary electrical source, there was no indication that they were working with the field generators. The island's inhabitants had been caught unaware, and afterwards been unsure what had happened. And Eraphie's story indicated that it wasn't unusual for ships from different ports to arrive and do business; substantiated by the fact that the survivors fled to various ports. Nor was there any sign of scientific research into establishing a modified warp field, or clues where the experimental equipment had been created.
Then there was the two humans killed by the Red. A fight had broken out just before the warp field was activated. Obviously, someone found out what was going on and tried to stop it.
All of which told Mikhail that someone had arrived with the parts already manufactured, installed them and activated the warp field without permission from the people of Fenrir. It didn't tell him, however, who. Nor did it tell him which side the mauled humans and the Red dead of vacuum had been on. Had the Red attacked the outsiders, or defended them from the men he killed?
And most importantly, it didn't tell him if any of the outsiders survived. Assuming that Eraphie Bailey wasn't lying through her teeth and she had nothing to do with modifying the engine, if the outsiders were still alive, they'd fled the island.
