When All Seems Lost

by William C. Dietz

  But, while not equal in magnitude, the recent annihilation of an enemy battle group in the Nebor system had done a great deal to restore the Queen’s previously flagging spirits. This meant the monarch was in a relatively good mood as Chief Chancellor Itnor Ubatha arrived on the platform in front of and directly below her normal-sized head.

  For his part, the bureaucrat was well aware of not only the Queen’s hard-eyed scrutiny, but the colorful drape intended to hide most of her swollen body, and the rich pungent odor of recently laid eggs that wafted up from the chamber below. The smell caused certain chemicals to be secreted into the Ubatha’s bloodstream and flow to his brain. As a result, the official suddenly felt simultaneously protective, receptive, and subservient. Just one of the many reasons why the monarch’s clan was still in power after thousands of years. “So,” the Queen said, without preamble, “how did the meeting with the Egg Orno go?”

  Ubatha bent a leg as his mind raced. It seemed that the Queen had him under surveillance. A perfectly logical move from her perspective. But why signal that fact to him? Because the Queen wanted him to know that even though she had been immobilized, very little escaped her notice. And to seize control of the conversation—a technique she was famous for. None of what Ubatha was thinking could be seen in the movement of his antennae or the set of his narrow wings, however. One of many skills the bureaucrat had mastered over the years. “I failed, Majesty. Of which I am greatly ashamed.”

  Ubatha hadn’t failed, not really, but his willingness to portray himself in a negative light amounted to an oblique compliment. Because by opening himself to the possibility of punishment, the Chancellor was demonstrating complete faith in the Queen’s judgment. It was the sort of political finesse for which the official was known. “Come now,” the Queen said indulgently. “I fear you are too hard on yourself. Especially since the failure, if any, should accrue to the head of my so-called intelligence service.”

  Ubatha knew, as the monarch did, that the official in question was standing not fifty feet away, talking to a group of royal advisors. And, because the Queen’s voice was amplified, there was little doubt that he was intended to hear the comment. “Your Majesty is too kind,” the Chancellor replied. “When asked about her mate’s whereabouts, the Egg Orno continues to maintain that Ambassador Orno is dead.”

  “But you don’t believe that.”

  “No, Majesty. I do not.”

  “Nor do I,” the monarch replied thoughtfully. “I have my reasons. What are yours?”

  Rather than address the fact that there was no body, or other physical evidence of Orno’s death, Ubatha chose to pursue another strategy instead. “As I entered the Egg Orno’s home,” the Chancellor said, “I noticed that a single pair of sandals had been left in the vestibule.”

  There was a moment of silence while the Queen absorbed the news. Ramanthian culture was rich in traditions. One of which compelled females to leave clean sandals by the front door to welcome her mates home. But when a male died, the sandals were ceremoniously burned. So if both of the Egg Orno’s mates were dead, as she steadfastly maintained, then there wouldn’t be any sandals in the vestibule.

  Yes, the whole thing could be explained away, and no doubt would be had the Egg Orno been given a chance to do so. But above all else the Queen was female, and possessed of female instincts, which meant that the presence of sandals next to the door carried a great deal of weight where she was concerned. “You have a keen eye,” the Queen said quietly. “And a keen mind as well. . . . I know you’re busy Chancellor, very busy, but please lend your intelligence to the hunt for citizen Orno. He made a promise. It was broken. And he must pay.”

  Ubatha bent a knee. “Yes, Majesty. Your wish is my command.”

  PLANET JERICHO, THE RAMANTHIAN EMPIRE

  It was raining, and had been for hours, as Oliver Batkin continued to fly just below the treetops. Having seen the Ramanthian shuttles a day earlier, he’d been looking for the ships ever since. No small task because even though the spy ball knew where the interim spaceport was, he’d been hundreds of miles away when the contrails appeared, and the cyborg’s top speed was about thirty miles per hour.

  So as water cascaded off the leaves above, Batkin followed a trail of dead bodies from the spaceport toward the future site of Jericho Prime. The corpses had already been victimized by jungle scavengers and were starting to decay. It was a shocking sight, or would have been, except that Batkin had seen it before. Because slave labor had been put to use elsewhere on the planet as well.

  What made these dead bodies different, however, was the fact that all of them wore identical blue uniforms and were clearly military. The first such POWs the cyborg had seen on Jericho given that the Ramanthians routinely killed any member of the Confederacy’s armed forces unfortunate enough to fall into their pincers.

  However, judging from appearances, this particular group had been spared. For a particular purpose? That was possible, although the bugs were notoriously unpredictable, and the whole thing could be the result of a whim by some high-ranking official.

  Still, Batkin’s job was to investigate such anomalies, so the cyborg was determined to follow the trail of corpses wherever it led. Which was why the spy ball topped a ridge and followed the opposite slope down to the point where a vast marsh gave way to a lake. Thousands of interlocking circles radiated outwards as the rain continued to fall, and the alien sphere followed a row of vertical poles out to the island beyond.

  The prisoners were gone by the time Batkin arrived, but tendrils of smoke marked the still-smoldering fires. The cyborg had given the ruins a quick once-over, and was about to depart, when he heard a strange keening sound. Which, after further investigation, originated from a fire-blackened lump that was wired to a metal spit. Batkin looked on in horror as two eyes appeared in what he now realized was a badly burned face. The raspy words were almost too faint to hear. “P-l-e-a-s-e,” Private Cassidy said. “Kill me.”

  It was a reasonable request given the circumstances, but the cyborg knew that his main source of protection lay in the fact that the bugs were unaware of his presence. So if he put the poor wretch out of his misery, there was the possibility that one or more Ramanthians would happen along and realize what had taken place. Especially since Batkin lacked the means to dispose of the body.

  But the chances of that seemed remote, so the cyborg activated his energy cannon, and there was a whir as the barrel appeared. “I will,” Batkin promised solemnly. “But first . . . Can you tell me where you were captured?”

  Both of Cassidy’s startlingly blue eyes had disappeared by then, and there was a long pause, before the pain-filled orbs opened again. The long, drawn-out answer came as a sigh. “G-l-a-d-i-a-t-o-r.”

  Batkin felt an almost overwhelming sense of despair. He was cut off on Jericho, with no way to receive news, but if the Ramanthians had taken the Gladiator, then the Confederacy was in dire straits indeed. “You’re sure?” the spy demanded. “You were aboard the Gladiator?”

  “Y-e-s-s-s,” Cassidy hissed. “Kill m-e-e-e. . . .”

  So Batkin fired the energy cannon, the marine was released from hell, and the rain continued to fall as the cyborg followed the trail east. Even though the spy’s top speed was rather limited, it didn’t take him long to catch up with the tail end of the column. But what Batkin lacked in speed, he more than made up for where sophisticated detection equipment was concerned, which was fortunate indeed. Because it wasn’t long before his sensors detected a substantial amount of electromechanical activity and he made visual contact with four Sheen robots. And, for one brief moment, the machines made contact with him.

  But Batkin had disengaged by that time, activated all the cloaking technology resident in his highly sophisticated body, and taken refuge in thick foliage. So, having been unable to verify a contact, the robots continued on their way. As did a large heavily armed human whose eyes were concealed by a pair of dark goggles. The only human on Jericho other than Batkin who
wasn’t a slave.

  Cautious now, lest one of the robots spot him, Batkin propelled himself out and away from the column. Then, having given himself sufficient electronic elbow room, the cyborg sped ahead. After about fifteen minutes, he turned back again, located the trail, and snuggled into a treetop. In spite of the rain and the curtain of leaves that served to screen his hiding place, the spy had a mostly unobstructed view of the point where the POWs would be forced to cross a small clearing. With his cloaking measures on, and most everything else off, the agent was confident he could escape detection. And thanks to some truly magnificent optics, Batkin would be able to snap digital photos of each person or thing that crossed the clearing. An important step in verifying whether the bugs had captured the Gladiator or not.

  A full fifteen minutes passed before the first poor wretch emerged from the dripping trees to splash through a series of puddles directly opposite the spy’s position. Batkin took at least one frame of each person’s face, and couldn’t help but be moved by the misery that he saw there. All of the men wore beards, most of the prisoners were filthy, and some were clearly lame. A woman who was walking with the aid of a homemade crutch tripped on an exposed tree root and fell facedown in a pool of rainwater. And when a man paused to help her up, a Ramanthian trooper subjected both prisoners to a flurry of blows and kicks.

  And so it went as the long, ragged line of POWs passed before Batkin’s high-mag lens. There were hundreds of them, so the faces began to blur after a while, until the unmistakable countenance of President Marcott Nankool appeared! The chief executive was wearing a beard, but was quite recognizable to a political junkie like Batkin. Still, the cyborg continued to wonder if such a thing was possible, until he spotted Secretary Hooks! A person he had met at a political fund-raiser and was likely to be at the president’s side.

  The discovery resulted in a heady combination of consternation, fear, and excitement. Because if he was correct, and Nankool was a prisoner, the sighting was a very big deal indeed! But even as the cyborg continued to snap his pictures, one aspect of the situation continued to trouble him. Assuming that the man who had already crossed the clearing and reentered the jungle was Nankool—then why was he being treated in such a cavalier fashion? Surely, assuming the Ramanthians knew who they had, the president would be treated in an entirely different manner. He would be more heavily guarded, for one thing, transported via flyer for another, and held separately from the other prisoners. But what if the bugs didn’t know?

  That possibility would have caused Batkin’s heart to race had he still been equipped with one. But the sensation was very much the same as the cyborg took pictures of the Sheen robots and the strange-looking human who trailed along behind the main column. Then the POWs were gone, having been consumed by the jungle, as the column continued on its way. That was Batkin’s opportunity to depart the area and upload his report to one of the message torps above. No, the agent decided, make that two message torps, just in case one went astray. Because of all the reports that Batkin might eventually file—this was likely to be the most important.

  Confident that it was safe to leave his hiding place, the cyborg fired his repellers, and “felt” the surrounding leaves slip over his alloy skin as he rose up through the thick foliage to emerge into the open area above. And that was when a host of threat alerts began to go off, and the sphere-shaped monitor that Tragg liked to refer to as “Tail-End-Charlie,” began its attack.

  Tragg was a careful man, so even though the overseer wasn’t aware of a specific threat, one of the airborne robots had been ordered to follow along behind the column just in case somebody or something attempted to follow it.

  And, had the Ramanthian-manufactured machine been equipped with more potent weaponry, Batkin would have been blown out of the sky. Still, the remote did have a stun gun, which it fired. That was sufficient to partially paralyze the cyborg’s nervous system, which caused the spy ball to shoot upwards, as his now-clumsy brain attempted to reassert control over the nav function.

  All this was effective in a weird sort of way, because it was impossible for the alien robot to predict what would happen next and plot an intercepting course. But Batkin had entered a death spiral by then, the jungle was coming up quickly, and the remote stood to win the overall battle if the human cyborg crashed into the ground.

  In spite of the numbness that threatened to end his life, the spy summoned all of his strength and forced a command through the neural interface that linked what remained of his biological body with its electromechanical counterpart. The response was immediate, if somewhat frightening, as the cyborg suddenly swooped upwards. The monitor pursued Batkin at that point, but the device lacked sufficient speed, and it could do little more than follow the spy as he led the robot away from the trail.

  Meanwhile, as the effects of the stun gun began to wear off, Batkin regained more control over his body. Still hoping to conceal his presence on Jericho, the spy chose to activate his energy cannon rather than the noisy .50 gun that was also hidden inside his rotund body. Conscious of the fact that there wouldn’t be any second chances, the recon ball dropped into the jungle below.

  The robot followed, and for thirty seconds or so, the creatures of the forest were treated to a never-before-seen sight as two alien constructs weaved their way between shadowy tree trunks and flashed through clearings before exploding out into open spaces. Then the chase came to a sudden end as the monitor swept out over the surface of a rain-swollen river where it was forced to hover while its sensors swept the area for signs of electromechanical activity.

  Meanwhile, just below the surface of the river, where the cool water screened the heat produced by his power supply and other systems, Batkin took careful aim as he fired a steering jet to counteract the current. Had there been someone present to witness the event, they would have seen a bolt of bright blue energy leap up out of the suddenly steaming water to strike the monitor from below. There was a loud bang, followed by a puff of smoke, as the robot fell into the river. The mechanism was light enough to float, and was in the process of drifting downstream, when a large C-shaped grasper broke the surface of the water to pull the monitor under.

  Batkin spent the next couple of minutes piling river rocks over and around the robot before firing his repellers and bursting up out of the river. Water sheeted off the construct as it shot straight up into the air, turned toward the protection of the trees, and moved parallel to the ground. Then, having established himself high in the branches of a sun tracker tree, the spy hurried to establish contact with two of the message torps orbiting above. It took less than a minute to upload both the images the spy had captured and a verbal report that would put them into context. Then, having instructed the vehicles to pursue different routes, Batkin sent the torpedoes on their uncertain way.

  6

  Murder is a tool, which, like all tools, can be used to build something up or to tear it down.

  —Hive Mother Tral Heba

  Ramanthian Book of Guidance

  Standard year 1721

  ABOARD THE CONFEDERACY VESSEL EPSILON INDI, IN HYPERSPACE

  The combined effects of the worst headache the officer had ever experienced, plus an urgent need to pee, brought Santana back to consciousness. The legionnaire’s eyes felt as if they’d been glued shut, and once he managed to paw them open, the officer found himself looking up into an unfamiliar face. A med tech, judging from the insignia on her uniform, and the injector in her right hand. The name tag over her right breast pocket read “Hiller.”

  The rating had big brown eyes, mocha-colored skin, and a pretty smile. “Welcome aboard, Captain Santana. You’re on the Combat Supply (CS) vessel Epsilon Indi, presently en route to Algeron, with a full load of supplies. Roll to your right so I can get at your arm.”

  Santana winced as the injector made a popping sound, and some sort of liquid was forced in through the pores of his skin. “There,” Hiller said as she took a step backwards. “That should help with th
e pain.”

  “Algeron?” Santana croaked. “Why Algeron? My outfit’s on Adobe.”

  “Beats me, sir,” the technician answered blandly. “But maybe Major Lassiter can fill you in. . . . He wants to see you at 0930, so we’d better get cracking.”

  “I gotta pee,” Santana said thickly.

  “And brush your teeth, and shave, and take a shower,” Hiller added pragmatically. “In fact, you might even want to get dressed. Can you sit up for me?”

  So Santana sat up, but the process was painful, as was the act of standing. Not only because of the many contusions suffered during the battle in the Blue Moon Bar and Fight Club—but as a result of whatever drugs had been administered to him thereafter. A subject the legionnaire planned to raise with Major Lassiter. “There was a noncom,” Santana said, as Hiller escorted him toward the head. “A corporal named Gomez . . . What happened to her?”

  “Gomez has been up and around for quite a while now,” the med tech replied. “She comes to check on you every couple of hours. The corporal says that while you have a lousy left hook, you’ve got some major cojones, and that’s rare where officers are concerned. Her opinion—not mine.”

  One hour later, Santana was shaved, showered, and dressed in one of his own uniforms. Which had clearly been removed from the hotel room in the MEZ and brought aboard the Indi. The pain still lingered but was under control by the time Hiller provided the legionnaire a hand wand and sent him out into the ship’s labyrinth of corridors.