Vitalis Omnibus

by Jason Halstead

  “Pay attention!” She snapped. “Everything will kill you here, even the rain. Everything!”

  He nodded, not trusting himself to speak. His ankle stung but he could walk on it. He glanced ahead and saw Sharp looking back at him, an annoyed crease to his eyebrows. Klous hurried after him, or at least it felt like he hurried now that he was taking each step much more carefully.

  Two trees and one platform later, Klous marveled at how the survivors of the Rented Mule had managed to do so much with so little. He’d seen shelters and hammocks in the trees as well as tables and even signs of firepots for cooking. Now they were headed towards a tree with a shelf or platform built around it as well as a hollow within it. Above the platform a matching roof had been made of wood, bark, and even long grasses woven together.

  Sharp pulled up sharply as a figure emerged from the tree. Another person was behind him, directly. The man in front lurched forward and fell to the decking, a knife protruding him his back. Klous cursed, recognizing his brother. Cooper knelt down and pulled it free, then looked up when Sharp and Klous both shouted.

  “Cooper, damn it, drop the knife!” Klous screamed. His words were jumbled by the storm and Sharp’s own shout. Kira slipped past both of them too quickly for Klous to even marvel at how she’d managed to get around them on the narrow bridge.

  Klous watched as Cooper stood, knife in hand. He turned to face them and saw Kira approaching. Klous was close enough to see Cooper grin. He wasn’t close enough to see the feverish glint in Cooper’s eye but he knew it was there. He’d come across Cooper once right after the man had made a kill and it had disgusted him.

  “Cooper!” Klous screamed again. His brother was a sick man but he was still his brother. He had to look out for him even if—

  Klous’s thoughts were interrupted as Kira jumped off the bridge and onto the platform, rather than going directly through where Cooper stood at the bridge’s landing. The leap itself had been something near super-human, Klous couldn’t begin to fathom what was happening.

  Kira swung around a pole with a skill reserved for the finest of adult entertainers and kicked out with her feet. The knife went flying and Cooper stumbled back. She landed and dove forward before Klous’s twisted brother could react. She grabbed his feet and yanked him to the hard wooden platform.

  Klous heard Cooper grunt out his breath even from a distance of twenty feet in the rain. He assumed the fight was over and started to move forward and follow Sharp. He froze when he heard a cry of alarm. Looking up he saw that Kira wasn’t finished.

  The muscular woman had grabbed his foot and now she yanked on it, pulling him with her as she backed off the edge of the platform. They fell, with Cooper somehow rotating around her to fall first. Kira abruptly stopped, her skirt flying up and coming to rest against her belly. Cooper, whom she’d just released her grip on, continued the twenty some foot fall headfirst to the jungle floor. His short-lived scream was cut even shorter.

  Klous stared down, knowing that his brother was dead. His head was at an extreme angle and his body lay motionless. He looked up to see Sharp kneeling next to the other fallen man. Kira was climbing back up onto the platform. A rope fell from where she’d looped it around her leg to the floor, disclosing the secret to the magic trick she’d used to levitate. Klous started forward, confused and uncertain, but needing to understand.

  As he approached Kira knelt next to her fallen crewmate. There was an angry red rash along her leg where the rope had scraped against her. She showed no sign of caring, her attention was focused on the man, Jeff, who appeared to still be alive.

  “Get plenty of water in it and he should be fine,” Kira said. “From the stream would be better.”

  Sharp nodded, then looked up at Klous. He returned the Captain’s stare, feeling his own numbness turning into a sense of anger. He’d just watched them kill his brother and now they were acting as though he’d never existed! “Hey!” Klous growled. “What about—”

  Kira spun around to face him. She stood up, a knife in her hand. Klous wondered where she’d hidden it, it was a decent sized blade and he’d seen no sign of it given her limited clothing. Straps! He remembered seeing straps on her upper thigh when she been briefly upside down. If he’d been paying more attention to her and less to Cooper he realized he might have seen a lot more.

  Sharp rose up behind her, helping Jeff to his feet by throwing the wounded man’s arm over his shoulder. “No law but mine here,” Sharp said. “We’re an endangered species on this planet. We all get along fine, but with you guys it’s simple. You don’t like it, you leave and find your own way. You do anything — anything — that threatens any of us and you get the same treatment he did.”

  Klous grabbed the same wooden stick that Kira had used gymnastically and peered over the edge. Cooper still lay there, as expected. He still couldn’t believe his brother had died so suddenly and so quickly. Cooper was quiet and intense, and when the situation warranted absolutely ruthless and skilled. Sick as well, given his history of choosing people he could lure into situations where he could capture, torture, and kill them. Cooper’d always preferred women but he’d never had sex with them, he just tortured and killed them. He’d done men too, but out of necessity, not pleasure.

  Klous looked away from the body of his brother, staring out into the jungle. In a sense he felt relieved. He didn’t have to protect or cover for his brother any more. The crew of the Black Hole already knew or suspected what Cooper did, but he doubted they had a real appreciation of just how depraved the man had been. Klous had been able to keep him under control, at least. Now he didn’t need to do that anymore.

  “All right Captain,” Klous said. He felt tired finally. Not his body, that was stronger and more alive than ever. He felt tired in his soul. “He had it coming. I didn’t want it to happen, but he deserved it. We won’t give anyone any trouble. Just tell me how we can help.”

  “Help me get Jeff somewhere safe,” Sharp said.

  Klous nodded. “I’ve never known Cooper to leave someone for dead and not have them die.”

  “Anywhere else and you’re probably right.” Kira let the mysterious statement go unexplained. Klous stared into her cold eyes and said nothing. He got under Jeff’s other arm and together the two Captains helped the wounded man back across the bridges.

  Chapter 11

  “I can’t believe Cooper’s gone,” Lizzie said, shaking her head. “He’s been with you…forever!”

  Klous nodded. The more time passed the less concerned he was about Cooper, even if it had only been a few hours. It was still dark out but Eric, Aran, Lizzie, and Ling all held up the portable lights. Tarn and Kira stood guard with their weapons. Klous stood back and watched, feeling useless, while Sharp helped Jeff at the side of the stream. They kept washing his wound with water, for all that Klous could tell, and occasionally Jeff would take a drink of the water as well.

  “All this rain, is the stream really necessary?” Sasha kept looking up and down the stream. Klous would have chuckled had he not shared the experience of being chased by a cross between a dinosaur and a chicken.

  Klous looked at his people. Well, he couldn’t really call them his people anymore he supposed. Still, they looked to him because that was all they knew. Sure, the Black Hole hadn’t been a place for a close knit family and crew, but they’d shared it at least and knew how to get along with each other. Or how to avoid each other, in the case of Cooper.

  “Something in the air, the food, and the water helps speed up recovery on this rock,” Tarn said. “Eric was a goner when we crashed, had a piece of metal sticking through his belly. Kira took care of him and instead of him dying after a couple of days like he should have, he got better.”

  “Love of a good woman,” Eric said, glaring at the former pirate captain.

  “A woman that conspired with me to have you captured and killed,” Klous reminded him.

  Rather than seeing Eric bristle with anger, as he’d expected, the man shrug
ged. “She wasn’t herself then.”

  Sasha snorted quietly beside him. Klous saw Kira glance over at her and then away quickly. He reached over and took Sasha’s hand to squeeze it and tell her to be quiet. She jerked a little at the contact, then gave him a shy smile. Klous realized she thought he meant something by it. He almost laughed until he realized he’d never done something like that before for a member of his crew. Maybe he did mean something?

  He pulled his hand back, a little confused by his own sudden emotions. “So who was she?”

  “Emily Bradford, a bounty hunter and an assassin,” Kira said. She turned to face him. “Stick around long enough without getting killed and I’ll tell you about it. Until then, just remember what happened to you and what happened to your man and don’t fuck with us.”

  He felt as much as saw Sasha stiffen beside him. Klous looked at Kira and saw that the woman had no bluff about her. He heard Tarn chuckle off to the side and remembered how the man had seemed nothing but impressed with her time and again, and he had been a Marine FIST, the best the military had to offer when it came to special operative.

  Klous nodded finally, reaching a decision. “Cooper was my younger brother. He had a problem, he liked to hurt things. Anything really, but people the most. Like I said, he had it coming.”

  The expressions from Lizzie and Sasha were the most notable to him. Open-mouthed shock at his admission. Klous shrugged as he met their gazes. “None of us are innocent, but Cooper…well, he was about as bad as they come.”

  “Your brother?” Sasha whispered.

  He nodded. “Didn’t need nobody knowing that though. Now I guess it doesn’t matter.”

  Her hand found his this time. He found it comforting, but only after he forced his confusion aside. He noticed Lizzie look over to Ling and found that the large man was looking back at her. Klous smirked and returned his attention to Kira. “Just try not to kill anybody else without giving them a fair shake first? Yes we were pirates and yes, we’ve done bad things…but other than Cooper none of us done it just because it was fun. Money? Yes. Revenge, maybe. Fun? No.”

  Kira nodded.

  Jeff broke the somber conversation by standing up with some assistance from Sharp. He moved his neck and arm about, then grimaced. “It’s better, I think. Doesn’t hurt as much to breathe and I don’t feel as weak anymore.”

  Sharp clapped him, lightly, on the shoulder and turned to the others. “Let’s head back. Rain’s keeping the animals in hiding but our lights are sure to draw something out sooner or later.”

  Klous looked at the lights and frowned. If they brought in more predators like the chickasaurus why where they using them? “Sharp, why not put them out?”

  “Only thing worse than letting the jungle know where we are is stumbling around in the dark and not knowing what might be coming for us.”

  Klous nodded. The reasoning was sound and, after what he’d seen, he’s rather take his chances than trust to blind luck.

  They walked back through the jungle, moving quicker now that Jeff was improving almost by the minute. The stream was another small one that ran through the jungle and was located only a few minutes from Treetown. They made it back without incident, aside from Lizzie slipping on the muddy ground. She twisted her ankle in the process but Ling was there to help her up and carry her back. Sasha and Klous shared a knowing look as they walked.

  “Hey Sharp,” Klous asked at the base of the ropes that led up to Treetown. “We put a salvage beacon out in orbit around this planet. We called it Vitalis, but if you’d like we can change it when somebody comes and finds us.”

  Sharp looked at him for a long moment, then offered what looked like a genuine smile. “Vitalis is just fine. Come on up, we’ve got some expansion to do in the next few days if you guys are going to be comfortable.”

  “A beacon?” Kira asked.

  “Yeah, probably be a few years at best though. We did what we could to jam your signal then when we got here we figured on the potential of the place. Figured it was undiscovered, but if we marked it we’d claim it under salvage law. No telling what we might get out of it.”

  “You can’t salvage a planet!” Eric blurted out. “What, you plan on strip mining the place?”

  “The Terran Coalition has been searching for a habitable world for over two hundred years, since before they even reached Earth’s moon!” Aran interrupted. “Even with ten of us we could still all be wealthy beyond our wildest dreams!”

  Klous nodded. “He’s right, we figured if you were still here we’d eliminate you and stake our claim on it.”

  “So why tell us now?” Klous noted the barrel of Tarn’s plasma rifle just happened to be pointed in his direction as the big man asked his question.

  “Like Aran said, there’s enough to go around, besides that, you guys saved our ass out there.”

  Sharp chuckled. “Not being stupid again, are you?”

  “What? I don’t think so.”

  “You’re a pirate!” Kira spat at him. “You never cared for what other people had or did unless you could take it from them or use it to your advantage.”

  Klous felt something snap in his brain. It wasn’t an epiphany but rather confusion threatening to make his knees buckle. “How does that make me different from you?”

  Kira stared back at him, her expression stony for so long he thought the storm might pass before she so much as blinked. “Come on, let’s get under cover,” Sharp suggested.

  “Wait, he’s right. I was like that. It’s complicated, but I’m not that person anymore. I can still do what she did, like make you cry like a baby, but Emily Bradford is gone.” Kira turned to look at her crew and then at Klous and his. “This place has a way of changing people, whether they want to or not. Even Tarn’s less of an asshole than he used to be.”

  “Hey!” Tarn protested.

  “She’s right,” Sharp silenced him. “Here I was figuring you was the one that sold us out, but the way you’ve been — the way we’ve all been down here had me doubting. Now we know it was Emily, but it looks like she’s already been taken care of.”

  Kira’s eyes found Eric’s for a long moment until she bit her lip and smiled. He returned it, allowing her face to return to the blank mask of business Klous had become accustomed to on her. “Either we kill them now, if they’re going to be trouble, or we stick it out and see. Besides that, we’re light years outside of Coalition space, we may never see another person again. If we want to survive as a species here we need as large a gene pool as we can get.”

  Tarn’s mild scowl shifted slowly to a grin. “I like the way you’re thinking!” He said with a chuckle. “I learned to never volunteer for nothing in the Marines, but I’m willing to break that rule. I’ll set up the schedule for the breeding program!”

  “Tarn!” Sharp snapped.

  Klous snapped his jaw shut. He chuckled in spite of himself, but the chuckle died on his lips when he caught the cold glare Sasha gave him. “Yeah, well, we’re all stuck here together, maybe I don’t know much beyond running a ship but I know that if we work together we got a better chance than if we don’t.”

  “Good enough for now,” Sharp said. “Now let’s get up there, we got work to do. Rain should be gone by morning then we can make Treetown big enough for all of us.”

  “Best idea I heard yet,” Sasha muttered, moving past the rest of them to one of the vine ladders. “Let’s go Captain, I feel like a drowned rat and look worse. I need to get out of these wet clothes and get warmed up.”

  The pirate Captain looked at her, then stumbled when a laughing Tarn clapped him on the shoulder. “She ain’t getting any warmer just standing there!”

  Klous nodded and stumbled after her. “Maybe I could get used to a place like this,” he mumbled to himself, staring up after Sasha as she climbed ahead of him.

  ###

  Part 3: Parasites

  Chapter 1

  “Jeremy?”

  Jeremy Sinclair jerked himself
out of his chair. He came to an uneasy imitation of standing at attention and realized he still held the hand held display with his daughter’s picture in his hand. In the doorway stood his new boss, Dr. Synnamon Rice. “Sorry Doctor, I was…um, did you need something?”

  Dr. Rice’s eyes went to the flexible display panel in his hand. “May I?” She asked. Jeremy thought her voice seemed distant. Then again, it was also icy calm. Her very demeanor was the polar opposite that her spicy name implied. Even her black hair, streaked with grey, reflected an absolute no-nonsense personality with it being pulled tightly back into a bun.

  Jeremy thought about denying her. Wasn’t it enough that he had given up everything in his life to come on the mission? Discovering a new planet was exciting. Even more so because this was the first in his lifetime. All the existing systems in the coalition had been settled nearly a dozen years before he’d been born. This one was far enough away even at full burn on the military transport, the TCS Explorer, it had taken years to get there.

  It would be years to get back too, not counting the time he was stuck being Dr. Rice’s lab tech on the planet. He glanced at the picture again then sighed and handed it to her. “Her name’s Jasmine, she’s my daughter.”

  “Oh,” Was all Rice said as she took it from him and looked at it. Jasmine was barely more than an infant but even so it was obvious something was wrong with her. She was smiling in the picture, proof of the innocence of youth. Tubes were attached to her belly and chest, providing a necessary exchange of fluids and nutrients.

  “Spartan’s Syndrome,” Jeremy heard his words and wished he could have taken them back. They sounded lifeless and pathetic. Spartan’s was a genetic disorder discovered less than a hundred years ago. It was also something that had come about at the same time, due to improper shielding of some of the earlier jump stations. Jeremy’s father had been through enough hops between solar systems and had passed along the genetic damage to him. Jeremy’s ex-wife, Bleigh, had similar damage. Between the two of them the one and only child they had was doomed before it was born.