Ragnarok: Colonization, intrigue and betrayal.

by Andrew Claymore

  He wasn’t quite sure what he should be doing but it seemed like a hug couldn’t do any harm. He sat next to her and put an arm around her shoulder.

  He almost breathed a sigh of relief when she leaned her head against his chest. He was unsure of how to handle this situation – the abduction of a noble-woman from his own household was the kind of thing that would reverberate throughout the republic – but his chief concern at the moment was his wife.

  “Should have left them on Earth,” she whispered. “Adelina would be alive right now.”

  “You can’t blame yourself,” he said softly.

  “Can’t I? We brought them here and now she’s dead and gods know where Gabriella is.”

  “There’s danger everywhere,” he replied, “Especially on Irth. You saw a guy get killed over a pair of headphones.

  “Hells, we barely stopped the Chironans from bombarding the surface. Billions of lives hung in that particular balance.”

  “But we did stop them,” Luna reminded him.

  “Yeah, but you don’t know there isn’t another fleet on its way to Irth right now.”

  He looked up in alarm as Luna broke their embrace and jumped to her feet.

  “Shit!” she exclaimed. “Gleb, that’s what we’re looking at here. Gabriella’s been taken but there’s been no messages, no demands made. We’ve been assuming she’s being held as leverage over us but what if that’s not the case?”

  Gleb got up. “They took her as an intelligence source?”

  She nodded, eyes wide. “Gabriella’s been on both of the Human-inhabited worlds. As a member of the ruling family, she has knowledge of the defenses around each planet.”

  “Then there is a fleet on its way right now,” Gleb said in horror.

  “Yeah,” Luna agreed, “but which planet?”

  Careful What you Wish For

  The Old Nova, Karnak Lanes

  Hilchazzar scowled at the stuttering holo. It needed fixing, though it would probably be cheaper just walking away from the Old Nova than waste credits on her.

  Aptly named, he thought for the millionth time. She was old and her engines were constantly on the verge of doing a passable impression of the second half of her name.

  That recent contract would have put him in a nice new Phonecian but he’d had no luck. Now, he was reduced to raiding the smaller trade runs.

  He’d used his last trip-line to tumble a convoy out of path and his teams were searching their prey now. The whole free-company knew he was running on vapors.

  If they failed to find anything of value, he’d be facing challenges. Maybe I should step down, he thought. Beats a bullet in the head.

  He growled. Speaking of bullets in heads… “What the hells is wrong with you idiots?” he shouted at the bridge crew.

  They were all standing stock still, as if… “Oh Nergal’s turds!” he croaked, realizing they were frozen in place. He’d heard of that before.

  He turned, emitting a strangled yelp.

  Standing there was an armored figure, its flat-faced helm painted with a white skull.

  Hilchazzar had never fully bought into the stories before but now… Standing in front of this creature, he felt an absolute certainty he was looking at a servant of the underworld.

  “You looking for me, Mercenary?” the terrifying figure asked him.

  Hilchazzar mewled in terror. The question had been asked inside his mind.

  What idiocy had led him to think he could simply capture one of these creatures?

  Underworld

  The Deathstalker, Kurnugian Orbit

  Gabriella dropped on the couch, shuddering with exhaustion and undefined emotions. Stupid bitch doesn’t know when to shut up and leave a person in peace, she thought, though it was clear that Ereshkigal knew exactly when not to leave if she was looking for information.

  Gabriella didn’t think she gave away anything they could use but they could read a person’s feelings, so who really knew?

  She knew she should drag herself into the bedroom, rather than fall asleep on the couch, just to wake up shivering but she was so tired. There’d be blankets in there…

  And then she realized she was alone for the first time since she’d left her bedroom on Babilim.

  She couldn’t sleep, not when there was finally a chance to escape. A ship this size had lots of places for her to disappear.

  She activated the net-phone implanted in her sinus, a graduation-gift from her grandmother, and brought up her snippet menu. There were no hatches in this suite, except for the one she’d walked in through and it would still have guards outside.

  Even if the guards weren't there, the door itself would have a security override. Maybe I can get that hag to take me for a walk and I slip away? she mused, frustrated at the lack of options.

  She sat up, her left heel striking the floor with a hollow sound. She froze, absurdly worried that one of her empathic captors would read the sudden surge of emotion.

  There was no security lockout on the decking itself.

  She used the snippet for hatches, adding in a few extra parts of code from an override Hack used on a regular basis. She killed the parts that created an actual hatch mechanism, keeping only the parameters for the opening that it would have fit into.

  Gabriella interrogated the layout schematics for this class of cruiser and found a large space under the decking. It was a pocket of space in the main trunk of cabling that connected the bridge to the engineering spaces.

  There was no way through the tangle of conduits but there was enough room down there for her to hide. She activated the newly coded snippet and the nanites beneath her foot rearranged themselves to create an opening.

  She slipped through the hole and into a world of darkness. She killed the snippet and the portal turned back into a section of decking. A new snippet created a small light emitter from spare nanites showing her the runs of real cables and data fibers that couldn’t be formed by nanites.

  Gabriella took a bundle of spun-crystal lines and spread them out to make a hammock. She eased into them and let her eyes close for a short rest.

  She woke, feeling suspiciously rested and ravenously hungry. It took a moment to remember where she was.

  “Where is she, Gods damn you?” an angry voice intruded from above, followed by an ominous click-whine.

  Indistinct muttering came from the direction of the door. A shot came from above her, followed by a thud near the door.

  “Gods!” the voice said, but quieter now, and fearful. “She has their magic already? No wonder I’ve been acting strangely. We thought we were being so clever and she was in our minds the whole time! The damned witch might be killing my bridge crew as we speak! She’ll kill all of us!”

  “Unlikely, lord,” a female voice said. “If she has their ability, then she has more than enough range to reach the hab-ring around Kurnugia.”

  “We’re well rid of her then,” the first voice, most likely Memnon, said with evident relief. “We have the information we need.”

  “You still mean to sterilize the planet, lord?”

  Gabriella’s blood ran cold. Sterilize? They’re going to wipe out everyone…

  “It’s time to send a message,” he said firmly.

  “A message for whom?”

  “For everyone, Ereshkigal. For everyone.”

  The footsteps moved away from above her, leaving through the door to her suite.

  She didn’t hear the door closing.

  Why didn’t she hear the door closing?

  She’d expected less security on her door, if they thought she’d already escaped, but did they typically leave suite doors open like this? Were they still standing out in the hallway, close enough to keep the door open?

  Should she wait a little longer? I might be losing my only chance by sitting down here. She shifted back over to where she’d entered her sub-floor hideout and reactivated the opening in the deck.

  It made the usual rustling sound but anyone in t
he hall might not notice, especially with the couch between it and the door. She crouched in the opening, eyes just above the decking so she could see under the couch.

  The door hadn’t closed because one of the guards, presumably shot by Memnon in a fit of anger, was lying dead across the threshold. She heard nothing from the hallway, except for a distant rush of air from a ventilation shaft.

  She waited a few moments but she realized she wouldn’t hear anything with her heart pounding in her ears. Putting her hands on the edges of the hole, she lifted herself up to sit on the decking.

  Still no sounds from the hall.

  Better get moving, Gabriella thought. Even megalomaniacs eventually send someone to clean up the bodies on their own ship. She lifted her legs out of the hole in the deck and padded over to the door.

  Straddling the corpse, she leaned out to check the hallway. Clear. She opened a new hole in the hallway decking and lowered herself into a far less cluttered space – one that had more freedom to move around.

  She closed both the hole above her and the one in her suite once her head was clear. OK, I’m out. What next?

  Just getting off the ship had seemed like a good initial goal but Memnon was planning to kill a lot of people. Was there any way to stop him?

  What had Sulak said? Maintenance tubes with training systems? A grim smile crept across her features but it froze, half formed.

  Did you know what would happen to mom, you sly bastard? She wouldn’t put it past him, not if this was the only way to prevent genocide.

  She shook her head. Ask him later. Sulak seemed anything but infallible.

  She opened a holo and found the nearest branch of the maintenance tubes that, hopefully, would be just as ignored on this ship as they were on the Mouse.

  It was going to be kind of a long crawl unless she wanted to risk returning to the world of the surface people and jogging twenty meters up the corridor. “No, thanks,” she muttered quietly.

  She shrank the holo window down to a small call-up point and pushed it out a few feet, giving her just enough light to navigate by. Now that she was outside the secured confines of her prison suite, she figured nobody would notice a random holo being used.

  Gabriella crawled along, getting stuck only once when her shorts caught on a cable tray. She stubbed a finger, reaching back to free them and nearly cursed out loud.

  She found the shell of the tube and opened a hole in the side. Nobody was inside. She slid in without hesitation. It was cleaner than the cable tier she’d been scrambling through and it was properly lit.

  She closed the hole and leaned against the wall of the tube to catch her breath and collect her thoughts. What have I got to work with here?

  She’d escaped from her captor, sort of. He had no idea she was still on the ship and she now had decent freedom of movement around the ship.

  She didn’t know shit about spaceships, though – at least, not much more than your average republic or empire layperson. She nodded to herself.

  Somewhere in this tube network, there would be a training system. She could learn how the ship worked and that knowledge would be needed if she had any chance of saving an entire world.

  “No pressure,” she told herself with quiet irony. Gods, listen to me. Talking to myself like I’ve been alone down here for years. She turned aft, hoping to find the training pod somewhere closer to Engineering.

  Numbers

  The Mouse, Babilim Station

  So that’s the situation,” Gleb told the holograpic Eth. “We’re fairly certain they’re probing her for defensive information about one of our worlds.”

  “That would certainly explain why we’ve been seeing these damned shipping raids in the empire. Someone’s been searching ships, trying to get their hands on our people,” Eth said.

  “We can’t pin down who’s behind it. They’re all mercs, and they’re hired through the usual intermediaries who make damned sure they don’t know enough to become a loose end.”

  Gleb nodded absently. “And you’re sure the contracts have all been terminated?”

  Eth reached out and pulled a Haidari into view by his ear. “We’ve heard it first-hand. Whoever’s behind this has no further need of their efforts.” He shoved the captured merc out of sight.

  “Then the attack, if it’s coming, is forming up now,” Gleb concluded.

  “I’d say we’re well past the point of uncertainty on this,” Luna said darkly. “It’s happening. I say we call it an opportunity.”

  Both men turned to look at her in surprise.

  “We’ve had nothing but questions lately,” she told them, “and no sign of an answer to any of them. They took Gabriella and we don’t know who they are or where they might be hiding.

  “Now we know they’re likely to hit one of our worlds. We can count on them being in one of two places. That narrows the odds against us by a pretty wide margin.”

  “But which world?” Eth asked. “We can’t afford to split our forces. The enemy sure as hell plans to concentrate all of their ships for this attack.”

  Gleb chewed the inside of his cheek for a few seconds. He shook his head angrily. “There are three hundred colonists on Ragnarok who expect us to protect them and there are Billions of people on Irth that don’t even know that we exist.” Except for Luna’s family, though they don’t even know where we’re really from.

  He looked at Eth. “You’re still at Heliopolis?”

  Eth nodded.

  “Detail one of your corvettes to find a freighter, preferably a willing one, but, if not, I don’t give a shit. They’re to put a security team aboard her. They and the ’vette will go directly to Ragnarok.”

  “Evac, if still possible?”

  “Yes. You and your other forces are to path directly to Irth at best possible speed. We’ll see you there.”

  Into the Crucible

  Ghost in… you know…

  The Deathstalker, In path

  Gabriella watched her holo. No evidence of crew-members near the aft mess hall. She touched a code snippet and stepped through a growing opening behind the buffet-style warming trays.

  She opened the haversack she’d found hanging off a chair during her last food raid. She dropped a lung fruit inside. Fresh, she noticed. Still breathing. She took a few hardboiled amphibian larvae and a grav-spoof flask of water.

  The flask was able to mimic the effects of gravity. Even if you dropped it while open, the water would stay inside. How it knew you were tilting it for a drink was beyond her but it wasn’t such a compelling mystery that she had to return to the training pod.

  There was also a tray of fried marsupial legs that did a pretty decent job of replacing fried chicken. She took two, dropping one in the haversack and taking a bite of the other on her way back to the hole.

  She was getting pretty good at being a ghost on the Deathstalker. She’d had more than a week of skulking around.

  She kept walking, dropping the first stripped bone into her bag and pulling out the lung-fruit. It always tasted better if its rudimentary lung was still functioning. Once it died, the sugars would start converting into a bitter compound that protected its seeds.

  Her feet took her forward without any particular reason and she dropped the first of her scraps down a shaft that led to the central monorail line.

  She turned to the left and reached a maintenance node meant for some kind of data upgrade that had never materialized. She’d been here a few times, fantasizing about killing Memnon.

  The forward bulkhead of this space was also the aft wall of his bedchamber. He was in there right now. She could hear the horrible caterwauling that the Quailu called music.

  Knowing she was taking an unwarranted risk and not for the first time, she used a snippet to open a small peephole behind the slowly waving arms of a plant on his nightstand.

  Memnon sat at the foot of his bed, wearing an ornate robe. He snatched a strip of fermented fat from the hand of his attendant, some old fool against who
m he held some grudge.

  The attendant retreated to a corner just as another Quailu came in. She snatched the fat from Memnon and took a large bite.

  At first, Gabriella thought it was Ereshkigal but her mannerisms were all wrong. This Quailu was too brash, too lacking in the passive-aggressive deference that his intelligence chief had elevated to an art form.

  She’d overheard the gossip while waiting for the mess hall to empty out. This one was cousin to the empress herself. A Quailu lady of unspeakably ancient lineage.

  And crazy as a shit-house rat.

  “I had plans for that,” he grumbled.

  “And I have plans for this,” she replied curtly, reaching down.

  Memnon’s robe fell off his right shoulder and he made a rumbling sound. Something undulated into view to the right of his waist.

  Oh! Gabriella leaned back from the hole in the wall. Oh… ewww! She shuddered, scrambling away from the peephole.

  She got to her feet and started moving away, stopping as she remembered to cover her tracks. She closed the small hole in the wall as a thud sounded from Memnon’s room.

  “What the hells was that?” the princess demanded.

  “Don’t come to my bed if I disgust you so much,” Memnon snarled.

  Gabriella fled down the passageway as quietly as she could. She could avoid having her emotions detected by the Quailu as long as she kept a certain level of control but her shock had broken that control.

  She’d felt her revulsion a little too keenly but, fortunately, Memnon thought it was coming from the princess. It would be wise to get away from them before they felt anything else from her.

  She reached the main trunk and sat to catch her breath. Relief threatened to bubble to the surface but she hammered it down ruthlessly.

  Relief might not be the strangest emotion on a ship belonging to Memnon, where the crew constantly balanced on the knife’s edge between life and extrajudicial execution but it could still draw attention her way. She calmed her breathing and stood.