They came to the end of the path and split up as they crossed the wide-open space. Galen was with Burr, and Messel and Iden paired off, too. Eria led the way past several groups playing different versions of whatever passed for sports on Zed. Some were kicking around a small yellow cube that never touched the ground; others were in the midst of a rough-and-tumble round of ramball. Another group was hitting a small green disc back and forth with large paddles. Still another group was chasing around some poor soul in cheap body armor and hitting him with sticks.
“Looks like fun,” said Galen dryly.
“I don’t think so,” said Burr. “It looks like it hurts.”
“I was kidding.”
“Oh, of course.”
They’d passed the halfway mark when a light hover tank zoomed in from Galen’s right and stopped over the field. A loud sonic pulse got everyone’s attention. “Cease all activity and sit down. A ground squad will be here momentarily to process you,” bellowed the tank.
Eria jerked her head toward the air docks before yelling, “Run, they’re killing everyone!”
Chapter Sixteen
Dur made a few nervous adjustments on the apparatus containing the Ruam girl. The device was a standard isolation tank filled with a viscous, hyperoxygenated fluid. Trem was unconscious and suspended by cables that stabilized her position. Her head was completely encased in a visor-less flight helmet that cut off all sensory input from the outside world. Signals from the helmet were sent via wireless means to a control panel. Dur’s movements were nervous because Lord Mohk stood behind him, his arms crossed. “One moment, my lord,” he said. His fingers slid over a few more control surfaces before he gave up. “The device is unable to narrow its focus to any area smaller than a medium-sized planet. We know her brother is here, but we cannot pinpoint his location.” Dur closed his eyes and wondered briefly how decapitation would feel.
“Find him,” growled Mohk before turning and leaving the bay.
When the door closed, Dur sighed and shook his head. Not sure how much more of that beast I can take. Pausing a moment to collect his thoughts, he punched a comlink. “Colonel?”
The colonel’s beleaguered face appeared on a vidscreen. “Yes?”
“By order of Lord Mohk, the rogue station Zed is to be locked down and a systematic search for the Ruam begun. All areas, including crawl spaces and containers large enough to hold an adult Ruam, are to be ripped apart. Gather and interrogate all base personnel and inhabitants, then prepare them for relocation or execution.”
The colonel rubbed his temples. “This is going to take some time.”
“Then I suggest you start. His Lordship is particularly impatient right now.”
The colonel started to speak, then stopped. “Acknowledged. What about the planet? Seems like a logical place to go.”
“We have a salvage team down there with some security personnel. I’ll alert them. Dur out.”
The vidscreen flickered off, and Dur leaned back in his chair, glancing at another screen as he did so. Something caught his eye. “Oh, now that’s interesting.”
One of the techs looked up from his screen. “What is?”
“Her genetic profile scan finished. She’s Ruam, part Terran, part . . . something else.”
**
Where am I? Floating. In space? No, liquid. It’s dark. I’m all alone. Wait. What was that? Something brushed my arm. I felt it.
**
It didn’t take more than a blink for everyone else on the field to get the idea they should be running. Now there were people charging and screaming in every direction. Galen guessed the hover tank wasn’t used to having its orders ignored, since it did what an upset hover tank apparently does, namely, firing explosive projectiles in every direction. Gotta keep moving, he thought, running toward the field’s perimeter and dodging panicky Zedites who kept blocking his path. He’d almost made it when a shell hit the ground about five steps ahead and launched him into the air. The last thing he remembered was intense heat and being yanked back, hard.
**
There it is again. I can almost see it—teeth, claws, eyes. It’s looking right at me with its horrible eyes filled with rage . . . and kindness.
**
Galen gasped and tried to sit up, but he couldn’t. Iden and Messel were holding him down. Eria stood a few steps behind, and all of them had worried looks on their faces. Burr, his own head wrapped in bloodstained bandages, dabbed Galen’s forehead with a piece of moistened cloth.
“Burr,” croaked Galen. “What happened?”
“You were nearly hit by a projectile from the hover tank. As it was, the explosion was close enough that the concussion almost killed you,” said Burr. “If it wasn’t for Lady Eria’s quick action in pulling you away, I have no doubt you would have died.”
“Oh. Thank you.”
Eria crossed her arms. “What was I supposed to do? Let an Imp tank kill you?”
“You look like you caught some yourself,” said Galen to Burr.
“Yes, I suppose I did. Looks worse than it is.”
Galen glanced over Burr’s shoulder. The soft artificial lighting and luxury structural components in view told him he wasn’t on the Ghost Star. “Where are we?”
“On my ship,” said Eria. “The Arrow.”
Galen sniffed and frowned. “Stinks like fried . . . something in here.”
“Yeah, the galley venting system is wonky. Big bad Burr here says he can fix it when we get somewhere safe.”
“Has anyone talked to Bartrice?”
“No,” said Burr flatly. “Someone neglected to give us his off-ship access code.”
Galen winced. “Sorry.”
Eria held up a mobile com unit. “You strong enough to talk to her?”
“Sure. What should I tell her?”
“She needs to decouple with the air dock as soon as possible and crawl down to an exhaust port on the planet side of Zed. They’re going to inspect the ships eventually.”
“Right.”
Galen punched in the access code and had to pull the com away when Bartrice’s voice came blasting out.
“Captain Bray! Where have you been? I’ve been worried sick!”
“We ran into trouble, and now we’re trying to get around it.”
“Did you know two battle cruisers just showed up?”
“Yeah, that’s the trouble I’m talking about,” said Galen. “Look, Bartrice, I need you to do something, and I need you to do it fast.”
“What is your command, Captain Bray?”
“You need to decouple from the air dock and crawl down to the planetside exhaust port as soon as you can. Eria says they’re going to start searching the ships.”
“Eria?”
“I’m Nolo’s sister, Galen’s aunt.”
After a pause: “Hello, Eria.”
“Hello, Bartrice.”
“Long story,” said Messel to Eria, seeing her puzzled look. “The short version is the ship’s AI is a digital copy of his mother’s personality.”
“Nolo talked about you frequently. He would have been quite pleased to hear you’re still alive.”
“I was sorry to hear he’d died,” said Eria.
“Yes,” said Bartrice. “Me too.” After another pause, Bartrice’s chipper default voice returned. “All right, I’ll get moving.”
“Make sure you crawl the entire distance and maintain physical contact with Zed, or they’ll pick you up on their sensors,” said Eria. “Once you get into position, wait until debris comes out of the ports, then drift along with it to the planet’s surface, firing your landers only at the last moment. Zed has timed autodumps of waste material, and I doubt they’ll pay much attention to a knot of garbage.”
“Ah, the old ‘escape by making them think you’re garbage’ trick,” said Iden. Eria glared at him, and he shrugged. “What? It’s a classic.”
“What do you wish me to do once I reach the surface?” said Bartrice.
�
�Wait for us. We’ll be riding the garbage down with you.”
“Hex?” said Galen before glancing at Eria. “My ship’s bot.”
“I am here, Lord Bray.”
“Be ready for anything. We don’t know how this is going to work out.”
“I am always ready for anything, but I take your words of caution in the spirit in which they are given.”
“Good.”
“Oh,” said Eria. “Turn off all electronics except for the bare minimum needed to function. That includes yourself, Hex, until you reach the surface. The Imps can pick up energy readings above what might still be happening in discarded hardware.”
“Understood. See you on Tac.”
**
Roughly two hours later, both the Ghost Star and the Arrow had crept down to the planetside exhaust port. Galen joined Eria in the Arrow’s command pod and assessed the controls. “This boat isn’t Ruam, is it?”
“No. Wish it was. It’s an old Varran pleasure yacht. Incredibly fast to begin with, even faster since I improved her.”
“The Ghost Star is a modified pocket destroyer.”
Eria looked impressed. “Leave it to Nolo to have the spheres to run Ruam tech out in the open. I imagine ‘modified’ is an understatement.”
“Yeah, it’s safe to say that.”
Eria looked Galen in the eyes and grew serious. “Right. Half Terran. Can you slowtime?”
“Yes.”
“Shre?”
“No. Can you?”
“No. Can your sister?”
“Uh, not sure.”
Eria stared at Galen for a long moment.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing. You look so much like your father, it’s shocking.”
The entire ship vibrated. Eria ran to her command chair and strapped herself in. “Go tell the others to hang on to something. Zed is about to take a dump.”
Chapter Seventeen
Lord Mohk paced. “Gone?”
The colonel fidgeted in place, shifting his weight back and forth between his real leg and the skeletal artificial one. “Yes, my lord. As you ordered, all of our available teams combed every square inch of Zed for the past day, and the Ruam child’s brother was nowhere to be found. We did, however, find a large concentration of criminals . . .”
Mohk stopped pacing, and the colonel’s report trailed off.
“Is there a chance he might still be hiding somewhere?”
“I don’t believe so, Lord Mohk,” said the colonel, his breathing now ragged.
Mohk walked toward the colonel. “What you are telling me then is that you have let the Ruam escape.”
“No, my lord. I mean . . .”
The colonel’s short stay as the leader of Lord Mohk’s troops came to an abrupt ending when his head hit the gravplates. “Dur!”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Appoint a sublieutenant as my new troop commander. Someone who seems eager to please.”
Because they want to avoid death? That would be all of them, thought Dur. “It shall be done, Lord Mohk. What about Zed?”
“Destroy it.”
**
On the planet’s surface, Galen and the others kept silent watch on the nighttime sky from the relative safety of the massive centuries-old debris field. Zed had been there long enough that scans taken on the way down indicated a band of garbage on the surface that ran around the entire planet, following the orbital path of the broken-down station. Most of the garbage that made it to the ground without burning up was large and partially melted chunks of metal and knots of ceramic components.
As planned, the Ghost Star and the Arrow had drifted downward with a tight knot of junk from the purge, using only the smallest of adjustments from flight thrusters to keep them coming in at the right angle. Even doing that, they were still able to generate a convincing glow from their heat shields in case any watchful eyes had decided it was recreational to watch trash burn in the atmosphere of a dead planet. A quick blast from their thrusters before the rest of the trash hit the surface was enough to safely land them and give the appearance of an impact. The two ships sat a relatively short distance from each other, their systems on minimal power.
Onboard the Arrow, Galen and Eria sat in the command pod monitoring the situation. “I can imagine the suffering going on right now,” said Eria. “Some of the scum deserve it, but there are normal people on Zed, too. Families, merchants, regular people.”
“You need regular people to make a place livable,” said Galen, looking skyward through one of the viewplates.
“Thinking about your sister?”
“All the time.”
Iden ducked into the pod. “Anything?”
Galen shook his head. “No. They’re just sitting there.”
“How long before they leave?”
“A few hours usually, maybe a day,” said Eria. “Even though they cause a lot of pain and suffering and try to act like they’re here as law enforcement, sometimes the fleet comes for a short visit. Unofficially, of course. Let’s just say the brothels on Zed do a brisk business when the Imps show up.”
“Hold on, something’s happening,” said Galen, making an adjustment on the vidscreen.
Both of Mohk’s void cruisers had fired their thrusters and were now moving away from Zed at a rapid clip.
“That wasn’t too bad,” said Eria. “We’ll wait until they get out of the system before we move around, though. You never know how far—”
Zed exploded.
The flash bathed the interior of the command pod in a harsh glow. All that was Zed was no more. The fireball vanished as soon as it had consumed the internal atmosphere of Zed, and the sky grew dark in the space of a blink.
Galen and Eria stared at the vidscreen, frozen in place by the horror they had just witnessed. Burr came running to the doorway, followed closely by Messel and Iden.
“The instruments—oh dear,” said Burr, noticing the empty vidscreen.
Iden gasped. “All those people . . .”
A massive thud shook the Arrow violently, knocking everyone who was standing to the floor or into a bulkhead.
“Chunks of Zed are hitting the surface!” said Galen as a piece of the station the size of the Ghost Star burrowed into the debris field. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
Eria stared blankly ahead, not moving.
Two more pieces of Zed slammed into Tac in rapid succession, viciously rattling the Arrow.
“Eria! Get us out of here!” shouted Galen.
Eria snapped out of her daze and lit up all the systems of her ship.
Galen yelled into the com. “Bartrice! Move!”
“Understood.”
Through the viewplate, Galen saw his ship streak out of view. Eria grabbed the steerstick and jammed it forward, sending the Arrow racing through towering canyons of debris, narrowly avoiding the falling remnants of her former home.
**
The trip to the mining outpost Zidac was somber as Eria kept quiet, brushing off any efforts to console her. This time Galen understood her reaction. While the death of Nolo was gut-wrenching, it was distant and somewhat abstract. Something that could be quietly mourned. The destruction of Zed and its inhabitants was close and immediate. He left her alone and looked out the forward viewplates for most of the journey.
Even though it was going to take much longer, he had decided it was more prudent to hug the surface of the planet than jump into the upper atmosphere and risk detection. The Imps were known to leave behind spy satellites. The landscape itself was unchanging and uninteresting, one continuous stretch of rust-stained sandstone with the occasional outcropping of darker igneous rock to break up the monotony. It was hard for Galen to believe this desolate place had, at one time, been the Ruam home world. To him, the planet looked like it had always been dead.
Every once in a great while, they passed a clump of grasslike vegetation, a lone piece of heavy equipment that had been sandblasted to a shiny luster by the win
d, or a small cluster of what used to be buildings. As they approached one such cluster, Burr suggested they stop briefly and stretch their legs.
Galen thumbed on the com. “Bartrice, we’re going to take a quick break near those ruins up ahead. Try and find a place where you can land without kicking up too much dust.”
“Understood.”
The Arrow and the Ghost Star landed and, between the two craft, managed to kick up quite a bit of dust.
The voice of Bartrice crackled over the com. “My apologies, Captain Bray, I did try.”
“Don’t worry about it, Bartrice. I think I was being a little optimistic about us not disturbing the surface. There’s dust everywhere!”
Galen and the others—except Eria, who was understandably still in a funk and stayed behind—suited up and stepped out of the air dock of the Arrow. The atmosphere of Tac was much too thin and oxygen poor for breathing. It was also near freezing, which meant wearing a ground suit was mandatory. They were met by Hex, who had slipped out of the air dock of the Ghost Star.
“The destruction of Zed was a truly horrific act,” said the bot as he sidled up to Galen. “The wanton destruction of life on that scale is an unforgivable sin.”
“You’ll get no argument from me or anyone else in our group. Especially Eria.”
“Yes. I shall go and offer my condolences on the total annihilation of her friends and neighbors,” said Hex, making a move toward the Arrow.
“Hold on, Hex. She’s still feeling pretty bad. I think it’d be a better idea to leave her alone for a while.”
“Understood.”
Burr strode over to a partially ruined building that still retained some of its elegance. Bas-relief geometric carvings covered its copper-colored exterior. Galen watched Burr reach out and hesitate slightly before gently caressing a section of the wall.
“In its day, Tac was the pride of the Rex Cloud, a center of learning, the arts, culture, and science. Then the Nell showed up with their void ships capable of crossing the great empty distances and defeated our people. Completely.”
“Not completely,” growled Galen. “Not as long as one Ruam still breathes.”
Ghost Star Page 10
