Fire Storm

by Chris Ward

  ‘Get to cover,’ he said.

  He activated the bomb from behind a stand of rocks, and for a few seconds glassy ice shards rained around them. When everything had gone still, Caladan looked up and found a gash torn in the ice with the grey outline of a steel door at its far end.

  ‘Close,’ he said. ‘We still have a couple of metres to dig. I guess it’s a good thing we brought the droid after all.’

  Harlan5, with his big, trash-crunching hands, attacked the ice wall with apparent relish, perhaps thankful to have been given something to do. Finally, they found themselves standing in front of a low steel door that reached Caladan’s neck. A control panel in one wall had been destroyed by ice, but when Caladan blasted the lock mechanism, the door swung open with a tired groan, revealing a dark, rock-hewn tunnel.

  ‘It’s lucky we decided to give this tunnel a maintenance check,’ Caladan said. ‘Would have been a problem if they were still using it.’

  ‘Did your system not highlight any other tunnels?’ Lia asked. ‘Perhaps it’s abandoned.’

  Caladan shrugged. ‘There were a couple on the other side, but that’s where Raylan’s ships came down.’

  ‘That’ll be why there’s no guard. They figured a wall of ice was enough.’

  Caladan patted Harlan5 on the shoulder. ‘They didn’t bank on us travelling with a trash compactor.’

  ‘My programming would like to point out that there is little sincerity in your apparent praise.’

  ‘Your programming needs to take a vacation.’

  ‘Will this take us right to the main code room?’ Lia said.

  ‘It should.’

  ‘Let’s move then.’

  The tunnel was dark, damp, and low. Caladan and Lia hurried quickly with their heads ducked, but Harlan5 was soon lagging behind, his squat body too wide to move straight forward, meaning he had to shuffle along facing sideways.

  After twenty minutes, they came to an airlock door.

  ‘Almost there,’ Caladan said. ‘A good job I brought plenty of charges.’

  Lia shook her head. ‘No need. We’re in my territory now.’ She went to a lock keypad beside the door and began tapping an intricate series of numbers. Caladan frowned as he watched her fingers working seemingly at random, but just as the droid finally caught up, grumbling about perceived hip ache, Lia looked up and grinned.

  ‘GMP override code. One hundred and nine digits. We were made to memorise them. Each system in the Estron Quadrant has to use one to comply with galactic law.’

  ‘You remembered a hundred and nine random numbers?’

  Lia shrugged. ‘I forgot it twice. That’s why it took me so long.’

  As the airlock hissed and the outer door slid open, Caladan turned to Lia. ‘Remind me what we have to do once we’re inside.’

  ‘Hit the transmission release button. That’s it. It’ll broadcast all recorded wormhole frequencies in Trill System, even the secret ones, allowing every ship currently in the system to store them to their own private databases. Even if the Barelaon then scramble the codes, enough will be stored that they can be privately broadcast from ship to ship. It will prevent the Barelaon from cutting Trill off, allowing other systems to come to her aid.’

  The outer airlock door hissed closed. The inner door slid open, revealing a wide corridor behind. They were halfway along it when the ground rumbled above them.

  ‘The assault has begun,’ Caladan said. ‘We’d better get a shift on. Move it, robot.’

  ‘My programming would like to remind you once again that my current form is not designed for such situations,’ Harlan5 said.

  ‘Nor is mine,’ Caladan replied. ‘But we have to make do, don’t we?’

  Lia took the lead, a blaster in each hand. Caladan came behind, with Harlan5 stumping along at the back. The corridor curved around to a set of steel doors. They were within a few steps when lights flickered on and gun emplacements extended from the walls, training on them.

  ‘Get back!’ Caladan shouted, but Lia stood her ground, dropped her weapons and lifted her palms to face the guns.

  ‘Now’s not the time to surrender,’ Caladan said.

  ‘Lianetta Jansen, Captain, Galactic Military Police,’ Lia said. Then, when the guns twisted to fix on her, she repeated the line again. ‘This is an emergency override situation. You are under attack. The GMP has taken control of this facility for the good of all Trill System. Open the doors. Please?’

  The guns retracted into the wall and an airlock hissed as the doors slid open, revealing a dusty command centre inside.

  ‘Definitely that last word that did it,’ Caladan said.

  Lia threw him a backward glance. ‘They need to update their records,’ she said. ‘I’ve been on the most-wanted list for ten Earth-years.’

  Every surface in the small control room was covered with a fine layer of what looked like dust, but when Caladan ran a finger through it, he found it was lime, probably leached in from the rocks that made up the wall. In the middle stood a terminal, lights flickering weakly, humming like an old refrigerator.

  ‘They’re coming,’ Harlan5 said from the door. The droid’s front casing slid open and a small photon cannon appeared.

  ‘Where’d you get that?’ Caladan asked.

  ‘The engineer made a few small adjustments while the captain was in the recuperation tank,’ Harlan5 said. ‘Request permission to defend our position as necessary?’

  ‘Of course!’ Caladan said, at the same time Lia shouted, ‘No!’

  Caladan turned to her. First he took in the hard set of her jaw, then the blaster trained at his chest.

  ‘What’s this?’

  Tears sprang to Lia’s eyes as she ran her other hand over the control terminal, activating a command screen on a visual monitor.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  Caladan began to lift his blaster, but Lia’s hand was a blur. A loud crack rang out, then the pieces of his blaster were scattering across the floor, smoking.

  ‘Don’t make me fire again.’

  Figures had appeared in the corridor outside. Harlan5, fixing Caladan with a blank look, stepped away from the entrance to allow them through. Caladan recognised the man they had met on the supposedly stricken deep space freighter.

  ‘Solven Snell. The Snake.’

  Snell’s grey eyes regarded the situation, then he began to laugh. ‘So, Lord Climlee was right. You’re as gullible as he thought. Disarm them.’

  A dozen tall Evattlan warriors—an insect-based species with bony exoskeletons as hard as any manufactured body armor—rushed into the control room, bony claws clacking over the steel floor. In a few moments Lia had her hands tied behind her back, and Caladan his single hand secured by a thick wire knotted around his waist.

  Caladan glanced at Lia, who was staring at the floor. ‘Tell me this isn’t real? That you didn’t just betray us?’

  Lia said nothing, but Snell began to laugh. ‘I have a message from Lord Climlee,’ he said, pulling a device out of his pocket and setting it up on the middle of the computer terminal. A light flicked on, then a projection appeared on the wall.

  ‘Little scumbag,’ Caladan spat, receiving a sharp slash across his back from an Evattlan. Caladan hissed with pain but fell quiet.

  ‘Dearest Lianetta,’ came a whiny voice as an image of Raylan Climlee appeared. ‘How nice that you completed your side of our bargain. It is a delight for me to see that you are reasonable after all.’

  ‘What’s this about, Lia?’ Caladan snapped, then shrank back as another Evattlan lifted a bony claw in warning.

  Lia ignored him. ‘Show them to me,’ she said. ‘I need to see that they’re all right.’

  ‘Lia—’ The strike came this time, leaving Caladan dizzy. He tasted blood on his tongue as his vision cleared, and he stared at the projection with disgust and horror.

  It now showed a man and a young boy.

  ‘Here they are,’ came Raylan’s voice. ‘Your beloved husband and son
. Stephen and Andrew Jansen. Welcome back, my dear friends, to the land of the living.’

  ‘He’s lying to you!’ Caladan shouted, only to find his mouth filling with blood as an Evattlan guard smashed him in the face again, this time with the butt of its weapon. He stumbled to one knee, watching Lia as she stared transfixed at the two figures projected on the wall.

  ‘Andrew … Stephen … I’m sorry I wasn’t there … I should have been … forgive me … please forgive me!’

  The camera zoomed out, revealing Raylan Climlee standing nearby, a cluster of guards beside him.

  ‘Do you remember the last time we met, Lianetta? I played you a recording of your family’s deaths? If I remember rightly, you found it rather pleasant. If I may, I’d like to repeat the process before I have my colleague Commander Snell bring you to my ship for a closer … reacquaintance. After all, now that you’ve given yourself up like the worthless coward you are, I have no need for these two wastes of valuable air.’

  With a wave of his hand, his guards fanned out into a line, their weapons raised, trained on the cowering man and boy.

  ‘Aim for the extremities first,’ Raylan said. ‘I don’t want them to die straight away. I want to hear their screams echoing across the galaxy!’

  ‘Raylan, no!’

  The camera zoomed in again, a close up on Raylan’s face. ‘How does it feel, Lianetta? How does true suffering feel? Are you breaking yet? Have I managed to shatter that disgusting lump of glass you call a heart?’

  ‘Don’t hurt them!’

  ‘Lia, it’s not—’

  Thud.

  Caladan’s knees hit the ground shortly before his face. From the icy cold floor, somewhat soothing on his aching face, he listened to Raylan’s final words:

  ‘Say goodbye, Lianetta. You have five seconds left to look on your husband and son before I have them slowly blasted into little pieces. Five little seconds. Five … four … three … two … one—’

  32

  Harlan5

  The poor dead engineer had enjoyed tinkering, although Harlan5 hadn’t realised until later that Stomlard had been practicing on what he considered an inferior machine, lest he make a mistake with the Matilda. Compromised with a Barelaon virus that had slowly ate away Stomlard’s reason as it took over his mind, the engineer had needed the Matilda in good working order, but a simple maintenance droid was expendable.

  However, the Boswell GT, had its surprises.

  The little cannon built into its chest cavity wasn’t designed for defense. In fact, its sole purpose was for breaking up larger pieces of trash which could then be compacted manually. It had limited mobility and blast speed, but was far more powerful than most inbuilt droid weapons systems. The Boswell, with its simple memory, would never have considered it for an alternative use, but Harlan, who had seen all kinds of combat situations most maintenance droids rarely experienced, was a little less innocent, as a human might have put it.

  Now, as he stood in a corner, ignored by everyone while the drama played out, he considered his options.

  The captain, having given the order not to fire on the attacking soldiers, had been compromised. The pilot was technically second-in-command, but he had been compromised too. Harlan5 delved into his remaining databanks to consider the appropriate protocol in such a situation.

  The captain was screaming with distress and rage as a diminutive man on a projector threatened to murder two people he had named as the captain’s husband and son. Harlan5 found this situation difficult to comprehend, having believed the captain’s family to be dead. He understood that while it was considered currently impossible in known systems to revive someone from the dead, it was extremely easy to create lifelike representations or visual images. The captain, however, seemed to be in total belief, so much so that she had compromised their original mission.

  And what had that been? Harlan5—who was feeling a little under the weather, perhaps as a result of something viral—deduced from what he had overheard that something needed to be transmitted. Some codes of some kind.

  The Boswell’s memory began to overheat with the strain of everything, and Harlan5 realised he needed to do something quickly before it was too late.

  What would a human do?

  The captain would certainly get drunk.

  And the pilot would do something reckless.

  The overheating was making Harlan5 feel a kind of robot-drunk. And what would be reckless?

  No one was watching him, not the enemy commander nor his Evattlan soldiers, because as a simple trash compactor robot, Harlan wasn’t even worth looking at. Hoping the sound of the Boswell’s chest cavity opening wasn’t audible over the shuffling of the guards, Harlan5 engaged the trash compactor’s cannon, training it on the control terminal in the room’s centre, aware that on destruction, a database like this likely had an emergency transmitter to prevent the important data from being lost.

  And then he tried to think of something heroic to say, something gung-ho that would make a human cheer or cry out with excitement.

  When nothing of note came to mind, he simply opened fire.

  33

  Lia

  ‘… one—’

  The image vanished, the projecting device exploding an instant before the computer terminal erupted in a cloud of smoke and sparks as a wall of noise and cannon fire filled the small control room. Lia twisted out of the grip of the Evattlan holding her, kicking out at the creature and knocking its gun aside as its chest exploded, showering her with pieces of exoskeleton. Others had been hit too, and across from her, she saw Solven Snell thrown back against the wall.

  Somewhere over the roar of blaster fire, she heard Caladan laughing.

  Knocked to the floor, Lia scrambled behind the terminal, slipping out of view as the Evattlans turned their attention to the attacker. Blaster fire was coming from both sides now, with the computer terminal a smoking ruin in between.

  ‘I’ll free you if you free me,’ came a gruff voice in her ear, and Lia found Caladan’s bloody face close to her own, a wild look in his eyes. ‘But be warned, I’m going to kick the hell out of you for betraying us, even if I can understand why.’

  ‘Who’s firing?’

  ‘The droid. We need to get him fixed. We can’t have one who doesn’t follow orders, can we?’

  The shooting stopped. Caladan, his back to Lia, was trying to pick up a fallen blaster with his tied hand. With her foot, Lia nudged it into his fingers.

  ‘Hold still a moment.’

  ‘Don’t miss.’

  Caladan grinned. ‘If I do we’ll be armless brothers.’

  ‘Brother and sister.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Are you drunk?’

  ‘I think I’m allergic to those bugs. Either that or the smoke is getting to me. Or it could be the dust—’

  ‘Hurry up.’

  The blaster went off. Lia felt a burning sensation, but her hands were loose again. She wiggled her fingers, then lifted them up. One cuff was seared through, leaving a little burn mark on her wrist.

  ‘That was close.’

  ‘It was a good effort though, wasn’t it? Hurry up and get me free.’

  Lia cut through Caladan’s bonds and helped him up. Blood soaked one side of his face, and his beard was a spongy red mess.

  ‘Look at me,’ he said.

  She turned toward him. He bared his teeth, snarling at her, then his shoulder jerked in her direction.

  ‘I just slapped you with my missing left hand. Be thankful I think I’ve dislocated the right. What the hell were you playing at? That wasn’t real. He’s playing games with you. You think if he really had your husband and child he’d just blast them like that? They were clones or projections or some other trickery.’

  Lia grabbed his shirt front, shaking him. ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘Because you’d know if they weren’t.’ He thumped his chest. ‘In here. They’re gone, Lia, and they’re not coming back, no matter how much y
ou might want it.’

  ‘How can you say that? You’ve never lost anyone you were close to.’

  Caladan shoved her away. ‘Yeah, I have. I lost you. And I found you again. Don’t let me lose you twice. Now, come on, we have to go. One of those things ran. It won’t be long before it comes back with more.’

  She stared at him. Her heart was burning with shame and regret, but he was right.

  As the smoke cleared, she took stock of her surroundings. A dozen Evattlan lay dead, many of them in pieces. Harlan5, having drawn their fire, was a smoking wreck.

  ‘The robot,’ Caladan said. ‘He took one for the team.’

  Lia could barely bring her feet to move, but Caladan was pushing her from behind, moving her through the wreckage to the entrance.

  ‘Snell … I spent years hunting you.’ Lia nudged his body with her foot.

  ‘At least the robot got a decent hit on its chart,’ Caladan said. ‘Better than any of mine.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were an assassin?’

  ‘I dabbled. Come on, let’s get out of here.’

  The walls shook around them as something boomed above ground. Caladan pointed to the terminal.

  ‘Is there anything we can do with that?’

  Lia ran her hands over what was left of the dashboard, but most of it was broken. She picked a piece of circuit board out of the ruins and held it up. ‘This might have something we can use on it, but we won’t know unless we can access it on board the Matilda.’

  ‘Better than nothing. Let’s go.’ As she jogged past him, she said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I don’t care if you’re sorry. I’d forgive anything you did, you know that. Even if you took my other arm, I’d let you off. Wait a moment.’

  Caladan flapped smoke away from Harlan5’s body and gripped the robot’s head, hugging it against his chest. With a sharp crack, he twisted it, ripping free the last wires connecting it to the chassis.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘You’ve got your souvenir. I want mine.’