The Hate Parallax

by Allan Cole

  Soon, a lighter would show up from the Borodino and the Stardove’s crewmen would help those on board unload the “medical supplies.”

  LT’s would exchange hands and everyone concerned would be happy, since the lighter’s Russian crew would expect a portion of the urgently needed “supplies” for their troubles.

  For Davyd’s purpose this small violation offered a very large hole in the Borodino’s security.

  He walked to the rear of the stack and found the large crate he’d once called home.

  Davyd pressed his thumb against the fourth bolt head from the bottom. A little red light beamed on, examined his thumbprint, then blinked off. There was a whir and the front of the crate swung open.

  And the corpse of the naked, tattooed man tumbled out.

  Davyd wrinkled his nose. The body was getting kind of ripe.

  He stared at the corpse, remembering:

  * * *

  At first, Davyd thought it was the rats.

  All spaceships of any size were infected by rodents. There was nothing that could be done about them. Over the centuries rats had become immune to anything— magical or otherwise— aimed at their slaughter.

  So when Davyd heard the scratches and scurrying noises somewhere off in the hold, he thought it was the rats.

  He’d heard the sound of rat-like movement shortly after he’d exited the crate— when the Stardove was well underway and no one would enter the hold to discover him.

  Davyd was setting up temporary quarters— consisting of an inflatable mattress, a few rations, and a little generator to keep him warm— when he suddenly noticed the ferret-like scratching coming from the vent above.

  He checked, climbing up on crates to examine the vent with a pinlight, but found nothing. Just rats, he thought again. And that was that.

  It went on like that for a time, the sounds becoming particularly active when he was eating, which seemed reasonable considering he had rats fixed in his mind.

  The image had been shattered the day before they entered the Borodino’s sector.

  Davyd was crouching over his ghost-flitter, getting prepared well in advance for the insertion. The flitter was contained in a large, torpedo-shaped tube that took up most of the space in Davyd’s crate.

  It was about eight feet long and its color was a smoky gray. A hatch opened on one side, revealing just enough room for a man Davyd’s size.

  This was where’d he’d hidden when the crate was put on board with the rest of the “medical supplies.” The ruse had taken only a small bribe and since there was no true ship’s manifest no one would be the wiser that there was an extra crate.

  When the time came, Davyd would climb inside again and launch the flitter. The moment he entered cold space the flitter would automatically unfold and unfurl until it took on its true form— a small craft built to literally sail through space.

  With Davyd safe in the torpedo-like hull he could operate the enormous sail, catching the space winds to close the distance between the Stardove and the Borodino with relative ease.

  Best of all, the flitter was made of special material, bolstered by powerful camospells, that would make him invisible to all the Borodino’s instruments. Still better, the flitter was so disguised it would even be difficult to see with the naked eye.

  Davyd was using the gremlin box for a final check of the flitter’s circuits when he sensed a sudden change in air pressure behind him.

  He didn’t think, only reacted. Twisting to meet his opponent, but clumsily, cursing himself for being caught in such an awkward position.

  Davyd had time to see a broad-bladed knife slash at him, a quick glimpse of swirling colors, and he dropped to one knee, catching a wrist and breaking it, hearing the knife clatter to the floor.

  Then he was coming up and under, fist powering in for the killing chest blow. But then he saw a second knife thrusting toward him.

  Shit!

  Two knives!

  The man had two knives!

  And injured or not, he was driving the second blade with such force that he would beat Davyd’s blow by a hair.

  Davyd hurled himself backward, skittering across the smooth plas deck on his shoulders, arms and legs all akimbo.

  He knew he was wide open, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it except pray that his enemy was too hurt to follow up.

  And then God must have had a good laugh at his prayers, because the next thing he saw was a huge man, naked to the waist, torso glowing with garish tattoos, hurling himself at Davyd. Knife gripped in a mighty fist that was swinging down, down, down.

  Davyd let him come.

  Everything was in slow motion battle-time now. The big body floated toward him. Wide-bladed knife plunging for Davyd’s heart.

  Davyd reached out with both hands, catching the blade between his palms. Then turning it.

  A harsh scream brought time back to normal and the man slammed down on Davyd. There was a gasp. Then a gush of warm blood soaking Davyd’s clothes.

  A final twitch and then the man was still.

  Davyd pushed the body away and came to his knees. His head swiveled slowly, senses on full alert, checking the cargo bay for another threat.

  Nothing.

  Davyd sighed relief, then looked down at the man, wondering who he was. The guy was barefooted, wearing only ragged shorts. Davyd checked them closer and saw they were old uniform trousers cut down to trunks. The uniform was Russian.

  Then his eyes went to the guy’s face, noting the rough but good-looking features. He was thirty, maybe thirty five. His face was tanned the deep color that came from working many years in space. And swollen. From drink?

  He saw two or three broken blood-vessels on the man’s nose and confirmed his hunch. Yes, drink.

  Okay, fine, okay sure. Now the tattoos.

  Actually it was one tattoo. But it was so large, so magnificently elaborate, that it seemed like many. The tattoo was an enormous portrait of a Russian battlestation. It covered the man’s chest and spread out onto his arms, going all the way to the wrists, including the poor bent thing Davyd had broken.

  Then it went all the way around to cover the guy’s back so the whole portrait was like a three dimensional view of the battlestation.

  If you looked close you could even see scores of small vehicles standing off the battleship and the face of miniature men peering out through portholes.

  Near where the left shoulder joined the trunk was the ship’s name, written in Cyrillic:

  It was the Borodino!

  For Davyd this was an even greater puzzle. What was a hand from the Borodino doing hiding aboard the Stardove?

  He went through the guy’s pockets, finding nothing. Then he searched the entire bay until he located the man’s shoulder pack hidden deep within a vent.

  Inside was a set of civilian clothes— rough, spaceport bar wear— and a crisp Russian naval uniform. Rank? Davyd checked the tabs, deciphering. A warrant rating of some sort. Or its equivalent. But low, he guessed.

  He checked further, noting that the awards on the tunic included none for combat. As good as the guy was with his two damned knives, he wasn’t a professional fighter.

  Then Davyd spotted the faded spot where a patch had once been sewn. He clawed through the pack until he found that patch. He was surprised. It was for the medical corps. The guy was some kind of medical tech.

  Hells, bells, what was going on here?

  More delving and he came up with a wallet. A military wallet built to withstand the elements. Davyd pressed a tab and it came open.

  Inside he found the man’s documents. All revealing that Davyd’s guesses about rank and job description had been right on target.

  He also found a wallet holo that made things a little clearer.

  There were two men in the holo— Davyd’s dead friend plus a younger man with fine features. They were both in uniform, but a little drunk, caps askew, Russian spaceport bar in the background. They had their arms around one a
nother and were beaming into the camera.

  Davyd squeezed the holo slightly and a message in Cyrillic started running across its surface.

  It said: “Friends to the death! Alex and Dmitri forever!”

  Davyd shrugged. What did he care? To each sinner his sin and all that.

  He unfolded a final document, quite battered and stained, and the mystery was solved.

  Alex, which was the dead guy’s name, had been cashiered from the Russian navy. It didn’t say what his offense had been, but Davyd guessed it probably involved drinking or drugs— maybe both.

  And considering Alex’s skills with a knife, he’d been wise to the ways of tough space port bars and streets.

  He glanced at the holo again, the two drunken friends embracing one another. Alex, it seemed, had been so distraught, so foolishly in love with young Dmitri, that he had stowed away on the Stardove to return to his lover’s arms.

  Risking certain capture and imprisonment— possibly even death by firing squad— to accomplish his purpose.

  Davyd glanced over at the body again. Very well, so that’s what he was up to, he thought. But why did he try to kill me?

  The answer was so simple that it occurred to him immediately. Once a military man, always a military man. Even one who had been cashiered.

  To Alex, Davyd had obviously been an enemy up to no good. It was Alex’s duty to stop Davyd. To kill him. And so he’d tried.

  Ah, well, it hadn’t worked and it had cost him his life. But what was grim news for Alex was good news for Davyd. The medical papers and other documents in the wallet had given him definite ideas about how to do his job on the Borodino …

  * * *

  Davyd blinked, coming back to the present. Alex’s dead eyes stared up at him— accusing.

  “Sorry, friend,” he said, “but I’m short on time and burial space.”

  Davyd lugged the body to the hatch leading to the cargo bay’s shredder, which was used to get rid of packing materials and crates too battered to be recycled.

  He dumped poor Alex through the hatch, locked it, and punched a button. He tried not to listen to the grinding noises of Alex’s body being turned into molecular-sized bits.

  Then he returned to the flitter. Stripped off his clothes and changed into Alex’s med-tech uniform, which he’d cut down to fit. He stowed his gear in the flitter, then man-handled the tube over to the garbage locker.

  Got it open, shoved the flitter inside with all the filth that had gathered during the journey— now including Alex— then slipped into position.

  The hatch automatically hissed down on him and soft lights came on. Not that there was much to see except the simple retinal screen which was operated by the movement of his eyes. He was on his stomach, arms at his side, feet brushing against his gear.

  Davyd blanked his mind as he waited.

  A few minutes later the Stardove’s First Mate got clearance for a routine dump. She touched a palm switch and there was a slight rumble, like gastric juices roiling in a giant’s belly, and the trash was expelled into space.

  In the flitter, Davyd examined the Borodino as his small craft unfolded around him. After memorizing Alex’s tattoo, he knew the ship quite well.

  Then he gave the command to set sail.

  And the flitter soared toward the massive battlestation, tacking on the hot spell winds.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Davyd had once read of a small spiny fish that hunted the Amazon River. Large mammals, including humans, were its favorite prey— not as food, but as nests for its eggs.

  Unlike its larger cousin, the piranha, this fish worked alone, slipping up to its huge victim while it bathed in the shallows.

  Big as the fish’s prey might be there was one vulnerability it could always exploit— the rectum. The details of what the fish did once it spotted its target were not amusing.

  Even so, as Davyd approached the Borodino’s Recycling Section he thought of that fish and laughed aloud.

  Rupturing from one side of the battlestation was an immense tube, flanged at the end like an exposed rectum. The tube was excreting large squares of compacted organic material into space.

  Robot garbage scows swooped in and out of the steady stream, gathering up the space-frozen hunks of matter to transport them to the main recycler, where billions of magical microbes would turn the waste into food and drink and air.

  It was the perfect cover.

  Using the scows as a shield, Davyd sailed the flitter right up to the aperture, which was many times larger than his tiny craft.

  He hovered there in the dense roar and clack of machinery until the there was a pause for the machines to gulp up another load. Then he put on full power and shot forward into the guts of the Borodino.

  At this point the Amazon fish would have spread its spines. Davyd, however, collapsed his— folding up the sails until the flitter was a smooth torpedo again.

  He studied the small, curved panel in front of him, which gave him a colorful gremlin-box view of the interior of the tube. He passed several gate locks— red on the panel— but they were all too small.

  Then the recycling machines belched back into life and he started getting worried. Just in time he saw a lock large enough for his purposes.

  Davyd whispered a few quick commands to the gremlin-box and moments later the flitter skittered to a halt within inches of the lock, gluing itself to the plas surface of the recycling tube like a barnacle on a great gray whale.

  At the same time big blocks of compacted filth— all the size of gravbuses— tumbled past him. He whooshed relief. Another second or two and he might have met with a rather disgusting fate.

  Hardly a fitting end for a hero of Odysseus Corps.

  The interior of the flitter shivered light and the underskin started to fold around him. He stretched out his legs and arms, splaying his fingers, and a skin-tight space suit formed around him.

  When the process was complete he pulled the glowing panel toward him, twisting left, then right, until it came loose, revealing itself to be a helmet shaped like an old fashioned goldfish bowl.

  He slipped it over his head and the helmet automatically fixed itself to the suit, making a perfect seal. Finally, he tucked the gremlin-box into a kit pocket.

  And Davyd was ready.

  He opened the flitter and got out, moving in the weightless environment with practiced ease as he retrieved his gear sack.

  The suit offered only a rebreather, with air enough for ten minutes tops. It made up for this lack by being less cumbersome than a bulky full suit.

  Besides, ten minutes was plenty of time to get in. The tricky part would be cutting that time in half so he could get out again.

  Assuming I live that long, he thought. He snorted laughter, wasting precious breath. Davyd couldn’t help it— in his mission-hyped state his humor button was on hair trigger.

  He worked the lock mechanism. There was a blast of foggy air that instantly turned to snow and the lock came open. He slipped inside, sealing the hatch behind him.

  Davyd made it in well under four minutes— moving through several hatches, tight-rope walking over clanking machinery and wriggling through a series of vents until he came to a storage bay where the atmosphere was breathable.

  It was a dark warren of crates and supplies stacked all the way to the high ceiling.

  He scanned the interior with the gremlin-box. No one there. Good. Luck holding.

  A few minutes later he was checking the pockets of the Russian uniform to make sure he had everything he needed— spacesuit and gear bag already hidden among the crates.

  Things didn’t go quite so quickly after that. Even with the gremlin-box it took him a good fifteen minutes to locate the wiring terminal, which was hidden behind a column of crates next to the entrance; and another half hour to uncover it.

  Still another hour was lost after he patched in as the little fiends in the gremlin-box crept through the ship’s optical links, ducking and dodging small
Russian devils as they went— leaving a private trail behind them like magical snail tracks.

  The process was slow, but at the end of the hour Davyd was plugged into several key sectors of the Borodino— all of them low security areas like bookkeeping, personnel, billeting, etc.

  This way he could avoid detection, but still manipulate nearly anything he needed— like the location of the battlestation’s hospital. Where he could find the records and whereabouts of a Borodino medical tech named Dmitri Aizenberg.

  He had a list of other names after that— starting with Billy Ivanov and ending with Igor Dolgov.

  Oh, yes. One another person— Tanya Lawson.

  Then the door beside him suddenly creaked open.

  Davyd whirled to see a grizzled Russian sailor gaping at him in surprise— eyes darting to the mess of wires hanging from the open terminal box, then back to Davyd.

  The gape became a red flush of anger and the sailor bellowed in Russian: “Kakogo cherta?”

  Which Davyd instantly translated as, “What the hell?”

  Those became the sailor’s last words as Davyd’s fingers pincered into his throat, crushing the larynx. He caught the toppling body and lowered it to the floor.

  As he finished off the still-twitching sailor, he thought: Shit! Another dead guy to get rid of!

  This job was getting grim and he’d hardly even started yet.

  * * *

  Dmitri Aizenberg would never know how close he came to being corpse number three.

  It was drink that saved him.

  Pining for his lover, Alex, he had lingered too long in the NCO Club after he got off duty. His friends had tried to cheer him up, but it was no use. Brandy seemed the only cure and so he’d absorbed great quantities of it.

  Now, as he approached his quarters, he was so sick he could barely stand. He fumbled the door open, supporting himself against the frame.

  As he stumbled into the dark cabin his stomach lurched toward his throat and he flung himself across the room into the little lavatory.

  There he crouched on his knees, an acolyte of excess, and gasped and heaved for many long minutes. Muttering to himself, he came up off the floor, wiped his face on his sleeve, then fell across his cot.