by Mark Wandrey
“You have a point,” Rick said. “Let’s make sure the ship is ready to run. I assume if we have weapons charged, it’ll be obvious.”
“Very,” Sato confirmed. “However, we can have power allocated, at the least, and keep the powerplant on high-demand. It might look a little weird, but we are in the troposphere of a gas giant.”
It seemed they had a plan. Vestoon continued its approach to the asteroid.
* * * * *
Chapter Six
Rick watched the approaching asteroid and fought down a growing sense of doom. The rock was in a carefully stabilized orbit. Vestoon’s sensors said it had a little more gravity than you’d expect from a rock of its size, which suggested it was a nickel/iron ore type. Probably mined out eons ago and eventually moved into low orbit around the gas giant for use as a base.
Who would use this as a base in such a place? he wondered silently. It was too small to be a defensive base, yet what would it defend? It was in as low an orbit as was practical. Anything lower would require almost constant thrust to keep it from falling, like the derelict battleship they’d passed. The salvagers were maintaining its orbit at a considerable cost in effort. There must be something valuable there.
There were no obvious weapons, minimal sensors, and only the barest maneuvering capabilities in the form of side thruster pods placed roughly opposite each other. With no signs of a fusion powerplant, this meant they were chemical thrusters. This what—base? This base was expensive and time consuming to keep, and to maintain it on the fringe of nowhere. His paranoia tingled even worse. Sato was walking into the serpent’s jaws, but why—because of a long-lost memory? The echo of memories?
But who was he to talk? Rick was himself nothing more than a ghost of his former self, resurrected by a curious alien octopus with the aid of a semi-sentient plant. Sato had modified his body to fit inside a suit of powered armor and brought him along on the quest. At the beginning, he was as damaged as Sato, but Rick had now recalled almost everything. Where vast amounts of his memory had once been lost, now only tiny bits and pieces were missing.
He might be an echo of himself, but he was a functionally complete echo. Sato was an empty shell. He appeared to only be who he was, formed from some years ago out of nothing. His mind had been destroyed. Mostly. When pushed, he seemed to tap into old training. Deadly training. Watching him fight the opSha had been educational and a little chilling. Did Sato really want to know who he’d been before whatever had happened?
The proximity alarm sounded, and Sato tapped the override, silencing it. He closed his eyes for a moment. “I’ve programmed the docking to be automatic; the asteroid has a properly working computer to supervise. We can be at the airlock when we dock.”
“Good plan,” Rick said. “We don’t want a breaching team to catch us off guard.” He gave Sato’s kit a quick look. The man was in the light combat armor they’d purchased en route and had both weapons. He had a new laser carbine slung cross body, and a Ctech GP-90 pistol in a low-slung thigh holster. The latter, Human manufactured, was a lucky find off Earth. The weapon was solid. Many alien-made slug throwers adapted for Humans just didn’t have good ergonomics.
In addition, Sato had a modular helmet on his belt. A blocky object resembling a breathing mask, it could quickly expand into a snug-fitting helmet. Sealing with the combat armor, it would provide vacuum protection for an hour, or for a few precious minutes in space.
The scientist had a series of bags on his belt. In addition to three extra magazines for the pistol, he had a single extra laser magazine, some emergency rations, a small canteen, and two pouches holding various equipment. Rick wasn’t sure what, and it didn’t really matter. He carried most of what he’d need within the internal storage bays of his armor. Dakkar had only his water/oxygen breather and a tiny emergency bubble. In the event they were caught in a decompression, the Wrogul could slither inside and inflate it, making himself a little safe space for a time.
“What if they get violent?” Rick asked as they approached the lock.
“Then I trigger the computer to get us out of here.”
Rick nodded and armed both arm lasers, setting one for 250kw, or full power, and the other for only 100kw. He wanted flexibility. He finished running down his list of weapons, noting the newly activated shield control. “In fact, it’ll hurt like hell, because I can’t get the bios to properly disable the pain receptors.” Sato’s words echoed in his mind and still didn’t give him confidence. He resolved not to use the thing until they finished it completely.
They floated next to the inside lock while their ship negotiated with the asteroid’s systems. After a moment, the telltales indicated a safe mating, and the inside door opened. The three moved inside, and it closed behind them.
“Okay,” Rick said. “I’ll go in first. Sato, you and Dakkar follow.” He turned to the Wrogul. “If you see the opportunity to slip away through an air shaft or something, do it, but keep in touch. See if you can find the control room. I suspect as soon as they realize we aren’t their opSha buddies, all hell will break loose. Sound good?”
“Sounds good,” Sato repeated.
“As you say,” Dakkar said.
“Okay,” Rick said and moved to the left of the outer airlock door. Sato and Dakkar went to the right. Rick pressed the cycle button. The airlock beeped, and the door slid into the lower bulkhead, revealing the inside of the asteroid base’s airlock. Nothing waited there.
Without comment, they floated into the other airlock, and Rick examined the interior of the lock mechanism. It was Union standard. “Ready,” he said, and they prepared again. Rick triggered the final mechanism.
A slight hiss sounded as the lock equalized with the asteroid’s internal pressure, then the door released and rotated inward. A smoothed-rock, perfectly round hallway was revealed. Every meter, the circular tunnel had a ring of tiny lights with their wiring visible. The illumination would be barely sufficient for a Human. Rick’s enhanced vision found it more than enough.
“Wow,” Rick said. “Took a lot of work to make this. I was expecting something like an old coal mine.”
“No,” Sato said. “This is familiar.”
“Is that good or bad?” Rick asked.
“I don’t know yet.”
The scientist closed his eyes and floated just inside the airlock for a long moment. Rick was about to ask if he’d decided to go back when Sato’s eyes snapped open.
“This way,” he said, and pushed off into the corridor.
“We agreed to let me lead,” Rick said and immediately followed.
“You cannot lead if you don’t know where you’re going.”
Rick didn’t like the answer, but he followed anyway as they arrived at an intersection. Maneuvering inside the asteroid was difficult. It clearly wasn’t made by Humans or any of the races he was familiar with. There was an almost complete lack of handholds. There seemed to only be three around each end of a tunnel when it met another tunnel, and there weren’t any doors he could see.
“What is this place?” he wondered aloud. Sato didn’t answer. He merely paused at the three-way intersection, picked a direction, and pushed off with a foot on a handhold he hadn’t seemed to look at. Has he been here before, or just somewhere like this? Rick didn’t know and didn’t ask Sato. Instead, he followed. Rick didn’t have to use the handholds; he used the fans integral to his armor to generate tiny little puffs to maneuver with great precision.
This next corridor had rooms off it. Rick didn’t stop to look in any of them, afraid Sato would get too far ahead, and he’d lose track of him. He glanced in them as he went by. From what little he saw, they looked like small
cabins or maybe cells? None of them contained furniture, equipment, or anything. Yet they were all as smooth and polished as the hallways they floated through. Sato adjusted his trajectory and made another turn. Rick hurried to follow.
They’d been traveling for about 15 minutes. The suit’s inertial navigation system showed the total distance was 1,200 meters. Based on the scans of the asteroid, they were nearing the center. Yet they’d encountered nobody and had seen no significant equipment or systems. He was just about to ask Sato how much further they were going, when the corridor made a turn and revealed a large open space, the first of any sort they’d encountered.
There were six corridors entering the space, which was around 20 meters across and roughly ovoid in shape. The exits were spaced equidistant. Since they were in zero-G, there was no up or down, and the way these corridors left the chamber suggested it was made for someone who was accustomed to zero-G. Like the corridors, this huge space was ringed with the same type of light, which necessitated massive amounts of cabling to run them.
Sato caught the ubiquitous handhold at the exit to the tunnel they’d arrived through, swinging out into the space before arresting his momentum on the wall. As he’d fought with seemingly forgotten martial prowess, he maneuvered in zero gravity just as well.
Rick used his jets to push himself into the room. Just as he crossed the threshold, he looked back to check on Dakkar’s progress. There was no sign of the Wrogul. Did he find an access shaft I missed? The Wrogul could use his vent to jet around easily with puffs of air. “Sato, have you seen—” He was cut off by a voice in his head, transmitted on all pinplant frequencies.
A second later, all the lines connecting the lights erupted with bolts of lightning. Rick didn’t have time to scream before he was plunged into darkness.
* * * * *
Chapter Seven
Sato opened his eyes and looked around. He couldn’t make his head move, nor anything below his jaw. His pinplants weren’t working. The fuck? He closed his eyes and concentrated, trying to regain control of his pinplants. It seemed as if they weren’t there. He tried harder.
“There is no reason to struggle.” This was said in Japanese, the accent distinctively mechanical, such as came from a translator.
“Who are you?”
“Your judge, Proctor.”
“I have done nothing wrong,” Sato insisted. “I just want to know who I am.”
“Despite your claims of amnesia, the evidence of your actions speak otherwise. Executing the Jōshi on Earth proves otherwise, as well as your somehow extracting the mission details and secure account codes. We found the mission tube on your ship! I do not know how you are managing to evade our neural probes, but we will find out. Oh, we will.”
“Who are you?” Sato demanded again. This time there was no answer. He could still feel the rest of his body, though it wouldn’t respond to his commands. It seemed like they were moving. He cast his gaze around as much as he could and saw the familiar interior of the common area on Vestoon. They’d taken his damn ship!
As he cast about for the speaker, he saw something not from his ship. It was capsule-shaped, maybe a meter and a half long, tapered at both ends, and a dull gunmetal color. A single bluish glowing band ran around one end. It made him afraid, and like so many other things, he didn’t know why.
“Where are you taking me?” he asked after a few minutes of fruitless attempts to access his pinplants.
“To your judgement.”
He silently cursed, then he remembered something from the earlier encounter with the opSha. “To Saisho?”
A single yipping laugh. “As if the Saisho would waste its time with a traitor like you.”
Like I thought, opSha. “Traitor? What are you talking about?”
“Shut up, or I’ll muzzle you.”
Sato bit back a reply. His mouth was just about the only thing working. He stared at the capsule-thing for another moment, then took a calming breath. There wasn’t much more he could do, so he waited.
Without his pinplants, Sato couldn’t be sure how much time had gone by. Maybe 15 minutes was his best guess. Whatever the time, he eventually felt Vestoon’s breaking motors fire. They’d reached their destination. For the first time, his opSha jailor floated into view.
“We’ve arrived, Proctor.”
“How many of you do I have to kill to get some answers?”
The little simian’s head came around, eyes narrowed in anger. He turned his head to the floating capsule. “Take him.”
With a hissing sound, a trio of long tentacles slithered out of the capsule’s center and wrapped around Sato. Their strength and surety were surprising. Whatever it used for propulsion in zero gravity was both silent and effective, because he was quickly towed along in its wake. As he was turned around, he got a brief look out a porthole next to the airlock. It looked like they were docked to a burned, charred piece of hull plating.
The battleship, Sato realized. The entropy-cursed battleship! He’d been wrong, or the asteroid was a decoy. Whatever the reason, his guess had led them into a trap. There was no sign of Rick, and his last memory of him was as they entered what should have been the data core of the asteroid base. He didn’t remember seeing Dakkar once they boarded the asteroid. As he berated himself for being a fool and buying their ruse, he was towed through the airlock.
The interior of the battleship was far from its outward appearance. The corridors were in excellent condition and didn’t match the military appearance he was expecting. Lighting was dim, the same as it had been on the decoy asteroid, but without the strange strands of lights.
“The lighting,” he said. “Some sort of EM generator?”
“A little surprise for your ham-fisted attempt at a Peacekeeper.”
Gears moved in his brain. “Not as good as this one,” he said, looking at the bot towing him.
“Of course not,” the opSha said. “This is a Peacekeeper.”
“I didn’t think there were any operational.”
“You know better than that, Proctor. Once we figure out how you’ve shielded your mind from us, we’ll pry out what secrets you have. The Himitsu are quite interested to know what happened on your last mission to make you…disappear.”
I wish I knew, Sato thought.
He was taken down a series of corridors, then up two ladders to different decks. Nothing was quite level. Since no races built their ships’ interiors as haphazard, not even the Izlian, he believed it was a reconstruction. Whoever had taken the wrecked battleship had rebuilt the interior for their uses. An intelligence base, perhaps. But who was running all this? Who had the millions of credits to throw at an operation to retrieve him? What were these positions he kept hearing about, like Himitsu, Saisho, and Proctor?
The Japanese word Himitsu translated to secrecy, while Saisho was first, or beginning. It didn’t make any sense. No more than calling him Proctor. What did he teach? Teachers weren’t usually pursued by killer opSha across the galaxy. The functioning Peacekeeper was a chilling part of the puzzle. They dated back to the First Republic; enforcer bots made by the Dusman to pacify planets they wanted to keep. Ancient accounts suggested they would be activated and dropped from orbit to do the Dusman’s will. Powerful and brutal, they were one step less than what Raknar were capable of. There were thousands scattered around on former battlefields. Nobody had ever managed to make them work. Sato had never seen one before now.
He was eventually taken into a room that looked like it had once been a medical bay. The first real feelings of fear began to creep up his spine. The Peacekeeper pushed him onto an examination table, where automatic restraints popped out to secure all four limbs, and one closed around his neck. They were none too gentle, and for a moment he feared it would strangle him. The restraint cutting off his oxygen abated a tiny amount. Not enough to make it easy to breathe, just enough to make it possible.
The Peacekeeper retracted its tentacles w
ith a snickt! and retreated into a corner, where it waited silently. The opSha also waited by the door. Sato wondered what they were waiting for. In a moment he had his answer. The portal hissed open and admitted a solitary Flatar. Sato blinked in surprise as the opSha bowed his head in respect.
“At last,” the Flatar said in its tiny voice. It floated over and deftly caught the edge of the table, looking down into Sato’s face with its beady black eyes. Whiskers twitched as it examined him. Up close, the resemblance to a terrestrial chipmunk lessened. The eyes weren’t of an earthly type, the set of the mouth was…strange. Its ears were set at an odd angle. It looked, for lack of a better word, sinister. “Welcome home, Proctor.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sato said.
The Flatar looked at the opSha, who replied, “He is acting as if he has amnesia. His mesh is deactivated, somehow. The initial probe by the Peacekeeper failed to reactivate them.”
“Indeed, he is a Proctor. He’s trained in the arts of deceit and subterfuge.”
“There is reason to believe he doesn’t remember,” the opSha said.
“Oh? What makes you think that?”
“He blundered into our trap with ridiculous ease. Though this base wasn’t here when he left on his last mission, it wasn’t nearly as complex a cover as we’ve used in other situations.” The Flatar glared at the opSha. “Shinjitsu, I meant no disrespect.” He lowered his head onto his chest.
Shinjitsu, Sato thought. Truth, veracity, or even reality. But it’s also a martial art involving a sword. The Flatar floated over to a shelf Sato hadn’t noticed. Velcroed to the shelf was Sato’s equipment. The Flatar examined the gear for a moment.
“No disrespect,” Sato said, then laughed. The Flatar’s head spun around. “Shouldn’t you be cleaning up for a Tortantula or something?”
The Flatar turned, and its lips quivered, showing a tiny flash of bright white teeth.
