Henderson was still where we had left him, tied to a chair with a sock in his mouth, the fury that had been perpetually burning in his eyes now reduced to a mild simmer. Sturb, turning in surprise at my appearance, was on the opposite end of the cabin, apparently engaged in dismantling the mobile Quantunnel gate.
“What are you doing?!”
“Oh, I’m glad you’re here,” said Sturb rapidly, holding some bits of Quantunnel gate in front of his torso as if to protect himself. “As you can see, I’ve checked on the hostage and everything looks secure. I was going to come back straightaway, of course, but then the thought occurred, maybe I should dismantle the portable Quantunnel in case—”
“Sit down,” I commanded. Sturb’s knees twitched immediately, but he managed to get in front of one of the seats before he obediently dropped.
I sat down in a seat next to his, then gestured to the seat on his other side. “Derby. Sit down.”
Derby, who had been waiting at the door, spat out a contemptuous sigh, but then crossed the room with long exaggerated strides and plopped himself down where I had indicated.
“Okay,” I said, in measured tones. “Now. We’re all going to sit still, here, together, and we’re going to quietly wait, and that way we can all be sure that none of us can betray the other two.” I gave Henderson a dirty look, and he responded with a cheerful wink.
“Unless they’ve already betrayed the other two,” said Derby quietly.
I passed my dirty look around for everyone to enjoy. “Then we can all make sure none of us try to kill the other two.”
“Could I just ask . . . what we’re waiting for, exactly?” said Sturb, clutching his knees.
“For the other ship to give up and go away. It might be strongly motivated by the fact that we killed their friend, but they can’t stay out there forever.”
“And how will we know they’ve gone away?” asked Derby.
I took a deep, calming breath and counted to ten before replying. “We’ll just wait long enough that we can assume.”
“Jimi could monitor nearby space, if you like.” Sturb shuffled in his seat as he made to dig his phone out. “All they’d have to do is put out what we call a remote surveillance—”
“No, no, no,” I interrupted. “There is a little thing you might not have heard of called ‘silent running’ which is the thing we’re trying to plying do. We don’t know what kind of scanning capability they have. What kind of signals we produce that they might be able to detect. That’s why we’re also going to turn our mics off and not send any help requests to Warden.”
“Oh,” said Sturb, hanging his head. “I might have already done that.”
I counted to ten again. “Then we’re not going to send any more help requests to Warden.”
I was sitting hunched forward, hands clasped, and keeping a close eye on Henderson. Sturb was sitting back but with shoulders slouched, and Derby was sitting straight backed with arms tightly folded. Sitting side by side, we were creating a sort of three-level effect.
“I suggested we should resume the battle,” said Derby, after a minute of awkward silence.
“And I told you to go forth and multiply,” I added in precisely the same tone of voice.
“I agree,” said Sturb. “About the not-battling thing, not about him going and multiplying. It seems to me that, if there’s an option with some guaranteed risk, and there’s an option with a chance of no risk, then no risk is the obvious, smarter way to go.”
“Quite,” I muttered. I was increasingly of the opinion that Sturb only agreed with me because he knew it ticked me off.
“Ugh,” said Derby. “The bold space hero and the galactic scourge, agreeing to sit quietly on the settee together. Lord knows how the Golden Age ended.”
“Well, if you feel like sticking a plying cricket bat out of your arm thing and going out to challenge them to a duel, there are plenty of EVA suits.”
Another tense couple of minutes passed. Henderson began tossing his head from side to side, loudly humming a melody that sounded vaguely like the anthem of the Terran military. His eyes widened and he gave me a significant look each time he got to the bit of the chorus about “crushing the noses of the enemies of freedom neath our proud boots.”
“How much air do we have?” asked Derby eventually, looking around at the darkened cabin.
“The air cyclers don’t turn off during emergency power, they just get turned down a bit. We’d only need to worry about that if we had about six more people onboard.”
“What about the electrical outlets in the walls?” asked Sturb, in the quiet tones of someone beginning to realize something horrible that everyone else is going to be upset about.
“No, they’re depowered. What? You need to charge your phone?”
“No, but I did plug the cryopod into one of them.”
Mr. Henderson suddenly stopped humming. He stopped tossing his head. For a moment I could have sworn his eyes were reflecting the same sudden fear that Sturb was displaying before he willed his expression into a more neutral one.
“Okay,” I said slowly, not looking away from Henderson. “Let’s move it down to the engine deck. Carefully. And then we can plug it directly into the backup generator.”
Sturb and I moved over to the cryonic cylinder that was taking up all the seats on the furthest bench. It was still caked in frost, but was starting to glisten moistly. Sturb took up position on the far end, grabbed it with both hands, and began to lift.
A layer of frost came away instantly and the cylinder slipped out of his grasp, rattling back down onto the hard bench. I distinctly heard Henderson make a little squeak of fright through the sock in his mouth, and turned my head to see that all of his muscles had tensed up, increasing his seated height by three or four inches.
When I turned back around, Sturb was doing something similar, standing frozen with his back arched and his hands halfway to picking up his end of the cylinder again. Sweat glistened on his brow, mirroring the condensation that beaded on the stainless steel cylinder between us. His eyes looked like they were about to plop right out of his head.
I followed his gaze. The frost had almost entirely melted away from the plexiglass window in the cylinder’s upper portion, and through it, I could now clearly see the cylinder’s contents.
“Oh cal-cu-lus.” I pronounced each syllable slowly in time with the pieces falling into place inside my head. My body went as tense as Sturb’s and Henderson’s.
“Oh, what is it now?” asked Derby, getting up and looking around at the three sudden cases of petrification. “Did someone start freeze tag and forget to tell me I’m it?”
I met his gaze and tried to say something, but my jaw could only shudder in abject fear. His sarcastic manner vanished, and he frowned.
“What?” He looked down through the thick plexiglass in the viewing window. “Huh. That doesn’t look much like a set of antidote containers.”
“No,” I managed to croak.
“That looks more like a person.”
It was a small person, of whom all we could see were their shoulders and the lower part of their face, but it was enough. There was no mistaking that skinny build, the unnaturally pink complexion the color of a first-degree burn, the cruel angles of the jaw, and the mouth so crammed with oversized teeth that the paper-thin lips could only just touch.
The face of the worst, most relentless evil that had ever blighted the galaxy. The face of terror.
Terrorgorn.
Chapter 16
I’d been holding up pretty well, trapped in a debris field by a hostile ship, in a small room with a career criminal, a murderous crime lord, and the infamous progenitor of the galaxy’s most persistent cyberscourge, but this new fact that I was also sharing that room with the cryonically preserved body of Terrorgorn was taking just a little bit too much piss.
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br /> I was the first to move. I shoved Sturb against a wall. He was sweating so hard that liquid flew off him like I was wringing out a sponge. “You knew about this?!” I demanded.
He shook his head rapidly, showering me further like a lawn sprinkler. “No! I . . . I wouldn’t have agreed to this if I’d known it was Terrorgorn in there, I swear to God!”
His argument checked out. Evil tech genius, yes, but not an evil lunatic, which is what one would need to be to want to be anywhere near Terrorgorn, even if he was imprisoned in a thick cylinder of stainless steel.
Still pushing Sturb into the wall, I dropped my head and stared at my shoes. I was only half-aware of my own babbling voice. “There’s nothing wrong with Blaze. Trac. Warden said I couldn’t see him for myself because of the quarantine. It made sense at the time.”
I looked to Derby, who put up his “hands” in innocent protest. “Don’t look at me. I had the same understanding you had. And why are we all soiling ourselves over this person? I could saw off their head with my plasma cutter with nary a stir to their slumber.”
I shook my head. “Terrorgorn can’t die. He can regenerate from any wound. No one’s ever found a way to kill him.”
“Suspended animation’s the best you can do,” said Sturb. “Extreme low temperatures actually halt the regeneration cycle in his cells, as I understand. I’d heard he was cryopreserved somewhere, but the last I heard he was being passed around the, you know, stupidly rich collectors . . . but anyway, I don’t . . . why would Penelope want us to recover Terrorgorn?”
Henderson emitted two hums, the second an octave lower than the first. With the sharp clarity of thought that tends to come in a crisis situation, I understood that he was saying “I know” in a singsong voice.
I stepped over to him and pulled the now extremely moist sock away from his mouth. “What?”
Henderson spat a few times and blew out his cheeks to dispel the last few traces of sock, then offered me a friendly smile. “I said, I know why she had you steal it. And I’ll be relaxed enough to be forthcoming about it as soon as you blow that damn thing back into space.” He was trying to maintain his trademark deceptively cheerful manner, but his current state of mortal terror reduced the effect somewhat. Henderson wasn’t big on star pilot history, but even the layman knew to fear Terrorgorn. He was to space villains what Robert Blaze was to space heroes: the one everyone knows even if they know ply-all else about it.
“We’re not shooting it into space,” said Sturb firmly, trying to control his breathing.
“Agreed,” muttered Derby.
“Right,” I said. “Except . . . why not?”
“At least plug it in first if you’re going to have a debate!” cried Henderson through gritted teeth. “Little professional advice from the hostage!”
I wasn’t prepared to risk waiting however long it took to get the cylinder below decks to the emergency generator. I took a quick look around. The air cycler relay unit and the emergency bulb in the ceiling were still powered, so I went for the former, on the grounds that there were enough relays throughout the ship to keep the atmosphere breathable and I still needed to see what I was plying doing.
After I had yanked the power cable out of the relay unit and plugged it into the universal inlet at the base of the cryocylinder, and the reassuring hum informed us that the refrigeration cycle had restarted, I turned to Henderson. “Well?”
“Story time.” Henderson sighed. “Danny found out about it from one of those delightful freaks he talks to on the computer. I decided to buy it because I saw an opportunity. I put a discreet feeler out to Mr. Blaze’s people, offering to give them Terrorgorn for safekeeping in return for a certain loose end I’ve been inclined to tie up.”
“Warden,” I deduced aloud.
“That might have worked, actually,” said Sturb. “No one knowing where Terrorgorn is has always been a loose end that Captain Blaze worries about.”
“Except Warden is Blaze’s people,” I said. “So she must’ve intercepted Henderson’s offer. And I’m guessing she thought she had to get the cylinder away from you before anyone else at Salvation got wind of it.”
“That’s my guess,” said Henderson. “Oh, wait. I don’t need to guess. She started bribing one of my security men. He made sure to make everything very clear to me when he came around to inject me with paralytic drugs every Friday night.” He gave a weirdly broad smile and stared into the middle distance as he pictured all the wonderful, horrible things he was now capable of doing to that person. “Until today, when you obligingly knocked him out before my weekly jab.”
“Friday night,” said Derby, a thoughtful hand flying dramatically to his chin. “Remember how she was so insistent that we do it on Sunday? She was afraid we’d mess with the injection schedule.”
“Spot on,” said Henderson. “And now I’d just bet she’s sent those star pilots out there to get rid of me, and Terrorgorn, and all the witnesses in one stroke.”
“She’s cutting her losses,” I thought aloud. “If it’d just been Terrorgorn’s cylinder she might have been able to keep it under control, but with Henderson onboard as well, she must have decided the risk had become too great.”
“Mmm,” agreed Henderson with relish. “Don’t you all feel silly now, knowing we were practically on the same side all along? It’s certainly going to suck some of the fun out of my testicle executive toy. Now, would you kindly get back to shooting this thing into space?”
“We’re not shooting it into space!” yelled Sturb.
“A deal was struck.” Derby brandished his wristlet deliberately. “I am owed a considerable sum for this object, regardless of its contents.”
“And it won’t stay powered in space!” said Sturb, clutching at his fully reddened face. “He might thaw out! Someone might find him! Then Terrorgorn will be loose! And we’ll be the ones who set him loose!”
Henderson rolled his eyes so hard it seemed to make his chair rock back and forth a little. “And what is the good captain’s view? It is, after all, his airlock.”
All eyes turned to me. I’d been lost in thought, clenching my fists tightly and staring at the floor, and it took me a moment to realize that I was being prompted. When I did, I opened my mouth, wrangled the churning thoughts that swam around my head, and began to laugh.
It was a strange laugh, partly because I was doing it while absolutely nothing was the slightest bit funny, but partly because it seemed to be coming from an unfamiliar part of me. Deep down in the guts where all my bile swam around, bubbling up through my torso and emerging from my mouth in low, humorless barks. I looked up at Sturb, and the expression on his face made me laugh even harder. He had the nervous expression of a dog that urgently needed to be let out.
“Was it like this for you?” I asked him, my smile and my eyes just a little too wide.
“Was what?” asked Sturb.
“When you were doing your thing, you know, sitting on your big plying throne, kidnapping people, slapping slave crowns on them to make them do your bidding, getting beaten up by every star pilot that came by, was there ever a moment when you thought to yourself, Hey, I’ve just realized I’m a supervillain?”
“Captain . . . are you all right?”
“What are you getting at, man?” asked Derby.
I tottered a little, as if drunk, and my voice seemed to come from far away. “It’s suddenly so clear to me. I just blew a star pilot out of the sky. While buddying around with my pal Malcolm plying Sturb. And Henderson. And Terrorgorn.”
“And Davisham Derby,” said Davisham Derby, bridling.
“Yeah, let’s plying add that on. Davisham plying Derby, galactic div. After we’d finished stealing Terrorgorn from Daniel Henderson and insulting a load of innocent fanboy doints and wrecking up half of Ritsuko City on the way.” I stared at my hands, and another little laugh escaped from my thro
at. “I’ve been in complete denial ever since this all started.”
“About what?” asked Sturb warily.
“I am a baddie.” I paused for a few seconds, ignoring the sudden blast of laughter from Henderson. “I’m a bad guy. A villain. I’m a murdering, stealing space pirate and the enemy of everything star piloting is about.”
“Erm, Captain,” stammered Sturb. “I think you might be—”
“Silence, dog!” I screamed, making him flinch. I bobbed on my heels in delight. “That was fun, actually. I’m starting to see the appeal of all this. What do we do now? Should I shave my head? Turn my collar up?”
“If you could put a halt on this epiphany of yours for a moment,” said Derby, bored, “what are we going to do now?”
“Oh, I know.” I straightened up. “Let’s go kill that other ship. Those so-called star pilots will rue the day they crossed the dread pirate Dashford Pierce!”
I marched out and trotted up the stairs to the cockpit with Sturb following at my heels, leaving Derby and Henderson to exchange mutually contemptuous glances. I had already reactivated the main power and booted up the flight systems before my posterior had touched the pilot seat.
“Captain, if you don’t mind me saying . . .” began Sturb.
“Would you shut up if I said I did?”
He would, as it turned out, but only for two seconds. “I just wanted to say, I really think you might be having some kind of breakdown.”
The scanner pinged the nearby surroundings after being persuaded with a sharp kick, and the dot representing our adversary lit up. As I’d suspected, they were some distance above us, monitoring as much of the debris field as they could.
I pulled down my headset and set it to broadcast locally. “Attention, meddling fool,” I announced. “Your ill-mannered attempt to bring an end to my glory will be your destruction. Leave now and you will not share the fate of the other fool.” I pulled the headset down again. “Am I saying fool too much? I feel like I should mix it up. Should I grow a beard?”
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