Star Force 11: Exile

by B. V. Larson

  “Riggs,” Sokolov mumbled through swollen lips. “Why aren’t we dead?”

  “Because you’re an idiot,” I told him, unaccountably even angrier with him now that the fireworks finale turned out to be a fizzle. I shook with the adrenaline of a close shave. Certain death had a way of doing that to a man. “You set it wrong,” I half-lied. “All your big talk and you’re dumber than my dumbest grunt.”

  “First you attack your superior,” he said wearily. “Then you lie.”

  He had a point, but I was beyond giving him a break now. I stood up, holding the grenade tightly by its carrying handle, and pulled out my rifle. I could see Sokolov’s faceplate had knit itself back together. In a few minutes it would be as good as new.

  “On your feet,” I told him. “We’re heading back to Valiant.”

  “Really?” Sokolov stood. “I’d expected a summary execution.”

  “You’ll not get off that easily.”

  “Then where’s the door leading out, bright boy?” he asked, gesturing around him with sweeping arms.

  Damn, the man was right. A portal had dumped us inside this anomalous globe and I hadn’t seen any way out. “You tell me.”

  “No.”

  “Okay, then what? We’re not blowing up. Natalia will stay forever in her box. You’ll have accomplished nothing.”

  “I’ll have killed you.”

  I sighed. “Why do you even care about that? You know, I can’t figure you out. Twisted unrequited love, lust for power, revenge on me for what my father did to you—you’re incoherent, man. Could you at least pick one evil motive and stick with it?”

  “I’m not the villain of this piece, Riggs. It’s not even you. You’re just a pawn as I was. Well, no more.” Sokolov raised his face and shook his fists at the crystals above. “You hear me, you bastards? I’m not your lab rat! I’m human, and I’m going to beat you if it takes me my whole life.”

  “Give it up, General. Seriously. How can you defy them if we’re stuck here like hamsters in a rolling ball?”

  Sokolov’s tone turned gloating. “You’ll be stuck, Riggs. Not me.”

  I barely had time to get worried before he turned, stepped, and fell into a portal.

  -25-

  Sokolov jumping into a portal in the deck and leaving me trapped inside a huge crystal globe filled with glassy filaments was a definite problem.

  I rushed over to where he’d been and dove at the floor, but the black circle had vanished. I pounded and stamped on the surface to no avail.

  I should have stayed nearer to him. Hell, I should have clipped a line to him, or maybe I should have shot him in the leg. Sokolov must have some device or known a technique for opening and closing portals, but I had no clue what it was.

  I had a few devices of my own, though.

  Initially, I fired my laser rifle at the deck. There was no effect other than to reflect most of the energy like a mirror. The beam struck filaments and surfaces, splitting into green slices that ricocheted around until they had dissipated to mere gleams.

  Next, I tried my standard com-link on all channels telling the suit brain to run through a complete range of frequencies. Nothing came up right away, but you never knew.

  Lastly, I tried to reach Marvin on the quantum ansible, my best hope.

  Nothing.

  I set the suit to intermittently keep trying Marvin, and then sat down and thought. I had to recharge anyway. All the running and fighting had emptied the battery and eaten half my fusion mix, meaning I was down to about one hour of juice. As long as I recharged with ambient power after every five minutes of activity I’d be fine, but the fuel represented my only reserve.

  With nothing else to do, I picked up the grenade and examined it, wondering just what had stopped it from doing its apocalyptic duty. These things were foolproof because your average line marine was a poster child for the technologically illiterate. All you did was set the timer and punch the big button labeled “Start.” After that, kaboom. Another setting enabled a contact detonator, but that would only work if all Star Force personnel—well, their beacons anyway—were outside the blast radius. That safety interlock could be overridden, but solely manually. For suicidal use, someone had to actively press certain buttons.

  “Suit,” I said, “bring up a standard tutorial on marine grenades.” It had been a while since I used one, and I wanted to make very sure I didn’t set this thing off by accident.

  Halfway through reviewing the simple, graphics-filled instruction sequence I began to laugh. I couldn’t stop for a solid five minutes. Eventually I ground to a halt, gasping.

  I hadn’t lied after all. Sokolov had screwed up. He’d set the contact detonator, apparently believing all he had to do was slam it to the ground. But he hadn’t bothered to run the tutorial, and so didn’t know about the safety interlock to make sure some fumble-fingered jarhead didn’t blow up his ship and crew by mistake.

  Patting the bomb absently as if it were a pet, I leaned my head back and breathed a great sigh of relief. At least now I understood what had happened. Lowering my eyes, I proceeded to carefully press the large buttons that returned the grenade to inactive mode. Once that was done, I stowed it in its clamp on my suit and reviewed the HUD video of when I entered the portal to this place, hoping to find something.

  The thing that immediately caught my eye was the flash I had thought I’d seen when I dove through the portal following Sokolov. Setting the video to ultra-slow, I realized the burst of light had come from the general’s wrecked pod. So I’d been right about that: he had set a booby trap, possibly using the second grenade. Or maybe it had been a coincidence and the pod’s engine just picked that moment to blow up. Fortunately, I’d hurried after him, saving my life.

  That was only of incidental interest, however. Now, I went over the recording frame by frame looking for anything that might give me a clue as to how Sokolov activated portals. I found nothing, but that may be because I wasn’t there when he’d activated it. Or maybe it was always on. Hmmm…

  I pulled up the record of when Sokolov had departed this place. In that instance, there had been no permanent portal, only a smooth expanse of inward-curving deck. Somehow, he’d created a way out.

  Frame by frame I checked, finding nothing. I slammed my fist on the ground, frustrated.

  “Suit,” I said, “do you have anything other than visual and audio records?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, what are they?”

  “Internal diagnostics. Telemetry. Energy and ammunition expenditure averages. Occupant biometrics—”

  “Wait. What telemetry?”

  “Compressed metrics are regularly downloaded from Star Force brainboxes and devices.”

  “Do you have anything from Sokolov’s suit?”

  “Yes.”

  Bingo. “Suit, give me a summary of all of Sokolov’s suit actions beginning ten seconds before he departed this location.”

  My HUD lit up with a diagram of a suit showing systems as they activated in realtime—servos, comms and so on.

  “Wait. What’s that? Go back…eight seconds and begin playing at one-tenth speed.” The display reset and then ran forward with painful slowness, until—

  “There. What’s that, a laser activation?”

  “Yes. Directional communications laser set to infrared mode.”

  “Aimed at the deck.”

  The suit brain didn’t answer because I hadn’t actually asked a question, so I rephrased. “Did Sokolov aim the com-link laser at the deck?”

  “Yes.”

  “Suit, replicate the exact settings of Sokolov’s laser burst on my own com-link laser.”

  “Replicated.”

  Using the recording, I moved to where Sokolov had been standing. I had no idea if a portal could be opened anywhere or only in specific places, so doing exactly what the general had done seemed to give me the greatest chance of success. Aiming the laser, I readied myself and then fired at the deck at my feet.
>
  I guess I aimed closer to myself than Sokolov had to his own feet, because a portal opened beneath my boots, and I immediately fell through it. I had no time to celebrate before I slammed into a hard surface. Scrambling to my feet, I found myself somewhere on the outside of the golden cube.

  There was no sign of an arrival portal. “Suit,” I said, ignoring that minor puzzle, “locate all Star Force beacons within range.”

  Immediately, Sokolov’s icon came up on my HUD. Focusing on it and magnifying, I could see a tiny figure floating among the many vessels arrayed above and around me. Perhaps twenty miles away, he seemed to be trying to get to one of the ships while tumbling and spinning. I figured he was having the usual trouble with repellers.

  I wondered what he was doing. Maybe he was trying to get aboard one of those vessels and fly it. They appeared to be crewless, as none of them were moving. The ships around him were alien to me and of a completely unknown type, so I thought it unlikely he would get control of one anytime soon.

  Other icons were displayed at the limit of my HUD, weak signals that must be leaking around the corner of the mile-wide cube I stood on. Pointing myself at the nearest edge I ran until my batteries read zero, and then spent an agonizing ten minutes refilling them. The next charge got me to the place at which two vast square surfaces met where I carefully stepped from one side to the other. The gravity seemed perfectly perpendicular to each golden deck, so my fear of floating off turned out to be unfounded.

  Now I had line of sight back to the flight deck where Sokolov and I had started. Zooming my opticals, I could barely make out a craft of some sort rising from the platform and, I hoped, heading toward me.

  “Riggs here,” I said, aiming a narrow com-link beam at the little ship. “Anyone read me?”

  “Captain,” I heard Hansen reply with relief in his voice. “Thank God. We saw Sokolov’s signal but not yours and thought…”

  I wondered if Hansen was genuinely glad I wasn’t dead or merely play-acting. It hardly mattered as long as he did his job right now. “A Riggs is harder to kill than most people, Hansen. Come pick me up with all deliberate speed. Sokolov tried to blow up the control center, but I stopped him. We have to arrest him before he causes any more trouble.”

  “I have to be conservative on fuel, Skipper, or we’ll run out. It’s burning at least ten times faster than normal.”

  “I believe that has something to do with the time manipulation here,” I replied. “Do the best you can. Try using your repellers on a very low setting to get some extra thrust. They’ll be squirrely but a good pilot should be able to eke out a little extra that way, and all it will cost is some battery charge.”

  “Will do,” Hansen said. “We’ll be there as soon as we can.”

  “Roger. Riggs out.” I walked around the edge of the cube again so I could see Sokolov, but he’d disappeared. I didn’t even see his icon anywhere, which troubled me. If he was outside of a ship, the signal should have been visible even if it wasn’t in direct line with my receiver. Radio signals curve, propagate and bounce much more than visible light, so it would take a big solid wall to block them.

  More likely, he was inside a ship, and his signal was completely contained by metal. Possibly he’d finally figured out how to turn off his beacon.

  Or maybe he was dead. But that was wishful thinking on my part.

  If we lost him, I had no idea how to locate him among these mothballed ships. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of them. Perhaps the best thing to do would be to just leave the golden world hoping Sokolov would run out of fuel trying to figure out how to activate some alien ship. The chances seemed remote that he would survive his current situation, but then, he’d lived through some other tough spots. Like my father and me, he was obviously resilient, and his instability didn’t seem to make him any less tough.

  “Head for Sokolov’s last known position,” I said, hopping aboard Hansen’s spiny alien shuttle.

  My suit spoke up as I strapped in. “I have established a channel to Marvin on the quantum ansible.”

  “Marvin, what’s your status?”

  “I am exploiting the Raptor technology, as you suggested.”

  “Are you repairing their ship, or did you forget about that part of my orders?”

  “I am hurt, Captain Riggs. I have made extensive repairs and even now I’m devoting over fifty percent of my effort to restoring all functions, even such low priorities as waste disposal.”

  “Marvin, if you’d ever had to pee really badly, you wouldn’t call waste disposal low priority. Wrap up what you’re doing immediately, and bring Greyhound inside the golden planet.”

  Marvin paused a moment before answering. “By this order I deduce that the planet is indeed hollow. However, I do not think it wise to attempt to enter. The machines of the Ancients seem to have protective protocols that may prevent or capture me.”

  “Marvin, I need you in here.”

  “Isn’t an operational Marvin outside the planet more valuable than sharing your prison with yet another inmate, Cody Riggs?”

  I growled in my throat. “Marvin, you figured out how to free Valiant and Stalker from the force field that was holding them. I have every confidence you can free yourself and Greyhound from this hollow sphere if you were to become trapped.”

  “I would still classify your suggestion as unwise.”

  “Marvin, you’re cloaking your cowardice with logic,” I told him. “By the way, have you got that ‘placeholder’ cloak operational yet?”

  “Of course not. I’ve been exceptionally busy trying to follow your many directives.”

  “Not to mention wasting time exploiting Raptor technology, I think you just confessed.”

  “I wouldn’t use the word ‘confessed.’ Rather—”

  “Marvin, just tell me: Can you get some kind of cloak or stealth system operational any time soon? Something that might hide you from the Ancients?”

  “Define ‘soon.’”

  “Within the next twelve hours.” I didn’t think I could stand being in this battlesuit much longer than that.

  “That’s extremely unlikely.”

  “Then Captain Marvin, you’re just going to have to risk it. Marvin? Marvin?”

  “The quantum signal from the other ansible has ceased,” my suit said.

  I cursed up a storm. “Marvin is dodging my order to come help,” I complained to Kwon. “That weasel.”

  “He’s chickenshit,” replied Kwon. “I’ll tear a few of his arms off next time I see him.”

  “I’m sure that would be fun, but it would only work for a little while. I just realized I took the wrong approach with him. Too much stick, not enough carrot. Hansen, anything on Sokolov?”

  “Nope,” Hansen said. “No signal. If I read this alien display right, we’re about where we saw him last.”

  “Open the ramp,” I said.

  Hansen obliged, and soon Kwon and I stood holding onto the edge of the hatch staring out into inner space. I brought up my video record and tried to match it up with our surroundings. “I think he was heading for that one.” I indicated a globular alien ship of battleship size.

  Hansen maneuvered us nearer the vessel.

  “There,” I said, pointing at a big open hatch, perhaps proportioned for cargo. “Fly in there.”

  “What if Sokolov shuts the hatch?” Hansen said.

  “There’s no way he’s gotten control of this ship so fast. Drop Kwon and me off and park outside.”

  Once we had disembarked into the alien ship, I held up my hand for Kwon to wait, and then turned on my ansible again. “Marvin, I know you can hear me. There’s something you should know. The inside of the golden planet contains hundreds of dormant alien ships most in perfect condition. I believe you’d be very interested in examining them. I also found the control center you predicted. It’s too bad the risk is keeping you from this treasure trove of technology.”

  The ansible feed hissed at me with an extended silence
but finally Marvin spoke. “Perhaps the risk can be managed. I will prepare and may be ready in as few as eight hours.”

  “Better hurry, Marvin. Sokolov is still on the run and he knows more about this place than we do. You’re our ace in the hole. You’re the only one who can beat him at his own game. He wants to destroy these ships—he told me that. He wants to destroy the control center too, which may shut down the rings forever. Imagine how your life would go if you were stuck in one star system for eternity.”

  “I would recommend that you delay his efforts,” Marvin said, and closed the channel. “I will arrive shortly.”

  “Come on, Kwon. Let’s hunt us a general.” I led the way over to the inner door of the bay we were in.

  “Can I kill him?”

  “If you have to, but let’s try for a capture, all right?”

  I could feel Kwon’s evil grin through the com-link. “Sure, boss, sure. I’ll try real hard.”

  “First, let’s try to get this door open.” It sported a couple of handles that looked like they might function as manual controls, so I grabbed one and Kwon the other. We shoved them back and forth until we found the open position and pushed. Thin atmosphere hissed out as we forced the door inward with our servos. I got the impression this ship had been here a long time.

  Inside we found a passageway, as expected. This one had heavily rounded corners, its cross-section almost a circle with four flattened sides. I guess these particular aliens like their curves. Bluish lights came on.

  “It’s still got power,” I said.

  “It must recharge just like everything else.”

  “Guess so.”

  “Which way?”

  I looked around, and then pointed right. “I see disturbed dust.”

  Kwon took off, and I followed. His mind might work slower than mine but not his reflexes or his eyes. Sokolov had no time to hide his trail anyway once we knew what to look for.