Starship Defender: Beyond Human Space

by Michael Keats

  The other man raised his guard and stroke John from above, but John jumped away an instant before being struck. He used the chance to swing his sword at his opponent and struck him on the left calf, just above the knee. Kate flinched at the blood, but at least John was winning.

  Now was the time to make it clear that she wasn’t going to help General Dovrik, no matter what he tried. She didn’t have the soul of a traitor, and she’d be a traitor if she helped him annihilate a species.

  “I’m not interested in your planetary conquest plans.” Kate stared at him directly without breaking eye contact. She wasn’t scared. If she looked away, she’d fear for John, she’d fear for herself, and she’d fear for her people. She couldn’t be scared. “I won’t help you.”

  The general remained impassible and equally polite. A bad sign. “You’ll change your mind. The sooner you accept this, the better.”

  The general snapped his fingers in the air and his servants released the three-headed dog. It growled and threatened them, but they hurried off outside the ring and left both fighters on the sand. John and his opponent stopped fighting each other and faced the unleashed beast. It growled, licked its nozzles, and advanced towards them, enjoying each step.

  The creature jumped onto John and bit his arm, but he pulled away and swung his sword in the air to keep it at bay. The creature used the distraction to attack the other man and rip his chest open with a single bite.

  “Your friend’s next,” the general said. “My friend here looks hungry today.”

  Tears fell down Kate’s face. Her wounded friend panted and held his sword high in the air, awaiting his imminent death.

  “Stop,” Kate begged. “Stop this at once.” She punched the invisible wall that separated her from the ring, but her fists rebounded. She tried again and again, more helpless and more furious each time.

  The general rolled his eyes and told the men in the ring to take the creature away. They did so almost instantly.

  Blood flowed down John’s arm, painting his arm, chest and leg in blue. He pressed his wound with the other hand, but he was losing too much. He dropped to his knees, and then fell onto the floor.

  Kate tried to push the invisible wall down, but the harder she pushed, the stronger it was.

  “Open the door, please,” she told the general.

  The general opened a door, but lacked any kind of empathy towards her or John. She didn’t mind about the general; she ran towards her friend and pressed his arm with her hands. The bite wasn’t clean.

  “We need to stop the blood,” she said. “We need you to get you out of here and cure you.”

  John looked at her and ran his fingers down the side of her face. “You look so much like your mother,” he said. He was losing his mind; he was too young to have known her mother.

  Kate tried to pull him up to take him somewhere safe, but he was too heavy.

  “John,” she said. “You need to help me. I can’t lift your weight on my own.”

  “Leave me,” he simply said. “Take care of yourself and save yourself. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

  Of course he wasn’t going to be fine! He was wounded, perhaps mortally so. He was going to die if nobody helped him heal his wound.

  The general’s feet stopped beside both of them. He looked down and tut-tutted. “Such a nasty wound that doesn’t heal properly,” he said. “That’s what you get for adapting to inferior genes. Slower healing and a bunch of health problems.”

  The doctor pressed his mouth together but nodded.

  What were they talking about? Kate had read everything about the genetic experiments. She’d undergone the same treatment. It had had no side-effects on her or the other refugees.

  “I was too old for the changes,” John said. “I needed to join you, though, so I went through anti-aging therapy. The trick works as long as I’m healthy, but wounds and disease make my natural DNA reject my appearance.”

  “He’s a walking clockwork bomb.” Dovrik almost sounded amused as he said it. “Your body hates the heretic experiments you’ve gone through. I’d have saved you the suffering, but if you’d rather take your chances and risk vomiting all your entrails, it’s your call.”

  “Kill yourself, Dovrik,” John said.

  “That’s one of your hobbies, not mine,” Dovrik said. “I have better things to do. Now, if you don’t plan to do anything useful for me, you can both disappear out of my sight.”

  Several guards entered the black ring, pulled John up, and dragged him out of the ring. They pulled Kate up too, but she pushed them off her. She didn’t need any help to move.

  Three guards took care of John, while two stood by her side. They were all armed with guns and short-range knives.

  None of them had their hands close to their guns.

  She lunged forward, grabbed the closest guard’s gun, pushed the other away, and shot at the general’s chest. The ray flew true but disappeared only inches away from him. Large arms grabbed her and took the gun away from her hand. Her shot should’ve killed the general, but he was still alive.

  The general chuckled to himself. “Did you expect to kill me with such a silly attempt on my life? Why do you think that my men didn’t guard their guns, huh? We mastered shield technology many years ago, but you were too busy teaching humans all the tricks you knew.” He strolled towards her, marking every step and smiling with the kind of contained rage that only a psychopath can have. He was going to make her pay for her actions.

  She tried to pull out of the guards’ grips, but they were too strong and kept her arms under their control.

  General Dovrik pulled a knife out of his belt and waved it only inches away from Kate’s face.

  That was it, then.

  Instead of slitting her throat open, the general raised a hand in the air and made a clean cut on his palm. The wound healed almost instantly.

  “Rapid healing,” the general said. “Close to immortality, but not there yet. Your parents had their genetic tricks; I have mine.” He gestured at some of his servants on the ring and they released the three-headed dog to finish eating the man who’d fallen. Once he’d seen enough of the show, he turned to her. “Your genetic changes are the only way out of our bloody contaminated planet, and I’m going to use them. Make up your mind quickly, Elietas, before you’re the last traitor alive.”

  With a dramatic gesture, the general waved them away and they were dragged out of the room. John remained closer to death than to life, and nobody was going to help him. If he didn’t get medical help, he was unlikely to live for long.

  Chapter 15

  “You’ve lost the girl,” Harry said as soon as I entered the great cabin, “lost the bad guys’ corpses, let them attack the admiral, and almost lost the Defender. Are you sure that you’ve picked the best job for your skills? I have a vocational counseling program if you want to change careers.”

  “I don’t want to change anything.” I ignored him and accessed the main computer in the room. We’d had to send Admiral Graff to the nearest starbase hospital, so I was in charge for the time being. We had to finish counting our losses and chase after the hostile ship.

  Harry excused himself and emptied the table of holographic rubbish: he’d scattered his holographic pens, files and empty cans everywhere. He’d borrowed most of the Defender’s great cabin and added elements to feel at home in it: an elliptical bike, several snacks, and a few bottles of strong drinks. Everything was holographic to make him capable of interacting with it. He was taking his own existence too seriously.

  He shrugged and touched the desk’s holographic display to show a view of nearby space instead of the star charts I was looking at.

  “Do you mind?” I told him.

  “What?” he said. “I’m just making the screen easier to read. You’re choosing small fonts and small scales, but human eyes prefer larger fonts and larger scales. And the color wasn’t optimal either.”

  We didn’t have time to waste with ae
sthetic preferences. Someone had boarded our ship, declared war on us, and abducted most of our scientists. I didn’t care what they were after, but we were going to get our people back. Even if I had to disable Harry and manually take care of the ship.

  “I like my fonts and my colors,” I said. “Stop touching everything.”

  “And you like to lose battles; I can see that. Now, are you going to continue complaining, or do you plan to do something about it? I don’t like it when someone boards the ship without permission and steals something from us. Especially if it’s the only half-decent woman on board.”

  He was talking about Dr. Thompson as if she were an object in high demand. This wasn’t the 15th Century, and neither he nor I were knights fighting for a lady’s attentions. I was merely doing my duty as an officer. I had to rescue all our civilian contractors, not just Dr. Thompson.

  I brought out a star chart to track the hostile ship’s movements. The Defender detected her despite any cloaking they’d turned on, so we could go after them. I only needed permission from Fleet Command and I was ready to go. We didn’t need to perform any repairs; we were still flying.

  “If I had a girlfriend giving me presents,” Harry said, “I’d chase after her to the end of the world. How likely is a decaffeinated commander to get another girl before he retires?”

  “One: I’m not decaffeinated,” I said, “and two: I can’t do anything without permission from Fleet Command.”

  Harry shrugged and covered the desk again with his holographic rubbish. “Your call, Decaf,” he said. “Have you even opened the box that she’s given you? I doubt it’s a box of cookies, you know?”

  I hadn’t. Perhaps Harry was right and it contained back-ups of some of her research instead of cookies. With her and the other scientists gone, it could be the only information we had left to rebuild another Defender from scratch.

  Harry ran his arm along the table to push all the holographic objects out of it. “Come on, let’s open it. Bring it here and let’s take a look.”

  I grinned at him. For once, I was going to do things my way: I was going to open the box in my room and without any cameras.

  “You can’t do that,” Harry said. “It’s cheating. The ship is supposed to hear everything you do or say in case you’re a spy. And I have access to everything the ship sees.”

  “Tough luck.”

  Chapter 16

  I hid in my room and disabled the cameras and microphones so that Harry couldn’t spy on me while I opened the box that Dr. Thompson had given me.

  It didn’t have any cookies in it. As expected, it was actually something else. It contained a concealed holographic recording and a small drive. A 5-inch Dr. Thompson hovered over the cookie box and waited before giving me the message.

  Holographic representations were actually 3D models that adapted the person’s recording so that the hologram spoke in the direction of the audience. It was a modern version of going to a museum and staring at famous paintings: they always seem to be looking at you.

  Once she started talking, she didn’t speak of the Defender at first. Instead, she talked about the alien starship that had landed on Earth. It turned out that the starship had actually brought a lot extra tech with it.

  Their most important toy was a DNA melder that allowed a species to acquire the appearance of an intellectually inferior species without changing anything else. If used on an inferior species to adapt it to superior DNA, it was lethal.

  The drive in the box was one of those DNA melders, and she’d given it to me for safekeeping. It came with compatible DNA from the alien species, so I first needed an intellectually equal or superior species to test it with. Or I could test it with a human volunteer and see if he really died like Dr. Thompson had promised. Nobody was likely to test it willingly.

  “Keep the DNA melder safe from the wrong hands,” the hologram told me. “It comes with exactly one charge. It might mean the survival of a species.”

  A species? I rolled my eyes. As if a bunch of aliens had really designed a system to change their appearances and live amongst humans. I liked Dr. Thompson well enough, but this was one of the worst and most unbelievable conspiracy theories I’d heard in a long time. The device was probably a bad joke, just like the explosive nano-ships that some pranksters had sent to outer space a few years earlier.

  The hologram promised me much pain to come if I ever allowed anyone to access the melder. It came with a small keyring, so I tied it to a cord and put it around my neck. If someone wanted it, they’d have to take it from my cold, dead hands.

  At least Harry hadn’t heard the story, so he wouldn’t chat about the DNA melder with anyone. The knowledge was dangerous, or Dr. Thompson wouldn’t have given it to me. I destroyed the holographic message in case someone ever looked through my stuff.

  And now that I knew that scientists working on the Defender had accessed more tech that still remained secret, it was my responsibility to get them back. I didn’t care what country wanted to keep the alien tech secret, but they weren’t going to succeed.

  I opened the sliding door to head to the bridge. Harry was waiting outside. He was leaning on the wall and stared at me. “Alien tech? DNA melders? What do scientists smoke nowadays?”

  “You weren’t supposed to listen.” I headed upstairs anyway. Knowing harry, he’d chase after me to demand more information about whatever he hadn’t heard.

  “I have the right to override your privacy settings if the ship is in danger,” he said, trotting after me. “But I’m serious: she’s given you something that combines two species’ genes, as long as the base species is superior to the other. Can you test it on me? I’m smarter than all humans and probably than aliens.”

  “You’re a machine, Harry.”

  “Here comes the racist Decaf,” he said. “And what are you going to do? Keep it safe for Dr. Thompson?” He accelerated his step to walk backwards while looking at me. “I do miss her; you know? She was the best-looking woman on board.”

  No more of the machine-in-love-with-a-human stuff. Harry was just a computer. Whomever had coded him had wanted to make him reliable but with enough variations to make him act like a normal crewman. They’d exceeded themselves.

  “Why don’t you pick another woman to obsess about? One of the marines, perhaps?” I suggested. Hooke was strong enough to keep Harry at bay without forgetting about her duties, and she was scary whenever she shouted so loud. They’d make a good couple.

  “I don’t like the marine type.” Harry tilted his head sideways. “Too violent. Might get my circuits burnt with her gun. So… shall we duel for the sexy doctor? I’m warning you: I’m the best duelist you’ve ever met.”

  Did he ever fall silent? A drinking buddy might be fun for a while, but avatars sometimes got too pushy. I was about to complain, but he gestured at me to be quiet.

  Hey, I was acting captain! I was supposed to be giving the orders, not him.

  “Call from Fleet Command,” Harry said. “Don’t seem happy at all with your performance.” He tut-tutted and shook his head disapprovingly. “They say that you should’ve kept the admiral on board.”

  And let him die? Did the admirals have a new candidate in mind for a promotion?

  I’m not supposed to complain about favoritism in the Navy, but everyone’s always promoting their sons, nephews, and distant cousins, and everyone else becomes expendable.

  Getting a call from Fleet Command so soon wasn’t a good sign. They weren’t going to let me take the Defender and chase after the enemy.

  Chapter 17

  “Commander O’Donnell.” Admiral Shepard greeted me from one of the screens of the great cabin. The conference call had four split screens and a different admiral in each of them.

  Shepard seemed nice enough, but admirals rarely called a commander from an official meeting. Whatever they’d decided to communicate me, they’d considered it necessary to prove that they all agreed with the orders.

  Admirals don’
t need to prove their unanimity except whenever they plan to step on someone. If they’re likely to anger someone from an important family, they act like a team. That way, they won’t get any side-effects if the officer’s family swears vengeance.

  I greeted them and sat on the desk, awaiting whatever they’d planned to tell me. I hate protocol whenever it guarantees me unpleasant consequences.

  Admiral Eleanor O’Donnell presided the meeting and stared at her colleagues with disdain. She was thin, with sunken cheeks and judging eyes. She’d climbed the ranks before many others and proved her worth a thousand times over. She had a particular dislike towards young officers who didn’t devote their lives, souls, and free time to the Navy, and especially towards people who shared her surname. Aunt Eleanor had never been a family woman.

  “Commander O’Donnell,” Aunt Eleanor said.

  “Auntie,” I replied with a broad grin. She hated that I called her aunt or auntie or anything except for Admiral, even during family reunions. I’d always thought she did it to increase the family spirit. Nothing better than calling your mom or aunt Admiral in front of your teenaged friends.

  “We’ve read the reports of the conflict,” she replied flatly. “The Defender has sent us security camera footage and everything we needed to know exactly what’s happened.”

  I glared at Harry. What a traitor! When did he plan to tell me that he was sending everything to Fleet Command? He was supposed to serve under me, not to work independently like a common mercenary.

  Harry shrugged. “They’re my bosses too,” he said. “Just doing my job.”

  Aunt Eleanor wasn’t moved by the family reunion or by the fact that I could’ve died during the fight. Instead, she led the questioning. They extended their condolences for the dead and wounded, but instantly resorted to asking about my choices.

  “Did you, either voluntarily or accidentally, ever leave the civilian contractors without supervision?” Aunt Eleanor asked.