by T. R. Harris
“You will regret your actions,” said the tall, six-armed alien.
“That I doubt.” Riyad said. He turned to Kaylor and handed him the satchel of dark matter cubes. Now with a free hand, he reached down and picked up one of the many MK weapons littering the floor.
The five aliens stood defiant. “They will not work; somehow you have disabled the devices.”
Riyad smiled. “Yet these are quality MK bolt launchers, the best in the galaxy.”
He took aim and blasted the three guards, leaving only the startled executives staring in disbelief, their brilliant white suits now sprayed with blood.
“But…how?”
“Sorry, no time to explain, oh…and no witnesses, either.”
Riyad shot the pair point-blank, ruining their pretty white suits.
20
Adam we have the collector, Riyad announced through his ATD. Where are you?
North along the main road, still trying to find a place for Coop to land.
Understood. We’ll get out of the building and head your way. I’ll stay in touch.
With so much shooting going on within the building, the place was nearly deserted by the time Riyad and Kaylor made their way down the stairwell to ground level. Even the guards had left, not wanting any part of the battle taking place. The same was true on the street outside. If there was one thing the criminal element understood it was gunfights. And unless you had a stake in the outcome, you made yourself scarce for fear of catching a stray bullet—or bolt in this case.
The pair moved along the sidewalk. If anyone was around, they remained hidden. The Belsonian and Human were the only ones to come out of the building alive after the initial panicked exodus. As a result, no one outside was willing to take them on.
Adam finally came upon a small park on his right, sandwiched between a series of large tenement buildings. Any of the grass that had once covered the ground had died off and all that was left were large mud puddles from the near-constant drizzle.
Do you see it? Adam asked Coop.
Yeah…I got it. It’s going to be tight, and unfortunately, the buildings are going to need a shitload of new windows after we’re done.
Consider it a form of natural air conditioning. Drop the landing ramp as soon as you’re down.
Adam and Sherri were coughing and blinded by the clouds of landing exhaust, made thicker and hotter than normal by the confining nature of the surrounding buildings. Adam could barely see to drive the money truck into the landing bay, yet once inside, he shut the door with his ATD.
We’re in. Now let’s go look for Riyad and Kaylor.
The ship took off, jostling Adam and Sherri as they set the brake on the truck and climbed out. The inertia compensators were off while the ship was under the influence of planetside gravity, so the going was rough on the pair as Coop banked the ship to the right and headed back toward the spaceport. The huge truck slid into a side wall, spilling a crate of credits out the back. It was the one with the loose lid Adam had opened. The contents spilled out onto the deck.
Adam and Sherri reached the bridge just as the Gracilian ship came in view of the spaceport. The MK behemouth was still there, but it wouldn’t be for long. Soon it would be lifting off coming for them.
Riyad, where are you? Adam asked through his brain-interface.
Hurrying along the frontage road, heading north.
Okay, we see you!
So how do we get aboard?
Give me a minute.
We don’t have a minute. The MK assholes will be after us before that.
Adam spotted an area of single-level tenement structures a couple of blocks over, made up mainly of lean-tos and aluminum boxes for housing.
“Copernicus, hover over that section for a moment. Let the residents get out before you land.”
“You want me to land on their homes?”
“We’ll make it up to them.”
Riyad, go east two blocks. We’ll pick you up there.
Prodigious clouds of exhaust smoke poured down on the slum, causing those who lived there to run for their lives. A moment later, Copernicus set the spaceship down directly on top of their homes, crushing them to thin pieces of rubble. Adam ran to the loading bay and helped Riyad and Kaylor into the ship. Then he stepped over to the pile of twenty-five thousand Juirean credits littering the deck nearby and scooped up a large armful. He carried it to the rear of the bay and tossed it out.
Riyad—still holding the DMC and satchel in his arms—looked at his friend as if he’d lost his mind. “What the hell?”
“A little donation to the neighborhood revitalization program.”
“Do you realize how much money that is to these people?”
“Yeah, I do. Now secure the DMC. We have to go back to Angar’s building and shoot the place up a little to destroy any evidence.”
Riyad flashed one of his trademark brilliant smiles as his friend. “I’ve already taken care of that. Just get us about twenty miles up and I’ll tell you about it.”
“You’re going to blow up one of the dark matter cubes!” Adam said. “That’s crazy. How do you know twenty miles is far enough away?”
“Kaylor said they have a radius of half a mile.”
“That is what the Gracilians told us,” Kaylor spoke up in his defense. “I was only going by what they said.”
“And how do we even know your flash weapon bomb will set it off?” Sherri asked.
“If it doesn’t then we go back to Plan A. If it does, then it not only takes out the building but also the MK ship,” Riyad pointed out. “But we best be moving. The bad guys will be lifting off soon.”
“You have to block the battery feed at the same time you fire the weapons. Are you good enough with an ATD to do both?” Adam asked.
“No…and that’s why I need your help.” Riyad turned to Kaylor. “You might want to record this; the information could come in handy.”
Kaylor went to a console. “I am not familiar with these controls. How do I record?”
Sherri went to help. After a moment, they had a brief sequence from the lower security camera recorded and playing back. It seemed to be working.
Riyad turned to Adam with a smile.
“So where are the weapons?” Adam asked.
“I’ll show you.”
The two men became silent, each concentrating intensely on the area of the city twenty miles below the ship.
They should be the only two active weapons on the floor, or at least the only two next to each other.
I see them.
What Adam actually saw in his mind were the bright white indicators of the weapon’s energy signal. He focused until he could follow the individual tracks of wires and battery components within each device.
What do you want me to do? he mentally asked Riyad.
You’re better with the ATD than I am. I’ll block the battery feeds while you fire the weapons.
Got it.
On the count of three, and I mean three, two, one…go. Understood?
That’s actually four counts. Adam smiled, which confused the others on the bridge, not knowing the mental conversation that was going on.
Ready? Riyad ask. Here were go. Three, two, one…go.
It happened in a flash—literally—and the team would have to replay the recording several times, mostly at extreme slow motion, before they understood what happened.
An intense bright point of light flared where the building had once stood. Instantly, a perfectly curved scoop of ground was removed from the surface of Woken, taking with it the set of buildings and parts of the surrounding neighborhood, as well as half the spaceport, including the MK starship. What was amazing was that other ships and structures at the edge of the annihilation event stood with perfectly smooth slices taken out of them, showing that the event did indeed have a limited range. However, that only lasted a fraction of a second.
As the sphere of atmosphere, dirt and structures disappeared from existence
, there came a volume of air rushing in from all sides to fill the vacuum. It moved at over a thousand miles per hour, but having to cover only a quarter mile before reaching the center of the missing sphere. The initial singularity—which had formed when the two dark matter particles met—was now gone. The air mass, and with it parts of buildings, soil and other debris, collided at the center, compressed and then recoiled, creating a tremendous shock wave that radiated out for two miles in every direction before dissipating.
Adam’s team was dumbfounded by what they saw in the recording. The results were both more satisfying—and tragic—than they imagined. The devastation was complete, and would serve their purpose of hiding the effects of the battle—and the theft—that had taken place. Hopefully, most of the natives had left the area while the fighting was going on and survived. The slum neighborhood where Adam dropped the credits was in shambles, but then he laughed, thinking how for years to come, the natives would be pulling stray twenty-five thousand credit chips from the rubble. That helped to soothe some of the conflicted emotions he was feeling at the moment.
The shiny new Maris-Kliss starship had also vanished, meaning no immediate pursuit would be forthcoming. Adam was sure, that prior to its fate, communications had gone out reporting on the battle in the building and the theft of the money truck. Back at MK headquarters, it would be assumed everything was lost, including the elusive dark matter collector. All the dire predictions the Gracilians had made about the catastrophic events that would transpire should that happen would be dismissed as just paranoid speculation. Yes, a singularity had been created, but nothing self-sustaining or large enough to destroy the galaxy. Until another collector was found, the promise of unlimited dark matter energy would have to wait.
21
Coop set a course out of the Woken system and back to the Klin saucer Kaylor had left about half a light-year away.
The DMC and loose cubes were under the shielding screen, so the comm was working, along with the gravity drive. As a consequence, a CW link was open with the Colony Ship, and Jym’s excited face looked down on them from a large monitor on the forward bulkhead.
“So what now, fearless leader?” Sherri asked Adam as the Gracilian starship dropped out of a deep gravity-well and approached the small Klin saucer. “We still have the dark matter collector and most of the cubes.”
“We also have a fortune in Juirean credits!” the tiny bear-like alien exclaimed.
Sherri smiled, about as broadly as Adam had ever seen her smile.
“That we do!” she said.
Adam waved his hand at the group. “We still have to be careful. Right now everyone thinks the money was destroyed along with the DMC. If we go around living high on the hog, someone is bound to notice and put two and two together.”
Kaylor batted his eyes rapidly, lost in the confusing translation he was hearing.
“But what about the Gracilians?” he asked, letting Adam’s comment remain unresolved in his mind.
“Simple. I’ll just tell them what happened,” Adam said. “The DMC was stolen three times, once by MK, then the Cartel and finally by Angar. We tried to recover it but everything was destroyed on Woken.”
“And the half-million credits we have been paid?” Jym asked. “I have already spent a large amount of that getting the Colony Ship ready to come to your rescue—a rescue I see is no longer required. Arieel and her natives are aboard as we speak helping with the final outfitting.”
“Arieel’s aboard?” Adam asked.
“She has been notified of the link and is on her way to the bridge, but the ship is large. She will arrive momentarily.”
Adam nodded. “About the money, that was non-refundable,” Adam reported. “The Gracilians will be upset, but relieved. They’ll think they’ve lost the DMC, but at least no one else will be able to get their hands on such deadly power.”
“Why don’t we just give it back to them?” Kaylor asked.
Adam shook his head. “If we did that, news would eventually leak out that the DMC wasn’t destroyed in the—what do you call it, the annihilation event? At that point this whole vicious cycle starts over again. One way or another, this technology will get out into the public domain, either by someone stealing it—again—or Volic will simply give in and sell it. It’s too dangerous for even the Gracilians to have.” Adam smiled. “And now that we don’t have to sell it to make a shitload of money, we won’t.”
“What are we going to do with it?” Sherri asked.
“That I don’t know. I honestly believe it is too dangerous to be destroyed. Look what one tiny cube did on Woken. And the Gracilians say the explosive effect is multiplied exponentially by the number of cubes involved.”
“We’ll have to hide it then,” Sherri said. “And someplace no one will ever find it.”
“That’s right,” Adam agreed. Then he paused and looked around the room at the faces of all the friends he had in the galaxy. “But first, let’s get back to the Colony Ship.” He looked at Jym’s image on the screen. “I assume all the ships that have been waiting for us have left?”
“Yes they did. Once word of the event on Woken filtered to them, they were gone almost immediately.”
“Good, it looks like our ruse worked. We’ll return to the Colony Ship and figure out our next moves there. And remember, no one runs off with their share of the money and starts flashing it around.”
“And that means you, too, Mr. Cain. So a log cabin instead of a log home for you back at Tahoe,” Sherri said, smiling warmly.
“You read my mind.”
“You know I can’t do that anymore, not since my poor little ATD broke,” Sherri pouted. “But maybe with some of my money, I’ll buy a replacement.”
22
The trip back to the Colony Ship would take eighteen days. It should have taken eleven, but Adam had to hold back so that the Klin saucer could keep up. Even still, Kaylor was trailing two hours behind the Orion.
The transit time gave the crew an opportunity to unwind and start to grasp the new reality before them. One hundred eight million credits divided six ways—approximately, since Adam had given some of it away to the slum natives on Woken—came out to eighteen million each. The team decided unanimously that each member would receive the same share, this after Jym expressed concern that he would be cut out of the deal. That wasn’t going to happen.
During the journey, Sherri transferred over to the Klin saucer to keep Kaylor from not feeling left out. He was traveling alone and missing out on all the euphoria inside the Orion. Now after two days, she sat on the bridge with the alien as an awkward silence grew between them. A few moments before, Kaylor had said some things, and then Sherri said some things. Now they were trying to work it out.
Kaylor spoke first.
“You do not have to worry about me. I am quite content to be alone.”
“I realize that,” Sherri said. “It’s just that the rest of us are celebrating our good fortune and I thought you might be feeling left out. Forgive me for having some empathy for your feelings.”
Kaylor grimaced. He studied Sherri’s face for a long moment before responding. “This is a sensitive subject for me,” said the alien, “but I am not comfortable being around Humans, even Humans like you and Adam. You are my friends, but still you are…aliens.”
Sherri laughed, which confused Kaylor. “I can understand that,” Sherri said. “That’s the same way I feel about you…hell, about all aliens.”
Seeing that Sherri wasn’t offended by his embarrassing admission, Kaylor relaxed. “Honestly, when I have to spend any extended time with your kind, I end up frustrated and often angry. Humans have such an odd way of speaking and thinking. It is not normal. Have you noticed that about your species?”
“Most definitely,” Sherri said. “It’s confusing for us, too. We seem to make things up as we go, and the more obscure the reference, the cleverer we think we’re being. It’s a real pain in the ass. I can understand how you feel.”
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“Then you are not angry or offended by my wish to be alone?”
“Of course not! I feel the same way most of the time. Can you imagine what it’s like having to hang out with Adam, Coop and Riyad, and be the only girl?”
“And yet you have had intimate relations with all three.”
Sherri frowned. Kaylor was right, even though it made her sound like a whore. It wasn’t like that…was it?
She stood up. “Okay Kaylor, you can have your peace and quiet, free of any Human interaction. I’ll get the shuttle ready and return to the Orion, no hard feelings.”
“Hard feelings? Is that good or bad?”
“It’s good. It means I’m not mad.”
“You do understand what I mean? Even the most simple of statements can become confusing when spoken by a Human.”
Kaylor leaned forward to check the nav screen, locating the Orion for Sherri’s return to the ship. He tensed and leaned in even closer. Sherri picked up on the alien’s reaction.
“What’s wrong?”
“The Orion…it is not there.”
A moment later Sherri was crowding the screen with Kaylor. He was right. It was gone…no wait, it had changed course. “There is it!”
“But why have they changed course?” Kaylor worked his keyboard. “I estimate they have been on that trajectory for ten minutes.”
“Why didn’t Adam contact us?”
“I will attempt to reach him—”
“No don’t!” Sherri cried out. “Something’s wrong. They would have contacted us if everything was fine. Plot their current course. Where are they headed?”
“Plotting: They are heading away from the galaxy, on a track above the plane. But there is nothing out there except—”
“—Except the Gracilian research station. I should know. I spent six long months there.”
“Has Adam decided to return the dark matter collector to the Gracilians?”
