Atlantia Series 3: Aggressor

by Dean Crawford

  ‘Two at a time,’ Lieutenant C’rairn ordered them. ‘Captain’s orders are clear: observe, don’t provoke anybody, see what you can learn. Talk to the people, okay?’

  The Marines nodded as one, most of them probably keen just to get into the sanctuary and away from Atlantia’s drab, cramped corridors.

  ‘Remember to re-weight your fatigues to zero before you enter the sanctuary,’ C’rairn reminded them. ‘I don’t what any of you landing in a crumpled heap, unable to stand up.’

  C’rairn turned to the sanctuary entrance and hit a button. A shaft door opened, some three feet square and leading into a steeply declined chute made of a flexible, metallic material.

  Because the sanctuary rotated within the Atlantia’s hull to create normal gravity, it was not possible to simply “walk” in. Instead, the flexible chute allowed access, dropping the entrant into the sanctuary via the gravity it created through centrifugal motion, the chute attached to it via disc-seals and bearings that allowed it to move freely as the sanctuary rotated. A similar system allowed crew members to exit the sanctuary at the opposite end.

  Two Marines stepped forward and jumped into the chute one after the other with a six second interval - enough for the first to land and get out of the way before the next Marine landed on top of him. Each soldier removed his magnetic armour and dumped it in a steel bin beside the entrance before pulling themselves into the chute and vanishing as they accelerated away.

  Qayin hauled himself inside the chute, his broad shoulders barely fitting as he dove in, and the tug of the sanctuary accelerated him gradually until he was flying down the chute. A waft of cool, clean air breathed across him, as fresh as heaven after weeks of heat and the stale odours of Atlantia, and then he flew out into mid-air and landed on a soft, deep pile of freshly cut grass. Bright, warm sunlight shone down on him and he squinted as he rolled to one side and landed smoothly on his feet, then stood up and sucked in a lungful of the clean air.

  The sanctuary was a vast valley, its immense scope partly an illusion created by powerful screens that cast a vivid, bright blue sky overhead and a distant ocean stretching to infinity in the distance. Behind Qayin, a waterfall crashed into a cool lagoon from cliffs that marked one end of the sanctuary’s cylindrical shape, the other somewhere out across the distant ocean. Steep hills to one side and vast blue sky above completed the illusion of a Utopian paradise far removed from the cold, lonely vacuum of space outside the Atlantia.

  Created as a reminder of home for crews serving aboard the prison-ship, the sanctuary now represented the only remaining part of home that was still populated by human beings. Most survivors of the apocalypse knew that in reality their homeworld was long gone, now the lair of the Word and its Legion.

  Qayin watched as the last of the Marines landed in the sanctuary and gathered around Lieutenant C’rairn.

  ‘You all know what we’re looking for,’ he told them. ‘Rumours, evidence of conspiracy, any hint of discord among the civilians. No sudden moves though, okay? Let’s get the people to talk to us instead of barging into their homes and making them hate us.’

  As they turned to leave a second platoon of Marines approached them, led by General Abrahim Bra’hiv, a squat and powerfully built man with shaved steel-grey hair and cold blue eyes. Alpha Company had been sent in to patrol first, easing the civilians into the idea of having soldiers in the sanctuary before letting Bravo’s former convicts wander about. The Marines of Bravo Company snapped to attention as Lieutenant C’rairn saluted.

  ‘At ease,’ Bra’hiv growled, his voice as rough as sandpaper.

  ‘Anything we should know about?’ C’rairn asked.

  ‘They’re as tight as a clam’s ass,’ Bra’hiv replied in typical fashion. ‘Nobody’s talking to us and they’re already suspicious of the patrols. Seems like they now consider the sanctuary their personal home and us as intruders.’

  ‘We don’t have time for this, baby-sitting civilians when there’s proper training to be done,’ C’rairn agreed.

  ‘Captain’s orders,’ Bra’hiv replied. ‘May not like ‘em but we’ve got to carry them out.’

  Qayin was paired-off with a younger, junior-ranked soldier named Soltin, a wiry street-youth whose neck was laced with cheap tattoos mostly hidden by the collar of his fatigues. Qayin led the way, striking out across a grassy knoll that led down toward dense forest within which countless tiny homes were scattered.

  The path ahead wound through a deep gulley lined with trees that climbed steep hills to either side of them. Qayin knew from much-cherished time spent down here for Rest & Recuperation that the gulley opened out onto an area of farmland that in turn met the “shore” of the ocean, no doubt where many of the oft-complaining civilians spent much of their idle time seeking new things to moan about.

  Qayin’s eye drifted upward and he watched the trees above. Steep hills gave access to the tops of trees further down, and as he scanned the higher branches he saw birds nesting deep inside the leafy canopy. A few species native to Ethera had been carried aboard, adding to the illusion of being home instead of on duty aboard the old prison ship.

  The path opened out onto a gathering of compact homesteads and instantly Qayin’s instincts were tugged as he saw sharp gazes directed at him. A few of the menfolk exchanges glances and it was as if an unseen switch had been flipped. One man turned and walked into the nearest homestead as the others shifted position, continuing with their chores but placing themselves between Qayin and the homestead that the lone man had vanished into. At the same time three women began walking toward Qayin, awkward smiles on their faces.

  ‘Welcome,’ one of them greeted him with a grin so forced it seemed she was trying to bend an iron bar with her lips. ‘How are you?’

  Qayin smiled back as he towered over her.

  ‘I’m very well indeed, thank you,’ he replied in a delightfully pleasant accent. ‘Now, what are you all hiding?’

  The woman’s smile slipped as shadows passed behind her eyes.

  ‘We’re not hiding anything,’ she insisted. ‘We’re just trying to make a living. Please, won’t you come inside for a drink?’

  The woman gestured to one of the other homesteads and Qayin grinned again.

  ‘I’d love a drink,’ he said. ‘Let’s go into that home there.’

  He pointed to the homestead and the women shook their heads. ‘Oh no, that one’s being renovated and fumigated. Infestation of skin-ticks, very nasty and…’

  Qayin walked past the women and made for the homestead, Soltin jerking into motion alongside him.

  ‘Whatchya doin’?’ he asked.

  ‘Stay sharp,’ Qayin snapped.

  The three men ahead of them looked up and immediately began moving to intercept the Marines. One of them, a bulky looking man with a thick beard, pointed one thick arm at Qayin.

  ‘You ain’t welcome here!’

  Qayin did not slow down until he was within six cubits of the three men, all of whom were armed with crude weapons such as pitch forks and other gardening implements. As per strict rules, nobody but Colonial Officers and Marines could bear arms aboard the Atlantia.

  ‘Just ‘cause I ain’t welcome doesn’t mean I can’t be here,’ Qayin replied. ‘What’s in the homestead?’

  ‘Nothing of your business,’ the bearded man replied.

  ‘Everythin’ aboard ship is our business,’ Qayin replied. ‘I don’t want to force my way in, but if I have to I will.’

  ‘Likewise,’ the bearded man replied, ‘I don’t want to have to stop you.’

  He gripped his fork tighter in his hands, and Qayin flicked the power switch on his plasma rifle. The magazine hummed into life.

  ‘Your fork against my rifle,’ Qayin grinned. ‘Fancy your odds?’

  ‘You ain’t got no right!’ the bearded man growled. ‘You’re all just murderers, not soldiers. You can’t tell us what to do.’

  ‘I can,’ Qayin replied, ‘but I’m not. I’m askin’. What’s in
the homestead? Your women said it was an infestation of bindweed.’

  The bearded man nodded. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Actually, they said it was skin-ticks,’ Qayin replied, his smile vanished now. ‘What’s in there?’

  ‘You can’t go in.’

  ‘I can, and I am,’ Qayin said as he marched forward.

  ‘Stay where you are!’

  The man who had vanished inside the homestead burst out, a plasma rifle cradled in his grasp that he powered up and aimed at Qayin.

  ‘Weapon!’ Qayin roared.

  Soltin dove for cover as Qayin leaped in the opposite direction, the two Marines instantly creating two targets instead of one and forcing their attacker to choose. Qayin hit the ground and rolled as he aimed back at the farmer. ‘Drop the rifle!’

  The farmer fired, two shots ripping across the open space between Qayin and his assailant and blasting the ground where he had just stood. The fearsome rounds of super-heated blue-white plasma incinerated the earth and started small fires in the grass.

  ‘Don’t shoot!’ Qayin yelled at Soltin.

  His command was too late, drowned out as Soltin fired and hit the farmer straight in the chest, his plasma round blazing straight through the man’s ribcage in a flare of blue smoke. The man toppled backwards onto the ground, the rifle falling from his grasp as the women behind Qayin screamed in horror.

  ‘Stand down!’ Qayin yelled as he scrambled to his feet and dashed toward the fallen man’s body.

  Even before he reached the farmer’s side Qayin knew that the man was dead, a smouldering black cavity of cauterised flesh the size of two bunched fists hollowed out where his heart should have been. He cursed and then looked up ahead at the darkened maw of the homestead.

  Qayin aimed his rifle into the darkness and advanced. To his credit, he heard Soltin silently move into position behind him without orders, covering Qayin as he entered the homestead. Despite Soltin’s returning fire, the fact was the farmer had fired first. Repercussions, if there were any, would come later.

  The interior was dark and Qayin hesitated in the doorway as his eyes adjusted to the gloom. He could hear the women outside huddled around the farmer’s dead body, their sobs haunting the homestead as Qayin moved forward, but the building itself was silent.

  A simple living room extended into three bedrooms, the home a single-story with a bath stall attached to the rear. Even here, in the sanctuary, there was little room for luxury and most of the accommodations were sparse and functional in their décor. On first sight everything appeared normal, but it was not the sight of the interior that bothered Qayin. It was the smell.

  Death had an odour and Qayin knew it well, the rank, stale aroma of flesh in a state of decay. Qayin, one finger resting on the trigger of his plasma rifle, advanced toward a corridor at the back of the living room that led to the bedrooms.

  A soft gurgling sound attracted his attention and he turned into the second room and froze in the doorway.

  A single mattress contained a man’s body, limbs trembling and twitching as though live current were surging through his veins. Sickly, pale foam trickled from his lips and stained the mattress beside his head, and his eyes were wide and feverish as they stared at the ceiling above him.

  Worse, the man’s naked body was laced with a miasma of thick purple lines that criss-crossed his skin as though his veins had burrowed out of his flesh to envelop him like writhing snakes.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Soltin called from behind him.

  ‘Big trouble,’ Qayin replied. ‘That’s what.’

  ***

  IV

  ‘Almost a thousand tonnes. Not a bad catch.’

  Captain Taron Forge fell rather than sat into his chair in the cockpit, casting a practised eye over the instruments as he pulled off leather gloves and let them hang in mid-air. The nebula outside the cockpit shimmered and glowed as the spacecraft accelerated through it and turned away from the star’s powerful, flaring surface.

  The Phoenix was not a large spacecraft, powered by twin engines mounted on strakes either side of a bulky, long-nosed hull, but what she lacked in size she more than made up for in manoeuvrability and durability. Capable of both atmospheric and space flight, super-luminal velocity and heavily armed, the merchant ship had long ago ceased to be the benign haulage craft she had been laid down as.

  Taron did not like the term “pirate”. He preferred to be known as a freestyle businessman.

  The broad, wedge-shaped cockpit looked out over the dense starfields as Taron’s co-pilot, Yo’Ki Yan, guided the Phoenix toward the habitable planetary orbits. A diminutive woman with long black hair pinned back in a pony tail and exotic, dark and slanted eyes against olive skin, Yo’Ki’s small stature belied her lethal nature. Taron’s partner in crime for many years now after he had liberated her from a slave-market way out beyond the Icari Line, she was a skilled pilot and a talented killer, when the need arose. She conveyed her displeasure with a sideways glance at him.

  ‘What? So she’s a civilian vessel. We’ve done worse, right?’

  One of Yo’Ki’s perfect eyebrows lifted a little higher.

  ‘Okay, so maybe we haven’t,’ Taron muttered and waved away the air between them. ‘Times are harsh and pickings are slim. You think we should let them go or something?’

  Yo’Ki simply stared ahead out of the viewing panel.

  ‘I didn’t think so,’ Taron replied. ‘We gotta eat, right?’

  A soft sigh and a shake of Yo’Ki’s head that rippled her glossy black pony-tail.

  ‘Oh, so now we’re starving ourselves to death?’ Taron asked her. ‘Why not save ourselves all this trouble and just fly to Ethera and hand ourselves over to the Legion? What about fuel? What about repairs to the Phoenix?’

  Yo’Ki’s sculptured lips formed a slight smile as she rolled her eyes.

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ Taron uttered. ‘Space is littered with parts and debris now. Just that little matter of finding what we need among all the junk before we end up floating across the cosmos for all eternity. You got any better ideas on how to make a living out here, I’m all ears.’

  Yo’Ki’s slim hand reached out for the cable jettison switches on a panel above her head.

  ‘Don’t you dare touch that!’

  Taron’s hand moved faster as he blocked her access to the switches. He glared at her and noticed her little shoulders shaking and her black hair shimmering as she chuckled to herself in silence.

  ‘Very funny,’ Taron grumbled as he re-took his seat. ‘I wonder how much I’d get for a talented comedienne on Chiron these days?’

  Yo’Ki’s plasma pistol was in her hand in a flash and aimed right at Taron’s face, rock steady and with two dark eyes blazing behind it.

  ‘What? Lost that sense of humour already?’ Taron mocked with a wry smile.

  Yo’Ki glared at him for a moment longer, and then the pistol was spun through her fingers and vanished back into the holster on her belt as she turned back to guiding the Phoenix through the vastness of space.

  Taron continued to smile to himself as he glanced down at a monitor that displayed an image of the mining craft being towed behind the Phoenix. The data Taron had collected suggested her holds were empty and she was low on fuel and supplies, but the ship still had value, as did her crew.

  ‘I’m going to check on the cargo,’ Taron said as he stood up. ‘You stay here and keep the joy alive.’

  Taron strode out of the cockpit down a narrow corridor into an austere circular living space. Beyond were other passages leading to cabins, engine room and gun turrets, of which there were four mounted fore and aft, above and below to deter attacks from unknown vessels.

  Taron passed a steel mirror on his way to the observation room and caught a glimpse of his reflection as he did so. He was tall, with rangy limbs and tousled brown hair, his father’s features ever present in his own like a ghost that refused to let him be. The rugged, loose-fitting spacer’s clothes that he wor
e broke the illusion, far removed from the stiff Colonial uniform of his father.

  Taron reached the observation platform, little more than a ladder really that accessed a small bubble projecting from the upper surface of the Phoenix’s hull. Taron turned as he saw his ship’s surface, and then looked behind. There, tethered securely, was the slender freighter and behind it the brilliantly flaring star receding into the distance.

  Scanners had detected a dozen or so human beings aboard and she looked like one of many merchant ships plying the trade routes around the Tiberium Fields. Or at least there had been, until the Word and its Legion scattered humanity from the core systems out toward the Icari Line and beyond.

  Around the cockpit of the freighter was a shimmering field of energy, as though the ship had been caught inside some kind of net and trapped there. Taron knew nothing of where the energy field originated, other than him winning it from a drunk Caneerian rogue two years previously during a Voltan match. The Caneerian had protested the next day with considerable violence, claiming that as he had been drunk he could not have played well enough and demanding a rematch. When Taron refused, the Caneerian had drawn his weapon.

  Taron had drawn faster.

  The energy field possessed a remarkable property: placed within reasonable range of biological life, it sent that life into a sort of comatose state. It worked on all life forms that Taron had tried it on, and that was many in the past couple of years as he had captured vessels and plundered their wares. Something to with the frequency of brain waves, or so he and Yo’Ki assumed, it also shut down low-voltage electrical systems. A carefully kept secret, it had made him one of the most successful brigands yet to curse the trade routes and one of the most wanted. That was until nobody cared about anything other than their own survival after the Etherean apocalypse that had claimed so many lives. So much for human ingenuity, he figured.

  The energy field was constructed by an unknown race, and recovered from an unknown location. Its original owner, before his unfortunate demise, had claimed he had no idea where the thing came from, a claim that Taron believed. The Icari Line, which held back all military and law-abiding civilian craft, presented no such barrier for the brigands, corsairs and escaped felons and convicts fleeing the core systems. Racing out into the unknown void, they had encountered things that could not even adequately be described using words alone. Many had barely survived long enough to describe their astonishing experiences. Nobody knew what else lay out there, beyond the charted systems.