The Forlorn

by Dave Freer

  With a quick jerk he snapped the pendant chain. A terrible feeling of abandonment washed over Keilin for a moment . . . and then more bitter cold sliced up from the ankle pouch. Keilin forced himself to be calm. He'd get away . . . he'd kill the man who'd dared to take it from him. Then a fresh wave of worry washed over him. What if Kim, hiding just back there in the trees touched the stone in her bracelet? Would the Morkth still come?

  Keilin was unprepared for the open-handed blow that rocked his head back. His head reeled and swam. The tall man's words, uttered through gritted teeth made little sense. "Something I owed your great-grandmother. Pity I can't give it to her in person." Then he appeared to regain control of himself. "Where is the other one who was with you earlier, boy? Talk, before I use it as a good excuse to beat the living shit out of you."

  Back in her tree perch Shael watched with horror. She heard the question, and wished she'd thought to run away as soon as things started to go wrong. . . . But she'd frozen, and now he would betray her.

  "I'm alone." His voice didn't even quaver.

  The tall man hit him again, with calculated force. "Don't ever lie to me again, boy. Beywulf here can track a breeze. He's been following your little banditry tour for three days now. Talk or get hurt."

  "He . . . argued with me. We split up a few hours ago. He went north." Shael closed her eyes before the next blow.

  "Obstinate little git. Still, I suppose it's in the genes. Tie him up and finish searching him, S'kith. Beywulf, you and Leyla, go and find . . . her."

  Beywulf put his nose to the ground, and followed Keilin's back trail like a hound. It took him all of thirty seconds to find her tree, and drag her out of it, kicking and squalling.

  Meanwhile S'kith's rough hands were searching Keilin. Skillfully he removed the knife from the boy's belt, and then the two hidden knives from Keilin's back and sleeve. His hand moved down the boy's leg, and arrived at the ankle pouch. He touched it, and the remote expression briefly went out of his eyes. Casually the bald-headed man looked at the rest of his party, while apparently checking the soles of Keilin's boots. Their attention was held by Shael's antics. He moved to the other side of Keilin so his back was toward them. And put his finger to his lips. Then he went on searching as if he'd found nothing.

  They were put down side-by-side in front of the fire. The one called Cap was looking at them down his long nose, the expression in his eagle eyes cold. "Two little pairs of green eyes." He produced Keilin's pendant from his pocket and touched it to Shael's cheek . . . and snatched it away. "Another flipping one. I search for near on twenty years to find one person the core sections respond to . . . and within a month of finding one, I find another two . . . together. Brother and sister?"

  "Yes," said Keilin.

  "No!" said Shael, vehemently.

  His cold stare washed over them. Finally he spoke. "One of you is still lying to me."

  Keilin had less experience at facial schooling. "You, boy? You don't learn, do you? Well, you will."

  He turned away briefly, and stared into the darkness. Keilin wondered whether he should try to induce panic in himself, whether the contact between his leg and the signet ring in the ankle pouch was sufficient, and whether he and the girl would be able to survive the Morkth attack that would follow. He tested his bonds. There was no give in them at all.

  The tall man turned back to face them again. "We were hunting this," he dangled the broken pendant in front of them. "This is the fourth one I've located. We've been tracking its movement down from the north for two weeks now." Keilin's heart gave a leap. They'd been following Kim. So, it had been another jewel on that bracelet. And their captors had made no effort to find their kit. They might be hunting the jewels, just like the Morkth, but they didn't realize that they had not found one, but three. They'd found his, but they'd been following her. He felt the girl tense up next to him. She'd worked it out too.

  Cap continued. "We were going to question you and then kill you." The way it was said, with a chilling lack of any emotion, made it totally believable. "It appears that you're both core-sensitives." He held up the pendant again. "I'm willing to bet you've been manipulated by the backup Compcontrol system." He shrugged. "You may not have been aware of it, but we are working toward the same end. You'll pardon my initial reaction to you. I don't suppose you can help the fact that you are descended from the woman who betrayed the human race to the Morkth."

  There was a stunned silence. Then Shael burst out. "That's rubbish. I know my ancestory. I am descended from Queen Lee herself!" Keilin cast his eyes heavenwards. Now she was going to sprout her princess story again. Stupid girl.

  Cap nodded, his eyes narrowing. "Evie Lee. So called Senior Captain of the colony starship which was Homo sapiens' last hope. The treacherous self-centered little bitch who betrayed most of her crew to the Morkth, so she could play at being royalty and have a good time instead of doing her duty." He paused, and then added grimly, "You see, doing her duty would have meant she had to die, so that a hundred million people could live. She betrayed the last hope of our species for her own selfish ends.

  "We were supposed to scatter the seeds of the human race on so many planets that the Morkth could never find and eliminate them all. Instead, more than three hundred years later we're all still on one damned colony planet which we share with mankind's worst enemy." His voice was full of a barely controlled fury.

  Even Shael quailed before this onslaught, but she came up fighting. "That's simply not true. She only just escaped the command center with her life, when she blew up the transmitter core. Her sub-captain betrayed them. She was little more than a vagabond until she reached Arlinn, and the people recognized her as queen."

  The tall man shrugged. "She could hardly tell the truth, could she? As for being a vagabond . . . well, let's rather say she was a promiscuous little tramp. She didn't much care where she got or where she dumped her offspring. You, boy, have the look of her command-center lover. The same Sub-Captain Fisher she blamed it on, poor sod. Anyway, what I'm hunting are sections of the supposedly blown-up transmitter core from the starship's control center. Fortunately, it was made to be virtually indestructible. The sections were just scattered across half the continent. This is one of them." He held up Keilin's pendant again. "If I can gather enough of them, then we can take them to the backup Compcontrol in the second landing command center, and reactivate the project."

  Despite being tied up, and told that the plan had been to kill him, Keilin was fascinated. He'd seen pictures, and been hypnotized by several stories of starships, back in the library. "You mean . . . my jewel is part of a starship? If you had enough pieces you could fly away from our world to the stars?"

  Cap sighed. "It's been a long three hundred years. The ordinary people haven't a clue about reality any more." He pointed upwards. "There is the starship Morningstar. Your `moon.' It's a lot smaller than the moon that used to orbit the world we humans came from. Less than a seventeenth of the size, but still the biggest ship the human race ever made. It's far too big to ever land. And this isn't `our world' either. We humans came from Earth, fleeing the Morkth. The terraforming of this place had been started by robot drones nearly fifty years before we even left Sol. Fortunately, there was an atmosphere with oxygen, but no other life except a lot of primitive mosslike stuff before that. I came here with the shipload of construction crews and equipment a year before the Morningstar was ready. They built your cities or Evie would have dumped millions of people without any shelter onto an alien world."

  "So how did people get down here, sir? I mean . . . that's high, there couldn't have been a ladder. Did they . . . um, have flying ships, or did they lower platforms with ropes or something?"

  Cap snorted. "You don't even know what you're talking about, but you've put your finger on the basic problem. We had to get nearly one hundred million evacuees onto that ship, and off again. They had to choose between carrying people or enough fuel to ferry the people down. Trotting up and down
into a gravity well is a fuel-expensive process, and the sort of loads we could carry on a shuttle would have meant a couple of lifetimes worth of trips.

  "Your `jewel' as you call it, was the answer. It is part of the matter-transmitter system. We could move passengers up from Earth, frozen, conditioned and ready to be good little settlers, zip-zap. We brought them down here the same way. Easy, although signal attenuation limits the use of the matter transmitter to a couple of thousand miles.

  "The only trouble was that we needed a psionic to make the damn thing work. A transmitter system has miles of bloody electronic amplifiers, but triggering the whole thing still needs something else. This `jewel' of yours. As well as some nanocircuitry, there is an unstable crystal lattice inside it. When you have perfect alignment in that lattice, right down to the atomic level . . . it works. That alignment is right, by chance, about once in every fifteen thousand attempts. Yet a stupid psi can make the thing work every time, without even knowing how they're damned well doing it! So, one decent psionic, and we had no need to carry loads of fuel and landing craft. We could pack in a lot more corpsicles instead. We just had a couple of shuttles for the crew."

  He sighed. "We lost those when the Morkth atmospheric craft hit Morningstar's principal control center. Now, the only way back up to the ship is to get the matter transmitter working again. Even the Morkth can't get there. The battleship that deployed their landing craft got taken out kamikaze-style by our one and only screening cruiser. Anyway, the defenses up on Morningstar should be able to trash the sort of piddly little ships the Morkth managed to drop. At least, I hope that's what they think. I presume they must, as they haven't tried a direct frontal assault on her. They obviously don't know that the crew are very dead, and that the ship is in shut-down mode, thanks to one of Evie's last little tricks."

  He ground his fist into his palm. The pendant swayed wildly. "One live human up there would be all it takes to get the ship up and running. One human being . . . and we can't even do that."

  Keilin remembered the burned-edged pages in back of the old book, Geophysical Survey of Planet IV, which his mother said their family had always had . . . so that was what it had been about. It made sense now. "Log of the Starship Morningstar"! But the events Cap talked of were different from those described . . . not totally different, just, well, not quite the same.

  Cap held up the pendant. "But if I can get all of these . . . get into Morningstar II, the second control center, with one psi, and we're away. There is a spare crew up there, frozen. We can be off looking for a wormhole nexus before you can say `knife.' "

  He looked at the bemused faces. "Hell! I might as well be talking Greek to you! Just take my word for it. That is a starship up there. It was once an asteroid called Juno. It had two detachable control centers, the size of small mountains themselves. Both of them were deployed, because a Morkth battleship managed to pick us up and follow us in the flight from Earth, despite the fact that Earth threw everything she could spare into that last `diversionary' attack. Our weakest link was those control centers. Without them to handle planetside matter transmission, we couldn't discharge passengers. Captain Fisher decided it would be safer to have them both down on the planet. It was one of the few orders of his that Evie Lee didn't countermand, although she insisted that the second one, Morningstar II, stay in inactive mode."

  He ground his teeth. "Computer's awake in there, but nothing else. The bitch had it all planned. She did a data dump at the last minute, programming the thing to exclude anything but her type. But I think I can get around that . . ."

  Keilin looked up at the full moon. Half of what the man said was beyond him, but he knew what a spaceship was supposed to look like. There'd been several pictures on book covers. "That's really a spaceship? I thought, I mean in the pictures I saw they were all pointed and, um, shiny metal."

  "Streamlining's pretty pointless for something that never enters an atmosphere. And a big asteroid had the plus of providing lots of raw material that we didn't have to lift out of the gravity well. Ceres was supposed to be next. I doubt if the engineers got there. You see, we never even got the seventeen years they'd predicted we'd have, before the Morkth invasion hit the solar system. So that is it, above us. Mankind's last hope. A forlorn hope. The good starship Morningstar."

  Beywulf chuckled and turned to Leyla. "On board the good starship Venus

  whose figurehead

  was a nude in bed

  sucking—"

  There was no approval in Cap's voice as he interrupted. "That's enough, Beywulf. For all that it's bloody accurate, and that it was a common enough joke among the non-psi crew. The figurehead captain's name was your Evie Lee." The last word was said with overt hatred.

  He shook himself, visibly clearing away the excess emotion. "So. I need to collect these transmitter-core sections, and one psionic of sufficient power, and the starship can move on from star to star. We can finally see that it carries out its original mission: to scatter the seeds of Earth far and wide, beyond the reach of Morkth xenophobia." He spoke with such conviction and power that Keilin wanted to be part of it. It was only the bonds that stopped him leaping to his feet and cheering. Being tied up poured cold water on his enthusiasm, allowing him to ask in a fairly steady voice, "What is a psionic, sir? Are you going to find one?"

  A wintry smile touched one side of Cap's mouth. "You are one. So is the girl. So is S'kith. A psionic has the ability to do things by mental power alone, like read minds or move things without touching them. Such people are very rare. One in fifty million, perhaps. Which is why Evie Lee's little clique of nutters were able to insist that she was given overall command of the starship, in spite of her having the same capacity for command as I have for childbirth."

  Keilin had a retentive mind for details and he was nothing if not stubborn. "Sir. I'm sorry, but you're wrong. I can't do anything just with my mind. If I could I wouldn't be here."

  Cap looked at him keenly. "More guts than sense. You keep arguing with me, boy. The core sections can only be activated by psionics. Did you notice the stone going cold . . . during sex for instance?"

  Keilin blushed and very carefully didn't look at the girl next to him. "Er . . . yes."

  "Typical of Evie Lee's descendants. She had a couch right there on top of the transmitter chamber. Did any little thing pop out of thin air when you did it?" Cap carefully ignored the guffaw from Beywulf and the snort from Leyla.

  Keilin thought of the Patrician's treasury. Hardly a "little thing." Just the biggest flipping phallic symbol in the city. He nodded, hoping he would not be asked for details. To lead off the subject, he added. "The Morkth came just after that too. Every time."

  "You're making the thing work . . . even without amplifiers, although you've no chance of getting sufficient range to get someone back up to the ship. The Beta-Morkth have instruments that sense the power flux. They're trying to collect the core sections too. You say this has happened more than once?"

  Keilin nodded again. Cap looked at him with a little more respect. "So you and the core section survived a couple of attacks by Beta-Morkth warriors. Not bad, boy." There was grudging approval in his voice.

  "I've lived through a couple of attacks myself. You've got a few moments. You've just got to run," said the Princess cooly.

  Keilin twisted to look at her, in time to see her going very red in the firelight. "It . . . it had nothing to do with sex! I was scared and it happened."

  "Shane Tomo."

  She looked puzzled. Cap continued, "It appears that the psionic ability runs in certain families. Shane Tomo was a handsome young blond paranoid manic-obsessive. He was psionically active when he was scared. Which was whenever he wasn't planning a murder. He is the so-called Tyrant's maternal great-great-grandfather. I knew the blond bastard well. He also escaped the crew massacres . . . because he expected them to happen."

  He turned to Beywulf. "Cut them loose."

  Keilin sat rubbing circulation back into his fee
t as he listened to Cap speak. He was not sure he could run yet . . . and he hadn't made up his mind if he ought to. The man was using mighty fine noble words and promising them the moon, with the sun and stars thrown into the bargain. Keilin was carried along by the tide of the words, but he still remembered the blows. He was covertly watching Kim, too. At the end of the speech she clapped.

  "Very good. I am sure half the peasants in the duchy would rise at your call. However, I am not a fool, or new to power speaking, Cap, or whatever your name is. You offer us any reward we care to name. What authority do you have to do so?" Keilin had never heard her doing the ice princess before. She did it quite convincingly.

  For a moment a red light burned in Cap's eyes. Then he laughed. It was a humorless sound. "This is my authority." He touched the badge on his shoulder. "I am, as far as I know, the only crew member that survives. All of you colonists are mine to command. I am First Mate Jacoob Ahrens and, as the surviving senior ranking crew officer, I intend to do just that. Besides," he looked at them with scorn, "what else do you think you can do? A Captain Jaine is hot on your heels, as is a large posse of local folk. They're failing to track you . . . but your raids have been so predictable they know where you are. That's how we found you." He looked at Keilin's stricken face. "Didn't think that far, did you? Too busy showing off, eh? What do you have in your head for brains, boy—cheese?"

  "Very well. I accept your offer. I'll join you. I want the Tyn States as my reward," Shael said coolly.

  "You can't be one of the Cru!" blurted Keilin. "Why, you'd be hundreds of years old then."

  "Three hundred and eighty-seven Earth years, to be precise. Longevity treatments for the crew can stretch my lifespan for at least six or seven hundred years, son. I'll make it clear, I might need you, and if need be I'll take you along in chains. And don't think you can run, because Beywulf will track you down. You can, however, try to kill me." The wintry smile that accompanied this final comment suggested that the man didn't think this much of a threat.