by Dave Freer
The scurrying robots had made up the bed on top of the transmitter core with fresh, smooth sheets. There was no sign of the ropes that had bound Shael. She led him to the bed, pulled him down onto it. Compcontrol had assured them they still had twenty-five minutes before the orbital lander reached the ship. There was to be no hurrying, they were sternly instructed, as they were inexperienced operators. Psi output had to be at an absolute maximum to successfully align the atoms within the crystal lattice matrix of the transmitter.
With the intensity of desire Keilin doubted if they'd last that long. His hands, clumsy with haste and need, fumbled with her buttons . . . and then his fingers, suddenly clever, drifted, caressing her soft body. Went down . . .
The need and desire, and . . . overpowering love. Togetherness. A melding of softness and hardness, and a moment in which all the vast, glowing, shifting colors of the jewel heart of the matter transmitter turned black, and a quarter of a million miles of nanocircuitry glowed instead. The lattices within the core shifted from helium ice to the surface of the sun. Their combined psi force reached out into it, just as Keilin and Shael reached that instant at which everything was utterly, absolutely perfect.
They certainly didn't hear Compcontrol say "99.999987% lattice alignment. Initializing transmission."
* * *
. . . Transmission. Transmission. Transmission. Transmission . . .
* * *
Dr. James Edwards found himself standing in the command center of the starship Morningstar. The computer recognized him, naturally. It informed him that the orbital shuttle from Morningstar II Control Center was about to dock. Dr. Edwards was a skilled surgeon, who knew when it was necessary to amputate. He was also a gentle, kindly man, but there comes a time to end gentleness.
"Destroy it!" he ordered.
* * *
On board the shuttle Dane Fisher knew that his long-laid and treacherous plans had reached fruition at last. This was his moment of triumph. There was the docking bay. Nothing could stop him now. Then he saw the gunports next to the docking bay slide open. And in a burst of ruby incandescence, a lifetime of monomania, lies, greed and treachery became nothing more than space-scattered atoms.
APPENDIX
Crew / Cru: Those who control the planet/starship Morningstar. The latter "uh" pronunciation is that of the colonists' descendants.
* * *
Colonists: Because the purpose of the entire mission was to drop seedling colonies into total isolation with no support mechanisms, the idea was to have passenger-colonists set up low-tech units based on Italian city-states of the 13th-14th centuries. Several units would be dropped on each settlement planet. To train the colonists in self-sufficiency they were voluntarily brainscrubbed and then tape-indoctrinated to believe themselves from this nontechnical era. A belief of near-deity status of crew-members was imprinted onto the colonists' minds to allow the crew to control them.
* * *
Transmitter core sections: Pieces of the matter-transmitter core were scattered across the nearest continent, to prevent them from falling into Morkth hands when the landing command center of Morningstar I was successfully breached because of treachery. Without them the matter transmitter is useless. Black, like opals in appearance, these are pieces of nano-circuitry and unstable crystal lattice. The lattice elements must be absolutely aligned for the device to work perfectly. The less precise this alignment the more "scatter" with transference. With scatter, what goes in, doesn't come out exactly the same, and the ability to transpose large masses decreases. Reliable control must be psionic. The core sections possess some degree of AI self-awareness and can manipulate humans psionically to a limited extent. Psionically capable humans can also manipulate the matter transference capabilities of the core sections, although, without the computer support machinery, range and mass are limited by how powerful the psi are. Unfortunately the power-flux can also be detected by the beta-Morkth instruments.
* * *
Gene-splice: Introduction of kodiak and chimpanzee characteristics of enhanced sensory perceptivity, speed, agility and strength into the human genome, to counter faster, stronger Morkth warriors. Dominant gene linked to slowly spread through the human race.
* * *
Morkth: An alien, vaguely insectoid species, totally xenophobic, intolerant of any other life form, considering non-Morkth intelligence absolute anathema. Star travelling, with the weight of a substantial empire behind them, with the science of three destroyed species to assist. The Sol System is the next step in their holy crusade. Those on the colony planet are without a queen, and split into two factions. Both factions wish to follow the prime directive of their dead queen: that of capturing a ship drive. Using the still active nav capabilities of their own crashed ships, they would then return to Morkth-controlled space and allow the human extermination to proceed using conventional Morkth warrior troops. They differ as to secondary objectives and means, however.
* * *
Alpha-Morkth: The biotechnicians—lifesupport and queencare—who want to use the human race to destroy itself. The biotech group escaped with a bare minimum of biological manipulation equipment, and little other weaponry.
* * *
Beta-Morkth: the arms tech—mechanical and ordnance—the latter group, though smaller, had seized control of the Morkth ship and the bulk of its technical supplies. They plan to destroy the entire planet.
* * *
Morningstar: Juno converted into a starship. It had two deployable mountain-sized landing control centers, for managing the matter transmission of passengers. These artificial mountains had been dropped at either pole of the colony planet, where they would remain until the ship was ready to move on: Morningstar I and II. Morningstar I has been destroyed. The crew of Morningstar II rests in cryonic sleep. The ship hangs in orbit above the colony planet. The few crew onboard are dead, killed by a delayed-action gas bomb, the ship shut down.
* * *
Morningstar command structure: Command was split, psionic and physical. Humans with sufficient psi potential to activate and direct the matter transmitter, even supported by a vastly complex computer system and bio-support drugs, are rare. They are also often emotionally unstable, and unsuited to leadership in the populist sense. However, because such folk are rare the transmitter-control crew was made up of whatever they could get. This included some weird people. Therefore Earth command added the safety factor to the transmitter that it could not be manipulated by people in a psionic hate flux but only in the grip of emotions like fear or love. The command of the psionic weirdos they gave to a woman: Evie Lee, seemingly stable, intelligent, kindly, motherly, humane and able to generate tremendous psionic flux during physical lovemaking. As it was the only condition that the transmitter crew would accept, she was also given ultimate command of the starship.
Command of the starship, when it was in transit, was given to a more conventional male captain. He was one of those humans on whom fortune seemed to smile. Tall, handsome and intelligent, naturally able at anything he attempted, an Olympic gold medallist at martial arts, with doctorates in military science, and biochemistry as well as being a medical doctor, a hero in the early Morkth-human encounters, Sub-Captain Dane Fisher was a man born to command. He was also a man with the same amount of psionic ability as a brick.
