The Ghost Fleet

by Trevor Wyatt

“He’s probably right,” he mutters, once we’re out of our captive’s earshot.

  “We’re bottled up in here.”

  I brush his hand off.

  “Oh, come on. We have a teleporter!”

  “No, you don’t!” The Tyreesian fucker hisses, dashing to the teleporter and quickly running his fingers over the panel, tapping it in a frenzy.

  “Fuck!” Jeryl whispers, moving fast and planting the sole of his boot on the torture’s back, kicking him back against the wall. Then, he looks at the teleporter, the lines on his forehead deepening. He goes down on one knee, running his hands over the small electronic panel with all the necessary information and coordinates. “Now we’re really boxed in.”

  “How’d you ever get to be a hero with that defeatist attitude?” I soften the gibe with a grin and after a moment he grins back.

  I blink twice.

  “Call it a character flaw.”

  He looks back at where the torturer sat against the corridor wall.

  “I guess he’ll know how to readjust the settings, just as how he knows to screw it up.”

  “If he does, he’s not going to want to tell us.”

  “No...” He cracks his knuckles thoughtfully. “I wonder if he’s susceptible to his own methods?”

  I nod slowly.

  “Well, if you want to try to...persuade him, I can just kind of stand guard down at the end of the corridor,” I say.

  “Yeah, I’ll have a word with him.”

  He walks back to where our hostage sits and crouches down beside him. I don’t see what he does, but a moment later the Tyreesian yelps.

  “So now we see what it comes down to,” I hear the torturer gasp. “Violence. It’s always like that with you Terr—ow!”

  “As if you never did anything underhanded or violent,” Montgomery says. “You’ve got several more of those I can break if I need to.”

  “You’re victimizing me!” the Tyreesian growls.

  “Don’t make me laugh. You Tyreesians foment unrest wherever you go. Why do you do it? We know your influence was behind that whole Homefront debacle on Sonali, when the Noble Marshal was shot.”

  “Surely you didn’t think the Sonali were acting on their own?” He sneers. “Those amateurs.”

  “No, we didn’t think...but it’s good of you to affirm it for us.”

  I hear distant shouts and the clanging of booted feet on metal flooring.

  “We don’t have time for this,” I say, glancing around at the two of them. “We’ll be having company soon, and plenty of it.”

  What I don’t tell him is that I have activated a portion of my nanite-infused brain and set it to work on the problem of readjusting the teleportation device. I’m no electronics genius, but my nanites have all sorts of interesting data stored away in their matrix, and what they lacked they can retrieve by remotely accessing the ship’s computer network. This they have been busily doing since my double-blink activation signal set them working.

  The torturer, cradling his injured hand with his other one, grins at us. Perspiration courses down his face. I know he is in great pain, and that doesn’t bother me one bit.

  “They’re coming,” he says with satisfaction. He nods at the teleportation hardware.

  “You don’t know how to assemble that into a working...”

  He trails off as I look down at the panel and press my index finger against the screen, following the best guesses supplied by my nanites.

  “What do you think?” I ask Captain Montgomery once the screen lights up, Tyreesian characters flashing there.

  “Looks like it might work, huh?”

  The Tyreesian chews his lips.

  “You’re just screwing around with it,” he says, not sounding convinced.

  “Yeah, what do you think you’re doing, No One?” Montgomery demands. “You can’t possible have figured it out that fast.”

  “Yeah, well, you better hope that I got it right, Captain.” I say.

  “Why is that?”

  Shouts; louder, nearer.

  I switch on the power.

  “Don’t do that!” our hostage yells. “You’ll kick us out into space!”

  “I don’t think so,” I say, smiling sweetly at him. “Hope not.”

  I calibrate the controls once more, double checking my work. Everything’s in Tyreesian, but I can read that quite well. The ACQUIRE subroutine pops up on the little screen.

  Closest terminal, I think. Pick it up! I’m sweating now, too.

  Come on, come on!

  TARGET ACQUIRED, the screen reads. I sag back with relief, and aim the aperture at Montgomery. “Happy landings, sir,” I say, and pressed ENABLE.

  A quantum weirdness of probability envelops him. He might be here, he might be there, he might be anywhere. He’d be drawn to the closest operational teleportation terminal, and that, I’m betting, has to be the one on my beat-up old shitbox of a cargo freighter, still in impound.

  Along with its nasty cargo.

  “Goddammit, Grayso—” His voice cut off as he vanishes.

  I grin at the Tyreesian’s pale face. “Guess it worked, huh?”

  “You were lucky,” he growled. “But that’s as far as your luck goes...you can’t use the thing on yourself.”

  He grins nastily at me.

  “Someone has to work the controls. You can’t do that and still be in range of the effect.”

  “Oh, I know. I wasn’t planning on going anywhere just yet,” I say. As I speak, I put the teleporter carefully to one side and back away from it.

  In a few moments, this Tyreesian and his friends, who are only a corridor away from us, will be too busy to be thinking about me or their stolen hardware—if Jeryl Montgomery has his wits about him.

  Meanwhile, I’m following the captain’s movements in my mind. He has materialized near the transport unit onside my impounded ship...takes maybe ten seconds to realize what I’ve done, maybe another ten to fifteen to figure out what his only logical course of action could therefore be...and another minute and a half to put it into action. That gives me maybe thirty seconds, now, to prepare myself.

  He’s leaving the transfer unit on...it’s warm...he’s giving the AI the orders now...

  The Tyreesian guards appear at the far end of the corridor, weapons trained on me. I put my hands in the air and paste a disappointed expression on my face.

  “Secure this cursed bitch!” barks the torturer.

  The guards head confidently for us—and that’s when another cloud of quantum weirdness appears in the corridor, shapes moving around inside it. They grow distinct as the focus narrowed; and suddenly fifteen hungry Predatory Mega Floras pop into existence in the space between me and the Tyreesians. They mill around for a few seconds, obviously disoriented. Being essentially ambulatory seedpods, their nervous systems are primitive. But they’ll snap out of their fog in moments.

  “Great Mother!” one of the guards yells.

  Captain Montgomery, you are my hero, I think. The shouts attract the PMFs and I leg it out of there faster than a scalded dog. He’s done it: gotten the ship to release the clamps on the PMFs’ cargo container, freeing the voracious little bastards who, attracted by the teleporter’s heat, charged into its field and were transported here, to a Tyreesian vessel full of warm bodies.

  The Seyshallian Predatory Mega Flora are blind, but their infrared sensory antennae make them every bit as capable as bats or deep-sea fish, and much more deadly to their prey. They leap for the Tyreesians, who open fire. I might have been hit but I’m already around the corner.

  I have to get to the command deck before the PMFs finish cleaning up the Tyreesians and take a wider interest in other possible edibles—me, in other words.

  The corridor I’m in leads aft, to the engines. Nothing back there will help me; I have to get to the command deck—and the PMFs are between me and it. They are fast and deadly, but I’m faster—if not quite as deadly. I kick into overdrive and shoot back around the corner
, moving so fast that there is plenty of time for the gory scene before me to sear itself into my brain.

  The PMFs, essentially immune to stunners and bullets even while being torn to pieces, have ripped through the unfortunate Tyreesians like razors through marshmallows. It isn’t a pretty sight.

  The deck is slick with Tyreesian blood and I have to use my momentum to run up and along the corridor walls to avoid the mess. Once on the other side I slow down to attract the PMFs’ attention. For a moment, they don’t notice me.

  I whistle.

  “Hey, shitbags!” I yell.

  That gets them going, and they shoot after me. I run, faster than an unenhanced human but by no means as speedily as I could manage on nanite-power, drawing them along toward the command center. I have to get that place cleaned out.

  No One

  “Wow!” I blink twice, flipping my metabolism to hyperspeed. It’s comparatively easy, then, to extricate myself from the clutching vines and spiny leaves wrapped around my arms and legs.

  Flashing a few dozen yards down the corridor, I drop back down to normal human velocity. The PMFs mill around stupidly, unable to process my abrupt disappearance.

  I sigh.

  “Hey, guys?”

  I snap my fingers to attract their notice. “Over here.”

  They give the fruit equivalent of a double-take, then charge after me as I lead them toward the nerve center of the ship.

  With the PMFs a hundred feet or so behind me, I skid to a stop and pound on the command center door.

  “Open up!” I scream in flawless Tyreesian, as hysterically as possible.

  “The ship’s been boarded! We’re under attack!”

  “Great Mother!” someone says as the door slids open. “What is going on out th—”

  A blood-chilling scream follows as the PMFs behind me burst into the room.

  I‘m already twenty-five yards away, doing my wall-running trick. I thud down to the floor and duck into a lavatory to catch my breath. Horrible squealing, slurping noises echoes down toward me from where the besieged Tyreesians fight grimly for their lives.

  I can’t help but admire the doomed crew. They are my avowed enemies, but even so they’re no cowards. The PMFs, bristling with spines and thorns along their vine-like tendrils, come on in wave after wave.

  I dash as far aft as I can, and come to a halt at the hatch leading to Engineering. I lean against it with one hand, panting. Sweat drips from my brow, spotting the deck plates.

  Damn those stinking PMFs!

  They saved my ass, but now the ship is infested. They have no ideological will against me, unlike the Tyreesians—but they are even more eager to kill me. At least the Tyreesians didn’t want to eat me. The PMFs are determined to spray me with their seeds, which would burrow into my skin and germinate, using my flesh as food for the next generation.

  I shudder. I’ve seen and experienced a lot of horrible stuff in my line of work, but being parasitized by an ambulatory plant would definitely be a low point.

  I cautiously make my way back to the place where I’d been standing when I teleported Captain Montgomery out of the ship. The machine is still stacked against the corridor wall. The rampaging PMFs ignored it in favor of warm-blooded prey. The priceless device is back in my hands once more, but I’m still stuck on the Tyreesian ship. I will have to fly it to the Armada and deliver my prize in person.

  The Tyreesians are no longer a threat, although it is possible that one or two might be hiding in a cabin or a closet somewhere. I didn’t think they would be able to hinder me—but the damn PMFs could. As far as I know, they are ripping through the Tyreesians in the command center. And, like it or not, that is where I’m going to have to go if I wanted to seize control of the ship.

  I can just make out my blurry reflection in the ceramic wall material lining the corridor. My hair is a mess. I tug it into place, because facing death or not, looks matter. I brush off my clothes as best I could and set out for the command center.

  I can hear the PMFs chirruping to one another ahead of me. There are no Tyreesian sounds, so I assume the crew is dead. Moving cautiously and as noiselessly as I can, I inch my way to the cross corridor and slowly lean out so that I can catch a glimpse of what’s happening further along.

  A puddle of blood pools on the deck outside of the door I’d pounded on not long before. The PMFs have obviously made short work of the Tyreesians, who’d been caught off-guard. I edge back into hiding and think about it.

  As far as I can tell, all the damn things are in there, feasting on Tyreesian bodies. Every so often I can hear a rattle as one of their filthy seed pods burst, sending dozens of little crawling seedlings out in search of flesh. It’s the most gruesome sound I have ever heard, innocuous in itself, but nauseating because I know what it means.

  I push the thought away and try to reason my way through my dilemma. I’m trapped on the ship with the PMFs, but the inverse is also true: the PMFs are bottled up with me.

  All I have to do is to figure out a way to kill them without harming the controls I need to fly the ship.

  “Yeah, that’s all,” I mutter to myself. “A walk in the park.”

  The problem is, the fuckers are attracted to warmth, and the control room, with all its wiring and LEDs and computers and such, make a warm little nook for them. They won’t leave it, especially since they have a food supply in there.

  Oh!

  I slowly knock the back of my head against the corridor wall. That’s it.

  I know how to incite them to move.

  I slip away and find the nearest ventilator duct. I jimmy it open, and hey, presto; I have access to the ship’s utility core. It’s cramped and I can’t get far, but I don’t need to—there are control nexi everywhere in a starship’s utility core—built in redundancy, making it easier for routine maintenance and for repairs to be made. Accidents do happen, and when they do, you don’t want to have to crawl for twenty yards to get to a diagnostic terminal.

  All I need to do is to hack into the ship’s environmental controls and change the thermostat settings to cold—very, very cold.

  Thanks to my nanites, I’m able to whip through the menus, and in moments I hear the telltale sound of air conditioning coming online. The sweat dries on my face, and even before I crawl all the way back to my entry point I’m starting to shiver a bit.

  Now, for the second part of the plan: a secondary heat source.

  Best place for that? The galley.

  As far as cooking goes, I’m good with eggs and that’s about it—but I do know how to put a pot of water on for spaghetti. I dash to the galley, yank out all the pots I can find, fill them with water from the ship’s supply and set them on the electric plates, then crank the temp all the way up. The PMFs will eventually sense the heat, but I need them to do it sooner rather than later.

  This is the part of my plan that I like the least.

  I open the door to the galley and zip out toward the command center—pausing only to grab myself a spacesuit from the shuttle deck and tug it on. I’ll be needing it soon.

  Now safely insulated from the cold, I run for the command center. The PMFs don’t notice me right away. I switch on the suit’s lights and its external speakers.

  “Hey, assholes!”

  That grabs their attention. They boil out of the control room in pursuit. I easily outdistance them, making sure to peel off down a side corridor once they get in range of the heat pouring out of the galley. Unable to fight the tropism ruling them, they zombie their way into the galley and cluster lovingly around the stove.

  Bingo: got ‘em. It’ll take them a while to break free of the heat’s spell. I go to the command center.

  The place is a mess. I push Tyreesian bodies away from the controls, wipe blood off with my sleeve, and with my nanites to guide me, tap into the main computer. It takes me less than a minute to menu my way to the ship’s emergency systems.

  There’s nothing more dangerous aboard a space vehicle
than fire. This brutal fact goes all the way back to the earliest days of the space program, when three astronauts died when their Apollo capsule caught fire while it was undergoing testing. They were in an oxygen environment, and oxygen is very good at supporting combustion.

  Lesson learned. It never happened again; and now, centuries later, each and every starship is equipped with tanks of compressed argon to smother any fire than may break out. They tend to be clustered in places with heat: the ship’s command center, for example...and the galley.

  I seal the galley and flood it with argon. The PMFs can’t survive in a 100% argon atmosphere. It will take them a while to die, but they will. Meanwhile, the spacesuit will protect me if I have to venture anywhere near the scene.

  Feeling rather satisfied with myself, I lie in a course and activate the ship’s engines. Acceleration pushes me gently back into my seat. Thanks to my nanites, I’m a decent pilot whether I’m at the controls of a Terran Union vessel or one belonging to the Tyreesians. All I have to do now is to get the teleportation hardware back to the Armada and hand it over, and my mission, or this part of it, will be completed.

  But there’s something I’ve forgotten—and I’m about to be forcibly reminded of it.

  No One

  When it comes to flying the Tyreesian craft, my piloting abilities aren’t in question. But having the ship’s helm and navigating are two different things; and when you factor in emergency conditions (like having a shipload of bloodthirsty super-carrots), stitches can get dropped. So here I am, guiding a clunky Tyreesian vessel on a course meant to converge with the Armada. Nothing suspicious about that.

  There’s a time-honored tradition among terrorists having to do with what used to be called IEDs: Improvised Explosive Devices. These are often buried roadside bombs, but can also be delivered by vehicles that crash through roadblocks or perimeter fences and are then detonated by the driver. No base commander with half a brain lets an unauthorized or unidentified vehicle anywhere near base personnel.

  Same thing for ship commanders. IDs are triple-checked and even then, unless you know the incoming pilot personally, there’s always a little residual suspicion. Especially in wartime. We aren’t currently at war, but a bad one ended relatively recently, and security remained tight everywhere in the Terran Union. Then you factor everything that just happened today.