Metamorph: The Outbounder Chronicles

by Chris Reher

  Azah turned in her seat and leaned close to Laryn. A gentle smile lit her face as she tilted her head to study the agent. “I have a gun that’ll make a difference,” she purred. “Jex has a program that’ll cut through the jammer. And you, Princess, have a brain that’ll get into the station systems. Is that enough difference or would you like us to drop you off on Earth before we lend a hand?”

  Laryn looked over to Ryle who shrugged with a grin. “She’s kidding. I’m not allowed on Earth right now.”

  “Look!” Nolan interrupted, gesturing toward the main screen.

  The others turned to see that one of the docking portals had lit up, as it always did when a ship was about to lock into one of the berths.

  “Guess they saw us,” Azah said.

  “Question is: who saw us,” Ryle said. The screens shifted as all of the ship’s forward cameras focused on the portal. “We’ll have to go on visual alone. Jex, you should be able to triangulate that, right?”

  “Yes, I will use a photon beam to guide the approach.”

  “Is there anyone else in the vicinity?”

  “I detect no visible traffic in the area other than the Chator nearing the Terrica filament and the Persephone returning from there.”

  Ryle tilted his head when the Nefer aligned with the port although Jex was handling the approach. They felt the ship’s gravity field match the station’s as it descended onto the docking port like a bird settling to roost. “Scan the bay for Kalons, Jex.”

  “There is no movement, although the scans are of poor quality. I do find that the moored outbounder vessels appear fully manned.”

  “Wonder what they’re waiting for.”

  “Don’t distract him, man,” Nolan said.

  Azah chortled.

  “Please be assured that this maneuver is a matter of mathematics,” Jex said. “The triangulation is as precise as the sensors.” The ship shuddered as he made adjustment against the station’s gravity. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re doing that on purpose,” Laryn guessed.

  “Yes.”

  “Now he gets a sense of humor,” Azah said. She exhaled loudly when the lights around the port turned green, signaling a secure connection to the station’s seal.

  Ryle pushed his console aside and stood up. “We’ll take the passage past Shelody’s office to get to the plaza and from there to Security. Want to make sure he’s all right. Maybe it’s best if we get him to board the Nefer.”

  A disquieting jolt shuddered through the ship and a warning signal appeared on one of the screens.

  “What was that?” Nolan tapped his console. “Damn!”

  “What?” Ryle said.

  “Someone locked the docking seals,” Jex reported. “All the ships currently berthed here are locked down. It’s a security override designed to detain ships for investigation or detention of suspect crew, as you may remember. I will add that the Pendra-owned ships are locked down as well.”

  “They are? That’s not something you see too often,” Ryle said. “Or ever, actually.” He gestured for Azah, Toji and Laryn to follow him to the ship’s exit chamber.

  He and Azah shrugged into their armored jackets to which he affixed collar com tabs. He also snapped a com collar around his throat to help with subvocal messages Jex might need. “Are these transmitting?” he asked, tapping Azah’s tab.

  “We hear you,” Nolan said from the bridge. “I’ve transferred the counter-jammer program to each of you.”

  Azah lifted a gun from its brace on the wall. “Let’s not get too hung up on rules now,” she said to Laryn.

  “I’ll take one of those,” Laryn replied.

  “There are several people below the Nefer,” Jex reported. “Humans. I don’t believe these are the regular ground crew members.”

  “Do you have more than that?”

  The overhead screen came on to show four men and a woman below them, guns drawn. All of them wore the uniforms of Pendra’s security force. A separate frame on the screen showed more armed guards pacing along the otherwise deserted docking area. Nothing moved along the repair bays where there was always something going on no matter what the time of day.

  “Just who we’re looking for. Except for the part with the guns pointing at us.” Ryle crouched beside the pressure seal in the floor once Jex had opened it but did not lower the lift. “Hello there,” he called down. “That’s quite the welcoming committee.”

  Laryn peered past him to see five faces and five guns aimed at them.

  “You will come with us, Captain Tanner,” a lieutenant replied. “And you will release Agent Ash to us.” His eyes shifted to Laryn. “Have you been harmed, Agent?”

  “What? Me? No, of course not. What is going on?”

  “Please come down and accompany us to Security,” he said. “The rest of the Nefer crew will remain aboard.”

  Azah hissed something under her breath.

  “All right,” Ryle said. “We’ll be just a moment.” He straightened and turned to the others. “We’ll be able to warn them about the Kalons. But something smells wrong here. Jex, Nolan, see if you can find and disable the Kalon jammers. We need communications. Also find out if there is any way to shake the Nefer loose. And the other outbounders. We’re going to be totally lame when the Kalon ships get here.”

  Jex lowered the lift and delivered Laryn and Ryle to the guards waiting below. Their expression suggested serious business but these were not career soldiers, Laryn reminded herself. They were trained to apprehend smugglers or break up brawls on the lower levels, not defend Pendra against an attack by alien infiltrators.

  “You’re with us, Tanner,” the lieutenant said, watching one of his men pat Ryle down for weapons and finding two of them. No one searched Laryn and she cursed herself for having given her gun back to Azah before coming down here. “We have a report about you firing on a Kalon ship during your last outbound.”

  “What?” Laryn exclaimed. She had been about to deliver a hurried report about the Kalons’ schemes aboard the station, but this came unexpected.

  “Iko,” Ryle said. “Damn.”

  “That’s him,” the guard said. “You’ve gone too far this time, Tanner. Pendra bosses are in a mood to have a talk with you about molesting their special guests. This way.”

  “Listen,” Laryn said. “That can wait. The station is under attack. By the Kalons!”

  The lieutenant scowled at her for a moment and then barked harsh laughter. “Did he tell you that, Agent?” He knocked the barrel of his gun against Ryle’s chest. “Last we’ve seen of the Kalons was them having one of their weird chanting things on O-deck, where they belong. Nothing going on here except more shoddy maintenance.” He pointed to the ceiling. “ANN-T’s down, that’s all,” he added, naming the ANN subsystem that operated everything from doors and toilets to elevators and docking rings. “Affecting com, too.”

  “Fine, arrest me.” Ryle nudged Laryn to move toward the exit tunnel of the docking bay. “Let’s get to Security before Iko and his group do more than jam transmissions. Someone there should have some sense.”

  “Don’t play with me, Tanner,” the lieutenant said. “I know what’s on your sheet. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

  They were prodded to the exit and then turned into the decon station for a mandatory scan and delousing of whatever they might have brought onto the station on their clothing and bodies. Following that would be internal scans and a review of their reports of Torren’s atmosphere, all conducted by people with a lot of time on their hands.

  “Can’t this wait?” Ryle said as they walked along a narrow hallway to one of the decon conduits. “Listen to the agent. You need to find every Kalon aboard and sequester them.”

  “He’s right,” Laryn said. “There are more Kalons on the way, and the ones already here have access to the systems. The coms, for sure. Who knows what else.”

  The lieutenant looked as if about to laugh at her for suggesting this, but perhaps some
thing in her expression stopped him. “How do you know this? You’ve been gone for days.”

  A dull, pervasive thud rang through the station, followed by a series of others, ever more distant. Everyone here recognized the sound of those slamming doors from past safety drills. At this moment, the individual modules that made up the station were sealed to reduce the risk of depressurization, contaminants, fire, or ventilation issues. All major gates between sections would also be locked and guarded.

  “Lock down!” someone yelled as if to point out the obvious when the pre-recorded message that would normally remind everyone of procedure remained silent.

  “Now do you believe us?” Laryn said.

  The lieutenant shook off his surprise and headed for the door of the decon station. His handprint would unlock it, clearing the way for a quick sprint to the security center of the station and Pendra’s arsenal of weapons.

  A high-pitched squeal cut through the air, accompanied by the dry-throated rasp made by Kalons, sounding much too close.

  “What the..?” the lieutenant said when the door slid aside to reveal four Kalons in the hall.

  The answer to that came from a curved tube held by one of the aliens. What looked like a rope whipped from it, split into several strands in mid-air and landed on the guard where it seemed to burn through his clothes. He cringed and slapped at the substance but then froze, arms still in the air, before crashing to the floor.

  Ryle grasped Laryn’s arm and whipped her around. “That way!”

  The other guards had overcome their stunned second of surprise and fired their weapons at the Kalons by the door. One of the guards was shoved back, also made immobile by the alien device, and Laryn stumbled over him before catching herself.

  “Go!” Ryle stooped and grabbed the man’s gun. He raced after Laryn around a bend in the hall. He cursed when he saw it leading nowhere.

  “In here,” Laryn said, combing her memory for the schematics for this part of the station. She ducked into the control alcove that managed the decontamination array. Beyond the console and the inactive display screens, a narrow door led to the access passage for the emitters. “It’ll take us to one of the substations.”

  Ryle flinched when something slapped his shoulder. He twisted to see a yellowish thread stuck to the fabric of his jacket, fusing into the material with a sizzle. Other strands adhered to the wall beside him.

  “Behind you!” she yelled.

  He looked up to see a Kalon only steps away, waving his weapon in a way apparently meant to whip the substance at his quarry. Ryle jerked his shoulder to tear the thread away and fired at the Kalon, grimly pleased that the species seemed no more resistant to a laser blast than the average Human. He waited a moment to see if more followed but only an eerie silence now filled the facility.

  “Let’s go.”

  “Wait.” She slipped past him and back down the hall, ignoring his protest. The Kalon lay motionless near the entrance to the decon service area and she stepped carefully over his sprawled-out legs. Like Toji, he had discarded the long mantle that slowed his movements and obscured the threat of his powerful limbs.

  “What are you doing?” Ryle hissed.

  Laryn peered around the corner and saw the bodies of the guards on the floor, all of them taken down by the strange ooze spewed from the Kalon’s weapon. She took a deep breath and snatched a gun from someone’s hand, avoiding the frozen stare on the woman’s face. The gun carried an almost full charge and so Laryn spun to race back to Ryle. As an afterthought, she bent and snatched the curved weapon from the dead Kalon’s fingers.

  “Are you crazy?” Ryle said when she reached him.

  “I’m not running around this place unarmed, Captain,” she said. She held up the Kalon horn with two fingers. “No dead Kalons by the entrance back there. This happened fast. This one’s different from the ones we saw on Torren.”

  He took it and gave it a shake, expecting some sort of liquid as the base of the ropy projectile. Nothing leaked from it and so he slipped it into a pocket on his thigh. “Always the scientist, aren’t you?”

  “You like that better than mediary, admit it.”

  “Yeah. But could you please not take chances like that?”

  They squeezed into the narrow space beyond the control room console and made their way past the emitters for each decon segment. As she had promised, the passage led to a larger substation, this one serving not only the decon facility but also the other mechanical systems for this segment of the station.

  “Where are we?” Ryle said, walking to an access console on the far side of the room and finding it out of service. “How far to Security?”

  “Let me look at your shoulder,” she said.

  “I’m all right,” he said, but then sat on a conduit running the length of the room to let her inspect his shoulder. “I hope.”

  She touched the piece of alien material, now hardened, that seemed fused to his jacket. “That melted right through to the graphene,” she said. “Never seen anything like it. Did it burn you, or whatever this does?”

  “No, but it felt like a shock. An electric shock, sort of. Made my arm go numb for a bit.” He pushed the jacket off his shoulder to show her his skin, reddened but unbroken by the hit. “I think we know one reason Pendra is so keen on the Kalons. Super-conductive snot you can use to build things with. Must be worth a lot.”

  “It hit the lieutenant right in the face,” she said, recalling the attack. She shuddered at the memory of the bodies left behind by the Kalons.

  “Are you all right?” he said, shrugging his jacket over his shoulder again.

  She gave him a perfunctory smile. “No worries. We can get to Operations from here. I don’t suppose we want to try making it across the plaza. I think I can keep us in the service byways for the most part.”

  “Jex,” he said to the com tab at his collar. “How are we coming along with the jammer?”

  “I have located the emitters of the Kalon interference but they are scattered throughout the station and not tied to our network. They will need to be shut down manually.”

  Ryle cursed. “We don’t have time for that.”

  “I cannot share my override program with the station’s communication network. It is managed by ANN-D, part of the Security sub-system. I do not have access to that. I suggest you find an open access port and upload it from there. That should return function to station-wide communications as well as internal and external scanners.”

  He nodded. Station Operations oversaw security, and traffic as well as maintenance for Pendra. If there was a way to restore communications within the station, they would be working on it there.

  “Azah,” he said. “We were attacked by Kalons. Warn the guards that the Kalons carry a curved tool, sort of a horn. It’s deadly.”

  “Attacked?” Azah said. “Want me to come with you? Where are you?”

  “Negative. Stay with Nolie and the Nefer. Look after Jex; it’s our best chance right now. We’ll make our way to Ops. Get to the rest of the fleet and give them the override program so we can at least talk to each other. If we can get the ships released they should get ready to defend the station when our pals arrive from Ophet. Ask them to leave as much armed crew as possible here. Who knows where Kalons are here on the station so we’ll need everyone with a gun. Around here that means just the guards and the outbounders. Not a hell of a lot.”

  “Understood.”

  “Jex,” Laryn said. “Can you use the jamming frequency to distort our location? Using our com units so the Kalons can’t track us?”

  “Yes, I can program your tabs to emit the signal. You should fade into the background noise created by the Kalons. Be aware that your open communication will betray your position if they are monitoring. You can still reach me via our neural interlink. I suggest you restrict contact with the others to the most urgent conversation.”

  “They might not bother monitoring if they think we have no coms or sensors,” Nolan said.
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  “I’m not taking anything we know about them for granted,” Ryle said. He came to his feet. “Cloak us now, Jex. I’ll contact you when we get to Ops.”

  “Understood.”

  “Now comes the big test,” Laryn said.

  “What’s that?”

  “This section will have been cut off from the next when the station went into lockdown. If my clearance doesn’t open it, we’ll have to backtrack and try the public hallways. That’ll get us as far as the arrivals concourse.”

  They walked to the sliding door separating this service room with the warehousing areas for the station’s food supplies. It would be crammed with cargo now, so close to the arrival of the incoming fleet from Earth.

  “This shouldn’t be all that secure,” Ryle said.

  “Might be, during a lockdown.” Laryn tapped the sensor strip beside the door. When it did not respond to her thumbprint, she entered a code. “Damn. No luck.”

  “Um, look, over there, a rat!” Ryle said.

  “Huh?” She turned to look around the empty control room. “Since when do we have rats on Pendra?”

  “Just trying to distract you, Agent,” he said. “You didn’t see this.” He had taken a roll of what looked like tape from a pocket and now placed a strip over the access panel of the door. She watched, amazed and amused by his brazenness, as he ran his hand over it to complete a circuit. The door slid aside without raising an alarm.

  “I just see a door. An open one.” She followed him into the shipping area, a network of low-ceilinged spaces crammed with identical, labeled storage containers. There were directional signs on the walls and she took a moment to orient herself. “This way.”

  They jogged through the maze of cargo modules until they found the delivery corridor supplying the shops along the station’s plaza. This door, too, responded to Ryle’s deft manipulation and let them pass.

  “Listen to that!” Laryn said when they passed the rear entrance of a tavern. The sound of conversation and even laughter drifted into the hall, made by people who seemed not at all troubled by the lockdown. “Getting drunk in there, thinking this is a drill or something. Unarmed sitting ducks. We need to warn them.”