by Steve Rzasa
“My partner and I were successful in our task,” Nil said.
Partner. Yeah, he was right. At this point, between the aliens on this ship, Carpenter on the other, and a third one full of bad guys bearing down on us, me and Nil were as close to a team as possible.
“Yes. You successfully delivered a powerful advantage into the hands of your enemy.” Carpenter laughed, like he’d heard a good joke. “I will stay here only long enough to watch you be obliterated by the Nivax, and then I have an appointment to keep that will ensure my place in the new order of the galaxy.”
Nil was frozen in place, clenching his four fists. Dac conferred quietly with an officer. Down in the hologram, red diamond shapes surrounded the little picture of the surveyor ship that had Carpenter on it. One crewman whispered to the other, “Target locked.”
What? They were going to blast Carpenter’s ship. I know they’d talked about doing that to prevent the info from falling into enemy hands—and incidentally no one told me how many hands a Nivax had—but I thought it was a bluff.
They couldn’t. I didn’t want the bad guys to get the Big Ring plans, but the idea they’d destroy something so valued by their people made me sick. Never mind the gigantic penalties Earth would incur. There had to be another way. Yeah, right. What could I do? I didn’t have military training or a starship or any of the tech the qwaddos did. All I had was a smart mouth and the ability to slip a good tale under people’s noses—
Bingo.
“You know, Carpenter, when I first met you at that meeting, you had a certain presence about you,” I said.
Carpenter’s smile twitched. “Oh?”
Fisk stared at me like I’d grown more arms than a qwaddo.
“Yeah. No joke. I knew right away you were an idiot.”
“Fortel,” Nil hissed, “If your purpose is to antagonize our opponent I do not think he needs your assistance. He has already promised to kill us.”
“Shut up,” I muttered back. To Carpenter: “You really botched this one. We didn’t come here to arrest you or blow up your ship. We came to deal.”
“Deal? In what way?”
“The Sozh Uqasod. The Big Ring data on it is encrypted.”
“Of course it is.”
“Well, you’re in luck.” I grinned. “We’ve got the key.”
Carpenter stared at me again. Suddenly I knew how a mouse felt when kitty stepped into the room. Like lunch. “You can’t possibly.”
“Sure we do. Why else do you think they put Nil on the case? He’s from a long family line that has the know-how. Don’t ask me where they got it: that’s a guarded secret.” I paced along the railing, making no sudden gestures. Just being relaxed. Confident.
Totally faking it.
“Prime Nil is a disgraced—”
“Yeah, yeah, disgraced ‘death-smeller,’ scorned by his own people, no one likes him except his heroic best pal, blah blah blah.” I jerked a thumb at Dac, who, incidentally, was breathing deeply and probably ready to remove my head permanently from my neck. “You bought that? Really? It’s the perfect cover: the symbol on his head, the disgrace, even the church visit.”
Carpenter made a gagging sound, and his eyes rolled up into his head, exposing the whites. Can’t help but get unnerved when the dude on the other end of the phone call goes all The Exorcist. When his features returned to the normal hardened mask, he said, “Tell us how this decryption is accomplished.”
Ah. From the sounds of Carpenter’s voice, his Jinn controllers had come out to play again. “Yeah, right. We tell you, what’s to stop you from blasting our ship to bits? Nope. We’ll give it to you in person. Just me and Nil.”
Jinn-Carpenter said nothing to that suggestion. Someone off-screen whispered something at him; whatever it was I couldn’t hear. Couldn’t see anything of his bridge or command center or whatever. Too dark in the background. But whatever they said, it was enough to tick Jinn-Carpenter off because he snapped at them to be quiet.
No response yet. So I pushed harder. “Carpenter, come on—why else would we risk following you? Try and steal it back? We’re on the run ourselves. Everyone thinks we’re the bad guys, thanks to you. But I thought about it. We can crack the sucker. You need it open, right? So let’s negotiate. Let us come aboard and work out a deal.”
You couldn’t hear a breath on the Ghantaqa’s bridge. Only the equipment made noise, probably because it was trying to fix the damage from the torpedo blasts and getting annoyed that its caretakers were busy watching me and Carpenter do our dance.
Me? I kept that easy grin on my face. Thankful that, for all my foul-ups, I could still don a decent mask. Gift or curse? We’d have to chat about that later, He and I. But right now it was the skill I had. The talent, to use the term from way back in Bible study.
“Your suggestion is acceptable,” Jinn-Carpenter said. “You will bring yourself and Prime Nil in a small ship-to-ship shuttle. Weapons will be deactivated. If you attempt treachery, you will be destroyed. If the cruiser Ghantaqa attempts treachery, it will be destroyed. We will confirm the veracity of your decryption secret and if it is found lacking, you will—”
“Be destroyed. Right, got it.” Broken record much? For all their abilities, these Jinn were short on linguistic originality. “No problem. We’ll be over there.”
“You have one qil. Be punctual.” The screen vanished, uncovering the nebula’s beauty once again.
It was quiet a moment longer. So I clapped my hands together. “Right. Let’s get moving.”
<<<>>>
Nil flew the shuttle. Duh. Let’s just say the control panel made an airliner’s look like a daycare’s building blocks.
Dac didn’t like my plan. He told me so and threatened to decapitate me if anything went wrong. See? Told you that’s what he was thinking. Which I thought was funny because if anything went wrong, my guess was we’d all be free-floating atomic particles.
But he went along with it because Nil backed it up, and he and Nil were friends. Simple as that.
The shuttle was a small flattened cylinder the size of an RV. No weapons, tiny engines at the back that sent a hum through the chairs and into my spine. Wide view ports gave us a nice panorama of the Helix Nebula, with the surveyor ship growing in size.
Nil pointed left—portside. The Nivax cruiser was sidling up to Ghantaqa, and up close it was even more menacing than its holographic representation. Black and gray and bronze, with four gaping holes at the front I assumed were weapons launchers because it kept them pointed square at Ghantaqa. Even as big as it appeared, Nil told me it was ten kilometers away.
“When we reach the docking hatch, we will have limited time in which to act,” Nil said. “Are you certain you don’t want a striker?”
“No way. We go in there packing and Carpenter will know. Unless you think his scanner-thingies or whatever he’s got won’t detect it.”
“You assume correctly. However, I was willing to chance his displeasure if it meant an increased chance of our survival.”
“Nice sentiment, but bad idea.” I glanced behind us. Beyond the set of six identical green chairs, complete with limp qwaddo webbing, were a pair of storage compartments with big doors and the docking hatch to the left side. “And you’re sure those compartments are sensor-proof?”
“Yes. Ghantaqa is called upon to interdict piratical forces in its patrol sectors and so uses these to gain the element of surprise.”
Piratical. So space pirates? I shook my head, clearing the questions away. Some other time. “Okay then. So we’re ready.”
“If you are prepared, yes, I am as well.”
You know, through all this, Nil hadn’t been a bad guy. Sure, he was arrogant, and frosty, and annoying. But he was good at his job. And he had my back. That made him one of three people I could now name on the same list. It was a big improvement over that list having just one name.
“Your assistance has been enlightening, Caz, in more than the mere resolution of our duties,” Nil s
aid. “My soul is eternally grateful. I will not purge your scent when our mission is finished.”
Man. Sounded like a high compliment. I rubbed at the back of my head. “Yeah, well, you don’t smell so bad yourself, Nil. It’s good luck and God with us from here on out.”
“It is indeed.”
Less than a minute later we got pulled in close to the hull of the surveyor ship, along a smooth flank empty of those sensor poles. The shuttle shook as green and black tendrils that looked awfully similar to the restraints on the bridge wrapped around the hull. Behind us, the airlock lights flashed from pale blue to red, then to the same pale orange as the shuttle’s interior.
Nil and I stood in front of it. He should have had a neon sign glaring over his head that said “I’m tense!” to go with his ramrod posture.
Me? I leaned against the rim of the hatch, crossed my arms, and made as if I were totally bored.
The hatch popped open, and on the other end of a bright white tunnel were two Ghiqasu in red and maroon coveralls. They had the same kind of stun weapons as the guys that hit us at the church. Both were fair-skinned for qwaddos—one mottled gray and tan, one pale brown.
“Disarm yourselves and step through the hatch,” the mottled gray and tan said in halting English. He waved his stun gun for emphasis.
Nil held out all four of his hands at his sides, palms toward them. I did what you do when in Rome. “We aren’t carrying anything, boys,” I said.
“Walk through to the hatch. Slowly.”
We did as ordered. Once we got through the hatch, a pair of those Tahomjr robots joined the party. The light brown qwaddo ran a handheld scanner over our bodies. The device was the spitting image of the item stuck to Nil’s belt. Speaking of which, our tour guides made Nil get rid of his belt and made me hand over my wallet and cell phone. The tan qwaddo flipped the phone over a couple of times and sneered at me. “Kiroqo.”
The mottled gray one pointed down the connector tube. “Guard the entrance to the shuttle.”
The Tahomjr robots took up sentinel positions on either side of the hatch. Our guides prodded us forward. The corridors here were actually wider than those on the Ghantaqa and brighter—all the bulkheads were a soothing pale green. The deck plates were a rich mahogany. I wondered if this was more a civilian ship than the cruiser we left. Certainly didn’t see military precision in our new buddies. Gravity dragged at me with each step, just like on the Earth-to-orbit shuttle, but surprisingly my body didn’t fuss as much.
“What’s kiroqo mean?” I muttered to Nil.
“It roughly translates as ‘toy for infants.’ ”
Gotta say this about qwaddos: they were just as handy with insults as humans.
We saw two more qwaddos wearing similar uniforms before we got to the bridge. It was a one-floor miniature of the Ghantaqa’s command center—captain’s chair dead center, four consoles at each corner of the boxy room. Lighting was bright in here, too, and that’s when it finally occurred to me that the Ghiqasu’s vision really was as poor as I’d heard. Explained all the giant holograms.
The entire front wall was a view screen, too, and we were treated to a crystal-clear picture of Ghantaqa floating against the green and pink haze of the nebula with ghostly stars scattered in the background. The Nivax destroyer followed a ways off, the proverbial gun held to our heads—or literal gun. Whatever.
There were two qwaddos on the bridge. One yellow-skinned guy with red-brown hair was seated in the front left corner, wearing a forest green uniform. The guy at the center chair had to be the captain. A head shorter than me, he had goldenrod skin and dark brown eyes. His uniform was a zamuq or captain, I guessed from the blue bands. But instead of having white side panels on the black torso, it had striped gray and tan.
Right. Dac was a Hounder and a ship captain. Special rank and position, no doubt.
Of course, Carpenter was there, silhouetted in front of the big screen. How did the guy keep that suit free of wrinkles? There wasn’t a hair out of place on his head. That set me daydreaming about salon products the qwaddos used.
“Glad you could join us, gentlemen,” he said, apparently back to his slimy plain-old human version. He sounded just as proper as that intro meeting with Isaac at FBI Boston.
Which made me think about my pal, then my ex- and possibly future girl, and the son waiting for me trillions of miles back through the Big Ring. Go time. “Yeah, it’s been great fun. So where’s the Sozh Uqasod?”
Carpenter made a sweeping gesture with his right hand. The left was behind his back. At the base of the big screen was a console, similar to the setups around the rest of the bridge and on Ghantaqa’s bridge except for two points: it was the size of a salad bowl, big enough to stick a basketball in, and it was floating three feet off the deck. Holographic readouts as incomprehensible as the instructions for IRS form 1040 filled the bowl, and there were all kinds of panels along the rim. Stuck to the front edge of the rim was the white ovoid container for the Sozh Uqasod. It was lodged into a receptacle—alien version of a USB port, I guessed.
“It is ready for transmission,” Carpenter said, “though our Nivax allies are hardly pleased about the lack of decryption. We’ve had no luck ourselves. Oh, the data is there. My technicians aboard this ship assure me there is something immense stored in the structure of the artwork, though even the computers are having great difficulty determining how to unravel the code.”
“Bummer for you guys.”
“Yes. I was intrigued to hear that you claim to have the key.” Carpenter’s eyes shifted sideways to Nil. “Or rather, you do, Prime Nil.”
Nil was still too stiff. Don’t know whatever passed for undercover investigations on the Ghiqasu homeworld, but I can tell you, they suck at it. Then again, maybe that was my keener human sight picking up on his body cues—they couldn’t see as well as us. As long as they didn’t smell funny to each other, maybe they didn’t notice. “I am prepared to share the secret passed to me from my ancestors, but first we must negotiate the terms of our deal.”
Carpenter chuckled. “Mr. Fortel’s personality has rubbed off on you, I see. Fine. My partners have agreed to the same basic, ah, benefits package we offered Fisk and Santoro: physical enhancement, longevity extension, and memory alteration.”
Nil nodded. He glanced at me, waiting for our signal.
I shrugged and looked at my watch. Fisk better be paying attention to his. I gave Carpenter the best bored smirk I could muster. “You’ll have to do better than that.”
“I don’t think you’re in a position to demand anything of me. Your ship is at my mercy. And perhaps you missed the mention I made of memory erasure.” Carpenter’s smile broadened. “The Jinn skill at those things extends to memory extraction.”
The guards stepped up closer to us. The humming from their stun guns reminded me of bees. Clock was ticking.
Carpenter shook his head. “You made a terrible mistake coming aboard.”
I grinned. “Yeah, don’t think so.”
My watch let off a double high-pitched beep.
Nil struck with both his lower fists at the same time, gut-punching the qwaddo guards. With his upper right he bent the gun arm of the mottled gray guy and wrenched it until bones broke with a snap that made me wince.
I punched the second guard across the face and slammed into him with my shoulder. It was way harder work with alien gravity dragging me down, but he obliged me by banging back against the open hatchway. Nice of him to drop his stun weapon too. Unfortunately, he was still with it enough to latch onto me with three of his four arms. And I was hampered by my lack of another pair of appendages. There was a flash of light—Nil firing the other guy’s stun blaster—and my opponent was flung into the corridor.
He was still groggy enough to moan and reach out for his own weapon. Until I stomped on his wrist, that is. He howled a deep guttural sound like a wolf baying. That stopped when I punched him again.
The mottled gray guard went tumbling by me
. He was limp as a noodle.
Carpenter shouted something, and the qwaddo at the bridge console opened fire. With a striker. Blue-green flashes screamed across at us. They scored ugly black marks on the bulkhead. I did my best impression of a surfer belly-boarding and hit the deck as the blasts shrieked overhead. From behind me, way down the corridor, came an entirely different noise.
A laser rifle’s tones.
Red lights lit off. Carpenter looked in shock, staring around at the console, searching for an answer. He slapped at a panel on the same bowl-shaped device holding the Sozh. “What is this? What’s going on?”
“We have an intruder at the shuttle dock!” A voice whined out of speakers hidden somewhere with the sound of laser blasts echoing in the background. Metal crunched and electronics sizzled. “A human! He is heavily armed! Two Tahomjr units are eliminated, and we have—”
There was a muffled thump that I recognized as bone against skin. The radio went into a long hiss.
My grin returned. Fisk was hard at it.
And we were just getting started. More alarms sounded from a different console. Carpenter gaped up at the big screen. Ghantaqa was firing on the Nivax ship with—well, a really big set of guns. Don’t ask me what they were. All I know, several of the bumps on the hull had split open and were flashing brilliant green. No projectiles were visible but something was hitting that Nivax destroyer with enough force to rip chunks off one side. Clouds of sparkling debris blossomed all around it. True, the Nivax shot back, but their bursts just grazed Ghantaqa’s underside because the smaller cruiser was twisting away. Fragments of hull plates and bits of antennae went spinning off from its belly.
Nil and the crewman were still trading fire, with Nil out in the corridor, ducking around the hatchway. Me? I stayed flat, crawling forward toward the crewman and hoping he wouldn’t pay me any attention. If I could get close enough, I could get the second stunner and—
Nil roared so loud my eardrums throbbed and surged forward. The crewman fired back with his striker. A blue-green bolt singed Nil’s lower left arm, but it didn’t stop him. Flashes from his stunner smacked into the crewman—one, two, three. The guy’s head snapped back so hard his forehead armor creaked. He rebounded off the bulkhead, flopped over his console, and banged onto the deck.
