Atlantia Series 2: Retaliator

by Dean Crawford

  The captain sighed again, this time in relief. Like Andaim, Evelyn was a quick thinker and a natural leader. Along with Bra’hiv she could be relied upon to do the best possible job aboard the Sylph. The problem that the captain had was that all three of his best people were aboard the plague ship and unable to support him directly. Even Qayin, the giant convict turned Marine, was aboard the Sylph.

  ‘How did this happen?’ he asked.

  ‘We don’t know yet sir,’ Evelyn replied. ‘Neither I nor General Bra’hiv believe that Andaim was infected before he boarded the Sylph. He was scanned repeatedly before we found this ship and he never registered a blink. That means that he must have been infected while aboard this vessel.’

  ‘Which means,’ the captain said, ‘that the carrier you believe to exist must have been one of the boarding team. Kyarl?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Evelyn said, ‘but the general said that Kyarl was also micro–scanned at least once and cleared for duty before we boarded the Sylph. That leaves the doctors and the councillor, but Andaim attacked her too.’

  Idris clenched his hands tightly behind his back.

  ‘And you say Andaim just drew his pistol and opened fire on Kyarl?’

  ‘Right when he was going to expose who infected him.’

  ‘That doesn’t make any sense if Andaim is the carrier.’

  ‘No it does not,’ Evelyn agreed. ‘If he was trying to protect his own infection Andaim had plenty of time to kill Kyarl or otherwise silence him. He was with Bra’hiv right up to the point when the data was sent across from the Atlantia and was actively advocating interrogating Kyarl.’

  ‘So something changed in that short space of time.’

  ‘Yes sir,’ Evelyn said. ‘My guess is that either the doctors, the Marine sentries or Councillor Dhalere was responsible somehow, but like I said, Dhalere got hit so it doesn’t seem likely it’s her.’

  ‘No, it doesn’t,’ the captain mused out loud, ‘but then we know how shrewd the Word can be. You should scan them all, right now.’

  ‘We would,’ Evelyn said, ‘but with all of us potentially infected nobody wants to go first. Innocent people could be killed, carriers who have no idea that they’re infected. Scans aren’t going to cut it any more, captain. We need some kind of vaccination.’

  Idris knew what Evelyn was referring to. Immune from infection, Evelyn could travel back to the Atlantia without fear of bringing the legion with her and continue with Meyanna’s attempts to learn the secrets of her immunity. But even then such a revelation would only prevent infection, not necessarily cure the afflicted.

  ‘No, we need a cure,’ the captain said. ‘Andaim needs a cure.’

  Evelyn’s voice sounded a little tight as she replied. ‘Yes sir, he does. The Infectors in his body will be replicating even as we speak. Before long, he’ll be completely gone.’

  ‘What about the Veng’en captive?’ the captain asked. ‘Is there nothing that he can shed upon what happened?’

  ‘He’s staying quiet,’ Evelyn replied. ‘I don’t doubt that he knows more than he’s saying, but right now we don’t have a good way of getting him to talk. Bra’hiv felt that seeing Kyarl tortured might give him pause, but I’m figuring that violence and pain is a way of life for their kind.’

  The captain nodded solemnly. In a lifetime of military service, much of it against the Veng’en, he had yet to have seen a gentler side to their nature. He had no reason to suspect that such a side even existed.

  ‘Pain won’t fold him,’ the captain said, ‘but I have an idea of something else that might.’

  The captain relayed his idea to Evelyn. Normally, he would not have considered sharing such a concept with a junior officer, but Evelyn was no ordinary pilot recruit. The captain had no trouble recalling what she had done aboard the now–destroyed prison ship, Atlantia Five, when she had been a masked and much–feared convict. Nor had he forgotten what used to be said whenever she was seen by members of the Atlantia’s prison staff: like death does she wander.

  ‘That could work,’ Evelyn replied, her lack of concern suggesting a hint of what she was capable of when pushed to violence. ‘I’ll see to it.’

  No hesitation, no doubts.

  ‘Report back to me when you’ve finished,’ the captain said. ‘I’ll see what can be done this end to support all of you.’

  The captain stepped down off the platform and passed Mikhain. ‘You have the bridge.’

  The Executive Officer saluted briskly as he took the captain’s place.

  Idris walked swiftly to the elevator banks and travelled down toward the sick bay, his thoughts plagued by the news of Andaim’s infection. If Andaim suffered the same fate as Kyarl then the leadership structure of the Atlantia would come under considerable strain. There was already a woeful lack of officers available to maintain effective command. As captain he held the senior rank and had the experience and loyalty of his crew to support him. But without a leadership as strong as Andaim’s there would be no equivalent figure to command the fighter squadrons of the Air Group.

  Idris walked through the sick bay to his wife’s laboratory and passed through the atmospheric chamber separating the two rooms, letting the pressure stabilise before moving into the laboratory. He saw Meyanna patiently extracting blood from a tube and filling a gyroscopic chamber with the dark fluid.

  ‘How is it coming along?’

  Meyanna looked up at him and sighed as she worked.

  ‘Slowly,’ she admitted. ‘Evelyn’s given me more blood to work with, but right now it’s hard to figure out any new tests to run. I’m blind guessing and I’m not getting anywhere.’

  ‘I hate to put more pressure on you.’

  Meyanna stopped what she was doing. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Andaim has been infected,’ Idris replied. ‘He’s in the Sylph’s sick bay.’

  Meyanna closed her eyes for a moment. ‘How long?’

  ‘It happened less than an hour ago.’

  Meyanna stared at the small sphere of Infectors trapped in the magnetic field chamber nearby. ‘They’ll have colonised his major organs by now, maybe even hijacked his spinal column and brain stem.’

  ‘He’s not responsive,’ the captain confirmed. ‘The infection is weak according to what scans the doctors have been able to complete, but he’s already become anaemic.’

  ‘They’re using the iron in his blood to replicate,’ Meyanna acknowledged. ‘It won’t be long before they’re strong enough to control him completely.’

  ‘We need a cure and we need it fast.’

  ‘I don’t even know if a cure exists!’

  ‘It has to exist,’ Idris insisted. ‘Everything has its nemesis. These things are machines, no matter how small or how numerous they may be. We need to find a way to get them out of human bodies.’

  ‘I don’t have an infected body to test,’ Meyanna complained. ‘I’ve never had a live victim to work on, and now we do have one it’s aboard the Sylph and we can’t travel there now. How can I do the work?’

  ‘There are doctors aboard the Sylph,’ Idris said. ‘You can direct them.’

  ‘To do what? Right now the only sure–fire way we have to cure a victim is to kill them, be it with rifle fire or microwaves!’

  Idris was about to answer when a distant claxon echoed down through the sick bay toward them. Idris turned as a wall speaker blared into life, Mikhain’s voice tense and urgent as it reached out to him.

  ‘Captain to the bridge, immediately!’

  Idris scowled as he glanced once more at the bots entrapped in their magnetic prison.

  ‘Think of something,’ he ordered his wife as he hurried out of the laboratory. ‘Anything you can. If we lose Andaim, we lose half the battle!’

  Idris hurried out of the sick bay to the elevator banks and travelled back up to the bridge. As he walked out of the elevator his heart skipped a beat as he realised that the ship was under battle orders, the lights glowing red as the bridge security deta
il made way for him.

  The bridge was a hive of activity and Idris noted instantly the tactical displays overlaid upon the main viewing panel. Data streamed across the displays as he walked to Mikhain’s side.

  ‘What is it?’

  Mikhain’s voice was tight with what might have been anticipation.

  ‘Contact sir, two orbital radii, quadrant one, elevation minus two point four.’

  The captain looked at the main viewing screen that showed a dense starfield off the starboard bow. A target designator was locked upon a tiny speck of light.

  ‘Identification protocol?’ he asked.

  ‘Encoded,’ Mikhgain replied, ‘tactically shielded from our scanners. We managed to calculate its hull mass when it emerged from super–luminal velocity.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It’s a battle cruiser sir,’ Mikhain replied, ‘mass and architecture matches a Veng’en vessel, Retaliator Class.’

  ***

  XVIII

  The universe looked different to a Veng’en.

  The lush but lethal tropical forests that engulfed their homeworld Wraiythe created thick mists, wreaths and ribbons of cloud that enveloped endless tracts of mountainous jungle. As a result the eyesight of many indiginous species had evolved to become sensitive both to heat and to light, sensing the Infra–Red and even the ultra–violet. Not only that, but sensors in the skin of Veng’en also detected both temperature and even odour, much in the same way as snakes tasted the air in order to hunt for their prey.

  Kordaz was a Veng’en who had served his race aboard military vessels for most of his life. Service was a rite of passage for most Veng’en youths, and there was no waiting for the onset of adulthood. The terrible growth pangs that were associated with crossing the border between youngling and adult were themselves treated as little more than a minor inconvenience. Instead, unlike the weakling humans who allowed their children to grow old before committing them to battle, the Veng’en way was to send their young into service before their fifth season.

  Most died.

  But then again, Kordaz reflected, before the advent of technology most Veng’en had died before their fifth season anyway, the beautiful forests and jungles a deceptive veil draped across a harsh and brutal existence of survival against the horrendous predators that stalked the jungles.

  Unlike most spacefaring species, the Veng’en had not been the dominant force upon their planet before developing technology. Just one reptilian species among many, the countless predators around them were simply too numerous for any one species to emerge as superior. Instead, technology had become the means to prevent the Veng’en from becoming extinct: they had evolved because of predation. The skills needed to build camouflaged shelters to protect themselves against ambush attacks from enormous and carnivorous shrencks or the swarms of venomous hisps had developed into the skills needed to produce fire. Then they had mastered metalwork and so on and so forth, until mechanical devices and projectile weapons had allowed them to create walled cities and then machines with which to travel.

  In the space of a few hundred orbits, the Veng’en had gone from being fearful denizens besieged by lethal predators into a species capable of leaving their dangerous homeworld behind in the quest for new and safer worlds. And they had taken their fearsome fighting skills with them.

  Kordaz looked across at the human laying on the gurney inside the oxygen tent nearby. Before the man called Andaim had been sealed inside Kordaz had detected a change in the temperature around him, had sensed the seething infection raging inside his body as the Infectors had taken control. Kordaz had seen countless of his brothers fall and die before swarming hordes of Hunters, victims of the same horrific force that rivalled anything he had witnessed as a child fighting in the wars against the humans, but he had only once seen an infection take hold.

  What he could not quite understand was why the humans had been so reluctant to kill the Marine they had called Kyarl right on the spot. Infected, murderous and dangerous, his erasure would have made everything else so much simpler. It was the Veng’en way, not just with the Word but also with tropical diseases and other lethal infections: the only sure way to prevent their spread was to destroy the carrier. Infected or not, the human named Andaim had done the right thing.

  Nobody wanted to die. Kordaz did not want to die any more than anybody else, human or otherwise. But it was infinitely better to die than be transformed into some horrible chimera of flesh and machine, or consumed alive by voracious Hunters. There could be no greater shame than losing one’s essence, the very fabric of one’s life to nothing more than glorified mechanical insects and…

  Kordaz silenced his train of thought as he saw somebody approaching the sick bay entrance, the sentries posted there letting them through. The woman, Evelyn. She walked alone, her expression devoid of emotion in a manner not unlike his own. She did not look at him, did not look at the man named Andaim in the tent. She walked with purpose and stopped between the two beds, looked at each in turn before her eyes finally settled upon Kordaz’s.

  She smiled.

  For a Veng’en, the baring of teeth was a sign of hostility. Although Kordaz knew that for humans the expression meant almost entirely the opposite, the blankness in Evelyn’s eyes told him all that he needed to know. There was malice there, cold and brutal.

  ‘You’re going to talk to me,’ she said.

  Her voice was even, not loud, calm and composed. Kordaz experienced a tremor of unease but he showed no sign of it, managed to control the fluctuating colour of his skin as he lay in silence. He waited for her to go on.

  ‘My friend is in that tent,’ she said. ‘He will die soon, either by being completely infected by the Word or because we’ll have to kill him before he can spread it any further. So if he dies, I will have no further use for you.’ She turned to face Kordaz directly. ‘You either help me now or I will force you to tell me what you know.’

  ‘If I am to die then I have no need to speak of anything to you,’ Kordaz replied.

  ‘Speak to me,’ Evelyn went on, ‘and you shall have no need to suffer or to die. But know this: you will want to die within a few minutes if you refuse to help me.’

  Kordaz let his expression hide the fear that swelled cold inside him. He felt his skin ripple with colour as he stared not at the woman but at the ceiling.

  ‘Then I will not suffer for long.’

  Evelyn’s expression did not change, as blank and as cold as the metal walls of the sick bay.

  ‘First,’ she informed him, ‘I will of course have to justify your death. It is not our way to kill in cold blood, but if you were to be found to be infected by the Word…’

  Evelyn let the sentence hang in the air between them as she slipped from one pocket of her flight suit a syringe and examined it.

  ‘What is it?’ Kordaz asked without looking at her.

  ‘Kyarl’s blood plasma,’ Evelyn replied. ‘We extracted it from his core, where the bots would have flooded to avoid the flames that burned the rest of his body. It helps us to study them, you see, to figure out how they work.’ She took a pace closer to him. ‘To help my friend we need to study the infection as it progresses inside somebody else, so that we don’t harm one of our own.’

  Kordaz managed not to flinch, but his eyes were now fixed upon the syringe.

  ‘You wouldn’t do it,’ he said. ‘I saw you, all of you. You didn’t want Kyarl to die. You want to protect, not to kill.’

  ‘You’re not one of us,’ Evelyn smiled without warmth. ‘Now, you have a choice. Either you help us and tell us how you avoided infection, alone aboard this ship for so long. Or, instead, I’ll infect you right here and now and find out myself. What’s it going to be?’

  Kordaz stared at Evelyn for a long beat and then he gritted his fearsome teeth and stared up at the ceiling instead.

  ‘So be it,’ Evelyn murmured.

  She slipped the needle from its sheath and reached out for Kordaz’s arm, which wa
s strapped to the bed by its wrist. Evelyn lowered the syringe slowly toward his leathery flesh and Kordaz felt a tiny prick of pain against his skin.

  ‘Stop,’ he growled.

  Evelyn looked at him. Kordaz sighed. He had called her bluff and he had failed. He would be of no use to his people if he were riddled with the Legion: they would kill him themselves without question. Better to fight another day, and reveal just enough of what he knew to keep the woman called Evelyn satisfied.

  ‘What is your name?’ Evelyn asked.

  ‘Kordaz.’

  ‘How did you avoid being caught and infected by the Legion?’

  ‘The Infectors get into the body through the nasal passages, or the mouth, or even the ears,’ he snapped. ‘They’re not strong enough to infect through Veng’en skin, it’s too tough.’

  ‘So is human skin,’ Evelyn acknowledged. ‘Only the swarms of Hunters are big enough to bite.’

  ‘As soon as we realised that the ship was infected we donned respirators with filters that protected us from breathing them in.’

  Evelyn waited as Kordaz fell silent.

  ‘That’s not all, is it?’ she said. ‘Don’t test me.’ She shoved the needle a little further in and Kordaz stiffened. ‘How did you end up here alone? And who is “we”?’

  Kordaz cursed his mistaken revelation that he had not been alone.

  ‘We were a Veng’en boarding party,’ he replied. ‘We were one of several dozen vessels posted out here, beyond the perimeter of human endeavour, waiting for the ships fleeing your system. Whenever we saw one, we attacked it.’

  ‘Looters,’ Evelyn said, keeping the needle where it was. ‘You attacked refugee ships.’

  ‘Several,’ Kordaz confirmed. ‘We saw the Sylph out here and we attacked. They fought back only briefly before surrendering.’ Kordaz tightened his fists. ‘They did not tell us that they were a plague ship.’

  Evelyn smiled grimly.

  ‘You got what you deserved. You’re little more than pirates. What happened next?’