The Lost Star Gate (Lost Starship Series Book 9)

by Vaughn Heppner

  Maddox heard the words, and he suspected the worst. “Down!” he shouted. The captain threw himself onto the sandy street. “Down, Sergeant. Get down before you die!” Then, Maddox covered his head with his arms.

  Riker blinked stupidly, finally dropped the strange weapon and threw himself down. Meta was coming through the door, must have seen Riker going down and did likewise.

  At that point, the upright Mr. Tubb exploded, android body parts, many of them human looking, flying violently outward.

  The blast concussion shook Maddox. But his evasive tactic proved effective in one particular. The shards of Mr. Tubb did not blow downward. They blew down the door of the Star Light Casino. Some of the shards peppered the interior of the place. Other android shards struck the casinos on the other side of the street.

  The blast alerted security systems, as alarms began to blare in the Star Light and other casinos.

  As Maddox, Riker and Meta lay stunned on the ground, the surviving legs of Mr. Tubb toppled over onto the dusty street. It was a grotesque performance. There was some blood, fake blood, to be sure, but there were also mechanical gears and mechanisms that fell out of the two legs’ upper openings.

  Across the street, several people stumbled out of casino entrances.

  Maddox’s ears still rang as his mind attempted to kick-start its thinking. The blast had disoriented him. He realized vaguely that he only had a few more seconds to do something. Otherwise, Meta, Riker and he were going to be arrested by someone. Later, that someone would interrogate him and the others.

  Maddox dragged his hands beside him, pressing his palms against the hot dust. He had to get out of here. He had to contact Starship Victory. This spectacle would blow his cover. This had blown the androids’ cover. Both sides would likely move openly now. Did that mean the Nerva Corporation people would do likewise?

  Maddox groaned as he shoved his hands against the dust. He levered his torso upward. He gritted his teeth and dragged his knees forward, helping to keep his higher position.

  More people were coming out of the casinos. Many of them pointed at Maddox and pointed at the two legs lying near the captain.

  What had just happened? Had Mr. Tubb been trying to help him? It would appear so. The android had tried to warn him, warn him of danger.

  What was the threat? It was imperative that Maddox learn about the danger as quickly as possible.

  Why had Riker used the android-capturing weapon? Hadn’t the sergeant seen the new signal?

  Well, that didn’t matter now. He could criticize the sergeant later for failing to be properly alert. First, they had to survive.

  Using his hardened resolve, Maddox forced his leg muscles to propel his body upward until he swayed where he stood. His eyes weren’t quite working right yet, but he stumbled to his wife.

  Kneeling, Maddox shook her. She groaned pitifully.

  “Get up,” Maddox told her in a rough voice.

  Meta opened her eyes, but it was clear she couldn’t see him yet.

  “Get up, Meta,” Maddox ordered. “We’re out of time.”

  He shoved up to an upright stance again, stumbling to Riker. The sergeant was an old-timer. The blast might have finished his oldest companion for good.

  Maddox put surprisingly gentle hands on the older man’s body. He shook just as gently. “Riker,” the captain said.

  The sergeant did not answer.

  “Sergeant Riker,” Maddox said, more sternly. “This is a gross violation of duty. You will get on your feet and start helping around here. We’re in trouble, and I need you to cover my back.”

  Riker lay on his back. Maddox had just rolled him over. Riker opened a bloodshot eye.

  “Did you hear me?” Maddox demanded.

  Riker just stared at him.

  “Fine,” Maddox said. The captain reached down, grabbed hold of the sergeant’s rags and heaved with considerable strength. He hoisted Riker to his feet and then heaved again, placing the oldster over his left shoulder.

  Maddox turned, seeing that Meta was on her feet. “Ready?” he asked her.

  “Where are we going?” she asked in a slur of words.

  “Straight for the Nerva Corporation Tower,” he said.

  “Won’t that be a nest of androids?”

  “Given Mr. Tubb’s last action, I’m beginning to wonder.”

  “People are pointing at us.”

  “The reason we have to move now,” Maddox said. “Someone is going to try to stop us, and the longer we wait, the more certainly they will insist.”

  “If—”

  “Move,” he said.

  Meta did, dragging her left leg. She had little left in the way of garments, mostly dressed in a bright red bra and equally red panties. That interested many of the watchers; a few who had started to whistle and holler their appreciation.

  Maddox did not like their leering or whistling. “Come here,” he told Meta.

  She did as ordered. He put his other arm over her—the first steadied the sergeant draped over his shoulder. Maddox now leaned some of his weight against Meta.

  “Help me remain upright,” Maddox said. “I’m feeling winded.”

  Together, Maddox and Meta moved toward the Nerva Corporation Tower in the near distance.

  “Hey, you,” a man shouted with a stentorian voice from across the street. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  Maddox halted, shuffling around with Meta’s help. “You talking to me?” the captain shouted.

  “Who do you think I’m taking to?” the loud-voiced man bellowed. He wore a costly suit and had many guards behind him. He was a casino owner, Mr. Harvey.

  “I’m calling out Nerva Corp,” Maddox shouted back. “That was their hitman that did this.”

  “What?” Mr. Harvey said. “That’s nuts.”

  “Follow along if you want,” Maddox said. “I aim to get justice for what just happened.”

  Many of the mob stared at each other. Maddox’s words did not sound like a guilty man’s false plea of innocence. They sounded like an angry man who’d been wronged.

  “Let’s follow him,” Mr. Harvey told his security honchoes. “We need to get to the bottom of this.”

  Maddox had Meta shuffle him around again so they faced the six-story Nerva Tower.

  “How does having them following us help?” Meta whispered in a pant.

  “Don’t talk,” Maddox told her. “I’m thinking, looking for an angle that will get us off planet before the other androids, or whatever this grave danger is, tries to kill us.”

  -9-

  Maddox still felt the effect of the blast, as it was making it harder than normal to concentrate, especially with the ringing in his ears.

  He carried Riker on one shoulder and sheltered Meta under the other arm. A mob followed. Many were simply following Meta’s wonderful butt.

  He needed to concentrate. What had Tubb been trying to tell him? The android had attempted to warn him of a grave danger. Tubb had included himself as being threatened. What sort of menace endangered an android and Star Watch operatives?

  The androids had factions. Had he stumbled onto an android civil war? Was Tubb on the weaker side?

  Maddox had had his fill of androids last voyage. Actually, he’d had his fill of them before that. Why didn’t the androids make a deal with Star Watch? The constant skullduggery hindered both sides. Possibly, the androids did not do so because their objectives were quite different from Star Watch’s goals.

  Builder androids…

  Could Usan III have ancient treasures buried in the sands? Given what had happened last voyage that seemed likely here. The mines went deep into the earth. Maddox wracked his brain. What did he know about the crystalline mines?

  In the extreme depths, miners chipped at unusual crystal formations. Those crystals were used in…in long-range detection and comm sets, if he remembered correctly. The unique crystals helped boost such technologies.

  Was it possible the crystals helped or
were used in ancient Builder devices?

  As Maddox neared the Nerva Corp Tower, he wondered why he would have thought of such a thing, the Builder angle. He had no reason to have made such a leap. It almost seemed as if someone else had…had slipped the idea into his mind.

  Maddox almost halted because that was an even stranger thing to think than the idea of ancient Builder use of the Usan III crystalline mines.

  He shifted the sergeant on his shoulder.

  “Ow,” Riker complained. “Your shoulder is too bony for you to move me around like that.”

  Maddox did stop this time, as he suspected the sergeant had been slacking, riding his shoulder instead of asking to be set down. Only a well man complained so overtly about a lack of comfort.

  The captain tilted his torso forward.

  “What are you doing?” Riker complained. “I’ll lose my purchase if you keep doing that.”

  Maddox slammed the sergeant onto his worn boots and released the older man. Riker might have fallen backward if Meta hadn’t jumped out from under Maddox’s arm and steadied the sergeant.

  “Keep walking,” Maddox said. “We need to stay ahead of the crowd.”

  He didn’t wait to see if the other two listened, but starting walking, lengthening his stride and increasing his pace to its normal abrupt manner.

  “Maddox,” Meta called. “Wait for us.”

  The captain glanced behind him. Riker had an arm around Meta’s shoulders as the two of them tried to keep up with him. Behind them by thirty feet, the well-dressed Mr. Harvey led his gunmen. Some of the gunmen did not look as enthusiastic as they had earlier.

  “Hey, you,” Harvey shouted in his loud voice.

  Because Maddox was waiting for Meta and Riker to catch up, he looked at Mr. Harvey.

  “Where are you headed?” the casino owner asked.

  Maddox pointed at Nerva Corp Tower looming nearby.

  “Why there?” Harvey asked.

  “Because they’re responsible for the blast,” Maddox said.

  Harvey stopped. So did his uneasy gunmen. The trailing mob also stopped, keeping their distance from Harvey and his men.

  The heat, the passage of time, the destination—it was possible all three had dampened everyone’s former enthusiasm to see Maddox get some justice. The explosion back at the casinos meant someone had seriously killed someone and might well use similar explosions to kill more people.

  “You can prove Nerva Corp had something to do with what happened back there?” Harvey shouted.

  “You saw the two legs, right?” Maddox asked.

  Harvey nodded slowly.

  “You didn’t check,” Maddox said, “but those weren’t human legs.”

  “What?” Harvey shouted.

  “They were an android’s legs,” Maddox said, “an android that just blew up.”

  Across the small distance between them, Harvey squinted suspiciously at Maddox.

  “What have you been drinking?” Harvey asked.

  “If you’re scared, go back.”

  “No one talks to me like that,” Harvey said in front of his gunmen.

  “Boss, look,” a security honcho said. The gunman pointed at the tower.

  Four big battlesuited marines were walking out of the tower entrance. The combat suits had exoskeleton power, an enclosed atmosphere, cooling units and heavy firepower along each armored sleeve. Each unit weighed approximately one and a half tons. Those looked like the newest high-grade military suits. All they lacked were jetpack-assisted takeoff nozzles in back. Such suited marines could make twenty or even thirty foot leaps.

  The combat suits began to lumber toward the mob, the four of them in a row. Dust swirled as each heavy suit-boot struck the ground.

  The casino mob in back was the first to turn around and take off. Two or three people hurried to the sides of the street, but they looked ready to run after those sprinting down the street.

  Several gunmen forcefully complained about the situation. Mr. Harvey looked back at them. Whatever the gunmen told the casino owner next must have proven convincing. He gave an order, and the group of them began walking away from the approaching combat suits. They walked away much faster than they had walked after Maddox a few minutes ago.

  “Now what do we do?” Riker complained. “We’ve given ourselves into their hands.”

  “Did you expect combat suited marines to show up?” Meta asked Maddox.

  The captain remained silent as he studied the approaching space marines. Back at the casino, he’d kept the three of them from a sudden lynching by boldly demanding justice. He had envisioned using the mob to storm Nerva Corp Tower. Once they were inside, he had planned to race up the flights of stairs or elevators and steal whatever air-car was on the top pad. Upon reflection, he realized that it had been a stupid plan. Surely, Nerva Corp had heavy weaponry here. A surprise blitz would have been unlikely to be successful under any circumstances, especially if the Nerva Corp people were trying to pull something strange.

  Why had he marched straight to his most likely foe? That wasn’t like him. Did it have anything to do with the unbidden insights he’d had earlier?

  Maddox recalled that the Spacers had developed an electronic form of mind manipulation. He also remembered that the androids sometimes adopted Spacer methods. This was looking more and more like an android civil war.

  “Maddox?” Meta asked. “What are we going to do?”

  As if upon some command, the four space marines raised their left arms, aiming heavy caliber anti-personnel cannons at the three of them exposed in the middle of the street.

  “Maddox?” his wife asked.

  The captain raised his hands high into the air and walked in front of Meta and Riker. “I surrender,” he told the marines.

  The four suited marines halted.

  Maddox watched, wondering if the cannons were about to open fire, shredding his body into bloody chunks.

  Instead of that happening, two of the space marines backed up toward one side of the street and the other two backed up the other way.

  Maddox understood the signal and starting walking toward the opening between them.

  “What should we do?” Meta called.

  Maddox did not answer. He hoped the marines would be satisfied with just him. He trudged past the towering suits, continuing for the Nerva Corp Tower entrance.

  “Hold,” an altered voice said over a helmet speaker.

  Maddox stopped.

  “You two,” the speaker said. “You are also our prisoners. You must join Captain Maddox in the coming interrogations.”

  Maddox looked back, watching as Meta and Riker stumbled after him. He had made a critical error, and it looked like it might cost him two of the people he cared about most.

  Who controlled Nerva Corp on Usan III, and what had Tubb been trying to warn him about?

  -10-

  Maddox stumbled as a suited marine shoved him into an underground holding cell. The captain strained but couldn’t stop himself in time, slamming his left shoulder and hip against the far wall, bouncing off it and finally bringing himself to a halt in the center of the cell.

  The hatch slammed shut, the door sounding heavy, too heavy to open with normal human muscles. Perhaps only exoskeleton strength could open and close the stone hatch.

  Gingerly Maddox sat cross-legged in the center of the dimly lit cell. It was a small holding area without any toiletry but with a musky odor and a sense of great solitude and heaviness.

  The feeling of heaviness would be the weight of the planet pushing psychologically against him. The space marine and he had ridden in an express elevator, going down to a great depth.

  What had happened to Meta and Riker? The marines had separated them after walking through the tower’s front entrance.

  Maddox calmed his breathing as he forced himself to ignore the throbbing in his body where he had struck the wall.

  Someone had captured him. That someone had known his name. That someone now had
him prisoner deep under the sands of Usan III.

  What could he decipher from the situation?

  Maddox started thinking. He had to think in order to stave off the claustrophobia that threatened him. His heritage was New Man. New Men liked to move, to act, to do. Long periods of confinement proved difficult for almost all New Men. That included the captain, although not to the same degree that it would a full-blooded Dominant.

  Great depth would seem to indicate an affinity for the crystalline mines.

  Maddox breathed deeply through his nostrils, holding his breath and only slowly letting it out. He did this several more times, attempting to calm his mind.

  He feared for Meta and Riker. But there was nothing he could do for them now. He must release the fear. He must let go of everything—

  Maddox straightened into rigidity. He stood up, raising his arms until the palms of his hands touched the rock ceiling. He pressed upward against the ceiling, straining harder and harder. He let rage grow in his chest. He continued to push, panting, drinking gulps of air as the strain began to tell against him.

  Part of him wondered what he was doing.

  Maddox deliberately opened his mouth and began shouting, the sound loud within the confines of his cell. He continued to shout—

  You’re not fooling me.

  The words were clear and distinct in Maddox’s mind. There was no concealing them, and the captain knew for a certainty that he had not generated those thoughts.

  He let his arms drop, lay down on his back and closed his eyes. He was tired. He was starting to get hungry and he was certainly thirsty.

  One thing he knew, an android had not generated that thought in him. He wasn’t sure how he knew this, but the certainty of it bubbled in his chest.

  “Spacers,” Maddox said aloud. “It has to be Spacers. Shu 15 had two modifications in her. One powered the other. The other was the ability of transduction.”

  Maddox cocked his head, feeling as if he was right about the causation of the thought in his mind. He recalled the trip into the deep Beyond with Shu, and the various ways that she’d used her transduction.

  “Ah, yes,” he said, speaking loudly. “Transduction was the technological ability to see electromagnetic radiation and electromagnetic wavelengths and process the data as fast as a computer. That’s how Shu used to say it, anyway. She also told me once that she could interfere with the neural connections of androids.”