The Lost Star Gate (Lost Starship Series Book 9)

by Vaughn Heppner

  Abruptly, Maddox stood and set the gun on the desk. He would switch to Plan C and roll the dice of fate.

  The next second, the door violently crashed open as a space marine in battle armor clanked into the room. A second marine followed on the first one’s heels. They both interposed their armored bodies between Maddox and Ludendorff.

  “Don’t shoot!” O’Hara shouted. “Don’t fire!”

  The second marine’s sleeve cannon was already aimed at Maddox. A round was in the chamber.

  “Do you surrender?” O’Hara asked.

  In response, Maddox held up his hands, palm forward.

  A faceplate whirred down, and a hard-faced marine with a knife tattoo on his forehead regarded the captain.

  “Should I kill him, Professor?” the marine asked.

  Maddox glanced at O’Hara.

  “These marines are his,” she explained. “It’s part of the deal.”

  “What deal?” Maddox asked.

  “Put him in the brig,” Ludendorff said.

  “What deal?” Maddox asked the professor.

  The second exoskeleton-powered marine grabbed Maddox in a crushing grip, lifting the captain off the floor. The marine turned toward the smashed door.

  “Brigadier?” asked Maddox.

  “I’m sorry,” O’Hara said. “You’ll have to ask the professor. He’s officially in charge of the mission.”

  The last sight Maddox had in the brigadier’s office was Ludendorff grinning in victory. Then, the marine marched out of the office, heading for the Moltke’s brig.

  -27-

  Sergeant Riker grumbled to himself as he studied the Moltke’s hangar bay from a spy-port in the shuttle that had brought Maddox to the battleship.

  A squad of armored space marines surrounded the shuttle. Beyond the marines were various techs monitoring machines that kept a strict watch over the shuttle.

  This was even worse than Maddox had originally suspected. After the captain had departed, a team of hard-faced men had scoured the interior of the shuttle, looking for any hidden compartments where a person could hide.

  They hadn’t found Riker’s spot. He didn’t know if they’d found Meta’s compartment. The captain hadn’t wanted his wife along. She had insisted, and she’d made solid arguments why she was the right person to do this. In the end, Maddox had agreed. He’d put aside his own desires for the greater good of the mission.

  The boy was growing, Riker supposed.

  The sergeant didn’t know if the hard-faced, non-Star Watch personnel had found the captain’s wife, because he didn’t know where Meta had hidden. The captain had kept the various compartments secret. That way, the two of them couldn’t give the other away.

  “No,” Riker whispered in alarm.

  He saw Meta. The woman dropped down from a hidden cache under the shuttle. She hadn’t even been inside the ship, but in some outer pod. Meta wore a regular Star Watch uniform, and she held a slate in hand, as she made notations. She was pretending to be part of the earlier search party.

  “That ain’t ever going work,” Riker complained. They weren’t dealing with stupid people, but clever sots that knew their business. Ludendorff always used the best, and from the feel of the hard-faced men, those had been the professor’s people. They had reminded Riker of that bastard of a slarn trapper the professor used to keep around—Villars.

  One of the techs at a monitoring machine shouted and waved his arm, pointing at Meta.

  Two armored marines turned around. Likely, they both saw Meta at the same time.

  She was a quick-thinking woman, and she showed her mettle now.

  “Look out!” Meta shouted. “The shuttle is going to explode.” She dropped her slate and sprinted away for apparent safety.

  “What in the Hell?” muttered Riker.

  At that moment, an explosion tore the underbelly of the shuttle. The blast lifted the entire vessel, surprising the sergeant inside, tossing him against a bulkhead and throwing him onto the deck. The shuttle crashed and tilted, and a fire began in a different interior compartment.

  Scrambling off the deck where he lay, hearing the crackle of flames and smelling electrical smoke, Riker realized that must have been the captain’s idea. Maddox must have anticipated incredibly tight security over here. Therefore, he must have decided to create a diversion.

  Despite the fire and smoke, Riker went back to the spy-port, peering outside. An armored marine had caught Meta. She struggled, but not even her 2-G strength could prevail against exoskeleton power.

  A siren blared outside, and regular damage control people raced in the shuttle’s direction.

  “I can’t believe this,” Riker complained. “He could have at least told me about the diversion.”

  Riker understood the cold-bloodedness of the captain’s plan. He was sacrificing Meta’s cover so his sergeant could slip off the shuttle as a damage control worker.

  Riker examined his uniform. Nope. He’d better climb into a pair of overalls. Later, he’d need the uniform he was wearing. But he also needed the overalls to impersonate a damage control worker. It was time to get started.

  ***

  Eight minutes later inside the shuttle, Riker passed a damage control worker wearing a rebreather and carrying a heavy extinguisher. The sergeant grabbed a rebreather of his own, put it on, waited for a chance and climbed down the shuttle ramp to the hangar-bay deck.

  “We need a C line,” he shouted from within the rebreather, waving an arm and pointing up into the shuttle.

  Two other damage control people dragged a line, running up the ramp with it.

  Riker followed them back inside the shuttle. He’d seen armored marines blocking the way free of the vessel. It looked like there was only going to be one way to do this. Riker hadn’t wanted to do it, mainly because it was morally dubious. But wasn’t that the nature of Intelligence work?

  Hurrying to a different area of the smoky shuttle, looking around, making sure no one was going to surprise him, Riker tapped controls. A hidden bulkhead slipped open. He pressed a timer and moved into the armored slot, closing it behind him.

  Five seconds later, more explosions lifted the shuttle, letting it slam down with a screeching crash. Riker was holding on tightly inside the padded closet. He knew that sections had flown off the hull, damaging areas of the hangar bay, maybe killing some of the people out there.

  “Don’t like doing this,” Riker muttered. But he did his duty as per regulations. He opened the hidden compartment, closing it behind him and raced through the twisted maze of the half-destroyed shuttle. He found a badly injured person.

  “You okay?” Riker shouted through his rebreather.

  “My ribs,” the man groaned, indicating his side where a small piece of metal had lodged.

  “Let me help you.”

  Riker used his bionic arm to hoist the man to his feet. The man would have been too heavy otherwise. Then he slung one of the man’s arms over his shoulder and began guiding him through the burning shuttle.

  Klaxons wailed outside in the hangar bay. Some of the bulkheads there were torn. There were at least four armored marines lying on the deck, some of their armor dented, some torn open.

  “We’re killing good people,” Riker whispered in dismay. “That’s too much.”

  Despite his words, the sergeant helped his man past others waving them on. They reached a hatch, leaving the smoky, damaged hangar bay and the burning shuttle. A short way up the corridor, Riker passed the wounded man to medical people.

  The man had fallen unconscious. That wasn’t from the injuries but because Riker had injected him with a knockout drug.

  “He’s my best friend,” Riker told the chief medic, forcing his eyes to turn moist with brimming tears.

  “Go on,” the medic said, jerking a thumb at the departing anti-gravity sled with the injured man lying on it.

  “Thanks,” Riker said with heartfelt gratitude, hurrying after the sled team. The sergeant began limping, and h
e veered off into a different corridor once the team had gained enough separation from him.

  He looked around. He was out of the hangar bay and inside the Moltke. He shed the overalls in a closet and marched briskly in an MP Sergeant’s uniform.

  Since Maddox hadn’t contacted them, this was Plan C. It meant the captain was likely dead or a prisoner. If he was dead—no. Riker didn’t want to go there just yet in his mind. He couldn’t believe Maddox was dead until he saw the corpse. Even then, he might doubt it. The other option was that Maddox had become a prisoner, and that likely meant the captain was in the brig.

  It was time for some hardcore and exceedingly fast Intelligence work. “Damn if it don’t always land on me to get the job done,” Riker muttered.

  The sergeant patted the stunner at his side. If Maddox was in the brig, did that mean Ludendorff was in charge here? That had been one of the captain’s chief worries.

  Riker didn’t see how that could have happened on a Star Watch battleship. He didn’t have Maddox’s imagination. But he trusted the captain, and he knew that Ludendorff had to be one of the slipperiest and dirtiest players they’d ever met. Usually, the Methuselah Man was on their side—mostly, anyway. Whose side was Ludendorff on this time?

  -28-

  Maddox was in a large room near the brig, secured to a metal chair. Steel bands bound his ankles, wrists and neck to the metal construct. Strange machines waited around him in a horseshoe shape. At the open area of the machines, a strange trio of abnormally thin technicians in white smocks arranged ugly, scalpel-like tools on trays.

  The three had bronze-colored skin and short red hair, with unusually thin noses.

  Maddox didn’t know their phenotype. They seemed altered from regular humans, not in a direct way, but maybe by living and evolving several generations on an alien planet. The alien world had changed them, first in subtle ways and now more overtly.

  Two armored marines stood like statues by the back wall.

  A hatch opened, and Professor Ludendorff moved briskly within. He came alone, and he seemed displeased. The professor wore dark garments, highlighting his thick white hair. He carried a computer slate in one hand. He also had a large bronze pendant hanging from his neck.

  Was the pendant a mini-generator for a personal force field? The pendant had to do something—it wasn’t just for looks. That was all Maddox knew for now.

  The trio of abnormally thin medical personnel stepped aside for Ludendorff, each bowing his head as the professor passed him.

  The professor halted in front of Maddox, staring at him in a challenging way.

  “What have you done?” Ludendorff demanded.

  “Made an operational error,” Maddox replied. “In hindsight, I should have shot you when I had the opportunity in the brigadier’s office.”

  “Bah!” Ludendorff said. “That’s meaningless prattle. Without me, humanity dies to the Swarm. Is that what you want?”

  “You’re right. I don’t want that.”

  “You’re in no position to play games with me. Why, this could mean—” Ludendorff stopped abruptly and shook his head. “I forget myself. You’re quite possibly the most egotistical man I know, half man, I mean. The other half is New Man.”

  Maddox said nothing as he strove to analyze his opponent.

  “Does hearing that upset you?” Ludendorff asked.

  “Some,” Maddox admitted.

  “Why is that, I wonder?”

  “I haven’t decided.”

  “I have.”

  “Oh?”

  “But I’m not going to tell you,” Ludendorff said. “I’ll let you figure that one out on your own.”

  “That implies you’re not going to—” It was Maddox’s turn to abruptly stop talking.

  “Do you fear to say it, Captain? Do you think the word will move me to act in that fashion?”

  “I suppose I do.”

  “I’m not going to kill you,” Ludendorff said. “I will, however, quite possibly have these seasoned neurosurgeons operate on your brain? Does the idea of mental adjustment bother you?”

  Maddox waited before he spoke, trying to compose himself. He should have shot Ludendorff when he had the chance. But…he hadn’t shot him. Thus, he must play the game as it stood. He must concentrate. It was possible he still had a card or two in play. That Ludendorff had come in angry likely meant Meta and Riker had begun Plan C.

  “I dislike putting you at ease,” the professor was saying. “But we’re running out of time. We cannot allow the Imperium the time to send any more invasion fleets into Human Space. We must destroy their capacity to do so. That means finding and destroying the nexuses in their nearest border regions to us.”

  “You’re serious about that, then?”

  “That’s a dull question. I wouldn’t have spoken that way just now unless that was the case.”

  “True,” Maddox said.

  Ludendorff glanced back at the red-haired, bronze-colored neurosurgeons before studying Maddox.

  “They are Bosks,” the professor said. “Theirs is a small rocky world making for a precarious existence. For several centuries, they were alone, and they mutated accordingly as you can plainly see. Once the Laumer Points changed the space-traveling game, they learned exportable skills, becoming quite proficient in certain trades. Their time alone, however, gave them several unique features. One of those is a predilection for working in threes.”

  Maddox noticed something as Ludendorff explained. The dark eyes of the three Bosks focused avidly on the professor. They did not watch him like subservient workers might, but… They watched Ludendorff like scientists observing their experiment.

  Maddox concentrated on what Ludendorff had just said. The Bosks had a predilection for working in threes.

  “Three freighters,” Maddox said sharply.

  “Oh, you’re perceptive as always, my boy,” Ludendorff said. “The Q-beam is of Bosk design, as are the Q-ships. Yes. I recruited many of my technicians from their world. They are quite loyal, amazingly loyal, really. It is a pity the trio must permanently mark you.”

  “For the mission to rescue Strand?” asked Maddox.

  Ludendorff nodded his head. “I did not lie about that. We desperately need Strand.”

  “Do we, Professor?”

  “What are you implying?”

  Maddox noticed that the trio no longer focused on Ludendorff, but on him. Were they in charge? If that was true… The captain wondered if he dared to use his greatest barb. Yes. He believed he did, as this might be one of his last opportunities to act.

  “I have a theory,” Maddox told Ludendorff. “But you’re not going to like it.”

  “A theory,” Ludendorff said. “Why would I care one way or another?”

  “You don’t want to free Strand.”

  The dark gazes of the trio intensified upon the captain.

  Ludendorff chuckled. “I’m afraid I do want to free him, most urgently, in fact.”

  The trio glanced at each other, almost imperceptibly nodding before focusing on Ludendorff again.

  “My theory is simple,” Maddox said. How should he word this? “The Builders created the Methuselah Men. I doubt they wanted your breed to become extinct. Have you ever wondered why you and Strand haven’t slain each other yet? You both claim to hate the other, is that not so?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” Ludendorff said.

  “I would. The answer is obvious. A Builder impulse put deep inside you long ago is driving you to attempt Strand’s rescue, so the Methuselah Men don’t die out.”

  Ludendorff turned pale and actually started trembling. He spoke in a low, outraged voice. “How dare you say a Builder impulse is driving me? How dare you imply that a Builder is once more in control of me? I am my own man, Captain. I decide my own fate. I have rid myself of all Builder programming.”

  Maddox made a scoffing sound.

  Ludendorff’s eyes bulged outward and he stepped nearer, slapping Maddox across the face. Th
at made the professor red-faced, possibly in shame or shock at his deed. He shook a finger in the captain’s face, and spittle flew from Ludendorff’s mouth as he said, “I am my own man!”

  The display surprised Maddox. He hadn’t expected this. He glanced at the trio. The three studied the professor again like scientists gauging their experiment. The captain noticed other details he hadn’t cataloged at first. The three stood unusually close to each other. Yes, they actually bumped against each other, and one of them lifted his fingers ever so slightly. That caused the other two to shift their gazes to that one.

  Why had Ludendorff gone to that particular small rocky world? Had the trio done something to the professor? It certainly seemed as if that was the case.

  Ludendorff turned his back on Maddox. The professor hunched his shoulders and breathed heavily as he clutched the computer slate he’d brought with him. Finally, the professor turned around. He was no longer red-faced, trembling or pale. He seemed to have regained his self-mastery.

  “You have low animal cunning,” Ludendorff said. “Some might even call that impressive. It is not true intellect, of course. You can achieve first-rate results in physical tasks and even do well in crafty dialogue. What you lack, however, is a true scientific mind that can comprehend technical marvels.”

  Maddox said nothing.

  “I will not stoop to your level,” Ludendorff said. “I will keep this at an exalted height.”

  Maddox still said nothing.

  “My Bosks will alter you so you can move freely on the Throne World. It will be more than giving you a new skin hue. For a time, you will think better, move faster and…well, age at a precipitous rate.”