by G. H. Holmes
Shanti gritted her teeth. She wanted to slug that engineer for belonging to the privileged elite. But she remembered the general's face near hers in the jungle module after they'd met the ghost. She'd lain on the ground, overtaken, and he'd kneeled by her side, tending to her. The general was looking out for her. He was a good man. And she had to give it to him, he had the face of an emperor. Shanti thought of his fine Roman nose, his broad jowls—and he was one of the privileged elite, too!
How she hated him for that.
You are thinking nonsense, girl, she chided herself. Get a grip!
Behind her, the door was opened. Shanti stumbled and let go of the man's jacket as she fell. Strong arms dragged her from the concourse; as soon as she'd crossed the threshold, she felt relief. The rage and hate and envy left her, ebbing away like dirty dishwater in the drain of a steel sink. Sitting on the ground, she looked around with her large brown eyes from one Marine to the next. These were her friends. These people, black and brown and amber and white, would give their lives for her, if push came to shove. They were all in the same boat. They were all Space Marines from Terra Gemina.
Shanti closed her eyes and sank backwards.
General Harrow dragged the traumatized engineer out of the waiting room and the door fell shut behind him. The medic and the other engineers immediately took Futse Kung and carried him off to one side, where they tended to him.
Great, Ben thought. Without a smile he crouched down by Shanti. "How are you doing, Marine? Did you heed my advice?"
Shanti, still lying on the ground with closed eyes, nodded. She sat up and said, "You gave me sound advice, Sir. Don't know if I would have made it without it."
"I give you five minutes to rest, Corporal. Then the two of us will go back into that room. We will go over to the steel door and, by God, we'll crack it open."
Shanti inhaled deeply and looked at him with big black eyes. "Go in again, Sir…?"
Ben nodded. "Think about the best thing that ever happened to you in your life. Meditate on that now. When we're in there, our minds need to be filled with positive emotion, or we'll never make it."
"You and I, Sir?"
"I'll need you to work the electronics panel while I take care of the manual side of things," Ben explained.
Shanti didn't understand completely, but surely the general new what he was doing.
The other Marines stood around them, silent and listening. Ben looked up and said, "Somebody give this soldier somethin' to drink. She earned it."
The second medic stepped forward and handed Shanti a plastic bottle with a clear liquid in it. Shanti took the bottle, unscrewed the lid and drank with deep drafts, replenishing her minerals. When she put the bottle down, she felt much better.
"You don't have to tell anybody what it is," Ben said to Shanti, "but I want you to meditate on the best thing that ever happened to you in your life. I say again: fill your mind with positive emotion."
"Sir, yes, Sir!"
Ben got up and walked down the tunnel, away from the others, until he stood in a vitrum tube and looked out into space. He fully intended to heed his own advice.
What was the best thing that ever happened to him in his life?
Thoughts of Sharon his wife flashed into his mind. They'd had a full life together and thinking of her right now only put him in a melancholy mood. That was not what the situation demanded. Ben looked out at the sparkling stars and the curvature of the planet below. Both were so beautiful. Both spoke of life, the mystery of Kasaganaan notwithstanding. He glanced back at his Marines. They were alive, too.
Life…
Ben decided, the best thing that had happened to him in recent years had been his rescue from dark space by Daniel von Schwarz. Coming back from the deep sea of despair right in young Daniel's transport ship, he hadn't felt a thing. No joy, no peace, no anger, nothing. For the first two or three years Ben's heart had been stone-cold.
Because he didn't trust his own rescue.
In those years he feared that he might wake up any second and find himself still marooned in that ice-cold hell that was outer space. The Emperor had come in from the cold and was slow to believe it. It had taken years for his emotions to come back.
And now he was here, because he needed to determine the fate of more than twenty thousand settlers who'd been taken over by an advanced invader. None of the defense technology that he'd encountered so far was standard equipment on any space station he'd ever heard of.
The fact that the station was empty, and not manned by invasion troops, told him that the invaders were not very many as of yet. They seemed to focus their efforts on the planet. Any aggressor worth his salt would have left a detachment in this station. But they hadn't.
Instead, they left its defense to machines.
Ben remembered the Invisibles marching off, singing a song in Old Western English. A cold shiver crept down his spine. Either this was one gigantic coincidence or somebody who knew him had programmed these Invisibles to send him a sublime message.
What did the sender say?
I'm here, Harrow. I know that you are coming after me, but I'm prepared for you. I know who you are and what you can do, but I'm not impressed.
I'm more powerful than you are.
Ben desired to meet the mastermind behind all this.
Behind his back, the Marines were whispering softly. He forced his mind back to the steel door that was waiting for him.
If the mood amp had its way, it would turn him into a stark raving mad power maniac and in that condition he might become a mortal threat to his own Marines. But he couldn't send another man in to do the job for him. The engineer he'd selected for cracking the door was the fastest and smartest of the bunch, and that man had gone down like a stumbling toddler.
Corporal Kumar on the other hand had managed to rescue the man. She was Ben's best bet.
He'd keep her busy with the electronics, having her work the keypad, while he did the heavy lifting. He'd override the door's locking mechanism—if it could still be done.
Ben walked back up to the vitrum doors, where Shanti Kumar stood waiting. His Marines parted like the Red Sea when he approached and then Ben stood in front of the girl.
"You ready, Corporal?"
Shanti pressed her lips together and nodded. "Yes, Sir."
Ben drew a deep breath and said, "I'll tell you which buttons to touch on the panel by the door when we're there. If you need a break because the hate gets too strong, just signal me and we'll take a break."
Ben's face hardened as he peered through the vitrum pane. Then he slammed through the swing doors and marched towards the steel door.
Shanti Kumar followed in his wake.
Three steps in, Ben felt an incredible haughtiness creep up within him. He was tempted to stop and relish the emotion. He was King of the Universe. All creatures tall and small lived solely because he allowed them to live. Nobody, positively nobody could ever stand in his way. But instead of stopping and enjoying this awesome feeling of invincibility, Ben walked on with leaden feet, thinking back to the moment thirty years ago when he became aware of the fact that he was no longer sitting in his imperial fighter craft—that he was now on a transport ship.
He remembered the voices of Daniel von Schwarz and his crew.
Human voices.
Kind human voices.
There had never been a nicer sound.
Ben remembered the moment in Harrow's Dale. He'd worked on his manual astrolabe, when the conviction came over him that he was really saved, that dark space was but an episode in his life and not its end.
He thought of the birds in the air and the bees in the meadow and the trouts in his pool and the cool waters of its river. He had no reason to be haughty. He was a human being like all others, subject to the same judgment and to the same rewards as everybody else. Pride came before the fall, but grace was given to the humble.
Shanti Kumar now stood next to him in front of the black glass panel on the w
all by the steel door. Ben stood in front of the massive obstacle.
"You thankful for something, Corporal?" he said to Shanti.
She didn't look at him and he saw that her eyes were narrowed and her jaws were pumping. She seemed to be chewing on something.
Ben touched the panel and it sprang to life. Silver buttons appeared on a dark blue background.
"Touch the corner buttons," Ben said. "Start on the upper left-hand corner."
Shanti did as told. Her finger began to punch the virtual buttons behind the glass.
"Do that until I tell you to stop."
He turned his back towards her and his left hand began to feel the contour of the door.
Joel Anderson and Stella Halvorsen stood side-by-side and peered through the vitrum panes as did everybody else. Kumar and the general had their backs to them. The troops couldn't determine what exactly they were doing.
Behind them, in the darkness of the tunnel, sat Vesantha Raj, her face in her hands. She was quietly praying for her friend, who was in that doomed entrance hall with the general.
By herself.
Who knew what he'd do to her if he got mad?
"This doesn't look good," Joel Anderson said.
Nervous excitement swept through the silent Marines staring into the waiting room. Inside, the general and Corporal Kumar were shouting at one another. Harrow towered over her and looked as if he was ready to bite off her head. Kumar herself looked up at him and yelled, too.
"We've got to do something," Joel said.
Stella glanced at him for a second. "What might that be, Sir?"
Now Harrow was pointing at the door entrance, through which many faces looked in at them.
Suddenly Shanti began to run towards the exit. She cut across the waiting room and when she approached, Joel opened the door for her. Shanti rushed out, screaming at the top of her lungs. When a few Marines crowded her to calm her down, she let her fists fly and screamed at them in her native tongue.
Vesantha Raj in the darkness of the tunnel heard the speech of Terra Gondwana and rushed up, pushed the men out of her way and hugged Shanti. She spoke soothingly to her in their own language. At first Shanti pushed her away, but she finally broke down and listened to what Ves was saying. Shanti finally calmed down.
The medic handed her his bottle again.
From up front, Joel Anderson shouted, "He's in! The door's open!"
Sure enough, the round door stood ajar.
And Ben Harrow was nowhere to be seen.
Chapter 16
I'm nothing special, Ben screamed in his thoughts. I'm a human like every other. I am not privileged. I just have a bigger job to do than other people. I'm a servant and not a ruler.
I'm not gonna get lost in space again!
No.
Way.
Blinking, he finally came to himself in the command center proper. The waiting room was now behind him. Ben noticed that in here the mood amplifier was not active to wreak its havoc.
He sweated profusely. Thinking hard, trying to catch his breath, he leaned on a console. It took a minute for him to calm down. The power of that machine was insane.
The idea crossed Ben's mind that there might be another version of this machine, enhancing pleasant instead of dark emotion. For a moment he wasn't sure which version would prove to be the more dangerous weapon.
He scanned the sparsely furnished room. One wall was made of top-to-bottom vitrum panels that faced out into space. Ben saw that they were one-sided mirrors; he could see out, but onlookers in the vitrum tubes around this inner sanctum couldn't look in.
Off in one corner was a long conference table. On a platform stood a large workstation framed by three big monitors. The desktop was the dark glass of a holo table.
The wall to the right consisted of server banks. They were active, because lights on them were blinking in a subdued fashion. The blinking patterns probably made perfect sense to somebody who could read them.
Ben had no time to look at blueprints or to figure out algorithms. He immediately expanded and began to glow an electric blue. In the vitrum panels he could see his reflection. He prayed nobody else saw what he was doing. A second later he was gone and only his clothes were left on the floor.
Ben searched for an interface on the computer bank. When he found a jack, he hit the mainframe like a lightning and flowed into its circuitry. Ben felt the weak electric current pulsing around him as he rushed through the computer banks and into the consoles and back. He reached deeply into the station's electrical grid, until he understood the setup.
After fifteen minutes he had figured out that the active denial systems of Kasa Station—but not the main battle stations—were intricately linked with its vital systems, such as its gravity controls. He couldn't just disable the red ghosts and the mood amp and all the other little plagues with one flip of a switch. Were he to flip it, he'd disable the artificial gravity, too, and Ben wasn't sure what would happen to the water and air supply. This required some further attention. It might even take a day or two to get the system under control.
But he couldn't just leave his Marines to themselves for such a long time. He needed to find something safe for them to do while was working. He had to go back to the troops right now.
He'd return later.
"What do you think keeps him so long?" Stella asked Anderson.
Joel pointed through the glass door. "There he comes."
General Harrow was walking across the waiting room with swift steps. When he was close enough, both Stella and Joel opened one wing of the double doors and he walked out.
Harrow's jaw was clenched. Everybody took a step back because they perceived a different air about him now. There was something haughty and dangerous in it, but he obviously tried to rein himself in.
Shanti Kumar elbowed through the crowd until she stood in front of Ben.
"Want to say thank you, Sir," she said.
Ben inhaled with barely suppressed anger. "Why do you thank me, Corporal? You really think I…"
Ben wiped his face with both hands, stared at the ceiling and inhaled deeply. "How was your experience, Corporal?"
"Thanks to your order I came through just fine, Sir."
Ben smiled vaguely. He turned towards the crowd. "Listen up, everybody. The mood amp is a real killer right now. I order all of you to stay away from it as I don't care for slaughter and mayhem. We go back to the gate right now and team up with the rest of our section."
Stella Halvorsen's hand went up. Ben noticed.
"What is it, Lieutenant?"
"What about those unusual weapons, Sir. Were you able to disable them?"
"No, Lieutenant, that's a bigger job than I'd expected." Ben proceeded to explain the situation to the troops in as few words as possible.
"You'll go back to the gate and turn in for the night," he finished. "and until those scary systems are disabled, you will lie low, as will the other companies. Everybody ready? Then let's go."
"Good to see you back, General," Colonel LeBlanc said when Harrow and his troops arrived back in the camp by the gate.
Ben greeted him, filled him in on the newest developments and said, "I can't raise Berlin and Chaos. How are they doing? Got any news on them?"
"Had contact off and on with Chaos a while back," the exec said. "Nothing on Berlin since after we got here. Surely a jammer is blocking them."
Ben nodded grim-faced. He needed to return to that command center. As soon as the troops were down for the night, he'd go back and beat the station's engrafted defense system into submission.
The comm sergeant left his chair behind Ben's FAV and walked up to the battalion's XO.
"The wing commander can't establish communications with the hangar bay, Sir," the sergeant said. "With a closed dock, they have no way to get into the station. Since their watch is about up, they request orders on how to proceed."
LeBlanc glanced at Ben as if he had an answer.
Which he did.
>
"There's a single cutter dock up by the command center," Ben said. "Probably for the leader's transport, but it's unoccupied right now. Tell them to fly there. They can exit their x-jets one after the other, put them into drone mode and park them there."
"Then we don't have eyes in the sky," LeBlanc interjected.
"Chaos Company should be manning the battle stations by now," Ben said.
"We don't know that they are," his exec replied.
Ben turned to the comm sergeant. "Tell the two junior pilots to come in. Juggernaut will have to do extra duty. He'll be relieved sometime during the night." Ben was referring to battalion time, not local Kasaganaan time.
"Aye, Sir," the sergeant said and walked back to his comm station to relay the order.
Once the pilots were in, Ben told the assembled men and women of Aleph Company that they needed to tie themselves down while they were resting, because he might momentarily disable the artificial gravity when he reworked the programming of the command center. The troops didn't mind if the result was that Kasa ghosts and invisible soldiers and mood amplifiers were history afterwards.
"What about Berlin and Chaos?" LeBlanc asked him quietly when he'd finished his speech.
"They'll have to live through it," Ben replied. "If we leave the system as it is, chances are, they will not survive the night."
The troops tied their equipment down—and themselves—and turned in for the night.
When all was quiet, Ben slung his rifle over his shoulder, went to the guard by the Xylon shield and said, "Crickets, Private."
The guard saluted and said, "Crickets aye, Sir."
She crouched down and switched off the Xylon shield to let him pass.
"Do you want us to go with you, Sir?" a voice said behind Ben.
He turned around and saw Rambler and Gargoyle, who snapped to attention and saluted.
"If we can be of any help, Sir, we're available," Gargoyle said.
"At ease, gentlemen," the general said and they relaxed.
