Sean Dalton - Operation StarHawks 03 - Beyond the Void

by Sean Dalton - [Operation StarHawks 03]

  Serula smiled. “I understand,” she said in excitement. “They’ll think that their damping field wiped out everything instead of just the power drives. Clever, Kelly.”

  “And what about our life signs?” asked Siggerson, hastily stuffing Ouoji inside his suit with him.

  “With the suit shields on, we’ll be blurred. They won’t be able to get a clear reading,” said Serula. She eyed Kelly with respect for the first time. “It’s a new design in space suits. You’ve been keeping up on your reading, Commander. ”

  “That’s what they pay me for,” said Kelly. He noticed that no one had given Serula a gun and frowned. “41, where’s the captain’s pistol?”

  41 straightened from the wall. Fury darkened his face. “She is not to be trusted.”

  “You will stand down from that remark, operative,” snapped Serula.

  Caesar stepped between her and 41. “You don’t know squat, Fleeter. Nobody stands down in this squad. And you shot him, remember?”

  “I did him no harm,” said Serula defensively, but her face was red.

  “Can it,” said Kelly. “We don’t have time for arguments. And we need maximum firepower. Give her the gun, 41.”

  For a moment it seemed that 41 would not obey. But at last with great reluctance he gave her the bi-muzzled pistol. His eyes had turned a flat, dangerous yellow.

  Caesar stepped a little closer, violating Serula’s personal space. “Just remember whose side you’re on. You take any more potshots at any of us, and I’ll personally ram this gel pack up your—”

  “Caesar,” said Kelly sharply.

  “Soyo, boss,” said Caesar, and moved away from Serula.

  Kelly signaled for 41 to start up the ladder. “Siggerson, stand by to jettison the air. Try to move about as little as possible when we go in. Don’t start shooting until I give the order.”

  He shut his face plate and heard the soft hiss as it sealed. His tanked air came on, smelling slightly sour. The others sealed their face plates. 41 waited at the top of the ladder with his hand upon the hatch control. Kelly gave his squad a thumbs-up. Gravely they returned the good luck gesture.

  He tapped 41’s boot, and 41 opened the hatch. As he and Kelly climbed into the tiny airlock, Kelly heard Caesar muttering over the general comm link: “I’d just as soon stick my arm into a whirl saw as sit in a hot drive tube.”

  Kelly frowned and started to say something, then bit it back. Caesar had a point, but this plan was the best Kelly could think up at the moment, especially since he hadn’t the foggiest idea of what they were up against. In times like this it was better not to think at all. Just get into the best position possible and wait for the right moment to pull the trigger.

  Grimly he opened the outer hatch and squeezed out first, leaving 41 to follow. The immense void of space surrounded them, too vast to look at, too incredible to comprehend. Dwarfed by the alien ship ahead of them, Kelly felt totally exposed although he knew he was no more than a mere speck to any watchers inside that enormous craft.

  The magnetic plates in his boots locked him to the hull, but he kept a tight handhold at all times as a precaution. Without a tether, boot plates alone just weren’t sufficiently reliable, especially with the shuttle moving on a tractor beam.

  Carefully he moved to the stern of the shuttle. There, he switched off the magnets in his boots and let his feet float upward. Headfirst, he pulled himself down to the starboard drive tube and crawled inside. There was just enough room for a man his size to fit. He wedged himself securely so that he couldn’t float out.

  Not daring to use voice on his comm, he tapped a pulse code to 41.

  After a short delay that had him sweating, thinking 41 had slipped off and was free floating behind them, 41 pulsed back a reply. He was in position and secure.

  Kelly sighed. His throat ached with thirst. His body felt tense and tired and restless for action. The aliens had started it, he reminded himself grimly. With a lot of luck, he and his squad would finish it.

  He just wished he knew how.

  * * *

  6

  Holborn was working on the third generation of Type 4 cultures when a carrier entered his laboratory. His back was to the door, yet he recognized that stolid footstep pattern and heard the faint hiss of hydraulic levers that lifted and propelled the carrier’s legs. The sound never failed to inject a burst of fear into him.

  Holborn straightened from his microscope and turned around too quickly, knocking off a petri dish as he did so. The glass shattered upon the floor. Fortunately that particular dish was empty. He had intended it to hold cell smears from the next mutation. Had he broken any of the three other dishes, the whole laboratory would have been contaminated with a deadly viral strain in seconds.

  The carrier stopped and bent its head slightly to scan the breakage.

  “I’ll have it cleaned up in a few minutes,” said Holborn. “As soon as I finish with this experiment.”

  The carrier made no reply, and Holborn wiped his face with an unsteady hand. He knew it was unwise to betray this much nervousness to his masters because they might suspect him of duplicity, but the carriers always made him nervous even when they were empty-handed and serving merely as messengers, as this one was. A simple reason for this little neurosis of his might be that a carrier had trod upon his foot, breaking it, the day he first came to the City.

  He had limped ever since, but deep in his heart he knew nothing was that simple. No, his fear was cold and black, growing daily, spreading from deep inside him like a cancer.

  The Visci were frightening enough in and of themselves, but they were seldom seen in their true state. And although perhaps a million Visci lived within the City, they were small and shut away in their containers. That left the thousands of robots who maintained the City, manned the ships, operated the time gate, toiled in the laboratories, and served as the arms, legs, eyes, and voice of the Visci.

  Holborn was no stranger to sophisticated machinery, certainly, but to have robots as the only visible population left the City an eerie, silent place that wore on his nerves. At first there had been a staff of fourteen coworkers for him to oversee. Most of them had been Therakans and Salukans, captured and brought here under duress. In the past six years all but two of them had died from various causes: overwork, improper nutrition, executions for attempted escape or sabotage. Holborn remained because he was too much a coward to try anything subversive. The fact that he was consumed with trying to solve the problem of the plague both shamed and fascinated him. He hated it here, but he did not really want to leave. He could no longer imagine living anywhere else.

  Still, he remained afraid. He might not solve the puzzle quickly enough. He might fail. And his masters did not tolerate failure. Yet if he did not fail, if he found the answer and saved them from the plague that eroded their numbers so mercilessly, what remained for him to do? This had become his life’s work. If he saved them, they would go from the City, and might they not leave him here alone with the machines?

  Swallowing hard, Holborn faced the glowing lamps that approximated eyes on the carrier and resisted the need to wipe his sweating palms upon his lab smock.

  “Yes?” he said sharply. “You are interrupting my work. I have only seconds in which to observe the next mutation—”

  “All experiments are being recorded,” said the carrier in a toneless, synthesized voice. “Presence requested in observation area.”

  Experience had taught him it was pointless to argue or try to delay answering a summons. Holborn nodded jerkily. “I will come.”

  The carrier turned its sleek metal head to scan the overhead lights. “Too bright by twenty watts. Wasteful. I will adjust.”

  The lights dimmed to a bleary gloom that made the digitalized readouts of the lab equipment glow. Holborn frowned and just managed to hold back a protest. He missed the bright sun of his home world, and he was currently suffering from an irrational aversion to the power-conserving gloom that shrouded most of
the City. The robots had their own lamps, so the dim light offered them no difficulties, but each time he left the comforting confines of his laboratory he felt as though he was leaving the only safe area in the City.

  Absurd. He must stop assigning living motivations to the robots. This carrier was not luring him out into the avenue in order to murder him. It was escorting him to his summons because he tended to get lost if allowed to wander about the City on his own. Nothing more sinister than that.

  Nevertheless, he glanced in appeal at the hunched back of Mevil, toiling over delicate DNA carving.

  “Mevil?” he said.

  The biotech engineer had not paused when the overhead lights dimmed. He did not look up now. “What?”

  “I—” Holborn frowned. What was there to say? Neither Mevil nor Righa liked him. They were not of his species; they had nothing in common with him other than the work itself. “I’ll be back soon,” he said lamely.

  As he passed through the doorway into the avenue of black floor, black walls, black ceiling, all fashioned of metal so strong a cutting diamond could not scratch it and a megaton focused plasma blast could not dent it, a shiver caught him right between his shoulder blades.

  The carrier followed him. The lab door locked. Holborn paused, breathing a shade too fast, and the carrier stepped past him to lead the way. Its head casing housed a computer that could process rapidly yet lacked the capacity for independent thought. Its body was ovoid, sleek with a metallic sheen that reflected light. Powerful arms and legs pumped in a stolid, rocking rhythm. They had no casing to disguise the levers and pulleys that operated them.

  Holborn followed, listening to the thump and hum of well-lubricated machinery. I will become one, he thought. If I stay here long enough I will mutate just as the cultures are mutating. My processes will be slower, of course, but it will happen. That’s where all these robots came from: living tissue ossified into metal.

  But even as that last thought occurred to him, he shoved it worriedly away. Delusions, fanciful thoughts, madness.

  Shaking hands, a tremor about the heart, burning sensation along his temples, difficulty in focusing on distant objects, irrational phobias: all of that spelled overwork. Possibly it even warned of an imminent collapse. He should stop driving himself so hard. But there was nothing to do here but work or sleep. And his masters wanted a solution so very badly to what was killing them.

  It would have taken a day to walk across the City. Instead the carrier came to an intersection of avenues and halted on the scarlet grid square set into the floor. Sighing, trying to master the urge to turn and scuttle into the nearest hiding place, Holborn stepped onto the grid and forced himself to stand still while the carrier grasped his arms with fingers of cold black steel. The carrier spoke in binary, and there came the nauseating sense of displacement that marked teleportation. Holborn shut his eyes quickly.

  Seconds later Holborn’s arms were released. He opened his eyes and found himself in the observation area.

  The carrier pointed. “Go that way.”

  Its task accomplished, it shut down until its control should have other commands for it. Holborn turned away and started walking in the direction indicated. The observation area was vast, as all areas in the City were. He stayed near the wall, well away from the windows overlooking the hanger.

  Spaceships of all makes and sizes were berthed here like exhibits mounted in a case. Their pale hulls gleamed softly against the darkness. Once he would have gazed out, eager to see the new additions to the collection. He would have counted them, wondered about the crews, made mental notations of their names and registry numbers, compared the various technologies. That habit had faded from him.

  He trudged along, barely glancing out at them, until his crippled foot ached from the unaccustomed exercise. The carrier could have teleported him closer, he thought grouchily. Twice he passed immobile carriers, eerie sentinels frozen in place until they should be needed. Each time he had to force himself not to break into a run. He kept imagining that they were watching him, pretending to be immobile, waiting for him to go past them so that they could strike at his unprotected back. Sleek, black, faceless except for their lamps, biped ambulatory, taller than he—were they humming to life?

  Despising himself, he glanced fearfully over his shoulder. They remained shut down. He was safe. He was also going quietly mad. Should he tell his masters? Ask for medical assistance, therapy, rest? Or should he go on with his work? He was close to a breakthrough. If only his mind didn’t burn so much with fatigue, he might come more quickly to the answer.

  And if he did find it, his masters would leave him here. He would die alone and purposeless among the machines.

  Breaking out in a cold sweat, Holborn paused a moment and rubbed his face. Perhaps the solution had been staring him in the face for several work cycles and he was subconsciously blocking it.

  He thought he should return to his laboratory and go over all his notes once again. Coming here was a waste of time. How would he explain to the Visci that he had the answer all this time yet could not see it because of fatigue? They would think he’d withheld it just to let more of them die.

  Twisting his hands, he hurried back the way he’d come, forgetting that he’d been summoned. Then a muffled sound caught his attention.

  He glanced to his left, and through the window he saw the hangar doors opening. A shuttlecraft was being towed inside. Holborn shook his head. He couldn’t be distracted now. He mustn’t linger here. He had work to do. He had such a headache. It was this dim light. He couldn’t see properly, but when he got back to the laboratory he would have those lights readjusted. And he felt weak suddenly, unable to go on walking, as though all the energy fled his limbs and left him boneless.

  Sinking to his knees, he feared he had been gassed for his disobedience. Then he realized it was only hunger. Bending over, he clutched his middle and began to weep, making small mewling sounds that embarrassed him.

  Am I crazy, he wondered, kneeling before the vast window while the craft came gliding closer, gleaming a pearly gray against the blackness of space, a nimbus of sheer blue glowing off her outlines from the magnetic field. She was a stubby vessel, too small for deep space going. Earth made, by the look of her.

  She came into her berth, looking as though she would penetrate the window and run upon him, crushing him against the bulkhead. But she stopped precisely where she was meant to. Mechanical clamping arms extended to fasten her in place. Her running lights were dead.

  Wiping his eyes and face, Holborn wondered if the same could be said about her crew. How much more genetic stock did the Visci need to examine?

  He pushed the doubt away. He never questioned the actions or the motives of his masters. It was safest that way.

  A nearby teleportation grid shimmered, and nine fighters materialized with their firing arms crossed and their lamps glowing scarlet in the gloom. Metallic giants, they marched along the corridor toward Holborn, who scuttled nastily out of their way.

  He knew they would go directly through the airlock and remove the crew from the newly captured shuttlecraft. The crew would then be dispersed to various labs and labeled according to genetic codes. If they offered no different pattern or if their DNA proved resistant to retro-virus 90, they would be terminated. The others would have tissue samples extracted from them and would be kept in a holding pen for as long as samples were needed.

  Samples for my work, thought Holborn. He got to his feet and moved reluctantly to the window, drawn almost against his will yet curious to see who had been captured this time. He knew that if he saw their faces he would have nightmares during his next sleep cycle. He always did, and for that reason he usually stayed away from the observation area. The tissue samples and genetic codes were brought to him and he worked with them, finding less torment to his conscience in that anonymity.

  The fighters seemed to be inside the shuttle longer than usual. Holborn pressed his face against the icy surface of the glas
s. He thought he saw movement atop the shuttle and frowned, squinting in an effort to see better. But nothing moved now and he decided he must have been imagining it.

  “Holborn.”

  The voice came out of nowhere and made him jump. He turned, his pulse hammering in his throat, and saw an ovoid monitor of black metal hovering perhaps ten centimeters above his head. Its cam lens descended to eye level to peer at him. Holborn nibbled on his lips, feeling his mouth dry out. He remembered now that he was supposed to report to someone.

  “Follow.”

  The monitor swiveled so that its lens remained fixed upon him as it turned about and floated away, its arrti-grav unit humming with a gravelly, irregular motor rhythm. Holborn followed meekly. He didn’t mind the eyes so much. That wasn’t consistent of him, for the eyes could watch his actions much more closely than the carriers whose primary function was to transport the Visci about, but who said madness had to be consistent?

  The corridor curved about the end of this docking pod with perhaps sixty or more pods stretching out past it. The monitor floated up out of the way, and Holborn found himself facing a triad of carriers. Each held a small container emblazoned with brightly colored crests marking the families and lineages of the Visci within. Holborn recognized the crest on the center container. No actual name had ever been given to him, for the Visci had other means of identification among themselves, but since being touched by the mind of that particular master, Holborn had always thought of it as Maon.

  Maon had great curiosity and more vigor than most of its kind. When Holborn first came to the City, Maon sent for him often to ask questions about humans and their world of origin. Twice, when Holborn’s line of research had failed, Maon had interceded to save him from termination. Holborn wanted very much to repay Maon by finding an antidote to the plague.

  He swallowed, conscious of being late, of having erred, of having perhaps offended. Those closed containers had a sinister air about them, although had one of them opened he would have gone blank with terror. He had seen Maon only once, but the memory was forever burned upon his mind. To have it enter him through the nostrils, choking him, smothering him, curling upward through his nasal passages into his brain, pressing the neural centers that controlled him until he was nothing but a puppet, possessed, horrified, dying of asphyxiation and fear, was an experience he never wanted to go through again. It had lasted perhaps seconds, but it seemed an eternity.