by Chris Ward
‘Not now, partner!’ Paul hollered, swinging the Matilda around, putting too much strain on the side thrusters and cutting them across the path of three incoming fighters. The ship juddered as they took their first serious hit.
‘Paul, what are you playing at? We’ve lost a cannon!’
‘Heat of battle, dear. Let’s finish this.’
‘May I suggest you take it a little easier on the main fuel drive?’ Harlan said. ‘We’re rapidly reducing our escape options.’
‘Beth! Mark it!’ Paul shouted.
The main shield-ship had come into range. Beth frowned, lining up the guns. If they could take it out, the rest would be cannon fodder. She pressed the fire button, then frowned. ‘What’s happening?’
The ship shook as it took a sudden hit on the left.
‘My programming wishes you’d completed your schooling,’ Harlan5 said. ‘Our guns won’t work on that shield-ship. You’re just wasting power. You need to use the central cannon.’
‘How?’
‘The button under the red button.’
‘It’s not working!’
‘The fuel is too low. We’ve sprung a leak.’
‘A leak?’
‘I was making a human joke.’
The ship rocked.
‘Concentrate, Paul!’
‘I’m trying! The robot is distracting me!’
‘It’s more seepage than an actual leak. The fuel is compressed gas, which is more of a solid than a liquid—’
‘Can you be quiet?’
‘Paul, where are you going?’
‘I’m not … it’s not responding—’
‘We’ve taken too many hits. My programming has decided to assume control. Engaging autopilot.’
As three more fighters came in, Beth hammered the guns, taking them out. The ship lurched right, then left, swinging out of the line of incoming cannon fire. On a sensor screen on Beth’s dashboard, she saw more dots coming in behind the others. Of the first group, only the shield-ship and two second-tier dogfighters remained. As the first engaged them, Beth squinted, tightening her finger over the fire button.
The Matilda swung around, the view on the screens turning to empty space. On a small rear-view-screen, the three remaining ships were rapidly shrinking.
‘Autopilot engaged,’ Harlan5 said.
Paul thumped the dashboard in frustration. ‘I had them—’
‘There’ll be other fights,’ the robot said. ‘The Matilda finds them quicker than a turd finds flies, our last pilot used to say. The good news is the ship’s systems have located a wormhole near our current location. It’s a short hop through stasis-ultraspace, so strap in. You might feel a slight tremble as we pass through.’
Beth stared at the screens, noticing a sudden shift in the night sky, a blurring of the stars, followed by a jerk back into position. Some stars, though, had changed position, others vanished altogether.
‘Where are we?’ Beth said, just as Paul turned around in his seat and fixed Harlan5 with a stare. He jabbed a finger at his terminal screen.
‘Tell me we’re not where this says we are. Like, of all the places you could have picked—’
Harlan’s head cocked to one side. ‘I’m afraid there was no other choice. Our fuel reserves were too low for a longer jump, but on the plus side, we’re not far from a remote-automated fueling station.’
‘Where are we?’ Beth asked again.
Before Harlan5 could reply, Paul blurted, ‘This moron’s flown us straight into the enemy’s butthole. Damn, the stench is making me gag.’
Beth gritted her teeth, trying to maintain her patience. ‘And does this butthole have a recognizable name?’
Paul punched the terminal, briefly causing an overhead light to wink out before flickering on again. ‘We’re in deep orbit around Vattla, hostile home to the Evattlans, Raylan Climlee’s foot soldiers. We couldn’t be worse off if we’d dropped right into the middle of the Bareleon Helix itself.’
11
Caladan
‘It’s quite something, isn’t it?’ Lia said, her arms folded, as she regarded the revolving core of radiation inside the containment chamber.
At her shoulder, Caladan nodded. ‘It looks potent from here. If you could drink it, I’d be telling you to get in there and bottle it up.’
Through the tinted, reinforced window above the control terminal, the radiation core spun like a miniature star within a lattice frame which held it in place with electromagnetism. It was difficult to tell how large it was, but Caladan estimated it was no larger than a single-occupancy escape pod. If it could be lifted out of its fittings, it could slip easily into the shuttle’s hold.
Unfortunately, the energy released by touching it would likely reduce the shuttle and possibly the base around it to dust.
‘You said the whole unit disconnects?’
Lia nodded. ‘You slide it out like a loose brick, load it into your containment chamber. Take it to Trill System, launch it into the Helix’s core, and problem solved.’
‘Except the shuttle doesn’t have a containment chamber.’
Lia shook her head. ‘Few ships do for something like this. We have to borrow a specialist vessel.’
Caladan laughed. ‘Come on. Don’t tell me you’re going soft in your old age? We’re not going to borrow anything, because we aren’t giving it back.’
Lia wrinkled her nose. ‘Steal is such an unpleasant word.’
‘So is sobriety, but we have to deal with it from time to time. The question is, where do we find a ship which can contain something like this without the risk of it contaminating the rest of the ship, and us with it?’
Lia sighed. ‘We could spend half our lives hunting the Fire Quarter for one, but Trill System might be long gone before we get even a sniff. Spacecraft that can transport a pure core of radiation like this are few and far between.’
‘Which leaves one option.’
Lia nodded. ‘Of course, the hardest of all.’
‘We go knock on the manufacturer’s door.’
‘Phevius System. Galanth, the machine world. It’s the only place we’re likely to find one while Trill System still has a chance.’
Caladan glanced over his shoulder, back into the dark corridor leading out of the containment chamber command center, back into the research facility. The thought of more of those little monsters crawling all over him sent shivers down his spine. ‘The sooner we get off this moon the better,’ he said. ‘Getting to Galanth would be a lot easier on the Matilda, though.’
‘If Harlan’s still on Ergogate,’ Lia said. ‘We’re blindsided here, the transmissions blocked. It’s possible he’s out in space somewhere, looking for us, but we’ve had nothing in response to our mayday signals.’
‘Or he could still be sitting on a landing pad in Tube Town waiting for someone to tell him what to do.’
Lia shrugged. ‘Or the Matilda could have been impounded, stripped and sold, or destroyed.’
Caladan smiled. ‘Oh, listen to you, harbinger of joy. Let’s just imagine he’s up there in orbit, waiting until we’re at our lowest ebb to fly in and rescue us, point out how we can’t survive without him. Nothing would surprise me with that robot.’
Lia pressed a button and a black screen slid down. Caladan’s eyes took a few seconds to adjust to the lack of light, but he could still see the burning core like a scar on his retinas.
They headed back into the research station. The radiation core—synthetic, lab-developed by the scientists who had built the station—was held in an adjacent block to the rest of the station.
‘We could blow it up and be done with it,’ Caladan said.
‘Ten years ago, I would have agreed with you,’ Lia said. ‘There’s more at stake now. Too much more.’ She took the transmitter from her belt and pressed a button. ‘Jake? You there? All still quiet?’
‘Like Christmas Eve,’ came a crackly voice. ‘Not a mouse was stirring….’
‘What’s he h
arping on about?’ Caladan said.
‘No idea, but it sounds like we’re clear.’
‘What do we do about that lot in the lab? Just leave them here? Without the radiation core, there’s no power source.’
Lia stared at the ground. ‘We shut them down.’
‘You mean, we nuke them.’
‘Yes. Their lives have been compromised, and the only thing we can do is put them out of their misery.’
Caladan grimaced. ‘You know I have to say it, don’t you? They were people…like us.’
‘There’s no humanity left in there. When you run that tech through a person, it doesn’t just shrink them. It screws with their mind, distorting it, warping it into something new. Something monstrous.’
‘The log had no new entries for forty Earth-years. You know what that means, don’t you?’
Lia punched a wall. An echo ran down the corridor. ‘Can’t you just shut up? When did you become a bastion of morality? It wasn’t so long ago you would have gambled my shoes for ten minutes in an alley with some whiskey-soaked hooker.’
‘I’m just pointing out things aren’t as simple as blowing the hell out of this place and leaving. Even if we can find some fuel rods…’
‘Please, can we talk about something else?’
Caladan shrugged, alarmed at the look of conflict on Lia’s face. ‘Sure. Let’s figure out if we even can leave, then take it from there.’
‘I did a little investigating while you were gone,’ Jake said. He sat at the droid’s control panel in the shuttle, lines of code scrolling down the screen. ‘I think I’ve found us a way out of here.’
‘Do you tell him the plan, or do I?’ Caladan asked Lia. She looked up, started as though just noticing him, and then shrugged.
‘We’ll swap,’ Caladan said to Jake. ‘You tell us how we can escape, and we’ll tell you why we have to come back.’
‘That bad, is it?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘It’s always the worse places that leave the biggest impression, isn’t it? Like a dirty old holiday camp you return to every year just because something about the way they make the eggs at breakfast allows you to excuse the rest of the filth. Some of the holes we have on Cask that they call entertainment districts…praise the Stillwater. There’s some glory left in the universe.’
‘That’s right.’
Jake pointed at the screen. ‘See here? This is a representation of the base from overhead. These glowing areas are where power is radiating from. That large one is your main core, which feeds all the scientific technology, though as you’re aware by now, the main connector has been severed, at this point here. How are those chaps down there in the main hall still going strong? Over here, this glowing blue, that’s a coolant generator. There’s a good chance that’s where we’ll find fuel rods to power the shuttle. But here…I don’t know what this is.’
Caladan looked at Lia. ‘They’ve got their own fuel source. That’s how they’re surviving. It also means we aren’t condemning them to death by stealing the radiation core.’
Lia turned to Jake. ‘What’s the fuel source?’
‘No idea. They’ve got some kind of machine in there.’
‘Let’s leave them for now,’ Lia said. ‘We’ll check out that coolant system first, see if it really does contain fuel rods we can use for the shuttle. We’ll worry about the rest later.’
‘Aye, aye, Captain,’ Caladan said, grinning as he snapped a salute.
Anywhere where the lighting was poor brought back memories of the thing Lia had shot off his face. Caladan had seen the worst the known galaxy had to offer, but something about that monstrous miniature human climbing up his beard sent shivers through him. Evolution was evolution, but there was nothing natural about something shrunk to a fraction of its original size. He’d barely slept during the three night periods they’d been here, and he doubted he’d sleep well until Ergon-7 was a distant memory.
‘In here.’ Lia indicated a door with her blaster. ‘Keep your eyes open. We’re around the back of the main experimentation chamber so it’s not impossible there could be more of those things nearby.’
Caladan hefted his own blaster, fully charged. Ethics or no ethics, if they came at him, they were dust. ‘Good to go,’ he said.
Lia shot the door release. It fizzed with a shower of sparks then slid open, allowing them access into an aquamarine-blue storeroom which coolant systems maintained at a constant temperature of zero. Caladan, despite his thermal space-wear, shivered at the sight of dry ice containers emitting steam into the air, which was then filtered through an air system and recycled. Vents in the ceiling were almost blocked by jagged limescale stalactites, rendering the room more of a rocky cave than a fuel store.
Lia went to one of the three tall storage machines standing in a line. A door in the front had been opened long ago and then left to calcify. ‘Empty.’
The other two machines were the same. Whatever fuel rods had been here were long gone.
‘You think the scientists escaped?’ Caladan asked.
Lia nodded. ‘Some. I think they took whatever fuel was here and left on their last ships. Those who were left behind suffered the same fate as the test subjects.’
‘Which means we’re stuck.’
‘No,’ Lia said. ‘There’s something else.’
‘Please don’t say it,’ Caladan said. ‘Please don’t say we have to go into that test chamber.’
‘We need to meet with whatever they call leaders. See if we can strike a deal.’ She sighed. ‘But I’d like a drink first.’
‘All we’ve got left is Jake’s Stillwater,’ Caladan said.
Lia grimaced. ‘If that’s all we’ve got, I guess we’d better take it.’
‘Do we really have to go in there?’
Lia said nothing, but the look in her eyes told Caladan everything he needed to know.
12
Harlan5
The Matilda, battle-scarred and low on fuel, bumped gently against the connecting port of the deep-space remote fueling station. Harlan5 activated a stolen trading code to gain them access to the station’s systems, then charged the refueling costs against the account of some forgotten space trader the captain had long ago bumped shoulders with. Figuring if he was going to steal, he might as well steal good, he also authorized a group of remote maintenance droids to do some cosmetic repairs to the ship. The fourth canon arm, damaged in the firefight, would require more repairs than they had time for, but the droids could at least clear the debris to ensure it didn’t hinder the revolution of the other arms in the outer weapons circle.
‘It just sits out here for anyone to use?’ Beth pointed out of the view-screen at the fueling station, which resembled a large gray rectangle.
Harlan5 shook his head. ‘It’s maintained by a traders’ guild,’ he said. ‘They’re funded and restocked at the guild’s cost, but any space traveler can use them if they have a payment access code. Plug and play, I guess you humans would say.’
‘It’s defenseless,’ Paul said. ‘What’s to stop us taking what we want and flying off?’
‘It’s not defenseless,’ Harlan5 answered. ‘It’s equipped with photon cannons capable of destroying a ship the size of the Matilda and seriously damaging larger ships. The cannons haven’t engaged because we haven’t tried to steal anything.’
‘You have a code?’
‘It’s a borrowed one. Traded for services a long time ago. My captain is adept at surviving in space. I hope you get to meet her. You might learn a few things.’
‘How to recklessly get captured?’ Paul said, puffing out his chest.
Harlan5’s eyes twinkled. ‘While my programming would like to request a more respective tone regarding my captain, the assumptions of my performance assessment memory would agree with you. Luckily, she has also perfected the art of the escape.’
‘What happens now, Harlan?’ Beth said. ‘Where do we go from here?’
‘I have sent
out a distress transmission that my captain will recognize if she receives it. However, so far, there was been no response. My programming would suggest we ensure the Matilda is in the best working shape possible if a response is received.’
Paul stared out of the visual screens. ‘So, what’s to stop a larger cruiser coming in here and stealing that fuel source? The guns would have nothing on decent shields, would they?’
‘You’re right,’ Harlan5 said. ‘The cruiser however would suffer the total condemnation of the free trading community across the entire Estron Quadrant, and the posting of any ship or crew identification across free boards throughout the quadrant.’
‘What goddamn is a free board?’
‘Any ship or person listed on a free board can be killed or captured without repercussion, their goods seized as salvage. In many cases, a reward is available for turning over those listed to a recognised policing authority.’
‘That’s nice,’ Beth said. ‘Are there many people on the list?’
Harlan5 nodded. ‘Give me a moment to access the last updated information … ah, here we are. At present, across the Estron Quadrant, there are just over seven million names on the free board, as well as three million starships, and seven hundred thousand droids.’
Paul put up a hand. ‘Save it. So, that’s quite a few, isn’t it?’
‘Relative to the assumed population across the entire Estron Quadrant, it’s a tiny fraction, but still an impressive number.’
‘So if someone blew up that fueling station, nothing much would happen.’
‘Yes. Few people have time to search through a database to find out if the person they are talking to is on the free list. For what it’s worth, my captain, our pilot, and myself are all on the current free list.’
‘Said with a sense of pride, eh, robot? What if we decided to turn you in?’
