by Chris Ward
Doors opened in the central ship and hundreds of heavily armed marines rushed out. Cannons and blasters filled the air with the squeal and crack of laser fire as they cut down the Evattlans in their thousands. Beth, despite what she had been through, wished for the victory of the bugs over Raylan Climlee’s army, and cheered silently as she saw one troop of marines go down under a swarm of hacking, cutting jaws.
In the end, though, the sheer firepower of Raylan Climlee’s soldiers proved too strong. When not a single Evattlan was left alive across the battlefield, the new battalion of marines joined the surviving soldiers and together they spread out into a line. Marching side by side, they swept into the forest, blasting everything that moved.
Beth backed away. Raylan Climlee’s army, a mixture of Shadowmen soldiers, enhanced Evattlan warriors, Rue-Tik-Tans, and a couple of hundred Bareleon mercenaries, was coming this way. The ridge would provide she and Paul a little time, but when the soldiers moved through the valley it would close a net, encircling them. And when the army came to investigate the downed transport on the hillside, they would be discovered. She had to get Paul back to the Matilda, or they were both lost.
Paul was slumped where Beth had left him, his face set with a grim stoicism, a blaster clutched in each hand.
‘They destroyed the queen,’ Beth said. ‘That seek-and-destroy unit. They’re coming this way. We have to hurry.’
‘We can fight,’ Paul said through gritted teeth.
‘No!’ Beth shouted, hitting him across the face harder than she’d intended. ‘I don’t care about being a stupid hero and dying for nothing!’
‘I can’t walk.’
‘Yes, you can!’ Beth screamed into his face. ‘Get up, now! That’s an order!’
The shock on Paul’s face turned to respect. ‘As you command, captain,’ he said, wincing as he put weight on his lacerated leg and forced himself to his feet. ‘I might lose this baby, but if robot legs work for the robot, they’ll work for me.’
‘You’ll be fine if we can get you back to the Matilda. Come on, we came this way.’
She had no choice but to support Paul’s weight as they struggled down from the ridgeline, first circumnavigating the ruined spacecraft, avoiding falling showers of molten metal and pluming gases. From the forest to Beth’s left came blaster fire, as a few remaining Evattlans were hunted down, or perhaps other forest creatures bore the brunt of Raylan Climlee’s anger.
They were nearly at the bottom of the ridge, both sweating hard, Paul groaning with each step and Beth gritting her teeth as her muscles threatened to fail, when the question came that she was dreading.
‘Where’s Davar? He went after you, I think. I wanted to storm that ship, but he was too chicken. Preferred to hide in the tunnels until the danger had passed.
Beth let go of him, standing back as Paul slumped to the ground.
‘He’s gone,’ she said, barely able to raise her voice above a whisper, afraid that anger or perhaps misery would come rushing through her senses in a sudden whirlwind.
‘Gone where? Back to the ship?’
Beth closed her eyes. It wasn’t Paul’s fault. He had never been the most sensitive of people, and in a way she’d loved his dumb heroism as much as Davar’s quiet intelligence. It carried a certain charm, but there were times… times when she would happily turn and walk away.
She opened her eyes, aimed a kick at Paul’s stomach, and glared at him as he doubled over, winded. ‘He’s dead, you damn fool. Crushed under that ship.’
Paul looked down a moment. When he looked up again, he was frowning, and she wondered if he finally understood.
‘Should have got out of the way,’ he muttered.
Inside, Beth was screaming. On the outside, she gritted her teeth, hauled Paul up and dragged him along beside her. Through the trees came the sound of gunfire, the whirl of cutting blades and the occasional boom of a grenade. Each time Paul would raise his free hand and wave his blaster into the gloom beneath the trees. Only once, when an Evattlan appeared from nowhere, darting toward him, did he fire, blowing a hole in its head, knocking it to the ground barely a couple of paces from where they stood.
‘They can’t tell us apart,’ he said. ‘Without their queen they’ll die anyway. All that’s left is to kill as many of the enemy as they can.’ Then, as though still unaware of how she felt, he shook his head, adding, ‘I told Davar to take a gun, the damn buffoon.’
Beth said nothing. In his way, perhaps Paul was grieving too, but she turned her face away from him, so he wouldn’t see her tears.
‘It’s getting colder,’ he said again, after a while, as they struggled out of the trees to the foot of the hill they had first climbed upon arrival. ‘Can’t you feel it?’
At first Beth thought it was his wounds lowering his body temperature, but when she checked a temperature gauge on her belt, she saw he was right. The temperature was falling rapidly.
‘Night’s coming,’ Paul said. ‘How do you think it happens? Like it does in other places, coming on gradual, or like a curtain coming down?’
Beth didn’t want to think about being left in the dark with an approaching army. ‘It’s this way,’ she said. ‘The Matilda. I remember we came this way. The moss has been cleared, so it shouldn’t take long.’
With Paul still leaning on her, she staggered back into the forest, finding signs of their initial passage—the occasional boot print in the sand, or a cut made by a blade in the vegetation.
‘She should be around these rocks.’
With an adrenalin surge pushing her on, Beth increased her pace, drawn by the safety the Matilda offered: a recuperation chamber for Paul, a warm bed for her, and guns and cannons to keep them safe.
‘About… here.’
She had found the right place. A wide scorched circle showed where the Matilda had touched down, and eight pits in the sand indicated her eight landing legs.
But of the ship herself, there was no sign.
36
Lia
It was a huge risk, but with the spaceport still on lockdown, Lia had no choice. Every spaceport had its scum district, and Lia, with her experience, was adept at finding them. On the third level underground, where the streets were narrower, and homes and businesses were packed as tightly as containers on a freighter, Lia paused, looking around for the signs.
Unmarked shop fronts, narrow alleyways blocked by apparent trash heaps, children with knowing eyes waiting on street corners, an old man smoking a pipe at a table outside a shuttered café… she had found it. She found a shadowed corner and leaned against the wall until a rag-wearing boy sauntered over.
‘Buying or selling?’ he muttered, picking at his nails, not looking up.
‘I need a terminal,’ Lia said. ‘A secure one.’
‘It’ll cost.’
‘I have credits.’
The boy shook his head. ‘No. They can trace anything. I’ll take that blaster on your hip.’
Lia hid her dissatisfaction. There were others on the shuttle, but she had brought only this one with her. ‘Fine,’ she said at last. ‘But try something and you’ll regret it.’
The boy nodded and picked at his nails again. ‘Watch me go. Three doors down, the one with the broken coolant vent. In there.’
He sauntered off, pausing to kick a discarded can out into the street. With hands stuffed into his pockets, he headed back to the shadows and disappeared through a doorway.
Lia waited a few moments, then followed. The entrance led into a pitch-black room where gravel crunched underfoot. A small hand took hers, and she briefly wondered whether it was a trick after all, then it tugged on her fingers, leading her away. She followed blindly into the darkness.
Under her feet she felt stairs. Behind her, a door slid shut with oiled efficiency, probably a concealed entrance at the back of what was outwardly an abandoned shop front. She followed her guide down, her free hand feeling other closed doors as they passed.
The stairs ended
at a corridor. Lia felt a slight give under her boots, as though this were some temporary walkway. She guessed she was already down to Hopewell’s level four, through some secret passage carved by the shop owners themselves.
Her guide stopped. ‘Through here,’ came the boy’s voice. ‘I’ll take payment now.’
Lia unclipped her blaster. Fingers lifted it out of her hands with a dexterity that suggested the boy had night vision. Satisfied, he opened the door and led her through.
A dim light illuminated a tiny room. A chair sat in front of a desk on which stood a wide touch-screen terminal. Dozens of wires on one side led to a multitude of portable adaptor ports and device plugs.
‘You have one hour,’ the boy said from behind her. ‘I will return then. If you wish to finish earlier, press the red button on the desk. Don’t attempt to leave by yourself.’ Lia nodded, aware the place was likely booby-trapped anyway.
The door clicked shut, leaving her alone. She sat down, then found a suitable port for her device and loaded the message.
Using a translation program, Lia put the message into a language she was more familiar with, her eyes widening as she looked over its contents.
She hadn’t been mistaken. Phevius System had signed an agreement with Raylan Climlee. All refugees out of Trill System were to be regarded as criminals and treated as such. Remand centers, prison camps, put to death if necessary. There was a memorandum requesting ten thousand able-bodied workers for a military production base.
Unpaid, slave workers.
Phevius had joined with Raylan Climlee in order to reverse the ICC’s most important policy: the complete prohibition of slavery anywhere in the Estron Quadrant.
It set a dangerous precedent. According to the memo, Phevius System had already sent a delegation to its nearest ally, Quaxar, requesting that it too join the alliance. The consequences of refusal? A declaration of war.
Phevius System’s space navy was second only to Trill System’s. It was highly likely Quaxar would bend to Phevius’s will. Facing the threat of three breakaway systems, Areola, Event, Frail, and Cask were in grave danger.
Lia gave a slow nod. The message was encoded with an official seal, undisputable. The other systems needed to see it while they still had a chance to prepare themselves for possible attack.
She moved to withdraw her device, but something caught her eye. One of the characters had begun to flicker, changing itself, scrambling the word it was part of. As she stared at it, another on the other side of the text did the same.
Lia frowned. Something was breaking down the message. She tapped the side of the terminal screen, wondering whether it was malfunctioning, but that only sent a line of static across the screen.
Desperate, she hit the button on the table and waited for the boy to appear. ‘Finished?’ he said, leaning around the door.
‘You know computer systems?’ she asked.
‘I know enough. What?’
‘Come and look at this. Tell me what it’s doing.’
The boy leaned close. ‘Oh, that’s interesting… it’s you they’re hunting, is it? I did wonder.’
‘The flickering letters. What is that?’
The boy squinted. ‘Ah… it’s a deconstruction program. Your message is restricted. You’ve broken that restriction by opening it on this computer, and as a result you’ve activated a slow deconstruction program which will eventually render it illegible.’
‘OK, so how do I stop it?’
‘You don’t.’
Lia punched the tabletop. ‘Why not? It’s a simple encryption program, right? Surely I can just switch it off?’
The boy shook his head. ‘It’s more elemental than that. Computers are too advanced these days. This is the simplest of reduction programs. What you need is something that will fix it in place before all the characters change.’
Lia stared. ‘I can copy it, write it down. Take a picture, even.’
The boy nodded. ‘That’s the best way to save the content, but by copying it you’ll lose whatever data pertains to its creator.’ He tapped the screen. ‘Sorry to intrude, but this is incendiary stuff.’
‘And if I copy it, no one will believe it’s real.’
The boy shrugged. ‘They might.’
Lia shook her head. ‘Governments and authoritative bureaus deal with hundreds of such things per day, believe me. I used to work with that kind of thing.’
‘Then I guess you’d better hope you can find a program that can fix the original message before too much of it is lost. At the rate of decay, I’d say you have three Earth-days at most.’
Lia jerked her device free. The screen went blank. ‘Thank you.’
‘Good luck,’ the boy said. ‘I’ll wait those three Earth-days then I’ll tell every off-world trader who comes here about what I saw on that message. It’s a small thing, but it might help.’
Lia nodded. ‘I hope so,’ she said.
The clock ticked louder than it ever had before. Lia’s ears felt stuffed with thumping white noise as she tried to clear a way through to some kind of answer. She’d asked around the spaceport’s bars for someone with the kind of computer knowledge that might be able to help her, but all she had done was leave a trail. Soon, Hopeful’s authorities would come for her.
As she sat on the bed in her room, staring at the portable device she’d used to steal the information, a single possibility kept returning, one that wouldn’t leave her alone.
The Phevian government had done what so many did these days: rely not on advanced technology to protect their information, but on regressed. Tech advanced with such speed that systems, devices, and procedures were quickly left behind, many becoming obsolete and forgotten, like ancient writing systems no one could decipher. The knowledge of such antiquated tech and the ability to manipulate it were sought-after skills, skills often bought with blood, or put to work with the muzzle of a blaster.
‘Caladan,’ Lia whispered, reaching for a bottle she had bought in a portside bar but tried so hard to resist. ‘Why aren’t you here? I can’t make this choice. I can’t.’
Tears streamed down her face. She’d already lost her husband and son. Their lives had been dangled in front of her like bait, taunting her, testing how much she could take and still keep moving forward.
And now this. Where did it end?
‘When they’re all gone,’ she whispered into the dark. ‘When there’s no one left.’
The scrape of boots outside the door broke her free from her torment. She looked up, sensitive ears picking up the click that might have been the loading of a blaster charge, a lock disabler, a stun grenade.
She didn’t wait for the courtesy call she knew was coming. She scooped up her device and climbed through the window she had left open, scaling down the outer wall of the hotel, leaving whoever had come to find her to open the door onto an empty room.
The spaceport buzzed with extra security, but some ships, after being thoroughly searched, were now allowed to leave. Lia’s shuttle was still in the impounded section, but maintenance droids were still moving in and out through a security gate, carrying parts out to engineers, bringing in cargo for inspection.
Thankful for the scrambler which would keep her off surveillance videos, Lia crept away from the main port into the maintenance area where cargo was stored and prepared for shipment. As she had hoped, there was a far lower concentration of guards in among the cavernous, empty hangars where droids trundled or lurched across spacious floors.
In a corner, Lia found a loading bay. She watched the droids moving back and forth with interest, picking one that was slightly slower than the rest, moving on two caterpillar treads of which one had a slight tear. Caladan had taught her the trick long ago but had always insisted the older the droid the better, because the security systems circuits were the first to corrode, and in any out of the way spaceport droids were rarely serviced due to the requirement that their work-logs be uploaded to the manufacturer’s database. As Caladan had of
ten told her, the galaxy’s scales had long ago tipped in favor of the criminal. If you were playing the odds, you were more likely to find a corrupt official than a straight one.
‘You,’ she said, leaning over the droid to read its serial number. ‘XR-14-3. Allow me to approach for servicing.’
The droid, little more than a steel box with a trash collection arm and a dome which flashed as it spoke, said, ‘State your identification.’
Lia hoped no one was listening. ‘Lianetta Jansen, Galactic Military Police, inspections and maintenance division.’
‘Your authorization code?’
’92-89-43-2F,’ she said. It was an old one, but the droid bleeped. ‘Authorized.’
It trundled closer, stopping in front of Lia like an animal waiting for its back to be rubbed. Lia reached under a protruding edge of the dome and felt for a switch. With a click, a panel opened in the droid’s back.
Lia stared. Caladan had been right. Inside a tiny compartment barely big enough for a child, was a seat and a control screen.
A manual control chamber.
Only newer droids, capable of learning new skills beyond what their original programming, were fully automated. Many older models were hybrids, particularly on poorer outlying worlds where their functionality had to be stretched to the limit. Lia had never seen one before, and Harlan, feigning human embarrassment, claimed no such thing existed. Caladan, however, had always maintained they were out there.
‘In the dirtiest scum holes of the galaxy, you can find anything if you look hard enough,’ he always told her. Then, with a wink meant to disguise his true feelings, he added, ‘Even a boyfriend.’
‘Right now I’d let you sit on my lap,’ Lia said, squeezing inside and pulling the rear compartment door shut.
It took a few turns to get the hang of the controls, but it was no different to operating a cramped moon buggy. Her feet, crammed into a pointed space behind the axles for the caterpillar treads, felt redundant with it being fully touch-screen controlled, but soon she was moving forward alongside the other droids, the occasional jerks and twists easily disguised as a problem caused by the damaged tread.
