Crystal Venom

by Steve Wheeler

  Those watching from the lifter could not see most of the violence, but they all knew when one of Rick’s craft had been destroyed by the different colours they made as they crashed, detonated or were struck by friendly fire. Slowly, the dirigible vanished into the fiery gloom and was gone.

  Fritz entertained them all for an hour or so with a percussion performance played on a variety of objects that he found in the lifter, much to everyone’s delight. Most of them watched the storm for a few hours, then slipped back to lie down and get some sleep in the bunks, taking care to keep their gloves on when touching any metal surfaces. Marko watched longer then any of them until he realised that the major, who he had been keeping company, had gone to sleep in his command chair.

  After a particularly fierce display he felt the hairs on his body stand up and believed that something malevolent was behind him. Carefully turning, he watched discharges of purple-coloured static electricity dance around the cabin and then across the window frames in the cockpit before vanishing into the floor. Outside he saw rolling balls of plasma leaping around the valley and wished he could record the images, as they were nothing like he had ever seen. He sat up for another hour, then went back to wake Harry to take his watch so at least someone would be awake through the night.

  *

  Four

  He awoke with Jasmine patting his arm then gesturing to the coffee mug she had placed beside him. He smiled up at her, then reached to pull her face to his for a kiss. He signed that he should learn her verbally spoken language so at least they could communicate better at such times as this, to which she nodded and smiled again. With coffee cup in hand, he walked forwards to watch the heavy rain in the dawn light and an electrical storm still in progress.

  The major signed that he considered it safe enough for everyone to power up their bioware and re-boot their augmented cognitive wetware as well. Marko smiled as he reactivated Glint and Spike. Spike immediately walked up his arm and locked himself back onto the side of Marko’s helmet. Glint just looked at Marko with disapproval when Spike reported to him that there were no images of the storm from Marko’s bioware.

  As soon as the major was able to speak to everyone, he said, ‘OK, go check your craft. Boot them back up, make sure that they are good to go and then stand by.’

  Twenty minutes later the storm had cleared sufficiently for Jasmine and Lilly to take off in the Hangers for a quick reconnaissance. Ten minutes later they returned to report that they had located most of the wrecks except the Games Board lander and the dirigible, and that the atmosphere seemed clear enough for normal flight.

  A message full of static came through. ‘Basalt crew, this is Patrick. I am inbound to your position. Suggest that you get as high as you can, as quickly as you can, for a hot pick-up. Coordinates as follows.’

  The major immediately responded. ‘You heard him. Get on with it! All craft RV with me once we are airborne. Patrick, did the Games Board lander or dirigible make it to orbit?’

  ‘Negative. Neither dirigible made it, and I have no knowledge of the Games Board lander. None of the Rick segments are currently communicating with me either.’

  Marko waited until the major had walked the lifter from the caves before starting the turbines and with a touch of antigravity eased his Chrysops out of the cave into the steady rain. Looking behind him, he saw a small group of adult Avians descending from stairways cut into the rock walls at the rear of the caves. He raised a hand to them, wishing that he had had an opportunity to speak with them. They waved back as the other craft all lifted off and started to climb out of the valley. He hung back for a few moments, signing to the Avians that they would be back as soon as possible. He smiled, knowing that the message had got through when most of them signed their greetings and best wishes to him.

  He spun the little craft around and accelerated skywards to catch up with the lifter.

  ‘Glint, keep looking around,’ Marko instructed. ‘The lander and dirigible must be around here someplace.’

  Looking up into the heavy storm-laden sky, Marko fervently wished that he was back inside the caves. He shrugged and loaded the instructions for motion sickness drugs into his bioware knowing that it was going to be a rough flight. Ahead of him his colleagues were already docking with the lifter.

  The monitor, Jim, suddenly spoke. ‘Marko! I am getting a message on my channels from Sirius!’

  ‘Really? What is their condition and can you say where they are, Jim?’

  ‘Yes. Information relayed on a loop. Their situation is dire. I fear that they will both need to be re-lifed.’

  Marko started looking at the coordinates of the message’s source. ‘Oh. Boss, did you get this?’

  ‘Yes,’ the major replied. ‘You have ten minutes absolute maximum, Marko. Go have a quick look and then leg it up to us, OK. Don’t piss about. They knew the risk and accepted it. I am far more concerned for the edited data. Secure that and I would be more than happy.’

  Marko poured on the power, climbing hard to bring them up into a tight little ravine slashed into the side of the buttress walls of the valley. They flew over the edge of another spectacular waterfall and between very close sheer rock walls. Marko decided to rely on the ground-mapping flight computer for flight control, which promptly slowed them down as they negotiated the tight confines of the ravine. The speed of the Chrysops dropped to walking speed as the wreck of the lander came into view. It was on its side, jammed between the rock faces, thirty metres above the raging creek below. Marko took back control and flew over the wreck, noting that the entire engine room had been torn away and lay further upstream. The main part of the fuselage was crushed down into the rocks and appeared firmly wedged in place. The cockpit canopy was cracked and as they hovered close up to it he could see the two women lying close together at the rear of the crumpled forward cabin, with Sirius waving feebly at them. They looked around for a place to land but could not find one.

  ‘Glint,’ Marko said, ‘take control, fly us over to the side entry hatch and I will climb down.’

  An agitated Glint replied. ‘Marko, the data blocks are accessible through the top of the cockpit which is easily reached. We have very little time.’

  ‘I know that, Glint. We will be fine. Just do as I say, please. You have control.’

  Glint nodded, knowing that he should be the one to board the wreck but deferred to Marko. ‘I have control.’

  Glint moved them further aft as Marko stepped out onto the Chrysops’s stubby wing before stepping off beside the hatchway onto the level, but slippery, surface of the lander. He punched the emergency access locks which forced the door to open outwards and then, grasping the lip, swung himself down into the still functional airlock. Cycling through as fast as he could he jumped into the cabin and walked forwards. Checking the air in his displays he saw that the lander must have been breached as the oxygen levels were just verging on the poisonous, although lower than at the mountain’s base. He pulled the buckled door out of the way and squeezed through to find the two woman at his feet. Neither had masks on, not that it mattered for Ivana, as it was obvious from her injuries that she had been dead for some time. Her head was in Sirius’s lap and as Marko knelt beside them he could only detect a very faint pulse in Sirius’s neck. As he touched her, she let out a little sigh but did not wake. Looking up, he found then pulled the combat first aid kit from its housing and pushed the diagnostic unit against her neck. The readouts stated imminent death unless immediate full surgical was available.

  Marko looked at the unconscious Sirius and knew that he could do very little for her as it would be pointless to risk a rescue mission in the time she had left. He explained the situation to Glint who told him they had time to make it back to the caves and that he had recovered the data blocks. Glint also relayed the best wishes of the Basalt crew and that they would return within a day. Marko sat down then pulled Sirius close with the Jim monitor arriving a few moments later to record everything. They then waited the half
hour it took Sirius to quietly die, while Marko constantly debated with himself whether he should allow the medical pack to wake her with stimulants.

  Several times he almost activated the unit. Each time he decided it would only be for his peace of mind to tell her that in spite of everything he still liked her. And he was just being a sentimental fool if he didn’t just wait the year or so when he would see her again anyway.

  A minute after she died, he activated the Soul Saver ejects for Sirius and Ivana and placed the disks in a secure pocket of his suit, took a last look at the two dead women and left the wreck with Jim following. Moments later Glint took them on a fast run down the ravine and then, in a vertical dive, raced ahead of the returning storm down to the valley floor and into the caves. They both leapt out with Marko pulling the electrics and Glint activating the earth straps while the Jim monitor deactivated himself after he grasped the side of the cockpit with his metal hands to hold on tight.

  Glint looked across at Marko. ‘Before Spike and I shut down, which we would have done without you interfering the last time, what are you going to do?’

  Marko pointed into the caves. ‘We run to the rear and hopefully we can hunker down in one of those carved-out rooms. Let’s go!’

  They moved at a fast run as the first serious rumblings of the storm reached them, through a broad fan-shaped entrance which opened out into a series of chambers, some of which had spiralling staircases cut into the honey-coloured stone and led both upwards and downwards. Everything they could see, except the floor, consisted of flowing, almost sensuous, curves without a single straight line anywhere. Marko told Glint to shut himself down as the first lightning strikes hit the ground out in the valley.

  Glint climbed onto a low bench in the nearest oval-shaped room and quickly powered down, with his primary access hatch opening in his side. Marko reached in, pulled the breakers out and shoved them in a pocket as he also switched off his arm, powered the suit down and was just about to switch his bioware and cybernetics off when Spike said, “Night, Grandfather, sleep well!’, and there was an echo of a tiny chuckle. Marko saw that the little spider had shut himself down as he was no longer accessing his additional conscious data banks from the Chrysops or Glint. Marko smiled and shut down his internal electrics, then sat on the bench beside the motionless Glint and watched the huge storm flashes light up the distant rooms.

  A little later, as it grew even darker outside, he perceived that the ring-shaped artificial lights had come on in the room that they were in and also in the hallway outside. Looking out through the visor, which felt unusual as there was no information from the shut-down heads-up unit, he looked carefully at the stone from which the rooms, benches and low tables had been carved. He wished he could take his right glove off to touch the beautifully worked stone when he also saw that most of the surfaces had very fine decorative work carved into them. Looking as closely as he could, he wondered as to the origin of the decoration, as the only place he had seen anything like them before was in the octopoid city on the planet at Cygnus 5.

  Without internal power, his artificial left arm felt and moved as a dead weight. He did not have a belt slack enough to tuck it into, so he supported the wrist in his right hand as he slowly walked around the room, then had a quick look into the corridors as well, finding even more elaborate and more defined stone carvings the deeper he went into the mountain. He counted the steps he took and then returned to find Glint still motionless on the stone bench. The storm outside the caves was now at its peak, with almost continuous blasts of lightning and concussions when the bolts hit the ground. Beautiful orange or red spheres of balled lightning moved around outside the caves. Sometimes they seemed to pass right through the rocks; other bolts just quietly dissipated, while still others exploded.

  Marko stood and watched, taking great delight in seeing the display, coupled with great annoyance that he wouldn’t have a record of it to show anyone. He found himself enjoying the spectacle, realising that the memories stored in the original biological parts of his brain would have to suffice and that for the great bulk of human existence it was all that had ever been available. He looked down at his suit and thanked himself for choosing the Tux suit with its inbuilt, non-electrical, air scrubbing and replenishment systems.

  Starting to feel hungry, he opened one of the upper arm pockets where he had stored a ration pack and squeezed the valve of the pack open, allowing the small gas charge to pressurise the pack; with his tongue he pushed on a spring-loaded feeding tube built into his helmet so he could suck it into his mouth as the three mouthfuls of pulp became available to him. As he finished the pack off, he mused how much better it tasted than the last one he had had many years before, then wondered if Stephine had anything to do with that.

  Feeling refreshed and satisfied, Marko sat in the middle of the corridor. He could see Glint and also the storm, and thought about the technologies that had surrounded him since birth. He wondered if, in some respects, he was the poorer for them, as they created a constant barrier between him and the actual world. A part of him wanted life to be that simple, but then the greater part of himself also understood that he would not cope without the constant information feeds and connection with his friends. He looked at Glint and also touched the side of his own outer helmet, under which Spike was dormant, and knew that they were a technological part of him he would never want to give up.

  He wondered why the purple electrical haze that made most things outside look fuzzy was not doing the same inside the rooms. Marko walked to the edge of the main entrance area from where he could see the Chrysops, which had glowing blue spikes of electricity on most of its edges. Looking up, he saw bands of what appeared to be copper in the ceilings and also across the floor. As he watched, a few small red glowing spheres of ball lightning floated in through the cave then lifted up into the domed area in front of him, quickly accelerating onto the bands to vanish.

  He stood watching for a few more minutes then walked back to see that Glint was still where Marko had last seen him and he also wondered where the Avians, who they had seen a few hours earlier, had gone. Marko went to another area of the entrance wishing that he could magnify his sight to look more closely at the copper bands and what also looked like fine copper mesh set into the stone. He looked back out into the storm trying to figure out how long he had been in the caves, then shook his head in resignation. He knew that without electronics he was completely out of touch with time. He was also annoyed that he could not listen to any of the music selections that Fritz had made up for him and loaded into all his suits.

  Still thinking about time he dropped his left arm to his side so he could manually operate a lolly into his mouth to suck on. He smiled as the taste of one of his favourites rolled through his mouth and he gave a quick mental thanks to Stephine. He wondered about Glint again and had turned to walk back when he felt a tugging on his left arm. Startled, he spun around to see a small human child looking up at him with a shocked expression on his face, now holding onto his deadweight left hand. Marko cursed, feeling like someone lost in a strange place, as the suit was not giving any of its normal proximity warnings or threat analysis.

  Slowly turning, he shuddered as he saw a group of Avians and humans in a semicircle behind him and wondered what to do. He could see that none of them had weapons that he could recognise, and that most were smiling at him. He signed ‘Hello’ with his right hand, which caused an immediate response in sign language using the same greeting. He signed in further recognition that he was effectively helpless, nodded to each of them hoping that they could see his smile through his visors, pointed into the room then slowly walked back to where Glint lay dormant with the child still holding onto Marko’s useless left hand.

  Reaching Glint, Marko sat next to him, while the child gazed at the ACE then slowly and very gently touched the tips of his long pointed ears. The adults also sat looking intently at Marko and Glint. One of them, the tallest of the Avians, signed at Marko: ‘I
s it dead?’

  Marko looked at the Avian standing across from him, then examined the sentient, judging the blending of bird types and human. Almost the same height of an average human, with five clawed splayed feet, very slim human legs, large genital fold, slim hips and huge chest; also overlarge folded wings, slim human arms and hands, and shoulder joints in the same plane at the wing scapula. The head reminded him of a parrot’s, although a little broader and streamlined, with black eyes below which were a flatfish human nose and a slim, but distinctly human, mouth and jaw. The feathers, which almost entirely covered the creature except for its palms and face, intrigued Marko because they were a deep steel blue-black with scarlet and gold tips.

  Marko slowly used one hand and finally signed back in reply. ‘No, not dead. Sleeping, shut down.’

  ‘Why shut down?’

  ‘Energy danger.’

  The Avian shook his head. ‘Not here. No need to. Is it a safe creature?’

  Marko smiled, signing, ‘Yes, very safe. Named Glint. Why safe here?’

  The Avian looked up at the ceiling, pointed, and signed a reply to Marko. ‘No danger. Isolated. You electronic?’

  ‘Yes, in part.’

  The Avian suddenly smiled. ‘We know who you are. Marko Spitz. You are a friend of created creatures. You are Marko?’

  Marko nodded and signed again. ‘Yes, I am Marko. I made Glint and many other ACEs. Your name?’

  ‘I am Ant. Is your ship hardened, Marko? Is it shut down?’

  ‘Yes, yes, shut down.’