by Rick Partlow
"Then where the fuck is he and what the fuck is going on?" Deke demanded hotly, looking up and down the corridor in confusion.
"What do you think is going on, Kara?" Cal asked her, straightening, not even looking at the bloody, decapitated body at his feet.
Before she could answer, the ship shuddered again, from what she clearly recognized by that point as a long range shot from a Predecessor weapon.
"Speculation can wait," Trint reminded them, pushing Cal down the corridor and waving for the others to follow. "We have to get off this ship."
Grateful for the interruption, Kara followed Cal and the Tahni around the next corner to the lifepod bay. It was a cavernous chamber, stretching across the whole width of the ship, with access hatches for two dozen of the escape capsules arrayed on the deck and bulkheads, only the overhead free of emplacements since the bay was designed to be accessible even when the ship was under thrust.
Trint went to the closest of them and punched his massive fist through the brittle polymer safety shield on the access panel and into the glowing red button beneath it. A blaring alarm echoed painfully through the compartment as the hatch slid aside, revealing a tunnel barely wide enough for the cyborg to fit through, inset with recessed foot- and hand-holds.
"Get in," the cyborg said to Caleb Mitchell, waving at the entry tunnel with an instinctual motion of hand and arm that struck Kara as nothing a human would ever do.
Cal looked for a moment like he would argue with Trint, but then sighed and reconsidered it, easing his way into the chute feet-first. Kara almost chuckled at the way Caleb Mitchell let the big cyborg order him around like a mother hen.
"You go next," she told Trint, but he shook his head.
"I am concerned that I may find myself stuck," he confessed to her. "In such an event, I do not wish to prevent your escape. You and Captain Conner should go before me."
Kara couldn't find a problem with his logic and decided to go against her nature and just follow his suggestion, though she did make Deke go first just out of innate perversity. She'd actually never been inside a life pod before. It was fairly sterile and bare on the inside, with half a dozen padded acceleration couches set in a circle in the cylindrical interior, all surrounding a central control station that Caleb was already activating.
She settled into one of the couches, setting her carbine in the crook of her arm as she strapped in. She was just thinking that the little pod wasn't all that cramped when Trint dropped into the couch next to her and suddenly a pod built for six humans felt totally inadequate for three humans and a Tahni cyborg.
"How the hell did you fit through the hatch?" Deke asked, dubiously eyeing the big alien's attempts to fit into the acceleration couch.
"With difficulty," Trint told him, squeezing into the safety straps.
His efforts were interrupted by a violent, focused lance of gravitational disruption accompanied by the shriek of ripping metal from somewhere far too close. The fusion drive cut off abruptly and threw them back into free-fall.
"Oh, that can't be a good sign," Deke commented, glancing around them as if he could see through the hull of the pod.
Kara grabbed at her shoulder straps and gritted her teeth.
"Get us the hell out of here!" she hissed.
"I'm getting it," Cal told her, fingers scrolling through the haptic hologram of the control console. "Here we go."
There was a distant metallic "thunk" and a sharp jolt that didn't seem to carry with it the normal sensation of motion, but Kara could see on the control screen that they had been kicked free of the cruiser. The solid, dark-grey armor that filled the tiny projection gradually shrank, revealing the spacecraft's stark, military lines...and jagged, ugly wounds that had torn out chunks of its superstructure. Fireballs glowed briefly where the ship's atmosphere had been ignited, then died as compartments were sealed, but at the rear of the ship there was no fire: the fusion drives were a cloud of hazy, shining particulate debris.
"He's not getting the deposit back on that," Deke said, shaking his head.
"Can we get back to the lighter?" Trint asked Cal, ignoring Deke's attempts at humor.
"Not a chance," Cal admitted, "if I could even find it with the sensors on this thing. There's still something like two dozen of those little ships to that side of the cruiser. We're going one way, and that's down." He nodded towards the image of the moon below them in the projection.
Kara reached out and increased the magnification on the viewer, showing a surface of mottled green, brown and blue. A swipe of her hand brought up a thermal and EM scan, showing some thermal concentrations but precious little electromagnetic radiation.
"I hope Robert and the others see where we're heading," she said, sighing heavily. "Because I don't see anything down there."
"In my considered opinion," Cal replied, his voice sounding unusually grim, "we'll be lucky if nothing is all we find."
Chapter Seventeen
Cutter:
Robert Chang smiled broadly at the sensor reading on the lighter's tactical display.
"There they are," he said softly, nodding at the icons that illustrated his ships jumping into the system in the sensor shadow of the ice giant.
"About fucking time," Pete Mitchell muttered. Chang suppressed a sneer. When the younger man cursed, it was as a boy trying to impress his elders.
It had been difficult to persuade him and Rachel Mitchell to wait there by the ice giant for his ships to arrive before jumping back in to determine the fate of Cal and the others. In the end, he had insisted that, as one of two people capable of taking the lighter into battle, he simply wouldn't risk it without the aid of the rest of his fleet. Even then, Pete Mitchell had threatened to take the ship in himself and Rachel had been forced to be the sensible one.
If either of them could be called sensible, he thought with a sniff that earned him a glare from the younger Mitchell.
Their new and unwanted colleague, Mr. Nouri, had wisely stayed out of the discussion.
"Mr. Chang, are you safe?" The question came from the holographic projection of his subordinate Colter, his holographically tattooed skull just as colorful in the broadcast as it was in person.
Chang almost tittered at that. A hologram of a hologram. How far down could you go in that rabbit hole before there was nothing real, just a simulation? Probably best to keep thoughts like that to himself, though.
"I am as safe as any of us," he said instead. "We were forced away from the Naga fleet by an attack from small, fast and maneuverable indigenous vessels that seem to be using a form of Predecessor technology. Captain Mitchell and the others were on board the cruiser when it was attacked and we don't know if they were able to escape it."
"We don't know anything hanging around here," Pete Mitchell interjected.
Chang fantasized about shooting him in the head and was able to calm himself.
"We need to jump back in," Chang went on, "but we need to do it in force. I want a staged entry with a five minute tactical separation, two globe formations. We need mutual fire support and I want all ships to concentrate fire with the lasers if attacked."
"Understood, Mr. Chang," Colter assured him, turning to issue the orders to his bridge crew.
"One other thing, Mr. Colter," he continued. "This ship is undercrewed. If we're going to fight it efficiently, I need you to shuttle over two more people. And do it quickly; I want to be jumping in less than half an hour."
"Got it, sir." The man nodded. "I'll send Rowena and Carlito. The shuttle should be there in less than twenty minutes."
"Efficient as always, Mr. Colter," Chang said with a smile, then cut the connection. He hesitated for just a moment, then turned to Nouri. "Mr. Nouri, if I am not mistaken, all this ship's docking slips are occupied and I don't seem to be able to operate the shuttles remotely from the bridge. If you would be so kind as to go down and free up a slip for my incoming shuttle..."
"No problem," the former DSI cadreman replied with a shrug, uns
trapping from his acceleration couch and pushing off through the bridge exit.
"Once we get into position," Chang explained to Pete, who was still glaring at him, and Rachel, "we'll jump back in. The drone we left should be able to tell us where to look for our...friends." He decided that was the best word to use.
"We can't get its signal from here?" Pete asked, glancing at the display as if he could see the probe.
"Generally," Chang grated out, his patience strained, "you don't want a secret probe broadcasting anything. That would tend to make it not so secret."
To his credit, the young man had the good grace not to say anything else.
"Chang," Nouri's voice came over the bridge speakers, from the ship's intercom. Chang waited a beat before answering.
"Yes, Mr. Nouri?"
"There's a problem with the shuttle," the man told him, his voice sounding strained with annoyance. "I can't get the boarding umbilical to release."
Chang affected a heavy sigh, working loose his safety restraints. "I'll be right there," he called, then nodded an apology to Pete and Rachel. "This shouldn't take too long."
Chang detested zero gravity. It made him feel mildly nauseous at the best of times and particularly when he had to move around in it, despite the best the drugs could do. It was why he'd always sought refuge on living worlds and not on the ubiquitous space colonies. Yet here he was, and if he hated it, he'd also had quite a bit of training in how to fight in it.
He moved through the corridors with practiced ease, ricocheting off the walls with the balls of his feet or an outstretched hand, reaching the lighter's docking bay in just minutes. Nouri was there, as close to fidgeting as you could come without gravity, holding onto a handgrip near the airlock for one of the docking umbilicals.
"What seems to be the problem, Mr. Nouri?" he asked, nodding towards the airlock.
"I wish I knew," the other man replied, shaking his head. "There's some sort of system glitch with the docking umbilicals...I can't get any of them to release, not just this one."
"I tried to access it on the way," Chang told him, "but I can't seem to communicate with the docking system. I believe there may have been a fail-safe trojan that we didn't disable."
Nouri grunted skeptically. "Maybe," he allowed, "but it wasn't part of my security protocols."
"You did work for the head spy for the whole human race," Chang pointed out dryly. "Some paranoia shouldn't come as a surprise. I believe I have a workaround, however. You enter the shuttle and activate the emergency fire alarm, while I activate the manual release." He gestured to the lever set in a recess in the wall, surrounded by red and yellow warning labels. "That should allow us to free it from the umbilical." He shot Nouri a look. "Just be sure to get your ass off the shuttle before the airlock shuts."
"Like I want to be out here in nothing but a shuttle," Nouri said, hitting the control to open the vessel's hatch.
Chang smiled at the thought. Yes, this would be a particularly bad place to be stranded.
"All right," Nouri called from inside the shuttle, his voice carrying thinly up the umbilical. "Do it."
Chang fastened the sticky plates in his shoes to the deck, then grabbed the lever and yanked it downward. An alarm went off, warning all concerned that the umbilical was about to separate, and he could see Nouri floating up towards the shuttle's airlock...until the hatch slid closed in his face with a solid finality. He thought he could see the man's eyes widening before the airlock shut, but that might have been his imagination filling in the details.
He could hear Nouri trying to transmit via his implanted comlink, but he made sure that the transmission was quickly jammed. The umbilical's airlock closed and then the locks cut loose, sending out a magnetic charge that pushed the vessel out of its berth. That gave the maneuvering thrusters room to kick the shuttle free, sending it drifting away from the bulk of the lighter.
Chang opened a line to the bridge and transmitted via his neurolink, making sure his simulated voice had the correct note of concern in it.
"Nouri has left the ship on one of the shuttles," he told Rachel and Pete. He could see them via the ship's security system, could see the confused look on their broad, stupid faces.
"To go where?" Pete asked, shaking his head. "We're on the ass end of nowhere!"
"Well, honestly," Chang growled, "he didn't confide in me, he simply took off. I can only assume he has a way to contact his comrades. Don't be alarmed...my people will take care of it."
"Take care of it how?" Rachel was asking, but he ignored her, instead switching his neurolink to the ship's communication network.
"Colter," he transmitted. "Do you read?"
"Yes, Mr. Chang," the reply came, voice only this time.
"Do you see that shuttle drifting away from this ship?"
"I do, sir," the man responded after a moment. "Its main engines just ignited."
"Be a love and destroy it for me, if you would," he asked.
"Immediately."
Chang watched the sensor feed patiently, confident in Colter's efficient competence. It wasn't another two minutes before the little vessel expanded into a glowing ball of gas. He sighed with satisfaction. Nouri had been an x-factor, a variable...and Robert Chang wasn't awfully fond of variables.
* * *
Mitchell:
I flexed my knees experimentally, the soles of my boots sinking into the soft, loamy dirt.
"A little less than one gravity," I opined. I sniffed the air; it had a fresh, ozone tang to it, like a thunderstorm had just passed through, and maybe it had. The sky was blue and fringed with threateningly dark clouds...and where they parted, you could see the surreal, looming bulk of the gas giant taking up half the sky, even at mid-morning. "And the air's breathable, thank God."
"That's what I like about you, Cal" Deke commented sourly, still sitting in the open door of the lifepod, chin propped on a fist. "You always look at the positives."
"I'm not reaching anyone with the commo board on this bucket," Kara announced, stepping into the hatchway of the pod behind Deke. The exit hatch was three times as wide as the entry had been; the pod had basically split in two along a line of explosive bolts once we'd landed. One use only. "I think there's no one to reach," she admitted. I noticed her reach down to squeeze Deke's shoulder and he covered the hand with one of his own.
"Cutter probably jumped back out," I said with a shrug. "He had to know there was no way he could take on that many ships alone."
"I believe I've spotted a settlement of some kind." The voice was Trint's, carrying across the meadow where we'd touched down as he approached back down the hillside. He'd immediately gone to the high ground to reconnoiter after the pod had opened.
"I didn't see anything on the sensors on the way in," Kara protested, squeezing past Deke to step down to the grassy field. Her carbine was already strapped across her chest and she automatically shifted it into her hands. "No electromagnetic radiation, no vehicles, nothing."
"From what I have seen," Trint said with what might have been a hint of grimness---it was hard to tell with him, "that is an accurate representation of the settlement."
He hesitated, looking back the way he'd come. "In fact, I think the inhabitants may be on their way right now."
I focused my senses in that direction and heard the far-off sound of feet crunching on dried leaves---it was autumn here, or what passed for it, and there was a hint of crisp chill in the air that I hadn't noticed before. The foliage here wasn't like home, but it did remind me vaguely of what I'd seen of Earth. The trees were different, but they were unmistakably trees, and I even heard the buzz of a few insects, saw flying animals in the distance that weren't too dissimilar from birds.
Those observations almost prepared me for what came next. What came over the hill, gathered into a tight group for defense and psychological comfort, wasn't some eldritch alien, nor even the Predecessors I'd seen before as genetic constructs put together by the Corporate Council. No, the beings
that topped that hill and stood staring at us were humans.
I didn't pause too long to consider how they might have come to be here. I knew that the Predecessors had intervened in human pre-history, at least if the story the Corporate Council had spread about them was even halfway true. I figured either they had kept some around for experimentation purposes or had grabbed samples at intervals and these were their descendants. Either way, my guess was that they'd been out here for tens of thousands of years and God only knew what sort of culture they'd developed over that time.
They were dressed in what looked like hand-sewn fabrics, the men and women both wearing trousers and cloaks lined with fur. The men mostly seemed to wear their hair short, bowl cut, and most of them had full beards; while the women's hair was long and usually braided. They were armed with a bristle of spears, one or two dull silver short swords and a smattering of recurved bows. None of them gave me much pause...arrow wounds were nasty, but I was fairly confident in the ability of our Reflex armor to protect us from them.
The whole group of them, maybe thirty or thirty five in all, paused about twenty meters away, watching us warily. Their leaders seemed to be a mature, broad-chested man with a brown beard that reached down to his belly, spilling over a vest of boiled leather---what passed for armor here, I supposed; and an unabashedly ancient woman with stringy, snow white hair and features carved with a dull knife into the heart of a gnarled tree. She was unarmed while he carried the group's only large sword in his left hand, but of the two she worried me the most. There was something in her eyes...a shrewd intelligence that reminded me of General Murdock.
"Great," Deke muttered, coming to his feet. "It's Conan the Barbarian and his entourage."
I blinked at him. "Who?"
He shook his head, waving it off. I shrugged, stepped forward to meet them, keeping my hand away from my sidearm. They didn't have guns, but I didn't want to take the chance they'd never seen one.
