by Ivan Ertlov
"Wait, like THE Troshk? The former leader of the fourth infantry regiment? The terror of the Plachtharr?"
The Stormcommander nodded gracefully.
"Somebody fry me a tree rat! Wait a minute ..."
Eastwood paused, considered and finally leaned forward.
"A few weeks ago, I busted a drunken bounty hunter who wanted to pay in the hotel with stretched ore. Routine matter, he got out on bail, but he told me a far-fetched story in his drunken stupor, a tale that was quite something. A latrine rumour of an artefact that had fallen into the hands of the Protectorate. Ancient technology, a ship so dangerous and powerful that the Alliance would start a war over it if the speaker hadn't handed it over demilitarised to a bunch of civilians. To a Stormcommander, one of her own daughters, a half-Tarjah, and a human - a human of all things!"
Dilara smirked, took a sip of the disgusting broth, shuddered briefly and put the cup down again.
"Guilty as charged - that's us. The Prospectorate Stargazer, fully assembled."
Visibly impressed, the peacekeeper sat back, but his curiosity was far from satisfied.
"Then what in the moons are you doing here on Pseudohursh? No, seriously, that's the ass end of the Rim Worlds, and the Rim Worlds themselves aren't exactly an area for Protectorate business."
"We are here to - to meet an old friend. Gurabsh Himmelfeind-Kreuzpointner. We were told he was staying with you."
Eastwood warped the bark.
"You could put it like that. And I can take the piss out of myself. Gurabsh had no friends, only interests. He was a fucking spy, even if I don't know for whom."
That had hit home. Neither of them had missed the past tense nor the latent disgust in the peacekeeper's words and the hard-nosed acumen with which he had drawn the spot-on conclusions. But Dilara did not want to lay her cards on the table yet.
"What makes you think he had no friends? And why do you think he was a spy?"
"He had no friends because no one could stand the sight of him. Have you ever seen a half-slime? One who is half-human at that? Your mind goes crazy if you even try for a moment to grasp his body, to understand how something like that can live. No one can stand that, probably not even your lawyer here. And why I thought he was a spy? We'll get to that later. But I had known for some time that he was not what he claimed to be."
"And what was that?"
"An archaeology student researching his final thesis. Sure, he had all the papers and certificates from one of the best universities on Durash, but they were as fake as a Gulptar trans bull's balls. Yes, the indigenous culture here has fascinating sites, some highly interesting artefacts, and for two, maybe three years, I would have bought it - but not ten. Nobody who studies archaeology fritters away twenty semesters on their thesis."
Frank nodded, impressed by Edge's perspicacity.
"That's right, only sociologists do that."
"Exactly. All right, do you want to see your alleged friend now or not?"
*
Cold.
Cold light, cold, smoothly polished stone floors, and cold, metal-clad walls with dozens of recessed doors awaited them, as did an air temperature that made Frank's breath visible.
Bettsy hooted indignantly as she scurried into the long room behind Eastwood, her segments trembling permanently in an attempt to keep warm. Frank and Dilara shivered too, and Florbsh uttered a hearty curse as his belly slime made the first contact with the floor of the morgue.
Only Troshk seemed to really blossom, stretching and swaying as he walked, breathing the air deeply into his lungs and positioning himself in a good mood next to the door to which Edge led them straightaway.
"I warn you for the last time - this is not a pretty sight; you should not go for it on a full stomach."
The warning was well-intentioned but fell on deaf ears - or rather, ears that thought themselves hardened enough. Troshk shrugged his shoulders, on which the fur had begun to nestle against the body again, to perform its natural function. Bettsy bobbed her antennae, and Dilara snorted contemptuously.
"I've had the guts of dozens of spacefaring races lying on the floor in front of me; I shagged slimers and borrowed Fifty Shades of Grey from the Terran Museum database. And, by the cursed moons, I watched it, in one sitting from the beginning to the end credits!"
Florbsh straightened his pseudopods in disgust.
"You are a sick pig, astrotelepath Kreethan!"
Eastwood rustled briefly with his remaining leaves.
"All right, you asked for it."
With nimble branches, he unlocked the door, pulled out the stretcher - and nameless horror overtook Frank.
Whatever had driven the parents to their decision and into the arms of a money-hungry bio geneticist - nothing justified the creation of such a creature. In a gelatinous and semi-transparent ball now solidified into a knee-high, tough slab were several interlocking spinal columns, like snake skeletons trapped in the green-brown block. Dark spots might once have been half-heartedly functional or completely unnecessary organs. Others seemed like flexible internal limbs, attached to joints with no discernible bones connecting them. With enough gruesome imagination - and yes, Frank, unfortunately, possessed enough of that! - one could even make out remnants of individual teeth and tufts of hair.
"That thing there ... was actually alive?"
Eastwood nodded with his crown.
"Not only that, he was an amazingly fit lad. He kept dashing through the streets and was a welcomed guest in the pub - that is if he could pay. Which was increasingly rare of late."
Horrified but united in a bizarre fascination, they stared at the speaker's informant. He was indeed the creation of a fevered nightmare, and even that was not the worst thing about the spy's corpse.
The Durash body itself, the slime compound around whatever its creator had built there, was encrusted, hard, brittle. And that was not due to the cold in the morgue.
Florbsh trembled with excitement, fear and horror.
"By the moons of Grarosh! They have salted him!"
The peacekeeper pushed the stretcher back, locked the door again and once more locked the victim in his merciful darkness.
"Indeed. From the looks of it, very slowly, over a period of days, to make a statement."
Frank closed his eyes and groaned, trying desperately to keep his rebelling stomach in check. Not only he was deeply horrified, but even Dila's voice was shaky.
"Do you think he was murdered because of his activity? Well, I mean his real job, of course."
Eastwood almost creaked in amusement - very incongruous given the place they were in.
"No, not at all. In fact, you could almost call it suicide - your friend had gambling debts to the Kribosh brothers and refused to pay them. Not only that, he loudly accused them of cheating and rigging the game in the bar."
Frank opened his eyes.
"Rightly so?"
"Rightly so, of course! But any idiot knew that the two cutthroats were tricking with holographic cards. But our student here thought he could dupe them in turn with a jammer. Didn't work, and that's when he snapped. The next day he was gone, a week later my deputy found him on a search flight - thirty kilometres out of town."
Bettsy hoisted in disgust, and her mandibles trembled with indignation.
"It's still murder! What are you going to do about it, peacekeeper? Where are these Kribosh brothers?"
Eastwood did not say a word and instead took a step to the side, where he pulled two more stretchers out of the wall with strong branches.
Troshk held his breath.
They were Borsht, even if only recognisable as such at second glance. All fur had been shaved off, the skin was covered all over with tattoos, and short, exceedingly colourful trousers covered the bare necessities. The children of the ice caves had become desert sons - and had obviously gone astray — a very slippery slope that had led them straight into their demise. The one on the left had three holes in his chest, the one on the right o
nly two - but an additional one in his forehead. Yes, the peacekeeper had done his job, and obviously very thoroughly. Nevertheless, there was a hint of reproach in the Stormcommander's voice, the lurking undertone of an interrogation.
"I take it this was done in self-defence?"
Eastwood creaked indignantly.
"Of course, what do you think? I'm a policeman, not a judge and not an executioner. But we stacked scum like that two metres high in the pirate wars and used them as sandbags! When we went to pick them up, first they pulled the cool act, you know, along the lines of our lawyer will fix it, you're wasting your time, dude. And then, suddenly, they pulled out their laser guns, pierced both my deputy's ears and fried my bark. Look!"
Indeed, on the side, midway up his trunk, the slowly healing remains of a fire were still emblazoned. Troshk nodded, not satisfied but at least understanding.
Growling, Eastwood locked the fallen Borsht up again and led his guests back to his office, where Dila asked the crucial question.
"If this was just a common crime - how do you know Gurabsh was a spy?"
The peacekeeper poured more disgusting coffee and made himself comfortable in his pot.
"Because I take my work seriously, and I have, of course, thoroughly sorted and categorised his hut, his possessions, indeed, his entire estate. And do you know what I found?"
One thing you had to hand it to the old tree - he knew how to keep them on tenterhooks. Spellbound, they shook their heads, antennae, and pseudopodia.
"Encrypted reports on the situation in the Rim. Movements of pirate fleets, political events on the more important planets and moons, assessments of current and future conflicts. Oh yes, and data. A whole shitload of data, but none of it was archaeological in any way - well, maybe some rock surveys of some distant worlds, but even those didn't seem to be aimed at ancient ruins or lost cultures. But raw materials. Vanished raw materials. From a vein of ore, mapped twenty years ago and untraceable months later, to depleted moons and harvested asteroid fields. My suspicion was that he worked for the Mining Consortium, but looking at your squad ..."
He hesitated briefly.
"... then I'd rather guess a few levels higher up the Protectorate food chain. Am I wrong?"
No, he wasn't, but of course, they couldn't officially confirm that. Frank smiled apologetically and cleared his throat.
"Can we have the data? Or at least see it?"
"Fine by me, but you'll need a supercomputer, ideally connected to a holoprojector, if you want to do anything useful with it. And you won't find either on Pseudohursh, not even in the magistrate's office."
Dilara grinned.
"We have both in our ship. And I think you would like to visit it, wouldn't you?"
Eastwood's leaves rustled excitedly - the astrotelepath had found a weak spot in the former privateer.
"Does the Durash slime into his pool? Of course! But not until tomorrow; it's getting late."
Frank looked outside through the narrow slits in the window blinds. Sure enough, night had fallen.
"The most dangerous of all worldviews is the worldview of people who have not looked at the world."
- Alexander von Humboldt
5.
Thou shall not pass!
Two hundred small, shimmering black-brown dots appear on the horizon, standing out as a distant but already recognisable swarm in its details against the pastel background of an imposing nebula of stars.
Two hundred?
Why this number of all things?
How can he know that?
Not at all - and yet, this number burns itself into Frank's mind, penetrates the foreground of his consciousness, again and again, resonates as an echo through the rest of his thoughts.
There are two hundred of them, and they are coming!
Distance creates the illusion of leisureliness, the manageable size of the individual strangers the deceptive feeling of security.
Superiority.
Both are fatal errors.
The ships are fast, much faster than Yrsha can fly in normal space, and impressively agile.
In perfectly synchronised harmony, they fan out, distribute themselves three-dimensionally in space, change the nature of their perception.
A sieve, no, a net, is spun from the swarm to capture them.
Frank feels into the triad, wants to unite with Yrsha and Dilara, establish a common perception, forge a common plan.
There is nothing.
No connection, no mental ribbon, no resonance.
Panic rises in him, and he jerkily turns his head to the side.
The astrotelepath is next to him - or rather her body.
Her spirit, her mind?
Seemingly light-years away.
Expressionless, Dila's big googly eyes stare through the window into space, at the blackness and the lights, the beauty of the mist and the two thousand enemies approaching.
Opponents?
The vague gut feeling becomes a hunch, the hunch becomes a suspicion, the suspicion finally becomes a certainty.
Enemies inbound, two hundred of them!
Frank lifts his upper body a little out of the pilot's couch, risks a look behind.
Troshk remains unmoved and silent at his new weapons console, not lifting a finger to defend the ship.
Even his fur seems petrified, hair sticking out like thin, stiff needles, his long forehead fringes frozen in a wave motion.
At the stairway to the engine station, where Bettsy lies curled up in her protective rigidity, a green-brown huge drop hangs like an icicle from the railing.
Dila and Troshk, Bettsy and Florbsh - they are here but not present.
No help, no assistance, no answer to his questions.
The ship itself is silent, and the enemies are getting closer.
Frank sweats and freezes, shivers and swallows.
His hand jerks upwards towards the haptic interface - and reaches into the void.
The holography blurs, flickers and dissolves into the nothingness from which it was created.
The network of enemy ships contracts, becomes a swarm again, the swarm becomes a ball, an almost organic-looking lump in space.
Shapes that change, silhouettes in flux, something new emerges.
An arrow?
A weapon.
They shoo!
Frank cries out, but no sound leaves his mouth.
The shrill, hysterical screeching is only in his head, echoes in his mind as the laser beam flies towards them.
Slowed down ten thousand times, Frank sees the focused light bridge the distance between them.
Still too fast if you can't react.
The shot will hit Dila.
No guesswork, no subconscious fear, but absolute certainty.
Frank pulls up first his arms, then his body, jumps to the astrotelepath's side, wants to drag her off the pilot's couch.
Remove her from the path of fire.
In vain.
He can't move her, can't lift her, can't even roll her to the side.
Dila seems to weigh a ton, and he seems far too weak.
Hey, did you just call her fat?
A frantic look back into space, through the window that will offer no resistance to the laser.
The tip of the beam is only a few hundred metres away, and Frank reacts.
No thoughts, no deliberation, no uncertainty.
Just instinct.
Frank himself is the shield, a last, desperate bulwark against the death of the astrotelepath.
She must not fall; she must not die!
He throws himself over her, protects her with his back, protects her with his body, protects her with his life.
In vain.
The beam burns hotly into his body, vaporises the skin, chars the muscles, and bites through bones, lungs, tendons, and finally, his heart.
Frank dies, and he dies for nothing.
Because the bundled light is stronger than his body, it is not absorbed, not compl
etely stopped.
It pierces him mercilessly.
From his chest, the beam penetrates Dilara, who only now, far too late, awakens from her rigidity, her eyes even wider, her mouth open to a final sound.
Her death cry.
*
The first thing he felt was pain in his knees. He had no idea what species the hotel beds were originally designed for, but they rested on bizarre, synthetic stalagmites in the middle of the otherwise amazingly cosy rooms, the lying surface on average more than a metre above the floor.
And he had fallen out, apparently landing on his knees and palms. Four points of pain in his body that just fought for his attention - and all lost. For Frank was now awake and mixed in with his scream, which echoed quite real through the room, was a rough, guttural, equally horrifying call from the next room.
Dila!
Ignoring the throbbing in his violated joints, Frank jumped up, staggered to the metal-clad sandstone door in the dark-stained wooden wall. Out into the corridor, through which the homely smell of fried food and spilt beer drifted in almost bite-sized wisps, a turn to the left, two more steps, and he stood before the astrotelepath's door. The decrepit ID scanner embedded there took three, four, five endlessly long seconds to craft the identity confirmation from Frank's DNA, voice pattern, mouth odour and retina and clear the way into Dila's room. An eternity, when the panicked screaming of his co-pilot echoes in your ears.
Interesting, so she added you to the eligible visitors.
That was indeed interesting, but not at that moment, not given the state Dilara was in. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, at a lofty height by her standards, dangerously close to the ground by those of her people. Her neck was stretched through; her head seemed to meet Frank's as well as her bizarrely contorted face. She had her eyes wide open, but also her mouth, a frightening view of the many rows of razor-sharp teeth as well as the depths of her soul.
And darkness reigned there.
Chaos.
The horror, commander, the horror!
