Victory at all costs (Spinward Book 3)

by Rupert Segar

  “I am Zeeann, one of the last of a long line of Creators … The alien woman revealed then long story of her race’s involvement with Humankind. She admitted that Creators had made mistakes and had created a potential catastrophe in the future. Zeeann told him about her conjunction with Art King and how he was the father of her three children. She explained the Creator’s belief that their offspring could be the salvation for both Humans and Creators.

  Marcus was completely convinced by Zeeann. The telepathic conversation allowed him to feel her emotions, her fears and her hopes. He realised how important this mission was not just for her and her children but for everyone. Zeeann had finished her tale, but Marcus was still mulling over the many details.

  “I see Zeeann has been filling you in,” said Lara, standing in front of him with the three ‘children.’ Marcus, I want you to meet Kimo, Gemi, and Calli.

  Marcus felt he already knew and liked the three young aliens because of his telepathic conversation with their mother, Zeeann. They were charming and endlessly inquisitive. They had never met a human before and they wanted to know everything.

  “If we’re the first humans you’ve met, how come you speak perfect Terran?” asked Marcus.

  “Our grandfather taught us seven languages,” said Kimo.

  “Creator, our mother tongue, Terran, ancient Greek, Mandarin, and French also from old Earth …” said Gemi

  “We also have a passing knowledge of Celtic and Glaswegian, which are both precursors to Terran.” Said Calli. “Our grandfather says Glaswegian is the language of warriors.”

  As if on cue, Asclepius appeared holding a piece of electronic equipment, with wires dangling from it. He did not look happy.

  “Ah, Marcus, glad to meet you,” said Asclepius. “My daughter tells me you now know why we are here. Do you know much about electronics?”

  “No, nothing,” said Marcus, “except the old ‘turn it off, then turn it back on again.’”

  “I do not see that as a solution,” said Asclepius. “This explains a few things. It appears our disruptor fields have not been working for quite some time.”

  The three children heard it first and turned their heads to the sky above Crete. Then the Humans and adult Creators heard the growing rumbling and also looked towards the largest island on Fair Isles. A spaceship broke through the cloud layer between Hope and Crete. It moved at speed towards the capital island descending and turning.

  “We are catching up with history,” said Zeeann, happily. “That is Explorer Spirit making contact with Fail Isles. For you on Fair Isles, the Millennium of Isolation is over.”

  “But dark clouds are approaching too,” said Asclepius. “The fate of our two species will be settled here.”

  Chapter 25: In the Blood

  Thistle and Nigeal sat side by side in the Intendant’s office. It may have been called an office but it was more like a suite: a series of grand rooms connected by large double doors. A tall dignified woman entered the room carrying a small tray which she set down on low table in front of the two guardian siblings.

  “The Intendant apologises for keeping you waiting,” she said. “He is summoning the cabinet for a meeting. He will be with you as soon as he can.”

  “Are you not Lady Thea, the royal spouse?” said Thistle.

  “You are very well briefed.” Lady Thea smiled and looked at the pair. “Please. My husband has been expecting you or someone like you. His intention is to try to effect a change of power without excessive violence.”

  “Unlike the executions and slavery used by the Empire when you took over,” said Nigeal, with some loathing.

  “We had no choice,” said Lady Thea. “My husband is a civilised man. The Kargol code for pacifying planets specifies a much harsher regime. There could have been decimation of the population or public torture sessions. The Intendant took the most humane course allowed him.”

  “Why not ignore the protocols and behave like a decent human being?” spat Nigeal.

  A drawling voice came from behind the guardian siblings. “Because among my staff there are the most loathsome political tell-tales just waiting to see me despatched to Crandos in chains.”

  A lean lantern-jawed figure stood in the doorway. The Intendent came forward smiling.

  “I won’t offer you the hand of a self-confessed mass murderer,” he said. “But please be assured that I kept fatalities to a minimum. Some of the political officers on my staff would have been draconian to a sadistic degree. Still, let us not consider the foibles of the past when our future is approaching a critical point. Our dear doctor has assembled enough of the cabinet downstairs to discuss the term for the Empire’s surrender. However, there has been an unexpected development. The Emperor’s enforcer is soon to join us. A quintuple flotilla of destroyers is in orbit and Colonel Garth is on his way down in a shuttle.”

  “With five Kargol warships above us, why are you surrendering to the guardians?” asked Thistle.

  “I’m considering all possibilities,” said the Intendant. “Garth and his destroyers may hold sway but I am not ignoring the capabilities of the alien ship that seems to have allied itself to the guardian cause.”

  “Our ship has some of those capabilities and is cloaked in orbit,” said Nigeal. “Tell me Intendant, which side are you on.”

  “Sir, I am a diplomat, so naturally I have to back both sides.”

  “Oh, Terrance, tell the truth,” said Lady Thea.

  The Intendant stopped smiling, clasped his hands together and bowed his head for a full minute. He took a deep breath.

  “Let us all hope your ship up above has the powers to protect us. What I am about to say will condemn both my wife and me as traitors. We want the guardians to hold sway here.”

  “Why would a dictator like you want to give away power?” said Thistle “You’d be betraying everything the Empire stands for.

  The Intendant smiled. “Oh, yes, as one of the ruling class on Crandos, I was brought up with the ethos of ruthless militarism but then I met Thea. Ever since I have striven to be as humane as I can within the imperial codes.”

  The intendant looked lovingly at his wife and she smiled back at him encouragingly.

  “The Lady Thea, my wife, shares none of her uncle’s selfish barbarism. I think the fact she has not one gram of ruthless ambition has allowed her to escape imperial assassination. All of her uncles and cousins have met with unfortunate, but quite deliberately planned, so called accidents.”

  “Terrance, most of the killings were the work of Colonel Garth,” said Lady Thea. “The Emperor’s enforcer is quite happy working for my uncle and would not want to see him deposed. The Emperor and Colonel Garth know I am not threat: I have no ambition to take the imperial throne.”

  “But you are next in line. So, why is Garth coming here now?” said the Intendant.

  +

  “Your Majesty, I convey felicitations from his Imperial Highness, the King of Ten Thousand Worlds, the Kargol Emperor, long may reign over us.”

  The colonel was down on one knee bowing before the Lady Thea in the throne room. This makeshift chamber in the Intendant’s apartment was remarkably modest given its function. Lady Thea sat on a grand but uncomfortable looking throne on a raised platform at the end of the room. Behind her on the wall was a 3-D projection of the Kargol Emperor. The intendant sat on a smaller throne on Lady Thea’s left side.

  “Colonel Garth,” she said, “let’s dispense with the fripperies. Please, rise and make yourself comfortable. Then you can explain why you are here.”

  “Your Majesty, always to the point,” said Garth getting up and taking a seat opposite Lady Thea. Now he had to crane his neck to look up at her. “I have but one purpose. It is to bring you a gift of uncountable blessings: that confers ecstasy and ease, faith and understanding. It is a prize beyond understanding!”

  “And what exactly would that be, Colonel?” said the Intendant, sharply.

  “Your answers, all the answers all ins
ide this container,” said Garth beginning to remove a metal cylinder from inside his jacket pocket. “It’s … it’s … No you mustn’t …”

  The colonel’s hand was frozen was frozen half way out of his jacket pocket, the shiny chrome side plate sized cylinder gripped by his fingers. The colonel’s face had a rictus grin of death.

  “Is he having a seizure, Terrance?” asked Lady Thea.

  Garth suddenly started breathing, gulping in the air.

  “Don’t open the container …”

  The colonel gave a sudden gasp of pain, his face wincing and eyelids opening wide.

  “I’ve gone blind! …”

  Garth’s fingers went into a spasm. The 2 cm thick disk was jerked out of his pocket and clattered onto the floor spinning ever more rapidly making a ringing tone that went up and up in pitch. The Intendant stepped forward, putting his foot firmly on the chrome cylinder, bringing the ringing to an abrupt halt.

  “What’s in it, Garth, a bomb, poison?”

  “I … I … I can’t tell you.” said the Emperor’s enforcer, beginning to slide off the chair, his eye’s gyrating wildly. “It’s the same as in me, doing this. I can’t … tell you their …”

  Garth fell onto the floor unconscious.

  +++

  “Garth’s blood is contaminated with some sort of organism barely bigger than his red corpuscles,” said Dr Robert Fillips, peering down a microscope lens in his medical bay in his house.

  The vid screen attached to the molecular microscope showed a score of red blobs and a few smaller dots each with four legs.

  “They are too big to be bacteria or viruses,” said Doctor Robert.

  “They are parasites,” said Dr Alicia Gomez, a specialist in tropical disease from Nassau Keys, now health secretary for Fair Isles. “But not a type I have seen before.”

  “I was hoping you could tell me,” said Robert

  “Well, it’s lucky for Garth that you were both at the cabinet meeting when he collapsed,” said Lady Thea.

  “Wouldn’t it be more propitious if we concentrated on what’s inside this confounding cylinder rather than fussing over an imperial assassin?” said the Intendant.

  “Never mind my husband, Dr Robert. He is over protective,” said Lady Thea affectionately squeezing her husband’s arm.

  “Unless we want to crack open the cylinder, which I wouldn’t advise, I cannot tell you,” said Robert. “The outer casing is made of some sort of tungsten alloy, completely blocking delta-rays and even x-rays.”

  “Garth said what was in the case was the same as what was causing him to collapse. At least, that’s what I think he meant,” said Lady Thea.

  “These parasites are controlling his actions. We need a scan of his brain,” said Dr Gomez.

  +++

  As Colonel Garth lay on a cot in an induced coma, Dr Robert and Dr Alicia Gomez examined a life-size hologram of the enforcer’s head slowly turning above a projector table.

  “Let’s strip away everything except the brain and the optic nerves,” said Dr Robert, dabbing and swiping at his control pad. “Garth said he went blind.”

  The hologram changed to an eerie image of an unsupported brain with two floating eyeballs connected to it by a paired nerve. As the 3-D image continued to rotate slowly, Dr Gomez peered closely at it.

  “Stop the rotation, please Robert. Can you enlarge the area where the optical nerves end at the chiasm at the base of the brain?”

  There at the base of both nerves were clusters of small back dots each with four appendages.

  “They are like tiny black crosses. But what are they doing?” said Dr Gomez.

  “I don’t know, but the scanner picked up two more anomalies, the first on the frontal lobe.”

  The hologram shrank back to life size and rotated down to give the doctors a view of the front of the brain. On each hemisphere there was a six legged parasite. The creature’s body was less than a millimetre across but each leg or arm was 5 millimetres long. Dr Robert and Dr Gomez exchanged glances.

  “And finally going up to the pineal gland,” said Robert.

  The holo-image turned again and now the two medical experts were looking at the back of the brain. The imaged enlarged coming towards them but the grey matter dissipated revealing an inner chamber. At the top of the brain stem was the pineal gland, once thought to be the seat of the human sole. There squatting on the gland was a spider, its body was a full 10 millimetres across. This creature had eight legs and each of them had pierced a different part of Garth’s brain.

  “They’re spiders,” said Dr Gomez. “They are all spiders.”

  +++

  “There is no way we can operate on Garth,” said Dr Robert.

  “Any attempt to remove or destroy the parasites could result in catastrophic damage,” explained Dr Alicia Gomez.

  The two doctors, Lady Thea, the Intendant, Thistle and Nigeal were sitting at a table in the shade of a cherry tree in Dr Robert’s garden.

  “These … spiders,” said Lady Thea, hesitantly, “are they really controlling the colonel?”

  “The two spiders on the frontal lobe are secreting complex chemicals that must be affecting his emotions,” said Dr Gomez. “The spider on the pineal gland is the more worrying. It seems to be sending tiny electrical impulses to different areas of the brain.”

  “So it’s a very effective form of brain control,” said Dr Robert. “As long as Garth was doing what the spiders wanted he was fine. The minute he disobeyed orders or tried to tell us about his infection he was paralysed.”

  “If it is true, it is a huge problem as we don’t know how many other people are being controlled by these parasites,” said Thistle.

  “We have a more immediate problem,” said the Intendant. “The captain of one of the imperial destroyers is demanding to speak to Colonel Garth. I told her that the colonel had collapsed and was being treated, but she’s insisting on sending down a military shuttle with a medic and a security team. They’ll be on their way shortly.”

  “We cannot allow a military medic to examine Garth,” said Dr Robert. “Either they know about the parasite and we don’t want them to see that we know as well – or they don’t know and we can’t let them find out.”

  “Can’t you stop them, Nigeal?” asked Lady Thea.

  “Our ship is only an explorer class vessel. They have five destroyers up there.”

  “I thought you said you had some of the features of the alien ship that defeated the entire imperial fleet at Chimera One?” said the Intendant.

  “In a surprise attack, we could destroy or disable one, maybe two warships,” said Thistle. “But then we would have to deploy our defensive shield and that would leave us stuck in a stalemate.”

  “OK, so brute force should be our last resort,” said the Intendant. “What else can we do? Why not declare quarantine – tell them Garth’s got some ghastly disease and no-one from the flotilla is allowed to land on Arcadia.”

  “I don’t think that would stop imperial troopers,” said Dr Robert.

  “Hold on, Robert, maybe the Intendant has the right idea,” said Dr Gomez, smiling. “We could put Garth in quarantine.”

  +++

  From the rear of their requisitioned carrier, the security platoon disembarked in pairs, guns at the ready. They quickly formed two lines back to back, one facing Dr Robert’s house, the other covering the approach road. Four of the twenty strong troop ran round the back of the building. The forward doors of the carrier folded down to the ground and out of the vehicle came a lieutenant and a medic.

  “Permission to inspect the patient, sir,” said the lieutenant saluting the Intendant.

  “By all means, he is in the isolation ward,” said the Intendant waving his arm at the small ward on the end of Dr Robert’s colonial style building.

  The four bedded room had been quickly extended using a collapsible plastiform airlock. The single window to the ward was covered with a sheet of transparent plastiform. Below the w
indow was an impressive vent pumping air out of the quarantined ward and funnelling the extracted gasses through a delta-ray sanitizing furnace.

  “As long as you and your medic have six months to spare,” added the Intendant. “Colonel Garth has a well-developed case of space leprosy. Come and have a look.”

  The two officers looked deflated as they peered through the plastiform sheet covering the window of the isolation ward. They could see Colonel Garth unconscious, covered in what looked like egg cup sized hives. A man in a white environment suit waved to them cheerily.”

  “Dr Fillips has an immunity to space leprosy, having caught it himself last year. He was fortunate in that his parasites were diagnosed early, unlike Colonel Garth,” said the Intendant. “Nevertheless, even to get Dr Fillips out of the ward involves 24-hours in the airlock, immersed in argon gas and being bombarded by gamma rays. The larvae of the Iberian mosquito are incredibly hardy.”

  “Can’t my medic just go in an isolation suit, do his tests, do his 24-hours decontamination, job done,” said the lieutenant looking slightly desperate.

  “If only it was that simple,” said the Intendant, shaking his head. “By Kargol regulation, anyone having contact with a full blown leper must demonstrate complete immunity before he or she can be released from isolation. It is the only certain way of preventing the scourge of leprosy spreading among civilian and military populations. Your medic would need to be infected, then, hopefully, cured of the condition, a process that takes months. And, even then, he may not develop full immunity.”

  “Naval regulations say my medic must make a visual inspection and take blood samples.”

  “That, I think, is in the realms of possibility,” said the Intendant, smiling.

  +++

  The medic stood with his nose pressed to the clear plastiform window peering into the makeshift isolation ward. Dr Robert pulled back the sheet covering Colonel Garth to reveal a score of large egg cup sized swellings on his body.