Not Fade Away

by Donna S. Frelick

  Jones waved it with a grin.

  Del held out his hand. Jones lost his grin, and Del thought he might refuse, but he relinquished the weapon.

  “Okay, Anak.” Del urged him toward the hatch. “And remember what I said earlier: we have nothing to lose. I don’t need a healer or that yeoman to operate your ship. I can kill them or confine them safely for the rest of the trip. Your choice.”

  “I understand,” the pilot said, hunching his narrow shoulders as he moved past the others to get to the rear of the craft.

  He hit a pad on the bulkhead beside the exit and the hatch cracked and extended outward and to one side. A ramp slid out from under the craft and set into place with a thunk.

  Anak stood in the open hatchway and gestured to his crewmates. “Basson is still unconscious, Healer. It will take all of us to move him. Come.”

  The medical officer made to move up the ramp first, but the armored yeoman held her back. “Allow me to go first, HO. There may be danger within.”

  “Danger?” Anak began, but Del, hidden in the shadows, shook his head at him and he subsided. Let the armed Gray come first. All the easier to take the unarmed doctor afterwards.

  Anak stepped back to allow the yeoman in. As soon as she cleared the hatch, Del fired. The Level One stun splashed harmlessly off the Gray’s body armor, but it was enough of a surprise that Soker could grab the shocked yeoman and disarm her. Shef rushed past the big man and the yeoman to snatch the healer, who had turned and was trying to make a run for it down the ramp. She didn’t put up much of a fight once Shef had her in his grip.

  Del and the others, including Anak and Soker with the yeoman, filed out of the shuttle to congregate on the Landing Bay deck. None of the captured Grays struggled now. They simply stood, their big black eyes and small mouths showing no emotion, though Del figured they were mad as hell. It was . . . disturbing.

  The healer turned her regard on Anak, who stood without restraint at Del’s side. “You!” The digitized voice emerged from a circlet around her throat like the one Anak wore, presumably for speaking with the fictitious injured Ninoctin guard. “You will be flayed over hot coals for your treason once we reach Minertsa. I will ensure that you face a Court of Judgment.”

  “A lot of assumptions in that statement, doctor,” Del said. “What makes you think I’ll let you live that long?”

  Anak, shivering at the doctor’s threat, looked up at him. “But you said—”

  “I said I’d let everyone live if they cooperated. You have cooperated so far.” Del stared pointedly at the healer. “What about you, doc? Should I kill you now, or can you sit quietly in the brig until we get where we’re going?”

  Except that the translator failed on the word “brig” and all three Grays stared blankly at him. “Prison,” he explained. “Holding cells. A place onboard where you detain people for punishment.”

  “I see. You wish to place us in confinement,” the healer said. “And where are you going?”

  That was a good question, Del thought, for which he had no answer. Yet. His men looked at him with curiosity, also waiting to hear.

  “Not something I’m ready to share,” he said.

  Then he saw the circlet around her neck glow green for a second. “Message from the bridge?” he asked.

  The healer said nothing, but Anak answered, “The Bridge Commander requests a status report. He is requesting one from me, also.”

  “Tell him you are refueling for the return to the planet,” he said to the pilot. “And, you, doc, you’re taking the guard to Sickbay.”

  Anak did as he was told, but the Healing Officer balked. “I refuse to lie to my commander,” she said.

  “Fine,” Del replied, placing the stunner against the yeoman’s temple. He turned the setting to Level Two.

  “No! Wait! I will comply.” She made the report as ordered in a few terse words.

  “Now, show these men the way to the confinement area.” Del saw that Soker still had the yeoman’s stunner. Best he didn’t keep it; the big man wasn’t much for thinking before he acted. Del took the weapon from him and gave it to Jones. “You two and Smith take the ladies to the brig and lock them in. Be nice. Mule, you’re with us.”

  Mule, Shef and Kwai closed in around him as he waved his own stun gun at Anak. “The bridge. On the double, before your Commander figures out things aren’t quite right.”

  The pilot led them up a set of metal stairs to the exit hatch, then out into the corridor to a lift covered with orange script. “This lift takes us to the bridge,” Anak explained. “But it requires special security protocols.”

  The Gray was shaking again. When Del glanced in Kwai’s direction, the fisherman shook his head slowly. Anak wasn’t lying, but he wasn’t telling the whole truth, either.

  “You’re the pilot,” Del said. “Why wouldn’t you have the bridge protocols?”

  “The Bridge Commander may have changed them. It is his prerogative.” Funny how you could infer emotion from a digitized voice. Anak was scared shitless.

  “Only one way to find out,” Del said. He nodded at a security pad on the wall beside the lift hatch. “Try it.”

  The pilot tapped the pad with long fingers to enter a code sequence, then he placed the pads of his three middle fingers in a complicated pattern on the screen. The lift doors sighed open. He looked up to blink at his captors.

  “See? Told you. Come on,” Del said and led the way into the lift.

  Shef held out a hand. “Here, give me that stunner.” Frowning, Del passed it over, and Shef flattened himself to one side of the lift doors. “In case the boys on the bridge get ideas,” he explained.

  The others followed his example, and, seconds later, Del appreciated the soldier’s instincts. The doors slid open and a sizzling blue arc of laze fire splashed against the back of the lift.

  Shef leaned out and shot their attacker from inside the lift, dropping him to the deck. He charged out onto the bridge, his stun gun on the remaining Gray.

  “Don’t move!” he shouted. The other, a male with more elaborate insignia on the sleeves of his uniform, wore no translator circlet, but he understood Shef’s meaning. He stood and said nothing. Did nothing.

  But Anak’s circlet flared green and he began to shake again as they emerged from the lift.

  “What is it?” Del asked him.“Who are we looking at?”

  “It is Bridge Commander Lodiss, the Engineer of the Merssa. He is . . . unhappy with me.”

  “Is there a translator on the bridge?” He wanted to hear everything the commander had to say.

  Anak sidled over to a console on the starboard side of the bridge and pressed a few pads, not daring to meet his commander’s gaze. “You should be able to understand the commander now.”

  Del stepped up to tower over the much smaller Gray, forcing Lodiss to look up at him. “Commander Lodiss, we have control of your ship. I intend to place you in confinement with other members of your crew. You will not be harmed. But I need your pilot and your navigator. If they cooperate, everyone will survive to return to your home port. Do you understand me?”

  “You expect my officers to commit treason! You are nothing but a lowborn coward! The Minertsan navy will hunt you down and torture you to death!”

  Del shrugged. “Maybe. But all that comes later. I have your ship now.”

  “You will not be able to navigate or pilot my ship. My officers will refuse.”

  “Oh, I doubt that. As long as your officers cooperate, you and the others will remain safe in confinement.” Del waved a hand at the navigator, who was recovering from his stun under the watchful eye of Shef and Mule. “Anak already knows, and your navigator will learn, if they give me any trouble, I will not hesitate to kill any of you I don’t need.”

  The engineer let loose a long string of curses the translator didn’t bother to convert to Galactic Standard.

  “I see you’re getting me now,” Del said. “Mule, think you can take this one to the brig on you
r own, or do you need Shef?”

  Mule was short, but he was wiry, and he had all the confidence of a much bigger man. “Don’t worry, boss, I can handle his scrawny ass.”

  With a nod, Del indicated the lift and Mule grabbed Lodiss by the upper arm to lead him off. The Gray went without resistance.

  Shef and Kwai leaned in. “Now what?” Shef said. “You have any idea where to go?”

  Del’s heart dropped into his stomach. Whatever triumph he might have felt at fucking taking over a Gray ship! was drowning in a sea of panic. His perceptual “map” of the galaxy was more like a collection of random photos. He only knew they couldn’t go back to Barelius, a planet full of slave traders only too happy to sell them right back to the Grays.

  “Get those two up and at their posts,” he said, pointing at Anak and the wobbly navigator.

  Shef picked up the downed officer and set him in his seat at the bridge’s center console. Anak took up his position at the helm.

  “Okay, we need to see where we are in relation to the inhabited galaxy,” Del said to the Grays. “Here, Barelius, Minertsan space, neutral space, ConSys space. Show us.”

  Anak looked at the navigator, who sat with his hands at his sides, staring straight ahead. He reached across to the navigator’s station and pressed pads. On a large screen at the front of the bridge, a schematic appeared.

  Anak explained, “We are here, at Tamira VII.” A cursor circled a red dot on the screen. “This is Barelius.” Another circle and dot. “All of this is Minertsan space.” Lines created borders across the starfield. “Neutral space. ConSys space.” More borders. Then numbers and symbols lit up along the bottom of the screen.

  “What are those?” Del said.

  “Coordinates,” Anak and Kwai said at once.

  “Good. And one more thing,” Del said. “Where is the nearest neutral or ConSys planet?”

  “Here,” Anak said, adding another dot and circle and more coordinates. “IzRa. Nine ship-cycles from here.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  By the time Gabriel’s hand fell away from Del’s arm to break their connection, the fire had burned low in the wood stove inside the crowded cabin. Charlie had watched the two men in fascination, as Gabriel had probed, then fallen into a silence broken occasionally by murmured exclamations she barely understood. Like the rest of her companions, she hadn’t dared interrupt the two men in their communion.

  Gabriel seemed to come to himself from a long way off to speak to Rafe. “Your father will sleep deeply now for the rest of the night. But I think you’ll find he feels better when he wakes.”

  Rafe said nothing, only nodded and rose to pick Del up and carry him to bed. The old man never stirred as Rafe scooped him up. Charlie thought he looked shrunken and pale after his ordeal, though he’d seemed to do nothing but sit with his eyes closed for nearly three hours.

  “We have the information we need,” Gabriel said to Rayna. “As we suspected, the camp is deep within Minertsan space, Tamira VII in the Frenoid Cluster. It will take time to get there.”

  He stood and stretched, then suddenly wavered. Lana took his arm to steady him. The Thrane merely smiled at her, but Charlie thought they said more with that exchange of glances than most people would have in paragraphs.

  “Inside Gray space. So, no help from ConSys Fleet,” Rayna was saying. “We’re on our own.”

  “Not unless you plan on starting an intergalactic war by leading the Fleet across the Gray border,” Rafe said as he came back into the room. He didn’t sit again, but stood awkwardly at the side of the room.

  “It will be difficult enough to slip through with one ship,” Gabriel said.

  “Huh,” Rayna said. “You don’t know Sam Murphy.”

  The more Charlie heard, the more alarmed she became. Were they really contemplating war with these aliens—the Grays?

  “The project—the creation of the weapon—was so secret the Grays kept it from all but a few of their own officers,” Gabriel said. “Is it possible this is the brainchild of a faction within the Minertsan military?”

  Rayna’s face wrinkled in thought. “Possible, but . . . the beginning of the project would have been, what, fifty years ago? Long before the start of the Third Rebellion.”

  Confused, Charlie held up a hand. “Okay, wait. Are you saying the official Minertsan government isn’t behind this superweapon?”

  “Could be,” Rayna confirmed. “The oligarchy just put down the Rebellion—a civil war—about five years ago. Things loosened up in the Consortium for a while, then the Labor Minister, Ren Sennick, tried a coup. Now Trin, the capital of the Consortium, is closed to outsiders, and intel is hard to get. We don’t really know how unified the government is.”

  Lana refined the argument. “First Sennick tries a direct takeover with the most conservative elements of his government as allies. Now it looks like someone has been working on a long-term plan to ensure the Consortium will have a steady supply of slaves for as long as anyone will need them. A plan that goes back fifty years. Seems like there’s a deep well of support for the traditional way of life on Minertsa. Back home we used to call that the Ku Klux Klan.”

  North Carolina was far enough south that Charlie knew instantly what she meant. “A secret society. On Minertsa.”

  There was a long moment of weighted silence in the room as the implications mushroomed in five minds before Rafe asked the obvious question. “To what purpose?”

  “What would any secret society in a changing world want?” Lana said. “To keep things the same. To hold onto power.”

  “And in the Consortium that means slaves,” Rafe finished for her.

  “The planet-killer is a sentient machine designed for one thing,” Gabriel said. “To strip a planet of its advanced technology, to eliminate all but the most primitive methods of resistance.”

  “Okay, explain to me how that works,” Rafe said, a skeptical frown on his face. “Is it an electro-magnetic pulse or what?”

  Gabriel considered. “No, the hardware is not affected. It’s more like the creature takes every bit of encoded information from any cybernetic device as a source of energy.”

  “So, when the Grays invade, they can harvest an entire planet’s population using minimal resources—small numbers of mercenaries, Ninoctin guards, the mindwipe,” Rafe said with a nod of understanding. “Like they did on Saltiss.”

  Gabriel confirmed it. “With this machine, this . . . creature, the Gray slaving operation has just become vastly more efficient. Resistance to the slave trade within the Consortium will be overwhelmed by the resources flooding in.”

  “There’s resistance? Within the Gray empire?” Charlie said. What she didn’t know about this brave new galaxy would likely fill the starship Enterprise. And where was Captain Kirk when you needed him?

  “Yes,” Rayna said. “We have some contacts in the resistance. In fact, we’ll need to use them to verify your hypothesis, Gabriel.”

  “Yes, and quickly,” Gabriel agreed. “We need to know what we’ll be facing beyond IzRa. If the whole Minertsan fleet is protecting this weapon at Tamira VII, our mission becomes one of sending a small sabotage team. But if we’re lucky, and the house of Minertsa is divided against itself, we may be able to get close enough with the Shadowhawk to destroy this thing.”

  One ship, Charlie thought. On a suicide mission to take out a sentient, planet-killing machine deep in enemy territory. Could the situation get any worse? Then she saw the shadow of worry in Rafe’s eyes and realized: Oh, yeah. As far as Del and Rafe were concerned, the enemy was already at the gates.

  Rafe wanted to pace the length of the room—moving helped him think—but the brace on his leg wouldn’t cooperate. And, when you came right down to it, that fucking brace was the reason he was afraid his CFO would say the one word he didn’t want to hear.

  “So. About Vaalad Zouk,” he said.

  Rayna nodded. “We can assume he knows his assassin failed and his local contacts are no longer in
place. He’ll be coming himself as soon as he’s healed.”

  Charlie looked stricken, her beautiful face going pale. Don’t worry, baby, Rafe thought, I won’t leave you.“Good, let him come,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  Rayna frowned at him. “You have no qualms about using your own father as bait?”

  He opened his mouth to unleash all the arguments he’d been holding back, but then he saw one corner of Rayna’s mouth lift. Lana and Gabriel, too, found something funny about this.

  “You never planned to move us,” he said. “Even though it’s standard operating procedure.”

  “Yeah, rules,” Rayna said with a shrug. “I’m not so good at the ones that don’t make sense. Why move you so you can live your life looking over your shoulder for Zouk?”

  “One thing we can agree on,” he said.

  Rayna considered him. “You sure you’re up for this?”

  “Zouk’s been one step ahead of us from the beginning,” Lana said. “I wouldn’t underestimate him.” She glanced pointedly at the brace that hampered Rafe’s movement.

  Gabriel put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “Doc Berta said Rafe’s leg will continue to heal at an accelerated rate for 48 hours, an effect of his time under the healing light. If we’re lucky that will be enough time.”

  “And we’ll send down a team from the Shadowhawk,” Rayna said. “Three of Sam’s best security people. You won’t have to face Zouk alone.”

  Rafe nodded, thinking the matter was settled, but Charlie hadn’t had her say. “Wait. Just . . . wait.” She paused, collecting her thoughts. “Isn’t this . . . Zouk . . . a little late? You already have the information you need from Del. What good would it do him to kill Del now? He lost the fight, right? Won’t he just give up and go home?”

  The Rescue agents in the room looked at each other for a long, uncomfortable moment before Rayna took up the challenge. “Maybe, if this were just about the credits the Grays are paying him,” she said. “But it’s gone beyond that now; we’ve hurt his pride. He’s out for blood.”