Mapped Space 1: The Antaran Codex

by Stephen Renneberg

  Adrenalin suddenly overpowered the numbing alcohol, giving me a moment’s clarity. I triggered the one thought psionicly embedded into the consciousness of every threaded EIS agent. It was the one safeguard that ensured if we were ever captured, if alien-tech ever tore us open the way the Codex was ripping me apart, we would reveal none of the secrets we carried.

  EMERGENCY PURGE AND WIPE! I thought, unlocking the last ditch rescue protocol, the threaded equivalent of a bullet to my bionetic brain.

  “Here! Hold the key to riches,” I said, pushing the Codex into Marie’s hands.

  “You know I love riches!” she said with a smile, taking the Codex.

  White spots flashed before my eyes as the emergency protocol erased everything my threading knew – everything Lena had uploaded into me – and tried to crush whatever the Codex had infected me with. My ears were assaulted by high pitched tones, a thousand unknown odors battered my sense of smell, bitter and sweet flavors tormented my sense of taste, all of it imagined. I stumbled and fell, no longer in control of my arms and legs, unable to breathe.

  Marie tried to grab me, but I was too heavy and it happened so fast. I crumpled to the rock floor, limp as a fresh corpse, heart no longer beating. When threading failed, it took the entire nervous system with it. It was bionetic technology’s Achilles heel.

  “Sirius, are you OK?” Marie asked, kneeling beside me confused and concerned.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d initiated a purge and wipe – I’d done it in training, but never in the field. And never like this! It took longer than in the simulator, because the protocol sensed an alien influence and scrubbed me clean with ruthless precision. To the emergency protocol, whether I lived or died was irrelevant. All that mattered was the destruction of the alien force and the deletion of everything stored in my artificial memory. When it came to bionetics, agent survival was secondary to secrecy.

  A simple thought appeared in my fading mind: CLEAR.

  The rescue protocol released control of my body, giving me one chance to revive before physical death.

  RESET BIONETICS, I thought, ordering a full system restart.

  Sensation returned to my body. My heart began beating again and with a gasp, my lungs filled with air. I took several quick breaths while Marie leaned over me, unaware how close to death I’d been. My threading’s sensory capabilities came flooding back, but my bionetic memory was empty, wiped clean. All the security codes and clearances that allowed me to identify myself to other EIS agents, to the navy, to every human and many local alien governments were gone. If I needed help now, I couldn’t call for it. I was completely on my own.

  “You OK, Skipper?” Jase asked, as he turned on wobbly legs and looked back towards me.

  I gave him a reassuring nod. “Just too much Merayan wine, I guess,” I mumbled as I sat up, no longer inebriated. The purge had wiped all trace of alcohol from my system, reading it as a poison to be destroyed. I relaxed, feigning mild drunkenness.

  Marie relaxed and whispered meaningfully, “Not too much, I hope. Your night is far from over!”

  I gave her an appreciative look, knowing with the alcohol gone from my system, she would be surprised how unimpaired my performance would be!

  When we reached my door, Jase eyed us both curiously.

  Before I could say anything, Marie said, “My room is second on the left.”

  Jase nodded, resigned to his banishment. “I know.”

  “And don’t go through my things,” she added. “I’ll know if you do.”

  Jase gave her a wounded look, then headed towards her room to sleep while I let us into my quarters.

  “Where should I put this?” she asked, holding up the Codex.

  “On the dresser.” I had decided I couldn’t risk touching it again. Whatever its universally adaptive interface was, it was a menace to my threading.

  She placed the alien device on the table, then approached me slowly, in that feline predatory way of hers that I adored. We locked arms, then lips, then I forgot all about the Antaran Codex for a few hours.

  * * * *

  An explosion shattered the night, then the sporadic crackle of magnetic accelerated gunfire reverberated through the darkness with increasing intensity. I sat up, listening to the cacophony of battle and the confused shouts of men echoing through stone walled corridors.

  “What’s going on?” Marie asked sleepily.

  “Sounds like war’s been declared.” I jumped out of bed, dressed quickly and was just strapping on my P-50 when Jase burst into the room, one fragger in hand, the other holstered.

  “There’s something out there!” he declared. “It’s tearing Sarat’s guards apart.”

  “What do you mean ‘it’?” Marie asked, pulling the covers up to conceal her nakedness.

  “I saw a blur in the dark!” Jase said. “It’s big! And fast!”

  I switched on my P-50. It was loaded with anti-personnel slugs; nasty against flesh, weak against armor. “Stay here.”

  “No way, Skipper!”

  “Guard that!” I said pointing at the Codex sitting on the dresser. When I passed him, I added in a lower voice, “And Marie.”

  “I don’t need guarding!” she declared, throwing off the sheets and running naked to where her clothes were. Instead of dressing, she checked her guns.

  “Fine! You guard him!” They could look after each other, but only I was threaded and ultra-reflexed, giving me an edge neither of them could match. I turned to Jase. “Whoever’s out there is after the Codex. Make sure they don’t get it!”

  “Damn it Skipper, you have all the fun!”

  I took that as agreement. “When you get your own ship, then you can have all the fun.” I exchanged a silent farewell look with Marie, who had finally started pulling on her clothes, and slipped out into the corridor.

  The penthouse lights were out. Red and orange tracer streaked past the end of the corridor amid a diffuse red glow spilling across the central lounge area from the windows. The storm was raging outside and the metal shutters should have been covering the windows, so where was that light coming from?

  Another explosion shook the spire, followed by the sound of a rock wall collapsing. Sarat’s guards yelled over the gunfire, their voices heavy with fear and confusion.

  “It’s over there!”

  “On the left.”

  “I’m hit! I’m hit.”

  “It’s behind you!”

  “Damn it’s fast!”

  A man screamed in terror and was abruptly silenced.

  “He’s dead,” another yelled in panic.

  “It’s behind us! Shoot it! Shoot it!”

  Sarat’s guards were all hard ex-military types, but whatever they were fighting was getting on top of them. I cranked my threaded optics to maximum and crept towards the end of the corridor.

  Two guards lay dead on the floor to the right, outlined by the red glow from the windows. Their bodies radiated ghostly thermals with hot spots marking where blood welled from shrapnel wounds caused by anti-personnel slugs. Their weapons lay nearby, still glowing infra-red hot from having recently been fired. One guard was missing an arm, cleanly severed from his body. It wasn’t a blast wound. It looked like his arm had been surgically sliced off.

  To my left, the shadowy forms of five guards fired at the source of the red glow as they fell back towards the meeting hall. They were working together, afraid but not panicking, covering each other’s retreat like pros and yelling sightings of their adversary. A dark slender blur, half again taller than a man, flashed past the end of the corridor trying to flank them. It vanished to my left, then a muzzle flash lit up the five guards, hitting one in the chest and hurling him against the wall. The attacker’s gun sounded like the suppressed sonic boom of a Union Regular Army Forger, a heavy assault weapon that could punch through any Earth-tech body armor. Yet the attacker was clearly non-human!

  So why would an alien be using Earth-tech weaponry against humans?

 
; Sarat appeared in the meeting hall’s doorway on the far side of the lounge, yelling for the guards to fall back. He withdrew inside as the four surviving guards retreated after him, firing as they went. Suddenly, a new stream of tracer flashed across the room from the right as another guard appeared, running alongside the windows towards the meeting hall, firing wildly.

  The alien blur swept past me again, leaping back across the room, too fast for the guards to hit. An eye-hand modded EIS sniper might have got it, but toughness modded grunts had no chance. It fired while in the air, momentarily silhouetting itself with the muzzle flash, revealing a willowy reptilian torso, slender triangular head, long lean arms and legs and a whip-like tail which flicked through the air for balance. The alien held the Forger in one hand and a long knife-like weapon with glowing edges in the other. The URA assault gun was too heavy for a man to hold one handed, but the alien wielded it as easily as it did the blade. In a flash, the attacker swept past the guard running for the meeting hall, raising the knife, then slicing him apart from shoulder to hip. The alien-tech blade passed effortlessly through the guard’s body as if it encountered no resistance, then the guard’s corpse collapsed in two pieces.

  Weapons fire from the remaining guards flashed around the agile reptilian silhouette, but it was too fast. At the door, one of the guards took a blast in the shoulder, and was knocked to the floor. As the wounded guard tried to rise, the reptilian raced forward and decapitated him with a single stroke of its blade. Without slowing, it darted into the meeting hall, firing and slashing with the speed and precision of a highly trained, fearlessly aggressive assassin.

  I crept into the lounge where my sniffer got line of sight on five dead and two wounded guards. One of the rectangular metal window shutters had been smashed in and now lay on the floor, partly covering a dead guard. A dull gray hull floated outside the window, surrounded by a soft red light which repelled the snowstorm’s icy blast. The dark opening of a hatch in the hull was aligned to the open window, marking where the reptilian had entered the penthouse.

  A stun grenade detonated inside the meeting hall as weapon flashes, shouts and screams filled the air. Knowing it was almost over, I raced across the lounge area. When I was halfway across, the wall exploded. The blast threw me sideways, hurling me onto the hard stone floor and sending me sliding into the side wall. For a moment, I lay stunned as the thunder of gunfire and the screams of dying men were drowned out by the ringing in my ears.

  My vision blurred, making the threading’s markers over the dead and dying guards in my mind’s eye unreadable. In the meeting hall the gunfire ceased, signaling the last of the guards were dead. A moment later, the tall reptilian emerged carrying a rectangular box. I didn’t recognize it at first, then as I started to regain my senses, I realized it was the diagnostic scanner Sarat had put the Codex’s transport device in the day before. I squinted, trying to clear my vision as I realized the reptilian wasn’t after the Codex at all. It wanted the transport device and the scans Sarat had made of it!

  While it strode towards the shattered window and the craft beyond, I pulled myself across the stone floor towards my P-50 lying nearby. I got my hand on it, then clumsily sighted on the reptilian. My arm rocked unsteadily, sending the first shot high into the rock ceiling. Instinctively, the reptilian dodged sideways while I weakly tried following its movement, firing again and again, missing several times until a white impact ring flashed at its shoulder. The reptilian stumbled from the impact, then straightened unhurt. The slug had been deflected by its dark, skin tight suit – not body armor but a skin hugging defensive shield.

  No wonder the guards hadn’t been able to hurt it!

  The reptilian held the URA Forger, but rather than shoot me, it dropped the diagnostic scanner and reached across its chest to a scabbard sewn into its ornately layered black body suit. It drew its knife, fitted with a blade almost as long as my forearm and inlaid with intricate serpentine carvings. The ritual assassin’s weapon came to life as an electric shimmer glowed along the sharp edges on both sides of the blade from point to hilt, while on the flat of the blade, the lines of serpentine carvings glowed starkly white. I’d heard of these weapons, but never seen one first hand. It wasn’t really a knife, but a quantum weapon able to sever atomic binding forces on contact. With new found purpose, the reptilian started towards me.

  I held down the P-50’s trigger, going to full auto, burping slugs three times a second. Flashes burst across the reptilian’s chest as its skin shield deflected my hypersonic slugs. The reptilian staggered from each impact, taking a step backwards, then my P-50 clicked empty and the room fell silent.

  Realizing I was out of ammo, it started towards me with its knife angled down, ready to inflict a decapitating death blow. It crouched, about to leap at me, when a familiar crackling sound broke the silence. Two streams of fragmentation slugs caught the reptilian in the side of the chest, shattering on contact and knocking it off its feet. Surprised, it rolled away, turning in confusion towards the twin streams of gunfire tracking its movement.

  Behind the flashes of the twin fraggers burping on full auto, blonde hair appeared from the shadows of the hallway. Jase walked toward the reptilian, eyes locked on his target, blasting with both guns held at arm’s length. The reptilian’s skin shield erupted in overlapping impact rings as slugs peppered it, then its torso rippled with electric force lines as its shield began to overload.

  The reptilian darted sideways as a siren began to wail throughout the penthouse. Thinking it would soon be facing many more guards, the reptilian retreated, powering off the blade and sliding it into its chest scabbard as it ran. It scooped the diagnostic scanner off the floor without slowing, then leapt through the shattered window into the craft floating outside. Dull gray metal irised shut, sealing the hatch, then the craft shot straight up away from the spire exposing the lounge to the full force of the icy wind outside.

  Jase bounded toward me, holstering his guns. “Skipper? Are you OK?”

  I sat up slowly, nodding. “I told you to stay with the Codex.”

  “I did – until I heard your MAK singing,” Jase said, referring to the distinctive high pitched sound of the P-50’s magnetic accelerator. “I knew you were up to your eyeballs in trouble!”

  I climbed slowly to my feet. “Get back there and keep an eye on it.”

  Jase gave me a hurt look. “You’re welcome – for saving your life.” He started back towards the room.

  “Jase.” When he stopped and looked back, I said, “Thanks, you did good.”

  He gave me a cocky grin and hurried back to our quarters while I tried to make sense of what had happened. Wind and snow blasted in through the open window, illuminated by the floodlit landing platform several hundred meters below. The two wounded guards were now both dead, their body temps plummeting in the freezing arctic air. In the meeting hall, all of the guards were dead, some with limbs or heads severed by the reptilian’s killing blade. Sarat lay near the back wall, breathing in short, sharp gasps, close to death. His lower abdomen was soaked in blood and his right leg was missing from above the knee.

  I knelt beside him. “Who are you working for?”

  His terrified eyes focused on me as he made a gurgling sound. “Ani- . . . Hata- . . .”

  “No, you weren’t. I’m not even sure he exists.”

  Confusion spread across his face. “Irzae . . .”

  “The Irzae had nothing to do with this. The alien that attacked, have you ever dealt with its kind before?”

  “No.” Sarat coughed blood and made a gurgling sound. “Holo . . . gram . . . only.”

  He’d been deceived all along, never suspecting who he’d really been dealing with.

  “Why?” he wheezed.

  “Because they hate us,” I whispered.

  The look on Sarat’s face told me he didn’t understand, then his eyes glazed over and his head rolled lifelessly forward.

  I gave my sniffer a chance to scan the room, but it found o
nly human DNA. When I returned to the lounge, it was the same story – human traces everywhere, but nothing I could use as evidence to prove what I already knew to be true. The lounge was freezing now with snow blasting in over the remains of dead guards and wrecked furniture. I retraced the movements of the reptilian, searching for any bio-trace, finishing at the wrecked floor-to-ceiling window. The shutter had not been blown in by an explosion, because that would have left an energy trace that could have been used as evidence. Instead, the window had been pushed in as if the alien craft had simply rammed it. Wary of the slippery, snow covered rock floor and the treacherous wind, I was about to give up when my sniffer indicated a possible trace.

  I dropped to my stomach and crawled through the snow to the edge, feeling the full force of the arctic wind on my face. Certain that whatever was out there would soon be gone under the press of the storm, I eased my head out over the edge to give my sniffer line of sight. The sheer rock face fell away to the landing platform far below where the floodlit scramjet shuttle was lashed down by cables and magnetic clamps and whipped by blasting snow. Below the landing platform, enormous sea swells crashed against the black rock spire, throwing spray high into the air.

  Immediately below the floor, my sniffer searched the slick rock face for biological traces. A targeting reticule suddenly flashed into my mind, highlighting a point on the rock less than a meter away. Jase must have winged the reptilian as its skin shield failed, because there was a droplet of blood on the rock face. One tiny drop! The wind was rapidly tearing away what little genetic material was left, but as I leaned closer, the sniffer got a positive read on the sample. My bionetic memory had been wiped, but some things were hard coded into the filaments themselves so no matter what happened, I could never lose them. This was one of those! The DNA sniffer matched its read to the hard coded data structure triggering a threaded alarm inside my head. It was a warning I’d only ever received in training, a warning I never expected to encounter in the field, but based on what I’d seen, it was a warning I expected.