Mapped Space 1: The Antaran Codex

by Stephen Renneberg

  “Izin, who’s on the roof?”

  “Four men. Three are armed. I don’t have a clear shot.”

  With the siren wailing relentlessly, we tried the biolab’s front door, but it was electronically locked. I might have expected the building to be secured at night, but I couldn’t understand why it was sealed shut in the early afternoon. I drew my P-50 and blasted the lock, then slid the door open and stepped inside. Two men and a woman wearing white head to foot anti-contamination suits ran towards us. I aimed my gun at them, thinking they were charging us, but they ran past us.

  “There are more trapped upstairs!” one of the men yelled as he ran outside.

  There were elevators near the entrance, stairs to the right and a floor map of the facility on the far side of the foyer. Pico scanning was on the third floor. Not wanting to risk being trapped in the elevator, we took the stairs. When we reached the third floor, we heard banging and muffled, frightened voices calling for help from a door labeled Genetics Lab 2.

  “Get away from the door!” I yelled, then blasted the lock.

  Two women wearing the same anti-contamination gear as the three on the ground floor rushed out. “Thanks! We thought we’d never get out.”

  “How long have you been in there?” Marie asked.

  “Six hours,” One of the lab technicians said as they started for the stairs.

  “What’s that alarm?” I called after them.

  The lab tech glanced back, surprised I didn’t recognize it. “The evacuation alert!” she said before disappearing down the stairs.

  “We definitely shouldn’t be here,” I said, wondering what they were evacuating from.

  I forced open two more doors in response to cries for help before we reached an entrance labeled ‘Picometric Scanning’. I blasted the lock, then slid the door open to find a large laboratory with a brightly lit, arch shaped machine at its center. The arch supported a translucent circular projector which was emitting a high pitched whine and directing a tight blue beam down onto the Codex, which sat on a flat metallic scanning surface.

  Vargis stood beside the Codex impatiently while my two old friends from Hades City – Scarface and Jawbones – threatened a white coated technician. None of them had heard me shoot the door lock over the siren and the deafening whine of the malfunctioning pico scanner.

  “Shut it down!” Vargis yelled.

  “I can’t!” the technician replied helplessly. “It’ll damage the Codex!”

  “It’s indestructible, you idiot!” Vargis shouted, turning to his two enforcers. “Shoot it!”

  Scarface fired once into the top of the arch, shorting out the pico scanner with a flash, silencing the machine. The blue emitter beam shut off, allowing Vargis to grab the Codex.

  I pushed the door wide open, raising my P-50. “I’ll take that!”

  Scarface pushed the technician aside and turned a nasty looking hammer gun towards me. I leapt back into the corridor as he fired. The hammer gun’s slow moving slug popped a micro field moments before it hit the wall, punching a hole through it bigger than Izin’s head. It was a short range, notoriously inaccurate weapon, but one hit would cut a man in half.

  I dragged Marie back down the corridor as Scarface fired again, blasting a large hole through the white wall and spraying the corridor with debris. We kept running as sections of wall exploded behind us until we were safely past the neighboring lab. Once out of range we stopped to survey the corridor, now strewn with shattered white prefab fragments.

  “Wow! They’re not kidding!” Marie said.

  Vargis’ pet knuckle-draggers might have been slow, but they didn’t need speed or accuracy with that kind of artillery. “Izin,” I whispered, “We’re on the third floor, half way along. Vargis is here. Can you see anything?”

  “No Captain, the windows are too dark.”

  “Sirius Kade!” Vargis yelled from inside the pico lab, “you have an annoying habit of turning up uninvited.”

  “The Codex isn’t what you think it is, Vargis.”

  “On the contrary, it’s everything I expected!”

  I had no choice but to tell him. “It’s Mataron. They wanted you to have it. They’re setting you up.”

  “The Matarons?” Vargis laughed. “If I told the Chairman that, he’d have my head. He’s very unforgiving of incompetence.”

  “It sabotaged my ship!” Marie yelled. “It’ll do the same to yours!”

  “I brought it all the way here from the Shroud,” Vargis said, “in a specially insulated vault. My ship is fine.”

  “Maybe it couldn’t link to his systems,” I said softly to Marie, then yelled, “The Codex linked to the base, didn’t it Vargis? Through the scanner. Now the base is being evacuated. Why?”

  “You expect me to believe the Codex caused the evacuation?” Vargis yelled.

  “That’s what it does. It attacks our technology!” I said creeping towards the nearest hole in the wall.

  “Thanks for the warning, Kade. I’ll be sure to pass it on to our cyber-weapons group.”

  I fired a single shot through the hole at the windows, then jumped back as both muscle-jobs blasted the wall, showering the corridor with white prefab chunks.

  “I see a damaged window,” Izin’s artificial voice sounded in my ear. “How close are you?”

  “We’re clear,” I said. “Let them have it!”

  Moments later, one of Izin’s penetrator rounds smashed through the side of the building and detonated a cloud of micro munitions in the center of the lab. A dozen tiny explosions sent shrapnel splinters flying in all directions. I took a step forward, about to run towards the lab, when a disk-like mortar-drone flew out into the corridor. I turned and threw myself at Marie, knocking her though the open door of the last lab we’d unlocked. We hit the floor together as the mortar-drone’s upper surface popped up three centimeters, revealing ten small explosive shells lying side by side. The self propelled bombs launched together, detonating against nearby walls, tearing the third floor apart. One bomblet flew past the doorway behind us, through the corridor and detonated in the stairwell. I was vaguely aware of a lump of prefab wall glancing off my head, then after a while, a familiar artificial voice sounded from my earpiece.

  “Captain, respond.”

  I couldn’t have been out for more than a few seconds, but I could barely hear Izin’s voice over the deafening tone in my ears. Marie stirred beside me, dazed from the explosions. I climbed to my feet and staggered into the corridor. The entire third floor was in ruins and spot fires were taking hold everywhere. The pico lab’s wall had collapsed. Scarface and the lab technician were both dead, shredded by Izin’s shrapnel slug, and Vargis, Jawbones and the Codex were gone.

  Marie emerged into the corridor clutching both her needle guns. Together we stepped into the lab, avoiding the two bloodied corpses on the floor. The picometric scanner was riddled with tiny holes, except for where the Codex’s impenetrable alien-tech skin had absorbed Izin’s shrapnel blast, leaving an undamaged footprint on the flat metallic scanning surface.

  “The fool!” I whispered, knowing Vargis had left me no choice. Whatever he thought he was going to do with the Codex, I knew he was playing right into the hands of the Matarons. “Izin,” I wheezed in a voice I barely recognized.

  “Yes, Captain?”

  “Vargis has the Codex! Don’t let him leave!”

  The view screens on the walls were cracked and pitted with shrapnel. Some were inactive, some hissed with static, while those that still functioned repeatedly flashed the same message:

  EVACUATE! EVACUATE! EVACUATE!

  ENERGY PLANT SUPERCRITICAL!

  A timer was ticking over fast showing less than four minutes remaining.

  Marie holstered her gun, staring at the screens. “That can’t be good.”

  I stepped towards the nearest functioning display. Row after row of barely visible numbers ghosted behind the alert message, corrupting the base’s control system. Whatever those ghost
numbers were, they didn’t belong.

  DIGITIZE OPTICS, I thought, triggering my threading to record everything I saw in perfect detail.

  “Captain,” Izin’s voice sounded over the slowly receding ringing in my ears. “Vargis’ vehicle was shielded. I could not destroy it.”

  “What’s it doing now?”

  “Heading for the spaceport. The Soberano is preparing to lift off.”

  “Is Klasson still with you?”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  I closed the channel and turned to Marie. “If they come for us, there won’t be time to clear the blast radius.”

  She nodded slowly. “I know.”

  “Izin, get aboard Klasson’s crate and get as far away as you can,” I glanced at the timer. “You have three minutes until the E-plant explodes.”

  “Captain?” Izin said uncertainly.

  “Get out of here now, while you still can. I’m going to call out a series of numbers I want you to remember.” If he could pass the number sequence to Lena Voss, the EIS might still have time to figure out what they meant. “Go to Hades City Spaceport. Ask for–”

  “Be on the roof in one minute!” Klasson yelled at us through Izin’s communicator.

  “Klasson! The E-plant is supercritical. There isn’t time!”

  “Then haul ass, flyboy! I ain’t letting you die ‘til I get my guns!”

  “You can’t make minimum safe distance if you pick us up!” When he didn’t answer, I swore under my breath. Marie and I ran through the door Vargis had used to escape, then up stairs to the roof.

  “Klasson’s ferry can do mach four,” Marie said hopefully as we scaled the stairs.

  “He needs ten times that to outrun the blast!”

  Three men wearing the Soberano’s crew uniform lay dead near where the executive transport had landed. Izin had cut them down, but Vargis and Jawbones were not among them. The down blast from Klasson’s ferry’s engines swept the roof as it dropped out of the sky in front of us, landing hard. Its rear cargo door was already open, with Izin standing at the entry motioning for us to run to him.

  Behind us, the Soberano lifted off. The super transport rose on more than forty thrusters, turning slowly in the air as one of her huge cargo doors opened outwards. When the door was horizontal, a tremendous energy blast flashed from the hold’s dark interior, destroying a building on the far side of the base. The Soberano’s cargo door immediately started to close as she nosed up began climbing on her sixteen engines, forcing us to shield our eyes from the dazzling light radiating from her stern. As she became a receding star, twenty ejection pods streaked skywards from the eastern side of the base, each carrying a hundred people to the distant safety of orbit.

  Marie and I ran to the ferry as the blast of its engines died, and charged up the ramp into the cargo compartment.

  “Go!” I yelled

  Izin began raising the rear door, filling the cargo compartment with the grinding metallic sound of rusting servos as the ferry’s engines roared to life. It lurched into the air as I hurried forward to the cockpit. Klasson was flying one handed, remarkably relaxed as the ferry’s engines rotated to the horizontal.

  “Once you’re over the crater wall, go low!” I yelled as I slid into the copilot’s seat.

  “Nah, the trees will block us,” Klasson said as he put the ferry into a steep climb.

  “The crater wall will absorb some of the EMP.” Even if by a miracle, we could escape the blast wave, the electromagnetic pulse would fry the ferry’s systems, sending us nose diving into the ground at four times the speed of sound.

  “This old girl won’t survive even a flicker of EMP.”

  “Going high won’t help!” We’d be exposed to the full force of the blast when the E-plant went up.

  “Don’t be so sure!” Klasson said with a sly grin.

  I thought he’d lost his mind, then Jase’s voice sounded over the communicator. “Cut your power now!”

  “Never flew a glider before,” Klasson said as he silenced the old ferry’s engines. “First time for everythin’!”

  The roar of the engines was replaced by the whistle of wind over the hull as the ferry hurtled through the air. A large shadow passed over the cockpit, then the Silver Lining dropped down on top of us. Brilliant blue lights appeared either side of Klasson’s ferry as the Lining’s two engines, glowing on minimal power, dropped either side of us. The Lining’s number two gantry’s maglock glowed to life overhead, snatching the ferry out of the air as if she were an empty VRS container. The ferry slammed up hard against the gantry’s maglock, knocking Izin and Marie off their feet as it was locked into place by powerful magnetic fields.

  “I got you!” Jase’s voice yelled from the cockpit’s communicator. “Hold on.”

  “Oh no!” I muttered, realizing we were outside the Lining’s inertial field, leaving us no protection from her acceleration. “Brace!” I yelled.

  Marie and Izin rolled flat on the cargo deck as Klasson looked up curiously at the three towing gantries extending from the Lining’s stern, seemingly unaware of what was coming. A moment later, the ferry filled with blue light as Jase fed a trickle of power to the ship’s engines. The Lining stood on her tail and began streaking up through the atmosphere, crushing us under the enormous weight of acceleration many times greater than Klasson’s rust bucket could ever have achieved. The old ferry had no chance of outrunning a reactive explosion, but the Lining could do it easily, providing the acceleration didn’t kill us. We gasped for air as Jase piled on ten gravities – as much as he dared. I nearly blacked out as I sank into the hard copilot’s seat which had never been designed for that kind of acceleration. Beside me, Klasson gritted his teeth, shocked by the force pressing down on him. After what seemed an eternity, Jase shed a few G’s to let us breathe, although we still couldn’t move.

  Outside, a shimmer obscured the air as the Lining’s battle shield went up.

  We continued climbing, picking up speed and piling on distance between us and the doomed E-plant. Suddenly, the sky around us filled with a stark white light. I squeezed my eyes shut, facing down away from the blinding flash. Below us, the BBI base vaporized, turning the ancient caldera into a boiling lava crater. The blast wave expanded like a bubble, ionizing the atmosphere to the edge of space and dumping star-intensity heat on our shield. A sphere of orange and red glowed around the Lining and its captive ferry as the curvature of the planet appeared. For several seconds, we raced through the upper atmosphere as the air inside Klasson’s poorly pressurized rust bucket began to thin, then the shield cooled and the acceleration eased, letting us move again. Soon we dived back towards the safety of the lower atmosphere, now half a continent away from the blast zone.

  “That was close,” I said, glancing at the ferry’s blank control console.

  The Lining’s battle shield had protected us from the blast, but not the electromagnetic pulse. While the ship’s hull was designed to reflect radiation, the old ferry’s systems had been fried by the EMP. I did a quick status check of my own, finding my biological threading had been unaffected, although all of my mechanical equipment was dead. Only my P-50 had survived, because like most weapons, it was EMP-shielded.

  “Your ferry’s had it,” I said.

  “Yeah, she was a good old girl,” Klasson said, glancing back through the cockpit window at the glowing dome rising beyond the horizon behind us. “It was worth it, to put an end to them terraformin’ shenanigans!” He chuckled, then craned his neck as he watched twenty points of light angling for orbit high above us. “Looks like most of them dirt doctors got out alive.”

  I followed his gaze to the ejection pods. The light radiating from their engines was proof they’d escaped both the blast and the electromagnetic pulse intact. “Where will they go?”

  “Refuge most likely, unless they got a deal with the smugglers.”

  “Will you accept them?”

  “Yeah, but only ‘cause the kelp beds needs a good cleaning.” H
e grinned. “Might do them terraformers some good to get their hands dirty and their feet wet.”

  “They’ll rebuild the base.”

  “No stopping it I guess, but by the time they do we’ll have a hundred of them fancy rifles and a few of Izin’s little sharpshooting cousins helping us out.”

  The way he said it, it sounded like fun. If the navy confiscated the Lining for smuggling his guns, I might even join him. “It’ll take a year for word to get back to the Core Systems, then another year or two to get replacements out here.”

  “Yeah, and then they got to grow them test plants all over again.” He gave me a crafty look. “Enough time for you to go get me an orbital gunship!”

  I laughed. That was definitely impossible and he knew it, but I went along with his dreaming. “Anything else?”

  Klasson sighed thoughtfully. “A case of Kentucky bourbon. I’m not talking ‘bout that pisswater from New Bardron. I want the genuine article – from Earth.”

  “You’ve got more chance of getting an orbital gunship.”

  He sighed wistfully. “I figured you’d say that, but a man can dream, can’t he?”

  * * * *

  The Silver Lining kept hold of Klasson’s ferry until we landed in Refuge. Jase waited while we all climbed out, then released the maglock. The old ferry crashed onto the petrified branch with a clatter of loose metal, now a pile of scrap to be cannibalized and melted down. An hour later, all of the ejection pods had splashed down in the harbor and were being towed to shore by survivalist boats. They were virtual enemies in an undeclared war, yet the survivalists treated the people in the pods, more than half of whom were women and children, with compassion and care.

  Marie and Jase accompanied Klasson to Refuge’s tavern to celebrate the destruction of the BBI base while I returned to the Lining with Izin. I immediately transcribed the ghost numbers I’d seen in the picometric scanning lab for Izin to analyze. To my surprise, he found the going particularly tough.