Mapped Space 1: The Antaran Codex

by Stephen Renneberg

  The Mataron shuddered, but hung onto my throat, squeezing with all his failing strength. “We will never let you join,” he wheezed, spitting blood, then his hand fell away from my throat and his body went limp.

  I pried his fingers off the Q-blade and pulled it clear of his chest, finding not a drop of blood adhered to it. After briefly examining the ornate weapon, I switched it off and slid it into my belt.

  My threading flashed another proximity alert into my mind. I scooped my P-50 off the floor and turned to fire as Izin appeared in the hatchway. He was holding his shredder pistol level in one hand and carrying a tool kit in the other. The small amphibian approached the Mataron curiously.

  “An impressive species,” Izin said. Considering Izin’s kin were feared across the galaxy, that was quite a compliment. “I’m surprised you could defeat it, Captain.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said, holstering my gun. “What are you doing here?”

  “Captain Dulon has located the vault. As you hadn’t responded to our communications for several minutes, I came to see what had happened to you.” Izin glanced at the dead Mataron. “He must be carrying a signal jammer.”

  “How long have we got?”

  “Sixteen minutes.”

  “We’re cutting it close.”

  We hurried out of the bridge and ran down the corridor towards the crew’s quarters. Even though Izin was only two thirds my height, he had no trouble keeping up. Tamphs could sprint short distances with amazing speed, but they tired quickly. Luckily for Izin, we didn’t have far to go.

  “Want me to slow down?” I asked.

  “Why? Are your long human legs getting tired, Captain?”

  If that was tamph defensiveness, Izin’s vocalizer gave no hint of inflection. “Just checking.”

  We jogged past several open cabins glimpsing crewmen murdered in their bunks, then turned into a side corridor where a body lay slumped against a bulkhead. It was Jawbones. He had a charred plasma wound in his chest and a black market neutron rifle on his lap. The charge indicator showed he’d got one shot away before he’d died.

  “I’ve heard of these weapons,” Izin said, holstering his little shredder pistol and picking up the rifle, turning it over curiously. It had a slender beam emitter mounted above a cylindrical radiation chamber and was fitted with fore and aft hand grips. Flesh destroying irradiation weapons had been banned since the twenty-ninth century, yet a handful of companies still manufactured them in secret – anything to earn a few extra credits.

  “Could it penetrate a Mataron skin-shield?” I asked.

  “I don’t know enough about their technology to say,” Izin said, testing the feel of the short range weapon. Originally designed for close quarters combat in urban environments, it was ideal for enclosed ship corridors because it killed without damaging bulkheads or sensitive ship systems.

  We hurried on past Jawbones’ body and entered the large cabin where I’d first encountered Vargis back on Hades City. The same chair I’d been restrained in stood in front of his polished desk. At the far end of the room, Marie stood beside the two meter high painting of the ancient sea battle, the Battle of the Albrolhos. The painting was affixed to a hidden door which now stood partially open.

  “Where is it?” I asked, rushing towards her.

  She stood side on, facing the space behind the painting. For a moment I wondered why she didn’t turn towards me, then I saw the tension in her face.

  “Marie?” I said, stopping short of the painting.

  Her eyes gave me a warning look, then the thick barrel of a Mataron plasma rifle appeared from behind the painting, aimed at her head.

  “Drop your weapon.” It was the same synthesized male voice the Mataron I’d killed on the bridge had used.

  I aimed my P-50 at the painting. “Drop yours.”

  “Your weapon is ineffective against my shield, human, whereas mine is quite deadly. I will not ask again.” He lifted the barrel until it touched Marie’s forehead.

  “Wait! Wait!” I yelled, placing my P-50 on the deck.

  Marie gave me a furious look. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m unarmed!” I yelled.

  The painting and the hidden door it was attached to swung slowly open. A snakehead, the twin of the one I’d killed on the bridge, stood in front of a circular silver metal vault aiming his rifle one handed.

  “He’s going to kill us both!” she said angrily.

  “He wants something, or you’d already be dead,” I said, remembering Lena’s warning that I had a weakness. She’d read me right. I couldn’t let the snakehead kill Marie, even at the cost of the mission.

  “Open the vault,” the Mataron ordered.

  I glanced towards where Izin had been standing, intending to ask him to get to work on the vault door, but he was gone. I’d heard about the instinctive ability of tamphs to camouflage themselves, but I’d never seen Izin do it. He’d vanished so fast, so silently, the Mataron had no idea there was even a tamph – an Intruder! – on the ship.

  “What are you waiting for?” the Mataron demanded.

  “This ship’s about to be destroyed,” I said. “Why do you want it?”

  “The vault will shield the Codex from the crash.”

  I looked past the snakehead to the armored door. Its silver surface was polished to a mirror sheen, giving it an impressively impregnable appearance.

  “Why haven’t you already opened it?”

  “We couldn’t find it.”

  “Why not?” Vargis had said it was shielded, but that shouldn’t have stopped the Matarons.

  “We lost contact with the Codex as soon as it was brought aboard. That could only happen if the vault was shielded by non-human technology.”

  If anyone had the resources to obtain alien masking technology, it was the Consortium. No wonder Vargis had been so confident he could move the Codex without it affecting his ship.

  “So how’d you find it?”

  “I didn’t. She did.”

  I glanced at Marie, who shrugged. “I always was good at finding things that didn’t belong to me.”

  The Mataron stepped away from the vault door, keeping his weapon aimed at Marie’s head. He turned towards me, seeing the quantum blade stuck in my holster’s belt. “Where did you get that?”

  “What, this old thing?” I said, drawing the Q-blade. This Mataron’s black body armor lacked a chest scabbard and was less ornate than that worn by Zatra e’Ktari.

  The Mataron’s hand dropped to his hip, touched a triangular surface, then he uttered several guttural sounds. When there was no response, he said, “Where is the Honored one?”

  “You mean the snakehead I disemboweled on the bridge – with this?”

  “You killed him? With his own weapon?”

  “Drove it right through his spine.”

  “You lie!” The Mataron swung his plasma rifle towards me, aiming at my head. “The Black Sauria are sworn to let no brother’s death go unavenged.”

  “Now you tell me!”

  A blue flash came from behind me as a neutron beam streaked across the room, striking the Mataron’s chest. He looked down surprised at the sparkling light flickering harmlessly against his skin shield, then I flicked on the Q-blade and threw it in a single motion with ultra-reflexed precision. The blade buried itself in the reptilian’s angular head, stopping only when the hilt struck his translucent faceplate. The Mataron’s knees buckled and he crumpled to the deck.

  Marie looked down at the dead snakehead, surprised. “You throw knives?”

  “You should see what I can do with laser cutters,” I said as Izin appeared in the hatchway holding Jawbones’ neutron rifle.

  “In answer to your earlier question, Captain,” Izin said, “the neutron beam is unable to penetrate Mataron skin-shield technology.”

  “But it sure makes a good distraction.”

  Izin placed the neutron rifle in his tool box and produced a rod like scanner which he a
ttached to the vault door. His large blue-green eyes watched as the scanner’s display quickly drew a schematic of the door’s locking system. “It’s an infinite probability combination locking system.”

  “Can you crack it?”

  “If I developed an infinitized heuristic solution.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “Seven months,” Izin said, removing the scanner from the vault door.

  “And we have how long?”

  “Nine minutes,” Izin said without looking at any time recording device. “We could leave the Codex in there and hope the Mataron was correct, that the vault will protect it.”

  “He was guessing.” I said. “They’re worried the Codex will survive and the TCs will find it.”

  Marie pulled the Q-blade out of the reptilian’s skull. “Will this work?”

  “Only one way to find out!” I said, taking it from her and plunging it into the vault. The Q-blade sliced effortless through the vault door, generating a fine particle mist as it severed the locking bolts.

  Marie glanced down at the dead snakehead at her feet. “How come he doesn’t have a knife?”

  “He’s just a grunt. He doesn’t rate one.”

  “You know that just by looking at him?”

  “It’s the body armor. If he were an officer, it’d be fancier, and he’d be wearing one of these,” I said, nodding towards the Q-blade.

  The dead snakehead was Sworn, not Honored like the Mataron I’d killed on the bridge. The Q-blade was a ritual weapon awarded to Honored Assassins of the Black Sauria, a sinister organization part death cult, part secret service, part religious order. The Black Sauria was strictly hierarchical, governed by an inflexible code of obedience and deference that embodied the Mataron’s obsession with feuding over even the most innocuous of slights. It was why blood feuds lasted generations and were rarely ever settled until one side or the other was exterminated – and why we could never placate them.

  “You seem to know a great deal about Matarons, Captain,” Izin observed. “About their ships, their soldiers, their weapons.”

  “Just enough to stay out of their way,” I said as I pulled the Q-blade from the vault door. I deactivated it and returned it to my belt before pulling on the ponderous vault door. The circular armored slab slid silently open, revealing a small compartment. Sitting on a low table in the center of the vault was the Antaran Codex. I moved towards it, then remembered how aggressively it had tried to invade my threading. “Izin, you take it. ” Without a word, the diminutive tamph retrieved the alien device while I picked up the Mataron plasma rifle and Izin’s tool box. “Now let’s get the hell out of here.”

  We ran back down the corridor towards the airlock as the sound of air whistling through the corridors began to grow.

  Once we were outside the range of the Mataron’s signal jammer, Jase’s voice sounded in our earpieces. “Skipper, are you there?”

  “I hear you.”

  “The Mataron ship in the Soberano’s hold just took off like a lightning bolt.”

  That’s what the whistling was! They’d left the airtight hatches open so the hole they’d cut into the ship would decompress the Soberano.

  “Have you got the Soberano turned?”

  “Yeah, we’re heading for the little moon, just like Izin planned,” Jase said unhappily.

  We climbed into the airlock, then the inner hatch irised shut, sealing us off from the growing howl of decompression in the corridor.

  “Nice trick,” Marie said, “Running and leaving us to get sucked into space.”

  “The Matarons left because we took the Codex out of the vault,” Izin said. “Now they believe it will be destroyed, along with us.”

  “Good, that gives us a chance to surprise them,” I said.

  We cycled through into the Lining, then wary of the Codex’s ability to take over the ship, Izin said, “There isn’t time to load it into the drone, and I can’t take it to engineering.”

  “Put it in the smuggler compartment. It’s the most insulated part of the ship, but keep an eye on it.” While Izin went to store the Codex, Marie and I ran to the flight deck. The view screen timer clicked below one hundred seconds as we climbed onto our couches. It was already too late to fire the Codex away in a drone, and even if we did, the Matarons would just grab it.

  “I can’t release the Soberano!” Jase said. “She locked onto us when you were in the airlock, and won’t let go.”

  The Mataron SI was now intent on dragging us – and the Codex – into Vintari II! Jase could hit the docking controls with a shock-hammer, but it would make no difference. The Soberano was never going to release us.

  I glanced at the view screen again. The timer was down to eighty five seconds and the sandy orb of Vintari II and the small dark sphere of its moon were both rapidly swelling in size as we hurtled towards them.

  “I have the helm!” I announced, taking piloting control. “Retract every second optical sensor and all the non-visuals.”

  While Jase buttoned up our sensors, I angled the vector nozzles on both engines hard to port, directing our thrust sideways at the Soberano, trying to blast our way free. All the non visual readouts vanished from the screen and the image quality dropped noticeably as half our optical sensors retracted.

  “Ah, Skipper,” Jase said anxiously, pointing to the view screen. “Why is the Soberano doing that?”

  I looked up to see eight of the super transport’s large square cargo doors opening in front of us. A large silver naval gun, mounted on a circular swivel mount, began sliding out of the nearest of Soberano’s holds.

  “The SI’s not going to let us leave with the Codex,” I said, activating the intercom. “Izin, is the burster ready?”

  The heavy naval gun locked into place. It was almost as big as the Silver Lining and right in front of us. Behind it, seven more guns identical to the first were extending towards their firing positions. If they’d been on a navy ship, they’d have been inside armored turrets, but on the Soberano, their protection was normally limited to the ship’s shield.

  “I haven’t test fired it, Captain, or calibrated the targeting –”

  “Forget targeting. Is it ready to fire?”

  “Yes Captain.”

  I nodded to Jase. “Charge it up, and hang on!”

  Jase switched his console to weapons and activated the proton burst cannon as the Lining’s collision alert sounded, warning Vintari II’s moon was now dangerously close. The timer ticked down to forty seconds as I fed more power to the engines. The Silver Lining shuddered, but couldn’t break free as the big naval gun locked in place.

  I kept sliding my finger up the throttle control, pushing through ten percent, but our mated docking rings remained stubbornly locked together. Fifty meters from our bow, the big silver gun began to swivel slowly towards us, the same weapon that had destroyed the BBI base’s processing center with one shot.

  “Can we survive a hit from that gun?” Marie asked.

  “Don’t worry, you won’t feel a thing,” I said, knowing with our shield down, at point blank range and with us a sitting duck locked to the side of Soberano, one shot would vaporize everything inside the Silver Lining’s paintwork, except for the Codex!

  “That makes me feel so much better!” Marie said.

  I pushed engine power to twelve percent, causing the Lining to shudder like crazy, but she couldn’t tear free. “I thought we could only apply three percent!”

  “For twenty minutes!” Jase said. “Not five seconds!”

  I glanced at the screen. The big gun was almost pointed towards us. “Jase, fire!”

  He tried, but nothing happened. “It’s not charged yet!”

  I dumped more power into the engines, wondering if they would tear the hull apart before the docking rings shattered. Status indicators began flashing red on my console and the main screen, warning of an impending catastrophic hull failure.

  “You’re going to tear the side out of her!”
Jase declared.

  “Better we lose half the hull than the whole ship!” I said, pushing the engines past fourteen percent. On the big screen, the body of the nearest naval gun began to glow.

  “It’s charging!” Marie said.

  I wanted to push the engines to full power, but that would have destroyed the ship. Restraining myself, I crept the energy feed to fifteen percent. A piercing metallic shriek reverberated through the ship as the hull began to tear apart under the strain. There were so many warning indicators flashing, I couldn’t tell if the engines were about to fly out their housings or the docking ring was failing.

  Jase’s weapons console flashed a green ready indicator as the cannon reached full power. “About time!” He yelled, slamming his palm onto the firing control.

  A ball of brilliant yellow light erupted from the top of our wrap around screen and streaked towards the nearest naval gun. For a moment, a brilliant white flash filled the flight deck, then a shower of metal burst from the where the gun had been and began raining back along the Soberano’s hull towards the other big guns as the super transport accelerated through the debris.

  “Damn!” I said, surprised at the power of the burster cannon’s blast.

  The Lining suddenly tore free, almost throwing us off our acceleration couches. With our engine thrust directed hard to port, we spun uncontrollably away from the Soberano, challenging our internal inertial field to offset a flat spin it had never been designed for. A spray of hull plates, airlock doors and docking rings flew out from both ships, some after us, most falling back towards the naval guns arrayed along the Soberano’s hull as she continued picking up speed. The second gun exploded as metal fragments crashed into it while the six remaining guns all swiveled after us. First one fired, then another, but we were too close, spinning too fast and the big gun’s mounts moved too slowly. Their searing blasts flashed around us, scorching our unshielded hull but missing us as we spun uncontrollably towards the Soberano’s stern.

  I angled the engine’s vector nozzles against our spin, fighting to get the Lining back under control as the Soberano’s mountainous stern came racing towards us. The next naval gun in line exploded as the thickening swarm of shrapnel tore it apart, then I fired our bow thrusters, pushing us away, narrowly avoiding a collision with the super transport’s stern. For a moment, her hull plating filled our screen, then her sixteen enormous engines blazed like blue stars in front of us as the super transport pulled quickly away from us. Beyond the bulge of her stern, now blocking her gun’s firing arc, a ripple of explosions shot out into space as the debris cloud destroyed one exposed gun after another.