The Chemical Mage: Supernatural Hard Science Fiction (The Tegression Trilogy Book 1)

by Felix R. Savage

  But Emnl ki-Sharongat said, “Are you offering yourself in his place?”

  “Uh ...” No. No, no, NO.

  “I think I would rather have you than him, anyway. You are prettier.” The little sentrienza’s insect eyes sparkled in the light of the setting sun.

  *

  “AXEL’S COMING BACK,” Colm said in relief, squinting across the icy plain. “That’s definitely him ... but where’s Meg?”

  “And who are those guys?” Tan said, from the cockpit.

  Two unknown figures accompanied Axel’s bright yellow EVA suit. They looked like they were wearing robes.

  “Three guesses,” Colm said, heart sinking.

  “Well, that’s a tough one,” Tan said. “Whose star system are we in?”

  “Yeah. Shit.”

  Tan waited in the cockpit. Colm waited on the ice. Small black shapes raced ahead of the approaching group. Walking Guns. Colm had heard about these. They were said to be semi-sentient killing machines, highly valued by the sentrienza as pets. Rumor said that a single Walking Gun could blow up a moon. Studying the spiky little machines as they coursed towards the Shady Lady, and ran in circles around it, Colm found that hard to believe. They looked like metal sea urchins, dead black, with an indeterminate number of legs and eyeless, crudely defined muzzles. They varied in size, but none stood more than three feet high.

  Then again, he’d better not underestimate them. The sentrienza had an interstellar empire stretching for thousands of light years across the Orion Arm. Their technology had to be fairly decent.

  One of the Walking Guns made a dash at Colm. Without thinking, he stooped and held out his hand to it. The machine nosed his glove. It was probably scanning him at the molecular level.

  Axel’s voice snapped him out of it. He was walking ahead of the sentrienza. “It’s OK to take the water,” he said.

  Colm straightened up. He said cautiously to the sentrienza, “Thank you. That’s very good of you.” He hesitated. “Where’s Meg?”

  “Isn’t she here?” Axel said.

  “No,” Colm said. “She went to look for you.”

  “She ...” Axel staggered to the meltbox and collapsed against it, swearing under his breath.

  Colm faced the sentrienza. In his most business-like voice, he said, “We’re still missing one crew member. I’d like her returned as well, please.”

  “You are guests here. It is not for you to give us orders,” said a high, thin, buzzing voice in his helmet.

  Colm had seldom been this scared in his life. Hiding it, he said easily, “You’re right. Let me try that again. You may have noticed that we’re short of water, but we have other supplies to spare.” Bribery worked on humans, sometimes. Maybe it would work on these sentrienza. “Carbon, nitrogen, uranium, tools, electronic components ...” he suggested, smiling, not knowing if smiles meant anything to them. Or if uranium and electronic components did, either.

  The sentrienza stood stock still, while their Walking Guns ran in circles around the Shady Lady.

  “Wait. Negotiations are proceeding,” the buzzing voice said abruptly.

  Betelgeuse set, plunging them into darkness.

  *

  COLM HAD EXPERIENCED few things worse than that wait, in the dark, out on the ice. He’d been out for hours already. His air supply was running low. He dared not even suggest retreating to the ship. The Walking Guns had treed him on top of the meltbox. If he even looked like he might be descending, they leapt up and butted his legs. Those spikes could breach his leathers. The message was clear: don’t fucking move, monkey.

  Axel, silent, tended the steam gun. The blue flare illuminated the two sentrienza standing at a distance. Colm was beginning to loathe those frail, bunny-suited shapes. They did not seem to need to move or even breathe. What were the odds they’d want anything humans had to offer?

  To take his mind off the awful uncertainty, he began practicing his coin vanish again. The ‘coin’ was a slice off the end of a welding rod. He threw it in the air, made it vanish. Tossed it from one glove to the other—where’d it go?

  A Walking Gun scrabbled up the side of the meltbox and hung on by its front claws, glaring at him. Colm spread his gloves; nothing. On an impulse, he leaned over and produced the coin from the Walking Gun’s jaws. He held it up; you may applaud now, ladies, gentlemen, and aliens! Then he threw it up and made it vanish again.

  The Walking Gun raced back to the sentrienza. Its shadow scudded over the ice, monstrously spined. It let out howls that rooted Colm and Axel in place.

  The sentrienza shrieked, “What are you doing?”

  Colm said, “Me?”

  “Yes, you! What were you doing just now?”

  “Er ...” He was going to die. They were all going to die, because he’d made the mistake of thinking the sentrienza were anything like humans. “You mean this? I was just making it disappear. Look—"

  “Stop it immediately!” The other two Walking Guns ran back to their masters. “Go away!” One of the sentrienza made a universal gesture: it pointed to the sky. “Go away, and do not return! You have twenty Earth minutes to comply!”

  Colm slid down from the meltbox. He was too frightened and confused to do anything but obey. Working as fast as they could, he and Axel dismantled the mining setup. Tan came out to help. Colm switched on the Lady’s exterior lights so they could see what they were doing. Fumbling in haste, they manhandled the kit back into the engineering airlock.

  16 minutes.

  “We can’t leave without Meg,” Axel said.

  Colm felt the same way, but he said, “What’s the alternative? We all die, and Earth falls because we screwed up our only chance to help.”

  The Walking Guns sat on their haunches, pointing at the Shady Lady. They might not be able to demolish a moon but it was a pretty good bet they could demolish a spaceship.

  17 minutes.

  “I’m staying,” Axel said.

  “Up to you,” Colm said, throwing the steam gun into the hold.

  18 minutes.

  At the 18:30 mark, Meg stumbled out of the darkness, herded along by a third sentrienza. Axel yodeled for joy and wrapped his arms around her, heedless of the Walking Guns.

  “Hope you didn’t think you were getting rid of me that easily,” she said in a bright, brittle voice.

  Colm grinned behind his faceplate. “You’ve got some explaining to do, Gunny.”

  “Let’s just get out of here.”

  They piled into the ship and blasted off fifteen seconds before the sentrienza’s deadline, back into the light of Betelgeuse.

  CHAPTER 33

  MEG SAID, “THEY’RE HIDING from the Ghosts.”

  She sat at the cabin table, elbows planted either side of a bowl of Pink Shit. She seemed tired and overwrought. But who wasn’t? Colm had put 20,000 klicks between the Shady Lady and the nameless rock before he dared to relax.

  He sat down with the others. “They think the Ghosts are coming here, Meg? To the Betelgeuse system?”

  “Yeah,” Meg said. That’s why they’re living on an iceball 225 million klicks from Juradis.”

  “Wonder if they know what happened on Mezamiria.”

  “Maybe that’s why they told you to leave.”

  Ouch. Colm poured himself a mug of hot water from the urn on the table. They were all out of tea and coffee. And everything else.

  “So you struck up a rapport with them,” Tan said to Meg, disapprovingly. “They invited you into their mound, you had a nice chat ...”

  “That’s right,” Meg said. “That’s all.”

  Colm didn’t believe a word of it. He’d known Meg a long time. She was lying.

  “And then suddenly they flipped,” she said. “Went all cold and angry. Hustled me back to the ship.”

  That, Colm believed. He’d seen the sentrienza ‘flip’ for himself. Thank Christ he’d managed to load enough reaction mass to reach Juradis first.

  “Makes no sense,” Tan said, dissatisfied. />
  “They’re aliens,” Colm said. “Nothing they do makes any sense. Why aren’t they helping us fight the Ghosts? Why are they letting refugees come to Betelgeuse system? For that matter, why’d they give us the zero-gravity field in the first place? Because they’re aliens.” He sipped his hot water. He was trying very hard not to think about the way the sentrienza had reacted to his coin vanish. He didn’t think Axel had noticed the precise timing of their freak-out, and neither of the others had seen it.

  Tan turned to Axel. “What about you? What were you doing while Meg was bonding with our four-fingered benefactors?”

  Axel laughed shortly. He, too, had a bowl of Pink Shit in front of him, but he hadn’t touched it. “They were going to experiment on me. They put me in a cage. There was some stuff in there. A scanner. A medical robot. At least, I think that’s what it was. It had scalpel attachments.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Colm said. “Why does anyone think the sentrienza are nice?”

  “Because they haven’t met them,” Meg said.

  “I was scared out of my fucking mind,” Axel said. “But nothing happened. I sat in there a while. Then they took me out of the cage and brought me back to the ship.” He met Colm’s eyes. “Sorry,” he said awkwardly. “I shouldn’t have stormed off like that.”

  Colm had been privately blaming Axel for the whole mess, but the apology softened him. Yes, Axel could be a self-centered arsehat. But he was one of the crew. After their long, cramped journey together, Colm knew his patterns, and knew that he was better than his oscillating moods. “It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.” And for good measure: “All’s well that ends well.” He stood up. “I’m going to check our burn parameters.”

  He went forward to the cockpit and fell sideways into the couch which had become his second home. The memory foam had conformed over the months to the shape of his body. He rested his cheek on the headrest, closed his eyes ... and gave in to the temptation, usually resisted, to spy on the others with the internal cameras.

  They were still sitting at the table.

  Axel began to eat his Pink Shit. Meg leant forward, tense as a cat watching a mouse. She said in a low voice, “You do not fucking walk off like that!”

  “I already apologized,” Axel said.

  “You apologized to Colm. Not to me. I was the one who went after you!” Meg sighed angrily. “For future reference, you do not walk off, on an unmapped rock, in a system where none of us has ever been before. Are we clear?”

  Axel looked up from his bowl. “Fine. I’ll apologize again. I am a worthless human being who screws up everything I touch. Is that good enough for you?”

  Tan, trying to make peace, echoed Colm’s earlier words. “All’s well that ends well.”

  Axel turned on him. “What are you fucking talking about? The Ghosts are on Gna. Is that going to end well? They may have overrun Earth since that drone was sent! All’s well that— Jesus, Sully, you’re the one with a wife and children!”

  That was going too far. Colm decided to go and intervene. But before he could move, Tan stiffly pushed his chair back and rose. “I’m going to get some rest.” He headed aft to the men’s cabin.

  “That was a shitty thing to say,” Meg said to Axel as soon as the two of them were alone.

  “Never mind what I said. What about what you said?”

  “Me?”

  “You had a nice friendly chat with the sentrienza? Bull, shit, Meg.”

  “I did, too.”

  “They told me I would have to remain there at the queen’s pleasure to pay for the water we took.”

  Colm’s jaw dropped. Axel hadn’t mentioned that earlier. Also, the sentrienza had a queen?

  “Maybe they were just joking. But when they let me go, they told me that you’d sorted it out, Meg. You made a deal with them in exchange for my freedom.”

  This, too, was news to Colm.

  “Complete and total fiction,” Meg said.

  “Really? Really, Meg?”

  “Yes, really.”

  “So there was no deal? You didn’t negotiate with them to let me go?”

  Negotiations are proceeding, the sentrienza had said. Colm’s blood ran cold. Meg had lied to him and now she was lying to Axel. What was she hiding? What was this ‘deal’ about?

  “OK,” Axel said after a moment. “I guess it was all just a big sentrienza joke. Ha, ha. Had me going there.”

  Meg was silent.

  Axel shoved back his chair. “Just promise me one thing.”

  “What?”

  “Next time I walk off? Don’t come after me.”

  He went aft to the men’s cabin, stripping off his sweat-soiled t-shirt as he went and hurling it into a corner.

  Left alone, Meg drove her fingers through her untidy hair. “I did it for Earth,” she whispered.

  This time Colm did get up from his couch. He needed to find out what she was hiding, even if it meant revealing that he’d been eavesdropping.

  Then Meg started to cry. Big tears welled out of her eyes and splashed on the table. Her shoulders shook with forlorn sobs.

  Colm fell back into the couch. He couldn’t walk in on that. God, what a mess.

  *

  THE TRAUMATIC MEMORY of their visit to the iceball receded as the Shady Lady decelerated towards Juradis. Whatever might be waiting for them down there, they were all ready for it. Every minute of their final approach felt like a year.

  To the ship’s eyes, Juradis looked as if butter wouldn’t melt in its mouth. Colm threw a composite view up on the big screen for the benefit of the three in the cabin. Cloud-dotted, the small planet was about the size of Mars. An ocean covered most of its surface, liberally dotted with islands. There were small, green-blanketed continents at the north and south poles. The wakes of boats, literally big enough to be visible from space, crisscrossed the temperate latitudes.

  Anyone with the sketchiest knowledge of Betelgeuse’s violent history would wonder how a planet this far out could be so hospitable, only 100,000 or so years after its star swelled into a red supergiant. That just wasn’t long enough for anything to evolve. By rights Juradis ought to be either a sterile water world or a parched rock.

  In fact, Betelgeuse’s violent past itself held the key to the riddle. During its main-sequence lifetime, the star’s inner planets had been home to a race of carbon-based, oxygen-breathing intelligent beings who looked, according to the scanty records they’d left behind, like large spider crabs. Predicting the catastrophic expansion of their star, they’d set about terraforming the system’s outer planets with massive bombardments of cyanobacteria. Alas, they hadn’t accurately predicted the extent of the orbital disruptions after Betelgeuse swallowed the inner planets. Those millennia of cosmic pinball had wiped them out, along with their painstakingly terraformed landscapes. A Chicxulub Impactor falling on your head every couple of years would do that. But the terraformed planets large enough to retain an atmosphere had also retained their water, soil, and the basic building blocks of ecosystems. Many thousands of years later, when the sentrienza came along, they had found three tropical paradises just waiting to be colonized. They’d named Juradis, Noom, and Barjoltan in homage to the extinct race that seeded them with life.

  “Here’s what I don’t get,” Meg said. “If these spider crab guys had the tech to terraform planets, why didn’t they just pack their bags and leave? Why stick around to be wiped out?”

  “No FTL?” Tan said with a shrug. “The zero-gravity field’s only ever been discovered once. By the sentrienza.”

  “That’s what the sentrienza want us to think,” Axel said.

  “There could be other ways to achieve FTL,” Meg said.

  “Couldn’t,” Tan said. “You’re either in Einsteinian space-time, or you’re in the zero-gravity field.”

  Colm, listening in from the cockpit, thought: Or you’re a Ghost.

  His nightmares had troubled him less during their voyage. It had felt as if he’d left them behind at last, th
e blue-eyed Ghost and the other one, the one in the forage cap. But the shocking news from Gna had brought it all back. He wouldn’t be free of them until he understood why this was happening to humanity, and to him.

  “OK, guys,” he said over the PA. “Get ready to strap in. I’ll be cutting the AG in about twenty minutes.”

  He pointed the Shady Lady at Juradis. He planned to establish a low equatorial orbit—it looked like there was a lot of stuff whizzing around in the 200-300 klick zone—and then request permission to land.

  A sentrienza voice stabbed his ears. High, buzzy, like a wax paper kazoo, it triggered an involuntary fear reaction. “Human ship approaching Juradis, do you read me?”

  “The name’s Mackenzie, and this is the Shady Lady,” Colm said, his pulse spiking. “I’d like to request landing coordinates.”

  “You will not attempt to land. You will establish a stable orbit at your present altitude and await further guidance.”

  Jesus, it was the Days of Glory all over again. Had Colm’s reputation preceded him? Surely not ... Juradis filled his vision, edged with atmospheric haze. “Stabilizing.”

  CHAPTER 34

  A SPECK ON THE radar swelled into a sentrienza ship. Colm had never seen one in real life before. He inspected it in nervous fascination. Modular, asymmetrical, it looked like a dead bramble a kilometer long, all the twigs turning at different rates to preserve trim. And yes, those were guns bristling from the business end. Spiky, fractal-looking, like a vegetable version of the Walking Guns.

  The ship eased alongside the Shady Lady. The guns swivelled in their direction, like animals seeking a scent.

  “Prepare to be boarded.”

  Colm took his hands off the instruments and tried to relax. He was conscious of the slight heaviness of the prototype rocket loaded into the drone launcher. He never had got around to removing it from the cradle. Maybe he should do it now. No, there wasn’t time.