James Wittenbach - Worlds Apart 06

by Crucible

  “Nay, it isn’t. The mechanoids on this ship have been upgraded with speech capabilities, and I don’t want anything said here to be repeated.”

  Churchill looked at Move-O-Bot. “Is that true? You can talk.” Move-O-Bot stood completely still.

  “Move-O-Bot, respond to the Watchman’s question,” Lear ordered.

  Move-O-Bot rotated his head toward Churchill and stood ready, but did not make a sound.

  “Now, he’s pretending he can’t talk,” Lear said. “Move-O-Bot, I order you to speak.”

  “Move-O-Bot?” said Sukhoi. “You gave it a name?”

  “It told me its name was Move-O-Bot,” Lear hissed. “Move-O-Bot, I order you to speak to Chief Churchill.”

  Move-O-Bot emitted a series of electronic chirps.

  “You’re certain you don’t want me to take a look at that bruise?” Sukhoi asked.

  Lear sighed. “Never mind. We will continue this conversation in the Hygiene Pod.”

  “Why?” Sukhoi asked. “Because you don’t want the mechanoid to overhear us?”

  “He might tell someone,” Lear insisted. She was already moving toward the Hygiene pod located in an alcove at the rear of the section. Sukhoi looked at Move-O-Bot, who chirped at him. Finally, Sukhoi shrugged and followed Lear and Churchill into the Hygiene Pod, sealing the hatch behind them.

  When they had left, Move-O-Bot extended one of his arms, placed it on the hatch, and followed every word of their conversation through vibrations on the wall. It was easier than reading lips.

  LEAR: I had intended for you to remain on Pegasus and help undermine Keeler’s command. We can no longer tolerate Keeler’s incompetence. He’s putting the ship in peril. I have to be put in command of this mission.

  CHURCHILL: I am unaware of any gross incompetence on Prime Commander Keeler’s Part.

  LEAR: Almost thirty people are dead because of an ill-conceived and unnecessary salvage mission… that is gross incompetence.

  CHURCHILL: Technically, the commander was under orders to render aid to a ship in distress. We received those orders at the StarLock Chapultepec.

  LEAR: Then, we can argue that his management of the rescue attempt was incompetent, and led to the unnecessary deaths of forty crewmen. Surely, there are tactical protocols he overlooked, that would have enabled him to assess the danger. Surely, the presence of a hostile force ought to have been detected if standard tactical protocols were followed.

  CHURCHILL: We would have to prove that he ordered standard tactical protocols to be disregarded, otherwise, that would be the fault of TyroCommander Redfire, and possibly Lt.

  Commander Honeywell.

  LEAR: If I have to take them down to, so be it. But what must be done must be done. And rest assured, I know how to destroy a man when I have to.

  CHURCHILL: And you believe it is necessary to do so now.

  LEAR: I believe leaving Keeler in command of Pegasus imperils Republic, and as Centurions, protection of Republic is our foremost duty.

  SUKHOI: Imperiling Republic? How?

  LEAR: Keeler is neglecting to address the threat posed by the Aurelians. We don’t need to be searching for Earth, we need to search for allies. The Aurelians are a threat to Republic, and we won’t be able to defeat them without allies.

  CHURCHILL: I agree with that.

  SUKHOI: But Keeler…

  LEAR: Then, you must help me undermine his command. Find out which officers are loyal, and who is not. Some of the Core Chiefs, and Sector Chiefs, must agree with us. We can persuade the others to our side by reminding them of the deaths caused by his bad decision to salvage this ship. When we have enough on his side, we can charge him with negligence, and force him to step down.

  CHURCHILL: Even if you did remove Keeler, you have also been removed from command status. Redfire would assume command of Pegasus. He is, if anything, worse than Keeler.

  SUKHOI: Redfire is missing in action, though.

  LEAR: He will turn up. He always turns up. I can handle Redfire. I’ll make sure it’s Change who is in command, and she is no friend of the Prime Commander.

  SUKHOI: Look, I haven’t always agreed with the Prime Commander’s leadership, but you’re talking about would sabotage the entire mission.

  LEAR: For the greater good of removing an incompetent and misguided commander who is pursuing some insane vision of finding Earth, instead of dealing with the real threat, which is Aurelia, we have to take Keeler down, by whatever means necessary.

  CHURCHILL: How does this lead to you being back in command, as opposed to Lt.

  Change?

  LEAR: I have given thought to that. It is critical that we return to Chapultepec. Once Keeler is removed from command, I believe I can persuade the Odyssey Subdirectorate to reinstate me. What I need to know now, gentlemen, is if you will stand with me.

  Move-O-Bot measured four-point-eight seconds of silence.

  LEAR: Gentlemen?

  CHURCHILL: I stand with Republic, Republic’s security is my first and foremost duty as a Centurion

  A briefer pause followed.

  SUKHOI: I will also stand with Republic, and with the ideals of our Order.

  Pegasus – The UnderDecks

  In the dark holding chamber beneath the manifold of an atmospheric processor, Hunter lay on the cold deck with his arms and legs bound, and a bag over his head.

  Most of the rats had gone back into hibernation, hiding and sleeping in dark cramped spaces, of which there were thousands in the utilitarian UnderDecks… the basement of the mighty Pathfinder. The Telepathic Rat had left only four guard rats in the chamber with the prisoner.

  The two guards nearest the entrance suddenly found the front part of their necks ripped out. The two nearest the prisoner tried to react to the sudden demise of their comrades, but found themselves eviscerated before they had a chance to squeak.

  Silver and black… still slightly wet… the deadly silent blur of teeth and fangs that had caused this was already working on the bindings around Hunter’s hands. “Who’s there,” Hunter whispered.

  “Shut the phuck up,” Queequeg whispered back at him, then swatted him with an open paw just to make the point.

  “Oh, you… the cat who let them tie me up and left me for dead.”

  “I had more important concerns at the time.”

  “Like what?” Hunter hissed.

  “Like saving my own life,” Queequeg whispered. “Not that it helped. I should have known better than to try and make a deal with rodentia. If their prejudices about feline cultural norms hadn’t been a few centuries out of date, I might be dead now.”

  “I’m touched that you came back for me.”

  “I need you for my revenge.”

  Despite his pain, despite the sudden rawness in his throat and the beginnings of a fever, Hunter almost chuckled. “Now, it’s my turn to ask. ’Why should I help you?’”

  “They infected you with some kind of virulent plague virus. They call it ‘Bacia.’”

  “Shit!” Hunter hissed. “Bacia.”

  This caught the cat by surprise. “You know what Bacia is?”

  “It’s a more virulent strain of what they called ‘The White Plague.’ It hit Sapphire about 2,000 years ago… near the end of the Commonwealth Era. It made about 20% of the population sterile. If they hadn’t found a cure, it would have wiped out the colony.”

  “So, there’s a cure?”

  “We developed an immunity to it. I don’t know if it will work against the strain they infected me with. I can already feel it fighting my system. My throat and chest are beginning to feel sore. My body temperature is increasing. It’s not a fever yet, but it will be. After that, I’ll either fight it off, or hemorrhage to death.”

  Queequeg went to work on the cords binding Hunter’s legs. “How do you know all that?”

  “I know about diseases… about epidemiology.”

  Queequeg went on. “They want to see what happens to you. Then, they’re going to infect th
e crew, and when Pegasus returns to Chapultepec, they’ll wait, and they’ll breed, and they’ll infest every ship that docks there.” Queequeg finished with the last of his bonds. “Let’s go.” Hunter had to flex his limbs. They had been immobile for so long that it was difficult to restore circulation. When the blood poured into his veins, it was like hot acid. The pain was all but crippling.

  “Would you move it,” Queequeg swatted him again. “I wouldn’t have rescued you if I didn’t need you for something.”

  Hunter crawled slowly across the floor. “This hurts like Hell, kitty cat,”

  “Oh, does baby need his level six painkillers?”

  “Actually, that would be great,” Hunter hissed. He punched the hatch, and it cycled open.

  He was in the service tube, from there, it was a painful, half-crouching walk a few tens of meters to a storage bay. Queequeg sealed the hatch behind him.

  Hunter squinted around the locker. “This is a mission module. One of those lockers should contain pain blockers.”

  “You’ll get your painkillers, you big baby,” Queequeg assured him. “But the important thing is, we have to kill those rats… all of them.”

  “And how do you propose to…”

  “I’m a cat, dammit,” said Queequeg. He opened a storage locker, which contained several packed pulse weapons. “They may be genetically enhanced, they may be intelligent, they may be telepathic, but underneath it all, they’re just rats. They’re just filthy, disease-ridden, vermin, and I am going to kill all of them.”

  “How,” Hunter asked, the simple effort of making the word causing him to cross his eyes in pain. “Those hand cannons weren’t designed for your furry little paws.”

  “Duh.” Queequeg sidled up to a COM Panel and settled on his haunches. “If I could just use a pulse cannon, I’d fry them. I could set it to overcharge and detonate it in the middle of one of their mass meetings, but that would be unsatisfying. Some of them might survive. I need them all dead.” He activated the COM Panel and tapped in some commands.

  “Are you calling for help?” Hunter asked.

  “Negative,” Queequeg told him. “I am going to take care of this myself. Humans would just screw it up.”

  “If hand cannons are no good to you, why did you just break those hand cannons out of the weapons locker?”

  “Because I will need them,” Queequeg finished at the COM Panel, and spared a moment to look at Hunter. “Really hurts, doesn’t it?”

  Hunter grunted. “Badly.”

  Queequeg jumped up to a shelf and, from there, climbed up to a rack. He disappeared behind some storage boxes. A moment later, a medical kit fell in front of Hunter. Round cat eyes peered down on the human. “Happy now?”

  Hunter pried open the kit. He took a pain patch and affixed it to his neck with fingers drenched in sweat. Chemicals and nanites flowed into his bloodstream, and began beating back the pain. As the cat made its way down, he dug through the kit, trying to find the counter-virals. He didn’t think any of them would work against Bacia, but they sure couldn’t hurt.

  Suddenly, the entrance hatch to the storage chamber cycled open. Hunter tried to scramble for one of the sidearms, but his limbs were cramped and difficult to move.

  An auto-mech appeared in the hatch. It was larger than Queequeg, with articulated limbs and a spine. Sensors front and rear stuck out on the stems of whiskers. An X-Term-O-Bot.

  “Help me take this thing apart,” ordered the cat.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Surface

  Magnus Morgan’s exploration crew had tried to get the command center operational again, but it did not respond to the quantum wave generator, and was apparently the more primitive electron-based power system they had seen on other worlds. These took longer to bring on-line, owing to amperages and voltages and other arcana. Technician Omega was good at that sort of thing, and was trying to work out a way to adapt one of the ship’s electron generators to power the systems without frying them.

  The Redoubt’s command center was not much more than a semi-circle of workstations, with screens, old style keyboard inputs, and touchpads built into the horizontal surfaces, and weird, wiry chairs with low backs. The workstations were wired, physically, to water purification, power generating, and waste disposal facilities in the deeper recesses of the Redoubt. There were slots on the surface of the work stations, and they had discovered a number of chunky bits of plastic that it fit into them; probably memory storage or something.

  Maybe when Omega got the system powered up, they would find out.

  Below the command center were ten habitation levels, 1,000 chambers with ten bunks in each of them and ten small drawers in each of them. Survivors would have had enough personal storage space for a data pad and two changes of clothes. “Our team opened a few of the drawers in the personal habitats,” Ing reported after his initial survey. “Some of them contained personal belongings of the survivors. They may also contain records, logs, personal journals. Could be valuable.”

  Morgan was a little uncomfortable with that. “Retrieving them would violate the sanctity of their final resting place? We would be like tomb robbers.”

  “How would it be different than reading a log?” Anansi asked.

  “An official log is one thing, personal belongings are quite different.” In the crowded habitats of Republic, and even moreso on Pegasus, the few truly personal items one kept for oneself often held a strong sense of attachment. Morgan could only imagine what a scrap of personal belongings… perhaps all one managed to salvage as their city was annihilated, would have meant to the survivors.

  “Don’t you think they would have wanted their stories to be told?” Ing argued. “If it were me, I wouldn’t want the last traces of my life to be left behind in a cave on a forgotten planet.” Morgan nodded, a little sadly nevertheless. “Tell the search parties to work their way through the personnel quarters and… in as respectful a manner as they can manage… catalog the personal effects of the survivors, paying special attention to logs, journals, and … whatever we may find.”

  Magnus Morgan checked his data pad as he was alerted to an incoming communication.

  “Excuse me for a minute.” He picked up the datapad and turned away. He walked to an alcove to give himself a little more privacy and touched his COM Link. Kayliegh Morgan appeared a moment later on the datapad. “Greetings, husband,” she told him.

  He could not help but smile warmly at her face, that wholesome beauty, a little marred because her hair was askew, and she looked a little tired. “How are the twins?”

  “Sleeping… and I’m fine, thank you.” She paused a second. “Are you safe?”

  “I’m currently inside a structure carved into solid rock,” he answered. “Arguably, I’m safer here than I am on Pegasus.”

  “Matthew’s missing on Lexington Keeler,” she told him.

  “Missing?”

  “He was on a deck that collapsed when they blew the ship out of the atmosphere,” Kayliegh’s eyes began to glisten. “Can you believe the commander did that? Knowing the risks? Knowing people could get killed. Just to recover an empty ship with no survivors on it?”

  “He didn’t know there were no survivors,” Magnus Morgan began to argue, before realizing this was a mistake.

  “And maybe he should have checked first before sending our people over there,” Kayliegh shot back, really fighting the tears now. “The crew shouldn’t have been on Lexington Keeler to begin with. I’ve always had doubts about Prime Commander Keeler, and now….”

  “Do you think Matthew’s dead?” Magnus asked, knowing that as twins, there was a bond between them.

  She paused. “I don’t know. I don’t think so, but I don’t know. How much longer do you think you’ll be on the surface?”

  “Two ship-days, maximum,” he told her. “Once the ground operation is set up, I can run it mostly from the ship. And then I’ll come back and we’ll get through this.” The Surface – Elsewhere

>   Johnny Rook awoke to the sound of Lt. Warfighter Taurus strapping on her combat gear.

  He had stretched out on a sleeping pack on a floor in the front entrance of the cave, and been lulled to sleep by the sound of water rushing over the rocks outside. He raised himself to a half sitting position. “Good afterdawn?” he asked.

  She finished fastening the closures on her sleeves. “Dawn was an hour ago while you were still sleeping. We lost telemetry on one of the Trauma Hounds last night.”

  “Really,” he said, his bleary morning mind trying to wrap itself around the concept. He vaguely remembered what he had been dreaming and, watching Taurus put her clothes on made an effective segue between his unconscious and conscious life.

  “It could be a malfunction, or environmental damage. I’m going to check it out,” she continued.

  “Can I go … I mean, back-up?” Rook asked, hopefully.

  She shrugged. “Gear up, and bring Jordan.”

  Rook looked over to where Jordan was still asleep in his pack, hair spilling all over his eyes.

  A lot of people look kind of cute when they sleep. Max Jordan just looked messy. Rook stood up and gave his friend a good hard wake-up kick. Max rolled out and was up in a defensive half-crouch, fists raised and ready to fight..

  “It’s me, killer!” Rook explained.

  Jordan lowered his fists and brushed his hair aside.

  “Gear up, Jordan,” Taurus ordered. “We’re going for a ride.” Max Jordan was still a bit biffy. “What?”

  Taurus bent at the knees and addressed him. “We’re going for a ride? You know, ride? You like rides, boy? Come on, boy, let’s go for a ride.”

  Jordan began pulling his battle-pants out of his sleeping pack. “If I gotta, I gotta. There better be a hot, stimulant-enhanced beverage with my name on it.” Taurus tossed him a thermal beverage containment unit. “Here. Have some hot chocolatized lactose.”

  Desultorily, he twisted open the lid. “Mom always put little marshmallows in it.” Normally, Taurus would have responded by reminding the soldier that his mother wasn’t here, but that would have been gratuitously cruel. “Just drink it up,” she barked.