Blake's 7: Criminal Intent

by Trevor Baxendale

  They tried the airlock but it would not open. ‘Enter the command code override.’

  Drena turned from where she stood and watched. The mutoid entered a code on the keypad, her fingers moving more rapidly than Drena could follow. But the airlock did not open.

  ‘The lock has been fused.’

  ‘Jettison the pod.’

  ‘We should report it to Kilus Kroe.’

  ‘There is no need. Our orders were to discard the bodies of all dead prisoners. Jettison the pod – if there are any prisoners remaining alive they may be in a position to transmit our location.’

  ‘Agreed.’ The mutoid entered a series of coded instructions on her wrist pad. ‘Engaging command link. Accessing the ship’s central computer control network.’

  ‘Wait,’ Gan said, climbing slowly to his feet. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Silence,’ ordered the other mutoid.

  But Drena had already checked the other prisoners in the pod and knew that Vila was missing. Melson too. She stared at the airlock to Pod Four and felt her mouth go dry. She had a shrewd idea where Vila and Melson might be. ‘I think Vila and Melson are in that pod,’ Drena whispered.

  ‘If they are, they’re dead,’ muttered Stygo.

  ‘Jettison the pod,’ ordered the mutoid.

  ‘No, don’t!’ Gan shouted. But the mutoid turned her rifle and clubbed him viciously back down.

  ‘Jettison subroutine entered and running.’

  *

  ‘Come in Liberator!’ Vila said again. He shook the bracelet. ‘Why won’t Jenna respond?’

  ‘Is it broken?’ Melson asked.

  Vila shook his head. ‘It’s fine. It’s transmitting. They’re just not picking up! Jenna! Come in!’

  ‘Vila!’ Cally’s voice crackled out of the bracelet. ‘This is Cally. I’m on the Liberator. What is your situation?’

  ‘Cally, I’ve never been so glad to hear anyone’s voice!’ Vila was flooded with relief. ‘But don’t say another word before you’ve teleported me back!’

  ‘What’s happened to Blake and the others? We’ve had no communication at all since –’

  ‘Cally! Teleport – now!’

  ‘I’m trying to get a fix on your co-ordinates, Vila. Jenna had to move the Liberator because of the pursuit ships…’

  Vila felt his heart sink like a stone. ‘What pursuit ships?’

  ‘It’s made communications difficult. We’re operating right on the edge of teleport range. Hang on, I’m getting a fix now…’

  ‘Hurry!’

  Something clanged in the airlock behind him and Vila leaped forwards in fright. For a second he thought the mutoids were coming through again and he braced himself for the inevitable kill shot.

  ‘What are they doing?’ Melson wondered, staring at the airlock. It was still firmly shut, all indicators flashing red. Suddenly a klaxon sounded and there was another series of loud clanks and hisses from the front of the pod.

  ‘Is that what I think it is?’ wondered Vila. He swallowed loudly.

  Melson nodded. ‘They’re disengaging the airlock. Separating the pods.’

  ‘They’re going to jettison us?’ Vila asked, a deeper level of panic clawing up inside him.

  ‘Pod Three will keep the airlock. This one will be left open to space.’

  ‘Space!’

  ‘Sorry Vila, I didn’t quite catch that…’ Cally’s voice drifted from the bracelet comm.

  ‘Teleport, Cally! Now!’

  The whole pod began to vibrate and the klaxon continued to blare.

  ‘What was that? I can’t hear you over the –’

  ‘Teleport!’ Vila shrieked as a gust of pressurised air blew out from around the airlock.

  ‘Stand by,’ Cally’s voice rang out calmly. ‘Co-ordinate fix in five… four… three…’

  The pod suddenly lurched backwards as it disengaged from the rest of the transport ship. A blast of mist obscured the airlock and then Vila glimpsed the cold, hard blackness of the vacuum outside.

  PART THREE

  DEATH PENALTY

  TWENTY-NINE

  The spacesuits were combat versions – matt black armour made from lightweight foamed plasteel over a micromesh lining. It was impervious to blaster and laser fire. The helmet contained a full comms suite and an integral air-filter system connected to a solid oxygen flask. Travis had used this kind of suit before – most memorably in the infamous battle of Laxis Major, when he had led a platoon of space commandos into suborbital battle with a well-organised and well-resourced group of space station rebels known as the Laxis Uprising. It had been a tough fight – zero-G combat was never easy – but the Federation troops were better equipped and the eventual result was never in doubt. The battle lasted fourteen minutes, and at the end thirty-eight rebels were floating dead in the vacuum and another seventeen were prisoners. Travis had not lost one man from his platoon. Par had been with him then, a good man to have with you in any kind of fight. But that had been in the good days, before things went sour on Serkasta. Now everything was different.

  The spacesuits had built-in jets and more than enough power to fly Travis and Kiera from the pursuit ship to the York. The red spike of the pursuit ship shrank behind them as the suits powered across space towards the prison ship.

  It was a twenty-minute journey. Travis let Kiera control the computerised thrusters because he trusted her to do the job better than he could. It was a relatively simple matter for her to sync her own cerebral cortex to the suit controls.

  The York grew larger in Travis’s spacesuit visor every minute as the distance was closed. It was brilliant white against the blackness, glowing like a string of pearls. To one side, lit by the same sun, was the giant planet, amber and brown, the vast slice of its glittering ice ring system extending out and beyond Travis’s field of vision. It was breathtaking, no doubt about it; Travis had long forgotten the mind-turning spectacle of deep space. As a young, raw recruit he had been inducted into bootcamp with a lunar walk on his first day. He could still remember the blinding grey vista as he stepped out of the Moonbase, still hear the sound of his own breath catching in his throat as he saw planet Earth for the first time from orbit. Spacewalks had become routine during his career, but now, hurtling through the void, no more than a speck of grit in comparison to the planet, the thrill briefly returned.

  But this was no time for wonder. Travis focused his attention on the York again. This was battle. He hadn’t bothered with the left-hand glove of the spacesuit; he had sealed the cuff of the sleeve around the laseron destroyer instead. Holstered on his right thigh was a fully loaded blaster pistol.

  ‘ETA five minutes,’ said Kiera. Her voice sounded close, relayed via the comlink in their helmets. Travis quickly identified the airlock located on the top of the prime mover. That would give them access straight into the flight cabin of the York and the crew. After that it was anyone’s guess. But Blake was somewhere on that ship, Travis knew it. The Liberator was hanging back, a bright speck on the far side of the prison ship, just out of range of his pursuit ship’s weapons. Travis guessed it was still close enough for the teleport to function.

  Probably not close enough to detect two people crossing the space between the pursuit ships and the York, however. Travis smiled to himself and pointed. ‘That airlock,’ he said.

  Kiera made a slight adjustment to their flight vector and the spacesuits veered towards the front of the ship.

  ‘Four minutes,’ she said.

  Something caught Travis’s attention in the corner of his eye and instinct told him to look. A cloud of vapour had issued from between the two rearmost pods of the spacecraft. A second later the last pod disengaged from its neighbour and tilted backwards, gushing vapour from the open airlock. Objects appeared in the gout of steam, tumbling into space, and Travis recognised them instantly. Limbs spread out, torsos streaming with clouds of red mist which instantly turned to flakes of scarlet ice.

  ‘The last pod has been jettison
ed,’ said Kiera.

  ‘I wonder if the occupants were alive when the pods separated?’ Travis said.

  ‘Does it matter? They are dead either way.’

  ‘Horrible way to die.’

  ‘There are good ways?’

  Travis risked a glance at the mutoid, but he couldn’t see her face through the reflective visor of her helmet. ‘Of course there are,’ he said.

  Kiera made no reply.

  The pod continued to fall away from the rest of the prison ship, disgorging its grim contents. As it did so, the prison ship moved as well, suddenly propelled forwards.

  Travis pointed at the flight cabin again, but Kiera was already compensating using the directional jets on their suits. Travis could see his own black shadow growing larger on the York’s hull as the distance closed.

  *

  Vila opened his eyes. He didn’t want to. He fully expected to see, just for a second, nothing but the blackness of space and a few distant and unfriendly stars before his eyeballs frosted and burst in the vacuum, quickly followed by the rest of him.

  But when, after a few more seconds of fatal exposure to the inimical environment of outer space, he realised he was actually still alive and breathing, he had to open his eyes just to be sure.

  ‘You’re on the Liberator,’ Cally told him gently. ‘You’re safe.’

  He was crouched in the teleport bay, hunched over, expecting the worst. He realised he must have been picked up at the very last moment. Possibly he had endured closer shaves before, but right now he couldn’t remember any.

  He took Cally’s hand and slowly stood up. ‘We made it,’ he said in complete disbelief.

  ‘You were screaming when you arrived. What was going on over there? Where are the others?’ Cally turned and looked at the unshaven man in prison fatigues who had unexpectedly materialised alongside Vila. ‘And who’s your friend?’

  ‘This is Melson,’ said Vila. ‘He helped us. Well, me…’

  ‘What about Blake? Where are Avon and Gan?’

  ‘It’s a long story,’ Vila said miserably. ‘Any chance of a drink before I tell it?’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ said Melson, pointing a neural stunner at Cally. A bright spark of light arced from the tip and dropped her where she stood.

  Vila could not have been more shocked if the stunner had been used on him. He watched, paralysed with incomprehension, as Cally flopped to the floor. She was utterly unconscious. He looked back up at Melson, who had now pulled a small blaster gun out of his tunic and was aiming it straight at him.

  ‘Sorry about this, Vila,’ Melson said.

  ‘Wh-what’s going on?’

  ‘I’m an undercover agent for Federation Security.’

  *

  Zola gripped the handrail as hard as she could. Her fingers throbbed inside the spacesuit gloves. She couldn’t feel the York moving but she knew it was. She had seen Pod One disengage from the rear of the train and fall away, felt the slight tremor through the hull of the ship beneath her, but then nothing. No sound apart from the rasp of her own breath inside her helmet.

  She knew the ship was moving because the rings of the planet suddenly came into view. The York was tipping towards them, moving forwards under the thrust provided by the pod being jettisoned. She had no idea what was going on there and for a while feared that each of the pods was going to be jettisoned in turn until there was only the prime mover left – with her clinging onto it and a mad mutoid trapped in the flight cabin.

  She started to hyperventilate. The suit oxygen would last for over twenty-four hours so she wasn’t worried about using up air, but she was worried about panicking. She needed to think clearly. She had been trying to think clearly since the very start of this trip and she felt mentally exhausted. Norton was dead and now so was Garran. She was alone. She had no idea what was going on in the prison pods but it didn’t look good.

  Pod Four spun away, and Zola saw the remains of bodies floating through space around it. She felt physically sick. She clamped her lips shut and kept the bile down. Spacesuits and vomit were not a good combination.

  She had to decide what to do next. She wanted to get as far away from the mutoid as possible, but she didn’t fancy spacewalking along the exterior of the ship. The pods were full of prisoners who wouldn’t be pleased to see her – and who knew what was going on with Kilus Kroe in Pod One? Besides which she didn’t fancy hanging onto a pod as it was jettisoned into space.

  She gripped the handrail as hard as she could. Her hands were sweating inside the gloves and no matter what she tried to think of she couldn’t stop the panic swelling up inside her. The planet was casting a sickly yellow light over the hull of the York now and she could see more of the ring system. It was stunningly beautiful and for a few seconds she simply gaped at it. As the York tilted further, Zola thought she could see individual grains of matter in the rings twinkling like frost. They would not be grains, however. Many of them would be chunks of matter bigger than the prison spaceship. The distance was deceptive, she knew; from here the rings looked smooth and flat, the edges razor sharp. But close up they were massive fields of jagged, tumbling icebergs.

  Zola tore her gaze away from the planet and thought furiously. What could she do? Where could she go? There was no-one to tell her.

  Something struck the hull not far away with a thud she felt through the handrail. Startled, she looked up to see a black shape crawling towards her. For a second she thought it was the mutoid following her out of the flight cabin. But it wasn’t a mutoid. Even more unbelievably, it was a man in a Space Command combat vacuum suit.

  ‘Space Commander Travis,’ said the man, introducing himself via the automatic comlink signal their helmets shared. In one gloved hand was a small but deadly pistol, aimed straight at Zola. ‘What the hell are you doing out here?’

  THIRTY

  ‘Biovores,’ said Kroe proudly. He held up a small transparent jar in front of Blake’s face. ‘So called because… well, just look at them.’

  Inside the jar was a seething mass of black worms. Each of them had two rows of minuscule legs running along their length. They squirmed and ran around the inside the jar and over each other in a mindless frenzy of movement.

  Blake looked away after only a moment, feeling more than anxious now.

  ‘Strictly illegal, these beauties,’ Kroe boasted. ‘They’re genetically engineered on the planet Verotox. Nothing in the least bit natural about them – except for the fact that they are living creatures. But they’ve never existed anywhere in the known universe outside of the laboratories they were bred in. Fascinating, don’t you think?’

  Blake closed his eyes. His head was throbbing. He was trying to brace himself, mentally and physically, for whatever ordeal lay ahead.

  ‘Let me explain how they work,’ Kroe said. ‘The biovores are let loose on the skin of the victim. They then search for suitable points of entry. Any kind of orifice will do. Any at all. They move quickly, working their way deep into the host body. Once inside, they find the warmth very stimulating. And the warmer they get, the hungrier they become. Ravenous, in fact. And so they eat.’

  Blake fought down the panic. He could feel it rising inside him like a dark tide. His heart was racing and the blood was rushing in his ears. He squeezed his eyes shut and listened to it, trying to force his pulse to slow down.

  ‘They really don’t know when to stop,’ Kroe said. ‘They grow as they eat, swelling up, gorged and bloated, until there’s either nothing left or they eat all the way out to the surface. And then they find another way back in and carry on. It’s disgusting, really, but they weren’t bred for table manners I’m afraid.’

  Kroe put the jar down carefully on the edge of the seat between Blake’s thighs. His feet were bonded to the chair legs so he couldn’t prevent it. He tried to twist and turn but he couldn’t dislodge the jar.

  ‘I used a jar full of these things once on a prisoner. They chased the man around his cell until there was nowhere
left for him to run. He stamped on a few but there were too many in the end. They got into him quick enough. Hollowed him out in twenty minutes flat. Nothing left but a man-shaped sack of the things by the end.’

  ‘You’re a sick, twisted maniac,’ Blake said. Spittle flecked his lips.

  ‘It’s been said before,’ Kroe admitted.

  *

  Zola pulled herself along the outside of the prison ship with a renewed sense of purpose. She gained strength with every handhold. Space Commander Travis was a legend in his own lifetime. Some called him a killer, which he undoubtedly was, or a murderer, which was open to debate. Others accused him of war crimes and even massacre. He was revered and feared in equal measure by all who had heard of him. Zola didn’t really know what to believe, but right now she didn’t even care; Travis had saved her life and she was more than grateful for it.

  The fact that she had met him out here, while clinging to the outside of a spaceship in the middle of nowhere when all had seemed utterly lost, made it even more remarkable. Almost dreamlike, she thought. It crossed her mind that something could have gone wrong with her oxygen supply and she was simply hallucinating as she spiralled into an asphyxiation coma. But no. This was real. Heart-poundingly real. There was no way her imagination would have turned towards a semi-mythical figure like Travis.

  Zola felt as alive and alert as she had ever been – perhaps more so. She had stared at death and been saved.

  Zola crossed the gap between Pod Two and Three, which was now the last pod in the train. Pod Four was still visible, far behind the ship now, tumbling away into the distance. If she held up one hand she could hide the pod with the thumb of her spacesuit glove. It was long gone, as were the people who had been in it.

  Using the handrail, Zola manoeuvred herself around the back of Pod Three and down to the airlock. She used her command override code to open the hatch and then climbed inside. Once she was inside and the airlock closed again she hit the atmospheric controls and the chamber filled with air. Thirty seconds later, artificial gravity had gradually increased to the point where she could stand comfortably.