The Borrega Test

by James Vincett

  “Cyrus here tells me the Union will help us gain our freedom.” Shirazi looked at Yazdani with raised eyebrows. “For sure this time?”

  “For sure,” Yazdani replied.

  “Come,” Abbas said, “let us get food and drink.” Abbas led them to the mouth of a narrow cave. He retrieved a lantern from the wall and led them down a narrow passage to a warren of small chambers. Other men were here, cleaning weapons and performing domestic tasks. Abbas led Shirazi and Yazdani into a small natural chimney with smooth walls and light streaming down from an opening above. Soon the three had settled onto soft couches to sip cool water and nibble on olives and nuts.

  “As you no doubt have guessed,” Shirazi said, “our circuitous route hopefully allowed us to reach this point unobserved by either the Shah’s security forces or the Naati. Tomorrow we will approach the site where the Naati are digging. We must travel by foot because the terrain is forbidding. Be alert and follow our lead.”

  The men walked in single file in the darkness; each man wore an LED that emitted soft light. Yazdani was unsure as to how many moved through the passage. He had to concentrate to avoid tripping over loose rocks and rugged fissures; it seemed he was the loudest, as he frequently stumbled and cursed. The passage seemed to be a narrow crack in the mountain, the ceiling lost in darkness.

  Shirazi stopped and hissed for silence. Yazdani looked over Shirazi’s shoulder and saw three soft lights bobbing in the darkness, and the three scouts appeared out of the gloom. “We are almost there; twenty meters,” one whispered.

  “We must be careful, Cyrus,” Shirazi said in a low voice. “The Naati use cyborg beasts and small robots to patrol the edge of the dig site. Follow close.”

  The men emerged from the narrow passage and fanned out along the edge of a large chamber. They knelt and brought their weapons to bear. Yazdani looked around and realized they were at the end of a large relatively smooth-walled tube. He saw the passage they emerged from was indeed a crack in the very rock of the mountains. The far end of the tube seemed bathed in a faint red light.

  “This lava tube leads directly to the dig site,” Shirazi whispered. “There is no way we can avoid detection when we proceed, so we must create a diversion.” Twenty-four of the men carried the unconscious cavecats, each of the beasts hung from a pole supported by two men. As the men unwrapped the cavecats from the metal nets, one of the scouts disappeared into the darkness.

  “Where’s he going?”

  “To break open a vial of Naati scent at the far end of the tube. The scent will draw the cavecats away from us. Once the beasts enter the dig site, they will seek out any Naati they smell.”

  Yazdani watched as several men applied an injector to each of the cavecats, presumably to wake them up. The men scrambled to the edge of the tube just as the scout returned.

  “Turn off your light,” Shirazi whispered.

  Yazdani complied and waited in the darkness, their breathing the only sound. After several minutes, he heard a rustling sound, then another, and another and then footfalls receding down the tube. After a few moments, all was quiet again.

  Yazdani waited in darkness and quiet for what seemed like an eternity. Then he heard the unmistakable sound of blaster fire.

  “Turn on your lights!” Shirazi hissed. The men rose and moved down the tube in single file. As they approached the far end, Yazdani heard roars and blaster fire. The red light grew brighter until they stood on a ledge looking out into a vast space. Lights strung up on the wall of the cavern cast a deep red and orange light. Yazdani looked up and saw the open sky far above. Dominating the chamber was a huge mass of rock and ice, what looked like the top half of a rough sphere. Yazdani figured the object was more than forty meters in diameter. Metal scaffolds surrounded the object, and several strange furry gourd-like creatures in exoskeletons moved around the cavern or on the scaffold. The sound of blaster fire and combat filled the air.

  “We don’t have much time,” Shirazi said. “Cyrus, Bijan, Hayk, and Arman will go with me. The rest of you will wait here, against the wall, and cover us.” Before Yazdani knew quite what was happening Shirazi and three other men jumped down from the edge of the tube to the smooth floor of the cavern. Yazdani scrambled to follow, and fell flat on his face. A man helped him up and they followed their leader toward the mass of rock and ice. Yazdani heard a chirping and clicking sound, and realized the creatures in the exoskeletons had seen them.

  Shirazi lead them into a narrow passage dug into the rock and ice. The three men stood near the entrance. “Follow me!” Shirazi called, and Yazdani moved into the frigid mist-filled passage. After several meters, Shirazi stopped at a smooth, mirror-like surface.

  Yazdani reached out to touch it, but Shirazi grasped his hand. “Do not touch it! It is deathly cold.”

  “What is it?”

  “No one knows. During our conflict with the Shah, several of these objects were found all throughout the Kabir Highlands, some by the Shah’s forces, some by the Naati, and some by us. The objects are so cold that the water in the rock has frozen around them.”

  Yazdani heard whispering; it rose like the sound of waves on a shore. A strange feeling settled on him like a dark cloak.

  “You feel it, don’t you?” Shirazi said, looking into Yazdani’s eyes.

  “Yes.”

  “Some can feel it, some can’t.”

  “It’s terrible.” Yazdani felt nauseous, as if he had swallowed poison.

  “When the Naati returned, just over a year ago, they occupied all of the known sites, and have since discovered more.”

  “How many?”

  “Over two-dozen in total, maybe more. One question I have, did Admiral Kilgore know about these strange objects?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I have seen no information about them. If the GID or Naval Intelligence does know, I was not told.”

  One of the scouts at the entrance to the ice passage hissed.

  “We’ve got to get moving,” Shirazi said. “There is one more thing for you to see.”

  They moved back along the ice passage and out into the cavern. Shirazi signaled for more men to follow, and then led them to the edge of the chamber. The sounds of blaster-fire and roars echoed through the chamber. The furry gourds in the exoskeletons had disappeared.

  Shirazi commanded his soldiers to take cover behind some crates and scaffolding near the wall of the chamber. He moved into another passage dug into the rock, this one lit with a string of red lights strung along the wall. Yazdani followed him down the passage and through an archway into another chamber.

  Yazdani saw three rows of transparent cylinders with attached machinery. Inside each cylinder floated a Human suspended in a fluid. All were naked, their bodies vivisected or riddled with wounds. Others looked to have large tumors on their heads, limbs, or bodies. Two of the cylinders contained scores of fetuses.

  “What is this place?”

  “You know the answer, Cyrus. These are my people, abducted and experimented upon by the slaves of the demon Naati.”

  The anger bubbled up inside Yazdani, replacing the nausea he first felt at entering the chamber. These are our people. “Did Kilgore know about this?” He began taking photographs with his pockcomp.

  “Yes. That is one of the reasons he was helping us.”

  “Why didn’t the Union intervene?”

  “Politics, Cyrus. Politics.”

  Shouts and blaster fire sounded just outside the chamber. Shirazi raised his rifle. “We need to move.” They moved back along the passage and emerged into the larger chamber, taking cover with the other soldiers. Blaster fire popped and zinged all around them. Yazdani saw the soldiers firing at several figures standing on a catwalk on the far side.

  “You first,” Bijan said to Shirazi. “We’ll cover you!”

  The men let loose a fusillade of bolts; Shirazi and Yazdani crouched and moved across the chamber toward the lava tube as fast as they could.

  Yazdani heard
an eerie keening sound, a high-pitched tone that seemed to warble and click simultaneously. As he scrambled across the chamber, he saw several creatures bounding across the smooth floor. They moved incredibly fast, each stride covering several meters at once. The keening sound grew overwhelming as they approached.

  “We’re not going to make it!” Yazdani screamed.

  Bolts of blaster fire from above and behind struck the beasts. Some tumbled and lay still, but still more moved across the floor of the chamber. As he climbed into the lava tube, Yazdani heard screams from below. He turned and saw several of the beasts tearing apart the men. Shirazi pulled Yazdani out of the way just before multiple bolts hit around and just inside the lava tube.

  “They’re gone,” Shirazi said. “We must retreat.”

  Tears clouded Yazdani’s eyes as he followed Shirazi and the other men down the lava tube. They died so I could see this. He had never seen such bravery in his life.

  Cortez

  Most Imperial Naval fleets existed as administrative fictions, the entire fleet never assembling in one place. The most common mission within any fleet was the patrol, with frigates and cruisers patrolling the vast stretches of space within the Union. Many patrols consisted of a lone frigate, but some were composed of two or three frigates or light cruisers. The patrol was the least glamorous and most dangerous duty in the Imperial Navy. Fleet Command assigned each patrol a list of systems based on information from Naval Intelligence, the General Intelligence Directorate, and complex computer algorithms. Not only were the assigned systems to be patrolled, but surrounding systems up to 50 LY were scanned with quasi-particle sensors in an attempt to discover any suspicious activity. In this way the Imperial Navy wove a web of warning; any enemy invading Union space would eventually trip over one of the thin strands woven by scores of patrols. If a patrol detected anything interesting, one or more of the ships immediately shunted to the closest system with a quasi-particle beam dictor array to contact Fleet Command and summon assistance from the larger and more powerful ship classes.

  Enemies were not the only dangers in the vast darkness. Asteroid fields, coronal plasma ejections, micrometeorites, unrecorded black holes, star-forming nebulae, supernovae, and a myriad of other dangers were the source of most Navy casualties, with several ships lost each year to these and other hazards.

  In addition, a patrol was tasked to visit any inhabitants within the assigned systems and make contact with the administrators of these colonies. The patrols were to provide what assistance they could within the scope of their orders, and carry any messages for later transmission via the QBD network. Patrols were also to report any “unofficial” settlements, the systems tagged for a later visit from the Union Security Service.

  Captain Marcus Braden Cortez had performed this sort of duty for the last thirteen years. First commanding a frigate, he rose through the ranks and served on several different ships, the last being the Gladius class cruiser HSS Naginata. He had seen it all: Naati spy ships attempting to hack the QBD network; illegal colonies of pirates, unlicensed miners, or religious fanatics; starship wrecks from the Snirr Wars; a Naati defector; dead colonies; quadruple star systems; a system with twenty-six worlds spanning thousands of astronomical units and systems with a lone world; vast asteroid belts; shattered planets; black holes; supernovae; vast nebulae; and a comet with a tail half a light year long and a nucleus the size of a small gas giant. Any action he had seen was usually a tight skirmish with illegal raiders or chasing Naati spy ships back across the Neutral Zone.

  The Battle of the Third Moon of Anuvi III, fifteen years ago, was still the largest battle he had participated in his entire career.

  Despite all of this, Fleet Command had seen fit to suspend him in limbo. He had spent weeks on Finwarden Station, looking out the ports of the station’s largest observation deck at the distant planet of Kongerslev and the constant comings and goings of the ships of the Fifth Fleet. After returning with the Naati defector, Fleet Command sent him a terse note relieving him of the Naginata and suspending him from all duties waiting “administrative actions.” He petitioned Admiral Pendleton, his superior, for a meeting, but command had only granted him an audience with a paper-pushing Vice-Admiral. Cortez could have sworn the man was welded to his chair; the fatso droned on and on about “officer reallocation” and “limits of officer duty” and “vessel distribution.” Cortez’ official status was “suspended from duty,” which sounded like a punishment for some sort of infraction. He was only reprimanded once in his career, when he ignored his superior officer’s orders and remained in the Anuvi system; however, Fleet Command was hard-pressed to punish him given the maneuver he pulled that destroyed a Bellicose class Naati ship.

  They gave him a medal for that.

  Fleet Command then slapped him on the wrist with a non-judicial punishment for disobeying a direct order, something that normally would have resulted in a dishonorable discharge at best, or thirty years hard labor at worst.

  Frustration had set in on day three of purgatory. He was assigned luxurious quarters, but he rarely spent time there, given he needed only a few hours of sleep a night. He tried to socialize with some of the officers he had served with in the past, but he did not appreciate sitting in the Officer’s Club while others drank until inebriated or ate huge gobs of food, given that he could no longer enjoy such activities. He only once attempted to watch the popular entertainment produced in the Core Worlds and beamed out to the edges of the Union, but after half-an-hour concluded all of it was a pile of trivia and frivolity. Therefore, he spent most of his time on the observation deck, swimming in memories. Now that he had nothing to do, the memories almost drowned him.

  He was fourteen years old when he first took the controls of a spacecraft. A carryall was a ship designed for hauling several tonnes of cargo between the mining ship and the larger freighter in orbit several thousand kilometers away. His father, too cheap to fix the autopilot, gave his son Marcus a fifteen-minute lesson in piloting the vessel one day, then promptly fell asleep in the co-pilot’s chair, exhausted from working thirty hours straight. Cortez was a natural; he knew just how much thrust to give the attitude jets, how to engage in a smooth acceleration or deceleration, and how to dock the ship into the freighter’s docking collar. He had even let his father sleep while he negotiated a price for the ore and supervised its unloading.

  Upon waking, his father said nothing. He just looked at his son, grunted, and carried on as if nothing unusual or exceptional happened.

  He spent long days on Portia Station, cooped up with his father and mother in their small quarters. He remembered desperately trying to concentrate on his homework while his mother and father fought about money, his father reeling drunk from the oily gin he cooked up in a makeshift still.

  “We don’t have any money for the boy to go to college,” his father had said. “He’s not a stuck-up, sanctimonious know-it-all, and as long as I’m alive, he won’t become one.”

  “I’ve got a scholarship for the Naval Academy,” Marcus had said with pride.

  “The Naval Academy? What you gonna do, boy? You wanna be the Consul’s attack dog? You wanna be a boot licker, killing homs and aliens for the Destillières? I thought I raised you to do honest work! You’re not a killer, and you shouldn’t want to be one!”

  Later, Cortez came to realize the man was scared, absolutely terrified, of the forces beyond his control.

  Better to meet those forces head on.

  Cortez bloomed at the Academy. Even though he had to work twice as hard for his instructors to recognize him over his wealthy classmates, he found he had a natural charisma, and soon had a wide circle of friends. He reveled in sports and physical training, honing his body to a hard, dexterous machine. Drawn to tactics and strategy, he scored the highest grades. All of his instructors told him they saw a bright future.

  The women! I almost had to beat them off with a club!

  He met McFinn at the academy, and hated him from the beg
inning. The man had two wealthy lawyers for parents; his family owned a residence in the Imperial Capital and property in North America. McFinn had gone to the best schools on Earth and benefitted from all the accoutrements of privilege. Cortez hated McFinn’s attitude the most: the breezy way he formed relationships, the cool sarcasm, the sanctimonious moralizing. There was also the whiff of scandal about McFinn’s father that frequently made the rounds, but at the time Cortez thought little of it; he figured most of the families who sent their children to the Academy were crooked.

  They’re all rich, aren’t they?

  After the Battle of the Third Moon of Anuvi III, pain and loneliness were the only constants in his life for almost two years. He woke from surgery with almost no memory. He recognized no one. Slowly, with the help of a crippled telepath, he began to remember: his childhood; the Academy; his daring maneuver. At the same time, he learned to walk again, his brain learning to use the extensive cybernetics grafted on to what remained of his body. However, the worst was his new appearance, all gleam and mirrors. The Hominin form was sacred, and society considered those who willingly cast it aside criminals and mentally unfit for society. Those who came about it through sacrifice still had to be branded as the other, and could not have a normal appearance, hence the statue-like figure and mirrored-mask. The telepath once told him the mirrored face was for others, so they saw themselves in him. What it really did was mark him as a freak.

  Cortez knew he wouldn’t have reached this far without an iron will. It was will alone that had brought him this far, the will to work harder and smarter than anyone else. People just didn’t appreciate how hard he had worked to get this far and Cortez’ anger bubbled when someone else chalked it up to luck or favor.

  Several other officers and enlisted personnel gathered in small groups on the observation deck. Cortez looked at them with no feeling at all. He felt he couldn’t relate to any of them. They could have been insects, for all he cared, inert tools to be used in his own command…