by B. V. Larson
“Maybe that’s our problem,” I said. “Maybe we’re too much alike.”
She spun around and studied my face. “What are you saying?”
“Uh… that we’re both naturally glib?” I said. “We tell people what they want to hear. It’s a defense mechanism.”
Robin turned away again, and I went back to slowly scrubbing. She didn’t seem to notice my hands were on her, not my own body.
“Yes…” she said thoughtfully. “We are alike. We’ve got people skills—different kinds, of course—but we’re both very good at getting what we want.”
“You know what I want right now?” I asked.
“Forget it.”
I shrugged, and we bathed together. She seemed to have settled down. Maybe it was the warm rushing water—it had a way of waking a person up and improving the worst of moods.
When we were toweling off, she kissed me suddenly. It wasn’t a big thing, just a peck on the cheek, but I knew it meant she was done hating me for now.
There wasn’t time for anything better in the making-up department. Instead, I headed to the labs on the lower deck, and I found Dr. Abrams waiting there impatiently.
“It’s about time, Blake,” he said. His skinny arms were crossed and his brows were knit together into a single line of bristling hair.
“Have you got the prototype ready?”
“Turn off the phasing system, and we’ll test it.”
“Do we have to phase-in?” I asked, disappointed.
“Yes. How else can we tell if it fools the Hunter?”
He had a point, so we headed for the bridge. When we got there I found Miller and the rest looking at us curiously. I was rarely late to my shifts.
“I have the watch, Ensign Miller.”
“The captain has the watch,” he said, getting out of my chair.
“Miller, man the phasing system. We’re turning it off shortly.”
The rest of the crew looked startled at the idea. They shook themselves and checked all their readings in alarm.
“No, there’s nothing dangerous going on,” I said. “We’re going to test a new kind of deception. If it works, we’ll have saved Ral.”
That got their attention. Miller flicked at floating icons over his station. “I see a message from you, Dr. Abrams.”
“Yes!” Abrams said. “Now, open it and install the attachment.”
Miller didn’t move. Instead, he looked at me. I nodded to confirm the suggestion.
Turning back to his console, Miller opened the message and installed Abrams’ software. It was a simple triggering mechanism that was supposed to engage our gravity-fluctuation software.
“What do I do with this?” Miller asked.
“Execute it,” Abrams said. “It’s not a virus. Have a little faith.”
Again, I nodded encouragement toward Miller. The large man listened and performed as he’d been instructed.
We phased fully back into the material universe, and I signaled Miller again. He applied the gravitational pulse device and—everything went mad.
“Turn it off!” Gwen screeched. She’d been pulled over backwards, and now was pasted to the floor. The rest of us had been seated, and we were less traumatically affected.
All over the ship, klaxons went off and warning lights spun. The churn in my guts was horrible. It felt as if bubbles were running through me. Hot bubbles that caused searing pain intermixed with tickles of intense pleasure.
Miller reached out a hand. It shook. I stared at him, my right eye blurring and then going blind entirely. What was this thing that Abrams had unleashed upon Hammerhead doing to my internal organs?
As I watched, Samson and Gwen lost consciousness. I had the greatest pity for Gwen. She’d been bent to the floor in the initial pulse, and I could see now that her knee was twisted up under her back at an impossible angle. It looked like it was broken—it had to be.
I tried to stand, but it was hopeless.
“Abrams!” I roared, losing vision now in my left eye as well. “What have you done to my ship?!”
But he couldn’t answer. He was twisted into a skinny pretzel, neck lolling oddly, tongue extended like a dead dog in a gutter. From the swollen red tip of that tongue a thread of saliva spiraled away, corkscrewing in the air until it touched the farthest bulkhead.
There was a sick, pulsing sensation, and my vision cleared enough to see again. With all my focus of will, I managed to turn back toward Miller. He was still trying to touch the icon on his console. His weaving finger slowly descended, as if he was pressing against a terrific, invisible force that sought to drive back his hand.
Would he make it? Would his touch turn off the effect if he did?
Were we all as good as dead anyway—our guts full of aneurisms and popped organs?
I lost consciousness with these thoughts drifting through my darkening mind.
=49=
When I awakened, I felt thoroughly drained and abused. I recalled this sensation from the past: it was like being shot senseless by disruptor fire in the pits aboard Killer.
That’s the only thing that convinced me I wasn’t in some sort of dark afterlife. I felt too much pain—and it seemed to emanate from inside me.
All around the bridge, people were vomiting on the decks, bleeding from every orifice and mumbling helpless curses.
Miller was out cold floating around the bridge with several of the others. With difficulty, I moved to his station and checked on the instruments. Abrams’ program had been shut down.
Moving back to my chair, I gave Abrams a stumbling kick. I hadn’t meant to do it, but Dalton chuckled weakly behind me.
“Give him an extra one from me,” he said.
I couldn’t blame him for the sentiment.
“Break out emergency medical supplies,” I said. “We’ve got a lot of internal bleeding. Everyone should drink a dose of meds.”
One thing we’d been given by the Rebel Kher was a form of universal curative. Really, it was cellular-growth stimulant. It amplified the natural production of new cells in the body, and allowed us to heal much faster than normal. Unfortunately, it did nothing to alleviate pain in the short run.
Those of us who were mobile crawled around the ship pouring liquids down every throat and into every open wound. Before I tended to Gwen, I straightened her broken bones while she moaned on the deck. Then I gave her a dose and moved on.
Abrams came last. His breath was raspy, and I felt a little sorry for him. After all, his gravity fluxer had worked—possibly, it had worked too well.
When Miller woke up, he was the first to think of a critical element the rest of us had forgotten about.
“Did anyone hit the phasing system?”
I looked at him in shock. “No, I don’t think so.”
We check the instrumentation. I tossed a projection of local space on the hull around us. Using my sym, I reached out, and I spotted first the Hunter—then the Imperial cruiser.
Both were bearing down on our position.
“Phase out!” I shouted.
“Phasing out!” Miller acknowledged.
I gritted my teeth, having no way of knowing if changing our physical state yet again might mean the death of us all.
We waited several seconds, without breathing, before I relaxed. At least the phasing system was still operating correctly.
“Dalton, give them the slip. Change our heading six times, once every minute, until they can’t possibly know where we’re going.”
“On it, Captain.”
Samson came awake soon after that. He got up groaning and rubbing at his left ear. There was a chunk of the lobe missing, and I tried not to let him know how bad that looked.
He soon figured it out anyway and howled in rage.
“Can I volunteer for a special duty, sir?” he asked me, panting.
“What’s that, Samson?”
“I’d like to eject that useless body into space, sir!” His finger stabbed down at Abrams, who wa
s still inert on the deck.
I paused, considering. After all, the man had caused us all so much pain.
“No,” I said with a sigh at last. “That service won’t be necessary, Samson. Not yet, anyway.”
He laughed. “But you thought about it, didn’t you Captain?”
“I did indeed.”
We revived Abrams, and he mewed like a newborn kitten looking for its first meal. No one offered him any sympathy, not even Gwen.
“I don’t…” he began when he was again capable of speech. His tongue had taken some time to reel back into his mouth. “I don’t understand it…”
“Your lack of understanding is pretty obvious, Doc,” I said. “You blew it big-time. You almost took out my ship.”
“Yes… unfortunate and inexplicable. One of my underlings must have—”
“You idiot!” Samson roared, losing his cool. He grabbed Abrams by the neck and lifted him into a sitting position. “You see this, Doc? You see my ear? Half of it’s missing, Doc!”
“Samson…” I said warningly.
He dropped Abrams like a ragdoll.
“It wasn’t me,” he said. “It couldn’t have been me.”
“Why not?” I asked him.
“Because I don’t make mistakes like that. Something unknown magnified the effects. Somehow, a series of amplifications to our anti-gravity field were altered, turned into a much stronger pulse. The most we should have felt was a sensation not unlike having a touch of gas.”
“I felt that too,” Samson complained. “I think I shit my pants, in fact.”
“Regrettable,” Abrams said, still lying flat on his back.
“You mean about Samson’s pants?” I asked.
Abrams’ eyes swiveled blearily in my direction. “No,” he said. “It’s regrettable that we’ve got a saboteur aboard.”
Samson blew air through his mouth, making a rude sound. He headed below decks to clean up, and I didn’t try to stop him.
I squatted next to Abrams. “Are you able to get up?”
“Possibly,” he said, “but I’d rather lie right here. I’m letting my bones and organs knit back together. It’s advisable that everyone do the same. Moving around as little as possible will allow us all to recover faster.”
I relayed that suggestion to the bridge crew, then turned it into a general, ship-wide order.
When Abrams was up on his feet again, it was nearly an hour later. His tongue still seemed to be about an inch longer than it had been, and I wondered if the effect was going to be a permanent one.
“Okay Doc,” I said. “Let’s analyze what went wrong.”
“I’ve been working on that using my sym. Apparently that’s what went wrong.”
“What? I’m not following you.”
“Our syms. We aren’t fully fleshed humans any longer. We’re infected by a symbiotic organism. As closely as I can work out, the syms reacted very badly to my gravitational flux field. I didn’t detect or predict this result before in the labs because my test subjects were mice—without syms, you see.”
“How’s that possible? The syms are small in total volume. How could a few ounces of metal shavings and artificial flesh get so warped out of shape?”
He looked at me with bloodshot, puzzled eyes. “No, no, no,” he said. “That’s not what I meant at all. The syms went berserk, reacting to the confusing gravitational pulls in a wild fashion. It was our syms that caused us to lose our balance and burst our cell structure here and there.”
I considered what he was saying. I supposed it was possible.
“No saboteurs then?”
“On the contrary,” he said. “I think we were bested by an army of miniscule saboteurs. Millions of them, each the size of a single blood cell, did a great deal of damage.”
“Huh…” I said thoughtfully. “You mean we did this to ourselves?”
“Not exactly. It was more as if we drank alcohol until we blacked out—or spun on an amusement ride until we vomited.”
“I vomited and blacked out,” I said. “But I don’t recall having any fun first.”
Abrams struggled up to one elbow. I let him take his time.
“You see,” he said, “I’ve been reviewing bio records from crewmen all over the ship. Our syms felt the micro-alterations in gravity, and they overreacted. We were attacked from the inside, almost like an auto-immune effect.”
I shook my head, giving up on understanding the details behind it. I wasn’t entirely sure Abrams understood them either. He might have been on some kind of kick to blame anything other than himself.
“I’ll have to adjust our syms before the next trial,” Abrams said thoughtfully.
“The next what?” Gwen asked. “Leo, don’t let him do that again!”
I looked at her thoughtfully. “I don’t want to, Gwen,” I admitted. “But we don’t have any other plays to make. This is all I’ve got. It’s either this, or we let Ral die while we watch.”
Dalton shook his head in disgust. He didn’t care about Ral—not much, at least. But Gwen was left thinking. She stared at the planets. Off to starboard, about a half an AU distant, was a large, bright planet.
We all knew it was the soft, blue-white world known as Ral. How could we forsake the billions who lived there in their hour of need?
Gwen closed her eyes and nodded. “I guess we have to try,” she said. “But please,
Doc, if you’re going to kill us, get it over with quickly, will you?”
He frowned at her.
“What nonsense! This single setback in no way indicates a failed concept. In fact, when one is applying the scientific method to an experimental field, early hiccups are only to be expected. Trust me, Lieutenant, I almost never make a serious mistake.”
“Right, Doc…”
=50=
I had to hand it to Abrams, once he could walk again, he worked like a devil with a tail-wind to fix his “setback”.
We were all limping around the decks, healing and complaining. It was one thing to have miraculous medical technology, but it was quite another to suffer the pain that came with the miracle. Sometimes, I thought dying outright might be a blessing in disguise.
“I’m envying heart attack victims about now,” Dalton said, echoing my sentiments.
“Yeah… any word from our mad scientist?”
“Nothing. He’s probably down there having a smoke in that posh lab of his.”
Gwen laughed, having overheard him. “I doubt that. I’ve been monitoring his activities. He hasn’t slept a wink since he regained consciousness. He’s working like a man possessed.”
“Like a man bereft of his senses, more like,” Dalton complained, but he finally shut up.
His attitude was common all over the ship. No one had actually died, but the gravitational freak-out we’d all suffered had left behind countless odd injuries. Some people had elongated limbs, dislocated joints or ruptured organs. We were all hurting, pissing blood and drinking our healing balms to ease our searing guts.
“Just a second,” Samson said as he came on duty some minutes later and strapped in. “Are we planning to let Abrams turn on his gravity effect again? I mean, seriously?”
“Only just worked that out, eh mate?” Dalton laughed. “We should have done it on the sly before you realized what was coming. Would have been a mercy.”
Samson punched Dalton, who scowled and rubbed his shoulder. Then Samson turned his glowering face toward me. “Is this insanity actually going to happen, sir?”
“I’m afraid so. Unless you have a better way of stopping that planet-eater. Look at it… it’s settling into its last appetizer before Ral.”
We all glanced at the projected visuals. Over the preceding hours, the Hunter had reached the next planet and attached itself to the surface. It was consuming the planet, farting out rocks and gases as it went.
“We’ve measured its output against its input,” Chang said conversationally. “I find it very odd, but the Hunter only releas
es ninety percent of the mass consumed as waste byproducts. These are ejected at speed from the tail-section, eventually forming a ring of debris in the orbit of the original planet.”
“Huh…” I said. “Maybe they’re making asteroid belts? For later ease of mining?”
“That’s speculation, but not outside the realm of the possible. What interests me more is what happens to the matter consumed but not ejected?”
“Could it be converting the mass to energy?” Gwen asked.
“Such a rate of conversion could only be accomplished by a continuous fusion of matter—there’s no trace of that level of energy being released.”
“Interesting…” she said. “Another mystery. The Rebel Kher did warn us that the Imperials had tech we’d never dreamed of. Perhaps this is an example of that sort of thing.”
I nodded, studying the terrifying image on the screen. The Hunter was devouring the planet whole. Already, it had dug a divot twenty miles deep into the crust. The internal heat of the planet didn’t seem to bother it, either. The advanced technology and sheer scale of the thing were daunting.
“The more I watch this monster in action,” I said, “the more I’m convinced that the Imperials only have marginal control of it, at best. For example, the Hunter always starts with the outer worlds and eats its way inward toward the star at the center of each system. That’s a very inefficient approach to wiping out populations of Kher, who are usually living on the innermost planets.”
“Perhaps we should contact them and give them a tip,” Dalton said sullenly.
He was being a smart-ass, but I didn’t chew on him about it. The situation was a difficult one. It seemed, in fact, to be unsolvable.
I made two more trips to the labs over the next hour. Dr. Abrams was working in a near delirium. He barely acknowledged my presence, and that only by waving a hand in my face, ushering me back out the hatch into the passages.
We were running out of time, but I didn’t have any better options, and he seemed to be on-task. I decided to let him work.
Thinking about Robin and our rocky morning together, I decided to check on her. When I arrived, she seemed surprised.
