The Spider and the Fly

by C.E. Stalbaum

  Chapter Seven

  The long trip out to the Tartarus Expanse was not what Markus would call the most enjoyable five days of his life, but given everything else that had happened to him recently it certainly could have been worse. Jen didn’t try to shock him, break him, or even casually berate him; in fact, for the most part she left him completely alone. He just couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or not.

  He wanted to believe he could still get through to her. Desperately, in fact. But with so many empty hours to fill by himself on the journey, he had plenty of time to relive his memories of their past together— the private conversations, the shared confessions, their last meeting on Typhus—and he started to wonder if he’d merely seen in her what he’d wanted to see rather than the truth. He’d been through the same decade of specialized Spider indoctrination that she had, after all, and it had turned him into a shell of a human being. He’d committed sins for which there was no redemption, and he hadn’t felt the faintest flicker of remorse at the time.

  Ultimately, it had taken the massacre at Mirador to finally reach him, and even then the transformation hadn’t happened overnight. He’d believed—he’d assumed—that maybe Jen had been changing right along with him the whole time. But then she’d stood there on Typhus glaring up at him from below the landing ramp, refusing to take his hand and flee in the Mire transport…and he couldn’t help but wonder if he’d imagined the whole thing.

  If that was true, then sooner or later Markus was going to have to make his move. No matter what else happened, he couldn’t afford to lose the Damadus. Lord Foln was counting on him. Everyone in the Mire was counting on him.

  All of humanity was counting on him. Whether they knew it yet or not.

  Sadly, right now there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it, and so once he inevitably grew tired of slogging through old memories, he forced himself to relax and keep his mind and body prepared. His makeshift cell wasn’t particularly spacious, but it was large enough that he could stretch out and do some rudimentary exercises to keep his muscles from locking up. What he couldn’t do, as it turned out, was sleep. Jen hadn’t bothered giving him a bed, a blanket, or even a pillow, and for some reason the cold metal deck plates weren’t particularly comfortable. He considered asking her about it on more than one occasion, but each time he decided she probably thought he was pathetic enough without him begging for a pillow and a nightlight.

  And really, it was a little pathetic how just a few years ago he’d been able to go for a week without sleep or eating more than basic nutrient packs. Life on the fringe as a resistance fighter should have hardened him further, but working for the Mire wasn’t exactly like living under a rock. Their secret base on New Keledon was much more than a collection of ramshackle hovels, after all, and all the hot meals and padded beds really had made him soft.

  By the time the Manticore shuddered with the tell-tale rumble of the sub-light engines, Markus had been up for probably forty hours straight, and he didn’t need to look in a mirror to know that he was a mess. He just had to hope he could hold it together long enough to get what he needed and then figure out a way to escape.

  The cargo bay door slid open a few minutes later, and Jen stepped inside. She barely even acknowledged him as she strode over to the wall terminal and released his cell’s energy field.

  “Catch a Dowd fleet lurking in the bushes anywhere?” Markus asked mildly.

  “Not yet,” Jen said. “No sign of them at all, actually. But given how badly all the stellar phenomena out here mess with sensors, that doesn’t really mean anything.”

  “I guess we’ll just have to hope we get lucky…and that your reinforcements are prompt.”

  She slapped a set of old-fashioned manacles around his wrists and gestured towards the front of the ship. They walked to the bridge without exchanging a word, and once they arrived she pushed him down into one of the terminal chairs where she could monitor him and turned to her partner in the pilot’s seat.

  “Anything new?”

  “Negative,” Thexyl said. His scales were a solid black, which, if Markus recalled correctly, meant that he was deep in concentration. Considering how difficult the expanse was to navigate, that was probably a good thing. Right now they were steering towards a shimmering, purple-orange nebula that coiled around a belt of distant stars like some type of solar serpent. Of more immediate concern, however, were the pockets of explosive gas dotting this entire region like an invisible minefield.

  “How long until we reach the coordinates?” Markus asked.

  “About ten minutes,” Jen told him. She leaned over and studied the tac-holo’s readings. “I’m still not detecting any power signatures or wake trails.”

  “This ship couldn’t pick up psionic signatures even if it wanted to,” he reminded her. “Just look for any big hunks of metal.”

  “Yes, I’m aware,” she replied tartly. “I meant there’s no sign of the Dowd. Either they haven’t gotten here yet or they’re off exploring another part of the system.”

  Markus nodded and tried to repress the flash of embarrassment. He really was tired, and it was already affecting his judgment. “Have you plotted out a likely search pattern?”

  “Yes,” Thexyl confirmed. He tapped a key at his station, and the tac-holo zoomed out and projected an array of multicolored lines across the system. “This is the most efficient search pattern, assuming standard Dowd sensor capabilities.”

  Markus watched as the numbers scrolled across at the bottom of the image. “Looks like we should be fine, then. They won’t be close enough to this area to pick us up for a whole day.”

  “If they actually follow this pattern, which is far from a guarantee,” Jen pointed out. “Dowd psychology is erratic at best. I figure it’s just as likely they’ll pick a spot at random and start from there. We could run into them in ten minutes or two weeks.”

  “Or maybe they’ll finally give up on this silly grudge of theirs and turn around and go home,” he murmured, leaning back in his chair. “It’s been what, two hundred years since the Sarafan poisoned their home world? At some point they really need to get over it.”

  Thexyl turned to face him, his scales shimmering an indignant-looking green. “Have humans gotten over the destruction of Keledon?”

  “No,” Markus conceded. “I suppose not.”

  They traveled in silence for several minutes, drifting past the wide gas pockets and navigating towards the system’s third planet. It was a giant ice ball, as far as he could tell, and its moons weren’t any more hospitable. Dimly, he wondered if the Damadus crew had picked this spot intentionally or if the ship had simply run out of fuel and drifted here by random chance. The answer to that was probably contingent on what fate had befallen them.

  Markus leaned back in his chair and tried to relax, but it wasn’t easy. His imagination was already busy concocting a thousand different scenarios where this could go horribly wrong. What if Pasek and Rodani had been mistaken and this ship wasn’t actually the Damadus? Worse, what if it was the Damadus and all the legends about the ship had been wrong? What if the crew had never actually found a cure? What if they’d just gallivanted around the universe until they ran out of fuel and then parked here in the middle of nowhere?

  He closed his eyes and buried the storm of questions. Whatever happened, he needed to be prepared to deal with it, and that meant staying calm and taking it one step at a time. He let out a long, slow breath and glanced down at the display—

  And then abruptly sucked that breath right back in.

  “It’s definitely a ship of some kind,” Jen commented, her voice hoarse with surprise as the sensor board pinged a proximity alert. “The computer is categorizing it as a Koralis-class science ship.”

  “No,” Markus whispered, his head shaking despite himself. It was real. It was actually real… “It’s an MX-964 Damadus-class science vessel.”

  It was a cold description for something so beautiful. From t
his distance the hull could have been a single silver piece of metal perfectly molded into a sleek, bird-like form. Beneath each wing were what appeared to be a pair of impressive cylindrical missile bays, but they were actually small rings clasping onto long shards of conductive blue crystal. The entire design was both a specter of the past and, if the Mire was successful, a vision of the future.

  “It’s a prototype that never saw mass production,” he went on. “It was the only one ever built.”

  Jen glanced over to him, one black eyebrow cocked. “How can you be certain?”

  “Because I’ve seen the holos,” he told her. “I’ve seen the engineering schematics…or some of them, anyway. We dug up a Dominion data archive about nine months ago and it contained an entire section on the Damadus Project.”

  “Interesting,” Thexyl said. “What was different about the design?”

  “The shielding, mostly. Allegedly, the design was supposed to be able to delay the onset of the Koro Effect by weeks, perhaps even a month.”

  “Thus allowing them to stay in astral space longer and avoid the Tarreen without going crazy.”

  “Right,” Markus confirmed. “The thing was, the designers ran out of time to field test it. It’s possible the crew ended up going crazy after all. Maybe that’s why the ship is here.”

  “Thanks for the history lesson,” Jen sneered as she tapped at her terminal. “There’s no life-support as far as I can tell, though I am reading faint artificial gravity. Our instruments can’t detect psionic emissions, but I suspect there’s only minimal power.”

  “Assuming the crew died or abandoned ship, the core would have exhausted itself decades ago,” Markus said. “I doubt Rodani even tried to plug in any of the capacitors he found.”

  She stepped forward and scowled at the display. “That’s going to seriously slow down any salvage efforts.”

  He shrugged. “It’s possible he left a few capacitors behind. If so, I should be able to hook them up and get us basic life support for an hour or two at least. Of course that might just draw the Dowd down on us even faster.”

  “If we can’t detect psionic emissions, it’s highly unlikely they can, either,” Thexyl pointed out. “But on the off chance they can, you’re right.”

  “We’ll make that decision after we’ve looked around,” Jen said. “Bring us in close enough to dock and we’ll get suited up.”

  “Being manacled inside a zero-gee suit is going to be fun,” Markus muttered. “And I’m not sure how useful I’ll be if I can’t touch anything.”

  “You’ll manage. Let’s go.” She shoved him out the bridge doorway and then glanced back to Thexyl. “Make sure you run a deep scan of the airlock when we get close. I wouldn’t be surprised if our smuggler friend left a surprise or two in case someone else stumbled upon his prize before he was done pillaging.”

  By the time they’d moved into the bay and suited up in the clunky but highly protective zero-gee armor, Thexyl informed them that Rodani had actually left three surprises near the Damadus: a pulse mine on the docking bay door and two smaller fragmentation charges just inside. They were small enough that most sensor packages on independent freighters wouldn’t catch them, and Markus was suddenly thankful that the Convectorate never skimped on equipment for their Spiders or their ships.

  “I’d recommend running another sweep when you open the door,” Thexyl warned as the two of them stepped into the airlock. “Just in case.”

  “I will,” Jen assured him as she sealed them inside. Without a computer on the Damadus to sync with, they weren’t going to have the luxury of a nice interlocking tube or walkway. Instead they were going to have to manually float between the ships and maneuver up into the hatch Rodani had blasted open, all while disarming the pulse mine and charges. But at least since they knew someone else had successfully gone this way before, Markus assumed it wouldn’t be all that difficult to actually get inside the ship.

  He was right. It took less than five minutes for Jen to glide into the open bay with her suit’s small maneuvering jets, disarm the makeshift booby traps, and then open the inner seal into the Damadus itself. She keyed the small sensor pack on her suit and let it run a quick scan to make sure there weren’t any more presents, and when that came back negative she yanked on the cable connecting their suits and dragged Markus across the void of space towards her.

  Jen stood in the entryway for probably a whole minute just peering around the interior of the ship with her flashlight, but Markus, for his part, couldn’t take his eyes off the pair of skeletal corpses not far from the entry hatch.

  “I guess they didn’t evacuate after all,” she said. “And the ship must have held atmosphere long enough for their bodies to decay.”

  He nodded solemnly as an unexpected cloak of melancholy pressed down against his shoulders. He should have been exhilarated. Finally, after four years living as a fugitive on the fringes of civilization—after four years of digging through every byte of data he could find on Sarafan technology—he was actually here inside a genuine psionic ship. But instead of exulting like an archaeologist who’d just stumbled on the discovery of a lifetime, he felt more like an ancient tribesman standing amidst the corpse-strewn battlefield where his people had made their last stand.

  This was a Sarafan ship, yes. But it was also a floating sarcophagus.

  “So which way do we go?” Jen’s voice poked into his reverie.

  “Um,” Markus croaked, clearing his throat. “Engineering should be to the left and then down two decks.”

  “What about the lab?”

  “To the right and up one,” he said, frowning. “You don’t want to try and get power back online?”

  “Not if we don’t have to. My orders are to salvage the ship’s data crystals. I couldn’t care less if the lights turn on or not. Now lead on.”

  He couldn’t see her face through her thinly-visored helmet, and with the neural implant activated he couldn’t stretch out and read her feelings, either. He just had to hope she was trying to keep as much emotional distance between herself and the ship as possible, because if so he might be able to find a way to take advantage of that at some point. If, on the other hand, she really didn’t care at all…well, then he’d have to rely on plan B instead.

  Just as soon as he figured out what that was.

  Markus continued forward down the corridor until he reached one of the corpses. His hands were still bound in the manacles, but fortunately a quick verbal command activated his suit’s scanners. The results flashed inside his helmet’s HUD, and he took a moment to study them.

  “I told you to walk, not to scan,” Jen growled.

  “This woman died from several crushed vertebrae in her neck,” he said, ignoring the comment. “The man over there died the same way. Both of them show signs of multiple additional breaks along their arms and spinal columns.”

  “Curious,” Thexyl’s voice came over the helmet’s com. “Perhaps the inertial dampeners malfunctioned.”

  “If that were the case, I doubt there’d even be bodies left—they’d have all been reduced to piles of goo. It looks like they were hurled into the wall, but at different angles. There are some indentations here that match up with—”

  He dropped to a knee as a sudden spike of pain stabbed through his head. It was a mild jolt compared to the others he’d endured, but it still took him several seconds just to breathe normally again.

  “I said move,” Jen growled from behind him. “I meant it.”

  “You really don’t care what happened here?” Markus asked between labored breaths. “This is the find of the century—maybe the millennium!”

  “The data crystals will tell us everything we need to know. Now move or I’ll bring over an anti-grav harness and carry you.”

  He grunted and stood, and once his temples stopped pounding he lumbered forward. They reached the first junction and turned right, and he shook his head as he inspected Rodani’s handiwork.

 
“Looks like our Claggoth friend stole just about everything that wasn’t bolted down,” he commented. “Maybe even a few things that were.”

  “I’m shocked,” Jen muttered. “Can we get around that door?”

  Markus frowned at the thick metal slab blocking the hall and searched his admittedly fuzzy memory of the ship’s schematics. “That’s a security door. It shouldn’t have lowered except in a state of emergency.”

  “So can you open it or not?”

  “Not without an override, and that’s going to take power.” He leaned back and glanced down one of the adjacent corridors. “We can drop down a deck and see if there’s a way around, but if this door triggered then I’m going to guess the rest did, too. They would have completely sealed off the bridge, the lab, and the forward weapon cluster.”

  “Can we blast through it?”

  “Unlikely,” Thexyl put in. “Not with sidearms, anyway. It’s a heavy thorotine alloy—you’d need the Manticore’s firepower to penetrate it.”

  Jen hissed, which sounded a bit like static coming through the distortion of her helmet. “How about an explosion? We have plenty of pulothium charges.”

  “If you want to take out the wall and the deck plates, sure,” Markus grunted. “Of course, you might end up vaporizing half of what’s in the lab, too.”

  “Fine,” she conceded. “We’ll check downstairs. Go.”

  He nodded and did what he was told, silently thankful for the break. Every extra second they were here gave him more time to come up with an escape, and if they did end up having to try and power up the ship, he had an idea…

  Two minutes and four turns later, they confirmed what he’d already expected: all the primary security doors were locked firmly in place. He just had to hope the secondary doors hadn’t also triggered, or engineering would be just as inaccessible.

  “Assuming Rodani didn’t steal every capacitor on the ship, we can use a few of them to fire up the core for a little while,” he reminded her as they stared at the other door. “And assuming it all still works, of course.”

  Jen stood there silently, and for a long moment he thought she might actually refuse and just order Thexyl to blow the Damadus to pieces instead. But eventually she sighed and gestured with her rifle. “Then let’s get it over with.”

  Markus led them back in the opposite direction, and to his relief it turned out the secondary security protocols had not, in fact, been triggered. He wove his way through the empty corridors past several more corpses before he finally found what he’d been looking for: a massive interconnected latticework of green and blue crystals arranged in a roughly hexagonal shape at the center of a wide, ovoid chamber. It didn’t look anything like the various iterations of the tridarium core that powered most modern starships, but then it didn’t operate in remotely the same way, either.

  The whole area should have been protected by a powerful energy barrier and a dozen other small shields, but without main power it was just sitting here fully exposed to the cold. Fortunately, psionic technology was largely impervious to extremes of temperature, and as a bonus it didn’t appear that Rodani had broken anything. The individual systems were largely worthless by themselves, but Markus wouldn’t have been at all surprised if the Claggoth had taken a hammer to the whole section and chiseled it into small, easy-to-carry pieces without knowing any better.

  “At a glance I’d say most of the systems should still work,” he said as they studied the room. “Of course without the proper equipment there’s no way to know until we try.”

  “I don’t see any capacitors lying around,” Jen replied. “I assume they’d be stored in a certain place?”

  “Yes, over here.” He maneuvered past the core and various monitoring stations to the storage area. It took about ten seconds for him to realize that Rodani had indeed raided it clean. Distantly, he wondered if the batch the Mire had bought a month ago had come from this very spot.

  Jen swore. “Fantastic. So now what?”

  “Well, there are exactly two ways to power up a psi-ship. Either you connect a few psionic capacitors…or you plug in a telepath.”

  “Then I guess you just volunteered. Congratulations, you get to live out a boyhood fantasy.”

  “I’d love to, but if you want to plug me in then you’re going to have to neutralize my implant,” Markus told her. “Otherwise the moment the ship tries to siphon power from me I’m going to get zapped.”

  Her helmet tilted down fractionally, and he could visualize her cold blue eyes narrowing beneath her opaque visor. “How very convenient for you. We just so happen to get blocked out of the only section of the ship we need access to, and then miraculously the only way to get inside involves me disabling your neural chip.”

  Markus snorted. “Yes, clearly I set all this up in an elaborate ruse to…do what, exactly? Maybe you haven’t noticed, but I don’t have anywhere to go.”

  “You’re delusional if you think I’m going to disable the implant. I’ll blow this ship to hell first.”

  “Do that and the Widow will have you strapped to an interrogation chair right alongside me when we get back.” He walked back into the central chamber and gestured towards the core. “Look, I told you your options. One of us has to plug into the ship or you’re not getting your data crystals. That’s all there is to it.”

  “We could also wait for the Argaz and its task force,” Thexyl suggested. “That may be the most prudent option.”

  “And hope the Dowd don’t stumble by in the next, what, twenty hours or so?” Markus asked. “Are you willing to take that chance?”

  Jen turned and walked over to the interface device. It didn’t look like much; it was little more than a palm-shaped blue crystal sitting right at the center of the main console. And yet a century earlier, the Dominion had used this technology to maintain a fleet of ships that spanned the entire galaxy. It made even the most modern conventional starship look antiquated and clumsy by comparison. To him, at least.

  “I assume there are risks to plugging into this thing,” she said after a moment.

  “Well, back in the day there’d be a team of psychics standing by to help out,” Markus replied. “Here we just have to hope it’s more or less automated. I’ve never seen an intact psi-core in person so I really don’t know.”

  “I guess you get to find out.” Jen lowered her rifle at his chest. “Try anything else and you die.”

  “I’m surprised you don’t want the honor,” he said, kneeling down at the console. It wasn’t quite the solution he’d hoped for—he knew from old Dominion logs that most psychics who plugged into a ship were overwhelmed the first time, and he’d been hoping she would insist on doing it herself. If she went under, even for a few moments, then he’d have been able to disable his implant, bind her, and then deal with the Kali.

  But this would work out almost as well assuming he timed it correctly. It was just going to hurt a whole hell of a lot more.

  Markus sat down in front of the blue crystal and licked at his lips. “Ready when you are.”

  “I’m disabling the implant, Thexyl,” Jen said.

  “Acknowledged.”

  There weren’t any pops or beeps or anything so dramatic to signal that the implant was off, but when Markus stretched out with his mind to brush against hers and wasn’t instantly knocked to the floor in pain, he smiled thinly beneath his helmet. As long as Foln and the others weren’t lollygagging around on the other side of the galaxy, he’d just found his escape route.

  “Then here goes,” he breathed.

  Closing his eyes, he gently placed his hand above the blue crystal. The skin on his palm began to tingle even through the thick buffer of his vac suit’s gloves, and the sensation quickly worked its way up his entire arm. If batteries were sentient, he imagined this is what they would have felt like just before they were plugged in. It was like he could sense the ship’s thirst for energy, and somehow it knew he was the only one who could provide it. There was no
point in keeping it waiting any longer.

  Mentally crossing his fingers, Markus reached out with his mind just long enough to touch a familiar presence at the far edges of his range…and then he pushed his hand down on top of the crystal.

  The response was immediate. His body convulsed like he’d just reached out to grab a live wire, and a ripple of power cascaded across the Damadus. The ceiling lights flashed on, followed swiftly by the low buzzing of the other terminals spread throughout the room. Moments later the immense crystal latticework in front of him lit up as well, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was standing inside the belly of a great beast awakening from a long slumber.

  “The exterior lights are coming on,” Thexyl reported with obvious surprise. “Whatever you’re doing seems to be working.”

  Markus tried to reply but nothing came out. As the Damadus leeched the power it needed from his mind, his control over the rest of his body quickly slipped away. Distantly, he could hear his own staggered, erratic breaths over the rest of the powering-up systems, and he might have even gasped or groaned or screamed. But without any of the active safety protocols or another psychic to watch over him, there was nothing to stop the ship from draining him until he passed out…or worse. He tried to break free, to somehow sever the connection, but it was like his hand was stuck on an electric fence; his muscles had been paralyzed and refused to cooperate.

  The last thing he remembered was the sight of the cold white floor rushing up to greet him.