The Spider and the Fly

by C.E. Stalbaum

  ***

  “Power readings remain stable,” Thexyl reported. “Regrettably, I lack the equipment or expertise to even hazard a guess how long that will be the case.”

  “Hopefully for a few minutes, at least,” Jenavian said as she slowly removed Markus’s helmet. “According to my suit the air is perfectly breathable. All the containment fields must have come up.”

  “I can’t imagine any ship not having a warning system if life support is about to fail. You should be all right for now. What about Coveri?”

  She detached her own glove and brought a hand to Markus’s cheek. Her scanners insisted that he hadn’t sustained any serious injuries, but she wanted to confirm that diagnosis for herself. Spider training didn’t include much beyond a few basic psionic healing techniques, but she needed him conscious—he might actually be able to make sense of these instruments and get the damn security doors open.

  Closing her eyes, she reached out and linked with his nervous system. A few of the other Spiders had learned to manipulate the physiology of other creatures, psionically bolstering their body’s natural healing capabilities and immune system, and she knew of a couple who had even learned how to regenerate damaged flesh. Her own skill was nowhere near that level, but she was able to convince his body to ramp up its adrenaline production, and with luck that would at least get him awake…

  Markus coughed and his eyes blinked open. It took him a few seconds, but eventually he realized his helmet was off and started to panic—

  “It’s all right, you got the life support working,” Jenavian soothed. “And everything else as far as I can tell.”

  He coughed again and then leaned up. “It’s still really fucking cold.”

  “Yeah, well, it’ll probably take a few minutes to get cozy. But it got us out of dangerous levels pretty quickly, and the air quality is respectable.”

  Markus grunted as he looked at her still-closed helmet, his teeth chattering. “Just not fine enough that you trust it, huh?”

  “I figured you were a better test subject,” Jenavian said dryly, offering him a hand. He took it, and she boosted him up until he could lean on the adjacent crystalline console. “And before you try anything, the implant has been reactivated.”

  “Naturally,” he muttered. He glanced over to the closest terminal. “You realize I can’t actually use any of this equipment without being able to psionically link to it, right?”

  “I’ll handle that part, assuming nothing else is going to try and suck me dry.” Jenavian popped free the locks on her helmet and took it off. The air was definitely brisk—her HUD was registering a balmy -12C—but the chill actually felt good for the first several seconds. At the impressive rate the ship was heating itself, she imagined it would be comfortable enough in a minute or two.

  “As long as you don’t touch this, it won’t try to sap you,” Markus said, gesturing to the palm-sized crystal. “Judging by the displays, we should have enough power to maintain life support and gravity for…oh, twenty minutes, give or take.”

  She nodded and eyed him up and down. “How did it feel?”

  He shrugged. “I wouldn’t recommend it as a tourist attraction, but it could have been worse. I think I could sleep for about a week, though.”

  Jenavian could feel the fatigue in his mind, and she had to suppress a shudder. For all the wonders she’d heard about psi-ships and Dominion technology, the idea of being turned into a human battery had always made her queasy. Seeing this ship knock him unconscious in person certainly hadn’t helped conquer that particular fear.

  “So which console opens the doors?”

  “Mm.” He walked over to the terminals in the back of the room. They could have been normal computer stations on a modern ship if not for the fact they didn’t have chairs or any type of obvious holographic interface. They didn’t seem to have any type of user interface at all, actually, just a series of numbers and display reports scrolling across another translucent piece of crystal. “I think any of them will work. Just try and convince it that the lockdown is over.”

  She blinked. “Surely the Sarafan had better security systems than that.”

  “Considering that only a telepath could give the command, and considering that virtually all telepaths on a ship this size would be mind-linked a healthy amount of the time…” Markus shrugged. “I doubt they had many security breaches.”

  Biting down on her lip, Jenavian touched the console. And to her pleasant surprise, it didn’t suck the life out of her. She felt an odd tickle at the edges of her consciousness, a whisper in the back of her mind. It wasn’t another lifeform, exactly, but it was definitely a presence.

  “Just think about the doors opening,” he prompted.

  She followed his suggestion, and the strange presence acknowledged her request. A low rumble echoed throughout the hull, and she knew that somehow the ship had listened to her.

  “I think we’re in business,” he said, grinning. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  Jenavian stepped away from the console lowered her rifle at him. “Let’s get moving. You first.”

  Markus sighed but did as she asked. As they walked she couldn’t help but feel that something had changed with him; he seemed calm, almost relaxed. She wouldn’t have described him as nervous before, but he was certainly a lot more cautious before he’d passed out. Perhaps the mere sight of seeing one of these ships fully powered up had made him giddy.

  If so, he was going to be especially disappointed when she finally gave the order to blow it to pieces.

  Two minutes later they passed through the open security door and into the ship’s massive laboratory. It was an impressive facility even if she didn’t recognize many of the instruments. The walls were lined with crystalline terminals similar to the ones they’d seen in engineering, and at the center of the room were four relatively standard med-tables that looked incredibly out-of-place amongst all this other psionic technology. There were also three more corpses.

  “They’re not nearly as decomposed,” Markus commented softly as he knelt over one of the bodies. It was a youngish man, probably in his early twenties, and his head was twisted in a nauseating position. “The oxygen must have escaped from this section a lot earlier.”

  “It appears he died in a manner similar to all the others,” Thexyl’s voice said. “Perhaps there is some voracity to the idea that inertial dampeners malfunctioned.”

  “Perhaps.”

  Jenavian stepped past him over to a large cylindrical case set against the opposite wall. Almost everything here looked completely alien to her, but she recognized a storage shelf when she saw one. “Is this where they’d keep the data crystals?”

  Markus nodded and finally pulled his eyes from the body. “Yes, I think so. You should be able to open it.”

  She found a release on the back and touched it, and several of the panels popped open. Inside were rows and rows of slender red and orange crystals.

  “The red ones are empty; the orange ones have at least some data on them,” Markus said. “I don’t know if you want to take them all or not.”

  “Might as well,” she said, tapping her belt and pulling out the containers she’d brought along. It would be a tight fit, but it looked like she’d be able to carry all of them.

  “Jen, if you don’t mind, I would like you to head to the bridge once you’re done collecting,” Thexyl said softly into her earpiece.

  She frowned. “Why? We got what we came for.”

  “It’s possible there are more crystals up there, including the ship’s flight logs. I admit I’m curious to look at them.”

  “We’re not here to sate your curiosity,” Jenavian growled. “We’re here to get these crystals and then get the hell out of here.”

  He didn’t reply immediately, and she could visualize the pinkish ripples of confusion shimmering up and down his scales. She had no reason at all to be mad at him, of course, but she really wanted to get off this damn ship. And th
is time it wasn’t just her desire to get away from Markus—there was something else here, something tingling at the back of her mind…

  But Thexyl was probably right. If the Hierarchy wanted the data from this ship, then they would surely want all of it. And a quick stop by the bridge wasn’t going to cost them anything.

  “I’ll take a look,” Jenavian said after she finished putting the last of the crystals in her containers. She picked up her rifle and gestured towards Markus. “Go ahead.”

  He made his way through the door on the opposite side of the room and led her onto the bridge. This layout she understood perfectly: two terminals on either side, one for a helmsman and one for a navigator, and the captain’s chair nestled directly between them. And in that chair was a middle-aged man’s body—a man who’d quite obviously been shot in the back. Tucked into the far corner on the right was a female roughly the same age, and a pistol was lying on the ground next to her.

  “Apparently someone was upset with the captain,” Jenavian commented. “I wonder if that was before or after the rest of the crew died.”

  Markus leaned down over the male body but didn’t reply. His face had gone pale, and his eyes were fastened wide.

  “Friend of yours?” she asked.

  “I can’t believe it,” he whispered. “It’s Foln.”

  “Who?”

  “Krucius Foln, the Damadus Project leader,” Markus explained. “He was supposed to be a brilliant psychogeneticist, possibly the best of his generation.”

  “He was also one of the Sarafan directly responsible for the attack on Kalifax,” Thexyl said quietly. “He led the failed rebellion against the Sarafan leadership not long before the war started.”

  “Yet they picked him to lead their research team?” Jenavian asked.

  “I imagine they had simply grown desperate given how many of their people were infected.”

  Markus nodded absently. “I wonder if the Koro Effect got to them. It must have driven her crazy and made her shoot him.”

  “Her body exhibits much of the same blunt force trauma as the others,” Thexyl noted. “Foln’s, however, does not.”

  “Telekinesis, perhaps,” Jenavian said as she reached down and picked up the ancient pistol from the floor. She’d never actually been able to hold one of these old psi-tech weapons before, and she wondered if she might be able to get it to work. “He could have thrown her against the wall after she shot him. Who knows, maybe he went on a rampage and murdered the whole crew.”

  “Maybe,” Markus murmured, leaning down to the body. Clutched in Foln’s hand was another data crystal, but unlike the others this one was glowing a faint violet.

  “Another storage crystal?” she asked.

  “A personal log,” he corrected. “Perhaps he had time to record what happened before he died.”

  “Sadly for you, you’ll never get the chance to find out,” Jenavian said, deftly swiping it from his hand. “Now if you’re quite done pretending to be a historian, we’re heading back to the ship.”

  “I suggest you hurry,” Thexyl’s said, his voice suddenly tight. “Our sensors just registered another ship. It’s on an intercept course.”

  Her heart skipped a pair of beats as she turned back to Markus. “Any idea what kind?”

  “Yes,” the Kali said. “It’s a Dowd Destroyer.”