by Chris Turner
Regers stared at him as if he were a talking fish. “They’ll want ship’s identification papers, credentials, the whole lot. Then they’ll take away our ship. Ever think of that, Jenner? Even accuse us of stealing the craft. Interrogation.”
“We can swap information for exoneration,” grunted Jennings.
“I say we can’t,” sneered Regers. “I say we keep flying this pretty little ship to Alastra station, as I intended. It’s a gift from above, and I don’t plan on losing it.”
Deakes and Vincent muttered agreement.
Ramra croaked his own wish to alert some of the authorities, licking his lips, a fine sweat beading on his throat. “At least tell somebody the coordinates of those people down there.”
“And have it traced?” queried Vincent.
Jennings hesitated, seeing he was outnumbered. “I mean—”
“Jennings, when you’d get so righteous?” spat Regers, rounding on him. “Get all goody-goody pansy-ass on me? I didn’t peg you as the do-gooder type.”
Jennings purpled. “Maybe since I fell victim to those brutes—being on that Aldeberan freighter and getting pulled out of my bunk by one of them, then bobbing in that freak-tank. I wouldn’t wish that hell on anyone. Call me sentimental, but if I could save anyone from—”
“Oh, so a saviour type? We’re all supposed to sit back and pay the piper while you get a bleeding heart for some philanthropic mission? You going up against the squids, solo?”
“Just a simple anonymous call.”
Regers swept out an arm toward the com. “Be my guest.”
Jennings jerked away like a marionette to make the call. Ramra and Creib who had said little or nothing, looked away non-committedly.
Regers turned back to the others at the table, with sober, sullen looks. “Jenner over there thinks he’s the martyr to carry the torch of some damn galactic war. But it’ll never end. There’ll never be any winners in this war. Bloodshed maybe. One side trying to dominate the other. I say, let them eat each other’s balls for breakfast, stuff each other in tanks, same deal.”
“Calm down, Regers,” cautioned Deakes. “Sounds as if you’re the one getting sentimental on us.”
Regers winced and shook his head, peering down at the leftovers on the table. “Yeah, maybe you’re right, Deakes. But I don’t want to hear any more whining or squabbling about those floaters down there on the Orb. What’s done is done. On a happier note, I’m proud to have you boys as my fellow knights. A toast—to the motliest band of rogues of the times. One ship today, rulers of the galaxy tomorrow!”
Vincent lifted his glass. “Here, here!” he cheered, getting into the spirit of Regers’ madness, a broad grin splitting his boyish face.
The Daulk ale had started to do its work and Regers reeled to his feet. “We’re the Robin Hoods of the new age. Stealing from the poor and giving to the rich!”
Deakes laughed, choking on his drink. “That’s rich.” The men were warming to the idea, encouraged by Regers’ no-holds-barred sense of wild adventure, or insanity, hardly daring to believe that they were free from the oppression and macabre reality of the locust tanks.
“How be steal from the poor and rich and enrich ourselves!” Deakes suggested.
“Not bad, Deakes. There may be a place in my fleet for you yet.”
Deakes snorted, drunker than ever, swaying in his seat, his eyes blurring over. “Not if our horned-headed Ramra here doesn’t wash himself. The man reeks of that locust piss water.”
Ramra sneered. “Hardee har har. And you think you smell any rosier?”
Regers leaned back in relaxed comfort. He and his merry band would get along fine. So they enjoyed their jests and insults, and for the moment, their loose-knit alliance, formed in a most improbable place, in a nowhere land. He figured they were beyond the edge of the Dim Zone, between the pirate belt and Perseus Major, somewhere in the haze of hyperdrive.
Regers looked around, pleased with the proceedings, but he grew wary. There were too many details to work out. Risks and perils lay ahead.
Deakes snapped Regers out of his reverie. “So, what you got planned for us, boss? Trolling the dives on Thieves World first for some choice wenches?”
Regers grunted and waved his hand. “That’s kid stuff. I got my sights set on bigger fish. Right after I get this hand looked after. Kinda getting used to it though. Could plate it up with some tempered steel,” he mused. On a sudden impulse he scrambled on the table, did a cakewalk, wiggling his ass. “I’m your Captain Hook, your baddest, meanest, bloodthirstiest Bligh. Shiver me timbers!” he croaked and lifted his stump and play-chopped at Creib’s neck.
Deakes snorted out a laugh. Ramra, having drunk too much, fell nose-first in his mash of half-finished shepherd’s pie on the aluminum tray.
Deakes probed. “So what’s so important in Perseus, Regers? You got a boyfriend out there?”
Vincent laughed.
“We could as easily land in Taurus, or jump over to Betelgeuse,” growled Deakes. “Thieves World, like I said.”
“Nearest hub to Phallanor,” said Regers. “There’s a guy I have a score to settle with. But first that fucker, Mathias.” He jumped down from the table, jolted out of his jocular mood.
“Mathias?” Vincent queried, “as in the Mathias of Cyber Core, or whatever it’s called? You got to be mad.”
“Keep the course set for Phallanor, Vincent,” Regers said grimly. “There’s going to be some hell to pay...”
AUDRA
BOOK III
(247 Sol years earlier)
I
Miko peered to starboard. The viewport showed interstellar dust, faraway clouds of glowing gas. The colours were magical. For a moment he was lost in its beauty when a sharp flash swarmed across his horizon: the sun Veela’s luminescence blazed some fifty million miles out from port. It slipped beneath the planet Numa’s slightly oval moon like liquid glass. Still very close, too close, the pilot thought. The mission was suicide at best at this distance. Scores of planets needed to be surveyed by next holo-check and he was as likely as any, the next guinea pig to get the job done.
The solar wind raged. The charged-particle stream seemed to play havoc on his craft’s navigation system. How could it be so fierce? The force was an order of magnitude above what his vessel was made for.
A terror crawled down his neck.
The flux was directed from the sunward side of Numa, the flat green disc rearing below him now. The pulse tapered off, stabilizing to a normal level. It jagged up again, as if some sinister intelligence were controlling the burst.
Miko felt an eerie tingling working at the base of his spine. What was it? Instinct had him feeling that something bad was in the works.
Sitty II, the most advanced human-meld-VR-machine, was engineered by the NAVO Military—the New-Avionic-Vanguard-Order. The craft supported a complete interface to human and machine, exposing its machine core to the pilot for best navigation and tactical operation. Miko had been struggling with the concept for a long time now. At best, it was an eerie alliance; at worst, a VR prison. Snugged into his warm liquid socket, a bio-matrix of plasma and electronics, he felt his limbs confined to a cocoon of organic VR. A sleek console rendered holographic visuals. A new holo-vision scattersplay linked his senses to all regions of the ship, including the viewport out to space.
The ship was larger than he had imagined; also a merger with its human host. Food was administered through various lumo-sensitive tubes, waste expelled by not dissimilar means. Mind, senses and soul were integrated as parts of the machine. Spine-chilling, but Miko had adapted. He could not help but feel a sense of exhilaration, as his own perceptions were enhanced.
The pilot looked over the empty cockpit and its tangled seat-harness. He shuddered, recalling the last time the hookup had been used. The apparatus radiated potentials of doom. They made Miko grimace. Its inner workings involved a merging of souls of pilot and co-pilot—as the more mystically-minded designers at NAVO had exp
lained to him.
The co-pilot socket was attached only a few feet away, but was a last resort mechanism, employed in case of a life or death predicament—a dead pilot or a mortally-injured one.
But Miko shook off the thought. Two pilots should never link to the computer at once; the co-pilot socket was only a means of manual control. He knew the casual use of the nexus could cause gruesome results: schizophrenia, madness, coma—even death for the unwary person.
His mind flashed back to an event eleven months ago, when a small electrical fire had laid Sitty low in orbit around Wiki Perseus. The rescue team, headed by Duty Sergeant Bazon had air-locked into the ship and engaged in an emergency repair. Latching himself into the co-pilot seat, Bazon had screamed as the link had accidentally fired and the Sergeant had gone instantly insane. Miko himself had barely escaped retrociniation. He remembered only the blackout of unconsciousness, how it had saved him from certain madness. Part of his mind had been shielded from the melding process when the machine, roiling away, had been unable to distinguish between Bazon and him, and had begun splicing the two into a composite form. A grisly surprise. Fortunately, Miko had escaped the disaster. His rescuer had not fared as well...
Miko’s sensitive body-machine link could feel the tugs of Numa’s gravity and his mind jerked back to the unnerving malfunctioning of the navigational system and the excessive solar flux.
Why a spike in electromagnetic energy? An unstable sun? A deliberate irregularity set for unwary vessels? He could not refute the possibilities—particularly the latter.
A trap?
Raiders were not unknown in these parts of the Gollonus sector.
He was about to exit the sector and send in a request for back up when the sensors reported a dip again.
Puzzling.
Miko recalled his agenda leading up to the mission. Scheduled to pick up lava samples from Numa’s surface, he was following a military inquiry into a possible fuel source. Strange metal and debris had been reported orbiting the planet by the captain of the freighter Wiscon en route to Gasgolis while carrying supplies of flash ore. Funding and resources had been minimal. Only his one-man ship had been sent out on the mission into the outer-zones to investigate.
Out to port, bits of wreckage now floated. Contorted hunks of metal, unknown alloys: zirconium, lead, chromium, iridium with traces of hyperactive radium.
Why the supercharged debris? Miko was bewildered by the ominous implications. A result of a ghastly explosion that had laid a vessel to waste?
Miko engaged the hyperlock; a pair of robotic arms extended out from the hull and grabbed the nearest chunk of metal. The tortured sample was hauled into the analysis bay where Trynium computers became busy anatomizing the results.
Automatically Miko’s neck swivelled in the VR. It was in one of these moments that he detected an irregularity racing from the far side of Numa’s dead moon. A craft? The moon looked as ominous as any he seen in his patrols. And yet the gigantic orb that came hurtling toward him looked far homelier than even that, homelier than the last decoy asteroid, haven to smugglers that he had been forced to destroy. The thing looked as lifeless as Numa’s moon, whose pale face was dead, the colour of funereal ash. But nothing ‘dead’ could travel at that harrowing speed—or with that ferocity of purpose.
It was a ship all right, etched against the blackness of the Magellanic Clouds, a grotesque aberration laced with spikes and rods, huge beyond imagining—at least five hundred times the size of his own craft.
A wave of panic flooded Miko. He sent signals via mental link to Sitty’s mechanical centres—impulses to guide her thrusters to fire, but the ship’s power was gone, her weapons dysfunctional. The Orb loomed over her now like some giant jellyfish with tentacles spread, or like one of those viruses blown up millions of times under a microscope. It blocked out all light from Numa’s sun.
The ship grew monstrous; Miko was powerless to prevent its approach, or to escape the mysterious pull.
A portal opened in the titanic globe off to port; Miko felt his craft being pulled in like a lamprey’s prey.
Tractored toward the captive bay, Miko discerned from the failing viewport incomprehensible symbols writ on the superstructure.
The word ‘Zikri’ kept resounding in his brain, like some foul whale-song from deep in Earth’s faraway oceans. He assumed his VR was going haywire—‘spooky’ as the technicians called it. Or was it an alien intelligence that had spoken to him through means of telepathy?
His vessel was being commandeered whether he liked it or not.
He swallowed back the bile in his throat. A hundred thoughts coursed to his mind, emergency defences, backup plans, contingency manoeuvres. All useless. He and his craft were prisoners, of some frightful origin.
A strangled cry burst from Miko’s throat when he was hauled out of his liquid matrix by hideous tentacles. Several bizarre shapes marched him dripping before a score of neck-high creatures with bodies like giant eggs and spongy, glistening flesh. They had no distinguishing marks or face, these blackish-grey creatures, only a mottled polyp-like orifice that might have passed for a mouth. The aliens moved in synchrony, swaying like puppets in a light breeze, their bodies flexible as snakes. Their means of locomotion was not apparent, for they had no appreciable legs or limbs, aside from the tentacles streaming from their sides. How they could move was beyond him. Miko could only liken them to walking jellyfish, their outerbody peppered with an irregular mix of yellow fiber-like cilia and the larger blackish tentacles. The ‘Zikri’, as it turned out, were not interested in his explanations or pleas; rather it was the ship they wanted. The NAVO innovative technology and state-of-the-art hardware were prizes more valuable than the dusts of Trynium that powered the supercomputers of the age. These beings were freebooters—nothing more than merciless pirates, but they were no ordinary pirates—they had a manifest destiny.
He discovered the interiors of the ship lit in eerie maroon and powered by some unknown source. On a control deck of fantastic construction, a throbbing mind or some mental force examined him with cold disfavour. Perhaps it was the combined might of all of them staring at him. Somewhere he could feel the cold, analytic press of those alien thoughts, probing his own, drowning out his individuality, tempering his impulses, searching for signs of weakness.
While the alien invaders studied his ship, Miko struggled for scraps of sanity. He bit back his fear; he cursed, kicked back, struck and fought. But those assaults were no match for the Zikri guard. The vessel he had once treasured sat in the cargo bay, now surrounded by alien machinery and mounted by drills and probes, vulnerable, like some virgin waiting to be deflowered. The creatures buzzed about, grasping something of the notion of the co-pilot harness and began to tinker with it, their tentacles milling. The blood drained from Miko’s face. He felt their hunger, their opportunism. The truth of his intuition was bared, and he did not relish the way they chattered on in their abysmal language, or the way the fibril-stalks on their bodies quivered in all kinds of offensive patterns.
Things were headed in a very bad direction for Miko.
No doubt that the creatures wanted to incorporate the VR technologies into their own spacecraft. This made sense, and Miko, under a flood of despair, crumpled in defeat, for he realized he was no more than a puppet in this affair. The hijacking had gone all too smoothly. Right from paralyzing his ship to the quick assault and invasion, it was well rehearsed. He was a dead man. The final explosion and murder of the crewmen provided the necessary enticement to bring other ships racing to investigate. Thus more victims. It was perfect. The wave signature of the debris was a lure, targeting specific, intelligent, advanced species.
After careful analysis, the chief alien, or whatever central-warden it was, dismissed Miko with a gulp of mouth-polyp and a jerk of wattled neck. Miko was shuttled below.
A team frogmarched him across the luminous foredeck. A scattersplay projector not dissimilar to his own, ranged on a curved wall, depicting an al
ien landscape complete with a city of gargantuan blocks of crystal, translucent stone, revolving bricks, rotating polyhedrons, rising and falling pylons. All moved in a fantastic synchrony of locomotion. The creatures within the scene were of unknown origin: large, sponge-like anemone, similar to the ungainly creatures that crouched before him. The beings kept the city guarded—for it looked like a city—as they flew through the air on machines that were shaped like large gnats, gliding between the floating pillars, the towers, and the fantastic gridwork of unguessable construction.
Miko shivered. Who was to understand their ways? These creatures were as alien to him as he was to them. What he saw were no more comprehensible than the eyeless monsters of the deep trenches of Mariana on Earth.
Miko only grunted with revulsion at this strange glimpse of a new world. Yet somewhere in it all he waited ominously for definite hints as to their plans for him.
A half dozen Zikri guards prodded him toward a detention port on the far bay. Perhaps it was to the hold, or some remedial buffer?
Miko, in his delirium, could not say. Before being terminated, likely he was to be tortured—or possibly examined? What could be worse? The military trained pilot in him worked to banish such sick thoughts, but he could feel only terror. The air was dry and sharp-tinged, yet breathable, surprisingly. It seemed that the Zikri wished, for the moment, to keep him alive. Why? Obviously these creatures had mastered artificial gravity, for he did not fly up to the ceiling or float down about the ship’s walls like some free object in space.
* * *
The guards dumped their prisoner in a glass chamber behind some peculiar luminous bars. Panic welled in Miko. Taking stock of his surroundings, he saw a block ten feet square.
His run.
No benches or objects were in sight. Whatever they had in store for him, he was free to roam his cage. Whenever he made efforts to touch the lumo-bars he felt a sinister tingle in his nerves, something which instantly projected him backwards on his rump. Miko felt like retching. He left the bars alone.
