The Space Mavericks

by Michael Kring

  It took some time before the obvious hit me between the ears. The paintings were old and perhaps that was how the system looked to them. The writing near the last painting was only one word, if that’s what it was, and there was an arrow from the word to the first, innermost planet in the system. I stared at the arrow and nodded as the name of that planet slipped into my brain: it was named Charcoal. I knew then I had to somehow get to the Vespers system and on that planet. I had to go there and discover what the people who made the chamber had done to the planet. Had the race immigrated there? Had they thrown the outer two planets off their orbits? What kind of beings could have lived in Charcoal, with its temperatures high enough to melt lead? I glanced at the painting of the alien and thought of Charcoal. I shook my head. The planet’s rotation was very swift. I just couldn’t imagine such creatures living there.

  There were no clues. Nothing. I had forgotten about the voices and the music, but they were silent now, and only the throbbing of something just below the level of my hearing was coming from the walls. I stood near the bottom of the steps, and as I stepped on the first step to go back out into the light of day, a voice suddenly called to me.

  I was paralyzed by its emotional power. My entire body went numb as the voice roared out. It was an anguished lament, a cry, a wail of such utter despair and anger that I was shocked into a stupor. My mind blanked out, and as I fell to the floor of the chamber, the words pounded into me.

  I came to some time later. The chamber was again dark, but something red was blazing off to my right. I glanced down and the ring on my hand was glowing a bright crimson. It throbbed in time with my heart and I could feel the itching in my brain again. I shook my head, and the glow from the ring faded. I staggered up the steps, groping my way, weak in the knees.

  Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. I didn’t know what to make of it, and I wondered if I would have the nerve to tell Kohn. Perhaps he could understand something about the situation that I couldn’t. I didn’t know, though. The whole incident in the chamber was strange and unreal.

  The sunlight blinded me as I got out of the entrance. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust, and when I did, I glanced at the ring. It was glowing, but softly, dully. The ring was puzzling, but then, so were the ruins. They were also a little frightening. I walked back to where I’d spent the night and picked up the parts bag. I opened it and rummaged through its various components, searching for an interface we could use. I came across two or three that could be modified to work, so I was satisfied. I wouldn’t have to go back to the police and fight those idiots again. I glanced at the sun peeking through the leaves of the trees, trying to gauge what time it was. I guessed it to be around noon on Green. I had been in the chamber longer than I had thought.

  Perhaps I’d been unconscious longer than I wanted to believe.

  I shrugged, and walked toward one of the tall trees surrounding the clearing. I’d have to make like a monkey again, and find out just precisely where I was. I hoped I wouldn’t be too far from the ship so we could get the bloody thing repaired and off the planet as soon as possible. I didn’t believe Heuser would force an attack on the ship, since he was afraid of killing Renate, no matter what he said. I was slightly relieved to know the knock-out drug’s after effects would keep her calm for the next day or so. I didn’t know if I could have coped with an hysterical teenager for any length of time.

  It took several hours, but eventually, I made it back to the ship. As I walked into the living area, Kohn came from the control cabin with a stem look on his face.

  “Did you get it?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said, smiling as I held up the bag. I looked around. “Where’s Renate?”

  “Taking a shower,” he said. He looked at me closely as he came for the parts kit. “What happened to you out there? You look different.”

  “How?” I asked, suddenly afraid the ring had done me harm after all.

  “You look . . . younger, I guess,” he said, his voice soft. His eyes suddenly widened. “The scar! It’s missing!”

  “What scar?” I asked. I rubbed my face.

  “The one you got on Deadly,” he answered. “You know, the one on your left cheek. It was fading, but now . . . it’s gone!”

  “This is what did it,” I said. I held up my right hand and the ring’s stone glowed dully.

  Kohn gripped my hand and examined the ring closely. He has a certain interest in old things. He looked back at me, and then at the ring again. He shook his head. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. “That stone seems almost alive.”

  “I get that impression, too,” I said. “I found in near some ruins.”

  “Ruins?” Kohn asked sharply. “What ruins?”

  “I don’t have time to go into that right now, but, sometime in the next month or so, we’re going to go to the Vespers system,” I said.

  “Why would you want to do that?” he asked.

  “We have to go to Charcoal,” I answered. “There could be something very important there.”

  “Hello,” Renate said as she came from the shower area. Her hair was drying and she was wearing one of Kohn’s jumpsuits. Mine would have been too large for her. As it was, Kohn’s was a little large for her, too, and she looked a trifle silly. “Where’s Charcoal?” she asked.

  “In the Vespers system,” Kohn said. He glared at me. “We’ll talk about this later. I’ve been getting more threats via the radio from Heuser. He seems to hate you for some reason. I’ve got to get to work on the interface problem.”

  “Why do you want to go there?” Renate asked me as Kohn took the parts bag and went down the shaft. “Isn’t General Haivs still in charge of that system?”

  “Yes,” I nodded. We both sat down. “But there’s something there I have to find out.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “Oh, nothing, really,” I lied. I didn’t know why, but I couldn’t tell her about the discovery of the ruins.

  “Just something Heuser said.”

  “Who is he, anyway?” she asked, bringing matters back to the original mystery. “Why does he want me?”

  “I don’t think he wants you,” I answered. “I think Central wants you.”

  “Central?” Renate squeaked in surprise. “Central! But . . . I’m only a kid! I haven’t done anything that bad!”

  “I know,” I said. “It doesn’t make any sense to me, either.”

  Renate began to prattle on about why in the world Central would want to talk to her as I leaned back against one of the walls. All I could think about was the chamber, and the horrible anguish in the voice that had knocked me out. I shuddered at the memory of it. I didn’t recall any of the words, but if I ever heard them again, I knew I would recognize them.

  8

  “Will you turn that thing off?” Kohn asked.

  I turned with a jerk and touched the button that snapped off the speaker. The police had been threatening us for two days, and each day, the threats had been more brutal and explicit. We had ignored them, or course. Renate had been alarmed, at first, when she had heard about the threats, certain the police would swarm over us and take us by force. Knowing the jungle as well as I did, I sincerely doubted they could send any force into that mess. It was a dangerous place, even for me. They couldn’t take off and land in the clearing with us, or hover over us, because if they tried that, we’d blast them out of the sky. We’d have to: there wasn’t enough room in the clearing.

  They had made a flight over us the day I had come back from the ruins, but it was just to see where we were. They had gone back to their clearing, and threatened again. They weren’t very brave, that was certain. They were out of their element, which didn’t help their morale, either. I was just as happy about any of their misfortunes. I still couldn’t forgive them for firing that torpedo in Warp.

  “Does it check out?” I asked.

  Kohn fed data into the main comp, and it was testing the new interface with the moni
tor comp of the Warp engines. He shook his head a little and pressed off. The countless numbers on the screen blinked off without a sound.

  “It’s close,” he said. He shrugged. “I think it’ll work, for a time. We’ll have to try it.”

  “I don’t want to stay around here any longer than I have to,” I said. I picked up the check comp and went through my checks quickly. It bleeped at me as it verified everything was ready for flight.

  “How are we going to handle the Customs Agent on Shadow?” I asked as I put the tiny check comp in its slot near the base of my chair.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he answered.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “We don’t have a thing to bribe him with, except this ring, and it won’t come off!”

  “We won’t have to worry about bribes,” Kohn explained. He looked at me, glanced over his shoulder in case Renate was near, then he looked at me. “It’s a Runner World.”

  “A Runner World?” I gasped. “What? But . . . damn! Why in the Seven Hells did you take that cargo?!”

  “It was either that, or nothing,” he said. “Runner Worlds aren’t really that bad, you know!”

  “Sure,” I said sarcastically. “They’re not that bad. They’re worse! You know how it was on Savior!”

  “This isn’t Savior,” he said softly. “Keep your voice down. I don’t know if Renate has heard about Runner Worlds before.”

  “How do you intend to explain it to her?” I asked. “After all, it will seem pretty suspicious to their dirty little minds that we have a young, beautiful girl on board with a nasty bruise on her cheek.”

  “I’ve heard that Shadow isn’t obsessed with sexual repression,” he said. “It’s more concerned with a person’s personal integrity.”

  “I don’t believe that,” I snapped. I sat in the pilot’s chair and he sat down in his chair. “And you don’t either,” I said.

  “I’m not sure,” Kohn said. “Shadow is a very strange Runner World. They left the First Sphere long before the others did. It’s one of the oldest of the Runners and one of the last to be contacted by Central.” “So what?” I asked. “A Runner World is a Runner World. They’re dangerous because they don’t let you know when you’ve broken one of their holy rules, they just try to kill you.”

  “Not on Shadow,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked. “Don’t they have a death sentence for looking at a woman too long, like Savior?”

  “They don’t have the death penalty, period,” he said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with the planet, really. The man shipping the castings wouldn’t give me any information, other than what I’ve told you. He was a strange one, all right. I was the first honest person he met, or so he said. He claimed he was a native of Shadow.”

  I snorted in disbelief. “You know something must be wrong with the planet, or else ...”

  “The Union would have taken the cargo,” he finished for me.

  “We’re going to have to tell Renate,” I said. “Why?” he asked. “We can just keep her aboard.” “What if those idiot police try to land? You know, they did fire that torpedo at us,” I explained. I glared at him, waiting for his next salvo. He didn’t have one. I lost the coin flip, and was elected the one to explain Runner Worlds to her.

  Actually, I’m fascinated by the concept of Runner Worlds, along with a fascination for death, and other grisly things. The basic idea behind the Runners was nice: religious freedom during the Era of Horror, when Terra was still trying to be dictator to all her colonies. I’ve read that Terra had military governors on each colony planet, and if the people didn’t behave, the governors would kill the colonies to the last child. There was such a huge population surplus on Terra in those days that life wasn’t worth anything. The Runners bribed certain people, had, somehow, gotten command of some ark ships, and went out into the unexplored parts of the Spheres, expressly against the orders of Terra. The Runners seemed to disappear, and when they were re-discovered years later, they usually had conquered a planet and didn’t want any contact with the rest of the Sphere, except for trade.

  But all Runner Worlds were strange in their own way. Some were very strict, and still touted the old religions. Savior is one of the worst. The settlers upon Savior had been religious fanatics and women haters. Women had a horribly low position on Savior, and I had made the mistake of helping a woman pick up some groceries she’d spilled. It had cost me a week in jail, and that was a light sentence because I was an off-worlder. If I had actually touched her hand, I would have been executed. I hate religious fanatics.

  But I had never heard of Shadow. If it was one of the earliest of the Runners, perhaps they had some sort of other thing in mind instead of just religious freedom. Perhaps they had merely wanted to get away from the slaughter of the Era of Horror. I didn’t know. I explained all that to Renate, and she seemed puzzled by it all, too. I told her we would have to play it by ear once we landed. I said she could pretend, if she wanted, she was related to me, or Kohn, or both of us. She agreed to think about it.

  “Fripp,” Kohn called form the corridor leading to the control cabin. “We’re ready.”

  “You’ve plotted the course?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he nodded. “We’re going to have to swing through the Triffid Nebulae, and perhaps as far as the Third Sphere.”

  “What?” I asked, surprised. “Is Warp that bad?”

  “I’m afraid so,” he said. “Shadow is in the 4th quadrant of the Second Sphere, but there’s no straight shot to that quadrant from here. We’ll just have to see what the Triffid Nebulae quadrant looks like.”

  I agreed. I got to my feet and made sure Renate was strapped in correctly. She had done a fairly decent job, and I followed Kohn back into the control cabin. We both strapped in, and I double-checked everything, making sure none of the figures or parameters had fluctuated too much since I’d last checked them. Kohn says I’m a bit on the paranoid side. Maybe, but we’re still alive.

  I put on my helmet, and Kohn began the countdown sequence. I flicked on the Police comm channel, only to my left ear, and listened to them still babbling away at us. They were a determined bunch. Determined to bore us to death. I hoped we could really catch them off guard. I would make the take-off a lot easier if I didn’t have to contend with a cruiser trying to force us back down.

  Kohn said, “Now!”

  I hesitated for a microsecond as a feeling of loneliness washed over me, and then I pressed the button. I shook my head. As the ship roared into the air, I thought that I was still feeling the aftereffects of whatever the ring had done to me the other day when it had healed all my wounds, past and present.

  “F’lish’ik,” I blurted.

  “What?” Kohn asked, after we had cleared the atmosphere of Green. He swiveled his chair as the comp took over. *

  “I... I don’t know,” I explained. What had I said? What could it have meant? “I think it has something to do with the ring.” I had told him all about the ruins.

  “I wish you could take that thing off,” he said.

  I nodded agreement. The blackness of space filled my screen and the bright, white points that were stars seemed to beckon to me. “I wish we could, too,” I said. “But we’ve both tried our best, and it doesn’t come off.”

  “I just hope that thing doesn’t spoil your piloting ability,” he said.

  I didn’t think it would. If anything, I felt a trifle more alert, a bit more attuned to what was happening all around me, in some odd way I couldn’t explain. It was a strange feeling, and it was more than a little frightening. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.

  “How long before Warp?” I asked.

  “I’d say about five minutes,” he answered. “We’ve got to get in Warp and maneuver around that whirlpool our friends so thoughtfully provided for us.”

  “Not just for us,” I corrected. “For themselves, too. Even if they do blast us out of the sky, they won’t be able to get back to Firelight fo
r another month, or more. That whirlpool feels as if it will develop into a grand-daddy of whirlpools.”

  “How do you know that?” Kohn asked sharply. “We’re not in Warp.”

  I started to say I could feel it, but I decided not to say anything. I shrugged my shoulders as I turned from Kohn and watched the numerals snap on and off and change with super-rapidity on the readouts. Kohn took the hint and went back to his duties. Everything checked fine. I really didn’t know how I knew about the whirlpool, but I had a gut feeling I was right. That whirlpool was gathering energy from some source in Warp, and, the more I thought about it, the longer I knew the whirlpool would be there. I knew it would be there for at least three months.

  “Warp!” Kohn called out.

  The Warp engines cut in. I almost screamed in agony as pain, sheer, raw agony, ripped at my face. My brain felt as if someone had smashed the side of my skull and was dragging the gray matter out of my skull with rakes and metallic claws. I couldn’t even move, it was so bad. My eyes burned, and the nerve endings in my eye teeth sent icicles spiking into my sinus cavities. My fingernails, and toenails, and my stomach and brain, all squeezed at the same time.

  The pain was gone in another instant, and I collapsed forward, sweat flooding my eyes, and tears blinding me.

  I couldn’t move, and I just sat in the chair, glad the straps were holding me upright. I was exhausted. I was gasping for breath, and Kohn must have heard that, because he was suddenly beside me, shaking my shoulder.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  I moved my aching head, and my brain felt like a bruised plum in my skull. “I don’t know,” I said. “I had an attack ... I guess. I’m all right now. Go on, sit down. I’m fine.”

  “Are you sure?” Kohn asked. “We can always drop out of Warp. The next maneuver is tricky, you know.”

  “I can handle it,” I said. I hoped I sounded a lot more confident than I felt. I was fairly certain, however, I could do it.