Nopileos: A novel from the X-Universe: (X4: Foundations Edition 2018) (X Series)

by Helge T. Kautz

  The Teladi breathed shallowly. Elena didn’t know if it made any medical sense to put him to a stable side position: saurians were not humans, after all. But it shouldn’t hurt and she couldn’t do more for the poor saurian descendant anyway. Nopileos would probably wake up soon and then he’d feel just as bad as her and Ghinn.

  Elena straightened up again. Leaning crookedly against the wall, the Split woman eyed her in disgust. “Clean energy bolt hit?” she asked and pointed her chin at Elena. She immediately closed her eyes for a moment; the movement didn’t seem to agree with her. She cursed restrainedly in her mother tongue.

  Elena looked down at herself Clean energy bolt hit? Her thoughts were leaden. “Oh. No, all naturally born humans have a belly button.”

  Ghinn raised an eyebrow but said nothing. Elena only now recognized how alien the Split woman actually looked. If she were clothed, she might pass as a very tall, very slender, and extremely ascetically proportioned albino woman. Without clothing, however, her non-human descent was only too obvious: even though thin, almost scrawny, no ribs were visible under the ashen skin, but a continuous bone case. Her flat breasts, which still looked very human under clothes, were simple bulges without nipples or areolae; she had no navel and, other than her head, no other body hair. Immediately below both armpits, long seams shimmering with moisture ran like vertical seams to her pelvis and looked like huge, lipless mouths that could open at any time. The stomach bulged palely and was covered all over with a network of thin veins, something moving inside. Both shins had fine, vertical wrinkles from the ankles up to the knees. Six toes without nails formed a broad, steady foot.

  “Do you find me just as repulsive as I do you?” Ghinn asked, noticing Elena’s scrutinizing eyes.

  A raspy laugh that ended in a cough escaped the Eurasian astronaut. “I wouldn’t marry you, Ghinn,” she wheezed. Ghinn stared at Elena. After a while, she pushed her knees and straightened her back further up the wall. “You are a brave woman, Elena Kho. I do not know anyone like you. Are all women from Earth like you?”

  Elena thought about that. Then she said, “I wish.” The nausea continued to recede. “Do you know what happened?” she asked.

  “Stun cocktail,” the Split woman snarled as quickly as if she had expected the question. “Contains anesthetic substances for each species.”

  Now Elena understood why she and Ghinn were so bad off. Chemicals that stun a Split, for example, had to provoke devastating reactions in a human, and the other way around. It was just amazing that no one just died right away.

  Ghinn seemed to guess her thoughts. “You can still die from it a up to a week later,” she explained with a look that Elena could only categorize as smug. The Split woman was surely lying to scare her!

  Behind the double bulkhead, metallic, echoing footsteps rang out. Something moved behind the observation port, then the wings of the bulkhead slid open. An Argon entered who had very long, black hair that was gathered into a thin braid at his back by several dark bands. Despite the predominating cold, thick beads of sweat stood on his forehead. His gaze was glassy and stiff. In his hand he held a blaster with a blast muzzle that gleamed cruelly. Behind him, a Split entered the room, clean-shaven, small, compact, dirty white leggings, black magnetic boots, and the same type of blaster in his hand as his crony.

  “Look wha’ we ha’ here,” said the Argon with a strangely lumbering accent. He giggled hoarsely. Drops of spit flew. “This is the Earther, Earth Goner.”

  “Who?” the Split growled in an equally curious cadence. “Well, these Earther—”

  “What do you want with her? She is fat, ugly, and her hair is black like clotted ghok blood.” With unsteady steps, the Split came closer to Ghinn t’Whht, who tensed up involuntarily. “This one here I know from somewhere.”

  “Wha’ I wan’ wi’ ’er, wha d’you thin’!” the Argon raged indignantly after some delay. A pungent chemical smell emanated from him. Elena was sure that both the long-haired Argon and the greasy Split had taken some kind of intoxicant. The movements of the two pirates looked choppy and erratic. Were there intoxicants that affected both species? She didn’t know, but it didn’t really matter.

  “Who are you, what do you want?” she cried.

  “Shu’ your face!” the Argon smirked and stepped so close to Elena that she could have grabbed his blaster. His chemical-laden breath wafted into her face. She tensed up inside.

  “Do you need the lizard lump?” the Split asked. His metal soles crunched on the dirt as he swayed past Ghinn. He raised his blaster.

  The Argon’s gaze passed over Elena’s shoulder. “Wha’s tha’, a Teladi? No, kill ’im.”

  Elena used this brief moment of distraction. Ghinn flashed a look from the corner of her eye as though in confirmation. Ignoring pain and nausea with all her might, Elena ripped her foot up and kicked the weapon out of the hands of the completely blindsided Argon. Her usually fast reflexes were terribly restricted, but the drug-induced delay in perception caused the long-haired man to react much more slowly than her. Elena hit the man in the temple with her good hand; he immediately folded without a sound. His body plopped on the deck like a wet sack. A sharp sizzle sounded. As Elena turned to find the source of the noise, both Ghinn and the Split pirate lay on the floor. Ghinn, however, bared her teeth in a grin and raised the blaster she’d grabbed from the air. The Split was lying on the ground with a black hole in his chest and didn’t move again. Behind Ghinn, an equally thick hole glowed in the wall. Apparently, the man had missed the Split woman and was then overwhelmed by her.

  “Duped by two naked women. Pitiful creatures!”

  “Tsh?” Nopileos faintly questioned, who was regaining consciousness at that moment. Elena didn’t have time to help her lizard friend or even to look over at him. A wave of dizziness rolled over her and buried itself deep inside her. She folded and fought in vain against the choking in her throat. Her overworked body punished her drastically for the heavy stress she had just given it. All senses vanished, only the feeling of endless nameless pain remained.

  After an eternity, the torture eased a bit. Someone dragged her roughly across the floor by her arms. The cold yielded. When she could see clearly again, she was no longer in the filthy room, but on a halfway clean, rather warm corridor. She leaned her back against the wall, the door to the shed immediately next to her left arm. A pile of white and blue linen piled in front of her: her USC jumpsuit, pilot’s jacket, underwear, boots.

  “Dress yourself,” she was barked at by Ghinn t’Whht. The pregnant woman had already slipped back into her robes.

  Elena clumsily did what she was told. “How is Nopileos?”

  “I live,” the saurian descendant’s voice hissed thinly, “But nothing more than that.”

  Elena grinned weakly. “Then you’re doing better than me. Ghinn seems to have gotten the least of it.” She looked up at the Split woman, who made a gesture Elena didn’t understand.

  “We are not alone on this ship,” Ghinn said. “I’ve looked around. The entire crew is intoxicated. In front is an environmental area with Boron breathing fluid.” What that meant, she left open.

  “Uchan and Kalmanckalsaltt?” Elena inquired as the tongue of her space boots merged with the active material of the shoes.

  “I do not know and it does not interest me,” Ghinn replied. “We have to get out of here before anyone notices what has happened.”

  Elena shook her head and closed her eyes. After a short pause, she straightened herself up wearily. “Not without the others,” she said with determination.

  In an almost human gesture, Ghinn shrugged her shoulders; presumably done to make it clear to Elena how little she made of the Earth woman’s decisions. “Do whatever is right for you, Elena Kho. But don’t do it without this.” She handed Elena one of the two captured blasters. Elena nodded her thanks and immediately switched the weapon to her left hand, as she couldn’t press the trigger with the broken index finger of the right one.

>   “Nopileos, you go with Ghinn,” she said.

  The Teladi looked up at her indignantly. “Tshh! You can’t even stand on your own legs, Elena, how do you want to free Uchan and Kalmanckalsaltt?”

  Elena looked at the Teladi irritated. “How many pirates are on the ship?” she turned to Ghinn.

  Ghinn remained silent for a while and looked down the corridor, which turned left a couple meters further. “This here is a medium slave freighter,” she finally said. The word made Elena shudder: slaves! “Maybe ten or twelve, certainly not more,” Ghinn concluded. “But you’ll find out quickly. Good luck, Elena Kho.” She turned to go.

  When the Split woman finally disappeared around the bend, a bulkhead crashed at the other end of the corridor and and loud hooting rang out from many throats. Hasty clopping from a multitude of metal heels approached rapidly. Elena glanced at Nopileos. “Maybe you’re both right.” She swallowed her dizziness and ran. Nopileos followed her as fast as his short legs allowed. “Elena, stop!” he hissed in despair.

  The door on the left led into a sealed environmental area. Good possibility that Nola Hi was held there! But the Teladi dared not stand on his clawtips to look through the observation port, for the pirates roiled ten lengths behind him in the best case. Elena, white in the face and red-eyed, turned and came back. She fired a shot at the ceiling of the curve in the corridor, sparks sprayed around and pelted white-hot on the ground. A many-voiced outcry followed; someone called with a heavy tongue, “Wait!”

  “Nola Hi’s in there,” Elena confirmed, following Nopileos’s gaze. “But without his environmental suit. It’s not going to be easy to get him”—a blazing energy beam entered the room for a fraction of a second and scorched the faces of the two fugitives—“out!” Elena completed her sentence with a scream. She grabbed the Teladi by the claw and dragged him behind her, occasionally firing shots over her shoulder. The hand dragging Nopileos ached painfully at the broken index finger, but she ignored the throb. A few steps ahead, the bulkhead at the end of the corridor hissed open. They stormed through. A hangar? All the same for now; she could look around later. First, Elena wanted to destroy the electronics of the bulkhead, to make it difficult for the pirates to get through.

  “Where are…?” Her eyes searched up and down both sides of the door, but found nothing.

  Nopileos looked at her with a wide open mouth, then he understood. “Down there!” He pointed at the floor. In fact, the controls were at foot level! Elena fired at them and the mechanism melted under swaths of black smoke.

  Only now did she look around, and looked directly into the huge blast muzzle of a the energy weapon of a barge that hovered over the deck! Elena dropped and rolled away. Not that it would have made a difference if the weapon had actually fired, but her reflexes were slowly returning. Nopileos hissed in alarm.

  “Over here,” called an artificially amplified voice. The low passenger lock of the dinghy opened up, a laughably tiny gangway folded forward. Elena didn’t think long. She signaled to Nopileos to enter and immediately followed the Teladi.

  Ghinn t’Whht looked at her with compressed lips as they stumbled into the tight and low cockpit. “You’re lucky,” the Split woman said dryly, “I was a hair away from firing when the bulkhead opened. Can anyone handle this?” With a contemptuous gesture, Ghinn pointed with to the forearm-length shafts which grew up out of the instrument panel instead of a flight yoke or a control stick. She had obviously managed to levitate the ship and activate the tiny weapon control console, but her knowledge of the alien instruments didn’t stretch further than that.

  “Yes, me,” Nopileos hissed. Inanias had relieved him of the burden of steering pretty often, but at least he still knew how how steering shafts, accelerators, and force feedback interfaces felt, and how to use all these instruments. Reasonably and approximately, in any case. What really worried him was the fact that the pirate ship they were on was a Teladi design—and not an export model, as one could see from the Teladi-specific controls. The pirates, however, were composed of Argons and Split. Where was the original Teladi crew of the ship? His hearts misgave him and he preferred not to think about it for the moment.

  Ghinn only ceded the pilot’s seat with a grumble. If Elena hadn’t been so miserable, she would have grinned as she huddled at the navigator’s station in the far right of the cockpit. Ghinn dropped down to the left and Nopileos sat in the middle. Teladian benches were low, hard, and terribly uncomfortable, but somehow the two women managed to squeeze into them.

  Nopileos switched on the headlight; the nose of the ship swung around until the glaring cone of light illuminated the lock. Then the Teladi set off the laser. Once, and the gate hung in glowing shreds. Twice, and white-hot metal sprayed into empty space, together with the white permafrost of the escaping air. Normally a one-sided permeable forcefield would have prevented the atmosphere from escaping, but the burst of the ship’s cannons had burned up the corresponding generators along with the bulkhead.

  “Careful!” Elena warned. “They’ll shoot at us. Best to let it drift along their side wall and go full throttle opposite their direction of flight past their stern.

  Nopileos nodded. “That’s good.”

  They had the opportunity to look at the slave ship from the outside for the first time. As already expected, it was a Teladi ship, strictly speaking a destroyer, from the class the Argonian military called a Phoenix. From up close, the gray, shapeless box showed its age—the ship hadn’t been captured yesterday! Makeshift repairs and a variety of modifications, mostly without apparent purpose, decorated the outer hull of the ship and made it seem scarred and rickety. A purple variation of the ancient Terraformer symbol taller than a Teladi covered the ship’s side, and the lines ran over the windows as well as the hull. Elena was reminded of #efaa in some way. “Sector Control,” an obviously broken maintenance robot had scrawled in Argono-Roman letters under the symbol. Why the pirates had opted for a parody version of the Terraformer fleet’s symbol eluded the bounds of Elena’s imagination.

  “That’s not one of the ships the Raindragon has encountered,” Ghinn noted.

  Elena shook her head. “No. I hope they’re not in the vicinity.”

  Nopileos could only agree. Even so, the chance that they could escape the Phoenix was slim. The three hunter ships who had shot the FL Raindragon to space scrap would drop their chances of survival to zero. Nopileos showed his teeth and let his tongue run over his nose. He had an idea.

  Under the attentive gaze of the two dissimilar women, the Teladi gently braked the barge until it was even with the engines of the larger ship. With his claws deep in the control shafts, he directed the small energy cannon at the dormant engines of the larger spaceship and let the destructive beam cross over the superstructure in small bursts. The ion engines’ expansion nozzles didn’t show any change at first because they were designed to withstand extreme loads and temperatures, but then some support structures vaporized with blazing flashes. Through the darkening cockpit window, the three fugitives watched as arm-thick feed lines burst and gas escaped under enormous pressure.

  “Pay atten—” Elena managed to get out before the barge was struck by a gas jet and whirled away like a dead leaf. Although the forces were small and effortlessly absorbed by the compensators, Nopileos lost his orientation the moment the stars began to spin around the cockpit. The shields, ran through the Teladi’s mind. Surely the Phoenix’s automation had started up the energy shields the moment the engines had been fired. The bombardment had long since stopped, but if anyone in the destroyer’s control center was quick-witted enough to keep the shields activated, they would smash the tiny dinghy at any moment.

  But nothing happened. The dinghy whirled diagonally behind the Phoenix in the blackness, accompanied by a flare from the slave freighter’s engines section that was now on fire.

  “Green salamander!” Nopileos muttered, as he began to doubt the wisdom of his spontaneous actions. If the spacecraft were to explode
, so would his three imprisoned comrades on board! After a while, however, the rear-facing camera showed that the Phoenix, far behind them, was separating its engines which were tumbling through space. The onboard computer of the barge reported the simultaneous receipt of an automated distress signal. Nobody would hear it for along time, out here in the no-man’s-land of this remote star system, which was christened Eighteen Billion by the Teladi. The name distracted Nopileos’s thoughts and reminded him of a half-forgotten task that he would have to carry out sooner or later. Embarrassed, he tried not to look at the part of the data projection that displayed the sector name. Instead, he concentrated on controlling the barge.

  Elena looked at the Teladi for a moment, then looked straight ahead. Nopileos seemed so attentive, so determined! She was glad that he was still alive. There wasn’t another Teladi like him. And at some point, she thought to herself with a small smile on her lips, she would have to start thinking of her saurian friend as a “she,” and alongside that, start using female pronouns.

  The saurian descendant got the dinghy under control with the help of the onboard computer. “Why didn’t they stop us?” he wondered.

  “They threw a party out here in space, far from any lawfulness,” Ghinn stated. “The creatures are devoid of any discipline. They do not even occupy the control room.”

  “Our luck, their misfortune,” Nopileos hissed.