Bad Bargain: A Space Rules Adventure Part 1

by Ian Cannon

  But Ben saw it. It drew his attention, made his eyes widen, made him grin. That was his wife out there. Bi-gods, she was giving them both hells. That girl would eat the whole moon before letting them get to her.

  Yeah—that’s my girl. Please, stay safe…

  The man smiled, switching the previous mood. “You’ve mistaken my intentions, here. So, let me be clear. You are not my prisoner. You see, I once fought for the Imperium as you did, a nameless number sent into futility many times. But I have found a much greater mission here at this facility. We are the Faction. My name is Zelit, administrator of this station, and you, Benjar Dash, are my guest.” He lifted his left hand showing a control bracelet with a single button, and pressed it. Ben’s cuffs clicked open freeing him.

  Ben looked at his hands with surprise etching tiny across his face. He sat up rubbing his wrists, bringing blood back into them. He said dryly, “Thanks for the hospitality. What about my wife?”

  “She, too, is invited,” the man said, “if she chooses.”

  Ben laughed at him. “You think she’ll accept your invitation to this little dinner party?”

  He said, “I hope she does.”

  “You should have just RSVP’d.”

  The faraway sky suffused momentarily in flame, blinked out as the cosmic background choked it. The man turned back around to face Ben, the viewport showing only a night sky now. “She’ll come.”

  Ben gave him a pathetic look, said, “You’re funny. You talk and talk like you know who she is, like you’ve studied her character, analyzed her personality. You don’t have a clue, though, do you? You read some scattered bits of data and then send your men out there looking for a mark in the dark, searching for something they’ll never find. Your men just walked into a storm, buddy.”

  “And what about you? Did you not walk into the same storm?” he returned coolly. “Yet, she married you.”

  “I didn’t try to kill her.”

  “Oh no? A Golothan soldier and a Raylon assassin meeting on the bloodiest battlefield known to the Solar Twin Wars, and there was no walking into a storm?” He sniggered, “You underestimate your wife’s judgment.”

  Ben returned the snigger. “The only underestimation going on here, is yours, bub.”

  “We will see. But to answer your question, yes. I want her to come to the dinner party.”

  Ben gave him a questioning look. “Why?”

  “Because I value—we value—what you and your wife have.”

  “Don’t tell me,” Ben said. “Character?”

  The man looked at him curiously. “Character is a funny thing. What some consider to be of great character, others might consider to be immoral.”

  Ben responded, “Depends on your standards, I guess.”

  The man studied him for a few seconds and said, “It’s possible that you are the one that doesn’t yet understand me. So, let me show you. Come.”

  Ben pondered his new company for a second before swinging his legs off the table and standing. He followed this man, Zelit, out into the passage. As they strolled, Zelit said, “This is our Mortus headquarter. As a faction, we’re small in comparison, but growing.”

  A pace behind, Ben said, “Comparison to what?”

  “The other factions.”

  “Other factions?” Ben eyed him. Surely he didn’t mean—“The Imperium, the Cabal?”

  “Precisely.”

  Ben laughed, said, “Small in comparison? Buddy, you’re microscopic.”

  “It is the germ that kills, Benjar.”

  They turned a corner. Ben said, “Depends on the cure, but if you say so.”

  “We have outposts just like this one scattered throughout uncontended space. We function as a fully militarized body, autonomous, capable and with a mission.”

  “What mission?”

  Zelit dripped with pomp and said, “Let me show you.”

  Uncontested Space.

  Outer Commerce Routes.

  Unmapped.

  REX had been experiencing the strangest feeling, one he was not entirely familiar with. His cognitive neural net had been asking questions he couldn’t answer.

  Where was Cap?

  Where was Boss?

  Why can’t I communicate with them?

  What if they met with danger?

  What should I do?

  In the end of all his digital swooning, he discovered he was worried. Actually worried.

  And then his proximity sensors fired off. He scanned nearby space and discovered his sub-personality moving toward him. The drop pod approached. He sighed very much out loud.

  It swam toward him through the greasy black and came about under the fuselage, both pieces of the net-mind coordinating perfectly, until the lower umbilicus connected. A swish of atmo made them one. The entire dialog in which all of REX’s questions were answered occurred over a microsecond as their experiential data banks connected and their vessel logs shared.

  It seemed the drop-off had gone wrong. There was an unforeseen event. Tawny suit-jumped off a mountain. Blew up a bunch of bad guys. Ended up at the bottom of a mountain shaft. Now, she was hurt. The indications were multiple injuries. REX would have to analyze her.

  But how?

  He wasn’t a medical bot or ambulatory vessel. He didn’t have so much as a med bay, surgical bots or physician tools, much less the necessary diagnostic machinery.

  But he did have two auto-assist utility bots with crane arms down in the cargo bay, a bevvy of engineering tools and an assortment of civilian gear. Not to mention some general hospital drugs that Ben and Tawny kept in reserve, just in case.

  REX intimated a thoughtful head scratch searching into his hypothetical scenario capacity.

  Ah—a possible solution.

  The dual utility bots powered up down in the cargo bay, both turning to the airlock, communicating through a series of blips and bleeps, and headed over. With their hover engines humming, they descended into the drop pod, went to the sleeping Tawny and, commanded to use their highest tactility setting for meticulous engineering work, they picked her up, one at the feet, the other at the shoulders hardly jostling her, and escorted her back up through the air lock, very carefully maintaining her position. There, they laid her across the flat bed of the All-Terrestrial-Vehicle, now doubling as an operation table, took her over-garments off very quickly, yet very gently, and left her to REX’s devices.

  He used his onboard security detection sensors to scan her body. It would only be a surface render, but using his vague understanding of bio-humanoid-infrastructure, he quickly spotted the broken knee, a deeply bruised lower back, the discoloration of her torso section and the multiple abrasions. From there, he commanded the crane bots to assemble a splint using some cargo netting and one of Ben’s shirts as a dressing. They did so with meticulous proficiency.

  Afterwards, they were given a series of commands, each of a medical nature that they went about performing as though they were assembling a bomb, and with one final command to inject her with a bio-stimulant, they slid away.

  She gasped tremendously as her eyes fluttered open and she screamed, “Benji!” She shook her head, looked around. At first, she didn’t recognize her surroundings, then she squinted, scanned the area left to right. The cargo bay. This was REX.

  “Hey, Boss, how do you feel?” he asked.

  “REX?” she said through a parched mouth, dry throat.

  “Yep, it’s me.”

  “How’d I get here?”

  “I was able to rendezvous with the drop pod. I brought you here with my utility cranes.”

  “The cargo bay?” she said still coming fully back.

  “Well, technically I guess. For now it’s more like the medical bay.”

  She looked up at the invisible A.I. She only remembered bits and pieces before she passed out. There were spaceships. A full armada. “How did you get away?”

  “Uh, well, it wasn’t easy. When I spotted them moving in I had to make a decision. I ju
st turned around and ran. Nothing I could do, Boss. Figured I’d be more good to you out here than scrapped.”

  That sea of agony still had her in its undertow. She laid her head back down. “You did the right thing. How long have I been out?”

  “A few hours, ship time. I had to stimulate you. You looked like you would have slept another half a day or so.”

  She gazed across her body. She was in her cotton fatigue undergarments which consisted of thigh-length body shorts and a combat halter top. Her leg had a full splint constructed from cargo equipment—two flat-sided leverage rods, some tightly woven cargo netting, one of Ben’s shirts. She recognized this style of medical treatment from her time spent in combat. Back then, they’d sutured, closed or splinted injuries in the field any way they could. It made her grin, amused. She said, “A field dressing?”

  “Does it look right? I had to look into Cap’s med logs to find the right practice. I’m not much of a doctor.”

  “It looks real good.”

  “Heh—should have been an auto med-kit. Sister model, maybe. How’s the pain?”

  She groaned heavily. “All over.”

  “Really?” REX said disappointed. One of the utility cranes shuttered, ready to go back into corpsman mode. “Maybe I got the dosage wrong. It said fifty milligrams of Floxa-codone. I gave you eighty.”

  “No it’s fine,” she said, and the crane bot folded back into its sleep position.

  She forced herself into a sitting position wincing in pain.

  “You shouldn’t get up,” REX said, very doctorly.

  “I have to.”

  “Boss, that leg won’t hold you. The dressing will keep it stabilized, but you put weight on it and you’ll drop like a Molosian dino dump.”

  “Well, I can’t just lay here. We got problems, REX.”

  “What do you want to do?” he asked.

  She looked around, thinking. REX was right. She couldn’t put weight on this leg, couldn’t walk or so much as stand on it. Her lips pursed. She needed something to lean on, something to support her weight. A thought occurred. She said, “My exo-suit. Get it.”

  Ben and his new host went through a set of double sliding doors and entered an enormous space. It was octagonal in design with terraced rows, each housing busy workstations. Operators with headsets and overlay computers worked diligently at their posts. Compu-bots shuttled back and forth. The place was a show of organized chaos, an operation center.

  The room’s central periphery was an enormous window revealing a dual-sided radar dish sitting outside. It was massive, a hundred feet in diameter spinning at a slow revolution, constantly extrapolating an ocean of long distance data from the solar system.

  “This is our command octagon,” Zelit said. “Only very few have seen this.”

  “I’m so lucky,” Ben said half blithely, half-impressed.

  “From here, we’ve crafted a network of data collection second to none in the galaxy. We are integrated into every piece of political infrastructure from Omicron to Solaptra, from Golotha to Pendulos. Our eyes are everywhere, our ears are on the inside, dwelling within every hall, every chamber, every conceivable office of policy in the civilized front—all integrated into the very fabric of operation for both the Imperium as well as the Cabal.”

  “Sounds complicated,” Ben said.

  “It is, actually,” Zelit said before leading him around the upper periphery of the command center. “We’ve spent a generation developing our network, a complete labyrinth of perfectly arranged personnel and alternative mech that funnels information here, to us. From these cubes we keep intimate track of every piece of legislation, every sanction, every maneuver made by each side—from the congressional cathedral of Golotha to the halls of the Omicron capitol. Departments of defense, military cabinets, councils of war—our influence reaches all of them.” He grinned pacing slowly, and said, “Yet … we are secret.”

  Ben showed dry acknowledgment. “You work on the inside, from behind their back.”

  “In a matter of speaking. It’s more a case of infiltration. We sit among their leaders, we move within their ranks. We are them, securing our ulterior objectives in silence and with covertness.”

  “A network of spies,” Ben assumed.

  Zelit put a finger up to make his next point. “They’re far more than spies, Benjar. Through them, we report on or even coordinate the direction of every politic body.”

  “You conduct the war.”

  Zelit stopped, turned to him. “No, not the war. The ensuing peace.”

  Ben tilted his head a little surprised at the word peace. “Well, pardon me for saying so, but you guys don’t seem like the most peaceful lot.”

  Zelit flashed him a knowing smile, turned and continued walking the perimeter. “We’re not interested in each side vying for power against the other. We work to topple governments.” He stopped again, turned, said, “From within. Our targets are culture, tradition, the normative underpinnings of each society. Our weapon is entrenchment, deception …” he said with a gleeful snarl, “change.”

  Ben chuckled piecing this place together. “So the theory is, get each side to blow itself up, and they won’t blow each other up.”

  “Put very simply, yes. It is, after all, more realistic than believing each side will simply put down their arms.” He started walking again and said, “This is where we work each day to orchestrate the downfall of the Imperium, as well as the Underworld Cabal.”

  “Civil war. Civil uprising. Heh. That doesn’t seem very peaceful to me.”

  “Peace will only be had through other means. A world at war is more likely to come to an amicable end than worlds at war, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Uh-huh,” Ben said casting his gaze across the entire panorama, and then beyond, to the radar dish blipping and turning. “And how do you people pay for all this? It can’t be cheap.”

  “I’ll show you that, too,” Zelit said and led him through another set of doors. The next room was very different, but equally as technological. It was a long room with enormous screens reading interplanetary stock reports. Financial sectors were broken down by graph and hologram charts. Industrial news reports blasted across the screens with real-time occurrence. Meanwhile, more operators sat at their high-tech workstations buzzing about.

  Zelit leaned on the railing overlooking the entire operation floor and said, “The interplanetary banking system.”

  Ben scanned the place, fascinated. “The IBS, huh? How much of it do you touch?”

  “Oh no, Benjar,” Zelit laughed. “That is the wrong question.”

  “What’s the right question?”

  “The one in which you ask how much of it we own?”

  “Oh boy,” Ben said. “And?”

  “We are the IBS.”

  Ben hid his sudden trepidation well. This place was bigger than he could have possibly imagined. Its slimy tentacles were endless, and the influence reaching across the solar system from this very room had been known to ruin entire planetary markets, leave industries in ruin. These people were scurrilous. This was pure evil. Glimpsing this place was a death sentence. Ben sighed, forcing himself to play along.

  “You’re the Currency Reserve,” Ben said.

  Zelit chuckled. “The Currency Reserve is a front, of course, to direct attention toward misnomer and lies, and away from us.”

  Without making eye contact but rather looking across the work floor, Ben said with a pragmatic tone, “But you are misnomer and lies.”

  “No,” he said putting his hand on Ben’s shoulder. He looked at him. “We are conspiracy.”

  Ben forced an uncomfortable grin and said, “Tell me about it. So, what does all this have to do with Tawny and me?”

  Tawny moved through the vessel. She had REX disassemble her battle-tech exo-suit, taking its left leg apart and applying the alloy plating to her injured leg, electro-hydraulic mechanism and all. She also wore the right boot to balance her height along with the lower back
support harness. The piecemeal tech suit whirred with each step, basically doing her walking for her while completely supporting her weight. It allowed full mobility, even heightened her physical capability.

  She stepped toward the holotable in the passenger hold where REX had emitted an assortment of 3-D images he’d collected during his split-second run from the Mortus armada. The warships flickered in digital brilliance, their detail clear. They had rounded features with parapets, and operation quarters bulging sleek and long along their flanks. The upper decking was all radar dishes and turret housings. Tawny tightened her face looking at them. It was odd. They didn’t have the angular, wedge design of Underworld craft or the garish, imposing look of the Imperium.

  The lead craft did, however, bear the logo of their people detailed across its large, forward command structure—square, three dots. She pointed it out. “These marks—they’re the same as before.”

  “Yeah,” REX said.

  “Back on Hominus Four.”

  “Yeah.”

  “This is the same party that kidnapped the Orbin heiress.”

  “That’s what I figured, too. Seems logical enough.”

  She scanned her eyes from one warship holo-image to the next taking in their detail, wondering about them. She said, “So who are they?”

  REX said, “I’ve been running reference probes on the data net ever since I left Mortus. I have a pretty good processor, Boss, but I can’t find anything.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “Nope. Their marking is unregistered. I don’t get any construction project on Mortus. There’s no way to know what their affiliation is, or if they even have one.”

  Tawny shook her head, doubt dripping off her. “They have battle cruisers. I saw them. You saw them. How can they have battle cruisers and no one know they exist?”

  “Mmm—I have a theory, but it’s stupid,” REX said. He sounded reticent.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s so stupid, Boss, I’m kind of embarrassed to say.”

  “Just say it, REX,” she demanded.