The Kenval Incident

by Philippe Mercurio

  When the skinless flesh on the Vohrn’s beak came into contact with his head, the man cried out briefly and then fell unconscious.

  To Hanosk’s surprise, the female demonstrated unexpected resources: she left the door and came toward him, apparently having decided to confront him. Unfortunately for her, the darkness was compounded by the Vohrn’s ability to move silently. When he immobilized her in the vice-grip of his arms and repeated what he had done to the male, the ordeal sent her down into the void.

  XVI

  GENOCIDE

  MARC Wulgis, owner of the Kaumann organ-cloning laboratory, was worrying himself sick. Almost six-foot-six-inches tall, with wide shoulders, he had thick black hair held back in a ponytail. His physique made a suit look incongruous on him.

  He paced, his forehead wrinkled with concern. The room he was patrolling was located in a kidney production unit, located in the Nogartha suburbs. The room held a round table and chairs in addition to the desk and executive chair.

  When his Artificial Intelligence’s logo—a double helix strand of DNA—appeared, Wulgis jumped.

  “Your new attorney is here,” announced the AI.

  Finally, he groaned. Then, out loud, “I’ll see her now.”

  One minute later, the door opened to admit an elegant thirty-something woman. Thin and seductive, she was wearing a charcoal gray skirt suit. The classic outfit was cut not to hinder her energetic stride. The attorney held out her hand. “Mr. Wulgis. I am Lucie Carenko and… I’m extremely curious. What could be important enough for us to need to meet on such short notice?”

  Wulgis contemplated his guest. Her blond hair was pulled back into an extremely well-coiffed chignon. At first glance, the industrialist thought her harmless. A pair of glasses—an old-fashioned accessory worn for vanity—reinforced this impression. Until he looked into her eyes.

  Cold and calculating, the lawyer’s blue eyes pierced through the lenses. Wulgis might very well be almost eight inches taller than she, and yet she dominated him with her very presence. Uncomfortable, he asked, “Before we continue, have you signed the confidentiality agreement?”

  “That goes without saying. If not, I wouldn’t have bothered coming here.”

  The man took a deep breath and decided to tell her. “Kaumann is having some difficulties at the moment, as I’m sure you know. The recent opening of the market for cloned organs to non-human suppliers has hurt us badly.”

  Carenko listened politely, waiting for him to get to the meat of the subject.

  “Last year, I met a man named Lanca by chance. His only virtue is that he works in the Idernax archives. If he hadn’t mentioned his job, I wouldn’t have paid him any attention.”

  In order to put an end to the hesitation she still felt from him, the lawyer prompted him with a question. “And in what way did this interest you?”

  “I just thought practically unlimited access to the files of a powerful multi-global might be useful.”

  “And how did you convince the archivist to work with you?”

  “Easily. Lanca is a petty, frustrated bureaucrat. I met him in a bar where he was crying into his drink about his failed life. A little money and some girls secured his loyalty.”

  The lawyer considered the organ maker’s story. “It’s illegal, but rather pedestrian. I didn’t come here for this, did I?”

  Wulgis hesitated again, before sighing and continuing, “Thanks to Lanca, I got word of the Idernax’s CEO’s project concerning Omsyn. A vaccine against the mutagenic disease would be worth a fortune. When I learned that the samples were being moved to Kenval… Well, I must admit I acted hastily. I hired and equipped some former soldiers. As soon as I learned the name of the hauler, I sent them to steal the cargo.”

  “Mercenaries? You’re not shy, are you? Do you even know who you’ve attacked? Jonas Morsak is suspected of drug trafficking. The charges were dropped, but… Well, you know the old saying: where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

  Carenko sat at the round table and took a silver pen decorated with black filigree out of her pocket. She put it delicately on the polished surface. Glowing characters appeared, projected onto the wood. The object contained a navcom. She touched one of the icons and read the documents that were displayed. “There are rumors swirling all around him. He has connections with gangs of dealers. As for your source of information… Nine out of ten, the information he obtained was incomplete or even falsified. Archival services exist out of legal obligation, I’ll remind you. I can’t imagine that Morsak and his band are too careful about keeping them up to date.”

  Wulgis turned pale. He thought he had been going up against a mediocre businessman, and now it turned out he was at risk of pissing off a criminal.

  Staring at the man with the ponytail, Carenko delivered the final blow. “Your soldiers of fortune failed, didn’t they?” she asked, smirking. “You contacted me out of fear that Idernax would send their best lawyers to eat you alive.”

  Looking defeated, Wulgis also sat down. “You live up to your reputation. Unfortunately, given the situation, I wonder if an attorney is what I really need.”

  “More than ever! This situation pleases me. Don’t worry, I’ll get you out of this hornets’ nest. If you can afford my practice’s fees, of course.”

  Mallory woke in the dark, lying on the hard, cold ground of the same room where the nightmare had begun. She couldn’t hear anything other than Laorcq’s regular breathing. Unharmed, she still felt odd, as if she had had a quick, unpleasant encounter that she could still feel.

  The shadows weren’t helping: her imagination filled them with a multitude of slimy and deformed creatures about to pounce on her. She crawled forward, groping for Laorcq, seeking to wake him. She was getting ready to shake him when a bright light suddenly flooded the place.

  Using her hand to shield her eyes, she saw the door open. A Vohrn entered. Senses on alert, she stood quickly, putting herself between the unconscious man and the new arrival. She didn’t take her eyes off the faceless, reptilian alien and held herself ready to jump at him.

  Slowly, to show that he had no bad intentions, he took something out of his purple robe. A small device that looked like a plastic kneepad, except that he put it on his beak. A monotone voice emerged. “I am Hanosk. First administrator of the Vohrn colony on this planet. We aren’t used to eating other forms of life. We think you may want an Apollo.”

  “An Apollo?!” Mallory lost it. The extraterrestrial leader’s speech left something to be desired.

  He brought a hand to the object on his beak and shifted it to adjust its position. “We owe you an apology. Our actions were urgent.”

  “You think that’s enough? You tortured us!” she cried, worried that the scarred man hadn’t yet woken.

  “We… sympathize, but your thoughtless, involuntary actions are killing us. You don’t know the consequences.”

  He leaned down to the man on the ground. Using a little instrument that he pressed into his shoulder, he injected him with a translucent liquid.

  “Medicine,” he added, in response to Mallory’s overly animated reaction.

  Laorcq moved, slowly gaining consciousness.

  She became impatient. “What are you talking about? I don’t understand what’s going on.”

  “Our people are dying. You have allowed Omsyn to attack us. Through the animals from your transport. You… carriers of death.”

  Suddenly, everything became clear to the pilot: Morsak and Lebrane… those bastards! That’s what they were planning. And they succeeded, thanks to me and my new crewmate, the soldier with the itchy trigger finger. What an idiot! I should have sent Lebrane packing from the beginning, accusation of theft or not. What a joke, if I find myself accused of such a crime in the process of trying to prove my father’s integrity…

  The reptilian alien didn’t realize that his translation box was miscalibrated. “The beasts from your ship are tanots. Animals that reproduce very quickly. They lay many eggs in a s
hort period of time.”

  “You just have to find the eggs and destroy them. If you can build structures like this one, it should be a cakewalk, no?” Mallory suggested, without conviction: it couldn’t be that easy.

  Hanosk retorted, “Larvae, not eggs. Female deposited them quietly at the astroport. Small, hidden progeny infected with Omsyn. Sick Vohrns before departing for our other worlds. Our people are dying.”

  Those words again. Short and lacking any intonation, transmitted by the translator. Nevertheless, a cold shiver ran down Mallory’s spine. Being responsible, even involuntarily, for a genocide. That’s an accomplishment I could have done without!

  “Thanks to the information I extracted from your warrior, we have found Geekler’s lab and his meticulous databank. Virus was not finalized, your intervention… precipitated. He planned tests before freeing the tanots. This Omsyn variant only kills Vohrns.”

  Fully awake, Laorcq rose and approached.

  “Why does Morsak want to destroy you?” asked the pilot.

  “To take worlds of us. Omsyn still not eradicated. Fear is spreading again and will cause panic,” replied Hanosk.

  The malfunctioning translator provided a laborious explanation. Despite the linguistic barrier, Mallory and Laorcq assembled the pieces of the puzzle. Provoking such a major outbreak would spread disorder throughout the Procyon system. A carefully prepared opportunist could wrest it from the Vohrns, too weakened by sickness to fight. The human administrators, puppets of the major corporations, would be the first to take advantage.

  Mallory acknowledged the evidence. “We were so wrong to believe that Morsak wanted to get rich off a vaccine.”

  “Yes, and it’s a big deal,” Laorcq admitted. “If Morsak makes it possible for the Earth government to retake control of the sector, he’ll have them eating out of his hand!”

  Laorcq’s anger could be seen clearly on his face, and Mallory understood why: instead of dealing a serious blow to his enemy, he had given him more power. Pragmatically, she let this topic hang in the air, and asked the Vohrn, “What’s going to happen to us?”

  “You innocent imbeciles manipulated by the Idernax CEO,” declared the alien. “Soon free but need your help. Follow me.”

  Guided by Hanosk, they retraced their steps back to the elevator. The glass cabin carried them again through the different layers of the vertical world.

  Just after they passed the aquatic sphere, Mallory noticed that the animals were panicking. Some of them had left their respective levels and were looking for a place to hide. Suddenly, the taut, glowing wire in the middle of the tower blinked and went out.

  The elevator stopped, shaking its three passengers vigorously. Pale blue lights shone here and there, little islands of visibility inside the building now plunged into shadow. The alien tried to open the doors in vain.

  A mechanical noise resounded, a half whistle, half groan. Growing stronger, it ended up drowning out all other sound. A dark red aeroglider dropped like a stone from the top of the building and landed, facing the cabin.

  Oval and perfectly smooth, it seemed to be made of a single block of glass. Its aerodynamic, scarlet-colored form made it look like a drop of blood. Gills gaped on its sides, from which the muzzles of firearms protruded.

  Taking Mallory by surprise, Hanosk reacted in a fraction of a second. With an energetic push from his long legs, he burst through the elevator’s wall in a spray of broken glass. He landed on the vehicle, knocking it off-balance. The guns on the aeroglider spit out a salvo that hit the cabin, sounding like thunder and sending fragments of concrete flying.

  Blinded by the alien slumped on the windshield, the attacker veered sharply to force him to let go. The maneuver almost sent the vehicle straight into the wall, but the assailant compensated at the last second to avoid the collision.

  Laorcq took advantage of the diversion to signal to Mallory. “That tree, there… It’s close enough. Jump! The Vohrn isn’t going to hold him off for long.”

  Six feet below them, there was an oversized trunk that branched out into a multitude of thick limbs. The pilot jumped into empty space, without considering her fate if she missed the vegetation. She landed on the uneven surface and heard Laorcq touch down behind her shortly thereafter.

  While the two humans fled, the aeroglider and its extra passenger completed their chaotic flight and crashed into a rocky platform.

  The driver of the flying car was Gamor, Morsak’s assassin for hire. He got out of the vehicle and fought with the Vohrn. Protected by armor made of thousands of ivory plates, he looked strangely like the exact opposite of the alien with his dark scales. The latter held his own, thanks to his limbs, which were as strong as steel.

  Deciding it was time to end the combat, Gamor compensated for his physical inferiority with his keen combat ability. The hand-to-hand fight ended abruptly when he struck the alien with a powerful electrical charge emitted by his gauntlets. The result was drastic: the Vohrn collapsed to the ground, unmoving.

  The assassin didn’t linger over the extraterrestrial he had just dispatched. After years of fighting his peers, murdering a bipedal headless lizard didn’t bother him. Unlike the unfolding events, which were beginning to be interesting: it had been a long time since he had pursued such difficult targets.

  In return for his failure in the devastated lands, where he had been unable to kill the Sirgan’s crew, he had ended up on a hunting expedition in a stack of miniature worlds. The little he had seen seemed promising: an ideal game board.

  After scanning the area to make sure there were no threats, he leaned into the scarlet vehicle. He picked up an assault rifle and activated the vessel’s optical camouflage. The aeroglider closed like a clamshell, became translucent, and then disappeared completely.

  Gamor had bought the vehicle with all of the money he had been paid by his employer. That hadn’t made him happy, but it was a matter of his reputation, so there was no question of sparing any expense. He had traded with the merchants from Altair, who were known for supplying high tech equipment.

  The weapons vendors didn’t object when he selected a prototype model: Gamor was on the list of long-term clients. A showcase for their wares, the aerial car contained a veritable artillery, including an EMP. This device could create a strong electromagnetic pulse capable of destroying most of the nearby electronics. Set off by the assassin at the moment when he descended into the hollow tower, the EMP had spread confusion. Nevertheless, the result was not quite what the killer had expected: the emergency lights and the ecosystem management were still working. The lizards’ technology was well-protected. He was going to have to end things quickly.

  He checked the condition of his ceramo-titanium armor, also bought from the Altairan merchants, with a glance at the information displayed by the navcom integrated into his visor. Some of the data came from the instruments in the aeroglider, while other sensors were hidden in the thousands of small scales that made up his breastplate. Any movement in a wide area around the vehicle was recorded and analyzed. Quickly, two signals appeared: the only living beings whose characteristics corresponded to human.

  Gamor smiled, invisible behind his mask. By bringing them onto their property, the Vohrns did half my work for me, he thought jubilantly.

  He took hold of the guardrail along the passageway and leaped over in one bound, landing lightly on a rocky plinth between two levels. A few strides brought him to the tracery of branches taken by his targets.

  Silently, he plunged into the vertical jungle. Focused on his prey, he let the hunt obliterate all other conscious thoughts. Without weapons and in a strange environment, Laorcq Adrinov and the pilot couldn’t possibly escape him. Cutting them down wouldn’t take long at all.

  XVII

  SLEEPING WATER

  JUST behind Laorcq, Mallory ran along a horizontal trunk. Above a yawning chasm, the tree provided a bridge between two of the immense Vohrn tower’s interlinked worlds. The vegetation looked like oversized snak
es ready to slither away under her feet. As if to illustrate this idea, her foot slipped on the bark, and she barely avoided falling into the void.

  Vulnerable and fleeing in a strange environment, she felt the claws of fear pierce her bowels. On her arms, her sensitive tattoos shrank down to tiny flower buds. Her life was now in Laorcq’s hands. By sheer bravado, and to counteract her anguish, she said to him, “Well, shit! Half the galaxy wants our hides! Please tell me you have a great plan to save us. After all, we’re here because of you!”

  “Don’t worry!” he replied. “I’ve been in worse situations. Don’t tell me an officer’s daughter is giving in to panic.”

  Mallory wasn’t duped by the deliberate psychological ploy of mentioning her father. Nevertheless, his reply hit the nail on the head.

  Laorcq continued, “Lebrane sent you into the line of fire, not me. Without my help, you’d be rotting in jail.”

  “At least, I wouldn’t be hunted by an armored assassin through a series of landscapes piled on top of each other like pancakes!”

  He dropped the subject, implicitly admitting that she wasn’t wrong. “The Vohrns will overcome the intruder in the end, but until then, we have to stay away from him.”

  Passing through the woodland level, they reached a large platform where the terrain seemed incomprehensible to Mallory.

  The ground was uneven, lumpy as an over-thickened soup. In places, it was covered by a blanket of rainbow confetti, from which long blue, green, red, and yellow stalks emerged. They were harmless, but they still slowed them down: they had to go around to avoid breaking them and leaving a visible trail. From time to time, they disturbed fat, multi-colored worms that crawled away.

  While Laorcq looked for a way down or into the Vohrns’ habitable zone, Mallory followed, intrigued by the strangeness of the flora. This level had nothing in common with the others. She supposed that it was a product of the designer’s imagination, or an area that wasn’t yet complete.