The Kenval Incident

by Philippe Mercurio

Pushed to the limit, Mallory’s limbs betrayed her: her right foot suddenly slipped, leaving her hanging in midair for an anguished second. She barely caught herself in time. Her hip banged into the luminous pillar. The column teetered dangerously, and cracks appeared along its surface.

  Her throat knotted with fear, and she descended in a rush. Feeling the pillar disintegrate, she threw herself backward and let go. She just avoided the sharp points of the shards that protruded from the broken column. The landing bruised the bottoms of her feet. Off-balance, she fell on her behind. The grill in the floor imprinted a marvelous red grid on her rear.

  Rubbing the mistreated parts of her anatomy, she recovered the storer. She approached the door and waited for the heat to cause it to unlock.

  “After my climbing session, I’m already dripping with sweat. And now the room is becoming an oven! At what temperature will it trigger?” she wondered, just as the panel finally swung open.

  The fresh air hit her like rain after a day in the desert. She glanced nostalgically at her suit obstructing the ventilation but abandoned the idea of recuperating it: it would be impossible to climb up again, so she would just have to get along without.

  Mallory moved toward the elevator. She might get caught using it, but there was no way she could cross the destroyed lab with bare feet. It was covered with broken glass, steel, and suspicious substances.

  Cursing her lack of foresight, she pushed the call button. While the numbers scrolled by, she pressed herself against one side of the opening. She said to herself without really believing, “With a little luck, the car won’t be occupied.”

  XXIV

  STRANDA

  WITH her back pressed against the wall, Mallory tensed when a ding indicated the arrival of the elevator. Deciding that she would hit the potential occupant with the butt of her gun, she heard the doors open. Seconds ticked by without a sound. Running out of patience, she concluded that there was no one inside and took her shot.

  She found herself facing the gaping muzzle of a pistol. Brandished by the guard with both hands, the weapon was almost touching her nose. Fortunately for her, a tattooed brunette in underwear and soaked with sweat was the last thing the sentry expected to find. Dumbstruck, he lowered his arms and asked, “Who are you and where did you come from?”

  Distracted by her curves, the guard didn’t see Mallory’s revolver. She hid it behind her back, regretting that she had emptied the charger in the data center.

  “And what is that thing?” he asked.

  “My flying lamp?” she replied, grabbing the object with her free hand. “A pet.”

  She smashed the firefly against the guard’s face. Before he could react, she continued by kicking him savagely between his legs. Focusing on the weapon she had to get hold of at any cost, she threw herself on him.

  They fell to the ground against the back of the car. After a bitter fight, she managed to immobilize the sentry’s wrist. While preventing him from pointing the gun at her, she savagely bit his thumb.

  For his part, the security guard, although blinded by the blood that was dripping in his eyes, grabbed Mallory’s hair and pulled violently. Despite the pain, she tightened her jaws. An agonized cry escaped from her adversary’s lips. Pushing off on one foot, she braced herself and struck his solar plexus with her knee.

  Staggered by the blow and overcome by the pilot’s intensity, he gave up. She ripped the weapon away from the loser and pressed the barrel into his throat. “Hands up! Or I’ll give you a second mouth!” she threatened.

  The man yielded piteously. Without changing her aim, she rose and pressed the button on the elevator. The doors closed, and it began to rise. During this time, Mallory’s heart recovered from the abrupt jolt of adrenaline, and her breathing calmed.

  “Get up and face the exit!” she ordered. “And no funny business, I’m really not in the mood!”

  He stared at her with hate in his eyes, but he obeyed. Idernax could do many things, but inspiring martyrs wasn’t one of them.

  When the car door opened, Mallory slid behind the guard. Protected by this human shield, she made sure no one was waiting for them. She forced the man to move forward with a shove. The place was deserted. Reassured, she told her prisoner, “Sorry, I don’t need you after all.”

  Not without grimacing at the sound of the blow, she knocked him out with the butt of her gun. He collapsed silently, while she reproached herself. Another victim of circumstance I could have gladly done without. He was just doing his job.

  Knowing perfectly well who to blame for her current situation, she added out loud, “Whether or not the ends justify the means, when I get hold of Lebrane, he’s entitled to a taste of every blow I’ve given and received!”

  With a deep breath, she restrained her anger: settling accounts would have to wait. Putting an end to Morsak’s insanity made the little crook’s schemes seem meaningless. Especially if the Vohrns helped her prove her father’s innocence.

  Continuing her game of hide-and-seek with the guards, she noticed they weren’t following her anymore. Instead, they were converging on the lobby. Rather than running after her, they had decided to block the exit.

  She realized that things didn’t look good. But if she hurried, there might only be three or four there when she arrived. She might have a gun, but they were still going to be able to thrash her.

  Her navcom wasn’t working because of the magnetic blast, so she couldn’t call for help from Laorcq or her cybrid. She would have to find a way to get close enough to them to call Torg to her rescue, otherwise she would die.

  In the aeroglider, Laorcq and the cybrid worried. The latter was becoming more and more agitated, torturing the back bench with his four hundred pounds. He muttered, “Mallory should be here already. I should have gone with her.”

  “Excellent idea! I’m sure that the guards would have thought you were cute enough to let you in,” the scarred man said mockingly.

  Obstinately, Torg raised what was from his point of view an irrefutable argument, “I would have just knocked them out.”

  Laorcq stifled a laugh. Making subtle allusions when talking to the red and black giant was a real challenge.

  Now that power had been restored to the neighborhood, traffic was picking up slowly. Soon, the place would be crawling with agents from Omega Sec, Idernax’s security service. Laorcq thought about using the magnetic pulse generator again. However, two electrical outages in a row would attract a lot more attention. He didn’t want to see the Nogartha police added to the ranks of their pursuers.

  A sudden agitation in the hall drew his attention. A guard with an abnormally frail frame given his profession was coming toward them. He was yelling and waving, “Torg! Hurry up! I’ve got a lot of people behind me!”

  Impressed by Mallory’s capacity for improvisation, Laorcq understood immediately that she had put on a security uniform to disguise herself.

  As he jumped from the aeroglider, the cybrid roughly shoved the driver’s seat, folding the back and sending Laorcq’s head into the windshield.

  Rather than complaining about Torg’s brutality, he turned on the aeroglider’s propulsion system. With his hands tensed on the controls and his eyes on his companions, he prepared to take off, confident in the cybrid’s ability to handle the sentries.

  Behind Mallory, four security guards appeared. They paused when Torg intervened. With courage drawn from their superior numbers and their weapons, they tried to flank him so they could capture her.

  With a steel-reinforced backhand, Torg threw one of the guards several yards away. Immediately, his colleagues riddled the cybrid with bullets. The low-caliber projectiles only scratched him.

  One of the guards managed to grab Mallory by her jacket collar. Fortunately, she hadn’t zipped it up. When her aggressor tried to pull her toward him, she straightened her arms and took a step forward. She slipped out of her jacket, and the guard found the piece of clothing in his hands. Seeing her in her bra, he hesitated for a mo
ment.

  Torg took advantage to grab his wrist and lift him like a paper bag.

  Laorcq wasn’t surprised at all: seeing someone manhandle his captain in front of him had set him off. The cybrid flipped his human burden backward before turning abruptly, then used him to knock down the two sentries who were still on their feet.

  Other guards came out of the building. Preventing Torg from continuing the carnage, Mallory shouted at him, “No time! Get in the aero!”

  They turned their backs on the new arrivals and ran the last few feet separating them from the aeroglider. She got in on the passenger side. Torg squirmed into the back, shoving Laorcq again.

  Holding his questions for later, he pushed the reactor to full power and took off before Mallory had even closed the door. He sent the vehicle up like a rocket, with an amused comment, “The time for discretion is over.”

  Disregarding aerial traffic laws, the vehicle shot out of the city like a champagne cork. They reached two thousand meters of altitude in an instant. On the ground, Nogartha dwindled to a large glowing smudge. Laorcq had to raise his voice to compensate for the engine noise. “Mission accomplished, or not?”

  He realized that she wasn’t wearing much other than her tattoos and a pair of pants. “You did a strip-tease for them and they didn’t enjoy it?”

  Occupied with settling herself into her seat, she ignored his questionable banter. Once belted in, she waved the storer and declared, “The data’s in here. Thanks for asking how I am!”

  “Well, aside from a few scratches, you look like you’re in good condition to me,” he replied, smiling from the corner of his mouth.

  “That’s it, make fun of me! I went through torture in there! I hope our faceless alien friends are satisfied: I’m not doing anything like that again!”

  “Those aliens have enough firepower to destroy all of the human colonies,” Laorcq reminded her. “And close the door, please. You’re going to catch a cold, we can’t leave the atmosphere like this, and I’m tired of yelling!”

  Once silence had been restored, they had a brief moment of respite, interrupted by the aeroship’s navcom. Hanosk was trying to get in touch with them through the last working communication device.

  Taking the call, Laorcq confirmed their success. The Vohrn continued, “I am still at Wulgis’ place. He rerouted a cargo ship under contract with his company. It’s waiting in low orbit to bring you undetected to the Moon’s astroport.”

  The alien transmitted the coordinates for the meeting and concluded, “We have extended the contract for the Antarian jet rented by Counselor Carenko for the trip from Procyon. In order to reduce the travel time, we will return there on board.”

  After satisfying her professional curiosity about the jet, Mallory was bored to death for the rest of the voyage.

  As with most vessels, a synergetic group provided propulsion. On the other hand, its configuration was unusual. It formed a tube wider than it was long, sacrificing comfort and useful cargo space for performance.

  Striding for the nth time along its lone corridor, she sighed. “In the face of such austerity, the Sirgan looks like a real yacht.”

  Arranged according to technical constraints along the enormous reactor, a cockpit and ten or so small compartments constituted all of the living space. The ship’s silhouette looked like a thick, bumpy ring.

  To make things worse, Mallory’s companions often spent their time alone. Hanosk was studying the data hacked from Idernax’s lab. For his part, Laorcq alternated between exercise and reading. Since the limited environment was incompatible with the claustrophobic cybrid, he had agreed to travel in suspended animation. Watched over by a medical AI, he slept in a state close to hibernation.

  One single event disrupted the monotony of the trip: the moment when Mallory remembered Lanca. Sitting in one of the tiny cabins, she thought back over her day working at Idernax. Suddenly, she exclaimed, “Shit! We forgot Lanca. He’s still in the trunk of the aeroglider!”

  She burst out of her compartment, crossed the three steps that separated hers from the Vohrn’s, and pounded on his door. The alien received the news indifferently. Sending a message on this subject concluded the most exciting episode of the trip.

  Fortunately for her, the Antarian jet was worthy of its name. It made the trip from Earth to Procyon in less than a week, three times faster than the Sirgan could do at top speed.

  When the time came to transfer from the ship to a connecting shuttle, Mallory discovered with shock that their destination was not Kenval.

  Instead of the purplish-blue disk of Procyon’s third planet, she saw a pale orange world through the porthole, adorned by several green sparkling oceans. Addressing the extraterrestrial, she asked with a suspicious tone, “Hanosk? Can you tell us where we are?”

  As startled as she was by this change in plans, Laorcq and Torg —just roused from his deep sleep— turned toward the Vohrn. He announced, “We are in orbit around Stranda, the second planet in the system. Normally, only members of my people are allowed to come here.”

  Mallory looked to her companions to bear witness. “We’re really going from surprise to surprise here.”

  Laorcq followed up, “I thought it was urgent that we return to Kenval with the information concerning Omsyn. Why this detour?”

  “Stranda is the best place to develop a treatment,” the alien said briefly.

  After a five-minute flight, the connecting shuttle left them in the middle of a vast rocky plain.

  Despite the unexpected turn of events, Mallory welcomed the chance to stretch her legs. Striding across the rocky terrain accompanied by Torg, she thought about her ship and Jazz. She missed both of them. She knew enough about the Vohrns that she didn’t doubt she would see the Sirgan and the Natural Intelligence again, but that didn’t stop her from worrying. Forced immobility was bad for the transport ship and especially for the Natural Intelligence’s brain. Jazz is going to be obnoxious for weeks…

  She was pulled back from her thoughts when a truck flying at a man’s height appeared on the horizon. It came straight at them and stopped in front of Hanosk and Laorcq. The massive machine looked like a barrel equipped with a half-sphere at each end. A door slid open at cabin level and a metal ladder descended to the ground.

  Without hesitating, Laorcq and the alien climbed up and took their seats next to the driver. Mallory and Torg hurried to rejoin them. The van started up and crossed the deserted expanse toward the south.

  When they were far enough away, the shuttle took off, broke the sound barrier with a bang, and disappeared into the sky.

  On the way, the truck flew at high speed over a road that snaked along the edge of a forest. Through the windows, Mallory picked out a surprising kind of vegetation: tall trees with trunks as straight as posts, covered in bark made up of rectangular scales. Devoid of crowns, they passed through all the colors in the spectrum. She noticed that they shed some of their bark as they grew. The residue covered the ground with a multi-colored carpet.

  This panorama awoke a vague echo in her mind. Understanding first, Laorcq gave her a hint, “Mallory… Remember? When we had the killer on our tail in the tower in Gloria City. The level we crossed just before diving into the water sphere?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  She looked attentively at the forest of growing pylons and finally grasped what had been bothering her. She was now seeing in reality the contents of the strange level in the Vohrn’s skyscraper. Incredulous, she spoke up, “Okay. It’s very pretty and impressive in reality. But if the colored stalks are really trees…”

  Recalling the worms climbing among the stalks in the miniature landscape, she exclaimed, “Then those multi-colored beasts are as big as cows!”

  “The species of which you speak is unknown to me,” Hanosk murmured. “However, the jufinols will become larger than this vehicle.”

  He took up his role as instructor again. “The jufinols secrete mucus when they consume the vegetation. In return, the
fluid they spread fertilizes the ground and allows the plants to grow.”

  Mallory’s imagination conjured up a troupe of soft, viscous, monstrous invertebrates. She concluded, “After the mercenaries, the Orcants, the mutants, and the Nogartha metro, drooling maggots more than thirteen feet tall! Perfect!”

  XXV

  U-BARG

  MORSAK picked up the cut crystal glass in front of him and threw it violently against a wall, where it exploded into shards. It was immediately joined by the matching carafe.

  This did not calm him, however. A video was projected above the desk, in which Mallory could be seen. He watched her enter the Idernax data center and copy the last three years of work from its research department.

  The image of the pilot doing acrobatics in her underwear, and then breaking one of the luminous columns, ripped a cry of consternation from him. With an enraged gesture, he turned off the video.

  “That little slut…” he spit out between his teeth, which were clenched in fury. “And with the help of Laorcq Adrinov and those lizard-skinned vermin!”

  He quickly wrote a note that he sent to the director of his company’s security division. Unable to call for their immediate execution, he gave the order instead to fire the lab’s guards and to sue them for blatant negligence. Once he let off some steam, his anger chilled. He considered the options available to him: kill Adrinov and the woman? Yes, but how? They had left Earth without a trace. Impossible to find them. Unless… obviously! They had no choice! If they wanted to save the Vohrns, they had to develop a treatment and to cure the first to be infected. They had to be going to Procyon.

  Morsak activated his navcom and made a call. A few seconds later, Lebrane’s image appeared in front of him. He said, “I’ve decided to relaunch the U-Barg project. I need a volunteer.”

  The underling’s eyes opened wide. “Now? You…”

  “Don’t argue,” Morsak cut him off sharply. “You’re going to pick up one of the human derelicts who deals jokal in a bad neighborhood. For example, that imbecile who’s always drugged up to his eyeballs. What’s his name? Zombie?”