Rogue Stars

by C Gockel et al.

  “Leave me alone,” Deve moaned.

  “That, unfortunately, I have no control over. I think we need to come to an understanding, Liron Deve, so you can stay healthy. About what is acceptable behavior. About who’s in charge and what needs doing around here. Seems to me what you need is to stay pain-free, no?” Lep Ako waited until, finally, Deve nodded.

  “There’s our first understanding. Believe me, it’s all for the best. You don’t want to bust heads for your chief for the rest of your undoubtedly short life, do you? You can do something far better with your time.”

  Deve pulled himself up and leaned against the wall, not yet trusting his legs. “Like what,” he said sullenly.

  Lep Ako pulled back to walk across the room. Something about his feet seemed to bother him and he reshaped them at little. “Those claws are fearsome,” he commented. “I have no idea how these creatures manage to walk with feet like this.” He faced Deve again. “I just sucked up every last bit of data from every storage system on this station and you ask me ‘like what’? Are you that stupid? We’re going to have us a great adventure, you and I.”

  “What are you? Please just tell me.”

  “Time for that later. Get up. We need to go.”

  “We’re not alone here. They won’t want you on board.”

  “They won’t know if you keep your mouth shut about me. And you will. Doing anything else will just get you dead.”

  Deve scrambled to his feet, rotating a shoulder still vibrating with whatever Lep Ako had done to it. “They’d think I’ve lost my mind, anyway,” he muttered.

  He left his cabin, aware of the alien moving along beside him. He paused in the narrow corridor leading to the ship’s airlock. There were voices ahead. He glanced at Lep Ako, wondering if, truly, he was invisible to all but him. Could he warn the others before it harmed him? Perhaps he could pass some subtle signal. Surely, this creature was a danger to them all.

  “Deve!”

  Before Deve could duck out of the way, Sybelle, the captain’s ever-present, silver-haired mistress, stood in his way. Wife, he reminded himself. It’s what she liked to call herself. Whatever she was, the boss doted on her, leaving her the run of the ship until she had even replaced his second in command.

  “Finally got your ass out of bed, I see,” she said, daring him to make another excuse for doing nothing while the others worked. He glanced at Lep Ako hovering in the air beside him, not quite vertical, making no impression on the woman at all.

  “Head hurts something awful,” Deve said to her, knowing better than to show the disrespect this harpy deserved. Last time he ended up swamping the hygiene closets.

  “Sure it does.” Her eyes moved from his broad face down along his well-maintained body. He cringed inwardly, also remembering when he had mistaken her cruel teasing for an invitation to touch. The beating he received from the captain served as a warning to the rest of the male crewmembers. She pointed to the rear of the ship. “How about you get yourself some fresh air and help get those supplies on board. Boss’ll want to take off the moment they get back here. They’re way overdue as it is.”

  “Sure,” he said. She made no effort to get out of his way. He felt her brush against his arm as he sidled around her to make his escape.

  Deve could almost hear Lep Ako snigger spitefully in his ear but the alien made no comment. Somehow, this seemed more disconcerting than his ridicule would have been. But would he have mocked him for meekly taking orders from his master’s bed-mate or for not alerting his crew to the alien among them?

  He owed them for nothing. Nothing but years of living rough aboard this tin bucket and ducking out of the way of Air Command patrols. He thought about what Lep Ako said earlier. Had the creature really circumvented the orbiter’s security systems? If so, of what else was it capable? He envisioned simply slipping into some secure facility to make off with untold wealth. Taking any ship he fancied. Becoming someone to be reckoned with among his fellow thieves. After the servitude he endured aboard the Haygen, wielding the power this alien had shown him exceeded his imagination.

  Wait and see, he told himself and strolled to the exit ramp, wrinkling his nose at the fetid air that greeted him. The expletives peppering his compatriots’ language wasn’t any less foul but he joined in as they brought the delivered supplies aboard and installed replacement coolant tubes.

  “It’s here,” Lep Ako said. “Or it was. Not long ago. I can feel it.”

  “Feel what?”

  “What I’ve come for.” Lep Ako stabbed a finger against the side of Deve’s head. “Just use your interface to talk to me, like you send commands to your data unit. No need to talk so people can hear you.”

  What did you come for?

  “You won’t understand. We need to get to the shops on the far side of the shipping docks.”

  I can’t leave here. Things will go bad for me if I’m not here when the boss wants to leave. They’ll be back soon. He’ll want to leave this place at once.

  “He’ll leave without you. Your work here is done.” Lep Ako leaned far too close to Deve, daring him to protest.

  Cowed, Deve heaved another crate into the cargo bay. His work here, as smuggler and occasionally as pirate, meant risking his thick neck to protect his leader and whatever unexplained schemes he carried out in the name of profit and sometimes the Shri-Lan. Calling himself a rebel when it served his purpose only added a thin veneer of justification for what amounted to murder and theft in the name of a cause he didn’t really understand anyway. Maybe it was time to move on.

  He loaded his last crate and waved to his crew mates. “Taking a piss,” he said and sauntered away from the docking platform to the service area. There were few people about and the loudest sound was the whistling of the breeze responding to the unevenly pressurized components of the station.

  “From over there,” Lep Ako said and the urgency in his voice made Deve walk more quickly. “I feel it. Get an air car.”

  “I have no currency for this place. I’m not even supposed to be off the ship. If the boss finds me out here he’ll—” Deve yelped loudly when a pain rammed through his insides as if impaled on something sharp and unpleasant. He bent over, thinking he might vomit.

  Lep Ako waited patiently until he straightened up again, pale and trembling. “Let that be the last bit of whining I hear from you, pirate,” he said. “See that Human over there? Take his currency. Hurry.”

  Deve nodded and lurched along the concourse to follow his target into a poorly lit part of the service area. Like much of the place, it was deserted by anyone with more pleasant things to do elsewhere. It took only a few well-placed strikes with his large fists before the man fell to the ground, leaving his possessions for the taking.

  “Not much here,” Deve said. “It’ll get me a car, though.”

  “So what are you waiting for.”

  They soon headed toward the orbiter’s hub, guided by some beacon only Lep Ako perceived. Their route zigzagged as if following a moving target and Deve felt a growing agitation that wasn’t his. His own had settled into a steady state of apprehension. What he perceived from this creature was anger and something akin to panic.

  “What’s wrong?” he dared to ask when they threaded their way through a crowded commercial quarter.

  “It’s not here anymore. The signal is static now, decaying. Some residue left here. I need to find it. Turn left.”

  “Residue? What is it you’re looking for? I can understand if you speak plainly.”

  “The sire. It’s here, dragged out of subspace by your people’s incompetence. I’ve been sent to find it. Return it.”

  “Sire? You mean like your father?”

  The yellow eyes narrowed. “Do I look like I have a father? Don’t try to think, Deve. It’ll just hurt your brain.”

  “You don’t have to be nasty,” Deve said. “I get that you’re in my head somehow. That means you need me to drag you around. I’m stuck with that, I guess, but I won’
t be your mule if you’re going to make my life miserable. I’m not that attached to it, if you know what I mean.”

  The creature regarded him for a long moment and Deve prepared himself for another blast of pain. It didn’t happen, perhaps because he was currently speeding through some very narrow gaps between buildings. “That’s kind of sad,” Lep Ako said. “Or it would be if I cared enough about your pathetic life. If you jump ship I’ll find someone else. Do not threaten me.”

  Deve steeled himself. “What is this sire?”

  “The beginning of all of us. Without it, we can’t be. It draws us together, we join and grow into something that thinks and understands.”

  “There’s only one of those sire-things?”

  “Yes. Maybe it’s a new beginning for our kind. Maybe it was all an accident. Just one more particle in a chain, maybe one change in the resonance, and something happened to make us into more than what we were.”

  “And it’s out here now? In one of those disks we’re delivering to the Shri-Lan?”

  Lep Ako nodded. “I think that’s what happened. Your people took it, took the sire, and some of us followed to get it back. Your ship passed by and I came along.”

  Deve furrowed his scarred brow. “Didn’t think anything lives in subspace. It’s just space in-between stuff. It’s not really a place at all.”

  “Guess you’re wrong about that, Human. Just as we were wrong about here. After all, it’s possible for us to exist here.” He considered for a moment. “Even if it means being tied to one such as you.”

  “You can find yourself someone else. I won’t mind.”

  A cruel grin reshaped the alien’s lips. “I may. Let’s see how useful you can be. Your fists work. Your legs work. That’s all I need.” Lep Ako suddenly raised his hand, making Deve flinch. “Stop.”

  They did, hovering above a crowd of revelers making their way from one tavern to another. One of them walked into the sled’s turbulence and shouted at Deve. Receiving no response, he hurled a bag which burst as it hit the sled’s side, adding the smell of rough alcohol to the air.

  “Here,” Lep Ako said. “Stop in here.”

  Deve lowered the skimmer to the ground and then followed Lep Ako’s directions to a shop wedged between a few others that didn’t look any less dusty or dilapidated. The door yielded to his touch when Lep Ako obliterated the lock’s circuits. His perimeter scan told him that no one occupied this thin slice of stacked crates pretending to be a building, but the alien nesting in his head demanded caution.

  The carnage on the second floor made even him blanch. He walked past the bodies of Humans, Centauri and a Feydan, recognizing his crew mates, three civilians in suspiciously expensive clothes and armor, and a few strangers. “That’s my boss,” he said wincing. “Used to be my boss. What a mess.”

  He crouched beside a Human and, after a brief search, enriched himself with a fine rail gun and a large sum of currency accepted on a number of planets, if you shopped in the right places. “This one’s rich.”

  “Vanguard,” Lep Ako said.

  Deve recoiled. “You could have said something before I touched him.”

  “Another over there. The female.”

  Reluctantly, Deve walked to the fallen Centauri Vanguard officer. He saw no blood, no burns, nothing that showed how she had died.

  “It was here,” Lep Ako said. “The sire. Trapped inside the thing we felt when it was taken from us. But there is more. There was another here. Another like me. This female was killed by that other. See if she has a bio scanner.”

  “We need to get out of here,” Deve said. “Someone’s going to come for the officers.” When Lep Ako only glared at him, he bent to search the dead woman’s equipment. “Yeah, here.” He waved the scanner inexpertly along the body. “What’s it say?”

  “Her heart stopped. Exploded, actually. Interesting. Four hours ago. Scan for DNA.”

  Deve fumbled with the settings and soon came up green. “Just two people on her. Males. And some tappit on the sleeve. Maybe a pet drooled on her.”

  “Centauri,” Lep Ako said thoughtfully, studying the scanner’s returns. “Both of them.”

  “Why do you need this?”

  “If there are more of my kind out here I want to find them. The sire was here. Maybe this Centauri has it or maybe he knows where it is. What I do know is that the sire isn’t on this orbiter any more. Let’s head back to the docks.”

  Deve shrugged, quite happy to get away from this slaughter. His foot slipped in a smear of blood and he took a moment to obscure his boot marks before remembering that his DNA, too, was now deposited on two of the bodies. “What do you want there?”

  “I want to leave this place, what else?”

  Deve trudged back down into the shop and out to the street, barely clear of the building when three expensive air cars pulled up in front of it. Uniformed officers and Air Command soldiers poured out of them. All but one guard rushed into the building. The soldier glared at Deve but stopped short of ordering him away.

  “Get back to the skimmer,” Lep Ako said. “But don’t leave.”

  Why do you want to hang around here? They’ll round everybody up when they see that mess up there.

  “Just do it!”

  Deve climbed into his rental and puttered around with the mapper while Lep Ako used his data sleeve to hone in on the com traffic in the area. He shared none of that with the Human who amused himself by watching the growing crowd of onlookers. Hookers and their customers this time of the night, Deve assumed, wondering what Lep Ako would have to say if he approached one of these women. Did Caspians even mate outside their species? It wasn’t even clear to him how they mated within their species. Of course, Lep Ako wasn’t even a real Caspian.

  “What’s so damn funny?”

  “Huh? Nothing.”

  “Get back to the docks. Hurry before the soldiers return. We’ve got a few things to do before we can get off this station.”

  Deve obeyed by lifting the car above the pedestrians and then merged with other traffic into the main traffic lane. “We’ll need more cash if you’re looking for passage.”

  “I don’t think so. Turn here.”

  Deve followed Lep Ako’s directions to the vast service hangars belonging to the orbiter’s administration. Here the components keeping the platform functioning and its population alive received maintenance and crew bosses dispatched repair gangs for work shifts. The plant made up one of the arms reaching out from the central hub, allowing crews to work in reduced gravity. The noise from machinery and the metal it worked upon obscured all other sound.

  He hurried across an echoing atrium, dodging trolleys and cranes, to reach a staff area directing workers to showers and change rooms, a med station and a food dispensary. No one paid much attention to the burly Human pulling work clothes from a shelf to change into coveralls in place of his shabby combat gear.

  Lep Ako absorbed himself with accessing the administrative information system, paying no attention when the smuggler broke into a few private bins to look for valuables. Deve filled his pockets with currency, some tools that caught his interest, and a nice little packet of mince to enjoy later. It occurred to him that the alien would probably not tolerate anything that would affect his brain and, reluctantly, he tossed the drug aside.

  “What are you doing?” Someone had walked around the end of the row of lockers he was exploring and spoke before considering Deve’s size and questionable activity. Another mechanic came in behind her.

  Deve lashed out and gripped the woman’s neck. A blow with his other fist broke it. He turned to grasp the other intruder when a peculiar, painful contact materialized between them. He watched, dumbfounded, as the man convulsed before dropping to the floor. That was unexpected. Deve examined his hand, wondering what had happened.

  “You’re not totally useless,” Lep Ako said, as surprised as Deve by this. “Maybe I’ll keep you after all.”

  “What… what happened to that
one?” Deve’s foot nudged the dead man on the floor. “I barely touched him.”

  “You did more than that, my friend. Get one of their sleeves and her badges. Then we better leave. The Air Command ship is leaving soon.”

  Deve blinked, startled from his contemplation. “So?”

  “Just do exactly as I tell you. I want to find out what Air Command knows about the sire. Why they sent Vanguard agents and not just some patrol. From what I understand, they don’t bother with smugglers like you unless there’s something important involved.”

  Deve made his way back to the docking ports where the Air Command transport had commandeered much of the space. Guards paced about but no local officials had appeared, making it clear that the military enjoyed no special status here. He had to take several deep breaths before he dared to approach the entrance ramp of the sleek transport. The Kimura’s three decks loomed above them and he saw fighter plane gates through the bleary observation windows of the concourse. Lep Ako prodded him along with cruel little jabs that irritated as much as they motivated.

  A husky soldier barred his way when Deve’s identification was not recognized by the sentinel parked near the air lock’s entrance. “Restricted,” he said, using Union mainvoice.

  Deve feigned surprise and waved his wrist at the sensors again. “I have orders to report here,” he said, coached by Lep Ako. “This is the Kimura, isn’t it?”

  “It is.”

  “Then I need to be on this ship. I was told to be here.”

  “Calm down,” Lep Ako warned. “I’m almost in.”

  “You can check with the CO,” Deve said to the soldier, battling with the tremor in his voice. The last time he’d stood this close to a Union soldier had been the day he’d left that jail on Feron. “I’ve got a job waiting on Targon and the boss arranged for my trip there with you.”