Doomed Cargo

by Ian Cannon

  Bi-gods, who had he become?

  He shook it off, got into the lift and went up to the main hold. No sooner did he slide open the gated lift screen than the kids dropped what they were doing and scrambled to the port wall. They had been programmed to do so, not by stern command, but by habit and routine. They’d obviously even lined up in accordance to a pre-assigned sequence. It reminded Ben of his time in the military.

  Officer on deck!

  Line up!

  Atten-hut!

  That knot in his stomach tightened. He stuffed it down and looked across them with his eyes, giving them an impressed grin, hoping it would make them feel safe. All-in-all though, his job was already done. They were ready for inspection.

  Moments later, Tawny escorted Lona and her pair of faithfuls into the main hold. She spied the kids quickly and gave her husband a dazzled look. He just shrugged.

  Lona stood before them grinning, half warm, half empathetic. “Hello, children,” she said in her disarming way. All eyes went to Ben. He nodded his head, motioning them to respond.

  A tiny chorus of “hi’s” and “hello’s” emanated.

  Lona said, “Do you know Ae’ahm?”

  Tawny looked down. Most of these kids had hailed from Sarcon and the planet twins of Iot and Zet, each deep in the heart of Cabal territory. They were of Wi’ahr. Only a few of the kids murmured a response. Lona’s smile broadened. “For those chosen, here you will be raised in the ways of Ae’ahm. None others will be spoken of. You will be expected to understand the values of the true One and live by His code. Though your faith is entirely up to you, you will be judged in His way at this facility.”

  The kids nodded, glanced around. It didn’t seem they really cared which god fed them next.

  “Very well.” Lona moved to the furthest one, a young girl, maybe five-years-old, with the forehead dorsals of a Stathosian, and took both her hands. She locked eyes with her. She grinned, shyly. She grinned back, moved to the next, a young boy not much older. His gaze wandered. She said, “Look into my face, love.” He looked up and shared a moment with her. She moved on to the next.

  Tawny and Ben glanced at each other. Apparently, this is what Lona had meant by inspection. They continued to watch.

  Lona came to a girl. Six years old. The prototypical features of a Sarcon child. Wonderful symmetry. Gorgeous, innocent eyes of unwavering blue. A single shade, like stone. When they met eyes, Lona shuddered. A power transferred that only her years of spiritual meditation could identify. It made her blink and jerk back, subtly. Lona reorganized herself quickly and stared into the little girl. She said, “What is your name, little one?”

  “Sireela,” she said in her unseasoned way, turning those three syllables into distinctive words unto themselves—Sir-EE-la

  Lona squinted, intrigued. “Are you Sarcon?”

  She nodded in her childishly inflated way, said, “Uh-huh.”

  Lona asked, “Are you of …” she paused and said, “N’hana?”

  Sireela’s eyes lit up with recognition. It was a voice from her past calling to her from far faraway. She nodded in an even more exaggerated way than before. “Uh-huh, uh-huh!”

  Tawny tilted her head. How curious?

  Lona didn’t hesitate, didn’t bother with continuing her inspection. She turned to Tawny and said, “We will accept these children.” Then to her faithfuls, she said, “Escort them to their holds in accordance with our doctrine.”

  They both nodded and said simultaneously, “Yes, Mother.” They shuffled the children out.

  Tawny said, “What does it mean?”

  Lona’s face scrunched thoughtfully. She said, “I am not certain, nor am I prepared to speak of something I cannot yet know. But there is a uniqueness of spiritual magnitude that surrounds the one named Sireela.” She made a wise grin and said, “Come, let us process our new entries, and we will have you and your subjugate on your way.” She strode easily from the main hold and into the lift.

  Ben clicked his tongue, resigned to the situation. He quipped, “Your subjugate?”

  Tawny gave him a snarky little grin. “I will have more use for you later, my subjugate. For now…” She nudged her head over a shoulder indicating that he was to walk behind. He rolled his eyes with a groan, and did as he was instructed.

  Ben sat alone in Requiem’s personnel bay. Nothing was very comfortable in these refugee colonies. Everything was bland and colorless. The quarters were steel and alloy, angular bulkheads ribbed throughout, and pipes ran overhead or underfoot. He sat on a metal chair designed into the wall about as comfortable as a bed of nails. Before him was a long viewport. He could see the crew of eleven and twelve year olds complete their task of unloading REX’s long cargo unit. Controlling the crane arms carefully, they inserted it back into the top slot of REX’s mag-spires rotating the stack of units down. With the proper disembark procedures completed, they were ready to go. He couldn’t wait to get the hells off this station.

  Tawny was inside the primary control room with Lona making their final appropriations. Ben wasn’t allowed in. He sat looking forlornly at REX. His ship sat without moving. It just waited patiently, like him. “That’s what we get for being guys, buddy.” He said. Looking left, then right, he leaned forward and whispered, “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  As if in response, the umbilicus retreated from REX’s airlock. His ship was auto detaching himself from the station. Ben perked up a notch. That wasn’t supposed to happen. That was how they boarded. REX backed out from his loading slip until he was free of the station and Ben stood up, concerned. Was his ship being overridden somehow, controlled by remote? Or was REX just that anxious to leave?

  What the hells was going on?

  REX pivoted around and faced the vastness of space with his inner-warp strips sputtering to life in that cold/hot blue. He was preparing a cold burn … or someone was.

  Ben lifted his wrist to speak into his comm-to-ship mol implant. “Uh, REX?”

  BOOM—REX disappeared in a blink.

  “What tha?” Ben cried. He called again into his comm mol, “REX!”

  As if immediate space opened an invisible mouth and burped him up, REX appeared back at his original starting position in the blink of an eye—BOOM—making Ben flinch backward and fall on his butt.

  Getting back up, Ben barked, “REX, what’re you doing?”

  “Cap, I’m tap dancing.”

  Ben’s face crinkled. He was tap dancing. Why would he be—?

  “Oh, bi-gods!” That signal was filtering through his drive systems. He was communicating with it. “It’s happening again?”

  “Yep!”

  “Another strike?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “Where?”

  REX hesitated cyphering the code, and screamed, “You, Cap—get out of there!”

  His skin prickled, blood ran cold. “How much time?”

  “Very little. These aren’t rockets. It looks like something’s coming. A ship of some kind. And it’s big.”

  Ben took off down the adjoining corridor yelling, “Get that umbilicus back, REX. Warm the drives.”

  His sudden appearance in the control hub as he burst through the entrance forced the ladies inside to obey their worldly third wall—a man has suddenly entered, don’t look! One of them even forced a look away.

  “Tawny,” he said. “It’s happening again.”

  Tawny stood quickly. “A strike?”

  “Yes,” he said. “We have to evacuate, like now!”

  Tawny shot a look to Lona who fought her impulses to remain calm, collected. “Mother, do you have range sensors?”

  “No,” she said, her voice beginning to thread thin. “We depend on the eyes of Ae’ahm.”

  REX’s voice came over Ben’s comm-mol, audibly. “Cap, I’m reading them on local range sensors. Holy smokes, this thing is big, Cap, one-eighty degrees, and it’s coming out of inner-warp real soon.”

  The entire team shot a gla
nce out the viewport at one-eighty, directly behind in the direction of the inner twin system. Something was approaching from civilized space. And there it was.

  Everyone gasped.

  It was made visible by the zipper blink of an inner- warp dropout. It was as far away as a lunar body might be, hiding the vessel from view, but only a thing of incredible mass would make a display like that.

  Ben cried, “The eyes of Ae’ahm have seen, lady! Let’s book it!”

  Lona pointed out three of her operators with hard, fast intention—the first, the second, the third—and said, “Begin hub preparations.”

  Tawny and Ben turned to bolt, but Lona called, “Tawny!” They spun back around. Lona approached, put her hands on her arms, then walked them up to her shoulders and beamed into her. “The one called Sireela must go with you. You are her protector. It is you, and no other.”

  “Why?” she said.

  “My life is forfeit to the Great One in the protection of the children. But she is yours.” Her hand lifted to Tawny’s cheek grabbing her attention, firmly. “You must return her to her people.”

  “Her people?”

  “N’hana. There must be balance among our suns. Even for those of … another. It is the way of Ae’ahm. It affects all.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” she cried.

  Lona looked at her with cold, hard eyes. A devastating look. “You will.”

  “What!”

  “All things will be answered. Go now.”

  Ben had a hold of her hand. He said, “Baby, let’s get the kids. We gotta go.”

  Malice 1 emerged from its space flight, the command bridge first. It jutted forward on its long neck bearing the grin of malcontent with its weapons array housing set beneath the main structure in a long, yawning fire bay. A frothing nebula churned and boiled behind like a cosmic storm front.

  The nebula was a spindrift of interstellar material that had collected over the surface of the city’s membrane as they arced at near-light-speeds across half the system. An ocean of gasses and ionized particles seethed away from the bubble in huge undulating ripples revealing the cityscape of Aphrodisia as it swam forward, on the hunt.

  The entire structure emerged into Tantalus local space staring the ugly, yellow planet down.

  Bitch Xantrissa sat perched atop her command dais with one hand set comfortably on its armrest, her weight leaning on an elbow. Her other hand was balled into a fist in front of her face. She smirked watching Tantalus grow through her control bridge membrane. Space was all around her.

  An operator called, “We have the target in sight, my Matriarch.”

  Her grin widened, and she said quite naturally, “Kill her.”

  Solar beam cannons jerked to life. They swiveled as per their coordinate feeds and found their target. At distance, it was a tiny speck hovering above the atmosphere along the western horizon of Tantalus—Requiem. Targeting comps zoned in and the cannon guns began pulsing. Blue-green banks cut the dark, an explosive condensed-light payload of a few billion megajoules growing inside them, preparing to fire.

  “Let’s go, let’s go!” Ben yelled waving his arms and spurring the kids through the umbilicus. They ran madly down the passage into REX’s cargo bay. He was quick to follow, slapping the airlock button on the move and parting through the orphans. “Everyone, sit down, stay seated,” he called. He took the maintenance ladder up to the main hold—it was faster than the lift—and toward the cockpit.

  Tawny was already in the co-pilot’s seat racing through the warm up process. Ben met her there saying, “Another delightful exit, huh?”

  She chuckled nervously. Their attackers were just off the portside aft hidden between those stars. One immense light beam would take only seconds to arrive, if that. It was time to haul some serious narse.

  REX knew the score. He’d kept the engines thrumming, and was now backing away from the Requiem airlock bay as Ben took the controls. The ship pivoted around, thrusters booming, and blasted off. Through the rear holo-display they watched the tri-hub frame of the station sink further and further away.

  Ben threw his headset on, tapped the transmitter and called, “Requiem station, this is REX on full thruster departure. Advise—it’s time to get out of there!”

  No response. Were they refusing to respond because he was a man? Tawny and Ben looked at each other. He repeated angrily, “Requiem! Get your people out of there, dammit!”

  Several jets of gas emitted into space from the station, each at respective disconnect nodes. The three hubs began drifting apart abandoning the connector passages, which started tumbling free under their own power.

  REX said with a tense voice, “There’s an emitted light payload coming in!”

  Glowing inner-warp coves flared into life at the rear of each of the Requiem hubs, sub-light engines boiling to life.

  Tawny and Ben both gasped. Seconds counted. Not one could be spared.

  The starboard hub blasted away, its inner-warp trail illuminating its endless road into infinity. Then the port. VWAP—they were gone in a blink.

  A broad band of blinding white light sliced the cosmos into halves like a sun. An incoming blast. It came in literally moving at the full speed of light, suddenly appearing from nowhere. Before it was even fully gone, it struck the surface of Tantalus, missing Requiem completely.

  The planet far below visibly spit a portion of its surface into its atmosphere making Tawny and Ben cry out.

  REX’s control boards blinked off and on from the electromagnetic pulse bristling off his bow, even at a distance of several hundred vacuum miles. Ben growled a curse. He shouldn’t have waited around. Now they were sputtering like a dying machine. Their enemy, whoever they were, were sure to detect them.

  “Stabilize!” Ben said.

  “Inner-warp will be online in twenty sec … holy bi-mothers!” REX said. “Look at this!”

  His visual display emitted a shot of the encroaching vessel. It was like nothing they’d ever seen. Its dark parts bled into space hiding its sheer size, but the city structure shown in angular silhouettes like big monoliths of varying size sliding into view. What was left of its warp cloud was still clinging to its atmosphere membrane giving the whole vessel the look of an entire planet shedding its stratosphere into space, as if the cosmos itself was passing it from one dimension into this one.

  They shot a look out their side viewport. It was out there somewhere, churning the vacuum, a big phantom growing closer.

  “Ben?” Tawny said clutching his arm.

  “Uh, yeah—this is bad.” He glanced over his gages. Everything was trying to come back online. Nothing was working. “We’re rebooting too slow, REX!”

  “We could focus boot up functions on primaries only.”

  “Fine, all we need is environment, artificial grav and inner-warp.”

  “No nav?”

  “I don’t care where we go, we just gotta go!”

  A high-pitched blipping emitted. “We’re being scanned.”

  “Great, they see us,” Ben mumbled.

  Tawny’s clutch tightened on is arm. They both looked out. They could see it, now. The thing was emerging, growing. Tawny said, “What about guns, REX?”

  “No good, Boss.”

  “They’re not taking these kids!” She dashed from the cockpit. Ben didn’t have to guess where she was going. She was going for her blasters, preparing for an airlock shootout with an army of unknown enemy combatants. Were they drone troopers? Automated war bots? They couldn’t know. The prospect made his guts churn. This was going to be very, very …

  Wait!

  Ben saw it before REX did. A second vessel.

  REX cried, “Detecting a second—”

  “Lona!” Ben yelled.

  The Requiem central hub—the command center—had not boomed away like the residence hubs. It had slipped invisibly down into the Tantalus atmosphere and waited. Now, it blasted forward, heading toward their assailant with its planet-to-planet thru
sters glowing hot.

  He followed it across the chasm between them and the phantom ship, pivoting his head. It was an empty feeling—a woman and her crew of spiritual followers on a suicide mission. Cannons aboard the phantom ship’s forward battery found her, narrowed in. Laser bombardment crisscrossed, cutting the dark.

  “REX, can we get a visual?”

  “Negative, Cap, but we got engines.”

  “What about comm?”

  A second, then, “Comm’s online.”

  Ben yelled, “Requiem command center, this is REX, come back!” All he could do was watch through the viewport as that hub vessel grew tinier and tinier on its advance toward that big, dark craft. Three points of light emitted. He knew what they were about to do.

  Fire those tucked away tri-rockets.

  “Mother Lona,” he called, “if you can hear me, come back.”

  “Captain Dash,” she said, her voice remarkably even. “My death will only be a doorway. Let it be your doorway as well. You must leave now.”

  He watched through tremulous eyes, unable to look away but knowing if he stayed, her death would be in vain. Those three tiny dots flared bright. A second later he could see their glowing streamers strike toward the bigger ship. Explosions marked a direct hit.

  And then laser fire roared back in return, turning the hub vessel into balls of fire. Lona and her followers … gone.

  “REX?”

  “Online,” he said. The ship pivoted around and hit inner-warp. “We’re out of here!”

  BOOM—gone.

  Xantrissa had flinched when those tri-rockets struck home. She didn’t like flinching. The explosions curved across the contour of her forward membrane creating a swirling sky of fire overhead, then faded. Any exterior damage had been dealt below the command stage.