Valyien Boxed Set 1

by James David Victor

  “It doesn’t have to a big hack,” she muttered as she worked. The master engineer often talked to herself, or the machines, when she worked. She found that the central Mela computers requested that the electronic ticket announce itself at certain intervals, so that they could keep up to date which ships were docked, and which ones were quarantined or had committed offenses. It was a simple enough process to write a tiny bit of code to piggyback inside that ticket, and one that requested access to their navigational array.

  Hiss-thunk! The hatchway closed loudly behind her and she heard the Duergar climb back inside.

  “Uh… Irie?” Val called.

  “I’m busy!” She kept working on the code.

  “I promise that it wasn’t me,” the Val grumbled, and Irie kept working for a full ten seconds before his words sunk into her consciousness.

  Oh no. “Val? What have you done?”

  “I didn’t do anything! You have my word on that, but you might want to take a look out of the window,” the Duergar said heavily. She could hear him thumping and barging around in the main hold behind her, apparently seizing weapons and ammunitions belts.

  No, no, no… She looked out of the nearest cockpit window to see a line of white-suited security guards approaching at a steady pace across their hanger, their blasters held up to their shoulders.

  “What the…” She turned to look out the opposite window, to see that yes, the line extended on all sides around the Mercury Blade. “They must have found out about Armcore,” she said. “Or that snake Primateur Hyle turned on us.”

  “Don’t worry. They won’t get into the ship,” Val growled savagely.

  Irie didn’t doubt for a moment that the Duergar was right. The hull of the Mercury should be able to take a good amount of laser shot from regular blasters, that was for sure—but they still didn’t have the captain and Cassandra on board, and the Mela platform was bound to have armaments big enough to laser-cut a hole through the Blade’s armor.

  Which meant that she still needed to find out where the captain and Cassandra were, and quickly. “Don’t kill any of them yet!” she shouted at Val. “Let them waste their energy for a bit. Hopefully, that will buy us some time.” She worked on the code. Nothing too dramatic, but something insidious enough to spread quickly.

  Thok-thok-thok! The hull of the Mercury Blade rang with the heavy thumps of the Mela security team outside. “Open up! In the name of Mela Security!”

  “Go eat a Gleesonian!” Val shouted back cheerily. There was a fizzle of blaster fire, and the hull shook.

  “You don’t have to exactly make them mad, either, Val…” she sighed as she worked. Almost done, almost… There!

  She waited for the next announce from the Mela central computers, searching through the base core commands until it flickered to life.

  Thok-thik-thok! More bangs on the side of the hull, and the ship rocked as security guards tried to grapple, burn, and search for any weakness they could.

  Announce Protocol: Mela Station Identification Check.

  The process appeared on the list of incoming commands, and the Irie crossed her fingers as she saw it computing, waiting, and then complete.

  Identification Check Complete. Status: HOLD.

  “Oh, frack,” she whispered. It seemed that the central Mela computers had already identified them as a dangerous vessel, which was no surprise, given the security staff outside, but still, it would make her job a lot harder when they had to leave. Anyway. Let’s see if this bad boy got home… She started clicking on the coded backdoor that she had left inside the electronic ticket.

  THUD-THUD-THUD! The banging sounds were getting louder, and now a low whine had been added to it.

  “They’re trying to cut their way in!” Val called, but he sounded happy. She didn’t turn her head but imagined that the Duergar was pleased at the idea of being able to rip heads from shoulders in the not too distant future.

  “Come on, come on, come on.” She worked feverishly.

  ACCESS GRANTED! She smiled at those words. She was in. The screens blanked, and immediately rebooted to display the Mela Main Navigational Controls Network. Now it was Irie’s turn to go on the offensive. She could do a lot of damage in here, if she wanted to.

  “But first, let’s find the captain.” The engineer keyed the captain’s communicator callsign into the main station navigational system, and, at that precise moment, about twenty-seven satellites, as well as hidden cameras and drones, turned their attention to finding him.

  TARGET ACQUIRED! The system bleeped happily.

  6

  Wet

  El thrashed and struggled, clamping his mouth shut but still losing half a lungful of air as the metal hatchway in front of him re-folded in on itself, leaving him outside of the Mela platform, underwater.

  Everything was green and grey, apart from the orange-brown immensity that was the Mela 2 Platform, curving away from him. Spears of metal towers sunk down into the sea and extended over him far above, dotted with the windows and lights of the platform itself. El wondered, absurdly, if he there would be anyone standing at one of those windows who might see him and the woman beside him, and…what? Call for Mela security to help?

  But he was sinking too, he realized, as the platform started to slide up in front of him. His fingers scrabbled at the sides, slid off the surface. His chest was starting to burn and he knew that his body would react at any moment, trying to snatch a breath even though it couldn’t.

  I am going to die out here. We’re going to die. This is it. The end of Captain Eliard Martin of the Mercury Blade…

  El had never been a great fan of water.

  Suddenly, hands were pulling his shoulders around, dragging him away from the platform.

  He shook his head in confusion. He would sink!

  And Cassandra was pushing her face to his, forcing her mouth onto his to blow air into his mouth. He blinked, feeling sick but a little better as he forced bubbles out of his nose.

  They were still sinking, though, and faster now. It was just the platform’s stabilizing towers that were around them. El clutched Cassandra’s shoulders as she was hastily fishing for something out of her belt. What? It didn’t look like anything. A small rectangle of white.

  With a flick of her wrist, she snapped it and pulled at the rectangle’s edges. El watched as it blossomed like elastic, wavering and almost translucent before she slapped it around El’s mouth and nose.

  “Urk!” He thrashed, letting go of her as he tried to back away from the thing, but it was already too late. The light film had adhered to his face and stuck to it like a mask. He coughed, opened his mouth, his fear of suffocating forcing his body to react—

  And amazingly, he could breathe.

  What the… He turned to prod at his face, feeling a soft, resisting plastic membrane over his features. “What is this?” he opened his mouth to say, but the words didn’t come out.

  The captain realized that he was still sinking, however, as he awkwardly tried to doggy-paddle. He had always hated swimming. He had been far more concerned with being up there in the stars, flying through the gulfs between the stars, and not the waters of terrestrial planets. But he managed to rise a few meters, before the graceful form of Cassandra, moving sharply and gracefully with small movements of her wrist and feet, she joined him. She too had the odd transparent, plastic-rubber mask over her face, distorting her features. El gestured to his own, and Casandra shook her head, pointing upwards instead.

  Well, we can’t talk anyway, the captain thought, accepting her arm as she helped him swim back up the legs toward the body of the Mela platform once more.

  It must be some kind of oxygen filter, he thought as he flapped and kicked. A membrane that let oxygen in, but not water. He found that it stretched with every movement of his face, and the only thing that he could feel of its presence was a slight, cool tingling on his skin.

  Thank the stars that Cassandra is some super-secret spy, he thought gladly
, despite the fact that he had cursed that very same fact multiple times in the last few hours.

  The platform grew larger before them, but it did so very slowly. El had forgotten how much hard work swimming could be. They started to look for a point of entry. There was a cloud of smaller, whizzing shapes moving back and forth from the platform’s legs, which El took to be the subaquatic craft that he had seen before. They moved up and down the same platform before entering new portholes.

  It’s probably quicker to move by water than it is to navigate all the corridors and avenues inside, the captain theorized. Still others were zooming out into the murky shadows of the water, presumably heading for the other Mela platforms on their own business.

  Could we hijack one? he thought, but quickly realized they were moving too quickly. They were more likely to get run over by one than they were to catch hold of it.

  A shape moved in the darkness underneath them. A large shape. El panicked, flailing his arms and feet.

  It was one of the Lobo Worms, the long ridge of a head and the serpentine body rising from the depths to reveal a circular, eyeless face. The thing was massive and looked, to the captain at least, like something out of his worst nightmares.

  “Run!” he screamed silently, thrashing in the water as Cassandra noticed the thing undulating toward them. Cassandra tried to make calming gestures, but El was too far gone for that. Instead, he kicked and paddled, willing his body in awkward butterfly-frog movements toward the nearest arm of Platform 2. The captain really didn’t care where he was or where he ended up. It might be back at the very same airlock that he had been thrown out of, with Trader Hogan and his goons and the entire Mela security force waiting to kill him on the other side, for all he cared.

  His hands hit and scrabbled at metal. He had found one of the many portholes, but there was nothing that his hands or feet could do to budge it open.

  Were there any controls? A button? A lever? He searched the nearby circle of the hull, but there was nothing apart from the old stencil marks of numbers, indicating something that he didn’t even understand.

  I’m going to die out here. Eaten by a hellish worm-thing!

  His desperate scrabbling moved along the hull, his brain panicking as he tried to rip apart metal plates, with no effect. The petal porthole was gone, and he was now over a ledge in the metal, and the smooth, colored-crystal glass of one of the windows.

  This could be it! he thought, seizing the rims of the frames and peering inside.

  Inside was a silent and respectable restaurant, with Mela citizens quietly sitting at hover-tables, sharing demure conversation between plates of brightly-colored seafood.

  “Help me!” he opened his mouth to scream, banging on the colored glass.

  Behind one of the tall potted plants, one of the diners, a woman with a fantastical headdress, happened to look up. El saw her suddenly open her mouth to scream, her dish went flying everywhere, and he saw her point up to the window that El was now sliding down. More of the customers, and then the black-dressed staff of the restaurant, noted the captain’s predicament, and the commotion spread throughout the restaurant. A staff member waved at him, pointing to the porthole that he had so recently tried to break into.

  Cassandra… Where’s Cassandra? El nodded and turned to see that Cassandra was calmly floating a little behind him, making small movements with her hands and legs. Of the Lobo Worm, there was no sign, and El had the strongest impression that she was laughing at him.

  “Fine. See how you like getting eaten by a sea monster!” the captain shouted at her in silence, as the nearest porthole finally whirred open and a shaft of light pierced the gloom from inside.

  Cassandra was already swimming toward it as El scrambled along the hull in awkward frog-like leaps before they fell through the glittering energy field and landed in a drenched heap on a metal landing gantry on the other side.

  “Whose dumb idea was it to come to a water world anyway? I hate water worlds.” El opened his mouth to gasp but didn’t hear himself say.

  “Captain?” His wrist communicator, unaffected by his watery emotion, bleeped, and El was surprised to see the face of Irie sitting at his own cockpit and grinning as she called to him.

  “Irie? What are you doing in my chair!” he said.

  “You’re technically AWOL. That puts me in command,” Irie said petulantly.

  “I’m not AWOL! I’m right here. And you’ll have to argue with Val over who gets my coveted captaincy when I’m gone, thank you…” El muttered. He was wet, and he was tired, and he needed to get off this planet.

  “Well, Val appears to be kind of busy right now,” Irie said with a shadow of nervousness to her smile. “Anyway, I want you to get to the staff elevator at the back of that restaurant, take it up to the service floors, and then get to the stairs up to the service hangars outside the platform.”

  “Outside the platform?” As much as the idea of fresh air that hadn’t been recycled by a few thousand citizens was appealing to the captain, he was aware that he would be nearer the wet of the seas once again. “What’s going on, Irie?”

  “No time to explain— THUD –just get up there, please, sir.” El watched the screen shake from side to side as if something had shaken the entire ship. But what? What was Irie doing to his beloved Mercury?

  “Is that Irie?” Cassandra had already thanked the waiters for their rescue, and the petal-door had closed behind them.

  “Yeah,” El informed Cassandra of his engineer’s bizarre set of requests before shrugging. “But she’s never failed me before.” He turned and took off into the depths of the restaurant, diving behind the bar, through the hissing seafood kitchens, and to the elevator.

  “Hey! Watch it! You can’t go in there!” The shouts followed them as the captain and Cassandra made their escape, rushing up through the levels as high as they could go, to emerge into an area that was much less refined than the main platform below. The pipes and struts were exposed, and there was the constant hiss and drip of water.

  “We must be near the hull,” Cassandra said, peering first one way and then through the forest of wires and metal, until she spotted a ladder. “This way, Captain!” She gestured, and they started to climb.

  They were halfway up the metal ladder, through the realm of support beams and steel cross-braces, when they heard the distant sound of warning klaxons coming from below.

  “Is that for us?” El said at first, as they had just escaped not only Trader Hogan and his thugs, but Mela security as well.

  “No, I don’t think so. It would be getting closer, wouldn’t it?” Cassandra paused and tilted her head before she continued climbing.

  El listened as he followed. “You’re right. If I’m not mistaken, that seems to be a station-wide alarm.”

  “But what could be a bad enough situation that it required a station-wide alarm?” Cassandra muttered. “Here, we’ve reached the top.” She paused and started to twist the heavy bars that unscrewed the manhole-like cover to the air outside.

  “Oh, you’d be surprised,” El muttered. “Everywhere I take Val, it seems to end up with alarms and screaming…”

  With a clunk, there was an influx of brisk wind from above as Cassandra pushed open the porthole and clambered out onto the sloping ‘roof’ of the floating platform. El followed suit, to suddenly have to snatch Cassandra’s hand to avoid them both losing their footing on the slightly domed expanse. The top of Mela Platform 2, like all of the Mela platforms, swept gradually toward the sea, with the starfish-like arms splayed out like long, immobile tentacles toward the horizon. Behind them sat the squat shape of the control tower, with its navigational lights blinking.

  There was a sudden shudder and the hiss of escaping steam as something broke through the hull of the platform on the other side.

  “What was that? Cassandra crouched, turning to see a plume of smoke and a jagged hole in the metal as laser fire shot out into the clouds.

  “Ah.” El knew, almost wi
thout turning, what it would be. “That would be Val Pathok.”

  Rising through the hole that its heavy guns had just created came the Mercury Blade, with the shot from laser blasters exploding across its hull. Just seeing its sleek, wedge-like shape filled El’s heart with pride. He watched as the orange and gold ship glistened in the bright sun, rocking slightly in the strong headwinds, and turned in their direction, powering toward them.

  “They’re mad,” Cassandra said. “All you pirates are mad.”

  “We’re not mad, just…unconventional.” El rose to his feet as he saw the loading bay doors open as the Blade hovered over their position. It took a jump and a scramble, but within a few seconds, the doors were slowly closing behind them and they were safely inside once more.

  “Get some!” El heard Val shout from his seat on one of the inter-linked gun controls, swiveling and firing the heavy meson railgun back at the broken-open port doors that they had blasted their way through.

  “Irie?” El was already running to the steps up to the cockpit.

  “Full engine power to booster rockets, and we won’t have to worry about being tracked,” she informed him as she hurriedly slid away from the wheel to let the captain take it.

  “Okay, then. I won’t ask how you did that.” El pulled hard on the ship’s wheel, tipping the arrow-tip nose almost directly upright, before punching the booster rockets. Flames and smoke scorched the top of the Mela platform as the Mercury Blade burnt its way into the sky. Val’s bottom-mounted guns continued to blast away at the spot they had emerged from. As the blue atmosphere started to darken, and the Blade started to shake with exit tensions, El could only grin.

  “You know what, crew? If I ever suggest going to a water world again, you have my permission to mutiny!”

  7

  Interlude I: Senior Tomas

  Senior Tomas was a large man. He was also not a very happy man at the moment. He smoothed a hand over his slightly greasy black hair, pushing it back from his forehead even though his hair was receding. He could get metabolic therapy to cure that, of course, but a part of him absurdly liked how his appearance sometimes shocked the younger, effete nobles of the Coalition that came to his doors.