by T. R. Harris
It was hard to drive and disarm flash weapons at the same time. He did his best, but a few weapons remained active, as did the truck with the bladed cone rapidly gaining on him. For a piece of mining equipment, it was remarkable fast…when not boring into a rock wall.
Adam spun the transport to the right at the next intersection. He had a vague idea where he was; the spaceport should be only a minute or two away, along the main road which was just ahead.
…And blocked by four heavy trucks and another mob of MK-waving aliens. It seemed Resric was a big deal in town, and he’d recovered nicely from Adam’s attempted intimidation.
Adam weaved the car back and forth, confounding the MK’s targeting computers. Then as he neared the wall of trucks, he steered for the sidewalk—or the wide area of dirt and dust that passed for a sidewalk. Curious pedestrians, who had stopped to watch all the commotion, drove for cover. Most made it; a couple didn’t and bounced off the hood of the transport. Flash bolts rained down on the car. They were level-two and did very little damage, designed more to affect flesh rather than metal. But a few quick-thinking aliens made the adjustment to level-one. As Adam spun the car to the left and onto the main road past the barricade, the rear window shattered from the more powerful energy bolts.
The truck barricade now fired up and came after him, with fifty or more aliens riding in their huge buckets. Adam kept up the wide gyrations, so only a few of the flash bolts struck the car. But then there were so many in the air that he found he was turning into the bolts rather than avoiding them. He made a beeline for the spaceport.
The entrance came up on his right. There was no gate, and only a toothless guard sitting under a thick metal lean-to. The transport raced onto the dust-covered ground and headed for the Defiant, about half a mile away.
Thought the rearview mirror, Adam saw the caravan of pursuers enter the spaceport only seconds behind. The huge trucks plowed into the guard’s lean-to and toppled it, with the unfortunate alien underneath. No one cared. They kept coming.
Get everything aboard, we have company! Adam yelled through his ATD. The team was shuttling cargo from two transports into the rear landing bay. They stopped and turned toward the commotion.
The constant rain of dust was thick everywhere, and Adam’s transport was churning up a large cloud behind him. He added to it by conjuring up an even larger dust storm, similar to a haboob back on Earth.
To his chagrin, the trucks kept coming; dust storms like this were common on Siron. Besides, they had a bead on the Defiant. All they had to do was maintain course.
Adam’s transport skidded to stop at the rear of the Defiant. He grabbed the cloak-full of credits and then pulled a Panur from the backseat.
“What happened to him?” Lila shouted out.
“I don’t know. Here.” He tossed the limp mutant to his daughter, who effortlessly caught him and carried him into the ship.
There were still a few boxes of food stock to be loaded. Adam rushed over and literally threw them into the landing bay. “Now go!” Kaylor, get us out of here.
The fuel mods are nearly drained, Kaylor responded through his ATD.
Use chem, just get us airborne.
Even the chems need power for steering and ignition—
Stop arguing. Just do it!
Even before the rear door closed, the Defiant was lifting on a massive cloud of chemical exhaust. The ship reached an elevation of a thousand feet before banking left and skimming over the peaked roofs of Boraxx.
Adam entered the pilothouse.
“Where to?” Kaylor asked.
“Go sub-orbital. Get us as far away from here as you can.”
“You mean before we drop out of the sky?”
Adam grimaced. “Well, maybe not sub-orbital then. Something a little more accommodating to a falling rock.”
There was no power left for a gravity-well, either external or internal, and without the compensators working, the crew was flung near the ceiling when Kaylor dove for the hard deck. He leveled out at about a hundred feet and began a series of wild slaloms through a craggy canyon between two huge impact craters.
Arieel threw up, which caused Riyad to follow suit. On top of the already offensive odor still present in the ship, this didn’t help.
“Hold on everyone,” Adam cried out. “Jym, anyone following us?”
The bear-like alien huddled over the contact monitor, holding on with his tiny claws. “None! Why are we going so fast?”
Kaylor pulled back on the throttle controls. “I was simply following the intensity in Adam’s words. I thought we were in a hurry.”
Adam placed a reassuring hand on Kaylor’s shoulder. “We were, to get out of the city. Now we can take it a little eas—”
The ship lurched forward and then sped off again, sending Adam and the other crew members not strapped in tumbling to the back of the pilothouse.
“Chem drive failing!” Kaylor yelled, stating the obvious. “Not enough energy to keep it lit. We’re going down!”
Adam leaned against the aft bulkhead and pointed out the forward viewport. “There’s a settlement to the left. Do you see it?”
“Yes!”
“Get us close. We don’t want to be stuck out in the middle of nowhere with a dead ship.”
The Defiant banked left…and kept banking.
“Level her out!” Riyad cried out.
“I am trying. This vessel was not designed to be aerodynamic.”
Lila stepped up to Kaylor’s console and placed a hand on the instruments. A brilliant spark shot out from under her hand. “That should give you enough power for one last burst from the chem drive.”
The Belsonian fired the engines. The Defiant wobbled to the right, leveling out just as the bottom of the ship made contact with the hard, dusty surface. The landing skids were deployed and crushed upon impact. The ship skidded along the ground, piling up mounds of dirt in front of it. Eventually, it came to stop, resting in the middle of a steep valley between the towering walls of the impact craters.
“Where are we?” Adam asked Jym.
It took a moment for the skittish alien to regain his senses. When he did, he glanced at the screen he was now on top of. “About three hundred miles from where we started. Elevation forty-two hundred feet. There is a settlement about five miles to our left.”
Adam looked at his team. They were all in the pilothouse, except Panur; Lila had placed him in one of the staterooms before they lifted. “Everyone okay?” he asked.
He was answered with nods and groans.
“Good. Let’s get the place stowed away. Lila, can you check on Panur? And someone…please clean up the vomit. The smell is making me sick.”
38
They were safe…for the moment.
The team did a quick check of the ship’s systems and found them all operable, if under-powered. They had enough power for lights, heat, monitors and the food processor. They just couldn’t use the engines. It took a lot of power to create blackholes. What they had left was fine for everything else, but the Defiant wasn’t going anywhere until they had new power modules.
Luckily, Adam had scooped up enough credits from the floor of the gambling hall to buy a couple of mods. The problem: they didn’t know where to get any without going back to Boraxx.
And then there was the issue of Panur….
He had been tossed about the stateroom during their escape but healed completely by the time Lila checked on him. She tucked into bed and then met the rest of the team to discuss the condition of the gray mutant.
“What the hell’s wrong with him?” Sherri asked pointedly.
Lila looked at the assembled people with concern and reluctance. “I regret to inform you that his condition is not unique and has been growing progressively worse. I noticed the changes a while back, yet the malady appears to be accelerating. I fear for Panur if this continues. The loss of such a powerful intellect would be tragic.”
“You think he could die?”
Riyad gasped. “But he’s immortal.”
“Something has happened to him that I’m at a loss to understand,” Lila said. “This could be a natural occurrence—unknown until now—since he is the oldest living mutant we know of.”
Arieel’s eyes opened wide. “Could the same thing happen to you?”
“Unknown, mother. I am a different type of mutant than Panur. He was essentially manufactured by the Sol-Kor queen. I was engineered as well, but over a much longer period and by beings infinitely more intelligent that the Sol-Kor. Yet he has lived for over five thousand years. Perhaps there is a time-limit on immortality. At this point, I do not have enough data to make an intelligence prognosis.”
I think we both have a pretty good idea what happened to him, said Sherri’s voice within Adam’s mind, relayed through his ATD.
We don’t know that for sure, he replied.
It makes sense, though.
Lila looked at Sherri and smiled. “You seem to have forgotten that I do not need a brain-interface device to access those which you now possess. What is this information you are keeping from me?”
Sherri turned beet red. Adam was a heartbeat behind her in his embarrassment. Lila scanned the faces of the others in the room.
“You all know?” she said, both shocked and hurt by the revelation. She looked directly at Adam. “Father, you must tell me. What is so important that you would hide such universal knowledge from me?”
Adam pursed his lips. He was cornered, and everyone knew it.
“It’s not that we were keeping the information from you, but more from Panur,” Adam began. “Let me explain. On the day you were kidnapped by the Aris, I was put into some kind of trance beam. I was conscious but I couldn’t move, see or speak. While we were searching for you, Panur suggested that I might have recorded what I saw through suppressed memories and that if he could access those memories it might help us find you. So, we did a mind meld, an actual merging of our physical bodies—more specifically, just our heads.”
He paused when he saw the shocked look on his daughter’s face. She was staring at him with unblinking dark eyes. Adam could tell her incredible mind was correlating data and following lines of logic. He continued.
“Panur admitted at the time that he’d never done it before, and all I had to do was sit back and let his head merge with mine. Well—” he looked around the room at the silence faces of his team—“when we separated, he wound up leaving a few of his brain cells behind.”
Lila gasped.
Adam frowned, thinking Lila was overreacting to the news.
“Hey, it was only a few thousand…out of millions. What’s the big deal? Anyway, I didn’t notice anything at first, but over the past couple of years, I’ve learned how to utilize the cells. I heal faster, I’m stronger, quicker and frankly, more intelligent. Having the brains cells has saved my life—and the lives of the team—a number of times. I was reluctant to say anything because I thought Panur would want them back.”
For an immortal mutant genius, Lila took an exceedingly long time to reply. When she did, her voice was thick with worry.
“Do you not realize what has happened? It now makes sense.” She looked at Riyad. “Mr. Tarazi, you asked if Panur could die? With this revelation, I can say it is now an inevitability.”
“What do you mean?” Sherri asked. “Why is the loss of a few thousand brain cells so damn important?”
Lila took a breath. “I must explain how mortals and immortals differ.”
“One can die, and the other can’t,” Copernicus Smith stated. “That’s fairly obvious. Or at least it was.”
“It is more complicated than that, Mr. Smith. First of all, mortal creatures survive through the process of evolution, moving through time to become more and more advanced versions of the base species. They adapt to changing conditions, and those species—or variants within species—that can adapt the fastest survive to pass along this ability to their progeny. And neither is evolution is a static, lineal progression. It moves in spurts as the conditions warrant. This is how normal life functions. And father, you mentioned the enhancement of your normal abilities when an advanced form of brain cell was introduced into your body. This is expected. Your body has learned how to adapt, to use the superior quality of the cells to help you survive. You have probably advanced ten thousand years or more in Human evolution with the introduction of Panur’s cells.”
“Then you can understand why I don’t want to give them back.”
“Perfectly. Yet let me now explain how immortals exist. Again, mortals survive by evolving into higher and higher forms of life, through a dynamic series of changes to your bodies. Without evolution, species die off over time. Immortals don’t need to evolve to survive. In fact, evolution is a death knell for immortals. For all intents and purposes, our systems are perfect, at least in terms of survival of the species. We are static in our existence. We have everything we need to survive…forever.”
“Unless something is removed,” Sherri announced.
“That is correct,” said Lila, a trace of admiration in her voice for Sherri’s leap of logic. “Our bodies exist in a very precarious state of balance. And although we have the ability to instantly regenerate, this simply means we can only replace what we have, not what we have lost.”
“But it was only a few thousand cells,” Adam reiterated.
“That is true, father, yet consider this. As an ability, thought or biological function travels through Panur’s brain, it relies on all the parts being there to complete the task. When such a line reaches a place where a brain cell should be—and isn’t—it stops. You would imagine it would simply reroute itself, but it doesn’t. It doesn’t have to in an immortal system. But then that thread also ends—dies for lack of a better word. As other functions proceed through the brain, other threads contact these now-inert lines, and the damage spreads. It begins slowly at first, and with the complexity of Panur’s brain, it was barely noticeable. I began to see changes in his reasoning ability over a standard year ago. It was minor at first, which I attributed to my own inability to analyze him properly. But then the changes became more apparent and impossible to ignore. From this new information, I can now conclude that the effects are cascading, especially when his mind is called upon to operate at peak efficiency, as it has been recently.”
“Is he beyond repair?” Kaylor asked.
“I do not know,” Lila replied. “He has reached a point where the damage has spread to his basic motor skills. These are the most rote of our bodily functions, which would indicate his higher skills have been corrupted to a very serious degree.”
Adam sighed deeply. “We need Panur to save us from the Klin,” he whispered. Then he sat up straighter. “Or do we? Can you solve the problem of the Klin warships?”
Adam didn’t expect his daughter to shake her head no, but she did.
“I have tried to explain to you before how genius works.” Lila said with impatience. “I admit to having genius capabilities, including total recall and much quicker deductive reasoning. Yet information is not automatically downloaded to my mind. I do not have instant access to all knowledge and all experiences. You must also realize that chronologically, I am only eight Human years old. Times flows at the same pace for me as for you. I can only know what I have learned or experienced. I simply haven’t had time to acquire all the information I need to solve all problems. Technically, I am a superior mutant to Panur; I was designed to be. Yet what makes Panur such a powerful intellect is the five thousand years he has lived. He has had more experiences than any living being, as far as we know. And from this experience, he was able to invent brainwave suppressor beams, dimension-linking space portals, a variety of advanced weapons and space engines, along with countless other contributions to the Sol-Kor and others. He was able to do this from his accumulated knowledge, not simply because he is a genius. And each new challenge only added to his catalogue of knowledge.” Again, Lila shook her head. “I will do
my best, yet I fear it will be inadequate within the timeframe you require. Given time, yes…but not now.”
“Then I’m going to have to give them back.” Adam announced.
The looks of concern on the faces of his team remained. They could point to several occasions where Panur’s brain cells had helped get them out of tight spots. None were anxious to give that up, even if it meant helping Panur. But the logic was inescapable. It was the only way.
“That may not be possible,” Lila stated, sending another shockwave through the team. Before anyone could ask why, Lila continued. “When Panur first did the mind meld with you, he was fully functioning. Even then, he was not able to recover all his cells from the merging.”
“He said it was his first time,” Adam said. “Maybe he didn’t see the danger and got a little careless.”
“That is a possibility,” Lila said. “Yet it is a given that in his present condition he would be even less capable of retrieving his lost material, if he could even comprehend what the goal of the procedure would be. It could cause even more damage to his brain, and yours as well.”
Adam was both relieved and depressed by Lila’s words. He could keep his mutant brain cells…but the galaxy would be overrun by the Klin. And then Robert McCarthy would take over Earth, using the Klin invincible black ships to enforce his will….
“There could be another way,” Lila said into the nervous silence filling the room.
“How?” Sherri asked.
Lila looked at Adam. “Through your Gift…your brain-interface device.”
“Explain,” Adam said.
“I could supervise the procedure, by accessing your mind through your device. I could identify and then manipulate the cells to link with Panur’s brain.”
“Link?” said Riyad. “Like through another merging? I thought you said Panur probably won’t know what he’s doing?”