Humans

by A. G. Claymore

  “Oh, that,” Gleb muttered around a mouthful of something starchy. “I forgot.”

  “You forgot!” Davu mocked. “Well, now you’re gonna learn what happens when you forget! What?” This last was to Mel who’d come to stand in front of Davu.

  “It’s my fault, Davu,” Mel insisted. “I must have forgotten to tell him how things work here.”

  “This true?” Davu demanded of Gleb.

  “What?” Gleb blurted, truly surprised at this turn of events. “No! He warned me I had to give you a cut!”

  “I’d believe Mel before I ever believe a new guy like you,” Davu insisted, “and the fact that you haven’t been complying for the last three days tells me he’s right.”

  He drove his fist at Gleb’s face and Gleb had to remind himself not to duck. The impact hurt like the demons but didn’t do enough damage to keep him from his next shift.

  “That’s for lying to me!” Davu shouted, barely hiding another wince.

  “You’d all better get your heads out of your exit portals!” he yelled at the crowd of quiet Humans. “You’ve forgotten how lucky you are to be serving on this ship as free-borns! Those slave-borns on Mishak’s ships don’t get the same perks you do!”

  He turned on Mel. “Suit,” he ordered.

  Mel deactivated his suit, stepping out from the footplates with a quick warning glance at Gleb.

  Gleb understood. If he interfered in what was to come, he’d only make things worse for Mel. Dammit, Mel! Why the hells are you doing this? You barely know me!

  They’d been getting along well enough in the comms suite but Gleb didn’t think that would justify taking a beating for him.

  And it was a hells of a beating. Davu may have been practically illiterate in terms of the comms systems, but he was an artist at the careful application of violence.

  Gleb’s fingernails were digging into his palms, drawing blood. If he knocked Davu out by pinching off his cranial artery for a brief instant, the bastard would take it out on Mel to assuage his own embarrassment. If he killed Davu outright, the Quailu officers would never believe he hadn’t been killed by some or all of the Humans in the room.

  All he could do was stand there and watch.

  This was how people like Davu gained power over others. Even Gleb, who could kill the man with a thought, who’d been keeping him in agony for several days now to protect Siri, came to realize he should have just given him a cut of his ration credits.

  Davu almost certainly knew Mel was lying but he’d rather punish someone else and leave it on Gleb’s conscience.

  And this was Davu’s proof of how much better off they were on this ship than on one of Mishaks? The sad thing was that it worked. Gleb had felt no disbelief from the Humans at Davu’s assertion.

  There they all stood, feeling grateful that they had it so good.

  It wasn’t until the distracting feelings of the beating had ceased and subsided into a dull agony that Gleb finally registered what he’d heard. Free-born?

  These people had all stepped out of their maturation chambers as mushkenu?

  Where they’d come from was already a mystery but they’d been grown as free citizens? That small fact seemed enough to let these Humans, who were treated worse than slaves, place themselves above those like Gleb.

  Gleb was proud of his hard-won Mushkenu status. He frowned. Aren’t I? He had to admit that a part of him would rather burn the whole damn system to the ground.

  He pushed the idea to the back of his mind and joined the others as they helped Mel back to his feet. He placed one of Mel’s feet onto a footplate and stepped back to give the suit room to close up around the heavily bruised body.

  He could have carried Mel to the comms suite – he’d still have to serve out his full shift, which was about to start – but the suit would do a much better job, practically doing the walking for him.

  Davu stormed out, smacking a tray out of a woman’s hands and sending her food flying all over the compartment. “Clean that mess up!” he snarled as he left the compartment.

  “Dammit, Mel!” Gleb hissed at him. “Why the hells did you have to go and do that? It was my own damned fault for not handing over the credits, you silly, soft-headed bastard!” Shaking his head, Gleb put a gentle hand on the back of Mel’s neck. “You’d better screw something big up so I can return the favor!” He grimaced as he felt a fresh wave of pain from the man who’d started to laugh but only aggravated his wounds. “It hurts, doesn’t it?”

  “Like buggery,” Mel wheezed.

  “C’mon. Let’s get you up to the comms room. You can lie down behind the cryo-bank and rest while I handle the coding.”

  Nobody asked you to do that! He thought. The last thing he needed on an enemy ship he was trying to get off of was a friend, someone who’d be in trouble once Gleb was found missing.

  But now he was stuck with one.

  Family Chat

  The Deathstalker, Outer Henx System

  Even as a hologram, Sandrak was intimidating. He leaned forward, making Memnon take an involuntary step backwards. “Five ships?” he growled. “Your brother destroyed five of my ships and you scampered away like a frightened child?”

  “It was a legal demonstration,” Memnon protested, his face darkening, sweat stinking of shame. “I can’t agree to a demonstration and then retaliate. The forms must be observed!”

  “The forms must be observed,” Sandrak mocked in a whining tone. “Do you even understand what the forms really are?”

  Even though he knew he was giving the wrong answer, the obvious answer, Memnon was unable to stop himself. “They’re the agreed rules for conduct between belligerent parties. They govern our interactions so we…”

  “Shut your weed-hole!” Sandrak said calmly, which he somehow managed to make more menacing than a shout. “The forms are rules made by the powerful, people like me, to control the weak and spineless.” He extended his neck forward toward Memnon, giving the clear impression that he’d meant the second group to include his new heir.

  “When you act as though you’re bound by those rules, you send a clear message to others. You’re telling them you’re not one of the powerful, not someone to be feared.”

  Memnon tried to hold his emotions in check but it was hard. Even though his father couldn’t read them through a holo-interface, he still held his anger back. “So you would have attacked?” he asked sullenly.

  “Of course!”

  “Against ships you couldn’t see? Ships that had to be so close that they could have boarded us? Those missiles closed so quickly our point defense systems didn’t even get target locks!”

  “Yes!”

  “We’ve heard they have some kind of trans-dimensional capability now,” Memnon insisted. “How do you propose to hit a ship that can just jump into another universe at will?”

  “That’s a pile of turds!” Sandrak scorned. “If your enemy tries to deceive you, I find that swift and brutal force evaporates that deception like a fart in a strong breeze!”

  Dammit, does the old goat have an answer ready for everything? The worst of it was that Memnon couldn’t say his father was wrong. Perhaps, if he’d gone on the immediate attack, he would have found those damned ships.

  Sandrak was the lord of nineteen systems, after all, and you didn’t reach a pinnacle like that without making a lot of smart decisions.

  Repressing a sigh, he straightened his back and looked his father in the eye. “I’ll adjust my responses regarding the forms.”

  “There’s a big part of your problem,” Sandrak lectured. “You talk of your responses. Why let others dictate the pace? Make them respond to you or I’ll take those ships back and find someone who knows what to do with them.

  “And get that gods-damned holo-crest fixed!” Without another word, Sandrak faded from sight.

  Memnon blew out an explosive breath. Every time he thought he’d caught up, his father found a way to prove he was really ten steps behind.

 
Curious, he opened the call-reception menu and brought up the holo-crest that callers would see while waiting for him to step into the holo-camera’s field of view. His fists clenched.

  “Comms officer,” he roared, “get in here with your team right now!”

  He wanted to smash something but he didn’t want the comms team to see evidence of a tantrum when they entered. He stewed in his anger as he watched his senior comms officer enter from the bridge hatch.

  She sensed his rage and radiated the appropriate alarm at his state. Her petty officer and two ratings followed her in and they reacted with even more alarm, given the gap between them and their enraged commanding officer.

  “Perhaps you could explain how this came to be?” Memnon inquired in silky tones, just the sort of silk used to strangle an awilu for high crimes. He gestured to the holo-crest.

  He could feel the brief instant of amusement from them all that was quickly smothered with horror and that was to be expected. Who, after all, wouldn’t find it somewhat amusing that his holo-crest identified him as Melvin the Bastard?

  The horror, of course, was because they knew he’d felt the amusement and, given the fact that they were responsible for anything related to communications on the Deathstalker, they’d only be making their predicament worse by being amused. There was no way this little meeting was going to end well for them.

  “Sire, I can’t believe that any of my people would do something like this,” the officer insisted. “It’s inconceivable!”

  “Is it really,” he asked, mimicking his father’s quiet tone of menace, which he felt he was carrying off reasonably well. He moved so the crest hung between them. “You think such a thing is impossible?”

  “I know my people, sire, and none of them would ever be so foolish!”

  “And yet,” Memnon replied, his rage tempering to a cutting edge, “the evidence would seem to indicate a discrepancy with your views.”

  “But they would never…” She quailed at what she felt in her leader’s mind. “There are Humans working in our division, sire…”

  “Those half-wit apes?” he sneered. “If you want to find a scapegoat, lieutenant, then I suggest you come up with something a little more believable than some hairless arboreal.”

  “We’ve heard they can be pretty dangerous, sire…” The petty officer trailed off under the full weight of his anger.

  “Who is responsible?” Memnon shouted, drawing a dagger from a sheath on his chest.

  The lieutenant tore her eyes from the blade, knowing it would take a life before it returned to its sheath. She took a deep breath, standing straight. “I am responsible, sire. However it happened, it’s ultimately my fault that it did.”

  Damn her for being noble! Memnon raised his blade and drove it down into the forehead of the petty officer who’d spoken up earlier, easily penetrating the thin band of bone that ran between the frontal and temporal plates.

  He yanked the blade out as the crewman slumped to the deck. “This also is on your account, lieutenant,” he said loudly, not from anger but because he wanted to be heard over the drumming of the dying crewman’s feet on the decking.

  There was a piquancy in the lieutenant’s shock and it pleased him. He’d managed to set an example and, though many of the crew would soon forget it, she, at least, never would.

  “Now,” he said, feeling in control again. “Trace this abomination. How did it replace my sigil and how long has it been there?”

  He was far more concerned about the second item than the first but he felt it was more important to show concern about the system’s security. “Now!” he prompted them, waving at the holo to indicate they should work there in the ready room.

  He certainly didn’t want them pawing through the coding for this in front of the bridge crew. He’d be known as Melvin the Bastard throughout the ship in a matter of days.

  One of the ratings opened the underlying code for the holo-crest. He scrolled through the rows, his consternation growing as he worked.

  “What the hells is eating at you?” Memnon finally demanded.

  A shudder of fear. “Sire, the code for this is widely dispersed, both in function and in its incursion.”

  “Pretend that I’m not a comms rating and say that again,” Memnon suggested acidly.

  The rating seemed to contract, as though he were trying to pull his head inside his body. “The code for this, sire… It seems to have arrived from a variety of sources, over the course of several days. It’s also dispersed in separate subroutines.

  “You’d never find it, unless you knew it was there,” he added, gesturing fearfully up at the shimmering insult. “I don’t know if it’s even possible to trace it back to a source.”

  “Alright.” Memnon surprised the tech with his calm response. He’d already killed someone for it and who was far less important to him than when. “When did this start replacing my original crest?”

  “Three days ago, sire.”

  Memnon didn’t move a muscle for several heartbeats. He stared at the terrified rating. How many lords have I talked to in the last three days? Five? Six?

  And hadn’t they looked amused at the start of those conversations? He knew that might be his imagination, but there was no doubting that they’d all seen that embarrassing name.

  Forget it spreading on the ship, the bridge crew had all heard him called that name by his brother, anyway. Now it was going to spread throughout the entire empire.

  “It would be easy enough to put together a list of who was on the bridge when you’re brother misheard you,” the officer suggested, probably prompted by Memnon’s own feelings.

  He waved it off. “No, by now, some of them have almost certainly told the story to their friends. The entire ship probably already knows. The lesson learned here is vigilance.”

  He stepped in closer to the three Quailu. “You will ensure that safeguards are put in place to prevent this from happening again. Is that clear?”

  They all voiced their assent.

  “Good! Now have that cleaned up,” he pointed at the dead petty officer as he left the room.

  A lesson well learned, he thought and he didn’t mean about comms security. The rules regarding crewmen in dereliction of duty were clear in calling for a proper tribunal. He’d ignored the rules and simply acted in killing the PO. He’d set an example and, more importantly, showed his crew that he was one of those exalted Quailu of power for whom the rules had no shackles.

  He might not yet have the title that came from ruling a system of his own, but he had power and that was infinitely better than being called lord.

  Exit

  The Deathstalker, Outer Henx System

  “You’re kidding me,” Gleb insisted, laughing. “His ass?”

  “Burnt a patch of hair off each cheek,” Mel insisted. “Looked like one of those ground-apes from Sulis Prime!”

  “He must have taken revenge for an ‘accident’ like that!”

  “Well, yeah, but he never found out who was behind it, so he was just a miserable bastard to all of us for nearly a standard lunar… well… more of a miserable bastard.” Mel grinned. “So it was more than worth it!”

  He shrugged. “Mostly, he seems to just let it slide if it’s some small bit of mischief. Like that shock he got from the door to our sleeping quarters two shifts ago. If he can ignore it, he usually will. Probably figures it’s the price to pay for his other perks.”

  Gleb frowned. “Two shifts ago? Didn’t hear about that one.”

  “Sure,” Mel nodded conspiratorially. “I’m sure you didn’t even ‘notice’ the crossed wiring when I saw you fiddling with the access panel a few minutes beforehand.

  “And, of course, you didn’t spend an hour chumming around with him before that just so he wouldn’t suspect you…”

  Gleb kept his emotions away from his face but this was disturbing. He’d hot-wired a door to shock Davu? He approved but he just wished he could remember doing it.

  And w
hat the hells was he doing hanging around with a treasonous piece of refuse like that?

  More to the point, why did he have no memories from any of this?

  “But you’d think…” Mel began but stopped when a chime caught his attention.

  He’d set up a chime to go off every time the door to the comms backup suite opened. Every time, Gleb could feel the man’s apprehension as he checked the holo-feed. Every time he could feel his relief at seeing it was just Siri who’d set off the warning.

  This time the relief didn’t come.

  “It’s him!” Mel’s despair was palpable, even if Gleb hadn’t been able to read feelings. Davu was there, on the holo feed, along with three of his cronies. Then, as Siri backed away from Davu, fetching up against a bulkhead, the despair gave way to something far more palatable, something that offered options.

  Rage.

  “Mel,” Gleb said in urgent warning. “You’ll both end up getting killed…” He watched his friend jump up, his mind a riot of anger and violence, and run out of the compartment.

  “Dammit!” he whispered to himself. He was planning on leaving the Deathstalker in favor of sneaking aboard Sandrak’s flagship. He’d managed to find several rendezvous points where Memnon could count on meeting with his father, if necessary.

  He was going to wait for a few more days and then ride to Sandrak’s vessel on the outside of a shuttle during an upcoming meeting. Since none of the ships in question were under Mishak’s command, none of the Humans were anywhere to be found in any ship’s database.

  He’d be able to repeat his strategy of claiming to be a transfer and just start working a shift. Humans were nothing more than a pool of emergency labor to keep these vessels running. A pool that merited no records.

  He’d have been able to fit in easily, if it wasn’t for the fact that he was about to meddle where he really shouldn’t. He didn’t see how he had any choice, though, so he jumped up and ran for the exit.

  Screw it! he thought. Careful plans were never my strong suit!

  He skidded to a halt, just inside the hatch to the backup suite. Mel was on the floor, one of Davu’s cronies stood over him with a suit-lock. Gleb’s friend was completely immobilized. The rage was still there but, absent the promised options, despair was shouldering its way back to the forefront.