Humans

by A. G. Claymore

  His focus was a bit off and the victim let out a slurred exclamation, staggering back from Gleb and knocking over a tray of implements. Still, he went down and stayed there.

  Gleb forced himself to stand and he wavered for a moment before risking his first, shaky step. He tottered over to the torturer and fell to his knees to pull out his pistol.

  Get to the dormitory, grab a suit, he thought. The striate-gears in a suit would do wonders for his mobility and it would protect what seemed to be at least a couple of cracked ribs.

  But how to get there?

  He’d had enough trouble focusing on his tormentor’s cranial artery, he didn’t like his chances of transposing directly to the dorms.

  A naked human staggering around the corridors would certainly attract attention. He winced, putting a hand to his ribs.

  What if it looks like I’m supposed to draw attention? He looked down at the dead Quailu for a moment and then reached inside the neck-ring of the Quailu’s suit. He pressed the retract button that was placed there so that casualty-aid techs could open the suits of unconscious patients.

  The provost marshal on this ship had some strange ideas regarding the punishment of minor infractions…

  He cursed, scrambling after the knife that had been sheathed on the torturer’s chest. It was flowing away from Gleb as the armor’s nanites carried it to a growing block at the feet. He pulled out the knife and set to work, cutting away the Quailu’s underarmor suit.

  He made a mess of it, shredding it without concern but not without reason. He made a few more cuts once it was free of the body, slicing it to make long, hanging strips.

  He wrapped most of the suit around his head, making it into a crude parody of a jester’s motley hat. He looked longingly at the pistol and knife, knowing they represented a false security.

  His only chance, now, lay in folly, not force. With a sigh that morphed into a moan, he climbed back to his feet and shuffled to the door, leaving the weapons on the floor by their former owner.

  He managed to get out of the provost section without incident but he ran into a lieutenant in the central corridor whose disgust slammed against him like a wave.

  “What the hells is this?” he demanded of the nude Human.

  Gleb sketched an elaborate but jerky bow. He had to play this to the hilt or else try killing everyone he met. He doubted he was in any condition to exert that level of mental control at the moment.

  “Pardon, Sire, if my presence offends.” He shook his motley headdress. “I pray my appearance makes amends?”

  The officer, seeing just another Human, must have assumed he was seeing another of the humiliating punishment practices common on the Sar Ili. He pushed past, shoving Gleb against the wall.

  Gleb hissed in pain, clutching his side. He took a moment, getting the pain back under control, and then he pushed himself away from the wall and set a course for the dorms.

  There were another eight Quailu between him and the dorms and he managed to receive two kicks in the posterior and one slap to the side of his head. He was not terribly well-disposed toward the empire’s master-race by the time he passed into the dorms to find a Quailu petty officer waving a pistol and screaming abuse at the dull-faced Humans.

  The Quailu turned, wondering what the dull faces were suddenly so interested in and he roared in laughter. “What did they catch you for, rank stupidity?”

  Gleb held up a hand toward the petty officer, savouring the moment. The hand wasn’t necessary but he figured a little showmanship sometimes went a long way.

  The Quailu slumped to the floor.

  “Thank you universe,” Gleb muttered. “I needed that.” He stepped over the corpse and walked to the bunks where the suits stood packed in marked squares on the floor.

  He chuckled at the looks the Humans were giving him. It sent a stab of pain through his chest, making him gasp. He stopped walking, struggling to control the urge to hunch up his left shoulder.

  “You should see the other guy,” he quipped darkly. He stepped into the closest suit-block and shifted his heels to activate it.

  “Hey!” a person in one of the middle bunks protested. “That’s mine you thieving piece of…”

  He stopped, frozen by the look on Gleb’s face.

  “Listen up, you humps!” he growled. “I’ve been having a really bad day. If any of you even thinks of walking out that door in the next hour, you’ll get a taste of what that PO just got.”

  He ignored their reaction. The suit had closed around his torso and, analysing his stats, applied pressure to his right flank, easing his ribs into alignment.

  He gritted his teeth, cursing the sadistic moron who’d designed the suit’s protocols. With his ribs now aligned and properly braced, an anaesthetic blasted through his skin.

  He shuddered at the release from pain, blessing the sadistic moron, as he had many times during his life as a combat slave. What a metaphor for the empire in general.

  The Real Gleb

  Ashurapol, Henx Prime

  “Mel!” Siri hissed angrily. “Come on! We’re going to get caught!” She held the cargo netting on a pallet of square-melons as if it were the only thing keeping her on the planet.

  “But look at the cipher on the side of the shuttle,” he whispered back, as though the Quailu pilot could hear him from a hundred feet away. “It’s from Sandrak’s fleet!”

  She gestured angrily. “If they see Humans, they’ll assume we’re deserters and they’d be right!” She let out a sigh of relief as he started back her way. Finally, you reckless fool!

  They crossed the perimeter surface-road that surrounded the cargo yard and headed for the cover of a nearby coffee shop that also had an exit from its other side, leading to a slidewalk.

  “If Gleb is up there,” she told him, “then he’ll come down and find us when he’s ready. There’s no need to risk getting captured.”

  “But what if that tracker you left in the apartment fails or gets found?” he countered. “We’d never know he was there and he’d have no way of knowing where we’d moved to.”

  “You can’t plan for every possible contingency,” she insisted, not for the first time. “Sometimes, you just have to accept a few risks. I’d just rather not run the risk of getting caught for no good reason. Don’t you realize how stupid it would have been for us to simply walk right into their…

  “Shit!”

  “Into their what?” Mel looked up from the wrist-pad on his suit to find two Quailu, the only other people in the place, getting up from their tables, the sigil of two crossed encryption keys on a black background emblazoned on their shoulders.

  They were looking intently at the two Humans.

  “Ah,” Mel said, sighing. “Context can be a real bitch sometimes. I was a lot happier with my first interpretation.”

  Siri couldn’t help but chuckle, though it certainly didn’t improve the demeanor of the two Quailu who came to stand in front of them.

  “Who are you two and what the hells are you doing down here unattended?” the senior of the two officers demanded.

  Siri reached out to rest a hand on Mel’s shoulder, warning him to let her respond. She took a deep breath. Bullshit meter to full. “Who we are would seem rather obvious, wouldn’t it? We’re Humans in the service of your lord. As to what we’re doing here, it should be equally obvious why you wouldn’t know about it, if you gave it even the slightest bit of thought!”

  The Quailu glanced quizzically at his companion but then pulled out his pistol. “You’re just deserters!” he insisted, taking refuge in a more concrete line of thought. “We can take you back up to the flagship for execution or, if you prefer,” he added with mock politeness, “I can just shoot you here and save us all the trouble. Which would you prefer?”

  Before she could frame a response, there came a horrendous crash from the ceiling and the four of them, Humans and Quailu alike, raised their arms to shield themselves from falling debris. An armored shape hammered its wa
y through the structure, thrusters firing, and came to a brutally abrupt halt, crouched on the now-cracked and bowed graphene floor.

  “Nergal’s ass-fungus!” the form exclaimed, placing his right hand against his torso.

  The intruder stood, helmet retracting and Siri laughed aloud in her sudden relief at seeing Gleb.

  “Don’t answer that question,” he ordered her briskly before turning to look up through the hole he’d just made in the building. He grinned, nodding toward the two open-mouthed Quailu. “That’s an invigorating way to make an entrance! I’d highly recommend it.”

  The senior officer lowered his pistol. He stared at Gleb in shock and amazement. “Who the hells are you?”

  “I’m their lawyer!”

  “Their… lawyer?”

  “Sure, why not?” Gleb took a step closer, almost causing them to back up. “Are you aware, Lieutenant, that their article of indenture would almost certainly be ruled illegal in any court in the HQE? They were made to sign in return for being grown in the first place and the law is very clear that you can’t be indentured for something you already possess.”

  “Where the hells did you just come from?” Mel blurted.

  “I was on a cargo shuttle coming down from the flagship. Seemed a better choice than the courier ship.” Gleb waved vaguely back up through the hole. “I was monitoring all ship’s personnel feeds and saw the two of you walking up to these two so I jumped through the hull.”

  “So, won’t they come looking for you?” Siri asked. She turned as she heard what sounded like thunder from the cargo yard outside. Alarms started shrieking.

  “Nope,” Gleb shook his head. “The part of the hull I jumped through happened to contain the main bus so I think my disappearance will slip through the cracks. They’ll be too busy recovering the pilot’s remains to worry about me.”

  He was looking past the Humans to the door they’d come in through. “No fresh produce for a while, I think.”

  With a suddenness that startled her, he spun toward the Quailu officer who’d started raising his pistol again. He grasped the weapon, turning it in toward the officer’s body. The grip and trigger rotated out of its owner’s fingers as if they were coated with oil and Gleb drove his left shoulder into the Qauilu’s chest, grunting with pain as he did. He stepped back, aiming the weapon at the other officer who’d started going for his own gun.

  “It’s all the same to me,” Gleb said flatly.

  The lieutenant was doubled over from the impact to his chest, trying desperately to hang onto the food he’d had for lunch.

  Whatever the other Quailu saw in the Human’s mind, it convinced him to surrender his own weapon. “When we get back to the ship,” he snarled, “your kind will be finished! We’ll shove them all out an airlock!”

  Siri felt a cold chill. She didn’t know any of Sandrak’s Human crewmembers but she didn’t want to be responsible for their deaths.

  “May as well make it worthwhile,” Gleb said with a note of resignation. He tossed the Quailu a credit chip. “Transfer your funds onto this or I’ll blow your heads off!”

  “And all this time,” the lieutenant wheezed, now mostly standing erect, “I didn’t think you were actually a lawyer. Turns out I was wrong!”

  They both transferred their credits to the chip and tossed it back. “There’s not near enough money on there to let you run forever!”

  Gleb smiled and, though the two Quailu couldn’t recognize the coldness of the expression, they both felt it from his mind and they shivered involuntarily. “I don’t care a steaming pile for the credits,” he told them. “They’re just…” He darted a wink at Mel. “… context.”

  “Context?”

  “That’s right. Something to make life easier for your provost officers. A robbery gone wrong…” He pulled the trigger and the junior officer was thrown back in a welter of blood.

  The senior threw up his hands, mouth moving silently and Siri wondered if Gleb could feel the other’s mental scream. The trigger was pulled a second time and both of the enemy now lay dead on the floor.

  Given his other abilities, it seemed possible.

  She watched him walk over to one of the corpses and activate the officer’s wrist holo. “What’s the plan, Gleb?”

  “The plan,” he said, scrolling through holo-menus at an awkward angle, “is to get out of here before Sandrak’s recovery and rescue teams blanket the area.” He pressed a holographic button and an image of the planet came up.

  “I was hoping there’d be a little more detail to that plan,” she admitted.

  He zoomed in on one of the orbital holding zones. “I thought I’d have a little more time to come up with something after I slipped away from the cargo yard but things got a little accelerated. I saw the two of you getting caught, so I improvised and now we need to keep on improvising.”

  “I was worried you wouldn’t find us,” Mel admitted. “We moved to another apartment, just in case…” He trailed off in embarrassment.

  “In case I got caught and started talking?” Gleb asked, still staring at the ships in the display.

  “Yeah,” Siri said. “In case you got caught. I figured it would be best to move a few blocks away and leave a tracker in the old place so you could find us.”

  “Oh, yes!” Gleb exclaimed. “Just what I was in the mood for!” He enlarged the view to show a frigate off to the side of a fleet labeled with an icon of Sandrak’s crest.

  “The Harpy of Irkalla!” He grinned wolfishly. “Taken from the Lady Bau some four months ago. Sandrak’s got her en flute; the Harpy, that is, not the lady. He’s pulled all the weapons systems and he’s using her as a prison ship. Crammed to the hull with folks he’s seized and who might prove useful to him someday.”

  He looked up at Siri. “You made a smart call, moving to a new location. Coming here was a bit of a screw-up but I’d say the first outweighs the second.”

  “Especially since it was me who caused the screw-up,” Mel admitted.

  Gleb looked at him an eyebrow raised. “At least it was a decision. Better a bad decision than none at all. Taking ownership of your screw-ups is something I firmly approve of.”

  He nodded toward the back of the café. “Both of you need to head to the toilets and take ownership of any cleaning equipment and supplies you can find. They’ll be crucial to getting us off Henx.”

  Siri led the way to the restroom. Her nose wrinkled at the smell of a room where dozens of different species, each with their own ideas on cleanliness, went to relieve themselves.

  Though many washrooms kept their cleaning supplies stored in a closet, this was an automated café and the owners had left the supplies hanging from hooks on the wall in the mistakenly optimistic hope that they’d be used by the patrons.

  “What the hells do you think this stuff has to do with getting out of here?” Mel asked.

  “Beats me.” She grabbed an entropy-neutral bucket which, by its smell, had probably not been recharged in years and snagged a bottle of emulsifying spray on her way back out. “He hasn’t steered us wrong, so far.”

  They found Gleb by the door leading back out to the cargo yard. “There’s a door back there,” she told him, nodding over her shoulder. “

  “No, we’ll just go out this way,” Gleb said with apparent unconcern. He nodded at the materials they’d collected. “Should be enough to convince them,” he added cryptically before pushing out into the smell of carbon dust and burning hydraulics from the shuttle he’d come down in.

  “Just stay quiet and follow my lead,” he warned over his shoulder as he passed the wreckage. He angled in toward another shuttle with Sandrak’s crest. A pilot was lounging against the side of the craft and he pushed away from the hull to confront the three Humans.

  “What are you three doing down here?” he demanded, one hand moving toward the handle of his pistol.

  “Shuttle taking us to the Harpy got redirected down here.” Gleb waved toward the burning wreckage. “They
told us to wait and that shuttle would drop us on the way back to the flagship.”

  “And why do you need to go to the Harpy?”

  “Well, it’s the uprising, see?” Gleb confided, happy to be spreading gossip.

  “Uprising?”

  “Yes, sir, almost managed to seize the ship from the provosts! After that, they put everyone into lockdown.”

  “So it’s in lockdown,” the pilot retorted, anger building. “Why does that have anything to do with the three of you?”

  “Well, nobody’s allowed out of their cabins. Food goes in but nobody can come out so, when a prisoner pounds on the door and tells a guard he needs to drop muffins, he’s told to make the best of a bad situation.”

  The guard’s anger was turning now to amusement. “So they’re wallowing in their own filth?”

  “Liquids and solids, sir!” Gleb said cheerfully. “That’s where we come in. Come in literally, you might say, as we have to go into each cell.”

  A deep rumbling laugh burst from the pilot and he waved them up the rear ramp. It wasn’t lost on Siri that the Quailu officer was far more willing to help them if it meant delivering them to a demeaning job. No doubt, that was exactly why Gleb had chosen his current story.

  She noticed how the pilot winced away from her as she passed.

  “Next time make sure that bucket is charged, you fool!”

  “Yes, sir,” she replied meekly. She scurried past him and buckled into a seat.

  “Well, I’m not waiting around down here so you can stink up my shuttle,” the pilot groused, brushing past between the Humans. “I’ll take you up now and then come back down here to get the stink out.”

  He must have been serious about the smell because he left the back ramp open as they ascended, only closing it when the atmosphere began to thin appreciably. They approached the prison ship at almost full speed, slowing only at the last second, sidling up on her port flank and opening a portal between the two hulls.

  Shuttles didn’t generally land inside prison ships, as it left them exposed on all sides in the event of an uprising. Using hull-to-hull portals greatly reduced the directions from which any boarding attempt might come.