Talisman of Earth

by A. S. Deller

  The cell’s lighting blinked on as the Pernet scientist Preceptor Sior Herci stood up from his cot. He was very much alive, despite some obvious bruises and swelling around his left eye and cheeks. Sior wore a skintight brown body suit, and the same white lab coat he wore at the LM-32f laboratory lay draped from his cot. He took a couple graceful steps toward Skeer and stopped, standing very straight with his hands folded before him.

  Valgons were never particularly fond of Malign in general, but they were tolerated because of their usefulness. Valgons hated the Kenek, the Althorians, the Insigari, and the eight-armed Yln because they posed a true threat to the Alliance imperative. Valgons didn’t just hate the Pernet, however. They were the one race which made Valgons feel uneasy. It was the very essence of Pernet that had this effect. The way they moved; looked at you with those squinty eyes; spoke in languid tones. A Pernet also represented riskiness. They were a very intelligent race, and willing to try almost anything to reach their desire ends. Such deep-seated discomfort with the Pernet as a species is what led the Alliance to wipe out their home system and every colony that could be located.

  Krell Skeer thought of all of this as he forced himself to stare at the feline biped through the translucent density wall.

  “I see you have come to visit me. Twice in a cycle. How pleasant,” Sior said.

  Skeer didn’t want to proceed with this, but he had to, despite the hideous creature before him and the distaste it caused in his gullet. He said, “We destroyed every last Yln because we deemed them worthless. They lived for making art with their slimy tendrils. They didn’t care to even attempt colonization beyond their system of origin.”

  Sior nodded. “Indeed. They developed their technology just to the point they need it to be. When they met the Althorians and Pernet, and learned of Valgons and Malign, they decided to stay right where they were.”

  “At first we wanted to rid the universe completely of your species. But we recognized that even if you would not join our Alliance, we might still make use of your peculiar talents,” continued Skeer. “So we kept some of you. Just enough to ensure the ongoing survival of your kind, unless we at some point decided against it.”

  “Where might you be headed with this meandering soliloquy, oh mighty Krell?” Sighed the Pernet.

  Skeer grimaced, quite the ugly expression considering his multi-layered mandibles. “When my superior Grand Krell Ekskell was given evidence that one of the human ships followed a Valgon craft into the lek essel located in Sol System, and was roaming free deep in our secure zone of the galaxy, he put his one true gift to use immediately. His intelligence. Ekskell knew that human curiosity rivaled even Pernet’s. There were already plans for a remote laboratory to be placed on LM-32f, and so Ekskell asked me to choose a Pernet who favored humans more than most. This Pernet would be placed in charge of the research to find a new, more lethal human-killing pathogen. He would be given all of the tools to do so, and also all of the tools to allow him to deceive his Valgon masters.”

  Sior’s expression faded from relaxed and calm into a glare of terrified realization.

  Skeer said, “You, Preceptor. You thought you were helping save humankind from one more of our attacks, when in fact it was you who did as we desired in having those human larvae lure the intruding League starship to them.”

  “What did you do?” Sior hissed accusingly.

  “What did you do, Preceptor?” Replied Skeer.

  Sior wobbled on his long legs, stumbling backwards to his cot. He sat and rested his head in his hands.

  Skeer said, “The trap is probably sprung by now. We will rid our space of some human pests and commandeer some of their technology while we’re at it. Thanks to you.”

  “Wh—-what is the trap?”

  “Oh, and rest assured that the rest of your Pernet researchers will continue to work on the problem of how to engineer a virus that results in 99 percent human fatalities or greater. You did manage to make some progress, after all, before you sabotaged the lab,” sneered Skeer. He turned and walked away, his claw-tipped legs clacking heavily on the Merkek floor.

  Sior sobbed alone on the cot. “My girls...”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Satisfied that he had properly ruined the disgusting Pernet’s day, Skeer rewarded himself by skinning one of the Althorian body slaves who had failed to properly cleanse some of the Lek’s soldiers. Torturing Althorians was one of the most popular Valgon pastimes. One would attach various pain stimulating devices, and then an array of neural sensors to the pitiful Althorian, and sit back with specially-made holo screen applications and play the specimen’s pain centers like a game. Often, if a Valgon had the proper authority, the Althorian could even be hacked into the lek’s extradimensional transmitter, and thus project its agonies throughout the galaxy for the amusement of other interested Valgons. This, in itself, was a burgeoning industry among the Alliance worlds.

  As the Althorian female shuddered and contorted in wretched distress, Skeer sat back in his most comfortable reclining sling chair. He drank some of the Althorian’s opaque amethyst blood as it pooled and collected into a reservoir, where it was fed through a tube into a waiting decanter. He leered at her as her screams trailed into whimpers.

  Just as she was dying, Skeer’s personal communications link, implanted next to a nerve cluster just above his second heart, pinged him with an incoming signal. He was immediately detached from his hedonistic indulgence. With an unslaked ferocity, Skeer lashed out with a claw and beheaded the Althorian. He roared, a clicking, metallic resonating sound that worked its way through layers of tooth and mandible.

  Staring at his claw, drenched in the Althorian’s gore, he answered the notification. “I am Krell Skeer of House Kleks.”

  The caller replied, “I am Krell Reksek of House Kleks, and I call upon you.”

  “Brother!” Skeer said, his mood lifting.

  “It is, brother. I heard of your latest travesty. What luck you have to still be alive!” Said Reksek, laughing greedily.

  Skeer groaned. He could picture Reksek, his larger oaf of a sibling, lounging in a pond of hot algae with several of his mates. He should be the one to speak of luck. How their father ever allowed one of his sons to forgo politics and spend all of their time fighting and copulating made no sense to him. Of course, Skeer knew the reason. Reksek reminded their sire of himself more than Skeer did.

  Skeer preferred manipulating to get his way before he ever considered a physical contest. The will was mightier than the claw, as the old saying went.

  “So generous of you to contact me. It’s been, what, thirteen cycles?” Skeer replied diplomatically.

  “Not so long. Our House has been speaking much of you. The prideful boasts are long departed, sadly, but the talk that remains is entertaining,” Reksek chided.

  “You know my new station. Have you earned any more medals?”

  “Of course I did. The Battle of Ylna-2. You heard of that, yes?”

  “You were injured sorely,” said Skeer smugly.

  “We found an entire colony of slimy Yln, swimming in brackish puddles of their own piss. They thought they were hiding from us, thought they had escaped their sun’s death. I held little hope they could muster a challenge...”

  “Until they revealed, what was it—- a herd of bargeth chargers?” Skeer prompted.

  Skeer could hear Reksek grimacing over the comms. “It was. They’d been raising them for cycles, and they were mostly grown adults. Stampeded us into a second trap. A minefield devised of large flowers whose nectar reacted quite violently when stepped on.”

  “The Yln. Say what you will about their ghastly artworks and bile-churning foul flavor, they can be very innovative when it comes to their survival,” said Skeer, quite satisfied.

  “I killed a dozen of them even after losing a claw and two legs!” Reksek spouted vehemently.

  “And father was proud.”

  “He should have been. And you should have at least contac
ted me afterward, to see how I faired,” said Reksek.

  Skeer said, “Maybe. It’s like us to rush in and get blown up, isn’t it? You are the emblematic Valgon. The exemplary son. You will die in combat, with honor, and as much stupidity as is essential. And you won’t care what others think about those brave choices.”

  “Ahh,” Reksek pondered. “Now, now. There he is again, my little brother. Still worried. Still saddened by the more commendable destinies of others. What you do not understand is that a Valgon’s fate is his legacy!”

  “Oh, I do understand that,” Skeer said shakily, unable to counterattack.

  Reksek continued, “You were jealous when I left for battle service. You were jealous because you could not join me, because of your cowardice.”

  Skeer protested, “No! I didn’t want you to die!”

  Reksek paused, listening to Skeer, now almost whimpering. Finally Reksek said, “There I was, trying to dishonor you in a direct way, and you go and dishonor yourself. You sound like one of those ragged Yln begging for its life.”

  Skeer trundled about in the torture chamber, mindlessly nudging the Althorian’s severed head about the blood-sodden floor with one of his forelegs. He decided to retract his anger. Breathing slowly to remain calm, he answered, “We are still brothers, are we not?”

  “Indeed,” said Reksek, clearly basking in his victory.

  “I am sorry for not hailing you sooner. You have recovered from the injuries?”

  “I have. I am truly a sight, now. The surgeons might have gone about regrowing my lost limbs if I did not entreaty them to... improve upon them,” Reksek hinted mysteriously.

  “Improve? How so?” Skeer asked.

  “Thanks to father’s sizable holdings in the Alliance treasury, I held the surgeons to graft into me Malign nanoseeds. It is a rather new process. They deduced the need for limbs, and multiplied trillions-fold to replicate my leftmost claw and one each of my forelegs and hindlegs.

  They kept reproducing and replacing much more than was initially, programmed, however. A risk I took. So I am a bit of a grotesque half-Malign now.”

  Skeer grinned a bit at this. At that point, every misfortune to befall Reksek was a good one.

  “However, I am stronger and faster than before. Overall, a proper return on investment for our grizzled old sire. I’ll send you a holo of myself. Despite the appearance, I’ve taken a third as many new mates in the time since, and I thank the Dead Gods every day for my blown-off body parts,” Reksek added, chased with a bellow of laughter.

  Skeer scowled, his improved mood eradicated once more.

  Reksek persisted, “And how is your mating situation these days, broth—-“

  Skeer instantly cut off the transmission, leaving the rest of his brother’s boorish remarks unsaid.

  Recent events were a definitive travesty, he thought. Hopefully, he could still find some triumph in the coming days. His little section of the galaxy might hold one things that no other Krell could claim.

  That revolting little Pernet, Sior, and his companions, had done his handiwork. And now, if all went to plan, Skeer could be the one to lay claim on capturing a League ship that had managed to evade Alliance search squadrons for many cycles.

  It would all go as planned. Skeer folded his fingered-arms together confidently as he returned to kicking the Althorian’s head around in its own hemoglobin.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  It started simply one day, when Tony Wong announced to the crew that he had added a series of blueprints for fresh fruits and vegetables into the food replication system. Along with numerous other data losses that were caused by damage sustained during the Talisman’s stranding, many of the complex food blueprints were also destroyed. With no real, living examples of the items to scan, the only way to get them back into the system was to painstakingly recreate their DNA in the ship’s lab. This process took years of on-and-off effort by some of Dr. Weller’s science team. Having fresh peaches, escarole and rhubarb on hand wasn’t anywhere near a priority. The replicator could still produce artificially flavored copies of certain ingredients, as needed for various recipes, after all.

  Grekkon Rax was one of the first crew to visit the galley after Wong’s news. He had heard, and read, a lot about the terran fruit called “apples”. So Rax requested one, and the replicator formed a juicy, crisp, chilled, Bella Vista apple, a beautiful chartreuse mottled with blotches of cardinal red. It took the machine two minutes to create it from slurries of base molecules. A dozen other crew members watched while they stood in line as Rax popped the rather sizable fruit into his mouth whole, chewed it to bits and swallowed it within ten seconds.

  Rhodes was one of the witnesses, having brought Jerni and Ruri with him for the special occasion. “You ate that faster than a horse!” He marveled.

  The look of satisfaction on Rax’s snub-nosed faced was disturbing. He appeared to be enjoying an epiphany. Finally, he said, “That...was...delicious.”

  He proceeded to order eleven more apples, including three Macintosh, two Granny Smith, and several more Bella Vista samples.

  Not long after, Rax sat in his custom stateroom basking in an apple-eating frenzy afterglow. He was watching out of date holos of a popular terran crime drama called “Plausible Deniability: New Angeles”, when he heard, and felt, the first grumbles from within his guts. By the final act of the episode, the hefty Kenek was grunting on his private head (or toilet) while trying to expel the physical discomfort from his body in an exorcism of angry grunts and alien curses.

  Petty Officer 3rd Class Mukesh Patel had just sat down in the galley to enjoy his own plate of fresh salad, including some diced apple, when Rax pinged him over his comm implant. Rax’s thought came across sheepishly, “Patel, there is a problem. With my washroom. It appears that I have created an obstruction in my waste receptacle and removal appliance.”

  Patel paused with a forkful of greens hovering in front of his open mouth. “Your head is clogged?”

  “Affirmative. And...it is quite unsatisfactory. Abominable, really.”

  Mukesh just stared blankly at his plate of food. Having worked as steamfitter and plumber most of his time in the military, he had never heard such a problem referred to as “abominable”.

  The next couple hours of Patel’s life were far from exceptional, to say the least. His travails would be talked about aboard the Talisman for weeks, even months, afterward. Ultimately, he was thankful only that he did not end up needing to ask Chief Falken for help. He sorted out the problem, and advised Rax, politely, to not eat apples again. Maybe just a portion of apple, diced and with other food, like a salad.

  Mukesh tried to forget everything he saw, heard or smelled that day, but one thing kept him up for most of that night. It was the image of Rax’s “clog” loosening and being vacuumed up and into his deck’s nearest waste catalyzer, where it was summarily disintegrated into component atoms.

  Captain Reina Lancer had her head resting back on her chair and her feet up on her desk as the undulating notes of Thelonius Monk’s “Blues Five Spot” trickled out of her stateroom’s speakers. Her eyes closed, Lancer imagined the piano rhythms as ribbons of gemstone colors, shuddering and curling through a bracing, cathartic mindscape.

  She never forgot the improvised jazz that had been playing on the jet as she and her brothers were leaving Brazil to go to their new home, thousands of miles away. The lush, burgeoning canopy of the Amazon rainforest ranged in all directions below them. It was the first time she had seen it from above, and the first time she truly understood that her life was small compared to the world around her. The first time for both, but not the last.

  A chime sung to indicate a visitor.

  “Open hatch,” Lancer said as she parachuted out of her ecstasy.

  Not a minute later, Sorakith relaxed across from her on the couch, right leg over the other.

  “Would you like a drink? I have some Levoirier 2466. It’s a molasses spirit from the French Province o
f the United Powers on Earth,” Lancer said, tilting a stout, crystal bottle of viscous amber liquid toward her guest.

  Sorakith said gratefully, “No, but thank you, Captain. I have just come from a meal.”

  “Please, address me as Reina when we meet like this,” she said, pouring herself a tumbler of rum. The honey-brown spirit glistened in an arc. Sorakith found her eyes drawn to it, and her ears to the tinkling sound it made coursing into the beveled glass.

  “Replicated?” Sorakith said with a glance at the drink.

  Lancer snickered, “Affirmative. The real thing is a stitch above my paygrade.”

  “What is it you would like to talk about today?” Sorakith asked, in full counselor mode.

  Lancer observed the Autumn-toned frills, beginning at the crest of her hairless scalp, lose some of their rippled texture. Althorians seemed to carry a lot of tension in their frills, and lost some of the trademark wavy folds whenever he, or she, prepared themselves to accept psionic input from others. Reina started, “I...I’ve been more solitary, as of late. When I’m not on the bridge, or not in the ward room, I do everything by myself. Even more so than before. It’s been getting worse for me, personally. The past year has been hard.”

  Sorakith nodded, “You’re lonely.”

  “Put bluntly, yes.”

  Sorakith leaned forward, elbows on her knees, and spoke with her eyes closed, “Being the Captain of a ship is almost by definition a lonely profession.”

  “Something I’ve known, and no one would argue,” Lancer said, following it with an unashamed slurp from her tumbler.

  “While everyone else is able to act on their impulses when it comes to relations with other crew members, you feel that if you did so it could put both your authority and your respectability in jeopardy.”

  “Be honest, now,” the Captain quipped.