by A. S. Deller
Sorakith’s eyes flittered open and locked onto Lancer’s gaze. The Captain paused mid-gulp, and warily sat the glass back down on her desk. “You need to take the risk, Reina.”
“I’ve been handling it for over four years now.”
“We may be on this ship for decades,” Sorakith said.
“There isn’t time,” Lancer denied.
“There could be decades,” pushed the Althorian.
Reina threw back the last draught of her rich, caramel-tinted, barrel-aged liquor, slammed the tumbler down, and twisted her chair away from the desk. She faced away from Sorakith, staring up at a wall on which hung a few mementos of less maddening times:
A real, physical color print of Reina when she was seventeen years old, in black cap and gown, posing with her adoptive parents Charles and Yuko. What people used to call a “photograph” before the term los relevance. They stood outside at her secondary school, an imposing stadium behind them. She knew that her brothers Joao and Matheus were standing on the other side of the camera. Everyone’s smiles were so large, bright and...sincere. The future was still unwritten; the ramifications of interstellar war still more science fiction than not.
Her matriculation certificate from the UPSN Officer Candidate School, another real, paper thing. Ivory stock gilded with gold, stamped with the Star Navy’s seal. Signed by Vice Admiral Akash Bandari himself. “This confers the rank of Ensign upon one Reina Aislara Lancer”. The greasy thumbprint of her Joao was still noticeable after almost twenty years, in the lower left corner. He’d taken it from her in a rush to digitize it, without thinking to wash with soap after fiddling with some cranky hinges in the Lancer mansion.
And there it was, the print of home. A country estate of granite and marble sitting on a dozen acres of lush, verdant grass. It was the oldest keepsake she had. Pictured was the entire family—- parents, two sons, and Reina herself—all in mid-stride, running around the front lawn playing a game of wildball. The soft, cantaloupe-sized white ball wobbled through the air, altering its own course using the very slight electromagnetic fields of the people around it. More fun than it had any right to be.
“The building of memories is the one thing that is both its own past and its own future,” broke in Sorakith’s mellow voice.
Reina backtracked out of her contemplation. The present always seemed to be a little ahead of her. The bronze skinned Althorian now stood, leaning on the desk with fingers spread wide. The Captain quickly rubbed moisture from her eyes before it could gather a critical mass, and sighed, “I want to see them again.”
“And they, you,” Sorakith said as she reached out and poured another tumbler of spirit. The liquid sloshed exquisitely into the crystal bottom.
“We don’t even know if any of them are alive, Sorakith. We don’t even know if Earth is still there,” Lancer nearly choked.
“What better reason do you need to change, just a little bit?” Sorakith said, lifting the glass to her lips and swallowing the entire serving in a single swig.
The ambrosia dispatched, Sorakith slapped the crystal back to the desk and smiled wickedly. Reina was shocked out of her somber mood by the Lieutenant’s unpredictable move. She found herself smiling despite herself as Sorakith slid the glass over the desktop toward her. “So. Your prescription is?”
Sorakith poured another, more ample, cupful of rum, and said, “Take one man, and don’t have time to call me in the morning."
Ruri snuck back into the ward room, where Jerni still sat watching Rhodes sleep. She handed her sister the injector, loaded with barbitaphorene stolen not ten minutes before from a storage cabinet in Sickbay. At the same time, Ruri sent the instructions for the proper application of the sedative to Jerni via their quantum transmitters, embedded in each of their occipital lobes. Jerni tiptoed over to Rhodes, and moved around so that his back was facing her. She carefully hovered the tip of the injector just a couple of millimeters above the flesh of his left shoulder, just above the socket where his cybernetic arm was attached. Jerni exchanged a glance with Ruri, looked back to the injector and pulled its trigger.
With a barely audible hiss, the dose of barbitaphorene passed from the injector’s capsule, through the air and painlessly into Rhodes’ flesh. The chemical instantly diffused through his intercellular lipid pathways and entered his bloodstream.
Jerni paced backward to stand beside Ruri, and the twins waited next to the ward room’s rations dispenser. Nothing happened for ten seconds. Twenty. Thirty...
Rhodes stirred, his cybernetic arm twitched, he groaned and began to push himself up with his human arm. He abruptly rolled and fell from the bench, landing on the floor with a thud. The twins watched him for a minute, and then bolted forward, kneeling beside Rhodes and immediately rolling him onto his back. Ruri and Jerni placed their hands on the Deputy Commander’s cybernetic arm. The quantum transmitters embedded in their sinus cavities, dormant up until a couple hours before, rapidly dumped nearly a petabyte of data into the arm’s computational matrix.
Finished with stage one of their instructions, all they could do now was wait for the virus to propagate from his arm to the cerebral implant that allowed him to control it.
The twins didn’t have to wait long.
Rhodes twitched once, slightly, and his whole body suddenly began to convulse, limbs banging against the deck. Ruri and Jerni took one large, synchronized step back against the hatch.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Two decks below, Dr. Kyra Weller finished reviewing the report from the Talisman’s lead exobiologist on the LM-32f starfish. She looked up from Dr. Seok Won Cho’s tablet at the two small, dark red creatures wriggling at the bottom of their terrarium.
“What do you think?” Asked Cho.
“This is very interesting. They have a completely different set of senses, all based around electromagnetism,” stated Kyra.
“Which is why they were gathered around where those ambushing Malign were, yes. They seem to feed off of electricity. No need for sunlight. LM-32f was a perfect world for them, with its constant electrical storms. But the plant life and soil microorganisms were a totally different ecology drawing from geothermal energy. Thus my conclusion that the starfish were from someplace else entirely. Probably escaped from the Alliance lab,” Cho explained. Hen, his face brightened and his voice became excited and he wheeled the terrarium cart over to a larger, separate cleanroom. “Before I forget, you have to see this!” Inside the cleanroom was what seemed little more than a jumble of random pieces of furniture and unused lab equipment.
Kyra watched as Cho hooked the terrarium up to the other room through a seal, and unlatched a small door. Without hesitation, the two wine-colored starfish suddenly flipped up onto the tips of their arms and began to cartwheel through the cleanroom, up and over the various obstacles and ramps. Dr. Weller could hear very quiet, but high-pitched squeals as they went, one always following the other closely. Occasionally, the one behind would overtake the other, and cartwheel over top of the whirling arms of the other to become the leader. Kyra couldn’t help but laugh.
“They’re playing!”
“A little improvised playground, yes!” Cho affirmed.Weller began, “I wonder. If they were brought there, they may have been part of the Pernet experiments...” when she received an abrupt message from her comm implant.
“Dr. Weller, Gulliver just pinged me that Commander Rhodes’ vitals have slowed substantially,” came Doc Martell’s voice.
Kyra replied on the comm, “Get to his location right away. Take the nearest security person with you. I’ll inform the Captain.” And then aloud to Dr. Cho, “My apologies, Seok. Something’s come up. This is great work, keep it up. Find a link between the starfish and the Twins if you can.” With that, she bolted out of the research lab.
Two minutes later, Martell and Petty Officer Bretan Carson, a tall, blond man in his mid-twenties with a bull neck and square-jawed good looks, barged through the ward room’s hatch. There sat Rhodes, sippin
g from the side of a soup bowl, across from the twins who were each enjoying some cookies and milk. Rhodes looked up, smiling uncharacteristically as he sat his bowl down. “What’s the emergency?” He said cheerfully.
Carson and Martell hesitated, taken aback by Rhodes’ obvious well-being. Martell finally stuttered, “Uh, so you’re fine? You look fine.”
Rhodes shook his head and looked to the girls, who smiled back at him. “Sure, I’m feeling okay, Doc. You look surprised.”
“Gulliver sent an alert that your vital signs lowered unexpectedly.”
“I was taking a little nap. The girls here spooked me awake. Might have just been a blip,” Rhodes countered.
Just then, Weller, Nunez and Captain Lancer hurried into the ward room behind Martell and Carson, who dodged to the sides for them. “Captain,” saluted Carson.
Rhodes sighed and chuckled, “Now I feel both really special and a little embarrassed.” He pushed his bowl of soup a few inches toward his guests and continued, “Soup, anyone? Thai coconut green curry. I had the autochef change the standard recipe to include more lime and pepper. Much better than before.”
“He seems alright,” Lancer said to Kyra.
Dr. Weller replied, “His mood’s improved, that’s a definite.”
“Hey, I’m actually in the room,” Rhodes shot back.
The Captain glared over at Gray Rhodes and said matter-of-factly, “No more false alarms, Commander. That’s an order.”
“Aye,” he replied with a salute.
Everyone exited, leaving Rhodes alone with Jerni and Ruri once more. They both looked up from their snacks and stared at Rhodes.
“Hey, what’s the story, here? You’re looking at me like I’ve got two heads or something,” Rhodes said snarkily.
The girls kept their eyes on him, unwavering.
“You two are starting to worry me,” said Rhodes.
He noticed then that the twins’ eyes seemed different somehow. Normally powdery blue with pale greenish swirls, they were darker, almost cerulean with streaks of sapphire. Rhodes stood, about to rush to them, and abruptly stopped. His mouth hung open in surprise. He was paralyzed.
Jerni and Ruri got up and moved over to him. Ruri touched his cybernetic hand, and that arm came to life. It reached up. Rhodes’ eyes moved, following the arm’s activity. He couldn’t cry out, or speak, or even breathe loudly. Rhodes’ eyes swelled with growing dismay. He felt the cool metal alloy of his hand touch the side of his face.
Jerni smiled as Rhodes’ eyes changed color, his irises metamorphosing from a rich, dark brown to a nearly pure black.
Now, the three of them were linked in a new network. Jerni thought, “Commander, you will create a distraction by crippling structural components on the Engineering Deck. Ruri and I will gain control of the Talisman’s AI Center and transmit a high energy message within local space as we have been programmed.”
Rhodes’ face contorted as he tried to fight back. He couldn’t bring himself to say anything aloud, so he thought, “No, you can’t do this. Why?” Even his thoughts were scrambling for coherence.
Ruri answered, “The Alliance placed Malign trojans in our brains, and we have no choice but to accept the programming. There is too much pain to resist it. We suggest that you accept it, as well, or you will feel much pain, too. And we do not want you to hurt.”
Rhodes grunted, and flopped backward, almost like a marionette, knocking over a bench and slamming into the bulkhead. He looked down, over his body, and felt apart from it. He was a bystander while his legs and arms swung below him, carrying him through the hatch on onward. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the twins sprint down an opposite passageway.
Gray Rhodes had experienced many, but this was certainly a brand new kind of hell, and as unwelcome as any.
Jerni and Ruri moved like a couple of speeding geckos through the corridors of the Talisman. In their short time aboard the ship, they had managed a full inventory of every nook and turn, every area passable by humans, and knew exactly where to go and the fastest way to get there.
They whipped around a corner and startled a pair of junior crew members, Petty Officers Lupita Lefevre and Linh Pham. They yelped in surprise as the girls dodged around them.
“Hey! Watch it!” Shouted Pham.
“I wish I had that kind of energy these days,” Lefevre mused.
The girls’ footsteps receded down the passage.
Linh Pham rolled her eyes and tried to continue, “Now where were we? Right. Tell me more about how Arno connected with you after that little soiree we had in the forward berthing compartment.”
“You’ll get your details later, after I get my damned nap.”
As the twins disappeared around another corner, the alarms began. Pham and Lefevre looked around expectantly, until their comm implants pinged and the message came across: “Multiple power failures, Deck C Aft. Engineering personnel report to stations.”
Linh started running. “Come on!”
The two starmen sprang into action, flying down the corridor.
The exasperated voice of Chief Electrician Carlos Williams filled their minds. “You two are the closest! The power loss is happening at passageway C8, just below the mess. Get your butts there on the double! Falken is literally going to kill me if it takes more than a minute to repair! I’m headed back there now myself! Go! Go!”
Pham and Lefevre heard the sounds before they saw anything. Crashes, and ripping and popping echoed even over the alarms and their own harried footfalls. They stopped in their tracks when he came into view.
It was Commander Gray Rhodes, and he was going berserk as he physically gashed the bulkheads, rupturing power lines and anything else his robotic, superstring metal hand could reach. Sparks spattered across the hall in front of them. “Sir!” Yelped Lupita Lefevre.
Rhode’s head whipped back toward the two women, eyes wide, dark and feral.
Pham pushed back against her shipmate and whispered, “I think we should go.” The two retreated, bolting back from where they came.
The twins came to a stop before the AI Center hatch. Behind it was located the ship’s main crew-AI interface, where a person could most directly communicate with Gulliver. He preferred it when someone actually did visit him. Although he was technically conneted with every crew member aboard the Talisman via their comm links, Gulliver’s massive array of sensors within the AI Center allowed him to directly experience the true presence of another being. For a human, it would be the contrast between talking with another over an ancient analogue telephone versus standing a couple of paces away from them in a room. A world of difference.
Gulliver noticed when the two identical girls appeared at his front door, and he addressed them via their comms, “Jerni and Ruri, welcome. Is there anything I can help you with?”
Jerni stated, “We would like you to allow us entry into the AI Center.”
“I am sorry, but not all personnel are permitted to access me directly. However, I can be of service to you in many ways despite this condition.
“We have been authorized for AI Center entry by the XO of this ship. Please ping him for confirmation,” said Ruri.
Gulliver noted that the girls’ behavior seemed irregular, and sent a short report flagged as ‘non-critical’ to ship’s counselor Sorakith. Then, Gulliver contacted Commander Rhodes over his comm implant, nearly certain that the two young humans were attempting to deceive him in some way. “Commander Rhodes, the twins have requested access to the AI Center, with the stipulation that you approved them for such. Is this true?”
What Gulliver got in response from Rhodes’ link was a garble of alien code. It infiltrated Gulliver’s ports, riding in on the Commander’s executive privileges that already existed. The AI Core was momentarily stunned. Gulliver recognized it as Malign in origin, a vicious string of algorithms that breached his firewalls in milliseconds. It was over in just a little under a second, a war waged on nanoscales in the physical realm but in a vir
tual universe of Gulliver’s digital world. He was able to erect a partition that protected his primary biological and quantum matrices from becoming infected, but the virus was already embedded in all of the ship’s involuntary systems. The AI Core was secure for the moment, but the twins now held dominion over most of the Talisman.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Pressing his human hand against the side of his face, Deputy Commander Gray Rhodes could feel his cheek bruising. But nothing he did or thought slowed him down as he continued marching through the passageway. His left arm shot out, grabbing fistfuls of power and data conduits and ripping them from their moorings one after another. Arcs of electricity spattered around him, but his mechanical arm’s shielding protected him as he went.
The alarm klaxons continued to blare. Sweat poured down over Rhodes’ face. He could feel the temperature drop, now well below fifty degrees Fahrenheit. He knew he was responsible. He was breaking the ship, and they may not have the resources to fix it all. He could be killing everyone. And he couldn’t stop himself.
Two security officers ran out into the hallway in front of him. Jon Dewling and Bretan Carson, he thought. Yes, those were the names. Dewling was a short but muscular man with close-cropped brown hair. Carson was a big man, taller and heavier than Rhodes. He had sparred with both of them before. They were tough, and fast.
“Tespers to stun,” Carson said.
Dewling complied, aimed his gun at Rhodes and said, “Sir! Put your hands up or we’ll be forced to shoot!”
Before Rhodes even tried to force his mouth to open so he could warn them off, the Malign programming executed. His muscles responded as fast as his nervous system fired the signals, and Rhodes came at the men with inhuman speed and accuracy. The Commander pushed Dewling’s gun aside and flipped it upside down, along with the man’s wrist. It broke with the sickening snap of a thick twig. Simultaneously, Rhodes placed his own finger over Dewling’s and pulled the trigger, blasting a wide cone of numbing soundwaves into Carson’s torso. The big guy was thrown off of his feet, coming to stop against a bulkhead. Rhodes twisted again, and Dewling flipped onto his back. Holding a hand up, Dewling’s eyes pleaded for mercy. Rhodes lifted his left foot off the deck and whipped it forward across the prone man’s face. Dewling and Carson were both unconscious in under five seconds.