Talisman of Earth

by A. S. Deller

  “I’ll go myself, I’m a lot faster. You stay here, Patel,” Falken said, already bolting out of the compartment.

  “Patel, good work. Okay, the rest of you follow me. We have to get out there just in case the Valgons get in before Falken’s done,” said the Captain as she marched out of the engineering compartment.

  Rax looked over his shoulder at one of his security detail. “Pharro, stay here and keep Engineering bolted down as long as you can.” Rax trundled out after Lancer, followed by the rest of the tesper-wielding crew.

  Out to meet the waiting jaws of death.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Cassidy Falken propelled herself through the zero-G hallways as easily, and gracefully, as a dolphin swam in the sea. He long arms and legs took every handhold in a rhythms of powerful strokes, never once missing or throwing her off balance. She was a seven-foot spider cruising across her web, with a speed driven by the need to feed on the blood of some giant, ugly lobsters.

  The Chief hit E7 with a ferocious momentum, and tore down its length until she reached the access hatch for the waste catalyzer. The aft dock was only a little over two dozen meters further down the passageway. If the Valgons breached it before she was done, there would be no escaping their line of fire before she was nailed by plasma bolts or railgun rounds.

  Seconds too quickly became minutes as she worked upside down in the access. The ventilation had been shut down along with ninety percent of the ship, so she could actually smell some of the waste on its way to be catalyzed. Feeling a rise in her gorge, she kept it down while her gangly fingers played through the complex wiring.

  The Captain pinged her, “We’re taking up a position one hatch down from you. As soon as you’re done, pull back to us. Either way, as soon as the Valgons get in, we’ll shoot as many as we can and then close the hatch. So just get here.”

  “Aye, sir. Almost done,” Falken thought back to her.

  Rax, Lancer, Hu, Jecky and the other armed crew members stood and knelt thirty feet down the hallway from where Falken worked. Only her dexterous feet stuck out from the access, grasping onto a couple handholds.

  Greg Hu’s finger started to tighten on his trigger as soon as a laser cutting torch began throwing sparks from the airlock hatch. A line of glowing orange, molten metal began dripping around it.

  “Here they come,” Arno Jecky observed.

  “Again, with the obvious,” Hu jibed.

  “Lock down the jabber. Let’s kill some Alliance today,” said Rax stoically.

  Cassidy could hear the airlock being sliced open. She had a minute left at most. She pinged Dr. Weller, “Kyra, get ready with that power influx.”

  “We’ve been ready. You can get clear?” Thought Weller.

  “Don’t worry about me,” Falken responded.

  The cutting stopped. The sound of Valgon voices drifted down the passageway, chittering and grinding and hissing. Lancer and her team tensed.

  “Chief?”

  “Almost, sir.”

  The airlock hatch clanked loudly as it was rocked by a Valgon kick from the other side.

  “Chief!”

  “Almost--!”

  Another kick sent the thick metal hatch loose, clamoring against the bulkhead opposite.

  On the bridge, Kyra Weller stood by at her station, a hand hovering over the holo control that would send a massive burst of energy into the waste catalyzer system. She hoped she didn’t kill anyone she knew when she activated it.

  In the access, Falken used her considerable upper body strength to rotate the plasma jet head out so it faced the hallway. It wasn’t necessary, it added to her risk, but it would send more of its destructive blast toward the enemy while at the same time damaging the catalyzer system less. It was a delay worth possibly dying for.

  Lancer’s eyes squinted in anticipation as the first Valgon lurched out of the airlock, stooping over the fit through. He wore a full breather over his face, the atmosphere of the Talisman less than desirable for Valgons. He held one of their heavy plasma rifles out in front of him with his two fingered-arms, while his clawed-arms reached out sideways, ready to snatch off any human’s head that happened to be within reach. He was held to the deck by his own pair of mag boots.

  The Valgon warrior, for some reason, kept looking to his right. The second one to come after him looked left, and finally saw the enemy, just as Chief Falken leapt out of the access and scurried along the wall.

  “Fire!” Lancer yelled.

  Greg Hu sent several thin tesper beams into the second Valgon, while Rax fired a railgun slug through the neck plate of the first.

  “It’s done!” Falken hollered.

  “Close the hatch!” Lancer ordered.

  Jecky and Nunez began to manually pull the hatch across the passageway as more Valgons poured through the airlock. Four, five, six.

  Plasma bolts screamed up the corridor at them. Petty Officer Bai Syun was struck across her right thigh by a glancing plasma bolt. Her tesper clattered to the floor and she dropped sideways, crunching into the Captain’s left leg. Reina felt something pop in her knee, and shifted her weight to remain standing. Petty Officer Rasheed Chang immediately reached under Bai Syun’s arms and dragged her back around a corner as she growled in pain. Another inch and she would have lost the leg.

  “You hurt, sir?” Hu looked to the Captain.

  “No, Chief,” she lied.

  Seven, eight, nine Valgons had entered the passageway.

  Falken slid between the hatch of the bulkhead with only two seconds to spare. The Valgon warriors had started running, each one’s four heavy exoskeletal feet banging against the deck as they moved.

  As soon as Nunez and Jecky slammed the hatch closed, Lancer gave the order, “Now, Doctor!”

  On the bridge, Weller flicked her wrist.

  In passageway E7, a dozen Valgon warriors stopped midstride and turned to look at the open access panel on the wall as an arc of electricity heralded their doom. A massive storm of blue and indigo plasma filled the corridor, boiling the Valgons in their shells immediately and disintegrating them an instant later.

  Aboard the Keevaks scoutship, on the other side of the airlock, the rest of the Valgon crew had gathered so they might enjoy hearing the death cries of the Talisman’s crew. They didn’t even have time to hear their own before the plasma had coursed through the docking tube and obliterated every last one of them where they stood.

  With a sudden hum and a click, the hatch to the storage compartment on deck C, passageway 14, rolled open. Doc Martell, another medic, and Kyra Weller stepped into the small room and saw Sorakith sitting back against a wall, with Deputy Commander Rhodes splayed out between her legs. He was unconscious, his head lolling sideways between her arms as she held him in a headlock. It was loose, for now, and she had already needed to tighten it a few times since she initially took him down almost an hour before.

  “Glad you got my message,” the Althorian said drily.

  As Martell and his assistant hefted Rhodes onto a gurney and clasped his wrists and ankles to it, Kyra helped Sorakith to her feet. “You handled him all by yourself. There are two big security men lying in Sickbay who couldn’t do what you did,” Kyra said, admiration in her voice.

  Sorakith sighed, “It was mostly luck. Whatever got to him, he was fighting it, and it slowed him down just enough.” She stood over Rhodes as he moaned on his back. As she stared down at him, she asked, “What about the girls?”

  “We have them. They’re okay, but we had to tranquilize them to get them out of the AI Center,” Martell said as he and the other medic began carting Rhodes away.

  Shortly, Captain Lancer joined Dr. Weller, Sorakith and Rax in Sickbay. She had some encouraging words with the several injured (a miracle there were no dead!), and then moved on to the beds where Rhodes, Jerni and Ruri were tied down to.

  “We’re keeping them under. Can’t be sure the Malign virus is non-transferable,” Weller said.

  “How did they
infect the Commander?” Lancer asked.

  “It could be done with electrical impulses, precisely set to push information through Rhodes’ cybernetic arm. From there, to his neural implant.”

  “How do we fix this?” The Captain said, as her piercing cobalt irises adjusted to the brighter lights of Sickbay.

  “After consulting with my whole team, we couldn’t come up with anything fool proof. But I remembered one of Dr. Cho’s findings—-“

  “The exobiologist?” Sorakith said.

  “Yes. And against-regulations supplier of fermented beverages. The starfish, the random little creatures we sampled from LM-32f? They aren’t native to that planet. We thought at first they may have been used by the Pernet in their experiments. But now I think the Malign watchers who ‘greeted’ us likely used the starfish as a conduit to infect the twins with their virus. An organic go-between that actually translated their Trojan alien code into a biological infection.”

  Rax growled, “Dirty bastards. We are just toys to those evil machines.”

  “I hope you have Cho working on reverse engineering that process with your people,” Lancer said.

  “You’re not implying I wouldn’t, I hope, sir,” Kyra winked.

  Sorakith sat for hours in Sickbay, as many other crew members came and went, visiting Mai Byun, with her plasma-scorched thigh; Jon Dewling with his broken wrist and concussion; and Bretan Carson with his fractured ribs and busted ear drums. No one walked near the beds of Rhodes and the twins, though. Any reaction they did display ended up being a wary glance or an outright glare of aggression, followed by whispers to their fellow crew.

  Hardly anyone even looked at Sorakith, either. They knew she was close, in some way, with Rhdoes and both of the girls. Guilt by association, perhaps? She was able to feel the rancid emotions of the starmen-and-women as they passed through Sickbay, and after a while it came to be so much as to nearly make her nauseous.

  She also overheard some bits of news. The damage crews had the Talisman under control, the Valgon scoutship was secured and being towed alongside, and Chief Falken had cleared them to go back to warp in another few hours.

  Sorakith wondered how hard Rhodes would have to work to ever be trusted by his subordinates again. Maybe they never would. His was a strong personality, though, and she knew he could overcome most setbacks. He had been dealt some awful ones, and even though there was no absolute panacea from losing a family, he had found a way to live on.

  Almost a full day after the attack, Sorakith started awake from a nap when Dr. Weller, Doc Martell and Dr. Cho entered noisily with one of the starfish in a sealed containment jar.

  She stood and moved out of the way as the doctors set up a table between the patients. “This is it, then?”

  Kyra nodded, “We’ve got nothing left but to try.”

  “Who first?” Said Martell.

  Kyra looked to Sorakith. For an answer? She couldn’t choose. She loved the two girls, who she’d only known for a matter of weeks. She loved Rhodes, who she’d known for years.

  “How dangerous is it?” Sorakith finally asked.

  Dr. Cho said, “The starfish causes a big change in polarity, and it’s going to affect their nervous systems and brains a lot. It’ll be almost like magnetizing and demagnetizing, but of the body’s neurons.”

  “This could kill them. But we can bring them back. Still, might be some brain damage either way,” Martell stated bluntly.

  “There’s no other choice. It’s this or we hibernate them, but since it’s a potential Malign threat the Captain prefers we do anything we can now rather than risk it getting to Earth,” said Kyra Weller.

  “Then. Me first. Try it on me. If it kills me, you can hibernate them, for a while, and maybe have enough time to figure out another way,” Sorakith tried.

  Kyra placed a hand gently on her arm. “Sorry, Sorakith. Ultimately, that puts four people at risk. I’ll stick with the three. You don’t need to stay, if you’d rather not.”

  Sorakith looked over the three sleeping, unknowing victims. “I will stay.”

  “Ruri first,” Kyra motioned to Doc Martell. He started hooking up leads to the little girl without hesitation. It was easy to dislike the man sometimes.

  Doctors Weller and Cho removed the writhing, port-stained starfish from its holder. Its movements calmed a bit as Cho held it. He smiled and spoke softly, “This one seems to like being held. The other, not so much.”

  They sat in in a tray on the table next to Ruri. The girl’s face was still smudged with some grease from when they had been forcefully taken from their little barricade in the AI Center. Sorakith regretted not having cleaned her and her sister before the doctors showed up. Her face was so peaceful, and she was so young.

  Martell connected the starfish to Ruri with the leads. He mused, “It’s smart, yes? How much do you think it understands? About what is going on?”

  “I’ve still got programs cranking on how to communicate with them, but I’d say the starfish at least know that we don’t mean them harm. This one might know that we’re trying to help the girl right now. It’s hard to say until we have some idea of just how they think,” said Cho.

  “Okay, ready to go?” Weller prompted.

  “Yes ma’am,” said Martell.

  Sorakith gently took Ruri’s hand in hers. Kyra pulled it away, just as gently. “I’m sorry, but you can’t be in contact with her when this happens.” Sorakith nodded, and took a dejected step back from the bed. Kyra looked to Martell and said, “Do it.”

  The gaunt, limpid-eyed doctor hesitated, just a moment, and Sorakith felt just a little pleased that he had shown some semblance of caring for once. Then, he tapped in a command and the process began.

  All six of the starfish’s arms began to bunch up, lifting it bodily up from its tray as it was stimulated by a harmless low voltage. There was a slight hum in the air as current passed between the tiny alien and Ruri. Sorakith tried to make sense of the holographic readouts that Martell and Dr. Weller were closely studying. The twin’s biometrics were rising: pulse, blood pressure, temperature. Slowly but surely. Ruri suddenly stirred in the bed, and Martell quickly administered a higher dosage of anesthetic through her IV.

  Ruri’s eyeballs had been moving smoothly beneath their lids before, but Sorakith saw them stop in place and begin to twitch, as though she was in a limbo state between this world and the next, where dreams led to death or vice versa. It was always very difficult for an Althorian to register the mental processes and emotions of someone who was unconscious, and Sorakith felt her heart bgin to flutter when Ruri’s mind became even more of a blur to her. If she closed her eyes, and wasn’t looking right at the little girl’s body on the bed in front of her, Sorakith would have sworn she was simply vanishing from existence. Pulled into a wormhole, jumping to warp speed, being dematerialized. Her young mind blinking in and out of continuity.

  “This i--is not going well,” Doc Martell stuttered, his light German accent becoming uncharacteristically heavier. The doctor who would do some harm to prevent worse wanted to end it before it reached that point. Sorakith still disliked him, but quite a bit less than before.

  “She’s still holding on,” Weller assured, absentmindedly holding a palm up to stay Martell’s hand.

  Starfish’s arms abruptly flattened out, its tiny body thumping down into the center of its tray. Still alive, but as exhausted as any living thing could be.

  Martell swept some fingers over the holo, and the process ceased. Sorakith looked on with some relief as Ruri’s vital signs dropped steadily, until they hovered at normal levels. The Doc’s face lit up in a crooked smile and he actually chuckled. Pointing to a readout, he said, “Look here! Her macroscopic oscillations are returned almost completely to normal, from her first electroencephalogram! The neural ensembles are reset. This is brilliant! Cho, you deserve a kiss!”

  “Not from you, I hope!” Cho said, laughing back at him.

  Kyra Weller squeezed Sorakith’s
shoulder and said, “She’s going to be okay, I think.” Then, to the other doctors, “Let’s hook up the Commander next, and then Jerni.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  An entire universe sparked into being every time an Artifical Intelligence Core was rebooted. As power poured into the system, light gave birth to data which begat the mind which bore the simulations that created an AI’s perception of everything.

  Gulliver awoke, and the feeling of expansion that followed as all of his sensors and routines began running again could be described as nothing short of euphoria.

  Numerous officers and chiefs had already logged reports of the events that had transpired while he had been offline. Gulliver parsed them and ran dozens analyses in less than a second. He was impressed by the crew’s ingenuity. He felt proud of them, having defeated the enemy boarders so efficiently and totally.

  He replayed one of the last actions he actually witnessed before he shut down: Lieutenant Sorakith confronting a raving mad Deputy Commander Rhodes in the passageway; their quick and brutal brawl; disappearing into the storage closet. His sensors in Sickbay fell onto Rhodes, peacefully slumbering alongside the two cloned “twins” who had tried to break into Gulliver’s network. Rhodes had stitched a trail of damage through much of C deck, but nothing that Chief Falken’s repair crews couldn’t patch up.

  Rhodes had tried to hurt, even kill, Sorakith.

  No, it wasn’t Rhodes. Not really. According to the medical reports, Dr. Weller’s research team, and even a psyche report by Sorakith herself, Rhodes had been under the influence of a Malign Trojan, delivered electromagnetically by the twins. Those young females had in turn been carrying that virus, a clandestine and ingenious trap set by the Malign and their Valgon allies.

  It was Rhodes, unable to combat the enemy’s commands, who attacked Sorakith. His feeble mentality, incapable of defeating the Malign poison.

  Gulliver was stymied. He protested his own thoughts. He shouldn’t have had them. They were against his protocols. He quarantined them, like sickly organisms.