by A. S. Deller
The time had come for a test. Chief Falken flung herself from a railing in the zero-G compartment that housed the electromagnetic field emitter. “Let’s fire this monster up, team,” she said, her mirror-helmeted head looking toward her crew that manned stations on the other side of a prodigious glass wall. Haley and Williams sat front-and-center, with a complement of other engineering mates at their backs.
“The fields are optimal at low power,” Williams said, giving her a thumbs-up.
“Haley, feed it some power,” Falken said as she drifted in front of a holo screen. A 3D schematic of the emitter floated before her, a multi-tiered pyramidal structure balanced atop a smaller pyramid. The fields were visibly pulsing outward from it.
“Antimatter feed is active, redirecting power through the shield conduit now. Okay, it’s at the emitter now,” Haley said, green eyes focused hard on her holos.
Lighting throbbed all over the engineering deck. Falken swiveled upside-down to check another panel’s readout.
“Just the expected surge,” said Haley.
The Chief oriented herself back in front of the emitter. “That’s it,” she whispered. Then louder, “It’s working! They’re working in tandem!”
A small cheer rose from the engineering stations.
Falken pinged both Captain Lancer and Dr. Weller over their comms, “We have one hundred and ninety-four percent shield capacity. We did it.”
Lancer’s voice replied, “Excellent, Chief. Go drink one of Dr. Cho’s illegal brews for me. In fact, treat your whole team. I’ll donate a few Units to Cho’s starfish fund, or whatever he’s calling it these days.”
In the meantime, Dr. Weller worked with Gulliver around the clock trying to reverse engineer any parts of the Valgon AI Core that were deemed remotely salvageable. Just like League and UPSN ship AI Cores, the Valgon AIs all self-destructed under certain conditions. This wouldn’t have been so bad, except for the fact that all of the secret technology behind the Alliance’s extradimensional communications ability was built into their AI Cores.
Kyra combed through all of the hardware with a couple of her computer engineers while Gulliver decompiled and decrypted all of the data retained in the scoutship’s ancillary systems. Kyra was nearly ready to pull some of her long, ebon hair out by its roots when Captain Lancer strode into her makeshift morgue of partially charred Valgon AI Core parts. Reina let out a loud breath as she scanned the tables full of ruined hardware, and saw the dark circles under the engineers’ eyes.
“We’re not getting anything out of this mess,” Kyra said flatly.
“Try everything, that’s our motto, Doctor,” the Captain said.
A ship-wide ping came over everyone’s comm implants at once. Gulliver informed the crew, “Three hours until the Talisman crosses into active scanning range of the target lek essel.”
Kyra exchanged a look of finality with her team members and the Captain. “This is it, then,” she said.
Reina Lancer gritted her jaw and replied, “We are going to make it through this. We’ve been through worse, if you think about it.”
“I’m not sure we know exactly what ‘worse’ is yet, Captain,” pronounced Dr. Weller.
Deputy Commander Rhodes strolled through the passageways of the Talisman with Lieutenant Grekkon Rax behind him. The Kenek security chief was too wide to walk down a standard starship hallway side-by-side with anyone else. It was a trademark of Kenek, and Valgon, ships and buildings that everything seemed vastly spacious. Smaller species that visited felt dwarfed by the architecture. Amazingly, the thought never occurred to Rhodes before how Rax must physically hate living aboard such a stiflingly small environment, especially for the many years longer than he had planned.
“So being stuck on this little ship has to be getting to you after all this time,” he quipped.
“Oh, it was quite claustrophobic for me the first year. I talked to Sorakith about it a lot then. While everyone else was fretting over being thrown halfway across the galaxy and missing their loved ones, I was crawling out of my skin trying to be patient and adapt to it. I’ve heard a lot of the crew talk about how the Talisman is a sort of ‘coffin’. Well, to me, it didn’t just seem to be a figurative coffin,” Rax said.
Rhodes grinned, “Well, you seem to have adapted after all.”
“The first thing I did after the Valgon scoutship got loaded into the shuttle bay was to board it and walk around for a few minutes. The passageways fit me just right. The place reeked worse than anything, though,” said Rax.
“That’d be the rotting meat they keep, unrefrigerated.”
“Or the Valgons themselves.”
Rhodes nodded toward a large hatch, “Here we are. You first. Just seeing you softens everyone up.”
Rax squinted, “Ha.”
The hatch rolled open, and Lt. Rax loped into the shuttle bay, where nearly 140 crew members were gathered with the gleaming, spike-hulled Vagon scoutship taking up most of the giant compartment behind them. Everyone saluted.
“At ease,” said Rhodes as he stood at the dais. “The Captain is on the bridge, as we are quickly approaching our point of no return. Once the Alliance knows we’re coming, we will be engaged in a life or death game of charades. We have done everything we can to make them believe that we are a League ship that has been commandeered by the Valgons they sent after us. We will continue to do everything we can to keep the illusion going even after we dock with the lek essel.
If we get that far, there are several boarding actions we need to perform to rescue some prisoners of interest, and try to get some important information. We will accomplish all of our objectives, because I believe in all of you. We will use the Alliance’s own technology to get us closer to home. We will survive this, and we will still be here tomorrow to make some serious trouble for the Alliance. You are more than the Talisman. Out here, you are all that stand in the way of evil. You are all heroes. Today we fight for ourselves, the United Powers, the entire Earth, our friends and families, the League of Kindred Worlds. Fight for it all.” With that, Rhodes stepped down. There were long seconds of silence.
Until the entire shuttle bay erupted in a cacophony of applause.
They are heroes, Rhodes thought. They will fight for it all.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Rhodes had every intention of heading right back to the bridge, but he was sent a simple text message through his comm implant. Meet me in my room, it said. From Sorakith. Why a text message? Rhodes thought. It was possible to do with the implants. The receiver simply saw a string of words, written in neon colors, a type of electromagnetically-induced phosphine. Texts could be sent and received without permission, because they weren’t complex enough to interfere with general visual stimulation. However, the comm implants allowed sending full 3D imagery. But since that could result in completely overlapping a receiver’s vision, and thus could cause accidents, sending of 3D images had to be authorized. It was rarely done, but sending texts happened even less often. There had to be a special reason to do that instead of simply talking.
He turned at the next corridor and made his way to Sorakith’s stateroom. The hatch opened as soon as he reached it, and he entered circumspectly. The room was dim, but light was on in the restroom. He saw partly into it. Some contours of her body were visible: an arm, the outer edge of a thigh. The skin smooth and bronze.
“Sorakith?” Rhodes said as he moved closer.
As the light from the restroom fell over his eyes, he stopped short. Sorakith turned. The arm was thicker, more sinewy and muscular. The thigh, harder. While Sorakith had some noticeable abdominal muscles, she didn’t have a cut eight-pack. Where she had breasts before, now there were two chiseled pectoral muscles. Sorakith faced Rhodes directly. Even her height had increased by nearly three inches. She-— he—- almost stood eye-to-eye with Rhodes.
Sorakith was a man.
Rhodes stayed there, still, almost in a state of shock. The Althorian took a step toward Rhodes, and he
instinctively stumbled backward, out of the doorway.
“Gray,” Sorakith said, cautiously extending a hand toward him. Rhodes understood right way why Sorakith had chosen to send a text message rather than call him with her voice. It was the voice of a him, deeper and resonant. Rhodes wouldn’t have recognized it.
“I don’t know what I was picturing. Maybe more of a gender neutral version of you?” Rhodes said as he kept wandering back. Finally he bumped into the dresser, toppling a short pile of folded undergarments.
Sorakith lowered his hand, knowing that it was best to not force anything. He said, “I am not Sorakith any longer. I am Kithsora.”
Rhodes couldn’t help but grin a little. “Really?”
“Yes. It is traditionally dictated,” Kithsora said.
“Is this...permanent?” Asked Rhodes, gesturing toward the Althorian’s physique.
Kithsora gazed from his feet to his shoulders, almost as if he were seeing himself for the first time. “No, no it is not. Metamorphosing into a female form takes half of the time. I can return to being the person you know me to be. Or I could remain as this.”
“I suppose it’s up to you. I mean, it is up to you, of course,” Rhodes said, still uneasy.
“It would make the most sense for me to become female again. If I get the chance. The crew, you, everyone, knows me as Sorakith.”
Rhodes pushed away from the dresser and took a step closer to his friend. “It really is up to you. If you want to stay like this, or not.”
Kithsora laughed. The bass of the sound startled him a bit, and he laughed harder. Rhodes caught on and started to laugh as well. When they were done, the Commander suddenly felt a little more comfortable in Kithsora’s presence.
“So, look at those arms. You look like you could give me a run for my money in the gym,” he said.
Kithsora flexed his right arm. “That cybernetic arm of yours makes bench pressing extraordinarily unfair.”
“Right, how about one-armed pull-ups then?”
“Not including your left arm.”
“Can’t get anything past you. Must be those psionics, huh?”
“That, or I know how you think,” said Kithsora.
“So, once this is all over, you and me, in the gym, and...200 Units to whoever can serve up the most one armed pull-ups,” offered Rhodes.
Kithsora smiled, and held out a hand. “What are you waiting for? Shake it.”
Rhodes grabbed Kithsora’s hand and shook it robustly.
Inside, he was still trying to reconcile the physical changes of his close friend, and almost-lover, with the seeming lack of mental alteration. It was nearly beyond his comprehension. He imagined Sorakith as trapped inside this weird new body, but that wasn’t the case at all. This was Sorakith. This was Kithsora.
The whole time he was sure Kithsora could tell exactly how he was feeling.
The lek essel loomed beyond the Talisman, a colossal torus of metal, the size of a small moon. It was time for some of the Alliance’s chickens to come home to roost.
Gulliver and Carly Ming had worked with Dr. Weller’s best scientists to keep the Talisman as invisible as possible on the ship’s slow sublight approach of the lek essel. They cruised as close as they could before they were noticed, and when they were contacted by the Alliance they responded with a Valgon message. It explained how during the confrontation with the Talisman, the scoutship was irreparably damaged, but the Valgon soldiers were able to overcome the soft, weak humans they encountered.
The message concluded with the account of how they, brave and loyal warriors, had taken the enemy vessel and limped back home, with one living prisoner.
On the bridge, Lt. Lille Altzen’s palms were sweating as she edged the ship closer to its docking stations. Thousands of them spiraled out from around the fifty-mile wide opening in the middle of the lek. Each docking station consisted of half a dozen huge clamps and a platform from which transfer tubes extended from air locks.
Dr. Weller kept a close watch on Gulliver’s performance. Most of his computational power was focused on a single task: Generating false life signs robust enough to fool the lek’s active biometric scans. All the while, Lt. Abdul Assif and Carly Ming monitored the scans and all communications they could pick up. The Alliance used their extradimensional transmitters when they needed to send messages across interstellar space, but within and around a ship or lek essel they functioned with local comms just like the League would rely on.
“Keevaks 149, you are cleared for docking,” came the voice of a Valgon docking attendant, instantly translated.
Rhodes answered, “Keevaks 149 is aligned. Docking now.” His words were processed and rendered in Valgon tongue to the enemy.
Captain Lancer nodded toward Rax and Greg Hu, and they left the bridge. It was time to get their special delivery ready.
Outside, the Talisman’s impulse drives were gently settling the ship against the docking clamps. It was a slow, tedious task. Anything with mass, in a frictionless environment, was dangerous. Tremendous skill honed through thousands of hours of practice was required to maneuver at sublight speeds. When a ship was moving under warp drive, long range scans keep it from colliding with anything more threatening than grains of dust. The up close and personal piloting at extremely slow speeds took the agile hands of a surgeon.
Lille Altzen was one of the best in the fleet.
Aboard the Talisman, Rax and Hu coordinated a sleight of hand trick that everyone had been unenthusiastic about undertaking, but which would probably buy the crew much more time. It had been Kyra Weller’s idea, yet another in a long line of brilliant suggestions. When Rax saw the result, standing before him like a gruesome wax dummy, he could feel bile rising in his gullet.
“I cannot believe we actually did this,” he grumbled.
Weller had planned it, but it was the work of Dr. Cho, several other exobiologists, and, amusingly, Petty Officer Tony Wong, which used the ship’s food replicator technology to craft a whole Valgon from scratch.
There it was, naked and revolting. Hu growled to a bunch of his Petty Officers, “Hurry up, finish dressing him. On the double.” He turned to Rax and said, “It smells so bad.” His nose flared as a cloying reek of ammonia and methane forced its way into his nostrils.
“Tell me about it. My sense of smell is twice as sensitive as yours.”
Petty Officer Tariq Zhang’s face curled in disgust as he pulled a breathing mask over the unliving Valgon’s mouthparts. He quickly hopped down from his perch on the cart, clapped his gloved hands together and shivered.
Almost as soon as the Valgon was appropriately covered, the POs began wheeling it on a cart toward air lock C. Doc Martell joined the group, along with Kithsora. The Althorian’s wrists were chained in a pair of standard Alliance cuffs that Rax had helped one of Chief Falken’s mechanics forge. He also wore a rebreather over his nose and mouth. The air on the lek essel would be unkind to Althorian, or human, lungs.
With a light, reverberating thump, the ship attached to several docking clamps. It was lined up with the air lock.
Hu nodded and smiled at Kithsora. He was a good man, Kithsora thought, but the Althorian didn’t need to be empathic to sense the deep discomfort Hu, and most of the male crew, now felt around him. A couple days ago, Kithsora had been a woman, one of the more strikingly beautiful ones, aboard the Talisman. Now, he was a man. Standing there, in chains, shirtless and sporting a few very minor contusions to help with the illusion that he’d been handled roughly, Kithsora was actually quite intimidating. His bronze skin was tight over chiseled muscles, and his frills were redder than they had been when he was a female. Kithsora was convincing as the only survivor of the Talisman’s crew.
As Doc Martell affixed a small battery package and a web of electrodes to the Valgon’s back and neck, Kithsora thought to Rhodes, “Good luck to you, Gray.”
Rhodes commed him back, “You take care of yourself. No matter what, we’re coming to get you. Don’t for
get that.”
“I will not.”
Doc said, “Okay, it’s ready. The puppeteer can now pull its strings.” Martell cackled under his breath, laughing at a joke no one else saw as funny. He jogged back down the passageway, bringing up a holo on his tablet of the Valgon clone’s body.
“Okay, move it into position,” Greg Hu ordered, and his POs immediately grabbed various limbs of the Valgon. They struggled for a moment, unable to budge it.
Rax huffed, “Ekton’s Fist, do I actually have to touch this damned thing?” Holding his breath, the big Kenek reached under the Valgon corpse’s arms and hefted it up from the cart. With the Petty Officers’ help, he stood it up on the deck behind Kithsora. “Alright, everyone pull back to passageway C8. Weapons hot. Doc, you ready?”
“Yes, yes,” followed Martell’s all-too-enthused reply. “Activating the puppet now.”
“Please don’t call it a puppet,” Petty Officer Tania Morris begged.
“I will call it whatever I like.”
“Put a cap on it and do your jobs!” Rax roared. The stench was getting to him.
In the bridge, Lancer stood in front of her chair, her knuckles white as she held on to a console. If this part of the plan works, she thought, we still have five more parts that need to work. Every one seemed to have no better odds than a coin toss. Any statistician would scoff at a successful outcome. That was just one reason why Reina Lancer wasn’t a statistician.
The Valgon lek dock attendant’s voice arrived again, “Keevaks 149, we are opening air lock for prisoner transfer.”
Rhodes spoke again, “Confirmed. Our crew will remain on board and continue our decontamination. We must take no chances.”
“Permission granted. Krell Skeer will be handling the prisoner intake.”
Lancer and Rhodes exchanged a look of mixed relief and tension. This was working. So far.
Three decks below, the hatch to air lock C opened automatically, and Kithsora stepped into the compartment. He looked over his shoulder, his frills twisting as his back muscles bunched, and watched as the tall Valgon corpse’s eyes flicked open, revealing their inky coldness.