by Geoff North
Another one reached across the table and tugged insistently at the sleeve of his tunic. Tell us something bad. Something so bad, you could never share it with anyone else.
There were four of them in the booth with him. They’d been prodding and asking him stupid questions for… Tor couldn’t remember for how long. He hadn’t given them permission to sit. More waddled over, their big heads wagging from to side to side. They pulled the others away from Tor, and crawled up into the booth after them. They asked even dumber questions.
What do you think about when you’re falling asleep? Let us in. Have you ever murdered anyone?
“Piss off, all of you.” He waved an arm over his head, tried to get Ma’s attention. “I need a drink.”
Another woman appeared before him, holding a dark bottle in one hand and two tall glasses in the other. “I’ll drink with you, General.”
“Mosa. I had a feeling you’d be back.” The Hunn were still squeezing in on him from both sides, but their annoying questions had become less than a buzz in the back of his head. “Sorry there’s no room for you to sit.”
She poured wine into the glasses. “Standing’s fine. Doing anything is just fine when you’re dead.”
Milun Mosa Cyon. She had been on the original mission Tor led to rescue Hadar Cen from Pegan captivity. The mission had failed. The entire rescue party—what remained of them—was captured. Mosa took her own life shortly after. Her spirit had been visiting Tor occasionally ever since.
He took a sip of the wine. It had no taste at all. “You never liked me when you were alive. Why do you keep haunting me now?”
“Because you need to redeem yourself, General, and it’s better to hear the hard truth from someone that despises you, not someone that likes you.”
“Don’t give me anymore of that crap. I don’t need to redeem myself to Sulafat. Admiral Lennix was the rightful commander of Ambition. It was his mission to carry out the assault against Pega… I was just following original orders.”
“And how did that mission work out? Did your orders include shooting Sulafat in the chest?”
“I wasn’t myself. The Hunn had gotten inside my head… I was groggy, couldn’t think straight.” Tor pushed the glass away. He pressed his palms against his eyes. “If I could take back what I did… If I had a chance to prove—”
“Save it for Ly Sulafat. He needs you more than ever now. Your chance is coming sooner than you think. Be ready for it. Be prepared.”
“What’re you talking about?” Tor lowered his hands from his face. “What’s going to happen?”
Mosa Cyon was gone.
The Hunn-ephei were still clustered around him in the booth. They were tugging at his clothes, scratching at his neck and cheeks with their long, slimy fingers. The questioning and prodding continued.
Tell us something bad. What is your favorite color? Let us in. What is your greatest fear?
Let us in. Let us in.
***
Fighter garage 1 had been destroyed. Wez climbed up the remains of two fighter ships melted into one solid glob for a better look. Hundreds more ships stretched off throughout the bay, burnt together, twisted and smoking in a sea of silent destruction. The Hunn-ephei were everywhere, crawling over the wreckage like ants, plucking out pieces of charred computer hard drives and bones of dead soldiers.
The blackened canopy of a fighter next to Wez popped up in the endless debris. Laris Bear emerged from a dark hole. “I can’t find my wife, boss.” He sat on the ship’s bent frame, crunching glass beneath him. His flight suit was in tatters, pieces of it were stuck into his burned, bleeding skin. “I’ve been looking for months, searching as hard as I can, but still nothing.”
“Why are we here, Laris?”
The fighter pilot scratched his head. “Flying away and taking on the Pegans by myself was a mistake. I should’ve stayed on Ambition. I should’ve stayed here with her.”
Wez crawled down and worked his way over to the troubled ghost. He grabbed Laris’s shoulders and shook him. “Why do you keep coming to me? What is this all about?”
“This?” He looked out over the bay. “Oh… None of this is real, not to you, anyway. It’s just a place I keep returning to. I’m looking for my wife. She was killed in the—”
Wez slapped him across the face. “Platoon Chief Laris Bear! Answer my question. Where the hell am I?”
Laris snapped to attention. “You’re on Alderamin 4, strapped to a chair. The Hunn-ephei are trying to break you down. The Captain is going to resist. Get ready to move.”
***
“Goddamn it, Hadar, recycle your cabin atmosphere! Looks like you’re drowning in the crap from up here.”
Hadar leaned forward, fanning the smoke away from the pilot console with his gloved hands for a better view of the controls. He found what he was looking for and pressed a button on his lower left side. The smoke was pulled instantly away and sucked out somewhere beneath him.
“Good job,” Kraz said. “My secondary pilot controls are out… do you still have main control at your end?”
Most of the console before him was lit in green. “Yes.”
“Well don’t just sit there. See if you can correct this tumble we’re in. I’m going to puke up my breakfast in about ten more seconds if you don’t.”
Hadar wasted four more of those ten seconds trying to remember where the ship’s trajectory override controls were. On the right, above my head. He started to reach for the three colored toggles and then stopped.
“Wait. Something isn’t right… I’ve done all this before.”
“Of course you’ve done it before.” Kraz laughed. “You’re in a recurring dream.”
“And you’re still dead, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, still dead. But that’s not what’s important now. Do you know where you are?”
Hadar looked around again at the controls and lights surrounding him. The view was becoming hazy. The grey smoke was creeping up again around his knees. “I’m inside Bite, the fighter we flew on the scouting mission into the Pegan system. We took a hit, got separated from the others.”
“Yeah, yeah, we’re in Bite, and in a few more seconds the top half of my body will disintegrate. That’s not what I meant, though. Do you know where you really are?”
The smoke was getting thicker. It was beginning to work its way into Hadar’s helmet. He closed his eyes and concentrated. “I’m in a chair… strapped down. The Captain… some of the others are with me. The smoke, it’s getting worse. I can hear it. The smoke’s whispering in my ears, Kraz. Like a thousand voices in my head all at once, digging in, asking questions.”
“It’s the Hunn-ephei. They’re inside all of you. Ignore the voices, block the bastards out. Listen to me, Hadar, and me only. You’re on Alderamin 4, in the city of Waih. You’ve been taken into the heart of the city, a place the Hunn call the Cerebrea-Hub. This is where the four of you will strike back and inflict the most damage.”
“How can we inflict any damage strapped into chairs?”
“Sulafat is the key. He’s carrying a weapon. We’ve brought you in this far so he can use it.”
“You’re wrong. The captain doesn’t have a weapon, none of us do.”
“Sol-damn it, Cen,” the old soldier snapped. “Quit talking back to me. Activate your holo-grid and memorize the city schematic.”
Hadar clicked a switch on the panel. A translucent image appeared on the glass dome above his head. He expected to see stars positioned on a yellow-lined grid, but saw an intricate blue map of buildings and walkways instead. A pulsing red dot appeared in the center. “That’s the Cerebrea-Hub, where you’re being held right now,” Kraz continued. A thin white line shot out from the dot. It made a series of intricate twists and turns through the isometric image, tracing out a route to another part of the city. “Memorize the path. It will lead you to a shipping terminal. You’ll find the transport ship you arrived on there. Are you listening? Are you memorizing it?”
“Yes, I’m
trying my best,” Hadar said. Memorizing the domed structures, each corridor and doorway within, and the distances they would need to travel, seemed impossible. He stared at the colors, focused in on the white line suspended slightly above the blue, and allowed the image to burn into his mind. He closed his eyes and saw it there. “I’ve got it. I’ll remember.”
“You’ll have to, because I won’t be going with you. Someone has to stay behind to drop the planetary shields to let you through.”
Kraz’s voice had changed, becoming softer, belonging to someone else. “Look at me,” a woman spoke.
Hadar twisted in the pilot’s seat, and looked out over his shoulder through the canopy cover. Kraz Corvus was no longer seated in the weapons turret. Jule Adeen was. “Wake up, Hadar. Wake up now!”
***
Sulafat heard a hissing noise. He opened his eyes and saw what looked like yellow smoke sifting through the thin layer of cloth covering his chest. “I’m on fire,” he said in a stunned, sleepy tone.
Someone was frantically trying to release the straps on his wrists. “You’re not on fire, Captain, that isn’t smoke.” Jule Adeen took a hold of his chin and went to work on the metal band holding his skull next. “Your chest brace has released a gas lethal to the Hunn-ephei. There’s a release clasp on the right-hand side. Remove it, and help me get your men free.”
She finished with him and moved to the puzzled-looking Tor next. Wez and Hadar were beginning to regain consciousness as well. Sulafat reached up under his arm and found the clasp. He’d always known it was there, but never even contemplated trying to remove the brace. “But it’s keeping me alive.”
“It repaired the damage to your body months ago. You don’t need the brace anymore, none of us do. It’s served its purpose.”
He snapped the clasp free and discovered a smaller button located beneath. Sulafat pressed it; the entire mechanism popped away from his body and fell to the floor. Yellow gas continued to spray out from dozens of tiny openings. It swirled and built into frenzied clouds, rolling outwards and away. That’s when Sulafat saw the effect it had already started to take on the Hunn-ephei.
Most of them were already dead, still lying-sitting on their diagonally positioned platforms. Their black eyes were steaming and leaking pus-colored fluid. Further away, hundreds more were slowly trying to crawl back from the creeping mist. It caught them too, dropping them to the floor in a short series of convulsions.
He looked away and went to help Hadar with his straps. Jule continued talking. “The toxin will spread quickly. The Hunn-ephei will eventually be able to contain it, but by that time we’ve theorized half the planet’s population will be dead.”
“There were never any ghosts,” Sulafat said. “It was you the entire time. You were always close by when we had our visitations.”
“In our resistance against the Hunn, some of my people developed a secondary subconscious defense system. It’s like a hidden room deep inside our minds they can’t see into.”
Tor stood, rubbing his temples. “But you can travel out when you’re in this state, can’t you? You can get into the minds of other Pegans with this ability… latch onto memories of people they used to know, make them seem real.”
Jule got in behind Hadar’s chair and finished removing the metal clasps around his skull. “Human minds are even easier for us to access.” She kissed the top of his head, and whispered. “Forgive me, but there was no other way.”
Hadar twisted away from her. “You’ve been leading me on since the beginning. Back on Pega, when we first met, that’s where it all started. You pretended to care about me… pretended to fall in love with me.”
“I suspect they’ve been leading all of us on,” Sulafat said. He stared out over the multitudes of dead, and still twitching Hunn bodies. “The entire Ambition-Pegan war was staged. They didn’t want to destroy us completely. They wanted us—a small handful of Ambition’s crew—brought to the Alderamin home world under false pretenses to fulfil their primary objective.”
“To destroy the Hunn-ephei civilization once and for all,” Jule finished.
“We were the Trojan horse.”
“I don’t know what that means, Captain, and there’s no time for an explanation.” She pushed a small square of plastic into Hadar’s hand and squeezed his fingers around it. “This is a prime security key card. It’ll open any door in the city, and will get you back onboard that transport ship. All you have to do is get there. The card’s been pre-programmed—automatic launch, atmospheric escape velocity, Alderamin-Rift navigation coordinates—it’s all stored on the card.”
“What the hell’s an Alderamin rift?” Wez asked.
“We’re not leaving the planet without the rest of our people,” Sulafat interrupted. “Tell us how to get to them.”
A dark expression fell over her face. “That won’t be possible… The others are gone.”
“Gone? Gone where?”
“The Hunn only needed three human minds to experiment on. They chose carefully—mental aptitude, life experience, and military knowledge were all taken into consideration. You, Captain, Tor, and Wez were finally chosen.” She looked into Hadar’s eyes. “I convinced them to take you as a fourth. There was nothing I could do to save the rest.”
“Where are they?” Sulafat asked quietly, fearing to hear the answer. “What happened to my people?”
“They were considered expendable. Six hours ago, all twenty-seven were put to death.”
Sulafat could only utter a single word. “No.” He shook his head. “Not after all we’ve been through.” He closed his eyes, tried to convince himself he was still in some kind of dream-state—that the Hunn-ephei were attempting to break his will by shattering his only reason left for living.
“I did everything I could,” Jule said. “I pleaded they be returned to Pega, but the Hunn said it would be a waste of resources. I’m so sorry.”
Sulafat opened his eyes. It wasn’t a dream. Sheratan Ries didn’t suddenly appear and laugh in his face, calling him a gullible old fool. There was only Jule Adeen, and he was sick of hearing her apologize. He wanted to strangle her, to wipe that forlorn expression of pity from her face. He took one step towards her and stopped. The floor was shaking. Something big was headed their way. A monstrous form appeared out of the yellow mist. The Prime-Hunn stepped on the corpses of its fallen minions, squishing them beneath its massive feet.
What have you done? It screamed inside their heads with enough mental force to throw them back into the chairs. How could you do this to my… to our children?
“Go,” Jule whispered to Hadar. “Go now while I try and distract it.”
Captain Sulafat and Canis were already climbing over the dead beings, rushing for the nearest exit away from the creature. “You’re coming with us,” Hadar grabbed Jules and pulled her into him.
She pushed him away. “I’ve been preparing for this day my entire life, Hadar. I’m not afraid to die. Go with your friends, escape from this planet.”
He went for her again, but Tor Emin got in the way. “You heard the lady, Cen. If she wants to take that thing on all by herself, I say let her.”
Traitorous… scheming… Pegan.
The Prime Hunn reached down and clamped its hands around Jule’s shoulders. It plucked her off her feet and up into the air. Tor pulled Hadar away, and the two men set after the others.
Hadar didn’t look back as he heard the woman’s bones start to break.
Chapter 23
Commander Edmund met his SIC in the Retribution shuttle. Barret had already taken the grand tour through some of the Ambition sections with their chief engineer, Lt. Kelly, and had called for the clandestine meeting with his commanding officer.
“We could’ve done this somewhere else,” Edmund said, sitting in the travel bench opposite the SIC. “Ambition’s a big ship, hundreds of levels, and nearly a millennium of history to explore. Why did we have to meet here?”
“You might want to shut the door
.”
Edmund smiled. “You really do want this to be private conversation.” Barret remained impassive. The commander reached back and pulled down a lever. The door lowered and thudded into the shuttle frame with a hollow thud. “You’ll have me checking for listening devices next.”
“I’ve already done that, we’re fine. Listen closely to what I have to say. This is serious.”
The smile left Edmund’s face. “Is this something to do with Shain Agle?”
Barret waved his question away. “This doesn’t have anything to do with Ambition’s crew, but the ship itself. I took the tour with Command Second Vin Vir. She showed me a lot in the last hour. The hydroponics level, water treatment and recycling, atmospheric control, and weapons manufacturing. They’ve done remarkably well sustaining themselves over the last seven centuries.”
“Where are you going with this, SIC?”
“While I was walking around in this living museum, Lieutenant Kelly was going through the main propulsion levels with Ambition’s chief engineer, a fellow named Gacrux Crucis. What he learned was far more important.” Barret leaned forward. “Ambition’s fold drive is fully operational. The mechanical principles that power this ship aren’t all that dissimilar to Retribution. Kelly seems confident that the repairs to our ship could be made here, using parts and materials from Ambition.”
“Did Crucis agree with him?”
“Kelly didn’t share any of this with him. He came straight to me. And now I’m reporting directly to you.”
“Why all the secrecy? Captain Drac and his crew have already agreed to help us.”
Barret leaned towards Edmund even closer and whispered. “I don’t think they’d agree with stripping Ambition to the point where the ship could no longer function. That’s what it’ll take.”
“That’s ridiculous. If it wasn’t for Ambition, our ship would be rubble. They saved our lives.”
“Don’t forget Alderamin, son. Don’t forget our mission.”
“To hell with the mission.” Edmund stood. “I’d rather die than go through with what you’re suggesting. My God, Corwin… listen to what you’re saying.”