Prisoners of Darkness

by Jason Anspach

  Lao Pak looked at Masters with humorless eyes. “Ha. Ha. So very funny. Of course this ship bad. It have to fly to Herbeer. You think I stupid, take luxury yacht into that place?”

  “A luxury yacht might at least have a chance of holding together,” Pike said. “I’ve heard the entries into Herbeer’s atmosphere are brutal.”

  “You worry too much.” Lao Pak reached for the light speed controls. But instead of turning on the ship’s dampeners and spooling them up with the slow ease that allowed them to comfortably keep the inertia from overwhelming those inside, he slammed his hand on the emergency button—a last-minute protection for a slow-moving cruiser caught by pirates or, in the old days, enemy capital ships.

  Everyone was thrown back as the freighter darted away into the swirling folds of hyperspace. Alarms and klaxons blared at near-deafening levels, with flashing red lights washing over the bridge.

  “Not good!” shouted Bear. He was the only one who stayed on his feet, gripping the captain’s chair Lao Pak was glued to.

  “Press button!” yelled Lao Pak. “Press button!”

  Bear reached out and swatted the emergency hyperdrive button with his great paw of a hand. The freighter dumped out of hyperspeed, causing everyone to lurch and stumble forward with the abrupt shift back into subspace.

  “Sorry,” said Lao Pak, wearily keying in something on the console before him. “I forget to enter jump coordinates.”

  “You forgot to enter the jump coordinates?” shouted Fish. “You could have gotten us all killed!”

  “Smashed us into the heart of a gas giant!” bellowed Masters.

  “Dumped us out of hyperspace into an asteroid field!” added Bear.

  “I say sorry already,” Lao Pak replied. “Beside, you not dead. You alive.”

  “No thanks to you,” grumbled Pike.

  Lao Pak’s hand hovered over the emergency hyperdrive switch. Once again, he seemed intent on jumping hard instead of easing in like a more capable pilot would.

  This time the legionnaires all found something to grab hold of.

  ***

  It was a short jump to Herbeer. The survival station Chhun had chosen as a staging area was the nearest one possible to the prison planet. Lao Pak had spent the jump time going over how he thought the infiltration should go, with helpful advice like “Don’t be noisy” and “Gomarii are dumb, but not that dumb.”

  Chhun finally got Lao Pak to shut up by threatening to let Bear have three minutes alone with the pirate. After that, Lao Pak sat stewing as the kill team rehearsed their exit course from the ship’s hold, studying maps of the synth mines they’d acquired through Dark Ops Intelligence. There were lots of places to disappear to… once they got off the ship. Doing that undetected would be the most difficult part of the mission.

  “Lao Pak,” Chhun said, “this is your ship. Do you know of any way off it other than the primary crew entrances, hold doors… or airlock?”

  “Oh! So now you want Lao Pak’s help.” The pirate puffed out his chest, full of self-importance. “Yeah. There ways. Maybe you soldier boys listen to Lao Pak instead of practicing running through open doors, huh?”

  “That little move through a doorway you’ve been watching,” Chhun said, resting his hands on his knees as he bent down to look at Lao Pak face to face, “is usually the last thing an MCR sees. Or a pirate. Like you.”

  Lao Pak gulped. “Like… me?”

  “C’mon,” said Masters. “I mean, Lao Pak, you were friends with Captain Keel. You’ve got what’s obviously a stolen freighter…”

  “And you’ve got a date with Gomarii slavers,” Chhun concluded. “Doesn’t look good, Lao Pak.”

  “That… that crazy,” Lao Pak said, struggling to get the words out. “You crazy. I help Republic. I hero. Deserve medal.”

  Chhun stood back up. “So cut the twarg dung and answer straight. What’s the trick to getting off this rig unseen?”

  Lao Pak’s face fell. “Okay, I show you. Soldier boys all so sensitive.” He moved to the command console and began cycling through holofeeds. “There special door by cargo hold, let you drop right down onto deck beneath ship. It long walk, and lift not work, so you look at camera.”

  “Fine.” Chhun and his team crowded around the monitors and watched as Lao Pak cycled through the feeds.

  The holocams covered what seemed like all of the ship’s interiors. Long empty corridors appeared and disappeared with a swipe of Lao Pak’s grimy fingers, as did the drive room, various support systems, quarters, even—Chhun thought, though it had flitted by quickly—a view of the showers. If Lao Pak didn’t install that camera himself, the ship’s previous captain apparently liked to keep a little too close of an eye on his crew.

  “This special cargo hold.” Lao Pak zoomed in on a square hold. It was furnished not with the typical restraint bars, tie-down rings, and containment fields, but with cots crowded together and stacked as bunks from floor to ceiling.

  “That hold looks like it’s designed to transport people as freight,” Fish said with a cold anger. Whenever they’d performed an op involving the Gomarii or other slavers, Fish had always carried with him an extra edge. Probably something from his past. Chhun had never been able to get to the bottom of it, but now he worried for the first time that it might be a source of conflict within his team. His mission was to rescue Major Owens, not to free the slaves.

  “That not my fault,” Lao Pak said. “Gomarii expect slave ship to arrive. What happen if I come with assault shuttle, huh? They blow you up before you get off.” He zoomed in on a bunk set against the portside wall. “Under there is door. Chute take you right outside ship. It for smuggling slaves past planetary customs—when that required.”

  “We taking slaves with us, Cap?” Fish asked.

  Chhun shook his head, but not definitively. “That’s not in the mission plan, but if the opportunity comes up… we’ll take it.”

  Fish nodded once and stepped back, finding a shadow against the wall and planting himself there.

  Something that Chhun thought he saw while Lao Pak was scrolling through the holofeeds made him take control of the console and begin to swipe back through. “You weren’t planning on taking any slaves to sell for yourself, were you, Lao Pak?”

  The pirate placed both palms on his cheeks, affecting surprise. “Oh, no! Lao Pak never do that. It illegal, Captain Chhun.”

  Chhun gave a humorless smile. He stopped the feed on a small cell, the holocam revealing only a single corner. But now that the image was still, Chhun’s suspicions were confirmed. Someone was detained in that cell. A man’s leg, wearing a calf-length boot, was visible. “How about deliveries? You making one to the slavers?”

  “What? That illegal too!” protested Lao Pak. “You all say Lao Pak bad guy. Not true!”

  “Probably a misunderstanding,” Chhun said.

  “Yes. It big misunderstanding.”

  “So what, exactly, do you do then, Lao Pak?” Chhun asked.

  Lao Pak’s eyes shifted frantically from side to side, resting for a split second on every legionnaire in his field of vision. “Oh… I do same thing as Keel. Legal things. Very good citizen of Republic. Everyone say that about me.”

  “And what, exactly, does Keel do?” asked Masters, perfectly capturing Chhun’s tone. His impression made Pike begin shaking with inwardly held laughter behind Lao Pak and out of his view.

  Lao Pak’s eyes again searched the room before he finally exploded with a loud, “Okay!”

  “Okay what?” Chhun asked.

  “Okay, yes, I sell him to Gomarii!” Lao Pak slumped in his seat as though pouting. He raised a finger like he was making a salient point. “But this one okay to make slave.”

  “How can it possibly be okay?” Fish pressed.

  Lao Pak smiled. “He MCR!”

  The legionnaires all looked at one another.

  “You’re selling MCR into slavery,” Bear said, his voice suggesting that the burly leej might not have thought
this was an entirely bad idea.

  “Oh, yeah. That all they good for. Like I say, I good citizen.”

  Chhun shook his head. “No. Can’t let you do it. How’d you end up with the prisoner?”

  Lao Pak made no reply.

  “Listen,” Chhun said. “One of the first things we did was run a cross-reference on your bios and facial capture when we met.” He knocked on his helmet. “These buckets aren’t just to keep our heads warm. We know you’re a pirate, wanted and operating near Pellek. You said the magic word, ‘Keel,’ but that doesn’t mean we’re going to have endless patience with you lying to us. So tell me: where’d you find this guy?”

  “This what always happen when I work with Keel!” Lao Pak banged a fist against his chair’s armrest. “Keel capture him and leave him with me to be pirate. But boy general, he terrible pirate. Always do something stupid, scare ships away. I tell him he mess up one more time I sell him to Gomarii.”

  “And he messed up one more time?” Masters asked dryly.

  “No, but he would have, and since ship was already leaving…”

  “We ought to arrest him,” said Fish, his arms crossed. “Or better yet, take him into the cargo hold and put a blaster bolt in his—”

  “No!” Lao Pak interrupted. “You can’t do that!”

  “Technically we can,” said Pike. “You willingly aligned yourself with an enemy of the Republic. In doing so, you became party to—”

  “I say no because Keel do same thing!”

  “How do you mean?” Chhun asked.

  Lao Pak gave a devilish grin. “He run around with MCR too. Just give me boy general when he stole my coder from me.”

  “Garret’s MCR?” Masters said with a shake of his head. “Didn’t seem like the type to get involved in war or politics… just sort of along for the ride.”

  “No, not him. The girl… the princess. She MCR. I want her, but Keel so greedy, he only give me boy general who is terrible at fighting and gave all his family money to MCR.”

  All the legionnaires had met Leenah. Had liked her. Chhun had never heard Keel mention that she was a member of the Mid-Core Rebellion—not in person, not in any of his reports. And with how friendly he’d seen the two of them getting back on the Indelible VI… it didn’t sit well. Not at all.

  “Cap?” Masters said, clearly disturbed by this revelation.

  “We’ll… figure that out later. For now, let’s get ready for entry into Herbeer.” Chhun looked down at Lao Pak. “You can use your MCR to build credibility with the Gomarii while we get off the ship… but we’re not letting you sell him, or anyone else, to them. Understand?”

  Like a scolded child, Lao Pak nodded.

  Cybar Ship Mother

  Position Unknown

  There was nothing but darkness.

  But a wobanki didn’t mind the darkness. Darkness was for hunting. Darkness was life for the wobanki.

  Skrizz had been in some kind of holding cell for days now. He was starving. He flicked his tail and once more crossed back and forth across the small cell.

  He popped his claws and flexed them.

  The last thing he remembered before ending up in this cell was being in the cockpit of the Forresaw. He had been with the human female running the operation, Broxin, and the monkey prey.

  His most fervent desire was to kill the monkey.

  And then there’d been gas.

  Clouds of gas had filled the hangar. Skrizz remembered trying to find the switches on the assault frigate’s panels to close the hatches, but the gas had come in like a sudden tidal wave.

  He turned to see the human hit the deck, passed out. And the monkey coming for him with a maintenance tool. He remembered popping his claws, ready to kill the monkey…

  And then lights out.

  Now he was here. He’d been here ever since he’d regained consciousness. There was no monkey to kill. No human female. No Prisma.

  Skrizz liked none of this.

  Again he popped his claws and tried to find a door in the cell. There were corners, but no seams that indicated an exit. He turned again, expecting to see something different even though he’d done this countless times.

  This was ever the way of cats. They never expected things to remain the same. Vigilant expectation for change was the way of the wobanki. The good wobanki, that is.

  It was the path of survival.

  And… then there was an opening. A gap, widening on its own. Waiting. Inviting.

  Cautiously, Skrizz stepped through it.

  He stood in a long and narrow corridor. It was dark, but again, the wobanki didn’t see darkness the way most other species did. There was enough light to hunt by, and without even consenting on any conscious level to entering the hunt, the wobanki had done just that.

  Crouched, claws ready, the wobanki padded down the corridor. He came to an open room filled with weapons.

  Heavy blasters, light blasters, slug throwers, spears, knives of all sorts, grenades, ancient tribal weapons from across all the known cultures… everything. And next to this was military gear and tactical equipment. Belts and merc armor. Even the legionnaire armor and all its task-specific variations, including the stealth armor the Nether Ops team had worn.

  Skrizz began to gear up.

  He took a heavy blaster and slung it across his back. He picked up a double-barreled blaster, his personal favorite, and stuck it under his furry armpit. His eyes raced greedily across all the wonderful weapons.

  He would need a weapons belt.

  He found one and strapped it on. It fit perfectly. As though it had been made and fitted just for him.

  He found a thigh holster for the double-barreled blaster, made some quick adjustments so it was just the way he liked it, and holstered the weapon. He drew it three times in rapid lightning-quick draws. Satisfied, he scooped up two powerful light blasters and secured those within the weapons belt. Then he moved on to the holdout blasters. He grabbed one of those and found a shoulder harness that fit two. He retrieved another holdout blaster, a twin of the other, and secured both.

  Knives seemed redundant what with his claws, but he took five anyway.

  Now he surveyed the explosives. The easiest way to carry them was to take one bandolier of fraggers and one of bangers, so that’s what he did.

  He inspected the armor for a long moment, but wobanki didn’t wear armor. With a final dismissive twitch of his whiskers he turned away.

  On the wall opposite the entrance, a seam opened, just like in his cell, as though the wall itself had sensed that the big cat had all the weapons he would need. Skrizz stepped through into another passage.

  This passage was alive with a gentle blue circuitry that coursed through the thick walls, pulsing with alien symmetry.

  Beyond this, Skrizz found the arena.

  It was high and dark and massive. Giant oblong blocks lay scattered about and stacked atop one another in an almost haphazard fashion, all of them alive with that same glowing symmetry of blue circuitry and alien metal. And even though this place felt like an arena, a place where sports of the deadly kind must be viewed, there were definite edges here, and no seating. Tall slate-gray walls guarded the space. Yet the feeling of being watched and judged by many remained.

  Skrizz immediately smelled danger.

  “Welcome, wobanki,” intoned a calm voice across the wide space. “You have been chosen to help us refine and test.”

  Skrizz watched the shadows, looking for the source of the voice, knowing he would not find it. Knowing somehow that this was a kind of ending. Which was a part of the wobanki mindset even the wobanki tied to ignore.

  Their priests had called it The Nine Endings.

  Which one was this, thought Skrizz in a part of his mind he seldom paid attention to and failed to pay much attention to now. Battle was taking over everything. His heart slowed, and his brain flooded his muscles with chemicals that were like endorphins, but designed for muscles. He felt his eyesight sharpen, his hearing in
tensify, and his whiskers darting ever so slightly about. Tasting, testing, sensing, informing.

  The Wobanki Battle Calm.

  It was here. He knew it was here when he wanted to do the opposite of all the right things and instead shed his weapons in favor of just his claws and claws alone.

  Because that’s how it should be at the end of things.

  Claws and blood.

  Blood and claws.

  “The wobanki are the apex of naturally evolved predators,” began the calm voice, its subtle power pulsing out over the ether of the still, dark space. “There is no finer combat hunter specimen in the galaxy than a wobanki warrior. We have already bested a legionnaire. But of course, they have their armor. For purposes of this exercise, it is our desire to kill something that kills as a way of life. We have selected you, wobanki.”

  From the darkness beyond the seemingly tumbled blocks alive with circuitry, there appeared an eight-foot-tall war bot. It looked new and updated. Its armor was skinned in matte steel. Its main processing unit was shaped like the helmet of some ancient warrior from the age of spear and short sword. From a time of galleys and massed phalanx attacks. Its three glowing optical assemblies swept over the arena and landed on the wobanki.

  “Begin.”

  Skrizz leapt away, preferring movement and evasion to first blows exchanged.

  The Cybar Spartan merely pivoted into a combat crouch, raised the heavy tri-barrel N-50 it carried as a rifle, and unloaded on its target.

  Hot white fire chased the dancing cat as Skrizz dashed and leapt for cover. Missing with every blast, the war bot tilted the weapon ever so slightly and advanced toward the last known location of the target.

  Weaving through the maze of stones alive with glowing circuitry, Skizz came out on the far side. He just barely had time to react to the Spartan. It had anticipated his path and come out ahead of him.

  It lowered its weapon and fired at a high cycle rate.

  There was no dancing here. No bullfighter’s game the wobanki would have loved. Instead the catman was scrambling for cover and only just getting behind it as the air all about him was filled with the sizzling cut of blaster fire.