by Chris Reher
The nod he received from Dmitra was on the frosty side. “I decided to see for myself. We’ll meet with security down here. Doctor Patman was about to brief me on the latest cases.”
Celois peered over her head into the room behind her. A Caspian sat on the floor there with his arms wrapped around his knees. His people bore a richly patterned hide which they rarely covered with clothing and he had been allowed to discard his hospital garb. The yellow raptor eyes stared listlessly at nothing, oblivious to the people on the other side of the window. A medic sat on the floor beside him, propped against the wall in what seemed to be a mixture of patience and boredom.
“This is Ras Ceta, our first victim,” Patman explained.
Celois remembered the name from their earlier meeting. This was the Caspian rebel that had led the Vanguard agents to Rishabel. He’d been found wandering near the docks and some of his peculiar ramblings had worried the local security force to contact Targon’s specialists. If not for several ships in the area turning up with dead pilots, his tales of people living in his head would not have caught Air Command’s attention. But the claim that the voices originated in sub-space were uncomfortably reminiscent of several recent distress calls. All six ships with such occurrence recently travelled through sub-space. “Your diagnosis?”
“Still too soon to tell. This is not a mental illness found among Caspians. There is something foreign inhabiting his system, but it’s not organic, nor caused by any mechanical means. Even so, it caused the formation of a separate neural circuit sharing this man’s nervous system. If you want me to throw an analogy in the air, I’d say he’s two people in one body. Or was. The alien neural activity has ceased now. He claims that his… passenger has died. It seems to have caused his current state which is very much symptomatic of depression.”
Celois sighed. If this followed the same process exhibited by another pilot, the Caspian himself would not live much longer, either. “A non-organic parasite? Is that even possible?”
“You’ll have to consult your physicists, Colonel. Sub-space is not my area of expertise. It’s certainly nothing we’ve ever encountered in real-space. So far.”
She gestured for them to move along. The door to the next room was open and a Centauri woman, reclining on a tilted chair and apparently unconscious, served as the center of attention for several technicians. Celois winced when he took in the array of diagnostic equipment connected to her remotely or by wire. One of her elbows twitched rhythmically in response to some stimulus.
They continued to yet another exam room. “This is the patient you’ll want to speak with,” Patman said.
A Centauri sat stiffly on the edge of his bed, also staring into space, but looking far less dejected than his neighbor. Whatever the man was experiencing was not distressing to him and even now a small smile played over his lips.
“He’s coherent?” Dmitra asked.
“Quite. He’s a communications officer on a freighter heading to Pelion. Your people checked that ship out. No special cargo, no smuggling, no rebel affiliations. Just a transport. No one else aboard was affected. When he started to talk about a voice in his head they isolated him in their med station and contacted Targon.” Doctor Patman checked her data unit. “He goes by name of Orajah. Besides the two patients you’ve already seen, he’s the only one to survive the infection.”
“Wasn’t there another one? The Union pilot?”
“Unfortunately, when we tried to scan more precisely to see if we can separate the second set of neural tissue from the Human victim, she died without apparent cause. I agree with your theory that we are dealing with sentient beings.”
“Murderous ones,” Celois muttered.
“Perhaps. The pilot was not very… cooperative with our efforts to remove the parasite. Maybe we triggered some self-defense mechanism. If so, it was at the cost of its own life. We did not detect any energy transfer upon death.”
“So not likely contagious. Or replicating.”
“Not in any organic way that we can determine.”
“I’d like to speak with the Centauri,” Celois said.
Doctor Patman ran her hand over a sensor and the door before them opened to allow the colonel to enter. He handed his sidearm to his aide and gestured for her to wait in the lab with the general.
Orajah looked up at the colonel but remained seated and silent. Celois stepped awkwardly past the bed and took a chair placed beside it. “Evening,” he said cheerfully.
The Centauri nodded. “More questions?”
“No, I just wanted to chat,” Celois replied. “I’m sure you’re tired of the doctors by now.”
“Yes. But the food here is good, so that’s something.” Orajah shifted his gaze beyond the colonel and then back again. “I suppose you want to know about Oss.”
“Oss? Your… guest has a name?”
“No. I call it that. I had an invisible friend when I was a boy. It seemed fitting. I think it likes having a name.”
“You can talk to it?”
“Of course. In a way. It doesn’t really understand what we are. It made a shape for me, so I can see it. It’s right over there, behind you.”
Celois turned abruptly and saw nothing but a tray of food not yet cleared from the bedside table. Still, the thought that Orajah saw something there made the closely-cropped hair at his nape bristle. “What does it look like?”
The Centauri sighed. “I answered all that already. Several times. I’m sure it’s in a report somewhere. I thought you didn’t have any questions.”
“You can imagine our curiosity, I’m sure,” Celois replied. As a civilian, this man did not owe him the rank and file subordination that he was used to but even civilians tended to exhibit respect for Air Command. Without the Union’s military, few freighters would make it far without paying tribute to pirates and rebels. Orajah did not seem to care who had come to interview him.
“I can. You’ve locked me in here and I’m sure it’ll be a long while before I’m let out again. I understand why that is. It makes me wish I had not told anyone about Oss.”
“You don’t mind it being here with you?”
The Centauri shrugged. “It’s soothing. I don’t really know what it wants. It talks sometimes but I’m not sure it knows the difference between us and that chair. I think maybe it’s damaged. It’s hurt or sad or something. It looks like a small Prime species now, but it keeps changing. Sometimes it’s just there, without any real shape.”
Celois glanced at the mirrored window where he knew the doctor stood by to observe. “Do you think it’s dying? Leaving again?”
“No. It wants to know us.” Orajah leaned forward and stretched his arm toward the colonel. “It needs that,” he said and covered the input panel of the colonel’s data sleeve with his hand.
Celois pulled away before remembering that only his own touch and code allowed access to Targon’s highly secured network. Orajah tried to grip his arm again, leaping from his bed at the officer. Like most Centauri, he loomed over his smaller Human cousin. Celois, seated in his chair at a disadvantage, struggled to reach for a gun that wasn’t there.
The Centauri released him and turned to the door just as two medics rushed into the room. He pushed them aside and one of them yelped in pain when she was thrown back and then crumpled to the ground.
“Security!” Lieutenant Lanyu shouted, drawing her gun to stop the Centauri.
“Don’t shoot!” Celois shouted at the same time that Doctor Patman did. Somewhere an alarm rang. They heard doors slamming as the facility was locked down. Orajah looked wildly around the clinic and then rushed to an interface screen that took up most of the wall beside the workstations. He thrust both hands against the glass and remained there until two guards tackled him to the floor. He gave up without struggle and allowed them to restrain him.
Celois stood over them, still gasping for breath after the attack. “What the hell was that?”
“I’m sorry,” Orajah said calmly an
d not especially apologetically. The guards yanked him onto his feet and he did not resist when they tied his hands behind his back. “Oss wants to learn more about here. Real-space here, I mean. So it looked. It learned from our ship’s database but it’s not interested in charts and cargo lists. You have more.”
Alarmed, Celois inspected his data unit. His security code had not been entered, and access to the network had not been breached. He hoped. Cursing, he entered the necessary code to have his clearance reset. “So what did it get?”
The Centauri said nothing for a while. “Not very much. There was no time to look and your system is well partitioned. It doesn’t like you, I think, but it can speak better now. At least I can understand more. It knows what this place is now. It wants to get out.”
“We are not going to harm it. We need to know more about it. Attacking us is really not a good idea. Maybe you can convey that to your friend.”
“You don’t understand, Major. It doesn’t care what happens to it. Or me. Or at least it doesn’t worry about it. It doesn’t care what we learn about it. It just needs to get to the others of its kind.”
“Oh? What others? Where are they? How many are there?”
Orajah shrugged. “It doesn’t know.”
Celois turned when someone arrived with a stretcher to take the injured medic away. The woman was conscious but unable to stand and didn’t seem to recognize any of them. “What did you do to her?”
“I don’t know. We did not mean to hurt her. I’m sorry about that. I hope she’ll be all right. She was very pleasant with us, earlier.”
Celois watched as Orajah was returned to his room. “I want him sedated and the other victims isolated. Disable all electronic devices in this room and install a manual lock on the Centauri’s door. Bring in a security detail and remove all access to the external network. For everyone.” He looked around to find the general among the guards and personnel rushing to follow his orders.
Some of them had hustled Dmitra into the next room, partitioned from this one by a transparent wall, where he conversed with a uniformed officer on a screen, apparently not bothered by the commotion. He activated a com panel. “Colonel Celois, I think we’ve seen enough here. Doctor Patman, if you would join us, please.” He exited the clinic, leaving the others to hurry after him into the adjoining meeting room.
Celois was not surprised to see Captain Bayla, an expert in electronic security systems, waiting for them. The captain was poring over a large sheet spread out over the table, moving data from one section to another, some of which was displayed on a wall monitor, while speaking in low tones with someone over his com band. Another specialist sat before another display, studying replays of the surveillance video of the incident in the lab. Both men looked up when the others entered, then straightened to salute the senior officers.
“What do you have for us,” General Dmitra said curtly but not unfriendly.
Bayla disabled his com link and indicated his project sheet. “We’ve completed our assessment of the reports from Feyd,” he said without preamble, no more interested in formality than their commanding officer. “What you’ve just witnessed in the clinic is not an isolated phenomenon any more than the fatal incident with the Vanguard team on Rishabel.”
Celois groaned. “Kada?”
“Kada. We were able to reconstruct some of what happened on the Factor’s estate. We’ve concluded that Sethran Kada may, indeed, be infected and pose a considerable threat.” He paused before adding, “of course, we currently have no way to confirm that since Kada declined our invitation to join us here.”
The colonel scowled. “They sent six men to collect him.”
“What do we know about him?” Dmitra said.
“Wouldn’t quite call him a pirate but he’s not above helping himself to what he needs. Has the ear of some fairly high-powered Shri-Lan and not a few Arawaj. Does work for them, although mostly for himself. Slippery. Tends to turn up exactly where we don’t want him. We never end up with quite enough reason to take him down.”
“Until now.”
“Yes, sir. He was trained by Air Command until he decided he’d rather play by his own rules. Top tier pilot. Language expert. Fully trained in special ops. And what we didn’t teach him, the Shri-Lan did. He’s been on his own for over ten years and doing quite well. UCB Feyd should have known better than to send a bunch of grunts to arrest him.”
“I’m more impressed by how he got onto the governor’s grounds than how he escaped again. And what interests me the most is why he was there after just murdering an Air Command officer.” Dmitra nodded to the security specialist. “What happened on Feyd?”
Captain Bayla consulted his sheet. He circled a part of it with his finger to send it to the vertical screen on the wall. A Centauri with thick black hair curling around his neck gazed back at them with just a hint of a smirk. Beside him appeared an image of the Factor’s armored ground vehicle. “He was being interviewed in there, according to the recordings made by your people. The situation was not especially confrontational. Then all recordings stopped. All weapons were disabled at precisely the same moment. And the squad and the doctor you sent woke up with a big headache hours after Kada left the planet. They are largely unharmed, thankfully.”
“You think Kada did that?”
“Not a single gun was fired. In fact, Kada wasn’t even visibly armed when the recordings stopped. We compared the doctor’s scans of Kada’s brain to the Centauri patient in the clinic. The activity, mostly involving the auditory and visual cortex, is very similar.” He looked to Patman for confirmation.
The doctor nodded. “Not only that, the residual radiation detected on the deceased officer on Rishabel is identical to that collected on Feyd. There is little doubt that, whatever weapon he is using, it was the same. And if this was not some new mechanical weapon, this parasite is not only intelligent enough to communicate with its host, it is capable of tremendous energy conversions.” She nodded in the direction of the lab. “I’ll expect we’ll find the same radiation on Milena after what we saw just now.”
“If Sethran Kada is hosting one of them, he’s not showing any ill effects,” the general said. “In fact, he seems to be working in tandem with it, or vice versa. From our perspective, not a good development. Perhaps he’s only one of many and the few we’ve found are only those who, for some reason, weren’t compatible and are washing up on the shore.”
Celois stared moodily at the display wall where Seth seemed to mock them with his smile. “And if that’s the case, we could have a whole lot more of them out there, ones that haven’t spun out, who are as opposed to joining us here as he is.”
“A reasonable assumption,” Patman said. “The victims we have been able to interview aren’t unhappy about being possessed by the aliens once they got over the surprise. Having conversations with them. Giving them names. Avoiding capture. Perhaps these visitors have a way of convincing their hosts that their presence is desirable somehow. Plenty of parasites, even some viruses, exhibit such behavior. If the host is unaware of them, or benefits from their presence, he’s unlikely to want to remove it.”
“All the while being used to infiltrate our ranks,” Dmitra said. “And not just ours.”
“You’re anticipating some sort of invasion? By sub-space entities?” Celois asked the general.
“Dismissing that possibility is a dangerous gamble. I don’t have to tell you that whatever method Kada is using to evade capture has got my attention. I’m sure Doctor Patman is also eager to get a look inside his head. So let’s come up with something workable to bring him in alive, shall we?”
Celois pretended that the general’s last sentence hadn’t been aimed squarely at his head. “I’m troubled by what we just witnessed with that Centauri victim. His ability to get into our ports would indicate that these entities can enter and scan our networks for information rather than learn from their hosts. Orajah mentioned that, just in those few seconds, his parasite improv
ed its language skills.”
“This is something we suspected,” Bayla said. “These entities can invade our electronic systems but they require living hosts to actually get around, perhaps even as a source of sustenance. This would mean that they cannot simply hijack our equipment, a rather reassuring thought, I may add.”
Celois did not share the captain’s elation. “But their living host found a convenient way to break into Factor Baroch’s home. Who knows what sort of opportunities they’ll have through Sethran Kada. The man knows as much about Air Command as he does about the Shri-Lan. Not the sort of person we want controlled by some alien.”
“It’ll be a chore to find him,” Bayla said. “After fleeing Feyd he keyholed and disappeared.”
“He’s a spanner?” Dmitra asked.
“No,” Celois said. “But he suddenly seems to have picked up the talent. Another point of interest. He was frisked at Aram gate, alone, and then showed up at Rishabel not ten hours later. That’s a four-week trip via three charted sites.”
Dmitra turned to Patman. “I want your entire team on the thing inside this Orajah’s head. If they are sentient, we need to communicate. If we can’t, we need to control them, eradicate them if necessary. Advise all stations to be alert to reports of any unusual mental aberrations among our flight crews. But for now the matter is classified.”
Colonel Celois addressed the general. “Sir, we should consider closing the gate at Rishabel. And increase patrols at other sites. If we can intercept these beings before they disperse—”
“Out of the question. Closing any site is going to have the entire trade sector pounding on the Factors’ doors. I don’t want to have to explain why we decided to block their transports. And if we had the means to frisk every ship that uses the sites we wouldn’t have a rebel problem in Trans-Targon.”
“Then we should at least restrict sub-space travel by those with top level clearance. We can’t risk someone with that sort of access becoming infected. Or at least issue a directive to avoid engaging their neural interface during the traverse.”