Star Force 11: Exile

by B. V. Larson

  I jerked back fast, almost slipping and falling. A monstrous visage lurked behind the glass. It was alien—all curving fangs and spines and with exposed teeth in a face tailor-made to give children nightmares. I couldn’t see what the rest of the thing looked like, but it wasn’t a creature I’d ever encountered before. Whatever it was, it seemed completely frozen—immobilized in stasis. I had no idea if the condition was permanent or if the thing was still alive in its state.

  After a full minute of carefully examining it, I hadn’t seen it move as much as a hair. Maybe it was immersed in some clear substance, or perhaps one of Marvin’s invisible “force fields” held it. Maybe time itself had been frozen within that box. I had no way of knowing.

  “What do you see up there, Captain?” someone asked. I realized it was Doctor Benson, my chief scientist.

  “Come up and take a look. Bring Doctor Chang too,” I said, and soon the two researchers had clambered awkwardly atop the row. I pointed at the window. “See what you make of that while I look into other boxes.”

  While the two men exclaimed over what they could see of the creature in the box, I checked the next one, braced for a scary face this time. Another version of the same alien showed. I shrugged and stepped to the next one.

  This time I saw a different alien. It resembled the warlike Worms we’d allied with during the Macro Wars, but I thought it was slightly different. I’d never met a Worm in the flesh and my recollection of the vids was hazy, so I couldn’t be certain. The next window showed another creature of the same type.

  The following window startled me, however, though not enough to cause me to stumble. No, this one was familiar.

  It contained a Centaur: One of the intelligent deer-goats my father had fought using a clubbed shotgun and his wits when he’d been plucked off our farm back in California. This was back when everything changed for Earth and humanity. The horns were large, indicating age and status. Its forelimbs were held up to its face as if in horror.

  “This is a zoo,” I said on the general channel. “Or a bug collection. It looks as if the Ancients have samples of many races in storage here.” Looking around from my vantage point atop the boxes, I did some quick math and came up with over a thousand units. If each race had two or three examples and all boxes were filled, several hundred different biotic species would be represented in this chamber.

  “It’s a treasure trove,” Benson exclaimed. “Even if they can’t be revived, the biological data alone is priceless.”

  “Yes, it’s amazing,” I said flatly. “But Sokolov wasn’t a scientist. Pure knowledge wouldn’t have obsessed him. There’s something else that he cared about here and I’m afraid I know what it was.”

  I let my eyes run from crystal to crystal up the row, and then my feet followed carefully. The obvious pathway through accumulated dust led about halfway down the line to one particular window. At this point I was fairly certain what I’d see. Squatting down, I looked through the clear substance.

  “Hello, Natalia,” I breathed.

  An ethereal, heart-shaped face, alabaster skin with dark hair and the classic Slavic features common to so many Russian models looked up at me as if yearning to find a way through the glass. Her eyes stared sightlessly past me and I could see her corneas glisten as if some child of the Ancients had hit the pause button on a 3D vid. I sat down on a small box seemingly set there for the purpose and simply gazed for a while.

  This woman was the source of our troubles—no, to be fair, it was Sokolov’s reaction to the woman. Was she alive or dead? Had she been snatched from Sokolov’s grasp or had he found her later? Had he known her in life or had he become obsessed with her here, staring for hour after hour, day after day, alone and longing for the human companionship forever unreachable on the other side of this unbreakable alien crystal?

  I stood up and moved over to look in the next window, expecting to see another human face if the pattern held. I was right. The occupant was a man, with a rich mop of dark hair and the face of a Greek god interpreted by Michelangelo. The light faded out just below his broad shoulders, but if the boxes held high-class specimens of each species—perhaps even breeding pairs—I could tell this guy was more than a match for Natalia.

  More than one emotion drove Sokolov, I realized. If love was the carrot, jealousy was the stick that beat at his ego. A man like the general couldn’t possibly tolerate a rival for his woman’s affection.

  “Captain Riggs!” Gunny Taksin called from the blocked portal where Sokolov had vanished. “I’m getting a signal. It’s Doctor Kalu. She wants to come through.”

  -23-

  Jumping down from the ten-foot-high row of vertical coffins I landed lightly on the floor. “So Kalu has had a change of heart? Tell her to stand by.” I hopped into my battlesuit and buttoned up.

  “Hansen,” I said.

  “Here, Captain.” By mutual unspoken consent, my exec and I had been avoiding each other for the past few minutes. Hansen might have been completely innocent and just following orders, or he might have been involved somehow. Maybe all he was guilty of was being happy I was gone and preferring Sokolov, at least at first.

  Or maybe he was a mutineer who hid it well.

  “Hansen, do you think Kalu was part of a plot to get rid of me and Kwon?”

  My exec furrowed his brow convincingly behind his faceplate. “Hard to say, Captain. She jumped at the chance to act like the queen bee, but most of her negative actions were directed at the other women.”

  “What about you, Nils?” I searched his face. Using his first name emphasized my personal questioning of his honor. “Anything to confess?”

  Hansen’s visage darkened with anger and, if I read it right, a bit of embarrassment. “If I were going to mutiny, I’d have done it after we lost the other officers when you were fresh and green. You’re not the hot shit you think you are, but you’re a damn sight better than most I’ve served under and getting better all the time. So no, sir. My conscience is clean. All I’m guilty of is being suckered into believing my commander was dead—just like everyone else.”

  I forced a smile. “Good. Forget I asked. Now I need you to do your best to keep the crew happy while I deal with Kalu.” I slapped Hansen on the shoulder gently, not wanting to mark his armor again. I turned away to walk over to the portal. “Okay, put Kalu through to me.”

  “Captain Riggs, please listen to me,” I heard Kalu say, using what no doubt was her most innocent, contrite tone of voice. I almost laughed aloud. Did she honestly think I would fall for this again?

  “Switching sides now that you’re losing status, Doctor? Or did Sokolov give you the boot?”

  “Captain Riggs, you must believe me. We thought you were dead, and when Sokolov took over we had to follow his orders.”

  “Half-truths. You tried to manipulate your way to the top again.”

  “I’ve always preferred a strong man. He wanted me. If that’s a crime, you and Miss Turnbull would be guilty too.”

  “But neither of us tried to kill anyone.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  I sighed. “You’re the only one with both the motivation and the expertise to do it. You hacked Kwon’s and my suits, and it would have worked if the Raptor battleship had finished us off the way you’d hoped. Unluckily for you, we survived, and now you’re shit out of luck.”

  “None of that is true. I didn’t hack anything. You have to believe me.”

  “I don’t have to believe a damn thing, Doctor. Your fate is in my hands. The maximum penalty for mutiny and attempted murder is death.”

  “I’m a civilian, Captain, not one of your Star Force people. You can’t just condemn me without proof, a trial or some kind of procedure.”

  I chewed on that one for a moment. Actually, she was right. I had nothing but circumstantial evidence. Without knowing for sure she’d hacked the suits, she was only guilty of bad judgment and general sliminess. I could probably get away with executing he
r or leaving her to die in the heat of this moment, but that would be the action of a tyrant. Worse, I felt sure it would come back to haunt me, making me look like a hypocrite. Keeping the moral high ground was part of leadership.

  My style of leadership, anyway.

  Worse than all those doubts were the ones I was forced to entertain about my convictions. There was still a chance my suspicions were wrong about her.

  “You’re right, Doctor,” I said finally. “I promise you an inquest and due process according to regulations.”

  Something occurred to me at this point in the conversation. How was she transmitting to us? She had to be out of range even if she was elsewhere in the maze.

  I stepped sideways around the barrier until I could see the tip of a suit antenna poking out of the darkness. I smiled.

  “There’s no need for me to be under arrest of any kind,” Kalu complained. “I won’t agree—”

  Reaching out with both my powered gauntlets, I yanked her through the portal. I signaled the marines and they moved up in case we had to grab an active grenade and throw it back.

  Kalu squawked and struggled briefly, but we had her with a half-dozen gauntlets gripping her armor.

  “Welcome home, Doctor,” I said.

  “Okay, okay,” she said. “I’m not resisting!”

  Soon Kwon and his men had her against a wall like cops doing a drug bust.

  “Kalu,” I said, “make sure your skinsuit and mask are in place, and then crack your battlesuit. Corporal Fuller, go find one of the Fleet crew that’s about her size and won’t trip over his own feet in armor. Then exchange suits. I don’t want the good doctor feeling too invulnerable.”

  It didn’t take long for one of the engineering techs, a former marine as it turned out, to switch suits with Kalu.

  I searched her myself before she put on the standard Fleet gear but didn’t find anything dangerous except her voluptuous curves. She smirked as I ran my hands over her body, but I ignored her. I told Fuller to select another guard and for both to watch her closely. Right now I wished I had some female marines to do it but our few had all been left aboard Valiant. Kalu could be distracting to my men.

  Once that was done, I left my armor and brought her up to the top of the line of boxes where the two humans were interred. I pointed. “What do you know about these people?”

  Kalu leaned over and gazed into the frozen woman’s face.

  “This must be Natalia,” she said, speaking in a detached voice. “Sokolov’s lost love. He tried to keep her secret, but one night in bed he told me she had been a captive on one of the Nano ships when they left Earth. When the fleet got to the bear planet and the ships ran the tests again, she ended up abandoned on the ground. Sokolov saw her and rescued her. When Sokolov woke up in the maze she was gone. Eventually he found her here and spent all his time trying to figure out how to get her out without killing her.”

  “So that’s what this whole thing was about? A woman?”

  Kalu turned to me. “Isn’t that why you’re here with us, Captain? Because of a woman?”

  She had me there. From Helen of Troy to King Arthur’s Guinevere and Napoleon’s Josephine, women had been inspiring men to do crazy things for centuries.

  “But why the nukes?” I asked. I had Marvin’s deduction about Sokolov’s intentions, but I wanted to hear Kalu’s explanation without tipping her off to my own thoughts.

  Kalu narrowed her eyes and blinked slowly, cocking her head and eyeing me in that languid sexy manner clearly calculated to slip past a man’s rational thoughts and tug at his libido. “You ought to be able to figure it out,” she said.

  “Maybe, but I want to hear it from you. If you’re really innocent of all but malice, quit playing games and start helping.”

  Kalu held up a hand. “Help you what, Captain? Track down Sokolov? Or get the hell out of this place and on our way?”

  “I don’t care about Sokolov. He made his choice and he can rot here eternally for all I care. But I get the feeling whatever he wants to do with nukes is going to piss the Ancients off royally. Either that or it won’t matter one bit. He might be nuts, but it’s a clever kind of crazy. Just tell me what he’s trying to do.”

  “He thinks he can shut this place down, and he hopes when that happens these boxes will open and Natalia will be freed.”

  My mouth went dry. “Yeah, along with a few hundred other aliens, some of which are probably going to be pretty upset at being turned into specimens. Assuming they can be revived, that is. We have to get out of here before that happens—or worse.”

  “What about them?” Kalu said, pointing at the encased humans. “You going to just leave them?”

  “Weren’t you just saying you wanted to get the hell out of here? Where do you get off lecturing me about morality, Doctor? They’re not my responsibility. The crew of Valiant is. Yes, that includes even you. For all we know these people are dead and perfectly preserved. Those cases are made of stardust. They probably mass a thousand tons each. Even if we tried to cut them open with lasers, the heat would kill whatever was inside. What do you want me to do, try to crack the crystal? Even if we could, the openings are too small to pull them through.”

  “They had to be put inside there somehow,” Kalu said.

  “These Ancient machines have exhibited the ability to teleport things with or without actual rings or portals. Maybe they were put in there that way, and the teleportation technology is way beyond us right now. We might come back for them someday, but for now that’s impossible.”

  “Captain—”

  “We can’t rescue them. We can barely rescue ourselves. I hope we can find the way back.”

  Kalu held up her hand. “We can’t go back. At least one of the portals we came through was one-way. Sokolov told me that. He also said some of the corridors shift from time to time. We’ll get hopelessly lost.”

  I called Hansen over and confirmed Kalu’s info.

  “Dammit,” I said. “How can we get out of here?”

  Tall for a woman, Kalu straightened and looked me in the eye. “You have to follow Sokolov. There’s a landing platform through the portal. I saw it. Sokolov took a vehicle and flew away cursing me when I didn’t want to get in and go with him.”

  Though Kalu was cooperating for now, I reminded myself to take everything she said with a healthy dose of salt. I marched her forward and up to the doorway.

  “Move the barrier,” I said to the marines, and then spoke again to Kalu. “So you’re sure Sokolov’s gone? No traps?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, think hard,” I said. “You’ll be the first to go through the door.” With that, I thrust her through and followed after a brief pause—just long enough for an explosion to dissipate.

  Nothing bad happened. Kalu stopped after ten feet, standing with her hands half raised and trying to look harmless. Marines pushed past me spreading out to secure the platform.

  Kalu was right. It was a flight deck about a hundred yards wide and fifty deep. Fortunately, gravity on the platform seemed oriented toward the floor and about an Earth-normal one G. It occurred to me that something might be deduced from this fact, but I wasn’t sure what. Did the maze-machine analyze us and change gravity to fit our biology? Or did most life, the gaseous Blues excepted, develop in the common range from about half a G to two G, and the gravity field was set to “average”? Or perhaps it was adjusted to the Ancients’ own “normal.” I just didn’t know.

  The entire far side of the platform was open to space, but not the space of stars and planets. Dim, persistent light showed the interior of an enormous golden sphere, and I realized we were looking at another hollow world. This time, though, it was not made by Lithos out of planetary dirt and rock. Instead, it was formed from the interlocking slab-ships of the ancients. The undersides appeared no different from their tops.

  A fuzzy cloud showed in the middle, its components impossible to resolve. If I really gazed upon the inside of t
he golden planet, I must be looking across thousands of miles. This cloud could be anything—gaseous, asteroids, fortresses, ships, debris, mysterious machines, even huge living creatures.

  “Suit, employ maximum optical magnification,” I said.

  Battlesuits didn’t have a lot of zoom, but the suit did its best. You could only cram so many auxiliary devices into the design, and high-res telescopes were not a priority. The cloud got bigger and seemed to have a bit of shape to it—perhaps as of a rough cube—but I still couldn’t tell what it was made of.

  Small craft ranging in size from one-man scooters to shuttles sat scattered on the platform. All were of alien origin but still obviously ships. Now I wished I had Marvin with us. Among us only he could quickly decipher alien technology.

  The only vessel I recognized was a Crustacean scooter sized to carry one Lobster. It roughly resembled a snowmobile or jet-ski for waterborne use. After examining it for a moment, I activated my quantum ansible. “Marvin, can you hear me?”

  “I hear you, Captain Riggs,” Marvin replied.

  “Put Hoon on.”

  “One moment. I’ll have to link his translator with the ansible.”

  “Spare me the details, Marvin. Just do it quickly.”

  A moment later I heard Hoon’s synthesized voice. “Make it fast, young Riggs. I’m very busy right now.”

  “Fine. Walk me through the controls on a Crustacean space scooter. I believe it’s a Model 27 or 28.”

  “My time is too valuable to waste giving you low-level instruction.”

  My tone hardened. “Professor, I have more than forty people stuck in this multidimensional maze and I need to know how to fly one of your scooters, so start instructing.”

  “You’re making even less sense than usual, young Riggs.”

  “Dammit, Hoon! For once in your life would you please just tell me what I need to know?”

  “I will upload a tutorial for the robot. Good day to you, young Riggs.”

  “Hoon? Hoon!”

  “He has closed the channel,” Marvin said.