by Welch, David
“Primitive fighters are closing on us,” Flynn spoke from his command pod. “We have breaches of the beast’s skin on multiple levels.”
“Is the immune response underway?” Blair asked.
“Yes, but it will take months for these wounds to heal,” Flynn informed.
“What speed can we do?”
The War-beast vibrated heavily as Flynn tested the engines.
“Nearly full. We still outpace our quarry,” Flynn spoke.
“Then follow. Destroy any primitives who try to stop us.”
* * *
“How far are we from minimum jump distance?” Rex asked, drumming his fingers on his console. He already knew the answer.
“Seventy-two million miles,” the computer replied.
“And how long again before they catch us?”
“Four minutes.”
“Well before we reach safe distance…” Rex grumbled.
“Yes.”
Silence. Lucius’s hand remained steady on the firing stick. His visor displayed the rear camera views. The bioship was just becoming visible. Its round curves were jagged and torn, damaged from battle. But it pressed on, its big guns pointed at them. It will be an easy kill, Lucius thought.
“Power up the jump drive,” Rex ordered.
“We are not at a minimum—”
“I don’t care, do it,” Rex commanded.
Lucius glanced over at him, his calm façade broken by fear. Rex didn’t meet his eyes, just kept looking at the viewscreen. Lucius’s gut screamed at him, telling him to yell at his captain. You didn’t jump within three hundred million miles of a yellow star. The gravity was too great, distorted space too much. They would have no way of controlling where they went or where they emerged.
He’d heard horror stories, unofficial things that nobles whispered about when alone; tales of people who jumped too close to a star or planet. He’d heard of ships emerging inside of a star or planet, or coming out in an atmosphere at such high speeds that you soon found yourself inside the planet anyway. He knew, academically at least, that there was a much higher probability of emerging in empty space. But his gut didn’t seem to care.
“The bioship will be within firing range in sixty seconds.”
“Are you even going to try to fight them?” Lucius asked.
Rex didn’t answer. Lucius returned his attention to his visor. Range figures ticked off at the bottom of the display, every second ticking off tens of thousands of miles. At this speed neither could maneuver and fight, and the ships themselves could come apart from the strain of banking at such speeds. If Rex wanted to take a chance and fight, he’d have to slow.
The Hegemons wouldn’t need to slow though, not if they kept behind them. A straight shot from the rail-guns could catch them. They’d only need one hit.
Several flashes emerged from the closing vessel. They were firing, well out of range. Pot-shots, Lucius realized. He closed his fingers around the gun-trigger.
“I want dorsal and ventral turrets firing as soon as it comes into range,” Lucius spoke, the computer chirping its compliance.
The bioship's shots streaked wide, passing harmlessly. A mix of rounds, large and small, came at them. The computer artificially illuminated the rounds in luminescent green on his viewscreen, letting him see the grey lumps of metal against the black of the void.
“They are in range,” the computer announced.
Rex’s hand moved toward his console screen. The ship shook hard, a smaller round slamming into the cargo bay, bucking them off course. The force of the blow sent them lurching forward. Lucius felt the console smack into his ribs, knocking the wind out of him. The computer didn’t waste time, firing the turrets while he struggled for breath. Thirty millimeter rounds spat out of the ship’s turrets. As Lucius came to his senses, he saw the rounds striking the bioship, little more than irritating bee-stings. In moments the bioship would lock in their big guns and fire again.
He glanced over at Rex. He lay on the ground, his head in a pool of blood.
Nobody was flying the ship.
Lucius leapt from his seat, the ship shaking from another hit. The bioship's defensive guns had more than enough power to tear up their little ship by themselves.
He glanced helplessly at the controls. There was no time to get Chakrika up here. There was only one option.
One dangerous fucking option.
He mashed his fingers on the console screen, right over the big red JUMP panel. Space twisted in front of him as the ship jumped away.
* * *
Some Random Red Star, Chaos Quarter
Standard Date 12/30/2506
Quintus screamed, his face red from exertion. The ship shook violently. Chakrika clung tightly to the infant, the two of them sitting in a ball in the corner of her room.
The intercom clicked.
“Chakrika!” Lucius screamed. “I need you here! Rex is down!”
She looked at the wailing child, a moment of panic overtaking her. She kissed his head and dashed to his crib, placing him gently amidst the blankets. Darting out, she found Second clinging to a pipe running along the corridor wall. She grabbed the woman by the shoulders.
“Watch Quintus!” she screamed.
The tortured woman blinked, taken aback by the force of her words. She shuffled lifelessly toward Chakrika’s room. Chakrika sprinted toward the bridge.
And saw red. It filled the entire viewscreen, brilliant and nearly blinding, filtered by the computer to a brightness that wouldn’t burn out human eyes. Lucius stood hunched over the pilot’s station, grasping the corners of the console to steady himself.
She spotted Rex, face down on the floor. A pool of crimson surrounded him.
“What the hell happened?!” she screamed.
“He struck the console,” Lucius said, pointing to a blood-covered corner.
“Where are we?!” Chakrika roared, moving toward the piloting console. Lucius backed away, moving to help his injured captain.
“I don’t know!” Lucius shouted, the ship shaking violently. The metal groaned, so loud it drowned out his voice. Chakrika sat down and looked at the viewscreen. The radiation levels were spiking, bathing the ship with gamma rays.
“Radiation will reach lethal levels in three minutes,” the computer informed.
“What—is that a star?” Chakrika managed, fitting her limbs into their appropriate spots.
“An M-classed star.”
She glanced at the speed. They were moving, barely. The display read twenty thousand miles per hour.
“Distance to the star?” she demanded.
“We are five hundred thousand miles from its surface,” the computer informed.
She didn’t have to be an experienced pilot to know that this could not be good. Panic racing through her, she pressed on the levers, rotating the ship to the right. The damaged engines responded sluggishly. The star’s gravity pulled hard, dragging them closer. The ship’s hull groaned once more.
“He’s alive!” Lucius shouted, hunched over Rex. His voice sounded distant, part of another world. She pushed the ship around, a full 180 degrees from their original position.
Her foot punched the accelerator. More groans bellowed through the ship as its engines battled the star’s pull. Little by little the speed increased.
“A breach has opened in the cargo bay,” the computer announced lifelessly.
“Damn it! Go! Faster!” she screamed, her voice rife with futility. The radiation numbers continued climbing. Even her helper-nanobots would be useless if the computer was right.
“Radiation will reach lethal levels in one minute,” the computer spoke.
She could do nothing but continue to jam on the accelerator. The inevitable flashed through her mind’s eye. She imagined the ship consumed in fire. She saw Quintus, burning and screaming. She could feel her own body burning, searing in agony as she watched the baby she loved disappear in flames. She could see Lucius, his body an inferno, crawling toward his dying chil
d.
She glanced over at Lucius, a wave of regret washing over her. His eyes met hers, his preternatural calm long gone. A tear traced down his face.
“I love you, Chakrika,” he spoke, still cradling Rex’s motionless body.
She moved her lips to speak, when something struck the ship, hurling her back in her seat. A hollow metallic clang filled the bridge. She turned to the viewscreen. A ship hovered in the darkness of space, its form too distant to make out. A long tether dominated the viewscreen.
Whoever it was, it had them and was reeling them in.
It’s the mind. It’s only ever been the mind! The rest is just a big, fleshy machine! Pluck my brain out of this body and stick it in another, it’ll still be me!
-Joseph Davidson, response during an interview when asked about his essays regarding the definition of ‘human,’ 2071
Some Random Red Star, Chaos Quarter
Standard Date 1/03/2507
Blackness. Not the normal kind full of stars, just an empty, warm blackness. Kind of relax—
A sharp, painful light hit his eyes, which somehow had opened. He tried to blink it away, but couldn’t.
“Sorry ’bout that,” an easy-going voice spoke.
The light shifted behind his head. The silhouette of a man filled Rex’s vision. Well, he thought it was a man. It was a man’s face, but the man’s body seemed to be made out of sleek, gray metal. The face seemed to go from where the neck would normally meet the chin, to the top of the forehead. It had jaws. But no ears and no hair. A metal casing forming the man’s head stretched back nearly a foot. Rex hoped there were actually brains in there.
“That better?” the robot/man asked.
“You’re a robot,” Rex replied.
“Close. Cyborg,” he said with a knowing smile. “Name is Jacob. But everyone calls me Jake.”
“Jake. Jake the Cyborg,” Rex spoke, cobwebs clearing from his mind.
“Well, Jake Gaderi is my actual name, but you’re not the first to call me that.”
“Huh,” Rex said, trying to blink again. Nothing happened.
“Got your eye-lids propped open so you can’t blink,” Jake said. He took a dropper in an equally metallic hand and moistened Rex’s right eye.
“Thanks,” Rex said, wondering why he hadn’t done the left one. He didn’t feel any dryness in his left eye. He didn’t feel anything.
“Uh, where am I?” asked Rex.
“Onboard my ship. You jumped wrong, came out a half-million miles from the sun. Lucky I decided to orbit in close this week. Wouldn’t have been able to reach you if I’d been much further away.”
“Oh. Well, thanks for that,” Rex said, trying to move his limbs. They did not respond.
“You’re not paralyzed,” Jake the Cyborg spoke. “Just an anesthetic.”
“Why?” Rex asked, curiously unalarmed by his predicament.
“You lost an eye. I replaced it,” Jake said. He picked up a probe and touched it to the surface of his left eye. Rex felt a jolt of pain.
“Excellent,” Jake spoke. “Some minds don’t always pick up pain right away, takes a while for the nerves to understand what the computer’s sending them.”
“Computer? My eye’s a machine?”
“Yeah,” Jake said. “Standard unit. One of my spares. Hooks directly to the optic nerve. Easy to remove if you want to have an organic one grown.”
“I don’t notice any difference,” Rex spoke.
“You won’t. Well no, that’s not true. You actually can now see beyond the normal visible spectrum. Should test that.”
“How do I do that?” Rex asked, not sure if he believed what his vaguely robotic doctor was saying.
“Think about seeing something in infrared,” Jake spoke.
He did. The vision in his left eye became a gray-scale, colder areas dark, warmer ones in lighter and lighter shades until white was reached. Jake’s body was a blaze of white, his face brighter than the rest.
“That is cool,” Rex spoke in child-like awe.
“OK, think back to normal. Then think about seeing magnetic fields.”
Rex thought about seeing normally, and instantaneously his new eye went from infrared to the good ol’ visible spectrum. He thought of magnetic fields. A web of lines appeared, overlaying his vision like a Heads-Up Display. They radiated from electronic devices around him, from Jake especially. He could see the fields.
“Pretty neat, eh?” Jake asked.
“Damn,” he said in awe.
“Well, I’ll get you feeling again. Hold on.”
Rex noticed, for the first time, an IV running into his neck. Jake inserted a capsule of something into the top of the IV. A black fluid ran through it into his neck. Feeling returned to his body. Jake slid out the IV.
“Time to get up,” the cyborg spoke.
Rex slid off the bed, his bare feet touching metal. Warm to the touch, it made him feel oddly relaxed.
“This your ship then?” he asked.
“Yep. The Seven-zero-zero-three-zero-six-four. Or as I call her, the Stupid-Worthless-Piece-of-Crap.”
“Something wrong?” Rex asked, looking around. He was in a large, perfectly square room. Besides the bed, which was really more of a glorified stretcher, nothing resembled furniture. Computer consoles lined the walls, projecting data into various sections of the room. A series of holographic figures floated on Rex’s chest. He stepped out of the way, only to insert himself into a projection of a nearby planet.
“Yeah,” Jake spoke. “I have a non-functional jump drive and no parts to repair it with.”
Rex smiled and said, “I sense you’ll want a ride in return for this surgery.”
“If it’s not too much trouble. Your engines got pretty shot. I can get them back to 50 percent,” Jake replied.
“They’re below 50? They were at 62!” Rex exclaimed.
“You took quite a beating, especially for a ship that small. You’re lucky to be flying at all,” said Jake.
Rex moved across the room, stopping before a projection of his ship, joined to Jake’s. The Stupid-Worthless-Piece-of-Crap resembled space stations of Earth’s past. It looked like the work of a child’s erector set, a plain rectangular box surrounded by scaffolding-like structures. No prow, no tail, nothing remotely designed for air-travel. It wasn’t much bigger than the scorched and blackened hull of Long Haul, but looked worlds apart.
Jake clomped up behind him.
“More than a ride actually,” Jake said. “Passage to the Commonwealth?”
“I’ll have to talk to my crew about keeping secrects,” Rex muttered.
“Your tech gave it away. Outside of Cyberdan there’s nothing in the Quarter that can match your ship.”
“There’s at least one,” Rex spoke.
“Your biological enemy?” Jake surmised.
Rex shot him a disbelieving look and then heaved a resigned sigh.
“Again, they just tell anybody.”
“Well, I only pushed because your ‘friends’ jumped into the other side of this system,” Jake spoke.
Rex spun quickly, meeting the cyborg’s gaze.
“They’re here? They found us already?”
“You’ve been out for two days,” Jake told him, “And to be honest, I’ve been working on your engines for much of the time. Your Weapons Officer gave me permission on your behalf.”
“Lucius…” Rex spoke, not particularly upset at this. “We need to get going as quickly as possible.”
“Not finished yet,” Jake pointed out. “Had to stop to fix you.”
“Why? I could’ve lived without an eye,” Rex spoke.
“Your women are quite insistent. The striped one screamed at me to do it, and the crazy one just screams at the sight of me.”
Rex laughed, imagining Second getting a look at Jake.
“It’s really quite intriguing. On my homeworld we use mechanical technology to improve ourselves, but her people try to do it organically. Guess everybody h
as their opposites,” the cyborg wondered aloud.
“You’re a lot nicer than your opposite. They keep trying to kill us,” Rex spoke.
“Yes, Lucius tells me they come from the space beyond the Achaean Confederacy. Heard lots of stories about that place; never thought there was any truth behind it.”
“There is,” Rex said. “And they seem hell-bent on stopping us from revealing that ‘truth’ to the universe.”
“Well, not much further to go now,” Jake spoke.
Rex cocked his head quizzically.
“What do you mean?”
“Your crazy jump brought you eleven light-years from the Alshain system, five light-years from the Commonwealth line of control. Two jumps and you’re home.”
Rex paused, thinking. He’d expected to be off course, but if what Jake said was true, their jump had taken them at least seventeen light-years farther than it should have. That was almost unheard of. Top-secret military stuff could barely bend space over distances like that. He’d heard stories of early jump pioneers being hurled farther then they projected due to the quirky effects of gravity-wells on jump-points. He’d never really put much faith in it though, figuring it had been legend and myth that had grown up around Mr. McDougal and his revolutionary jump drive. Luckily this ‘quirk’ had thrown them in a fortunate direction.
Boundary was out of the question now. This red star, whatever it was, had to be right on the border of the Commonwealth. There was little chance there would be anything other than surveillance drones on the line of control, and there would be no way for them to get a jump drone off to Alshain, have a ship dispatched, and have it arrive on site before the Hegemony ship found and killed them all.
“How much longer do you need to finish our engines?”
Jake shrugged his bulky, squared-off metallic shoulders.
“Six hours should do it, give or take,” he spoke.
“And how long before they reach us?”
“About eight hours.”
“Which means at just over twice our speed they’ll overtake us hours before my drive recharges,”he spoke. Even given the fact that no two jumps were ever identical, and that it could take some time for the bioship to find them after they jumped, it just didn’t add up. They were just too slow.