Spaced

by Greg Curtis

  “Mute!” she shouted, pointing and yelling it at the holo, forgetting that the officers couldn't hear her. They were five floors above them. However she was right. She knew her enemy, and she finally understood him.

  None of that mattered though as the prisoner leapt gazelle-like on Nero even as he was falling to the ground. It was an impossible move: too fast, too high, too powerful. He’d been genetically engineered. And he was far stronger and faster than a natural human being. Far wilder and more dangerous too.

  Before Nero could even react White had him in his grip, hoisting him up by his collar so he could look straight at him. Gone was the calm, smiling and insufferably smug businessman: in his place was a wild creature. That was the heart of mutes, the reason they'd been outlawed. No one understood why the increased strength and speed was accompanied by such outbursts of rage. But everyone understood the danger. They were one gigantic genetic defect.

  Wars had been fought to eliminate them. And once they'd been won genetic engineering had been banned. People were people with all their faults, so they would just have to deal with them. There would never be any more mutes created. There would never be another mute war. The Navy was strict when it came to enforcing the prohibition.

  “You filthy animal!” The prisoner yelled at Nero, who for his part wasn't doing much except looking broken. He'd obviously been hit too hard even through his body armour. “You dare?!”

  That was as far as White got before the second warbot grabbed him, and pulled him off Nero. That was when things went wrong. The warbot was five hundred or more kilos of armoured metal standing nearly three metres tall and shaped like the crudest collection of vaguely man-shaped parts imaginable. It had the strength of twenty men and the speed to match, so no one should have been able to stand against it. But White knocked it backwards almost as if it was a toy. Then while it reeled away, he went after the other one.

  The man’s strength was unbelievable and his speed blinding. He was everything that the mutes of legend were reported to have been and more. But he was also outnumbered.

  As he went after the second bot one of the fallen officers shot him with a laser. It was a clean shot, straight to the back, making White scream and leap into the air. It also made him forget the bot and that was a mistake. It punched him, its steel hand connecting with his hip and sending him flying and spinning like an out of control top. When he hit the far wall he bounced – badly.

  He managed to land on all fours and, despite having been hit with a laser and punched by a warbot, he was far from down. White leapt lightly to his feet and ran at the nearest bot again. He was limping Annalisse noticed, though it was hard to be certain when he was moving so quickly. But how serious an injury was that for a mute?

  White punched the bot hard, knocking it back, but it wasn't enough. The bots were programmed to work together and as he attacked the first one the second barrelled into him from behind. It was two on one, and while White might have the edge over one, he couldn't take two simultaneously. He couldn’t deal with the punishment the bots were delivering. While he took one on the other would pummel him and unlike them he wasn't made of metal. He could push them around and send them off-balance but he couldn't damage them. However, they could damage him.

  He screamed, not in pain but with rage. Pure, animalistic rage which hurt the ears and set the heart pounding. There was no doubt that he was more wild animal than man. But no amount of savagery was going to help him. He screamed and raged and struck the bots with everything he had, but they still took him down. Punch by punch, hitting him with pile-driving impacts which should have shattered bones. And even if they didn't they still sapped him of strength and his ability to fight back.

  Soon he was crippled, badly so. He collapsed between them, in obvious pain but still raging. Yet despite all the screaming and all the adrenaline coursing through him, he couldn't get up. He couldn't resist as the bots kept raining blows upon him. Eventually he stopped trying and lay on the floor, bleeding. If his body wasn't completely broken it was the next thing to it.

  That gave the officers the chance they needed to apply the restraints, locking his elbows in place behind his back as well as the wrists. They weren't used often. Only for those who were completely out of their minds on one drug or another. And they’d never been intended to hold a mute. But even being one he wouldn't escape them.

  When White was fully restrained and Annalisse could finally breathe again, her brain came online and the questions began forming.

  A mute, and after all this time! How could it be? Where had he come from? Watching the man being picked up and taken away to his cell, Annalisse was amazed by the revelation. The mutes were supposed to be history. Created eight or nine hundred years in the past, and then destroyed two centuries later in a truly bloody war. And now here was a whole new one, showing all the signs of his genetic inheritance. Massive arrogance and self-confidence, as well as savagery when things went wrong and he found himself trapped. A complete lack of regard for the lives of others.

  But now she knew why his longevity had appeared too good to be true. It was one of the traits the mutes had had incorporated into their being, the next best thing to immortality. They had the strength of the gods as well. That was why he'd been so confident, so smug as Nero said. They were incapable of considering themselves as anything less than the masters of whatever situation they found themselves in.

  His genetic inheritance probably had something to do with the crime – certainly with the shocking brutality of it. Because mutes had always felt entitled. They never considered what they did as crimes, not when other people didn't have rights compared to them.

  Make that their inheritance she realised. She was certain there wasn't just one mute out there. One wouldn’t flourish on his own, not in the Commonwealth and not even if he was immortal. But an underground? A society? A colony perhaps? One that no doubt saw the Commonwealth as a prize.

  Now they were back causing widespread destruction. And they had an entirely new motive for the crimes. This was a mute attack, maybe the start of a new war. This was no longer a case at all – it was a military action. Meaning White wasn't a criminal – he was an enemy combatant.

  She grasped one more thing: the police had just been made redundant. Soon, probably by morning, there would be naval officers everywhere. They wouldn't be military police either: They would be soldiers.

  In giving in to his base instincts White hadn't just betrayed himself. He'd finally succeeded in completely derailing the police investigation. It had been a laser-guided botbrain move – but it had still worked.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Translation complete,” the Nightingale informed Carm of their latest successful jump. It didn't need to. He had felt the jump even in the lounge.

  “Thanks.” He didn't need to thank the ship either, but manners had been ingrained into him from childhood and the words came automatically. “Anything to report?”

  “All systems green.”

  That was good Carm thought. Since dropping Kendra off they'd made seven more jumps and despite the damage it had taken during their disastrous jump from Aquaria the Nightingale hadn't skipped a beat. He hoped it would keep doing that – for fifty years at least! By his calculations and working on his revised jump schedule of one jump every day, they'd have nearly twenty thousand translation coordinates plugged into their new map by then. If they were incredibly lucky, they might have enough of a map to begin plotting a jump point home. It was a faint hope but it was all he had.

  “Flash up the system when the data's available.”

  “You should be on the bridge. It's regulation.” The ship bluntly told Carm – it was annoyed with him.

  “I'm fine here so just do as I say and file a report.” Technically the ship was right: he should be on the bridge for every jump, but he simply didn't have the energy. There was so little hope so what was the point in getting up?

  Why had the Commonwe
alth given up on space exploration so long ago? He wondered about that as he sat in the cushioned synthetic luxury of the galley's seating area, chewing moodily on a tasteless synthetic beef sandwich. He often mused about it. Because if they hadn't, there would have been a lot more hope with a lot more known systems for him to run across. For some reason, however, they'd simply thrown exploration away as a defective line of code in their program.

  He might be a geologist but he had still studied some history. And he knew that when the translation drive had been discovered and the Commonwealth had been formed, a rush to space had followed. It had been costly and messy, and there had been accidents and lost ships. Nevertheless in that first century two thousand jump points had been plotted and most of the ninety eight colonies established. But after that the pioneering spirit had stalled and over the next nine or ten centuries there had only been another six thousand or so added.

  Laws about ships, crews and safety had been brought in, increasing the cost and preventing any old fool from simply going wandering. Training requirements had become more stringent and the credits people could earn from discoveries had dried up too. Now geologists like him had to make a lot of strikes to pay their way. He had explored fifty systems and laid thirty-plus claims, and while he was doing well enough to have paid off his ship, he was nowhere near astronomically wealthy.

  The number of pilots travelling through space seemed to be getting less and less every year. A number of them left to take up running freight or passengers and they only jumped from one established jump point to another.

  It was as if something had died within the human race. They'd lost their urge to explore and now were content to simply settle on new worlds, raise families and livestock, and sit back with their feet up. Maybe that was just the natural order. The human race had reached middle-age. Carm dreaded to think what humanity would be like when it was ready to retire.

  There was plenty of blame to share: the Spacer's Guild and spacers in general had to take a piece. Spacers like him jumped a lot more than the number of times they reported. It was simply part of life for them. To find something valuable, whether it be a mineral strike, a habitable planet, another alien culture or just a spatial phenomenon, they had to investigate further. They had to jump to many completely worthless places. Consequently they’d got into the habit of only filing the translation coordinates for the systems where something of value had been discovered. It was quicker and easier and if nothing else it saved them the prohibitive filing fees.

  He was as guilty of that failure as everyone else. It seemed pointless to report dead system after dead system, void space after void space. It all took time and there were regulations to follow. So they omitted their failures. But if they'd reported them all, how many more translation points would the map contain? How much greater would his chances of finding one be?

  He was saved from having to let his thoughts meander too much by the ship flashing up a holo of the new system and its planets one by one. It was a big system, sixteen planets, but that wasn't surprising as the sun was a red giant. None of them had anything like a breathable atmosphere let alone life of any sort. That wasn't surprising either. He'd already had his fair share of luck in that department.

  One of them did have a large strike of titanium near the surface. That was something to consider. But not something to investigate he decided. Not when the planet was a week and a half's flight away on the EM drive.

  After flashing up the system the ship went on to start showing him the galaxies. One galaxy looked more or less exactly like another to him – which was more or less the problem. When there were hundreds of millions of them and he could be seeing them from any angle, and at incredible distances, they mostly looked like blobs to him. He'd reduced the amount of time he stayed at each jump point to a single day. It let him visit more of them in a shorter time, but it made it less likely that the ship would identify anything familiar at each one. But still the odds improved. Perhaps it was only a five percent better chance. Maybe it wasn't even that. But any advantage was something and he had to take every chance he had if he was ever to have a hope of getting home.

  Then, if he did make it back, he would have to face the police, something which he was avoiding thinking about. But if or when he made it home, he figured that years if not decades would have passed, and with any luck the madness would have died down. They might even have discovered the truth and dropped the charges. Plus he had Kendra's attack and her admission that she'd sent his biometric data to someone. That was the closest thing he had to a legal defence

  Maybe it was finally time to start examining what had happened. The ship as a matter of course picked up all the media channels and recorded them. The chances were that it would have some information on the events of that day. He knew nothing at all of the original crime – the reserve had been blown up just after he'd landed. Besides he'd been in quarantine and decontamination at the time – something the police should have known.

  But they'd been far too intent on killing him to worry about such things.

  “Discovery Carmichael.” The ship interrupted.

  “Yes?” Carm knew better than to get his hopes up even though for a brief moment they had fluttered.

  “In orbit above the seventh planet there is an artificial device.”

  “Analysis?” It was probably nothing, In fact it was almost certainly nothing, but he was still curious.

  “Object most closely resembles race 4D's artefacts.”

  4D, when Carm had the ship flash it up, was a race which had left objects in orbit around other planets, but none more recently than eighty-three million years before. They’d endured because they’d been left in space. None had been working: their electronics and magnetics had failed, leaving little more than a lump of metal, plastics and composites. Nothing useful had ever been gleaned from them.

  “Should we investigate?”

  “No,” Carm answered without even having to consider it. Normally he would have, but it entailed a week’s flight there and another back. “Log it, take detailed readings. And if we ever get home someone else can investigate.”

  And wasn't that the reality of his life now he thought. All the things he had once done, he could no longer do. There would be no mining save for things he absolutely needed. And though he would once have loved nothing more, he couldn't waste time studying alien artefacts. He couldn't do more than the most cursory examination of a system. He couldn't even plan his next trip home. But then he was fifty nine days spaced. And it was beginning to sink in that he no longer had a life. This wasn't an adventure. It was a life sentence.

  “Have you decided on a name?”

  A name! Carm thought he should at least do that. It was a point of pride with him that every system he visited he named it. Something more than just the random string of letters and numbers the ship would give it if he didn't. If nothing else it meant that somewhere on the great Commonwealth map of the universe there would be a whole bunch of points with names on it, with his name underneath as the discoverer.

  The giant red star dominating the system gave him the inspiration.

  “Is Cyclops taken?

  “No.”

  “It is now.” Carm collapsed back into the couch, his day's work done. And for once the ship didn't bother him further.

  Where was Kendra when he needed her? She would know what to say. What to do to make him feel better. That was what he needed.

  This wild jump had been the worst mistake of his life. And yet still he knew while staring at the holo in moody silence and chewing on his tasteless synthetic sandwich, if he had to do it again, he would. It had never been a choice.

  The only thing he would change was that he'd get a cat instead of an android

  Chapter Sixteen

  Three weeks had passed since Max White had exposed himself as a mute, but absolutely nothing had come of it. The Navy were everywhere of course, not just running the investigati
on but practically all of New Andreas as well. They had more ships in orbit and more soldiers on the ground. This was a Commonwealth crisis and if anyone doubted it, the holos of White's attack had been made public. There was an enemy in town and they were going to hunt him down. The police in their view were only there as back up.

  The ALEB had been sidelined, as had Annalisse. Officially she had been thanked for her efforts, her hand had been shaken by an admiral, she'd been given a citation, and then she'd been quietly retired. The police were no longer involved in the investigation. It was now a military matter. They still received briefings but nothing more.

  And it was her fault. Her new boss, Captain McMillen, was convinced of that. He couldn't quite explain what she'd done or how it had gone wrong, but he was certain she'd screwed up. In fact he'd called her a laser-guided defect to her face, which was the reason why she was on evidence now and stuck day after day in a reinforced concrete bunker, which in turn was inside a larger reinforced concrete bunker otherwise known as the twelfth floor, with no one to talk to and not a lot to do. Sharding bastard! He didn't yell and scream and turn bright red like her last captain had, but he was still a bastard.

  At least the work was easy. There was almost nothing to it: accept the evidence, get the officer's details, palm print, DNA and retinal scan logged into the system along with the material presented. Check the locks were secure on the evidence box, and then hand it to a bot for storage.

  It could have been worse Annalisse supposed – she could have been dumped on the night shift with nothing to do. Hers was a nine-to-five job meaning that every evening she got to go home to her tiny apartment and crash on a couch while eating her dinner in front of the holo. How she hated the holo!

  Mostly she hated it because it was the way she found out most of what she did about the case. The damned reporters had more access to the Navy than she did. More access to everyone concerned, especially to the lawyers. And if there was one group of people heavily involved in the case and stuffing things up even more than the Navy, it was the lawyers.