“How far does your shield work?” Dusko demanded.
“It is broad-based in open air. Otherwise, it would give away my location to counterstrikes. But inside a ship it could vary. Stay within visual range. If you stray, come back quickly. Infestor influence is not immediate unless there are large numbers of soldiers or science drones present.”
Jaelle gestured with her head at Bavara. “Does that mean she will come out of it?”
Curiously, Maauro was slow to respond. Maybe she’s distracted, I thought.
“I do not know for certain. With Creators the effect would ameliorate, for a while at least.”
“One of the enemy must be on board,” Maauro continued. “Yet the situation here is not what I would expect.”
“What do you mean?” Dusko said.
“Infestors rule. They make things comfortable and safe for themselves. This station is in chaos. The personnel that we have seen are dead, feral, or like this one here, living down to an animal level, if not simply catatonic. Also, I am created to home in on and destroy Infestors. None of my senses register a biological Infestor, nor do I sense any psionic units like the one in the centipede. This does not make sense.”
“Then something else is going on,” I said.
“Either way, our best chance of an answer may be this woman.”
“Let’s see if we can get some useful intelligence out of her,” Dusko said. “She’s been cleaned, fed, rested, and within your influence for a bit.” He knelt in front of her and rapped out a command in Guild.
“Use Confed standard,” I growled.
“I will,” he replied. “Those were Guild commands to let her know I am high rank and she needs to respond.”
The Guild commands did seem to rouse Bavara from her stupor. She seemed to focus on us. “Empty. Empty. I only hear the hunger, the hate, the madness.”
“You are Bavara Voght,” Maauro said. “Unmarried female, with one child named Kelzard Voght, who died in a hovercraft accident ten years ago. You are 45 elapsed galactic years old though you have experienced less time as you have traveled extensively by starship. You are a genetic scientist and a Guild criminal…”
Bavara’s eyes locked on Maauro as the slender android spoke calmly, almost hypnotically, reloading a memory into the woman sitting loose-limbed on the floor. As Maauro gave her additional details Bavara’s eyes seemed to grow more self-aware. She began to study each of us as if trying to recognize our faces.
“I can’t hear it now,” she whispered. “Gone. All gone.”
Maauro repeated everything she’d said to the woman, who watched her intensely. Halfway through she absently reached up and began to run her hands through her hair, trying to arrange it. While Maauro had cleaned it and shorn off anything matted, she wasn’t a stylist and the cut was irregular.
Jaelle reached into her jacket, pulled out the broad-tined comb she used for her own rough mane and handed it to the woman.
Bavara reached up to take it, stared at it for a second and then ran it through her hair, wincing occasionally as it hit a snag. Meanwhile, Maauro continued her monologue on Bavara’s life, trying to resurrect the woman’s personality.
“Bavara Voght” the woman murmured. “Yes. Before the emptiness. Bavara Voght. I…I helped make it. I helped….the emptiness…the hunger…I helped make it. It eats. Wants to consume. It eats…minds….who am I?”
“You are Bavara Voght,” Maauro said, “genetic scientist. What were you working on?”
She shook her head slowly, the hand with the comb dropping idly to the floor.
Dusko rapped out commands in Guild. The tone or the words snapped the woman back.
“I ordered her to—” Dusko said
“I now speak basic Guild,” Maauro said. “I decrypted your speech with what I found in the computer.”
Dusko drew back, astonished.
“You?” Bavara said. “Guild Captain?”
“Yes.” Dusko gestured to Maauro. “She is High Guild. Answer her questions.”
Bavara looked at Maauro, who then spoke in the same language as Dusko.
Bavara started to answer in the same tongue, when Maauro interrupted, “Use Standard for these others.”
“Yes, Guildmaster. I… I have trouble…thinking…remembering. We were working on something ancient. DNA from an old, dead, life form.” Her voice drifted off and the eyes emptied, then closed.
I reached forward, feeling her pulse and breathing. I wasn’t a doctor but at least I was another human. “I think she’s just asleep.”
Dusko shifted impatiently. “Well, wake her, damn it.”
Maauro shook her head. “Let us defer to Wrik concerning this biological’s limitations. She has been ill-maintained and abused for many weeks, if not months. She may be a better intelligence source with more rest. However, a picture is emerging. Someone is resurrecting Infestors from DNA from a corpse, almost certainly the tar-preserved corpse that the Murch found and were using for a scarecrow. This lab, the station, these scientists show this to be true.
“Yet there is no ship here and I still cannot directly sense an Infestor presence. Meanwhile we can explore this area, seeking both information and valuables. We are here for salvage as well.”
“What about the remaining crew?” Jaelle demanded. “Shouldn’t we be trying to gather them in one place? There may be other Okarans out there.”
Again there was the curious pause from Maauro before she spoke. “Until whatever is operating here is destroyed, we will not gain any cooperation from them. Controlling this one small female and making sure she does not turn against us will be distraction enough.”
After a second, Jaelle reluctantly nodded.
“A Guild station,” Dusko said, with a predatory gleam in his blue eyes, “should be well stocked with currency and precious metals. We do not deal in credits if we can avoid it—too easy for governments to track.”
“Very well,” Maauro said. “But stay in sight of me.”
Maauro’s instruction limited our searches but after what I had seen of the disaster on the station I was happy to be tethered to her, even if it was by an invisible leash. Dusko proved correct, leading us to a strong room where we found an abundance of gems and currency and gold. We kept some choice pieces for ourselves, filled our pockets with the bigger bills, and cached the rest for quick recovery later.
We were packing up some of our treasure when a moan reminded us of our survivor.
“She’s awake,” Jaelle said.
We turned back to find Bavara looking at us. “Who are you people?”
Maauro turned to her and spoke in Guild, as did Dusko. Now that I knew Maauro spoke it, I was less concerned about Dusko setting us up.
“My team and I came to check out why this facility went silent about three months ago Galactic Actual,” Maauro continued in Standard.
“Three months,” Bavara gasped, looking down at her emaciated body with its covering of bandages.
“Yes,” Maauro said. “We arrived to find the station a shambles. Most of the crew are dead. What few are left seem to be in an animalistic state. At least one Okaran was found eating a Guilder.”
“The Okarans,” Bavara shuddered. “Yes. It had use for them. Strong, with a preference for meat. It used them first. There are five aboard. Scientists, but they went first. The emptiness…the hunger…never satisfied.”
“There is something operating here,” Maauro continued, “something ancient and evil. You woke it. Brought it back into the universe. Why? How? Who ordered this?”
Bavara’s head rocked back and forth slowly under Maauro’s questions.
“The Collector,” she said finally, “Guildmaster Ferlan, came to us, paid for us to reconstitute some DNA from an ancient corpse with our Guild boss’s approval. It took a lot of work, lot of money. We grew three viable lifeforms
from the DNA. Ferlan took them and left.”
“But your boss,” Dusko interjected, “wasn’t satisfied with the payment. He wanted to know what Ferlan was doing. See if there was more profit in it. He had you hold out on some material.”
“Yes and more,” Bavara said, her mouth gone slack as she stared at the floor. “He wanted to find out why she wanted these things. I was able to get access to one of their computers while researching the lifeforms. There wasn’t much I could get into. I found a very old record of a Guild raider finding an ancient alien…something, maybe a ship. It seemed to be hidden in some form of time-distortion. They called it the Artifact. That was all I learned.
“It seemed that what Ferlan…the Collector…grew, were merely some form of animal: big, fast-growing omnivores, but nothing special, except for some oddities in the brain. Oddities in the brain, oddities…” she shook herself almost physically. “I was able to hide some brain tissue from her and her people.”
“I grew a brain, didn’t need the body to study that. Then it became aware…aware. We didn’t know it. Didn’t see it coming. We began to act strangely. Then came the emptiness, the hunger…I…I don’t remember.” She put her head on her knees and sobbed like a lost child.
To my surprise, it was Dusko who moved to help her. He drew a flask from inside his jacket. “Here, drink some of this.”
She took a swallow, which made her gasp and cough, but seemed to revive her. Enough for her to take another long pull.
“Thank you.” Bavara said, then continued. “We have to get away. Got to get off this station. I’ll do anything, get you anything if you’ll take me with you.”
“We’ll take you,” I said. I thought I caught disapproving looks from both Dusko and Maauro, but I was not going to deprive this pitiful wreck of hope of escape from this nightmare. “First, we have to deal with the situation here. See if there’s anyone else who can be saved.”
“No, no, no,” she said. “Have to get away—the hunger will come back. Minds, minds, minds will go. Into the Empty.”
“We have defenses against the Empty,” Jaelle assured her.
“How?” Bavara said with a hint of derision. “No one even knew these powers existed months ago.”
“Untrue,” Maauro said. “I am a combat android designed to both ward off and destroy such creatures.”
I looked at Maauro, surprised at the admission. A dark suspicion formed in my mind.
Bavara stared at her. “You’re not a Confed machine. You appear alive. Where did you come from?”
“That need not concern you. Let it suffice that I have the power to do so or you would not now be in your right mind.”
“Yes, yes.” The woman seized on that thought as if it were a lifeline.
“What happened here cannot be permitted to continue or to spread,” Maauro said. “Tell me all you can about what you did and where.”
Bavara filled in the gaps in the information Maauro had extracted from the computer.
Maauro turned to us. “This brain they grew will be unpredictable in its reactions. However, it does not have complicated patterns. I believe it has sensed us, either directly by impacting on my shields, or indirectly, through the surviving crew.”
Dusko gave Bavara a hard look. “Is she transmitting information now?”
The woman cringed.
“Not since she entered my shielding, but for a few seconds before I destroyed the Okaran, likely. We may expect that the brain has drawn the remaining crew into a defensive posture to defend itself.”
“So we may expect an attack as we move inward,” I said.
“Yes.”
“This won’t get any easier with time,” I said through a dry mouth. “Let’s get it done.”
Jaelle nodded. Dusko, either indifferent or realizing he did not get a vote, said nothing.
“Follow me and ready your weapons,” Maauro said.
Maauro led, keeping Bavara near her as we descended and worked our way inward to the station’s core, where the protected labs were. The further we went, the more surprised I was that the station hadn’t already decompressed or exploded. Burned-out sections alternated with intact ones. We slogged through another flooded corridor where a water tank had ruptured. We found more evidence of murder and degeneracy, gnawed corpses and parts of bodies.
“Okarans,” Bavara said with a shudder, pointing at a pile of cracked bones.
I envied Maauro her composure in the face of all these horrors. For all her gentle delicacy and love of sunsets and stars, she remained at her core, a weapon of war. The darkened halls with their slaughtered occupants were her natural environment. She’d certainly caused as bad or worse. I remembered her chilling discussion of interrogating Infestors and the day she’d fired into masses of fleeing natives in the village by the Tar Sea. I wondered if I truly knew or understood her at all.
Or was she so different? My grandfather fought the Conchirri almost a century ago. I remembered the day I found a necklace of Conchirri claws on a chain made of hull metal from his old cruiser. My finding it upset him and the necklace disappeared into a drawer, never to be discussed, any more than the war was, save when his old friends came over and they got deep into a bottle. Yet I knew that the grisly trophy was buried with him when he lay in his coffin in his full Marine dress uniform.
Maybe Maauro wasn’t so different.
She looked back at me. Somehow, whenever I was thinking about her, Maauro seemed to divine it. Maybe she detected my eyes on her. Maybe she read minds and kept it from us. She waved to me.
I silently slipped up to her, Dusko and Jaelle on my heels.
“We are near the core now,” Maauro whispered. “Be alert and ready your weapons.” She turned to Bavara. “Remain by me at all times.”
The other woman stared at her with wide, despairing eyes, but nodded.
We moved forward in a diamond formation, with Maauro leading me on her right, Jaelle to her left. Dusko brought up the rear and Bavara was protected in the center. Despite my expectations, we were not swarmed by a mindless horde of stationers. Yet there was sound all around us. Hoarse shouts in the distance, running feet, even maniacal laughter.
I looked at Maauro.
“Odd,” she said, “that we are not attacked.”
“Maybe they fear our weapons,” Jaelle added. “Nothing we’ve run into has been carrying a weapon. It seems beyond their capacity.”
“Perhaps so.”
“Yes,” Bavara said, surprising everyone. “When it’s in our minds, you’re…you’re only dimly aware of anything. Machinery is impossible. That’s why the station is such a ruin.”
“If it got some sense of who, or what you are,” I added, turning to Maauro, “it may see the futility of throwing fists and teeth at us.”
“Infestors do not care about those they control, but you may be right. They did not use others as attrition troops in my day, but my Creators were far more resistant of their telempathic power, even without special protection.”
We moved down the spiral ramp that constituted the central core of the station. Half the lights were out on the ramps and it was full of debris and shadow. The corridors radiating from it were mostly dark and abandoned. Again we heard movement.
It was more than wide enough to accommodate us, but we did not spread out.
“Do you see them?” Jaelle asked.
“Fleetingly,” Maauro said.
The comment reassured no one.
The ramp terminated at the base of the station hub. A half-lit sign said, “Lab Central.”
Again the expected attack did not surge out at us.
“Could it be ready to decompress us, blow up a steam line or something?” Dusko demanded. His blue eyes searched the darkness ahead.
“I would detect and intercept any cybernetic attack,” Maauro said. “In addition
that would require it to use the station AI, as it has no body and its servants are mindless. The station AI is offline. No, I do not fear electronic assault or mechanical booby traps. Yet I cannot believe it will give up without a fight, for all that its pattern is atypical for an Infestor.
“Let us move in slowly, in case I have missed something.”
We moved down the hallway, checking for trip wires, pressure plates or any other form of trap, but Maauro proved correct, and we found none. Nor could we hear the footsteps of our unseen trackers.
At the central core was a circular lab room. Many doors led into it and half were open, or partially so. We stepped over broken equipment, a cart, and around a long-dead human body. Fetching up against a wall, we looked around, then stormed into the room, weapons leveled.
The lab was ninety meters across, filled with equipment I couldn’t even guess the uses of. In the center stood an immense, plaststeel tank that went from deck to ceiling. Sitting in the enclosed, liquid-filled container and surrounded by conduits, cable and fiber optics, lay something organic. It did not look like a human brain. It was far larger and smoother, yet we had no doubt this was the source of the contagion.
A blast of heat rolled off Maauro. Her systems had gone into overdrive.
Something changed in the room, as if it had suddenly darkened and we were standing in a small clearing of light in a sea of blackness. A feeling of despair was rammed into me.
“Wriiiikkkk,” she managed. “It attttaaaaccks. I am hoooolldiiing it offfffff. It’s after youuuuuu.”
Chapter 21
The Infestor brain strikes me with the force of a storm. Were I not made of steel and ceramics I might have been driven to my knees. I have never before felt such psionic force. The thing before me has mutated into a hive queen brain. But there is no intelligence in it. The brain is deprived of a body, of senses, yet it has become aware, through its native psionic power, of itself and of others. It has also become powerful on an incredibly primitive level. It is hunger. It is emptiness. It is despair. It is also quite insane.
My Outcast State (The Maauro Chronicles Book 1) Page 21