by T. R. Harris
Fortunately, most interior compartments within the ship had been sealed at the onset of the battle, so the forward section—and even the rear third beyond the cut—remained airtight. But gravity was lost, along with internal power, engines, communications and life support. Battery-powered emergency lights flashed on, revealing a bridge crew in panic.
With gravity down, the Tactorians used the various grasping bars to move through the room, all in a headlong rush to reach emergency air tanks held in storage compartments along the base of the interior bulkheads. Adam held onto the side of a console to keep from floating away, both amused and saddened by the reaction of the crew. The room was airtight and large, with enough residual atmosphere to last a couple of hours. Yet already the Tactorians were pulling out small, personal air tanks and placing masks over their faces, using up emergency reserves before they were needed. At this rate, Adam would have enough air to last five or six hours…even without an emergency tank.
The Tactorians huddled near the deck, sucking on air tanks and shivering from fright and the gathering cold. All electronics were down, including communications, and any ships within range would consider the drifting flagship to be a lost cause. Adam had to do something about that.
Using the Artificial Telepathy Device embedded beneath his right armpit, he reached out mentally, searching for electronic signals within range. His ATD allowed him to connect with control modules designed and built by the Formilian race, which amounted to about ninety-nine percent of all electronics in the galaxy. He was rewarded with the detection of a nearby source.
It was a starship, located about four hundred thousand miles away and just now charging its gravity generators, preparing for a deep-well jump out of the area. Adam’s mental intrusion raced through computers and circuits until he found the gravity drive controls. He shut down the generators, leaving the ship dead in space and the crew frightened and confused.
He accessed the ship’s comm controls and opened a channel.
“This is Adam Cain aboard the Tactorian flagship.” His voice boomed from bridge speakers, even as operators were at a loss to pin-point the source of the incoming transmission. “Just open a channel and I’ll hear you. Please respond.”
A moment later a weak voice sounded in Adam’s mind.
This is H’can, commander of this vessel. I do not understand.
“You don’t have to at this point. Just know that Commander G’ks and most of his crew are alive and trapped in secure compartments aboard the flagship. We’re in desperate need of a rescue operation.”
We read no power output...and no communication signals originating from the flagship. We cannot proceed without confidence. And add to that our generators are malfunctioning; we are in no position to assist.
“I shut down your engines so you wouldn’t bolt out of the area. Your chemical engines are still operating. Now stop thinking and get your asses over here!”
To punctuate his sentence, Adam ignited the chem drive of the Tactorian starship, not at full power, but just enough to let them know he had the means to make his request-slash-command a reality. The oblong spaceship cycled around and headed for Adam and the bifurcated flagship.
Three hours later, most of the crew from both sections of the flagship had been rescued. Adam even managed to salvage his personal starship from the landing bay. This did involve some rather abrupt depressurization of the chamber, since all the controls were dead. But once the outer door was open, he remotely activated the ship’s controls with his ATD and coaxed it out of the flagship’s bay and into that of H’can’s ship.
Half an hour later, Adam was on the bridge of the second Tactorian ship, listening as H’can briefed his commander on the status of the battle.
“A total of five atom weapons were sent against the Klin warship. At that point it left the system.”
“It left? Was it able to create a gravity-well?” Adam asked H’can.
“The ability to or not cannot be discerned. I report that it did not leave in a gravity-well,” said the alien.
Nuclear explosions had a nasty habit of interfering with gravity-well creation. Apparently the Klin had not solved that problem. But that wasn’t what excited Adam the most. The Klin had been driven away. This was great news.
“Their energy absorption must have limits,” he said. “So they split before their systems overloaded.”
“Correction: The Klin ship remained intact as one unit during its departure,” H’can pointed out. Adam gave the beetle-like alien a full-tooth smile. He figured he was safe with the whole exposed-teeth-mean-a-death-challenge thing…since the Tactorians didn’t have teeth.
“That is true, my friend, but they aren’t gone, not for good. They probably retreated just so they could dump some of their excess energy. We’ll need more nukes if we want to keep them away from your planet for good.”
“Confused as to your meaning, Adam Cain?” H’can said. Again, the solid black eye orbs made reading his expression impossible. “The second Klin ship delivered the conquering robots to the surface.”
“What second ship?”
“The second Klin ship. It appeared from the opposite direction as the first vessel. It reached Tactoria unopposed.”
“They used two ships to attack your system?”
Both H’can and G’ks shared a look. “Was the meaning not clear?” H’can asked.
“Yes it was. It’s just that I’ve never heard of the Klin using two ships for one system. I didn’t know they had that many available.”
According to command intelligence sources, the Klin only had seven completed black ships to deliver their deadly cargo of killer robots to a target world. With a galaxy to conquer, they shouldn’t be in a position to allocate more than one ship per system—at least not yet. Even factoring in a reasonable build-out rate, it would take decades to accomplished the Klin’s Final Solution—the annihilation of all Prime life in the galaxy.
“In spite of our efforts, our homeworld is in the process of being destroyed,” G’ks stated. “There is nothing more for us to do.”
“You can gather up the survivors and start over,” Adam snapped. “The Klin never kill everyone on a planet. Eventually their robots shut down. But warn your people, as the machines power-down, they also explode. So don’t go near any dormant robots.”
“We have been so briefed,” G’ks replied. “A warning conveyed in words I add, which is all the Expansion has given us to this point.”
Adam didn’t have a response. He’d heard the same complaint a dozen times before. ‘The Expansion should have done more.’ ‘The Expansion should be able to protect its member planets.’
Adam bowed slightly. “I’m sorry for your loss, G’ks, but I’ll be leaving now—”
“So you can relay your observations?” asked the Tactorian commander. “It should be a short report, repeated often. I assist: Another world destroyed, billions dead.”
2
Adam’s two-person command-class transport starship was not much more than a secure crew pod stuck between two of the largest gravity generators he’d ever seen on a ship this size. The craft was Juirean-built and extremely fast. They’d loaned it to him the last time he was on Formil, desperate for real-time intelligence regarding the Klin and recognizing Adam’s mastery of strategy and tactics. He also had the most up-to-date working knowledge of the Klin, making him the acknowledged ‘expert’ in this war and once again the default savior of the Milky Way Galaxy.
As he steered the ship to a safe distance from the Tactorian starship before engaging a deep gravity-well, Adam gnashed his teeth out of frustration. Once more he felt the weight of the galaxy pressing down on his shoulders, with all eyes looking to him to pull a rabbit out of his hat. For once—just once—he wished someone else would come to the rescue. He was getting too old for all this hero shit.
The trip to Formil took eight days, even in the Juirean’s just-get-me-to-my-destination-as-fast-as-possible starship. During the journey, Ad
am had time to organize his thoughts, and using the omnipresent galactic Library, he was able to pull up data to support his hypothesis. He would be ready to present his findings and recommendations as soon as he arrived on Arieel Bol’s home planet.
His team had arrived on Formil thirty days earlier, assembling there for a specific purpose unique only to them. As a result, when Adam entered the main hall on the twenty-first floor of the Trimen O’lac Building, he was greeted with a frustrating sight.
The lights in the room were flickering on and off.
“Knock it off, Jym!” Copernicus Smith snapped. “We get it; you can control the lights.”
“I can control more than that,” the tiny bear-like creature responded with gusto. “I can work elevators and food processors—I could even pilot a starship without touching the controls.”
“Yeah, we all can,” Sherri chimed in, frustrated as well by the alien’s obsession with his new Artificial Telepathy Device. “But I wouldn’t recommend trying to pilot a starship with your ATD, not until you’ve had more training.”
Several years ago both Sherri Valentine and Riyad Tarazi had been fitted with ATDs and received on-the-job training from Adam and Arieel. Since then Riyad’s old unit had been removed, while Sherri’s burned out during one of the team’s many adventures. Now they were both proud owners of new units, as was every member of the team who didn’t already have one.
The Formilian Temple priests had raised holly-hell over the plan, but Arieel and Adam’s persistence proved more than they could resist. Considering the desperate state the galaxy was in facing the genocidal Klin, having a team of operatives equipped with the secret brain-interface devices was the only advantage the allies had going for them. Even so, there were seven team members against a whole army of alien-built killer robots and their ever-growing fleet of invincible warships.
Yet a year ago, Adam—with the help of his ATD—had proved effective during his one and only encounter with the Klin in this new war. It was argued six other people so equipped couldn’t hurt.
Or could it? Adam was having his doubts.
It had taken considerable time and training for him to gain the level of expertise he had with his device. And Arieel had grown up with hers, as the heir-apparent to the leadership of the Formilian people.
But the aliens Kaylor and Jym were another matter.
For his part, Kaylor seemed more apprehensive of the device than anxious to learn how to us it. His Belsonian race wasn’t known to be overly religious, but they did have a fervent belief in the sanctity of their physical being. Having an artificial device implanted in his body that could sync with his brain was something he was having difficulty accepting.
On the other hand, Jym welcomed the device and all the power it gave him. As the smallest and weakest of the team, he felt the ATD put him on an even keel with the others. But an ATD is a complicated device, with a lot of training required before it could be used efficiently. Jym was having none of that. He was too impatient to concentrate on the training sessions, inclined more to learn on his own through obnoxious—and potentially dangerous—experimentation. Jym’s antics were also interfering with the training the others were going through—especially Copernicus Smith.
Coop was new to the whole ATD thing. Sure, he’d seen Adam and Arieel operate theirs, but unlike Sherri and Riyad—who had prior experience—he was the only Human on the team who was a complete rookie with the device. Whereas Kaylor feared his ATD—and Jym experimented with his—Coop was confused by the whole concept of the brain-interface and was having a heluva time making the damn thing work.
“You have to gain awareness of the Gift within your body,” Arieel was explaining to Coop as Adam entered the room. For two thousand years, the Formilian race considered the powers of the interface device a Gift, given to their supreme religious leader—their Speaker—as a means of communicating with the polar-opposite gods Mislin and Sufor. “At the moment, you do not feel the gift within you,”
Arieel continued. “Once you become more aware, you will have an easier time accessing its miracles.”
Adam was surprised to hear Arieel speak in such terms about the ATD. By now she was fully aware that all the so-called miracles the device created were merely a result of science and technology, and not from any mystical or divine providence. But old habits die hard, so Adam gave her a pass.
No one seemed particularly glad or surprised to see him. His habit of coming and going was old hat by now; besides, they were too distracted with their new toys to give him much notice.
But Sherri did come over and give him a cursory hug.
“How was your trip?” she asked flippantly, as if he’d just spent a few days in Cleveland at a widget convention, rather than getting a starship get cut in half with him aboard.
“It was fine, dear,” Adam answered, matching her tone. Sherri nodded absently and moved back to where Copernicus stood red-faced, listening to Arieel explain more about the ATD—in frustratingly-religious terminology.
“Let’s get him to concentrate on the area under his armpit,” Sherri offered. “Take your hand and feel the unit under your skin. Maybe that will make it more real to you.”
Arieel nodded, and the two women devoted all their attention to the bare-chested hunk of a man with the feral six-pack abs.
Copernicus Smith was only thirty-six years old; at that age Adam been just as cut. And now with the tiny colony of alien mutant brain cells residing within his skull, he was more physically-fit than he’d ever been in his life. But on the exterior, he was still a forty-nine year-old man who’d seen more than his share of youth-stealing mileage. He looked over at Riyad, seated on a large couch and shaking his head at Jym’s annoying antics. He was the oldest of the group, yet his smooth olive-skin and jet black hair and beard disguised his chronological age. He could pass for anywhere between the mid-twenties to around forty, but never his actual age of fifty-two.
Depressed, Adam walked to the food prep station located along an outer wall of the room. There was a large window facing north, revealing a spectacular vista of snow-capped mountains and a wide river called the Yanis. The team had been given the entire twenty-first floor of the thirty-story skyscraper to use as their base of operations. So far, not many operations had been planned or implemented since the Klin invasion begun a year earlier. The team was still in the information-gathering stage, and the longer it took for them to come up with any viable countermeasures, the more planets would be lost to the insane aliens.
Adam pulled a cup of steaming coffee from the processor and turned to look into the room. Yes, his team had proven themselves over and over again, but why were they always the ones drafted into saving the galaxy? To be fair, he knew there were billions of other creatures, made up of a thousand different species, all working on the same problem. But it was Adam Cain and his people who were expected to come up with a solution. It was the cavalier nature of the assumption that upset him the most.
A large conference table was set off to his left, with a data box imbedded in its surface and a viewing screen on the wall. He walked over and took a seat in front of the control box, his shitty mood causing him to gripe about why there weren’t holographic projectors like they had in Star Wars. Instead, his presentation would be displayed on a normal-looking glass panel, resembling a large flat-screen TV. Sure, the technology under the hood was light-years beyond what Sony ever came up with before alien tech took over on Earth. But still…there should be holographs.
Adam’s acerbic mood made everything he saw or touch piss him off just a little bit more. He also didn’t like being taken for granted….
“Hey, you think you could stop playing around for a minute?” he barked into the room, sounding as bitchy as possible. “We have some very important things to go over. This is serious, something all of you seem to have forgotten.”
“What bug climbed up your ass and laid an egg?” Sherri snapped back. “All you had to do was call the meeting to order.�
�
“I thought I just did.”
“Come, Jym,” Kaylor said to his life-long friend and shipmate. “Our master has spoken.”
Adam cursed under his breath. When Kaylor got snarky with him, he knew he’d crossed a line. Even so, Adam was in no mood to apologize.
When everyone was seated at the table, Adam inserted a data chip in the computer.
“Getting right to it, there were some interesting developments during my time with the Tactorians. I’ve gone over some of this already with Riyad during the transit back here, but for the rest of you this will be new.”
He looked to the huge display screen. It was dark. He pulled the chip from the reader and inserted it again. Still no data.
Pursing his lips in anger, Adam glared at Jym, who was seated at the opposite end of the rectangular table.
“I concede,” the alien said with a laugh. “Yet you must admit to being impressed. I was able to locate the control module and affect the workings of the monitor.”
The screen flashed on.
Through his anger, Adam had to admit the tiny bear was making progress with his ATD at a faster pace than expected. But this was not the time or the place to play games. Not with the mood Adam was in.
The screen showed a detailed graphic of the approach of the Klin warship, and the subsequent attack by the Tactorians. When the five nuclear bombs exploded in succession, Adam suddenly had their attention.
“It wasn’t destroyed?” Copernicus asked, unbelieving.
“No, but the ship did leave the system,” Riyad reported. He looked at Adam. “We could just keep blasting them with nukes until they leave, and then set up a perimeter to keep them away.”
“That would take a lot of nukes,” Sherri noted. “It would also saturate the system with clouds of radiation.”