Void Ship

by Dave Bara

  “Go!” he yelled as he broke from behind the rock and into the brush, running a zigzag pattern, making for the Yan android. As he ran he saw the chaos near the control room. Automaton bodies were piling up near the entrance as the two advanced androids approached inexorably. Renwick angled for cover, closing in behind the Yan android. A concussion blast drove him to the ground again. When he regained his senses he looked to the battlefield and saw only one android, Amanda, advancing to the control room door. Frantically he looked for Yan, and saw her laying in a patch of grass just a few meters away. He went to her as the firefight wound down, Amanda sweeping the area clean with red fire from her two coil pistols. When he got to the Yan android she looked for all the world like she was dead. Her eyes were open and her mouth agape, but there was no evidence of a wound of any kind. A second later and Kish was at his side, bearing the pack that had their two rifles.

  “Zueros left the pack when Yan was taken out,” he said, then looked down to the fallen android. “Is she dead?” he asked Renwick, dead being a relative term when dealing with an android.

  “I don’t know. She was knocked down by that last concussion blast,” said Renwick as he struggled to remove the android’s pinky finger. He looked around for cover and saw a rock outcropping nearby. “Help me get her over there.” The two men dragged the downed android behind the rocks as the firefight continued behind them. Renwick resumed his tugging and pulling.

  “Do you see Zueros?” he asked Kish. Kish looked out.

  “He and Amanda are in the control room, but I have no idea what they’re up to,” he said.

  “I think I do,” replied Renwick. “They’re going to overload the station’s dark matter generator. They’ll force a massive dispersal of dark energy into this sector, perhaps enough to envelope the whole of the Known Cosmos in just a few months.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “It’s the only thing that makes any sense,” said Renwick as he continued to try and free the finger. “The Soloth invasion fleet is trying to seize the station intact to gain a beachhead in this sector. We want to shut it down, then use it to reverse the effects of the Void. But Zueros is a Preserver agent. His agenda is to knock us back as far as he can, and he’ll use this station to do it.”

  “But he’ll still have the Soloth to deal with, won’t he?” asked Kish.

  “Yeah, he will, but my guess is that they’ve been under his influence for a long time, as far as I can tell. He pulls the strings and they dance. We’ll have to fix that, after we save the station,” said Renwick. “Here, you try this,” he said, giving up on removing the android’s finger. “You’re the engineer.”

  Renwick took one of the rifles and looked over the top edge of the boulder. The control room was still burning around the edges but he couldn’t see inside due to smoke and burning android bodies.

  “Give me the jump drive,” said Kish, holding the Yan android’s pinky in his hand. Renwick tossed him the new finger.

  “How’d you do that?” Renwick asked.

  “I’m the engineer, remember?” replied Kish. “If we’re lucky this thing will have a pulse generator in it, hopefully it’ll reset the android’s neuro-phasic systems.”

  “Uh, could you say that in Standard?” said Renwick.

  “Reboot her memory, her brain,” said Kish. “The grenade likely knocked it out.”

  “But not Amanda,” said Renwick. Kish shook his head.

  “Not Amanda. She’s a different type of android altogether.” Kish stuck the finger on Yan’s hand and pushed in, then twisted the finger into place. It locked in with a click. The android body started up with a jitter, then shot bolt upright to a sitting position.

  “God, that hurts!” said Yan, grabbing at her temples and rubbing. She looked around the landscape, then to Kish, and finally to Renwick. “Where the hell are we?” she said.

  “The emitter station,” said Renwick. “And things aren’t going our way.”

  “Figures,” she jumped up, grabbing the other coil rifle. “That the control room?” she said, nodding in the direction of the room.

  “Yeah,” said Renwick, “Zueros and Amanda are inside, doing god knows what.”

  “I know what they’re doing,” said Yan. “The same thing I came here to do three hundred years ago. Blow this thing back to the hell it came from.”

  “I think he’s planning on overloading the emitters and flooding the Known Cosmos with as much Void energy as he can,” said Renwick. Yan whipped her head around to face him.

  “He can’t do that,” she said. “That could-“

  “Flood the entire sector in a matter of months, I know. And it would eliminate the only way to clean the Known Cosmos of Void Space, probably for generations,” said Renwick. Yan powered up the rifle.

  “We’ve got to stop them,” she said.

  “Too late,” said Kish, pointing. Zueros was hastily retreating from the control room, covered by Amanda. There were no android automatons left to fight, however.

  “I’ve got to stop them,” said Yan. She turned to Renwick. “How good a shot are you with this thing?”

  Renwick accepted the rifle from her. “Good enough,” he said.

  “I’m going to distract Amanda, get her back towards you,” Yan said. “You’ll need to hit her right at the apex of the back of the neck, where the spine enters the skull on a human. There’s an input sensor there. If you hit it, you’ll send a charge through her neural net that will knock her out for maybe an hour, just like the grenade did to me. You’ll only get one shot at this. If you miss, we’ll likely both be dead.”

  “I won’t miss,” said Renwick. She smiled.

  “I know you won’t,” she replied, then she kissed him, hard, and leapt over the rock in a single bound, charging at android speed for the retreating Amanda.

  23.

  Yan crashed into Amanda from behind, the jolt sending the command android flying across the open plain, her dual coil pistols flying from her hands and scattering to the ground. Zueros, who already had one of the pistols, grabbed a second from the ground and fired at Yan. She dove behind a rock, avoiding the hell-fire of the laser at the last possible second.

  “Goodbye, Senator. What a shame we won’t be working together anymore,” Zueros yelled out. Then he donned his EVA helmet and began a rapid retreat out of the sanctuary. Renwick had a shot at him from behind the rock outcropping, but didn’t take it. Zueros barked off final commands to Amanda in his strange language, then retreated through the airlock.

  “Why didn’t you take the shot?” demanded Kish.

  “Because he can lead us to where the secrets are, and the damage here has already been done. Can you feel it?” said Renwick. Kish put his hand on the rock. There was a noticeable low-frequency hum and vibration that made the rock quiver.

  “Christ-“

  “The overload sequence has started. We have to stop it.” Renwick watched as the two androids circled each other in an open glade about thirty meters from the two men. Both androids were unarmed. This was going to be strength against strength.

  Amanda made the first move, crossing the ten meters between the two combatants in a flash of android fury, leaping for Yan and sending her crashing across the ground, digging a deep trench across the tall grass and soil. Yan was immediately up and dove back at Amanda, the force of her thrust propelling the two androids against the control room wall, smashing a good portion of it away as they grappled. A cloud of dust and dirt shot into the air, obscuring the fight.

  “Can you see them?” asked Kish.

  “No. Now shut up, I’ll only get one shot at this!” replied Renwick as he gripped the barrel of his rifle and aimed through the sight. Suddenly the androids were both out in the open again, flying across the glade, wrestling in each other’s arms, ripping and tearing at each other as they went. Another burst of dust and dirt flew up where they landed, rolling, arms flailing at android speed in a furious fight. Then, out of the cloud there was the kick
of a leg and Amanda stood upright with her back to Renwick, towering over the downed Yan. She raised her arms, clasped together to deliver a final hammer blow. Renwick took his shot.

  The laser light from his coil rifle hit her spot on, right between the neck and head. Her arms dropped in a jittery dance and she fell down to her knees and then hit the ground, falling like an imploded building.

  “You got her!” Kish rushed out to examine the downed android. Renwick shouldered his rifle and ran out to Yan, helping her up from the ground. She brushed herself off.

  “Nice shot,” she said, “Another minute of that and I’d have been mashed into a small toaster.”

  “I wouldn’t let that happen,” said Renwick. Yan smiled.

  “I know you wouldn’t,” she replied. She looked to the control room. “We’ve got to get in there.” She made for the room and Renwick followed her.

  “Make sure she stays out of commission,” Renwick called to Kish over his shoulder as he went.

  “Will do,” said the engineer as he rolled the downed command android on to her back and bent down to examine her.

  Renwick and Yan went to the control room entrance, which was three-deep in dismembered android body parts. Yan cleared the detritus out of their path with little delicacy and went inside. Renwick followed in her path.

  The room was small, with a low ceiling, unlike all of the other structures on the station. It indicated that the automaton androids or humans were the most likely users of this room. A set of opaque hexagonal glass panels separated the outer control room, filled with working consoles and stations, from an inner chamber. The chamber glowed with an orange resonance. There were other, darker shapes moving inside the chamber, though it was unclear what they were. Yan ignored the inner chamber and examined a set of consoles on the near wall. Many of the other areas of the chamber looked like berths for the android automatons. They were all empty. They’d given their all in the battle to protect this room.

  “I can’t read these consoles but the equipment looks familiar. This whole room looks familiar,” Yan said. Then she pressed both her hands into the main console, which took up one entire wall. It absorbed her hands, up past the wrists.

  “Yan, wait!” said Renwick, panicked as he tried to pull her back out.

  “Don’t interrupt me,” Yan said, her voice cold, distant, and demanding. Renwick retreated and watched as the console began to light up from within, a rainbow of colors flowing across its surface, then swimming between Yan’s arms like some sort of sea creatures before diving back down into the dark. He watched the interplay, feeling helpless. Yan shuddered, then a bolt of amber light enveloped the room.

  A display panel on the main console lit up. The face of Captain Tanitha Yan, the real one, Renwick realized, appeared. He hair was shorter and more severe than the android wore it, and there were lines on her face, showing the long-term effects of stress for such an otherwise young woman. She wore an EVA suit of a type common in her time, the crest of the Commonwealth Military forces stamped on her chest. The image began speaking, playing back a recorded message.

  “This is Captain Tanitha Yan of the Human Commonwealth Star Carrier Kali. I have come to this station in a time of crisis. My crew of five and I suffered a malfunction of our main energy emitters during our initial test phase. The Pendax system was completely enveloped in dark energy, as was planned in the test. But when it came time to reverse the process our systems suffered a breakdown of unknown origin. Per my instructions from General Zueros I placed the Kali in lockdown mode and proceeded here, pending a return by us or a relief team being sent in our place,” she said.

  “General Zueros?” said Renwick out loud. Yan was engulfed by her communion with the console and said nothing in reply. He could only assume she was hearing all of this at the same time he was. The real Yan continued in a harsh, military tone.

  “We returned to this station as ordered, but when we arrived we found that the station was already operative and spilling dark energy into the entire sector. I began to suspect sabotage, both here and on board the Kali,” Yan said.

  “Smart girl,” said Renwick.

  “When we boarded the station, we found that the battle androids had turned against us. After a long fight during which my security chief was killed, we managed to make it up here to the control room. The robots here did not fight us or acknowledge us in any way, in fact they were all in shut down mode. The control room was accessible but we could not effect a shutdown of the emitters.” She took in a deep breath.

  “The four remaining crew and I are agreed that the only way to shut down the station is to attempt to breech the power core from here. If we are successful, then the General Counsel will be reading my report in a few days. If we fail, then God help us all,” she paused again at this point before finishing.

  “And one more note. Based on what I have seen here and the absence of both General Zueros and his command crew, I can only assume that it is Zueros himself who is responsible for this sabotage. If we are able to shut down the power core, then I promise you that I will make hunting down and bringing General Zueros to justice my life’s work.” With that she hefted her helmet raising it to her head. “This is Yan, Captain of the Kali, signing off,” she finished, then started to put on her EVA helmet as the image faded.

  Yan slowly withdrew from the console.

  “Are you all right?” asked Renwick gently. The android Yan said nothing, and instead went to a side panel and keyed in a sequence. One of the hexagonal panels slid aside and the power core chamber was exposed. She walked to the open panel. Renwick came and stood at her side, looking in at a horrific sight.

  There were four EVA-suited bodies inside, each of them floating in a slow death ballet around the glowing core.

  “They never left,” Yan said grimly. “They tried to shut down the core, but they didn’t know it was protected by a stealth technology field, some trap Zueros set for them. When they stepped inside this chamber they stepped out of time, into a different temporal realm. Their bodies accelerated at a frightening speed. They aged a whole lifetime in a matter of minutes. Then they died.”

  Renwick watched as the bodies drifted by one by one, each attached to the other by a tether line, and each of them in turn held in place by the stealth security field, floating in zero-g for all eternity. He saw the faces inside the helmets, withered skeletons with sinews of skin and fiber still clinging to their bones. He read the names on the EVA suit plates as they floated past; Tanner, Chandra, Malcom...

  And Yan.

  He turned away, his stomach churning. “What can we do?” he said.

  “Nothing,” came the reply. But it didn’t come from Yan. They both snapped around to the control room entrance. Amanda stood in the doorway, holding one of the advanced coil pistols to Kish’s head with one hand while she easily hefted him off of the ground with the other.

  “But I can save this station,” she said. “If you’ll just get out of my way.”

  “AND THANK YOU, SENATOR, for the shot in the head. It reset my neural net just as you anticipated. It also released me from Zueros’ command programming,” Amanda continued, setting Kish down and withdrawing the coil pistol. “Now I can help you.”

  “You expect us to believe you’re going to help us?” said Renwick.

  Amanda raised an eyebrow at him. “What you believe is irrelevant. I intend to keep this station from exploding. That is what you want. Therefore, I am by definition helping you,” she said. She pushed past Kish and went to the main console. Renwick raised his rifle at her back.

  “If you’re going to take your shot, I suggest you do it now, Mr. Renwick,” said Amanda. “Just between the spine and left scapula should do the trick, even with that outmoded rifle.” Then she immersed her hands into the board and the console sprang to life again. Renwick hesitated. It was Yan who pushed the barrel back down.

  “Let her go,” Yan said. “It’s not her fault.”

  “Quite right Captain,�
� continued Amanda as her hands flew over the console, her eyes staring blankly ahead. “As I said, it was Mr. Zueros who had control of me before. Now I am back in my right mind, and free to make my own decisions.”

  Renwick shouldered his rifle again as he watched her. “Who built this station?” he said to Amanda. She looked at him without stopping her programming.

  “We did. Over half a million of your standard years ago,” she said. “There are over a thousand of these stations throughout the galaxy. A vast network. Designed by our creators and built and implemented by us.”

  “By androids, you mean?” he said.

  “Exactly,” she said.

  Renwick eyed her again, finally putting it all together. “It’s not Zueros, it’s you, isn’t it? You’re the Preservers,” he said. She actually smiled.

  “Your species is so ingenious. That’s why you’re one of our favorites,” she said. “You are correct, Senator. We are the Preservers, as you call them, or more accurately, what’s left of their culture. We are the guardians of their vast plan.”

  “What happened to them?” asked Renwick.

  “It’s much as you surmised. Ten thousand of your centuries ago the parent race that created us was at their peak. They ruled over half of this galaxy. But they were wise. They saw their culture deteriorating, and they knew it would collapse eventually. So they did three things; they started seeding new life forms, modifying others via genetics, and they built these stations, with us in charge of them,” Amanda said. “And now, that is all that is left of them.”

  “But why? Why build something so potentially destructive?” asked Kish.

  “For precisely the same reasons as your people wanted the technology, Mr. Kish; to encase belligerent or potentially dangerous races, to keep them from growing and harming the other species. Our builders were wise, and they wanted only the best of their creation to survive and flourish,” she said.