Balance of Terror

by K S Augustin

  Saff moved to one of the cupboards and opened it, taking out a dun-coloured rucksack. Moon watched her movements in disbelief.

  “You’ve had it here all this time? So you knew that it was medication and you still—”

  “We didn’t know anything,” Tamlan interrupted. “You told us it was medicine so we brought it here to verify the contents.”

  “I told you what was in there—”

  “People say a lot of things they don’t mean,” he cut in, “and I’m not the trusting type. Deal with it.”

  Moon glowered then turned away, muttering angrily to herself as she ripped open the front flap and started rummaging through the contents. It wasn’t…they had taken…then her fingers closed on some reassuringly cool tubes and she breathed a sigh of relief.

  Moving with more confidence, she laid out her supplies, methodically lining them up along the edge of the bunk.

  “What are you arranging? What do you have in those tubes?”

  Tamlan again – didn’t the man ever stop asking questions? – but this time Moon didn’t mind so much. The situation was now more under her control.

  “Anti-hyperpyrexia medication,” she answered, touching one of the tubes Leen Vazueb had given her a lifetime ago. “My own concoction, a mix of drugs, to deal with his convulsive attacks and,” she licked her lips, “and a cognitive enhancer to help cut through the side-effects of everything.”

  “That’s quite a cache of drugs you’re pumping into him.”

  She glanced up and caught his speculative gaze, then returned to concentrate on what she was doing.

  “The day I don’t have to do any of this will be the happiest day of my life.”

  He left her in peace for the next fifteen minutes but Moon felt his presence, like a gigantic pulsating question-mark, in the corner of the medical bay. When she was finally done, and Srin looked to be out of danger – his temperature back down to normal, his skin colour natural and not so flushed – she closed her eyes and sagged against the bunk.

  “I think we need to talk.”

  “What you really mean,” Moon amended in exhaustion, “is that it’s time for me to answer your questions.”

  “You’re smarter than you look.”

  Her eyes snapped open but the expression on Tamlan’s face was unreadable. The other crewmember, Saff, was nowhere to be seen.

  “I’m not leaving the medical bay,” she said, “so don’t expect me to follow you to another meeting room.”

  He shrugged. “That doesn’t bother me. I can imprison you here as easily as in any other place aboard this ship.”

  She frowned at him. “You don’t like me much, do you?”

  “I haven’t formed an opinion yet.”

  He walked so there was an empty bunk between them and perched himself on the last mattress in the bay.

  “You mentioned hyperpyrexia? That’s heat, isn’t it? Something to do with high body heat?”

  “It’s a condition that translates to an extremely high body temperature. If it gets too high, above forty-two degrees, he dies.”

  “How did he get it?”

  The moment of truth.

  Moon didn’t like Tamlan very much but he appeared to be the kind of person who said exactly what was on his mind, which was reassuring. On the other hand, what kind of man travelled in an empty ship for seven years? Was he a freedom-fighter or a lunatic?

  Was there any difference?

  “It’s a control mechanism,” she finally told him. “The Republic didn’t want their walking super-computer getting any independent thoughts, so they fixed him.”

  Her voice became bitter. “Drugs to erase his memory and give him a two-day retention cycle. Drugs to incapacitate and kill him should he manage to escape.”

  “Are you his doctor?”

  Moon laughed, but it was a sound devoid of humour. “No, I’m his physicist.”

  She let Tamlan stew in his own confusion for a while before explaining herself. “I was his most recent client.” Her lips twisted. “Dr. Moon Thadin, stellar physicist, working on a project to rehabilitate dead stars, completely unaware – in her studied ignorance – that her government’s aim was to destroy worlds, not rebuild them.”

  Tamlan frowned. “Thadin? Moon Thadin?”

  Moon quirked an eyebrow. “At your service.”

  “But you disappeared months ago. There were rumours that you had died on Slater’s End. You and…,” his gaze dropped to Srin’s sleeping figure.

  “My god,” he whispered. Then hardness crept into his amber eyes. “You can’t be.”

  Moon put on the best tone she used with recalcitrant undergraduates, so dry it would have made the deserts of Marentim appear as lush oases. “Would you like to run a DNA scan?”

  “You didn’t die on Slater’s End?”

  “Obviously not.” One of her eyebrows quirked. “Not for lack of trying.”

  And she was back there again, in the chill of the mid-morning, trying not to sneeze as she breathed in the dust within the ramshackle hut where she and Srin had been hiding. A Space Fleet patrol had landed on the edge of a mining town before Moon had time to jack a shuttle and they had to keep as quiet as rodents if they were going to evade the dragnet.

  “It was close,” she said softly.

  It was more than close. They were dead…if it hadn’t been the Differential’s captain himself who had found them. Drue Jeen’s pale blue gaze had seen them, swapped a message with Moon’s look of desperation, before he closed the door quietly behind him and ordered the patrol onward.

  “How did you get off-planet?” A hint of respect crept into Tamlan’s voice.

  “We found a contact. A doctor. She did what she could and smuggled us to Lunar Fifteen, a mining colony within the same system. My—a colleague arranged for transport to Marentim with the Fodox Rebels cartel.”

  “Pirates.”

  And that’s when Moon knew that Tamlan wasn’t one. He said that one word with such loathing that she wondered what story lay behind it. Had a pirate cartel been responsible for what had happened to his face? For the starkness of his ship?

  “That’s right,” she agreed. “Pirates. To give them their due, they kept their end of the bargain. We landed on Marentim and were travelling across it with a guide when we…changed our minds.”

  Tamlan’s eyes narrowed. “Which is how my engineer managed to capture you at Kushin Meet. It’s strange that you tried to jack a shuttle. Especially when you have more than enough cash to buy one.”

  They found the money! Moon’s eyes widened before she could think to school her reactions and she saw a savage grin flash across Tamlan’s face.

  “We were in a hurry,” she conceded, her voice hesitant. “Someone was following us.”

  “Your guide?”

  “Yes. We didn’t have time to find a vehicle, barter for it, complete the formalities.”

  “And why was that? It would have only taken a few more hours to do things legitimately. Or, from what I hear, as legitimately as things can get on a place like Marentim.”

  “I told you, we couldn’t wait.” She glanced down at Srin. He was looking much better, the angry redness further receding from his forehead and cheeks.

  She looked back up at Tamlan. “If you know who I am then, from your reaction, you must already know who he is.”

  Tamlan looked unsure. “I heard rumours. I didn’t believe them but then, you just called him a super-computer on legs, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “So the rumours are true.”

  “His name is Srin Flerovs,” Moon said. The time for deception was past. Tamlan had to know exactly who Srin was, and how important he was. Srin’s life depended on it. “He was once a scientist working for the Republic, until they found out about his prodigious mental abilities. Once they realised what they had on their hands, they kept him in captivity for almost twenty years, feeding him a regime of drugs that erased his memory every two days.”


  She leant down and smoothed an errant strand of hair from Srin’s forehead. Mercifully, his skin was cool to her touch.

  “But he’s a very clever man,” she said softly, still looking down on her lover’s face. “Too clever for them. All he needed was an ally to help him escape.”

  “You?”

  She looked over at Tamlan. “Me.” Her voice held pride. “We escaped from the Republic ship, the Differential, and have been on the run ever since.”

  “So what happened on Marentim? It looks like you had a plan. You were on your way to a rendezvous point, you said. You had a guide, you said. What did that have to do with jacking my shuttle?”

  Moon sighed and turned to lean against the bunk. “Our guide decided that he wanted to play the Republic for a while – exploit Srin’s abilities to make money for himself, much as the Science Directorate had done.”

  “So you ran away again?”

  “Yes.”

  Silence dropped between them. Had she been too trusting? Moon wondered. What was to stop Tamlan behaving in the same way as Gauder? In the same way as the Republic? Was there an alternative she could tempt him with?

  “We’ll pay you,” she said suddenly.

  His eyes narrowed. “What did you say?”

  “Take one of our cash discs. It has almost sixteen kilo-credits on it. That’s more than fair compensation for whatever aborted theft we attempted. In return, we request that you take us to 3 Enkil IV.”

  “What’s on 3 Enkil IV?”

  Another cryptic comms chip, no doubt. Another half-reliable contact. Another month of running.

  “That’s where we find our next contact,” Moon told him.

  Although, as she said the words, Moon wondered how they were going to do that. She didn’t have any information on who would be meeting them or what they were supposed to do once they reached their destination. If getting to Marentim was like spinning a wheel with dozens of options, their current trip to Enkil IV was like throwing every credit they owned into the abyss, hoping for a miraculous return.

  “We’re not mercenaries.” Tamlan sounded affronted, but it would have been a lot more genuine if she hadn’t seen the speculative gleam in his eye.

  She made a show of looking around.

  “Sixteen kilo-credits can do a lot for a ship like this. Maybe buy some military-grade systems. Hire some crewmembers.”

  “I select the crew for the Perdition. And they aren’t mercenaries.”

  Moon remained unfazed by his brusque comments. “Still, sixteen kilo-credits,” she said enticingly. “We’ll need the rest for Srin’s medical treatment and to start a new life, but sixteen is yours if you agree to ferry us to 3 Enkil.”

  Tamlan shifted. “I need to find it first. I’ve never heard of the system.”

  Moon took a breath. “Full payment up front. You can’t ask for fairer than that.”

  Tamlan looked at her. “Considering I already have all your money, that’s not much of a show of trust. Then again, it sounds like a fair deal. Let me find this system first. Then we’ll talk.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  The conversation was alarming and Moon’s hands tightened on the back of a chair. The cockpit of the Perdition – Moon still couldn’t get over the cheery name Tamlan had given his ship – was small but well-equipped. Besides herself, Tamlan and the young man whose shuttle they tried to jack, Toy Cenredi, were also there. Tamlan’s expression was grim but Cenredi didn’t appear worried by it.

  “And I keep telling you, grandpa, it ain’t there!”

  “You searched for Enkil?”

  “Do I look stupid to you? Of course I searched for ‘Enkil’. That was the first term I fed into the nav-comp. It came up blank. So I tried ‘3 Enkil’. Blank as well. Same with ‘Enkil 3’.” Cenredi’s gaze skittered in her direction then darted away. “Maybe there’s a mistake with the name.”

  Tamlan didn’t look happy. “Can you check the name?” he asked, looking down and to the side. The question, Moon knew, was directed to her.

  “The, er, chip that the information came on was destroyed,” she said, then hurriedly added, “but I’m sure I heard right. Kad said ‘3 Enkil IV’.”

  Cenredi exhaled noisily and threw his hands in the air. “What do you expect me to do, grandpa? Conjure this system out of skeevin’ vacuum?”

  “Is the system classified in any way?” Tamlan asked, ignoring the youth. “Does it have a secret base? Is it used for special projects? Anything like that.”

  “Kad wouldn’t send me someplace like that. We were supposed to be running away from the Republic, not towards them.”

  Tamlan rubbed his eyes with his fingers. “3 Enkil IV. Sounds like it should be an easy place to find.”

  “Maybe Saff can find it,” Cenredi suggested. “She’s good with that kind of stuff.”

  “Maybe. Okay, Dr. Thadin, let me get my second-in-command on this. As my engineer intimates, she can triangulate a spy probe in a sector of space as big as the Stellar Barrens.”

  He gestured for them to exit the cramped command centre, no doubt leaving the relieved Cenredi to whatever duties were assigned to him.

  “Your second-in command,” Moon prompted, after the cockpit door slid shut behind them. “That’s Saff, the pale-skinned woman?” If she was wary of Tamlan’s grimness, the edge of ridicule that always seemed to dance around Cenredi’s lips was even more off-putting, and she was glad they had left him behind.

  “Yes.”

  “Is she,” Moon hesitated, “human?”

  Tamlan looked down at her. “What do you think? We don’t discriminate on the basis of species here on the Perdition. Only on the basis of ideology.”

  Was he…accusing her of being speciesist? Moon’s back straightened.

  “It was nothing more than scientific curiosity,” she remarked stiffly. “Your crewmember looked like a possible hybrid to me, and that means money and a lot of technical expertise. I just found it, interesting, that someone worth so much is here.”

  “Aboard a barren ship, you mean?”

  Tamlan’s tone was barbed, making Moon want to stamp her foot with frustration. Was the man deliberately misinterpreting every word she was saying?

  They stopped at the door of the medical bay.

  “You better go in and see to your, friend. If you’re feeling hungry, the canteen is back towards the stern, about ten metres along to your left.”

  And don’t disturb me.

  He didn’t say it, but the words were implicit in his voice. Knowing she was being ill-mannered, but thinking that he deserved no less, Moon turned her back on him and wordlessly entered the bay. She thought she might have heard a chuckle but it could have been the sound of the bay doors sliding shut.

  “So you palm the second card then deal it to the fourth person?”

  Cenredi’s voice didn’t contain its usual hint of mockery. Moon heard concentration and, as she turned into the small alcove that led to the canteen, saw Srin and the young engineer hunkered over a table, a deck of cards half-dealt between them.

  “Or to whoever your accomplice is,” Srin added, deftly flicking cards over and spinning them in his fingers.

  They had been on the Perdition for a week and Moon felt herself relaxing into the rhythm of ship life. It had indeed been the ship’s second-in-command who’d solved the problem of the missing destination. She had checked the charts and noted that they were out-of-date. After pulling recent updates off the military nets, she’d identified 3 Enkil IV as a new mining operation and a chastised Cenredi had set the route to take them there. After seven days, they were still more than a day away from the nearest hyperspace crease that would start them on their journey proper.

  Moon felt, rather than heard, someone approach and turned to see the white-skinned woman hesitate at the doorway.

  “Srin’s teaching him to gamble,” Moon commented, her tone wry.

  “He needs an occupation,” was all Saff said. She walked over to a dispenser and p
rogrammed herself a plate of food and a drink.

  Maybe it was boredom, or it might have been curiosity, that made Moon ask, “May I sit with you?”

  Large obsidian eyes regarded her for a second before the woman nodded. Moon pulled out a chair and sat opposite the Perdition’s second-in-command.

  “It must be lonely for you on this ship,” Moon began, not sure of what else to say.

  “Lonely?” Saff repeated. “In what way?”

  “No friends.”

  “That is correct,” Saff said, forking some food into her mouth. She chewed carefully then swallowed. “The people on this ship aren’t my friends.” Her voice was deliberate. “They are my family.”

  As if struck, Moon was overcome with a wave of embarrassment. “I’m sorry,” she apologised in haste, “I didn’t mean to imply anything. It’s just—”

  “You see me as a being who is different, because of the colour of my skin. Moreover, a being who is only comfortable among her own kind.”

  They were statements behaving as questions and Moon, after hesitating, was forced to nod.

  “Yet you are even more different.” Saff leisurely ate some more food and took a delicate sip from her drink bulb.

  “I don’t see—”

  “I accessed the files the Republic has on you. Dr. Moon Thadin of the Phyllis Science Centre. Developer of the Solar Missile.”

  Moon felt a hot flush begin at her neck and move up to her cheeks.

  “It was never meant to be a missile,” she objected.

  “What else could it be?” Saff countered. “What else but a weapon to destroy entire star systems?”

  “That wasn’t why I did it!” Moon flicked a startled glance over to where Srin and Cenredi were seated but they appeared to be absorbed in their game.

  She looked back at the other woman. “I created the technology to re-ignite dead stars, to give life back to solar systems.”

  “Even if that was possible, the effect wouldn’t have lasted long.”

  Moon waved a hand. “I knew that. But giving a planet a few extra centuries of heat and light was better than the alternative, wouldn’t you say?”

  Saff didn’t rise to the bait. “The files say you’re very ambitious.”