The six remaining members of the hunter squad took only a second to regroup. Leaving the three bodies where they had fallen, one of the Jaxxans motioned to the others, and they stalked after the Deathguard.
As soon as he escaped the scattered hunters, the Werewolf Trigger lapsed into quiescence, and Rader’s thoughts, intelligence, self-control flooded back into his mind.
He heard shouts from behind as the hunters called to one another. They were still out of sight, but with his amplified senses, he could hear them split up to approach him from different directions. However, Rader had an advantage now as calm calculation returned to him. The others expected him to act like a rampaging berserker.
He had to damp his emotions, draw them back into himself so that his turmoil wouldn’t become a beacon that declared his hidden presence to the empathic Jaxxans. Rader sought refuge in the darkness beneath an outside stairway, and his non-reflective, camouflage armor helped him melt into the shadows, turning him into a shadow himself.
He breathed methodically, forcing rigid control back into his body, imitating Click’s holystal meditation. Click! He didn’t think he had killed his comrade. Rader closed his eyes, ignoring the marching feet and hushed voices that hurried closer, then moved past him.
When the team had passed, he emerged from his sanctuary. Instead of pursuing the hunters, he crept toward the landing field and their way off Fixion. Click would have gone to the ships—he hoped.
Across twenty meters of open concrete, a small short-range cargo vessel rested, as well as six larger personnel transports and a bulbous fuel tanker. One lonely Jaxxan guard stood at the open door of the small cargo ship.
On the perimeter of the landing field, Rader spotted Click’s ill-concealed form in the shadow of a building. At least the alien was trying. The Deathguard silently made his way over to his friend, keeping so well concealed that even Click didn’t know he was there until the last moment.
The Jaxxan froze, then realized that he no longer sensed the raging, killing beast inside the Deathguard. Rader spoke in a whisper. “I’m in control now, but the rest of that squad is still after us. It won’t be long before they realize I’ve doubled back. Let’s get that ship!”
He knew that if they could get off of Fixion, they could lose themselves in the debris of the asteroid belt, travel slowly, hopscotch from rock to rock, and reach the observatory asteroid. Beyond that, Rader didn’t care.
He brought his laser rifle up, aimed. “I’ll get rid of the sentry.”
But Click’s bony arm stopped him. “Wait, there is a better way.” He hunkered down and concentrated on the sentry. Even through his armor, Rader felt a tingle in the air; his sensors registered an energy buildup. A galaxy of lights flickered in the deep universe of Click’s black eyes.
The sentry flailed his angular arms as a half-formed energy-web folded over him. The sentry clawed at the dimly sparkling strands, searching for his unseen attacker—a Jaxxan attacker.
Leaving their hiding place, Rader and Click rushed across the landing field toward the Jaxxan cargo ship. When Click spoke to the sentry, Rader was surprised to hear the menace in his comrade’s usually timid voice. “Do nothing unwise, or I shall be forced to complete my web.”
The Jaxxan guard did nothing unwise.
While Rader kept his laser rifle pointed at the sentry, Click scuttled forward and activated the hatch. “Can you fly this ship?”
The insectoid head bobbed up and down on its stalk of a neck.
“A hostage and a pilot,” Rader said. “Good enough.” He did not know what they would do with the sentry once they reached their destination.
Click chittered his instructions to the sentry. “You will fly on a random, evasive course. The humans have an observatory asteroid located on the far edge of the Belt. It must be in the database.”
Rader detected movement in the construction area, the hunter squad picking up on them again. “They’re coming. Get inside the ship—now!”
With a victorious outcry, the hunters charged across the landing field. Rader shoved Click through the cargo ship’s open hatch as one of the human soldiers braced for a careful shot, but chose the wrong Jaxxan. He burned a large hole in the alien sentry’s back.
As he tried to escape, Rader’s left leg suddenly collapsed, and he sprawled on the ramp. The attackers raced toward them, shouting, and he rolled, trying to assess the damage, sure that a laser blast had cut through the armor, ruined his cyborg leg systems. Using his good leg, his elbows, and his gloves, he hauled himself to the hatch.
Click had turned back to help him, and an energy-web glittered against the hull, smoking and sparking. Rader yelled, “Leave me—get to the control room!”
Instead, the Jaxxan grabbed his arms, dragged him the rest of the way into the ship. As soon as he was clear, Click sealed the hatch.
Rader looked down to see how much damage the shot had done to his leg, but he saw no burned hole, no melted slag of armor or shorted-out cyborg parts. The leg had simply failed.
Click dashed away from the hatch and scrambled up a thin-runged ladder to the control deck. Rader called after him, “You can fly this type of ship, can’t you?”
Click pointedly did not answer, and Rader stifled a groan.
* * *
The cargo ship rose jerkily, leaving behind a whirlpool of displaced air. The hunter squad watched in anger and defeat. After the vessel zigzagged in a drunkard’s flight from the landing field, the soldiers watched the flares of its engines dwindle into Fixion’s thin atmosphere.
The human captain stared at the sentry who lay sprawled on the still-warm pavement. “He’s dead. We can’t interrogate him for any intel the two deserters might have revealed.”
The Jaxxan leader shook his head. “Not too late. We will implement a post-mortem interrogation.”
He removed equipment from his belt pack—a probe, a diagnostic reader, two long wires, and a skull splitter. Jamming down hard, he broke the chitinous shell of the dead sentry’s head, spreading the hard faceplates to expose the soft, contoured brain. “We should still be able to access the chemical memory of the last few moments he experienced.”
The Jaxxan unfolded the screen, then dipped the sharp probe wires into the dead alien brain. Static washed across the screen accompanied by surreal images, colored patterns, old memories. He worked quickly before the memory-storage chemicals dissipated, the neurons deteriorated.
He touched different sections of tissue with the probe wires, moving urgently, until he found a blurred image of Deathguard Rader and his Jaxxan companion. He zeroed in, turned up the volume on the receiver, and heard their words, relived their last conversation, studied everything they had said.
The Jaxxan captain got the information he needed before the chemical traces crumbled into disjointed fragments and incomplete sentences. It was enough. He looked up at his comrades. “Now we know where they are going.”
–13–
“They got past all ten?” Sobel was still rubbing sleep from his eyes in front of the image of Kiltik.
The insistent call from the viewscreen had dragged him out of bed. He hadn’t expected to be disturbed, but Sobel had given the Jaxxan Warlord his direct contact code. At first, the Commissioner thought he would be happy to receive the call regardless of the hour, expecting good news—but Kiltik had not told him what he wanted to hear.
“Yes, all ten, Commissioner. The Deathguard killed four of them and escaped with the Jaxxan soldier in a stolen ship. A very reckless flight, evasive action. They vanished into the asteroid field.”
“Good riddance,” Sobel muttered, but knew the problem didn’t end there. Even if the two were never seen again—and the cyborg systems had to start breaking down soon—Sobel’s failure to resolve the situation properly would be a permanent blot on his record. He couldn’t just let the Deathguard die on his own. “This is a disaster, Warlord. We’ll never be able to track them—unless you can guess their destination from the patterns in th
at holystal thing of yours?”
The Jaxxan’s face was unreadable. “We have a clearer answer than that. Your Deathguard and my deserter tried to take one of the landing-field sentries hostage, but our hunter squad shot him inadvertently—a happy accident. Fortunately, one of my soldiers set up a mind probe quickly enough. We know the location of the asteroid where the two intend to go.”
“Really?” Sobel didn’t quite allow himself a sigh of relief. “Well, that’s better than a complete debacle, but we have to act without delay. Let me send you two of my best fighterships—ours are faster than yours.”
“Accepted.” An expression of what might have been humor crossed Kiltik’s face, but then the alien broke into a spasm of dry coughing.
Sobel rolled his tongue around in his dry mouth. He had been asleep for only a few hours, and already his mouth tasted foul. “I’ll get those fighterships sent over right away—and please don’t shoot at them! Then I’m going back to bed.” He yawned, but felt no better for it. “Don’t you ever sleep?”
“No.”
“Oh … Well, I’ll speak to you when I have something to report, Warlord.”
“Call me Kiltik.” The Warlord touched the screen, and the images of his fingertips were blurred. “Now that I have met you in person, I find this communication very unsatisfactory. I feel no emotions, which makes understanding more difficult. From now on, I would rather dispense with this apparatus and meet you face-to-face.”
“That can be arranged—but let’s hope we can wrap up this problem quickly.” He blanked the screen, then established another connection. He spoke to a corporal in the fightership hangars, repeated his baffling instructions several times, then worked his way up the chain of command.
Sobel knew his bed would be very cold by the time he finally climbed back into it.
–14–
They flew away from Fixion, diving at breakneck speed and without a course into the scramble of drifting asteroids. Click quickly became adept at maneuvering the cargo shuttle.
“The military will be tracking us. We have to get far enough away,” he announced over the intercom.
Rader still lay on the lower deck, trying to get his uncooperative leg to function. He was sure the survivors of the hunter squad would be commandeering their own pursuit ships. Click accelerated as much as he could tolerate, and his tough alien body could withstand severe gravitational stresses. Rader’s Deathguard armor protected him.
“Once we are in the densest portion of the Belt, I will cut the engines,” Click continued. “Then our signature becomes identical to that of the other small asteroids.”
Taking a moment to assess his own malfunctions, Rader propped himself against a bulkhead. The cyborg leg had suffered no obvious damage, but the neural pulses from his brain no longer made it move as he intended. Unavoidable glitches, the start of what would be a cascade of breakdowns, and he knew how to do only the most basic repairs. He breathed silent thanks that his systems had functioned long enough and well enough to get him and Click off of Fixion. Now, if he could only find a plan that would get his Jaxxan comrade to safety.
One problem at a time.
Working with enforced patience, still feeling the afterwash of the synthetic adrenaline that had poured through his systems, Rader removed emergency tools, cracked open the primary circuits, and performed a standard reset procedure twice before his armored leg would twitch again. He swung himself back to his feet and tried to walk. He took painstaking steps at first, then limped forward. The metal ladder to the upper deck proved quite a challenge, but he eventually made his way into the control chamber.
Click flew the ship among a cluster of high-albedo icy asteroids. To confuse any systems tracking them, he matched the orbits of random stony asteroids of approximately the same size as the cargo ship, and the glaring sunlight masked their thermal signature after Click shut down the engines.
“We wait half a day,” the Jaxxan said, “then alter course slightly to take us closer to the observatory asteroid. We are patient.”
“Yes, patient.” Rader silently ran thorough diagnostic checks of his systems, his power sources, the alignment of neural conduits, and found many domino-effect malfunctions; his last battle and escape in the Jaxxan base had strained his components, running out the service life. “Take as much time as you need.”
One way or another, he doubted he had more than a week. Click didn’t need to know that, but his empathic senses would probably tell him anyway.
“With the ship’s life-support levels, we can survive for three days. Breathe as little as possible.”
Rader realized it was a joke. “Nobody’s been to the observatory asteroid in ages. Better hope their systems are functional. We won’t make it to anywhere else.”
Click said, “We have nowhere else to go.”
“That’s the next thing I have to figure out.”
While they drifted, Rader tried to implement repairs to his cyborg systems in order to buy a little extra time, but most of the systems were beyond him. And the failings were in his mental interface, not in the large-scale mechanics. He experienced a persistent headache that seemed to be growing worse. His eyesight suffered from double vision, as if the images from his real eye and artificial eye did not align properly.
For two days, they made their cautious, tedious journey across a stepping-stone course. Click monitored the cargo ship’s passive sensors. They were surrounded by far too many datapoints, which was good—a swarm like identical needles in a very large haystack. “I see no indication that pursuers have followed us through the numerous blips.”
Rader’s hope grew as the image of the observatory asteroid grew on the viewscreen before him. It was a domed rock less than two kilometers wide, moving among the rubble in the Fixion Belt. In less than an hour, if Click kept up his improved navigational abilities, they would arrive.
Rader almost smiled for the first time since … since that final day with his squadmates. He should have died then, and that day could have served as his final flash of glory, not this awkward encore. With so much time to think aboard their ship, he could not escape the conclusion. Even after they reached the observatory, Click had little chance of going much farther. He had not managed to come up with a viable plan.
He felt dismayed that this abortive “second chance” as a Deathguard had accomplished nothing—not for himself, not for his people, not for Click either. It was just a delay. And when Rader’s cyborg systems finally broke down, Click was not likely to last long alone on the observatory asteroid. He’d wait there until food supplies and life support ran out, like a man stranded on a desert island.
Short-term thinking. But it was better than shorter-term thinking. They were still alive. Rader had to hope they would find some other ship, or supplies … or a miracle once they got to the asteroid.
In the pilot seat, Click seemed satisfied. If he detected Rader’s troubled thoughts, he did not show it.
As they made their final approach, Rader studied the enhanced images, saw the framework of bowl-shaped radio telescopes reflecting starlight, the automated tracking mirrors of optical telescopes gazing out into the universe to gather astronomical data.
And he saw the recently installed military fuel depot, large tanks of spacecraft fuel, as well as Earth League stockpiled missiles, a forest of javelin-shaped warheads ready to be launched. He stared, realizing that this asteroid was not as forgotten and abandoned as he had hoped.
When Click scanned the rear navigational sensors, his glassy black eyes clouded over. “Rader …”
Two pursuit fighterships swept up behind them like cruising sharks. They came straight toward the sluggish Jaxxan cargo ship.
“I cannot accelerate enough to outrun them,” Click said. “And we have very little fuel remaining.”
Rader glanced at the type of ship, knew their capabilities. “Those are the League’s fastest fighterships. We don’t have any chance of outrunning them.”
When the p
air of pursuers circled the cargo ship, Rader saw the Earth League insignia, but the image blurred and shimmered in his unfocused vision. The face that appeared on the comm screen, though, was a Jaxxan, demanding their surrender.
“Why don’t they just destroy us from a distance?” Click said.
“They will want proof—or trophies.”
The squad of hunters was composed of humans and Jaxxans working together; Rader wondered if the Earth League soldiers had orders to kill their alien comrades after a successful mission—especially now that they had seen the unexpected missile stockpile hidden on the observatory asteroid. Commissioner Sobel could not possibly want the Jaxxan high command to know about the depot.
“We cannot defend ourselves,” Click said. “This cargo shuttle has no weapons.”
Rader held his laser rifle. “We can defend ourselves.”
A clang of metal thrummed through the hull as the two fighterships attached to the Jaxxan airlocks. “I have sealed the airlocks and denied them access,” Click said.
“They’ll burn their way through.” On the visual monitors he discerned a glow on the inner hull: one airlock being cut away by a powerful laser rifle, and the opposite lock rippling from a continuously applied energy-web. Even a Deathguard couldn’t defend both hatches at the same time.
Limping on his faulty leg, aligning his weapons systems with the vision from only his artificial eye to minimize errors, Rader picked a defensible position at the entrance to the cargo ship’s cockpit. He braced himself there, holding his laser rifle ready, his targeting sensors attuned. His artificial heart pumped nutrients through his cyborg and biological components, but the Werewolf Trigger remained silent. He didn’t need it. Or maybe that, too, had malfunctioned.
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