Mutiny on Outstation Zori

by John Hegenberger

  Zaxt observed offhandedly, "Low level child's play," and stepped over to a blinking control console. He thumbed in a sequence with remarkable speed and the activity in the room multiplied and accelerated until the two combatants howled and yelped in protest.

  "Hey! Knock off the damn floorshow!" shouted a deep bass voice. The man who spoke wore fur knee boots and the tunic of an Imperial Admiral, cut ragged at the armpits. His white spiked hair shot out and up ten centimeters from his head like a snowy halo. His thin lips pulled back, exposing clenched teeth through which he snarled, "You unwiped asshole! I'll kick your head in!"

  His sparring partner swirled her long cape and caught the man in the face with its edge.

  He tumbled back, dropping his staff, as Zaxt shut down obstacle programming.

  "I win," the woman called. She approached Jamie and the bot with confidence, her smile flashing exhilaration. "Even if he did cheat by trying to spit in my face."

  She wore her light violet hair long and full in a shape similar to that of her cloak. Her green eyes danced with the afterglow of exertion and triumph. There were laugh lines at the corners of those eyes, and a dimple on the left—but not the right—side of the woman's face.

  Jamie watched as she clamped her staff into a rack along the wall next to the vator and moved with a minimum of effort like a mature and experienced feline. He decided she must be a replicate.

  "I declare a foul!" The fuzzy-headed man jumped back to his feet. "Nobody said anything about interference from a diplobot. And what about those weights you've got hidden in the corners of your cape, Devor? I claim the right of a rematch without hidden weapons."

  "Look who's talking, Karr," the woman breathed softly; her green eyes still dancing. "What about the partial absorption screen you used to protect your left side from my excellent thrusts with the electro-staff?"

  "You want to see excellent thrusts? I'll give you—"

  "Please!" Zaxt stepped between the quarreling figures.

  "Who's this," Karr wanted to know, gesturing at Jamie. "Another pushy Panic Inker?"

  Jamie began to seriously wonder what he had gotten himself into.

  "This," the silver bot answered, "is Clamber, co-pilot and scout."

  "Co-pilot?" Karr said in surprise.

  "Scout?" Jamie asked at the same moment.

  Zaxt explained. "For security purposes, the team is to be broken up into a balance of power. Kleg Karr's ship, The Silver Dagger, will be used for transport, but manned by Aura Devor's Qestan crewmen."

  "Now wait one juicy minute," Karr warned.

  The bot cut him off. "Surely, you didn't expect Mr. Werch to fund this mission, leaving you in control?"

  "Of course I did. What's with that?"

  Aura laughed, "Thought you'd get away with something, didn't you, Kleg?"

  "What exactly does a scout do?" Jamie wanted to know.

  The bot shrugged. "Navigate. Identify the team's destination. Look out for possible trouble."

  "I already see plenty of that."

  "What do you mean?" Kleg asked, suspiciously.

  "This isn't a team," Jamie said. "It's a...a miscellaneous collection of lone wolves. How are we supposed to function as a team, when there isn't even a clear leader?"

  "I'm the leader," Kleg insisted.

  "Not of my people," Aura replied dryly.

  "You see?" Jamie asked the glimmering robot.

  Zaxt uttered what passed as a bot chuckle. "Exactly, sir. Which is why the company requires a shakedown mission. Come, I'll show you." He, it, or h/it turned and walked across the paneled room to a plexed area where three HAVENset chairs sat wired to a makeshift control console.

  "We're going to play a HAVENset?" Aura asked, inspecting the familiar, yet modified device. "I thought that was addictive."

  "Only mildly," Jamie told her, from experience. She seemed to notice him for the first time, said nothing in response to his comment, and returned to examining the complex tangle of equipment.

  The HAVENset looked much like the one Jamie had used on Idyllis, except the three chairs were linked together by cables leading to the back of the programming unit.

  "I don't like it," Kleg said, crossing his arms.

  Zaxt snapped the system to life. "There's absolutely no cause for alarm, sir. Panic's techs have modified these units to minimize the addictive qualities. At the same time, they've inter-woven the game so you'll experience the psychic contributions made by each of you. A one-hour training mission will help you learn to work better as a team, without any actual physical danger. It's perfectly safe."

  "I still don't like it," Kleg said. "How do we know you're telling the truth?"

  "I never lie," the bot stated, flatly.

  Aura slid into one of the reclining chairs and tested the cushions. "Come on, Kleg. Don't tell me the great pirate captain is afraid of a little mental schooling." She inspected the derminals and finger caps.

  Kleg pointed at the silver bot. "How do we know he won't mess with our minds while we're in there?"

  Jamie was beginning to think that was a little paranoid. After all, what purpose would the bot, or Werch, or anyone have in affecting their consciousness before the mission began? This was just a HAVENset, and a damn clever way to see how well the three of them would work together. He had to admire the corp's personnel evaluation technique. He also looked forward to sharing a dream with the purple-haired woman. There were worse jobs in the universe.

  Clamber took a seat next to Aura Devor, leaving Kleg to stand alone in protest.

  "Mr. Karr," the bot shrugged, "if you don't train with these people, the possibility of error will jeopardize the mission. No mission, sir, no reward."

  The spike-haired man grunted in disgust, but stood his ground.

  Jamie wondered what sort of reward would be important to a person as clearly self-centered as Kleg Karr.

  "All right," Kleg said, reluctantly. He climbed into the third chair and crossed his arms. "But after this is over, I better not find out you've messed with my mind."

  Aura muttered, "Who would want to?" The grin on her face was appealing.

  Jamie reached up and pulled the electronic leads down, sticking them into place on his temples and the back of his head. He poked his fingertips into the wired cups and sat back, ready for the game to begin.

  He'd imagined shared HAVENsets before, but this would be the first time he'd ever had the opportunity to experience one. Seated between the intriguing Devor and the anxious Karr, he felt a curious balance between anticipation and dread.

  "Shall we begin?" Zaxt asked.

  The trio nodded.

  CHAPTER 3

  Jamie felt himself slipping into a grey humming sleep...

  And then, they were seated together inside the tight confines of a land rover; Kleg on his left, looking back and forth between two of the exterior screens, and Aura behind him working at a multi-keyboard.

  Clamber's mouth felt as if he'd been asleep for days.

  "'Bout time you came to," Kleg said. "Some co-pilot, you are."

  Aura tore off a strip of plastext and handed it over the back of Jamie's seat. "Hot, dry, rocky, heavy grav and fierce UV sunlight." She scanned a collection of readouts before her. "Looks like Hellstar II, to me."

  Jamie glanced at the printed coordinates and began entering them into his piloting computer. He realized they were in the cabin of a long-legged "mosquito" mining-crawler.

  "Where the hell's that?" Kleg wanted to know.

  "What?" Jamie asked.

  "Hellstar II." The pilot's spiked white hair was crushed down in a wide band by his com-link headset. Jamie reached up with the tips of his fingers and found that he was wearing one too. There was something on the side of Kleg's neck under the round cup of the earphone that Jamie hadn't noticed before. It was a small cluster of two-centimeter long earrings.

  Aura responded: "It's a big barren planet with a 13 base rotating around a yellow F star on the edge of FZ5. I'm not saying th
at's where we are, mind you. It just looks like it."

  "We're in the HAVENset," Jamie remembered. "So, this is what it's like to share a dream..."

  Kleg turned his seat. "This has got possibilities." He arched an eyebrow at Aura. "If know what I mean."

  "God, you're a crass bastard," Devor told him. "Stick to the training mission."

  Kleg said, "What is the—"

  "I've got it here," Jamie interrupted. One of the screens on the co-pilot's console scrolled out tactical and strategy info. He read off the mission instructions. "We're to proceed fifteen klicks to 75/15/22 latitude and 128/03/07 longitude."

  Karr engaged the forward drive. "Simple enough." The mosquito rose up on its spindly legs and began stepping over the field of jagged boulders. "What do we do when we get there?"

  "Says here that we're to rescue a couple of archaeologists who were excavating a shallow cave when their ground transport malfed."

  "Yeah? And?"

  "That's all," Jamie said, a little dismayed that the mission was so easy.

  "Big deal." Kleg punched the mining-crawler's speed up another notch.

  Small servos whined in protest, struggling to keep the cabin perfectly level while the mosquito clambered forward over the rough terrain.

  Jamie let his mind drift, wondering if he could make mental contact with his companions, since they sharing this dream. He centered his thoughts on Aura and felt something, but got no response when he tried to address her mentally. Finally he decided that a shared HAVENset wasn't much different from an ordinary one.

  Aura mused aloud, "I wonder why we're inside such an exotic vehicle. That long drilling assembly in the front must be important for something on this assignment."

  "Use the vid, Clamber," Kleg commanded, "See if you can get through to our stranded rock collectors. Let 'em know help is on the way."

  It was a good idea, but Jamie didn't like taking orders from Karr. Still, he thought, I am only the co-pilot, so I shouldn't complain. The whole purpose of this exercise is to see how well we can work together. He flipped the switch labeled Auto Freq Tune and immediately got a dark scene on one of the screens. "There they are," he said with some pride. "Got them on the first try."

  Two men were standing in what looked like a small cavern, arguing about something.

  "You...you...you...better do it and do it quick!" one of them charged, shaking his nearly bald head. "I'm not ...I'm not going to do it."

  "It's not my turn," the other explained more calmly. "You don't expect me to do things out of turn, do you Tommy?"

  "I...I...I...?" The flustered man placed his hands on his hips. "You think I'm pretty stupid, don't you? You think I don't know about the Satanic Hairburners. You think—"

  "Whoa, wait, Tommy! Get it right. You're talking about the Serrantic Harbingers. The Old Ones, the forerunners of all intelligent life in the universe."

  The mining-crawler moved in closer to the mouth of the cave. Jamie released an anti-grav spy-eye to establish communications with the two men standing in the rear of the caverns. "That...that's what I said," implored the archeologist. "The Santa Harpon ...the ...what you said."

  Devor wondered aloud, "How are they just standing out there in the heavy gravity?"

  "I don't know." Kleg crouched the mosquito into the cave. "Let's ask 'em."

  "This isn't right," Aura breathed.

  Jamie sent a spy-eye orb ahead to hover above the arguing scientists, while Kleg announced, "Attention, gentlemen. You can relax now. We've come to rescue you."

  "Swell," smiled the nervous one. "My… my brother and I were starting to think—"

  "Wait a sec," Jamie warned. "I think I've found something." Behind a large boulder next to the damaged crawler lay two human bodies, flattened and deformed from the planet's 13-g force. "That's what's left of the archaeologists." He looked up from his screen. "Those other two guys must be fakes."

  "Get 'em, Dickey!"

  The two men outside the mining-crawler burst out of their human forms and swelled, hardening and cracking into larger craggy-looking rockmen.

  "Holy juice!" Kleg exclaimed, backing the vehicle out of the cavern.

  "I can stop them mentally," said Aura. "They don't look very intelligent."

  "What are you talking about?" Kleg shouted. "They did a hell of a good job of suckering me into this cave."

  "Suckering you," Aura answered, "doesn't require much intelligence."

  "You'd like to know, wouldn't you?"

  "It's only a game," Jamie reminded them. "They don't have to follow logic or make sense."

  One of the lumbering rock creatures grasped and tore a leg off the mosquito, sending the servos into high-speed, trying to keep the vehicle upright.

  Kleg switched on the laser drill in the machine's nose and burned the rockman in half.

  The other one picked up the mosquito's broken leg and began swinging it back and forth, bashing them in a frenzied attempt to get at the team.

  Kleg tried another shot, but missed.

  Jamie sent the spy-eye on a direct intercept course for the rock creature's head.

  The battle began to affect the cavern's integrity. Ragged chunks of stone and debris thudded down on the mosquito's back. Another leg bent, and then snapped, under the increased force.

  A rocky fist smashed through the interior wall of their vehicle, and Jamie instinctively drew in his breath.

  SSNAPP!

  "Very good!" Zaxt exclaimed. "Very good, indeed."

  Slowly Jamie exhaled and sat up. Both his chest and head throbbed with a painful, accelerated pulse.

  Kleg rubbed his head. "What the hell happened?"

  "I knew you'd work well together." The bot finished shutting down the HAVENset and placed a neural probe in an open drawer. "The minute T.W. gave me your profiles, I could tell you'd make a terrific team, especially under combat conditions."

  Aura pulled off her finger caps and swung her legs to the floor. Her eyes held a worried expression. "But we died. That's not a winning situation."

  "It's only a game," the silver bot acknowledged. "And you did very, very well at it. But you're probably very, very tired now. You can check into your private chambers for a few hours and then we'll eat dinner at 2100 hours."

  Jamie came unsteadily to his feet. Just a test, he told himself, a training session. Then why do I feel so very, very uncomfortable?

  * * *

  Back in his room, Jamie inspected his luggage. Nothing appeared to have been tampered with. He threw cold water on his face and decided to strip down to take a long hot shower.

  This was not at all like anything he'd anticipated when leaving Idyllis in hopes of finding Cast. The Karr guy was arrogant, rude and… insecure? The Devor woman was secretive, hostile and...damned attractive.

  The basic shape of her face kept drawing Jamie's attention. Perhaps it was the inward intensity of her expression, the way a worry line appeared between her brows whenever she thought no one was watching. He had seen thousands of alluring women over the years, but right now, this one was...hauntingly captivating.

  Jamie smiled, letting warm water dribble down his face and body. He tried to relax, but found that his mind just wouldn't let loose of the host of questions from the last few hours. Was it possible that Cast had lived through the destruction of his freighter? If so, why hadn't he returned to FZ5? How had he supposedly gotten to the Core and involved with a high-security industrial theft?

  Jamie stepped out of the shower and let the warm jets of heated air blow him dry. He wondered just how much Turner Werch knew about his and Cast's background. Could the trader/businessman possibly think that Jamie had something to do with the disappearance of the twelve Esper Shadows? Why was he offering such a high reward for the ships? And he'd mentioned other teams of searchers; where were they and what did they know?

  Stepping into a clean polycanvas flightsuit worn soft from years of use, Jamie decided to do a little research and commit what he knew or suspected to hi
s private data log. Maybe if he heard himself describing his thoughts and feelings, he'd get a better handle on sorting them out.

  * * *

  Kleg Karr lay on his back with his hands behind his head. He stared up at the ceiling of his private quarters and smiled. He was sure that Turner was watching his every move; if not Turner, then that half-bald redhead associate of his, Bright Law.

  "You might as well turn off the spy equipment, Werch. I'm not going to do anything that'll help you strengthen your hold on me."

  He listened for a moment and thought he heard a faint snap from over by the vid unit, like a tiny switch turning off… or on. He got up and smiled into the dark screen. All he could see was his own ghostly reflection. He reached into a back pocket and ran a staticomb through his golden-white hair.

  "What we've got here is an uneasy partnership," he said to the blank vid display. "You need a good pilot and a good ship, and I need the money deposited to my account in order to finance the release of my men from that damn Cavonian prison. But I have to tell you, this search assignment is about the most boring mission you could have come up with. And those two backnet amateurs—Devor and Clamber—why you think I need them along on this job is beyond me. For a cagey businessman, you're not too smart sometimes, if you don't mind me saying so."

  He slapped the side of the vid unit with the palm of his hand. "Are listening, Werch?"

  There no sound in the room except for that of his own breathing.

  Kleg laughed quietly. "How 'bout we watch a little vid before supper:" He touched the key that turned the unit to the commercial channels. "You like sports? Let's see how the Dolphins are doing."

  He changed the channel. "No, let's watch a little educhannel. What's this'? 'The Wonderful World of Fractals.' Nah..." He changed the channel again. "I know what. A game show! You like games, right?"

  Kleg Karr continued rotating through an assortment of the more than three thousand micro-stations until 2100 hours, when Zaxt appeared at his door to escort him to dinner.

  * * *

  Aura Devor carefully packed her meager belongings into two small suitcases. She had come to PANIC, Inc. only two days before, but almost everything she owned, including all three of her purple and grey uniforms, was setting or hanging somewhere in her small room. She'd put them there, out in the open, certain that someone would search her luggage anyway. Thus her clothing wouldn't get soiled or torn by heavy-handed security clowns.