“It doesn’t matter,” Maddox said. “I think you went to the small rocky world and spoke to the Bosks. There, in some manner, they persuaded you that they could ease your mental anguish. I don’t know if those three were Strand’s agents or if they had their own agenda. But they’ve been using you, manipulating you. It would never have happened if—”
Ludendorff cried out in horror as he clutched his head. He continued to cry out, squeezing his head, finally moaning and sinking to his knees.
“What have I done?” Ludendorff whispered. “Dana, Dana, what did the Bosks do to you? What happened?”
“What did the Bosks do to you, Professor?”
From on his knees, Ludendorff looked up at Maddox. Anguish twisted the Methuselah Man’s features.
“Break their conditioning,” Maddox said. “Prove to all of us that you are the Methuselah Man. Look. Two of the Bosks lie dead.”
“They are the Draegar,” Ludendorff whispered.
Maddox almost said more, but he saw something on the professor’s face that stopped him.
“Draegar 1 is the Primary,” Ludendorff recited. “Draegar 2 is the Designer. Draegar 3 is the Orator. They are in symbiosis with one another. Together, their united brains are stunning in outlook and ability. They…they helped me purge any remaining Builder programming within me. I am my own man now.”
“Could the Draegars—”
“No! Together, they are the Draegar.”
Maddox nodded even if he didn’t fully understand. “While the Draegar helped you, could he have inserted his own programming into your mind?”
“That’s impossible,” Ludendorff whispered. “I took every safeguard.”
“The Draegar might have eased some of your mental anguish,” Maddox said. “Clearly, one of the costs was the ability to make love to Dana. Or maybe Dana’s love was thwarting their progress with you.”
Ludendorff swallowed heavily as he hunched his shoulders.
“The marines are going to be coming soon,” Maddox said.
“You overheard the conversation?”
“The leader of the marines wants to rape Meta first.”
“He is Jard the Commander. He is a bondsman of the Draegar, a creature of the vats.”
“The Bosk space marines belong to Draegar?” Maddox asked.
Ludendorff nodded.
“Did Draegar manipulate O’Hara’s mind as well?”
“It’s possible,” Ludendorff said. “He was alone with her for a time on the station.”
“The Tau Ceti Station?”
Ludendorff nodded.
“Is Draegar one of Strand’s agents?”
“Maybe. I…I seem to remember that Strand—” Ludendorff groaned. “I remember now. It’s like a veil lifting from my thoughts. Strand created the Draegar and the vat-born. I was desperate after the Swarm invasion. With Strand a prisoner, I believed I could control the Draegar. Somehow, I made a mistake while there.”
“You were distraught after the invasion,” Maddox said.
“Yes.”
“The Builder program had sapped you of your normal brilliance.”
Ludendorff swallowed. “What are we going to do? Jard is coming. He might come with one or two others. He can summon the rest of the vat marines and kill us all.”
“Unlock me, Professor.”
Ludendorff stared at him and finally shook his head. “I cannot.”
“It’s the only way you’re going to find Dana again.”
Ludendorff began blinking. Maybe he was too distraught to notice Meta rising from the floor. She picked up a computer slate, tiptoeing toward the professor, no doubt intending to bash him over the head with it.
“Free me,” Maddox told Ludendorff.
A sudden look swept over the professor. He whirled around from on his knees. Meta swung. The computer slate struck the force field, stopping centimeters from Ludendorff’s face.
“Treachery,” Ludendorff declared.
At that point, the half-conscious Draegar 2, the Designer, removed a small device from his smock. From on the floor, he aimed it at Ludendorff, and a narrow beam flashed past any protective force field and struck Ludendorff in the shoulder.
The professor howled in agony, and who knew if he would have died if the ray kept beaming. Riker also stirred on the floor. He saw what was happening, used his stunner and blasted Draegar 2, the Designer, until the bronze-colored human collapsed. The device tumbled from the Designer’s twitching fingers.
Meta raced to it, snatching it from the floor. She did it just as Ludendorff recovered his poise, pawing at his belt device.
“Don’t do it, Professor,” Meta warned.
Ludendorff looked at her, stricken.
“Remove the pendant and take off your belt,” Meta said. “If you don’t do it this instant, I’ll kill you.”
Ludendorff considered his options, and at last, he did as Meta bid. He found a numbing patch and put it on his bloody shoulder, adjusting his garments as best he could to hide the burn. Then he composed himself, waiting for everything to come crashing down.
-31-
Meta freed Maddox. Maddox took the pendant, the belt device and one of the three identical palm-weapons off the Draegar.
Meta kept Draegar 2’s palm-gun, and Riker took the last one.
Ludendorff sat cross-legged in a far corner. He seemed resigned to whatever fate offered him. The patch had numbed his shoulder, so he likely didn’t feel any pain from the shot.
Riker had trussed up Draegar 2, the Designer. The strange human glared at the sergeant but never uttered a word.
“Can the man speak?” Maddox asked Ludendorff.
The professor looked up, considering the question. “Can your mind speak?” he finally asked.
“A quick yes or no answer would be more helpful.”
“Draegar 2, the Designer, is a mind not a man,” Ludendorff said. “You see him in humanoid form, but that is an illusion.”
“If I kick him in the shins, will the illusion scream?”
“I realize you think of yourself as clever,” Ludendorff said. He cocked his head. “And yet, that is an interesting question. I don’t know. Maybe we should try it.”
With sudden swiftness, Ludendorff scrambled to his feet, rushing toward the bound man.
Maddox intercepted him, holding the professor back. “I much prefer this to resignation. But let’s wait for a more opportune time to torment the man.”
“He’s not a man, exactly.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Maddox said. “Now, tell me. Are you going to try to interfere against us?”
Ludendorff glared at Maddox before shaking his head. “I have some deep thinking to do. Then, I must find Dana.”
“Maybe she’s aboard one of the Q-ships.”
Ludendorff paled. “If they’ve done anything to her…”
“I have an idea,” Maddox said. “We have Draegar 2. Maybe we can exchange him for Dana—if she’s over there.”
“Yes!” Ludendorff said. “That’s a splendid idea. I wonder why I didn’t think of it first.”
“You’re not yourself,” Maddox said. “Otherwise, I’m sure you would have already seen it.”
“Don’t patronize me. I find that more insulting than anything else you could do.”
“Right,” Maddox said. “Maybe your full recovery isn’t that far off after all.”
“Someone is coming, sir,” Riker said from the partly opened hatch where he had been peeking out. “It sounds like armored marines.”
“How many?” asked Maddox.
“By the footsteps, three,” Riker said.
Maddox nodded. He’d tested a palm-gun earlier. It was an incredible little device. The Draegar must have used the lowest setting for shooting Ludendorff. At the highest setting, the thing was like a hotshotted laser.
If combat armor had one true vulnerability, it was the visor. That was almost-always the easiest place to achieve a burn-through.
“Get bac
k,” Maddox said.
After closing the hatch, Riker retreated behind the metal chair. He rested his shooting arm on the piece of furniture, no doubt to steady his shots.
Meta was to the right and back five meters from the hatch. She held a dead Draegar in front of her, using the corpse as a body shield. Maddox was to the left the same distance from the hatch, doing the same with the other dead Bosk.
He hoped the vat-born space marines would hesitate to murder a Draegar. Of course, these two were already dead, but the marines didn’t know that.
“One, two—now,” said Riker, who had been silently counting cadence.
The unlocked hatch opened, and a marine in combat armor walked in.
Meta beamed the marine in the visor, tracking him as he walked deeper into the room. Riker did the same to the second marine that had followed the first.
The last armored marine looked in. Maddox shot the visor—but the marine pulled back, clanking away.
Meta and Riker each achieved a burn-through. One of the face-shot marines crashed to his knees, raised his arms as if to fire and fell to the side. The other marine staggered backward, slamming against a bulkhead before clanging onto the floor.
Maddox had already dropped his Draegar and sprinted after the third marine, passing the dead or dying ones. He supposed the last of the three was Jard the Commander. Combat armor increased a man’s speed, but not enough for Jard to pull away from Maddox. The confines of the ship’s corridor prohibited Jard from using the full benefit of his exoskeleton-powered suit.
As the captain sprinted down the corridor, catching up, he beamed the back of the helmet. The armor was thicker in back than the visor was. He held the beam to the spot until the armor began to melt.
The marine whirled around. The arms lifted, the cannons fired—Maddox had already ducked back into a side corridor.
The firing stopped, and a loud clang told Maddox the suit had crashed onto the floor.
Suspecting a trap, Maddox peeked around the corner. The armor was on the floor. The suit cracked open along a seam, and a beefy marine wriggled out much as Maddox had done on Usan III.
Maddox pocketed his palm-gun and hurried toward the vat-born marine.
“I should have known,” Jard said, climbing to his feet. He was a big man, just as tall as Maddox, but likely a hundred pounds heavier. He had a wide face and a muscled jawline. A knife tattoo adorned his forehead. He had dark hair and stark white skin. The man bulged with muscles, likely a combination of steroids and intense power lifting.
“Is Draegar dead?” Jard asked with a strange intensity.
“Why did you slip out of your suit?”
“You already know why. It shorted out. Now, answer the question.” The man’s intensity increased. “Is Draegar dead?”
Maddox wasn’t sure what was going on, but he found it fascinating. “Two of them are,” he said.
Jard frowned as if the captain had spoken gibberish. “I don’t understand you.”
“My words are simple enough. Two of the Draegar are dead.”
“There is only one Draegar aboard the Moltke. Why then do you say two are dead?”
“Draegar has three…images, right?”
“Images?” asked Jard.
“Three…personas?”
“There is only one Draegar,” Jard said.
“Fine. But he’s made of three…components, right?”
“Do you mean three personalities?”
“There you go. Two of his personalities are dead.”
Jard snarled as he began to shake his head back and forth. He gnashed his teeth and flexed his thick fingers.
“Why does that bother you?” Maddox asked.
Jard’s eyes bulged outward, and the muscles along his neck became like steel cords. He howled like a lost soul and charged madly like a beast.
Maddox had intended to fight Jard man to man. He wanted to feel the man’s bones break under his fists, as Jard had wanted to rape his wife. Maddox had felt a primal desire to beat the man—if not to death, at least into bloody submission. Now, with this madman going berserk—Maddox sidestepped the wild rush, ducking the initial blows. He drew the palm-gun, turned and drilled Jard in the face as the commander whirled around for a second charge.
Before Jard could reach him, the vat-grown marine thudded dead onto the corridor floor.
Maddox stopped beaming, feeling soiled. What had just happened? Who were the Bosks? Who were the Draegar, and why were vat-grown men so brutal and elemental? Before he tried to clear the Moltke of the rest of these men and before he bargained with the Q-ships, he believed it would be wise to know who and what he was dealing with.
-32-
Maddox eyed Draegar 2, the Designer. The man—the personality, whatever that meant exactly—sat miserably on the floor, with his hands tied behind his back.
Riker had removed the other two…personalities, Draegar 1 and 3, depositing them in a ship’s storage closet. Meta had sopped up some of the blood and covered the areas with capes and jackets, including the dead marines. The corpses in the armor suits made big mounds.
Ludendorff sat brooding in the large metal chair, tapping his lower lip from time to time. The Methuselah Man kept shaking his head, saying, “No. No. That’s not going to work.”
“We don’t have much time,” Riker said quietly.
“Please don’t talk,” Maddox said. “I’m thinking.”
“Why don’t we race to a hangar bay and take a shuttle?” Riker asked. “Seems like the sooner we’re back on Victory, the sooner we can clean up this mess.”
Maddox raised his head, eyeing the older man. “Brigadier O’Hara is stuck in their web.”
“Whose web?” Riker asked.
“That’s one of the particulars I’m trying to determine. Now please shut up, Sergeant. I can’t think if you’re annoying me.”
Riker glanced at Meta. She shrugged, clearly trying to be sympathetic to both of them.
Maddox clasped his hands behind his back. He’d been thinking while hurrying back to the chamber. He’d also been trying to think as Riker and Meta cleaned up the chamber.
The captain eyed Draegar 2 sidelong. Did he really believe the man couldn’t talk? No. Still, he’d seen many strange creatures and strange humans in his time. Why not this three-in-one man? Why not yet another weird group of humans?
What did these altered and vat-grown humans ultimately want?
Maddox mentally examined what he already knew, starting with the brigadier’s story. There had been two New Men on the Tau Ceti Station. Later, Ludendorff had shown O’Hara two New Men corpses with wires in their brains. That had convinced the brigadier she had been dealing with Strand agents. And yet…according to what Maddox had learned some time ago, there hadn’t been any more free New-Men Strand agents after the Methuselah Man’s imprisonment on the Throne World.
Maddox quit pacing and glanced at Ludendorff.
The professor noticed. “You’ve thought of something, my boy?”
“A possibility,” Maddox admitted.
“Well? What is it?”
“Do you remember the Strand New Men agents you showed O’Hara?”
Ludendorff nodded.
“Did you really kill them?”
The professor opened his mouth to answer and then shut his mouth with a snap. “I believe I did. But I’m beginning to wonder if some of my thoughts are manufactured memories. I’m no longer certain of many of the things I’ve seen in the past year.”
“Undoubtedly,” Maddox said, “the answers lie aboard the Q-ships. Why are you traveling aboard the Moltke instead of staying in one of your privateers?”
“I had thought in order to keep an eye on O’Hara,” Ludendorff replied.
“And now?”
“Maybe it’s as you’re suspecting—I’m here in order to keep me off the Q-ships.”
“If we can clear the Bosks from the Moltke and establish our authority here, we’ll have a battleship, a missile cruiser a
nd Victory. They’ll have three Q-ships. I wonder how long the Q-ships will do nothing until whoever is over there acts.”
“‘Acts,’ as in attacks us?”
“Precisely,” Maddox said.
“No!” Ludendorff said. “We must never allow that. I don’t know it as fact, but I believe Dana is aboard one of the Q-ships. I will certainly not allow a battle to take place that could jeopardize her life.”
Maddox raised his eyebrows and then resumed his pacing. Something was off here. According to Ludendorff, long ago in the past Strand had created the Draegar, the vat-grown marines—
The captain halted and closed his eyes as if in pain, shaking his head. “I’ve been a fool. It is obvious.”
“Not to me, my boy,” Ludendorff said. “What have you determined?”
“It ain’t obvious to me, neither,” Riker complained.
“The place you went—the small rocky world—holds genetically modified people,” Maddox explained. “That’s like Meta’s world and what happened to me. Think about it. A place like that with superior beings and advanced technology would have been in the mix for control of Human Space a long time ago.”
“Perhaps this is their first testing, their dipping their toes in the water, so to speak,” Ludendorff said.
“That’s a minor possibility,” Maddox said. “The more reasonable answer is that they’re part of the same groups we’ve been seeing all along, but with a new twist.”
“Spit it out, my boy,” Ludendorff said. “You’re not making sense yet.”
Maddox shook his head in disbelief. “The answer was right there from the beginning. Two New Men greeted O’Hara on the Tau Ceti Station. Think about it. After many years of sparring and with some help, the brigadier bested the Throne World’s Intelligence efforts on Earth. I imagine that has stuck in their prideful craw for some time now.”
“You’re forgetting something,” Ludendorff said. “Those two were Strand’s New Men.”
“No, they were not. They were regular New Men renewing the Throne World’s Intelligence efforts against the Commonwealth. This whole scheme has their heightened brilliance stamped all over it. Yes…” Maddox said. “The New Men have been far too quiet lately. According to you, a vast Swarm science team invaded their Throne World System. They destroyed the Swarm, but… I imagine the sudden attack must have worried them. They likely interrogated Strand during and after their victory. They saw their future vulnerability to more and greater hyper-spatial tube attacks. Wouldn’t the New Men have come to a Strand-like conclusion: destroy the Builder nexuses so the Swarm could no longer use hyper-spatial tubes? Maybe the New Men are gathering the people and devices that thwarted them in the beginning in order to use them to halt the Swarm menace, at least for the foreseeable future.”
The Lost Star Gate (Lost Starship Series Book 9) Page 17