Force of Gravity

by T. R. Harris

  Panur flicked a switch on a console and the doorframe began to buzz. Then from within an image began to form, looking like a big screen TV set on its side. But the image inside was upright and static. There were no lights on in the room, just the glow from the control panel for the portal, which only came to life when Panur flicked his switch on Vesper.

  “After you,” Panur said. draping an arm at the portal.

  Adam hesitated. “You built it,” he said. “You should have the honors.”

  Panur smiled and stepped through the portal. He turned back to Adam and smiled.

  Then the skin on the mutant’s body began to shiver. His face distorted, one eye falling down while the other migrated to the top of his bald head.

  Adam stepped back in shock. Something was wrong—

  Then the quivering stopped and the mutant’s face returned to normal.

  “Sorry, I couldn’t resist.”

  Adam gnashed his teeth. “If you weren’t an immortal mutant asshole, I’d wring your scrawny neck.”

  “Come on through,” said Panur. “We still have a ship to commandeer. I love that word: commandeer.”

  Adam and Panur opened the door to the Colony Ship’s portal room and scanned the outer corridor. A vessel designed to carry a long-term colony of twenty-thousand individuals had to be big and sophisticated. Adam had been a temporary guest aboard one of the Colony Ships years ago—in fact it was this one. Yet he never got the James Bond tour of all its most-secret inner workings.

  However, the last one he was on was an entirely different experience. That was after Copernicus Smith sold him, Riyad, Kaylor and Jym to the Klin. They spent two weeks aboard the giant spacecraft being tortured unmercifully until they were rescued by a team of Human commandos. It would have been nice if Coop had told them at the time that he was a deep-cover spy working to discover the location of the Klin, and that Adam and the others were simply bait. They’d gotten off the station moments before the Klin blew it up, taking a hundred commandos with it. That was a terrible price to pay for the rescue of Adam and his friends. Even the deaths of the twenty thousand Klin aboard couldn’t make up for the sacrifice the commandos made that day on their behalf.

  Now as Adam and Panur stepped out into the deathly quiet passageway, the full scope of their mission hit them. Neither man nor mutant knew where to go. They had to get to the bridge, wherever that was.

  “Can you tap into a computer and learn your way around?” Adam asked.

  “Good idea. Wait here.”

  Panur ducked back into the portal room and returned a moment later with a big grin on his face. “A piece of cake, but even I must admit this sucker is big. Follow me.”

  Panur set off down the corridor to the left. Adam followed like an obedient puppy.

  27

  Robert McCarthy had an MK-17 in his hand set on level-one when he approached the door to the CW station on the twenty-third floor. The hallway outside was quiet, even though he’d come across several Klin on his way here, panic growing on the faces of some and being transferred like a virus to others they passed. The news was getting out. The Klin VN-91s were disappearing, and along with them, the Klin’s stranglehold on the galaxy.

  He pushed open the door until it met with an obstruction lying on the floor. Through the opening, he could see several dead Klin and a CW comm shack that had been literally ripped apart in a fit of violent rage. Robert pushed the door open the rest of the way and stepped inside.

  All the Klin were dead, even though there was little blood. This spoke of broken necks and other trauma injuries, carried out by incredibly strong killers. Adam Cain and the mutant, no doubt.

  But as he surveyed the room, he had to correct his previous assumption. The equipment in the room hadn’t been ripped apart. It had taken apart and then reassembled. Robert walked up to a seven-foot-tall metal frame, resembling a doorway. The effect inside the portal was dizzying. He looked around to the other side of the doorway. The image he could see from one side disappeared from behind.

  It was a trans-dimensional portal. Robert had seen the huge land-based units the Klin built that had first attracted the Sol-Kor to the Milky Way. He’d even seen the small personal units about the Colony flagship.

  He smiled and nodded in admiration. The damn mutant had cobbled together one of the most elaborate pieces of scientific innovation—in less than an hour and out of parts found in the CW comm center.

  For a brief moment, Robert hesitated following Cain and the mutant through the portal. Perhaps he had bitten off more than he could chew? If the mutant could do this, what else could he do…to Robert?

  But he had no choice. The Klin were destined to die, and he was the last of the 2G’s. Escape was his first priority, and here was an open door—literally—beckoning him inside.

  Robert clutched his precious case…and stepped through the portal.

  There was an elaborate system of elevators and trams throughout the Colony Ship. This was more of a space station than a spaceship, and as Adam and Panur made their way to the bridge, they saw wonders Adam never thought could exist in a spacecraft.

  The ship was so large—and the token Klin crew aboard so small—that they didn’t encounter their first alien until they reached the command bridge.

  There were two of them, each sitting at separate computer consoles and doing whatever Klin do on computers in their spare time. Adam wasn’t curious enough to ask. The aliens barely had time to react before he and Panur were upon them. Adam had killed a lot of aliens in his time, but there was something especially satisfying about snapping the brittle bodies of the Klin. His hatred for them went back twenty years, to the image of the charred bodies of his wife and daughter. He couldn’t rid his mind of the horrific memory, which only served as an icon for all the death and destruction the silver bastards had caused. Perhaps he was particularly savage with this latest victim of his anger. He didn’t care, and Panur seemed not to notice as he made short work of his Klin.

  Adam surveyed the room. It wasn’t as big as he imagined it would be to pilot such a huge spacecraft. But the Klin were masters of automation, either with flying their spaceships or with fighting their battles.

  The Colony Ships were near-obsolete at this time in Klin history. For thousands of years they had served as mobile homeworlds for the aliens. But as the Klin operations moved to planets—and the huge black ships became the tip of the sword—the space stations were left in reserve simply as transport vehicles from one place to another. And with no strategic value, there were no killer robots aboard. After disposing of the bridge crew, Adam and Panur could get the ship underway before hunting down what other Klin may be aboard.

  “Do you have any idea how to fly this thing?” Adam asked. The control room looked manageable; it was when the sheer size of the ship was taken into account that Adam got worried.

  Panur pointed to a panel. “You push this button, and it goes forward. You push that one, it goes back.” The mutant laughed when he saw Adam’s expression. “Don’t worry, I’ll figure it out. Give me a minute.”

  Panur sat down at what looked like the main piloting station and scanned the controls. Then he accessed data files on the various screens around him. Less than a minute later, Adam could feel the hum and vibration of generators spinning up.

  “See, no problem. It will take the generators five minutes to warm up, then we’re on our way.”

  Adam walked up to the fifty-foot wide viewport at the far end of the bridge and looked out. This Colony Ship was one of three left. From his vantage point he could see the other two, sitting off in the distance. They appeared as half-lit globes, about the size of the moon from Earth. From here, their size was deceptive. They were the largest artificially-built objects in the galaxy, surpassed only by the massive gravity generators at the Nuorean’s midpoint station.

  Adam began to relax, feeling the reassuring vibration in the deck below his feet. If all was going according to plan, Lila and his friends were out de
stroying all the Klin black warships, and along with them their cargos of millions of deadly robots. This would free the galaxy to pursue the Klin and put a final end to all their diabolical plans for domination. Too many people had died just so the aliens could stand upon a hill and proclaim themselves masters of the universe. Adam found the whole process stupid and vacuous. What sane creature would ever want to rule a galaxy? What would you do with one if you could?

  Just then the calming hum in the deck faded away. He turned to Panur at the control station.

  “What happened?”

  “The generators have gone offline.”

  “A saboteur?”

  “More-than-likely. There are undoubtedly more Klin aboard. I will go below and check it out. The engine room is sixty floors below. There’s an express elevator to the station just outside the bridge.”

  “Should I go with you?”

  “No, stay here and secure the bridge. I can handle anything I find. I can also fix whatever damage has been done.”

  Adam nodded. Panur seemed to have a pretty good grasp of the situation.

  The mutant left the bridge, while Adam continued to stare out the viewport, fantasizing about all the great things to come.

  Robert McCarthy had spent half his life aboard the flagship of the Klin’s Colony Ship fleet, although he was born on a planet with similar gravity to Earth and raised with thousands of other Second-Generation Humans. Then based on his lineage, he was removed and placed in a special training program designed by his father, Nigel McCarthy. The training sent him to a variety of planets before ending up on the Colony Ship. He and his brothers were treated differently from the other 2Gs—not better, just different.

  When the whole Human-Juirean debacle happened, the Klin turned on the 2Gs. Most were killed, but Robert and a few of his siblings were locked away, kept in reserve in case the Klin needed them. When the Sol-Kor attacked, the Klin began coming to the Humans for advice. The aliens never admitted this was what they were doing; they had too much pride. But the way the questions were phrased and reactions Robert got, showed him the Klin were in desperate need of a new idea, a new direction. Everything they’d done in the past had failed. They had to be at wits end to come to Humans for answers.

  About that time, Robert came up with his new idea involving the invincible black ships and army of killer robots. The Klin leadership bought into it and began setting the plan in motion. It took nine years to reach this point, and during that time, Robert attained a special place within the Klin hierarchy. That was all over now, including the legacy of the Klin. They would all die, and there was nothing they could do to stop it.

  And now all Robert McCarthy was trying to do was survive.

  Robert knew the ship intimately, so upon transporting the relatively short distance from Vesper to the Colony Ship, he rushed to the engine room to set his plan in motion.

  After everything was in place, he took the case he’d brought with him from Vesper and sat it on a counter in the engine room.

  He open it and withdrew a pale yellow breastplate made of an unbreakable composite material and strapped it around his chest. Next came a flimsy looking harness that fit around his shoulders. He fastened the guards to his arms, forming a plate running along his outer forearms and biceps. Then he placed a skull shield on his head.

  The apparatus wasn’t anything to look at, but it was practical. The breastplate would protect again even laser beams, and the feather-weight shields on his arms would stop any physical blow without breaking. Coupled with his thirty years of hand-to-hand combat training—thanks to his father—Robert McCarthy knew he could handle anything Adam Cain could throw at him.

  And if that wasn’t enough, Robert had his MK-17 and a full level-one charge. Level-one bolts could burn a whole through Human skin. Cain wasn’t super-human, just a Human. Soon he would be a dead Human.

  Robert took up a position at the door to the express elevator from the bridge. He carried a canister of liquid nitrogen he’d taken from the engine room—just in case. When the door slid open, Robert relaxed and stretched out a wide, full-tooth grin.

  Resting on the floor with his back against the side of the elevator, was a thoroughly frozen immortal mutant genius. Robert had rigged the elevator with canisters of the chemical before he shut down the gravity generators, expecting Panur to come down from the bridge to get them started again. Now the mutant was just a gray ice cube.

  Robert laughed, wondering if the mutant was getting tired of being frozen every few hours. He knew he would.

  Wearing protective gloves, Robert placed the heavy block of ice on a cart and wheeled it to the nearest airlock on the engine level. There were several, used to move parts, fuel modules and other equipment into the vast complex that made up the propulsion department of the Colony Ship.

  He rolled the cart into the airlock and left it there. He stepped back into the main lobby and closed the inner door. Once the light turned amber, he pressed the button that would open the airlock to the unforgiving cold of space.

  Still wearing his manic smile, Robert headed for the elevator. All he had to do now was take care of Adam Cain. He would get a lot more satisfaction from that act than he did ejecting the mutant from the ship.

  In the airlock, the wheeled cart began to move toward the open portal and the infinite vastness of space beyond. Just as it neared the threshold, an arm and hand pulled away from the frozen block. Panur was immobilized, but he wasn’t completely frozen, at least not yet. He reached out and grabbed a bracing bar near the outer door. He barely closed his fingers around the metal rod, when his body froze. The cart slipped out from under him and fell away. Then the outer door cycled shut. The chamber pressurized automatically. However, the air that entered was only slightly above freezing. At this rate of warming, it would take days for Panur’s frozen body to thaw.

  Adam Cain didn’t have days.

  Adam heard the door to the bridge slide open; he also noticed the vibration had not returned to the deck.

  “What’s wrong, you couldn’t get the generators—”

  Through the reflection in the viewport, Adam saw that it wasn’t Panur who had entered the bridge. It was Robert McCarthy, and he had an MK aimed his way.

  Adam jumped to his right just as the room lit up from a level-one plasma bolt. The ball of energy seared the skin on Adam’s left side. He fell to the deck, writhing in pain.

  “I bet that stings!” Adam heard Robert say. “Get used to it. It’s just the beginning.”

  “Are you crazy!” Adam called out. “Killing me won’t save you. When Panur—”

  “Oh yeah, your little mutant buddy. I just blew him out of an airlock in the engine room. He won’t be coming to your rescue, not this time.”

  Adam leaned against the back of a control console and checked the burn on his left side. It had burned off part of his baggy uniform, with the skin was red and raw. Fortunately, it didn’t hurt as much before. Adam scanned the room for flash weapons with his ATD. There was only one, the MK Robert was holding. A moment later the firing circuit on the bolt launcher was severed. Adam winced from the pain in his side and he stood up to face his enemy.

  Robert had moved into the room. He stopped and pointed the weapon at Adam’s head. “A level-one bolt will splash that pretty face of yours all over the viewport, so I don’t know what you’re doing. I’m not asking for your surrender, only your death.”

  “Then go for it, dickhead.” Adam stepped around the console in Robert’s direction.

  When the weapon didn’t fire, he fingered the trigger a second time before accepting reality. “You did something to it,” he stated. “So your interface device can do more than just make telepathic telephone calls. Now I truly must have it. I was worried that it might self-destruct if you were to die, but that’s just a chance I’ll have to take.”

  Robert tossed the weapon away and approached Adam, taking a fighter’s stance as he did.

  “I do not need the weapon,” he s
aid. “I have skills, developed over thirty years. I also have this.” Robert raised his right arm and then tapped with his left hand the metal shield running the length of his arm.

  “What the fuck are you wearing?” There was no fear in Adam’s voice, just annoyance.

  “A little something I had the Klin make for me, unbreakable composite material, light-weight and flexible.” He balled a fist and smashed it down on the top of a control station. The metal bent, forming a perfect mold of Robert’s shielded hand. “That will soon be your head. And another consideration: this is Human on Human. You will have no advantage here.”

  “You’re not Human, just a cheap imitation of one.”

  Adam saw the fire in Robert’s eyes, a moment before the 2G jumped. An enhanced fist came at Adam’s head; he leaned back, sweeping the arm away as it passed, before landing his own right fist into Robert’s chest.

  Adam twisted away, gasping in pain and holding his injured hand with his left. That wasn’t such a good idea, Adam thought. He’d just been told the material covering Robert’s arms and chest was made of indestructible material. It was also really hard.

  Distracted with the pain, Adam failed to notice the left fist coming at him. Robert’s flesh didn’t make contact, but the composite material did. Adam fell back, stunned, and tumbled over a control console. Robert raced around the obstruction and dropped a knee into Adam’s chest. Air was forced from his lungs and he fought to breathe. Robert took him by the loose fabric of his dark blue overalls and lifted him from the floor. He balanced Adam against a console, stepped back, and then performed a lightning-quick spin kick to Adam’s chin.

  Adam fell, tasting the hard, cold metal of the deck, stunned and nauseous, blood pouring from his mouth. He was on the verge of passing out when something odd happened. His eyesight cleared. Not only that, but he began thinking he wasn’t as badly injured as he suspected. Sure, he was battered, but the pain was tolerable.