Sean Dalton - Operation StarHawks 03 - Beyond the Void

by Sean Dalton - [Operation StarHawks 03]

  “See what?”

  “No! Look at the floor. Did that gas dissolve your brain cells?”

  Caesar looked at the floor in each of the four corners. “Yo,” he said. “I see the beam sets.”

  “Right.” She squatted in the center of their cage and faced him at eye level. “Beam sets. The circuit running this field has to interconnect to form walls. Otherwise it would just keep running in a straight line. Each connection point marks a corner. So if we disrupt that—”

  “Tell me how, kid, and I’ll kiss your feet.”

  Phila grinned and pulled out her prong. “The bots didn’t take this. No circuits so it didn’t register on their sensors. You can be too sophisticated, now, can’t you?”

  “Yeah.” It was Caesar’s turn to be impatient. “So they’re dumb about a few things. But if you start prying on a beam set with a knife blade, you’re going to be one crispy cookie.”

  Phila snorted and got down on her stomach. She scooted across the floor until her nose was almost to one of the beam sets. It was fist-sized, very slightly raised above the level of the floor with a thin crack running around it that showed it could descend to floor level when deactivated. Phila released only one blade of her prong and inserted the sharp tip into the crack with surgical precision.

  The hair prickled on the back of Caesar’s neck. He moved prudently to the opposite corner to watch. Phila’s head went up. She laid down her prong.

  “Caesar, you idiot! Not the opposite corner. If I slip and set off sparks, they will always go in a diagonal. Don’t you know anything?”

  Caesar blinked and hastily scrambled to a new position. “You’re Miss Dynamo. I just blow things up. Is this spot okay?”

  “Yeah. You could start on one yourself. Just pry it out with one sharp snap. Get enough leverage and—”

  “Never mind. You do it. I don’t need my brain juiced, thanks.”

  She grinned at him, taking no offense at his refusal to help. With her tongue between her teeth, she resumed work. Caesar figured if she got electrocuted she’d bite off her tongue. The notion made him faintly queasy. He looked away, wishing she’d hurry, hoping she didn’t kill herself, wondering how long it would take.

  A loud spitting of sparks made him jump. He looked around in time to see blue energy, live and terrifying, arc across the cage, missing Phila by such a narrow margin it made the hair on her head stand up from its charge. Now he understood why she’d lain so flat. She scrambled right to the next corner, leaving Caesar no choice but to move right also. Which put him in the corner she’d just jimmied, where all the short sparks were crackling and fizzing. He felt like his fingernails were going to curl off in the backlash.

  “Hurry up!” he shouted.

  A blinding flash answered him. For a moment he could see nothing but stark whiteness that seared his eyeballs and left him clutching his face. The crackling stopped although his ears were buzzing so much he barely registered the drop in energy. Purple bars seemed branded on the inside of his eyelids.

  “We’re out of our cage,” said Phila smugly.

  Caesar rose to his feet, still pressing his hands to his eyes. “Great. I’m also blinded for life. Somehow the cage was better.”

  “What did you do, stare right at the beam set when I pried it out? Mandate, that was pretty stupid.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it.” His eyes were streaming tears, wetting his palms.

  She took his arm in a grip surprisingly strong for her small hands and maneuvered him a short distance. “Now. If they recircuit and raise the field again, we won’t be inside. I’ve seen too many idiots stand by and be caught again just because they forgot to leave their cage. Oh, Caesar, for God’s sake. Stop being such a baby.”

  She pulled down his hands and he stood with his eyes squeezed tightly shut, tears still streaming.

  “Open them.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Open them.”

  He turned his face to her. “Not yet, dammit! I’ve experienced enough explosion blindness to know you don’t rush. If my optic nerves are just stunned, they need to be left alone for a few minutes. The quicker I try to use them, the longer it will take. If they’re really damaged—”

  Phila’s hand tightened on his arm. “Something’s coming. This way.”

  Caesar turned clumsily, trying not to fight his blindness, trying to let her guide him. He wanted to grope. He felt terribly cautious. He had the sensation that he might fall at any moment, that there were obstacles in his path to stumble over. But he kept telling himself to trust Phila, to just run beside her, trust her.

  “Here,” she whispered, jerking him to a halt so suddenly he nearly overbalanced. She tugged him left, caught his other arm so that he sensed her standing close in front of him. He caught a whiff of her hair, smelling as though it had been lightly singed.

  She backed away from him, pulling him after her. He detected a difference in air temperature. Slightly warmer. The air smelled stale. His shoulder brushed a wall. He flinched.

  “What—”

  “Hush!” she whispered. “Quiet. We’re in a bulkhead cavity. Don’t speak.”

  He waited, straining to listen. In the distance came cadenced footsteps. Robot. His mouth went dry. They were in for it now.

  But it went on by as though their escape did not matter.

  When the sound of it faded, Phila let out her breath and sagged against him. Ordinarily he enjoyed females clinging to his chest. But Phila was like a kid sister, and about as appealing. He gave her a brief hug, then pushed free.

  The whiteness behind his eyelids was fading, becoming dark, becoming normal. Relief washed over him. His luck of the Irish still held.

  “I don’t understand,” Phila was saying. “It walked right through the area where our cage was and never seemed to notice.”

  “Was it a rolling cannon, or something else?” Caesar rubbed his eyes, smiled, and opened them. He saw total blackness.

  “Something else,” Phila said. “Just a bipedal robot, unarmed and not as big as the others. It was carrying a small box. I guess it wasn’t programmed to observe anything in this area. But you’d think we’d be under surveillance. You’d think by now the sensors would have registered a forcefield failure. This is weird.”

  Caesar didn’t answer. He kept blinking into the darkness, straining to see even the faintest glimmer of light. His pupils must be dilated to the rims, but nothing came in. The luck of the Irish sagged from him. He felt old, quiet, and without confidence.

  “Phila,” he said, knowing that if he told her, if he said it aloud that would make it true. “I’m really—”

  “Come on,” she said, brushing past him. “Let’s get out of this bolt hole and see if we can find the others.”

  She caught his hand and tugged him after her. He turned and followed, bumping into the bulkhead. Phila fumbled about and stopped in front of him.

  “Damn!” she said. “All the lights have gone out. I can’t see anything.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Not one single thing. The darkness is total. Do you think they’ll shut off the air and heat as well?”

  Caesar didn’t answer. He brought his palm up to the tip of his nose and spread his fingers wide. Could he see it? No, but maybe his eyes were okay. He couldn’t test them now, so in the meantime he was going to believe they were fine. It was the only way to loosen that painful knot inside his chest.

  “Orient yourself,” he told Phila. “Put your back to the wall. Which way did we come from?”

  “Starboard,” she said.

  “Take my hand.”

  They clasped hands tightly, equal now.

  “Go port,” said Caesar. “Always keep your hand on the wall.”

  “What if we come to a dead end?” Her voice was small and not as impatient as usual.

  “Naw,” said Caesar with forced cheerfulness. “We’re following that bot, remember? Do you think bots just cruise this place for the fun of it? What would they be d
oing that for? Trying to pick up shebots?”

  “Caesar, that is a very bad joke.”

  Her voice sounded less scared. Caesar grinned to himself in the darkness, wishing someone would tell him bad jokes to cheer him up. He could sure use a big shot of reassurance right now. Because he didn’t like this one bit, this groping along like two helpless grunts.

  “I think we ought to have our prongs ready,” said Phila.

  “For what? You going to unscrew an arm or two? Remember, toots. We haven’t seen one living being in this place since we got here.”

  “I know. It’s spooky. Do you figure this whole ship is automated?”

  “Who knows? It’s so big we may never get to where the people are. Maybe we’re down in the hold or something. Maybe this is just the brig. Maybe in about ten kilometers we’ll come to a duty station.”

  She mumbled something rude, but it was too low for Caesar to catch.

  After that they walked in silence for what seemed like forever.

  “Caesar,” said Phila, making him jump. “There’s no more wall.”

  “What? What are you talking about? There has to be a wall.”

  “I’ve lost it. Caesar—”

  He gripped the fabric of her sleeve. “Calm down. Just calm down.”

  “I am calm,” she said in a lower voice. “Sorry. It’s a sharp corner. Watch it!”

  She jerked backward into him, nearly knocking him off his feet. He clutched her with both hands.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  He could hear her breathing in short, jerky catches.

  “I ... touched something.”

  “Something like what? Come on, Mohatsa. Pull yourself together. You’re supposed to be the original firecracker, not some quaking, helpless—”

  “All right!” she said in fury, elbowing him in the stomach. “I don’t like the dark, okay? I got buried alive as a kid when we were hiding in the trenches during a Jostic raid. It bothers me a little, okay? I think I’m doing pretty good not to be screaming right now.”

  “Yusus.” Caesar blew out a breath. “I’m sorry. Sorry. Okay? Just calm down. What did you touch?”

  “Something oozy, like liquid only thicker than that, about like warm pudding.”

  “On the wall?”

  “Look, Samms, I am not making this up.”

  “Right. Sure. There’s some warm pudding on the wall of an alien spacecraft the size of a city.” But Caesar’s whole attention wasn’t on his sarcasm. As he spoke he stepped past her to get in front, still keeping one hand firmly on her sleeve while he groped with the other. He found the corner and slid his fingers around it.

  For an instant he felt nothing but solid metal wall. Then his hand plunged into something warm and soft and oozy, something that pulsed against his fingers. And a feeling of hatred washed over him in a wave powerful enough to make him break out in a cold sweat. He snatched back his hand and as it left the thing it made a dull sucking noise.

  Caesar staggered back, nearly mashing Phila into the wall. He let go of her and held his hand, gripping it hard as though to be sure it was still there. Surprisingly it wasn’t wet. But the thing’s warmth still tingled on his flesh. He flexed his hand uneasily.

  “Merciful Mary,” he whispered, for once swearing sincerely. “What the devil is it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Phila nervously. “And I don’t want to find out. Did you feel something from it? Did you get the idea that it doesn’t want us here?”

  “Yeah,” said Caesar. “I think we just met our first life form. The robots were nicer.”

  “What do we do? It hasn’t sounded an alarm.”

  “Not one we can sense anyway,” said Caesar dourly. “Somehow, I don’t think it talks or hears or has alarm sirens.”

  “Will you stop babbling? It knows we’re here. We can’t just stand around flat-footed and wait for those bots to come pick us up.”

  She had a point. Caesar fumbled down her arm and found her hand. Grasping it tightly, he said, “Put your other hand on the wall and I’ll try to cross the intersection of these corridors.”

  He started edging his way out there into the middle, his free hand held out slightly ahead of him in case he bumped into anything. Phila yanked him back.

  “Caesar, you’re going the wrong way. You’re headed back the way we just came.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes! Don’t argue. You’ll get me confused. Here, you stand by the wall and let me try it.”

  “I don’t think you’re—”

  “Yes, I am. Now shut up and let me do it.”

  He gave in, feeling more than a little foolish and wondering how long it would be until the bots got here with bazookas sprouting from their navels and axes for hands. He shivered and felt his forehead. He was stressing out; he had better get himself together.

  “I need some more slack,” said Phila.

  “Slack? It’s my arm you’re talking about. I can’t pay it out like a rope.”

  “Well, move farther from the wall then. Just don’t lose it.”

  Grumbling, he shifted his position slightly, just keeping his fingertips on the wall. He couldn’t help but wonder if little oozy might decide to come on around the corner. He shuddered.

  Just then there came a muted flash of light that might as well have been blinding for what it did to his dilated pupils. He cried out, dropping Phila’s hand to cover his eyes in a purely reflexive move. In that instant of sight, however, he had seen her standing on a grid painted crimson with a nimbus of light flashing out all around her. Her long black hair stood on end in a broad fan behind her skull, and on her small face was a look of utter terror.

  She screamed, then the lights went out again and Caesar was once more plunged into darkness.

  “God, what was that! Phila? Phila? Hey!”

  She didn’t answer. Swearing, he pushed himself in the direction he’d last seen her, but his outstretched hands found nothing. She was gone as though she’d been swallowed up.

  Caesar stood there, turning about and turning about. “Phila? What did you do, fall into a teleport field?”

  Nothing answered him. But the lights flashed on again, making him cringe even as a part of him rejoiced at having his sight back. He had an instant to look down and see that he was standing on the grid.

  He knew then what it was and what had happened to Phila. The question was, where had she teleported to? Another part of the ship, or into space?

  Dumb thing to think of now, he told himself. And he vanished.

  * * *

  10

  Beaulieu knew a DNA coding chamber when she saw one. She stood in a line of Alliance Fleet personnel, most of whom were suffering hunger, cold, and the side effects of experimentation. They had all been stunned lightly, just enough to numb their extremities and make them feel too nauseous to cause any trouble. Every thirty minutes a robot that looked like a canister rolled by and stunned them again.

  Without wanting to be obvious about it, Beaulieu glanced ahead and counted. Thirty-eight, no, thirty-seven people stood ahead of her. Processing was going very rapidly. Past the access point she could see a decontamination booth. That was standard procedure. But as far as she had been able to determine, no one was coming out. Either they had a different exit point, or ...

  She ducked completing that thought, then felt ashamed of herself. A competent doctor should be able to face anything, no matter how unpleasant. Certainly she had faced death before, in many guises and many forms. She had not always saved her patients, but she had saved enough for her to feel that her existence made a slight difference in this universe.

  Battling death was one thing. Standing like tame cattle in a slaughter line was something else. Her courage kept failing her, leaving her with bad moments when her mouth dried out and she could hear her own heartbeat. Then she had to dig her nails into her palms in order not to disgrace herself.

  The people in line, wearing Fleet uniforms of gray, now rumpled
and stained, were mostly youngsters, lacking enough officers to steady them. They kept glancing back, seeking faces they knew, their eyes darting to hers and away. There was little talking. They smelled death, the way animals do.

  Beaulieu had looked up and down the line herself. So far, she had not seen any of her comrades. The only person she knew was Captain Serula, standing fourteen people ahead of her. Serula had not glanced back a single time, and for a while Beaulieu was angry at her. Then she saw Serula’s hand clasped tightly by the man in front of her. He was Serula’s height but nearly twice as broad, with massive shoulders that strained his uniform. His hair was as dark as Serula’s was fair. They stood as close to side by side as the line would allow them. Beaulieu understood. The husband. Dying together was better than dying alone.

  Her eyes stung unexpectedly with tears. She’d had a husband once. God, how long ago? Thirty years? For a foolish moment Beaulieu couldn’t remember his name. Then it surged back to her. Chaka Narenga of the distinguished College of Physicists. Handsome, brilliant, already famous for his theories of particle dynamics, Chaka had filled her eyes from the first time she saw him. They had spent a year together, complete and happy, he busy with new professorial duties, she finishing her last months of residency. Then she’d gotten the chance to join the Fleet and jumped at it. Chaka went on a tour of research with a team of Minzanese engineers. From that point their paths diverged until they saw each other once every two years, then every five, then there seemed no reason to keep the marriage anymore.

  Now, she didn’t know where he lived or what he was doing. She could no longer remember clearly what he looked like. She didn’t even know why she should be crying over him, except that she needed his passion right now and all she had was a ghost.

  Serula and her man went through the decontamination booth. Beaulieu shuffled forward. The robot came back down the line to stun them again. The Boxcan in front of her leaned over and retched miserably. Beaulieu put her hand on his back; it was all the kindness she could offer.

  But inside her anger grew. This was no way to go, tame and helpless, unable to fight. She didn’t even know why.