A Taste Of Despair (The Humal Sequence)

by Robert Taylor

  Someone had got there before him and removed one of the ultralight self-inflating mattresses, but there were plenty left. He grabbed one, then he and Johnson wandered deeper into the maze to find a quiet place to spend the night.

  Their brief attempt at love-making was abandoned amidst snorts of laughter and giggles as they were both too drunk to have any idea what they were doing.

  In the end, sleep claimed them before they could sober up enough to regret the amounts they had drunk. That would come the next day.

  *****

  In the morning another attempt at sex failed as their respective hangovers pounded mercilessly at their skulls. They lay quietly for a while, hoping the hammering in their heads would subside enough to allow them to enjoy each other’s company properly, but they never did. Finally, thirst and a desire to find some sort of chemical to take away the pain drove them to dress and wander back towards the main area.

  As they made their way back they heard low voices from the area with the tank and, on a whim, decided to investigate.

  Carl and Klane were enjoying the delights of the tank. The water was steaming hot, by the look of it, but Hamilton knew it couldn’t have remained warm from the previous day. Somehow, the pair had found a way to heat the water again.

  He and Johnson were about to sneak away and leave the pair to their fun when Klane’s voice called out to him.

  “Hamilton! Don’t even think about trying to sneak off! Get your ass over here!”

  Hamilton and Johnson exchanged glances, shrugged and walked out from behind the crate they’d been hiding by.

  Carl sat in one corner of the tank with Klane propped up against him. Both appeared to be naked.

  “You know,” Hamilton stated. “The last thing I need when I’m as hung over as this is to see you cavorting naked in a pool!”

  Klane grinned. “Best cure for a hangover. Hot bath and good company.”

  Hamilton shook his head. “Just when I thought you were done shocking me…” He smiled.

  She grinned. “I’m not done yet. Why don’t the pair of you join us?”

  Hamilton made a choking sound and turned to move away. The woman was incorrigible.

  “We have fresh, cool water and pharmaceuticals….” Klane added.

  Hamilton stopped and looked back at the pair.

  “Of course,” Klane continued. “The price for such delights is that you join us!”

  Hamilton glanced at Johnson. She shrugged. He sighed and pulled off his shirt.

  “I’m in too much pain to argue with you.” He told Klane.

  “You never win anyway.” She laughed.

  “Not when I feel like this.” He finished removing his clothing all apart from his underwear.

  “Oh no you don’t!” Klane waggled a finger at him. “Skinny-dipping or nothing! We’re both naked!”

  For a moment he looked at her. “Thanks for that image.” He muttered. Then he shook his head and pulled his pants off. He didn’t bother trying to hide his genitals, but he climbed into the tank swiftly.

  Johnson hesitated at the underwear stage as well, looking helplessly at Hamilton.

  Klane chuckled. “Don’t be embarrassed Johnson. Carl was one of the few men not hitting on you last night.”

  “I had other plans!” Carl rumbled. The pair dissolved into fits of laughter.

  Johnson slipped out of her under-things and hopped in rapidly.

  “The water?” Hamilton prompted after a few seconds.

  Klane reached over the side of the tank near her and pulled up a thermal bottle and threw it across the tank to him. Hamilton opened it and took a long draught before passing it to Johnson. The water was cold, as she had said. In the tank, however, it was extremely warm and very relaxing. His head pounded at him still, but it was difficult to pay it much attention whilst the heat was soaking into his body.

  “You mentioned drugs, as well.” He pointed out.

  A small bottle came sailing his way. Hamilton glanced at the label, took two and passed it to Johnson.

  For a time no one said anything, being content to just relax in the warmth.

  “How did you heat the water up again?” Johnson asked after a time.

  Klane shrugged. “That plasma cutter you brought back from your heroic rescue of Lewis. Turns out that it makes quite a good water heater.”

  Hamilton shook his head. Klane was almost as crazy as Lewis.

  There was another length of silence.

  “So. What happens now?” Carl asked.

  “Jump to the world we’re going to leave the others on, drop them off. Make plans for our two missions, carry them out. After that, we’ll see.” Hamilton mumbled, half asleep.

  “It’s a shame we had to lose some of the Marines.” Klane muttered.

  “We still have four left, plus you and me.” Hamilton replied.

  Johnson and Carl exchanged a glance. It was as if the pair had forgotten anyone else was in the tank.

  “That’s a lot of mission for six trained infantry.” Klane noted.

  Hamilton made a negative grunt. “Not so bad. We’ve faced worse odds.”

  Both of them had closed their eyes.

  “Hey, don’t go to sleep on me!” Johnson prodded Hamilton in the ribs. He sat up with a start.

  “I wasn’t. Just drifting, that’s all.”

  There was a loud snoring from the other end of the tank. Propped up against Carl, Klane had fallen asleep.

  Hamilton looked at the big Enjun. “Don’t ever tell her she snores.” He advised. “She’ll make your life hell if you do.”

  Carl frowned. “You two, you were close, once?”

  Hamilton was aware of Johnson suddenly paying a lot more attention to the conversation, which had taken a turn he hadn’t expected.

  “Once.” He admitted. “A long time ago. Simpler times.”

  Carl nodded. “What happened, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  Hamilton thought about his answer for a moment. The whole story was not something he cared to share. It wasn’t a pleasant tale and was as much hers to tell as it was his.

  And it was all so long ago. He thought.

  “Let’s just say I made a choice. A choice that she didn’t agree with. As a result, things went bad between us. After that we couldn’t stand each other.” He told the big man.

  Carl frowned. “But you two get along now. You must have made your peace with each other?”

  Hamilton nodded. “We buried the hatchet, as it were. But it took a long time. By then we were….very different people than we had been. Maybe it’s because we were so different that we were able to put….it…behind us.”

  It looked like Carl wanted to ask more questions, but he simply nodded and lay back in the water, thinking.

  Johnson looked like she had questions of her own.

  Hamilton leaned close and nuzzled at her ear. “Another time, okay?” He murmured.

  She smiled and nodded, leaning back against him.

  Jones found them like that about thirty minutes later. After the fun of the night before, nobody was eager to make a quick start. Jones climbed the steps and sat at the top.

  “You folks naked in there?” He looked aghast.

  Hamilton nodded. “Join us, if you like.”

  Jones snorted and shook his head, then winced as his own hangover made him pay for the head-shake. “Not a chance!” He scowled, hand going to his head.

  Johnson threw him the pill bottle and thermal water bottle.

  “If you’re not here to join us…” Hamilton wondered.

  Jones hooked a finger at the still snoring Klane. “I heard a noise. I thought it might be a hull breach!”

  Hamilton chuckled. “Don’t ever say that to her! If you value your life…”

  Jones grinned. “I ain’t stupid. What are you all doing in there anyway? Not still partying?”

  “It’s a good cure for a hangover.” Johnson told him. “And you get to learn all sorts of interesting things abou
t the people you share the tank with! Oww!”

  Hamilton had pinched her under the water.

  Jones looked between the two, then looked at Carl, who merely shrugged. “Anyway,” Jones said. “Rames last comment before he left the party last night was that he wanted to get under way first thing. Well, it’s first thing now, by my watch.”

  Hamilton groaned. “Okay, Go back and tell the others we’ll be there presently.”

  Jones nodded, looking grateful to be leaving.

  Carl glanced at Hamilton, who showed no signs of stirring after Jones had left.

  Hamilton caught the glance and waved dismissively after the departed Jones. “They’ll cope.”

  He lay back and let the warmth fill him.

  *****

  The others did indeed cope. Although Rames and Jones did both visit the tank to talk at Hamilton. It was talking at him, since he was paying scant attention to Rames seeming urgency. The captain seemed to think that they needed to get out and get moving. In the end, though, it was Rames that got moving when Klane, irritated at being woken, decided to stand up in the tank.

  Although undoubtedly female, the sight of her naked torso with its musculature, scars and prosthetics was too much for the good captain, who suddenly found he ‘needed to attend to business’ and beat a hasty retreat.

  The four of them settled back down in the tank.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The two ships divided their crews and undocked. The course for the ‘colony world’, as it had been decided to call it, was laid in and the ships jumped in good order. All without Hamilton and the others even getting out of the tank.

  LeGault and Lewis flew the Morebaeus, whilst Veltin and Puckett had returned to the Ulysses to act as pilot and navigator once more.

  Apart from Hamilton and his tank-mates, Lewis and LeGault, only Jones and Corporal Collins had chosen to remain aboard the Morebaeus. The latter said he wanted to inventory the freighter’s cargo supplies, to see what was important for their ‘colony’.

  The hyper jump would take them a further twelve days in the Morebaeus. Ulysses would make it in eight.

  The journey was uneventful. Hamilton spent it considering his plans for their capturing of one of Walsh’s people and the kidnap of the Humal expert from Mars. There were things they need to obtain first. But, for the most part, they were things they could obtain ‘en route’ to the missions.

  Despite the critical shortage of personnel, he became more and more certain that both missions should be carried out more or less at the same time. He wasn’t sure why he thought this was a good idea, given their limited resources, but he had the feeling that it should be that way. A gut instinct told him so.

  *****

  Corporal Collins made his move on the last night in hyperspace. Although he had been cordial enough all along and had stuck to his task of doing an inventory, there was something about his willingness to be parted from his fellow Marines and do the task, entirely alone, that made Hamilton suspicious.

  He and Klane had kept an eye on the Marine but hadn’t said anything to the others. It might have proved to be nothing more than Hamilton’s suspicious nature. There was no point in causing alarm when it wasn’t necessary. Besides which, the others weren’t particularly good at hiding their emotions and feelings. Collins would have likely detected they were on to him.

  Hamilton and Rames had discussed the possibility of an attempted mutiny. It had seemed likely. They were, after all, going to maroon people on an uninhabited world. If the situation had been reversed he would have tried something. The fact that the four Marines had decided to join the leavers had set alarms off in both men’s heads.

  Collins had, with access to the Ulysses arms locker, helped himself to a heavy duty stunner and a couple of gas and stun grenades.

  The gas grenades he tossed in amongst the sleepers in the makeshift camp then, as they woke coughing and spluttering, he threw in a stun grenade. Although the cargo module was big, the effect was still deafeningly loud. Wearing a spacesuit borrowed from the Morebaeus’ own stores, he then waded in, firing the stunner at any sign of movement, downing anyone foolish enough to have tried to get away.

  Looking around, he must have congratulated himself on the success of his simple plan. Everyone seemed to be accounted for, except….

  That was when Klane had strode through the slowly dispersing gas cloud, wearing a small oxygen cylinder and mask, to kick him unceremoniously between the legs. Had she still been equipped with the military-grade prosthetics she’d had aboard the Hope’s Breath, Collins would have likely never had children again. As it was, her general size and strength were more than enough to double him up, whereupon a knee to his faceplate sent him over backwards, the plastic of the faceplate cracked. He started wheezing as the gas got to him.

  By the time Hamilton found them, similarly equipped with a makeshift breathing system, Klane had bound and tied the Marine.

  “How the hell can you see anything in this?” Hamilton coughed. His eyes were streaming from the gas effects.

  Klane tapped her cybernetic eye. “I can switch between a variety of different wavelengths. This is as clear as day to me.” Her normal eye, however, was weeping just as much as his.

  None of the others were seriously hurt, other than their pride. Collins had clearly been trying to capture them all, not harm anyone. The stunner wore off after ten minutes or so, the gas had long since dispersed by then so it was just a matter of bathing their eyes with saline to salve the irritation. In less than an hour everyone was recovered.

  Suggestions as to what to do to Collins were varied and colorful. However, Hamilton and Klane were running the show, so Collins ended up securely bound and locked in one of the crew’s cabins. In his defense, Collins said he had just wanted to make sure his family were safe and wasn’t out to hurt anyone.

  In the morning they would emerge from hyperspace and then they could see what had befallen the Ulysses.

  *****

  As it happened, the Ulysses had been just fine. All three of the Marines that had decided to be put off the ship had staged a mutiny, but with four other Marines on board and thanks to certain precautions taken by Rames and Major Harvan, the coup lasted precisely up until they realized their weapons had been disabled, at which time they surrendered. Harvan had removed components from the weapons making them unable to fire after he had discovered the armory missing the grenades that Collins had taken.

  Since the entire plot seemed to have originated with the Marines – the civilians denying all knowledge of it – nobody else was locked up in the brig other than them whilst they waited for the Morebaeus to show up.

  Once reunited, Collins was transferred to the Ulysses and then both ships headed to the world slated for the ‘base. Everyone used that term now. It made the notion of effectively marooning people more palatable.

  Once in orbit, the process began of picking a spot for the ‘colonists’ to build their base. Charlton, Puckett and the two techs from the Ulysses were consulted, as was Corporal Collins. Lewis, being a planetologist, was helpful in pointing out obvious failures to the colonists, such as Puckett’s planned “riverside” idea. It looked ideal, until she pointed out that it was a flood-plain and they’d wake up one day to find themselves swimming.

  Eventually, however, a spot was chosen and the work began of sorting out supplies to be shipped down to the planet for them. Prefab housing, food, equipment, defensive gear. All those things and more. All that a colony would ever need resided in the three huge cargo modules that the Morebaeus carried. The difficulty lay not in lacking what the colony needed, but in getting it from the modules to the planet’s surface.

  The Ulysses had a decent sized shuttle, but it was not a cargo hauler by any stretch of the imagination. Each of the three modules had its own small loading hangar at the aft end of the ship, more than substantial enough to take the Ulysses’ small shuttle.

  The shuttle, however, only had small, human-sized entry por
ts, so much of the cargo had to be unpacked and carried aboard laboriously by hand, making the whole process drag on longer than it should have.

  Alpha Centauri, the colony the supplies had originally been intended for some fifty years before, would have had a fleet of big cargo haulers to unload the modules. But they only had one small shuttle, so the process took much longer than they anticipated. Several days, in fact, with Puckett flying the shuttle on multiple trips each day.

  The mutinous Marines had been taken down on one of the first trips, in order to start work on the base and to provide labor to unload the shuttle when it arrived. They had been issued with weapons for self-defense and the shuttle was heavily scanned each time it returned from the planet, just in case the Marines decided to try their hand at a take-over again. But it seemed as if they had learned their lesson.

  The fusion generator that the Morebaeus’ original crew had set-up in the main module was not able to be dismantled. So the colony had to rely on wind and solar generators to provide their power requirements. The generators were highly efficient, however, so it was unlikely that the colony would ever be left without power. That, plus the addition of backup fossil-fuel generators, ensured the colony would never go dark. The two defecting engineers went down to oversee the set-up of the generators, not wanting to trust the Marines with the task.

  Although the Marines saw to the loading of the shuttle, most of the others helped out in some ways, either helping to load, like Carl and Klane did, or assembling more specialized equipment that the colony would need, like Anderton, Lewis and Johnson.

  Despite the relatively low capacity of the shuttle, soon the supplies began to pile up on the surface faster than the builders could make use of them. Charlton and Puckett said their farewells and joined their fellow exiles on the surface.

  During the course of those days, Hamilton busied himself interrogating the Ulysses’ database and planning for the missions to come. The database was comprehensive and, being military in nature, had plenty of detail which civilians would not have access to.