A Taste Of Despair (The Humal Sequence)

by Robert Taylor

  “You know,” Hamilton frowned as if in thought. “It seems to me that you’ve said much the same thing to me twice now, and both times I’ve managed to get away. I think you overestimate your omnipotence.”

  Walsh wore a tolerant look. “Sheer luck, that’s all!”

  Hamilton did his best to imitate the smug, self-satisfied look that Walsh liked to wear. “I’ll give you luck on the first instance. I had no idea what I was dealing with then. The second time was down to thinking ahead. Planning. You ought to try it occasionally. It makes you a lot more confident about what you’re doing and when things go wrong, it isn’t usually because you didn’t foresee the outcome. Or maybe your kind just isn’t that good at thinking ahead. Maybe that’s why the Humals defeated you?”

  Walsh’s demeanor changed ever so subtly, almost imperceptibly, but Hamilton knew he had struck a nerve.

  “Big words from someone who’s a fugitive from his own people! I planned ahead thoroughly for all eventualities back on Tantalus. I bugged your ship, in case you got away. Once you had, and I found out about Mr. Tane, here, I sat on him until you showed up. Killing two birds with one stone is the phrase your kind uses, I believe. Oh, and don’t worry about your friends on the Ulysses, I have quite the surprise waiting for them at the array!” Walsh pointed out.

  “We’re both fugitives, it seems.” Hamilton agreed, indicating Tane. “And yet, despite that, here we are, in the heart of the Empire, free men.”

  “Not for much longer. Now, I think I’ll…” Walsh began. He/she never got to finish the sentence.

  Carl surged up from where he had lain, apparently unconscious, and landed a huge punch to the back of the ImpSec agent’s skull. She went down as if pole-axed. The other stunned members of Hamilton’s group then began to stir as well.

  The two other ImpSec agents seemed to momentarily appear to have gone to sleep. Hamilton thought, as he lunged towards them, that despite Walsh’s claim of instant communication, there must be a delay, no matter how small, in transferring control from one person to another. So it appeared here.

  By the time the two men stirred themselves, Carl had grabbed one of them and thrown him half across the lab, over a bench and causing glasswork to shatter as chemical apparatus was knocked flying.

  Hamilton reached the second man an instant later. The agent, or whoever it was controlling him, brought up his own laze pistol a fraction too slowly. Hamilton’s foot caught him mid-chest, throwing him back out into the corridor and against the opposite wall. His gun went flying, the power cord to his waist pulling free of the belt-pack.

  The man straightened up as if untroubled by the kick, then assumed a combat stance.

  It was professional, but there was a certain stiffness about his movements that was very obvious to Hamilton’s trained eye. It wasn’t that the man had been injured, it was just as if he was unfamiliar with his hand-to-hand skills. Almost like he was rusty and out of practice.

  Hamilton knew all ImpSec agents received regular refresher courses and constant skill evaluations, so lack of practice could not be the answer.

  He’s awkward because it’s not him doing it. Hamilton realized. It’s Walsh, or one of his alien buddies controlling the man. And he’s unfamiliar with his new body.

  The man charged at Hamilton, who spun aside at the last minute and tripped the man, sending him stumbling down the corridor on his hands and knees.

  Hamilton snatched up the fallen laze pistol and jumped on the man, wrapping the power cord around his neck and heaving backwards with all his strength.

  Despite the sudden lack of air to his lungs and Hamilton’s weight on his back the man, who was stick-thin by anyone’s estimation, surged to his feet and threw himself back against the corridor wall.

  Hamilton grunted and tried to tighten the cord further but he was already using all his might. The man moved forwards then threw himself backwards again. Hamilton felt the substance of the flimsy wall behind him give under the assault.

  Abruptly, the man bent forward as Carl, emerging from the lab, joined the fray with a kick to the man’s stomach. From inside the lab, there was the sound of repeated stunner discharges.

  It was Carl that eventually finished the fight in the corridor. He tripped both the man and Hamilton over, then grabbed one of the man’s legs and twisted it with savage force. There was a horrible popping noise as the man’s knee gave out. The big Enjun wasn’t done, though. He snatched up the man’s other leg and did the same thing.

  Hamilton crawled away, still clutching the useless laze pistol.

  His assailant was far from unconscious but, with two useless legs, he was hardly a threat any more.

  Jones and Klane emerged from the lab and stunned the man repeatedly until he went limp.

  The rest of his team, along with Tane, followed them out.

  Hamilton turned to Tane. “I wondered how much longer you’d let that go on.”

  Tane shrugged. “Information is always useful. However that one was starting to get on my nerves. Releasing your big friend was never difficult. It was priming him to do the right thing instantly that took some time. Thank you for distracting … it.”

  “Hamilton! What the hell happened?” Klane was staggering a little, looking around in confusion at unconscious agents. “Where did these agents come from? What happened?”

  “Walsh, basically.” Hamilton said bluntly. The others looked confused and waved their guns about as if expecting the alien to appear again at any moment.

  “If that was Walsh, have we captured him?” Jones frowned.

  “No, just severed his comms link, most likely. What we have captured, however, is a controlled human. A drone, as Walsh referred to her. These others are drones, too.” Hamilton explained.

  “So all we’ve done is to piss Walsh off?” Klane suggested.

  “Definitely.” He agreed. “We need to get out of here right now!”

  “I believe I’ll come with you, then.” Tane said. “My cover is blown and I’d rather not end up in the clutches of that creature.”

  Hamilton nodded at the old man. “This will likely cause a massive response from Walsh. I’ve pissed him off and he’s desperate to know what happened in the war between his kind and the Humals. He won’t want to let either of us get away.”

  “Well, we’re screwed then!” Jones stated. “I don’t like to be the bearer of bad news, but we have no way off planet!”

  “We do seem to have entered the lion’s den without even a whip.” LeGault added.

  “What do we do?” Klane scowled.

  Everyone looked expectantly at Hamilton. For a few moments he scanned the worried faces, keeping his own face set in a deathly serious expression. To one side, he saw Tane smile.

  He knows. He saw it in my mind. He thought and his expression lightened.

  The looks of hope in the eyes of the others was surprisingly pleasurable.

  “Seriously? You all think I’d have dragged you in here on this crazy scheme with absolutely no idea of how to get away?” He asked them. “I don’t do one-way missions!”

  Shaking his head, he dug inside a suit pocket and removed the tiny transmitter that he’d used to trigger the EMP blast in orbit. Flipping it over, he slid aside a small recessed panel in the back. Within, a countdown timer stood frozen.

  Ninety minutes. He noted. They must be close.

  “What’s going on, then?” Klane demanded. “What’s the timer for?”

  Hamilton pulled out the small data pane from another pocket and pulled up a map of the city. Ninety minutes was both not long, and too long, all at the same time. Walsh wouldn’t give them that much time, he was certain. Still, it could have been a far longer length of time.

  “Hamilton!” Klane’s voice took on a warning tone he knew only too well.

  He grinned. “What’s the important feature that defines a Skip Drive? Anyone?” He continued to prod at the city map. There was nowhere suitable for his purposes within Olympus itself. He expande
d the map outwards, including the city’s surroundings.

  “Skip Drive?” Klane scowled, confused.

  “There’s no energy burst on emergence.” LeGault reminded them.

  “Absolutely!” Hamilton agreed cheerfully. “So what was to stop us from Skipping straight here to Mars instead of doing all that sneaking around that we did?”

  “We couldn’t do that!” Johnson frowned. “We’d have been detected immediately!”

  “It would have been suicide!” Jones muttered.

  Hamilton continued to scan the city’s surroundings. The road eastwards out of Olympus led to the next city along, Hyperion, some one hundred and fifty miles away. In between was nothing but a fused topsoil highway and a maglev rail line that ran alongside it. It would have to do.

  “Why? What would have detected us?” Hamilton added, prodding at a point on the map some thirty miles away from Olympus.

  “The sensor net, you idiot!” Klane actually gritted her teeth and balled her fists in frustration. If he didn’t spill the beans soon, she’d have him spilling teeth instead. He brought up the transmitter and used a finger nail to prod a small button in the recess at the back. The data pane displayed the message “handshaking” in flashing letters.

  “So. If there was, say, a gap in the sensor net, we could have flown a ship right in here without anyone knowing?” He said. The pane and the transmitter finished their handshaking. He hit the button marked transmit on the pane.

  “Of course we could have! But there wasn’t a gap, that’s why….” Klane trailed off, realization dawning in her expression. Her mouth fell open as she stared at him in disbelief.

  He grinned at her. She closed her mouth and started to smile

  “What!” Jones protested. “What did you do?”

  Klane chuckled. “Sometimes, Hamilton, you are too clever for your own good!”

  “What!” The combined voices of Jones, Carl, Johnson and LeGault demanded.

  The pane beeped at him, displaying the message “transmission completed” for his consideration. He canceled it and put the pane away.

  “Basically, the reason we didn’t fly in was because we’d be detected immediately.” He explained finally. “However, if there was some problem with the sensors, say, due to some idiot detonating an EMP warhead in orbit, then there’d be a gap, if only for a day or two, in the net’s coverage. A gap that another ship could make use of. A rescue ship, maybe!”

  There was silence for a moment.

  “You have a ship coming for us?” LeGault nodded appreciatively.

  Klane however, swapped her grin for a scowl. She thumped him on the arm heavily. “Why the hell didn’t you include this in your briefing, you moron!”

  “Ow!” He complained. “Go easy! I had my reasons!”

  “They better be good ones!” She warned.

  He nodded. “Look, when we were on Tantalus, the Morebaeus was left ‘unattended’ by any of us for days. I judged it reasonable that Walsh, once he knew we were there, would plant some sort of bug aboard. It’s the kind of thing he’d do. So it seemed a safe bet that he’d know our plans. That’s why I didn’t tell you anything. So that he would think he had us trapped here.”

  Johnson went wide-eyed. “That’s why he showed up here! Just at the same time as we did!”

  Hamilton nodded, recalling that the others had been semi-conscious thanks to Tane for most of the conversation with Walsh. “He knew we were coming here. Knew all our plans, or thought he did. He just didn’t think we had a way out.”

  “So, who’s coming to get us?” Carl asked.

  “Rames. The Ulysses and the Morebaeus basically jumped across the system when they left us. They’re on the other side of Sol. They’ve been waiting for the EM pulse to show up on their sensors so that they could begin their run in here.”

  LeGault frowned. “Wait a minute! It’d take a day or more, even with a Skip drive to get from the edge of the system to here.”

  Hamilton glanced at the timer on the transmitter. It had already begun counting down. “Eighty-five minutes, to be more precise.”

  “That’s not possible!” The pilot shook his head.

  Hamilton grinned again. “I didn’t say they were coming from the edge of the system.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  The Lagrange Five point of Mars was in advance of the planet’s orbit, sharing a common orbital path with the red planet. As with all Lagrange points, the various gravitational influences of Mars, Sol and others balanced out to zero at that point, effectively allowing anything located at that point to maintain its relative position without expenditure of fuel or power. It meant that whatever was located there maintained the exact same distance from Mars at all times.

  Anything at all could have been put there – a shipyard, a refinery, or a factory – anything. But instead, given the vast amounts of damaged ships, goods and waste materials that the system produced as a whole, the Empire had decided to put a monstrous recycling facility there.

  It seemed like an elegant solution to the powers that be. Anything put there remained with virtually zero effort or cost, awaiting a time to be reprocessed. It meant that all the waste of the entire system could simply be shipped there and essentially forgotten about. Waste went in and new, shiny materials came out.

  Of course, as the sheer volume of broken vessels, industrial waste and Earth garbage increased, so the facility began to be unable to cope. A second facility was built, then a third, and a fourth, orbiting the ever increasing debris cloud.

  As time went by, the edges of the cloud began to drift off into space. It had simply outgrown the L5 point’s area of gravitational stability. A small, low-power gravitic field generator was installed at the heart of the cloud, ostensibly to attract the wayward debris and keep it nice and tightly together. That worked rather better than those who had come up with the fix had in mind. The debris clumped together, rapidly entombing the generator until derelict ships, refuse and all the other disposed of waste for the system had formed a rough ball of thrown away material. That made it harder to recycle, so they tried to switch off the generator now that the material had aggregated. Unfortunately, the almost one kilometer of metal and other debris blocked the signal, so the generator remained on.

  Somewhat embarrassed, the Empire sold the site to a private contractor and washed its hands of the whole thing.

  The contractor persevered. Even though the ball of rubbish was harder to work, they still made plenty of money from the site. The ball of debris grew steadily until the contractor began to turn away fresh material. At which point another site was set up at the Trojan Lagrange point in Jovian orbit. That went much the same way, expanding until it could take no more. Then another site was built, and another and so on.

  Those other sites did not make the same mistake of installing a gravitic generator to manage the wayward debris. They instead were more choosy about what they accepted and used other methods to martial the expanding clouds of rubbish.

  But that first site, in Mars’ own orbit, remained. The four recycling plants were automated, with a veritable fleet of robotic “dustmen” craft to keep the plants supplied with material from the debris ball which, by then, was some four kilometers across. No new material was allowed in. The owners concentrated on disposing of what was already there. Estimates suggested that the facility had enough material to keep going for thirty years before it needed to worry about re-supply. So it was automated and left to itself.

  *****

  Aboard the Ulysses, Rames and his crew had watched the comings and goings of the fleet of rubbish collector craft with some concern initially, then boredom. Each ship seemed to have been assigned a spot which it pulled rubbish from, so once Veltin had moved the ship away from any of those, they were effectively in no danger of being mistaken for a derelict ship.

  After dropping off Hamilton and his team, they had watched Sol for some time before spotting the recycling plant. The facility accepted no new rubbish.
The only ships that visited it were automated collection vessels, there to collect the recycled materials for shipment to factories and manufacturing facilities. Sensor coverage was light, and mostly focused on craft arriving under normal power.

  After much argument and calculation, Veltin had Skipped the ship right in next to the debris ball. Rames still didn’t know how the man could seemingly perform such calculations in his head, but he did, for the most part and he was damned accurate.

  They emerged from the Skip to within eighteen hundred meters of the edge of the debris, immediately went into low power lurk mode and edged closer to the debris using chemical thrusters.

  There was no alarm. It was a rubbish facility, after all. Other sensors, from beyond the facility, regular swept the area, but since the Ulysses transponder was disabled and the ship on low power, any hits they received were likely thought of as just more rubbish from the facility.

  When Hamilton detonated the EMP warhead, all hell broke loose in the system. Sensor sweeps went into overdrive. Military vessels converged like ants around sugar and comms traffic was phenomenal.

  Nobody seemed to know what was going on, who had set of the EMP or why. So they concentrated on looking as busy as possible, searching for the ship responsible.

  Across the system, tell-tale flashes of tachyon and neutrino bursts marked the Skipping of countless warships heading towards Mars, and also hundreds of civilian vessels fleeing for a safe harbor.

  Mostly that safe harbor seemed to be Earth. The homeworld of man was a natural haven in times of crisis, it seemed. Martian orbit, by contrast, belonged to the military. All civilian shipping was suspended whilst the military ‘investigated’.

  When Hamilton sent the signal for the pickup point from his data pane, they replied with the time it would take them to reach it. Ninety minutes. Twenty five of those minutes were spent waiting whilst Mars rotated sufficiently to allow a direct Skip into the dead-zone created by the EMP blast. The actual Skip would take a further forty minutes, then it was down to Major Harvan and the Ulysses shuttle to head to the surface to pick up the team. Twenty five minutes, they estimated.