by Trevor Wyatt
* * *
AVERY: And now for the analysis of Ngano and L’blanc. That is Baldwin Ngano of the Solar Times, and syndicated columnist Harry Leblanc. Gentlemen, welcome back.
BALDWIN NGANO: Thank you, Tash.
HARRY L’BLANC: Thanks. Good to be here.
AVERY: So let’s talk about the Maxia Sector elections, Baldwin. Undercover work by Armada Intelligence seems to implicate the Tyreesians in a scheme to influence the election outcome.
NGANO: Well, it’s no secret that they wanted Sheila Simmons to be the winner. But I don’t think anyone expected they’d have the capability to hack into the Consolidated Party’s data network. But now it looks like...they did. It’s going to cause problems for them in the Council.
AVERY: (chuckles) That’s an understatement. Harry?
L’BLANC: It’s certainly given some context to other conflicts we’ve seen them involved in, for sure. But on the one hand—well, look, Tash. Whoever was going to win was going to be presiding over a ruined economy, with half of their population enduring a lowered standard of living after the war. You can see the economic justification for colluding with the Tyreesians. Simmons is known to be fairly outspoken on the subject of the Tyreesians. She’s said any number of times that we ought to bring them more closely under the Union’s auspices so that we can more quickly rebuild.
AVERY: But Terran Union officials don’t want that, do they?
NGANO: No. Nor do a lot of people on Earth and the colonies. We’re seeing a wave of dissent and unrest following the disclosures. And you can’t blame people for that. But you know the saying; ‘Tyreesian politics.’ Their own campaigns at home are so riddled with maneuvers and tricks and twists that it shouldn’t be a surprise that once they tried to tamper with the Maxia Sector election, the results would be almost unreal.
L’BLANC: That’s right, and it underscores, I think, Simmons’ naiveté. We simply can’t trust the Tyreesian Collective. We’ve seen them tampering in the Ascensionist issue on Sonali Prime, to cite only the latest example. I’m sure that next we’ll find they’ve been colluding with the Outer Colonies.
N’GANO: I don’t know about that, but I think it is clear that they’ve been working behind the scenes on Lomagon, fomenting dissent among the Kurta.
L’BLANC: You’re talking about the increased tensions in Kurta space?
N’GANO: I absolutely am, and if the Union doesn’t take steps to prevent it, it’s going to blow up into civil war. I believe we’ll see the Seyshallian Nation involved next.
AVERY: Harry, how likely do you think that the Tyreesian have been looking to manipulate the Kurta?
L’BLANC: Um, not very? (chuckles) The Kurta are a matriarchy, and we know very well how females are treated among the Tyreesians. The Kurta won’t allow themselves to be influenced by males of any species. I know the Collective has a lot of money to throw around, but if they think that’s going to help them, well...(chuckles again)
AVERY: They used human females to bomb the Lomagonian embassy on Irivani Prime.
L’BLANC: That was a one-off. They got lucky. It won’t happen again. I think we should make it clear the conflict between two interstellar empires is at its heart stupid and inglorious, a war that shows us humans, at least, as petty and spiteful.
N’GANO: And that whole thing on Perseus; that mess even roped in a Union intelligence operative.
AVERY: You’re talking about Anika Grayson.
N’GANO: I am, indeed.
AVERY: We’ll get to that in a minute, Harry. First, I want to ask you gentlemen about the disturbing allegations of sexual misconduct by the...
* * *
AVERY: Harry, Anika Grayson was sentenced this week to life in the penal colony on Kalselux. Some people are saying that’s overly harsh. Kaselux is just barely capable of supporting human life, with a frigid mean temperature and nearly three times the gravitational pull of Earth.
N’GANO: (scoffs) Not me. She’s a traitor. The name of ‘Anika Grayson’ is now as synonymous with treachery as Brutus from the Roman assassination of Julius Caesar or Benedict Arnold from the American Revolution. Or even Evan Chambers from the weaponized bubonic plague on San Diego. Even more so, I’d say, because she didn’t sell out her ruler or her country—she sold out her entire species.
L’BLANC: It’s hard to dispute the charges, but yeah—basically, exiling her on Kaselux is a death sentence. The prisoners there are forced to spend their entire lives inside sealed environment suits. They’ll never get out of them, because the things have been surgically melded to their flesh. Layers of skin, layers of metal, layers of organ tissue, layers of metal...they’ve become cyborgs.
I think it’s a lot of trouble and expense to go to just to punish someone when you could imprison them on Mars or even Venus and put them to work in a factory. So yes, I guess I do think Grayson’s punishment is a bit gratuitous.
AVERY: Even given that she allegedly returned some valuable information from her mission?
N’GANO: Tash, that’s hearsay, and I don’t know one legitimate source that confirms it. I think the only thing she did worth a damn was to rescue Jeryl Montgomery from the Tyreesians. Kudos to her for that, but she was working for the Tyreesians when she did it.
I don’t think she did it out of the goodness of her heart, but because she knew that if she didn’t we’d be looking at war again. And no one has the stomach for that now, not after what we had to live through with the Sonali not so long ago.
L’BLANC: Yeah I agree, but a lot depends on what other information comes out about that mission.
AVERY: You think there may be more disclosures, Harry?
L’BLANC: All I’m saying is, be on the lookout.
AVERY: Watch the skies, eh? Well, all right, we’re going to have to leave it there for now. Once again, you’ve been watching the commentary of Harry L’Blanc and Baldwin N’Gano, our regular Thursday commentators. Gentlemen, we’ll see you next week.
N’GANO: Thanks, Tash.
L’BLANC: Thank you.
Jeryl
Viewed from orbit, Kaselux looks like it wants to be left alone. From here, it’s a long way to anywhere.
I sit in the ship’s command center, listening to the murmur of conversation among my crew. None of them wanted this duty. Hell, I don’t want it—but for different reasons.
My nose itches and I rub it. There’s a fine sheen of perspiration on my upper lip, which the gesture removes.
“It’s better than she deserves,” says the navigator, a tall African. He glances at me out of the corner of one red eye. I grimace but say nothing.
Kaselux is just about the most extreme environment in which a human can survive.
The air she breathes will support combustion, so she will be able to cook whatever she manages to glean from the land, but that won’t be much. Cooking will be a waste of time anyway, because all she has to do is to stuff any organic matter she finds on Kaselux’s inhospitable surface into the intake unit of her biosuit, and the suit’s systems will break it down and rearrange its compounds into ones compatible with human life. About as tasty as being on an IV drip, but it will sustain her indefinitely.
The planet has never undergone the evolutionary spasms common to most life-bearing worlds. There’s aquatic life, but nothing much more advanced than the sort of jawless fish that are common in the Silurian period on Earth.
A few species of arthropod-like insects have crawled out of the water. The few plants that have made the transition from the sea to the land hugged the coastline, forming tall, sculpted columns and mounds—stromatolites—comprised of layer after layer of cyanobacteria. The free oxygen in the air is the result of some four billion years of stromatolite survival.
Kaselux’s system is old, and located past the Rim, in what can almost be called intergalactic space. A red dwarf lights its surface with a wan light. Stars are visible in the Mars-like planet’s thin air even during the day. It is one of the most depressing worlds I have ever
seen.
Grayson will spend the rest of her life here encased in a biosuit that will keep her alive and report on her whereabouts as she wanders the desolate world.
I swivel my seat around and stand. It’s time. Without a word to any of my crew, I leave the command center and head down to the sickbay.
Anika, disavowed by the TAIOC, has been shamed as a traitor and terrorist. In view of her having saved my life, I’ve volunteered to transport her to Kaselux personally, piloting a special small cruiser with a crew of only three others.
I pause outside the sickbay. I sigh. Condemned to endless solitude and silence, never to feel another human touch for the rest of her life...never to taste food, make love, smell a flower, pet a cat...never to feel the air on her skin...because she no longer has skin, simply a network of plastic sensors with a few patches of tissue here and there.
I shudder. It’s beyond imagining.
And her fellow exiles? The lowest of the low, the most depraved and unrepentant criminals in the galaxy, all, like her, sealed into biosuits and cast into Purgatory. Perhaps a dozen others overall, scattered across the face of Kaselux, isolated one from the other by electronic surveillance and proximity webs that will prevent them from even seeing each other, let alone conversing and perhaps planning an escape attempt.
Not that escape is possible from this place—unless it’s an escape into madness.
I stare glumly at the biosuit that’s going to house her. It’s bulky, insectile, the matte finish of its robotic carapace reflecting only diffuse highlights from the overheads. Staring blue-lensed eyes gaze unseeingly upward, and the suit’s “mandibles” are open.
The suit’s cranium is bare metal. Within it, her brain will endlessly review the crimes that have led her here.
. The door to the sickbay slides open.
“She will awaken in five minutes sir,” says the nearest bot. A medical AI is overseeing the process. I nod.
“Let’s get her to the shuttle,” I say quietly, not wishing to disturb the funereal atmosphere.
“At once.”
The medbot makes no move, but the lifters on the bed turned to green from amber and the bed slowly rolls out of Ops. I walk alongside it to the shuttle bay—barely more than a basement-sized space fully taken up by the small shuttle that will transport her down to the surface.
And a bloody good thing, I think, because if the teleportation tech she brought back was in general use the way it’ll be in about a year and a half, there’d be no way I could pull this off.
I watch the medical sensors on the bed reporting her gradual return to consciousness. That’s expected. There is, however, no way to know what her reaction will be when she finds out what’s going to be done to her. From what I‘ve heard, some people accepted it...over time.
Some don’t.
Unseen by the videos monitoring my progress with her unconscious form, I blink twice. Before leaving New Washington, I have been injected with a modified series of nanites that are capable of performing only one task. As soon as they accomplish this task, they break down into simple chemical compounds and will be flushed out of my body through my urinary tract.
The nanites now broadcast a coded message to the dormant receptors of Grayson’s own nanite enhancements. She will be awake now, and listening to a prerecorded file. All she has to do now is to follow instructions. I tense.
Her arm shoot out and grasps mine.
“Do what I say,” A voice says, “Or I’ll rip your arm off, see if I don’t.”
I know her nanites are back and she’s strong enough to do it.
“Okay, okay,” I say. “Calm down, Anika. I’m not going to—ouch!—do anything stupid. But you’re not getting out of this, you know.”
“We’ll see.”
We’re at the shuttle bay now, and I know that everyone on the ship can see I’m being held hostage. Suddenly she moves, releasing my arm and rising from the bed so quickly that she’s almost a blur.
The sickbay AI deactivated her nanites after we picked her up in space. But a few discreet conversations with Flynn got me what I needed to reactivate them.
“The medbots...they should have deactivated your nanites,” I say through clenched teeth. I hope it fools the Board of Inquiry when they review the security footage.
“Not enough. I still got them. Enough for me to take this chance.” She activates the shuttle’s airlock.
“It won’t work.” I feel perspiration break out on my forehead. “You’ve got nowhere to go, Anika.”
I watch her as she climbs into the shuttle and closes the hatch.
The shuttle’s speaker grates out a laugh. “I have a fucking spaceship right in front of me, Captain. With air, food and water. And again, my nanites have hacked your ship’s computers. You’ll find your weapons and propulsion systems are down for half an hour, long enough for me to get out of range.”
“Someone’s head will roll for this.”
“Maybe; but not mine, and probably not yours,” she replies.
“You better get out of the bay before the blast cooks you,” she says, and I hear a note of malicious cheer in her filtered voice.
I try one last warning.
“There’s nowhere to go except Kaselux! What’s the point? You were going there anyway.”
“Thanks for the tip.”
The airlock clangs shut and I hear the deep cough of the shuttle’s thrusters as they come online with their preliminary burn. I know that note; the mains will fire in less than ten seconds and she isn’t going to bother opening the bay’s outer doors. If I don’t want to be sucked out into space, I have to move.
And move I do, with moments to spare. The shuttle bay’s bulkhead clangs shut behind me as I dive through it, cutting of the roar of the mains.
I sag against the far wall of the corridor outside the bay. That was close. I get to my feet and am dusting myself off when the security detail burst into the corridor, weapons at the ready.
Shaking my head at them, I say, ruefully, “She’s gone. I want to know how this happened. I want to know who was responsible for programming those medbots. I want this followed right back to the manufacturer if need be!”
One of the guards is chewing his lips. He doesn’t look the least bit happy.
“What?” I snarl at him.
“There...” The man’s voice breaks. He clears his throat and tries again.
“A corvette—most likely space pirate,” he says. “Must’ve been cloaked somehow. Popped up right on the screens just now, and she slid into its bay, as slick as dammit.”
“She what? Holy jumping Judas!”
It’s all I can do not to burst out with a cheer. I can barely believe it. With a fake scowl pasted to my face I stalk back to my quarters, where I pour myself a shot of tequila and toast her successful getaway.
Sometimes things work out.
Tales From The Sonali War Vol. 1
By Trevor Wyatt
Copyright 2018 by Pax Aeterna Press
All rights reserved
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons is entirely coincidental. This work intended for adults only.
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The Ribhus Incident
Marcus
“Doctor Carson.”
“What?” Marcus’s head snapped up to glare at his assistant, who shoved a bag in his face. From the tone, he guessed Trevor had been trying to get his attention for a while, but he was too intent on the data readings on the tablet.
“Dinner.”
Marcus took the bag, which reeked of grease, and smiled in apology, “Sorry, Trev. I just can’t seem to make heads or tails of these readings.”
“Another all-nighter?”
“I’m afraid so. You c
an go. Enjoy your rest.”
Trevor nodded and turned to go. Before taking that first step out of the office, he hung his head and turned back, “I’ll call your wife,” he sighed and plodded to the office next door, “Eat your dinner,” he called before picking up the phone.
Trevor was the best assistant Marcus ever had. As the reluctant head of Weapons R&D of Ribhus Industries, he was thrilled to have someone willing to take care of the logistics so he could focus on the science.
Trevor also made sure that he always ate. He grinned and dug a fat sandwich out of the bag. Trevor found a reference to an old recipe and improvised the ingredients that could no longer be found. He still called it “cheesesteak” although there was no meat nor cheese in it, and Marcus had the suspicion he made the pocket bread from scratch. It was his favorite, and Trevor brought it at least twice a week. Marcus absently took a bite while thumbing through the readouts when the screen froze.
That could only mean one thing. His gut rumbled in protest when he put the sandwich down and waited. Giant neon orange letters took up the entire screen.
Alert! Section 23 blinked in and out, filling him with dread as he slipped the tablet in his lab coat pocket and ran.
“Trevor!” He yelled as he slid the keycard in the lock. Trevor was already two inches behind, waiting patiently for the door. The light turned green and Marcus jerked it open, speeding down the hall.
Section 23, the reason Dr. Marcus Carson had written a letter of resignation that he was too chicken to hand over to Corporate. With their classified military contracts, he would disappear. Or worse, his wife would vanish. He knew he should have some fanatic patriotism for the Terran Union, but he had seen too much in the two short years since the war began. He had built too much at the behest of the military and Corporate, and held no illusions of innocence. Section 23 was the worst. Taking a deep breath, he slid the keycard down and punched the extra security code into the number pad. He pulled the door open and two elderly security guards blocked the way, staring at him with expressionless faces. They parted to make a path for the two then closed back in. It was almost laughable to think they could protect anything, but the last person to mistake their ages for weakness was still in the infirmary. These were hardened military men, and the toughest employees in the lab. If they were here, shit just hit the fan.