by Stel Pavlou
“So what?” said Hex, clearly not understanding the significance.
“So where did you pick me up from? Where did it all go? There has to be a list somewhere—a manifest.”
“Beats me, kid.”
Daniel refused to go any farther.
The rat stopped in his tracks and turned around. Even if you couldn’t speak Mendese, the tone of the rapid-fire clicks would have gotten the point across. “Kid, we’re out on the front range, hauling to and from a thousand different worlds. We pick up from planets, stations, and other ships. We don’t care what it is, where it came from, or where it’s going. We don’t care if it’s even legal. We don’t. Ask. Questions.”
Daniel exploded. “Well, somebody had to know what was on board! They combed through everything pretty thoroughly—”
Hex threw his paws over Daniel’s mouth in a panic. “Will you be quiet?” He waited for Daniel to catch his breath and calm down. “It’s standard procedure. The receiver checks for transit damage, files a claim with their insurer, and we take out the trash. It’s all part of the service.”
Daniel wouldn’t give up. “What about the Truth Seekers? Don’t they have a planet?”
Hex narrowed his eyes. “Wait a minute. . . .” he clicked. “They?”
“I meant we. Don’t we have a planet somewhere?”
Hex did not seem convinced. “You’re not a very good liar.”
Daniel shrugged. “That’s because I’m only used to telling the truth.”
Hex chewed on that thought for a moment. “Huh. Good point. Kid,” he said, “Truth Seekers operate on half the planets in the galaxy. Running into one ain’t going to be hard.”
“Then why have you never seen one?”
“Because most of my adventures happen while I’m hiding.”
“Okay, so where’s the nearest planet where we’ll find one?”
“Questions, questions! Sheesh, kid, I don’t know!”
“I thought you knew everything.”
“I don’t have time to know everything,” said the rat, his light-wire whiskers twitching indignantly. “It’s a very large universe and I’m a very busy rodent. Look at all these wires. They don’t chew through themselves, you know,” he said, before stopping himself. “Hmm,” Hex mused. “I wonder. Wait here,” he said, shooting off down the tunnel.
Daniel was happy to oblige; he had no intention of going anywhere. Resting his head on his arms, he waited patiently while the rat gathered what he needed from a supply pouch and started chewing through a heavy-duty conduit. Pulling out a cable, he gnawed it in half, inserted a T-junction, and ran a line from it all the way back down to Daniel.
Attaching a jack to the end of the line, he said, “If you’re wired up to a socket, that must mean you can be programmed just like I can—”
“I’m not an anatom!”
“You know what I mean.” He held up the finished connector. “The WaKeenee’s navigation system.”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Daniel remarked, edging backward.
Hex wouldn’t take no for answer. Pleased with his ingenuity, he leapt onto Daniel’s head, poking his little steel claws around the tiny opening, and buried the jack into the socket.
“Hey!” Daniel protested, but it was too late. A blue streak of electricity shot out of his head, knocking Hex to the ground.
With his brain vibrating around inside his head, Daniel clutched his skull, holding on tight in case it came bouncing out through his ears. Stars burst across the inside of his eyeballs, each searing pinprick a star system complete with names, orbits, hazards, shipping lanes—
Screaming in abject agony, Daniel ripped the cable from his socket and collapsed.
Hex watched him for the longest time, a motionless heap in the maintenance shaft. He held a paw over his mouth. “Oh no, I think I’ve killed him.” But it was a short-lived execution.
Daniel took a sharp breath, holding his head up, trying to focus on the rat. The overwhelming mosaic of information and emotion took an eternity to process. He held out his hand as though begging it to stop, and when Hex shuffled closer to see what he could do to help, Daniel grabbed him by the throat and snatched him up to his face.
“Never. Do that. Again . . .” he growled.
“I was only trying to help,” croaked Hex.
Daniel threw the anatom back down the shaft, pushing himself up on to unsteady knees. He took a moment to catch his breath.
“Musa Degh,” Daniel said eventually. “All I can see is a planet called Musa Degh.”
Hex’s whiskers lost all their sparkle. “Musa Degh?” he said, perplexed. “That’s impossible. I don’t think that planet even exists anymore.”
25
DOUBLE CROSS ON THE FRONT RANGE
Hex rubbed his furry little neck. “Ah, kid,” he said, apologetically. “I obviously scrambled your brain. Give it time—I’m sure it’ll clear right up in a day or two, maybe a week.”
“What do you mean?” asked Daniel.
Hex tried on a sheepish smile, but it didn’t quite fit his face. “Okay,” he admitted. “You got me. Maybe a month. If you still have problems after that, I’d go see somebody. I’m really sorry. Really.”
Daniel rolled his eyes. “Not that. The planet. How can it not exist?”
“That’s what you’re worried about?”
“Yes.”
“Huh.” With obvious relief, the rat turned around and got going again, signaling Daniel to keep following. “A planet can disappear for all kinds of reasons. Maybe its star went supernova, or something crashed into it. I can’t remember what happened to this one, it was over a hundred years ago. If I remember, I think it got destroyed in the last war.”
“The last war . . . ?” What was it the Overseers were always telling them? Your efforts in the war will be rewarded.
“We’re not still at war?”
“Somebody’s always at war with somebody,” Hex remarked, leading Daniel up into a junction compartment, a noisy hole filled with wires, pipes, and relays.
A handful of maintenance shafts branched off in various directions. Hex quickly set about closing a few of them off.
“You’ll be okay in here for a while,” said the rat, jabbing a tiny paw at the hatch above Daniel’s head. “Just don’t open that. Stay put, and I’ll get you a blanket or something.”
As hideouts go, this one seemed like a pretty safe bet. At least Daniel had room to get up and stretch in. “Thank you,” he said.
Hex shrugged. “Good for a couple days.”
“What about food?”
Hex looked to the heavens, exasperated. “There’s always something.”
Daniel shrugged. “I have to eat. I’m starving.”
“All right! I’ll figure something out.”
The rat climbed into another shaft, but Daniel wasn’t done. “Why is Musa Degh still on the charts, if it was destroyed?” he asked.
Hex glanced over his shoulder. “It’s not.”
“Then why is my brain telling me it’s important? Are there Truth Seekers there, or is it where I got on board—”
“What? No! Kid, I don’t know where you got on board, but if anything of that planet still exists, we’re nowhere near it and never have been. The Embers are over a thousand light-years from here.”
“Then why do I know its name . . . ?”
“You got a short in the socket,” Hex replied, holding out a paw as though he were training a pet. “Now, stay . . . stay.” Satisfied that Daniel wasn’t about to go anywhere, Hex darted off down the shaft.
Daniel sank to the deck, head in his hands; so many questions with no obvious answers. If the relic mines weren’t on Musa Degh, what was he remembering? His home? Was he born there? Not possible; Musa Degh was destroyed a century ago—that’d make Daniel over a hundred years old. Not possible! Besides—
What was that smell?
His stomach growled, saliva washing through his mouth—deep-fried yampa with sl
iced pipiril. Real food. Somewhere in the back of his brain a memory was being dragged out, kicking and screaming. Yampa and pipiril, usually served with some kind of roast thing on a stick that dripped grease down your chin every time you bit into it.
Daniel hadn’t eaten in days; no way was he staying put. He followed his nose. The aroma wafted in through the air vents surrounding the hatch in the ceiling—the very place Hex had warned him not to go. What the heck was up there? Could be a canteen. Could be a private room. There was no way of knowing unless he looked.
He pressed his ear to the metal hatch. He couldn’t hear anyone walking around, but that didn’t mean anything.
Daniel glanced back down the open maintenance shaft. No sign of the rat.
Did he dare risk it? His head told him not to be so stupid, but his head wasn’t in charge right now—his every impulse had been rerouted through his stomach.
He unlocked the hatch, too impatient to let it finish retracting before poking his head out.
There was no food; just a trick of the air duct.
Whoever had just served themselves up a meal could have been at the other end of the ship, for all it mattered.
Daniel had popped his head up in the middle of the landing strip of a massive hangar. At the far end a whole bunch of the WaKeenee’s crew were gathered together, watching a ship gliding in through the hangar doors, passing right over Daniel’s head—
THRUMMMMMMM!
The thick smoke of maneuvering thrusters fired relentlessly down on Daniel, choking off his air and stinging his eyes. It was only at the last possible moment, and through heavy tears, that he noticed the landing gear extending out through the fog, coming straight at him—
He ducked down just in time, the whole deck shuddering as the weighty vessel finally came to rest.
Sucking down clean air from the ducts, Daniel listened to the whine of servo motors extending the boarding ramps, the hiss of pressure equalizing, and the rumble of the vessel’s airlock opening.
He poked his head back up to see the back of a tall figure stepping down onto the flight deck, cloaked in scavenged parts.
A single member of the crew stepped forward to meet him, wearing a long greatcoat fastened up around the neck, with a sidearm holstered at the shoulder.
Daniel recognized his unnaturally calm voice immediately as the one he’d heard when he first woke up in the cargo hold: the captain of the WaKeenee. “You’re late,” he said.
In a dialect of Jarabic that Daniel could barely understand, the visitor replied, “I don’t care. Do you have it?”
The captain of the WaKeenee held out a small device to the visitor, sleek and silver. “Your payment,” he said. “The rest of the ship is yours. Just make it look like a leecher attack.”
“Not a problem,” said the visitor, signaling his ship. “I brought actual leechers.”
All at once, awkward-shaped figures began shambling down the boarding ramps.
“Your crew has ten minutes to abandon ship. I make no guarantee of their safety after that.”
With a satisfied nod, the captain strode away. “Oh, my employer expects all evidence that his cargo was ever aboard this ship to be extinguished.”
Panic broke out among the assembled crew. One of them lunged at their commander. “Captain, what are you doing? This ain’t the plan!”
The visitor launched a projectile at the crewman, a slimy, black parasite with metal teeth rotating from inside a single sucker. Boring into the back of his neck, the crewman struggled against the leecher, but it was a losing battle. The parasite emitted a translucent holographic shell, enveloping its victim.
In mere seconds, life left the crewman’s eyes, slipping from that of a thinking, feeling human into that of a dead automaton, a zombie whose every thought and action were dictated by the parasite. With the transformation complete, the crewman joined the other leechers in attacking his own shipmates.
Daniel was absolutely okay with running away. Scrambling back down inside the junction compartment, he scratched around for the controls to close the hatch—
Where were they?
WHERE WERE THEY?
There!
He reached up to the panel above his head—only to have a fetid hand reach down inside and grab him before he could throw the switch.
The leecher yanked him off his feet.
Daniel kicked and wrestled against its grasp, but the nightmare was only beginning.
The leecher’s face emerged, just inches from his own: a ghostly, translucent one. And the more Daniel looked into its eyes, the more he realized that this face was merely a mask, a holocule stretched over the rotting flesh of a dead victim whose body it used as a vehicle for the attack.
26
LEECHERS!
In the palm of the leecher’s free hand, a glistening, slime-covered parasite slithered toward Daniel’s neck, its razor-sharp teeth whirring away.
Daniel grabbed the leecher’s wrist with everything he had, trying to push it away.
Down below, a muffled tirade of angry clicks and hisses erupted from under a blanket emerging from one of the shafts. It translated roughly as: “I told you, don’t open that hatch!” but Daniel was pretty sure if his Mendese vocabulary had been bigger, it would have been far more colorful.
Hex threw the blanket aside and ran up Daniel’s leg.
“I thought I could smell food!” Daniel explained, barely able to breathe.
“From an air duct? How have you not died from stupidity before now? It could have come from anywhere!” Hex scolded, scrambling over Daniel’s back and perching on his shoulder.
“So I discovered!” Daniel yelped, rapidly losing his struggle with the leecher. “Are you going to help or just sit there?”
Hex shivered, watching the slithering parasite edge closer. “Ugh, I hate these things.” And with that he leapt over onto the leecher’s hand, biting down on the parasite and flinging it away before jumping back to relative safety, using Daniel as a springboard and somersaulting up to the control panel, hitting the switch with a click.
The hatch slammed shut on the leecher’s arm, forcing it to loosen its grip.
Daniel landed in a heap, Hex running circles around him, opening up all the access panels to the shafts. “We have to find somewhere to hide.”
“It’s no use, they’ll hunt us down,” Daniel explained, coughing for air. “We’ve been sold out. Your captain told them not to leave any survivors.”
“I knew he was no good the moment they hired him,” Hex replied, climbing up to survey the tunnel closest to the deck, ducking out of the way of the leecher’s hand.
Shaped like a trench, this shaft ran along the deck, separated from the surface by grates every few paces, flight-deck lights shining down through the mesh. “A front-row seat, but we don’t have a choice. Come on, human.”
Hex didn’t wait around to see if Daniel would follow. Pressing flat to the shadows, the anatom ducked down onto all fours and scurried beneath the lowest pipes, following their length down the access trench.
Daniel tried to keep up, but it was hopeless. With a human body shape, he just couldn’t do the things a rat could do. Hex could push his bones together to squeeze through holes as small as his head—all Daniel could do was get stuck.
Hex tossed an impatient look over his shoulder. “Try going around, genius.”
High above their heads, a wailing siren erupted with an earsplitting screech. Weapons fire shot back and forth across the flight deck, lighting up the smoke rolling in from all sides—
Slam!
A WaKeenee crewman landed on the grate, his clothes ripped and bloodied, a leecher bearing down on him, looking like rotten flesh encased in jelly.
Daniel held his breath, watching in horror as the leecher gripped the man’s head, pressing his face tight against the grille—slapping a parasite on the back of his neck.
Holocules spread rapidly over the victim’s skull, encasing him within moments, choking off his
air until a new face emerged, and a new personality—
Sick to his stomach, Daniel couldn’t watch anymore. He bolted into the darkness in search of Hex.
“What are they doing to those people?” he said.
“Leeching!” Hex replied, yanking a panel off the wall, scratching around inside for a particular conduit. “What does it look like?”
“I don’t understand!” Daniel said.
“They’re Umbrian nomads,” Hex explained, as though that explained anything. Finally, he pulled the correct wire from the conduit and patched into it with his tail. His ears flattened against his head. “Oh no . . .” he said.
“What is it?”
“All commlinks are offline and somebody disabled the distress signal. We’re on our own,” said the rat, disconnecting from the cable and getting right in Daniel’s face. “If you’re just pretending that you’re all screwy in the head, or you still have some secret Truth Seeker trick up your sleeve, now would be the time to use it.”
Daniel didn’t know what to say. He shrugged apologetically. “There has to be a way out of this.”
Hex thought long and hard. “There is if you can keep us both alive long enough to get there,” he said. “But you weren’t doing too well against that leecher—”
“It took me by surprise,” Daniel explained, his jaw set in defiance. “It won’t happen again.”
“I hope not, because I’m just a rat, kid. I’m no good in a fight.”
Daniel figured that was a fair observation. “So where do we need to get to?”
“We’re already here,” Hex explained. “The flight deck has its own set of escape pods. We just need to reach one.”
“Assuming they haven’t disabled those too?”
Hex didn’t answer. He’d obviously been thinking the same thing.
Daniel scooted forward. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.”
Hex held him back. “Don’t be so quick to die, kid. You hear that war out there? Let’s wait it out.”
Easier said than done. When the air wasn’t filled with the din of weapons fire, or the shouts and screams of pitched battle, the WaKeenee shrieked every time her hull was ripped open.