The Human Chronicles Saga : Boxset #2 (The Human Chronicles Saga Boxsets)

by T. R. Harris

  “It would not be wise to challenge Enforcers, foreigner.” One of the other rat-cops actually growled at him.

  “Like I said, I wasn’t challenging you. Now why don’t we just go ahead and get this whole misunderstanding settled. I ran a small electrical charge through my ship to keep people—Vicoreans—from getting too curious. Unfortunately, three of them had to learn the hard way, and then another three of their buddies attacked me as I was entering my ship. And then another one in the crowd went crazy and pulled a weapon on me. I wasn’t looking for a fight, but they got one anyway as I defended myself. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Is it then your defense that you harmed six Vicoreans and threaten another with your weapon out of self-preservation? And yet there the six victims, plus several others, who say it was you who initiated the confrontation.” The lead officer hesitated as he scanned Adam up and down. “I find it hard to believe that you could have bested six Vicoreans, without you having initiated the attack, and by unseemly methods.”

  “You think I sucker-punched them?” Adam was too drunk not to grin at the formal speech of the alien, although this time he kept his teeth covered.

  “I do not understand the term, yet I believe you struck first, and unexpectedly.”

  “That’s the definition of a sucker-punch, dude. But it didn’t happen like that. They attacked me first.”

  “And yet you still stand, while the others do not. How do you explain that?”

  “Lucky, I guess.”

  The native police officer had had enough of Adam’s wise-cracking answers. “I will now be placing you into confinement and confiscating your vessel. There are too many inconsistencies with your testimony, against that from so many more-respected witnesses. I tend to favor their version of events over yours.”

  Adam pursed his lips and shook his head slightly. “I was afraid you were going to say that. So now I supposed you’re going to put me in restraints?”

  “That is correct, and I implore you not to resist. You may have bested three other Vicoreans in a physical confrontation, yet they were not as skilled at combat techniques as are we.”

  “Oh, I’m not going to resist,” Adam said. “In fact, here, lock me up.” He extended both his arms and held his wrists together out in front of him.

  One of the other officers stepped forward, ready with a pair of metal handcuffs to secure around Adam’s wrists.

  “Oh, I see I have interrupted a serious event!”

  The Nurick’s unexpected voice caused all the officers in the room to turn their heads towards the entrance to the bridge. “Oh, hey, Nurick,” Adam said. “You come for your money? Okay, I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  The Enforcer with the handcuffs pulled his attention back to Adam just as the Human snatched the cuffs from him—and in a blur—snapped them onto the wrists of the officer. “Oops,” Adam said. “That isn’t how it works, right?”

  All the Vicoreans were shocked into inaction and stayed that way long enough for Adam to sweep in between them and pull their primitive flash weapons from their holsters. He stood back now holding the guns, two in each hand. “Wow, how did these get here?”

  “What you have just done is entirely inappropriate,” said the lead officer. “You indicated you would not resist.”

  “This isn’t resistance,” Adam said. He then let three of the weapons fall to the floor while retaining the fourth in his grip. He stepped up to the officer and planted the MK against the tall rodent’s chest. “But this is,” he said, lowering his voice until it was almost a growl of his own. But then he laughed again. “I’m sorry, but you guys look so funny that it’s hard to act like Clint Eastwood with a bunch to talking rats.”

  “Your attitude, alien, will get you in much trouble if you persist any further.”

  He motioned with the gun toward the door to the bridge. “Yeah, I hear that a lot. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ll ask you to leave my fine ship and resume your normal activities.”

  With grunts and groans, the four officers soon found themselves outside the ship, disarmed and humiliated. Adam secured the hatch with a command through his ATD, while at the same time activating the gravity generators. He would use chemical thrust to lift out of the spaceport, yet a mile or so up, he’d initiate a shallow gravity-well and streak off toward space.

  He slipped into the pilot seat, where through the viewport he could see the four Vicoreans police officers running for their transport. They jumped in and barely made it to safe range by the time Adam sent a massive cloud of hot chemical exhaust through the lifting tubes. The Pegasus lifted straight off the ground, until Adam aimed the ship at a sixty degree angle toward the stars.

  Adam was pressed back in his seat from the rapid acceleration, but this was soon counteracted when he initiated the gravity-well, along with the internal compensators. Soon the light of the Vicorean atmosphere gave way to the clear blackness of space, where the few nearby stars ceased to sparkle and instead blazed bright and steady; yet his view was dominated by the white glow that spread across half the vast expanse of space before him.

  It was the globular cluster known on Earth as the Large Magellanic Cloud, yet by the name of Tanic by the natives here. Being this close, the cluster dominated his view, and once clear of the gravity of Vicor, Adam engaged four of his focusing rings with the most power in reserve, deepening the well.

  Within minutes he was beyond the two moons of Vicor and racing toward the outer regions of the Vicorean star’s planetary disk and toward the brilliant white cluster of stars ahead.

  The system was full of space traffic, including, Adam was sure, a few police vessels on station. From the information Kroekus had provided, the Vicoreans didn’t maintain a military force—very few of the races within the Cloud did. Instead, they substituted any unified galaxy-wide governmental entity with dozens, if not hundreds, of small affiliations called Clans. These coalitions formed as way of fostering trade among worlds more than from any shared philosophy or dominant military force. Adam was sure that would change with time as the races interacted with each other more. Yet according to Kroekus, the Cloud—Tanic—had only had faster-than-light travel for five hundred years or so, having acquired it from the first intrepid voyagers to the galaxy. This was only a short time before Kroekus’s ancestors made contact, and from then on the technology of the Milky Way was available—for a price.

  Yet because of the vast distance between the galaxies, the scientists and engineers of the Cloud merely reverse-engineered the items Kroekus and his family sold them, rather than wait decades to receive them in bulk from the Milky Way.

  Kroekus’s powerful ancestors—from the planet Silea—had dominated the early contact with the Cloud, and over time the galaxy where the Sileans came from became known as the Silean Galaxy, rather than just the name of the planet where the race originated. To Adam, it was just one more layer of confusion on top of everything else.

  Adam got his first taste of this knock-off Milky Way technology when he arrived on the planet Vicor—his first stop on the outskirts of the Cloud after seven long months in space. It was here that he discovered his Formilian Artificial Telepathy Device—his ATD—was just a little out of sync with the computer processors built here. Based on the ubiquitous Formilian design that was so prevalent throughout the Milky Way, Adam found that even though he was able to detect the presence of these processors, he was unable to sync up and gain access to them. He was sure it was simply a matter of making a few minor adjustments to his device to correct this flaw, but he had neither the means nor the expertise to make these adjustments.

  So to his disappointment and frustration, his ATD was essentially useless in the Cloud—except as a way to make sparkling energy balls out of the free electrons present in the atmosphere, to the delight of alien children everywhere.

  However, Adam could still control all the systems aboard the Pegasus with his mind since the ship had been built by Kroekus at a time when he and Adam were still friends.
So without any physical effort, he linked with the ship’s main computer and scanned the surrounding space, looking for any signs of pursuit. It didn’t take long for his scan to produce results; two groups, one from the planet and another at an oblique angle to his path, originating in the outer reaches of the star system. He changed course, angling away from the nearest ships.

  He also picked up a series of urgent communications, each demanding his immediate return to Vicor and surrender. He ignored them all.

  After a few quick calculations on the nav computer, he found that with his current energy output he could barely maintain his lead over his pursers. This was a problem, since it meant he wouldn’t have time to shut down and install the new power-modules, not with the Vicoreans right on his tail.

  And then a horrible thought crossed his mind: Had the new modules even made it aboard the Pegasus before he bolted off the planet?

  The thought sobered him up rather quickly.

  Adam left the bridge in a panic and raced aft toward the cargo hold. He knew from his ATD that the rear bay doors were closed and had been since before lift-off. Hopefully this meant the modules were secure in the hold, and that was when Nurick had come looking for payment.

  Speaking of Nurick, I wonder what happened to him? Adam hadn’t seen him in the spaceport during lift off, and he hadn’t stuck around on the bridge long enough to collect his gold while Adam had his little run-in with local law enforcement. He sincerely hoped the alien hadn’t been caught up in the fire from his lifting engines. The tall rat was obnoxious and rude, but he was beginning to grow on him.

  Adam pulled open the pressure door between the main section of the Pegasus and the cargo hold and immediately breathed a sigh of relief when he saw the sixteen power-mod crates all neatly stacked and anchored to the deck with tie-downs. They were all there.

  As was his gold.

  Adam had to smile. He had sixteen brand new hybrid power-modules onboard and he hadn’t spent a dime for any of them. Of course, in reality he knew they’d been stolen; however, that wasn’t his original intent. He shrugged. Just add that to my rap sheet—along with assault, reckless endangerment, resisting arrest and humiliation of local law enforcement officers—if that’s even against the law. Oh, well, it’s a pretty good bet I won’t be coming back to Vicor anytime soon….

  He headed back to the bridge—and that’s when he heard the noise.

  He stopped in his tracks and Listened for the sound again over the constant hum of the gravity generators. Luckily, Adam was so accustomed their omnipresent sound that he could clearly hear the unfamiliar, low-pitched groan again over that of the generators. It was coming from the starboard-side cargo hold—the room where he kept his gold!

  Adam activated the sliding door to the room with his ATD and jumped inside. He was unarmed, yet he didn’t care. This was his gold, and he would do anything to protect it.

  To his somewhat conflicted surprise, Adam was relieved to find a very scared-looking Nurick Nur inside the cargo hold. The alien was slumped over and panting heavily—while also holding a flash weapon leveled at Adam’s chest.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Adam shouted. Even though he was unarmed, he wasn’t worried while confronting the energy merchant—which may have just been the alcohol talking.

  “Came aft…after your confront…with Enforcers,” Nurick panted. “Payment unlikely. Came…for collection.”

  “And then the ship took off,” said Adam.

  “Yes…and now…gravity! How you survive?” Nurick gasped for air, appearing on the verge of collapse.

  “I’ll adjust it in a moment—”

  “Must…return me…to Vicor,” Nurick continued, each breath forced from him with incredible effort. “Do so…I not lodge…complaint.”

  “Unfortunately, I can’t go back to Vicor. Your buddies with the white sashes are fast on my tail, and it’s the least I can do just to maintain the current spread between us.”

  With Nurick nearly about to pass out, Adam calmly stepped forward and took the bolt launcher from his hand. The Vicorean offered no resistance.

  “Not go…wherever you go.”

  “That I can’t argue with,” Adam said, “but now is not the time for me to do anything about it. Once they stop following, I’ll drop you off at some nearby planet and let you get back to Vicor as best you can. I’ll still pay for the modules, so you’ll have plenty of money to get back to your home.”

  Using his ATD, Adam accessed the ship’s internal gravity controls and backed off on the well-intensity some. He had had it set at twenty-five percent over Earth-normal for months now as he sought to gain even more strength and muscle mass during the long journey. He had no idea what he’d come up against in the LMC, so he reasoned being even a little more of a superman couldn’t hurt.

  It also meant that it was easily twice that of Vicor’s.

  Relief was immediately visible on Nurick’s long face, even though Adam detected the unasked question as to how the gravity had been adjusted without Adam touching a control. Beyond that, it was obvious the Vicorean had more pressing issues on his mind than the gravity aboard the Pegasus.

  “Do you not realize where you are, foreigner?” he asked after catching his breath. “There are no star systems nearby with civilized planets, not for another seven hundred to a thousand light-years. That is what makes Vicor so vital to travelers between the galaxies. If there were other inhabited planets, then we would not dominate the power-mod market as we do.”

  “A thousand light-years, you’ve got to be kidding? There are no other worlds where I could drop you off?”

  “None close and civilized.”

  Adam fell back against the metal bulkhead of the cargo hold. “This is just great. What the hell am I supposed to do with you until then? I wasn’t planning on having company.”

  “Company? But we are not in a business relationship, Adam Cain, at least not beyond the purchase of the modules.”

  “In this context, company means to have a guest onboard.”

  “Oh.”

  “Still, I don’t know what to do with you?”

  “If you had not accosted the Enforcers then you would not be in this predicament. Now you have little choice…and apparently neither do I. So I will have to accompany you until a suitable drop-off planet can be located. I can think of four, yet they are very far away. Where is your final destination?”

  “It’s a world called Anicett—”

  “Anicett! That is halfway through Tanic, clearly twelve thousand light-years from here. It is clear I cannot accompany you for all that time and distance. It would take nearly four months to reach the planet from here.”

  “Not in this ship,” Adam stated, “but I don’t expect to have you around that long, either. We’ll shoot for one of the other four planets you mentioned.”

  “Karlis is about seven hundred light-years from Vicor. By conventional means, that is a journey of eight days or so.”

  “Then we can make it in about a day—once I’m able to get the full array installed and online.”

  Nurick was stunned. “How can that be?”

  “It’s the same technology that got me all the way here from the Milky Way—I mean the Silean Galaxy—in only seven months. I know the time conversion, so that’s an accurate estimate.”

  “Then the complete journey between galaxies would take only nine months in total?”

  “That’s right.”

  Nurick sat down on the pile of gold ingots and hung his head.

  “What’s wrong?” Adam asked.

  It took Nurick several moments to formulate his thoughts, and when he looked up at Adam again there was sadness painted on his rat-like face. “It means your kind—as well as many others from Silea—will soon be making the journey. They will come with new technologies and new ways of conducting commerce. Creatures from Silea will invade Tanic, both with their capital ways, as well as militarily—that is evitable. Vicor will soon be bypassed along the
trade routes, and the Tanic Galaxy will itself become nothing but a colony of our much larger galactic neighbor.”

  Adam watched the dejected alien for several moments before replying. “Unfortunately, Nurick, I can’t argue with any of that. I know the motivations and priorities of the people from my home galaxy better than you, and you’re right. But my mission here is not to initiate the takeover, but rather to delay it some.”

  Nurick looked hard at Adam. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that there’s an even more immediate and deadly threat to life in Tanic than what you mentioned, and I’m here to stop it.”

  “And what threat is this?”

  Adam attempted a weak smile, not sure how Nurick would take it. “It’s a hundred more creatures just like me who are planning to take over your galaxy and by any means necessary.”

  Nurick nodded. “I have seen what you are capable of doing.”

  “Now imagine me a hundred times worse, and with the resources of Silea’s most-powerful person supporting them.”

  “That is a truly horrifying thought; I realize now the context of your statement. And yet you say you are here to stop this threat? How can one being do such a thing, especially when you say this threat is from others of your species?”

  Adam grinned, a sour expression with little conviction. “That, my friend, is still a mystery.”

  The pair left the storage hold and headed to the bridge, where Adam slipped into the pilot seat and called up a general navigational readout of the local region. Kroekus had reluctantly provided him with what star charts he had prior to his incarceration, yet already Adam had noticed huge gaps in the accuracy of the data.

  “Where is this planet Karlis?”

  Nurick leaned in closer to the screen. “I do not see it, yet it should be in the Lismic Sector…here.” He pointed a long finger at the upper right hand corner of the screen.

  “Okay, we’ll head over that way, but I really have to get the power-mods linked to the focusing rings before we’ll be able to shake the cops.”