by B. V. Larson
Captain Lael stepped into the room and saw the pile of junk I’d thrown on the floor. It was just a diversion, but she fell for it.
Any magician will tell you the real magic behind any ‘trick’ is to get the mark’s eye to watch something that doesn’t matter while you do your worst to deceive them. In this case, she was left thinking for a fraction of a second that I’d somehow turned into silky pillows and sheets—or perhaps that I’d buried myself under them.
Whatever she thought, she stepped into the chambers with her attention riveted on the distraction.
I moved, and I moved fast. My hand shot out, grabbing her wrist. I plucked the wand-like device out of her slender hand and took it from her.
The machine-looking guards behind her were not amused. They surged into the doorway after me. Their arms were upraised, and I had no doubt the black, muzzle-like tubes they were lifting in my direction were deadly.
Then suddenly, they all tumbled onto their faces and shivered there. I’d activated the neural paralyzing effect, exactly as I’d seen her do earlier.
Grabbing her wand had been a big gamble, but it had paid off. I would never have tried it if I’d had a better move—but there hadn’t been time to come up with anything better.
I shuddered to think what might have happened if the paralyzer had affected me and not them. Or, if the body armor had rendered the troops immune.
None of these things had been the case, and I knew I’d lucked out.
The captain had been paralyzed along with her troops. I took a moment to grin and squat next to her, placing myself within her field of vision. Her beautiful eyes, wide-open and motionless, saw me but were unable to acknowledge it.
“See?” I told her. “Weapons are unfair in any duel.”
I stood up and reached out with my sym again. I held the wand tightly in both hands, hoping it would help somehow.
It did. I could see more now, I could move through the ship more quickly. It seemed I no longer needed to rely on my sym for any kind of security hack. Apparently, I had unfettered access to everything.
As if flipping through pages, I reviewed the decks. Everywhere there was a security camera, I could see through it. There was an overload of information, and I ordered my sym to collate it all, to gather it into a single unified interface. It did this quickly, as that was what it had been designed for.
When I found the deck I was on, I saw myself standing over the fallen forms. My eyes were closed, yet it felt as if I were outside my body, looking down at myself. This was virtual reality at its finest.
But as I looked around the deck, reaching out farther down the local passages, I became alarmed.
My actions hadn’t gone unnoticed. A veritable army of troops were coming now, clanking in teams of six from both directions toward the passage outside. I saw unarmored officers among them as well. The unarmored officers were women, and they guided their armored males in my direction.
They paused at the far ends of the passage outside. The officers touched their troops with wands, making their armored suits glimmer with new fields. Could it be they were making them immune to the neural paralyzer? I couldn’t think of a better explanation.
My eyes snapped open. Breathing hard, I dragged the captain’s limp form into the chamber, and rudely rolled and kicked the armored troops out. They were quite heavy in their metal suits. After a moment, the door snapped back into place.
Picking up the captain again, I found she was shockingly light. She couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. That was extremely light given her height. Maybe her bones were thin—I tried to be careful with her.
Laying her down on the pile of pillows, I stood beside her and turned on the force cube again. It closed around us, locking us in. All over the ship, the force-walls in security systems glowed in place once more.
This time there was a difference. Instead of keeping the inhabitants within and shocking them if they touched the walls, the security barriers were set to operate in reverse. They were now kept things out, rather than keeping them in.
Doing this was simplicity itself, as it turned out. All I had to do was the equivalent of changing an option in a database field. The “type” of field was changed from security, to defensive.
The door opened again a moment later, and a squad of angry, robot-looking troops marched in. I could see their long-chinned faces through their faceplates, sallow and snarling, as they rushed to my force-cube.
I couldn’t suppress my grin as they reached for my protective walls and banged on them in unison.
When the captain had tapped on my cube before, it had sickened me. It was their way of tormenting prisoners. I guess the captain would have experienced the pain too, if she’d been fully in charge of her senses.
But that wasn’t what happened. Instead, because the field had been reversed, the troopers shocked themselves. They recoiled with alarm and surprise.
Two of them fell on the floor outright, their own fields flickering. Maybe they’d shorted out their suits.
Three more were left reeling and fell onto the deck. They scrambled weakly, unable to completely control their limbs. These men had not touched the force-walls directly but had been stunned by the rippling effects.
The last guy in the back wisely marched back out of the chamber to where the officers waited, scolding their troops. I laughed at him quietly, and I closed my eyes again.
I didn’t have much time for my next trick, but I knew I had to make it a big one. Sooner or later someone was going to figure out how to stop me from hacking their ship.
This time, I sent my consciousness down to engineering and examined the engines.
I think, in the end, someone down there knew what I was up to. They tried to shut down the core. But doing such a thing takes time. You have to do it right, or the whole vessel will explode.
Using all the tricks I had, I ordered my sym to open a rift in front of the ship. That part took time as well. Several minutes of thrumming followed as the generators built up a charge.
Without their captain, and in general disarray, the ship’s crew seemed to forget about me. They were no longer mounting an attack on their captain’s quarters. This was a mistake, as it gave me more time to work mischief.
The rift appeared directly in front of the ship. I froze the helm controls so that the frantic bridge crew couldn’t divert our course.
The entire ship’s complement watched on in horror as we sailed into the rift and vanished.
The scary thing was that I had no idea where this rift might take us. I hadn’t bothered to figure that part out. I hadn’t had the time.
And I’d bet a million bucks no one else aboard knew where we were going, either.
=40=
They began hacking back the control systems at about the same time Captain Lael came out of her paralysis.
It was a lot to handle at once. I had to pretty much sit on the captain—which she didn’t appreciate at all.
“Get off me, you worthless ape!” she snarled, writhing around weakly.
“Just a second, your people are giving me problems.”
My sym had gained control of the Imperial interface due to a heavy reliance on certain top-level security systems. They were built in to bypass everything else, to allow the top officers easy access to whatever they needed to do.
The problem for them seemed to be that they hadn’t considered a hacking attempt, even a simple one. Apparently, Imperials were a pretty docile, law-abiding group. These people did what they were told and didn’t go up against each other much if I had to guess.
My sym had been developed by people from a very different, chaotic culture. We weren’t good at lining up, me and my wild-eyed Rebel brethren, but we knew how to break things.
As my sym worked to regain control of the ship, I took a moment to reflect upon the current situation. I couldn’t help but see this as an example of the advantages afforded to those living among varied cultures and backgrounds. A ship that came from a
planet full of thieves, for example, was bound to have solidly built locks on everything, while a ship from a world without crime would have few, if any.
When my sym came through again, I was disappointed that I didn’t have complete control any more. I couldn’t even see where we were in space. All I could do was control some basic things like life-support, force-walls and various chemical processing systems.
Deciding to give the Imperials as much trouble as I could, I turned off the air then took a look at the chemical systems. That rabbit-hole led me down to my crew, who had escaped in the confusion—most importantly, they’d gotten past the force-walls that had kept them in the algae tanks. Using the security cameras and transmitting to their syms, I finally got their attention.
“Hey…” I said with some excitement. “Gwen, can you hear me?”
“Leo?” she asked, looking around wildly at the walls. She spotted a camera stick tracking her and stepped up to it. “Are you behind all this chaos?”
“Naturally. Listen, you need to find an oxygen supply. I cut off the ship-wide distribution matrix.”
“How in the hell—?”
“No time to explain, but you might be able to do the same thing with your own sym if you focus hard enough. Reach out with it to the chemical processing facilities. They’re all located in your area. See if you can use them to your advantage.”
“All right… I’ll try.”
She was a good hacker, I knew that. She’d demonstrated her powers several times in the past. But she wasn’t as used to using her sym in that way as I was. It was going to be a challenge.
I had no more time for Gwen. In fact, I’d just felt a powerful pinch in my hindquarters.
Opening my eyes, I found Captain Lael was trying to take a bite out of me. I restrained her and talked to her seriously.
“Tell your crew to stand down,” I said, “or I’ll kill everyone aboard.”
“You couldn’t—”
“I killed the force-walls, didn’t I? I can kill the ones containing the reactor core just as easily.”
Her wide eyes widened further. “You wouldn’t. The ship would be destroyed.”
My face presented her with my best grin. “Exactly. I’ve already tried to take you out twice, you know that. And I don’t care if I die as long as I achieve my goals—you know that, too.”
She looked at me in growing alarm. I could tell she was paranoid to begin with, and after the events of today, I’d done nothing to reassure her.
“I’ll tell them,” she said, “but they may not listen. I’m your captive, therefore my orders are nullified.”
“You’d better sound convincing then.”
I let her sit up, and when she reached for her wand, I moved it out of her reach. I activated it myself and allowed her to speak into it.
“This is Captain Lael. The situation is under control, the barbarians have surrendered. The Empire has prevailed, as it must.”
I waved my hand at her, suggesting she speed it up. She kept talking while I listened with gritted teeth.
“Security techs are ordered to return all passcodes to their original state for the convenience of the officers. Everyone else should focus on damage control. That is all.”
I killed the transmitter. We looked at one another, and I smiled thoughtfully.
“You really do want to live, don’t you?” I asked her. “I should have realized that when I sensed your paranoia. Who would be paranoid if they didn’t value their own lives very highly?”
“It’s a natural instinct,” she said. “There’s nothing in this part of the galaxy worth my life.”
I nodded. To her, this wasn’t a war at all. This was a hunt. An exercise designed to bring pleasure and training opportunities to her kind. Who went hunting willing to die to shoot the deer?
Not Captain Lael, anyway. She had no intention of sacrificing her life or her ship for honor, or anything else.
That simple fact gave the Rebels an advantage. This was real to us. We were losing planets, whole civilizations. If we could only get our act together, we might win this war simply because we cared more about the final outcome than the Imperials did.
Morale. I’d learned back in my officer training days in the Navy that battles and even wars were often won before they started. If one side didn’t really want to fight, they often lost by default. That was how so many nations had lost their colonies to rebellions in the past—they just didn’t have the stomach to lose all that blood and treasure over some distant outpost.
“Okay,” I said as I felt my sym regain control over the ship’s systems, one after another. I could hardly believe she was allowing it, but then, I was effectively holding a gun to her head and that of everyone aboard.
“Let me go now,” she said.
“No… I don’t think so. You’ll stay here as my hostage and go-between. I want to take this ship back to Rebel territory.”
“What?!” she demanded in shock. “I’ll never allow that! You’re a mad creature and—”
That was all she said before she took a “nap.” I’d activated the neural paralyzer again. She slumped stiffly onto the pillows that surrounded us.
Knowing I had a few minutes of peace during which to concentrate, I took a look around.
We were inside some kind of big nebula. That was interesting all by itself. A gassy cloud of dust and vapor surrounded the ship, and it made our shield sparkle with thousands of tiny impacts.
Sand-grain sized particles flared into energy as the ship ran into them. Now and then, a sheet seemed to ripple across the vessel, lighting it up like the Fourth of July.
There were stars nearby too. Big, blue-white giants. By “near” I’m talking about half a lightyear or so, but still, at this distance they were lovely to behold.
Recalling what little I remembered from my only college class in astronomy, I figured out this was what they called a “stellar nursery.” A place where young stars grew from accumulated dust and were flung to become independent burning chunks of matter in the heavens.
I tried to get my bearings, but I had difficulty. I couldn’t see the way home.
“Mia?” I called, trying to reach out to her again.
“Here, Chief.”
“How are things with you?”
She gave me a mean giggle. That surprised me, as she wasn’t much for laughter even when someone told an excellent joke.
“Are you drunk or something?” I asked in concern. “Is the oxygen running out already?”
“No,” she said. “Look here—follow my sym.”
I piggybacked my sym onto hers, and I let her lead the way. We raced through cameras and conduits until I saw the algae tanks again.
Only this time, the crawling, green-black mess in the tanks wasn’t contained in the tanks. It was sliding around the passages, attacking people. Several were mired in it, and even the armored guys were having trouble.
“Those monsters fed us to that slime,” she said. “I hope they get their skins peeled off!”
“Uh… that’s great,” I said, wondering if her own sym was influencing her emotions less than optimally. “We need to do some navigating. I can jump the ship again, but I don’t have any coordinates to target.”
My vision retreated to her location, and she shrugged. “Try finding a beacon star—like Rigel. That’s an easy one.”
Of course. I was an idiot! When jumping between the stars, we’d always tried to use a beacon star. A big, massive lighthouse of a star that could guide us to the correct destination.
I didn’t know if Rigel was still in our effective range or not, but I felt I had to give it a try. The ship’s crew had already begun their effort to retake control using stealthy techniques. My sym revealed that they were crawling down the passages shutting down systems they didn’t need and reactivating essential ones. Already, they’d turned life-support back on.
Captain Lael had given them my orders, and they were following them, but it was only a matter of time
before they figured out who was really calling the shots. They had to be suspicious by now. The wand I’d lifted from the captain was vibrating almost constantly, and I was pretty sure there were something like cell phone calls coming in which I couldn’t afford to answer.
On the floor, the Captain was beginning to twitch. Her eyes were swiveled up, almost rolled up into her head, just so she could glare at me.
Closing my eyes again to eliminate distractions, I reached out with my perception and used the ship’s navigational interface. Where was Rigel? Where was the biggest class B giant star in this part of the galaxy?
After a minute or so, I found it. With an effort of will, I directed the ship to open a new rift.
The people on the bridge reacted much faster this time. They knew something very fishy was going on. They implemented their new security protocols, and shut down all my access to the rift engines.
But it was too late as the space-time rip I’d created was right in front of us. They reversed the engines, but you don’t turn on a dime in space. We were going around a thousand miles a second, and even though they managed to slow that down by half, with our rudder controls frozen, they couldn’t turn away.
In those final moments, I could imagine the panicked shouts by the bridge officers as we plunged into another rift that led to God-knew-where.
The thought made me smile.
=41=
My biggest worry over the next few moments was that we’d scatter again. There was only one ship in this train, and she had a beacon star to guide her, but I was still worried. After all, it was only my second stellar-jump I’d performed in a lifetime.
The computers did their magic right this time, however. I needn’t have worried. The gravitational forces caused by the immense hot mass of Rigel guided us in with ease.
All over the ship, alarms were wailing, and people were panicking. It took me a second to realize Splendor’s crew had been called to battle stations. After all, this was enemy territory to them, and this cruiser had no backup.
Standing up, I took two seconds to look at Captain Lael. She was in control of her eyes again by now, and she looked up at me with the most malevolent stare I could recall having seen from a lovely woman.