The Biofab War (Biofab 1)

by Stephen Ames Berry

  Chapter 15

  Implacable’s First Officer reread the commscan:

  MOST URGENT

  From: Grand Admiral Erlin Laguan, aboard Vigilant

  To: Captain Jaquel Detrelna, Implacable

  II Sector Fleet and elements Home Fleet en route your position. Be advised massive repeat massive enemy withdrawals from occupied sectors. Enemy converging on your location. You are to defend the planet Terra until relieved. If, in your judgment, position becomes untenable, you will retreat only after destroying all Imperial equipment on Terra.

  End

  “Maximum scans all sectors. Maintain high alert,” Lawrona ordered the incoming watch as he eyed the screen. Implacable still showed as the only ship in the system. “Get me the captain.”

  Dwarfed by the huge ship, the men stood craning their necks, trying to gauge her size.

  “A mile high, at least,” marveled John, taking in the vast expanse of gray metal, bulging with weapons blisters and instrument pods.

  “A mile and a quarter, actually,” corrected POCSYM. “And about eight miles long. Designed for space but transported here by me, under orders.”

  “Magnificent,” Detrelna breathed. “I don’t recognize her class, but she’s certainly one of the great Imperial dreadnoughts. Why didn’t they take her with them, POCSYM?”

  The computer hesitated, as though debating with itself. “They couldn’t, Captain. She was exiled here to the Empire’s Outer Marches, last of the symbiotechnic dreadnoughts.”

  Detrelna stepped back with a gasp. Kiroda’s eyes widened. A murmur of disgust swept the Kronarins.

  “A mindslaver!” Detrelna managed.

  “If you will, Captain,” said POCSYM distastefully. “But not just any ‘mindslaver.’ She’s T’Nil’s Revenge. Does that name still mean something to you?”

  The Terrans saw the name did indeed mean something to their allies—it flew from lip to lip. “Only one ship’s ever borne the name,” said the captain slowly.

  “Want to tell us?” asked Bob.

  “T’Nil’s Revenge, great ship of woe

  To distant time, to greater cause

  Must she need go,” quoted Kiroda. “There’s truth in nursery rhymes.”

  “You see before you a legend, Professor,” said Detrelna, hand sweeping the vessel. “T’Nil’s Revenge, politely known as a symbiotechnic dreadnought, commonly called a mindslaver. Bigger, faster and deadlier than any battleship since her ancient day—and outlawed. To build a mindslaver or to research mindslaver technology carries the death penalty—a punishment otherwise reserved for high treason.”

  “A mindslaver?” said Sutherland.

  “A ship having, as its various cognitive cores, disembodied human minds,” POCSYM said. “Such vessels enjoyed vast superiority in weapons, maneuver and tactics. Properly maintained, the mindslaves were long-lived.”

  “Tell them the rest, POCSYM,” said Kiroda. “How such minds went quietly mad, unable to die, living only for combat, the thrill of killing.”

  “This is the last mindslaver?” asked John.

  “Yes,” POCSYM said. “The rest were destroyed as a mercy by the selfsame T’Nil whose revenge she embodies.”

  “How so?” asked Zahava.

  “The Annals say only criminals were killing people and selling their brains for use in these warships,” said Kiroda. “T’Nil, then Admiral T’Nil, brought them to justice and was crowned Emperor by a grateful people.”

  Startled, the humans looked up as the laughter resonated through the cavern.

  “I’m sorry,” POCSYM apologized, recovering. “You just reminded me, Mr. Kiroda, of what a Terran general once said when asked what history would say of him. ‘History, sir, will tell lies.’ I’ll tell you the truth of Revenge and T’Nil and the Mindslavers Guild—my truth.

  “Once upon a time, many thousands of years ago, there were space pirates, raiding Kronarin shipping and small colonies. Each year the problem grew worse, with Fleet never able to catch more than an occasional small pirate ship. The captured outlaws would usually confess to knocking over a few yachts, but even when mindwiped proved ignorant of the large, fleet-sized raids. The raids’ victims disappeared forever. Ransom was never asked.

  “Attacks grew bigger and bolder. Fleet, responding to the public outcry, built more and more of the new symbiotechnic dreadnoughts, equipped with the brains of convicts and the terminally ill. Within five years fleets of these great ships were scouring the galaxy, searching for the brigands’ base—a hopeless task, it seemed, given the vast number of possible hiding places, the dearth of accurate intelligence. Heeding the cries of anguished relatives and friends of the hundreds of thousands of missing colonists and spacemen, an already overtaxed Empire dug ever deeper to build more ships to end the scourge. End it did—unexpectedly.

  “A task force under Admiral L’Rar T’Nil—a cagey old war dog brought out of retirement to hunt down the pirates—received a frantic distress call from the mining colony of Rilnoa. Traveling at flank speed, T’Nil’s force dropped out of drive almost on top of the unsuspecting outlaw fleet—sleek vessels, bearing no insignia, but deployed in standard Fleet pattern. Although taken by surprise, the brigands made a fierce stand. Only when T’Nil’s marines stormed the bridge of the sole surviving pirate ship did resist to the end. And only then did the diabolical truth come to light.

  “These were no ‘pirates.’ They were mindslavers—avaricious men ruthlessly collecting functioning human brains. Brains that they sold to Imperial Fleet contractors to build more mindslavers to hunt down the nonexistent pirates. The captured ship was a brainstrip facility. The colonists’ brains were carefully removed and their bodies harvested for spare parts.

  “The mindslavers had only partially scrubbed their records before dying, vivisected within their own ship. A complete list of their shareholders was recovered. It contained some of the most powerful and wealthy names in the Empire: senators, industrialists, financiers, senior officers, privy councilors, members of the royal family—the top ten percent of the top one percent of the Empire. All had profited handsomely from the venture.

  “T’Nil was a brilliant strategist, and not just in space, adept at the political infighting that pervaded both Court and Fleet. More, he commanded the fierce loyalty of his officers and men, for he’d been given back his old battle group, Task Force 47. They’d followed the Admiral into hell more than once. Now he asked them to do so again, for he knew his command and life would be forfeit if he sent an honest report of the action. Task Force 47 disappeared, captured ship in tow. With unseemly haste, T’Nil and his men were proclaimed deserters and traitors, tried in absentia and sentenced to death.

  “Two months later, raiders in Fleet uniform seized all the communications stations over Kronar and broadcast graphic proof of all I’ve just told you to a horrified, sickened Empire: brainless, recognizable heads, holograms of the brainstrip vessel, airtight documentation. The ensuing popular revolt was brief but bloody enough for a general catharsis.

  “Did I mention T’Nil’s daughter? She was on R’Noa. Her father arrived too late to save her or his grandchildren.

  “Even before his coronation, T’Nil rounded up all the masters of the de facto Mindslavers Guild and had them publically brainstripped and placed to serve this monstrosity now before us. The other mindslaves were mercifully destroyed and the mindslavers converted to conventional craft. Thus ends my truth, Subcommander,” said POCSYM. “May it inform your own.”

  “Why was she sent here?” Kiroda asked.

  “I wasn’t told. I suspect, though, that the disintegrating Empire didn’t want Revenge falling into the hands of, say, a rebellious sector governor.”

  “And the mindslaves?” asked Bob.

  “Functional, as is the rest of the ship. I’ve had her in stasis, of course. The mindslaves . . .”

  The computer was checked by Detrelna’s upraised hand. “Yes?” the captain said into his communicator.

 
“Sir, message from Admiral Laguan.” Lawrona read it to him.

  “I have something to add,” said POCSYM. “Please check your tacscans, Commander. Do you confirm what my satellites have detected?”

  As Lawrona turned toward the screen an ensign called, “Enemy force emerging from hyperspace.”

  Next to Pluto a swarm of tiny red dots were forming into a huge phalanx.

  “Scotar battle fleet has entered the system near the ninth planet, sir,” reported the first officer. “They’re forming their assault wedge.”

  “How many?”

  Lawrona hopefully tapped the telltale. The figures didn’t change. “Two thousand five hundred and twenty-eight,” he reported. “Heavy cruisers, destroyers, scout and patrol craft, supply and transport vessels—lots and lots of transports. It’s not a casual visit.”

  “Where’s their command ship?” asked the captain.

  “Can’t tell at this range, sir.”

  “I have her,” said POCSYM.

  They were back in Central Control, facing a hologram of the solar system. “My apologies,” the computer said, “but it seemed less cumbersome.” In the midst of the red dots now advancing on Earth glowed a single green light. “The command ship,” said POCSYM. “She is Nasqa—‘Deadly Wraith,’ about a mile in diameter, a crew of three thousand.”

  “Well, Captain?” asked John.

  Detrelna was silent, eyes distant. He ran his fingers through thinning hair. “POCSYM,” he said finally, “can you defend Terra against such a huge force?”

  “Gallantly, Captain, but very briefly.”

  “Can you put Revenge in orbit?”

  “Easily.”

  “Can you put an assault team aboard Nasqa before those ships come within range of Terra?”

  “Yes.”

  “My friends”—Detrelna smiled—“let’s adjourn to the meeting room and discuss a mad scheme I have. It’s just insane enough to work.”

  “The hell you are!” John stormed at McShane. “You heard what the captain said. His own men are afraid to mindlink with those creatures. What makes you so damned omnipotent?”

  No sooner had Detrelna announced his twofold “mad scheme” than Bob had volunteered for what John thought its most dangerous aspect: mind linking with the disembodied brains aboard Revenge.

  The professor calmly regarded his angry ex-student. “I saw no rush of volunteers,” he observed dryly. “Also, I submit myself as the logical candidate.” He poured water from an onyx carafe into a matching cup and sipped. “It’s been speculated that only Terrans, with their heart rate higher than Kronarins, have a chance of arriving aboard Nasqa undetected.”

  Speculated was the word for it. Two months ago the Kronarins had captured a Scotar courier ship. Along with new deployment and withdrawal protocols, it carried modifications specs for their ships’ security systems. Henceforth, penetration alarms would be keyed only to the Kronarin heart rate. The Scotar had evidently been plagued by false intruder alerts triggered by too broad a detection program.

  Rigging the courier’s drive to overload, the Kronarins had blown the ship up along with her dead crew, hard by the Scotar advance. They could only hope the aliens had bought the accident and left their program modifications intact.

  “Thus, all Terrans now here fit for combat may attempt entry,” said Bob. “Unfortunately, the surviving U.S. troopers left with Mr. Montanoya; his ‘witnesses,’ he called them.”

  “He’ll need them for credibility,” said Greg.

  “Knowing the cobwebbed minds cluttering our senior government posts, I’m sure he will,” said Bob. “If he appeared alone crying, ‘Watch the sky! Watch the sky!’ they’d put him in a rubber room. But that leaves only the five of you. As we know, the Kronarins refuse to meddle with what is to them abomination. The good captain here will only ask his crew to man the less exotic parts of Revenge.”

  “Never give an order you know won’t be obeyed,” murmured Detrelna, sitting on the table’s edge, eyes occasionally flicking to the screen and the advancing Scotar fleet.

  “Further,” continued Bob, “without the mindslaves and the weapons systems they control, Revenge is just another ship. Correct, Captain?”

  Detrelna nodded.

  “Someone who is expendable, unburdened by ancient legend and possessed of a disciplined mind must serve as, well, mindslave liaison. I am that man—Hobson’s choice: Take me or do without.”

  Before anyone else could try to dissuade him, POCSYM spoke. “Nasqa will be within transporter range in thirty minutes and her fleet within bombardment range of Terra in four hours.”

  “Nasqa assault group will don warsuits and arm. Be back here in twenty minutes for transport,” ordered Detrelna, rising.

  “Crazy old coot,” John muttered as he walked past McShane, affectionately squeezing the professor’s shoulder.

  Bob turned his head, winked and lit a cigar, exhaling a wreath of pungent smoke.

  Wonder if he’ll look so smug in the slaver’s mindlink helmet, Kiroda thought, seated across from Bob. Pouring himself a glass of water, he toasted McShane.