Crystal Deception

by Doug J. Cooper

  He lifted the sheet back up above him. “Ready?”

  He started them shuffling down the main road. They passed by one building-sized box unit after another, scurrying in lockstep and listening for Kardish scouts. Jack understood that being on a main road held the highest risk for discovery by their hunters, but it was the fastest way to gain distance from the Alliance.

  While shuffling down the road, Jack listened to the Kardish superior as he walked through the Alliance. The anger in his tone flipped to apoplectic fury. He screamed at his staff to redirect all resources to a search and ordered the deployment of foot patrols and roaming carts. Jack heard him yell, “Find them and bring them…” And then there was silence.

  It continued for several minutes until Jack concluded that the sticky speck had either been discovered or dislodged. He thought it most likely to have been dislodged, reasoning that if they’d discovered it, they were smart enough to use it to deliver deceptive information. They could have set a trap using staged conversation and then sat back and wait while the three walked into it.

  “The search has gone full scale,” said Jack. “Let’s get off this road.”

  They turned down a side street and onto a narrow alley, keeping to backstreets after that. None of the alleys went very far before dead-ending, so they were forced to zig and zag and even retrace their steps on occasion. Their persistence was rewarded with slower but steady progress.

  They were about halfway to the dividing wall when Jack felt a hand slip off his shoulder. He stopped and looked back. Cait was bent over panting.

  “I’m sorry. I can make it. Let’s keep going.” She straightened up and reached her hand out, but was so weak she missed Jack’s shoulder and stumbled.

  Cheryl caught her and held her up. “It’s all right, Cait.” She guided her over to a narrow gap between some smaller box units. Catching Jack’s eye she said, “We were going to be taking a break anyway.”

  The gap went a short distance and then turned a corner into a slightly wider area. Cheryl helped Cait sit down. The hideaway offered great cover in every direction but up, and Jack solved that by laying the cloak sheet across the boxes above them. He unshouldered the food pack and pushed it under the cover of the sheet as well, then noticed that Cait, leaning in a corner, was already asleep.

  “Is she all right?”

  Cheryl looked at her and back at Jack. “I’m wiped too. I don’t know what comes out of those weapons, but they really suck the life out of you.” She took off the ghost pack, sat down next to Cait and huddled against her. “I’ll keep guard over her.”

  “I’m going to push ahead and see what I can learn.” He picked up the ghost pack and slipped it on. It shimmered and then disappeared. “I’ll bring my toys with me to keep me company.”

  “Hey,” said Cheryl. “I can see fuzzy patches. You’re starting to show in places. Don’t be thinking you can stand in front of them and be invisible.” She twirled her index finger. “Turn around.”

  Jack did a slow pirouette.

  “Your back is better, maybe ninety-five percent. Your front is more like eighty percent.”

  “Just the fact that you can tell front from back is bad enough. This suit wasn’t designed for what we’re doing here.”

  As he spoke, he could see her eyelids drooping. Moments later, they were both asleep. He stood there quietly and confirmed he could see them both breathing steadily. As he walked out of the hideaway, he toggled his speck to urgent mode so Cheryl wouldn’t be disturbed by his idle chatter. But if he spoke under stress, even in a whisper, the speck would amplify the words and grab her attention.

  He left the hideaway and made his way out to the main road, placed a tracer on a corner box-building so he could find his way back, and began a slow jog down the road. He reached a comfortable stride and then he heard the purring of an approaching cart.

  Chapter 25

  Jack stepped into a shadow and, recalling Cheryl’s comment about the degraded concealment of his ghost suit, kept his back to the road. He waited for the cart to pass, watching over his shoulder as it went by. He was surprised so see that it held only one Kardish. He expected them to be traveling in teams.

  Acting on impulse, he turned, lifted his arm and fired a bolt, hitting the driver in the back. The alien slumped forward, and the cart slowed to a stop. He ran over and confirmed that the fellow was dead. Pushing on the frame of the cart, he discovered that it rolled easily, so he kept pushing and moved it onto a side street.

  He studied the driver’s clothing, considering taking his outfit and attempting an impersonation routine, but discarded the idea. With their pale skin and blond hair, the Kardish all seemed to be created from the same pool of DNA. Anyone who saw him would know he was an imposter.

  The alien’s boots had sturdy laces. Jack didn’t understand their culture of ornate clothing and didn’t dwell on it. He bent over, pulled the laces off both boots, and tied the ends together to fashion a longer cord. He then hefted the driver upright, looped the cord around the driver’s chest, and tied him to the seat support.

  Standing back, he surveyed his handiwork. The driver’s head hung awkwardly to one side, and his body slumped in the seat in an unnatural fashion. But from a distance and overhead, the charade might hold up. Jack got in on the passenger side, slid close to the driver, examined the cart controls, and found them to be simple and intuitive.

  Using one hand to prop up the driver’s head, Jack engaged the cart. “Off we go, mate.”

  He drove around the block, back onto the main road, and turned toward the near dividing wall. A few blocks ahead, the environment seemed somehow brighter. He was trying to decide what specifically was different when it became obvious. The road led straight into a huge open area.

  He swerved the cart onto a side lane, followed by a quick turn into an alley, then hopped out. “You stay here,” he said to the driver. “I’ll be right back.” He updated his body count as he walked. Four to three. Definitely moving in the right direction.

  Staying to the backstreets, he worked his way to the open area. A wide road ran down the long border where the box city ended and the open area began. He didn’t cross it, but stayed back in a sheltered spot where he could study the scene in front of him. As the details of the site registered in his brain, he became increasingly alarmed.

  It was an airfield, or perhaps more accurately, a space port, and it was so astonishingly large, he was having difficulty judging its size. He guessed that a dozen Blackworks hangars could fit inside it.

  It extended the entire width of the Kardish vessel and was at least as long as it was wide. He could see the curve of the vessel hull in the distance as it rose from the field deck on his left, arced up overhead, and descended down to meet the deck on his right. The most prominent features in the vessel’s hull were massive hangar doors overhead. And because they were fitted into the hull, when the hangar doors opened, it would be to the vacuum of empty space.

  The reason for the hangar doors was sitting right in front of him. Military craft. Row upon row of weaponized death machines. With no place for a pilot to sit, these small, agile craft could only be drones.

  The drones were parked in an immense garage-like shelving unit that was five tiers high. He looked left to right and tried to count the rows of shelves. There were too many, but his rough tally reached two hundred. He looked down the row in front of him, and it faded into the distance. He guessed two hundred deep, but that was just a guess. Two hundred rows that were two hundred deep and stacked five high meant two hundred thousand drones. Two hundred thousand war craft, each a mobile arsenal.

  The drone garage was huge, but it occupied only a fraction of the total expanse in front of him and was positioned in the center of what was an otherwise open, empty deck. On either side, two vast fields ran from the drone garage all the way out to the hull. He presumed these open fields were to provide for an orderly passage of swarms of drones as they flew in and out through the hangar doors ab
ove.

  As Jack moved back to the cart, he mentally processed his discovery. It was clear he had to reorient his thinking about the Kardish. Could such an assemblage of armaments be something a passive culture would create for self-defense? No, he concluded, these were the trappings of a warrior race. The drone armada was a tool they used to attack and conquer, or perhaps simply to attack and destroy.

  He tried to imagine the Union going into battle against such a force. It seemed clear that Earth would be defenseless against a sky blackened with these drones. Given what he now knew, he was glad that Fleet Command had stood firm on the notion that Earth shouldn’t provoke a confrontation.

  He reached the cart and climbed back in. “Move over, mate,” he said to the dead driver. “You’re hogging the seat.” He drove out of the alley and stuck to smaller lanes as he made his way back to Cheryl, Cait, and their hideaway.

  As he purred along, he thought about how few Kardish he’d seen since their arrival. A warrior race would have legions of soldiers. The streets should be full of search parties hunting them down. Granted, this vessel was huge. Many thousands of troops could appear as sparse numbers if spread out. But it was still hard to square up the idea of a warrior race with the apparent absence of troops.

  The drones might tell part of the story. Maybe there was so much automation embedded in their society that they were able to conquer planets with a small crew. Or maybe this was a forward ship designed for a first attack, with troop ships following later. Yet the Kardish had remained in Earth orbit for twenty years, the whole time carrying the means to destroy the planet many times over, and had never shown any signs of aggression.

  He slowed when he came to a large street, his thoughts turning to the logistics of how the three of them would advance to the dividing wall. If they were to continue their push to the ship’s bow, they needed to make it across that open field. If he were on Earth, his go-to solution was tried and true. Create a diversion. Lacking a better idea and feeling the pressure of time, he decided to stick with the method he knew.

  He changed course and drove at an angle away from the hideaway. He continued for a number of city blocks, and when his intuition signaled, he stopped. He fished inside the ghost pack and pulled out a demolition square. Scanning the box-buildings around the intersection, he spied a crevice running horizontally along one. He bent the square in half and slid it into the crevice, stepped back to confirm it wasn’t exposed, and clambered back inside the cart.

  He purred on, moving in a large semicircle that curved around the hideaway, placing two more demolition squares in places he believed would create an impressive show. With his diversion preparations complete, he turned the cart back to Cheryl and Cait.

  He negotiated onto a main drag and spotted a cart coming toward him. He grabbed a handful of his cart’s driver’s hair and pulled up as hard as he could, drawing the dead Kardish to a mostly upright position. The other cart drew closer. His heart was pounding. The only way this is going to work, he thought, is by increasing the body count. He liked the sound of that and found renewed strength to keep pulling on the driver’s hair. He lifted his free arm and took aim.

  When the two carts were half a block apart, the other cart turned and headed up a different street. No wave or nod of the head. No outward sign of curiosity or concern. Jack let the driver slump back down and flexed his aching arm. “Not such a friendly chap,” he said to the driver.

  When he was within walking distance of the hideaway, he pulled into a sheltered slot between two box units, jumped out of the cart, and moved toward the tracer signal. He saw one more cart driving across an intersection in the distance during his walk but couldn’t tell if it was the same one he’d seen earlier. He stuck to shadows where he could, crossed the large roads quickly, and stayed vigilant. The place remained eerily quiet.

  He picked the tracer off the box-building as he passed. Moments later he turned into their alley. Ducking into a crevice across and a few boxes down from their hideaway, he watched the entrance gap. After a short wait, he gained confidence that there would be no surprises. Cheryl hadn’t contacted him, so he assumed she was still asleep.

  He crept into the gap, peeked around the corner, and saw the two snuggled together in deep slumber. He checked the time and realized he hadn’t slept in more than thirty hours. He knew this wasn’t a good time to nap, but couldn’t imagine that there would ever be a good time on the foreseeable horizon.

  Lying down and curling up facing the entrance of their hideaway, he cradled his head in his arms, then remembered that the cloaking on his back was in better shape. He rolled over so he was facing inward. Either way, anyone coming in or out would trip over him. He thus acted as both a shield and alarm of sorts for Cheryl and Cait. He put his head back in his arms and was asleep in minutes.

  * * *

  The helmsman of the Kardish vessel was tasked with tracking the two Earth ships that were pursuing them. Both were tiny things that had recently docked together to become one. The consensus was that they were more like bugs to be squashed than threats in any real sense.

  His orders were to monitor the pests and report new developments. The assignment was tedious, and he struggled to maintain his concentration. And then he saw that the ships were moving apart. He blinked his eyes several times and reviewed the display, worried that perhaps he’d been daydreaming. He verified the movement and was about to call out the news when both ships disappeared in a brilliant conflagration.

  “Your Excellency,” the helmsman called to the one sitting in the captain’s chair. "The Earth ships have exploded.”

  “Show me,” he said as he stood, his robes rustling softly with his movement.

  The helmsman enlarged the projected image to such an extent that he had to step back to see it clearly. He played the event in a slow-motion loop, and they watched it again and again. They saw the smaller ship undock, move off from the larger ship a short distance, and then ignite in a tremendous eruption. A ball of flames that began in the smaller ship burst out and engulfed the larger one.

  The larger ship faded away in its death throes. It seemed to reemerge briefly from the flames, and then it disappeared for good.

  “I didn’t see the larger ship explode,” said the helmsman.

  “I saw it disappear in a ball of fire. Didn’t you?”

  “Yes, Your Excellency. It most certainly disappeared in a ball of fire.”

  “Let it play forward.” The leader pointed at the image. “What are all those pieces?”

  “Fragments from the exploding ships,” said the helmsman. “There is a cluster of them headed right for us. Should I move to avoid them?”

  “Will they cause any harm?”

  “No, Excellency. We may hear them, but they will cause no damage.”

  The prince stood silently. “Your assignment here is finished,” he said. “Go help kill the rats scurrying around my ship.”

  “Yes, Your Excellency.” The helmsmen hurried off the bridge.

  The prince watched the explosion again and displayed a cheerless smile as the destruction unfolded in slow motion. He sat back in his chair, reached to his side, and lifted the scepter from its stand. Lost in thought, he held it in his lap and stroked the royal emblem.

  Chapter 26

  Juice followed Sid to the tech shop and stood in the doorway. She leaned against the frame and watched him yank open one drawer after another. Apparently not finding the object of his quest, he methodically rifled the cabinets. Finished with the lot, he walked in her direction. She stepped back to let him pass and watched him enter the exercise room. There he repeated his rapid-fire drawer and cabinet search.

  He stopped looking inside things and moved to the middle of the room. He studied a wall, looking it up and down, made a quarter turn and examined the adjoining wall, and continued until he finished the room. Returning to the tech shop, he slipped past Juice yet again and inspected its four walls.

  “Hmm,” he said, folding his arms
across his chest.

  Juice desperately wanted to ask, but when Sid was improvising, she knew that wasn’t the best way to work with him. She walked over to a drawer, pulled it out, and dumped it on top of the worktable, pretending to study the pile.

  Glancing over, he said, “No, too small.”

  “That’s what I was thinking.” She used her arm to sweep everything back into the drawer, then looked in a few more until she found one that held an organized collection of brackets and braces. She paused to study them.

  “Right size,” he said, “but too regular in shape.”

  Still guessing, she said, “I wonder if the collection of tools near the bottom hatch would work?”

  He shifted his gaze in her direction, but his eyes weren’t focused. Then he nodded and their eyes connected. “Not bad. I’m guessing we’ll need more than that, though.”

  “Criss,” said Juice. “Where on the ship can we find irregularly shaped objects the size of hand tools?”

  “The tech shop, galley, and recreation areas all have items that can contribute to such a collection. For example, add two forks, two spoons, and two knives and you will increase the size of the pile without adding to the repetition. The scout and racer have a great many pieces that would fit the category.”

  “That’s good,” said Sid. “We can work with that.” He resumed studying the room. “Now we need a sturdy pipe about as tall as I am and maybe as wide as my leg.”

  Criss was the one to ask. “Sid, if you tell me what you are trying to achieve, I can help with the design.”

  “I told you,” said Sid. “We’re going to blow ourselves up.”

  He picked up a bucket and started his collection of odd-shaped objects. “Criss, do you believe the scout’s cloak will work?”

  “My confidence level is very high.”

  Juice noted that he didn’t simply say “yes,” but she didn’t say anything to Sid.