Inherit the Stars

by Tony Peak

  Rhii lay on the floor with Basheev. Horror filled their eyes as Inheritor soldiers aimed pistols at them all.

  “Is this what you seek? The blood of the innocent?” Navon, now held by two pirates, asked. Like Shekelor, they all morphed through the walls. The action made little sound and left olive stains in their wake.

  Ice-cold fear sank into her gut as Kivita wondered how the pirates breathed, since so much air had been sucked out from the cracked viewport in the last corridor.

  “No one is innocent—only those who claim to be,” Shekelor said. “Take her. Bring the Ascali, too.”

  Kivita flinched as two pirates affixed her wrists together with flexi. Others did the same to Cheseia and Navon. The Inheritors waited, as if supporting Shekelor’s deeds.

  Shekelor spoke into a mic inset into the carapace armor covering his arm. “Bring Fanged Pauper to Airlock Eight. Inform Zhhl that I have her.”

  Concentrating, Kivita tried to shove raw data into her enemies’ minds again, but Shekelor snatched up Rhii and Basheev with one hand.

  “Continue, and I shall kill them right now. The boy I shall take my time with.”

  Kivita glowered at Shekelor. “Goddamn you. No wonder you’re so cruel. You can’t have a heart, moving through walls like that.”

  “This is just the beginning,” Shekelor said. “The Sarrhdtuu keep their promises.”

  “Whatever they’ve promised you, you’ll still suffer,” Kivita said.

  Shekelor shoved Rhii and her son into the hands of another pirate. “You know nothing of suffering. Nothing.”

  The pirates led them through corridors coated in slag, corpses, and body parts; dead Inheritors sliced in twain; crumpled Aldaakians with pierced armor lying in pools of frozen blood. Here and there, a Thede Kivita had trained with in the gym or studied alongside in the library lay dead. With fierce effort, she fought back tears.

  “I know it needs to end.” Taking a deep breath, she began sorting all the data in her mind for one final broadcast.

  • • •

  Sar paused while Bredine concentrated on what she claimed was Kivita’s position. They stood in a corridor filled with Inheritor and Aldaakian dead. Slag pools still cooled at their feet, and the walls had been blasted to the bare framing underneath. He snatched another kinetic pistol, since none of the Shock Trooper rifles retained any power. It surprised him they’d left their dead, and made him even more concerned for Kivita.

  “Hmm. Kivita is on this deck. Redryll? She is sending more things. More . . . beautiful things.” Bredine stared into the air with wonder, her mouth open.

  Sar tapped her shoulder. “Not now. Lead on.”

  Together they tramped into the remains of a cryo chamber where olive-skinned pirates lay among the dead. Shouts reverberated back to them from an adjacent corridor. The air grew so thin, Sar took slow, shallow breaths, each one tasting of dry cryonic exhaust and slag fumes.

  “Redryll? That way. Gushing hot for Kivita, I know. That way, I said.” Bredine’s tone became more demanding and urgent.

  “You handled yourself well back there,” Sar said, as they went in the direction she’d indicated. In the next corridor, the scents of charred flesh, melted steel, and burnt hair made him gag.

  “Father was selfish. I wanted all to see what Kivita has shown me. Hmm.”

  Walking into the next chamber, Sar realized they’d simply rounded a turn; they were heading back to Airlock Eight. He almost chided Bredine, when the clanking of magnetized boots reached his ears. He went prone with the wall, as did Bredine. Two squads of Inheritor soldiers passed. Many carried or shouldered wounded comrades. The small force entered an opposite corridor leading straight to the airlock.

  A moan from the floor caught Sar’s attention. One Shock Trooper, blood flowing from her cuirass, beckoned him closer.

  The visage inside the faceplate shocked him. “Seul?”

  “Shekelor Thal . . . took Kivita,” Seul whispered. “All my Troopers . . . dead. Kivita will bring the Vim. . . . Sar, please help her.”

  “You’re going to help me.” Sar hefted her up, but Seul coughed and pushed away from him, strength still in her movements. “Can you hail one of those assault shuttles of yours?”

  Seul gasped until her polyarmor compressed. Blood ceased flowing from the cut across her chest. “The Vim signal . . . The signal has blocked most communication.”

  “Lean on my shoulder.” Sar kept the pistol aimed forward. Right now, any foe of the Inheritors became his ally.

  “No, I—” Seul coughed.

  “Just do it, dammit.” Sar wrapped a hand around her waist, and Bredine steadied her other side.

  Luccan’s Wish rocked violently. His footsteps grew lighter.

  “Shit. Hurry.” They ran with slowing steps into another corridor. Half a platoon of Inheritor soldiers rounded the corner they’d just left.

  “Thedes! Shoot them!” an Inheritor officer shouted.

  Sar jerked Seul with him into a declivity between the corridor wall and an intercom panel. Bredine knelt behind a supply crate as kinetic shots dented the bulkheads around them.

  The red-uniformed troops crept closer, cursing the lessening gravity. Sar poked out from the declivity and fired twice. Two soldiers bucked backward, holes in their chests, bodies floating off the floor.

  “Officer . . . um, Kael, can you hear me?” Seul asked. “Sar, there’s nothing but static now.”

  “Keep trying,” Sar said.

  Bredine edged forward until the pressurized door on their right hissed open. “Redryll? Go through.”

  Six Inheritors charged down the corridor, blades and pistols in hand.

  Bredine fired, the shot snapping through one soldier’s helmet. Ducking, Sar exited the corridor with Seul. Two dead Troopers barred their path. One of them still clutched a beam rifle.

  “Come on!” Sar called to Bredine, and fired. An Inheritor clutched his shattered shoulder and retreated.

  Seul grabbed the rifle and fired, holding down the trigger. The soldiers screamed as the concentrated beam continued on through three of them. She swept it, decapitating another before the last two fell prone and fired.

  A shot ripped into Sar’s left leg above the knee. He grunted and bumped against Seul, and the green beam sliced into the ceiling as she fell back. The lamps went dead, casting the corridor into darkness.

  Bredine tugged him through the circular door. Seul followed, holding her chest. For a moment, the corridor’s dim light revealed another charge by the Inheritors. Desperation shone on their faces, and Sar realized they might all be stranded on Luccan’s Wish. The significance of Airlock Eight loomed larger in his mind.

  “Redryll? Hold me. Not like Kivita. Redryll, Redryll,” Bredine murmured as her bony frame managed to aid him from the corridor and into the airlock bay.

  Inside it, a dozen pirates were boarding a ship Sar had seen too much of late: Fanged Pauper.

  Luccan’s Wish trembled as gravity decreased. The pirates tugged down several floating prisoners while ushering them toward the airlock. One prisoner had lovely red-blond hair. Straight, with a Dirr braid on the right temple.

  “Kivita!” Sar shouted. All his wounds lost their pain, and he ran forward. Their past together now seemed a dream, and their future a spacer’s tale without an ending.

  Bredine pulled him back around the corner as two beams sliced through the metal. The heat from it warmed his face, but Sar wriggled free and aimed both pistols. Pirates kept their beam rifles trained on him while Cheseia, Rhii, Basheev, and Navon were shoved toward the airlock. Kivita kicked and struggled, her hands bound.

  “Sar! Sar, I have—” Her screams sounded tinny through her helmet’s exterior speaker, until a pirate crushed it with a rifle butt. Kivita mouthed words to him, but he couldn’t make them out.

  More beam shots kept Sar a
t bay as the pirates shoved Kivita, Navon, and Cheseia into Fanged Pauper. Shekelor pushed Rhii and Basheev aside as Sar rolled from behind the corner and fired twice. A pirate just inside the airlock clutched her chest and staggered back into the airlock bay. Another collapsed on his knees, his features red pulp.

  The airlock slid shut, and Fanged Pauper disengaged itself from Luccan’s Wish.

  Sar cried out in rage and despair. He loved her; he needed her. These people needed her—

  The sounds of more Inheritor soldiers nearing the airlock bay echoed in the corridor.

  35

  As Fanged Pauper drifted from the airlock, Kivita cursed and shouted. She struggled with the pirate holding her, but his grip was like steel bands around her arms. Sar had been in there. He’d come for her again—beyond all hope, he’d come . . .

  Shekelor chuckled and gestured out the viewport. Kivita’s heart jumped and her body went limp.

  Through the viewport, Aldaar listed to starboard. Gaping holes covered its hull. Just within eyesight, a huge Inheritor battleship fired a kinetic barrage at the Aldaakian cruiser. Kivita’s heart sank into her stomach.

  A fine data stream snapped into Kivita’s thoughts, all of it in Aldaakian code. Aldaar’s crew complement, its mission around Vstrunn, Seul’s genetic matrix, the Pediatric Ward . . . and a name linked to that matrix: Taeu Jaah. All of it transmitted by Commander Baan Vuul.

  “Her daughter,” Kivita breathed.

  The salvo slammed into Aldaar, gutting the cruiser. Kivita choked as the data stream ended. All of Aldaar’s viewports flashed once; then the vessel split apart. The force of decompression flung albino bodies, cryopods, and countless other items into space. Several Aldaakian shuttles darted away, but debris smacked into one, crushing it. Another exploded, struck by a sabot round.

  Kivita wanted to slap the smile off Shekelor’s face. Seul’s friends and comrades, her ship . . . all claimed by the cold darkness.

  “Bastard.” She glowered at Shekelor.

  Navon nudged Kivita and nodded out to port. She finally recognized the battleship: Arcuri’s Glory, flagship of Rector Thev. It veered away from the destroyed cruiser. Several rents had been cut into its 2,500-foot-long hull. Red-uniformed bodies drifted from it toward the gas giant.

  Whistles, screams, and gibberish invaded her thoughts. Kivita gasped and focused her will, trying to close her mind. It was the same signal she’d received minutes ago while on Luccan’s Wish.

  “Sense something?” Shekelor smirked, then entered the cockpit and spoke with his pilot.

  She shared a look with Navon as something massive filled the viewport.

  A Sarrhdtuu battleship.

  The vessel hovered in the void, a gray-green sentinel of death. It measured at least ten thousand feet in length, superseded in size by only Vim derelicts. Kivita swallowed as Fanged Pauper flew toward it. She’d been on a Sarrhdtuu ship once, after her and Sar’s mission to Xeh’s Crown. Then they’d visited an airlock bay and nothing else. This time she shivered at what she might see.

  Port side, Luccan’s Wish neared the gas giant’s upper atmosphere, while Frevyx hovered near Airlock Eight. A jolt shot through her heart: someone had piloted the trawler away prior to Sar calling her name in the airlock bay. Hot, maddened hope rose in her.

  Cheseia squeezed Kivita’s hand for a brief moment.

  “I see it, too,” Navon whispered. A pirate smacked him with a rifle butt, and he fell silent.

  Shekelor exited the cockpit and approached Kivita. In contrast to the empty seats she’d seen on Umiracan, Fanged Pauper now held dozens of pirates in dark green carapace armor. All of them had green-rigged skin, and few possessed coils or purple-slotted eyes. As one unit, they parted before Shekelor like wheat before a tread harvester. He measured her with his brown-and-purple stare.

  “The Sarrhdtuu will turn this Cradle over to me once you perform your task,” Shekelor said. “Yet I admire you for resisting them, Kivita. A woman of strength. Sar must not have realized what he had.” One of his coils rubbed her faceplate. “Unfortunately for you, I do.”

  “Yeah? Then you’ll just be their slave afterward.”

  “Ah, but I am not a threat to their designs. You are.” Shekelor smiled.

  Navon shook his head. “There is nothing dangerous about knowledge, only those who keep it from others. Once you are of no use to them, they will destroy you, Shekelor.”

  “You both disappoint me. I know you two possess great knowledge, maybe even a dash of wisdom. Sages in your own right, as it were. You assume the Sarrhdtuu will remain in the Cetturo Arm after this? How wrong you are.” Shekelor smiled wider. “Yet you are correct about the Sarrhdtuu’s penchant for treachery. That is why I have prepared my own defenses.”

  Shekelor nodded to two pirates, who turned and opened a storage locker. A tall female Ascali bustled out from it, into their arms. Attired in a translucent gown and veil, the Ascali resembled Cheseia in every detail: dark, silky mane, red-brown eyes. The same beautiful face and sinuous, athletic build.

  “Zhara,” Kivita breathed.

  The sisters gaped at each other. Cheseia rushed forward, and four burly pirates had to restrain her. Zhara hung her head, muscles flexing in vain.

  Cheseia glared at Shekelor. “What do you maliciously plan to do with us?” Raw, unrestrained violence lurked in her stance, her voice. Zhara looked up, eyes full of love and regret for her twin. Kivita’s heart went out to them both.

  “The Sarrhdtuu have a, shall we say, aversion to certain Ascali characteristics,” Shekelor replied. “Once we are aboard Zhhl’s ship and I mention the word ‘Sygma,’ you are both to sing in a higher register. Refuse, and one of you shall die. Cooperate, and you might live. I have nothing to gain from the death of any of you.” Shekelor glanced out the viewport with a faraway gaze.

  An odd look passed between the Ascali twins. Great. What did they know that Kivita didn’t?

  And yet Kivita knew Shekelor suffered inside. But why? What would bring him to such cruelties, drive him across the cosmos to capture her?

  The teenager’s portrait in Shekelor’s fortress on Umiracan. That had to be it.

  “What happened to your son?” she asked in a neutral tone.

  Shekelor shot her a look of unabashed hatred. His muscular body flexed so much, his joints popped audibly. “Whatever Redryll may have told you, he is wrong.”

  “Then you tell me,” Kivita said.

  “My son fought alongside me years ago, against the Inheritors on Bellerion. Byelor ambushed an Inheritor platoon on his own; he would not wait for me. When I found him . . .” He sucked in a breath. “I refused to bury him. I placed his body in cryostasis.”

  “He is on that Sarrhdtuu ship, isn’t he?” Navon said. “Augmented by their technology as payment to you.”

  “Yeah, and what is this ship called?” Kivita said.

  The smirk returned to Shekelor’s olive features as he pointed to the bulge in Kivita’s envirosuit where the Juxj Star rested in her pouch.

  “Zhhl’s ship is called Juxj.” Shekelor strutted back to the cockpit.

  It finally dawned on Kivita. The Juxj Star: a datacore planted by the Sarrhdtuu in preparation for this event. As her mother had sent Kivita into hiding, so the Sarrhdtuu had readied themselves for a reply to the ancient Vim signal.

  A deep anger stirred in Kivita as she continued assembling the data in her brain. Her transmission would reach hundreds of ships, spaceports, and outposts. One way or another, she’d achieve the ultimate goal of the Thede organization: spreading knowledge for the freedom of all. There was no way they could stop her. Even if they killed her, her last thought would still be sent out.

  Kivita shivered. If they killed her? She’d never thought about dying before, not really. There’d be no flying away in Terredyn Narbas. No Sar Redryll saving her.

  Throu
gh the viewport, Juxj’s hangar bay yawned open. Unlike on human ships, no running lights or landing indicators aided Fanged Pauper inside.

  A minor gravity flux made Kivita’s stomach jump, and the pilot dimmed the overhead lamps. Diffuse gray light filtered through the viewport from the Sarrhdtuu hangar. The hatch sealed behind them, and Fanged Pauper touched down on a triangular landing platform. The pylons sank into the hangar floor a few inches.

  “Unbind the humans,” Shekelor said. “Gag the two Ascali, but not too tightly.”

  Pirates removed Kivita and Navon’s flexi bonds, while two others placed medical tape over Cheseia and Zhara’s mouths. The airlock slid open, and Shekelor herded them all out.

  Kivita, at a look from Navon, turned off her air supply and opened her helmet vents. The hangar’s mildewed air had a harsh lubricant taste. Gravity remained normal, and a human-friendly atmosphere allowed them to breathe, but the humid temperature made her sweat inside her suit.

  Knobby protrusions and fleshlike stalk growths covered the walls. The floor was flat and unadorned. The ceiling rose fifty feet above them, with dim lamps spaced twenty feet apart. Shadows obscured the rest of the hangar, save for a twelve-foot-tall protrusion. It opened, as all Sarrhdtuu doorways, like a flower spreading its petals.

  The pirates entered three abreast. Kivita forced herself to look calm. Visions of what the Sarrhdtuu had done to other Savants, as shown by the datacores, haunted her thoughts.

  Juxj hummed with latent machinery as mist exhausts from high above sprinkled moisture on them. Ducts and vents pulsed with moist, slimy squishes. Kivita had to block mental whispers and mutterings from her mind, all of them unintelligible. The ship was a self-contained, living system, much like the human body.

  Memories of her and Sar aboard a Sarrhdtuu ship renewed the combined joy and pain of their erstwhile reunion on Luccan’s Wish. She had so much to show him, so much to say.

  The group entered a triangular hall lined with protrusions and glowing green consoles. Pipes writhed in organic semblance along the bulkheads. Oils, jellies, and other mixtures coursed in transparent conduits on the walls and floor. Purple-slotted eyes stared at Kivita from the bulkheads. In the ceiling’s apex, an unbroken row of gray light gave everything a desolate, aged sheen. The mildew scent grew stronger.