by Sean Allen
“Go ahead, you twisted fuck, what will I care—I’ll be dead,” Abalias wheezed through clenched teeth.
“Oh, no, my dear Colonel,” Killikbar snickered, “you’re wrong. My phantoms are very much aware that they’re doing my bidding. It’s part of the magic—the torture! You’ll be screaming every second inside your head, urging your arms to stop the butchery, calling out a warning to each innocent life you slaughter to run, hide—but you’ll be helpless to stop it.”
Abalias knew Killikbar wasn’t bluffing, and the thought of being trapped inside a phantom shell while fully conscious and murdering innocent people made his blood run colder than it ever could on its own, but he wasn’t about to show it.
“Let’s do it, asshole! Let’s dance, you and me—right here, right now!”
“Ah, Colonel,” Killikbar laughed, “we have plenty of time!”
Not even the pain wracking his body could mask the confusion on his face as he stared back at the Berzerker general.
“Marstulu, my overlord God of war, will be high above Pelota del Fuego in three months’ time. Spilling your blood slowly in the arena will be a perfect offering! Until then, we’ll make sure you are properly…conditioned… GROWWWL!”
The helmed phantom, Atrolus, pointed his sword at Abalias and motioned him to get to his feet. He rose on one leg and Noruuka lashed his back. Abalias grimaced and couldn’t help but cry out, not only in pain, but in despair: even if he survived the three grueling months of torture that were ahead of him, when the constellation of Killikbar’s wicked war god was high overhead, Noruuka would lash him to his feet and march him to the black arena, not only to his death, but to an eternity of torturous murder under the control of Killikbar’s sorcery.
Interlude
The control room overlooking the bazaar at Luxon from inside the hollowed out head of King Gamuun’s statue was filled with smoke and the acrid tang of spent rounds. Its rows of display screens still showed the comings and goings of almost every pilot, merchant, traveler, and thief in the great port city from beneath the thick spatter of blood oozing down their glossy fronts. The remains of the portmaster lay slouched in a chair, his squat arms hanging limply at his sides. A strange-looking hand, with several clawed fingers on both sides of its meaty palm, reached down and reengaged the gate.
“I’m sorry, my friend, but The Ghost has something we require aboard that ship, and I’m afraid I need him alive.”
***
Chapter 32: Time to Run
“Twelve meters.” The alert from the program was flashing erratically, and Dezmara didn’t have time to contemplate the four gunshots she heard on the other end of the com as she pegged the throttles at full. The Zebulon class star freighter leapt forward, and Dezmara smiled as the acceleration pinned her to her seat and she flicked the control stick starboard. The ship passed horizontally between the gate’s split doors with mere millimeters to spare, and as it rocketed above the dead, gray remains of Trinity Major, Dezmara held the stick to the right and turned several barrel rolls in celebration of their victory and regained freedom.
Diodojo slunk from the surrounds of his pipe-enclosed hiding place in engineering and dropped to the floor without a sound. Sensing the danger of Luxon had passed, he sauntered out of the room and up the main deck toward the cockpit. His sleek, spotted head was held high, and an expression that looked every bit like a smile parted the whiskered flaps of skin beneath his nose, revealing the pointed tips of his teeth. He walked undetected into the cockpit and leaned hard into Dezmara’s right leg as a loud purr motored from his throat.
“Oh, god!” Dezmara’s nerves were still on edge and she jumped. “Doj, you scared the shit out of me!” She flicked on the auto-pilot and caressed both sides of his head just under his ears. His eyes were bright and the nostrils on his triangle-shaped nose flexed in and out as he took in her familiar scent.
“How’re you doin’, Doj?” Dezmara said in the most upbeat tone she had heard from herself since before they docked at Luxon. Of course, she could guess the answer—Diodojo was alert and in good spirits—but she wanted to check the site of his wound just to be sure.
She carefully slid her hands up onto his head and applied pressure with her fingertips through the bandages along the length of the gash. Diodojo’s right eye flickered with discomfort but he didn’t flinch or yowl, and the baritone rumble of his cheery mood was constant throughout the prodding.
“Good boy,” Dezmara said as she scratched roughly behind his ear, “you’re healin’ up nicely!” Diodojo pawed at her knee and let out a spry roar and Dezmara jumped involuntarily but kept on smiling. “I’m glad you’re okay,” she said as she got to her feet. “Now c’mon, I’ll get you some raw steaks from the galley, then it’s off to the infirmary to bandage my wounds. Then I have to talk to Simon.”
Diodojo’s jubilant purr went silent and the corners of his mouth relaxed. Small crests of fur wrinkled the skin on the right side of his snout. His smile was gone and in its place was a silent scowl.
Simon Latranis had climbed down from the gun turret above the engineering room and settled into his high-backed chair. He was sitting in front of no less than eight monitors and an equal number of keyboards, stacked in pairs and hovering along the inner edge of his crescent moon shaped control station, when a strange object landed in his lap with a soft thud.
“Shite!” he cried as he looked over his shoulder. “What’s the big idea, luv? Tryin’ to send my heart right back into overdrive?”
“That thing saved my life,” Dezmara said as she pointed at the vambrace Lilietha had sold to her, “and I need you to look at the tech and see if you can rig it to protect the ship.”
Simon’s eyebrows bunched under the goggles on his forehead as he turned the item over in his hands and eyed it curiously. “Look, luv, I’m not wrappin’ the ol’ girl here in an intergalactic prophylactic, it just won’t”
“Just set it up in the armory, press the button there, and squeeze off a few rounds, would ya? Oh, and, Simon, aim wide of it all the way ‘round.” Simon looked at her like she’d recently gone off the deep end. “Trust me, you won’t be disappointed.”
The reassuring look on Dezmara’s face melted Simon’s doubts and ignited his curiosity. She had never led him astray in their three years together. He cradled the little guard from the bottom with both furry hands like it was an offering to the technology gods as he got up to start his newly appointed task.
“Wait a sec, chief,” Dezmara said as she placed a firm hand on his shoulder. “First things first. How’s the ship?”
“Would’ve told ya if you hadn’t distracted me with this little gem—was workin’ on the damage scans ‘fore you arrived.” Simon tapped a button and one of the screens beeped as its blank front transformed into a glowing schematic of the Ghost. “Right, then, good news first. As you prob’ly guessed, since we haven’t been strained through a bullet hole into the cold vacuum of space, the ol’ girl’s hull is intact. She’s got some dents an’ scrapes, but nuthin’ a little make-up, applied by the maestro, won’t fix once we’re docked in a non-hostile port.”
“And by make-up, you mean?”
“Some bangin’ with my tools, a little heat from my burner—standard body work, luv—the usual.”
“And the bad news?”
Simon bunched his lips and breathed heavily through his nose. “Got ‘bout a quarter of our ammo left an’ the tanks are thirsty.”
“How thirsty?” she asked, more irritated at herself for not noticing the fuel status in the cockpit than at anything else. “Enough to get us to Chuudagar?”
Simon’s cheeks puffed out as he completed a quick calculation in his head. “It’ll be close, luv, with very little room for all that fancy flyin’ of yours. That’s the heaviest haul we’ve ever run and Chuudagar idn’t exactly the moon next door, now, is it?”
“Well, look at it this way,” Dezmara said with a feeble attempt at optimism, “with a quarter of our ammo, we should w
eigh less.”
“Not really the reassurance I was hopin’ for, luv.”
“Okay, got a job for you and it’s priority one, got it?” Dezmara said without acknowledging his concerns. She wouldn’t admit it to a soul, but she was just as worried as he was about the ammo and fuel—maybe even more. “Where’re you with The Bug?”
“Nearly there.”
“How close, Sy?”
“Hour or two tops, luv.”
“I need you to get down there,” she said, motioning to the thick black line marking the center of the bay door in front of Simon’s station, “and get it done. She’s been out of commission too long and we could’ve used her today.”
Dezmara wasn’t accusing Simon of anything—he knew that—but he felt guilty anyway. She was right, and if he didn’t spend so much time tinkering with his gadgets and computers, The Bug would’ve made a world of difference back in the dockyard at Luxon. He thought about everything that went down—Dezmara’s unbelievable heroics and feats never ceased to amaze him, no matter how many times she pulled off the impossible—and he was utterly dumbfounded as to how they had managed to make it out alive.
“Luv?” he said hesitantly. “I still don’t understand what bloody happened back there. Thought you and me were havin’ our last cheers. How’d we get out?”
That very thought had been pulling at the seams of her mind, distracting her focus from the dangers of the upcoming run, from the second the Ghost skimmed through the great gate. Her eyes glazed over as they followed her mind into the mystery for a few moments. “I honestly don’t know, Sy. I mean, I heard shots—four of ‘em, clear as day over the com—and when the gates cleared, I punched it and didn’t look back.”
“Do you think someone did the chap in so we could escape—same someone who sold you this?” Simon was waving the vambrace from side to side.
Dezmara fought against the picture of Lilietha’s innocent face twisted in ugliness as her long, delicate blue finger snapped the trigger of a gun back four times and the grotesque image of the portmaster’s body falling to the ground in front of her. “She’s not capable of that! How do you know? You barely know the girl! She helped you escape, gave you the shield. How do you know she didn’t kill him? There was definitely more to her than she let on!” The argument in her head would’ve raged on if she hadn’t made a serious effort to stop it.
“Maybe. I really don’t know.” Dezmara realized she was shaking her head in confusion—or perhaps it was denial—a little too much and looked up to find Simon staring at her with concern. She forced a smile to coerce her mind back on an even keel. “How long ‘til the rendezvous at the launch?”
“At our current speed, be ‘bout forty-three minutes.”
Dezmara synched her watch to Simon’s estimate and then looked up at him expectantly over her raised forearm.
“Right, The Bug,” he said as he got to his feet. He punched a button and the sound of the retracting bay door filled engineering. He skirted his flashing screens and dropped to a sitting position on the floor, then paused, legs dangling somewhere below in the innards of the ship, before reaching up and snugging his mechanic’s goggles over his eyes. He kicked out over the edge, pushed off the floor with his hands, and disappeared below decks.
Thirty-eight minutes and twenty-two seconds after she had stood in engineering and heard the ship’s bleak status from Simon, Dezmara was sitting in her captain’s chair with her eyes closed in her usual pre-run meditation. She was visualizing her two hundred and thirty-first victory when Simon plopped noisily down in the seat next to her. She cracked her lids like a coma patient struggling to break free of an eternity of sleep, but only partially succeeding, and peered over without turning.
“Bug’s all done-up, luv.”
“Good,” she said in a dismissive whisper and then closed her eyes again.
“An’,” Simon continued with a strange combination of excitement and frustration, “I checked out this little beauty as well.”
Dezmara pulled her mind from its tranquil surroundings and plunged her senses back into the tension of the Ghost on the verge of a run. She turned, clear-eyed, to see Simon holding the vambrace with even more reverence than he’d shown when she first handed it over to him. Simon never ceased to impress her: the Kaniderelle had a singular talent for solving complex mechanical or technical problems in record time, and she laughed to herself when she thought of the original time frame of one to two hours to fix just The Bug. Now Simon stood in front of her in almost a quarter of that time, having completed both tasks she had given to him. He was a genius.
“What’s the good word?”
“As far as I can tell,” he said excitedly, “it’s a velocity magnet.”
“Come again.”
“A velocity magnet. It forms a hemispherical field, ‘bout six feet in diameter, an’ sucks the fastest movin’ metal whirly-gig within that space right into the disk.” Simon made a swooshing sound followed by a noise like a freshly popped cork as his hand floated in and tapped the arm guard. “Absolutely, amazin’ technology, luv—absolutely amazin’!”
A smile of understanding graced her lips and Dezmara shook her head in amusement. “Six feet,” she said under her breath. “So, kid, that’s why you wanted to know how tall I was. Can you replicate it?” Simon’s eyes went wide and he took a small, pained sip of air.
“Luv, I know what it does, but I don’t have the foggiest how it does it. There aren’t any seams or screws, no place for me to open ‘er up and see what makes the bloody thing tick! I’ve never heard of tech like this, let alone held it in my hands. Where’d you get it exactly?”
“A friend.”
“Right, well, if you don’t mind, I’ll be seein’ if I can’t unravel the mystery while you try your best to unseat my lunch from the already frazzled confines of my stomach—which, if you succeed, an’ you almost always do, will not contain the slightest trace of stout, I’m very glum to report.”
“You can buy enough stout and fancy dinners to last a lifetime from this payday. Biggest one ever.” Dezmara tried to continue the lighthearted banter that Simon had begun with his ‘lunch’ comment but, much to her surprise, his face turned sour—instantly sad.
“Yeah, biggest one ever,” he said, then turned and left for his work.
Although it bothered her somewhat, Dezmara had plenty to do in the next three minutes, and Simon’s strange mood shift would have to go unaddressed. She whistled loudly, with her thumb and forefinger, for Diodojo, who appeared a moment later between the two seats in the cockpit. Dezmara fitted a sturdy harness fashioned from thick cargo strapping over his head. In addition to the material now arching down over his shoulders, a strap crossed his chest, and she rubbed the upper part of his belly after securing the tightly woven fabric under the pits of his two front legs and attaching the upper and lower pieces with heavy duty clamps sewn into the device. Four heavy cables were looped through the inner edge of both seats in the cockpit. She clipped the topmost restraint from each seat to a D-ring on the back of Dojo’s harness between his shoulders, followed by the bottom cable from each seat to an identical ring on his chest.
The instrument panel beeped, signaling that they had reached their destination, and Dezmara disengaged the auto-pilot, grabbed the control stick, and feathered the throttles. She exhaled loudly. They were on the edge of danger—about to teeter over and plunge headlong into uncertainty. The Ghost slid into place and then hovered among five other star freighters in a semi-circle. Dezmara was familiar with two of the competing ships’ captains, Rilek in the Lodestar and Saraunt at the helm of the Maelstrom, and them by reputation only, but she knew that every runner drifting nearby was focused on the same thing. Each captain and crew was keenly aware that the broken remnants of the Trinity planets swirled just below them and to the left—shattered dead-gray stones circling ominously, hoping to reach out from the grave and add to the countless souls that haunted their fissures. They stared out of their viewing p
anes in tense silence as each waited for the call from Trillis and the run instructions; then all hell would break loose.
The holodex chimed a full minute and thirty seconds ahead of the scheduled launch countdown.
“Ringer, Leonardo Fellini. Authentication code LFX6239. Encryption secure.”
“Well, that’s a first,” Dezmara said as she punched the com button.
“Greetings, my brave runners! Here are your official instructions. Each of you is to proceed through the Straits until you reach the clearing at Trinity Medar. From there you will head toward Hexalon in the Simokon System and the port city of Chuudagar through open space. The first ship docked wins the prize! Gentlemen, I will remind you that the odds in Trillis are calculated using the course I have prescribed, and any deviation will result in disqualification. Should anyone care to communicate to a fellow captain during the run, the shared frequency is—” Dezmara terminated the transmission.
“Ha,” Dezmara scoffed, “communicate, my ass!” Runners were outlaws and bandits, loners who trusted no one outside of their own crew—and most likely not even them—and any communication over the shared channel during a contest amounted to nothing more than trash talk. Dezmara never used the shared frequency. She was more than a little secretive about her identity, and she never knew who might actually be listening on the other end, or how many other ships had a crewman like Simon who could decrypt the voice-veil program with his eyes closed and one hand behind his back. She had learned long ago to terminate the instructions before hearing the frequency, in order to eliminate the temptation—and the risk. There was someone out there that knew she was Human, and she had almost died because of it; and she had a feeling that person was close by.
She punched the coordinates into the flight computer for the second half of the run. The flight through the Straits would require too many twists and turns and too many variables to get a route that made any sense. She gripped the stick, letting her fingers wrap one by one around it before holding the contoured grip steadily, then she reached for the throttle with her opposite hand. Her limbs shook slightly as she anticipated the start of the launch sequence. This was one of the many aspects of being a runner where she excelled. Her reflexes were so sharp, and the Ghost so finely tuned, that it was a rare occasion indeed when Dezmara didn’t jump into first place right from the start. Of course, Rilek was a formidable pilot, and she savored the battle to come for the lead position. She waited, body buzzing with surges of energy. And then her excitement gave way to confusion.