Mech Zero: The Dominant

by B. V. Larson

  Goddard stood up, struggling to pretend he did not feel the agony in his groin, nor the overwhelming desire to smash Davenport to death. He turned toward the walls and spoke calmly.

  “This has been an important lesson. I want everyone to understand that the nature of real combat is never fair, nor predictable. You’ve just witnessed two of your command officers—”

  “You are…” hissed Davenport from the floor. “You are recording this?” He had not attempted to rise yet, but he spoke from the side of his mouth. His right cheek still hugged the steel and blood ran out into an expanding puddle with every word.

  Goddard glanced down at him. “No,” he said. “I’m not recording it, I’m broadcasting it. Every eye in the fleet witnessed every second of our trial.”

  “Why?”

  “For discipline enhancement purposes.”

  “You cheated,” Davenport gurgled.

  Mentally, Goddard marked the captain down as a dead man. Davenport was never going to return to Mendelia. Instead, his ashes would join the admiral’s personal collection. He’d made a long-standing habit of keeping the remains of his political enemies. He kept their ashes in cheap, plastic urns. Each urn was unlabeled, but color-coded with a scheme only Goddard himself knew. A false batch of ash was issued to the grieving parents, carefully irradiated so that no testable genetic material was included. Goddard kept the actual ashes. On moody nights, he would retire with his seven, colorful urns. He had drilled a spit-hole into the top of each urn which he freely made use of. Davenport’s remains would fill the eighth such urn. He would make it a delicate shade of mauve…it seemed like a fitting hue.

  “Cheated? Hardly,” Goddard said with calm he did not feel. He removed his weighted gloves as he spoke, casting them onto the curved floor. “You struck the first foul blow.”

  “Blades are not—” Davenport began.

  “I’m not talking about the cowardly blade to the groin. I’m talking about the boot you launched into my face.”

  “We clashed our boots…together,” Davenport said with a tremendous effort. His eyes were closed again.

  “I’m sure the vid files will say otherwise.”

  “I’m sure they will,” mumbled Davenport.

  Goddard had been about to walk out, but he turned. The man dared to publicly accuse him of altering evidence even as he lay helpless upon the floor? He felt a rage that almost shook his body. If it had not been for the cameras, he would have finished the seditious captain on the spot. His frequent psychotic rages were a part of his make-up his parents had not intended. After his birth they’d realized their error, but had hidden it carefully, eventually coming to accept their son as he was. After all, truly great men tended to have flaws that were commensurately large. Fortunately, Goddard had the intellect to control his murderous urges when in public.

  And so he was able to turn away from the man he wanted to murder more than any other. He waved to the vid pickups and walked smartly out of the combat sphere. When he was out of camera range, he doubled over in pain and made his way to his podship. He would not allow anyone to see his true state.

  He traveled to the frontline cruiser of the formation, the Galton. There, he retired to his quarters, hissing and cursing as he went. He broke out a personal medkit and went to work on himself, hating Davenport and fantasizing about his doom.

  Five

  Like many single-star systems, Tranquility’s sun had an Oort cloud of ice chunks and other debris left over from the formation of her planets. As the Mendelian cruisers approached, they first entered this broadly scattered region of frozen garbage. Few living things dwelt here, but there was a singular exception upon one of the larger chunks.

  A being known as a Dominant wandered alone among the ruins of an Imperium scientific outpost. She had been doing so for nineteen long centuries. One might say she was a victim of the Great War between the Imperium and the Tulk, but in reality she had simply been forgotten. The Parent that had given birth to her and sent her to this place had long since perished in the war along with all the rest of the Imperium forces in the vicinity.

  The Dominant had long ago given up any hope of rescue. She fantasized about suicide constantly, but her genes simply wouldn’t allow it. She must survive, she knew, on the off-chance that she would be freed from this tiny world some day. She hoped it would happen before the nearby sun went out, but her hopes were not strong ones. The vessels that existed in this system were primitive alien craft built all of crude metal in geometric arrangements. Their technology seemed absurd to her. But they did seem to sense the dangers of her region of space, because as the centuries rolled by, they never came near to investigate.

  She would have tried to lure them close with a false distress signal, if she had been able. But all her equipment had ceased to function after the first millennium passed, and the creatures infesting the system hadn’t arrived until the last century or so. The sad truth for her was that her biology was superior to her electro-mechanical technology. Unlike the combat varieties of her species, she could not die naturally. Her genetics did not break down as her cells duplicated—so she did not age. There were no errors in the reproduction of her new cells, errors that eventually produced cancers and failing organs in most beings.

  Survival under her harsh circumstances was not easy. Built with a carapace of interlocking plates that protected her body, she was vaguely similar in shape to a terrestrial scorpion. Inside her shell, the Dominant did not mind the intense cold, but she did yearn for true warmth. Her only pleasure was her semi-annual bathing ritual, which was done in a biotic soup heated by bubbling methane. There, for a short time, she could extrude her stalks and lobes, letting the mud-like baths ooze soothingly over her true fleshy interior. As the station had been grown upon this distant spot intentionally, it had a deep well of glucose and methane. The supplies had been intended to sustain dozens of individuals for many years. Since she was alone, they would keep her alive indefinitely.

  Her life was exceedingly dull, but she did not go mad as other creatures might have in her situation. A dozen times she’d attempted to grow her own transmitter, but she was not built for even the simplest organic production. She was not a Parent, who could give birth to a desired form, nor was she a Savant, who could engineer life as she willed. As a Dominant, she had no options.

  At least, not while she was alone.

  #

  Redemption glided silently through the void. Her five sister ships now glided alongside. Every crewmember had blood-shot eyes and foggy minds, but they were resolute. The only clear-eyed member of the squadron was Captain Beezel, whose eyes were made of soft wet polymers and which possessed no capillaries to expand and throb with blood.

  “Everyone awake now?” she asked, calling loudly into their headphones.

  Eight men groaned in unison. Several groped for the wine bottle, but it had long since been stowed.

  Alone among the crew, Ensign Theller was neither hung-over nor determined to meet the enemy. He sat in a heart-pounding, personal Hell. He should have turned down the mixture valves more sharply. None of the ship’s alarm systems had given warning yet of his sabotage. He realized he’d been too cautious. Now, he was going to participate in this insane battle and die as an incandescent pinprick in a sphere of atomic fission. He checked the gauges again and again, but the results were always the same, the readouts still displayed two green bars. No one would care until they were yellow, and probably not even then.

  “Captain?” he said, almost before he knew what his plan was. “I need to go check the oxygen tanks.”

  Captain Beezel glanced toward him. Her strange eyes held no warmth, and precious little concern. “Go check them then,” she said.

  Theller unstrapped and bumped other men’s shoulders with his hips as he scooted sideways down the aisle. The crewmen cast him brief, irritated glances. Each worked at his own station, monitoring some part of the ship.

  When he made it back to the tanks, he gave each v
alve a hard, random twist. Quickly, he returned to his seat.

  “Report, Ensign,” Captain Beezel said.

  “Uh,” he said, “I’m not sure. I just saw the CO2 levels were rising and went back to check the main boards.”

  “Well?”

  “Nothing seems to be wrong,” he said.

  She glanced at him. When she looked away, he could see by craning his neck she had pulled up the readings.

  “You’re right,” she said. “We’re down to green-one—no, it’s gone to yellow-one now.”

  Normally, they would call off any mission at this point and do a full overhaul. These were unusual circumstances, however. Yellow-one wasn’t going to do it. They had to be into the red to take action. They were less than an hour from contact with the enemy fleet. According to the interferometer optics, the Mendelian cruisers were incoming on a new, unexpected course.

  Theller sweated for another five minutes before the meters reached red-one. At that point, they were breathing toxic air, and the carbon-scrubbers could not keep up. They would become sleepy, then slowly die.

  “What the hell is happening?” Captain Beezel growled at her board. She formed a tiny, hard fist with her hand and crashed it onto the outer edge of her screen, which dented slightly from the impact.

  Theller winced. He almost suggested they call off the mission and leave the formation, but knew he couldn’t speak such words. She must think of it and give the order herself.

  She turned toward him, and lifted her chin a fraction higher. “Theller,” she said.

  “Yes Captain?” he asked, trying not to sound elated.

  “Break out the emergency vacc suits.”

  Theller blinked stupidly. “But, they only have an hour’s air supply,” he said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “That will be long enough.”

  In shock, Theller headed back to emergency lockers. He opened them with numb fingers. He only had forty-five minutes to live.

  He stared at the suits for about five seconds before he began twisting valves. In less than a minute, the emergency suit tanks were down to ten percent full.

  How had he gotten to this point? He could not answer the question. One thing had led to another. In a weak moment, he decided not to empty the last suit. He put that one on the bottom of the stack.

  “Theller!” he heard a shout from the prime deck. “Get up here, we’re back to yellow-one.”

  “Excellent, Captain!” he shouted back. He closed the valves on the suits and carried an armload of them forward, handing one out to each crewmember. He was near panic. He knew the sensors were showing improvement due to the excess air he’d released into the ship. His ears popped, in fact, due to the added pressure.

  A warning soon sounded, and several crewmen began to investigate.

  “Are we okay?” Theller asked. “Do we need the suits still?”

  The captain turned to him and gave him a strange look. Again, his training as an actor came in handy. He returned her stare, as if he were as baffled as she was.

  “We’re fine,” she said. “Everyone suit up, but leave your helmets off to save the oxygen. We’re back to yellow-one.”

  The gauges quickly went to yellow-two, and finally red-one. Breathing had become noticeably more difficult. Theller cleared his throat, but the captain ignored him. He got up and came close to her.

  “We’re going to have to abort, Captain,” Theller said quietly. “We can’t fight if we’re all dead. We aren’t equipped to fix this in freefall, but if we put down, I can go outside and open the external tanks manually. We’ll be able to breathe then.”

  She stared at him. He knew he’d taken a terrible risk by making the suggestion himself, but he’d been unable to hold back.

  “At full burn,” he continued, “if we fix the problem fast enough, we can still rejoin the squadron before they make contact with the enemy.”

  Captain Beezel made a hissing sound of frustration. “All right. Do it. I’ll tell the squadron leader.”

  She made ship-to-ship contact and explained the situation. Theller took over the piloting controls and steered them toward a nearby chunk of dark ice. It was the only thing out here big enough and stable enough to land on. They edged in on puffing jets. Theller did it with a minimal use of fuel. He didn’t want the Mendelian cruisers to see their telltale emissions.

  They set down quietly and Theller flicked off the landing lights. “I’ll see what I can do out there,” he said, and left through the airlock.

  The gauges stayed at red-one, and Captain Beezel ordered the crew to put their helmets on. The men began complaining soon thereafter, as their tanks were nearly empty.

  “I can’t believe this,” the captain said. “What are we doing sitting on this rock? How can every oxygen system be failing at once? This has to be deliberate.”

  Suddenly, she stiffened. She whirled in her chair, her lips lifting in a snarl. She opened her mouth to yell at Ensign Theller—but of course, he wasn’t there.

  Six

  Theller walked off the prime deck, entered the airlock and let the pump cycle. Every stroke was echoed by the pounding of his nervous pulse in his head. When the outer door opened, he almost fell out onto the surface of a dark, alien world. In the distance he saw what could only be a cryovolcano. Such structures resembled normal volcanoes, but instead of molten rock they bubbled with ammonia, methane or water when the planetoid came near other bodies and the temperature rose due to tidal friction. There were patches of ammonia hydrates and water crystals on the surface at his feet. The stuff resembled snow, but was much colder.

  The suit’s heaters were already blowing full blast and he wasn’t sure they would be up to the task. This frozen, dirty iceball was the sort of thing that would turn into a comet when it came in closer to his home star. The temperature was somewhere around that of liquid nitrogen. He climbed down the ladder and walked back toward the external tanks.

  Redemption was not really designed to land. She was built as an orbital patrol craft. As a result, her structure was not in the least aerodynamic. Tanks, hoses and weaponry poked out here and there in an arrangement that was convenient only for her designers.

  Theller switched off his suit radio, having no interest in hearing Beezel’s commands or accusations. He found the external tanks, but kept going. He walked around to the far side of the ship, where he would be more difficult to find if the crew came looking for him.

  What was he doing? He tried not to think, but he could not help it. The crew in the ship must have figured out they had no air in their suits by now. They could be close to panic. All he had to do was adjust the mixture valves, and everything would be fine. But if he did that before the next hour passed, he might well find himself back in this hopeless fight. Worse, Redemption might be left facing the incoming cruisers alone. He’d lied about being able to catch the others in time. There was no way they could do so.

  On the other hand, if he didn’t fix things, the crew could easily die, or at least go into convulsions and eventually comas. How long did they have? He wasn’t sure—he was no med tech.

  Finally, after fooling around for a while with hoses which he barely understood the purpose of, he couldn’t stand it any longer. He decided to go back and fix the damage he’d done. He would readjust the valves and if they accused him of sabotage and decided to space him—well, he’d just have to rely on his acting skills. With luck, they’d be so relieved they would count him as a hero. Whether they missed the battle or not, he didn’t have it in him to kill them all just so he could survive.

  It was when he came around the corner and approached the ladder he understood something was wrong. There was someone in the airlock, but they weren’t on their way outside—they appeared to be entering the ship. Baffled, he stared at the airlock hatch as it slid silently closed.

  #

  The Dominant had seen the alien vessel approaching, and had scarcely been able to believe her orbs. The propulsion emissions trail appe
ared remarkably short and dim, indicating the incoming craft was small. This was further positive news from her standpoint. She could safely dominate only one alien mind at a time, and she was out of practice in even that regard. A smaller ship would have a smaller crew, and thus be more easily controlled.

  It took her only seconds to plot the probable landing site. They were coming down on the far side of the ice volcano. She crossed her frozen world with surprising alacrity. Her numerous, segmented legs churned. Fortunately, the icy rock wasn’t very large, but there was no time to waste. The aliens might land and leave quickly, changing their minds about the wisdom of their mission.

  Reaching the craft, she found the design strange. It was made of hard metals formed into angular planes and curves. This ship had a definite and uniform shape to it. Her people preferred to grow their vessels, and no two were identical.

  Although she was less than a meter in height, she was big enough to scuttle up the ladder to the hatch door and open it. She clattered inside and let the hatch slide closed behind her. The air automatically cycled, blanketing her with heat such as she’d not felt for many long years. The Dominant drew upon her final reserves of glucose.

  This was her chance—most likely the only one she would ever get. Once the aliens learned of her presence, if they were not able to defeat her directly, they would either mark the planetoid for destruction or avoid it entirely. Thus, if she failed to take the ship but survived the encounter, she would be doomed to spend the rest of her existence on this frozen rock. The eons would drift by until the tug of gravitational forces drew her world into a spiral that took her close to the burning star at the center of the system. Gathering her wits as best she could, she probed the beings on the far side of the airlock’s inner hatch.