by R. M. Meluch
If we are prey, this opens a new category in predators playing with their food.
Glenn crawled out of the hollow, brushed off dirt and bugs, and followed Patrick and his playmate out to the clearing, her gun at her side.
Immediately she was surrounded by curious faces and twitching noses.
She felt a nose up from behind, right in her crotch. She fought the reflex to hike a mule kick at it.
Patrick made his way to Glenn’s side in the throng of foxes.
He was intact, his hair tousled, face flushed. A fox stood up on its hind legs, stuck its nose in Patrick’s ear, and gave him a good sniff. Then it stuck its nose in Patrick’s face, nostril to nostril, and inhaled.
It showed all its teeth.
Sometimes a baring of teeth really was just a smile.
Glenn got a nose up her armpit.
Giant claws picked at her sleeve without cutting it, just curious.
A furry muzzle found its way down the front of her shirt. Her hands closed on reflex around its head. Her fingers curled in the fur behind its ears.
The head leaned into her touch.
And I’m giving a fanged alien intelligence an ear scratch.
She didn’t dare show anxiety. But didn’t dare assume the aliens were harmless.
Patrick was long past daring. Patrick was already family.
Patrick tussled and rolled and boxed as Glenn hung onto her heartbeat. Patrick kept getting up unscathed.
The foxes were apparently smart enough to know that the strangers were breakable. And so far they were choosing not to break them.
A fox sniffed Glenn’s face.
“Hello,” said Glenn.
The fox drew back. Blinked huge eyes. It opened and shut its mouth. Another fox turned its head over sideways, as if thoroughly perplexed by the sound.
“Hello,” Glenn repeated.
One fox pawed his muzzle as if he had something stuck on it. The other rolled all the way over, as if Glenn might sound different when viewed from upside down.
“Hello,” Glenn said again.
The foxes hummed to each other. One touched Glenn’s mouth, its big claws pulled back, its black footpads on her lips. If the fox were human, Glenn would say it was perplexed.
It really did seem perplexed.
They can’t form words. The foxes didn’t know how she was making these sounds.
She realized, They look perplexed because they’re perplexed. Body language was crossing the alien barrier.
And possibly the foxes looked friendly because they actually were friendly.
When Patrick found his way back to her, Glenn pulled burrs from his hair. She said, “These creatures didn’t build the spacecraft that attacked us on the way in.”
“No,” Patrick had to agree. He turned his face up toward the sky. “Means they’re not alone.”
The consul’s body had scarcely fallen to the deck when Nox was shouting, “Bernini! Emergency dust off! Execute! Ora!”
The Xerxes obeyed in an instant. Hatches sealed. The ship lifted off the ground in full stealth mode and shot skyward in a panic rising. The emergency command did not allow time for directions, they just told the ship to get aloft and elsewhere fast without hitting anything.
Nox expected to be slammed to the deck with the sudden liftoff. But the inside of the Xerc was staid and stately as an ambassador’s reception room. The only thing Nox felt was the disconnect between the inner stillness of the ship and his view out the portal. It was like watching an action video.
He pounced on the ship’s communications station and shut everything off. Phoenix’s ground and sky controllers were not hailing him yet. The controllers didn’t even know the Xerc was airborne.
Hands shaking, Nox disabled the res chamber and the auto SOS sounder. He stepped over the consul’s body. Skidded in the blood.
He dashed through the ship, scouring all systems for anything that might be used as a tracking signature. He disabled the displacement collars, the landing disks, the displacement straps, and the displacement chamber itself. Turned off the emergency sounders in all the life pods and life craft. He rifled the private compartments for personal communicators and threw them in the annihilator. He pulled the ambassador’s workstation out of the bulk, turned all its systems off, and removed its batteries.
He ran back to the control room to find out where in the world he was.
The Xerxes hovered like a hole in the air high over an ocean on the dayside of Phoenix.
Nox instructed the ship to no longer respond to the name Bernini. From now on the Xerxes was to respond only to the name Bagheera.
Nox purged all users other than himself from Bagheera’s registry. He fed the biometrics of his brothers into the ship as registered personnel.
He executed a passive scan for possible searchers. He detected no frantic activity from any base on planet. The satellite eyes would have seen nothing alarming. If they were focused on the compound between the Italian Embassy and the Italian consulate, they would have seen the Xerxes appear out of its cloaked state. They would have seen the consul board the Xerxes with a guest. They would have seen the Xerxes disappear as it returned to full stealth. There were no further visuals for them to detect. As far as they could know, the Xerxes was still in the compound, invisible.
None of the Roman Legion bases were showing alarms. None of the orbital defense stations were launching anything.
Nox knew they were going to start up—any heartbeat now. The Xerc would undoubtedly miss a scheduled call-in. Nox needed to get off world as soon as inhumanly possible.
He had already told his brothers where to be.
Now attend and listen! I’ll either pick you up, or my death will be on the news.
This was going to be a flying grab.
Trouble was, Nox was ahead of schedule. Would his brothers be at the rendezvous coordinates now? Would they come at all?
Be there, be there, be there. Nox did not want to be alone on this side of the Rubicon.
The place of rendezvous came into visual range. It was a lonely stand of gnarled gray knot trees at coordinates of nowhere in particular. There was no reason for satellite eyes to monitor this place at all, much less be watching it at this particular moment in time.
Nox saw nothing at the rendezvous coordinates.
No police. No watchers.
No brothers.
Nothing but bedraggled trees, rocks, and dust.
No.
Then, at the instant of despair, There!
Pallas.
And behind the bleached tree skeletons was Nicanor.
Among the rocks were Faunus, Orissus, Leo, Galeo.
Nox’s chest unknotted. His brothers had come. They were there, waiting.
Nox brought the Xerc straight down, abrupt as a runaway freight elevator. Set it down hard.
The brothers jerked away from the sudden noise and flying sand. They hadn’t seen the ship coming. Still didn’t see it.
The Xerxes unveiled in the rising dust. The hatch opened. The brothers stared, astounded, six mouths perfectly round. They looked like a tenement birdhouse.
Nox shouted, “Come on! Come on! Come on!”
Now came an alarm—sounding from inside Bagheera’s control room.
The Xerxes calmly spoke warnings of air and spacecraft approaching in direct lines.
Suddenly, a skyhook from the orbiting horizon guard smashed down, a fist of energy at the speed of light.
There before any of them could know it.
Either the Xerxes deflected the hook or the sky watch had targeted a thrown image. Either way, the hook missed the Xerc and captured the trees instead. Ripped them and the rock-hard ground under them out of the planet surface and hauled them up, leaving a crater behind it.
Nox bellowed, “Run!”
His brothers charged up the ramp, pelted through the air lock. Hatches sealed fast behind them. Bagheera’s inertial field sealed over.
“Bagheera! Escape!”
The Xerc rose up hard. The ascent exceeded the speed of the ship’s in-atmo stealth capabilities. It left a scorch mark in the air pointing the way it fled.
Immediately clear of the ionosphere, the Xerxes assumed full stealth again. Its image disappeared from all sensors. Its heat trail scattered.
Bagheera changed course. Changed again.
Outside the space lanes, Nox jumped the Xerxes to FTL. He ordered a hard turn on a skew vector and punched the Xerc to threshold velocity.
Threshold velocity was a function of a ship’s mass. Few spacecraft existed with a combination of extreme power and low mass better than a Xerxes. And no one could chase an FTL plot unless they knew exactly on which vector to look.
Roman Intelligence could locate the source of a res pulse, if Rome knew your resonant harmonic and you had your res chamber activated. Nox had deactivated or destroyed all res sources on board Bagheera.
Nox leaned, straight-armed, over the control console, waiting, breathing, listening.
Monitor lights blinked benignly green. Only the threshold indicator hovered near red, but Nox wanted that.
They’d got away.
Nox’s brothers entered the control room with cautious, awed laughter, tentative smiles, and shining eyes.
Orissus left his mouth hanging open. Faunus smacked him up under the chin. Orissus bit his tongue.
Nicanor ran his hand over the sleek steel surfaces and the instrument panels as if making sure they were real.
Leo and Galeo prowled, unfocused, dazed, happy, horrified, amazed.
Pallas’ gaze fell on Nox’s shirt. He noticed the darker patch of wetness on the dark fabric and found the red-brown crust limning Nox’s fingernails. There were red fingerprints and handprints on the consoles.
Everything Nox touched had blood on it.
Pallas dropped his stare to the black deck, the pool of something wet shining there. Pallas nodded down. “What’d you do with whoever that was?”
“I, um, got rid of him,” said Nox unsteadily.
The mortal remains of Camiciarossa had blown out an air lock.
A moment of thick silence pressed in on Nox. The brothers were trained to be soldiers. They’d been taught how to kill.
It was still theory for the rest of them.
“I guess you had to,” Nicanor said gravely, understanding.
“Not really,” said Nox. “I didn’t have to.”
“And what was that like?” said Orissus.
Nox threw up. Spattered the deck. Got Pallas’ boots.
Nox’s throat stung. “Oh, screw.” He braced himself, palms on his knees, head down, body bent over, waiting for anything else that wanted to come up.
“Well, then, why did you kill him?” said Orissus.
Nox spat, stood up, his nose thick. He sniffed. That was a mistake. He swallowed. His voice came out raw. “To slam the door behind me! You all think I can go ‘home’ somewhere! I can’t! This is you and me! We are in this!”
“In a river of shit,” said Leo over the pool of blood. It was a statement of solidarity.
“Face down.” Galeo said as the others nodded.
“No, Best Beloved. That’s only the eighth circle of hell,” said Nox. “We’re lower than that.”
“All right. Agreed,” said Faunus. “This isn’t the future any of us wanted, but here we are.” He ran a beefy hand along the elegantly molded trim around the hatch. “Nox, you make a superb pirate. And I think I can get used to hell.”
“Where is it?”
The Italian attaché was a trim, fast-moving young man amped up on designer chemicals. He’d taken the marble stairs two at a time charging up to the governor’s office. He looked around for his stray Xerxes as if it were to be found inside the governor’s palace.
“Where is Bernini?”
Round and jovial as Good Saint Nick, Aemilius, Roman governor of planet Phoenix, answered the young man placidly, “We don’t have it.”
The attaché sputtered. “But you launched a skyhook at it!”
“It missed.”
“How can a skyhook miss?”
“That’s a fine stealthy ship you had,” the governor assured him.
The attaché’s eyes stretched. He checked himself before he could say something unfortunate.
Governor Aemilius asked, “Did you not have failsafes in place?”
“They failed,” the attaché said tightly.
“That is the problem with a stealthy spacecraft. It’s very hard to find when you misplace it.”
“We did not—!” The attaché checked himself again. Yelling at a powerful man he needed was a bad idea. The attaché started over. “Are you going to help me?”
“I tried, sir. I did. Count me as one of your failsafes. Your ship did actually leave an exit trail. But that will point us the last direction we want to look. Which narrows the search down to the rest of outer space. You see my problem? The IFF on board your Xerxes is turned off. Its com is not receiving or sending. Bernini is probably traveling faster than light. Attempts at remote system overrides have failed. Your ship is obeying a new master.”
“That is the ship,” said the attaché. “What about the ambassador’s system?”
“Say again?”
“Control of the Xerxes does not give you access to the ambassador’s system. His data banks. His communications module. His programs. His network. His—His—”
“System,” the Governor supplied.
“Yes.”
“The ambassador left sensitive material in the ship?” Aemilius guessed.
“It seemed like a safe place,” the attaché said dryly. “The ambassador’s system is a separate entity from the ship. It has a separate security program, a separate lock, a separate ID, separate authentication protocol, its own access codes. Its own tracking code.”
“Tracking code?”
“Yes. The ambassador’s system is equipped with a passive tracker.”
“What is that?”
“A passive tracker doesn’t initiate signals. It’s a catcher. You ping it, it returns a signal. Otherwise, it emits nothing. The hijacker can’t tell it’s even on.”
Aemilius considered this. “Assuming the hijacker is somewhat clever, would he not shut the system down entirely?”
“The tracker interprets any unauthorized attempt to access the system as a ping. The tracker would return a signal. We haven’t received a signal. We know the hijacker hasn’t tried to disable it. You ping him, you have him.”
“You don’t suppose the Xerxes would bolt the instant we pinged your ambassador’s tracker?”
“No.” The attaché hesitated. He was forced to show his hole card. “It’s a resonant ping.”
And suddenly the attaché was facing a man who could get his feet kissed if he wanted. The governor knew it too.
Aemilius asked silkily, “Just how do you suppose to get a location on resonant pulse?”
The attaché took a breath. “I grovel before the might and mercy of Rome.”
Alone among all nations in the known galaxy, Rome could locate the origin point of a resonant pulse, a pulse that existed everywhere at once in the instant of its existence.
The governor of Phoenix ordered Legion ships to stand ready to run down the target as soon as he determined its location and vector.
Aemilius left the Italian attaché upstairs in his palace, while he descended to the cellar, to sunless chambers where Imperial Intelligence agentes dwelled.
Aemilius expelled all but necessary personnel from the secure room. That left four, counting himself.
A young res tech, seated at his station, prepared to engage the resonant locator.
A tactical coordinator stood by at the com, ready to dispatch whichever Legion vessel turned out to be closest to the target.
One lone Intelligence agent remained in the room, watching, only because Aemilius couldn’t get rid of all of them.
“Here.” The governor held up a data slip. On it was the harmonic he had
received from the Italian attaché. The man had nearly cried letting go of it. “Find this.”
Aemilius gave the data slip directly to the res tech, bypassing the Intelligence agent.
The res tech loaded the harmonic into his res chamber, then stretched and flexed his arms as if preparing to work magic. “If he’s out there, he’s mine.”
“No, he’s mine,” the governor gently corrected the young man. “Do this.”
The res tech sent out a single res pulse.
Instantly got a resonant return in the locator. “Got him.”
“That simple?” Aemilius said.
The tech caressed his locator unit. “This is the love of my life, Domni.”
The locator unit fed the resultant galactic coordinates to the tactical coordinator’s station.
Tactical confirmed. “Target located.” He was about to say something else, but he did a double take at his instruments.
The res tech laughed.
Aemilius looked from the res tech to the tactical coordinator. “Something is funny?”
“Yes, Domni.” The res tech snickered like a boy. “His location!”
The tactical coordinator blinked at his readouts. Said, “He’s here.”
12
“HERE?” THE ATTACHÉ ECHOED when the governor surfaced from the underground chambers with an Intelligence agent in tow. “What do you mean here?”
“Here,” said Aemilius. “On Phoenix.”
“But the Xerxes left,” the attaché said. “We know he left the atmosphere.”
“The fox doubled back,” Aemilius said quickly. “Your Xerxes is at the bottom of the Uxine Ocean. I’ve sent the coordinates to the horizon guard. They will have a skyhook in place presently.” A buzz sounded on his ear com. It was the horizon guard. Aemilius took the hail. “Talk to me.”
“Domni. The target is too small.”
An impatient puff passed between the governor’s lips. “You won’t be able to detect the target,” he explained as patiently as he was not feeling. “The target is a Xerxes in full stealth mode. What you are registering as the target is only a collateral object within the target coordinates. Hook everything inside the given coordinates. As soon as you are ready, execute. Do not wait for my command.”