Slipspace: Harbinger

by P. C. Haring

  “Did you find the supplies?”

  Charten’s only response was to motion her to the display and the tech stepped aside to allow her an unobstructed view. They had indeed found the cargo that Rashar had tasked them to recover. But they had found something else, and while the information in front of her did not tell the whole story, she saw it and knew this station offered far more than supplies.

  “Contact the ship. Get additional science and security teams here immediately.”

  November 8, 2832

  15:15

  Kelten Supply Depot

  HER HANDS FLEW over the console as she struggled to force her brain to keep up with the speed at which her fingers wanted to move. Despite her frustration at the time, her work with the General continued to prove useful even if her understanding of the language remained rudimentary. Still, there was nothing to enhance her comprehension of their language like hacking into a secured database.

  She continued working through the garbage, but it continued to stymie her progress.

  “Did you run the codes that Rashar gave us?”

  The technician nodded. “Yes, ma’am. I ran every one we don’t have mapped yet. A couple of them yielded results, but I think you’re in as deep as those codes are going to let you.”

  Cassie sighed in frustration. “Which means I’m probably misinterpreting what I’m seeing. Is the translation matrix available yet?”

  The technician nodded.

  “Break it out and hook it up. There’s not enough time to screw around.”

  Within a minute, the portable computer activated and interfaced. Yes, this was much faster, much better. But still, this could not be right.

  “Run a diagnostic. Is this thing running properly?”

  The tech nodded. “Yes, ma’am. 98.72% accurate based on the linguistic tables the Remali provided.”

  She nodded in silence as she reviewed the information in front of her. Data entries went as far back as almost two standard centuries detailing research notes, results, and analyses.

  “Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing?”

  “I have no idea.”

  She continued to read and review, her eyes widening at the implications of what displayed before her. Her head shook in slow disbelief. No one could have expected this.

  Something in her mind snapped into gear as if telling her exactly what she needed to do next. She set to work, closing out of the data logs and retrieving the floor plan. The schematics appeared, rotated and zoomed in on a large compartment.

  “Charten, can you get me here?”

  He leaned forward, scrutinizing the readout as it zoomed out again, allowing a path to line out between their current location and the destination.

  “Yes, ma’am. When do you want to move out?”

  Cassie gathered her gear and her weapon. “Right now.”

  They departed in silence and made their way through the. As they moved, they observed the same rhythmic expanding and contracting. As it turned out, the analogy to the human lung had proved accurate as the science teams had concluded the rhythm was quite literally a respiratory action. Their reports indicated that the biological components were not just part of the station’s engineering, but that it quite literally might be alive, While the Mjöllnir used a mechanical scrubber to remove carbon dioxide from the ship’s air, replacing it with breathable oxygen, this station used biology to do the same job. Preliminary reports also indicated that this biological system had a larger role, but more time would be needed before a proper analysis could be made.

  The pair arrived at a heavy set of doors, the last obstacle between them and the destination compartment. The bulkhead had long since discolored, due in no small part to two hundred years of decay. But there was something else about this. If the entire station was that old, this appeared even older. With over two centuries of mold and rust, it took a manual pump action override to crack the doors enough for Charten to wedge them open enough for them to pass.

  Based on what she had read in the database, this compartment came as no surprise to her. The room’s wide expanse had long since been filled by a now disordered array of equipment. Glassware, most shattered and broken, sat on carts and counter tops. Computers were left tipped over, screens broken and nonfunctional. The two swept around the room, taking note of the examination tables, and the desiccated corpses atop them. These were not the bodies of the Remali or any humanoid species, but of something else entirely- something eerily familiar but unknown. She swept up, surveying the ceiling and the broken lighting. She came to focus on a hole, which had been sealed from the outside by a biological patch. Perhaps this was the station’s doing, some way of healing itself. Even so, the internal structure of the laboratory had never been repaired, leaving stressed plates hanging from the ceiling. Despite their age, they seemed intact and free from the stress of gravity.

  “Someone should call the maid,” Charten said. “This is quite the mess.”

  Cassie took one of the larger pieces of broken glass in her hand. The surfaces were crusted with dust, but the break was clean.

  “Don’t be so sure of that. This break is fresh. I bet this happened when we transmitted the codes to bring the station back online and it started its rotation to create a gravity field.

  She made her way around the room, turning inward to the central pillar. As she stepped forward, the mechanisms came to life in a whirr as ancient machinery started operating. Plates, a meter wide and twice again as tall, lifted shakily, exposing the inside of the column. But before they could open properly, they fell back into their original positions with a creak and a crack, listed forward, and fell out of their tracks. Cassie turned away, flinching and protecting her head from the falling debris.

  As the commotion settled, Cassie stood up and turned back to the pillar. Dust had been thrown into the air, obscuring her view. She clicked on her flashlight, allowing the beam to penetrate the cloud and illuminate the column. Within the column sat four canisters. One had broken, its contents gone. But the other three were still intact, half-filled with some sort of liquid. But it was not the liquid that piqued her curiosity. What lay within, perfectly preserved after two centuries, demanded her undivided attention. The creature was unmistakable despite its hideously ugly carapace, now a discolored brown and yellow. Even its long narrow pincers, a far cry from the claw that had been used to kill Foster was an undeniable harbinger of what this monster was intended to become. Cassie’s mouth fell open. Behind her, Charten’s boot fell hard on the deck as he froze in place.

  “Oh...my...God....”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  November 8, 2832

  17:00

  Mjöllnir - Captain's Office

  CODY AMADO FELL into the couch along his office wall. Cassie stood over him, the pain apparent on her face. Cassie had offered no softening of the blow when she delivered her report to him, and now he struggled to reconcile it.

  “The Remali created the Ralgon?”

  Cassie could only offer a nod of her head.

  The implications hit as a tidal wave of dead weight holding him down.

  “Why…”

  Cassie swallowed. “From what we can tell, Cody, it was an experiment in bio-engineering gone awry. They had a need for something capable of handling their toxic waste products. In response, they engineered the Ralgon. When their initial results showed promise, they advanced the project, developed different strains of the species to perform different tasks. Those eventually became the different forms that we identify today.”

  There were no words. He motioned for Cassie to continue. She sat down next to him on the couch, offering her support as she continued her report.

  “This is where I get fuzzy on details. I’m sure Nira could look at the data and make better sense of it. But from what I understand, the hazardous byproducts of the toxic materials the Ralgon were supposed to break down interacted with their genetic structure and started causing mutations.”

  “E
ven so…” Cody finally found his voice.

  Cassie remained calm and continued her patient explanation. “It caused a significant jump in their evolutionary development.”

  “But if they’re artificially created, how can they evolve?”

  Cassie shook her head. “I’ll refer you to the experts in this field. Calling it over my head would be an understatement. But the long and short of it is that the Remali tried to shut the project down and destroy the Ralgon…

  Her voice had started to falter, her strength of will fading. Cody couldn’t blame her.

  “That obviously ended poorly. Let me see the report.”

  She handed it off to him without fanfare and he found where she had left off. The Ralgon had done what any creature would do in their position and they fought back for their own survival. It escalated from there when they broke containment.

  The rest of the report summarized a long and brutal war between the Ralgon and the Remali, one that lasted for almost three decades before the Ralgon retreated. The author of the report then went on to theorize that they had found a different part of the galaxy, one rumored to be filled with fertile worlds and even had included a star chart showing the general direction the Ralgon had gone. Cody did not need to cross reference the stellar data to know the author had been referring to Alliance space.

  Cassie had even gone to the trouble to put a time line together for him.

  “Wow. You would have thought that after almost three centuries of work on the Ralgon in their contained environments, the Remali would have been able to control them.”

  “Obviously, they didn’t. The mutations would have had to take time to develop and propagate through the generations. The report also indicates that one of the evolutionary jumps was the development of a control network not unlike the way bees back on Earth communicate and behave.”

  “Eusocial,” Cody interjected. “The term you’re looking for is Eusocial networking.”

  “Well whatever it’s called. It’s entirely possible that the... Oh hell,” she said. “What term did the Remali use?”

  Cody skimmed the report, searching for the notes on the social structure. “You’re talking about the Queen bee?”

  “Yeah, that. The controlling entity.”

  He skimmed again. “Prime. The Ralgon called the controlling entity in any given hive, the Prime.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if this Prime, or the Prime’s waited to break containment until conditions were optimal. One doesn’t just wake up one morning and decide to start a war.”

  Cody shook his head. Cassie had found one hell of a smoking gun. Between the field notes, research logs and analyses she had cited and appended to her official report, there could be no denying it.

  But as he grappled with everything and worked through its ramifications, Rashar’s words echoed in his mind.

  “How…where did you find this?”

  Cassie moved to the counter and poured him a glass of water.

  “Aboard the station. We secured the control center and found some data that indicated a lab. I got curious and investigated. The place was a mess.” She paused as she swallowed. “I found research logs and started reading. They only went so far, but the station was linked to a remote archive that filled in the gaps.”

  Cody shook his head and took another sip. For some reason, an inner calm washed over him. He wanted to be angry, wanted to lash out, cry foul and hold General Rashar and the rest of the Remali up as accessories to mass murder and genocide, return to the Alliance with the information they had and begin a campaign against the Remali, holding them responsible for their deeds. Yet, as he sat there, an inner calm prevailed. He couldn’t bring any malice, hate or anger towards them. Perhaps it had been the refugees on Surahan and in the orbiting fleet. It might be a hoax, a ruse, but if so, they all had gone to incredible length to perpetrate it.

  The General’s reaction had seemed genuine. Even now as he looked back with the perfect vision of hindsight, he could find no flaws in her demeanor that would betray her motives. Hell, she had given them the access to the station.

  “Cassie, how did you access the log?”

  She frowned at this, cocking her head. “I don’t understand?”

  “How did you gain access to the logs? I’m sure they weren’t just displayed on a computer screen for all to see.”

  Her eyes lit up and she snapped her fingers. “Oh! When we secured the main control room, I found some references to a lab in relation to the word the Remali use for the Ralgon. I took Charten, hoping to find something we could use against them. Once there, we used one of the codes Rashar provided to access the computer system, and a second one to access the remote archive.”

  Amado leaned forward on the couch, sitting up for the first time. “And the code you used to access the archive. Had you used it for any other purpose?”

  “No. It was in its own subsection.”

  At that moment, it all clicked into place. The inconsistencies fit into their missing context, and the solution hit him like a light house beacon on a foggy marina.

  “She wanted us to find it...”

  “Cody?”

  “It’s the only thing that makes sense. Think about it...”

  Cassie’s brow furrowed. “I’m not a telepath, Cody. Walk me through it.”

  “Okay, go back to when the General was on board leveling her accusations at Lieutenant Melor- Rashar demanded one of our crew serve as intermediary. She asked for you specifically only to stall you and trick you into learning the Remali written language.”

  “I remember that...”

  “What if she wasn’t testing you, as she claimed she was. But rather, what if she was trying to ensure that someone on our command staff had a working knowledge of her language?”

  “Why?”

  Cody extended a finger, asking her to slow down and let him get there.

  “That issue resolved far more amicably than it should have. Even though she lost that dispute, she invited us back to their station. We see a different side of them, not as a powerful military presence, but as a race of refugees. She ducked a direct question from me about how her race came into contact with the Ralgon.”

  “I thought you said she answered it?”

  “She did, but her response was a half-truth at best. She knew more than she was telling us. But then before we can probe further, she asks us to go and meet up the convoy.”

  He started to pace while Cassie remained seated, watching him with growing intrigue.

  “We go, and it doesn’t come off as planned. I don’t think she expected that, but she found a way to work with it. It makes us hot and angry, of course, and we demand answers, demand proof. But instead of providing them, she cites another humanitarian crisis tied to the pending Verasai attack.”

  “Do you think she lied about that?”

  Cody shook his head. “No. Melor verified the data. They’re coming. But again, instead of answering our questions she diverts us to this supply run, which happens to take us to the very station where her people created the Ralgon.” He paused. “No. That is not coincidence. Her exact words to me- ‘When you return with my cargo, you will have your proof.’ She knew where she was sending us.”

  “Still, that doesn’t prove anything. She had no way of knowing whether or not we’d poke through the station.”

  “Yes, she did, she specifically asked us to empty the cargo stores. She knew that if I agreed to the mission, we’d scour the station and find the lab.”

  “Maybe, but we only had access to the logs because of the command codes that you demanded from her.”

  Cody stopped at this, turned, and smiled. “As you said, it was in its own subsection. Would you have missed the code if she had excluded it? Would you have even known it was missing?”

  Cassie leaned forward to respond, but stopped short. She shook her head, “No, I don’t suppose I... we would have. But even so she had no way of knowing we’d be able to translate.�
�

  Again, Amado smiled, “And that, dear sister, is where we come back to you. General Rashar knew we’d be able to translate because she personally trained a member of this ship’s command staff to read and understand her written language.”

  Cassie’s eyes widened as she made the connections and Cody braced himself for the backlash. True, Cassie had mellowed some since coming aboard. But given everything, it would not take much to reignite her confrontational attitudes.

  “Okay, I think your theory is a bit of a stretch, but I’ll admit that it fits. Assuming you’re right, why? Why would she go through this elaborate process to tell us what happened? Why not just say so outright?”

  “I’m betting she can’t.”

  Cassie’s face scrunched in confusion. Cody cocked his head, his mouth curling into a wry smile. For as smart as she was, and he did have to admit her intelligence, sometimes she had difficulty keeping up with his thought process.

  “Cassie, tell me something. If we—if the Alliance had created a race of beings that ultimately became responsible for the destruction of billions of sentient lives and countless worlds, do you think we would allow that information out in the open for all to see? Would we go out proclaiming, ‘Hey, we created the Ralgon who almost wiped you out of existence!’? Or would we close that door and lock that tidbit of knowledge away, forbidding all those in the know from ever disseminating the information.”

  Cassie nodded slowly, “So she wanted us to know, but couldn’t tell us. Great. We know, but how does that help her? She’d have to know that we’d need to report back to Cent-Com where they could very well order us home.”

  “If that happens, they’ll never let us return without a fleet.” He turned away, staring off in a daze. “That would be most unfortunate.”

  “Why?”

  Amado’s head spun the logic out in front of him faster than he could explain it to his sister. But now he slowed down, forced the mental pieces falling into place to downshift and ease off. He would only get one chance at this.