by Chris Ward
They made the journey in a small wooden boat with a motor whirring at its rear. When they came to a couple of steep waterfalls, his guides employed a thruster built into the boat’s underside to allow the boat to safely lower itself down, a system Leon-Ar found frustrating in its scarcity. Surely they could make the whole journey in something that flew? It was infuriating, wiping dirty water off his arms, and swiping bugs out of his face. Each time he complained, his guides just chortled, as though they had heard the same thing a dozen times before.
Eventually, after an impossibly frustrating journey, the trees opened up, and Leon-Ar found himself facing a towering cliff impaled with hundreds of small caves.
‘We leave you here,’ the guide said. ‘We will return at the same time tomorrow, to retrieve either yourself … or your bones.’
Despite the damp that permeated everything, Leon-Ar’s throat felt so dry he could only nod in reply.
The boat chugged away. Soon, even its engine noise was lost in the sounds of the jungle. Leon-Ar stood on a semi-circle of grey beach in front of the cliff and waited.
For a few minutes, all he heard was birds and insects calling in trees that rose like tower blocks around him. He wondered whether to shout his request into one of the tiny caves, but there were so many, and none looked larger than his wrist.
A slithering sound came from the water behind him. Something cold and wet touched his ankle, but Leon-Ar shut his eyes and gritted his teeth, doing what the dignitaries of Jak had told him gave the best chance of survival. Say nothing. Do not react. Do not show fear.
Something was wrapping around his left leg. Something else was biting through the shoes he wore and weaving around his toes. A third creature, as thick as his arm, was coiling around his belly.
It was all Leon-Ar could do not to howl and wail with terror as his body was engulfed by slimy, sticky snakes of all sizes. He stayed stock still until his vision was reduced to a tiny hole through half a dozen shifting bodies, the weight of it all nearly too much even for his muscular Tolgier structure to stand.
Then, as quickly as they had appeared, they fled from his body, rushing back into the water, and he found himself alone on the small strip of beach.
‘You have a request of us?’
The voice came from nowhere and everywhere at once, a thousand little echoes from each of the holes in the cliff intermingling to form a single sound. Leon-Ar, his body still chilled from the touch of the snakes, his clothes slicked with slime from their bodies to his skin, turned in a circle, trying to decide where to address.
‘Yes, I have need of you.’
Something tickled the base of his neck. When he reached up, he found something firm but slimy, like a leech, but when he tried to rip it away, a pain rushed down his spine so sharply that he dropped to one knee.
‘You don’t need to show deference to us.’ The voice this time contained a hint of amusement. ‘We are honored enough that you dared to come.’
‘I have heard you are the best at what you do.’
‘There is no equal.’
‘Then I have use of you.’
‘Her name is Lianetta Jansen,’ the voice said. ‘Once she had honor. Now she has none.’
Leon-Ar started. ‘How can you know?’
The thing on his neck twitched in answer. Leon-Ar grimaced. It was reading his mind. Immediately he tried to blank out his thoughts, something that was both pointless—they had already taken their answers—and obvious, from the way the cliff seemed to chuckle.
‘A former military captain, discharged for betrayal and dishonesty. Earning a living as a mercenary and rogue trader. A smuggler. Handy with most weapons. Elusive.’
‘Attractive in a way that makes you hate her,’ Leon-Ar added before he could help himself. ‘A desirability so strong that you want to destroy her rather than let another have her.’
‘If the races descended from man always had what they desired, the universe would become chaos,’ came the voice of the Hispirians again. ‘You are as foolish as you are controlled by your physical being.’
The cliff began to shimmer. Before Leon-Ar’s eyes, several dozen snakes dropped from the small holes to the beach, then wove themselves into a human shape. When the form was almost complete, the whole being blurred, and Leon-Ar found himself staring at a single giant lizard dressed in grey steel body armor.
‘The Hispirians have decided to accept your offer,’ the creature said. ‘We will hunt and slay this Lianetta Jansen because her death presents a challenge. For your understanding, yours would not. Your death would neither be difficult nor remembered. However, you will remain alive in order that Lianetta Jansen’s slaying can be known. The Hispirians know no equals across the galaxy.’
‘Thank you.’
‘And this item you require recovered, it will be returned.’
The chip? He hadn’t mentioned the chip. He nodded, remembering that the creatures had read his mind. ‘I appreciate it. Should you wish for anything in return, just ask.’
‘There is nothing you possess that we require. Satisfaction alone is all that is necessary. It is the only thing we want which we do not have.’
‘I hope this will prove satisfying.’
‘Greatly so. Goodbye now. You will be notified of our success.’
With that, the creature dissolved into its component snakes, which climbed back up the cliff and disappeared again into the holes. Leon-Ar waited, wondering what might happen next, when a great roaring came from out of sight above the cliff, followed by the appearance of a long, sleek spacecraft. Needle-thin, it appeared to meander through the air like a snake as it blasted away into the sky. It became a line against the grey clouds, then was gone.
Leon-Ar sat down on the beach, feeling both a sense of satisfaction that his request had been granted, and frustration that he now had to sit here in the middle of this green swamp and wait for an entire day to pass before he would be picked up.
HARLAN5
The Matilda’s camouflaging system, which had worked so well for the first few hours, was malfunctioning. Instead of maintaining the design it had adopted upon landing, it was cycling through previous settings stored during visits to other worlds. At present, it was a deep purple, the color of the hills on the marsh-world of Larsisus, in the Event system, where they had dropped off some passengers travelling under assumed names.
Now, sitting against a dark green landscape, the Matilda looked like a giant purple bug, the kind of monstrosity that drew eyes rather than turned them away.
It wouldn’t be long before the ship attracted attention from Seen, and Harlan5 was keen to avoid the need to take off and leave Lia on the surface.
Caladan had proved of no use. The pilot had decided to take a few days’ deep sleep in one of the Matilda’s five recuperation pods, which, while not strictly an elixir of youth, bombarded its inhabitant with a concoction of radiation that at least made it appear so. Caladan, he claimed, was keen to rediscover something of his sexuality, in that he might take Lia to bed sometime, if she could overlook his physical shortcomings.
Neither the pod nor his efforts had worked yet, but he kept trying.
At least so he said. Harlan5 suspected Caladan had just tired of the droid’s conversation, something that his programming suggested Harlan5 should feel aggrieved about.
The malfunctioning camouflage unit was at least keeping his mind off his discontent, even if it was creating new pressures of its own. Harlan5 had tried to access the unit from the bridge computer, but had failed, so was now making his way down into the ship’s bowels to consult with the main storage computer, which contained the ship’s memory. Years ago, the systems had linked up, but like much of the Matilda, age, poor servicing and even poorer management had let her slip into disrepair.
As always, his programming told him he should be worried as he stomped along rarely-visited corridors where bundles of frayed wires hung from the ceiling and puffs of coolant from leaking pipes made it impossible to
see more than a few metres ahead. Thanks to a few jammed elevators, he had to take a frustratingly circuitous route through parts of the ship he had rarely been, once having to stop and tap into the mainframe through a linked terminus in an old crew quarter in order to consult a map.
At last he reached the main storage computer, kept in a cramped room in what felt like the very tail of the ship, even though in reality it was somewhere in the middle. Here, the heating systems barely worked, so the corridors were bitterly cold, something Harlan5 didn’t feel but liked to pretend he did in order to feel more A.I. He shook his old body in a human-like shiver, let out a puff of his own coolant to give the appearance that his breath was frosted, and muttered under his breath that it would be nice to see some warmer weather.
He was careful, of course. Everything he did was logged into a maintenance program, and if Caladan discovered his mimicry, the one-armed pilot would mock him from here to their next port of call. Harlan5’s programming told him he really needed to work on some good comebacks.
The main storage computer was sleeping, and took a few minutes to warm up. When it did, it quickly spewed forth a few million terabytes about the nature of the camouflage issue. Harlan5 filtered out the fluff to find the important part, and it was there, contained in a single line. Apparently a lever on level three was jammed. Harlan5 resolved to acquire an oil can somewhere on his return journey and go to fix it.
Something else was bothering the computer though. It was programmed to detect any anomalies in the Matilda’s systems, any unusual drains of power, unexplained links to mainframe systems, data being sent or received that was unauthorized. And on level two, not far from the ship’s entry hangar, something was showing up as wrong, a little program that had tapped into the Matilda’s power source and was sending out digital information and linking it to a rogue satellite for further distribution. If it was being beamed into stasis-ultraspace, then their location could be found by anyone searching for their signal across the known galaxy.
He instructed the main storage computer to cut off power and isolate the program, but, not recognising his authority—as some of the systems in the previously-stolen ship tended not to—it refused. Harlan5 had no choice but to stomp upstairs and deal with it manually.
He tried calling Caladan, but the pilot had disobeyed landing protocol and switched off his contact transmitter. It wasn’t unusual, but it was still frustrating. With his programming telling him that a scowl was the appropriate facial expression to use, Harlan5 disconnected from the main storage computer and headed back up to the entrance deck.
Inside an old first-aid locker, the contents of which had long ago been taken out and probably lost, he found a small, circular object that had a power needle inserted through the frayed casing of one of the Matilda’s cables. Harlan5 scanned it with his memory system, and thought it might have been Barelaon-made, but that was an assumption based on the simple fact that most objects of an antagonistic nature tended to be Barelaon-made. The Barelaons, being a naturally warring race which had so long ago left their home system in search of conquest that they no longer knew where it was, now lived in vast space-colonies that had the frustrating knack of popping out of stasis-ultraspace into systems that had just established a long sought-after lasting peace. Since driving them off often required total annihilation, their arrival often signified the onset of a couple of centuries of system-wide war, before the Barelaons were either destroyed utterly or got bored of fighting a common enemy and broke off into mercenary bands to fight each other.
Harlan5 tried to remember when the ship’s security had been breached, but an exact log of unauthorized access would require another long walk down to the main storage computer, so his programming told him he was tired and not to bother, but it was likely that during the stealing of the plans from the Grun cargo freighter, someone would have had time to sneak aboard, particularly as Caladan tended to forget to lock the doors.
His programming told him the little tracking beacon was a threat, so he removed it with one quick tug, then held it up in his hands to examine it more closely.
When its casing popped off, emitting a little electrical charge which air-dropped into his movement systems, paralysing them, he could only feel surprise in the absence of any pain. Something out in the receptors leading between his brain and his body had burned out, leaving him frozen to the spot.
He tried calling up Caladan again, even going so far as to add an emergency alert to the call, but Harlan5 had used the emergency alert once about a blockage in the water filtration system that had required Caladan to use his single arm to fish a decomposing freshwater urchin out of their drinking water, and afterward Caladan had switched it off. Even though Lianetta would likely scold the pilot, Harlan5 was stuck in place until someone either tried to get on the ship or off it.
Frustrated, he glared at the little object he had dropped on the floor with a look his programming told him ought to kill.
LIA
‘Raylan Climlee.’ Trina sipped a cup of Cable tea as she rolled the name over her tongue. ‘A warlord. He runs various trading operations in the asteroid belt surrounding Abalon 3. Most of his businesses are believed to operate below local law, but as with most of these scumbags, discreet payments in certain places and a lot of fear keep the system’s police at arm’s length.’
Lia sat on a stood in her mother’s small kitchen, her hands shaking with rage. The name was more than familiar; it was burned into her memory. She had crossed the murderous dwarf’s path before, back in her military police days.
‘I know him.’
‘Don’t tell me you’ve traded with him? Oh, Lia—’
‘No.’ Lia paused. It took a few seconds to figure out how to get the words off her tongue. ‘He had my family killed.’
‘You don’t know who was responsible—’
Lia shook her head. ‘I do. I never told you what happened. I couldn’t … bear to. I received a message one Earth-week after Davir and Colm’s deaths. It contained just two lines: Payment has been made for services received. A pleasure doing business.’
‘How can you know that was him?’
‘It’s close enough. It was his smuggling operation on Brentar in the Phevius System that my crew shut down. You asked why I disappeared; that’s why. That and that I lost total faith in my profession. I was court-marshaled and demoted to sub-lieutenant rank because higher officers than me were receiving benefits for turning a blind eye. I was a maverick because I followed the rules, and the rules destroyed my job and got my family killed.’
‘You never told me.’
‘I never told anyone. This is the first time I’ve spoken about it. I can’t. I turned myself into a different person because I cannot face the death of my husband and son. I blindly pursued law and order, and what did I get for it? I suffer every day. It is better that they never existed.’
Trina put a hand on Lia’s arm. Lia tried not to cry, but the tears came unbidden. Even in the presence of her mother they were unwelcome, but she waited them out. Trina said nothing, just patted Lia’s arm in rhythm with each sob, until Lia was done.
‘I have to stay focused,’ Lia said. ‘It’s the only way. So, tell me, why has Raylan Climlee resurfaced on Abalon 3 and what need does he have of a virus? I was told I was recovering stolen military plans in a fight against insurgents, not something that constitutes genocide.’
‘News passes through me here in Cable,’ Trina said. ‘Knowledge is power, and I always hoped I’d hear news of you. You’re my only daughter, after all. When I hear something big, I ask the right people the right questions.’
‘What’s he doing up there? He’s never gone beyond smuggling and drug running.’
‘I heard he bought up an old mining operation on one of Abalon 3’s moons a few Earth-years ago and from then became the dominant operator in the region. Trioxyglobin. You know what that is?’
Lia nodded. ‘It’s used for starship fuel. Lasts for years, burns practica
lly forever.’
‘I heard the mines are practically dry. Of course, the other fire planets have massive operations, but Abalon 3 has always been protected, used by sand farmers. My sources claim Raylan wants a piece of the action.’
‘So he wants to drive the Abaloni out?’
Trina sighed and shook her head. ‘That’s the military police captain in you speaking. Raylan Climlee is a businessman. Think like one.’
Lia frowned, then nodded. ‘If the Abaloni got sick, it would make it easier to get hold of the land.’
‘The Abaloni, who are half-machine, never get sick. But say they don’t just get sick, but they get wiped out by a plague. Extra-planetary mining operators often have a contractual clause giving them first rights on planetary operations that become available. Plus, Raylan has half of the Trill System’s government in his back pocket. Do you see how easy it would be for him to buy up most of the planet for his mines?’
‘All it takes is a little covert slaughter.’
‘Exactly. You have to destroy your copy of that virus, Lia. Destroy it, then get as far away as possible.’
Lia wanted to agree, but the memory of what had happened to her family held her back. Sure, the old message had been unsigned, and Raylan Climlee definitely wasn’t the only warlord whose operations she had tried to shut down during her time in the GMP, but the connection was too close.
And now she knew where he was.
‘I’ll do what I can,’ she said.
‘You mean you’ll go after him.’
‘Mother—’
Trina rolled her eyes. ‘My word, you always were a headstrong little so-and-so, even as a child. Do you want to follow Davir and Colm?’
Lia shook her head. ‘No. I want to avenge them.’
‘Or die in the process.’
‘If that’s what it takes.’
‘Don’t be a fool, Lia.’
‘You don’t understand. Until now I had no way to get near him. He’s a paranoid little munchkin, likely hidden away behind a fleet of ships and a wall of guards, but this … this is a way in.’