by Chris Ward
Trina wiped away a tear. ‘I don’t want to lose you, Lia. You’re all I have left, even though you’ve been as good as gone from my life this past Earth-decade.’
Lia reached out and pulled her mother into a hug. ‘Ah, Mum, you know I’ll be back when I need something. Isn’t that what children are supposed to do?’
Trina laughed. ‘You just make sure of it. I wish I could come with you on this suicide mission, but my place is here, and I’m so old I’d only slow you down.’
‘You could stay on the ship and play cards with Caladan,’ Lia said.
‘Oh? Do you have a new man now?’
Lia almost choked. ‘No! He’s my pilot. He only has one arm, and no … okay, we don’t need to go there.’
‘Well, it’s not all about physical appearance, is it?’
‘Mum, just stay away from there. I’m a num—isn’t what they were called? Those women who wore black and white cloaks and hid in old buildings.’
‘Nun,’ Trina corrected. ‘Well, it would at least keep you safe.’
They eventually said goodbye, and Lia headed off back to the ship. On the way, she took a detour through Seen to buy a few weapons on the black market. It wasn’t hard to find a dealer when you knew how to look; you just picked the seediest, darkest alleyways and kept your hand on your blaster.
Often, all you had to do was ask. Boys loitering between stacks of bins had two purposes: one was personal, the other was as informants for whomever might be hidden out of sight. Within minutes, Lia had procured herself a handful of palm grenades—tiny devices you hid under synthetic folds in the skin of your palm to keep them safe from detection, but powerful enough to blow through most starship doors—a long-range laser-rifle used for sniping, but compactable so that it folded up into a rectangular box that could hang from a belt like a hipflask—and a new blaster battery, to replace the one of hers that had been misfiring for a long time. Prices were cheaper than expected, and while she received a couple of offers for favors that would cut the cost further, she declined.
Once suitably armed, she felt it only appropriate that she get drunk. She found a dive bar, the kind frequented by other lost souls, and took her pick of imported off-world drinks, paying with credits she had made from delivering goods over the years to people who likely made far more. As she sank deeper and deeper into a drunken despair, reflecting over so many lost nights and hangover days, a decade-long aftermath to the loss of her beloved family, she had one of those moments of clarity where she wondered if what she was doing with her life made any sense at all. Morality wasn’t something she cared greatly about, not since justice and fairness had turned its screw and taken her husband and son, but every once in a while she got the urge to smarten up her life, find some kind of path that wouldn’t lead to an eventual painful death. Whenever the memories stirred, though, as always, she reached for the self-destruct button.
Bristling with hidden weaponry, she got as drunk as she needed, then took her pick of the other customers, an out-of-work fighter pilot who claimed to be from Dove in the Areola System. They shared a bed for a while, during which time Lia figured out from his limp efforts that he probably wasn’t a fighter pilot, but the first mate on a long, slow, deep-space barge. Lia left him snoring and headed back out, loaded down with her new weaponry, while also taking what tip she felt was appropriate from the pilot’s money pouch—all of it, currency from four systems which might come in useful further down the line.
Angrily hungover in the chilling air of Seen’s pre-dawn, Lia turned her thoughts to her new focus:
Raylan Climlee.
She could already feel her hands around his shriveled dwarf’s neck. She would need to be sure: he would have to confess before she killed him, so that she knew for certain his mercenaries had killed her husband and child. She wanted to look into his eyes as he begged forgiveness, then watch the light fade, the movement going still, as she squeezed the life out of him.
She caught a transport heading out into the suburbs, the towering townscape of Seen falling away behind her. Somewhere along the line it had become night, and now day was once more upon her, and grey clouds were rising over the horizon as a strip of color slowly worked its way over grassland spotted with outlying villages toward the city. She remembered where they had landed the Matilda, in a hollow just beyond a ridge overlooking Seen. She alighted from the transport as it turned back on its arc to collect commuting workers, and made the last of the climb on foot.
The Matilda should have blended in with the surroundings, but Lia found the ship pulsing orange like a piece of Cable’s sun that had fallen to earth. The camouflaging system had been misfiring a long time, but she wondered why Harlan5 hadn’t fixed it.
As a bird screeched in the grass as though caught in the jaws of an enthusiastic cat, Lia stopped, dropping into a crouch.
Something was wrong. She felt for the blaster on her belt, eyes scanning the ship sitting in the hollow.
Then she realised.
The Matilda’s hatchway was open.
10
HIBERIAN-ORST
The Slither-14 Ultra-Space Fighter was homemade. Created out of the stored information taken from thousands of visiting minds, it had nevertheless required hundreds of Earth-years of building from scrounged materials before the Hiberians could take to the skies. It wasn’t easy to create metal sheeting or build radiation-burning thrusters when your base components were pieces of metal collected by small snakes. But still, it had been done, and when the Slither blasted off into stasis-ultraspace in search of the species’ latest challenge, Hiberian-Orst, one of the oldest and most accomplished of his kind, could feel the collective gasp of awe from the rest of his race.
Together with Hiberian-Soth, they raced across the charted galaxy to the Estron Quadrant, something that alone was a great challenge to be overcome. Nothing terrified snakes more than fire, perhaps from some long-passed-into-myth situation that had become an evolved memory. The tail always twitched at the mere thought of it.
The ship’s monitors told him everything he needed to know as they approached, like a history lesson for assassins. The Estron Quadrant consisted of seven systems, each with three to seven habitable planets. Within each, though, there were another five to nine fire planets, planets on which the atmosphere was rich with trioxyglobin, an extremely flammable substance that had a tendency to burst into flame without warning, scorching great swathes of the planets’ surfaces. Life on such planets was harsh and uncertain, but at the same time, the trioxyglobin had begun a revolution in starship technology, the kind of long-range fuel which had made fuel-consuming stasis-ultraspace jumps and inter-system trips to distant, outlying planets not only possible, but commonplace. Some hundred-thousand Earth-years after the substance’s use had been discovered, and the known galaxy was an ever-expanding connection of wars, villainy, and other debauchery, of which no single system could ever have comprehended.
They burst out of stasis-ultraspace into orbit around Cable, third planet in the Trill System. The tracking code which Leon-Ar’s mind had provided immediately popped into life, and on their computer monitor they found exact coordinates to the spacecraft known as the Matilda. Grounded just outside the planet’s capital city of Seen, she sat waiting for their arrival.
Hiberian-Orst and Hiberian-Soth left the Slither in orbit and took a planetary shuttle down to the surface. They found a spot a few Earth-miles south of the Matilda, then broke into their component parts to make the journey. Had locals noticed a hive of snakes slithering through the grass over a distance of several hundred metres, they might have suspected a forest fire somewhere nearby.
Even though several of their component parts were consumed by local fauna during the journey, most reassembled in sight of the Matilda. Hiberian-Orst offered a couple of his components to Hiberian-Soth, who had lost part of an arm, but the other Hiberian’s sense of pride overcame him and he refused.
The first requirement was to gain entry to the ship. Dep
loying two of their smallest component parts, but two containing great intelligence stolen over long years of reading minds, they searched the Matilda’s surface for some imperfection where a breach could be made. The ship had clearly not been serviced in a long time—possibly ever—and soon the two microscopic vipers found a space-rusted chink in the ship’s body armor through which they could burrow. Once inside, they set about locating the security systems and unlocking the doors.
It wasn’t hard. The Matilda was a positive relic by starship standards, even out here in the Fire Quarter, where few shipping companies sent their best craft due to the constant threat of pirate attacks, and the junk that ended up for sale in the asteroid trading yards ranked among the worst in the known galaxy. It was a ship that should have been scrapped long ago, even if its outward appearance of a crouched tarantula appealed to the Hiberians’ sense of familiarity.
When the doors fizzed and slid open, Hiberian-Orst and Hiberian-Soth stood up and strode across the clearing to the ship with the swagger and confidence of beings who knew the hard work was done, and all that remained was to finish cleaning up.
The signal they had followed across the known galaxy ended inside the door, at a small round shape lying on the ground. Nearby, a lump of metal in a vaguely human shape stood motionless, occasional flickers in the ports that likely acted as eyes the only sign that it might be more than something awkwardly placed in the way of the doors.
Their components connected to the mainframe computer told them a humanoid lifeform was present, currently engaged in a private recuperation chamber. Hiberian-Orst instructed the components to disengage the chamber and release the humanoid from its hold. Then, hoping this was Lianetta Jansen, they went to meet it.
The creature that stumbled out of the hatch, its only hand rummaging in frightfully unkempt hair that was a mirror image of the thrush that hung from its chin, was clearly not a woman. Hiberian-Orst instructed a group of component parts to quickly restrain it, while they prepared a leech for mindreading.
‘What is this, a hijack?’ the creature said in common speech. A Farsi, Hiberian-Orst, recognised from his memory banks, a human subspecies which shared most of the same characteristics as their master species, baring slightly larger facial features, an extra toe, and an average lifespan of an extra ten to twenty years. Unconfirmed reports claimed they had a stronger natural body odour and an extended sense of laziness, but his files had stored this information under unconfirmed, possible racial prejudice.
‘A hijack,’ Hiberian-Orst said, copying the Farsi’s speech but adding a sibilant ring that made the creature’s eyebrows bounce with alarm. Its one arm reached for a weapon hung from its waist, but Hiberian-Soth’s component parts were too swift, removing the weapon and pinning the creature’s single arm to its side.
The Farsi groaned when the leech was attached, at first with discomfort, then with pleasure as serotonin was injected into its bloodstream. A relaxed captive gave up its secrets far more easily.
Within a couple of minutes, the leech had taken all useful information. The Matilda was on a smuggling mission that had gone awry after an attack on a previous stop. The target, Lianetta Jansen, had gone into Seen for an undisclosed reason. While she had taken the original copy of the smuggled goods—stolen for and then stolen from Leon-Ar—a duplicate of the information had been copied to the ship’s main computer.
Several component parts got to work retrieving the goods, and within a few minutes they had infiltrated the mainframe and retrieved the information, naively neither filed out of sight or encrypted, instead sitting on top of the main hard drive like a spot waiting to be picked.
In the meantime, Hiberian-Orst arranged the Farsi’s memories into a profile of their target.
Lianetta Jansen, of unknown age but in the thirty to forty Earth-years’ range, fit, strong, sexually promiscuous and prone to trouble—often caused by excessive drinking and a lack of anger management—and follower of a complex moral code. Fiercely protective of anyone within her close circle—despite subjecting them to relentless trauma, not limited to physical abuse, emotional blackmail, and social rejection—but combative and heartless toward anyone without. Dangerous, as much for her unpredictability as for her skill with weapons, her greatest flaw was an inability to prevent past issues from clouding and influencing her present decisions.
In short, a target not to be taken lightly, but one that could be taken easily if a few simple rules were followed.
Killing the Farsi had been high priority. However, it now appeared a hostage situation might prove more successful. A group of component parts headed into the Matilda’s corridors and returned with several lengths of wire rope, with which the Farsi was tied to the immobile metal thing near the door, in the hope that Lianetta Jansen would spot it upon her return.
In order to illustrate their deadliness, Hiberian-Orst commanded several component parts to remove by forcible pulling alternative strands of the Farsi’s beard, thinning it by exactly half, while inflicting great pain on the prisoner. After eight hundred removed strands, the Farsi passed out, but the cries and moans of agony during the first few hundred had warmed Hiberian-Orst’s reptilian blood.
It was said in many prisons around the known galaxy that pain was the one thing that made you feel alive.
When the punishment was over, Hiberian-Orst and Hiberian-Soth broke their entire bodies down into component parts and assumed predatory positions across the whole approach to the ship, as well as inside the main entrance. When Lianetta Jansen arrived, she would be sure to find a terrible surprise waiting for her.
While letting the main controlling section of his mind remain in a larger component part coiled up in a wind-twisted grassland bush twenty paces from the entrance, Hiberian-Orst wished he had the ability to smile.
11
LIA
Something wasn’t right. Caladan was as useless at times as letting a small child play with a very complicated toy, but even he wasn’t stupid enough to leave the main doors wide open. It just wasn’t a done thing. Even on a relatively docile world like Cable, countless hostilities still existed. To a star cruiser captain, the Matilda wasn’t worth spare parts, but to the kind of subsistence farmer scraping an existence out of the barren hills around the city, even a few small parts could be worth a hundred years of getting drunk and laid. You didn’t let your guard down, ever.
She crept closer. Something slithered through the grass at her feet and she stamped it, finding the crushed head of a little viper under her boot. Snakes. She shivered. There were few things she hated more. Weak wine and Raylan Climlee probably took the top two spots, but snakes would make the top ten, without a doubt. Even the amiable, talking off-world reptilian species sent a tingle of disgust down her back when she was sharing a drink while making a business transaction. You could make a man out of a snake, but you could never take the snake out of a man.
Where was Harlan5? The droid, stolen and reprogrammed to carry out all the work neither she nor Caladan wanted to do, was a stickler for rules and regulations. Unless he had been damaged, he would at least have closed the doors.
Perhaps the ship was malfunctioning again. She had planned to get a cheap service done after the payment came in for the delivery of some forged political documents she had run to Dove, but she had found her way into a casino and lost the lot just a couple of days later.
It was helpful to keep one’s wits about them, but from time to time everyone could be forgiven a little slip.
She pulled the newly charged blaster from her belt and crept forward, wishing the open moorland offered better cover than the odd half-buried rock.
The Matilda, looming over her, wasn’t the most picaresque of ships, but she had a certain charm. Unlike many space-built starships, her arachnid design allowed her to land on planets’ surfaces, and though while landed she looked like a half-dead spider with its legs bunched up to its body, during take-off her legs were spread in a magnificent snowflake shape, and then
in flight they slotted into each other beneath the ship, leaving her a neat circle. For high-speed travel, she could elongate into an attractive oval—like a teardrop, Caladan had once claimed after a little whisky and a lot of reminiscing—but of course, the only time Lia ever saw the Matilda from outside, she looked like a metallic monstrosity that belonged in a zoo for ugly robots.
Another snake slithered past her foot, and she crushed it as she had the first, feeling her skin crawl. Looking back at the Matilda, she felt a determination to hold on to it. It wasn’t much, but it was hers, kind of. That it was technically stolen didn’t really matter, not when the previous owner was likely dead.
The entrance hatch loomed. Twelve feet tall, it made even Harlan5’s towering frame look small. Something odd attracted her attention as she reached the retractable support pillars—a layer of slime on one which could have been scraped from the back of some detestable scaled creature. Lia tensed her finger on her blaster.
She was halfway up when she saw what had become of her crew.
Harlan5 stood rooted to the spot, a light in his eyes flickering, but otherwise an immobile lump of metal. Something had disabled his circuits—an enemy, or a trap. Even more of a shock was Caladan, tied to Harlan5’s front with a disorganised assortment of wires. He looked somehow different, as though he had spent the afternoon at the barbers. His beard had frizzed out, and what remained was mottled with something dark.
Blood, she realised.
Every instinct screamed at her to run.
Lia lifted her blaster, pointing it into the ship.
‘Come out,’ she whispered.
From everywhere, something jumped out at her. The trap had been set on every flat surface, an invisible sheet of something living that now connected as it moved into a thick, sticky web that encircled her, squeezing tight. Slime filled her eyes and nose, seeking to close up her senses, lock her down.