by Mark Wandrey
After he choked down the food and stuffed the garbage in the little chute extruded for that purpose, he began his daily calisthenics before they turned off the gravity again. That was when a little screen came alive by the door. He stood up and faced it in surprise.
“Human.”
“Yes?” he replied and gave a little bow. Must keep decorum.
“A deal has been struck for your return. You are lucky, the crew is as bored with rations as you are and were beginning to bargain on what you tasted like.”
“I’m flattered.”
The Tanam who spoke seemed to consider it a compliment and nodded. “As your status has increased you will be moved to better accommodations on my vessel.”
“Can I have the owner of knowing this vessel’s name?”
She considered him for a moment then gave a snapping yelp. The translator considered for a moment then spoke. “Tail Snapper.”
“A fine ship’s name,” Aaron lied and smiled. The captain bought it and nodded again.
“Your exchange is in five days, we are making space to hand you off. You have been a compliant prisoner,” and she signed off. Aaron had the distinct feeling that the last part was not a compliment.
Despite the promise of better accommodations, Aaron went through his routine in case he had to spend another night in the room. But as promised, the warrior who’d always brought his food arrived two hours later, opened the doorway, and allowed him to exit.
“You are valuable for a human,” the warrior said.
“And you don’t stink too bad for a cat,” he replied. The translator again rendered it as a compliment and the warrior nodded. Aaron sighed at the hopelessness of insulting them subtly and walked in the indicated direction.
Compared to Lilith’s ship, the Tanam ship’s passageways were cavernous, easily twice as wide and half again as tall, owing to the size of its crew. And there were a lot of them. In the five minutes they walked together, including two trips up zero gravity tubes between decks, he counted twenty warriors and twice that many ship’s crew (identifiable by their utilitarian dress, less facial tattooing, and that many were smaller males).
He made an assumption that the ship was much less automated and filed it away for later. Maybe he’d get to see some of the engineering spaces or the bridge? They’d covered his head with a bag while transporting him in a craft and been careful enough that he hadn’t known for sure he was even in a ship until now. Even with the larger crew, the ship seemed no larger than the Kaatan. So a frigate or corvette?
They’d just reached what Aaron assumed was his new home when an ungodly screeching erupted from the corridor and green light bars began to pulse along all the surfaces. The warrior who’d been escorting him cocked its head and looked both ways in surprise.
“What’s going on?” Aaron asked. The sound was horrendous, but the green lights had him disarmed.
“Battle,” she snapped, black fangs dripping saliva.
“But—” Aaron started to say.
The Tanam opened the door and shoved him in with a quick push from a middle arm and the door slid closed. A second later the ship shuddered from an unmistakable weapons impact. He dearly hoped his daughter wasn’t about to kill her father accidentally. The feeling of drastic acceleration and movements of equipment within the hull was equally impossible to misconstrue. The Tanam were fighting back.
Almost right away he was jerked off his feet and flung across the floor. This vessel’s gravitic technology was not nearly as developed as the Kaatan. He looked around the spartan cabin, desperately looking for somewhere to strap down, and found nothing. At least there was a padded platform, probably the bed, and a chair not designed for his physiology. He dove into the bed, lay on his stomach and grabbed on for all he was worth.
Trying to interpret what was happening was almost worse than the beating he took. The ship absorbed fire several time then seemed to try and make a run for it, only to then begin radical course changes.
“You’re outmatched,” Aaron said aloud. Could it be Lilith coming to rescue him? How could she possibly know where he was or what ship he was on?
Then came the horrible sound of a direct impact against the hull. It made the craft ring like a bell and the sound of crunching duoalloy and moliplass transferred along its length like an echo chamber. Another impact, this was making the lights flicker, and the gravity failed. The ship was defeated.
“A space suit might be a good idea,” he wondered aloud and pushed off the bed. Dim recessed greenish tinted lights came alive and showed him the interior of the cabin enough to move around. There was a locker next to the door. Empty. And none of the controls worked either. Plus they were all written in Tanam script.
“Where’s the button for catnip?” Lots of green flashing indicators he figured were problems, and one yellow tab. Curious, he pressed it.
The door made a pinging noise and Aaron eyed it curiously. Upon closer examination he found a little recessed loop was now accessible. No doubt made for a Tanam claw, his fingers were a poor substitute in tensile strength. Still he managed to get two index fingers through and grunted past the sheering pain as he pulled the door upward enough to float through.
Outside a solitary Tanam male was up to his waist in an access panel. Dozens of smoldering components were floating all over the corridor and he was fishing through his equipment bag for replacements. The air reeked of overloaded circuitry and burned cat hair.
Aaron floated past the male technician. Even a non-combative Tanam was several hundred kilos of cat he didn’t want to mess with. At the end of the corridor was a vertical shaft. He was just trying to decide up or down when “whoomph!” went the hull and his ears popped.
“We’re breached,” he said aloud and spun around. He pushed off with his legs and rocketed past his former cabin and the still occupied Tanam. As he figured, this direction led to the hull. Already the air was moving in a slight breeze as he found the outline of an airlock.
No-one was inside so he slid in looked at the controls, all in Tanam. Grabbing his translator pendant he pushed it against the controls and listened as it read off the options one at a time.
“Come on,” he growled as it talked of pressure equalization, lighting, safety override, all the while he was breathing harder as the air got thinner. Finally the translator said ‘cycle interior door closed’.
He blinked tears from his eyes to see the translator’s tiny screen and jabbed at that icon. The inside door whirred closed with a thump and air rushed in.
He watched the hallway through a window no more than twenty centimeters across. Small bits of debris whirled by for a time as the ship decompressed to vacuum. Afterward he checked the locker inside. It held six Tanam vacuum suits and a pair of beamcaster rifles.
The suits were easily three times too big, but they were a backup. Using the pendant he read off the lock’s displays until he found the oxygen telltale. It had its own supply now estimated at six hours, the suits probably several more hours each as well. He also checked the beamcasters. Loaded. So he had a couple days, and could fight.
The wall against his shoulder vibrated and he pushed over to the airlock door just in time to avoid dying. A beamcaster bolt penetrated the inside door and burned a fused line of slag into the exterior door. Air began to rush out.
With no more options, he clambered into one of the six legged cat suits and clumsily pulled it closed. There were locks in the gauntlets to allow the cats’ claws to penetrate through. He almost screamed in pain as he shoved a pair of fingers through to pull closed the magnetic seals. The lock was almost in vacuum by the time he got his fingers back inside. He pulled his arms into the spacious interior of the suits and rubbed them. They felt almost frozen.
The icons on the suit’s HUD all showed yellow. He knew green was bad, so hopefully yellow was good. The pressure was light but the air was sufficient, so he got his legs through by scrunching up the abdomen as much as possible and pushed back over to the do
or.
A firefight was going on outside. His airlock door was throwing a meter long plume of white mist into the corridor as it gamely tried to maintain an atmosphere and likely would until it exhausted its supply. He saw four Tanam, their backs against the end of the corridor and in combat armor firing furiously down the corridor.
The space outside was so flooded with billowing mist from his lock and whirling debris he couldn’t see who the cats were fighting. He thought he spotted a pair of scurrying crab-bots before another bolt nearly took his head off. He pushed backwards and wedged himself into the suit locker for the most safety he could afford.
The airlock door was five centimeters of dualloy and he could still feel the electric shiver of particle accelerators as the cats exchanged beamcaster fire. He looked in the lock and couldn’t find any defensive shield or forcefields. He took hold of a beamcaster rifle as best he could (without exposing his fingers to vacuum again) and prepared. After another few minutes, the shooting stopped. Someone had won the engagement. The question was who?
After a time, the wall reverberated from an impact, and then another. Someone was beating on the lock door. He decided to remain where he was and after a minute, a well-controlled plasma beam started cutting into the lock. It only took seconds of robotic precision to proscribe a half meter wide circular cut and the chunk of airlock door drifted inward. As he’d expected a crab-bot stuck its ‘head’ in and scanned the room.
“Maybe it will miss me,” he wondered, just as the head locked on him. He considered shooting the bot. Considered it just long enough that the option was removed as the head retreated.
He fully expected a pair of dragonfly-bots or worse to dart in and fill him with holes. What he didn’t expect was a tiny figure in combat armor, just small enough to fit through the hole, to wiggle through and deftly catch the edge of the lock with its lower appendages and produce a pair of miniature beamcasters to point at him.
The faceplate of the armor was polarized providing no detail of the occupant. It was no more than a meter long, fairly squat in appearance, with forelimbs longer than the rearward ones. It shimmered from its active shield and its weapons were trained with ambidextrous precision. Aaron let the rifle go with a gentle push and it floated across the lock away from him.
The visitor slapped one of its weapons onto its side (where it stuck) and with incredible grace swung closer. He tried to push back a little farther into the locker. It reached out and he saw its armored gauntlet ended in grasping claws, not like the long serrated ones of the Tanam. It tapped his faceplate and cocked its helmet slightly. Aaron realized his faceplate must be polarized.
The soldier was curious who was in the suit. It must have been quite obvious that whoever occupied it wasn’t Tanam, as scrunched up as Aaron was forced to make the abdomen so he could get his legs and arms through and head high enough to look out the faceplate (the Tanam necks were annoyingly long). He held up his arms in a helpless gesture.
“I don’t know the controls?” he said, though he knew the other wouldn’t hear it across vacuum.
The attempt to communicate failed and the armored figure pressed a beamcaster pistol against Aaron’s head. He yelped and yanked an arm out of its sleeve, retrieved his translator, and managed to wedge it into the helmet against the tiny HUD.
“I hope this works.” Sure enough, it began reciting controls. An entire sweat soaked minute later, “Depolarize Helmet” was listed and he jabbed it with his chin.
The other pulled the gun away and seemed to be having some kind of spasms. Coughing? Sneezing? No, the damn thing was laughing! Aaron let the pendant go and lifted his middle finger. “Up yours, shorty.”
The other cocked its head and touched helmets. Squeaking chatter echoed through and was instantly rendered by his translator. “You are welcome, human.”
Aaron was wondering where he’d heard that language before when the warrior depolarized its own helmet and there was a furry face, quivering whiskers, and dark black eyes. Buck teeth were visible in an unmistakable smile.
“You are now our prisoner,” the Squeen told him.
Chapter 79
September 19th, 534 AE
Office of the First, Fort Jovich, Peninsula Tribe Territory, Bellatrix
Five days remained before the prisoner exchange with the Tanam on Coorson and Minu was pretty sure everything was ready. The last off-world transfer was late the previous night. The council put up no fuss over the one thousand beamcasters. The price was considered light.
There was some grumbling from the planetary government over the hundred thousand tons of wheat, but despite the unpredictable weather because of the sun, harvests were excellent. It wouldn’t even effect a decimal place in humanity’s profits this quarter. Besides, if the bigger plan worked out the food income would no longer be necessary.
She oversaw last night the official transfer of all business interests of the Rasa to their own people. It made zero sense to control their offworld sales, and even less to take half the profits.
They took all the chances developing the algae protein harvesting operations on Remus, and what little material costs there had been must have been repaid a thousand fold by now. They would continue to pay the Peninsula tribe for the lease of their land for Lizardville though, Var’at had insisted on that.
They hadn’t worked out how to begin raising sheep and vineyards on Remus… yet. The first of their young were bonding and Rasa schools were operating. Their species was returning from the brink, and that made Minu feel better since humanity bore some of the responsibility for where they had found themselves.
The sun was just coming up over the equatorial sea. The sea was tinged a light red hinting at yet another storm soon, but for now it was calm and a flotilla of fishing boats were racing out into the waters. Work while you can, Minu smiled and turned back to her computer just as her communicator squeaked.
“First Groves,” she said and Ted Hurt’s face appeared. It was fuzzy with distorted interference.
“ –class at least –
“Ted, enhance your signal, I didn’t get that.”
He turned sideways and his image went blurrier for an instant then cleared. “How is this?”
“Much better, what’s going on?”
“X class flare from Bellatrix, just happened about five minutes ago. The corona is at least a hundred thousand miles wide, you should see it!”
“Oh no, aimed?”
“Right at the planet, Minu. I’m up on Romulus with some Chosen scientists and Rasa techs working on the power scheme. This facility’s sensors are more powerful than our orbiting satellites.” Minu did some quick calculations. This was bad.
“Keep your heads down, I need to warn the planetary governments!”
Ted nodded and his face disappeared. She brought up her main computer account and triggered the planetary emergency action control. All the Chosen forts were instantly put on alert and her communications went straight into each tribe’s government offices, emergency management agencies, and news media. All over the planet TV broadcasts were being pre-empted and her face was appearing. She hoped she didn’t have egg in her teeth.
“This is an emergency action message from the Chosen. An X-class solar flare has just erupted from our sun and is aimed directly at Bellatrix. Seek shelter immediately if you are on the dayside of the planet. All power distribution hubs will shut down in ten minutes, I repeat, all power distribution hubs will shut down in ten minutes!”
* * *
The storm of charged particles slammed into the planet of Bellatrix like the edge of a tsunami, bending and quickly breaking its miniscule magnetic field. Unlike Earth, the planet’s core was nearly cool and the planet had little defense. Electricity built up on all metallic surfaces and arced wildly between metal buildings and cars.
In Plateau a pair of businessmen trying to secure their load of refrigerated produce were electrocuted as a ten thousand volt bolt of electricit
y jumped from the trailer, through one man, then the other, and then to ground. Their bodies were not found for hours after the danger had passed.
Two Chosen transports were caught in the air trying to outrace the storm to the night side of the planet. One made it with only minor electrical damage, the other found its gravitic impellers shorted out completely and plummeted into the ground at two hundred kilometers per hour, killing all four aboard.
Generally luck was with the humans of Bellatrix. Aside from a few hundred burns from static discharge and untold fried power lines and farm implements (the flare hit the farming center of the Rusk territory dead center), those were the only deaths. Remus was on the far side of the planet, shielded by its primary, and those on Romulus were deep underground and shielded quite adequately.
Six hours later in the mid-afternoon, everyone emerged to survey the damage. Some delicate plants were harmed, and a few pets killed as well, but that was the extent of it. Media all over the planet heralded Minu and her Chosen once again as heroes.
Late that evening, Minu met with the science department to discuss the event.
“Could it have been worse?” she asked them.
“Not really,” Bjorn assured her. Ted’s image floated over the table along with a Rasa researcher who specialized in stellar physics. “At least until the sun flares.”
They’d long lived under the threat of their blue-white star killing them all. The overeating behemoth would continue to gradually get hotter for eons until it either collapsed in on itself or shed a spectral class and settled down.
The Lost had used Romulus to move their planet intermittently to make sure it stayed out of range of such stellar phenomenon. Scientists went as far as suggesting the planet had probably started life far outside the so called ‘goldilocks zone’ (not too hot, not too cold) and was moved to its habitable zone to be terraformed.
“Solutions?” she asked them.
“Use the generators on Romulus to create a planetary shield,” Jasmine suggested. As head of the science department, she had access to more scientific knowledge than just about any human on the planet. “We can set up a couple field boosters in orbit using the Phoenix shuttles and bring the whole thing on line when threatened.