Mutant Hunter

by Tobias Roote

  Grady looked at the sensors and seeing that they were approaching from the same vector of space they had just vacated made the assumption that somehow he had not shaken off the Angels and they were now after him again. He was caught in a trap between the Core navy and their paid assassins.

  He detected a sound behind him and looked over his shoulder. Shrilla was standing in the doorway, a little unsteady, but looking at the sensors from where she stood.

  “What have I missed ?” she enquired.

  “Not a lot, except we seem to be in the pincers of a trap and I’m trying to figure out how we can get out of it.” In truth, Grady had no idea what to do next other than to embrace the blockade and attempt to run it all guns blazing in the highly unlikely hope they could slip through.

  He prepared to choose the route between ships he deemed less capable of chasing him, but that meant he would run the gauntlet between two of the most powerful Core navy battleships out there which were also the slowest. They were heavily armoured, bristling with guns and shielded. He would make no impact on them whatsoever with his puny armaments. However, they would be able to target him at long range. He doubted their close range guns would be a problem and they were less capable of giving chase which could give him an edge. He needed to divert their attention somehow.

  As if in answer to his unspoken thought his voicecom burst into life.

  “Grady - Citrix, come in,” the voice hailed them.

  Grady looked at the private frequency and recognised the voice. He realised that at least one of the ships coming up behind them was an ally, which made him wonder at the second ship.

  “This is Grady,” he asked cautiously.

  “Grady, this is Dalt. Do you intend to run the blockade ?”

  “Yes. Who is your companion ?” Grady asked, cautious of the other ship.

  “A friend who has the means to aid you.”

  Shrilla was scanning the data feed pulling up the information that Ario was compiling. She whispered to him, “This doesn’t look good, I think at least one of those ships has to be the one that shot us out of the sky back on Archon-5.”

  Grady looked at her, the surprise evident on his face. The thought that Dalt and his team were working alongside assassins didn’t seem right, but then he vaguely remembered a murmur during his training in the DIA of the Angels being a distant offshoot of the Dispersalistas. A renegade bunch that had turned to pirating Core interests. So, Dalt had the means to co-opt them into assisting him. Interesting, but confirmation was needed.

  “Or, equally the means to sink us ?” Grady shot back through the comms warily with the obvious reference to the shuttle attack.

  There was a slight delay before the response came back,

  “Yes ! A misunderstanding. It is resolved,” Dalt replied convincingly.

  Grady sighed with relief and looked at Shrilla who looked very unconvinced, but kept her own council on her thoughts.

  Both the other ships were close enough to open fire. The three of them still remained undiscovered by the Core fleet thanks to the DIA transponder neutralisers which wouldn’t broadcast their nature, or position in direct contravention of Inter-space law, but not a law that the Dispersalists had been inclined to ever abide.

  Grady was tempted to activate his targeting which would have immediately painted the three ships on the Core sensors. They had scant minutes before discovery. Grady had to make a decision. He looked at Shrilla who was highly suspicious of his conversation with the other ship, but he had no time to explain so smiled reassuringly at her as he keyed the microphone.

  “I need a diversion,” was all he said.

  “Understood. Your present direction will place you between the two battleships. A risky manoeuvre, but worthy of merit if you follow my instructions, I believe you can succeed. You must power down your engines and all equipment, and run completely blind. We will take the starboard flank while you proceed on your chosen course. It will enable you to ‘float’ past and beneath them. With luck they will ignore you and concentrate their fire against the two of us. We will hopefully have enough fire-power to keep them occupied until you are clear. “

  Grady knew that Dalt was recommending a course of action that might possibly result in his own ship being destroyed as well as the other unknown ‘ally’, but their Dispersalista training accounted for such risk. It wouldn’t be the first time, although the stakes had never been higher.

  “Agreed. Good fortune,” Grady responded and looked up in response to the sharp intake of breath from Shrilla as she realised that the other ships were putting themselves in harms way to protect the Citrix.

  “What is so important that the Core is prepared to blockade us, while these ‘allies’ of yours are prepared to get themselves killed to protect you ?” she asked incredulously.

  Grady knew there was no going back from the current situation. There had been enough questions raised that Shrilla would be putting in a report as soon as they returned. He had hoped she might have seen the light in view of their recent activity, but she wasn’t connecting the actions of the Core with the evidence on the planet. He made one more attempt.

  “Shrilla, it’s not me they’re protecting - it’s those people on the planet.”

  She continued to look nonplussed. “Whatever you think, they’re just mutants, what’s so different about them that the Core is prepared to go to these lengths to stop us ?”

  “Because they aren’t mutants,” Grady responded angrily as he plotted the fine line between the two Core ships. “They represent everything our ancestors hoped to achieve. A natural evolution on another planet. They aren’t simply a genetic splice from you or me. They are a completely parallel breed of humans that are as old, if not older than us,” he paused to to carry out the shut-down of the ship’s systems.

  He deliberately ignored her while he regained control of himself. He didn’t need to prompt her into taking impulsive action. He concentrated on the procedures while tempers had time to cool. Having closed down the engines Grady began turning dials to off and flicking switches. Lights went off, power died everywhere and just in time he remembered the AI.

  “Ario you’re going off-line, emergency shut-down procedure. Now !” Grady ordered the AI.

  He watched as the lights on the unit that housed his AI went off one by one. They would be without life support and heating, but it would be the least of their problems if they were observed by the Core and fired upon. He turned back to Shrilla now only dimly lit by a single tiny emergency light. His voice hushed by the silence of their flying metal tomb, he continued to talk into the eery darkness. Unable to see her face clearly he couldn’t monitor her responses. He hoped she would be reasonable and test her own logic rather than sit on the established teachings.

  “The Ektepoi as they call themselves, prove that the Dispersal really happened and that the corporations have been trying to hide the fact all along. There are worlds out there with new humans on them and my job has been to find them, protect them whilst at the same time proving their existence. The corporations will stop at nothing to protect their hold on the Empire. The Dispersalistas have always fought to expand the known worlds and draw in these other planets across the universe, but that wouldn’t serve the interests of the companies. Short-sighted though it is, they fought a secret war with us for hundreds of years before the Mutant wars.”

  “Why would they not want to search for other inhabited worlds ?”

  “They are afraid of coming across an Empire that is as large or bigger than theirs - it would mean war,” Grady replied.

  “Why would it mean war ?”

  “Because the corporations are all about control. What do you think would happen if they came up against an Empire as big as ours and both sides wanted control, or at least the other side restricted the corporations efforts to increase their holdings. They’re afraid of coming upon a world that has greater weapons and technology than their own where they would lose their own h
ard-won worlds.”

  “But that’s just paranoia talking – “

  “That’s precisely what is controlling the corporations actions back home - to wit, the attack on the AWA,” Grady interrupted.

  The discussion had taken them into range of the guns of both battleships and as they turned their attention to the various portholes to gauge their position and the outside activities of the other ships, they could see the occasional flash of weapons fire from the Core navy, none of it directed at them. Their instruments were useless, their tiny dead hulk ignored by the other ships’ sensors which were concentrating on the strafing Dispersal ships on their other flank.

  As the silence closed over them and the dim light forced them to settle, Grady decided to recount the history of the Dispersal.

  “Let me tell you the truth that you won’t hear from the Corporates, or the Empire. It may seem to you a different version of what you already know, but what I’m about to tell you is as it was from the beginning and hasn’t changed in centuries.”

  Grady settled and began to recite what he knew from memory.

  “Dispersalistas believe that during the origins of man, there was a time when humans lived on a single dying planet, Terra. To protect humanity a great exodus was created, a fleet of automatic ships sent out with a single mission - find planets and imbue them with life. Each ship had a different sector of the universe to navigate. It was to take centuries, but eventually the vessels would reach their destinations and terraform them. When the time was right, life would be introduced and genetic blueprints would recreate humanity as closely to the planet's native biology as their systems would allow.

  Overseen by the Dispersal ship's autonomous AI, the planet would continue to adapt and humanity genetically altered until it was perfectly suited to its new environment. The ships were as gods, creating everything at all levels, but only until biological directives had been met. It would then shut down and maintain a watching brief over future genetic patterns, only altering if required. With a technological knowledge base that would one day be available to those that found it, and for those who had the means with which to interpret its storehouse of treasures, the ships were designed to lay in wait for a day that might never come.

  The Dispersalistas are convinced there are thousands of such planets out there seeded with the genetics of their forebears and it is our sworn mandate to find them wherever they are and connect them into one integrated human race with all of the diversity, strengths and weaknesses that their different worlds could provide. Never again would humanity be under threat of extinction and the universe would be available to all.”

  “Nice story,” Shrilla responded sarcastically. “So the Dispersalistas are protectors of history now and the saviours of the human race ?” she scoffed.

  “No, I didn’t say that, but let’s take it a little further. What you and I are taught about evolution is carefully doctored. However, there is a universal truth that pervades all of the science and archaeology ; that there were no stepping stones to humanity, no evolutionary trail. We evolved as we are today minus technology and science with only minor alterations occurring since we began cloning and creating mutants,” Grady explained. “Even our technological progress has been meteoric because science already had the answers. How can that be ?” he added, but Shrilla wasn’t listening, already into a retrospective analysis of her own beliefs, she had withdrawn into her own thoughts.

  The Pressure to Believe

  Shrilla remained deep in thought, grateful for the fact that the near darkness hid her face from Grady. Her biggest problem was her anger at the man next to her. She felt he had betrayed her as well as the AWA. Everyone he had been involved with thought they knew the top-class agent. He was trusted, respected, liked. Held up as an example of what an agent should be in the field. Many of his missions to discover mutant enclaves had been included into training manuals. They might not always have known his identity, because he was usually undercover, but they still used his techniques and learned his skills.

  Shrilla was aware that if they knew he was a ‘Dissie’ then they would feel as she felt, betrayed. However, if the teachings of the Empire and corporations were wrong and the Dispersal was for real, then she had to reconcile what she had seen back on Archon-5 and accept that the mutations evident in the human called Kraell and the others she had quickly studied, were not commercial advances to corporate bio-engineering. That seaweed trick was amazing ! That itself could revolutionise how humanity viewed its worlds. Was it new bio-technology invented by the corporations ? If so was Archon--5 a test-bed for new mutant breeds ? Was that the reason for the secrecy and now, the backlash ?

  Shrilla was torn. She had to accept what Grady represented, or remain true to the belief that there was no Dispersal and the world they had just left behind was a commercial nursery for some new kind of mutant. And about that, she thought, if radically new mutant strains were about to be released on other worlds, what would that mean for the Empire and its inhabitants. She was certain it would spark a new mutant war, but so would releasing information about a Dispersal ‘seeded’ world.

  Either way the AWA itself was under threat and the reason was obvious. It was the only respected neutral entity capable of discerning the truth and possibly warning the Empire of the corporations intentions. The fact the Core had shown its hand prematurely would soon be forgotten if the news about Archon-5 was spread, whichever version of the truth was released. No, there had to be a rational explanation for all of this and Grady was still a ‘Dissie’ and she had to make a decision about what to do about it all.

  She had deliberately not added her report to Grady’s and was holding back to deliver it personally to Kildark. She had watched while Grady completed his reports and hadn’t missed the fact there were two. She considered the possibility that if the AI would respond to her over-ride commands she might be able to sabotage the second one to give her and Kildark some time to respond to Grady’s revelation. She thought about that some more and decided it wasn’t likely. Still, she had to make a decision about what she believed and wanted before they landed at the AWC.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Operation Shadow

  Dalt and Olgar hadn’t wasted any time. When they advised Grady to play ‘dead’ and float past the battleships they immediately angled their approach to draw maximum attention from their enemies automated gunnery systems. This close in the Core navy wouldn’t use missiles. So, it would be laser turrets and plasma guns. Both the small ships were already flying too fast for the automated responses to properly engage them, especially as they would be varying velocity, direction, yaw and pitch in an attempt to thwart targeting. Their small size and limited shielding would do the rest. Their experience of this design meant they had already amassed plenty of simulated flight-time taking on the Core battleships in escape and evade scenarios.

  Unlike the battleships, Olgar and Dalt could use their missiles. However, the enormous size of their intended target meant they would be ineffective in stopping any attack. This was a diversion, which meant maximum attention with minimum exposure while the Citrix drifted behind the battlefield and hopefully beyond range of the blockade. With luck their vessels would survive this engagement to lead the enemy a merry dance across the system. At the very least they would need to prolong the intervention long enough to get the Citrix clear.

  Dalt’s crew looked nervous as the battleships took the bait. This wasn’t the first time they had engaged superior forces, but the sheer speed with which the battle had been enjoined had them all a little twitchy. They were rarely made aware of the plans and strategy behind their leader’s missions. The crew were his to command and they would die for him. They might indeed die here and now, but would do so willingly in the name of their cause. They were fanatical and Dalt had chosen them because of that trait. His own children were amongst the crew, but received no preferential treatment. They performed to the limit of their abilities, or else.
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  As they came about to zig-zag through the cordon of ships, both vessels came under unexpectedly intense fire from the broadside guns of the nearest battleship, the one called CN Dramatus. Dalt quickly realised his mistake in assuming that their enemy was unprepared for their subterfuge and took evasive action, but he could already see from the outside sensors that in those first few seconds of the engagement a massive barrage of mixed fire had taken out Olgar’s ship.

  Neither of them even had time to open fire on the battleship and there had been no warning. Dalt groaned inwardly at the loss of his brother, and the crew of the Angel ship, but kept his face impassive. He and his crew, with no time to grieve the loss, threw everything they had into first evading, then responding to the battleships opening salvo.

  “Fire a full salvo of missiles, target their laser turrets,” he commanded the gunners.

  It would never be enough, but they had to try. Grady would need more time than this. As their navigator swung the ship wildly to avoid the battleship’s targeting, salvo after salvo of missiles were directed at the other ship’s lasers. The pilot wrestling with the controls in a flight path so erratic that even their AI couldn’t compute where they would be two seconds from now. They missed the next barrage, and the next, but they were only by tiny margins.

  Dalt knew he had badly miscalculated the readiness of the Core navy to eliminate any threat, however small, coming out of the Archon sector. Whilst he knew there was something very important on that planet, he still didn’t know what and Olgar had paid the price for their lapse of judgement. Now he had to make sure his crew didn’t fail and that if they died it was to ensure Grady got out with the news the Dispersalists needed.

  The only reason his ship had survived the first barrage was because a broadside from the Core battleship was deflected by the front half of Olgar’s ship spinning past their bows. It had disintegrated in the blast leaving nothing but small debris peppering their shields. Dalt briefly thought of his brother’s desire to make good on his mistake for shooting down a DIA Sleeper agent and decided he would have died happy knowing he had balanced the books. Dalt now used the same debris field to slip under the nearest battleship where its weaponry was less effective. A known (to the DIA) design fault had left a narrow trajectory down the underside of the battleship where an enemy fighter could hide and fight. He used that weakness now to step up their speed to safety.