Captives of the Kratzen (Hearts in Orbit)

by S. C. Mitchell

  Talk hushed and all eyes in the room swung toward the doorway at the side of the stage where Kirtl led Carter toward her. While most Dzlozians seemed to regard her and Carter as simply people with oddly colored skin, Kirtl always drew amused and interested expressions. The Blarmling had certainly made an impression on the population of the city in the days he’d been here.

  Tina’s eyes, however, were only for Carter. How she’d missed him.

  He wore a green Dzlozian tabard trimmed in silver and purple, and the black, billowy pants Dzlozian men seemed to favor. He looked amazingly exotic.

  Still, Carter Arcturus looked good in anything . . . and even better in nothing at all.

  Tina clenched with desire. By the gods how she wished she could get him alone for a few minutes.

  But this inquiry was important to the Dzlozians and Tina was determined to forge an alliance with them. Going forward, it could prove invaluable.

  Carter took a seat next to her, his hand seeking out hers for a gentle squeeze. “What’s going on?”

  Rolanda had filled her in on the way here.

  Apparently, the ship they’d escaped in was a prototype for a new generation of fighter craft to be used in the Dzlozian’s war against the bugs and it had somehow failed epically during a test run, causing Rolanda and Tendle to be captured. This inquiry was to determine what had gone wrong.

  The Dzlozian governing council had invested heavily in Tendle’s father’s company to produce the craft. There was talk of graft, corruption, and misappropriation of funds leading to an inferior product.

  Because Tina, Carter, and Kirtl had experience using the misaligned blasters on the ship, they’d been called on to testify at this hearing. As the proceedings wore on, Tina took what comfort she could from Carter beside her. His hand in hers.

  Rolanda testified that, during a routine test of the new craft, it suddenly lost power just as a force of Kratzen ships attacked. “We couldn’t attack. We couldn’t run. We couldn’t do anything.” She shook as she spoke, her hands tightly fisted.

  “I don’t know why the ship suddenly lost power.” Across the stage, Tendle pounded his fist on the arm of his chair. “We’ve checked the ship from top to bottom. Yes, there are some flaws, I’m not sure how they crept into the production line, and I will look into that personally. Still, the power supply was adequate, and should not have failed.”

  “There has to be some reason for the failure. Watch.” Rolanda pulled a remote controller from the pocket of her kimono and pressed a button. A holographic view panel lit, displaying a recording made from the ship, starting right before it lost power. Multiple views, from inside and outside the craft, displayed in real-time.

  Six attack ships swept toward Rolanda and Tendle’s craft from behind a moon. Weapons fired on them as Rolanda set an escape course. Tendle brought up a weapons console.

  Then a seventh, larger ship slid into view. The lighting on the bug ships flickered, then the holographic record display went black.

  “That’s when we lost power. Not even the ship recorder could keep running, and that is supposed to be on an independent power source. Our ship was taken in tow to a Kratzen facility where we were boarded and rendered unconscious. ” Rolanda glared at Tendle as if it was all his fault.

  But it wasn’t. At least not totally. Tina knew that now.

  She stood. “Could you replay the last few seconds of that recording?”

  The Dzlozian technician nodded, and restarted the display. As the seventh bug ship slid into view she had him stop. “Have you ever encountered this ship configuration before?”

  Heads shook around the room.

  “We hadn’t either, before the attack that captured us. I believe it to be a new design.” Tina pointed toward the other attack ships, now dark, their interior lighting extinguished. “See here how even their ships lost power? Only they were ready for it.”

  An older Dzlozian, his skin a deep purple, brought his hand to his chin. He wore a tabard with insignia Tina had come to suspect signified a military rank. “Some kind of pulse weapon that disrupts power?”

  Tina nodded. “That’s how they captured Carter, Kirtl, and me.”

  Her gaze swept the room. “You’ve been at war with them much longer than us. Have the Kratzen ever captured Dzlozians before?”

  “Never captured anyone before.” The old man stood. “We’ve watched them for decades as they approached our system. Wiping out civilizations and plundering planets and systems around ours. We are new to space travel. Couldn’t hardly reach those other worlds, let alone help them. But we saw the death and destruction through our distance viewers. We even took in a few fleeing refugees. The Kratzen never took prisoners.”

  “So what changed? Why did the Kratzen set up that menagerie and start taking prisoners?” Tina spread her arms wide, palms up.

  Kirtl’s reply hit like a Survian piledriver. “We changed it. We came from another galaxy. And we brought them Kristin Devenport.”

  Chapter 10

  Carter paced the room, his stomach newly upset, but this time not from Dzlozian food. “That . . .”

  Tina caught his gaze, raising an eyebrow. “Say it.”

  “Terraleach!” It did feel better to let it out.

  He, Tina, and Kirtl had retired to their apartment to discuss their next steps after Kirtl’s astounding assertions.

  Kristin Devenport was working with the Kratzen. She’d helped them design the pulse weapon that caused ships and starbases to lose power. She’d convinced the bugs to start studying their enemies for weaknesses they could exploit. They were studying humans now with the purpose of enslaving them.

  In return for her help, the bugs were changing her into one of them. Some kind of hybrid of human and Kratzen. Some of them even accepted her as some kind of goddess or queen.

  There appeared to be factions within the Kratzen. Most only wanted to swarm, destroy, and pillage. The mantis-type Kratzen tended more toward the intellectual and curious. These Kristin Devenport had cultivated for her plans.

  All this, Kirtl had pulled from her mind during their encounter.

  “She’s becoming a frackin’ bug.” Carter raged. She wasn’t even human anymore. Maybe she never had been. “By the galactic gods, we should have killed her when we had the chance.”

  “She was human . . . once.” Kirtl’s tone was measured. How could he remain calm? He’d been in her head. Listening to her thoughts.

  Carter fisted his hands so tightly his nails cut into his palms. “Then how the hell—?”

  Tina’s soft touch on his shoulder cut him off like a Zingarian razorwhip.

  He’d become irrational, emotional. Damn Kristin. She set him on edge. He needed to get a grip.

  Kirtl nodded. “Kristin hears the Oracles of Andromeda like Magda hears those of our galaxy. How or why I cannot say.”

  Magda was a former circus fortuneteller, who was now the medic on The Starboard Mist, Carter’s ship. She claimed to have a connection with some otherworldly voices she called the Oracles.

  She was certainly a nice, caring woman, but was she a seer?

  Carter had his doubts.

  Pulling himself up into the chair, Kirtl settled in the cushions and eyed Carter. “The Oracles are real. I’ve heard them in Magda’s head. I also heard something in Kristin’s, but it was different. In both cases, the Oracles knew I was listening.”

  Oracles, Galactic Gods, deities of any kind were a mystery to Carter. Never a very religious man, he preferred to trust science over faith. Perhaps it was time to reassess his beliefs.

  Knocking at the door pulled him from his thoughts.

  “Tina? Carter? Kirtl?” Rolanda’s natural voice, followed by a sentence in Dzlozian that translated as, “There is something I think you need to see.”

/>   ~ ~ ~

  Tina followed Rolanda through the winding underground corridors of Dzlozia. Carter walked beside her, his hand a comfort at her waist.

  Could they never find a moment to be alone?

  Kirtl had begged off, insisting he needed rest. “I can pick up the experience from one of you later if it’s important.”

  He’d looked so tired as he’d trundled off to his bedroom. His purple eyes were almost black with exhaustion.

  As they traversed the winding hallways, they encountered Tendle. “Rolanda, I was looking for you, to apologize before I left.”

  “You’re leaving?” There was regret in Rolanda’s tone.

  “I’ve been cleared of all charges. Not my father, who they’ve put in prison where he belongs.” His mouth firmed and tightened. His brow furled.

  Rolanda took his hand. “I never believed you a part of it. Truly.”

  Something passed between them. An emotion?

  This was more than a business relationship.

  “The ship is my design, but my father cheapened it, changed the production line. Now our ships are substandard. I need to go fix this before the Kratzen attack again. This may not be my fault, but it is my legacy. I would see it put right.”

  Tendle bowed to Rolanda, then left.

  ~ ~ ~

  The vast underground chamber was domed. The lighting, hidden behind soffits around the perimeter, defused softly up the smooth arching ceiling. Even hushed, Tina’s speech echoed in the large, empty cavern. “What is this?”

  Because they’d had to house their entire population underground, space down here was at a premium. Tina couldn’t imagine why all this space was being left empty.

  Rolanda called it the pritno dormino, which translated as star room. She insisted they would understand better once she started it up.

  The door closed behind her, and she pressed a button on the wall which made the lights dim. As the room darkened, pinpoints of light appeared in the air around them, pulsing into representations of stars and planets.

  Rolanda gestured toward the display. “These are the stars and systems we have mapped so far. It is my hope, from what we have, that you can show us where you come from.”

  A black metal disk about a meter and a half across, hovered in the center of the room a few centimeters off the floor, a soft glow issuing from underneath. On a thin rod rising up from the disk like a set of handlebars, was a small set of controls. Rolanda stepped on and invited Tina and Cater to follow suit.

  The disk rose into the star display, allowing them to view the constellations from different perspectives.

  “Do you note any configurations you recognize?” Rolanda offered Tina the controls.

  It took her only a moment to master moving the disk they stood on around the room to view the display from different angles.

  Carter leaned over her shoulder, watching.

  She offered him the controls.

  He shook his head. “You’re the navigator. If anyone can find something familiar, it’s you.”

  She had been studying the Andromeda galaxy almost from the moment they’d accidentally ended up here months ago. As the navigator of The Starboard Mist, it fell to Tina to map and study the stars and planets. She probably knew their part of this galaxy better than anyone else from the Milky Way. But did the Dzlozian maps overlap with anything that Tina had already charted?

  How far away from home were they?

  The controller displayed coordinates of some kind. Rolanda explained how it worked and Tina began to grasp the differences in distance measurements, doing rough conversions to parsecs based on the size and gravitational forces of the stars, but she realized it would be worthless if she couldn’t find a point of reference somewhere here that tied her back to Andromeda Star Base One and the wormhole to the Milky Way.

  Then she saw it. The twinkling silver star anchoring the hexagonal arrangement she’d named The Bridge.

  “There. Kirtl.” Her stomach fluttered. Could it be?

  If so, Star Base One would be only three parsecs beyond what the Dzlozians had mapped.

  Carter cocked his head, raising an eyebrow at her. “Kirtl stayed back at the apartment.”

  “No.” She pointed. “That star. I think that’s the one I named after Kirtl.”

  “You named a star after Kirtl?”

  “I’ve named stars after every crew member on The Starboard Mist.” She maneuvered the floating disk up and to the right, sighting the star again as she rotated the display ninety degrees.

  Yes. Markus, Harvey, and Kyra fell into place beside Kirtl. It could definitely be the outer rim of her explored sector.

  “Can we get here?” She pointed toward the sector.

  After listening to the translation, Rolanda nodded. “It is near. We have not explored much that way. The journey would take only about five dzlerts.”

  Units of time were also different, and the translator couldn’t yet convert.

  “Dzlerts?”

  Rolanda shrugged. “We can get there if you need to go. On the way I can mark Dzlerts so you will know.”

  Skewer two clanwings with one projectile.

  The more they understood about the Dzlozians, the easier it’d be to work with them. And now it felt like there was a possibility of getting home.

  “Yes. We need to go there.”

  Sirens blared throughout the Dzlozian base. Tina started, accidentally hit a controller button, and the floating disk tilted to the side.

  Rolanda reached over to take control, righting the disk and setting it down on the floor. Then she dispelled the display and brought the lighting back up in the chamber. “That’s a call to battle stations. We’re being attacked. I have to go to our mission control room.”

  Pretending they could find their way back to the apartment on their own would be foolish.

  Carter seemed to agree. “We’ll go with you. Maybe we can help.”

  ~ ~ ~

  The tension inside the Dzlozian flight prep room was palpable. Carter had seen the same dozens of times at Fleet headquarters back in the Milky Way Core Worlds. Last minute instructions before a mission evidently went the same no matter what galaxy you lived in.

  Switching his translator into silent mode and placing the earpiece in his right ear, Carter followed the discussion without causing any interruption. He wasn’t planning to add anything to the conversation anyway.

  Tina, standing beside him, did the same.

  He put his arm around her, sliding his hand to her waist and pulling her in close. Warmth, contact. He needed so much more of her, but would settle for what he could get. She did seem to fit perfectly against him.

  Rolanda stood in front of the group, a hologram of the new fighter ship at roughly quarter-size behind her as she described each function to the group of pilots and gunners. This ship was their first designed solely for battling the bugs in space. And it had its share of drawbacks, thanks to Tendle’s father.

  “It still flies. It still shoots. But it doesn’t maneuver as well as the simulators you’re used to.” Rolanda kept her tone neutral. “I have been assured that the issues will be fixed in future models, but for now, this is what we have. Hopefully we will only be facing a small swarm of Kratzen vessels.”

  They had limited ships, and limited pilots and gunners. Some of the Dzlozians suited up for battle were young. Too young.

  Yes, Quatrain Tyson, one of the gunners on The Starboard Mist was only fourteen years old, but he was an exception. Most kids his age were . . . kids. Able to be kids. War stole so much from a generation.

  The image on the hologram shifted to the new bug ship. The one with the energy draining pulse. “Priority has got to be given to this ship, if you see it. One blast from its energy weap
on will sap the power from your ship and render you helpless.” Murmurs cascaded through the room, but Rolanda silenced them by holding up her hands. “I know. I know. In the next ship design they will try to implement some defense against this as well, but for now we only have what we have.”

  And they only had eighty-seven of the newer craft, plus under a hundred other older, under-powered ships for support. Against a Kratzen mothership, with hundreds of attack craft onboard, it would be a tough battle even without the bugs’ new energy weapon.

  Tina nudged his shoulder.

  “Are they ready for this?” Her hushed tone held a tight urgency.

  The new ships would have been a good fighting craft against the Kratzen, if they’d have been delivered in the quantity and specifications expected. Even as delivered, the ships weren’t bad and gave the Dzlozians a chance. But this would be a hard fought battle. There would be losses. How quickly could they replace lost ships, pilots, and gunners?

  “Images incoming from surveillance station twelve.” The translation came from an announcement from an overhead speaker.

  The holographic image next to Rolanda changed once again. A Kratzen mothership hovered in the image. Spherical in shape, the size of a small moon, the craft had eight launch tubes sticking out of it like long arms. From these tubes the attack ships would spew like a swarm of Pluvian blackflies.

  Carter’s stomach dropped.

  Behind the craft hovered a second mothership.

  Two? The Dzlozians would now be heavily overmatched. He plotted tactics, possibly splitting the force, trying to lead one of the motherships off while engaging the other.

  “Oh my.”

  Tina’s gasp drew Carter’s attention back to the hologram as two more motherships came into view.

  “This isn’t an attack. It’s an invasion.” With this kind of force, the bugs must be planning to overrun the planet. Hell, overrun this whole galactic sector.