by Isaac Hooke
His voice reminded Barrick that they weren’t truly alone. Captain Dallas and the crew were listening and observing. Barrick had to be on his best behavior.
Sil must have muted him, because her mouth still moved behind her faceplate, but he couldn’t hear her words.
Barrick glanced at the overhead map the aReal overlaid onto his vision. Up ahead lay a section of the ship that was currently “blacked out” to the on-board AI due to damage sustained in the last battle. Though none of the Zarafe faction members had said so outright, Barrick had inferred as much from his mind discussions with Valor and other aliens.
Barrick had convinced his guards to take a long detour through that section at one point, and he discovered several interesting fixtures in the blacked-out area. One of them was an out-of-the way armory.
“Be ready,” Barrick sent to Sil.
The small party reached the aforementioned section. The dark disks that were omnipresent throughout the ship were completely black there. He was convinced those disks were the AI’s sensors, and that black meant they were offline. Good. He was worried that the repair units had finally made it down there, but they likely had higher priority areas to deal with first.
The group approached a side passageway. “Now,” he told her over the comm.
Sil silently broke away from the party, moving deeper into the black-out area. Earlier, Barrick had transmitted the full map of the region to her. She knew precisely where to go.
Good luck, Sil.
Barrick continued after the Raakarr guards, who had yet to notice her absence. He kept their minds occupied with idle discussion.
SIL HURRIED DOWN the side passage, making her way toward the armory marked on the map. She paused beside each bend to peer past first, as the last thing she wanted to do was to run into another Raakarr while she was alone and unarmed in those corridors. Who could say what the thing would do to her? It wouldn’t care that she was a renowned xenobiologist, and she wouldn’t be surprised if she was ripped limb from limb, giving her a lesson in her own biology.
“They’ve realized you’re absent,” Barrick said over the comm. “We’re heading down the side passage after you. Hurry up.”
“Almost there,” she said.
She glanced at the map. Only one final bend lay before her and the armory. She approached the corner and carefully leaned past.
A dark mist floated there, watching the armory.
“Barrick, there’s a guard here,” Sil sent. “Can you get rid of it?”
An instant later the dark mist accelerated toward her. She ducked behind the bend.
“What the hell did you tell it?” While she retreated, she glanced at the map and saw that a side passageway up ahead doubled-back and came to the armory from the other direction. She decided to take it.
“I haven’t actually transmitted anything yet,” Barrick replied.
“The alien must have seen me, then,” Sil said. Or you betrayed us.
She doubled back down the side passage and approached the armory from the other side. When she reached the bend in the passageway just before the armory, she slowly drove her helmet past the edge: the black fog was gone.
She hurried into the passageway.
“The hatch is closed,” she sent Barrick.
“Stand in front of it for a moment,” Barrick replied. “Because the AI is offline there, the hatches are hardwired to automatically open after a few seconds.”
Sure enough the hatch swiveled aside. She hurried into the compartment beyond. Around her lay strange layered holding units that could best be described as hexagonal shelves. They were full of alien gear. She spotted a unit full of the darkness generators and immediately scooped one up, securing it out of sight beneath her harness.
She considered grabbing some of the other strange items, but most were too bulky. She had what she had come for, and felt no need to press her luck, as it were.
“Got it,” she sent Barrick. “I’m heading out.”
She stepped from the armory.
The living mist of a lone Raakarr hovered there in the passageway beside her.
BARRICK HURRIED FORWARD, leading the two guards.
Shortly after Sil had departed, the guards realized she was no longer with the group. They made Barrick turn around immediately, and Banjo demanded to know why he had not reported her absence.
I only noticed myself a moment ago, Barrick had lied. The Organism was falling behind because of its illness, and when I looked back to check, the Organism was gone.
Talk to it with your communication device! Banjo had said.
The Organism is not answering, Barrick had replied. I cannot determine its position.
Barrick had only retraced his steps for a few moments when Sil’s voice came over the comm. “Got it. I’m heading out.”
Banjo sent him another message almost immediately thereafter: The Organism has been spotted. This way.
The dark mist of Banjo thrust past him and took point, while the other Raakarr kept the drag position.
“Sil, what’s happening?” he sent.
She didn’t reply.
Since the AI was offline there, the only way she could have been spotted was if another Raakarr had seen her—likely the armory guard she had mentioned. A sudden fear gripped Barrick, and he hoped Sil was all right. In the few times he had lived through the current moment, not once had the Zarafe ever left a guard in front of the armory.
He wasn’t sure what that meant.
Barrick and the two Raakarr moved deeper into the black-out region, rounding several bends as they neared the location where he had marked the armory on his map.
And then the group turned one final corner and Sil stood there, the dark mist of another Raakarr towering over her. She had her arm assemblies extended, palms out, and she was slowly retreating from the advancing alien.
Barrick hurried forward, squeezing past Banjo and the Raakarr that loomed above her, and he grasped her by the shoulders, screening her with his body.
“Quickly!” he said. “Give it to me!”
She retrieved the tartaan from her harness and furtively passed it into his glove. He turned from her, palming the device.
Step away, Banjo said. Ask the Organism what it was doing here.
Barrick stepped back, as requested. While their attention was on her, he surreptitiously slid the tartaan into a secret pocket in his forearm.
The Organism says it fell behind, Barrick told the guard. And then lost consciousness for a few seconds. When it awoke, we were gone. It took a wrong turn. Got lost.
Convenient, that the Organism should find one of our armories.
The guards proceeded to search her. Tendrils of black mist enwrapped Sil’s spacesuit, and clawed forelegs momentarily emerged from the darkness.
Tell the Organism to remove its upper exoskeleton, Banjo commanded.
“They want you to take off the harness,” Barrick told Sil.
She complied.
The Raakarr searched the harness, and when they were satisfied that nothing was hidden inside, Sil was allowed to put it back over her spacesuit.
They frisked him next, making him remove his harness as well, but they found nothing of course.
“How did you manage to hide the device from them?” Sil asked as the party made its way back down the passageway. “They searched your harness thoroughly.”
“I’ve seen this future once before,” Barrick said. And in that future, while there had never been a guard watching the armory, Banjo had always searched her, and then him.
“I see,” Sil replied.
“Yes. And I made preparations.” He showed her where he had stashed the device in the hidden pocket sewn into his forearm.
“Nice,” she returned.
Barrick found himself beaming.
They emerged from the black-out region, returning to the watchful gaze of the AI. Barrick was confident the machine would not be able to track the stolen device, as he had never foreseen s
uch a thing previously.
After passing through an airlock into the examination room, which had breathable air as it also served as his quarters, Barrick made her remove the spacesuit. Then he put on a show of examining her with the various human equipment at his disposal, most of it salvaged from the Selene and flown over to the Talon via the lifepod of the downed prison vessel, T300. Included in the stash was a rather heavy comm node—moved into and out of the lifepod with great effort—and a run-of-the-mill medical kit.
After half an hour:
I believe the Organism is going to be fine, Barrick sent. It merely suffered from a passing ailment typical to my kind.
You organisms are so weak, Banjo replied.
On the way back to the area where the remaining humans berthed, the party passed the black-out region once more. Barrick used the opportunity to slip the tartaan to her.
When they reached the berthing area, Banjo gave the authorization for the outer hatch to open, and Sil stepped inside the airlock.
As the hatch groaned closed in front of her, Barrick said: “I trust you’re feeling better?”
Behind her faceplate, she grinned slyly. “Better than ever.”
The hatch shut.
With that, Barrick and his escorts departed.
twenty-one
The days passed relatively slowly as the Talon edged its way across the system toward the inner Slipstream.
Jonathan had been somewhat surprised that Barrick had come through for them. Maybe he really was wrong about the man. But even if Barrick was on their side, Jonathan couldn’t yet forgive the telepath for what he had done to his crew, and to Bridgette.
With the darkness device in hand, Connie, escorted by two Raakarr, had returned to the Dragonfly under the guise of retrieving more supplies; once there, using the precision scientific instruments aboard the shuttle, she had determined the new frequency the device used. Connie propagated the necessary modulations to the laser rifles of the party, so that their weapons would penetrate the shielding.
With the updated modulation programs in place, Jonathan felt more at ease already. Even so, Connie warned him there was no guarantee those frequencies would stay the same for long.
“Who knows,” she said. “Maybe they change out the frequencies daily.”
“If they did change it,” Jonathan asked her. “Would the new frequency propagate to the device we have in our possession?”
“Maybe, maybe not,” the chief scientist responded. “It depends on whether or not it’s linked to their ship’s AI. But if it is linked, I’d say we were in trouble, because then the Raakarr know we have it.”
“But that would depend on how it’s linked, wouldn’t it?” Jonathan said. In human systems, location data wasn’t always transmitted back by remote devices.
“Sure,” Connie replied. “Still, I’d take it as a good sign if our device didn’t receive any updates.”
PURSUED DOGGEDLY THE whole way by the Raakarr laser ship and its two escorts, the Talon finally reached the exit Slipstream five days later. Once there, it launched a probe to confirm the destination. When it was obvious that the endpoint opened into Anvil Rappel, and that no ships waited in ambush, the Talon crossed through.
Anvil Rappel proved abandoned as well. The system was owned by the Asiatic Alliance, though the local government allowed the United Systems to operate a military base there.
Debris consistent with comm nodes and starships was scattered in orbit above the colony world, Anvil Prime, a planet famous for the all-day-long aurorae that dominated its skies. Notable was the lack of Gate debris around either Slipstream in the system.
“What do you think happened to the Gates?” Jonathan asked Rodriguez over the comm.
“Hard to say,” Rodriguez returned. “Maybe the inhabitants hid them somewhere in the system. Or maybe the invading Raakarr decided to tow them away.”
“Where?” Jonathan said.
“I don’t know,” Rodriguez admitted.
Jonathan pulled up the system map on his aReal. Most star systems in the galaxy had more than one sun, and Anvil Rappel was no exception. It was a stable binary system of two main sequence stars, one blue, the other orange. Their orbital distance varied with time, and according to the corresponding note in the aReal database, if traced the orbits formed an outline vaguely reminiscent of a medieval anvil—Jonathan had tried plotting a complete revolution once, but the only shape he got was a sideways figure eight. The remaining seventeen planets orbited the same center of mass, forming ellipses of varying sizes. The Slipstream they had emerged from orbited halfway between the tenth and eleventh planets—gas giants—while the exit Slipstream to the next system revolved directly around Anvil Prime, one of the smaller terrestrial planets of the inner system.
“You know Anvil Rappel has seventeen planets and an asteroid belt, right?” Connie transmitted over the comm. “And some of those planets have up to thirty-two moons. That’s a lot of places to hide a Gate.”
“Yeah, I’m refreshing my memory as we speak,” Jonathan said. According to the aReal, the only military base in the system was located on the planet around which the inner Slipstream orbited.
“Nukes could have vaporized the Gates entirely,” Rail suggested. “We wouldn’t find any debris, then.”
“That’s certainly a possibility,” Jonathan said. “But then we’d detect nuclear residue in the region.”
“Maybe we should launch a telemetry drone to confirm,” Rail said. “Unless you trust that our Raakarr masters are revealing everything to us.”
“What happened to the Gates isn’t our biggest concern at the moment,” Jonathan said. “Though we’ll certainly need them if the United Systems ever expects to pass this way again.”
“You don’t sound too confident the Raakarr will share their fabled Slipstream-traversal tech with us,” Rodriguez said.
“That’s because I’m not,” Jonathan replied.
“You know,” Sil Chopra said. “If the inhabitants really hid the Gates, that means Prius 3A managed to get a warning through. So NAVCENT has likely received news of the threat by now. As I argued already.”
“We still have our own news to deliver,” Jonathan said.
“We do,” Rail piped in snidely. “And an inquiry to set up.”
Jonathan smiled grimly. Really itching to testify, isn’t she? Maybe she and Knox were secret lovers. Jonathan somehow doubted it, given Knox’s reputation as a strict disciplinarian, and Rail’s general bitchiness. Then again, he supposed he would never truly know.
The Talon began the journey toward the Slipstream situated in orbit above Anvil Prime. The estimated arrival time was four and a half days.
Jonathan had only returned to the berthing area for an hour when the illumination inside his tent became crimson in color. He quickly donned his helmet and emerged from the tent to find the bulkhead filaments glowing a bright red. According to Barrick, the color meant the ship was currently engaged in an elevated state of readiness, similar to general quarters aboard a human vessel.
He was about to tap-in the telepath but Barrick was the quicker, sending him a message first instead: “Captain Dallas, the two of us are to report to the bridge.”
Jonathan rounded up two Centurions and hurried into the airlock. After it sealed behind him, the two waiting Raakarr led them forward. Hatches that had been open before blocked the way, preventing ship-wide decompression in the event of a breach scenario. The hatches automatically slid aside when the Raakarr approached.
He joined Barrick on the bridge momentarily.
“What is it?” Jonathan asked.
“Otter says they just detected an incoming heat signature,” Barrick told him. “Judging from the thermals recorded in our previous engagements, they believe it to be a human weapon. Nuclear.”
twenty-two
Where the hell did it come from?” Jonathan said.
“Otter says it was floating out there, and activated when we approached to within fifty
thousand kilometers.”
Jonathan pressed his lips together. “Basically a smart mine. Why put it all the way out here? A better strategy would be to mine the entrance.”
“How do we know the residents of this system didn’t do just that?” Rodriguez asked. “And this could be all that remains of that mining. Whoever was operating them likely pulled back the nukes when they realized the Raakarr were triggering them with probes.”
“So there might be more,” Jonathan said.
Barrick spoke up. “Otter says they’re also detecting two more thermal signatures emerging from behind a nearby asteroid. A rather large one. The heat patterns don’t match anything they have in their databases, but the Zarafe believe they belong to human vessels. The pair currently reside eighty thousand kilometers off the nose.”
Jonathan wished the Raakarr tech was compatible with his own so that he could pipe the thermal feed to his aReal and do a look up. The situation would remain that way for some time, he suspected, even when the Raakarr signed a treaty with humanity—technology was often closely guarded, even among allies.
“Anvil Rappel had a small military presence,” Jonathan said. “Four corvettes. This has to be two of them. The question is, where are the other two? Barrick, are there any other moons of the tenth planet nearby? Somewhere the United Systems ships could emerge in ambush, perhaps to launch a pincer maneuver?”
“According to Otter,” Barrick said. “There is only one other asteroid nearby, though it’s too far away to make a difference at the moment.” He paused. “Otter says they’re detecting more incoming weapons. Looks like another nuke. And what he calls ‘rocks.’ I think he means mortars. They’re currently the same distance away as the ships. Freshly launched.”
Jonathan nodded. “The corvettes are trying to herd us into the second nuke. Classic strategy. Though in this case it’s more defensive than offensive. They want to steer us away from them.” He subconsciously reached for his lips, but remembered the glass faceplate.
“I think the refugees from the military base saw what they thought was an easy target,” Rail countered. “And decided to go for it. It’s an offensive strategy, in my opinion.”