by Barry Kirwan
Fentra laughed, a few others joining her. “You can’t be serious? That’s just a legend we tell our children after the Slapping.”
Kilaney had no idea what they were referring to. “The Slapping?”
“Tell him,” Xenic said. “He needs to understand.”
Fentra folded her arms, the humour in her voice transmuting to cold metal, her smile replaced by a somber look, even by Mannekhi standards. “We Mannekhi are born into servitude. When any child reaches the age of four, when we consider them independent decision-makers, they go with their parents to the Municipal Hall where others gather in front of one of our sponsor races’ Ambassadors. The Ambassador asks the child to do something…” She looked sideways, presumably remembering what it had been for her. Kilaney felt sorry for Fentra already.
“For example,” she continued, taking a breath, “to run through my brother’s hand with a knife.” She straightened up. “The child refuses, of course. Then the parents – first the father, then the mother – slap the child across the face, hard. Most children do not cry, Kilaney, Jorann, whoever you are. It is their parents who weep later. Some people never –” her voice cracked, she cleared her throat “– have children, just to avoid this scarring that keeps us forever in our place.”
Kilaney could imagine how it would be one of a number of acts to break the spirit. He began to count up all the Mannekhi ships he had destroyed in the past ten years, estimating how many Mannekhi had been killed under his command.
She continued. “Six thousand years ago, the Eleventh Mannekhi tribe, called Helgothora, escaped. They were tracked down by the Q’Roth and annihilated, but a story lingers that one man, Corakadahn, a geneticist, managed to send a Seeder to a neo-fertile barbarian planet inhabited by bipeds. Every child and every parent knows this story, a dream of a Mannekhi strand that escaped and grew up free.” Her eyes burned into his.
Xenic stared at Fentra, then Kilaney. “Look at him.”
They did. Fentra folded her arms.
Xenic added spark to the tinder. “The humans built pyramids nearly five thousand years ago.”
Now the crew stared harder, their all-black eyes less harsh and more inquisitive. Fentra continued playing devil’s advocate while Siltern worked fast on the console behind the Captain. “Did the Ossyrians come?”
Xenic nodded. “Five thousand years ago. I have checked the Grid database records. The humans have the ankh.”
She unfolded her arms, her voice quieter. “Most races have the ankh.”
“They have ours, the cruciform one, blue steel.”
Siltern drew back. “We are ready, but we must go quickly.”
Xenic looked around at his crew. “I want you all behind me on this one. If anyone disagrees we turn around and leave.”
Kilaney decided he had best stay quiet. But one by one they nodded assent, until the vote came to Fentra.
Fentra gave Kilaney a hard stare. “If the others are the tribe, we can save them… cherish them. But this one… You, Kilaney – Jorann – you must die for your crimes.”
Kilaney nodded, not breaking her gaze. “I’ve paid that price before.”
Xenic turned to Siltern. “Execute.”
* * *
“Damage negligible, Your Eminence, hull plating around the engines is intact, planet-cutter functional integrity one hundred per cent. It will take some time for the Mannekhi vessel to find us again.”
Sister Esma made no acknowledgement. The Mannekhi vessel was no match for a Crucible. While she would have relished dissecting their Spiker, time was of the essence. However, their presence signified both a threat and an opportunity. She clicked a message in Largyl 6 to the red-cloaked Q’Roth Commander at his console. His blue-black head swivelled toward her, all six vermillion slits waxing, but he made no reply. Nevertheless, she saw on her console that he had transmitted the message to the Krishtach Q’Roth destroyer on standby two sectors away, to approach in case of need for assistance or extraction. Hubris was a human affliction; Sister Esma knew how to hedge her bets.
She then turned her attention to the secondary screen in front of her, scratches like cobweb strands hanging in empty space. “Shrell, you say?” The Q’Roth commander confirmed it. It was going to be hard getting out. She turned to one of her lieutenants behind her. “Is Serena aboard yet?”
“Both Raptors have just docked, Your Eminence.”
It was tempting to turn and go right then, and leave Esperia to its own fate amidst increasingly poisoned space. Certainly no races would be coming to help them now, and Qorall and his worms would eventually arrive and finish the job.
But Sister Esma didn’t believe in leaving loose ends, and hadn’t gotten this far without attention to detail. Besides, she’d been waiting eighteen years to crush Micah and humanity’s remnants. “Can we reach the planet to activate the cutters?”
The lieutenant stared deep into his console before replying. “We risk being trapped there if we approach closer, Your Eminence, Shrell activity appears highest around Esperia.”
Sister Esma’s fingers curled, her sharp fingernails pressing into the softer flesh of her palms. They were behind the moon on the night side of Esperia, with Esperantia on the dayside. She could not target the city with an energy beam. Her dark red lips whitened, tightening to a thin scratch.
A door swished open behind her, and Serena waltzed onto the Bridge, beaming more than usual. “We have sixty humans. They are being processed now, and will soon go back into stasis for the trip home.”
“I asked for one hundred, Serena. And you have lost five Raptors, not forgetting a Q’Roth Legate.”
Serena’s smile didn’t falter. “They are resilient. I took notes of the Genners’ abilities, not to mention the last Sentinel alive.” Serena glanced at the screens in front of Esma. “The moon,” she said.
“Excuse me?” Sister Esma parked the reference to a Sentinel for later. As for the moon, she guessed what Serena was referring to, and should have already seen it herself.
Serena continued. “I was listening to comms while coming here. Break up the moon – it’s a much quicker job, and it will rain asteroid-sized rocks down on Esperia for weeks. Even if one doesn’t strike their excuse for a town, the impact craters and dust clouds will plunge the planet into winter darkness for decades. They will perish, especially since no help will arrive.”
Sister Esma gazed up to the Q’Roth Commander, his trapezoidal head bearing down on her. “Do we have time to do this and find a conduit out of here?”
“Esss,” the Q’Roth Commander hissed, raising a claw from under his cloak. A hooked digit slid into a recess on an inert panel in front of him. Mustard lights and lettering lit up all over the panel, accompanied by a grinding noise.
“Come,” she said, gesturing to Serena to join her at the front so as to have a prime view.
Together they watched the eight tendrils rapidly uncoil from the long fuselage, reminding her of an octopus getting ready to devour its prey. All the filaments unfurled and spirited outwards as they commenced their deadly embrace around the moon. After several minutes the Q’Roth Commander’s inserted claw flicked sideways. The threads coated in super-charged plasma flashed yellow, then orange, red, violet, and finally black and blue, the Q’Roth signature colour. A nice touch. The grinding noise on the bridge segued into a deep hum, throbbing in time with the energy spikes.
The gaps between pulses decreased, like a heartbeat speeding up, and the tendrils glowed across space to the moon. Sister Esma approached the screen, content that Serena knew not to follow without a further invitation. The hum’s heartbeat sped up further.
The flashing cords that had latched onto the moon’s mountainous surface began carving out ridges, cheese-wiring their way down towards the crust. One of Sister Esma’s staff brought up a smaller screen showing a close-up of one of the tendrils in action. It had already cleaved a mountain in two, and now burrowed deep beneath the surface, its fierce blue glow still detectable beneath t
he smoking lava-red fissure left in its wake. Rocks and slag billowed out, plumes of steam from deep perma-frosted water flashing into the vacuum of space. Abruptly the entire left side of the terrain shifted angle, caving in, signifying that the tendril had cut through the outer crust. The split mountain shuddered and cracked, slow motion avalanches of massive boulders tumbling down its sides. The rift snaked towards the horizon like an open wound. The image zoomed out, revealing other angry scars spreading across the moon’s surface. It was breaking up.
An alarm intruded, and Sister Esma returned to her command chair. “Report.”
“It’s the Mannehki vessel,” Serena said. “They’ve found us.”
Sister Esma never hesitated, particularly in battle. She addressed the Q’Roth Commander first. “Separate the ship, so the cutter can finish its job. Set it to auto-destruct in fifteen minutes.”
She addressed Serena. “Take the tactical station. Bring us about, all weapons ready.”
Serena leapt up the step to the central console, the lieutenant there hurrying out of her way. Sister Esma heard but ignored Serena’s whispered remark, “About time.”
Sister Esma noted the Q’Roth Marauder was now in-sector, and wondered when Louise was going to bother to contact her, and whose side she would be on, aside from her own. But Sister Esma would wait. Patience wasn’t a virtue, it was a strategy, one that had never failed her.
Chapter Twenty
Mutiny
The only weapon Kat could find was a knife. She didn’t know if it would be enough. Eighteen years ago, after Louise had sent one of the four refugee ships from Earth into the heart of a star, taking two thousand souls with it, Micah and the others had developed a plan to kill her if she ever attacked again. She did, and they succeeded. But Louise had arranged a back-up clone that had sprung to life almost immediately, more enraged with humanity than ever, making Louise a permanent threat. All Kat knew about the process was that there could be only one clone, as otherwise the memory back-up process became unstable. Aramisk had figured out where the clone lay hidden, inactive. All Kat had to do was kill it so that it could never activate automatically in the event of Louise’s death. No big deal, she told herself, as she perspired, scurrying through the lower corridors of the fourth deck, the sheathed knife tight in her white-knuckled hand. Kat would have complained about the complete ineptitude of the plan if it hadn’t been her own.
Arriving at the door, she found the keypad and recalled the Q’Roth six-character code the Hohash had embedded in her memory. Half-wondering whether it would work, and no small part of her hoping it wouldn’t, she waited after entering it. Nothing happened. About to try again, she stopped herself. Level Five and Six didn’t make mistakes such as simple slips of the finger or claw, and if she entered the code a second time it might trigger an alarm or worse. After a few more seconds the door slid open, and Kat stepped inside. The door swished closed behind her.
Inside the square chamber the smell of astringent disinfectant washed over her, blue light seeping out from an open sarcophagus raised on a plinth. Kat spied a pulse pistol on a rack near the door. It made sense – if Louise was killed, the clone would auto-activate and might well need a weapon. Kat stuck the sheathed knife in the back of her waistband and picked up the gun, checking its charge. She almost tiptoed over to the large bath-like basin, filled with what she guessed was Q’Roth blue amniotic fluid. Underneath the surface was a human outline, but she would have to reach in to pull out the clone’s head in order to kill it. What made me think this would be easy? At least there were no ripples, not even bubbles on the liquid’s surface. Reluctantly, she rolled up her left sleeve, took a breath and slid her fingers, hand, and then her entire arm into the body-temperature fluid. It was deeper than she’d hoped.
When the liquid was almost up to her shoulder, she touched soft flesh. Her fingers skirted around, finding a nose and closed lips. Kat needed to reach deeper to get her hand around the back of the clone’s neck to pull her out, but she’d have to put the pistol down and hold onto the edge with her right hand, and she was on her toes already. Kat cursed, but there was nothing else for it, so she laid the pistol where she could grab it in a hurry, gripped the side of the bath, took a breath and leant a little deeper, the side of her chin dipping into the syrupy fluid, praying that the clone was inert.
Her left hand slid behind the clone’s neck and, using her right hand as anchor, she began to tug the clone to the surface. As Kat hauled herself back, so that her feet reached the floor again, she grunted with the effort to raise the clone’s head competely out, against the sucking effect of the gelatinous liquid. Her right hand groped for the pistol.
Just as the clone’s face broke surface, its eyes opened, followed by its lips. Kat grabbed the gun but Louise’s arm whipped out, catching Kat’s at mid forearm, killing her grip. The pistol rattled to the floor.
“Hello Kat,” the clone gurgled, blue liquid oozing out amongst the words. “How long can you hold your breath?”
The clone’s hands snapped around Kat’s neck and dragged her down into the sarcophagus. Kat’s entire body tumbled in. Her eyes and nostrils burned, and she thrashed about, trying to break the clone’s grip. She suddenly remembered the knife, and reached back with her right hand. At the same time, the clone’s arms straightened, its hands squeezing tight, strangling Kat. The pressure on her carotid arteries triggered dark patches in her already-blurred vision, almost making her drop the knife. But the straight-arm stranglehold gave her the room to manoeuvre. With a bubbling grunt, Kat swung the knife staight up into the underside of the clone’s jaw, driving its long blade up through the clone’s throat and into its lower brain.
The hands around Kat’s neck stiffened, spasming, then went slack. Kat didn’t bolt for the surface. Instead, bracing herself against the clone’s forehead, she withdrew the knife and then slit the clone’s throat from ear to ear, just to make sure.
Kat breached surface, gasping and coughing, then clambered out, slopping out of the ooze, and sat shaking on the floor, her back against the sarcophagus, in a large blue puddle. She tossed the knife, sending it skittering across the floor. “Longer than you think, bitch,” she said, then spat out some more of the fluid.
* * *
Louise was losing patience. “Why can’t we go faster?”
Aramisk said nothing, busying herself with the navigation console, feverishly swiping strands of black hair out of her vision. Tarish spoke, fingering his white goatee as he stared at the viewscreen depicting a normal star view, with Esperia’s small rusty disk dead centre. “There are Shrell here.” His voice sounded reverent. “They are poisoning space in this sector. If we move any faster than Aramisk can navigate with our scanners, our ship will be sliced in two.”
Louise didn’t know how Aramisk was tracking the Shrell, particularly as her own screens showed nothing; rumour was that these insular, Level Nine ray-like creatures lived in subspace and Transpace rather than normal space-time. In her years travelling the Grid she’d had plenty of time to catch up on its history; fully a tenth of Mannekhi territory had been devastated by Tla Beth-sanctioned poisonings, retribution for rebellions. She had little doubt the Mannekhi had developed ways to fathom the creatures’ pathways.
Louise activated a Level Six tracer in the ship’s data-core to see how Aramisk was tracking the Shrell, then addressed Tarish. The black Gel-suits they wore, prepped for battle in case of hull breaches, made Tarish look younger than his two hundred years.
“Can we fire on the planet from this distance, through these fractures you insist are there and my scanners cannot see?”
Tarish’s voice remained calm. “That would not be prudent. We can only detect the wake of a Shrell, some minutes after they have passed. There would be a risk of detonation due to collision with a fracture, perhaps close to our ship. I do not need to remind you –”
“No, you do not. Any change in the other three ships’ status?”
Aramisk answered from behin
d her console, voice taut. “The Mannekhi Spiker just came in range of the Crucible, which is decimating the moon. The Ossyrian vessel is nearby, but adrift and heavily damaged. The two Raptors returning from Esperia have berthed inside the Crucible.” She chewed on a knuckle, her face lit up green by the Marauder’s tactical displays. “I could finish off the Pyramid with an interceptor, if you wish.”
Louise studied the diminutive Aramisk, her thick black hair shrouding her features, making her look as if she was hiding from the world. She was the most talented but also the most unpredictable of the crew, and had been spending too much time with Kat for Louise’s liking. Aramisk clearly had no love for the Ossyrians, but that could be a feint; maybe she was looking for a way to help her Mannekhi colleagues in the Spiker ship move against the Crucible. In any event, Louise cared little for Ossyrians; they were of no consequence, and their ship would not survive long. Avoid secondary entanglements, Sister Esma had once counselled.
Louise strode toward the bridge exit. “Leave them. Their ship is no threat. Call me when we have a clear shot of the planet. Until then, no contact with any of the three ships. We destroy Esperia, then we leave, understood?”
Tarish and two of the others bowed. “As you order.”
Louise hovered in the doorway, waiting.
“Understood,” Aramisk added.
It sounded genuine to Louise, for a Mannekhi at any rate. She quit the bridge.
As soon as Louise left the bridge and was alone, her mood brightened. It made her realise how sick she was of her Mannekhi crew; she could never fully trust them. They were from a culture born into Patronage, taught from early childhood how to hide their true feelings. The only interesting companion had been Kat. Even if Kat wanted to kill her, at least she was honest about it. As she walked through the ship Louise realized she was sick of it, too, having spent seven years aboard this particular vessel, after the previous one was destroyed in an ambush by the Q’Roth Ninth fleet. Qorall’s forces had saved her life that time, rescued her from capture. Even if it had been to gain information on the former whereabouts of Kalaran, the fact was that he’d saved her.