The Last Star Warden - Tales of Adventure and Mystery from Frontier Space - Volume 1

by Jason McCuiston

  The medical robot clicked and hummed for a moment, the digital face squinting in thought. “I’m sorry, Star Warden, this system does not recognize the authority of Star Law. Please step away from the terminal or I will be forced to kill you both.”

  The Warden drew and blasted the medical droid to smithereens.

  As the smoking robot crumpled to the floor, Ramirez rolled her eyes. “Is that how you deal with everyone who stands up to you?”

  The Warden holstered his Comet and turned to her. “Not usually, but I’m a little on edge. And I never did cotton much to robots. Especially those that don’t recognize the authority of Star Law… Now, see what you can find on that computer while I tend to our friend, Mr. Carter, here.”

  Another chorus of disembodied howls sounded through the station’s intercoms. A horrific shriek answered from the corridor outside a few moments later.

  “Warden,” Quantum’s voice sounded from his wrist chrono. “Are you there?”

  “Yes, what’s up?”

  “The engineer and her men. They locked me in the upper observatory. I think they mean to head down to the radiation labs.”

  “Are you okay? Did they attack you?” The Warden glared at Ramirez. She raised her eyebrows in response, shaking her head as if pleading ignorance.

  “I am fine. They sealed the door, but I unlocked it quite easily. Should I follow them, or continue searching for the administrator’s office?”

  “No. Keep l—”

  A horrific shriek came through the open coms channel.

  Ramirez’s eyes went wide. “That was Hicks.”

  ---

  The coms filled with incoherent babble as half of Rook’s crew tried to talk over one another. After a moment of auditory chaos, he bellowed, “Shut the hell up!”

  When the coms went silent, Rook said in a more reasonable tone, “Brock, what happened? What’s going on?”

  She sounded scared, or at least nervous. “I—I’m not sure, Captain. Me, Hicks, and Chan were headed to the lowest tier… we decided to take the lift… The three of us boarded. Then the lights flickered… Hicks screamed… And then he was just gone. Right out of the moving car! Vanished from right beside me…”

  Rook chewed on this. “Was the alien with you?”

  “No.”

  “All right. You and Chan stay where you are. Me and Strega are on our way.” He flipped on the crew-tracker of his wrist chrono, then motioned the saurian alien to follow him. As they headed down the central winding corridor, he sent a private text to Ramirez:

  “No time to play nice anymore. When you see your shot, take it.”

  ---

  Leaving the sedated crewman restrained to his recovery bed, the Warden and Ramirez made their way to the lowest tier. The Warden hoped to head off the rest of Rook’s crew. As attractive as he found her to be, he didn’t fully trust Ramirez. But as long as he had her at his side, she wasn’t at his back.

  “You get anything out of that computer?” he asked as they hurried down the spiraling corridor.

  Ramirez nodded, pulling up the display on her wrist chrono. “Feeding it to me as we speak. Looks like a wave of nausea and headaches swept through the entire crew about a week ago. Two days later, over a dozen crewmembers came in complaining of bad dreams, and a few admitted to having waking hallucinations… The medical officer prescribed antidepressants and re-commended bed rest or lighter duty… These recommendations were denied by the station’s administrative officer, citing…”

  She looked at the Warden in surprise. “Citing missing crewmembers. The last entry in the medical log was two days ago. The medical officer admits to suffering hallucinations and requests an immediate transfer.”

  The Warden absorbed this as they reached the lower labs. “What were they fooling around with on this station?”

  They entered a prep room where bright yellow hazmat suits hung from the walls and a row of lockers divided the center of the chamber. The heavily sealed door on the opposite side of the room was marked with biohazard and atomic radiation warnings, as well as large-print reminders to double and triple check all safety protocols before entering.

  A horrific wail erupted from the left wall. One of the hanging suits moved, fell to the floor. Ramirez gasped, raising her weapon.

  A pale, fluttering figure stepped from the wall. It staggered, fell through the row of lockers as if they weren’t there. It sprawled on the floor, moaning in agony. Then it sank through the deck as if in water.

  Ramirez covered her mouth, her dark eyes wide. “That was Hicks… That was his ghost!”

  The Warden stared at the empty floor. “There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

  ---

  Brock and Chan were sharing a nic-stick with shaky fingers when Rook and Strega found them sitting at a table in the empty cafeteria. Aside from a few un-bussed tables and an overturned chair, the place looked like any other eatery just before opening. Chrome gleamed, soft music played from the wall speakers, and potted plants stirred in the subtle breeze of air conditioning.

  “Any sign of Hicks?” Rook asked, approaching the table.

  Brock shook her head, her blue eyes remained downcast. “No… but we saw some… someone or something else…”

  “It was a ghost,” Chan said before finishing off the smokeless cigarette. “It had to be a ghost. Ran right past us, screaming before vanishing into the bulkhead.”

  Rook frowned. He checked the environmental readout on his wrist chrono. According to the display, everything was normal. “Maybe there’s a chemical leak on that lift or something. Maybe you guys are hallucinating.”

  Strega licked the air above the two seated crewmembers. “No chemicalsss… Sssomething elssse.”

  “What?” Brock demanded, finally rising from the table. “What is it, Strega? What do you sense?”

  Before the big alien could answer, a chorus of disembodied howls and shrieks echoed from somewhere outside the cafeteria. The lights flickered.

  Chan snapped another nic-stick and popped one end in his mouth, his hands still shaking. “Forget this haul, man. We need to get off this hulk before we wind up like Hicks. Ain’t no score worth this sh—”

  Rook backhanded him out of the chair. “Shut up.” Turning to Strega, he said, “What is it? What do you sense on them?”

  Ignoring Chan’s dazed look as he wiped blood from his lip and got to his feet, Strega said, “Not sssure.” He licked the air again. “Tastesss like ssspace, but different.” Tilting his big head, he said, “Make sssenssse?”

  Rook shook his head. “Hell no, but it’s better than another damn ghost story… All right, let’s go find the Warden before his blue pal catches up with him. I like the odds of five on one a lot better than five on two.”

  ---

  “What is it?” The Warden whispered into the microphone of the hazmat suit’s sealed helmet. He and Ramirez had donned the protective gear and triple checked each other before entering the sealed laboratory. What he saw in the cavernous room’s center made him wonder if the suit was protection enough.

  “No idea,” Ramirez whispered back. “But it’s beautiful.”

  The insulated chamber was bare save for an array of control panels and humming machinery surrounding a shiny, metallic, four-meter-tall ring in the center of the room. Looking into it, the center opened onto a pulsing, shifting vista of multihued energy that whirled and changed like the inside of a kaleidoscope before fixing for a brief moment to display a distant star system… then a storm-wracked beach on some protean world… the icy surface of a hurtling comet… a busy space station orbiting a yellow planet… the infinite pink sky of a gas giant… an epic battle fought near the ragged fringe of a collapsing black hole...

  The Warden froze.

  He recognized this last image just as it faded into the swirl of hypnotic lights. These then coalesced to reveal a savannah covered in lush blue grass, roamed by a herd of tall, violet-furred and six-legged animals. In that previous brief moment of bl
aster fire and burning spacecraft, the Warden had seen silvery sleek Ranger-class ships darting among the black and bulbous interdimensional battle cruisers of the Mechtechan.

  He had seen the climactic battle of the Continuum War that had ripped him from his own era, his own place in the universe.

  “Warden?” Ramirez’s tinny mechanical voice came through his suit’s speaker. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.” He didn’t tell her he had just found a way back home. Or so he hoped.

  “This is clearly what’s causing and absorbing all the energy output as well as all the mechanical disturbances.” Ramirez had a handheld scanner moving among the machinery. She looked up with a frown. “And that cycle is growing stronger by the minute. We need to get out of here.”

  They hurried from the lab and into the GlasSteel decontamination chamber. As the decon sequence ended, the Warden cast one last, hopeful glance over his shoulder at the strange gate. The gate that might put him and Quantum back in the right place in time.

  That glance was why he didn’t see Strega’s fist when he stepped back into the prep room.

  ---

  “Keep the suit on.” Rook covered the Warden with his blaster pistol as the “great man” removed the hazmat helmet. The Warden sat on the prep room floor where Strega’s sucker punch had dropped him. “Nice of you to pull it on over your gun belt. Makes it awful hard to draw, no matter how fast you are.”

  “What are you doing, Rook?” Ramirez asked in a low voice. “We can’t do this… He’s a legend out here.”

  Rook laughed. “Easier and better to kill a legend than a man. At least that’s what all the new VR shows say, anyhow.”

  “I’m no legend.” The Warden smiled, rubbing blood from his square chin with the back of his glove. “But if you’re thinking about killing me, Rook, I advise against it.”

  Rook laughed harder, raised an eyebrow. “Oh, I’m sure you would. But, as I’m the curious sort, why would that be, exactly?”

  The Warden tilted his head toward the sealed door. “Because of the thing in that lab. I’m guessing you think that’s Tuatha tech, which part of it might be. But I’ve seen that kind of thing once before, back when we fought and drove the Mechtechan out of our universe. They made whatever’s at the root of that thing in there, and if you want to shut it down, you’re probably going to need Quantum’s help. He’s a Mechtechan.”

  Rook glanced at Ramirez, who frowned and refused to meet his eye. “And he’s not likely to offer that help if I put a hole in you, is that right?”

  When the Warden gave a tight smile in reply, Rook asked his first mate, “That what you saw in there?”

  Ramirez finally looked at him. “I don’t know what I saw. But whatever it is, it’s cycling energy at an alarming rate. If you hope to salvage it before it turns this entire system into a blank spot on the charts, then I reckon you’ll need the alien’s help.” She sneered at Brock. “She sure won’t be able to handle it.”

  Brock, all but listless until that moment, shot the first mate a murderous look. “Slag you, Ramirez! So long as it runs on juice of one kind or another, I can handle anything!”

  “You certainly know how to manipulate a magnetic lock in a hurry.”

  Rook turned to the prep room’s entrance to see the Warden’s blue-skinned friend standing in the doorway, his particle rifle at waist level, covering the lot of them.

  Frowning at the alien and more at Chan, who should have been watching their back, Rook said, “Easy there… Quantum, was it? No need to get uncivil.”

  “Uncivil is the last thing I am, sir. And yet my friend shows signs of minor damage.” The alien raised the muzzle of his weapon slightly. “How is that civil?”

  The Warden started to rise. “I’m fine—”

  Strega hissed, brandishing his vibro-ax as the bony protrusions on his skull rose.

  The blue alien made a tsking noise. “No, no, no. I would not do that, my reptilian friend. You are quite large, yes, but your atoms react just like everything else in this universe to a stream of supercharged particles.”

  “Easy, Strega.” Rook sighed and holstered his blaster. If his prize required the help of the Warden’s Mechtechan friend to extract, he would just have to resort to diplomacy. As much as he’d like to take the two of them apart and space the remains, he was not foolish enough to risk getting killed, or even wounded, when he was just one room away from the score of a lifetime. “It’s okay. We’re all friends again.”

  The Warden got to his feet and started removing the hazmat suit. “I’d not go that far, Captain. But at least we don’t have to kill each other.”

  The part of the man’s face not concealed by the black visor told Rook that the unspoken end of that sentence was, At least not yet.

  ---

  The group reconvened in the cafeteria. They sat or stood or leaned in a circle facing each other. No one’s back was to anyone else. The Warden stood with his arms folded across his chest, watching Rook and his saurian muscle watch him. Quantum went over the data Ramirez had collected on the hand scanner.

  For her part, the salvage ship’s first mate looked utterly dejected, sitting with her elbows on her knees, hands folded and head drooped. Ramirez gave the impression of a good person who knew she’d made a bad decision but couldn’t find a way out of it. At least the Warden found himself hoping that was the case, along with hoping that he could help her find her path when the current crisis was over and done.

  He also found himself hoping that path coincided with his own.

  Rook’s engineer and her assistant kept throwing nervous glances over their shoulders. Especially when another terrible shriek or unearthly moan would sound from somewhere in the station and the lights would flicker.

  “Well?” Rook cleared his throat. “What do you think?”

  Quantum’s antennae turned slowly, his big, unblinking black eyes still fixed on the scanner. “I think, Captain, that what is in that laboratory is not only responsible for the current laudable state of this facility, but it is also a doomsday weapon in the making.”

  The Warden cast his partner a glance. “You get that from the data there?”

  “Partially. While the rest of you were chasing ghosts and double-crossing each other, I located the administrator’s office and accessed the station’s logs. With that information and the data here, I have deduced a plausible reconstruction of what occurred on this station, as well as a prediction for what is likely to happen next.”

  Ramirez sat up straight. “Care to share, Quantum? Are we going to die, or what?”

  “Not if we leave immediately. But if left unchecked, that device will certainly destroy this system… and possibly more besides.”

  “What is it, exactly?” Brock asked. “I thought it was just a Tuatha super-dimensional engine, designed to bend the laws of physics in a localized area for experimentation and matter manipulation.”

  Quantum shook his head. “That is too much of an oversimplification. The device began as an interdimensional reconnaissance probe designed by my people’s scientists several millennia ago, as you reckon time. It was obviously assigned to this reality to send back information but was discovered by the civilization you refer to as the Tuatha. The Tuatha, in turn, must have modified the probe’s inner workings, allowing them to use the interdimensional data streams to open windows into the space-time continuum.

  “And now, the U.P.C. seeks to turn those windows into doorways. Unfortunately, one of this station’s crewmembers must have passed through the gate before the technology could be perfected. When his body entered the interdimensional data stream, he was caught in a space-time slip, creating a… a sort of phasal anomaly or time shadow of his former self, which now exists insubstantially in several different times and places simultaneously.

  “Furthermore, it would seem this condition is somehow transferrable to other biological entities. So, this unfortunate crewman must have then transmitted this phasal anomaly to others, wh
o in turn have done likewise until the station has become effectively abandoned, save for Mr. Carter now in sickbay.”

  “The ghosts,” Brock said. “That’s what happened to Hicks. One of those things turned Hicks into a ghost.”

  “Phasal anomaly,” Quantum corrected. “There are no such things as ghosts.”

  “A rose by any other name…” Ramirez shook her head.

  Quantum shrugged. “The bigger problem at hand is the device. Left open and untended, the gate has since exceeded the regulating capacity of the station’s experimental and imperfect framework. I believe the common expression used in such a situation is, running in the red…”

  “Before we shut it down, we need to consider the crew.” The Warden wanted to use the gate to get back to his own place in time, but that selfish notion was low on his list of priorities now. “Is there any way to use it to bring them back? To normal, I mean.”

  Quantum looked at the data once more. “Sadly, I think not. However, if we close the gate and sever this reality’s connection to the space-time continuum, it may return them to their original physical states. Though there is no way to predict which part of the multiverse in which that original state will find itself. Nor what permanent effect their sojourn in the space-time slip will have had on their individual psyches. Judging by the sounds we have heard, I can only assume that most of them are quite irrevocably insane at this point.”

  The Warden shook his head in frustration.

  Rook rubbed the stubble on his chin. “Then how do we close it?”

  The lights went out.

  The whole station shuddered.

  Artificial gravity failed. The Warden lost contact with the floor.

  A spectral scream ripped through the darkened room.

  The Warden tapped his visor, turning the gloom to emerald light.

  A trio of glowing wraiths emerged from the wall behind Chan and Brock. The haggard, maddened specters moved in quick, jerky steps, claw-like hands outstretched, hollow eyes and distended mouths filled with pale white fire.