Lifemates (Tales of Wild Space Book 1)

by Brandon Hill

  “Yeah. I guess we’re in the clear, then,” Isibar said in a noncommittal tone. The bell sounded, and the doors opened to blinding sunlight.

  Isibar was the first to step into the trap, as a furry, clawed hand shot forward with an iron grip on his neck, and forced him back headfirst against the wall of the elevator car.

  The Felyan owner of the hand stepped into Mokomba’s field of vision: a much larger specimen than his compatriot from the secret lab. This one wasted no words as he pressed forward, attempting to crush Isibar’s throat with his weight.

  ***

  Fear engulfed Mokomba, but the desire to live prevailed even more. He had made it this far, and only because of Isibar, who gave him hope for a second, and now third chance at redeeming himself. He loathed violence, but freedom was worth overpowering his personal feelings.

  He shoved Isibar to the side, weakening the Felyan’s grip. In the confusion, he ripped the gun from its holster on Isibar’s pants. Mokomba then snapped his head towards the now surprised and furious alien, aimed, and fired.

  The recoil painfully slammed both himself and Isibar to the ground. Mokomba, still reeling from the swiftness of previous events, righted himself slowly. He heard Isibar coughing, meaning he was still alive. He glanced to the side. The Felyan was dead, a splatter of blood was on the far wall of the elevator car, and on his own shirt.

  He cast a desperate gaze towards Isibar, who had not yet fully recovered from his brush with death. Grabbing him by the arm, he hoisted him up to his side with all his might, lending him his strength to aid him out onto the rooftop, gun in one hand, Isibar around his shoulder.

  “Come, he said. “Lève-toi. We must go.”

  The rooftop sported a landing pad and a bordering wire mesh fence, but there was no ship, or the sounds of one approaching. Nevertheless, there was someone waiting for them. Mokomba froze, but adrenaline switched off his fear as he took aim. The doctor stood in the landing pad’s center, unafraid at the pistol he had trained upon her.

  “The Felyan was the last of the guards who stayed behind,” the doctor said over the untamed winds high above Bistran’s skyscrapers. “He woke me up. The rest was simple logic. It seems like he played too roughly with little guest, though. You killed him, I see? You surprise me, Jean-Pierre.”

  ***

  With surprising confidence, she walked across the landing pad –closing in on them with an undoubtedly feminine gait, as Isibar noticed. “You put me to sleep; you killed my specimens, and you freed my newest guinea pig. I never thought you had it in you.”

  “The … gun,” Isibar said. His voice was rasping and hoarse.

  “But you’re not strong enough,” Mokomba protested, and kept the weapon trained on the doctor.

  “I don’t like banter,” Isibar wheezed, and coughed dryly. “You either take action, or it takes you.”

  “Bon chance,” Mokomba said, and after one uncertain moment, relinquished the weapon. Isibar aimed-

  -and then gasped deeply as blinding pleasure struck him down. He fell heavily to one knee, nearly bringing Mokomba down with him. In the confusion, there was the sound of a gun. The doctor screamed, and Mokomba dropped Isibar.

  The doctor stooped to the ground, tenderly gripping her hand, from which flowed a great deal of blood. Upon the ground, however, were two broken halves of a white card.

  “So much for your torture device,” Isibar said, his voice much stronger than before. He picked himself up and helped Mokomba to his feet. “Surprising thing about pleasure is that a little bit counteracts pain really well.”

  The doctor shot Isibar a look that would melt quartz, and reached behind her. She was far enough away that he could not exactly see the gun, but its glint off of the sunlight gave it away. But before anyone could react, a line of bullets slammed into the concrete. The shots drove up tiny columns of dust between Isibar and the startled doctor, who shuffled back several feet, dropping her weapon. It slid towards Isibar, and he fired, his well-placed shots knocking it out of reach.

  “Looks like my ride’s here,” Isibar said over the winds, whose sound was subsumed by the increasing volume of a ship engine’s whining roar. Soon, the sound was nearly deafening, and the wind gusts became more powerful. “I wouldn’t try anything else. My ship can be a bit ornery about threats.”

  “Where is it?” Mokomba said, glancing about blindly.

  “Stand down from security measures,” Isibar said into his watch, “De-cloak ten seconds, retrieval, then launch to pre-arranged coordinates.”

  Directly above them, a ship appeared, fading into existence like a ghost. Its slanted hull was a patchwork of repair panels. It had no visible wings, floating solely under the power of its antigravs. Two long gun barrels protruded from dorsal and ventral ports. It swiftly hovered towards the landing platform, opened its entrance hatch, and extended the gangplank.

  “Come on,” Isibar said, and he and Mokomba hurried on board, passing the doctor who merely knelt and watched, wounded and paralyzed with impotent rage. Isibar leaped over the slight drop from the entrance hatch to the cargo bay, forgetting to warn Mokomba, who fell to the ground.

  “Launch! Launch!” Isibar shouted into his watch, running sure-footed to the cockpit area, despite the ship’s constant corrective pitch and yaw. Mokomba followed behind, but at a stumbling pace, much less used to such motion.

  “Miss me, baby?” Isibar said affectionately, patting the control panel like an old friend.

  “Pardon?” Mokomba said, overhearing his last words as he entered the cockpit.

  “Not you,” Isibar said. “Have a seat. Emergency hyperspace jumps can be a little bumpy.” He tossed himself into the pilot seat and ran a cursory check on all systems. Police skimmers were headed their way, but the cloak was already in place. They were safe as safe could be. He smiled.

  “You can’t be serious,” Mokomba said, at last settling himself in the copilot chair. “Icona has the best planetary defenses in the-”

  “How do you think I got inside?” Isibar said dryly. “Besides, the Mistress isn’t just some old rust bucket; even you know that.” Briefly, he redirected his attention towards the sensor readouts and laughed. “This is great; they’re going crazy trying to find us! I love it!”

  The blue of Icona’s sky faded into the black of space as the Mistress pierced the atmospheric ceiling. About a minute later, the white of stars streamed into bright, flowing lines as the Mistress shunted itself into a hyperspace conduit.

  As Isibar leaned back, allowing the autopilot to fly the rest of the way, he felt something being pressed into his hand. He turned and saw that Mokomba had handed him a disk.

  “As promised,” he said. “Some of those who worked under the doctor were quite good with hacking, and a few of them were on my side. It is an overview of Icona’s military strength, and the entire R&D of our labs.”

  “Just what I need,” Isibar said, and slipped the disk into the drive beside the navicomp. The secondary screen subsequently scrolled through several pages of text, each with the swirling glyph that was the seal of the Second Imperium emblazoned in the background. He scanned through some of the files. They were authentic.

  “It’ll do,” Isibar said, ejecting the disk and placing it in his black box underneath the console.

  “You thought I’d deceive you?” Mokomba said.

  “The thought had crossed my mind.”

  “Well, I can’t blame you.” Mokomba shook his head. “What would you have done if the data was false?”

  “Shoot you, and throw you out of an airlock,” Isibar replied in a flippant tone. “Not necessarily in that order.”

  “So, where are we headed?” Mokomba asked after a long silence.

  “Beauvoir III. It’s where you wanted to go, right?”

  Mokomba seemed to exhale in relief. “Yes, yes, absolument.”

  “Hopefully, you’ll stay there this time. You saved my life, after all, twice. You thought I’d renege on my end of the bargain?”<
br />
  “The thought had crossed my mind,” Mokomba gave a faint smile. “And what of you afterwards? What will you do?”

  “First, I’m going to pick up my pay on Siberna, and then pistol whip a certain android who gave me some seriously outdated info,” Isibar said. “Then I think I’ll retire. I’ve seen too much this time around to want to do this job again. At least I managed to shut the door on a mystery that’s been bugging the Felyans for awhile now. Bad news is that I’m the one who’ll have to explain to those families what happened to their kids.”

  “I’m only playing devil’s advocate here,” Mokomba ventured, “but don’t you feel that the doctor’s plans would have worked? What if she had succeeded, and broken the back of the Second Imperium? Would that have been such a bad thing?

  “And then what?” Isibar said, incredulous. “You think she would’ve stopped there? What would have kept her from trying to rewrite the galaxy in her own image, with that kind of power? I’m just glad we stopped her.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Mokomba said. His gaze shifted to the forward rain of stars outside the view port. “The doctor … she is as resourceful as she is tenacious.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Before I used the sleeping device on her, the doctor confided in me that she’d extracted DNA from all your tissues: everything, skin, hair, organs, even sperm. Remember, she did tell you that when Felyans mate with a human, an imprint of their own genes is left indelibly upon the genes of their lover. But what she didn’t say was that children born from two humans, if one of them had a previous tryst with a Felyan, have some abilities akin to human/Felyan hybrids. The doctor also told me that she’d artificially inseminated herself with your own genes.”

  Isibar went completely white.

  “Oh, god…” His hands slid off of the control console as he felt a cold numbness subsume his entire sense of touch. He swallowed hard. “You mean to tell me that she’s pregnant… with my child?”

  “I don’t know for certain,” Mokomba answered, clearly regretting having divulged the information. “It may have happened; it may not have. But we did not destroy the lab, and I don’t know where she kept her samples.”

  “Damn it…” Isibar said through gritted teeth. “Damn it to hell! That’s why she said that she had plans for me!” Isibar slammed his fist upon the control panel, furious, and like how he left the doctor, knowing fully how impotent that fury was.

  “I ought to go back just to have the Mistress finish the job with her!” He squeezed his eyes shut, and for several minutes, slammed his head back upon the head rest, panting and cursing. “Dammit! Dammit! Good God, why…?” Tears of both pain and rage streamed down the sides of his face.

  Mokomba silently waited for Isibar’s anger to wane. “For what it is worth mon ami, I’m sorry. Perhaps I should have said nothing.”

  “No,” Isibar said, regaining what composure he could. He let out a long, harsh sigh, and swallowed down the last vestiges of his simmering rage. “No, it’s better that I know.” Then he turned to face Mokomba, and fixed him with a hard stare. “But as for you, tell no one of this. You understand me?”

  “Bien sûr,” Mokomba said, most sincere. “You have nothing to worry about. But you know that this may not be over.”

  “For now, I don’t want to think about that,” Isibar said in a pained voice. “I just want to go back home. I miss my family, and I miss Cala’s cooking.” He laughed softly in spite of himself. “When I get home, I’m going to massage the hell out of her-”

  He paused and laughed in spite of himself, remembering where he was. “And for what I know of this mission, I’ll get in touch with my cousin, and tell him before the Alliance gets hold of his ear. He’s in the same business as me, and crazier than I am. No doubt the Alliance might have something for him to do involving Icona.”

  “So you’re putting the ball in his court now?” Mokomba said.

  “Sort of,” Isibar answered. “And he’s got a way of dealing with people who mess with his family.”

  THE END

  Her Hand in Mine

  By Brandon Hill and Terence Elliot

  1

  I would never have believed that on the day that Sar’vana returned to my life, I would begin to die. It wasn’t real death, mind you. But slowly, irrevocably, the man that I was faded away, bit by bit, becoming ever more a stranger to Zynj, the planet of my birth -if I had not already been so. Bit by bit, I was reborn, free of my world’s constraints. I became whole and complete, and healed of a disease I never even knew I had.

  I saw the ship landing on the day it began, at the tail end of a dust storm that had my convoy grounded for a full hour. The blinding darkness and flesh-eating particles of glass and jagged sand that blew in 100 mph winds was pleasant summer weather for my planet. And we were thankful to only be waiting an hour. As the skies reverted to what passed for clear, I saw it coming in for a landing. The craft was unmistakably Felyan; I had seen them before in videos, but it had been ten whole years since I’d gotten to look at an actual one. It was just like I remembered: a tapered bullet with no visible gun or exhaust ports upon its shining surface. It possessed an almost organic sleekness that put even the most streamlined vessel from any of the Colonies to shame. Its immaculate hull was glaringly incongruous against the bleak, windswept valley that had been pockmarked with ancient craters and curtained above by leaden clouds of poison. It landed without a sound upon the distant tarmac, and I stared, wondering what the occasion was, until the radio crackled the foreman’s irate voice.

  “Hey, Galway! You fell asleep out there or something?” The volume alone shook me unpleasantly from my reverie. “I said move! This slag ain’t gonna haul itself!”

  And so it was back to business. I hit the truck’s throttle and my job continued as it had since I turned sixteen: hauling slag from the ruins of old Valis, one of millions of what remained of Zynj’s surface cities, crushed by the Imperium Wars, and now only so much scrap metal on the convoy to the processor. I was a Class-A hauler, licensed to lead the convoys and operate the processor that purged the radiation and toxins from the slag, and separated it into its constituent parts to be shipped offworld. The scrap was the only reason why Zynj still had a human population, and probably the only reason the Felyans still dealt with us, not that their help had been appreciated, with how much I’d heard the Elders whine about it on news reports. I read once that Zynj had been the most populous of all the Colonies before the war; now our population was so scant, it would be centuries yet before we ran out of cities to scrap, possibly millennia. God only knew what would become of us then.

  Only after work did I have time to truly be myself. But this was usually after Chester, my friend and coworker, dragged me along to have a drink with him in the local pleasure house. Sure as sandstorms, he caught up with me after we exited the decon room, still reeking of that salve they sprayed on you while buck naked. Realizing that I had been holding my old respirator through the entire process, I threw it into the recycler just as Chester came to my side and threw his arm around my neck: a bit of a feat, considering how much larger and thicker of build I was compared to him.

  “Jules!” His shout echoed off of the tiles of the locker room. “Come, my friend! We party tonight!”

  Ducking out of his impromptu embrace, I paused to give myself a cursory view the mirror above the sink. I had dressed in fresh clothes and the chemical bath had wiped away all of the toxic grime from me, but I never was what anyone would call handsome. My dirty blond hair seemed always wild and unkempt; my face was a mask of conflicting features, with its broad nose and incongruously soft-looking brown eyes set upon leathery skin. My facial hair grew out to a simple five o’clock shadow, but no farther. Ironically, this rugged look was not as off-putting as it ought to have been, and I did manage to attract a fair amount of unwanted attention from plenty of girls in the sector: a fact that Chester found amusing, much to my irritation.

  “What’s
the occasion?” I asked, at last satisfied that I could do much worse with my appearance.

  “What indeed?” The freckles upon my friend’s ruddy face seemed even darker when he grinned this broadly. “Keisha’s there, and she’s been asking about you.”

  I must have had quite a stupid look on my face when I saw how Chester returned my gaze.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t remember her!” he said. But try as I might, my mind was an embarrassing blank.

  “You know, Keisha, the Thursday night bartender?” Chester was utterly nonplussed. “The one who was hanging all over you last week? That Keisha?”

  “Oh, her!” I then frowned as I fuzzily recalled the girl who would not leave my side last week, even when it had been evident that I was not interested. “I might’ve been drunk.”

  “Yeah, that you were,” Chester replied, unsurprised, despite the fact that I rarely ever found myself in that condition. “Why was that, anyway?”

  “Because I wasn’t exactly in a good mood last week. The slaves we licensed to operate two of our trucks tried to make a run for it ... as if there was anywhere to run. Someone hacked the master controls, and so I couldn’t shut the trucks’ systems off. I had to shoot their engines out, and then shoot the slaves when they tried to run off on foot. It’s not something I felt good about doing, so you can understand why I wasn’t in the mood for women that day.”

  “No wonder you were so mopey,” Chester said after an elongated “Oh” of realization. “Foreman chewed you out?”

  “A little. But he understood, for the most part. He was actually more pissed about the trucks than about the slaves.”

  “You did them a kindness, is what I think,” Chester said. I knew that he was attempting to be consoling, but he was falling rather short of the mark. “Better they die from a bullet in the brain than from their respirators getting clogged with the toxic crap out there.”

  “That’s not very encouraging.”