by Barry Kirwan
He’d planned to move closer to the storm-shrouded planet Pierre and Katrina were surveying in the Hohash scout vessel, when he discovered the mother ship had slipped into sleep mode. At least the two thousand human refugees aboard were unaware of their predicament – tensions since they’d fled a burning Earth two weeks ago had meant he might just as well have a manifest of gunpowder rather than people, a tinderbox ready to ignite at the mere hint of a spark. He glanced at Axel and Sofia, but their furrowed brows, reflected in the jungle green lighting from the consoles, told him they were just as confused and apprehensive. He hoped his own concern was better masked than theirs. On impulse, and because they’d exhausted all other options, he kicked the stand of the extruded grey console with his boot, which did nothing whatsoever for the controls. However, a voice lanced across the room from behind him.
“Engine trouble?”
He spun around to see the upper half of a woman, honey-blonde hair strained back in a ponytail, rending her eyes – which could otherwise have been considered beautiful – too elfin-like to trust. Her crystal-clear image, sliced off at the waist, stared back at him with an equivocal expression, hovering in the middle of the room. A hologram, he assumed, though not like any he’d ever seen, and without any obvious source of projection.
“I wish to speak to Vince. Or Micah. Or even the legendary Blake Alexander.”
Rashid jutted his chin at the seated woman. “All dead, killed on Eden,” he lied. “And – you must excuse me – but we have not been introduced.”
A smile flickered like a nascent flame, and was gone. “Louise.”
He narrowed his eyes. He’d heard enough about Louise – an Alician assassin – from Micah and Vince – to presume that he, his ship and its two thousand frightened souls were in grave trouble. Yet she was supposed to be dead. He decided not to question the obvious, but she must have read his expression.
“Vince gave me a headache, but I’m all better now,” she said, mock sweetness.
He knew Vince had in fact put a hole clean through her skull. He brushed it aside: it didn’t matter how she was here. He rebuffed the idea of asking the clichéd question of what she wanted. As he suspected, he didn’t have to wait for her to get to the point.
“I’ve taken remote control of your ship. Perhaps that possibility didn’t occur to you when you stole it?”
He grimaced. Of course it had, which is why each of the four ships fleeing Earth and Eden had taken separate, fractally-coded pathways to the Ourshiwann home world, transiting to distant jump points, only entering each destination just before the next jump. He glanced over to the empty wall-space where the Hohash mirror-device normally resided. Pierre and Katrina had taken it to the nearby planet, looking for water. It meant he had no way to communicate with the other ships to warn them. Still, at least Pierre and Katrina might survive.
He suppressed his mounting curiosity at how this holographic projection could transmit both ways, if indeed, he wondered, it was a hologram. She looked real enough to touch, except for the obvious fact that the lower half of her body was missing. If she can interact with me – if she can hear my voice and see my actions, maybe this hologram can sense and transmit pain back to the real Louise…
She stifled a yawn. “Give me the coordinates of your final destination and you may live. If not, I will jump your ship into this system’s star.”
Rashid heard Sofia gasp and Axel take a step backwards. Sofia, a dark-skinned woman in her thirties who he’d been getting to know in the two weeks since leaving Eden, touched his arm. “Rashid –”
He tensed his body, standing to attention, and faced Louise. “How do I know you’ll keep your word?”
Louise didn’t answer immediately. Instead, she interlocked her fingers and flexed them outwards. The bone-cracking noise whipped across the control room.
She smiled. “Rashid, is it?”
He nodded, not blinking. He remembered learning as a Rajasthani child how to catch a cobra, or at least to judge when one was going to spit venom. At age nine he’d lost his best friend in that deadly village game. He wondered if there was some way to grab this cobra’s throat before she could strike.
“Well, I’m not after you, or your sorry baggage.” She waved a hand dismissively. “I’m after Vince and Micah. They killed me, and I need –” she leaned forward, “really, I need, to repay the privilege.” She reclined, folding her arms. “Give me your flight plan and I’ll leave you with one jump possibility, following which your ship’s navigation database will corrupt. There’s a planet nearby with oxygen, though it’s a tad heavy on sulphur. You might survive, after a fashion.”
He heard Axel hovering near the doorway, and he understood. The young engineer had married only three weeks ago, and knew where he wanted to be when… Rashid shut out everything except the cobra. “Give us some time to decide, I need to consult with other members of the crew and the council,” he ventured, guessing it would make no difference.
Louise shook her head once. “No, Rashid. You’re Captain, so it’s not a democracy. You have one minute before you get to see the inside of a star.”
Rashid knew it was probably futile, but he’d kick himself if he didn’t at least try. He reached over his shoulder with his right hand, felt inside the back of his collar, and found what he was looking for. In one smooth flowing movement he hurled the stiletto straight at, and through, Louise’s left eye. The knife lodged into the far wall with a thwack. At his side, Sofia gulped.
“Nice aim,” said Louise. She hadn’t even blinked. “Fifty-five seconds.”
He pursed his lips, then moved to the back of the control room. “Move aside,” he said, brushing Axel out of the way so he could access the navigation console. “You’re dismissed ensign.”
‘But Sir, I –’
Rashid seized him by the shoulders, and spoke softly. “Go to her. Now.” He pushed so that Axel half-stumbled backwards, then turned and darted out onto the central ramp. Rashid tapped in a flight plan. Sofia shadowed him, peering over his shoulder as he stooped over the displays and controls. He heard her soft intake of breath as she recognised the decoy flight plan Pierre had created just before he had left. She clutched his forearm as he typed. His fingers chopped at the keyboard as if he was entering their death sentence. She whispered into his ear, her voice unsteady. “You’re doing the right thing.”
He’d have preferred it if she’d started clawing at him, begging him not to lie to Louise. He punched in the transmit command and walked back towards the hologram, steady, setting his jaw. “It is done.”
Louise studied something outside the hologram frame. “I’d warn you that if it’s a trick, I’ll be back.” She cocked her head, elfin eyes gleaming. “But there’s no point, is there, Rashid? Well, it’s been a pleasure doing business with you. Say goodbye to your girlfriend.” The hologram dissolved into granules of flickering violet, then vanished.
He knew it would be fast. He met Sofia’s wide, frightened eyes. He reached out to her, stroked her cheek with the back of his fingers. Everything froze, and shifted into the familiar mercurial shades that meant that the ship, together with him, Sofia, his crew, and its precious goods – a quarter of surviving humanity – had just jumped.
Rashid had no illusions about the colour he would see next, but its brightness was beyond anything he could ever have imagined.
* * *
“Don’t think I’ll be sending any postcards,” Kat said.
Pierre allowed himself an evanescent smile, not on account of Kat’s sardonic wit, but because it meant she was relaxed with him. He valued the friendship that was coming like spring, after a bone-chilling winter, even if she’d never shown any warmth to him in the prior three months travelling from Earth to Eden. No matter that she loved Antonia, either. Sex was as over-rated as companionship was under-rated, in his opinion. He wondered what might grab her attention. Humour wasn’t his strong suit.
“Not human-sustainable in the long term. At least t
here’s some water, if we can filter out all the chemicals. Also, the day-night temperature cycle would severely challenge human endurance.” He cut himself off. She looked bored. He tried another approach.
“We haven’t named it.” There, that was better. Yet again, he was painfully aware of how his father’s genetic experimentation on him as a child had instilled scientific brilliance, at the cost of basic social aptitudes. It had made for a lonely life so far.
Kat swivelled her closely-cropped, raven-haired head from the displays, and cast a look at him as if she’d just noticed he was there. She was short and of slight build, with a constant edginess about her, as if she trusted no one. Her pale blue eyes were almost grey, and she had a habit of looking people in the eye for a split-second, drawing her assessment, and then looking away. But this time her eyes lingered. Pierre shifted in his seat as her stare penetrated through to the back of his skull; he’d never believed the expression ‘see right through you’ could be taken literally until he met Kat. He cleared his throat and gazed resolutely through the portal, out into the toxic vermillion funk masquerading as this planet’s excuse for an atmosphere, hoping the stars would soon re-appear to distract them both.
“Pietro,” she said, finally. “That’s what we should call it: stone – rock – you.”
He’d been called a cold fish enough times in his life, but her sarcastic tone and crooked smile anaesthetised the insult, the net effect being the verbal equivalent of a friendly punch on the arm, rather than a nasty jab. She was playing with him, he guessed, because he was no threat to her or Antonia.
They had left Rashid and the other two thousand refugees on the Q’Roth transport ship in order to inspect the planet, the only one they’d encountered since leaving Eden, just to check if it was habitable, a back up in case Ourshiwann wasn’t viable. They’d taken with them the ship’s Hohash, one of five surviving alien artefacts – and their only ally – found on Eden. The Hohash resembled an upright, art-deco mirror with an oval gold frame, like he’d seen once as a teenager in the holo-museum in Reims. The memory tripped him up as surely as an astro-blader hitting an updraft. Reims, Europe, Earth itself, was gone, scoured clean by the Q’Roth, sucking the bioelectricity out of all living mammals, leaving empty, flaccid husks behind.
He felt a connection with the Hohash, the last remnants of the spider world harvested by the Q’Roth a thousand years before they raked across Earth. The Hohash were unique, like him. As far as he knew he was the only non-Alician genetically altered human left, genned for intelligence. He usually hid how fast he thought, though it had come in handy back on Eden. He guessed the Hohash too, must feel lonely. Only Kat could communicate with them, after a fashion, courtesy of the play-node embedded in her cortex. The Hohash had sensors far beyond human technology, which was why he’d brought it along. Rashid had protested at first – as far as their overly-polite captain could complain about anything – but Pierre had persuaded him there was little danger, and they’d only be gone a few hours. Besides, they hadn’t heard from any of the other three ships, each equipped with their own Hohash, for over a week. Evidently the Hohash had limited range.
He registered a mental shiver. It had only been twelve days since they’d left Earth and Eden. It was just possible that some humans were still fighting – or more likely hiding – from the Q’Roth. But the probability was vanishingly small. The purge had been so efficient, so relentless and swift. Earth was most likely desolate, destroyed, devoid of life.
Pierre bent his mind back to the task. The Hohash sensors had explored the planet far quicker than he’d imagined possible, relaying the information back to Kat. But it had not been good news. They wouldn’t last a week on this planet – Pietro. It felt good to have a planet named after him, he decided, even a dud one.
The claret-coloured clouds faded as black night sluiced in around them, the stars glinting all around; they were back in space. He felt a thrill run through him: an astronaut, the best job conceivable for an astrophysicist. He let himself imagine he and Kat were explorers on a months-long mission, just them on this small ship. A rare warmth suffused his lean frame. Yet as he turned to face Kat, he watched a frown form on her face, then morph into a grimace of shock. He glanced down at his instruments, but saw nothing to be alarmed about.
“Something’s happened,” she whispered. Her face blanched, eyes distant as if seeing outside the ship.
He looked over his shoulder to the Hohash, whose fluid mirror surface showed a zoomed-in picture of the neighbouring sun. A flare gushed upwards from the corona, like a wave slapping against rocks, then subsided again. He knew the Hohash was tied into the ship’s external sensors, and that they were watching something in real-time, but he didn’t know what. Kat shrieked with such ferocity that he leapt out of his chair and rushed toward her, just in time to catch her collapsing body. He lowered her twitching, unconscious frame to the floor. Worse than her tremors was the stillness which followed as she lay listless as a corpse. He checked her vitals, and the diagnosis emerged soon enough – coma. He leaned over her. “Stay with me, Kat.” He glanced at the Hohash, but its mirror surface no longer rippled, instead registering only a dull, charcoal-coloured fog.
For the next hour he steered the craft back to the rendezvous coordinates, but he already had a bad feeling about what he would find. When he arrived, he decided it would have been preferable to find wreckage, rather than nothing at all. The absence of data left too many uncertainties. He wondered how much longer the air would last in their small craft.
After a day spent loitering in space waiting to see if the ship returned, with the air beginning to taste of stale mushrooms, Kat still in a coma, and the Hohash inert, he powered up the engines and directed the ship back to Pietro. I hope I was wrong about surviving only a week. He recalled what Zack had said about him once, not that long ago: “When it comes to facts and figures, Pierre’s never wrong.” He gunned the engines. Every rule has an exception, his father had told him, more than once. He prayed his father was right.
* * *
Ukrull, a reptilian Ranger under instructions from Grid Central, who had observed the Q’Roth culling of Earth as per galactic protocol, had tagged undetected behind the Q’Roth hunter-seeker warship, until the Alician female calling herself Louise located a ship containing a reasonable number of the species calling itself human. Cloaking his ship with a spatial harmonic offset, Ukrull tuned in to the communication exchange between the two ships. It was depressingly primitive, involving serial rather than parallel processing, brimming with redundancy, and inefficient far beyond the point of irritation. All of this meant that monitoring the exchange required almost none of his attention. Of more concern was the Bartran slave-mind humming quietly to his right. Ukrull had been mind-plexing through his former colleague Shatrall’s database on this erratic race calling itself humanity, and the claustrophobic yet unusually diverse biospheric habitat they called Earth. He noted a passing similarity to the Bartran’s exo-skeletal appearance with an Earth-based creature called an armadillo.
A thousand Grid-standard angts – or nine hundred Earth years – earlier, Shatrall had experienced a gravitational shear-front caused by an unscheduled neutron star burst during a long-distance spatial jump. It had caused him to crash-land on this remote planet in a region the inhabitants called Tibet. The indigenous people had saved Shatrall after the crash, pulling him from the burning wreckage. Luckily, further contact had been minimal, and a rescue transport arrived within a few days, though the encounter had sparked a small religious sect, as was frequently the case with unofficial intrusions into nascent civilizations. Sentinels, they had called themselves, according to Shatrall’s somewhat patchy logs.
Ukrull nudged the Bartran, but it maintained its stiff, vibrating posture. Sliding his claw into the recess in the Bartran’s armoured back, he found the centre of focus of the creature’s mind, in the control room on the transport ship, focusing on a single male biped. Ukrull hissed at what he perceived:
A blood debt! Was it possible? Yet the genetic marker was there, corroborated in a natshuul by the ship’s archives. He growled.
He composed an urgent message requesting instructions from his station master, but no sooner had he transmitted, than an alarm signalled a jump initiation on the Q’Roth transport. Ukrull’s octospheric brain unleashed a cyclone of commands through his neural interface: raising his ship’s shields to maximum, interrogating the transport ship’s coordinates; calculating an intercept point inside the local star, initiating the extraction protocol for the single entity with the genetic marker, and then firing the engines to maximum. As his ship catapulted towards the system’s sun, at the same moment as the Q’Roth transport vanished towards its doom, Ukrull realised he would arrive one natshuul later than required. He hoped this human species was more resilient than it appeared.
Chapter 4
Eden Council
Micah ruffled the towel over his wiry black hair and then evaluated the effect in the aluminium mirror: as usual it was no different than before he’d entered the field-shower. One good thing about his run-of-the-mill features was that over the past few weeks, while everyone around him gradually became more unkempt, dishevelled, and rough around the edges, due to the absence of life’s usual little luxuries and fancy toiletries, he stayed exactly the same. But there was a family resemblance he’d rather not see in his reflection.
He’d never liked his father, and could never even in his thoughts think of him as ‘Dad’. As Vince had remarked back on Earth, every hero has a dark side. He stared deep into his seemingly bottomless brown eyes, the main family trait. “Well, father, now Mom’s with you, you’d better behave at last.”
An impatient knock on the frosted door reminded him of the queue waiting outside. He wrapped the towel around his waist and bustled through the disgruntled line, avoiding direct eye contact, as everyone else did, in the status-levelling conditions onboard the ship nobody cared to name. No problem, he thought – now we’ve landed, we’ll leave these leviathan ships behind soon enough, and get out into the fresh air of Ourshiwann. He’d heard that atmospheric testing had shown it was safe to go outside; the military were probably already out there. He quickened his pace.