Shattered Lamps (Osprey Chronicles Book 2)

by Ramy Vance

  “I’m not outmatched. I’m using my resources stupidly.” She scrambled to return the force field to its standard configuration, ignoring the scattered chess pieces. The clock was ticking.

  “Thanks, good talk!” she called as she opened the door and stepped into the crew quarters.

  She left him dangling from the ceiling, staring at her from between his rippling deltoids.

  Jaeger stood alone in outer space. A cloud of jagged, watermelon-sized asteroids orbited her.

  The hologram projection flickered briefly as the door to the observation deck slid open. Toner, red-eyed and haggard, joined Jaeger in the middle of the asteroid belt, followed by Occy.

  Baby stood in the doorway, sniffing at hologram asteroids drifting past but not quite crossing the threshold.

  “I have a couple of ideas for getting us out of this mess.” Jaeger offered Toner a smile, which he met with a cold glare. She didn’t flinch. Soothing his ego was rarely a simple matter. “I wanted to see what you thought of them.”

  Toner grunted and plopped into one of the observation deck chairs, untwisting the cap of a hip flask. He batted lazily at a projected asteroid drifting past his head.

  Occy stepped to the center of the asteroid belt. He had self-consciously drawn his tentacles close around his body, making himself small. The artificial spin-gravity of the central column made it hard to disguise the fact that Occy’s tentacles made up more than half of his body mass. In here, where they dragged along the floor, he looked less like a small boy living in a nest of tentacles and more like a half-mutilated sea monster manipulating a child’s body like a meat-puppet.

  Occy blinked, his big eyes reflecting artificial starlight as he studied the holographic asteroid belt. “This isn’t to scale,” he said, uncertain.

  “No, but it’s close enough for demonstration purposes. Virgil, please overlay our information about the Creeper base and troop movements.”

  The projection lights mounted overhead flickered, and dozens of glowing white Creeper mining vessels appeared, swarming through the belt. The hologram shifted, panning forward to enlarge on a particular cluster of asteroids.

  “It appears they’ve built their primary base across several smaller asteroids,” Virgil said as a network of glowing white tunnels appeared, stitching the cluster of asteroids together. Like bees around the hive, mining vessels disappeared into the tunnels and re-emerged, always busy, always moving.

  “Why?” Toner eyed the cluster base as he sipped from his flask, sounding curious despite himself. “Why build bridges across little asteroids when there are plenty of big ones around?”

  “They’re probably better off using the bigger ones for mining and disguising their profile,” Jaeger said. “What are you drinking?”

  Toner glanced at his flask as if he was surprised to see it. Then he offered it to her with an unfriendly smile. “AB negative. Want some?”

  Jaeger shook her head and turned back to her diagrams. “The Overseers are a species who value honor.”

  Behind her, Toner snorted. “Honor is in the eye of the beholder.”

  “Maybe. We came to them offering a gift: the location of this base. In return, they offered us something they considered equally valuable. A place for us and twenty others.”

  “That’s not enough,” Occy said pensively.

  “Apparently not,” Jaeger said.

  “It’s not,” Toner agreed. “But that’s the value they place on the gift we offered them. It’s like any good negotiation. They have to make a bargain with us. We need to up the ante.”

  She forced herself to turn and meet Toner’s gaze. She expected him to explode, but he only stared at her over the mouth of his flask.

  “Up the ante,” she said flatly.

  He nodded, tipped back his flask, and drained it. A dribble of blood ran down his chin. “It’s kind of what my genetics built me to do.”

  “You want to handle the Creepers yourself,” Occy realized. “Not just tell the Overseers where they are, but go…go blow them up, so the Overseers don’t have to.”

  “Yes,” Toner said. “The Overseers established base values when they made their offer. The information was worth about twenty lives. The action of handling the problem ourselves—that will be worth many, many times more than that.”

  Occy cocked his head, thoughtful as he considered the Creeper base pulsing like a four-lobed heart at the center of the asteroid belt.

  “We gotta double down. I don’t like it, but…” Toner mused, staring into the belt of swirling space rocks. “Lord, what fools these mortals be.”

  “Ante up,” Jaeger repeated.

  She met his cold gaze and didn’t waver. “I was wrong not to consult with you before. What’s the plan? I’m listening.”

  Toner brought his flask to his lips and tipped it back until it was empty. Unsatisfied, he shook the flask. A single drop of coagulating blood substitute dripped like cold oil from the flask onto his pale lips.

  Then he tossed the empty flask aside. He wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. “We need a battle plan. I’ll come up with Plan A. You come up with Plan B.” He held up a finger to keep her from interrupting. “Before you ask, I already got Plan C. Fuck shit up with big explosives.”

  Jaeger laughed. So did Occy. Toner wore a deadly serious look on his face. “We’re wildly outnumbered and outmatched for a military operation of this scale.” Then he grinned. “But you know what they say? You can’t make an omelet without cracking some eggs. We got eggs. Almost four hundred thousand of them…all crew members with nothing better to do.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “Commander! Excellent timing. Come along. I’m about to miss my tee time.”

  Percival LeBlanc, Support Fleet Commander and former captain of Tribe Six let out an undignified yelp and covered his eyes.

  “Oh, don’t be so dramatic. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before.”

  The hatch to Professor Greyson’s private quarters clicked shut behind Percival, making him jump again. He fiddled with his stiff uniform collar. His throat itched. Bad enough that the laundry department had run out of hypoallergenic detergent. Coming into the professor’s den had always made Percival break out in hives.

  The professor browsed through a small rack of golf clubs behind his desk, lips pursed thoughtfully. He wore a terrycloth bathrobe, a pair of oversized Bermuda shorts, thong sandals, and nothing else.

  “Ah, having trouble with the laundry services again?” Percival asked.

  “Hm?” Selecting a single five-iron, the professor shut the cabinet door and stepped toward the back of his office, where a subtly designed ramp curved up to the first door of a small, private airlock. “No. Why do you ask?”

  Percival shook his head, despairing.

  “Come along, come along.” The professor waved him forward. “No time to dawdle.”

  Head hanging between his bony shoulders, Commander LeBlanc followed the professor into an airlock. The door slid shut behind them, sealing the two grown men into a tin can the size of a generous closet.

  Propping his golf club beside him, Professor Greyson sat on a narrow ledge and fiddled with the mag soles stuck to the bottoms of his sandals. “I’d power up if I were you,” he said to Percival. “You don’t want to go floating off into the void, do you?”

  Wordlessly, Percival reached down and cranked his mag soles up to full power.

  After completing the pressurization cycle, the airlock’s exterior door unsealed with a whoosh. Percival’s breath caught, like it always did, as the pressure change popped his eardrums and the swirl of thin, frigid air hit him like a kick in the gut.

  Resting his five-iron on his shoulder, the professor stepped out of the airlock and into the cold vacuum of space. His mag soles softly hummed as he strode away.

  They stood on the exterior of the Reliant, the first of three freighters that made up the bulk of Tribe Six’s support fleet. Percival had made it into his mobile command center after�
�well. After.

  The freighters were fat, ugly ships beside the long sleek marvel of the Tribe Primals. Starlight turned her irregular hull into a cold landscape of harshly glittering sensor arrays and impossibly deep shadows. It stretched on and on, a monolith beneath their feet as Percival followed the professor to a comparatively flat stretch of hull a few meters from the open airlock door.

  Percival couldn’t see the force field generators protecting him from explosive decompression and instant freezing. He could only trust that they were there, mounted to the ship's exterior hull, creating a delicate bubble of atmosphere that was utterly invisible. Bitter cold curled at his fingers and toes and nipped at his ears. The generators projected a force field to contain atmosphere—and nothing else. No faux-gravity. No heat. The only warmth protecting them from the bite of absolute zero was what emanated from the airlock door hanging open behind them.

  Indifferent to the cold, the professor stood with one fist planted on his hip, his golf club on his shoulder as he surveyed the metal landscape and the starry void above.

  “Terrible, isn’t it?”

  Percival didn’t know if he was supposed to agree or not, so he only nodded noncommittally.

  “You have to wonder what’s out there hiding behind all that nothing,” the professor went on. He pulled something out of his robe pocket. It was a golf tee. He leaned down and wedged it in a gap in the hull plating. “If it’s God, or something better. Or something worse! That’s always an option, too. If you go exploring, you can’t be upset if you happen to find something.”

  He dug out a golf ball as well and displayed it to Percival. “These are special order. I had Anthony coat them in a bit of glue,” he said like he was confessing a sin. “Just enough to keep them from floating off the tee.” Gently, he pressed the ball onto the tee. As predicted, it didn’t float away.

  The professor straightened, resting his club between his feet. He shrugged in a lazy stretch.

  Percival clamped his jaw shut to keep his teeth from chattering.

  “Are you chilly, Percy?” The professor asked. The open flaps of his terrycloth bathrobe fluttered around his bare calves. He gripped his club, brow knit with concentration as he wound up for a practice swing. The professor had undergone some subtle and mysterious genetic modification of his own. He wasn’t trying to hide it anymore. For all his talk of the purity of humanity, the little shit was a hypocrite.

  Besides, Percival had always hated that nickname. “I’m fine,” he said gruffly. “I don’t plan on being out here long.”

  “No? Neglecting your driving practice?” The professor swung, his wrists rotating expertly around the shaft of his club as it arched smoothly over his shoulder. He squinted into the deep void of space as if watching an imaginary golf ball fade into the distance. “You’ll let your game grow rusty that way.”

  “I’m afraid I haven’t had much time for golfing lately.”

  “No, no, of course not.” Shaking his head, ultimately dissatisfied with the conclusion of his practice swing, the professor reset his stance and prepared for another. “You’ve been too busy watching wormholes burst and collapse like bubbles in boiling oil. I suppose someone has to watch. Otherwise, how will we know it really happened?”

  Percival set his teeth and said nothing as the professor took another practice swing.

  “This is a remarkable sector of space,” the professor observed. “We’ve never seen anything like all of the membrane-wormhole activity. Why, until last year, we hadn’t even realized it was possible. Now there’s a new wormhole every few weeks. Who knows where they all lead? Certainly not you.”

  “Our supplies are limited. We don’t have the resources or personnel to spare on risky exploratory missions.”

  “Commander LeBlanc.” The professor rested his hands on the butt of his club and gestured to space around them. “Do you know where the force field barriers end and hard vacuum begins?”

  Percival shook his head. Most force shields emitted faint visible light, enough cue to let a standard human know where safety ended and death began. Not these. He edged a little closer to the professor’s elbow, trusting the crazy little man to at least look after himself.

  The professor’s face lit up with delight. “Neither do I! At any moment, you or I could take one careless step out of the safety zone, and before we even knew what was happening, our blood would start to boil in our veins. I programmed these generators to create a randomly sized, differently-shaped atmospheric bubble every time I come out onto my little patio. I have no idea where safety ends and hard vacuum begins! Do you know why?”

  Because you’re a crazy fuck, Percival thought, feeling a lump of cold terror forming in his throat. His face must have betrayed his thoughts because the professor laughed gently and patted Percival on the shoulder. “Relax, Percy. My tricky force fields aren’t the real danger. Why, at any second, an aneurysm could form in your brain and kill you.

  “Healthy man, fifty years old, fit as a horse. Dead. Hit by lightning out of a clear blue sky, dead. Crushed by a falling meteor, dead. Spontaneous allergic reaction, dead! We live our entire lives half a step away from blind destruction, and only fools ignore that truth. The universe is a scary place, my friend. We all live on the edge. The ones who hide their faces from it are blind. They will never learn to appreciate the view.”

  “I don’t play Russian roulette to feel alive.” Percival breathed. Overhead, the starfield gently spun as the ship beneath their feet continued its eternal rotation. Two meters away, the open airlock glowed gently, beckoning with warmth and safety. Somewhere nearby, somewhere invisible, maybe only centimeters from Percival’s head, the invisible force fields stopped, and vacuum began.

  The professor lifted his narrow chin, meeting Percival’s stare. He was a slender man, elfin and pale, bony and downright scrawny in his bathrobe and Bermuda shorts. He searched Percival’s face. “No, you don’t,” he said quietly. “You don’t do anything to feel alive. You sit on the bridge and stare wistfully into space, wishing your ship would come back to you. Your ship isn’t coming back to you, Commander. If you want her back, you have to go to her.” Ultimately disappointed with whatever he found in Percival’s face, he shook his head and stared down at his golf ball.

  “Tribe Six is lost,” Percival said stiffly. “We will establish contact with one of the other Tribes and consolidate with them.”

  “No faith, no faith.” The professor shook his head, tsking softly. “How many other Tribes have you been able to contact?”

  Percival hesitated. “Two.”

  The professor grimaced, and Percival thought it might be the only honest emotion he’d ever seen on the man’s face. “Two.” He sounded unhappy. “Of the Twelve that went forth, and if the reports are correct, those are in straits nearly as dire as ours. It seems our Tribes don’t have a terribly impressive success rate. Or even survival rate.” He dropped his head and gave another lazy practice swing. “Famine, mutiny, poor planning, terrible accidents… It would take months to regroup with one of the other surviving Tribes, and by that time, they might have met their ends as well. No. Tribe Six is our best hope.”

  “That is your opinion. Fortunately for all of us, the decision is mine.”

  The professor tipped his head back and laughed. “Percy! Keep up that attitude, and you might reclaim your balls after all. But good luck maintaining any semblance of discipline or order on your scrap metal fleet without the full support of the Seeker Corps and the Military Police.”

  Percival bit back a long string of curses.

  “We will put our faith in Tribe Six,” the professor said. It wasn’t a request or a suggestion. It was a command.

  Once upon a time, Percival might’ve had the authority and grit to put the scrawny little man in his place—the brig. That was before Tribe Six had escaped and taken his cojones with it.

  Now, he needed the little man with the Seekers and the MP in his tattered bathrobe pocket.

  “You’
re fortunate word hasn’t gotten out about Tribe Six’s last message before the wormhole closed,” the professor went on. “The rank and file are slowly starving to death and drowning in their recycled shit. If they found out that Tribe Six discovered a perfect little planet on the other side of one of those wormholes, you’d have another mutiny on your hands.”

  “Is that a threat?” Percival asked quietly.

  “Heavens, no. I’m a fan of law and order, myself. Mutinies are messy, ugly things.” The professor cupped his hands over his eyes and squinted into the void. Percival wondered if he imagined some sunlit green on the Florida panhandle.

  “But, well,” he sighed. “Sometimes you do need to shake up the order, bring in fresh blood. Like Sarah Jaeger. Traitor, certainly, but the woman has vision. You must give her that. That vision might be exactly what saves the human race.

  “Class-M planets are astonishingly rare, Commander. Sarah Jaeger found you one. Go and take it from her. Thank her profusely. Then execute her, of course.” He dropped his shoulders and made another practice swing.

  “That wormhole is closed.” Percival recognized, even as he said it, that he had lost the battle. He was no longer telling the professor what would be. He was seeking the man’s reassurances. “We’ve lost contact.”

  The professor shook his head. “I’ve had my people running a few experiments of our own. With all these wormholes popping up and bursting, we couldn’t let the chance go to waste.”

  Percival was stunned. “You’ve been conducting wormhole experiments? I haven’t allocated the resources….” He didn’t finish, silenced and shamed by the little man’s flat stare.

  “We are very close to re-establishing contact with Tribe Six,” the professor went on. “We will not give up on her.”

  “Understood,” Percival whispered.

  “I’m glad we agree.” Another practice swing. “I’ll have my people send our proposals to your office for official approval. Let not the record show that you’ve lost control of your research staff.”