Black Phoenix

by B. V. Larson

  “Yes, that’s right,” Turtle said, sensing an opening. “If you’ll make an effort to preserve ours, we will help you continue to exist in our computers. The human factions, the guests and the crew, we’re at each other’s throats. Stattor had the alien personality scans mismatched to their human counterparts. We’re trying to dig our way out of it... can you help us?”

  The monster stood up again. This caused further vibrations to rock Turtle’s tiny body, but he still stood upright. The towering monster cocked its great head as if thinking, or perhaps listening to distant thoughts.

  “Yes…” it said at last. “The reality you offer is acceptable… for now. I will tell you what to do.”

  The thing told Turtle, and he shuddered. The consequences of failure… they were unthinkable.

  Turtle’s mind churned with information. Nothing went together anymore. “One more thing…” he asked, “why do you look like a god-sized rat?”

  The monstrous figure shifted positions again. A gust of wind struck Turtle, almost knocking him down.

  “Read between the lines,” it said at last.

  * * *

  “Turtle,” Scarn said urgently. “Turtle!”

  Scarn held Turtle’s goggles in his hand. As before, white, thread-like tendrils dangled and squirmed from the rims, reaching for a human connection. Once Turtle’s mind cleared, he said one word: “What...?” and he pointed behind Scarn, at the entrance.

  Scarn looked, and then he spun around to face the intruder.

  What stood there looked mostly human. Banded like a black centipede in its combat gear, it was so symmetrical and flawless that it hardly seemed capable of having a person inside. A protective helmet enclosed its head and gave it a sleek reptilian look. About their height, it carried several small devices on its belts, and held a high-powered version of a zeta shear which was aimed at them.

  In a weird fluttering voice, it spoke to Neva. “Cease your activity.”

  Neva did not cease. She ignored the soldier’s existence. Once again, her hand slapped the bright red button and another human-alien pair was normalized.

  The soldier repeated the command, and Neva worked even faster. Almost too fast to see, her hand hit the button again. Another pair had been made sane.

  The soldier turned the weapon in her direction.

  “No!” Scarn shouted, and he threw himself in front of her, arms spread wide.

  There was a thick explosion and for a second, Scarn expected to be dead—but then he realized it was Turtle who had opened fire with the bore riveter.

  Turtle fired again and again until the thing rattled on empty. No one needed to check what was left of the body. One of the militia’s prime combat devices had been knocked down, but it was still moving. The armored plates had deflected the rivets from its vital parts.

  Turtle and Scarn charged close. Scarn took the super-charged zeta shear, and Turtle wrapped his arms around the thing’s helmet, concentrated, and strained for a moment.

  The helmet spun off, and—

  “Where’s his head?” Turtle said, breathing hard. “All I see is blood.”

  “I think it’s still inside the helmet.”

  They checked and verified that Scarn was right.

  “It probably started out as human.”

  The sound of more marching armored troops resounded out in the passages, and with that, they heard zeta shears blasting anyone they found.

  “The guest militia seems pretty thorough,” Turtle said, and they raced back to Neva’s side.

  “They’ve been preparing for years,” Neva said. “Ever since the last rebellion. The crew knew it, of course, but they didn’t suspect they would grow new beings to serve as their soldiers. They always figured they had superior discipline and gear. They underestimated the science types among the guests.”

  “They underestimated their determination,” Scarn said. “Let’s hope these things can be stopped.”

  The guests had always been scientific types, the nerds with nice suits and big brains. The crew had won the first conflict with their superior organization and natural willingness to take orders—but the guests had clearly learned their lesson. They weren’t fooling around this time.

  Neva was still working the computer. She’d aligned another dozen people and aliens, bringing them back to their senses.

  The militia was close. Scarn and Turtle looked at one another meaningfully. Now they had only the new zeta shear, and its charge wouldn’t last forever. Besides, the guest militia had engineered their armor specifically to stop pulses from such weapons.

  Moving as one, Scarn took Neva’s right arm and Turtle took her left.

  She tried to resist but was lifted from her seat bodily. They weren’t going to argue anymore or leave her behind.

  With a final kicking effort she managed to hit the red button one more time.

  “Another pair…” she said, and she let them drag her away from the console at last.

  A hissing sound had begun, and it was getting louder. The militia was depressurizing the deck. Their ears popped.

  They ran for the lifepods, the egg-shaped modules that everyone hoped never to use.

  Only two could fit in the single, dented and stained pod they found. They hadn’t been properly maintained—after all, it had been a century since Tarassis had been built.

  “Get in,” Scarn said, lifting Neva up bodily and placing her in the pod.

  She squirmed. “There’s not much room in here.”

  “I talked to the Singularity,” Turtle said. “It gave me an idea. You stay with her. Don’t let her climb out and try to any more good deeds.”

  Scarn read Turtle’s face. He blinked once, then he nodded. “I’m fresh out of good ideas, so it’s your show. Wish us luck, Turtle.”

  “Luck.”

  Neva gave Turtle a quick, worried hug, and he left them. The seals crumped shut on the lifepod. In seconds it began moving down its track to an exterior port.

  Turtle grabbed the zeta shear they’d picked up from the soldier they’d killed. Hopefully, it would be powerful enough to take out militiamen in their armored suits, if it came down to that.

  Turtle was wheezing, and his breath now blew out as white frost. The air pressure was dwindling, and it was getting cold. He didn’t have much time left.

  He pried open an old emergency locker. The door was stuck, frozen probably—but his big arms bulged. He ripped it open.

  He pulled out an emergency spacer’s suit and slipped it on. The suit wasn’t armored, it wasn’t even fully charged, but it would have to do.

  Turtle’s vision throbbed inside his eyeballs. A whisper of stale O2 filled the suit and soon he found he could breathe normally. The suit didn’t seem to leak, at least not perceptibly.

  He checked the armband: twenty-three minutes of air. He tried to calm down. Panicked people used more oxygen.

  “White Queen, White Queen.”

  The voice rattled in his headset, but it didn’t mean anything. His brain wasn’t processing fully yet.

  “White Queen, right turn.”

  He was on a guest deck, and he’d powered a guest’s spacer suit. It must be automatically attuned to their emergency channel.

  The recognition was sudden and blunt: He was listening to White Queen’s channel. He knew in an instant of clarity who they were talking about: the new captain, Emma Venner. The guests were calling her their White Queen.

  Creeping along a passageway, he turned off all the suit’s unnecessary systems, including every light the suit had. That was partly to save power, but mostly to keep from being seen.

  The air was thin now. It barely carried sound. Frost was forming a glaze on the observation windows, the equipment—even the dead on the deck. After turning through two connecting passages, he slowed and peered around the next corner: White Queen moved into view. She wore another caterpillar-like combat suit, similar to the one they had destroyed, but heavier and, like her name, the bands were white and tight
ly interlocked.

  The captain walked with an odd, undulating gait, looking in one room, moving on, and checking another. She was hunting humans.

  “Ten meters, left turn. Five targets,” said the voice in Scarn’s helmet.

  Scarn followed as the White Queen turned and faced a sealed door. She did a quick reset of her combat-version zeta shear—like the one Scarn held. When she fired, it made a flash and muffled pop in the thin atmosphere. A slag-edged rectangle big enough for her to walk through dropped away and banged on the floor.

  She was inside before Scarn knew what she was doing. He followed close but kept out of her sight.

  There, spread against the far wall, five bodies sprawled. They showed the full range of psychic damage, from the white-skinned gape-mouthed man on his back who stared up at nothing, to the wild-eyed girl who tried to hide behind someone else, to someone who was muttering… “Kill me first... kill me...!”

  The White Queen was eager to grant their requests. In her excitement, her weird-looking suit reared up, standing taller than any man.

  Like a primed explosive, White Queen stood poised in front of her prey and began executing them one at a time.

  Turtle rushed to one of the abandoned psychonaut probe stations next to him, found the access panel on the side of his helmet, opened it, and plugged himself in. His suit read-outs said he had only minutes of air and heat. With luck, that would be all he needed.

  Chapter FORTY

  Turtle was a psychonaut again. He broke every rule at once—immediately.

  He reached out not to the stars, but through the rippling ether to the consciousness of a creature that was almost human.

  The White Queen shuddered in surprise when he boarded her mind. She stilled her thoughts and scanned her perceptions.

  Her arm, without her willing it to act, reached out and shut the door behind her. The room began to warm and re-pressurize again.

  Turtle, riding in the mind of Tarassis’ new captain thought about the White Queen’s arms. Her hands and the muscles that ran through them, were the focus of all his energy and willpower. She was slow to sense her lack of control.

  In an unplanned impulse, while she was momentarily off-guard, he turned the emission point of the zeta shear toward her face.

  Through her helmet, she looked at the hand that held the weapon as though it belonged to someone else. She observed her finger curled around the trigger and wondered if that’s how deliverance had looked to others....

  “White Queen? White Queen,” said the voice in Turtle’s helmet, “we’re getting shit from your monitors. What are you doing? This is a Red Ninety-nine. Actionize, or we’ll have to enact our rescue protocols.”

  Slowly and with force, the hand turned the zeta shear away from her face. White Queen bared her teeth. She again looked across her array of victims and once more positioned herself for the kill.

  “You are all hereby sentenced to death,” she said.

  Turtle saw her reset the zeta shear and raise it to fire. Through White Queen’s eyes, Turtle glimpsed a cowering girl on the deck. She was squirming and turning blue as the air left the compartment. The horror and revulsion of what he was seeing spurred him on to do as the Singularity had instructed.

  Slowly, shaking with countervailing forces, the White Queen’s arm lifted. Instead of targeting the girl, her wrist turned completely around to aim the zeta shear’s emission point between her own eyes.

  Working in her memories, Scarn found her secret stores of guilt, and with them a trove of suicidal impulses. Now that he was so deeply implanted, her resistance was gone, and he could have killed her in an instant.

  On the visor in front of her face, the text MULTIPLE ERRORS glowed in green. Then DEACTIVATE, DEACTIVATE, DEACTIVATE flickered in hot orange.

  “White Queen, do not move. A retrieval team is on its way. White Queen, respond. Captain?”

  “Something... is... wrong,” she managed to gasp.

  Turtle kept his silence. White Queen looked at the half-dead humans, and she felt regret. She had so wanted to cleanse existence of their consciousness and make clear, empty sense of their lives... but now....

  With difficulty, Turtle forced her out of the room, away from the humans, and into the main passage. Since he was walking her back to the rest of her militia, it was easy to let her think it was her own idea.

  A minute later, three identical centipede-banded guests surrounded her. They had smaller less powerful suits, like the one they’d beheaded earlier.

  Without speaking, one of them touched a reader to one of her data nodules.

  A fluttery voice from the device spoke. “She’s a carrier.” The soldier studied the readings for five seconds. “Fully possessed.” He looked from his handpad to her face. “Captain, can you understand me? Can you speak?”

  Turtle had nothing to say and White Queen’s mouth worked oddly, silently. She needed to arrange her distracted thoughts before speaking.

  Inside her headset, inside all their headsets, came the militia commander’s overriding voice: “Dispose of the defective unit.”

  There were no questions, no hesitation. The three regulars stepped away from her and lifted their weapons.

  White Queen was confused. Her life had been given to the dream of freeing Tarassis from all its ills—but now they were thinking of killing her? She, the hero who had finally orchestrated the assassination of Captain Stattor?

  Faster than she could resist, Scarn had her lift her weapon, a heavier model than that carried by the standard soldier, and fire on the three who faced her before they could get their weapons half-raised.

  The first of them died. The second lit up in a brilliant magenta flare as his oxygen canister exploded—but the third had flared his zeta shear’s reflector and the glare of her beam came back at her.

  Turtle felt her register the bright momentary burn as it sliced past the nerves, through to her left leg, and then upward momentum as it sliced higher, cutting most of her to pieces.

  Turtle fled her mind and her body, relying on the probe unit’s retrieval program to reintegrate his psyche. He wondered vaguely if he could possibly survive, and if he did, what would he be?

  Chapter FORTY-ONE

  It took weeks for Turtle to breathe normally again. The cold had gotten into his suit, and into his lungs. He’d been frostbitten, and it had required a full-immersion into a bath of nano-gels to smooth away the scar tissue.

  Scarn had visited him every day. .

  When Turtle’s mind was fully functioning, he wanted to know what he had missed.

  “How did it all go… at the finish?” Turtle asked in a voice like sandpaper.

  “Not so good. The crew showed up and killed the last of the militia—but it was bloody.”

  “It was bloody before, too.”

  Turtle nodded. The first civil conflict had predated their births. But the scars of it were deep and never completely left the minds of anyone aboard Tarassis.

  “Did we win?” Turtle asked.

  “Well… sort of. The crew won. Is that what you wanted?”

  Turtle thought about it. What he’d wanted was peace. What he’d wanted was sanity aboard Tarassis. So far, it sounded like those things were out of reach.

  “There is a bright point,” Scarn said.

  “Tell me.”

  “You know that planet we’ve been sniffing around a lot lately? The one with continent-sized swamps that has insects the size of birds?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s closer to Tarassis than anyone was letting on.”

  Turtle blinked. “What are you telling me?”

  Scarn smiled. It was a big, honest smile. The kind of smile you rarely saw aboard Tarassis.

  “I’m telling you, you muscle-bound freak, that we’re going to change course. We’re going to make planetfall. There’s water, edible plants and lots of insect protein… It’s not a garden spot, but it will work.”

  “You’re shitting me,” Turtle sai
d. “Even now, as I lay dying in this plastic-sheeted bed—”

  “He’s not shitting you, Turtle.”

  It was Neva. She was at the door. She smiled, too, and leaned against the entrance, as if she wasn’t sure if she should come in or not.

  “You made it,” Turtle croaked. “You both made it. I’m glad. How have my tests been? In normal ranges?”

  “Absolutely not,” Scarn told him. “You’ve never even been close to normal. You’re a breather, a waste of skin and O2.”

  Turtle made a gesture, crooking his finger.

  Neva came farther into the room, over to his bedside and clasped his hand. He could tell he was weak. He had no grip.

  “You’ve been in an induced coma,” she said. “Things have changed over the last two months.”

  Turtle’s eyes opened wide. “Two months? Are you—?”

  “No, no bullshit this time. We’ve got Tarassis under control again.”

  Turtle’s eyes narrowed. “How did the killing stop?”

  “You killed the White Queen,” she said. “The crew who didn’t trust her were right not to. She’d wanted to kill Stattor for years. She’d worked her way into the perfect trusted position, as his bodyguard. But it wasn’t until Scarn came along and actually pulled the trigger….”

  “That gave Venner the guts to go all the way,” Scarn said. “To do what she’d always wanted to do. She took over as captain, to become the White Queen. Then she plotted to get those killing-machines the guests had been building into position. She almost pulled it off, too….”

  Turtle turned back to Neva. “Who’s the new captain then? Who’d they find to replace her?”

  Scarn eyed Neva. She smiled. Then she showed Turtle what she had been holding out of sight.

  He understood immediately why she’d lingered in the passageway outside his room. She now held up a jacket and cap…. Neva was the colony’s new captain.

  “But… but you’re a guest… and sort of crew.”

  “Right. A navigator with a guest background. This ship needs peace, Turtle. Even the hotheads see that now.”