The Lost Swarm

by Vaughn Heppner

  “But we want to leave now,” Valerie said.

  “Give me half an hour.” Without waiting for an answer, Riker hurried to the hatch and slid down the ladder. It was all he could do to keep from running through the hangar bay. Maddox had slipped into a coma. If the young man died, Riker would never forgive himself for leaving. The sergeant began to run.

  ***

  Maddox lay in medical with tubes attached to him. He hardly breathed, simply lying there as if waiting to die. It was unbelievable, inconceivable.

  Riker bent one of the bedrails with his bionic grip until he realized what he was doing. “Captain Maddox,” he whispered. “I wonder if you can hear me, sir. I, I’m planning to help do something that I don’t know if you’ll like or not. I’m hoping a man like you would like it, but you can be such a stickler for rules sometimes when it applies to others. How’s a mere sergeant to know?”

  Riker frowned. He might have retired some time ago, but he knew he could never live with himself if the captain died and he could have saved the young fellow by a well-placed shot or knife thrust.

  The hatch opened. Riker turned as Ludendorff waltzed in.

  “Oh, you’re here,” the Methuselah Man said, stopping. “I didn’t know.”

  Riker craned to look past Ludendorff, but he didn’t see anyone else.

  “Is there a problem, Sergeant?”

  “Yes…I guess I don’t have to ‘sir’ you, do I?”

  Ludendorff didn’t answer, just watched him.

  “You don’t always like the captain much, do you?” Riker asked.

  “What are you trying to imply?”

  Riker bared his teeth. “You know I’m a dead-eye shot, don’t you?”

  “Is this one of your quaint threats?”

  “I’m not going to threaten you, Professor. I’m going to promise you something. If you harm the captain in any way, I’ll kill you.”

  “How odd,” Ludendorff said. “That actually sounds like a threat.”

  “Mince up my words however you want,” Riker said. “I don’t care. I’ve said what I’m going to. But listen to this. Either Meta or I will guard the captain at all times.”

  “You’re not going on the darter mission?”

  Riker stared at the Methuselah Man, wondering how Ludendorff knew about that.

  “I’m here to speak to the captain,” Ludendorff finally said.

  “So speak,” Riker said gruffly.

  “This is personal, old boy. I need to talk to him alone.”

  Riker’s nostrils flared, and he continued to stare at Ludendorff.

  “Oh, well…” Ludendorff said. “I’ll be off, then.” With that, the Methuselah Man turned around, and suddenly he seemed to be in a hurry.

  -18-

  Valerie was busy rechecking everything on the darter. She had stowed her gear and Keith had stowed his. They were waiting for Riker to reappear. During that time, she was going to make sure she hadn’t forgotten something critical.

  Galyan, meanwhile, had gained clearance. A klaxon had begun to wail, and the hangar bay personnel were hurrying so the outer port could open.

  Valerie still wasn’t one hundred percent certain this was a good idea. But she wasn’t going to quit now. She would see this through no matter what. If Keith became a problem…

  She frowned, shaking her head. She wouldn’t let him become a problem. The tricky part would be finding Thrax’s new homeworld, if the bug actually had one. They had some “E” radiation to check in several star systems. Did Thrax have to be at one of those locations? Of course not. This could turn out to be a wild goose chase. But, the “E” radiation needed investigating. If there was nothing…then the captain might actually agree to call headquarters for help. They were going to need help this time. That seemed obvious to her. How Maddox had always managed—

  “Lieutenant,” Keith called in a strange voice. “We might have a problem.”

  Valerie raised her head, and an odd dizziness struck. She rubbed her forehead and held onto a desk to help keep her balance. She hated people calling from down the corridor, expecting her to come running. Why didn’t he come down here if he wanted her attention so badly?

  “Lieutenant,” Keith shouted.

  The dizziness struck again. Valerie closed her eyes, fighting it, and heaved the tiniest bit. If she hadn’t immediately controlled it, she might have vomited. She was not going to throw up.

  “Lieutenant!”

  “What?” she shouted back from her room.

  “I need you here!” Keith shouted.

  “Where are you?”

  “In the piloting chamber,” he yelled.

  “What’s wrong, anyway?”

  “Will you just come here?”

  The dizziness passed. She shoved an e-reader into a drawer and marched out of her bedroom, down the corridor—the dizziness struck again. She staggered this way and that, as if the deck heaved under her feet. She crouched low, rubbing her forehead, and decided to lean against the one bulkhead, sliding along it into the piloting chamber. She stopped short because Keith strained to stand from his chair, but he could not, and she couldn’t understand why not.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

  Keith blinked several turned, strained so his face began turning red, and breathed out explosively. That caused him to collapse back into the piloting chair.

  “Keith,” she shouted, running into the chamber and around the chair so she could face him. She staggered once, and then stumbled in front of him.

  He just sat there staring at her, breathing steadily now. The whole situation was bizarre—

  “Oh,” she said, noticing a metal collar around his throat. Normally, he didn’t wear jewelry of any sort, thinking it unmanly. What was going on?

  “Say something?” she said.

  Keith slowly shook his head.

  “Can’t you speak?” she asked.

  He just stared at her.

  Okay, she told herself. Something was seriously off. The collar—

  Keith collapsed forward, and he might have struck his head against the pilot board, but Valerie caught him and gently laid him on the deck.

  “Keith,” she said, rolling him onto his back. “Keith. What happened to you?”

  “He’s fine.”

  Valerie froze, recognizing the voice. It belonged to Professor Ludendorff. She thought about it, and then she snatched for her holstered beamer, straightening and aiming the weapon at Ludendorff—and screamed, releasing the suddenly hot pistol.

  The beamer clunked onto the deck beside Keith.

  “What’s going on?” Valerie said coldly.

  “Not a thing, my dear,” Ludendorff said in a pleasant voice. “We’re doing the responsible thing. I’m simply making sure it happens.”

  “You’re not coming with us, if that’s what you mean,” she said.

  “On the contrary, you two are coming with me.”

  “There’s no way you can make me take you.”

  “Do you see the collar around Keith’s throat?”

  “I get it,” she said. “You put it there. I don’t understand when.”

  “I can walk very quietly when I want to, and I wanted to a few moments ago. I needed a small diversion, and Keith provided it. Now, my dear, I’d like you to put another collar around your neck.”

  The professor held one up.

  “Not a chance,” she said.

  “Lieutenant, I do not mean you or the pilot any harm. I’m going to join the expedition and see if the captain was correct about Commander Thrax.”

  “And if he is?”

  “Then, the three of us are going to race back home to gather reinforcements.”

  “Leaving Victory to her fate?” Valerie asked.

  “I wouldn’t put it like that. I would rather say that we’re going to help the stubborn captain save his crew and starship.”

  “How can you do this, Professor? The captain has pulled your fat out of the fire more times than I
can count.”

  “Do you have such a limited vocabulary, then?”

  Valerie rubbed her forehead as the dizziness slammed home. It seemed as if the deck tilted under her feet. She grew very still in order to keep herself from vomiting.

  “Not feeling so well?” Ludendorff asked.

  She glared at him, noticing that one of his hands was in a jacket pocket. “You smug bastard, you think you’re so clever. What are you doing to me? Why do I feel dizzy?”

  “I’m a professor, not a country doctor.”

  Valerie’s brow grew tight. “Why did I feel dizzy? Are you secretly beaming a ray at me?”

  “Will you freely don the collar or not?”

  “Not,” she said.

  “Then, you leave me no choice, Lieutenant.” The professor pulled a clunky looking gun out of the jacket pocket. He aimed it at her and pulled the trigger—and nothing happened.

  Valerie laughed harshly. She bent down and grabbed for the beamer on the deck beside Keith, and that was the last thing she remembered as she fell forward what seemed like a thousand kilometers until she struck the deck, unconscious.

  PART III

  ENLISTMENT

  -1-

  Three weeks after leaving Victory, the Reynard slipped into yet another star system.

  Valerie’s strange dizziness had been due to a brain calibrator disc Ludendorff had used to disorient her so she wouldn’t feel the darter as it drifted out of the hangar bay.

  Now, the darter entered its seventh star system just like the last six, using stealth mode as it came out of its star-drive jump. Valerie piloted, with a collar around her neck and a ten-ton chip on her shoulder.

  She raised her head, shaking off Jump Lag, and stared out of the polarized window at the nearby red giant, Mira A or Omicron Ceti. The star was part of the constellation of Cetus. The pulsating variable star was also 305 light-years from the Solar System, and was part of a binary system.

  Valerie swallowed uneasily. In her opinion, the darter was far too near Mira A and the stream of mass leaving the “cool” red giant.

  The darter did not have a shield to protect them from solar radiation, just the special polymer skin on the outer hull. Ludendorff had assured her the darter could take this. He’d also told her that appearing in the system near the star was the wisest course. If Thrax and his bugs were in the binary system, they would be hard-pressed to spot the tiny speck of a stealth ship against the giant’s huge mass.

  A bridge of stellar material flowed from the red giant 70 AUs to the hot white dwarf, Mira B, which absorbed the mass. This was a symbiotic pair system, the closest one like it to Earth’s Sun.

  How there could possibly be a habitable planet in such a binary, symbiotic system, Valerie had no idea. There was a protoplanetary disk rotating around the hot white dwarf, but it would be a tremendously long time before the matter in the disk coalesced into planets, if ever.

  Valerie studied the sensors. There were some planets here after all, but they were far beyond the two stars—the white dwarf orbiting the red giant 70 AUs out.

  When Valerie had awakened from her original swoon, she’d found the collar around her throat. She’d tried to tug it off a hundred times. The attempts had left her with neck pain for days. The professor had used the collar’s control properties on her seven times. Sometimes that meant destabilizing shocks. Sometimes that meant another swoon. Sometimes that meant an incredible headache as her eyesight blurred. She’d learned to hate Professor Ludendorff. The Methuselah Man had said more times than she could remember that he was helping Star Watch, not hurting it.

  “Why can’t you see that?” he’d ask her repeatedly.

  Every time he spoke like that, she tugged at the collar. Maybe Maddox could overlook the professor’s transgressions. She certainly would not. When she got her chance, she was going to blow the Methuselah Man’s oversized brains out.

  In fact, Valerie had taken as much as she was going to take. Three weeks of his insufferable self was too much. She had reached her breaking point. The few times she’d seen Keith and whispered her plans, he’d laughed.

  We wear collars, he said. So what? It won’t last forever.

  Well, damnit, Keith hadn’t grown up in Greater Detroit, in the slums. He hadn’t fought his way up from the bottom. He hadn’t fought off rapists before, thrusting a knife in a man’s eye so she could keep her dignity intact. Keith hadn’t been a loner, enduring by grit and sheer stubbornness.

  The point was this. By not giving in Valerie had almost reached the place where she would rather see Ludendorff die than Star Watch win. It was a harmful trait in her, but she had always known it was there. The trait had actually sustained her mental health during the Academy days. Valerie knew she could only take so much, and then she would snap and hurt the ones trying to hurt her. Only…she would hurt them ten times worse than they had hurt her.

  Was that vengeance?

  Hell yes, it was vengeance, a double or maybe even a quadruple dose of vengeance. Was she proud of that?

  As Valerie piloted the darter away from the red giant and the 70 AU long bridge of mass loss, she nodded the affirmative. She had tried since joining Victory’s crew to work on her positive emotions, reinforcing them as much as possible. She had watered them like plants, she might say. But deep inside her, the negative emotions, the dark ways, lived, waiting for the day she needed them again.

  This was the day, the time, the hour. She had gone over in her mind a hundred, nay, a thousand possible methods for paying Ludendorff back for his treachery. The smug bastard, the proud prick—

  Valerie’s eyes brightened with that thought. Prick…she would use his dick against him. Hadn’t he used to brag that he was the universe’s greatest lover?

  She actually laughed for the first time in three weeks.

  Yes, the professor could boast about his sexual prowess better than Keith did concerning his piloting skills. Ludendorff believed that he was the greatest lover in the universe. Maybe she could seduce him; she’d seen the way he looked at her a time or two. It wasn’t open admiration like Keith. Keith had honest lust. Keith wanted her, and maybe even wanted to marry her. What had Sergeant Riker told the ace, anyway?

  Valerie shook her head. That didn’t matter now. Dealing with the Methuselah Man was the issue. Of course, Ludendorff would be cagier than any other man alive. He supposedly had hundreds of years of experience under his belt. But he was still a man who liked what he saw.

  The hatch opened.

  Valerie’s hackles rose. She could feel Ludendorff staring at her. She forced herself to relax as she manipulated her board.

  “You were supposed to alert me the moment you came out of Jump Lag,” he said.

  “I must have forgotten.”

  “I doubt that.” Ludendorff walked to a second chair, sitting down near her. The Methuselah Man glanced at the controls. “You haven’t set the stealth field.”

  “Oh,” she said, making no move to do it.

  “Are you trying to get us caught?”

  “No,” she said mulishly.

  Ludendorff laughed, shaking his head. “Do you think you’re clever, Lieutenant? Do you think I don’t know exactly what you’re thinking?”

  She glared at him. “What am I thinking?”

  “How to seduce me,” he said with a leer.

  Valerie could feel heat on her face. No doubt she blushed crimson. How could this lecherous old bastard know how and what she thought? Did he have mind powers?

  “If you successfully seduced me,” he said, “you would never want another man. Yet, you would be glad for the unique experience. You would tell other women what they’ve been missing. It would help you throughout the decades, remembering our time together. But you would always long to lay with me again.”

  “Sure,” she said. “That’s why Doctor Dana Rich is racing back to you even now.”

  Hurt and then rage entered his eyes. She hadn’t seen either during the trip. The rage boiled ag
ainst her. Instead of making her fearful, she felt wonderfully glad. Finally, she had a way to needle him.

  Valerie laughed openly in Ludendorff’s face.

  “You do not understand the forces you are playing with,” he said in a dangerously controlled voice.

  “But I do,” she said. “It’s that I don’t care.”

  “Don’t care whether you live or die?”

  She looked away, silently cursing herself for being a fool. She was supposed to trick Ludendorff, not make it easy for him.

  “Oh, Valerie,” he said, “you must be the simplest member of Victory’s crew. You are so elemental. It’s one of the reasons I chose to use the darter: that you would be here.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “I know. You hate me. It’s how you sustain yourself. It’s a poor choice on your part, but it is your way. I can sympathize. But if I’d chosen that way, I would have been dead three hundred years ago.”

  “You hate Maddox.”

  “No. I let people believe that. For instance, I tricked the sergeant into staying back on the ship. He’s another simple person like you. In his case, though, I needed him off the darter so I could take his place.”

  She faced the professor. “I don’t think so. I think you’re an opportunist, grabbing at this chance. I don’t know what you’re really after, though.”

  “No one does,” he said quietly.

  “Yeah, whatever. Why are we out here?”

  Before Ludendorff could answer, a red blip appeared on the board.

  “Bingo,” the professor said. “There’s the reason.”

  “More ‘E’ radiation?”

  “Look, Lieutenant.”

  She heard something different in his voice. Might that be genuine excitement? She looked at the “E” Radiation Scope, and she saw—

  “A surge,” she said. “The ‘E’ radiation is surging.”

  “From a Swarm ship,” Ludendorff said softly. “We may not found have the new colony, but we have definitely found a working saucer-shaped vessel moving through the system.”

  The saucer was beyond the white dwarf 70 AUs away. They would need to make another star-drive jump to reach there quickly. Before that—