Hold the Line (Chimera Company Book 5)

by Tim C. Taylor

  The minds were as distinct as the flesh she would see if she opened her eyes, but gradually the surface differences eroded. They were merging.

  She’d read some great stories as a kid about group minds, and others about ritual circles formed by wizards. They would channel a blood sacrifice to boost sorcerous abilities until they could cast insanely powerful spells. The reality was nothing like that shit.

  For a start, they still had neither a purpose nor a leader. That erratic Zhoogene slut had tried to lead their first mind sharing attempts, with little success. Zan Fey was a prisoner of her own hormones for the moment. Squids could feel many of the minds in the circle trying to work off the consequences of their last psychic-merging. Just when their minds had begun to build on each other, the Zhoogene had hit her season, and that had been that.

  At least sex was an honest desire. Mostly.

  The more she knew the minds of the others, the more she saw they were calculating, selfish, in it for themselves. Incredibly, many thought they were pushing for a better galaxy, but that was no more than internalized propaganda from the enemy. There were no true progressives here but her.

  Zaydok sat to her left. She knew his mind better than anyone’s. She saw in it his passive acceptance of the corruption and inefficiency of the Federation. The comrades he mourned had fought and died to prolong the corrupt regime they themselves had despised.

  He was a weakling who deserved his pain, and yet she clung to him.

  As the only two survivors of Pirna, their fate had been fused in nuclear fire. They shared the same survivor’s guilt, bound by mutual self-loathing that was even stronger than their distaste for each other.

  He stuck with her as a form of penance as much as anything else, and she him.

  Suddenly, his mind flared with excitement, and he passed a tingling into her left hand.

  Then her right hand prickled in the exact same way, and she realized she was passing the excitement onto the boy to her right. The sensation zipped around the ring at the speed of thought. Admittedly, it was the thinking speed of a hungover jump sniffer, but she was impressed all the same.

  Over several seconds, the buzz stopped zinging around the mind-ring and cohered into a single thought. The ring is different this time. That was the shared thought she’d passed on. As thundering insights went, it wasn’t much, but it was a new achievement. The ring had a new sense of purpose, a focus, and everyone was thinking that in exactly the same way.

  So far, the plan had been to meditate on the information Chimera Company would feed them once they’d started their op. Exactly how they’d go about that was never clear—they’d make it up as they went along. With an experienced team, that could work. Indigo Squad was the opposite of experienced.

  Pyruula. Swapping out Zan Fey for the Lungwoman had made this session different. She was a leader. No, more than that. A lens for their minds. A focus.

  Hesitantly at first, more group thoughts arrived. Sparkles of conception would coalesce into something tangible and transmit around the ring. Or not. Most ideas fizzled and died.

  She felt fatigue dragging at her mind like nothing she’d felt before, but they stuck at it, each of them reluctant to let go of this unique thing they were building.

  Thoughts came faster, with greater clarity. For the first time, she was able to see the distinct texture of each mind shape she was blurring into. If she was merging, it was only with her outer mental shell. For the most part, they remained separate pieces of a circular puzzle, learning to slot together.

  But there was also this outer layer, a fragment of themselves merged into a ring. A distributed thought plasma that belonged to no one individual and to all of them.

  Now that was some serious mutant shit.

  One mind shape burned brighter than the others. It tasted of Burmina, a tiny, quiet humanoid female, who insisted the purple lacework coloring her cheeks was a tattoo, not mutant pigmentation.

  Burmina was sprouting an idea that rose above the mind ring like a flower on a tall stem, and like an insect to a flower, Squids found it irresistible. She leapt for it, trying to grab the thought, but it grabbed her.

  Squids fell into the idea and was squeezed through its stem. It was like journeying through psychic jump space. She emerged into the Dyson ring. In hard vacuum! Without a suit!

  Panic gripped her, as much from being thrust into the sudden enormity of space as the lack of pressure suit and air, but she didn’t die, and when she reminded herself that none of this was real—probably—she calmed and took in her surroundings.

  Below her, the gas giant’s glorious bands of ochre and dark amber confirmed this as Tej Prime, though it was unlikely to be anywhere else, with the Dyson ring curving beyond the planet’s terminator into the darkness beyond.

  A node within the ring was close enough to make out people on its surface. At this distance, it was apparent that the node was a collection of gleaming white hexagonal blocks netted together. It was a mountain range of supersized white basalt columns. No, more than a single mountain range. You’d have to crush the entirety of several rocky planets to provide the material to construct the ring.

  It was gleaming.

  When Oouzo had brought Ghost Shark in for a flyby, the ring material close up had looked pitted and dulled.

  Thoughts of her companions prompted Squids to look around. Burmina wasn’t here with her. She felt Zaydok’s presence but couldn’t see him. On the other hand, the presence of the people on the ring node drew her in.

  They were quadrupeds with two tails. Not a species Squids was familiar with. They were running. No, they were fleeing.

  Metal-clad soldiers—were they robots?—had fortified the ring node and began firing heavy weapons into space.

  All this was taking place in absolute silence.

  By tracking the lines of fire, she saw the invading force of ships that appeared part organic. Some looked as if they were constructed from bone scales. A wedge of the bone ships dove at the node, throwing s-shapes along their bodies like fish propelling themselves through water. Hair-like rods stuck out from their hulls, but the most fearsome aspect were their noses, which breathed fire upon the defenders, melting them to slag.

  The attackers pulled out of their dive and corkscrewed away. In their wake came a flood of dark, fleshy bags, also bristling with hairs. They were giant warts, in space. Her guts crawled in revulsion. Whatever had provoked that ran far deeper than disgust at their ugly appearance.

  A few of the metallic defenders had survived the initial attack and shot at the flesh bags, bursting a few. The warts behind sucked up the juices of their fallen comrades, consuming them.

  Squids sensed the helplessness of the quadrupeds. Their abject terror. There was nowhere to run. The horror was going to claim them. Nothing they could do would escape that.

  One of the warts pulled out of the attack wave. It flew directly at her, closing the distance with astonishing speed. She tried to get away, but she was as helpless as the quadrupeds down on the ring. Despite flailing imaginary limbs, she was motionless.

  At least the other victims could run. She couldn’t move at all, couldn’t scream, couldn’t even hear her death as it approached.

  The thing’s front extended into a maw. It swallowed her whole.

  An all-encompassing dread wrenched open her eyes, and her ears, too, which were heavy with the sound of screams filling Spurrell’s Hall.

  Her own.

  * * *

  Adony Zaydok

  “It’s all right,” Zaydok told her. “You’re safe.”

  Squids calmed a little. Her screams ceased.

  He suspected she wasn’t actually screaming in the physical world. It didn’t matter. Here in this psychic reality, something had scared the hell out of her. Her terror had dragged him out of the ring, which was now sealing itself back into a whole after the two had ripped gaps in it.

  He was still out of his body, drifting. Somewhere, away from the others. Away from th
e world of bomb-blasted urban environments, of aches and touch, of beer and bacon and banter. There might not be any way back.

  “Are we dead?” he asked Squids. “Is this hell? I mean, with you here, it can’t be the other place.”

  “I don’t think so, veckhead. Did you see the ring? The bone ships?”

  “No. What are you talking about?”

  “I’ll tell you later. You were a part of it somehow. Whatever just happened, it affected just you and me. I don’t think the others even realize we’ve gone.”

  He thought he saw one of the minds react to her words. It winked at him. The Lungwoman. Could a mind wink? He was going crazy.

  He tried to open his eyes, but they were sticky. Resistant. He steeled himself to rip his eyelids open, but stopped when he saw one of the people left in the ring begin to accumulate power. It was the little Orsiric, whose name he’d forgotten. She was a high-pressure boiler with a blocked valve. About to explode.

  Zaydok forced his eyes open. The Orsiric was shaking, moaning, her hand still gripped by the mutants to either side.

  He leaped at her across the circle and gripped her by the shoulders. “Hey! Snap out of it.”

  The Orsiric drew a sharp breath and fixed him with a manic stare. Then she yelled for all she was worth.

  “It’s a trap!”

  * * * * *

  Chapter Thirty-Five: Claudio “Beans” Zanitch

  By the modest standards of the mutant super team that was Indigo Squad, they’d just enjoyed a monster success. A tiny humanoid who resembled a plastic dog chew had seen into the future and revealed a trap. Further practical details were light on the ground.

  Who was the trap meant for? No, didn’t know that.

  Who would set the trap? Where? When? Nope.

  But she’d most definitely been sure that it was, indeed, a trap.

  Beans—and he’d already taken to thinking about himself under that name—shut down the whining circling his mind, that weird, fizzing sensation in his gut that told him he knew something without having any reason why. He also sensed a trap was about to be sprung on them, he just didn’t know a damned thing more than the dog chew.

  The group was still in the Hall of Spurrell. Most were half dazed, Zaydok and Squids more than half gobsmacked. From the looks on their faces, you’d think they’d just learned they were secret siblings. Pyruula was giving Beans a sultry look—although it was tricky to be sure, with those fish lips—and the two former Militia troopers from Chimera Company were headed for the bar.

  Joining them sounded like a solid plan, but first Beans made a beeline for the woman who’d cried trap. She was a small and shiny humanoid with purple lines streaming down her face. They’d previously exchanged meaningless pleasantries but never spoken properly.

  “They’re not a sign that I’m one of you freaks,” she told him, catching him staring at her face. “I have normal skin coloration for my people. You’re gaping at a tattoo.”

  Beans sucked in his lower lip and remembered his wife’s constant advice to think before he spoke or typed. (Although he knew she loved that he didn’t).

  Asking questions of somebody you didn’t know was fraught with danger in the malevolent clownverse of the Federation. Even the concept of what was normal was surrounded with minefields and overseen by hidden snipers. Say the wrong things to the wrong person, and the result would be struggle sessions and reeducation.

  Screw that.

  He smiled at her. “Hi. I know we’ve been introduced, but that was just being polite. This is real. I’m Beans, and I’m a Human. I don’t know what the fuck you are, but I’d like to know if you’d care to tell me.”

  She nodded. It was originally a Human gesture, but a lot of species had taken it up. “My name is Burmina. I’m an Orsiric. We don’t travel off our homeworld much. Too many aliens, for a start.”

  “I hear you, Burmina. Aliens, eh? Humans are the worst. I mean it. I like to think we’re the best, too, though it can be hard to convince myself. So, Burmina, what’s your story?”

  “I’m a monk.”

  “Okay. Didn’t expect that.”

  “Not through choice. I’ve dedicated my life to religious devotion in order to atone for my sins.”

  “Sinning. That a big thing with you?”

  “I’m a witch, a whore of the Devil. That’s what everyone’s said about me for years, so people figured it must be true.”

  “Aren’t there laws against saying things like that?”

  “No. Of course, no one would dare say such things about a Xhiunerite or a Human woman. Now you tell me your story, Human Beans.”

  “Forensic accountant first class. Just as well I can do most of my job through remote working, because my people also washed their hands of me. To stay sane, I cooked up a sideline making up adventures. Micro holo-animations. I set my little people on epic quests. Heroes and dragons and the like.”

  “Do any of your heroes look like me?”

  “Nope. Can’t say they do. They’re mostly Humans.”

  “Write me in.”

  “You got it.”

  “I want to be a villain, not a victim.”

  “I understand. You’ll be a badass baddy. My viewers will secretly want to be you.”

  She retreated a few steps.

  At first, he thought she was walking away, but the gnomish woman tilted her head back to take in his big fat face.

  She narrowed her eyes and smacked her lips. Then she pronounced her verdict. “For an oversized lump of flesh with head fur in all the wrong places—” she shuddered with distaste, “—you are marginally less contemptible than I expected.”

  “And you, Burmina, are a rude plastic dog chew. Pleased to meet you.”

  They shook hands.

  “Come on,” Beans said, gesturing toward the main area. “I think we deserve a drink.”

  * * * * *

  Chapter Thirty-Six: Lily Hjon

  Only the absence of powered vehicular traffic betrayed the fact that Zone Obsidira was not a dirtside town. Ducting for ventilation and power had been carefully concealed, and a curved screen overhead showed a passing semblance of a blue sky with a few stretched wisps for clouds.

  The three of them had been walking along the center of the quiet street, but she edged onto the sidewalk to avoid a furiously pedaling rickshaw driver, who was overtaking a couple of well-heeled Zhoogenes riding side by side on their robo-ponies.

  She stopped and looked in the window of the nearest store. It sold hats, the kind you wore to exude more style and privilege than the person next to you. Which wasn’t difficult when you were walking the streets with Sybutu and Arunsen.

  An entire store dedicated to fancy hats. And in Obsidira, which wasn’t even the wealthiest of the Hub Beta zones. Said it all, really. There was money on this station.

  Her eyes rested on a peppermint cocktail hat with a flat crown and an elaborate comb inspired by a Tej system orrery. There’d been a time when she’d been interested in such confections. Now she was more interested in her reflection, horridly fascinated by the way the galaxy must see her.

  Her tattoo had changed again. Still the razzle-dazzle, but shifted from black and white to cream and sepia. The pattern had softened, too. She had a horrible feeling it was her unconscious whispering that she’d lost her hard edge.

  “This goes against everything drilled into me by training and experience.” The words of Sybutu’s grumble changed each time, but its essence remained constant. “We’re walking around inviting our enemies to select the ground upon which they will oppose us. Why don’t you save me time and pass me a sword so I can fall upon it?”

  “I don’t disagree,” Lily said, “except maybe the sword part. Sounds expensive. Can’t you make do with a knife?”

  “Count yourself lucky you didn’t serve in the Militia,” Arunsen said, unable to help himself. “If you’re saddled with the wrong kind of officer, you’d end up following orders that make Lily’s idea of walking arou
nd until someone shoots us seem like tactical genius.”

  “That’s enough!” Lily snapped. “Neither of you chuckleheads has come up with a better plan. Would you prefer we march into the military zone and see how far we get with those pardons Lady Indiya wrangled for us?”

  “Walking around until somebody takes an interest in us makes sense from Lady Indiya’s point of view,” Sybutu said. “If it’s true that we have clone backups, that means our current incarnations are expendable.”

  “I don’t want to hear any more immortality shite,” Lily said, stepping back onto the center of the street. “If I die, I die. Maybe it’s true that a clone body will take my last memory scan and pick up where I left off. Good luck to them. But as for this me, I’ll be dead.”

  “The lieutenant’s right,” Arunsen said. “No one can divide a soul.”

  “I didn’t know you were religious,” Sybutu said. “After a few ales, I’ve heard you yelling, ‘Valhalla awaits!’ I thought that was the limit of your spirituality.”

  “I’ve always been religious, especially around the subject of death.”

  “Better start praying then, Vetch,” Lily said. “We’ve got company.”

  Militia troopers in smart blue jackets and red pants emerged from alleys to either side of the street. She’d never seen troopers so well turned out on an operation.

  When Lily and the others made no signs of resistance, an officer followed his troopers out of the shadows. He wore the same basic trooper’s service uniform, but the insignia didn’t match. Four spinning silver stars. Holy crap!

  “Can I help you, Vice Marshal?” Lily asked sweetly.

  “You made a big mistake showing your face here.”

  “Strangely enough, that’s what I’ve just been discussing with my two friends here. But to be clear, that isn’t because we’re frightened of you.”