Night Raiders

by James David Victor

Anders lifted his head to see that Patch had opened the porthole door ahead to darkness and was stepping into it with Jake and Dalia crowding behind.

  Just then, there was a screech of protesting metal, and a shriek as it finally gave up its many centuries of service.

  The suspension chains behind and on either side of Anders popped, one after the other like an invisible force was plucking them from their rusted fittings.

  And Anders slowly slid backward and down.

  13

  Doorway

  “Anders!” Dalia shouted, at the same time as Jake. The Ilythian was already moving back along the gantry to where one entire half had broken free and was crashing down into the crowd of Night Raiders.

  “No!” But there was a hand on her shoulder, and when Dalia flinched, she saw that it was Patch.

  With a rising torrent of shouts and screams, the bridge had fallen into the middle of the Night Raiders’ Death Palace ceremony, and Anders the rogue policeman was gone. Even the Ilythian’s sharp eyes could not find any trace of the man in the confusing tangle of bodies.

  “I could still get him!” Dalia was saying, as strong emotions that she was not used to surged through her. Below them, the horde was still tumbling and writhing in confusion. They hadn’t seen the rest of the infiltrators above.

  “Dalia, no. You know what the policeman said…” The young Voider’s voice was insistent and serious, both features that the Ilythian had never heard coming from him before.

  But Dalia had also heard what Anders had said to Patch earlier, too.

  “He lied,” she said sternly.

  Their argument was suddenly interrupted by a louder, amplified voice from below. It was the bell ringer/cult leader of the Night Raiders.

  “Make way! Make way! Move!” She looked down to see that the bell ringer was at the lead point of a wedge of guards forcing its way through the shocked and angry crowd. Dalia could see twisted and mangled bodies under the collapsed bridge.

  Don’t let Anders be one of them, she threw the thought down.

  The bell-ringing leader and his guards were using the butts of their rifles and metal clubs to beat back their discombobulated followers. They cleared a space around the tortured metal, and there, on a section of the bare floor where he must have landed on the heads of those beneath him, lay Anders.

  The Ilythian had her laser pistol out and was raising it expertly to sight down the muzzle at the distant cult leader. She was thinking that maybe she could take him out, and in the resulting confusion–

  “Dalia, please…” Patch was insistent at her side.

  With a heavy crash of her strange alien heart, Dalia realized the truth of what the young man was saying. What would she do in the resulting confusion exactly? Jump down there and kill nearly five hundred people, and somehow fight their way out through the rest of the Bonetown hulk?

  “What’s this?” She saw the bell ringer lower his rifle at Anders.

  Dalia hissed in anger.

  “He’s still alive!” one of the guards called, which was almost a relief for the Ilythian agent. Almost.

  “Seize him,” the bell ringer ordered maliciously, raising his head to look up at the ceiling where the gantry had fallen from. He was still looking at the far and broken section of the gantry bridge. He hadn’t yet swept his head around to where the rest of the Nova crew stood.

  “Dalia, we have to go. Now!” Patch pulled on the Ilythian’s shoulder.

  The young man was right. He had already pushed Jake ahead through the airlock, and Dalia let herself be pulled back by the man’s hands. They couldn’t save Anders, not now. And unless they wanted five hundred odd laser pistols and rifles and the stars knew what else firing up at them…

  We have to go if we want to complete the mission and stop the Archon, Dalia growled at herself. She jumped into the airlock after Patch but threw a look back over her shoulder just before disappearing into the darkness.

  The Ilythian agent looked down at Lieutenant Anders Corsigon being hauled to his feet. She was sure that she saw him bob his head woozily, although that could have been just the action of the guards manhandling his body.

  She felt terrible.

  But Anders is alive, she told herself. And if he’s alive, then he can be rescued.

  14

  Ozymandias Field Control Hub

  Sector 8 (Near Territory)

  Alarms blared throughout the Voider station of Ozymandias. The unthinkable was happening.

  For the first time in a generation, the wide blue burn of the station’s gigantic field generators and assorted thrusters was starting to sputter out. The blue glow weakened and lightened as it did so. The super-massive station, home to thousands of Voider souls, still moved on course as it carried its forward momentum, but it was slowing at an unprecedented rate.

  And every rebellious and recalcitrant soul that called the near Void their home knew that was bad. You could never stay long in any one place out here, not if you didn’t want to be picked apart by the Night Raiders or eventually join the other assorted hulks and debris fields that drifted after the galaxy.

  The effect this had on the swarm of eccentric Void craft was one of surprise and panic, as there were several near-misses between the smaller craft and their parent station.

  The failure of the engines was unannounced, and it was only the last-minute action of keen-eyed pilots taking the helms from their automated or simulated intelligence controls that avoided greater disasters.

  As it was, there were still plenty of disasters to go around. The internal gravity generated by the forward motion and the rings went haywire. It was worse in the habitat ring nearest to the engines of course, as people were suddenly thrown to the sides of their rooms or found their tools, utensils, objects, and experiments shifting and rising with the sudden loss of gravity.

  The problems extended also to the hundreds of docked Void craft on the rings as they juddered and wrenched against their mechanical vices, tearing and bending metals.

  None of these problems were catastrophic, of course, and they could all be rectified by a group of people as resourceful as the human engineers of the Void, but it would put back each and every one of their experiments, projects, and personal missions by a factor of months.

  It was this sudden derailing of a thousand plans and experiments that concerned the willowy Councilor Martravia the most as she hurried to the field control hub.

  The anti-gravity experiments. The zero-point energy experiments. The enhanced FTL-systems, the astro-navigation studies, the superior titanium-graphene alloy processing. She panicked as her boots clattered down the corridor, the lights around her flashing orange, on and off.

  The councilor knew that it was these procedures that really gave the Voiders their edge in the ever-competing world of throne politics. If the Voiders didn’t have their enhanced node technology, then they wouldn’t be the cutting-edge scientists of their day, and that was the only thing that kept the Eternal Empress from arriving at their airlock and demanding that they come into the Reach of the Throne proper.

  And if we’re engaged in a full-scale war with the Night Raiders because we’re not even moving… Martravia grumbled as she reached the gigantic bulkhead door that stood in the way of the field control hub.

  Well, in answer to her own question came the awareness that their existence was only tolerated so long as they could provide ever-more wondrous and ahead-of-the-curve technologies to the rest of the Golden Throne.

  “System check.” She tapped the command node on her wrist, the largest one surrounded by a spray of smaller, more specific nodes—each one specializing in various micro-processing procedures.

  The node linked up to the hub with a dull chime, and a green light winked from both the door panel and her node at the same time.

  “Field control hub compromised,” the automated voice stated.

  “I couldn’t have guessed,” Martravia drawled heavily. She was the first to arrive, mostly because the
re was a reason why she was a councilor after all. Other Voiders might be rushing to the combustion rooms of the thrusters or the actual field generators themselves to ascertain where the fault lay, but Martravia had a mind like a laser.

  Start at the root of the system and work your way out, she knew. This was the central place where all the structural field systems were regulated. The master-switch, she might have explained it as.

  Behind those doors, processors matched, filtered, and regulated the different field generators around the station, keeping things in balance. She knew that the station was always playing a careful game of juggling energy from one system to another, and if any one part drained too much, then the rest of Ozymandias would suffer.

  “And anyway…” she muttered as she reached for the emergency locker release panel to take out gloves, helmet, and a toolset. “We weren’t attacked. The proximity alarms and scanners and shields didn’t show anything.” Martravia knew that this couldn’t be actual physical damage to the engines, therefore it had to be a micro-processing problem, didn’t it?

  There was a reason why she was a councilor, after all.

  “What are the internal environmental controls like? Hazardous? Good?” Martravia snapped as she waited for her node to request information from the hub.

  “All levels normal. No detection of hazardous materials, leaks, or radiation,” the metallic node-voice once again supplied.

  “Well, at least that’s something,” she sighed. Her worst fear had been that something had gone awry inside the hub, and that they would have to isolate, quarantine, or even go so far as decontaminate the hub room before they could fix anything that had gone wrong, but luckily not.

  The woman checked the toolkit, fixing it to her utility belt. There was a good array of tools in there—everything from blank nodes waiting to be activated to pliers and laser-cutters. She felt confident as she hit the door release button.

  “Message to Ozymandias Central Comms,” she said. “I want the station’s top three programmers and top three micro-engineers on my location, as soon as they’re available,” she said as the doors slid open, and she stepped inside. Between them all, she knew that they would be able to isolate the fault and make a programming hack to get around it.

  The bulkhead doors slammed shut behind her with a heavy clang, and she was walking into the large and complicated control room, everything underlit by a hazy blue.

  As was to be expected. She frowned as she walked past the rows of giant glowing crystal-glass tubes, filled with the constantly shimmering and changing haze of the 18G blue field.

  These tubes were stacked, one above another, each one several meters in length, plunging back into their wall units, with data-pads displaying their power outlets. The entire control hub was a maze of small avenues between these stacks.

  The problem was, however, that there appeared to be far too many of these field tubes operating. “That’s odd,” Martravia said shrewdly. Given the fact that Ozymandias was slowing to a near halt, she had thought that she would find this room almost entirely dark.

  She had a thought, moving to the nearest data-screen to check their readouts.

  Aha. It was down by some sixty percent of expected output. That meant that one or many of the master relays must have gone, and only a tiny amount of residual power was left to flow through the system.

  Councilor Martravia hurriedly followed the yellow arrows on the floor that led to the center of the maze, where the master controllers and relay switches would be stored. She turned one corner, and then another and another until she came to the central room, which appeared to be a crystal-glass box with steel supports and a latticework of metal around that.

  Ultimate shielding, Martravia knew. All in order to prevent any static charge. She couldn’t see inside the room as these panels of crystal-glass were bubbled and opaque.

  “Let’s take a look at you.” She tapped the door release node, waited for the door to slide out and open, and stepped inside to a room filled with tall, white machine-control boxes, gauges, and dials.

  And Black Rose, standing with a small half-smile on her features as she pointed her laser pistol straight at Councilor Martravia.

  “Ah. I see.” The councilor froze.

  “Do you?” Black Rose raised an eyebrow, gesturing with her pistol for the woman to step inside. She did so, and the door swung shut behind her.

  The tall, white boxes of the master controllers were mostly dark. She knew what she was doing. Martravia scowled, still with her hands up. The woman that she faced was tall and athletic, with hair that was a deep strawberry red and skin that was almost as pale as an Ilythian’s. She also had a form-fitting encounter suit, all in black, with many pouches and module attachments.

  An assassin for sure, Martravia thought shrewdly as her eyes searched for any rank, badge, or insignia. Of course there was none.

  But there’s only one power in the whole known universe that could pull this off, isn’t there? Martravia soured.

  “I take it that you’re an emissary of the Eternal Empress. What does she want?” she said.

  The Black Rose’s eyes narrowed for the briefest moment. “All hail the Empress Eternal,” she said flatly, sounding as though she herself were a simulated intelligence.

  “All hail,” Martravia spat the words.

  The Black Rose lifted her chin and looked down at the councilor, seeming to appraise her. After a moment, the woman appeared to decide something.

  “I want information,” Black Rose said seriously.

  15

  Before the Bell

  Sector 8 (Outer Territory)

  “Tell me your name!” someone screamed into Anders’s face as a bucket of something that was probably water was thrown over him.

  “Hgh-phubr!” the lieutenant spluttered, blinking.

  There was an angry face looking at him. The bell ringer was a man whose crow’s feet and deep cheek lines spoke of a life spent outside of the therapeutic bubble of the Golden Throne. He had short-cropped gray hair, and his mashed ears were ragged with several chunks long since torn. He had sunken eyes that were dark and bloodshot.

  I’m alive, was Anders’s first thought, and then, but perhaps not for much longer.

  Where were Dalia, Jake, and Patch? Had they managed to get out? He immediately tried to rise, but found that the Night Raiders had strapped him to a chair. He could see the backs of the scavenger guards a little way ahead of them, and the angry, baying crowd spitting and hooting at him.

  Wonderful. If he was here, then he realized that meant that the radiating heat at his back must be the bonfire-bell. Which is either a great or a terrible sign, depending on which way you look at it, the man had to admit.

  Slap! The bell ringer’s hand snapped out to catch him on the cheek, and it was a strong enough blow that when Anders’s head stopped ringing, he could taste blood.

  “Don’t look at them, look at me! I asked you a question!” he growled. “Who sent you? The Voiders? The throne? The republic?”

  “That’s four questions,” Anders said instinctively. He had never been good with bullies and had barely managed to stay on the good side of his old police chief.

  Slap! Another cuff, this time on the other side of his face, presumably for symmetrical effect. Anders gritted his teeth and glared at the scavenger.

  His gaze lowered to his tied wrists. They had stripped him of his helmet and the top jacket of his encounter suit, but his mesh undershirt and his voluminous trousers, still with their supports and pressure filtration systems, had been left. They have my node, Anders realized and could have groaned. He couldn’t even contact Moriarty.

  The bell ringer raised his hand to slap him once again as Anders recalled his basic training in such situations.

  If you find yourself in a hostage situation, you are NOT authorized to give any operational or personal details to your captors. So went the MPB manual.

  The idea was that every officer was a part of the greater
‘whole’ of the Golden Throne, and such a mighty and glorious edifice could not be brought down by one person!

  Well, screw them, Anders thought. He had other sources of training however, and that was from his actual years on the streets. On some occasions, he’d even had to negotiate with hostage-takers.

  You keep them talking. You buy yourself time for them to slip up or to provide you with useful information…

  And, in Anders’s case since he couldn’t see the rest of the Nova crew around, he guessed that they had gotten free, and he could instead buy them the time that they needed to secure the field ansible.

  “Wait!” Anders said, just as the man’s hand rushed down.

  Slap! This bell ringer didn’t bother to halt.

  Okay, so it’s like that, is it? Anders spat out some blood.

  “So? Which one? Voiders? Throne?” the bell ringer demanded of him as he straightened up, raising a gloved hand to quiet the boisterous audience. “Out here, we don’t like intruders, do we?” The man played to the crowd.

  And Anders started to see the glimmer of a plan.

  Unfortunately, that plan started by Anders Corsigon telling the truth.

  “I’m Lieutenant Anders Corsigon, a Golden Throne Military Police Officer,” he said in a loud and clear voice.

  A ripple of hissed surprise went out amongst the raider crowd, turning quickly into bellows of outrage. The effect it had on the cult leader in front of Anders was galvanic.

  “You don’t deny it?” the man growled in a deadly serious voice, suddenly standing right in front of Anders. A long-bladed knife pricked the skin of Anders’s throat.

  “No.” Anders looked up at the man with clear eyes. “But if any of you have nodes out here, then you’d also know that I am currently one of the most wanted men under the entire Reach of the Throne,” he said calmly.

  Start with a truth, he remembered the more useful interrogation lessons. There was only one way to beat an interrogation, especially one that looked set to involve beatings and torture—give pieces of information that you could confidently say was the truth, but make sure that the information is not valuable to the questioner.