Ch'k'te had still not turned from his station. She wanted to shout his name and attract his attention, but she held back.
"Commodore," Noyes said, saluting her. "Welcome back, ma'am."
"Thank you." She returned the salute. "Where is se Sergei? I would have expected him to be here."
"se Sergei?" Noyes looked directly at her for a moment. "se Sergei was . . . not feeling well. He is in his quarters—he asked not to be disturbed."
Her glance happened to look past Noyes to Ch'k'te. His neck muscles were bunched, almost taut . . . almost as if he were straining to turn around.
"Perhaps," Noyes went on smoothly, "he is feeling the effects of the trip." Ch'k'te's chair swiveled a few centimeters, and his head turned with obvious effort. "I'm sure"—another few centimeters—"he will be better—" She could almost see Ch'k'te's face now. A shiver ran from the small of her back up to her neck. "—in a few hours."
With what seemed to be a great effort of will, Jackie's exec swung his chair completely around to face her. He raised his eyes slowly to meet hers.
In an instant of eye contact that seemed to stretch out to infinity, she felt Ch'k'te's mind reach out to hers. The contact was hastily batted away by some presence. She felt anger and surprise from that mind, as if it had not expected the event to even occur. As fear crept up in her mind, she felt a rising tide of hatred, directed unilaterally toward whatever sentience was controlling her exec and friend.
"Commodore?" Noyes said.
As the contact failed she returned her glances to Noyes.
But she did not see a man there anymore.
Without even thinking, she dived for the deck. The creature seemed to realize at once that its disguise had failed. Before she even reached the deck, a laser shot rang out a few centimeters above her head, detonating in a console behind her.
Not knowing what her chances were of taking out the creature with a single shot, Jackie looked for a tactical advantage. She aimed for a power receptacle near the pilot's board and fired a narrow beam at it.
All the lights on the bridge went out at once. A pale reddish glow replaced the familiar white. Jackie noticed from her crouching position that pandemonium had broken out on the bridge.
"You cannot escape me," the Noyes-thing said, in a croak that still sounded frighteningly like the officer she knew. "I can find you even in the dark, meat-creature."
She refused the bait and remained in her crouch. A shot struck a railing above her head, fired from somewhere on the other side of the bridge.
"I control them as well, Commodore," the half-alien voice sneered. "Silence!" it shouted into the commotion . . . and it was quiet.
She could hear the blood pounding in her ears as the bridge went silent. In the dim red emergency light, the creature was silhouetted against the bright half-circle of Cicero, and she could see its true outline for the first time. It looked like a crustacean or perhaps a hard-shelled insect, with four legs and two stubby arms. Its head was dominated by a pair of what looked like sharp mandibles, and constantly wriggling tentacles hung down from either side of its head.
"I can smell you, Commodore," it croaked. "I can smell your fear as you hide from me in the darkness. You were so clever. I did not even sense your contact with that egg-sucking zor. It does not matter, however—I can seize your mind at any time. Or I can kill with a single thought."
Just like what must've happened to the admiral, she added to herself.
She saw the alien turn its head toward her. It seemed to be growing in size . . . becoming larger and larger and reaching out its tentacles to touch her. It was true this time, not a fever dream or a vision shared with Ch'k'te—not some imagining of a madman.
It was true, and she could not prevent it. Her hatred had given way to fright and then to despair. Only a supreme effort of will kept her crouching, rather than allowing herself to be drawn closer to the alien. She could not stop the shaking, and her pistol wavered in her hands—
But before the tentacles from the now giant alien could reach her, a shriek cut across her consciousness like a bright, sharp blade. From the corner of her eye, she saw a figure spring from the darkness, landing atop the creature.
"Ch'k'te!" she shouted.
The alien screamed, and she knew now it was pain that had brought it about. An unarmed zor, as humanity had learned decades ago, is nothing to trifle with—though more fragile than humans, their sharp claws and wing-talons combined with lightning reflexes and uncanny agility made them dangerous even unarmed.
She felt a claw at her shoulder pulling her away, and she found herself half crawling, half running to the lift, Ch'k'te at her side. Laser fire arced through the air as they dived the final few meters into the compartment and the door slid shut behind them.
She took a few breaths as Ch'k'te ordered the lift to descend to the shuttle deck. While it began to drop, she had her first opportunity to look at him.
His face was marred by a number of cuts and bruises and his uniform was torn in several places. His wings appeared to be undamaged, but his chest was sliced neatly and leaking blood.
"Got to get you to sick bay—" she began.
"No . . . time," Ch'k'te responded. "se Jackie." He grasped her arm firmly with a clawed hand. "He . . . it . . . already controls this station. We must get off—" He broke off and began to cough. "We—"
"You're in no condition to—"
"Pain . . . irrelevant."
"Bullshit!" The lift continued to drop. They were in the spindle now, heading toward Engineering Section. "What about your wounds?"
"No . . . time," the zor repeated, "se Jackie. Need . . . I need your help, your strength."
"For what?"
"Healing. esLiDur'ar, the gift of life. Requires—" He began to cough again and Jackie helped him to a seat in the corner of the lift compartment. "Requires internal strength, hsi. It is truly a simple matter . . ."
"If you live that long."
"Need your help," Ch'k'te repeated. "Please, Jackie." He'd even dropped the prenomen. "T-trust me."
"I trust you." She looked up at the lift indicator, and watched them slip down, deck after deck. "What can I do?"
"Open your mind . . . I will do the rest."
She tried to calm herself and breathed slowly and carefully, squatting on the deck. It was easier opening her mind to Ch'k'te while he grasped her arm. She felt a wash of calm come over her as the contact formed and firmed.
Then, while she watched, Ch'k'te moved his wings into a particular pattern and slowly drew his other hand across the gash in his chest. Where his talons passed, the opening subsided to a pinkish scar . . . and as she looked, fascinated, the scar faded gradually and disappeared altogether.
Ch'k'te let go of her arm and slumped back against the wall of the lift, breathing shallowly. She felt drained and almost overcome by lassitude; but from somewhere deep inside she drew on strength to fight it off.
She forced her limbs to work again, fighting the lassitude that the esLiDur'ar had left behind. The zor's vision seemed to clear.
"I thank you most humbly," he said at last.
"No time for it." She looked up at the lift indicator and noted they were slowing, approaching the shuttle bay at the aft end of the spindle. "Report. What the hell is going on?"
"A few hours ago I . . . arrived here on Cicero Operations. I had received an order from you to come here. I was met by Commander Noyes on the shuttle deck—except that it was not Noyes at all. He . . . It seemed to know at once that I had penetrated its disguise. It dominated my mind and controlled me.
"I do not know much more, se Commodore. Its intention is to control this base. With Operations under its control it will be much easier for them to seize control of the system."
"How many of them are there?"
"Three—perhaps four. There are at least two more at Cicero Down."
"Half a dozen of them, and hundreds of us? Surely—"
"You do not understand." He pulled himsel
f to his feet, straightening out what remained of his uniform. "se Jackie. They can dominate minds. They can disguise themselves as anything, even People. As me. As you. We cannot defeat them . . . They may have already won."
The statement sunk in for a moment and then was interrupted by a sudden, stomach-wrenching thought.
"se Sergei . . . We have to save—"
"He is a warrior. The Gyaryu'har will take care of himself." Ch'k'te took Jackie's arm, more gently this time. "We must get off this station, se Jackie. If we attempt to rescue the Gyaryu'har, we reduce our chances of escape."
" 'Escape'? Where do you plan to go?"
"I . . . thought that perhaps we could use your gig. We could reach the Pappenheim or another of the ships in quarantine and then get outsystem."
Before she could frame a reply the lift shuddered to a stop. Jackie stepped back to one side of the door, her pistol drawn and held ready. Ch'k'te had no pistol but held his blade in his hand.
The door slid aside, giving a vantage across the shuttle deck. They flattened themselves out of sight within the lift compartment and glanced carefully around. Jackie's gig was parked on the deck; there were also several small travel pods, each set in a launching tube. The cutter was guarded by four Marines, laser rifles held ready.
"We're expected," Jackie whispered. She nodded to Ch'k'te, and they crept from the lift entrance to a concealed position be hind a fuel pod. The Marines did not appear to notice.
"We probably don't have much time," she said, watching the Marines in front of the small craft. "The—thing—that took Noyes' place won't give us a lot of time to plan. We don't stand a chance to get to the gig; looks like we should try to get to a travel pod."
"If the station opens fire on us," Ch'k'te said, his inner eye lids closing and opening rapidly, "we will be debris."
"Do you have any better ideas? We can't go back up to the bridge."
"Decidedly not." Ch'k'te shuddered slightly at the mention of the possibility. "Very well." He gestured toward the nearest travel pod. "The access hatch on the closest pod is partially obscured from the Marine guards. We should have thirty seconds or so to reach it."
"Are you up to it?"
"I was not aware that I had a choice. Besides," he added, "it will be harder to hit a flying target."
Most of the Earthlike planets scattered across the Solar Empire had gravities between nine-tenths and one-and-a-half Standard gravities. By comparison, Zor'a and most of the zor Core worlds were just over half a g. It was there the zor had first settled, and over these worlds trillions of young zor had learned to fly.
Even for the light and hollow-boned zor, nine-tenths of a gravity precluded the possibility of flight; thus many humans had never seen a zor fly, viewing the articulate wing-structure more as an aesthetic part of native costume than as a means of locomotion.
Jackie had seen zor flight at the Academy, in the low-g flight simulators. While human cadets flapped around with artificial wings strapped to their backs, looking for warm updrafts to buoy their earthbound bodies into the air, zor cadets rejoiced in the freedom Earth had never afforded them, and which the narrow corridors of Moonbase did not allow, showing their true home to be the boundless reaches of the sky. Man had always dreamed of flight; the zor had lived it, in the truest sense.
In the three-tenths of a g of the station's spindle, Ch'k'te suddenly took flight, rising in an easy arc and attracting the attention of the Marine guards. Jackie was as transfixed as they were for a moment; then she darted out from cover and zigzagged across the few dozen meters of open space as Ch'k'te glided quickly about, easily dodging the miscalculated shots. He arrived several moments before she did. He already had the hatch door open. They dived for seats in the cockpit and sealed the hatch behind them.
The outside camera pickup showed rifle fire splattering against the hull while she feverishly went through preflight check. Before any of the Marines could reach the launch bay she punched the firing stud, spitting the pod out into space, slamming both of them back into their seats.
The instruments were alive in her hands. She had kicked the thrust up to maximum, using up fuel in the process, but it did put distance between them and the station. All the landmarks in space were set out in stark relief: it was powerfully different than the view obtained from inside a starship or space-station. The planet Cicero seemed bigger somehow, and Cicero Operations was likewise gargantuan, a huge child's toy visibly spinning in space, half-lit by the planet and trimmed in vermilion from Cicero's primary.
She was also well aware of the thinness of the pod's hull and just how close she was to the vacuum of space. It had been a long time since she had flown something this flimsy. The Pappenheim was four or five hundred million kilometers away: It would be a long flight.
"Bogeys," Ch'k'te said suddenly from the other seat. "Two—no, three. Fighters launched from the station."
"Do they have our bearing?"
"They seem to."
She reached down with one hand and adjusted the comm to the frequency she expected them to use, based on day and watch. The pilots' chitchat told her more than she wanted to know.
She also knew they did not stand a chance against armed fighters in open space.
"Ch'k'te," she said, without looking away from the displays. "See if you can find us vacc suits."
"Aye-aye," he said, and scrambled into the rear part of the pod.
"Ch'k'te?"
"Yes?" he said, beginning to don a suit.
"We can't avoid those bastards in open space and we can't possibly get to the Pappenheim. I may have to land this thing on Cicero itself, just to keep us from being vaporized. What are the chances that a . . . that an alien has control of Cicero Down?"
"I—" Ch'k'te grunted, and sealed the suit from the neck down. "I would estimate that they are quite good."
She cursed. "Do you have any alternate suggestions? Once I'm in atmosphere, there's no getting out again."
"Prayer to esLi," Ch'k'te replied, coming forward and strapping himself in again. He activated the reserve instruments and she turned control over to him. Before she could unstrap, however, he spun the pod end for end and rolled it sharply to star board, forcing her back against the seat cushions.
"What the holy hell—" she began, and then saw something streak past the front viewscreen of the little craft, wobbling back and forth as it dropped toward the planet's surface and detonated.
"Prayer to esLi," he repeated. "Your suit is beside the medikit."
She crawled into the rear part of the pod and quickly began to don the suit. "My friend, if we ever get out of this alive, I will get you a promotion."
"se Commodore—" he began, then swung the pod rapidly again to avoid another incoming missile. "se Jackie." He turned for a moment to look at her. "The zor sage spoke truly when he advised his pupil, 'Do not set S'r'can'u to protect your garden before he has been planted.' "
"I . . ." She sealed the suit around her chest. "I think I know that saying." She clambered forward and took her seat again, just as Ch'k'te performed another maneuver that pushed her back into the cushions.
A quick glance at the telltales indicated that the three fighters were almost in laser fire range.
She took the controls again and let the onboard nav computer plot a landing. As soon as it had produced a course, she let it execute. The little pod, burning most of its remaining fuel, sped away from the fighters and toward the planet's atmosphere.
The last thing she remembered, before the g-force made her black out, was the planet growing to encompass the entire for ward screen, blocking out the stars.
Chapter 6
The commodore's gig rolled forward on its landing gear into the hangar and out of the storm. A med team was already on hand, along with the Gyaryu'har's staff; as soon as the hatch opened, Jackie and Ch'k'te descended to the deck followed by two crewmembers carrying a stretcher.
Lieutenant Daniel Hamadjiou, Officer of the Watch, was on hand to exchan
ge salutes with his commanding officers. Sergei's staff and the medical team attended to the Gyaryu'har, who was lying immobile.
"Commodore," Hamadjiou said. "Cicero Down is on alert, as you ordered."
"Very good," she answered. "Have you received any reports of intruders?"
"No, ma'am. Down Control recorded the launch of aero space fighters from Op. Is everything all right topside?"
"An escape pod was launched. Commander Noyes ordered the launch of a fighter wing, but it fell into the atmosphere."
"We should be able to locate it once the storm passes, ma'am."
Commodore Laperriere looked at him. "You may consider that an order, Lieutenant."
For a moment, Laperriere seemed larger than life and the overhead phosphors seemed to dim. Dan Hamadjiou was afraid for reasons he couldn't adequately explain. He did the only thing he could: he saluted and said, "Aye-aye, Commodore."
***
South Continent was completely covered by a low-lying storm, preventing recon planes from flying over the secluded forest where Jackie had finally landed the pod after she'd regained consciousness in the lower atmosphere. Even when the weather started to clear, there hadn't been any overflights. It was almost insulting, as if she and Ch'k'te didn't matter; but perhaps the enemy simply thought she had crashed the pod and was out of the way.
The map showed that their encampment was a bit over three hundred kilometers southwest of the Cicero Down naval base. She imagined the aliens there on the base, controlling the personnel there, perhaps even assuming her own shape. During the first few days she hadn't thought about it much: she was far more concerned with keeping them alive. Ch'k'te had suffered several stress fractures—his fragile frame was unaccustomed to the g-force of unassisted reentry—so he stayed inside the pod under sedation. She busied herself with the craft of staying alive, using techniques she hadn't needed since her Academy days.
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