The Weapons of War

by Dan Schiro

  Mervyn nodded and leaned his cane against Zovaco’s desk. “I’m late to meet Koreen as it is.” He sauntered over and helped Aurelia hoist Kangor. “Let me tell you,” he added when they both had a thick arm draped over their shoulders, “when she’s in a mood, she’s far scarier than a vycart.”

  Orion nodded. “Keep your guard up, Mervyn.” He turned to face Zovaco with a shrug. “So… what now?”

  “All of Union space goes on high alert.” Zovaco leaned back in his chair and rubbed his face with weariness he would have never shown a crowd of voters. “From the Maker Rings to the homeworld systems to the colonies to the asteroids, all the way down to the most trifling space station.”

  “What?” Dalaxa spat. “Do you still not understand the kind of weapons we’re talking about? That’s not good enough.”

  “Of course it’s not,” Zovaco said as he straightened. “We’ll also be trampling the rights to privacy and free speech that I hold dear. Not to mention, it will all be predicated on lies about a Dawnstar resurgence, may the stars forgive us. But,” he added with a small sigh, “all for the greater good.”

  “Maybe there’s a better way,” Orion said, feeling a tickle in his subconscious. He closed his eyes as he reached into Memory’s Prism and fished out the moment. “From the overlords to the poison-makers to the rats who carried it.”

  Zovaco gazed at him blankly for a moment. “Come again?”

  “That’s…” Dalaxa shook her head, her pink eyes tired from the long day in the Grand Chambers. “Isn’t that what the Mad Thinker said?”

  Orion nodded. “This is about revenge, Zo.”

  “Well, of course it is,” Zovaco said. “I read the black file, I know what the Union did because they feared vycart expansion.” He looked up at Orion with three curious, narrowed eyes. “But ‘the Union’ is a fairly nebulous entity, as targets go.”

  “True, but it felt like Typhus was being specific.” Orion thought for a moment, a finger to his jutting chin as his mismatched eyes searched the ceiling. “The ‘overlords’ seems obvious enough.”

  Zovaco nodded. “Union Parliament. They voted to develop the geno-toxin and issued the command to deploy it.”

  Dalaxa shrugged. “He plans to attack the Maker Rings. That’s no surprise.” She started to take her seat again, realized Kangor had destroyed the chair, and turned back to face Zovaco’s desk. “But who are the ‘poison-makers?’ Who are the ‘rats?’”

  “You read the black file,” Orion said to Zovaco. “Any ideas?”

  “Much of the text was redacted, even some two and a half centuries later.” He ran a hand over his inky-blue head and pursed his thin lips as if deep in thought. “However… the file said that a ‘non-contiguous’ sovereign state of the Union dispersed the geno-toxin using its ‘sizable’ trading fleet, which makes me think…”

  “The Collective Fleet,” Orion said, finishing for him. “The largest, most diverse mix of ships in known space. And the poison-makers?”

  “A designer toxin crafted to infect a very specific, very resilient genetic code?” Zovaco glanced at Dalaxa ruefully. “If I know the Union, they went to the best scientists in the galaxy.”

  She nodded as if expecting it. “The s’zone.”

  “From the context of the file, that would be my guess.” Zovaco folded his hands atop his wooden desk. “I’m sorry, Dalaxa.”

  Her legs trembled as if she might collapse, and Orion made a quick move to take her by the arm. “I’m not blind to the irony, you know,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “A vycart using s’zone weapons to destroy the very people who…” She tipped her head forward and clamped a hand over her own mouth, unable to finish.

  “That settles it, then.” Orion forced a brave smile. “My team will head for the moons of S’ai, patrol the system until we spot something suspicious, and then we’ll end this.”

  Zovaco winced. “Orion, perhaps it’s not that cut-and-dry. We’ll not leave the s’zone homeworld, or any homeworld, unprotected at this time. But the Collective Fleet is over a standard astronomical unit wide, with hundreds of thousands of ships coming and going daily.” He shrugged. “Perhaps your talent for seeing patterns would be more valuable there.”

  “What?” Orion tilted his head toward Dalaxa. “Zo, this is her home we’re talking about, we have to—”

  “I understand,” Dalaxa said quietly. “The Fleet is messy, vulnerable. They need you — us — more.”

  “I, of all people, know what you can do, Orion.” Zovaco raised his right hand and flexed cybernetic joints hidden behind printed synthetic skin. “I know what’s beneath the skin.” His three-eyed gaze bore into Orion with intensity. “If anyone can spot Typhus’ agents amid the chaos of the Collective Fleet, it’s you.”

  Chapter 16

  Kangor paced the small cabin of Orion’s Prodigal Star, his footsteps heavy with anger. “Anything yet?”

  “Yeah,” Orion snapped from the captain’s chair. “Yeah, I spotted a vycart warship and didn’t sound the alarm.”

  “What?” Kangor roared.

  “Sarcasm,” Orion sighed. “Again.”

  Sitting patiently by his side, Bully looked up at him and yawned. Orion, Kangor, Aurelia and Dalaxa had been aboard Orion’s Prodigal Star for three days, the craft’s shift-skin tuned to space black as they drifted amongst the Collective Fleet. On the main viewscreen, huge generation ships mingled with dropships, warbirds, bubble gardens, cargo freighters, luxury yachts, industrial platforms and more, their makes from hundreds of eras and races. An increased military presence loitered at the edges of the vast swarm, and the SpaceCorps fighters and Paragon-class warships were newer, sleeker models than Orion had seen around the Maker Rings. He had been trying to plunge deep into Blooming Flower, trying to see patterns in the cloud of ships that had gathered at a crossroads of ether routes and declared themselves a community back when humans lived in caves. If he could find the patterns in the sea of steel and ceramic, he might be able to recognize the signs of an attack before it happened. But Blooming Flower took deep concentration, and someone kept interrupting him.

  “There must be something we can do,” Kangor huffed.

  Orion swiveled the captain’s chair to face him. “Would you stop?” Frustration lined Orion’s pale face. “I’m watching this thing churn, but other than a rogue comet passing the outer edge of the cloud, everything is business as usual.”

  “Full-spectrum scans show no change,” said Dalaxa, manning the operations station. She had taken to the job shockingly quickly, and after just three days she manipulated the interface better than Kangor did, though that was a low bar. “I’ve kept an eye on the newsfeeds from S’ai and the Maker Rings, and all’s quiet there, too.”

  “I’ve got nothing as well,” said Aurelia Deon as she removed her manacite spirit mask. Sitting in the back of the cabin, she waved away lilac-scented tendrils of smoke from her burning incense sticks, uncrossed her long green legs and stood. “If there was any kind of energy disturbance in local space-time, I would have sensed it by now.”

  “Were Typhus a true vycart warrior,” Kangor grunted through clenched teeth, “he would attack, end this waiting.”

  “I almost wish he would,” Dalaxa said, her sharp chin lifted in the air. “The anticipation is unbearable.”

  “There must be a way to call him out,” Kangor muttered.

  “Antagonize the crazy person with the weapons of planetary destruction?” Aurelia said as she took her place on the crash couch. “I’m not sure that’s for the best.”

  “Even if we wanted to provoke him, I don’t know what we would do,” Orion said, spinning back to his curved control dash and the data-littered main viewscreen. “I’ve been listening to reports from the SpaceCorps patrols, watching the dataflow, and other than the rogue comet, nothing’s out of—” Orion’s body tensed over the control dash. �
�Hang on a second,” he breathed as he opened a holo-interface and peered at the scrolling data. “That comet has changed vectors.”

  “What?” Dalaxa spat, opening a new interface at the ops station. “There’s no natural gravity well out here, that shouldn’t be possible.”

  “Exactly.” Orion’s hands danced over the curved dash in front of him, and the Prodigal Star tuned its considerable sensor net on the foreign object at the edge of the Fleet’s swarm. The forward view shrank to a small window on the main screen, replaced by a live spectral analysis of the speeding, jagged object. “Are you seeing this?”

  Dalaxa gaped at the composite image and the data descriptors surrounding it. “Ice-rock shell, but beneath, alloy substructure… ion engines… a manacite drive…” She shook her head. “Incredible — it’s a stealth ship.”

  “It’s him,” Kangor growled as he gripped the tall back of Orion’s chair. “It must be Typhus the Mad Thinker.”

  “If it’s not,” said Aurelia drolly, “the Fleet has real problems.”

  “Gotta do this smart,” Orion muttered. He reached for the control dash to contact SpaceCorps, but then the breath caught in his chest. “It just fired something.” He plotted a quick intercept course and cranked the ion engine to full. “Crash couches, now,” he shouted as the Prodigal Star lurched into motion and went hurtling through the crowd of drifting ships.

  Dalaxa’s big eyes flitted over the information projected by the ops station. “I can’t get a read — what did it fire?”

  “Not a missile, thankfully,” Orion said, gripping the navigation wheel. “The drive signature’s all wrong, and it’s moving too slow.”

  “A dropship?” Kangor suggested.

  Orion shook his head as he shot through the narrow gap between two coasting generation ships. “Too small.” He pulled back on the wheel to veer up over the diamond-glass dome of a bubble garden. “It almost moves like a…” He thought back to their raid on the Dawnstar compound on Jutera-4. “It’s a warmech.”

  “I didn’t give him designs for those,” Dalaxa murmured.

  With a quick stab at the control dash, Orion opened Zovaco’s pre-arranged emergency channels to SpaceCorps and the Collective Fleet’s High Admirals. “This is Orion Grimslade III, special agent of Union Parliament, come back.”

  “Copy that, Grimslade,” said the hard voice of a SpaceCorps man. “Go ahead.”

  “The High Admirals,” said a second, ponderous voice, “acknowledge your entreaty and recip—”

  “A warmech has entered the Fleet,” Orion shouted without waiting for the Admirals’ liaison to finish. “I repeat, a warmech has entered the Fleet from the cloud’s fourth quadrant at an angle of 27 degrees below the equatorial plane. Be advised it is inbound headed for…” He touched a few buttons and checked the transponder signal. “Ship designation Equitable Beamer.”

  “A clumsy name for a ship,” Aurelia remarked, not a hint of distress in her voice. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know,” Orion said as he glanced at the preliminary sensor readings, “but it’s a big one.” He flipped his Prodigal Star on its side to sneak through the lane between two cargo ships. “Dalaxa, think you’ve figured out enough on ops to check the listing?”

  “Let’s find out.” She tapped rapidly at the ops console and squinted at the results. “Looks like… a power freighter. Refines and beams wireless energy to an eighth of the Fleet.”

  “Typhus’ plan,” snorted Kangor, “can’t be as simple as causing a brown out.”

  “Right,” Orion said as he swerved around a manufacturing platform. “Dalaxa, any idea why Typhus might want a power plant?”

  “I… it could be…” she froze, her mouth agape.

  “Out with it,” Orion shouted over his shoulder.

  She looked down. “Darkwell.”

  “Not good,” Orion hissed as he jerked the ship left, then right to move through a lazy school of luxury yachts. “That is really not good.”

  “What is it?” Kangor barked from the crash couch next to Aurelia. “This Darkwell?”

  “Yes, refresh my memory?” Aurelia added.

  “You two,” Orion shouted as the Prodigal Star swooped around another bubble garden dome. “You never read the briefs, never!”

  “Project Darkwell,” Dalaxa told them, her voice still wavering. “It needs a tremendous energy source, but — very basically — it uses principles of commonplace gravity manipulation in concert with the manacite drive’s space-folding—”

  “It makes a black hole,” Orion snapped as a small flock of racing dropships scratched by on the viewscreen. “It opens the jaws of hell and chews up the Collective Fleet, get it?”

  “The point is,” Dalaxa said, her sculpted face lined with worry, “we can’t let whoever’s in that warmech access the ship’s main reactor.”

  “Hold on, we’re almost there,” Orion said as a collision claxon blared.

  The Prodigal Star dove to sneak beneath a garbage barge, and the path lay clear ahead of them. The cigar-shaped power-plant ship drifted listlessly in space, a snow-white plume of atmosphere escaping from the small hole smashed in its gray-green hull. He set the ship’s auto-docking system with a few quick commands, and then Orion flung off his harness.

  “Alright,” he said as he jumped to his feet. “Remember what the Doc said — protect the main reactor.”

  Orion’s midnight-black Prodigal Star locked its belly flush against the side of the Equitable Beamer, a great improvement over the drill-and-tube boarding system of his old ExAstra dropship. Orion and his crew took a ladder down into the lower level of his ship and assembled around the circular airlock in the floor. Once the atmosphere indicators flashed green, Orion threw the lever to open the aperture. The four of them and Bully leaped down into the hull substructure of the power freighter, and “down” flipped 90 degrees as they passed from one artificial gravity field to another. Once oriented, they found themselves in a slag-dripping tunnel, presumably cut by the warmech’s laser torches. Orion heard the grinding whir and pumping pistons of heavy machinery from the other end of the tunnel, but beneath the cacophony, he thought he heard distant screams.

  “We’ve got one target.” Orion took a deep breath and brought his spellblade gauntlet to life, conjuring a heavy mace in his grip. “We know the target has a warmech. But since that target is one of Typhus’ agents, we can assume he has a spellblade too.”

  The others nodded or grunted their understanding, and they started down the smoldering path cut by the warmech. A few feet from the end, Orion held the others back with a closed fist while he peeked out over the still-hot edges of the inner hull. He saw they were about a dozen or so feet from the floor of a large factory. Broken assembly lines littered the ground with piles of unrefined ore, sparks shot from grinding gears and unattended drill pieces, and a towering, cauldron-like container leaked molten metal from a crack in its side. Piles of gooey bones gleamed grimly here and there, the races unidentifiable. Perhaps most curiously, Typhus’ man had abandoned the gunmetal-gray warmech below the hole.

  “Steel yourself,” Orion told Dalaxa with a glance over his shoulder. “It’s a bad scene.”

  He hopped down to the cockpit bubble of the warmech, then dropped to the blood-slicked factory floor. The others followed his lead, Kangor with the grace of a panther, Aurelia as if gravity were just a suggestion, and Bully with a woof and a thud. Dalaxa came last, freezing atop the warmech as she saw the piles of bones and ragged organs left behind by whatever had swarmed through ahead of them.

  “Come on, Dalaxa,” Orion said, reaching up to assist her. “Quick now.”

  The s’zone nodded and slid down to him, a slender hand covering her small mouth. “What… what in creation could do this?” she whispered.

  Orion glanced down at his gauntlet-clad right arm and the spiked mace he held, a flicker of his i
magination turning the weapon into a long sword. “You know the answer to that.”

  Aurelia appraised the empty warmech with a sneer. “I’m guessing a powerful spellblade at that, if our enemy thought it easier to abandon this.”

  The fear seemed to disappear from Dalaxa’s face as an idea lit her eyes. “That was a mistake on their part.”

  “What are you doing?” Orion asked as she broke away from him and climbed up into the open cockpit.

  She glanced down at him with the tug of a scowl on her lips. “Weapon scientist, remember?” She snapped the harness down over her chest and slipped her arms and legs into the control sleeves. “I was redesigning these things before I even got to GCU.”

  “No, no, no,” Aurelia said, shaking her head. “This is starting to remind me of Konnexus. That time we only gave her a pistol.”

  “I’ve learned a lot since then,” she hissed. “And I can’t be a liability, not when the stakes are this high.”

  Orion thought about it for a moment as the diamond-glass cockpit bubble sealed over her. “Strictly for your own protection,” he said with a nod. “No pulse cannons, no missiles, no tasers. I don’t want you catching me and my crew with friendly fire.”

  “Try not to punch a hole in the ship,” Kangor added. “Breathless in a vacuum is no way for a vycart to die.”

  “You have my word.” Dalaxa took a few whirring steps, the warmech’s feet striking the metal floor like hammer blows. “I’ll hang back when the time comes, but at least you won’t have to worry about protecting me.”

  They moved quickly across the factory floor, stepping over and around the ravished bones and malfunctioning equipment. Soon they reached a pair of doors that had been smashed flat, as if by a huge battering ram. In the well-lit industrial corridor beyond, they found more of the same skeletal remains with only a fluff of bloody feathers or a pair of stubby horns to suggest which race they might have been. They followed the trail of death and shattered security doors for the better part of an hour. Eventually they saw signage pointing the way to the main reactor and warning unauthorized personnel to redirect immediately. After a few more minutes of silent progress, Orion and his companions came to a final set of broken security doors and stepped into the cavernous room containing the main reactor.