Chapter 8
“Tribal cultures are often ridiculed and scorned, or at least pitied, within the academy due to their tendencies toward total conformity and a lack of nuance. But aside from the realm of civil social structures, intellectuals can generally admit that strength is found in unity and a unified vision. This discrepancy seems more rooted in ideology than any observable facts of human success or contentment.”
—Dr. Georgette Hester-Vicary, Irresistible Puppeteer: The Motivational Primacy of Tribe
Aboard the 25,000-ton transport Dromedary, Saef Sinclair-Maru worked through his usual shipboard fitness routine, sweating freely, his mind light-years away. His mood revolved from chagrin at losing Hightower—yielding command back to her rightful captain—to relief at escaping from the pointless grind of a planetary assault of Ericsson Two, to depression at the prospect of being beached by Admiralty nonsense. What would they subject him to now?
At least their transit to Core would be rapid, Dromedary tasked with transporting munitions to the squadron in Ericsson system. Like many dedicated vessels carrying munitions, Dromedary possessed several vast compartments and only a minuscule section for crew and passengers.
On this particular leg, Inga, Saef, and the kitten Tanta composed their only passengers, with Erik Sturmsohn in their train, his parole personally retained by Saef. Inga’s shuttle, Onyx, lay tucked away in Dromedary’s tight little shuttle bay, as befitted a captain’s allowed “pinnace” craft, and Loki’s hardware remained safely ensconced within.
Inga seemed inordinately absorbed with Loki’s status, Saef thought, physically checking on the Intelligence frequently, requiring multiple trips to Dromedary’s shuttle bay, to the disgust of the transport’s steward, Sponson.
As Saef concluded his exercise routine, he reflected for a moment on that odd little character, Sponson. As unfriendly as the steward seemed, he remained the only crew member to actively interact with Inga or Saef now for the second day of their out-transit to Dromedary’s transition point. The other crew had appeared only as occasional fleeting figures down one of the transport’s empty corridors, or as a voice issuing from an internal comm.
The usual courtesies to a supernumerary captain had been ignored by Dromedary’s captain, and Saef wondered if this discourtesy was intended as a personal affront, or if it signaled the feelings from higher up the command chain.
As Saef employed a small towel, drying the cooling sweat from his chest and face, the cabin door chimed softly. He opened it to Inga Maru, seeing only her relaxed pose as he measured her.
“Maru,” he greeted, stepping back. “You find the shuttle, the Intelligence, and—er—Tanta to be in working order, I take it?”
Inga eased into the cabin, produced a food concentrate bar, and began nibbling at it with a distracted frown. She shrugged. “Well enough.”
Saef drew on a shirt and belted his pistol and sword in place. “But…? I take it something is on your mind; something beyond the shuttle and your various minions.”
Inga chewed thoughtfully for an uncharacteristic length of pondering before finally saying, “You know…I don’t think I understand what you really desire at all. What is it you want?”
Saef froze even in the midst of fastening his collar tabs, flummoxed by the question. “What I want?” he repeated.
“Yes,” Inga said. “Not what Fleet wants. Not the Family…just you.” She stared at him, her blue eyes fixed upon him, expressionless.
Saef found his mind recoiling from the question. What he desired had always been folded into the Family plans. He could scarcely consider a want separate from its application to Family. Even casting his mind back to adolescence and the more visceral, fanciful desires then, he saw few dreams that now survived the discovery of this creeping alien invasion of the Myriad Worlds. That revelation had changed everything for him.
“Well,” Saef mused aloud at last, “I would like us to survive, for a start.”
She tilted her head, her half smile crooking her lips. “It is a start, but as they say, survival for the sake of mere survival can never be a valid intellectual stopping place. You know that.”
Saef thought for a moment more, glowering to himself, drifting slowly to nebulous conclusions. “I would like to defeat or destroy these damned…Strangers…aliens, whatever they are.” He suddenly, truly perceived Inga there before him, her vitality, her quick intelligence and poise seeming to transform and create a fresh mystery that he could not explore. “I’d like…” Saef closed his mouth and looked away from Inga’s penetrating eyes. “That’s enough, to begin with, I think.” Saef felt Inga’s gaze seeing through him and nearly blushed.
The cabin door chimed again and Saef hesitated a moment before opening it to find Erik Sturmsohn standing there, his expression troubled. Saef stared at him. “What’s wrong?” Saef asked, suddenly tense.
Sturmsohn shook his head. “I cannot be certain.…It may be we are betrayed.” Saef’s vision traveled over the Thorsworlder’s torso before returning to his face. “Is that blood on your sleeve, Sturmsohn?”
* * *
As Inga heard Erik’s words, she keenly felt the debilitating lack of immersive contact with Loki. Dromedary, being a mere transport, operated only a fractional Intelligence to handle artificial gravity and to assist in astrogation, rather than utilizing a proper synthetic Intelligence. The necessary infrastructure to accommodate Loki did not exist onboard, leaving Loki bottled up in the shuttle…and Inga largely blind. Even Dromedary’s data Nets operated with the most restrictive limits in connection zones and bandwidth.
This allowed only Inga’s connection to Fido, her not-so-dumb mech, and its onboard sensor suite to secretly monitor nearby stretches of the vessel for trouble, and she felt that limitation with sudden intensity now.
“You have given your parole, Sturmsohn,” Saef said in a cold voice. “If you have injured Fleet person—”
“No time for this, grundling!” Erik interrupted sharply, slashing the air with one powerful hand, looking down each arm of the passage. “Think! Why would this captain and some other officer flee this ship? For I say they have done this.”
“Flee?” Saef repeated. “In a lifeboat?”
Erik held up two blunt fingers. “Two boats, gone. I saw them with my eyes, truly.”
“And that blood there…” Inga said. “Who’s missing that?”
Erik looked past Saef at Inga, then quickly looked left and right down the corridor. “One cold-eyed demon was among them.”
At those words Saef’s hand fell, lifting his pistol clear of its holster, checking the load in one fluid motion, his face visibly calming under the Deep Man’s influence. “You put that one down? So that’s three out.…What about Sponson and the others?”
“Of these, I have seen nothing.”
Saef glanced back at Inga. “We need to move fast, seize initiative now. You on anything?”
“No,” Inga said, releasing her Krishna submachine gun from its magnetic holster under her right arm, allowing it to dangle on its short sling as her right hand grasped it, raising it to high ready and checking the load. “They probably can’t vent this to vacuum fast enough to catch us if we push fast.”
Saef only paused to snatch Erik’s strange black sword from his cabin’s table, tossing it to Erik. “Try to keep up, Sturmsohn.”
Erik caught the sword easily in his left hand, his eyes alight, and his right hand emerged with a blood-speckled pistol, evidently seized from his fallen foe, now looking strangely dainty in Erik’s brawny grip.
Dromedary’s accommodations for crew and passengers lay in a narrow band from the bridge aft to Engineering, long and narrow, and Saef led the way up the main corridor toward the bridge at almost a run, his pistol up, Erik a few paces behind, and Inga at the rear. Fido galloped behind Inga on its six articulated legs, its scanner suite linked to Inga’s UI, pulsing ahead.
She felt a sense of relief that Dromedary, like most of the large transport vessels, provided very few internal sensors in the passenger tier. An enemy on the bridge might only catch occasional glimpses of them, and then only by monitoring the feeds diligently.
Fido’s sensor signal swept out, highlighting motion ahead, and Inga immediately sent Saef a line-of-sight message in the Sinclair-Maru Family code, comprising only three characters.
Saef slid quickly to a halt just a few paces back from an approaching intersection, glancing quickly back toward Inga even as they heard a murmur of conversation ahead. Inga quietly sidestepped two quick strides to her right, the sights of her Krishna pinned on the left branch of the intersection as Erik crooked his elbow, the pistol in his hand leveled at waist height, his sword hanging loosely. They stood momentarily frozen as voices became clearer, an argument in progress.
“—heard me say it, Corso? If you want to go chat with the passengers, go chat with them. Why do you need me along? I don’t want to.”
Sponson’s distinctive whine was answered by an expressionless tenor: “You will accompany me to the passenger tier because the captain orders it so.”
“Oh, yeah, Corso?” Sponson said. “Where’s the captain? Why don’t he tell me himself, then?”
“We are moments from transition. The captain is busy.”
“Like hell, Corso. Transition ain’t for hours yet. You sure been acting uppity lately, and I don’t like it one bit!” The two arguing figures rounded the corner, moving away from Inga, Saef, and Erik, Inga’s glowing sight reticle tracking the man who could only be Corso, her index finger resting ready along the trigger guard.
Sponson continued, “I’m going to see the captain. See what he says about all your talk, Corso.”
Corso stopped dead still and he turned to regard Sponson, his face visible to Inga and the others for the first time. Corso’s fixed grin did not even flicker as his gaze rose from Sponson’s face to stare at the three passengers with weapons drawn standing a dozen paces behind the steward’s back.
At that moment, the air around them flickered into the strange luminance of transition as Dromedary’s N-drive activated. Bathed in the strange energies of N-space, the grinning creature who wore Corso’s face revealed a horrifying new aspect. Black eye-pits stared into Inga’s soul as glowing translucent tendrils seemed to sprout from Corso’s skull.
All at once, Erik Sturmsohn uttered a guttural sound, Sponson fell back from Corso, quailing with a frightened cry, and Corso’s right hand flashed, drawing a pistol. Though Corso performed a lightning draw, Inga remained much faster. The Krishna spat a short burst of slugs through Corso’s skull, even as his pistol nearly covered Sponson. Corso dropped as if every nerve impulse had been instantly cut, clattering heavily to the deck, the ethereal tendrils fading away, the eyes clearing, becoming the marble stare of any dead human.
Sponson spun with another yelp, and Erik stepped forward. “Don’t kill him!” Saef barked.
“He lives, he lives, grundling,” Erik growled, his voice strangely choked, tapping Sponson’s shoulder with the naked edge of his black blade. “You want your captain, hmm? But he is gone, see? So tell me, who commands?”
“I—I don’t…” Sponson looked down at Corso’s body, staring blindly. “What—what was that…inside Corso?”
“A demon,” Erik murmured thickly, glancing down at the corpse. “I have seen it finally. I have seen its true form.”
“Never mind,” Saef said, though his eyes also lingered uneasily. “Lead the way to the bridge, Sponson, and we will see who still remains.” As Saef spoke, the transition luminance faded. Dromedary had emerged from N-space…but emerged where?
Inga changed to a fresh magazine on the Krishna, replaying the violent moment again, finally witnessing the alien aspect of their foe for herself. That creature who once was Corso, had desperately tried to kill Sponson with his final act. Why Sponson, the only harmless person present?
“I’ll take point,” Inga said, seeing Saef frown as he looked from Sponson to Inga, but he reluctantly nodded.
They advanced quickly down the corridor, Inga and Fido a few paces ahead, Saef, Erik, and Sponson in a loose group behind.
In the grim gun battle with mutineers on Hightower, Inga had captured her very own rare and ultra-expensive Shaper body shield, a twin to the shield passed down for generations of the Sinclair-Maru, now protecting Saef. The Shaper shields rendered Saef, and now Inga, nearly immune to any high-speed projectiles, making explosives, blades, and hard vacuum the most immediately lethal threats they now faced.
But Sponson…why did that smiling fiend spend his final effort trying to kill the whining Steward instead of any of us?
Ahead, Inga spied the closed iris of the bridge access, and paused to glance back. “Sponson, is there an access code for the bridge hatch?”
At first the pale, shaken steward seemed unable to answer, finally managing to say, “Shouldn’t be…if the cap—captain’s really gone.”
Inga snorted, advancing, her weapon sight pegged to the iris, sensor info flowing from Fido slowly revealing the enclosed space of the bridge behind the hatch. She held up two fingers of her left hand, glancing back as Saef and Erik slid to the sides, ready, Sponson shuffling uncertainly behind Erik.
Inga actuated the bridge access as her internal biotech surged up, burning through her veins, her nerves singing. The iris opened to reveal a man and woman standing easily, facing Inga, their hands empty, no visible weapons. Both wore the fixed grins she had grown to loathe, their cold, inhuman eyes measuring her.
Inga resisted her immediate urge to drop them both where they stood with Sponson as a confused witness. “Down on the deck,” she commanded. Instead, both raised their hands submissively and advanced toward her, their expressions unchanged.
“We surrender,” the woman said, grinning, drawing nearer to Inga.
“Stop!” Inga ordered, but they continued forward, now only a few steps away. Inga slid back one fast step, depressing her sub-gun, squeezing the trigger to send a burst through the woman’s left knee.
With her knee shattered, the woman should have dropped in a shocked heap, but instead she launched forward on her sound leg, her hands reaching out like claws as her grinning companion scuttled through the bridge access behind her.
Inga’s augmented reflexes remained far too fast for even such an unthinkable, inhuman ploy, sidestepping in a blur and triggering a burst into her attacker’s body at point-blank range. As the woman folded, Inga still spun, her weapon sight aligning on the grinning man…but unable to fire for fear of hitting Erik.
The enemy jerked twice as Saef fired into his body, but he still managed to produce a knife, flying into a springing lunge at Sponson. The steward’s bulging eyes stared at the knife blade plunging down even as Erik’s black sword slashed out to parry, severing all the fingers on the grinning attacker’s hand, the knife falling away. That inhuman smile and cold eyes did not flicker as Erik’s backswing bit halfway through his neck. Both attackers toppled onto the deck, whatever life had animated them, extinguished.
Erik stared down at both the tumbled corpses for a moment, then grunted, turning to look at Sponson in a measuring way as Saef stepped beside him. “Why do the demons want this worthless one dead, hmm?” Erik asked, looking from Saef to Inga. “Seem feverish bent upon this, no?”
Inga wondered the same thing, but she woodenly changed magazines on her weapon, feeling the inevitable reaction to her brief use of her augmentation. Cold flowed from her belly out through her limbs even as she fumbled for a food concentrate bar. Through numb lips Inga said, “We transitioned. What system have they left us in now?”
Saef looked away from Sponson and moved, advancing past Inga into the bridge. Normally it might take some minutes to determine a ship’s location, particularly within the bridge of a vessel like Dromedary, devoid of a full synthetic Intelligence, or even many of the more advanced instruments of a warship. In this case, Saef made the determination quite readily, observing the automated query signals and sensor sweeps registering on their scopes.
He turned back to Inga, puzzled. “We are right where we are supposed to be: Core system.”
Inga tried to push through the numbing ice flowing through her veins permeating her mind, attempting to decode the meaning. Their enemies held full control of Dromedary, and obviously went to considerable effort to engineer a particular fate for Saef, Inga, and Erik. Why not bring Dromedary to some enemy-controlled system? Why not simply self-destruct and be rid of them all? Had they not fully controlled Dromedary’s captain for that option?
There must be some great manipulation afoot…if she could only see the levers that moved them.
* * *
Commodore Scarza controlled by far the most powerful squadron of his entire long career, and while the siege of Ericsson Two remained an unpalatable duty, the steady, gradual process precisely suited his nature.
The operation was not without its headaches, foremost among them that loose cannon, Captain Sinclair-Maru, admittedly a skillful officer, who had provided more prize money for Scarza’s personal enrichment than the commodore had seen in the whole of his prior Fleet career combined. But Saef Sinclair-Maru no longer comprised his personal headache, or fortune. Hightower, however; Scarza frowned heavily to himself, thinking of issues it embodied.
Several experienced officers in the squadron had told Scarza that Sinclair-Maru’s claims about Hightower’s damaged Intelligence simply could not have been true, representing a shifty bit of deception so Captain Sinclair-Maru could opt out of any unpleasant duties he chose to avoid. But…Hightower’s Intelligence, it turned out, was completely, inexplicably defunct—dead, for lack of a better word.
Scarza sighed to himself, turning his gaze to the holo containing the highlighted vessels of squadron and convoy. Now Hightower—along with her original commanding officer, Captain Mileus—would likely return to Core for repairs. When had a Fleet warship suffered the total loss of a synthetic Intelligence before? Ever? Not that he had heard.
Scarza noticed his Comm officer sit up sharply a moment before the young lieutenant turned. “Commodore, getting a detailed message from a picket ship…and, uh, you will want to hear this, I think.”
Scarza wrinkled his brow. If a picket ship had anything meaningful to report it would be the location and bearing of some vessel—enemy or otherwise. What could they possibly have to chat about? “Give me the brief version, Comm.”
The Comm lieutenant stared for an uncertain moment before replying. “Uh, yes, Commodore,” she said. “The picket has identified two inbound lifeboats. They’re from Dromedary.”
Scarza leaned forward. “What?”
“Yes, Commodore,” Comm said. “Dromedary’s captain and first officer abandoned ship…said their passengers went crazy; killed the whole crew and took Dromedary.”
Scarza could scarcely believe what he heard. “That’s…” He closed his mouth and thought. “How many passengers did Dromedary carry?”
“Just three, Commodore.”
Scarza well knew the identities of those three passengers, surprised to hear that the transport held no other passengers. “Where is Dromedary now?”
Sensors spoke up. “They transitioned out about…seventy minutes ago.”
Scarza still couldn’t credit what he heard. It had to be some bizarre error, some misunderstanding.
“Send a priority message to Fleet HQ via QE comm, please,” Scarza ordered. If the allegations were true, no crazed mutineer would be so foolish as to jaunt into Core system, but Fleet must be informed immediately.
Within the systems of the Myriad Worlds, only those worlds in open rebellion might serve as a shelter for some seized vessel such as Dromedary allegedly now was.
There could be nowhere else to hide.