There was a brief silence as everyone remained motionless. Then Adrian started to descend the gangway and as he walked he started talking.
“Alright, this situation is about as fucked as it could possibly get,” he said.
“French?” Jen asked, clearly surprised to hear him swearing so casually.
“Not this time, sweetheart,” he replied. “Jen, meet Chir and Trix. Vice-versa. Introductions complete, everybody lower your guns and relax because the news gets worse from here on in.”
Trycrur and Chir looked at each other and then did so, taking a step away from Jen just in case of any sudden movements.
“Good,” said Adrian, “everybody is friends. Right now I’ve got a pair of doctors on board. They’re not happy to be there but they haven’t got any kind of choice in the matter.”
“Why do you have doctors?” Chir asked, eying the entrance to the Hunter vessel.
“Jen here doesn’t have an inoculation implant,” he said. “That little oversight has already taken out one crew. We need to assume that you’re both infected with whatever she’s carrying.”
Trycrur and Chir looked at each other entirely aghast, taking another few steps back from Jen who seemed equally horrified at what was being said.
“Sorry to drop that on you like this, Jen,” Adrian apologised, “but since these two have turned up we’re going to have to hurry. I don’t want my friends here dying like those Ringle-pringles.”
Jen looked at the two aliens. “These are your friends? That explains why the robot didn’t kill them.”
“I hadn’t removed them from the database yet,” Adrian said. “Figured if they ever decided to come back I didn’t necessarily want them killed before I could tell them to go fuck themselves.”
“Adrian,” Trycrur began, “I’m sorry, we-“
“Left me a note,” Adrian said, bitterly. “I’m a big boy, Trix, you could have just told me you were going. You all had lives to return to.”
“But,” she tried to continue.
“We’ve got other things to worry about,” Adrian interrupted her. He wasn’t in the mood to discuss things that didn’t directly relate to everyone getting out of this situation alive. “I have the implants for Jen. I got the doctors. Nobody leaves before this thing is contained, I may be a bastard but I won’t be responsible for a galaxy-wide plague.”
“What do you need us to do?” Chir asked.
“Right now? I’m currently in the middle of abducting two Dominion doctors, Chir,” Adrian replied, “do you want that sort of thing on your record?”
“Not particularly,” Chir admitted. “You were intending to return them alive, then?”
“I’m not some sort of fucking monster, Chir,” Adrian replied sharply. “I don’t murder people. Not even people who really have it coming.”
He let them wonder over that one, and as far as he was concerned they could keep wondering. The details of that were his business alone. “This is how we’ll play it,” he explained, “Chir and Trycrur will be put in the brig as my prisoners.”
“I’m not liking this plan so far,” Chir said.
Adrian looked at him. “If you’re my ‘unwilling prisoners’ then you’re not going to be marked as criminals in this undertaking of mine, are you?”
Chir looked uncomfortable. “Probably not,” he said, “but still…”
“It’s only for as long as it takes to make sure you’re cured,” Adrian promised him. “If we don’t do it, you won’t have a home to go back to. It’s better if it’s just me.”
“Why don’t you have a home to return to?” Jen asked. “I mean, I’ve probably had the bank seize mine…”
“Not a discussion for now, Jen,” he said. Or ever, he thought. There’d come a time, though, when he’d have to tell her as much, but right now he needed to keep her mind on the task. “You will be playing the part of my significant other.”
“You want me to pretend to be your wife?” she asked with a smirk. “I already told you I’m not doing your laundry.”
“I’ve already proven my… aptitude to these doctors,” Adrian told her. “I’ll make sure they don’t try anything too interesting when they do the surgery.”
“So in summary,” Trycrur said, “we pretend to be your prisoners, and you ‘convince’ these doctors to treat us all in addition to implanting ‘Jen’ with whatever it is she needs.”
“When you say it like that,” Adrian said, “it does sound like a terrible plan.”
Chir grunted. “It’s because it is a terrible plan, but somehow your terrible plans always manage to keep us all alive.”
“What he’s saying,” Trycrur interpreted, “is that we’ll do it.”
+++++
“This way, Doctors,” Adrian said, leading the two Corti doctors from the Hunter vessel and across the flight deck. “You both being Corti simplifies things; I’ve recently come into possession of a Corti heavy scout, so I’m sure you’ll be familiar with the medical facilities.”
“That is the Endless Sequence,” one of the Doctors, evidently the senior of the pair, “and it was supposed to have been destroyed when a crazed human… ah.”
“Ah, I’ve been figured out,” Adrian said, pretending that this was somehow very unfortunate. “My acts of piracy are revealed.”
“You’ll be considered a criminal by both the Dominion and the Corti Directorate, along with everybody else you’ve crossed paths with,” the doctor said. “I can only imagine that I will not be returning home.”
“I’ve already made my intentions clear when I shot your fucking landing vessel through your ship,” Adrian said. “Black flag is already raised, mate. I just need you to sort out a few problems for me.”
He stepped aside as the two Corti followed him into the Endless Sequence, and studied them closely as they moved. They were clearly terrified of him – he had not been particularly gentle with his abduction of them, which, when he considered their species, was wonderfully ironic – but they were also concerned about whatever it was he needed from them, it was apparently not commonplace to seize medical personnel from a Dominion warship and he hadn’t yet told them the situation.
“This,” he said as they entered the state-of-the-art medical room and found Jen waiting there, “is Jen. And she’s just the first reason you’re here.”
Two humans in one place, thought Grnzk as he studied the female. That was a terrifying enough prospect, given the Great Hunt, although from the looks of things the Hunters had already been here and hadn’t left with any of their equipment.
All the more reason to regard these particular humans as something unusual.
“What is wrong with her?” he asked, not seeing any obvious signs of injury or sickness.
“She’s in dire need of a translator implant,” the male human said. “I picked up some from the old crew of this vessel, but I also have some fresh ones. Reckon we’ll use one of those.”
“You abducted two Dominion doctors from a warship to install a translator implant?” Grnzk asked angrily. “You could have had that done on any world you went to!”
“There’s another problem,” the male said. “Your problem now, too.”
Grnzk glanced sidelong at Rklkrk. They had agreed to let Grnzk do all the talking, but Grnzk was finding he could use some support in dealing with this aggressive being. “What other problem?”
“She hasn’t been inoculated,” the male said flatly. “Everybody on this ship is probably infected.”
Grnzk and Rklkrk stared at the female human in horror. She was smiling at them wanly, as though ashamed of being a walking biowarfare factory instead of doing the galaxy a favour and incinerating herself on the spot.
“That is problematic,” Grnzk said, his voice wavering unintentionally. That was an understatement, of course; it was nothing short of a disaster, and although he had heard of the pathogens and their treatments through his connections in the medical industry, he wasn’t personally familiar with them. If they were infected, it was unlikely that they’d last long enough to re-develop the treatments.
“If we are already exposed,” he told the male human, “I am uncertain that I’ll have enough time to fabricate the cures. I was not expecting to be treating any humans and we lack the knowledge to re-create the treatments in time.”
“Not a problem,” the human male said, holding up a datapad. “I have it all right here. You see, baldy, this ship was prepared for carrying a human – me, in fact – and all of the information on the cures you’ll need is right here. And only here.”
“I see,” said Grnzk, “so if we behave ourselves and fix the female…”
“Fix my wife,” the human male corrected, “just so you understand the importance of it, but yes. You’ll get the cure, and then you’ll use it to treat yourselves and my other prisoners.”
“There are others being subjected to your particular brand of savage diplomacy?” Grnzk asked. “Do they also need translators and inoculations?”
“Just the cure will be fine, mate,” the human male told him. “And when I’m satisfied that everybody is feeling better, I’ll drop you two off at the nearest civilisation.”
“I suppose we’ll just have to trust you, then,” Grnzk said bitterly. Not that that would stop him from attempting to escape the human at the earliest opportunity, not when this ship was being hunted by the Hunters, the Dominion, and who knew what else? These humans were like a beacon for all sorts of unfortunate events to happen to them, and Grnzk wasn’t so careless with his life that he wanted to be anywhere nearby when the first of them occurred.
+++++
Jennifer Delaney. Mid-twenties, laying on a bed in some sort of alien hospital where wee grey aliens were about to install certain things in her body. She was beginning to suspect that life had just been teasing her when Adrian had rescued her from the Blue Encounter, offering a faint glimpse of hope before throwing her fully into an real-life nightmare.
“I’ve never liked hospitals,” she told Adrian with a thin smile. “they do my head in. Especially alien ones, it looks like. Been ascared of them since I was knee high, you know? My ma had to spend a while in one, when she was awful sick. All those tubes and things… she was there for months before they finally let her out, but I’d never wanted to go and see her.”
She was a little surprised he sat on the edge of her bed, his hand on her arm but his gaze somewhere else. It seemed softer, more distant and full of memory. “Yeah,” he said, “me too. But mine didn’t get better.”
She swallowed hard. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, it was the best she could come up with after that kind of revelation. This was the first conversation they were having where she wasn’t doing most of the exposition, and as conversations went this one was getting a little dark and intense. His hand was nice and warm on her arm though, even if they were a little rough from all his years of hard labour.
“Terminal cancer,” he continued quietly. “Not all that rare down in Oz, but this was before they had any half-decent drugs like they do these days.”
“That’s a bad way to go,” she said, equally quietly. She’d lost an older cousin to cancer, and although they hadn’t been close she’d at least made the effort to visit. A visit that had only reinforced her dislike of hospitals, in fact.
He nodded. “Yeah, it’s hard on everyone. My step-dad lost his mind after she passed…” he stopped, returning to the his normal self with a false smile.
“But in any case, you’ve got nothing to worry about.” He said as he pointed to his own head. “I speak from experience. This is a standard procedure for these guys.”
He lifted his hand from her arm and slid from the bed, and as he did so she felt a sudden burst of anxiety. “Adrian,” she said, “you’ll be staying in the room for this, right?”
He smiled a little at her. “Yeah, Jen,” he said. “I’ll be right here.”
+++++
Adrian had sat watching the procedure with some interest, keeping an eye on the doctors to make sure they didn’t try anything stupid. He wasn’t anything like a doctor himself, but he could tell that the medical technology available on the Corti ship put anything on Earth to shame.
Right now he was looking at Jen’s brain, a not disconcerting experience given he’d been having a conversation with her less than half an hour ago. Possibly a deeper conversation than he intended, but like her he had nothing but bad experiences in hospitals and he’d wanted to put her at ease.
He knew that he should at least try to get her home, or at the very least find out more about the barrier that had sealed Earth away from the rest of the galaxy. He also knew that he was being selfish when he’d decided that he didn’t want to. It wasn’t that he thought he owned her, or that she owed him anything, or even that he’d really like to share her bed. It was that he had been starting to lose it, being out here alone without any human contact, and that he needed someone to stop him from going completely crazy. Today he had effectively declared war on the largest governing body in the galaxy for her sake – not a particularly sane thing to do – so he supposed that perhaps his mind was not fully intact.
The Corti doctors inserted the first of the devices, the translator, into her skull at this point, and Adrian winced as he watched the small device being worked into position. He’d been unfortunate enough to see some really fucked up things regarding human body parts, and had become somewhat inured to the awfulness of it all, and yet he still wished he’d been able to have someone else watch surgery being done.
He snorted. Clearly there’d not been enough concrete in his wheatbix this morning if he was getting uncomfortable at something this small. It might have been the personal factor that was doing it, however.
“Harden up, Saunders,” he muttered to himself. “It’s not as though there are bombs going off.”
That was about when the Zhadersil’s intruder system activated, and the bombs started going off. The doctors looked up to him in a panic, although they did not stop working.
Adrian rubbed his temple. “I should stop talking.”
Agvidl, Celzi Light Cruiser: Command Deck
Ship Master Hkrzitl looked at the enormous alien vessel on his viewscreen. It was an unknown, and he could definitely rule out construction by Dominion or Celzi. Any other known race seemed unlikely either.
What he did know was that its flight deck was full of Hunter vessels, along with a couple of Corti design – including a heavy scout! – and that he didn’t see any sign of anyone anywhere. It might have been a trap, but he hadn’t seen any reason that such a trap might have existed. What could be gained by leaving a lot of ships unattended on the flight deck of the largest vessel he had ever seen?
He had judged that there were enough Hunter ships to carry about six hundred of their number. A terrifying number to contemplate, although it was hardly on par with the ‘swarm of swarms’ that had been wreaking bloody havoc on the galaxy.
He had decided to send in one hundred and fifty of his marines to take control of the flight deck, and had been pleased when they had executed the perfect boarding strategy. All ships had aligned for rapid disembarkation of the troops, unlike the haphazard arrangement of the other ships.
The troops had burst from their ship with precise timing, their training evident in their execution, and had arranged themselves into tight formations ready to take control of the flight deck and the ships parked thereon.
That was when the explosions had started.
Two of the tactical teams had been shredded by whatever it was before any response could be made. The ruined bodies of the marines crumpled to the deck as the rest of the force scattered in unprofessional blind panic.
“What is going on down there, mission commander?!” Hkrzitl had hissed into the communicator link. “Give me an update! I have thirty men coming up as dead!”
There was heavy breathing on the other end of the link. “Sir,” replied the mission commander, “I’m not sure what’s going on, but I have a number of men down here who have suffered wounds from flying shrapnel.”
“There shouldn’t be anything down there that explodes enough to cause shrapnel,” Hkrzitl replied. A flight deck didn’t normally have anything on it that could actually explode, although power conduits could definitely light up into lines of pure plasma if your engineers didn’t know what they were doing.
“I think something is shooting canisters of exploding shrapnel at us, sir,” came the reply. “I think it’s some kind of machine.”
“Automated defenses?!” Hkrzitl asked. That sort of thing was uncommon, there was always the possibility of them being hacked and turned against the defenders, and it would be a hassle to have to take a vessel of this size with the potential number of automated defenses it could hold. “Stand by, I’ll get Cyber-Support to assist you.”
+++++
Zhadersil Flight Deck
To Mission Commander Utl it seemed as though they’d been taking cover from the robot for (hours), although it had only been a handful of (minutes). He’d given orders to avoid its firing arc, to hide behind the ships on the flight deck to stay alive until Cyber-Support could switch off the defense systems.
And if that didn’t happen, Utl wouldn’t hesitate on getting his men out of this meat-grinder. They weren’t land-troops, they were marines, and marines actually knew how to fight.
He had been watching the robot crawl around through a hover cam that flew high enough that it had no chance at being shot down. That let him know where to move, to tell his men where to move, and it let the Ship Master bear witness to what his men were going through.
The robot stopped moving.
His communication link lit up again. “Cyber-Support tell me they disabled it, Mission Commander,” said Ship Master Hkrzitl. “They tell me whatever system that ship is running, however, is entirely unlike anything they’ve ever seen before. I urge caution.”
“Is there anything else down here I need to be worried about, Sir?” Utl asked bitterly. “Before I lose another thirty men?”
“Scans show only the ships you see, and a pair of heavy plasma cutters.” the Ship Master responded testily. “And watch your tone, soldier!”
Utl scowled as he deactivated the link, and was bad-tempered as he called his men together to start investigating ships for hidden enemies. At least the ones he could see were all open for entry, and one Corti styled vessel even had a big hole cut in its side.
He wished he had more men, or even that he still had the thirty that had been killed before they knew what was happening to them. Some truly twisted mind had come up with that kind of weapon, and while Utl couldn’t help but admire its effectiveness – all of the men who weren’t injured and badly shaken were obviously very nervous – he would still have shot the person responsible for its creation if he could.
“That’s strange,” said his second, Prtl. She was pointing at the heavy plasma cutters. They were obviously originally of Hunter design, a realisation that made Utl’s fur prickle, but they had been heavily modified with the addition of a steel box where the driver was supposed to sit.
After the robot that had shot shrapnel exploders, Utl didn’t like the look of those cutters at all. They spoke of the same demented mind at work.
“Stay away from those,” he instructed Prtl.
And that was when the two cutters came to life.
+++++
Agvidl, Celzi Light Cruiser: Command Deck
As near as Hrkzitl could tell, all of his marines had been set on fire as a billowing cloud of scorching plasma had flowed across the flight deck, emitted by two malfunctioning plasma cutters.
He also guessed that their horrific screams would haunt him for the rest of his life. He sat in his command chair, considering his next move. The answer was not coming easily to him.
That’s when the communication console came to life. Somebody was trying to contact him from one of the ships down there. A Corti vessel, from the looks of it.
He patched it through, hoping that maybe someone had survived. Instead he was greeted with the first human face he had ever had the misfortune to see outside of the information and news networks.
“A human!” he growled angrily. “You are a human!”
“Guilty as charged, mate,” replied the savage creature, almost candidly. It was like he wasn’t taking this seriously at all!
“Why are you on that vessel!?” Hrkzitl demanded. “Why did you kill my crew?!”
“This is my ship, mate,” the human said factually, although as far as Hrkzitl knew no humans had ever built a ship and certainly not one so large.
“Liar!” Hrkzitl spat. “You have stolen that ship! You have stolen all of those ships!”
“Yeah I did,” admitted the human. “I killed about a thousand Hunters personally, took these other ships from Corti soldiers, and today I blew a hole straight through a Dominion cruiser. Now I’ve just killed your little invasion, I thought I’d see if I could convince you to go away.”
Hrkzitl wanted to call the human a liar again, but most of those claims were fairly well substantiated by the fact that the ships he was talking about were in plain view.
“You killed my men,” Hrkzitl told the human. “Why would I simply leave after that? I am in command of an entire light cruiser and within moments I could turn its guns on you!”
“Well, mate,” said the human slowly, clearly trying to be intimidating, “I guess there we might have a problem. Do you know what cosmic rays are?”
Hrkzitl paused for a moment. “I know a little,” he lied.
“They’re a type of radiation that goes through anything, mate,” the human explained, “hull, shields, flesh… it doesn’t matter. Except you’ll feel real fucking poorly if you get a serious dose.”
Hrkzitl looked at his tech officer, who simply nodded with the kind of grim expression that confirmed that what the human had just said was entirely true.
He turned back to the communications console. “You’re saying you have a weapon capable of producing these?”
“Mate,” the human told him, “I have more than just that, but right now I’m trying to fix all manner of bullshit and I don’t have the fucking time to deal with yours. Pull your fucking head in or I’ll come over there and shove it up your-“
“TRY IT!” Hrkzitl snarled, despite himself. “You think your species is so dangerous that you can’t die? I WILL DESTROY YOU! ALL GUNS, FIRE ON TARGET VESSEL!”
The human stared at him with such a troublesomely cold, dark intensity that Hrkzitl was glad that he was the only one watching him. A shudder seemed to go through the entire ship.
“Ship Master,” ventured the weapons tech, clearly discomforted by Hrkzitl’s outburst. “Our weapons are no longer responding.”
“Least of your fucking worries,” the human said, the link still active. “Mate.”
Endless Sequence Medical Ward, aboard the Zhadersil
“You,” the human male had said, pointing at Grnzk. “You’re coming with me! Your mate here gets to keep working on Jen.”
“Where are you taking me?” Grnzk demanded. “And why?”
“Why?” the human male asked, as though the question was for some reason baffling. “To make sure your mate here doesn’t do anything stupid. You and I are going to murder those fuckers.”
“They have a cruiser!” Grnzk protested, even as he was dragged from the room. “We can’t go up against that without something better than a cruiser.”
“I’ve just set fire to a small army and used flying bombs to take out all of their ship guns,” the human male told him. “What is so fucking difficult to comprehend about this situation?”
Grnzk was forced to accept that argument. He’d been listening to the screams of burning men, to the desperate, crazed rant of the enemy commander, and he couldn’t recall anyone else being able to single-handedly elicit that sort of reaction.
Add to that the fact that as that had all been going on the human had been baring his teeth in some kind of mad, evil joy, and Grnzk found he was unprepared to do anything that might bring him into direct confrontation with the psychotic creature. Destroying a Celzi light cruiser seemed relatively tame by comparison.
He noticed that the human was dragging him through the scorched corpses of the landing party towards the ships that they had come in. Beyond the edge of the flight deck he could see the bulky form of the light carrier lit up with its running lights. “Don’t tell me you’re going to try and board them!” he cried, “even a human can’t fight that many troops at once!”
“You’re not wrong,” the human male agreed. “I just thought they might like their property back. I had some luck with this tactic earlier, you’ll remember?”
“You’re going to shoot their landing ships at them?!” Grznk asked, glad at least that this time he would not be on the receiving end of the tactic. It would probably work, there was no reason for the Celzi to expect this sort of tactic to be used against them out here.
“I am,” said the human male, its evil grin returning. “Do you think all three will do the trick?”
Grznk hesitating, assessing the situation further. “I doubt it will wholly destroy them, but I doubt they’ll be in any condition to continue the fight.”
“Where are the reactor and command decks located on that light cruiser?” the human male asked.
“But you said you weren’t boarding…” Grznk began, then looked at what the human was entering into the console. “Oh… well, the configuration is essentially the same as the vessel I was on before.”
“Set the coordinates on this one for the deck,” the human male ordered him. “The next one will be the reactor. Dealer’s choice for the third one. We’ll set them all to launch at the same time.”
“I suggest that you target their life support,” Grznk said, “instead of whatever ‘Dealer’s Choice’ is.”
“Good plan,” the human male said approvingly.
Grznk wasn’t sure he liked this human approving of anything he did, but right now his thoughts were focused on surviving the assault the Celzi were undoubtedly about to launch. “Let’s just get this done.”
+++++
Agvidl, Celzi Light Cruiser: Command Deck
“Ship Master,” the sensor tech said, calling Hrkzitl’s attention. “The troop landers are returning.”
Hrkzitl immediately gave the tech his full attention. “I was under the impression that the marines were all dead.”
“Nobody is on those ships, sir,” the tech replied. “I’ve already scanned them, and they have strange bearings.”
“Define ‘strange’,” Hrkzitl ordered him. He wasn’t in the mood to play games. He already had techs setting about repairing the weapons the human had managed to disable – with more explosives, no less – and it would only be a matter of time before he was able to kill that savage monster.
“They’re not on a trajectory for the docks,” the tech said.
“A ploy to try and distract us so they can escape then?” Hrkzitl suggested. “The human is cunning!”
“Sir…” the tech said, paling, “they are on a trajectory for the ship…”
“He’s using them as weapons…” Hrkzitl realised. “EVADE!”
+++++
Zhadersil Flight Deck
Adrian and the Corti doctor stood and watched their handiwork from the edge of the flight deck. The three transport ships had all gone out at the same time, putting all their power into accelerating once their trajectories were set, and quickly seemed tiny against the much larger Celzi vessel.
“Looks like they’re not entirely stupid,” the Corti had said as the ship began to turn. “They’re trying to evade.”
The transport vessels must have chosen that time to hit, as sizable holes and clouds of fire, gas and debris shortly appeared at the locations they’d targeted. The running lights went out.
“Not fast enough,” Adrian said flatly. He couldn’t believe he’d had to use the same tactic twice in the same day, or that it had worked both times. “I wonder if anybody survived that.”
An explosion began to rock the Celzi vessel, starting from the reactor and running through the inside in a red cloud of plasma. Jets of cooling plasma burst from holes in the hull in huge plumes of faintly glowing gas. The death of a starship was beautiful in its own way.
“I suspect not,” the Corti replied grimly. “And I suggest that you should increase power to the kinetic barrier here, unless you want us all sprayed with debris.”
Adrian sniffed, admiring his handiwork for a moment longer. “Yeah,” he said, “that sounds like a good idea.”
“And you realise you’re now at war with the Celzi as well?” the Corti asked him, turning away from the sight of a fast-dying starship to look at Adrian.
“Mate,” said Adrian, “at this point I don’t even give a fuck.”