DATE POINT: 4Y 2M 1W 3D AV
ABOARD SPOT, INSIDE THE FAKE-ZHADERSIL DEBRIS FIELD
ADRIAN SAUNDERS
“Well, that was some serious bullshit right there,” said Adrian as the comm-link terminated, wondering just how it was that everything kept landing buttered-side down. It was a very human trait to gift wild events with personalities of their own—with everything being blamed on the gods, there was no doubt that this had been the basis for a multitude of religions—but as an engineer, Adrian preferred to view his world as an incredibly complex web of cause and effect, no different from a staggeringly complicated machine, but sometimes he did wonder whether he really had attracted the interest of some puckish deity. Looking back at his life over the last two years, the truth was hard to believe at face value, but that was why he was broadly known as the Human Disaster.
“You mean the ‘now you belong to me’ part?” Trix asked, replaying the recording of Adrian as he’d said it, making him wince at just how disgustingly cliché he’d sounded. “If so, then I agree.”
“I might have overdone it a bit,” he admitted, grimacing with personal embarrassment. He waved a hand dismissively towards the viewscreen, which currently showed only the wretched remains of the gargantuan starship, still glowing white-hot and sparking with long arcs of purple-blue lightning. “As is completely fucking obvious! Fuck me dead!”
“I’ll pass on that offer,” she replied, and the image of the wreck vanished to make way for eight major console windows that showed the state of everything that mattered on their own ship. Highlighted was the perfectly functional state of the sensors, and the fact that they weren’t picking up much of anything outside the ship itself. That was more than a little unusual, and it didn’t point to good things. “I think we have bigger problems. Normally I’d say that the high energy levels of the wreckage were disrupting the sensors, but even then we should be getting something. This is different, and I don’t know how it’s happening. Right now we’re entirely limited to the electromagnetic spectrum.”
Adrian stared at the information being displayed on the screens, drumming the side of his helmet in lieu of stroking his fingers through his hair or beard. His gaze was turned inward, however, as he attempted to sort through a million or so hours of V’Straki false-memory implants for information he could actually use. These were the remains of the original Zhadersil, first dumped into his subconscious when he’d first assumed the Shiplord’s chair, and had been guiding his hand ever since. They were not intended to be remembered—only to speed more conventional learning techniques—but just like everything else, the process was not designed for a human with a head full of space-meth and alien mutant juice. The memories had been surfacing in his dreams, and his brain had been busy filling in all the gaps until they became a vaguely coherent sort of mess, but it still felt like remembering the events of another life or even a very poorly written novel; hopefully this development wasn’t going to make him any crazier than he already was.
“Clever move, by the way,” Trix continued. “I’d never have imagined we could protect the ship from a warpfield breakdown with a stasis field. That… is what happened there?”
“Something like that, I think,” Adrian agreed, completely dishonestly, although the truth was not an option. Nobody wanted to hear him talking about ‘false vacuum metastability events’—even less if they actually understood what they were—and it was much better if they didn’t know where he’d gotten the idea for it. Finally he stumbled across the information he needed, and his eyes flicked over to the results provided by the quantum sensors. “Positronic charge is at forty-five,” he noted, knowing that it was normally at thirty; it’d be a bad idea to be in the area if it hit eighty. “How’s our kinetic drive looking?”
Trix replied with some hesitation. “Fine… why do you ask? And what was that about positrons?”
“I think we need to strongly consider getting the fuck out of here as soon as fucking possible,” he told her without explanation. The positronic charge count was not something many people generally paid attention to, and it wasn’t the problem in itself, but it was a sign they were on a road that didn’t lead any place nice. False-vacuum metastability was the basis of the creation engine, and the accompanying lessons came with no shortage of dire warnings, but Adrian had intended to keep the warp field wafer-thin so that only the flight deck would be destroyed, but the evidence suggested something had gone very badly wrong. Quantum space was always going to be disrupted by the event, but unfortunately the scale of the problem scaled exponentially, and because the quantum sensors didn’t work it was impossible to say how far the effect had spread.
“Surely you’re not intending to just leave this thing here so it can come back a third time?” Trix rebuked. “We already have enough recurring villains in our lives, Adrian! We should finish the job!”
Adrian chewed on his lip, not liking the situation any more than Trix did, but the decision had been made for them. “We don’t have time.”
That much he was certain about; the little pocket of undamaged space-time they were sitting in wouldn’t last forever, and they’d be proper fucked if they weren’t already moving when it fell apart. “I need you to get us out of here. Accelerate as hard as you can in the nearest safe direc—”
“Sorry,” she interrupted, “but I’ve just detected the Devastator through the optics. I think they just dropped from a stasis field.”
Bad news after bad news, but this was more or less what Adrian had expected. “What’s their situation?”
“They’re gaining distance from our position,” Trix reported. “I could attempt contact by laser?”
Adrian shook his head. “That’ll take too fucking long… can you just send a message? We don’t need a conversation.”
There was an audible beep. “Recording now.”
That was a little quicker than he’d been expecting, and left Adrian scrambling to consider what it was he should actually say. “Shit… uh… this is Adrian. You’ve spent four months or so in stasis. Keep going in that direction and do not change course. Warp out when you can and do not try to return. End message.”
“Message sent,” Trix replied. “What exactly is going on, Adrian?”
“I’ll have to save the explanation,” he told her as he took a seat in the most comfortable chair available and made sure his vacuum suit was still sealed in all the right ways. “It’s a long story, and we need to get moving. Can we reach the space covered by that stasis field?”
“It means going through a cloud of super-charged iron particles, which may destroy us,” she explained, although the tone of her voice didn’t suggest the chances of destruction were very low.
“What if we fire coil-bolts through it?” he asked. “Maybe that’d clear the way for us?”
She paused briefly. “That’s… somewhat less suicidal.”
He nodded decisively. “Then that’s what we’ll do. Once it’s done, I need you to accelerate as hard as possible, then you’ll need to do the same when we hit that patch of space. You know what that means?”
Trix was horrified. “It means you’ll be exposed to nearly one-hundred times your normal gravity, Adrian! It will crush you!”
“Yeah, but… probably not to death,” he replied, trying to keep things a little realistic. “I’ll just black out for a while, and feel really fucking shitty when I wake back up. We’re also going to lose all quantum tech for a bit—kinetics, reactors, and computing… it’ll all be down—but hopefully you’ll be up again in time to push through the next patch. Got it?”
“I’ve got it,” she said, “but I’m not happy about it.”
“Neither am I,” he said with a grimace, already imagining how it was going to make him feel. “I’ll see you on the other side.”
Hinging, of course, on the hope that there was actually another side to this glorious cluster-fuck, and he hadn’t produced a slowly spreading wave of quantum ruin across the entire universe. He was feeling optimistic, though.
“See you there,” she replied, and for the briefest moment Adrian felt as though his every molecule was being crushed in a vice-like grip, and just generally forced to become one with the chair. That was only for a moment, however, because one struggling heartbeat later the world had gone dark.
++++
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ABOARD THE DEVASTATOR
CHIR
The message had been unexpected, alarming, and simple enough to only be played once. They didn’t need to verify it—it was hard to forget Adrian’s Australian drawl—but the image of the little ship in the glowing embers of a colossus was all the additional evidence that they needed.
Chir had turned to face Jen, glaring daggers. “[Four months!?” he growled. “That’s where trusting that abomination gets us! We might have been trapped in there indefinitely! As it is, we’re—”
“Saved—once again—by Adrian Saunders,” Darragh finished resentfully, and Chir found himself agreeing with the sentiment. It was shameful to be so easily subdued by an enemy that they’d had no idea it’d even happened, and it was even more shameful to be repeatedly rescued by the same man who should have been dead a dozen times over. Chir knew that they were all reasonably competent at what they did, at what they’d actually trained for, but playing at space-pirates had not prepared them to deal with the kinds of things they now found themselves coming up against. Hunter swarms? Duplicates of loved-ones? Ancient alien conspiracies? Impossibly powerful warships? The rapid succession of these events had left Chir feeling like he was in some story that only grew more ridiculous as the storyteller went on. Normal people didn’t have to deal with this quantity of… of… of bullshit.
“Once again,” he echoed through gritted teeth.
Jen held her hands up with both palms open in the human gesture for peace, taking a step back as she did so. “Look,” she said, “I’m as pissed off about this as you are, but we all knew this was a risky plan, and well… we’re all alive.”
“Pissed off?” Keffa asked, glaring at Jen. “Why would you be pissed off after finding out your boyfriend is alive and well!?”
Jen inhaled sharply. “He’s not… look, we never…”
Everybody, including Chir, rolled their eyes. “I am no expert on humans,” he said, “nor am I stupid, but I’m beginning to think I’m—”
He was interrupted by the room suddenly plunging into absolute darkness and the utter failure of the artificial gravity. In spite of floating away, Chir experienced the sinking feeling that usually occurred whenever things were going from bad to worse. “What… what’s happened?!” he demanded. “Anyone?”
“It’s dark, and there’s no fucking gravity,” Keffa reported unhelpfully. “Consoles are off as well.”
“Mine too!” Darragh muttered. “It’s all off… everything is fecking off! Arseways as usual!”
With one hand gripping it for purchase, Chir tapped at his own console, feeling at the buttons in the dark, but there was no response from the unit. There wasn’t even a hint of activity, and with the exception of the four of them the ship seemed as silent as a tomb. “This is very bad.”
There was a click from nearby, then twice more. “Getting worse,” Jen reported. “My fusion blade isn’t firing up. No idea what that means, but I think it means we’re in trouble again.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Darragh grizzled. “This can’t be fecking happening! I refuse to be rescued by Adrian Saunders twice in the same day! Let’s get this fixed without him!”
More clicks from Chir’s other side. “Kinetic pistols don’t work either,” Keffa reported. “Whatever happened, I’m guessing that it’s drained all the power from everything. It does leave us without weapons.”
Chir snorted in amusement. “Without weapons? We have four deathworlders aboard, and you’ll recall that I’m not as soft as my fur makes me look.”
There were some brief chuckles of agreement in the darkness, and the heavy mood seemed to lighten somewhat. Chir knew that was for the best, it’d be too hard to work together if everyone was focused on the doom that now gripped them, and that’d be enough to turn a possibility into an inevitability.
“You’re right about that much,” Jen admitted, “but I suggest we all go down to the engineering room and see what Xayn and Askit are up to. Even if we’re all together to make sure we work as a coordinated group.”
“Of course…” Keffa complained in sudden realisation. “The god damned intercom won’t be working either!”
Chir tested it, discovering that it did indeed fail to function. “I think your idea is for the best, Jen,” he told her, “and I don’t think we have much choice in the matter. We need to find Layla, though… I won’t have her wandering around alone in the darkness.”
“Let’s stop fucking around then,” Keffa suggested, now over where the command deck connected to the adjoining corridor, “and get this done. There’s a door here, and it’s fucking-well closed. Can I have a hand in opening it up?”
Chir gently shoved off from his chair, drifting in the general direction of where he remembered the door being, and braced himself for an impact against the opposing wall. He bumped into it with some force, but managed to grip a handhold with a furious scratching of claws before he bounced too far in the other direction. “Where are you Keffa?”
“Over here!” she replied from only a few strides away. “Do you remember how to open these things without power?”
Chir picked his way over to her with care, one searching hand sliding around the wall as he tried to find what he was after. “I remember that there’s a panel around here with a manual release behind it.”
His claws finally tapped onto something that seemed a likely candidate, and he slipped one claw into the catch and let the panel pop open. “Found it… I think,” he said, groping around inside until he found a mechanism. Pulling it, he was rewarded with a metallic clunk. “Try it now.”
“Got it!” Keffa declared with triumph as she forced the door open with little resistance. Whatever they were hoping would be on the other side, however, it was just as dark as the command deck. “Looks like the rest of the ship is in darkness as well.”
“Glow in the dark paint would fix that right up,” Darragh suggested from nearby. “Back home they’d have these strips that would glow in the dark, so you didn’t stumble around in the dark on your way to take a piss in the middle of the night. My old dad had a strip around the door to the jacks.”
“Hindsight is twenty-twenty,” Jen replied, although Chir had no idea what ‘jacks’ were nor of the significance of that particular number. As usual, he decided it wasn’t important enough to try and figure out when their lives were on the line, and kept his attention where it belonged.
“Quick question,” Keffa asked, interrupting the irrelevance, “who can remember how to get to engineering with their eyes closed?”
“I should be able to manage it,” Jen said, but without the confidence that Chir would have liked to hear. “At least I think I can.”
He considered his own memory of the corridors, and wondered if it would be good enough to get him where he needed to go. “If we work together, we should be able to manage it. First we find Layla, though.”
“She’s over in the far side of the residentials!” Darragh pointed out. “And she’ll be stuck safe-and-sound in her little room!”
Chir ran his tongue across his incisors, not liking the prospect of leaving Layla imprisoned in darkness and ignorance, but it was difficult to justify going to find her when time may be of the essence in engineering. “Fine… I don’t like it, but your point is made. We’ll head directly to engineering.”
That proved far more easily said than done, and conversation began to dwindle as the number of backtracks increased. It was in sullen silence that they finally reached the door to engineering, and when they opened it they were greeted by a dim red glow that broke the eternal dark.
“Light!” Keffa gasped, and would have said more had Jen not clapped a hand over her mouth.
“Thank you,” Chir whispered. “I don’t see our people, so I will go and investigate quietly before we all rush forward into what could be a trap.”
“What if it is a trap?” Darragh asked, his face now visible as a shadowy outline. “Do we have a plan?”
“The plan is ‘I have three humans to back me up’,” Chir replied with a human-like shrug. There was ultimately no way to formulate anything more than that, given everything they didn’t know, and he’d have to trust that they’d manage to do something without messing it up. “Jen, you’re in charge of rescuing me if it all goes wrong.”
She nodded without speaking.
Chir ventured forward towards the light, sparing a glance over his shoulder to ensure that they weren’t following him after all. They were loyal friends, most of the time, but they were habitually terrible at just doing what they were told. This time, however, they seemed to have fallen back into the darkness of the corridor, and he couldn’t see a trace of them.
Satisfied, be closed the distance to the source of the light, circling one of the silent support structures that usually managed the power emitted by the reactors, and discovered it to be a small glowing disc of unknown origin. It sat beside an access panel that had been slid open, but he saw nothing but darkness within its depths.
“Ah, you’re finally here,” said a voice from the darkness, startling Chir enough to send him scrambling into a zero-gee fumble. Only after a moment did he realise the voice belonged to Askit, albeit through the external interface of a vacuum suit, and the Corti hacker drifted into the circle of dim lighting with one arm outstretched to help haul Chir back to the floor.
Chir took the proffered hand without a word, and allowed himself to be dragged back to safety. “Thank you.”
Turning back towards the darkness of the corridor, he called out to summon the others. “It’s only Askit here.”
Askit scowled. “‘Only Askit’? I’ve been busy securing all the vacuum suits in the engineering area for your use. What took you so long?”
“We were…” Chir began, and tried to think of an explanation that didn’t include the words ‘getting lost’, “delayed. How is the vacuum suit working?”
The Corti grimaced. “For the most part it isn’t, but it does have functioning life support.”
“Why do we need vacuum suits?” Darragh asked as he drifted into the gloomy circle. “Is there some sort of atmospheric leak?”
“Maybe somewhere,” Askit replied, throwing a suit in Darragh’s direction. “But as I’ve said, they have working life support, which seems to be something in short supply on this ship right now.”
Chir bobbed his head in agreement. He could have sworn that the ship was already beginning to cool, although that might have simply been his imagination, but it was enough to convince him that they should all get into them immediately and he gave a quick order to Jen and Keffa to follow suit while he had a quiet word with Askit to the side.
“I take it Xayn went in there?” he asked, pointing towards the open panel with a pair of claws. “What’s in there?”
“Reactors run themselves, but it’s the rest of this stuff that allows the ship to use all the power,” Askit replied, “which I happen to know you’re already aware of.”
Chir glared at him. “That doesn’t answer my question.”
“He went looking for the control unit in there,” Askit explained in further detail. “I don’t know what he expected to do with it, but he took the other light disc with him. It’s a V’Straki design, if you were wondering.”
“I’d guessed,” said Chir, looking down at the circular light and studying it as though staring would offer up secrets. “How does it remain lit?”
“It’s chemically powered,” the Corti replied, and picked the light up. “You just need to click it, and it powers up again.”
He demonstrated the concept by clicking the button a half-dozen times, doubling the luminescence the disc provided. “Don’t ask me why an advanced species would bother with such a basic device, but I’m glad he had it with him.”
“So no idea what’s actually going on, then?” Chir queried. “None of our other technology seems to be functioning at all.”
“Except for our implants,” Askit reminded him, “which run on our internal biochemical energy, but more than that I can’t say. We were actually hoping you’d be able to answer those questions. No pressure, since only our lives depend on it.”
Chir growled. “Does Xayn think he can get it back online?”
Askit shook his head. “Not at all, but he’s checking on it anyway. I recall we were about to engage the Faster-Than-Light drive—which poured out a whole lot of navigation errors—then everything went dark. Maybe you could shed some light on that, since I’ve already helped shed some light on everything else?”
Irritatingly, Keffa answered on Chir’s behalf as she finished putting on the vacuum suit. “We received a message from Adrian. Test of radio?”
“Radio working,” Chir grumbled in reply, and turned back to face Askit who stared at him expectantly. “He told us to get out of here. It seems he managed to destroy the enemy starship as well, so at least that’s two major problems dealt with and we didn’t even have to do anything.”
“He also mentioned that we’d been frozen in stasis for four months,” Keffa added as she assisted the others in getting into their own suits. “The A.I. outsmarted Jen completely.”
“Try not to sound so happy about it,” said Jen. “I mean, it wasn’t as though we could have all died, or ended up in the distant future, was it? Oh, wait… it was? Shit, we could have all been well and truly fucked!”
Keffa coughed awkwardly, almost done helping Darragh get into his suit and putting him in the awkward position of being directly between them. “Look, I’m sorry—”
“No,” Jen said firmly, “that’s enough from you! We’ve all made mistakes, and fine… that was one of mine! And since we can count our lucky stars that Adrian managed to get us out of that one, maybe we can be a little less shitty about him always having to save us?”
Askit spared a glance at the trio who’d now fallen into an awkward silence. “I see the humans are getting along as well as they usually do.”
Chir bobbed his head in understanding. “Even better than usual, I think.”
“So Adrian survived,” Askit continued, although with an attitude that suggested he was talking to himself. “And somehow managed to save us again, using only the few things we left aboard Spot.”
The Corti didn’t need words to make his point; Chir gritted his teeth in annoyance, bobbing his head in agreement. “Again, yes. I suspect we’ll only have to wait to hear his story.”
“He also said to warp out as soon as we could,” Darragh added, his suit finally sealed. “Test radio.”
“Radio working,” Chir replied in unison with Askit, who smiled in amusement. “That’s why we came down here as quickly as possible.”
Askit nodded, turning his gaze to the open panel. “I don’t think we’ll be ‘warping’ anywhere any time soon.”
“It can’t be soon enough for me,” Darragh replied. “Chir, you should get into a suit as well. Just in case.”
“Agreed,” said Chir, taking his own suit from the top of the pile Askit had assembled, and noting that there was still one more remaining. Maybe it was Xayn’s, and the V’Straki had simply gone into the access tunnels without one, but it might have been for Layla, in which case the Corti had a marginally more thoughtful side than Chir initially believed. Either way, it served to remind him that Layla was still locked away somewhere, and that he’d been happy to leave her there. That was something he needed to rectify, now that he had the means. “Once I’m ready,” he said, “I want to go and—”
Lightning exploded from one wall, bathing the room in purple-blue light and hard shadows as a crackling ribbon of pure light snaked its way through the air and exited the room in an equally impressive display. Chir released the breath he had been holding, and began struggling with the vacuum suit in his hands.
“What the feck was that thing?!” Darragh shouted, both hands gripping at his helmet as though he was trying to keep his brains from melting out. “Did a purple laser-snake just blast through our ship, or is this suit full of LSD?”
“That definitely happened,” Keffa said, equally stunned but freaking out much more subtly. “Anybody want to hazard a guess what it—”
Another blast erupted from the floor as another laser-snake sparked its way up to the ceiling. Maybe it was the same one, of course, but Chir had the feeling that would mean they were luckier than they actually were. “I’d suggest we avoid getting hit by those.”
“No shit!” Darragh shouted in reply. “They must have like a billion volts!”
“It’s the amps that’ll kill you,” Jen replied absently, scanning the room with her eyes as though that could help, while Chir busied himself with clambering into a vacuum suit in record time.
“Yes, I’m sure it has plenty of those as well!” Darragh countered. “I’d sure love to know what these feckin’ things are, though.”
“Crazy purple space lightning,” Jen summarised. “That’s all we really need to know right now.”
“This only underscores the fact that—” Chir began, briefly interrupted by the vessel suddenly lurching forward, bringing the ceiling around to meet them in a slow, sweeping motion that at least provided them with consistent gravity. The manoeuvre was more than any of them could handle, however, and each of them landed heavily on the smooth metal surface. “—that we really need to get this ship powered up again.”
Lightning erupted from their midst, showering them with sparks as the purple ribbon shot across the room in an arc. “As fast as we can!”
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ON THE HULL OF THE AMBER RADIANCE
LAPHOR METMIN
“What in the void can this possibly be?!” Laphor wondered aloud as she stared into the spiralling purple-blue glow due starboard of the Amber Radiance’s current course. She was standing on the exterior hull with thirty of her crewmen—and Six-Skulls Zripob—tethered to hardpoints so that they could manually release the catch-cables. Laphor knew she ought to have been keeping an eye on the soldiers, but the anomaly was as beautiful as it was terrifying, and she doubted there was anybody who hadn’t given it the same consideration. Turning to Zripob, she found his own attention fixed squarely on the mission at hand, but Laphor couldn’t help but wonder if he was actually as confident as he seemed to be. Surely even someone as unflinching as Six-Skulls would find cause for concern in this bizarre situation? “Have you ever seen anything like this before, Six-Skulls?” she asked over the open comm link running between suits. They’d been lucky enough to discover that the suits could maintain radios and life support only a short time after the ship had powered down, but they’d been even luckier to set an intercept course as well. Now they were running the suits as a network to provide them with communication between various parts of the vessel, and protection against sudden airloss or the steady cooling.
Zripob turned to look at her appraisingly with his intense, bulbous eyes, and did not appear to think much of what he saw. “No,” he said after a long moment, “but this is clearly the work of the Human Disaster.”
“So you don’t think this is because of the warship that exploded?” she asked. From their perspective there’d been, in the first moment, an enormous and terrifying warship, and in the second moment a husk of glowing debris with a small hunter ship inside it. The fact that the tiny vessel had turned around and fled at high speed suggested that all was not right with the world, and Laphor would have liked to do the same, but Zripob had swayed the crew against her once again and forced her to salvage as much face as she could manage. She’d felt a small hint of satisfaction when the ship had totally shut down, but that had been brief and was quickly replaced with a growing dread that they weren’t going to make it out of this alive.
Zripob seemed to give this some consideration, but ultimately returned to his former certainty. “If it is, then it’s because the Human Disaster blew it up. We can only hope that this is not another weapon like the last one.”
“Right,” Laphor agreed, feeling sick at the very thought; the terror she’d felt in that pocket of broken space-time was not something easily forgotten, and she was certain she’d have nightmares for the rest of her life, but even that place had not shut down all their technology. There were hundreds of questions to be answered—possibly thousands—but there was only one that really mattered in the current moment. “How long until interception?”
“[Two minutes],” Zripob replied without looking at her. His gaze was now fixed on a distant fleck of darkness moving against the purple-blue backdrop. “The catch-cables are ready?”
Laphor knew they were, and so did Zripob, but she ran her eyes along the soldiers arranged at intervals on the outer hull. They were clustered in pairs, wherever there was a catch-cable spool. The catch-cables were lengths of cable on a spool which were released in the hope of latching onto a nearby vessel. Normally they were fully automated and worked with kinetic clamps, but today it was up to the crew to make sure things went off without a hitch. “Looks good.”
As if making a liar of her, a ribbon of purple light erupting its way from the inside of the ship, blasting straight through one of the soldiers and flashing out into the void as he crumpled in a wave of static. His companion staggered back, losing grip of the spool, and spun away from the hull while furiously grabbing at his tether.
Laphor wasted no time in clambering across the handholds until she could clamp herself to a nearby tether point, whereupon she began hauling the hapless soldier in. “I’ve got him,” she reported back to Zripob, “how long do we have?”
“Countdown to release begins now,” he replied, guiding her attention to the looming shadow of the smaller ship. “Three, two—”
Laphor abandoned her efforts to pull the soldier in—he’d be fine on the tether anyway—and grabbed at the spool-release as Zripob finished his countdown.
“—one! Cast the lines!”
Laphor released the cable along with another fourteen, spinning it feverishly to make sure it had enough length, and the line whipped out like steel lightning. Odds were against the plan—usually you had computers to deal with the complex calculations needed to do it safely—but the ship lurched hard as seven of the fifteen cables caught and drew the two ships closer together. Soldiers scattered, or tried to, as the hunter ship pulled in too hard and hulls crushed together in an impact that instantly crushed five soldiers and sent four more spinning into the void without their tethers. The terror of the moment was all that drowned out their terrified screams, as Laphor contended with keeping her own footing. Air was blasting from both ships in powerful jets, blasting crewmen caught in the damaged rooms into the void as she ships began to spin as though locked in a slow but complicated dance.
“Now!” Zripob called out in triumph, springing up one of the taut catch-cables without regard for his own tether, proving once again that he was as crazy as he was lucky. “Charge while we have the element of surprise!”
Laphor begrudgingly seconded the order, but was glad to see that her remaining soldiers made their way up the lines with much more care than their would-be commander. No doubt they were all equally haunted by the screams of those recently lost.
“Go,” Laphor commanded, busying herself in hauling in the hapless soldier still flailing on his own tether. “I’ll manage this, and coordinate the second wave.”
Zripob cackled, which was not a very pleasant noise, and pointed his fusion blade forward towards the enemy airlock. The weapon didn’t work as intended, of course, but it still held a cutting edge that was equally deadly in hard vacuum. “As you like, Shipmaster Metmin, but I doubt we’ll be needing them!”
Laphor reflected that she wouldn’t have minded seeing Zripob spinning off into the unforgiving void, but it seemed he was luckier of the two of them. She finished hauling the soldier in—Comos she thought his name was—and looked up at the hull of the enemy ship where soldiers carefully crawled across the smooth surface. “Ship status?” she requested. “Looks like we lost some atmosphere towards the front.”
“We suffered some breaches,” reported her technical personnel. “The command deck is hard vacuum now, but it’d be a lot worse if we hadn’t been in vacuum suits.”
“Understood,” she replied, wondering where she’d get the time or credits to fix this kind of damage. The job for Zripob was quickly beginning to cost them more than they’d earn from it, which meant she’d need to renegotiate when this was over; that really wasn’t a prospect she enjoyed. “How are we looking on wave two?”
The response outlined the situation that the impact had delayed them, but that they would soon be ready to dispatch from their own airlock. She gave the order to make haste, but it felt like she was just trying to make herself feel better.
“Remember,” Zripob was telling the soldiers under his lead, “we need only stab him once, and he knows it. In spite of the evidence, he’s no fool; with so many of us he’ll think twice before picking a fight.”
That was his promise, anyway, which wasn’t backed up by the evidence eventuating a few moments later. The smaller vessel’s airlock, which had been closed up until now, burst open in a rush of atmosphere, carrying with it a small biped in a vacuum suit, tethered to his ship by a harness fashioned from what looked like power conduit. Even from where she was standing, Laphor could see a variety of weapons had been strapped to the suit—a fusion blade and some other simple weapons—but it was a length of blackened metal that the Human Disaster had selected for his weapon. She saw him look out at the purple glow in a mix of wonder and fear before his focus fell on the soldiers crawling across the surface of his ship like insects. Under normal circumstances, Laphor would have worried for the safety of her crew, but it was clear that their enemy had not yet realised that advanced technology did not work in this place.
Her pity was short lived, abruptly ending when the length of metal belched flame and a soldier’s scream was cut short by the rush of escaping air. The Human Disaster drifted backwards on each shot, and the weapon continued to flash with fire as soldiers died on their tethers, no cover to be found anywhere.
“He has a functional weapon!” Laphor shouted in warning to the second wave, for she was certain that the first would be lost in its entirety. At least that meant that Zripob was equally doomed, which was something to be grateful for. She and Comos got to cover as the first wave fell away, fleeing back to the catch cables as quickly as they could manage. Only Zripob remained, and pressed forward with a snarl that carried across the radio network. “Cowards! I will show you how to slay a human!”
He flung his blade at the power conduit, managing to slice it off-centre without cutting through it entirely, but it still began to unravel immediately. In this situation the Human Disaster seemed unable to do anything—he would be as doomed as any of Laphor’s poor crewmen—but a rapid succession of shots fired directly away from his vessel sent him spinning back towards his ship where Zripob was waiting.
Laphor took her eyes away for a moment as she ushered the remains of the first wave back into cover, trying not to listen to the bestial snarls of Zripob as he went toe-to-toe with the deathworlder. They all heard his final rush forward, his final snarl, both truncated by a small, wet explosion. He was silent after that, and Laphor spared a glance towards his last location where his corpse drifted along on its tether like a ghoulish balloon.
For Laphor, it was almost a relief to see it. All she had to do now was convince the Human Disaster that she wanted to put an end to hostilities. Clicking through the different radio settings, she tested one channel after another until she finally found one that accepted her link request.
“Yeah, who the fuck is this?” came the instant demand, in a voice that was deep and angry. It could be nobody but Adrian Saunders, but Laphor still felt the need to double-check for herself.
“I am Shipmaster Laphor Metmin,” she replied, ignoring the unsolicited proposition; she’d heard that humans—and this one in particular—made a habit of making such suggestions and references as part of their regular communications, only underscoring how primal they really were. “Is this Adrian Saunders, also known as the Human Disaster?”
There was a pause. “Some call me that, yeah. So, I take it you’re surrendering?”
Laphor assessed her situation, and agreed that it didn’t look good, but she wasn’t quite prepared to completely give up just yet. “I don’t need to surrender,” she replied, planning on the fly, “since you’ve just killed the one who was employing us to chase you down.”
“Mercenaries, then,” the human inferred, sounding rather more amused than Laphor liked. “I take it that means you’re not getting paid for this fight anymore, so it follows that you’re either about to suggest an ‘alliance of convenience’, or you’re looking to me as your new boss, or maybe you just don’t want me to murder my way through your entire [spawn-thrusting] crew. Sound about right?”
“Yes,” she replied. She had always known that the Human Disaster was no incompetent, but it was slightly disconcerting to have her thinking picked apart so quickly. Her species had a term for it, ‘enk-thinking’, which was all that remained of a phrase describing how one could think with the mind of another. Most members of the herd-thinking galaxy could reason out how they’d act in a given situation, but a mere handful of species could reckon the thoughts, feelings and choices of someone else in that same situation. Since this was generally limited to the more warlike species, it should have been no surprise that the humans would share the trait, but it was still an unhappy discovery; it would make things all the more difficult if she took a more underhanded course. “Any of those sounds better than waiting to see whatever that purple thing does next. I’m thinking that maybe you’d prefer to avoid wasting time in your own escape as well? I know that if my ship was so badly damaged—”
“Point taken, and I agree” he interrupted, notes of reluctant resignation in his voice. “Will you be wanting what’s left of this [faecal-delivering cloaca] back? He’s a bit fucked up.”