In Earth's Service (Mapped Space Book 2) (29 page)

“That’s no ASD!” Jase exclaimed, surprised. “It’s
got claws!”

My bionetic memory identified it as a Caliphate
device, used by their security forces to prevent suspect ships from escaping
patrol vessels, the ideal weapon for raiding Rashidun Souks. Considering the
connections the Drakes had, it was no surprise they had access to weapons ideal
for capturing freighters with their cargos intact.

“It’s a shackle drone,” I said, “and we’re not going
anywhere while it’s out there!”

* * * *

“Any progress on the drone?” I asked as I
entered engineering.

Izin sat in the middle of his six screen setup
viewing separate feeds from the hull crawlers he’d sent out to study the shackle
drone. Without taking his eyes off the screens, he pulled on his vocalizer to
reply. “Only the outer hull was penetrated. The inner pressure hull remains intact.”

“Lucky for us.” No explosive decompression.

“It did what it was designed to do, keep us alive
so we could shut down the ship, then generate a directional acceleration field
that intersects our bubble seventy meters from the hull. It’s also equipped
with a homing beacon that began transmitting as soon as we unbubbled.”

“As good as a gun to our head. Cut it loose. We’ll
patch the hull later.”

“I can’t. It’s equipped with a self destruct device
that will detonate if I remove its arms or body panels. The explosion would not
destroy the ship, but it would wreck the port engine and prevent superluminal
travel. To disarm the detonator, I have to cut in through the drone’s engine exhaust.”

“How long?”

“It could be done safely in two days.”

“You’ve got ten hours.”

“Ten hours, thirteen minutes,” Izin corrected,
well aware how long it would take the drone’s locator signal and our energy
plant’s neutrino emissions to reach Acheron Station and for them to jump out to
collect us. “While you’re waiting, Captain, you may wish to check your reader.
I’ve completed decrypting the Merak Star’s log.”

“Anything interesting?”

“They used seven rendezvous locations, never the
same place twice in a row. After meeting the Cyclops, the Merak Star always
returned to the same system to unload and pick up another cargo.”

“What system?”

“The Duranis System.”

It was the same place my brother had offered to
take me to! He’d called it a transport hub, although I’d never heard of it and I’d
visited almost every human port within a thousand light years. “What’s there?”

“Nothing, according to the navy’s astrographics
catalogue. No colonies, no stations, only a Forum safety advisory.”

“Good work,” I said, then headed to my stateroom,
eager to trace the
Merak Star’s
movements for myself.

My cabin’s light came on automatically as I
entered, illuminating a thin metallic sliver floating above my bunk. It’s
movement caught my eye as it shot toward me, forcing me to duck instinctively
and dart away as it turned and came after me again. It was as long as my little
finger, with no markings revealing what it was or where it came from.

Wary of firing my P-50 inside the ship, I grabbed
a datapad off my desk and swatted at the sliver, but the slender device easily avoided
my attacks. As it circled around, I tried striking it twice more, then it flashed
toward me. I leapt sideways, but it was too fast. Cold metal latched onto my
neck, instantly paralyzing me. I crumpled, dropping the datapad, then it caught
me before I hit the deck, isolating me from the ship’s internal acceleration
field. A moment later, I was floating face down above the deck, completely
helpless.

My listener flashed a proximity warning into my
mind’s eye as a large, dark form stepped into my stateroom’s doorway. I
couldn’t turn my head to see who it was, but my listener pattern matched the heavy
footsteps immediately.

WARNING! ALIEN CONTACT! IDENTIFIED AS GERN VRATE.

“The chase is over, human,” he said in a low voice,
removing my gun from its holster and dropping it on the deck.

He touched a control surface on his forearm, then I
floated face down into the corridor and along the passage toward the airlock. I
tried to yell, but the paralysis prevented me speaking. Izin’s security systems
should have been flashing alerts to the bridge and engineering, but Vrate’s lack
of urgency told me he’d disabled them all.

We cycled through the
Lining’s
airlock into
a narrow, cylindrical chamber. The Kesarn ship had attached itself to the port
airlock without Jase receiving any warning on the bridge, and Izin was so
absorbed in disarming the shackle drone, he hadn’t noticed the magnetic anomaly
signaling its approach.

After passing through a high arch-shaped inner
door, Vrate floated me along a short oval passage, past several sealed
compartments, to a spherical chamber. Its walls were non-reflective black which
instantly became transparent the moment we entered. Only the dark metal floor,
the frame of the passageway and the rounded shoulders of his ship behind us
diminished an otherwise uninterrupted view of space. The
Silver Lining
was just visible astern, mated to Vrate’s aft facing airlock, while ahead lay
the blanketing darkness of the Acheron void. The spherical chamber extended
from the short body of his ship like a fishbowl. In the center of the chamber
was a circular platform rising a meter above the deck. On it were two hip high,
silver metal poles, each crowned by a polished silver sphere.

Vrate rotated my body to the vertical, then a
pressure field pushed me securely against the bulkhead beside the entry. The
metal sliver then detached itself from my neck, immersing me in the ship’s
gravity, and floated into Vrate’s hand. He slid it into a thin belt
compartment, then strode up the short ramp to the circular platform.

With his back to me, he stood between the two
metal poles and placed his hands on the spheres. The moment he established
contact with the ship, thin glowing lines marked with unfamiliar characters
appeared across the fishbowl walls surrounding him. Silently, we slid away from
the
Silver Lining
into the Acheron darkness. As the ship’s orientation
changed, the lines glided across the transparent surface, suggesting they were a
form of navigational aid.

I craned my neck to see the
Silver Lining
fall away behind us. The shackle drone was just visible forward of the port
engine, surrounded by Izin’s hull crawlers, one of which was using a laser
cutter to slice through the drone’s engine. Once we had moved away from the
Lining
,
the Kesarn ship bubbled. To my surprise, the gray blur of the bubble was
visible, indicating Vrate’s sensors could withstand the exterior heat. Vertical
navigational lines surrounding the piloting platform slid aft across the
fishbowl’s inner walls with increasing velocity. Most surprising of all was the
geometry of the bubble. Unlike our spheroidal bubble, the shape surrounding Vrate’s
ship was biconal, reaching forward to a distant point and even further behind
to a trailing point.

A point!

It was as if we were inside a long narrow spear,
racing through spacetime in a way I’d never dreamt possible. I tried to speak,
but found my voice hadn’t yet recovered from Vrate’s paralyzer.

His helmeted head turned to watch me. “You should
be proud, human. You’re about to be the first member of your species ever to
leave this galaxy.”

TransGalRef: 89X4-03g5-8fH3-Ui30

Red Dwarf Star, Extra-spiral
Zone 0714

Galactic Halo

22,462 light years from Sol

Uninhabited

The Kesarn ship was smaller than the
Silver
Lining
, with a narrow body designed to fit inside its biconal bubble. Throughout
the flight, Vrate paid me no attention, standing like a statue with his hands
on the silver spheres at his hips as the navigational lines and their symbols
slid smoothly across the spherical shell surrounding us. Incredibly, he showed
no sign of the injuries he’d received on Hardfall, demonstrating a miraculous
healing ability.

“How come you’re not dead?” I asked when my power
of speech returned.

“The healsuit regenerates me,” he said without
turning.

He’d certainly suffered broken bones and massive
internal injuries, yet he moved as if the bonecrusher had never attacked him.
“That’s some suit.”

“Self reliance is the key to survival, when one
travels alone.”

He’d been standing on the circular platform for
hours, manually piloting the ship even though he could no more see through his
biconal bubble than we could see through our spherical equivalent. I assumed
the strange bubble geometry was an ominous sign of how fast we were travelling.
It was certainly at a velocity only an artificial intelligence could control, so
why hadn’t he handed flight control to the ship? On the
Silver Lining
,
once we were underway, the autonav did all the work, turning Jase and I into
passengers who did little more than watch the course simulator calculate our
progress.

“I don’t suppose we can discuss this?” I asked.

“If you keep talking, human, the neural blocker
goes back on.”

I fell silent, knowing if he paralyzed me again I
was finished. For several minutes, I watched the circles on the inside of the
fishbowl slide toward me, noticing there was one thicker circle inside the
sphere that was parallel to the rear bulkhead. As it crawled slowly aft, it
reminded me of a horizon line, representing a reference plane of some sort.
He’d said we were leaving the galaxy, which made me suspect the horizon line was
the galactic ecliptic, marking our progress out of the Milky Way’s great
spiral.

After a few minutes, I tried again. “Your bubble shape
should be impossible.”

“Why?”

“Propulsion geodesics are fragile. That bubble should
collapse.”

“Hmph. You’ve been out here over two thousand
years, and you’ve learnt nothing!”

“I wouldn’t say … nothing.”

“You continue to place limits on the unknown,
unknown to you.”

Is that what I was doing? I thought I was trying
to build rapport so I could talk my way out of this mess. I gave him some more
silence, then asked, “How long have you been out here?”

“Two hundred and eighty thousand giran.”

“Giran?”

He grunted. “Three hundred and … forty six
thousand Earth years.”

The answer surprised me, being much less than I’d
expected. It was obvious from his ship that the Kesarn were far ahead of Human
Civilization, yet extragalactic travel was normally accessible only to much
older species. In cosmic terms, the Kesarn and humanity were almost peers on
the lower rungs of the galactic ladder.

“Cross-species kidnapping is prohibited by the Access
Treaty,” I said.

“I’m not subject to your Access Treaty.”

My Access Treaty? Every species in the Milky Way
was subject to the Treaty. None were excluded, no matter how young or old, not
even primitive civilizations who knew nothing of its existence. Observer
civilizations had ensured for eons there were no exceptions, certainly not a
species whose existence was measured in mere hundreds of thousands of years.
Even the Matarons, who were twice as old as the Kesarn, couldn’t opt out. Only
the Intruders, who had evolved far beyond the galactic disk, had evaded its
reach – ultimately to their detriment – but Gern Vrate was from the Perseus
Arm. Galactic law applied to him as much as it did to me.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Nowhere you’ve ever heard of.”

“Try me.”

“No more talk, human,” he said sharply.

I wanted to press him further, but couldn’t risk
being silenced again by his neural-blocker, not if I hoped to escape. On the
fishbowl wall, the horizon line of the galactic ecliptic had fallen behind
where Vrate stood, indicating we’d left the disk behind.

I wondered, even if I could escape, where would I go?

* * * *

The spear-shaped gray blur
surrounding Vrate’s ship vanished, revealing a great black void, broken only by
isolated misty pearls of light. It took me a moment to realize they were
globular clusters, orbiting high above the galaxy in halo space, while dimmer points
of light marked distant galaxies. Behind us lay the Milky Way with its
distinctive glowing bar at the center of a vast whirlpool of light isolated
amid an infinite night. At that distance and perspective, I couldn’t tell where
human space was located, so tiny was it against the vastness of the galaxy.

Gern Vrate lifted his hands off the two control spheres,
paying no attention to the spectacular panorama behind us. He massaged his palms
without turning, visibly relaxing.

“Why are we stopping?” I asked.

“I need to rest.” He stretched his thick neck,
showing signs of fatigue.

“No autonav, huh?”

“The ship can fly only when I’m part of it,” he
said simply.

“Suppose you have to sleep?”

“I stop.”

“That’s not too smart.”

“As if you would know.”

“Hey, even human ships fly themselves!”

“It’s the price we pay.”

“The price for what?”

“For what we are.” He pointed to a feeble, red point
of light directly ahead. “That is our destination.”

Without instruments, I had no way of knowing how
far it was. “Looks close.”

“Ten light giran.”

At that distance, it could only be a solitary star
thrown from the galaxy by a cosmic quirk of fate. Considering how far we’d come
in such a short time, we could have covered the remaining distance in a matter
of seconds. So why rest now?

“Are you just leaving me here?”

“Yes,” he said, marching down the ramp from his
piloting platform.

“You could at least put me in a cabin where I
could get some sleep.”

“There’s only one sleep pod on this ship.”

“Suppose you have company?”

He stopped in front of me. “I travel alone.”

I nodded, feigning sympathy. “No friends, huh?”

“I am Kesarn.”

“I take it you’re the aloof loners of the galaxy?”

Vrate studied me like I was a bug. “You humans
have no concept of individualism. Compared to us, you are a docile herd
species.”

“I’ve been called a lot of things, but that’s the
first time I’ve ever been compared to a cow!” The Tau Cetins were herbivorous
avians who considered humans to be an aggressive hunter-predator species. I
guess it depended on your perspective. “So, do you want to tell this docile herd
creature what’s waiting up ahead?”

“You ask a lot of questions for a condemned prisoner,”
he said, then strode out into the corridor.

His footsteps receded as I fixed my eyes on the
solitary star ahead, wondering what interest I could possibly hold for its
inhabitants.

* * * *

When Vrate returned, he offered me
a fist sized cube with a thin tube extending from the top.

“This will sustain you,” he said as the pressure
field released my arms, letting me reach for it.

I took a sip, gagged on the bitter liquid and spat
it out, spraying his boots. “I thought you had to deliver me alive, not poison
me!”

“One container will keep you alive for a week,” he
said glancing disdainfully at the spittle on his boots.

“Do I have a week?”

“That is not my concern.”

He touched his helmet at ear height, causing his
dark visor split into two horizontal slices that slid apart revealing his face
for the first time. He had light brown skin, large round eyes beneath a
prominent brow and a flat nose with a single nostril. He was the same species
as the frozen alien I’d seen on the
Merak Star
!

“You’re Kesarn?” I asked surprised, wondering how
any Drake could ever have captured one of his race.

“Drink!” he ordered, then strode up the short ramp
to the circular platform.

I glanced down at the alien food substitute uncertainly.
It tasted like acid, but I needed my strength, so I took a breath and gulped it
down, then tossed the cube away in disgust when I’d finished. “Argh!”

When I looked up, Vrate was studying me from the
piloting platform. “Your survival instinct is strong, human. Many species would
not have drunk.”

“You actually like that stuff?”

“It tastes like doongpa!”

“It sure does!” I agreed. Whatever doongpa was, I
now considered it to be the vilest tasting substance in the galaxy.

Vrate turned and placed his hands on the control
spheres at his hips. Almost immediately, the stretched biconal bubble appeared
around us, sending us hurtling toward the solitary halo star.

“I’ve seen your kind before,” I said.

“That, I doubt! We are rarely seen and never by
the likes of you.”

“No, really. I’d recognize your ugly face anywhere.”
I hoped an insult might draw him out, but he simply ignored me. “They must be
paying you well, to go to all this trouble.”

“You would think that.”

“You don’t like us much, do you?”

“You are what you are.”

“A docile herd creature?”

“Talkative.”

The bubble vanished, revealing a small red orb a
quarter the size of Earth’s sun. Whatever gravitational cataclysm had ejected
the red dwarf star from the galaxy had also stripped it of planets, hurling it toward
the emptiness of intergalactic space. Whoever Gern Vrate was delivering me to,
they couldn’t be inhabitants of this system. The solitary star was nothing more
than a rendezvous point far enough outside the Milky Way that it was beyond the
gaze of those who enforced galactic law.

Vrate waited while his ship searched nearby space,
then when three markers appeared on the fishbowl wall to starboard, he nosed
his ship toward them. Considering the speed the Kesarn ship was capable of, it
took a surprisingly long time for the contacts to resolve into dark hulled
ships. Indistinguishable at first, they slowly grew in size as we crept up on
them, taking on a flattened teardrop shape marked by ridges running bow to
stern. I knew at a glance what they were – snakehead armored cruisers, Ortarn
class.

“You’re selling me to the Matarons?” I asked
incredulously. “I thought you weren’t a bounty hunter.”

“I’m not,” he replied, his eyes fixed on the three
ships floating in line ahead formation still some distance away.

We slid in astern of them with a caution that
showed Vrate didn’t trust the Matarons any more than I did. He matched their
velocity while keeping his distance, then Kesarn script began appearing below
each ship, identifying them in ever more detail.

“You’re scanning them?”

Vrate acknowledged my question with a distracted
grunt.

“They can’t see us, can they?” I asked, knowing
Mataron cruisers wouldn’t just sit there and let themselves be scanned, unless
they knew nothing about it.

“Not yet.”

The Matarons might have been militaristic
xenophobes, but they were also hundreds of thousands of years ahead of the Kesarn.
There was no way Vrate should have been able to sneak up and scan them without
being detected. “I know humans are slow learners and all, but how can you hide
from them?”

“Easily.”

“You obviously don’t trust them, so why are you
doing their dirty work for them?”

“I don’t trust anyone.” He lifted his hands off
the two control spheres. The Mataron ships immediately broke formation, circled
toward us at high speed and took up firing positions forty five degrees apart. “Now
they see us.”

A holographic image of a triangular reptilian face
appeared directly ahead of Vrate. I normally couldn’t tell one snakehead from
another, but this one wore a thin black circlet around the top of his head and
an ornate black uniform with a chest scabbard holding a ritual blade. I’d only
ever seen one other Mataron dressed like that. He’d been a high ranking
commander of the shadowy Black Sauria organization, but surely this couldn’t be
him. Not out here.

“Identify yourself, Kesarn!” the Mataron Commander
snapped, angry that Vrate had gotten so close without being detected.

“Gern Vrate. You are Hazrik a’Gitor?”

“I am.”

It wasn’t the first time I’d been wrong, but it
might be the last. Hazrik was the same Mataron who’d sworn a year ago to have
my head. Thanks to Vrate, he was about to get his wish.

“I have the prisoner,” Vrate announced.

The Mataron’s anger began to abate. “We nearly
destroyed you!”

“If you had, you would not get the human.”

“Do not be so careless approaching Mataron
warships in future.”

“I am never careless and it was not my defenses
that were penetrated.”

The Mataron emitted a low sound, a sign of anger,
confirming Vrate had a genius for irritating everyone he came in contact with,
even the snakehead he worked for.

“Reveal yourself next time, or you will not be so
lucky.”

“There’ll be no next time. Do you have the
information?”

“Yes.”

“Transmit it now.”

“Not until Sirius Kade is in my possession.”