In Earth's Service (Mapped Space Book 2) (30 page)

“He is here,” Vrate said, motioning toward me.

My image must have become visible to Hazrik,
because he leaned forward studying me closely. “I told you we would meet
again.”

“And here I thought all snakeheads were liars,” I
replied lightly.

“My daughter waits for you on Kif-atah. You
murdered her husband, now you will die by her hand, my gift to her.”

“That’ll give me plenty of time to kill you and
escape,” I said, relieved to discover I wasn’t going to die today.

“You will be on the Mataron homeworld in three
weeks,” Hazrik said, “and you will not escape.”

Knowing roughly how fast Mataron ships were, three
weeks to Kif-atah put us approximately twenty two thousand light years from
Mapped Space. It was a long way for the Black Sauria commander to come just to capture
me, and he’d brought three top of the line cruisers with him as escorts. I knew
he wanted me dead, but that seemed like overkill, even for a vengeful
snakehead.

“Transmit the data,” Vrate said.

“I will send a transport to collect Kade. When he
is aboard, you will have your payment.”

Vrate hesitated, but realized he had no choice.
“Agreed.”

Hazrik’s triangular face vanished, then I said,
“You can’t trust him.”

“But I can trust you?”

“I saved your life on Hardfall.”

“You almost got me killed trying to escape,” he
said as a small transport emerged from Hazrik’s cruiser and glided toward us.

“As soon as you hand me over, he’ll cheat you.”

“Betray the Kesarn once, never deal with us again.
He knows that.”

While the Mataron transport maneuvered to dock, Vrate
reached over his shoulder for his gun and leveled it at me. The pressure field pinning
me to the bulkhead dropped, then he motioned me to the passageway.

“I will shoot if you try anything.”

“And risk disappointing Hazrik’s daughter?” I said,
stepping through the doorway.

“Her feelings are not my concern.”

“I don’t suppose we can make a deal?” I said,
starting along the short corridor leading to the airlock.

“No.”

“What’s this information Hazrik has? Maybe, I
could help you?”

“You can’t even help yourself,” he said, irritated
by my stalling tactics.

“I can put you in touch with people who could help
you, like the Tau Cetins.”

“I trust them even less than I trust you or the Matarons!”

I took several more steps, then turned to face
him. “How about…”

I swept my hand with ultra-reflexed speed at his
gun, caught the thick barrel and pushed it wide as he fired. Before he could
wrestle the gun free, I kicked him in the abdomen, but his healsuit absorbed
the blow, then Vrate threw a jab at my head with his free hand. I ducked, trying
to twist the weapon out of his hand as he grunted in pain, but not from
anything I’d done. Realizing his wounds from Hardfall hadn’t fully healed, I
threw myself at him, slamming my elbow into his chest, aiming for where the
bonecrusher had held him in its jaws.

The healsuit was tough, but it wasn’t armor. The
breastplate flexed under the impact, causing Vrate to stagger back holding his
chest with his free hand, never letting go of his gun with the other. Before he
could recover, I kicked him again, aiming for his thigh where the bonecrusher
had bitten down on his legs. Vrate stumbled back, wrenching the gun barrel out
of my hand as he dropped to his knees in pain, proving no matter how good his
healsuit was, bone needed time to knit, even Kesarn bone.

I dived sideways as he fired from his knees,
sending a white blast flashing past me. He followed me with his gun, forcing me
to dive through an open hatchway onto a small landing as he fired again. I
bounced off the far bulkhead and fell down steep, narrow metal grill stairs to
the deck below where I lay momentarily stunned as Vrate staggered onto the
landing above. He aimed down at me as I scrambled away behind storage containers,
then his heavy boots sounded on the stairs as he came after me.

From the far side of the compartment, a static
electric hiss filled the air, throwing flickering yellow light and sharp
shadows toward me. I couldn’t see the source as I crawled between containers,
looking for a way out.

“There’s nowhere to run, human,” Vrate declared as
he landed on the deck. He fired once, shattering a container’s contents behind
me, then made a short tech-assisted jump over the containers, landing in front
of me and aiming his bulky weapon at my head. “It didn’t have to be this way,”
he said as the yellow flickering light played over his healsuit.

I glanced toward the light source, a white metal hemisphere
floating in the center of the chamber – the twin of the alien-tech device I’d
seen loaded aboard the
Merak Star
on Novo Pantanal. A brilliant yellow
beam emanated from the flat cylinder protruding from its base and poured into a
dish shaped receptor in the deck.

“Wait!” I yelled.

He adjusted a control on his weapon. “It’s set to
stun. You will not see me again.”

“What is that?”

“No more talk!” Vrate said, extending his arm to
fire.

Suddenly I knew why he’d brought me out here, far
beyond the gaze of any Observer civilization, and it wasn’t for the reason he
thought!

“It’s not me they’re after! It’s you!”

He hesitated. “What are you talking about?”

“I told you, I’ve seen your kind before!” I
pointed to the hemisphere floating at the heart of Vrate’s ship. “And that
thing! Whatever it is!”

“Impossible.”

“I can prove it!”

“How?”

“In my pocket!” I said reaching toward a sealed section
inside my flight jacket.

“No tricks,” he said, ready to fire, but letting me
proceed.

I retrieved the rectangular plate I’d taken from
the frozen Kesarn on the
Merak Star
and tossed it to Vrate, who caught
it one handed. “I took that off one of your people. He was in cryostasis
alongside one of those things,” I said, nodding toward the hemisphere.

He turned it over suspiciously, studying it. “He
was alive?”

“Frozen. His life signs were low, but he was
definitely alive.”

“This could be a fake, a copy,” Vrate said,
lifting the control plate, comparing it to an identical device on his wrist,
the same device he’d used to remotely pilot his ship.

“That’s your language! Humans don’t know your
language!”

Vrate glanced at the control plate once more, then
slid it into his pocket. “Do you know
why
he was alive?”

It was a trick question, but I had no idea what
the trick was. “No. For questioning maybe?”

He stared at me, deep in thought, then slowly
lowered his weapon. “I believe you.”

“You do?” I asked surprised.

“He was alive because the siphon cannot exist
without him,” Vrate said, his mood changed. “You could not know that.”

“You’re right! I didn’t! And I still don’t know what
you’re talking about!”

He motioned toward the hemisphere. “That is a dark
energy siphon, my ship’s power source.”

“Dark energy?” I turned to the Kesarn machine with
renewed interest. “Really?”

“It taps into the force driving the accelerating
expansion of the universe.”

“I’ve heard of it.” Dark energy made up seventy
percent of the total mass-energy content of the universe. “I just never knew it
could be harnessed.”

“It is the ultimate energy source in the universe,
infinite and free.”

“That’s why we can’t detect your ship’s emissions.”

“Yes. There are none.”

“But we can detect Mataron ships,” I said, struggling
to understand how the Kesarn, who should have been far behind the Matarons, were
so far ahead of them.

“Their ships are reactively powered, although not
in the same way yours are.”

If Hazrik was involved, then the Black Sauria had
orchestrated everything. That meant the snakehead technician on the
Merak
Star
was no renegade. He was Hazrik’s agent! The Black Sauria would kill
any Mataron who dared help humans, unless he was following their orders. Being
the only link to the Matarons, Inok a’Rtor would disappear at the first sign of
trouble, leaving us holding a dark energy siphon in one hand and a frozen Kesarn
in the other.

Considering what I’d seen of Gern Vrate, no human
– not the Brotherhood, not the Consortium, not even my brother – could steal his
technology without help. Snakehead help! If the Consortium genuinely believed
Inok a’Rtor was a renegade scientist, they wouldn’t know who their alien-tech supplier
really was.

That left only my brother, who was in this up to
his cybernetic skull cap! He was the one dealing directly with the Matarons, the
only member of the
Cyclops’s
crew who really knew what was going on, and
that made him the biggest traitor of all. But he was human, and anything he did
was – under galactic law –mankind’s responsibility. No excuses. It was a harsh
law, but it was our job to police ourselves because when it came to
interspecies relations, no buck passing was tolerated.

But there was more here than simple cross-species
piracy. The Matarons were taking a huge risk attacking the Kesarn, who were clearly
more advanced. And why were the snakeheads simply handing such advanced tech to
humans, rather than keeping it for themselves?

Certain Vrate wasn’t going to shoot me, I climbed
to me feet and asked the one question I had no answer for. “How’d you get so
far ahead of the Matarons?”

Vrate lifted his gun over his shoulder and locked
it to his back. “It’s not our technology. It’s Tau Cetin.”

“You stole tech from the TCs?” I asked, genuinely
impressed.

“No one steals from the Tau Cetins!”

It took me a moment to understand. “They gave it
to you?”

The Tau Cetins were millions of years ahead of the
Kesarn, the Matarons and us, and one thing they weren’t was generous with their
secrets. For them to simply gift technology to a vastly inferior civilization
went against everything I knew about them, about how the galaxy itself worked!

“Everything to do with the Tau Cetins comes at a
price,” he said bitterly. “Remember that.”

A dull clang rang through the ship as the Mataron
transport docked with it, then Vrate’s eyes lifted toward the airlock above, deciding
what to do next.

“Sounds like there’s a bunch of armed snakeheads
about to kick in your airlock and kill us both.”

“They will kill you. Me, they need alive.”

“Alive or dead, it’s a bad deal for both of us, so
let’s get out of here.”

“It’s too late,” he said. “They’ve locked onto my
ship.”

“It’s a Tau Cetin ship! Let’s kick their scaly
asses from here to the other side of galaxy!”

“This is a Kesarn ship equipped with Tau Cetin
technology. There’s a difference.”

“But you’ve got TC weapons, right? So let’s fry
these snakeheads!”

“If I had Tau Cetin weapons, the Matarons would
already be dead for what they’ve done. All I have is the siphon, the star drive,
sensors and masking technology. I’m no match for them in a fight.”

“Then hide!”

“I can’t, not while they’re clamped onto my hull. Come,”
he said, then limped back up the metal stairs.

I followed him up to the airlock and said, “They’ll
be wearing skin shields.”

“This weapon is ineffective against their
micro-contour shielding,” Vrate said, tapping his wrist panel. A circular hologram
appeared in front of the airlock, revealing its interior. Four snakeheads were
squeezed inside, all dressed in Black Sauria body armor. They were so tall,
they were hunched over with their shoulders pushed against the ceiling.

“A quantum blade would do it,” I said.

“Do you have such a weapon?”

“Yeah, a real fancy one – back on my ship.”

“Very helpful,” Vrate said, then strode off down
the passageway to the flight deck. I hurried after him, then watched as he
stepped up onto the piloting platform.

“This is Gern Vrate. Your ship is disrupting my
airlock system. I cannot release the inner seal.”

Hazrik a’Gitor appeared before him. “We are
showing no disruption to your ship.”

“My systems do not recognize the outer seal is
closed. You will have to undock your vessel.”

“Correct your malfunction and open your airlock
immediately.”

“I will try again,” Vrate replied, closing the commlink.

“You can’t let them inside,” I said.

“Obviously not,” he replied tersely, studying the
locations of the three Mataron ships, calculating his chances of escape. Once
sufficient time for a systems check had elapsed, he reestablished
communications. “I cannot solve the problem. I am a tracer, not a technician. If
you want this prisoner, undock your ship!”

Hazrik hesitated, but his desire to enter Vrate’s
ship got the better of his innate suspicion. “Very well.”

The Mataron Commander’s image vanished, then the snakehead
transport released the Kesarn ship and moved away from the airlock. Vrate
placed his hands on the spheres at his sides, then the biconal superluminal
bubble appeared, accompanied by a bright flash as the transport’s bow was
sliced off by the bubble’s extreme quantum forces, fortunately missing its
energy core. The transport’s sharp nose remained trapped inside the bubble
while the rest was left behind, adrift in space. Almost immediately, the three Mataron
cruisers fired together, but the Kesarn ship was much too fast for them. We
were a quarter of a light year away before the blast of their weapons reached
the point in space we’d occupied an instant before.

Inside the bubble, the transport’s bow section drifted
against Vrate’s hull aft of the fishbowl flight deck, sending a tremendous
shudder through the ship, then it tumbled slowly away. For a few seconds, it
hung in space over our heads, then it slid into the bubble and vanished in a brilliant
flash.