In Earth's Service (Mapped Space Book 2) Page 25

  “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.

  “Ouch!” I said. “Never seen that before!” It occurred to me a bubble was fragile in highly curved space, but could be a deadly weapon in flat space.

  “No damage,” he said without any data displays appearing.

  “The four snakeheads in the airlock will wonder why they’ve lost contact with their ship.”

  Vrate didn’t answer.

  “We could take them prisoner and hand them over to the Tau Cetins,” I suggested, thinking it wouldn’t take the TCs long to probe their minds.

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, because you’re a good galactic citizen and you want to make the Tau Cetins mad at the Matarons.” That was certainly my motivation.

  “I am not a good galactic citizen,” he said ominously.

  The bubble dropped, revealing empty halo space around us. The distant red point marking Solitaire’s position was now dozens of light years away. The visual feed from the airlock appeared in front of Vrate showing the two closest snakeheads firing at the inner door.

  “How long before they blast their way in?” I asked.

  “Long enough,” he said, then the airlock’s outer door snapped open, hurling all four Matarons into space.

  “Blowing their scaly asses out the airlock wasn’t exactly what I had in mind,” I said, disappointed I’d lost the chance of handing the reptilians over to the Tau Cetins for questioning.

  Vrate turned the bow of his ship toward the four Black Sauria operatives drif
ting helplessly in space. They were still alive, protected by their suits, although they wouldn’t survive long stranded in halo space. One by one, they began firing at us in a futile act of snakehead defiance. From the bow of the ship, four rapid energy blasts flashed out, shattering the Matarons into a million pieces.

  “Neither was vaporizing them with your cannon!” I muttered, realizing he hadn’t simply killed them, he’d summarily executed them for their crimes. I could hardly blame him for that.

  In silence, we watched a cloud of Mataron droplets drift away into the transgalactic void, then Gern Vrate turned and fixed a cold stare upon me. “Now … tell me what you know of Kesarn in cryostasis?”

  “Three Kesarn disappeared in your part of the galaxy,” Vrate explained after I finished recounting my experiences on the Merak Star. “I was sent to find them.”

  The tiny red solitaire glowed in the distance, our nearest companion in the halo void. Even if the Matarons had extrapolated our course and were searching for us, Vrate assured me they couldn’t penetrate the Tau Cetin masking technology now hiding his ship.

  “What led you to me?” I asked.

  “The Matarons discovered I was asking questions. Hazrik a’Gitor offered me information in exchange for a condemned human who’d killed a member of his family. You.”

  “It was self defense.”

  “What humans and Matarons do to each other is of no interest to me.”

  “OK,” I said slowly. “Obviously, the Matarons took your people. You could lodge a protest with the Forum.”

  “The Kesarn are not members, haven’t been for a long time.”

  For two millennia we’d been told the only way to be granted interstellar access rights was to join the galactic political system and commit ourselves to the principles that had governed interstellar relations for eons. Refusal would force the Tau Cetins to take back their astrographics data and neutralize the precious novarium we needed to power our ships, trapping us in our scattered systems. Yet somehow, the Kesarn had found a loophole, been allowed to follow a different path.

  “How can you not be members?”

  “We were once, for hundreds of thousands of giran, until the Intruder War.”

  The war had been fought centuries before mankind had developed interstellar travel, lain waste to many worlds beyond the Orion Arm and made Izin’s people the pariahs of the galaxy.

  “What happened?”

  “They invaded our homeworld in the Perseus Arm, fortified themselves behind massive shields we couldn’t penetrate, then swarmed our planet with robotic armies and millions of their kind. We couldn’t match their technology and even if we hurt them, it made no difference. They breed so fast, casualties mean nothing to them.”

  “But they do to you.”

  “We are individualists,” Vrate said. “Our numbers are small.”

  “The Forum couldn’t help?”

  “They were driven from the Perseus Arm, leaving us to fight alone. Vastly outnumbered, we could not win.”

  “Why’d you stay?”

  “It is our way,” he said, as if that explained it all. “We raided and spied upon the Intruders, but always, they found us. The Tau Cetins changed that. They gave us what we needed to evade Intruder sensors, to became the eyes of the Alliance in enemy controlled space. With Tau Cetin technology, our ships reached the Intruder home cluster, established contact with conquered races, scanned Intruder ships and brought information back to the Alliance. We even warned the Tau Cetins when their homeworld was about to be attacked.”

  “So why don’t the Matarons keep your TC-tech for themselves?”

  “Because they can’t use it. No one can, but us.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Nothing is ever simple where the Tau Cetins are concerned. They are peaceful and old and deceptively cunning. They gave us their technology to use, not to understand. They were desperate for information we could provide, but not so desperate as to advance our civilization millions of years even when theirs faced destruction.”

  “That was thousands of years ago. Your ship looks new.”

  “It is. The Tau Cetins gave us machines to produce the equipment we needed to spy for them, but there were conditions.”

  “There’s always a catch,” I said.

  “We provide the raw materials the Tau Cetin fabricators need … including ourselves.”

  “Yourselves?”

  “We are a solitary species. We travel alone, we mate infrequently, have few children, just enough to survive. The Tau Cetins knew this. Everything the fabricators produce is linked to one of us – only one. It is the price we pay. I was present when my ship was formed. When I die, so does my ship. I can never be further than a light second from the siphon or it will destroy itself. The same is true for every Tau Cetin component aboard. If the siphons are separated from their Kesarn imprint, or if any attempt is made to disassemble them, there will be a very contained, very Tau Cetin annihilation.”

  “That’s why you have to touch the control spheres.”

  “I must be one with the ship. No other can fly it, not even another Kesarn.”

  “And you’re still using the same construction machines – fabricators – the TCs gave you during the Intruder War?”

  “The Tau Cetins build to last and we have taken great care to preserve them, much better care than the they expected.”

  “I’m surprised they let you keep them.”

  Vrate was slow to answer. “They owe us.”

  “Because you helped save their homeworld?”

  “Because they didn’t save ours. The Intruders destroyed my homeworld when they discovered we were spying for the Tau Cetins. They couldn’t subdue us, so they exterminated us. It is a debt the Tau Cetins can never repay.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It was the price of our freedom. Now we go where we please, we answer to no one, although we continue to respect the law.”

  “So they don’t sanction you, and the Tau Cetins turn a blind eye because they feel guilty.” They might be the shrewdest super-intelligent birds in the galaxy, but I found it reassuring that they were capable of remorse.

  “They are patient. They hope we will rejoin one day.”

  “Will you?”

  “No. The Tau Cetins continue to inform us of galactic affairs, but we keep our distance. They are how I knew of the tension between humans and Matarons. Hazrik a’Gitor’s claim that he was settling a blood feud with a human seemed plausible, and as Matarons cannot use our Tau Cetin technology, there was no reason to suspect I was his target.”

  It was a double win for Hazrik, capturing the Tau Cetin technology and taking his revenge on me in one operation, although I was simply icing on his snakehead cake.

  “So why are the Matarons giving your energy siphons to us humans?”

  “I don’t know. Humans lack the technology to utilize limitless energy. Even we Kesarn would have no need of the siphons if not for Tau Cetin star drives.”

  “And it all works, providing you’re alive,” I said thoughtfully. “Cryostasis is not dead.”

  “We have never put it to the test, but … I believe you are correct.”

  “The siphons must be needed to power some other alien-tech in human hands. It has to be the tower they loaded aboard the Merak Star, and Hazrik’s snakehead scientist is there to show them how to plug it all together.”

  “The Matarons could tell your people any lie about that technology and they’d never know.”

  Considering the scum of humanity’s propensity for self interest, they’d believe anything they assumed was to their advantage. They might well have no idea what that tower’s real purpose was!

  “Your missing people will be where that tower is. If you take me back to my ship, I’ll lead you to it.” Izin had already told me where the tower was headed, but I didn’t trust Vrate enough to tell him, not while I was still his prisoner.

  “The Kesarn and their technology are to be r
eturned to me. The humans are your problem.”

  “And the Matarons?”

  “Them, we will share,” he said menacingly.

  “Deal,” I said, offering my hand. Vrate glanced at my hand curiously, making no move to shake, then I withdrew it awkwardly remembering shaking hands was an ancient Earth custom from the era of sword fighting – a meaningless gesture to the Kesarn.

  “We have an agreement, Sirius Kade, but that does not make us allies.”

  He stepped onto the piloting platform, placed his hands on the control spheres and turned his ship toward the Milky Way’s great spiral disk. A moment later, the biconal bubble formed around the Kesarn ship, sending us hurtling back down into the galaxy.

  Gern Vrate might not be my ally, but he’d referred to me by name for the first time, signaling he was no longer my enemy.

  We docked with the Silver Lining without Izin or Jase becoming aware of our presence. Izin’s hull crawlers had removed the shackle drone’s thruster assembly and a crawler now clung precariously to the drone’s tail, reaching into its interior.

  “There are no other human ships nearby,” Vrate informed me as he removed his hands from the control spheres and escorted me to the airlock.

  “Will you deliver a message for me?” I asked as I stepped into the airlock, past black scars burnt into the bulkhead by Mataron weapons fire.

  “I’m not a courier.”

  “It’s to your advantage as much as mine.”

  “What message?”

  “There’s an Earth Navy ship waiting in the Paraxos System. The message is for Lena Voss. Tell her to come to the Duranis System with everything she has.”

  “Paraxos … Duranis … these are human names. They mean nothing to me.”

  “I’ll enter the Tau Cetin coordinates of Paraxos into my autonav, then delete it, then enter Duranis. You can read them both before we bubble.”

  Vrate gave me a noncommittal look as the inner door sealed shut between us, then I cycled through into the Silver Lining and hurried to the flight deck.

  “Skipper!” Jase exclaimed with an astonished look as I appeared in the open hatchway. “Where have you been?”