In Earth's Service (Mapped Space Book 2) Page 33

I glanced into the compartment. The snakehead sat near the exotic matter chamber, holding his bleeding hand while his gun sparked on the deck a few meters away. Izin stood nearby covering him with his shredder, but there was no sign of the tamph traitor.

  I hurried across to them, facing the Mataron. “Turn it off.”

  The snakehead glanced at me, opened his long snout and exhaled slightly, causing a synthetic word to sound from an implant in his throat. “No.”

  “You sure about that?” I said, switching out my standard ammo for hardtips. The snakehead didn’t dignify me with a response, so I shot him in the ankle, shattering his dense reptilian bone with an armor piercing slug. He groaned, grabbed his ankle, then after giving him time to appreciate my resolve, I explained my position. “I’m morally opposed to torture, but we both know I don’t have time for niceties. So … how do I shut it off?”

  Inok growled defiance in his own guttural language, so I shot his other ankle. He fixed his angled eyes on me with growing hatred, but refused to make any sound.

  “Captain, I doubt this line of questioning will be effective.”

  “Give me a better idea.”

  Izin watched the Mataron bleeding on the deck, but said nothing.

  “You snakeheads have more joints than we do,” I said, aiming at his lower knee, “but I have plenty of ammo.” I shot him in the left lower knee, waited a moment, then seeing Inok was ignoring me, shot the right one.

  His legs slid out in front of him as his back slumped against the exotic matter chamber. The armor piercing slugs had shattered bone and caused a growing pool of dark fluid to form beneath his legs.

  “Answer me, and I’ll get you medical treatment,” I said, aiming at his upper knee. “Otherwise, I’m going to let you bleed to death, after I run out of ammo.”

  Inok a’Rtor raised a hand as if fending off the next shot. “Wait!” I hesitated, then he added, “If you shut down the extraction field, the exotic matter will cease to flow and the wormhole will collapse.”

  I lifted my aim from his upper knee to the bank of exotic matter chambers and fired. The hardtip flashed harmlessly against a field surrounding it, then I returned my aim to the Mataron.

  “Not like that,” Inok said, nodding toward a control console in front of the containment chamber. “Drag the second vertical control all the way down … That will reduce the flow rate … to zero.”

  I stepped over to the console. It had a row of vertical sliders. I reached for the control the snakehead had indicated, then a large Kesarn hand materialized out of thin air and grabbed my arm, pulling it back.

  “No!” Gern Vrate declared as his stealth field dropped, causing him to appear beside me, a large weapon in his free hand.

  “I have to!” I said, aiming at his face, knowing he cared more about three frozen Kesarn than billions of humans on Earth.

  “That will collapse the wormhole,” he said.

  “That’s the idea!”

  Vrate released my hand and turned to watch the shadows, unconcerned by my gun. “Do you know what happens when a wormhole collapses?”

  “What?”

  “It forms a black hole.” He looked me in the eyes. “Beside your homeworld!”

  I turned to Inok a’Rtor who avoided my stare, confirming Vrate’s warning. With controlled rage, I strode back to him and pressed my gun to his head. “Give me a reason not to kill you!”

  The Mataron looked up at me and emitted a guttural coughing sound, what passed for reptilian laughter, challenging me to shoot him. It was what he wanted. If he were dead, I couldn’t make him help me.

  “You’re Black Sauria!”

  “Of course,” he said, a fanatic in his own snakehead way.

  “Vrate, do you know how to shut it off?”

  “No,” he said, drawing a small tracking device from his belt and studying it as he moved away from the exotic matter console.

  “Izin, get over there!” I snapped, nodding toward the control panels on the far side of the compartment.

  “Captain, I know nothing about this technology.”

  “You’re a fast learner. Figure it out!”

  He holstered his shredder and hurried between the siphons to the control consoles while Vrate glanced into one of the cryochambers, keeping his gun level and his eyes darting back to the tracker in his hand.

  “Can you save them?” I asked.

  “Yes, but they’re very weak.”

  The Mavia suddenly shuddered, ringing hollowly as if struck by a giant hammer. A moment later, another resonant thunderclap reverberated through the ship. The three Kesarn energy siphons increased in brightness as they sucked in more power, feeding it into the ship’s massive defense shield.

  Jase’s voice sounded from my earpiece through roaring static. “Skipper, we’re here. Get out of there now!”

  I glanced at Vrate, who heard it too. “If they destroy us, they’ll collapse the wormhole!”

  “Jase!” I yelled into my communicator, “cease fire. Do not destroy the Mavia! Tell the navy to stop firing!”

  “Skipper, can you hear me?” Jase’s barely audible voice came from far away. “The battlecruiser is here. She’s blasting the Mavia!”

  “No! Cease fire!”

  “He can’t hear you,” Inok a’Rtor said, certain the siphons were causing too much interference.

  I turned to Vrate, “Can you get a signal out?”

  “Not through this,” he said as the depot ship shuddered again, causing the siphon’s energy stream to surge in brightness to compensate.

  “Will the siphons overload?” I asked.

  “No. They’ll keep feeding energy into the shield until this ship melts from the inside out.”

  “And the wormhole will collapse!” I added.

  “Yes.”

  The snakehead started his guttural laughing again, so I lashed out with the butt of my P-50, slamming it into his head, sending him slumping unconscious to the floor.

  “You humans have a temper,” Vrate said. “I like that.”

  A flash of light streaked out of the darkness and struck the Kesarn’s chest, sending him flying back. He dropped his gun and tracker as he hit the deck, then groaned as wispy smoke wafted from a ragged hole in his body armor where mangled flesh and bone were visible. Within moments, fluorescence began spreading from his healsuit into the wound, trying desperately to seal it.

  The surprise nature of the attack screamed tamph, so knowing I was next, I dived toward the nearest cryochamber as a blast flashed through where I’d been standing. Another blast grazed the cyrochamber, then my threading triangulated the tamph’s position. He was at the vehicle passageway I’d entered from, having backtracked around behind me as Izin had predicted. I looked for Izin to warn him, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  “I can get a shot from the other side, Captain,” Izin’s voice sounded calmly in my earpiece.

  “No,” I whispered. “You shut this thing down. I’ll take care of the tamph.”

  “Remember Captain, he fights like me, not you.”

  The ship continued reverberating from the Vigilant’s bombardment as shockwaves carried through the shield into the hull every few seconds. Jase’s voice was no longer audible above the static as the siphons pumped more and more power into the Mavia’s shield. Vrate was right, the battlecruiser might not be able to destroy the shield, but the old depot ship had never been designed to handle the kind of energies the siphons were feeding into her. It wouldn’t be long before her interior began to melt.

  I stole a glance around one side of the cryochamber, long enough to see a delicate hand holding a streamlined, silver weapon. I fired and pulled back behind cover as the tamph unleashed another blast from his plasma weapon, then I sprinted for the side entrance Izin had sniped the Mataron from. Halfway across, I let off an unaimed shot at the vehicle passageway, trying to keep the tamph pinned. When I reached the corridor, I threw my back to the bulkhead and aimed around the corner, waiting for the tamph to show hi
mself, but he remained hidden.

  While I waited, Izin’s words echoed in my mind: he fights like me, not you!

  The tamph’s instincts would drive him to gain surprise, something he couldn’t achieve if he stayed where he was. He hadn’t shown himself because he was already circling around through blacked out corridors. With the light from the siphon chamber silhouetting me, I’d be an easy target once he got behind me.

  I glanced over at Vrate who lay on his back, eyes closed, breathing shallow.

  “Vrate, are you dead?” I whispered.

  He coughed blood and wheezed, “No.”

  “The tamph’s coming around behind me. I’m going after him.”

  The Kesarn turned his face toward me, opening his eyes. “Don’t go to him … Let him come to you.”

  I pumped my threading’s thermal sensor to max, confirmed the tamph wasn’t already waiting in the shadows, then crept along the corridor to the first junction. My instinct was to move toward the tamph, to hunt the hunter, but Vrate’s words sent me down the opposite corridor away from the vehicle passageway. At the first open pressure door, I felt my way into a darkened compartment with a cold metal table, bench seats and food dispensers. After confirming there was only one way into the crew mess, I waited in the shadows inside the entrance, not daring to look out, relying solely on my listener to detect approaching footsteps.

  Tamph eyesight was superior to human vision, especially in low light, and was augmented by their biosonar which doubled as sonic vision. If I stuck my head into the corridor too soon, the amphibian traitor would see me sonically and I would never know what hit me. I had to hide until he found his ambush position and was facing away from me, toward the wormhole control room.

  Hearing the tamph approach was complicated by the shockwaves vibrating through the ship as the Vigilant continued to blast away. With my listener on high gain, every creak in the ship was a clash of symbols, every blast from the Earth Navy battlecruiser a pounding of drums. Nervous seconds passed with no sign of the tamph, making me wonder if he’d outsmarted me, if he’d gone into the siphon chamber and killed Vrate and Izin, leaving me hiding like a fool in the dark, squandering my last chance to avert a disaster mankind would never recover from.

  Anxiety was driving me to move, then a threaded warning appeared in my mind:

  INTERMITTENT, NON-MECHANICAL AUDIO CONTACT.

  Amplify contact, I thought, block other audio.

  Silence descended over me as my threading suppressed every distracting sound except one. It wasn’t footsteps or rustling clothes but shallow breathing, steady and slow, the way I’d seen Izin breathe when he turned to stone before firing his sniper rifle. It told me the tamph was close, waiting for me to show myself.

  I leaned toward the open hatch and the sound of faint, rhythmic breathing, then I spotted a thermal apparition crouched close to the bulkhead outside. The tamph’s weapon was aimed at the corridor intersection, perfectly positioned to ambush anyone circling around to the vehicle passage.

  With painstaking slowness, I brought my P-50 up, knowing if the tamph heard me, he would attack with lightning speed. When my gun was aimed at the back of his head, I hesitated. If Izin couldn’t figure out how to shut down the wormhole, this tamph traitor was our only hope. He’d been trained by Inok a’Rtor to operate the Hrane tunneler, and while the Black Sauria agent would never talk, Izin would know how to break one of his own kind.

  I switched my aim to the tamph’s weapon and fired. The P-50 sang as it magnetically accelerated an armor piercing slug past his head, through his hand, into the pistol. The energy weapon exploded in the tamph’s hand, hurling him backwards, past the hatchway. I leapt forward, aiming my pistol at his head, ready to finish him if he resisted, but he lay on his back, badly burned with a rasping breath and a right hand missing its fingers.

  “Any sudden movements and you’re dead.”

  The tamph made no effort to resist, so I pulled him off the deck by his undamaged arm and half carried, half dragged him back to the control room. Vrate had crawled on his back to his gun and lay with one hand on it as phosphorescence glowed brightly across his chest, regenerating his body at an incredible rate.

  “Thought it … killed you,” Vrate wheezed as I threw the tamph onto the deck.

  I aimed my P-50 aimed at the amphibian’s head while he pressed his finger stumps into his side to reduce the blood flow. “Tamphs are tough, not invincible,”

  Vrate dragged his gun across his body to cover the prisoner. “Is that what you think it is? … A tamph? … Look again.”

  The diminutive amphibian wore a dark, skin tight jumpsuit with a metallic finish, a black belt covered with thin rectangular attachments and short black ankle-high boots. A thin metal strip laden with ultra-miniaturized technology ran from above the biosonar lobe on his forehead over the top of his bulging head halfway to the base of his long, streamlined skull.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s not a tamph…” Vrate said.

  My prisoner turned toward me with a penetrating stare that sent a chill down my spine. Even though he was helpless and crippled, I felt a sudden pang of fear as I realized this creature was unlike any tamph I’d ever seen.

  “It’s an Intruder?”

  “Take a good look, human,” Vrate said. “Pray you never see its like again!”

  “How’d you know?”

  “I didn’t, until it shot me,” he said, never taking his eyes off the Intruder. “What didn’t make sense was Matarons using Hrane technology. It’s too advanced for them. They couldn’t teach humans to use it any more than I could, not without help. When it shot me, when I saw that weapon, I knew.”

  “He was teaching the Mataron!” Not the other way around. I looked down at the Intruder whose cold stare told me he understood our every word. There was no denial, no fear, only a quiet defiance. Before I could interrogate my prisoner, Izin approached from the consoles on the far side of the compartment.

  “Captain, there’s a–” He stopped suddenly as his eyes fell upon the blackened amphibian sitting helpless on the deck. The Intruder turned toward him, although its bulging right eye was so blackened and shriveled from plasma burns, he must have been half blind.

  Vrate nodded toward Izin. “He knows.”

  “Izin?” I said, sensing something strange was happening to my tamph engineer, now transfixed by the diminutive figure at my feet. “Is this a tamph?”

  “No. She’s not … from Earth,” Izin said slowly, having trouble speaking.

  She?

  There was a reason female tamphs weren’t ever allowed off Earth. It wasn’t just because the Forum insisted on it. It was because they couldn’t be trusted. With one female for every hundred thousand males, the female’s biological role was command. Their pheromones gave them the power to dominate the males. They were the queens, the Matriarchs, while the males were the obedient drones.

  “Careful,” Vrate warned. “They’re communicating!”

  “Izin!” I said, my finger hovering over my P-50’s firing surface.

  He ignored me, hypnotized by the female Intruder’s pheromones as she used her biosonar to bombard him with ultrasonic commands.

  “Snap out of it!” I yelled, flashing an order to my threading.

  Expand auditory range to tamph ultrasonics.

  My head filled with an incomprehensible melody, all going one way, from the Intruder Matriarch to Izin. He stood helpless before her, arms by his side listening to a siren song he could not resist. Suddenly I realized how dangerous she was to him, so dangerous I couldn’t risk keeping her alive for the Tau Cetins to interrogate. I swung my gun toward her but she kicked up at my hand, sending my P-50 flying across the deck. Before I knew what was happening, she jumped to her feet, kicked me in the stomach with more strength than I would have thought possible considering her wounds and sent me reeling backwards. Vrate tried lifting his gun, but Izin trod on the barrel, pinning it to the deck as it discharg
ed. Vrate was too weak to pull his gun free as the Intruder Matriarch projected her seductive song at Izin, who lifted his shredder, aiming at nothing. I expected him to turn and shoot her as she ran toward him, but he remained in a trancelike state.

  She snatched the weapon out of his hand, aiming back as she ran. I rolled away anticipating a shot, but I wasn’t her target. She fired once, putting a single shredder round into Inok a’Rtor’s head, ensuring even the Tau Cetins couldn’t extract what he knew, then I scooped my P-50 off the deck as she darted behind the exotic matter containment chamber. I started after her while Izin continued to stand on Vrate’s gun, oblivious to what had just happened.

  I’d expected her to head for the wormhole controls, knowing Izin’s little shredder couldn’t penetrate the siphon shielding, but instead, she ran to the nearest cryochamber. I thought she was going to use it for cover, but she leapt up onto it and aimed down through the transparent surface at the frozen Kesarn.

  “No!” I roared as I realized what she was doing.

  She fired once, then blood splattered up onto the inside of the transparent cover. The dark energy siphon nearby began to spark with flecks of orange and red lightning, slowly at first, then with growing strength. Now with its Kesarn symbiote dead, the siphon was doomed. Nothing could stop it cycling out of control, destroying the Mavia and collapsing the wormhole, ensuring Earth was flung from Sol’s habitable zone.

  “Why? Why are you helping the Matarons?” I demanded, aiming my gun at her. “What have we ever done to you?”

  The Intruder Matriarch jumped down from the cryochamber, then touched the muzzle of Izin’s gun to a control surface on her belt. “It’s not about you,” she replied in a flat, synthesized voice. “It’s about us!”

  She stepped toward the siphon, watching the brilliant yellow beam blasting down from the flat cylinder at its base into the dish shaped receptor in the deck. The beam’s color continued to shift toward the red as the siphon destabilized.

  “That’s far enough!” I said, still hoping to extract a solution from her.

  The Intruder Matriarch turned, studying me through her one good eye, then dropped Izin’s shredder as if in surrender. “Now I know why the Matarons hate you.”