STAR HOUNDS -- OMNIBUS (2 page)

H
e loved her.

His first thought as he regained consciousness was of her, as though his very ground of being was her.

Laura.

She was there with him, behind his eyes as he struggled up toward waking, her eyes bright, her voice insistent. “Don’t die, Cal. Don’t die! We are for each other, and I am lost without you.”

Opening his eyes, he glimpsed the flash of machinery, the sparkle of glass, the glitter of a starfield through a vu-plate. Then the pain hit him. He shut his eyes and curled into a fetal ball. It was cold, so very cold.

At first he thought he had a hangover. His confused mind searched for the telltale swirl of memory that was the residue of Cal Shemzak on the town. But he drew a blank. Where was the rainbow of drink, the sweet and sour? He had no recollection of women’s smiles or the perfume in their hair as he whirled them on the dance floor. No whispery surrender to his virility, either, and he knew despite his closed eyelids that he was alone now.

He was alone and cold, with a head that ached and a stomach that churned with nausea. He fought back the almost overwhelming sensations and opened his eyes.

Cal Shemzak lay naked upon a cool length of some silvery alloy. The slab connected to a smooth obsidian wall that seemed to roil with darkness. The floor was riveted metal. One wall was slotted by a view of raw, star-spotted space. Four meters above him, the ceiling hovered like smoked glass.

I’m on a starship, Cal Shemzak thought, shivering. Bile was bitter at the back of his throat, but he controlled his urge to vomit. A starship …
but I’m not supposed to be on a starship!

He looked down at his naked body. A pool of blood lay by a nasty gash in his knee. His hands were scraped raw, and his wakening nostrils were filled with the rancid odor of burnt hair. “Laura,” he said, with sudden conviction. “Laura, I’ll never see you—” But no sooner did the thought form than he rejected it. He filled his mind with complex computations and formulas, solving random equations, inventing new ones. He rejected the chill in his body, and suddenly it was not so bad. Woozily he pushed himself up into a sitting position, slowly allowing coherent thought to enter again through his defense shield of mathematics. “Follow the
wo wei
,” he told himself in the chant that he and Laura had sung so many times. “Follow the
wo wei
.”

The pain dimmed. The room within the mysterious starship sharpened into focus.

Abruptly Cal Shemzak realized where he was.

He was on an
alien
starship.

And with that realization came the memory, which started with the pain of a real hangover.

C
al Shemzak, postadolescent wunderkind, had a hangover. “I just don’t know, Torl,” he told his project supervisor, Dr. Torlos Ornix, as they sipped coffee above the whirring engines of the Causal Field Matrix Generator that Cal had helped to design. Neither he nor his thin, dapper companion was aware of the two Jaxdron whip-ships preparing to crack through the cloudy atmosphere of Mulliphen. Shemzak brushed back a shock of sandy hair and readjusted his Visual Augmenter implant, an action that drove a spike of pain through his cerebral cortex. He ignored the sensation
(Brains don’t feel pain!)
and scanned the color-depthed holographic readout from the Compunet Analyzer, trying to ascertain a shading of quark action. (Charming, he thought.) “This shows just what all the other charts show, Torl … no patterns. Totally random activity on the Prediction Gradients, and numbers that make nonsense of the Reality Window.” He looked up pleadingly, his pupils huge owing to the augmenter action. “Let me get a No-Man in here, Torl. I know they’re dangerous, but there’s no way we can make the Piercing with just this machine!”

“Hot time at the Go-show last night, eh, Cal?” Torl took out a pack of cigarettes, withdrew one, and lit it. Cal Shemzak cringed at the acrid odor of the awful Beta Ophiuchi tobacco that his boss smoked. “Still enjoying the liberties provided by a colony planet? Now, what would Friend Chivon Lasster back on Earth say to a detailed documenting of your debauches?”

“Irrelevant data,” Cal said, smiling, as he took out another pill and chased it with a swallow of black coffee. “Or should I say irrelevant date?”

“Oh ho, a pretty one you found, then, Cal?” Torl clucked his tongue. “Now what would sister Laura have to say?”

Cal snorted, already feeling a wave of relaxation from the Washpill. The second one always did the trick. Better living through chemistry! “Laura? Laura wouldn’t know what a good time was if it walked up and asked the time of day. About the only joy Laura gets out of life is when she gets stuck into one of those blip-ships of hers.” Cal shuddered as a wave of regret swept through him. He hadn’t seen Laura in months and he missed her badly. “Anyway, Torl, I am serious here.” He rattled the stiff holograph chart. “Unless we make some significant changes, we are going to have to report the exact same results to Friend Lasster as last quarter. Namely, absolutely zip!”

The supervisor pursed his lips and tapped ash into a tray. Smoke wound around his head in translucent threads. “Don’t you like it here, Cal?” he asked with a casual, encompassing gesture. “A world light-years from stuffy old Central’s nosy snuffling, assigned to a project already listed in the ‘improbable’ category. Plenty of recreational time on a planet with plenty of distractions, several fascinating alien races, an interesting ecology … and a healthy salary.”

Cal shook his head. “I’ve heard this one too many times, Torl. This place may be Wonder World to you, but frankly I sometimes wonder what the hell I’m doing on it. In case you haven’t noticed, I actually care about being a Quantaphys.” He chuckled. “Even more than having a good time with some hot numbers on the Slippery Track, no matter what you say. This is important stuff, Torl, explosive stuff, and I still can’t figure out why the Freaky Feddies put the project so damned close to Jaxdron space.”

“You know this is the closest habitable world to the Fault, Cal,” Torl responded coolly.

“Yeah. The Fault. Dr. Hindrix and all that. Well, I’m sorry, and you can attribute it to my recent less than successful graduation from adolescent rebelliousness, but I’m not sure if I buy the company line on physics. A lot of what they taught me doesn’t cut the mustard empirically.”

Torl smiled sardonically. “You certainly love your words, don’t you, Cal? Take it from an oldster. Enjoy what you’ve got. Don’t look too deeply into everything, it doesn’t bear scrutiny. And above all, don’t rock the boat, Cal Shemzak! You’re not the only person in it, you know.”

“Yeah. I know. “Cal got up, unable to hide the slight air of contempt in his voice. Even though this planet, Mulliphen, was many light-years from GalFedCent, even though it was just a meteor’s throw away from a number of Free Worlds, the iron fingers of the Friends hovered at the top of every string of every puppet here.

Mulliphen was one of the many worlds in the Human Zone considered “Earth standard.” The uniqueness of the world was that it lay so close to what Terran physicists had dubbed “the Fault,” a disruption of energy flow in Underspace. It was appropriate that the Federation use its beachhead upon this distant world to study the disruption with a team of physicists and engineers. Not that the Friends really gave a hoot in a hand basket about the beauties of physics, Cal Shemzak knew. They just wanted more power.

Cal Shemzak selected his breakfast—eggs, bacon, and toast; his usual—thankful that he didn’t have to eat the Shift-stew glop the natives sold to the Earthies. Not that Shift-stew wasn’t checked out first for its wholesomeness. Nutritionally it was absolutely top-drawer stuff. The greenish purple color was never particularly appetizing, though, at the best of times. And one never knew exactly what the source of the proteins, carbs, and fat was. The station had all kinds of rumors, to be sure, none savory, but the sweet-natured Mulliphenians merely smiled wistfully when questioned and sang a song or spoke of the weather.

Anyway, Shift-stew was definitely not a post-hangover kind of meal.

Cal Shemzak clopped his plate onto the table beside Dr. Ornix. “Sorry, Torl. Maybe you’re right. Besides, what can I do?”

Torl’s face seemed to relax at this, which was just what Cal wanted. No good letting the management know your true feelings. He was very close to getting a real tachyonic tailspin from the tonal to the naugul, and the boys in charge would have fits if they ever realized the implications of his work.

“Revolutionary” was the only word that fit, and any form of revolution turned the Friends a little red around the gills. At the best of times the leaders of the Federation government were called benevolent tyrants by their opposition, and though Cal Shemzak somewhat questioned the descriptive noun, he definitely doubted the preceding adjective.

“You are a welcome addition to the team, Cal,” Dr. Torlos Ornix said. “I suppose it’s understandable that your innovative mind champs at the bit that feeds you.”

Cal Shemzak concealed his chuckle at this, concentrating on getting his food down.

Breakfast dishes were pushed to one side and the two scientists were absorbed in studying the holocharts when the Jaxdron struck like hammers from the sky.

They first felt it as a vibration deep in the guts of the Matrix Generator.

“What’s going on here?” Dr. Torlos Ornix said, staring down at his cup of tea as it clattered in its saucer. Cal Shemzak’s coffee mug wobbled off the table and shattered on the floor, splashing the men’s shoes with the remains of its contents.

“I don’t know!” Cal shouted. His teeth ached from the subauditory rumble; he lost his vision momentarily as the Visual Augmenter ejected its crystalline components onto the table before they could shatter in his eye. This should not happen, Cal Shemzak realized. The vibration buffers on the generator were the most sophisticated in the universe.

“We’ve got to get down to the engines,” Torl was saying as the sound overwhelmed him, rising from a gravelly hum into unbearable volume, then modulating to a siren-like keening. Tor clamped his hands to his ears. His eyes bulged from their sockets. The sound seemed to rip Cal’s breath from his lungs. One moment he was sitting, the next he found himself lying on the floor.

“Get out,” he yelled as he strained to lift himself up. “We’re sitting on a volcano.”

A thin stream of blood leaked down Dr. Ornix’s left earlobe, dripping into his neat beard. He clung to the table, which was bolted to the floor. The high keen lowered to a steady throb, and Cal became aware of people screaming. He knew that, on the lower levels, people would be scurrying up ladders, climbing stairs, getting out.

Then the explosion came.

It hurled Cal Shemzak off his feet and slammed him into a wall. A girder fell onto the table, smashing it into the floor, barely missing Dr. Ornix, who crawled away beneath the rain of plastic and carbon-fibers. From below, a kind of obscene gargling sound arose. From the central well shaft connecting the generator’s subterranean bulk and the surface operations—solar interaction, atmosphere conditioning, temperature control—a geyser rose like a breath from hell. Fire, shifting curtains of energy, firecracker blossoms of color gathered into a searing maelstrom.

Momentarily stunned, Cal recovered, picked himself up, and ran to Dr. Ornix. “This way,” he called. The doctor did not resist as Cal tugged at him. One thing to say about the Fed’s projects—they did not stint on safety. Their emergency precautions were as modern and as thorough as possible. Cal guided Dr. Ornix to the nearest blow-pod. “Help me uncycle the door,” he cried. Dr. Ornix nodded and together, as the building began to buckle and crack and dissolve around them, they turned the locking wheel. After a moment of resistance it spun. The door opened. Cal pushed his companion into the padded cell, then followed, closing the door behind him.

“Come on, man!” he yelled at the dazed Ornix. “Strap yourself in!” Cal pushed the eject button, then used the ten seconds it took for the pod to activate to buckle into the molded cushion.

Despite the padding, despite the comfortable design of the escape pod, when it rocketed away from the Generator Building the experience was akin to rolling bare-assed down a rocky slope. Dr. Ornix lost consciousness. Cal’s world whirled head over heels as the pod lifted into a short trajectory, then headed downward into the Catchfield two hundred meters away.

Unfortunately, the Catch field was off. When the pod landed, it landed hard, and if not for the cushioning, Cal knew, he and the doctor would have resembled a bowl of Shift-stew moments after impact. When the spherical pod finally rolled to a stop, Cal felt as though his arms and legs had been pulled from their sockets. He seemed a series of aches linked together to form a human being.

Painfully, the taste of blood coppery in his mouth, he unfastened the buckles and pushed away the cushion straps. “Torl,” he said. “Wake up.” He slapped the doctor’s face lightly. “We’ve got to get out of here!”