STAR HOUNDS -- OMNIBUS (3 page)

Dr. Torlos Ornix woke into something close enough to consciousness for him to be moved about. Cal removed the doctor’s harnesses, then kicked open the escape hatch.

They crawled out onto the grassy field. Other pods had already landed. Generator technicians struggled out, bloody, burned, bruised. Another pod landed hard and rolled into a stand of vlack trees. A group of natives—short humanoids with three sets of hands and long stiff hair covering their bodies—helped the occupants out.

“Oh, my dear God!” came a cry. Cal Shemzak turned to see Shyla Armstile, assistant chief operations director and his occasional girlfriend point back to the compound.

The Generator Building was constructed like a mountain: a mountain with levels, a subtle pyramid of levels, much of its operational tubing and piping external rather than internal, but formed in an aesthetically pleasing fashion.

Now the building that housed the Casual Field Matrix Generator seemed to shiver as though it had turned to flesh and that flesh were terribly cold. Chunks of the structure had fallen off. Fluid spewed. Electrical lines sparked.

The energy geyser that Cal had observed in the core well was slowly rising from the peak of the mountain sized building, reaching for the sky.

And then the whole building simply disappeared.

It phased out of existence, like a dream upon waking.

Moments later there was a loud thunderclap as the surrounding air rushed in to fill the vacuum.

People still dragged themselves from their pods, stunned. The natives danced to and fro, helping them, chittering their squeaking language, pointing back to where the Generator Building had once stood, and to the devastated periphery.

A silence hung over all, an eye-of-the-hurricane silence. Cal Shemzak staggered over to attend to Dr. Ornix, who was leaning now against the battered casing of the pod.

“What could have caused … ?” Torl muttered through broken teeth, gazing blankly over Cal’s shoulder. “Oh, my God!”

Cal swiveled. At first he saw nothing—and then he saw the ship, descending.

Cal had never seen a Jaxdron ship before. He had seen pictures, and the models used in the war films that had become popular since the start of the First Galactic War five years ago. All had been inaccurate. Cal thought with irony as the real McCoy thundered down on retrorockets and shimmering repulsor beams. The human renderings of the whip-ships were too symmetrical. The Jaxdron ship that landed a hundred yards away was a jumble of alien geometry, a jagged cluster of angles and rods and nameless shapes.

“The Jaxdrons,” Cal said. “They did this. But how?”

“Where are our defense ships?” Dr. Ornix said, suddenly lucid in terror.

Cal shook his head. “Orbital debris, no doubt.”

Humans and Mulliphenians were already running away from the imposing shape of the Jaxdron ship.

“Let’s get out of here,” Ornix said.

“But where to?”

Before they could do anything, however, a triangular shaped piece of the Jaxdron ship detached itself from the hull and rocketed over the field, knifing through the air.

Cal looked over to Ornix to see if the man had any suggestions. The doctor was staring down, horrified, at the pinkie finger of his left hand.

The finger glowed red for two seconds, then pulsed to blue, then back to red.

“Oh Jesus!” Ornix said. “But it was an approved prosthesis!” He looked up with a stunned expression. “It was from Pax Industries, on Walthor!” Angrily, he tore the hand from his arm. Gray fluid flowed from his stump. The pinkie still pulsed and the digits writhed.

The swift Jaxdron air-sled swooped toward them.

Dr. Ornix looked up at Cal. “It must be you they want,” he whispered harshly.

“What are you talking about?” Cal said, suddenly not certain of his grip on reality.

“Things about you that you are not aware of,” Ornix said, reaching into a jacket pocket. “Aspects of your work. We were so blind, so stupid not to see!” He pulled out a mini-needler and aimed it at Cal. “I’m sorry, Shemzak, but we can’t let them have you.”

Cal Shemzak should have died then: the needler beam was directed right at his heart. But Dr. Torlos Ornix froze, eyes glazed over. A wisp of smoke rose from his head. A puff of fire licked up his scalp. He flopped forward, legs twitching, a hole burned through his head.

Cal became aware of a harsh humming from behind him. He spun around and found himself facing the grav-sled. Sensor bubbles clung to the underside of the gray slab, like multifaceted fly’s eyes.

Cal Shemzak remembered GalFed’s orders. “Die before you let the Jaxdron take you. Die for your Friends.” Cal looked down at the weapon still gripped in Dr. Ornix’s hand. The way Cal Shemzak lived his life demanded only one course of action.

“Hi,” he said, raising his arms in surrender and trying to smile through his headache. “Let’s be buddies.”

The stun beam hit him hard.

C
al Shemzak groaned as the last of the memory swept through him. He tried to stand, to get off this table, to walk, to do something to get his circulation flowing again, but could not.

He looked up at the ceiling and the clouds seemed to move, as though making way for a clearer view of sky.

A peace settled upon him. He lay back upon the table, no longer cold, but calm, only vaguely aware of pink light spilling down from above him.

The headache was gone. All his pain was gone.

“Laura,” he whispered before sleep sent him to an even gentler place.

He loved her.

I
t was the kind of world that might have inspired Dante. An uninformed visitor might see it as a planet of the damned, a world of the doomed. Not that it was barren or hellishly hot, or tundra-cold. On the contrary, its physical properties made it look like some tropical paradise. An eighty-six-degree axial tilt and a regular orbit, combined with a high water-land ratio, made it a planet lush with life, both flora and fauna. Three separate kinds of intelligent alien life—all agricultural/hunters and preindustrial—had developed on the verdant continents. These races were, on the whole, peaceful until Discovery Day. Then the Federation arrived. They saw that this world, listed on the charts as AB 40, second planet of six around the primary Delta Theta, was perfect for the terraforming techniques Federation scientists had perfected. They created an ideal prison world of magnificent utility, far enough from the main thoroughfares of galactic life not to be examined too closely by individuals with a conscience.

The Intelligence operative deep in the corridors of the World’s Heart Computer knew this. She also knew that an agent with access to the core data banks within the Block—the castlelike monolith that controlled the planet—could steal priceless information of incredible variety. That was why she had come here, posing as a biotech specialist, and infiltrated the upper-echelon of the Controllers of the Industries. That was why she was padding down the steel corridors as stealthily as a bit of hidden datum in a mainframe. The woman had come to open that core, a job deemed totally impossible by the experts.

But the woman was no ordinary intelligence agent.

The guard at the last door was a Conglomerate—a strange fusion of human, alien, and machine manufactured by the ecoindustrial process of this weird world. His antennae wobbled as he reached out to take her pass. Other appendages positioned the identiscreen sensors for retinal readings and additional security checks.

The woman reached across the desk swiftly, and a stunning jolt of electricity at just the right amperage passed from her hand to a control plate in the creature’s squat neck, rendering it unconscious. Its oddly jointed limbs twitched as she carefully removed the creature’s identity wires. She unbuttoned the loose workblouse she wore, lifted skin flaps, and attached the jacks to her own subcutaneous biotech apparatus.

For all practical purposes, for the next few minutes, until the system destabilized, the security devices would read her as the guard. It had taken a lot of hard work to buy just a short time—and if she wasn’t done within the time allowed, the security system would align on her and burn her body to a cinder.

The agent smiled as she tapped in the opening codes. There was no possible way to finish the job wearing this security identity; she needed more time than it would provide. And when her identity dissolved, and the alarms rang, and all of the multibillion-credit defense weaponry was alerted that an unwelcomed entity was moving about in its most private places …

Well, she really wasn’t certain what would happen then. No one had ever made it back to tell her.

But one thing was for sure, the agent thought to herself confidently as a static hiss marked the opening of the thick door: when those klaxons blew, and those guns had her in their photonet cross hairs, the drudgery of this assignment would end and the real fun would begin.

Quickly she slipped the guard’s needle pistol from its holster and ran through the open door into the unknown.

Immediately she was presented with a choice: three separate corridors confronted her at thirty-degree angles. Tubing and wiring gleamed softly in the corridors’ ambient lighting. The smell was, if anything, even more antiseptic than in the rest of the building, the familiar ozonish taste of electricity in the air.

Though she did not know which was the correct way, the agent hardly paused. The rubberized soles of her shoes smacked the tile floor of the rightmost corridor almost instantly.

It took less than thirty seconds to reach a location which, according to her cyborg sensors, was a tapping place. She unscrewed a panel and found the appropriate neural grid. Less than another forty-five seconds later her biotech consciousness was roving freely through the systems, piercing past the macros of the languages the vast computer understood, skirting even the machine codes, and diving directly into endless kilometers of circuitry, understanding their complexities with a power that was beyond analysis, close to intuition.

At her touch the entire security network shut down. The agent chided herself; her estimates had been wrong. She wouldn’t have to dodge laser beams after all. Damn, and she had been looking forward to some significant exercise here!

With only a few moments’ pause, her mind intuitively found its way through to the top-secret data banks, tapped what they needed, then sped back to the agent’s corporeal form.

Dizzily she blinked. Even though she was accustomed to biotech transference, the stepping up of her mind through the macro circuits of the computer, the withdrawal was a heady rush, a sensation of almost druglike intensity. But she had what she needed stored in the nanobanks wrapped around her internal organs, and she had made the necessary adjustments inside the computer; no sense sticking around.

Quickly she ran back to the security guard, plugged its identity wires back, retraced her path through the other security measures she had passed to get there, then boarded an elevator.

The Governor of this world lived on the top floor of this massive citadel, in a penthouse restricted to a very few. With her new powers over the controlling computer network, the agent was inside the man’s quarters within minutes.

He was sound asleep in his bed, snoring.

The agent walked to his bedside, cocked a forefinger, and placed it against the man’s temple.

“Bang,” she said. “You’re dead.”

The man jumped up, startled, but the agent pushed him back, holding him down, fingers nimbly finding pressure points. She laughed.

“Who are you?” the man demanded.

“My name, Governor Bartlick, is Laura Shemzak. I am an operative of the Federation. Your security measures have been tested and found wanting. You will receive a report soon on the necessary methods for strengthening them, after my return to Earth from Walthor.”

The man blinked. “But how did you get in here?”

“That will all be in the report, Governor.” She released him and stepped back, holding up her empty hands to show that she meant no harm. “Now, may I have a drink? I’m very thirsty”.

Still bemused, the man put on a dressing gown. The agent—Laura Shemzak—followed him into his office, where she sat quite arrogantly behind the man’s desk and accepted a bottled soda. She also used a few names and phrases that established the validity of her claimed identity. Governor Bartlick was then eager to please this astonishing visitor.

“I must admit,” the gray-haired man said, pouring himself a drink more alcoholic than soda, “that I am astonished. I personally selected the security chief. I hope you will stay long enough to go over this affair in some detail, so that we can take measures against this happening again. What with the Jaxdron war and everything, the Federation simply cannot afford to have a vulnerable security system here at Pax Industries. Especially given the sort of thing that happened on Mulliphen.”

Laura sat up. “Mulliphen? What happened on Mulliphen?”

“Oh yes, you would not have heard. Terrible business. Jaxdron attack. Just received a communiqué on FedNews this evening.”

Laura stood. “Jaxdron attack?”

“Yes, I suppose that would interest you,” the Governor said. “The news release is on that data pad.”

It did not take long for Laura to find the report that Governor Bartlick referred to.

She read it quickly, and then she read it again.

She took a long breath.

“When’s the next flight out of here?” Laura demanded.

“Can’t you stay?” the man asked. “I really would like you to speak to the security chief personally.”

“That’s impossible,” she said curtly. Then her voice softened. “According to this, Governor, the Jaxdron kidnapped one of the scientists working on the project on Mulliphen, someone of extreme importance to me.”

“But you can’t just break into my computer system and then leave!” the Governor said.

“Can’t I?” Laura said. “Governor, I’ll work up a full report in transit to Earth. In the meantime, just watch my smoke!”