Weird Space 2: Satan's Reach (13 page)

To the smartcore she said, “Bring up a schematic of the sector and all the habitable worlds and star stations between Tarrasay and the rim world of Kallasta.” She glanced at the Vetch. “My guess is that he’ll make at least one stop between here and Kallasta, for refuelling if for nothing else.”

Kreller flung its head back in an affirmative, then leaned forward and stared at the screen.

The schematic showed Tarrasay and Kallasta as shining points of light, with three smaller points in between. She brought up details of the first one, a star station known as Amethyst, eighteen light years from Tarrasay; the station was a vast chaotic hub swollen with modular accretions, a stop-over for ships in transit to the rim and a home to a million citizens. The second was a world known as Teplican, uninhabited according to the most recent records. The third world was Vassatta, a planet with a highly eccentric orbit around its primary.

Kreller said, “Amethyst Station is the closest, and therefore the most likely place Harper would stop.”

She nodded, and brought up the schematic showing the ion trails leading from Tarrasay. She homed in on the two likely candidates, both indicating small ships in the category of Harper’s, heading towards the star station.

Janaker smiled to herself. “We’ve got the bastard,” she said. “Now we keep our distance and follow them to the station.”

“And then?”

“Then we assess the situation and take it from there.”

She told Kreller she was going to get a little shut eye and hurried from the bridge.

S
HE WAS AWOKEN
a while later by the insistent buzzing of her wrist-com. “Developments,” Kreller said. “Get yourself to the bridge.”

Her scout ship was small: the bridge, a lateral corridor giving onto two cabins, the engine-room aft and, on the deck below, a cargo hold and a storeroom. She stepped from her cabin and was on the bridge in seconds. She slipped into the couch beside Kreller and stared at the screen, which appeared to show a deep-sea fish, all warts and barbels. She glanced at the Vetch. “You didn’t tell me you were into natural history.”

He indicated the screen. “It’s one of the ships we detected earlier, and it appears to be trailing Harper.”

“You sure?”

“Well, it’s an Ajantan ship, and Ajanta is where Harper rescued the girl.”

“So you think...?”

“Clearly, they want her back – or intend to punish Harper for taking her. I’ve looked up information on their culture. They’re a... a barbaric race, to put it mildly. In the Vetch system they would have been wiped out centuries ago.”

She stared at him. “Don’t you think that a little... excessive?”

“The Ajantans enslave the humans on their planet with a drug, to which the humans become addicted. Then the Ajantans take the humans and... and perform sexual congress upon these individuals. In the course of which, the aliens secrete chemicals which are poisonous to the human metabolism.”

Janaker stared at the hideous Ajantan ship. “And the authorities allow this?”

The Vetch barked what might have been a laugh. “What authorities? The Reach is lawless... and apparently the humans on Ajanta are quite happy with the situation. They exist in a drugged bliss for years before they are... taken.”

“Delightful,” she said. She indicated the alien ship. “So how does this alter things?”

“I can discern both benefits and disadvantages.”

“We can be pretty certain we’re on the right trail,” she said, “and so we just follow the Ajantans until they catch up with Harper. But... then the fun begins. We’ll have to fight off the amphibians before we snatch the telepath.”

“Just so. The situation is fluid, at the moment. My advice would be to hang back, assess the situation as it develops, and be ready to act at all times.”

“I wouldn’t disagree with that,” she said. “Do you know the weapons capability of the Ajantans?”

He flicked his chin. “Negative. No information available. But as they are a star-faring civilisation, we would be safe to assume their ship possesses a fairly sophisticated armoury.”

She slipped from her couch, fetched a beer for herself and a container of water for Kreller.

They sat in silence for a while, until Kreller said, surprising her, “You keep your bridge, if I might make the comment, in a state of disorder and filth.”

“Now you’re sounding like my mother,” she said. “She was always telling me to clean my bedroom.” She stared around the cramped bridge, at the discarded beer cartons, greasy food trays, the miscellaneous streaks of unknown fluid that marked the worn surfaces of the consoles and couches and made the deck a sticky mess.

She shrugged. “Home comfort,” she said. “I’ve always worked alone in the past, haven’t had to consider other people’s refined sensibilities.”

Kreller flicked out a hand. “And who are all these people?”

She stared around at the pix of all the women she’d known, going back years. Some images were old and faded, others new and shiny. “Lovers,” she said.

Kreller leaned forward and stared at several images closely. He turned to Janaker. “They appear to be all women,” he said.

“That’s right.”

At the last count there were two hundred – two hundred smiling faces staring out at her from all around the bridge, reminding her of all the pleasure and the pain, the good times and the bad.

“The term ‘lover,’” Kreller said, “suggests that you mated with these people. But how is that possible?”

“Mated as in made love, yes. Though of course we can’t mate to the point where we produce offspring.” She looked at the Vetch. “Do you have a problem with that?”

He avoided her eyes. “We Vetch consider such practices immoral. The point of two beings coming together is to produce a litter.”

She smiled. “And I always thought the point of two people – humans, at any rate – ‘coming together’ was to love each other and have fun.”

“Such behaviour is against everything that is natural,” Kreller said.

She sighed. “You sound like a few politicians from way back I’ve heard about, in unenlightened times.” She shook her head. “Look, my kind of love happens, between two
natural
beings, so how can that be called
unnatural
?”

The Vetch looked at her. “You are a strange person, Sharl Janaker.”

She smiled. “You’re not the first one to say that,” she murmured. “Right, I’m not going to be lectured at by an alien on how to live my life, so I’m out of here. Call me if anything happens. On second thoughts, don’t bother. I need my sleep.”

She pushed herself from the couch and hurried from the bridge.

CHAPTER SIX

M
IRO
T
ESNOLIDEK HAD
been a human being, once.

Now no one was sure what he was – or even if he was still ‘he’ and not ‘it.’ Even Miro himself had no real idea what he had become.

Harper preferred to think of his old friend as still human, however, and to think of him as ‘he’, even though the label human might be stretching the definition. They had been through a lot together, before Miro’s metamorphosis – and it had been Harper who had saved Miro’s life back on Stanislav, three years ago. He often wondered whether it might have been kinder just to let him die.

Now Miro stumped around
Judi
, scoping its superstructure with his one good eye.

Harper followed, keeping his distance. Miro was unpredictable. There was no telling when he might lash out with one of his chitinous claws, not that it would be Miro doing the lashing.

In his lucid moments, Miro often joked that he was the only human-alien in the Reach with Tourette’s syndrome.

“What do you think?” Harper asked, not for the first time.

Miro dragged himself around the ship. He growled something, or rather the thing he had become growled at Harper.

In his younger days, Miro had been tall and slim. Now he was grotesque, bloated. He had been tanned, muscular – but now very little of his skin was visible beneath the grating plaques of grey shell. He clanked as he walked. What had been his face – a very handsome face, as Harper recalled – was covered by a mask of warted tegument, through which one piercingly blue eye peered.

This eye shuttled back and forth, taking in the ship.

Not long after Harper had hauled Miro from the swamp on Stanislav, during the early stages of the metamorphosis, he had made the mistake of attempting to read his friend’s mind... or what remained of it. He’d read the agony of the human being buried beneath... something else. That something else was alien, and seemingly as confused, as terrified, and in just as much pain as Miro himself.

Harper had vowed never to read his mind again.

“I think it can be done,” Miro said now, surprising Harper with his cogency. He had moments of lucidity, but they came and went.

“But how quickly?”

The bright blue eye rolled to regard Harper. “A day, if I drop everything else.”

Miro suddenly darted towards Harper. “
Yesh sankrat! Yesh! Yesh!
” An arm swung, terminating in a lethal claw. Harper ducked and the claw whistled millimetres above his head. “
Yesh!
”

Harper backed off, putting five metres between himself and the creature Miro had become. He stood and watched his friend warily. Miro slumped, the plates of his bloated chest rising and falling with his uneven breathing.

“
Yesh, sankratash!
” Miro cried, turning and stomping away across the ringing deck of the hangar.

Harper followed at a distance. They passed a couple of small starships in for repair, Miro’s engineers and apprentices clambering over their superstructure.

Miro squeezed through a door into the room he used as his office. Harper paused outside and peered in through the window in the door. He waited until Miro had climbed into his cage and given a voice command for the bars to lock. Only then did Harper push through the door and sit down across the room from his friend.

Miro rested in a seat adapted from the sling of an old star-liner. An analgesic hypodermic on the end of a waldo dangled from the ceiling like a scorpion’s tail. As Harper watched, the needle descended, inserted itself between the scales on Miro’s pachydermous back, and released its sedative load.

“Ah... Christ, but that’s better.” Miro laughed. “I feel almost human again.”

It never failed to amaze Harper how, despite his condition, Miro managed to maintain a sense of humour.

“It’s good to see you, Miro,” he said.

“And you too. It’s been a year or more. What you been doing with yourself?”

Miro liked to hear the stories of Harper’s travels across the face of the Reach; through them he lived vicariously, visiting worlds no longer open to him. “Crossed the Reach three times since we last met, Miro. Nearly won a fortune on Constance...” He told the story again, even though on meeting the mechanic less than an hour ago he’d told the same tale; Miro had seemed lucid then, but soon after had begun to phase. He often forgot what he’d heard just before the alien within him gained ascendancy.

“And you want work done on the old ship?”

He’d outlined his needs in detail earlier, too, but obviously Miro had forgotten. “I want weapons mounted, fore and aft. Void capable, with a range of up to a million kilometres. And not just pea-shooters. You said it could be done.”

Miro shifted his bulk, heavy plaques scraping. “I did?” He nodded his domed head. “I don’t see why not.”

“You said it’d take a day, if you dropped everything else.”

“I’ve got a quartet of decent Housmann Defenders that would fit nicely. That’s not the problem, though.”

“What is?”

“I could fit the mechanisms, no problem, and it wouldn’t be expensive.”

“What are we talking, including labour?”

“To you, a thousand.”

Earlier, on arriving at Amethyst Station, he’d taken the ten thousand Ajantan units and changed them for a more stable currency, walking away from the deal with six thousand standard Reach units.

“I can afford that, but what’s the problem?”

Miro leaned forward, his scales scraping the bars of his cage. “It’s not the mechanisms, nor fitting them, that’s the expensive part. It’s the missiles themselves. They don’t come cheap.”

“How much?”

“A thousand each.”

Harper whistled. “And I’d need at least four...” Which, along with the cost of fitting, would leave him with just a thousand standard units.

He had no idea how much Zeela’s treatment might cost, but he guessed a lot more than one thousand. He had scant savings, few assets other than his ship itself... and the steamboat engine which he had been hoping to hang onto and sell later.

Miro said, “So... what do you say?”

“Let me think it over, Miro, okay?” He pushed himself from the padded chair and crossed the room to the viewscreen, and stared out into space.

He marvelled as always at the grotesque complexity of Amethyst Station. It was so called because, hundreds of years ago when it had been constructed by the engineers of Lansdowne in the Expansion, it was said to have resembled a purple, faceted gemstone. Over the centuries, however, since its sale to junk dealers in the Reach and its subsequent removal from Expansion territory, it had undergone a slow process of change, with a thousand accretions building up from its original core. It looked like some nightmarish coral reef now, shaped like a spinning top but hideously unbalanced, scaled and patched and extended with tentacles and pseudopods.

A bit like poor Miro himself, Harper thought.

He watched the tiny shapes of starships flitting from the void and heading for the letterbox openings of the reception berths.

Might one of them belong to the bounty hunters, he wondered, or the Ajantans?

He turned from the window and nodded. “Agreed. Go ahead and do the work. I have little choice, really.”

Miro turned his bulk awkwardly to regard Harper. “You mind telling me what kind of trouble you’re in?”

He’d done so already, an hour ago, but he didn’t mind repeating his tale of woe. He told Miro about the Ajantans, and the bounty hunters, and how he had little hope of outrunning them both before he reached Kallasta. His only really hope was to stand up and fight.