Weird Space 2: Satan's Reach (21 page)

Minutes later, though it felt much longer to Harper, the ship settled.

“Damage?” Harper enquired.

“Minimal. No shield breaches. Slight antennae damage.”

“And the Ajantan ship?”

The viewscreen showed what remained of the alien ship, an oddly stylised confetti of metal in the shape of a sphere, radiating slowly as the expanding blast-front carried debris through the grey of void-space.

“Very good,” Harper said. “Okay, full speed ahead to Vassatta.”

Beside him, Zeela was very quiet. She reached out and took his hand.

CHAPTER NINE

J
ANAKER WOKE SUDDENLY
, dragged her wrist-com from the bedside unit and stared at the dial. She’d been asleep for ten hours.

She sat up, and only then realised what had awoken her. The ship was going through a patch of turbulence. Flight through the void was normally smooth, so this could only mean that they were dropping through the atmosphere of their next port of call, Teplican.

She strapped on her wrist-com, pulled on her jacket and staggered from the cabin. The ship yawed and she careered from wall to wall as she made her way along the corridor to the bridge. The ship was on auto, and should have negotiated entry with more finesse than this. Teplican must be one hell of a stormy world, she thought.

Helsh Kreller sat in the pilot’s seat, staring through the viewscreen. As Janaker slumped into the co-pilot’s couch – irritated that the Vetch had appropriated
her
seat – she saw that they had yet to phase from the void.

She glanced across at Kreller. “I thought we were making landfall?”

The Vetch gestured at the swirling greyness and snapped, “Does it look as if we are?”

She squinted at the viewscreen and made out what appeared to be scraps of debris. “So are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

The Vetch stared ahead. “Harper used a missile on the leading Ajantan ship,” he said, “and destroyed it.”

She stared at him. “The
leading
Ajantan ship? Just how many of them are out there?”

“There were two,” he said. “I detected the second just three hours ago, hanging well back, before Harper destroyed the first one.”

“Destroyed...” she echoed. “You’re not joking, are you?”

“Of course I am. And what you see out there, those scraps of bulkhead and superstructure, and no doubt pieces of pulverised Ajantans, are figments of my imagination. As is the turbulence of the aftershock we’re riding.”

She stared across at him. “What the fuck,” she said, “has got into you since we left Amethyst?”

He was silent for a time, then said, “You could have reacted a lot faster than you did.”

She blinked, wondering what the hell he was talking about. Then she had it – Tesnolidek’s attack back at the station. “I reacted as fast as I was able to, Kreller. The monster moved before I knew what was happening.”

“You stood frozen, like a statue.”

She laughed. “Listen to you! He was attacking you, Kreller – and I didn’t see you get out of the way very fast, for all your claims of superior reactions.”

The Vetch turned to stare at her. “I am sure that, before you fired, you hesitated.”

“I was in shock, you bastard. I didn’t expect the attack. The very fact that I fired when I did probably saved your life. And why the hell,” she said, “would I deliberately hesitate? What are you trying to say?”

“You never wanted me along on this mission.”

She nodded. “True. I could have done this alone, without all this running around. Simply followed Harper to Kallasta and apprehended him there. But just because I didn’t want to be accompanied by an ugly, bad-tempered bastard like you doesn’t mean to say I want you dead. Get a fucking grip, Kreller!”

They sat in silence for a long time as the aftershock of the alien ship’s destruction abated. She asked at last, “How long before we land on Teplican?”

Kreller stared into the void. “We don’t.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I said, we don’t land on Teplican. We orbited the world some six hours ago and I decided that the wisest course of action was to avoid the planet.”

“Just when have you been making the decisions, Kreller? I seem to recall, back on Hennessy, you said that we were to work as equals.”

“You were sleeping. I made an orbit of Teplican, and what I saw down there decided me.”

“What you saw down there?”

He tapped the console set into the arm of his couch, and the scene on the viewscreen changed. She saw a blue world striated with thin cloud. He touched the controls again and the image magnified: a continent loomed, an inland lake.

“I traced Harper’s ion trail to where he landed not far from the base of a human scientific team. They are studying an alien ship... Look.”

The image jumped and Janaker made out the skeleton of a ship beside the lake; it had evidently been there for a long time, interior spars and girders corroded, panels fallen in or removed.

Kreller adjusted the magnification and homed in on a fin which had slipped sideways, allowing them to see the pattern etched on the metal of its surface.

She looked at the Vetch. “So this is what decided you not to land?”

“That is correct. It would be... dangerous for us to do so.”

“Would you mind explaining exactly why that is, Kreller?”

“I recognise the ship,” he said, “or rather the scroll-work on its superstructure. Several ships identical to this one landed in Vetch territory many years ago. They were very mysterious – as they were without a crew. They and the areas around them were quarantined, declared no-go areas, and it is only in the last few years that we have come to understand what the ships... harboured.”

She nodded, recalling something Commander Gorley had told her back on Hennessy. “Weird mind-parasites,” she murmured.

“Exactly. Which is why I decided against landfall.”

“They might still be... active, after so long?”

“According to scientific reports,” he said, “the parasites can lie quiescent for more than a century.”

“So Harper and the girl, and the scientific team down there...” She didn’t finish the sentence. “Did you say Teplican was uninhabited?”

“I accessed your ship’s smartcore. Records indicate that it was inhabited until shortly after the Weird ship arrived, approximately one hundred years ago.”

“So the colonists...”

The Vetch twitched his head in an affirmative. “The colonists, if they were infected, carried that infection to the Reach, and maybe beyond.”

“But that was a hundred years ago, right?” She shook her head. “The colonists would be dead by now...”

Kreller said, “My people’s scientists are working on the theory that the Weird parasites can pass themselves through generations, lying dormant in their hosts until they give birth, and then infecting the newborns.”

“Lying dormant...” she echoed, “until when?”

The Vetch spread his massive hands. “Until they deem the time is right? Until they have spread through the Reach, through the Expansion, through Vetch space, infiltrating our respective command structures?”

She shivered mentally. “That doesn’t bear thinking about, Kreller.”

“It is nevertheless a scenario that we must take into consideration in our fight against the Weird. And it increases the value of telepaths like myself... and Harper,” he finished.

“If he hasn’t gone and got himself infected,” she said.

“Quite.”

She glanced at him. “You’ve read infected minds, right?”

“Correct, back in my home system.”

“And... what did you do then, when you found...?”

He looked at her, his big bloodshot eyes unreadable. “It was incumbent upon me to... liquidate the infected,” he said.

She nodded. “Right.”

“When we apprehend Harper, I will scan him, and if he
is
infected...”

He let the sentence hang, then cleared the image of the alien ship from the screen and gestured at the void. “When Harper destroyed the first Ajantan ship, the second hung back beyond Harper’s range. We are following the remaining Ajantan ship. I have no idea of whether the aliens are aware of our presence. As for Harper, he’s no longer heading straight for Kallasta, but for the world of Vassatta.”

“So what do we do? Wait until he leaves Vassatta and head for Kallasta?”

The Vetch was silent for a time, before replying, “I am reluctant to do that. The remaining Ajantan ship is much larger than the first. I fear that they will have revenge in mind for the destruction of their fellows’ ship. If they are armed with missiles...” He gestured. “At present they are being cautious and hanging back, but that might change.”

She nodded. “So we make landfall on Vassatta and try to apprehend Harper there?”

“Harper
and
his ship,” he said. “I think that is the wisest course of action.”

She almost asked him, then, about Harper’s ship and his inordinate interest in it, but decided not to press the issue. He was still prickly about her so-called hesitation on Amethyst Station. The matter would no doubt arise when they eventually apprehended Harper.

She pushed herself from the couch. “I’m hungry,” she said. “You eaten?”

The Vetch made a grunting sound. “I should have brought my own food along,” he said. “It is an oversight I am beginning to regret. I will have meat, if you have any. And water.”

She fetched two self-heating trays of food from stores, along with water and a couple of beers for herself.

“Y
OU ARE A
strange woman, Sharl Janaker,” said the Vetch.

She opened her eyes and sat up. A greasy tray slid from her chest and joined all the others on the deck.

“I was almost asleep,” she said, yawning.

The Vetch was staring at her.

“What?” she said.

“I would like to know how you square your radicalism with the fact that you work for the Expansion authorities, which in your own words is a ‘repressive, totalitarian organisation’?”

She found a half-full carton of warm beer wedged between her hip and the couch and took a long swallow. She waved the empty container at him. “In my early days, I admit, that did bother me.”

“But not now?”

She pursed her lips, thought about it for a nano-second, and said, “Nope.”

“And why is that?”

She shrugged. “I worked it out this way: whatever I did, in whatever field I worked, I’d always be working in some way for the regime I despise – or even if I wasn’t directly working for the Expansion, then the very fact that I was a tax-paying consumer would be contributing to the success of the regime. The only thing I could really have done would have been to flee the Expansion.”

“For the Reach, like our friend Harper.”

She nodded. “But the opportunity never arose.”

Kreller regarded her and said, “But there are degrees of... complicity, shall we say? You could be a tax-paying consumer running a artist’s commune on Hennessy, and your conscience would at least be a little cleaner than it is now, no?”

She sat up, riled by this virtuous prig who, on his own admission, was a fully paid up member of the fascist elite in his own system. “Way I see it, Kreller, is this: I work as a bounty hunter because I have... morals.”

“I don’t see...” he interrupted.

“Other bounty hunters, Kreller, go after their man, or woman, and if the subject dies during the chase then so be it. Part of the job. Way they see it, the subject was scum anyway so he or she’s just dead scum now. But me... I’ve never killed a subject, Kreller. I don’t work that way, and my controller knows that. And because I’m good at my job, I always get my man, or woman.”

“And take them back to the authorities so that they can carry out what you were too squeamish to do.”

“They shouldn’t have broken the law in the first place...” she muttered.

The Vetch made an odd gesture. He held two fists in the air and brought them together so that they were joined but misaligned. He said, “I hear what you say, Janaker, but it doesn’t quite fit. You might not kill the criminals yourself, but you return them to the authorities who do.” He stared at her and, before she could respond, went on, “I have a theory about you.”

She snorted. “Oh, yeah?”

“Yes.” He indicated the pix of her lovers that covered every available vertical surface of the bridge. “Look, all these woman, the people you have engaged in sex with over the years.”

“You make it sound so romantic, Kreller. I loved some of those girls, you know?”

“Have you noticed something about them?”

She shrugged, staring around at the smiling faces. “They’re all cute?”

“They are all,” he said, “of a certain type. Small, blonde, and younger than you are, or rather were – going by the images in which you appear alongside them.”

“So what are you getting at, Kreller? What’s this great theory of yours?”

“My theory is that in engaging with these women, these physically small women, you are sublimating your guilt at working for a masculine fascist organisation.”

She stared at him, open-mouthed. “And what the fuck do you, a fascist alien prick yourself, know about human psychology, or come to that women’s psychology?”

“I know enough to believe that on some deep strata of your psyche you seek out lovers who are smaller than yourself, physically weaker than yourself, and maybe even mentally vulnerable, because this is a way of re-establishing some form of... control in your life, of compensating for the fact that, every working day, you are subjugated by the Man, in the form of the Expansion authorities.” He waved a hand with insufferable arrogance, and finished, “This might even account for the reason that you chose to be homosexual in the first place.”

She contained her anger, turned in her seat and stared at the bastard. “Listen up, you ugly fucker... For your information I didn’t choose to be lesbian – it’s who I am. I was attracted to girls from an early age, okay, before I knew the first thing about the political make up of the Expansion. So that fucks your theory, doesn’t it?”

He gestured, turning a placid hand. “It in no way disproves my theory that you are sublimating your guilt by seeking out small, physically weak, partners.”