Weird Space 2: Satan's Reach (6 page)

He could smell expended solid fuel and charged particles and the unmistakable reek of displaced, ionised air... and it was the finest perfume in the universe.

They stepped on the bodies of prostate Ajantans, crunching bones, stumbling once or twice but keeping their feet. He dragged an insensate Zeela after him. The headwind was abating, and with it the howling roar, and it could only be a matter of seconds before the tumbled aliens regained their feet and gave chase.

“What...?” Zeela cried, in response to his laughter.

“Salvation is what!” he yelled in return. “We’re saved, girl! Saved!”

The tunnel widened and a minute later they staggered into what had obviously been the Ajantans’ pleasure cavern, a vast chamber the size of a starship hangar... which was not that crazy a description.

Around the perimeter of the dome were the grisly remains of the aliens’ depravity, dozens of human corpses in varying stages of decomposition. Among them, startled
in
flagrante
by what had happened, several aliens lay staring about in a stunned stupor.

Not that Harper had eyes for the aliens...

Zeela came to sudden, shocked halt and stared at what filled the chamber. “What...?” she began.

“Welcome to the my ship,” he said.

He dragged her across the chamber towards the hatch of his ship, which slid open at their approach. He heard a cry behind him and turned. A lone Ajantan appeared in the mouth of the tunnel, raised its incendiary weapon and fired. Harper ducked, pulling Zeela with him, and the bolus of flame hurtled overhead and exploded against the ship’s carapace.

He pounded up the ramp, Zeela at his side, and seconds later threw himself into the ship. He commanded the hatch to shut and
Judi
to phase back into the void.

He held Zeela to him. It seemed oddly wrong to be static now, after so much hectic flight – but he told himself that they were safe at last, that they had survived, and seconds later he felt a vibration pass through the ship as they made the transition into the void.

He led Zeela to the recovery-room and had
Judi
prepare the med-pod. He laid her on the slide-bed, then removed the tattered dress from her torso to reveal a long, deep wound.

Zeela stared up at him.

“Don’t be alarmed,” he soothed. “You’ll be unconscious for up to a day, and the med-pod will do its work. By the time you wake up, we’ll be far away from here.”

The med-pod snaked an analgesic probe towards Zeela’s torso and eased itself into her flesh. Harper squeezed her hand.

“We’re
really
safe?” she said in wonderment.

“We’re really safe,” he said. “
Judi
scanned our approximate position – thanks to my wrist-com – located the chamber and phased into the void. Then it phased back into reality in the pleasure cavern.”

“Your co-pilot...” she said sleepily, “deserves a medal. I’m looking forward to... to thanking her.”

Harper smiled. “All in good time,” he said. “Now, sleep.”

She closed her eyes, and Harper eased the slide bed into the med-pod and shut the hatch.

He climbed wearily to the flight-deck and slumped into the pilot’s sling.

Through the viewscreen he watched the depthless, marmoreal swirl of the void.

“Good work,
Judi
,” he said, dog tired. He felt like laughing, or crying – he couldn’t decide which.

“Den,”
Judi
said, “I detect that the Ajantans sent a vessel into the void a matter of minutes after our departure. Judging by its course and velocity, I think it is following us.”

“Very well,” he said. It was not the easiest of tasks to chase a ship through the void, and he was confident his ship would lose the Ajantans. “Take evasive action and keep me posted.”

He closed his eyes and minutes later he was asleep.

CHAPTER THREE

S
HARL
J
ANAKER OFTEN
said, when drunk, that she hated the Expansion authorities but took their filthy lucre in order to make ends meet. She spent a lot of time drunk these days, between missions, and her big mouth got her into a lot of trouble. The Expansion was seething with spies and petty informers, and only the fact that she was good at her job had kept her out of jail.

She left her two-person scout ship at the port on Hennessy’s World and took the monorail to the towering needle of the Expansion headquarters.

She was in a pretty foul mood on two counts. Her lover of three months, a slight blonde as physically unlike her as it was possible to imagine, had ditched her – and, while trying to get over the girl with a holiday on the resort world of Khios, she’d had word from her contact in the Expansion, Commander Gorley, to get back to Hennessy pretty damned quick. She’d felt like telling Gorley to go fuck himself, but that would only have resulted in him sending a team of militia to rough her up and drag her back, kicking and screaming.

She wondered what he wanted this time. It had to be pretty important for him to contact her personally. Usually he delegated the task to one of his crawling minions.

She rode the upchute on the outside of the needle, staring out over the multiple waterfalls that made the planet a prime tourist destination. A dozen stepped lagoons tipped perfect arcs of water from one level to the next; rainbows and snowbirds played in the spume. Normally Janaker might have enjoyed the view, but not today.

When she reached Gorley’s penthouse office, the bastard kept her waiting for thirty minutes.

She strode back and forth in reception, fuming, and was about to hammer on Gorley’s door when his PA smiled sweetly and said, “Commander Gorley will see you now, Ms Janaker.”

She paced into his office and towered over his desk, staring down at the thin, rat-like man. In her experience he was typical of Expansion high-ups, physically puny specimens – and often psychologically pathetic, too – who compensated for their inadequacies by wielding cruel and indiscriminate power.

Gorley sat back in his mock-leather recliner and steepled his fingers before his pinched mouth. “Sit down, Janaker,” he said, indicating a chair with a limp hand. “You know how your constant pacing irritates me.”

Or rather
, she thought,
when I stand over him he feels intimidated.

She sat on the edge of the chair and snapped, “Must be important, Gorley, to drag me all the way back from Khios. What’s happened? A jail break? Some assassin’s after your blood?”

He smiled, and it wasn’t a pleasant sight on a face so rodent-like. “I have militia trained for that eventuality, Janaker. They wouldn’t get within a light year of here.”

I could give them some pointers
, she thought.

She wondered if her dislike of Gorley was merely a sublimation of her guilt at taking the coin of the Expansion. He represented everything she hated about the repressive, totalitarian regime, the regime she had colluded with for the past ten years.

“So who is it this time?”

“First, some background... You’ve heard the rumours?”

She sat back, staring at him. Massive troop movements across the Expansion to the planets of Rocastle and Woczjar, a sudden increase in the budget in the area of weaponry development – and, from a contact in the marines, word that the colony world of Cassandra had been evacuated.

She nodded. “Sure I’ve heard the rumours. The Vetch are sharpening their claws again.”

Gorley laughed. “How misinformed you are, Janaker. In fact, relations between ourselves and the Vetch have never been better, as you will soon find out. No... this is a threat altogether more serious than any that might be posed by the Vetch.”

She stared at him. “A threat? So where do I come in?” A threat that serious could only mean extraterrestrials other than the Vetch.

He tapped his pursed lips, considering. “I want to impress upon you the seriousness of this matter. Thus informed, you will realise the importance of your mission.” He paused, then went on, “The Expansion is being invaded.”

She looked past Gorley’s head, through the plate glass, to where thin clouds like silver ribbons drifted. “I’ve heard there’s been trouble on Rocastle and Woczjar,” she said.

“And on other planets, though we’re trying to keep that under wraps.”

“So who’s invading us?”

He reached out and touched a sensor on his desk. A screen rose from its surface and he flicked it around so that she could see the images.

She sat forward, squinting. “What the hell are they?”

“We call them after the name given them by the first humans to come into contact with these... these creatures. The Weird.”

She grunted a laugh. “Suits them.”

The screen showed a succession of creatures: some were humanoid, empurpled and featureless – like unfinished clay models of the human form – while others were vast, bloated, and vaguely whale-like. Some were thin and gargoylish, and others as squat and repulsive as giant toads.

“And they’re
all
the Weird?” she asked.

“All,” he said. “They go through stages, change from one form to the next as they... individually evolve.”

She looked at him. “So where are they from? Which planet? As I see it, we go in, bomb the fuck out of their world, and job done.”

“That’s just the problem, Janaker. They’re from no single planet.”

“I don’t get it. They have to be. Where the hell else can they be from?”

“They’re from the realm, the dimension, that underpins our reality...”

“The void? You’re saying that these ugly bastards inhabit the
void
?”

She was about to ask why humanity had never come across them before, but Gorley forestalled her.

“Not the void,” he said. “They’re from
beyond
the void.”

She sat back and stared at him. “This all sounds kind of screwy to me, Gorley. How do you know all this?”

“Because, six months ago I ventured with a team of marines through Vetch space to the Devil’s Nebula. We discovered the world where these creatures first manifested themselves. They... they erupted into our reality through a manufactured portal and enslaved a human colony there.”

“I didn’t know there was a human colony in the Devil’s Nebula.”

“Well, you learn something every day, Janaker. I saw these creatures at first hand. I saw their portal... and I saw the human beings they’d enslaved.”

“But if the portal is all the way across Vetch territory...” she began.

“Janaker,” he said, “it appears that they now have the ability, the wherewithal, to open portals at random across the Expansion.”

“So we find where they’ve opened these portals and blast the holy shit out of them.”

His steely stare was all the more intimidating because it was accompanied by a withering silence. “What the fuck, to employ your favoured vernacular, do you think we’ve been trying to do on Rocastle, Woczjar and Cassandra?”

She opened her mouth to say something, but no words came to mind.

“We’ve thrown everything at these portals – neutron bombs, hydrogen missiles... Between you and me, we’ve reduced Rocastle to rubble – it’s nothing more than an asteroid a tenth the size of what it was, and the portal is still functioning.”

“And the... Weird?”

“They are still sending through their... creatures, which have the ability to exist perfectly well in the vacuum of deep space. We’re hard pressed to destroy these as they emerge.”

She thought about it. “So... these Weird... what is it exactly they want from us? Territory, presumably?”

“They want
us
, Janaker. They want to absorb us, our knowledge, our culture. They aren’t an enemy in the accepted sense of the world. They aren’t... evil, exactly, because to be evil they must have some understanding of us as creatures in our own right.”

Her throat was dry. “And they don’t?”

“The Weird are...
is
... a hive mind. They do not see us as sentient individuals. Rather, they see the human race – and the Vetch race, too – as the sum total of our intellectual culture. It’s this that they want to assimilate, absorb, understand. And to do this they ingest us as individuals and see no wrong in doing so.”

“You paint,” she said, “a charming picture of these creatures.”

“I can assure you my words are nothing compared to the reality of the Weird I witnessed in the Devil’s Nebula.”

She was about to ask where she featured in all of this, but Gorley went on, “However, their portals are not the immediate danger.”

“They’re not?”

He told her that a century ago the Weird enslaved an alien race in the Devil’s Nebula – it was from this race that they learned how to manufacture machines, starships and the like – and sent a fleet of ships into Vetch- and human-space.

“These ship were loaded, for want of a better word, with Weird mind-parasites, which could infect humans and the Vetch, lying dormant until they decided to take control of the individual. We have no idea how many humans in the Expansion have been infected over the decades. We assumed a worst case scenario of tens of thousands – and of course we have no idea who or where these people are. You see, they don’t even know they are infected themselves. We assume that by now the parasites have infiltrated their hosts into positions of power in the Expansion...” He fell silent.

She stared at him. “Holy. Fucking. Shit.”

“Quite,” he said.

“So...” she said at last, “there’s absolutely fuck all we can do.”

He shook his head. “That’s where you’re wrong, thankfully. You see, these mind-parasites are detectable... by telepaths. There is no hiding from the probe of a telepath, and already we have a psionic team working to root out the infected. We’re recruiting more individuals who test psi-positive, and fast-tracking their operations. We are also tracking down rogue teleheads, those individuals who have absconded, for whatever reasons, down the years.”

“Ah... so this is where I come in, right?”

He nodded. “Five years ago a Grade I operative absconded from the Expansion, stealing a starship and heading for the Reach.”

“Satan’s Reach?” she said.

“Do you know any other Reach? Of course Satan’s Reach. We sent an operative after him, but word came out a little later that he’d killed the operative in a shoot-out on the border planet of Rhapsody.”