The Dark Defiance Read online

  He snaked his tail past the corner and peered in the mirror. “Two on the left, one on the right where the labs branch off the main companionway. There’s cover five meters up on the left.” He looked to Tommy. “Ready?”

  Tommy nodded, flipping the selector to three-round burst. Grenades were not allowed for this evolution. They would have to rely on controlling the fire-fight and closing on the enemy quickly, before they could come up with a plan.

  “OK,” Gelna was peering into the mirror again. “They’re talking to each other – GO!” He leaned around the corner, firing controlled bursts as Tommy raced for cover.

  “Covering,” Tommy yelled as he brought his weapon up to loose a few bursts at both corners.

  Gelna moved out from cover and advanced down the right side of the corridor, aiming towards the left hand corner ahead. Tommy moved out from behind the heavy stanchion that had been his shelter and moved up the left side, aiming to the right hand corner. They fired a couple of bursts as they advanced to keep their enemies behind cover. Danraj stood in the intersection of the two hallways, playing God.

  Jan stuck her head out and Tommy pulled the trigger. “That’s a kill,” Danraj shouted.

  “Sorry, Jan!” Tommy felt strange shooting at her, even with blanks, but he intended to win.

  Gelna was holding his mirror two feet in front of his face, angled to see beyond the corner. His weapon was held to a similar angle in front of him and he suddenly fired several bursts.

  “Hate to say it, but he’s killed or wounded both of you,” Danraj shook his head. “Nasty trick, that.” He gave Gelna a good-natured grin. “One of your lads nearly got me with a mirror when we boarded the Radiant Sun in Mars orbit. Shot his bloody tail off, though!”

  “I imagine he died from the suit breach?” Gelna had seen his share of combat casualties and the humans had boarded the Radiant Sun by smashing armored shuttles through the ship’s hull. The pressure loss had killed half the crew outright.

  “Willie patched him.” Danny grew solemn. “Once you see someone die that way, you discover you don’t want to see it ever again.” He looked around the group. “We should start putting you in suits once you get the hang of this. Fighting in a depressurized ship adds a whole new dimension. Do you keep shooting when your friend’s minor wound also includes a potentially fatal suit breech or do you try to patch him?”

  The Ormen

  Three hours travel from Cera

  “I’m telling you, it was right here!” Hergils pointed at the spot where the device had been. “Scan for a magnetic trace, it had to be held there by something. I’d bet it was magnetic.”

  “In here?” The technician was incredulous. He waved at the myriad of lines and pipes running along every surface except for the floor. “There are so many electromagnetic spectra present down here that we’re probably both sterile by now. You really think I’d be able to find evidence that a weak magnet was here?” He turned for the ladder. “It’s probably affecting your brain. I’d say you had a hallucination. It happens down here sometimes.”

  “A lot of help you are…”

  “Here’s your help.” The technician nodded at the ladder. “Get out of this conduit before you suffer permanent psychosis.” He started climbing. “Can’t believe I walked away from a winning hand of Morris for this.”

  Balli quietly followed them out of the conduit. He stood at the edge of the corridor. Psychosis? Norns save me! It’s bad enough being invisible for so long, but to have a real, physical reason to start going crazy? He shook his head. He had to concentrate on his mission. He had no idea when the device might be put into play. He had to repair the cloak and get it reactivated quickly.

  Where is there a place that nobody goes?

  The Völund

  In transit to Cera

  Tommy sat in the lounge with the rest of the crew. Harry was deep in conversation with Bernie, waving his hands to emphasize some point that Bernie obviously didn’t agree with. What’s the bloody hold-up? I’ve got the screaming abadabs, sitting here waiting to start. Bernie started in on a detailed list of objections. That’s it.

  Tommy stood up and pressed the ‘start’ button on his tablet. Half the port side windows of the lounge were filled with a huge projection of Tommy’s findings. His nerves calmed as the small-talk died out. He took a deep breath and used it to augment the normal volume of his voice. “To begin with,” he said, bringing up a carving of a vicious-looking humanoid, “The Kholarii natives have promoted us all to the rank of god.” A few chuckles rewarded his lame joke.

  “Even Kale?” Gelna’s question increased the chuckles to outright laughter.

  “You just remember what I am, little mortal,” Kale shot back. “You better start showing some respect or, so help me Kale, I’m gonna smite you right into next Tuesday!” The crew paused in surprise, looking at Kale for half a second before dissolving into gales of laughter.

  “All right,” Tommy called out. “The rest of the pantheon will get their chance for input later. Let’s get through the details first.” The room settled down, though the odd chuckle still caused occasional ripples.

  “They believe that a race of ravaging gods shows up every few thousand years to punish them for a laundry list of shortcomings.” Tommy brought up an image mosaic of the ruins. “We found these inscriptions at the old Kholarii temple and the computer managed to reassemble most of it by matching the geometry of the broken edges.”

  He brought up the image of the surface monument. “The all merciful and mischievous Kale, our divine version of the ancient god, Loki,” he paused to allow the giggles that followed yet another reference to Kale as a god, “managed to blow the door off this mystery, quite literally, when he fragged a sniper.” He brought up the image mosaic from the underground chamber. “The inscriptions are a warning to the natives, telling them what to expect if they fall in with the Apokalyptii. The inscriptions are in both Kholari and Dheema.”

  He brought up a text-based screen showing the temple inscriptions. A tap of the play button started the animation. Dheema translations of each word flew into place under their Kholarii counterparts. English words followed on the third line.

  “Lots of blather here, but I’ve managed to pull out a few points.” He turned from the projection to face the crew. “These ‘gods’ look just like us – same height and facial bone structure. Big surprise, right? Every alien we’ve met so far has pretty much the exact same genome. It even sounds like inter-species mating is viable.” He brought up the next page of translation. “The really interesting thing about our divine cousins is their longevity. The temple chronicle indicates that the same individuals have shown up on multiple raids. They’ve actually been overheard by Kholarii reminiscing about their adventures on a previous attack.”

  “Didn’t you say the raids happen thousands of years apart?” Jan was surprised that Tommy hadn’t told her about this yet, even though it had only been a few hours.

  Tommy nodded. “Every five thousand years, give or take a century. That would mean that these fellows reach exceedingly ripe old ages.”

  “That’d be a neat trick,” Harry breathed. “How long before they’re due back?”

  “Well, that’s an interesting question,” Tommy paused to be sure everyone was listening. “They were due to come back here twenty-five-hundred years ago but they didn’t show.” He grinned at his crewmates. “Rather embarrassing for a doomsday cult. Everyone asking them ‘will they come today?’ or ‘should I keep paying my mortgage?’”. They lost a lot of credibility. Almost had to close up shop except for one spectacular event that sowed doubt even in the most sceptical minds.”

  Kale looked around the room as the pregnant pause grew. “Well, someone has to give in here.” He leaned towards Tommy, eyes wide in mock anticipation as he breathlessly asked the necessary question. “What spectacular event, Tommy?”

  Tommy laughed with the rest. “Right, fair enough. I’ll leave the showmanship to you and Gelna.” He
brought up a shot of Ghela’s ravaged second moon. “The Apokalyptii predicted an exact date for the return of the gods and nothing happened. A week later, while they were still scratching their heads and trying to figure out if they ‘forgot to carry the y’, this happened.” He waved his hand at the screen, indicating the half sphere that trailed massive, colliding pieces behind it.

  Bernie snorted. “So a natural disaster saved their asses?” He raised his hands as though placating an angry mob. “See? They came after all. They beat the shit out of the other moon because they were too pressed for time to come down here. But you better straighten up and fly right or they’ll come down here and do disturbing things with your toothbrushes…”

  There was a short pause as Bernie’s rant sunk in, then grudging laughs. I have to admit, for Bernie, that was pretty funny. “I’m sure we’ll all keep a closer eye on our toiletries from now on, with Bernie around. The thing is, he’s pretty much spot on, though I haven’t seen any references to toothbrushes.” Tommy noticed Bernie’s casual shrug. Of course you think you’re right, they teach you cynicism at that posh school of yours?

  “On the other side of the same coin,” Tommy continued, “the cult may have been more right than they knew.” He activated the next animation. The various fragments of the moon disappeared, one by one. Each was replaced by a detailed wireframe model.

  “This is the same modeller that I used to recreate the temple inscriptions,” he explained as the final pieces of the Earth-sized moon were replaced. “The trajectories were mapped and then all I had to do was reverse the force vectors in the model. I had to tweak the mass a bit, but this is a pretty good approximation of what happened twenty-five hundred years ago.”

  The fragments began to drift backwards towards their original place in the moon. As they approached their final destination, they began to look like they didn’t know where they were going.

  “This part doesn’t make sense.” Mike got up from the couch he was sharing with Keira. He walked over to stand near the window that held the projection. “The particles aren’t simply reacting to an explosion or a collision; their trajectories converged here.” He marked a point on the screen with his finger. “They look more like an implosion, and… Where’s the rest of them?” He looked over at Tommy. “There’s a lot of missing material where the trajectories converge.”

  Tommy took a deep breath. “I’ve only got one idea about that, but I would rather hear what you come up with first. This sort of thing is your area; I don’t want to contaminate your own theory.”

  Mike nodded, looking back at the screen. “Play it from here, going forward?”

  Tommy reversed the animation. The surface of the sphere fragmented, the parts collapsing inward at an accelerating pace that suddenly stabilized. After a few collisions with fragments coming from the other side, they all found their way out into space.

  Just like the first time he had run this animation in the forward direction, Tommy felt the hairs on his neck raise. He looked at Mike’s face. The physicist had a look of utter amazement on his face as he stared at the projection.

  “My God!” he said quietly. “That was a wormhole – a big damn wormhole and it opened inside a planet.” He shook his head slowly. “The old empire used them for transport but they had to stop because they left wrinkles in the fabric of space-time. It got so you couldn’t travel without an unacceptably high risk of catastrophic failure. That’s the main reason why the empire collapsed.”

  “So, who opened this one?” Harry asked.

  “The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” Mike responded absently, still staring at the screen. “The wrinkles faded over time but so did the technology, since it couldn’t be used. The empire had access to vast resources and could maintain fairly regular wormhole schedules. If we had to collect enough negative matter to try something like this, it would take generations.”

  Tommy put up an image showing a rampaging god. “These chaps drop by every five thousand years,” he said. “Perhaps they got a little lost on their last trip and ended up in the middle of a moon?”

  “Wouldn’t we see debris from their ships?” Carol asked.

  “No,” Mike said after a moment’s thought. “As soon as the wormhole opened, it would have started pulling in loose planetary mass. It wouldn’t have been able to remain open with so much matter pouring through it. Any ships destroyed while trying to go through from the other end would likely have been pulverized and forced back. Any ship that made it through intact – I doubt they would stick around if they no longer held the upper hand.”

  “If there are any of these guys left, after their little accident,” Harry waved his hand at the animation, “they aren’t due back for another twenty-five-hundred years, right?”

  “That’s what the inscriptions say,” Tommy hedged his answer.

  “So we have time to make a few deals.”

  “All the same, Captain, I’d like to do a little asking around when we get to Cera.” Tommy nodded over his head at the screen. “I think our visit to the temple ruins on Khola has paid significant dividends.”

  “Oh, sure,” Bernie cut in. “I damn near got killed down there so you could learn how the moon was destroyed.” He waved a dismissive hand. “They won’t be back for thousands of years. What’s the use in poking around on an entirely different planet?”

  “Near got killed?” Kale blurted out. “I probably come closer to death eating that goo we call breakfast. You won’t even have a scar by the time we get back Earth-side.”

  Bernie glared at the mercenary but Tommy jumped in before the meeting got sidetracked. “There’s no guarantee about their timeframes, and there’s no guarantee they haven’t attacked any other worlds.” Don’t they understand how important this is? “From all we’ve learned, these aren’t the sort of fellows we want to tangle with. They pose a real danger in this region of space and the more we can learn the better.” He looked back to Harry. “We might find signs of their activity on Cera if we look for it.”

  Harry sighed, frowning at the projection on the window. “Alright,” he stood up. “Once we’re done talking to the Cerrans, we’ll take a look around. Soon as we’re unloaded, we head straight back to Khola, so no archeological digs or pith helmets.”

  “If there’s no further business?” The captain looked around the room. “Alright – movie time!”

  The Ormen

  Three hours travel from Cera

  Balli sat in the cargo hold of a Cerran shuttle. The small craft possessed several technical advantages over the type used by the Midgaard. Caul would have the technology reverse-engineered when they returned home. This captured shuttle, sitting in one of the Ormen’s cavernous holds, represented a major windfall for its new owner.

  It had also served as a convenient, safe place for Balli to sleep and he naturally thought to come here to repair his crucial device. He wasn’t having much luck. The power unit for the shield had been faulty and it was now completely drained.

  In frustration, he stuck it on the bulkhead, behind the pilot’s seat, and leaned back against his seat to marshal his thoughts. He stared accusingly at the device for a long time. Then he closed his eyes, sighing as he slapped a palm against his forehead. Nothing looks unfamiliar on an alien shuttle, he realized, reaching out to activate the object.

  There would be no need to repair the visibility shield. His only job now was to ensure that this device was kept active. Sooner or later, it would be used. He happily turned his thoughts to the possibility of stealing some ale. The dogwatch started in two hours.

  The Völund

  Halfway to Cera

  “Wally, what the hell is going on?” Harry staggered onto the bridge from his cabin, just down the hall. He wrinkled his nose.

  Wally wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand. “Something knocked us out of our distortion envelope.” He leaned in closer to one of his screens. “Showing a singularity to starboard. That would have done it, all right.”
r />   “Are we in any danger from the singularity?”

  “No danger, Cap.” Wally looked over his shoulder as Carol entered the bridge and leaned over her own screens.

  “All right, send the telemetry down to Doc Willsen’s lab and page him.” Harry looked over at Carol. “Structural?”

  “We’re good,” she answered without taking her eyes from the screen. “The fiber optics are showing no structural damage.” Much like an army tank, the Völund had optic fibers embedded in all critical structures. Any cracks would interrupt the flow of light through the network and allow the crew to immediately pinpoint any damage.

  She wrinkled her nose. “That was a pretty wild dropout. We should see if anybody was hurt.”

  Harry grinned. “Let’s start with the bridge crew. Walt, you lose anything we should know about?”

  The helmsman hefted a small bag. “Almost lost my lunch, but this caught it.”

  “Carol, get Doc Fredo to make the rounds, assuming he wasn’t turned into a pretzel just now.” Harry dropped into his seat. “I’ll check with Keira and get her to go over the engines, just to be…”

  “Bridge, this is Dr. Willsen. We have a problem; that singularity looks like it may be man-made,” Mike’s voice cut in over the ceiling speakers. “I’ve been looking at it since we dropped out and nothing’s supposed to be out here. I’d say that someone took an old ship with distortion drive and tinkered with the engines so it would collapse into what we’re seeing right now.”

  “Why would anyone want to make an artificial singularity?” Wally took a long sip from a water bottle.

  “I’ll show you why,” Carol brought up a view on the main screen. “Old imperial-style corvettes. Looks like six of ‘em and a large civilian vessel with carbon scoring all over its hull.”

  “So what does that mean?” Tommy asked as he entered the bridge, stopping by his seat.

  “Pirates,” Harry answered curtly.