Alien Shores (A Fenris Novel, Book 2) (3 page)

“Let’s roll the dice,” Cyrus said.

Skar gave him a look of incomprehension.

“It’s not so fun when the shoe is on the other foot, is it?” Cyrus asked.

“I do not understand you,” Skar said. “What should I do concerning the comm hail?”

“Answer it,” Cyrus said. “Let’s see what they want.”

Skar tapped “Receive,” but the comm unit simply hissed with noise. The soldier hunched over the panel, adjusting the controls.

Cyrus tried to relax. He had to keep rolling his shoulders as he waited for another psi-attack. The null was a superb tactic, especially for someone of his limited abilities. If he’d been Venice or Jasper—

The hissing quit and a man’s voice came online. “You must immediately cease acceleration and await a boarding party.”

Skar stiffened.

How did they get to him so fast? I didn’t even feel the psi-attack this time
.
What happened?

“You have launched a missile at our vessel,” Skar said, hotly. “That is an aggressive enemy action. Detonate the missile and give us a reason why we should comply with your demand.”

Oh. Skar isn’t being controlled, he’s just angry
.

“You fool,” the man said. “I belong to Attack Talon
Valiant
, the personal vessel of Chengal Ras the 109th. You are his property and engaged in unlawful space travel. That is against the Protocols of Ten Fourteen.”

“Who are you?” Skar said.

“That is immaterial,” the man said. “Will you comply with the lawful order or must you force the Revered One’s Talon?”

“Let me ingest your words,” Skar said. His hand hovered over the cutoff switch.

Cyrus had been waiting for something psionic to happen. When it did, it almost caught him by surprise. Instead of a second’s advance warning, an avalanche of thought hit like tons of mental boulders. It was loud to his mind, disorienting and confusing. The null began to slip away from him.

Skar went rigid. Then his head whipped around and his eyes bulged outward.

“
You
,” Skar said, in a higher-pitched voice than normal. The features of his bullet-shaped head seemed to melt and distort. Then his lips drew back, revealing his teeth. He attempted to lunge upward and attack Cyrus, but the buckles and straps of his piloting chair restrained him.

As enemy mind bolts flashed and crashed around Cyrus, seeking to latch onto him, his thoughts ran riot.

They never did it like this before. Is this a new type of mind assault? Are they using the A team now? How do I get out of this? How—turn off the comm unit, you idiot
.

Skar, or the psi-master controlling him, hissed with frustration and tried to lurch the Vomag up again. The soldier’s strong hands flailed at the buckles, attempting to rip and tear them apart. But not even he was that strong. Still, the savagery of it daunted Cyrus.

It took an effort of will, but Cyrus reached for the cutoff switch.

“No!” Skar shouted. He grabbed Cyrus’s wrist. “Chengal Ras wishes to examine you.”

Cyrus leaned his weight for the switch, shoving his arm toward it. Skar gripped cruelly, and the wrist bones ground together. At the same time the mind bolts flashed harder, attempting to hit the hidden null through luck.

They can’t see me, but are attacking in my vicinity. If they ever get a lock on my mind
. . .

One of the buckles clicked free and a strap fell away. Cyrus realized Skar, or the psi-master controlling his friend, had finally realized what to do.

“We’ll surrender,” Cyrus said, in a rush. “Do you hear me? I want to know your terms.”

“No terms,” Skar said. Yet he eased up on the pressure, no longer grinding Cyrus’s wrist bones.

Taking the opening, as small as it was, Cyrus shot an elbow against Skar’s stony face. The eyes flashed with rage. Sometimes, when one had powerful control of another, the Special or psi-master felt unexpected pain.

The soldier shoved Cyrus away from him. Cyrus crashed against the panel. The small of his back exploded with agony. He grunted, and then swiveled eel-like and slapped the switch, cutting communications with
Valiant
.

It wasn’t over, though. The enemy had established the link. As Skar unlatched the last buckle, stood, and brought his other hand into play, Cyrus took a gamble. He broadened his null again, thereby weakening it. He might become barely visible to the enemy, showing them an outline of his mind. He heard enemy thoughts in his head, indistinct noises. For a second, he could see the chief psi-master in the alien Attack Talon. He was a human with an elongated head. A sliver
baan
encircled the cranium and was pressed against amplifier discs. Cyrus almost caught the psi-master’s name.

Disappear,
he told himself
. Go null—

Skar’s hands latched onto his throat. The soldier choked him, the ironlike fingers digging into flesh.

Despite that, Cyrus held onto the null. As a thumb dug deep, the whispering minds in his head snapped off. The mental images vanished and the pressure against his throat immediately quit.

“Cyrus, I—”

The Special from Milan opened his eyes. Skar slumped into the pilot’s chair. The soldier turned away and wouldn’t look at Cyrus.

Massaging his raw throat, coughing, Cyrus eased off the panel and sat down. That had been too close. What had he been thinking? It never paid to talk to the bastards. They always tried tricks. They had no sense of honor.

His gaze wandered to the scanner. The incoming missile kept accelerating even as the Attack Talon decelerated.
Valiant
had a greater velocity than their needle-ship, even with them accelerating. How long would it be before their vessel was in laser range of the enemy?

“It must be a nuclear-pumped missile that will fire X-rays,” Cyrus said.

Skar still said nothing. It appeared he brooded.

“Don’t worry about it,” Cyrus said. “You didn’t have a choice. They controlled your mind.”

Skar’s head snapped up and his mouth twisted with distaste as if he had sucked on a lemon. “Don’t you understand? I despise my weakness. I acted contrary to my will. They controlled a Vomag soldier. I am a liability to you, to the cause.”

“No you’re not.”

“I almost killed you.”

“How does your face feel where I hit it?”

There was a red mark on the left side of the nose.

“You used a clever trick,” Skar muttered. “I congratulate you.”

“Look, I can teach you how to defend against mind control.”

“I do not possess such abilities,” Skar said.

“Right, you’re not a Special, you’re a . . .” Cyrus almost said “Normal.” But Skar wasn’t really normal. In a fight between them, Skar would win unless Cyrus could do something tricky. Maybe Argon could win a fight against Skar, but no regular human had a chance.

Argon had been the chief monitor aboard
Discovery
. The man had the blood of the Highborn in him. Cyrus hoped Argon was still alive. Out of all the Normals he’d known, Argon had the best mind shield.

“There’s a way to shield against mind control and reading,” Cyrus said. “Thinking about mathematical formulas, going over them again and again in your thoughts, is one of the best ways.”

“That would shield me against them?” Skar asked, sounding dubious.

“Not completely,” Cyrus admitted. “The math formulas make it harder. It’s like static or the hissing just now. The mind controller would have to work harder to pierce your running computations. Sometimes repeating an endless litany in your thoughts helps, too. If you’re really stubborn, that also helps.”

“He dominated me so easily,” Skar said.

“They hit us with something new, something more powerful than before. Personally, I think Chengal Ras brought along his best psi-master.” Cyrus nodded. “They must want me—want the two of us—really badly, more than I realized.”

The comm signal beeped again.

“No way,” Cyrus said. “They can’t believe we’re that stupid.”

“We are cattle to the Kresh,” Skar said, glumly.

“Yeah,” Cyrus said. “Tell me about it.”

Their words dwindled, and they kept watching the scanner. Soon, the comm signal stopped. The missile didn’t, though—it kept coming for them.

This is depressing, watching death accelerate for us
.

Cyrus got up, went to the head, came out, and sat down at his station. A
baan
was there, a metal-colored band. It sat next to what looked like amplifying discs, but was really a reader. Two long prongs curved up out of it with discs at the end for him to press the
baan
against once it encircled his forehead. He’d been doing just that for the past three weeks. He had one memory crystal. The Reacher had given it to him on High Station 3. The crystal held information about the Anointed One, about Klane as a baby when first inserted into Clan Tash-Toi.

Big, muscular, reddish-skinned humans inhabited the stony highlands of Jassac. They were the Tash-Toi, and they lived like primitives, with clubs, spears, and a ruling hetman. The crystal had shown Cyrus the seeker, a shamanistic individual with obvious mind powers. Cyrus had reviewed the crystal repeatedly, studying in depth everything it had shown him. Unfortunately, the crystal hadn’t given him many clues. How was he supposed to track down this Klane on a moon the size of Earth? Clearly, the psi-masters aboard
Valiant
would be hunting him, provided Cyrus and Skar even made it down onto the planetoid.

How old was Klane now, anyway? How old was the crystal? How had the Reacher gotten hold of the information?

Cyrus shrugged. He didn’t know the answers. Maybe the Reacher had gotten the information through a clairvoyant. Anyway, except for Klane’s age, the questions hardly mattered at this point.

“Any change in status?” Cyrus asked.

“No,” Skar said, who had maintained his post.

“Should we get ready?”

“What do you suggest we do?” Skar asked.

Cyrus sighed, got up, and approached their sole window. Jassac filled the view. High clouds drifted over the red moon’s surface. The place boasted fantastic mountain ranges and valleys like knife slashes.

“I’m surprised the Kresh on Jassac don’t just fire missiles or ground-based lasers at us,” Cyrus said.

“Perhaps Chengal Ras has not yet contacted them about us.”

“I find that hard to believe,” Cyrus said.

“Why is that?” Skar asked.

“It should be obvious why.”

Skar shook his head.

Maybe the soldier had a point. The Kresh were unfathomable. Well, they were aliens and didn’t appear or act like humans. An individual Kresh stood about nine feet tall and looked like an intelligent raptor wearing leather straps and metallic streamers. The aliens lacked psionic abilities, but apparently were intensely logical. They hungered for facts, and they had something called the
Codex of All Knowledge
.

Cyrus wasn’t sure what that was supposed to be. Maybe the codex was a running encyclopedia or a vast computer program. The Kresh fiercely competed for rank. Despite their warm-blooded dinosaur bodies, they were hyperindividualists. The top one hundred Kresh ran the star system. Unimaginatively, the Kresh called that group “the Hundred.” It seemed they ranked each other exactly. Thus, when the humanoid earlier referred to Chengal Ras the 109th, that meant the Kresh was the 109th highest ranked among his species.

Cyrus wasn’t sure, and Skar hadn’t been able to enlighten him much on the subject, but it seemed as if each Kresh had his or her precise area of authority or responsibility. The Reacher had told him a few things about the aliens. Each Kresh seemed to act like an independent king or lord. Therefore, it was just conceivable that Chengal Ras hadn’t yet informed the Jassac-bound aliens about the runaway needle-ship.

“How much time do we have until impact?” Cyrus asked.

“A little over an hour until we reach the upper atmosphere,” Skar said.

“Are we going to try to land our vessel?”

“Not at these speeds,” Skar said.

“Do we parachute out then while we’re screaming down?”

“Negative,” Skar said.

The soldier, like the other gene-warped humans Cyrus had met so far, seemed to be devoid of humor.

“We have one antigravity sled,” Skar said. “The needle-ship builders did not incorporate normal antigrav plates onto our vessel.” The soldier shrugged. “I do not know why, perhaps to conserve weight or because they lacked the hardware. Luckily, the Reacher or one of his people put an antigrav sled into storage, and therefore we have some hope.”

“I haven’t seen any storage chamber aboard our ship,” Cyrus said.

“Naturally,” Skar said. “It is outside the vessel.”

“So . . .”

“We will need to don vacc-suits, go outside, and climb onto the sled.”

“And it can float us down to the planet?”

“In theory it should,” Skar said.

“What could go wrong?”

“The sled is a one-person device, and there are two of us.” Skar looked away. He stood, and he nodded crisply. “I will, of course, remain on the vessel as you—”

“No you won’t,” Cyrus said.

Skar turned in obvious surprise. “I am a danger to you. The enemy has locked onto my mind patterns—”

“Forget it, Skar. I’m not wandering the Jassac wastelands alone. You’re coming with me.”

“The sled—”

“We’re going to make it work,” Cyrus said.

“The danger—”

“You’re my bodyguard, soldier. Are you attempting to shirk your duty?”

A sour look crossed Skar’s features.

“I didn’t think so,” Cyrus said. “Now, I don’t want to hear any more about it. You have to pilot us down to the surface. That’s your task. Mine will be keeping the psi-masters off of us as we do it.”

“If we reach Jassac in time,” Skar said.

“Let’s get ready,” Cyrus said. “That will be better than sitting here watching the scanner.”

“Agreed,” said Skar.

Cyrus headed back to his station to pack what he’d need, or had room to take. They had to stay alive, and then they had to find the Anointed One.