Rebel Fleet (23 page)

=38=

When I awakened, I knew why everyone aboard
Killer
had hated my kind so much. We were too similar in appearance to Imperials.

Apparently the original Kher, the base stock of all our races, were primates. Smart, technologically capable—and ruthless.

No one had ever shown me a picture of an Imperial, but the officers had to know what they looked like. They’d leaned on me because of the resemblance, even if they weren’t doing it consciously.

None of that mattered now. I found myself on a cold metal deck. The surface was rippled with hard ridges, and they’d caused red painful lines to appear on my slack cheek.

I staggered up and looked around. I was still inside a force-cube in the Imperial captain’s bedroom. The captain herself was gone.

Taking stock of myself, I found no weapons, but I had something else I could use: my sym.

Closing my eyes, I willed the synthetic lifeform that resided in my body to contact its brothers wherever they were. I had to know what was happening to my crew.

There was a pause. The sym never talked to me directly, but it could be encouraged to do complicated things. It was especially good at communications tasks. As I understood it, the nanites that formed part of its structure were powered chemically by my body. They allowed it to send radio transmissions.

After a long time, I thought I saw and heard something. A snatch of a scream. An echoing conversation. Was that Samson’s face?

Then, the vision came to me in full-force. My sym had hacked into the ship’s network and found a pathway to my crew through the ship’s surveillance system. Unfortunately, the vision it presented wasn’t a happy one.

At first, I thought they were drowning. They were in cold-looking water up to their necks. They were all splashing and pushing away growths of some kind—could that be the algae the captain had mentioned earlier?

“Dr. Chang,” I said, pressing to make contact. “Can you hear me?”

He twitched and frowned, but he seemed too distracted to talk. He dragged a patch of green-black seaweed-looking stuff from his arm. It left a red weal behind. Could the algae be consuming them?

“Doc!” I shouted, forcing the sym to carry my urgency.

He reacted as if startled, and he looked around. His sym tipped him off to look for a camera eye somewhere, and he spotted it.

“Is that you, Chief?” He asked. “Get us out of this tank! This organism is carnivorous!”

I felt a surge of worry in my gut. My crew was my responsibility. I had to get them out—but how?

The following few minutes I tried to hold a conversation with the group and to explain my situation. It didn’t help much. They were too distracted to talk or think. My tortured crew didn’t know the layout of the ship, but they thought they were in the lower decks, in what we might have referred to as “the bilge” back on Earth.

After reassuring them I’d do something to save them, I cut the connection and pressed my sym further. I urged it to “see” beyond
Splendor’s
hull.

My perception tricks were really generated by mass data input through a ship’s sensors which were filtered into a form my mind could take in directly as visuals. Accomplishing the same thing aboard an Imperial ship might have been impossible—but it wasn’t.

After a few minutes of trying, perhaps driven to greater concentration by the fact my crew was dying below, I broke through. It felt strange, as if a plug had been pulled out of my skull and the contents of the ships sensors were being poured inside.

The heavy cruiser was in flight.
Splendor
was no longer in the same empty patch of space where we’d been captured. We’d jumped to somewhere new. A group of five vessels had gathered here.

There was a planet, the target of the hunting party. They were circling the target like sharks. Bombs were being readied. Gravity-bombs that would crush the inhabitants to pulp when they fell.

My mind was brought back to my body with a sudden shocking sensation. I opened my eyes to find myself confused and writhing on the deck again. My muscles had contracted, and I’d crumpled to the floor.

The captain was back. She was breathing hard, standing tall.

“I see it,” she said, “but I don’t believe it.
You
hacked our networks? From inside a force-cube?”

I looked up at her, deciding how to play the situation. Slowly, I got to my feet. I lifted my chin and shrugged.

“Of course,” I said. “Are you surprised? I thought since you left everything open—”

“Shut up,” she said dangerously. “Drop your device on the floor of your cage, and your life will be spared.”

“Device?” I asked, as if confused. “Oh, I see you don’t understand. There is no device. You can scan me if you want to. It’s an innate ability.”

I was gambling hard, but with my crew in jeopardy, I felt I had to. My sym was mostly biological, with only trace amounts of metal. I hoped the nanites wouldn’t show up on an electromagnetic scan.

She paced around the cage angrily. She obviously didn’t like the idea that I possessed any kind of tech that she didn’t.

“We’ll have to dissect you. The lot of you.”

Captain Lael lifted up her hand and spoke to her wand. “Remove the prisoners from the tanks. Feed the bloom some other kind of protein source. I need to study all of these vermin.”

I felt relief, but I didn’t show it. I looked at her blankly. One of the keys to getting away with any con was to look like you didn’t know what was happening.

She studied me in return.

“This can’t all be a coincidence,” she said. “A vicious streak. A mad assault on my ship—wanting to be captured, perhaps? Now, you invade my networks from inside a force-cube? No, this has been carefully planned.”

“You’d best kill me now, then,” I said. “It’s the only safe thing to do.”

Her face tightened. She was paranoid as well as arrogant, and I was feeding her worst concerns.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” she asked. “The only reason you’d make such a request is because you’ve already finished your mission. Have you downloaded and transmitted any design information? Force intel?”

Her eyes widened as I continued to stare at her with my best innocent-rabbit expression.

“A trap!” she said. “This is a trap! You’ve called Rebel forces here. I’m reporting this immediately—and don’t worry, all your secrets will be torn from you in time.”

Turning, she left the chamber. I heard her say something about the bridge as she marched down the passages. A squad of clanking troops in heavy armor followed her at a jog.

It was time to do my worst now, I figured. I reached out with my mind and tried to get my sym to engage the ship’s controls.

It was easier this time around. I’d thought they might have put up a firewall or something, but whatever work-around the sym had figured out was still functioning unabated. I continued to browse their ship’s network with impunity.

It would probably be only a matter of time before they shut me out, so I knew I had to do something drastic, and do it fast. When you’ve got an advantage, it’s best to work it hard while you can.

Skipping weapons, communications, sensors, life-support… I went to the security systems.

Things were difficult there, but I found what I was looking for at last: the force-field generator and its all-important control unit.

I thought about switching them
all
off. That would surely mess things up—but it might be deadly, too. The warp core was contained by a force-wall on Rebel ships. I figured that might be true on this ship as well. Singlehandedly destroying a heavy cruiser would be an impressive final act, one I’d been willing to settle for a few hours ago—but now I was becoming ambitious. I wanted more.

Figuring out exactly which force-wall was surrounding me right now was too difficult, so I killed all the security walls at once. Every prisoner on the ship was instantly released, including me.

The first thing I did was stand tall and stretch out my spine. That felt good!

A moment later, I walked to stand to one side of where I knew the door had been. The ship’s doors were like those on
Killer
, they simply vanished and reappeared when you touched them.

I considered exiting the chambers, but I knew that was likely to end in death. The guards would spot me. I wouldn’t stand a chance against those guys. They were well-armed and armored.

Instead, I walked to the captain’s bed. I gathered up all her bedding and threw it on the floor where the force-cube had been. Then, I stood against the wall again near the entrance and waited.

It was a long wait, but she showed up at last. Behind her, guards were clanking. I could hear them in their metal suits. This was going to be tight, if it could be done at all.

Holding my breath, I saw the door vanish to reveal the passageway and the captain—and then I made my move.

=39=

Captain Lael stepped into the room and saw the pile of junk I’d thrown on the floor. It was just a diversion, but she fell for it.

Any magician will tell you the real magic behind any ‘trick’ is to get the mark’s eye to watch something that doesn’t matter while you do your worst to deceive them. In this case, she was left thinking for a fraction of a second that I’d somehow turned into silky pillows and sheets—or perhaps that I’d buried myself under them.

Whatever she thought, she stepped into the chambers with her attention riveted on the distraction.

I moved, and I moved fast. My hand shot out, grabbing her wrist. I plucked the wand-like device out of her slender hand and took it from her.

The machine-looking guards behind her were not amused. They surged into the doorway after me. Their arms were upraised, and I had no doubt the black, muzzle-like tubes they were lifting in my direction were deadly.

Then suddenly, they all tumbled onto their faces and shivered there. I’d activated the neural paralyzing effect, exactly as I’d seen her do earlier.

Grabbing her wand had been a big gamble, but it had paid off. I would never have tried it if I’d had a better move—but there hadn’t been time to come up with anything better.

I shuddered to think what might have happened if the paralyzer had affected me and not them. Or, if the body armor had rendered the troops immune.

None of these things had been the case, and I knew I’d lucked out.

The captain had been paralyzed along with her troops. I took a moment to grin and squat next to her, placing myself within her field of vision. Her beautiful eyes, wide-open and motionless, saw me but were unable to acknowledge it.

“See?” I told her. “Weapons are unfair in any duel.”

I stood up and reached out with my sym again. I held the wand tightly in both hands, hoping it would help somehow.

It did. I could see more now, I could move through the ship more quickly. It seemed I no longer needed to rely on my sym for any kind of security hack. Apparently, I had unfettered access to everything.

As if flipping through pages, I reviewed the decks. Everywhere there was a security camera, I could see through it. There was an overload of information, and I ordered my sym to collate it all, to gather it into a single unified interface. It did this quickly, as that was what it had been designed for.

When I found the deck I was on, I saw myself standing over the fallen forms. My eyes were closed, yet it felt as if I were outside my body, looking down at myself. This was virtual reality at its finest.

But as I looked around the deck, reaching out farther down the local passages, I became alarmed.

My actions hadn’t gone unnoticed. A veritable army of troops were coming now, clanking in teams of six from both directions toward the passage outside. I saw unarmored officers among them as well. The unarmored officers were women, and they guided their armored males in my direction.

They paused at the far ends of the passage outside. The officers touched their troops with wands, making their armored suits glimmer with new fields. Could it be they were making them immune to the neural paralyzer? I couldn’t think of a better explanation.

My eyes snapped open. Breathing hard, I dragged the captain’s limp form into the chamber, and rudely rolled and kicked the armored troops out. They were quite heavy in their metal suits. After a moment, the door snapped back into place.

Picking up the captain again, I found she was shockingly light. She couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. That was extremely light given her height. Maybe her bones were thin—I tried to be careful with her.

Laying her down on the pile of pillows, I stood beside her and turned on the force cube again. It closed around us, locking us in. All over the ship, the force-walls in security systems glowed in place once more.

This time there was a difference. Instead of keeping the inhabitants within and shocking them if they touched the walls, the security barriers were set to operate in reverse. They were now kept things out, rather than keeping them in.

Doing this was simplicity itself, as it turned out. All I had to do was the equivalent of changing an option in a database field. The “type” of field was changed from security, to defensive.

The door opened again a moment later, and a squad of angry, robot-looking troops marched in. I could see their long-chinned faces through their faceplates, sallow and snarling, as they rushed to my force-cube.

I couldn’t suppress my grin as they reached for my protective walls and banged on them in unison.

When the captain had tapped on my cube before, it had sickened me. It was their way of tormenting prisoners. I guess the captain would have experienced the pain too, if she’d been fully in charge of her senses.

But that wasn’t what happened. Instead, because the field had been reversed, the troopers shocked themselves. They recoiled with alarm and surprise.

Two of them fell on the floor outright, their own fields flickering. Maybe they’d shorted out their suits.

Three more were left reeling and fell onto the deck. They scrambled weakly, unable to completely control their limbs. These men had not touched the force-walls directly but had been stunned by the rippling effects.

The last guy in the back wisely marched back out of the chamber to where the officers waited, scolding their troops. I laughed at him quietly, and I closed my eyes again.

I didn’t have much time for my next trick, but I knew I had to make it a big one. Sooner or later someone was going to figure out how to stop me from hacking their ship.

This time, I sent my consciousness down to engineering and examined the engines.

I think, in the end, someone down there knew what I was up to. They tried to shut down the core. But doing such a thing takes time. You have to do it right, or the whole vessel will explode.

Using all the tricks I had, I ordered my sym to open a rift in front of the ship. That part took time as well. Several minutes of thrumming followed as the generators built up a charge.

Without their captain, and in general disarray, the ship’s crew seemed to forget about me. They were no longer mounting an attack on their captain’s quarters. This was a mistake, as it gave me more time to work mischief.

The rift appeared directly in front of the ship. I froze the helm controls so that the frantic bridge crew couldn’t divert our course.

The entire ship’s complement watched on in horror as we sailed into the rift and vanished.

The scary thing was that I had no idea where this rift might take us. I hadn’t bothered to figure that part out. I hadn’t had the time.

And I’d bet a million bucks no one else aboard knew where we were going, either.