Spacer Clans Adventure 1: Naero's Run (25 page)

28

Baeven kept them all together in
a high sec cell.

The meeting place for the coming auction remained secret. Once they arrived, Baeven’s guests were not allowed leave or make any type of transmission until the issue at hand was decided.

Baeven possessed some means of jamming or cutting off the facility and blocking all tracing and transmissions within that area.

Naero went
on display for the highest bidder.

Baeven
controlled the auction.

Of course the main sticking point remained whether she actually carried part or all of the Kexxian Data Matrix somehow.

No one from Triax was present.

Some
of the bidders didn’t want to take any chances. They offered to buy her outright, and have their people take her apart and figure it out later.

But then they haggled about the price.

Thus far, offers ranged from metric tons of credits or other fungible wealth. Entire fleets of ships. Entire worlds–including their economies and populations. Appointments to the Boards of Directors at various Gigacorps, or Directorships themselves, granting Baeven unimaginable wealth, influence, and godlike power over the lives of trillions.

When not up for bidding,
Naero sulked or plotted with her fellow prisoners, in either abject despair or boredom.

“We never should have trusted the outcast,” Gallan complained. “I’m sorry, Naero. I’m embarrassed and angry that he took us down so easily.
Haisha
. Some Spacers we are.”

“What if he does sell you?” Tarim said. “We aren’t worth anything. What’s he going to do to us? Cut our throats? Poison our food and water? Blow us out of an airlock?”

He worked himself up like that until basically they all told him to shut the hell up.

Even Naero had to take a turn against his incessant blubbering. “Will you be quiet with all that? It’s not helping us at all, Tarim.”

“I...I can’t help it. I can’t stop thinking about what he might do. What could happen.”

Tarim
fidgeted, asking questions based on his fearful nature. Reacting to almost everything with terror and despair.

All of them worried. Each of them dealt with fear in a different way.

Strangely enough, Ellis seemed to gloat over the situation a little and tried to make light of it. His response?

Laugh in the face of fear.

“It’s kind of funny, no? It’s like being back with Kattryll, but without the torture and the buggery. Cheer up, Tarim. There are only so many times they can kill and revive us. At least we have each other against this betrayer, and all of the Gigacorps and our other enemies. No problem. We’ll find a way out. I’m absolutely sure of it.”

Ellis’s flip nature
bothered Naero almost more than her former uncle’s treachery–if in truth, he’d ever been her uncle.

Baeven might tell her anything to
keep her off guard.

Even if he had been family once, as an outcast, he was dead to her and her clan
now. Nothing would stop her from killing him if she got the chance.

Instead of Naero being ordered out, t
he security panel to the brig slid open without warning.

Baeven st
rode in among them.

Alone
.

Gallan attacked immediately. F
ollowed by Ellis, and finally Tarim.

Baeven stunned Ellis with the back of his hand,
knocking him ten meters across the room, leaving a red smear against the wall.

He endured
a glancing blow from Gallan. Merely winded Tarim and let him drop.

Naero maneuvered
for an opening.

Gallan
gave it to her.

Baeven countered
Gallan’s combinations and flipped him into the high ceiling corner. The big Spacer fell hard and did not move.

Naero
attacked low off the floor, and then from the adjacent wall behind Baeven.

She tossed hidden
stun powder directly into Baeven’s face.

He deftly deflected most of it with one hand, but still
gagged and choked.

Naero
followed up with combo kicks to several vital areas.

Like kicking someone made out of steel.

She hit Baeven with several microbomblets she and Gallan had kept concealed on them.

The blasts rocked him and pushed him back across the length of the cell.

She got a good running start. Ending with a powerspin kick that should break his neck.

Baeven caught her ankle
. Speed. Terrifying

His
raw strength. Horrific.

With one hand
, he slammed her against the wall to either side of him.

Wham, wham, wham.

Several times, faster than thought.

Massive p
ain erupted in her ribs, arms, and legs. Multiple tears, twists, contusions, and micro-fractures.

He dropped her to
the floor, helpless and gasping, ribs moving in ways they shouldn’t.

Baeven could have
slain her and the others easily. At any time.

In a
day or so, her smartblood might regenerate much of the damage. But he made sure her next several hours would be filled with wrenching pain every time she moved.

He grabbed her by the hair and yanked her to her feet. Naero gasped. She felt her eyes bulge as if they might burst.

She ground her teeth, but other than a few weak grunts, she did not cry out. She wouldn’t give the bastard the satisfaction.

He stared into her eyes
up close, his scorching breath on her face. “I warned you not to trifle with me. I thought you were smarter than this, Naero. But I guess not. I don’t want to hurt you and your friends. But I will. If you force me to.”

“
Please, don’t hurt her,” Tarim pleaded, crawling on the ground, still clutching his gut. “Oh, Jesus.”

“
Be quiet,” Baeven snapped.

He glared at Naero again and shook her
, knowing full well the intense pain it caused.

She felt her eyes roll up. She almost blacked out.

“Listen to me,” Baeven said “The next one who interferes with me I cripple. Including you, Naero. You don’t need to be able to walk to be of use to me.

“
The next I kill. No hesitation. No mercy. Understand?”

She
barely managed to nod.

“
Good. Now, come with me and cooperate. Clean yourself up. More interested parties have arrived. They wish to examine you along with the others and renew the bidding.”

“
Why didn’t you just leave me with the Triaxians?” she said.

“
They don’t have the information I desire, and they always double-cross you in any case. I couldn’t trust to their heavy-handed methods to tell me anything. Besides that, I detest them the most of all the Corps.”

“I hope
this is all worth it, you renegade son of a bitch.”

He half-smiled
. “Such flattery. Some of our new guests claim to have certain ancient testing methods they would like to try out on you. We shall see.”

“J
ust what do you want, Baeven? Wealth, power, control?”

“Information. Knowledge. Still so many things I want to know,
and I’m running out of time. Thus far, all the players know something. All of them possess one or more pieces to this puzzle. Perhaps these new tests will tip the scales. That’s why I’ve lured them all here to this secret location–to find out who knows what, and put it all together.”

“
You’re playing all the Corps against each other?” Naero laughed, even though it nearly killed her. “You didn’t strike me as the ambitious or greedy type, Baeven. I guess you’re just a criminally insane fool.”

He smiled a grim smile
. “You could be right.” He led her out of the brig and secured it behind him.

“I have always been quite mad, they say.”

2
9

Baeven strapped her
down in her flight togs, tight onto a medbed in the center of a mid-sized, bone-white lab room.

She gasped and felt her eyes pop again and again.

The medbed stood nearly upright, causing her agony yet again. Her weight sagged against the restraints. A stifled sob escaped her; she leaned back slightly. She struggled to swallow.

At a distance to either side
of the lab, two halves of a circular table and chairs popped up from the floor panels and surrounded her.

Naero tried not to
struggle or move, allowing her body to heal.

Several minutes passed before the players
filtered in.

New examination equipment emerged from the ceiling and wall panels, closing in around her like angry torture bots.

The lights in the back of the room dialed way down, leaving her spotlighted up front for everyone to watch, like an experiment test subject.

Eleven
individuals took seats at that circle table in the darkness, four more than before. Six of the eleven had bodyguards standing behind them at the ready.

Lights came on at
Naero from above. Her eyes adjusted. The first one to scan and examine her from his displays looked like a high-level tech of Stellar Industries, a humanoid Naivatch.

She
could tell by the deep black skin of his hands and the purple flesh beneath the fingernails. His palms and the soles of his feet would be bright violet.

Deeply private about their appearance, the Naivatch showed only their han
ds when abroad, the rest of their body wrapped in robes or covered in blast armor and a visored helmet, like this one.

He turned impatiently to Baeven.

“Why have you brought us here again, Vatril? And who are these others? This girl carries no information whatsoever–”

“You will all refer to me as
Baeven from now on.”

The Naivatch waved one hand, revealing his purple palm. “
If you insist. Who are these people? Allies of yours in this massive scam? What are you trying to pull? If she indeed carries the kind of data Triax claims, there’d be some detectable trace of it. No one can prove anything.”

“As always, you could be right, Na’Darroch,”
Baeven said.

He paced between the two tables
. “But as we all believe, this data is Kexxian. The trick is to determine how the ancient masters hid and encrypted it. None of us can take the chance that it is indeed present and that others shall retrieve it first.”

The others appeared restless and impatient, in no mood for further failure or delay.

“We demand proof.”

“Stop wasting our time, Betrayer.”

“Show us something, or your life is forfeit.”

Baeven half-smiled.

“Time to put all the pieces of this puzzle together.” He turned to one of the new arrivals, a heavy-set woman with short blond hair and pale blue eyes, wearing a high-level Krupp Corps uniform.

“Madame Garrold, provide us with your information.”

She nodded. “Our researchers discovered an anomaly on the surface DNA on scumworld algae and mold spores in sectors of a rimward spiral arm thought to have been included among the Kexx ancients.

“It took us over two centuries to break the encryption.”

“And what did you uncover?” Baeven said.

Everyone waited.

“Music files. Kexxian music, very intricate. Even beautiful.”

The emissary from Gelden Corps snorted. “What good is that to us?”

“It proves,” Baeven said, “that the Kexx had a way of imprinting coded information right on the very DNA of living organisms that was both self-replicating and eternal. The information was neither changed nor corrupted in any way, after millions of years. Am I correct, Madame Garrold?”

“Yes, and we believe this method of transmission was very commonplace to the ancient Kexx. They could do so with great ease. Making every form of life and existence they had contact with potential computerized storage devices.”

Baeven turned to another new guest, a small pale man with long black hair, wearing a green kimono suit, from Hita Corps.

“Master Kurita. Give us the details on the strange plague that destroyed the distant colony of Tora-3 eighty-seven years ago.”

Kurita bowed his head slightly.

“Tora-3 was also believed to be an important homeworld of the ancient Kexx, home to many important ruins. We stumbled upon it quite by accident during our early expansion period. The colony found several mysterious artifacts that were dead to us. Nothing could make them function or reveal their purpose.”

“And, as we all know,” Na’Darroch added, “the colony was completely destroyed.”

“Yes,” Kurita continued. “The terrifying plague awoke and destroyed all life on Tora-3. It is a Black Zone, a Dead Zone to this day. No ship or probe can land on its surface and take off again. All tek disrupts and negates. Nothing living can survive on the planet’s surface.”

“And what caused the plague? What form did it take?”

Kurita bowed again, and looked slightly nervous.

View screens popped down from the ceiling. Vids started up.

Kurita narrated.

“These vids are top secret. Only high-level directors have ever seen them. This is the first time they have been shown outside the Hita Board of Directors.”

Techs in a lab were scanning or performing some kind of medical procedure on what looked to be a mid-sized anthropoid.

“That creature was a blue-haired mountain ape, native to Tora-3. They swam in the heated mineral lakes and pools scattered throughout the volcanic mountains on one of the continental coasts. A deep genetic scan stumbled upon something strange. A wealth of encrypted alien data, right on the surface of this species’ DNA. The teks grew excited and called in the best researchers of that period to decode the information.”

“What went wrong?” Baeven asked.

Kurita violently motioned toward the screens.

In the vids, without any warning, chaos and destruction exploded.

Weird specks of light burst out of the test subjects and the equipment monitoring the apes.

People exploded, imploded, or dissolved and melted right in their clothing.

Strange ribbons of coruscating light and dark tendrils and thrashing tentacles of shadow ripped through teks, guards, equipment, and the very walls before the vids blacked out.

Master Kurita shook his head. “To this day, no one knows for certain. But the destruction spread from that lab to all over the entire planet. Within seconds. Killing everyone and everything on Tora-3.

“From the final data streams, it is believed that the teks unlocked a vast source of data encrypted on the DNA of the native apes. But this time, the information was somehow protected. A defense mechanism triggered, destroying the information itself and everything around it. Our officials didn’t know what to call such destruction, so they referred to it as a virulent plague. But as you can see from the vids, it was something much more.”

He speaks of a level thirty-four defensive protocol. A very severe planetary level response.

Quiet, Om. We need to listen to everything they have to say.

The reps from Marsten and Brannock Corps tried to protest, talking over each other.

“This is ridiculous. What good is something that self-destructs in this fashion?”

“So, even if we decode the Kexxian Data Matrix, we have to get past this doomsday defense mechanism?”

The Gravlink Corps rep sneered. “This deal sounds worse all the time.”

“My good friends,” Baeven said. “What valid enterprise doesn’t entail a little risk? What if there were a way not only to detect the presence of such data streams, but unlock them, without triggering these nasty, inconvenient self-destruct protocols?”

“We don’t have the tek to do so,” the man from Omni Corps blurted out.

“
Perhaps we do,” an odd little voice noted.

Light struck
the speaker from another direction and the medbed spun around to face the third new arrival, while the other lights dimmed. Because of her small size and the focus on the troubling vids, few had seen her take the stage.

“
I am Mxgob, trading agent for Brannock Terraforming. I am also of the Cumi Medtek Consortium.”

Naero
’s eyes focused on a small bipedal mammalian humanoid less that a meter tall and, somewhat akin, in appearance, to a large Terran mouse.

The Cumi
remained an ancient race by any modern standards, also famous for their vast medical and genetic knowledge, trade, and negotiation skills.

Naero’s parents had been on friendly terms with some of their leaders.

One of these creatures, a deep-space traveler and medtek, had given her and Jan that strange medical scan concerning the ancient plague that her parents seemed so afraid of.

With apparent basis in fact it seemed now. The horrific vids from Tora-3 were still fresh in her mind.

Mxgob cleared her throat and clasped her hands behind her.

“
My people traded with the Kexx, long ago at the beginning of our enlightenment, and just before they faded away. We use a very similar method of encoding our own data files in molecular DNA. It is somewhat simpler, more primitive, but the principle is basically the same, just at another level. And without the violent security protocols.”

She held up a strange-
looking scanner.

“
With permission, I will access my ship’s archived data records for information on ancient Kexxian encryption methods. Even a million years ago, much of their tek remained highly advanced, beyond even our standards today. But because of our trading relationships with them during their final centuries, we were able to adapt and incorporate some of their most basic systems and the underlying concepts of their technology within patterns of our tek that survives to this day. Operating on the exact same principles and electromagnetic frequencies.”

The thin lady with orange hair and white eyes from Odyssey Corps broke in, striking the table in front of her with her fists. “Can you or can you not detect the existence of the Kexxian Data Matrix in this spack?”

“I believe I can. With some modifications to present equipment, I think I can duplicate the process, bypass any built-in security, and access the raw encrypted data. It will need to be decoded and translated further from that point to make it usable. Of course.”

Heads turned to Baeven, eagerly.

He finally nodded his assent to the small furry creature.

“
Mx, if this is a trick to bring in outside help, I will skin you. Access your ship, but do not attempt to send any signals or activate any other systems. You will be monitored.”

“
I object,” another buyer said. “I’m with Chikara Corps. This could all still be just a big set up to trick us into buying something that does not exist.”

“All of you have your spies.
You know Triax’s efforts as well as I,” Baeven said. “Check your sources. They would not be expending this much effort chasing after nothing.”

“
Perhaps, they too, are deceived,” the Matashi rep said. “The Cumi are known to lie at will when profit is involved. This creature could be in league with Baeven. Don’t be surprised if she discovers something fantastic.”

“I am Director
Prebin from Omni Corps,” the thin woman said. “It was we who first contracted the exploration of Kexxian ruins wherever they were located. By rights, anything found should be returned to us as our rightful property. Our original exploration team was slain by raiders on Chosala-5. One survivor escaped, rescued by a Cumi ship, and supposedly turned over similar information to them before dying. The Cumi never told us what came of it.”

“
Then you no longer have a legal claim,” a familiar voice said.

Naero twisted her head
painfully before the medbed even moved.

There sat Adrin, dressed impeccably
. “Come now, even if such knowledge exists, it would not be monopolized for more than a few decades.”

“
But in those few decades,” Na’Darroch, the Naivatch from Stellar Industries said, “those who did monopolize and apply it could drastically affect the fortunes and prospects of their competitors.”

“You are new to this gathering as well,” Madame Garrold said. “
Please, identify yourself as we all have. This is an open auction.”

Adrin leaned into the light
and removed his head covering. Naero counted nine ornate braids.

“
Mellis Tarret VI,” he said, “Patriarch of the Matayan Cartels, Emperor of the Matayan peoples.”

“What a joke,”
the Gelden agent said. “The Corps crushed your so-called empire when you were a child. The Cartels do not exist anymore. I thought you were on Triax’s leash? They will strangle you with it when they learn of your duplicity.”