‘Surge cleared,’ the helmsman reported from his station. ‘All quarters stabilised. Ion engines disengaging.’
Captain Sansin glanced at velocity indicators projected onto the viewing screen, showing the Atlantia breaking through the light barrier. Having attained super–luminal velocity, the engines were no longer required. The ship’s massless nature meant that it had little to fear from collisions with other objects, although navigation would have ensured that no super–massive stars or black holes were in their path before allowing the drive to engage.
‘What was the last triangulation data from the distress call?’ he asked Lael.
‘No fixed point,’ she replied. ‘Our best estimate places the origin of the call approximately one light hour away. Countdown is set, we’ll disengage mass drive at zero point oh oh five orbital radii from the source.’
The captain nodded thoughtfully. An orbital radii was the distance at which Ethera had orbited its parent star, a yellow dwarf sun. Lael’s calculations would bring them to within a hundred thousand cubits of of the signal, close enough to maintain the element of surprise, not so close as to be caught out by any ambush.
‘Too close.’
Dhalere’s voice came from behind the captain. He turned to see the exotic woman standing nearby, her dark eyes reflecting the sparkling lights of control panels around the bridge.
‘I had no idea that you were a tactical specialist, councillor,’ the captain murmured. ‘Perhaps you should sign up and join us?’
‘My hands are full,’ Dhalere purred in response as she stepped up onto the command platform, her elegant skirt suit revealing a brief glimpse of long, tanned legs as she moved to stand before Idris. ‘My constituents are running low on water and food. They’re becoming restless and they’re uncomfortable with the rumours spreading that we’re approaching an unknown vessel’s distress signal.’
‘As are we all,’ the captain replied, his gaze fixed not upon the councillor but upon the viewing screen and a rapidly changing scroll of data alongside it. ‘As soon as we find suitable resources, rest assured we will stop to gather supplies.’
‘And when, exactly, will that be?’ Dhalere demanded. ‘Should we not be looking after the civilians as our priority?’
The captain stood and straightened his uniform, the same one that he had worn with immense pride for years now. He looked down at Dhalere.
‘It is our job to provide for the civilians,’ he replied. ‘It is yours to look after them. We are already looking for another suitable star system to reconnoitre for supplies. There is little more that we can do right now and I assume that you, along with all of the civlians, would be extremely grateful for any assistance offered were it our vessel that was stranded or in danger?’
‘Our vessel
is
in danger, captain. Our last brush with the Word almost destroyed us and now we’re on a war footing and heading back for home, into the teeth of our enemy.’ Dhalere’s dark eyes betrayed a glimmer of fear. ‘We had the chance to run, to hide. We defeated the Word in battle and we could have vanished, never to be seen again. The Word would never have found us.’
The captain frowned.
‘Yes, we could have, and spent countless millennia living in fear. Condemned our children and countless generations thereafter to live beneath the same shadow. That is not a legacy, it’s a prison sentence. We’ve been over this before, Dhalere. Even the civilians understand that running away is no longer an option for us.’
Dhalere sighed.
‘I fear for us all, captain,’ she admitted. ‘Did we learn anything more about the distressed vessel, before we made the jump?’
Even a non–military councillor like Dhalere was vaguely aware of the limits of super–luminal velocity travel, the captain knew. Signals intelligence could not be received while travelling at such high speeds and weapons could not be fired. Opening a landing bay or docking port would be suicide, the pressures outside the hull so great that the entire vessel would be obliterated by radiation and smashed into a billion fragments in the blink of an eye.
‘No,’ the captain replied. ‘The signal was without doubt Veng’en, and so we assume the vessel from which it originated was also built by them. What it is doing this far away from the colonies and who may be aboard is mere speculation.’
‘Do we have enough Raythons operational to defend the ship if we’re attacked?’ Dhalere asked. ‘Or troops trained?’
‘I cannot impart that information, councillor.’
‘Oh come now, captain,’ Dhalere protested. ‘We’re not back on Ethera now. The people need reassurance. I have to take something back to them.’
Captain Sansin bit his lip, fighting against a lifetime of military training.
‘Our fighters and troops are still in training,’ he said, ‘and two thirds of our Raythons are operational at this time. That’s why we’re pulling up well clear of the signal’s origin. If anybody comes at us, our best bet will be to flee. Take that to them, councillor.’
‘I don’t think that’s going to reassure them.’
‘Like I said, my job is not to reassure. That’s yours.’ He smiled down at her. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a ship to run. Guard?’
An armed Marine, a young man with keen eyes and alert bearing, jumped up onto the command platform.
‘Yes captain?!’
‘Escort the councillor from the bridge and to the elevator banks,’ the captain ordered him, and then turned his back on Dhalere.
‘Aye sir!’
Dhalere concealed her anger as she turned and stalked off the bridge, the Marine’s heavy boots thumping the deck with each stride as he followed her.
As Dhalere exited the bridge and walked toward the elevator banks she realised that the Marine was watching her. She could not see him: it was just a sensation, an instinct that had served her well for many years. The Marine was young, not far out of his teens and not one of Qayin’s reformed convicts either: a true
patriot
.
She reached the elevator banks and abruptly turned to the young man in time to see his eyes flick up from her legs to her eyes.
‘Would you escort me to my quarters?’ she asked. The Marine hesitated, conflicted by his captain’s demands and her request. Dhalere softened her tone a little. ‘What is your name?’
‘Kyarl,’ the Marine replied. ‘Private, four–seven–oh–nine–four.’
‘Is
four–seven–oh–nine–four
your second name?’ she smiled.
‘No, ma’am. It’s my number.’
The Marine flushed a little. Dhalere stepped closer to him. ‘I’ll ensure that the captain does not mind, Kyarl,’ she said as she deliberately looked him up and down. ‘It will make me feel safer. And I suspect that you won’t mind, either?’
She turned toward the elevator and let her hand gently brush the Marine’s thigh as she did so.
The elevator doors opened and Dhalere walked smoothly inside, striding a little longer than she normally would and swaying her hips. She turned and looked at Kyarl expectantly, and with a blink the Marine came to his senses and followed her into the elevator.
The doors closed.
‘Which floor, ma’am?’ Kyarl asked.
Dhalere turned to him and pressed her hand against his groin as she threw the other behind his neck and kissed him fiercely. Kyarl almost recoiled in surprise but then he responded with youthful vigour, his hand resting on Dhalere’s behind as he pulled her against him.
She let him, let him touch her in any way he wanted, for to do so was all that she required. Dhalere felt something warm flood the back of her throat, a tingling sensation that crossed her tongue and flooded into Kyarl’s mouth.
The blood in the human body circulated roughly once every sixty seconds, pulsed through the arteries by the relentless beating of a powerful heart. In Kyarl’s case, young and fit from his intensive training with General Bra’hiv’s Marines, his heart would be in peak condition and would thus beat more slowly than an older man, although right now she could feel it pulsing in his chest. Dhalere would not rush.
Dhalere let the younger man kiss her for as long as he could, and then she slowly drew away from him. His skin was flushed and his eyes swam with passion, and then something changed as she watched him with interest. Kyarl’s lust mutated into confusion as he felt the cloud of tiny Infectors flood into his body, tunnelling through his windpipe and into his bloodstream, rushing through his body with each and every beat of his heart. Close to ten thousand of them, she figured, each as small as a biological cell.
A brief flare of panic appeared in the young Marine’s eyes as he realised what was happening, and he tried to open his mouth. Before he could scream for help he slumped to the elevator deck and his body convulsed as the Infectors flooded his brain stem and cut off the signals from his brain to his body.
Dhalere watched as the Infectors took control of Kyarl’s optical nerves, then his limbs and his hearing, then worked their way down his spinal column. Kyarl shuddered and then lay on his back in the elevator, staring up at her.
‘That was good, no?’ she purred down at him.
On cue, the Infectors stimulated the pleasure centres of Kyarl’s brain and his eyes rolled up into his sockets as unimaginable ecstacy coursed through his body. Dhalere knew the sensation well, knew that she too would feel it again soon. Like an addiction, the Legion rewarded obedience with something just beyond imaginable pleasure.
‘Return to your duties on the bridge,’ she ordered him. ‘I will call upon you soon.’
Kyarl got to his feet as the last wave of pleasure faded away, his body no longer his own. It had been the same for Dhalere when the ship’s original councillor, Hevel, had infected her months before. Utter, insane, indescribable pleasure, a drug more powerful than any narcotic, once experienced, forever craved. The Word was more addictive than any chemical substance and there were no withdrawal symptoms unless its bidding was not obeyed. Then, the pain was every bit as indescribable as the pleasure.
‘Go, now,’ she snapped.
Kyarl turned, the elevator door opening as he marched back toward the bridge.
Dhalere closed the door and hit the button for her level, where her meagre quarters were located. Whatever was waiting for the Atlantia out there in deep space, occupying the distressed vessel, Dhalere knew that her mission was to infect it as fast as she could.
She had barely made it into her quarters when the Legion sent an overwhelming surge of pleasure through her body. Dhalere cried out as she slumped onto her bunk and squirmed in ecstasy as she forgot about the universe.
***
‘Y’aint our leader no more! We’s all got our rights now, captain said so.’
The Marine’s face was sprinkled with ugly scars and one of his eyes was opaque, blinded when a plasma round had detonated close by and seared his skin with white–hot shrapnel. As far as Qayin could recall it had happened when a drug deal had gone bad on Caneeron, or something like that anyway.
At twenty six years of age, Tyrone was a scrawny relic of the gang’s heyday before the apocalypse. He hadn’t yet earned the gang colours, the bioluminescent tattoos of spirals that illuminated Lance–Corporal Qayin’s giant black head and flickered in the low lighting of the barracks, and likely never would. The
Mark of Qayin
was history now, or so Tyrone figured.
‘That don’t mean I don’t still hold sway here,’ Qayin rumbled.
Qayin stood nearly seven feet tall, his frame a cliff of hardened muscle that glinted with sweat. His hair was tightly braided into alternating blue and gold locks that hung to his massive shoulders, a sharp contrast to the dark greys and blacks of his combat fatigues. By contrast, Tyrone was a feeble but aggressive fly.
‘Bra’hiv’s the boss now!’ he retorted. ‘You don’t got no say in what we do.’
The barracks were filled with Marines, many of them bearing the tattoos of the various gangs that had once populated Atlantia Five, the prison hull that had been towed behind Atlantia in earlier times. That prison was long gone, and its inmates now soldiers in training to defend the Atlantia against who–knew–what.
‘Bra’hiv,’ Qayin replied, ‘is a general. I am your leader, and any man who denies it answers to me.’
‘You’s a soldier, jus’ like us all!’
Qayin cast his eyes across the forty or so off–duty Marines watching him with interest. Some, like Qayin, were former convicts. Others were square–jawed, battle hardened patriots cut in the mold of Captain Sansin, colonial blooding running thick in their veins. Alpha Company consisted of such patriots, with Bravo Company populated by the dregs of the high–security prison. The shortage of experienced officers meant that a single Lieutenant, C’rairn, acted as subordinate commanding officer to General Bra’hiv, the overall commander, with a single sergeant, Djimon, to support them. With all senior officers absent, and the Alpha Marines watching with folded arms and neither supporting nor hindering Qayin, he had a free reign.
‘You’re forgetting where you came from, Tyrone,’ Qayin uttered. ‘You was nothing until I picked you up out of the gutter on Caneeron.’
Tyrone’s defiance slipped a little but he was conscious of the crowd watching him and he rallied.
‘You betrayed us back on Five, left us to die,’ he shot back. ‘There ain’t a man here who trusts you further than I could throw you.’
‘You couldn’t throw me at all,’ Qayin scoffed, ‘and oh how I wish I commanded the trust that you do, Tyrone.’
A ripple of low chuckles drifted across the Marines. Qayin smirked as Tyrone’s complexion darkened and anger flared in his eyes.
‘Least I ain’t no traitor.’
Qayin reached Tyrone in a single stride and one giant fist lashed out and grabbed him by the throat. The younger man squealed as he was lifted off of his feet and slammed into a support pillar beside a row of bunks. The back of Tyrone’s head smacked against the pillar with a clang that echoed through the barracks as Qayin glared at him.
‘Don’t think that yo’ uniform’s gonna save you from me,’ he snarled.
The voice that replied came from the barracks entrance.
‘Or you from me, Qayin.’
Sergeant Arran Djimon stood in the barracks doorway. He was as tall as Qayin but the polar opposite in appearance: pale skin, short–cropped blond hair and cold blue eyes that seemed still to reflect the glaciers of his home on Caneeron. Djimon, the senior NCO of Alpha Company, spent most of his spare time shifting iron in the Marine’s makeshift gym or sparring with other soldiers.