Sean Dalton - Operation StarHawks 03 - Beyond the Void (3 page)

 

It wasn’t suicide. Just as the squad opened fire, a forcefield shimmered across the corridor between them and the approaching warbots. It didn’t reflect the squad’s shots; instead it absorbed them.

“Cease fire!â€

 

Pain, the clawing madness of it. The suffocating nearness of an
other.
Thoughts meshing unwillingly. Flashes of mathematical symbols, blurry images, concepts in colors too brilliant to bear. And the pain, always the pain. Entwining through him in a radius from his mind. Sickly tendrils of control. No way to fight. No way of escape
.

One master.

One subject.

Two struggling.

The pain ... horrible, blinding, intensifying.

Loss.

Surrender.

One.

 

Caesar and Phila sat on a metal floor that was bone-numbing cold and harder than a Vynerian angel’s pelvis. They had forcefields for walls, active, not passive, force-fields that crackled viciously if you got within centimeters of them and just about crisped your fingers off if you touched them. Caesar much preferred the passive kind that simply stood there, bending a bit beneath your weight if you leaned on them while their low vibrational energy waves gave you a massage.

“How long have we been here?â€

 

Beaulieu knew a DNA coding chamber when she saw one. She stood in a line of Alliance Fleet personnel, most of whom were suffering hunger, cold, and the side effects of experimentation. They had all been stunned lightly, just enough to numb their extremities and make them feel too nauseous to cause any trouble. Every thirty minutes a robot that looked like a canister rolled by and stunned them again.

Without wanting to be obvious about it, Beaulieu glanced ahead and counted. Thirty-eight, no, thirty-seven people stood ahead of her. Processing was going very rapidly. Past the access point she could see a decontamination booth. That was standard procedure. But as far as she had been able to determine, no one was coming out. Either they had a different exit point, or ...

She ducked completing that thought, then felt ashamed of herself. A competent doctor should be able to face anything, no matter how unpleasant. Certainly she had faced death before, in many guises and many forms. She had not always saved her patients, but she had saved enough for her to feel that her existence made a slight difference in this universe.

Battling death was one thing. Standing like tame cattle in a slaughter line was something else. Her courage kept failing her, leaving her with bad moments when her mouth dried out and she could hear her own heartbeat. Then she had to dig her nails into her palms in order not to disgrace herself.

The people in line, wearing Fleet uniforms of gray, now rumpled and stained, were mostly youngsters, lacking enough officers to steady them. They kept glancing back, seeking faces they knew, their eyes darting to hers and away. There was little talking. They smelled death, the way animals do.

Beaulieu had looked up and down the line herself. So far, she had not seen any of her comrades. The only person she knew was Captain Serula, standing fourteen people ahead of her. Serula had not glanced back a single time, and for a while Beaulieu was angry at her. Then she saw Serula’s hand clasped tightly by the man in front of her. He was Serula’s height but nearly twice as broad, with massive shoulders that strained his uniform. His hair was as dark as Serula’s was fair. They stood as close to side by side as the line would allow them. Beaulieu understood. The husband. Dying together was better than dying alone.

Her eyes stung unexpectedly with tears. She’d had a husband once. God, how long ago? Thirty years? For a foolish moment Beaulieu couldn’t remember his name. Then it surged back to her. Chaka Narenga of the distinguished College of Physicists. Handsome, brilliant, already famous for his theories of particle dynamics, Chaka had filled her eyes from the first time she saw him. They had spent a year together, complete and happy, he busy with new professorial duties, she finishing her last months of residency. Then she’d gotten the chance to join the Fleet and jumped at it. Chaka went on a tour of research with a team of Minzanese engineers. From that point their paths diverged until they saw each other once every two years, then every five, then there seemed no reason to keep the marriage anymore.

Now, she didn’t know where he lived or what he was doing. She could no longer remember clearly what he looked like. She didn’t even know why she should be crying over him, except that she needed his passion right now and all she had was a ghost.

Serula and her man went through the decontamination booth. Beaulieu shuffled forward. The robot came back down the line to stun them again. The Boxcan in front of her leaned over and retched miserably. Beaulieu put her hand on his back; it was all the kindness she could offer.

But inside her anger grew. This was no way to go, tame and helpless, unable to fight. She didn’t even know
why
.

Two ahead of her. She could see past the decontamination booth now. A door slid open, yawning as dark as a throat. The young Boxcan disappeared.

With a faint sense of shock Beaulieu found herself facing a globe that pulsed white. When it spoke to her, its synthesized voice was flat and impersonal. Somehow that made it easier.