STAR HOUNDS -- OMNIBUS (21 page)

“Y
ou’ve got a black hole for a brain if you think I’m going to get on an operating table for that guy,” Laura Shemzak said. Her black hair was longer now and she had a new habit of running her left hand through it.

“Laura, now that Dr. Mish has … uhm … reassembled and reoccupied his … shall we say, mobile unit,” countered starship captain Tars Northern impatiently, “there is no reason whatsoever that the implant the Federation placed in you should not be removed.”

“Yeah, but which one?” Laura said. “I’ve got so goddamned many, how is he going to know he won’t shut off my speech modulators or something!”

Silver Zenyo looked up from her meal, smiling nastily. “Oh, but that would be a blessing!”

“Shut up, you painted bitch!” Laura said, her dark eyes flashing at the exotically dressed officer. Laura wore her usual black jumpsuit and blood-red scarf.

“Now ladies,” said Northern with a mollifying gesture. “Laura, now that you are a member of the crew, you’ve got to have more respect for your shipmates. And Silver—you can well understand Pilot Shemzak’s feelings about biotech operations. Remember her experience on Baleful, shooting her own brother as she was secretly programmed to do by Overfriend Zarpfrin and the Federation.”

“It wasn’t her brother, it was a copy,” Silver said, daintily dabbing her lips with a napkin. “A cyborg copy of Cal Shemzak, just like the other pair of copies we’ve got hidden away so that our gentle blip-ship pilot doesn’t plug them as well!”

Laura opened her mouth to shoot another insult at the midshipman from Morpheus Three, but stopped herself. She looked over to Dr. Michael Mish, the robot body that externalized the consciousness of the artificially intelligent starship she sat in, the
Starbow
. Dr. Mish wore a white silk jacket and floppy bowtie, his mane of white hair and kind eyes making him look like a kindly grandfather in one of those old movies she and her brother Cal used to watch.

Laura reminded herself she had promised to trust these people. Besides, as much as she hated to admit it, Silver was right. She had to get this goddamn device off her optic nerve.

She sighed and nodded. Uncharacteristically mute and sullen, she stared at her mystery meat grown in the hydroponics section, her mind ranging back over what she had been through in the last month.

After finishing an Intelligence mission on Walthor, she had discovered that the mysterious Jaxdron—the only other intelligent species in the galaxy with stardrives and weaponry sophisticated enough to challenge the might of the Federation and the separate autonomies of the Free Worlds—had raided an experimental Federation station on Mulliphen. Mulliphen was close to the Fault, a weakness in the fabric between normal space, Underspace, and the complex array of potential different dimensions. They had destroyed the Causal-Field Generator that attempted to explore these strange intersections of time and space, and had kidnapped her brother Cal.

Federation officials had at first been reluctant to grant her permission to acquire a blip-ship—a small, experimental starship she had been surgically altered to pilot—and pursue her captured brother, “Hopeless” was the term Friend Chivon Lasster had used. But hopeless or not, Laura knew she had to try, that she had to fall back upon her unique intuitive abilities to rescue Cal. Then Overfriend Zarpfrin had interceded, dispatching her to the planet Shortchild to be assigned the latest model of the XT blip-ship line. From there she was to proceed to where sensors showed that the Jaxdrons seemed to be headed: Baleful, one of the few human-colonized worlds the aliens had actually captured in the five standard years of the first Galactic War.

However, the freighter
Ezekiel
, conveying her to Shortchild, was attacked and put out of action by a group of pi-mercs—pirate/mercenaries—under the command of this strange man, Captain Tars Northern. Northern was well-known by Overfriend Zarpfrin and Friend Lasster. Years before, his ship
Starbow
had apparently been one of several experimental artificially intelligent starships, a project headed by Zarpfrin. Chivon Lasster had been Northern’s copilot, and lover. But when, unexpectedly, the Overfriends terminated the project and ordered that the starships be destroyed, Northern had already absconded with
Starbow
, having anticipated the order. He left Lasster behind, as well as his own loyalty to the Federation. Since then, he’d formed a weird crew of misfits who now cruised the starways on mysterious missions.

Laura, in her inimical fashion, had smuggled herself aboard the pi-merc ship—by taking the place of Northern’s contract wife, Kat Mizel—and attempted to coerce the crew into making up for the time she had lost by taking her to Shortchild. Since Northern was interested in utilizing the blip-ship designs himself, a deal was struck: if Laura would allow them to study the XT Mark Nine, they would take her to Shortchild. However, it was discovered that the precious metal attilium existed on Shortchild. Captain Northern had attempted to steal it and was caught, along with Midshipman Gemma Naquist. Laura rescued them and the journey to Baleful continued, the
Starbow
committed to the rescue of Cal Shemzak for its own reasons.

On Baleful, though, Laura discovered the true reason she had been allowed to find her brother. The Federation, not wishing Cal Shemzak to serve their enemy, wanted him dead. They had implanted a device in Laura that programmed her to automatically shoot him on sight. She had, but the real Cal Shemzak had been taken from Baleful by the Jaxdron, leaving behind three enigmas: cyborg copies of the man Laura had killed.

The Jaxdron, briefly tangling with the
Starbow
, had sent its resident semi-psychic Dansen Jitt a taunting message to follow them to a planet clear on the other side of the galaxy. There, the Jaxdron said, they would find Cal Shemzak. There they would find their destinies. Jitt had had the impression that these destinies were not particularly good ones.

Laura glanced past the elaborate neo-Victorian furniture and draperies of the stateroom in which the assembled crew dined, to the view of space afforded by the panoramic vu-plate stretched across the wall. The majestic images of countless stars clustered there, swimming in soft shimmer; intimacies of comets, flecks of planets, all tangled in the strange forces and energies that governed this incredible universe. The
Starbow
now traveled in Underspace, and the view was a composite representation of the area of the galaxy they traversed.

As the others of the
Starbow
crew finished their dinners, Laura allowed herself to realize that, as truly odd as the company was, they wished her to be their companion. That much had been clear in the strangely moving ceremony-like acceptance of her after the sad business near Baleful. She had to give up this new fear of having her body entered and tampered with, she thought. In this strange and forbidding universe, she had to trust someone.

“I apologize, Dr. Mish,” she said, her thought sincere but her words still evincing a faint truculence. “It is very difficult for me to trust someone after—”

The doctor arched his eyebrows and smiled gently. “Please take my assurance, dear lady, that all my knowledge and technology shall be used. You must remember that I feel a great deal of regret that I did not realize the deadly nature of that particular microchip linked to the core of your cybernetic processor array. I was looking for weapons, not programming. I should have done a more detailed analysis.”

“Spilt milk, Doctor,” said Laura. “At least we know that Cal is still alive. And I guess I do want to talk to those copies of him without having the compulsion to kill them. Have you had any more thoughts about why he Jaxdron would make duplicates of him?”

“Experimental purposes?” suggested Gemma Naquist, tinkling the ice in a water glass thoughtfully.

“Then why leave them behind?” asked Captain Northern. “It doesn’t make sense. For that matter, not a whole lot about this business with the Jaxdron makes much sense.”

“Human sense, perhaps,” Dr. Mish interjected. “But not enough is known about the creatures to hypothesize upon the components of Jaxdron sense. My computers come up with nothing substantial based on anything discovered on Baleful, or on the patterns of Jaxdron activity in the past five years. And analysis on those robots that waylaid me shows nothing more than that they could have been constructed on any decently advanced industrialized planet.”

Dansen Jitt shook his head sorrowfully. “They’re totally mad … and terribly dangerous! I say that we just forget this whole thing and get as far away as possible.”

“Sorry, Jitt,” said Captain Northern. “We’re committed … for more reasons than one.”

“How long before destination, Captain?” Laura asked.

“This is going to be a long trip, people. We’re headed to the other end of this side of the known galaxy, clear on the other side of the Fault. It’s going to take over a month.”

“Good, then I’ll have plenty of time to talk to those Cal Shemzak clones,” Laura said. “How are they doing, by the way?”

“They’re principally occupying themselves by playing board games of various sorts with each other,” said Gemma Naquist. “Otherwise, they seem to be just plain confused.”

“Board games? That doesn’t sound much like Cal. Of course, they aren’t really my brothers …. Anyway, Doctor, when can you get this operation done?”

“Tomorrow morning would be convenient,” Dr. Mish answered.

“Fine, just name the time and place and I’ll be there.”

Captain Northern looked at her like a fond, pleased father. Things were apparently rolling along on Northern’s new time schedule, Laura thought, though God knew what that was. There were many crazy things about this boat that she hadn’t yet scraped the surface of.

But she’d get down to the bottom of it all, she told herself. She liked nothing better than mysteries, and the ship they traveled upon and its disparate crewmembers certainly had plenty of mysteries hanging over them.

Yes, she thought, fully recovered now from that frightening dream and its aftermath earlier that morning: all of this might actually turn out to be fun.

T
he
Starbow
slipped from Underspace at a much earlier time than previously expected: later that evening, ship’s time.

A standard measure, of course, in any pirate ship, was to have state-of-the-art, far-range sensor equipment for twofold reasons: to locate possible prey and avoid possible pursuit.

From her cursory examination of the
Starbow
, Laura surmised that the starship had much better equipment than any she’d ever encountered before, equipment able to penetrate the high-energy barriers between Underspace and normal space, to detect specified sorts of activity there. In this it excelled, at the very least, her blip-ship and goodness knew what other Federation ships.

What other equipment did this strange and intelligent ship have? she wondered. This equipment had often come in handy. She’d already discovered that the
Starbow’s
equipment enabled it to elude Federation gunships, which was one of the principal reasons why the
Starbow
had been so successful in its raiding missions.

But the sensor arrays had been programmed to detect even more. Both Dr. Mish and Shontill the alien searched the galaxy for the rare transuranic element known as attilium. This was what they had been seeking aboard the
Ezekiel
, and why Captain Northern had gone down to Shortchild with Laura—to pilfer some of the Federation’s supply.

Shontill was in search of his lost people, apparently fugitive in Omega Space, where physicist Cal Shemzak was researching. Thus the lines of interest converged, and on that quiet evening on the
Starbow
, yet another line was intersected.

Sensors showed the presence of attilium in a ship floating in normal space. It was a derelict ship, and the telltales revealed as well that this was no normal ship at all, but one of alien design. Apparently not Jaxdron.

As it happened, Laura was already on the bridge when Shontill was called for.

Although these were not the Navy sort of people she had become used to of late, in service of the Federation, they were her new crewmates and she was determined to get to know them better and to do her bit in the running of the ship. When the ship’s computer alerted bridge crew to significant activity on the far-range sensors, she was sitting with Communications Officer Tether Mayz, learning her duties and sharing some of what she knew from her own training as a blip-ship pilot.

“It’s damned strange doing all this rigmarole with your hands,” she told the tall and handsome lady behind the banks of keyboards. Laura studied the arrangements of the various modes of commun
ications through the starways and through the ship. “In my blip—my XT, that is—it’s almost all mental. Oh, I’ve gotta nudge a toggle or punch a switch from time to time, but if I want to use the starbands, I just kind of feel out the frequency, like a violin player feels out the right note, and then receive or broadcast. Now, if I’m a singleton—that is, if I’m on call without my blip-ship around me—I can just peel back some skin on my arm and do some of this manually.”

“Amazing.” the tanned Jenuvian replied demurely. “I wonder, though, Laura, with all this circuitry integrated into your body, don’t you feel heavy?”

“Special suspension grids powered by tiny molecular servo-motors take up the slack, Tether, but the weight differential is not that much. So even if those for some reason short out, God forbid, I can still get around very easily. And with the blip and me complementing one another maintenancewise, I don’t have to worry too much about—”

A delicate but insistent chime announced that the sensors had picked up something of interest. Lt. Ratham Bey, manning that board-area at the time, tapped orders for a read-out immediately. The computer quickly spit out data flagged with special orders. The special orders were to immediately notify the top personnel, Captain Tars Northern and Dr. Michael Mish, and let them alert the alien known as Shontill as well, at their own speed.

As it happened, there was no need to alert the doctor. No sooner had Bey turned his brown face to communications and Mayz was about to key open the lines, than the tall, stoop-shouldered robot strode in, long white lab smock aswish about his legs.

“Yes, yes, no need to call me, but get Northern up here fast,” he instructed. “Hold the message to Shontill a few minutes. I don’t want the big lummox excited. He tends to break things.”

“How did—” Laura began, then remembered that Dr. Mish was an extension, a personification of the
Starbow’s
intelligence, and hence had an awareness of all the sensor activity, much as she had such a grasp when she piloted her blip.

“Spooky, huh?” said Tether Mayz. “He used to do stuff like that all the time and I never could figure it out. But now that the cat’s out of the bag for the whole crew, it all makes sense. Still strange, though. Maybe we’ll eventually find out the other stuff too.”

Laura had no time to ask just what “the other stuff” was; she was too busy listening in on the excitement.

Captain Northern stormed on deck. He’d either been interrupted mid-sleep or mid-drink. His usually neat attire was disheveled, as was his longish blond hair.

Dr. Mish, standing above the boards, did not look up as he said, “Splendid news, Captain. We’ve got some sort of alien artifact. Spacecraft. Derelict.” Mish spouted off the coordinates. “Only a brief detour and then emergence from Underspace will bring us there. And Captain, it looks similar to the spacecraft we found Shontill floating in—only not so old!”

Captain Northern rubbed his hands together with the kind of boyish glee that sometimes came over him. “Navigator, did you mark those coordinates?”

“Aye aye, Captain,” responded Dansen Jitt in sober tones.

“Please plug them into your automatic pilot, and when the course is set, I want immediate diversion of course.”

“Hey, wait a minute,” Laura objected, hands on hips. “What’s this going to do to our schedule? We’ve got my brother to save, you know!”

“Dear lady,” Captain Northern said, still radiating his rumpled boyish glow, “the Jaxdron will wait with your brother. They’ve made it perfectly plain that they are going to be delighted with our arrival, after extending their rather ineffable invitation through poor Jitt. Meanwhile, adventure’s afoot, and last one there’s a heel!”

“Your attitude really steams me sometimes, Northern!”

“My attitude, my dear, is my own, and so is this ship. Though you have deigned to bless us with your company.” Captain Northern executed a mock-gallant bow. “Please be advised that I am still in charge!”

“What does some hunk of ancient metal have to do with anything?” Laura found herself saying the words almost automatically, just to be contrary.

Captain Northern’s deep blue eyes seemed to twinkle. “More than you might think, Ms. Shemzak! More than you might think.” He was clearly in one of his unpredictably manic moods, his graceful movements a dance of delight at some secret joke, his long delicate features parading excited emotions.

This Northern character was a quixotic sort, no question, Laura thought. But she found him strangely fascinating. He was like a buccaneer in one of those swashbucklers that Cal liked … only quite crazed, and periodically depressive and somber.

Now he pointed his finger in the air like a maestro wielding a baton above an orchestra, about to direct a frenzied symphony. “Time to call up Mr. Shontill, Lieutenant Mayz. Doctor, might I borrow a brace of your robots to escort our friend to the bridge? This may get him in one of his”—the captain showed even white teeth in a silly smile—“excited moods.”

“Quite,” said Dr. Mish. “I believe that General Patton and Attila the Hun are sufficiently empowered to control any untoward actions on our guest’s part.”

Attila the Hun? thought Laura. That was a new one. In the days since the Jaxdron encounter near Baleful, Dr. Mish’s robot factory had been busy. First it had to reproduce Mish’s own fatherly-scientist type from the copy blasted by the Jaxdron robots in their successful bid to break free of the
Starbow’s
powerful tractor beam. Then it had to replace those
Starbow
robots that had been destroyed by the alien berserkers as they fought their way to the bridge and to Dr. Mish.

If Captain Tars Northern could be characterized as a manic-depressive loon anchored by a strong sense of duty and mission, then Dr. Michael Mish—and thus, the intelligence of this very ship itself—might be dubbed unclassifiably eccentric.

His crew of robots was a case in point. They did not look like robots at all, but like human beings. And they were all limited simulacrums of famous Earth military leaders. They were primarily used in boarding ships that the
Starbow
attacked, but also did double duty as servants, allowing the
Starbow
crew of some thirty officers to live quite comfortably, with no menial work to speak of. But Laura found them as weird as women’s beards.

She stood back, watching with fascination the activity aboard the bridge as the crew went about the business of redirecting the course of the
Starbow
. The ship went from the supra-Einsteinian dimension called Underspace, back to the normal galactic way of things. From what she could tell as she listened to the voices call off readings, the derelict spacecraft was caught in orbit around a red-giant star. The star was surrounded by eight planets, huge flecks of cold cinders around a dying furnace, none holding any life. Spectrum analysis showed the definite presence of Fault influence, a fact that seemed to excite Dr. Mish inordinately.

Personally, Laura could not get too excited about all this Fault business—this strange dimension that everyone wanted to enter and study. All she cared about was rescuing her brother. She found that the best way to achieve her goals was to focus upon one at a time and let the others be of little consequence. True, from the sound of it, the very reason that Cal had been captured by the Jaxdron was because of his association with the study of this dimension. But as far as Laura was concerned, the fact remained that the aliens had her brother, and she wanted him back safe—Federation, Jaxdron and universe be damned!

By the time Shontill arrived on the bridge, everything was ready. All calculations had been made, the course had been set, and the
Starbow
had been put on an automatic pilot that would whisk it back through the veil between Underspace and normal reality.

The alien strode calmly through the door, ducking his head to get through, bookended by the two robots that had been detailed to retrieve him. Although the starship’s superiors clearly had some trepidation concerning Shontill’s reaction to learning this bit of information, the only difference in the alien that Laura could detect was a hard gleam in its (his? her?) eye which, humanly interpreted, looked more like determination than excitement and enthusiasm.

Still, though the creature completely ignored her, it gave Laura the jitters, the memory of its reaction to her intrusion upon its private quarters clear in her memory.

When Laura had first encountered Shontill, the alien being had been horrifying, a Lovecraftian nightmare of tentacles and teeth in a nutrient-rest tank. But it had a metamorphic talent, and could change to a humanoid shape and breathe (raspingly) through sets of laterally placed gills in its neck and body. It still wore the robe Laura had last seen it in over its greenish body. Wide, proud nostrils flared as its eyes took in the movements on the bridge—the dancing lights, the yellow and green data lettering the ship’s vu-screens.

“Ah, Shontill!” called out Northern. “My dear, dear fellow! So good of you to—”

The alien’s voice was a deep vibrato and definitely understandable, but nonetheless quite inhuman. “I expected … your summoning …. I sense the relic … I pray for revelation … yet lain prepared … for disappointment.”

“Remarkable,” returned Northern. “Now Shontill, we don’t know for sure that this is one of your race’s starships, even though the readings—”

“The ship! … Frin’ral” Shontill’s voice rang authoritatively. “I can … sense it! You doubt me, Captain Northern?” Something like anger seemed to glow in its alien eyes.

Captain Northern raised his hands defensively. “No, no, of course not! And of course we’ll check it out most thoroughly. We haven’t got an attilium reading on the derelict yet but I’m sure that we can get that just as soon as the
Starbow
breaks back into normal space and we can get near enough to the vessel. It’s out near the edge of the planetary ecliptic, so that should not be too much trouble. Then we’ll have some probes and—”

“The Frin’ral ship,” said the alien authoritatively, “will be boarded.”

“Well, I suppose we can send out a few robots—”

“No. It will be … boarded by … units of life. Robots may trip … traps …. Robots may not … see what can be seen.”

“Oh, well, if you think that this is absolutely necessary …. If probes and sensors find no danger. I don’t care to place the lives of my crew in jeopardy.”

“Not necessary,” said Shontill tonelessly. “I will go.”

“But Shontill! Look here! How is that possible?” Northern demanded. “You have no life suit. Part of that derelict is almost certain to be in vacuum.”