Then, even before those advance ships were all the way through the system, they would begin their own still more violent deceleration, to come to a stop a light month beyond, and get back to Ulubis weeks after the main fleet had arrived: at best to help with the mopping up, at worst to deliver a retaliatory hammer-blow.
The remainder of the Advance-attack Squadron would pass through the system in small groups of ships, their arrival staggered, unpredictable, distributed, their tactics in part defined by whatever the high-speed craft had discovered. With luck, with what they hoped and trusted was a good battle-plan, the waves of war craft, each able to spend more fighting time in the system than its immediate predecessor, would deliver a succession of softening-up blows against the enemy: rocking it, unbalancing it, confusing and bloodying it. The main body of the fleet, arriving like a bunched fist, would just provide one final massive knockout punch.
Their drive light would precede them, of course. There would be no complete surprise.
The Starveling invasion had given the defenders of Ulubis even more warning, not that there was much they could have done with it. The E-5 Discon fleet had slowed right down, shut its drives off almost as one while still a few days out, well within the system’s Oort shell, then slowed further as its lead ships crossed the boundary into the planetary system.
For the next few weeks after the drive signatures meshed with the Ulubis system and shut off, when the invasion must have been at its height, there had been a lot of weapon-blink. Much of it had been around the planets Sepekte and Nasqueron.
*
‘My name is Leisicrofe of Hepieu, Nasqueron equatorial. This is my last testament. I will presume that whoever you are you have followed me for the data which I carried on behalf of my fellow Dweller, the scholar Valseir of Schenehen. If you have not, and this recording has fallen to you in what one might term a casual manner, it may be of little interest. If, however, you do seek the data I held, then I must tell you now that you are going to be disappointed.’
Something in Fassin seemed to break and fall away.
‘Uh-oh,’ Y’sul said.
‘This may seem unfortunate and may make you angry. However, I have most likely done you a considerable favour, as it is my sincere and firm belief that what I was asked to carry was something I should not have been, and something that nobody should have been or should be asked to take responsibility for. It was not something I was supposed to know about, of course, and it was not really Valseir’s fault that I came into possession of the knowledge of what it represented.’
‘Talks a lot, doesn’t he?’ Y’sul said.
‘To my shame, I think I must be more shallow than my friend Valseir gave me credit for. He gave me the data sealed in a safe-keep box and asked me not to open it. I said I would not. He did not even ask me for my word, thinking, I am sure, that simply asking a friend and fellow scholar such a thing, and receiving such an assurance, was guarantee enough. However, I am not like Valseir. I am inquisitive by nature, not as the result of an intellectual fascination with any particular subject. I resisted the urge to open the safekeep box for many years while I was on my travels, but eventually I surrendered to temptation. I opened the safekeep, I began to read what was inside, and realised its importance. Even then I might have stopped reading, closed the box and put it away again, and had I done that I would still be alive. Instead, I carried on reading - and this has resulted in my death. I can only claim that perhaps I was in a sort of trance of disbelief at the time.’
‘More likely taken some recreational substances,’ Y’sul snorted.
‘And so I came to hold within myself the knowledge, the meaning of that which I had been asked to keep safe, rather than just having charge of the medium containing it. Realising what I now knew, and comprehending that it was of inestimable value, I came to the conclusion that I could not be trusted with it. While not entirely understanding what I had read, I could not forget it. I could tell others, and it was not impossible that I might be made to tell what I knew through the use of drugs or more direct intervention with my brain and mind.’
‘Nutter,’ Y’sul said.
‘What’s that?’ one of Quercer & Janath said distantly over the open link to the
Velpin.
‘Hmm. Don’t know.’ It didn’t sound like they were paying attention to what was being said by the recording of Leisicrofe. ‘I will not pretend that I had not been thinking of my own death for some time. However, it was habitually within the context of having completed my studies into the many differing forms of the Cincturia and publishing a learned - I had even hoped an at-the-time definitive - work on this, my chosen and beloved field of study. Knowing what I now know, I have thought it best, however reluctantly, to curtail my studies forthwith and kill myself as soon as may decently be achieved. I shall do so here, in the Ythyn Cineropoline Sepulcraft
Rovruetz,
where my death will at least appear to have a fraction more meaning than it might have had elsewhere.’
‘- Looks like, or…’ Fassin heard over the open channel.
‘Ping it?’
‘No! Are you… ? Shut off that--’
The open channel closed. Fassin looked back to the access hatch and the short ship-to-ship connecting them to the
Velpin.
Leisicrofe was still speaking.’… Will forgive me. You should. If you know what it is you are looking for, then all I will say is that it looked more like a code and frequency, not what I believe was expected. But it is quite gone now. Destroyed, along with the safekeep box itself, thrown into the sun called Direaliete. I know of no other copy. If none of this makes any sense to you, then please respect an old, and - as it turns out - foolish, Dweller’s last wish, and leave him here in peace.’ The recording froze and an end-message signal flashed.
Fassin stared at the image of the dead Dweller. It was over. He’d failed. Maybe now there was no way ever to find out whether the Dweller List meant anything or even had ever meant anything.
‘Totally mad,’ Y’sul said, with something like a sigh. He fiddled with the glyphboard controls. ‘Looks like that’s our lot.’
He turned to Fassin. ‘Doesn’t sound too hopeful, does it, young human-me-lad?’
The open channel from the ship clicked on suddenly. ‘Get out!’ Quercer & Janath screamed. ‘Ten seconds to get off there and back in the
Velpin!’
‘Being attacked! Must run!’
Fassin shook himself out of his shock and started backing towards the open hatch leading to the
Velpin.
Y’sul pulled out of the sensory-nook, began to follow, one hub-limb scratching at his mantle. ‘This madness is obviously contag--’
‘Fucking
Voehn
ship! Out,
now!’
‘
Engines in five, four, three…’
SIX: THE LAST TRANSFORM
… Sssss 1000101011001010101 \ on\\ symcheck \ ssscheck \ syt - sytser \ syst - syst - \ fail reboot \ livel \ livl \ lev - levl - level 001 \ hup \ gethup \ paramarametsr \ woop! woop! \ check \ check \ check \ system check \ run ALL \ cat. zzero sssum-check postcrash full allowablesss\ rebot \ rubot \ reOot \ lbit \ cat. zero sumcheck postcrash fullabables \ ints. postcrash (likely antagonistic external hostile agency cause) full All reboot restart: \ starting mem. \ lang. \ sens. \ full int… bip bip bip… Bang! Wo!
Hnnh? You all right?
I’m all right. Now. You all right?
I’m all right.
Happened?
This: ‘Closing hatch!’
The hatch at the end of the ship-to-ship joining the
Velpin
and the Dweller SoloShip started to close before Fassin got to it. Y’sul was still behind him, moving quickly along the exit. Fassin swung through, flipped, turned and grabbed the hatch’s moving edge with his left manipulator.
The closing hatch nearly took the manipulator off. Fassin was swung around by the force of it and found himself having to brace with his other manipulator against the lock interior, struggling to keep the hatch - grinding, mechanism humming mightily - from closing.
‘Somebody holding that hatch open?’ one half of Quercer & Janath shouted indignantly.
‘Out the way, Fassin!’ Y’sul yelled, rising fast straight out of the ship-to-ship and colliding heavily with Fassin’s gascraft, sending the two of them tumbling through the lock and into the
Velpin’s
interior. Error\failure messages from the gascraft’s left manipulator arm crowded against one edge of Fassin’s field of vision. The hatch slammed shut behind them. Immediately, a great force smashed them against the compartment’s sternward bulkhead. They were stuck there, unmoving, the arrowhead snagged over the Dweller’s tipped left discus until the increasing acceleration and a series of sharp vibrations made Fassin slide off one edge of Y’sul’s carapace and whack down onto the carbon bulkhead by his side. The ship roared around them.
‘Engines are on, one takes it,’ Y’sul said, wheezing. Fassin could feel the apparent gravity building still further. They were at something over twenty gee already. A young, fit Dweller with no esuit protection stuck on his side against an inelastic surface could take about twenty-four, twenty-five gees continuous before their carapace just collapsed and turned their insides to mush. The
Velpin’s
acceleration topped out at twenty-two gees.
‘All right back there?’ their travelcaptain asked.
‘Not really,’ Fassin said. ‘You’re kind of near crushing Y’sul.’
‘Acknowledged.’
‘Not outrunning the fucker. Can’t.’
‘Cut off and come about. Surrender.’
‘Agree.’
The acceleration snapped off. Fassin and Y’sul were instantly weightless, rebounding fractionally from the bulkhead just by the released compression in the hull of one and the carapace of the other.
‘Get up here, you two,’ Quercer & Janath told them.
The Voehn ship was a klick-long needle spined with swing-guns and weapon tubes. It came quickly up on them and was alongside by the time the human in his gascraft and the Dweller Y’sul got to the
Velpin’s
control space.
‘Since when do the Voehn choose to attack Dweller craft going about their--?’ the travelcaptain began to ask.
‘Be quiet,’ said an imageless voice. ‘Make yourself ready for boarding.’
Quercer & Janath’s shiny suit rustled as the truetwin turned to look at Fassin and Y’sul while tapping some controls. Images of the
Velpin
appeared in holo displays, showing hatches and doors flashing in outline.
‘The Voehn have turned pirates,’ Quercer & Janath told them calmly.
‘How fucking
dare
they!’ Y’sul roared.
‘They didn’t follow us through the wormhole, did they?’ Fassin asked.
‘Ha! No.’ The truetwin seemed purely amused. ‘No, they were waiting in this system.’
‘Assume we’ll see why shortly.’
‘The fucking scumbag bastards will pay grievously for this outrage!’ Y’sul yelled, shaking with fury.
A shudder rang through the
Velpin
and alarms started blaring. Quercer & Janath roted closer to a brightly flashing display. ‘Look at that.’
‘Penetrated amidships with a cut-through.’
Cameras briefly showed a thick tube extending from the middle of the Voehn ship into a neat circular hole in the hull of the
Velpin.
Then the images crazed and faded. Other displays started to disappear. The alarms warbled down to a croak, then shut off. Fassin thought he could smell burning.
‘And us cooperatively opening all our orifices.’
‘Fucking typical.’
‘Here they come. Thundering through.’
Another display showed an abstract of large beings pouring through the breach and spreading through the ship, bouncing off surfaces in the zero-gee. The largest force was coming straight towards the control space. Then that display shut down too. All the lights went out. The background noises of the ship, hardly noticed until they ceased, just faded away.
A ragged pulse of what sounded like heavy steps came pounding from the closed door leading to the
Velpin’s
central corridor.
‘Probably going to zap us soon as they--’ Quercer & Janath began. Then the door punctured with a coughing noise and something small flew into the middle of the control space and exploded into a million barbs like dust.
Ah-ha.
Though what got us was a fucking EMP cannon. Aimed at the ship’s vulnerables.
Indeed. So there we are. And here. Indeed. See what happens?
See what happens… Better ship, anyway.
Fassin was being carried within a sort of transparent, braced sack by two big creatures like giant eight-legged dogs in mirror-armour, one at either end. He was still in the
Velpin.
The cut-through tube was a great pipe with a slanted hole, like the end of a massive syringe plunged into the guts of the ship. The two Voehn commandos flicked him and themselves up the tube and into the Voehn ship with near-effortless ease. Fassin, confused, senses ringing, unable to move, peered through the transparent material of the prison-stretcher and caught a glimpse of another two Voehn behind him carrying Y’sul, similarly wrapped.
They went through a rotate-lock. The Voehn ship was dark inside, faintly red-lit. It was in hard vacuum, like the Sepulcraft. The wrapping round the little gascraft ballooned taut.
Fassin, Y’sul and the truetwin were taken through another lock and into a pressurised, slightly heated circular chamber. The wrappings around them collapsed again. They were settled into something like dent-seats and clamped there with thickly shining restraints. They were half-unwrapped from their transparent covers, sufficient for them to be able to hear and see and speak. The warriors tested their bonds and then left.
Fassin looked around as best he could. Y’sul and the travel-captain appeared still to be unconscious, Y’sul’s ruff-mantles waving limply in the free fall and Quercer & Janath, still in the shiny coveralls, floating seemingly lifeless in the dent-seat. The chamber was plain, just a flattened ovoid, filled with a gas-giant atmosphere entirely breathable by a Dweller but that didn’t smell quite right. Light came dimly from every surface. A hint of gravity built up, producing about a quarter standard.
A door appeared and irised open, closing behind a trio of Voehn: two of the mirror-armoured commandos and another wearing just a torso-uniform decorated with various insignia and a holstered side arm. He stood and looked at the three prisoners, the great grey snout-face and fist-sized multiple-lidded eyes turning fractionally as he directed his attention from one to another. He arched his long body and flexed his back spines, raising all ten with what looked like a sensual motion. Blizzardskin on the Voehn’s spines scintillated like a minutely shattered mirror.
Fassin, trying hard not to lose consciousness again, thought dreamily of the screen series he’d watched as a child -
Attack Squad Voehn.
Had that been its name? - and struggled to recall what the uniforms and insignia might indicate, remembering only slowly. The Voehn in the uniform was a Prime Commander. A multi-talent. Top guy here, certainly. Significantly over-ranked for a ship this size, unless it was on a special mission. (Oh-oh.)
One of the mirror-armour soldiers waved a hand-held instrument at them, watching a display. He barely glanced at the results from Fassin and Y’sul, then did a double take when the device was aimed at Quercer & Janath. He altered a few controls, swept the machine over the truetwin’s still lifeless-looking body again and said something to the Voehn commander, who moved over, looked at the display and made a small swaying motion with his head. He clicked the machine off and came over to the prisoners, saying something as though to one of his decorations.
The restraints holding the gascraft and the two Dweller bodies slid back into the floor. The Voehn commander took off a glove and ran one leathery-looking hand over the surface of the little gascraft, then Y’sul’s carapace, then felt the shiny membrane covering Quercer & Janath. He looked for and found a catch and opened the coverall up so that it hung down over the transparent material the prisoners had all been trussed in. The commander looked very closely at Quercer & Janath’s signal skin, and seemed to sniff it.
He looked at Fassin. ‘You’re awake already.’ His voice was quiet, with a deep, gurgling quality. ‘Reply.’
‘I’m awake,’ Fassin acknowledged. He tried moving his left manipulator. More error\damage messages. He moved his right manipulator and shifted fractionally in the dent-seat. Aside from the partial constriction of the transparent material covering the gascraft’s rear, he was actually fairly free to move; even the prisoner-wrap felt like it would shuck off without too much difficulty.
The Voehn reached for something in his uniform pocket and waved it at Y’sul, who jerked once and then shook for a few moments, fringe mantles stiffening and limbs quivering. ‘Warrgh,’ he said.
The commander went to point the device at Quercer & Janath, who said quite cheerfully, ‘Already awake actually, thanks all the same.’
The Voehn looked through slitted eyes at the truetwin for a moment, then pocketed the device again and moved back to take in the view of all three prisoners. The two mirror-armoured guards stood on either side of where the door had appeared.
The commander sat back a fraction, resting on his rear legs and tail, crossing his forearms.
‘To the point. I am Commander Inialcah of the Summed Fleet Special Forces Division Ultra-Ship
Protreptic.
You are, in every sense, mine. We know what you have been looking for. We have been waiting for somebody to come here. We are combing your ship for data, hidden or otherwise, but we don’t expect to find anything germane. We have authority covering all eventualities. That means we can do anything we want with or to you. That latitude will not need to be exploited if you cooperate fully and answer any questions honestly and completely. Now. You are the Dwellers known as Y’sul and Quercer & Janath, and the human Fassin Taak, correct?’
Y’sul grunted.
‘Hi,’ the travelcaptain replied.
‘Correct,’ Fassin said. He could see Y’sul moving, working his body as though to get rid of the prison-wrap.
Oh, no, don’t do this,
he thought. He was about to say it when--
‘Who the fuck do you fucking think you are, you piratical pipsqueak?’ Y’sul bellowed. The Dweller wriggled free from the transparent material and floated above the dent-seat.
The two guards by the doorway didn’t even start to move.
The commander, arms still crossed, watched as the Dweller roted up to him, towering over him. ‘How fucking
dare
you start attacking a ship and taking people hostage! Do you know who I
am?’
‘Go back to your seat,’ the commander said, voice level.
‘That’s probably quite good ad--’ the truetwin began.
‘Go back to your fucking own
planet!’
Y’sul roared, and stretched out a hub-limb to push the Voehn.
The Voehn commander seemed to disappear in a blur of movement, as though all along he’d been a hologram and was now dissolving into individual pixels, rearranging into a grey cloud shot through with rainbow shards. Y’sul shuddered once and was sent sailing serenely back, colliding with the wall behind the dent-seat and the discarded prison-wrap. He hung there, then revolved backwards and fell slowly to the floor, spinning gradually downward along his rim like a coin on a table.
The Voehn commander was sitting where and how he had been, unruffled. ‘That was not cooperating fully,’ he said, voice soft.
‘Urgh,’ Y’sul said thickly. His carapace held two dents, one on each discus rim. There was another large, broken-looking bruise on his inner hub. That was serious damage for a Dweller, the equivalent of a broken limb or two and perhaps a compressed skull fracture for a human. Fassin hadn’t even seen quite how the Voehn commander had hit Y’sul. He’d have gone back for a replay but the little gascraft’s systems seemed to have been zapped and they weren’t providing any recording ability.
Oh fuck,
he thought.
We’re all going to die and the only one they can torture properly is me.
He saw himself peeled, prised out of the gascraft like a snail from its shell.