Mapped Space 1: The Antaran Codex (19 page)

“Damn it Skipper, you have all
the fun!”

I took that as agreement. “When
you get your own ship, then you can have all the fun.” I exchanged a silent
farewell look with Marie, who had finally started pulling on her clothes, and slipped
out into the corridor.

The penthouse lights were out. Red
and orange tracer streaked past the end of the corridor amid a diffuse red glow
spilling across the central lounge area from the windows. The storm was raging
outside and the metal shutters should have been covering the windows, so where
was that light coming from?

Another explosion shook the spire,
followed by the sound of a rock wall collapsing. Sarat’s guards yelled over the
gunfire, their voices heavy with fear and confusion.

“It’s over there!”

“On the left.”

“I’m hit! I’m hit.”

“It’s behind you!”

“Damn it’s fast!”

A man screamed in terror and was abruptly
silenced.

“He’s dead,” another yelled in
panic.

“It’s behind us! Shoot it! Shoot
it!”

Sarat’s guards were all hard ex-military
types, but whatever they were fighting was getting on top of them. I cranked my
threaded optics to maximum and crept towards the end of the corridor.

Two guards lay dead on the floor
to the right, outlined by the red glow from the windows. Their bodies radiated
ghostly thermals with hot spots marking where blood welled from shrapnel wounds
caused by anti-personnel slugs. Their weapons lay nearby, still glowing
infra-red hot from having recently been fired. One guard was missing an arm, cleanly
severed from his body. It wasn’t a blast wound. It looked like his arm had been
surgically sliced off.

To my left, the shadowy forms of five
guards fired at the source of the red glow as they fell back towards the
meeting hall. They were working together, afraid but not panicking, covering
each other’s retreat like pros and yelling sightings of their adversary. A dark
slender blur, half again taller than a man, flashed past the end of the
corridor trying to flank them. It vanished to my left, then a muzzle flash lit
up the five guards, hitting one in the chest and hurling him against the wall. The
attacker’s gun sounded like the suppressed sonic boom of a Union Regular Army Forger,
a heavy assault weapon that could punch through any Earth-tech body armor. Yet
the attacker was clearly non-human!

So why would an alien be using
Earth-tech weaponry against humans?

Sarat appeared in the meeting
hall’s doorway on the far side of the lounge, yelling for the guards to fall
back. He withdrew inside as the four surviving guards retreated after him,
firing as they went. Suddenly, a new stream of tracer flashed across the room
from the right as another guard appeared, running alongside the windows towards
the meeting hall, firing wildly.

The alien blur swept past me
again, leaping back across the room, too fast for the guards to hit. An eye-hand
modded EIS sniper might have got it, but toughness modded grunts had no chance.
It fired while in the air, momentarily silhouetting itself with the muzzle
flash, revealing a willowy reptilian torso, slender triangular head, long lean
arms and legs and a whip-like tail which flicked through the air for balance. The
alien held the Forger in one hand and a long knife-like weapon with glowing
edges in the other. The URA assault gun was too heavy for a man to hold one
handed, but the alien wielded it as easily as it did the blade. In a flash, the
attacker swept past the guard running for the meeting hall, raising the knife,
then slicing him apart from shoulder to hip. The alien-tech blade passed effortlessly
through the guard’s body as if it encountered no resistance, then the guard’s
corpse collapsed in two pieces.

Weapons fire from the remaining
guards flashed around the agile reptilian silhouette, but it was too fast. At
the door, one of the guards took a blast in the shoulder, and was knocked to
the floor. As the wounded guard tried to rise, the reptilian raced forward and
decapitated him with a single stroke of its blade. Without slowing, it darted
into the meeting hall, firing and slashing with the speed and precision of a
highly trained, fearlessly aggressive assassin.

I crept into the lounge where my
sniffer got line of sight on five dead and two wounded guards. One of the rectangular
metal window shutters had been smashed in and now lay on the floor, partly
covering a dead guard. A dull gray hull floated outside the window, surrounded
by a soft red light which repelled the snowstorm’s icy blast. The dark opening
of a hatch in the hull was aligned to the open window, marking where the
reptilian had entered the penthouse.

A stun grenade detonated inside
the meeting hall as weapon flashes, shouts and screams filled the air. Knowing
it was almost over, I raced across the lounge area. When I was halfway across, the
wall exploded. The blast threw me sideways, hurling me onto the hard stone
floor and sending me sliding into the side wall. For a moment, I lay stunned as
the thunder of gunfire and the screams of dying men were drowned out by the
ringing in my ears.

 
My vision blurred, making the threading’s
markers over the dead and dying guards in my mind’s eye unreadable. In the
meeting hall the gunfire ceased, signaling the last of the guards were dead. A
moment later, the tall reptilian emerged carrying a rectangular box. I didn’t
recognize it at first, then as I started to regain my senses, I realized it was
the diagnostic scanner Sarat had put the Codex’s transport device in the day
before. I squinted, trying to clear my vision as I realized the reptilian
wasn’t after the Codex at all. It wanted the transport device and the scans
Sarat had made of it!

While it strode towards the
shattered window and the craft beyond, I pulled myself across the stone floor towards
my P-50 lying nearby. I got my hand on it, then clumsily sighted on the
reptilian. My arm rocked unsteadily, sending the first shot high into the rock
ceiling. Instinctively, the reptilian dodged sideways while I weakly tried
following its movement, firing again and again, missing several times until a
white impact ring flashed at its shoulder. The reptilian stumbled from the
impact, then straightened unhurt. The slug had been deflected by its dark, skin
tight suit – not body armor but a skin hugging defensive shield.

No wonder the guards hadn’t been
able to hurt it!

The reptilian held the URA Forger,
but rather than shoot me, it dropped the diagnostic scanner and reached across
its chest to a scabbard sewn into its ornately layered black body suit. It drew
its knife, fitted with a blade almost as long as my forearm and inlaid with
intricate serpentine carvings. The ritual assassin’s weapon came to life as an
electric shimmer glowed along the sharp edges on both sides of the blade from
point to hilt, while on the flat of the blade, the lines of serpentine carvings
glowed starkly white. I’d heard of these weapons, but never seen one first hand.
It wasn’t really a knife, but a quantum weapon able to sever atomic binding
forces on contact. With new found purpose, the reptilian started towards me.

I held down the P-50’s trigger,
going to full auto, burping slugs three times a second. Flashes burst across
the reptilian’s chest as its skin shield deflected my hypersonic slugs. The
reptilian staggered from each impact, taking a step backwards, then my P-50
clicked empty and the room fell silent.

Realizing I was out of ammo, it started
towards me with its knife angled down, ready to inflict a decapitating death
blow. It crouched, about to leap at me, when a familiar crackling sound broke
the silence. Two streams of fragmentation slugs caught the reptilian in the
side of the chest, shattering on contact and knocking it off its feet. Surprised,
it rolled away, turning in confusion towards the twin streams of gunfire
tracking its movement.

Behind the flashes of the twin fraggers
burping on full auto, blonde hair appeared from the shadows of the hallway.
Jase walked toward the reptilian, eyes locked on his target, blasting with both
guns held at arm’s length. The reptilian’s skin shield erupted in overlapping
impact rings as slugs peppered it, then its torso rippled with electric force
lines as its shield began to overload.

The reptilian darted sideways as
a siren began to wail throughout the penthouse. Thinking it would soon be
facing many more guards, the reptilian retreated, powering off the blade and
sliding it into its chest scabbard as it ran. It scooped the diagnostic scanner
off the floor without slowing, then leapt through the shattered window into the
craft floating outside. Dull gray metal irised shut, sealing the hatch, then
the craft shot straight up away from the spire exposing the lounge to the full
force of the icy wind outside.

Jase bounded toward me,
holstering his guns. “Skipper? Are you OK?”

I sat up slowly, nodding. “I told
you to stay with the Codex.”

“I did – until I heard your MAK
singing,” Jase said, referring to the distinctive high pitched sound of the
P-50’s magnetic accelerator. “I knew you were up to your eyeballs in trouble!”

I climbed slowly to my feet. “Get
back there and keep an eye on it.”

Jase gave me a hurt look. “You’re
welcome – for saving your life.” He started back towards the room.

“Jase.” When he stopped and
looked back, I said, “Thanks, you did good.”

He gave me a cocky grin and hurried
back to our quarters while I tried to make sense of what had happened. Wind and
snow blasted in through the open window, illuminated by the floodlit landing platform
several hundred meters below. The two wounded guards were now both dead, their
body temps plummeting in the freezing arctic air. In the meeting hall, all of the
guards were dead, some with limbs or heads severed by the reptilian’s killing blade.
Sarat lay near the back wall, breathing in short, sharp gasps, close to death.
His lower abdomen was soaked in blood and his right leg was missing from above
the knee.

I knelt beside him. “Who are you
working for?”

His terrified eyes focused on me
as he made a gurgling sound. “
Ani
- . . .
Hata
- . . .”

“No, you weren’t. I’m not even
sure he exists.”

Confusion spread across his face.
“Irzae . . .”

“The Irzae had nothing to do with
this. The alien that attacked, have you ever dealt with its kind before?”

“No.” Sarat coughed blood and
made a gurgling sound. “Holo . . . gram . . . only.”

He’d been deceived all along,
never suspecting who he’d really been dealing with.

“Why?” he wheezed.

“Because they hate us,” I
whispered.

The look on Sarat’s face told me
he didn’t understand, then his eyes glazed over and his head rolled lifelessly forward.

I gave my sniffer a chance to
scan the room, but it found only human DNA. When I returned to the lounge, it
was the same story – human traces everywhere, but nothing I could use as
evidence to prove what I already knew to be true. The lounge was freezing now
with snow blasting in over the remains of dead guards and wrecked furniture. I
retraced the movements of the reptilian, searching for any bio-trace, finishing
at the wrecked floor-to-ceiling window. The shutter had not been blown in by an
explosion, because that would have left an energy trace that could have been
used as evidence. Instead, the window had been pushed in as if the alien craft
had simply rammed it. Wary of the slippery, snow covered rock floor and the treacherous
wind, I was about to give up when my sniffer indicated a possible trace.

I dropped to my stomach and crawled
through the snow to the edge, feeling the full force of the arctic wind on my
face. Certain that whatever was out there would soon be gone under the press of
the storm, I eased my head out over the edge to give my sniffer line of sight. The
sheer rock face fell away to the landing platform far below where the floodlit scramjet
shuttle was lashed down by cables and magnetic clamps and whipped by blasting
snow. Below the landing platform, enormous sea swells crashed against the black
rock spire, throwing spray high into the air.

Immediately below the floor, my
sniffer searched the slick rock face for biological traces. A targeting reticule
suddenly flashed into my mind, highlighting a point on the rock less than a
meter away. Jase must have winged the reptilian as its skin shield failed,
because there was a droplet of blood on the rock face. One tiny drop! The wind
was rapidly tearing away what little genetic material was left, but as I leaned
closer, the sniffer got a positive read on the sample. My bionetic memory had
been wiped, but some things were hard coded into the filaments themselves so no
matter what happened, I could never lose them. This was one of those! The DNA
sniffer matched its read to the hard coded data structure triggering a threaded
alarm inside my head. It was a warning I’d only ever received in training, a
warning I never expected to encounter in the field, but based on what I’d seen,
it was a warning I expected.

The blood trace reeked of Mataron
DNA!

I’d recognized the reptilian form
and the assassin’s quantum blade, but machines can be built to take any form.
This tiny blood trace proved there was a Mataron on Icetop, who’d butchered
Sarat and his men and stolen the alien-tech device that had delivered the Codex
into human hands. I knew now the Matarons wanted us to have the Codex, but without
anyone knowing they gave it to us – only they hadn’t counted on Sarat’s greed.
He’d sabotaged their plan by scanning their transport device, forcing them to
expose themselves. There must have been something in that scan linking the
Matarons to the Codex.

Or maybe they feared the scans
would be enough for the Tau Cetins to smell a rat, a reptilian rat. The
Matarons didn’t fear much, but they feared the Tau Cetins. Our reptilian enemy was
seven hundred thousand years ahead of us, but the TCs were millions of years
ahead of them. That kind of inferiority left the Matarons with no way of knowing
what TC technology could do, and not knowing made them paranoid.

Ever since human fanatics had landed
on
Kif-atah
, the Mataron homeworld, and detonated
their ship’s energy core in 3154, we’d faced an implacable enemy who would
accept no apology, consider no reparation. The human fanatics, opposed to alien
contact, had chosen well. They gave the militaristic and highly xenophobic
Matarons someone to focus their hatred upon, someone who could never hope to match
them militarily, yet whom the Forum would never allow them to harm. They’d
tried to destroy Earth after the terrorist attack, only to be humiliated when
their fleet had been disabled at the edge of the Solar System by a single Tau
Ceti ship sent to find out what all the fuss was about.

Months of Forum level discussions
had followed, resulting in Earth’s stockpiles of novarium – the element needed
to generate the immense quantities of energy required for interstellar travel –
being rendered inert by the Tau Cetins. Every human ship in Mapped Space had suffered
the same fate. Even now, almost fifteen hundred years later, we still didn’t
know how they’d done it.

At the time, hardly anyone on
Earth even knew what was happening until a TC ambassador explained it to us. It
didn’t matter that the rest of mankind condemned the terrorist attack and
executed everyone associated with it in the most uncompromising retribution
ever seen in human history – in the eyes of the galaxy we were responsible. It was
the first, most basic principle of the Access Treaty, the Responsibility
Principle. Our collective-governments were responsible for the actions of all
our people, no matter how crazy, and we’d failed to take that responsibility
seriously.

One tiny group of crazies had ruined
it for the rest of us.

For the next ten centuries, the
Forum imposed Embargo prevented novarium from entering human hands, giving us
time to sort out how we governed ourselves and stranding mankind in the Solar
System and on the colonies and outposts we’d taken centuries to establish. Many
outposts survived, although some withered on the vine with frightening
consequences for the last survivors.

That’s what happens when you
break the Access Treaty. They don’t exterminate you, they isolate you – it’s
more civilized than genocide.

When the Embargo ended a thousand
years later – much to the ire of the Matarons who’d sworn never to let us back
out – the TCs arrived with a new supply of novarium and we started a second five
hundred year road to Forum membership, only this time, if we screwed up the
resulting Embargo would be ten times longer. It was why the Earth Navy and the
EIS had been founded, to make sure we didn’t get it wrong a second time. It was
a tough job, made more difficult by the Matarons constantly plotting against
us.

The Mataron hatred of mankind was
fueled by the exponential growth of Human Civilization. While the Matarons had
the technology to traverse the galaxy, their innate xenophobia had limited them
largely to their own system and a few tiny outposts, whereas human willingness
to be locked inside flimsy ships for months or years on end had seen mankind
spread to the limits of Mapped Space at a speed that utterly infuriated the
vengeful Matarons. Even the Tau Cetins were surprised at how quickly we’d
expanded. They’d thought it would take us five thousand years – we did it in
less than five hundred. The difference was the Tau Cetins didn’t care how far
we went, or what we did, providing we obeyed the law.

Fortunately, the law was just and
the Tau Cetins argued that the Mataron protests lacked any factual basis, and so
were dismissed. The fact the Matarons had remained neutral during the Intruder
War, refusing to help the other Local Powers even when they were fighting for
their very lives, had left the Mataron Supremacy with few genuine friends. Of
course if we screwed up again, the TCs would have no choice but to side with
the Matarons because Observer Civilizations had a duty to impartially interpret
and, when necessary, enforce galactic law.

Considering how badly the
Matarons wanted us back in the bottle, I wondered why they’d go to so much
trouble to give us exactly what we desired most, the ability to explore and
colonize as far as we wanted without restriction. We lacked the technology to even
get out of the relatively small, ten thousand light year long Orion Arm, let
alone cross the vast Milky Way or reach other galaxies, yet the mere promise of
such freedom was always going to be irresistible to mankind.

It was that allure that made the
Antaran Codex bait, but for what kind of trap? Whatever it was, the Matarons were
actively fabricating an Access Treaty violation, and we’d walked right into it.

The realization chilled me more
than the freezing winds wiping away the last trace of Mataron DNA from the
slick black rock. I was filled with a desire to destroy the Codex, but as it
was virtually indestructible, that would be impossible. I considered handing it
over to the Tau Cetins, but would possessing it be enough to trigger an Access
Treaty violation?

I crawled back into the lounge,
then hurried towards my quarters while my mind raced through endless
possibilities. The lights were still out, but there was enough light reflecting
in from the lounge area to let me see by threaded optics alone.

The door to my quarters was ajar.
Inside, Jase and Marie lay unconscious on the floor. My threading told me they
were stunned, not dead, their weapons lying close to them. One look at the
dresser told me the Codex was gone!

In a blur of rage, I was sure Vargis
had stunned them both and stolen the Codex while I’d been distracted by the Mataron
agent. I tried shaking Jase awake, then I heard footsteps in the corridor. A
man appeared in the doorway, flashing a small hand light in my face, momentarily
blinding me, but my threading told me it was Vargis.