STAR HOUNDS -- OMNIBUS (16 page)

S
he felt alive again.

Like a horse straining at its reins, Laura Shemzak, in her XT Mark Nine, yearned for release from the
Starbow’s
bonds. It was almost as though the very fabric of her hull trembled with her impatience.

“C’mon, Northern,” she vocalized through her implanted neural connection to the channel that linked her to the specially souped-up shuttle. “Let’s get a move on!”

She’d made her connections with the blip-ship in record time, and her contact with the energies coursing through the intricate mechanism gave her a high like no other she had ever experienced.

“Weapons calibration, dear heart,” the voice spoke inside her head. “Give us a minute.” For some reason, it annoyed her to have Northern’s authoritative sound inside her skull, although constant communication between the two ships was vital in this operation. “You got the hang of your new gizmos?”

“Nothing really new,” she returned’. “Just improved. I’m surprised that additional biosurgery was needed.”

“Well if the Feddies built you and they built the ship, I guess they knew what they were doing.”

“They kinda built us all, though, didn’t they?” Laura added tersely.

“They certainly would like us to believe that.”

Slightly over the time predicted by Captain Northern, the air was removed from the lock, the hangar door opened, and two ships separated from the belly of the
Starbow
like oddly shaped eggs dropping from a metal beast.

For Laura, exhilaration mounted with acceleration; she swooped down through the atmosphere, radiant with sunlight, ablaze with friction. The shuttle was hard pressed to follow on her heels. Planetfall was a rush of splendor, scorching through the air, skirting a sea, playing delicate gyroscope tricks with the air currents above flat desert wastes. She tasted this world, smelled it, inhaled it, sensors wide open and alert for danger.

Within minutes of departure from the low orbit of the
Starbow
, she reached the destination. The pressure dome that emitted the Morse code signal was a brown wart on the desert skin, crusty and hairy with protuberances and antennae. In the seconds it took for Northern and his ponderous shuttle to catch up with her, Laura looped about the structure, energy fields up full, ready to dodge any weapons.

Nothing happened.

She did not scan anything tracking her, although she definitely picked up full-scale electronic activity within the metal and silica shell, indicating life-support systems and intricate computer operations.

“If Cal is in there,” Northern’s voice sounded in her mind, “he’s got plenty to eat and drink and breathe.”

“Of course he’s in there!” Laura said. “Question is how do we get in without exciting any automatic defense systems?”

“How about knocking on the door?”

“Cute, Northern. Real cute.”

“Sensors indicate craft entry in the lower northwest quadrant of the dome, Laura. As you might notice from our circling, this thing isn’t real great at hovering. We haven’t raised anyone on the standard combands. How about if you take a look at one of those doors down there? See if maybe you can throw a switch or something.”

“Gotcha, Captain.”

Using retros, riding on her antigravs, she descended to the recessed doorway. Her holo vu-tank displayed everything in perfect detail, like she was standing at arm’s length from the doors. Quick analysis, a speedy energy futz with the wiring of the identification panel, and the thick doors drew back with a clang.

“No sign of any defensive mechanism inside,” she said. “Still, I’m not nuts about doing the cycling procedure.”

“Pressure and atmosphere content at this time of the year are only marginally different,” reported Arkm Thur. “We can fuse the closing mechanism of the outer door, Laura, and then open the inner door. No one inside will be hurt.”

“You got it,” Laura said. She found the right metal rod and welded its joint with a laser. Then she drifted into the lock, force field on high.

She triggered no defenses.

“Guess they just don’t expect nasty visitors,” was her conclusion as she saw to the next door, which only took a nudge to a pair of levers with tractor beams to open.

Reoxygenated air whooshed past Laura, almost refreshingly. She directed her ocular units past the opening and returned her energy flux detection sensors. Nothing amiss … just your average Federation pressure dome, efficiently chugging away, more on air-conditioning mode than anything else.

It was like a city in a nutshell, with the interior of the shell painted to look like a pleasant Midwestern America Terran day. She moved forward, entering a different, much smaller world, a microcosmic reflection light-years from its model.

Past the main cluster of buildings lay a large fenced field. Inside were a manor house and a swimming pool and, according to the signal, Cal.

“Come on in, guys, the water’s fine,” she said, and waited only long enough to see the shuttle nosing in before she sprinted for the field.

“Put her down on this stretch of grass,” she said, landing. “I’ll leave you plenty of room.”

“Roger,” said Northern. A moment later he set his ship down beside the kidney-shaped pool. “Looks deserted. You coming out, Laura, or are you just going to stay in there? The signal’s coming from that house, and unless we blast in the roof, we’re going to have to go in by foot.”

“Have Thur cover us, okay?”

“Sounds reasonable.”

She found that her hands trembled slightly as they unjacked her attachments. Her consciousness folded back in to rest behind her eyes, within the sensations of fingers, mouth, ears, body.

Cal, she thought excitedly. I’m going to see Cal again! She realized then that Captain Northern had been right. She did feel guilty—guilty that she had allowed the Federation to take him away from her at all.

Well, no more. When she and Cal were reunited, if the Federation wanted them back, they were going to have to accommodate this brother and sister act! Cal and she would live together again, see each other more, not be so much strangers to each other as in the past years.

She would try to make him see why she’d had to change, she thought as she opened the door and felt the sweet grassy air rush in like a promise. She would show him that even though she could deal with the roughest of spacers, inside she was still his sister, always surprised and delighted with his antics, always understanding and loving.

She checked her sidearm, a power gun in a leather holster. Cal had given it to her last year. “Remember how we used to watch those movie Westerns, Laura?” he had said. “Well, I had this made. Looks like a Colt .45, though it’s Federation regulation all the way. You can be like a sheriff, Laura. Wyatt Earp of the spaceways!”

The Federation had not been thrilled with the different design, but they had finally acquiesced to Laura’s demands that she carry this, strapped around her waist. The spacers she bunked with would sometimes make fun, until she showed them how fast she could draw it.

When she wore it, it made her realize one of the reasons she cared for Cal so—he had such a sense of play, such imagination!

When Laura stepped down from her ladder onto the grass-matted springy soil, Captain Tars Northern, fully armed with his own more standard energy weapon and a scanner, was waiting for her.

“This is the strangest rescue I’ve ever been involved with,” he said, glancing around. “I see no sign of a trap, and no sign of Jaxdron, and yet from all indications you’re quite right. Your brother is here. I guess they just didn’t expect any kind of rescue mission. And why should they? No one’s tried before—no one has been loony enough.”

“Shut up and walk, Northern,” Laura said. “The signal’s coming from that old-style house there.”

“I want you to know, Pilot Shemzak,” Northern said as they strode toward the gabled mansion a hundred yards away, “that I am not pleased by your insubordinate talk.”

“Don’t feel bad, Captain,” she said. “Everybody gets it. And you know, I keep my word, too. Just as soon as we get Cal out of this place, he’ll help you as much as he can on … whatever Dr. Mish is working on.” She allowed herself a quick scan of the environs. Well kept, pleasant, the place had the very taste of tranquility. “It doesn’t look as though they’ve been keeping Cal in a dungeon, does it?”

“I still don’t like it, Shemzak. No sign of people—or aliens, for that matter.”

“Why are you exposing yourself like this, then, Northern? You could have sent Thur out here. For that matter, you could have stayed on the
Starbow
.”

Northern shook his head. “Not my speed, Shemzak. I like to participate. Besides, like I say, I owe you. This way I get to pay you back in person.”

“Doesn’t seem as though it’s going to be much of a cost. I … ” They were now only fifty yards from the arched threshold of the manor house. Past the scrolled columns, Laura could see someone moving. The door opened. A man walked out, waving one arm. She could not make out who it was; he was still in shadow. “Look, Northern!”

“Yes.” Northern drew his weapon and pointed it toward the figure.

“What … ?” Laura said, startled by the motion.

“Just a precaution, Pilot. Can’t be too careful, can we?”

The man moved into the full daylight. He wore a simple set of blue trousers and gray shirt and he was smiling. “Laura!” he said. “You found me. It’s so good to see you!”

Cal!

He ran toward them, waving happily.

Laura started to run to meet him, then suddenly stopped. It felt as though all of her joints were frozen in place.

“Laura!” Cal called gaily. “Is this a new boyfriend or—”

With practiced speed, Laura Shemzak drew her power gun, aimed it quickly, and shot her brother once directly between the eyes, and then, before he fell, in the heart. Blood spewed as Cal’s face contorted into a rictus of surprise and pain. He crumpled onto the ground, shuddering out his last moments of life, face and chest horribly burned from the brief power blasts.

“What the hell!” cried Captain Northern, looking from the body back to Laura.

Horror swept through Laura like ice.

“No!” she wailed. “No!”

Then something struck her in the back of her neck, and someone pulled the plug on reality, leaving less than darkness.

A
fter a long day manipulating her holocomp, seeing that the bureaucratic minutiae of the government process were functioning smoothly, Friend Chivon Lasster navigated the halls for home.

Naturally, for security purposes, home was within the labyrinth of Overfriend Headquarters. Sometimes, though she had always been told that the Friends were the most free of the Liberated, she felt as though this honeycomb of rooms and corridors were a prison.

And her crime?

Ambition.

Hands folded under arms as though for warmth, she walked a short distance to the lift to the residential section where she lived, eyes downcast at the dull gray floor.

Her aptitude tests had surprised the system; in every way she was equally adept, mentally and emotionally, in the practical science necessary for starship piloting and the complex needs of the modern administrator.
Perhaps,
she thought morosely,
if they had chosen me to be an administrator, my ambition would have wandered among the stars.
Instead, she had trained as experimental pilot, and her very first assignment had been work with the Al Project, that wondrous fleet of Federation ships that was expected to change the course of interstellar history.

She remembered how, in the course of the work, she had been assigned to help Overfriend Zarpfrin in administration, and how the taste of power that he had shown her changed her.

Yes, imprisoned by ambition, she thought as the lift whisked upward and deposited her on her floor.

But then, she knew very well as a Friend, that ambition was something which was programmed into everyone born under the aegis of the Federated Empire. The system not merely programmed individuals with goals; it also glorified the pain, sentimentalized the anguish of striving for goals, thus creating mental mechanisms that worked and worked and worked for a future that never came, while glorifying an illusory past. This was called “individual attainment for the greater good, with no cost of human freedom.”

It worked perfectly.

But no! Friend Chivon Lasster thought. I criticize the very system that gives me meaning, that structures my existence, that works for the causes I believe in.

This system rewards me in the way I deserve to be rewarded, doing the tasks that I should do to serve my society! Uncomfortably, she wondered if she were thinking traitorous thoughts …. She felt as tense as a rubber band stretched and stretched ….

And how stupid, she thought as she unlocked the door to her apartment. If this state were as totalitarian as my programming notion implies, then there would be a device in my brain now, reading my thoughts. The foundation of the Federation Constitution was liberty for the individual. The methodology had a very important purpose: the survival of the human race!

After all, what if all human-held planets were like the Free Worlds! There could be no united front against the Jaxdron, or any other alien threat, and humanity would soon be under the leash of other species. A small price for the greater freedom of the individual as reflected in the macrocosm of their state!

No, she thought, flicking on a light. Zarpfrin and the Overfriends were quite right. The ontological disaster that was nationalism must be opposed at the root; look how it had scarred the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries. Humans must look to a higher plane, and that plane was the confederation … the system that had molded her. It must not be questioned, must not be undermined—certainly not by one of its primary officers!

She slipped into a comfortable robe, allowed herself the luxury of a Hookah, and called up a popular drama serial she enjoyed into the holocomp display.

When the segment had run its course, she still felt anxiety. She had not used Andrew for a while. Soon the spectral, fatherly figure of her Companion sat before her.

She told him about Kat Mize, and how through her Tars Northern might be brought back to Terra to face trial. “I would like to see him brought to justice,” she concluded. “I should like to see him punished as an example to the people of the Federation of what happens to a traitor,” she said tersely.

Ghostly hands clasped together thoughtfully under Andrew’s nose; he was a brilliantly programmed simulacrum of human behavior. “This is not the song you were singing before, Chivon Lasster.”

“Perhaps my talks with you have been therapeutic. Perhaps these pathological thoughts bordering on the obsessive are clearing up.”

“And yet you are clearly upset at the story that Kat Mizel has told …. And her relationship with Northern troubles you.”

“I have no reason to feel wronged in this instance, although the state was damaged by Northern’s betrayal. It is well that the illusory bond he constructed to fool me was disrupted. It had confused my higher moral and ethical values.”

“You called me up to tell me that?”

“You’re supposed to help me, dammit,” Lasster said, fury blossoming in her eyes. “You’re supposed to listen! Just listen! I … I just want to tell you that I am better now. I have some travel ahead of me to help oversee this operation. Zarpfrin has already left. I won’t be calling you up for a while ….” She looked at him, and chuckled to herself. “Wait a moment. What am I saying this for? You’re just a construct! You don’t really exist, not as a human being does. I’m treating you as if you really care what happens to me. You’re just a machine.”

The classically handsome face of the Companion looked at her with an interested expression. “And what, Friend Lasster, are you?”

“I’m not in the mood for any sophistry. What are you talking about?”

“I mean, what makes you so sure that you know who and what I am? We’ve not discussed this before, Chivon.”

“You’re … well, you’re just a fantastically complex program running through a matrix of biochips.”

“As complex as your program. As interconnected as your matrix of neurons.”

“What are you trying to say, Andrew?”

He smiled. “I am saying, Chivon Lasster, that there are things you don’t know. About many things. About me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Perhaps it is time to explain,” said Andrew. “At least about me.”

“No! No, this must be some kind of new therapy and I’m just too tired. I need to go to bed, I have a busy day tomorrow, and well, goodbye, Andrew.”

She turned the computer off, and Andrew instantly disappeared.

She was tired. She knew she could sleep now. She took off her robe, and slipped under the covers of her bed. Sleep was not far away.

Some time later, she awoke, startled.

Something had touched her.

She pushed herself up.

He was even easier to see in the darkness, constructed of a kind of gentle phosphorescence, sculpted from light.

“Chivon,” he said somberly. “We really must talk.”