Weird Space 2: Satan's Reach (16 page)

It would take a lot of unnecessary time and effort, as far as she was concerned – but she had to admit that a part of her was curious to see if the station’s interior was as chaotic and
ad hoc
as its exterior. She had always lived on rural worlds, by choice, and she wondered how people could live in such an ugly, enclosed environment, without sky and sea and countryside.

She recalled the pursuing Ajantans and asked Kreller, “Any sign of the aliens?”

“They’re keeping their distance; more than a million kilometres away.”

She nodded. “Playing a waiting game,” she said.

Kreller contacted the station’s docking authorities and gained permission to berth. Janaker slotted her ship into the approach run, behind a tanker that had seen better days, and stretched out on her couch.

Kreller said, “Amazing. No accreditation required, no security checks...”

“And if it’s anything like Tarrasay, no identity scans when we pass through customs,” she added. “This is the Reach, after all.”

The Vetch made a disgusted, venting snort through its many facial tentacles. “And I thought security in the Expansion inordinately lax, compared to that in Vetch territory.”

“Remind me never to take a holiday in Vetch space,” she said. From the little that Kreller had said about the authorities that ruled the Vetch, they seemed even more fascistic than the Expansion authorities.

They docked in a vast hangar and walked down a ringing umbilical to passport control – which consisted of a bored official who waved them through without bothering to insert their proffered data-pins into her terminal.

Kreller indicated an upchute access which gave onto the next level. “Now we make our way up, one deck at a time, and I scan the personnel. I will need to concentrate, so no unnecessary questions, please.”

She nodded, suddenly tense, and touched the pistol on her hip. “One thing before you start,” she said, “when we find Harper, we stun him immediately and I’ll deal with the authorities, okay?”

He considered this. “I would rather we follow him to his ship and deal with him there. Then I will take his ship and return to the Expansion while you return with him aboard your ship.”

She looked at him. What was it about Harper’s vessel that was so important, all of a sudden? She nodded without replying as they rode the upchute to the second level.

Beside her the Vetch had tensed, leaning forward slightly, his head moving from side to side. The upchute bobbed to a halt and they stepped out. They were in a cavernous hangar swarming with grease-stained mechanics and engineers with soft-screens. A dozen big ships occupied gargantuan cradles and racks. Janaker scanned the ships for any sign of Harper’s vessel, but his wasn’t among them. As they watched, a liner slipped through the rectangular entrance at the far end of the chamber, blasting through the vacuum-impermeable membrane with a roar of auxiliary drives, and came to rest in the exact centre of the deck.

They made their way around a gallery catwalk that looked down on the busy deck. Kreller was silent, turning his head this way and that, his eyes half closed in concentration.

They made a complete circuit of the hangar and came to the upchute access. She said, “Nothing?”

He flung back his head in an affirmative. “We ascend.”

They stepped into the upchute and rose to the next level. She stepped onto the catwalk of another hangar, this one given over to the refuelling of vessels: umbilical hoses hung from the ceiling, each one pulsing as fuel was pumped from reservoirs into the ships’ tanks. Only a dozen personnel worked here, and the Vetch didn’t bother making a circuit of the hangar. “Nothing,” he said, and indicated the upchute.

“Two down and ten to go,” Janaker said to herself.

The next level was a storage hangar filled with ships that appeared to be mothballed, attended by a lone curator who Kreller quickly scanned and dismissed. The fourth level was another busy repair shop replete with vessels big and small in various stages of reconstruction. They made the requisite circuit and returned to the upchute.

One hour later they hit paydirt.

They stepped onto the catwalk enclosing a hangar on the seventh level, and the Vetch gripped the rail and leaned forward. He half-closed his eyes and turned his head from side to side.

“What?” Janaker asked a minute later as he opened his eyes and straightened up.

“Harper had his ship fitted with a weapons system,” he said. If he possessed a mouth, she thought, he would be smiling now. Only his wide eyes indicated his pleasure. “It is my guess that Harper armed himself against the Ajantans.”

Janaker snorted. “He killed the last bounty hunter sent after him,” she pointed out. “I guess he’d have no qualms about killing another.” She looked around the deck. “When did they leave here, and do you know if they were heading directly to Kallasta?”

The Vetch flung back his head. “All I read in the mind of a mechanic was that Harper phased out some hours ago.” He indicated an office at the far end of the hangar. “The... human who dealt with Harper is in there. I need to get closer to read him. I would like to know exactly what weapons system Harper had fitted.”

She glanced at the Vetch. “The way you said ‘human’... you sound almost doubtful.”

He hesitated, then said, “The creature is human... or was human, once. Now I’m not so sure. It seems to have been taken over by something – something alien. From time to time this
thing
asserts cognitive dominance. It makes it hard for me to read its... his... mind.”

Janaker stared through the rectangular window in the wall of the office, but made out no one inside.

Kreller led the way to a flight of stairs and they descended. As they were crossing the deck towards the office, the door swung open and something limped out.

Janaker stopped in her tracks and stared.

Her first feeling was one of revulsion, quickly followed by pity. The thing before her had obviously been human once, but something terrible had happened to him. It was as if half of his body had been grafted onto something vaguely crustacean, but bloated and alien. Even the right side of his body, which still resembled a human being – in form if nothing else – was scabbed with overlapping plaques of shell. Only his right eye had survived whatever had happened to him; the rest of his face was lost under a pebbled, chitinous tegument.

“What happened to...?” Janaker murmured.

“His name is Miro Tesnolidek,” Kreller murmured. “He is... hard to read. I see an alien swamp, read the trauma of an accident...”

The creature limped towards her, the plaques scraping against each other with a painful, grating sound. He paused a few metres from where she and Kreller stood.

“How can I help you?” Tesnolidek said. What had been his right hand, but was now a giant claw, gave a galvanic twitch as if barely under his control.

And the touching thing was that his voice – muffled though it was beneath a scab of shell – was deep, rich, and beautiful.

Kreller leaned forward and scanned the man. Janaker said, “We are friends of a star trader called Den Harper.”

The man screamed, took a quick step forward, his outsized claw flying in threatening arc. “
Veshank! Kretch! Nassa
...”

He stopped his advance as if with great effort, and said, once again in his beautifully modulated baritone, “I’m sorry. Sometimes I have little control over...” The claw waved. “You were saying?”

She and Kreller had backed away, and now the Vetch murmured to her, “I’m getting nothing. Keep him talking while I...”

She smiled at Tesnolidek and said, “I quite understand. We are friends of Den Harper. We understand that he was here, that you did some work for him. We were wondering where...”

“Friends of Den’s?” Tesnolidek said. “Den has few friends. He would have mentioned it if...” His one good eye flicked towards the Vetch.

“We met him just recently, and we’d like to meet up again. Did he mention where he was heading after leaving here? We understand his destination was Kallasta, but...”

“I’m sorry. I do not discuss the travelling plans of friends with... strangers.”

“I assure you...” Janaker began, frustrated.

“My friend is a very private person. He has few friends. I am fortunate to count myself one of them.” He stopped there and the claw flew to his head, clashing with the chitin that covered his skull.

“
Yesh!
” he screamed.

He swayed, regained his balance and stared at Janaker. “My head... I can feel – one of you? What are you doing?”

They backed off. Kreller said, “I assure you...”

“I can feel you in my head! You bastards!
Yesh – yeshank! Kresh!
”

When Tesnolidek struck it was lightning fast and Kreller – for all his vaunted rapid response times – was unable to defend himself. The creature leapt forward, struck out once, twice, his great claw a blur. Kreller staggered back, jets of blood as dark as port wine sluicing across the deck. Tesnolidek, or whatever he had become, pounced and struck again, slicing through Kreller’s leather tunic and scoring a long gash in the meat beneath.

The Vetch screamed and fell to his knees, then toppled onto his side, and only then did Janaker act. She drew her pistol and fired a blinding laser beam. It struck the chitin that covered the creature’s chest, stunning him – even though the weapon was set to kill – and knocking him backwards a couple of metres.

It was enough to bring Tesnolidek to his senses. He stopped, as immobile as a statue, his one eye taking in what he had done. He cried out, turned and dragged himself back towards the office door.

Already the attack had brought mechanics and engineers running. While Janaker stood, frozen with shock, two mechanics attended to the fallen Vetch, applying first aid and spraying synthi-flesh over the alien’s lacerated torso. Another took her to one side, murmuring that a med-team had been called. She stared through the window of the office and saw Tesnolidek crawl into a silver cage, incarcerating himself. A mechanic followed him into the office and turned a dial on the cage, locking the mechanism.

She said to a mechanic, “What... what is he?”

“Human, most of the time.” The man was clearly as shocked as she was, his voice shaking as he spoke. “The alien in him is prone to... to violence. For the most part he can keep it under control, but...” He gestured to the slick of blood on the deck, and the Vetch lying on his back.

Minutes later a med-team rushed into the hangar and surrounded the Vetch, soon followed by a security patrol. She and the mechanic gave statements, and she watched as the cage containing Tesnolidek was wheeled from the office and loaded onto a buggy. Tesnolidek regarded her with his one good eye, a hand and a claw gripping the bars.

Perhaps she should have felt anger towards the creature that had attacked her colleague, but all she felt was sympathy.

The medics carried Kreller to the upchute and she followed. They rose two levels and when they emerged the medics slid the stretcher onto a waiting buggy. Dazed, she accepted a lift and the next few minutes passed in a blur as they raced along wide corridors, citizens of the station alerted by the buggy’s penetrating siren.

She turned to one of the medics and asked, “Will he...?”

“Impossible to say. He’s strong, so with luck... and we do have the finest surgeons in the Reach working here.”

Kreller was wheeled into surgery and an official took Janaker’s credit details.

Later she sat on a hard chair in the corridor and waited. She slumped in the seat and considered what had happened, and was vaguely troubled to realise that her shock, her numbness, was occasioned less by any sympathy she felt towards the Vetch than by a simple revulsion at the attack and the resulting bloody mess. All things considered, she realised, she didn’t care one way or the other if Kreller lived or died.

And she was shocked that she could feel this heartless towards a fellow sentient being.

She found a bar next to the clinic, sat in the gloomy half-light and stared out into space. She drank one beer after another, then slumped in her seat and slept. She jerked awake some time later to find that four hours had elapsed.

She returned to the hospital, found a nurse and asked after Kreller. She was told that he’d come through the operation and was recuperating. He was sleeping at the moment and would be up to receiving visitors when he awoke.

She took a seat and stared down the utilitarian corridor. The plastic seats, featureless walls and antiseptic stench brought back painful memories. She thought back ten years, to the time when she’d sat in a similar corridor on a far away planet, this time waiting for word of someone she cared about passionately. Kara had been the love of her life – they’d been together three years; a record for Janaker. That night they’d arranged to meet at a restaurant to celebrate their anniversary, and when Kara was late Janaker had not worried in the slightest: she was always late.

Thirty minutes later Kara had walked in... only it was not Kara but her sister – with the news that Kara had suffered extensive head injuries in an air-taxi accident.

They’d gone straight to the hospital and waited for hours and hours in the dead, featureless trauma ward, only to be told by a sympathetic nurse that Kara had passed away on the operating table.

For the next year she’d gone through a dozen lovers, fixating on petite blondes as if trying to find what she’d lost, and of course failing.

Her wrist-com chimed. “Janaker.” It was Kreller’s graceless growl.

“Kreller. You’re...?”

“I am fine. There have been developments.”

She shook her head, confused. She repeated the word, and the Vetch said shortly, “Get yourself in here, now.”

She found the reception desk and asked if she could see Helsh Kreller, only to be told that they were experiencing some difficulty with the patient.

She hurried past the desk, attended by a harassed nurse, to a private room where Kreller was pulling on his lacerated jacket and struggling to get out of bed.

“Sign all the waivers they’re demanding, Janaker, and pay these people! We’re getting out of here, now.”