Weird Space 2: Satan's Reach (31 page)

“Because what is in there once belonged to my people.”

“What
is
in there, Kreller?”

He ignored her. He reached out, pressed his palm against a precise spot high in the centre of the hold door, and laughed when the panel moved, slid slowly aside.

“I thought you said no one...” she began.

“The opening mechanism is keyed to the genetic code of the Vetch,” he said, “for security. Only we can gain access, operate what is within. It closed itself down, sealed itself in here when it was stolen.”

“By Harper?”

“No, not Harper. By another, more foolish human.”

The door slid fully open and a golden glow poured out, filling the corridor and dazzling Janaker. She raised a hand to shield her eyes and laughed uneasily. “What the hell...?”

Kreller stepped into the effulgent golden chamber, and she followed him hesitantly.

The hold was empty but for a central, hexagonal pedestal which held a dozen metre-long crystals; they throbbed with light, giving off a hum at the very threshold of audibility. From the pedestal flowed a pulsing light-show, which slid down and spread across the floor, walls and ceiling of the hold – a nexus of golden light that pulsed like a photonic heart.

“What is it?” she asked in a whisper.

“A Vetchian weapons system,” Kreller said, “the most sophisticated ever devised. Nothing as powerful has ever existed in the universe. This,” he went on, striding towards the crystals like a devotee towards some holy icon, “will be the means by which we overcome the Weird.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

H
ARPER OPENED HIS
eyes and was surprised to find that he was still alive. He sat up – or rather tried to. He was strapped into a couch on the flight-deck of an unfamiliar ship. The bounty hunters’ ship, of course. Through the triangular viewscreen he could see the clearing, with the blazing Ajantan ship in the foreground surrounded by dozens of dead aliens. Beyond was the long-house and, beside it, his ship. The hatch was open.

He struggled, but the clamps on his wrists and ankles held him fast.

“You’re wasting your time trying to get free, Harper.”

Janaker moved into sight and leaned against the console below the viewscreen. She was holding a carton of beer and taking the occasional sip. She was bigger than he recalled her from Tarrasay, both taller and broader, and more muscular. She wore a jerkin with the sleeves cut away to reveal impressive biceps.

He looked around. “Where’s Zeela?”

“With her people...” She indicated the long-house over her shoulder. “And don’t worry. We didn’t harm her.”

She stood over him, her gaze unreadable. “I must admit, Harper, you’re not what I was expecting.”

He glared at her. “And what the hell were you expecting, Janaker? A violent thug, or a raving madman driven psychotic by his mind-reading ability?”

“Commander Gorley painted a picture of a ruthless killer who would stop at nothing to maintain his freedom.”

He had to laugh at that. “‘A ruthless killer’? Coming from an Expansion Commander? Now I’ve heard it all.”

To his surprise, she smiled at that. “And the man I find, after chasing him halfway across the Reach, turns out to be – if the evidence of his ship’s library is to be believed – cultured and educated, if self-educated...”

“I’m delighted you’ve had your prejudices overturned,” he said. He strained against the straps that held him fast. “What do you want with me? Why didn’t you just kill me and take my corpse back to the bastards...?” Because, of course, the Expansion authorities wanted the pleasure of doing that themselves, executing him as a warning to other potential errant telepaths.

“Because they want you alive, Harper.”

“I bet they do.”

She smiled and drank her beer. “It’s not like that. They don’t want to kill you – even though that’s what they did to absconding telepaths in the past.”

“So what’s changed? Don’t tell me the authorities have gone soft. What can I expect when you take me back, solitary confinement for the rest of my life?”

“Not at all. You can expect a place aboard a starship, with a highly trained crew, and you’ll be paid a very competitive salary.”

She was speaking in riddles. “What do you mean? I’ll be back on the treadmill, reading minds for the authorities again?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes.”

“Why the hell do you think I fled to the Reach? I detested what I did back then, and if you think I’d willingly go back to it...”

She was watching him closely, her lips pursed. “You might go willingly, when I explain what you’ll be doing.”

“I very much doubt that. Do you know what it’s like, reading criminal minds, day after day? And it makes it worse that the people I worked for were cruel, ruthless, authoritarian bastards.”

“The devil you know...” she said with a shrug.

He shook his head. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

She pushed herself away from the console, sat down on a couch beside his and swivelled to face him. “Look, Harper, for your information I’m not a big fan of the Expansion authorities, either. I didn’t choose to race across the Reach after you – a slimy bastard called Commander Gorley gave me little choice in the matter. That’s beside the point. I just want you to know where I stand. The fact is, sometimes enemies must come together to fight a greater enemy.”

He grunted an unamused laugh. “And there’s a greater enemy than the Expansion fascists?”

She held his gaze, then nodded. “Oh, yes, Harper. There’s a much greater enemy.”

The way she said this, with a gravitas he could tell was genuine, stopped the protest that he’d been about to voice. He said, “Would you mind telling me what’s going on?”

She leaned back in her couch, still staring at him, and said, “The Expansion, and the Reach – in fact all human space – is being invaded.”

He stared at her. “The Vetch? They’ve resumed hostilities?” But why, then, had she teamed up with a Vetch sidekick?

Janaker was shaking her head, smiling. “Good God, no, Harper. The Vetch are pussycats compared to this enemy. In fact, Vetch space is under threat too.”

“Then who?”

“They are known as the Weird – or, in the language of the people on Kallasta, the vakan.”

He sat forward, straining against the clamps. “We saw them – and later the colonists told us about the vakan.”

“The Weird first manifested themselves in the region of space beyond Vetch territory known as the Devil’s Nebula. They enslaved a human colony there. I was told that what they did to these people was... horrendous. They also took individuals to their own realm, to... to study them.”

Harper said, “Which is what they are doing here. But... their own
realm
?”

“The Weird are not from normal space. They inhabit a strata of reality beyond void-space. Gorley described it as another dimension.”

“They
first
manifested themselves in a region beyond Vetch space, and now they are here...”

“And, apparently, at one or two other locations in human inhabited space. They can... they have the ability to open portals between their dimension and our space, and send their...
creatures
... through them.”

“We saw a vakan ship land in the clearing yesterday,” he told her, “though it wasn’t like any ship I’ve ever seen. Things emerged from it, formless, humanoid creatures.”

“I’ve read Gorley’s account of his experiences in the Devil’s Nebula. He said they’re called the Sleer. But the Weird come in many weird – if you’ll excuse the pun – and grotesque forms.”

He shrugged, the gesture restricted by the clamps. “I can’t see why the Expansion is that worried, Janaker. The Weird might be able to overcome a relatively rural, unsophisticated people like the Kallastanians, but against the military might of the Expansion... A couple of well-armed marine units would blow them out of existence in seconds. Surely they...”

Something in her stare stopped him in his tracks. She shook her head. “You underestimate the type of enemy the Weird is, Harper. They don’t posses technology as we know it. Individual Weird are units in a much vaster... hive-mind, if you like. They can take considerable losses and still their portals churn out more and more grotesque monsters, thousand after thousand after thousand. And so far their portals have proved indestructible. Two or three have opened in Expansion space over the course of the past six months, and Gorley sent in a crack strike force. Nothing, repeat nothing, could destroy the interface between Weird space and our reality. And with the Weird having the ability to open portals at will across the Expansion...”

Harper considered her words, nodding. At last he said, “Which is all very well, but I fail to see how my ability fits into the picture.”

Janaker pointed at him. “What I’ve described so far, Harper – the portals, the monsters they send through – that’s not the greatest threat.”

“It’s not?”

“If it were, then the battle would be bad enough, and hard enough to win.” She paused, staring at him with her intense, dark eyes. “But, you see, the Weird are cleverer than that. They have also infiltrated themselves into the Expansion, and into Vetch space, into both command structures.”

He recalled what the young man had said about the vakan being able to change their forms, assume other guises, and began describing this to Janaker.

She stopped him, then said, “Not like that, Harper. They have a far more sinister, insidious way of going about the infiltration than that.”

“Go on.”

“Around a century ago they entered this realm when they opened the portal in the Devil’s Nebula. Apparently they took over a space-going alien race there and built a fleet of starships – the precise number is not known – and sent them into Vetch and human space. These ships came to rest on colony worlds, but the strange thing about them was that they seemed to be empty, devoid of life.”

Her words stirred the memory of the alien starship on Teplican...

Janaker went on, “They
weren’t
devoid of life, of course. They were devoid of
visible
life. But in fact they were crewed for the duration of the flight by creatures which, on landing, broke into constituent parts... and these parasites lay dormant until suitable humans came along.”

“How long,” he asked, his throat dry, “could they lie dormant?”

“A long time. We think that humans are still being infected. The Weird parasites can dwell in the human cortex for years, decades, and then, when they judge that the time is right, assume control and take over the individual. As yet we don’t know whether or not infected humans can pass on these Weird parasites. The authorities have their best scientists working on the problem.”

She stopped when she saw his expression, and read it correctly. She nodded. “The ship on Teplican,” she said, “was a Weird ship.”

“So... the scientists there,” he began... Di Mannetti, Ti Xian and the others.

Zeela and himself?

He said, “Would I know if I... if a parasite had...?”

She shook her head. “Of course not.”

He stared at her. “I was on Teplican, if only briefly,” he said. “I myself might be infected...”

She smiled at him. “We know you are not infected,” she said.

“You do?”

“My ugly partner in crime, Helsh Kreller, the Vetch, is telepathic. While you were unconscious, he ensured that you were uninfected.”

He leaned forward as far as he was able. “And Zeela?”

She said, “We returned her to her people. Kreller had more... important matters to attend to, at the time. He will scan the gathered Kallastanians later, before we leave this world.”

“And if he does find infected individuals?”

“Our orders are unequivocal, Harper. We must eliminate the infected. You have to realise the necessity of this.”

A thought occurred to him. “If your tame Vetch is telepathic, then how was it that he failed to read Zeela in the café on Tarrasay? He would have read that she was with me, through her read my identity.”

“Like yourself, Kreller doesn’t have his enhancer enabled all the time – and no doubt for the same reason. He says the mind-noise is too much. But you can be assured once we’d let you slip through our fingers on Tarrasay, he was scanning from then on.”

“Which is how you came to find us with such ease on Vassatta...” Harper said.

“Precisely. Your friends’ decoys didn’t fool Kreller for a second.”

He stared at her, going over everything she had told him, then said, “Of course, I have only your word about all this. How do I know that your story of the Weird, the parasites, is not some fabrication?”

She laughed derisively. “To what end, Harper?”

“Exactly. I’ve been trying to work that out.” And, for the life of him, he could not see what the bounty hunter might gain from making up such a fabulous story.

“Everything I’ve told you is the truth. And, if anything, I’ve understated the full horror of the Weird. I have seen photographs of the creatures, and the human individuals they’ve... worked on.” She paused, then went on, “It is imperative, Harper, that I return you to the Expansion, so that you can begin training and start work rooting out those officials, and others, infected with the Weird parasites.”

“There is one way I would be able to tell if you’re speaking the truth.”

She flung back her head in a full-throated laugh. “And if you think I’ll let you into my head, Harper, you’re wrong.” She stopped, suddenly, and stared at him.

“Having second thoughts? It wouldn’t take long. A matter of seconds, to verify your story – in that time I wouldn’t go deep, read all your secrets, your guilt and remorse...”

“Quit it, Harper. I wouldn’t allow you inside my head for a billion units. But...” she went on, “if Kreller was unshielded, could you...?”

He watched her, sensing that there was something else going on here. He guessed, then, that her relationship with the Vetch had underlying currents.

She said, “How much can telepaths read of an alien mind? Helsh claims that mental comprehension is limited, though some emotions, thoughts can be deciphered.”

Harper shrugged. “That’s true, to a certain extent. It differs from individual to individual, and from race to race.” He paused, then took the plunge. “What do you want me to find out?”