9 Tales Told in the Dark 19 Read online

  “Yes, sir.”

  Jones stormed out of the kitchen control room. There were other parts of the ship that needed to be assessed. Unfortunately, the space pirates had little nano-drones in their torpedo. They could not be contained even when the hull was closed off after the strike. They spread throughout the ship like gremlins, tinkering with this or with that. Jones had been confident he could undo the mess they had done to the food processor, but the captain wanted his morning latte.

  Deidra stared at the colander. She rehearsed the intention of the stel-fuel’s drip. It was thick like molasses. Too much at one time and it would clog the pipes that infused the proteins, vitamins, and amino acids. Not enough and it would not fill the chamber that properly distributed the nutrients. Shifting like a key missing notches. The lock would not be turned.

  These systems were rarely in the realm of a starships’ maintenance crew’s duties. They were installed and ran effortlessly, recalibrations were done at set intervals, by trained commercial mechanics, but it was generally regarded as something one could leave alone. In fact, Deidra had never seen the inner workings on the machines that had made her food since she was born. It was accepted: this was where food came from. The past tense being key to that statement.

  Other life support systems, Deidra knew by heart, and had detailed schematics for it. She had trained seven years to be able to apply for her current apprenticeship and now, she felt a shimmer of hope. It tickled the side of her mouth. If she could fix the food processor, then not only would she keep her crewmates from starving until they reached an outpost, but she would impress Mr. Jones. He would recommend her to every starship in the galaxy. In addition, that is where the life she wanted awaited her.

  She had hated living in the colonies. They were crowded and desperate feeling. Everyone seemed to be waiting on something. Nevertheless, the starships always had everything a colonist wanted. They shuttled between colonies making sure goods and people ended up where they were needed. The life of a mechanic was mostly card games and recliners. An hour each day devoted to checking the systems that checked all the systems. Then the wait for an alarm or a sign of trouble.

  Space pirates were to be expected, but they were still rare enough that Deidra doubted they would have another run in. Not when Captain Showalter had managed to outgun them. Their final shot was the only thing that got through.

  Yet it had started to spread like a cancer.

  Under the right programming, nano-drones could have addressed the large dent in the colander. Now, Deidra just needed to find a way to make enough of the stel-fuel pool so that it entered the system at the correct rate.

  She smirked. She would create a second colander, or drip pan. If placed that the right angle she might be able to match the consistency that the food processor needed to function correctly.

  Anger had blinded Mr. Jones.

  And fear, she reminded herself.

  The food processor not working would not have mattered if the starship were able to travel faster than it was. Word had trickled down from the bridge that the navigators were trying to move the starship into the gravitational pull of a star, so that they could sling shot us back onto a course where they could drift into an outpost’s range.

  At present, their ship resembled a lone asteroid on any scanner.

  They were not due to reach a colony for a week. No one would start wondering where they were until then.

  Deidra was set to go raid the rest of the starship for materials to repair the processor when she heard something like a gnat. She would encounter them in the colonies, but starships were supposed to be free of them. No, it was more electronic sounding. Like static.

  She chased the shadows and blinking lights of the room, looking for the nano-drone. She understood that she would not be able to see it out right, but she might be able to see evidence of its trail. Of course, she was a bit surprised that it was still out an about. The destruction of the space pirate’s ship should have ended its mission. No one should be alive to control it.

  It pricked her.

  Her hand smacked her neck.

  For a second, she figured it flew away like a gnat. Then she felt it burrowing. A cold needle moving deeper and deeper. She had seen what a nano-drone could do to a starship. What could it do to a person?

  Deidra was applauded.

  It took her sixteen hours to repair the food processor, but she lied and said she had gone about her other duties before having the idea to use several dishes and trays to correct the flow.

  One person was not cheering.

  Mr. Jones had his arms crossed and one eyelid was half shut as Deidra displayed the feast the functioning food processor could provide.

  Deidra had not impressed him. She had upstaged him.

  He had left her to fail. If he could not fix it then no one should be able to. His inability was not left unaddressed by Showalter. Though his comments were sly, he meant them.

  “Always good to have someone who thinks outside the box on board. Always.”

  “It’s not exact,” Deidra admitted. “The beans taste a little off.”

  “Are you kidding? They taste as good as if they’d come from a can!” Showalter had a plate of them. Perhaps he was just hungry. But Deidra knew the rate of flow was not perfect, but it was as close as she could manage—and that fact that it processed edible food was all that really mattered.

  “It tastes off, doesn’t it?” she asked Mr. Jones.

  “No. It doesn’t.” He stormed off.

  The taste of the bad beans lingered in Deidra’s mouth. Even as those around her continued to shovel them down, she realized she could not really swallow.

  She had convinced herself there was not a nano-drone in her. That she would just experienced a sharp shooting pain, and her mind painted the horror of having something small slicing through her body. Like when one reads the symptoms of a disease and starts to feel itchy, hot, or cold—however the symptoms read.

  But what if the beans were fine. What if it was just her?

  She finally swallowed. Her mouth felt roomier… as if more than the beans had been in there. She ran her tongue around her teeth.

  A molar was missing.

  They locked Deidra in her quarters.

  She had refused the medic’s explanations, and the dose of painkiller and mood booster did not fix her. She swore it was inside her, chipping away. She paced and discounted what they thought had happened. When the torpedo hit, Deidra was struck. It loosened the molar, eating did the rest to loosen the tooth.

  They offered to remove it so that it did not come out in her stool. She refused because they would not listen to her concerns.

  Nano-drones have to be operated by a living person. The pirate ship had been decimated.

  Deidra was simply insane.

  As she turned to pace back through her room, her hand stayed in the air. Deidra could not move it. It held tight. She felt a needle shooting down her arm.

  “It’s happening again!” She screamed. She broke her hand free and ran to the door. She pounded and screamed more. “It’s inside me!” She jerked the lock and kept screaming.

  Then she looked down at her hand. Heard the click of the door lock.

  The door swung open.

  The prick.

  It shot back into her. She clenched her teeth and felt her body yank forward, out of her quarters. No guard had been appointed. No one was within earshot. They were all busy trying to repair the rest of the ship.

  Then a lone officer crossed her path.

  Deidra did not say what she thought she was going to say. It came out like, “Me killing.”

  Deidra made her way through the ship. No one stood in her way—for long. She did not mean to. She did not want to. But she had no control. She was a puppet.

  Mr. Jones saw her.

  “Stay back!” She told him.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “I’m not in control. It is the nano-drone. I
t’s making me…kill.”

  “Is that so?”

  “You have to help me,” Deidra said.

  Mr. Jones shrugged. “Don’t have to do anything. You’re Miss Fix-It.”

  “Please.”

  “You should’ve told me your plan, but you wanted my job. All you apprentices are the same. So desperate to get off a planet. You probably planned this before her were placed on my ship. You knew I would have no background in food processors. You were the one that showed the captain where the controls to the processor was. You opened the door. You are an empath, so you knew he was ready to snap. And if he had not would you have weaseled your way into there and damaged it some other way, or was it all just luck. Did you see your opportunity?”

  “I didn’t. Listen to me. I’m sorry.”

  “You may be able to fix a food processor. Whoopdey doo. I can hack a nano-drone.”

  “You put the nano-drone in me? No. That happened before I fixed it. I heard it. I felt it.

  “Yes. I had a plan for you. I saw your betrayal coming even if you did not fix the food processor. That was just the final straw.”

  Mr. Jones made a fist and punched the air.

  Deidra felt it in her gut.

  “I’m locked in right now,” Mr. Jones said. Then he laughed and struck her repeatedly. “Go on, try to scream.”

  She could not.

  “Now. I am not going to tell you what I make you do next. I want it to be a surprise. Close your eyes!”

  Captain Showalter ordered her. Then he pleaded with her.

  But she was speaking for Mr. Jones as she told him, “I am the best mechanic you have ever had!”

  THE END.

  WHAT CAN’T BE SALVAGED, YET MUST BE by Jim Lee

  Word that Colony 9 was attacked put an apprehensive knot in Dante Karpinski’s gut.

  Then his ship—the military salvage vessel Andersen—was ordered out to assist in cleaning up the aftermath. It would be their first mission. But that was only a small part of what caused said knot to tighten. His crewmates’ reassuring words did nothing to ease it. True, most were more experienced than he when it came to interstellar travel; a few were even combat veterans. But none knew more about the recent battles than he did.

  And Dante had a sister serving aboard one of the six ships Zilharko’s Planet had assigned to help their methane-breathing allies defend that isolated colony.

  Or maybe he didn’t now . . . .

  Lieutenant Chen’s Mission Briefing—delivered for security reasons a full hour after they jumped into hyperspace—only made things worse. The enemy task force had been driven off, earning the Alliance a hard-fought victory. But two of Big Z’s light cruisers had been lost—with no survivors. Another was badly damaged, surely with additional casualties.

  “And that’s all we know,” Andersen’s First Officer added reluctantly. “The initial battle report didn’t even specify which ships got creamed.”

  “Shut it down!” Chief Petty Officer Zhang bellowed, silencing the discontented mutterings that last comment occasioned. “You clods should know, the Polygens are notorious for keeping details about such things as unit deployments and battle losses as quiet as possible, for as long as possible—especially when dealing with outsiders.”

  “Outsiders?” At Dante’s side, Crewman Svonavec blinked. “Chief, we’re talking about our own ships—our people!”

  “But serving under their command,” Zhang replied. “We should learn more upon reaching the colony’s system.”

  “Should?” Svonavec snorted.

  “Damned five-sexed bastards,” someone else grumbled.

  Dante Karpinski closed his eyes, held back a shudder. His dread-fueled gut-knot tightened yet another notch.

  Andersen returned to normal space just long enough to exchange a few encoded comm-laser signals with the locals and rendezvous with two Polygen ships.

  “Treni 329 and Treni 332,” Zhang remarked after the jump back into hyperspace. “Roughly equivalent to our destroyers in size and armament. On this mission, they’re our bodyguards—not to mention minders.”

  Third Mate Logan chuckled darkly as she passed, bound for the galley’s beverage dispenser.

  Dante frowned, but it was the other Crewman Third Class at the table that spoke up.

  “How’s that, Chief?”

  Zhang pursed his lips. “Mr. Ansell, you were paying attention during that little talk our First Officer gave last week?”

  “Sure, Chief.” Ansell’s already ruddy cheeks darkened an extra shade or two. “I know the first fight—the one involving three of our ships—happened as they patrolled the outer edge of Colony 9’s defense zone. We have to recover everything useful from the wreckage, while the locals finish cleaning up from the bigger second battle, right on their doorstep. I know we need the protection, too—the enemy might send ships on a similar mission. I meant about that ‘minders’ crack. Granted, these Polygen don’t fully trust us—few aliens do. But still—we’re on the same side now!”

  “That’s correct.” Zhang grunted, pulled out a chair and sat. He took a bite out of his turkey-wrap and chewed aggressively. “Us and several other human worlds are, just not all of them. Three or four are still neutral—at least officially. Then there’s Republic, who teamed up with the Narakans to start this whole shit-storm and have been fighting alongside them since. And the puppet government they set up after taking New Cleveland are in it, too—no matter how ineffectively.”

  “But we’re not—”

  “No, we’re not Dick the Dictator’s goons or a pack of spineless collaborators. But what we are is bad enough.” Zhang popped the last of his lunch into his mouth, chewed and swallowed. “We’re humans.”

  “The only intelligent species that makes war on itself,” Dante muttered as he gathered his courage to ask the terrible question that he must have answered.

  “Correct, Mr. Karpinski.” Zhang glanced over his shoulder at Logan. “Hey, Edna? Mind snagging me a hot one while you’re at it? Coffee—black, two sugars?”

  “Sure, Boss.”

  “None of the aliens know what to make of us. The very idea of, for instance, a people who would lay to waste their own evolutionary home planet . . . . ”

  “That was the damned Confeds!”

  “Makes no difference. Humans bombed Earth back to the proverbial Stone Age. And while we never went completely nuts like the Solar Confederacy, our grandparents and great-grandparents did fight to get out from under Earthgov’s thumb.”

  “Our War of Independence isn’t the issue,” Ansell insisted. “Or it shouldn’t be. We’re fighting to keep our freedom—same as the Polygens, the Tama Ka’Mor and the others.”

  “And humans,” Logan interjected brightly as she handed Zhang his drink, “would never, ever betray their own kind—in groups or as individuals—right, Steven?”

  Ansell grimaced. “Okay, guess I see what you mean.”

  “Chief,” Dante said, unable to wait another second. “You said we’d hear more at Colony 9?”

  Zhang pursed his lips. “Right—which ship is your sister on?”

  Dante took a deep breath: One way or another, the awful suspense would end. “Carina’s a Second Mate aboard the Zafir.”

  Zhang was silent for a couple stone-faced seconds. Then: “Sorry, Karpinski. Victorious and Zafir were both destroyed. Teppo—my old ship—was shot-up pretty bad, too. But they got their hyperdrive running and limped home a few hours after the second battle ended.”

  Dante bowed his head, bit his lower lip.

  “Hey, she died a hero,” Ansell said after several moments of very awkward silence. “They all did—spotted the Narakans, sent a drone back to warn the colony then swung around and attacked. Stopped—what was it—five of the fucking long-nose’s most important ships from reaching their objective? Weakening the Narks like that pretty much assured the victory—right, Chief?”

  “Likely true,” Zhang agreed. “At the least, knocking out the troop carriers
forced a change in the Nark’s plans. A full-blown invasion force was reduced to an oversized raiding party. But right now, let your friend be. He needs time to mourn and he can have it. We’re still almost two full days from where we’re going.”

  “Where we were going,” Dante muttered to himself as everyone paused for a glance up at the viewscreen. Andersen and its escorts had come out of hyperspace again, almost twenty lightyears beyond Colony 9. Now they faced the relatively confined patch of normal space between two obscure stars that formed an utterly unremarkable binary system.

  Points of light between them periodically glinted here and there, starlight reflecting off what had to be bits of battle wreckage in otherwise empty space.

  “You okay, Karpinski?” Logan asked, for once honestly sympathetic.

  “More or less.” Somehow, knowing Carina was gone was better than the miserable uncertainty. He still wondered about her last moments though. He hoped she was too busy with her duties and never knew what hit her—or at least that she’d been knocked unconscious before the end came.

  “I still don’t get it,” Svonavec complained from the other side of Service Bay Two. “Why fight them out here, alone? They could’ve beaten the Narks back to Colony 9 and fought it out there, alongside the methane-sniffers.”

  “Maybe—or maybe not.” Ansell finished checking his e-suit’s air recycler and stood up. “Oh, sure, they’d have gotten back ahead of the Narakans—in hyperspace. But then what? Man, you always overlook how different time moves there. In effect, you’re shifting from one reality to another—right? No matter how far you travel or how long it feels like you’re in the artificial universe the generators create—an hour, a day or a fucking year—when the field collapses, you fall back into normal space the exact same amount of time after you left it—right, Chief?”

  “Correct,” Zhang mumbled, busy adjusting one of their tow-sled’s thrusters.