The Otherworld Rebellion (War of Alien Aggression #9) Read online

  "I didn't do anything." Those last words came out the speaker in the chest of his exosuit, and Bellamy just nodded.

  After the airlock hatch closed, the Captain's face cast doubt on him through the slit window until he turned away and focused his attention of the displays being projected in the visor of his helmet telling him all exosuit systems were functioning as the pressure dropped around him rapidly. The bay's external doors had already been opened and once the cycle had completed, he stepped into the vacuum.

  The Empress Kate's two skiffs were in there, but he didn't even glance at them. He'd be crazy to run. It was all a mistake. They'd figure it out fast and he'd be back on board in a couple of hours.

  He turned his eyes to the silverpoint stars and watched the longboat grow in the frame of the open bay while meek voices from the bridge pretending calm gave the unresponsive craft its final permission to land.

  The hull of it seemed darker than it had before. Up close he thought he made out small discharges coming off the shunts now pulled tight to the hull. He couldn't make out the pilots through the cockpit canopy, but they had to see him standing there in front of the open airlock. He should have moved, but he didn't. They'd bled off most of the speed with small retro bursts from the maneuvering thrusters, but the boat steamed at the mouth of the bay at a few meters per second and didn't initiate final braking until it had completed a 180 spin. By the time they blasted out the burst to bring the craft to a complete halt, they were close enough to hit him with the wash.

  He swore he could hear the pilots' shits and giggles on local suit comms as it happened. The pale blue engine plasma flashed over his visor and blinded him the same instant the force of it hit him in the chest. It slammed like a burning ocean wave and knocked him back into the bulkhead next to the hatch.

  They only scorched his suit. He wasn't even bruised. He didn't exactly feel invincible, but after that, once the 4SI longboat's hatch opened, it was easier than he'd imagined to walk up to it, step inside, and disappear.

  4SI Longboat, Alpha Pegasi

  Over the next hours, the longboat crossed two star systems, breaching space to open transits using a charge-initiated field pinch device they launched like a small torpedo. He'd seen them employed before, but since Staas and the UN didn't want unregulated travel, their proliferation had been banned. Until today, he'd thought only Shediri hives and Human smugglers used them.

  The pilots turned and burned without any warning, rotating the longboat and pulsing their forward drive field hard to decelerate. The inertial gees pressed him to his seatback, but not nearly as much as he would have expected. The 4SI longboat had advanced coil sets and power to spare. After the abrupt deceleration, Samhain decided they must be early since there was no sign of the ship with which he'd expected to rendezvous. At some point they'd have to transfer him to another craft if they weren't planning on taking a 42-hour cruise with him to get back to Earth.

  He rose and stole a glance over the pilots' shoulders at the combined NAV and tactical projections from their consoles. It confirmed not a whiff of emissions or LiDAR contact across that half of the Alpha Pegasi system. A small convoy of gas tankers returning with holds pumped full of the fifth planet's red-tinted H3 clouds were the closest contacts and they were nearly 600-million Ks out, about to cross the star's limb.

  The very moment the tankers were lost to sight, the stars that filled the cockpit canopy seemed to dim in a swath so broad he could only find the edge of it by looking out to port. A stealthed ship was the only explanation that made any sense at all, but the size of it was staggering.

  Only a piece of it became visible in front of them and his eye darted over the angular lines and the bits of it that seemed to jut outwards inexplicably. His view was limited to less than seventy meters of it he estimated and without seeing any more of it, he couldn't even tell what end was the bow. The tiny part they were allowed to see hung in the blurred and dimmed expanse. "3.4 Ks, said one of the namelss pilots. Ease off on the coils. We don't want to have to flare the maneuvering thrusters in the bay."

  If it was 3.4 Ks out, then he estimated it to be at least 1.4 Ks across, bigger than a UNS battleship by a half. As the longboat plunged forwards into the solid shadow in their path, Samhain realized why he could see through it. It wasn't entirely here. This ship had to be using the famously dangerous dimensional slip stealth developed for and leveraged by SCS Boomslang in 2165 on the drive to the Squidy homeworld moon. Instead of using discrete shunts to push energy into the n-space sub-layer between dimensions, the ship's bounding expanse had been covered in a skin that isolated her entirely from regular space and placed the ship itself partly between dimensions. He could only see it where they'd opened a bay door. The warm light showed more of their longboats inside. Figures in black exosuits waved them in.

  Field leakage sucked the light from the cabin, and the consoles and projections in front of the pilots flickered. "Put your helmet on," said one of the pilots as they landed. "Follow the directions projected in your visor. Don't get lost. Welcome aboard the Corpus."

  The ship was a maze. All corridors and decks looked similar, nobody would talk to him, and if he hadn't had the arrows in his visor to follow, he wouldn't have found his way in a year. The people he passed wore exosuits at first, then wool suits. His helmet's visor blurred their faces.

  Samhain knew he'd arrived because there were no more arrows to follow and the face of the attractive woman sitting behind the curved desk at the far end of the uncanny room wasn't blurred out. She smiled. "Welcome. Please remove your helmet and wait here," she said before attending to some business on a console set out of sight.

  The walls of the compartment looked as if they'd been made of marble and the light poured out of them. He couldn't find his shadow in there. Behind the walls, out of sight, there would be sensors, all sorts of them. Already, they'd be reading his blood flow and perspiration, assessing brain activity patterns and comparing them to the personality simulations of him. Samhain remembered all the things they did to test you. Nobody got out of the camps without passing the tests.

  Besides the warm, endogenous glow of the waiting room's walls, the painting itself provided the only real color in the room. "It's by Rene Magritte," she said. Her eyes were too far apart to look at one or the other comfortably so he could only look in the middle of them and watch them both. It was strangely hypnotic. "Mr. Pavic had me hang this painting especially for you. Usually it's the little Titian study that hangs there." Samhain couldn't make out the lettering on the small brass plaque that accompanied the painting. "The Menaced Assassin," she said as if he'd asked the title. "1927."

  His eye took in the figures in the frame - the murderer, the victim, the detectives. The way they'd all been flattened to the picture plane like Egyptian hieroglyphics and trapped in the painting's geometries made it look to Samhain like none of them had chosen to be in that scene. How many such flattened and trapped figures would a spymaster like Pavic possess?

  "A lot," his assistant said, looking up as a thin smile escaped.

  "A lot of what?"

  "Mr. Pavic has an impressive collection. He says he'll see you now."

  The purposeful movement of her eyes was his only indication that a doorway had opened where none had appeared before. He still couldn't discern how. All he saw once he looked over his shoulder was a newly opened rectangular passage with edges so sharp he didn't doubt they were dangerous to brush against. The passage was paneled in the same backlit marble, and she had to nod and smile at him one more time before he pushed away from the shelter of her desk and stepped across the slick stone.

  Once inside, the walls and deck absorbed the sound of his steps as if he was already being erased. The passage seemed purpose built because it was narrow and short. Once he was a few steps in, he felt a tiny change in air pressure when it sealed behind him. He was trapped now. This was another man-trap - another chance to keep him confined and isolated while they scanned him. Maybe they were tryi
ng to get a baseline on his brainwaves so they could detect the patterns that indicated deceit.

  Three steps after he continued down the corridor, the next door appeared. The far end of the passage blurred and faded as if it had turned to mist. The smell of the water in the air surprised him and the roaring sound of falling, crashing water filled his ears. Out past the threshold of the newly opened door, the light was dimmer, but it was easy to see the path in front of him that led out into the narrow and deep chamber. It was only twice the width of the hallway he'd left and the mist in the air had slickened it. The ceiling was too far away to see, hidden in darkness like the source of the water that fell in a sheet across the path, obscuring everything beyond.

  Samhain stepped carefully; there was no telling how far down the bottom was if he fell. Once the waterfall shut off and the last of it crashed on the pathway, he saw how it had been not a single sheet, but four curtains of water falling around a modular compartment. The hatch was open, but the metal burned his hand with cold as he pushed it open. "Should have kept my gloves on," he whispered to himself as he stepped inside to face another hatch only a meter away.

  "Yes, I'll bet that hurt," said a baritone voice with an accent that betrayed no location as the place of the speaker's origin. The annunciation was precise. He couldn't locate the source, but he was proud he hadn't tried to jump out of his skin when he heard it. "Close the hatch please." He closed the hatch with his elbow and turned to open the next. "Last one."

  The cubic compartment beyond was no larger than five meters on a side. The wall and floor looked like ivory panels and the yellow light came from battery-powered floor lamps, two in the far corners. A pair of leather chairs so classic their shape hadn't changed in centuries and a broad, ironwood desk were all that separated him now from the Director.

  He couldn't place the man's age better than 40-60. Samhain saw none of the swelling or overly rosy cast so common with the fashionable artificial rejuvenation treatments favored among men of power. The Director appeared less susceptible to vanity than that. The design of his suit had been cut fifty years before the chairs. A suit like that was a gesture that proclaimed the cycles of fashion as a whim left to another. It was the signifier of the establishment class that felt much the same way about changes in power. His brilled hair was a yellowed silver.

  Samhain discerned the and quiet commitment he exuded like a menacing chill.

  "My name is Balthus Pavic. You may call me Mr. Pavic or Director Pavic." He knew the name. Pavic was one of five men that had built Staas Company's intelligence wing over the last half-century, but after the struggle between them for power, he was the only one left standing."Please be seated," said the Director.

  Samhain's company personnel file hovered between them, projected over the polished ironwood expanse of Pavic's perfectly clear desk. The Director's eyes flitted over the text and images as he flipped through them with waving gestures of his right hand. The images of his past Pavic glanced at felt like they belonged to someone else. There were pictures of a boy in the Houston rubble and then the reeducation camps, then a young man at school, then a grown man on an alien world. Pictures of her were in there, too, and Samhain was glad Pavic waved past those quickly. Then came the image he remembered being taken as he stood against a bulkhead and raised his chin in front of the floating lens the day he signed on with Staas. After that, there weren't many images, just performance reports.

  Pavic spoke without removing his eyes from the file. "Anne Gellanden."

  Samhain didn't much like hearing her name on his lips. "What about her?"

  "You entered the field of exoanthropology to get close to her. Same undergraduate class. It lasted six years and when it was over with her, it was over with you and Dr. Gellanden. He wouldn't even help you complete your masters'. What did you do to her, Samhain?"

  Fuck you for thinking you understand, he thought, but this wasn't a man to say such things to. "I didn't do anything to her. Anne Gellanden loved someone else. She worked with her father. I couldn't stay where I wasn't wanted." It was that simple.

  The silence while Pavic nodded seemed almost merciful. "You could have applied for different work, but you enlisted with the Staas Company."

  "Good pa-"

  "A lot of jobs pay better. What's the real reason you joined?"

  "I wanted to go to space. Fresh start, I guess."

  "You're from Houston. Or you were initially. Not many people can claim to be from Houston anymore, not after what happened there. Madness like that leaves an impression on a boy. What were you, ten?"

  "That's right. It was all over in a month. And then we were in the camps."

  "And you joined Staas because you didn't want to see that happen again."

  "Excuse me?"

  "Staas Company is a force of stability."

  "I don't understand."

  "You didn't join us for the pay. You joined us to prevent the threat of similar disruption - the threat of life as you know it being wiped out again."

  "I'm not sure I se-"

  "Your wish was to stop another disaster like Houston from happening. Personally speaking, we offered you the promise of protection through strength and order."

  "I guess. Maybe."

  "Tell me. Has the order you found been comforting to you? Does it quell the night sweats and the ever-present fear that the loss of what little you have now is just around the next corner?"

  "I'm not sure if you're mocking me or not."

  "After all, you joined us right after it had just happened again."

  "What had?"

  "You'd just lost everything once more, but this time you did it all by yourself." Pavic seemed to wait for a reaction, and Samhain refused to give it to him. "Scans of your cabin show only work-related items...no souvenirs, no images of friends or loved ones...no personal items at all. I suppose if you don't have anything, then nobody can take anything from you. What do you think of that theory?"

  "I don't know."

  "I'm telling you what I see because I need you to understand the real reason you came to Staas. You could have gone literally anywhere else."

  "It didn't seem that way at the time."

  "Your family were among the chief conspirators that fateful summer in Texas. Your father was quite a preacher and a leader in the Communal Neo-Baptists. We keep copies of what's been purged from the historical archives; I've watched his sermons."

  "I was ten. It didn't have anything to do with me."

  "But you believed. Like they did, you believed you could win somehow in armed revolt. It went against all rational thought and logic, but that didn't stop anyone. 51,000 went mad and attempted what was guaranteed to end in disaster. You know what happened better than anyone. It wasn't a fresh start that brought you to Staas Company. It was a debt. You came to us to pay it, to help make sure Houston never happens again."

  "I wasn't responsible for what happened."

  "You almost say it like you believe it. Unfortunately, Lieutenant will likely be the highest rank you attain in the Privateers. Even without your family history hung round your neck, from what I've read in these evaluations, you came too late and burned too dim to be promoted higher."

  By the time Samhain could finally ask, the question had tortured him enough that it came out sounding like a plea for mercy. "What am I doing here?" Pavic exhaled and said nothing. "I haven't done anything wrong."

  The spymaster grunted then, and it seemed possibly meant as some cursory affirmation of that fact, but he gave no other indication of what he thought about that. Pavic said, "Your former mentor, Doctor Richard Gellanden, is dead. His body was recovered from the South polar badlands of our colony in the Altair system. He was working for my office, engaging a species of alien primitives and investigating rumors of an accessible Weirdling artifact on Otherworld. The criminal secessionists there, the rebels, kidnapped him and eventually killed him when he couldn't give them what he'd found."

  "How can you be sure he found anyt
hing?"

  "He was onto something. We have his data store. It was wiped clean by him and overwritten with random noise before he wiped his own memory in New Madras. You don't erase information you don't have."

  Samhain blinked at Pavic. The pieces were falling into place now and he knew why Pavic wanted him. It was all a misunderstanding.

  "Dr. Gellanden is gone, but you were his star pupil."

  "That was seven years ago. Besides - I can't pick up where he left off. Even at my best, I could never do what he did. I was never adept at communicating with alien species. Not like him. I wasn't as good at it as he thought I was."

  Pavic nodded in a way that was slightly insulting, as if that was all too plainly evident in the file in front of him. Then, the company man scrutinized him looking for guilt of some kind. The next words were entirely unexpected. "What success you experienced as an academic exoanthropologist was probably due to your receptive and projective abilities."

  "Excuse me?"

  "You're a nosy parker and a loud thinker, Mr. Samhain. You're a walking antenna and a pirate radio station. While that is not uncommon in the slightest, the fact that you seem to have achieved some degree of semi-conscious control without any help does bode well for your development as an asset."

  The sense of relief at hearing a joke made the laugh leap out of Samhain's mouth. Pavic glared at him. "I'm sorry. I didn't expect....I thought it was a joke..."

  "Did you." The spymaster's backhanded wave over the desk dismissed the file. It vanished, leaving an uncomfortably clear line of sight between them. "Your abilities made up for some of your deficiencies when communicating with alien species, I suspect. And your evaluations read as if you've projected vague, self-complimentary thoughts to make your superiors think you were doing a better job than you really were. That's when you were feeling confident. It went the other way when you weren't."