Quinten’s Story
One
The call was waiting for Quinten in the morning, bounced off his carefully constructed piggyback network of commercial feed points, scientific arrays and even—like a tongue childishly stuck out at the Republic—some military outposts. He might be described by most people as grim but, underneath the scar tissue, Quinten did have a sense of humour. It was emaciated and under-nourished, beaten to within a nanometre of its life, but still stubbornly alive. And it made him twist his lips in cynical amusement when he read the entire message, pieced together by the bitcrypt spiders while he slept.
“So the pirate kids want to meet,” he said to himself.
He wondered what they wanted. His last trade with the Neon Red cartel had been more than a year ago. He found them a skittish lot in general, too nervous to deal with goods of any real value, and ill-suited to the lifestyle of freewheeling racketeers. At times, he felt that the purchases he made from them amounted to little more than charity, a way of sustaining some tiny needles occasionally pricking the Republic’s tough hide.
“And maybe that’s enough,” he muttered.
He commanded the ship to prepare the return message, indicating a rendezvous near Port Tertiary in six hours. That would barely give the Perdition time to get there but, if it was going to be a rush for him, then hopefully it lessened the chances of the Republic staging an ambush. And if the cartel couldn’t make it in time…well, he wasn’t in this for the popularity. Quite the opposite.
With the order received and in processing, there was nothing left to do until the ship entered normal space near the rendezvous point. Quinten looked around the cockpit of his pride and joy. The command centre was originally created with many more staff in mind—eight, to be exact. In the almost four years since he’d acquired the Perdition, he’d made extensive modifications to the original battle-scout design. He installed expensive, black-market AIs, paid handsomely for a string of labour-saving modifications, and incorporated the latest in shielding and sensor technologies. It might still resemble a Republic ship from the outside, but the Perdition’s innards were pure Quinten Tamlan.
Restless, knowing the time had come for him to exercise, he muttered a quick curse and rose slowly to his feet. Some days were better than others, but this wasn’t one of them. He thought his body creaked as it moved, aching and already weary, to the back of the cockpit. There was experimental surgery available that could give him a cyborg body…for an astronomical sum. But the procedure was risky and there were too many good memories still associated with the hulk his mind was still encased in, for him to seriously consider it.
Although officially classed as a “scout”, the Perdition was almost one hundred metres long, a knobbly, clumsy-looking ship that dished out death with ease. Its primary cockpit was buried just forward of centre, with a secondary cockpit in the rear, up near the skin, in case the sensor feeds to the main hub of operations got cut during an attack. Bulbous protuberances marred the ship’s surface, containing accommodation quarters, the ship’s canteen, and cargo bays. Quinten converted those areas to hydroponics, and used one cargo bay to receive the rare, and only ever invited, guest. He cut through bulkheads, forming two long thoroughfares from the tip of the scout to its stern. It would make it easier for any enemy soldiers to barrel through the ship, but he knew he was in no physical shape to give them much competition anyway. If the enemy was ever in a position to set an armed and armoured foot on the Perdition, then the game was over, and he was probably already dead.
The rumble beneath his feet changed tempo, became a jolt, then nothing—just an unnatural smoothness—and he knew he was in hyperspace. It would take more than five hours, and four jumps, to make it to Port Tertiary. The journey would entail a litany of trembles, jolts and the absence of movement completely, leaving him with little to do, except trust the navigator to do its job while he worked his body into some semblance of suppleness.
His limbs were stiff, as they were most mornings, and he limped badly. Part of one cargo bay had been turned into an exercise area, and he had deliberately chosen the one closest to the stern so he would need to walk some distance to get there, damn his self-knowledge. He knew his tendency to prevaricate too well.
It took him almost five minutes to walk the forty-metre distance, but he tried to keep the bitterness out of his thoughts. It could be worse. He could be floating in a bowl somewhere, condemned to a half-life peering at the universe through a mist of pastel rejuv-gel. He could be on Bliss, the Republic’s hell-hole prison planet. Or he could be dead. All those options made the agony of fifty sit-ups insignificant. With gritted teeth, he disrobed, sliding his gaze past the one mirror in the room, and began his regime.
He worked out for an hour, and was shaking and sweating profusely by the end of it. It took effort to merely lift himself from the exercise chair, and the steps to his quarters were truncated and staggering. He knew he could fall—had done so several times in the past—but he refused to give in to his body’s frailties. Not yet. If he could not exercise just a small degree of self-discipline with his body, then it was no use being alive.
He turned the shower as hot as he could stand it, letting the steamy heat massage his aching muscles and wash away the stink of his sweat. The water streamed over a bare chest, criss-crossed with surgery scars, a pale shadow of the muscled bulk he used to carry with pride. His arms, once bulging, were withered remnants, his legs—well, to call them maimed would have been a compliment. The only things that remained in perfect working order were his mind and his damned libido.
His mind, to force his body to do his bidding, and his libido, to remind him of all he had lost.
He remembered an ancient joke. If you lie on your hand for a while, it’ll get numb and feel like somebody else. Even without that temporary anaesthesia, the fingers that touched himself, on the rare occasions when he gave in to the itch, still didn’t feel like his. But who else would have him? An attractive woman, of her own volition? He grinned savagely as he laboriously dried himself. They would run parsecs in the opposite direction the moment they saw his unadorned form. He could pay for sex—he appreciated the no-strings aspect of a commercial transaction—but could never be sure that while the women sold one part of their anatomy to him, they weren’t using another part to betray him to the Republic. That only left his hand, thin yet loyal.
Moving to his wardrobe, he asked the ship for a progress report. Still three hours to go. He used the time to make sure that the Perdition was in full fighting trim. He primed the sensors to operate to their maximum limit, much further than that of the normal commercial craft that cruised the spaceways, and even a bit further than the run-of-the mill Republic battle craft. Or, rather, he tried to prime the sensors, and met with only sparse screens, bereft of their usual crowded detail. That indicated another problem, too worryingly close to the last. The solution would be something easy, he had captained the ship for long enough to get an intuition for that kind of thing.
Only two weeks ago, the missile bay doors had jammed shut. Thankfully, the failure hadn’t happened during an actual emergency, only in one of the monthly simulations, but it still took him more than a week to laboriously hunt down the problem—an overloaded secondary relay—and thirty minutes to correct it. Now some of the sensors weren’t functioning properly. His body wouldn’t thank him for putting it through its paces again, so soon after the last bout of bending and crawling.
The Perdition was too big for one person to maintain for any length of time. He had known that when the opportunity arose to capture a battle scout almost whole, more than four years ago, and had still talked himself into claiming it as his own. He had worked hard to get it spaceworthy and modified to his exacting requirements, but the time for continued delusion was gone. If he wanted to continue piloting the Perdition, while staying out of the Republic’s ever-alert gaze, he was going to have to either take on crew or...get rid of the ship.
Neither option was attractive. New crewmembers could betray him as easily as making a stealth comm call. And, after getting the Perdition in exactly the kind of shape he wanted, he was loathe to part with it. It would take almost as much time removing all traces of his modifications as it did installing them in the first place. And the thought of trashing such expensive, hard-won equipment was one he couldn’t even begin to contemplate.
He stared at the uninformative screen. The front and back sensors seemed to be operational, with standby power below their maximum, but the side, top and bottom arrays appeared totally out of commission. He was hoping that the readings were false. Maybe everything would snap back into peak efficiency once he jumped out of hyperspace and had time to properly calibrate them.
Yeah, and the Neon Red cartel might actually have something worth selling for a change.
One hour out from Port Tertiary, Quinten started getting ready. He walked the corridors of the Perditionunencumbered when he was by himself but, for guests, he made sure he looked as formidable as possible. The exoskeleton, graphite grey and gleaming, may have struck a note of ostentation, but only Quinten knew how necessary it was to his wellbeing. Out of the soft armoured suit, he was a limping and crippled man but, once inside, the finely tuned groups of micro-servos ensured that he could lift incredible weights, crush steel in his fist and run faster than a human. It was almost like being a cyborg, without the attendant risks. He hadn’t chosen the full body cover, so the armour reached only up to the top of his neck, fully encasing him in a cloak of darkness and forcing his head erect. It looked constricting and uncomfortable. It wasn’t.
Once in his quarters, he took the suit off its harness and stepped into it, pushing his arms through the loose sleeves and fastening the front at three points. Reaching down, he touched a small indented point on his right thigh, and the suit’s memory got to work, tightening against his skin and forming a profile of the man he used to be before the Gilgan disaster. The suit recreated the bulges of a chest that his body no longer remembered, the ripple of a taut torso, and the strong muscles of proud arms and two evenly-matched legs.
Fortified, he walked to the cargo bay, unable to stop his mind from contrasting the hobble from the exercise room to his current distance-eating stride.
Why am I doing this? Why not just give in and get a cyborg body, 80% failure rate be damned? Kiel wouldn’t care. Kiel’s past caring.
But he knew he couldn’t. The worst part of it was, he loved life too much to give it up. Coward that he was.
He reached the bay just in time. With a practiced flick, he activated the filtering sensors and made himself comfortable on the modified gantry high up near the ceiling, its edge bristling with rows of serious firepower. The weaponry, and his position, masked a clear view of him, accentuated by the distinct lack of lighting near his position. His voice was captured by a mic in his suit and amplified through different points of the bay, also confusing his exact position. Of course, he could have transacted the entire visit remotely, from the comfort of his own cabin, but Quinten liked the personal touch. He felt it added a note of courtesy, even when dealing with pirates.
“Coming out of hyperspace in ten minutes,” his ship told him in masculine tones. He’d had the original, more soothing female voice replaced, soon after losing Kiel.
“Destination confirmed?” There had been unsettling rumours recently, of ships ending up at different places to their originally logged destinations. Whether commercial, private, or Republic craft seemed to make no difference. There had even been cases—ones he’d been able to confirm—of ships disappearing completely, lost in that chaotic trans-universal plane commonly known as hyperspace. Although he wasn’t sure there was anything he could do about it, it still paid to stay alert.
“Port Tertiary trajectory confirmed. Crease operating within normal parameters.”
He rubbed his cheek, careful to do it softly so he didn’t accidentally break his cheekbone.
“Initiate scanning upon insertion,” he told the ship. “Set up a tumble algorithm, using front and back sensors as primaries, full spherical coverage, artificial gravity axes calibrated to this position.”
“Continuity cannot be guaranteed. Periodic disorientation probable.”
“Acceptable. Scan for all ship signatures while tumbling to the rendezvous point. Plot and execute an escape route in case of confirmed Republic signatures.”
“Destination?”
“Make it Tor Prime.”
That was the very heart of the Republic. With any luck, any ambushers would be expecting him to jump away from the heart of evil, rather than towards it. And, like his current route had been, it would take multiple jumps to get there. More than enough time for him to come up with an alternate destination. It didn’t worry him to have the ship execute a plan autonomously. His reflexes couldn’t match the Perdition, and he knew it. His strengths lay in other directions.
“Orders confirmed.”
He sat in the chair at one end of the gantry. It ran on a rail so he could choose where, along the length of the metal platform, he wished to greet his guests. This time, he decided to stay in the corner. He strapped himself into the harness and tried to relax, while waiting for the insertion and the tumble to begin.
No matter how much stability the Perdition attempted to maintain, Quinten knew the short jaunt to the rendezvous point would be uncomfortable and disorienting. But it was either that, or be shot into scrap through his carelessness.
The ship jolted, then the spinning began, and Quinten felt bile rise in his throat. Grimly, he kept his mouth shut and swallowed hard. Eyes opened or closed, it didn’t matter. The cargo bay would settle into familiar lines for a second, then blur into nonsensical diagonals, and the vertigo played havoc with his sense of balance. It seemed to continue for an eternity, a brief reprieve followed by a dance of lines. If there was good news in the vertigo, it was that no ambushers appeared to be close to his position.
“One ship within scanning range.” The Perdition voice was smooth and unconcerned, while Quinten’s own fingers clenched the alloyed armrests of his chair, the suit’s strength almost forming furrows beneath his hand. “Ship identified as God’s Harness, belonging to the Neon Red cartel.”
So they still had that hulk, he thought, while the world spun around him.
It’s probably in better shape than mine.
Then the physical spinning ceased, although the after-effects kept going for far too long. Quinten knew he either had to fix the sensor problem soon or resign himself to a constant state of budding nausea.
While he willed his stomach to some semblance of normalcy, the ship picked up and reported on a small pod that had detached itself from the God’s Harness, traversing the distance between the ships carefully, as if a two-person shuttle could simulate walking forward with bare hands stretched into the air. Quinten grunted in satisfaction. The craft was obviously piloted by someone who knew the routine. Good. He hated breaking in new guests.
The clang, as the pod docked with the circular hatch embedded in the bay doors, echoed through the void, then the unlocked hatch turned and opened inwards.
Quinten’s finger was literally on a hair-trigger, waiting to blast whoever appeared into their component atoms. His touch relaxed fractionally when he recognised the second-in-command of the Harness, Setino Shaw. The man looked as he always did, like he’d woken up to find himself robbed and dumped naked in some spacer alley. The sour look on his face didn’t change as his pale gaze scanned the bare bones of the cargo bay.
There was a flash of white—Quinten’s finger spasmed—that resolved itself into a woman, stumbling then catching herself as her bare feet touched the cold floor. She was tall, with short white hair and pale skin that looked like it had never been exposed to a planetside sun. Despite her appearance, however, there was something strange about her. Quinten kept quiet and observed her for a moment longer, taking in the jerky hesitation in her movements. Her dark, fathomless eyes looked around, much as Shaw had done, then her gaze narrowed in on Quinten’s figure, unerringly finding him amid the high tangle of metal and weaponry.
Only one other person emerged through the hatch after the albino, Ifola Breit. It must have been he who pushed the woman through, causing her to trip.
Somehow, life had just got more interesting.
“Tamlan, you here?” Shaw asked belligerently, but Quinten detected the note of anxiety beneath the bluff.
“I’m here,” he answered quietly, and had the satisfaction of seeing both men spin around crazily. He thought they would be used to his amplification system by now. Something else must be making them jittery. “How can I help you gentlemen?”
“We’re here to sell something.”
Breit jangled a nerve-chain, a combination restraint and control method for delivering excruciating pain to a captive’s skin through their nerve-endings. Quinten’s eyes followed it, from the small control pad in Breit’s florid hand, down to where the chain’s slack curved gracefully, and up to the wide collar that fitted snugly around the woman’s neck, like a grotesque form of jewellery.
“What is it?” Quinten asked, although he was reasonably sure of the answer.
“Not sure. Type B humanoid, we think.”
Yes, that would explain the subtle differences in how she moved. The Republic hated to admit it, but occasionally breeding occurred between humans and the rest of the galaxy. The results, classified as Type Bs, were hated by both groups, regarded as too alien to exist in each other’s communities. They often turned to crime to make a living. As Quinten was sure the young woman in front of him had done.
“So?” he drawled. “Why sell one to me?”
“You’re probably the only person we know who can control it.” Shaw snickered. “It tried to commandeer the Harness. It took four of us to restrain it until Ifola grabbed the nerve-chain and latched it round its neck. It hasn’t been out of the collar since. And that was a week ago.”
“Language?”
The pirate spokesman shrugged. “Don’t know. She may be deaf. Stupid. Playing stupid. She’s cunning though, like a Republic strike fighter. You know what these Subs are like.”
Quinten started assembling the little facts together in his mind.
Perceptive. Female. Strong. Hated.
“Where did you catch her?” He wasn’t going to play along with Shaw’s petty xenophobic digs.
Shaw shifted his feet, his posture relaxing with each sentence he spoke. He even lifted his hands onto his hips and slouched a bit. It was obvious he thought he had this deal sewn up. In the darkness, Quinten’s eyes gleamed.
“She was in a small passenger craft near the inner edge of the Chimpect sector. Must’ve killed the crew, some gentry family joy-riding around the galaxy, before taking control. We didn’t find any bodies, but there was enough blood to supply a hospital.”
Breit chuckled and jiggled the chain again, as if proud of some favoured pet’s antics.
Ruthless. Determined.
The Chimpect sector was solidly in Neon Red territory. No surprise that they had caught her. No surprise, too, that they couldn’t keep something like her. And what Shaw said was true. Quinten was probably the only one among the cartel’s even semi-regular customers that wouldn’t turf them out on their ears the moment they caught sight of the cargo.
“Why would I want a Sub?” Quinten asked, idly. “Don’t you think I have enough to worry about without adding one of them to my problems?”
In the back of his mind, however, there was something strangely compelling about the deal he was being offered. If there was any person, or species, more reviled than him in Republic space, with the exception of shapeshifters, it was the Type B humanoids. Their ability to act with total implacability, their physiology—sometimes exceeding human norms—and their propensity to wreak havoc within governed space, were legendary. Whenever a Sub community was found, the Republic either killed them all or shipped them to Bliss, depending on how much trouble they turned out to be. There was no love lost between the two groups. Only shapeshifters were treated with equal ruthlessness.
It occurred to Quinten that the solution to his nagging problems was staring him straight in the face.
Not hearing a response, Shaw put a wheedling tone in his voice. It was his equivalent of exhibiting intellect.
“She could be useful to you.” He looked around. “On this ship. Pretty big for just one person to handle.”
So, it was obvious to them too. That wasn’t welcome news.
“As long as you keep her on the nerve-chain, she’ll be as passive as a lump of putty, and not likely to betray you. And if you get lonely,” Shaw shrugged, “well, with that chain around her neck, she’s not going to be too―”
Quinten unlocked his harness in one movement, and vaulted over the gantry’s railing, landing hard on the floor. The thick metal vibrated with the force with which he hit the deck. He had towered over Shaw by a head when he was whole, and he looked down on the pirate now from that height.
“Too what, Shaw?” he growled.
Shaw’s eyes tightened and he looked away, but whether it was from the expression in Quinten’s eyes, or the remnants of jagged scars that radiated from his right cheek across his entire face, didn’t matter. Breit remained as still as a rodent, not drawing attention to himself. Only the Sub dared look him in the face and he was surprised to see that she was taller than he thought, the tip of her head just brushing his bottom lip. Her expression was impassive, detached, as if the men were discussing something other than her life.
“I was going to say, she’s not going to be too resistant,” Shaw muttered. It was a lie.
Fussy. The bastard was about to say, fussy.
Quinten made a show of walking around her. Probably to safeguard their own security, they had dressed her in little more than what was strictly necessary. The tight, short-sleeved suit hugged slight curves, the leggings ending above her knees. Her toes, like her fingers, were long and lean, tipped with short, colourless cuticles. Everything about her form was bland and pale, except for those huge angled, dark eyes that looked at him as if he was nothing more than an interesting biological specimen.
“We’ll throw the nerve-chain in,” Shaw added. “No charge. We reckon you’ll need it.”
“And what are you asking for in return?” Quinten took a step back and cocked his head, watching her intently.
“Captain Mestoo wants some shield technology.”
“You can buy your own shield technology.”
“Not like what you got. Not the stuff that can evade the military’s sensors.”
“I can’t evade all their sensors.”
“But you can evade more than most,” Shaw insisted.
Quinten considered the deal. The shields on the Perdition were his own refinements built on a very promising kernel. Even if he traded an older version of his customised technology for the Sub, there was still the slight chance that somebody could reverse-engineer what he’d done and find a vulnerability.
He shook his head. “Forget it.” And turned to walk away.
“Wait!”
Shaw’s frantic voice stopped him in his tracks. He slowly spun around and lifted an eyebrow.
“We don’t know what to do with her,” Shaw admitted with a hunched shrug. “We don’t want the entire fucking government after us just because we have her with us. It’s dangerous enough as it is for the cartel. Once word gets out that we have a Sub, one that murdered some fucking gentry family with more money than sense, everybody’ll be wanting a piece of us.”
“But you obviously don’t mind if they have a piece of me?”
“Anyone with sense already knows to stay away from you.” Perspiration started beading on Shaw’s upper lip. He was fighting for the continuance of his, and his friends, lives. If Quinten had been them, he would have shoved the Sub back into the passenger craft the moment he’d discovered her, and given her three minutes to either take off or be blown into oblivion. Human-alien hybrids were more trouble than they were worth.
“And it’s much harder to just go after the Perdition than the five ships that make up the cartel. None of our ships are as fast as yours.” Shaw was almost begging by now. “Give us something, Tamlan, and we’ll be happy with that.”
“You shouldn’t have caught her.”
“We didn’t know there was a fucking Sub in that ship! We thought it was easy pickings for us. Looting, ransom, then a quick escape.”
Silence filled the chill of the cargo bay.
“I have two military-grade sensors in storage,” Quentin finally told them. “Republic sourced, version five kernels. They’re still working, but I upgraded my systems three years ago, and they’re now obsolete.
“They’re still more powerful than any of the commercial stuff that’s selling nowadays,” he added, holding up a hand to forestall their objections. “That’s my deal. The two sensors for the shapeshifter.”
He might still need replacement sensors for the repair job he knew awaited him, but the two he was trading wouldn’t set him back significantly. Besides, he still had the feeling that the current malfunction was minor.
Shaw and Breit looked at each other.
“The Harness is one of the fastest ships the cartel has,” Quinten told them. “And it can’t outrun a Republic striker. Help yourselves. Take the deal. Increase your chances of survival.”
“There are five ships in the Neon Red,” Shaw said.
“I only have two sensors.” He waited for three heartbeats. “If that isn’t enough for you, then take the Sub back to your ship.” The alien shifted at the words, and Quinten wondered how much of the conversation she understood. “Try selling her to someone else.”
“We did,” Breit remarked, before Shaw could stop him. “Nobody wanted her.”
A cruel smile lifted the edges of Quinten’s mouth, made even crueller by the pull of scar tissue on the right side of his face.
“Two sensors, Shaw,” he repeated. “That’s the offer. Take it or leave it.”
“Damn you, Tamlan.”
And that’s how Quinten knew the deal was done.
Intrigued? Read the rest when the book is released in late 2011.