A Taste Of Despair (The Humal Sequence) (5 page)

“The element of surprise, huh?” Rames smiled.

“Something like that.”

The Captain sighed. “Well, sorry to disappoint you. But your cover is already blown. We took images and ran them through the databases. You know that all military ships constantly transmit data back to their home-base. That query, along with your images, is already known to Tantalus Station, our base of operations. By the end of the day, it’ll be burst-transited to the major naval base at Aurica system. From there to HQ back at Sol. Then it will filter back out to all the other systems. In about four days time there isn’t going to be a system that doesn’t know you’re back in human space.”

Hamilton thought for a few moments. “Well then. I guess we need a new plan.”

“What’s this ‘we’ business?” Rames scowled. “I got involved in your schemes in the past and look where it got me!”

Hamilton sighed. “I suppose you’re right. I have no right to drag you into this again.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to help.” Rames added. “But something like this…I have a feeling you’d be better off just telling the truth. You know what the military are like. They’ll slap a quarantine on that world and that’ll stop any do-gooders, or aliens, from going there.”

“Walsh isn’t like us. To him such a blockade would just slow him down. He was always several steps ahead of me on the Hope’s Breath.” Hamilton frowned.

“Well, either way, I think you should let the authorities deal with this. I ..”

Rames was interrupted as Anderton returned, bearing a transparent data pane, through which they could vaguely make out words.

“You need to see this, Captain.” He said. “It just came in from Tantalus Station, marked alpha priority.”

Rames and Hamilton raised their respective eyebrows. Alpha priority was the military’s top message priority. It basically meant ‘stop whatever you’re doing and do what the message says at once.’

Rames reached out and took the pane, reading the message envelope on the screen. It clearly stated it was for his eyes only. Despite that, he remained seated next to Hamilton and thumbed the ident box displayed. It took some moments before the message accepted him as its rightful recipient and displayed the message.

Rames read it, a deepening frown registering on his face.

“Bad news?” Hamilton fished, cautiously. He exchanged a glance with Anderton, the medic, who had remained after delivering the data pane. The medic glanced at his captain, then nodded slightly to Hamilton. The man knew his captain’s facial expressions well.

Rames let out a loud breath. “Not bad, so much as puzzling. Apparently, I’m supposed to put a caretaker crew on the
Morebaeus
and take her and the
Ulysses
in tandem back to Tantalus Station. Once there I’m to dock the ships and remain aboard until arrangements are made to transfer all personnel to Q-section.”

“Q-section?” Hamilton frowned.

“Quarantine section.” Anderton offered. “All stations have them now, in case of plague or disease etc.”

“That’s not a plague ship you were flying on, is it?” Rames looked sharply at Hamilton.

“If it is, then it’s the slowest plague I ever heard of.” Hamilton answered. “We spent months aboard, trying to fix the drives enough to get home. No one got sick.”

“There are no pathogens in your system.” Anderton added. “Reanimation requires an awful lot of scans during the process. There’s no way anything got by me.” There was a hint of professional pride in his voice.

“Why quarantine us, then?” Rames scowled.

“Probably what we were discussing earlier.” Hamilton suggested, his glance flicking to Anderton.

“You think?” Rames looked thoughtful. He looked down at the message again, re-reading it. “It also says that, under no circumstances am I to thaw any of the survivors out. Anderton, you have made time-coded log entries about the reanimation, haven’t you?”

Anderton nodded. “It’s all marked from well before the message was received. We’re covered as far as obeying orders goes.”

Rames breathed a sigh of relief and tapped the data pane for a few moments, composing a reply, before hitting send.

“I’ve told them we’ve already thawed out one survivor for questioning, but that he remains unconscious. All other capsules are secure and still frozen. We’ll see what they make of that.”

It didn’t take long. Less than five minutes later the data pane chirruped as the reply arrived, also marked alpha priority.

Rames earlier frown turned to a scowl. “Apparently, I have been chided for my recklessness. I’m to secure you in the brig. In addition, they are dispatching the destroyer
Triton
to ‘escort’ us home safely.”

Hamilton noted that even the medic bridled at the suggestion they couldn’t be trusted. He glanced at Rames.

“Looks like my story isn’t sounding so far-fetched now, after all?” He said to the captain.

Rames nodded slowly, thinking furiously. The he looked up at Anderton. “Eldon, would you mind going and finding Mr. Grimes and Major Harvan and asking them to join us down here. We have some things to discuss.”

CHAPTER THREE

“So why don’t you tell us again, Mr. Hamilton, in your own words, exactly how you ended up on a ship thought lost for fifty years.”

Hamilton glanced around the room at the suits present. All corporate big boys and military top brass. This inquest had really attracted the big guns. Of course he was very familiar with all their faces by now. This was the fourth time they’d called him in to repeat his story. Of course, they weren’t actually there. They were just visual representations projected onto the holo-slates that adorned the room, giving them a slightly translucent, ethereal look. The room was just a conference call chamber in Q-section’s medical isolation area. Hamilton was the only person physically present.

After his conversation with Rames, the pair had gone over the story he had concocted with the others of his group. It was too late to change it now, but Rames would be questioned as well, so he had to know the story so that he could relate it as if Hamilton had told him it as the truth.

Anderton, Rames’ medic, Grimes, his executive officer and Harvan, the Marine commander, had all been told the truth. Rames had served with them for some time and trusted them. Given the reaction of the military authorities to the reappearance of the
Morebaeus
, Rames had decided that more than just he and Hamilton should know the truth, in case anything happened to them. So the medic, marine and exo had been brought in on the deal. Between the five of them they had spent some time discussing their options.

The truth as they all knew it would remain hidden, of course. If Walsh was out there, the re-appearance of Hamilton would cause him some concern. Hamilton knew little of the alien that called itself Walsh, other than the information and feeling he had gained from his last minute conversation with him. But he had a feeling the alien would want to get rid of the loose end that Hamilton represented. Rames, Hamilton and the three officers had discussed that at some length and drawn up contingency plans for all the likely results.

So he spun the suits the same yarn that they’d all agreed on. Of having signed on for a mission on behalf of businessman Paul Vogerian. They’d all gone aboard the survey vessel SVIII63 and set off in search of a crashed Humal ship. There’d been a malfunction, they’d dropped out of hyperspace and been forced to abandon ship due to an imminent drive core failure. Safely away from the survey vessel, they then noticed the ancient freighter just floating there. They’d boarded her, fixed up her engines, and headed home, putting themselves into cold storage just in case.

It was a fabrication, of course. Hamilton knew the secret of a good lie was to mix enough truth into the tale to be believable, but leave out the parts you didn’t want the listener to hear. In this case, those left-out parts could very well get them killed, or worse.

The suits listened politely, not interrupting this time. They’d heard him tell the story enough times to know it off by heart. They were just hoping he’d slip up.

Hamilton did, of course, add small details in to the story. Nothing relevant, just thoughts and comments to add to the realism of the tale. What he’d eaten at breakfast, his sadness at the loss of the survey vessel and so on. Little things, entirely personal to him, that couldn’t be checked up with anyone else. It added a nice touch and only he had to remember the details he invented. It was something that he was very good at.

He could only hope that the others were sticking to their story as well. Klane and Jones he had no concerns about. Klane had probably glared at them silently and Jones was a criminal after all and well used to lying through his teeth. The others had promised to do their best if it came to it, but Lewis was the wild card. Hamilton just hoped even she could see the need for caution here.

It was, he reflected, a sorry state of affairs.

Ostensibly their mission for Paul Vogerian had been touted as a way to get rich and help mankind into the bargain. Take a newly built ship, the Hope’s Breath, into an uncharted section of space to find the Humal homeworld. Recover their technology, including a supposed energy-matter convertor, and return to fame and fortune.

It had been too good to be true. Hamilton had known that from the start. But despite his best precautions, he hadn’t expected to be confronted by a new alien race.

Walsh
.

The man had been on the mission previous to theirs and had uncovered a parasitic alien life-form that had taken him over completely. Some sort of virus or program that had invaded his mind and dominated him. In the months it had taken them to fix the
Morebaeus
, Hamilton had often found himself wondering if the original Walsh had been there still, trapped in his own head, a prisoner and helpless observer to all that transpired around him.

Doesn’t matter now
. He thought.
He’s dead
.

Dead and atomized when the Hope’s Breath and the Humal monitoring station collided in orbit and exploded. But the alien thing that had controlled him, that had called itself Walsh -Hamilton didn’t know about that. He’d had a long conversation with that thing via radio and one of the last things it had said to him was.

“Transmission has begun. Farewell Hamilton. I have to go.”

It was fairly chilling. Walsh, or the thing that controlled him, was little more than data or a program. It had intended to transmit itself and hundreds more like it back into human space. It was the beginnings of an invasion.

When Hamilton had reunited with his fellows on the planet the station had orbited, he had told them what he had learned. There was anger, confusion and more than a little fear. They had debated long about what to do if they got back to human space.

The problem was, they had no idea what had happened to Walsh and his army of programs. Had they successfully made the transmission? Or had that signal been cut off prematurely when the ship and station collided? One way, Walsh and his cohorts had all perished. The other they had successfully reached civilization and begun their infiltration.

Regardless of which was the case, they all agreed that letting others find the location of the Humal world holding the Jada-Ko-Vari – as Walsh named his kind – was a disaster waiting to happen. Men would tinker, they would study. Inevitably, it would backfire and another Walsh would get loose. The cycle would start all over again.

So they agreed to lie. All of them. They had thrashed out the story of a failed mission and left out the Hope’s Breath, Walsh’s alien identity and the location of the Humal world. Instead, they substituted the survey vessel SVIII63 as their ship, a ship which Walsh had destroyed as soon as it had dropped them off aboard the Hope’s Breath. Walsh himself was using aging tycoon Paul Vogerian as a front man for the expedition. They had no need to change that. Vogerian would have gone missing, in any case, so the explanation that he had died aboard the survey vessel was a convenience that fit nicely. Instead of the Humal world they substituted the location of the crashed ship that Walsh had come from. If anyone checked, they’d find both the remains of the survey vessel where they said it was, and the alien wreck on its planet, too. All extra details adding to the authenticity of their story.

Truth mixed with lies
. Hamilton had told them.
The best kind of bullshit.

That their story would be checked into, he did not doubt. Their arrival aboard the long-lost freighter
Morebaeus
would spark an investigation. Their story about discovering the ship adrift near the point where the survey vessel was destroyed was a coincidence of, literally, astronomical improbability. But it was all they had to use to explain their return. In truth, the old cargo hauler had been at the Humal world, far out beyond a shell of asteroids that enveloped the entire system. What had taken the Hope’s Breath hours to traverse had taken weeks in the two shuttles they had to work with.

That was fun
. He thought wryly.

Weeks spent in a tiny shuttle designed for surface-to-orbit hops. No toilet as such. They’d modified the tiny airlock to serve, but the smell had been rank by the time they reached the freighter. They had all been sick of the sight of each other, too. Enclosed spaces, people you didn’t like, nothing to do. A recipe for trouble. Tempers had frayed almost to breaking point.

Once at the freighter, things had settled down. There was a lot more space, if you counted the cargo modules. They found the
Morebaeus
’ last surviving crewmember, King, quickly enough. He’d set up a cryo-tube and frozen himself. His life-signs were good so Charlton, the only medic they had left, had started the reanimation procedure. Despite taking great care it really hadn’t mattered. Fifty years in a cryo-tube designed for short-term, emergency medical stasis, had left him in a total vegetative state. No brain function at all. The unkind slang for it was
Freezer Burn
.

The guy was a lost cause. However, on the off chance he might be recover at a proper medical facility, they had re-frozen him. Freezing him also meant no one had to look after him or make the uncomfortable decision to put him out of his misery.

Despite his current non-functional state, King had not been idle on the
Morebaeus
. He’d attempted repairs to the
Morebaeus
hyperdrive, which had been damaged in the original misjump that had brought the ship to the Humal world. He’d also set up and activated a “portable” fusion torus in the cargo module where the cryo-tubes were. Such things weren’t easy to get up and running, but he’d managed it alone. McDonald, the sole engineer left from their own expedition, had marveled at the man’s ingenuity. But then, McDonald had turned out to be not so hot an engineer himself. The
Morebaeus
own power core was offline, damaged along with the hyperdrive. The fusion torus provided enough energy to light and heat the modules and maintain the artificial gravity.

To be fair, King had three modules worth of equipment, supplies and machinery intended for the new colony of Alpha Centauri. Anything that those pioneers might conceivably have needed was in one or other of the modules. He wanted for nothing. Except companionship.

His fellow crewmembers had gone off to explore the Humal world. Hamilton knew that some had perished on the station orbiting the planet, whilst the rest had escaped to the planet’s surface. Either way, they weren’t coming back for King, though he could not have known that.

After a year and a half though, he had gotten depressed. Unable to complete the repairs on the hyperdrive, and not having heard back from his fellows who had taken the ship’s shuttle to investigate the Humal planet, he had taken to drowning his sorrows in the enormous alcohol supply that was on hand. There had been so many empty bottles, cans and pouches that it had taken them a day to tidy up. How long he had drunken himself into a stupor every day before he decided to freeze himself they did not know. But eventually he had tired of his lonely existence and put himself into a cryo-tube, half-drunk. And that was the end of him.

Hamilton and the others found a lack of certain exotic materials had been the reason King had failed to effect repairs completely. Luckily for them, the shuttles had some of the materials they needed. But not quite enough. Eventually, they had conceived a jury-rigged repair. It meant that the huge burst of energy that was normally used to fire a ship into hyperspace was altered to a slow build up over time. The end result was the same; it just took several days, not minutes.

There was a problem with that, though. The interface between normal and hyper space wasn’t kind on human issue. Massive amounts of radiation were unleashed as the ship slipped from one to the other realms. In a normal jump, the ship’s own shields dealt with the sudden, but short-lived burst. In a protracted entry scenario, the radiation would overwhelm even the densest shielding and fry anyone aboard.

The only answer was to dose themselves up with anti-rad meds, put themselves in cryo-stasis and hope the additional shielding of the tubes would protect them sufficiently to survive the transition.

Clearly it had worked. Hamilton was still alive. So, if the panel of suits were to be believed, were the rest of the refugees. The only problem was, having put themselves into cryo-stasis, the damn things didn’t let them out again. They’d set McDonald’s tube to wake him a few hours after entry to hyperspace. He was to check everything had gone okay, waking others if needed to help him make adjustments or further repairs. But that had never happened. Instead, they’d stayed frozen whilst the
Morebaeus
made its way back to human space.