Chains of Destruction (35 page)

"She's got a point there," Levits said. "Still
 . . .
There is still a viable power supply here. I would have thought they would have at the very least taped that. Lights, generators
 . . .
it just doesn't make any sense," he said again. "It's like leaving a vehicle half way through a trip so you can walk the rest of the way."

RJ started to read the data that filled a screen. "Hey, I've activated the ships log
 . . .
Well, would you look at this shit?"

"I am, just looks like trash to me. What's it actually say?" Levits asked.

"This was an Argy prison ship. Apparently this ship was hauling prisoners to be interred on this planet. They were coming here to serve life sentences. This was to be a prison colony."

"A way to give them a death sentence without looking bad to the general public," Levits said, no doubt thinking of the world outside the ship.

"Crap!" RJ exclaimed, moving to stop the text rolling in front of her so that she could make sure she had read it right, even though there was really no point in it.

"What?" Levits asked.

"These people had all committed the same crime," RJ said.

"What crime was that?" David inquired.

"They were all rogue telepaths," RJ said. She sat down hard in the chair in front of the screen, oblivious to the cloud of dust she sent into the air. They could all but see her mind calculating.

"
That
was their crime – that they were telepaths?" Levits asked.

"Among humans empaths are rare and telepaths are almost nonexistent. Among Argy's, empathy is the norm and telepathy is not uncommon. But no one – human or Argy – wants anyone around who knows their every thought. Knowing someone's every emotion can be unnerving enough, but on a world full of empaths it's a given. On Argy, telepaths were supposed to register and wear a special apparatus that keeps them from reading the minds of others. Mostly they work in the military sector. The people imprisoned on this ship were all caught using their telepathic abilities without authorization, so
 . . .
" she lowered her voice then almost talking to herself. "A shipload of telepaths lands on a third class planet. For some reason they completely abandon the ship and everything in it forcing them to live a primitive life on the planet's surface. They breed and start a civilization. In just a few generations they forget all about technology. They only know of stories handed down from one generation to the next about how they came out of the sky. So demented, handless black French guy comes along, and what do they do?
They all read his mind
! They realize that he knows things they don't know, and they decide he is the god he believes himself to be. Feeling himself superior to the primitives he has encountered he breeds with as many as possible and puts in motion a breeding program that still exists today. So what happened to the telepathic/empathic gene? Did it get bred out or mutate? Janad appears to have at best minimal empathic abilities. The Prince certainly has no such gift, but what of the priests? What if they are priests because they are telepathic? What if they think they're talking to gods because they can read the thoughts of the King/God? There is only one thing that makes no sense at all
 . . .
Why did they abandon the ship?"

When no one answered, RJ turned quickly around and found herself alone.

David hadn't realized that he was leaving the ship's bridge until he was lost in some long, dark seemingly endless hallway. "Hey! Guys, where are you?"

No answer.

"Janad, RJ, can you hear me? Hey! I'm lost in the ship!"

There was no sound except the echo of his own voice. He looked around quickly. Suddenly the light coming from his wrist-com seemed to be dimmer than it had been. He started back the way he thought he'd come, mumbling, "That asshole Levits is never going to let me live this one down."

Out of the corner of his eye he saw something move. He walked faster, not caring to find out what it was. Then he caught a glimpse of something again and started running. "RJ! Can you hear me, RJ?" He hit his wrist-com feeling like an idiot. "RJ, can you hear me? I'm lost in the ship!" There was nothing but static in reply. And then he clearly saw what was in the hall with him. It was a rat, a huge filthy rat. "It's just a rat, just a rat," he said. He hated rats. When he had been in the prison camp rats were everywhere. They would steal the food right out of your hand if you weren't careful. At night if you would finally fall to sleep they would come in and start chewing on you, literally trying to eat you while you slept. Then there was the vision he couldn't wash from his mind. Alsterace was still smoldering when he returned from what he had thought had been his ultimate horror. Dead, bloated and decaying bodies filled the air with a stench he was sure would never completely leave his nostrils, and rats, rats everywhere. Rats feasting on the dead. They were on top of and even inside the bodies, so many of them that the bodies appeared to be moving.

He had started running without even being aware of it. He forced himself to slow down. He was panicking. If he wasn't careful, he was just going to get more and more lost. He saw two more rats. "It's just a freaking rat," he reminded himself, then started screaming into his wrist com. "RJ! Damn it, RJ! Can you hear me!"

There was still nothing but static. "Damned magnetic pulse," he mumbled.

He heard something moving at the end of the hallway, and he moved towards it. Maybe it was RJ and the others. Suddenly the hall in front of him erupted in an ocean of rats coming right at him. He turned around and ran the other way until he reached a wall and came up short. He turned, grabbed his weapon and started firing.

Janad looked around her. She wasn't sure how she had come to be in this room, or even how or when she had been separated from the others. She shown her light around, trying to find a door, but there was none. How had she gotten in here if there wasn't a door? It didn't make sense. There had to be a hidden door. She started banging on the walls trying to find a hidden panel or a button. She wished she had a wrist communicator like the others. Without it her only option was to scream, and if she did that people would think she was scared, and she wasn't afraid. Not of being in a room with no doors and no windows. A room that seemed to be growing smaller by the minute.

She realized that it wasn't her imagination. The walls
were
closing in on her, and the air was getting thin and stagnant.

"David! RJ! Levits! Can you hear me?" she screamed. There was no answer, no sound, no smell – nothing at all to tell her where a door might be. And the walls seemed to move faster making the room smaller and smaller. She banged harder and more frantically on the walls and screamed louder. "Help! Help me! Help!"

Levits heard something and walked towards the sound. Now he had no idea where he was in the ship, or where the others were. He got on his com-link. "RJ, I have managed to get lost in your little archeology project. Apparently the builders of this ship thought it was a good idea that there be no rhyme or reason to the lay-out."

There was no response.

"RJ
 . . .
This isn't funny. Tell me where you are. Better yet come and get me."

There was still no answer.

"Oh, that freaking David will have a field day with this," he mumbled. He thought he heard voices, so he went in that direction. "This isn't funny, RJ! All right, I admit it. I'm an idiot and I got lost. Now come and get me."

Then Levits smelled smoke. He turned around and saw that the hall he was in was engulfed in flame. He got on the com-link again. "Guys! When we turned this thing back on it must have caused a short! The ship's on fire! We have to get the hell out of here, except I don't know where you are. Hell, I don't even know where I am."

There was still no answer.

"Damned magnetic pulse." He forgot about the com-link and just started screaming. "We have to get the hell out of here. The ship is on fire!"

He ran around, franticly looking for some sort of fire extinguisher. Finding nothing and no one, he ran away from the flames looking for RJ and the others and a way off this burning death trap. He couldn't find anyone, and the fire was getting worse. RJ could hear
anything
.
Why couldn't she hear him? "RJ!" he screamed at the top of his lungs. "RJ!"

There was still no answer. She must be hurt – or worse. He doubled his pace, ignoring the smoke that scorched his lungs.

RJ tried her com-link for the fifteenth time. "Damned magnetic pulses." Then she found the monitors on the ship's console and started playing with the switches. Finally they came on. She started scanning the ship room-by-room and hall-by-hall. She found Janad first. She was being crushed in a room that was rapidly getting smaller. While RJ was busy trying to figure out where in the ship Janad was so that she could go to her aid, she found David being attacked by rats. Before she could find out where he was, she found Levits being consumed in a room full of fire and smoke. Even if she could locate their exact positions there was no way she could save them all. As she tried with every skill she had to find the exact location of even one of them, she watched in horror as one by one they died. As she saw Levits engulfed in flames, she fell into a seat and started to cry. When she looked up the screens in front of her were blank, but then they flickered back to life and David and Levits and Janad were dying all over again.

RJ realized then what was going on, and why the occupants had abandoned this ship never to return.

He was crouched in a corner screaming and the rats were rending his flesh. Suddenly the pain ceased and he found himself crouched on the floor of the bridge. His gun was still in its holster. Levits was screaming and RJ was shaking him. Janad was rolled up in a ball, crying.

RJ left Levits and shook Janad.

David realized that RJ must have woken him up, too

"It's all right," RJ said. "It wasn't real. None of it was real."

"What the hell happened?" Levits demanded.

"It was a weapon," RJ answered, still badly shaken from her own experience. "A weapon that attacks the mind. The perfect weapon to use against telepaths."

"But I wasn't here," Janad said. She stood up and stretched her arms out. "I was in a room alone and the walls were closing in." She shook with remembered terror.

"No one left this room. We must have triggered the ship's defense system when we walked in. The weapon put us into a kind of sleep, a dream state. Apparently the prisoners tried to take over the ship before it could land. They caused the crash, and the ship's internal defense weapon was triggered automatically. It wasn't a distress beacon this ship was emitting, it was a warning to other ships that there were escaped prisoners on the planet's surface."

"Well, at least we know why they abandoned the ship," Levits said running his hands through his hair. "It was so real. I swear I can still smell the smoke in my hair and on my clothes. I don't understand how anyone could have resisted. How they could have gotten away."

"I imagine they were all well aware that such a weapon existed. As soon as I knew that what I was seeing wasn't real, I was able to fight the visions in my head and wake up. It wasn't easy, but it wouldn't have been impossible. The worst part would have been keeping people awake. I imagine they worked in shifts to get free of the ship. It explains why they left the ship and everything in it behind. They just wanted to put as much distance between them and the weapon as quickly as they could."

"What did you do to it?" Levits asked.

"I found the weapon, located the switch, and turned it off."

Even knowing the weapon was off, none of them were eager to stay on the ship. They were not at all happy to learn that the thing that RJ found she absolutely could not live without, among all the wonderful things on the ship to chose from, was the accursed weapon itself.

She was digging around under the console, occasionally pulling out little parts attached to fiber-optic cable.

"Just leave it," Levits begged. "We don't need it."

"Yes we do need it. We do," RJ said. "Don't you see? Even I was rendered completely useless for several minutes. We may be able to use this weapon. If we get in a position where it would work perfectly, I don't want to be kicking myself that I left it here. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure that you don't want to be the one that I'm kicking instead because you talked me out of getting it."

Levits mumbled and walked away.

"I don't think people should use weapons that attack the mind," Janad said disapprovingly. "It's sneaky and underhanded. There is no glory in it. No courage, no bravery."

"Gee!" RJ said, never stopping what she was doing. "I never thought of it that way. I just figured that the object of war was to kill the other guys before they killed you. I apparently missed the fair play class when I was in basic training."

RJ yanked the last of the components out and then started looking around at the top of the wall. She jumped up and grabbed something that looked like a normal surveillance camera. Then she started off down the hallway. They all followed her. Every few feet she jumped up and grabbed another of the camera-looking devices. Since they were all following her, all secretly afraid to be alone for even one minute after the ordeal they had just gone through, RJ handed the devices to them to carry.