The Reality Dysfunction

  “She’s my friend,” Joshua said. “And it’s my spaceplane.”

  “If there’s any trouble in orbit, then we’ll need you, Joshua,” Dahybi said. The slightly built node specialist was uncharacteristically firm.

  “You’re the best captain I’ve ever known.”

  “This is both melodramatic and unnecessary,” Warlow said. “You all know that Ashly will pilot it.”

  “Yes,” Joshua said.

  “Joshua!” Melvyn shouted.

  But Joshua’s neural nanonics were already feeding him an alarm. The gravitonic distortion warning satellites were recording nine large gaps in space being forcibly opened.

  Thirty-five thousand kilometres above Lalonde, the voidhawks from Meredith Saldana’s 7th Fleet squadron had arrived.

  An electronic warfare technique that can knock out power circuits as well as processors? What the hell have we come up against?

  A single gleam of bright pale green light shone up into the lounge through the inspection window in the middle of the floor hatch. There was movement below.

  “Erick, what’s happening?” André Duchamp datavised.

  The channel to the lounge’s net processor was thick with interference.

  Erick’s neural nanonics had to run a discriminator program to make any sense of the captain’s signal.

  “We’re getting power drop-outs all over the ship!” Madeleine called.

  Erick pushed off from the ladder, and grasped the floor hatch’s handle to steady himself. Very gingerly he edged his face over the fifteen centimetre diameter window and directly into the beam of light. A second later he was airborne, arms and legs cycling madly as a twisted shout burst from his lips. He hit the ceiling. Bounced. Grabbed at the ladder as his body spasmed in reaction.

  Erick had looked into hell. It was occupied by goblinesque figures with hideous bone faces, long, reedy limbs, large arthritis-knobbed hands.

  They dressed in leather harnesses sewn together with gold rings. A dozen at least, boiling out of the airlock tube. Grinning with tiny pointed teeth.

  Three of them had clung to Bev, yellow talon fingers slashing rents in his ship-suit. His head had been flung back, mouth open in black horror as the abdominal gashes spewed entrail strands of translucent turquoise jelly. And suicide-terror shone in his eyes.

  “Did you see that?” Erick wailed.

  “See what? Merde! The net is screwed, our databuses are glitched. I’m losing all control.”

  “Dear God, they’re xenocs. They’re fucking xenocs!”

  “Erick, enfant, dear child, calm down.”

  “They’re killing him! They love it!”

  “Calm! You are an officer on my ship. Now calm. Report!”

  “There’s twelve—fifteen of them. Humanoid. They’ve got Bev. Oh, God, they’re chopping him to pieces.” Erick shifted a stored sedative program into primary mode, and immediately felt his breathing regularize. It seemed heartless, callous even, wrapping Bev’s suffering away behind an artificial cliff of binary digits. But he needed to be calm. Bev would understand.

  “Are they heavily armed?” André asked.

  “No. No visible weapons. But they must have something in the spaceplane, that light I saw—”

  All six electronically operated bolts on the floor hatch thudded back together. The metallic bang rang clear across the lounge.

  “God ... André, they just cracked the hatch’s codelock.” He stared at it, expecting the manual bolts to slide open.

  “But none of the systems processors are working in that capsule!”

  “I know that! But they cracked it!”

  “Can you get out of the lounge?”

  Erick turned to the ceiling hatch and datavised the code at it. The bolts remained stubbornly in place. “The hatch won’t respond.”

  “Yet they can open it,” André said.

  “We can cut through it,” Desmond Lafoe suggested.

  “Our hatches and the capsule decking have a monobonded carbon layer sandwiched in,” Erick replied. “You’d never get a fission blade through that stuff.”

  “I can use a laser.”

  “That will allow them into the other capsules, and the bridge,” André said. “I cannot permit that.”

  “Erick’s trapped in there.”

  “They will not take my ship.”

  “André—” Madeleine said.

  “Non. Madeleine, Desmond, both of you into the lifeboats. I will stay. Erick, I am so sorry. But you understand. This is my ship.”

  Erick thumped the ladder, grazing his knuckles. This life-support capsule’s lifeboats were accessed from the lower deck. “Sure.” You murdering pirate bastard. What the fuck do you know about honour?

  Someone started hammering on the floor hatch.

  They’ll be through soon, Erick thought, monobonded carbon or not. Count on it.

  “Call Smith for help,” Desmond said. “Hell, he’s got five thousand troops on the Gemal, armed and itching to kill.”

  “It will take time.”

  “You got an alternative?”

  Erick looked round the lounge, inventorying everything in sight—cabins, lockers filled with food and clothes, emergency equipment cubicles. All he had was a laser pistol.

  Think!

  Open the floor hatch and pick them off one at a time as they come through?

  He aimed the laser at a cabin door, and pressed the trigger stud. A weak pink beam stabbed out, then flickered and died. Several small blisters popped and crackled where it had struck the composite.

  “Bloody typical,” he said out loud.

  Look round again. Come on, there must be something. Those dreary months spent on CNIS initiative courses. Adapt, improvise. Do something.

  Erick dived across the intervening space to a wall of lockers, catching a grab loop expertly. There wasn’t much in the emergency cubicle: medical nanonics, pressure patches, tools, oxygen bottles and masks, torch, processor blocks with ship’s systems repair instructions, fire extinguishers, hand-held thermal sensor. No spacesuit.

  “Nobody said it was going to be easy.”

  “Erick?” André asked. “What is happening?”

  “Got an idea.”

  “Erick, I have spoken with Smith. Several other ships have been hijacked. He is taking some of his troops out of zero-tau, but it will be at least another thirty minutes before anyone can rendezvous with us.”

  The lounge was getting lighter. When Erick looked over his shoulder he saw a ring of small hemispherical blue flames chewing at a patch of the hard grey-green foam on the floor decking. Little twisters of smoke writhed out from the edge. When a circle of titanium roughly a metre in diameter had been exposed it began to glow a dull orange. “No good, Captain. They’re coming through the decking, some sort of thermal field. We haven’t got five minutes.”

  “Bastards.”

  Erick opened the tool-box, and took out a fission-blade knife. Please, he prayed. The blade shone a cool lemon when he thumbed the actuator. “Sweet Jesus, thank you.”

  He flew cleanly through the air. A stikpad anchored him near the middle of the ceiling. He pushed the fission blade into the reinforced composite conditioning duct, and started to saw a circle about thirty centimetres wide.

  “Madeleine? Desmond?” he datavised. “Are you in spacesuits yet?”

  “Yes,” Desmond replied.

  “You want to do me a real big favour?”

  “Erick, they cannot stay on board,” André warned.

  “What do you want, Erick?” Desmond asked.

  “Hauling out of here. Soon.”

  “I forbid it,” André said.

  “Stuff you,” Desmond retorted. “I’m coming down, Erick. You may count on me, you know you can.”

  “Desmond, if they break into the lounge I will scuttle the ship,” André datavised. “I must do it before they glitch the flight computer.”

  “I know. My risk,” Desmond replied.

  “Wait to see if
they break out of the lounge first,” Erick said. “That’ll give Desmond a chance to get clear if this doesn’t work.”

  There was no answer.

  “You owe me that! I’m trying to save your ship, damn you.”

  “Oui, d’accord. If they get out of the lounge.”

  The yellow patch on the floor had turned white. It started to hiss, bulging up in the centre, rising into a metre-high spike of light. A ball of fire dripped off the end, gliding up to hit the ceiling where it broke into a cluster of smaller globes that darted outwards.

  Erick ducked as several rushed past. He finished cutting a second circle out of the duct and moved along.

  Another ball of fire dripped off the spike. Then another. The patch was spreading out over the floor decking, scorching away more of the foam.

  “I’m by the hatch, Erick,” Desmond datavised.

  The empty lounge was awhirl with small beads of white fire. They had stung Erick several times now, vicious skewers of pain that charred out a centimetre-wide crater of skin. He glanced at the ceiling hatch’s inspection window to see the sensor-studded collar of an SII spacesuit pressed against it, and waved.

  Erick had cut eight holes in the duct when he heard a shrill creaking sound rise above the hiss. When he glanced down he saw the floor decking itself had started to distend. The metal was cherry red, swelling and distorting like a cancerous volcano.

  He watched, mesmerized, as the top burst open.

  “Erick,” a voice called out of the rent. “Let us out, Erick. Don’t make it hard on yourself. It’s not you we want.”

  The triangular rips of radiant metal began to curl back like petals opening to greet the dawn. Shapes scuttled about in the gloom below.

  Erick kicked away from the stikpad that was holding him to the ceiling.

  He landed beside the floor hatch.

  “We want the ship, Erick, not you. You can go in peace. We promise.”

  A big bloodshot eye with a dark green iris was looking at him through the floor hatch’s inspection window. It blinked, and the lounge lights came back on.

  Erick gripped the manual lock handle, twisted it ninety degrees, and pulled up.

  The possessed came up through the open hatch, cautiously at first, glancing round the sweltering smoky lounge with wide eyes. Their skin was as white as bleached bone, stretched tight over long wiry muscles. Oily black hair floated limply. They started to advance towards him, grinning and chittering.

  “Erick,” they cooed and giggled. “Erick, our friend. So kind to let us in when we knocked.”

  “Yeah, that’s me,” Erick said. He had positioned himself beside one of the cabin doors, a silicon-fibre strap round his waist tethering him to a grab hoop. Level with his shoulder, the environment control panel’s cover swung free. Erick’s right hand rested on a fat red lever inside. “Your friend.”

  “Come with us,” the one in front said as they floated sedately towards him. “Come join us.”

  “I don’t think so.” Erick yanked the atmosphere-vent lever down.

  The vent system on board a starship was included as a last resort to extinguish fire. It dumped the affected life-support capsule’s air straight out of the hull, cutting off oxygen to the flames and killing them dead. And because of the danger a fire represented inside the confined cabin space of a starship, the vent was designed to be quick acting, evacuating an entire deck within a minute.

  “NO!” The leader of the possessed screamed in fury and panic. His hands were flung forwards towards Erick in a futile belated attempt to stop the lever clicking home. Spears of white fire arced out of his fingertips.

  The panel, its lever, the circuitry behind, Erick’s hand, and a half metre circle of wall composite flamed into ruin. Molten metal and a fount of incendiary composite blasted outwards.

  Erick cried out in agony as his entire right arm was flayed down to the bone. His neural nanonics responded instantly, erecting an analgesic block. But the shock was too much, he lurched away from consciousness, only to have stimulant programs bully him back. Menus and medical physiological schematics appeared inside his dazed fragile mind. Options flashed in red. Demands for drugs and treatments to be administered at once. And a single constant pressure alarm.

  The very air itself howled like a tormented banshee in its rush to escape from the lounge. Thin, layered sheets of smoke drifting around the ruddy cone torn in the floor condensed to form airborne whirlpools underneath the five ceiling grilles. They spun at a fantastic rate, betraying the speed of the air molecules as they were sucked into the duct.

  The possessed were in turmoil, clinging desperately at grab hoops and each other, their assumed shapes withering like glitched AV projections to reveal ordinary bodies underneath. All of them were buffeted savagely by the tempest force drawing them inexorably towards the ceiling. One flew up through the hatch from the lower deck, curving helplessly through the air to slam against a ceiling grille. Suction held him there, squirming in pain.

  Another lost hold of a grab hoop, to be sucked backwards up to a grille.

  Both of them tried to push their way off, only to find it was impossible.

  The strength that the external vacuum exerted was tremendous. They could feel themselves being pulled through the narrow metal bands of the grille. Sharp edges cut their clothes and began shredding the flesh underneath. Ripples of blue and red energy shimmered around their bodies for a short time, delaying the inevitable; but the exertion proved too much, and the ghostlight quickly faded. The bands of metal sawed down to their ribs. Strips of lacerated flesh were torn off. Blood burst free from a hundred broken veins and arteries, foaming away down the conduit.

  Organs started to swell through the gaps between the ribs.

  Erick activated the Confederation Navy’s emergency vacuum-survival program stored in his neural nanonics. His heart began to slow; muscles and organs were shut down, reducing the amount of oxygen they took from his blood, extending the time which the brain could be kept alive. He hung inertly from the strap fastening him to the wall, limbs pulled towards the ceiling. The charred remnant of his right hand broke off and smacked against a grille.

  Blood oozed from the blackened meat of his upper arm.

  Scraps of paper, clothing, tools, miscellaneous litter, and personal items from the cabins and lower deck plunged through the lounge to crash into the grilles. There might have been enough material to block them, at least long enough for the possessed to rally and try and shut down the vent or retreat back into the spaceplane. But the extra holes Erick had cut into the duct allowed an unrestricted flow of smaller articles into space. Tattered ribbons of water from the shower and taps in the bathroom poured through the open door to streak through the nearest hole.

  The uproarious torrent of air began to abate.

  Through pain-hazed eyes, Erick had watched the group’s leader turn from semi-naked ogre to a podgy forty-year-old man in dungarees as the micro-storm raged. He was hanging onto a grab loop two metres away, legs pointing up rigidly at the nearest grille, trousers and shirt flapping madly. His mouth worked, bellowing curses and obscenities that were snatched away. A red glow grew around his hand, bloodlight shining through the skin, illuminating the bones within. Mucus and saliva streamed from his nose, joining the flood of debris and liquids vanishing into the duct. The seepage began to turn pink, then crimson.

  Now the glow from his hand was fading along with the sound and the fury of the evacuating air. He fixed Erick with a disbelieving stare as tears began to bubble and boil from the surface of his eyes. Balls of blood were spitting out of his nostrils with each beat of his heart.

  The last wisp of air vanished.

  Erick swung round as the force waned, rotating languidly on the end of the tether strap. The physiological medical schematic his neural nanonics were displaying appeared to be a red statue, except for the right arm which was completely black. Each turn swept the lounge into view. He saw the surviving possessed struggling through the
solid cloud of junk that filled the achingly silent compartment. It was difficult to tell which of them were alive. Corpses—two badly mutilated—floated and tumbled and collided with the ones trying to reach the floor hatch. Dead or alive, everyone was weeping blood from their pores and orifices as capillaries ruptured and membranes tore from the immense pressure gradient. They were acting out a bizarre three-dimensional wrestling match in slow motion, with the hatch as their prize. It was macabre. It swam from his view.

  Next time round there were fewer movements. Their faces—those he would remember without any help from his neural nanonics image-storage program.

  Turning.

  They were slowing, running down like mechanoids suffering a power drain.

  The vacuum was turning foggy with fluid. He realized some of it was his own. Red. Very red.

  Turning.

  All purposeful movement had ceased within the lounge. There was only the gentle stirring of soggy dross.

  Around and around. And the redness was fading to grey with the ponderous solemnity of a sunset.

  Around.

  Ilex and its eight cousins flew into a standard defence sphere formation two and a half thousand kilometres wide. Their distortion fields flared out to sample the masses and structure of local space. In their unique perceptive spectrum Lalonde hung below them like a deep shaft bored into the uniformity of space, radiating weak gravity streams to bind its three smaller moons and Kenyon, as it in turn was bound to the bright blue-white star. The interplanetary medium was rich with solar and electromagnetic energy; Van Allen belts encircling the planet shone like sunlight striking an angel’s wings. Starships and spaceplanes were revealed in orbit, dense knots in the fabric of space-time, pulsing hotly with electrical and magnetic forces.

  Electronic sensors detected a barrage of narrow-beam maser radiation flying between small high-orbit sensor satellites, communication-relay satellites, and the starships. Terrance Smith was being informed of their presence, but there was no hostile response. Satisfied there was no immediate threat, the voidhawks maintained their relative positions for another ninety seconds.