The Plasma Master

  Chapter 7

  “Welcome aboard, Ned!” Smardwurst called as Ned stepped through the airlock. He had not been aboard Green Scorpion for a while, and it was just a bit like coming home. “So we’re headed for the Uraxis Nebula, are we?”

  Ned nodded. “Yup.” He was about to continue, but then he realized that Smardwurst’s crew might not have been told the full purpose of this mission. Smardwurst picked up the conversation, though, and they talked pleasantly as they walked down the hall.

  “I was just about to feed Guz,” Smardwurst mentioned as they approached his quarters.

  “Guz?”

  Smardwurst stopped and looked at Ned. “I never showed you Guz! How could I forget?” He hurried down the corridor to his room and stepped inside. Ned followed him in and froze, gasping in air and forgetting to exhale. Less than five feet away stood a monster. It was at least six feet long, although it would have been longer if it were to uncurl its tail, and its body was about three feet high. It had eight legs, plus two huge claws. Several black eyes stared up at Ned above a fanged mouth. A large tail curled up above the monster’s body and ended in a sharp point. It was a scorpion. And it was green.

  “Guz!” Smardwurst greeted warmly. “I’ve missed you so much! How are you?” He walked up and embraced his pet scorpion, petting it affectionately. The animal seemed to hug him back, although it was difficult for Ned to tell, among so many legs. “Don’t worry, Guz. I’ve got lots of yummy food right here for you.” Ned had recovered from his initial shock, but when Smardwurst momentarily left the room to get the food, Ned and Guz just stood there contemplating each other. Smardwurst saw the look on Ned’s face when he came back in. “Oh, he’s all right. He’d have you paralyzed in half a second if you were an intruder, of course, but Guz knows the difference.” He smiled. “Really, he’s fine.” Still, Ned was rather relieved when Guz wandered off into another room to play, or whatever giant green scorpions did with their free time.

  “I’m glad I finally know what I’m doing,” Ned said to Smardwurst when they were sitting on a couch in the Zalorian’s entry room. “For the first time since I left I’m confident that I’ll be able to do something productive while I’m here.”

  “I am sure you will,” Smardwurst said.

 

  The trip was largely uneventful. For most of two days Green Scorpion flew out toward the boundaries of explored space. They encountered no one; Smardwurst had made certain that his ship carried all the supplies it would need for this journey, and there was very little this far out that would interest anyone anyway, especially in wartime. Uraxis was several days’ travel from Varlax Kanlor for Green Scorpion, which had an average warp capacity, but Varlax Kanlor itself was nearly a week from the war’s front lines. Smardwurst was confident that he would receive no threat from the Empire on this mission.

  The nebula itself, however, was another matter. Not that nebulas were uncommon; the galaxy was full of them, collections of matter thrown off by the death of one star, waiting to coalesce into a new one. They were generally of little interest, except to scientists and stellar photographers. Uraxis, however, was a slightly different story. To Smardwurst’s knowledge, it had never been explored, at least not by anyone who had come out to report it. It had been scanned, but there was something within the cloud of matter that prevented accurate readings. Viewed from without, Uraxis was lit only by the million-year-old light from the distant stars. Probes which had been sent into the fringes of the nebula, however, had recorded energy readings from within; perhaps a star already existed in the center of the dark matter. The presence of a star inside the already-massive cloud would have normally been marked by a huge difference in mass and therefore gravity, but at least part of what blocked normal sensors was a storm raging within the nebula consisting of graviton waves; these strange phenomena were extremely rare in nature, and some scientists believed them to be entirely artificial. In any case, they seemed to have gravitational forces that were unproportional to their masses, so even gravity was unreliable in the study of Uraxis.

  The bottom line, then, was that Smardwurst did not know what to expect when he entered the nebula, and that bothered him. The Uraxis Nebula would make as good a place as any for Koral Ralok to hide out from the Anacron Empire, but it would have been nice if he had chosen a place where he would not have been cut off from the rest of the galaxy. That was pointless thinking, Smardwurst knew, but the idea of flying in, talking to the long-lost Plasma Master, having Nedward learn about the Plasma force enough to use it as a weapon, and fly back out again in time to overthrow the Empire and restore peace to the galaxy all seemed a little too simple to believe without a healthy measure of caution.

  Smardwurst tried to keep his apprehensions to himself during the trip, deciding that all he could do about the matter was to keep his crew alert and his mind open. He spent much of the time on the pricom running the ship, but he spent a great deal of his free time with Ned. Green Scorpion did not have as advanced an ASI training system as Galactron did, but Ned kept himself busy studying about the various planets in the Alliance and Empire, along with various forms of technology he thought he might eventually have to use.

  Ned found it all tremendously interesting. And while Smardwurst was worrying about what dangers he may face in the nebula, Ned was reveling in the fact that there was a very good chance that he was about to learn something useful about his power. With a little luck, Ned would learn to control it, report back to General Marnax, and put his abilities to some productive use within a few weeks, and he might even be able to return home within a month or so. Not that Ned was anxious to leave. The details of the war were slowly receding into his memory, and Ned was enthralled by the vast amounts of knowledge he found in the freighter’s computer records. His interest in engineering was tremendously boosted by what he found there; the starships, buildings, and other structures he read about were absolutely mind-boggling. In time, Ned thought, he might get used to living here. Maybe, after returning home, he could make a business of applying some of what he learned here, and perhaps someday he could explore the galaxy on his own, without having to worry about war. The prospect seemed very inviting, and, although it was admittedly a long way off, it motivated Ned all the more to finish what he had started here and get on with his life.

  It was evening of the fourth day when Green Scorpion dropped out of warp on the fringes of the Uraxis Nebula. From such a close proximity it seemed to stretch in all directions, an endless blanket of gas and dust. Ned stood before the pricom’s viewscreen staring at it as the freighter approached, and then the ship was enveloped. Stars slowly faded and disappeared. The particle density increased the farther in they went, although it stayed well within the tolerance level of Green Scorpion’s shields. Still, the ship was forced to proceed through the nebula at phase space speeds, since a warp field would have been severely disrupted by the gravimetric activity within the nebula. Besides, the ship’s warp-range sensors were useless here, so there would have been no way to know where to stop.

  Smardwurst turned to Ned as they passed through the nebula. “In even coming here, we are pretty much assuming that if Koral – or anyone – is living in here, that he will send us some sort of message, or that there will be some sort of artificial passage for us. It would take hundreds of years to search the entire nebula at this speed.”

  Several minutes into the nebula they did discover what appeared to be a passageway. Energy field generators lined a long, narrow corridor into the nebula, forming a passage that was free of graviton and subspace disturbance. Smardwurst took the ship at low warp along its length, but it ended about a half-hour later. They were well within the nebula now, and a reddish light was clearly visible ahead. Ned asked if it was from a star, and Smardwurst said it might be, but it was also likely that the source of the graviton waves would emit visible light. Shortly afterward they had their answers. The dust and gasses abruptly parted, and the ship’s sensors reported an immense pocket of
relatively empty space. Green Scorpion came to a relative stop safely behind the near border of the space pocket, and the source of the light could be clearly seen. Innumerable tendrils of energy twisted and coiled along the borders of the pocket. Smardwurst later explained that these energy ribbons were the source of the graviton waves that permeated the nebula. The fact that they were arranged so that they protected such a large space from the incursion of the nebular matter was basically conclusive that they were artificial; natural formations of that type were virtually impossible. It was not the graviton waves, however, that held the gazes of Green Scorpion’s crew, but a second, more distant glow. At the exact center of the space pocket was a ball of white light, glowing brightly in the distance. It was a star.

  “There is one planet, sir,” someone reported. “I can’t tell if there’s life there or not from here. We’ll have to get away from the gravimetric disturbance.”

  “Sir,” said another pricom officer, “the graviton waves are extremely powerful. A collision with one could rip us apart. If we even get close …”

  “I know,” interrupted Smardwurst. “Will our communication systems work yet?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Very well. Take us in.”