“I still don’t know why you gave up on the plan to liberate Earth,” I told him.
He cocked his head, and his good eye narrowed with suspicion, like I was fishing for information. As it happens, I was. I hadn’t forgotten that the Phandic renegades had a portal that opened to my planet as well as a fully formed plan for freeing it. I wanted to know what they’d worked up in case I needed more options.
“I didn’t abandon it,” the colonel said. “Convex Icosahedron did. As far as liberating Earth went, the plan was solid, but in terms of destabilizing the Phandic Empire, it was less of a sure thing. Apparently, the Phands use a kind of faster-than-light technology to provide energy to their conquered worlds.”
I nodded. “The subspace energy relay. I saw it in Manhattan.”
He looked at me, maybe remembering that I wasn’t just some dumb kid. “The plan was to shut it down. Deprive the Phands of their power source, cut them off from the empire. They only have a few thousand soldiers on Earth, so without the technological advantage, human numbers take care of the rest.”
“What’s to keep them from just sending more ships?” I asked.
“The hope was that enough other planets would follow Earth’s lead, and there would be too many uprisings to put down. A domino effect. The numerical projections looked pretty good, but then they came up with the idea for destroying that space station, and those looked even better.”
“Once we get Ghli Wixxix back to Confederation Central, you won’t need either of those plans,” I told him, though I wished I were as confident as I sounded.
• • •
We drifted for hours. Villainic spent the beginning part of the trip chatting endlessly, until I finally pretended to fall asleep. He gave up talking after a while. Finally we received a notice on my data bracelet that our ship was closing in. There was always the chance that it would see us for what we were, and if that happened, the odds were pretty good it would decide to fire weapons at us. Alternatively, we could be captured.
Neither one of these possibilities appealed to me, and I was starting to think this mission had been a huge mistake. Since that moment in the meeting, I hadn’t had another flicker from my HUD. I’d spent most of my pretending-to-sleep time trying to coax my skill system back to life, like John Carter wishing himself to Barsoom, but it clearly wasn’t a matter of will. I began to worry that the flicker I’d seen had been nothing more than my imagination or, less humiliating but not less dispiriting, a momentary glitch in a system that had shut down entirely. If my HUD did not come back to life, I had no idea what I was going to do when we got to Planet Pleasant.
The good news was that the transport ship didn’t seem to take notice of us. The pod behaved just as it was programmed to do. It moved in behind the ship and attached itself near the engine exhausts, where the plasma wake would make us invisible to any scans. Now it was time to get to work.
Using the equipment Adiul-ip had given me, I set up an automated drill that began to cut a hole about four feet wide in our hull and then the supply ship’s. Our pod created an airtight seal between the two vessels, so that when we breached their hull, the Phands would not receive a structural-integrity warning on their bridge, since there would have been no loss of atmosphere. Adiul-ip had explained that any readings produced by our actions would look like normal hull stress to be noted in their maintenance logs.
We would be emerging in one of the cargo bays, where no crew were generally assigned. That meant we should be able to enter unseen, but I had my PPB pistol ready for an emergency.
This operation took perhaps fifteen minutes. Once we were through, I crawled into the cargo bay, saw that it was empty, and signaled Villainic to come through. I then activated the nanotech hull sealant we’d been given. It took about thirty seconds to create a new, equally strong hull plating over the hole. With that complete, I keyed my bracelet to disengage the pod. It fell away, leaving nothing behind except a few near-microscopic cameras. Once the pod detached, it would begin to disintegrate, leaving no sign of our entry. Unless someone walked in and saw us, we would remain completely undetected.
We now had a whole other series of problems, such as not knowing where in the compound our friends were being held—and how we would get from this ship to that unknown location. I had a schematic of both the transport ship and the research facility uploaded to my bracelet, but unless I could crack into the computer system or interrogate a prisoner, I would be operating blind. Adiul-ip had provided me with some hacking tools, but there was still a strong chance any attempt to breach the computers would send off alarm bells.
I used my bracelet to call up the cargo manifest that Adiul-ip had provided, and scrolled through the cargo. Villainic hovered over my shoulder, peering at the information.
“Much of this is fairly ordinary,” he noted. “Food, bedding, toilet tissue. Things of that nature. However, if there were equipment related to the research on Tamret and the others, then we might be able to follow those shipments.”
I stared at him. “Villainic, that’s actually a great idea.”
“You know I want only to help.”
“But this time you’re actually helping. This is a huge step forward for you.”
I reviewed the manifest, and it seemed like there were a few boxes that contained equipment related to reverse engineering nanites. These crates were, I discovered, quite large. It turned out to be fairly easy to open them, crawl inside, and close them up again. Now we had to hope they wouldn’t be opened immediately, since if some eager scientist wanted to peer inside at his new goodies, we’d be in major trouble.
Once again I was stuck in a cramped space with Villainic. We waited for what must have been at least three hours until I felt a rumble I recognized as a ship entering a planet’s atmosphere. Using my bracelet, I projected a visual so I would have some idea what we were getting into. We came through the upper atmosphere and flew over a vast ocean, low enough that I could make out gigantic creatures—they looked like monstrous emerald-green eels, twice as big as any whale—leaping out of the water, snapping their jaws at us, though we were thousands of feet above them.
We then flew over a vast and uninhabited forest region. Finally we approached what looked like a small city, almost totally uninhabited, made up of mostly squat rectangular buildings. It looked more like an industrial park on Earth than anything fantastically science-fictional. The structures were windowless, covered in a reflective coppery substance. Around the perimeter were dozens of towers—for defensive purposes, I assumed. There also seemed to be a rail system connecting different parts of the compound. The Planet Pleasant facility was depressingly huge. I had to hope we were right about our crate and we ended up somewhere near where we needed to be. Otherwise we were in big trouble.
Once the ship came to a halt, we had to wait another two hours for anything to happen. We heard movement and dull voices outside, but our crate remained motionless. Finally, some sort of antigravity device lifted our container and began to move it. We were taken off the ship and set in a waiting area, from which we were eventually placed on a flat car of the train. From there, the transport itself took maybe fifteen minutes. We were then set down in what—through the slats—appeared to be a lighted space. Most likely the storage room off a lab.
No one appeared to be around. I waited another half an hour to be safe, and then signaled Villainic that it was time to move.
We exited the crate, and while I expected sensors and proximity alarms to start screaming, we managed to avoid attracting any attention. Of course, the Phands could have had silent alarms and might have been closing on our position at that exact second, but I decided to remain optimistic.
I scanned the room looking for cameras or other security measures that would trip us up, but I didn’t find anything. I knew that the Phands had a strict culture, one in which creative thinking and indulging in wild speculation were frowned upon. During the pre-mission briefing, Adiul-ip had explained that that was one of
the reasons their highest-level scientific research was conducted at a remote facility. They wanted their scientists to feel free to experiment without facing the sort of scorn and condemnation such freethinkers were generally subject to in Phandic society. The security to get in—and especially out—of the facility was very tight, but once inside, I could rely on my own senses to make certain I was unobserved.
All around me were workstations, mainly pale green countertops. Many of them had clear plastic boxes, subdivided into drawers, for storing materials of various sorts, but these stations were otherwise empty. I guess they didn’t need computers since, like in the Confederation, the Phands had personal data devices that could produce a screen and keyboard at will.
All of that meant that there would be nothing here to give me a clue about finding the others.
I turned to Villainic. “Don’t you have like an amazing sense of smell or something?”
“I have never won any sniffing competitions, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Okay, on my planet we don’t have sniffing competitions, because sniffing is something no one is good at. I have to think even an embarrassingly mediocre sniffer like you could give us an edge. Can you smell any of them?”
He pointed his face upward and sniffed the air. “No,” he said.
“Well, then. Let’s just give up and go home.”
“Aren’t we here to find them?”
“Yes, Villainic. That’s why we’re here. Maybe we should go sniff in some other places.”
“I see,” he said, grinning. “You are being funny. We’re joking, as buddies are inclined to do!”
We approached the door, which hissed open to reveal a deserted hallway. It was another instance of the Phand scientists needing to feel free of scrutiny in order to indulge in scientific creativity. I felt sure that if we were seen, plenty of guards would come pouring out of nowhere, but for now we were safe.
Villainic sniffed the air like a werewolf ready to maul a minor character, and then walked quickly away from me. I followed along, forcing myself not to ask questions. I didn’t want to mess with his sniffing mojo.
Villainic passed about five doors and then stopped in front of one. “There’s something in here,” he said.
“What sort of something?”
“I’m not certain. It smells sort of like you.”
“Like me? One of the other humans?”
Villainic didn’t answer. He just kept sniffing.
I raised my wrist to the door scanner, and the security override that Adiul-ip had given me did its work. The door hissed open. The room inside, like the one we’d come out of, was deserted. It was a similar space of workstations, but this one looked less neat. There were materials spread out all over the various surfaces, like someone wanted to continue with what they were doing when they started their next shift. There were no prisoners. That did not stop Villainic, though. He kept walking around the room, sniffing.
I was about to tell him to knock it off, since none of our friends were here, but he seemed to be seriously engaged, and I was curious. What, exactly had he been smelling?
He went over to a workstation and picked up a glass container, bulbous on the bottom but narrow at the top—basically an alien test tube. It contained what appeared to be blood. “This is it,” he said. “I believe it’s yours.”
I walked over and picked up the container. It certainly seemed to be blood, but I had no way of knowing whose. “Are you sure?”
“It smells exactly like you.”
How had Phandic scientists gotten hold of my blood, and what did they plan to do with it? The second part was easy. After I’d shown them how much butt I could kick back on Earth, they wanted to figure out what my nanites were up to so they could reverse engineer Tamret’s work. Maybe they hadn’t even realized our skill trees were hacked. Maybe they approached augmentation from a purely mechanical perspective rather than focusing on hardware.
That left the question of where this blood sample had come from. I remembered back to the fight with Ardov in Central Park. I’d seen him put a cloth with my blood on it in a little plastic container. I had not been bleeding nearly this much, but it was possible they’d been able to replicate more blood from the few drops Ardov had taken. The only reason they would want to do that would be to study the nanites I’d received at the Hidden Fortress. I seriously doubted they were looking to make an army of Zeke clones.
I was about to put down the test tube when I noticed that the blood was moving. I almost dropped it, because moving blood is, pretty much by definition, gross. Little tendrils of the stuff were pushing up along the sides of the glass, like they wanted to return to the business of circulating. There was no way I was going to let that stuff back inside.
Then I realized it wasn’t trying to return to me. It was trying to get away from something. I had been holding it close to another container, one filled with a yellowish powder, and the blood seemed not to like it. Experimentally, I moved the blood a little closer, and it pushed away from that side of the glass.
“I wonder if it’s magnetic,” I said.
“I don’t think so,” said Villainic. His voice had an unusual tone, like he was actually thinking about stuff. He took the vial from my hand and moved it back and forth, closer to the powder and then away, several times. “It’s not a consistent movement like you would see with a natural force such as magnetism. It’s more like a fear response.”
I took the vial away from him again and tried the experiment. “I think you’re right.” I stared at him. Every once in a while, I thought Villainic might not be as much of an idiot as he seemed to be. Either that or he’d simply noticed something completely obvious that I’d missed, which by no means made him a genius.
I moved the vial around experimentally a few more times, not quite sure what I was looking for. This seemed to be important, though. During one pass, I moved it a little too close to another powder—this one pale blue in color—and the blood reacted entirely differently. It seemed to want to get closer to the blue powder.
I found a pair of metal tweezers and grabbed a few grains of the blue powder. I dropped it into the blood. There was a little bit of swirling, but otherwise nothing happened. I then moved it closer to the container of blue powder and the blood moved toward it, only this time more forcefully. I moved it closer to the yellow powder, and it pushed away.
“You know what I think?” I said. “They are experimenting on ways to strengthen and weaken nanites.”
“Perhaps that is how they shut down your system,” Villainic suggested.
I turned to him, again thinking I might have underestimated his intelligence. “What makes you think they shut me down? Tamret decided that the tech was in a natural state of decay.”
“That’s true,” he said, “but it seems a bit strange that you suffered such a complete and embarrassing failure while fighting with Ardov—the very same fellow who took our friends and brought them here. And here is where you find this material. It seems more likely that you were exposed to something that harmed you during that fight.”
I grabbed the container of blue powder. “Maybe if I eat some of this, I’ll go back to full strength.”
“I can think of nothing wiser than consuming an unknown chemical found in an evil alien lab,” Villainic said.
Now he was calling me out for being stupid. This was a new low. At least he was developing a sense of humor. “Do you have a better idea?”
“No,” he admitted, “but you don’t know what that is. Too much, or even too little, might kill you. Maybe it is meant to be injected or turned into a cream that’s rubbed on your skin. You can’t simply eat mysterious experimental chemicals and hope for the best.”
“On the one hand, you are making a lot of sense, but on the other, I don’t care.” I found a small vial and scooped a bunch of the powder inside. The vials had screw-on lids, so I sealed it and put it in my pocket.
The moment the vial made contact with my
skin, I saw it again—the flicker from my HUD. It was just for a second, but it was there—the flash of static and the scroll of text. It was real. There had been none of this powder back at the renegade base, but I had no doubt that this time the powder had caused that moment of life. It was like my augments were trying to reboot.
As much as it pained me to admit it, Villainic was right. This stuff could kill me or turn me into a raving lunatic. Or, in the tradition of the most classic origin stories, it could turn me into a superhero.
For now I would simply keep some with me. Maybe we would be able to gain access to the files. If I could see the research notes, it was possible I could figure out a way of restoring my abilities. In the meantime, I was wandering around a Phandic research facility with no one to depend on but Villainic. Admittedly, he’d done pretty well so far, but I wasn’t anxious to give him enough time to do something dim-witted.
“This is all interesting,” I admitted, “but we still need to find the others.”
Villainic nodded. He went back into the hallway and took some deep sniffs, but he shook his head. He wasn’t getting anything, so we walked a little longer.
I checked my data bracelet, which was automatically set to adjust to local time. It was still deep in the middle of the night, which was good, but we couldn’t keep wandering forever. Pretty soon we were going to have to deal with early risers, and that meant conflict.
After about half an hour of hapless exploration, Villainic picked up on a scent. We went through a few hallways until I heard what sounded like movement. I gestured for him to stop and be quiet, and miraculously, he understood. Pressing my back to the wall, I peered around the corner and saw two guards standing in front of a heavy door. It had to be the entrance to where the prisoners were kept.
The two Phands were wearing some kind of body armor—quite possibly something that would resist PPB fire. On the other hand, maybe it wouldn’t. Two quick shots, and we could be past them. There was also the chance that weapons fire would trigger an alarm. Adiul-ip didn’t have any details about the specifics of their security setup, and he’d warned us not to use energy weapons except in an emergency.