Nearly there.

  He slowed the evocation and noted how a translucent quality was imposing itself over the clarity of the image, like the glass through which he viewed the past was becoming increasingly frosted. The moment was close, he could sense it.

  With an exertion of will, Kader focused his vision on two of the cages. The bars were still broken. Then, two great shapes appeared, each wreathed in darkness. Kader turned to the other cages where the occupants were also breaking free.

  He let the time stream flow forward, this time at a crawl. Whatever was in the cages, he couldn’t distinguish any details, as if they – somehow – defied his efforts to watch. He sensed the rock chewer coming through the ceiling, directly above a black cube etched with lines of bright blue. The bars ruptured and then…

  Kader’s vision ended and he was back in the cavern, with a bad head and a dry mouth. Brutus studied him intently.

  “You have finished.”

  “I think I got kicked out.”

  “That is significant?”

  “It’s the first time it’s ever happened.” Kader swore as the ramifications came to him. “That means whatever was in these cages was able to detect me doing the rewind, while having enough control to do something about it.”

  “You must ponder it later. What did you learn?”

  “These cages were a prison for something. Five different somethings. They escaped the moment the rock chewer landed on a cube which was in the center of the floor.”

  “You should evocate for a second time.”

  “Let’s check out what the chewer landed on first,” said Kader. The incident had left him on edge and he wasn’t desperate to try another rewind.

  The two of them approached the chewer, which loomed over them. A rupture in the vehicle’s outer plating revealed the darkness of its interior and the lack of cargo. It was beyond repair, as was the object it had landed on.

  Approaching cautiously, Kader scanned the shards on the ground and got no hints as to what they were made from. The pieces had scattered everywhere, some large, some small, and most of them with edges that appeared wickedly sharp.

  Directly underneath one of the chewer’s steel caterpillars, a lump of the black material seemed to be partially intact and Kader half-crouched in order to see it better.

  “The chewer really screwed things up.”

  From this range, he could sense a faint vibration emanating from the shattered cube. It wasn’t strong, but it made him feel queasy like he was on the verge of throwing up. Kader stepped back.

  “Something about that doesn’t feel right. You check it out.”

  Brutus crouched and, still holding his minigun, crawled beneath the caterpillar track. A few meters away, Kader dropped to his haunches so he could watch the cyborg’s progress. Brutus advanced without apparent concern for the chewer balanced over his head, and he came to the cube.

  “Can you see what it is?”

  “No. There are no markings. Something emanates from it, though my sensor is not able to interpret the data.”

  Before Kader could warn him otherwise, Brutus reached out and placed his hand palm-first onto the side of the cube. The cyborg kept his hand in place for three or four seconds and then withdrew it.

  “Strange.”

  “No shit.”

  With a scraping sound, Brutus emerged. “A code has been implanted in my data core.”

  “Just because you touched that cube?”

  “I believe so.”

  “What does the code represent?”

  “I do not know. It is a string of digits.”

  “You can’t figure out the meaning? I thought computers were supposed to be good with numbers.”

  “I am not a computer,” said Brutus. “I am a security cyborg created for a specific purpose.”

  “A purpose which doesn’t include de-scrambling code?”

  Brutus tapped the side of his head. “There’s only so much room inside here for processing and data arrays.”

  “The Hardliner has plenty of processing grunt.”

  “Several thousand times the magnitude of that available from my personal core.”

  Kader looked around. “Maybe we should get back.”

  He really didn’t want to evocate and Brutus didn’t suggest it again.

  “Let us return like you suggest,” said the cyborg.

  A minute later, they were in the shuttle’s cockpit again and Kader took it vertically off the floor. He spent a few minutes on one final circuit of the area in case he spotted something he’d missed earlier.

  “I think we have got what we came for,” said Brutus.

  “So do I.”

  Then Brutus came out with something odd.

  “This is like a marble run.”

  “How do you know about marble runs?”

  “I am expected to put children at their ease and have been programmed with knowledge of popular games.”

  Kader couldn’t imagine children doing anything other than crying or running at the sight of Brutus, but he didn’t mention it. “So, a marble run?”

  “Yes – the chewer came from the top, rolled down the slope, along the floor of the cavern and down the shaft to the bottom. Just like a marble run.”

  “You think this was set up?”

  “I am simply making an observation.”

  “It’s a good one,” said Kader, quickly learning there was more to Brutus than met the eye. “True or not, I like it. Now let’s get out of here.”

  Kader piloted the shuttle out of the Xindrol-lined cavern and into the shaft. At that moment, he felt the tension pour away from him and he realized that it he’d allowed it to build up far too much. The return to the Hardliner couldn’t come soon enough.

  Chapter Twelve

  Teleportation through a vacuum was, for reasons nobody had ever been able to fully explain, significantly less draining than teleportation through a dense atmosphere. Having given the Hardliner instructions to skim past the Invidder, Hawk waited until she felt confident with the distance. The two spaceships were travelling at incredible speed, leaving her a window of opportunity that was shorter than she wanted.

  At what she hoped was the right moment, Hawk imagined herself on the Invidder. She didn’t know the exact internal layout of a Firvent star sweeper, so played the odds by aiming for somewhere in the middle.

  Hawk vanished from the Hardliner’s bridge and reappeared in a dark space somewhere on the alien warship. The sensor in her suit adjusted quickly and outlines became visible, though it wasn’t yet clear what they were.

  Suddenly, the space was filled with a deep rumbling, followed by a series of booming noises that made everything shake violently. Hawk guessed she’d arrived somewhere near the business end of the Invidder’s weapons systems and that it wasn’t wise to stick around. She turned her head, until she got a sense of another clear space ahead and below. Without waiting any longer, she ported towards it.

  “That’s better,” she said, ignoring the growl from her stomach and the sense of fatigue in her muscles.

  This time, Hawk had ended up in one of the maintenance storage areas, which was a long, narrow room, faintly lit. A distant thrumming rose and fell, and Hawk felt herself buffeted by forces resulting from the spaceship’s partially suppressed acceleration and hard banking.

  She paused to get her bearings and cast her eyes over the steel shelves piled up with replacement parts, ready to be swapped in if anything broke down. Firvent tech was generally reliable and capable enough, but it always looked somehow archaic, like they’d put it together with screws, wires and pieces of salvaged clockwork.

  Hawk half-expected to see a box of spanners and a few drums of oil but was nothing of the sort was present in storage area.

  What did exist was a group of Firvent technicians. They were dressed in drab, faded yellow vacuum-proof suits, though their helmets were elsewhere. Hawk was a live-and-let-live kind of person, but she couldn’t help feeling that the Firvent were just a tiny bit repulsive. She was sure it was because of their undeniable resemblance to rats. It wasn’t like they had muzzles or whiskers, but as soon as you looked at one, you thought rat.

  Hawk didn’t like rodents. Never had and never would.

  She hurried towards the door, having seen first-hand that the Firvent were experiencing the same troubles as humanity.

  The door was operated by an access panel, which looked identical to a HIF model - the Firvent weren’t beyond a spot of tech theft when it suited them. This panel wouldn’t respond to Hawk’s touch and the door stayed shut.

  She bit down on a few curses and accepted that she was going to have to rely on teleportation to get to the bridge. She ported through the door and into an alloy-clad corridor which curved ahead and behind, like it followed the outer shape of the Invidder. A couple of Firvent were at a wall panel, one of them in the process of pushing a tool into a socket. Again, an impression of old tech that was somehow enough to get the aliens into space.

  By Hawk’s reckoning, and some uncorroborated intel data she’d taken from the Hardliner, the bridge on a Firvent star sweeper was likely to be left and up some steps.

  Something caught her eye. A metal plate fixed to the wall listed the nearby sections in spidery Firvent script which Hawk’s language computer duly translated when she stared at the text for a couple of seconds.

  “Bridge ahead,” she said quietly. “The intel was good.”

  She wasn’t certain how long the Hardliner’s AI could keep the Invidder occupied before the battleship’s shield collapsed, so Hawk sprinted along the corridor, avoiding another member of the crew as she did so. This one was carrying a tray of brown gloop that may have been edible if you enjoyed dining on insects blended up with herbs, spices and animal fat.

  At a junction where a second corridor intersected the first, Hawk was saved from indecision by another sign pointing the way. She turned and sprinted up some steps. At the top, she entered a large room with a high ceiling and a huge blast door on the left.

  Luckily for Hawk, she was in phase stealth, else she was certain the two automated chain guns in the left-hand corners would have detected her as an intruder and turned her into paste. It wasn’t unknown for Firvent or Drogol scanners to inaccurately sniff out Hawk’s position, but these chain guns remained still.

  At the blast door, she took a deep breath and teleported through.

  The Invidder’s bridge was an oval-shaped room, as dimly lit as everywhere else on the spaceship and approximately ten meters wide and seven across. The center space was filled by an enormous oval-shaped console which had seating for about twenty around its perimeter. Most of the crew were at station, in the same place they had been when everyone got frozen.

  The place stank of Firvent chow and the tech gave off a high-pitched squealing that got on Hawk’s nerves immediately.

  On the opposite side of the console, a single Firvent in a grey spacesuit stared at the row of sensor feeds. The Hardliner featured prominently on most of the screens, the battleship’s shield clearly defined by the quantity of explosives detonating against it.

  This was the moment that Hawk had been dreading. In one hand was the Tor, ready to put a high-caliber bullet clean through this Firvent’s head. In the other was an injector from the Hardliner’s medical bay.

  Unsure if she was doing the right thing, Hawk teleported next to the Firvent and jabbed it in the neck with the injector. With a hissing sigh, the alien slipped to the floor, rendered unconscious by the drugs Hawk had administered.

  “We’re all in this together, huh?” she said, nudging the comatose Firvent with the toe of her boot. “You should be grateful for the company.”

  With this part of the side mission accomplished, Hawk turned her attention to the next step of her plan: getting back to the Hardliner whilst it was under bombardment from the alien warship.

  She sent the battleship a prearranged data packet using her suit comms. At once, the Hardliner unleashed its weaponry upon the star sweeper’s energy shield.

  No pissing about, Hawk had airily ordered the AI before she’d teleported away.

  It was clear that the AI was happy to oblige. Hawk winced when every one of the Invidder’s sensor feeds suddenly turned white. The bridge lights went red and, a few seconds later, a muted alarm sounded – nothing loud enough to prevent speech, but insistent enough to make it clear that the spaceship was taking a pounding from the pride of the HIF fleet.

  Assuming the outcome would not be achieved for another minute or two, Hawk strolled around the central console. She recognized some of the hardware’s functions, but much of it was beyond her.

  One of the functions she did understand was that relating to the energy shield. A single blue-colored gauge represented the power reserves. The gauge was falling fast. In front of Hawk’s eyes, a fifteen-percent chunk vanished in a single hit, probably resulting from the Hardliner’s modulating beam cannons which were the latest in weapons tech and specifically designed to knock out shields. Straight after, the gauge fell another ten percent.

  The Hardliner was going to emerge the victor, she was certain. However, she wasn’t so certain that she was ready to teleport back onto the battleship. Hawk was determined that when this was over, she’d be standing on the warship that hadn’t been turned into molten wreckage.

  Her stroll took her inevitably back to the Firvent she’d knocked out. The alien lay on the floor, its eyes closed. For an anomaly, it didn’t appear different to any of the other Firvent. There again, Hawk was a T1A and nobody could have guessed it by looking at her. And Hawk got more than her fair share of looks.

  With a sigh, she slung the Tor across her back and stooped next to the alien. She wrinkled her nose, expecting it to smell of that crappy food they ate. This one didn’t smell and she got her hands under its arms.

  “Come on, you asshole,” she said.

  With physical contact made, Hawk sent an enquiry to the Hardliner. The AI responded at once.

  “Chance of Hardliner victory: 95%.”

  Hawk requested distance data and wrinkled her nose for a second time when she heard how many kilometers separated the two warships. Teleporting so far was bad enough without the extra baggage. The Tor was fine, a whole Firvent, not so much.

  Waiting around wasn’t going to make things any better, so she visualized a suitable location on the Hardliner and teleported to it.

  When Hawk arrived, she felt weak, shaky and ready to eat a million calories of whatever she could lay her hands on. She let the Firvent drop to the floor, pulled an injector from one of her leg pockets and jabbed it into her thigh. Real heroes, she knew, injected themselves in the neck, but she wasn’t planning to compete with them.

  The rejuvenating fluids would take a minute or two before they kicked in, which was just enough for her to haul the Firvent into one of the Hardliner’s three holding cells. Having deposited the alien in the middle of the floor, Hawk straightened and checked out the facilities.

  A cell with a bed.

  She backed out and closed the door behind her, locking the alien inside.

  Five minutes later, following a diversion to the officer’s mess food station, Hawk entered the bridge.

  “Hardliner, give me a status update.”

  “Energy shield 15% and recharging normally. Hull integrity: 100%.”

  “Does that mean no damage at all, or that a bunch of missiles hit you and didn’t cause a breach?”

  That gave the AI something to think about, like it wasn’t expecting a cross-examination of its status report.

  “The Hardliner suffered no impact damage. The Invidder’s weaponry did not penetrate my shield.”

  “Way to talk about yourself in both first and third person,” said Hawk, biting into a taco. The shell cracked and mince fell onto the floor.

  “I would prefer it if Captain Plante resumed command.”

  “Had enough of me already? Bad news for you - I’m staying put!”

  The AI went quiet and Hawk realized she was on a high from her precision and successful assault on the Firvent warship. She took another bite from the taco and laid it to one side while she checked out the comms logs. The shuttle hadn’t made contact while she’d been away.

  “Come on Cal, where are you?” she said.

  It appeared that Kader was in no great hurry to return and the minutes passed. Hawk became worried and wondered if maybe she should teleport down there for a look. She decided to give Kader until the end of the next two cheeseburgers to show himself.

  When the shuttle’s comms receptor went briefly green, Hawk breathed a sigh of relief. She sat closer to the console and watched it flicker again. The signal strength climbed quickly from zero to twenty percent.

  She opened a channel.

  “Well?”

  “You don’t want to know.” Kader sounded tired.

  “If you think I don’t want to know, that means it’s something important. What did you find?”

  “An alien maximum security prison with five convicts.”

  “And?”

  “They escaped.”

  “Are they responsible for what happened to everyone?”

  “They must be. I got kicked out of an evocate.”

  “That’s bad.”

  “It’s definitely not good. Not only that, a Drogol visited the cave before we did – maybe eight or ten hours before us.”

  “How did it get here so soon?”

  “A combination of a fast spaceship and luck.”

  “This just gets better and better.”

  “Listen – we’re on our way to the surface. Brutus went and got himself implanted with a code. He doesn’t know what it is, but maybe it’ll give us a lead on what happens next.”

  “A code?”

  “Whatever question you’re about to ask, I can’t answer it.”

  “You know I don’t like waiting, Cal.”

  The comms went quiet for a few seconds and then Kader spoke again.

  “You took the Hardliner somewhere?”

  “Oh, that?” asked Hawk, feigning surprise. “I’ll return to the rendezvous point and I’ll tell you all about it when you arrive.”