The Vanity of Hope Page 4

  Mary grabbed Tom by the arm and hugged him tight. “God’s speed Thomas Ryder,” she whispered into his ear.

  “I’ll come back, just you wait and see.”

  Mary turned to William and buried her face in his chest. He wrapped his arms around her and patted her shoulders. “You two run along,” he said. “We’ll be fine.”

  They filled their plates with food in silence, picking listlessly from the menu of smoked, cured, and cooked game and early-ready garden vegetables. He threw a scrap of meat on the ground. “That’s for you, Dougal,” he said, remembering how the old fella used to hover close for the free food.

  “Oh Tom, I just can’t stand the crowd anymore,” Sarra said. “Let’s leave.”

  They fetched their horses and rode Marco and Ellie slowly around the outside of the clearing, passing the group of rowdy boys and girls at the horseshoe tossing contest, the earnest shooters in the fifty-yard archery final, and lastly, the boisterous tug of war teams getting ready to take up the rope. The team from Black Nest roared and poked jibes at the Bentley team. “Let’s see how good you are this year without Tom to anchor your pull.”

  “Don’t get caught doing anything I wouldn’t do,” the judge called out.

  “I don’t plan on getting caught.”

  They left the festival behind and rode along one of the oldest pathways in the forest between the enormous oaks.

  The emotions from the festival subsided and a cold, rational mood settled on them.

  “There’s the clearing,” Tom said.

  “And there’s Thornton Way.”

  They galloped up to the mouth of the Way, then turned sharply and raced for Shipwrights Way.

  The beech trees down either side of the lane rattled in the rising wind and the fallen leaves whirled up into the air behind them.

  Three horsemen rode in front of them from the London end of the Way. The frontrunner of the out-of-towners hollered his horse to a stop and the other ruffians, swigging on a shared bottle of grog, fell into line, blocking the escape route.

  The oldest rider, the father of the two given their similar faces, reached down and pulled out a loaded crossbow. “Off, now,” he said, waving them to dismount.

  Tom glanced over his shoulder. Hopefully, he’d get them on their way before the real trouble arrived. He nodded to Sarra and stepped down, keeping a firm hold on Marco’s reins. Sarra came to his side. He drew his hunting knife, remembering what had happened to her father.

  “I’m Pikey,” the oldest rider slurred. He gave a drunken bow and wobbled upright. “And these are my sons, Ed and Arty.”

  The laughing, fool sons copied their father’s stupid bow, right down to the wobble in the saddle.

  Pikey gripped the reins tighter against his unsteady horse “Who have we here?”

  “A damsel in distress who needs rescuing,” Arty said.

  “The festival is down the Way,” Tom told them. “You can’t miss it if you keep to the path on the other side of the clearing. There’s plenty more grog in the tents.”

  Sarra held Tom’s arm tighter.

  “All we want is a kiss from the fair lady and then we’ll be on our way.”

  Arty passed the bottle of grog to Ed and climbed off his neighing horse.

  Sarra spat at his feet. “I’d rather kiss a toad.”

  “Feisty, aren’t we?” Arty said.

  Ed’s horse shied backward as he stuffed the bottle into the side saddle and tumbled to the ground. He gripped hold of Arty’s leg and hauled himself upright. “That’s how I like them,” he said, leering at Sarra as he jammed his hat back on.

  “Take another step,” she said, “and I’ll show you feisty.”

  Tom peered towards the leaves swirling around the two invisible, cylindrical shapes approaching up the Way. “We haven’t got time for this. None of us have. We have to run.”

  He struck Arty flush on the temple with his staff as he tried to block their way and Sarra punched Ed square in the mouth with her left fist, her good arm, and then kicked him in the crotch.

  Pikey drew his loaded crossbow. “For that, I ought to shoot you where you stand.”

  “You only have one arrow,” Sarra said.

  “Your woman has quite a mouth on her.”

  Tom stepped further away, keeping in front of Pikey. “Run, before it’s too late,” he said, concentrating on the swirling leaves.

  “You’re scaring me, Tom,” she said, hitching up her frock to run. “What can you see?”

  An invisible charge blasted a hole in the chest of Pikey’s horse and razor-thin red beams of light seared Arty and Ed clean through the forehead.

  Marco, and then Ellie reared sideways and bolted in terror.

  Pikey struggled out from under his horse as the other horses fled in terror. “You’re going to pay for this,” he said, still clutching his crossbow.

  A green beam of light vaporized the crossbow. The dot moved onto the long coat and turned black as it drifted up and settled on Pikey’s forehead. His head splattered over the ground.

  A small, feathered dart hit Tom in the arm as he held Sarra behind him. He stumbled and sagged to his knees and reached for Sarra. The harder he pulled on the dart, the longer the barbs grew under his skin. His grip faltered and he collapsed onto the ground, still fumbling for the dart.

  Sarra slid her arm across his chest. “Can you hear me?”

  He looked into her eyes. “Ad infinitum.”

  A dart struck her arm. “Una in perpetuum.”

  Tom’s limp arm rose off the ground as though lifted by an invisible string, then settled across his chest.

  “Pulse is active,” Rulg said, as he moved over to check Sarra’s pulse.

  “What the hell are you up to?” Jbir screamed down the audio channel.

  Rulg slung the blaster over his shoulder. “After one hundred and fifty-two years on this rock it’s only right we celebrate leaving town.” He uncloaked his bioGen camouflage skin and displayed his magnificence to the world. “Always wanted to use the blaster one more time,” he said, cursing how the helmet sucked the joy from his laugh.

  “Get your tail back to the shuttle.”

  Strapi clicked the scanner shut. “The targets are stable. Good work, Rulg, but you needed the hoverPods to make up the lost ground for being tricked. They nearly got away from you.”

  Rulg jammed the barrel of his sidearm under Strapi’s chin and the spines between his shoulder blades stiffened. The camouflage skin tightened as he puffed out. “I was on to it. He mentioned ‘Thornton’s Way’ once too often.” He knelt and patted Tom on the shoulder, admiring the human’s love of the hunt. “You and me are going to have a lot of fun.” He could refine and rebuild from the human’s knowledge of predator and prey, and his unmatched skills at reading the terrain until Thomas became the right tool for the right job. He was an invaluable asset for the task ahead. “Me against you. Never know, if you get good enough we might even team up and go after some big game. You sure had some nasty animals seventy million years ago.”

  Strapi opened the chamber lid of the hoverPod. Sarra rose from the ground as he lay her inside the chamber.

  “Rulg, stop staring at her,” Jbir yelled. “Stop day-dreaming and pay attention.”

  “Relax, there’s nobody around and even if there was, who would believe a story about a lizard-man?”

  “Have you forgotten about what happened with Nukal?”

  “Werewolves in London? Lucky bastard.”

  Strapi lifted Tom’s limp body into the cloaked isolation chamber. He closed the lid and Tom vanished from sight.

  Rulg jerked his head towards the forest and flicked his tongue in the air. The pits flared down either side of his jaw. “Shut the lid and get the cargo back to the survey ship,” he said, staying uncloaked to boost the suit’s scanning power. He slapped his tail on the ground and an ancient unease grew inside his gut that he hadn’t felt since the bad old days on Tilas. His yellow eyes narrowed as he reactivated t
he helmet and visor and meticulously searched the forest. Nothing, except squirrels and roosting birds in the trees, two crouching rabbits, an adder, and one, slow hedgehog.

  He unclipped the safety and blasted into the forest until the magazine emptied then swung the blaster over his shoulder and grabbed the smaller, rapid-fire ray gun he’d used on the horsemen. The air sizzled with hot laser fire as he sprayed back and forth and up and down into the trees. Burning branches fell to the ground and clumps of grass spat into the air. Rabbits crisped, the adder was cooked where it slept, and the birds exploded in feathery puffballs.

  “Get out of there, Rulg. That’s an order. Now!”

  He stood his ground, firing into the forest until the energy pack warning lights glowed. He aimed at the snuffling hedgehog and squeezed the trigger. Empty. He sniffed the burnt air. Nothing on Earth could’ve survived the barrage, but just in case, he popped a canister of iDust and shook the micro-sensors over the ground. He backed away for twenty yards then turned and ran to catch Strapi.

  “What was that about?” Strapi asked, as Rulg barged up the ramp.

  Rulg grabbed an energy pack from the weapons locker and stood guard in the doorway. “Get inside,” he said, scanning his blaster back and forth until the ramp had fully retracted.

  “Do as he says,” Jbir said. “Iris is acting twitchy.”

  The outside seals hissed shut and Rulg switched on a lightScreen to read the iDust dataStream. He thumped the screen. Just static. “Get this tub out of here.”

  #

  A creature with skin that mirrored the forest’s dappled sunlight emerged from the trees. It whipped the canister of iDust away with its long tail and stalked forward to where Tom had fallen. It sniffed the ground and delicately picked up his walking staff between its claws.

  A tear formed in its star-filled eyes as it crouched on its back legs as though praying while it looked heavenwards. Lightning flashed against the darkening sky and a crack of thunder split the air. It blinked and the tear slid down its scaled cheek and fell upon the parched earth. Heavy drops of rain fell from heaven so hard that plumes of dust exploded in the lane beneath the gaps in the forest canopy.

  The creature watched the shuttle ascend through the atmosphere and dock with StarTripper with timeless patience. The stars passed from the creature’s eye until only one remained.

  The door opened and Rulg glided Tom’s hoverPod off the shuttle behind Strapi who led the way with Sarra. He spun around to face the shuttle door. The feeling from the forest had followed him. It was here.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Jbir asked. “Your gills are flashing and you look like you’ve seen your reClone.”

  Rulg thumped his tail onto the floor and bared his teeth.

  Jbir edged behind Strapi and Kuilp. “I thought you would be happy to get home.”

  “It’s not too late to leave them behind,” Rulg said, raising his blaster into the doorway.

  “Are you crazy? Fire that thing in here and we’ll all end up out there. Strapi, take the chambers to the medical bay. Rulg, you can stay behind if you want, but the humans are the most valuable part of the treasure. They prove Earth is real.”

  Rulg peered at Tom inside the chamber as Strapi walked passed. “This will not end well.”

  Chapter 4

  Jbir shuffled across the bridge to his command chair. Deep in thought, he almost tripped over the power cable he should’ve had Kuilp fix when it had worked loose from the floor channel. Point eight light-speed wasn’t that fast, but the main propulsion system had lasted only two hundred and fifty years since leaving Earth. Rulg was right to say StarTripper was getting old and that it was an unnecessary risk to hope the ship could return home in the same twelve hundred years it took to get to Earth. Even so, the way the gravity drive had malfunctioned was unusual. Kuilp said it couldn’t have been sabotage, but it wasn’t a ‘typical’ failure either, at least Iris thought that way. The degradation of the propulsion system wasn’t catastrophic, but it meant less thrust to navigate around any interstellar outliers, especially if they had to pass through any asteroid clouds surrounding the older star systems.

  Rulg, awake from deep-space hibernation inside his modified bioPod, would arrive any moment now and be even more dangerous for warning the ship was ‘old.’ The rest of the crew would never side with a bully who’d roughed up each one of them more than once. Nevertheless, Rulg’s drip-feed placenta diet would have him extra spiced up and the thousands of training missions he’d had against Thomas Ryder, more recently as an ally, would only increase his boldness to take over the reins.

  Rulg strutted into the bridge. His bioGen suit, chest armor, heavy boots, and spiked gloves meant he wasn’t here to discuss the technicalities of the antigravity propulsion drive. He stopped in the middle of the bridge between the command chair and the system consoles. He folded his arms across his chest and puffed out.

  “I told you,” Rulg said to Engineer Kuilp. “Didn’t I? Don’t push this piece of junk too hard.”

  “It was an order,” Jbir said. “I take full responsibility.”

  Rulg stepped closer to Kuilp. “How bad did the gravity drive overheat? How long to Heyre, now?”

  Iris appeared beside Rulg. “It’s seven hundred and eighty-four light-years to Heyre. This setback will add between three hundred to eight hundred years, depending on whether it stabilizes or continues to degrade.”

  Rulg slapped Kuilp to the floor with his tail and held him down under the heel of his boot. “Setback!” He swiped his fist through Iris. “We’re space junk, now. What a way to go out.”

  “Rulg, that’s enough,” Jbir said. “We can get out of this mess alive if we keep our heads.” That was sure to put the idea to mutiny further into his reptilian mind and push him closer to the edge—where he’d be more easily disposed. It wouldn’t be a good look if he had Rulg removed for just being his usual angry self. But if he was forced to kill Rulg? That was understandable self-defense—for the good of the mission and the safety of crew. He cared for their welfare. He activated the near-field security system around the chair. “You stick to navigation and leave the others alone to do their jobs.”

  Rulg kicked Kuilp as he stepped over and stabbed an accusing finger at Jbir. “If you’d listened to me…”

  “I should have left you on Tilas,” Jbir said.

  “You’d never have got off Tilas without my connections.” Rulg’s laugh slowed to a hiss. “I had your ship hardened to get you past the Federation.”

  “You used my ship to get your cargo to Heyre.”

  “You disgust me,” Rulg said. “You sold out your home planet for credits. At least Emperor Tilaxian had ambitions.”

  “The emperor had no choice even though he had his doubts about working with your kind.”

  Kuilp picked himself off the floor and rested his gangly frame against the console. “What do you mean ‘kind?’ He’s like us, isn’t he, Tilasian?”

  “He’s Decay—right the way through,” Jbir said.

  Rulg looked across to Kuilp, Strapi, and Nukal cowering at their consoles. Red streaks ran across his face and his neck gills flared. “That was supposed to be our little secret.”

  Kuilp cautiously backed into his seat. “What’s he doing here?”

  “She insisted he was part of the deal.”

  Rulg reached his full height. “And why would Queen Lillia do that?”

  “To keep you from General Reuzk’s prying eyes.”

  “What do you know, Jbir, that’s too risky for her not to have you around?”

  Jbir smiled. “When you play both sides you get to know when things don’t add up. Let’s just say, I have my suspicions about the emperor and his daughter, and the ties that bind.”

  “You’re out of your depth, Jbir.”

  Jbir slid his jacket back over his hip to show his holstered gun. “That’s far enough.”

  “This ship reeks of the Federation: the 4i forensics, my shielding you had ripped out and r
eplaced, right down to that starMap. Should we ever get back to Heyre, all this tech will be your death sentence—if you’re lucky. Give me the ship and I’ll plead your case for leniency. I have currency with Decay. You have a new line of genetics and we both know how Decay will ‘appreciate’ them.”

  “You assume Decay’s won the war,” Jbir said.

  “And you don’t?”

  “Like I said, ‘both sides.’ I don’t know and neither do you, but I’ve taken precautions either way. You’re not the only one with connections. You can’t have the ship.”

  Rulg quizzically turned his head to the side. “You’re bluffing.”

  “The homing instinct to return to Heyre is a core subset of the operating system and Iris is under my biometric command, as are the bioPods,” Jbir said. “Any attempt to disconnect the bioPods and Iris will initiate an automatic shutdown sequence. Then it’s bye-bye genes. What would your master think of you then?”

  “I’ll take my chances. You’re not fit to captain this ship anymore. Your reckless command will cost us everything.”

  Jbir drew his pistol. It would be easy to end the mutiny and kill Rulg in cold blood as a lesson to the others, but Rulg deserved better than a bullet. He pointed up. “There’s someone you need to meet.”

  The ceiling panel zipped open and a sinewy, bioMech android uncurled and dropped to the floor. The stealthFighter landed on all fours and positioned itself at Jbir’s side.

  “I expected as much.” Rulg folded his arms and laughed. His ceramic fangs shone in the white light and the guttural sound came from deep down as his gills flared wider. “I am much more than I was before.”

  “You are out-matched, no matter how good you think you are. You have a reaction time of one hundred and twenty; the stealthFighter is under one hundred. Cheramein skeleton, double honeycombed. No organs, fibrous tissue in fluid. No soft spots. Tylinite weave skin. You can’t win.” He gestured to the stealthFighter. “Show him.”

  The stealthFighter morphed through a range of camouflages for city and jungle conditions, finishing with a crescendo of evolving fractal patterns. Then it vanished.