Tolan’s guts knotted as he watched the damaged hive ship grow in the viewport. Flashes of memory came back to him: the thunderous roar of weapons fire, soul-shattering screams, mandibles rasping in the dark.
His rebirth had dampened his emotions, but now, seeing that icy splinter of a ship and all that it implied, he felt a rush of fear.
He clenched his fists as a stinger escort guided his transport into a docking bay where other captured ships were moored, invasive umbilicals trailing from their battle-scarred hulls.
When he stepped through an organic membrane into the hive ship proper, its cilia probing the segments of his armor, he fought the urge to flee.
He was expected here. No harm would come to him so long as he showed no hostile intent, despite his instincts telling him otherwise.
Still, he kept his weapon implants primed—just in case things didn’t go as planned.
A pair of wasp-like drones led him through a maze of tunnels bored into the heart of the comet fragment and brought him to the queen’s lair, a vast chamber protected by a web of hidden defenses that were barely perceptible to his enhanced senses.
The queen observed him with clusters of black eyes, mouthparts clicking, the stubs of vestigial wings twitching above her bulbous abdomen. Transparent tubes sprouted from ports in her thorax, pumping fluids.
Tolan floated up into the chamber with the two drones flanking him. The queen flexed her segmented legs, a pair of which had been replaced with prosthetics. Her exoskeleton was scarred in places. Like the hive ship, she had clearly been through hell.
The queen’s voice buzzed from a translator orb hovering by her head. “You should count yourself among the privileged. Few humans have seen my inner sanctum.”
Tolan’s eyes focused on the queen’s wicked-looking ovipositor. Except for those who become incubators for your offspring.
A quiet rage clawed at his chest. Memories of Moira and the kids still haunted him, their horrified faces forever burned into his mind.
“You know why I’m here,” Tolan said coldly.
“You have come for the weapon.” The queen scraped her legs together, and high-pitched stridulations rattled his skull.
Whatever Varyk had promised her in exchange for the bioweapon must have been substantial. The swarm didn’t make arrangements with their inferiors. Other species were no more than breeding stock to them.
“Hand it over, and I’ll be on my way.”
The queen made a series of clicks with her mandibles, but the orb did not translate. The drones flittered off, disappearing into one of the many tunnels that fed into the chamber. They returned carrying an unmarked canister between their forelegs.
Tolan took the canister, which he recognized as a portable stasis unit.
The bioweapon it contained had been derived from samples of the cyber-organic plague, a technological pathogen of unknown origin that had ravaged much of the spiral arm, causing horrific and unpredictable mutations in those it infected.
Possession of a single spore—even a highly modified one—was enough to bring the plague hunters after him.
Why Varyk wanted it, Tolan didn’t know, and it wasn’t his place to ask. He had no choice but to deliver it to his master.
“He didn’t mention payment.”
“Our compensation will come in due time,” said the queen, her alien features unreadable. That lack of expression made Tolan even more uncomfortable.
As if to emphasize her point, she flicked her ovipositor.
#
Tolan woke from suspension more than a week out from the wormhole, his transport rousing him from induced hibernation when its sensors detected another ship on an intercept course.
He withdrew a breathing tube and climbed out of the tank, trailing gobbets of orange fluid. Using a zero-G scrubber, he cleaned himself, then pulled on a self-heating undersuit.
In the cramped control room, his heart pounded as he crawled onto a crash couch and plugged the interface cable into a data port in his wrist. If the plague hunters had found him…
He sighed in relief as an image of the other ship appeared in his ocular feed. From its aftermarket weapon mods and the faded guild markings on its hull, he identified it as a merc ship.
A husky voice crackled over the intership comm. “Unidentified craft, power down at once and prepare to be boarded.”
Tolan ignored her demands and fired the thrusters, executing evasive maneuvers.
His pursuer launched a salvo of disruptor mines, which attached to his hull like limpets. Electromagnetic pulses knocked out his engines and navigation.
As his transport tumbled through space, Tolan tried to regain control. Meanwhile, the merc ship drew closer, deploying grapples and docking clamps. It loomed over the incapacitated craft like a predator.
When his efforts proved useless, Tolan unplugged and rolled off the crash couch.
While the merc ship latched onto his transport’s hull, Tolan donned his armor, its artificial muscles enclosing him like a glove, and armed himself with a nonlethal stun whip.
The airlock portal dilated, and mercs entered the transport, their chitinous body armor giving them an unsettling, insectoid appearance. Each was armed with a bulging wrist gun mounted to their suit’s forearm.
Tolan ambushed them in the main passage linking the control module to the cargo storage area, uncoiling his whip and snapping it against one of their torsos.
The nerve induction fibers delivered a high-voltage shock, sending the merc’s muscles into spasms. His cohorts raised their weapons and unleashed a barrage of poison darts, some of which hit their mark, embedding themselves in Tolan’s armor.
The suit’s artificial muscles seized up, and he lost his grip on the stun whip.
One of the mercs hit him with a shock baton.
Stars exploded in his vision, and he tasted hot metal in the back of his throat. He smelled something burning, then realized it was his armor’s organic carapace.
He blacked out.
#
When Tolan came to, he was in a confined space, restrained on an examination table. Stripped of his armor. Bio monitors attached to his bare skin. His muscles ached, and his head pounded—aftereffects of the shock baton.
“You have some impressive modifications,” said a familiar voice. The merc captain stepped out of the shadows, her magnetic boots clicking against the metal deckplate. “Implanted radial spurs, thoracic raptorials, subdermal bioplating…”
“What do you want?” Tolan groaned. His mouth tasted like something had crawled inside it and died while he was unconscious.
The merc captain brushed a lock of blond hair out of her face with her mechanical hand, revealing a web of scar tissue. Part of her ear was missing. “You’re either fearless or you’re a fool, dealing with the swarm. You know what they do to human planets, right?”
Tolan exhaled sharply. If she’d known anything about him, she’d have never asked that question. “So, you’ve been tracking me. For how long?”
“Since you left Varyk’s orbital stronghold. We know you’re working for him. That you were sent to retrieve the weapon from a rogue hive queen.”
“And who are you?”
“Larisa,” the merc captain said. “We work for the apostate worlds. You should know, I’ll do everything in my power to stop you from delivering that bioweapon. I’d rather not harm you, but if you try to resist…”
“I get it,” Tolan said. “Look, I have no love for Varyk. But I’m indebted to him.”
As much as it pained him to admit, Varyk had saved his life, salvaging what was left of his mutilated body from the ruins of the agrarian colony planet he and his family had called home.
Not much of his original flesh and blood had survived, just his brain, spinal cord, and part of his digestive tract, which Varyk had transplanted into a cyborg body with some rather unusual augmentations.
In exchange for his life, Tolan had served Varyk as enforcer and assassin, eliminating his enemies across his multi-planet empire.
“Do you know why he wants the weapon?” There was a cold distance in Larisa’s green eyes.
“Why does a warlord want any weapon? To deter resistance.”
“Normally, I’d agree with you. But I’m afraid Varyk’s intentions are far more sinister. With that bioweapon, he’ll be able to alter the genetic makeup of anyone exposed to it, reprogramming their bodies and minds to make them more amenable to his rule. They will become slaves, unable to resist him.”
With such a weapon at his disposal, Varyk would crush the apostate worlds and anyone else who tried to rise against him.
“And what do you think he offered the swarm in exchange for this weapon?” She paused, waiting for him to make the connection.
Tolan swallowed. “Breeding stock.”
“Very good. Entire planets ripe for harvest. With their populations under his control, they won’t be able to put up a fight. When the swarm comes for them, they will accept their fate without a single word of protest.”
Larisa approached the table and placed her mechanical hand on Tolan’s chest. “If you deliver that weapon, millions will suffer the same fate as your loved ones.”
“How do you–”
“We know a lot about you.”
He breathed in through his nose. “So, what do you want me to do? Give it to you? No offense, but you haven’t exactly earned my trust.”
“No one should have that weapon. It’s far too dangerous. It must be destroyed.”
“If you truly believe that, then why bother capturing me? Why not just destroy my ship?”
“I’m not in the business of taking a life when I don’t have to. Especially that of someone who might help me if given the chance. You don’t have to serve Varyk. Join me. Help us break free of his tyranny.”
“I want to help you. But I can’t. It’s too risky.”
Larisa stared into his eyes with an intensity that made him feel like a bug pinned to a display board. “Tell me, Tolan, what would your family think of you now?”
He choked back tears and fought the urge to engage his implants, break free of his restraints, and rip her throat out.
In that moment he hated her for invoking his loss. Almost as much as he hated himself for not being able to save his family. But she raised a valid point.
What would Moira have thought of this abomination he had become? Could she have ever forgiven him, knowing the atrocities he had committed?
“I—” Before he could complete his thought, he was pressed into the table by a sudden burst of acceleration.
Larisa careened into a bulkhead and struck her head, blood spurting from a gash.
“We’ve got another ship inbound at high speed,” a voice announced over the comm.
Larisa pressed her metal fingers against her injury to stop the bleeding. “What kind of ship?”
An uncomfortable silence. “Plague hunters.”
#
“How did they find us?” Tolan followed Larisa into the merc ship’s control room. Since they were under thrust, he didn’t have to use the handholds.
“Same way we found you,” Larisa said. “They’ve been shadowing you ever since you left that hive ship.”
Larisa called up a holo, which formed in the air above them, showing their position between an asteroid cluster and the local star’s heliopause. A scarlet line traced the plague hunters’ trajectory, intersecting with their own.
“We can’t outrun them,” Larisa said. “And we’re no match for them in a straight fight.”
“What about those asteroids?” Tolan pointed at the nearest clump of rocks.
She rotated the image and zoomed in on a large, spherical asteroid and its smaller orbiting companions. Tolan could make out signs of industrial infrastructure on its cratered surface, surrounding an aperture wide enough to fit the merc ship.
“It’s registered to one of the clans. Looks abandoned. Might be a good hiding spot while we figure our way out of this.”
She ordered the pilot to alter course.
Tolan felt the change in velocity in the pit of his stomach. The holo updated and showed their new trajectory, which aligned with the abandoned asteroid.
“Release decoys,” Larisa said.
The deckplate shuddered beneath Tolan’s feet. In the holo, a cluster of drones dispersed, each emitting a power signature comparable to the merc ship’s.
The plague hunters vectored toward one of the decoys. Tolan let out a breath. Too close…
Later, after the pilot had tucked them safely inside the asteroid’s cavernous interior and powered down, Tolan joined Larisa in her private cabin in the ship’s spin section.
A false viewport showed deep space and the bright blue wisp of a nebula. It was only a holo, but it looked real enough and helped to break up the cramped conditions.
“We’ll hide out here for a while, until the danger has passed.” Larisa opened a cabinet and removed a bottle containing a pale violet spirit. “Drink?”
“Please,” Tolan said, settling in a sling chair. “I guess I should thank you for not killing me.”
She filled two tumblers and handed one to him. “Don’t thank me yet. I haven’t made up my mind about what to do with you.”
Tolan sipped his drink, alcohol burning in the back of his throat. After a long moment of silence, he said, “Why bother going up against Varyk? He’s too powerful.”
“I have no choice.” Larisa gulped down her drink. “After what he did to my planet. To me…”
“What happened?”
She turned away from him and stared into the holo, nebula light reflecting on her scarred face.
“I grew up on Saiph-6. We didn’t have much, but we got by. One day, his soldiers came, occupied our land, took our resources, and enslaved us. When some of us refused to bend to his will, he sent in kill squads.”
Tolan shifted in his sling chair and took another hefty swig, hoping it would loosen the tension in his chest.
“I watched my parents, my cousins, and life-long family friends resist them without hesitation. Then I stood over the mass grave outside my settlement, just staring at their corpses and wondering when I would be next.”
She faced him, tears in her eyes, unashamed of emotions rekindled by such terrible memories. Emotions Tolan had been unable to feel—despite wanting to—for so long.
“Instead of resisting, I capitulated. After what they did to my family, I was too afraid to fight them. But in the end, it didn’t save me.”
She lifted her shirt, revealing a thin scar across her bare abdomen.
Tolan’s jaw clenched.
“When they discovered I was pregnant, they took my unborn child from me. At the time I was broken, utterly inconsolable, but later—much later—I realized death had spared her from the horrors of life under occupation. Still, it filled me with rage.”
He leaned forward. “What did you do?”
She lowered her shirt. “I made a deal with some smugglers who agreed to get me off world. I was determined to escape, make contacts on the neighboring worlds, survive. I’ve been fighting ever since. Resisting. It’s all that matters now. I won’t let the death of my family be in vain. I’ve already sacrificed too much.”
She wiped her eyes and leaned against a bulkhead for support. “So now you understand. Varyk must be stopped at all costs.”
Tolan stared into the dregs of his drink, studying his weary reflection.
#
“I’m afraid we’ve got company,” said the pilot. Pulsing green cables trailed from metal ports in his skull, joining his brain to the ship’s exomind.
The holo showed a menacing craft bristling with weapon nodes. It had entered the cluster and was lurking around the largest asteroid like a spider in its web.
“We knew we couldn’t stay here forever.” Larisa anchored her magnetic boots to the deckplate. “How long until intercept?”
“Minutes.”
Tolan tightened his grip on a handhold. Sweat seeped through the thin fabric of his undersuit.
Plague hunters were a universal omen of death. Wherever they appeared, total annihilation followed.
No one had ever seen one and lived to speak of it. Their existence was limited to hushed whispers in the dim corners of grimy spaceport bars.
Who were these people? Where did they come from? And how did they always know precisely when to show up?
“Can we get a head start on them?” Tolan asked. “Launch more decoys.”
“We’re fresh out of drones,” the pilot said. “They’ll overtake us before we reach the wormhole.”
“Our only option is to fight,” Larisa said. “A ship like that has twice our armament. Three times our mass. We’ve got to take them by surprise. Go for a kill shot. They’ll expect us to run, so we must strike quickly.”
“And if we fail?”
“We die.”
The pilot engaged the thrusters, and Tolan’s weight returned. The control room was built into a gimbaled sphere that could orient itself to the direction of thrust, so “down” was always toward the deck.
Larisa made a gesture with her mechanical hand, and the curving walls became transparent, showing open space outside the asteroid.
Like the viewport in her cabin, it was all an illusion—the control room was buried deep inside the merc ship’s hull, protected by layers of armor. But the effect was realistic enough to give Tolan a feeling of vertigo.
As soon as they were clear of the asteroid, the plague hunter ship launched a salvo of missiles, giving them no time to attack.
“Hang on,” Larisa said.
The pilot executed a series of wild maneuvers, jinking and rolling out of the line of fire.
Tolan strapped himself into a crash couch. The bulkheads shuddered around him as the ship deployed countermeasures.
Point defense guns hammered out a barrage of flak, forming a wall of shrapnel between the merc ship and its attacker.
The plague hunter blasted a hole in the wall with a scintillating particle beam, clearing a path through the flak. It launched a boarding pod, which moved to intercept them.
If the rumors were true, plague hunters were part machine and could tolerate much greater changes in velocity.
He clamped down on the urge to throw up as the merc ship tried to outrace the pod. But the pilot could only pull so many Gs without smearing the crew’s bodies across the bulkheads.
At last, the boarding pod caught up to them, weaving through a maelstrom of point defense fire. It snagged the hull with its magnetic claws.
The pilot altered course, vectoring back into the asteroid cluster. With any luck, it would provide some cover while they dealt with their problem.
Larisa drew a snub-nosed pistol from the holster at her hip. She touched a metal stud behind her right ear—a comm device wired into her jaw. “Attention crew. We are about to be boarded by plague hunters. Arm yourselves and prepare to repel intruders.”
Tolan climbed off the crash couch.
“Can you fight?” Larisa asked.
He nodded.
Though he was still recovering from his earlier assault, his implants were nearly at full charge. A battle would drain what little energy he had left, but if it meant life or death, he didn’t have much choice.
Larisa pulled on a helmet, which sealed itself to her chitinous armor.
Tolan followed her through the guts of the ship to a narrow passage connecting the drum-shaped spin section to the outer hull.
There, they hooked up with more mercs, armed with assault weapons.
An actinic flash lit the bulkhead in front of them as a laser carved a hole in the inner hull. A circular plug of metal tumbled away, its rim glowing.
The mercs advanced toward the opening, weapons aimed into the darkness.
Tolan deployed his wrist spurs. Hidden compartments opened in his flesh, and the spring-loaded blades flicked out, poisoned tips glistening.
A spherical object shot out of the opening and ricocheted off the deckplate, tumbling through the air. One of the mercs batted it off the muzzle of his weapon. It detonated, unleashing a nova-bright explosion that sent them all scattering.
Tolan’s ocular lenses polarized.
An intruder emerged from the hole: a dark shape, vaguely humanoid, a pair of tentacles coiling from its shoulders.
It floated through the opening with an unexpected grace, accompanied by something dog-sized with far too many legs.
The cyber-hound clambered into the passage like some horrific experiment escaped from a rogue gene splicer’s lab, jaws trailing saliva.
Tolan recoiled, fear ratcheting the tension in his gut.
Larisa and the mercs opened fire, their weapons hissing and popping, flashes of plasma lighting the passage in tones of blue.
The plague hunter shrugged off the assault like it was a minor annoyance. Its armored exosuit was clad in thermal resistant plating, absorbing or dispersing the impacts.
Tentacles curled above it, mechanical claws snapping.
“Fall back!” Larisa ordered, slapping a fresh charge canister into her weapon’s receiver.
The cyber-hound attacked one of the mercs, its jaws clamping down on his leg and worrying it like a rag doll. The merc screamed, clubbing it in the head with the butt of his weapon. Globules of blood whirled through the air.
Tolan froze as the plague hunter approached, transfixed by its alien movements. Respirator tubes trailed from its bulbous helmet.
Tolan’s pulse pounded in his ears, drowning out the sound of screams and weapons fire.
One of the plague hunter’s tentacles coiled around his torso. It pulled him closer, and he sensed he was being examined, scrutinized for any sign of infection.
The other tentacle hovered by his head, its three-clawed manipulator folding open. A needle-like probe extended, piercing Tolan’s flesh and entering his skull through his temple. It was so sharp, he barely felt it.
A tingling sensation manifested in his head, and he knew the plague hunter was probing his memories. Soon it would discover his possession of the bioweapon and his dealings with the swarm.
Tolan clenched his jaw and struggled to regain his composure. He could hear Larisa’s voice, shouting at him from a distance.
At last, the plague hunter withdrew its probe.
With every ounce of strength remaining, Tolan clenched his abdominal muscles, triggering the raptorial implants.
The weapons deployed from his torso with the speed of a coilgun round, a pair of curved blades punching through the plague hunter’s exosuit like hydraulic rams. Blood and other fluids spurted into the air, and the plague hunter slumped lifelessly against him.
The tentacle released, and Tolan wriggled free of its grasp.
One of the mercs shot the cyber-hound, splattering its brains across a bulkhead.
“Are you all right?” Larisa said, using handholds to reach him. The plague hunter’s body drifted through the air beside her, trailing viscera.
“They know,” Tolan said. “They know about the weapon.”
#
The plague hunters held position outside the asteroid cluster, lobbing plasma bombs into orbit. It wasn’t enough to do any significant damage, but it would draw the merc ship out, making the cluster far too dangerous a hiding spot.
In the control room, Larisa removed her helmet and studied the holo.
“All this ordnance is becoming a navigational hazard,” the pilot said. “We can’t stay here.”
“Why don’t they just blow us up and be done with it?” Tolan said. “That ship has more than enough firepower.”
Larisa paced the control room, the soles of her boots clicking. “They know we have the weapon. They’ll want to capture us alive to find out more about where it came from.”
Tolan stared at the plague hunter ship looming on the verge of sensor range like a black claw, ready to strike.
“Then why don’t we just give it to them?”
Larisa’s brow furrowed. Her lips compressed.
“They probed my memories, so they know the weapon is in my ship’s cargo hold. If you release it and put enough distance between our two ships, maybe they’ll go after mine instead.
“If we stay within comms range, I can remote connect, overload the power plant as soon as they’re within the blast radius. It’ll solve two problems at once. You said you wanted to destroy the weapon.”
“It could work,” Larisa said, after giving it some consideration.
She ordered the pilot to release the docking clamps.
The merc ship maneuvered away from Tolan’s transport. He dropped into one of the control room’s interface chairs and plugged in, opening a link.
“Hold position here.”
He fired the transport’s thrusters and brought it to the edge of the asteroid cluster, close enough for the plague hunter ship to detect it.
As the enormous craft drew closer, its front pincers opened to reveal a harpoon launcher.
It had taken the bait.
Tolan closed his eyes, focused on channeling as much power as he could to the transport’s engine core. Alerts flashed across his visual cortex, warning him of an imminent overload.
“Hit the thrusters on my mark,” Tolan said.
He opened all the injectors at once, releasing fuel into the turbocharged reactor core.
“Now!”
A small sun appeared where the transport had been, swallowing up the plague hunter ship in a furious explosion of plasma.
Tolan was thrown back into his chair as the merc ship accelerated, trailing a hailstorm of debris and ionizing radiation.
When they were clear of the blast zone, he unplugged and climbed out of the chair.
What remained of his transport and the plague hunter ship had been reduced to an expanding cloud of incandescent gases in the holo.
“Varyk is going to be pissed,” Tolan said.
Larisa placed her hand on his shoulder. “So, now what?”
He put his hand on top of hers and turned to face her. For the first time since his rebirth, he didn’t feel so alone. “Now, we fight. And we don’t stop until we win.”
###
M.T. Preston, Jr. 