Starship Alchemon Read online

  “Departing lunar orbit in seven days,” he continued, following the VP’s lead. “They’ll be landing on the fifth planet, Sycamore, where the probe found evidence of bacterial life. It’s a violently unstable world, locked in perpetual storms.”

  He glanced up at LeaMarsa, expecting the presence of storms to produce a reaction. He wasn’t disappointed.

  “Sounds perfect. I want it.”

  The VP adopted a thoughtful look, as if pretending to consider her demand. The dwarf lion rubbed its mane against his ear, seeking attention. Zoobondi ignored the animal.

  “Where do I sign?” LeaMarsa pressed.

  “Would you please wait in the lobby.”

  She strode out with that stiffly upright gait that seemed to characterize so many psionics. Renfro Zoobondi held his tongue until the door whisked shut behind her.

  “You’ll take care of the details, make sure she’s aboard?”

  It wasn’t really a question.

  “Yes sir. But I do have some concerns.”

  The assignor hesitated, unsure how forthright he should be. This was obviously a setup. For reasons above his security clearance, Pannis wanted LeaMarsa on that ship. But dropping a powerful and moody psionic into such a lengthy mission fell outside the guidelines of standard policy, not to mention being enticing bait to some Corporeal prosecuting attorney looking to make a name. He didn’t want to be the Pannis fall guy if things went wrong.

  “Sir, I feel obligated to point out that LeaMarsa de Host is no ordinary psionic. The Jamal Labs report classifies her in the upper one-ten-thousandth of one percent for humans with such abilities.”

  “Your point?”

  “There are a number of red flags. And the OTTO classifies her as–”

  “Most psionics have issues. A long voyage might do her good. Bring her out of her shell.”

  “She suffers from the occasional loss of consciousness while wide awake, a condition the Jamal researchers term ‘psychic blackouts.’ Even more disturbing, she’s been known to inflict bodily harm on herself through self-flagellation or other means. Presumably, she does this as an analgesic against some unknown emotional torment originating in childhood.”

  The VP looked bored. He stroked the lion’s back. The animal hissed.

  The assignor tabbed open another part of LeaMarsa’s file and made a final stab at getting his concerns across. “Sir, to quote the Jamal analysts, ‘LeaMarsa de Host is a disturbing jumble of contradictory emotions. It is imperative that careful consideration be given to placement in order to prevent–’”

  “The Alchemon is one of the newer ships, isn’t it? Full security package?”

  “Yes sir, the works. Anti-chronojacker system with warrior pups. And of course, a Level Zero Sentinel.”

  “A very safe vessel. I don’t believe she’ll cause any problems that the ship and crew can’t handle.”

  The assignor knew he had to take a stand. “Sir, putting someone like her aboard that ship could create serious issues. And wouldn’t it make more sense for her vast talents to be utilized on a mission here on Earth, something with the potential for a more lucrative payoff?”

  “Better for her to be first given a less critical assignment to gauge how she handles team interaction.”

  “Yes sir, that makes sense, but–”

  Zoobondi held up a hand for silence. He slid off the edge of the desk and removed a safepad from his pocket, stuck the slim disk to the wall. A faint, low-pitched hum filled the office as the safepad scrambled localized surveillance, rendering their conversation impervious to eavesdropping. The lion squirmed on the VP’s shoulder, bothered by the sound.

  “We’re entering a gray area here,” Zoobondi said. “Trust me when I say it’s best you don’t pursue this subject.”

  The assignor could only nod. If things indeed went bad, he likely would be the one to take the fall. And there was nothing he could do about it.

  Zoobondi smiled and threw him a bone. “I believe you’re due for a promotional review next month.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Everything I’ve read suggests you’re doing a fine job. Keep up the good work and I’m certain that your promotion will come through.”

  The VP deactivated and pocketed the safepad and strolled out the door. The assignor was relieved he was gone. There were dark tales murmured about Renfro Zoobondi. He was ruthlessness personified, supposedly having arranged for the career sabotage of men and women standing in the path of his climb up the corporate ladder. There was even a rumor that for no other reason than the twisted joy of it, he’d killed a man in armor-suit combat.

  The assignor returned to the file on the Alchemon expedition. Reading between the lines, he wondered whether researching a primordial lifeform was really the mission’s primary purpose. Could Pannis have a different agenda, a hidden one?

  He closed the file. If that was the case, there was little to be done. He was midlevel management, an undistinguished position within a massive interstellar corporation. Going against the wishes of a man like Renfro Zoobondi was career suicide. The assignor had a wife and young daughter to consider. What would happen to them if he lost his job and possibly fell into the ranks of the “needful majority,” those billions who were impoverished and struggling? It wasn’t so farfetched, it had happened to a good friend only last month.

  That night, the assignor slept fitfully. In the morning he awoke covered in sweat. He’d been in the clutches of a terrifying nightmare.

  Thankfully, he couldn’t recall any details.

  CHAPTER 2

  Morphing panels of abstract wall art caught Captain Ericho Solorzano’s eye as he entered the Alchemon’s bridge, a six-meter-wide ovoid space with a vaulted ceiling patterned in delicate hues. Aesthetic effort had gone into the construction of the 200-meter-long starship.

  A surveillance cam tracked Ericho, projected his moving image on a monitor. It revealed a tall slender man with sea blue eyes, a trim goatee and short auburn hair. The black-and-gold uniform of a Pannis captain completed the portrait of a seasoned veteran, fifty-nine earth-years young, not even halfway through his projected lifespan based on genomic and familial demographics. With a regimen of stem cell upgrades, microbiome reboots and old-fashioned luck, he’d be commanding ships until mandatory retirement for bridge officers at age one hundred and twelve.

  “Can you truly see yourself, captain?” a moody voice asked. “Or are you lost in the shadows?”

  The voice came from behind the HOD, the holographic display occupying the center of the bridge. The large sphere showed an animated swirl of clouds, its default setting. When activated it could display in 3D any object in the ship’s library or within telescopic range.

  Lieutenant Tomer Donner drifted out from behind the HOD in a motorized chair, his lanky frame oddly contorted as if resistant to comfort. Awkward posture was just one of the lieutenant’s quirks although not as strange as applying a particle razor to his entire body five times daily to shave even the tiniest strands of hair.

  Ericho had first met the lieutenant at the outset of the voyage. Back then, he’d seemed normal. No bizarre philosophical ramblings and no ungainly posture. Not to mention, a full head of brown locks.

  A smile crept onto Donner’s pale face as he uttered his favorite enigmatic phrase.

  “We are but pawns within the realm of luminous dark.”

  A second chair floated into view, occupied by a slight man with thin lips and emerald irises streaked with silver. But his most notable feature was the flesh-colored umbilical attached to the center of his forehead that connected his prefrontal cortex to the Alchemon. The umbilical drooped across his shoulder like a snake, slithered across the deck to plug into the ship at the base of the HOD.

  Jonomy J. Jonomy was the ship’s lytic. Like all cyberlytic humans, he boasted identical first, middle and last names, the byproduct of an arcane judicial ruling at the dawn of the cyber age. Back then, the powerful I-Human movement, foes of artificial intelli
gence, had won a lawsuit demanding that lytics be assigned names that distinguish them from “organically pure citizens.” As if a hole in the head wasn’t enough to mark them as different.

  Through Jonomy’s umbilical flowed an immense amount of data. Every aspect of the ship could be monitored and controlled via the neuromorphic processors surgically woven into his brain in utero. He was the only crewmember capable of understanding at a fundamental level the vast network that was the Alchemon.

  “Captain, we are maintaining prime geosynchronous orbit,” Jonomy announced. “However, another storm epicenter has moved in below us. We have lost touch again with the lander.”

  They’d been circling the cloud-veiled world of Sycamore for the past three days, mapping the planet as best as they could through the disruptive storms. Ericho had finally granted permission for a surface mission in one of the Alchemon’s pair of landers. A few hours ago, four of the crew had touched down on the turbulent world.

  The Alchemon was the first manned expedition to this star system, Lalande 21185, a red dwarf more than eight light-years from Earth and so old it had been shining when the sun was still a collection of swirling gases. Exobiologists long ago concluded that none of its planets could support life. Yet an unmanned probe had discovered bacteria on the fifth world, a Venus-sized rock with a nasty atmosphere, setting the stage for the Alchemon’s mission.

  “Message coming through, Captain,” Jonomy said. “Severe distortion. Audio only.”

  Amid high-pitched static, science rep Hardy Waskov’s voice filled the bridge.

  “We’ve concluded our studies here at alpha base. We’re preparing to lift off for an area two thousand kilometers to the north. We’ll reestablish contact at that time.”

  Ericho grimaced. “You know the rules, Hardy.”

  On a virgin planet, communication between a lander and mothership were to be maintained wherever possible. The science rep knew Corporeal exploration policies all too well. That didn’t stop him from circumventing them if it suited his aims.

  “Relocation is necessary,” Hardy said. “I’ve discovered that the bacteria has been migrating southward for half-a-million e-years. I suspect dissemination from a common source.”

  “If you use ground travel, we’d be less likely to lose the com link.”

  The boxy lander could operate like a tank, make reasonable speed across Sycamore’s rocky but navigable surface. The electromagnetic anomalies in the atmosphere made communication all but impossible with airborne craft.

  “Are you ordering us to waste a day in transit when we could fly there in a few hours?”

  Rules occasionally needed to be sidestepped. But Hardy seemed to take that notion to the extreme. He’d been a thorn in Ericho’s side since the Alchemon’s departure from lunar orbit nine months ago.

  “Affirmative, Hardy. Consider it an order.”

  “In that case, I must refuse. Our psionic has experienced a psychic event.”

  That got even Donner’s attention. The lieutenant leaned forward to concentrate on Hardy’s voice.

  “What sort of psychic event?” Ericho asked.

  The intercom disintegrated into static.

  “Atmospheric discharge,” Jonomy said. “We will have to wait it out.”

  The science rep was within his rights to ignore mothership directives of a non-emergency nature, an example of the inflated importance of psionics in Pannis Corp’s grand scheme of cosmic exploration and development.

  That scheme was made possible by Quiets – Quantum intra-entangled transpatial systems – short cuts connecting the solar system with any other system reachable by unmanned probes. Thousands of such probes had been sent out over the past centuries, setting up Quiets to allow instantaneous travel.

  However, the volatile nature of Quiets meant they had to be constructed at significant distances from large planets. It took months to travel from Earth to the growing collection of Quiets located at the edge of the asteroid belt, and a similar amount of time to reach a targeted world in a distant system.

  Creating and maintaining a Quiets was notoriously expensive, even for a huge corporation like Pannis. Hundreds of them now linked Earth to faraway stars. But less than twenty percent had led to worlds with useful resources or capable of being terraformed to support colonies. Still, those few successes generated enormous revenue for Pannis and the other megas, the only entities wealthy enough to fund Quiets travel.

  The Lalande 21185 Quiets would never be profitable. The star’s planets were too far outside the habitable zone to sustain life, even with severe terraforming. Pannis had undertaken this mission only because the US – Unified Sciences, one of the few governmental entities not tax-starved and dependent on corporate generosity – had insisted that the discovery of bacteria on a desolate world was worthy of a manned expedition. The corporation had agreed to foot the bill in exchange for unlimited mineral rights on another venture. Such trade-offs were common throughout the laissez-faire Corporeal.

  Ericho enjoyed his role aboard these powerful vessels, journeying to distant star systems, helping the human species expand into the cosmos. That knowledge helped offset the fact that decisions about whether to undertake a particular mission remained far above his pay grade.

  The storm interference passed. Hardy returned to the intercom.

  “The psychic connection is based on LeaMarsa experiencing a strong emotion at the precise instant my calculations were pinpointing the source of the bacterial migration.”

  “Could be coincidental,” Ericho said. He’d served with psionics on previous expeditions and not once had their abilities proved useful. But ever since one of LeaMarsa’s brethren had led his crew to a treasure trove of new pharmaceuticals on the planet Nike Sneak, the megas had been scouring Earth and the settled planets for humans with potent extrasensory abilities.

  LeaMarsa had been added to Alchemon’s crew a week before departure. That in itself was unusual, considering that extrasolar assignments were generally booked months or years in advance. Technically, she was in Hardy’s department and therefore under the science rep’s direct supervision, which was all right with Ericho. One weird crewmember, Lieutenant Donner, was enough of a challenge.

  The HOD caught his eye. Donner had activated it to display his favorite doodled portrait, a skull-like face. It resembled a human one that had been stretched to accommodate an additional sensory organ, a marble-sized orb between the mouth and nose.

  The lieutenant barked laughter and pedaled his chair closer to Ericho.

  “Ah, Captain. You are poised at a juncture, drenched in the consequence of choosing between the unknown and the unknowable.”

  Ericho ignored Donner’s latest verbal diarrhea and returned his attention to Hardy.

  “For the record, I don’t support your decision.”

  “Understood. We’ll reestablish contact when we touch down at the new site. Waskov out.”

  “Wait. You said LeaMarsa experienced a strong emotion at the moment you discovered the source of the migration?”

  “Yes.”

  “What sort of emotion?”

  “I fail to see how that’s pertinent.”

  “Humor me. Was she happy? Sad? What?”

  The link remained silent. Ericho was about to conclude that Hardy had terminated the transmission or that Sycamore’s unstable atmosphere had done it for him. But then the science rep’s words abruptly came through loud and free of interference.

  “LeaMarsa experienced a nebulous sensation of fear.”

  Lieutenant Donner lunged from his chair, charged at Ericho with an expression of mad rage. His hands were balled into fists, his posture that of a man ready to do violence.

  Ericho’s fight instincts took hold. He gripped the armrests, ready to springboard from the chair. But Donner abruptly froze.

  “Is something wrong?” Ericho asked, keeping his tone even, the preferred technique for dealing with an unhinged individual. He watched Donner’s face for any telltale
s that an actual attack was forthcoming.

  The lieutenant’s anger dissolved as quickly as it had appeared. Donner backed away, chuckling with delight. Ericho was reminded of a child who’d just gotten away with some outrageous playacting stunt.

  “I caused you a fright, did I not?”

  “Yes, Lieutenant, I would say so.”

  “I was merely making a point. A person’s actions and reactions lie beyond the realm of predictive behavior.

  What happens to any of us isn’t our fault.”

  “Captain Solorzano, is there anything else?” Hardy demanded, unaware of what was transpiring on the bridge.

  “No. Alchemon out.”

  Jonomy cut the link. Ericho kept a wary eye on Donner. The lieutenant settled back in his chair, stared blankly at the vaulted ceiling.

  Ericho didn’t know what to make of the incident. Had Donner truly been on the edge of losing control or had it merely been a bizarre stunt?

  Whatever the case, one thing was certain. The unknown demons afflicting the Alchemon’s second-in-command were growing more inexplicable by the day.

  CHAPTER 3

  LeaMarsa de Host, the freaky ghost.

  The disparaging phrase from childhood popped into LeaMarsa’s head as she stood in the new locale where they’d touched down. It was daybreak on Sycamore, which meant fierce winds scouring the boulder-strewn landscape and thunderous energy storms ripping through the upper atmosphere. All were amplified into a cacophony by her shieldsuit’s external mikes.

  LeaMarsa de Host, the freaky ghost. Schoolmates had taken to calling her that. Mostly it was because they were frightened of her psionic abilities although sometimes it was simply because they were mean. She tended to recall the words whenever she found herself in an unpleasant environment.

  And Sycamore was certainly that.

  Everything was sporadically perceived here because of the atmospheric turbulence and swirling fog. Nearby hills seemed to blend into the brooding sky. The distant sun was a sickly halo when visible at all. Shiny green liquid the consistency of mercury huddled in small ponds. Violent gusts occasionally lifted the ponds off the ground and sent them shooting through the air like aquatic fireworks.