Slavers of Antar
By
DocPaul
***************************************************************
Chapter
Three: Mephitis
Before Julia could respond, her COM badge beeped.
“Yeah?” Michael smiled at her brusque off-handed way of response to the
call.
“Doctor, the recovery team just brought in
Kyle,” said one of the medical bay interns. His voice was hollow and worried.
“He’s unconscious.”
Michael swore, rocking Mikey. He knew Max was
sending Kyle off the planet, and wanted Maria to stay clear, but Maxwell
hadn’t mentioned that Kyle was down. Julia rushed to her feet as Michael’s
badge alerted him to the bridge.
“Commander, the Sarasvati reported in.
She’s on her way back. The Captain is bringing in his wife. He is requesting a
medical team. She’s unconscious too.”
“Understood!” What the hell was going on? He and
Maria shared a look of concern, feeling Max’s agitation, and their eyes met
over the heads of their young nephews. “Julia…”
“I’m on my way!” Julia grabbed her medical
scanner. “Maria, no excuses! My medical bay as soon as we have a break.” She
went straight to the landing bay. Kyle was in medical. He had to wait.
Julia made the landing bay as the Sarasvati
was landing. Waiting, she watched as the Captain exited the recovery vessel
carrying his wife. She was covered in blood. “Oh crap!” Julia quickly
scanned the unconscious Isabel, her scanners quickly noting all the different
blood types on her body, none belonging to her. “Let’s move her quickly!”
Max was fast on their heels. Once in medical, Julia
had her on a full medical scanning bed. Nothing. Isabel’s heart was slightly
out of rhythm. Otherwise, she seemed in excellent condition.
“What was she doing down there?” Max was holding
Isabel’s hand to his cheek. He didn’t seem to hear. “Captain?”
“What?”
Julia shook her head. “Nevermind. She’s fine.
The twins are with Maria and Michael. I’ll call to let them know she is
fine.”
“Why hasn’t she come to?” Good question. One
that Julia had no answer for, so she took her medical results, scanner, and
squeezed Max’s shoulder in comfort. Isabel would probably wake when her brain
allowed her to do so.
~~~
Julia stopped outside the chamber and looked in at
Kyle. He was confined to a special room. It was sealed to prevent too much
interaction with the outside world. His normal empathic shields had taken hard
hits from the devastation on the planet. It had been years since he had found
his natural defenses so weakened.
Julia knocked on the window and waved. He shook his
head. Too much. He wasn’t able to deal with anyone in his space at that time.
Julia acknowledged him and walked away.
Kyle watched her leave. Turning on his side, he put
his hands over his ears and curled into a fetal position. The screams seemed to
echo and echo into the night. His new third heart raced hard in his chest out of
sync with his two others, the third heart taking the dominant pace.
~~~
“Lizard…”
“No.”
“Lizzie bean….”
“No!”
“Oh c’mon! Lizzie bear….”
Liz turned from her job and glared at her boss.
Technically, her boss. Realistically, a walk in the pink plastic world of insano.
Sean was without a doubt the world’s biggest whining wart on the butt of
humanity. Liz frowned at the thought. Well, that’s it! Three years, and the
boob in space official had bled away all the niceness in her body, exasperated
her to foul language and evil thoughts. Most of the thoughts were how to dispose
of Sean’s boorish body using an antimatter manifold as the murder weapon.
“It’s festering! Look at it.” Sean held out
his tragic finger.
“That’s red marker.”
“No! Beneath it! Festering. Pus…” Sean
actually guffawed at that—pus. “Hey, Liz how do you spell ‘pus-y?’
Liz moved through her usual end shift diagnostics.
“P-U-S-S-Y….” She stopped and looked at him. Huffing, she hit him upside
his head. “Juvenile! I’ll tell you how to spell pus-head! S-E-A-N!”
Jonesy was over in a corner working on a new relay
switch. He chuckled under his breath, but not before Liz heard. She glared at
him as well, and Jonesy smiled even more. He ducked his head and pretended not
to listen to their highly intellectual conversation. Sean was the only person
that frustrated Liz to murder.
Sean added a little whine to his voice, on top of
the larger whine already there. “C’mon. I promise. I’ll be quick. That
quick. Zip. There and back.”
“Nope. I’m off in ten, and I’m not staying.”
Liz starting counting in her head. One. Two. Three. Fo…
“C’mon! Be a pal!”
Wow, three whole seconds between whining breaths.
“No! I’ve got dinner plans.” Liz glared at
Jonesy, her dinner plans. The least he could do was vocalize his resentment for
Sean trying to rearrange his evening—their evening. Engineers. She should know
better than date an engineer.
“Liz, it hurts, and….”
Liz stopped and stomped her foot. “And nothing!
She’s busy! The medical bay is probably packed full with survivors. She is
over worked, over stressed, and you walk in with a mythical splinter in your
finger and she is going to rearrange your internal anatomy.”
Jonesy nodded his head in agreement. Sean looked at
him, cursing under his breath. Maybe a little accident. Fall off a ladder?
Jonesy could knock him into a bulkhead. Or….
“She doesn’t even like you, anyway.” Liz added
for good measure.
“What? She doesn’t?” Sean’s eye narrowed.
“Did she tell you that herself?”
“It’s obvious.” Liz looked at the time
counter. “Oh, look! I’m off.” Liz grabbed her stuff and quickly left
engineering. She didn’t even bother to look back at Jonesy. Men. Some days,
she missed being an Immaculate.
Jonesy smiled to himself, but Sean wasn’t through.
“Did you hear anything? Did the Doc tell you she hates my guts? What is hate
anyway?” Sean tried to reason it through. He was charming. Sweet. Hell, he
occasionally bathed. He made his special stew just for Julia. What wasn’t to
love?
“I think she likes you,” said Jonesy. He was
practically bouncing on his toes.
“Really?” Sean clapped Jonesy on the back.
“You know, J-Man, I was thinking of demoting that uppity Liz. What good is she
anyway? Never willing to work past her shift anymore. Liked her better when she
was all Immaculate-like. I swear she spit on me the other day! I swear!”
“What are you saying?” Jonesy asked quietly.
Yeah, like he was gullible to think Sean would demote his second-in-command. Liz
was his special project.
“I’m saying spill! Tell me what Julia said about
me. Did she mention my eyes? I know she loves them.”
Jonesy scratched his nose. Sure. Why not? “She
said you were a special case.”
“She did!”
“Yeah, a special nut case. Mental.” Jonesy
chuckled.
“Special? She thinks I’m special!” Ignoring
the parts he didn’t want to hear. “I knew it. She was pretending to be
avoiding me, but I could tell.” Sean straightened. “Here I was worrying that
I lost my Seanlike charm, but no sir! The boy is back!” He smiled. “I better
go let her look at my festering splinter. She loves taking care of me!”
“Uh-huh.” Jonesy watched Sean saunter out of
Engineering. It took a moment for him to realize that he was the highest ranking
officer on duty. Crap! Sean had just shoved his shift on him! Liz was gone. He
should’ve gone with her. Reluctantly he rang through to Liz. “Um, Lady
Liz—um, I think I’m going to be a little late.” Jonesy cleared his throat.
“It’s like this….”
“Uh-huh.” Liz disconnected.
Jonesy hung his head dejectedly. He really, really
hated Sean some days.
~~~
“Iz?”
“Hey.” Isabel looked around her. “Where—what
am I doing here?”
“Good question.” Max kissed her fingers.
“Better question, what were you doing down on the planet?”
“I wasn’t down on the planet.” Isabel frowned.
“I—I needed to see you. It couldn’t wait. I had Maria watch the boys,
and…”
“You had Maria watch the twins?” Max actually
smiled at that. Last time Maria watched them, she constructed special padded
safety suits for them. The twins adored them. They wore them and tried to beat
the stuffing out of each other.
“Yeah.” Isabel rubbed her head. It hurt. “I
had a dream, Max. A nightmare. It had
Max stared at the drawing. Serpents. Red eyes. The
staff weapon. It was drawn in a child’s hand with colored crayons, but the
similarities were striking. “Isabel, why did you come down to the planet?”
Isabel shook her head, her mouth opened in wonder.
“I didn’t. I don’t remember going to the planet.”
~~~
“Maybe this isn’t such a good idea,” worried
Maria. They were babies. They shouldn’t be interrogated. She had the boys over
at a table eating a special chocolate dessert. They were eating with a gusto,
happy to see their parents, and happy to cover themselves in sickly sweet
confectioners sugar.
“God, Maria! What did you give them?”
“Cookies. Ice cream. That whippy stuff they
like.” Isabel looked at her happy twins covered in sugar, and literally
sticking to each other.
“They’re never going back to sleep.”
Maria looked confused. “Sleep? They just woke up.
Maybe we can play a game of ‘Kill the Evil Michael Dragon!’”
That got the twins’ attention. Their favorite
game. Whenever they were with Michael and Maria, Maria tied special linen around
their necks, and made them shields and play swords. They chased around the
quarters trying to slay the Michael Dragon, before he caught them, and ate them.
Max’s eyebrow went up. “No wonder whenever they
come home from Michael and Maria’s we can’t get them settled down. Between
the sugar and adrenaline, the little guys are running high.” He should’ve
known. Both Michael and Maria were highly active people.
Michael looked at his nephews. “I don’t know,
Max. One of them drawing it must be a coincidence. This thing is too strange.”
Maria refilled her coffee. “Those ships. They were
strange. I could feel them.”
“Explain that, Maria.” Max looked at his
brother. “You felt them too?”
“After Maria did. I think she pinpointed them and
once she did, I felt what she was feeling.”
“Maria?”
“I don’t know. It’s a feeling. Almost a queasy
feeling in the pit of my stomach. I can feel the sweat on my skin. Clammy. And
my hands were shaking.” She paused. That was the same reaction she had to the
twins at the time. But, it was different. The twins never made her want to throw
up. Yet.
“You said it was evil, Maria. Evil that never
dies.” Michael said. That disturbed him. The only evil he ever understood in
his life was Khivar, but Khivar was dead.
“I know.” Maria licked her lips. It was hard to
verbalize. Something unnamable. “When you’re a child, you have these fears.
Not always rational, but there they are anyway. Spiders. Creepy-crawly things.
Things that move in the dark that you can’t see, but know are there. That’s
the feeling.”
Isabel pushed her hair back out of her face and
frowned. “Maria, those fears are instinctual. They’re inherent in
everyone.”
“I know. I can’t explain it, but it feels like
that. A fear. Overwhelming. Foreboding. Real. Perhaps irrational, I don’t
know.” Maria nervously moved her cup around. “The thing is that it felt
familiar. I knew it.”
Max sat up straighter. “You knew it? Maria, in
your travels, you ran into these ships before?”
Maria shook her head. “I’ll run the diagnostics
and scans that the Shiva received from the four ships while they were
here, but I can almost promise you that I’ve never met them before. Despite
that—I know them.”
“Maybe it’s like Alex.” The twins looked over
confused. Was Uncle Michael talking about Alex? Mikey looked at his brother.
Michael continued, “He was an Eminent. He saw things. Felt them. A foresight.
Maria was talking in damn riddles. She feels shifts in the matrix of space, and
her evolved sense touches the Great Understanding, as does Kyle’s with his
empathy. Maybe this is a sense of warning from that?”
“Spider senses?” Maria teased.
Michael laughed. “You always seem to know where I
am.” That was a truth. When they exercised together, and practiced in the gym,
blindfolded, she could sense his position. Her senses were more highly evolved
than his, and he was from a warrior clan that had the most highly evolved senses
in the known Universe. Yet, Maria’s were better.
“Eminent talk?” Max frowned. “What did Maria
say?”
Michael frowned. “I can’t remember. Something
about the ‘father of all paths and all the world’? It made no sense.”
Max looked at Maria. “Any ideas?”
“Spiritual vectors? I don’t know for sure.
There’s a belief that time is fluid, that all things settles or finds a level.
If you could find a pinpoint in space, or perhaps a cluster in space, it would
be hard to define it specifically to that point in time or space if the fluidity
runs in all dimensions.”
Max moved his hand over his mouth. “Maria, please,
no theorizing, okay? I can’t handle too much of this today. Can’t you just
give us a specific answer?”
Maria shrugged. “I’ll try. I’m saying that
time doesn’t exist. That if theories of reincarnation and existence are true,
then you live in all times with the same people or particles around you.
You’re joined, and in each time as it flows, it carries a continuity. So the
father of all paths and all the world is the world. It is the very existence. It
would be like Morals or Ideas. They move through time as Truths. Something that
remains true regardless of when they are conceived or idealized.”
“Maria...,” Max said in exasperation.
“I’m saying that Evil is like Truth. It travels
through time as well. Sins of the father? Or maybe it’s the self same evil.
Who’s to say? I am saying that I recognize these ships, because my people
recognized them or would’ve known them regardless of the time or space.
They’re something I know.”
“Genetic memory?”
“Perhaps. So I can know them, feel that
instinctual foreboding, but what is that? A premonition or a glimpse of a time
memory? What is déjà vu?” Maria shrugged, “perhaps in another life I knew
them, and it’s that interaction that creates this sense of knowing that I
have, and an ability to sense them, and fear them.”
Michael looked over at the twins. They were still
eating and talking to each other in a way that only twins could. He smiled
slightly. He and Max had that as children. They looked so much like Max, but he
could see Isabel in them as well.
“Maria, what was the whole ‘someone opened the
door’ thing?”
Isabel stopped. She was going to start cleaning the
children, but she whipped around. “What did you say?”
Michael looked at Isabel and then the others.
“Maria said that she fainted because someone opened the door.”
Isabel sat down, her hands were clenched. “
Michael shook his head. “Isabel,
Maria looked at her hands. “No she’s not.”
~~~
“I do not have time for this!”
“Just look at it. It hurts. A lot.” Sean kept
shoving his finger in Julia’s face. She sighed and made him sit down with his
hand out on a table. “Wouldn’t you prefer to hold my hand instead?”
Julia shot him an evil glare. Against her will, she
swallowed a smile. He really was charming in a ‘look at me, I have a nappy
head and limited intelligence’ way. Which made no sense, because after a year,
she knew he was intelligent. Very intelligent, but he hid it.
“Do you ever get tired of playing the fool?”
Sean frowned. “Who’s playing?”
“Uh-huh.” Julia used alcohol and wiped away the
red marker. “Pus? Festering?” Sean nodded. “You think there’s a splinter
in here?”
“Absolutely. I can feel it. It’s painful.”
Julia sighed and looked at her assistant. “Leah,
can you get me an extraction tray, extra forceps, and let Dak know that I’ll
be to help him soon?”
Sean looked around at the busy medical bay. All the
staff was on duty meeting the crisis. “Where is Kyle?”
Julia made a grateful noise in her throat when her
tray was set down. Opening it, she quickly sterilized Sean’s finger and placed
it in a sterilized field. “He’s in a special quarantine.”
“Quarantine? He’s not diseased is he?”
Sean’s face flushed. “Did he catch the dreaded love bug?” Dammit! Not
fair. It was his frickin’ turn!
Julia stared at Sean. “Are you on drugs?”
“What? No! Only what you’ve given me.” Sean
looked around. “What happened to Kyle?”
“His shields fractured when he was on the planet.
All those deaths. Those people….”
Sean went quiet. “I know. He had problems during
the war.” Julia’s sharp look made Sean clarify. “The first war, not the
last one. It took him years to regain control. He lost his family because of his
broken shields.”
“I heard that it could happen. I was surprised to
see him on duty on a warship.”
“Shiva wasn’t always a warship. It was at
first, but Alex brought her out of the first war, and we turned her into a
really good salvage business.” Sean paused. He missed his old life. He was
more than happy to remove the evil Khivar from power and the Universe, but it
was three years later, and they were still acting as a warship for the New Royal
Federation. It wasn’t what he saw as his life.
“I heard the stories. You—all of you, and the Shiva
are a legend.” Sean’s head puffed up at that. “I know what you mean,
though. I was hoping that life would find a balance, come back to something
resembling normal.”
Sean winced as she numbed up his finger. “What are
you doing?”
“Probing for the splinter. I can’t find it.”
Julia avoided looking at Sean. She might burst out laughing.
“Like cut my finger open?” Sean asked. His voice
suddenly not so sure.
“I can’t find it. This is the next step.” Sean
quickly ripped his hand out of the sterilized field before the laser scalpel
could cut into his finger.
“Actually, you must have found it. I feel
better.”
“You can’t! I didn’t…”
“No, really.” Sean smiled big. “See? All
better!”
“Hmm, well at least let me put a dressing on
it.” Julia looked at him. She was tempted to ask him if he wanted a big or
small dressing. Forget it. She read him as a big dressing man.
“No cutting?”
“No cutting.”
Sean gave her back his hand. She quickly dressed the
slight area that she had probed. “So can I check in on Kyle?”
“He’s in a protective environment, but I can let
you look in if you like.”
“I do.” Sean watched her closely, or
specifically the scalpel. “Kyle, he’s more than family, you know?”
Julia looked up, her eyes bleak. “I know.” She
knew everything about family, about people that you found that were more than
family. She understood having a sister. Standing up, she was tempted to offer
him a candy or balloon. “All done. So I need to get back to real—um, other
patients.”
She watched Sean walk off with a huge smile on his
face and a large bandage on his finger, heading to see Kyle. She understood a
lot. Kyle’s illness made Sean forget to ask her out on a date. Julia easily
put her latest excuse away for the next time.
~~~
“Alive?” Michael frowned at his wife. “You
want to explain that, Princess?”
“Death. Some believe it’s not the end, but
rather the beginning. If all matter is conserved, and the Universe has a limited
amount of matter and energy, then it can neither be created nor destroyed. That
means that in a finite manner, matter must move on to another form. So perhaps
“Like Alex and Eoin?”
“Yes.” Maria looked at Max. “I think I need to
go home to
“We need to find these Raiders, Maria.” Max
said.
“I know. I can take the Zephyr. I’ll
catch up.”
“We’ll see.” Max avoided looking at Michael.
They would work it out, but he was sure that if Maria left the Shiva,
then Michael would go with her. “First we need to figure out this picture. I
admit that this entire situation is bothering me. Something smells foul.”
“Agreed,” said Michael. This space was creeping
him out, and it took a lot to creep him.
Max looked over at the twins. Isabel had gone over
and was washing them down, trying to de-stick them.
“Boys, can Daddy ask you a question?” The little
bodies wiggled past their mother, happy to do anything other than a undergo
washing. Washing was bad. Max held out the picture of the serpents. “Did one
of you draw this?”
Both boys shook their heads no.
Max stroked his scar. “Alex?” Alex shook his
head no, his eyes big and round. “Mikey?” Max’s eyes narrowed. It had to
be Mikey, but Mikey shook his head no as well. Max sighed. “Neither of you. So
I don’t suppose you know who did draw it?”
Both boys nodded enthusiastically.
“Good!” Max said. Now they were getting
somewhere. “Mikey, who drew this nice picture?”
“Eoin. He’s real good!” Said Mikey, and his
brother’s voice piped up echoing his words. “Real good.”