But Miko shook off the thought. Two pilots should never link to the computer at once; the co-pilot socket was only a means of manual control. He knew the casual use of the nexus could cause gruesome results: schizophrenia, madness, coma—even death for the unwary person.
His mind flashed back to an event eleven months ago, when a small electrical fire had laid Sitty low in orbit around Wiki Perseus. The rescue team, headed by Duty Sergeant Bazon had air-locked into the ship and engaged in an emergency repair. Latching himself into the co-pilot seat, Bazon had screamed as the link had accidentally fired and the Sergeant had gone instantly insane. Miko himself had barely escaped retrociniation. He remembered only the blackout of unconsciousness, how it had saved him from certain madness. Part of his mind had been shielded from the melding process when the machine, roiling away, had been unable to distinguish between Bazon and him, and had begun splicing the two into a composite form. A grisly surprise. Fortunately, Miko had escaped the disaster. His rescuer had not fared as well...
Miko’s sensitive body-machine link could feel the tugs of Numa’s gravity and his mind jerked back to the unnerving malfunctioning of the navigational system and the excessive solar flux.
Why a spike in electromagnetic energy? An unstable sun? A deliberate irregularity set for unwary vessels? He could not refute the possibilities—particularly the latter.
A trap?
Raiders were not unknown in these parts of the Gollonus sector.
He was about to exit the sector and send in a request for back up when the sensors reported a dip again.
Puzzling.
Miko recalled his agenda leading up to the mission. Scheduled to pick up lava samples from Numa’s surface, he was following a military inquiry into a possible fuel source. Strange metal and debris had been reported orbiting the planet by the captain of the freighter Wiscon en route to Gasgolis while carrying supplies of flash ore. Funding and resources had been minimal. Only his one-man ship had been sent out on the mission into the outer-zones to investigate.
Out to port, bits of wreckage now floated. Contorted hunks of metal, unknown alloys: zirconium, lead, chromium, iridium with traces of hyperactive radium.
Why the supercharged debris? Miko was bewildered by the ominous implications. A result of a ghastly explosion that had laid a vessel to waste?
Miko engaged the hyperlock; a pair of robotic arms extended out from the hull and grabbed the nearest chunk of metal. The tortured sample was hauled into the analysis bay where Trynium computers became busy anatomizing the results.
Automatically Miko’s neck swivelled in the VR. It was in one of these moments that he detected an irregularity racing from the far side of Numa’s dead moon. A craft? The moon looked as ominous as any he seen in his patrols. And yet the gigantic orb that came hurtling toward him looked far homelier than even that, homelier than the last decoy asteroid, haven to smugglers that he had been forced to destroy. The thing looked as lifeless as Numa’s moon, whose pale face was dead, the colour of funereal ash. But nothing ‘dead’ could travel at that harrowing speed—or with that ferocity of purpose.
It was a ship all right, etched against the blackness of the Magellanic Clouds, a grotesque aberration laced with spikes and rods, huge beyond imagining—at least five hundred times the size of his own craft.
A wave of panic flooded Miko. He sent signals via mental link to Sitty’s mechanical centres—impulses to guide her thrusters to fire, but the ship’s power was gone, her weapons dysfunctional. The Orb loomed over her now like some giant jellyfish with tentacles spread, or like one of those viruses blown up millions of times under a microscope. It blocked out all light from Numa’s sun.
The ship grew monstrous; Miko was powerless to prevent its approach, or to escape the mysterious pull.
A portal opened in the titanic globe off to port; Miko felt his craft being pulled in like a lamprey’s prey.
Tractored toward the captive bay, Miko discerned from the failing viewport incomprehensible symbols writ on the superstructure.
The word ‘Zikri’ kept resounding in his brain, like some foul whale-song from deep in Earth’s faraway oceans. He assumed his VR was going haywire—‘spooky’ as the technicians called it. Or was it an alien intelligence that had spoken to him through means of telepathy?
His vessel was being commandeered whether he liked it or not.
He swallowed back the bile in his throat. A hundred thoughts coursed to his mind, emergency defences, backup plans, contingency manoeuvres. All useless. He and his craft were prisoners, of some frightful origin.
A strangled cry burst from Miko’s throat when he was hauled out of his liquid matrix by hideous tentacles. Several bizarre shapes marched him dripping before a score of neck-high creatures with bodies like giant eggs and spongy, glistening flesh. They had no distinguishing marks or face, these blackish-grey creatures, only a mottled polyp-like orifice that might have passed for a mouth. The aliens moved in synchrony, swaying like puppets in a light breeze, their bodies flexible as snakes. Their means of locomotion was not apparent, for they had no appreciable legs or limbs, aside from the tentacles streaming from their sides. How they could move was beyond him. Miko could only liken them to walking jellyfish, their outerbody peppered with an irregular mix of yellow fiber-like cilia and the larger blackish tentacles. The ‘Zikri’, as it turned out, were not interested in his explanations or pleas; rather it was the ship they wanted. The NAVO innovative technology and state-of-the-art hardware were prizes more valuable than the dusts of Trynium that powered the supercomputers of the age. These beings were freebooters—nothing more than merciless pirates, but they were
