Bio-Weapon

Sometime later Lycon’s intersystem shuttle sniffed through the Bangladesh’s debris, which maintained their velocity and heading. Scanners searched the junk for signs of life.

Lycon had studied the shock trooper transmissions sent from the Bangladesh, at least before it had been destroyed. Those who had stormed aboard the beamship had clearly taken losses. Highborn training had given them strict procedures for dead or dying shock troopers. Such individuals were to be injected with Suspend and battlesuited with fully charged tanks and their vents opened to ship air. When the beamship had been destroyed, the air vents would have automatically closed and the battlesuit would have switched to tank-air. Those suits were the best in the Solar System, able to take incredible damage. Lycon’s hope was that a few such premen had survived the nuclear explosions. He needed live shock troopers as examples of the success of his idea.

A day’s search garnered exactly nothing.

To go home empty-handed meant at the very best that he would become a trainer of the Neutraloids. Lycon loathed the idea. “Increase the range of our circuits,” he ordered.

“At once,” said the training marshal acting as pilot.

They searched a second day and then a third. On the fourth day, the pilot turned to Lycon.

“I’m picking up a distress call.”

Lycon lurched to the com-board.

“I can’t make anything out of it,” said the pilot.

“Go there,” said Lycon.

“Are you certain?”

Lycon laughed harshly. “I grasp at straws because we have nothing else.”

The pilot set course for the weak distress call.

33.

First, Marten saw the braking jets, a bright smear in the darkness of space. Then Marten watched the shuttle visibly grow from a dot to that of a discernable spacecraft.

A beard covered his face and his muscles had already grown slack. He couldn’t describe his emotion. Birth was indescribable. To float alone in space, drifting, hopeless, rethinking conversations and actions repeatedly, it was a hellish experience. He shuddered and made a sound that many do after crying for a long, long time. He would walk again, talk to people, eat, think, and have plans, hopes and dreams, and fight.

He tried to concentrate. Training Master Lycon came. Lycon was Highborn. The last time they had spoken Lycon had been unhappy with him. Marten couldn’t marshal his thoughts. Instead, he wiped tears from his cheeks. Oh how he wanted to live.

“But not on their terms,” he croaked.

He sipped water from his bottle and shook his head. The stirrings of hatred returned. To be born afresh, that’s what he experienced. Life! What an incredible word it was. What a gift to breathe, play, eat and meet women. Life!

“Hurry up,” he whispered, his heart beginning to race.

34.

The shuttle eased beside the tiny life-pod, dwarfing it, belittling its crudeness. An emergency tube of flexible plastic snaked from the shuttle and glued over the pod’s airlock. Soon air was pumped into the tube. After a time the pod’s hatch slid up and Marten Kluge floated an inert Omi toward the shuttle.

Marten peered at the vastness of space surrounding him. He used the plastic railing attached to the inner tube, pushing Omi and pulling himself. The shuttle airlock opened and Lycon waited at the end, his angular face impassive, but his strange energetic eyes filled with questions and it seemed to Marten traces of wonder.

As Marten pushed Omi to Lycon, the powerful Highborn nodded. Marten nodded back as one would to an equal. They entered the shuttle’s airlock. As the inner hatch opened, Lycon removed his vacc helmet.

“He has a plasma burn on his chest,” Marten told a waiting Highborn, a seven-foot fellow with a medical tag on his shirt. “If you have any medical facilities—”

“We do,” said Lycon.

“Good,” Marten said. He took Omi from Lycon and pushed him to the other Highborn. “Let’s get him hooked in and brought around.”

The two Highborn exchanged glances. “Yes, a good idea,” Lycon said a moment later. Together the three of them floated Omi to the medical center. There the second Highborn took over, stripping Omi of his filthy clothes, tsking at the sight of the ugly plasma burn across his chest and then securing him into the medical cradle. Drugs, blood and special concentrates surged through the attached tubes and for the first time in weeks Omi’s body quivered.

The Highborn checked his medscanner. Then he turned it on Marten, sweeping it over him. To Lycon he said, “He should shower, change into clean clothes and take an injection I’ll prepare.”

Lycon turned to Marten.

“I heard him,” Marten said. “Just point the way.”

Lycon hesitated before pointing toward a hatch.

* * *

Apparent gravity returned to the shuttle as it accelerated at one-G for Earth. Marten relaxed in a chair, sipping coffee. He wore a clean jumpsuit with the shock trooper skull-patch on his right pectoral and left shoulder. The beard was gone and his hair cut to the short buzz of blond hair. He was thinner, with his cheeks gaunt. His eyes had changed. They were hooded, guarded, wary. It seemed too as if part of him still floated alone in space, as if not all of him had returned to the land of the living.

The exercise room had padded walls and ceiling and several isometric machines. Lycon sat across from Marten. The seven-foot Highborn, with his legs crossed, doodled with a stylus on a portable comp-screen.

A door opened and the Highborn acting as medical officer poked his head in and reported to Lycon. “It looks like it will be a full recovery.”

“When can I talk to him?” asked Marten.

The Highborn scowled, although he said, “Two days, two and a half at the most.”

“Thanks. I appreciate what you’ve done.”

The Highborn lifted his eyebrows before he withdrew, closing the hatch behind him.

“Your experience was no doubt horrifying,” said Lycon. “But you must use correct protocol procedures when addressing us.”

Marten smiled, but more the way a gang leader would to a cop than with any genuine pleasure. “Yes, Highborn,” he said, saluting him with the coffee cup.

Lycon frowned. Then he sat a little straighter and tapped the tip of the stylus on the portable comp-screen. “I’m curious how Omi and you found yourself in such a makeshift escape pod.”

Marten crossed his legs and leaned back in his chair. He didn’t stare at the Highborn. Rather, he picked a point on the wall to examine.

“The Bangladesh’s pods had already been jettisoned, Highborn.”

“Yes. But how did you come to make your spacecraft?”

“From an intense desire to leave the beamship, Highborn.”

“You knew that the missiles were coming?”