The Border Runners Pt 02

THE BORDER RUNNERS PART TWO

II: ZERO HOUR

THE OTHER WORLD, DEEP SPACE,

UNKNOWN STARS CLUSTER,

336 B.C.E.

Mother!... I'm not really here!...

Air Marshall Segan S. Mardurk's mind cried in numbed horror, his gaping mouth screaming wordlessly into his wet oxygen mask as the tremendous fire he had unwittingly set off in space overtook him. The hard radiation-filled shock waves overturned and battered like an enraged beast at the magnificent but helpless starfighter -- trying to rip the pride of the Nokkians apart like it was so much paper.

Fire broke out all around him in the assault craft's flight cabin. An astro-navigational computer's screen exploded, all his scanners went black. Smoke instead of oxygen streamed into his face-mask. He pressed a tiny knob on the helmet's ear level and the visor plate rose up and he was tearing out the oxygen tube from its connection in his head gear. He stared distraughtly out through the pilot side window to his left, then through the right one, and then for a seemingly long minute out through the wide, transparent metal alloy forward windshields...The rapidly settling blackness of space behind and ahead of his craft was a sight that quickly dried his throat...

In the background, seen through the cockpit windows, the inky black expanse of space was a serenely beautiful, all-encompassing sea of diamond-studded midnight blackness: the multitudes of tiny, bright diamonds being distant star clusters --

He coughed fitfully, tears already snaking down his cheeks. He gulped in air hungrily and found that he had a big problem. The cabin was filled with gases -- oxygen, hydrogen sulphide, helium, hydrogen...He slammed down the face-plate just as something caught fire on the left control console. With an ominous whoosh the air all around him ignited and caught fire. He felt the heat...then couldn't believe it as he saw his suit buckling all about his body. The flight cabin was an inferno now. His suit creased, smoldered and caught fire. Strangely, he felt no pain. He only knew he was dying...

...But...but,...I couldn't just die?! He cried mentally, desperately. What about my mission? My crowning success... The last of the Exvetron race I had sent on off the Prison Planet?...The gung-ho kid!...Dear Lock...He forbade me to die!

The scream -- of pain, realization or frustration, no one could tell -- built up from all parts of his body and exploded with soul-wrenching intensity out of his wide-open mouth, as his internal universe ignited with a bright white glare of pain...As if ignoring his agony, a blue and round translucent crystal ball -- the size of a ball-bearing -- bounced on the metal-deck floor and rolled slowly along the floor of the bottom left console. Still in sight, it began to blink. With sudden horror Segan recognized it as one of the three component charges of another of his Venom grenade secured snugly inside his suit's armpit pouches; and now escaped out of its sausage pod by means of what can only be termed a dubious miracle...

Internal fire roiled inside it in lilac incandescence. Another coldly burning fire-crystal bounced out and joined the first, glowing even brighter than its mate. Segan gasped aloud...He was not going to make it --

A shimmering, violent gale, rapidly turning to a spinning whirlwind impregnated with golden motes of dust, crashed through the compact cabin from starboard to port. And time stood still; noticed by the bizarre effects of the dancing lights on Segan's suit breast-plates and wrist-shields, now stopped in mid-blink; and Segan's sudden freezing into statue-stillness...

The aliens appeared one by one like spectral ghosts in the confined space of the flight compartment. In full-moon circle, distributed on the walls, the floor and the roof, the partially lizard-bodied, distinctly humanoid beings crouched in rings of light at their feet -- defying gravity, artificial or not, as the deck had rolled through 180 degrees with the space-fighter's spin.

In motion as if through molasses, a scion of a warrior was chosen by the apparent leader by a targeting beam of infra-red light. Cutting through space and time with a breezy economy of effort, the chosen teleported the short distance from its upside-down crouch on the roof -- as the assault craft rolled level again -- to its leader's position just astride the stilled, venomously glowing, tiny feral bomb; its dreadlocks-like helmet sensors waving about its saurian-simian face-shield like live snakes; its metal alloy suit heavy gold in places...

The armor suit helmet, in creeping patches of matter-disintegrating light, dematerialized into thin, stilled-flames-bathed air. The face that was revealed was simply an organic, animated version of the helmet's face-shield --

Their grungy, webbed-in-places armored suits gave the general impression that if they had come from a battleship, it must be one of ancient make -- probably a million years old: interiors dust-filled, cobwebs-matted in large sections; heavily armored surface badly pitted and scarred by numerous ancient battles and meteorite strikes. And now, drastically short on crew...no awards for the guesswork, for the huge, awesome, ancient battleship was within a stone's throw of the stricken smaller craft...It was the last of the superships of the once-mighty Xofan battle fleet; come to rescue one of its own: Segan actually being the last surviving son of the long believed dead captain of the lost flagship.

They peered at his terrified face in the transparent helmet face-plate, and the Captain ordered the indentured volunteer to adjust something on Segan's right wrist-shield. That executed, the Captain said something in their alien, snake-tongue-like language -- which, transcribed, would be something in the order of:

"SSGOOD SJOURNEYS," and he was offering an anointing at the same time: a pointing motion with a long-talonned finger -- scratching the indentured one deeply. The talon sheathed itself, leaving a golden dot behind on the scion's broad forehead. The golden dot quickly spread into the form of a red, flaming, alien-bodied spider; just as the others stepped back into the central whorls of their strangely smoky transporter beams -- having had to previously step away from its bull's eye lighted region to avoid a premature exit -- and were gone, each leaving in their wake a crackle of brush lightning.

By this time, the volunteer -- for an as yet unclear mission -- on completing his transformation had become Segan's exact look-alike. Then, in creeping patches of solidifying light, materializing seemingly out of the ether, its suit helmet closed in stages about its new face. It walked deliberately upright -- long claws clinking on the metal floor -- towards its still smoking cylindrical column of a transporter beam...The clone hesitated for a moment, hissed a deep sigh and went back towards Sango; by this time the claws-through-the boots had gone completely, assimilated into each foot...The clone splayed out its gloved fingers, looming it over Segan's eyes and temple inside the helmet:

"Remember not what your eyes have seen of us," its voice boomed, and then it rapidly performed the post-hypnotic spell pattern motions and words. It teleported back into the cylinder beams just as the craft around it began to shudder. With another brush discharge of webbed lightning it was gone; all the other rings and columns faded with it.

A shimmering, violent gale -- rapidly turning into a broad whirlwind impregnated with golden motes of dust -- crashed into and through the compact flight compartment -- this time from portside to starboard of the craft... And time jolted once more into motion; indicated by the continued blinking of lights on Segan's helmet, combined body armor and spacesuit, central consoles and his sudden reanimation.

Segan took another shallow indrawn gasp of thin, hot air. His mind, now in the grip of panicked terror, collapsed in on itself -- rewound in picturesque, blue-red accusing rage, the past few hours, days and nights of dire events that the body had made it go through..

I: ZERO HOUR AGAIN!

The Other World, Deep Space,

Unknown Stars Cluster,

336 B.C.E.

Mother...

The cosmonaut, battling off waves of dread for so long now, was two hours long since dead without even knowing it... His name was Segan Sango, half demigod and son of the Moor god, Lord Marduk. Only the rasp of his panting breaths gave a vestige of what had gone by, or what was shortly to come...

The flash of fire from the last of the ferally armed Vanquisher vessels he had destroyed in his bid for escape returned to center at the screen in the back of his mind. His breathing, his strength, surging back, pushing away the fear and the fatigue that had threatened to swamp him as death knocked on his front door thrice, back there. His eyes darted at the scanners. All okay. He was alright. Nothing to fear...

He was fully nine feet, two and a half inches tall; lanky, bulging-muscled and wearing a humanoid, lizard-form suit with green, alien eyes--specks of blue in them that passed for irises.... Two whip-like, tail-like, very restless and sensitive organs on the suit's opposing hips whipped about around him. His dark, ebony-black face could clearly be seen behind the transparent face-plate of his fantastic uniform suit. The strong jawline, the clear white-purple irises, the full, sensuous red llps, the arrogant, straight nose, the close-cropped blue beard were trademarks of his strong lineage and personality. His battle suit was not the standard Moorian issue, but a one-piece heavy-nano body armor with a mass of unknown runes designed into the upper, close-fitting torso section; with four prominent, shimmering blue crystals--hemispheres that were arranged in a spaced, rectangular, pattern extending from the broad chest to the stomach.

The crystal balls reached from the surface matrix of the armor suit -- in through the electronic and mechanoid cortex of the fantastic suit -- to touch the Exgal nanoskin-suit; effectively fusing with the zillions of microcircuits that crisscrossed the internal structure and energy sources of the still largely unknown capabilities of the skin armor... His boots were the standard plasti-steel suit-pack system-boots equipped with jet-lift mini-thrusters. A flowing, luxuriant sheen of a red cloak with the lightning, yellow S in an inverted pentagon emblem of his family name emblazoned in the middle of the plastic fiber-cloth -- was bunched up at the small of his back. His helmet's multi-sensor tendrils was as abundant as his own hair (The more sensor leads, the greater the warrior -- telling almost sportingly of the importance of the wearer as a soldier of the Moorian Space Forces), bearing also the same color --a yellow gold -- springing from slots in his ear region; just beneath the bird wings shaped, back-thrusting, gray-feathered ridged metal form of the helmet's super-lightning force-field generators. The total effect made him look what he actually was -- a truly vital soldier.

Amazing!, he thought, with a scowl on his craggy face -- wonderingly scanning through the all-aspect viewscreens that showed him the commotion he was causing in the space all about him with his hyperdrive generators. Sheer hell!... Raped, ravished, bastardized and then cast violently aside, the eye-hurting, green, red and white flaring, curling-in-upon-itself whorls of colored tenuous gases and cosmic dust trailed the vagrant path of the ship as it dashed through space like a callously uncaring, incandescent tadpole. For about twenty million miles the densely packed, nova-induced particles flared, sped and glared -- hesitantly and then frantically pursuing the indecently voluptuous shape of the warcraft; colliding with quintillions of packets of photons, unending mountains of gravitic fields and white matter that persisted in these regions of intergalactic space. Raping them all, it strove onwards in its bid for escape.

He sighed deeply and switched on the viewscreens which gave him the exterior view of space he was hurtling through.

In front of the suggestively sexy, saucer-shaped, metallic playboy of the void, an indented cone of barely discernible gravitic field preceded the craft: towing and pushing it at immense velocities; thus creating a sheath of gargantuan energy fields that protected the cosmic bruiser -- not only from the outraged energies counteracting it from allspace, but also from the vagaries of light, energy, mass, space, time and universal cogs. The warcraft plunged on, mercifully shedding rampant energy that in turn swirled to every direction of his hurtling warcraft. For another two hundred million miles the collision of tortured particles writhed, trailing his blazing path like a comet's. Somewhere inside the craft, even at this distance of a hundred meters away, the steady hum of the faster-than-light particle injection hyperdrive generators could be distinctly heard.

He sighed deeply again, feeling the lethargy slowly creeping into his body. But now he didn't care. He was free. And with that thought -- softly whispering -- came the grand realization.

He was alive!

He smiled. He truly felt like a god now. Immortal. Omnipotent. Omniscient. He lifted his two fists in a gesture of self-congratulation. He had the ability to see, to reach, to conquer... Diminishing speed.

Mother of god...!

Something going wrong with his ship's huge anti-gravity synthesizers -- automatically noticed by the indicator that read the pull of the nearby stars on his spacecraft. He switched autopilot control on the gravity drives, switched off the light drives and delegated control of the ship to the small, ion drive autopilot; a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence computer. He sighed yet again as his craft further decelerated. Then his proximity sensor blipped.

The AI computer, reading the astrogator screen in alliance with the laser/radar imaging cameras, gave him the information that the graviton anomaly was a huge disc, distance more than three hundred light minutes away.

He cancelled out the alert states of his ship's armament just as the IFF -- Identity Friend or Foe -- radar sensor told him the ship was one of his planet's superships; a scientific vessel whose identity was unknown up till now. His own identity was to remain secret, no matter what. Omen had impressed that vividly to him after his main mission briefing. Under no circumstance reveal yourself... He smiled again. He would not. He was a...a... Try as hard as he could, he could not reverse his partially electronically blanked-out memory. Then the blaze of fire as the alien terminator crafts vaporized under the brute fire force of his ship's guns came again. Then, like a warm susurration, the memories spilled into his consciousness.

Sango...his family name, was Sango. Segan was his given name. House of Marduk. Rebels, Prison Planet, civil war, saboteur mission... Mission?... Mission!

By the God of War!...

He hadn't crosschecked his sensors!.. He had been caught off-guard like a rookie on his first mission. The IFF could have been damaged during the duel. The thing out there could be an enemy vessel, ready to blast him to smithereens. Time to war again. No...He was tired...He needed a plan. He cancelled out the alert states of his weapons systems, realizing that he had unconsciously switched it on again.

Target distance... His computers ticked off the distances. Estimated time of arrival -- ETA -- two hours. He tensed, then relaxed as he settled in for the long wait.

The memory of the events in the Prison Planet lingered in the screen at the back of his mind as the gap closed. The pain in his guts intensified, then he tore away from the memory. Others came to replace it. The automatic pilot further decreased the speed of his hurtling warcraft as he made the call to seek permission to come in for a docking. Slowly, he reached for the knob on the torso of his semi-armored uniform spacesuit that changed the configuration and shade of his highly prized officer's light armor. He twisted gently. The configuration of the runes on his body-spanning metaplastic outer-layer armor morphed. The color of the spacesuit body piece, helmet and visor-plate changed from deep green to blue.

The immense ship, THE BULLION, as its traffic control identified it, belonged to the government of his planet -- and if the control crew found out that he was a rebel soldier under the seceding Omen, he had his stars to thank if he got out of the ship with his butt intact... The Prince Omen had been fighting against his father for over a decade now: for the liberation of their people; who were ultimately slaves to the terror of the varied weapons of subjugation and huge budgets of conquests the Emperorship swallowed in his bid for ultimate space power.

That meant less food for the masses, more work and low life expectancy; this compounded by the miserable wages the Throne handed the proletariat. There seemed no end in sight to the civil war as both sides fought ferociously for its own cause. One day, during a lull in the battles to take one of the Throne's big cities, Omen had called him off the warfronts to his vast, secret headquarters. Inside his regal office the great lord had commended his bravery and skill in war. Omen had then asked him to do their cause one last favor, and if he could return -- Omen had made it plain to him that all the other great lords of his elite unit who had been sent on the same mission in the past, had never returned -- he would not need to fight in the warfronts again. If he accomplishes the mission, he would be promoted; his allowances increased a hundredfold; good accommodation would be provided him; three of the best protectors in his Vector Squad would be his bodyguards, if he so wished... The offers seemed endless. Even going as high as being granted a permanent seat as a senator on the Board of Advisors -- the most prestigious posts after the seat of the Prince himself in the rebel enclave.

He was sent to aid the Venamon -- a half-antimatter race of angel-like humanoids trapped by unknown means -- to escape the prison planet. The Prison Planet: A rogue world that rove from galaxy to galaxy, somehow escaping the gravity well and clutches of nearby stars as it virtually flashed through star clusters and solar systems. Banded by a physical, enclosing wall of anti-energy that was more effective than a mere gargantuan cage in that it progressively drained off shielded antimatter energy from the fugitive race living on it. Captives on a world of their choosing, visitors had therefore nicknamed it The Prison Planet...

That mission almost killed him!

He had been caught, only to be kept for the sport of a female she-beast. Revulsion filled the pit of his stomach as he remembered what the she-monster had done to him. He shook the thoughts out of his head and wondered how Omen and the others were faring... Then he made his reply to the calling Throne traffic control fleet-ship officer. He informed the female controller through Guard fleet-ship laser frequencies that he was a scout returning from the distant Latvian Solar Imperium; where, in the course of his duties, he had been ambushed and nearly annihilated. The female controller confirmed their detection of a violent aurora of fiery lights from the region of space he was coming from, and that they were looking forward to receiving him, if he could properly identify himself: Name, rank, unit, and number. If possible, a vidscan of himself...

He reported a faked malfunction: his videocom screen was out of order; he would need repairs on that, as well as immediate refueling of his ship. He also needed some food, too -- just enough to last him the rest of the way home. And would they please hurry it up, as he had some urgent mission reports to deliver to the Imperial Fleet Headquarters?