The Aftermath gt-16 Read online

  Elverda looked up from the salad taken from the hydroponic tank that Yuan had built for the crew.

  “It might be better if you didn’t know,” she said softly.

  Yuan studied the aged sculptress. Her face was seamed with years, her hair white and cut short: poorly, he thought. Yet there was strength in that imperious face, natural dignity in the firm set of her frail shoulders beneath the woven robe she wore.

  “Mr. Humphries is a bad enemy,” Yuan said, trying to keep his tone casual. “He has a long reach.”

  “And a longer memory,” said Elverda. Then she took a forkful of the salad. “Delicious. I missed fresh vegetables. We had nothing but prepackaged meals and supplement pills aboard Hunter.”

  Yuan saw that she was trying to change the subject and decided to go along with her, for the moment.

  “What were you doing on your ship?”

  She looked at him from across the little table with onyx eyes of endless depths. “Didn’t Dorn tell you?”

  “He said you were searching for dead bodies.”

  She nodded. “Mercenaries killed in the war and left to drift through space.”

  “This… person you call Dorn, his real name is Dorik Harbin.”

  “His name once was Dorik Harbin,” Elverda conceded. “But he has changed his life, his entire personality. So he’s changed his name, as well.”

  Yuan leaned back in his chair. “Do you expect me to believe that you were searching for bodies? Like a pair of ghouls?”

  “That’s what we were doing,” Elverda replied. A small smile bent her thin lips slightly. “Not like ghouls, though. More like priests. Missionaries, perhaps.”

  Feeling his brows knit in a frown that he didn’t want to display, Yuan said, “Mr. Humphries’s orders are to execute you both.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “Which brings us back to my first question: What did you do to make him so angry with you?”

  “He’s not angry. He’s afraid.”

  “Of what?”

  Elverda seemed to think about that question for a moment. Then she replied, “He’s afraid of himself, I believe.”

  Yuan picked up his napkin, started to daub his lips, but instead threw it onto the table in frustration.

  “This is getting us nowhere!”

  Elverda said nothing.

  “I want to know why Humphries is out to get you,” Yuan said, his voice rising. “If you won’t tell me, I’ll have to pry it out of Harbin.”

  “Dorn.”

  “Don’t play games with me, woman.”

  She put down her fork. “Captain Yuan, have you considered the possibility that if you knew why Humphries wants to kill us, then he might want to kill you, too?”

  Yuan blinked.

  “In fact,” Elverda went on, “I would imagine that the chances are very good that once you do kill us, Humphries will have you murdered as well.”

  Yuan’s jaw dropped open.

  ATTACK SHIP VIKING:

  COMMUNICATIONS CENTER

  Tamara Vishinsky decided that the soundproofed comm center was the best place to interrogate Dorik Harbin. The booth was small, but it was adjacent to the bridge, and once its door was shut no one could see or hear what was going on inside it. So she had Koop and the burliest of the crewmen strap Harbin firmly into the chair while she searched through the ship’s medical stores for the necessary drugs.

  Now Harbin sat in the narrow booth facing her, his arms pinned tightly, his booted feet clamped to the deck. He had not struggled against being bound; he had not resisted in any way.

  Standing in front of him, with a shelf full of hypodermic spray-guns at her side, Tamara eyed the cyborg. Harbin seemed impassive, the human half of his face as expressionless as the etched metal half.

  “Now then,” she began coolly, “do you expect me to believe that you have been wandering through the Belt looking for the bodies of mercenaries killed in the wars?”

  “That’s the truth,” said Harbin. His voice was a deep, flat and calm baritone.

  “You call yourself Dorn. Why?”

  “I am a different person from Dorik Harbin. Suicide and death are life-changing experiences.” His lips did not curve in the slightest; he gave no indication that he appreciated the irony in his statement.

  “You tried to kill yourself.”

  “And failed.”

  “When did you decide to search for the dead?”

  For the first time, he hesitated. “After another life-altering experience.”

  “What was that?”

  Harbin stared at her steadily. Tamara felt uneasy under the gaze of those eyes, one human, one artificial, both burning intently.

  “It would be better if I didn’t tell you.”

  “That’s what you said to Captain Yuan.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  She picked up one of the hyposprays. “I’m not satisfied with that answer.”

  His shoulders surged slightly against the restraining straps. Tamara reflexively flinched back, banged her hip against the booth’s bulkhead. He can’t break those straps, she told herself. Besides, there’s an armed crewman outside and all three of the bridge officers on duty.

  But Harbin seemed to relax. “I’m thinking of your welfare, not my own. What you want to know could put you in danger.”

  “Danger? How?”

  “Martin Humphries.”

  “I work for Martin Humphries,” Tamara said. “I report to him personally.”

  “I’ve met him. I’ve seen into his soul.”

  Tamara slapped the flesh side of his face. “This mystic mumbo jumbo is getting us nowhere. What was the life-altering experience you mentioned? What do you know about Martin Humphries?”

  “I know that he’s capable of murdering you and the entire crew of this ship if it suits his purposes.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  Harbin shook his head slightly, the barest movement from side to side.

  “Very well,” Tamara said, holding the spraygun before his eyes. “If you won’t tell me voluntarily…”

  “Psychotropic drugs may have unforeseen reactions with my body chemistry,” Harbin said calmly.

  “You mean pain?”

  “I mean… unforeseen. I warn you—”

  “You warn me?” She began to push up the sleeve on his human arm.

  Harbin grimaced as she held the spraygun against his bare biceps and pressed its activator button. There was a slight hiss.

  “Now then,” she said, removing the emptied cylinder from the syringe, “we’ll wait a few moments for it to take effect. And if that dosage doesn’t work, we’ll go higher. Or try something stronger.”

  Harbin’s metal chin sank to his chest. He muttered something almost too low for Tamara to understand: “Stay dead.”

  He could close his human eye but with his arms bound behind him he couldn’t reach the prosthetic eye to dial it shut. Still, the scene before him began to swirl and shift. He saw the artifact again, glowing too brightly to look at directly. An alien construct, blazing brighter than a star, burning straight into his soul.

  Tamara thought he’d passed out. She lifted his chin. The metal felt cold in her fingers. Harbin opened his eye and stared at her ferociously.

  “Still defiant?” She turned for the shelf of medications.

  “Don’t,” he warned.

  She took his word as a plea for mercy.

  “What was your second life-altering experience?” she demanded, picking up another hypospray.

  If I tell her and Humphries learns of it…

  “What made you come out here to search for dead bodies?” she demanded.

  Dorn heard her voice, but it was distorted, echoing weirdly in his mind. He tried to say, “I don’t want to hurt you,” but his tongue was too swollen and dry to get the words out.

  Tamara jammed the spraygun against his bare flesh and pressed it home. Harbin’s head snapped back; his whole body seemed to spasm, arc
hing against the straps that held him pinned to the chair.

  “Harbin,” she said sharply. “What happened that made you decide to search through the Belt? What are you really doing out here? You can’t expect me to believe—”

  He saw the artifact, looked into its molten glowing heart and saw the faces of the dead. A woman screaming as she clutched her baby to her. A harmless old man, his face distorted with the sudden realization that he was about to die. Children. Men. Women. All the people of Chrysalis, staring at him in terror. Some of them pointed at him. Some of them pleaded with him. All of them died.

  I killed them, Harbin knew. And before them, years and years before. The people of the village where he’d grown up. Burn their homes. Shoot them as they come running out, in flames. Kill them all. All.

  Tamara saw that he was drifting into unconsciousness. She slapped him again, harder.

  “What made you change your name?”

  “The artifact.” His voice seemed to come from a million kilometers away.

  “Artifact? What artifact?”

  “Alien. Humphries saw it. Went insane.”

  “Martin Humphries? Alien artifact?” She was suddenly breathless. “Where? When?”

  He smiled: a strange, twisted, brutal smile. “Now I’ve killed you, too.”

  “Talk sense, damn you!”

  I am Dorik Harbin, he said to himself. I have killed thousands. I am death.

  He growled like a feral beast, looking up at her, both eyes glaring. His mechanical arm yanked free of the restraints, popping the straps like ribbons of straw. Tamara backed away, hit the bulkhead, turned in blind panic and fumbled with the locked door.

  Harbin rose to his feet, pulled his boots from the floor clamps and grabbed her by the hair with his human hand. She screamed uselessly in the soundproof chamber.

  His face mere centimeters from hers, its human half twisted into a mask of fury, he snarled, “You’ve unleashed the monster.”

  He threw her against the chair. With his prosthetic arm he smashed the door of the booth open, knocking the startled guard on the other side halfway across the bridge. Harbin stepped through the suddenly open doorway. The three officers on the bridge jumped to their feet. He grabbed the nearest one by the jaw and lifted him off his feet; bones snapped audibly and the man screeched in agony. Throwing him to the floor, Harbin saw the half-stunned guard on the deck groping for the pistol in his holster.

  Harbin turned toward the guard, who pulled the laser pistol free and fired squarely at his chest. The laser pulse burned through Harbin’s shirt and splashed off the metal of his torso. The fabric of the shirt smoldered as Harbin leaped on the guard like a pouncing lion, ripped the gun from his hand and flung it across the bridge. He took a handful of the guard’s hair and bashed his head against the deck plates.

  On his feet again, he pounded the control console. Metal bent, glass shattered. He reached for the woman standing frozen in shock, tossed her across the bridge, grabbed the next man by the shoulder and smashed his face into the control console. Blood spurted. He ripped the command chair out of its deck clasps and threw it against the main display screen. All in a blur of raging power.

  Tamara staggered to the ruptured door of the comm booth, her eyes wide, her jaw slack.

  “You!” Harbin shouted, pointing at her with his human arm. “You!”

  She froze, hands gripping the doorway’s sides. For an instant no one moved, no one made a sound. Then Harbin turned and punched the wall panel that controlled the hatch that led off the bridge. The hatch slid smoothly open and he ducked through and lurched down the passageway, leaving the bridge in a shambles, its officers stunned and bleeding.

  * * *

  Kao Yuan had holed up in his quarters. He wanted no part of Tamara’s interrogation of their prisoner. My prisoner, he reminded himself. But she’s got the upper hand. She reports straight to Humphries himself. I’m just the captain of this ship, the commander of this little task force. She probably sleeps with Humphries when she’s back at headquarters.

  He heard a muffled roar, then thumps and heavy banging and screams of agony. Yuan jumped out of his bunk and slid his door open just as Harbin came boiling up the passageway from the bridge.

  He managed to say, “Hey!” before Harbin whacked him on the forehead with the heel of his human hand, knocking Yuan backwards to crash painfully into his bunk and slide to the deck.

  His head spinning, Yuan pulled himself to his feet and stumbled to the bridge. It was a disaster area: consoles smashed, officers on their knees groaning and bleeding. He ripped my command chair out of the fucking deck! Yuan screamed silently.

  “He’s gone amok!” Tamara gasped, staggering to him and collapsing into his arms.

  Yuan couldn’t suppress a grim smile of satisfaction.

  He helped her to one of the still functional chairs, then leaned on the intercom button. “General alert! General alert! Our prisoner is loose and extremely dangerous. Arm yourselves and hunt him down. Use whatever force necessary to subdue him. I repeat, he is extremely dangerous! Use whatever level of force necessary to subdue him, including lethal force.”

  ATTACK SHIP VIKING:

  INFIRMARY

  They had not bothered to assign Elverda quarters of her own; she was still housed in the infirmary. From her bed she heard the captain’s frantic warning over the ship’s intercom.

  Their prisoner? she thought. He means Dorn!

  “Lethal force is authorized,” the captain was repeating. “He’s a maniac! Don’t take any chances with him!”

  Elverda got up from the bed. She had been drowsing but now she was entirely awake, alert, alarmed. They’ll kill him, she realized. God knows what’s happened.

  Pulling her robe from the closet by the bed, Elverda rushed out into the passageway. It was empty and silent.

  What’s happened? she wondered. What did they do to him?

  The captain ought to know, she reasoned. He’d be up on the bridge, most likely. She headed toward the bridge, using the maps displayed on the wall screens along the passageways. Crewmen ran past her, strapping holsters to their hips, their faces strained with apprehension. They ignored her as they raced down the passageway.

  When she got to the bridge, she found Captain Yuan standing in the midst of chaos. Equipment was smashed, crew members were writhing on the floor with others bending over them, spraying bandages on them. Koop was tenderly lifting one of the women officers to a sitting position, she saw.

  “Captain,” Elverda called, stepping across shattered shards of glass and plastic toward him.

  “Get back in the infirmary,” Yuan snapped. “We’ve got a madman on our hands.”

  “Don’t hurt him,” Elverda pleaded.

  “Don’t hurt him?” Yuan spread his arms in a broad, sweeping gesture. “Look what’s he’s done here!”

  “What did you do to him?”

  The captain glanced at a dark-haired woman sitting huddled on one of the serviceable chairs. She looked pale with shock.

  “He’s hiding somewhere on my ship. We’ve got to catch him before he does more damage. Before he kills somebody.”

  “Let me go to him,” Elverda said. “I can talk to him, calm him down.”

  “He’s insane,” said the dark-haired woman. “A homicidal maniac.”

  Elverda hated her instantaneously. “Did he kill anyone?”

  “Not because he didn’t try.”

  “He could have snapped your neck like a twig,” Elverda said. “You must have done something to set him off.”

  “Those damned drugs,” Yuan muttered.

  “Drugs? Madre de dios, you didn’t give him drugs, did you?”

  Again Yuan looked toward the dark-haired woman. She would not meet his eyes.

  “I’ve got to find him before one of your crew kills him,” she said, heading back toward the hatch.

  “Or before he kills one of my crew, more likely,” Yuan shouted after her.

  * * *


  Dorn sat hunched on the deck plates next to the thrumming power generator, his head sunk in his hands.

  How close to the surface lurks the beast, he was saying to himself, over and over. How close. How close.

  Just beneath the surface lies the monster. You thought you’d buried him deep, but the drugs brought him back. One little dose and all your discipline cracked like an eggshell.

  He looked up bleakly, seeing nothing but his own misery.

  Was it really the drugs? Maybe that was just an excuse, a justification to allow the monster out of his cage.

  It felt good to be free! He shuddered at the realization of it. It felt good to smash and rage and let the fury boil out. To scatter them. To break their bones. To see the terror on their faces.

  He pounded both his fists on the metal deck plates. I’ll never be free of him! I’ll never be rid of the beast. He wanted to cry but he had no tears.

  He knew what he should do. Get to your feet, go out and meet them. Let them shoot you. Finish it, once and for all.

  But something within him held him fast. A mocking voice in his head laughed bitterly. For all your talk of death, you cling to your miserable life. You know you deserve to die, but you’re not willing to face it. Not again. Once was enough for you. Beneath all the fury and violence is the ultimate cowardice.

  I killed myself once, he said to the voice. I tried to atone. They wouldn’t let me die. They wouldn’t let me pay for my crimes. They want men like me. They need killers in their employ.

  Unbidden, a quatrain of Khayyam came to his mind:

  Up from Earth’s Centre through the Seventh Gate

  I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate,

  And many Knots unravel’d by the Road;

  But not the Knot of Human Death and Fate.

  Human death and fate, he repeated silently. I could have killed them. That woman who questioned me. The stupid oafs on the bridge. I could have killed them all. Maybe I did kill one or two of them. But I tried not to. Despite it all, despite the rage of the monster inside, I kept myself from deliberately killing them.