Mapped Space 1: The Antaran Codex (37 page)

My threading flashed another
proximity alert into my mind. I scooped my P-50 off the floor and turned to
fire as Izin appeared in the hatchway. He was holding his shredder pistol level
in one hand and carrying a tool kit in the other. The small amphibian
approached the Mataron curiously.

“An impressive species,” Izin
said. Considering Izin’s kin were feared across the galaxy, that was quite a
compliment. “I’m surprised you could defeat it, Captain.”

“Thanks for the vote of
confidence,” I said, holstering my gun. “What are you doing here?”

“Captain Dulon has located the vault.
As you hadn’t responded to our communications for several minutes, I came to
see what had happened to you.” Izin glanced at the dead Mataron. “He must be
carrying a signal jammer.”

“How long have we got?”

“Sixteen minutes.”

“We’re cutting it close.”

We hurried out of the bridge and
ran down the corridor towards the crew’s quarters. Even though Izin was only
two thirds my height, he had no trouble keeping up. Tamphs could sprint short
distances with amazing speed, but they tired quickly. Luckily for Izin, we
didn’t have far to go.

“Want me to slow down?” I asked.

“Why? Are your long human legs
getting tired, Captain?”

If that was tamph defensiveness,
Izin’s vocalizer gave no hint of inflection. “Just checking.”

We jogged past several open cabins
glimpsing crewmen murdered in their bunks, then turned into a side corridor
where a body lay slumped against a bulkhead. It was Jawbones. He had a charred
plasma wound in his chest and a black market neutron rifle on his lap. The charge
indicator showed he’d got one shot away before he’d died.

“I’ve heard of these weapons,”
Izin said, holstering his little shredder pistol and picking up the rifle,
turning it over curiously. It had a slender beam emitter mounted above a
cylindrical radiation chamber and was fitted with fore and aft hand grips.
Flesh destroying irradiation weapons had been banned since the twenty-ninth
century, yet a handful of companies still manufactured them in secret – anything
to earn a few extra credits.

“Could it penetrate a Mataron skin-shield?”
I asked.

“I don’t know enough about their
technology to say,” Izin said, testing the feel of the short range weapon. Originally
designed for close quarters combat in urban environments, it was ideal for enclosed
ship corridors because it killed without damaging bulkheads or sensitive ship
systems.

We hurried on past Jawbones’ body
and entered the large cabin where I’d first encountered Vargis back on Hades
City. The same chair I’d been restrained in stood in front of his polished
desk. At the far end of the room, Marie stood beside the two meter high
painting of the ancient sea battle, the
Battle
of the Albrolhos
. The painting was affixed to a hidden door which now stood
partially open.

“Where is it?” I asked, rushing
towards her.

She stood side on, facing the space
behind the painting. For a moment I wondered why she didn’t turn towards me,
then I saw the tension in her face.

“Marie?” I said, stopping short
of the painting.

Her eyes gave me a warning look,
then the thick barrel of a Mataron plasma rifle appeared from behind the
painting, aimed at her head.

“Drop your weapon.” It was the
same synthesized male voice the Mataron I’d killed on the bridge had used.

I aimed my P-50 at the painting.
“Drop yours.”

“Your weapon is ineffective
against my shield, human, whereas mine is quite deadly. I will not ask again.”
He lifted the barrel until it touched Marie’s forehead.

“Wait! Wait!” I yelled, placing my
P-50 on the deck.

Marie gave me a furious look.
“What are you doing?”

“I’m unarmed!” I yelled.

The painting and the hidden door
it was attached to swung slowly open. A snakehead, the twin of the one I’d
killed on the bridge, stood in front of a circular silver metal vault aiming
his rifle one handed.

“He’s going to kill us both!” she
said angrily.

“He wants something, or you’d
already be dead,” I said, remembering Lena’s warning that I had a weakness.
She’d read me right. I couldn’t let the snakehead kill Marie, even at the cost
of the mission.

“Open the vault,” the Mataron
ordered.

I glanced towards where Izin had
been standing, intending to ask him to get to work on the vault door, but he was
gone. I’d heard about the instinctive ability of tamphs to camouflage
themselves, but I’d never seen Izin do it. He’d vanished so fast, so silently,
the Mataron had no idea there was even a tamph – an Intruder! – on the ship.

“What are you waiting for?” the
Mataron demanded.

“This ship’s about to be
destroyed,” I said. “Why do you want it?”

“The vault will shield the Codex
from the crash.”

I looked past the snakehead to
the armored door. Its silver surface was polished to a mirror sheen, giving it
an impressively impregnable appearance.

“Why haven’t you already opened
it?”

“We couldn’t find it.”

“Why not?” Vargis had said it was
shielded, but that shouldn’t have stopped the Matarons.

“We lost contact with the Codex
as soon as it was brought aboard. That could only happen if the vault was
shielded by non-human technology.”

If anyone had the resources to
obtain alien masking technology, it was the Consortium. No wonder Vargis had
been so confident he could move the Codex without it affecting his ship.

“So how’d you find it?”

“I didn’t. She did.”

I glanced at Marie, who shrugged.
“I always was good at finding things that didn’t belong to me.”

The Mataron stepped away from the
vault door, keeping his weapon aimed at Marie’s head. He turned towards me,
seeing the quantum blade stuck in my holster’s belt. “Where did you get that?”

“What, this old thing?” I said,
drawing the Q-blade. This Mataron’s black body armor lacked a chest scabbard and
was less ornate than that worn by
Zatra
e’Ktari
.

The Mataron’s hand dropped to his
hip, touched a triangular surface, then he uttered several guttural sounds. When
there was no response, he said, “Where is the Honored one?”

“You mean the snakehead I
disemboweled on the bridge – with this?”

“You killed him? With his own
weapon?”

“Drove it right through his
spine.”

“You lie!” The Mataron swung his plasma
rifle towards me, aiming at my head. “The Black Sauria are sworn to let no brother’s
death go
unavenged
.”

“Now you tell me!”

A blue flash came from behind me
as a neutron beam streaked across the room, striking the Mataron’s chest. He
looked down surprised at the sparkling light flickering harmlessly against his
skin shield, then I flicked on the Q-blade and threw it in a single motion with
ultra-reflexed precision. The blade buried itself in the reptilian’s angular
head, stopping only when the hilt struck his translucent faceplate. The Mataron’s
knees buckled and he crumpled to the deck.

Marie looked down at the dead snakehead,
surprised. “You throw knives?”

“You should see what I can do
with laser cutters,” I said as Izin appeared in the hatchway holding Jawbones’
neutron rifle.

“In answer to your earlier
question, Captain,” Izin said, “the neutron beam is unable to penetrate Mataron
skin-shield technology.”

“But it sure makes a good
distraction.”

Izin placed the neutron rifle in
his tool box and produced a rod like scanner which he attached to the vault
door. His large blue-green eyes watched as the scanner’s display quickly drew a
schematic of the door’s locking system. “It’s an infinite probability
combination locking system.”

“Can you crack it?”

“If I developed an
infinitized
heuristic solution.”

“How long will that take?”

“Seven months,” Izin said,
removing the scanner from the vault door.

“And we have how long?”

“Nine minutes,” Izin said without
looking at any time recording device. “We could leave the Codex in there and
hope the Mataron was correct, that the vault will protect it.”

“He was guessing.” I said. “They’re
worried the Codex will survive and the TCs will find it.”

Marie pulled the Q-blade out of the
reptilian’s skull. “Will this work?”

“Only one way to find out!” I
said, taking it from her and plunging it into the vault. The Q-blade sliced effortless
through the vault door, generating a fine particle mist as it severed the
locking bolts.

Marie glanced down at the dead snakehead
at her feet. “How come he doesn’t have a knife?”

“He’s just a grunt. He doesn’t
rate one.”

“You know that just by looking at
him?”

“It’s the body armor. If he were
an officer, it’d be fancier, and he’d be wearing one of these,” I said, nodding
towards the Q-blade.

The dead snakehead was Sworn, not
Honored like the Mataron I’d killed on the bridge. The Q-blade was a ritual weapon
awarded to Honored Assassins of the Black Sauria, a sinister organization part death
cult, part secret service, part religious order. The Black Sauria was strictly
hierarchical, governed by an inflexible code of obedience and deference that embodied
the Mataron’s obsession with feuding over even the most innocuous of slights.
It was why blood feuds lasted generations and were rarely ever settled until
one side or the other was exterminated – and why we could never placate them.

“You seem to know a great deal
about Matarons, Captain,” Izin observed. “About their ships, their soldiers,
their weapons.”

“Just enough to stay out of their
way,” I said as I pulled the Q-blade from the vault door. I deactivated it and
returned it to my belt before pulling on the ponderous vault door. The circular
armored slab slid silently open, revealing a small compartment. Sitting on a
low table in the center of the vault was the Antaran Codex. I moved towards it,
then remembered how aggressively it had tried to invade my threading. “Izin,
you take it. ” Without a word, the diminutive tamph retrieved the alien device
while I picked up the Mataron plasma rifle and Izin’s tool box. “Now let’s get
the hell out of here.”

We ran back down the corridor
towards the airlock as the sound of air whistling through the corridors began
to grow.

Once we were outside the range of
the Mataron’s signal jammer, Jase’s voice sounded in our earpieces. “Skipper,
are you there?”

“I hear you.”

“The Mataron ship in the
Soberano
’s hold just took off like a
lightning bolt.”

That’s what the whistling was!
They’d left the airtight hatches open so the hole they’d cut into the ship would
decompress the
Soberano
.

“Have you got the
Soberano
turned?”

“Yeah, we’re heading for the
little moon, just like Izin planned,” Jase said unhappily.

We climbed into the airlock, then
the inner hatch irised shut, sealing us off from the growing howl of
decompression in the corridor.

“Nice trick,” Marie said,
“Running and leaving us to get sucked into space.”

“The Matarons left because we
took the Codex out of the vault,” Izin said. “Now they believe it will be
destroyed, along with us.”

“Good, that gives us a chance to
surprise them,” I said.

We cycled through into the
Lining
, then wary of the Codex’s ability
to take over the ship, Izin said, “There isn’t time to load it into the drone,
and I can’t take it to engineering.”

“Put it in the smuggler
compartment. It’s the most insulated part of the ship, but keep an eye on it.” While
Izin went to store the Codex, Marie and I ran to the flight deck. The view
screen timer clicked below one hundred seconds as we climbed onto our couches.
It was already too late to fire the Codex away in a drone, and even if we did,
the Matarons would just grab it.

“I can’t release the
Soberano
!” Jase said. “She locked onto
us when you were in the airlock, and won’t let go.”

The Mataron SI was now intent on dragging
us – and the Codex – into Vintari II! Jase could hit the docking controls with
a shock-hammer, but it would make no difference. The
Soberano
was never going to release us.

I glanced at the view screen
again. The timer was down to eighty five seconds and the sandy orb of Vintari
II and the small dark sphere of its moon were both rapidly swelling in size as
we hurtled towards them.

“I have the helm!” I announced, taking
piloting control. “Retract every second optical sensor and all the non-visuals.”

While Jase buttoned up our
sensors, I angled the vector nozzles on both engines hard to port, directing
our thrust sideways at the
Soberano
,
trying to blast our way free. All the non visual readouts vanished from the
screen and the image quality dropped noticeably as half our optical sensors
retracted.