Star Force 12 Demon Star (36 page)

“That was totally unnecessary,” Marvin said.

“Is that a hurt tone?” I asked. “You’re gaining emotions, Marvin.”

“I’m capable of feeling irritation, excitement and several other basic responses,” he said. “I would classify my current state as annoyed.”

“Same here. Why’d you grab me like that? You know you can’t just grab a Riggs. We have a bad history with tentacles.”

“Are you claiming you acted out of some kind of feral instinct? I’m not sure I believe it.”

Cameras circled me. There were a lot of them.

“Well, forget it,” I said, fighting down an urge to bat away a few of the nosy cameras. “You’ve got me here inside the guts of your ship. What’s up? What have you done now that’s going to bring me to grief?”

“It’s not me who’s brought the pain this time,” Marvin said. “It’s you.”

“Quit hinting around. I hate that. What are you talking about?”

“I think you’ve gone too far. You’ve interfered in a number of star systems on this voyage, and you’ve gotten away with it every time—but this time is different. They’ve finally taken notice—or at least, one of them has.”

I rolled my eyes. Getting Marvin to the point without a preamble was rarely in the cards.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ve done something. What? Slapped down the Demons?”

“I’m not defending the Demons, it’s the delicate balance they maintained. The harmony, the synchronicity.”

Removing my helmet, I pushed back sweaty hair and took a breath of stale air.

“Are you talking about the attacks? The relentless annual attacks?”

“Yes.”

“Okay…we did change that. I doubt the Demons can mount another attack next year.”

“Exactly.”

“So what’s the problem?” I asked. “Besides the Demons themselves, who could possibly be upset by our victory?”

“The hidden being in this system. The experimenter…the observer.”

Frowning, I began walking through the ship, looking for Marvin. He wasn’t anywhere to be seen.

“Where are you?” I asked. “I see cameras, tentacles…but no brainbox, no Marvin.”

There was a pause. When the ship finally spoke again, it gave me a chill.

“I never said I was Marvin.”

-29-

Instantly, my heart began to pound. I was inside
Greyhound
, I was sure of that much. But the intelligence running this ship wasn’t calling itself Marvin anymore.

I knew I was in great danger. Scenarios swam inside my head. Maybe this
was
Marvin, but he’d finally gone completely bonkers. He’d been half-way there ever since I’d met him. Classes had been taught on Earth pondering his mental imbalances. Had the darkness of insanity finally consumed his brainbox?

There were other possibilities. Maybe an alien had subsumed him. Or maybe he’d cloned himself, and this was his evil twin.

In every case my mind quickly conjured, I was in big trouble.

“Okay,” I said, keeping my voice calm. I made no sudden moves. “You’re not calling yourself Marvin today…that’s cool. What should I call you?”

“Use my name. I’m known as Astrolyssos.”

I blinked, but didn’t otherwise react. “Astrolyssos—got it. Mind if I call you Astro for short?”

“That’s unacceptable.”

“Okay, okay…Astrolyssos it is…and hey, I’m sorry about your tentacle.”

I toed the severed limb. It had stopped squirming by now.

“You’ve been forgiven for that transgression. It’s the least of your crimes.”

“Crimes…? Okay, good enough. I’ll take all the forgiveness I can get.”

Then I snapped my gauntleted fingers suddenly. They sparked as I did so.

“You know what?” I asked. “I have to be going. Damn, I’m sorry about this Astrolyssos. I was just getting to know you, but I’ve got a critical staff meeting to attend.”

The ship didn’t say anything, so I calmly moved toward the airlock.

“You know,” I called over my shoulder, “I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize for anything we’ve done to disturb you—anything at all.”

I opened the airlock’s interior hatch. Nothing unusual happened, but I was as jumpy as a cat.

“In case you’re interested,” I said loudly, “this meeting I’m going to concerns our exit from this system. It’s time we left Trinity and headed home for Earth. I’m taking all the humans out of this star system. We’ll bother you no longer.”

Still, the ship didn’t speak. Only the cameras moved at the end of snake-like tentacles. They’d followed me to the airlock and watched carefully through the fogged-up window as I began to cycle the air out.

“It was a pleasure to meet you, sir,” I said, my eyes glued to the gauges. “Really nice…”

“Do I gather you’re attempting to return to your ship?” Astrolyssos’ voice asked inside my closed helmet. Now that I thought about it, the voice wasn’t Marvin’s after all. It was similar, but different somehow. That gave me another chill.

“Uh…yes,” I said. “Yes, I was planning on it. How else could I order my ships to leave this star system?”

“You should look outside before you open the external hatch.”

My mind froze. Slowly, I spun around. There was a tiny, triangular porthole in the exterior hatch. I stared through it.

Valiant
was gone. The Whale fleet was nowhere in sight, either. The only things I recognized were the burning ember known as Tartarus and the Demon planet, which had shrunken to a small disk. The planet now resembled Earth’s Moon when seen from deep space.

“Where are we going?” I asked quietly.

“I wanted to show you something. Something new,” Astrolyssos responded.

I tried to contact Hansen, or anyone else. They were already out of range. I hadn’t tried before because I knew I couldn’t have said anything without Astrolyssos listening in. Now, I was desperate.

But the radio failed, and even the ansible system didn’t work—could it be blocked? I supposed anything was possible for this being that had so easily captured me.

“I guess we should have a heart-to-heart chat,” I said. “Since we seem to have the time.”

“That sounds nice.”

I couldn’t recall ever having heard Marvin speak that way. If Astrolyssos
was
Marvin, my old friend was pretty far gone.

“Okay, can I ask a few questions then? You seem to know more about me than I do about you.”

“That’s most certainly true.”

“What are you, Astrolyssos?”

“I’m what you would call an Ancient.”

I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but that wasn’t it. I stared out of the portal and watched the Demon planet fade away.

“Are you still functioning?” Astrolyssos asked.

“Yes. It takes more than a shocking statement to kill me.”

“It’s a pity, but you seem to be correct.”

I drew my lips tightly against my teeth. My breathing accelerated. Was this thing going to kill me? If it really wanted to, what could I do about it?

“You’re an Ancient? This ship is an Ancient? Or do you mean the intelligence that runs the ship?”

“You’re on the right track, but both guesses are wrong. I’m not here, physically. My kind doesn’t do well in open space. We live inside stars.”

“Right…I’ve heard that theory.”

“It’s not a theory. It’s an adaptation.”

“How can a living creature evolve to live inside a star?” I asked.

“We didn’t evolve, we transformed ourselves long ago. The process is beyond your understanding. Think about it this way: anything can be made intelligent, given a restructuring of form. What are you but an organized clump of cells, each of which is formed of molecules? I’m the same, but made up of entirely different source materials.”

“Okay,” I said thoughtfully. “You’re a god-like being. A stellar inhabitant. An inorganic intelligence. Why do you care what we tiny humans are doing in this system?”

“As you may imagine, my lifespan has been immense. Unending tedium is our greatest enemy. To keep ourselves amused, we build things. Here in the star system you know as Trinity, I’ve built a laboratory and set up an experiment. It has gone on for a thousand years. I planned for it to continue for a thousand more—then you came into the system and destroyed everything.”

Suddenly, I was beginning to understand this alien. I was also becoming angry with it.

“What right do you have to manipulate the lives of others? We’re beings too, if less powerful than you are.”

Astrolyssos laughed. It was an odd sound. “What right do you have to step on an ant, kick over its anthill, or spend a day burning them with a magnifying glass? Humans consume lesser creatures without a qualm. Why should I extend you any greater courtesy?”

“We’re sentient,” I argued. “Self-aware.”

“Euphemisms for slightly higher intelligence ratings.”

“Still,” I said, “I hold that your actions here are unethical.”

“What actions in particular?”

“You’ve set three races at one another’s throats. You’ve caused them to kill one another for centuries. It’s wrong. I righted that wrong. Kill me if you want, but that will only prove my point.”

“Prove to whom?”

“Me and you. That’s good enough for me.”

“This is an interesting approach,” Astrolyssos said. “I’m pleased. You’ve already helped relieve some of my irritation and stress. I hadn’t expected this level of entertainment from a human. Perhaps your kind is smarter than I thought you were.”

“What are you going to do with me? With my crew?”

“You don’t belong here. We broke the rings connecting your part of space to this region eons ago. Somehow you escaped your cage, but I took too long to correct the matter. I will correct it now.”

There was a lot of information buried in his words. We’d always wondered who had broken the rings, who had left us in a permanent cul-de-sac of rings with broken links at the end. Apparently, it had been the original builders of those rings—the Ancients themselves.

If I ever got out of this alive, I would have a lot to tell the people back home.

“Astrolyssos,” I said, “what is it you wanted to show me?”

“Look out the bow portal.”

“From the cockpit?”

“Yes.”

After a few moments of hesitation, I crawled through Marvin’s ship to the cockpit. Marvin wasn’t a tidy robot. There was stuff everywhere. I finally made my way through the cables and junk to find the forward viewports were open.

Outside blazed the brown dwarf, Tartarus. I squinted at it. We were quite close.

Fascinated, I watched the glimmering star for a few moments, and something happened. A dark spot appeared on the surface then faded away again.

“A sunspot? That’s what you wanted me to see?”

“That wasn’t just a sunspot. Natural sunspots take days to appear and vanish.”

Thinking about it, I knew he was right.

“What was it, then?” I asked in a hoarse voice.

“That was me.”

I didn’t say anything for several seconds. The enormity of the situation was beginning to sink in. I folded my legs, took a deep breath and relaxed on the piles of tangled junk.

Normally, I would have put up a fight. But what could someone do against something like Astrolyssos—a creature the size of a sunspot? For all intents and purposes, he was a god when compared to me.

“What are you going to do, Astrolyssos?”

“Now, finally, you are asking the right question in the right tone,” he said. “I’m going to remove your species from the cosmos. Like a tick that has dug in deep, the removal will be painful but  necessary. You’re too dangerous. Too feral.”

“Just because we ended a bloody war?” I demanded. “We didn’t kill the Demons. We didn’t erase them from existence. We just defeated them. Peace will reign here now. Is that so terrible?”

“You’ve begun to wield technologies that threaten everyone around you. Really, it was the fault of the beings you refer to as the Blues. They released machines that disturbed your feral race. You learned from them, and you took to the skies yourselves. Now, you’re out of your cage, running wild. You have to be put down. Don’t take it personally. If you hadn’t come here, another of your kind would have done so eventually. I see that now.”

Breathing hard and staring into the glare of a tiny sun, my mind raced. How was I going to get out of this one? What would my dad have done in a situation like this?

The big problem, the thing that made it hard to think, was the scale of the threat. It wasn’t just me that this crazy super-being was thinking of killing. It wasn’t just my ship and my crew—it was everyone. Every living human everywhere.

What had he said? That it would be long and painful? I doubted it would hurt Astrolyssos—countless others but not him.

I was beginning to hate the Ancients, and I’d only just met them.

Astrolyssos left me at some point after that. I’m not exactly sure when he slipped away, but it must have been while I was staring out of the forward screen at the brown dwarf star he supposedly inhabited.

“Is it gone, Captain Riggs?” asked a familiar voice.

I looked around, but saw no one. “Marvin?”

“Yes.”

“Are you quite sure you’re sane, Marvin?”

“Yes.”

I chuckled. “Of course you are. What madman ever suspected the truth?”

“You’re in an odd mood, Captain.”

“I’ve just had an odd experience. The Ancient known as Astrolyssos was here. Apparently he inhabited your mind and controlled your body.”

“I know. I was aware of the entire chain of events, but I was unable to take action. It was very frustrating.”

Nodding, I sighed and stood up. My head struck a cargo net full of random junk as I did so.

“Captain Riggs?” Marvin asked after a while.

I was standing, gazing out at the star.

“What is it, Marvin?”

“Do you want to fly back to Valiant?”

“No,” I said. “I want to defeat this monster—this Ancient.”

“How do you defeat a god?”

“I don’t know, but I’m trying to come up with something right now.”

“Since Astrolyssos took over my body, I’ve been working on the same problem.”

Smiling, I nodded. “I bet you have. Any luck?”

“Some. I think I can stop the creature from hacking into my control system again. I’m embarrassed, in fact, that he was able to bypass my security, remotely log in to my person, and operate me like a cheap puppet.”