<<< PREV | FIRST | NEXT >>>

Chapter 5

"It's okay, boss... It's okay..." Lautrec said, patting the fallen Synth on the shoulder desperately. "I think he was one of the invaders... He was a bad guy! He was one of Them... One of the ones planning to invade our homeworld and kill a bunch of innocent people!"

"But..." Xerian wailed. "He..."

"What the heck is his problem?" Quirk asked, dragging the corpse towards the door.

"Must I spell this out?" the jaguar snarled. "Xerian comes from a utopian society based on mutual cooperation. A world so peaceful that even mentioning violence causes him to stutter. He's never even seen death before, and now you've just blown someone's brains out right in front of him, while we were still talking to them!"

"Oh," Quirk said. "Oops. Ah. Well... Look, let me move the body away from the hideout and then I'll explain something to you about... uh... well, the facts of death."

* * *

Xerian was lying listlessly on the spare bed when Quirk returned. Lautrec had been standing guard in case the fallen protogen had been missed by their fellows, and did not look pleased when the assassin finally reappeared.

"Okay," Quirk said, adding the deceased protogen's gun to the collection in a weapons locker. "Listen, Mr. Lautrec, I'll tell you first, you'll probably be better at passing the message on to your friend when he's suitably recovered.
"But firstly, things really aren't as bad as they look. See... this ship has regeneration equipment stationed at regular intervals."

"Meaning what...?"

"Well, the guy I shot... He's still fresh. I've put him where the robots will find his body. Partly so he gets found away from the hideout but also so they'll find him quickly before his systems power down."

"...Are you saying that they can revive him? But you blew his head open!"

"Yeah! Cool, isn't it? Our cyber-implants aren't just there to look pretty."

Xerian rolled over. "...Did I hear you right?" he asked, a pleading expression on his face. "Did you say that that guy you k-killed... Might recover?"

"He should do," Quirk said brightly. "Isn't technology wonderful?"

"So if something unfortunate were to happen to you..." Lautrec said, eyeing the protogen with an evil grin and tapping a gleaming claw against his muzzle.

"Oh no no no," Quirk said hastily. "No threats, please. My combat routines might take over and then you'll be in trouble. Also, you're missing a very important point. He's crew. He's supposed to be here. He'll be revived when he's taken to the resurrection machinery. I'd be taken away and turned into a mindless drone. I'd rather not be lobotomised, thank you very much.

"You l-lobotomised him," Xerian said nastily. "Do as you would be done by..."

"Had to," Quirk said. "With a hole through his brain he's not going to remember where we are once he's been put back together. Also it'll take time for the machinery to fix that level of damage, during which time he won't be able to capture us, and they won't know where to look for us."

"Unless they have a way of tracking his position aboard ship," Lautrec pointed out. "Through his implants, perhaps...?"

"It hasn't happened yet, but it won't hurt to beef up security. I had best show you where some of the other hideouts are, too."

"And will his mind recover once he's alive again?" Xerian asked, an expression of desperate hope in his eyes.

"I've probably killed him before," Quirk said. "Like I say, most of us get backed up by the cybernetics, but the last half-hour will be missing. I suppose I could have shot his implants out too, but, well... I have my reasons. Same as why I put the body somewhere obvious."

"For a self-proclaimed assassin, that's quite a humanitarian attitude you have there," Lautrec said, looking impressed.

"Call it enlightened self-interest," Quirk said. "Think about it. Right now, I'm strictly an irritant. As long as I stay that way, they won't expend too much interest in hunting me down. Someone would get a handy bonus for taking out a thorn in the Emperor's side, but that's about it.
"But if I were to start escalating things by perma-killing the Emperor's fan club, that'll change the equation significantly. They'll make a concentrated effort to hunt me down, and I'm not ready for that.
"Yeah, maybe I've destroyed a few of his mindless drones, but if I start targetting his loyal henchmen? They'd tear the ship apart piece by piece to find me. I'll end up with my head on a pole in the Emperor's throne room, and my body stuffed into a matter converter.
"But as long as I don't play too rough, I get to keep the title of Quirk-With-His-Head-Still-On."

"So assuming you do manage to kill the Emperor, what's to stop his buddies from putting him back together?" the jaguar asked.

"If I told you that it would upset your peace-loving friend," the protogen pointed out reasonably. "Let's just say that he'll have to have a corpse for them to revive."

"So, if you have advanced medical technology here, does than mean you've had to use it yourself much?" Xerian asked, attempting to steer to topic away from Quirk's murderous plans.

"Yeah. My right arm's not original," Quirk said. "See, I was throwing a frag grenade at one of the robots and I didn't notice the low ceiling. Slammed it right into the doorframe. Lucky it didn't kill me outright I guess, but it hurt like hell and I needed a new arm and tail afterwards. I'm just glad we're modular."

"That is a handy part of our design too," the Synth admitted. "Anyway. While I'm not sure k-killing the Emperor is the best solution, he does need to be stopped somehow. But first, I have to know if 'Zuki is okay! Is there a way we can get to the stasis chambers? Or see who's there?"

"That's rather selfless of you," Quirk said. "I kind of figured that you'd want to go straight to the teleportation chamber and be beamed back down to the planet so you could warn the authorities or run away or something."

"I can't abandon my boyfriend," Xerian protested. "And yes, maybe we could rescue him and flee, but what good would that do? The authorities tried to arrest us on suspicion that poor Lautrec was somehow kidnapping people! And now I've disappeared - there's probably a warrant for our arrest on every world in the Outer Rim! Having technically evaded arrest, do you think the authorities would listen to me raving about an invisible alien spaceship kidnapping people?

"And what if they did?" the Synth continued, miserably. "What could they do against a warship filled with superior technology? If they try to evacuate everyone or broadcast a warning, what good would it do? You implied that the ship's crew understand my language from studying our broadcasts, so if they're monitoring our communication channels, it will tip them off that they've been discovered! And then they'll start the invasion immediately! And even if they didn't, even if my government somehow managed to evacuate everyone to another world in the Outer Rim, it will only be a matter of time until the ship goes there too!"

"At a pinch we could probably bail on this whole universe," Lautrec said softly. "I have an open arrangement with Bob to warp me back to Furrae if I need emergency aid that can't be provided here, or if things go bad and I have to flee. But whether Xerian would want to do that... leave his home, everything and everyone he ever knew and abandon them all to enslavement and possibly genocide by a troupe of biomechanical fluffballs..."

"I couldn't," Xerian whimpered. "Not even if we brought 'Zuki back with us... I wouldn't be able to live with myself if that happened and I'm not sure he would either! Just because we're synthetic, that doesn't make us immune to survivor's guilt!"

"That doesn't leave many options," the cyberjag said. "It boils down to... well, helping Quirk kill the Emperor is one obvious option. If we can get rid of their leader, it will become a lot easier to subdue his underlings, assuming they don't just surrender once their chain of command has been decapitated.
"Or, Quirk could take his place, assuming all that power doesn't go straight to his funny little head, of course." Quirk's visor scowled and flashed "KiLL" briefly at this remark, but he made no further comment.

"Another option I can see is surrendering, going directly to the Emperor, and pleading with him not to go ahead with the invasion. Frankly, I don't expect that to work, but it's the only plan I can see that wouldn't offend Xerian's sensibilties. And who knows? It might work."

"Fat chance," Quirk said.

"Then what does that leave?" Xerian asked, knowing that he wouldn't like the answer.

"Well, the only sure way to stop the invasion is to scuttle the ship," Lautrec said slowly. "Blow up the power plants, trigger the self-destruct mechanism, whatever. Obviously, destroying the ship will kill everyone aboard it - the Emperor, his mooks, the folks in stasis and us too, unless we can beam to the surface or take an escape shuttle or something before that happens. But it would save our worlds and the people on them. A sacrifice for the greater good."

Xerian looked horrified and Lautrec gazed back up at him unhappily, concerned that the Synth was going to have a meltdown over their predicament, but then the robotic lizard's eyes narrowed as a new thought occurred to him.

"What if we just disabled the power plants?" Xerian asked. "A hard shutdown of all the energy systems? The ship remains intact, but nothing works. No power, no invasion, right? I don't even know how he intends to do that of course, but if he has some kind of big energy weapon, that won't work. If he means to send down troops, he won't be able to do that either!"

"And we won't be able to escape," Lautrec pointed out. "They may very well be able to repair the power plants eventually, but there is also the very real possibility that it would kill all the Synths currently in stasis pods, such as 'Zuki. If we leave the ship in the dark, they are likely to leave stasis and require energy to keep themselves alive. Energy which we no longer have, nor any practical way to return all of them to the planet."

"Okay, how about this?" Xerian mused. "There is one way to tell the authorities on our world, a way they can't ignore. The ship is in orbit around our planet, right? But nobody has detected it even though we have interstellar travel. So it's being hidden while the crew carry out their evil plans."

"Ohh," Lautrec said. "If we shut down the cloaking system, an evil alien ship will suddenly appear to Space Traffic Control, and the authorities will be aware that something bad is happening. We could sabotage other things too, say part of the power systems. If we cause enough mayhem we might be able to distract the Emperor and his crew enough to rescue the captives and escape.
"At that point, our civic duty is done and it's up to our elders and betters to actually do something about the alien menace. I agree. There's no reason we should shoulder the entire burden of protecting the Outer Rim. I'm just a robot cat. Saving worlds is way above my pay grade."

"I like it," Quirk said. "It's just a holding measure until they repair the cloaking device, of course, and it will probably cause them to get serious about hunting us down. But the chaos it would cause has a definite appeal to it. And it might confuse things enough to let me get at the Emperor."