Chapter 7

"Hyperspace exit?"

"Twenty minutes, sir!"

"Are the new hull modifications complete, Lieutenant Vark?"

The junior officer nodded, "Fully operational. The electrical charge should reduce the rate of infection by at least a third; not slow enough, but it gives us some breathing room."

Klu'koth said, "Our ships?"

Another voice said, "All present and accounted for, sir; including the Hiigaran vessels."

This was it. Their first fight against the Beast that was planned by them, and not thrust upon them. With the new modifications, and the loss of the Beast's element of surprise, this skirmish would be far more rewarding than the previous ones. Yet, Klu'koth felt that there was something more going on; something that they hadn't uncovered yet. They had sent Mimic-enabled Missile Corvettes to spy on the Somtaaw, and the last thing they'd heard from them was that they were hooking up with an Imperialist spy who they thought knew something about the Beast, and their relationship with the Taiidan. However, the information on their results was not going to reach them before they got into this next battle, so the Magistrate had decided to do what he had to do to find out for himself.

The Hiigarans were formulating some theories on the Beast infection beam, and what countermeasures could be used to deflect it. Unfortunately, their efforts had been fruitless so far. And despite their truce, the Raiders and the Hiigarans were never very comfortable in each other's presence.

Admiral Liir Hra was no exception. He flipped through the security camera views from his quarters to survey a Turanic engineer team that was making repairs aboard one of his Assault Frigates. And if anyone asked, he would have to admit his ordering the security robots to pull double-shifts.

The engineers did not seem to be sabotaging their ships, and at least that Klu'koth fellow seemed honorable enough (as a warrior, he deeply admired his successes against the Kadeshi), but he still wasn't too sure about them.

Tired, he checked their nav. status. They were mere minutes away from the Taiidan missile silo. He wasn't tired because of the fact he'd been working twenty-hour days since he first encountered this Beast, or at least not entirely. He felt impotent. It was a feeling uncommon in the elite cadre of Heavy Cruiser captains spanning all sentient races. In their positions at the head of such a powerful warship, they did not even consider death. It took a lot to destroy their ship, and they weren't exactly armless. Even in their death throes, they could, and most crews did, take another enemy ship out with them.

But this Beast…

They would capture his ship, subvert his crew and himself into mindless slaves, and feel no emotion in the process. At least with a race like the Turanic, who fought for money, or the Kadeshi, who fought out of powerful fanatic beliefs, one could see why they attacked. And in some rare occasions, one could even convince them to stop fighting (actually, he doubted the Kadeshi were that good.) The Beast, however, would fight to the bitter end, and if their fleet died, did they give a shit?

Hell no. That was the problem fighting races based around hive minds. They considered their whole existence as one big family, but a family that would rather kill itself than run from battle. If a race cannot be reasoned with, and it considers any others as impeding on their space, there is only one sane course of action.

Eradication.

It was cruel, but true. And he would have definitely not have any problems sleeping if he wiped this particular enemy out. Not at all.

He got up, and left his room. Two minutes left.

Mej'hol looked from his bridge chair. As the new Gul'daan Leader, he had immediately ordered the PDA to crank out a fabulous new throne to sit upon. Jewel encrusted and shining platinum, he found no problem with regaling in the opulence he was entitled to.

He heard the pilot count down the seconds to reversion. "Four…two…one…we're hot!"

He sat up, and said into his comm., "This is your Leader," he declared to the rest of the Turanic warships. "Be watchful out there. We know how powerful this enemy, and allied with the Imperialists they can only get-"

He froze. "What the hell is going on?"

Klu'koth saw it, too. There was no space station; no warships; no sign of Beast life.

Instead, sitting there in the middle of space, was a planet.

He turned to Lieutenant Vark. "Are you sure we are where we should be?" He nodded, but checked the navicomp again. "Yes, sir. And I doubt that our records of the station's position was right where that planet was.

Klu'koth frowned, but then a wave of realisation fell over him. "Unless that isn't a real planet." Vark looked at him, confused. "Sir?" Klu'koth looked at him. "Lieutenant, do you remember how the former Leader died in the Tel sector? Those Hiigarans took hold of our Mimicking technology and used it to send a suicide unit to destroy his Corvette. What if the Beast captured that technology from our ships, or even those of the Somtaaw? They may be hiding that station under that ruse of a cover.

He grinned at himself. Sometimes he knew everything. "In any case, there is no way the station is as big as a planet, so theoretically, our weapons would pass through the hologram's edges. Fire our Ion Cannon at the Northern Polar Region, and keep sensors primed at maximum."

The blue beam fired out at the planet, and…boiled a hundred tons of ice into the atmosphere.

He sighed, relieved. At least there wasn't a surprise fleet waiting for them. Though just to be sure, he sent out a few Probes to analyse the dark side of the planet.

He turned to the sensors officer, and said, "Report on the planet's condition."

"Well, surface temperature is stable at absolute zero all throughout the planet. Not surprising, since there isn't a star out here for at least four light-years. Atmosphere consists of methane and fluorine, which means we can breathe down there, but because of the temperature we will have to go down in bio-suits. Detecting rich deposits of titanium ore and…what looks like a huge mountain of platinum."

Klu'koth walked over to his station, and saw that, indeed, there was a huge deposit of platinum right there, smack in the middle of this planet in the middle of nowhere. Klu'koth said, "Is there any chance this is some sort of ruse? A trap?" He still couldn't believe any of this was happening. Instead of ambushing a Beast-subverted Taiidan station that no one had heard about, they found a planet without a sun, with a conveniently-laid mountain of precious metal that didn't belong to any one. It seemed like a set-up.

But he had to do something. He picked up his comm., and said to his Collector pilots (he had found it rather easy to acquire beaten-up, but easily repairable Providence-class Collectors in Hiigaran orbit just after the Battle of Hiigara) "Ok, pilots. Listen up. I have been informed that there is a whole lot of platinum and titanium down on that planet. I want you to get the titanium for our PDA, and keep the platinum stored separately. We could get a whole lot of good out of that wealth. There may be Beast presence down there, so never touch down on the surface, and keep an open sensor sweep."

He paused, and added, "No doubt the Hiigarans are going to act upon this new discovery as well, not to mention our Turanic brethren. If they try to siphon the resources away to their ships, don't fend them off, but try to get the most out of the situation."

There was no sign of acknowledgement from them, but he did see the hexagonal ships, repainted in grays and blacks, fly past the bridge and down to the planet. A few fighters followed them, but he called them off. "Commander, do not escort the collection team." He protested, "But sir-" The magistrate was adamant. "No. If there are Beast down there, I want to lose as few ships as possible. And there is nothing you could do if they did attack."

It pained him to give that order, but when it came time to make a sacrifice, he had to pick out the Collectors. And that was assuming that there were Beast down there.

"I'm reading five Providence-class Collectors coming out of the Swift Death, sir. The other Turanic Carriers are also reacting accordingly. Should we launch our own Collectors to the platinum deposit?"

Admiral Liir Hra shook his head. "Do we even have Collectors?"

"Well, sir, the Kull-ani has been building a pair as we speak. They should be flight-ready in four hours."

He thought it over. "No, I still don't think so. Let the dogs have their bone. I say we send down a survey team to the surface to check the place out. It still seems fishy." The junior officer acknowledged. "Dropship, sir?"

"No, I don't want them touching the surface. Just in case. Besides, the weather down there is damn harsh; I think they would be safer inside a ship. Send down five of our modified Repair Corvettes, repulsor-lifts on. I want them to shunt all power from their plasma guns to sensors, and create a broad-scan of the whole surface first. Then they can make tight-beam scans of the planet's core. If those bastards are waiting for us thirty meters below the surface, I'd like to know."

The Collector hovered ten meters above the surface of the mountain. The metal was severely dulled by the environment, but once they were broken down through the collection beam they would be rebuilt as pure, shiny metal. Boy, something like this rarely happened to anyone, least of all a merc race.

The Collector officer was pleased. The beam shot out from the Hiigaran ship, and began to eat away at the mountain slowly. The control panel screen showed the storage tanks filling up gradually; nothing surprising.

The Collector reported back after fifteen minutes of Collection. "Swift Death, this Collector 589. I am at 57% storage capacity, and have not detected anything anomalous. However, I cannot scan to a sufficient depth with any reliability because of the large pockets of metal. Will report back in fifteen minutes, Collector 589 out."

The Repair Corvette screamed down the landscape. It was pumping out almost 1500 meters per second, and Captain Lance Soban couldn't be happier. He had personally modified this bird for high speed, and had hoped to race it in the coveted Tegris Junkyard Tournament, but unfortunately he had been forced to return to service and keep this baby flying sedate, repair runs.

Fortunately, since the old Admiral had ordered the RCs to go down and survey the terrain, it gave him a good excuse to try out its turbo-engines. His co-pilots were not as enthusiastic, though.

One of them, (both were Liir Hra, of course) Halen, said, "Are you sure you know what you're doing?" Lance shook his head, yelling over the howl of the wind outside. "Nah, but if I were, we wouldn't be having any fun, would we, Tek?" Tek, the other officer on the corvette, was the kind of guy who would get nauseous sitting in a chair, so he was currently retching in the ship's bathroom.

But Lance cared little for their objections. He loved speed. Like a fighter pilot, he risked his life every time he flew, but unlike them, he was only in it for sheer velocity. Surprisingly, he couldn't stand hyperspace jumps, which could move someone as fast as 3,000 light-years in only a week's journey. There was no feel of break-neck rapidity that he'd become infatuated with. Let the rest of his kiith get shot at in combat, or those fighter jocks get shot down in a blaze of plasma; the only way he would go down would be at 40,000 kilometers per hour, a death so quick, yet so glorious.

All he had to do was fly around the surface relaying his sensor logs to the remaining Carrier and the Protector, and even he couldn't go too fast for his scanners to search the area. As the dark, methane clouds began to flare up with dangerous lightning, only a small jolt from one of them needed to break his concentration and force them to smash into the ground in a billion shreds of metal and flesh, he tried not to think about the Beast.

It wasn't easy, though. Ever since he watched the first Taiidan ship back there taken over by the techno-nightmare, he couldn't get it out of his mind, like all other Hiigarans in the fleet. The thought of an enemy without fear or remorse, or even anger, scared him. They only hungered, and when they were hungry they fed. And the Beast was always famished.

He saw a bunch of natural obstacles that he thought would help to destroy that train of thought, so he banked hard to starboard while Halen checked his restraining belts. They approached a large boulder, and he cranked down the repulsor-lift cushion down to two meters; not enough to hit the ground, but enough to improve the thrill immensely. They reached the rock, and he hopped over it with a mere flick of his wrist on the joystick.

Along came a series of interesting arches, which kind of looked like the ribs of a very large animal. He zoomed through them, finishing the last one by making a quick loop around it before blasting forward. He performed a barrel roll in mid-air, which caused the port wing to barely scrape the ground as it raced by, and also to cause a yell of protest emit from the restroom. Lance laughed. "Sorry, Tek!"

He continued down the horizon, when he saw the ground seem to break up in front of him. They shot off the cliffside like a bullet out of a mass driver, and they began falling diagonally down to the hard ground. Lance levelled the ship out, and let the controls go. Halen eyed him nervously. "Lance, what are you doing?"

He grinned. "Nothing, Halen. Just trying to have a little fun, that's all." His co-pilot went white as he watched their altitude quickly drop from seven hundred meters to fifty in mere seconds. They were careening down to the bottom at terminal velocity, and he closed his eyes to prevent watching the crash.

And then they stopped. They rather abruptly went from impossible speeds to zero velocity. Halen opened his eyes, and glared at his colleague. "No matter how many times you do that, I get frightened every time. You know, that repulsor-lift mechanism won't last very long if you keep making these foolhardy stunts."

Lance only shrugged, and began plotting in a new course. "With an insurance coverage like mine, I can afford to act like a bastard." They began to go forward, but slowly enough to allow the queasy Tek to get out of the restroom and strap himself into the third chair. He looked at Halen accusingly, but he only gestured off-handedly at Lance. Lance knew he could be a bastard behind the wheel, but as long as he had his precious speed, he really couldn't care less.

They flew around for a bit when Halen pointed something out. "Lance, go closer to that."

He looked up from his speed-trance. "What?"

Halen pointed, "That."

He saw. He got in closer to it, and parked the Corvette. They entered the howling atmosphere in their bio-suits, and walked closer. It was a miracle that Halen spotted it; it seemed to be embedded in the ground. But it was there.

It looked kind of like a starship airlock, but seemed sealed shut. Lance tapped it with his knuckles, and it seemed pretty solid. All he knew for certain was that there was a Taiidan Imperial crest burned into the lock. He turned to Tek, whom Lance knew always carried a laser torch. He bent down, and began to shear off the circular door with the red beam, with the two others watching in fascination. He finished tracing the circumference with the laser, and the door fell down into a pit, and even through the howling wind they heard the clang of metal striking metal as it hit the bottom.

He observed that a ladder was leading down into the darkness, and he turned to Halen. "Think we should check it out?" He only replied, in a grim fashion, "You first."

They went down into the abyss. Tek had contacted the other RC teams with the news, and were on their way, but for now, they were alone. They reached the bottom, which turned out to be a rather dark, yet brightly-painted hallway. Like a hospital, Lance observed.

They walked down the corridors, and managed to pass through a series of locked doors with some elbow grease and some stolen Imperial codes that he had received from friends in Fleet Intelligence. They saw several doors and rooms where complicated surgical tools and stasis tubes lay, which only reinforced Lance's original impression of the place. It was unlikely that this was a medical station, out in the middle of nowhere on a hostile world, but a good place to hide a research station.

They found a console on a wall that Tek managed to operate successfully, and declared that he could access environmental controls from it. "This place is currently a vacuum, with only traces of methane that probably crept in through the main airlock. Should I restore oxygen levels?" Lance mused. "Yeah, but don't remove your helmets. We still have six hours of air in these things, and I think we'll need them for protection anyway."

They walked down some more hallways, seemingly at random, and Halen observed, who was scanning the area with am omni-scan glove, "This place looks incredibly old. The metal is at least three thousand years old, which wouldn't predate Taiidan time, but-"

"Bu the Imperialists have only existed for fifteen years," Tek finished for him.

Halen nodded. "Right, but there's more. In old starships or stations like this one, which remain in vacuum for long amounts of time, the metal begins to vacuum-freeze, and that, out of many things, causes doors and stuff to seal shut, and cannot be reopened. And this metal seems to be mere hours into the process. Someone has recently been here."

They exchanged glances, and Lance saw that one of the doors they were near had a plaque with the words "BIOLOGICAL RESEARCH" emblazoned across it. They approached the door carefully, and, with a finesse known only in the deepest ranks of the Hiigaran military, broke it down.

They entered a room which was basically a small catwalk that stretched across the room, splitting up two large banks of stasis cells, with a myriad of rather frightening-looking experiments locked inside. There was a lone console on their end of the catwalk, and they moved closer to it and turned it on. When they did, a huge row of lights illuminated the nightmarish tubes, giving them a much better look at the experiments.

Halen played around with the computer, and several windows popped up with information that was written in archaic Taiidani script. Lance slumped, but Halen seemed to understand it, going through all the different displays expertly. He noted, "All of these are dead. When the Taiidan left, they must have left in a hurry, or they would have destroyed the evidence as well. He pressed some buttons, and one of the tubes separated from the display rack and came into view. Inside, a Taiidan male had several electrical apparatus protruding from his skin, and his head was nothing more than a technological mess.

"Apparently, this guy was an attempt to make the Taiidan Unbound."

"Not very successful, huh?" said Lance.

They cycled through others, and one, a Turanic/Taiidan hybrid, was particularly gruesome. Other more mild creatures included Taiidan that could breathe methane (for planetary scouting?) and Taiidan who could resist far greater temperatures.

But another in particular made them very uneasy. "Get the admiral. I think he'll like to look at this. After all, a Beast/Taiidan hybrid could be very dangerous indeed."