Tranquility Lost Read online

  The gentle old man was dead.

  Tranquility leaned over Charles, tears streaming down his cheeks. They’d given him a pseudo personality to hide his true identity behind the psych-block, and his entire life rushed back to him in that instant. Charles had been his mentor for most of his life, and the soft-spoken old man was now dead.

  “You weak fool,” Deland snarled. He grabbed Tranquility by the throat and lifted him as he had lifted Charles, and face-to-face Tranquility saw the true madness in Deland’s eyes.

  Tranquility didn’t struggle, for he now knew he was not the Tranquility who had only recently laid aside his novitiates’ robes. He was Brother-Captain Tranquility, Primus Lord of the Songs of War, Initiate Master of the Arts of Death, and with Charles dead it was his job to stop Deland.

  He struck like a viper, one massive mental blow aimed at the madman in front of him. Deland dropped him and staggered back. Tranquility struck again and charged, intending to augment his mental attack with a physical one. But as he reached Deland the older man threw a counter-strike that brought Tranquility to his knees.

  Pain, fear, terror, he knew they didn’t really exist, that Deland induced the signals directly into his cerebral cortex, but the older monk was so powerful he couldn’t ignore them. Deland struck again and Tranquility fell to the floor, lay on his side in a universe of agony, his muscles twitching in random spasms, urine staining his pants.

  “So it is Brother-Captain Tranquility,” Deland said, standing over him. “I should have known they’d send a ringer. But you failed, and now you’re going to help me get to your ship. I’m finally free of this planet, and nothing you can do will stop me. I’ll have an entire galaxy of souls to grant me the immortality I’ve earned.”

  Again he lifted Tranquility by the throat and continued hammering his mind with wave after wave of mental power. Tranquility knew he had lost, and that triggered the contingency plan in the psych-block. In an instant he probed outward for the mind of the ship’s captain, but he met a solid wall of psychic force.

  Deland laughed at him. “No, Brother-Captain Tranquility. You won’t be giving the captain of your ship orders to sterilize the planet. I long ago took control of his mind.”

  The final contingency, that was all that remained. Tranquility sought and sensed the neural switch hidden deep in the bowels of the ship. It was keyed to his mental patterns, and with a thought he triggered the self-destruct node in the transition drive.

  Deland didn’t realize what he’d done until the harsh glare of the new thermonuclear sun in orbit slashed through the windows and lit up the room.

  3

  Better Than Nothing

  AS JACK EASED the big cargo lifter forward on its grav fields into the hold of the freighter, his com crackled to life with the voice of Crester, the yard boss. “Strand, guy here name of Jorgenson wants to talk to you.”

  Jorgenson! Now that was someone he never expected to hear from again. They’d been friends once, not so long ago, shared a lot of experiences, some good, many bad. Jack keyed his com. “Tell him I’m busy. Tell him to go away.”

  “Can’t do that, Strand. He’s some big-shot from Commonwealth. Higher-ups told me you’ll talk to him, so you’ll talk to him. Park the lifter and get in here, or you’re fired.”

  Jack parked the cargo lifter in its cradle, shut it down, and climbed out of its harness.

  Jorgenson waited in Crester’s office. He was a little grayer around the temples, but otherwise unchanged: still tall, stick-thin, an almost skeletal look about him. “Jack,” he said warmly as Jack entered the room, warmth that was all sham. He took Jack’s hand, left Jack no choice actually, shook it vigorously. “How have you been, Jack?”

  Jack managed to end the handshake without appearing rude. “How do you think I’ve been?” They both knew that operating a lifter in a cargo yard on a prime satellite wasn’t much for a man of Jack’s training and skills.

  Jorgenson turned to Crester. “Forgive me for imposing, but might Jack and I speak privately?”

  It took Crester a few seconds to realize Jorgenson required him to vacate his own office, and when understanding came he stumbled all over himself to accommodate the man. Jorgenson must have pulled some strings really high up to get the ass-hole to be so obsequious.

  When they were alone Jorgenson asked, “It’s been quite a while. How have you been, Jack?”

  Jack was in no mood for Jorgenson’s crap. “Put the bullshit aside and tell me why you’re here.”

  Jorgenson grimaced. “Do you blame your present circumstances on me?”

  Jack shook his head and dropped into a seat. “No. We both know I’m the one who violated protocol. I’m the one who fucked up. So why are you here, clearly not to catch up on old times?”

  Jorgenson shrugged. “I’m here partly because you do admit it was your fault. That tells me you won’t make the same mistake again. And I’m here because I believe the review board was overly harsh, and because I have something that might get you reinstated.”

  Jack forced himself not to get his hopes up. “I’m listening.”

  Jorgenson reached into a pocket, pulled out a small device that Jack recognized, pressed a couple of switches on its face, then returned it to his pocket. There’d be no one listening in on this conversation, or, if someone tried, they’d only get garbled bullshit. Jorgenson asked, “What do you know about the Devastation?”

  An odd question, that. “Not a lot. It’s a region a few hundred light-years across at the edge of charted space, I think in the direction of galactic center, some human-habitable worlds with signs of an extinct human civilization.”

  Jorgenson nodded, his eyes examining Jack. “Four-hundred light-years across to be exact. And over the last twenty years we’ve identified a little over ten planets that once held significant human populations. Most were burned-off about three or four hundred years ago; some so completely there’s nothing for the archeologists to sift through, some even down to the bacterial level. Some skeletal remains here and there that allowed us to confirm they were human. A couple of planets with no burn-off but everyone just plain dead, dropped in their tracks. Skeletons everywhere, though more often than not they proved to be a feast for the local wildlife.”

  “That’s ugly,” Jack said. “That’s interstellar war on an unheard-of scale.”

  Jorgenson shook his head. “It wasn’t war. It was all done from within. We don’t have a lot of archeological data, but we’ve got enough to know the whole region was ruled by a bunch of mystical priests or monks. There’s some superstitious mumbo-jumbo about amazing mental abilities, but no one pays any attention to that. And it looks like it was those crazy monks who killed themselves off, along with the entire populations of their planets. In fact, they’re the ones who coined the term the Devastation.”

  Jack nodded and tried to digest what he’d just heard. “I used to be privy to some seriously classified information. Why haven’t I heard of this before?”

  Jorgenson grinned, and Jack hated it when he did that. “Because this stuff is so classified, it’s not even classified.”

  Jack’s hopes for reinstatement slowly crumbled. “Again,” Jack asked warily, “why are you here?”

  Jorgenson tossed a reader chip onto the desk in front of Jack. “You can read all the details there, but the short version is that six months ago Special Survey Ship 193 down-transited at the edge of system DD-281, which is in the heart of the Devastation. Following standard procedures they mapped the system, found one planet that might be habitable, then moved into near orbit to investigate, expecting to find another burn-off. But guess what they found.”

  Jack closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. “I don’t like guessing, and in any case, I really don’t think I want to know.”

  “It was populated; several million people, living pretty much a medieval existence. The first habitable planet in the Devastation not burned-off, and with an active population. The captain of SSS-193 knew they weren’t e
quipped to handle it, so he immediately ordered them out of the system. And as soon as they turned to go, most of the crew went nuts, berserk actually, tried to stop the ship from leaving the system. For some reason the XO, one junior officer, and two NCOs were immune to whatever affected the rest of the crew. They managed to arm themselves, control the bridge and the engine room, and up-transit out of the system. And as soon as they made transition, all the berserking stopped.”

  Jack opened his eyes. “Just stopped? Just like that?”

  Jorgenson nodded slowly. “Just like that, though they’re all still suffering from paranoia, some nasty psychoses, and vivid nightmares. I’m afraid we’re going to have to pension them out.”

  “Again,” Jack said. “Why are you here?”

  It was so typical of Jorgenson to just ignore his question. “Interestingly enough, they all share the same nightmare. Even the four who didn’t go berserk, and are relatively unaffected, keep having vivid dreams about men in hooded robes, very much like a bunch of monks.”

  Jack grimaced and couldn’t hide his skepticism. “You’re not buying into some mind-control hoodoo crap, are you?”

  Jorgenson raised his eyebrows in his equivalent of a shrug. “The Commonwealth’s official position is that no one has ever provided solid proof of the existence of paranormal phenomena.”

  Jack didn’t miss the fact that Jorgenson hadn’t answered his question. “What do you want?”

  Again, the eyebrow-shrug. “We’re putting together a re-contact crew to go in and investigate, a very exclusive crew. We’re starting with just the four from SSS-193 who didn’t go berserk. We know they’re immune to whatever affected the rest. But we need a re-contact specialist, and none of them qualify. We need one trained to operate in a medieval environment. You know: knives, swords, horses, gruel, disease, lice, all that fun retro stuff. And there is no question it must be someone with considerable experience. That’s a unique set of talents.”

  Jack shook his head. “Not that unique. There’s got to be five or six others equally as qualified as me, with the added bonus that they haven’t been cashiered.”

  “But we need someone who won’t go nuts.”

  “But you don’t know that about me.”

  Crester’s office had a large window overlooking the dockyard. Jorgenson turned his back on Jack and looked out the window as he talked. “We struggled for quite some time to understand what was unique about the four who didn’t go berserk. Couldn’t really find anything that matched up. Not until someone in psyche took a look at the personality profiles we’d put together on them early in their careers. They all tested high on intuitive deduction, immunity to subliminal suggestion, empathetic cognition, and other traits the paranormal freaks believe are associated with . . . enhanced mental abilities.”

  Jorgenson turned back to face Jack, a look of distaste on his face. “You’re the only re-contact specialist we’ve got with all the requisite abilities and the right psyche profile.”

  Jack shook his head and stood. “I don’t want it. Find somebody else.”

  “There is nobody else.”

  “I still don’t want it.”

  “You’ll lose your job.”

  “I still don’t want it.”

  Jorgenson frowned, a prelude to delivering the punch line. With Jorgenson there was always a punch line. “Listen, Jack. Some very powerful people want you on this, scary powerful people who are scary scared. If you take it, you’ll get full reinstatement, and no matter what you do on that planet, there won’t be any review board, no inquiries, no questions asked. If you decide to murder the entire population, no one’s going to second-guess you. They’re that scared.”

  Jorgenson hesitated, but Jack decided not to fill the silence because he hadn’t yet heart the punch line. Jorgenson tried to wait him out, but Jack refused to give in, and Jorgenson blinked first. “If you don’t take it,”—he grimaced—“you’re about to be fired from this job, and you’ll find you can’t get any work anywhere else in the Commonwealth.”

  ••••

  Jack may have had the right psyche profile, but that certainly didn’t prove to the other four members of the crew that he wouldn’t go berserk. The former XO of SSS-193, Commander Anton Zarkovy, was in charge of their little expedition. Ensign Maria Candow looked like a frightened deer in the headlights. Chief Stowicz seemed indifferent, and Petty Officer Palaski was openly hostile. When Jack first met him he radiated distrust.

  “Stay away from me,” Palaski said. “You’re going to get us all killed.” He backed away from Jack, clearly unwilling to expose his back to a man he perceived as a clear and present danger.

  “Don’t worry about him,” Stowicz told Jack. “He don’t want to go back to that place. None of us do, but they didn’t give us any choice.”

  Jack shrugged. “They didn’t give me any choice either.”

  Stowicz shook his head sadly. “Welcome aboard, Strand.”

  Jack learned from Candow that they’d already tried to return once, with a re-contact specialist that didn’t have the right psyche profile. He’d quickly berserked-out, but the crew had been forewarned, and were watching him closely. They had returned with him under neural sedation. This time, as a precaution, before they down-transited into DD-281 nearspace, Zarkovy issued sidearms to all but Jack. He felt like a bug under a microscope as they watched him for any signs of derangement, and Jack worried that Palaski might jump the gun and put a bullet in his face just to be safe.

  After down-transition Zarkovy ordered them into a geosynchronous orbit above the planet of interest, DD-281–2. Ostensibly they were going to monitor the planet for a while before going in closer, but Jack knew the real purpose was to monitor him. The normal compliment of a Special Survey Ship was a crew of ten, with another twenty-or-more specialists on board for survey activities. But in an emergency such vessels could be piloted by a single crewmember. The five of them managed with only a little strain, though Palaski was jumpy, and constantly rested his hand on the butt of his sidearm when Jack came near. Jack began to wonder if he’d survive to get down to the surface.

  Jack didn’t go crazy, but his dreams began to change. He found himself seated at a campfire in a forest, and across from him sat a man huddled in a cloak, with a sheathed long-sword on the ground at his side. He wore a broad-brimmed black hat, long black cape and black leathers. Ordinarily the shadows beneath the brim of the hat would hide his face, but the fire illuminated it in sharp angles. He was young, perhaps late twenties, with handsome, strong features, though his eyes were pinched and strained, as if deeply troubled. He held a long stick in one hand, and poked at the fire indifferently as he hummed a strange tune, a soft, sad tune. His cloak could have been that of a monk, but he seemed more warrior than monk.

  In another dream they rode horses side-by-side down a dirt road, and in another, again on horses, Jack followed the warrior on a narrow game trail in the midst of a dark forest. But always the warrior hummed that same strange, sad tune, and never seemed to take notice of Jack’s presence.

  When SSS-047 shifted to an orbit much closer in, infrared mapping confirmed a population of several million people on one continent spread over a distance of about two thousand kilometers. There was one large city with a population of about twenty thousand, and several smaller population hubs, each centered on a medieval fortification. The large city radiated outward from the biggest of the castles which was perched on cliffs overlooking the ocean. After ten days of observation, since Jack didn’t go nuts, they decided to proceed with the re-contact operation.

  Jack, Stowicz and Candow dropped to the surface in a stealth boat, and landed about thirty kilometers from a remote village. Candow remained behind gathering flora and fauna samples while Jack and Stowicz, both in stealth armor, hiked to the village, photographed the natives, and recorded their speech and idioms from a distance. Then they stunned a couple that lived alone on a farm and kidnapped them, drugged them up good, ran them through a thor
ough examination, deep neural probe, speech pattern analysis, idiom analysis, the works. After a couple of hours they put them back on their farm. At most they’d have a few blank spots in their memories, or maybe some stories about abduction by aliens that no one would ever believe.

  They spent a month on detailed analysis of the data, plus a few more short trips to the surface and another kidnapping. After more analysis and a serious upload into Jack’s neural implants, plus a few dry runs, they were almost there. They replicated a few coins they had borrowed from one of the kidnap victims, and reproduced local clothing, though with stealth and armor filaments woven into it. They ran another dry run, and Jack was ready to go native.

  After a couple thousand years of interstellar expansion, contraction, and wars both major and minor, it was not uncommon for Commonwealth ships to come across human-inhabited worlds that had gone retrograde. They had found worlds that had either digressed or progressed to any stage of development from the early Bronze Age to post-nuclear/pre-interstellar. Anything short of serious technological development, and it was the job of Jack and others like him to go in undercover and get a good first-assessment of the situation, file a report and, if the powers-that-be determined it was appropriate, make a few adjustments to the local political landscape. The term they used was intervention, a nice euphemism for what frequently turned out to be assassination.

  Jack’s thoughts returned to his last assignment. He’d intervened, without authorization, an emotional decision that was wrong, and it had gotten him cashiered. But the bastard deserved it.

  4

  A Travelling Companion