Strider's Universe Read online

  STRIDER'S UNIVERSE

  Volume II of The Strider Chronicles

  John Grant

  STRIDER’S UNIVERSE

  Volume II of the Strider Chronicles

  John Grant

  Captain Leonie Strider and her crew, stranded in a galaxy millions of parsecs from the Solar System, have helped the so-called Ancient Species of The Wondervale defeat the tyrannical Autarch Nalla. But all too soon the remaining warlords are fighting among each other. Before too long the genocidal Kaantalech emerges as the new Autarch.

  With the outcome looking desperate for the Ancient Species, only Strider and a handful of crewmates decide to remain in The Wondervale to help.

  If she is to lead the Ancient Species to victory and restore order to The Wondervale, Strider must not only battle the colossal power of Kaantalech but also find a way to overcome an even older danger that threatens to destroy them all . . .

  Combining high-powered space action, a gaggle of bizarre aliens -- both friend and foe -- and passions that are all too recognizably human, Strider's Universe continues the epic space opera begun in Strider's Galaxy, of which Stan Nicholls wrote in Time Out:

  [Strider's Galaxy] discards restraint and lets rip. Unashamedly occupying the pure entertainment end of the spectrum, this is a primary-colors read -- exotic, extravagant, zingy. Pipe-and-slippers science fiction it isn't.

  Dedication

  This book is for Jo, because she likes space battles the bestest.

  For copyright page:

  Strider's Universe, originally published as by Paul Barnett, appeared in the UK in 1998 from Orbit. This slightly revised version represents the book's first US publication.

  Copyright (c) 1998, 2014 by John Grant

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-293-8

  Electronic version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  1

  It's Not a Cat, But I Guess It's Kinda Cute

  "Come here, dammit," said Strider, her head stuck into one of the storage units on the command deck of the Midnight Ranger. She'd called the ship the Bredai had given them Midnight Ranger on whim, and now wished she hadn't: something like Autarch-Buster or Shaft of Vengeance might have seemed—she searched for the word—more macho. The other thing she was searching for was Loki.

  The damned cat . . .

  Loki—whose sex had yet to be determined, if in fact gender-identification was possible or meaningful—had been picked up during the Midnight Ranger's last planetfall. No one had been able to work out how the creature had been able to get aboard the spaceship: she, he or it had certainly not passed through the airlock. Hence the naming of the beast: it was a trickster, and had the habit of melting into or even through walls when it wanted to. It had clearly decided to stay for a while in this storage unit, whose door Nelson had inadvertently left open.

  "Here, pretty one," said Strider, futilely. There was not the slightest stir inside the storage unit. This was in a way good news: there were items in there that could be severely damaged if one of Loki's scales slashed through them. Normally the little creature could be relied upon to keep its scales flat to its sides but sometimes, for no perceptible reason, it could become a ball of cutting edges, like a morningstar without the handle or the chain.

  Strider's major fear was that the cat would have a crap in there, so that the command deck would be stunk out for days on end. It had happened before. Cute and affectionate Loki might be, but there was a limit to what one's nostrils could take. The first time this had happened, before Strider had to her profound irritation become fond of the little animal, she and particularly Maloron Leander had proposed to stick it out of the nearest airlock. The boy Hilary had promptly offered to take full responsibility for the pet, and some of the time he actually did so.

  Loki most certainly wasn't a cat, but the crew of the Midnight Ranger couldn't think of any better term. They'd all seen ancient holos where starships had cats aboard, presumably to hunt down and exterminate all those infestations of alien mice. As starships had decontamination systems that eliminated vermin right down to the viral level, the holos always evoked chuckles.

  On the other hand, Loki had somehow got aboard . . .

  The real difficulty with Loki was that it was fascinated by Segrill. He was of the Trok species, and stood no higher than Strider's raised thumb. One of these days either Loki was going to remember that every time it ventured to investigate the Trok it got hit on the jaw or Segrill was going to lose patience and strike back with one of his small but lethal weapons.

  "Kitty, kitty," said Strider, too aware that, as she groped here on her knees, her bottom was sticking up in the air. There was nothing wrong with the bottom per se—or so she had been told by several lovers when neurosis had struck her in the darkness—but sooner or later someone on the command deck was going to crack a joke.

  To hell with the friendly approach.

  Strider settled back on her haunches, drew her lazgun from its holster, and pointed the weapon in the general direction of the storage unit's interior.

  "Look, kitty, I'll give you the count of ten to be out of there. Otherwise you're dead meat."

  By the count of three the creature slunk out, looking guiltily with its single eye up at Strider before scuttling off to the far corner of the command deck.

  Strider was astonished. The little animal must be more intelligent than she had realized. Was it telepathic?

  Then she took a deep breath, and coughed.

  "Hilary!" she bellowed at Lan Yi and Maria Strauss-Giolitto. "Get the goddam kid up here on the deck at once. This is his pet."

  #

  The Midnight Ranger was tiny by comparison with the Santa Maria, the craft which had brought Strider's mission here to The Wondervale: it was barely more than a hundred meters long and less than half that wide. The Bredai had rescued the Humans after the latter had succeeded, with the help of the Images and the Trok, in destroying the stronghold of the Autarch Nalla on Qitanefermeartha—not to mention the Autarch himself. The trouble was that Bredai and Humans were built on incompatible scales. Bredai were as big compared to Humans as Humans were to Trok, but were very much more careless. Also, they breathed a methane atmosphere, so that outside the sealed areas that had been demarcated for Humans and Trok one had to wear a spacesuit the whole time: everyone joked about the smells inside spacesuits except when they were wearing one. The Trok had learnt over generations to live with their clumsy allies—in their odd, hopping way, the Trok were nimble—but the Humans hadn't, and so, after too many fatalities, there had been a mutual agreement to part ways. The Bredai had adapted one of their ship's escape pods to create the independent craft which Strider had dubbed the Midnight Ranger.

  The Santa Maria had been over three kilometers long and mightily outfitted with drive units. On Strider's original expedition from the Solar System, heading for Tau Ceti II there had been forty-six people aboard, if you counted the bot Pinocchio. Two years from home the plodding craft had fallen into one of the countless wormholes that linked distant parts of the Universe, and the dazed Humans had found themselves in The Wondervale, an elliptical galaxy in orbit about a giant spiral galaxy, Heaven's Ancestor. Almost immediately the Images had discovered them, and had taken over their lives. Strider had remained captain of her mission, but the Images had taken most of the decisions from her hands.

  Just as well, because otherwise the Santa Maria would have been destroyed within hours. The Wondervale had not yet erupted into full-s
cale rebellion against the Autarchy, but it was about to do so. There was no way home, and circumstances had forced the Humans—aboard a Santa Maria reconfigured almost entirely by the Images, and equipped by them with the tachyon drive—to ally themselves with their new galaxy's insurgents. Even stranger circumstances had conspired to let Strider and a few of her personnel—not to mention Segrill's army of Trok—be in at the death of the Autarch himself.

  The remainder of the Humans, assisted by data acquired from the Spindrifters, one of The Wondervale's ancient species, had departed in the Santa Maria, with luck to rediscover the wormhole that would take them back to the Milky Way. Since then there had been casualties.

  I started off with forty-six, thought Strider glumly, and now there are only eight of us, two of whom are aliens. Let's magnify the figure flatteringly by counting in the cat: nine. And it's some mission you've been conducting when you can't even stop the cat crapping. She settled herself in her seat and looked through the view-window at the planet they were approaching. The reddish disc seemed to be expanding visibly, and it was difficult for her to relax even though she knew that the ship's two Images—Pinocchio and Ten Per Cent Extra Free—would have everything under control..

  A claw touched her shoulder.

  "Hi, Polyaggle," she said without turning round. From a distance the Spindrifter looked beautiful, but close up Strider found Polyaggle's appearance disconcerting. At first glance the face looked as if it were a Human's, but almost immediately you saw the proboscis where there should have been a nose: it coiled and uncoiled whenever Polyaggle spoke. Her mouth was diamond-shaped, with four lips. Her face was covered in short black bristles, and a high crest of the same material—it looked like hair—ran from the top of her forehead towards the rear. None of this would have concerned Strider much—she'd encountered some fairly peculiar-looking specimens of Homo sapiens in her time—but the alien's slanting eyes were something else. They were utterly black, so that when you looked into them you had the unsettling feeling that you were staring into eternity, into a time before the Universe had formed.

  There was also Polyaggle's inexplicable sexuality. It was difficult for Humans to concentrate on what they were saying when they spoke to her face-on. Probably "sexuality" was the wrong word, because the allure went far beyond sex.

  "We will soon be at The Pridehouse," said the Spindrifter. "It is something I anticipate with great pleasure."

  Polyaggle's chirruping made no sense to Strider, who heard it simultaneously with the translation into Argot which one or other of the Images supplied.

  "Yeah," said Strider, "I can understand."

  She could. Polyaggle was almost certainly the last of her species, although she was nurturing a brood somewhere inside her and, when the time was right, would give birth. Strider's mind boggled at the biological complexities that must be involved in the gestation, for Polyaggle was a colonial organism: if need be she could dissolve into myriad tiny butterfly-like creatures, and they in turn could dissolve into . . . something else entirely, things that were as elusive as quarks. Strider had seen it happen once—Polyaggle had performed the feat in order to start the regeneration of the Santa Maria's Main Computer—and, although the display had possessed a bizarre beauty, she rather hoped she would never see it again.

  The Spindrifters were—had been—one of The Wondervale's ancient species. The Pridehouse were another. The ancient species were the ones who had first evolved in The Wondervale, and who had explored both this galaxy and Heaven's Ancestor. A few million years ago, when younger and more aggressive species—the Comelatelies—had emerged and the Autarchy had been bloodily installed, the various ancient species had retreated to their home planets and tried to make their cultures seem as uninteresting and unexploitable as possible, biding their time until the Autarchy dissolved. Within the past year or so, however—Strider still found herself thinking in terms of years—this had changed. Kaantalech had destroyed Spindrift and annihilated the Spindrifters; it had been by sheer chance that Polyaggle had been with the Humans when this act of barbarity was performed. What could happen to one ancient species could happen to another. The Pridehouse, the Lingk-kreatzai, the Wreeps, the Semblances of the Eternal, the Fionnoids, the Janae, the We Are and countless further cultures had quietly declared that their patience was exhausted. If the Autarchy would not of its own accord disintegrate over the aeons of history, they would encourage it to do so. They had waited long enough.

  But they were not warriors. Millions of years of stubborn neutrality had deprived them of the ability to make war—although their defenses, as Strider had seen during the destruction of Spindrift, could be impressive. The Onurg of the Pridehouse had told Polyaggle—and, through her mediation, Strider—that the ancient species should be led by the commander of the extragalactic ship that had somehow fallen into The Wondervale and had already done so much damage to the Autarchy.

  No wonder Polyaggle yearned to reach The Pridehouse. The people of that world might not be of her own species, but at least they were not Comelatelies. She had more in common with them than with most of the other species of The Wondervale—and certainly more than with the Human on whose shoulder her claw was resting.

  In a way, Polyaggle was going home.

  "We'll be there soon," said Strider, feeling that the remark was hopelessly inadequate. She found there were tears in her eyes, and wondered if there were tears in Polyaggle's. She didn't dare to turn round and look.

  Ten Per Cent Extra Free spoke to her.

  WE SHALL BE IN ORBIT AROUND THE PRIDEHOUSE IN JUST OVER TWO HOURS, the Image said. His voice was like a song.

  "I want to communicate with them," said Strider. "Can it be arranged?"

  It can.

  "How soon?"

  As soon as you wish.

  She leaned forward and put her head into the Pocket in front of her. The Images had installed Pockets in the Santa Maria and now they had done the same for the Midnight Ranger although, the command deck being so much smaller, there was room for only three. At first all she saw was the standard projection—a depiction, in startling detail, of the exterior of the Midnight Ranger with, behind and beneath it, a graphic portrayal of their position in relation to The Pridehouse—but within a few seconds there was a flicker and she was looking directly at the face of one of the ancient species.

  It could have been a wolf's face were it not for the third eye, near the tip of the snout.

  "Are you the Onurg?" said Strider. It was difficult as yet for her to tell the individuals of the Pridehouse apart. But this wolf's coat seemed greyer than the Onurg's startling silver.

  "I am not," said the face. "My name is Hein. Are you Umbel Nelson?" The Images translated between the species, but the effect was always that of a badly dubbed holo.

  "No. I'm Leonie Strider."

  "My apologies."

  "And mine."

  The wolf's third eye momentarily disappeared into the fur of its nose, then re-emerged blue rather than grey.

  HEIN IS SMILING AT YOU, warbled Ten Per Cent Extra Free inside Strider's mind. IT WOULD BE POLITE TO SMILE BACK. I SHALL CONVEY TO HEIN THE MEANING OF THE FACIAL CONTORTION.

  Strider dutifully smiled, and again the Pridehouse's third eye disappeared. When it resurfaced it was an astonishing green—the green a child uses when painting a tree—which reminded her that . . .

  "Please wait a moment," she said, and withdrew her head from the Pocket."Has that damned boy cleared up the mess yet?" she yelled at no one in particular.

  "I'm doing it," said Hilary sullenly. She glanced over her shoulder towards the storage unit. Seeing the expression on his face, she hastily jabbed her head back into the Pocket again.

  "You have taken a long time getting here," said Hein at once.

  "Less than a year. We're not equipped with the tachyon drive."

  "You're not?" Ten Per Cent Extra Free made the wolfish face produce a semblance of astonishment.

  "The Onurg knows."

&
nbsp; The decision had been Strider's. The tachyon drive allowed instantaneous transport from one side of The Wondervale to the other—or to anywhere else in the Universe, for that matter, so long as you knew where you were going—but it was not unobtrusive, and if there was one thing that Strider wanted to be at the moment it was unobtrusive. After the death of the Autarch, Kaantalech had moved swiftly to take power. There were other potential claimants to the throne, and Kaantalech was dealing with them as ruthlessly as she had the Spindrifters. Kaantalech was going to win the contest for the autarchy—there could be little doubt of it—but still a few warlords held out against her, as did various rebels against the institution of the Autarchy itself. Strider knew it was only a matter of time before the tyrant's thoughts turned again to the Human intruders: the longer the moment could be put off the better. Kaantalech could find the Midnight Ranger any time she chose, because she had sensors capable of detecting the Humans' protoplasm, which was quite unakin to anything else in The Wondervale, but she must have other things on her mind as she tried to stamp out the last pockets of resistance to her usurpation—or so Strider had reasoned. A few Humans in a small craft represented no threat: they could be dealt with later, after the might of the rebel Helgiolath fleet had been countered. That said, there was no reason at all for the Humans to advertise themselves as they gathered their forces among the ancient species.

  "Ask him," said Strider, feeling suddenly weary. She wasn't in the mood to explain. Back in the Solar System—so long ago—humanity had felt reasonably proud of itself that it could construct a spaceship capable of achieving a reasonable percentage of lightspeed. Now Strider was not going to apologize because the Midnight Ranger could drift along at only a few hundred times the velocity of light.