Four on the Run Read online

  The Borderlands

  An untamed place of little law lying in the direction of the galactic core from Earth, it had been designated five hundred years earlier by a treaty between the Imperium and the Layeb Instrumentality, the two great powers of the Orion Arm, as a buffer zone, separating the Layeb from Earth and most of the region once belonging to the old Republic of Earth. That territory stood between the theocratic reptiles and the other major races of known space, the Delph, the Viridians and the Tatar. No ships of either government of any type were allowed in the Borderlands, and no new colonies could be established. Those that were already there were independent and neutral by interstellar law.

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  Four

  on

  the

  Run

  by

  Jeff Deischer

  a

  westerntainment publication

  FOUR ON THE RUN

  published by Westerntainment

  Denver, Colorado, USA

  Westerntainment.blogspot.com

  [email protected]

  “You’d Have to be Crazy to Go in There” copyright 2017 Jeff Deischer

  “Where Angels Fear to Tread” copyright 2017 Jeff Deischer

  “Let’s Make a Deal” copyright 2017 Jeff Deischer

  No part of this publication may be reprinted without permission, except for purposes of review or scholarly discussion. All rights reserved.

  Dedicated to

  David Webb,

  for his wonderful and

  thoroughly necessary

  feedback, which makes

  my books better.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to:

  The Fulton Street Irregulars: David Webb, Daniel Dickholtz, Ric Croxton, and Andra Stan for their valuable feedback;

  The creators of various science fiction – TV, books, games, especially but not limited to FARSCAPE, Traveller, Starships & Spacemen, Dungeons and Dragons, Worlds Beyond;

  And my parents, for their support.

  FOUR ON THE RUN

  “You’d Have to be

  Crazy to Go in There!”

  Where Angels

  Fear to Tread

  Let’s Make a Deal

  Introduction

  It will be immediately obvious to readers that one inspiration of this book is FARSCAPE, one of the best three serial Sci-Fi television shows ever, so let’s get that out of the way so we can proceed to a little background unencumbered by suspicion, for those of you interested in such stuff.

  In a different form, SINNERS AND SAINTS started out almost three decades ago inspired by THE CABAL series, about a group of criminals in space. I don’t recall much about the books, remembering the vivid covers more (FYI, there are three novels in the series as far as I know; I read one).

  Originally, I had seven characters, the names of none of which I can recall without looking them up in my old paper files. I was going to kill some off occasionally, and replace them, rather like BLAKE’S SEVEN, a British television show about terrorists/revolutionaries. I may have gotten the idea for seven characters from this show – or, just as likely, “Seven Against Thebes” and “The Magnificent Seven”. Or maybe just the idea of seven being a mystical number.

  I had a few ideas for stories, including titles, but I didn’t do much work on the project. I wasn’t doing much actual writing back then, occupying my time with creating characters and backgrounds relationships and settings. This wasted time is one of the biggest regrets of my life.

  The stories in this book started as adventures in an RPG game that I based on FARSCAPE in 2013 or ‘14, but, rather than doing a literal adaptation, I wanted to use my own background. I planned to use TRAVELLER, which is the oldest and probably most popular generic SF game, as my system. TRAVELLER is basically Dungeons and Dragons in space, and the idea of casting my main characters, when I began thinking about this as a story, as the four character classes in D&D appealed to me. These are magic-user (which becomes scientist), cleric (priest), fighter (soldier) and thief (general scoundrel).

  But the protagonists herein are the second try. The first batch was mostly too human, and all male. So I re-thought this, for a more diverse – and interesting, in my opinion – cast. Worlds Beyond by Frank S. Shewmake was a great help in this. Another SF game, he came up with fairly unique races with histories. I planned to use the back-story he wrote as history for my game campaign. Starships & Spacemen by Leonard H. Kanterman also inspired some of the politics of my universe. I was off and running.

  The adventure ideas I came up with were good enough to actually be short stories, in my opinion, which is how my game became this book. I had to jettison the material written by Mr. Shewmake, of course, but my original material was inspired by his, trying to use something other than Earth history as a basis for alien cultures, for example. This book owes his a great debt in that regard, even if I didn’t use his races.

  The adventures were then planned as episodes of a TV show, keeping in mind their length and rhythms. I sketched out an entire season’s worth of episodes – actually a little more, at twenty-eight. Revisiting these ideas – a few characters and concepts borrowed from my original seven-protagonists SINNERS AND SAINTS – I found the story arc to be a little daunting for a first season of TV show. I also decided that 28 of these stories – longer than I’d originally thought – was too many, producing a gigantic volume if I included them all (not to mention taking six months to write). So I scaled this back to a mere three, which is how the original STAR TREK episodes were novelized, coincidentally. My “hour-long adaptations” being roughly the same lengths as published ones makes me happy. I’m perverse that way.

  Thinking about how to best package the stories has made me re-think the twenty-eight “episodes”. The deep stories about what’s really going on in the Borderlands are going to have to wait until Season 2 and later (though the initial mystery is explained at the beginning of Season 2.There is lots going on in the Borderlands). At three books a volume, that’s a ways off.

  So this initial volume is an introduction to the world of the Rastheln’iq, Noomi Bloodgood, Indri Mindsinger and Tully. Future volumes will deal with bigger issues and longer story arcs.

  And the title, Four on the Run, comes from my plans for the originals SINNERS AND SAINTS, with all titles having “the Seven” in them (stolen without any shame from “The Magnificent Seven” film series).

  Jeff Deischer

  August 2017

  “You’d Have to be

  Crazy to Go in There!”

  The p
lant man stirred, his green skin blushing slightly as he came to consciousness. What passed for blood in what passed for veins began circulating normally again. Not being made of meat, the drug given him intended for animal life worked less efficiently than expected. He was supposed to be unconscious for the voyage from Sparta to Perga, better known as Purgatory, having been given the drug while still in his cell on the Imperium capital planet.

  Perga was a prison planet, location top secret. It did not appear on any star map. Its location was in fact so secret that convicts were drugged to prevent them from getting even an inkling of where they were going. The prison transports were automated, not requiring human pilots. The guards on the ship did not know their destination, and because of the way faster-than-light technology worked, there was no passage of time to give them clues as to the distance traveled; for those aboard ships making jumps between stars, voyage duration was always roughly instantaneous, time passing only in real space.

  No one involved in the transfer of prisoners knew anything, really. Only the higher ups in the Imperium knew the truth about Purgatory, and they weren’t talking. This silence had led to some outlandish rumors about the planet, that prisoners were turned over to an alien race that was unknown to the citizens of the Imperium, that convicts were killed in secret, and the like. All that was known for certain was that beings sentenced to Purgatory were never seen again.

  When he roused, the plant man Rastheln’iq gave no sign of it to the guards tending the convicts. Instead, he began thinking.

  The thought processes of the Vir, the race to which Rastheln’iq belonged, were different than that of animal life. Not possessing emotions, at least none analogous to animals, they were not motivated by greed, jealousy, hatred, love or even fear. They did possess the drive to survive, however, and their prodigious mental capabilities were usually directed in this pursuit in ways that were not always understood by the intelligent animal species of known space.

  Rastheln’iq’s mind began working on an escape plan, undeterred by the fact that no one had ever escaped Purgatory. Or, if they had, word had never reached the public. Technically, the plant man’s escape would occur before the transport landed on the prison planet, where life was harsh and the only escape was death, but this detail did not matter to him. It was irrelevant and therefore a waste of mental energy to consider. If the Vir were anything, they were pragmatic.

  Rastheln’iq breathed deeply, but slowly, so as not to alert the guards to his condition, invigorating his cellulose form as it threw off the effects of the anaesthetic drug. Based on the way his body had reacted to it, he concluded that it was corsuline, a drug with which he was quite familiar. It was highly effective across the spectrum of sentient races in known space, and well tolerated. There were few enough plant species in the Imperium so as to be statistically insignificant, which explained why it did not use other drugs more effective on races like the Vir.

  The interior of the ship was as gray and dull and plain as one might expect. Rastheln’iq knew his surroundings. It was not his first time on a prison transport. A surreptitious glance told him that the ship was not special. That helped him, as he was familiar with its design and technical details. Escape would be difficult, possibly impossible. That did not matter to the Viridian scientist.

  Taking over the transport was impossible, so the Vir’s mind looked elsewhere. The ship carried a shuttle, which was more manageable, for it was not normally guarded. Stealing it seemed doable, or at least more doable than hijacking the transport itself. But that also limited later options.

  A larger concern was what to do once he was free. Not knowing where Perga was limited Rastheln’iq’s ability to plan. The transport’s shuttle, used to ferry prisoners to and from planet surfaces, had a very limited range. This was no accident. Hijacking the transport ship, which possessed Overdrive, would allow escapees to go anywhere in known space, within reason, and was under tight security because of this. The relatively tiny shuttle did not possess Overdrive, the engine that allowed faster-than-light travel. It was strictly a single-system vehicle. There was therefore less reason to guard it, at least while the transport was in flight. And therein lay a chink in Imperium security’s armor.

  Rastheln’iq’s analytical mind did not like the odds. It seemed extremely unlikely that Perga would be located in a populated system, where escapees could easily lose themselves. If so, more would be known about it. Still, if conditions on Perga were anything like the rumors about it, a plant being would die a slow and inevitable death. Not being meat sometimes had its disadvantages.

  The plant man tried to move his feet, forgetting he was wearing grav-cuffs. These were ankle manacles that only allowed one foot to be off the ground at a time. Anti-gravity propulsion had been used in such a way as to increase gravity, not reduce it. This prevented prisoners from running.

  Surreptitiously, Rastheln’iq surveyed his fellow prisoners, all of whom wore the drab garb denoting their current status. Each was adorned with electronic signalers to warn anyone who might pass by, as well as alerting any electronic surveillance devices a prisoner encountered. Prisoners could easily be tracked by the signalers. But that was a worry for another time. If Rastheln’iq could not get off the transport, the signalers wouldn’t matter.

  Nearby prisoners were a mélange of races, some of which the Vir did not recognize. Known space contained a hundred races. Among the convicts who were close by were a Tatar and a Delph. The plant man found these two to be most promising for his nascent escape plan.

  Tatars were a chimera race, the mixing of two species. Its members were sleek, furred, possessing claws and fangs. There was some variation to their features. They had been compared to both dogs and cats, but were truly neither. Hyena was another common comparison. The breed had come about when human passengers of a primitive colony ship and the shipwrecked survivors of the crash of a Bringle warship had been forced to cooperate to survive. Cooperation had led to interbreeding. The hybrid race possessed the best qualities of both its parent species, as hybrids often do. Taking their name from fierce nomadic warriors of Middle Asia on Earth, they had returned to space a hundred years later, and within two hundred more, had effectively become the military arm of the Concordat Federation, one of the two major powers in the Orion Spur of the Milky Way at the time. A century later, the Tatar Confederation seized control of the government and established the Imperium. That was seven hundred years ago.

  This particular Tatar was female.

  The Delph occupied the other end of known space from the Tatars, inhabiting territory coreward from Earth, which lay in the trailing part of the Orion Spur belonging to the Imperium. Directions such as “north” and “west” had no meaning in three-dimensional space. Instead, “rimward” and “spinward” and the like were used.

  Descended from cetaceans, the Delph were completely hairless. Herd animals, they were derisively called the faithful lap dogs of humans, which was not quite fair to the Delph, but captured the general timbre of the relationship. Leaders were rare in Delphian society, and, as a culture, they acquiesced to mankind, which was full of leaders, both good and bad. Humanity, as a species, was brasher than most. The Delph were sworn to peace, if not precisely non-violence, and provided much needed temperance in the Concordat Federation. They were born peacemakers and negotiators. They were also well known in the Imperium for their psychomancy abilities, and it was this attribute that Rastheln’iq found useful.

  The plant man’s visual organs darted furtively about the chamber, calculating distances and probabilities.

  Long minutes passed. Rastheln’iq could not decide if the transport had already made the jump from Sparta, and the ship was moving at sub-light speed in the system where Perga was located, or whether the jump was yet to come.

  Half an hour passed. Not much later, things started to happen. The guards, in rooms secure from the prisoner chamber, began doing things. The Vir waited to see if he interpreted these activities correctly. Soon,
air containing the antidote for the anaesthetic was pumped into the room. The prisoners were being awakened for transfer to the shuttle that would take them to the surface of Perga. The transport was nearing its destination!

  Those around Rastheln’iq began stirring as the medicinal atmosphere did its work on their drugged bodies. There was not much time to put an escape plan into action, so, as soon as the Vir saw the Delph move, he hissed in a low tone, “Mindsinger! Listen to me and we may escape before we arrive at Perga.”

  Groggy, the Delphian man struggled to comprehend the words that followed. Rastheln’iq repeated them until he was certain that he was understood. If the Delph failed, there was no escape. He then turned his attention to the Tatar woman.

  The plant man now noticed that she was little more than a girl, but she was the most suitable candidate in the immediate vicinity. He could not relate his plan to those too far away for fear of being overheard by the guards, who were beginning to move about the cabin as their wards revived.

  Rastheln’iq quickly told the Tatar what to do when the time was right. Her part was equally vital as the Delph’s.

  As a guard approached the trio, Rastheln’iq hissed, “Mindsinger! Are you ready?”

  The Delph nodded. The plant man watched expectantly as the gray-skinned being focused his attention on the single guard, a human who appeared to have undergone genetic modification, for he was short and quite broad.

  As the officer came to the Tatar’s seat, his eyes glazed over. Silently, he reached down and, with an electronic key, undid the shackles of the Tatar woman.