Vortex Part 5

VORTEX Part 5

I could do nothing about it and kept beating Jessie repeatedly. She could barely defend herself against my attacks despite her fighting skills. Finally, the rays stopped having an effect and I fell to the ground. A-Tya came to me immediately and placed her hand on my head. In that moment, this COTTON-WOOL EFFECT ceased, I could think clearly again and could dedicate myself to the main problem: the soul collector that had landed.

Still shaky on my feet, I sat down in front of the monitor and beheld something horrifying. The Ectomorphe dragged people out of their houses and injected them with an undefined substance. These people died shortly after in terrible agony, as I could tell from their facial expressions.

Memphisto sat down next to me and said:

"— That's how they always proceed. The rays awaken the aggressiveness of all living beings, which confuses you, then they come get you and inject D14. D14 causes the victim to die in horrific agony, thus releasing more life energy."

I turned to Memphisto and told him straight to his face:

"— You are perverted, brain-sick perverts!"

Memphisto lowered his head and said very quietly:

"— That's not even half of it, look closely at the screen."

Indeed, the Ectomorphe wasted absolutely nothing; whether men, women, children, or the elderly, they dragged them all out of their houses and gathered them in a large square that—how could it be otherwise—had been built by Luzifer.

In our universe, the Ectomorphe back then had been far more sensible, sparing at least the very young humans in order to have, so to speak, renewable resources; here, by contrast, they devastated every planet until no life could exist on it any longer.

"— Are they prepared for resistance?" I asked Memphisto.

"— Naturally, that is why they isolate every city under attack with a force field, and every one of them carries, besides the regeneration biochip, a weapon that would burn even you from the inside out."

I didn't particularly fancy the idea of my innards evaporating, but I had to do something after all. The force field presented absolutely no problem for me, because with the wormhole expander I could easily emerge inside it. It was time once again to go to war with the BRIGHT STAR 3. I couldn't waste time infiltrating their ship and searching for their main computer for hours. My ship's dispersers were practically made for turning that damn ship into an atomic cloud along with its crew and main computer. Time was running out, so I couldn't fly with the entire crew; by the time they were all on board, half the city would have lost its inhabitants, so I ran aboard alone and put on the neural interface that had been developed specifically for combat missions. It allowed me to control the ship via thought power, and therefore very quickly.

The setup had one minor drawback caused by sensory feedback: I could feel every bit of damage on my own body. In colloquial terms, people call that hellish pain.

"— What are you planning to do?" I heard Tya say, but by then I was already closing the hatch and initiating hover mode. Since the ship could perform breakneck maneuvers in thought-control mode, the gravitational force field was activated so that I wouldn't end up as a grease spot on the floor. With the cooling of the gravitational capacitors and their rectifiers, plus the second power source activated, the ship was now twice as fast in atmospheric flight; I was proud of the improvements Dean Rho had introduced here since the Zer War to enhance maneuverability during planetary combat, though I still wouldn't have stood a chance against, say, an atmospheric gunship of the Juventaner, as they used genuine anti-gravity with Element 116 as a power source. For us, manufacturing this element was simply too complex, and the electrogravitational capacitors were nearly as good. Of course, high-frequency irradiation of certain materials like plutonium worked as well, just like with Element 116; the humans of Earth used that, but the handling left much to be desired, and radioactivity was harmful to us Genomorphe even in tiny doses. The terrestrial radiation-gravitation drives felt very harsh, whereas our electronic manipulation of gravity through charge alteration was better suited for control, but the underlying principles are a bit hard to explain.

Since I had linked the main screens of the ASO Base with the Bright Star's monitor, the horror followed me everywhere. Immediately after emerging from the wormhole, the enemy ship opened fire on me. I felt every hit, but fired back at once. The dispersion emitters quickly grew white-hot.

The armor of the BRIGHT STAR 3 didn't hold up long enough; it soon became clear who held the upper hand, and I gave myself no more than a hundred-to-one chance of surviving this.

Suddenly a piercing pain shot through my body, so violent that I thought I was breaking in two. Wrong! It was the ship breaking apart. The debris crashed down onto the other ship, damaging it heavily. But nobody noticed that I was one of the falling pieces of wreckage, landing on the outer hull of the Ectomorph ship.

Once I stopped burning and my skin began regenerating, I jumped down onto one of the Ectomorphe who was just about to carry a full soul condenser into the interior of the spaceship. The poor devil didn't even realize what hit him when a well-aimed strike sent him straight to dreamland. The condenser fell to the ground and shattered. The glowing ectoplasmic energy cloud drifted up into the sky and vanished.

From the left and right, several other Ectomorphe approached with drawn weapons, aiming at me. I managed to jump barely ten meters to the side so the shots missed me, but that wasn't enough, because a third blast pierced and burned my upper arm, and for some inexplicable reason the wound wouldn't heal right away. The situation grew dire; my strength was fading fast. Luzifer emerged from the ship and shouted:

"— For a human, you're pretty inflexible! You might have damaged one of our ships, but we have thousands in every other city with more than half a million inhabitants."

I saw a flash out of the corner of my eye and leapt aside, but it was already too late: a beam struck my face and disintegrated parts of it. Shocked, I touched the wound and felt absolutely nothing—there was only empty air. Parts of my face were simply gone.

Everything went black before my eyes and I could barely breathe; cold sweat broke out all over me, and finally I collapsed to the ground, partially losing consciousness. Partially, because I could neither see nor move. I could still hear Luzifer laughing and ordering them to bring me inside the spaceship, and then the film snapped.

A-Tya watched the entire incident on the monitor, deeply distressed.

"— Why aren't his wounds regenerating like they usually do?"

Master One merely shrugged, but Memphisto knew something, pressing himself deeper and deeper into his chair. Finally, he spoke up:

"— Our people use a radioactive beam; that could produce this effect on his species."

A-Tya knew that radiation harmed Genomorphe much faster than humans; the genes are split, thereby suppressing the regenerative ability for a period of time or permanently, depending on the intensity of the radiation.

Master Two asked Memphisto:

"— Would it be possible to program a virus that locks up all the Ectomorph computers?"

"— Yes, we always use the 8192-bit RISC multiprocessor RUTAL, but I wouldn't wish programming it on my worst enemy."

"— If you get me the mnemonic list, I can program a virus."

"— Well? Awake already?"

"— ..."

"— Morph, wake up already!"

I could finally move. The first thing I checked was whether my face was still there; in fact, it had already regenerated, but my upper arm was still aching. When I touched it, some putrid, foul-smelling fluid leaked out.

"— Yeah, I'm awake, turn on the light."

"— No problem."

I felt an injection needle in my arm and shortly after saw glowing patches of color swirling all around; besides that, nothing else mattered anymore and I felt intensely happy. I knew it was a drug, but there was nothing I could do against it. The visions soon began, growing ever wilder. First, my sister appeared to me and said:

"— Tvorgh, from now on you are on your own." Then came A-Tya and A-Kara, both saying at the same time:

"— Varlon, come back to us, we need you!"

Then Luzifer laughed scornfully and injected D14 into the neck veins of both.

I leapt up, drenched in sweat, and could immediately think clearly again. The drug wore off astonishingly fast, yet some genetic damage remained, and I could no longer morph. No matter how hard I tried, I could no longer visualize my genetic substructures before my mind's eye, let alone combine them with one another.

The cell didn't look quite so deserted in infrared. Someone was chained to the wall, just like myself. With my healthy arm I tore myself free and cautiously approached the fellow prisoner.

Everything indicated that this time things wouldn't go as I had planned. Luzifer and the other Ectomorphe were overwhelming adversaries and had support among the Earth's population through the Skytology organization. I don't think the Skytologists knew they were merely food.

Despite my infrared vision, I couldn't tell who was lying there next to me in the cell. The thermal radiation only revealed that it was a human of medium build and still alive. Softly, I asked:

"— Who is in this cell besides me?"

A young female voice answered just as softly:

"— I'm still here!"

"— And who is 'I'?"

Then I laid my uninjured hand on her face and cried:

"— By the Etern..."

"...! You are a Genomorph too!?!".

"—Not so loud! I'm not a real Genomorph; my mother was a Genomorph, my father is an Earth human."

"—Does that mean you lived on Earth until the Ectomorphs came?"

"—Yes, you know an astonishing amount, who are you?"

"—I am Varlon Traas, originally from the planet Zer and came from the parallel universe, and I am already several millennia old. But it's slowly getting more and more complicated when I introduce myself."

"—Well, my name is Selina and I'm ten, so still way too young to morph."

Genomorphs reached adulthood at fifteen and could only morph then; this was due to a very specific hormone that allowed the acceleration of the metabolism.

"—Selina, please tell me where your mother is."

She didn't need to say anything, because suddenly I could read minds again—something only possible among Genomorphs—and retrieved an image of her mother from her brain. It was unbelievable. It was my sister, who had disappeared years ago during an explosion on Zer II, leaving me believing she was dead. Back then, I was just on my way back from Malkor. Somehow everything seemed so unreal to me.

Tero had apparently stumbled upon a way into the parallel universe back then and started a family here, but now she was definitively dead, as I could read from her mind. During the Ectomorph attack, great care had been taken to ensure that she died.

Luzifer obviously had something planned if he had specifically brought her here from another city and put her into the cell with me. I had an uneasy feeling that he was using her for some dirty trick to get to the people of ASO, maybe he was even after Master One.

My attention was drawn to the door; it seemed to be the only exit, but it was too solid—even if I were healthy again, I couldn't do the slightest bit of damage to it.

Even if I managed to get out of here, my freedom of movement would be constrained by Selina. I left Kara's upbringing to her mother, and I doubted she would want to raise Tero's daughter as well.

Finally, Luzifer came into the cell and said angrily:

"—I was ordered to release you."

You can probably imagine my surprise. I asked:

"—And why suddenly now, even though I've caused you so much trouble?"

Luzifer laughed at me and said:

"—If you found that out now, it wouldn't be a surprise."

"—And what about Selina?"

"—She stays here for safety; neither of us wants her killed, do we?"

Luzifer spoke in riddles and I gradually ceased to understand anything; it was only clear to me that he had something very terrible planned, and not for me, since he could have easily killed me long ago. It would turn out later just how right I was about that.

"—Varlon, you're back? When I saw the ship breaking apart, I thought you were killed in the process," said A-Tya when I reappeared at the base.

I wanted to answer her, but when Memphisto and Master One came into view, I drew the disperser and fired. Immediately everyone threw themselves at me and ripped the weapon from my hand.

Master Two looked at the remains of the two on the floor and asked me:

"—Why did you do that? They are dead!"

I simply didn't know; some inner force had compelled me to do it, and now I was in a tight spot because Master Two was aiming my disperser at my head—something that was rather uncomfortable.

A-Tya came to my defense and cried:

"—Please don't act rashly, there must be a reason why he killed them both, I will examine him and find out the cause."

"—Can you do that?"

"—Yes, back on Malkor I found out that he was a Genomorph even though he didn't know it himself yet. All I need is an MRI scanner."

Master Two opened a door to the ASO lab, and there stood the centerpiece. All the ASO people were still holding onto me and strapped me to the sled that led into the scanner, then A-Tya carried out the scanning procedure. Layer by layer my head was scanned, so that after two minutes the finished image appeared on the screen.

With a few keystrokes, Tya began to toggle off individual layers of the computer image; already at the very first layer, it became clear to her what was wrong with me. She sat down on the sled and asked:

"—Why are you missing half your skull?"

"—No idea what you're talking about, my skull looks completely fine," I replied immediately.

"—Fine? I'm looking right now and half your skull is filled with a metallic implant; aside from that, I see three small chips here, two of which are connected to the implant. What functions do they have?"

Suddenly, I spoke with Luzifer's voice:

"—To wipe out that traitor Memphisto and my greatest adversary, Master One, of course, you slut. Maybe I'll kill you too! Ha ha."

A-Tya recoiled in shock and cried out in horror:

"—Varlon, try to morph and reject the implant!"

"—I can't do it, I can't morph anymore! The radioactivity has this effect on me, hopefully it will only take a short time before the morphing ability returns."

"—Alright, then I'll use a laser scalpel to remove it. I certainly can't kill you with that, right?"

Once again, I spoke with Luzifer's voice:

"—So what? Leave the implant alone or I'll kill you, bitch!"

"—Remove it immediately!" I screamed with all my might as I regained at least partial control over myself.

A-Tya wasted no time and immediately picked up a laser scalpel. With a few precise cuts, she removed the implant and several other parts of my skull, then she moved on to the chips:

"—Var, please tell me which one is the one keeping you alive and which one is the Battlemorph chip."

Since I was fully conscious, I had a mirror brought over so that I had a good view of my brain.

"—I don't remember anymore!"