By Jed Gibbeline
North State author Jed Gebbeline comes from the pulp tradition and we are lucky to present the premiere episode of intergalactic investigative adventurer Jet McClintock, which Jed created especially for Mystery Thursdays. Space and mystery: it’s two, two great tastes in one story!
Part 1: Redheads and Power Crystals
The first laser burst burned a small tunnel through an igneous boulder behind him. He ducked to safety. But now the super-heated tip of the great rock trembled and shattered like old glass, and he scrambled forward as razor-sharp shards and blunt chunks clattered down all around him.
Once more he was an obvious target and his attackers made good on the situation.
As he flattened himself best as he could against the gritty, black soil, several hot blue beams flashed and hissed above him. Then he lunged up and right, toward a low gray pile of stones. Several bursts trailed him, instantly fusing the sandy soil into multi-hued webs of glass at the point of impact. But the beams reacted differently against the old gray stones. As he lay behind them, he noticed that rather than splitting or ricocheting off the stones, the beams seemed instead to disappear into the odd rocks.
These stones are what I’m looking for. What Du Quesne hired me to find.
But two Sst’sst’lln guards rounded into sight, their weird, boneless, snaky arms wielding short, dense clubs. He sat up and began to crawl backwards through the sand, pushing with his legs.
“Uh, come on, guys,” he said. “I’ve got nothing against clubs. And I prefer they have nothing against me … like, themselves!”
But the odd beings were upon him. And they demonstrated a fearsome proficiency with their blunt tools.
Some time had passed. But the pain was too persistent to care or guess how long he’d been unconscious. Against the cold metal floor he could feel the lumps in his face. A substance was caked to the right corner of his mouth… and his corresponding temple. Dried blood. He knew his eyes were blackened; the lids behaved like stumpy, inflexible slabs of numb flesh. Yet somehow light entered. He turned his throbbing head up from the floor. Then he slumped back down and lay still.
But he had seen enough. Enough to take in his surroundings and weigh his situation.
He was on an unknown type of craft. A couple of meters away, two Sst’sst’llns were utilizing glowing wands, coaxing opaque spokes to develop on some kind of crystalline power source. Several large, dense, five- and six-sided crystals jutted from the floor and one wall. The beings’ eyestalks kept turning toward a holographic starfield floating above the crystals. From what he could tell they seemed to be planning to make orbit. Then leaping to some other star system, possibly their own. He wasn’t particularly versed in Sst’sst’lln points of origin or their ship technology. However, he did understand a little about their culture.
Before he feigned a return to unconsciousness, he had seen one other thing. A tool box. Nothing exotic. Nothing peculiar. Just a tool box. A plain, very ordinary type of red tool box. And that was the problem. These beings would never utilize anything like that. That design. That shape. Their tentacle-like appendages preferred twisted arcs of metal for handling and gripping something heavy or unwieldy.
But this ordinary red tool box had a very five-fingers-and-a-palm friendly handle on top.
And that troubled him more than the Sst’sst’llns and their weapons.
A rhythmic hissing, blurping sound was followed by a sharp jab to his left leg.
“All right, all right,” he said. He turned his head up toward the creature. “Thanks for the wake-up call.” He sat up. “I hope room service hasn’t closed. I’m starving.”
But the creature only gurgled and hissed, indicating an opening and closing iris in a wall beyond the techs and the crystals.
“Going for a stroll, are we?”
But the creature brought forth a dull amber rod and touched his back with it. His brain seemed to light up, every cell energized. He stood up quickly.
“Hey! What the hell was that?”
He was alert… restored.
A strange voice entered his mind, possessing a quality that reminded him of a metal cylinder slowly rolling across a stone floor.
“Move now. The Supervisor desires optical confirm and interrogation of your presence.”
“Great,” he said. “I feel better than I have in months, and I gotta take a test.”
The Sst’sst’lln gestured with the amber rod.
“Move now. Move now. Move now.”
He didn’t feel like finding out what a second touch would do.
As they approached it, the iris stopped, mid-closing. And then its individual metallic slats twisted counterclockwise, seeming to fold and slip back until the round aperture was large enough to allow passage.
“Move now. Move now. Move ….”
“All right, all right, I get the picture.”
Beyond was a peculiar space. To refer to it as a round room would have been extremely generous. Instead there were asymmetrical alcoves and bumps distorting the “roundness” of the space. And within each of these smaller spaces were crystals of various sizes and colors, each station manned by a Sst’sst’lln. But standing near the center of the room was quite a different being. One more like himself.
“Who the hell are you?” the tall, red haired woman said.
“I might ask you the same,” he said.
“Yeah, but, y’know, you … don’t have a room full of subordinates, all armed, and ready to defend to the death their employer. Get it?”
“In the interest of not ‘getting it’, yeah I do.”
Her green eyes studied his face.
“You’re McClintock, right?”
He simply grinned and shrugged.
“You operate out of the Gamma Cygnus system, yeah? Du Quesne and all her intrusive little busy bodies?”
“Well. We all work for somebody. Don’t we. Who do you work for?”
She turned toward a set of violet crystals, and pretended to examine them.
“We’re about to make orbit. Then leap to the… to another system. Give me one reason why we shouldn’t make you a permanent satellite?”
“I’m an exceptional conversationalist.”
“Not exceptional enough, I’m afraid.”
She produced a set of blurping, hissing sounds and two more Sst’sst’llns were flanking him, both wielding long green crystalline rods.
“Ah, that’s nice. You don’t see too many people bothering to learn another species’ language these days.”
“Do you know,” she said, ignoring his comment, “what the colors signify in the weapons of the Sst’sst’lln race?”
“I’m still doing research, it seems.”
“They represent the severity of the devices’ effects. The blue rods produce a high intensity laser beam that can bore through anything. The amber rods can clear a beings’ nervous system or paralyze it. Or fry it, leaving the victim little more than a vegetable. I understand that you have had opportunities to ‘research’ these devices, as you put it.”
McClintock shrugged and grinned.
“I’m a quick study.”
The tall redhead smiled coolly.
“Then study this. I have utilized the services of Sst’sst’lln workers for almost ten years now. And in all that time I have never seen them use their green crystal weapons. The effect of these devices is so terrible, it seems, even they would rather not use them.
“But you seem to be an exception they’re willing to make. You, they feel, are too great a threat to their supervisor. And in Sst’sst’lln culture, a supervisor is a king. Almost a god, really.
“They … don’t like threats to their gods.”
The rods jabbed him in the ribs. And the beings drove him toward a large iris.
“As soon as we make orbit, you’ll get a chance to practice your act … in the vacuum.”
“You’d be surprised how well I perform in an empty house.”
Her eyes flashed with anger. But her face remained emotionless.
She hissed low and long. And the technicians waved their appendages about the crystals, and he could vaguely feel the craft begin to rise. A few seconds later, he was prodded with the green rods again.
The iris slipped open with a soft metallic ring. A shallow–roughly four meters–cylindrical space extended away, terminating in an iris made of a clear material. This was obviously the Sst’sst’llns’ idea of an airlock. Beyond, through the glasslike, overlapping, twisting slats, he could see the dusty atmosphere and the dark, rocky surface of the world below them, and the infinite blackness of space above.
To the left of the window-like iris, in the wall, he noted, were three fist-sized, squat cylinders: a black one, a blue one, and a red one.
The weapon-wielding guards began to back out of the airlock space. And that’s when McClintock leapt up and punched the black button. The clear aperture instantly opened, the resulting vacuum dragging him and the Sst’sst’lln guards from the ship.
Out into deadly space.
§
Thus ends part 1 of Mystery of the Absorption Stones. Come back next week for the next installment–but before you go, please vote on this story. Our readers are the final editors on serialtales.com. Vote for one of three options:
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(c) 2009 Jed Gebbeline. All rights reserved.
