Alien Skies, page 2
part #3 of Wakanreo Series
Kamuhi staggered, reeling from the sound as well as the punishment his coverall imposed. It wasn’t a shock bomb, he concluded; there must be a sniper with an energy weapon nearby.
Ranghhour had caught the worst of the sniper’s charge. He was caught in mid stride, his weight on one leg as he hung in the air, frozen into immobility by the paralysis his coverall induced. A moment later he dropped to the ground like a stone, the indicator on his helmet blinking rapidly in the blue light of a fatality.
Kamuhi struggled to move, but he had taken enough of a charge that his suit registered him as disabled, and he couldn’t make his legs work properly. He tripped over his own feet and landed on a patch of stinkgrass. When he heard a cry that suggested Cheung had taken a hit, also, he lifted his head just in time to see her pitch face-forward into the dirt.
A shrill whistle sounded and the observation team bounded into view on the hill above them. By the time they reached him, Kamuhi had managed to drag himself to where Ranghhour lay and had reassured himself that the Shuratanian was still breathing. The smaller man’s bright, jewel-like eyes gleamed in appreciation, but he still couldn’t speak.
The three observers split up, and began to take readings from each member of Kamuhi’s team. The woman who held her monitor against the sensor in Kamuhi’s helmet grunted with satisfaction. “Eighty percent chance of fatality.”
Kamuhi didn’t answer until she had turned off the neurological block that had partially paralyzed him. “I’m still twenty percent alive, then?”
She frowned but didn’t answer him. Cheung was getting to her feet, stretching. She looked at Kamuhi and laughed. “Buddha, Hailoaka! You look like you rolled in that stuff!”
Kamuhi looked down at his coverall. The stinkgrass had left huge streaks of gray-green slime all over him. Kamuhi tried to brush it off, but all he did was smear it over his hands. Sadly, the action seemed to make the smell even worse.
“Ah!” Ranghhour had also regained the use of his limbs. He lurched to a standing position and straightened up to his full height. “It feels good to be alive again.”
A short, stocky Terran came out from a cleft in some rocks. He was wearing a ThreeCon training coverall with a bright blue arm band on his left sleeve, and he carried a rifle simulator.
“Sorry,” the Terran said. “Hope there are no lasting ill effects?”
Ranghhour shook his head. “Only to my pride—and Hailoaka’s coverall.”
The Terran grinned at them. “I’d just about fallen asleep. I’d thought you’d never get here. The observation team were getting seriously annoyed. I could hear them arguing about being late for breakfast.”
“Well, we won’t keep them from breakfast any longer,” Ranghhour said dryly.
“If it’s any consolation,” the Terran told them, “you’re the only group from your team that made it anywhere near this close. We might have missed you except that the Captain told the team leader to post someone on all sides of the checkpoint.”
The observers did seem in a bad mood. They checked Kamuhi and his teammates off their roster and brusquely pointed out an air transport to take them back to the base.
Kamuhi nearly fell asleep on the way. The cool morning air hit him in the face when he jumped down from the transport, providing a needed jolt of awareness. The sky above glowed a beautiful shade of lavender just touched with gray. He walked briskly toward his own apartment building with only a farewell wave to Ranghour and Cheung.
Yulayan looked up from the stove as he came through the front door. She resolutely refused to use the food synthesizer, so they had hunted through the nearby town to find a stove.
“Good morning, sweetheart,” Kamuhi said.
His wife started to smile, but stopped to stare at him. “Kam! What in the world happened to you?”
“We lost the exercise,” he said. “And I fell in some stinkgrass when I got tagged.”
Yulayan studied him in consternation. “Couldn’t they find a less messy way to pretend to kill you?” Her nose wrinkled. “And a less smelly way?”
“I don’t think they were trying to make a mess. It just worked out that way.”
Yulayan declined to even kiss him until he had cleaned up. Malia was sitting in her chair when Kamuhi came back into the kitchen wearing his bathrobe. She gave him a sunny smile and went back to eating her breakfast.
Kamuhi smiled back as he looked at his daughter. Her face was heart-shaped, a cross between Kamuhi’s oval Terran face and Yulayan’s more triangular Wakanrean one. Like him, Malia’s hair was black, but the resemblance stopped there. Even though they had never trimmed her hair, it only grew long in back; the front was still very short, like her mother’s Wakanrean headcrest. And her eyes, which had been blue since she was born, had stayed blue.
“She’s so beautiful,” Kamuhi said, watching his daughter. “How did we ever make anything so beautiful?”
“If you don’t remember,” Yulayan said with a smile, “I’ll show you how we did it tonight.”
Kamuhi shook his head regretfully. “I have night duty again.”
Yulayan made a face. “It seems to me that ThreeCon wants too much in the way of sacrifice.”
She put a plate of food in front of him, and he ate it quickly. He was tired, and he wanted to go to bed.
“What are you going to do today?” he asked her.
“I’m going to take Malia to the park for some fresh air,” she said. “And then I’ll take her to the childcare center so I can get some work done on my dissertation.”
“How’s it going?”
Yulayan shrugged. “All right, I guess. I still need the final results back on my research, so I can’t finish the conclusion, but I think it holds together so far. Would you look at it a little later this week?”
“Sure. When will you get your results back?”
“I have some time scheduled at the physics lab tomorrow. I’m hoping the simulator will have gotten to my experiment by then.”
Kamuhi felt a pang of guilt that his wife had to wait her turn at a lab. She had had access to much better facilities before he enlisted. He was going to comment when the com set beeped. Yulayan answered it and told him it was for him.
When Kamuhi sat down in front of the screen, his heart sank. The face looking back at him belonged to his company master sergeant.
“Good morning, Hailoaka,” the sergeant said. He was a Miloran, a vaguely humanoid race from a heavy gravity world. Milorans always reminded Kamuhi of a stack of boulders with arms and legs. Their skin color ranged from light brown to dark gray and their faces tended to be craggy. The sergeant’s was no exception.
“Good morning, sergeant.”
“I hope you ate breakfast already, Hailoaka,” the sergeant went on cheerily, “because the Captain wants to see you—now!”
“Yes, sir,” Kamuhi said, rising to his feet. “I’ll be right there.”
“What is it?” Yulayan asked.
“I have to go see the Captain.”
Yulayan was indignant. “But you haven’t had any sleep!”
“I know,” said Kamuhi wearily. He went into the bedroom and pulled on a clean uniform as quickly as he could. Captain Ibori wasn’t known for her patience.
When he presented himself at the Captain’s office, Kamuhi was kept waiting for several minutes. This didn’t surprise him in the least. He sat in the outer office and read the motto on the wall: ‘To serve beneath alien skies.’ It struck him as appropriate. The patch of violet he could see from the only window in the room was certainly different from the deep blue he had grown up seeing overhead on Terra.
When the Captain’s aide looked up and called his name, Kamuhi took a deep breath and walked into her office.
Captain Ibori was a Terran from a colony world. Her face always reminded him of the sculpted oval he had once seen on an ancient mask in a museum of ancient African art.
Kamuhi came to attention and saluted. Captain Ibori returned the salute but she didn’t look particularly glad to see him.
“Sit down, Private.”
Kamuhi sat in the chair opposite her desk.
The Captain tapped her fingers on the desktop like she was annoyed about something. “What did you do before you enlisted?”
“I worked for ThreeCon as a civilian.”
“Doing what?” she persisted.
“I was a physicist,” Kamuhi said, a little reluctantly. He knew the information was in his file, but he generally preferred not to talk about it.
Captain Ibori leaned back in her chair. “Why the hell are you here, Hailoaka? Why is anybody with two doctorates sitting in front of me in a goddamned private’s uniform?”
It was a question Kamuhi had asked himself many times during his second session of boot camp. “I guess you could say I’m paying back a debt, ma’am,” he said finally.
“It must be one hell of a debt.” The Captain leaned forward in her chair and rested her elbows on her desk. “Tell me about last night’s exercise.”
“Ma’am?” Kamuhi asked, surprised by the change of subject.
“Tell me about the training exercise,” she repeated. “Why did you persuade your group to leave the test area?”
“No one said we couldn’t leave the test area, ma’am,” Kamuhi said. He was prepared to repeat the entire presentation the sergeant had given, word for word, if she disputed that fact.
“I know that, Hailoaka. That’s actually a calculated omission. And not one in a thousand trainees ever figures that out. How did you?”
“Once I realized we were under observation from the air, I couldn’t think of any other way to get close to the checkpoint without being seen. The only possible advantage I could think of was to be where they weren’t likely to look for us. And when I thought it over, I remembered that our orders never said we couldn’t leave the test area.”
“And how did you find out about the airship?”
“I looked up and saw it, ma’am.”
“Those ships are selected for this type of exercise because they’re virtually soundless,” she said, a note of warning in her voice. “In addition, they’re camouflaged to blend in with the night sky. You can’t see them with those night visors unless you’re really close and you know to look for them. How did you know to look for them?”
It occurred to Kamuhi that she suspected him of having inside information about the exercise. “I didn’t know about them ahead of time, if that’s what you mean, ma’am. I heard a noise like something hitting the ground in front of me, and I looked up.”
“They didn’t drop any shock bombs from the ships,” Captain Ibori said. “Ground troops fired them with portable launchers.”
“I didn’t say it was a bomb hitting,” Kamuhi said. “I don’t know what it was. I don’t think it came from the ship, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”
“Then why did you look up?”
“I don’t really know,” Kamuhi said with a shrug. “I suppose in the back of my mind,” he went on, without considering where this revelation would lead, “I was still thinking about flight.”
“In the back of your mind you were thinking about flight?” the Captain repeated. “Explain.”
Kamuhi cleared his throat. “It took a while to get to the drop site,” he said, wishing he had kept his mouth shut, “so I spent the time thinking over an article I read recently about the ancestors of Tryffs.”
Captain Ibori sat back in her chair and looked at him incredulously. “What? You were on your way to a training exercise and you were reflecting on the evolution of Tryffs?”
Kamuhi nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
She shook her head in disgust. “Hailoaka, you have another four months here before you qualify for Officer Preparation and Instruction. Don’t ever come into my office and tell me anything that ridiculous again.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Kamuhi cleared his throat again.
“Was there something you wanted to say?”
“Yes, ma’am. I haven’t made up my mind about applying for Officer Prep.”
“Don’t sweat it, Hailoaka,” she said. “Someone made it up for you. It’s in your file already.”
Kamuhi frowned. “What?”
“It’s in your file,” Captain Ibori repeated. “You’ve been assigned to OPI, and it’s been approved.” She chuckled at his expression. “Did you read your enlistment agreement?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Kamuhi had read it extensively and could still quote much of it.
“I thought you would have,” she said. “The paragraph on ‘The Third Confederation shall have the right to assign you wherever it deems you are most useful,’ has been interpreted to mean that they can assign you to OPI, whether you ask to be an officer or not.” She leaned over her desk and smiled a sardonic smile. “I’m sure you’ll do great at OPI, Hailoaka.” The smile disappeared and she waved a hand. “Dismissed.”
Chapter Two
When Kamuhi finally got to bed, he fell asleep so fast he had no memory of it. There were late afternoon shadows on the wall when something woke him. It took him a minute to realize where he was. It took him another minute to realize that Yulayan’s hand was stroking the side of his leg. He rolled over, and she smiled at him. She was lying next to him, and she hadn’t a thing on but the fur she was born with and the silver heicha that she always wore pinned to the fur at the base of her throat.
Kamuhi became aroused almost instantly. “Hello, sweetheart.”
Instead of answering, she bent her head down and kissed him, a deep passionate kiss that she had learned how to perform from him. Wakanreans were not natural kissers, but Yulayan was half Terran and she had had a lot of practice with Kamuhi.
When she let him up for air, he pushed her down and began to nibble gently on her neck. He could feel that she had put her claws out, and she was gently stroking his back and sides in a way that she knew would excite him.
Before he got any more involved, Kamuhi forced himself to ask a question. “Where’s Malia?”
Yulayan seemed a little short of breath. “At the childcare center. I have to pick her up in an hour.”
Kamuhi laughed softly. “Let’s not waste any time then,” he said, and he moved his mouth down to find her breast. Yulayan gasped, and they didn’t speak again for some time.
When they had finished, they lay side by side for a few minutes. Kamuhi had almost fallen asleep again when Yulayan woke him up with a question.
“Kam, are you glad that you enlisted?”
Kamuhi considered. “I don’t know that I’d say I’m glad about it,” he said after a moment’s reflection. “But I do still feel I made the right decision.”
Yulayan clicked her tongue against her teeth in a disapproving noise. “It just seems like such a waste. When you look at my research, you can see right away if I have a problem or an error. It’s as natural as breathing to you. Why waste that talent?”
“Maybe because it’s too easy. I wanted to do something different, something that wasn’t effortless for me. Learning to take orders took more discipline on my part than learning differential calculus.”
“Then why didn’t you try something really difficult like learning to fly without a flyter?”
Kamuhi smiled, but still he was worried, both by her tone and her questions. “What’s wrong, Yulayan? We had this discussion on Wakanreo, before I took the oath. You weren’t upset about it then.”
“I don’t think I realized how different it would be. I knew we’d have to go wherever you were sent; I just didn’t know that you couldn’t call your life your own.”
“I’m still in training,” Kamuhi said. “One reason ThreeCon insists on a ten year enlistment is that they have lots of training up front. Everyone who enlists has to do at least six months of universal training after boot camp, no exceptions. That’s why there are nine other training bases on this backwater planet. No one even bothers learning local time here; there are more trainees than residents.”
“This planet’s not so bad. ThreeCon provides good support facilities, and I’ve made friends with some other recruits’ spouses. It’s having you gone for days at a time that I don’t like.”
“Well,” said Kamuhi, wondering how she was going to take the news, “as soon as I finish universal training, I’ll be gone for a little longer than that.”
“What do you mean?”
Kamuhi told her what the Captain had said about OPI.
“Can they do that?” she asked.
Kamuhi nodded. “I can’t be sent to a posting where I can’t take you and Malia if it lasts longer than six months—unless I agree to it—but that’s about the only restriction on assignments.”
“Do you want to go to OPI? You didn’t seem too sure when we talked about it earlier.”
“I don’t know. The only point that really counted against it was that it takes six months, and it’s away from your family.”
“You mean we can’t go with you?”
“OPI is always on a space station, Yulayan,” Kamuhi said. “There’s nothing else there. They want a perfectly controlled environment—no outside influences, no distractions.”
“Distractions!” She sat up and got dressed without speaking, and when Kamuhi tried to put his arm around her, she pulled away.
“I have to go pick up Malia,” she said, pulling on her sandals.
Kamuhi sighed. Well, he had known there would be bumps on the road of his new career path. He would just need to find a way to smooth this one out.
He ate a hurried meal by himself, and then changed into a clean uniform and left the apartment. It was dark by the time he checked in at the duty center to find out his next assignment. A bored clerk told him that Security was short-handed and had requested any available personnel. Kamuhi glanced at the base map displayed on the wall and saw that the security office was located in the next building. When he got there, the lieutenant in charge, a Miloran named Guhlhan hna Parkwaht, took one look at him and smiled happily.
