Hunted, page 26
Very pointedly, she tipped her head to give the boy a face-on view of her birthmark. “I grew up knowing something you didn’t, Dade. So did Tobit. So did Kaisho. So did York over there, even if he still doesn’t think he deserves an Explorer’s uniform. York never went to the Academy, but the uniform fits him just fine. As for you, Dade— I’m giving you a chance because in your whole damned life, I don’t think you’ve ever been put to the test. Maybe by some miracle, you’ll find a real Explorer in your heart. If you don’t…well, considering we’ll be landing in a war zone, your future career is the least of your worries.”
She waited a moment, then did the most unexpected thing an Explorer could do: lifted her hand, gave Dade a salute, and said crisply, “Dismissed.” It took the boy a moment to remember Festina was an admiral; then his face went stony, he returned her salute, and walked stiffly out of the room.
The rest of us stayed where we were a moment, then slowly let out our breaths. In a low voice, Festina asked, “What do you think, Kaish? Any mystic visions of the boy smartening up?”
Kaisho reached both hands up to the hair over her face and suddenly lifted it high…as if her cheeks were hot and in desperate need of air. I caught a glimpse of her handsome crinkled face, just a tiny bit damp with sweat; then she let the hair fall back into place.
“The boy does have hidden depths,” she whispered. “But I don’t think you’ll like them.”
30
CHECKING IN ON THE NEIGHBORS
Three full orbits of Troyen and we still hadn’t picked up any transmissions from people down on the ground.
“Um,” I murmured to Festina. “What if the Explorers’ radios have been eaten by Fasskister nanites?”
Festina shook her head. “As soon as the navy heard about the Fasskisters’ Swarm, our researchers developed equipment that was immune to the little buggers. Otherwise, the whole fleet would be at the Fasskisters’ mercy.”
“Yeah,” Tobit put in, “everything we carry should be fine. Of course,” he added, “the Fasskisters have probably invented a Swarm that’ll eat our new equipment. But we’ll cross our fingers there isn’t any of that on Troyen.”
“There shouldn’t be,” Festina said. “If Willow’s Explorers aren’t transmitting, they’re just being careful. In a war zone, it’s dangerous to broadcast continuously, even if your messages are encrypted to look like static. Sooner or later, some army will decide you’re an undercover agent sending intelligence to the enemy; next thing you know, you’re surrounded by a platoon of spycatchers.”
Lucky for us, there was a fallback plan for making contact. Whenever an Explorer team is assigned to a ship, they’re given a “transmission second”—one second of the standard twenty-four-hour clock when they should try a burst transmission, if they’re ever on a planet where longer broadcasts are dangerous. It took a bit of calculating, converting Willow time to Jacaranda time and allowing for relativistic slippages in everybody’s clocks…but eventually, Festina and Tobit agreed that the folks down on Troyen would try a single blip of contact at 23:46:22, Jacaranda time. Since it was only ship’s morning, we had most of the day before we’d hear anything.
“So, a whole day to kill,” Tobit said. “You folks play poker?”
“Enough to know I don’t want to play with you,” Festina told him. “What do you say to a side trip?”
“Where?”
Instead of answering, she turned to me. “Edward, do you know exactly what Willow did its five days in this system? Were you watching the whole time?”
“I wasn’t watching at all. The base’s monitors just had a big display of what navy ships were close by. Willow showed up on the list, and stayed there till they picked me up to go home.”
“So Willow might not have stayed near Troyen all the time. They could have gone somewhere else for a while.”
“But there’s nowhere else to go in this system,” Dade said. “Nowhere else inhabited, anyway.”
“Wrong,” Festina told him. “There’s an orbital around the sun. Occupied by Fasskisters who don’t want to leave the area, for fear of being killed by the League.” She smiled grimly. “Now ask yourself: if anyone in the galaxy created specialized nano like the stuff on Willow that was stealing queen’s venom, who would it be?”
“Oh,” Dade said. “Yeah.”
Festina nodded. “Let’s assume Willow visited the orbital while they were in this system. And let’s assume the Fasskisters smuggled nano onto the Willow during that visit. Shouldn’t someone ask them why?”
Like most orbitals, it was a big cylinder floating in space, the surface skin covered with photocells that gathered energy from the sun. Unlike most orbitals, the photocells had been arranged into bands running lengthways with strips of white in between, so that the whole cylinder was covered with long black-and-white stripes.
“Assholes,” Festina muttered. We were all sitting in the bridge’s Visitors’ Gallery, watching as Jacaranda slowly approached the Fasskister habitat.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Do you know why they left some stripes clear…even though they could collect more power if they covered the whole damned surface?”
“No,” I said.
“They did it so you’d know the orbital wasn’t spinning,” she told me. “Anyone flying up can see the stripes are holding steady…so the Fasskisters can’t be producing gravity with good old centrifugal force.”
“They don’t have gravity in there?”
“They have it; they just use some flashy fancy artificial field that guzzles energy twenty-four hours a day. This close to the sun, they have solar power to spare…but it’s still waste for the sake of waste.”
“Admiral,” Prope said, turning around in her command chair, “they aren’t answering our requests to dock.”
“Can we dock anyway?” Festina asked.
“Affirmative,” Prope answered, “but they probably won’t like it. Docking without permission can be interpreted as intent to commit piracy.”
Festina made a face. “Send them a message in English, Fasskister and Mandasar. Say we’re worried about their status because they’ve gone incommunicado. If we don’t get a reply in five minutes, we’ll assume they’re in trouble and come to give aid.”
“Begging the admiral’s pardon,” Prope said, without an ounce of begging in her voice, “but that’s a standard tactic for pirates too. Even if the target is broadcasting like mad, the pirate ship says, ‘We can’t hear anything,’ and keeps coming in. Naive victims think their radios are broken and let the pirate come aboard. More experienced sailors think they’re under attack and take defensive action.”
“What kind of defensive action?”
Prope shrugged. “The Fasskisters believe they can’t leave this system because the League considers them non-sentient. Under such conditions, they may have decided they have nothing to lose by arming themselves with lethal weapons. Especially with warring Mandasars nearby. The Fasskisters could legitimately argue they were afraid of being attacked.”
Festina drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair. After a few seconds, she said, “Send the message and go in anyway. Take any precautions you think necessary. I’ll assume responsibility.”
“Aye-aye, Admiral,” Prope said. She tried to make her voice sound icy-full of misgivings…but if I knew Prope, she’d lived her whole life hoping to luck into an honest-to-God space battle.
We docked without incident—sliding up to a hatch on the orbital’s dark side (the half that wasn’t facing the sun), and dropping our Sperm-field so we could stretch out a docking tube. Prope hated cutting the field; star captains feel kind of naked when they can’t go FTL to get away from trouble. (It must have mortified her when the black ship had ripped away Jacaranda’s field back at Starbase Ms—like getting her clothes torn off in public.) Prope kept telling Festina, over and over, “One hour on the orbital…not a second more, if you expect us to reestablish the tail and get back to Troyen by 23:46:22.”
I could tell Festina wasn’t too happy with the time limit; but considering the circumstances, she couldn’t argue. One hour would have to do.
Festina declared our jaunt to the orbital would be Explorers only. The Mandasars grumped, but the admiral held firm—with all the bad feeling between Mandasars and Fasskisters, it wouldn’t help to take the hive along.
Kaisho wanted to go too. “Why?” Festina asked.
“You’ll see,” Kaisho told her.
“Come on, Kaish,” Festina said, “cut the inscrutable-alien crap. Either give me a straight answer or stay on Jacaranda.”
“Sorry,” Kaisho replied, “but the Balrog loves watching lesser beings get smacked in the face with surprises. Just between you and me, the damned moss really gets off on human astonishment.”
“Shit,” Festina growled. “Just once I’d like to meet an alien who enjoyed giving clear explanations of what the fuck is going on.”
We didn’t wear tightsuits this trip; apparently Fasskisters found the suits grossly offensive, though they never said why. With any group of aliens, there’s always some area where they just mutter, “Can’t you see it’s indecent?” and refuse to go into details. Anyway, the dock hatch reported good air on the orbital’s interior, and we didn’t have time to get dressed up. There could still be nasty germs wafting about…but if the Fasskisters ever wanted to regain their claim to sentience, they’d make sure we weren’t exposed to anything that could hurt us.
“All right,” Festina said, as we hovered Weightless in front of the dock’s airlock. “In we go.”
She pressed the button to open the door. One by one, we passed over the threshold; and immediately gravity clicked in, twisting around so that the outside of the cylinder was down. If I’d been taken by surprise, I might have fallen right back out into the docking tube…but lucky for me, Festina went first and I could watch how she grabbed the support bars just inside the door.
I got in without too much trouble, followed by Tobit and Dade. All three of the others tapped their throats as soon as they were inside, activating the radio transceivers implanted in their necks. It made me feel a bit bad, to be an Explorer without a throat implant…but then, I wasn’t a real Explorer, was I?
Meanwhile, they did the usual, “Testing, testing,” and Lieutenant Harque back on Jacaranda answered, “Receiving loud and clear.” Harque’s voice came in on receivers we’d clipped to our belts. The receivers could also transmit if you pushed the right button, but there was no need for that if you had a throat implant.
Festina worked the airlock while the rest of us stood back trying not to look nervous. The far door of the lock had a tiny peekaboo screen that wasn’t working—either the Fasskisters had deliberately blinded the cameras, or the system had broken down sometime in the past twenty years and nobody bothered to fix it. From my days on the moonbase, I knew the Fasskisters only got supply ships once every three years…so maybe they didn’t care a whole lot if the dock-area cameras went out.
“Are we set?” Festina asked, just before she pushed the button to open the inner door.
Dade tried to draw his stunner, but Tobit slapped the boy’s wrist. It was pretty unfriendly to be carrying guns at all; having them drawn and ready was going too far.
The door whisked open. A second later, the smell of buttered toast filled my nostrils. In front of us, a ramp led up at an easy slope; and the ramp was covered with glowing red moss.
31
GETTING TO KNOW THE FASSKISTERS
“Kaisho!” Festina roared.
Laughter came over our receivers. “A problem, Festina?”
“You knew about this!”
“Of course.”
“And you didn’t tell us.”
“As I said,” Kaisho answered, “the Balrog adores surprises. The nice thing about precognition is knowing when someone else will step on a banana peel.”
“We’re not going to step on anything,” Festina growled. The four of us stared at the ramp again. It was completely crammed with moss, at least ankle deep, starting a few paces beyond the airlock door. No way we could go forward without getting it all over our boots, unless we could crawl across the walls like bugs.
Kaisho spoke again from our receivers. “If you like, I can ferry you over in my hoverchair.”
“No,” Festina told her. “I don’t want you anywhere near us. You’re hard to trust at the best of times, and recently you’ve been a real pain in the ass.”
“Then what are you going to do?” Kaisho asked, a bit smugly.
“Um,” I said “Give me a second.”
In my mind, I tried to imagine a stench that would make moss wither…like really bad breath, something that could knock you straight off your feet, except that it’d only work on Balrogs. The Balrog could obviously smell stuff humans couldn’t, like royal pheromone; so maybe I could produce a stink so powerfully awful to Balrog senses, the moss would kind of shrivel. Not die—I didn’t want it to die. I just wanted to turn its stomach. If I started with its own buttered-toast scent and pictured the toast going all green and moldy…
“Teelu,” Kaisho said sharply. Talking out loud, not whispering. “Stop it!”
“Stop what?” I asked, trying to sound innocent.
“You know what,” Kaisho snapped, “but you don’t know what you’re doing. Given time, you might find something that would cause serious harm.”
“What’s she talking about?” Festina asked me.
“Teelu and I are playing a little game,” Kaisho answered, “and he doesn’t understand his own strength. Biochemicals can be more than smells, Your Majesty—one species’ pheromone is another species’ poison. If you muck about too much, you might hurt someone…and it could be humans just as easily as Balrogs.”
“What?” Festina demanded. She stared straight at me. “What are you doing?”
“His own form of diplomacy,” Kaisho said. “Talk softly and carry a big stink.”
Festina looked like she wanted more answers; but at that moment, the moss in front of us simply rolled aside. A parting of the glowing red sea. The spores in the center of the ramp slid right or left, till they left a clear walkway up the middle—bare concrete floor, walled on either side by heaps of glowering fuzz. The buttered-toast smell turned a bit edgy…as if even a higher lifeform could get ticked off.
“Did you do that?” Festina asked me.
I shook my head as Kaisho answered, “I did. Or rather, the Balrog did it at my request. Go ahead—the moss will leave you alone. I promise.”
“She promises,” Tobit muttered. “That fills me with loads of confidence.”
“You two stay here,” Festina told Tobit and Dade. “Edward and I will go in. If anything happens to us—like we get our toes bitten by spores—arrest that bitch for assaulting an admiral. Even if the Balrog is sentient, I have faith the High Council can devise an appropriately unattractive punishment.” She lifted her hand to her throat implant. “You heard that, Kaisho?”
“You lesser species can be so suspicious. I said the Balrog would leave you alone, and it will. It won’t try to touch you as long as you’re on this orbital.”
“Great,” Festina muttered. “That sounds like those promises the gods always gave in Greek myths—loaded statements with nasty loopholes. But,” she continued, staring at the open path through the moss, “I would dearly like to ask a Fasskister what the hell happened here.”
She looked at me, as if I had some kind of deciding vote. I thought of what Captain Prope would say if we came running back at the first sign of trouble…not that I cared about my own reputation, but I didn’t want Festina to look bad. “Let’s go,” I said.
So we did.
The ramp led to another hatch that should have been closed but wasn’t—it had jammed partway open, leaving a gap in the middle. Our path through the moss led right up to the gap and beyond.
“Looks like the Balrog has fouled up the gears,” Festina said, examining the hatch.
“Do doors have gears?” I asked.
“Don’t go literal on me,” she answered.
We squeezed through the gap and into a world glowing crimson. At one time, this must have been a pretty standard orbital—forty square kilometers of land on the cylinder’s inner surface, a lot of it dedicated to parks and agriculture. Orbitals always go heavy on the fields and forests, so people don’t fixate on being closed in; even if you can see the other side of the cylinder overhead, it’s not so bad if you’re surrounded by trees and grass.
So the Fasskisters’ home had probably been filled with their own native versions of nice little woods, quiet meadows, and the occasional rustic village. Now it was filled with Balrog, and it looked like some classic version of hell: scarlet, scarlet everywhere, like fire and lava and blood.
The orbital had a long white sun, kind of a fluorescent light tube stretching down the middle of the cylinder; but here on the ground, the whiteness of the shine was tinted crimson as far as the eye could see—as if we’d stepped inside a cherry-hot blast oven. The temperature was actually a bit cool, but the sheer look of the place made me break into a sweat.
“Dante would have been proud,” Festina murmured, staring at it all. The red light shone up from the ground onto her face, casting weird shadows and giving her eyes little pinpoint dots of scarlet. I didn’t like the effect.
“What do we do?” I asked.
“Damned if I know,” she answered. Looking off to our right, she said, “There’s a village over there. Let’s see if anyone’s around.”
