Union, page 17
He kept himself as busy as he could after he got some rest, mostly by tinkering with the ship’s internal systems. Kaya spent her time rummaging through her wardrobe to assemble some basic disguises for them—nothing complicated, but enough to make it a bit harder for any recognition software or security systems to identify them. She assured him that even though Mushiri was a major sector hub, the part they were going to visit would have far less conventional security. The ship’s planetary database confirmed that the planet supported two entirely different populations, one on the surface and another deep below. The Union had apparently been operating in the latter.
They had just finished the meal Mysha had cooked for them—some tasty minced vixxa with a side of flemmic chips—when the computer alerted them that they were nearing their destination. By the time they had cleaned up and returned to the cockpit, they had arrived at Mushiri.
And it was dramatically more hectic than anything Dorian had imagined.
He whistled softly through his teeth as the Prowler approached the planet, his eyes drinking in the seemingly endless traffic streams flowing into, out of, and around the planet. There were constant flickers of light in all directions as ships popped out of hyperspace corridors, and the tac-holo had so drawn many navigation lines that he briefly wondered if it was glitching out. But then he realized that without such stringent, pre-defined approach vectors, trying to land on or leave from the planet would have been like manually driving groundcars without traffic lights.
Though the particularly crazy thing—something he didn’t even notice for a solid minute, was that the majority of ships in-system weren’t heading to or from the planet at all. Mushiri really was a hub in the literal sense: ships would arrive in one corridor, stop at the massive orbiting station for food and fuel, and then jump into another corridor toward their final destination without actually landing at all.
Dimly, Dorian wondered what kind of a cut the local government must have been taking from all the station’s transactions…and, given the conspicuously meager number of CDF ships policing the system, how much of that they were probably hiding from their Convectorate overseers.
“You were right—I’ve never been anywhere like this before,” he commented when he finally found his voice. “Not in the Belt, anyway.”
“No one ever believes it until they see it for themselves,” Kaya replied with a vaguely smug snort. “There are almost five hundred jump corridors in this system.”
“Incredible,” Dorian breathed. “The amount of shipping that moves through here must be insane.”
“Considering how the Vecs typically treat physically weak aliens, I’ve always been shocked that a planet filled with mole-people would get this much official traffic.”
“The Musheen aren’t mole-people,” Mysha protested. “They’re…” She paused for a moment, searching for a different word, then finally shrugged. “Okay, they’re basically mole-people, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t clever. Trust me, once we break atmosphere and you get a look at Talhajiir, you’ll never see cities the same way again.”
“I’ll bet you fifty creds he starts panicking before we reach the lower city,” Kaya teased.
Mysha smirked. “Mm…I’ll pass. I think he’ll start freaking out the moment we see the Kraken’s Maw.”
“I appreciate the vote of confidence,” Dorian muttered.
The girls shared a giggle at his expense before Mysha eased the Prowler into line with the thousands of other vessels angling toward the gray-green sphere called Mushiri VII. Soon there was nothing to do but sit and wait for the local port authority representative to provide further instructions.
Given the sheer amount of empty space in a star system, Dorian had always found it a little absurd that traffic patterns would ever be a consideration, his previous observation about the navigation lines here notwithstanding. But wherever he had traveled, modestly populated worlds made certain to funnel all incoming and outgoing ships onto specific, pre-defined trajectories, if for no other reason than security. After all, every vessel was a potential weapon, whether it was packing heavy ordnance or not. A relatively small vessel like the Prowler could still cause an ungodly amount of damage by ramming other ships—or the planet’s surface.
The consolidated traffic flow also created the need for a highly trained bureaucracy, which was something else that every tax-hungry government appreciated. The Convectorate had conquered the galaxy for a whole host of reasons, including its superior technology and obvious military might, but the reason it was able to maintain control were the day-to-day institutions that organized the entire economy and population of its worlds.
Though in Mushiri’s case, the term “organized” ended up being overly generous. Ships who merely wanted to dock in orbit or pass through to another corridor seemed to experience no delays whatsoever, but ships who wanted to land were all forced through a byzantine layer of security checkpoints and scans that made Dorian weirdly nostalgic for the anarchic simplicity of Cira Narn’s Free Zone. Sure, it had been a crime-infested hellhole where someone was liable to strip your ship while you weren’t looking, but at least they had been able to get in and out without much fuss.
Well, get in, at any rate…
Three hours and about a hundred frustrated sighs later, they finally received clearance to begin their spiraling descent through the planet’s upper atmosphere. Ten minutes after that, they passed through the last layer of wispy clouds and got their first look at the Mushiri capital—or part of it, anyway.
The topside portion of the planet wasn’t so different than most other inhabited worlds Dorian had visited. All the major geographic features from mountains to oceans to everything in between were clearly visible from low orbit, and Upper Talhajiir, the sprawling city on the northern continent, could have easily passed for any of a thousand other industrialized coastal metropolises in Convectorate space. The glittering skyscrapers, the flashing neon signs, the vast grid of airborne vehicles…
What truly set Upper Talhajiir apart—and what Kaya and Mysha must have been talking about earlier—were the glowing, semi-translucent tubes jutting out from the sea just off the coast like the tentacles of an enormous aquatic monster preparing to devour the whole city.
“What the hell are those supposed to be?” Dorian gasped as he glanced down at the sensors to confirm what his eyes were already telling him.
“Told you,” Kaya said with a knowing grin.
Mysha grinned back. “Officially, they’re called ‘descension tubes.’ Unofficially, the whole thing is called the Kraken’s Maw. The tubes are made of some type of semi-organic tissue grafted onto a flexible composite polymer. I don’t know why the builders didn’t just use metal, but it probably has something to do with the frequent windstorms. They’re bendy enough that they won’t snap in half.”
Dorian opened his mouth but couldn’t think of what to say. The entire apparatus looked like a work of abstract art mixed with something out of a low-budget horror vid. He started to wonder if Kaya had put some red hurricane in the vixxa just to fuck with him…
“There’s nothing to worry about,” Mysha said with a snicker. “The tubes will take us into the subterranean sections of the city.”
“Wait, we’re going to fly into one of those things?” Dorian stammered. “What idiot at the Science Ministry thought that was a good idea?”
“The tubes predate Convectorate colonization by almost three centuries. And when the Dominion took over, the Seraphim Council cut a deal to extract the mineral wealth under the planet’s surface.”
Kaya grunted. “By ‘deal’ I assume the Seraphim forced their way in.”
“Maybe,” Mysha conceded. “But Mushiri is usually touted as one of the few colonial success stories of that era. The natives welcomed outsiders, and their natural habitat has been left largely undisturbed. Now they sell their geothermal tech to companies all across the Convectorate and live upon one of the wealthiest worlds in this sector.”
“Yeah, and I’m sure there’s no local resentment at all,” Kaya muttered. “That’s always how these things work.”
Dorian braced his hand against the back of her chair as he leaned forward to get a better look at the nearest tube/tentacle/whatever-the-fuck-it-was-called. “Those things can’t be more than fifty meters wide. How do bulk freighters get their cargo down to the undercity?”
“They don’t,” Mysha said. “The major starports all have some type of tunnel conveyer system set up to haul bulk goods down to the lower levels. The whole system is pretty incredible, honestly. Musheen engineers could give the Kali a run for their credits.”
“Looks like it’s our turn,” Kaya said. “You ready for this?”
Dorian winced as they drifted closer and closer to tube. “Do I have a choice?”
“Not really. Here we go.”
Mysha opened the throttle and steered them in graceful arc into the narrow aperture. The tube looked just as weird on the inside as out—Dorian couldn’t shake the mental image that they were flying inside a massive worm with strobe lights for guts. In principle, it probably wasn’t all that different from flying through any other narrow space, and he knew that Mysha was more than up to any piloting challenge. But somehow, his mental assurances didn’t make him feel any better.
The tunnel lights flashed by in an endless, dizzying display. It took about ten seconds before Dorian wished that he had a chair to sit down. After a minute, he was so nauseous that he was seriously tempted to leave the cockpit and just ride out the rest of the descent in Kaya’s quarters. But eventually the weird lighting in the tube became more hypnotic than sickening, and his stomach finally started to settle.
“We’re almost through,” Kaya told him. “We should exit the other end in less than ten minutes.”
Her estimate was pretty close—Dorian spotted the exit aperture at almost eight minutes on the dot, and by nine the Prowler emerged, and the real Mushiri sprawled out before them.
Despite having read the entry in the ship’s database, Dorian still wasn’t prepared for the grandeur of the sight before him. Lower Talhajiir—or Old Talhajiir, according to the locals—was easily five times as wide as the surface version and ten times as densely populated. The central mass of lights was nestled in the center of a ten-kilometer-wide, twenty-kilometer-tall cavern, and it housed the bulk of the upper- and middle-class population. Most of the lower-class folk, including the alien laborers who worked in the sprawling core mines, lived inside the vast warren of tunnels surrounding the city affectionately called the “Labyrinth.”
Originally, the tunnels had been created by the Mushiri as basic passageways linking their many vast underground cities. But as Dominion and then Convectorate colonists had slowly driven the natives deeper and deeper into their own world, the old passages had been widened into grottos and eventually converted into quasi-villages for other alien immigrants who preferred living underground—or who had no other choice.
“I wonder if my dad has ever been here,” Dorian mused. “If not, I almost feel bad that he’s missing out.”
“The good part about Old Talhajiir is that the Vecs barely have any presence at all,” Kaya said as she visually checked the instruments. “The bad part is that we’re going to stick out, and there’s no way around it. Hopefully we can get in and out of here pretty quickly.”
Dorian nodded, mentally bracing himself for yet another attempt to reach out to the Union. Seraph willing, this time wouldn’t end up a disaster.
Mysha set the Prowler down on one of the commercial landing pads within the Labyrinth, and after they paid the requisite docking fees and locked up the ship, they grabbed their disguises and headed for the exit ramp.
“I was starting to get used to wearing giant weird helmets everywhere we went,” Dorian said dryly as he put the breathing mask over his face.
“Sadly, a Yorilach would stand out even more than a human here,” Kaya said as she adjusted her nondescript black jumpsuit. “A hologuise matrix would probably work, but since the air down here is so shitty that we’ll need a mask anyway, we might as well add a hood and call it a day.”
He nodded as he pulled up the thick hood of the black, lightly armored jacket she had given him. It was surprisingly heavy on his shoulders, but the temperature underground was supposed to be on the cool side.
Mysha’s horns and tail couldn’t be concealed quite so easily. Still, her mask, goggles, and jacket did at least hide her specific identity, and she wouldn’t stand out too much since there was a small Velothi population here. It was just too bad that their fear of alerting the Spiders meant that she couldn’t use her powers to turn invisible. Kaya couldn’t shapeshift for the same reason, and when she put on her own mask…
“If you think it’s creepy, imagine how I feel,” Kaya said, glancing at her reflection in the panel by the landing pad release. “And to think, there was a time when I thought about being a brunette all the time.”
Dorian tried and failed to suppress shiver. With the mask covering the bottom half of her face, Kaya suddenly looked—and sounded—exactly like the Shadow who had nearly captured them all at Ziphrades.
“Come on,” she said in that filtered, mechanical voice, hitting the release to lower the ramp. “Let’s get this over with.”
***
The last time Kaya had been wandering the streets of Old Talhajiir, she had been disguised as one of the numerous Krosians who called the underworld home. With their light-sensitive eyes, hulking musculature, and typically poor grasp of galactic economics, the aliens were a natural fit as miners—and an easy target for predatory corporate contracts that turned hard-working people into indentured servants.
She hadn’t needed to worry about the Spiders back then, since the Echo had promised he had a way to distract them, but even if she had been forced to wear a breathing mask, it wouldn’t have been a big deal. After all, she hadn’t yet realized that she was part of an army of psychic clones designed to bring down the Convectorate from the inside.
Ah, to be young and foolish again.
The wry thought didn’t do much to improve her mood as they left the Prowler and ventured out into the weird, seemingly haphazard warren of buildings and streets beyond the landing pad. From the top of the massive cavern above the city, she had to imagine that Talhajiir would look something like a giant ant colony. It was almost as if the Musheen had never heard of civil engineering as a concept. That, or perhaps they had built it this way on purpose just to annoy their colonizers.
Either way, navigating the city would have almost certainly been easier if she were high. The yellowish-brown air reduced visibility to about twenty or thirty meters, and the dust carried by it turned all their black jackets into a disgusting shade of muddy brown within five minutes.
Still, the lighting was brighter than she remembered, and no one seemed to give a damn who they were or why they were here. All things considered, it was definitely a good start.
The contact info that Dorian’s father had provided was for a place a little over a kilometer from the landing pad, which turned out to be just enough time for her to start getting paranoid about a Convectorate ambush. Everything was shadows, tight spaces, and chokepoints. Every time they turned a corner, she expected a team of Baalir commandos to be waiting for them.
Or another Shadow.
But against all odds, they reached their destination without incident—a large, enclosed hollow with several tunnels leading in and out. Within it was an entire boulevard of shops and apartments, as if someone had taken a few blocks out of a surface city and dumped them in a bubble down here. Overhead, the hum of air purifiers could be heard, laboring to make the environment at least somewhat livable for non-Musheen.
Kaya had them hold position in an alley across the street from where they needed to go while she surveyed the area, but she didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. The building was a mechanic’s shop, of all things, albeit one that had seen better days. The neon lights on the sign outside were dark, though the ones inside were on, and more were visible beneath the cracks in the garage door entrance.
“Would be nice if we had a little more info,” she groused. “Is this a front business or is it supposed to look condemned?”
“Not sure, but at least there aren’t that many people around,” Mysha commented, glancing up and down the sparsely lit, mostly deserted street. “It could be worse.”
“Yeah, we could be back on Cira Narn. One time—just one time—it would be nice to visit a real planet with grass and sunlight and smiling people.”
Pushing aside her random gripes, Kaya gave the area another quick visual scan just in case. Meesh was right that there were only about a dozen other people in sight, almost all of them native Musheen who probably lived in the area. The lumpy, downy-furred aliens looked like waddling clods of dirt in the gloom. The lack of any ground vehicle traffic made her wonder why anyone would have built a shop here in the first place, but there were probably a hundred perfectly innocuous explanations for that one.
“Well, I’m reasonably certain that no one has been following us,” Kaya said leaning back around the corner. “What do you think, Meesh?”
“I think standing here like this is just asking for trouble,” the Velothi replied nervously. “We should send the signal and see what happens.”
Nodding, Kaya turned back to Dorian. “Go ahead.”
Pulling out his holopad, he sent the signal. It wasn’t much—just a bit of nonsensical data uploaded to the Holosphere that wouldn’t get flagged by any security algorithms. But if Samir’s information was right, the Union should notice it and prepare to receive guests.
