Hidden in Predator Planet, page 2
The cockpit shut out all sound, but I could imagine the alarms and the zip-whoosh of the pods as the launchers jettisoned them.
SCOOBE began the countdown, and I crossed my fingers and closed my eyes as the cryo-mask slipped over my face and adhered around my nose and mouth.
Did I do the right thing? Every time I second-guessed myself, all I had to do was remember my Mama, helmet under her arm, down on one knee and peering into my eyes.
“I’ll miss you too, baby,” she said. “I’ll miss you every day, and I’ll wonder if I did the right thing by leaving. To have a child is to forever be torn in two.” She put her hand on my chest. “My heart will be here.”
I had put my hand on her forehead. “And your reason will be here.”
She nodded and grabbed my hand and kissed it, tears running down her face.
“God above let my reason and heart be right,” she said when she released my hand and pulled me into a fierce hug before standing and kissing Daddy goodbye.
Daddy rested a heavy hand on my head, and we watched her join her team on the temporary dais the Aux Space Agency, a subdivision of Space Global, set up for the pre-launch ceremony.
Mama’s team was the first human envoy to meet the Qhudret in neutral space after they initiated first contact.
Every choice I made today was governed by my heart and my reason. But every choice had incalculable consequences that would spiral in an irretrievable domino effect that might be felt for eons. That sob I’d swallowed earlier rose right back up, and I cried.
“Damn, CeCe,” I said to myself. “You really know how to party.”
The orbiter launched into the field of stars, its FTL engine blurring them into streaks, but they would have blurred through my tears anyway.
2
Raxthezana
81 Day Cycles Ago
Restless, I paced the narrow corridor in the archives. Another wasted day trying to find similarities, indicators, explanations or even a Goddess-twice-damned curse that could explain the escalating deaths caused by the infant burial disease. Nothing.
My neck ached; my back ached.
A Queen’s eunuch had come down a zatik prior and with trembling hands, offered me a slip of parchment reminding me that I was due to attend the Lottery Drum Feast in a week’s time and hadn’t I better travel to Ikthe and hunt?
Crumpling the paper in my hand, I stalked to the roaring fireplace that kept the archives from freezing solid this far underground and tossed it in—a snowflake disappearing in the mouth of a volcano.
Sighing, I walked back to my table and closed up the books save one.
Spying the archive steward nodding off in his chair, I slid the volume inside my tunic and left my fruitless studies behind me as I climbed the forbidding staircase to the higher levels.
Zatiks later found me in my ship waiting for the steward to signal the all-clear. Lifting off, I pointed my ship’s nose to the shimmering green orb in the viewing window and accelerated.
I’d hunted Ikthe for so long, my muscles remembered every task from the smallest steering adjustment to the complicated atmospheric entry calculations needed to land without damaging my ship. It left my mind clear to ruminate on the countless interviews I’d conducted without the Queen’s knowledge, or anyone else’s, for that matter.
Not only the interviews respecting the infant burial disease deaths, but also the interviews with Ikshe’s oldest living hunters.
Perhaps it was my own age as it climbed ever farther up the ladder, but my patience for the ways of Theraxl had grown thin. Why must I spend the keenest years of my mind’s life scrabbling for meat on filthy Ikthe? Why did the Lottery Drum rule the judgment of the sanest hunter and turn him into a slavering fool, just for the chance to create offspring?
Could not anyone look around and see the dilapidation of the fortress and its city? Did not anyone notice our dwindling population and the growing instances of infant burial disease? Was it possible that the least qualified hunter on either planet was the only Theraxl paying attention to the signs of a weakened civilization approaching a catastrophic end?
By interviewing the oldest living hunters, I hoped to garner more information to secure safer and more profitable excursions for all hunters. My people could not afford to waste half its population on dangerous quests as well as the perilous hunting expeditions. Armed with knowledge, I hoped to ease at least some of the burdens of my hunter-brothers over time. For that was my people’s scarcest commodity.
Should the infant burial disease overtake our ability to increase our numbers, there would not be time enough to recover.
Landing on Moon Shield, I exited my ship and stretched, cracking my back and laying out my pallet on the mesa under the stars. I would give my old bones a rest before the rigors of my hunt on the morrow.
Lying with arms behind my head, I admired the wealth of gems studding the sky. Life could be simple and abundant if one only appreciated what one already had. The Queen seemed to me to be a great void, always in search of more to fill the hole where her heart once resided.
While her lands, possessions, and people crumbled at her feet, she sought more and better. I had watched her with disappointment these last several revolutions, stealing the affection of the BoKama’s consort, and then the hunters’ dignity, one by one, slipping behind the tapestry to drain their seed and their self-possession. How long had I before the Queen invited me to join her, and would I have the strength to say no? Squirming on my pallet, I feared I might not.
If I yet believed in the Goddesses, I might venture to pray on a night like this: the temperature at this altitude soothed the soul, and the stars and planets sparkled like gem-dust on the jewel-cutter’s velvet cloth. I feared for the future of my people and for my own soul, but what good would a prayer do when it was less substantial than a smoke tendril from a dying fire?
“If you were real, Holy Goddesses, I would take you to task for failing a once-thriving people. Not only that, but for thrusting a knife into the festering wound. What good is draining the fester if you kill the wounded in the process?”
At that moment, a flaming streak entered my field of vision just at the horizon where the dark desert mountains met the star-studded sky. The meteor flashed a brilliant white and disappeared behind the shadowed green crescent that was Ikshe.
I scoffed.
“Was that an answer? It looked like the ash tossed from an old man’s pipe,” I said. “Even you have given up on my people. It only means those of us who care must work the harder.”
Turning away from the beautiful sky and the non-existent deities of my people, I determined to sleep. But the meteor returned to my thoughts without relent, and my next day’s hunt suffered for my lack.
If it wasn’t for stumbling across a nesting ground of rokhural, my hunt would have been as useless as the Goddesses. Eight days I hunted the adult rokhural, stocking my cargo bay to bursting.
My efforts and thankless sacrifice netted me enough meat that when it was accounted for at the fortress hangar, I was notified that my name would be entered for the Lottery Draw.
Stalking away from the meat counters, I collided with an obnoxious hunter in red armor.
“Look you not where you walk?” I said, shaking my head. When it became obvious that we headed to the same halls where the eunuchs would scrub us down for the ceremony, I avoided his gaze, ashamed at my outburst. I was the one who had been woolgathering.
Once dressed in ceremonial garb and armbands sizzling on my skin, I walked to the great hall, composing a script for refusing the Queen. Every sentence I tried in my head sounded inane and ineffectual. Stomach in knots, I couldn’t eat. Mouth dry as Moon Shield, I couldn’t drink.
Squinting, I saw the same hunter I’d run into earlier on the dais regaling the Ikma and the BoKama. His discomfort evident, I laughed and leaned over my plates of meat to grab a chunk of sister-bread. Tearing into it, I watched the hunter, divested of his red armor, attempt to shield himself from the sisters’ attentions.
My appetite returned, and I ate with relish, enjoying the comedy playing out before me.
Clashing my goblet against my tablemate’s, I allowed my eye to travel the room. Perhaps it would not be all bad to choose a dam tonight.
Movement caught my eye, and I saw that the Ikma and the hunter stood near the tapestry. Turning in my seat, I watched, curious but resigned. No one refused the Ikma.
Fury flashed in the Ikma’s eyes. The hunter bowed. The Ikma bared her fangs in a feral smile. And when she turned to face the room at large, I placed my goblet upon the table and rested my hands on my knees. It appeared the hunter of the red armor had, indeed, refused the Ikma.
The feast turned to coals in my belly. The fruited wine turned to vinegar on my tongue.
I waited.
3
CeCe
81 Day Cycles Ago
“PHRED, you are cleared for activation of phases one and two,” I said through my comms. “Under no circumstances should you activate phase three.”
“Understood,” the smooth female voice that was identical to VELMA of the egress pods and SCOOBE of the orbiter intoned. “Activating phase one: planet atmosphere entry.”
Monitoring everything with the orbiter’s onboard computer, I couldn’t see the P-MIV or the planet we would be landing on. Besides being several times larger than an EEP or an orbiter, the P-MIV’s functions required more power and maneuverability, so it harnessed IGMC’s fractionated quark technology to power its engines. In other words, it reached the planet’s orbit before I did in order to take advantage of its star system’s gravity to slingshot it into position.
SCOOBE woke me two standard hours ago, and I’d spent the time reacquainting myself with my ship and the orbiter’s systems and the limited information SCOOBE had gathered about the star system and its planets.
Binary, or two-star systems, in general, were unstable choices for the VELMA software to have chosen for the rescue pods, but I’d programmed specific parameters regarding the goldilocks zone, gravity, water availability and axis tilt.
It seemed the software chose this system because it was a 96.4 per cent match to the parameters I gave it—a planet that could sustain human life.
Chuckling, I couldn’t wait to see the uninhabited paradise we found. Talk about sticking it to IGMC where it hurt.
As soon as I had stumbled across intel that the Kerberos 90 mission was bogus, my neurodivergent brain went into hyper-overdrive.
The Lucidity and its caravan of ships housed over two-thousand souls. Comprised of some of the best minds employed by IGMC, we were also a ragtag group handpicked for our “spirit of adventure” and “freedom from attachments.” When we signed up for the mission, there wasn’t a spot to write down “My friend needs me.” Joan wouldn’t admit it, but I’d seen her drifting the last few years. When I realized IGMC wanted to launch the VELMA project during Kerberos 90, I’d jumped at the chance.
The day half the ship contracted food poisoning, my IT team was down for the count. That’s how I ended up working on an email server issue that one of my subordinates would normally have taken care of. It turned out to be kismet.
The solution to the problem was a simple SMPT port error, but in fixing it, I recovered the private email server utilized by Clemmins and Hackney. When my gaze drifted over the phrase “acceptable risk”, my curiosity got the better of me.
There ensued my hyperfocus on rooting out how deep the subterfuge went, and how far IGMC was willing to go. Tracing email correspondence from the present day to the Kerberos 90 mission’s inception, I had found enough dirt on IGMC’s executive administrative team to put them away for life.
If only we weren’t over three-quarters of the way to Kerberos 90 and tucked between the Pollack-Custer belt and the electromagnetic riptide discovered by the Qhudret.
Communication with Earth or even Titan-based IGMC headquarters was next to impossible, due to the electromagnetic riptide. That’s why I’d tagged a field drone as defunct, buried my evidence in its hard drive, and released it during a routine waste dump. It would get to Titan, just not in time to help us.
Unless I did something, all of us were doomed to manning EEPs and being launched God-knows-where with no thought to the relationships formed and maintained on the Lucidity or anyone waiting back home.
Admin had planned to run a faux test drill, utilize VELMA-X to operate the EEPs, and then hang out until the numbers started coming in on rare ore discoveries. Then admin would launch the big vehicles and send the Mining Ship to the most profitable regions, working its way back toward the Pollack-Custer belt.
The only thing I never understood was how they planned to track everything. Without a Deep Space Network, VELMA’s communications abilities were hamstrung, unless they’d planned on adapting the fleet ship into a DSN tower of sorts.
The final straw had been when I was summoned to alter VELMA’s code to include acceptable risk parameters that would raise the eyebrow of the coldest Qhudretian mafia lord. Upon my first refusal, they threatened to go public with my juvenile record. Upon my second refusal, they piggybacked on the fallout of my original IT team learning about my misspent youth and threatened to release sensitive information about each member of my already-jaded team.
Gritting my teeth, I wrote the software they wanted and sent them regular updates.
As far as they knew, VELMA was right on track and ready to be deployed once they reached the predetermined coordinates for sending 435 unwitting miners and scientists as a first wave of explorers: roughly eighty-seven of them marked for death based on a few lines of code that I had been forced to write.
But they’d underestimated my ADHD. And the loyalty among the crew. And VELMA’s AGI. And most important of all, the power of friendship.
Once I’d pieced together their entire plan, I set my own plan in motion by inserting code within code, encryption so subtle that neither man nor machine could detect it until it was too late.
Yes, the EEPs still deployed as a result.
But with VELMA’s shiny new code and minor adjustments, every batch of EEPs traveled together so that people were in friend groups, or at least as close to friend groups as I could cobble together in the few months I had been working on it. Prioritizing human life had been at the top of my list; if I had waited until we reached Kerberos 90, chances for survival would have plummeted. As it was, there were still some pods entering uncharted territory. Thankfully, most would end up well within the Intergalactic Unification of Races’ mapped regions and would be picked up within a matter of days from whatever charted planets they landed.
“P-MIV ready for insertion,” PHRED’s voice broke through my reverie. I wished I could witness it; the videos of P-MIV activation were frighteningly mesmerizing, in the way that any giant manmade creation inspired both awe and misgivings. But I was still too far away.
“Phase two activated,” she said.
A computer-generated model played out the P-MIV’s insertion in real time, and I hoped the advance drones operated seamlessly to warn most wildlife away from the area before the P-MIV hit. The on-board camera went live as soon as the vehicle cleared the atmosphere, and I caught a glimpse of green and black mountains, desert and jungle terrain, a gigantic body of water, snowcaps, and then the feed blacked out.
Satisfaction fought with confusion.
“Why’d I lose the feed?” I said.
“Standby. Altering angle of entry.”
Concerned, I tracked the numbers, but it should still land correctly in spite of PHRED’s modified equation.
The uninhabited planet had looked breathtaking, and I would receive immense joy in prepping for the rest of the EEPs from Joan’s group to arrive. My little orbiter just needed to get there, first.
Readouts indicating a successful insertion, I turned my attention to my own ship’s trajectory. It looked like I should land not too far from the P-MIV’s contact point.
Alarms beeped as I toggled from the readout screen to my flight path.
“What’s going on, SCOOBE?” I asked.
“Entering a field of space debris,” SCOOBE said. “Thirty-seven percent of the matter is of significant size. Changing flight path to avoid impact.”
“Got it,” I said, watching the digital models rotating on screen. That’s why the P-MIV’s course had been altered.
“Alternate planet found that meets eighty-five per cent of ADVISOR’s parameters,” she said. “Initiating cryosleep in three minutes.”
“Negative,” I said, trying to ignore the spike in my heart rate at SCOOBE’s initiative. “I need to land on the same planet as the P-MIV and all the EEPs. That is non-negotiable.”
“Due to the nature of the space debris field and orbital positioning, that will not be possible unless you authorize the use of the remaining forty percent of the fuel cell,” she said. “However, you run the risk of running out of fuel before landing, thus impairing my ability to land safely.”
My mind raced over the numbers. If I hadn’t hit this debris field, I could have coasted straight to the planet and initiated the landing sequence. Having an orbiter with almost half its fuel meant cross-planet travel, easing a lot of the process of temporarily inhabiting this new world until the cavalry could arrive.
If I used up all the fuel, it might mean landing on the other side of the globe and not being able to travel to where the EEPs ended up. I’d been counting on decent proximity to the EEPs considering the orbiter wasn’t stocked with as many supplies.
“I want to land on the same planet as the P-MIV,” I said. “Do what you have to do to make that happen.”
