Star Crossed

by C. Gockel

  "That’s right."

  He frowned, gazing into his glass. "It sounds almost as if something crossed and combined," he muttered. "It’s intriguing." He shook his head as if to flick the thought away. "I’d love to see the diary. And the musical instrument you mentioned." He gave her a tentative smile. "Could you show me?"

  She wavered for a moment. But why not? She wanted to share what she’d found. "Okay. Come on."

  She took him up to her room, feeling a little like a student sneaking a man into the dormitory after hours. She fetched the books first. He admired them and commented as she had done on the quality of the paper. The ghabra riveted his attention. He turned the instrument over with gentle hands. "This is incredible. How is it played?"

  Allysha grinned. "They use their top mouth to blow into here and then block the holes with their tentacles. It’s quite astonishing to watch a really good player; their tentacles are a blur."

  "What does it sound like?"

  "Like half a dozen cats fighting." She laughed. "But that’s just us ignorant humans."

  Jarrad had his head on one side. "Maybe you should get this sterilized before you take it anywhere."

  "Why?"

  He shrugged. "I guess as a precaution, really. If the mine manager played this while he was ill, there might still be traces of the virus."

  "After thirty years? Surely not."

  "Viruses are tough and this environment is ideal for them. Moist and warm. You’re probably right but is it worth the risk?"

  Allysha stared at him. The very idea that Xanthor and his family might contract this horrible disease was too ghastly to contemplate.

  "Let me take this. I’ll sterilize it for you and bring it back."

  She nodded. "Take care of it. And keep it secret, yeah? You’ve seen what these… these vandals do to Ptorix artifacts."

  "Of course."

  She let him kiss her goodnight, not tongues and passion, but she put her arms around his neck.

  "You’re very beautiful, Allysha," he whispered. "I love your eyes."

  She smiled. "Thanks for the evening, Jarrad. It was fun." She had enjoyed herself. He was nice, enthusiastic, interested in her and where she came from, and in the Ptorix and their culture. Yes, he was nice.

  "See you tomorrow?"

  "Fine. Same place, same time?"

  "For sure." She walked to the mine entrance with him and watched him walk away, wondering why her body wasn’t thrumming with anticipation.

  6

  Chaka Saahren, currently using the identity Brad Stone, alighted from the shuttle on the Tisyphor landing platform along with the other new arrivals, three men and a slatternly-looking young woman who’d tried to attract his attention on the day-long flight. The heat hit him like a wall. This would certainly try his fitness. He hadn’t spent much time planetside anywhere for years, let alone a steamy, jungle location.

  "Take the lift down to the ground," somebody shouted.

  He crammed into the waiting car with his fellow travelers, jammed tight next to the girl. She pressed her breast against his arm and simpered at him. The smell of cheap perfume competed with body odor.

  He stepped out of the lift with the others and breathed a sigh of relief when an ugly woman with hair scraped back from her face gathered up the girl. A big, florid man welcomed the three men while a thickset fellow with the look of a bully stepped toward him, arms folded.

  "Brad Stone, right?"

  "That’s right."

  The fellow gazed up at him, chin jutting. "I’m Seth Ludovic. You can call me ‘boss’."

  Saahren nodded. "Understood. Boss."

  "Come on. I’ll show you the barracks and get you a uniform, then I’ll show you around."

  He jumped into a ground car, flicked his fingers at the passenger seat and waited while Saahren swung inside.

  The car rose and drifted along a road overhung by jungle, almost like a tunnel through thick, red-green foliage.

  Ludovic stopped at the barracks, a line of prefab rooms, sparse, clean and adequate, two men to each room with shifts organized so that the two were on opposite rosters. Saahren pulled on the uniform, dark grey with a light grey undershirt. The trousers were tucked into short boots. The fit wasn’t bad, not that it mattered.

  He presented himself to Ludovic, who waited outside, leaning on the verandah rail. "You know, you look a bit like Admiral Saahren," he said.

  Saahren snorted. "If I had a credit for every time somebody said that, I’d be pretty well off."

  He wondered how his body double was faring, on a hunting trip in the mountains. Fleet Intelligence would trot him out occasionally to say some orchestrated words to the media to keep the illusion going. But the truth of it was that hardly anybody had given him a second glance, out of uniform in an improbable location.

  "Huh. True enough. They say everybody has a double somewhere. Handled one of them before?" Ludovic nodded at the Emson beam pistol in the holster on Saahren’s belt.

  Fleet issue, no doubt obtained illegally. "Yes."

  "It’ll be enough for most things. Unless you have to go outside the perimeter fence. Then you’ll need one of these." Ludovic lifted an AR70 assault rifle, also standard Fleet issue. "You’d have handled these?"

  "Yes. What’s out there to need an AR70?"

  "Ah." Ludovic turned to a screen. "These." A large, bipedal beast with long, strong forearms sporting three wicked-looking claws appeared. "They’re smart, they hunt in packs and we encourage them around the perimeter. Helps convince the workers they should stay inside the fence, know what I mean?" He chuckled. "Your main job here is to make sure there’s no pilfering and that the perimeter stays secure. Van Tongeren’s very particular about who goes where. Here’s the tunnel layout for patrols." Ludovic handed him a tablet. "Come on and I’ll give you the tour."

  Saahren attached the tablet to his belt. They walked through the settlement’s main square and up a road through the jungle to the mine’s entrance.

  The well-lit main access tunnel looked newly cut; or at least, newly shaved. Saahren had noticed Ptorix carvings, flowing and evocative, around the door surrounds but none of their characteristic decoration was visible here. Signs on the walls gave destinations and distances; canteen three, control room point five.

  "This here’s the medical center," Ludovic said, ushering Saahren through swinging doors. A man dressed in loose blue pants and shirt raised his head from a console.

  "Just showing the new man around," Ludovic said.

  The fellow nodded and returned to his work.

  Saahren glanced around at an examination couch, sterilizing units for instruments, shelves stacked with bottles and packets. All perfectly ordinary, except for the sign on the door behind the counter that read ‘Authorized Personnel Only. Strictly No Admission’. "What’s in there?"

  "Pharmaceutical experiments. Technical types doing some tests on the wildlife here. Seeing if they can make some useful drugs." Ludovic shrugged. "Though what you could get out of karteks and thranxes is beyond me. Anyway, you don’t have to worry about this place unless somebody tries to get in there without permission. The sick rooms are down there." He gestured at a short passage.

  Back in the main drive, Ludovic showed Saahren the tunnels leading to the external exit, the hangar, the equipment bays where the excavators were kept and the entrance to the deep mine where all miners were routinely searched. They moved on to the store room.

  "The biggest risk is in here," Ludovic said as they walked between shelves holding lights, diggers, clothing, boots, ropes, clamps. "We don’t want pilfering."

  Ludovic stopped in front of a locker. "This is the explosives cupboard. You need authorization to open it. If anybody tries to break in, an alarm goes off in the control room and on your tablet and the store room locks itself down so the person can’t get away. That alarm comes on, you come running, got it?"

  "Got it."

  They returned to the main drive, following the signs back to the
control room. His guide stopped outside. "You’ll spend quite some time in this room. We conduct surveillance from here in between periodic patrols."

  He opened the door and his demeanor changed. He sucked in his stomach, straightened his shoulders.

  "Oh. Miss Marten, isn’t it? Pleased to meet you at last. I’m Seth Ludovic, in charge of security." He thrust out a hand, an oily smile on his face.

  Saahren looked past him, at the woman. He’d never seen eyes like that. The bright green of new leaves shaded to a dark green pupil. It was almost as though the colors blended together, instead of that stark definition between pupil and iris. Her skin was the color of cream and the dark, slightly wavy hair that hung around her shoulders held a hint of red. No slatternly serving girl, this one. Slim and lovely, dressed in simple pants and a shirt. The expression on her face was unreadable.

  "Mister Ludovic. Don’t let me hold you up."

  Ignoring the hand, she stepped past him, flashed a glance up at Saahren that sent his heart hammering and slipped out the door.

  "Phew. Haughty piece." Ludovic turned to stare after her. "Quite the ice maiden." His voice oozed sexual innuendo. "I wouldn’t mind melting her." He jiggled his hips in a thrusting motion.

  "Who is she?" Saahren asked. He was staring, too. He’d met a lot of women in his day, women who threw themselves at him at official receptions but not one like this. She had an accent, one he didn’t recognize.

  "Oh, she’s not on the menu. More’s the pity. She’s an expert on information systems, here to do some work for van Tongeren. Integrating the systems. Hard to believe somebody so good-looking would have brains. Except for those creepy eyes. Still, you wouldn’t see ‘em in the dark, would you?"

  Those eyes. They were beautiful. She was beautiful. If she threw herself at him, he might even consider catching her, something he hadn’t done for many, many years. But somehow, he didn’t think she was the type to throw herself at anybody.

  "Right, Stone, here’s the surveillance station." Ludovic’s voice brought him back to the mine. "It handles most things but for now it can’t control all the doors. When the lovely Miss Marten’s finished we’ll have control of the old Ptorix systems as well. Or so van Tongeren’s been led to believe."

  Saahren followed the man’s instructions almost mechanically. Someone who could understand and program Ptorix systems? That was an art only the very best of the Fleet’s experts had managed. The Ptorix coding was so very different, not helped by the fact they saw different emission spectra. The Fleet had InfoDroids that could interpret Ptorix systems but they were kept closely guarded. And she could do this? He needed to know more. And he definitely wanted to see her again.

  He noticed something oddly familiar in a corner. He shifted position to get a better look at the dull grey sphere hovering just above the ground. An InfoDroid. With the familiar spiral galaxy symbol of the Confederacy Fleet etched on the side.

  7

  Allysha squared her shoulders and marched across to the tavern, ignoring the stares and whistles. Sean would be here, for certain. And no, she didn’t want a drink, didn’t want to sit down. She wished Jarrad was still here; he’d been a good friend, someone she’d been able to talk to.

  "Hello darlin’." A miner smelling of an afternoon’s worth of beer tried to put an arm around her.

  She shrugged him away and strode over to the blond-haired figure at the bar.

  "Got a minute?" She had to shout to be heard above the music.

  Sean turned around and his eyes lit up. "Ally. Sure. Sit down." He patted the stool next to him while the barmaid with the boobs scowled at her.

  "Outside." She shot a glance at the barmaid. "Don’t worry, I won’t keep him long."

  Sean followed her outside to a table in the square.

  "How’s progress?" he said, slouching onto a bench, his glass clenched in his hand.

  "Progress is good." She took a deep breath. "Look, I’m just a little bit concerned about that InfoDroid. Did you know it was going to be a military probe class machine? The rest of this setup was pretty simple. But that thing… it’s taking me days. And it would have been much easier if they’d had it here to begin with, not as an add-on when I’d nearly finished."

  "They did say an InfoDroid but I didn’t realize it was a probe droid until I saw it. Do you need me to help?"

  "No, I don’t need you to help." Anything you know about InfoDroids you learnt from me. "I just want to know what’s going on here. I don’t mind if it’s not strictly to the letter of the law. Some of the stuff we did in Ullnish was a bit dodgy. But why would they need such a very high level of security? The place is a mine, for pity’s sake."

  Sean drank another mouthful of beer. "Look, van Tongeren told me the mine has less viable ore than they were led to believe. They’re trying to expand their activity into other areas. His lot are GPR. They’re aiming to form a conduit between the GPR and the Ptorix Khophirate, as well as some of the edge worlds like Rota Jengo and our own Qerran planets. They’ll be providing goods the Confederacy doesn’t want to sell them. Hardware, manufactured goods, mining equipment, that sort of thing."

  She nodded. "Smuggling."

  "They don’t see it as smuggling. It’s a trade opportunity, is all."

  She didn’t know much about the GPR—the Galactic People’s Republic—just that it was another human political system, smaller than the Confederacy, with different values and cultures. As she understood it, they’d broken away from the Confederacy for some reason. There did seem to be a trading opportunity. But it still didn’t ring true.

  "But a military grade InfoDroid? It seems like overkill to me."

  Sean leaned toward her over the bench, his breath wafting beer.

  "They’re astonished anyone can ‘crack’ it. They didn’t think it was possible."

  "Oh, goody. I don’t need to be patted on the head, Sean."

  He was a good engineer himself, one of the best but she was better. And not just because she could work with Ptorix systems—which he couldn’t.

  "It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? They want the authorities to think all they’re doing is mining, so anyone examining the system will see what they want them to see. The mountain graphic that shows the mining operation only; and inventory for mining and so on. So you integrate the Ptorix systems to run the mine itself, and build the additional systems to hide what they’re really doing."

  "Sure. Understood. But—"

  Sean waved a hand, irritated.

  "Van Tongeren says that the Confederacy Fleet enforces trade restrictions. If they turn up, that’s what they’ll have. And they don’t see it as smuggling to provide people with necessities, but the Confederacy has its own opinions on those matters and it has the military clout to try to shove its values down their throats. Why do you care? You usually see these things as a fun challenge."

  She sighed. She was enjoying the challenge. But she didn’t like this place, didn’t like van Tongeren, didn’t like these lewd, crude miners and their attitude to women. Oh, well. The sooner she finished, the sooner she could go home. She started to stand.

  "How’s your boyfriend?"

  "What?"

  "Korns, that fellow you were seeing."

  She pushed down the little pang of guilt. Of course he would have known. But it was none of his business. "He’s gone. He had to leave very suddenly. His mother took very ill. And anyway, he wasn’t my boyfriend, just somebody I had a drink with a few times." He hadn’t even said goodbye, just left a message on her comlink. She felt more than a little hurt but it wasn’t his fault.

  Sean grabbed her hand.

  "Ally… why don’t you move back in with me? You really are the only one I love. We were good together, Ally."

  She stared at him. They had been. For the first few years it had been great. Great sex, fun writing clever software.

  "Come on, Ally. I miss you." His hazel eyes pleaded.

  "What about the barmaid? Or did you fancy a threesome?"


  His eyes sparkled. "Would you?"

  "Oh…" She snatched her hand away. The very thought disgusted her. "Have a good time, Sean."

  Ignoring his protest that he was only joking, she stormed off, back toward the mine, her boots ringing on the pavement. Her pace slowed as the anger drained. Now she thought about it, he must have known it was going to be a military grade InfoDroid. His explanation about the military was there, off pat. He could say what he liked; the whole set-up bothered her and she didn’t like the notion of being used to do something illegal.

  Back in her room she logged into the security system. If she was going to go exploring on her own, she’d better cover her tracks. The human resources system held data about all the workers and the sensors could be used to show each individual’s location within the mine using personal recognition algorithms as well as ID. The miners probably didn’t know how the security really worked. It meant leaving your ID somewhere wasn’t going to be enough to fool the system. In fact, anybody not wearing an ID generated an alarm in the control room and their name was displayed.

  By the time she’d finished, she could select a point where the IS would report her to be, such as the control room, her own room or anywhere else, regardless of where she really was, or she could elect not to be shown on the system at all.

  Next were the visuals, the cameras that recorded activity. It took a little longer, but Allysha was proud of her work, disappointed she wouldn’t be showing it to anybody. When the IS received the data from the cameras, if she had activated the tracking system functions she’d built, her image would be replaced with whatever the background was.

  One final chore. The main drive was permanently lit but most of the other tunnels used motion detectors so that the lights would only turn on when required. She programmed the lights the same as the cameras, so they wouldn’t switch on if she wanted to be invisible. A torch turned down to almost nothing would give her enough illumination.

  Good job, well done. She could make herself invisible in the mine. Unless she bumped into somebody. If nobody was going to tell her what they were up to, she’d find out for herself.