Stars Beyond

by S. K. Dunstall

  “Yes,” Alistair agreed, stopping the aircar. He even opened the door and stepped out.

  “Got to go, Angel,” Melda said. “We’ve found our missing person. I’ll call you back.” She clicked off and sat shivering while Alistair returned to his seat and started the aircar back on its course.

  “If you need someone to talk to,” Alistair said softly, “you know where I’ll be.”

  They finished the east ridge in silence. Melda didn’t complain when Alistair turned the aircar down the southeast route, prickly with plants that would scratch the vehicle. Normally she’d complain about that. She wanted to return the vehicle in as good a condition as she could. They’d be docked for repairs. It was part of the contract.

  “You tell her about—” Alistair inclined his head toward the undergrowth.

  “I’m not stupid.”

  Alistair still didn’t know if that was a wise decision or not. He hadn’t agreed with Melda’s decision to play down his own early encounter, didn’t agree with her holding off now.

  This was his first job with Santiago Company—Melda was a lifer—but surely a company would be reasonable about first contact with another sapient species and make some allowances.

  Or maybe they wouldn’t. Companies cared about profit first, and Melda knew more about how Santiago worked than he did.

  “I’ll tell them after the bonuses come in. We have worked for them. We have earned them.”

  Even Alistair admitted the bonuses were exceedingly generous. It was clear to him that Santiago had never expected to pay them. Alistair hadn’t expected to earn them. But the team was a good one. They’d worked well, and innovatively, together. So here they were, two weeks and a hundred grams short of ten kilograms of transurides that would make them all rich.

  Melda’s link beeped again. She ignored it.

  “Maybe Angel just wants to see you.”

  Melda laughed. “Angel wouldn’t go out of her way to see you if you were in the same city. They call her the Hatchet, you know.”

  “Because she ignores people?”

  “It’s her job. Closing unprofitable departments. She loves it. Cutting off the deadwood of the business, she calls it.”

  He had no idea what Melda saw in Angel, but then, he couldn’t talk. Lisbet wasn’t any better. “What about Bob?”

  “Depends whether his boss is watching or not.”

  At least she was realistic about her family.

  He saw a warm red body to their left and set the aircar down gently.

  Mayeso had fallen among a copse of bushes known as cutter bushes—because get in among them and that’s exactly what they did. Cut you to pieces.

  She was hotter than normal. Still in the throes of the first bout of fever.

  Alistair killed the lights.

  “What—”

  “Shhh.” He bounded out of the aircar. Nothing. Not even the usual night sounds. Alistair turned a full circle. There. Heading east. A long straight streak of heat, rapidly cooling, like the heat trail the engine of an aircar might leave. Alistair took a careful reading. “Got you.”

  Of course, they may have just lifted off that way, but it was a clue. The first they’d had in all the long months.

  He waited a full five minutes after, to be sure they were alone, before he turned on the lights again.

  “I swear,” Melda said as he turned the light onto the huddled figure, “even the Ort can’t have changed your eyesight that much, Alistair.”

  “It’s my magic trick.” Alistair looked down at his felted boots, which were fine in the confines of the camp but totally useless out here among the bushes. No one went into a copse of cutter bushes willingly.

  This was going to hurt.

  He scanned the area. He had a stunner and the fire-breather. Bovines—who had two heads and absolutely zero brains between them—loved the taste of the bushes, but the sharp leaves cut the inside of their mouths and their stomachs and sent them crazy. A bovine in pain was a rampaging monster. If it came your way, the only thing you could do was kill it. The fire-breather was for emergency use only. Setting the cutter bushes alight accidently was not the way to help Mayeso.

  There were no bovines close.

  He’d have liked an ax, but there was nothing in the car. Where were his brains today? In bed, where he wanted to be. A heavy iron bar was the only tool. He grabbed the bar and stepped out.

  “Be ready to grab her when I hand her out.”

  He used the bar to push the leaves aside, but they still cut into his hands, and—as he pushed in farther—into his fleecy coat as well. He swore under his breath. It was the only good coat he had left.

  Mayeso was as far into the bushes as she could get. Alistair was bleeding and scratched all over by the time he backed out with the inert body in his arms. At least he wasn’t hurt badly, not like Mayeso was, for she was in running shorts and a sleeveless top.

  “My God,” Melda muttered. “How long will she be off work?”

  “Melda.”

  “I know. I’m sorry, but we’ve only two weeks and our bonuses depend on us delivering. We were so close until this started happening.”

  Right now Alistair was tired of hearing about the bonus, although that was all any of them could think about this close to the end. The bonus, the end of the job, and going home.

  He checked Mayeso over. She didn’t seem harmed, but who was he to say? They didn’t have a doctor to fix things. Their doctor had wiped himself out two months into the first year, rock climbing. What had possessed him to go rock climbing on a world where the closest help was five nullspace jumps away was beyond Alistair’s comprehension. But then, Lennie had been an adrenaline freak.

  Which was fine, providing you weren’t the team doctor.

  So now they had a machine coded to a dead man, which none of them could use, and no way to heal anyone. Not that Alistair himself had ever used the machine while on Zell, but there’d been times when it would have been useful.

  Like now.

  As he laid Mayeso carefully in the back seat of the aircar, a thunderous roar had him reaching for his fire-breather. He looked up.

  The entry burn of a shuttle lit up the sky. It came closer and closer, a massive ball of heat.

  They watched it come.

  “It’s headed our way.” Alistair set the aircar on auto. “Let’s get home.”

  He called Cam as soon as they were airborne.

  “Got it,” Cam said before Alistair could say anything. “We’re on it.”

  Cam was the settlement lawyer—although why Santiago had bothered to send a lawyer on a mining expedition Alistair didn’t know. Or maybe he did, for Cam was the worst lawyer Alistair had ever met. But in a crisis, Alistair wanted Cam behind him. His levelheadedness calmed them all. You could rely on him to do what you asked of him. And people talked to him.

  He was everyone’s favorite. Cam played on it rather well, but he had a charm and diffidence that offset his obvious enjoyment of his own looks. Most of the camp babied him, even though he was—according to Alistair’s records—thirty years old and three of the miners were younger.

  Mayeso came around as Alistair carried her into the warmth of the shared lounge. She was dazed and disoriented and clutched at Alistair as if he were a lifeline.

  Alistair helped her stand. “Do you think you can walk?” He guided her to one of the couches. The lounge was full of strangers in suits. Strangers who all turned to watch as they entered.

  Cam was off to one side, talking to a woman whose suit looked as expensive as those that Alistair’s old boss, Paola, used to wear. For a moment he thought it was Paola. Then sanity returned. He’d seen the woman’s image less than an hour ago.

  “Angel,” Melda said. “What are you doing here?”

  Why hadn’t Melda’s partner told her she was coming
? Or had Melda cut her off before she got around to it?

  Cam gave a quiet thumbs-up from where he was and kept talking to Angel. Melda went over to join them.

  Mayeso stared around the room as if she’d never seen it before.

  Cadel came over with a warm blanket, Yakusha with hot soup. The rug was a brightly patterned, felted weave. Yakusha had spent the whole of last cold season making it. Alistair gently unclenched Mayeso’s fingers from his arm—he would be bruised tomorrow—and curled them around the rug instead. “Look, Yakusha’s rug.”

  She clutched at the rug convulsively.

  “And some hot soup.” He kept his voice low, tried to sound reassuring.

  “Seaweed nut soup,” Yakusha said. “Strong, healthy.”

  Alistair would have picked something out of the freezer, something that didn’t taste like the sludge out of the recycler, but it seemed to work, for Mayeso lifted her head to take a sip.

  He turned to Cadel. “Can you get me a first-aid kit?” To Timoty, the miner next to Cadel, “And some warm water and a clean cloth.”

  Yakusha’s rug was already spotted with blood. He hoped it came clean.

  He moved to prevent a spot of his own blood dropping onto it.

  The first-aid kit was in the cupboard. Cadel didn’t have to go far. “What did you do? Fight off the—?” He looked at the suited people staring at them, cut off the rest of what he’d been going to say.

  “Ended up in a cutter copse,” Alistair said.

  Had the Ort put Mayeso there? If so, why hadn’t they returned her back to where they’d found her, to where it was safe? Maybe because they thought the cutter copse was safer.

  Mayeso shuddered and clutched at Alistair’s arm again. Another bruise for tomorrow. “They’re big. Bigger than us. Like a pole on four legs.”

  Bigger than Mayeso, but they hadn’t been taller than Alistair.

  A stick insect, others had described them. Long, skinny legs set around the body to balance. Four smaller forearms and an oval head with four bulbous eyes.

  “Claws like needles.”

  They hadn’t been claws. More like leathery fingers, but Mayeso was telling the truth as she believed it. He could see it in the way her color stayed constant.

  “It took my necklace.”

  “What was the necklace made of?” He thought he remembered it. A clunky gold flower. “Gold?”

  “Yes. It was. A gift from my daughter. I wore it because—”

  She started to cry.

  They liked gold, these aliens. Ravi had lost a gold signet ring. Teena had lost a pair of gold earrings. He had lost his wedding ring. That wasn’t a loss. He shouldn’t even have been wearing it, for the divorce papers had come through a week after he’d arrived on Zell.

  Alistair took the bowl of warm water from Timoty, started wiping Mayeso’s arms. He made it as gentle as his voice. “Tell me how it happened. What were you doing when you first saw the Ort? What did it do?”

  “I didn’t see it. I felt this . . . sting. I thought it was an insect. I put my hand up to swat it.”

  One of the suited men moved across. “What’s the problem here?” He wore a blaster. Security, Alistair guessed.

  Right now he didn’t want to go through the whole story. He wanted bed. They all did, and Melda hadn’t yet mentioned the Ort to Santiago. “Didn’t Angel tell you? One of our people went missing.” He nodded at Mayeso. “We found her.”

  “She came up against wild creatures?”

  He wasn’t sure he’d call the Ort wild, but, “There are plenty of dangerous creatures on Zell. I’ll give you a rundown later.” After he’d convinced Melda it was time to talk about other sapient species. “But not tonight. For the moment, please don’t go out of our camp without one of us.” He looked around the room, counted the visitors. Ten. “Is this all of you? Bedding will be tight.”

  “We don’t plan on sleeping,” the Santiago man said. “We’re here to pack everything up. We’ll do it in shifts. We’ve ten here now, and we’ve ten more upstairs.”

  “Upstairs?”

  “On ship.” The man smiled, as if at some private joke Alistair wasn’t privy to. “But this shift is ready to make a start.”

  “We’re still using most of the equipment. There won’t be much packing up done for two weeks.”

  “We have our orders.”

  “I don’t care what your orders are. We have another two weeks. You’ll need to talk to Melda and Cadel.” Was this how the company got out of paying the bonus? He quashed the uncharitable thought. They probably thought they were doing them a favor by arriving early and starting the packing. “Regardless, you can’t start tonight. Everyone is exhausted.” Cadel would have to make the decisions about what equipment could go early. And Yakusha, who oversaw stores. “It’s been a long night.”

  “We’ll see.” The Santiago security man moved over to talk to Angel and Melda.

  Alistair turned back to Mayeso. “Tell me the rest.”

  Mayeso would have spilt her soup if she’d had any left. “When I come around, I’m strapped on a table, with this . . . with this . . .” She gestured, to indicate height. “Four legs.”

  They were slowly building up an image.

  “Green. Like a big stick insect. Four smaller forelimbs that it used like arms.” Mayeso stared into her empty bowl. “A cold circle on my arm. Then it left the room, and the table went down, and I heard a click, and I wasn’t restrained anymore.”

  They all told a similar story.

  “I was so tired. I couldn’t get off the bed. I went back to sleep. I couldn’t help myself. Then you found me.”

  “Why did you go into the cutter bushes?”

  “I . . . I don’t remember.”

  Whatever the Ort injected them with knocked them out for a few hours. Alistair himself remembered blacking out several times before Cam had found him. At the time he’d thought he was lucky to survive while he’d been unconscious, but given what they knew now about how deadly salynxes could be, he hadn’t been lucky—he’d been helped.

  They’d put Mayeso under the bushes. What kind of—presumably—sapient creature put a fragile-skinned body under leaves so sharp they could cut?

  One that thought it was the safest place for them.

  Melda’s voice rose above the noise in the room.

  “Leave her with me.” Yakusha handed Alistair a filled beaker. “Drink this first, then you can go over and sort that out.”

  He drank in one long swallow. It burned on its way down. His eyes watered, and he choked. “Thanks for nothing.” But he needed it. He was tired, he was cranky, and he did not want to face strangers.

  Time to be civil. He went over to where Melda, Cam, Angel, and the security person who hadn’t introduced himself yet were standing.

  “You are not packing up anything until we finish here,” Melda said. “We’ve people still working.”

  “Let’s sort this out tomorrow.” Alistair stifled a yawn. “No one is doing anything tonight. We need sleep. All of us.”

  “We don’t work to planetary times,” the security person said.

  “I’m sorry, whoever you are, but that’s too bad. You are on planet. Here, I’m your security. It’s not safe to wander around. If you don’t plan on sleeping, don’t leave the fenced-off area. I’ve already said I will give you the full rundown later. Until then your people can bunk down here on the floor. We need sleep, even if you don’t.”

  “You are not—”

  “Maybe we will tonight, Barry,” and Angel looked at Alistair, as if committing his face to memory.

  * * *

  • • •

  Remembering the past didn’t help with the future. And if Nika Rik Terri wasn’t alive, what then? Would the Ort take matters into their own hands? Would Santiago slaughter the colonists at the set
tlement and take the prize of alien technology for themselves? Once, Alistair wouldn’t have believed they would. But that was before Zell.

  “Where to now?” Cam asked as they finished another delicious meal Alistair probably couldn’t afford.

  “Songyan Engineering.” One of the people killed in the explosion had been a Songyan engineer. According to Wickmore—at least, according to what Wickmore had told earlier agents—he thought the engineer was there to service the genemod machine.

  Cam sighed. “This is the life of a Justice Department agent. Plodding from one interview to another. Spending our life in ships en route to other planets.”

  “Songyan Engineering’s on Kitimat.”

  “Or aircars.”

  Alistair called one from his own building. He knew that would come immediately.

  “We don’t even get to travel executive class.”

  Alistair could have gone up a class because Paola had reinstated him at the same seniority level, but not Cam, who was a junior agent.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask. How did you get this job?” There was always competition for the few jobs going.

  “I used my contacts.” Cam glanced at him. “I didn’t sell out.”

  He hadn’t wanted to think that, but he had wondered. “I’m glad we cleared that up.”

  Cam punched his shoulder lightly. “Don’t feel guilty. It’s in your nature to wonder.”

  What sort of nature was that?

  “I went to Manu Pascale and asked him to get me in.” Pascale was the Santiago board representative at the Justice Department. “I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know about the other business.”

  By “other business” Alistair presumed he meant Zell and the Ort.

  “I think they’ve told no one they don’t need to. Because Manu—” Cam broke off, took a breath.

  There were some parts of Cam’s life that were out-of-bounds. Alistair recognized the limits. They’d just hit one.

  “Do you think we will find Nika?”

  “There’s no evidence that she’s dead.” Time to change the subject. “What was she like?”