by Mark Wandrey
Denied their usual methods of attacking at range and closing only when enemy forces had been reduced, the fighting quickly became hand-to-hand, and it turned into a slaughter. The Valley of Loss was the single greatest defeat of the Dusman’s Raknar during the Great Galactic War. The Kahraman abandoned the outpost shortly after their victory, so when the Dusman returned with reinforcements, they found nothing on which to avenge their loss. By the looks of the world, that hadn’t stopped them.
Jim set foot on the ground. It was soaked from the incessant rain. There were a few clumps of growth nearby. The shuttle’s landing lights threw illumination for a dozen meters, just far enough to show the foot of a fallen Raknar. Now, where to begin?
“Who are you?” asked a voice his translator picked up. Jim turned, his hand falling to the grip of his GP-90. Half hidden in shadows was a Jeha, its many legs and antenna twitching.
“People keep asking me that,” he said.
“You’re not one of the buyers,” the Jeha said.
“Buyer? No,” Jim said, “I’m looking for information.”
The Jeha slid further out and came closer, raising half its body up to examine Jim with its tiny eyes. “What are you?”
“I’m a Human, from Earth.”
“I’ve heard of neither your race nor your home. Your translator knows my language, though.”
“Jeha are well-known and respected by my people,” Jim explained.
“Indeed?”
“How long have you been here?”
“My whole life, and my forefathers’ lives, going back many hundreds of generations.”
“Are there many Jeha here?”
“Some,” he admitted, “though lots of different races as well.” The Jeha’s longer manipulative limbs waved around. “We’ve made a world here, living off the remnants of disaster.” Jim moved sideways, not letting the Jeha get too close. Splunk watched it as well, her eyes glowing slightly in the landing lights. The foot of the Raknar was different from the ones he owned. The rain continued to fall.
“Do you live inside this Raknar?”
“It’s my territory.”
Interesting term to use, Jim thought. “May we speak inside, out of the rain?” The Jeha’s small eyes moved upward, as if realizing for the first time it was indeed raining.
“As you wish,” he said and turned to move toward the Raknar. Jim used his pinplants to trigger the shuttle’s lockdown sequence. The airlock slid closed, and the ramp retracted behind him. The Jeha watched this happen before leading Jim up into the wreck of the Raknar.
Jim spent a few minutes looking around at the cavernous space. The interior was relatively dry. It was as empty as it was dry. It seemed like every component which could be removed, had been.
“Would you care for something to drink?” the Jeha asked.
“No, thank you,” Jim replied. He doubted it would be a good idea to eat or drink anything on the planet. “What should I call you?”
“You may call me Zhzzztivz.” The translator program in Jim’s pinplants worked for a second before coming up with something. “Caretaker.”
“Caretaker, I am Jim Cartwright.”
“What do you do, Jim Cartwright, to bring you here?”
“I’m the commander of a Human merc company.”
“Oh!” Caretaker said. “Oh, merc is it?” It headed to an area where equipment and other items were stacked on shelves made from various bits of metal; none of it matched.
“Yes, and I have a working Raknar.”
Caretaker froze where he was fiddling with something and turned to look at him. Jim immediately wondered if he should have spoken. “Where is this Raknar?”
“Far away, with my company.”
Caretaker considered Jim for a long time, then went back to work. The smell of something cooking reached him, and Jim realized the alien was preparing a meal. He hoped he wouldn’t be required to taste any of it. Most of the food insectile races preferred wasn’t very appetizing to Humans.
Splunk jumped from his shoulder, skittered up into the interior of the Raknar, and was quickly gone from view. Caretaker took no notice of the departure.
“What information do you seek?”
“You and the others here, do you know a lot about the Raknar?”
“Much, yes,” Caretaker said. “Much, indeed.”
“I’d like to know more about how the Dusman built and maintained them.”
“I’ll share what I know,” Caretaker said and began talking.
An hour later, Splunk finally came back. The little pouch she often carried on her belt was full. Jim knew when she’d left it had been empty. Caretaker had spent most of the hour talking generally about the Raknar—what they were made of, what kind of muscle-actuating electro-metals they used, how their control systems were non-electronic, but not how they functioned. In other words, nothing Jim didn’t already know.
“You okay, Splunk?” he asked. She gave him a sly grin and patted her bag.
“We should go,
“It cannot be,” he said and skittered in a circle. “It simply cannot be!”
“This is Splunk,” Jim explained. “She’s my friend.”
“Hall’ita!” Caretaker yelled and pointed a claw at her. Jim’s translator didn’t render the word. “Hall’ita!”
“What does Hall’ita mean?” Jim asked. Caretaker shot over to a bench, grabbed a small box, and put it against his sounding organ. Jim couldn’t hear what he was saying. He used his pinplants to access the radio feature and scanned local frequencies. He found it in a second, missing most of what Caretaker said.
“…I am sure of it, a Hall’ita is in my Raknar!”
“What does it mean?” Jim yelled. The radio responded with a hundred transmissions coming from all around them. Oh, shit, he thought.
“Time to go,
“Gah!” Jim cried out and dove behind the first thing he saw, a pile of rusty Raknar components. Another laser beam burned into the components but didn’t penetrate. He was safe but trapped. “Splunk, get to the shuttle,” he yelled, “I’ll distract this crazy bug and be right there.” He didn’t hear her reply, and hoped she’d do what he said.
Jim drew his GP-90 and set it for three-round-burst. He didn’t want to kill the insane insect. He also didn’t want to get any of his limbs cut off, either. Another laser bolt cut a metal support bracket cleanly above his head. The beam made a neat little ziiiing! as the metal was vaporized. It separated and missed landing on his foot, red-hot edge first, by inches.
“Enough,” he said and leaned the gun out from behind cover. The gun’s sight relayed the image around the corner directly to his brain through the pinplants, a superimposed red X showing where his shots would land. The mental heads-up display would compensate for range, wind, and movement of a target once he designated it. He’d used the technique to kill a body jacker more than a year ago when they’d tried to kidnap him to sell his organs. The problem was, the Jeha wasn’t firing the laser.
On another workbench, a robotic assembly had an old electric laser fixed to it. An optical sensor and an equally old slate controlled the weapon trying to kill him. Nice improvised sentry gun, he thought as he pulled the trigger and destroyed the weapon’s controller, the computer slate.
A skittering sound on the metal floor made him spin around, his weapon trailing slightly. Caretaker was there, another laser cradled in a dozen or so of its arms. “Now the Hall’ita is mine!” he said and aimed. Jim knew he wouldn’t get the gun on target in time.
The Jeha was blown in two, and insect blood and gore sprayed all over the walls of the ancient Raknar. A fraction of a second later a Boom! reverberated inside the space, loud enough to make Jim
cringe. He turned in the direction of the shot, looking for his savior, and saw Splunk holding a Fae-sized rifle, the improbably large barrel sending up a curl of smoke.
“Splunk?” he said in shock.
“Run, Jim,
Outside, it was raining even harder than before. Distant forks of lightning lit the alien sky. He held a hand up against the driving rain and spotted Splunk’s tail whipping down the side of the Raknar. He followed, slipping and sliding on the moldy, moss-covered armor plates. Going up he’d been able to pick and choose hand- and footholds, now he had no such luck. Near the bottom he caught his foot on a crack in an armor plate and went sprawling face first into the mud and muck.
Jim rolled to his feet as fast as his extra-large body would let him, then had to spend a second digging his gun out of the filth as well. He shook the mess off, hoping it would be enough, and ran toward the shuttle again. As he fled, he saw splashes in the mud around him, and he realized he was under fire.
Something hit his left leg, and he slid to the ground. Jim rolled onto his side, expecting the pain to hit him any second. All he felt was a throbbing numbness. The older mercs all said the worst wounds were the ones you didn’t feel. How bad am I hurt? he wondered. Then the shooting stopped.
Splunk was at his side, the huge-barreled rifle at her shoulder, and she moved in a circle around him. All he knew was they weren’t shooting at him anymore, so he took a second to look at his leg. The armor was torn on the leg and a chunk was gone. He quickly turned on the GP-90’s gun light and saw only mud, no blood. The armor had stopped the projectile.
“Jim hurt,
“No,” he said and got to his feet. The leg hurt, but not too badly. It took his weight. The shuttle was just a few meters away. He used his pinplants to open it and, as soon as the ramp was down enough, began limping up it. Near the top he turned and covered the dark, sweeping his pistol back and forth. He could see shapes with the IR function, but couldn’t tell what races they might be. They all held weapons which glowed hot from firing.
Splunk skittered up the ramp. None of them fired at her as she slapped the control and the airlock cycled. Immediately, he heard impacts on the hull. They were either shooting at the shuttle or jumping on it! Either way, he didn’t care. Jim used his pinplants to order the autopilot to take off and held on.
The vertical lifting jets roared to life and the shuttle jumped into the rainy night. He made his way to the cockpit and almost fell into the pilot’s couch. Mud and yuck from his uniform got everywhere. It would be hell cleaning it all up, and he didn’t care. He used the ship’s belly cameras to look below them.
In the blazing light of the lifting jets and landing lights, he could see dozens of aliens, including many he didn’t recognize. All were armed, but none of them were pointing their guns at the shuttle. They all held their limbs up toward the climbing shuttle, almost as if reaching up to pull it back down.
The shuttle finally gained sufficient altitude to angle upward and its main rocket engine ignited. Several Gs of thrust pushed him back in the chair as they blasted toward orbit.
* * *
Pale Rider was right where Jim had left it, orbiting serenely around the deceptively quiet world of K’o. As soon as they docked, he checked the ship’s sensors and confirmed for himself nobody had approached in the hours he’d been gone.
“We’re going to have to go about this differently,” he said, mostly to himself, as Splunk floated into the bridge.
Jim stripped to his underwear, the muddy armor and uniform causing globs of debris to float about in microgravity. He used his pinplants to activate the cleaning bots. Below them, the Valley of Loss orbited by, flashes of lightning still visible from orbit. He could almost imagine they were flashes of gunfire.
They busied themselves getting the ship ready to leave orbit. Jim examined the leg that had been shot. A deep, ugly bruise was the only injury he’d sustained. He didn’t bother to waste a nanite treatment on it. Splunk floated over and looked at the wound, her long tufted ears straight up with concern.
“I’m fine,” he assured her. “Are you okay?”
“Not a scratch,
“And what’s with the gun?” he asked. She’d left it floating in the bridge after they’d come aboard, and he reached for it to take a look at it. While each part had a cleanly machined appearance, it was also clear none of the parts had been originally manufactured together. He thought he recognized a piece or two from Cavaliers gear. “You made this yourself?”
“Yup,” she said, a phrase she’d learned from Adayn. “You like,
His first instinct was to be upset at her, then he realized he was being foolish. She wasn’t his pet; she was his friend and companion. They’d fought together countless times and somehow joined to operate a Raknar! She was a living, thinking being, with her own feelings of self-worth. Most importantly, she’d obviously just saved his life when Caretaker had gone nuts.
“Yes, Splunk, I like it. You have something smaller?” She grinned and produced not one, but two smaller, Fae-sized pistols. One had an overlarge barrel and looked to be single shot, the other was a reworked C-Tech holdout pistol, a model he’d seen before. “Good. I get the feeling we’re going to need you armed.” He tickled her ears, and she cooed in appreciation. “Thanks for saving my life.”
“You and me are partners,
“You and me,” he agreed. But what about you made Caretaker go crazy? he wondered. “What did you find while we were there?”
She opened her bag, and a constellation of chips floated out. He’d seen their type before. Their Raknar back in Karma Upsilon 4 had a few, and many more missing. “They’ve been stripping those Raknar for 200 centuries,” he said, “how could they have missed those?” Then he realized they hadn’t missed them at all. “You little thief,” he said, “you found a secret stash.”
“Caretaker hide these, was going to hurt you,
“I believe it,” he said. “Okay, I’m going to set the next stop and we can go over what you found while we head for the stargate.” Splunk gave him a thumbs up, and Jim programmed Pale Rider to leave orbit. The fusion torch pushed them away from the planet and toward the distant stargate, and Jim was finally able to breathe.
An hour later he’d spun up the gravity deck and taken a shower. Splunk cleaned up as well, though she preferred to use a damp washcloth instead of direct water. He felt immensely better with the layers of mud washed off. The bruise on his leg was a nasty shade of black and at least 20 centimeters across. It really hurt after the shower.
Back in zero G on the bridge, he and Splunk began examining the chips. The first thing he found was that they weren’t standard chips. They used a unique interface program and were encoded. It took him several hours to write a custom program, only to realize most of the chips appeared to be corrupted. The data wasn’t readable in any fashion his programs could understand.
“I’ll go through them,
“Okay,” Jim agreed. “I have a lot of images to go over from our visit with the Caretaker.” Splunk created a small constellation of Raknar chips floating around her while Jim began feeding pictures from his pinplants to the ship’s computer. Once they were stored, he displayed them on the bridge Tri-V.
One major advantage of pinplants was a literally photographic memory—if you remembered to turn it on. You didn’t have unlimited memory, so it needed to be used carefully. Schools on Earth were still struggling with the implications of pinplants. Their existence had all but destroyed the old TV game shows.
The data Splunk stole might have been a bust, but he was mesmerized by the images. The inside of Caretaker’s Raknar might have been gutted, but the structures we
re still there in detail. Sections he’d never seen inside his own Raknar were clearly visible. He spent hours categorizing recorded images of parts on racks and other components. He was so busy he didn’t notice when Splunk stared at a screen of orderly data for a second before removing it from the slate and sliding it into a pocket on her vest.
The rest of the cruise passed without incident. K’o’s stargate activated on its scheduled departure schedule, and Pale Rider transited safely into hyperspace.
As Pale Rider was leaving, another ship arrived in-system. It was only passing through, but then the ship’s master received a communication from K’o, and it decelerated. A negotiation via radio took place. After a time, an agreement was reached, and the ship turned toward the stargate. As it accelerated toward the stargate, another negotiation took place. The crew had to wait a few hours before the gate opened again, and the ship jumped away.
* * * * *
Chapter Three
Pale Rider came out into a system as different from K’o as regular space was from hyperspace. A warm, inviting yellow G-class star lit a world which was an amazing blue-green, conjouring up memories of Earth. Jim immediately wondered why the seas were so intensely green.
Of course, the planet was named Emerald Sea, which made sense. He’d spent most of his time examining the data which had brought them to the system, and none of it learning about the world itself. There was no one guarding the emergence point so Splunk set them on a low-power course toward the planet. Fuel was getting low.
Jim gave a quick scan through the GalNet on Emerald Sea. The planet was the only inhabited world in the Fesk’l star system. The alien name for the world was Boosh, which must have been Maki because it meant green in their language. It was once a mining planet with rich copper reserves deep under the oceans.
