Friends in the Stars

by Mackey Chandler

  “We may be the same grade, but I have seniority,” Bill said. “If I decide you have a need to know because of changing circumstances I’m going to read you in to protect our mission. If they don’t like it what are they going to do to me? I’m already stuck in a low-risk general intelligence gathering post just killing time until I can retire.”

  “I appreciate we work pretty much as equals,” Sam said. “You could make this a real hardship post if you were a jerk and the only other person I work with.”

  “I love you too,” Bill said. Sam could only imagine the heads that would explode back at headquarters if they had a bug to intercept that.

  “I don’t want to give you the wrong impression that Singh isn’t dangerous too,” Bill said. “The Chinese have messed with him a couple of times and got nuked for it. They stole one of his ships once and he nuked it as soon as they landed it. You can still see the crater a few kilometers across where the spaceport used to be.”

  “I never heard about that,” Sam said. Bill looked at him sharply to see if he was disbelieving, but it just seemed a factual statement.

  “You won’t find it searching the public web, and the Chinese have no reason to publish it. But you can find it in some foreign satellite pix if you know where to search for it,” Bill said.

  Sam nodded and sat, brow furrowed hard.

  “Maybe this Singh character doesn’t know he’s supposed to be afraid and travel with security,” Sam concluded.

  “It might be better not to provoke him,” Bill agreed. “From what I have read if you do. his girlfriends tend to hunt you down and kill you artistically as an example.”

  “Girl friends?” Sam asked, because North America was in a resurgence of public prudery that showed no sign of letting up.

  “Like he cares what we think about that too,” Bill said.

  “I’m going to check and see if the Foys or anybody else we are watching just happen to be going to the port right now,” Sam said. “I wonder what his business is here?”

  Chapter 16

  Jeff stepped off the shuttle to a passenger tunnel. He was kind of disappointed that Derfhome was so modern. It was like getting off a shuttle on Earth, although he hadn’t been able to do that safely in a couple of decades. The port wasn’t huge and didn’t try to impress, but it was comfortable and spacious, even given the fact Derf were extra-large compared to Humans. It didn’t smell bad, but it wasn’t the outdoor air of a living planet he’d hoped to experience.

  It had the faint scent of machinery or electronics and an odor that reminded him of a pet ferret. He suspected that was Derf. Trying to hide those odors was a faint whiff of burnt popcorn. Being a station dweller since his teens Jeff had a very keen sense of smell, accustomed to air scrubbed clean and carefully monitored for unexplained pollutants. He never rode behind a diesel truck or was stuck in an elevator with old ladies drenched in perfume to dull his sense of smell.

  He was wearing thin stretchy pants, slip on shoes, a long sleeved t-shirt, and a long jacket or tunic over it all, that was a concession to Heather and April to armor up. The bottom edge could be grabbed and pulled down to his knees without losing its ballistic properties, but it was just below his buttocks at present for appearance sake. The hood was not up or his face covered, but he had on a soft looking beanie that was deceptively thin and incorporated a reactive layer. It came down over his ears and covered the temple pieces of his spex.

  A thin over-vest had no fasteners or zipper in the front and was simply a carrier that substituted for the pockets the long jacket lacked and blocked him from reaching in his pants. It held his pad, some walking around money, and a pair of drones he didn’t want to deploy to orbit him unless he found himself in visibly hostile circumstances. It would probably be mistaken as some ethnic garb on an outsider. It had a vaguely Middle Eastern look to it and had embroidery along the edge to reinforce that appearance. Everything else, his documents, several changes of the light clothing, a more capable computer and a serious pistol on top of the other items all fit in a small handle bag. The armored tunic was able to cool or warm him over any range of temperatures he should encounter.

  There was no customs to deal with on the planet since he’d easily cleared customs on the station. Jeff hadn’t even been asked to empty his bag. The port was busy but not packed, most of the traffic here was from local aircraft rather than shuttles. There were Derf everywhere and a majority of the workers were Derf, but more Humans than he had honestly expected. The exit gate out was an unmanned turnstile that couldn’t be entered the other way and Jeff could see the Foys standing back against a wall on the other side of it.

  “We have a car and driver orbiting around the port,” Eileen said as soon as Jeff walked up to them. “He’ll stop as soon as he sees we’re out front. He’s supplied by the Red Tree Mothers and on call for you to use as long as you are here. Be advised he regards himself as a bodyguard also. Is that all you have?” Eileen asked, nodding at his single bag.

  “Yes, and I’d rather carry it myself,” Jeff said. He didn’t care to explain his pistol was accessible on top inside, bodyguard or no. He really had to talk to the makers about pockets on the armor. How hard could it be?

  “We have a hotel suite reserved, Eileen said. “It’s on the same top floor of the Old Hotel in which Lee Anderson keeps an apartment. That should make having a meeting with her easy and private. Nobody can track either of you coming or going.”

  “Is there room for my driver to stay in the suite if he’s a bodyguard too?”

  “We met him just in time to get here and pick you up,” Vic said. “The suite has room, though we didn’t have time to inspect it. There hasn’t been time to discuss any details of what you require or schedules. I’m pretty sure he has a very loose set of orders to accommodate you, so tell him what you require.”

  There was no security to clear outside the turnstile blocking entry to the actual shuttle terminal, and people were visible entering the same doors they exited. There were driverless cars for hire along the curb with distinctive company colors, and ‘FOR HIRE’ in several languages painted on the side. There were only three and Jeff didn’t see any big rush to them.

  A plain car came along and Eileen called out, “There he is now.”

  It pulled to the curb between cabs. A large male Derf got out and came around to open the doors for them.

  It wasn’t lost on Jeff that his eyes scanned the pickup area each way carefully before he nodded hello to them. He stood upper arm on the front door letting them choose their own seats.

  “Mr. Singh? I’m Specialist Strangelove at your service.”

  The Foys didn’t expect Jeff to erupt in laughter. Strangelove smiled rather than take offense. “You’ve seen the flattie then?” He inquired.

  “I’ve seen the old one and the colorized version upscaled to higher resolution,” Jeff said. “It’s a cult classic.”

  “I’m not sure what that last means,” Strangelove said, “but it will give us an interesting thing in common to discuss. I still have some questions about the movie other Humans have been unable to answer.”

  “I’d be happy to talk with you about that, and I have questions about Derfhome I’d like to put to you. Let me sit in the front with you and we can talk a little right away. The Foys say they haven’t made detailed arrangements. Would you be agreeable to sharing my suite at the Old Hotel so you don’t have to commute back and forth to drive me?”

  “That would be a treat for me,” Strangelove said. “The Old Hotel is probably the fanciest place in town and I’ve never set foot in the place. I’ve never had an excuse to even charge a meal there to my Mothers, much less stay there.”

  He shut the door on Jeff and then the back door for the Foys.

  “Where do you stay then?” Jeff asked when Strangelove took the driver’s seat again. “I understand Red Tree is fairly distant for the City. Do you have enough business here for a barracks or apartments in town?”

  “There a
re other hotels and rooming houses far less grand than the Old Hotel or the Holiday Inn that caters mostly to Humans,” Strangelove said, easing out into traffic. “The Mothers have arrangements with some of them for contract workers the clan sends to work on fishing boats or forestry work on unclaimed land. But I have been staying in our safe house since my work recently required my presence there and there was no need to move out.”

  “I’m not sure we don’t have some confusion in translation there,” Jeff said. “What do Derf consider a ‘safe house’ by definition?”

  “A place owned rather than rented where we can maintain much tighter security for agents of the clan to come and go or keep sensitive political prisoners under arrest.”

  “That’s pretty much my definition too. I can see we’re going to have a lot of interesting things to discuss. Are you an agent in the sense of a criminal investigator or a spy for the Mothers? Human’s wouldn’t normally reveal that,” Jeff said.

  “I am a military officer of the clan in the third rank,” Strangelove said. “I report directly to the Champion of Red Tree, who reports to the Mothers. We aren’t big on specialization so I do whatever needs to be done. We cross train extensively so I can lead a platoon of infantry by your definitions, or work air defense or indeed gather intelligence if that is required.

  “My specialty is maintaining and deploying nuclear weapons for surface warfare. I’m sorry to say I haven’t had a chance to rotate through the training and deployment to learn the details of my specialty in space forces. But neither have the space trained specialists had a round of training at surface warfare. We’ll get around to it, but the whole field is relatively new compared to other tasks that have histories and procedures formed over thousands of years. We still train the basics of traditional weapons. I’ll have you know I was regarded as very skilled with a pike.”

  “Or that ax stuck in your belt?” Jeff asked.

  “That is regarded as a current service weapon,” Strangelove said, patting it. “You notice the bottom of the blade has a hook. The head is forged of a material that compares favorably in strength to turbine blades. Since an adult Derf can pull against a set object with about five tons of force, the leverage is sufficient to peel open the best hard space armor. One of your people described it as like opening a can of sardines. I’ve never had the experience of star goods as exotic as canned sardines, so I wouldn’t know.”

  “We’ll try to keep it that way,” Jeff said. “Be aware, I am armed, so you can factor that in as support since I was told you are bodyguard too.”

  “The Mothers value you, and the Foys. I am pleased to serve any ally of Red Tree. Derfhome doesn’t have a lot of crime, less so violent crime. If we have any difficulties I would expect it to be from without. So you might pay closer attention to other Humans than Derf. The Derf generally would be in terror of crossing the Mothers who have made certain Humans a concern of theirs under formal protection.”

  Strangelove looked over briefly and smiled. “But we have crazies too.”

  “Off subject a little, but don’t you have a straight road anywhere?” Jeff asked.

  That provoked laughter from the back seat.

  * * *

  “I can’t believe nobody met Singh at the port,” Sam said.

  “Neither can I,” Bill said. “He could have hired a car or bought one for that matter, but he has people on-planet and allies. Somebody met him. If it wasn’t the Foys it was Lee Anderson or somebody from Red Tree. I find it very hard to believe he has some other contact or business on Derfhome and never told his people he’d be here.”

  “Unless there’s a problem, and he’s here to take names and kick butt, so he didn’t want to give them time to cover up any evidence,” Sam said.

  Bill smiled. “You’re getting better at this. That’s good thinking, but you want to eliminate the more likely things first. Check all the cars that visited the Foys today, not just the service they usually use, and backtrack them all. Check where they went after stopping at the Foy’s, and if that yields nothing, then check every car that stopped at the Old Hotel and where they were from or where they went.”

  “That’s going to be a lot harder than the Foy’s place, even using the AI to just give me results instead of doing it manually,” Sam objected.

  “That’s the boring downside of intelligence work,” Bill said, “but it works.”

  “Oh, incidentally, one of our hired teams reports somebody else is ghosting them and tracking who they watch,” Sam said. “They’re not sure who, but it would more than double their workload to find out, so they weren’t willing to investigate. Even if they got paid well for it, they are simply out of available warm bodies.”

  “That really frosts me,” Bill said. “Somebody got the better company to my mind, and I can’t even ID them to try to subvert them and hire them away.”

  * * *

  The elevators for the top floor were all in a small alcove off the lobby but in sight of the service desk. They set the call plate and the door entry above to Jeff’s hand and Strangelove’s. Jeff had the Foys touch the panel and get access too, which they hadn’t expected. Is this a pre-contact building?” Jeff asked inside, looking around the suite.

  “Yes, we had to ask them to change out the master toilet and the shower fixtures for some compatible with Humans,” Eileen said. “I hope they didn’t go overboard and change them all since you invited Strangelove to stay. If they have we can get him a room in the hotel until they have one switched back tomorrow.”

  “Why would a shower head be species-specific?” Jeff wondered.

  “Think high-pressure washer like for cleaning pavement or a ground car. The Derf version has to penetrate their tight coat. It will peel skin or at least bruise it,” Vic said.

  Strangelove came back from inspecting a smaller bedroom. “Not to worry, they left that guest room set up for Derf. It still has a pad instead of a bed too.”

  “Let’s look at the balcony,” Jeff said, and led the way.

  “Ah you have a lovely view,” Strangelove said, leaning on a very stout railing with his lower arms. The rail was chest high to Jeff.

  Jeff nodded agreeing. “When did they put in electric lighting?” Jeff wondered.

  “That predates Human contact by a couple of hundred years,” Eileen said. “They used to have their own generator though, before there were city mains. The fixtures are all updated with Human tech though, except for the restaurant on the first floor. The patrons said it would ruin it to put in modern fixtures and it retains the original lights.”

  “If you read the Earth literature you’d think they were all living in mud and bark huts and the great gods from the sky brought them fire,” Jeff said.

  “Well, consider what they say about Spacers,” Vic said, and as was his custom let Jeff fill in all the details and draw his own conclusions.

  “There is a rift there?” Strangelove asked, “beyond turning Lee away from their Claims Commission?”

  Jeff looked shocked, and didn’t know where to start to answer Strangelove, or ask how it was he didn’t know.

  Eileen jumped in. “Jeff, it’s going to take a lot to explain how clan Derf live and what they know about the outside world. The Mothers are in charge of all law and foreign relations. There are no video screens and very few pads to be found at a clan Keep. The average clan Derf isn’t exposed to news programs, and they aren’t encouraged to form private opinions of external affairs. They simply do as the Mothers direct. Their education is very targeted and doesn’t include general classes of history, neither their own nor foreigners and aliens.”

  Strangelove spoke up for himself. “There is a channel on the city net about news from Earth and Fargone, and they touch on news from other worlds like New Japan from time to time. Frankly, it was a bunch of nonsense to me. I didn’t even know half the words although I’m one of the better English speakers. I’ve been learning from our doctor who is a native speaker.

  “I remember there
was this show about tariffs between Europe and China, and I had to learn what tariffs were. They seemed to feel it was a serious matter. The Europeans were unhappy with the price of pigs from China. I was trying to figure out why, if they didn’t like the price of the pigs, the European leaders didn’t just say, ‘That’s it we aren’t buying any more.’ Then I finally figured out they were unhappy the price was too low! This is a problem? So I pretty much gave up looking at that channel since it didn’t make any sense at all.”

  Jeff was nodding and looking abstracted. “I can really understand why it wouldn’t make any sense if you don’t have tons of background about how Earth economies and politics work. Even then, sometimes it doesn’t make any sense to us, because it’s foolishness and something is done a certain way because that how it has always been done and nobody will fix a hundred-year-old law that was made for entirely different reasons. I just hope you will be patient with me when your world and way of doing things doesn’t make any more sense to me.”

  “Such as not having any straight roads?” Strangelove asked.

  “I admit, that seems peculiar to me,” Jeff said. “I suppose it is to be found in history once again. Once I understand how it started it will make better sense how it came to be like it is.”

  “You’d understand that one if you ever saw a Derf hunting party that goes out in the fall, Strangelove said. “By the time Derf invented firearms they had hunted all the big dangerous predators to extinction. I know that horrifies a lot of Humans when they learn that, but they never had to meet one of these horrors in the woods. That was done with spear and bow, and even in war, Derf are so good with a bow that expensive firearms never became a big thing. A Derf draws a bow with his lower arms that has eight to ten times the pull of a human bow and throws an arrow three times as heavy.

  “If you saw a bowman practicing you’d find that the average distance around a city dwelling to the public through way is about how far such a bowman can hit a target the size of my palm,” Strangelove said, lifting a true hand.