Space Pioneers

by Hank Davis

  He’d believe it when he saw it, and he’d be dead by then.

  “You sure this’ll work there, Kal?” Gant’s voice came clear through the earpiece.

  The old hunter grimaced and did not respond, but clambered up onto the top of one of the great fishery vats, looking down on turgid green waters tossed here and there by rippling movement. Great plumes of white steam rose from stacks on the low buildings around, and his osmosis pack buzzed to indicate that it was safe to remove his nose-tubes.

  He didn’t, turned instead to the height of the tower near at hand.

  Subvocalizing again, he said, “There it is, see?”

  “Ooh . . .” He could hear Gant’s grin over the line. “I knew I liked you.”

  The old Narayan building was separated from the top of the fishery by a space only perhaps a dozen feet wide, near enough that a man might leap to it if he started high. “These prefab units are almost all Wong-Hopper standard kit, the sort they sell to new colonies,” Kalas said. “Used to see a lot of them back in the Legions. Colonists buy them cheap and in bulk.” He squinted, judging his chances. He didn’t like them.

  The building units were all built to a similar plan, and Kalas had been in and out of hundreds on them on a dozen worlds in his day. Towers like the Narayan building were built simply by stacking the same ugly white block of a unit atop its duplicate over and over and over—in this case, twelve times. The windows were in the same place on every level, as were the exterior lights. Perhaps the units’ inner walls varied floor to floor, perhaps not—it wasn’t important.

  What was important was the door, or doors, rather. The Narayan Shipping company had built the tower when Abhanri City was just a few thousand people brought in to mine the massive vein of tungsten that had attracted the first wave colonists. They’d built cheap and fast. The prefab units came in sets of three, which meant every third floor on the tower had the same doors as the first floor. Someone had come after and built balconies outside the main doors, but the side doors? The emergency exits? No. There was only a narrow shelf, perhaps eighteen inches deep, set beside a fire-escape ladder that stood hiked up to the third story.

  “But are you sure this’ll work?” Gant asked again.

  “Consortium hasn’t changed factory codes in seven thousand years, Gant,” Kalas replied, lips barely moving. “You know that just as well as me.” Theoretically, it should be possible to use the manufacturer’s override codes to open that back door without triggering any internal alarms. And they were the manufacturers—or their hired guns. The Wong-Hopper Consortium had its fingers in everything: interstellar trade, starship manufacture, raw materials prospecting . . . even politics. But it was the colonial trade that had catapulted them to power and prominence. Terraforming equipment, construction gear, orbital mirrors, hightower anchor stations and counterweights, prefabricated housing, industrial, and commercial buildings. And genetic seed stock: everything from super-oxygenating designer algaes and plastic-eating fungi to dogs and oaks and moray eels.

  Everything.

  “You, uh . . . you gonna make the jump there?”

  “In a minute,” Kalas said, squaring his shoulder and turning away from the edge. “You want to do this instead? I’ll wait until you can get down here.” He glanced up towards the factory smokestack where Gant crouched, nestled in the scaffolding.

  Gant liked to run support when it came to this part of the job. I’m just not a blunt instrument, he often said, pressing one hand to his chest. How the fellow had survived in this line of work for so long Kalas could never quite understand. At least not until Gant started shooting, that was.

  “You got about forty guys in there, or so the thermals say. No telling how many of them are fighters though.”

  “Best assume all of them.” Kalas swore. “Any sign of the hardware?” The seed stock would be chilled, but there was no telling how well shielded the crate might be. Sen would have had to pack it pretty well to smuggle it out of the research park. It could have been in a sub-basement for all Kalas knew.

  “No shine, boss.”

  Kalas swore again.

  At that moment, a shadow passed over the stars, and Kalas ducked, pulled by some primordial reflex, as if he were some brush-dwelling rodent shrinking from a hawk in the night. Or an owl. He heard something. A high-pitched, thrumming whine. Drive cores. Repulsors. A ship overhead. He didn’t see the tell-tale blue-white glow, nor the flashing green and blue of wing lights.

  Pressing the comms patch against the skin of his throat, he said, “You hear that?”

  “Sounds like a ship, but I don’t see anything on the scope.” Gant’s words came across slow and considering, as if he was thinking hard.

  The old hunter overrode him, “Bugger the scope, man! Use your eyes.” It was thermal emissions a ship would try the hardest to hide. “Look for a shadow.” He had a sinking feeling that Vela’s buyer had arrived. He’d known time was short, had known it since Director Yin had ordered him and Gant to recover the contraband. Kalas knew he must be cursed. He must have had the worst luck in the whole damned Imperial universe and beyond. Couldn’t they have come an hour later? Or two? Two would have been better.

  He was getting too old for this sort of thing.

  “I still don’t see . . .” Gant’s voice trailed off, and Kalas imagined him squinting over the railing, peering down over the stinking fisheries and Narayan building and the lower structures around. “No, there it is!” He sounded like he was pointing. “Right on top of the building, hanging off the south side. I don’t recognize the make, though.”

  Kalas peered up at top of the building, but there was nothing to see. Some sort of active camouflage? That did not bode well. Abhanri didn’t restrict flight, didn’t have a customs office. Who would cloak themselves in such a place? Who would need to? “I’d better move fast,” Kalas grumbled, more to himself than to his companion. He gauged the jump one last time, aimed for the ladder, and leaped.

  The factory codes had worked perfectly, and Kalas slunk through the hissing airlock into a dimly lit hall. Only the odd glow panel still shone in the ceiling. Only the odd door stood open. Kalas moved slowly, careful not to make a sound as he moved down the hall. Not for the first time, Kalas understood the attraction of the sensory implants common out here beyond the borders of the Empire. He could never quite bring himself to get them, citizen of the Empire that he was. The mingling of man and machine was forbidden by the Holy Terran Chantry, and fear of such machines and loathing ran deep in Kalas, whatever his more freethinking tendencies. He might have had his eyes genetically augmented, but at home such augmentations were reserved, awarded for exemplary service by the great lords and ladies of the Empire. It felt wrong to Kalas to bypass the cultural order. Call him old-fashioned.

  The hallways were precisely as Kalas expected them, the standard office unit made available by the Consortium. If he turned left, towards the center of the building—yes, there were the lifts. He didn’t like his chances with those lifts, not with a guest arriving on the rooftop. There should have been service stairs . . . he turned right, glad not to have been seen, and moved along a side hall, past a graffitied mural of a naked woman defaced by rude words in angry, block letters and a busted drinking fountain. A man emerged from the bathroom ahead. Kalas fired his phase disruptor without breaking stride, caught the man full in the side of his face with a stun blast. He spasmed, slumped against the door. He’d barely made a sound.

  “I hope you’re making progress with the cameras,” Kalas mumbled, tidying the stunned man into the bathroom whence he’d come. He didn’t envy the man. Taking a stunner shot at all was unpleasant, but to the face? Crouching, Kalas checked to make sure the man was still breathing. Even on its stun setting, a phase disruptor might disrupt the vagus nerve, stop a man breathing. He was alive, if quite unconscious. He’d wake up with a monstrous headache, and his face would be slow to recover its full motion. But at least that was one of the tower’s occupants out of commissi
on for the foreseeable future. Kalas studied him: thick neck, shaved head. He was only missing the tattoos to complete the stereotype image of the lowlife gangster. He even wore the nondescript button-down shirt and gold jewelry one expected, and a plasma burner at his belt. Kalas took the burner and cracked the compressor unit with the spiked cap on the butt of his phase disruptor, just in case this one woke up with a fury.

  The stairs.

  The stairs were right where Kalas expected them, right where they’d been in a thousand identical buildings. He pushed the metal door with its peeling white paint open and stepped out onto iron and concrete steps that switch-backed up and down just inside the outer wall of the building.

  Up or down?

  “Gant, any sign of contraband?”

  “I’m not sure, I—”

  “On the roof, man,” Kalas cut into him. “With the ship.”

  Kalas could practically hear Gant shaking his head, as he looked for signs of the supercooled cargo, “No. No. About twenty guys, though.”

  This wasn’t going to work. They hadn’t counted on a ship arriving while they were just scouting things out. They’d been banking on a couple hours recon, easy, find the payload, get it out and into the flier. Things were starting to come undone. “Leave the scope up where you’re at,” Kalas said, “monitor the feed from the flier.”

  “What about cover?” Gant said, “I thought you wanted me shooting out windows if things got hairy?” The other man had carried a heavy-gauge MAR up the stack with him. The magnetic rifle would put an iron slug clean through the building if they had a mind, and irritating as he was, Gant was not a bad shot.

  “We gotta go fast,” Kalas replied. “I just want you ready with the flier at a moment’s notice. I don’t like this, Gant. I don’t like anything about this.” He made his choice.

  Down.

  The next floor was identical to the one he’d entered on: walls scratched and badly graffitied, lights broken or fading. The same arrangement of rooms. That was the trouble. It was hard to find a central anything in such a place, where everything was duplicated. What they were looking for should not have been that hard to find: a refrigerated metal cube about a foot and a half to a side.

  There was no one here.

  There was nothing here.

  “Gant, where are the other guards?” he asked when he reached the level immediately above the ground floor.

  The response was a moment coming, “Five floors up—two past where you started—and on the front door. Rest are on the roof. Looks like they’re waiting for—”

  The comms line went dead mid-sentence.

  Fearing an attack was imminent, Kalas pressed himself through a side door into what once had been a set of office cubicles. Still holding his phase disruptor in his right hand, he fiddled with his terminal. Access to the Kanthi datasphere was blocked, and even the device’s more primitive radio functions were blocked. It was no use trying to reach the Consortium’s private satellite net, either.

  His instinct to hide saved him.

  “Arno! Bass! You two still fucking up in here?” a voice called from the hall, “Boss wants us on the ground floor, make sure no one gets in.”

  Another voice floated down the hall, nearer at hand, “She said she wanted us covering the street from up here!”

  “You heard me!” The first voice again.

  “Yeah, and I also heard your mom sells tricks down portside for the price of a cigarette,” came a third voice, higher and more nasal than the others. “And not one of them good cigarettes, neither. Heard she sells out for those T-free cigarettes what they sell to little girls in school trying to impress their friends.”

  “Fuck you, Arno!”

  “Fuck you, Kees. It’s fucking cold out there and some of us still got balls as might freeze off!” A pause. “Say, why’re comms out?”

  Kalas pressed himself against the wall near the door, trying to see down the hall. He could just make out a thin slice of a man standing at a door not far down. The first man—Kees, if he was keeping track.

  Voice suddenly hushed, Kees said, “The buyer. Boss agreed to let him jam up comms until he had everything he came for.” That made Kalas sigh with relief. They hadn’t been discovered, then. Everyone was jammed. “I’m going back up to eight. If you assholes won’t do your job, don’t come crying to me when the boss slaps you good.”

  “Fuck you, Kees!” said both men in unison.

  From his vantage point, Kalas watched what little of Kees he could see turn, moving back up the hall. The old hunter gave the man two—three paces to get away from the door he’d been standing at before he leaned out into the hall and fired his phase disruptor. The shot spat silently down the grimy hall, caught the man between the shoulder blades. He fell with a solid thud—the stunner bolt had hit right over his spine. Not wasting time, Kalas slid towards the door, barely pausing to note much about the two men who sat by the big arc of window overlooking the street below and the bulk of the heated fishery drums rising into the cold night air. He fired, dropping both of them without ceremony.

  If the comms really were down all over the building, he hardly needed to hide the stunned men. It might be minutes before someone came looking for Kees and his loudmouthed compatriots, and when they did they’d have to come running up the stairs.

  The old-fashioned way.

  Kalas clenched his teeth. He almost grinned.

  He was from the Empire. He was the old-fashioned way.

  Two men stood flanking a door on the eighth floor, plasma burners strapped to their thighs, hands ready, waiting. Kalas felt certain there had to be more guards inside, and felt even more certain that he was in the right place. None of the other rooms had been guarded. He stayed hidden around the corner. Gant could have told him how many hostiles were in that next room. Gant could have told him many things. He could—for example—have told him about the lift carriage that had just arrived from the rooftop, about the woman and her guest that had just stepped out into the lobby near at hand.

  He heard their footsteps first, coming from the other end of the hall, beyond the guards. There was something wrong about them. Too heavy. Too metallic. A little bit too far apart. And Kalas knew then that Adri had been right all along, knew that sometimes the rumors were true—and the childhood legends also.

  A woman came into view, tall and with the native copper complexion, dressed in a gown of simple black, and beside her . . . beside her walked a monster.

  The Extrasolarian stood nearly seven feet tall on legs bent backwards like the legs of dog. His hands—where they emerged from voluminous black sleeves, looked more like the anatomical sketch of a pair of hands than hands themselves, with tendons and tissue of black carbon like pencil lead. The feet were like cloven hooves shod with titanium, and his face . . . Kalas had seen less pallor on a corpse. He might have been an albino, so pale was he and hairless, his scalp glistening, studded with mechanical implants behind his ears and along the column of his spine.

  “My captain, Lady Marishka, is most grateful that you have found what we required on such short notice, M. Vela,” the Extrasolarian said, and from his hiding place Kalas felt certain that the man’s lips did not move, that his sepulchral voice came instead from somewhere in his chest.

  The native woman, Vela, replied, “It was no trouble, M. Giacomo. Thank you for thinking of us.”

  The impossibly deep voice again: “Hardly, madam. Your reputation precedes you, and what you’ve gotten for us will go a long way to ensuring that the Parliament of Owls will go on sailing for another four thousand years.”

  Sailing.

  Kalas paused, watching the mismatched couple come to a stop at the door with the two guards. Sailing. It was a ship. The Parliament of Owls was a ship, one of the nightmare vessels that plied the Dark between the stars. It was the type of ship his old gran had told stories about when Kalas was a boy. He gripped his disruptor tighter, watching as the Extrasolarian and the woman passed within. It was now or
never, and so Kalas stepped out into the hall, raised his arm.

  And someone else fired.

  The stunner bolt took him in the side, and he lurched into the wall. His arm still worked, and in desperation Kalas aimed his stunner at the guards on the door. Where had the shot come from? He fired, caught one man in the face before he could turn. He crumpled even as the other man leaped back, pounding on the door.

  A second stunner bolt caught Kalas in the shoulder, and he fell.

  Everything had gone wrong. Everything.

  They should have pulled out the moment the ship arrived. Cut their losses. Lied to Director Yin and the local board. Kalas’s last thought before he lost consciousness was that he was going to miss his date with Adri after all, and that he’d lied to her. Then a sound like rushing water filled his ears, and everything went black.

  Red pain lanced across his face, went black as a thunderclap. Someone winced. Was it him? He could move his arms. Good. Legs? Good. But someone had tied him to a chair. Less good. His neck felt tacky where someone had peeled the subvocalizing patch off, which meant that even if the comms started working again, Gant was out of the picture.

  “I said ‘Who are you?’” A woman’s voice. Adri? No, that was a native accent.

  Kalas looked up with blurry eyes, saw the woman in the black dress standing over him. Vela. He would have touched his forehead in salute, murmured instead. “Ma’am.”

  She slapped him again, less hard. She wasn’t strong, but it was enough to snap Kalas’s head back. Dimly, he was aware of the pale devil watching him. That Extrasolarian with his satyr legs and black hands. Up close, Kalas could see his eyes were all white, like the eyes of a statue. “Who are you?”

  “Who do you think?” he said, words bitter. There was no point in denying it. “Consortium repo man.”