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The Fifth Civilization: A Novel

Page 18

by Peter Bingham-Pankratz


  The ship’s lights began blinking blue, the signal the Colobus was about to land on a planetary surface. These alerts were color-coded, of course, so the crew could alternatively jump in panic or readiness depending on the situation. On the cargo floor, no one seemed to react too much to the flashing lights, except the forklift driver, who sped up his vehicle as he angled it toward the exterior doors.

  “I hope these Bauxens know what they’re getting into,” Roan said.

  “Of course they do,” David said with a snide touch. “My friend on the planet has dealt with many Kotarans before.”

  “What do you mean, your friend?” Roan looked at David with a slightly astonished expression. What do I not know about you that I should?

  “The friend we are meeting on Bauxen. He is Prince Duvurn Dedro—actually, his station is not quite equivalent to what you would call a prince on Earth. He is more like the cousin of royalty. Do you understand this? Anyway, Duvurn has agreed to help us with our mission to Aaron’s planet, and his men will hand over the Kotaran to the proper authorities.”

  Roan nodded, leaning against the balcony railing. So the Nyden had been in contact with the planet. How fitting that Roan was not told of any of this. Kel probably knew all about it, too.

  “Captain Streb was the one that suggested I contact the Prince,” David continued, as if reading Roan’s mind. Roan tensed his body. “And I can assure you it was done over a secure channel, with an encrypted com Captain Streb and I developed. I doubt very much our pursuers picked it up.”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  “You are surprised I knew someone of power on Bauxa. I have made many friends on many planets, Mr. Roan. Not only was it part of my job, but part of the duty of every Nyden. ‘All species are family, every member your kin’—so said the First Monk. Prince Duvurn was more than happy to help out the Colobus and offered us much support. He has a vast fortune, you know, and in this case he is more than obligated to use it to do good.”

  “How gracious of him.” Roan wondered where this Prince got this vast wealth and what he would be asking in return. Before he could voice any of these concerns, crewman Lucas came out onto the balcony and noticed the two observers.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be in the cockpit?” he asked Roan. Jesus, did everyone know where he was assigned?

  “Aren’t you supposed to be in that control room?” Roan countered, smugly.

  “The captain wants to handle this herself, with as few people as possible. She doesn’t want unannounced guests messing anything up.” Lucas gestured with his thumb back through the door. “Shall we?”

  Roan pointed to David. “Can he stay?”

  Lucas smirked. “I don’t care what the pigeon does. If he can talk to the Bauxens, that’s great, he can stay. But you, Roan, get out of the cargo bay.”

  Apparently everyone was aware of the Bauxen deal but Roan. This information shunning had to stop. Roan simply turned away from the control tech and, to a shout of “hey!” walked to a gangplank that led down to the bay floor. Just as he jumped off the last few steps, the ship shook and Roan nearly tumbled on his face. A quick embrace of the railing saved his nose. The lights flickered and then slowly brightened from blue to their normal hue.

  “Looks like we did it,” said one of the crewmen directing the Kotaran-cell lifting. Roan saw that Kel was now staring him down.

  “Why the hell are you here?” she shouted.

  “I thought you might need someone—”

  “Go back to the cockpit!” she shouted. “I can handle things here fine without you.”

  The exterior door clunked and then opened with a pneumatic hiss. A bright, natural light streamed into the cargo bay, saturating it with a twilight glow. The dying sunshine was everyone’s first natural light in weeks. Fighting suddenly seemed trivial compared to the natural world. All present directed their attention to the gaping threshold, where four portly figures now stood silhouetted.

  “Someone tells me you have a Kotaran problem?” said a booming voice, and one of the Bauxens waddled through the cargo threshold, cane in hand, onto the Colobus. Evidently, he was not worried about possible contamination, but Bauxens were never much concerned about such things.

  As the silhouette turned into a fully-developed figure, Roan could better make out his features: a rotund body, green and scaly, with pudgy feet that tapered off into yellow toenails. His fingers were stubby and his arms small, growing out of his shoulderless body like limp pipes. Topping it off was half an oval as a head—no hair on it, just a shiny pool of sweat. The eyes were twin domes on his face, accentuating a miniscule nose and a wide mouth. He wore but one piece of clothing, a red sash decorated with blue dots—evidently, he was some kind of important.

  “Well?” he asked, curling his voluminous lips in a smile. At least, the Bauxen equivalent of a smile. “Am I not welcome here?”

  David had worked his way down to the deck and to Roan’s side without the human knowing.

  “Prince Duvurn Dedro?” David said, in unison with Kel, both apparently having to be sure this Bauxen was, in fact, their planetside benefactor.

  “Yes, but please call me Prince,” Duvurn said, bowing ever-so gracefully, something picked up from years of contact with the Japanese officials who frequently represented Earth to outsiders. What followed was an uproarious throaty laugh, something Duvurn’s toadies quickly mimicked. The Prince’s men seemed to be humoring his grace.

  “Ah yes, Bogoy Del-hevaya Vy Selkek,” Duvurn said to David when the laughter subsided. Or, at least, something equivalent to that collection of syllables. He pointed his cane at David, whose head lit up yellow and who bowed slightly in Duvurn’s direction. “I am gratified you contacted me. Out of all the people you knew on the planet, out of all the billions…you chose me! Thank you!”

  “You are a very kind person,” David said, tipping his head.

  Then Duvurn turned to Kel. “You must be Captain Streb.” Instead of the usual bow, he stuck out a fleshy hand and Kel had to step forward and stoop down to take it. She smiled awkwardly and acknowledged that she was, in fact, Kel Streb. “Let me say that in all my years meeting freighter captains, I have never met a female captain. It is a most enjoyable experience. Tell me how you manage it sometime.”

  “Thanks,” Kel said through gritted teeth. Roan rolled his eyes. Kel motioned to the open door leading to the landing pad, and gestured to the prison cell lifted high in the air. Duvurn, however, was more interested in the curiosity that was Nick Roan.

  “And who is this?” he bellowed, waddling over on his cane to Roan. “He must be the one who discovered the information in question.”

  Kel sputtered and again cringed. She was going to get wrinkles from doing that all the time. Duvurn stood in front of Roan, expecting some kind of remark.

  “Captain Nicholas Roan,” Roan said, and he extended his hand. Duvurn didn’t acknowledge it, but merely bowed. Roan decided to do the same. “Your Excellency, it is an honor to be…feted by this hospitality.”

  “Do not mention it,” Duvurn said, waving away the compliment from the air. “I have actually heard your name before, Nicholas Roan. Is that not the same name as the Earth saint of capitalism? Nicholas, I mean.”

  “Um…close enough.”

  “Close enough!” Duvurn snapped his stubby head back as he laughed. “You are a funny one, Nicholas Roan. You must forgive my lapses in knowledge about your naming customs and such, for I only learned your language from watching all the broadcasts emanating from your world.”

  Roan was going to comment that the Prince’s English was quite good.

  “Now! Captain Streb. Where do you have the prisoner?”

  Kel again pointed above her to the crate suspended by the forklift. Duvurn craned his neck and jolted as if he had a sudden burst of inspiration. “Ah, I see! You have him caged as if he were a wild depson! Ha! Well, we have a container ship in the hangar. Bring him out and we will deal with him there. Come, come.” He motione
d to the door and began walking out of it. Kel gave a thumbs-up to the forklift operator and the vehicle started toward a ramp that had been placed next to the ship.

  “Perhaps this Kotaran can shed some light on this planet of phosphate you have discovered!” Duvurn said, surveying the transport of the crate. Roan was half-listening, but did a double take on this. It sounded as though the good Prince didn’t know their real reason for coming out here. He cast glances at Kel, who was walking out to the hangar, and David, who had sensed his confusion.

  “Mr. Roan,” whispered the Nyden, “This is why you were told not to come down. Prince Duvurn does not know the true nature of my trip.”

  Roan frowned. “David, what the hell is going on here?”

  “Captain Streb and I decided it might be best to only tell the Prince the partial truth—that the Kotarans want what we want on this distant planet—because we don’t know how many leaks there are in his entourage.”

  “Don’t you trust the guy?”

  David’s face contorted every so subtlety. “We have known each other for some time. When I was doing research for Aaron on Bauxa, Prince Duvurn was my patron. He allowed me access to many areas sacred to Bauxa’s religions, as well as documents that no outsider had ever seen. I don’t know how he managed to do this, but I assumed he held a lot of power. Needless to say, he may not surround himself with the most savory of characters.”

  Roan looked among the crowd of Bauxen toadies, some sporting what looked like assault rifles, milling around the hangar pad. It was a motley bunch, and probably not a few of them were on the take of other princes. Roan had no counter to David’s claim, so he just shook his head.

  “This is going to come back to bite us in the ass, David.”

  “I know what that expression means. Maybe you are right.” The two joined the others on the other side of the ramp, the Prince laughing again at some joke that tapped his funny bone.

  Chapter 20

  “It’s the city of dreams,” Duvurn said, gesturing out the window of the private hoverbus. The multilayered sections of the Port of Siy, with its soaring glass towers toward the center, glittered in the twilight. Duvurn was reciting in detail to the Colobus crew the population of the city, and some of its more recent political woes, as if none of these were things they could look up in a datapedia or read in English-translated news accounts.

  “You see, my ancestor Pia Bount was one of the designers of the Port of Siy. Can you believe they seized his fortune when he fell out of political favor? Allegedly, he was screwing one of the mayor’s wives. Ha! She was a slut.” He hobbled on his cane to a window on the opposite side of the bus, gesturing with his stubby fingers to a grimy industrial area that lay on the Port’s outskirts. “Just be glad I don’t have to take you through that section of the city…though if we had the windows open you could smell the refuse piles from here.”

  “Yes, a good thing,” Kel said, barely glancing at the window. She sat across from Roan, who gazed at her with great interest. Kel seemed less interested in Duvurn or Roan and more focused on her crew. The Colobus’ compliment was spread out on the lounge chairs of the stately hoverbus, tagging along for the ride toward the Prince’s palace. A good number had elected to stay with Kel, David, and Roan as they sought to make history: Masao, Jasper, Sundar Kher, and Joseph. Six humans and a Nyden: not a terrible number. The remaining humans wanted no part in the expedition, saying they wanted to return to Earth and the Company as soon as possible. Moira hadn’t decided yet and in any case stayed with the freighter to inventory her medical equipment.

  Meanwhile, the Colobus had been placed in the supposedly-capable hands of the Prince’s private mechanics, who were going to be scrubbing it down and repairing it as best they could. Roan wasn’t sure how much confidence he had in Bauxen mechanics, but if Duvurn was a man of wealth he probably employed the best of the planet. The sooner they got the ship working, the better.

  The Kotaran prisoner was last seen being loaded in his crate on board a Bauxen craft personally chartered by Duvurn. It was assured that he would be transferred to the Bauxen Planetary Police and kept in holding until it was decided what to do with him. Duvurn told the crew he could probably pull some strings and have him tried on Bauxa for “crimes against guests of the planet.” It was fully expected that the Kotaran embassy would issue a stern complaint.

  Roan twiddled his thumbs. He watched Duvurn’s webbed feet as the man paced around the bus, blathering all the time.

  Duvurn made Roan uneasy, as men with lots of wealth often did. Where he came from they did not follow the laws of mere mortals. The man who ran Roan’s Euro refugee camp, for example, saw no problem with doling out beatings to solve simple property disputes. And Roan suspected some Company executives had ordered rivals eliminated. On Bauxa it was much the same way, only the cutthroat culture permeated the entire elite class. The word of a deal was not law. Depending on who was willing to offer the most money, allegiances could change on a whim.

  “Excuse me, Prince Dedro,” said Masao, forgetting all the protocols associated with titles and royalty and such, “Not to be unkind or anything, but Bauxen food doesn’t really agree with me. I mean, I tried those binjishins of yours once, and I became a near-permanent resident of my lavatory. What I guess I’m asking, uh, Mr. Duvurn, is…do you have any Earth food?”

  Once again the Prince laughed. Everything set this guy off.

  “Of course. I’ve been expecting your arrival for a few days, so of course I’ve prepared a, ah, bountiful feast for you, if that’s the right word. Just tell my cooks when we arrive and we’ll work it out.”

  “Thanks.” Masao seemed pleased with himself. Roan looked over at Kel, sitting across from him, and saw that she was now staring at him. That didn’t last long. Duvurn had moved away to the front of the bus and announced his house was approaching, but Roan didn’t listen and instead picked himself up and sat down beside Kel.

  “You didn’t want to tell the good Prince over here about the lost world we’ve found?” Roan asked quietly, knowing that Bauxens couldn’t hear very well but not taking any chances.

  “I didn’t think David needed to tell him,” Kel whispered. “Frankly, I don’t know what this guy’s like. Or who’s on his payroll.”

  “You should’ve told me. No need to be so cloak and dagger. Don’t you think I can keep a secret?”

  “Oh? I expected you to be drunk half the goddamn time.”

  “Why worry? You locked up the liquor.”

  She stared Roan straight in the eyes. “I locked that up from you because I didn’t know if your mind had been sucked down a black hole or not.”

  “And here we are!” Duvurn shouted, smiling and opening his froggy arms in a celebratory gesture. Out the window, the cityscape was replaced by columns of trees, trees as wide as the Redwoods of the Old World. These trees lined the road that led into the mouth of a hangar, where the hoverbus came to a complete stop. Duvurn’s men quickly stood at attention, slinging their rifles over their shoulders. One turned a latch and the doors opened with a hiss. As he piled out along with the rest of the crew, Roan thought there was something unsettling about all of the guns and security. They signified several possibilities: Duvurn had power over a local militia, Duvurn was a marked man, or Duvurn was a criminal. Likely all three.

  “And this is just the hangar!” Duvurn said. The Prince and his entourage headed toward a door at the other end of the hangar and the humans clumped like tourists behind them. They marveled at the craft on display, primed and ready to fly: sports shuttles from Earth, each with a gleaming new paint job; Bauxen hovercraft for both land and sea; a few wheeled vehicles; and finally, a luxury space yacht, sleek and angular in spotless chrome. A few of the crew craned their necks to look at replicas of birds hanging from the ceiling. Their wingspans were enough to envelop the hoverbus.

  “Look, David,” Roan said, pointing to the avians on display. “Prince Duvurn has models of your ancestors.”

  Da
vid didn’t even glance up. “Those aren’t models. They’re bird carcasses.” David continued walking, and Roan tried to get another look at the birds but was ushered along by the crowd behind him.

  Through the oval doors, the Colobus crew gained entrance to the grand chamber of Duvurn’s palace. There were gasps all around. An instrumental march played to provide a soundtrack to the whole scene, coming from hidden recording devices and no doubt timed by Duvurn to impress his guests as soon as they entered. In the middle of the rotunda were four support columns, one of which appeared to be marble and the others of different shapes and colors. Sea creatures, definitely Bauxen by their hammerhead shape, swam in two of the pillars, mixed with algae and other bits of debris. Roan had seen an aquarium once, but this put that sorry collection of fish to shame.

  A staircase wound its way up the rotunda and spiraled to the very the top of the palace. It glittered from what looked to be solid platinum. About a hundred meters up was a circular window built into the high ceiling, the golden glow of twilight streaming through it. The light danced through the water of the aquatic pillars, and cast wild shadows from the plants lining the staircase balconies.

  “Now that you have seen the city,” Duvurn said, “See my home! You will all be guests here, at least for the night. Enjoy the amenities and go where you like, but be sure to tell one of my men where you are headed first. You might get lost! I’m sure you’ve been aware of my bodyguards’ presence, but don’t let their guns scare you. They are there for your protection as well as my own. I am royalty, you know. That kind of status does not make your life easy, let me tell you!” Roan expected a laugh, but Duvurn’s eyes narrowed. He looked almost stern.

  He pointed to two crimson doors with a woodcut of a landscape on them, standing opposite the crowd at the other end of the rotunda. “There will be food beyond those doors in an hour…that is, sixty of your minutes. Come find this cook here and tell him what you’d like. He speaks English!” He pointed to a Bauxen wearing pink. “In the meanwhile, feel free to explore or rest. I know you’ve been in space for a month and need to get used to solid ground. Just remember not to climb the stairs if your legs haven’t healed!”

 

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