“They won’t find any from us. This isn’t about diplomacy, and you know it.”
Naero tried to rise. Aunt Sleak rammed her back onto the mat with a heavy foot.
“You want to learn about sex, spacechild? Well that’s just great. Pick one of the crew. Take that lander boy for a spin. Go hire someone at one of our stops to throck your world. Knock yourself out. But stay away from that Matayan bastard. Before you screw the sons of your family’s slayers...I’ll kill you myself. You got that?”
Naero glared back. “Got it.”
“Good.”
A big, athletic Intel self-defense instructor stepped in, ready to spar.
Aunt Sleak let Naero up and motioned to the Intel instructor. “Continue this session. Push her hard.”
She didn’t even look back, adding, “You’ve really disappointed me, Naero. I thought you were smarter than this.”
Naero took her stance, her bleeding lips tight.
As far as she was concerned, that instructor was in serious trouble.
34
“Take your stations, then.” Aunt Sleak turned and met Naero’s eye the next morning as their Intel training continued
Naero smiled back.
After laying low to drive Triax insane, very soon they would make good their escape from Corps Space under the cover of their new merchant freighter.
For intents and purposes, The Rio Lobo was just a standard, 400 ton freighter out of Arnett Corps Space. The escape team transferred all of their basic gear to their new quarters, and continued to work and train on their new home, hidden in one of The Alamo’s huge cargo bays.
They left behind anything that might give them away.
Each member of the escape crew also swallowed a temporary Intel programmable implant that remained inside them, identifying them as genetically standard humans to all Corps scans and sensor checks, even at the genetic level.
No one would be able to tell they were Spacers; their covers, solid. And the IDs could still be changed if needed.
Their itinerary would take them several days to eventually reach Hadar-1, close to a far corner of Triaxian and Joshua Tech Space. Close to, but not yet within, the worlds of the mining revolts.
The only restrictions Intel placed on them insisted that Tarim and Ellis could not leave the ship at any destination unless accompanied by an Intel handler.
Naero and Jan also had to remain under heavy guard at all times, but everyone would more or less do their jobs and function as normal crew to avoid suspicion. The Intel agent who helped train them, Irith, was assigned to them both as a body guard.
Naero liked Irith, even though the quiet agent was almost thirty, and very tall. But she had black hair and violet eyes like Naero, and they pretended to be sisters as part of their cover.
She never had a real sister before.
Today, Irith and Aunt Sleak ran the backup checks on their jump drive.
Naero finally got relieved from her post at the navigation console and slipped away.
The Intel Chief Klyne gave them their final instructions.
“The escape plan is simple and straightforward. Play your roles. Remember your parts. Stick to the plan. We’ve been running this ship for three years now along the same route. Its various trade stops are firmly established with the authorities and accepted as routine. There’s some room for deviation, but not much.
“We do this right, and we make it safely into Joshua Tech Space easy. That’s the plan. Any last-minute questions?”
Naero tried not to nod off. Intel was nothing if not thorough in their rigorous training. On top of her aunt’s tender love.
After running through the plan multiple times from almost every angle for days on end, Naero had few questions.
They launched that evening.
By all reports on INS, Triax and the other nearby Corps had gone berserk looking for terrorists, rebels, anarchists, alien infiltrators, renegade psyons–anything to justify the additional strong-arm police-state tactics they unleashed on their systems.
The fact that Naero and Jan vanished off everybody’s scans by hiding out in The Alamo had many convinced that they had already made good their escape, with the help of The Shadow Fleets.
A equally dumpy, old Triaxian cruiser boarded The Rio Lobo upon their scheduled approach to Hadar-1.
The first test of their new cover.
The Corps Marines knew Klyne under another alias, but checked and scanned everything and everyone according to SOP.
Luckily, the Intel people did their homework well. Their cover held up airtight.
“You’re clear, Dutch,” the Triaxian Marine lieutenant told Klyne. “Everything checks out, just like your manifest says. You got those creds you owe me on the fights?”
“Next time,” Klyne said with an easy laugh. “I’m a little short now, but you know I’m good for it. We can go about our business?”
“Yeah, stick to your route. Watch out for mining ships, though. Don’t trade with them, don’t dock with them. Even if they’re in distress. Triax gives you permission to let them cook off if you have to.”
“What’s going on?” Klyne asked.
“Check the local system news monitors. Miner revolts are spreading across several systems in this direction. Nothing we can’t handle, though. They’ve got a powerful psyon helping them, but we’ll either blast or starve them all out in the end. That’s how we usually get it done.”
“I see,” Klyne said. “How dreadful.”
Naero resisted the urge to glance at Jan, expecting to find him drooling over potential high-risk profits.
Naero looked for Tarim, overwhelming compassion for the miners and their families washing over her. She couldn’t spot him.
The Triaxian duty officer rambled on. “To be safe at the starports, stay out of the local areas and any place frequented by miners. They’re desperate for weapons and ships. No one’s safe. Wear psycaps if you have them or can buy them. If you see anything suspicious, anyone tries to mind control you, contact the authorities and let us check it out. We have psy-detection units and routine patrols throughout this entire region.”
“Will do.”
Luckily, all of their weapons and other nefarious gear were temporally displaced so as not to show up under any normal scans. The temporal pockets were just one of a number of high-tek advantages that Spacer Intel had over the Corps. The only problem with the pockets was that you could not hide anything alive in them. It even killed plants and single-celled organisms.
Tests had been made, unsuccessfully, with live animals. The data collectors on the test subjects survived, recording an excruciating death as the space-time dimensional anomaly broke them down and tore them apart.
Maintaining a technological edge over the Corps would continue to spell the difference between life and death for her people.
The Kexxian Data Matrix could not be allowed to fall into the hands of their enemies.
Naero glanced at the deathband on her wrist.
Could she really use it to blow herself up if need be?
Haisha.
She shuddered, sensing a flurry of muted objections from Om. She’d told him to remain silent during the boarding. Just in case.
The Corps boarding party returned to their warship.
The Rio Lobo continued on its way.
“Get it in gear; to your stations,” Klyne called out. “Proceed to Hadar-1. Request landing instructions.”
Naero scanned Hadar-1. Fifty-percent land mass. A white, red, green, and blue world, mineral rich. A slight cloud cover obscured the south pole due to vulcanism.
Lots of mining interests. No signs that the revolts had openly exploded there yet.
Klyne piloted. Aunt Sleak co-piloted. They took the ship in.
Naero manned her sensor array station. Nothing but the naval patrol ship receding, a few traders around the planet, and a couple of old satellite networks.
“We have some limited contacts with the rebel miners,
” Klyne told Aunt Sleak. “If things go badly, they might be able to help us in a pinch. Yet their backs are against the wall. They’re very wary, but desperate for allies.”
Aunt Sleak nodded. “Let’s follow up on that quietly if we can. We need all the intel we can get.”
The Rio Lobo settled down into the starport docking bay.
What a clunker. Sturdy. Reliable. But still a clunker by any stretch of the imagination.
And Naero couldn’t ever afford a clunker like it.
The auto-landing sequence brought all drives to a full stop.
Naero sprang out of her gelchair before anyone else.
Back in her cramped quarters, she reviewed a holo of the planet in her room for any curious details. Hadar-1. A near-earthlike, terraformed to be somewhat more pleasant–if that was even the correct term. Even with huge continents and barely fifty-percent oceans, most of the northern and southern hemispheres lay locked in the grip of ice age glaciers.
In the habitable zone around the equator, it got up to only fifteen degrees Celsius in the summer. Twenty or more might be considered hot. Normally five or ten degrees in the morning or at night.
Fun.
The Hadar system did possess a wide variety of rich mineral deposits, hence Triax’s primary interest.
It remained a relatively young system, and together with its equally rich asteroid belts, it had yet to be strip-mined out. Even with modern equipment, Corps miners went there by the multitudes on freeze ships to slave for Triax and scratch out a meager existence for themselves and their families.
They had little choice in the matter.
Production demands, profit-sharing restrictions, and safety code violations eventually led to a grinding process of misery and death.
Surprise.
As long as the Corps overclass thrived, their military remained dominant, and the struggling middle class were kept more or less happy and distracted, the other sixty percent of Corp society could simply go straight to hell and wallow there in abject misery.
Triax. The worst and the oldest of the Corps, had no reason to improve things. Their systems produced an abundant supply of desperate, expendable workers.
To Naero, the miners looked royally sodomized.
By local time it reached morning where they were headed, the sky still dark.
35
Naero went to the loading docks to help ship out their cargo.
Put everything else in the back of her mind. Focus on the mission.
In and out and move on.
She, Gallan, Tarim, Ellis, and an Irith took a large order of sensor gear, heavy machine parts, and medical supplies to a high-level Triaxian mining manager. She didn’t look forward to that, but at least it would get them out of the ship for a while.
Where were the rest of her Clan, her fleet, her friends? She tried to stay focused and not fret, but Spacers and Triax teetered on the brink of open war.
Triax could still blast Fleet Maeris out of existence for no reason. They might do so out of spite.
In their space, they made the rules and broke them when they felt like it.
Naero popped their bright orange, obsolete gravhauler up out of the docks and vectored an approach to their destination: what looked to be a massive mining fortress nestled within a vast, shattered mountain range at the outskirts of the starport.
She scanned other transports and a few local patrol craft flitting around, but the sky remained relatively clear.
A big blue Cumi space barge lurched skyward from the mining station. It lumbered up out of the atmosphere–probably loaded with ore and precious raw materials. Their bulbous bulk vessels always looked clownish and comical to her, but she had long since learned that the ancient Cumi were aggressive explorers, opportunistic traders, and profiteers in their own right.
The mining station functioned much like a secondary starport on its own–actually larger than many regular merchanting starports, due to the huge orelifters that came and went on a regular basis. Mining survey and collection teams returned and set out on their own regular schedules, both onworld and off.
“Freight-hauler Lobo-3F, you are clear on approach,” Station Control cut in. “Defensive shield window opening per these coordinates.”
Gallan uploaded them.
They adjusted their approach, the shield window opening highlighted on Naero’s piloting display in violet. “Thank you, Station Control,” she said. “We’re coming in on approach.”
“Use loading bay 8-7-8-Gamma, Lobo. You’re in the pipe.”
They came in low over a wide swath of squatter towns that miners and their families had erected out of Triax’s trash. Even while focused on piloting, Naero easily spotted the signs of past transport crashes, gouged right through the kilometers of settlement huts, tents, and lean-to’s.
A huge, yawning waste pit lay just beyond the camps, sprinkled with dead bodies tossed in around the rim–hundreds of corpses. Burn teams busy at one section, using plasma cutters to incinerate some of the carcasses right along with the refuse.
To Triax, people were just garbage. She could only imagine the stench down at ground level.
They flew through the thick gray and black belching smoke, as if descending right down into one of the Nine Hells.
At the energized gates of the facility itself, waves of people threw themselves against the stunfields only to collapse and be dragged off or trampled by those behind them.
Naero checked her spotting cameras, revealing a rippling sea of human, near-human, and alien slaves: Besh, Ramor, Silesians, Zotchans, dwarflike Piettos, avian Quess and Moh-Karran, catlike Mndar, leopard-spotted Mahri, even a few Naivatch, wrapped only in rags against the frigid winds.
The protestors threw rocks. They chanted. They rushed the gates. They carried banners painted on planks, on blankets, on strips of cloth. Naero looked at their sea of angry, crazed, and desperate faces.
She struggled not to weep with rage.
She couldn’t look back, but she heard Tarim sigh and clear his throat several times.
Landing sirens went off. Lobo-3F approached. Most of the miners drew back. Those that didn’t or couldn’t were staggered, driven off, or sluiced away to drown in the rushing spew from high-pressure mining water cannons and the flash floods they produced.
Naero shut the cameras off.
She couldn’t watch the sea of human misery anymore.
They docked in the assigned cargo bay. Irith remained at the controls while Naero, Tarim, Ellis, and Gallan unloaded their shipment with the old-fashioned lifters.
Naero noticed Ejjai guards, close-up–brutal hyena-like humanoids.
She’d studied their vicious society and behavior a bit more after seeing the one on Drianne’s yacht.
Reports claimed them to be one of the most avaricious and opportunistic species in the known universe.
Right. Next to humans.
Only the low numbers of Ejjai and their lack of tek kept them from becoming a threat to the other races.
That might change one day, if enough of them got off somewhere on their own, or they obtained enough ships and teks.
Until then, the Corps found Ejjai useful in a variety of nasty roles: bodyguards, mercenaries, assassins, bounty-hunters, torturers. And, of course, guards at prisons, mines, and other facilities.
They worked for carrion. Anything that was meat, fresh or rancid. But they especially prized devouring the young of any species, even their own. Alive if possible.
About four dozen Ejjai guards drove and directed hundreds of slaves before them throughout the dock area with shock batons. That docking bay just one of many throughout the complex.
Battered slaves, ragged people in torn miner coveralls with control collars, gritted their teeth and silently performed various tasks. If they remained idle too long or tried to say anything, the collars glowed and sent them writhing on the ground in pain.
Naero looked on as one of the Ejjai walked over to a convulsing woman. Sudd
enly the collar stopped glowing and the woman went still, denoting either coma or death.
The Ejjai guard beat and kicked her until the woman awoke and struggled weakly, trying to rise.
When she couldn’t, the guard split her head wide open.
Naero noticed Tarim’s hand go to his holstered side arm. The look on his face. Furious.
Naero pulled his hand away and held it, cautioning him with her eyes. They couldn’t do anything. Especially not in their situation.
As if that weren’t bad enough, three Ejjai, cannibals even among their own kind, got down on all fours and began to devour the woman’s corpse.
First they scooped up steaming brains in the cold air with both clawed hands, crunching through the shards of skull with their powerful teeth.
Then they snapped and ripped open the torso to get at the hot entrails. Fighting and working gobbling jaws, nuzzling deep into the warm gore that smoked with tendrils of heat vapor up into the cold air.
One stopped and snarled up at Naero and her friends.
“You got a problem, skinners? You like to watch? Maybe you want some, heh?”
Then the Ejjai laughed, a horrid odd wheezing, giggling sound.
Naero remained expressionless. She glanced up at Gallan and the others. Gallan looked back.
Now it was her hand that strayed absently to her own hidden blaster.
Gallan, Ellis, and Tarim blocked them further from anyone’s sight.
“Let it go this time,” Tarim said. “You were right to stop me. Now I’m stopping you.”
“Tarim’s right,” Gallan said. “We can’t get involved.”
“Naero,” Ellis whispered, “don’t do or say anything. You know we can’t afford any trouble.”
Naero let out a deep breath of her own, and nodded.
They kept walking.
More Ejjai snarled and snapped at them as they walked over to the supervisor’s station with their manifest chip.
Close-up, most Ejjai stood short–most of them stocky, muscular females, of course. A few smaller males, but in subordinate roles–of course. Ejjai remained militantly matriarchal. Only dominant females and their favorites could breed. Not many males needed for that. Most male Ejjai got devoured at birth.
Spacer Clans Adventure 1: Naero's Run Page 26
