Dark Planet

by Charles W. Sasser

  It was said that in first encounters between Humans and Zentadon, some of the Humans slew Zentadon for our fine and woven hair because they thought it really was gold.

  “I see,” Commander Mott resumed, then finished his previous thought. “Being half-Human, you are anticipated to have a better genetic understanding of them. It is to our mutual benefit that we cooperate against the Tslek. For, if the Tslek prevail, they will ultimately destroy all within the galaxy.”

  “I am being sent out to save the galaxy!”

  “No, Kadar San. You are being dispatched to do your job as a Zentadon Sen.”

  C·H·A·P·T·E·R

  THREE

  In DRT-213’s team room, music throbbed contrapuntal and over scored, synthesized, jagged, and loud the way it was in the VR clubs off-post. Life-sized holographic cartoons populated the room like squads of ghosts, producing a dark military humor involving smashed hovercraft, bent rocket howitzers, crushed bots with mechanical, near-life-like heads, and other battle-damaged robots that resembled rusted hydrogen cans still used in the smoky high-rise prolie tenements occupied by the lower levels of human and Zentadon society. One of two Human holos in a VR bar filled with every form of fantastic life to occupy the edges of the Posleen Blight was saying to another, “Have you ever seen so many foreigners in your life?”

  Captain Shinkichi Amalfi, team commander, entered the room with me close on his heels like a loyal pet grafette and clapped away the music and holograms, leaving only a translucent gray light emanating in soothing tones from sources in walls, floor, and ceiling. The mission warning order had already been issued, accounting for the tension I felt among the assembled team members, but the hostility and resentment could only derive from my addition to the operation.

  “They issuing elves now, sir?” growled a stocky man whose eyes in his fair skin were black like twin holes in space.

  We Zentadon, especially one half-Human like myself, did in fact bear resemblance to the mythical fairies and elves of Earth lore. It amused me sometimes to think that Zentadon visiting Earth may even have been the source of that Human whimsy.

  There was some muffled laughter, which seemed to please the stocky man. The team had apparently spent much of the day at the rifle range, firing Gravs. The M-91 Grav, the Galaxia Republic’s main battle rifle, was a real bitch to clean. Due to its incredible muzzle velocity, 30,000 kilometers per second, carbon and uranium sublimed and coated the breach and bore with a substance so hard to remove that it was like chipping off glazed nickel. While the Humans had stolen enough Indowy technology to construct certain weapons systems such as chameleon-camouflage combat uniforms, protection force fields, ordnance, and energy transference, they lacked facilities and know-how to perfect them. As a result, munitions and other sophisticated items gummed up barrels, overrode each other, or failed at inopportune moments. The present Indowy were no help in correcting problems, as they no longer practiced war and depended upon their former serfs, both Human and Zentadon, to protect their limited sovereignty in the Tau Ceti Cluster.

  The stocky man must be the team’s sniper; he cleaned an M-235 Gauss while the others worked with Gravs. He had the eyes of a sniper and handled his weapon in a sensuous way that suggested sufficient arousement to breed with it at any time. He was not a tall man compared to the others, but he was solid and muscular from body enhancements. He stared in an unblinking, indecipherable way that was like the stab of a dagger’s blade, which, I assumed, accounted for why he was called “Blade.” Sergeant Darman Kilmer was undoubtedly a dangerous Human to have as an enemy, and perhaps even as a friend.

  “Sir,” he sneered, “couldn’t you have at least got an elf with a tail?”

  “At ease, DRT-bags.”

  Captain Amalfi was tall, but then all Humans, or at least most of them, were tall compared to Zentadon. He was gaunt, a Nordic greyhound that appeared built for speed and stamina. A victim of that easy familiarity among Humans that bred nicknames and malapropisms, he was known as “Captain Bell Toll.” As from the Human literary phrase, “Never ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” “It tolls for thee,” he would say whenever he had to pick one of his soldiers for a particularly unpleasant detail. Unlike the others, however, all of whom had nicknames, never was he referred to as “Bell Toll” to his face.

  “This man …” Captain Amalfi began.

  “Man?”

  Blade the sniper made it difficult to ignore him. If I were Human, if I were more Human, my pointed ears would not twitch and give me away as they did whenever I was nervous or excited, uncertain or uncomfortable, or even sexually whetted during the annual Zentadon breeding season. The Captain fixed Blade with a level gaze. Blade shrugged, opened the breech of his Gauss and sneered into the bore.

  “This man is Sergeant Kadar San,” Captain Amalfi continued. “He has been assigned as Sen to DRT-213 for the duration of the Mission. As a member of the team, he will be treated as such.”

  I wore the Sen badge on the chest of my new Republic khakis. Our Zentadon’s cat’s eyes made Humans anxious, especially if we were Sens and they thought we were reading their minds. It was to my advantage to let them think I could do exactly that.

  Tentatively, I mind-tested the mood in the room, reaching out for a collective sampling first and then testing individuals one at a time. Reaction to my presence ranged from mild suspicion on the part of the female to almost a blow in the face from the hulking sniper.

  “Clear, DRT-bags?” Captain Amalfi barked.

  “Do you trust him?” asked a wiry soldier with short-cropped black hair, a dark olive complexion, and a face like the rusted edge of a hatchet.

  “He’s a Sen, Ferret.”

  “That’s not what I asked, sir,” Ferret said. “I was thinking about the Homelanders.”

  Sergeant Taraneh Ferreira, called Ferret, the team’s scout and point man, seemed as small and quick and inquisitive as the Earth creature from which he acquired his name. I was to learn that implanted battlefield sensors made him supersensitive. He could smell game from a hundred meters away and feel with the soles of his bare feet the heat from the tracks of whatever entity passed ahead of him.

  “The only DRT to make it back from any Blob recon mission had a Sen along,” Captain Amalfi pointed out.

  Humans were a superstitious lot.

  “What about this … this drug?” asked a fit-looking Viking-type with cropped yellow hair. Staff Sergeant Florian Ronnland, “Atlas,” a designated hitter, a grunt in the crude military parlance of the Humans, glanced at me, then glanced away. He sat so near the female that I assumed they must be a breeding pair.

  Captain Amalfi looked to me to answer the question. Humans who had had little association with Zentadon always asked about taa. Zentadon with the same ignorance of Humans inquired about how it was that Humans could have sex all the time.

  “The drug, as you refer to it,” I replied, my left ear twitching, “is called taa. Strictly speaking, it is not a drug at all. It is a hormone manufactured involuntarily, or voluntarily within our bodies during stress.”

  “You aren’t stressed out now, are you?” Atlas asked, and they all laughed again.

  “The Zentadon are dangerous when you do this … this taa thing, aren’t you?” Ferret accused. “Two Zentadon Homelanders on drugs blew up themselves and a munitions plant two weeks ago.”

  The Captain had obviously considered the same question. I felt his misgivings.

  “Taa is similar to adrenalin manufactured by your own endocrine system,” I explained. “Adrenalin is your Human reaction to stress.”

  “Yes,” Ferret admitted, “but when I have an adrenalin attack, I can’t leap over tall buildings, run faster than a speeding bullet, and get stronger than a Battlestar. And I don’t eat raw flesh.”

  My ears twitched harder.

  “Such stories come from centuries ago when the Indowy developed a technology to turn taa in our bodies on and off against our will,” I said, “and to indu
ce us to use it for their will.”

  “Against us,” put in a giant fully six-eight in stature and so black his skin shone over huge muscular implants in his bare arms. Staff Sergeant Grgur Parkpoon, “Gorilla,” was the team’s technical support and Intel specialist. Beneath that shaved bowling-ball head and mass of muscle, I sensed a being normally quiet and introspective with a keen intelligence.

  “What’s to prevent it happening again — You Zentadon coming under someone else’s control?” Gorilla asked. “Such as, for example, the Homelanders?”

  “Nothing more than what prevents you Humans from coming under another’s control,” I said, attempting to project patience. “The Indowy technology that used taa against us was just as capable of using your adrenalin to control you — on a much less destructive scale, of course. We shall never permit that kind of domination over us again.”

  The sniper snorted contemptuously. “Fu-uck.”

  The vulgarity, the way he used it in two syllables, made it sound twice as obscene.

  “That’s all in the past,” Captain Amalfi interrupted, to my gratitude. “The Indowy are today the most peaceful species in the Tau Ceti Galaxy …”

  “Pusses,” Blade muttered.

  “And the Zentadon are our … allies.”

  I knew from the hesitation and the uncertainty of his emotional pattern that he started to say “trusted allies,” but couldn’t quite bring it off.

  “They’re incorporated into the Federation Army of The Republic of Galaxia,” he concluded. “We need their skills against the Blobs.”

  “So, this elf is our token,” quipped the Viking with a grin that blunted the sharpness of his observation.

  “I am your token,” I admitted.

  The female sitting on the couch next to Atlas, the pieces of a dismantled Grav across her lap, studied me out of large blue eyes in a pleasant brown face. Her thick mop of thatched black hair rippled and sprang back into place whenever she passed her hand through it. Sergeant Pia Gunduli, “Gun Maid,” was DRT-213’s communications specialist. I marveled that Humans sent their females into combat. Good breeders must be protected and maintained. Commander Mott said any civilization that used its females in such a manner was not worth defending.

  “You speak excellent English, Kadar San,” Gun Maid observed, sounding my name in a way I liked.

  “The Human tongue you call English is currently the diplomatic and commercial language in this galaxy and Earth’s,” I said lamely. I did, in fact, speak it well, with only a little clip at the beginning of some words and an occasional hanging diphthong because of my sharper Zentadon teeth.

  “And he’s such a cute elf.” She laughed, and that made the others laugh with her.

  All except the sniper.

  “Good,” Captain Amalfi said. “We receive the Ops Order at 0900 tomorrow. We could be gone up to six months this time.”

  “Or longer,” Gorilla added darkly.

  “By the time we get back, Ferret,” Atlas gibed, “that little prolie slut of yours will be bedding down with the home guard.”’

  “She already is,” Gorilla said.

  Sometimes I envied the Humans their easy bantering.

  “Sergeant Shiva,” Captain Amalfi said, “make sure our Sen is issued his team gear.” He turned to the others. “Whatever personal affairs you have, take care of them today and tonight. Isolation lockdown begins at 0500. OPSEC, operational security, is in effect. The bell tolls for thee.”

  Master Sergeant Chital “Shiva” Huang was the final member of the team and its NCOIC, second in command to Captain Bell Toll. Next to Gorilla, he was the biggest and meanest-looking human being I had ever encountered. He was easily six-and-a-half feet tall, a grizzled old bird of the Human Polynesian wrestler race, with a long jagged scar torn down the right side of his face, and nails rather than whiskers growing out of his cheeks. He didn’t shave his whiskers; he chiseled them. There was no exaggeration in the phrase “one tough hard-core old sonofabitch” when it was applied to him.

  “Come with me, fresh meat,” Sergeant Shiva rumbled.

  Blade’s cycling the bolt of his Gauss stopped us. I felt the sniper hard and cold inside my head. I turned to find him aiming his rifle directly at me.

  “There’s no problem while we’re out there as long as the tailless elf does his job,” he said. “But if he fucks up, he becomes my problem.”

  C·H·A·P·T·E·R

  FOUR

  Officers and senior NCOs of the Federation Army of The Republic were allowed to live off-post if they desired. Zentadon were excluded from the ranks of commissioned officers, but I was a senior NCO and I desired a cubicle of my own in the city rather than the regimented and sterile environment of living in barracks. After my unsettling introduction to the DRT-bags, appropriately so-called, I thought, I needed a drink before I went home to get my affairs in order prior to the beginning of isolation. Cocktails were something Human to which I had become accustomed. They were delicious and cold, mildly intoxicating and wonderful.

  I caught a hovercraft outside the post gates and had the bot controller drop me off at the Starside, a watering hole for upwardly-mobile young professional non-Humans like myself who had acquired certain Human tastes. I took a false tail of golden hair out of my briefcase and attached it to my uniform trousers so that it looked like I possessed the Zentadon’s total number of appendages. Never mind that it lacked prehensile abilities and I couldn’t use it to cop a feel up a female’s kilt if the breeding season suddenly began. Like Commander Mott, I claimed it had been crushed — an old war wound — and therefore dragged out my tracks when I walked. There were some places you didn’t go if you were Human, half-Human, or overly associated with Humans.

  A warty Kutaran breeding pair of indistinguishable sexual characteristics occupied a dark booth at this early hour and a convention of four-armed Zutu merchants in on a flight from the planet Nesshoue were whooping it up with squeals and shrieks under the colored lights. It was cool and relatively clean inside the lounge, especially when compared to the hot dry winds that blew down the streets of the Capital, rattling discarded food containers and whipping other trash about like missiles. My eyes still burned from the smog. The barkeep, a Zentadon, stirred up a potato gin cocktail and, after a contemptuous glance at my wilted member hanging off the back of the stool, delivered the drink with his own adroit appurtenance. He grinned his full-blood Zentadon sharp-toothed grin.

  Show off.

  I was half through the cocktail and already feeling somewhat assuaged toward my unasked-for and unwanted assignment with the Humans of DRT-213 when Mina Li popped through the door. She gave my fake tail a look but kept any untoward comments to herself. Like me, she was golden-haired. Her hair was finely-woven and hung in a snatch down her back. Females had much less hair on their bodies than males. Her face was full with full lips and full green eyes. The end of her tail darted suggestively to her left shoulder and reached out to caress my cheek as she occupied the stool next to me. She assumed I would be available to her when breeding season arrived and urges started roaring.

  I assumed nothing.

  “I buzzed your locater,” she chirped brightly. “It told me you were here.”

  “Lucky me,” I grumped.

  “Are you not happy to see me, Kadar? The time is almost near.”

  “Time?”

  She batted her long lashes and gave me a coy smile.

  “Oh.” I snapped my fingers. “That time.”

  “I have our conjoining bed already prepared. There is a lock on the door that will not open again for nine days once we are inside. The pantry is stocked. I have your cocktail materials ready. Are you ready, Kadar?”

  “That is me — Ready Freddy.”

  “Ready Freddy? Is that a term you borrow from the Humans with whom you associate?”

  “I do not associate with Humans.”

  “You are in their military.”

  “It is our military as well as theirs.” />
  “Then why are you not an officer? Answer me that.”

  “I do not want to quarrel with you, Mina Li.”

  “Yes. Politics is not for lovers. Politics will work themselves out.”

  She ordered a Coca Cola from the barkeep. “Coke says it best,” she said.

  Humans didn’t need weapons to conquer the universe. Not when they had Coca Cola, Wrangler jeans, Chevrolet hovercraft and Ford Fanger Sky Rovers. Coke Says It Best. The slogan was emblazoned on the cloud cover so that when the smog cleared out and you looked up, that was what you saw. Coke Says It Best.

  What did it say best?

  “You are ear-flicking,” Mina Li noticed. “You are excited about our conjoining?”

  “Excited.”

  She looked disappointed, sipping on her Coke. Her tail waved above her head, then caressed the back of my neck in a sensuous manner.

  “I have an appointment next week to remove my tail,” she blurted out.

  “Why would you do that?”

  “So you will not be ashamed of me. I will look very good in tight jeans.”

  “Mina Li, I am not ashamed of you. It is just that …”

  “Just what?”

  I didn’t understand what it was just.

  “Just that you are more Human than Zentadon,” she accused. “I have seen you look at the Human females with their tight little no-tail asses and their round no-ears that they have to move with their fingers.”

  Here we went again. I tuned her out. All I wanted was a bracing cocktail and a good mope before I had to prepare for the mission.

  “I will conjoin with Mishal,” she threatened finally. “Would you like that?”

  “That would be fine.”

  “You would let me?”

  “How could I stop you if that is what you want?”

  “Mishal has a tail and he is proud of it,” she scolded. “He is very brave.”

  “He is a terrorist and will likely die before breeding season.”