Starbase Human

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

He knew better—there was a long history in this sector. It just wasn’t an Alliance history. Humans who had come this far out were running from the Alliance. They didn’t want to be part of it.

  That was the other side of work on the Frontier. The humans who were out here were mostly anti-Alliance and anti-Earth. They didn’t like humans in uniform showing up and telling them what to do. They really didn’t like it when the Frontier Security Service started asking various cultures if they were interested in joining the Alliance.

  Footsteps resounded behind him, clip-clopping their way toward him. He didn’t turn around, but he watched the reflections in the windows. He saw the form first, and realized that Chepi Verstraete was joining him.

  She wasn’t wearing her uniform. Instead, she was wearing her day-off clothing—a white, gauzy, flowing pants-and-shirt thing that always made him think she could fly away. She was tiny to begin with, and the clothing seemed to give her wings.

  The white did set off her ebony skin and made it seem even darker. It added a depth to her dark eyes, as well. She had gathered her black hair in the back, but left it down. It flowed to her waist.

  Verstraete was the only other person on the Stanley who knew why they were out here. She also knew about the clones, and wanted to investigate. Gomez hadn’t given her the same speech, but a similar one—Gomez hadn’t wanted Verstraete to ruin her career, either, by going on “this crazy mission.”

  So Verstraete remained on the Stanley, and Nuuyoma had promoted her to his number one deputy. He had done so because she was good, but he had also done so because they shared a secret.

  “I kinda thought maybe there’d be something here,” she said by way of greeting.

  He nodded. “Me, too.”

  She stopped beside him. The scents of teak and green bamboo teased his nose. Verstraete designed perfumes in her free time, usually using materials she found on their journeys. But for herself, she always wore a scent her grandmother had designed. Verstraete had had to tell him what the scents were, and now he would always associate them with her.

  “That report threw me off,” she said.

  Report was the wrong word, but he knew what she meant. Someone had actually written about the starbase just a few years ago, as if that person had stayed at the base recently.

  His entire team had tried to trace the author. Apaza was also working on it, or he had been when Nuuyoma last saw him. They all had found nothing. It was a deliberate misdirection, one Nuuyoma still didn’t entirely understand.

  Just like he didn’t understand who had made the Alliance maps of this sector, and why those maps still included the starbase—and had included the starbase for the past 35 years.

  He had done a cursory investigation of that in his spare time, but he wasn’t as good at ferreting out information as Apaza was. And Nuuyoma had to be careful, too; he didn’t want to tip off whoever was in the Alliance, trying to keep the base’s destruction a secret.

  That was the one thing that had worried Gomez about their trip here. She knew—they all knew—that their presence would show someone in the Alliance that the maps were wrong.

  Nuuyoma figured he’d deal with that by not reporting that they had ever come to these coordinates. One nice thing about being the head of this ship was that he could control what information he sent to FSS headquarters.

  He wouldn’t send their exact route to headquarters. And he certainly wouldn’t do so before he sent information he gathered—if it was valuable—to Gomez herself.

  She needed time to finish her work, and he was determined to give that to her.

  “The maps threw me off more,” he said.

  Verstraete stood beside him, mimicking his posture, hands clasped behind her back, chin out, staring at the field of stars before them. She looked younger when she wasn’t in uniform.

  “Hmm,” she said. “The maps didn’t bother me much. I’ve always figured that Alliance maps of the Frontier had mistakes in them.”

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about it.” More than he wanted to admit, actually, although it felt good to talk to her. “And I’m still confused by it all. I mean, if no Alliance ships have been out this far, how did we get the maps in the first place?”

  “No official Alliance vessels,” she said. “I’m sure that members of the Alliance have come out here.”

  “And sent maps back?” He looked at her. She had to raise her head to meet his gaze.

  She shrugged. “Why would that be unusual?”

  “Most humans who come out here don’t want anything to do with the Alliance,” he said.

  “Maybe the maps came from one of the non-human Alliance members,” she said.

  “Maybe.” He still didn’t like it. It felt wrong.

  “We can’t research it in depth without tipping someone off,” she said.

  “Except in the non-networked databases that we have,” he said.

  She nodded. “It sounds like you have.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “And the only materials I’ve found have been ‘screw-yous’ from people who got contacted as they headed out here, and then severed their links so that no one could find them. I found one reference that mentioned a human-only starbase.”

  “You think that was this one?” she asked. “The review said it had an alien section that was small but sufficient.”

  “I know,” he said. “It’s a weird detail, don’t you think?”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “It seems specific.”

  She turned toward the windows again. Her image looked slightly wavy, as if something was causing a distortion.

  “You think it’s true,” she said.

  “I do,” he said. “That alien part makes sense to me. Even a human-only base would need an alien section for ships that had malfunctions or refueling issues or needed to stop for some other reason.”

  “And it would have to be well-segregated to avoid trouble.” She rocked back and forth on her flat shoes. That was the closest she could come to going barefoot. Regulations didn’t allow it on the ship.

  “Yeah,” Nuuyoma said. “That would have to be memorable, even after thirty-five years, don’t you think? A small alien section, humans only, that sort of thing. It couldn’t have been common.”

  “Actually,” Verstraete said, “it is.”

  Nuuyoma frowned. He hadn’t heard of anything like it in nearby regions, and he’d been working the Frontier longer than she had.

  Still, he didn’t correct her. He had learned that she often saw things he didn’t. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because,” she said, “there’s another human-only base not far from here.”

  Replacing the one that got destroyed? He didn’t ask that question, even though he thought it. He wanted to hear what she had to say.

  “How long has it been in existence?”

  She smiled at him, eyes twinkling. “Thirty years.”

  He let out a small breath. It took time to build a starbase. “What’s it called?”

  “It has several names,” she said, “depending on the map. The most common one, in a variety of languages, is Starbase Human.”

  “That can’t be a coincidence,” he said, more to himself than to her.

  “I thought it was,” she said. “So I did a little digging. It’s run by the same corporation that ran the other starbase.”

  “Is it an Alliance corporation?” he asked.

  “That would be too easy,” she said. “No. It’s a corporation that runs bases all over the Frontier. Most of those bases cater to different species. This is the only one that I could find that catered to humans.”

  “The corporation isn’t human-owned, then?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “I’m not one of those researchers who can find that stuff, and I was leery of digging too deep. I don’t know how to hide my trail.”

  “Probably a good call,” he said. “So there’s a need for this starbase out here. It makes me wonder how many humans fled the Alliance and
settled out here.”

  “Because they didn’t like the multi-species aspect of the Alliance?” she asked.

  “It still causes issues,” he said. “A lot of humans think we shouldn’t be subject to alien law.”

  “We’re not,” she said. “We’re subject to Alliance law. We agreed—”

  He held up a hand to stop her from launching into one of her favorite rants. “I know, Chepi,” he said softly.

  She glanced at him—and then laughed. “Gosh. It’s like I’m programmed to give that response whenever anyone says anything.”

  “We all are,” he lied. It was part of being in the FSS, though, that need to explain what the Alliance was about and how it worked, and how fair it actually was. He just didn’t like ranting about it.

  He sighed, thinking about that other base. “I wonder if there’s an institutional memory.”

  “In the corporation?” she asked. “Did you really want to contact them?”

  “In the starbase,” he said. “Essentially, that’s the rebuild, even if it isn’t in this exact spot.”

  She looked around, as if she could see the base with the naked eye.

  “Thirty-five years isn’t that long,” she said. “Someone has to remember something.”

  “Starbases don’t get destroyed very often,” he mused. “A lot of people would have died. You don’t get over that, no matter how long ago it was.”

  She stood next to him silently for a long moment. She was clearly giving him time to come up with something.

  When he didn’t speak, she started shifting position. He recognized it. She didn’t like silence. She never had.

  “So,” she said when he didn’t speak. “Are we going to go in as FSS or as some people who are on our way somewhere else?”

  “Undercover or official?” he asked. “They both have advantages.”

  “I don’t see any advantage in being official,” she said. “Not in a place that’s clearly hostile to a lot of things.”

  “You really believe they hate the Alliance,” he said.

  She nodded. “If they don’t want aliens, they don’t want humans who are forced to interact with aliens. And that would mean they certainly don’t want someone who is supposed to enforce the laws between humans and aliens.”

  He hadn’t thought of it that way. He might have come to it later, although he wasn’t certain. Verstraete had a way of seeing the heart of the matter much quicker than anyone else.

  “Undercover it is,” he said. He felt a little jaunty about it, even though that would create problems. Because he wasn’t sure how to explain to the rest of his team why he wanted to go into a human-only base.

  He would come up with something, though.

  He always did.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  MARSHAL JUDITA GOMEZ stood with her right hand clasped over her left wrist, behind her back. She straightened her shoulders, a habit she had just acquired in the last few months. She’d done more sitting around than she had ever expected, so after she felt herself growing flabby and tired, she decided to stand whenever possible.

  Before her were the two other main people on this silly quest. Neil Apaza probably hadn’t stood up since he boarded the Green Dragon. He had become pear-shaped, something that didn’t surprise Gomez. One of the reasons he had joined her on this misadventure was because he knew he would no longer pass the physical tests for the Frontier Security Service, and he wasn’t willing to put in the time or the effort to get into shape.

  Lashante Simiaar hovered beside him. Simiaar was the best forensic director in the FSS, and she had taken a year off to join Gomez. Simiaar had lost some weight on this trip—surprising, since she’d been cooking fantastic meals for them—but she still carried an extra kilo or two. She was tall and broad, and one of the strongest people Gomez had ever met, although she didn’t look strong at the moment.

  She looked concerned.

  Gomez couldn’t blame her. They were staring at a floating screen showing a tiny section of the planet below them. Hétique was deeper in the Earth Alliance than any place Gomez had expected when she started following this lead, and a lot more established.

  Sixty-six different sentient species called this planet home, even though its land mass was relatively small. Most of the species either lived in the water or in the skies above the planet’s surface. They claimed the cliff tops, the oceans, and the lakes—which was why a human colony had been founded on the only arable land long before the Alliance even existed.

  That human colony had now spread to three major cities, crammed into a few thousand kilometers, and housed several industries that human-governed societies usually didn’t want on their land.

  Humans were not the dominant species on Hétique. When three-quarters of the species joined the Earth Alliance, the Alliance determined Hétique was non-human, and not governed by human laws.

  Gomez had never even seen the laws for the dominant culture, winged aliens called Tiquis. She didn’t want to look those laws up now.

  She felt at loose ends these days, because the way she used to conduct a mission—investigating everything there was to know about a planet before she even approached it—did not apply at all now.

  She couldn’t even really call what she was doing a “mission,” nor could she call Apaza, Simiaar, and the senior pilot, Charlie Zamal, her staff. They had worked for her when she ran the Earth Alliance Frontier Security Ship Stanley, but she had stepped away from that post for a year, ostensibly to see if she was ready to retire.

  She had left the Stanley in the capable hands of Elián Nuuyoma, who continued its mission on the Frontier. She missed the constant changes, the unsettled moments when she wasn’t certain what she was about to encounter.

  Ever since she had left the Stanley, she had gone deeper into the Alliance. Before that, she hadn’t been in Alliance space—truly deep in Alliance space—for years.

  Her ultimate goal now was to get to the Moon. She had information—a lot of information—that she believed the people there would want, and she didn’t trust that information to any of the normal channels.

  In fact, the longer she had been on this quest, the less she trusted channels at all.

  “This planet is settled,” Apaza said. “I mean, it’s completely established. I’m not liking this at all, Judita.”

  They had somehow segued away from last names and titles in their conversations since their first month on this ship. They were colleagues, and Gomez decided they should act like it.

  Especially since they kept the support staff on the Green Dragon specifically segregated from these main rooms.

  The support staff was still pretty impressive. Gomez had hired an extra pilot, who had never been inside the Alliance before and had no family or ties here. She could pilot the ship if she had to—the Green Dragon was a medium-sized cruiser, with its own weapons system and a fairly good ability to mask its presence within the Alliance—but she didn’t want to pilot the ship at all.

  Still, she had learned its weapons systems, just in case, and she had encoded every high-level system to her voice and DNA prints. She did have a navigator and a chief weapons officer, as well as some people that Simiaar simply called “the muscle,” glorified security guards who would protect Gomez and her team as long as she paid the guards to do so.

  That was the diciest part of this plan—she hated paying people to do their jobs well. She really wanted them to volunteer and do the job because they believed in it. Hiring people to do a job for excellent pay meant they could get bought away if someone else offered them even better pay.

  She worried about it, which was why she kept them away from the discussions she had with Zamal, Simiaar, and Apaza.

  Sometimes she wished they hadn’t come along, either. Oh, they were doing fantastic work, but Gomez felt responsible for them. And the deeper she was traveling into the Alliance, the more responsible she felt.

  She worried that this entire mission—quest—trip—whatever she wa
nted to call it, could cost them their lives.

  Especially now.

  The floating screen showed the coordinates Gomez had found on an old ship. She, Simiaar, and Apaza had been back-tracing the ship’s route from a planet called Epriccom in the Frontier all the way to its starting point inside the Alliance.

  For some reason, she had expected that starting point to be some uninhabited part of some remote moon or a difficult-to-reach starbase.

  She hadn’t expected to find an industrial plant with a footprint so old that it looked like it had been in place for a couple of hundred years.

  “Let’s see this up close,” Gomez said.

  Apaza zoomed in on the coordinates. The buildings had a grayish look. They were rectangular and built up several stories. It appeared as though some of the buildings went deep underground, as well.

  People swarmed the entire area—walking, talking, sitting in some grassy areas. Gomez supposed she could ask Apaza to go even closer, but she didn’t.

  “I guess the first thing we do,” Gomez said, “is figure out what business this is and how long it’s been on this location.”

  “Already on it,” Apaza said.

  “From the look of those buildings,” Simiaar said, “it’s been there longer than we would like.”

  Gomez looked at her. Simiaar did not look back, which was not a good sign. Usually Simiaar winked at her or smiled or had some kind of snide comment.

  This industrial park unnerved Simiaar as much as it was unnerving Gomez.

  Gomez shifted slightly. She realized that her right hand had tightened so much on her left wrist that she had twisted the skin. She let go, brought her hands forward, and looked at her left wrist. The skin was an ugly red where her fingers had dug in.

  Nothing on this trip had gone as she expected. She had left the Frontier, initially planning to travel alone. Then Simiaar had convinced her not to try this by herself. Simiaar had helped her find the Green Dragon.

  It had been easy to retrofit a forensics lab into the ship—a good lab, equal to the one on the Stanley. The Green Dragon had been a science vessel for one of the human Frontier communities—one of the communities that had hidden away from the Alliance—so the ship had all kinds of features that weren’t common to Alliance ships.