“Sounds awful,” Guts commiserated, patting the arm not held in a hammerlock by Nuts.
“Yes. But that is just the beginning. For under the floor of each innocent-looking house, there lurks-”
He paused as the Demmies all leaned toward him, wide-eyed.
“Yes? Yes? What lurks!?”
Earl’s voice hushed.
“There lurks a trap door…”
“A secret entrance?” Captain Olm asked in a whisper
Our guide nodded.
“… leading downward to catacombs below the urb. In other words, to the sub-urbs, where-”
I cut in, coughing behind my hand. I did not want my crewmates slipping into a storytelling trance right then.
“Hadn’t we better move on then, while there’s still light?”
Earl cast me a sour glance. “Right. Follow me this way.”
Soon we passed down an avenue lined by bedraggled trees. No light shone from any of the rusty lampposts onto narrow ribbons of buckled sidewalk bordering small fenced lots. Most of the houses were dark and weedy, with broken tile roofs and missing windows, but one in four seemed well tended, with flower beds and neatly edged lawns. Dim illumination passed through drawn curtains. Once or twice, I glimpsed dark silhouettes moving within.
The Demmies, their eager imaginations stirred by Earl’s testimony, kept swiveling nervously, peering into the darkness, shying away from the gaping storm drains. Our greenies, especially, looked close to panic. They kept dropping back from their scout positions, trying to get as close to the captain as possible, much to his annoyance. At one point, Olm dialed his blaster and shot Ensign Jums with a dose of itch-nanos. The poor fellow yelped and immediately ran back to position, scratching himself furiously, effectively distracted from worrying about spooks for a while.
I admired how efficiently Earl had accomplished this transformation. His uninformative hints managed to put my crewmates into a real state. I wondered - did he do it on purpose?
Almost anything can set off Demmie credulity. Once, during an uneventful voyage, I read aloud to the crew from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Telltale Heart.”
Mistake! For a week thereafter, we kept getting jittery reports of thumping sounds, causing Maintenance to rip out half the ship’s air ducts. The bridge weapons team vaporized nine or ten passing asteroids that they swore were “acting suspicious,” and the infirmary treated dozens for stun wounds inflicted by nervous co-workers.
Actually, if truth be told, I never had a better time aboard the Clever Gamble, and neither did the Demmies. Still, Healer Paolim took me aside afterward and demanded that I never to do it again.
The urb became a maze. Few of the streets were straight, and most terminated in outrageously inconvenient dead-ends that the translator described as culled-socks-an uninviting and unappetizing name. Even in better days, it must have been a nightmare journey of many kilometers to travel between two points only a block apart.
I felt as if we had slipped into a type of warped space, like a fractal structure whose surface is small, but whose perimeter is practically infinite-a true nightmare of insane urban planning. We might march forever and never get beyond this endless tract of boxlike houses. Captain Olm shared my concern, and while the other Demmies peered wide-eyed at shadows, he kept his sidearm nonchalantly poised toward Earl’s back, in case the native showed any sign of bolting.
I scanned selected dwellings with my multispec. Blurry infrared signals indicated humanoid forms within. From carbon scintillation counts, it seemed this part of city must be as old as the downtown area. I wondered about the apparent fall in population. Were things like this planetwide? Or did these symptoms relate particularly to the local crisis our guide had mentioned?
Surreptitiously, I pressed my uniform collar, turning it into a throat microphone to call the ship with an info-quest. Soon, the nanos in my ear canal whispered with the voice of Lieutenant Not’a Taken, on duty at the Clever Gamble’s sensor desk.
“Planetary surface scanning underway, Advisor Montessori. Preliminary indications show that paved cities comprise over six percent of total land area, an unusually high proportion, even for a world passing through stage eighteen, though much contraction appears to have occurred recently. Gosh, I wish I was down there exploring with you guys, instead of stuck up here.”
“Lieutenant Taken,” I murmured firmly.
“Umm… survey also shows considerable environmental degradation in agricultural zones and coastal waters, with twenty-eight percent loss of topsoil accompanied by profound silting. Say, will you bring me back a souvenir? Last time you promised you’d-”
“Lieutenant-”
“All right, so you didn’t exactly promise, but you didn’t say ‘no’ either. Remember the party in hydroponics last week? You were talking about detection thresholds for supernova neutrinos, but I could tell you kept looking down my-”
“Lieutenant!”
“The worst environmental damage seems to have occurred about a century ago, with gradual reforestation now underway in temperate zones. Umm, I’ve just been handed a preliminary estimate of the decline in the humanoid population. Approximately sixty percent in the last century! Now that’s puzzling, I see no sign of major warfare or disease. And there are some other anomalies.”
“Anomalies?”
“Bio section urgently asks that you guys send up some live samples of the planet’s flora and fauna. Two of every species will do, if that won’t be too much trouble. Male and female, they say… as if a brilliant man like you would ever forget a detail like that.”
Exerting patience, I sighed. Subvocalizing lowly, I repeated-
“Anomalies? What anomalies are you talking about?”
“It’s got me worried. I admit it. I haven’t seen you since the party. You don’t answer my calls. Doctor… was I too forward? Why don’t you come to my quarters after you get back and I’ll make it up to-”
I let go of my collar. The connection broke and my ear-nanos went quiet, letting night sounds float back… including a faint rustling that I hadn’t noticed before. A creaking… then a scrape that might have been leather against pavement.
The captain halted abruptly and I collided with his back. Through his tunic I felt the tense bristles of Demmie hackle-ridges, standing on end. Olm’s pompadour just reached my eyes, so I couldn’t see ahead. But a glance left showed the ship’s healer also stopped in his tracks, staring, utterly transfixed by something.
Lieutenant Morell hurried forward and gasped, fumbling the dial of her blaster.
A sudde
n, grating sound echoed behind me, followed by a clang of heavy metal on concrete.
As I rotated, a horrific howl pealed. Then another, and still more from all sides.
Before I could finish turning around, a dark, flapping shape descended over me, enveloping my face in stifling folds and choking off my scream.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
****
Travails With Momma
John Ringo
1: Paradise Sucks
“JOSH!”
Josh Parker ignored his mother, leaving his eyes closed as he kept reading.
The book was pretty good, a collection of short biographies of the space aces of the Second Orion War. It was split between the Ortulian front and the Joostan so there was a lot of variety. But the basic theme, Terran superiority in space combat, was what Josh liked. That’s what he wanted to be, a fighter pilot.
He brought up a toolie and began blasting the wicked Ortulians that had started the war by the sneak attack on Diamond Haven. Ortulian fighters fell around his invincible Devilspray space fighter as he flew among the stars… but he had to rescue the beautiful princess… Cindy Goodhead. Cindy was so cute. She was in his reading class and…
“JOSH! COME DOWN HERE THIS INSTANT!”
The image of his mother’s face appeared in the middle of the combat and with a wave of her hand the fighters and stars disappeared, along with the picture of Cindy tied up in the middle of ten bug-eyed, octopoid Ortulians he was just preparing to defeat in bloody hand to hand combat after which, if he was lucky, he might get a peck on the cheek from Cindy and then they’d have about a half a dozen children…
“I have to talk to you, Josh. Now.”
“Oh, Mother,” he memed. “Can’t you talk to me here?”
“Now, Josh. Downstairs.”
Josh opened his eyes, wiping the toolie, and shuffled across the room disconsolately. He kicked a datacube out of his way and a blue tunic, making a path through the clutter to the room iris.
The house was old fashioned and to make his way to the kitchen he had to walk down stairs instead of using a bounce tube. Sure, it was only one floor, but everybody had bounce tubes.
This was the third house they’d occupied in the Alu Islands. Dad was working on the new Malt Whiskey Corporation theme park outside Greater Papua and after the project got extended by another year, and their lease was up on the house outside Papua, Mom had picked them up and brought them to the Alu. It meant a one hour air-car commute each way for Dad, but Mom was in charge of housing and she could be less than subtle. From her point of view, it was Time To Leave.
“What do you want, Mother?” Josh said as he entered the kitchen. “Couldn’t you just meme me?”
“Mouths are for talking,” his mother said. “Implants are for learning.”
He hated that expression.
Mom was just pulling a roast out of the fresher and his stomach growled.
“Can I have a snack?”
“No,” his mother snapped. “You won’t have any room for supper.”
“But all I want is a choco-bar,” Josh whined.
“Two or three, more like it,” his mother said with her standard sniff. “We’re moving back to Bowan.”
“They’re finished?” Josh said. “Gosh.”
“With phase three,” his mother replied. “So we’re going back to the home office.”
“Do we get a house this time?” Josh asked. “I’d really like a house. I want a dog, Mom.”
“No, we’ll be in an apartment,” his mother replied. “It will be an hour until supper. You need to do something besides read in your room. Outside.”
“Oh, Mom,” Josh whined. “It’s boring!”
“It’s a nice day out,” his mother answered. “Go.”
Josh schlepped out through the back iris and frowned at the view. Waving coconut palms and a pink sand beach surrounded a crystalline cove. The houses around the cove were set back from the beach so that they were barely in view and, except for one or two locals out catching the sun or fishing, the cove was almost deserted. The trade winds blew in a constant stream, lowering the temperature to what most humans considered idyllic.
Josh went down to the waterside and kicked at the sand. When they’d first come to the Alu Islands, he’d gone swimming nearly every day and turned brown as a nut, his dark brown hair shading to almost white at the tips. It still was bleached and he still had the tan but he’d hardly swam a week at a time anymore. Even swimming in crystalline water could get boring day in and day out. And while Alu was one of prettiest places they’d ever lived, and he’d lived in a bunch of places, there weren’t many kids his own age around.
If they could just settle down for a while. A year here, a year there, by the time the local kids had gotten over beating him up and stealing his lunch money and started to let him steal other kids’, it was time to move. They’d lived for two years in Greater Papua, right on a river, and that had been great. Sure, he had to take getting beaten up a time or two not to mention the ritual jokes about having his head collected, but he’d made friends. Had a bunch of kids to play with.
He wandered along the beach in a deep funk, watching the animals along the waterline. He saw a purple and pink crab in the water and stopped.
“That’s what I want to be,” he said. “A superhero! Crab-man!” He held his hands up and made clacking sounds. “Crab-man! With pincers of… super hero stuff!” Clack, clack. By day, Crab-man was an unassuming fourth grade student. But by night he… rescued damsels in distress. Especially Cindy Goodhead!
“Oh, Crab-man, you’re my hero,” Cindy said, breathlessly.
“Well, there were only a hundred of them,” Crab-man said in a deep voice. He had the arms and legs of a crab but his body was rippling with muscles and he had a really handsome face and black hair and bright green eyes… “You know, Cindy, by day I’m really…”
No, that wouldn’t work. Super-heroes never gave away their secret identity. She’d just have to work it out herself and then they’d live in a big house on the top of a mountain and make pancakes while the snow fell and have about… oh, nineteen kids…
****
Steve Parker sent a command to the airtruck, shutting it down, and dilating the door. He climbed out and stretched his back, wincing. Flying an hour either way to work was… well, when he’d started it nine months before he’d called it a pain. Now he had an entirely new appreciation for the term.
But that was about over. For good or ill. Working on the Malt Whiskey project had given him a billing rate that was astronomical. Yara and Barchick had been happy as hell about it. Unfortunately, the number of fifteen billion credit projects to be had on Terra was… small. The planet had all the infrastructure it could handle and there just wasn’t room for the sort of massive projects he specialized in.
The term he was groping for here
was “redundant.” As in, “I’m sorry, Mr. Parker, you’re simply redundant to our current needs.”
With five kids in college or just starting out in independent life, not to mention a wife and kid at home to support, that was not a conversation he was looking forward to. Which was why he’d pulled every string he had to keep working on Malt Whiskey, long after less competent, and less expensive, engineers could have wrapped it up.
Before Malt Whiskey he’d spent three solid years doing failure analysis on other planets, especially ones with harsh soil and working conditions. It had been fun, figuring out what other people had screwed up always was, but he’d seen his wife and kids exactly eighty-seven days in those three years. He wasn’t looking forward to that, either.
Something would come up. Something always did.
****
“How was your day, dear?” Jala said, ladling spaghetti sauce onto Steve’s noodles.
“Fine,” Steve said. “Whiskey Corporate sent another hot-shot out to reinvent the wheel…”
Josh tuned out his parent’s conversation, twirling the spaghetti. Wrapped in rings of… really strong stuff, Spaghetti-man…
“Do you have another project?” Jala asked, in a tone that bespoke calm disinterest overlaid with worry.
“No,” Steve replied, calmly. “They want me to do… sales for a while.”
“Oh.”
Josh had learned to not even turn an ear or look up. Grownups would drop the most important information if they were sure you weren’t paying attention. And knowing where you were going to live, for a kid, was really important information.
Jim Baen’s Universe Page 51
