Cosmopath - [Bengal Station 03]

by Eric Brown

  “Whatever,” he said. “Well?”

  “Okay.” She nodded. “We’d first assess the position of the alien natives. It might be that they would willingly cede portions of their land. I mean, it isn’t as if this place appears overly populated. If there are thousands of subterranean pockets like this...” She shrugged. “Discovering and terraforming, or adapting, extra-solar planets is an expensive business. This would be a treasure trove.”

  “And the slight matter of the FNSA having got here before you?”

  “Well, according to Chandrasakar the colonists were split as to whether to tell their government what they’d discovered. Technically, the FNSA haven’t planted their flag.”

  “So Delta Cephei VII is fair game?” he said.

  “Think of how opening this world up would benefit the masses of humankind on overcrowded Earth.”

  He laughed at this. “Or rather, think how opening the world would benefit the high-ups and apparatchiks of the Indian Communist Party.”

  She glared at him. “No, Vaughan, the ultimate winner would be the proletariat.”

  Bullshit, he thought. But he knew how futile it would be to argue the point.

  More to himself, he mused, “I feel sorry for the damned aliens, caught between the fascist FNSA and your scheming crowd.”

  “What’s the lesser of the two evils, Jeff?”

  He wasn’t going to admit that she had him there. “How about a third alternative? We leave well alone? Let the aliens keep their planet. It’s bad enough that they have a bunch of American colonists here anyway.”

  She shook her head. “A massive waste of resource potential, Jeff, especially if these pockets aren’t utilised by the natives.”

  “We’ll never agree,” he said. “Let’s just wait and see what we find, okay?”

  She smiled to herself. “Let’s do that, Jeff,” she said.

  But the communiqué had been sent, he thought; the scavengers were circling round the prey, hungry for the kill.

  Ahead, the alien had come to a halt. It knelt, disappearing from sight, marked only by the circle of orange strands. Vaughan approached and peered at what it was doing, Das at his side. The alien was rooting through the fine soil, gently pushing away, rootlets with its long fingers and digging deeper. It found something, eased it from the ground, and set it to one side, then resumed its digging. Vaughan saw that it had unearthed a red object the size of a grapefruit, and seconds later it had another, then a third.

  It stood, bearing the fruit, and passed one each to Vaughan and Das. As if in instruction, it peeled its own and slipped the pulpy, apple-coloured flesh into its lipless mouth.

  Das hesitated. “Do you think we should?”

  He thumbed open the thin peel and tore off a chunk of flesh from the globe. It tasted sweet and then pungently spicy, with the consistency of banana.

  “It’s not bad,” he said. “Go ahead, try it.”

  She peeled her fruit and tentatively nibbled at the flesh.

  “I’ve tasted worse,” she said as they set off again.

  Vaughan finished the fruit and looked about him. The lack of geographical features made it difficult to judge the distance travelled; the cliff-face they had left seemed kilometres away, but the range towards which they were travelling seemed no closer than when they had set off.

  The ceaseless routine of the walk soon became monotonous.

  He thought of Sukara, Pham, and Li. He wanted nothing more than to be able to talk to Su, reassure her that all was well, and receive similar reassurances that Li’s recovery was progressing. The longer he went without contacting her, the more she would worry.

  When I get back from here, he thought, that’s it; no more leaving Earth without Sukara and the girls.

  Das looked at him. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. I’m fine.”

  She said, “Missing wifey and the kids?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Ah, the palliative of domesticity,” Das sighed.

  He glared at her. “It’s what matters to me,” he said. “But as you’ve never experienced that...”

  She opened her mouth to say something, but evidently thought better of it.

  They continued in silence.

  They had been walking for two or three hours - without the use of his handset, he was unable to tell exactly how long - when he thought he saw an irregularity in the savannah a few hundred metres ahead. He stopped, stared, and knew he wasn’t seeing things.

  “What is it?”

  He pointed. “There, eleven o’clock.”

  “I see it. Looks like an old flier to me, Jeff.”

  The alien had evidently seen it too, as it veered off course and headed towards the vehicle. Two minutes later they came to a clearing in the savannah, and Vaughan stopped and looked upon the remains of the burnt-out flier. Beside it, planted in the soil at regular intervals, were half a dozen crosses lashed together from metal spars and struts.

  “Graves,” Das murmured.

  The flier was a bulky, old-fashioned model, its paintwork blackened and bubbled with the ravages of fire. It looked incongruous in so alien a landscape.

  Vaughan turned to the alien. The creature was standing to one side, staring at the flier and the crosses with its massive, unmoving eyes; it gave the impression of suitable reverence, but then it gave the same impression no matter what it did.

  “What happened here?” Vaughan asked the alien. “Do you know?”

  The alien didn’t so much as turn in his direction.

  Das said, “My guess is it has something to do with the rebels. Either it was their flier, or the colonists, and it was caught in the fight. If there was a battle of some kind... then that would explain the fire-damage to the Cincinnati back there.”

  He moved along the line of graves. There were no inscriptions scratched into the metal crosspieces to signify who was buried, not even so much as an RIP.

  He crossed to the flier and peered inside. It was gutted, with a great hole punched through the passenger door. Whoever had been inside the vehicle had stood no chance of surviving the impact of the missile.

  “I wonder what the natives thought of this?” Vaughan said. “Strangers drop from the stars, and the first thing they do is start killing each other.”

  Das grunted, “What makes you think they don’t get up to similar things, Jeff?”

  He shrugged. “In my experience, humans seem to have a peculiar propensity for internecine violence. Think about it. With the exception of the Korth, have we come across a race as aggressive as ourselves?”

  “Maybe that’s because most of the races we’ve discovered have been older than us; they’ve... matured.”

  “I rest my case,” he said.

  Das moved around the wreck. “I just hope the humans we came across weren’t the only survivors of the conflict.”

  “I wonder if the natives are aware of the slaughter up there?” Vaughan shook his head. “Christ, the poor bastards don’t know what they’re in for.”

  Das looked at the alien, who had moved to the edge of the clearing and appeared to be waiting for them to continue. “Well, it doesn’t seem to make our guide any more reluctant to have anything to do with us,” she said.

  They left the clearing and followed the alien.

  Perhaps two hours later, Vaughan looked back. There was no sign of the clearing and the burned-out flier; the savannah stretched seamlessly to the right and left. Ahead, the mountain range seemed just as far away.

  A while later he asked, “How long do you think we’ve been walking?”

  She paused and looked back at the distant cliff-face. “We aren’t even halfway there, Jeff. I don’t know. Four hours or so?”

  “Seems like more. I’m bushed.”

  “I wonder if our friend intends to let us rest?”

  He laughed. “I could always ask him, for all the good it’d do.”

  They walked on, and it was perhaps an hour later when the alien
paused, turned to look at them, and then moved off sideways into the savannah. It bobbed down, vanishing from sight. Vaughan stepped forward and peered at what it was doing.

  He smiled to himself. The alien was standing now, having rolled flat a section of savannah, creating in the process a deep mattress of flattened fungal strands.

  “Do you think it was aware we were tired?” he asked Das.

  She looked up at the bright, ersatz suns embedded in the ceiling far overhead. “Thing is, will we be able to sleep with the lights on?”

  The alien had moved off as Vaughan and Das sat down on the surprisingly spongy bed of flattened strands. He watched the creature pluck something from several fungal stalks nearby and return to where they sat.

  It passed them what looked like buds, the size of a thumb. The alien inserted the third one into its mouth, chewed, then lay down and curled into a foetal ball.

  Vaughan shrugged. “Here goes...”

  The bud certainly wasn’t as pleasant as the earlier fruit, but then he suspected it wasn’t meant to be.

  It was hard and bitter, and left a sharp aftertaste on the palate. A minute later he began to feel woozy.

  “And?” Das said, watching him, the bud halfway to her lips.

  “Nice,” he slurred, slumping onto the wonderfully comfortable fungal bed.

  “Jeff, this might be dangerous!”

  He heard her, but he was past caring, and seconds later oblivion claimed him.

  * * * *

  TWENTY-ONE

  ESCAPE

  Sukara came awake quickly and found herself in the back of a flier, dazzled by sunlight.

  Despite her fear, she knew better than to move. She was alone on the back seat, slumped behind the driver with her head against the side window. There was no one else in the car other than the Chinese orderly... or rather the impostor orderly. Either he had misjudged the dose of sedative he’d sprayed in her face, or had taken longer than planned to get her to the flier... At any rate, the fact was that she was awake - and could move her arms and legs - and he was unaware of the fact.

  The question was: who was he and what did he want?

  The bastard wasn’t an orderly and had nothing to do with Dr Grant. He wouldn’t have sent an orderly running after her, and she swore at herself for being taken in so easily. But at the same time she felt a stunning relief: the bastard had used Li as a pretext, knowing that it would have the desired effect of making her biddable to his suggestion of taking the outer lift, down to the under-level car-park...

  So Li was still okay.

  She felt a welling of anger, the quick urge to do the bastard permanent damage.

  She ruled out the possibility that the Chink was a rapist or related sadist. He knew about Li; had planned the abduction to the point of posing as an orderly. Which might not preclude the possibility that he merely wanted to hurt her, but she thought not. There was another reason behind the abduction.

  She thought of the assassin who had tried to kill Jeff, and had succeeded in murdering the other telepaths. Could this have something to do with those attacks?

  She put the question aside. Her priority was to find some means of getting away from her captor.

  She turned her head minimally and peered through the window.

  They were on the top level, flying low. She saw Chandi Road flash by, with the expanse of the spaceport beyond. They were flying north-east. At some point they would land - and then Sukara would make her move.

  The Chink turned in his seat and she closed her eyes, feigning unconsciousness. She counted twenty long seconds, then slit her eyes open fractionally.

  Slowly, she moved her right hand towards her handset. She pressed a release code on the console. A second later the communications pin Jeff had given her ejected itself. She gripped it in her right hand - a silver needle almost five centimetres long, slippery in her sweat-soaked palm. For the rest of the ride she fantasised about the amount of damage she could inflict with the needle and a lot of righteous rage.

  The flier slowed. They were at the northern end of Chandi Road, where the ethnic make-up phased from Indian to Thai. The flier dropped suddenly and eased itself down a narrow alley, with barely six inches between its bodywork and the walls of warehouses and industrial storage depots.

  Sukara knew she had to be fast and decisive when the time came. If she messed up... she didn’t like to consider the possibility. The bastard was probably armed, so she had to make the first blow a telling one.

  The flier came to a halt and settled in the alley, and her heartbeat raced.

  To the right of the vehicle was a compound, its wire-mesh gate open as if awaiting her delivery.

  The Chink jumped from the flier and opened the back door. Sukara closed her eyes and gripped the needle. Her captor opened the door, against which she was leaning, and she half-fell from the vehicle. This made his task easier. He gripped her under the arms and tugged her from the flier. Her heels banged painfully on the concrete as he dragged her into the compound.

  She hoped that he didn’t have an accomplice at this end of the operation. One bastard she might be able to deal with. Two would be a little more difficult.

  He laid her on the ground, easing her head onto the concrete with incongruous care. She heard footsteps as he walked away from her, then the sound of a door being unlocked.

  She opened her eyes, but all she could see was sky and a margin of guttering overhead.

  She had to act now, while his back was turned.

  She leapt to her feet and sprang towards the bastard.

  He turned, obligingly, and she leapt at him screaming and stabbed the needle into his face. She would remember the bastard’s expression for a long time after that: the wide-eyed look of shocked fright, the toothy rictus like some Chinese carnival dragon. She would remember his scream, too, as she stabbed.

  She was surprised by the rubbery resistance of his eyeball. The bastard fell to his knees, yelling, a hand to his right eye and blood spurting between splayed fingers. Sukara turned and took off, gripping the needle as she careered out of the compound, turned left and sprinted down the alleyway.

  She felt a surge of elation, a mix of adrenalised flight reflex and the delight of revenge. She replayed the stabbing and told herself that he deserved it not so much for the abduction, but for the lie about her daughter.

  She heard a shout from back down the alley. She turned. The bastard was staggering from the compound, waving something. She judged she was a hundred metres away. He pointed at her and a split second later she saw the foreshortened streak of a laser vector lance her way. She dived, scraping her knees and palms, and the vector raced over her by about half a metre. Then she was up and running again, zigzagging between the alley’s walls. She heard another screech of ripped air as he fired again, and she dived. This one missed her by centimetres. She looked up as she took off like a sprinter from the blocks. She was about ten metres from the bustle of Chandi Road. The third vector lasered a neat, stinking hole in the flapping material of her jacket and gouged concrete from the wall to her right.

  She came to the road and turned left, instinctively. Only later did she wonder if her unconscious mind knew where it was taking her. She barrelled into pedestrians, earning curses in Hindi and Thai. She fell, scattering a gaggle of old men, picked herself up and elbowed a passage through the throng. She slowed, not wanting to give her pursuer the advantage of tracing her by the commotion she might cause.

  She eased herself into the press, her breathing returning to normal, and hurried down the road. She glanced behind her. If the bastard were still chasing her, there was no sign of him. She told herself not to be complacent. He’d overcome a skewered eyeball to give chase, and he’d be out for vengeance. A wounded animal.

  Then her heart jumped as she heard aggrieved cries behind her. She looked over her shoulder. Perhaps twenty metres further back she made out a disruption as someone fought their way through the crowd towards her.

  She y
elled in fright and sprinted, taking a slalom course between ambling citizens. She wondered where to go, where she might be safe from the berserker.

  The she saw Dr Rao’s coffee house twenty metres away on the left of the road, and thanked her intuition.

  Just as she was approaching the building, the press around her seemed to congeal, slowing her progress. She abandoned all pedestrian etiquette now and thumped her way through the mass of bodies, crying out and tearing aside startled citizens. She heard another cry in her wake, a plea to stop the bitch who’d attacked him, and a second later the crowd loosened and she stumbled up the steps of the coffee house and into its cool interior.