Juanita Coulson - [Children of the Stars 04]

by Past of Forever (epub)

Cavanaugh broke in. “Dan and Sheila have both mentioned contacting the Fleet, and we all know what that would mean for the N’lacs..

  “I’m more aware than you are,” Dan said. “If it comes to that, I’d prefer working with my brother, rather than those greedy planet developers who are pressuring Eckard to give them access to this world—or my cousin, who thinks the N’lacs are subhumanoids. But we have to look beyond T-W 593. If push comes to mash, the rest of the humanoid sectors have got to have a fighting chance to defend themselves against a new invasion by the Old Ones. Otherwise, history will repeat itself, and the knowledge will be swallowed up for millennia—again. I don’t know about you, but I want our species to get off that slavemobile!”

  “Things up through,” Armilly said.

  That stopped the argument cold. It took several moments for non-Lannons to figure out what the procyonid meant. He jerked a hairy thumb at his scanners, then at the far end of the tunnel. Dan and Praedar glanced at the screen display, then hurried along the corridor. Another locked door barred the way. Armilly shuffled forward, playing his detector probe across the wall and portal. “Things. Make stirs little.”

  “Faint indications of activity,” Praedar paraphrased. “Whatever’s going on inside, it isn’t making much headway on this lock mechanism,” Dan said. “This looks like another patch assignment. How many damned doors are there in here, anyway?”

  Praedar probed the barrier with his spidery hands. “That is to be determined. Answers. Armilly?” The Lannon pointed to his screens. “A small room with a door that may be linked to this one. A pressure chamber?”

  Dan, peering narrowly at the lock, nodded. “That would fit with the general arrangement, given the difference between the aliens’ worlds and the one the N’lacs evolved on...”

  “Beyond the airlock, one large room—the end of our quest.” “Maybe the end of more than that,” Sheila said, “if we don’t watch our step.”

  The scientists huddled around Armilly’s gear, fascinated by the shadowy images he was extracting from the dome’s hidden interior.

  “Look at that huge platform in the center!”

  “Platform?”

  “Must be. You can make out the shape...”

  “It’s enormous!”

  “Was that where the Old Ones held court?”

  “A pressurized slave market! Built to keep the visiting masters comfortable until they returned to their spaceship.”

  “No wonder the N’lacs treat this place with dread and awe. This is where it all began and finished for them and the only place the escaping slaves recognized. During captivity, they must have tried to hang onto legends of their home world. But the sole constant was the Old Ones’ pressure chamber; everything else had changed—the climate, the city, decayed and buried in dust drift... The dome was a haven, even though it was a symbol of their hated masters.”

  “Stow your philosophy! Just consider the size of that central enclosed platform!”

  “If the Old Ones stood there... are they that big ...?”

  “As much bigger than we imagined as that marauding robot is bigger than the model demons the N’lacs smash.”

  “Kat said it. Sleeg’s myths reduce the enemies’ sizes, so his people can cope. Dealing with a monster that huge is ...” “Horrifying!”

  Dan headed out of the dome. The discussion interested him, but he needed additional tools to unlock the latest barricade blocking access to the temple.

  When he was halfway down the hill, Kat caught up with him. “Wait, Dan! I want to...” As he turned to face her, the brunette ran into him. He braced her to keep her from falling. She gulped and blurted, “About the pit fit...”

  “That again?” Exasperated, he started to move on.

  Kat held on to him. “You dodge me every time I approach this topic.”

  “What’s there to talk about? We had fun, even if it all blew up because of our intruder.”

  “My problems occurred before the robot appeared.” Kat was no Whimed, but she was damned good in universe-class staring games.

  She gathered her courage. “I... I’ve rarely been that drunk. I dislike losing control of myself.”

  “Your control seemed perfect, to me,” Dan said lightly. “You’ve got superb physical reflexes.”

  She looked tom between the urge to bawl or belt him. “I know I-I said something, gave you an idea that. .. I...”

  “That you’re in love with Praedar.”

  He expected her to blush. Instead, Kat went ashen. “Y-yes. It’s not unusual for young field workers to have a crush on the dig’s leader. But normally that leader is of the same species.” Kat sagged in relief, now that she’d put things out in the open.

  “I thought you’d be...”

  “Blase? The trained xenosocio, well versed in the biosexual customs of all humanoid species? I am, in the abstract. It... it’s very different when it involves personalities. I-I haven’t handled the situation at all well, and I’m ashamed.” She touched Dan’s face gently. “I would have continued to shove my feelings into a buried reservoir forever, if you hadn’t come along, and if Sheila hadn’t pushed me, as she’s pushed for years, to bring me to reality.”

  “Our friend from Kruger 60,” Dan said, embarrassed. So the women had traded confidences, before as well as after the pit fit. “Sheila’s quite a manipulator, among other things. Talk about mixed-up personalities.”

  Kat laughed nervously. “She’s a very generous being.”

  “I take it then that you don’t resent her throwing you at me?” The brunette’s jaw dropped. “I thought she was throwing you at me!”

  Dan embraced her and they shared a laugh. As their tension eased, he said, “I’m not complaining about that night. If you’re not, we’re fine.” Sobering, he added, “Anyway, we don’t have time to bite our nails over minor, personal snags.”

  “I know.” Kat had regained her normal, brisk tone. “That’s why it’s essential to clear away emotional clutter. I-I’ve been a fool. I recognize that now, finally. Years, wasted on a hopeless fantasy. Praedar doesn’t... won’t ever....! I’m grateful, really, that you and Sheila put me on... What do pilots call it?”

  “A correct vector.” The spacers’ phrase was salt on a wound. Sensing his pain, she said, “It’s rotten, what Feo’s done to your ship and your license. The bastard.”

  “Oh, he’s legitimate, right down to old-fashioned legal forms in quintuplicate. Main branch Saunder-McKelveys are very fussy about that, for inheritance reasons.” Dan sighed and said, “I’ve accepted the situation, like you with Praedar. I have to. Even if this uproar with the robot hadn’t happened, I’m stuck. Feo saw to that. Either the expedition takes me on as the resident xenomech, or I’m a charity case, taking handouts from my brother, or Feo.”

  “Of course we—”

  “Dan! Dan!” Norris, Getz’s former student, ran up the hill toward them. Spurts of dust flew from his bootprints. The young scientist panted to a halt beside the crates and bent over, his hands on his knees as he sucked in air.

  “Take it easy!” Kat exclaimed. “It’s too hot to run ...”

  “Message. On the com recorder. Feo and Hope... on their way here...” Norris wheezed.

  “They can’t be!” Dan and Kat chorused; then Dan added, “My cousin said they’d need at least three weeks to tidy up leftover business from the Assembly.”

  Norris waved toward the complex. “Dunno. The message came in about an hour ago. Maybe two. None of us noticed it then. We were all busy. I just happened to go past the com room and saw the recording light. When I checked it...”

  Kat ordered the winded student to sit down and catch his breath. She lectured him as sternly as any paramed.

  “I’d better notify Praedar and the others,” Dan said, and headed back to the domes.

  Half a local hour later, nearly the entire camp’s personnel had jammed into the insta-cells, eager to see the message. The crowd filled the labs adjacent to the com room and overflowed i
nto the cook shack. Dan fed the signal to monitors throughout the complex, so that everyone could witness the news simultaneously.

  The Saunders’ images formed on the screens. The signal was extremely sharp, particularly when compared to what T-W 593’s equipment could put out. Subspace static and shimmer was reduced to a minimum.

  “Amazing what you can do when you can afford top-grade com gear,” Dan muttered.

  “Hello!” Feo said. “We’re sending this while we’re en route to your dig. In fact, our crew informs us we’re nearing the T-W 593 system right now. Hope and I realize this is a bit sooner than we promised to arrive. But we decided we’ve owed you a visit for so long we might as well advance the date a trifle. I trust you won’t object...”

  “You mean you wanted to foul up our work schedule,” Sheila retorted.

  Dan halted the playback momentarily, then let it roll once more.

  “... wanted to pay our courtesy call while the media were in attendance. We know you’d want a complete record of the exchange ...”

  “Media,” Kat said bitterly, and again Dan interrupted the playback until she’d finished speaking. “Pan Terran network, he means. Read ‘Rei Ito.’ Keep it in the Saunder-McKelvey family. ..”

  “We don’t need any of them,” Rosie grumped. “They’ll just get in the way.”

  “That’s what they want to do,” Dan said. “The Saunders will fulfill their promise, catching us with our pants down, and they’ll have reporters to sop up every awkward thing we say and do. Or so they plan. The idea is to make us look like unorganized amateurs, and the Saunders like expert professionals.”

  “Indeed,” Praedar said. “I understand. Chen was wise in the manners of Earth. Feo will verify he is ethical. He has kept his word. He will attempt to expose our flaws.”

  “A PR stunt,” someone in the labs shouted. “Dirty tricks!” “However, the situation has altered since the invitation was extended,” Praedar said.

  No one else chimed in, and Dan cued the playback. Hope, front and center, was putting on her best maternal act. “You mustn’t go to any trouble for us. We’re well aware of the demands of field work on remote planets. We’ll bring all our own food and housing. It’s the least we can do to facilitate matters. After all, we’re in the same profession, and we must have some feeling for our colleagues’ inconvenience...”

  That brought a noisy round of catcalls. The backtalk made Dan grin. Even sophisticated humanoids tended to argue with vid images that displeased them. Not even techs were immune to the impulse, though they, more than most, were keenly conscious of the time lag differential in a message like this.

  Praedar didn’t join the sassing session. He stared inscrutably at his rivals’ faces. It struck Dan that the boss and Chen had been a truly odd couple. Reversed stereotypes. A rubber-visaged, voluble Terran Oriental. A Whimed, a species noted for its impatience and intense emotional reactions, who. specialized in cool rationality.

  “Our arrival time...” Feo turned from the lens, speaking to someone out of frame. “Captain Topwe? Ah!” Saunder read off the ETA.

  That created consternation on the receiving end. “Ouch!”

  Sheila yelped. “That’s... that’s tomorrow! Less than twelve hours from now!”

  “We’re looking forward to seeing you...” Hope gushed.

  The rest of the message was a formal sign-off by Feo’s “Sparks.” Dan did some fast calculating. Allowing for a space yacht’s fancy com gear and Feo’s A-One broadcasting priority, the call had been made deliberately late. There was no reason it couldn’t have been sent days ago, when the Saunders were still on T-S 311. Instead, they’d wanted to surprise their competitors and virtually drop in out of a blue-green sky.

  “Warn them off,” Dan said. “They can still turn back. They’ve got plenty of fuel reserves. That’s no problem, for them,” he added, thinking of how Feo had all but emptied Fiona/Praedar’s Project’% reserve package.

  “We will accommodate them,” Praedar said. His team protested. He waited out the arguments, then went on. “Dan will inform his kindred of the situation. They will be given the opportunity to retrace their course. I do not believe they will.”

  “Hardly!” Dan agreed. He frowned, studying the Whimed. “i’m beginning to see your angle. You’re thinking the Saunders will wield a lot more influence with the C.S.P. Council and Space Fleet than we can, if this robot hunt turns really ugly. Come to that, the Saunders probably pack more clout with the Whimed section of the Xenoethno Board than we can. You figure they’ll be useful, on that score? Dubious. Prying open their minds may be tougher than getting the door to the main dome cracked.” “Inform them,” Praedar repeated. “We will demonstrate to Feo and Hope that there is far more to our dig than we ourselves knew when I issued them the invitation to visit us.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Collision Imminent

  Like Praedar’s Project, the Saunders’ personal ship was a single-stage starhopper. However, her top-of-the-line design put her light-years beyond any ordinary indie craft. Sleek and powerful, Lady Belvedere-Saunder poised as if she were still in flight, not parked on the mesa. She was a luxurious big sister of the well-worn smaller ship nearby.

  A parade of aides and flunkeys was offloading luggage and portable housing units to the local expedition’s trucks. Feo and Hope certainly didn’t intend to rough it while they were on T-W 593. In fact, they were flaunting their wealth blatantly. They’d brought their own press corps, as well; Rei Ito and her aide, Kimball, panned their lenses across the landscape, recording. Expedition members who’d interrupted their work to drive out to the landing strip and fetch the visitors watched the show sourly.

  Praedar’s welcome had been polite, not cordial. The Saunders milked the formalities, effusively thanking their host repeatedly for his invitation, as if they’d wrangled it out of him, rather than having been cornered into accepting it!

  Dan ducked out of that time-wasting exchange and spoke to the ship’s crew.

  “Thanks for those landing coordinates,” Captain Topwe said. “Very precise. Good signal, too.”

  “Better than you expected from a nowhere Settlement like ours,” Dan noted. The pilot didn’t deny that. “About that request I made when you were in descending orbits...”

  Topwe pulled a dupe wafer from his pocket. “Here you go. Full-spectrum scan. Five thousand kilometer radius sweep. What are you looking for?”

  “A servo. One I’m not sure I want to find,” Dan said, the yacht crewmen blinked at the cryptic answer. “Thanks for the search dupe. With your equipment, I know that if you couldn’t locate the robot, nothing short of a battle-state Fleet intervention will.”

  Topwe glanced curiously at Praedar’s Project. Dan read the man’s thoughts. “She’s bare-bones on fuel. Won’t lift and get back intact. So I’ve yanked some of her packages for surface research work. That’s why she’s sitting there like that with her ramps and hatches wide open.”

  “Too bad,” Topwe said. “She’s a trim little craft. A shame to let her rot.”

  “I agree. But my cousin and I had a disagreement. And he’s getting even with me through my starhopper.”

  The men and women of the yacht’s crew sympathized. They understood.

  Or did they? Half a year ago, Dan would have been devastated by the grounding and cannibalization of his ship. Now his mind and emotions were full of that bigger picture, and the loss of one inanimate possession no longer seemed so crucial. Far more vital issues were at stake.

  Loading was complete, and the trucks and rovers headed westward. Dan drove the lead vehicle. As he steered around rough spots on the road, Feo leaned forward and commented to his kinsman and Praedar, “I invited Topwe and his crew to join us, but they declined.”

  “Naturally,” Dan said. “Their ship’s home to them. Nonspacers don’t realize that.”

  “What were you talking to them about?” Hope demanded waspishly.

  “Collecting a favor. Pilots’ prot
ocol,” Dan replied, looking smug. His relatives were miffed by the cryptic retort. Whatever the future held, Dan would remain a member of the space fraternity. The Saunders could never take that away from him.

  He was proud of the caravan’s smooth, purring operation. His kindred took such things for granted. Praedar’s team hadn’t done so, until their resident xenomech had repaired their fleet.

  The first sight of N’lac Valley sent the reporters into an orgy of recording. After his initial surprise, Dan saw that their enthusiasm was genuine. This was a first for them—an honest, in-the-raw dig, very different from that sterile, enclosed museum the Saunders were creating on T-S 311.

  A second welcoming committee of sorts was on hand in camp, starting another round of introductions. Those who’d complained the loudest yesterday about this visit now lined up to meet the Saunders. Dan couldn’t fault his relatives’ behavior. They were in their gracious, noblesse oblige mode.

  Joe Hughes led Chuss and Meej forward. The e.t.s had been expertly coached. This recess from their vigil in the domes was doing them good. Both N’lacs were cheerful, eager to shake hands. Feo and Hope were strongly taken aback by this face-to-face encounter with a species they’d dismissed as subhumanoid. Chuss bowed and bobbed, as elegant as a Vahnaj diplomat. “You fellow come see our Home. See Pwaedar’s Home. Happy meet you fellow. We show you valley. Dome place. Village. Catch you much meat for supper.”

  “Impressive command of an alien language for Level Two, isn’t it?” Kat asked archly.

  The Saunders managed to recover their poise and thanked Chuss warmly. They did seem impressed. Maybe, with the N’lacs’ help, the expedition could dent Feo and Hope’s stubborn opposition. They weren’t stupid. But were they bendable?

  Chuss and Meej scampered a few meters away from the new arrivals, sat down briefly with their backs to the offworlders, then turned and hurried back to greet them again. It was a charming display. Kat and Joe had to restrain the youngsters from welcoming the Saunders ad infinitum.

  “You will wish to refresh yourselves before you begin a tour,” Praedar suggested, gesturing to the insta-cell complex.