A family of sea otters broke the surface, paying us scant attention as we passed overhead. I realized the net across the harbor entrance wasn’t so much to protect the otters as to prevent them from swimming away into an empty ocean where they’d starve to death.
We flew on over the harbor’s calm waters, past several small work boats harvesting kelp and otters. Some were fitted with masts and sails, others were oared. The crews stopped and watched as we passed, but ominously, none waved a greeting.
“They don’t look happy to see us,” I said.
We flew on towards a towering wall of stone trees with gigantic interlocking branches broad enough to land on, yet eerily absent of leaves. There was no soil exposed to direct sunlight, only a rocky shoreline where thousands of otters lay sunning themselves. With the petrified forest dominating the land, there was no sign of even subsistence agriculture, although the soil that had once supported such monolithic flora must have been rich and deep. Surprisingly, the dead forest was not the bleached white of death, but a sea of reds, browns and yellows from the iron oxides and manganese that had transformed wood to stone millions of years ago.
“Greenery, to starboard!” Marie declared, pointing to the right of the view screen as if she was looking through a window.
In a dead mineralized world, any greenery was a sign of life, so I banked gently in the direction Marie had indicated. Soon we were hovering above a thick cluster of branches wrapped in dark green vines that stretched down into the shadows below. Carved stone houses nestled among the greenery, most decorated with flower filled planter boxes. Drably dressed people emerged from the houses, shielding their eyes from the glare of our thrusters as we floated past the village. Beyond the houses, cows, sheep and pigs were corralled in stone enclosures alongside shallow strip fields growing crops on soil hauled up from the forest floor. A network of stairs had been carved into the branches leading to other houses and tree-farms scattered far across the forest canopy. South of the settlement, a small stone bridge led to an immense branch whose upper curve had been leveled to form a landing area. Several ancient aircraft were parked in front of a long stone building that, from the air, appeared to be a maintenance facility.
I gave the village a wide berth, ensuring it wasn’t struck by the down blast of our thrusters, then landed near the antique aircraft. Armed men and women came running towards us from the village, although none started shooting.
“Why do I get the feeling they want to lynch us?” I said as I climbed out of my acceleration couch.
“Don’t worry, Sirius,” Marie said comfortingly. “They won’t want to lynch you, until they get to know you.”
“Izin and I will cover you from the cargo door,” Jase said. “If they make any hostile moves, we’ll blast them!”
“No shooting, no matter what happens. This is their home. We’re the invaders.”
“But Skipper, suppose–”
“No buts! No guns!” I turned to Marie. “I don’t suppose you know anyone who might help us?”
She shook her head. “No, but I remember they’re kind of traditional. If we go down as a couple, that might confuse them long enough to start talking.”
We’d spent the last few weeks living as husband and wife on the flight here, although the survivalists wouldn’t know that. We could just as easily have been BBI representatives come to tell them they had twenty four hours to find another planet before we destroyed them from orbit.
When the airlock outer door began to cycle open, Marie grabbed me and we kissed for a long time. By the time we finished, the outer hatch was wide open and the lynch mob outside had lowered their guns and were watching us curiously.
“We have an audience,” I said.
“I knew they wouldn’t shoot a pair of unarmed lovers!”
“So the kiss was just to manipulate these poor country folk!”
“Maybe,” she said slyly.
“You’re the most scheming woman I’ve ever met.”
“You’ve only just worked that out?”
I sighed. “Shall we go meet them?”
“Let’s,” she said taking my arm as if we were simply going for an evening stroll.
We climbed down onto the petrified mega branch and walked slowly towards the welcoming committee.
“Good day folks,” I said. “Who’s in charge?”
* * * *
Julius Klasson was lanky and sun-tanned with rough stubble on his chin and an easy manner. He was also the nearest thing the survivalists had to a leader. He lived in a simple cottage made of petrified wood bricks quarried from the forest and decorated with furniture made of the same material, polished smooth to bring out their metallic colors.
“You’re lucky to be alive,” Klasson said as he motioned us to a stone bench seat fitted with hand sewn cushions. He took a large single stone chair, adding, “Some of our folks shoot strangers on sight.”
Hospitality was clearly not required to survive on a post-mass extinction world.
“All strangers, or just those from BBI?” Marie asked pointedly.
“No difference. They all want to level our homes, and we ain’t going to let them.”
The dirt-poor farmers outside scratching in shallow trenches with hand tools couldn’t have appeared less formidable. The impression was accentuated by Klasson’s Spartan house and simple clothes.
“BBI’s a big corporation with a lot of money,” I said. “No offense, but you don’t look like you’re in any position to stop them.”
“Looks can be deceiving flyboy.” He glanced meaningfully at an ancient long barreled hunting rifle perched against the stone wall. “We’ve been shooting up their shiny little bits of junk for years.”
“When they’re ready, the Consortium will come in here with mercenaries packing state of the art firepower. You won’t be able to stop them with a handful of antique guns.”
“Watch me.”
I liked his courage, but doubted his sanity.
“They want to terraform this planet,” Marie said. “You’ve already started. Why not make a deal with them?”
“We ain’t changin’ the planet, we’re adaptin’ to it. Yeah, we brought kelp, and sea urchins to eat the kelp, and otters to eat the sea urchins, and we eat them all, but we didn’t destroy the dinotrees to do it. We live with them.”
Dinosaur trees? I glanced through the window at the gigantic stone mega-trees Refuge clung to. In a way, they were like dinosaurs, only bigger.
“This planet is nearly dead,” I said.
“Not dead! Comin’ back to life. The forest is full of small animals, insects, even our vines. We scattered seeds from the air about seventy years ago. Now the vines are all across this continent. In another hundred years, this continent will be green again.” He glanced at the thickening, leafy vines snaking around the enormous limbs of the dinotrees thoughtfully. “They want to terraform the planet with high explosives, but we don’t need to do that. We can live here just as it is.”
It didn’t matter whether Klasson was right or wrong, once BBI’s plan was accepted by the Earth Council, large scale demolition would begin and there would be nothing he could do about it.
Klasson saw the skepticism in my eyes. “We were here first. They can go find their own damn planet.”
“They’ve deleted all record of your existence,” Marie said. “There’s nothing left to support your claim.”
“There’s us. We’re proof.”
“Not if you’re dead,” I said. One minute’s bombardment from orbit and all that’d be left of him or his bedraggled tree farmers would be a pile of ash.
“You sure you don’t work for ‘em?”
“I don’t, but I intend to pay them a visit.”
Klasson eyes narrowed. “Why would you want to do that?”
“They’ve got something of mine, something I intend to get back.”
“What would that be?”
“An alien artifact,” Marie said. “We’re . . . collectors.�
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Klasson gave us a dubious look. “Hmph.” He stood and retrieved a triangular metallic object from a stone shelf and threw it to me. “What’s that worth to you?”
I turned the object over in my hand, noting it was marked with a script I’d never seen before. “What is it?”
“You tell me, Mr Collector. There used to be aliens here millions of years ago, before the Tree Killer ripped the guts out of the planet. They must have cleared out fast, because they left a lot of stuff behind.”
“Alien tech?” Marie asked, smelling an opportunity.
“Relics. You just got to know where to look.”
“Which aliens?”
Klasson shrugged. “Don’t know. Never paid much attention to the ruins. Never met an alien.”
I turned the artifact over in my hands curiously. Whatever it was, its power source had depleted long ago. I tossed it back to him. “Thanks, but I’m after something specific.”
He returned the relic to its decorative position on the shelf. “So you’re going to steal something from those BBI lab monkeys and you don’t want them knowing you’re coming. Right? And you figure I can help you.”
I nodded. “Do you know a way in?”
Klasson grunted noncommittally. “It’s a big base and it’s well guarded.”
“You’ve been there?”
“They kidnapped one of my people a few years back – for questioning. I went in with some of the boys and got him out.” His leathery face slowly cracked a smile. “They don’t kidnap our people no more.”
Clearly there was more to that story, but I was already certain he was our man. “How’d you get in?”
“Walked in. Shot up the place. Walked out. Home in time for supper.”
Klasson might have been nuts, fighting a war he could never win, but I was beginning to like him. “Feel like another walk?”
His face darkened. “They’ve increased their security since then. Got a lot of tech guarding the place now.”
“What we’re looking for will be with their picometric scanner,” Marie said. “Ever heard of it?”
“Nope, but the lab’s on the east side.”
“Help us and we’ll help you,” Marie said.
“How you going to help me?”
“We’ll bring you weapons,” she said.
I gave Marie a surprised look. “We will?”
“You don’t look like no gun runner,” Klasson said.
“I’m not,” Marie said putting her arm around my shoulders, “But Sirius here is one of the best smugglers not in jail.” She turned towards me. “Aren’t you?”
I’d smuggled contraband, just to make ends meet, but running guns was another matter. As far as the navy was concerned, that was a capital crime, punishable by death. “What do you need?”
“Better guns, smarter ammo and a few sat killers.”
“How many guns?”
“A thousand.”
Was this guy equipping an insurrection or an army? Even so, a few hundred hardened survivalists sneaking through Deadwood’s petrified forests taking shots at terraformers with modern weapons could tie up BBI and the Consortium for years. I found the idea strangely appealing.
“Got any money?” I asked.
“Nope. Have you?”
I still had Lena’s credit vault. Would she mind if I used it to pay for a small war on a dead planet? I knew Armin’s Armaments had everything Klasson wanted, even satellite killers, but they were illegal and would draw the attention of navy spies. “I’ll get you a hundred guns, spare parts and enough smart ammo to keep you in business for the next twenty years, but no sat killers.”
Klasson considered the offer a moment. “If you get killed, I get nothing.”
“If I get killed, I won’t be dying alone.”
His weathered face took on a calculating look as he wondered how many BBI goons I could take with me. He probably would have guided me to the base just to annoy BBI, treating any guns he got out of the deal as a bonus. “How many of you?”
“Both of us,” I replied, “And my engineer . . . He’s a tamph.”
The survivalist arched his brow curiously. “Never met one. Heard of ‘em. This planet would suit tamphs, down on the equator. Ain’t much life in the oceans, not much for ‘em to eat, but the climate’s good. Throw a few fish out there and they’d be right at home.”
“Izin could tell his friends on Earth. If they got here, BBI would never get rid of them.”
“Hmm. I heard tamphs are good fighters.”
“You have no idea.” Because of their history, tamphs weren’t allowed in the military or the EIS, and because of their inhuman abilities, they weren’t allowed guns on Earth. Even so, legends persisted from the ancient past of what they were capable of. Having seen Izin fight, I knew the legends were true.
Klasson looked thoughtful, perhaps imagining tamphs swarming through the warm equatorial waters to the south, then he said, “For a hundred guns, parts and ammo, I’ll get you to the base. After that you’re on your own.”
“You got a deal,” I said.
Klasson picked up a plate of dried, spiced seaweed. “Hungry?”
* * * *
Julius Klasson’s aircraft was an old sub-orbital ferry armed with a pair of modified laser mining drills. It could destroy undefended robotic science stations in a few passes, but its makeshift weapons barely qualified it as a combat vehicle. That didn’t seem to bother the survivalist leader, who flew the rusting ferry like he was piloting a strike fighter.
“You’d do better trading for spare parts than guns,” I yelled over the rattling ferry’s noisy engines as we skimmed the ocean at mach four.
A tangled cliff of dinotrees slid up over the horizon ahead, marking the location of Deadwood’s largest continent. It straddled the sub-tropics south of the equator, was dissected by snow capped mountains in the north and stretched to a slender spur of land in the south that almost reached to the pole.
“If you can find me parts, I’ll take ‘em,” Klasson said, “But I still want them guns.”
He nosed up, climbing high enough to pass over the top of the petrified forest before leveling off closer to the stone canopy than safety or common sense dictated. Occasionally, he dropped into valleys or skirted tall dinotrees, sometimes flying under massive branches or through openings that seemed barely large enough for his aircraft.
“When will we be in sensor range?”
“Soon,” Klasson replied. “The base is in a caldera. We’ll use the crater wall for cover. You’ll have to make your own way down from there.”
“Why’d they put it on top of a volcano?”
“A super volcano,” Klasson corrected. “It’s been dead a couple of million years. They went there because it’s the largest open space on the planet, and has a lake in the middle. Cheaper than clearing land and building a dam.”
I glanced back at Marie and Izin sitting behind us on cramped jump seats. Marie gave me an anxious look, unimpressed by Klasson’s reckless flying.
Beside her, Izin had one of his large eyes close to a window, studying the petrified forest below. “What are the small flying animals called?” he asked.
“Where?” Marie said excitedly, turning towards a window.
“There,” Izin said, pointing at spot in the forest at least ten kilometers away.
Marie squinted, unable to see what Izin’s naturally telescopic vision had picked out.
“Tree gliders,” Klasson said. “Aggressive little bastards. Won’t attack a man by ‘emselves, but a pack of them will eat you alive.”
“There are carnivores here?” I said, surprised any apex predators had survived the Tree Killer mass extinction.
“Hell yeah. They eat rock hoppers mostly, little rat-like critters that live off moss and fungus, but it’s the saberwolfs you got to watch out for.”
“Saberwolf?”
“That’s what we call them,” Klasson said. “Their teeth are sharp as hell and they’re fast lit
tle buggers. Bigger than a dog, quiet as a cat, mean as the devil. They’ll take your leg off before you even know they’re there.”
“Any in the crater?”
“Yeah, but they stick to the trees mostly. Nothing on this planet likes open spaces. Be tough for them if BBI destroys the forest.”
“At least you wouldn’t have to worry about them eating you,” Marie said.
“I don’t give it a thought,” Klasson said. “And I don’t want ‘em wiped out. It’s their planet. They got more right to be here than we do.”
Izin leaned forward. “Can you eat them?”
Klasson glanced back at Izin curiously, unused to speaking with tamphs or to the sound of Izin’s synthesized vocalizer. “Yeah, but by the time you cook ‘em enough to kill the local bugs, the meat’s no good. It’s like eating boot leather. We prefer our Earth animals. Trouble is, so do they!”
“They’re not affected by the organisms in your animals?” I asked.
“Ain’t none. Everythin’ our grandparents brung went through full decon. Even them! They didn’t come here to poison this planet.”
The petrified forest began to show signs of broken trunks and branches. Soon the entire forest lay on its side, felled millions of years ago by a devastating volcanic eruption triggered by the Tree Killer’s passing gravity. Giant angular roots, torn from the ground, rose up sharply out of the lava plain. The petrified dinotrees all lay aligned away from the source of the ancient blast, now marked by a ragged cliff rising hundreds of meters into the air.
Klasson banked slowly as we approached the caldera’s rocky rim wall, coming around to cruise just below the crest as we looked for a landing spot.
“That’ll do,” Klasson said at last as he rotated his ferry’s two wing engines to the vertical, slowing to hover. He nosed over onto a narrow perch just large enough for the landing struts, leaving the tail of his aircraft jutting out over the cliff.
“How do we get down the other side?” I asked.
“You slide,” he said with a grin, adding, “it’s not as sheer as this side.”
Klasson threw his shoulder against the squeaking side door, forcing it open, then we filed out after him. As soon as Izin was outside the aircraft, he moved as far from the cliff’s edge as possible.
Mapped Space 1: The Antaran Codex Page 22
