Xenotech General Mayhem: A Novel of the Galactic Free Trade Association (Xenotech Support Book 4)

by Dave Schroeder

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Further Adventures

  Dedication & Copyright

  About the Author

  Series Reading Order

  Prologue

  “We are made wise not by the recollection of our past,

  but by the responsibility for our future.”

  — George Bernard Shaw

  “When are you going to tell him?” asked Shepherd.

  “When I work up the courage,” said the man.

  “No time like the present,” said the Pâkk.

  “I know,” said the man, “but I don’t want him to hate me.”

  “It may be too late for that.”

  “Perhaps,” said his companion, “though Jack’s a better man than I am.”

  “So tell him and give him the chance to find that out for himself,” said Shepherd.

  “Soon,” said the man. “When his life’s not so complicated.”

  Shepherd laughed.

  “What?” asked his companion.

  “That won’t be soon.”

  Chapter 1

  “Cliffhanger: noun, a situation of imminent disaster.”

  — WordReference.com

  I hoped the piton held—and wished I hadn’t had such a big appetite over the past few days in Las Vegas. My extra pounds were making it harder for me to support myself and putting more stress on the small sliver of metal my life depended on. I was three-quarters of the way up a vertical rock face five hundred feet tall. It was sandstone, one side of a big butte not far from town, and I was scaling it to rescue my son, my lover, the mother of my child, her brother, and his girlfriend. They were all being held captive in an oligarch’s villa at the top—except that it was more of a fortress than a villa and was dug into the side of the butte, not really on top.

  The fortress villa had a great view of the lights of Las Vegas and was nearly impregnable. It could only be reached by lighter-than-air transports, and then only when a docking platform and mooring mast were extended from the villa by powerful motors. The top of the butte directly above was liberally seeded with antipersonnel mines and security cameras covered all the approaches from the front and the top.

  Approaches from the rear were a different matter. That’s why I was climbing—or more accurately, given my current situation—not climbing. I’d say “I like big buttes,” but I’d be lying. I didn’t like this one at all—especially because the sky looked like rain. Climbing dry sandstone is challenging—climbing wet sandstone is suicidal.

  I’d done a little mountaineering in Alaska and New Mexico with my stepdad and had learned how to climb clean, using chocks, not pitons, to protect the integrity of the rock. The piton my rope and I were attached to—the one I wasn’t sure would hold—was probably close to a century old, a legacy of some forgotten adventurer from the nineteen-thirties.

  I was looking for a spot above me where I could plant a chock, but nothing appropriate was in reach. Then a drop of rain decided to have a party on the tip of my nose and invite its friends.

  “Jack,” said my phone. “You’re running out of time. Once the sandstone gets wet…”

  “I know,” I said. “It will change from stone to mud. Can you spot a crack where I can set a nut?”

  “Maybe,” it replied.

  My phone scuttled up my back from its usual spot on my belt and followed my right arm that was hanging onto the rope through the well-aged piton. It was carrying three chocks of varying sizes and a length of climbing rope on its back. When it reached my hand it grew a dozen new pseudopods with sharp points, jumped a few inches, and made its way up the cliff face by digging them into the soft rock.

  “Here’s a spot,” it said, setting a chock into a crack almost out of sight above me.

  The rain was changing from scattered showers to torrential downpour, which wasn’t good. It hardly ever rained in the Las Vegas basin, but hardly ever is not the same as never. The rope my phone carried wiggled and I grabbed it.

  “Ready for a test?” I asked.

  “Ready,” said my phone.

  I pulled on the rope, putting weight on it to confirm it would hold.

  It didn’t.

  The new chock came free and I watched the rope sail past me with my phone using more pseudopods than I could count to hang on to it. The rain was soaking the rock around the piton—it had probably never been wet and had a load on it over the decades—and the piton picked that moment to pull loose. The chock I’d set below the piton also came free from the rain-sodden rock and I was regretting the fact that this might truly be a cliffhanger ending for yours truly.

  I fell. It seemed like I was falling for a few hours, but it was only a few breaths. I expected to leave a Jack-sized hole in the desert floor, like Wile E. Coyote after a failed attempt to take out the Road Runner. Instead, I smacked into something well before reaching terminal velocity. It was painful, but my protective Kevlar-like pupa silk shirt stopped me from breaking any ribs. I still held the rope my phone had been clutching and maintained a secure grip on it as I examined my surroundings.

  I was in a large, bowl-shaped depression made of a dark, somewhat resilient material. Five tall pillars, topped by spiky formations were on one side and a long, green slope of regularly patterned rocky ground stretched above me on the other. I hadn’t remembered seeing anything like it on my way up, but then again, I’d been focused on the cliff in front of me, not looking behind.

  The torrential rain stopped as suddenly as it started and the hot Nevada sun dried me out. A few seconds later my phone crawled up the rope and joined me in the bowl. It was displaying a yellow smiley face on its screen with black oval eyes so big there wasn’t much room left for yellow.

  “What?” I said.

  “Look up,” said my phone.

  I tilted my head back and saw another cliff, covered in the same scaly green rocks. A huge overhang loomed above us and my monkey brain was afraid it would collapse and crush us. Giant pale stalagmites and stalactites were arranged in an even pattern on its near side. I was so slow on the uptake that I wondered what geological forces could have formed
them.

  “Now look down,” my phone suggested.

  I leaned so I could see over the edge of the bowl and saw several hundred feet of empty air below me. Two strange symmetric green hills had mysteriously appeared nearby, leading to a pair of massive green pillars stretching up toward my refuge. Then the huge overhang tilted towards us. The stalagmites and stalactites separated and an eye the size of an adult Dauushan’s head appeared even higher in the rock face.

  The overhang wasn’t a natural rock formation—it was the snout of a green scaly monster, hundreds of feet tall. Its massive mouth, with dozens of sharp teeth, not ’tites and ’mites, opened wider. Then it roared—with a noise like a thunderclap and a rush of unpleasant-smelling wind like a tornado in a sulfur factory.

  “Sorry about that,” said a voice that was deceptively normal-sounding, given the size of the being doing the talking. “I knew I shouldn’t have had extra onions on my burrito.”

  I felt myself being lifted closer to the monster’s jaws and saw a huge tongue, larger than a politician’s ego, moving inside its mouth. It would have been licking its lips, if it had lips.

  “Don’t eat me!” I squeaked.

  “He doesn’t have good taste!” added my phone. “That is, he doesn’t taste good!”

  I was strangely comforted to know my phone was as weirded out as I was.

  “No worries, guys,” said the voice. “I just ate.” Then the creature belched again, as if to emphasize its point. It lifted us even closer to one of its huge eyes.

  “Are you okay?” the gigantic being asked, sounding sincere, not scary.

  My brain had trouble taking everything in, but my gray matter finally managed to integrate the details of what it had felt, seen and heard. I was in the palm of some sort of creature out of a Japanese monster movie, or a Tyrannosaurus Rex with a major pituitary problem. The arms were wrong for a tyrannosaur, though. They were too long. This big guy’s arms were so long it could probably touch its toes—which were likely at one end of those mysterious new hills below me.

  “We’re okay,” I shouted. “Thanks for the save.”

  “You don’t have to be so loud,” said the voice. “My ears are big, too.”

  I stared up at the humongous eye again and saw a giant scaly green bunny ear flick straight up, then fold back down against the creature’s neck in what I took to be a nervous gesture.

  “Would you mind putting me on top of the butte?” I asked.

  It looked like the giant’s arms would reach that far.

  “No problem,” said the voice.

  The enormous entity didn’t lift me up—it grew until it was taller than the butte and able to place me, and my phone, gently at the top of the cliff. Thank goodness the antipersonnel mines were supposed to be concentrated on the other half of the butte’s surface.

  “Wow!” said my phone. “You can violate the cube square law!”

  “It’s no big deal,” said the voice. “I was told my species can manipulate our size and mass using internal congruencies.”

  The giant proved its point by planting its arms on top of the butte, shrinking down to human size, and levering itself over the cliff edge.

  “I’m Gustávish, by the way,” said the saurian, “but you can call me Gus. I have a gig for Kingsworth Electronics at GALTEX later this afternoon. I’m supposed to play a really big threat to network security.”

  “Typecasting,” said my phone, its words tinged with awe.

  “Jack Buckston,” I replied, extending my hand to shake with Gus. Thank goodness his claws were retractable.

  Then a loud and irreverent voice spoke up two inches from my left ear.

  “Are you tellin’ me your species has a built-in congruency, too?”

  “Chit, be nice,” I said.

  “Is the bug on your shoulder talking?” asked Gus.

  “Dang right I’m talkin’, buster. Murms are the only species in the Galaxy that evolved with a built-in congruency,” grumbled my little friend.

  “I don’t think so,” said Gus. “Though maybe you’re right. Gojons don’t have a built-in congruency. We have three of them. One for mass, one for temperature control, and one for energy.”

  “I’ve never heard of Gojons,” said Chit. “And I’ve heard of everybody.”

  “My apologies, but Gojo was only recently discovered. Our star is out near the end of the Sagittarius-Carina spiral arm. We’re the newest member species in the Galactic Free Trade Association.”

  My phone bleeped and blooped a few times, then reported.

  “Gus is correct,” it said, “according to the latest report from the Joint GaFTA Exploratory Corps, they were found by a Nicósn scout ship six months ago.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” I said. “I’ve never run into anyone from a species that can radically change size before.”

  “It comes in handy when you’re dealing with the local flora and fauna on Gojo,” said Gus.

  I made a mental note not to put visiting Gojo high on my bucket list. Then my phone chimed in with an inane and borderline-impolite question.

  “Can you breathe radioactive fire?”

  “Only when I eat too many jalapeños,” said Gus.

  I knew the feeling and was beginning to like the Gojon. Like a lot of big guys—and actors—he seemed to be shy and insecure underneath a blustering façade.

  “How come GaFTA had to discover you, instead of you discoverin’ GaFTA?” asked Chit, belligerently. “Didn’t you have congruent space travel?”

  “No, we hadn’t developed space travel on our own,” said Gus, “but we have internal congruencies, so we could join. The scout ship’s first officer said there was a precedent for that sort of thing.”

  “Murms are that precedent,” grumbled Chit. “Gol’ durn giants with three internal congruencies…”

  The rest of her rant faded into mumbles.

  “Terrans didn’t develop congruent space travel,” I said. “How did we get in?”

  “Space travel’s optional,” said Chit. “It’s discoverin’ congruencies that’s important. Besides, the galactic networks couldn’t wait to get their hands on your content.”

  “Just how long had you Galactics been observing us before we got our invitation?” I asked.

  “You don’t wanna know, buddy boy.”

  Maybe I didn’t. I distracted myself with another question.

  “Why are you wandering around out here in the desert, Gus?”

  “Nerves,” said the Gojon. “I get anxious before I perform and walking helps me calm down.”

  “Good to know,” I said. “I’m glad you were nearby.”

  “Me, too,” said Gus. “You seem like a nice guy and if I can estimate Terrans’ ages correctly, you’re too young to die.”

  “You’ve got that right, my friend,” I said.

  Then my phone made a bleep and a comment.

  “Poly and Max and Rosalind and Cornell and Sally aren’t going to rescue themselves.”

  It wasn’t a completely accurate statement. I gave odds of better than fifty percent that Poly and Rosalind, at least, could pull off their own rescue. Still, it was smart of my phone to get me back on task.

  “Thanks again for your help, Gus,” I said, “but I’ve got to get moving. People’s lives may be at stake.”

  “Is it going to be an adventure?” asked the Gojon, bouncing his kangaroo-like tail. At human size, his enthusiasm was more endearing than frightening.

  “Based on past experience…” said my phone.

  “…the odds are good,” said Chit.

  Chapter 2

  “The best fortress which a prince can possess

  is the affection of his people.”

  — Niccolò Machiavelli

  Gus asked if he could join us and I said “Sure.” Having a size-changing saurian on our team seemed like a plus. Chit and I had a plan for getting into the oligarch’s fortress villa, but it had room for improvisation.

  Our new Gojo
n friend wouldn’t be able to fit into my Blend Into the Scenery coverall with me, and I was counting on that to get me past the security cameras above the villa. The B.I.T.S. coverall in my backpack tool bag had been a gift from one of my clients. It was made from Orishen morphabric and bent light to make its wearer effectively invisible. Originally designed for stage hands who needed to be unseen when moving sets during performances, it had saved my life on more than one occasion. I’d also found some spare B.I.T.S. cloth, but Poly had that now and used it as a poncho. I wondered if Gus could curl up and imitate a rock for the cameras. I explained the situation to him.

  “…and that will make it very difficult to sneak up on the fortress villa.”

  “No problem,” said Gus.

  He grew until he was twenty feet tall, leaned over me, and shrank to the size of a praying mantis, landing on my right shoulder. Chit, on my left shoulder, did not sound happy to have company. The two of them started an argument on either side of my neck, debating the virtues of their respective species—with particular concern for their internal congruencies. Chit pushed for quality over quantity, while Gustávish couldn’t understand how any species unable to change size could be worth much in the galactic scheme of things. It felt like I had an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, though I couldn’t tell you which one was which. While their words echoed back and forth through my empty skull—at least it would have been easier if my skull had been empty—I found my B.I.T.S. coverall in my backpack tool bag and started to put it on. Chit and Gus put their discussion on hold while they found places to nestle next to my ears that allowed them to see out the thin face-panel on my coverall.

  “You can continue your conversation about the merits of your species later,” I said. “Murms have instantaneous communications and Gojons can change size. Apples. Oranges.”

  “More like apples and kumquats,” muttered Chit.

  “Or raisins and watermelons,” said Gus, giving as good as he got.

  “Table it, please,” I said. “This next stage is tricky and I need to focus.”

  I put the climbing rope back in my backpack tool bag and found the small B.I.T.S. cloth covering that rendered my backpack invisible as well. Then I put on my pack by feel and followed my phone as it crawled toward the opposite side of the butte.