Mission Pack 3: Missions 9-12 (Black Ocean Mission Pack)

by J. S. Morin

  “Your captain mentioned exiles, too. You guys all political refugees?” As best he knew, Urbok—the stuunji home planet—had the same ARGO status as Meyang. It was a protectorate, which meant they’d been conquered.

  “We are free. Much as we hate the Eyndar dogs who plague this region, their treaty with ARGO opened the path for our colonization out here.”

  They passed an observation deck, a room where a pair of stuunji meditated before an altar, and a cafeteria that smelled like a garden after a rainstorm. Roddy took it all in, trying to keep his questions to a minimum. Curiosity was good in the general sense, but he knew he had a penchant for wearing thin his welcome—something he could ill-afford at this point.

  A door opened with a gnashing of unseen mechanisms, and Roddy followed Pahn Ro inside.

  The stuunji medical bay looked to Roddy’s trained eye like it might have once been a refitting garage for hover-cruisers. There were four beds, and the blinking equipment and vital sign indicators showed one of them was occupied. Roddy was going to have to find high ground to see its occupant.

  Pahn Ro led Roddy to the bedside. Seeming to notice his lack of stature, he set the case for a hand scanner on the floor as a stepping stone. With a half meter added to ground level, Roddy could peer over the edge and see Amy lying there unconscious. There was a contraption that fit over her head like a clear plastic bubble with tubes coming out. Grossly oversized for her human head, it would have been a comfortable fit over a stuunji cranium.

  “How is she?”

  “She died briefly, I’m told. But if there is one species in this half of the galaxy whose medical treatments are widely known, it is humans. Half our equipment is human-built. It was no difficult task reviving her—though there was some dispute as to whether we should let the Lord keep the soul He had gathered to His breast.”

  “Well, thanks for going with reviving her. There’d be hell to pay if I got her killed out here.”

  Pahn Ro nodded sagely. “Tell me, which is she? Is this Tanny or Esper?”

  Roddy’s tongue caught in his throat. So that was the deciding factor? These guys were assuming Amy had been one of the Mobius crew for the Gologlex job. Scared, sober little thoughts raced circles in Roddy’s head. Esper was the hero of the day there, if anyone had gotten a proper accounting of that story. But any physical description that might have gone along with it would be hard to reconcile if they took a good look at her. Tanny was brawny and gruff, but he could work with that cover story. What was brawny to a stuunji, anyway? And if Roddy made a point of calling her Tanny when she woke up, he was pretty sure he could convince Amy to play along. If she slipped up and used her real name, he could always say they were traveling under aliases.

  “Neither. This is Amy, she wasn’t with us on Gologlex, but she’s Carl’s mate.”

  Pahn Ro patted Amy’s hand with gentleness at odds with his vast bulk. “Well, it is good to meet another noble human. I’m no zealot; I know some of them aren’t bad at all. I’ll go find one of the doctors and have him wake her up. You can wait here with her.”

  In the quiet that followed—punctuated by the hiss of the assisted-breathing machine—Roddy could only stare down at Amy in wonder. He’d had a plausible, defensible lie all cooked up and ready to go. If the stuunji were going to run a DNA scan and check it against ARGO identity records, they’d have done it already. They were just going to take Roddy’s word, and he could have turned Amy the Nobody into Tanny, Savior of Stuunji Slaves. They might have held a feast in their honor (maybe even with booze).

  Instead, Roddy had told the simple truth, and nothing had happened. The gnawing paranoia while operating under a life-or-death lie just wasn’t there. It felt… liberating.

  # # #

  “You can’t be talking about the same girl who ran away from New Singapore,” Samson said, shaking his head. “Given the stuff we found clearing out her room, she wasn’t shy about anything.”

  Mort chuckled. “Not only that, the store owner didn’t believe in mannequins—had all his merchandise displayed on live male models. I think Carl knew in advance and kept it quiet, but Esper was totally blindsided. She shut her eyes so tight you could hear the lids creaking under the pressure. Had to walk her through the place like a seeing-eye dog. Well, we settle into a quiet corner of the store while Carl and the owner haggle over details, and eventually there’s this soft electro-ding that says the place is closing for the day. I—ahem—may have given her the all-clear before realizing that the models don’t take the display clothes home with them.”

  Samson let out a hoot. “The Esper I knew would’ve cat-called and tried to tip them.”

  “Well, she went so red I thought she might explode. You know, like one of them old-timey bombs that gets redder and redder until… kaboom!”

  The skeptical look furrowing between Samson’s brows gave Mort a moment’s pause.

  “They had those.”

  Samson shook his head and shrugged. “I’m no historian, but that sounds like a wizard’s tale to me. No offense.”

  “Bah! Martians. What do any of you know about proper wizarding? Anyway, I’ve got another one. You ever see Esper with a hangover?”

  “Only every Saturday and Sunday morning when I was home visiting. She was a wild thing. Me and Napoleon took care of Mom and Dad, but they turned right around and spoiled Esper rotten to the core. I’m glad she got herself cleaned up. If you don’t get us killed, I’m really looking forward to seeing her again.”

  Mort heaved an exasperated sigh. “Now you’ve done it. Just gone and ruined the whole ‘getting your mind off landing on a deity-infested planet.’”

  “Well, we’re starting our approach now, anyway.”

  “Just starting? Haven’t we been approaching the bloody moon this whole time? It’s sure as toast been getting bigger out the window.”

  “It’s a term. The approach is where we get ready to land.”

  “Bugger of a thing, calling a landing an approach. That’s like calling a romp a tickle.”

  The moon was indeed taking up most of the forward window of the shuttle. Much as Mort would have loved to beleaguer the subject, something in Samson’s demeanor warned him off. His shoulders were bunched, and there was a sheen of sweat across his forehead. When the planet disappeared from view and the window filled with the vaporous fog endemic to the moon’s upper atmosphere, Samson’s breathing quickened.

  In an attempt to keep the mood light, Mort began to hum. It took him a moment to identify the tune his brain had chosen while he wasn’t paying attention. Once he did, he smirked at remembering the off-color lyrics. But if Samson was even aware of Mort’s musical attempt, he gave no indication. Samson continued to tug on the handlebars and poke at buttons. Half a dozen smaller screens vied for his attention. With the windows filled unhelpfully with opaque fog, his pilot kept his focus there.

  If there were something Mort could have done, he’d have snapped to it like a bellhop at the Ritz. There weren’t many places left on Earth where a man could get law-abiding humans to do menial service jobs, but the Ritz was one of them. Of course, aboard a starship, the most useful thing Mort could do was nothing at all. So that’s what he did. On the off chance that Devraa had some science-warping magic on this moon as well, it was all the better that he keep a tight grip on the current rules of science.

  “We almost there?”

  “Don’t know.”

  Mort had a vague notion that glancing over Samson’s shoulder would have revealed their remaining flying time. Hearing that he didn’t know was… less than comforting. While Mort would never like science, there were certain facets of its flawed and vexsome existence that one could count on. Chief among these was supposed to be reliability. Science picked its facts and stuck with them. They didn’t know how to change the rules midway through, so once such a pronouncement had been made, that was that. Simple arithmetic could figure out how long it would take to land if the science gizmos told you how far you were and ho
w fast you were going. Samson not knowing meant that at least one key bit of information was in absence.

  “Need me to—?”

  “NO!” Samson snapped. Considering that the lad knew damn well who his passenger was and the sort of things he might—strictly theoretically—do to someone who talked back to him, Mort thought better of pressing the issue. If it looked like they really were going to crash, then he’d reconsider.

  The shuttle broke through the cloud cover into a dingy off-white panorama of plains and mountains. It was like an old map of Luna without the sharp bits filed smooth. Didn’t bode well for the prospect of air out there on the other side of the glass, but Mort had resigned himself to that likelihood.

  Mort felt his gorge rise as the terrain drew ever closer. It occurred to him that he knew next to nothing about Samson Richelieu’s qualifications as a pilot. He’d just wanted to get to know Esper’s elder brother. Accustomed to decorated, military-trained pilots growing like weeds everywhere he looked, Mort was used to a certain grace under pressure and certainly an assurance of a safe landing. A quick glance at the controls told Mort nothing—they were gibberish, same as ever.

  A thump reverberated through the ship. There was no jolt to accompany it, but the view stopped shifting in the window. Samson slouched back in his seat and let out a long breath. “We made it.”

  “Made it? Egads, that was the easy part. Which way is it to that central point the laaku woman kept yammering about?”

  With visible effort, Samson drew himself up in the pilot’s seat and browsed the control console. “Now don’t hold me to this… we lost scanner feeds around the time we hit atmosphere. This is all based on speeds and lunar rotation and—”

  “Just spit it out.”

  “Far side of that rise. Maybe a couple kilos.”

  Not wanting to start a metrology debate, Mort tried to remember the relationship between kilometers and miles. Two-to-one was the rule of thumb, if he remembered correctly, and he was leaning toward miles being the larger of the two. But either way, he was looking at either a mile’s walk or four. The former would be mildly inconvenient, the latter rather more a bother. Neither was disastrous.

  “I can’t tell you if there’s anything to breathe out there. I mean, odds are there isn’t. I brought a couple portable breathers. Thought you might end up needing one.”

  Mort patted him on the shoulder. “Good lad. Thanks, but I’ll be fine.” He dug into a pocket and pulled out a necklace of glass beads. Each whorled and swirled with pale blue radiance.

  “What’s that?”

  “Oh, little knickknack I picked up at the Kilimanjaro Summit gift shop. It’s a bit touristy for my taste, but I took my wife for her thirtieth birthday. Here, try it on.”

  Samson cringed but allowed Mort to slip the necklace over his head. There was a faint rush of wind. “What’s that smell?”

  “Supposedly the scent of the ancient African savanna. Blast me if I’d know any different. Took it along when I figured I’d be on a lot of starships, breathing scienced-up air. Then I learned that when the life support goes kerflooey, it’s not suffocation that kills the crew. I also learned that sciencey air smells better than ancient African wildlife. But the thing is, this thing’ll generate Essence of Wildebeest anywhere. It’s better than nothing; and frankly, that’s probably the only thing it’s better than.”

  Mort reclaimed his necklace and slipped it over his own head. “Pleaugh. I should look into getting one of these that comes in evergreen grove, or maybe Bavarian food festival—though being constantly hungry might be a downside there. In any event, pop the hatch and set me down.”

  “Oh, no you don’t. Sorry, Mort, but you’re going out the airlock.”

  In a flash, Mort prepared to rend the limbs from Samson’s body. The traitor was about to airlock him! But the impulse drained away when Mort remembered that airlocks—used responsibly—had a purpose besides deep-space executions.

  The airlock reminded Mort of the cryo pod they’d found with Mriy’s cousin in it—small, metal, and at the mercy of controls on the outside. Mort’s staff barely fit inside, and the hem of his ceremonial robes caught in the door the first time they tried to close it. “Damn techno-coffin wants to eat me,” he muttered. There was a faint echo.

  A moment later, the door on the far side opened, and a pair of stairs folded down, leading to the surface. As Mort set foot on the rocky ground, the stairs retracted, and the airlock door closed. From the cockpit, Samson waved to Mort through the window.

  It was bitterly cold. The temptation to summon fire and warm the vicinity warred with the knowledge that he needed that shuttle to get off this moon. Any sudden burst of magic might endanger his escape plan. Instead, Mort resolved to simply ignore the cold and decline its effects on his body.

  The sky was overcast, but enough light was filtering through that it must have been daytime. Without Shoni of Ikuzu to interpret the spins and orbits, he was at a loss to say how long that light would last. Samson had pointed in the direction of a ridgeline halfway between a mountain and a hill. With a uniform barren rockiness all around, it was hard to judge scale and distance. Staff in hand, he trudged off to see what lay beyond.

  # # #

  Kubu did not like Mommy’s new friends. They were not fun to walk with. None of them said anything nice to Kubu—or to Mommy or Mriy for that matter. They argued a lot, and they all had pointy spears meant for hunting but got used in the arguing, too. Kubu hoped he never got mad enough at anyone that he had to point a spear at them because his paws had a hard time gripping anything thin and round.

  Everyone had gone on a long walk, and part of it was through a sneaky tunnel under a mountain. There was a big rock blocking the tunnel, and it took three of Mommy’s friends to move it. Kubu offered to help, but nobody listened.

  Now they were in one of the jungle cities. It was like the ones Mort liked to break, except Mort hadn’t broken this one yet. All the tall, pointy rock towers were standing, and Mommy was leading the way toward one of them. Kubu was finally going to get to talk to this Devraa person who everyone was always worried about!

  Mriy laid a hand on Kubu’s shoulder. “Remain calm. Play along for now.” She used her very quiet voice, the one that most people’s ears weren’t good enough to hear. Kubu had very good ears.

  Kubu wanted to tell Mriy that he was pretty sure that no one here was looking to play. Thinking that this was play time might get Mriy in trouble. But while Mriy had very good ears too, Kubu couldn’t do the quiet voice. Even his quietest voice was too loud for people not to hear.

  Kubu’s tummy was rumbly. They hadn’t stopped for a snack or let Kubu run off to hunt since they found each other. At times, Kubu wondered what went on in human tummies. Certainly not much. Food sat in a human tummy for a long time before it went away and the tummy demanded more. Kubu hoped that this big talk with Devraa was short, and that there was a feast afterward.

  This was Kubu’s first time going up one of the big ramps that went ‘round and ‘round the towers. Mort knocked them down before letting Kubu have a chance to go up. He could see a long way over the sides, over the tops of the big grass and over the littler buildings. The times he tried to stop and really take a good look, someone bumped him or grumbled something mean to make him start up again. If they had been something other than people, Kubu would have just knocked them all off the ramp for being so mean. But it was wrong to hurt people, and these were most certainly people.

  Kubu sighed. Being a good boy wasn’t always easy.

  Near the top of the tower, the ramp ended at a doorway. It was a nice doorway, big enough that Kubu didn’t have to squeeze to get through. On the inside, the tower was hollow like a knock-knock fruit but less tasty. There were lots of tilted beds made of rock, and Mommy’s friends laid down on them, looking up. It was the middle of the day, and Kubu wasn’t sleepy. He just hoped that they would let him go find something to eat while everyone else napped.

  “Go on,�
� Mommy said, patting one of the rock beds. “We do this to talk to Devraa. Nothing to be afraid of.”

  Kubu had never been afraid of naps or of talking to people. “Do you talk to Devraa in nap time? Is it like that time we all went in Lloyd’s head?”

  Mommy blinked and looked at Kubu funny. “Um, no. This is nothing like that. It’s more like a big holovid theater. We’re all going to ask Devraa to talk to us, and usually, he answers.”

  “If he doesn’t answer, can we have lunch?”

  Mriy stepped over. “He eats more than you can imagine. In the time it took to get here, he could have eaten four meals.”

  “If this goes the way I think it’ll go, we can put together a little hunting party. I think everyone’ll love having Kubu around once they see how good a hunter he is.”

  Kubu wagged his tail.

  Since he wanted to get the talking over with and have lunch, and since he had been reassured there would be no napping, Kubu stepped onto one of the beds and lay down. While everyone else—even Mriy—lay on their backs, Kubu had to settle for curling up and twisting his head to look upside down toward the ceiling. Any other position had most of him flopping off the sides of the rock bed.

  “We gather,” one of Mommy’s friends said, using his outdoor voice. “Today we announce a new brother and sister to mighty Devraa, praise him for his wisdom.”

  Kubu took a quick glance around, looking for new brothers and sisters, but he didn’t see anyone else waiting to come in.

  “Devraa is wise,” Mommy’s friends all said at the same time.

  Kubu wasn’t sure whether he was supposed to say it too, since no one had told him. He stayed quiet, which usually got him in less trouble.

  “We listen for the voice of Devraa to judge the souls of these wayward hunters,” Mommy’s friend said.

  “Devraa, we listen,” everyone said at once. Well, everyone except Mriy and Kubu—even Mommy was saying it.

  “We open ourselves to you, Devraa!” Mommy’s friend shouted.

  That was when the ceiling went away. One minute, there was a ceiling; the next, the sky was above them. Kubu didn’t see it go, and it didn’t make a big noise like the ramp on the flying house. The sky was so very big today. The moons that drifted by at night like slow clouds were so close Kubu imagined he might leap up and chomp down on them—not that moons looked yummy, but chomping down on something juicy and delicious was taking up a lot of Kubu’s thinking.