Five sentrienza came aboard and drifted around the ship, poking at everything. The hoods of their drapey EVA suits cowled around their shoulders. They had masses of pale hair in light green and purple shades to match their slightly grayish complexions. It occurred to Colm that maybe everyone insisted the sentrienza were nice and friendly as a way of denying the obvious truth: they were creepy motherfuckers.
They interviewed Meg, Axel, and Tan. Name, birthplace, qualifications, expertise? It sounded like a job interview. Meg and Tan answered truthfully. Axel, with a mischievous grin dancing around his mouth, lied. He admitted to being a former Marine, but denied his relationship to Philip K. Best of Best Industries. Colm groaned inwardly, torn between approving of Axel’s presence of mind, and fearing that it was not smart to lie to the sentrienza.
However, the sentrienza didn’t question any of the answers they received. Nor did they interview Colm. They ordered him to de-orbit and land at Haravalding, one of the island spaceports near the equator.
He complied. The reentry gees were something fierce. The sentrienza did not use the couches in the cabin. They just balled themselves up on the aft wall like pillbugs. Creepy, and tough.
The Lady’s jackstands thumped down on flexible pavement splotched with salt and birdshit.
Blazing sunlight blinded Colm’s camera eyes.
He hastily dark-filtered the feed. So this was Juradis. Big haulers resembling nautilus shells dwarfed the Shady Lady. Further away, high, rickety-looking terminal buildings shimmered in the heat haze. Birds filled the sky. Roadkill baked on the tarmac. He engaged the hydraulics and lowered the ship to its horizontal position, reorienting the view.
“This ship is capable of taxiing,” the sentrienza said, landing gracefully on the floor. Though smaller than Earth, Juradis had a dense metallic core that gave it a near-terrestrial gravity field. “Slowly approach those hangars over there.”
Colm put down the wheels and taxied through the maze of large and small ships, into the shadow of a row of flat-roofed hangars.
“That one.”
Colm rolled the Shady Lady into the hangar the sentrienza indicated.
“Stop.”
Walking Guns surrounded the ship. Sentrienza in drab overalls clustered at a distance. Colm’s internal FUBAR-o-meter edged into the red zone.
“Disembark,” said the sentrienza behind him.
“Me?” he stalled.
“All of you.”
A strong mix of smells rushed in when he opened the airlocks. Sea air, rocket fuel, sun-baked seaweed. He could hear the sea, or maybe it was the roar of traffic. The sentrienza prodded all four humans down the steps. In the gloom of the hangar, the faces of the others reflected Colm’s own question: Just how screwed are we?
The leader of the sentrienza pointed to Meg, Tan, and Axel. “You are free to go.” A door shuttered up at the back of the hangar. Bright light and street noise flooded in. Engines, human voices, laughter, dogs barking. The sentrienza pointed to Colm. “You are not free to go. You are suspected of—” A string of gibberish. “We are therefore taking you into custody.”
Colm stared at the sentrienza. “I haven’t done anything.” Oh, who was he kidding? What hadn’t he done? But he was fairly sure he had not done whatever they were accusing him of, simply because he hadn’t had the chance to do anything in this star system yet.
“Yes, you have,” the sentrienza said with a hint of impatience.
“Never fear,” another sentrienza said. “The death penalty does not apply in all cases.”
Meg gasped, “Hold on! You’re going to kill him?”
Tan said, “You can’t do that. We’re citizens of the Human Republic. Doesn’t that count for anything around here?”
Axel looked at the door. Looked back at Colm. Jerked his chin imperceptibly.
Right.
If they took him into custody, he’d have no chance to escape. No chance to find the queazels and get to the bottom of their plot against humanity.
He sprinted towards the open door.
The sentrienza’s high, buzzing voices screamed at him. A Walking Gun lolloped out from under the Shady Lady and entangled his legs.
As he fell, he glimpsed Meg attacking two of the sentrienza with a flurry of punches and karate kicks.
Jesus, the Walking Guns will take her apart!
With a thought, he powered up the light railgun.
The housing clanked open. The prototype rocket shot out of the launch cradle, trailing smoke and flame from its solid rocket booster, and smashed into the back wall of the hangar.
The nose cone fragmented, triggering the detonator Colm had wired into it.
The oxyhydrogen payload exploded in a blue fireball. It spun up the wall like a firework gone amok. Flames licked over the walls, up to the roof.
Meg, Axel, and Tan ran back out to the spaceport.
Colm picked himself up. As the Walking Gun that had tripped him bounded back to help its master, he dashed out of the open door.
He hurtled into a narrow street and into the path of a top-heavy cart drawn by a beast resembling a six-legged rhinoceros. He clipped the beast’s pebble-hided shoulder, spun past. A motorcycle with a sidecar barreled straight at him. The driver, a sentrienza in a broad-brimmed hat, gesticulated angrily and whistled. Colm shouted, “Sorry, sorry!” He lunged out of the way and kept running, along the foot of a towering pagoda whose ground floor leaned out at a 100-degree angle over the street.
The noise was an invisible wall he pushed through at every step. He collided with pedestrians three feet tall, eight feet tall. Aliens! Good Christ, aliens everywhere! And the light was so strong he had to squint. Alien light, from a sun thousands of times as luminous as Sol. Even at the bottom of this shady canyon, watery reflections from upper storeys wobbled on the ground. He smelled smoke. It was very hot.
An alley opened on his left. Banners and awnings tossed in a powerful breeze. Pedestrians thronged the narrow gap between the buildings. Colm hooked a left, squeezed between bric-a-brac stalls. His vision kept whiting out. Felt like he was going blind. It was esthesia, showing him what the Shady Lady saw: flames surrounding the ship, overloading the optics.
Spindly helicopters thudded overhead. The pagoda-like buildings swayed in their downdraft. Colm pushed on blindly.
The alley opened out into a roofed court. It reminded him for a crazy instant of Merchant Square, the covered market in Glasgow where his parents used to take him and Bridget for lunch on shopping trips. Like a recreated medieval town square, with bonus trattorias. To Colm’s astonishment, humans outnumbered the gangling or dwarfish aliens. By sheer luck, he’d stumbled into an area where he wouldn’t be so conspicuous.
At least, no more conspicuous than a redheaded six-footer in a 207th Regiment t-shirt would be anywhere.
Back at the spaceport, a section of the hangar roof fell on top of the Shady Lady. Colm staggered at the painful impact on his shoulders. “OK there?” someone said.
He had to hide. He plunged into a restaurant. Up the stairs. The universal sign for a men’s room caught his eye. He fell inside and sprawled against the sink.
A full-body spasm of pain overwhelmed him. It vanished as quickly as it had come. The Shady Lady’s sensory feed dwindled to nothing.
His connection with the ship was dead. The ship itself was either dead, or so badly damaged it came to the same thing.
Had Meg, Tan, and Axel got away? Bracing himself upright, Colm glanced out the bathroom window, which overlooked the alley.
Humans and aliens pressed back against the stalls as a Walking Gun prowled along the alley.
Colm flinched away from the window, heart hammering.
An older man came in, pissed, and washed his hands. He glanced at Colm with mild interest. Then raised his eyebrows.
“207th? The Unsinkable?”
“What?” Oh. His t-shirt. “Yeah.”
“New here?”
“How’d you guess?”
The
man tapped his cheek. Like all the other humans here, he was darkly tanned. Colm had spent the last year and a half on a spaceship, getting paler, not that he could tan if he tried, anyway.
A commotion broke out downstairs. Colm started for the window, tried to get it open, couldn’t. Anyway, it was three storeys up.
“What’d you do?” the man said.
“Blew up a bit of the spaceport.”
“I was in the 105th. The Indomitable.” The man cupped his hands on his knee. “Crawlspace above the ceiling. You can thank me when they’re gone.”
Colm took the boost, parted the leafy fabric of the ceiling, pulled himself up. He lay across rafters like thick dry branches of kelp until the cracks of sunlight coming through the roof faded.
CHAPTER 35
“VETS GOTTA LOOK OUT for vets,” the man said. He was a former Navy mechanic. His name was James Lee. “You’d have done the same for me, or any of these guys.”
Colm said that of course he would. It felt like a miracle to find fellow Navy veterans here, 600 light years from Earth. He felt a bit dishonest for not telling them about his dishonorable discharge, but he suspected that Lee and his buddies also had blemishes on their records, or they wouldn’t be on Juradis.
The restaurant had closed. They were eating leftover bread—real bread, with cheese or jam or smoked fish to top it—at the counter. Colm was full but he kept nibbling. The food tasted so damn good after a monodiet of Pink Shit.
The owner, another vet, pushed draft beers across the counter to them. “So, you were in the 207th?”
“Eight years on the Unsinkable.”
“You must’ve served under the Rat,” Lee said. “He’s a great leader, isn’t he? Inspirational.”
“He couldn’t lead his way out of a paper bag with a hole in it,” Colm said bluntly. “We lost the Upsilon Andromedae system because of him.” He did not feel like mentioning what the Rat had done to him personally. But the vets guffawed, and Lee’s eyes twinkled.
“That’s what I heard, too.”
Test: passed, Colm thought. He helped himself to another piece of bread.
“So, you interested in work?” Lee said.
“I’ve got some shit to take care of.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ve got to check up on my crew.”
“They’ll be fine,” Lee said. “The sentrienza are fair. Bastards, but fair. If they didn’t do anything, they aren’t in trouble. Did they do anything?”
Colm didn’t even know what he’d done. Apart from blowing up a hangar, that is. “No.”
“Then they’ll be OK.” Moths the size of bats fluttered around the LED globes over the counter. The sea breeze rattled the shutters. Lee unwrapped a fresh pack of cigarettes, worked one out. “You, on the other hand. You’ll need to stay out of sight for a while.” He offered Colm the pack.
Colm took one, lit it and exhaled. First cigarette in a year. It made his head spin, as if it wasn’t spinning already. “This place blows my fucking mind.”
“Not what you expected?” All the vets smiled.
“Aliens.”
“Yeah. Apart from the sentrienza, there’s the shablags. Those are the little hairy guys with the purple noses. Then there’s the mara, the big green ones. And us, of course. We’re aliens here.”
“And the queazels?” Colm tried for a casual tone.
“Quee ... whats?”
Colm’s heart sank. “Eight legs. They look like ferrets crossed with caterpillars.”
“Oh, them. Yeah, we get a few of them down here from time to time. They mostly live up at the north pole.”
Colm stowed this information away. “It’s not as high-tech as I was expecting. Six-legged rhinos. Buildings made of dried seaweed.”
“It’s alive,” said one of the other vets. She rattled her knuckles on the counter, which looked like a dark green tree branch winding horizontally through the restaurant, its top surface planed flat. “Anti-seismic. When a quake hits, the weed towers shake, but they don’t fall down. However, if you’re prone to seasickness, you do not wanna rent a room on an upper floor.”
“He doesn’t want to rent anything,” Lee said. “He needs to get off Haravalding, and he needs coin. That sound right, my friend?”
“Maybe,” Colm said warily.
Lee ashed his cigarette in a six-pointed alien seashell. “So here’s the deal. These Hail Mary ships have been coming in every month, every week recently.”
“We saw the news about Gna.”
There was an odd moment of silence, as if Colm had made a faux pas. He got it. These vets had cut their ties with Gna. With the Fleet. With Earth itself. They did not want to be suckered into caring about humanity again.
“Yeah, so it’s getting to biblical levels,” Lee resumed. “The newbies land, and then what? Mostly, they’re elites that don’t know shit apart from pushing pixels around the cloud.”
Colm thought of Tan’s wife and daughters. Not elites, just a ordinary family. God, let them have made it onto that ship.
“So the sentrienza triage the new arrivals. You got useful skills? You go free.”
“That’s you,” Colm surmised. He wondered if Meg, Axel, and Tan would also fall into that category.
“Correct,” Lee said. “You don’t got useful skills? You go into a refugee camp. You may have seen the big boats out in the harbor. Those are the camps. There’s no nice way to put it: they’re floating hells.” Lee stubbed out his cigarette. “I’m in the security business. The money comes from the sentrienza. What I do with it is up to me. So I try to use it to make the lives of the refugees a little bit better.”
The restaurant owner drifted back. “I can see what you’re thinking,” he said to Colm. “But if it wasn’t us providing camp security, it would be the mara. Those fuckers are bad news. They don’t like the way you look at them, they bite your head off. Literally.”
“Yup,” Lee said. “So I’m picky about my hires. You got no resume that I’m aware of, but you were in the 207th, and the first thing you did when you got here was blow up some sentrienza infrastructure.”
“My kind of guy,” said the female vet. She had African features and a hoarse, attractive chuckle. Colm smiled back at her. Another vet offered him a fist-bump. The underlying current of resentment against the sentrienza struck him powerfully. It went counter to everything he’d been taught on Earth and in the Fleet. Then again, he’d only needed a few days in the Betelgeuse system to come around to their view.
“I’m willing to offer you a trial at full pay.” Lee grabbed a piece of bread and chewed, watching Colm. The low light caught a silvery gleam in his eyes. He probably had his infocals set to record. If Colm said no, his image would find its way onto the local net, he figured.
“I’ll have to think about it,” he said.
*
LATER THAT NIGHT, HE sat on the beach, watching alien surf crash on alien sand. The island was an extinct shield volcano, every square inch built up. Fifty-storey towers of living seaweed crowded the center of the island. Low-slung sentrienza dwellings, surrounded by walls and garlanded with fairy lights, lined the waterfront. Even at this late hour the promenade teemed with humans and aliens. No. Scratch that. Aliens, including humans.
Reflected city lights swayed on the slicks of water that drained away when the waves ran out. The wind ripped at Colm’s hair and ballooned the t-shirt that had got him into trouble. Or, out of trouble. He couldn’t decide which yet.
The beach was nearly as crowded as the promenade. Nearby, a group of the dwarfish aliens—shablags, had Lee said?—milled around a bonfire. They were singing, or maybe quarrelling. Colm couldn’t tell.
Unknown stars twinkled overhead, dimmed by light pollution from the island.
Colm felt cast adrift, cut off from everything he knew. All he had was the clothes on his back and the esthesia implant in his head—and the implant was inert. After all these months with the Shady Lady, the absence of feedback felt like an amputat
ion. He kept pinching his arms and legs to make sure he hadn’t really gone numb.
His whirling thoughts settled on Gil. The queazel was a connection to his old life, the reason he was here. He had to find out what had happened to Meg, Axel, and Tan ... but more importantly, he had to find Gil. The Uzizzellans had betrayed Gna to the Ghosts. He had to stop them before they betrayed Earth, too.
Yeah, Mackenzie. You and whose army?
He took out another of Lee’s cigarettes. The wind defeated his cheap lighter.
A woman crunched across the beach and sat down beside him. The female vet from the restaurant. She cupped a powerful flame in her hands. Her skin was dark, her palms surprisingly pink.
“Thanks,” Colm said.
“Lee told me to watch you. I got bored. So, are you gonna take the job?”
“I’m still thinking about it.”
“What’s to think about?”
“My crew.”
“I get that. You want to know if they went free, or got put in the camps.”
“Yeah.”
She shook her head pityingly. “Dude? You need to get away from here. Two sentrienza died in that fire. They’re not gonna forget that in a hurry.”
A trawler chugged through the waves offshore, its kite-like tackle lit up with warning lights. Colm, watching it, remembered his first trip to Skye. Maybe this was just a bigger version of Portree, on an alien planet. Just a fishing town, after all.
“These boats,” he said. “These floating refugee camps. Where do they go to?”
“To? They don’t go to anywhere. They just sail around, following the shoals. You get pretty damn sick of fish, but hey, the refugees get a healthy diet.”
“They must make port calls. Fresh water. Fuel.”
“Oh, sure. They stop here, at some of the other islands. At Kevesingod, that’s at the north pole.”
The north pole. Where Lee had said the queazels lived.
“OK,” Colm said. “I’m in.” He stubbed his cigarette out, rose and extended a hand to help the woman to her feet. “Hope I get to crew with you. Would you say there’s any chance of that?”
She let out that hoarse, sexy chuckle. “And I had you pegged as a gentleman.”
The Chemical Mage: Supernatural Hard Science Fiction (The Tegression Trilogy Book 1) Page 21
