The twosome was led to the nearest rock formation. Once inside the innocuous cluster of boulders, they followed a tunnel large enough to drive a truck through, wending downwards.
They heard explosions beyond the mouth of the cave and screams, followed by even more agonizing wailing.
“They’re trying to get inside the ship?” Sonny grimaced.
“Yep.”
Sonny’s face tightened. “Serves them right.”
“You can probably ask for more now than they would have been willing to pay earlier.”
The latest explosions from the surface were so severe they sent shockwaves and flashes of flames and light down the tunnel, threatening to bring it down on their heads. Did the fools relent in their determination to broach the unguarded ship? No. Instead a transport arrived to whisk the two dignitaries to safety so some deal could be made in the event the Tinka couldn’t breach the UFO.
A short while later, the tunnel opened into an immense cavern that could easily have swallowed up a couple football fields surrounded by a ridiculous amount of stadium seating.
The rock eaters, giant sandworm creatures, were in evidence chewing new tunnels that would ultimately lead to other giant caverns. Sonny judged as much by the other chambers already in evidence, linked to this one by way of other tunnels. Perhaps the worms used the caverns for breeding, and if you kept them contained enough, they kept hollowing out more of the planet’s mantle to keep up with their expanding population.
It wasn’t much of an introduction, but if this was how the Tinka treated indigenous lifeforms, he liked them already. Nothing like pragmatic exploiters. You could always reason with them. Idealists were the worst. Leon hailed from that crowd. The problem was Leon had just enough pragmatism to make him truly dangerous.
Sonny and Xenon were led to one of the many tables where bartering was going on. The din of shouting hagglers was ear-splitting, even with the chamber’s evident sound dampening qualities, which Sonny’s ears picked up on right away.
“This is their business class,” Xenon explained. “Outside, we met the warrior class, whose job is to evaluate the value of the weapons being bartered.” He pointed to another body type. “The vulture class’s job is to scrounge up the shattered pieces of weaponry and bring them to the tradesmen who will look for people who can rebuild them better than before, with the intel gathered by the Hawkran. They’re kind of like the CSI teams on Earth who investigate after a plane crash, piecing the whole plane back together if need be to get at what actually caused the plane crash.”
Sonny nodded.
“In case you were wondering,” Xenon said, anticipating Sonny’s next question, “each of the planets in this galaxy is structured the same way. The warrior caste, of course, has its own subdivisions that allow them to test ground force weapons versus the space warriors that test the space fleet weapons, and so on.”
Finishing the brief cultural exposé, Xenon added, “the various tribes learned to get along over time, and to stop their own in-fighting, only upon discovering that other galaxies had it in mind to devour them for lunch.”
Sonny nodded some more, his eyes taking in everything going on around him, his ears, standing erect for once, picking up on even more.
The one they’d been brought to see looked up from her tinkering, offered the tradesman a piece of equipment in barter, something presumably more deadly than the busted weapon being traded. The barterer accepting the scrap metal in exchange was obviously hoping to reassemble it into a weapon of even deadlier force than the one he’d just traded, for even more money, or social acclaim, or whatever these people used for accumulating a higher station in their society.
The exchange completed, with a wave of her hand the barterer at the table dismissed her customer, who walked away happily with his device in hand, looking like an automotive engine in serious need of a car. Maybe that was indeed what it was, at least on the surface, meant to explode as soon as someone turned the engine. As if reading his mind, Xenon leaned in and whispered, “Yes, these people have their own Shadow Warriors, too, whose weapons of choice are sabotage, extortion, blackmail, anything to get their hands on the weapons they want.”
The woman doing the talking had lowered her hood. It was all Sonny could do to stifle his startle response, though his pricked ears had pivoted toward her instinctively. She didn’t just look humanoid; she looked human. Her face and figure beguiling, as if seduction was part of her toolkit of negotiating aptitudes.
What horrified Sonny was that if she looked human, then maybe all those tales of ancient aliens visiting Earth once upon a time were true. Allegedly, human beings had descended from a slave race once utilized for mining gold, and when the needed gold was extracted from the planet, their masters had moved on, leaving them to fend for themselves. Somehow, though Sonny had never spent a second on Earth, the thought piqued his own animosity toward Guardian or master-races as yet unmet. Whether or not this backstory indeed had any truth to it, and however dark Earth’s early history might have been, the look on this woman’s face suggested her history was far darker.
Sonny flinched, realizing, he was suddenly not the most ornery, conniving, do-whatever-was-necessary-to-subjugate-any-and-all-potential adversaries son of a bitch in the room.
“I’m Gaffon,” the woman said to them, waving off the guards that had escorted Sonny and Xenon in. Considering how readily the Special Forces soldiers stood down, it was clear which class was in control here.
“Needless to say, we like the vessel you arrived in. Perhaps you can tell me what we can do to get our hands on it.”
“A small matter of invading the Gypsy Galaxy for me,” Sonny said, “destroying everything in sight. That achieved, you’re free to claim the UFO and any other spoils for yourself.”
She scrutinized him, wondering if he was joking or not, reading his face for any clue, perhaps to see if he was a madman.
Sonny glanced about the cavern. “Of course, going by what we saw on the surface, I don’t like your chances for getting past the least of Leon’s vessels in his armada.”
Gaffon’s ears pricked at the word ‘armada.’ “This is the most primitive of our worlds, specializing in the most primitive tech we handle. It’s where we greet all potential traders from all galaxies within The Menagerie. If they can’t at least survive what we can throw at them here, it’s a pretty safe bet they have nothing to offer us.”
It was clear to Sonny why the Tinka had chosen her to negotiate for them. She could at least present the semblance of reasonableness amongst a race or races of people which otherwise could not conceal their bellicose natures in the slightest. Witness the latest swell in the din of hagglers, who, if they weren’t screaming at one another, had resorted to physical violence to help grease the trade.
Gaffon gestured for her guests to sit. The seats looked like more booby-trapped weapons, like that engine the last barterer carted off. They declined to sit. “We’ve, of course, heard the rumors of the precious tech within the Gypsy Galaxy borders. And the Legacy tech they got their hands on…”
She said the last part with more of a conspiratorial tone, as if she was still bargaining to make sure that the Legacy tech was part of the deal. It most certainly was not, but she didn’t need to know that. Sonny kept his face impassive and let her think what she wanted, either that that too would be handed over, or that there might well be another fight in store for them over it.
“I presume you’re going in with overwhelming force, the Tinka but one of the galactic fleets among your alliance.” Gaffon returned to her tinkering, as if this conversation didn’t demand her full attention, but more likely to mask her face, and thus make her harder to read. She obviously wasn’t trained to handle exchanges with people in Sonny’s league. “From the talk skitting across the singularity phone lines, Leon is not an adversary to take lightly,” she said. “And he has a nasty habit for playing the underdog role all too well even when he’s up against superior numbers and techno
logy.”
“All that and more has been factored in,” Sonny assured her. “He may be good at playing the underdog, but I’m even better at playing all sides off one another.”
Her eyes went up from the item in her hands she was tooling away on. “Yes, so I’ve heard. Amazing how, in the Menagerie, word travels faster than light.”
“I’ve always taken the stance that the only thing which can is gossip.” Sonny smiled as if the deal had already been struck. But she didn’t seem all that hard to read.
“Very well. We’ve done some assessments of our own. We have not only overwhelming numbers, but enough variety in our weapons that the Gypsy Galaxy Grouping fighters cannot possibly repel them all. I like our chances.”
She returned her eyes to the item in her hands she was tinkering on. “Your piling on ensures our success all the more—and removes the one reason we’ve held back this long.” She once again raised her eyes to him. “We didn’t want to get bombed back into the Stone Age, giving up most of the tech we have just to get our hands on the newer, more interesting stuff. My people are hoarders by nature. More variety and more quantity both is traditionally how we’ve maintained our edge.”
Sonny bowed to her in a mock show of respect. “You’ll know when to strike, the same way I imagine you knew I was coming. My compliments on your spy network. It appears second only to my own.”
She chuckled with genuine bravado. “Believe what you like.”
Sonny and Xenon took their leave, being escorted out by the Special Forces that had merely pulled back earlier when dismissed.
It troubled Sonny that she had not haggled further to seal the deal with a gift of the UFO in advance. It could only mean one thing, relative to the tech on the other worlds belonging to the Tinka, it was nothing special. In the short-term, that was a great thing. It ensured getting Sonny’s hands on Leon’s empire all the more. But in the long-term, it could prove a problem for Sonny. And Gaffon may be right; her spy network might be better than his, explaining his uncertainty as to what she was hiding on those other worlds.
They knew nothing of the Tinka hierarchy, moreover. For all he knew, he was negotiating with a low ranking tradesperson, whose opinion counted for nothing, or she might well be the queen of their entire federation.
Either way, there were too many unknowns. He would be assigning Xenon and his Special Forces with a new mission by the time they were back on the UFO: to gather all the intel on the Tinka they could by sneaking into their domain in ways the rest of the Shadow Warriors could not, or they’d have done so already. One more sign that Gaffon’s spy network really was better than his, or at least, better at spotting other spies, explaining some recent attrition in the Shadow Warriors’ numbers in this galaxy.
Sonny wasn’t about to communicate with Xenon even mindchip to mindchip until he was safely cocooned back in that UFO with its signal jamming technology, and until he was well out of this sector. If he didn’t know the full extent of the Tinka tech, he could hardly expect to hold on to secrets with any certainty. Not even speaking in the private encoded language he had created for his Shadow Warriors spy network could be entirely trusted. As difficult as it was to hack, given enough time and resources, anything and anyone could be hacked.
Still, if things went to shit with the Tinka, and they turned on him in the worst way, there was always Leon and his assets to fall back on. The enemy of my enemy, as they say…
ONE HUNDRED
ONE OF THE NAUTILUS’S GALAXY CLASS CRUISERS
THE STARHAWK VESSEL, CAPTIVA
Satellite swiveled toward Skyhawk from his COMMS station. “Dude, we’re taking casualties.”
Skyhawk, seated in the captain’s chair of the Starhawk, refused to look up from his handheld video game console. “I’m sure you’re talking about Omega Force. It seems to be their job.”
“No, dude, we’re taking casualties.”
“Dude! I’m in the middle of a Pac Man game. Seems I’ve gone all retro. Have you no sense of shame?”
“Do you really want to give Omega Force bragging rights over us?”
“If we’re taking casualties, trust me, they’re taking way more.”
Satellite sighed. Tired trying to get through to Skyhawk the polite way, he cut the feed on Skyhawk’s Pac Man game, and put the feed up of Alpha Unit on the big screen portal. Currently in smart screen mode, the portal was no longer showing what was immediately outside the ship, but what Satellite wanted Skyhawk to see.
With no choice now, Skyhawk looked up from his video game, fit to be tied.
“Guess what, we’re playing a Pac Man game out here, too, only it’s us that are getting gobbled up,” Satellite said.
Skyhawk’s jaw dropped. On the screen was the clone of him, captaining the Starhawk Finesse, giving his full attention to what was going on, and looking out of his depths. Something no Skyhawk clone had experienced before, this Skyhawk was sure of it. The other Skyhawk was shouting orders at his crew like a mad man.
***
THE STARHAWK FINESSE
“What the hell is that thing?” Skyhawk blared, swiveling on his captain’s chair in both directions, seeing only the backs of everyone’s heads, as if they were determined to ignore him in his moment of need. His intermittent swiveling and nail biting were but the latest nervous ticks to surface out of his fears of abandonment.
Satellite put the image of the Finesse up on the big screen. It was trapped in what appeared to be a solid block of acrylic. It was safe to say the substance was not acrylic, but the solid block part was undebatable. “It’s a Dead Man’s Box,” Satellite explained. “Mother came upon the technology when doing a brief survey of allied galaxy tech via Omni that could come in handy. Only the Dead Man’s Box is meant to be used in a biosphere, not out here in space. It’s supposed to tweak the hydrocarbons in the atmosphere, creating a catalytic reaction leading to this. It appears The Tinka got their hands on the tech and made some decided improvements.”
“Yeah, no shit.” Skyhawk hadn’t waited for the rest of the data dump. He was already poring over what else Omni knew about the device, hoping to guess at how it had been modified.
“We’re overheating,” Ariel informed them from her science station on the bridge. “I’ve shut down the engines, but if I shut down the energy shields, who knows how much further that catalytic reaction could spread?”
“Yeah, definitely don’t do that,” Skyhawk said absently, refusing to look up from his handheld PDA and his ongoing analysis. The PDA came with various analytic apps loaded, along with a hundred and one other functional capacities it wasn’t worth cluttering his mindchip with, considering the longshot scenarios that would require any of them—like this one. For all the PDA’s assistance, Skyhawk may as well have been blind. “If I can’t see how to modify this Dead Man’s Box to manage what they’re doing here, then that device wasn’t retrofitted. It must be housing the actual device inside it.”
“Sorry to break it to you, Skyhawk, but it has been modified.” It was Gaffon breaking in on their video feed, punctuating her remark with a humorless smile. She was seated in her captain’s chair, surrounded by an all-male crew, and wearing a metal skull cap with wires attaching her to the ship’s COMMS line in the armrest of her chair. She clearly did not want to waste time barking orders that might slow her reflexes. “We are the Tinka. Did you seriously think your pitifully primitive humanoid brain could compete with our core competence and most well-guarded niche in cosmic commerce?”
Skyhawk frowned. “Says the chick trying to hurry communications along to her ship AI via a skullcap mind reader out of the Stone Age.” He saw her flinch. “Wait, your ship doesn’t even have an AI!”
“My mind will do nicely.”
Skyhawk had been thumbing instructions to Satellite the whole time he was baiting her. Satellite’s scans in response to his questions completed, he swiveled toward Skyhawk and nodded.
Ariel sent a message to Skyhawk’s screen in turn. “We hav
e less than a minute before the Finesse blows if we don’t shut down our energy shields.”
“Got it,” Skyhawk keyed back.
He turned his attention to Gaffon. “Satellite tells me you’re captaining all of the vessels the Tinka are using to invade the Gypsy Galaxy. And me thinking you were the one chosen to handle negotiations with Sonny because you were the only one they could find among the Tinka with a cool head. It seems I was only partly right. Isn’t that so?” It was Skyhawk’s turn to return her cruel smile.
“You got ahold of a cloning device. Only it’s a primitive one relative to our own, and you had to make too many copies of yourself in too short a time to take control of this many vessels in the timeframe you had to work with.” Skyhawk noticed her condescending smile shrink further. “Hence the expiration date on these clones is coming to an end. You don’t have much time to get me to accept your proposal, do you? Let me guess, it amounts to me handing over one of our bioprinters.”
Satellite had thrown up the numbers on the big screen, as an overlay in the corner, showing him the results of his scans of Gaffon, supporting Skyhawk’s thesis of her embodiment in a rather shoddy clone. She had but hours left to live.
“Well?” Gaffon asked, clenching her arm rests, sounding overly anxious, no…It was more like she was getting ready to burst from impatience and fury comingling in one ugly pastel of emotions. If this was the best the Tinka could do to procure someone who could keep their cool, Techa help them. Her icy-headed diplomacy was evidently little more than a ruse, like a cheap personality suit that fitted even less well than the clone knockoff.
Maybe if Skyhawk could bait her further…
He laughed. “Fat chance of getting your hands on our bioprinters, bitch.”
“Says the man whose ship is about to blow in ten, nine, eight…” Gaffon was smiling as she counted off, but, as before. there was no warmth to the smile.
“Ariel?” Skyhawk said through clenched teeth.
“I’ve cut shields to thirty-percent. Bought you another couple of minutes. Assuming they hold at this level,” she broadcasted to his mindchip.
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