by Eric Thomson
He mentally shivered as his imagination conjured a nightmare of giant creatures mindlessly crawling through miles of dark tunnels, feeding the likes of Zack to their young. Then he had another thought.
He turned his instrumentation on the bomb craters and sent the scans deep underground. The computer cycled through another analysis, leaving Zack to twiddle his thumbs with impatience.
The captain, struggling to control his own anxiety, ignored his gunner and stared at the planet on the viewscreen as if regretting this run. Raisa Darhad busied herself with minor tasks, shutting out the growing feelings of uncertainty and worry from the rest of the bridge crew.
Here we go. Zack focused his attention on the readout again. Just as I suspected. Remains of tunnels similar to those of the bug city, under the nuke craters. Shit, when did I start thinking of the aliens down there as bugs? They could be anything. Bad to develop preconceived notions, Pathfinder.
But Zack couldn't wipe the picture of hives from his mind. He was ill at ease, much more so than at any other time since joining Shokoten. The remainder of the crew seemed to be as well, if he was any judge of moods. It seemed like a damn strange place to be shipping household tech.
He turned his attention on the other continent and was surprised to find an environment dissimilar from the first one. The continents were at nearly opposite ends of the globe, separated by thousands of kilometers of ocean, but even then there shouldn't be that much difference. Few nuclear explosion craters pockmarked the surface, and only near the water's edge as if someone or something had used them to drive off an enemy landing.
Continent Two also had more vegetation and more signs of sentient life, widely scattered in above ground towns. The life signs too differed from the earlier ones. Sure, the basic patterns looked similar, but that was normal if both species evolved from the same earlier, more primitive life forms. Somehow, Zack wasn't surprised when he found no underground warrens, but he suspected that the nuke sites near the water's edge might have obliterated embryonic hives.
The more he saw of Ventos Prime, the less he liked it. It was no wonder the place wasn't listed in any standard navigation data banks or the Guild's Better Business catalog. Now he really wanted to find out what they were doing here.
He entered his observations in the ship’s log but put his own comments and deductions under password lock in his personal files. No need to alarm the crew, and maybe, just maybe, Strachan would prefer him not to be quite so observant or smart. Especially smart.
Raisa had told him Strachan was often surprised to find that former Marine noncoms were a lot brighter and more knowledgeable than he thought. And Zack's instincts, for reasons he'd rather not dwell on, told him he shouldn't push things.
“Mister Decker!”
Zack's head snapped around when he realized he'd been lost in thought and had missed Strachan's orders.
“If you're still with us,” the captain said, with uncharacteristic sarcasm, “you might wish to scan the coordinates navigation has fed to your console. We've already wasted enough time up here.”
“Yes, sir,” Zack came to attention in his seat. “Right away, sir.” A few moments later he turned his chair towards the captain again. “The coordinates are near a large city on Continent Two.” At Strachan's raised eyebrows, Decker explained that he'd baptized the two largest continents on the planet.
“Radiation readings are within tolerable limits, but I suggest all personnel who'll come into contact with the air down there wear filters. It'll sift out the most noxious airborne dust particles. We ought to be fine for about an hour or so of continuous exposure. I wouldn't recommend shore leave here.” Nor would he recommend resupplying in this place, he thought, remembering Strachan telling them they'd get the pantry topped up on Ventos Prime.
“Thank you for that editorial comment, Gunner,” the captain snapped. “Nav, confirm course and lay in.”
“Confirmed, sir.”
“Helm, engage.”
*
The filters might have kept pollutants from searing his lungs, but they didn't keep out the choking smell, and Zack grimaced as he stepped out of the airlock.
The red sun hurt his eyes, and he cursed all cheap civilian filters without self-polarizing facemasks. But the fiery, giant orb hanging over the horizon did more than just hurt his eyes. It turned the gray, chemical and radiation filled atmosphere into a churning smog-tinted an unhealthy shade of brown.
The alien town shimmered in the distance, its dun-colored walls, and spires merging with a monotonous plain devoid of vegetation. Billowing pillars of smoke grew from muddy stems on the town's outskirts, adding to the crud hanging over Ventos Prime.
Far away to the north, a purplish mountain ridge reared up against the dirty sky like the rotting teeth of an antediluvian creature. The ship's scanners had shown high concentrations of heavy metals in the ground, an underground aquifer so polluted that a single sip of the water would kill a human being, and heavy traces of cancerous chemicals in the air. One heck of a vacation spot for would-be mutants.
Zack took in the scene with one sweep of his watchful eyes, but strange and worrisome as the planet was, the ship beside which Shokoten had landed worried him even more. Sleek, pointy, with many dark scars and welded-on patches, it looked like nothing other than a marauder, a renegade ship. He searched its hull in vain for a registration number, a name or a home port.
Its belly ramp was down, and a pair of fierce Kardati humanoids stood guard, their plasma rifles slung over their shoulders. Deep-set red eyes had glanced at Decker with disinterest, cataloging him as nothing more than a civilian spacer, potential prey.
A cloud of dust rose at the foot of the town's walls and grew as it neared, accompanied by a loud, irritating sound that set Zack's teeth on edge. Soon, the cloud resolved itself into a column of ground vehicles, each carrying several standard containers, each belching clouds of dark fumes from rusty tubes behind the cab, and each making enough noise to wake the dead. The stench from these trucks was indescribable, and several of the bosun's mates with Zack swore as they fingered their guns.
A set of feet made the decking of the ramp vibrate. He glanced behind and saw, to his surprise, that Captain Strachan was coming down to join them, wearing one of the lightly built breathing masks.
“Sir.” Zack nodded.
“I see our cargo has arrived. Please make sure that none of the natives climb aboard. I must speak with the agent. I believe that’s him coming now.”
A swarthy skinned, black-clad figure stepped off the other ship's ramp and, accompanied by one of the guards, made his way towards Shokoten, seemingly oblivious to the racket of the ground convoy.
As Strachan stepped off the ramp to meet him halfway, Zack motioned one of the mates to follow the captain. If the reiver was going to have a bodyguard, so was Strachan. As an added gesture, Zack loosened his blaster in his holster, making sure the gesture wasn't lost on the strangers. They gave him a cold, uninterested glance and then looked away dismissively.
The captain and the mystery man held a quiet conversation on the dusty landing field between the ships while a group of natives waited patiently by their trucks. They weren't on a real tarmac. This looked more like a combat LZ than a spaceport: no tower, no ramps, no terminal, and no communications array. In fact, nothing broke the uneven sameness of the beaten ground. It probably meant the natives didn't have spaceflight technology yet, and that meant the humans shouldn't be there.
Commonwealth law was clear about contact with pre spaceflight civilizations. Nobody wanted a repeat of the near disaster caused by first contact with preindustrial cultures in the Shield Cluster. Within a few years, unscrupulous traders had sold Shield races such as the Kardati, enough tech to let them jump to a spacefaring society without accruing the benefits of civilization.
Ever since, the Shield had been a nest of reivers, pirates, buccaneers, slavers and worse: feudal cultures with high tech, techno barbarian, as the Fleet called them. The only way to st
op them after a few generations of violent living would have been to bomb them back into the Stone Age. Even the hardest of hardliners would have balked at those measures.
Decker studied the Ventosans with eyes narrowed against the glare. They were not humanoid by any stretch of the imagination, looking more like six-limbed, tailless lizards with long eyestalks and gray-brown skin. The center pair of limbs appeared to function as feet or as hands, depending on the owner's whim. The eyestalks could swivel independently and did so with dizzying speed as the natives anxiously glanced at both intruding vessels and their strange crews. With the capacity to produce nuclear bombs, they certainly weren't preindustrial, but what they had done to their planet put them far down the scale of civilization.
Strachan finished his exchange with the agent and returned to Shokoten, his face a neutral mask. The other man headed for the cluster of natives. A few moments later, the trucks, still belching their noxious fumes, formed in a single file and made for the ship. Zack repressed an overwhelming desire to run for the clean, scent-free air of the ship's interior and dispersed his mates to cover the approaching aliens.
The Ventosans parked their empty, wheeled trucks directly beneath the ship's fully deployed gantry. With the help of the second officer's crew, the inbound freight was quickly unloaded and driven away. Just as rapidly the outbound containers were hoisted aboard from the backs of the remaining trucks.
None of the ship's crew spoke with the aliens, and all communication was done through basic hand signals that the aliens seemed to understand well enough. In less than an hour, Shokoten had exchanged its battered containers for those supplied by the natives, and the crew was busy strapping them down for the return trip.
Decker saw Kiani slip out of the freighter and vanish into the other ship. She returned half an hour later with a scowl of disapproval on her face, but with a string of grav pallets, driven by the other ship's crew, behind her. The pallets held standard foodstuff crates, marked with the logo of one of the Commonwealth's larger chandleries.
As he read the markings, only to discover they were getting soy-based rations, Zack made a grimace of distaste, causing the nearest Kardati to laugh derisively. But Nihao, who seemed to be in an atrocious mood, snapped out an order in a tongue Decker didn't understand, and the spacer lost his look of merriment.
With Ventos Prime's sun setting the horizon on fire, Shokoten closed up, pumped out the polluted air, and prepared for liftoff. Zack had made sure every crewmember who had exposed himself to the atmosphere went through a decontamination routine in a specially prepared airlock. Some, like Nihao, grumbled but cooperated when the gunner showed them a list of the crud they were carrying on their dust-covered bodies.
Later, when Shokoten was buttoned up, and Zack sat at his station on the bridge, he kept a close, but surreptitious eye on the other ship. As it powered up to leave the planet, he took scans of its emissions.
That pretty much kicks it. No honest trader has that much power in her thrusters. Eats up too much fuel to be profitable.
But he didn't dare ran an active scan. They'd be bound to detect his interest, and that might not be good for his continued health. By the time Shokoten broke out of orbit, the mystery ship had vanished, boosting out on powerful engines to destinations unknown.
Zack returned to his quarters, lost in deep thought, the moment they went FTL. Something smelled to high heaven. He was sure the secret lay not in what they'd delivered, but what they picked up. Standard Commonwealth-style containers on a distant, pre spaceflight world meant more than just simple smuggling, and Zack's gut instinct gave him severe pangs of discomfort.
He had to scan those containers without being caught. Doing it openly was out. When he asked Strachan whether he should camouflage them, the captain shook his head, acting just too much on the anxious side of irritable, and that had raised the former Pathfinder's sensitive bullshit detectors even further. Beans to bullets Strachan didn't want Zack to find out what was in the containers.
Nihao Kiani, when she finally joined him in their cabin, remained silent and ignored the gunner in her old, cold manner. Judging by the temperature in the room, nobody could have figured they'd made the beast with two backs in the shower less than forty-eight hours earlier.
That night, Decker’s sleep was plagued by nightmares where monsters conjured by his overheated imagination pursued him down claustrophobic tunnels lined with silvery cocoons. More than once, he woke in a cold sweat only to repeat the experience the moment he fell asleep again. Even if his conscious mind couldn't pinpoint the origin of his discomfort, his subconscious was on to something.
*
It took Zack a few days to plan and prepare his unauthorized visit to the cargo hold. As chief of security, he had many access possibilities, but it was a given, at least in his mind, that anything he did would be double checked by someone else. The Marine Corps trained its Pathfinders to assume the enemy was at least as competent as they were, and the former sergeant wasn't about to chuck that oft proven bit of wisdom out the nearest airlock.
If this were something beyond mere smuggling, Strachan would watch him closely for any signs of disloyalty. Or, as Decker saw it, signs of his old loyalty to the Corps resurfacing.
Gun turret number four was below the hold and its access tube also had emergency hatches into the hold itself. On freighters, where space was at a premium, systems that could be combined often were. Of course, the access plates were all wired into the security system, so his first move was to reroute the detectors into a closed loop.
Then, he needed an excuse to spend time working on number four, which meant a controlled malfunction that would look real to anyone but a gunner. Finally, he needed a way to keep random security checks from detecting him in the hold while simultaneously showing him in the turret. That required a delicate rewrite of the control software, a modification that would only kick in when Zack wanted it to.
As he spent hours on his secret work, Decker felt more like a Fleet agent out of a low-grade action show, than a merchant gunnery officer, and that brought his mind back to the inscribed Master Gunner's badge that had been slipped into his pocket.
*
Five days out of Ventos, the mood on the ship was at its lowest ebb. Strachan's tension had trickled down to the lower deck and added to the crew's underlying nervousness at the long light years between Shokoten and the safety of home space. There was also something indefinable in that atmosphere, something that had started on the alien planet and had grown, as if evil had slipped aboard and was waiting in a dark corner of the ship, biding its time.
Zack had never experienced a sensation quite like it. Infected by the mood himself, his own paranoia grew as he worked on his plans for a private visit to the cargo hold. He was disturbed to find he didn't even trust Raisa, although the Arkanna seemed just as uneasy as everybody else did, and had been cut off from Strachan's usual confidences along with the gunner.
Decker sat at his console during the final hour of the afternoon watch, alternately checking his security net and scanning the surrounding hyperspace bubble for drive wakes. The bridge was quiet, each member of the watch keeping to him or herself. Below decks, the off-duty crew was quiescent for once, most either sleeping or playing games. Raisa had the con and sat in the captain's chair, eyes alert, observing the crew and their stations. Her body seemed relaxed, but Decker knew it was filled with coiled power, energy that couldn't find an outlet.
His plan was ready, and he wouldn't have a better chance than now, near the end of a watch, with Raisa in charge. He ran a full check of the weapon systems, triggering the carefully placed subroutines. These, in turn, created a malfunction in turret number four, started the feedback loop, and set the scan foiling routine to standby mode.
“Mister Darhad?”
“Yes, Gunner,” she replied, stretching as she walked over to his console.
“I've detected a malfunction in turret four, probably nothing more than an end-of-life breakdo
wn in one of the components. But the guns aren't going to fire until I fix it. Permission to carry out repairs? It's near the end of the watch anyways.”
She glanced at the screen over his shoulders, giving Zack's nostrils the chance to get reacquainted with her scent, and lightly laid her hand on his shoulder.
“By all means, Gunner.”
“Thank you, sir.” Decker glanced up at Darhad and forced a smile. “I'll give you a report when I've seen the damage.”
She removed her hand and stepped back to give him room to rise. As he unfolded to his full height, their eyes met. Her brows furrowed minutely as if she had seen or sensed something unusual, and Zack suddenly feared she had somehow sensed his purpose. He smiled again and winked though his insides were in turmoil and his throat constricted as if he were about to jump into battle.
Without a backwards glance, he left the bridge, stopping by his cabin only long enough to change into coveralls and pick up his tools. Nihao Kiani, stretched out on her bunk, reading, ignored Zack.
*
The dark access tube was as claustrophobic as the hive tunnels of his nightmares and Zack shivered as he closed the hatch behind him. Crawling slowly, he passed the access plate leading to the cargo hold above him. Upon reaching the turret, he pulled the command module from its socket. That simple act broke a computer-monitored loop and set in motion his scan-masking routine, which would show him to be in the turret and not in the hold, no matter where he was. Of course, it wouldn't foil a handheld unit independent of the ship's systems. But as far as he could tell, he had the only one on board.
He crawled back to the access plate and carefully broke the magnetic seal holding it in place. With a grunt of effort, he caught it and slowly put it on the tube's floor, taking care to make as little noise as possible. Vibrations carried far.
Decker pulled himself through the opening and onto the cargo hold's cold floor, emerging between two stacks of battered containers. He remained motionless for almost a minute, heightened senses reaching out to listen and smell for anything that shouldn't be there. Then, he pulled out his sensor and flicked it on.
