by M. G. Herron
The rutted dirt trail was bordered by densely packed scrub and cacti, shaded by sprawling oaks. Overhead, the stars shone. I viewed the night sky differently these days. It used to feel so empty. Now, its speckled black expanse brimmed with possibility and sparkled with danger.
“We’re a ways from the road,” I said. “You could launch a rocket out here and no one would notice.”
“That’s kind of the idea,” Vinny replied.
About a mile farther into the property, I finally saw lights up ahead. We emerged into a grassy clearing. The source of the light was a huge pole barn. It was classic red, with broad straight walls, a peaked roof and a sliding door. Windows set high up near the roofline shone with a golden light. The sound of some type of nightlife drifted toward us, but it was faint—either the barn dampened the sound, or the noise of my truck engine overwhelmed it at this distance.
“Are you taking me to a barn burner? Reminds me of my high school days.”
“I guess you could call it that. Welcome to Rashiki’s.”
There were easily a hundred cars, trucks, and motorcycles parked in haphazard rows to our right. I found a spot way in the back, near a short yellow bus.
“Crowded,” I observed, slamming my truck door shut.
“You’ll soon see why.”
Vinny strode confidently toward the barn, straightening his collar as he approached the open door. Moonlight reflected off his gator-skinned shoes. I shook my head wistfully. It was rare that I saw Vinny out of his chef’s apron and hat, and I’d never seen him dressed up like this. He obviously wanted to make a good impression.
“Anything I should know before we get in there?”
“Don’t do anything stupid,” Vinny said. “Usually, that goes without saying, but I know you, so I thought I ought to mention it.”
“Hey,” I said, affecting mock offense, “that hurts.”
Vinny snorted. “Offworlders come to Rashiki’s to gamble, watch the races, and enjoy offworld delicacies that are hard to find elsewhere on Earth. If you want my advice, just watch and listen. Don’t ask any prying questions, and don’t say anything to make people suspicious.”
We’d reached the side of the barn. Vinny turned back to me. “Oh yeah, and you don’t have a weapon on you, do ya?”
I shook my head. A pistol, a rifle and a few other useful tools could be found in the lockbox in the back of my truck, but this was a night on the town, not a job, and Vinny hadn’t given me any reason to be worried about my safety.
“Good,” Vinny said. “You’d never make it through the door if you did. Unless you work security here, Rashiki’s is a weapon-free zone.”
Vinny adjusted his collar one last time, then threw open the door and stepped inside.
As he passed over the threshold, he disturbed an almost invisible film of golden light. Vinny came out the other side with a long snout covered in a fine tan fur. His drooping whiskers were thick and elegant, tapered to a fine point. Looking back at me, he bared his teeth in a rat-like grin. I didn’t know how to read his expressions very well with his cloaking shield turned off, but I had the distinct impression that I’d never seen the oversized marsupial so happy. The look in his eyes reminded me exactly of a kid in a candy shop.
After only a moment’s hesitation, I stepped through the door behind him. A slight tingling passed over my whole body as the hidden tech scanned me. I felt a slight resistance, especially around the metal buckle of my belt. But after a tug, it gave way and I stepped inside.
I was plunged into the vast, echoing murmur of a big crowd. We stood on a broad wooden path that ringed the barn. The center, where the floor should have been, fell out below us. As I looked down, I tried and failed to pick my chin up off my chest. This was no basic pole barn. I was standing at the top of a vast spiral circus, full of life and buzzing with activity. Beneath the yeasty smell of beer and the woody scent of tobacco smoke, there was a hint of fresh soil, and an undertone of alien musk.
Walking to the railing, I tried to contain the sense of vertigo that washed over me from the unexpected shift of perspective. Carved in a bell shape, the chamber took up a blueprint that was far larger than the barn in which we stood. The barn was merely a cupola that had been placed atop a hive extending deep into the earth.
And hive was a damn good word for it.
The broad wooden path jogged to our right and meandered downward, an irregular boardwalk that corkscrewed around the perimeter of the cavern, ringing the walls with neon lights, holographic signs, and restless motion. Clouds of smoky vapor drifted up toward the roof, where it was sucked into ventilators that, presumably, filtered it out, keeping any sign of this place hidden from the outside world. That explained why the noise outside had been dampened, too.
On the many levels below us, offworlders gathered at bars, milled around in front of food vendors, hung off the railings of sweeping, angled balconies much like the one on which we now stood. The number of aliens I saw boggled the mind—colorful crowds of dozens of species I’d never seen before, skins in hues of brown and turquoise and vermilion, creatures that flew and creatures who floated, those that had two legs or three or five. One alien in particular caught my eye, looking like a miniature, spindly elephant drawn by Salvador Dali. Another looked like he was made out of a swarm of bees. Through his body, I could see a group of three squat gray aliens taking shots of a smoky liquor out of gauzy balloons. The boardwalk wrapped the circumference of the cavern four or five times as it spiraled downward before spilling out into rows of empty bleachers near the bottom.
“Ah, good,” Vinny sighed as he came up beside me. He braced his hands against the railing next to me. “They haven’t started yet. Incredible, ain’t it?”
“You’re not kidding,” I murmured. I’d seen Harbor, the Gatekeeper’s nightclub, twice, but that was designed exactly like you’d expect a nightclub to be, even if it, too, was underground. The unexpected perspective shift of this place, the fact that it was built like an ant colony with the smallest part of the structure closest to the surface, made it seem surreal. I felt as disoriented as I had been as a small child when my parents took me to Circus Circus in Las Vegas for the first time.
My eyes finally peeled away from the crowded boardwalks, moved past the bare bleachers, and came to rest on the floor at the bottom. Outlines of what looked like a track were painted in a broad oval. The track itself was dirt, but contoured with hills and banking curves and ramps that curved up at the edge of impressive gaps.
“Is that a racetrack?” I asked.
Vinny confirmed my assessment with a nod. “For the Jel’ka races. Food and drink are on the boardwalk, and so are the bookies. We better find seats soon. Race starts at midnight. The bleachers are empty now, but once the gate’s up, everyone will make a mad dash for the good seats.”
We made our way down, moving along the boardwalk and doing our best to blend in among the crowds. As I suspected, Vinny seemed to know a lot of the offworlders we passed. He nodded to a humanoid with a prominent brow and bony spurs running along his shoulders and arms. He bumped his shoe against the hoof of a horse-like creature in greeting, and spoke to him in a whinnying, grumbling language.
It was then that I realized I was probably the only human in the place.
Triggered by this humbling feeling, I started studying those around me and noticed that the crowd was unevenly distributed. The vast majority of the offworlders here were of two or three varieties. There was a huge number of other species, but they made up a small percentage of the total.
“I see quite a few Pangozil here,” I said to Vinny. I had counted at least twenty of them.
Vinny nodded. “My people like to gamble. We have that in common.”
“What do you call that fella over there?” I pointed to a vaguely humanoid offworlder, lowering my hand quickly when he looked over. Standing six feet tall, with two legs and two arms, he had a prominent forehead and ridges of bone that extended from his head along his neck and sh
oulders. Just like Dyna.
“Lodians,” Vinny said, confirming my silent assumption. I didn’t connect those dots right away because, as special agents of the Federation, the Peacekeepers I’d met had cybernetic augmentations and other genetic enhancements to give them special abilities and set them apart, visually, from others of their kind.
“Half the offworlders here are Lodian,” I said. “Is it always like that?”
Vinny nodded. “Lodians have been running the system you know as the Milky Way galaxy for tens of thousands of years. They’ve spread to all the known habitable planets through emigration, colonization and government appointment. In other words, they came to this galaxy first.”
I bristled at that. “Who was here second?”
He shrugged his steep-sloping ratlike shoulders. “Depends who you ask. My people say Pangozil. Others have their own versions of history. The Federation Accords were ratified by six spacefaring races. Others were added over time.”
“Lodians, Pangozil… who else?”
“Hmm… See that skinny, golden-skinned woman with one eye and four arms? She’s a Torlik. The racetrack is run by a Torlik. My people are probably the next most populous. It’s hard to say, though, after that. Any census of galactic species is wildly inaccurate and untrustworthy, especially if the Federation conducts them. Lodians don’t like to see themselves in anything but first place.”
“Of course. People are the same way. When people form tribal groups, they invariably begin to think that their way is the best way.”
He smiled. “Exactly. But not at the Jel’ka track. You’re out of your element, my friend! How’s it feel?”
“Honestly? Awkward. But it’s good practice in being out of my comfort zone.”
Still, this information made a certain sense to me. Was it so different from the ethnic divisions here on Earth? If the Lodians and Torliks were the most populous species, that probably also meant they held the most power. I didn’t think I had anywhere close to a full picture, but I was starting to get a sense of the source of the tension between those who ruled the Federation and those who were ruled over.
“What species are part of the Tetrad?” I asked. “Is it mostly Lodian, or is the Tetrad run by other races?”
“Shh,” Vinny hissed. “What did I say about being discreet? Not here. Come on, this way.” Vinny motioned me onward.
We squeezed through a crowd at a narrow bottleneck in the boardwalk, then down a set of wide stairs. At the bottom, I realized we’d come level with the bleachers. Lodians, Pangozil, Torliks, and other aliens I didn’t have names for had gathered in front of a set of carved metal doors with an intricately wrought border. In the center of the gate was what looked like the head of a velociraptor with two rows of razor teeth imposed over a wheel.
To our right, a bank of booths manned by four-armed Torliks waited on a shortening line of excited aliens.
“Those look like bookies,” I said.
“Right you are.” Vinny licked his lips. I could tell he was debating on whether or not to get in line. His eyes kept darting toward the line, while my attention was more absorbed with the vicious depiction of the dinosaur on the doors to the track.
“You going to make a bet?” I asked.
His nose twitched. “I haven’t decided yet.” He absently patted the chest pocket of his shirt with one furry hand, then let it fall to his side.
I followed Vinny to the boardwalk’s railing, and looked down over the racetrack. Up close, I could see that the contours in the landscape would make for an off-road course that would have been impossible for a horse to run, but might have been doable for a man on a dirt bike going full bore. There were jumps and gaps, banked walls, and other obstacles. Some of the gaps were pits with spikes in them, and other metallic contraptions were arranged on or near the track with purposes I didn’t have the experience to divine. A crew of Torlik males in plain jumpsuits walked along the track now, spraying water over the dirt, presumably to keep down the dust and make it less slick.
“What do these Jel’ka look like, exactly?” I asked Vinny.
He gestured at the effigy in the gates. “You ever seen the movie Jurassic Park?”
I must have blanched, because Vinny waved his hands.
“Don’t worry, they’re well trained. It’s just a good comparison, anatomically—”
“Vinkalathis! Is that you?”
Vinny turned to gaze into the air, searching. I followed his eyes and made out a fat Torlik in a small, airborne pod. It cut down from an upper level, crossed the center of the hive, and floated toward us.
He was the fattest alien I had ever seen. He had no neck, just a broad head that sat perched on a mountain of carrot-colored flesh. Set in the middle of his head was a single, almond-shaped eye the size of a rugby ball, and big wet mouth that sucked vapor out of a hookah hose. The hose was wrapped around one arm up to his elbow, and strapped in place with a silver band. Two other hands rested on the vehicle’s controls, which consisted of a joystick and a panel of colorful buttons. The last hand—for a total of four, two on each side—gripped the side of the pod. When I thought he might plow into us, the fat alien jerked to a stop in the air, jiggling the folds of his skin. I was staring at the pod because it didn’t seem to have an engine, or make any noise at all. I thought about Alek and his fondness for nice cars—if he could only see this thing. Was it powered by electromagnetism? Where did they keep the motor? The Torlik exhaled a massive cloud of vapor in our direction, making me cough.
“My friend!” the fat alien said. His accent reminded me of a Russian. “At last, stars have aligned to bring you back to my humble establishment. Your light is wasted on the surface.”
Vinny cocked his head and looked askance at the fat alien, then jostled my elbow. Loud enough for the Torlik to hear, he said, “He just wants my business. I used to spend a lot of time down here—and a lot of money, too.”
“Ahhhh,” the fat alien waved his finger at Vinny. “But you have rare talent. You could be best Jel’ka breeder in whole galaxy.” He even tended to drop his pronouns like a Russian speaker.
“Just because I can spot a winner doesn’t mean I want to spend my days picking up Jel’ka turds, or training the short-tempered scoundrels.”
The fat orange alien put all four hands to his chest, threw back his head, and belly-laughed. He blinked tears out of his slow, ponderous eye as his body heaved. I noticed that he never closed the eye completely. He made a jovial show, but I could see through the front to the cunning beneath.
“Rashiki,” Vinny said when the alien had gotten ahold of himself again. “This is my friend, Anderson Gunn.”
Rashiki took a deep draw off his hookah hose and looked me up and down while smoke seeped from his broad nostrils. “Don’t see your kind down here very often.”
I shrugged. “I don’t see why not. Pretty neat place. I’m looking forward to the races.”
The fat alien slapped the sides of his pod. “I bet you are, eh! Did you place your bets?”
I snorted. “I’m bad enough with money. Probably better if I don’t.”
“Speaking of bets,” Vinny said, “which Jel’ka are you putting your money on tonight, Rashiki?”
“Ah Vinny, you know I cannot say. But we have fresh meat for the track, two premium competitors that I’m very excited to introduce. Her’lik of the Tattered Skies, and Slim’dar Killperch.”
Vinny raised one eyebrow. “Okay. I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Rashiki!” someone called from the balcony above us. “Float up this way and I’ll let you taste some of that homebrew I was telling you about!”
“Excuse me,” Rashiki said. “I must make rounds. Remember, betting closes in five minutes!”
With a flick of his wrist, Rashiki spiraled his pod up to the level above us and out of sight.
“He’s a hoot,” I said.
“Rashiki has his vices, obviously, but he’s a good sort.” Vinny’s voice trailed off. His eyes had wa
ndered back over to the bank of bookies. The line of waiting bettors had shortened significantly while we chatted with Rashiki. “Excuse me.”
Without waiting or even looking for a response from me, Vinny strode toward the bookies, reaching into his shirt pocket as he went. He laid down a thick wad of cash—US dollars were legal tender here, apparently—on the counter of an open booth. The bookie swept it up, counted it out, and the two had a low-voiced discussion.
While Vinny was making his bets, I walked over to the bar to get a drink. Now that I knew they would take my money, I ordered two beers, one for myself and one for Vinny. The bartender, a squat, bald Lodian with a gold earring in one nostril, eyed me suspiciously while pouring the beers into big plastic cups. Foam ran over and down the sides. He dropped them unceremoniously down on the counter in front of me. Ignoring his attitude, I grabbed one drink in each hand at the same time as Rashiki announced through a loud speaker that betting would be closing soon, and the races were about to begin.
Vinny was rubbing his hands together excitedly in front of the bookie. The exchange complete, he scooped up three transparent triangular chips in his hands, then made to cross the busy boardwalk back toward me.
A chime sounded, and the huge double doors that led to the bleachers swung open. The pathway suddenly swarmed with traffic as the river of aliens shifted direction and flowed toward the bleachers. With his eyes on the chips in his hands, I caught glimpses of Vinny as he unwittingly stepped straight into the path of a drunk, towering Lodian miscreant in a worn leather vest, who bumped into him, hard.
“Hey, watch it!” Vinny cried, lashing out reflexively with his free hand.
The Lodian cocked a beefy arm and drove it into Vinny’s twitching black knob of a nose.
5
Vinny didn’t even yelp when the drunk Lodian’s fist flattened his face, it caught him that much by surprise. He did, however, stagger back, fumbling the triangular chips in one hand and covering his nose with the other as blood fountained out.