Orion Arm

by Julian May

  Later on, if Galapharma hotshots got wind of our invasion and came sniffing around, all bets might be off.

  We were taking two portable CL-4 lasercoms with us, as well as a number of personal LC units. Using orbiting Chispa as a satellite relay, the communications system was undetectable by all but the most advanced type of sensors—at least during the daytime. We'd use it at night only in case of a major emergency event such as a call for an evacuation via Chispa's gig.

  The privateer began its descent to Dagasatt. I was still not sure that we could trust Ba-Karkar completely, so I kept the holster of my Ivanov stun-pistol unfastened while I crouched behind him. He followed orders well enough, breaking orbit and guiding his ship manually through the outer atmosphere, but his responses to my attempts at friendly chitchat were grudging and curt. The Qastt's bottlebrush antennae had gone droopy again, which I took as an indication of deep anxiety.

  Hey, in his position I'd have been depressed, too.

  When Mimo saw that I was getting nowhere in my attempts to calm the alien, he gave me an almost imperceptible signal and took over the small talk himself. He told Ba-Karkar about his own background as a smuggler and scofflaw, which instantly made him muy simpatico in the skipper's eyes, and spoke of his experiences trading contraband on various Qastt worlds. He apologized for my brusque manner even more elaborately than Ildiko had done, trying to excuse me by painting a highly exaggerated picture of my importance in Rampart Starcorp. This emboldened the pirate to once again bring up his hope of a bonus payment.

  "You and Asahel give me money in addition to starship," he said to Mimo, doing the cheek-munch grimace again, "I not only cooperate, I cooperate significantly"

  I nodded my agreement above Ba-Karkar's head. After all, my father was the one who'd pay, not me. Mimo went into a long rigamarole of bargaining and a sum was finally agreed upon. The flight-deck ambience perked up noticeably after that, along with the little Qastt bandit's auditory antennae.

  Money: maybe not a universal solvent of life's intestinal blockages, but it does make the shitclogs more bearable.

  Because of technical limitations in our translator equipment, Mimo and I were able to understand only Ba-Karkar's side of the routine space-to-ground transmissions during reentry; but he appeared to be proceeding in a straightforward manner. He requested permission to land at Taqtaq Auxiliary Starport and it was granted. As part of our plan, he also notified Ground Control that his ship's subluminal powerplant was behaving somewhat erratically, although he was not yet prepared to declare an emergency. The controller told him he could descend to thirteen thousand meters, a lower altitude than normal for starship approach. His vector would be monitored closely by Taqtaq Control when he was within its range.

  "What kind of a place is Taqtaq?" I asked Ba-Karkar.

  "Not know. Never go there. Everyone say putrid."

  "It's a petroleum refinery town," Mimo said. "One of several at the edge of the Great Bitumen Desert. These people still make wide use of fossil hydrocarbons in their fuel and plastics industries. I peddled some contraband chemical equipment at Taqtaq over twenty years ago. The smog was cosmic-class and the auxiliary starport was very small and poorly equipped."

  "We'd better scope it out as we pass over," I said. "Twenty years is a long time."

  We were traversing a largely flat, arid continent with a broad underwater shelf, situated in a pale blue ocean ominously named the Empty Sea. It wrapped around most of the planet's north subtropical zone and had a decidedly odd appearance. The rocks and soil were ochre or vivid red, sprinkled with thousands of rounded lakes having borders of blue-green vegetation. Denser rings of plantlife encircled the cities, which were sited on larger lakes and connected to one another by networks of ruler-straight high roads and forested parkways. Overall, the Dagasatt landscape looked like an intricate connect-the-dots puzzle drawn upon a long, blotchy apple peeling.

  I knew from the orientation holovids that much of the planet's rainfall sank immediately through the sandy soil into shallow aquifers, from which it was easily pumped to the surface and utilized for irrigation. Eroded mountain ranges rose along the northern coast of the continent, some of them snowcapped. Streams flowing from their forested inland slopes fed ribbons of cropfields before disappearing underground.

  We flew eastward, toward the night, at moderate velocity. From time to time Ground Control made contact to make sure we were still airborne. The unintelligible squeaks of the controller didn't sound particularly worried. Our own aerial tracking display showed only small numbers of conventional aircraft sharing the stratosphere with us. On Dagasatt it appeared that people and commodities flew mostly at low altitudes or traveled on the ground.

  The main forward viewer finally showed the eastern edge of the continent in the purpling distance. Along the coast lay what seemed to be a mosaic of hundreds of adjacent lakes or lagoons covering a hazy oval basin of enormous proportions. The dry land within the basin was very dark in color.

  "Great Bitumen Desert," Ba-Karkar informed us.

  It was vast, nearly three thousand kilometers from north to south and a thousand kilometers wide, surrounded on three sides by a waste of barren red sand traversed by highways that had oases strung along them like beads. Our ship was approaching the basin's western boundary, where there were six widely separated refinery cities. Smoky pollution trails streamed out from them, carried on the prevailing west wind. The opposite side of the Great Bitumen Desert was narrowly separated from the sea by a long arc of cloud-girt volcanic peaks called the Barrier Range. Short rivers flowed from the highlands into the desert basin, creating the myriad shallow bodies of water covering much of the natural hydrocarbon deposits. The area of bitumen was a "desert" only in the sense of being an uninhabitable wasteland. It wasn't arid at all.

  "Taqtaq northernmost city," Ba-Karkar said. "We decelerate now, turn over desert for approach."

  "Give me a closer look at the surface," I requested.

  He activated the privateer's terrain scanner and showed me how to use it. Some of the dry land between the iridescent, oil-slicked ponds was rough, slate-gray or pinkish in color. Other areas were much smoother, almost jet-black, and marked with peculiar concentric ringed features like huge whirlpools. Due east of Taqtaq, the desert had a slightly higher elevation and less water coverage. Parts of it looked almost like solidified lava. In the far northeastern quadrant of the basin, adjacent to the Barrier Range separating it from the Empty Sea, was an area where fantastically eroded red sandstone buttes thrust up out of a plain of pitch. Scattered plumes of smoke rose from the surface.

  The Haluk facility was supposed to be located somewhere in there. I ordered Ba-Karkar to do a multiphase scan of the region, but none of the primitive sensors of the privateer found any trace of a structure or any other anomaly, and it wasn't feasible to use our more sensitive portable equipment inside the Qastt starship.

  "It could be shielded from overhead detection by human technology," Mimo suggested. "A GBD horizontal projection unit would do it. With luck, they won't have bothered with perpendicular dissimulation fields—only a roof to foil scans from space by Rampart or Zone Patrol. You'll probably be able to find the place easily enough once we're on the ground."

  I asked Ba-Karkar, "Is there any way to take an aerial photograph of this region—or do a topographic scan in hologram and make a printout?"

  Both were feasible. He showed me how to do it, and I clicked off shots of the entire northeastern portion of the desert, plus the adjacent mountains and seashore. The printouts had Qastt alphanumerics, of course, but they were a hell of a lot better than the chart we'd retrieved from the ship's databank.

  Then I adjusted the scanner to survey Taqtaq itself and the adjacent starport. It was larger than I had expected. At least sixteen spacers of various sizes sat on the ground, as well as numbers of conventional aircraft. I spotted something else that made me frown, but at that moment Ba-Karkar spoke up.

  "Asahel, now time we begin
final approach and then undertake your untranslatable subterfuge. You understand: disaster impact simulation might become genuine disaster under unforeseen circumstances. Warn your people take precautions."

  There really wasn't much we could do, since the Qastt crash harnesses would only accommodate human nine-year-olds. But I sent Mimo aft to alert the others.

  The pirate spoke briefly to Taqtaq Starport, notifying the controller that we were on final approach. I was expecting a relatively sedate human-style descent pattern, but instead Ba-Karkar threw the privateer into a precipitous auger spin that didn't flare out until we were less than three hundred meters above the ground. We were inertialess, of course, but I still clung white-knuckled to the back of the command seat as the various flight-deck displays reflected the giddy maneuver.

  "Holy shit! Did you have to drop out of the sky like a goddamn rock?"

  "I great corsair captain," Ba-Karkar growled. "I drive star-ships when you mere embryo sleeping in untranslatable of your putrid mother. Now be silent, Asahel! I must drive with significant cleverness."

  He punched some controls and the engine power faltered. The ship did a wild dance before abruptly losing more altitude. It leveled out again at a hair-raising 125 meters above the asphalt, moving very slowly on a 280-degree course toward Taqtaq. I hoped we hadn't fallen off the starport's tracking equipment. We needed to have them find us.

  Ba-Karkar touched the com pad and said calmly, "Attention, Taqtaq Ground Control, this incoming starship untranslatable."

  The controller answered.

  "I now have significant emergency. Untranslatable maneuvering apparatus malfunction. Altitude human equivalent 124.6 meters. Engine power very erratic."

  Ground Control responded with what sounded like a query.

  "No, Taqtaq. Impossible. Power failing."

  We maintained our westerly course. The desert surface was much more rugged than it had appeared from upstairs. Heaped broken blocks the size of houses that looked like an aggregate of asphalt and red gravel formed what might have been pressure ridges. Among them were gleaming black mirrors, pools of some liquid that I didn't think was water. By now the sun was almost on the horizon, shining straight at us, and every irregularity on the dark ground threw a long, confusing shadow.

  More interrogatory squeaks came from Ground Control.

  "No no! I must attempt desert landing. You track my vessel? Yes?"

  A more urgent hum, chirp, chitter.

  "Descending, Taqtaq. I now proceed with emergency landing. I activate locator beacon and await rescue craft." The little pirate captain cut off the com.

  "Do they still have a lock on us?" I asked him. "Dammit, you weren't suppose to let them lose us."

  "Silence, untranslatable fool, or we all maybe die!"

  I shut my mouth and crouched on the deck, watching the navigation display. Our position was about six hundred kilometers east of Taqtaq, on a beeline between the city and the presumed location of the Haluk facility. We were almost exactly where I had ordered Ba-Karkar to put down—far enough from the starport so the Qastt would be obliged to do an aerial search-and-rescue operation at an inconvenient distance from base, far enough away from the Haluk facility so its guardians wouldn't be suspicious.

  The main viewer showed the ship almost skimming the dark ridge tops. We flew slower and slower. Ba-Karkar turned skillfully to avoid a collection of bristling scarlet crags and we passed out of the chaotic jumbled area into a level region cracked like a dried playa. A host of blobby black pinnacles had broken through the surface here and there like columnar mushrooms. The tallest rose at least fifteen meters high and measured about four meters in diameter.

  "This looks like a good landing place," I said. "We can conceal the ship among the outcroppings."

  "If we land here," Ba-Karkar said, "ship sink within human equivalent fourteen minutes. All soft bitumen under cracked surface." He pointed to a small console display. "Also, air have excessive noxious components from gas seepage out of cracks."

  "Oh."

  We continued to waft along at what would have been treetop level had there been any trees. The sun had set and daylight began to wane. The pinnacled poison plain gave way to a wide lake blotched with oil slicks, and on its opposite shore were more of the jagged black pressure ridges. Some of their fissures vented thin ribbons of vapor and were rimmed with a dirty yellowish crust that I suspected might be elemental sulfur.

  Then Ba-Karkar uttered a squeak of triumph. "You look!"

  Beyond the ridges lay what seemed almost like tarmac—a nearly round expanse of unblemished gray pavement over four kilometers wide. In the middle of it hulked a black excrescence that looked almost exactly like a gigantic tree stump. It had spreading buttress "roots" and a snaggly top. The entire formation was perhaps sixty meters high. The upper portions steamed gently, giving it the aspect of a charred victim of a recently extinguished forest fire.

  "What the hell is it?" I asked, forgetting to whisper.

  "Untranslatable. Chart say many other untranslatables like it exist this area. We land beside this one. Little water there but not much. Surface here very tough rind covering sizable reservoir of viscous pitch. Firm enough to support starship." And then he made my stomach lurch by adding, "I think."

  "You're not positive?"

  "Who positive?" he demanded rhetorically. "Great Bitumen Desert significant enigma with imperfect data. I study data, I decide where we land. We go down now... Untranslatable!"

  The last defiant squeal almost sounded like a battle cry, a Qastt banzai. He had deployed his crash harness.

  I shouted for the others to brace themselves as we headed straight for the peculiar black formation, came to hover in midair, and then descended as lightly as a feather into a steep narrow V between a pair of buttresses. It would have been a flawless touch, except that the skipper had miseyeballed the deeply shadowed inner angle of the notch by a scant half meter. Two of the six legs of the splayed landing gear scraped the walls on the way down. I heard a couple of loud reports and a grinding scrunch. The privateer lurched and shuddered.

  Ba-Karkar slapped the power kill-pad and 1.1 gravity took hold of us. We hit the pavement with a sublethal impact and I was flung to the deck.

  "We arrive," said the pirate captain. He retracted his crash harness and peered down at me. "Emergency beacon on. You want me contact Taqtaq on voice communicator?"

  "Is the ship badly damaged?" I checked my own chassis. It was operational and I climbed to my feet.

  "We take off easily. Land again maybe very dangerous. Starship tip over and break. But I think two support-legs not difficult to repair. I look and see. We now very well concealed from casual aerial observation, just as you command."

  "Well done!" I shook hands with myself, which is the Qastt way of indicating enthusiasm and a generalized slap on the back. "Do not communicate with Taqtaq Ground Control. Will our ship's scanner be able to detect the rescue aircraft approaching?"

  "When aircraft attain sufficient proximity."

  "Okay. Do you have any idea of the rescue craft's top airspeed?"

  "Maybe human equivalent three hundred kilometers per hour."

  That gave us over an hour and forty minutes, even if they scrambled instantly, which wasn't likely. I asked him for an atmosphere analysis and wasn't too surprised when he told me that the air was filthy with volatile hydrocarbons, sulfur compounds, and smog particulates. But it was breathable by humans—at least for a few days—and if we hadn't accomplished our mission by then, it wouldn't matter.

  Mimo, Zorik, and Ildiko pushed forward cautiously on the canted deck.

  "Only light damage," I reassured them. "The caper's still on track. How you guys doing?"

  Ildiko was super, Zorik was excellent, and Mimo told me that Ivor had survived the minor crash in good spirits but was very anxious to be released from the cargo bay because it had no latrine facilities.

  "Open both hatches," I told the Qastt skipper. "We'll all go outs
ide for a little while. Ba-Karkar, while I talk to my people, you can inspect the broken landing gear. Do not reenter the ship without my permission."

  "I understand," he said. "You fear I commit some bad act alone in ship. No fear. I cooperate significantly"

  That was nice to know. But I still wasn't about to trust him.

  We trooped down the forward ramp into evening on Da-gasatt. The air was very warm, about thirty degrees. Its petroleum stench was occasionally alleviated by cooler gusts of untainted north wind that blew straight into the shadowed cut between the tall black buttresses. The starship rested in a pool of water no more than a couple of centimeters deep, which was obviously a condensate of the vapor that wreathed the upper part of the stump. Bits of material scraped from the root walls by the ship's glancing collision lay about the two broken legs of the landing gear.

  Ildiko bent down and fished a black chunk of debris out of the puddle. "Look at this. It's chock-full of tiny bubbles, almost like Zanderian pumice stone or even burnt toast. Weighs hardly anything. Do you suppose Stump Mountain is some kind of a volcano?"

  Mimo asked her for the specimen, sniffed it, and studied it briefly. "Not exactly, although volcanic heat probably accounts for its birth. I think this formation must be a carbonized mass of fossil organic material—not petroleum, but perhaps more like coal. The bubbles in it were probably produced by a subterranean cooking process that yielded carbon dioxide and steam. Since the spongy mass was much less dense than the rock strata and molten bitumen surrounding it, it rose slowly to the surface and cracked the hard crust in a starlike pattern. Then it squirted through the crevices like a thick paste and gradually assumed the stump shape as it cooled and hardened."