“Quarters,” he said aloud. Such a strange use of the English word. The first time he’d heard them say, “You’ll be quartered here”, it sounded as if they would cut him into four pieces!
The mess door swung open. Buoun expected an off-duty tech or warrior, drawn in by the mourak nolgoush. It was Pi. She barked an order toward the kitchen and slid into the chair by his. Neither she nor he spoke. It was not tiredness, since Tluaanto did not need as much sleep as Humans. It was more that there was nothing to say. He had often witnessed Human superiors conversing pleasantly with underlings. It was not that way in Domain Space culture. Tluaanto of different stations did not make “small talk.”
After a steward had served them bitter tea and seaweed cake with sweet paste, and once they were alone again, Buoun decided that if small talk was out of the question, then he could raise a subject that had troubled him for days.
“Councillor, I want to ask you something. Of course, I will understand if—”
“Ask,” Pi said simply. She cut a seaweed cake in half and nibbled on it, face wrinkling in disappointment at the flavor.
Buoun drew a teacup closer and stared into it. “Very well. Both you and the Grand Councillor have indicated that there is information we need to keep from the Humans. For the sake of our domain. For the sake of our children’s children, Councillor Naat said.” A slight misrepresentation of Naat’s words back in Buoun’s apartment. But if his leaders could play at subterfuge, then so could he. “If I am to translate correctly, I need to know what secrets we are keeping from them—so that I don’t mistakenly reveal any special information.”
Pi’s jaw paused mid-chew. There was a sudden openness in her gaze that surprised him.
“Sometimes,” she said and swallowed her food, “ignorance is the happiest state of being.” She sipped her tea before pushing plate and cup away and wiping her hands on her trousers. “I think I understand you now, Buoun’nyimiun’t. There is nothing more important to you than understanding. Understanding anything. It must have pierced both your hearts when Naat took the Human Exhibition Facility away from you.”
Interesting way to phrase it, Buoun thought, “took it away from you”. To be diplomatic, she might have said, “closed it down.”
“And later, when we picked you up from that asteroid mine, when we assigned you your current commission, you must have felt something like the resurrection Human religions talk about.”
She had been reading up on Human cultures, then. Matching her frankness, he replied, “That is an apt analogy for what I felt.”
She grunted, eyes clouding in thought. “All the domains lust after knowledge. Just as you do. But for different reasons, I suspect. Knowledge is for you what art is for wealthy people. What family is for poor people. It gives you pleasure in and of itself. For we who lead the domains—as with those who formerly led the clans—knowledge is a means to supremacy, to shaping the universe in ways that favor us.” Again she beheld him with that open, searching gaze. “Are you sure you want the knowledge you ask for?”
“Yes, Councillor.”
She lifted a hand. “Do not respond so quickly. I know you admire Humans. I know you hope for a mutually beneficial and open relationship.” Here she used the English word, perhaps to mock him, perhaps because she understood the word had nuances it lacked in their own language. “If I reveal this knowledge you seek, it may strain your loyalty to your domain and its goals.”
The statement worried him. Nevertheless, he felt insulted by her intimation. “I remain completely loyal to Domain Space. I am Domain Space.” The statement felt especially resonant in view of Surface’s recent disgusting actions, and Moon’s. To emphasize his point, he quoted a Space poet: “Tlaa and Tlu with half a brain cannot their own domain disdain.” The line worked in English, he realized, even rhymed in English.
Pi’s expression was dubious. “Those fine words have been proven false in the past, Buoun. Many a time. But I take your point. And I believe you.” She pushed her cup and plate further apart and leaned into the space she had cleared. “What am I about to tell you is known only to members of the Council and a handful of trusted custodians, including Chlalloun. Whispering one syllable of this will earn you a death sentence.”
He swallowed. “I am ready.”
“No,” she said. “You are not. But I will tell you anyway. And, no doubt, you will not sleep tonight …”
14
Chipper had a mocktail in one hand and his face was turned toward the sun as a light breeze caressed his cheek. Landfall Beach was busy around him. Russell, his brother, was there. And Cindy from his old high school class. Everything was sweet, everything was sugary.
Then Lieutenant Berderhan elbowed him in the arm and woke him out of it.
“Ah, crap,” he slurred and wiped a line of drool from his cheek. Straightening in the nav chair, he sucked in a lungful of cool reprocessed air, catching his bearings.
“Good dream?” Berderhan asked.
“Sun, surf, sand.”
“A girl?”
“Maybe,” he grinned.
She grinned back then pointed out the viewport. “Well, the local sun’s that way, but ain’t no surf round here, bud. Girls neither. ’Cept for me and Vazak. What we do have is the Qesh home world and its two moons.”
Kh’het3 has been a dot dead ahead the last time he’d seen it—which felt like a moment ago. A clock check told him he’d been out for two hours. The planet was now the size of a basketball and had moved to the starboard side of the viewport. Its two moons hung above and below it, one a dirty white marble, the other a brown dirtball.
He indicated a hologram marker projected onto the canopy, a tiny triangle flashing on and off to the “side” of the planet. “What’s that? Satellite?”
“That’s the orbital station the Tluaanto briefed us about. I scanned it while you were taking your babe to the beach. Looks like a tube, two point five klicks long, eight hundred meters high each end.”
She tapped out a command with a knuckle. A screen on his side of the board came to life. The long-range photograph of the orbital was clear as crystal.
The Qesh station had been a cylinder too, but that had definitely been manufactured. This thing looked grown, like a gigantic fruit or tuber. Its hull was stubbly and pimpled, as if rendered with gravel. And it was ever so slightly raised in the center, as if someone had pressed against the ends and bowed it.
Not a fruit, he corrected himself, and thought of something he’d harvested often as a kid. If the ends weren’t flat, it’d look like a big latch-fish egg.
“Won’t be winning any awards for Prettiest Space Station,” he told her.
“Leave the fly-by of the orbital until last,” Chinyama called from the back.
“Ice moon first, boss?” Berderhan returned.
“Ice moon, planet, dirt moon, orbital.”
“The fun tour, it is.” The Lioness banked starboard and a few degrees up-plane. The dirty white moon shifted across the canopy until it was dead ahead. Berderhan pulled the datapen from its holder and tapped a few things on her wep-con screen, then jammed the pen in her mouth and spoke around it. “Weapons ready, willing, and able, sir.”
“Acknowledged.”
“Don’t go bumping anything,” she told Chipper. “You might fire a missile at nothing, or detonate one still in its mount.”
Hearing that warning, an ignorant passenger might get jittery about where they put their hands and feet. Chipper only laughed. There was no way to detonate a missile inside its own launcher. And there was nothing for him to bump—wep-con was on her side of the helm.
He said, “I’ll try not to sneeze on your screens.”
“I’d prefer you didn’t do that anyway.”
Chipper took a peek at Vazak. He wasn’t sure if it was his imagination, but her damaged arm seemed longer than it had been yesterday. Could their medical tech work that fast? She was absorbed with the datafeed on her own tablet, the mirror image of Chinyama
seated across from her.
“It’s great our techs were able to finally marry the Tluaan devices with ours,” he told Berderhan.
“Not really.” The pilot shifted her leg to show him a wiry box fitted beneath the console. “I keep scraping my knee on the damn adaptor.”
The ice moon had lived up to its name. Scans revealed it was simply an uneven mass of water ice and rock. When they found nothing exciting happening on it or around it, they continued swiftly toward Kh’het3. Now the Lioness entered high orbit on the planet’s daylight side, keeping the planet between them and the orbital facility on its other side.
“I count three artificial satellites in view,” Chinyama called forward.
“That’s what I have too.” Chipper bent as close to his monitor as the harness would allow, reading the data. “Tiny. We could play basketball with ’em.”
The satellites were in low orbit—so low that their decaying orbits put them in danger of reentry sometime in the next few decades. All showed up as composites of metals and plastics—and they were dark, emitting zero radio or electrical activity. Same as the ones that had fallen silent above Oceana in the centuries after the PBT virus. How long had these babies been up here? And why were they dark? Had the Xenthracr burned out their hearts? Had the Qesh civilization already been in decline before the invasion?
Chinyama told Berderhan, “We’re in view of the dirt moon, Lieutenant, but let’s take a closer look at that continent down there first.”
“Happy to oblige.” Berderhan tilted the T15’s nose toward the fuzzy crescent of atmosphere and checked her monitors. “I make something like a large town, center-landmass. Lotta heat coming out of it for a relatively cool region. Wanna looksee?”
“Please,” said Chinyama. “And then on to the coordinates for the crashed Tluaan shuttle.”
After some reentry buffeting, the Lioness settled down to a slower, smoother approach toward the first location, coming in from the southwest. Chipper alternated between gawking out the windows at the region’s grassy steppes and small lakes and scouring sensors for signs of airborne hostiles. So far there’d been none. He could only hope it stayed that way.
“Will ya look at that?” Berderhan jinked to starboard for a couple of seconds until Chipper could see it too.
They’d passed the steppes and were now over a lower expanse of land, most of it marsh. Beyond that, jagged spires rose. Chipper counted eight … before more came into focus a few klicks behind those. As the Lioness closed on them making features easier to see with the naked eye, the spires appeared quite sharp at their peaks, their coloring a light tan with frecklings of reds and greens. They were notched and jagged in ways that suggested erosion, their uniform height suggesting design rather than natural formation.
Checking the scans, Chipper reported, “Tallest one’s two hundred meters. Shortest is one-eighty. You really think that’s a city?”
“Gotta be,” the pilot replied. “Ambient air temperature out there is twenty-two Celsius. They’re emitting air that’s too cool to be volcanic venting or geothermal, and too warm to be anything than other than biological activity. Also—” She tapped one of the screens. “we have life signs. I’m slowing to pass by the easternmost one.” She rotated the ship to port, so she and Chipper could see more of the ground as they reached that eastern spire.
This close, the “freckling” he’d noticed earlier resolved as random smatterings of plant life. Also …
“There’s our life signs,” he said, and started focusing an external camera on the movement he’d seen.
“Well, well,” said Berderhan. The Lioness braked hard as she steered it into the canyon between two rows of spires. “Hello, non-human people.”
Chipper zoomed the cam in on the living creatures streaming along that canyon, wondering if he should start thinking of the area as a “street.” He snapped off several photos. The creatures were barrel-chested, their naked torsos tapering to narrow hips. They went about on four limbs, with many carting goods in netting on their backs. “Look like Qesh to me. Must be a hundred of them.”
“More,” Chinyama returned, presumably watching Chipper’s camfeed on his tab. “This is definitely a settlement. Though the building design doesn’t match the Qesh brick-and-tile work we saw in the images from Assured. This is more like the way Anachromites live.”
“I know they taught us about Anachromites in school, sir,” Chipper said, “but I think I was sleeping through that lesson. Their buildings look like that?”
“Their hive cities are formed of tall but rounded mounds, served by aqueducts for fresh water and sewage flow. They maintain uniform heat and airflow within them using quite ingenious methods. These towers are radiating a similar temperature from within.”
“It’s a Xenthracr colony, then,” said Berderhan. “Maybe.”
Vazak spoke in English, or tried to. “Make thing where?”
Chipper and Berderhan exchanged a Did you get that? look.
“She may be asking about their manufacturing,” Chinyama suggested. “I’m wondering the same thing. I see buildings analogous to housing towers. But scans aren’t showing factories anywhere.”
“Been wondering about that,” Chipper added, scratching at his chin. “There’s almost zero pollution in the atmosphere. Trace readings of carbon monoxide and dioxins, but very faint.”
“Maybe it’s all underground,” Berderhan said as she steered the ship out the end of the canyon, banking slowly north again.
The camera feed shifted with the angle of the ship, still zoomed in, and Chipper caught a glimpse of something not-Qesh clinging to the base of the one of the spires.
He pointed. “What the hell is that?”
Berderhan performed a hard turn to pass back over the same area. This time, Chipper captured video, while the pilot muttered cusswords.
Evidently still watching Chipper’s feed, the XO said, “It’s not a Qesh.”
Chipper was about to comment when something like hail pattered against the belly of the Lioness.
Berderhan swore as she jerked the T15 into cover behind the next row of towers and dropped her head over one of her monitors. “That’ll teach me to save power by dropping the shields.”
“Shooting at us?” asked Chinyama.
“Ballistic rounds. No damage done. Shields up now. Wanna go back?”
“We have a recording. Push on, please.”
The ship cruised along a new street-canyon. Chipper took a moment to study a screengrab of the creature that had shot at them. Longer and bulkier than the Qesh, this creature had eight legs and three distinct body segments. The pilot captured by the Tluaanto had only six legs, but both individuals had a stumpy fan tail. It had to be a kind of Xenthracr. He zoomed in on the face. The four eyes seemed more developed than the pilot’s, one pair larger than the other, more dominant. Also … “It looks like it has some kind of growths or sacs under its mouth.”
Berderhan glanced at his screen. “Ew. I really don’t wanna think about what they’re for.”
“And it’s holding a pretty simple ballistic weapon,” he continued. “Might be magazine-fed. Think this is a warrior caste?”
“Warrior caste?” Berderhan said.
“Of the invaders. A lot of insectoids break up into specialized versions of themselves, ey?”
“Possible,” said Chinyama “Or a slave overseer. It looks like it’s watching the Qesh do the work.”
There were less Qesh in this new canyon. Chipper watched one scale the lower reaches of a tower, then headed for an access hole while lugging a net of gears or machine parts. Movement within the access hole made his heart beat faster.
“Contact!”
Six more warrior-slavers scrambled out. Their roach-like shells ranged in color from bronze to a mottled tan. They raised rectangular weapons that flared with muzzle flash.
Berderhan yanked back on the control stick and hit the burners, catapulting them high into the sky. “I’d so love to return fire
!”
“Negative,” said Chinyama. “Let’s go look for the survey shuttle crash site.”
Once she’d settled into a new heading and higher altitude, Berderhan said, “Commander Chinyama, sir, mind if I do a little wondering based on the facts we have so far.”
“Go ahead.”
“Assured reported the captive pilot as non-responsive, almost comatose, right? Maybe it’s like the rifle-jockey here said … they’re a diversiform species, differentiated into specialties. Or maybe the pilots are an immature life stage, like nymphs.”
“Could be,” Chinyama replied. “Would be useful to confirm that. But let’s see what else our reconnaissance uncovers.”
As the elevation rose again, the terrain below became thick forest. At one point they came across a rectangular butte poking above the forest. A different kind of settlement climbed its sides. It was composed of edifices more recognizable as buildings, all of varying heights and lengths, all formed from brick. They passed over it low and slow, marking the presence of a couple dozen Qesh, a population that seemed much too low for a settlement that size.
“The main population may be out gathering food,” Chipper suggested. “Or working within the buildings.”
“Or enslaved and taken away by the bad guys,” said Berderhan. “Hey, boss, you wanna set down and say hi?”
“Absolutely not,” said Chinyama. “Not in today’s job description.”
“No worries,” she said and steered away. To Chipper she added, “They didn’t look that interested in us anyway.”
“Which I find very strange,” he responded. “Same as the ones at the spire city. The Qesh didn’t notice us at all. Poor hearing?”
“The mission briefing said the artifact Qesh are pretty disinterested in anything that doesn’t need fixing. Maybe we crash-land and let them come and fix us up?”
“Don’t make jokes like that, Lieutenant,” Chinyama scolded.
Assured (Envoys Book 2) Page 16