Assured (Envoys Book 2)

by Peter J Aldin

“I’ll go first, sir,” said Westermann, handing him a holstered pistol which he immediately clipped to his belt.

  “Thank you, Corporal. That won’t be necessary.” Pan pointed to Hecate. “You. Up.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re the non-personnel addition to my recce party. You get the honor of going through doorways first. And you’re the first person going into that water.”

  “Captain, I don’t think—” Gregory started.

  Pan said, “Your objection is taken under advisement. But she put us all in this mess. She can play her part in helping us survive it.”

  “Whatever,” Hecate said, climbing clumsily to her feet. “Anything’s better’n lyin’ around in here.”

  22

  The Humans were discussing environment suits, their opinions divided. The males were opposed to wearing them, Corporal Bradstock stating that standard suits didn’t allow for speed and flexibility the way combat models did. But they accepted it might be best to wear the suit against environmental hazards, just not the helmet since those would impair their vision and hearing. Bradstock tapped on a screen and quoted air quality data to prove it was safe to breathe out there, if a little cool at the current point of the day. The females wanted to wear the suits complete with helmets, quoting Captain Pan’s orders.

  Gladky, the kitchen worker with the earlier burn injuries, said, “I wanna breathe real air. And if some ten-legged monster’s comin’ runnin’ up behind me, I wanna hear it in time to shoot the flegger.”

  “Suits do have external microphones, you know,” said the clerk, Evans, her hands on her hips.

  “Enough of this!” The Peacekeeper’s harsh tone silenced the others. “You and her wear a helmet. Me and him don’t. Leave it at that. We make our choices and live with the consequences.” Nurse Moore looked as if she would argue further—Buoun was certain “Ensign” outranked “Corporal”—but she acquiesced.

  While the women pulled the new outfit over their existing uniforms, the males searched closets for supplies, stuffing water bottles, a “first aid” kit and medicines into two small backpacks. Buoun asked for neither suit nor helmet: Tluaanto had tinkered so much with their biology over the previous hundred orbits that it would have to be a very special environmental pathogen indeed to affect him. Besides, a Tluaan head wouldn’t fit inside a Human helmet, and their suits would also be ill-fitting. What he would need was water. While the Humans rummaged for other things, he found three clear flasks, filled them from a tap and used a roll of bandages as a makeshift belt to hang them from his waist. Not knowing how long he would be walking, he then drank from the tap, cupping his hands beneath it.

  Lacking helmets, the males tied a kind of yellow and black scarf around the lower half of their faces, covering nose and mouth.

  “Might as well wear a helmet,” Evans said.

  Gladky swore at her.

  Bradstock used his fingerprint to unlock a high cupboard, retrieving two holsters with handguns in them. There were no spare magazines. Bradstock already had his own pistol—and many spare magazines in the armor vest he had put on over his e-suit—so he gave one of the new weapons to Gladky. The other, he offered to Buoun.

  “Hnnh, no. I don’t think so. But thank you.”

  “Thought you might be up for protecting yourself out there, sir. You did tackle a Silver.”

  Buoun touched the bruises on his face and throat, the glued area around his ear. “My single attempt at violence has taught me how poor I am at it.”

  “Very well, sir. We’ll watch your back.” He held the weapon toward Moore. She declined, so it went to Evans. “You ladies happy to carry the packs for the first half hour? Good. Gladky brings up the rear. Envoy Buoun in the middle. I’ll scout ahead for ten minutes. Then I’ll come back for you and take point. Watch what you touch, what you step on, what you walk under. Chatter to a minimum. All right. Envoy, wanna hit that button beside the hatch there?”

  Buoun did so, letting in midafternoon sunlight and sweet-smelling air that reminded him of the forest near his childhood home. He hadn’t been in the open air on a planet since boyhood. He wasn’t really sure he’d missed it.

  Gregory was only just reaching for his helmet when they unsealed the pod. He caught a whiff of dry and earthy air. Unsuited passengers behind him complained and coughed. Something tickled at his nose and he rubbed it hard, knowing there wouldn’t be another chance for a while. He got the helmet on fast then, locking it down.

  The queue ahead of him was moving. Gregory reached the lip of the opened door behind Grace and stared past her at the muddy water lapping at the pod. For the first time, he realized that their life vessel was moving, bobbing gently on the lake surface. The helmsmen had used its maneuvering jets to reverse it as close as possible to the shore, jamming it against the shallow lake bottom seven or eight meters out.

  Pan and Sintopas waded through gritty water that foamed around their legs. Hecate, Westermann, and Toller already stood on the dusty beach. From there, the rocky terrain angled upward steeply, patched with low-growing scrub, grasses, and the occasional stumpy cactoid plant. Above the rim of the old volcano, the sky glared a clear azure. From Gregory’s right, the sun peeked around the pod’s hull and over the top of the caldera. He couldn’t feel its heat through his suit or get a true sense of how this star compared with Foucault’s or those of other human worlds because of his visor tinting.

  Grace’s voice crackled in his helmet speakers. “You coming? People inside want the door shut.” She had stepped down and moved away while he paused here, lost in thought.

  He waved an apology over his shoulder. Hand rungs had been set into the hull by the door. He grabbed one for balance and let himself drop into the water. Immediately, he was glad of his handhold as his boots slipped sideways on the silty lakebed. Once his footing became surer, he waded after Grace, conscious of Westermann on shore and sweeping her rifle across the water near him. After recent events, the appearance of a hideous, toothy lake monster would not have surprised him.

  On the shore, he kicked and shook and scraped mud and lichen from his boots, taking his cue from the others. Pan turned in circles, surveying their surroundings. Grace ventured further out to study the thick purple paddles of a cactoid. Able Spacer Esana had a scanning device pointed toward the sky. Hecate dropped into a crouch, plucking at a clutch of short grass by her toes. Pan hadn’t dressed her in a full e-suit; she’d been equipped with a breath filter and comms rig plus goggles. The loose handcuff still dangled from her uninjured wrist.

  Helmsman Toller leaned on a collection of moss-covered rocks nearby and prodded one with his rifle. It jerked to life before heading slowly up hill. Toller had startled and backed up a step. On the open channel, he said, “Don’t know what that is, and don’t want to know.”

  “Let’s avoid them, yes?” Pan suggested and those closest to the other “rocks” stepped away.

  When Sintopas moved, he stumbled and fell onto one hip, gathering himself clumsily. Since Toller was closest to the comms officer and was assisting his awkward attempts to rise, Gregory sent Toller a private voice comm. “He okay?”

  Toller released his hold on the comms officer’s arm and tapped a suit control to reply. “Probably gravsick. Hasn’t set foot on a planet in six years.”

  “Why not?”

  “Hates them.”

  “Hm, I think we’ll all be hating this one pretty soon.”

  “Copy that, sir,” said Toller and killed the channel.

  Pan was now staring at one point on the caldera wall. Gregory followed his gaze, visor darkening as he faced into the sun. There, a little lower than the rim, was the stone structure some of them had been calling the temple entrance. Their destination. And, if rescue did not come soon, perhaps their home.

  “It’s late-morning,” Esana’s voice said on the open channel. Gregory checked the time. It hadn’t reached 0100 yet according the shiptime he was now acclimatized to. Esana continued, “Temperature’s nineteen C
elsius. Storm’s coming in from southwest. Heavy precipitation coming with it, but it won’t last long. Wind’s picking up ahead of it.”

  The wind was noticeable even through the suit, the swirling breeze buffeting him and ruffling the clumps of long grass around and above him, kicking up wavelets across the lake. “Shall we move then?” he sent back on the open-chan.

  Pan said, “Aye, Ambassador. Let’s go for the temple. Diamond formation, people. Westermann, you have point with the prisoner leading you. The ambassador, Ms. Renny, and Esana in the middle. Toller, take our left flank, I’ll take right. Sintopas, bring up our tail with an eye on that lake—we still don’t know what’s in it.”

  Pan needn’t have worried about aggressive fauna, as it turned out. The climb was a slog, but hardly dangerous. By the time Gregory’s small party of three joined Hecate and Westermann at the temple entrance, his legs burned and he was sweating, causing his suit to up the speed of its internal fans to cool him. He looked to the entranceway set into the hill. The dark mouth framed in pocked and ancient stone implied dangers to come. Hecate was crouching again, back against the bricks while Westermann played her rifle’s flashlight into the tunnel. It revealed a stone-lined shaft—although the wind had blown grit inside, the way was largely clear of detritus.

  “Goes back a ways,” the Peacer said. Gregory came up close to her. The flashlight beam hinted at a wall or corner sixty or so meters within the mountain.

  “I got what they call grave misgivings about going in there,” Grace muttered on open-chan.

  Pan pointed to the sky where gray and angry clouds peeked over the caldera rim. “Ever heard the ancient saying about any port in a storm?”

  Gregory turned his visor upwards and flinched when a huge raindrop hit it dead center. More of them impacted the dirt nearby, kicking up small puffs of dust.

  “We’ll stay out here for a minute or two,” Pan commed. “Good chance to wash the pollen off before we go inside.”

  “Anyone got any pain meds?” Hecate asked as the rain fell harder. Grace and Westermann swore at her. “Just thought I’d ask.”

  Thinking about the way Buoun had tackled and wrestled her, he wondered how he was faring. He and the people with him.

  “I am on another planet. Another world.” Buoun’s boots crunched down on twigs that had blown or fallen into the dry creek bed his party hiked along. The cool, dry Kh’het3 air was peppered with scents and particles he couldn’t identify. Even the sunlight slanting in through the tall and scraggly trees seemed odd, paler than it should be—and softer.

  “You say something, Envoy?” Ensign Moore asked. She was walking behind him, her voice tinny coming out of her suit’s exterior speaker.

  A few arm lengths ahead of him, Spacer Evans turned all the way around and glared at him a moment before continuing. Glared. As if he had no right to speak his thoughts aloud.

  He cleared his throat and shifted to English. “With everything that has happened, Ensign Moore, I have been very distracted. I only just realized I am on an alien planet. I am on someone else’s homeworld.”

  “We don’t use the word ‘alien,’” Evans’s voice came from ahead, also thinned by her suit speaker.

  “Why not?” Buoun wondered aloud. “The word was in many of the dictionaries and historical texts included in your probe. Has its meaning changed in the past nine hundred of your years?”

  “Every word changes meaning,” she said in reply. Her tone seemed hostile. Her body language had become noticeably sullen—even through her e-suit—since leaving the pod. She trudged ahead of him with slumped shoulders. The hand not carrying an equipment pack had clenched into a fist and kept beating on her thigh. She was afraid, no doubt. She was tired and unsettled, angry at a state of affairs she had no control over.

  He understood those feelings very well. To distract her, he said, “And yet the three languages I have observed spoken and written on Assured are almost identical to the versions sent on the probe we intercepted.”

  Her only reply was an impatient snort. Her pace increased, distancing her from him and closing the gap with Bradstock at the front of the line.

  In a more conversational and respectful tone, Moore told him, “Since its inception, the DCHC has made it common practice to school citizens in old world languages from a young age. So, yes, we speak like CUSET-era people did. Or close to it. At least anyone under seventy years of age does. Most of us have grown up speaking the standard English or Spanish or Mandarin you know … along with our original regional or cultural languages. Even the Xerxian Sevens Party have followed this practice since about 2985. That was twenty-nine years ago,” she added, in case the date meant nothing to him. Which it didn’t. “The idea was to align our languages across multiple worlds.”

  “I have wondered about that,” he replied, then grunted as a misstep caused him to trip and stumble forward a few paces.

  When he regained his balance and composure, Moore told him, “There are philosophical as well as practical benefits and reasons for using the syntax and vocabulary from the last time in history we were all united. Returning to your question: in the context of intelligent beings, the word ‘alien’ has been deemed inappropriate, judgmental. But it’s perfectly okay to use in the context you did. You meant that we are walking through unfamiliar and foreign terrain. And, hell yes, that’s exactly what we’re doing.”

  Buoun felt a burst of chill wind on his face. The breeze had shifted direction as well as temperature. He gazed up through the leafless canopy at an approaching storm front that had suddenly blocked the sun. The last time he’d felt rain, he had been a child. He remembered it as cold and unpleasant. Why hadn’t he chosen to wear an e-suit?

  Ahead of him, Evans squealed and fell over backwards, her pack dropped and forgotten, her hands to her faceplate.

  “What—?” he started to ask, then yelped as a hand on his shoulder yanked him a few steps back.

  Past Evans, he could see Bradstock jogging back her way with his pistol aimed at her. No. Not at her. Near her. Near, where ground had opened! A hatch or flap of some kind had been flung back onto the creek bed, allowing a creature to emerge. They’d seen nothing but some flying creatures high above and the occasional lines of tiny crawling things. The area had been almost devoid of life—or else they had scared it away. But this …

  The creature was perhaps as long as Buoun was high but less than an arm-length wide, colored a dusty brown that blended well with the dirt around it. A flat worm with a multitude of short and stubby legs, and four long tendrils writhing from the sides of its beaklike mouth. The front half of its body reared up as the back half pushed it cautiously toward Evans. The Human screamed again. Then Bradstock fired his weapon. Moore yanked Buoun again, moving him to the side, keeping them out of the line of fire. They fell together with their sides pressed to the hard bank of the creek. The predator shuddered under the hail of Bradstock’s energy pulses, twisting mid-body to face its aggressor, before dropping to the ground and fleeing up the side of the dry waterway, its myriad limbs driving it fast, its body blackened and pocked with energy burns. A moment later, even the noise of it was gone.

  The scene fell still as people caught their breath and scrutinized the earth around them for other hidden predator dens. Gladky left his rearguard position to come in closer. Bradstock stood over Evans and reached out a hand. She took it, got herself upright and stared in the direction the predator had gone. Her pistol had not left its holster on her thin utility belt.

  “No more walking in the creek bed,” Bradstock told them. “Might be the favorite place those worm bastards set up shop.”

  “Plus,” said Moore as she helped Buoun to his feet and as the first raindrops fell hard around them, “it’s going to get wet and slippery.”

  Bradstock led them all up the bank and grouped them close. There was no sign of the flat, many-legged worm. He said, “We stick closer. Evans, give your weapon to the nurse.”

  “What? I …”

>   “Give it.”

  She did so without further objection.

  “Three in the middle, cluster up. And keep up with me. Gladky, you still okay at the back?”

  “No. But I’ll do it.”

  Bradstock winked a raindrop out of one eye, then set out again, pointing ahead to where the dead volcano was visible through the growing murk of rain. “We’ll be at the base in less than an hour. Attention where it needs to be. That means no more yik-yak.”

  They had been walking a dozen heartbeats before Evans disobeyed his order. “That was a Xenthracr.”

  “That was not a Xenthracr,” murmured Nurse Moore.

  “It looks like the things in the video I saw.”

  It didn’t, Buoun thought. Longer, flatter, different body shape, many more legs.

  “Just like those big bugs,” Evans added.

  “And from a Xenthracr’s point of view,” said Moore, “we’d look like Tluaanto. Or marsh woggles. Or chimpanzees. Arthropoidal life is prevalent everywhere we have been, Able Spacer. Don’t go making assumptions that it’s all related. Just focus on getting through this alive.”

  “I am. Sir.”

  They pressed on quietly, gazes sweeping the ground while the rain increased to the point that Buoun had to raise a hand to keep it from his eyes.

  After a while, Gladky at the back asked, “Marsh woggles?”

  Moore replied, “Never been to Leicester Province?”

  “Nope. Where’s that?”

  “Castor. Where I grew up. Bloody awful place.” She slipped in the mud, had to right herself. “Marsh woggles are these creepy things that live deep in the swamps. We almost culled them to extinction before PBT. But they’ve rallied since then. Lots of them. They’re like a cross between slugs and mermaids.”

  “Mermaids?” the man said.

  “Mermaids are creatures of Earth legend, half Human, half fish.”

  “Yech. So, woggles are one half slug, one quarter human, one quarter fish?”