by Blaze Ward
“Stand by, Leader,” the Mondi killer’s voice changed.
No, not killer. He sounded more like a pirate now.
The rest of them were the killers.
“Secondary target identified. Stand by for scan,” Glaxu said.
Kyriaki listened to the bridge systems chirp as the fightercraft on their flank sent a pulse of energy towards the surface.
A new image appeared on Valentinian’s screen, surrounded by all the dials and gauges of his usual flight controls.
“Population estimate two thousand, Leader,” Glaxu said. “Power systems and vehicles scanned, but no long-range radio transmissions or defense systems detected at present. Settlement comparable to Soulrake in most ways. Smaller and less sophisticated than Meeredge.”
“Acknowledged, Outermost.“ Valentinian replied. “Maintain course and heading. Scan them randomly twice more, just in case we accidentally woke someone up, or they are playing possum. Dave, scan for a landing zone in the southeast quadrant of E-2 or northwest F-3.”
“Yes, sir,” Dave said.
Kyriaki remained silent and watched the two screens, memorizing the two cities displayed: one ruined that her mind kept interpreting as a temple complex, and the other almost a fortress, with low, thick walls circling the outside and a number of vehicles parked inside.
Roads suggested that most of them ran on wheels, rather than repulsors, which made sense if they had little trade with the exterior. Simple power systems ran for a long time if you maintained them, while repulsors needed constant care.
If they came for her…
No, when they came. Yes, when. They would be on the ground, marked by huge roostertails of dust in the air. Perhaps the warlord would have a flying craft of some sort, but that just put him in the air with Glaxu.
Or up where she could see him easier than he might hide in rough, undulating terrain. None of those vehicles looked armored enough to withstand a twin pulsar cannon, if she wanted to commit some level of xenocide.
Of course, she was here as a thief and a temple robber, depending on who you asked, so there was good case to be made for her being evil.
But she’d also been a White Hat, once upon a time. Some probably considered them the very essence of evil, when you got right down to it.
24
Bayjy
And now, the tables turn.
Bayjy smiled as Longshot Hypothesis came in for a feather-soft landing that just amazed her. She’d never flown with a pilot that good, in more than fifteen years since she left home. And cargo transports sure as hell weren’t supposed to be that nimble, but Captain had the touch.
On the ground though, she was in charge. Kinda made up for all the other craziness she’d had to go through.
She wasn’t a death-dealing, fire-breathing, killing-machine sort of person, like the others had apparently been hiding under those pleasant facades. But none of them really understood the fine art of stealing shit. And now that she had stolen all her gear back from Butler, she was in business.
Ship was down on the south east side of the place Kyrie was calling the Temple. There were schools of logic to being out of sight beyond the target, as well as being upstream. Here, someone else could get to the complex maybe before the crew realized it, as opposed to having to drive by them if they were further northwest.
Captain had split the difference by finding a nice elevation where the scanners had a good circle of clearance. Down in a hollow would hide them, blind them, and probably be the place where all the heavy metals accumulated their radiation.
Whoever had blasted this place had gone in with weapons that had an exceptionally long half-life. Kinda like salting the earth. Two thousand some years later and there were still bright spots to avoid if you didn’t want to grow a third eye overnight.
“All right, my little apprentices, time to get to work,” Bayjy announced as she backed into the rec room, with Kyrie grinning and following.
Captain and Big Guy finished shutting the ship down and came in, about the same time that the back door chimed. Big Guy went and let Glaxu in. Quick enough, she had everyone around the table.
“So,” she grinned. “Salvage is about patience, paranoia, and scholarship. In that order. It’s been here a long time already, so we’re not in a hurry to get it out. Never cut corners on the checklists I’ve provided for everyone. We never know what is a trap set to kill folks like us, so we move methodically. Good so far?”
Four nods. She’d banged on three of them enough on the way to this planet that rich salvagers had a long-term view. Butler had never gotten his head wrapped around that, so he burned his crew, which probably torched his entire reputation in Laurentia. Especially after the stories she’d told anyone who would listen.
“Two, we’re in hostile country here,” Bayjy continued. “Glaxu’s scans don’t show if anybody over there noticed us arriving, but we don’t know what the local religious schedule is like, so we have to assume that someone might show up at any moment, and thus we must be prepared to bug out on short notice. That means either we drive the truck right into the bay when we’re running, or we abandon it, so let’s keep things neat and open back there at all times, just in case.”
She fixed Dave with a hard eye that elicited a solemn nod. He would be in charge of loading and packing things, so anything that came in had to be fit into an area taped off from where the truck went. Since they would drive the truck into the aft bay with heavy things and pull them off with an overhead crane, probably safe there, but you never, ever took things for granted.
“Three, and related,” she turned to Captain and Glaxu now. “Sensors need to be set up on a schedule to ping, or we need to put some sort of tripwire laser across the far end of the valley so we get warning when someone drives over to say hello. Probably both. We don’t have enough spare crew to have someone just keeping sensor watch at all times, but we have to balance that with paranoia.”
“Four targeting pulses at the ground did not engender a response, Bayjy,” Glaxu did something with his head feathers that probably meant he was extra serious. Bird was like that. “I can set an automated targeting program in place, but we should put out localized sensors as soon as possible.”
“Agreed,” Bayjy nodded. “I’ve got a set built we can drop in the six hours of darkness we have left right now, if we want to move. Alternatively, we wait until sunset tonight and make sure nobody happened to catch a flash of light from an engine or anything.”
“I vote for now,” Captain said. “Paranoia, as you said.”
“Good, we’ll do that,” she said. “Finally, scholarship. That map got us to Kryuome. It got us to these coordinates. How much tighter can it set the search?”
“I’ve got two more rows of details to translate,” Valentinian said. “E-2 more or less corresponds to the penultimate one, or the one above it, but I’ll need sunlight and time to work out a formal grid and find the last spot.”
“There you go,” Bayjy announced to her little, innocent ducklings. “We’ll break out the truck and set sensors on the far side of the basin on the main approach. Glaxu, you’ll be our backup, on your ship, so we have your sensors immediately available plus your guns if shit gets too hot to handle.”
“As you command,” the little birdman nodded crisply.
Yeah, Senior Cutter. Expert on the dismantling of old warships by sneaking up on the bastards who had left things behind, and getting inside their decision curve so you could see what they would do next, and prevent it.
Bayjy didn’t have to be lethal. Force was usually indicative of a failure at that point, because you always ended up destroying valuable loot.
She just had to work with an entire ruined town at this point. Possibly a religious center, so she’d have demented fervency to go with sex-crazed cannibals, but that wasn’t much worse than some of the crews she had worked with previously.
“Okay, then, let’s break out the gear and the big guns,” Bayjy commanded. “Kyrie, there are no birds lar
ger than hawks on this planet, so anything flying that isn’t Glaxu is a target and you should just splatter it first and ask questions later. Understand?”
Gun chick nodded. She’d gone quiet and serious over the last few hours. Well, even more so than usual, which was saying something, but Bayjy figured she was just feeling the weight of expectations or something.
“Let’s move, people,” she rose and headed aft, right behind Glaxu. Most of her gear was in a box just waiting for Big Guy to stash in the truck.
Then they could get down to the serious business of looting.
25
Valentinian
The sun was just starting to lighten the eastern sky, beyond that sharp rim of mountaintops, as they set the last of the short-range sensors. Valentinian wasn’t as confident in them as Bayjy was, but he wasn’t going to say anything. There were still extra layers he could add.
Dave and Bayjy walked up and stood next to him, quietly watching.
He lifted up the goggles that let him see almost as if in daylight and glanced over.
“Time to head home?” Bayjy asked.
“Probably,” Valentinian agreed. “Wondering if we should set a visual sensor on the top of that central peak and aim it at the village. Plus a second one covering the southwestern approaches.”
“Don’t remember anything over there,” Dave offered.
“Nor do I. But if I suspected trespassers, I might circle wide so I could sneak up on them,” Valentinian said. “Plus, if I’m up there, we can take a really crisp picture in daylight and I can use that to map against the sensor images we have. Or just have the camera pan down.”
“Okay, but I don’t have anything like that in the arsenal right now,” Bayjy said.
“If you sleep all day today, you can build it tonight,” he offered. “I’d like to move the ship up there under darkness anyway to place something. Like you said, I’m not in a hurry to do anything until I nail down all the approaches. If whatever it is is still here, then it’s going to be either buried pretty deep, or it’s in the middle of their religious ceremonies. Or both.”
“We need to get gone, anyway,” Bayjy said. “Sun will come over those rocks lightning fast and expose our dust plume to anyone awake, so it needs to be settled down before then.”
They piled into the vehicle and Valentinian powered it up. Backing away from the sensor array Bayjy and Dave had installed, he felt more comfortable. Not safe, but less like a barbarian horde was going to come over the rise before he could get his people out safely.
Kyriaki had been wound tight. Bayjy was nervous. Even Dave was moving with greater care, so at least they understood the stakes.
Valentinian let the drive back to the ship be his time to think.
He had a treasure map he was following. Seriously.
Won it in a crooked poker game, where the Sheriff of Bohrne Station cleaned out a dumb punk en route to arresting the kid and throwing him off the station. It had gotten them to Kryuome, like Bayjy had said, once they got it translated and triangulated. Got them to this basin. Supposedly got them to a specific set of coordinates laid down two thousand years ago, at or right after the end of the Great War that saw the Urlan Empire destroyed forever. Along with several hundred other, previously-inhabited planets.
What was now called Wildspace since no government had lasted long trying to rebuild. Laurentia and the star nations that way were almost exclusively pure human and well beyond it in one direction. Glaxu and his kind were apparently from the far side somewhere. All the Variant Humanities and the descendants of the Urlan Empire were more or less centered around here.
All Valentinian wanted out of life was enough money to eventually either retire, or just not care. And to take care of all of his new friends. He trusted his gut instincts, and none of them were right now telling him to run like hell, so maybe there was something here that could get them closer to wherever it was they were supposed to be.
Other than hell, that is.
26
Glaxu
He had promised Bayjy not to eat any of the animals he might find around here, but Glaxu already knew how stupid that idea was. The predators would concentrate whatever poisons existed in the entire biosphere, making each step worse.
Hopefully, whatever creatures lived in that village, those that all the bipeds universally called Muties, would understand to grow crops in the cleanest soil they could, and live a vegetarian lifestyle.
He even promised himself not to look down his beak at them if they did. The alternative was that they absorbed all the radiation that their prey did, in addition to what the landscape contributed.
Mutants, indeed.
With the rest of the crew having been up all night, he and Dave Hall were trading watch shifts right now. Captain Valentinian was relaxing and probably studying maps and notes. Kyriaki and Bayjy were hopefully asleep.
For his rest period, Glaxu had needed exercise. His goggles had a radiation detector built in, however rarely used, so he could do some reasonably safe explorations in the nearby ruins while jogging. And it wasn’t like the natives would probably see him as a person.
No, the bipeds would be the same as in Meeredge.
At least he had not seen any smaller creatures of his type, so the Muties of the Juxx Wastelands wouldn’t default to calling him a roadrunner. Even if that was exactly what he was doing today.
Outermost was keeping watch, augmented by a triple-depth of short-range detectors. Anything approaching the edges of the basin should set off an alarm, and he agreed with Captain Valentinian that an extra set on the southwestern reach would be good, as well as up on the mountain itself, if they could find a spot flat enough for Longshot Hypothesis.
Glaxu had considered offering to hover near a good ledge and let someone like Dave crawl out and rappel down to set the sensors they needed. Glaxu knew that man’s physical capabilities were far greater than the others, for reasons not yet disclosed.
Later, perhaps. For now, he ran.
Enjoyed the overwhelming mid-day heat in ways that perhaps only Bayjy would appreciate. Set a jogging pace so slow that perhaps a human could even keep up with him over a short distance.
The ruins were psychologically magnetic, or something. They drew him in with their ancient, alien architecture and color. So much of the surrounding terrain was a pinkish, orange-ish stone. Either the kind that the winds could carve up into sand, or a harder version that might be the remains of ancient volcanoes.
Around him, however, the buildings in this area were a different color. Almost white, in spite of long exposure to etching winds, so perhaps the marble itself was white all the way through, with just the faintest, occasional colors. Glaxu could not remember seeing this color anywhere else on the planet.
He stepped close and inspected one of the walls visually before running his tongue over it. Not concrete, so it had been cut from a mountain, rather than poured in place.
The area in best repair was a cone-shaped open field, funneling one visually down to a central point that looked like a stage. Perhaps the place where a priest would call benedictions, or stand to be seen while leading the congregation.
Glaxu had no idea what Urlan religious circumstances might have been like, to say nothing of a group of semi-barbaric humans with enough technology to manage weapons and ground vehicles, but not capable air-defense networks or village-wide lighting.
Then he noticed a pattern in the stone of the square itself where the sand had blown away. Circular, with ring sections set into the ground in blocks perhaps four meters wide and ten or so along the arc.
Sand had built up in many places, but a recent breeze or storm must have disturbed enough that his eyes could see the pattern underneath. In other places, the covering was perhaps thirty centimeters thick, all the way up to massive drifts on the west-facing walls that nearly buried some buildings.
Glaxu let his perception draw him to the right. He got a running start and flapped madly enough to make
it to the roof of a two-story building and turned around to see the whole cleared area.
Yes, locals still came for religious ceremonies. He could see where vehicles with plow blades on the front regularly shoveled sand out of the way for several others to park. And then paths packed down by many centuries of feet leading to the stage at the distant end away from him, down there where all the buildings worked architecturally to draw the eye.
But the uncovered circle was clear at the top, at the round end of a teardrop, if you will. The center of the design was covered, but it looked off in ways he could not identify.
Glaxu reached into a pocket and triggered the short-range radio, once he was sure that there were no rogue transmissions.
“Captain Valentinian,” he said, waiting for Leader to respond. “I have something interesting here that I think you should see, sir.”
27
Dave
He’d had to go and admit to another previously-undisclosed element from his past, but Dave was pretty good with the others knowing about his love of architecture. Not like he was going to be constructing any more cathedrals or triumphal arches, unless something extraordinarily weird happened.
More weird than his life had been so far, at least.
He and Vee were in the suburb that held the thing everyone called a Temple, standing on a rooftop with Glaxu. Notes had been left outside their doors for Kyriaki and Bayjy, whoever woke up first, so they didn’t panic when the rest of the ship was empty.
The sun overhead was just coming into the hottest part of the day, so he and Valentinian were wearing those overrobes that were pretty much standard attire on this world. And guns. You didn’t go anywhere on this planet without adequate firepower.
For now, that meant he kept a rifle at hand that he could score a kill with at four kilometers on a calm day.