by David Liss
“Assume there are more out there,” I said to Villainic, “so keep low and keep quiet. We need to get back to the pod, but we have to scout it before approaching in case they’ve discovered it already. You have to follow my lead and do everything I tell you.”
“Of course,” Villainic said. “Don’t I always?”
I moved over to the Phands and searched them quickly for weapons. Surprisingly, they had none. No food, either, just some old-fashioned canteens with water in them. I hated Phands, but I wasn’t going to abandon them in the desert with nothing to drink, so I left the canteens and hoped I didn’t later regret the decision. When I’d given up on finding anything useful, we headed toward the uphill slope we would need to climb in order to get back to the pod. To anyone watching from a distance, we would be visible and slow, but there was only one way back, and we had to take it. At least it was starting to get dark, so it was cooler. It would probably be cold soon, and that would be its own challenge, but I had enough problems to face now without worrying about the problems that were going to crop up.
The climbing was difficult, and though Villainic kept quiet, I could hear the complaints vibrating off him even though his species was more athletic than mine. Still, he didn’t give them voice, and that showed some improvement on his part. We reached the top of the climb and kept our backs to the outcroppings as we risked scans of the expanse ahead, but there was no sign of any Phands or their vehicles.
It took twice as long to get back as it had to get to the dig in the first place. Night had almost completely fallen by the time we were in visual range of the pod. In spite of Villainic’s implicit protests, we crouched low and watched the pod for another hour, until the desert had descended into full darkness. The temperature moved from refreshingly cool to uncomfortably cold, and I regretted having left my blazer behind.
I heard the sounds of nocturnal creatures beginning to crawl and skitter and belch bullfroglike cries. These last, I think, came from carnivorous plants. I realized that there might well be things far more dangerous than the Phands out there, and that it would be a terrible irony if I were to be taken down by an alien vine bite, but I couldn’t protect myself against every unknown.
Finally I decided it was as safe as it would ever be, and we made it back to the pod. I closed the door, put on my blazer, ate a food packet, and turned to the main control panel. It had to be possible to look for the heat signature of something like another ship. An escape pod would be designed to seek out friends and avoid foes.
I wrestled with the main computer for a few minutes until I found exactly what I was looking for, but in order to run the kind of search I had in mind, the pod had to be in the air. I was tired, maybe too tired for safe flying, but I didn’t think it was safe to wait.
Unfortunately, it looked like I was going to have to. Power reserves, the computer told me, were too low for flight. That was the bad news. The mostly good news was that the pod would recharge using solar energy. I hadn’t realized this, and so I hadn’t set the pod to charge. I could do that in the morning, and, if I was reading the data correctly, we’d have enough power to be airborne by noon. I hoped it would be enough time to avoid detection.
I would sleep for a few hours, I decided, get up early and start the charging process, and lift off as soon as we possibly could. There was a plan now. It was a vague plan at best that involved stealing a ship of unknown size from a Phandic force of unknown number, so it was hard to say just how hopeless this plan might be. I didn’t care. I’d thought I’d run out of options before, but it had turned out I wasn’t done yet. I had a chance, and that was more than I’d had when we searched the Former cave.
I opened one of the emergency medical bays to use as a bed, and slipped inside. I closed my eyes and began running through the morning’s tasks, but I couldn’t concentrate. My brain was fried. Things began to run together. Somewhere in the distance Villainic was talking, but his words were too distant to hear. I could, I thought dreamily, escape him in sleep.
• • •
I awoke with a start but somehow managed not to sit up fast and hit my head. I checked my bracelet. It was now well past dawn. I’d overslept. I was annoyed with myself for having missed at least an hour of solar recharge.
I also had to pee, and while there was a sort of emergency onboard toilet, I was not about to go in front of Villainic. I pressed the button to open the door, and morning sunlight streamed into the pod.
Standing outside the pod, as though they were about to knock, were the three Phands we’d stunned the day before.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
* * *
I knew I should have brought my pistol with me. I’d never needed to bring weapons to the toilet before, but times had changed, and I marked this down as a lesson learned. Besides, there was probably not a whole lot I could have done even if I’d had my pistol. There were three of them and one of me.
Instead of shooting them with a pistol I didn’t have, I stared at them, which was not terribly intimidating.
One of the Phands stepped forward and did something with its mouth that, were it to come from any other species, I might have thought was a smile. He took his hat off his head and pressed the brim to his chest.
“Good morning,” the Phand said. “I hope we’re not intruding.”
This is not the sort of greeting one typically expects from a Phand. I wasn’t quite sure how to respond.
“Ah, yes,” the Phand said uneasily, as if he realized he was intruding and felt terrible about it. “I am being rude, aren’t I? You don’t know our names. I’m Nimod Plood Adiul-ip. This is Usmoor Jope Thindly-bak, and the pretty lady is Plovim Roove Hopir-ka. We noticed that this is a Phandic escape pod, but you are clearly not Phands. I recognize your species—at least I think I do—and I’m not entirely certain what you are doing here. We’re also pretty sure you tossed a stun grenade at us yesterday. They’re reusable, you know.”
He held out the stun grenade as if he was offering it to me. Unsure how to respond, I reached out and took it. I was now holding a weapon, so that seemed like a step forward. I still had no idea what was going on, though.
“Would you mind answering a few questions?” Adiul-ip asked. “We are very curious about who you are and how you came to be here.”
I was still trying to process all this information when Villainic appeared behind me. Then he shoved me out of the way and bowed in almost a single movement. He proceeded with his weird Rarel introductory gesticulations—hand and head movements, plus lots of footwork. “I am Villainic, Fifth Scion of House Astioj, Third Rung of the Caste of the Elevated.”
“Terrific!” the Phand called Thindly-bak said cheerily. “I love his little ritual.”
“It’s charming,” Hopir-ka agreed.
“And this,” Villainic continued, “is my ritual brother, Zeke Reynolds.”
So, here’s something to keep in mind. The Phands hated me. They hated everything about me. You know the expression to hate someone’s guts? They hated my guts. My other organs too. They hated my lungs. That’s how much they hated me. Maybe this sounds a little self-absorbed, but it seemed like their entire imperial policy was built around the question What would make Zeke most miserable? With that in mind, I felt like it would be a good idea not to tell the first Phands you saw that the guy standing in front of them—with no gun and in desperate need of a urinal—was the being their species most wanted to execute. That was how I saw it.
“Seriously?” Adiul-ip asked, his orcish face brightening like he’d just heard a new torture chamber had opened on his block. “You’re Zeke Reynolds? For real?”
“Of course,” said Villainic before I could devise a convincing lie that would somehow make them forget what they’d already been told. “Why would anyone pretend to be Zeke Reynolds?”
“For the attention?” Thindly-bak proposed.
“I bet everyone wants to be his friend!” Hopir-ka said. These two seemed just as excited as the first Phand.
> “You must get free things in the mail all the time,” Adiul-ip suggested. “Invited to parties. Stuff like that.”
I was starting to feel like I was in one of those nonsensical dreams where your telephone turns into a pineapple. These Phands were not trying to capture or kill me. This was just the sort of thing that should not be happening.
“He looks like he is confused,” observed Hopir-ka.
“He is also tapping his foot in the manner of someone who needs to urinate,” said Thindly-bak.
“That bush over there provides excellent cover,” said Adiul-ip.
It seemed likely that they were not going to shoot me, and as I needed my head clear, I did not wait for the suggestion to be repeated. By the time I returned, Villainic had invited the Phands inside and was offering them food packets. I’m all for hospitality, but giving away our limited supply of food to our sworn enemies seemed to be a pretty poor policy.
“Oh, no, thank you,” Adiul-ip was saying. “You are very kind, but we have already had breakfast. Still, if you don’t mind, we would like to take your supplies and put them in our stores. It is good to have emergency rations set aside. You never know what the future will bring.”
“You expect us to give you our food?” I asked, beginning with outrage. I’ve found it to be a winning strategy in most social circumstances.
“Only if you don’t mind giving it to us,” Adiul-ip said.
“What, exactly, do you expect us to eat after we give you everything we have?”
“You won’t want to eat these emergency rations,” said Thindly-bak. “We can offer you something much better in the settlement.”
“Settlement,” I repeated. “There is no settlement. I scanned the planet before landing.”
“Oh, we have it cloaked,” Thindly-bak said. “This close to the Phandic Empire, on a planet with Former artifacts, we have to conceal ourselves or we would be caught.”
“Of course,” Adiul-ip added, “we would be found very quickly if anyone ever searched specifically for a cloaked outpost, but no one has bothered. Why would they? So, yes, there’s a settlement, and a rather nice one.”
“And you expect me to simply surrender to you?” I asked, though I didn’t really see that I had much of a choice besides doing exactly that.
“No one said anything about surrender,” Adiul-ip said. “You will be our guests.”
“Our honored guests,” Thindly-bak corrected.
“I don’t understand,” I finally admitted, finding no choice but to lay things out on the table. “You guys are Phands, aren’t you?”
“According to my primary health-care provider,” Adiul-ip said with a guffaw.
“Then why aren’t you being, you know, meaner to me?”
“I don’t think you understand,” Thindly-bak said. “Yes, we are Phands, but we don’t serve the Phandic Empire.”
“Surely you don’t think all Phands share the exact same political beliefs,” Adiul-ip said good-naturedly. His tone suggested that of course I couldn’t have thought something so absurd. I didn’t tell him that it was exactly what I’d thought. The idea that there might be non-evil Phands had somehow never crossed my mind.
“Like you,” Hopir-ka said, sounding pleased with herself, “we are renegades. Outlaws. Part of the resistance.” She made a couple of finger guns with her hands and fired them off in rapid succession at imaginary enemies. I was grateful that she did not make zapping noises.
The news that there was a Phandic resistance took me by complete surprise. I’d never even suspected something like that, but if it was true, and Phandic renegades were on this planet, then this was better news than I could have hoped for. I tried to control my excitement. Depending on the kindness of Phands seemed to me a bad idea, but these particular Phands were clearly unlike any I’d met before.
“Well, let’s not make ourselves out to be more than we are,” Adiul-ip said. “We’re not heroes like you, of course, but we aspire to be. Zeke Reynolds, you are our role model, and you have inspired our resistance, breathing new life into a movement that has been doing little or nothing for decades. We are seeking to topple the corrupt and cruel government that rules our world and dominates so many others. We wish to live in a society in which we are free to think and express ourselves as we choose.”
“For a long time,” said Hopir-Ka, “the movement had given up hope. We’d become little more than a social club for misfits, but since you began your adventures, we have recruited new members and new leadership, and we believe we are on the cusp of striking a devastating blow, one that will change our lives forever.”
“When we have deposed the empress,” Thindly-bak said, “I will pursue my creative side, though I am now forbidden to do so.”
“He makes giant sculptures of fruit out of the desiccated corpses of insects,” Hopir-ka explained. “They’re charming.”
“But forbidden,” Thindly-bak said sadly. “Art that does not glorify the empire is always forbidden. I am creatively stifled, and so instead of being an artist, I am a rebel. For art.”
“Now that you are here on this world,” Adiul-ip continued, “we would be honored if you would share with us some of your ideas. Perhaps you could review our operations and offer some advice. After we serve you breakfast, of course.”
Almost from the first moment I went into space, I dealt with people who didn’t want me around, who thought I was in the way or dragging them down. Then things got worse, and I had to grapple with powers that saw everything I did as disastrous and destructive. No matter how much my friends and I accomplished, we were called troublemakers and criminals. Now there were beings—Phands!—who not only understood the truth, but wanted to exaggerate it and be inspired by those exaggerations. The fact that they were kind of dressed like cowboys in no way diminished the importance of the moment for me.
This one time I was glad that Villainic was there to step forward and speak for me.
“We would love some breakfast,” he said.
• • •
They did not use vehicles, since too many emissions might be spotted from space and give away their location, so it would be about a three-mile walk to the nearest micro-tunnel transport hub they’d established.
One of their scientists had invented this technology, according to Adiul-ip. Unlike the transporters from Star Trek, these mico-tunnels could only take a being from one prearranged position to another, and instead of dematerializing and rematerializing a body, it simply moved a being or objects from one location to another, much like ships tunneling through space. When a ship tunneled, it created a temporary wormhole that closed as soon as the ship emerged into normal space. These were tiny, stable wormholes.
“Why not use these to get from planet to planet?” I asked, marveling at the idea of being able to travel across the stars without even having to use a ship.
“It can be done,” Adiul-ip explained as we walked, “but this method of transport, while necessary for us, is not without risk. Unlike a temporary tunnel that a spaceship creates, these fixed tunnels can occasionally become unstable. If that happens, the tunnel collapses uncontrollably, forming a singularity.”
I might not know all that much about science, but I know a lot about science fiction, so I understood what he was saying. “You mean a black hole?”
“Yes.”
“One that would consume the entire planet?”
“That would be the most likely outcome.”
“And this doesn’t worry you?”
“Oh, the inventor—you’ll meet him back in town—thinks the odds are very likely that such a thing will never happen. You can choke to death on your own spit, you know.”
“Nice transition,” I told him.
“Maybe he can’t,” Thindly-bak proposed.
“Of course he can,” Adiul-ip said. “All species with spit can. You do have spit, don’t you?”
“I do have spit,” I told him. “Thank you for asking.”
“Get him excit
ed about something, and it’s likely to fly in your face while he talks!” Villainic announced, clearly pleased with his wit.
“If you have spit, you could choke to death on it,” Adiul-ip repeated. “It’s in your mouth, and things can go wrong. Still, you don’t spend your days worrying about choking to death on your spit, do you? Of course not,” he answered, not giving me a chance to disagree, though I would not have. “Similarly, we don’t worry about our entire planet vanishing within a matter of hours into a microsingularity.”
These struck me as very different kinds of concerns, but I couldn’t really do much about whatever experimental technology they were using to get around the desert planet. Were these Phands totally nuts, which was starting to look like a real possibility, or just your regular old Phands up to no good? They could be trying to lure me into a false sense of security. I couldn’t guess why they would do that, but I’d faced too many disasters to let my guard down, no matter how sincere this bunch of space orcs might seem.
“There’s an escape hatch,” Adiul-ip said. “To a planet, I mean. We do not like to use this system for interstellar travel, since we wish to keep it a secret, but we have an emergency anchor portal to a distant location. We have chosen a planet where we might further our rebellion so we could still be useful should this world be, you know, on the cusp of vanishing into a vortex of nothingness.”
To be clear, there was not one second of conversation I’d had with these Phands that I had not been thinking about whether or not they could provide me with a way off this planet. I was using the word “provide” in the loosest sense. Maybe I’d been spending too much time with Steve, and maybe I didn’t want to live the rest of my life, or even pass the rest of the conflict, on this desert planet, but I’d be perfectly willing to steal a ship if that was what it took. Tamret was out there somewhere, and if she was not coming to help me, there was a pretty good chance that she needed help herself. My parents needed help. Alice needed help. I was not going to sit around while a bunch of weirdos talked about black holes and spittle when I was needed elsewhere.