by J. S. Morin
“Where are we headed?”
“Some gibberish-named system outside ARGO space,” Mort replied. “Nothing you or I need to bother with.” He took a sip of his drink, wrinkled his nose, and added a pinch of extra coffee crystals.
The door to the cargo hold cracked open. “Hey, Sunshine,” Roddy called. “Time to learn a trade.” The door clanged shut.
Mort stood, taking his coffee mug and heading for his quarters. “He wasn’t talking to me,” he said in a cheery voice at odds with everything Esper felt in her head.
“I’m in no condition,” Esper replied.
The door opened again. “Today, maybe?” Roddy asked.
Mort snickered. “Go on. Penance, remember?”
# # #
The plasma torch was the size of a flute, with a bend that terminated in a tapered nozzle. It had been awkward at first, but after several passes, she had made her first clean, straight cut. The protective goggles fogged as Esper sweated from hauling her practice pieces around.
“How many more of these do I need to do?” Esper asked.
Roddy shrugged and sipped at his beer. “You saw what happened to Chip, right? How bad you want to avoid ending up like that?”
Esper sighed, and the tip of her plasma torch flared to life. She bit her lip in concentration and started cutting another thin strip off the edge of a steel plate, trying to keep the width as uniform as possible.
“We’re not a ferry service,” Roddy said as she worked. “And we’re not pirates. Cargo runs don’t always fall in our laps, at least not ones that pay worth taking. So we make do with a lot of salvage work. That torch in your hand can get you through a door or bulkhead, cut open a lock, disconnect high-price equipment from the junk around it. It’s the omni-tool of a salvager. Best friend you’ll have on a derelict, aside from your EV suit.”
“I want to pull my weight, but—”
“You don’t weigh much,” Roddy said. “Not for a human. You’re gonna have to pull more than that around here. There’s only six of us, and any work that don’t get done, we don’t get paid for. Mort … well, he’s Mort; he gets off on the grunt labor. Wouldn’t trust him with a torch if he offered. The rest of us work for a living.”
Esper whispered a prayer.
“What’s that?” Roddy asked. “You bitching about me? Laaku aren’t deaf you know, despite what you might’ve heard.”
“I was just asking for strength to get through the day,” Esper replied.
“Sister, you ain’t gettin’ off that easy. Only way to get strength is to work for it. I’d offer you a beer to make it go by quicker, but after seein’ you last night, I don’t think you’d handle it too well.”
“It was peach. I didn’t think it would be that strong.”
“About twelve beers a bottle,” Roddy replied. “I checked the label.”
“Really? It stopped burning after a few sips, so I figured …”
“Numbed. Listen, kid, if you’re going to drink, you’re going to need to be careful,” Roddy said. “Don’t watch yourself, you’ll wind up like me. If you weren’t human, you probably already would have.”
“I didn’t want to say anything.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard it all, sweetie,” Roddy said. “Laaku can’t hold liquor. Ain’t quite true. Stuff’s banned on the homeworld because we can’t stop ourselves. Just physiology is all. Livers and brains and pancreases and whatnot. Azrin almost never get addicted. Your kind is hit or miss. Me? I’m a victim of biology.” He tilted back his beer can, draining the contents. Even before he finished, his walking hands were popping the top on another can.
Esper set back to her cutting, and tried to let the subject go away.
# # #
The trip to Vi Tik Naa was shorter than it had any business being. Tanny had marveled at how deep Mort had put them into the astral, but the wizard had told only Carl just how close he had come to the inflection point. Though Carl was fuzzy on the specifics, if Mort had pushed much farther, the Mobius would have emerged into a different universe than the one it had left. Keesha Bell had given him five days to reach the contact on Vi Tik Naa before the message she had planted in him wore off. Mort had gotten them there in two.
Vi Tik Naa was neither a member nor a protectorate of ARGO, though there was a human presence on the planet. It fell into the grey space between a wilderness preserve, a colonization prospect, and a sovereign world. The inhabitants were a sentient but primitive race known as the in-Tik, evolved from avians. They had radios and chemically-propelled ground vehicles, but had not discovered powered flight. Reading through the computer files on the in-Tik, Carl chuckled at the thought of birdmen needing machines to fly.
Of course, Vi Tik Naa had heard of all the modern sciences now. Humanity was nothing if not prolific in the spread of technology, even if ARGO laws prohibited sharing the science with primitives. They were more concerned with keeping the dangerous wildlife from being exported off world.
The ship shuddered. Tanny’s voice came over the shipwide comm. “We’re atmospheric. I’ll have us on the ground in ten.”
Carl shut down his datapad as the rest of the crew congregated in the common room. “This is it everybody. We’re going to keep it tight. No shore leave, no sightseeing, no shopping. Roddy, we desperate for any supplies?”
“Nope,” Roddy replied. He slouched back on the couch and crossed both sets of arms—or a pair of arms and a pair of legs, depending on human versus laaku perspective.
“Right then,” said Carl. “No one goes down but me and Tanny. We’re taking a megafauna safari at one of the tourist parks and rendezvous there with our contact. I don’t know what it’s going to take to move this cargo, so keep an ear to the comm if we need someone to bring the ship around. Mriy, you handle in-atmo pickup if we call.”
“Fine,” Mriy agreed. She slumped down on the couch and threw an arm around Roddy. Within seconds, her eyes had closed and her breathing slowed. Her part of the planning acknowledged, she wasn’t going to waste time listening to the rest.
“Anything you need me doing?” Mort asked. “Wouldn’t mind a peek at some dinosaurs if there’s nothing pressing.”
“It’s not the dinosaurs sort of megafauna,” Carl replied. “And no sightseeing.”
“I had assumed you meant the rest of them,” Mort replied with a frown. “It’s not like I can’t keep out of trouble.”
“Sure, just like Champlain,” Carl snapped. A dull thump sounded, and the omnipresent hum of the Mobius’s engine died down. “Keesha got news of a break-in at a wizards’ shop in Nephrim. She put two and two together, you know, but since nothing was taken, she shrugged it off.”
“I just—” Mort began.
“Since when did you start calling Ms. Bell ‘Keesha?’” Roddy asked.
Carl jabbed a finger in the laaku’s direction. “Can it. I can call her whatever I want. Mort, I don’t need you doing anything on this pickup. I just need you not doing things. Things go right, this’ll be our first big payday in months. We’re not taking any chance. Any chances. You got me?” He scanned the room, looking for signs of dissent, or at least a bit of shame or contrition. He settled for all of them paying attention, save for the sleeping Mriy.
Tanny walked in from the cockpit. “I set us down at the safari park’s landing site. Vi Tik Naa traffic control is more of a concierge service than any authority. They just wanted to give me landing coordinates to wherever we were headed.”
“It’s not ARGO space, and not even ARGO fugitives running the place like most of our borderlands runs. They can do whatever they want. Unlike you lot.”
“Laying down the law?” Tanny asked.
“Something like that,” Carl muttered.
“Working?”
“Nope,” Roddy replied.
“Get changed,” Carl said to Tanny. “Standard tourist couple getup. Nothing elaborate.”
Tanny grinned. “Not this time.”
Carl gave her a puzzled look.
Carl held up an objecting finger. “No. We can’t look suspicious. Who’s going to believe—”
“That a guy like you’d marry a girl who looks underage,” Tanny said. She leaned around to address Esper briefly. “No offense, sweetie, but you look eighteen as much as I do, coming the other way. No one’s going to question whether you’re a couple, just your character.”
“But I’ve never done anything like this,” Esper protested. “Plus I’m—”
“Gotta earn your keep somehow,” Tanny said. “Maybe this is it.”
“… hung over,” Esper finished in a quiet voice. She swallowed, and Carl saw the resignation in her slumped shoulders.
He sighed. “You pick up anything on Champlain that would work? I saw the combat getup, and I’m not sure the coveralls are tourist guild approved.”
“There’s no such thing as … oh,” Esper said. “Yeah, we got some casuals, too. Nothing nice, but I can look like a normal person.”
Mort shuddered melodramatically. “What a horrible thing to be.”
“Or …” Tanny said, letting the word hang as everyone focused on her. “You could take Mort with you. Sort of a spring/autumn couple. You two would be cute together.”
Carl scowled at Tanny. “I’ll take Esper. Mort’s not my type.”
Mort huffed and turned his back with an air of offended dignity.
“Go get changed … darling,” Carl said to Esper.
# # #
The safari hover-cruiser was open air, with a tent-like canopy overhead but sides unobstructed by either glass or shield. They were higher than most ground-transport hover vehicles, with a good ten meters altitude between them and the savanna below. The sky was brilliant blue, with just a few fluffy white clouds and a yellow-light sun in the sky above. It was one of the true Earth-like worlds, nearly indistinguishable from ground level if the nighttime stars weren’t out. Carl didn’t get to the Earth-likes very often, and it always made him stop and wonder about the God’s Seeds theory of the galaxy when he did.
But it was no time to be philosophical. Despite the warm climate and fantastical creatures promised by the tour officials, the safari was a means to an end. Their contact was on the hover-cruiser—supposedly—but had yet to identify himself. Or herself. Keesha Bell had withheld even that level of information about their target.
Esper sat beside him, nestled in the crook of his arm, staring out at the passing scene through dark-tinted lenses. They’d had a brief but pointed conversation on faux-marital boundaries before leaving the Mobius. Kissing, but no tongue. Touching, but ass, breasts, and thighs were off limits. Pet names were fine, but no phony boasts about their physical relations or her anatomy beneath the loose blouse and trousers combo she wore. All in all, it was a more reasonable set of demands than Carl had anticipated. She felt different beneath his draped arm than Tanny did—less substantial, certainly less muscular. It prompted an unfamiliar protectiveness in him.
“To your right, about half a klick, you’ll see a pair of short-haired mammoths with a calf,” the tour guide said over an amplified comm, with speakers scattered throughout the craft. He was human, mid-twenties, with an easy manner and casual familiarity with the alien world. “In a few minutes, we’ll come up on Mount Jixhau, where we’ll see the nests of floral raptors, birds with no Earthly counterpart, but with kaleidoscopic feathers and a wingspan of nearly eight meters.”
The rest of the crew was comprised of in-Tik waitstaff, sliding about the rocking hover-cruiser with plates of local delicacies and human-friendly drinks. The in-Tik were avian humanoids, covered in such tiny feathers that they looked like short fur. They had huge eyes and hook-beaked mouths with nostril slits instead of noses. Their hands were two long fingers and a shorter, opposable thumb, each ending in a stubby talon. The waitstaff each wore a speaker around his or her neck—Carl couldn’t tell their gender—programmed to translate in-Tik to English. With his translator charm earring, it was amusing to listen to the differences.
“Hey ape, you want a drink or not?” a waiter asked.
“Sir, would you care for a beverage?” the speaker echoed.
Carl looked over the platter. “I’ll have a beer. Lemonade for Mrs. Ape here.”
The feathers on the waiter’s face bristled and he ducked his head. “Buddy, I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Sir, I meant no offense,” the speaker echoed.
“Please don’t tell hair-head over there,” the waiter said.
“I beg you not to inform my supervisor,” the speaker echoed.
Carl waved the waiter’s worries away with the hand draped across Esper. “No problem. By the way, what do I owe for the drinks?”
The waiter took the hint. “Hospitality gift. No charge.”
“No charge,” the speaker repeated, curiously leaving out the in-Tik idiom.
With their drinks in hand and the waiter scuttled off to elsewhere on the cruiser, Esper leaned close. “I need one of those charms.”
Carl put his lips to Esper’s ear and whispered. “Could have had Mort working on that while we’re here. Remind him when we get back.”
As the safari continued, their guide pointed out dozens of animal species, some familiar, others reminiscent of Earth creatures long lost to history. A few were unique to Vi Tik Naa. Whenever he could spare a moment, Carl twisted around and looked at the other passengers. They were a mix of hardened spacers and wealthy travelers out to see the galaxy. Not the usual weekend holiday-goers, but neither did any of them scream “I’m the one you’re looking for,” to Carl’s eye. Which was just as well; a contact who stood out was bad for keeping business on the deep-astral band.
He noticed Esper fiddling with her borrowed wedding band, and put a hand over hers to stop her. “Cut it out. You’re breaking character,” he whispered.
“Sorry,” she whispered in reply. “It’s just I’m not used to wearing one. It’s loose, too.”
“Cuz it was Tanny’s.”
Esper made a fist, preventing any possibility of the ring slipping off. “I thought it was a fake! Why would she give me the real thing?”
“Hey, ask her. I’d just be guessing. Just … stop acting like it doesn’t belong on you, ok?”
As they passed over a lake, the safari guide pointed out a group of sauropods grazing along the bank, bodies submerged while their long necks reached onto the shoreline trees. The hover-cruiser gained altitude, ten meters being insufficient to stay out of reach of the creatures as they passed close by.
“I thought you said there weren’t any dinosaurs,” Esper said.
Carl chuckled. “I couldn’t have kept Mort off this thing if I’d said there were. Not like he’s going to scour the omni looking up Vi Tik Naa’s wildlife, though I’d love to be there to watch him try.”
A tower appeared on the horizon, slim and sleek, with a bulbous top. It grew rapidly as they approached and ascended. The top, it turned out, was an observation deck, and the hover-cruiser pulled up alongside. The tour guide disembarked, and passengers started doing likewise.
“Welcome to Observation Post Olympus,” said the tour guide, using that voice all tour guides had, just loud enough to carry across a group of semi-attentive tourists. “For those of you who are taking the Man Eaters’ Big Game Tour, your transport will arrive shortly. Just remember, animals over twelve tons are protected by in-Tik law, and your rifle’s targeting assist will not allow you to fire at larger animals. For those of you staying on the safari tour, please enjoy the buffet. Lindsay will be along with the transport for the second leg of your journey.”
The group broke up, most heading for the buffet. A few headed for the far side of the tower platform, where a smaller hover-cruiser was arriving.
“Mriy would love this place,” Esper said, watching the hunters queue up for their transport.
“Nah,” Carl replied. “Armed hunting is for older azrin. This place would be a retirement commune for them. Come on, now
’s our chance to ferret out our contact.”
The buffet was at the hub of the tower, well away from the railings. Carl glanced at the dishes as he mingled with his fellow safari tourists. They all had little placards beside them, identifying what they were made from. It was all familiar human fare made from ingredients native to Vi Tik Naa. Carl took a handful of hors d’oeuvre pizzas and took half of one in a bite. He choked down the sour, over-spiced morsel, and returned the others to the platter, discarding the half piece under a napkin.
Esper followed on his heels, sampling the food and finding it better to her liking than Carl had. Martian upbringing. Rich parents. She had probably eaten alien foods before. For all his travels, Carl had never developed a taste for anything that didn’t taste like home.
“You see anyone?” Carl asked.
“I’m not even sure what I’d be looking for,” Esper replied.
“Excuse me,” the tour guide said, placing a hand on Carl’s shoulder. “I understand you had some complaint with the service on the tour.”
“I didn’t really—”
“Not to worry, sir,” the tour guide assured him. “Your waiter confessed everything. If you would just step this way, I’m sure we can make amends for your treatment.”
“It’s all right,” Esper said. “We—” She stopped short when Carl gave her a nudge with his elbow.
“We didn’t want to make a scene earlier. That’s all. Thank you,” said Carl. He leaned close and whispered to Esper. “I think we found him.”
“Him?” Esper asked, incredulous.
The tour guide was young, smiley, tanned golden as fresh-baked bread, and perfectly hidden in plain sight. Carl followed him onto the hover-cruiser. As soon as Esper was aboard, he disengaged it from the tower.
“Sorry about the delay,” the tour guide said. “Gotta keep my day job happy, ya know?”
“So, where’s the cargo?” Carl asked as they zipped across the savanna, soaring over a herd of what looked like shaggy oxen.
“We’re heading for it now,” the tour guide replied. “I’ve got it stashed in the preserve. You got your ship on comm?”
“Yeah,” Carl replied.