by J. S. Morin
“I … I don’t know,” Esper said with a huff. “I expected him to be mad at least.”
“If Carl blew a fuel rod every time something went sideways around here, he’d be in a mental ward as a permanent guest,” said Roddy.
“The thing Carl understands is that he’s not really all that in charge,” said Mort. “He’s captain. Mobius is registered in his name. But when you boil the skin off the tomato, we outnumber him.”
The intra-ship comm opened. “What’s going on back there?” Tanny’s voice crackled. “I’m showing power distribution malfunctions.”
“Now, there’s a bit more of a problem,” Mort said in an undertone, leaning close to Esper and pointing to the comm speaker.
# # #
A council was convened in the common room, unlike any seen in the halls of the great kingdoms of ancient Earth. Esper and Mort sat on opposite sides of the kitchen table with the egg and its empty box between them. Roddy lounged on the couch with a bowl of cereal held in his lower hands, the upper two being occupied with a spoon and the remote for the holoviewer. Tanny stood at the entrance to the forward corridor with her arms crossed; the Mobius was at idle, stopped but still deep in the astral. Mriy waited by the food processor as it thawed a raw lamb haunch. Their would-be king, Carl, sat in his flannel boxers and a sleeveless undershirt with his battered leather jacket on over it.
Carl raised one hand in half a shrug. “What’re you going to do? You knew it was bound to happen.”
“We had the perfect chance this time,” said Tanny with the resigned exasperation of a schoolteacher who came back to find the class pet had been set free in the wild. “They locked it six ways from Sunday. All we had to do was not bust our brains figuring out a way into it.”
“Ah,” said Mort, raising a finger. “But I didn’t get into it. I got it out from around the egg, not the other—”
“Can it, Mort,” said Carl. “None of us could have gotten into that box except you. I wouldn’t be getting all professorial right about now.”
“Pffft. You were all assuming we were up to something horrible for the money we were getting,” said Mort. “Turns out we’re nothing but zoo recruiters.”
“From a world where they let you hunt dinosaurs,” said Mriy. “I could see going back to Vi Tik Naa for a vacation someday. They just don’t want anyone else opening a hunting park like theirs.”
“Either way, now we’ve got to get that egg cleaned up navy-like,” said Carl. “Spit and polish, except don’t go getting any DNA on it, and don’t use any polish. Just clean. Like we never touched it. Mort, I assume you can get it back inside?”
Mort shrugged, then nodded.
“Roddy, I want it cleaned up good as new,” said Carl. “No trace of the marker on it.”
“That shit’s a pain to get—”
“I’ll take that as a ‘yes,’” said Carl.
“One of these days,” said Tanny. “One of these days, we’ll take one of these don’t-open-the-cargo jobs and not open the cargo.” She strode off down the corridor, leaving them to clear up the mess of the egg. The cockpit door slammed.
Esper broke the awkward silence that followed. “I thought she’d have been in a better mood since … you know.”
“You kidding me?” said Carl. “She pulled a blaster on Roddy last time he opened one. Roddy, find us something comedy on the holo. We’ll deal with the egg after lunch.”
# # #
Esper sat in her quarters, cross-legged on the bed. The pod was filled with the sound of Mindy Mun’s peppy, high-pitched vocals as the speaker system fought to drown out the sound of the loudest, most obnoxious 23rd Century comedy she had ever heard, coming from the common room. Esper bobbed her head along with the beat and let the gibberish lyrics of one of Earth’s heritage languages wash over her. She had experienced quite a shock when her earring translated the words for her, so she’d taken it off while she listened. Mindy Mun was a talented singer, but the song sounded better without understanding the words.
The datapad in her hand was borrowed. Or pilfered. It had been in the pile where a conference room should have been. She didn’t own one of her own, and she needed data. Stranded at a weird astral depth, she couldn’t connect it to the omni to get better answers, so she had to settle for what was stored in the Mobius computers.
SEARCH> EGG> DINOSAUR
A brief listing came up for ancient paleontological records, modern dinosaur theory, and a serial drama about teenagers who traveled back in time to bring home a dinosaur egg. She ignored the fossils and fiction and looked up what modern scientists said about the creatures. Instead of the kilometers-long flood of information she was accustomed to when connected to the omni, all she got was a synopsis slapped together for children to read. Her students on Bentus VIII would have demanded better than this.
“If Mort likes dinosaurs so much, you’d think he’d have looked them up …” Esper realized her error when she said it aloud. Why would the Mobius’s computers have anything about dinosaurs stowed inside? Mort never used it.
With a touch of the datapad, Mindy Mun went silent. The muffled guffaws and shrieking laughter from the comedy holo and its viewers in the common room intruded, but Esper took a steady breath and pushed them aside. She looked to the ceiling of her quarters. “Lord, I don’t know what to do. I keep trying to follow the righteous path, but it twists and doubles back and I don’t know whether I’m even on it anymore. I’m lost in the darkness … the real, super darkness of the Black Ocean, and I can’t tell whether there’s even light enough to see it by.
“They all seem like such good people, until you consider what they do. Am I any different? I don’t want to fall prey to their easy trap. Lord, grant me the wisdom to ask the right questions, so that I can see which path is which. I realize that knowing what sort of dinosaur comes from that egg won’t change anything. I just don’t know what else I can do. Show me the way so that I can keep my path, and show the others the way as well. Amen.”
“Skiffy, look out,” came a muffled voice from the holovid outside. There was a crash that sounded like hundreds of dishes falling. Mort, Carl, and Roddy hooted and laughed.
Esper sighed. Through the window, she could see the endless void of the Black Ocean, which looked a bit greyer than black down in the astral. Mort could probably explain why. Everyone was so helpful, so nice, so loose and friendly with one another, and they had extended that to include her. The Mobius was a tiny speck of life amid the bleakness all around. She remembered the words of Saint Ashleigh, the first saint of the interstellar era: “Lost in the endless ocean of black between worlds, the same stars shine that touch the Earth. Each of us carries that light within us.”
The datapad was in easy reach. The temptation to bring back the soothing, saccharine melodies of Mindy Mun beckoned. The idiocy outside her quarters would just fade away. Too easy. She recalled Matthew: “For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.”
Esper clenched her fists and set her jaw. It was time to stand up to Carl.
# # #
“I thought we already said we’re packing it up,” said Roddy, peering through the frozen, translucent image of two men in chicken costumes being chased through a shopping plaza by dozens of policemen.
Carl shrugged. “We’ve already gone and paused it. Might as well hear her out.”
“We bring the egg back,” said Esper. “We make an anonymous drop-off, let the local wildlife officials know where to find it, and everything is back the way it belongs.”
“Except we don’t get paid,” said Carl.
“You already got paid,” Esper said. “We still get to be criminals, but we only robbed someone who was breaking the law.”
“Who’s to say the little dino isn’t better off with this new zoo, or as a pet, or wherever it’s going?” asked Carl. “Vi Tik Naa lets people pay to hunt them. Maybe this is one of the small ones. I can’t imagine anything huge growing out of an
egg that size.”
Roddy furrowed his little brow and tilted back a beer. “You know … maybe we can make a play. We know what the thing is now. Maybe we can angle for a bigger payout.”
Carl stretched up and reached the comm panel. “Mriy, Tanny, come on down here. We’ve got a can of worms open and I’d hate for you two to miss out.”
Esper flushed. This wasn’t going as she’d imagined. In her heart, she had seen Carl with his face grim, nodding his understanding that it was the right thing to do. In her head, she had pictured Carl laughing and Roddy unpausing the holo-viewer.
Mriy came in from the cargo bay. She was shirtless—which due to anatomical and cultural differences was nothing unusual for a female azrin—and out of breath. Her pupils were wide, nearly round. “What?” she snapped.
Carl waited for Tanny to arrive from the cockpit. “Esper’s got a plan half baked, and we’re debating whether to finish baking it or bin it,” he replied.
“What? Does she expect us to turn around and bring it back?” Tanny asked.
“Yup,” said Roddy. He squeezed an empty can in his hand and dropped it on the floor at his side. He called across the room to Mriy. “Hey, beer me?”
The azrin grabbed a beer from the fridge, and Roddy caught her toss with a foot—hand? Esper was still struggling with laaku terminology. One or the other was supposed to be considered rude.
“Why would we bring it back?” Tanny asked. “If we were going to refuse the job, we should have done it before we left the Vi Tik Naa system.”
“We didn’t know what we had,” Esper replied.
“Sweetie,” Tanny said. “If I had my guess when we picked that thing up, a dumb egg was nowhere near the top. You always gotta worry a little picking up black-box cargo, and if I’d have known we were hauling that,” she pointed to the egg, still resting on the table atop a towel, “I’d have slept like a baby the night we picked it up.”
“But what if whoever we deliver it to decides to kill us instead of paying us,” Esper said. It was a valid point, she knew, but not one that came from pious thinking. Doing the right thing out of cowardice or caution was no path to redemption.
“She’s got a point,” said Roddy. “This is a bigger job than we’re used to. Maybe we need a secure exchange. Let’s load up a few heist holos and get some ideas.”
“Or we could hatch it,” said Mort. Everyone turned to look at him.
“Thanks Mort,” said Carl. “We needed someone to put together a worst-case scenario, where we don’t get paid and can’t return it like nothing happened.”
“At least we’d know what kind it was,” said Mort. “You don’t have any scanny thingies to look inside, and all I can tell is that whatever’s inside is still alive. Hatch it, and we’d know.”
“And knowing wouldn’t do us a damn bit of good,” Tanny said. “For once I’m with Carl. We gotta get that thing to its new owner, get our money, and get the hell out of there. Maybe we can rig up a secure drop though.”
Carl waved his hand in front of him. “Negatory. No changing the plans. We’ve got a delivery location. We’ve got an amount to collect. We start fiddling with our end, that’s what’ll get things turning wet and red when it comes time to get paid. Reliable. Quick. Professional. Rich guys like having a few crews like us around they can count on.”
“And rich women,” Tanny noted, an obvious reference to Keesha Bell.
“Exactly,” said Carl. Esper watched for any sign that he had picked up on the venom in Tanny’s voice, but he seemed oblivious. “One good job leads to another.”
“Is that why all our jobs lead to shit?” Roddy asked.
“I have an idea,” said Mriy. “If it is a small one, we keep it. Train it. Make it a mighty guard pet. Let Mort hatch it.”
Carl turned to Mort. “I owe you an apology. Your idea wasn’t the worst case. Mriy’s got you beat.”
Esper considered the idea that if it was a truly harmless creature, a pet might be just the thing to teach the crew a little responsibility. Math class was no place for pets, but the science teachers at her school all kept hamsters or gerbils or fish. Caring for a living thing built empathy. The odds of a random dinosaur egg being from a harmless species, especially the kind that someone would dole out hundreds of thousands of terra for, seemed remote. Maybe it was especially cute … two hundred fifty thousand terras worth of cute?
“I was just—” Mriy began.
“Yeah,” said Carl. “I know. Listen, if you and Tanny want to put together an oh-shit plan for this one, be my guest. It’s not plan ‘A’ though. Esper, I want you to do something.”
She nodded. There was going to be no return trip to Vi Tik Naa.
“Grab a beer or one of your peach-flavored things from the fridge, park it on the couch, and we’ll find something to watch that we can all agree on. Spacers go nuts spending too much time by themselves, and you’re wearing a little thin, I think … err, no pun intended.”
And that was the afternoon. Peach liqueur and pretzels that were more preservative than food. A kid-friendly animated adventure on holovid. Then Mort and Roddy left to take the egg and seal it back up like they never opened it. Carl stayed with her and they watched an Abbey Stanton mystery. It didn’t seem like the sort of thing he would choose, but he was trying so hard to be nice to her.
They were all trying to do right. And they were all failing. Especially her. Esper should have known better, but the wide highway to hell was too inviting. It tasted like peach, spouted bland, childish clichés about love and friendship, and ended with the guilty man going to prison. Prison was where Esper was going to belong on her long wait to hell, the way things were going.
# # #
Hadrian IV. It was technically in ARGO space, but mainly because all the systems surrounding it were. Officially it was uninhabited. The system’s two green-belt worlds were on the list to terraform, but nowhere near the top. It might be centuries before any official effort was made to colonize either of them. Unofficial efforts, apparently, were a different story.
“This is vessel Mobius, requesting landing clearance and coordinates,” Tanny said into the comm. As soon as she keyed it off, she turned to Carl, who was standing beside the co-pilot’s seat, leaning over to watch the sensors. “I’ve got nothing. No settlements. No ships. No relay beacon. If someone’s out there, they—”
“Vessel Mobius, this is Gologlex Menagerie. Stand by for landing instructions,” said a female voice over the comm.
“Mountain range in the southern hemisphere,” Tanny said, tapping one of the sensor panels. “Can’t pinpoint it.”
“I guess we wait for those instructions,” Carl replied. “Whoever these guys are, they’ve got one helluva sensor jammer up.”
Tanny shook her head. “Maybe, but look out the window. It’s a green/blue world. It may not be an Earth-like, or have an air mix we can breathe, but that’s a living planet and I get no readings for life.”
“Natural phenomenon, then?” Carl asked. “Might be why someplace that looks like an easy terraform got bumped to shitsville on the colonization plan. Who’d want to live somewhere you can’t even use basic sensors.”
One of the computer screens flashed a scrolling field of numbers as a data feed came in from the planet. Detailed approach vectors. Visual-landmark orientation to set a coordinate system on a world with a haywire magnetic field. Temporary pass-codes to a planetside shield generator. It was presented in an easily-digestible format for the Mobius’s computer, but at the same time the feed contained a boilerplate greeting tacked to the end, where the feed stopped and stayed on screen.
Welcome to Gologlex Menagerie, the galaxy’s most comprehensive multi-xeno wildlife collection. All our animals are bio-quarantine safe and provided with habitats that mimic their home world ecosystem as exactly as possible. Hadrian IV has a 22.8 hour day, and our exhibits are open on a rotating basis depending on the activity cycle of the animals. Please find a local-time conversion and schedule of
exhibit open times in your visitor’s package. You are welcome to follow the approach vectors provided, but we encourage you to open your navigation controls to Gologlex Menagerie Flight Control to guide you to a safe landing at your designated pad. Thank you, and enjoy your stay.
“I assume I’m taking us in manually,” said Tanny.
“Hell, yeah,” Carl agreed. “We know this place can’t be trusted. They hired us.”
# # #
They landed under open skies, on one of a row of pads nestled against a mountain range. The valley was over a hundred kilometers across, with lush jungle vegetation. Even on approach, the landing site had been difficult to spot due to the surrounding trees. But once on the ground, the facility took on a modern look. The pad was dura-crete, marked with ARGO regulation lights and signage in English and Atik, the dominant language of the laaku. The area around the pad was walled in with glass supported by steel. Scattered around the interior were poles with nozzles that forced a jet of oxygen into the landing zone.
There was a delegation waiting to meet them as the cargo bay door of the Mobius opened. Two were obvious security types, with their black uniforms, dark glasses, and comm earpieces—the readied blaster rifles helped too. The woman in the sky blue uniform with the name badge appeared to be the welcoming committee. Carl assumed she must be good at her job if they expected anyone to feel welcome with the thugs to either side of her.
“Welcome to Gologlex Menagerie. My name is Celeste, and I’m here to escort you to see Mr. Gologlex.”
“Carl Ramsey,” Carl said, holding out a hand. Celeste smiled but declined to take it. “This here’s Tanny and Mriy. They’re uh …” Carl looked to the thugs, first to one side, then the other of Celeste, “… my security. Rest of my crew is staying aboard.”
Celeste nodded. “Of course, Captain Ramsey. I assume you have the cargo.”
Tanny patted a knapsack slung over her shoulder. “Right here.”
“Please leave any weapons on board your ship,” said Celeste. “We take complete responsibility for our guests’ safety on Hadrian IV. I’ll give you a moment.”