by J. S. Morin
Things had been bothering her. Details didn’t fit together. Why go to so much trouble for one egg? For a huge zoo like Gologlex Menagerie, acquiring rare species for such crazy prices would take mind-boggling amounts of money. Plus, why hide a zoo? Even a zoo with creatures from outside ARGO space could get permits and be completely legal. And why the box? Half the spacers on the wrong side of the law wouldn’t bat an eye at transporting an egg as cargo. There was something at work besides what they had discovered by opening that box.
She hurried past doors with innocuous signs like Maintenance, Cafeteria, and Gym. She sped her pace past one listed as Security. Poking her head inside the Medical wing had shown nothing out of the ordinary, just a few workers being treated for minor injuries.
“You there, give me a hand with this,” a voice called out. Esper looked up to find a man with gold stripes on his uniform sleeves. She hurried over and saw that his name badge said “N. K. Jameson.” He was standing beside a repulsor-cart that was resting on the ground, piled with equipment.
“Yes, Mr. Jameson?” Esper asked.
“Repulsor’s dead on this thing,” he said, clutching his lower back. “Get this down to Sub-Humans. This is for the new exhibit.”
Esper hesitated.
Jameson gave her a hard look. “You new around here? I don’t remember seeing you.”
Esper smiled and gave him a doe-eyed look, hoping she wasn’t playing it up too much. “I’m still learning my way around.”
He snatched the datapad from her hands, muttering. “Here,” he said, handing it back. There was a route displayed from her current location to an unlabeled spot on the facility layout.
“Thank you, sir.”
“Thank you …” he glanced down at Esper’s name badge. “Richelieu. That thing’s about busted my back. I’m heading to Medical if anyone asks about me.” Jameson limped down the hallway, still clutching his back.
Esper looked at the overloaded repulsor cart with apprehension. Jameson might have been past his prime, but he was also twice her size. The cart had little wheels on the bottom, but a test push barely budged it. Esper set down her datapad and pried the access cover free. Inside there was a tangle of cables connecting an array of circuit cards.
“Need a hand?” a young mechanic asked as he passed by.
“Yes!” Esper said. “It looks like the repulsor control board is fried; do you know where I can find a replacement? Jameson asked me to bring this load to Sub-Humans, and I don’t want to be late.”
“You have access to the maintenance bay?” the mechanic asked with a skeptical frown.
Esper held up Murray’s keycard. “Don’t know. I’m still lost around here.”
The mechanic smiled. “It’s OK. This place is a maze, but you get the feel for the layout after a couple weeks. Here. Take my card, it’s two bays down that way. Just leave it with Mickelson. I’ll grab it when I get back from lunch.”
Esper took the card from him. “Thanks!”
“I’m Garret. Chad Garret. Catch you around sometime?”
Esper nodded.
As soon as he was gone, Esper hurried to the maintenance bay, where she looked up repulsor cart parts and grabbed one of every circuit card it used. Mickelson wasn’t around, so she left the keycard on a desk and headed back to fix the cart.
Esper had never been much for mechanics, but her father had been a local-transport pilot before he moved up in the world. She had seen him work on vehicles enough that she wasn’t afraid to poke around inside one, even if she had no idea how this repulsor cart worked. She pulled out and replaced the circuit cards one by one until the machine coughed and sputtered to life.
“Yeah, Roddy, I didn’t need you for this,” she whispered. The fact that Roddy wasn’t there was beside the point. As was the fact that keeping the Mobius flying and brute-force repairing a repulsor cart were light-years apart. She had bested the little monkey and his patronizing plasma-cutter lessons.
Datapad in hand and the repulsor cart drifting along with a gentle push, Esper made her way to the Sub-Humans department. The name alone set her teeth on edge. Polite society didn’t use that term, let alone plaster it on overhead signs and across doorways. It was a term relegated to xenophobic corners of the omni, she had thought, where human supremacists argued over genetic destiny and whether ARGO should bomb primitive worlds or round up alien races as workers.
She pushed her cart through the door with the faint worry that she would burst into flames as dark powers rejected a pure soul. It was a silly thought; she knew it even as it popped into her head. But as the cart crossed the threshold she secretly hoped some supernatural force would keep her out, spare her from seeing what lay beyond. Even if such a force existed, who was she to be judged so pure and precious? She was a criminal now, and if she differed from the Gologlex Menagerie employees, it was only by type.
The hall was well lit, the walls lined with inert info panels on both sides that acted as black mirrors, showing Esper reflected ad infinitum. Infinite darkness. Never a good sign.
Her breath caught when she came to the first exhibit. The perfection of the glassteel made it look as if the squat, rat-faced creatures could reach out and grab her. When one of them slammed against the transparent barrier, it clawed at her with dexterous hands sporting opposable thumbs. Esper had taken basic xenobiology in school. She knew that the opposable thumb was near synonymous with the development of sentient life. The rat-faced creature’s mouth moved, and she could hear something faint through the heavy muffling of the glass.
Swallowing back her fear, Esper edged closer. “Let us out!” the creature screamed. “We’ve done nothing wrong! I want my advocate!” Esper clutched her hands to her ears, unprepared to hear the plea translated. She was still growing accustomed to Mriy speaking intelligibly.
Esper continued down the hall, face forward but eyes constantly flitting to the sides. The habitats had beds and chairs, blankets, food bowls with utensils. Some had primitive altars, showing that the occupants were not only sentient but spiritual. Several were empty.
“You there,” someone called out. Esper nearly dropped her datapad. “Is that for the in-Tik exhibit?”
Esper’s heart stopped. Her soul curled up in a corner to weep.
That was the missing piece. It was too much trouble over a dinosaur egg. It was too much trouble for a simple xeno-diverse zoo, even one that got its animals illegally. It was quite in line with a zoo that included sentient creatures, one that catered to that xenophobic segment of humanity that might pay a lot of money to gawk at “sub-humans” from safely behind glassteel.
She had to get out. She had to tell Carl. A plan would come later. “Yes, sir,” Esper said after an awkward pause. With a quick naval salute, she backed away. “Got to get back to Medical. Jameson hurt his back.”
At a walk that bordered on a jog, she hurried from the Sub-Human department, clutching her pilfered datapad. First things first: get back to Mort and Roddy.
# # #
As soon as the cargo bay door clanged shut with a hiss of pressurization, Carl let his shoulders slump. For the first time in hours, he allowed himself to remember that he wasn’t the ruthless, hard-hearted sonofabitch that he wanted Gologlex to think him. All at once he felt both relief and sick to his stomach.
Tanny shook her head. “I don’t know how you could eat with that piece of shit.”
“And that food … I’ll be in the washroom,” said Mriy. She had choked down the turtle soup and collard greens. Gologlex had raved about their homegrown imported species, but Carl suspected he had chosen the meal just to discomfit the azrin.
“Block it out,” said Carl. “Not like he was poisoning us.” He glanced after Mriy as she hastened up the steps to the common room. “Well, not you and me anyway.”
“What do you think got into Mort?” Tanny asked. She still had the knapsack slung over her shoulder, heavy with hard-coin terras, all two hundred thousand they had been promised. “He’s not us
ually this reckless.”
“Dunno, but I’ve got my suspicions,” Carl said. “Esper’s not much of a liar, but she can play on a man’s conscience—or a wizard’s curiosity, maybe.” He scratched the back of his head. “Might have done better leaving Mriy here and taking Mort with us. At least that way I could have kept an eye on him.”
“And Mriy away from that xenophobe,” said Tanny.
“I’m not even sure that’s quite it,” Carl replied. “I don’t think he’s a blister pack xeno hater. His flunkies maybe, but not him. I think he’s … well, Mort’s sort of scientist, you know? The kind he’s always kicking dirt on.”
“I don’t care what you want to call him. That shit’s evil, plain and simple,” said Tanny. “He’s kidnapping sentients, and he got us to do his bio-transport. And we took his money.” She hefted the sack. The coins inside were tightly packed, so there was no jingle or rattle.
Carl headed for the stairs. “I don’t think we were getting out of there with the egg. It was either with the money and an understanding, or without and we turn into a liability. We’re accomplices, which means we can’t just rat him out. If we’d refused, I don’t think we’d have had a ship to come back to.”
“I’m throwing this sack through the clothes cleaner, coins and all,” said Tanny. “I’m tempted to jump in there myself.”
“Shower’s less painful.”
“I’m not sure any of us deserve less painful,” said Tanny.
Carl continued up the steps. “I gotta get Roddy on the comm. Sooner we get them back on board, the sooner we can forget this place even exists.”
# # #
The shuttle puttered and wobbled along though a tunnel of glassteel. The lack of science in the steel was its saving grace, clear and perfect, and not distorting the view much at all. Murray had told them that the animals could not see through in the other direction, which Mort found more than a bit disappointing. He rather fancied the idea of staring down a tyrannosaurus, the two of them sizing one another up. But they hadn’t seen anything so grand as the king of lizards, and even if they had, it would be oblivious to them.
“When are we going to see something big?” Mort asked.
“Those stegosaurs were three tons apiece,” Murray replied. “Fully grown, they’ll be close to five. In five years, we’ll—”
“I don’t care about five years from now,” said Mort. “Where are the huge ones? Fully grown. Mouths full of fangs. Huge. Not these plodding half-grown lizards. I’ve seen elephants, Murray. You’re going to have to top that.”
“We have sauropods a little bigger than those,” said Murray. “But we only import juveniles. Transport of adults is prohibitive and, frankly, dangerous.”
“Turn this serving-platter of a vehicle around,” said Mort. “I came to see fearsome reptiles of a bygone era, not to be disappointed by a bunch of underfed dino-larvae.”
“Some of the little ones are pretty cute,” Murray offered.
“Hold up,” said Roddy. “Turn around and have a good look at me and him. Where do you see someone who looks like they came here looking to see cute?”
“You’re not supposed to be drinking in the shuttle,” Murray said, unable to offer an effective counter to Roddy’s retort.
Roddy held the man’s gaze as he drained his beer and flicked the empty can away. It bounced off the glassteel tunnel wall with a hollow ring. “The man said to take us back. Haul it, peach-fuzz.”
Murray scowled. “I don’t need to take this from a drunken halfwit chimp! Walk for all I care.” Murray reached for his comm.
Mort waved a hand, and the air rippled.
“Security,” Murray said into the comm. “This is Murray, out in sector Baker Nine. I’ve got two guests from the cargo ship causing trouble. Send a team. Over.” He gave them a smug look. “Mr. Gologlex doesn’t take kindly to ill-mannered guests.”
Roddy fought back a smirk when Mort winked at him. The silence loomed over them in a way that the dinosaurs had failed to manage.
“Security, do you copy?”
…
“Security?”
“Roddy, think you can fly one of these contraptions?” Mort asked.
Murray scrambled out of the shuttle. “What are you going to do with me?” he asked. “I just work here. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything. I’ve got nothing against laaku.”
“How long a walk is it back to your headquarters?” Mort asked.
Murray’s eyes went wide. “It’ll be dark in two hours. I’d never make it by then. Please …”
Mort climbed down from the shuttle. Murray backed away from him, but ran out of room with an ill-considered retreat toward the arched glassteel of the tunnel wall. Mort took him by the collar and pushed. The glassteel was as insubstantial as it was transparent. A faint gleam shone around Mort’s shirtsleeve where the barrier passed through him.
“Murray old chum, I am sorely tempted to leave you out there with those harmless little dinos you spent the afternoon wasting my time on.”
“You wouldn’t!”
“You know Mort, this doesn’t seem like the sort of place where security sends troublemakers off with a warning,” said Roddy. He hopped into the driver’s seat and adjusted the settings until the controls were within comfortable reach.
Mort harrumphed. “Roddy’s probably right about that one, isn’t he?” he asked. Murray grabbed Mort’s forearm in both hands and tried to pull it away, but the sleeve was slick and his fingers slipped off; the cotton-synthetic blend was supernaturally slippery at the moment. Mort gave a quick shove and released Murray. When the Gologlex employee lunged for the tunnel, he struck solid glassteel.
Roddy winced. “Ooh, that’s gotta hurt. But whatever. He didn’t seem like the sensitive type anyway. Hop in, Mort. Where do we find Esper?”
“Not the foggiest,” Mort replied. “Let’s head back to the ship. If she’s not there, we’ll come up with a plan to look.”
# # #
Esper kept her head down and her eyes on the datapad’s map. It was a puzzle where no one had bothered to check whether all the pieces were in the box. The labyrinthine system of tunnels had a distinct pattern to it, a sort of architectural logic that would probably be mind-numbingly simple if there were only a few notations to hint at the logic behind them. Every time she passed a labeled door, tunnel, or corridor, she added a quick comment on the map. Eventually she started to get a feel for the layout.
“Big animals outside the mountain, little ones inside,” she muttered. “But where outside would they put dinosaurs?” It wasn’t that Esper didn’t suspect them of being in a topical or jungle climate, it was that there was no mention of the surrounding terrain. She slipped into a power distribution room for some privacy and browsed through the datapad’s files on Hadrian IV, hoping to get a geographic survey to overlay onto her facility map.
“Richelieu?” a familiar voice called out.
Esper quickly flipped the datapad back into map mode. A head popped around the corner and she allowed herself to relax just a little. “Oh, hi, Chad. Didn’t know you were back there.”
“What are you doing back here?” Chad asked. “Did you get your repulsor cart working?”
“Yeah, thanks,” Esper replied. “Sorry I didn’t leave your keycard with Mickelson. He wasn’t there.”
“I got it back. No biggie. So what’s with the datapad? You lost or something?” Chad smiled, trying to be reassuring. He was also clearly flirting with her. He had a kind face and broad shoulders. If she wasn’t planning a hasty escape, she would have liked to get to know him. There were certain hardships of the clergy that she was beginning to feel less obligated to follow. How binding was a vow once the terms were broken by the other party, anyway?
Esper remembered her need, the one of circumstance and not of flesh. “I think someone’s having some fun at my expense,” she replied. “I’m supposed to bring a snack out to a group of test tourists looking at dinosaurs. I guess we had some delivery
people ask to see them. But that’s just silly, I mean—”
“No, we’ve got dinos,” Chad replied. “We don’t call ‘em that officially. Reptilian Megafauna is the zone you’re looking for.”
“Which way is it?” Esper asked, handing over the datapad.
Chad worked poked here and there on the datapad and handed it back. A route was highlighted. “There you go. Don’t go getting lost now, though. All right?”
“Thanks,” Esper said with a goofy smile that was intended to be endearing.
“Listen, if you get back in time for dinner, I wouldn’t mind showing you around the place,” said Chad. “Holotheater is test running some of the aerial footage for the promo campaign tonight.”
Esper blushed and nodded. She hurried away, wondering why he was having such an effect on her. Maybe Tanny was right, and a girl needed to take care of herself once in a while. She couldn’t be acting like an idiot whenever a cute guy threw himself at her. Things were so much simpler at Harmony Bay, surrounded by stern priestesses and children.
Still, she felt badly, knowing that she wasn’t going to see Chad again. He’d be sitting alone at dinner, wondering why she hadn’t come.
# # #
An hour later, Esper sat in the pilot’s seat of a hover-shuttle under the roof of a clear steel tunnel. She had a covered platter filled with pastries, in case she needed to reuse her cover story about bringing refreshments to the tour group, but there was no tour group to be found. The end of the tunnel was in sight, a simple dead end, walled off for construction, probably some sort of rest area or observation platform like the one on Vi Tik Naa.
“Where’d you guys run off to?” Esper said aloud. There was no one within kilometers of her. She took a deep breath to calm herself, and thought things through. “OK. Mort and Roddy are gone. If they’d been captured, I’d probably have heard an alarm or something. But they’re not in this tunnel, either, and the branches are still closed. They must have backtracked, and since there’s no way I didn’t see them, they must have done in a while ago. Unless Mort used magic. Darn it, that would be just like Mort, too. But if they did leave already, would they have gone back to the ship, or another exhibit?”