Jai nodded and said into the pickup; “Thank you for the offer, but we prefer to use our own shuttles, which are already stowed with our equipment and supplies, and will comfortably carry all of us. You merely need provide the coordinates where we should land.”
The same blank buzzing and crackling stretched for nearly thirty seconds, which was twenty-eight seconds too long for my overtaxed heart. My breath came quicker and I glanced at Dalton.
His infinitesimal nod told me he had the weapons on a hair-trigger, just waiting for the Terrans to say the wrong thing.
The Terran voice said, “We will transfer your belongings. Our shuttle is large and comfortable. You will come with us.” A distinct hesitation, then the Terran said, “We will not permit an outsider to land upon the sanctuary of human life.”
“We are human, “ Eliot Byrne muttered.
I thrust my hand up in a sharp silence! gesture and he nodded.
Van Veen ran his hand against the base of his neck, thinking hard. Then he grimaced and said, “Very well, we will stand by for your shuttle’s approach.”
He glanced at me. “You have control of the security of this venture, Colonel. You must work with the parameters that are presented to you.” His tone was stiff and formal.
I’d been out-voted. I glanced at Lyssa. She stared back at me and I knew she understood what I could not say right now. Then I looked back at Van Veen. “Very well, Colonel,” I told him stiffly. “Let us hope this is a limitation I can work around.”
—3—
Everyone moved off the bridge, flowing into the common area between the staterooms, heading back to their rooms to pack, if they hadn’t already. The parawolves flowed between us, all bouncing on their feet, feeling the tension in the air, but not understanding why. But they tried to help, tried to stick by their masters and lend moral support.
Vara was right by my left side, too.
Eliot Byrne came over to me as I walked down the ramp, his face working. “We really have to voluntarily step into one of their shuttles?” He’d nearly died in one of them. Actually, scratch that. He had died of complications from being a Terran captive. He was wearing a clone body, now. He looked a lot healthier than the last time I’d seen him, but still with not enough lean muscle mass for a man who had once been a Ranger and, more recently, a successful wildcat captain. Yet I’d seen him eating—he didn’t stint himself.
I rested my hand on his arm. “I’ll have the others go first. If you just can’t make yourself step on the shuttle once they’re aboard, then you can stay here and help Lyssa. She’ll have lots to do.”
Byrne rubbed the back of his neck. “I want to see Terra,” he said bluntly. “I want to put my boots upon it.”
“Then you’ll have to wind yourself up to step onto the shuttle,” I told him, not unkindly. “That’s the only way you’re going to get there.”
He nodded, his throat working. I left him to sort out his demons and moved over to where Fiori was fussing over Ven, the one Terran onboard, her pack of instruments on the table next to him.
“Are you sick again, Ven?” I asked him.
“A mild fever,” Fiori said. Her glance at me seemed to be trying to say something that I couldn’t understand.
“Nothing major, then,” I said, with a touch of relief. There were three people on board who could read Terran ideograms as easily as they could Carinad text, but only one of them spoke the dialect used on Earth. Ven had lived here for four years. We would need him, down there.
Ven, though, pressed his fingertips to his temple. “I should stay aboard.” His voice was scratchy. “I am recovering, but if I were to catch something else…”
Fiori sealed up her pack with a swift movement, shaking her head. “They’re your bugs down on the surface, Ven. You breathed them for years. I thought you would be eager to escape all the Carinad viruses for a while. Give yourself a break.”
Ven looked anything but eager, though. He gave a great sigh. “I suppose, yes…”
I gave his arm a pat. “You’re with us, Ven. They can’t do anything to do you while you’re with us. I won’t allow it.”
His gaze skittered over my face, measuring my sincerity. I stared right back.
Ven nodded. “Very well. I will meditate some more and find my center.”
“You do that,” I told him as heartily as I could. “Excuse me, I need to get ready for this thing.”
“Now you sound crabby.” Fiori picked up her pack.
I rolled my eyes at her and she just grinned. Over her shoulder, I saw Seong standing before the big screen displaying Terra. He was the only still figure among the many of us moving around the common room taking care of last-minute matters.
I had been reluctant to bring Seong along, but he could read ideograms fluently, and spoke one of the more common Terran dialects to go with it.
He was only fifteen, though. Plus, he had spent the last four years of his life as a captive of the Terrans. The problem was, he didn’t think of those years as captivity.
I moved over to his side. “Are you pleased to be here, Seong?”
He glanced at me. He was tall for fifteen—I thought he might have grown another few centimeters just in the last few weeks. He was nearly my height. He kept his black, tight-curled hair shorn very short, the way it had been when we took him off Hegara, although he had been forced to re-adopt Carinad fashion. “Pleased?” he repeated in response to my question. “Yes, in a way. Only the very best of us are given positions on Earth, you know.”
“You mean, only the most compliant slaves were sent to Terra to work,” I replied, my tone hard.
Seong gave a shrug, as if the interpretation was irrelevant. “This is not the way I thought coming to Earth would go.”
“You know the graduation crap and all the hoorah that went with it was all bullshit, right?” My tone was harsh, for Seong’s insistence upon clinging to the brainwashing the Terrans had put him through made me cringe. It also made me feel useless. There didn’t seem to be a way to reach him.
Seong was the reason Jai had brought Elizabeth Crnčević along. She was a master head mechanic. And I had seen her chatting with Ven more than once on the near two-week jump to Terra.
Seong’s startled look also held discomfort. He crossed his arms. “They did train us thoroughly. We deserved recognition for all the hard work and learning we did.”
I gave up. Elizabeth and even Marlow, who had been a psychoscientist in another time and place, warned me that conditioning of the sort Seong had been through wouldn’t dissolve easily. It would take time and patience.
I was not good at patience. And Seong’s blank insistence upon Terra-good, Carina-strange, made me incredibly uncomfortable.
I was relieved when Lyssa rose up beside me, her nanobots assembling swiftly. Then she informed me in a low voice that the Terran shuttle was within touching distance of the Lythion, waiting for us to open our doors.
And I was back to dire discomfort once more.
*
I was crunched for time now. Vara sat in the corner on the stateroom, out of my way, panting softly, while I washed swiftly and donned the shiny new clothes Jai had insisted everyone wear for this first meeting. I had Lyssa build a screen which followed me around the stateroom, showing me the Terran shuttle hanging just off our port bow. I kept studying the thing, my discomfort rising. It looked exactly like the slave shuttles—a blocky, rectangular, un-aerodynamic and featureless ship. Worse, the front of the craft was all flat window, showing a Terran standing behind the controls in his blue-black all-over armored environment suit, complete with the helmet that showed huge eyes, a long, thick snout and concentric circles of teeth in red gums.
At my direction, Lyssa and the shuttle pilot nudged the two craft within spitting distance and sent out grapples. When the Terran snakehead attached to the side of the Lythion with a jolt that shuddered through the ship, I heard people exclaiming out in the common area, their voices high and nervous.
&
nbsp; That made me feel a little better.
I directed Lyssa to let the Terrans build their physical tunnel between the ships. I wasn’t in a hurry to let the Terrans directly experience our molecular barriers. When their tunnel was built and filled with air, I hurried out to the common area and over to the hatch and had Lyssa open the hatch.
Jai Van Veen and the others fell in behind me, although I suspected that we would be greeted with more suits, not a Terran ambassador. But just in case, I was glad Jai was there to take over if we were faced with diplomats.
The hatch hissed and clanked and swung open, revealing more fully armored Terrans. They were not carrying weapons, but each suit had one of the miniature snakehead lariats built into the hip. I supposed they couldn’t get rid of those without dismantling the suits and tried to be pleased they weren’t actively armed.
The suit at the front of the six standing upon the lightweight floor of the tunnel, just beyond the lock wore no helmet. It was male, his features showing advanced age degeneration markers—grey hair and finely wrinkled skin under the chin.
He stared back at us, too. Then he cleared his throat, and said slowly, “Your be-long-ing. We put.” He pointed over his shoulder.
I painted a huge, sincere smile on my face and nodded. Then I murmured over my shoulder. “Lyssa, have the gear brought from the shuttles. Everyone else, bring your packs and put them here.”
“And let them touch my stuff?” someone murmured.
“They’ll scan and maybe look inside, yes,” Jai said, his tone firm. “We let them do it. We want them to relax. Clear?”
I shuddered and tried my best to hide it. From the corner of my eye, I saw Dalton add my duffel bag to the pile of packs, bags and other luggage building in the middle of the common area.
I beckoned to the Terrans and pointed to the pile on the floor.
The spokesman nodded. I saw him suck in a deep breath before he stepped over the sill of the hatch and into the Lythion. Then he froze, his gaze on Vara. His eyes got very large.
Vara growled, showing her teeth.
I thrust my hand in her fur and pushed her away with my knee while sending her soothing thoughts and a direct order to sit down.
She sat, but her gaze stayed upon the Terran.
He looked from her to me. His gaze shifted around the common area, as he picked out the other four parawolves.
Dalton came over to me and pushed his hand into Vara’s fur. “Vara, come.”
I didn’t expect it to work. Vara knew Dalton very well, and his parawolf, Darb, just as well, but she was still bonded to me and rarely listened to anyone else, especially when she felt she needed to defend territory.
I encouraged her to go with him. Maybe that helped. Vara rose and let Dalton lead her away. Everyone else—Marlow, Lyth and Sauli—was leading their own parawolves to the nearest stateroom and pushing them inside.
When the door closed, I turned back to the Terran. “You’re safe now. Go ahead.” I gestured to the luggage piled on the floor.
He spoke swiftly to the others behind him, and they moved into the Lythion, too. They marched over to the pile, picked up an item each, and moved back into the tunnel, all the except the spokesman-sans-helmet, who watched all of us with wary eyes, a meaningless smile on his face. His gaze shifted back to the room with the parawolves in it occasionally.
By the time his crew had returned, empty-handed, Lyssa’s nanobot carts had trundled into the common area carrying the first of the freight crates. Inside the crates was all the gear, equipment and supplies we thought we might need for a stay of about a week.
We had little idea of what to expect. Fiori wasn’t certain we could eat Terran food, for the former slaves we’d freed all spoke of an initial period when everything they’d eaten as captives had made them nauseous. Many of the crates were environmentally controlled, sterile food containers.
It would have been easier to heft a printer down to the surface, only we didn’t know if the Terran’s usual energy sources could run one, and I didn’t want them studying any of our technology too closely. I had insisted we pack fresh food, instead.
Jai had at least gone along with that, although he hadn’t been happy about it. He used the word “trust” a lot.
I had already anticipated that the Terrans would find a way to scan and probe our gear. They could inspect all they wanted. I’d spent days ensuring that nothing they might find would alarm them.
The Terrans worked tirelessly, transferring all our things to the shuttle. When everything was carried out of the Lythion, Terran-sans-helmet waved toward the hatch. “Please.” His accent mashed the word to pieces. His gesture translated for me.
I took a deep breath and glanced at Jai. “Let me go first.”
He nodded. Everyone ranged behind him wore wary expressions, too.
I stepped through the hatch and felt the flimsy bridge flex beneath my feet and clutched the edge of the hatch. Then I straightened and pulled my jacket back into place, and marched across the bouncing surface, my fists tight.
I stepped through the double doors of the shuttle and paused, for the interior was not what I had been expecting. Every Terran shuttle I’d seen inside of, before, had been the same. They had been lined with the form-fitting cryogenic shells and nothing else, except for the piloting controls.
This one was a different species. To begin, what I had thought were featureless walls were actually transparent from the waist up. A Terran was closing off the end opposite the pilot controls and I glimpsed our crates and bags behind the doors just before they closed.
Between the pilot and the freight section was a…I wasn’t sure what to call it. Dozens of well-upholstered chairs sat in rows, with a passage through the center of them to give access to each row. Each chair had belts with metal ends that I assume was a fastening of some kind to join the two sections together over the top of the passenger. A basic harness, then, to secure the passenger against gravity fluxes and inertia.
The floor wasn’t a cold, hard white surface, either. It was covered in what I decided was carpet. It was soft underfoot and gave the interior a warm and mildly welcoming feeling, although I could still feel my shoulders hunching in, and my heart was galloping.
Suit-sans-helmet stood beside me, patently waiting for me to proceed. “Thank you,” I told him. He must surely have learned those two words while rehearsing his speeches. “I’ll get everyone else.” I pointed back to the Lythion.
He nodded and stepped aside. So did the other Terrans as I made my way back to the hatch.
I leaned inside. “It’s okay. It’s not a slave shuttle. There’s even windows.”
Jai stirred. “Very well.” He was the first through the hatch and after a first initial wary step on the flexing platform, he strode to the shuttle and stepped inside, his head nearly grazing the top of the doors. Everyone else followed him while I stood to one side, counting.
Gratia Rosalie ducked as she moved through them.
Marlow had Coal under his hand, and Dalton lead both Vara and Darb. Lyth came directly behind them with pure white Hero, and Sauli with Venni.
All the Terrans stepped back, their backs to the flimsy tunnel walls, as the parawolves passed by. Their helmets tracked the wolves into the shuttle.
When everyone was through, I peered into the Lythion. “Ready, Eliot?” I asked Byrne, who had hung back.
He nodded and swallowed. He stepped through the hatch and glanced at me. I could see sweat glistening at his temples, but he marched across the bridge with a firm step and only hesitated the smallest amount before moving onto the shuttle. I could see his shoulders relax a little as he took in the interior.
Lyssa stood just inside the Lythion’s hatch. I gave her a small smile. “Well, this is it.”
“Good luck, Captain.”
I took a deep breath. “Yeah,” I said heavily, turned and marched with the same white-knuckle squaring of the shoulders that Byrne had used, into the guts of the Terran shuttle. I was t
he last one on, and the doors slid firmly shut behind me.
We were committed.
—4—
I pointed Vara to an empty row of seats, and she squeezed between the backs of the chairs in front of us. The tight space would help Vara cope with the surges. I settled in the seat I’d picked by the windows.
I touched the spot beneath my ear that switched on the cochlear implant I’d had inserted. “Lyssa?” I murmured.
“I hear you,” Lyssa replied in my head.
“Reading. Good. Shuttle isn’t shielded. Shutting up now.”
The earworm implant wasn’t the only minor operation I’d undergone in the last few weeks. Everyone travelling on the Lythion had permanent archival implants. I had threatened to leave them behind if they didn’t get one installed before lift-off.
Back at the Laxman Institute on Wynchester, we either had clones growing, or our DNA on file. It had been a personal choice for each of us whether to just store DNA or leap and have a clone generated, and it basically came down to our level of confidence in the outcome of this visit to Terra. I chose to have a clone generated. Jai, of course, just filed his DNA, and he’d been reluctant to do even that much.
“This is pure doom-crying,” he’d told me, his tone irritable.
“You said take care of the security of the mission. I’m doing that. Shut up and let them scrape, Van Veen,” I’d shot back.
No, Jai and I had not been on good terms, lately.
So it was a surprise to me when Jai settled on the shuttle seat next to me.
He glanced through the window beside me as the tunnel we’d used to cross over collapsed and retracted back into the side of the shuttle. The shuttle gave a shudder as the snakeheads were released from both ships and immediately drifted away from the Lythion.
Planetary Parlay Page 2