Xenotech Rising: A Novel of the Galactic Free Trade Association (Xenotech Support Book 1)

by Dave Schroeder

  “And there are plenty of places where I could shoot you that wouldn’t prevent you from doing what the boss wants,” said Cornell, pointing his pistol in my direction.

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” said Zwilniki. Penn and Princeton looked disappointed. They would clearly like to see me get mine after what I’d done to them outside the Georgia capitol’s network room.

  “It’s going to take at least a week,” I said.

  “You’ve got twenty-four hours,” said Zwilniki. “I know you can automate the process once you figure out the first one.”

  “That’s not how it works,” I said.

  “You’re wrong,” said a new voice behind me. A female voice. “Shuvvath told me the process can be automated.”

  “‘Columbia Brown?’” I said, figuring out who it must be—the saboteur from Morphicouture.

  “If you want to call me that,” said the voice. “And if you need extra incentive to do a good job, I could easily make more trouble for Ellie and José at Morphicouture—the long term permanent sort of trouble.” I heard another pistol slide being racked behind me and didn’t like the way my odds kept changing in the wrong direction. I hoped Chit was relaying this as it happened. I couldn’t feel much, on the back of my neck or elsewhere.

  “Time to get started, Mr. Buckston,” said Zwilniki.

  I started to say “Call me Jack,” by reflex but caught myself before I could say anything that stupid.

  “Ms. Brown, take Mr. Buckston to the freighters and see that he’s putting forth his very best effort,” said Zwilniki. “The rest of you, come with me.” Zwilniki, Cornell, Penn and Princeton left through the door I’d recently entered—the one that should have had “Abandon hope all ye who enter here” stenciled above it.

  The muzzle of a pistol pressed into my back. It was gentle enough that my pupa-silk shirt didn’t turn rigid, but it definitely got my attention.

  “Get to work, Jack,” said Columbia Brown.

  I spoke through gritted teeth.

  “As. You. Wish.”

  Chapter 26

  “Transformation literally means going beyond your form.” ― Wayne Dyer

  Columbia Brown was pushy, literally. She used the muzzle of her pistol to force me toward the gangway of the nearest Orishen freighter. The freighters weren’t big, maybe eighty feet long, twenty-five feet high and twenty feet wide, but they had an organic look that made it seem like they were grown, not built. Orishen construction goes in for ramps more than stairs—they’re easier for several of their life stages to navigate—so I made my way up the sloping steel entrance and into the ship. It was a standard model, just like the ones that had been repurposed as classrooms at Mulberri Tech. I could reprogram it to morph back into a troop carrier for 100-120 soldiers in a few minutes. I even knew how to change it into a casino, or, if pressed, into a warship, but I wasn’t going to tell Ms. Brown or Tony Zed about that.

  I caught a glimpse of my captor in the reflective surface of a bulkhead wall screen. She was tall and, well, brown. Not as tall as I am. Not even as tall as Poly, but still above average height for a woman. Her hair was short, tightly curled, and black. She wore glasses. That’s normally more of a fashion statement than a vision essential given modern ophthalmic surgery techniques. Maybe they were for information retrieval, not self-expression. She was wearing a black button-front blouse, gray pants and black boots. I couldn’t make out additional physical details, but when she spoke I could tell more about her. Her voice was as hard as a nickel-iron asteroid and as cold as cometary ice.

  “Control room.” Columbia Brown could give lessons in brevity to Clint Eastwood. Her gun poked my back to get me to pick up my pace. I could do that, now that I was sure where I was going. I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of poking me again, so I double-timed it up the ramps to the ship’s bridge. The bridge was on the top deck and as far forward as you could go unless you wanted to crawl into the service tubes for the sensor array. We could make fast progress to get there because I didn’t need to open and close a lot of doors. Orishen vessels don’t need air-tight hatches and solid bulkheads to ensure atmospheric integrity. Instead, walls can be extruded from any surface organically to seal off hull breaches and reconfigure interior spaces for new purposes. Engineers on Orish design ships, homes, cars and buildings to maximize flexibility. That’s just how their minds work.

  There was a door to the bridge, however, since basic security protocols required bridge access be restricted. My captor held a sliver of metal the size of a matchstick up to the door. She waved it back and forth. I smelled something like allspice infused-sardines and the door opened. We both entered. The bridge was shaped like the upper half of a horizontal cone. It had a curved transparent ceiling crisscrossed by narrow supporting members and tapered toward the front. There were six stations, engineering, communications, navigation, scanning, trading and command. The captain’s command station was far forward, near the point of the cone, while the other stations were located in a group of two and a group of three farther aft. The trading officer, responsible for cargo and negotiating with suppliers and customers in civilian mode, switched with the weapons officer when the ship was in troop transport or warship configurations. Without being prodded, I made my way to the engineering station and saw what I was looking for.

  Like the key to the bridge door, controls on Orishen vessels responded to olfactory cues. No matter their life stage, Orishen crewmembers could produce the scents necessary to trigger specific actions using specialized glands on their manipulating digits or their mandibles. Humans had a much smaller range of innate scent-producing capabilities. What I’d been looking for was a scent-organ, a small box with piano-like keys and dozens of pipes sticking out from it. Scent-organs were the equivalent of prosthetics for handicapped Orishens who had lost all or some of their capacity to generate scents. Scent-organs were also essential for humans who wanted to interact with Orishen controls. There was just one of them on the bridge and it was sitting on top of the engineering station.

  Columbia Brown stood a few steps behind me. “Do you have what you need?”

  “Looks like it,” I said, running my fingers over the keys to reacquaint myself with this model’s controls. Using a scent-organ is like playing the accordion. Once you learn, you never forget. “It’s going to take some time to reprogram the morphogenic algorithms.”

  “Then get on with it. We’re on a deadline.” Still hard. Still cold. Probably not much fun at parties.

  I touched a few keys on the scent-organ and extruded two human-appropriate chairs from the floor, one next to the engineering station for me and another one up front by the command station. The chairs materialized in milliseconds. Now if Ms. Brown would only take the bait.

  I sat down at the engineering station. Columbia circled around me, moving closer to the command station. Her gun’s focus on my center of mass didn’t waver.

  “It’s going to take me several hours to reprogram this ship then propagate the new programming to the rest of the fleet.”

  My captor didn’t say anything but continued to pace until she was standing behind me again. I think she had trust issues. She snapped a handcuff on my left wrist and attached the other cuff to the arm of my chair.

  “Don’t think you’ll be going anywhere on breaks while you work,” said Columbia Brown, returning to stand in front of me. She gave me a look that matched the disdain for ordinary mortals shown by her employer. I nodded, looked submissive, and started pushing keys on the scent-organ to show I was properly cowed and following her instructions. She stepped around me and moved toward the chair at the command station. I yawned, hoping for sympathetic magic to do its trick. She yawned and continued to move. I yawned again. I’d been up late talking to Poly the previous night so it didn’t take much to get me yawning. Columbia didn’t yawn this time, though I could see it took some effort for her not to. She never took her eyes off me, but she did stand in front of the command chair and sl
owly sat down. Bingo!

  I pushed several keys on the scent-organ in rapid succession and two things happened. First, the chair Columbia Brown had been sitting in disappeared, almost instantly reabsorbed into the floor. She abruptly fell on her butt and dropped her gun in the process. Second, while she was distracted by the chair’s vanishing act, a transparent bulkhead extruded from the floor and cut off the command station and the entire front of the bridge from the other five stations. I didn’t even have to do much programming to make it happen—Orishen vessels have problems with mutinies, too, and sometimes captains need to be isolated for their own protection.

  Without a scent-organ Brown had no way to cancel the security bulkhead so she was effectively trapped at the front of the bridge. Her gun’s bullets wouldn’t penetrate the bulkhead and would likely be more dangerous to her than to me in the enclosed space if she tried. I instructed the ship to reabsorb the chair at the engineering station, which left one end of the pair of handcuffs dangling from my wrist. Then I moved to the communications station and set up a localized jamming field for the front of the bridge so she couldn’t contact anyone outside the ship to ask for help. That should cover all contingencies, I hoped.

  The new, transparent bulkhead was thick and soundproof, but I’m pretty good at reading lips. I’m not going to repeat what Columbia Brown was saying, though I was impressed by her creativity. After a minute she upped her threat level.

  “You’re a dead man.” I’m pretty sure that’s what she said.

  “Not yet,” I mouthed. I brought my left hand up and pretended to scratch the back of my head while tapping my teeth to ask Chit for help. She was small enough to be able to fit one of her legs into the lock on the handcuffs and pick them. Chit did so. The cuff fell off my wrist and Ms. Brown seemed to get even more unhappy and more creative in her use of invective. I made sure the bridge security cameras were capturing things—this would be very helpful at her trial, if there was a trial.

  I re-extruded my chair and sat back at the engineering station. I had some programming and propagating to do if I wasn’t going to put Terrhi’s life in danger. It wouldn’t take long to convert the gross of freighters into troop transports, but I wanted to add some special touches. I could hear the ship start to reconfigure itself as my changes took hold.

  “Thanks for your help,” I tapped.

  “My pleasure,” said Chit.

  “How’s Poly?”

  “She’s doing fine. She’s scouted things out from the far side of the hanger with passive sensors and got an exact count. Zwilniki wasn’t lying about having 144 freighters.”

  “That’s a surprise. I thought the signal Tony Zed was lying was that his lips were moving.”

  “You’re thinkin’ of lawyers,” said Chit.

  Zwilniki was several steps below lawyers in my estimation. If I made it out of this mess I’d have to find a good lawyer to help me with the partnership paperwork for Poly. And maybe I’d need the services of a judge, too, in the not too distant future, if Poly would have me.

  “This is going to take me a while,” I tapped. “Why don’t you take a flit and check out the immediate vicinity. There may be more surprises in here and you might find a clue about where they’re keeping Terrhi.”

  “Roger, Wilco, over and outta here,” said Chit. She buzzed off. I took a deep breath and started pressing keys.

  It didn’t take me long to finish converting the freighter into a troop transport, with my embedded surprises, and to start the process that would result in all the other ships being likewise configured. That progress should keep Zwilniki happy and Terrhi safe, at least for now. I retraced my way down the ramps to the ship’s gangway and looked around for Chit at the bottom. Even with all the bright lights inside the hanger it would be hard to spot something Chit’s size. I started walking around the ships, hoping she’d find me.

  I started to take a short cut across an empty space between two ships when I was smacked in the head and ended up on my ass on the floor.

  “Hey,” said Chit, “Watch it! You coulda squished me!”

  I turned my head, opened my eyes and saw Chit just inches away, rubbing her head segment with her front legs.

  “Sorry,” I said. “What hit me?”

  “For a guy with all your education sometimes you ain’t too bright.”

  I got to my knees. Chit hopped up to her usual spot on the back of my neck to avoid any chance of accidental squishing. I stuck my hands out in front of me and felt something hard and something soft. Or something hard with something soft draped over it. The soft stuff was fabric. I pulled on it and the B.I.T.S. cloth fell away to reveal a commuter-sized commercial hovercar outfitted with crop dusting nozzles. I stood up and pulled off more fabric. I could see the bottom of the passenger compartment was covered in small pieces of cardboard printed with the Earth First Isolationist logo. This was the hovercar that had sprayed the powdered grajja on the Dauushans on Peachtree Street. It was the same craft that had kidnapped Terrhi, the same one Poly and I had jumped from at ten o’clock this morning.

  “What time is it, Chit?” I asked.

  “Four o’clock,” said Chit. “I know ’cause Best of the Alabama Senate Judiciary Committee reruns always come on at four. It’s one of my favorites, which I’m givin’ up ta help cover your butt.”

  “It’s probably preempted by First Contact Day specials,” I said. Time flies when you’re having fun.

  Chit and I passed the word to Poly and Tomáso. This positively confirmed that Tony Zed was behind the kidnapping, as if his “We know you know” speech hadn’t given it away earlier.

  “Poly’s on her way with your backpack,” said Chit. “You can meet her right outside the door.”

  “Great,” I said.

  “Hey Jack,” said Chit. “Then what?”

  “We make it up as we go along.”

  Chapter 27

  “Life is no straight and easy corridor along which we travel free and unhampered, but a maze of passages, through which we must seek our way, lost and confused...” ― A. J. Cronin

  Chit and I met Poly outside the door to the hanger. I’d normally say that I saw her there but she was still wearing the B.I.T.S. suit. I collected a hug, my backpack in its B.I.T.S. bag and an insufficiently intimate kiss through a layer of fabric. I leaned close to Poly and started talking. I wanted her thoughts on where we might find Terrhi. While we spoke I strapped on my Spike’s tooth knife. Then I transferred the things I usually carried in my pockets from where I’d stowed them in my backpack. I found my phone, my wallet, my backup Swiss Army knife, a handful of micro-surveillance drones and a Xenotech Support Corporation pen and put them in various pants pockets. I also noticed something I’d forgotten I’d had—Cornell’s stun phone—and put that in a pocket as well. Perhaps circumstances would allow me return it to him, with interest.

  “I didn’t find any clues about where she might be,” I said.

  “But you did find the hovercar that kidnapped her?”

  “Right.”

  “How did they get a pink princess the size of a Shetland pony from the hanger to wherever they’re holding her without her being spotted by aerial surveillance?” asked Poly.

  I slapped my palm against my forehead.

  “D’oh!” I said.

  “Watch it,” said Chit from her perch on the back of my neck. “Warn a girl before ya do somethin’ like that so I can hold on.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’ve got to go back in.”

  “Why,” said Poly.

  “It’s time to boogie.”

  “We have to leave?” said Poly.

  “No,” I said, “it’s time to get down.”

  “What are you talking about?” Poly sounded puzzled. I turned my head in the direction her voice had come from.

  “I’m betting they’re keeping Terrhi in one of the lower levels of the VIGorish Labs’ headquarters building. I don’t think the kidnappers would want to transport an unconscious Dauushan ac
ross two parking lots where she’d be easy to spot during the transfer. I’m going back and getting down underground to look for a tunnel. They must have used one to transport her while staying out of sight.”

  “That makes sense,” said Poly, “But there’s one problem. The door’s locked.” I kicked myself because I’d forgotten to prop it open when I left.

  I heard her rattle the door’s knob but it didn’t open.

  “Let me try.” I found my Orishen mutakey in my backpack and opened the human-sized hanger door in a few seconds. Then I enlisted my phone’s help to reprogram the rather dumb controller managing the door’s security system. I didn’t want it to start shrieking the second I tried to bring all the gear in my backpack over its threshold. Once that was accomplished I looked out to where I hoped Poly was standing.

  “Good luck,” I said. She’d be handling the details about how we planned to neutralize Tony Zed’s ten thousand paramilitary “sales reps” if they appeared, so she’d need it.

  “You, too,” said Poly. Her voice sounded a bit choked up, but it could have just been the layer of B.I.T.S. cloth over her mouth.

  I shouldered my backpack, still mostly covered by its B.I.T.S. bag, and entered the hanger. This time I put a strip of tape over the door’s lock so it could open it easily if anyone needed to get back in. The door’s dumb security controller didn’t know any better. The same could be said about me. Rescuing princesses was easier in fantasy novels and video games.

  The bright overhead lights in the hanger were still on. Once my eyes adjusted to the glare I walked over to the hovercar. I tried to spot possible clues to where they’d taken Terrhi. When I got close to the craft I tripped over a length of invisible Blend Into The Scenery fabric and nearly fell on my butt again. I resolved not to make a habit of doing that and thought it would be wise to roll up the material and take it with me. The stuff could be useful. The rolled bundle of fabric rode nicely attached to the bottom of my backpack like a sleeping bag.