Space Pioneers

by Hank Davis

  “Hell if I know,” Sen said, gritting his teeth. “I told you I don’t know, you bastard.”

  “Two names is more than nothing, friend,” Kalas replied, crouching down so that he looked Sen directly in the eye. “Now tell me everything, and this will go easier for you.”

  Gant’s voice came low in one ear, “Still nothing on the comm channels, Kal. But it’s almost too quiet. I don’t like it.”

  Kalas didn’t move, kept his elbow propped on his knee, the gun leveled at Sen’s head. He didn’t need to ask any questions, the man knew what he wanted.

  Sen tried to speak, but the pain caught in his throat, and he choked. “The . . . the Parliament of Owls,” he managed after a moment’s strain. “Giacomo and the Parliament of Owls, that was what she said. Vela, I mean.”

  “The what now?” Gant’s confusion over the comm was thick enough to scrape over bread.

  Kalas understood how he felt, “The what now?”

  “That was what she said,” said Anwen Sen once more. “The Parliament of Owls. That’s really all I know.”

  “What is it? A company?”

  “Sounds more like a cult to me,” Gant put in, unhelpfully.

  The little man was shaking his head. “I don’t know, I really don’t know. Maybe a company, maybe a ship, maybe it’s the name of some colony state—I don’t know, man. I sequence genomes. That’s all I know!” His fingers squeezed the wound, blood welling up between his fingers. Tears brimmed in the doctor’s eyes, “You’re going to kill me.”

  Kalas nodded once, “Yes.”

  Sen swallowed, “I just wanted . . . just wanted to get offworld. Needed the money.” He sniffed, sucking back the panic that was starting to run down his face.

  “You and me both, pal,” Kalas said. And fired.

  Dr. Sen’s head hit the door of the oven behind him, blood and brain spattering as the black glass cracked. At once it was very quiet again, the only sound the distant rush and murmur of the city: the faint beep and squeal of groundcars, the whine of fliers. Kalas stood, slid the autorevolver into the pocket of his coat and returned his phase disruptor to his shoulder holster. He turned, found a gray cat watching him from atop one neatly arranged bookcase. The useless thing hadn’t so much as raised a paw to aid its master. Kalas looked back at Dr. Sen’s body, not sure if it was the man or the little beast he felt sorry for.

  Kanthi was a gray purgatory Kalas had come to at the end of a long campaign. Sen had been born here, near as Kalas could guess. He couldn’t blame the man for wanting to get out. When he’d been a boy, the Legion recruitment posters on Maglona had told of strange places and foreign peoples, enticing the grubby peasant boy he’d been to strike out among the stars, following in the footsteps of those first pilgrim-pioneers that had left Old Earth so many thousand years ago.

  It hadn’t been worth it.

  Home—Maglona—had been as near to Earth as terraforming and hard work could make it. Blue skies. Green hills. No seas, of course, but lakes and little rivers. So many of the worlds Kalas had seen were not. They had been places where the sun was strange, weak and red, reflected by the glare of orbital mirrors. Places where the gravity pulled too heavily on the bones, or not heavily enough—as was the case here on Kanthi. Places where the people seemed hardly people at all, so changed were they by their environs.

  Places where the air was poison.

  Places like Kanthi.

  Kalas fished his nose-tubes out of the collar of his coat. He passed the line up over his ear and plugged the things into place. Turning on his osmosis pack, he felt the chilly flow of clean oxygen start, and turned towards the airlock and the bitter world beyond.

  “You’re awfully quiet,” Gant said from the driver’s seat. As he spoke, he tipped the controls, steering the flier in low over a block of drab tenement buildings. “That doctor get to you?”

  Kalas glanced at the younger man. Gant had the manners of a cat. He dressed like one of the lordlings Kalas had seen swanning about so many an Imperial palace in his day: in a long suit of gray and black, the lapels of crushed velvet, twirling vines embroidered about silver buttons. He wore a wide-brimmed hat that matched, a white feather in its band—and in place of boots he wore buckled shoes and a pair of tight gaiters patterned white-on-white that accentuated the flare of his jodhpurs. He didn’t look like a thug at all. He looked like a procurer, one of the leno who used to come round selling women and boys to the legionnaires when they put in at port. He was the sort of man as like to smile as shoot, the sort of man who fussed about getting blood on his hands but not about the trigger. Kalas did not like him, but he was efficient, and he knew Abhanri City.

  “No, no, just thinking’s all,” Kalas said, and massaged one hand with another. “Sounds like someone paid this Vela to find the seed and Sen was the first nut she could crack, paid him to smuggle it out of the of Consortium park.” He could see the park buildings towering away in the distance: three massive white cubes more than half a mile high standing on the tundra between downtown Abhanri and the starport. From their height he could see the horizon curling away on all sides, see the CO2 plants in the air farm belching greenhouse gas into an atmosphere that needed it so desperately. Maybe one day people could breathe on Kanthi without air tubes and osmosis packs. Maybe not. He’d heard there was talk of plantings being done in the equatorial regions: beans and peas and the like trying to enrich the quality of the thin and rocky soil.

  It was a start, but it would be centuries—maybe millennia—before Kanthi flowered the way Maglona did. How had he been so stupid not to see it? Why had he ever left?

  “You think there are others?”

  “No, that’s what I’m saying,” Kalas replied. “Not that it wouldn’t hurt to warn the folks in HR, tell them to scan company and personal communiques—but I reckon this was a one-off. This Giacomo person . . . Sen said he was an offworlder. I bet my boots he came here knowing we had a Consortium center but very little planetary government—no Empire, say. Figured that’d make the heist easy, just pay off a disgruntled employee to smuggle the stock out of cold storage. If he’d wanted more I think we’d have more stolen property on our hands. So I figure either there was more as got stolen that we haven’t heard about, or they tried to steal more and only Sen carried it off proper. Or what Sen took was all this Giacomo guy asked for.”

  Gant sucked on his teeth, angled the flier into a sweeping arc that brought it down towards the car park at one end of a high street in the Narrows. “Still seems like a lot of effort to go through for seed, be better off just paying.” Smoke stacks rose like the turrets of some ugly castle from the gray mist, rust red or black. Even from the comfort of the flier Kalas could feel the damp already, the damp bricks and sweating metal walls of the low town.

  “Shit’s expensive. Paying someone like Vela for the heist’s gotta be cheaper. Paying off a disgruntled employee like Sen definitely is.”

  The younger man grunted. “You’re probably right.”

  “I’m definitely right,” said Kalas, checking the seal on his nose-tubes again. “You ready?”

  “Man, you know I’m always ready.” Gant flashed his artificially bright smile. He’d had his real teeth shattered two years back when he’d been caught by a lowtown gang, and rather than pay to have a bonecutter regrow them, Gant had opted for ceramic implants.

  The flier’s door seals hissed—although Gant had never bothered to scrub the internal compartment—and the two hunters slung out from under the big gull wing doors and hit the street. It had snowed again not two days past, and the black slush stood piled against the curb and the sides of the buildings, soot-stained and filthy. The heat of the buildings would melt it eventually, or the street sweepers would clear it away—but it would never really melt. Kanthi had not experienced anything any reasonable human being would have called summer in perhaps millions of years. Kalas popped his over-sized collar and clicked the magnetic clasps to baffle the thing over his lower face like a scarf, and a
dded warm air and sunshine to the list of things he missed.

  Adri’s was still there, crouched beneath the shadow of a warehouse, the bright neon in its windows contrasting against the dead-eyed frosted glass of the buildings around, inviting in that threatening way all such dives were inviting. They brushed past a trio of big men in striped nylon racing suits crouching at the stoop and through the airlock with a gesture. Kalas knew the men on sight. Mother Earth knew he drank at Adri’s often enough. Despite the fact that it was only mid-afternoon, there was a fair crowd inside already. Doubtless some were poorer spacers on different clocks than the planetside natives, but Kalas recognized a few old stalwarts, and tapped his fist to his chest in quiet salute to the old man watching from the bar. He’d been a veteran of the 225th, a centurion—which meant he was owed Kalas’s respect.

  “Kalas, you old goat! Is that you?”

  “Yes, ma’am!” Kalas replied, unclipping his collar from his face and pulling out his nose tubes with relief and a big sigh.

  The woman behind the bar set down the mug she was cleaning and came round the table to give the older hunter a hug. “Been a couple weeks, we were starting to worry you’d been done for.” She kissed him on the cheek, one hand lingering on his arm as she pulled away, looking up at him. Adri had owned the little pub for more than a decade—going on two, maybe—at any rate far longer than Kalas had been on Kanthi. She’d started it young, and might have been only a year or two his junior. She smiled crookedly up at him, the heavy makeup around her eyes making her look more tired than beautiful—not that Kalas didn’t think she was beautiful. She was the sort of woman they said had aged gracefully, who’d come to the good side of middle aged looking only a little older than she had as a girl. A little wiser, perhaps. A little more sad, with a knowing light in those blue eyes. She was an offworlder like him, yellow hair shot now with gray she hadn’t bothered to hide.

  Kalas smiled back at her, “I’ve been working. You know how it is.”

  Glancing at Gant, she said, “The peacock’s looking a bit drab today. Where’s all the purple, Gant?”

  “He’s in mourning,” Kalas said wryly, stepping aside as Adri thrust out her hand.

  “Mourning?” she echoed, “What for?”

  “His fashion sense, mostly,” Kalas said.

  Adri thrust out her hand for Gant to kiss it, which he did, saying, “You’re looking lovely as ever, Miss Adri. Did you change your hair?” She hadn’t.

  “Do you like it?” Adri asked, tossing her head.

  “I’m sure you’d put a palatine duchess to shame.” Gant grinned, looking like nothing so much a satyr with his sculpted goatee.

  Adri swatted at him and returned to stand behind the bar, leaning over the half-cleaned mug in such a way that Kalas could see down her loose blouse. He looked—as he was meant to—then tracked to her face as she said, “So what can I get you?”

  “Zvanya for me,” Kalas replied, leaning over the bar, “the peacock will doubtless take something questionable—”

  “But delicious,” Gant interjected, “Sunrise Sultana, please.”

  Adri groaned.

  “Someone’s going to kick the shit out of you for ordering that drink there, Gant,” Kalas said, settling against one of the stools bolted to the floor.

  The other man shrugged. “Let them try. You’re the one drinking that Jaddian piss that smells like someone set a cinnamon tree on fire.”

  “You don’t make it sound so bad when you put it that way.” The proprietor busied herself cleaning the glass she’d abandoned and set it back in the chiller before she poured Kalas his drink and set about mixing Gant’s. “What are you boys in for? Because I know this ain’t a social call.”

  Kalas threw the Jaddian liquor back in one shot, grimacing, but Gant beat him to the response, “Vela.”

  The barkeep stopped midway through shaking Gant’s drink, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Now see, if that were true, Adri,” Gant said smoothly, propping his elbows on the surface of the bar, “you’d have just said, ‘Who?’” The younger man leaned in over the bar as he spoke, the shadow of his wide-brimmed hat drawing a line across Adri’s painted face.

  Kalas put a hand on the younger man’s arm to stay his advance. “You know what we do, Adri. That’s no secret. Word is she fenced or is fencing a supply of Consortium seed stock boosted from Park Towers three days back.”

  Still clutching the silver mixer in her hands, “You know I don’t want any trouble . . .”

  “And we’re not looking to bring it,” Kalas said, glancing round the dingy room. Another group of men sat in the far corner, huddled around a hookah that stank of jubala, while not far off a mixed group of men and women watched a recorded Colosso match projected in miniature on a holograph table. No one was really listening, not even the old centurion in his cups. Still, Kalas was too much the former Sollan legionnaire to lose the sense that they might be being listened to. Speaking more softly then, he said, “We’re just trying to find the tech’s all.”

  Blue eyes narrowed and Adri shook her head, “You’re missing my point. It’s not you I’m scared of. It’s her.”

  “Vela?”

  The barkeep flashed Gant a look that probably soured the liquor in her mixer, which she still clutched to her breast like a talisman. To Kalas she said, “Now you being new from offworld I can understand you not knowing, even in your line of work, but you?” She glared at Gant, not breaking eye contact as she poured the man’s violently orange drink into a broad cocktail glass. The drink immediately began to separate in the grimy yellow light, the lowest portions turning a bright, sunny blue. “How in Earth’s name do you not know about her?”

  Gant sipped the Sultana, a puzzled look indicating that a thought had penetrated his perfectly coiffed haircut and the skull beneath it. “She’s not the one who did for old Arturo and his lot, is she?”

  Adri nodded. Gant swore.

  “Does the name ‘Parliament of Owls’ mean anything to you?” Kalas asked, shaking his glass to signal for a second shot, which Adri obliged.

  Putting the glass stopper back in the bottle, she said, “No. What is it?”

  “The buyer, I think,” Kalas replied, downing the cinnamon liquor, “that was all our . . . informant said. Said this Vela of yours was selling our contraband to someone called Giacomo and the Parliament of Owls.”

  “Sounds like a sex club to me,” Gant put in, speaking around the rim of his cocktail glass, “a weird sex club.”

  “You’d know,” Kalas said, turning his glass over.

  “Would not.”

  “What’s Vela’s deal?” Kalas asked Adri, jerking his chin up, “Why’s she got you so tight-lipped?”

  Adri’s deep blue eyes swept over her attendees, taking in the sights. “She’s a big fish is all. Eyes everywhere, fingers in everything. Been knocking off a bunch of the small timers for years now. Making noise. Surprised you lot haven’t heard of her, or did you pop your eardrums living so high up in those Consortium towers?”

  Both men snorted at the same time, prompting Kalas to glare at his partner. “Big fish . . .” he repeated, thinking it a strange expression to bring this world where fish were so few. “Heard she works out of a stockhouse down here. Any idea which one?”

  “You know the old Narayan Shipping offices? Right on the reservoir?”

  “Sure.”

  The barkeep looked down and away, as if unsure she’d said the right thing.

  “What is it about this Vela woman’s got you so scared?” Kalas asked, and thinking of his time in the Legions added, “I’ve met worse.”

  Adri looked him in the face, eyes narrowing, searching for her answer in Kalas’s face. “Word is she’s the one you go to if you want to trade with the Extras.”

  Gant choked on his drink, “The Extras? You sure?”

  The Extrasolarians. The word had a special sharpness for Kalas. As a boy—in the Empire—the Extrasolarians were th
e stuff of nightmares. Monsters his gran had threatened him with, pirates who dwelt between the stars, who kidnapped children and turned them into their mindless machine servants.

  Adri looked from Gant to Kalas, gave them a slow nod.

  But Kalas had lived long enough and fought long enough to take this in stride. It was a rumor—and even if it was true, it didn’t change the fact that he had a job to do. He stood, drew out his credit chit. Seeing her cue, the barkeep keyed a number into the scanner—the price of three drinks and a bit of information—and Kalas paid. No matter. It was Wong-Hopper money anyway. Gant hadn’t stirred for any of this, and Kalas had to haul him off his stool even as he struggled to drain the last of his garish drink. “Thank you for the drink, Adri,” Kalas said.

  “That’s it?” Adri asked, stunned. “Just like that?”

  “Unless you know more.” Kalas shrugged, “What am I supposed to do? Gant and me—we don’t get paid unless we recover the Consortium’s property.”

  The woman only shook her head, muttered, “I guess a hunter is a hunter . . .”

  They turned to go.

  “And Kalas!” the barkeep’s words caught them before they’d gone five paces. He turned. Waited. “We still on for next week?”

  The old hunter bobbed his head ever so slightly and gave her a neat half-salute, tapping his chest with his fist. “Yes ma’am.”

  In a small voice—so small that Kalas wasn’t quite sure or not if he was meant to hear it—she said, “You be careful.”

  The Narayan building was easy enough to find. Like most of the oldest buildings in Abhanri City, it wasn’t gray, but white: assembled from prefabricated units brought in from offworld on some super-carrier and assembled on the ground. It wasn’t tall—Kalas only counted twelve stories—but it dwarfed the massive concrete drums of the water reservoir and the fisheries around it. Even with his nose-tubes in place, Kalas could smell the mercury stink of fish and of the algaes living and dead that helped feed the fish and clean Kanthi’s poisonous airs. It would take a lot more of such algae to make the planet’s poisonous air breathable, and for that it would take a lot more water. The experts said that water was trapped in permafrost and the ice caps far to the north and south, but Kalas wasn’t sure.