by neetha Napew
“Do I have to repeat everything to you denseheads? I am Quinada,” Pollili said, scowling and pulling her brows together in an excellent imitation of her model. “Servant to lenois, senior Administrator in the eminent Parchandri Merchant Families. Who are you to challenge me?” There was a long pause during which the audio was cut off.
“We know of your master and we know your name,” the voice announced at last, “though not your face. What are you doing on this planet?”
“My master’s affairs. My last duty to him,” Pollili answered crisply. “No more of that. Arabesk is dead and I speak for those still alive.”
“Where is your master?”
“The lung-rotting cough took him yesterday. The puny lightweight stock from which he springs will probably see the end of him before the week is over.” Pollili delivered the last with an air of disgust overlaying her evident grief. Lunzie nodded approvingly from her corner. Pollili’s own psyche was adding to the pattern Lunzie had impressed on her mind. Fortunately, there weren’t the same dangerous leanings in Pollili’s makeup that repulsed Lunzie in the original Quinada but the telemetry officer sounded most convincing.
“Quinada” confidently answered the rapid-fire questions that the voice shot to her. To consolidate her position, “Quinada” put up on the screen the genetic detailing of the bacterium which Bringan and the others had created. She explained what she understood of it. As Pollili, she knew a good deal about bacteria but the Quinada overlay wouldn’t comprehend that much bioscience.
With her headset clasped to one ear, Flor gestured frantically for Zebara to join her in the soundproof control station. “Sir, I’m receiving live transmission from the Zaid-Dayan. They’re approaching from behind the sun after making a triple jump! Those must be some fancy new engines. They’ll be here within minutes!”
“Keep them talking!” Zebara mouthed through the glass to Pollili.
The woman nodded almost imperceptibly as she ordered the bio-map off the screen.
“It may interest you to know. Citizen Quinada, that we have taken atmospheric samples and find no traces of this organism which you claim has killed five of your colleagues.” The voice held a triumphant note. “Eight,” “Quinada” corrected him. “Eight are dead now. The organism hovers within ten meters of the surface. Your probe didn’t penetrate far enough.”
“Perhaps your entire complement is alive and well, with no cough at all. We have noticed no difference in the number of infrared traces in your group between our first conversation and now.”
“Dammit,” Bringan groaned. “I knew we forgot something.”
“Quinada” had an answer for that. “We have placed some of the sick in cold sleep. You are picking up heat traces for the machinery.” “Quinada” coughed pointedly.
“You are not fooling us,” the pirate sneered. “Your ship’s identification signal is being scrambled. We suspect it is EEC, not Parchandri or Diplo. We have doubts as to your identity, Quinada. Your bio-file will be in our records. If it is yours.”
Nervously, Zebara began to drum on the door-frame. The sound affected Lunzie’s nerves. Tension began to knot up her insides. She forced herself to relax, to set an example of calm for the others. In the communications booth, Flor was white-faced with fear. Bringan paced restlessly in the corridor.
Under strain from her interrogator, “Quinada” started coughing. “You dare not accuse me of lying! Not if you were standing here before me. Come down, then, and die!”
“No, you will die. We will broil you and your make-believe organisms where you lie.” The voice became savagely triumphant. “We do not look kindly on those who deceive us. We claim this planet.”
The team members looked at one another with dismay.
“Attention, unidentified vessel.” Another voice, crisply female and human, broke into the transmission. “This is the Fleet Cruiser Zaid-Dayan, Captain Vorenz speaking. Under the authority of the FSP, we call upon you to surrender your vessels and prepare for boarding.”
Pollili sat, eyes on the swirling pattern on the screen, without reaction. Scarran dashed for the telemetry station, the others right behind him.
“There is another blip! Phew, but the Zaid-Dayan is a big mother,” he said.
The light indicating the FSP warship was fast closing with the planet from a sunward direction. On screen, it projected the same intensity as the transport ship but with much more powerful emanations. Statistics scrolled beside each blip. The enemy must have been reading the same information on its screens, because the two pirate vessels veered suddenly, breaking orbit and heading in different directions.
Tiny sparks erupted on the edge of the pirate escort facing the FSP cruiser as the transport ship broke for the edge of the Ambrosian system.
“What’s that?” asked Lunzie, indicating the flashes.
“Ordnance,” Timmins said. “Escort’s firing on the ZD so the lugger can escape.”
Answering flickers came from the FSP ship as it increased velocity, coming within a finger’s width of the pirate.
“They’ve got to stop the lugger from getting away!” Elessa exclaimed.
“It can’t get them both,” Vir chided her.
“I’d rather the ZD took out the armed ship, myself. We’re not safe and home yet.”
“Oh, for a Tri-D tank,” Flor complained. “The coordinates say that they’re miles apart but you can’t get the proper perspective on this obsolete equipment.”
The transport zipped off the edge of the screen in seconds. The two remaining blips crossed. For a moment they couldn’t tell which was which, until Scarran reached over and touched a control.
“Now they’re different colours. Red’s the pirate, blue’s the Zaid-Dayan.” Red vectored away from Blue, firing rapid laser bolts at the larger ship. The blue dot took some hits, not enough to keep it from following neatly on the tail of Red. Now it was Red’s turn to be peppered with laser bolts. Then a large flash of light issued from the blue dot.
“Missile!” Scarran exclaimed.
A tiny blip joined the larger two on the screen, moving very slowly toward the red light. The pirate vessel began desperate evasive manoeuvres which apparently availed nothing against the mechanical intelligence guiding its nemesis. At last Red had to turn its guns away from Blue long enough to rid itself of the chasing light dogging its movements.
The Zaid-Dayan sank a beautiful shot in the pirates’ engine section. The red blip yawed from the blow but recovered; the pirate had as much unexpected manoeuvrability as weaponry. But the FSP cruiser inexorably closed the distance between them.
The speakers crackled again. “Surrender your vessel or we will be forced to destroy you,” the calm female voice enjoined the pirate. “Stop now. This is our last warning.”
“You will be the one destroyed,” the mechanical voice from the pirate replied.
“They’re heading into the atmosphere,” Flor said, and indeed it seemed that the pirate was making one last throw of the dice, a desperate gamble with death.
“Turn on visual scan,” Zebara ordered.
The communications officer illuminated another screen which showed nothing but sky. Gradually they could catch the shimmering point of light growing larger and larger in the sky to the north.
“Increase contrast.” Flor complied, and the point separated into two lights, one behind the other. “Here they come.”
Even at a thousand kilometres the scout team could hear the roar of the ships as they plunged through the atmosphere in controlled dives. On the screen, the two ships resembled hot white comets, arcing from the sky. Laser fire scored red sparks in the blazing white fire of each other’s hulls.
“They’re coming in nearly on top of us,” Flor said in a shriek.
Red fire lanced out of the lead ship on the screen. Instead of pointing backward at the pursuing vessel, it blazed toward the planet’s surface. There was a loud hiss and an explosion from outside the scout. Fragments of stone flew past the open hatc
hway. The force field protected those inside, but it would not hold for long. A smell of molten rock filled the air.
“Bloody pirates!” Zebara roared. “Evacuate ship! Now!” He lunged for the command console, ripping it from its moorings, and made for the exit.
“Well, I expected retaliation,” Bringan replied, cradling something against his chest as he followed the captain. “Everybody out!”
The rest of the team didn’t wait to secure anything but dove through the hatch. Lunzie was nearly to the ground before she realised that Pollili still hadn’t moved.
“Come on!” she yelled, urgently. “Hurry! Come on - Pollili!”
The woman looked around, dazed and incredulous.
“Lunzie? Where is everyone?”
“Evacuate, Poll. Evacuate!” Lunzie shouted, waving her arm. “Get out now! The pirates are firing on us.”
The heavyworlder shot out of the booth like a launched missile. On her way down the ramp, she picked Lunzie up with one muscular arm about her waist and flung them both out of the hatchway. They hit the dirt and rolled down the hillside as another streak of red light destroyed a stand of trees to the left of the ship. The next bolt scored directly on the scout’s engines. Lunzie was still rolling down the slope when the explosion dropped the ground a good three feet underneath her. She landed painfully on her arm brace and skidded down into the stream at the bottom of the hill, where she lay, bruised and panting. The only part of her which wasn’t abraded was the forearm protected by the arm brace.
Pollili landed beside her. They flipped on their force-screens and covered their heads with their arms. The pirate escort made a screaming dive, coming within sixty feet of the surface. Its engines were covered with lines of blue lightning like St. Elmo’s fire. It had sustained quite a lot of damage.
The pirate was followed by a ship so big Lunzie couldn’t believe it could avoid crashing.
“The Zaid-Dayan’.”
The two ships exchanged fire as they changed direction, headed out toward Dondara’s rock flats before ascending once more into the sun. Radiant heat from their passage set fire to the trees on the edge of the plateau. The pirate and the cruiser continued to blast away even as they touched the bottom of their parabola and veered upward toward the sky. They were completely out of sight in the upper atmosphere when Lunzie and Pollili felt air sucked away from them and then heard a huge BOOM! A tiny fireball erupted in the middle of the sky, spreading out into a gigantic blazing cloud edged with black smoke. The explosion turned into a long rumble which altered to a loud and threatening sibilation.
“Into the water, quickly!” Lunzie gasped.
The two women were just barely under the surface when hot fragments of metal rained down around them, hissing angrily as they struck the water. The fragments were still hot when they touched the edge of their protective force-screen envelopes and passed through harmlessly. Lunzie’s lungs were beginning to ache and her vision to turn black by the time the pieces stopped falling. When she finally crawled up the bank, her legs still in water, she gratefully pulled in deep breaths.
Pollili emerged next to her and flopped on her back, water streaming out other hair and eyes. There were burns on the fabric of her tunic, and a painful-looking scorch mark on the back of one hand.
“It’s over,” Lunzie panted, “but who won?”
“I sure hope we did,” Pollili breathed, staring up at the sky as the thrum of engines overhead grew louder.
Lunzie rolled over and dared to look up. The FSP warship, its spanking new colours scorched and carbonised and lines etched into its new hull plates by the enemy lasers, hovered majestically over the plateau where the destroyed scout had once rested, and triumphantly descended.
“We sure did.” Pollili’s voice rang with pride.
“That,” declared Lunzie, “is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Singed about the edges, scorched a bit, but beautiful!”
The Zaid-Dayan carried the scout team to rendezvous with the ARCT-10. Zebara’s team was lauded as heroes by the Fleet officers for holding off the pirate invasion until help could arrive. Pollili especially was decorated for “performance far beyond the line of duty.”
“It should have been for sheer invention,” Dondara muttered under his breath.
Pollili was uncomfortable with the praise and asked Lunzie to explain just what she had done which everyone thought was so brilliant.
“I trusted you; now tell me what you trusted me to do,” Pollili complained. When Lunzie gave a brief resume. Poll frowned at her, briefly resuming her “Quinada” mode. “Then you should take some of the credit. You thought up the deception.”
“Not a bit,” Lunzie said. “You did it all. I did nothing but allow you to use latent ingenuity. Chalk it up to the fact that people do extraordinary things when under pressure. In fact, I’d be obliged if you glossed over my part in it to anyone else.”
Pollili shook her head at first but Lunzie gave her a soulfully appealing look. “Well, all right, if that’s what you wish. Zebara says I can’t ask how you did it. Only at least tell me what I said that I don’t remember so I can tell Dondara.”
Lunzie also reassured Dondara that his mate could not snap back into her “Quinada” role. He’d missed it all since he was just returning to the scout just as the ship was blown up. He had been set to wade into the molten wreckage and find some trace of Pollili. He was very proud that his mate was considered hero of the day and constantly groused that the computer record of her stellar performance had been destroyed along with the scout ship. Lunzie was relieved rather than upset and eventually gave Dondara a bowdlerised description of the events.
The other team members had suffered only bruising and burns in their escape, treated by Fleet medical officers in the Zaid-Dayan’s state-of-the-art infirmary. Bringan’s hands and feet were scorched and had been wrapped in coldpacks by the medics. In his scramble from the scout ship, he had been so concerned to preserve the records he salvaged that he hadn’t turned on his force-belt. He also hadn’t realised that he was climbing over melting rock until the soles of his boots began to smoke. He’d had a desperate time trying to pry the boots off with his bare hands.
Zebara had a long burn down his back where a flying piece of metal from the exploding scout had plowed through his flesh. He spent his first eight days aboard the naval cruiser on his belly in an infirmary bed. Lunzie kept him company until he was allowed to get up. She called up musical programs from the well-stocked computer archives or played chess with him. Most of the time, they just talked about everything except pirates. Lunzie found that she had become very fond of the enigmatic heavyworlder.
“I won’t be able to give you the protection you’ll need once we’re back on the ARCT-10,” Zebara said one day. “I’d keep you under my protection if I could but I no longer have a ship.” He grimaced. Lunzie hastened to check his bandages. The heavyworlder captain waved her away. “I had a message from the EEC. I have number one priority to take the next available scout off the assembly line but if I break my toys, I can’t expect a new one right away.” He made a rude noise.
Lunzie laughed. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they said just exactly that.”
Zebara became serious. “I’d like to keep you on my team. The others like you. You fit in well with us. To reduce your immediate vulnerability, I’d advise that you take the next available mission ARCT offers. By the time you come back, I should be able to reclaim you permanently.”
“I’d like that, too,” Lunzie admitted. “I’d have the best of all worlds, variety but with a set of permanent companions. I think I would have enjoyed myself on Ambrosia. But how do I queue-jump past other specialists waiting to get on the next mission?”
Zebara gave her his predatory grin. “They owe us a favour after our luring a pirate gunship to destruction. You’ll get a berth in the next exploration available or I’ll start cutting a few Administrators down to size.” He pounded one massive fist into the other to emphasise
his point, if not his methodology.
Chapter Fourteen
Zebara was right about the level of obligation the EEC felt for the team’s actions.
“Policy usually dictates non-stress duty for at least four weeks after a planetary mission, Lunzie,” the Chief Missions Officer of the ARCT-10 told her in a private meeting in his office, “but if you want to go out right away, under the circumstances, you have my blessing. You’re lucky. There’s a three-month mission due for a combined geological-xenobiological mission on Ireta. I’ll put you on the roster for Ireta. With the medical berth filled by you, there are only two more berths to assign. It leaves in two weeks. That’s not much turnaround time. ...”
“Thank you, sir. It relieves my mind greatly,” Lunzie said sincerely. She had come straight to him after that talk with Zebara. The scout captain had depressed the right toggles.
Then she had to give the Missions Officer her own report on the Ambrosia incident, with full details. He kept the recorder on through the entire interview, often jotting additional notes. She felt quite exhausted when he finally excused her.
She later learned that he had interviewed each member of the team as well as the Zaid-Dayan officers. Apparently the fact that the lugger with its cold sleep would-be invasion force had escaped didn’t concern him half as much as he was pleased that the overgunned escort had been destroyed. Most of those ARCT-10 Ship-born felt the same way. “One less of those hyped-up gunships makes space that bit more safe for us.”
The rest of Zebara’s team was given interim ship assignments until a replacement explorer scout ship was commissioned. Lunzie, waiting out the two weeks before she could depart on the Iretan mission, found herself with one or more of the off-duty team, and usually Zebara himself. To her amusement, a whisper circulated that they were “an item.” Neither did anything to dispel the notion. In fact, Lunzie was flattered. Zebara was attractive, intelligent, and honest: three qualities she couldn’t help but admire. She was duly informed by “interested” friends that heavyworlder courting, though infrequent, was brutal and exhausting. She wasn’t sure she needed to find out firsthand.