Lantern Road: 8 by Cullen

by John T. Cullen

  In that moment, a small worm of determination settled in Jory's soul. If he were ever able, he would come back and smash those gates. He would tear down that concrete drum wall. He would free not only the humans on Oba, but the Shurians from themselves.

  “This way,” Jerzy said, grabbing a handful of Jory's cloak. He pulled, and Jory and the other two men followed. They bolted up a narrow, claustrophobic metal stairwell that rang with their footsteps. On the second floor, they entered a doorway that led to a series of narrow rooms or cabins set into the boat's walls, whose windows overlooked the loading bay. Jerzy locked the door behind them, while Don pulled the dark blue curtains on the windows closed. There was one virtual window to see space once they took off. The room was carpeted in dark red, and had a kitchen built into the other end from where Jory stood. A door at the other end led, he supposed, to more rooms like this one, places for the crew or maybe the officers to rest while the boat was under way.

  “About ten hours,” Jerzy said, “and she'll be lifting off."

  They pulled off their disguises and threw them over a set of couches set in one corner. The three spacemen wore the ubiquitous uniform of the bipedals—a loose fitting cotton jumpsuit that opened down the front and had many small pockets to keep things when gravity was at a premium. Jerzy's was a faded khaki, Don's a new dark blue, Hans's a dim light blue. Hans and Don threw themselves back on the worn but comfortable looking brown couches along the outer wall. Jerzy headed for the corner sink. Jory stared at the soft lighting, and the smooth waves it made on the creamy, plastic-coated ceilings. He welcomed a host of clean, human smells. These men took everything for granted while, for him, every moment meant a new sensation.

  He hardly noticed the door that opened or the woman who walked into the room.

  She had to speak his name twice before he looked at her, startled.

  She was pretty, that he could see. Her skin was dusky brown. Her hair was puffy like the Shurians', but black and thick, with many fine curls, and cropped just beyond the ears so it made a fluffy helmet. Her eyes were serious, light blue and playful. Her jumpsuit was new and clean, brown like a tree trunk. Jory liked the way her hips moved in the suit, and her unassuming breasts were high and firm. She moved with style and authority. “I'm happy to see you, Jory O'Call.” She extended a small hand whose nails she'd painted glossy rouge. Her grip was light but firm. Official. “I'm Josenda Kellahi. I'll be your official guardian until you join the crew of Dora Mora."

  Jory nodded, enjoying her warmth and light smile. He noted the light pink lipstick, the several tiny gold rings in her cheeks, the small pink bow attached to her high forehead. He also noted with surprise that she packed a huge black gun in a dark green holster on a wide web belt with small military-looking pouches. On the left chest surface of her overalls were insignia patches suggesting she could shoot, run, wrestle, and fight with the best of them.

  “We'll be taking off in six bells,” she said. “They are loading the heavy cargo bottom first. Ten tons of special Oba core-soil for a royal pleasure garden on Rorath IV.” She grinned. “Where there's a need, we go. You'll probably enjoy the Service.” Seeing his confused, numb look, she added: “Of course you're entitled to quit if you wish. Just—don't before Captain Aptath has had a chance to present you with a proposal.” She had a crisp, athletically attractive, almost handsome face. The softness of her skin, the curvature of her cheeks, and the twinkle of her lipstick made her look pretty and feminine. He liked looking at her, in this wealth of wonderful light, as her features kept pulling between the athletically hard and feminine soft.

  Jory sat on the couch while she stepped beside Jerzy at the sink to prepare steaming hot cups of something for them—kjaba, they called the bitter but savory black brew whose steel-keen edge could be blunted with sugar, milk, and other condiments too strange for Jory to name. He didn't care about the confusion of this wonderful new world whirling around his head—he was just glad to be alive. Then, as always, the thought of Ramy followed, and he felt a wrenching sadness.

  That, in turn, reminded him of Girex and Giru. “Josenda, there is one thing,” he said as she walked carefully juggling two small, white ceramic cups on tiny plates.

  “Yes?” she asked attentively, since apparently it was her job to hover around him like a mother, a friend, and a police officer. She handed him his cup and they sat down. “Careful, it's hot,” she said. He took his first sip of kjaba and spit it out. Not only was it hot, but it was sheer black hell.

  “Ah!” he cried, handing her the cup and running to the sink. He heard clouds of laughter all around him as he rinsed his mouth out. “Sacred Oba Mountain, that stuff will kill you."

  “You'll grow to like it,” Josenda said.

  Minutes later, sipping gingerly at a cup doused in condiments, he began to appreciate the cloying but robust way this drug entered his senses of smell and taste and made his blood run faster.

  “There is one thing.” He pictured Girex and Giru sprawled in their sad and dishonored deaths. “I had two friends here in Kusi-O. They were very gentle and took good care of me. I wish we could take them with us for burial. They have a child who will wonder what happened to them."

  The three men howled with derision, and Jory almost hated them. He could see why the galaxy had rebelled against their human overlords hundreds of mendz ago—if the legends were true—.

  Josenda seemed poised as ever, and he sensed resistance from her also. “Jory, it's impossible. The risks ... the timing ... the laws ... we'd have to negotiate with the local authorities, and one thing would lead to another. Do you realize that if anyone learns about you, you'll be marked for death?” She set her cup aside and spoke firmly. “Maybe you don't understand. It's illegal for the five of us to exist on this planet. Or for that matter to run free in most of the galaxy. We have for centuries been under a shoot to kill edict. We don't own these ships or run this cargo. We have proxies and overlords like Captain Aptath."

  “Captain Aptath isn't human?"

  “Well ... he is of our kind,” she said slowly. “You'll learn more about this ship soon enough. The officers and the crew of the ship are Ruandap.” She continued: “For us to make arrangements like this would involve Captain Aptath's officers contacting the Fril police and somehow explaining ... no, it can't be done, I'm sorry."

  Jerzy and company still laughed. “A couple of snake drug addicts, ho ho!"

  Don slapped his sides. “Hope they don't clog up the incinerator."

  Jory rose and walked close. “Gentlemen, if you amuse yourselves further, this will become very personal, very quickly. I warn you."

  Their expressions faded into looks of disbelief and joshing. “Oh come on, man, we're just having a laugh."

  “The Fril couple were kind to me. I would like to bury them with honor. Where I come from, we honor those who have died."

  “But these are reptiles."

  “No, they were people. They treated me like a person."

  Hans rose huffily to refill his kjaba at the sink, and he brushed past Jory. He was a big man who moved in hulking movements, and Jory heard him mutter in his thick patois, “I can see why they would kill you on the other side.” He shook his cup out on the floor and walked to the kjaba urn. “If I don't take you back there and toss you over the wall myself."

  Josenda rose. “Hans, this man is worth a million of you to Captain Aptath. I will throw you over the wall if you even say another word."

  “Keep your beans in the bag,” Hans muttered.

  Jory turned to her. “I insist that we make an effort."

  “All right,” she said, snapping open a com pad. “Dora Mora, this is Josenda. Patch me through to the O.D.” She walked out of the room, slamming the door shut, leaving Jory with the men.

  Jory stood his ground and looked at them.

  Jerzy waved his arm. “It's not worth the sizzle. Ease up, O'Call. You made your qifin’ point and I respect you for it. Don't push it by being rectal."

&
nbsp; “I'm not pushing anything. I'm prepared to answer any further questions."

  Hans scoffed to himself, but appeared to be thinking that the price of pursuing this wasn't worth it. They were human, on a hostile planet, and subject to execution if someone slipped up.

  Don apologized. “Sorry, man. We all have buried dead. We know the feeling."

  Jory slowly turned away from the confrontation, thinking, yes, and half of them you probably killed, being mercenaries.

  Josenda re-entered the room. “Captain Aptath will send an officer to the Fril boss. He'll say that he was contacted by the child's guardians to retrieve his parents’ bodies.” She appeared somewhat surprised. “I can see you'll have your way around here.” She remained friendly enough, but something had changed. Jory figured it out soon enough. He wasn't one of them. He was a special person whose any word to the Captain (whom he hadn't met yet, nor whose purpose he knew) could affect them in unknown ways. Suddenly it was the woman and the three mercenaries on one side of a wall, and Jory alone on the other.

  When the bodies of Girex and Giru were brought to the boat hours later by Fril mortuary workers, Jory looked down from the secrecy of the curtained mezzanine office. He was alone in the room. Josenda had gone to freshen up after making sure the doors were securely locked, and the three mercenaries had gone to catch up on their sleep.

  Jory felt sad, seeing naked Fril laborers carelessly handling the two yellow ceramic tubes smeared with black calligraphy. Then he spotted his first Ruandap. There were three of them, big men in uniforms similar to Josenda's, with side arms. One appeared to be a ship's officer, for he wore a colorful sash around his neck, and a gold medal on his chest. He had dark, blunt features. The Ruandap officer and a Fril representative nodded and shook hands. Fril workers carried the containers to a safe spot in the ship.

  * * * *

  The boat lifted on time with a powerful whine of all four grav-desist engines, while Jory, Josenda, the mercenaries sat strapped into high-backed chairs in a passenger transit bay on the third floor. Josenda explained that the engines still had to push the boat upward, but somehow the engines fooled the atmosphere into thinking it was more like water and the ship more like a block of wood.

  They rose into the night sky. He saw more stars as the atmosphere thinned and his field of vision deepened. The red moon showed its valleys and rilles.

  The boat burned upward, and they seemed to move in several directions all at once, and always in shifting combinations, that made his stomach feel like a balloon full of air. Josenda slipped him a small bag just in time, and he expelled the last of Giru's vegetable soup, bless her soul. He rinsed with mint tea.

  They slowed to a crawl before a huge black shape with myriad tiny squares of light in its many surfaces. Rockets fired in near-zero grav. The boat slowly bumped to a stop inside a featureless cage just big enough to hold it, and the boat was bolted to the floor and ceiling. Only then were the humans allowed to get out. Jory followed Josenda on shaky legs.

  As they walked down the metal ramp, Jory looked around in amazement.

  Josenda laughed at his expression. “It's big all right. But it's average. RTL runs hundreds of freighters up and down the Third Arm. Some of them are so big the Dora Mora could fit into a single cargo bay."

  Jory could not imagine that. He craned his neck as he walked. This was a noisy, industrial environment. There was room for four or five boats; at the moment, only one was out and he assumed still on the ground here or on Fril. The ceilings receded into darkness, and he could not see how high they went—he was blinded by round factory lights that floated on cross-stabilizing cables. The ship had its own gravity, he noted, though he felt a little bit different, just a fraction—he couldn't tell if it was more or less gravity than on Shur.

  They passed knots of humans in overalls. All were busy—some pushing cargo around on small grav-desist floats, others welding metal on metal so sparks flew before their black safety lenses, others trooping to the water cooler or carrying electric data tablets around.

  Josenda took him up in a lift. “You'll stay in your own quarters on the Officers’ Deck. What a lucky guy. I'll get to see you most of your waking hours though."

  “When do I begin to find out why he brought me here?"

  “When he's ready.” She spoke deferently of the Ruandap.

  “I will be patient.” He waited in the dim light as the lift hummed.

  When the lift stopped, they stepped into a pleasantly gloomy, wide corridor with carpeted floors and electronic lighting. The walls and doors were paneled in wood, and all the doors were closed, their heavy brass handles ornate.

  “This is where you will stay for the time being,” she said, throwing open a door. Jory stepped into an oppressively close, musty smelling room with no flavor or personality. “Like a tomb,” she said lightly, “let's freshen it up.” She flicked switches, and the lighting closed in—brighter wherever he walked, dimmer the farther away. A faint sigh of machinery caused delightful cool, fresh air to waft around Jory. A wall flickered into life, showing a panoramic sunset over a sea somewhere in the universe. The air, wherever that was, seemed to be on fire. “If you want music, entertainment, you have everything.” She flicked some more switches, and music blared over him, and the wall changed to a scene of naked women strutting with feathered fans. She turned off the music, and the sunset returned. “I'll let you blast your senses numb after I'm gone if you wish."

  “Thank you, I like the quiet."

  She stood awkwardly and squeezed her hands together. “Maybe I should be direct, Jory. I am married, so don't get any ideas."

  He felt his cheeks burn red. He'd already had some ideas, albeit dim and unrealized. He wanted to say something clever, but couldn't think of anything.

  She showed him a refrigerator and a kitchen. He had a bathroom, whose workings she explained to him. “You know how to flush, yes?"

  “How to what?"

  “Flush.” She pushed a button, and water swirled away, replaced by transparent fresh water colored blue like a mountain stream. “After you go. And always wash thoroughly afterward. It's important, because we're in confined quarters, and we have to keep the bugs under control."

  After she bid him goodnight and left, he turned and looked into a mirror. He saw how different he looked. He tried cupping his palms over the round horn plates on his temples, but he still looked different. What human woman would want him?

  He ate a few prepared foods with a spoon, not knowing how to hold them or what to put on them. He learned quickly that, no matter how a thing tasted, if in doubt, there was a small bottle of red liquid that would cover the food's smell and taste with a blanket of fire as potent as those flaming sunsets roiling on the walls.

  After eating, he lay on the bed and watched the wall. After a while, he figured out that there were controls in a side panel of the bed. He simply had to march his fingers up and down the edge of the bed. As he did so, the pictures changed. He was fascinated by markets and beaches and roads and waving life forms on various worlds. Before falling asleep, however, he gazed at a scene of women who wore tiny two-piece bathing suits and lingered around a square pool of greenish-blue water whose surface rippled in a hot white noon sun.

  * * * *

  In the next few days, Jory received a thorough medical exam and was pronounced fit. He must eat more fruits and vegetables, he was told, and from then on, every day a new basket of such food arrived in his room.

  Wearing undistinguished second-hand—but clean; around Josenda, always clean—overalls, he strolled the length and breadth of the ship, just on the two decks reserved for humans, and sampled its pleasures—restaurants, holo houses, wine shops. She took him to a viewing blister upside, where the unwavering stars spread out in motionless disarray.

  After a few days, someone knocked at the door, and Jory yelled “Come!” thinking it was Josenda. But, as the door drifted open, in the hall stood three persons like himself. Jory jumped up from his bed,
startled. One was a tall, broad-shouldered older man with white wavy hair and a handsome if florid face wrinkled with too many kjirs—Malinu.

  The second was a shorter, slighter man, much younger, with the slitted eyes Jory had seen in Don—Kinkidai.

  The third was a woman—skinny, small, cold—Nolani. She had almond eyes like Josenda, but her skin was white and waxy.

  All three wore plush brown overalls with no marks of wear on them. Also, all three had keratin plates on the sides of their heads as Jory did.

  “May we come in?” Malinu asked after introducing the three. He had a pleasant, modulated voice.

  “Of course,” Jory said. He showed them to the corner table, which had four chairs.

  Malinu said: “We are astropaths. I take it you are one of us, or will be shortly."

  “That's the first I've heard. Sorry I have nothing to serve you."

  “It's all right. We can order something later. Maybe a hot kjaba?"

  “With lots of condiments,” Jory replied. Malinu appeared charmed, Kinkidai calmly nodded with a certain reservation, and Nolani merely opened her dark eyes wider as if he'd said something shocking. Nolani puzzled Jory. He studied the black makeup around her eyes, the perfect little silver bowtie in her forehead, the rings in her cheeks, the way her long black hair was wound in braids to make a crown atop her head.

  While Kinkidai raised a wrist gadget to his ear and spoke softly to the ship's galley, Malinu said: “The Captain will meet with you this evening, and he wanted us to explain the rudiments of our work to you. Have you ever traveled in space before?"

  Jory shook his head.

  “I can see we must start at the beginning. Have you seen the observation deck?"