Planet Broker

by Eric Vall

  I smiled, and maybe it was the near-death experience or the concussion I was almost positive I had now, but either way, I leaned down and pressed a kiss to the top of the mechanic’s silver head. She smelled like grease and sweat and the salt of the sea. I took a deep breath in and let the scent soothe me.

  It took us a few more minutes, but we finally reached the base of the loading ramp. The second our feet touched the metal, I knew it was coming.

  “CT! Akela!” Neka yowled from the belly of the cargo hold. I looked up just in time to see the cat-girl launch herself down the ramp.

  “Whoa, whoa, wait a sec--” Akela started to protest and tried to back away, but she was too late. A moment later, forty-five kilograms of crying cat-girl tackled us back into the sand.

  “I was so scared!” my assistant wailed as she rubbed her face anxiously against my chest and then leaned over to rub against Akela’s face as well. I knew the cat-girl just needed to get the fear out of her system, so I just let her nuzzle herself out as I shushed her and gently pet her hair and scratched behind her ears. “Don’t ever do that again!”

  Akela muttered something, but the words were muffled by a mouthful of Neka’s orange hair. My assistant didn’t seem to care. She just cried harder and wrapped her small arms around the mechanic and me.

  The three of us lay there in a pile of akimbo limbs for a moment while Neka wore herself out. Then I heard a familiar whirl of machinery and looked up to see one of the mini-drones standing over us.

  “Nice shootin’ out there, Tex,” I said to Omni. “Thanks for that.”

  Even without a face the AI seemed able to portray a strong expression of disapproval. Even upside down. “I am in agreement with Neka,” Omni huffed. “Please don’t do something like that again, Colby.”

  “Alright, alright, I’ll try not to take on any more fish monsters while we’re here,” I chuckled. Akela snorted, Neka ‘hmphed’, and Omni just flat out said, “I don’t think I believe you.”

  I rolled my eyes at my weird little family and let myself collapse back into the sand, Neka on my chest, Akela pressed against my side. The three of us laid there together and watched the unfamiliar constellations wheel overhead, the sound of the sea now a soothing lullaby.

  “CT… CT… CT, it is time to wake up.”

  I blinked open my eyes and lay there in a daze for a moment. Why were there stars above me instead of the ceiling of my room? I shifted and my bed moved like sand beneath me. … oh, wait. That was sand.

  With a flash, the memories of the Opalks fight slammed into me, and I jolted up with a start. The loading ramp of the ship loomed above me. I craned my head around to see the wheels of Omni’s drone centimeters away from my face. I leaned my head back, and the rest of the drone came into view.

  “What… what happened?” I slurred and reached up to rub my eyes. They felt gritty and sore, and the sand didn’t help.

  “We let you sssssleep,” another voice responded, the ‘s’ elongated into a quiet hiss. I looked around and saw that the dozen or so Almort we had saved now stood less than a few meters away. Cyl’ass stood at their head, and the prince had his head tilted toward me.

  Something felt off, but my brain was too foggy to catch it. “Sleep? Wait. How long has it been?” I looked around frantically. “Where are Neka and Akela?”

  “Worry not. They are with Slal’ops,” Cyl’ass told me and pointed to where my assistant and mechanic stood about fifteen meters away near their vehicles. Slal’ops was with them and he gestured to various things, his head weaving from side to side in that sinuous movement as he seemed to answer Akela’s questions. … wait a second.

  My head snapped up so fast I swore I heard something in my neck crack. “Wait, you… I can understand you better now,” I stuttered. The last time we had spoken, the communication tech I wore only seemed to be able to render loose translations. But now it was nearly seamless. “How long was I out?!”

  Cyl’ass chittered again, and his facial scales flashed to signal laughter. “Not very long.”

  “Few hours, tops,” Omni chimed in from beside me. “But while you got your beauty sleep, one of Cyl’ass’ people returned to speak with us, and Akela and I were able to upgrade and adapt the translations using the Klathian language as a base and build from there.”

  I gaped at the small drone.

  “Your machine and machine-healer are very advanced,” Cyl’ass said to me, and even through the small translation box, he sounded impressed.

  “Machine-healer?” I repeated and glanced at Omni.

  The small drone shrugged his little mechanical arms. “Don’t look at me. Akela liked it, so we kept the translation.”

  I shook my head. I was still trying to clear the fog and cobwebs from my mind and catch up with the present. “Okay so… what now?” I asked.

  “Now,” Cyl’ass hissed, and I realized as I looked up into his face that his teeth were opalescent and needle sharp. “We go and meet with my father, U’eh, Chief of all the Almort.”

  Chapter 10

  After a brief discussion with Cyl’ass, I decided to leave our ship parked on the beach so as not to frighten his people as we made our way to their capital city. We moved it further back toward the dunes in case any more Opalks decided to show up, and Omni turned on a cloaking protocol that Akela had fixed and upgraded on our way here. When this was all over, I’d really have to sit down with the mechanic and have her list out all the work she had done because, frankly, I don’t think the ship had worked this well even when I’d bought it brand new from Terra-Nebula’s factories.

  As it turned out, the Almort were way more technologically advanced than prior reports gave them credit for. They didn’t seem to have any particle-beam technology since they were very fascinated with our weapons, but they were far from the sticks and stones we’d been led to believe they utilized.

  Their vehicles weren’t wheeled as I had previously assumed. They actually functioned as hover cars and skated about half a meter off the ground. Akela had apparently peppered Slal’ops with dozens of questions while I had been taking my sand nap, questions about the blue-gray metallic material that made up the frame and body of the vehicles, questions about the bioluminescent streaks that matched the ones the Almort had on their bodies, questions about what fueled the cars, and how they ran, and how reliable they were.

  “They’re hybrid-vehicles,” the mechanic relayed to me as the Almort began to climb back into them, her violet eyes bright with excitement. “They do have a metallic ore from their mountain ranges that they refine to use as a fuel additive, but the vehicles seem to run mostly on water, given this planet’s natural abundance of it, and some solar energy from their tiny sun.” She gestured up into the sky, which as it turned out remained in a perpetual state of twilight.

  The sun for the Icarius System, Luminar Alpha-39ii, wasn’t actually tiny since it was about the size of Earth’s sun in the Milky Way, but it was much farther away. The planet received maybe thirty to fifty percent the amount of sunlight Earth did.

  Proxima V was also an eyeball planet. Eyeball planets were tidally or gravitationally locked, and that meant that they didn’t turn on their axis the way most planets did. The same was true for Proxima V. Due to the wormholes on its opposite side, the planet was fixed in position. There wasn’t a ‘day’ or ‘night,’ nor were there traditional seasons. The side facing the wormholes was cold, near immeasurably so, and consisted of one vast, continuous ocean, mostly covered in ice. It was uninhabitable and untraversable. The side facing the sun, on the other hand, was warmer, and thanks to what light it received, life had evolved. Hence the giant continent, or the “eyeball,” and the Almort.

  “This is amazing. Isn’t it, CT?” Akela asked me as she stared at everything with wide and curious eyes. “I can’t wait to see what their cities are like.”

  “I can’t wait to taste Opalks,” Neka added. I turned to my assistant to see her staring at the carved up carcass that was stacked in
the trailers the Almort’s vehicles dragged behind them. The cat-girl’s eyes dilated in interest and hunger, and she licked her lips repeatedly.

  “The feasting will be grand indeed,” Cyl’ass said as he came up behind us. His opalescent needle-teeth were bared in what I realized was a smile as he regarded Neka. “Opalks are a delicacy we seldom get to have. As both conquerors and guests, you will have the first cuts.”

  Neka purred in happiness and didn’t take her eyes off the meal that now awaited her.

  Cyl’ass then turned to me. “We are ready to depart now, CccccT,” he hissed. The Almort prince gestured to the waiting vehicles. The three of us would ride with him and Slal’ops as we made our way to their home.

  I nodded and helped Akela and Neka up into the car before I climbed in after them.

  Car was probably the wrong word. The vehicle was tall and wide like a van, and like most vans designed to haul cargo or large numbers of people, there were no seats. Cyl’ass and Slal’ops stood at the front, where the driver and passenger seats would be, respectively. Akela had already moved so she could stand directly behind them and watch them work the controls.

  “Is that the ignition switch?” Akela muttered and pointed to something. “You don’t seem to have a key. Does it respond organically? And how does that work with the engine? Can you start all of your machines by touch? Man, I’d really love to see the inside of this thing. If that’s possible, of course!”

  The mechanic talked a kilometer a minute but Slal’ops just chittered his weird laugh before he answered her endless stream of questions.

  Neka and I stood shoulder to shoulder at the mechanic’s back. The cat-girl was fascinated by the tech as well, but she had been on enough broker missions with me to be considered a seasoned pro. She knew the drill. She smiled politely at the three additional Almort that stood at the rear of the vehicle and glanced around the cab with a curious eye. She mostly kept silent and pressed up against my side as Cyl’ass started the vehicle and we lurched across the sand.

  And by lurched, I mean Neka, Akela, and I almost immediately lost our balance as the van accelerated.

  “Whoa!” Akela exclaimed as she flew backward into me, and her arms cartwheeled as she tried to find purchase. I grunted as her body connected with mine. Neka yowled in surprise and clung to my arm. I managed not to slide back into the three Almort behind us, but it was a near thing.

  “Are you alright?” Slal’ops asked as he turned to regard us with his navy-blue eyes. He glanced down at our feet and clicked. “Ah. I see the problem. You do not have our ways for balance.”

  I frowned and looked at his feet, and then the feet of the Almort behind us. As a species, they wore little clothing. Cyl’ass and Slal’ops wore straps across their chest and backs that looked to be made of leather that I had thought must mark them as leaders, and they all wore form-fitting garments in grays, greens, and blues on their lower halves that attached to a utility belt of sorts with pockets. None of them wore shoes, and as I stared at their webbed feet, with their fine bone structures and sharp spines along the toes, I realized why.

  “Wait,” Akela said and tried to bend down to get a better look at Slal’ops’ feet. I wrapped an arm around her waist so she didn’t pitch completely forward. “Do your feet adhere to the floor of the vehicle? Is that another organic quality of your technology? Like the bioluminescence on the outside panels?”

  And she was off again, quickfire questions that Slal’ops struggled to keep up with. I smiled at the mechanic’s enthusiasm. Even if the Almort refused to deal with us, and we left Proxima V empty handed, I felt like it would all have been worth it just to see that light in Akela’s eyes.

  As Cyl’ass drove and Akela kept Slal’ops preoccupied, my mind and eyes started to wander. I stared out the slightly semi-translucent windows that made up half the walls of the vehicle, and I got my first real look of the planet.

  Outside, the landscape of Proxima V opened up for us. Once we crossed the dunes and left the beach, the sand gave way to pastures of green and blue grasses half as tall as me. As we drove through them, the grass flashed and flared in pockets of bright lights.

  Now, I’d like to think I was well traveled. I’d been around the block a few times. I’d brokered dozens of deals during my tenure at Terra-Nebula and been to nearly twice as many planets. And yet, every time, every single time without fail, the first sight of a new planet got to the poor Proto kid in me. The one who had grown up in a shitty, space tin can and couldn’t believe that there were whole worlds out there, just like this one, full of beauty and mystery and life.

  When I was a fresh, green broker, I had been just like Akela. I had pressed my face to every window, asked every question that popped into my head the moment I’d thought it. I had wanted to know anything and everything there was to know about whatever planet I landed on. In some ways, I was still like that, and it was why I had always insisted in the past on mingling with the native populations of planets while Terra-Nebula began their colonization process. I had wanted to see how their world worked… before the Corporations changed everything.

  However, over the years, I had learned how to bank the wildfire of my curiosity and bask in the moment. I’d get to my questions, but first I was content to just take everything in: the scenery, the wildlife, the people.

  So, as the prince of the Almort drove us to his capital, I just took in his homeworld.

  The endless pastures soon gave way to cultivated farms, but it didn’t look like the Almort cleared more land than they needed. The wild grasses seemed to merge and blend with the neat rows of crops we passed. I fleetingly wondered how they kept the grass from invading the beds. We were going too fast and were too far away for me to make out what crops the Almort grew, but I could see people working in the fields well enough. They left flaring patches of grass in their wake as they trailed from one plot to another, bursts of blues and greens to mark their way.

  Akela must have seen me staring at the flashing flares of color because she leaned toward me and whispered, “I think their bioluminescence is an evolutionary trait caused by the lower light levels on this planet.”

  I turned to the silver-haired woman and raised an eyebrow. “I thought you were a mechanic,” I teased. “Not a biologist.”

  Akela stuck her tongue out at me but turned back to Slal’ops when the Almort asked her a question for a change.

  Beside me, Neka suddenly pulled on my arm and pointed out the window. “What are those, CT?” the cat-girl questioned. Her yellow eyes were wide as dinner plates, the pupils blown out by the low light levels of this planet.

  I turned to follow the line of her finger and saw that the fields of crops had transitioned back to taller grasslands… and there was something grazing out there. A lot of somethings.

  I moved closer to the window for a better look. The glass wasn’t clear enough to make out all the details, but one thing I noticed for sure was the size of the creatures. Like the Opalks, they were massive, great hulking shadows with horns that extended out and up from their skulls at least two meters. However, unlike the Opalks, they moved rather slowly, barely even a flicker of light in the grass surrounding them. Not a single one lifted its head or took a step before we had moved past the herd.

  “Are those domesticated creatures?” Akela suddenly asked as she plastered her body against mine and tried to crane her neck to catch a last glimpse of the creatures.

  “Yes,” Slal’ops clicked. “Those are the Stuogrors. Before we created these vehicles, we rode the Stuogror and the Atsae. The Stuogror we used to carry big things: food, materials, people. The Atsae are fast, so we used them for travel.”

  “What do you do with them now?” I asked curiously. You could learn a lot about a people by the way they treated their wildlife. “The Stuogror and the Atsae. Now that you have the vehicles.”

  Slal’ops chittered and rolled his head from side to side, perhaps the Almort version of a shrug. “Now we mostly let them be. The Stuo
gror we use for food, but only when the herds grow too large or if there is a shortage in the harvest. The Atsae we let run free, for the most part, but some of our youth like to try to tame and ride them like our ancestors did. They are not often successful.”

  The Almort turned and smiled over his shoulder at us. The needle-teeth made the motion quite disconcerting, but I believed he was trying for mischievous.

  The drive did not take very long after that, perhaps half an hour, and the landscape didn’t change much save for a few creeks and rivers that ran through the plains and presumably fed the fields we had just passed through. Before I knew it, Cyl’ass clicked at me and pointed through the windshield.

  “That is Ka’le,” he said. “It is the home of U’eh, Chief of the Almort, and the center of all our people.”

  I leaned forward to get a better look and stifled a chuckle as Akela all but pressed herself against the windshield in awe.

  Ka’le sprawled out before us, a city illuminated by the natural blue and green lighting of the planet. The bright bioluminescent colors seemed to flow from grass to building as seamlessly as water. It was a city, not a village, not a collection of thatched-roof huts and shoddy structures. Sure, it was no megatropolis, nothing like the behemoth constructions of space station cities or Terra-Nebula colonies, but it wasn’t small by any stretch of the imagination.

  Most, if not all, of the buildings were single story, save for a single tower that rose twenty or thirty meters into the sky at the center of the city. The tower was built intricately, and the walls spiraled upward with threads of green and blue light woven throughout the structure. The apex of the tower was large and circular and so brightly illuminated it was like a blue-green star had perched there. Everything else in the city spread out low along the ground, and everything seemed to be made from a combination of X’ebril, the metallic ore found on this planet that these vehicles were made out of, stone, and semi-translucent glass.