Tanager's Fledglings (The Tanager Book 1)

by Cedar Sanderson

“We will consider that.” The stationer lifted his hands again, and Jem followed suit a heartbeat later.

  The hatch having closed again, Jem stood there for a couple of minutes staring at it blindly. The funds from trading here were only a small part of the whole, but on top of Flinders, it became a much larger slice of the pie. And he didn’t want to lose the station. That would be a slap to his reputation, even if few knew of the station, there were traders who gossiped. It would spread, even if slowly, from here.

  Finally, he turned and went back to face Moskvin. Jem thought the other might tease him, but he was quiet, and simply took the box Jem handed to him without a comment.

  “I don’t know how long this will take. I’m going to the garden.” Jem told him.

  Moskvin didn’t follow. Jem took out some of his frustration on the work that needed to be done, harvesting greens, moving a bed that needed to be re-cycled, and then cleaning out the beeves’ filters. Filthy and tired, he headed for his cabin and the ‘fresher. Moskvin intercepted him.

  “Not now.” Jem said, trying to walk around him in the corridor.

  “Whew, you stink.” Moskvin didn’t move.

  “Yes, I do. Now let me go clean up.” Jem could feel his anger coming back out.

  “No need to snarl at me. I just wanted to let you know that analysis shows your contact to be human.”

  “Oh, good.” Jem pushed past Moskvin.

  “Not that that means anything. The aliens test out as human. It’s later interactions that reveal them. I need you to talk to more people.”

  “Were you listening?” Jem turned on his heel and shoved a finger into Moskvin’s chest. “I might not get to talk to anyone at all. They might kick me off the station.”

  “Nah. Your ship has a reputation. This is a formality.”

  “And if they discover I’m helping you spy on them?” Jem took a deep breath and mentally squashed his temper, hard. “No. No more. I’m done playing your games.”

  Jem lengthened his strides and hit the panel for his cabin, ignoring whatever Moskvin was trying to say behind him. He took a long time to clean up, enjoying the relative peace, and trying his best not to let his mind wander over the possible bad outcomes. The Tanager did have a reputation, and it was up to him to preserve that. Walter’s legacy wasn’t the ship itself...

  Jem leaned against the wall, his fingers splayed on the smooth plasti-board finish. The ship was family. What the Tanager stood for was what Walter had taught him from the beginning. Trust, respect, duty and honor. They all connected, and it was up to him to keep the connections intact. Moskvin was weakening the links.

  Jem pulled his sock all the way on and straightened. Time to make a meal, and not monitor the comm for a while. He’d earned the trust of these people, and he would keep earning it by dealing with them like a ship’s captain, not an insecure boy. As for Moskvin...

  When the hatch opened, Moskvin was leaning against the far wall, his arms crossed over his chest and a grimace on his face. He straightened away from the wall. Jem held up a hand. “I am going to the galley. I’m hungry, and you can wait until we’ve eaten, if you’re hungry too.”

  Moskvin bit off whatever he was going to say. Then he took a deep breath and spoke in a controlled tone, “I’m not.”

  Jem marched toward the galley, Moskvin and the dog trailing behind him. Jem reflected with an inner smile that he was beginning to feel like a mother duck with ducklings. That effect was only magnified when both Moskvin and the dog stopped at the hatch to the galley, letting him have room to work. Jem didn’t have the patience to make something up, so he settled for strips of vat meat from the replicator over salad greens.

  “I’m not going to spy on them.” He told Moskvin as he came face-to-face with him in the galley hatch. Moskvin took a step back to let Jem get to the table. Jem kept talking as he walked. “But if I observe odd behavior I will let you know. If, that is, I’m allowed to continue with my trading here.”

  Jem put his plate down and met Moskvin’s eyes for a long moment. The other man looked as though he’d bitten into something sour. Slowly, he nodded. “Then I had better brief you in fully.”

  Jem nodded, and Moskvin went on, “You’re going to be sorry you know this, by the way. But you’re the captain, and, well, to be honest I can use your help.”

  Jem cocked his head, his mouth full.

  “Not just on this trip.” Moskvin answered his unspoken question. “But you hit a lot of the more obscure parts of the galaxy than I do. I might catch hell from the boss for reading you in, but whether you know it or not, I have a lot of respect for you.”

  Jem put his fork down. “Funny way you have of showing it.”

  “Yeah, well, when you know what I know, you’ll set up defenses, too. Mine just happens to be a deplorable sense of humor.”

  Moskvin rested his hands on the table and looked at them in silence for a long moment. Jem just waited. Finally, Moskvin spoke quietly, “Have you ever read stories about shape shifters?”

  “Yes, they’re a pretty common trope in novels.”

  “Old myths and legends, too. Well, I can tell you that they’re real. They look and act, mostly, just like a human being, but...” Moskvin looked up, and his face was grim. “They’re contagious.”

  “So it’s like a virus. Only it turns the human into a meat puppet?” Jem was playing on what Moskvin had already told him.

  Moskvin grimaced. “Yeah. We don’t know enough about transmission - only that it’s not airborne - to know how you can be taken over. But we know it’s happened, and we know where it started. Well, we think we know.”

  “It can’t be terribly easy to do, or I’d have heard about it by now. An epidemic of people being hag-ridden by aliens...” Jem stopped and thought about what he was saying. Moskvin had been right, he didn’t want to know about this.

  “I know you’re probably wondering how we can even know this is actually what’s happening, and then you’re wondering why we aren’t making it public.”

  “Pretty much,” Jem said. “Sorry, but I am having trouble just swallowing this one.”

  “Yeah, I did too, the first briefing.” Moskvin shrugged. “Look, I can show you video...”

  “Easy to manipulate.” Jem interrupted him.

  Moskvin nodded. “Aye, so you’re just going to have to take me at my word. And you might check the Tanager’s logs. I don’t know how far they go back, but she’s old enough a station called Termine might be in them.” He spelled out the name. Jem hadn’t been expecting the affectation of the e on the end.

  “What am I looking for?” Jem pulled his tablet from the cargo pocket. “I know I don’t recognize that name.”

  “That’s because it went dark long before your time. About a century ago. Which is why I’m not sure the Tanager would have gone there.”

  “But the Robin may have.” Jem opened the old logs. The original owners of the Scarlet Tanager had a thing for bird names, and their ships all had them. “I have access to those, since in theory some of the data is still useful. Walter told me that things change too much for them to be more than a curiosity...” The tablet chimed as his search concluded. “Ah...”

  “What did you find?” Moskvin leaned across the table like he was trying to read it, but Jem knew the screen wouldn’t be readable from that angle.

  “Termine was a regular stop. It was considered the furthest outpost in the galaxy at the time, let’s see, that was about two hundred years ago. It was rather more high-tech than you’d think for some little podunk place.” Jem was scrolling through cargo manifests. “And really didn’t outship much. Pharmaceuticals, looks like. I don’t recognize half these names.”

  “It was a research colony. Isolated...”

  Jem wondered what Moskvin knew. “And the entries just... stop. About a century ago. The ship’s captain, Captain Bretian, didn’t even make a note. Just a black asterisk. I don’t know what that means.”

  “It means it was gone. Probably be
tween one trade cycle and the next. With no messages. The only thing he might have found, if he were curious enough, was a small amount of debris in orbit around what had been a viable earthlike planet. But even the planet would have been changed beyond all recognition, into an active volcanic ball, the surface scalded and broken.”

  Jem stared at Moskvin, who had spoken like a man seeing the face of death. “Then... how do you know this? What happened?”

  “We’re not sure what happened. Probably the station had a beef with the planet. The planet, as best as we can tell, got a few shots off at the station, wiping it out, but the kinetic bombardment was probably already in place, and the asteroids they used shattered the crust. An entire colony, wiped off the map. Back then, the Terran Federation was what passed for a police force.”

  “They fell apart about... Um, before I was born but I remember Walter mentioning them.” Jem couldn’t remember the dates.

  “Yeah. But what very few know is that there’s a small group of us tasked to the Termine problem. Because after - we think after, the timeline is fuzzy - it happened, a very strange data packet was fed into a survey buoy.”

  Moskvin leaned back and stretched. He looked older, just in the short time since he’d been talking with Jem. “I’m telling you more than I probably should. But you’re not going to just swallow a line from me, and I’m trusting you to understand when we’re done talking, that you can’t just talk to anyone about this.”

  “Now that you’ve told me, you’re going to have to kill me?” Jem smirked at him.

  Moskvin startled into a laugh. “You hide that sense of humor well. Not quite, but we can certainly make your life uncomfortable. Who will want to trade with the crazy guy?”

  Jem made a face, reminded of why they had time to kill. “You, or the intelligence agency you’re with...” He chuckled at the look on Moskvin’s face. “Mac told me, back on Flinders.”

  “So much for that secret.” Moskvin murmured.

  “Anyway, you got a message.” Jem realized he was caught up in this saga, like it was a novel, or some thrilling sensie. He shook his head slightly. Yes, the logs corroborated Moskvin’s story. But that didn’t mean it was all real.

  “We did. Basically, it warned that an inimical being had absorbed all the inhabitants of Termine and the planet. The writer of the message wasn’t clear on the method, only that there had been an infection which carried the hivemind - the wording in the message, not mine - to subsume individual humans.”

  Jem eyed Moskvin dubiously. “Why was this believed?”

  Moskvin nodded, smiling slightly. “You’re smart. It wasn’t.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, sometime later it was noticed that Termine was missing. A Survey ship went into the system, and didn’t come back out. A second ship, somewhat, ah, larger and better armed, crept into the system in full stealth mode. And it found nothing. Debris. Recorded the new state of the planet. Described it later in informal briefings as ‘spooky as hell.’ They left as soon as they could make up an excuse to do so.”

  “What about the survey ship?” Jem asked.

  Moskvin nodded approvingly. “Got it in one. Never heard from again. Not officially. I have a handful of ‘ghost’ reports but nothing firm.”

  “So you’re chasing ghosts?” Jem got up with his plate.

  “No. There was an incident about, well, probably about the time you were born, and doesn’t that make me feel old. Before that, the investigation had been cold, and it had been that way for more than 80 years.”

  Jem returned from dumping his plate in the ‘cycler. “So what happened?”

  Moskvin shook his head. “Sorry, that I don’t have the clearance to brief you on.”

  “Seriously? You want me to help you look for these... this... whatever it is. But you don’t want to give me all the intel.” Jem shook his head. “I’m going to the bridge and sitting at the comm. You never did tell me how to know if what I’m talking to isn’t a human.”

  Moskvin shook his head, smiling. “You don’t give up, kid. You’ll know. It’s nothing specific, but you’ll know it when you hear it. They tend to talk about themselves in the collective. Humans are rank individualists, you of all people should know that. When you find one who refers to themselves in the plural, it’s a clue.”

  “Ok. I can work with that.” Jem shrugged. “I can tell you this station is pretty privacy-conscious, so I’m unlikely to see many people.”

  “We think that it spreads rapidly. So if it’s here, we’ll know just from that. One guy, hard to tell. More data helps.”

  “More data is always useful.” Jem knew that from trading. Weird seemingly trivial information could help make a big profit. Even this, conceivably. Or just keep him from being taken over. He shuddered.

  “Sends chills up my spine, too.” Moskvin shrugged. Jem couldn’t tell if that were a gesture, or just loosening up tightening skin from the thought of being turned into a ghastly puppet. He didn’t think he was going to sleep tonight. Moskvin waved Jem off. “Go do your thing. I’m going to take a nap.”

  Jem went on to the bridge, the dog on his heels. He sat in the captain’s chair and patted the dog, playing with his long silky ears. Funny how much comfort he absorbed from the animal’s friendship. The comm chimed, and Jem let it ring twice before answering, one hand still on the dog’s head. Dog was growing, he thought idly. He could reach the pup’s soft skull without bending over in the chair any more.

  “Tanager speaking.” Jem said aloud.

  “Tanager, this is Stationmaster Sivasuta.” The voice on the other end was familiar, and usually when they spoke, he was Ahmed. Jem wondered if this was a bad sign. “Would you be willing to come before the committee in an hour?”

  “I would. May I know why, so I can prepare?” Jem didn’t want to walk into this blindly. Not after the conversation he’d just had with Moskvin.

  “We have a few questions for you. There is no need to prepare at length. Simply be yourself. Station out.”

  The comm went dead, leaving Jem staring at the board hoping that last was an assurance from an old friend. He’d had an unconventional education, but he’d sat exam boards for his pilot’s license. They felt exactly like this, waiting beforehand. Nervous stomach and sweaty palms. Only this time he didn’t have the solace of cramming while he waited. Instead, he thought back and analyzed the speech patterns. Ahmed had sounded far more formal than his normal, but he hadn’t sounded, well, like something had taken him over. Jem wondered if he’d know, if the aliens were obvious. What if they were real? He shivered again, and looked down at the dog.

  “Toy?” He suggested. He’d learned the pup understood some commands clearly, and this was one of them. The dog dove under the control boards with a happy tail, and emerged a minute later with one of his balls. “You’re not supposed to keep them in here, you know.”

  Jem was convinced that while the dog wasn’t dumb, he wasn’t that smart, either. The dog dropped the ball in his hand and did a little dance, waiting for it to be thrown. Jem banked it off the corridor wall and the pup chased it with joyous little howls. He came trotting back with it in his mouth a minute later.

  “Ew. Less slobber, please?” Jem threw the ball again, and this time it bounced off the wall, and a surprised Moskvin, who was walking toward the bridge. He caught it and tossed it behind him, as the puppy skidded around his legs.

  “I don’t think there’s an off button for the beast’s drool.” Moskvin wiped his hand on his pants.

  “Didn’t mean to hit you, sorry.” Jem said.

  Moskvin shrugged. “More fun to play with the puppy - when are you going to give him a name, by the way? -- than to wait on your fate.”

  “I’m appearing before the Committee in an hour.” Jem glanced at his wrist. “Fifty minutes. He has a name. It’s on his papers. It’s just an awful name.”

  “Oh?” Moskvin grinned.

  Jem tapped his board and brought it up. “Why anyone woul
d name anything like this is beyond me. His official name is Sir... I can’t even pronounce that.”

  Moskvin leaned over the screen. His eyebrows rose. “Neither can I.”

  Jem could spell it, Eglwys Bwlch, but saying it, on the other hand…. “I think it’s Welsh. Old Earth language.”

  “If you say so. Or they ran out of ideas and just shoved some random letters on the paper.”

  Jem snorted. The pup came back with a different toy in his mouth. “Bored with the ball?”

  He dropped the toy, then flopped down with his chin on it. Moskvin laughed. “I think he’s done playing.”

  “That’s all right. I’m going to get changed into nice clothes.”

  “Do you own a captain’s uniform?” Moskvin stood aside to let Jem pass out of the bridge.

  “Um. No. Should I?” Jem thought about that. Walter had never needed such a thing. It seemed everyone had just accepted him as the captain, never questioning his place as the master of the Tanager.

  “No, most merchant ships don’t bother. But it can lend some gravitas to an appearance before authority like this one.”

  Jem shrugged. “I am the captain. I can’t help it if they are having a problem with that.”

  Moskvin just grunted. He went into his own cabin, and Jem changed into his most formal clothing. He looked in the mirror and fingered his chin. Maybe if he grew a beard, that would help. This might be the first time he’d been questioned, but he had a sinking feeling it wouldn’t be the last. With his shoulders tight, Jem went to wait in the outer hold. The puppy came to join him. Jem looked down at him.

  “You can’t come with me.”

  The puppy looked up at him with big eyes, and flattened his ears a little. It was more a wiggle, since his ears drooped all the time. Jem bent and patted his head. “I’ll be back. This won’t take long.”

  Chapter 17: All the Formalities

  The hatch chimed, letting him know someone was there. Jem palmed the release, and took a half-step back. The pup stayed by his legs. It was the stationer who had come aboard earlier. Jem started to make the greeting sign of pressed hands in front of his face, but the other didn’t respond. He was staring at the dog.