It was as silent as in the cave of the forgotten clans so I said, “This is food fit for the Aseir! I must apologize for being skeptical. Mr. Eeeryt, this is the best I’ve eaten since I left Nilfeheim. I hope you made enough for seconds, and why is it I am eating alone?”
I could not tell how or where they came from, but the table was full in no time and everyone was trying the fish soup.
The cook said to me, “I know our reputation, Captain. Believe me, I do. I was the butt of every joke there is during boot camp and specializing training, but I learned cooking in a town of Earth called Marseille. I have worked as a chef at the Waldorf Astoria in New York and was the Head Chef on the Silver Swan, a five-star luxury liner before I decided to serve our Union.”
I had stuffed myself like a starving Tyranno during the last Shortsummer month and hoped that my leather suit would hold. I leaned back and smoked one of Shaka’s cigarettes, as he had joined us as well. Before me was a cup of Navy blend coffee and a glass of golden whiskey that came out of a case McElligott himself had sent. The horror images of the last days slowly faded into the background of memories.
To the Golden, I said, “Sobody, what can you tell me about Brhama Port?”
He had just finished his third plate and pushed the plate away, dabbed his small mouth with a napkin and said, “The area is known to most as the Thalim Nebula. The Union calls it the Prometheus Five Star Nebula. While no one knows why, all five suns went supernova approximately at the same time, and it created a nebula. Not nearly as thick as the Igras Nebula soup and not as full of radiation as the Ballard Nebula those Mini Terrans call their home, but full of ‘roids. I mean asteroids and planetoids, micro matter and solar gasses. One side is in Union space and the other extends into Free Space. Brhama Port is much like my own bazaar, a hollowed asteroid, but much smaller.”
Ship called up a map of the area and then a visual of Brhama Port. While the holographic image was slowly turning in the middle of our table, Sobody continued, “The asteroid is about nine kilometers in diameter and, as you can see, looks more like a Terran potato than anything else. The area has always been a particular nasty space in terms of outlaws and pirates, but Brhama and the area around it is controlled by the Bassett ‘Roid Mining Association. The Bassetts are a big family of nineteen brothers and seven sisters with all their extended families. They are as tight as it gets and you only get in by marrying or being adopted. The other miners associated to that area lease their claims from the Bassett family by sharing parts of their profits. The port is also a well-known pirate hang out, and they can do as they please as long as they leave the miners alone. Attacking a miner is a no-no and stirs the Bassetts like a nest of Thikar-stingers. They do most of their business with the Kartanian and the Togar. The miners on Union Side are their sworn enemies, and there are constant battles, as the Union border is less than well defined in this area.”
Shea, who had joined us just a few moments ago, asked, “The Bassetts are humans or a species?”
Sobody shrugged. “I am not sure. I haven’t seen one personally, but they maintain a sales stall on my asteroid, and I was told they are humanoid. Rumors I cannot substantiate say they are a mix of Human and Kermac. Disliked on both sides and that is why they settled there, but then this family has been in business for almost one thousand years, and they keep their family secrets well.”
Har-Hi sighed. “I know this area, actually. Well, the galactic north part of it. It was there where my father and the other clans that decided to join the Union crossed into Union Space, with Cam Elf-Na and 6500 Dai clans in hot pursuit. It was a dark day for the Dai indeed.”
Sobody made a sad face and nodded. “I know, noble Har-Hi. There are many scavengers still scouring the area for Dai artifacts and scrap. I have seen many thousands of tons go through my bazaar alone.”
Shea asked, “Why haven’t the Dai attacked this port?”
It was Har-Hi who answered, “We don’t mine, but we need raw materials. Attacking them will supply you once, buying minerals and metals will allow you to get a steady and reliable source. I am sure these brothers have several clans among their steady customers.”
Shea made Har-Hi tell the entire event out of his perspective, and he told us that this was when he saw the Devi for the first time. He had forgotten his cigar, which was burning in an ashtray before him, and he finished saying, “Only three weeks after that, I was on my way to the Academy.”
Narth said, “You could have almost met each other back then; Eric and you, that is.”
Har-Hi raised one of his sharply angled eyebrows and said, “I thought you weren’t in the Navy back then and still on Nilfeheim. Were you already fighting on Union side?”
I said, “No, not exactly. I was aboard a civil yacht when we encountered a battleship of the Ima Clan under the command of a Dai named Win-Do.”
Har-Hi now raised both eyebrows, “I know of him; he was always known for his exceptional hate toward all Union. I think his clan was destroyed as he was one of the first that entered Union Space. How did you survive?”
I tried to tell the event without many details, but they kept asking and so I had to tell the whole thing.
Har-Hi put his hand on my shoulder. “Win-Do made one fatal mistake; he asked Eric to surrender.” Then he started giggling. “You are something else, Captain. I wonder what else happened before you even went to the Academy.”
Narth said, “Oh, there is quite a lot…”
Epilogue: Meeting on Alvor’s Cove
(Author’s Note: This is a chapter in my story that is not told by me directly. I added it to give those who read my adventures an insight into the politics and events of these days. I have met most of the characters and persons. From various sources like brain dumps, witness accounts, and interviews from which come the facts in this epilog. The rest is conjecture and some artistic freedom I am allowing myself. ~Eric Olafson)
About twenty klicks north of Alvor’s Canyon, where the mountains ended and the endless sand and dust deserts really began, a dull yellowish-colored all-terrain vehicle plowed through the rough terrain. It was an old machine with tracks and an engine that ran on a petroleum distillate, black stuff that could be found everywhere on this dusty, dry world. Ban-Ho, the driver and owner of the crawler was quite proud of it, as most of the other desert scavengers used carts drawn by Katthais lizards.
Ban-Ho hated these lizards, mostly due to their revolting stench, because like all Dai he had an excellent sense of smell.
That the other desert scavengers accused his machine of stinking even more bothered him little, as this was one of the benefits of his chosen occupation; you had very little social contact with anyone once you left town.
Out here, he had time to think and talk to himself or his crawler. Whenever he started thinking, his mind wandered back, and he was once again contemplating the reasons he was here on this dry planet in the first place.
The other Scavengers had long quit asking why he, a proud Dai Than space warrior became a planet-bound vagabond instead of raiding ships and planets with his clan. They didn’t ask because he had been here for over thirty-five years and they all had heard his story by now. Why he wasn’t with his clan was simple; his clan was dead, all of them. He was the last survivor, and they all had died because of him.
He was the last of the Tun-Ha Clan as far as he knew.
It was his task as scout to fly ahead, find a colony or prey to be raided and make sure the target was not too well defended. He remembered it as if it happened yesterday; the Union colony was there, a young colony with all the equipment and resources still mostly in containers, delivered there by the rich Union Colony Bureau. Containers full of machinery, metal, steel, those amazing Union Agra Bots and thousands of tons of food to sustain the colony until it was self-sufficient.
Nothing the Union did was unorganized or desultory. It didn’t matter if it was something little, like their colony support and expansion programs or their mighty fleets. Othe
r civilizations sent out colony ships more or less on a prayer and the hopes they would make it in whatever conditions they found. Not so the Union; they sent out survey ships and gathered data and then tailored huge colony packages with all the equipment the new settlers needed. This service was available for free to any group that went to the UCB and wanted to start a new colony.
He knew all this from the settlers they had raided before. His tribe’s chief had never allowed them to take prisoners or engage in the lucrative slaving business. The chief always maintained this creed and made it law. Only take what we need, and let those who surrender live.
The lonely Dai snorted at his own train of thought and clenched his fist .What good did it do to him or the clan?
He removed the stained scarf from his nose and mouth and spit out the side window, took a sip from his cooler bottle and was convinced, like countless times before, there wasn’t anything better in this universe than good cold water. He grunted and took another sip, then replaced the scarf, and pulled the steering wheel to the side so his wide tracks would crush a Jahtori snake. He hated those, too, not for any particular reason other than that they had no value. Not even the elusive brown folks would eat them. There were no snakes in space, at least not this kind, and if he had not been blinded by that shiny, new, and seemingly defenseless colony, he would still be with his clan.
He had done only a quick scan, completely overlooking the fifth planet, where an entire Union Battlegroup had landed and waited for them.
His clan fought gallantly but was hopelessly outnumbered and outclassed, due to the cursed translocator technology that rendered the best Dai Shields useless. What good were shields when the Union could send exploding bombs of incredible magnitude right into an engine room or a bridge? They all died that day. The Union Fleet commander showed no mercy until the last Dai ship was destroyed.
After this failure and being responsible for the demise of his clan, it would have been his duty to commit suicide. The only alternative to suicide in such a case was revenge. While he was emotionally devastated to lose his family and everyone he knew; he was not too keen on ritual suicide as the most honorable option would demand. Neither did he want to go to another clan and become an Inb-Tha, a coward who had failed to do his duty and not commit suicide, which was a fate worse than death.
The truth of the matter was that he was a coward, a trait as rare as blue skin among the Dai, but not completely unknown. So instead of committing suicide or joining another clan in shame, the only other alternative was to affect revenge, but how impossible was that? So, he had decided to flee into Free Space and make his own destiny.
At Sin 4, he had to sell his scout craft as it was out of fuel and he had no money to buy more. In a series of events, he almost ended up as a slave and was destined to fight in one of the arenas. He managed to escape by killing the slaver who thought he was too drunk to fight. He was a coward and by far not the best Dai warrior, but he was still Dai. The money he made from selling his ship and most of his gear was enough to get him a passage to Alvor’s Cove.
At first, it seemed a bad decision to come here since this was one of the busiest slave markets in the Galaxy, but he had enough money from the ship sale and paid the Alvor Citizen Fee to the local lord and, unlike Sin 4, Alvor’s Cove had rules. The rules and laws were crude and simple but quite reliable.
After a few weeks staying in a local hotel, he knew his money wouldn’t last, and he had to come up with a way to make his living, especially with the prices for water here.
He interrupted his own musings once again for a moment as he steered the crawler around a group of large boulders, locally known as Ummerti’s Graveyard. It was called that because a stubborn and quite unlucky Volting and his five-man gang tried to rob a water caravan at this spot, not knowing that it was not a water caravan but a war party of the local lord coming back from punishing one of the independent settlements in the Glagadrinn.
Five men against a well-armed war party... well, that was why the rocks were named that way.
These rocks were the last outcroppings of the Bentryidnn Mountains, thirty kilometers behind him. From here on out, the Glagadrinn desert stretched over 3000 miles in almost every direction, with featureless dunes and sand.
There were a few small independent settlements all over the place. To the far northeast was the Galgus Settlement, right at the entrance to the Mitiro Caves where the most precious commodity could be found in a large underground lake—fresh cold water. The Galgus were a weird kind, often called the Brown people, never seen without their brown mantles. No one knew how they looked underneath. They barely talked and if they did, it was in a strange labored way. They weren’t native, that was certain because they weren’t here when the first local lord showed up only about 150 years ago. No one, however, knew where they came from. He had no problem with them. He could go there and purchase his water for much cheaper rates than in Alvor’s Cove canyon city, and they even showed him the underground lake a few years back.
Now as the Ummerti’s graveyard was behind him, all visible trails faded. The constant wind, sand, and dust obliterated any tracks in a few hours. One could get lost out here, even with good nav-equipment, because some of the dust was laced with fine metal and played havoc with most nav-equipment. He didn’t need that anyway. By now he knew this desert better than he knew space. In 700 kilometers he would pass Mount Hagir, the very place he needed to reach for this trip
He had learned to read the sand and the dust and knew how to stay clear of drift sand-bog that could swallow his crawler and him in seconds.
There weren’t many career choices on Alvor’s Cove. You could be a slave merchant, slave guard, shop owner, water merchant, food vendor, lord guard, lizard hunter, or desert scavenger. This was basically the entire list of professions
To become a merchant, he needed much more capital and would need connections to suppliers. To be a lord guard, you needed to be family; the local lord only trusted family. Lizard hunter or slave guard did not appeal to him due to the stench, so all that was left was desert scavenger.
At first, it seemed to him a fool’s job. What could possibly be out there except sand and dirt?
When his money had almost run out, he made friends with an old scavenger. That old man showed him the ropes and taught him to read the desert. After the old man died, he took over his business.
Alvor’s Desert held many treasures, subterranean water sources, Tutu Cactus buds eaten by the tame lizards, and Tutu Cactus flowers very rare and hard to find but eaten by the locals for their intoxicating, dream-inducing effects. Tutu Cactus roots reached far into the ground, and it was hard work to dig them out, but ground to a powder it became very valuable and bought by Togar males as an aphrodisiac. There were open petroleum pits; the stuff wasn’t worth much, but it always paid for the trip getting it and supplied him with cheap fuel. There was the Dawal Lizard. If you were lucky enough to find one and even luckier to survive a fight and kill one, then you had a load of good meat, bones, and blood that sold for top coin. This and a thousand other things could be found in these endless deserts.
Of course, like every desert scavenger, he dreamed of finding the Nakh. Legend had it that out here somewhere was a buried Celtest ship. Celtest artifacts were the single most valuable commodity in the galaxy and would make anyone even finding just a piece of Celtest metal a rich man.
No one doubted that there was a Celtest ship, as Bulmag the Grarr had found a Celtest artifact almost ninety years ago and became a very rich man and with his find, started the whole desert scavenging business in the first place. The only sad part of this story was that Bulmag the Grarr did not enjoy his riches for very long. He was robbed blind and murdered, but then almost all stories of Alvor’s Cove ended in a similar way.
Sometimes he dreamed it would be him finding that Celtest ship. In his dreams, it was fully operational and filled with the most wondrous technology. He would then take the ship out from the sand and fly i
t in Union Space and destroy everything he could find. Of course, this would always be a dream, and he knew he would end like the old man, simply sliding off the seat behind the crawler’s controls and dying. It wasn’t very far from here where he had buried the old man.
But all in all, this was preferable over suicide, and today he’d already earned more than he did in a month. Today he actually had passengers, two Kermac no less.
He had an office in town, the Office of Ban-Ho Desert Exploration and Transport Services LTD. His office was nothing more than a cavern burned into the side of a canyon wall, but it had a real door and a desk with chair. It also was his home, where he slept when he was in town. He was especially proud of the long business sign that he had glued to the rock face above his door. It was illuminated and had cost him 98 Polos. He had just exchanged the old man’s name for his, and he had no idea what LTD meant, but it sounded very important. That his sign would actually do what it was meant to do, advertise his business and bring him customers was something he would have never thought possible. Yet the two Kermac that were now riding in the back stepped into his office and told him they wanted to use his transport services.
Why the Kermac wanted to go to Mount Hagir was anyone’s guess, but none of his business. He knew that a tribe of Browns lived there, and there were rumors about a space ship that was landing there. He had passed the mountain many times and dealt with the tribe that lived there on occasion
It was still a long drive, but his crawler was reliable. He had plenty of fuel, water, and provisions. Thanks to the generous payment of his passengers, all his strong headlights worked again, and he would drive through the night. In his old Scout flyer, he would have done 700 kilometers in less than an eye blink. Now it would take almost two days.
Their bodies rocked back and forth whenever the crawler rumbled over something other than soft sand. The wayward Dai had tried his best to make his passengers comfortable. He had put thick mattresses on top of a wooden bench he had screwed to the cargo bed and even placed the hard-shell canopy on it. He hadn’t used it since the crawler was brought to this world and they had purchased a real air conditioner of Union manufacture with a ZP cube that would last for decades. For the price they paid for the air conditioner, you could buy a luxury skimmer or a nice apartment on Kermac Prime, but without it, neither one would have made it that far. Everything was dirty, dusty, and hot. Everything smelled and sweated, and to their own disgust, they found out that Kermac, too, still had sweat glands.
Eric Olafson Series Boxed Set: Books 1 - 6 (The Galactic Chronicles Series) Page 95