A Taste Of Despair (The Humal Sequence)

by Robert Taylor

  As it happened, their rapid reactions were not needed. The sole other occupants of the Seraphim were the captain-pilot and his duty engineer.

  Hamilton found them both enjoying a little “down-time” with each other in the single, courtesy cabin the little freighter sported.

  His snort of laughter at the sight of the man’s hairy bottom pumping up and down went entirely un-noticed by the pair. His stunner blast, however, they could not ignore.

  “Bow area secure.” He said. The pilot was bouncing around on his female companion in a frenzy of uncoordinated muscle spasms. Sadly for her, she didn’t look in any state to appreciate the extra attention.

  “Roger that.” Klane acknowledged. “How do you want us to proceed?”

  “Back to the cargo bay. We’ll need to keep loading before the terminal notices the stoppage.”

  “Affirmative.”

  Back in the cargo bay, Carl had already manned one of the pallet claws and was getting to grips with it. Klane was just climbing into the second one. The rest of his gang had come forwards from the corridor and were watching bemused as the Enjun and the cyborg resumed loading the cargo.

  “Philip!” Hamilton called down from the catwalk. The pilot looked up. “Get up to the cockpit and check everything out. I don’t want any surprises!”

  LeGault nodded and started up the stairs to the catwalk two at a time, passing Hamilton who was on his way down.

  “What do you want us to do?” Jones asked, indicating himself and Johnson when Hamilton reached them. They both clutched their stunners nervously, as if expecting more crew to leap out at any moment.

  “Find out where Carl hid the three cargo handlers, then make sure they are secured safely. They’ll stay stunned for the best part of an hour, but better safe than sorry. Tie them up, use tape, plastic ties, whatever you can find, so long as they can’t get free. Likewise the pilot and engineer are in a cabin just by the cockpit area. Make sure they are secure, too. If in doubt, stun them again.”

  He thought about mentioning the nakedness of the pair of crew in the cabin, but decided both Johnson and Jones deserved the right to that discovery themselves.

  “What are you going to be doing?” Johnson asked.

  Hamilton put his stunner on top of a nearby crate. “I’m going to muck in with the cargo loading!”

  *****

  The loading of the remaining cargo took another two hours. It wasn’t hard work – the pallet claws did all the work, really – but it was dull. However, if they had failed to finish loading the cargo and just undocked it would have set alarm bells off. As far as possible, they wanted the terminal, and Mars, to think that everything was normal.

  Jones and Johnson gave Hamilton some scowls when they returned from securing the crew. They’d dragged them all up into the little cabin, bound them hand and foot and disabled the comms and door locks within the room. They had draped the naked pair in covers from the bunk to protect their modesty even though they had blindfolded and gagged everyone concerned.

  Once the last pallet had been removed from the cargo slideway and pulled inside the Seraphim, the terminal’s inner lock door shut of its own accord. Hamilton suspected the last pallet had some sort of embedded transmitter in the labeling that triggered the closure, rather than any obvious monitoring by the terminal itself.

  Leaving Carl to park the last pallet in the bay, they all hurried up to the single person cockpit.

  LeGault looked round at them as they tried unsuccessfully to cram themselves into the tiny hatchway.

  He shook his head. “We ready to go? I’ve got the green light from the terminal to leave whenever the cargo is secured.”

  “We’re good to go.” Hamilton told him. “You figured out where this thing is supposed to be heading?”

  LeGault nodded. “Straight to Mars Olympus starport! That’s both the good, and bad, news.”

  “I’ll bite.” Klane asked. “What’s the good and bad?”

  “Good news is that it’s only ten klicks north of Olympus itself, so not far for us to go to our destination.” LeGault responded. “Bad news is that it is a major starport. Security will be extremely high. We’ll have a hell of a time getting out of the starport.”

  “We’ll figure something out.” Klane told him. “We’ve gotten this far against the odds.”

  “I have a suggestion.” LeGault offered.

  “Let’s hear it.” Hamilton told him.

  “We could have a gravitic drive malfunction on the way down. SOP is to immediately put down at the nearest safe point in such emergencies. We could effectively pick our own landing site in those circumstances.”

  Hamilton and Klane exchanged glances. “It sounds like a good idea, but I’m not sure it would be in the long run.” Klane frowned. “The emergency services would respond to it quickly. We’d need to get well away before they got there and it would ultimately alert them to something going on when they board the ship and find the crew.”

  Hamilton nodded. “At the moment no one knows there’s anything untoward going on. I’d like to keep it that way for as long as possible.”

  “What do freight crews normally do when they land at starports?” Johnson asked.

  Hamilton shrugged. “Unload their cargoes, I imagine. I expect there’ll be a designated landing spot assigned with a cargo slideway and a few robotic load handlers. Essentially it’ll be the reverse of what we just encountered here on the terminal. After that, I guess it’s down to whatever work schedule they have. Either back up for another cargo run, or knocking off, handing over to a secondary crew, that sort of thing.”

  “According to the schedules I’ve seen,” LeGault added. “It looks like this is the last run for this crew for a few days. A replacement crew is due tomorrow to resume duties.”

  “So we’ve got a few hours from landing before the new crew shows up?” Jones inquired.

  LeGault nodded. “About seven hours, or so, looking at previous hand-overs. Officially, we’re not supposed to leave the ship until the new crew arrives and we hand it over to them.”

  “So nobody is going to be suspicious if we stay aboard after landing and unloading?” Klane nodded thoughtfully.

  “Basically.” LeGault agreed. “It’s a privately owned company vessel. Apparently it’s a sackable offence to abandon the ship.”

  “I’m guessing the crews only leave one person aboard, normally, whilst the rest go and play.” Hamilton suggested. “However, at least we don’t have to rush and it won’t be noticed if we all stay aboard.”

  “I have an idea, if anyone’s interested?” Johnson said brightly.

  Hamilton nodded. “All suggestions are welcome.”

  She grinned. “Well, this cargo we have aboard. It’s all bound for Olympus city, isn’t it? And isn’t that where we want to go? And isn’t all the cargo handling mostly automatically performed by machines?”

  She let the thought hang there, not that she needed to explain further. They all understood what she was implying.

  “Hmm.” Klane mulled it over. “That’s not a bad idea.”

  “The cargo will all be scanned.” Jones pointed out. “We’d be detected.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.” Hamilton mused. “We do have those nice suits the Marines gave us. They’re not foolproof, but they should get us through a cargo scanner.”

  Jones frowned. “I may have some ideas about additional ways to foil the scans.”

  “I was hoping you might!” Johnson smiled at him. “So…about my idea?”

  Hamilton nodded. “It beats trying to simply walk out of the starport.”

  “Nice work.” Klane told Johnson. “You sure you’re a scientist?”

  Johnson grinned.

  Carl stomped up along the narrow companionway behind them. “Cargo’s secure. I’ve sealed our lock.” He noticed the smiling faces. “What did I miss?”

  “We were just deciding whether or not to put Johnson in charge of tactical planning.” Klane told him.

>   He frowned, not understanding.

  “I’ll tell you later.” Klane said. “In the meantime, I guess there’s no point hanging around here.”

  LeGault nodded, poking at buttons on the console in front of him. “I’ve let the terminal know we’re all loaded and ready to depart.”

  The console beeped moments later, several red sections on the display turning green.

  “And they’ve told us to go ahead and released the docking latches.” LeGault smiled smugly.

  “Let’s go, then.” Hamilton told him. “Nice and easy. No need to worry them.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The undocking, and the trip halfway around the planet was, as Hamilton had requested, accomplished in as sedate and boring a manner as LeGault could manage. Once again Hamilton found himself wondering how the trip would have gone with Veltin at the controls and gave an involuntary shudder. Veltin did not do sedate and boring.

  As they descended into the atmosphere, Hamilton and the others headed back to the cargo bay to begin preparing the next phase of their infiltration.

  It was a simple matter to identify where the pallets were heading from the cargo manifest and to pick six that were going to a relatively innocuous location. Finding where the cargo handlers had hidden most of it, however, was another matter. With all the cargo sorting done by robots and machinery, there was no real need for any kind of logic to how the pallets had been stored in the bay. The handlers had simply packed the pallets in as efficiently as possible, without regard to where they might be going. Since there had been three of them, there had been three differing opinions about what should go where.

  Each grav-pallet was six foot square and stacked with assorted boxes and packages. That each pallet was neatly stacked and of similar bulk suggested the pallet stacking was also done by machines, rather than manually. Once loaded, each pallet was wrapped in a protective film whose main purpose was stopping the contents from falling off the pallet. A simple adhesive label was then stuck on the film, containing information on the contents and their destination, all remotely readable by the various freight handling automation systems that the pallet passed through en route to its final destination.

  It took them some time to find and unpack the pallets that were all headed to the same destination they had chosen. Then they repacked the pallets with a space in the center for a single person to hide in. The excess cargo which had been removed to make space was dumped in a corner. They had re-wrapped most of the pallets in the protective film – the cargo handlers had a large supply of it – leaving only the top unwrapped.

  The plan was to climb into the hole in the center, pull an empty box in over you, another person would finish the wrapping to make everything look good. Your pallet would be unloaded for the robots to deal with. Hopefully, if all went well, next stop would be Olympus city.

  There were a couple of drawbacks to the plan. Firstly, the last people off would be the people unloading the cargo bay, namely, Klane, Carl and Hamilton. The six pallets they had chosen would be the last to be unloaded. When it came down to those last six, Klane and Carl would stop loading, Carl would be secured in his pallet by Klane and then Hamilton would unload the four occupied pallets before pausing to seal Klane up and unloading her. The last pallet, destined to be occupied by Hamilton himself, presented a problem, since it couldn’t be sealed up properly, and Hamilton would have to unload it, return the pallet claw to the ship’s cargo bay, leave the vessel, sealing it up behind him, and then run after the moving pallet and get aboard, all without being noticed. It was the single most difficult part of the whole operation.

  After scouting around the cargo bay, Jones found large rolls of a type of packing film he swore would help deflect any scans of the pallets from showing them up. Hamilton was dubious – why would it be used as a packing material if it helped defeat the scans? – but humored the black man, allowing him to line the cavities in the pallets with it. After all, it wouldn’t make the chances of detection any worse and, if it didn’t hurt, there was no harm in trying it.

  By the time they had completed their preparations, LeGault’s voice warbled down over the internal ship’s comms system. “We’re about ten minutes out from the starport, so finish up what you’re doing and get ready for landing!”

  Mars Olympus Starport was a sprawling, massive affair spread over many square kilometers. As with most such facilities, it dealt with both freight and passenger movements and both commercial and private interests were catered for. The original starport had been built to supply the growing Olympus colony way back in the early days of spaceflight, when man had yet to discover any Humal artifacts and discover the secrets of hyperspace travel. That early, government funded project had served the growing community for only a few short years before the increased popularity of living on Mars led to several other colonies being set up.

  In the early days of Martian colonization, most of those new colonies had begun as nationalistic endeavors by individual countries on Earth, eager to stamp their claim to the riches on Mars. Of course, the colonists needed supplies, and soon Mars Olympus Starport began to expand, allowing other nations at first, then increasingly corporate bodies, to add to and expand the starport and its facilities. Eventually the port became a hodge-podge patchwork of terminals, loading and unloading zones, landing pads and import controls, all of which worked well individually, but not as a whole.

  As the colonies grew, so did the level of standardization and automation at the port. Those who had grown rich importing colonists and materials to Mars quickly stepped in to purchase the smaller, independent parts of the starport. The patchwork slowly, but surely, became a homogenized body, with generic standards and practices throughout.

  The increase in efficiency led to an increase in colonial growth and, as the colonies grew, so too did the starport.

  As human colonial efforts moved away from Sol with the discovery of hyperspace travel, so the colonies on Mars slowed their dramatic growth. Soon, few wanted to go to Mars when actual worlds with an immediately breathable atmosphere were available. Mars still grew, but at a much slower rate. The lack of new colonists led to the big corporations focusing their efforts on the extra-solar colonies, selling off their interests to smaller, less organized businesses.

  Mars suffered for a long time until the newly formed Terran Empire took charge of the port, buying out all the companies and restoring some sort of order again.

  As time went by, Mars’ atmosphere was made breathable, and a good deal warmer, through terra-forming techniques, but it was never going to be a garden planet. It remained much as it always had been for so long, a desert world with no water. The various city-state colonies that had sprung up across it the few oases amid the desolation. Things would grow on Mars, with careful management and protection from the bitter cold at nights, but it was hardly paradise. Little wonder then, that colonists chose worlds beyond Sol, where the conditions often matched or exceeded those that Earth had once been capable of. Earth itself, once the cradle of civilization, was spurned by anyone wealthy enough to afford to leave. Mars might not be the garden spot that its early colonists hoped it might one day have become but, compared to Earth, it was at least clean and relatively pollution free. For those that had settled early, and their descendants, that made it a place worth staying and living in.

  As the Seraphim swept in towards the starport, Hamilton and the others crowded the cockpit area, gawping like tourists at the red planet below them. LeGault had altered his approach slightly to allow them to view the massive sprawl of Olympus city to their port side. It occupied mile after mile. It seemed odd to see such a vast city in the midst of a desert, but Olympus was the oldest colony on the planet and had been growing for nearly two hundred years, from well before the days of hyper travel. In the rough center of the metropolis a large, domed structure could be seen.

  “What’s that?” Jones frowned. “Some sort of sports arena?”

  Surprisingly, it was Johnson t
hat answered. “No. That’s the original colony dome. When they started Olympus way back, the planet was too cold and the atmosphere unbreathable. So they quickly built a massive dome to protect the growing colony.

  “Back then, they thought it would be big enough to support the colony for a hundred years, but they were wrong. It grew far quicker than that. There are similar domes at the center of other Martian cities. These days the areas under the domes are considered prime real estate. Only the richest people, or government buildings, occupy them. That’s where the Mars Science Institute is.”

  The rest of them stared at her.

  “What?” She said, scowling. “You people don’t have history classes in school anymore?”

  It wasn’t the lack of education that made them stare, however, and she quickly realized it.

  “Oh, I get it! I’m a rebreather, so I can’t possibly know anything about the time whilst I was frozen, is that it?”

  Eyes flickered towards Hamilton awkwardly, willing him to deal with the situation. For the first time he was aware of the others’ uncomfortableness around the woman. If anyone else had come out with such a comment Klane would likely have shot them down with sarcasm, or Jones would have made some smart-mouth reply. But with her, it was like they didn’t know how to respond. It was like she was an alien, or something.

  No wonder she’s felt so alone. He thought. It’s an unintentional, but nasty blend of inclusion and exclusion, all at the same time. Being a part of something, but never really accepted.

  She had told him of that effect before, but this was the first time he’d seen it for himself.

  “I suppose it’s just a shock, that’s all.” He replied quickly. “Most of us don’t have a clue about Earth history beyond the basics. It’s more that you know the details, rather than you know anything at all, that surprised us.”

  It wasn’t the best of answers, and her gaze told him that the matter wasn’t over with, but she let it slide, saying. “Well, pardon me for reading a book occasionally!”