Hunted lop-4

by James Alan Gardner

  "So Willow might not have stayed near Troyen all the time. They could have gone somewhere else for a while."

  "But there’s nowhere else to go in this system," Dade said. "Nowhere else inhabited, anyway."

  "Wrong," Festina told him. "There’s an orbital around the sun. Occupied by Fasskisters who don’t want to leave the area, for fear of being killed by the League." She smiled grimly. "Now ask yourself: if anyone in the galaxy created specialized nano like the stuff on Willow that was stealing queen’s venom, who would it be?"

  "Oh," Dade said. "Yeah."

  Festina nodded. "Let’s assume Willow visited the orbital while they were in this system. And let’s assume the Fasskisters smuggled nano onto the Willow during that visit. Shouldn’t someone ask them why?"

  Like most orbitals, it was a big cylinder floating in space, the surface skin covered with photocells that gathered energy from the sun. Unlike most orbitals, the photocells had been arranged into bands running lengthways with strips of white in between, so that the whole cylinder was covered with long black-and-white stripes.

  "Assholes," Festina muttered. We were all sitting in the bridge’s Visitors’ Gallery, watching as Jacaranda slowly approached the Fasskister habitat.

  "What’s wrong?" I asked.

  "Do you know why they left some stripes clear… even though they could collect more power if they covered the whole damned surface?"

  "No," I said.

  "They did it so you’d know the orbital wasn’t spinning," she told me. "Anyone flying up can see the stripes are holding steady… so the Fasskisters can’t be producing gravity with good old centrifugal force."

  "They don’t have gravity in there?"

  "They have it; they just use some flashy fancy artificial field that guzzles energy twenty-four hours a day. This close to the sun, they have solar power to spare… but it’s still waste for the sake of waste."

  "Admiral," Prope said, turning around in her command chair, "they aren’t answering our requests to dock."

  "Can we dock anyway?" Festina asked.

  "Affirmative.," Prope answered, "but they probably won’t like it. Docking without permission can be interpreted as intent to commit piracy."

  Festina made a face. "Send them a message in English, Fasskister and Mandasar. Say we’re worried about their status because they’ve gone incommunicado. If we don’t get a reply in five minutes, we’ll assume they’re in trouble and come to give aid."

  "Begging the admiral’s pardon," Prope said, without an ounce of begging in her voice, "but that’s a standard tactic for pirates too. Even if the target is broadcasting like mad, the pirate ship says, ‘We can’t hear anything,’ and keeps coming in. Naive victims think their radios are broken and let the pirate come aboard. More experienced sailors think they’re under attack and take defensive action."

  "What kind of defensive action?"

  Prope shrugged. "The Fasskisters believe they can’t leave this system because the League considers them non-sentient. Under such conditions, they may have decided they have nothing to lose by arming themselves with lethal weapons. Especially with warring Mandasars nearby. The Fasskisters could legitimately argue they were afraid of being attacked."

  Festina drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair. After a few seconds, she said, "Send the message and go in anyway. Take any precautions you think necessary. I’ll assume responsibility."

  "Aye-aye, Admiral," Prope said. She tried to make her voice sound icy — full of misgivings… but if I knew Prope, she’d lived her whole life hoping to luck into an honest-to-God space battle.

  We docked without incident — sliding up to a hatch on the orbital’s dark side (the half that wasn’t facing the sun), and dropping our Sperm-field so we could stretch out a docking tube. Prope hated cutting the field; star captains feel kind of naked when they can’t go FTL to get away from trouble. (It must have mortified her when the black ship had ripped away Jacaranda’s, field back at Starbase Iris — like getting her clothes torn off in public.) Prope kept telling Festina, over and over, "One hour on the orbital… not a second more, if you expect us to reestablish the tail and get back to Troyen by 23:46:22."

  I could tell Festina wasn’t too happy with the time limit; but considering the circumstances, she couldn’t argue. One hour would have to do.

  Festina declared our jaunt to the orbital would be Explorers only. The Mandasars grumped, but the admiral held firm — with all the bad feeling between Mandasars and Fasskisters, it wouldn’t help to take the hive along.

  Kaisho wanted to go too. "Why?" Festina asked.

  "You’ll see," Kaisho told her.

  "Come on, Kaish," Festina said, "cut the inscrutable-alien crap. Either give me a straight answer or stay on Jacaranda."

  "Sorry," Kaisho replied, "but the Balrog loves watching lesser beings get smacked in the face with surprises. Just between you and me, the damned moss really gets off on human astonishment."

  "Shit," Festina growled. "Just once I’d like to meet an alien who enjoyed giving clear explanations of what the fuck is going on."

  We didn’t wear tightsuits this trip; apparently Fasskisters found the suits grossly offensive, though they never said why. With any group of aliens, there’s always some area where they just mutter, "Can’t you see it’s indecent?" and refuse to go into details. Anyway, the dock hatch reported good air on the orbital’s interior, and we didn’t have time to get dressed up. There could still be nasty germs wafting about… but if the Fasskisters ever wanted to regain their claim to sentience, they’d make sure we weren’t exposed to anything that could hurt us.

  "All right," Festina said, as we hovered weightless in front of the dock’s airlock. "In we go."

  She pressed the button to open the door. One by one, we passed over the threshold; and immediately gravity clicked in, twisting around so that the outside of the cylinder was down. If I’d been taken by surprise, I might have fallen right back out into the docking tube… but lucky for me, Festina went first and I could watch how she grabbed the support bars just inside the door.

  I got in without too much trouble, followed by Tobit and Bade. All three of the others tapped their throats as soon as they were inside, activating the radio transceivers implanted in their necks. It made me feel a bit bad, to be an Explorer without a throat implant… but then, I wasn’t a real Explorer, was I? Meanwhile, they did the usual, "Testing, testing," and Lieutenant Harque back on Jacaranda answered, "Receiving loud and clear." Marque’s voice came in on receivers we’d clipped to our belts. The receivers could also transmit if you pushed the right button, but there was no need for that if you had a throat implant.

  Festina worked the airlock while the rest of us stood back trying not to look nervous. The far door of the lock had a tiny peekaboo screen that wasn’t working — either the Fasskisters had deliberately blinded the cameras, or the system had broken down sometime in the past twenty years and nobody bothered to fix it. From my days on the moonbase, I knew the Fasskisters only got supply ships once every three years… so maybe they didn’t care a whole lot if the dock-area cameras went out.

  "Are we set?" Festina asked, just before she pushed the button to open the inner door.

  Dade tried to draw his stunner, but Tobit slapped the boy’s wrist. It was pretty unfriendly to be carrying guns at all; having them drawn and ready was going too far.

  The door whisked open. A second later, the smell of buttered toast filled my nostrils. In front of us, a ramp led up at an easy slope; and the ramp was covered with glowing red moss.

  31

  GETTING TO KNOW THE FASSKISTERS

  "Kaisho!" Festina roared.

  Laughter came over our receivers. "A problem, Festina?"

  "You knew about this!"

  "Of course."

  "And you didn’t tell us."

  "As I said," Kaisho answered, "the Balrog adores surprises. The nice thing about precognition is knowing when someone else will step on a banana peel."
>
  "We’re not going to step on anything," Festina growled. The four of us stared at the ramp again. It was completely crammed with moss, at least ankle deep, starting a few paces beyond the airlock door. No way we could go forward without getting it all over our boots, unless we could crawl across the walls like bugs.

  Kaisho spoke again from our receivers. "If you like, I can ferry you over in my hoverchair."

  "No," Festina told her. "I don’t want you anywhere near us. You’re hard to trust at the best of times, and recently you’ve been a real pain in the ass."

  "Then what are you going to do?" Kaisho asked, a bit smugly. "Um," I said. "Give me a second."

  In my mind, I tried to imagine a stench that would make moss wither… like really bad breath, something that could knock you straight off your feet, except that it’d only work on Balrogs. The Balrog could obviously smell stuff humans couldn’t, like royal pheromone; so maybe I could produce a stink so powerfully awful to Balrog senses, the moss would kind of shrivel. Not die — I didn’t want it to die. I just wanted to turn its stomach. If I started with its own buttered-toast scent and pictured the toast going all green and moldy…

  "Teelu," Kaisho said sharply. Talking out loud, not whispering. "Stop it!"

  "Stop what?" I asked, trying to sound innocent.

  "You know what," Kaisho snapped, "but you don’t know what you’re doing. Given time, you might find something that would cause serious harm."

  "What’s she talking about?" Festina asked me.

  "Teelu and I are playing a little game," Kaisho answered, "and he doesn’t understand his own strength. Biochemicals can be more than smells, Your Majesty — one species’ pheromone is another species’ poison. If you muck about too much, you might hurt someone… and it could be humans just as easily as Balrogs."

  "What?" Festina demanded. She stared straight at me. "What are you doing?"

  "His own form of diplomacy," Kaisho said. "Talk softly and carry a big stink."

  Festina looked like she wanted more answers; but at that moment, the moss in front of us simply rolled aside. A parting of the glowing red sea. The spores in the center of the ramp slid right or left, till they left a clear walkway up the middle-bare concrete floor, walled on either side by heaps of glowering fuzz. The buttered-toast smell turned a bit edgy… as if even a higher lifeform could get ticked off.

  "Did you do that?" Festina asked me. I shook my head as Kaisho answered, "I did. Or rather, the Balrog did it at my request. Go ahead — the moss will leave you alone. I promise."

  "She promises," Tobit muttered. "That fills me with loads of confidence."

  "You two stay here," Festina told Tobit and Dade. "Edward and I will go in. If anything happens to us — like we get our toes bitten by spores — arrest that bitch for assaulting an admiral. Even if the Balrog is sentient, I have faith the High Council can devise an appropriately unattractive punishment." She lifted her hand to her throat implant. "You heard that, Kaisho?"

  "You lesser species can be so suspicious. I said the Balrog would leave you alone, and it will. It won’t try to touch you as long as you’re on this orbital."

  "Great," Festina muttered. "That sounds like those promises the gods always gave in Greek myths — loaded statements with nasty loopholes. But," she continued, staring at the open path through the moss, "I would dearly like to ask a Fasskister what the hell happened here."

  She looked at me, as if I had some kind of deciding vote. I thought of what Captain Prope would say if we came running back at the first sign of trouble… not that I cared about my own reputation, but I didn’t want Festina to look bad. "Let’s go," I said.

  So we did.

  The ramp led to another hatch that should have been closed but wasn’t — it had jammed partway open, leaving a gap in the middle. Our path through the moss led right up to the gap and beyond.

  "Looks like the Balrog has fouled up the gears," Festina said, examining the hatch.

  "Do doors have gears?" I asked.

  "Don’t go literal on me," she answered.

  We squeezed through the gap and into a world glowing crimson. At one time, this must have been a pretty standard orbital — forty square kilometers of land on the cylinder’s inner surface, a lot of it dedicated to parks and agriculture. Orbitals always go heavy on the fields and forests, so people don’t fixate on being closed in; even if you can see the other side of the cylinder overhead, it’s not so bad if you’re surrounded by trees and grass.

  So the Fasskisters’ home had probably been filled with their own native versions of nice little woods, quiet meadows, and the occasional rustic village. Now it was filled with Balrog, and it looked like some classic version of hell: scarlet, scarlet everywhere, like fire and lava and blood.

  The orbital had a long white sun, kind of a fluorescent light tube stretching down the middle of the cylinder; but here on the ground, the whiteness of the shine was tinted crimson as far as the eye could see — as if we’d stepped inside a cherry-hot blast oven. The temperature was actually a bit cool, but the sheer look of the place made me break into a sweat.

  "Dante would have been proud," Festina murmured, staring at it all. The red light shone up from the ground onto her face, casting weird shadows and giving her eyes little pinpoint dots of scarlet. I didn’t like the effect.

  "What do we do?" I asked.

  "Damned if I know," she answered. Looking off to our right, she said, "There’s a village over there. Let’s see if anyone’s around."

  As soon as we aimed ourselves in that direction, the moss in front of our feet slipped aside to let us pass. Underneath was bare dirt. There must have been plants here once, grass or vegetables or something; but the Balrog had eaten clean down to the soil, gobbling whatever it found. It had probably eaten the support life too — all the worms and bugs and bacteria that orbitals need to keep the land healthy. The little animals weren’t sentient, so they were fair game for food… but still. It made me kind of squeamish to think of them getting dissolved by mossy digestive juices.

  The path continued to open in front of us… and close in behind us. Not comforting. But the moss kept its distance, sifting away like drifting snow as we approached the village.

  The huts in the village were half-sphere domes molded from glassy crystal, with millions of facets catching the light. The light was crimson, of course, glinting as if each dome was a cut-glass bowl plopped over a campfire. Twelve huts in all, and nobody in sight… till we got to the central square and found a single lumpy figure.

  When Fasskisters aren’t dressed as some other species, they live inside "utility bots" — egg-shaped torsos with all kinds of legs and arms. I truly mean all kinds: ones that are clearly mechanical, as well as ones that mimic other species. If ever they have to deal with human technology, for example, it’s useful to have a human-shaped arm with lifelike human fingers; makes it easier to punch buttons, lift levers, and all that. So a utility bot is designed to have one of everything… a human arm, a human leg, a Mandasar Cheejretha, a pincer, a tentacle, a pseudopod, and so on.

  Of course, these weren’t exact duplicates of the original limbs; since the robot had no head, each arm had its own eyes… and maybe ears and nose too. I can’t tell you how the Fasskister in the central egg keeps track of sixteen eyes at once, but I guess that’s none of my business. Anyway, it didn’t matter to this particular Fasskister: all its eyes and arms and everything were completely clogged over with moss. It had to be blind; it also seemed to be frozen in place, as if all that fuzz had gummed up its works.

  "Aw," Festina said, "poor Tin Man. Need some oil?"

  A strangled sound came from inside… maybe the actual voice of a Fasskister: what you got when you shut down the electronic amplifiers they usually used for speaking. It didn’t sound like words, at least not in English. I’d heard people say Fasskisters always spoke their own language; then circuitry in their suits converted their speech to a language their listeners understood.

  Fest
ina lifted her hand to her throat. "Kaisho," she said, "can you clean this guy off?"

  Kaisho’s whisper sounded over our receivers. "Why would I want to do that?"

  "To keep from pissing me off," Festina told her. "One. Two. Three…"

  Like sand spilling through an hourglass, spores began to tumble off the Fasskister in front of us — clearing the tips of his uppermost arms and slowly sliding downward, leaving behind bare metal and plastic. I didn’t know which was more mind-boggling: that all these flecks of inanimate moss were moving of their own accord, or that Kaisho, way back in Jacaranda, could know which particular Fasskister we were looking at. And that she or her Balrog joyrider had some way of telling the spores in front of us, "Please, clear off, thanks so much."

  The spores continued to fall. Suddenly, one of the Fasskister’s metal arms gave a twitch. Its wrist rotated through a complete circle, then its first elbow twisted most of the way around too, till the glass sensor on the hand’s thumb pointed directly at Festina and me. From the robot’s chest, a deep male voice said, "Humans?"

  "Greetings," Festina said with a slight bow. "We are sentient citizens of the League of Peoples. We beg your Hospitality."

  The Fasskister swung his arm and nearly took off her head.

  Festina didn’t just duck; she deflected the swing with a quick little forearm block that flicked over and turned into a grab. Almost instantly she tugged on the robot’s wrist, pulling the whole Fasskister forward. At the same moment, her knee came up hard. The effect was the robot getting yanked into a very nice knee strike that landed CLANG against the machine’s metal chest.

  On a human, the blow would have broken ribs. On the robot it didn’t leave a dent, but I could hear something go THUNK. It sounded like the flesh-and-blood Fasskister smacking against the walls of his robot housing.

  I jumped forward to help, grabbing two more arms (one light and spidery, the other wide and chunky). Festina yelled, "Lift!" and together we heaved the Fasskister off the ground. He didn’t weigh much, but he’d started to wave his limbs wildly — not trying to wrestle us, more like a panicked attempt to get away, but I still got clonked a few good ones.