Worlds Apart 02 Edenworld

by James Wittenbach

  Matthew wished she didn’t have to sigh like that.

  “Are you all right?” he asked finally.

  “I feel great. I’m weightless,” she answered. “Oh, yeah... oh, yeah it feels so good.”

  Again, Matthew wished she didn’t have to sigh like that. “Run a diagnostic on your emergency over-ride. If you have to maneuver suddenly, and your gravity doesn’t kick in first, you’ll instantaneously become a stain on the back of your cabin.”

  She didn’t reply. Matthew ran a remote systems check on her ship and assured himself that the emergency gravity over-ride was engaged. He looked through his canopy, at the stars above, below, and on every side of him. It was like walking through the sky. He put his own ship in shepherd-mode, so that it would guide hers. “Eliza... Lt.. Change, I mean. I’m going to go into sleep mode until .... I’m setting wake up for fifteen minutes before orbital insertion.”

  “Sounds nice,” her voice lilted back. “I haven’t had a zero- g nap in a long time.”

  He closed his eyes.

  “Matthew,” came her voice.

  He opened his eyes. An hour and a half had passed. Ahead, he saw the blue-green sphere of 10 223 Equuleus. He began sighting the moon to make a course correction.

  “I’m here,” he answered.

  “Do you think civilians are really different than us. Do you think they have a different set of rules than we do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’ve spent your adult life in the Republic Military. I spent my whole life with the Mining Guild. We both believe, fundamentally, in chains of commands, mutual respect, and doing your duty.”

  “This is about Eddie, isn’t it?” Matthew said, amazed he had not picked up on it sooner.

  “Affirmative.”

  “It didn’t bother you before that he was ignoring his duty before. Have you changed your mind?”

  “Before, it didn’t have anything to do with me. Now, he wants me to bail him out. He knew I’d be in command and that I’d decide whether and how to discipline him.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I referred his discipline to Commander Lear.”

  Matthew was quiet for a moment. “Damb,” he said finally.

  “Did I do the right thing?”

  “Absolutely. As an officer, your duty was clear.”

  “What about as a friend? I’m not accustomed to this friendship device.”

  Matthew thought hard. “A friend should never put you in that position.”

  “Which is exactly what I have been telling myself, but I know I caused trouble for Eddie, and I don’t feel good about that. I’m furious at him, partly for making me have to do that to him, and mostly for putting me in this position at the beginning.”

  The words came with some difficulty. “If it is any consolation, I don’t think in Eddie’s mind, he was doing anything bad to you. I think, the way he saw it, he would break the rules for you if your position is reversed. I don’t believe that it’s right for him to think that way, but it is how he thinks.”

  They swung around 10 223 Equuleus V in a breaking maneuver and set a course for the planet’s second moon. It was a fairly large body, only a little smaller than Hyperion. Its surface was a broken mass of ice and sheet rock. The ice seemed to flow, making the patterns of rivers and seas, dividing the places where it cracked through the rocks. Change reported. “I’m picking up a magnetic anomaly. Coordinates: Latitude 12° 9’

  South, Longitude, 118° 14’ West. There’s a concentration of metallic elements not found elsewhere on the planet’s surface. Let’s check it out.”

  The two ships swung over a spiky range of ice-capped mountains. Matthew stared at the scanner. The magnetic anomaly had taken on a distinct appearance, like a huge shield. Its metallic content was dominated by gold, molybdenum, and corundum, exactly like the surface of Eden. “There’s an artifact down there. Do you see it?”

  “I’m picking it up.”

  The passed over the object. It was a large dark shield, faintly coated in frost. Snow danced across it, making whirlwinds from the moon’s thin atmosphere. It was approximately 400

  meters across, 100 meters high, and about ten meters thick.

  “Scanning,” Matthew reported as a beam of blue-white light was emitted from the bottom of his ship. “Very smooth. Detecting only minor surface imperfections. No indication of electronic circuitry, energy flow, mechanisms. Apparently solid metal all the way through.”

  They held position over the object. “That’s all I can tell. Any idea what it is?”

  “It’s refined metal, that’s for sure.”

  “Jettisoned cargo from the colonial era?”

  “That would be my guess, but a cargo of what. It isn’t pure ore, it’s not a mechanical device, it’s not electronic.”

  “Log the position. We’ll come back with an Aves and examine it.”

  With a kick of their gravity engines, they left the moon, and steered a course back for Pegasus.

  Chapter Eight

  Eden-The Dayside

  Keeler and his Landing Party had been led out of the Scion’s second best palace by the means of underground tunnels which led from the Citadel to the so-called “Goldstone Highway.” There were no signs of gold paving stones in the wide dirt path, but the roadbed was still more or less intact, or, at least, easy enough for the trackers to delineate from the surrounding ground. The Guardsmen left the party by the side of the road, pointed in the direction they were to travel, and returned to the tunnel without wishing them well, or presenting them with lovely parting gifts.

  Keeler took a good look at his party. There were ten of them. Four were Marines, which made him feel good. There were two medical technicians among them, and Keeler had a feeling it would be useless to pray they were not needed. He said a quiet prayer to that effect anyway before leading his people in a spoken one.

  “To the Creator, the Sustainer, and the Giver of Life, we pray for protection on the long and unknown road that lies before us. We pray for the capacity to meet and understand the challenges that lie before us. We pray that everything we do along our journey serves Your Peace. We shall fear no evil.”

  “God is Near,” answered the rest of the landing party. The unbowed their heads, except for Honeywell and the other Marines, whose job it was to remain vigilant and had never bowed to begine with.

  Keeler tapped his walking stick on the ground and pointed up the trail “Let’s exeunt this quiescently frozen juice-treat dispensary.”

  Although they were laden with food and gear, the packs were light on their backs. Their jackets kept them cool as the air grew sultry. The tunnels had deposited them well outside the Citadel, and the little camps that surrounded it. Before they had traveled even a few kilometers, the dwellings had become quite few and primitive, little more than shacks among the trees and fields. They saw no sign of intelligent life.

  They soon found themselves amidst an expanse of fields. On one side stretched a large grain-field where some wheat-like crop was maturing, filling the air with a scent of dust and nuts. On the other was an equally long expanse of thorny shrubs laden with clumps of yellow and purple fruit, about the size of two hands held together.

  David Alkema stood at the edge of the second field, which was somewhat below the level of the road, pointing his tracker at the shrubs. “Captain, those plants are unknown to us. I should get a sample of the fruit for Agro-Botany.”

  Keeler looked back at him. “Neg!” he was thinking. Do not leave the path, but Alkema was already carefully picking his way down the incline.

  The shrubs were only a little taller than the young specialist. His tracker analyzed the fruit by sniffing the chemicals it gave off in the air. It told him the fruit was safe to eat, had a composition and a fructose constituent similar to grapes, nectarines, and tomatoes. He took a container from his pack and reached out to collect a sample.

  Suddenly, there was a stabbing pain in his hand, as though it had just be
en stung by a large, voracious insect. He pulled it back from the shrub and was surprised to see the point of a black, metallic blade protruding from between his fingers.

  He turned his hand over, aware at the back of his mind of searing pain throbbing outward from it and beads of his own dark blood pooling and dripping from the ragged edges of the wound. The piece of metal that protruded from either side of his hand was shaped something like the wing of a bird, but with razor-sharp edges.

  The next thing he was aware of was of the weight of something slamming against him and bringing him to the ground, which turned out to be Marine Specialist Dallas. They rolled over on the ground, coming to rest with Dallas underneath him.

  “Shields in place! Protect the Captain!” Marine Lt. Honeywell was yelling. “We’re under attack.”

  Keeler was staring at the crumpled forms of Dallas and Alkema. An enormous Marine hustled the Captain to the far side of the incline. Honeywell and the other Marine took positions on the top of the road.

  “Scanning, one life form, humanoid, twenty-two meters away at 67 degrees.” The young Marine pointed.

  “Pursue!” ordered Honeywell.

  The Marine was off like a flash. Eden’s low gravity and the amplification of the landing gear making him run with the swiftness of a Panrovian stalking cat. Medical Technician Bihari picked her way to Alkema and Dallas, under the cover of the Marine who had taken Keeler to safety.

  Alkema moved aside, blood dripping profusely from his damaged hand. Dallas looked bad, unconscious with the color drained from her face. A thick dark puddle of blood---turned oily black in the light of the Edenian sun, spread beneath her. Bihari carefully rolled her over. There was another one of the things embedded into her stomach. She must have caught it in mid air, then driven it further into her guts when she rolled over with Alkema. Alkema instinctively reached out the try to help her, and was answered by a sharp stabbing pain across the length of his right forearm. He withdrew.

  “Get back to the road,” Bihari hissed. “The Marines will cover you.”

  “Will she be all right?”

  “She will be all right.” Bihari withdrew a scanning plate from her medical pack, a transparent rectangle, about one centimeter thick. As she passed it over Dallas’s abdomen, it displayed a full-color view of her internal organs. The weapon had cut into the muscles of her belly, and penetrated into the abdominal cavity, nicking her small intestine and stomach. The former was bleeding profusely.

  “There’s nothing you can do here,” said Bihari without looking up. She placed a small bio-regulator on Dallas’s chest to slow her respiration and heartbeat and to keep her unconscious. Her small brown hands dug into the medical pack again, removing bandages, sealant, and finally a grasping tool. “I have to seal the wounds internally before I can remove the weapon. Medical Technician Skinner will take care of you.”

  Alkema raised to a crouch, sheltered his wounded hand on his stomach and made his way back to the road.

  “Are you all right?” Keeler asked him.

  “I’m in better shape than Dallas.”

  “Let me look at that,” said Medical Technician Skinner. He was a middle-aged man, a little older than the commander, but much more trim, with immaculate silver-white hair. His eyes were icy blue. He took Alkema’s hand and turned it over, to see the blade protruding from both sides. “This reminds me of when I was a young medical technician, just out of the Medical College of Baden Baden Baden. My internship took me to a remote outpost in northern Carpentaria, a fishing village, where I lived among the Johnsonites for two years. You’d be surprised how many objects I had to extract from the flesh of those hardy sea-farers.”

  His tone was enthusiastically conversational, inappropriate to the setting and made more so by his eccentric and erudite inflections. He waved an examiner over Alkema’s palm.

  “Your bones are intact, but there is severe tearing in the muscles of your hand, and several blood vessels have been severed.” His tones were clipped and precise, and suggested a life of privilege. He dug in his field kit for a strong-jawed instrument. He clamped it onto the larger protrusion of metal.

  “This won’t hurt a bit,” he said quietly. “Until I pull it out.” He pulled, one fast, fluid motion. There was a flash of intense pain, a momentary sensation of razor-sharp metal slicing away from flesh, and then he saw the blade held in front of his eyes, still speckled with drops of dark maroon blood.

  “A souvenir for you, young specialist. Handle it carefully. You may want to mount this in your quarters, a reminder of staring down the grim spectre of mortality.” He took out an anti-infection spray, and began dousing the wound with it.

  “May I see that?” asked Honeywell. Skinner handed it to him and proceeded to bandage Alkema’s dripping appendage. Honeywell examined it. It was a simple piece of metal, three-sided, with claw-like curved blades at each point. Personal shielding should be sufficient against it.

  The Marine who had chased the assailant appeared at the edge of the field. He carried what looked like a long bundle of rags. “I have him.”

  Keeler and Honeywell crossed to him. Alkema began following his leader, but was held back by Skinner, until his hand was finished being bandaged.

  The Marine laid his package on the ground, gently. “I tackled him and gave him a stun with my buzznucks.” He said, referring to the electrical shock pads built into the palms of his Marine Landing Gear gloves.

  The figure that was laid on the ground was thin, not the coveted litheness of youth, but the gauntness of prolonged deprivation, skin stretched tight over the bones of his face and revealing far too much of the definition of the boy’s skull. None of them had eve seen anyone so emaciated. He was dressed in layers of rags, tattered and thickly encrusted with the moist, sticky brown dirt of the field. His body was clearly human, beneath its own coating of mud, but his arms and legs were as thin as sticks and the bones of his ribs strained against the skin of his chest like tent poles.

  “It’s just a kid,” Keeler said.

  “Did you find any weapons?” Honeywell asked.

  “He dropped these,” the Marine, a tall, crew-cut young Sapphirean named Everything, answered. He displayed a small leather bag and a device that seemed half-slingshot half crossbow. Honeywell took and examined them. The bag contained more projectiles like the ones Alkema and Dallas had taken. He fitted one into the launcher and fired it into the field, where it cleanly clipped a fairly thick branch from one of the shrubs.

  “Impressive,” said Honeywell, handing the weapon back to Keeler.

  “In the Name of the Lady!” Skinner exclaimed, fresh from bandaging Alkema. “This child is malnourished! You there…” he pointed to Everything. “Bring me a nutrition kit and a sonic scrubber. Chop-chop!”

  Eden – The Farside

  “… and this is our ship.”

  Winter had come back to the Aves Kate . The temperature outside had, according to the ship’s instruments, leveled off at thirty-five degrees below zero. The entire ship was coated with frost, which had formed elegant wave-like patterns across the canopy of the command deck. The main hatch had opened with a crackle of falling ice chips and a blast of warm air and light from inside.

  “I have never seen anything like this,” Winter told him, running her fingers appreciatively across the back of a passenger seat, gazing at the control panel in front of it. “Your artisans must be superb.”

  Artisans? Redfire thought. That was an interesting way to describe them, although not the word the shipbuilding robots would have used. “They are indeed.”

  “And this ship travels among the stars?”

  “It could, but it would take a very long time,” Redfire responded. “We use it mostly to travel from our mother ship to the surface of planets.”

  “Mother…ship?”

  “The village in space I told you about.” He swung one of the flight couches around to her.

  “Have a seat. Would you like something warm to drink?”

/>   “It is comfortable in here. I have no need of warm drink.”

  “Speaking of the mother ship, I better check in.” Redfire touched the surface of the Communication Panel. “This is Team Gamma hailing Pegasus. Please respond Pegasus. ”

  A young blonde woman with warm blue eyes appeared. “Communications Specialist Kelleher responding. Good to hear from you, Commander. Please report.”

  “We have made contact with the inhabitants of the planet’s dark side. They are human, and do not appear to be hostile. We will proceed to learn what we can. There is no need for additional support presently.”

  “Pegasus acknowledges.”

  “Please transmit the most recent status reports on Alpha and Beta teams.”

  “Transmitting now.”

  Redfire transferred the reports to the side-viewer. He distrusted neural link downloads, preferring to read and analyze information for himself. Winter studied his face. “What’s wrong?”

  “We have two other teams on your world at present. One of them has ceased contact with the ship. Our leader is with them.”

  “They are on the Nearside?”

  “Za, a place called… Altama Prefecture. Do you know of it?”

  “Only that it is one of the Inner Prefectures.” Redfire thought he detected a note of disdain in her expression.

  “Is that bad?”

  “We have a saying on our world. Those who live in the Outer Prefectures, they work. Those who live in the Middle Prefectures, they trade. Those who live in the Inner Prefectures, they take. They are not to be trusted. They are like serpents, always circling one another, looking for a weakness, waiting for the chance to strike. I’d sooner lay down in a nest of cave-vipers than in any noble house of the Inner Prefectures.”

  I will have to remember that expression if Commander Lear ever invites me for dinner, Redfire thought. “Will they be in any danger?”

  She hesitated. “Are they well-armed?”

  “The same as us.”

  “They may be safe then.”

  “That isn’t very reassuring.”

  She looked around. “You have weapons unlike any we have here. This ship can travel to any place on my world. Imagine a fleet of such ships and an army with weapons like yours. One Scion could rule the whole of my world. That is why the Scions will want to possess your… your ships, your weapons, your knowledge.”