by A. D. Bloom
The wheel of the hatch shrieked as it turned. Once she pushed it open, he was shocked to see the rosy blush of her cheek soured to a pallid gray. Her pupils were pinpricks between swollen, squinting lids. She said, "You look like hell, Samo," and brushed past him. She flopped down on the mattress facing the bulkhead and didn't move.
The Shediri hissed at him and chatter-clacked. "Captain Hank Devlin is waiting in the mess."
He wanted to ask her if she was alright, but he knew she wasn't. "He didn't hurt you did he?" She laughed at that. "I'll be back soon," he said.
"Fuck off."
It wasn't like he looked at the bug for any kind of consolation or commiseration, but it seemed like the Shediri thought he did because he held all four arms out with its two-fingered, long-palmed hands open to show it had nothing. He knew the Shediri gesture. It meant the bug didn't understand.
They'd set their mess in the base of the command tower, just behind the welds that joined that section to the tugboat module in front of it. He'd been smelling the food from there for days, both the familiar smell of garlic and onions frying in oil and the sharp tang of Shediri spices. Their fermented beef revolted all humans, but the milder side of Shediri food included a thing like a citrus curry that tasted good with anything. That's what he smelled now and he wanted the food far more than he wanted to talk to Hank Devlin.
Absolom's small mess was only half full and none of the crew bothered to look up from their food for more than a second when he entered. The tables had been bolted down with the benches. Six sets of them lined the narrow compartment with a kitchen that looked to be one, eternally repeating grease fire. The entire forward section of the compartment had been charred with an ablative coating of shiny black carbon except for the bright and gleaming section of the working surface that must have been recently cleaned with the laser hanging above it. Blue and orange flame licked at the bottoms and sides of two stock pots crusted with burned sauce. The rice cooker looked clean at least.
When the bug nodded its head at the food and then at the bowls on the side, Samhain filled a bowl with the Shediri curry he'd smelled, cooked with chunks of unidentified meat. What they'd fed him for the last two days hadn't been bad food (besides the fermented meat) but there hadn't been much. Now that he had a chance, he piled the bowl high.
The Shediri gave him a spoon and what looked like coffee and pointed him to a table.
"Where is he?"
The bug said nothing; it pointed behind him. Samhain turned and saw him then and wished he hadn't. Hank Devlin's chest stuck out more now, Samhain thought. "Mr. Samhain, it's good to see you don't turn your nose up at our food. I'd feel terrible if your last meal weren't to your liking."
"That was a joke. I can tell."
"It's funnier when you display fear."
Samhain nodded and held up one finger as he chewed to indicate he'd get out the important thing he had to say any second now. As the alien curry became a spiced pasted between his teeth, Hank Devlin's frustration rose. He could almost hear it like a rattle in a machine or engine that wasn't bolted down all the way. The longer he chewed, the louder Hank's internal shuddering became. "I forgot what I was going to say."
"We'll be transferring to another vessel for the trip to the inner system and the third planet. Then, you're going to find what we've been looking for. While I thank you for your earlier candor in disclosing to me the uncertainty you feel regarding your ability to locate what your academic mentor is thought to have located, I think perhaps this would be an excellent time to remind you that if you cannot find it, then no matter what my father wants, your time with us will be up. Do you understand?"
This time, Samhain spoke with his mouth full of curry. "You mean you'll kill me. And if I do find it, then what? Same thing?"
"Then, I'll still want very much to kill you, Martin Samhain, but I won't. At least not until my father meets you."
Landing bay
Samhain listened to his breath in his helmet and watched the bands of the swirling blue planet while he and Scilla waited in Absolom's open bay along with Hank Cozen, the Stripey he'd now come to know as Tsk, and Scilla's small herd of luggage.
"They're on time," said Hank.
Samhain's helmet picked out the slender, hammerhead craft coming round the limb of the planet riding a plume of blue plasma. Its active broadcast transponder ID flashed as he zoomed in on it. "Zevo's Tours?"
"Zevo's tour boats go out every day. The permits and the operating taxes we pay to Staas are a small price for the ability to launder funds through the business and make runs through the smugglers best drop points daily."
In the light reflecting off the planet, the boat had looked green, but now it was clearly a gaudy kind of imitation gold hull. Despite that, the design was efficient especially the improbably narrow hammerhead of the forward drive coils, a human-made, first-gen copy of Shediri tech. They were small and didn't produce a wide field, but that hull didn't need one.
The Shediri pilot could be seen through the canopy. It waved two arms at them as it pulled the tour boat so close to Absolom that the gold hull reflected the ship's partially stealthed length as a waving dark patch blotting the stars.
They sat in the brightly-colored seats of the tour boat as it made its daily run back into the inner system. Staas Cutters and patrol boats prowled on the fringes of the lanes, but it wasn't until they closed on Otherworld that any of them approached. The patrol boat that pulled up and ran parallel to them was 62-meters with a micro-bore railgun block on her bow. "Those patrol boats carry boarding skiffs," Samhain said. "They're thinking about using them."
Scilla looked past him out the porthole at the patrol boat. "They do seem to be looking us over. Looking for a tell, perhaps. Probably scanning us for irregularities like the fact that this boat seats 15 and we're only four and a pilot."
Up in the front of the boat, the Shediri at the controls turned over its shoulder and clicked slowly. Hank said, "They're just trying to spook us into running. It's a game they play to kill the boredom I think. Am I right about that, Mr. Samhain?"
"Sometimes it works."
The Shediri pilot and Tsk erupted in a furious exchange of click-clack-hiss and whining chatter, both of them with their translators 'thumbed' in the off position. The patrol boat turned to close range and the blue flare behind it brightened. In the reflection off the porthole, he saw Scilla grinning. She turned and showed her amusement to Hank. "They do seem to be coming for us. Whatever will you do?"
Hank pointed to high off the port side, almost directly behind the patrol boat from their perspective, where a small hauler that had been steaming close to them was now breaking from the shipping lanes and making a run for it as if it had been spooked by the patrol boat.
"No pilot on that one," he said. "We stole the boat weeks ago."
The company ship cut a hard turn to pursue. "SCS Picann to Indie Commercial Vessel Snakehead: ICV Sneakehead, cut your engines and prepare to be boarded." The message repeated, but the Snakehead didn't stop.
"They'll catch it in less than ten minutes," Hank said. "But it'll be enough time for us to slip through the worst of the security."
Within minutes, the clouded face of Otherworld grew large and covered the porthole and canopy of the tour boat. At least a dozen, smaller orbital warehouse stations were visible on approach. Lines of departing ships streamed through them in twisting lanes that would have made Samhain want a local pilot aboard if it had been his watch at the NAV.
Bofor's Station orbited above at the center of the shipyard berths and docks that ringed her. The Shediri shipwrights' open magnetic induction forges burned above and below the docks. The molten metal spun superheated in the vacuum and lit the ships under construction with a warm glow as the bugs pulled molten metal in hot streams and spread it on like lacquer.
"Those are UNS hulls."
"That's right," said Hank.
"I didn't know any were made here."
"That's the first UN
contract to actually go anywhere but Deimos. They won't put the guns on them until those ships get back to Mars."
Discharges sparked from the bugs' induction furnaces. They flashed across the mountain of towers and the shipyard docks as the tour boat left Bofor's Station behind and dove at a gap between the clouds over the planet's equator.
The Shediri pilot held a few Ks behind a prison transport. Inside the block hull of the old Hammurabi class ship, there might be five thousand, all of them on their way to the prison colonies. It changed vector and fell into a slow descent on retrofitted coils, apparently making for the rings of development that spotted the coast on the smaller Southern continent.
"Another prison transport just like that one comes every day or two," said Hank. "Staas Company doesn't want to let the ones on Earth fill up again. Now, they're even sending debtors here."
"What do they all do?"
"The Legion takes some, but they'll never be officers. The ones with shipbuilding skills go to orbit. The rest work in the war factories or build housing for more prisoners. The company makes the money mostly on the food they import for the convicts. And of course what Earth pays Staas Company for the Legion to fight. Between the snub fighters, the assault Squadrons, and the regular infantry they're currently defending over two-hundred alien planets, moons, and strategic asteroids for use as forward bases. Earth's victories are only possible because the Legion pays for them in blood."
Detonations winked and snuffed on the coast of the largest continent where day was only beginning. "Those were warhead dets," said Samhain. The tell-tale clouds rose as the tour boat crossed from sea to land only 10Ks over the striated surf.
"That would be the Legion," said Hank. "They never stop training. I don't see any fighters on the wing right now so it must be the ground forces. Those shots probably rumbled New Madras a tad."
New Madras City rose from the horizon after they'd flown only a few Ks past the beaches and the purple-green carpet of razor-edged grasses that covered the dunes. The city had doubled in size in the decade since Samhain had laid eyes on it and the shape of it had changed into something the planners hadn't predicted.
The original walls surrounding the first planned construction area proved too constrictive. Last time he'd seen the place, the walls had already been broken through in seven places. What had once been envisioned as the entire city had become a hub for the myriad districts that had formed around the whole as if projecting the individual aspects of the Human/Shediri hybrid city - mysterious New Madras.
Curving towers corkscrewed at the sky from the Shediri side where the concentric walls of Hive Hrt'ee housed the clan in their own fortress. The alien citadel passed below the tour boat. They avoided its clawing spires and flew the strip between the Shediri sector and the Human sector where the traders and the engineers and the mystics of the two species met. It was formed out of both the bugs' twisting towers and the cheap, fast-printed, fuse-faced walls of cost-driven human construction.
The red dust that blew in on the high winds hung over the city, but it swirled thickest over the far side of the Veterans' Quarter, licking up in the winds from a two-block scar where the buildings had been reduced to a dangerous field of jutting, jagged-edged debris. Knuckledragger mechs raised more dust clearing the rubble from one edge.
"What happened?"
"Always troubles in New Madras," said Hank Devlin.
"So glad we're not landing here," said Scilla.
The city fell to the stern as the pilot turned South following a train of mining haulers, and Samhain said, "I don't get it. Only half the population are ex-convicts or Legionnaires. The rest of you people came to a new world to get a new start. What happened? I mean, the hills are filled with Cynium for god sakes."
"Oh, those lazy indigenous, eh Samhain?" said Scilla.
Hank nodded, and the line of his lip curled into a faint sneer before he spoke, "It's the raw materials like the Cynium in the hills that are the problem. Besides the Company's monopoly on all mining exports, the Cynium of which you speak and other such resources are the reason we're all poor."
"How is that possible?"
"If you're from Earth and you have money you want to invest, the most profitable place to put any money coming into the planet from Earth or Shedir is into mining and export of Cynium and Brandon's metal and the like. For investors, there's no sense in buying or investing in anything else. That's fine for Staas Company; they have a monopoly on the minerals. It's terrible for us. All other business on the planet dies. We have to buy everything we need from Staas Company. I'd admire it if it weren't so..."
"Cruel?" said Samhain?
"No...that's no the word," Hank said. "Myopic...short-sighted. The conniving minds of the Board used to plan further into the future. Otherworld exports violence via the Legion. That's the only legal resource and export we've got."
They broke away from the mining haulers at the edge of the continent and slipped low over the waters for another twenty minutes while Hank and Tsk kept nervous eyes on what appeared to be an ad hoc electronic warfare console. "No emissions. No beams. Tell Zi'vt to stay low over the water until we hit the southernmost continent," said Hank. As the bug clattered forward to pass on the message, Captain Hank said, "Get ready, Ensign Samhain. It's time for you to go to work."
11
Otherworld
South Polar Region (Summer)
The cliffs shimmered in a line that marked a visual boundary, the border demarcation of a place he'd been invited to, but a place that was not his. The Southernmost continent would always feel as if it belonged to the Weirdlings. On the horizon one of their five-million year old, 30km-long, derelict arks protruded from where it had been fused into the crust and mantle of the planet after an unsuccessful attempt to pass through it. What Samhain's eye took in couldn't have been mistaken for a natural feature. Time had attempted to disguise it as a steep-sloped mountain with a circular plateau but failed.
As they crossed over land, the flowering cactus screamed out in a single, somehow perfectly consonant chord of color that blanketed the terrain. Off to the tour boat's port side, the great-walled vessel of the Ekkai's ever-waiting consulate bulged outwards from the coastline where it rose from the tidal flats.
"That's rather Ha'ar I'sii, of them to put it there, isn't it," Scilla said. That actually got the first hint of a humor-keen out of Tsk, as if the bug thought there was something funny in what she'd said using the humanized version of the Shediri word for 'the shadow of the unseen current', something spoken of only indirectly by the bugs' fighting monks. The pilot sounded as if he got it too, and the two Shediri keened their alien laughter.
"Do you mean to say the placement of the Ekkai's embassy is Ha'ar I'sii ?"
"Not just them. All of the alien embassies set up on the Southern continent to meet the Weirdlings were built on the coast." After Scilla's words echoed through Tsk's translator, the bug keened even louder, lifting one of its four arms from the OPS console next to the pilot and swaying on its hump while whacking one of its arms across its chest to make a set of sharp chitin on chitin impacts.
"What would you know about Ha'ar I'sii?" said Hank. After that, he sat back, eyebrows raised looking as if he was waiting to be amused. Samhain thought the man just wanted to show off that he knew what it was. Samhain didn't much care for the way Hank smiled at her. It was as if Hank Devlin thought he and Scilla were sharing a Ha'ar I'sii between them and he wouldn't get the joke.
Scilla said, "The Shediri, the Ekkai, even us...we all built embassies to meet the Weirdlings should they ever decide they wanted to talk again. We all put them precisely between land and sea. Look at them," she said, slapping at his thigh with the back of her hand and then pointing out the porthole at the clams' triple-hulled fishtank on the coast. "It says something that even the Ekkai did it. The clams live at the bottom of the hydrocarbon seas of the fifth planet, under god only knows how many metric tons per square inch. Even they built on the edge between
ocean and land, between what, even for species disparate as clam, bug, and Human, represents the boundary between one world and another. That just makes Ha'ar Ii'sii sense considering the nature of the Weirdlings. I mean, from what the Weirdlings told Hank's fathe-"
"I was there too," Hank made a point of reminding her.
"They said they were neither living or dead."
This was Samhain's area of expertise. It astounded him how the myths about them persisted. "It's a translation issue that led to the use of that duality to express what they were not. They were just trying to explain the particular interdimensional nature of their being to us in a language we could understand. They're not living dead alien ghosts so the three species all building on the coast is not the Ha'ar I'sii - the 'shadow of the unseen current'." Samhain insisted. "It's coincidence."
That was almost more than the two Shediri up front could take and the bugs began to whack their arms on the consoles as the segments of their lower bodies writhed with alien appreciation of the irony.
Samhain insisted, "Really. Nobody planned it. It's just coincidence."
Tsk triple clacked and clapped its alien hands together and spread them out. The gesture said, 'new joke'. Then, Tsk and the pilot began to keen and clack again.
"Interrogative: that's funny too?" he said it with an irritation in his voice that he thought only the humans could detect, but the two bugs keened even harder when the translation came through.
The pilot said, "Interrogative: he is here for Weirdlings?"
Samhain got the joke that time. It was a bit like the superstition about meeting the devil after speaking his name. Gellanden had been working with the Freezt. He would be, too. But nobody was talking about them. Instead, the unseen currents had pulled their thoughts to the Weirdlings, the supposed makers of the artifact his mentor had found.