Whooping like a deranged Hooparan, he plunged into the corn and broke off the largest ear within reach. He shredded the husk with both hands, not waiting to pick out the silk before sinking his blunt human teeth into the honeyed kernels. The nectar dribbled down the sides of his mouth, gluing bits of the silk to his chin. He didn’t care. He would gnaw the cob bare and suck the memory of its juices from the strands. It had been generations since the leached soil of Avinar had produced anything so magnificent.
Was this how Kleaax turned rogue?
The thought shook him to the cells of his Aviann core. He clenched his teeth against the craving to take even one more bite, and forced himself to run the obvious scans. The soil’s composition, like the planet’s eminently breathable air, wasn’t that different from ancient Aviann baselines. His unit detected no unmanageable pathogens. The genetic structure of the corn itself was close to its Aviann counterpart. If it weren’t physically impossible, they could’ve been hybrids of the same root stock.
Avinar had been looking for granary planets since the days of Hreaak’s grandparents. Why hadn’t Kleaax mentioned this in his Lexicon or the twelve standard years of reports he filed before dropping off the scope? He could’ve been a real, stupendously wealthy hero without breaking a single law.
The wheezy chucka-chucka of a tiny steam engine roused Hreaak from his daze. Using the cornstalks as cover, he peered down the road. A motorized bicycle huffed up the hill. Wisps of water vapor clouded the road in its wake. A leather-helmeted figure hunched over the handlebars like a jockey in a native horserace. As the cyclist drew closer, Hreaak recognized Shiro’s gray shirt and red suspenders.
How did Shiro wind up behind him? He probably had trouble convincing Genny to forego her steamcycle lesson. Not that Hreaak was complaining. A hatchling could follow Shiro’s vapor trail.
The chase ended at a two-story clapboard building with a peaked roof. The building’s pillared porch overlooked a small parking area at the end of a graveled drive. Another open-chassis aircar, this one black, nosed a porch-side hitching post. On the ground beside it lay Shiro’s steamcycle.
Two, tiny, round-headed dogs with bulging eyes lounged on the porch. As Hreaak approached, they jumped to their feet, barking and bouncing in place. Hreaak shook his head. Dogs. What did humans see in them?
At least these two were smart enough to get out of his way. Three strides later they bolted through small flaps cut into the building’s double front doors. Switching to heat vision, he watched their yellow-orange thermal images scoot toward a humanoid shape his sensors identified as an aging, artificially generated human suit. A much younger, native-grown body darted to the back of the room.
Hreaak punched the doors. By the time they scraped across the rubber entrance mat, his sensors had mapped the interior. Illuminated by bare windows and simple electrified chandeliers, the space extended to the rear of the building. Glass jars packed the tall shelves between the windows. A row of tables ran along each side of the room. One table boasted a miniature P’lod generator. Others were furnished with sinks and canisters of gas. More rubber mats covered the floor behind the tables, but the floor in the center of the room was bare.
The back wall featured an electromagnetic shielding cage, an outside door, and a set of stairs. Shiro must have thought he was hidden behind a collection of crates under the table nearest the stairs. He could stay there as long as he didn’t try anything. Hreaak would prefer not to shoot around gas.
The old rogue sat behind the center table on the left. Despite the enormity of his crimes, Hreaak couldn’t suppress a reluctant tug of sympathy. Human suits aged poorly. Kleaax’s hair had thinned to cottony wisps drifting over a liver-spotted scalp. His skin, originally the warm light brown of milky coffee, looked drab and peaked. Deep wrinkles scored his forehead and trailed from the corners of his gray moustache. The inverted triangle of his upper body had sagged into a pyramidal paunch. Despite the season, he was buttoned to his chins in a high-collared shirt, vest, and gray wool frockcoat. Hreaak didn’t know how the anthropologist could stand to wear so much clothing in this heat.
Was it fear? Kleaax’s pulse stuttered, despite the pugnacious jut of his jowls.
“Go away,” he boomed. “The lab doesn’t open ‘til nine.”
Hreaak stepped into the center of the room and activated the mandatory holographic IDs. “Weevirril Kleaax, on behalf of Avinar and the Consortium of Allied Planets …”
“Avinar? Avinar!” Kleaax pulled a pince-nez from his coat pocket and peered at the projected display. The thick lenses made it difficult to tell, but his eyes seemed to brighten. He jumped to his feet. “Well, it’s about time! Where’s my money?”
“Your what?” Hreaak asked.
“My twenty-nine standard years and three months’ back pay, that’s what! And you’d better not have forgotten the interest. My contract with the Council of Academies calls for full hazard pay with a non-delivery bonus of five percent compounded annually. And that’s before you add in royalties from the Lexicon.
“Uh uh uh, don’t try to tell me it wasn’t published.” He wagged a knobby forefinger at Hreaak. “I didn’t finish my dissertation yesterday, you know. Those old clucks in Galactic Field Studies tried to pull that with my master’s thesis. They didn’t succeed then, and you won’t succeed now. If it hadn’t been published, you wouldn’t be standing there dressed like a two-bit desperado, now would you?”
“Yes. No. I mean …”
Hreaak closed his mouth. Kleaax had gone from terrified to excited in a matter of heartbeats. His readings showed none of the usual signs of deception, either. Given everything he’d done, did the old coot really expect the Council to send him a windfall?
“Let’s start over.”
“You can start over as many times as you want, you still owe me …” Kleaax rifled a stack of papers on his work table. A significant number tumbled to the floor. The dogs shot out from under the desk and joined Shiro behind the crates. Hreaak activated his weapons array.
“You owe me … Ah, here it is!” Kleaax triumphantly hoisted a collection of slats Hreaak’s implants identified as a slide rule. Kleaax shifted the slats, aligning the markings until the results elicited a satisfied grunt. “Just as I thought, the Council owes me eight million, six hundred thousand, forty-three feddeks and change. Or it did as of three months ago. But for tax purposes, we might as well call it eight-point-six. It would take more than a week to work out the taxes on a slide rule, and my time is money.”
Hreaak shook his head, trying to clear it. He wondered if sniffing all that corn had affected his wits. The number twenty-nine rattled around his brain like it was important.
Something happened in this sector twenty-nine standard years ago, something buried in the data he uploaded for this mission. Multiple lines of coded information streamed past his mind’s eye. There! Despite his ingrained Aviann stoicism, he was tempted to throw up his hands. He settled for shutting off the holograms and shifting his array to standby.
“The Consortium collective mining the system’s exo-planets automated its operations twenty-nine years ago.”
“What’s that got to do with the price of eggs?” Kleaax demanded.
“The transition disrupted your pay string.”
“So? My reports got through. If they didn’t, you wouldn’t be here, speaking the lingo like a native, now would you?”
Hreaak’s stomach knotted around the corn he shouldn’t have eaten. “Did you complain through proper channels?”
“Of course I did. What kind of capon do you take me for?”
Hreaak refused to answer that. There were all those criminal charges to consider. “For the record, could you tell me what steps you took to correct the problem?”
Kleaax scratched a ragged patch of white skin under his ear. “It’s been a long time, and I don’t keep my field notes here. But I followed all the steps in the manual. I wrote Departmental Finance. When that didn’t work, I petitioned the De
partment Chair, then the Academies’ Bursar, and the Council Deans. Toward the end there, I may have fired off a … less than polite message—or two—to my Aerie Representative.” His embarrassed grimace showed how far those missives deviated from Aviann standards of decorum. “You don’t think that’ll affect my pension, do you?”
“Trust me, that’s the least of your worries.” As they talked, Hreaak tracked Kleaax’s data streams through time. Everything was perfect up to the point when the exo-post’s last living employee exited the station. “I understand why you finished the Lexicon. It was a matter of survival. But why did you keep filing reports for twelve years when you weren’t getting paid?”
“It takes ten standard years for the courts to declare someone dead. Since I was dealing with the Council and an exo-post, I figured I’d give it an extra couple years to be on the safe side.” Kleaax ducked his human head in a disconcertingly Aviann expression of discomfort. “I kept hoping someone would answer, but it was like flipping stones at a black hole. I got receipt notices, but nobody answered my messages, even when I attached those, ahem, letters I mentioned.”
They never answered the messages, because the Department Chair of Galactic Field Studies never saw them. The Chair’s gatekeeper program automatically stripped everything that wasn’t an anthropological observation.
Which didn’t mean records of Kleaax’s communications didn’t exist. Buried in the records Hreaak had uploaded—which constituted only a tiny part of the Council’s hard-protected archives—was enough information to topple the sitting Deans and compromise the senior members of the Aerie’s Social Sciences Committee. Whether or not they knew about the situation wouldn’t matter. They should’ve known one of their most honored scientists had been cut loose on a planet where gun duels were a spectator sport. Killing Kleaax now would trigger an automatic investigation of his records and a search for heirs, turning the case into a galactic scandal and magnifying the political fall-out by a factor of five. So much for the easy way out of this mess.
Something of his frustration must’ve registered on his too expressive primate face. Kleaax’s readings spiked.
He said, “You didn’t come to pay me, did you?”
“No, the Aerie assigned me to investigate your disappearance.”
“Took them long enough. They were probably hoping to find proof I was dead. That way their friends in the department would own all the rights to my work instead of just half.” His face grayed and his pulse raced. “They, ah, didn’t send you to…” He jerked his thumb across his throat.
“Not part of my brief,” Hreaak answered.
As a Special Agent of the Aerie, Hreaak was charged with protecting Avinar’s interests and terminating all threats. He had killed for the greater good. But the more he learned about this case, the more he started seeing Kleaax as a victim instead of a villain—abandoned by his Academy, marooned among humans for thirty long years. The nature of Hreaak’s work meant he lived his life as an outsider. His job came with a star cruiser and a stratoflyer. He could always get away. Kleaax was dropped here. He had no way off this rock. No wonder he ran mad.
“The important thing is I found you. I’m going to bring you home.”
Kleaax retreated as if from a bad smell. “Oh no you aren’t.”
“You can’t seriously believe the Council is out to get you. You’re a Hero of Science. You’ll be a celebrity, as well as rich. Better yet, you’ll get your feathers back.”
“Feathers!” Kleaax blew a wet sound through his lips. “What good would feathers do me? At my age, all they’d do is molt.”
Hreaak heard a clatter from the vicinity of the stairs. He couldn’t tell if it was Shiro or the dogs.
“If the Aerie wants to honor me, all they have to do is send a little of the money they owe me, preferably in gold,” Kleaax continued. “There’s nothing for me on Avinar. After thirty years, I wouldn’t recognize the place. It’s not like anyone’s pining for me, either. It took them seventeen years to notice I was gone. Here, people care about me. They depend on me. You know they call me a wizard?” He hooked his thumbs in his vest pocket and grinned so wide Hreaak could see the steel bridge where his upper right molars should’ve been. “The Wizard of Woodrow Park—that’s me.”
“There’s no such thing as magic,” Hreaak said. “There is, however, a Consortium-wide mandate known as the Uniform Non-Intervention Pact of Standard Year 4614.”
Kleaax’s eyebrows pulled together, multiplying the creases on his forehead. Could the author of the Lexicon, and the founder of a major manufacturing operation, really be so dense?
Another rattle issued from Shiro’s hiding place. Behind his thick lenses, Kleaax’s gaze slithered toward the sound.
“Old floors,” he said. “They creak in the summer.”
“Not like that, they don’t,” Hreaak replied. “Shiro, come out where I can see you.”
The dogs whined. Shiro stilled like prey gone to ground.
“You know your boss isn’t human, right? That’s just a body he wears. His real face has a beak for rending flesh.”
The boy gasped.
“You bustard,” Kleaax swore. “Why’d you have to scare him like that?”
“He needs to be scared. Under Consortium law, he’s an accessory to the crimes of a galactic felon who contaminated an entire world with his dangerous alien technology.”
“I did nothing of the sort,” Kleaax said. “I couldn’t work outside this planet’s existing technology if I wanted to. The manufacturing base wouldn’t support it.”
“That excuse won’t fly. An Allied Planets’ scientific observer—regardless of origin or discipline—is prohibited from entrepreneurial operations in any field related to industry, technology, manufacturing …” In the space between words, he heard another click.
“Shiro!” he barked. “Get out here. Now!”
“Do as he says.” Kleaax’s big bass voice shook slightly. He cared for the boy. In addition to his stressed vocal chords, his readings registered a sharp increase in the hormones associated with nurturing in primates. “Don’t hurt him,” he pleaded. “Please.”
“Don’t beg,” Shiro said. Slowly, sullenly, he rose to his feet. He edged sideways across the floor. “It won’t do any good. Whoever this guy is, he’s not your friend. He’s been questioning you like a lawyer this whole time. He’s setting you up to take a fall.”
Hreaak tasted bile. The charge cut too close to the truth. He rasped, “Move away from the cage, Shiro. Keep your hands where I can see them.”
“Do you want me to dance, too?”
Kleaax’s breath hitched.
Hreaak almost smiled. “Not when you’re still growing into your feet.”
That drew his eyes to the oversized extremities in question and the wire running out from under the boy’s trouser leg.
“Banzai!” Shiro shouted. He ripped the end of the cord from his pocket.
Hreaak fired. The charge lifted Shiro off his feet. He dropped to the floor. The dogs erupted from under the table. Snarling, they threw themselves between Hreaak and the boy.
At the same time, a swarm of toy-sized rotorcraft erupted from Shiro’s former refuge. They fanned across the center of the room, too fast and too many to risk shooting with so much gas around. They attacked an instant later. Sharp blades notched the sides of Hreaak’s right hand and sliced into his shoulder. He slammed them from the air with his vambrace and his hat. He stomped them to scrap.
By the time the dogs stopped barking and the last of the rotors lay shattered on the floor, Hreaak’s right sleeve and the front placket of his shirt were shredded and red. Blood seeped from a cut on his cheek, filling his nostrils with a meaty tang. His breath labored from exertion and pain. He trained his weapons array on the large, yellow-orange thermal blot huddled behind the table nearest the metal cage.
“If you think you can activate an electromagnetic shield before I fry your chicken ass, you’ve got another think coming.”
“I stunned him. I’ll have to mind-wipe him unless we can fix this mess.”
Kleaax’s eyebrows pushed his wrinkles to his topmost tuft of hair. “You wouldn’t.”
“I wouldn’t enjoy it. But I would. Under Consortium law, you’re both dangerous criminals. The courts won’t care that you lost your livelihood to a data glitch. The only things they’ll care about are P’lod coils, anachronistic aircars, premature electrification, and all those signs out there reading ‘Kleaax Industries: Home of the Invention Factory’.” He fought the urge to howl like one of those wretched dogs. He could’ve finessed almost anything else, but he couldn’t erase those damned signs from his optical data banks. “Of all the stupid things to do, why’d you have to start a business?”
“I had a family to support!”
“They’re apes,” Hreaak said brutally. “Nesting with them—also a crime under the Pact.”
“What about denying me the means to survive? Isn’t that a crime? Who’s going to be punished for that?”
“Nobody.” Hreaak hated it, but he couldn’t do anything about it. The universe might be infinite, but as the guardian of Aerie interests in this sector, his options for averting a miscarriage of justice were limited.
“Believe it or not, Kleaax, I’m trying to help you. There’s only one way you can prevent the authorities from turning you into an organ farm. You’re going to dust off your communications pad and write another report, a copy of which I will personally deliver to the Aerie. You’re going to tell them you’ve spent the past seventeen years preparing a turn-key granary world for entry into the Aviann Commonwealth.”
“I will not!” Kleaax exploded. “This is a protected planet!”
“Were you born a moron, or was that your human suit talking? The planet lost its status as an anthropological theme park the minute you got into the invention business and changed the course of its technological development.”
Clockwork Universe Page 16